The Natural Law Tradition and Belief 9781536149647, 1536149640

Table of contents :
Intro
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Preface
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Prologue
Natural Law
Part 1
Chapter 1
The Project: Naturalist, Theistic, and Religious Approaches to Natural Law
Introduction
NAVE and Hume
NAVE and the Three Rs
The Three R Questions and the Possibility of Theism and Religious Belief
Chapter 2
Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism: Element 1) Ontology
Element 1) Metaphysics, Ontology and "Ontological Goods" in the Scale of Nature
Evil and Being
Theory of Truth and Meaning
Analogy of Attribution
Chapter 3 NAVE Element 2) Anthropology and Element 3) The Wish for Wellbeing and Its IngredientsNAVE Element 2) Anthropology
Level A Capacities: Intellect and Will of the Self
Level B Capacities: Sensation of Pleasure and Pain, Perception, Limb Mobility, Reading, Writing, and Speech
Level C Capacities: Automatic Physical Substructures and the Autonomic System
Knowing the True Good
Assimilating the Goods
Individuation
Moral Psychology
NAVE Element 3) The Wish for Wellbeing and Finding Its Ingredients
The Will and Evil: How Evil Action Happens
Chapter 4 NAVE Element 4): Principles, Precepts, and VirtuesJustice: A Multi-Clause Analysis
Practical Reasoning Depends Systematically on Assertoric/ Theoretic Reasoning
Theoretic and Moral Modality
Moral Modalities
From Consensus to Controversy: The Good of Life and the Badness of Killing
Principles and Precept: How They Are Known to be Self-Evident by Conscience
The Practical Moral Analogues of Theoretic Self-Evidence
Chapter 5
Element 5) of NAVE --
The Method of Determination in Moral Reasoning
Practical Moral Reasoning and Casuistic Determination
Step 1
Step 2
Step 3
Step 4 Step 1 & 2Step 3
Step 4
Conclusion
Chapter 6
Physicalism Is Not Proven
Defending the SMB Account of Soul, Mind/Will/Free Choice and Body given above in Element 2) and 3)
According to Physicalism
The M Question
The P Question
The E Question
Some Critical Responses
The Reality of Persons' Selves/Psyches and Minds
Non-Identity and Non-Reducibility
Multiple Description, Reduction as Explanation, and Qualia
The Problem of Analysing the Conceptual Meanings (Representational Significance) of Words
Teleological Practical Reason and Agent Causality Teleological Laws Are Better Predictors of Behaviour Than Physical LawsCircular and Contradictory
The Reduction Ad Absurdum Argument against Physicalism
Conclusion on Free Choice
Part 2
Chapter 7
Bringing Back God and Religion
Ontology of TNL
TNL's Anthropology of Capacity
The Human Good and Wellbeing in TNL
Principle, Precepts, and Virtues
Casuistry
The DGE Difference
Adding Religion: An Overview of Aquinas Summa Theologica
Ontology
The Anthropology
Moral Psychology
Wellbeing and Its Ingredient Goods
Principles, Precepts and Virtues
Casuistry
Chapter 8

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WORLD PHILOSOPHY

THE NATURAL LAW TRADITION AND BELIEF NATURALISM, THEISM, AND RELIGION IN DIALOGUE

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WORLD PHILOSOPHY

THE NATURAL LAW TRADITION AND BELIEF NATURALISM, THEISM, AND RELIGION IN DIALOGUE

DAVID ARDAGH

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NOTICE TO THE READER The Publisher has taken reasonable care in the preparation of this book, but makes no expressed or implied warranty of any kind and assumes no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental or consequential damages in connection with or arising out of information contained in this book. The Publisher shall not be liable for any special, consequential, or exemplary damages resulting, in whole or in part, from the readers’ use of, or reliance upon, this material. Any parts of this book based on government reports are so indicated and copyright is claimed for those parts to the extent applicable to compilations of such works. Independent verification should be sought for any data, advice or recommendations contained in this book. In addition, no responsibility is assumed by the publisher for any injury and/or damage to persons or property arising from any methods, products, instructions, ideas or otherwise contained in this publication. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information with regard to the subject matter covered herein. It is sold with the clear understanding that the Publisher is not engaged in rendering legal or any other professional services. If legal or any other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent person should be sought. FROM A DECLARATION OF PARTICIPANTS JOINTLY ADOPTED BY A COMMITTEE OF THE AMERICAN BAR ASSOCIATION AND A COMMITTEE OF PUBLISHERS. Additional color graphics may be available in the e-book version of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ardagh, David, author. Title: The natural law tradition and belief: naturalism, theism, and religion in dialogue / author, David Ardagh (former associate professor, University of San Francisco, CA, US). Description: Hauppauge, New York: Nova Science Publisher's, Inc., [2019] | Series: World philosophy | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2019003065 (print) | LCCN 2019004107 (ebook) | ISBN 9781536149647 (H%RRN) | ISBN 9781536149630 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Natural law. | Natural law--Philosophy. | Natural law--Religious aspects. Classification: LCC K450 (ebook) | LCC K450.A73 2019 (print) | DDC 340/.112--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003065

Published by Nova Science Publishers, Inc. † New York

CONTENTS List of Figures

vii

List of Tables

ix

Preface

xi

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

xv

Prologue

xvii

PART 1 Chapter 1

xiii

1 The Project: Naturalist, Theistic, and Religious Approaches to Natural Law

3

Chapter 2

Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism: Element 1) Ontology

25

Chapter 3

NAVE Element 2) Anthropology and Element 3) The Wish for Wellbeing and Its Ingredients

37

Chapter 4

NAVE Element 4): Principles, Precepts, and Virtues

53

Chapter 5

Element 5) of NAVE - The Method of Determination in Moral Reasoning

79

Physicalism Is Not Proven

95

Chapter 6 PART 2

113

Chapter 7

Bringing Back God and Religion

115

Chapter 8

Select Applications: Organisational Agency and Ethics: States, Churches, Corporations

133

Chapter 9

Applying Natural Law to Violence: The NAVE and DGE Positions

155

Chapter 10

Global Poverty: The Moral Obligation of Persons, Organisations and States to Relieve Poverty

175

vi Chapter 11

Contents Natural Law Application: Sexuality and Marriage

PART 3

189 215

Chapter 12

Concepts of Justice, Benevolence, and Agape

217

Chapter 13

Justice and Satyagraha/Agape: The Rationality of Unconditional Non-Violence (ahimsa)

229

Epilogue

245

Glossary

253

References

261

Bibliography

269

About the Author

273

Index

275

Related Nova Publications

283

LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Correlating degrees of altruism and ontological commitment. Figure 2. Domains of personal action. Figure 3. Revised stakeholder model.

18 51 149

LIST OF TABLES Table 1. The I-It and I–Thou Dimensions: Adapted by the author from Buber (1937) I and Thou Table 2. A Neo-Aristotelian model of the ethics, politics, organisational relation Table 3. Relations between theoretic and practical intellect Table 4. The roles of reason in teleological virtue ethics (TVE) Table 5. How circumstances determine moral status Table 6. Spectrum of non-violence (NV) Table 7. Arguments of the CNV-UNV debate Table 8. A business organisational quasi-person on an implicit social contract view: What a “good corporate citizen” does

17 47 58 60 89 158 161 178

PREFACE Starting in Greece, for over twenty-three centuries, the ideal of Natural Law has been appealed to in Western moral and legal philosophy as a grounding for ethics, law, and jurisprudence, centered on capacities of a common “human nature.” From the early medieval rise of “Christendom,” it was embedded within a theistic and religious system for over a millennium, during which time it was treated as incomplete and part of an enveloping Divine Law requiring unconditional forgiveness and loving kindness even to strangers, enemies and the wicked. Modern agnosticism in theology, religion, and metaphysics then saw Natural Law distinguished from religion and these demands, but still suspect due to its lingering ties with religion. It endured through its meta-ethical capacity to present a stable theory of truth about being and “the highest good”, while the reference of that definite description varied; a theory of human nature’s capabilities and our wish for wellbeing; some common moral principles, precepts, and virtues as means to the common good; and a decision procedure for ethics. An open concept of reason, including interpersonal, practical, and other modes of nonscientific reason, allows it to remain a forum for ongoing rational discussion of theism, agnostic naturalism, of the religions of indigenous peoples, East and West, and of the nonviolence of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and others. Nature, and human nature’s wellbeing, are presently endangered by ecological destruction from unbridled growth and pollution; nuclear accidents and possible war; population displacement though extreme poverty, and political repression. Given Natural Law’s meta-ethics of a universal human reason and wellbeing, both agnostic humanist normative ethics and some of its enveloping theistic and religious Divine Law addenda, exacting though they are, can be canvassed in attempts to address such global evils from a cosmopolitan standpoint. The book aims to reinvigorate Natural Law as a unifying ethical organ on for this ecumenical purpose, showing that it can dialogue with its enveloping Divine Law “overlays” constructively; acknowledge their historical contributions to natural science; its points of unity with them, and enlist their support to quell global terrorism. Within the Meta-ethics of Natural Law, what Buber called “the I-Thou relation” between humans has aspects of transcendence which mark it as a “highest good”. Naturalism, Theism, and Religion, interpret this in notionally differently ways; and different aspects of that unique relation can be illuminated by dialogue between all three schools of thought. Their shortcomings in practice to sustain it as an ideal can be observed from all three positions, but their strengths in identifying, promoting, and preserving it as they understand it, can still be admired.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My thanks are due to those who have encouraged the project, especially Reg Naulty and Rob Macklin; to past teachers, some of whom would not have supported it, including some long deceased: at St. Andrews University: James Opie Urmson, Neil Cooper, and Neil Elder; at University of Windsor: John Deck, Pat Flood, Bob Pinto, John Catan and Ralph Nelson; and, at University of Washington: John Boler, David Keyt, James Mish’alani, Arthur Smullyan, Fred Siegler, Robert Richman, John Chambliss, Oswaldo Chateaubriand, and Ken Clatterbaugh. Thanks also to former colleagues at University of Wisconsin, Madison: Gerald McCallum, Marcus Singer, Haskell Fain, Keith Yandell, Julius Weinberg, Bruce Freed, John Moline, Bill Hay, Fred Daly, Nancy Holstrom, Gary Young, William Courtenay, Fred Dretske, Peter Unger, Dennis Stampe, and Ivan Soll; at University of San Francisco: Desmond. Fitzgerald, Bob Cunningham, John Robinson, Barbara Mackinnon, Ray Dennehy, Ed Muenk, Mike Howe, Hartmut Fischer, Harlan Stelmach, Joe Petulla, and Brenda Schildgen; at Charles Sturt University and Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at CSU, Paul Casey, John Weckert, Reg Naulty, Geoff Bamberry, Alan Fish, Terry Heazlewood, Mark Farrell, John Walker, Pamela Matthews, Ed Oczkowski, Rob Macklin, Andy Smith, Merv Morris, Steve Mathews, Emma Rush, Graeme Mclean, Morgan Luck and Steve Clark; at CAPPE: Ed Spence, Thomas Pogge, Tom Campbell, Seamus Miller, Noel Preston, Tony Coady, Andrew Alexandra, Adrian Walsh, Anna Corbo-Crehan, Steve Colemen, Janna Thompson, and Neil Levy. I wish especially to thank Marion Bannister for her invaluable assistance in editing the book for publication, and my wife Anne for her support in discussions of some of the issues it raises, and making it possible for me to spend time to write it, despite her own professional and other commitments. Portions of Chapter 4 appeared in a Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics Working Paper; parts of Chapter 5 in Professional Ethics; parts of chapter 8 appeared in a an article in Philosophy of Management; parts of Chapter 9 appeared in the Australian Dispute Resolution Journal; of Chapter 10 in Australian Journal of Professional and Applied Ethics.

ABBREVIATIONS DGE GREAOS HV IRP IRP 1A IRP 1B RP 2A IRP2B IRP3

IRP4 IRP5 IRP 6A IRP 6B IRP7 IRP 8 IRP 9 KGR Met MENL MWB NAVE NE NL NNL SMB

Divine Glory Ethics Goals, Roles, Ethical decisions, Actions, impact on Others; and on the State (Acronym for Organisational Ethics) Humanae Vitae, 1968 Encyclical of Pope Paul VI Interpersonal Responsiveness Principle “Do as you have been done by” (Tit for Tat) “Do no harm” “Act Rationally” “Be Just” “Seek the good” “Do not do what you would not want others to do” (Sometimes called the Silver Rule) “Do as you would be done by” (The Golden Rule) “Do as you would will all others to do in similar circumstances to yours” (Kant’s Categorical Imperative). This concept is very similar to the so-called “Universalisability” test. “Respect persons as ends in themselves, not mere means” (Categorical Imperative, alternate version) “Seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (Mill’s Utilitarianism) “Better to suffer than do injustice” (Socrates, in Republic of Plato) “Relieve suffering when possible” (Principle of Humanity) “Love God and your Neighbour as Yourself” “Love strangers, enemies, and the wicked” “Choose to go in harm’s way and/or die for the good of these and any or all others” Knowledge of God and religion Aristotle’s Metaphysics Metaethics of Natural Law The meaning, marks, or criteria for ends of wellbeing, such as delight, Neo-Aristotelian Virtue ethics Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: as in Met supra Natural Law New Natural Law of Grisez and Finnis The Soul-Mind-Body relation

xvi

Abbreviations ST THG TNL

Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae The Highest Good Theistic Natural Law

PROLOGUE The concept and ideal of Natural Law was brought to prominence in the West, during the period of the Roman Empire, mainly through the Stoics. Along with its cruelties, the empire brought benefits, like roads, bureaucracies, and infrastructures; state enforced law and order; the idea of universal human bonds and duties; and rights of citizenship. Like Rome itself, the idea of Natural Law, as reflected in actual positive law, was a moral mixed blessing, but the ideals of universal human equality, the common good, and of law and order were inherently benign. As an undergraduate at University of St. Andrews, I discovered that my secondary school History had been almost silent on how a self-styled Christian British Empire, along with the European empires of Spain, Portugal, France, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, and Italy, through lethal force, had become the once most powerful of these Empires. It did mention that some of these same imperial states had defensively contained, and then later repeatedly crusaded against, Islam, and later still rivalled the equally compromised Muslim Ottoman Empire. But it was quieter on the fact that, like the other empires, the British Empire had in fact been accomplished largely by lethal force of arms, not in battle, but through invasion of and theft from nonaggressive indigenous peoples. In our case, these were in Ireland, North America, India, Australasia, Africa, and elsewhere, and this seventeenth, and later eighteenth, century takeover was lubricated by appeal to British law, as an allegedly superior version of Natural Law than the few indigenous versions which were even recognised; and the Empire in most cases was consolidated morally by the missionaries of the Church. In fact, there were many violations of Natural Law, like invasions, group killings of the indigenous people by settlers, the opium trade out of British India which devastated China; and complicity with the slave trade. One distant ancestor of mine was a Major-General, knighted in the nineteenth century for crushing an uprising against an ally of the Empire to secure its interests in the Suez Canal. Some years ago, I read a succinct summary of this history, attributed by some to Jomo Kenyatta: “When the missionaries came, we had the land and you had the Bible…now you have the land and we have the Bible.” Natural Law, Religion, and Empire have indeed always coexisted, and in this grim way, I am, like other European-born people, the beneficiary of many “original sins” of my Christian ancestors, like slavery. But slavery was also ended by Christian agitation. I am a recipient of many benefits of the universal human equality ideal of Natural Law, like representative democracy, civic law and order, and, from the medieval Church, of a university education. Religion has also motivated many liberation movements, aimed at opposing and rolling back all these Empires, and their

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effects, like slavery, often led by religious figures and religiously educated secular freedom fighters in Africa, India, and the Americas. The intertwined record of universal Natural Law, Empires, and the Churches turns out to be complicated by the differences in their interpretation and practice by individuals. As education and literacy increased and elite rule slowly gave way to representative democracies, and as church membership broadened, the moral potential and strengths of Natural Law and Churches emerged. Even the British Empire began to have its willing defenders in the colonies in education, medicine, law, and science and engineering, bringing students back to the centre and eventually producing the British Commonwealth. In 1968, as a beginning teacher of Philosophy in Madison, Wisconsin, a time of continuing struggle for national liberation, civil rights for Afro-American descendants of slaves, and civil resistance to a war waged to take over from a departing French imperial regime in Vietnam, a video recording of the Baptist Martin Luther King’s prophetic speech the night before his assassination, viewed a short time after that event, made a lasting impression on me. He had earlier acknowledged a debt to Gandhi, also assassinated, and at the time, I was teaching a subject on the Philosophy of Non-violence using his writings. Gandhi and King were both educated in the values and schools of their oppressors, and both achieved great improvements for humanity, but their being jailed, their loved ones being harassed, and eventually being killed meant they did not attain a full measure of temporal happiness. Western Moral Philosophy at its best, in the works of Aristotle, Kant, and Mill, taught that moral virtue tended to wellbeing, even if in Kant’s case, our concern should be the wellbeing of others, and our own should not be the motive of willing the ideal “Kingdom of Ends,” in which the moralised wellbeing of all is attained. The promise of a common temporal wellbeing, moralised or not, was a rationale for Natural Law, which they and others accepted in some form. Yet here were two of many moral heroes, invoking the oppressors’ own version of Natural Law, challenging Empire, and some of its bad features and results, but repeatedly also invoking the oppressors’ notional adherence to a further Divine Law of agape or ahimsa. Moreover, their assassination seemingly disconfirmed the Philosophers’ thesis that “virtue tends to bring wellbeing.” Many such people of heroic moral virtue speak truth to power, by criticising a regime or refusing induction into the armed services during an unjust war; or they deliberately dedicate their whole lives to fight for justice or human rights for an oppressed minority or work for the poor on site. They are often jailed, or “disappeared,” or killed, for doing these things, and do not attain wellbeing in the ordinary sense. They answer what they take to be a vocation from God to become life-long exemplars of dedicated peace-making or outreach to the needy. Besides Natural Law, they often believe in a Divine Law and wellbeing in some other nonnatural or supernatural sense, associated with an afterlife. They do not believe virtue leads to temporal wellbeing, and they turn out to be right. Finding only limited philosophical treatment of the tension between virtue and these two notions of temporal and eternal “wellbeing,” natural and supernatural, I wanted to examine some presuppositions and implications of this phenomenon in this book. For some, Natural Law is a stepping stone to wellbeing of a different order than temporal happiness, associated with Divine Law. For others Natural law and attaining human wellbeing in the ordinary sense is a sufficiently difficult objective. I try to understand their differences in this book, beginning with Natural law, then looking at Divine Law and finally at the application of both.

Prologue

xix

NATURAL LAW It is assumed here that “Natural Law,” (NL) is the concept of an allegedly self-evident law, one binding equally on all humans as humans; unchangeable and universal in whatever ways rational animate human nature is unchangeable and universal; and variable in the ways that are variable and different, and in some way reflecting Nature at large. It is a law which, if followed, results in the human good. It is expressible in both written and unwritten form, known to all when it is known to all, through moral conscience. Only part of NL is self-evident, known to all and the same for all, and part is not. For the parts known to all and the same for all, such as general imperative or gerundive principles, like “The good is to be sought/done” and “Justice is to be done”; and primary precepts, like “Murder is wrong,” the self-evidence of such imperatives is claimed. In Natural law systems, “self-evidence” comes in different senses. It can be attributed to: a) b) c) d) e) f)

an intuitive, true utterance, not needing formal proof; or, not capable of proof; or, an obvious truth; or, a truth known to all; or, one evident to the wise; or, an analytic proposition in the modern sense, the truth of which follows from the meanings of its component terms, or where the predicate is included in the subject.

There is some ambiguity about imperatives being themselves ‘true” or “false,” rather than it being true that their satisfaction or execution is in fact satisfactory to the attainment of a moral or natural goal. But taking the second sense of true as relevant, at least primary precepts of NL are said to be self- evident in senses a), b), e) and f). They do not need formal proof and none is available. But informal dialectical proof is available, as it is for the principle of noncontradiction1. Senses c) and d) concern whether there is a de facto consensus. Although it is implied that there ought to be a consensus on primary precepts known to all, it is doubtful if there is universal consensus de facto about any human judgement unless some humans are excepted like children, the senile, for example. The imperative secondary precepts of Natural Law are not the same for all or known to all and not self-evident to all. Natural Law is an ethical and legal notion invoked in discussions of the attainment of the good or wellbeing of all people, thought of as having a common human nature. It is assumed in such discussions that such wellbeing is a flourishing of their human capacities within a social context and that human wellbeing (eudaimonia) has some shared content. Wellbeing is found in great part through communities, and communities of communities, like cities. In matters of personal Ethics, Natural Law adherents commend the goodness of the fullest bloom or exercise of their human capacities, such things as knowledge, friendship, beauty, successful use of creative skills, leisure pursuits and play, and physical health. The virtues of prudence, courage, temperance, and justice tend to assure these goods. They also commend kindness and limited altruism, rational cooperation between good people, for the sake of the common human good and our common habitat. Following principles and precepts of Natural Law in personal and

1

See Glossary under non-contradiction and analytic.

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social domains is assumed to tend be in our enlightened long-term self-interest, individually and collectively. Justice is seen as a bridging virtue between the personal and social domains. In institutions, justice requires, and aims to assure: freedom to choose the means to wellbeing; freedom from violent treatment by others; equal treatment with respect to our shared human capacities; equal access to economic opportunities and shared public benefits, but different degrees of respect for different contributions, or lack thereof. As a personal virtue, justice is the disposition to respect such values in non-political domains like the household or the market. Conditional altruism or benevolence is expressed within the constraints of a regime of communal justice specifying a balance or harmony between interests which are “mine” and “thine,” “ours” and “theirs.” In the interchange and distribution of goods, justice requires fairness through proportionality of the goods exchanged and equal respect for all persons as equal specimens of humanity, as an initial attitude or position.2 This presumption of equal worth can be outweighed by partiality to kinship, citizenship, desert or merit, and response to enmity. Justice permits or requires that we should particularly honour those who have contributed to our wellbeing; and defend ourselves, at court or by arming ourselves, and, if necessary, use lethal force against, our non-contributing social enemies. For Natural Law proponents, altruism with justice and limited benevolence requires excluding non-citizens from some privileges and distributed public benefits, and discriminating against and punishing the wicked as a means to restoring social balance and harmony, for the social good, thereby delivering enlightened wellbeing on the widest scale to the most people possible. Benevolence prompts us to relieve suffering and assist others to meet their human needs as much as possible without harm to our own and our kinsfolks’ needs-satisfaction, or those of neighbours and fellow citizens. But there must be punishment for evil doers, forceful deterrents and restraint of evil doers, and defence against invading enemies threatening the community with lethal force. Equal respect for other humans as humans and love for persons as such, regardless of their kinship relation to us, their social contribution or desert, or their unfriendly disposition towards us, is not found in NL accounts, or found reflected in the behaviour of most people. The concept of such unconditioned indiscriminate love is associated with a concept of a Divine Law and found in the West in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus on agape, in St. Augustine’s concept of caritas, and in some of their followers, like Martin Luther King3. In the East it is found in the teachings of Jain Hinduism, some Buddhist teachings on compassion, and in individuals advocating nonviolent ahimsa, chastity, brahmacharya, and self-suffering tapasya, as Gandhi practised. This extended unconditional altruism is treated as either an ideal or a requirement in both Eastern and Western cases, although the distinction is sometimes left unclear, with commendation and prescriptions addressed to different people in different circumstances, as when it is required for priests or mendicants or monks only. In some key Western Christian scriptures, like the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel, verses 5-7, it is apparently said to be a requirement, and the duty of all regardless of social or other role, and this creates some formidable difficulties to be taken up in Part 3 of this work.

2 3

Justice is treated in more detail in Chapter 4. King’s ideas and projects are set out in Strength to Love (1958) and Where do we go from here? (1967) and several other works.

Prologue

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This Divine Law’s initial un-persuasiveness is diminished somewhat when we realise that we are ourselves at some time the naturally unlovable strangers, sinners, and enemies. It is good to be shown kindness and welcome when we are the strangers; forgiveness, when it is we who have sinned against others; reconciliation, when we have antagonised or hated another or been the target of their enmity. If “Do as you would be done by” is understood to be a valid ethical principle as long as the desire in question is ethical, or “Love your neighbour as yourself” is a defensible moral principle, then, in following such a principle, we should indeed welcome the stranger, forgive the sinner, and reconcile with the enemy, knowing that we would want this to be done to us when the stranger, sinner or enemy is ourselves. Christians pray to God that He forgive their trespasses, as they forgive those who have trespassed against them. This is the maxim of agape or caritas. But we should not and cannot expect such unconditional mercy from the state, founded to attain common wellbeing. There are important differences of goal and scope between Western Natural Law and Divine Law. The latter has more exacting standards, and it envisages the possibility of eternal wellbeing for individuals in an afterlife and not just temporal wellbeing. This difference can obstruct dialogue between Natural and Divine Law proponents. It comes out most clearly in The Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount at Matthew 5-7. NL would prohibit adultery, murder and theft. The Old Testament Ten Commandments or Decalogue prohibits coveting your neighbour’s wife and property, not just adultery or theft. Jesus goes further, saying that if a man lusts after a woman, he has already committed adultery with her, and is liable to eternal punishment. And if he calls someone who is angry with his brother a fool, he is likewise liable for murder. This is more than upholding the maxim: “it is better not to want what is wrong, and not do it, than to want to do something wrong,” but not do it. NL adherents would agree with that maxim. They could also agree that the wish is father to the deed, and perhaps that it is wrong to wish for something that is wrong or threaten to do what in fact would be wrong to actually do. Nuclear deterrence is based on violating that principle, but an NL case could be made for the maxim that it is wrong to threaten what it would be wrong to do, and so nuclear deterrence is wrong. Natural Law, like Divine Law, allows for punishment of positive law breakers. NL arguments can also be adduced against positive laws like apartheid or Nazi laws. What NL will not agree to is punishing a person, here or in an afterlife, merely for wanting to do something wrong. Hell is rejected in any case on agnostic grounds in what will here be taken as the paradigm or exemplary or minimal version of NL, as will be explained presently. NL does concern itself with the inner life of virtue, but it does not warrant punishing people for their wants alone, however bad or wrong. Divine Law sometimes does. NL sharply distinguishes bad private individual from overt unjust public behaviour. Public positive law in most nations is close to NL not Divine Law, understood as extended altruism, both in spirit and letter. Nations allow punishment for illegal overt acts, and usually have tough immigration barriers, even against asylum seekers. They have prisons, and even capital punishment is still meted out in many other nations including the US and China. Most nations have standing armies to defend against enemies, and nine countries have nuclear deterrents, allegedly to ward off enemies, using the threat of retaliatory mass murder. Although there is an overlap between states and persons, it seems that some things which we allow or require states to do by law, as necessary evils, like punishments imprisoning thieves, murderers, and rapists, we would regard as immoral or questionable for us as individuals to do. We permit them for states, as necessary evils. Yet we do not approve

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everything states do either: some state actions we condemn or should condemn, as ultra vires, like nuclear mass murder or genocide. We tend to allow or even agree with the ideal or maxim of agape if adopted by individuals. Forgiveness is not illegal. This suggests that whilst states are permitted to do some things individuals are not permitted to do, states are not empowered to dictate the content of individual personal morality. State and personal domains have boundaries which are drawn differently on the basis of NL by secularist and religious adherents. The individual, organisational and civic/public domains, the content agency in them, and their likenesses and differences will be the subject of Chapter 4 and Chapter 8. But many agnostics and atheists, like Nietzsche, and other non-religious people would say that this Divine law is totally irrational. It is irrational to love strangers, free-riders and criminals, and show respect or forgiveness to enemies. Those who favour NL stand for the conditional altruistic approach, but not the unconditional altruistic approach. But the proponents of the more extended or extreme altruism of the second approach have held that while valid up to point as a rationale for state and community morality and politics, NL is only an incomplete part of the picture. These proponents have tried repeatedly over the centuries to insist that there are theological or religious considerations which should be taken into account in moral and legal deliberation. These favour individuals following the more extreme concept or idea of altruism, imitating the gratuitous love of God for sinners, at least at the individual and voluntary group level. In the time of the Roman emperor Nero, when they were being thrown to the lions, individual Christian Divine Law adherents were probably disdainful of NL in so far as it supported state positive law. They were pacifists in state conflicts and wars; they have sometimes been anarchists, opposing the state or even the market; and some extreme altruists in the East, like Gandhi, have been opposed to large social structures as opposed to selfsufficient, village level, “commune-ism.”4 Others like Augustine have agreed to state policy being shaped by conditional justice and NL but encouraged the conditional NL adherents to also respect and care as individuals for the morally and socially worthless or wretched, arguing that NL must be extended by being overlaid with an absolute universal Divine Law of caritas or love. For many centuries they successfully managed to preach and enact systems of morality and law which enveloped NL and tried to extend the scope of altruism by seeing NL as merely an incomplete stepping stone to the more exacting morality of Divine or Eternal Law, and/or a “downward” acting Divine love, mediated by the Church through grace, as opposed to the state. Since the late nineteenth century this medieval theme of the duty of alms-giving has often been translated into the Social Justice teachings of the Roman Catholic Christian Church, into practices like tithing, and more recently talk about a “preferential option for the poor” found in Church documents and in Liberation Theology. Alas, in their medieval ascendancy, the Church has used states to punish heretics on occasion in the name of NL and public order. In historical NL accounts of principles and precepts, there is always some “principle of interpersonal responsiveness,” a term coined in Pogge (2002) which we will appropriate and designate as IRP. The nine variants of IRP set out below, and in the Abbreviations, should suffice to give an idea of what this abbreviation means. An IRP can be associated with reciprocity, justice, limited benevolence, strong benevolence or conditional altruism, and extreme or maximal altruism. With the expression, Pogge himself had in mind Rawls’ usage of the idea of foundational political “principles” of freedom and equality and helping the least 4

Gandhi favoured this “Small is Beautiful” approach; also the title of a popular book by E.F. Schumacher in 1973.

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advantaged in A Theory of Justice, (Rawls 1971). Rawls lists some primary goods, but makes no appeal to a detailed anthropology or history and uses an imagined pre-life choice under a veil of ignorance of one’s realised anthropological incarnation to show these principles are the most choice-worthy if one were to make an imaginary “pre-incarnation” life-choice in circumstances where one’s actual life chances were to be unknown to the pre-incarnated soul. We will not follow Rawls here. Rather, what is meant here are such things as for example: IRP1A: “Tit for tat”; or IRP2A: the Silver Rule: “Do not do to others what you would not want done to you”; or the Golden Rule: IPR2B: “Do as you would be done by,” or one of the more exacting variants, like the Socratic IPR6A: “Better to suffer injustice than inflict it.” There are more IRPs of increasing exactingness, like IRP7-9. At one end of a spectrum is an IRP expressing the maxim: “Do no Harm” and some general principles; or the reciprocating of good or bad treatment, (Tit for tat). The spectrum passes through justice and limited benevolence to the other end of the spectrum, where we find extreme altruism, like “Love your enemies.” Each delivers a quite different tone and content to ethics and politics, and some clearly go beyond basic NL itself, and beyond justice. They are numbered below as 1-9: IRP 1A IRP 1B IRP 2A IRP2B IRP3

IRP4 IRP5 IRP 6A IRP 6B IRP7 IRP 8 IRP 9

“Do as you have been done by”; (Tit for Tat) “Seek the good, and avoid evil”; “Do no harm”; Act rationally”; “Be just”; “Do not do what you would not want others to do” (sometimes called the Silver Rule) “Do as you would be done by” (The Golden Rule) “Do as you would will all others to do in similar circumstances to yours” (Kant’s Categorical Imperative). This concept is very similar to the so-called “Universalisability” test “Respect persons as ends in themselves, not mere means” (Categorical Imperative, alternate version) “Seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (Mill’s Utilitarianism) “Better to suffer than do injustice” (Socrates, in Republic of Plato) “Relieve suffering when possible” (Principle of Humanity) “Love God and your Neighbour as Yourself” “Love strangers, enemies, and the wicked” “Choose to go in harm’s way and/or die for the good of these and any or all others”

Natural Law endorses the principles in IRP 1A, if what was done to one was good and those between there and at least IRP5. It has been the target of appropriation by both Naturalism or Secularism and Divine Law ethics, and that is reflected in the range of IRPs which different versions of NL have taken to be countenanced, which usually cuts off at IRP5 or IRP6. In the division of opinion about altruism’s scope, and the proper subject of its demands, NL will usually not extend to IRP 8 and more often sits around IRP 6, on the measured or “conditional” altruism side of the moral divide between justice and benevolence. However, its proponents have been in dialogue with the Divine Law and the more exacting extended altruism concept at individual level for many centuries. If we subtract reference to God and God’s love from NL,

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as I will argue in Chapter 1 and 2 is possible, this will give us a useful minimal version of NL, and then later if we add in the theistic and religious overlays of extended altruism, as corresponds very loosely to the history of NL, we will not then create a completely new NL but rather one of several manifestations, extensions in scope, and rankings in status, of one nuclear conception. In one context, taken as a non-theistic non-religious law for persons, it is comparatively freestanding, and conditional in its conception of altruism; in another context, when embedded within a regime allowing recognition of God and Divine Law, unconditional altruism will be allowed to challenge the primacy and/or the content of NL. In the latter contexts, NL becomes subject to infiltration and extension, where Aquinas claims that love of God and neighbour (IRP 7)5 is part of NL (S.T.1a-11ae 100, 3 ad 1), which can make for confusion unless you are a believer. If NL primary precepts are self-evident in some sense, as Aquinas later argues in S.T. (1-11ae 94, 2) and yet God’s existence is not selfevident in that sense, but needs proof (S.T. 1a 2.2), one would have expected that God and love of God would not belong amongst NLs prime precepts as known to all and the same for all. If one takes Socrates or Stoicism as a NL representative, neither of these figures invoke the Christian God, or an alleged God taking on a human nature (Incarnation) or perfecting it. On the other hand, if we try to restrict the use of the NL tag to denote only a non-supernatural account, we will rule out Aquinas, who is a major representative of the notion of NL. There is also a possible theistic, but non-religious, context, exemplified by Aristotle, for whom God and reason are examples of goods in the category of substance (NE 1096a ff), which can be placed into NL, but which need not result in the theistic advocate calling for radical changes in NL’s content or scope, although other later theists do rank NL below Divine Law. To resolve the difficulty, NL as understood here, will be understood in such a way that it need not necessarily be atheistic, theistic or religious. I will distinguish and give a name to a theologically agnostic NL entity: Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, or NAVE, which is a construct of theological agnosticism and Aristotelian anthropology. I will also distinguish two other manifestations of NL, one theist, TNL, and one religious, DGE. I will present all three accounts as falling broadly under the rubric of NL’s Meta-ethics, or NLME. The following are five abstract elements of NL’s “meta-ethical” framework, and persist across the centuries in naturalistic, theistic and religious manifestations, allowing us to canvass and collect all possible examples of this indefinite metaethical NL type. Meta-ethics considers what sort of writing counts as Ethics. The Meta-ethical features of any NL, what ethics is taken to be about in a Natural Law Ethics scheme, and for whose elements one can look in any historical candidate for a version of Natural Law Ethics, is one with the following features:6 1) An Ontology and theory of good: a theory of being based on privileging beings with a “nature” or essence, especially human living natures with a good or telos, within Nature and the cosmos as a whole -the Universe; a correspondence theory of truth; a theory of meaning and analogy; and an implied cosmic history, or grand narrative, such as the mistaken geo-centric astronomy; or the big bang theory, or some variant of evolutionary biology; an attitude to a possible God, and entities posited in religions 5 6

See Glossary and Abbreviations under IRP Interpersonal Responsiveness Principle. Besides Stoicism, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and others already mentioned, the account generalises mainly over more recent accounts in such works as: Battaglia (1981); Copleston (1946-75, 1957); Davis and Stump (2011); D’Entreves (1951); Foot (2001); Hall (1994);(Hittinger (1987); Kerr (2002); McInerny (1997); Maritain (1948, 1951); Murdoch (1970); Nagel (2012); Porter (1995,1196; 1999); Potts (1980); Veatch (1962).

Prologue

2)

3)

4)

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like Christianity or Islam. This is dubbed below as the KGR position of the NL candidate. Something is identified as “the highest being, and the highest good,” e.g., in the Naturalist case, Reason or humanity’s perfection; in the theist case, the Unmoved Mover; in the religious case, the God of the Bible. An Anthropology: a theory of human nature’s being, usually a hierarchical/ architectonic teleological anthropology of human beings’ natural capacities and activities, as rational animal (homo sapiens), one in which intellect/reason and will/choice are the “highest” capacities of the person; through which the person can “rule” the other capacities which support it through practical reason; and can reflect on its own success. But the anthropology allows that we can also do evil, and there is a moral psychology supplied. This anthropological element includes an account of what is below called the concept of the soul-mind-body relation (SMB) in the human composite in an NL variant. A theory of the human good or telos: a notion that humans naturally wish for wellbeing and act for what they perceive, rightly or wrongly, to be their wellbeing; and a set of criteria for human wellbeing, generating a list of human inclinations/ends and needsatisfiers as ingredients to be sought by practical reason in order to fulfil them. The meaning and criteria assigned to wellbeing (MWB) generate the list of ingredients or referent of wellbeing, (RWB), for the soul’s mind and will, as the architectonic director of the other capacities in 2), to choose. These human goods supply the distinctive ends and content to Natural Law imperatives-like the principles and primary precepts of NL at 4 below. A theory of means to wellbeing: a set of means to the attainment of the ends in 3) including a) practical and ethical general principles, like “Do good and avoid evil”; “ Be rational” or ”Be fair”; interpersonal responsiveness principles (IRPs) like the Golden rule; universal primary precepts against murder, theft, and adultery; and variable secondary precepts e.g., about degree and mode of punishment; b) virtues, e.g., of courage and temperance and especially justice, with variable moral modalities, like ideal, obligatory, permitted, and prohibited. These and other means compose an Ethics and Politics of the common good of all, and of the public good, of a community. IRPs range from reciprocity, through justice, to benevolence to maximal/extreme altruism; c) natural and positive/public Law as a means to wellbeing, and for theists, so is d) grace as a means to wellbeing. A theory of choice: a method of ethical decision-making, guides attainment of the goods in 3) above, (RWB); the general principles, IRPs, special precepts, and virtues in 4) above to inform particular ethical choice of particular actions in particular circumstances in accord with the method of object, end and circumstances called casuistry.

The move from 1) to 5) is a case of descending levels of abstraction, moving from 1) being and beings with a good; to 2) human being; to 3) human being’s good; thence to 4) principles/precepts, virtues, laws, and grace as means to the human good; and finally to level 5): particular good actions chosen as means to a perceived human good in particular circumstances by this particular agent now in the light of any relevant law. The implicit “beinggenus-species-specific - good-particular - good-instance” structure running though points 1 to 5 is taken here as the key criteria of NL Meta-ethics.

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As 3) and 4) suggest, NL always presents a normative Ethics, and 1)-5) are the template or structure of an NL meta-ethic, which is filled out at levels 1) and 2) in different ways by types of NL, like the naturalistic neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethic, here dubbed NAVE, presented in Chapters 2-5; or by non-religious theists offering an NL account, dubbed TNL; or by religious theistic variants of the sort called Divine Glory Ethics, to be introduced now as DGE. The “Divine Glory Ethics” label was used in Purtill’s Thinking About Ethics (1976) to mark it off from two other teleological theories, Egoism and Utilitarianism, and to designate those moral philosophers allowing a theist metaphysics. That seems a worthwhile difference to mark by adopting the label DGE. Modern representatives would include Swinburne (1996), Kretzmann (1999); Haldane (2010); Porter (1996); Stump (1995); Finnis (1980); and Cottingham (2008; 2009). For post-Aristotelian theists and religious writers, NL is subsumed as a normative Ethics into a wider scheme along with Divine Law, but not abrogated thereby. Aquinas’s usage of NL on this point, which include God in its content, is acceptable on the basis that his version of NL is still, in the metaethical sense, an effect of and targeted on “the highest good,” interpreted as Divine Providence, not just humanity’s perfection as in the construct NAVE to be presented below. If Divine Law were thought to completely replace NL, the case would be different, and we could not entertain the idea of DGE being cause of, built on, or sitting alongside NL, or its completing NL in some way by supplying a referent for the meaning of the definite description: “The highest good.” But in the actual history of NL, DGE proponents were at pains to claim NL had its own, now subordinate status and substantial integrity. On the other hand, even if historically there has nearly always been a God-like figure, like Plato’s Demiurge, Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover or the Stoics’ Reason, or some sort of ultimate law-giver, in the NL narrative, there can theoretically be one basic (theologically agnostic) NL, targeted on a putative highest good, taken to be unknown or unspecified, found embedded in two further contexts, theist and religious, where a referent for the definite description is supplied which turns out to be supernatural for some, but not others like Nagel (2012), Murdoch (1970), or Foot (2001), who are sympathetic to teleology in Ethics, but not God.7 This is just to stipulate the way the term will be used, not a definition of the essence of NL. In this usage, the exacting variant or manifestation we discussed as extended altruism above enjoining IRPS 7- 9 would not count as part of normative natural law but be a later manifestation of Divine Law, set within a wider metaethical NL framework of type 1-5 above. Normative Divine Law is the source from which the IRPS 7-9 came and is not itself a part of all normative NL variants, where IRPs 1-5 or 1-6 might be acceptable. Thus, although NL has often been enveloped into and overlayed with extensions from Theism and Divine Law, I shall be trying to mark where these extensions occur and how they are thought to connect rationally to the base or nucleus as impositions which can result from the enveloping systems. As described in NAVE here, even if one were prepared to allow some sort of God to figure within NL’s compass, justice is in NAVE taken to have the conditional character of IRP 1-5, plus its own conceptual content or sense, apart from any IRP with which it is linked. Justice is not just a property of institutions governed by two or three master principles as in Rawls (1971). It is both a virtue of persons and states, and a concept with its own integrity and connotations of 7

Divine Law can (logically) be part of Natural Law considered as a meta-ethics, but not as a normative ethics; NL can sit alongside or within Divine law as an enveloped code. This simplified account might be challenged by the position of Kant, which envelops a non-theistic Natural Law within a generalised agnosticism about all human knowledge, which he redefined as based on appearance.

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freedom, equality, desert, and need-satisfaction linked to a variable IRP, as chapter 4 will explain. I shall employ the above meta-ethics template for NL to avoid ruling out, or ruling in, the theistic manifestations of NL at the start; and so, ruling out major naturalist, theistic, or religious figures who have accepted and defended NL. The template for NL meta-ethics is one based on generalising over or abstracting from the main historical candidates. The first of these five features of the metaethical template is that a NL account always has an ontology or theory of what beings exist according to which something plays the role of “the highest good/being.” This metaethical criterion allows one to say that any specific normative NL candidate can be agnostic in theology, or atheistic, or theistic, provided it nominates a highest good/being and affirms a doctrine under the other four headings in the meta-ethics. In such a conception, neither theism nor atheism but only “The highest good/being” is a necessary part of the NL paradigm at levels 1 and 2. There is required only a space for “the highest good/being” of Nature as a whole, including humans, and there can be an agnostic or atheistic manifestation of NL. Any theistic or religious account in which God is taken as the referent of that definite description is also NL in the meta-ethical sense, in this same but indeterminate sense. But it will not be NL in the normative sense of a stand-alone humanism or secularism if NL is now subordinated to Divine law, or its content is infiltrated by religious doctrine. Besides a range of IRPs, there is also in our NAVE construct of NL, an anthropological theory, SMB, at the level of meta-ethics element 2 above, with some implied history, and a bias towards human beings and reason in discussions of the “ontological” good, as opposed to the moral good. In a scale of natures, humans are taken to be “higher” and inherently of more value than other animals and living things, because they have minds or intellectual souls, with the power to raise meta physical questions (of the type I dub the 3-Rs in Chapter 1) and there is always some doctrine of the relation of the soul and mind to the body, which we will call the SMB relation, like physicalist monism, property dualism, or substance dualism. At level 3) in the meta-ethics, there is always some account of wellbeing, its criteria and ingredients; of justice linked to an IRP; and an account of knowledge of God or our lack of it; and of religion, KGR, whether theistic-rationalist, agnostic, atheist, or fideist. The DGE version features scripture, tradition, or authority. There is always some assumed relation between the nature and imperative content of NL; the ontology/epistemology regarding God and the soul (KGR); and the anthropology itself, the position on the relation of soul, mind, and body (SMB). These can be identified in the history of any school using NL and inform the identification in Ethics and Law in an NL variant, its IRP, relative to these factors and to the social context. There are parallel conceptions of NL, and of correlative beliefs about KGR, SMB, and IRPs, in other cultures which assume a moral law, although the moral law is not explicitly denoted as NL, such as references to “The Law” in many oral Indigenous traditions, in Eastern Philosophy, with references in Confucius and Mencius to the concepts of li (礼), yi (义), and ren (仁). to the Tao, and to a law of karma, and NL is incorporated into many of the world religions. In Western theistic DGE versions, there is reference to a God as an entity best meeting the criteria for “the highest good” and some form or expression of God is connected to the human good or wellbeing. In religious versions, there is usually a God or Gods, but not necessarily, as in the case of the Buddhist religion which rejects any personal God, but in some forms is somewhat pantheist; there is usually some reference to a creed and rituals within a community of faith; and/or some prophetic or exemplary teacher(s) whose words and practices

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are handed down from generation to generation through testimony. The basic content of Natural Law to be described in Part 1 is cross culturally similar at high levels of abstraction, but there are some differences in moral content which can result from more specific beliefs and the presence or absence of God and religion. As in the West, the differences in Oriental parallels regard what powers or chakras and moral virtues there are, and what should motivate a virtuous person; the sources of some virtues; and the scope and exactingness of theistic and religious ethics tends to be greater than that of secular NL but heaven/nirvana perfects human nature The Politics and Political Economy disciplines and doctrines, built upon the nuclear NL meta-ethical conception have been and remain quite various, and Natural Laws have seldom been successfully used to do the work of specifying positive economic or other policy by reference to precepts and virtues of NL alone. The associated ontologies and religious beliefs, and specific facts and local norms of the diverse communities in which NL has been invoked as a final court of moral appeal, have varied sharply, from Athens and Ancient Rome, to Byzantium and the Holy Roman Empire, and on to the British Empire, especially in the Americas, Africa, and India. Much of the grounding of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 owed its acceptance and success to prior works on NL. It is argued below that this difference in Political Economy stems from the degree or level of abstraction, which in politics and economics is low, but not so particular as to render the NL input thereby insignificant. Any specifications or individuated concepts of NL depend for their sense on the abstract notion specified and instanced. Abstract propositional contents derived from the metaethics and ethics of NL and its ideals are important. They can be part of the process which motivates concrete actions even if they cannot do so alone. I will also offer in Chapter 1 a model of three applications of rationality: scientific, theistic, and religious. I will suggest that NL basically aligns with a theologically agnostic natural and social scientific reason. But theist and religious applications of reason, based on metaphysics and natural theology and/or religious experience or testimony, can be and have been rationally associated with NL through the overlaid theistic and religious belief systems. These metaphysical enveloping overlays, stemming from application of what will be called the 3-R questions in Chapter 1, have been responsible for suggesting addenda to NL’s content and scope. By claiming to have identified the highest good as God, they have claimed to have subsumed NL into a wider scheme of Divine Law. Only these extended applications of reason, which recognise immaterial substances, and a supernatural quasi-personal God, will support love of God and the extended Divine Law altruism which we discussed above. They support the kind of altruistic love shown when we love the person of the worthless as fellow creatures, lovingly respect strangers, criminals, and enemies or are actively putting ourselves in harm’s way and prepared to die for others whom we do not naturally love as they are naturally unlovely. Thus, the sense of the concept of altruism is inherently equivocal with respect to its focus - the other – in its scope. This different scope is reflected in the difference between specific variants of nuclear Natural Law’s meta-ethical recognition of some sort of highest being, THG. One variant of NL, NAVE, does not identify this with God: the conditional selflessness and compassion and justice of agnostic NL. Another identifies THG with God, and another, DGE, supports the more extreme or extended meaning of altruism’s “other,” which covers love of persons as persons, including strangers, the wicked, and enemies. The rationale for theistic and religious altruism goes beyond the nuclear agnostic version of NL and science to add (still rational) Natural Theology and to allegedly possible religious experience.

PART 1

Chapter 1

THE PROJECT: NATURALIST, THEISTIC, AND RELIGIOUS APPROACHES TO NATURAL LAW INTRODUCTION According to NL exponents, social customs, conventions, and publicly known written moral rules and positive laws, in some way, make explicit, and for the most part successfully express, NL. When NL is successfully expressed, at an appropriate level of generality, explicit, public laws can achieve a near-universal consensus and acceptance, in communities and states attempting to foster the human good. This success is taken by NL advocates as evidence that they have successfully articulated the Natural Law. They concede that such claims can conceivably be mistaken: natural and conventional/positive laws are ideally the same in content, but they are logically distinct notions, and can differ in reality. Multiple cultural and linguistic forms of law, found in the positive law, at different levels of abstraction, make for perceived and real differences. Positive customary law is, in one way, “for the sake of” expressing NL as an ideal human standard, and NL serves customary law as its guide. Presence of consensus suggests there has been successful apprehension of NL, but logically the two can come apart. A positive law contradicting NL would not command obedience need not be obeyed. If we ask whether such a Natural Law exists, the question is best interpreted as asking whether positing such an ideal law has helped us in the past and can help us now to make sense of human morality, in the sort of way Utilitarianism or Kantianism can do so. These ethical approaches or “theories” draw attention to some distinctive features of morality, like consistency or weighing the possible good of foreseeability of results, and prioritise them. NL does the same thing, and like the other approaches, prioritises its own distinctive features which will be listed presently. There are broadly three Western manifestations of NL, with permeable boundaries: naturalistic, theistic, and religious. They present from before the time of Socrates, over a period of more than two millennia. In the beginning NL seems to have been conceived as “naturalistic,” in the sense of an essentially stand-alone set of imperatives, referring to human nature’s good alone, as part of Nature. As the idea of a rational cause of the order in Nature gained greater currency with Plato, by the time of Augustine, NL was subsumed into theistic beliefs, and later into religious institutionalised belief systems, and although it continued to be

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recognised as having its own integrity, as allegedly created by God, its complete independence of non-human beings and of God was eroded. In the eighteenth century, Hume questioned the place of reason in ethics, saying that reason is the slave of the passions and that the idea of NL as a set of rational self-evident and selfaddressed moral imperatives was not based on factual evidence or on reason as he conceived it. He held that there was no rational justification or subsuming of naturalist morality under a theistic or a religious ethics. In particular he argued that one cannot deduce a sentence containing an “ought” claim about morals or values to be respected in action from an “is” statement about facts. There followed Kant’s response of trying to maintain the accessibility to reason alone of NL, without a realist or theological ontological basis, and without religion, by beginning from an absolute “categorical” moral imperative, 8not an optionally pursued passion, and not the facts alone. Until the 1950s, the so called “Naturalistic Fallacy” was accepted as a fallacy, based on Hume’s remark that one cannot get deductively from an “is” assertion of fact to an “ought” imperative, was widely taken to rule out NL, as allegedly based on an attempt to derived values from facts alone, or to derive non-natural (moral) properties from natural ones.

NAVE AND HUME To proceed at all, we need to dispose of the Naturalistic Fallacy. As will be argued here in several places, the alleged fallacy is doubtfully a logical fallacy. NL reasoning was in fact never an example of the “Naturalistic fallacy,” formally deducing moral values from facts alone, or indicatives from imperatives alone, whatever the written specimens Hume may have been denouncing. Parts of NL, like the general principles and primary precepts, were certainly in gerundive or imperative mood, but thought to be undefended axiomatic starting points of moral argument, not conclusions. They were in any case also potentially rationally supportable, through practical reasoning as satisfactory means to the ingredient goods of wellbeing, using informal, not formal deductive, argument from some facts such as these: 1) an allegedly inescapable universal wish for wellbeing, indefinitely conceived as “living and acting well,” with some further marks like self-sufficiency, and exclusion of evils, like being the victim of the harm caused by the moral evil of others or one’s own poor choices 2) an alleged tendency to see chosen goods and the means to them as perceived means to wellbeing as one conceives it 3) alleged facts about the tendency of some act-types, in some circumstances, to result in harm or evil to any human, e.g., murder. Some allegedly “self-evident” general imperatives and moral precepts regarding wellbeing and avoiding these evils, which if followed by everyone, would better avoid the absence of wellbeing, and so further the inescapable desire in 1. by recognising the facts in 2. and 3., were indeed cited. Yet the principles and precepts were usually simply stated as self- evident, without these factual supports, even though one could have constructed an informal argument for the precepts from these facts. The general principles and primary precepts of NL, which contain 8

See IPRs 3 and 4 in the Prologue and Glossary.

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“oughts,” were actually presented as underived, un-deduced, and allegedly self-evident. The following of the moral imperatives is baldly stated as an allegedly obvious “ought” statement, without any argument or fallacy. But if the wish for an indefinite wellbeing is granted as natural and universal in all humans, a practical argument can be constructed for the desirability of following the principles and precepts. They are desirable, causal, practical means, and satisfactory to wellbeing. There is no effort to formally deduce “ought” imperatives from logical truths or anything in the theoretic factual order of consideration alone, or from 1-3 alone. And again, informal “dialectical” argument ad hominem is also possible to support the self-evidence of the primary precepts, though they still remain self-evident in some of the listed senses a) to e) above. Dialectical, practical, or other informal reasoning is not offered as formal deduction. Following or obeying the imperatives is allegedly an obvious and efficient means to i) - the inescapable wish for wellbeing. Thus, the moral imperatives and gerundives are either presented as undeduced and self-evidently wise; or dialectically defensible; or they can be supported by inductive dispositional/tendency-ascriptions and practical informal means-to-ends reasoning, and so are capable of a non-deductive, dialectical, rationale, explained in Chapter 4 as tracts of practical reasoning. Despite the dead hand of Hume’s challenges in Moral Philosophy for over 150 years till after G.E. Moore, the revival of NL in the Anglo-sphere began in the 1950s with the account of D’Entreves, (1951), which appeared in this still Humean context as a rather contrarian effort. It is where we will begin our account of NL, and it assumed that although NL has changed over time, there is still a significant positive normative thread of continuity in NL, and a recurrent set of issues lying behind its changing forms, from Socrates and Plato up until the time of Hegel’s doctrine of the State, as a source of ethics and law, in the nineteenth century. Even after this, NL survived into the twentieth century in Christian circles and elsewhere, through NeoKantianism and Thomism, up till 1948, where D’Entreves’ account ends with the post-World War II Nuremberg trials, and the NL-indebted U.N. Declaration of Human Rights. The contemporary Human Rights movement is sometimes seen as replacing NL, but it will be assumed here that, although distinct, the two are still yoked together. NL spells out human duties to respect the good of persons in some respect, and that implies the respected person has a right to be so respected in that regard. D’Entreves (1951) begins his discussion with the “convention/custom (nomos) versus nature (phusis) ” debate, in Plato’s Republic, which in some ways anticipated later eighteenth century discussions of modern Social Contract Theory, which has in some form has always coexisted with NL, as its foil. Volition or will, while an unchanging, defining feature of human nature, (rational animal), is perhaps the least “natural,” in the sense of unchanging, power, the most flexible along with reason, of the human natural capacities, compared to the animal and physical powers of humans. In the light of his consideration of the conventional aspect of nature, D’Entreves disavows any attempt to find a common historical element in all accounts invoking NL. My interest here is similar to his: looking for the normative continuities and possible ethical usefulness of picking out where NL was a creative disrupter of previous order for good or ill in an ethical sense. He cites the equivocation possible with use of the word “natural” as that between what is common to humans, and what ought to be common, as just one of many deterrents to anyone offering a history. This point is related to Hume’s above, but it is not the same, and it is convergent with the point made above about natural and positive law being logically distinct, and the possibility

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that the latter can be disobeyed if they conflict with the former. As one descends from abstract generalisation to the particular via specification, variability increases exponentially. If Plato, in the Republic and the Laws, be taken as one of the founders of NL, which is plausible, he was immediately followed by his student, Aristotle’s sharp critique of some particulars of his quest for a social order based on human nature, delivering ethical and legal outcomes. Aristotle in Politics Book 2 demolishes Plato’s case for one main social and political suggestions of his teacher’s work: the rulers’ conception in mating festivals, apart from families, and exclusion from the holding of inheritable property. This was an inauspicious start to two thousand years of dialogue about NL, if we take it as such, as I think we should. After Plato and Aristotle, the Stoics talk of Reason, human nature, and a universal human community of equal humans, of which NL was the basis and expression, puts NL firmly on the map. From Cicero through Ulpian, to early Christians like Augustine and Ambrose, who take the Pauline notion of “a law written on the hearts of men” (Romans II,15) very seriously, by the sixth century the compilation commissioned by Justinian, Corpus Iuris Civilis, becomes an authoritative source of NL. And by the twelfth century, the Dectretum Gratiani, does the same for Canon Law, the latter conceived as part a DGE conception, alongside NL. By the thirteenth century, Aquinas and the Scholastics build on these to reinvigorate the tradition, recognising some possibility of changes, and allowing NL, scripture and reason to interpenetrate in ways disallowed earlier by Augustine. As a result, we have a fully developed Divine Glory Ethics (DGE). By the Reformation, as D’Entreves says, the medieval NL doctrine had altered in some important respects, as NL distanced itself slowly but surely from Roman Catholic Christianity, with the works of Grotius, Pufendorf, Hooker, and Reid and the rise of a more explicit Social Contract theory with the strongly opposed views about human nature of Hobbes “Man has a restless desire for power after power” and Rousseau, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains,” and the moderate anti-innate-ist position of Locke. Then comes Kant’s profound revisions of NL’s epistemological basis, how we know NL, while preserving most of its content. This is accompanied by Utilitarian rejection of NL and the polarised versions of Utilitarianism of Bentham, “Pushpin is as good as poetry” and Mill “Better Socrates satisfied than a pig satisfied,” which resulted in Mill’s famous mental breakdown, but the eventual triumph of his view that the majority favour qualitatively “higher” pleasures. Although the tilitarians did not believe themselves to be agreeing with NL, the adoption by Mill of this “higher pleasures” standard and of the greatest happiness of the greatest number principle are in part an inheritance from Aristotle and aligns him with NAVE. In Europe, after the rise of the Hegelian and Marxist schools, as D’Entreves explains, NL’s ethical aspect goes into decline, with the historicism of von Savigny, which comes back to the English-speaking world with the legal positivism of Austin, and the descriptive scientific Jurisprudence of Kelsen, divorcing law from ethics. Only Thomists and Kant and neo-Kantians maintained the connection of NL and ethics throughout the period. And since the 1950s, and D’Entreves, NL along with DGE has made a comeback with Anglo-American Thomism, the New Natural Law movement, and Analytic Thomism, associated respectively with Owens (1958), Finnis (1980) and Haldane (2010). Given these historical complexities arising from changes within and without NL, there is a need to distinguish the Meta-ethics and the Ethics of Natural Law, as above in 1)-5) and to settle here on a slightly idealised and ahistorical, but still reasonably representative naturalist account of the normative Ethics to cover the Greeks, Romans and pre-Christian era up to the

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end of Stoicism and the Emperor Constantine; and a representative of a position in Ethics combining NL with theism and religion to cover the post-Constantine era and the rise of Islam. I decided that the construct outlined in Chapter 2-5 representing the pre-Christian period’s mainly naturalist non-religious account, and its modern adoptees, was best typified by a modified Neo-Aristotelean account, one deliberately detaching his quasi-theistic Unmoved Mover, which plays only a limited part in the detail of his Ethics and Politics compared to human reason. This Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics, here dubbed NAVE, also covers the Stoics, who are better known as proponents of NL. They are recognised within the construct to have had a stronger egalitarian focus than Aristotle, which is their main difference. They can be seen as prizing and capitalising “Reason,” and thus having a largely congruent ethical view to Aristotle, but we have much less of their textual material with which to work. Nor will NAVE be as different from Utilitarianism and Kant’s reason-based naturalist ethics as many introductory Ethics textbooks suggest, given Kant explicitly recognises ethics as independent of belief in God along with NL, and given that Mill is an agnostic in theology, but like Aristotle values “higher” human pleasures. In Iris Murdoch’s (1970) The Sovereignty of Good, her Platonism was also considered as a source for a robust naturalist ethics, but does not adequately address the many problems with Plato’s position. Philippa Foot’s kind of naturalism in her book Natural Goodness (2001) was considered for the role NAVE will play here. Foot once claimed in private conversation at a conference to be an atheist Thomist. But the book was judged not to be well enough connected to the NL history or developed fully enough to typify naturalism as it stands. A better modern analogue of the NAVE construct in Chapters 2-5 is to be found is Lisska’s (1996) work Aquinas’ Theory of Natural Law on a naturalistic version of NL. This is based on attempting to detach Aquinas’s theism from the account in his Summa Theologiae (ST) Treatise on Law. Lisska’s fairly compact, suggested construct, in his Chapter 4, describes and defends the idea of a non-theist NL, based on a correspondence theory of truth; the ontological theory of essences, form and matter (later called “hylomorphism”); and some synthetic a priori principles, like the principles of causality,at my suggested metaethical level 1), Ontology, outlined in the Prologue. He mentions an essential human nature, essential dispositions, and basic human inclinations as being in the Anthropology, set out at my level 2); gives a very brief account of temporal wellbeing at level 3); some imperative moral principles and precepts at 4); and an account of moral reasoning from human dispositions to final ends of dispositions to particular moral judgements at my level 5). In these ways the NAVE construct in Chapters 2-5 of this work overlaps with Lisska’s less detailed construct of a naturalistic natural law. NAVE takes the Lisska suggestion further by spelling out such a version of NL in much more detail under each of the five-point meta-ethics headings set out above. My reason for provisionally spelling out, and conditionally adopting, NAVE, is that it is more detailed than Lisska’s parallel project of detaching a naturalistic version of NL from Aquinas. Although NAVE is also meant to show the potential of non-theistic naturalism as a possible stand-alone ethical or jurisprudential NL organon, and this aim of Lisska’s project is one I support and share in principle, there are some important omissions from Lisska’s comparatively undeveloped construct. For him a meta-ethics is any way of showing how a normative ethics can explain moral and legal choices. Some “principles of meta-ethical naturalism” are set out (Lisska 1996, p.103), but they comprise only the necessity of an analysis of dispositional properties, of the concept of “natural bent”; and wellbeing as completion of dispositional development. The goodness of this flourishing, via attaining a multiplicity of

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incommensurable goods; the evil of frustrating a developmental process; and the identification of the completed process in a person as being the source of morality, complete his sketchy meta-ethics of NL. Later, examples are offered of NL theorists, but there is no clear account of why the candidates all qualify as NL candidates. Lisska says one needs only a theory of natural kinds and of essences with dispositional properties, with finality-determining ends, and an ethics as a means to develop them; a good-to end analysis; and a consistent theory of practical reason (p.189). There is otherwise no example or talk of an increased specification of an analysis using a systematic template like 1) to 5) above. Those metaethical points which he does mention oddly fail to explicitly discuss Ontology as a metaethical element of NL, given agnosticism in theology is obviously pivotal for his whole construct, as it is for NAVE. It is just assumed that there is no need to explain.At level 2) above, under the rubric of the Anthropology, the description of the human powers and relation of higher intermediate and lower powers and their inclinations is mentioned (Lisska 1996, p.101; pp.234-236) but the nature and architectonic causal differences between the end/objects of the intellectual/voluntary dispositions, the intermediate perceptual, mobility and sexual powers, and lower natural autonomic ones is not spelled out at all, but only the molar human inclinations which result; nor is practical reason’s differences from theoretic in relation to the decision making procedures, mentioned at levels 4) and 5) above, like casuistry, made clear enough. There are no examples of an application of the proposed NL derivation using his construct’s decision-making methods, or integration of discoveries about direction of fit and causality in Speech Act Theory into such reasoning. In Part 2 of this work it is argued that on several issues, NAVE, Theism (TNL) , and Divine Glory Ethics (DGE) differ radically in content and scope, and where the difference lies has everything to do with theism and religion. Lisska may well agree, but the point of his construct and topics in his coverage seems to be exploring independent naturalistic grounds for jurisprudence and human rights, not exploring the NAVE-DGE differences. For his purposes, revealing a possibly consensual NL unencumbered by religion, a godless neo-Thomism, his sketch may suffice, but this is not the main aim of NAVE. Aquinas, as a theist (TNL) and a believer (DGE), will not fit under the NAVE construct either, so there is some overlap with Lisska’s construct. But the aim of NAVE and of Parts 2 and 3 of this work, is not to show NAVE’s undisputed stand-alone potential. It is on the contrary, to show how DGE and theistic TNL relate to NAVE as radical extensions to a naturalistic foundation; to point out and to critically discuss some of NAVE’s internal ambiguities and weaknesses regarding some justice issues; and its inherent limits with regard to some global world order issues compared to DGE. Lisska is exploring the possibility of subtracting theism and religion from NL in order to produce a new NL theory which avoids the Naturalistic Fallacy of deducing a value claim from a factual one, showing that an essential disposition with an inherent end and good as its completion can succeed in avoiding this move, permitting the extraction of an independent version of naturalism. I am suggesting that the Naturalistic Fallacy is not found in NL and exploring the NAVE-DGE interrelations, complementarities, and differences. The purpose of NAVE is to discuss its relation to its DGE extensions when restored after Chapter 5. So, it seems that we are only partly on the same page, and for the rest, we are going in opposite

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directions on the same road and mostly discussing different issues.9 Lisska’s naturalist NL construct is just too underdeveloped for my purposes, and there are four NAVE chapters here. Unlike in NAVE, there are some non-naturalist, non-materialist elements, and a theism of sorts, in Aristotle’s own virtue ethics, like the agent intellect and the Unmoved Mover, but they are not central or indispensable to his meta-ethics or ethics, his account of a human-nature based ethics, an embryonic Natural Law, and of virtue, as a perfecting disposition of natural capacity ordered to wellbeing. In the post-Stoic period, the DGE position, from St. Augustine onwards, imposed theistic and religious ontological addenda under metaethical heading or element 1), Ontology, with implications for each of the other four metaethical headings in DGE. The position of DGE is best typified by Aquinas. Aquinas argues for a creator-God, as cause of the being of the Universe, and for the supernatural entities and events posited in scripture, like angels and miracles, under metaethical element 1) and KGR above. He reproduces, with amendments, and endorses, Aristotle’s descriptions of human nature’s capacity under rubric 2) and SMB; but adds a possible afterlife for the soul. At 3) he again endorses the same criteria (MWB) for wellbeing but changes the reference of “the highest good” to the Christian God and introduces the possibility of eternal salvation under RWB; under 4) he adds several IRPs like IRP 7-9 from the Bible to the naturalist list of IRP1-6, plus adding grace and divine law to means to wellbeing; the precepts relating to theological virtues of faith, hope, and agape/caritas to natural virtues of Aristotle. Under 5) he allows the changes in 1-4 above to alter the reference of wellbeing to cover eternal wellbeing at crucial steps of casuistry or determination. By and large Aquinas can also stand for theism, but not for a stand-alone theist version of NL, like some versions of Deism. For him, Divine Law is obeyed by humans with the same nature and human capacities as those with which they should obey NL, enhanced with grace. Natural law is just not the last word, but embedded within Divine Law, with grace-enhanced theological virtues or perfecting dispositions of those capacities. Faith in a Divine revelation is the distinctive addendum. Theism alone, without revelation, such as Deism, is not easily represented here as a stand-alone NL version. There certainly can be such a theist nonreligious NL position, or TNL But Hobbes and the American founding fathers, like Jefferson, or the contemporary philosopher A. Flew, a late convert from atheism (Flew and Varghese 2007) and many Deists are not friendly to some of the most basic metaethical ideas of NL, as will be clearer when we introduce and describe the two main representative types. Likewise stand– alone religions, like fundamentalist Evangelicalism, have little time for NL as a source of truth or morality. In the five-point constructed Neo-Aristotelian Meta-ethics of the naturalist version of NL, NAVE, in Chapter 2-5, the naturalist/secular version, is assumed as in some ways minimal and fundamental, and its theistic and religious addenda are provisionally edited out as far as possible in these chapters. Chapter 7 re-admits theism, as a possible addendum to NL, and DGE as a separate religious ethics. The major later theistic and religious elements, best represented by Aquinas, were, historically speaking, laid over, and connected logically to, the NAVE base as expounded here, by Augustine, Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, and Suarez in the medieval period. The definite description: “the highest good” (THG) in the NAVE metaethical system did, for the historical Aristotle refer to an Unmoved Mover. Aquinas assimilated THG to the 9

I share Lisska’s view that the New Natural Law (NNL) account of Finnis is an unsuccessful attempt to work within acceptance of the Naturalistic Fallacy doctrine that one cannot get an “ought” from an “is,” by affirming a list of allegedly intuited self-evident basic human goods generating something like prima facie duties without resort to metaphysics and ontology. My parallel convergent argument to his against NNL is spelled out in Chapter 11.

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Christian God, creator of the Universe, and to Christ, in his “Five Ways” arguments for God, by saying, of the entity concluded to: “This we (Christians) call God” (S.T.1a Q2, 2). He thereby believed he had successfully melded the two NL accounts, with the Christian additions, in ontology, theology, and “grand narrative,” the very novel ideas of Divine Law, grace, and theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, which now appeared in conjunction with basic NL, or NAVE, as alleged complements. This creates the hybrid Divine Glory Ethics, described in Chapter 7. In the DGE variant of Natural Law Meta-ethics, as the five elements were filled in, Christ was believed to be at once human and divine, so the concept of human nature was being stretched to hitherto inconceivable limits by Christian NL advocates like Augustine and Aquinas. The Incarnation was accordingly said by believers to be an officially designated “mystery” a doctrine to be accepted on faith alone, like the Trinity. The doctrine of the Trinity, and other such religious addenda, partly altered and partly explained the subsequent nature of later NL itself. Historically, after the Roman Empire fell, it was the theists and religious believers and religious writers who most needed the concept of NL to define where their own differentiating addenda interfaced with NL. They used NL to express their own theism and religion, and embedded NL within a Divine Law supernatural scheme, as a stepping stone to their own accounts. The Anglo-Roman St. Patrick may not have actually used the shamrock to explicate the Trinity, (see book cover) but in the missionary period there was an unavoidable and pressing need to connect DGE with TNL and NAVE. Missionary Irish Christianity always respected and conserved pre-existing “natural” cultures, and happily for NL, Christianity was able much later to embellish and return naturalist culture to Europe through the Monastic movement reinvigoration of Europe starting with St. Columbanus. These reflections suggest a need to clarify where we are now with NL, by drawing the limits of basic NL. The construct NAVE in Chapter 2-5 will be the starting point for this task. This subtraction is done with some difficulty, and the excerpts are not discarded. They are reintroduced in Part 2 discussions of possible and real contemporary applications and purported extensions of NL. The reader should note that, although risking confusion, in the spirit of Lisska’s use of Thomistic concepts like essence and virtue in a naturalistic account, I have allowed Aquinas along with other writers, like the naturalist Searle, to describe many of the details of the five basic non-theist elements of NAVE, using some Thomist as well as Speech Act Theory terminology. This is done on the grounds that, although Aquinas modestly credits Aristotle with almost everything he says in the area of Philosophical Anthropology, in some important respects, he systematised and improved on Aristotle’s own sometimes incomplete anthropological remarks, e.g., in describing the differences between intellect and will, and their role in choice and action in S.T. 1a-11ae QQ1-18. I have incorporated these improvements into NAVE. The naturalist Searle’s work in Speech Act Theory (Searle 1983) likewise, is in the spirit of NAVE, and his notion of different direction of fit between world and word in assertions and commands ironically captures and incorporates the Scholastic medieval maxim: “Truth and falsity are in the mind; goodness and badness are in things.” Other classical candidates for representing the naturalist theologically agnostic or atheist version of NL, who are mentioned ad hoc to explicate NAVE, are Feuerbach and Mill and more recently Nagel (2012), Murdoch (1970), Mackie (1982), and Foot (2001), Reformation and Renaissance revisions of Christian doctrine in the sixteenth century in various ways changed the relation of naturalist, theistic, and religious NL, with deeper reflections on the famous Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5:7. Such reflections dwelt on the notion found in this text of scripture, that eternal salvation was a very difficult accomplishment,

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which many would not achieve. It dwelt on some seemingly outrageous and impossible requirements for avoiding Hell, including those concerning plucking out eyes to avoid lust, marrying a divorcee being adultery, and the suggestion that family ties should be over-ruled if necessary for the sake of salvation. These doctrines of the seeming impossibility of salvation lead to the “grace versus works” controversy surrounding Luther’s claim that justification was by faith alone. As Nygren (1932) argues, he was fully committed against Natural law, to the doctrine of agape, God’s love flowing through us, from above, with us as passive tubes of grace as opposed to caritas as a virtue which involved human voluntary action assisted by grace. In the nineteenth century, the Biblical “higher criticism” questioned the literal status and finality of Scripture, and it was suggested that Jesus Christ could have meant that he was “one with” God, in the sense of “in touch with” the Father, without himself being part of the Godhead or God. The struggle continues over the claim that the near-impossible Sermon teachings are only aspirational counsels of perfection. Part 3 of the book will revisit some of these matters including the plausible revisionist suggestions, some religious Apologetics arguments made for a DGE, and the often very thin difference between mysticism and negative theology on the one hand and atheism on the other, which continue today.

NAVE AND THE THREE RS These matters are mentioned here in part to further the suggestion that even if there never was a naturalist, non-theist NL, until Philippa Foot and others in quite recent times. NAVE is a useful hypothetical construct intended to illuminate some differences about the nature and possible scope of reason. Scientific reason is a capacity exercised among other uses in answering the question: “Why do things happen in the world?” with answers from natural science as to what happens and why things do happen in the world codified in Physics, Biology and social sciences. This is scientific reason at work, which we shall dub R1. It is “natural” that we should compile and teach its successful discoveries in mathematics and physical science, and so its implied metaphysics, ontology, and philosophy of science at this level. If we think of ourselves as following a path of rational reflection, when we reflect on humanity’s own success, it thereby opens up a second-order why-question: “Why is there an intelligible world?” “Why is it so fine-tuned that earth survives in it and humans can study it?” “Why can we scientifically understand the Universe’s billion year near-infinite past, the infinitely small and infinitely large?.” “Is the success of science a miracle?” (Davies 1985; Kretzmann 1999; Schlesinger 1988; Swinburne, 1993). We will dub this question-level, level R2. One answer to such questions is that we do not know, or cannot know, and complete explanation is impossible as evidenced/seen in the writings of Hume along with those of Kant, and more recently Mackie (1982). We will in that case simply stop walking the path. Another option is to press the causal principle further and to speculate that there is some underlying creative rational principle or agency at work, or a creating quasi-personal God, about which some inferences can be made from the cosmos and its structure and from humanity, as effect. Again, we can stop at this point saying that this application of the causal principle is the end of the line of thought. But once again, we may want to continue. We can then ask: “If the world had such a rational uncaused cause, did whatever caused the world have a reason, with implication for, or a view of, the human good?” ‘Is it in some way personal or quasi-personal?”

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“Can anything be known about God’s Providence, if she exists?” “Can the alleged historical revelations to humans about God’s will be assessed?” This is a different level of questioning, we shall dub R3. If not ruled out as before, the answers here will tend to be based on alleged extraordinary experience, individual or group, and the experiential support will have to be strong enough to complete with R1 claims based on replicable prediction and natural science law; and with claims arising from the R2 Natural Theology reflections (Alston 1991; Hick 1989; Stump 2016; Yandell 1993). Besides the graduated decline in certainty, there are obstacles to R2 type reasoning posed by the difficulty of warranting the scope of causal reasoning; of reconciling a good creator-God with the existence of natural and moral evil, and the problem of unanswered communication/prayer. For R3 type reasoning those problems carry over, and there are added difficulties posed by the alleged revelations about Original Sin and Atonement, Hell, and human ability to respond to the exacting requirements claimed in the alleged revelations. Nevertheless, the answers which can be given to R2 and R3 questions do qualify as reasons to believe, however weak. Contemporary representative of the attempt to respond to the objections to religious belief include Eleonore Stump, Richard Swinburne, John Cottingham, Keith Yandell, Keith Ward, and John Haldane already mentioned and many more. I will dub this set or questions the “3-Rs questions”, for short, and apply them in what follows. NAVE is basically an R1-level account, and Aquinas’s DGE is a level R3 account. Hobbes, as a theist, could be a candidate for an R2 account, but has little use for mainstream NL because he is the first modern Social Contract theorist and his portrait of human nature is so bleak. Possible theistic natural law upholders who were not religious include the American Thomas Jefferson and Paley. I shall revisit the 3Rs different types of reason below and eventually argue that there has always been a nexus between NL and some sort of transcendence. Prior to the millennium-long medieval union, Plato’s early mentions in the Republic of a basically naturalistic version, still makes reference to the immaterial Forms, the World Soul and Nous, and a cosmos-creating Demiurgos. As already noted, Aristotle refers to an Agent Intellect and an ultimate Unmoved Mover, and the supreme Stoic entity, Reason or Logos, is a unique being, in some ways transcendent. Historically, NL nearly always assumes a narrative history of some type, an ontology/epistemology, and anthropology of some sort, simple or complex. The ontology and epistemology of a given period, and religious context, say medieval Islam or Buddhism, will show NL’s variable relation to theology, or theisms. These give an account of whatever turns out to be deemed “the highest good,” and this in turn governs some of the content of the highest human good (RWB) associated ethics, moral psychology, and politics of NL. The remainder of this section will be an overview of where the argument will be heading; how the Parts listed in the Table of Contents fit together, and the rationale for the NAVE thought experiment. It will also touch on how far one can get in global as opposed to national or communal ethics, without God and religion. The short answer, emerging from a discussion of organisational ethics, (Chapter 8); violence, (Chapter 9) poverty, (Chapter 10) sexuality (Chapter 11) will be that one can make considerable headway on the issues with NAVE alone, but one cannot go as far the naturalist might think. For example, NAVE is strong on conditional altruism and justice, but less so on unconditional forgiveness and charity. There is disagreement between NAVE and DGE about where justice ends and charity begins, and the “NAVE-only” based argument for charity and agape beyond justice is controversial, not only within the NAVE fold, as between those privileging self-sufficiency of

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recipients (Berger’s Pyramids of Sacrifice (1976); Wisor (2011) over financial philanthropy, (Singer’s One World, 2004) but also over the scope and ranking of competing moral claims on individuals, in families, groups, organisations, and states, regarding the basis of their duties, and the scope of altruism. In the area of sexuality, there is disagreement on contraception in marriage being against NL, and the connection of gender, love, sex, procreation/children, and monogamy in marriage, with NAVE defenders having radically changed their line on marriage and homosexuality in the last century. There is some disagreement on nuclear weapons deterrence within and between religious non-violence advocates, and religious just war advocates, and between religious and secular writers, on the use of nuclear lethal force as a deterrent in strategic policy by states. There is much less disagreement on the motivation and strategy to shape an ideal global community, especially regarding the global arms trade and tax evasion through tax havens, and the immense steps forward on the last century; although there are problems about the scope and moral motivation for humanitarian intervention and global poverty relief, and the dangers of speaking truth to power. In these areas we will use the above extended model of reason to explore the possibility that DGE can contribute an added rationale unavailable to NAVE, by recognising the openended nature of causality and the relevance of individual vision and religious experience, even if at some risks to consensus-building. The World Religions are held in some version by a vast majority of the billions of human beings, mostly theist (a creator God) or pantheist (God exists but is not a person), or believers in a supernatural afterlife experience. They could support a global ethics like NL in the sense of complementing it, by rationalising extensions of its scope, if their differences from, but continuity with, scientific reason could be recognised, as it is in the 3-Rs model or doctrine set out in the Prologue and in this Chapter. Provided individual experience or intuitive understanding and knowledge, including group knowledge and testimony, is accepted as having some inconclusive standing, and R1-style natural and social science is not challenged as the rational paradigm or exemplar of truth discovery in its own domain, with its publicly testable predictions, R1 can be maintained as the paradigm case of reasoning and a check on some of the more outlandish claims of R3 belief, as can R2 reasoning. As Feuerbach argued, (1855) much of the essence of Christianity and its God can be seen as an idealisation of humanity, and though they think it is much more than that, Christians have since before Augustine agreed that man is an image and likeness of God, and so like God. But “likeness” is a reflexive relation, and likenesses, if ascribed, is ascribed to and can apply to, both likened terms. The content of the concept of a God has been of use in philosophical debate about terrestrial and human matters for centuries, in the form of thought experiments, especially by medieval philosophers and logicians. The idea itself was the subject of Anselm’s famous Ontological argument for God in Proslogion, and even Descartes treated it as an effect in the Meditations. It has been used as the notion of an effect (the cosmos) suggesting a cause of its existence; a cause of all other effects, and a way of attributing qualitative properties to God from the alleged effects. If God as an idea did not exist it would have had to have been invented. There is nothing essentially problematic about theology or atheology. If R3 claims are also allowed, the DGE concept of humans as “the children of God” so central to believers in Christian agape10 as an extension of NL, could perhaps strengthen the naturalist case for equality and justice and the hand of moderates in nuclear armed states with majorities of believers in Hinduism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity against their own zealots 10

See Nygren (1932; Harper and Row paperback edition appeared 1969).

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and fundamentalist wings. Natural law appears in all three Religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and is found in parallel forms in Hinduism and Buddhism. Its metaethics as set out in the Prologue, could form a bridge between religion and secularism. Chinese Confucianism with its doctrines of li, yi and ren, is basically humanist, and NL-friendly, but even there, in reality, many accept a form of theism and the worship of ancestors complicates its naturalistic status. The DGE envelopment of NL has its own epistemological grounds, practical paradigms, and limitations. One strength is its doctrine of equality of all humans as children of God and its focus on the uniqueness and creative freedom of the individual as individual, found in Christian existentialists like Scotus, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, G.M. Hopkins, and Gabriel Marcel; and also in Buber and other non-Christian writers11. Another strength is its distinction of the behaviour/sin and the person/sinner. This allows for hatred of wicked behaviour and love/forgiveness of the person. However, although its proponents can give some metaphysical reasons, based on causality, and some psychological and aesthetic arguments, for theism and some anecdotal and collective non-scientific reasons for its religious conclusions about mercy and forgiveness, they cannot give the same kind of compelling confirmable arguments as R1 does for its assertions, or even as theism can for its R2 claims in Natural TheoIogy. There is a stronger case for God as an immaterial entity and for an immaterial self than generally recognised, as Chapter 6 and 7 will try to show, and the arguments for a God are pitched largely at the level R2 in the suggested model of reasoning offered above. R3 claims, like the sacred history claims in R3 type confessional beliefs, or the most distinctive and exacting ethical ideals of universal compassion, non-violence and extreme altruism, while intelligible, and for those who have the relevant experience and belief, subjectively certain, are not objectively compelling for non-believing others, in a way like those of natural and social science. This lower quality of rational demonstrability means they are in some ways rational, but “less rational” in the sense of grounded in generalisation than R1 claims. This is a real threat to global consensus, but one that must be endured. It must be granted that confessional religious anecdotal and even institutional claims passed on through apostolic succession for extraordinary religious experience, claims of thought transference, answered prayers, healings following prayer, supernatural contacts and interventions, and testimony about past miracles worked by the holy religious figures and prophets of the various religions, are all very much harder to assess and confirm than publicly confirmable perceptual claims, claims of natural science or even Natural Theology at R2 level. The suggestion here is however that although R3 claims of supernatural experiences are less replicable /confirmable than scientific ones, and the latter can be, and sometimes need to be, confronted about alleged departures from R1 normality, which strives to better assure reliability, anecdotal R3 claims can sometimes survive scrutiny. Unique scientifically nonreplicable individual experiences, including those based on non-propositional knowledge or understanding, do occur. Moments of the appreciation of unique beauty do occur. Claims regarding immaterial objects and events can and should be accepted as possibly true. All the circumstances should be considered, e.g., the context and content of the religious claim, and the track record of the witness. Healings based on prayer do exemplify the placebo effect, but definitely occur, even if this is still an unchartered phenomenon. If successful, such healings can be evidence of a sort. Chapter 6 argues that immaterial being exists in the form of mind, 11

The historical roots of the existentialist movement are discussed in Farmer (2010) and Maritain (1948).

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and that belief in immateriality more widely is still reasonable. These phenomena are still reasons or evidence in favour of the powers of non-material entities. Assessing particular anecdotal and institutional religious revelations will not be attempted here. I have not had any such supernatural experiences, but I accept the word of many people whom I trust over the years that they have had such experiences, and that they occur. There are works which attempt to deal with by some of these matters, such as healings, premonitions, near-death experiences, and post-death appearances of persons, by Almeder (1990) and Murphy (1992). Assessing the Christian belief in apostolic succession and the transmission of a creed or nuclear corpus of teaching in its integrity from early Christian times to Constantine, Helen of Rome, and the definitive scriptural compilations of Marcion and of Eusebius onwards, will not be attempted either. These are matters of faith, reasonable in the way beliefs of this sort are reasonable. Yet the THL and DGE versions of NL are worth discussing as a possible tool of global ethical reconciliation, alongside Buddhism, and Confucianism and its offshoots, which feature the Golden and Silver Rules expressed in maxims which pre-date Western NL. Granting religion has some rational status allows non-theists to dialogue with the majority of people, who believe in a supernatural or have a religion, and can strengthen the hand of moderate believers within religious ranks. We need to face the fact that although religion is now deeply suspect in a Post-Enlightenment Western world, we cannot throw God and religion out and still have a good understanding of the potential of NL’s Metaethics. The famous Abraham–Isaac story, in Genesis 22:12. to be examined now, is a good example of why people may want to do so, and move into something like NAVE or Utilitarianism, Kantianism or the other versions of naturalistic Virtue Ethics. A simple and intuitive way to see the case for something like NAVE and insisting on the reasonableness of a non-theist NL would be to reflect on the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac. If it is unfamiliar, the reader is invited to read it and reflect on its implications. Many would condemn Abraham for his willingness to murder his son to show his faith in Yaweh. If anything is clear in Ethics, and NL, knowingly and deliberately killing one’s innocent son is wrong. Unless we are selfstyled mystics, we do not normally experience personal contact with God of sufficient intimacy to know the will of God, or respond to such a command, even if the power of God theoretically (or incredibly) extends to reversing time and with it a murder and all its evil results, as the medieval Peter Damiani apparently argued to be implied by Divine Omnipotence. Nor do we know if it is even possible to know and distinguish when we have been divinely commanded to do something from a self-delusion. We do however know we should not murder our children. This is as good an example of an ethical judgement based on Natural Law as one could get. So, there is a strong prima facie case against the alleged priority of religious ethics over naturalism and non-theist Natural Law. On the contrary, Natural law seemingly trumps Divine and religious law hands down.

The Three R Questions and the Possibility of Theism and Religious Belief The only way to let God and religion back into the picture is if sense can be attached to the notion of an experience with or inference to a non-material, non-natural or supernatural content or object, or a mode of accessing higher realities, permitting an assertion which is potentially true. Such assertions or existence claims, if accepted, can allow for positing a God, for the

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dilemma to arise in the first place, and for the story to have implications for the content of Ethics and Law. If further questions about existence and the good are allowed, at levels beyond natural science, science will not answer them. The 3-R questions asked above at level R2 included: “Why is there anything (a Universe) at all?” “Why is the universe and in particular the earth the result of law-like physical factors which are so “finely tuned” that the minutest change in one law would have extinguished the possibility of life?” “What caused the conditions for the human genome?” “Why is science successfully able to talk about and generalise over the entire cosmos, from the level of nano-particles to galaxies of near-infinite size?” “Why and how is it that we are on a relatively miniscule planet, in a single solar system, within one of many galaxies, apparently alone in an infinitely large universe, or even universes, which we can potentially know to exist?” These questions, treating science as a miracle, are taken here to be coherent, warranted, legitimate questions, and they will not be ruled out by science itself since they are metascientific. They can be ignored, or deemed unanswerable, either in fact or in principle. But in NL meta-ethics, at ontological level 1), some reason needs to be offered to do so. If accepted, at the next R3 level, one can ask: “If there were an ultimate uncaused necessary cause of contingent objects/events or their causes, could it be personal?” “Is it well-disposed to humans?” “What would that mean for humans?” The viability of such discourse depends on whether words like “exists” and “good,” “person” and “cause” can be used in ways not familiar to natural science, such as analogically. If X causes the Universe to exist, it does not cause it to exist in the same way as a heated pot causes water to boil an egg, as the heat’s effect. In the familiar or paradigm cases, the cause will be an instance or specimen of some type, not the cause of there being a type or types of any kind, or good in the whole universe. Analogy of attribution can broaden one’s notions of personal, existence, good, beauty, unity, and truth-of the transcendentals. Another way of thinking about R3 possibilities is also provided in Kant’s Critique of Judgment discussion of the beautiful and sublime in art, music and nature, and in Buber’s (1937) distinction of “I-It” and “I-Thou” relations, attitudes, or realities developed from Spinoza and set out below.12 It concerns what the existentialist claim that individuals can be known as individuals in ways different from the way they are known abstractly. Buber calls this knowledge the “I-Thou” type of knowledge versus the “I-It” type of relation. Like Spinoza, Buber seems to offer a dual aspect account of mind, God, and Nature in which mind and nature are attributes of God or God is an attribute of Nature itself. It might however be possible to go further than Spinoza or Buber to argue that these “I-Thou” relational attributes, set out presently, disclose a distinct reality or level of beings, in some way transcending the physical world. Perhaps such personalistic relational phenomena indicate a need to acknowledge that there are phenomena which are more than just two ways of viewing the same being. “I-Thou” relations are objectively possible between entities which have a quality of having come from without, an unbidden tone, and are not just physical. Natural science or R1 success in the understanding of “I–It” relations is necessary and good in itself and also provides the explicandum of R2. If R1 is confined to description and generalisations about the world and includes only actual generalised human value preferences, it is formally silent on normative matters of Ethics. For how we ought to live, we will need ethical norms, even though these can be informally and dialectically reasoned to from R1 data 12

Buber’s I and Thou appeared in 1937, but it is not presented as a systematic work of existentialist philosophy.

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about temporal wellbeing. These arguably yield the desirability of reciprocity and limited altruism, a just war stance, but perhaps not agape/ahimsa/caritas. Table 1. The I-It and I–Thou Dimensions: Adapted by the author from Buber (1937) I and Thou I-It world Individual seen as an accidental concatenation of universal properties, a variation of the rational species, homo sapiens. People may be generalised about, (once you’ve seen one...) and given measurable quantitative rating or exchange value, in the objective world. Realism and economies of scale in politics; speed and routine valued in interaction; interchange-ability the practical focus. Who you are/What you have done is the measure of worth, not what you can do. Arms-length measurement/manipulation is practiced. Scientific experimental critical study of species itself rational; deals in laws, formal recursive functions and descriptions with impartial decision procedures for judging probable truth value; all knowable objects, including persons, to be described, discussed, assessed impartially; managed; one role player to many clients, customers, consumers, patients etc. Role/Task orientation; impersonal; overt; objective; public; one-many relations focal; socio-political order addresses basic social needs for security, health, work, and information as prime; sphere of contract and commutative justice; quid pro quo reciprocity. Absolute clarity ideal. Science and policy are both disinterested; impartial; seek the replicable; the controlled; treat the same the same; justice as desert is focal; the explicit as prime; in practical order, principle, rule, law target common good, with equity as the only personal relief; market exchange arena, Practical reason as contractual; pragmatic, instrumental and manipulative; quid pro quo reciprocity; sphere of unfettered market.

I-THOU world Individual seen subjectively, as idiosyncratic/unique changeable entity, physically and psychologically, with own “this-ness” or haecceitas – and own qualitative essence/species specialissima (Scotus); apprehended by intuitive cognition of individual as individual, or “inscape” (Gerard Manlley Hopkins). I am not a particular in the scientific sense (Gocke; Priest in Gocke (2012); one is ineffably and indescribably connected to the All. Intuitive awareness found in ecstatic/aesthetic performance or concert experiences. Slow and small is beautiful. Contemplation focal Attitude to the person of self and the other is hopeful, empathetic, intuitive, a-rational, discursive, informal, playful, creative, and tacit. Not based on their actual virtue alone, but their humanity/being and potential. Personal objects cannot be explicitly described replaced or measured; symbol and metaphor needed; persons as ends in themselves; one to one intimate relations. Expressive orientation; personal; subjective; immanent; private, family domain; one to one relations is focal; personal higher development needs included. Sphere of domestic justice and agape. Making relation explicit is difficult because hope creates change in the object(s). Ethics requires emotional engagement; partiality is OK; unconditional creative love not necessarily based on merit focal; needs of the other matter; agape for the sinner, enemy, stranger. The irreplaceable; ecstatic; implicit are intuit-able: casuistry in decisions; no market “commodification.” Practical reason as based on treating person as ultimate transcendent end (Kant); capable giving/receiving unconditional commitment.

If however, R2 accounts take what Buber dubs the “I–Thou relation” as part of the human data to be explained at level R2 and at level R3, or it is taken as part of the answer to the R2 question, an experience of or indication of the will of “the highest human good” – one of the key elements in describing wellbeing and the basis of Ethics- then personal “I-Thou” relations are capable of supplying some reason for practising moral heroism. The idea of experiencing self-transcendence and applying absolute self-suffering agape to one’s partner or child or parent or friend, makes good sense. If we are aware that we are prepared to die for our loved ones, there may be a link to R3 “grand narratives” belief in forms of transcendence, or immortality/eternity. This might be supported by Substance Dualism in Philosophy of Mind, which would place the self in the R2 realm in the 3-R model. Religious experience, supernatural testimony, or tradition; or the conservation of moral energy/karma, or spiritualism would be put in the R3

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realm. R3 accounts usually depend on the idea of God from R2. R1 can exist without R2 or R3. But empirically unconfirmed intuition, the non-scientific one-on-one personal knowledge, especially the knowledge of partners and children, is not strictly speaking on the radar of natural science. Religious experience, intuition of other persons as persons and/or apprehension of harmony through meditation techniques, or other personal and interpersonal historical testimony, may be capable of bringing us knowledge of higher powers. R1 alone does seem incomplete. The “I-Thou” relations terms’ differences from, but relations to, the terms of the “I-It” relation, is itself a meta-phenomenon needing explanation. In such an account, Nature and scientifically described beings, and their practices and disciplines, would be viewed as “for the sake of” sustaining or illuminating a higher spiritual reality, or realities, disclosures of “higher level,” architectonically related, made real in entities in “I-Thou” relations. Such relations are those found in interpersonal relations, experienced in subjective states or persons like parenthood, friendship, sexual and other familial forms of intimacy and empathy, holding between idiosyncratic persons and personalities; and perhaps other alleged self-transcending experiences of souls/minds or of God. One can be aware that one is prepared to die for love of another. If these qualify as religious experiences, perhaps religious experience is more accessible than we are accustomed to believe.

Figure 1. Correlating degrees of altruism and ontological commitment.

In the Figure 1 graph, the vertical axis attempts to ‘map’ the territory between reciprocity and natural justice and kindness of NAVE at ethics level i) and ii) and religiously motivated justice and self-consciously dedicated love of sinners, enemies, and strangers, for God’s sake, with the known risk of loss of temporal happiness at top-most point vii).Although the diagram would become rather crowded, one could alternatively place what we called IRP 1A at position i) and IRP 9 at position vii). In the space under iv) one could place IRP s 2A and IRP 2B representing the Silver and Golden Rules, and IRPs 3-5 associated with Kant’s two versions of

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the categorical imperative and Mill’s greatest happiness principle. The spectrum is assumed to be the same however many intervals one displays. The positioning of Love God and your neighbor (iv) a) and iv b) in the diagram is controversial. There is real debate over whether even if R2 type reasoning of Natural Theology can ground belief in a God, the command to love one’s neighbour follows from theism or can be rationalised on similar grounds of a non-religious type. The horizontal axis represents the differences accorded to the scope of rationality/ontology. It pictures the continuum from secular naturalism to theistic and on to religion-friendly rationality, and to belief in Divine Providence. The diagonal embodies the suggestion that there is some correlation between the progressively expansive applications of reason, R1-R3, to include theism and religion on the one hand, along the horizontal axis; and expansions in scope of justice; horizontal axis; and expansions in scope of justice and kindness ideals, along the vertical axis (i)–(vii) on the other. R3’s applications are the least cognitively demonstrable; and principle (vii) or IRP 9 is most morally demanding, but all positions are rational. There can be ‘outlying’ individuals, acting under (vii)’s nonviolence on the basis of R1, without theistic beliefs or invocation of R3. But given their reliance on testimony, and/or successful ‘experiments with truth’, the heroism of most self-avowed nonviolent religious individuals can best be rationally explicated/re-constructed by reference to a rational belief in R2/R3, not reductionist dismissal of their self-avowed moral springs. The graph suggests with respect to the horizontal axis that there may be interaction or correlation between a person’s formation of a belief on that axis and the degree of altruistic action they exhibit on the vertical axis. R1 science leads to the possible R2 questions, and these lead to possible R3 questions, and R2 and R3 entities are believed by those at that point to cause things to change in the R1 reality. Correlating responsiveness to evil/good and applications of reason one might think of the horizontal axis positions as on a spectrum of graduated permeable intervals of increasing degrees of belief, in metaphysics and “higher powers” or transcendence; or of invocation of the supernatural, sustained by progressively expanded applications and forms of reason, with quality metaphorically measured by quantity. The left end of the horizontal axis represents belief based on perception/observation used to test physically verifiable hypotheses of natural and social science. The capacity to do this declines as we move along the axis to belief in the results of the study of the non-physical or metaphysics. In the R2 zone, answers will not be confirmable by experimental hypotheses and replicable observations. The data are the successful laws themselves. Further to the right R3 narratives are anecdotal, individual experience claims, and testimony, and not reports on physical experiments. The horizontal axis is constructed to reflect the gradually increased ontological commitment associated with cumulative answers to repetition of the why? question, asked three times in succession. The extent to which reason is thought possibly applicable to generate reasons for recognising beings, both natural and supernatural, at the intervals R1-3, is represented as a continuum of descending demonstrability. At the left is belief based on observation used to test physically verifiable hypotheses of natural and social science. The capacity to do this declines as we move along the axis to belief in the results of the study of the non-physical or metaphysics. In the R2 zone, answers will not be confirmable by experimental hypotheses and replicable observations. The data are the successful laws themselves. Likewise, R3 narratives are not reports on physical experiments. The graph is only suggestive of a very complex intellectual territory. Under R3 would fall both dharma (action) and bhakti (worship) versions religious practice (Smart (1968).

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On the vertical axis, DGE followers ideally follow the principles vi) and vii). They believe in R3 type entities. Secularists or NAVE types have weaker motive to act with extreme or extended altruism. The areas b and c describe real populations of individuals with nondemonstrable but rational beliefs in transcendent entities and ideals as described. Their beliefs are based on dialectical/pragmatic considerations, intuition/experience, or testimony-based arguments. These groups rely on a broader conception of reason, and challenge the limitations of the (i)-(iii)/NAVE/R1 moral horizon. They issue to everyone an ethical invitation to a more exacting moral ideal on indemonstrable but rational grounds. Non-believers are justified in using naturalistically demonstrable R1 truths, theoretical and moral, to support naturalistic ethics and question/challenge/evaluate and reject if necessary alleged miracles, divine commands, or strong agapistic moral claims, based on R3. Many religious beliefs are demonstrably false or unethical, and their practice, as by the Crusaders, or ISIS, have led to massacres. Others are paradoxical (Abraham–Isaac faith testing case). The model makes clearer how R2 and R3 enter our disagreements and can underpin selfcommitments. It helps to see how one can ground such unconditional commitments/ideals and argue tolerance for them. They are not demonstrably false. R3-based claims are embedded in “total interpretations” ultimately based on unique experiences or testimony, giving them some rational credibility for those who have such experiences. The fundamentalist Islamists we now most fear cannot even be talked to if their religion is dismissed as irrational, not seen as dependent on R1 as a complement, permitting use of R1 as a possible corrective to extreme R3 claims. Buber’s I-Thou experiences can straddle R2 and R3 depending on their interpretations. R1 is the province of natural and social science; empirical verification/falsification of hypotheses; enumerative and eliminative inductions; mathematics and mathematical physics; and synthetic a priori necessary truths of fact if any. Natural science predictions are verifiable and usually replicable. R2 is the province of philosophy of mind/science, modal logic, metaphysics, natural theology, and the study of metaphysical and alleged empirical evidence for supernatural/transcendent entities, if any. The replicability of natural science is also taken as a phenomenon to be explained. R3 is the study of comparative religions’ total interpretations, and its basis includes evaluation of testimony and of alleged religious experiences if any. The “I-It” versus “I-Thou” difference can be claimed as favouring R3 and agape. The vertical axis shows increasing degrees of moral commitment to altruism correlated with increasing belief in supernatural moral demands and divine providence, divine reason and goodness and human transcendence based on reason, The furthest points on the spectra, as one moves to the ‘absolute’ end of each line, are marked by increasing reference to the notion of a God of some sort, with a Providential Will; or a transcendental World–Soul or truth-force (Satyagraha) or Tao; a law of conservation of moral energy (karma); or a notion of personal transcendence (reincarnation/immortality); and are correlated with increasingly exacting moral requirements-like non-attachment, absolute non-violence, non-acquisitiveness, and self-suffering. The vertical axis is similar to the spectrum noted above as Figure 1, but now seen vertically. It runs from pragmatically based “tit for tat” of PNV through minimal justice reciprocity of CNV to stronger unconditional altruism, UNV, not based on tendency to temporal wellbeing alone. In some way and to some degree, the differences outlined here have to do with different estimates of the likelihood that, by confronting evil, one will jeopardise one’s temporal happiness. As noted, if a peace keeping law and order background is absent, the practitioner of

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Non-Violence or alternate dispute resolution practitioner is often at risk of temporal pain and even death. At the top of the left vertical axis in the Figure above are the unconditional nonviolence practitioners, such as the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount (turn the other cheek and love strangers, sinners and enemies). In the Figure, Jesus, Gandhi, King, and others would appear at B, the intersection of R3 and A, along with Quakers, Tolstoi, the religious mystics of Judaism, Islam, and other religions such as Jainism and Gandhi. In the middle of the left vertical axis south of iv) might be those who go further than R1 to admit angels, God and souls, via R2, but who do not necessarily endorse any R3 narrative. They would uphold the use of legalised violence by nation states; standing armies, law and order measures like courts, police, prisons and capital punishment; the concept of hereditary property; the “just war” theory of mainstream Christianity since Augustine; and an institutionalised church supplying chaplains in just wars. There might also be at least some quasi-theistic belief, some idea of “Divine Justice,” in an afterlife. Towards the base of the vertical line but north of Tit for Tat are the many forms of pragmatic secularism of a NeoAristotelian sort. From R2 and R3, the question of some ultimate meaning or grand narrative might be pushed beyond the problem of evil to a solution at level R3 in terms of the of limiting divine omnipotence and foreknowledge by human freedom of choice; and/or answered from the presence of there being some necessity to have some evil if there is to be any finite, non-perfect good, and how much is necessary we cannot judge, as non-divine creatures. A popular rationale is that the victims will be assured of a blissful afterlife, Divine power is said by Augustine to be able to bring good out of evil. At R3 level, if personal or collective testimony to religious experience of any kind, from mystical to near-death experiences, is allowed in some form, alongside experiences of I-Thou intimacy, then human souls are possibly eternal beings who may survive death, and do so for theistic or a religiously based reason. These issues will be revisited in Part 3. If traditional collective testimonies about past events of religious significance, which are not scientifically provable, because they appear to contradict scientifically probable laws, are still allowed as possibly reasonable, then this will allow, as possibly credible, testimony about alleged Divine interventions and miracles like resurrection. Virtues of faith, hope, and charity can be added onto NAVE’s temperance, prudence, courage and justices. A virtue category of theological virtues, like Divine justice, and agape can be added. The IRPs indicated as required or ideal by Christian grand narratives are IRP 6-9, can be linked to R3 level reasons. As noted, Natural Law in our initially preferred NAVE form, can be described at several levels of abstractness: at the highest level, it consists of the description and identification of common goods of human wellbeing, by reference to the objects and ends of a hierarchically ordered set of human nature’s capacities, and their perfecting virtues, via some criteria or marks of wellbeing. There is an account of rational desire or will and choice and about ethical decision-making procedures like casuistry. This leads to the identification of a few allegedly self-evident imperative general principles. At the next degree or level of abstraction/ specification, come slightly less abstract primary and secondary precepts ordered to attain wellbeing, and the need-satisfying goods of the capacities, couched in terms of descriptions of types of action in types of circumstances, are spelled out. These tendency-to-wellbeing ascriptions given to act-circumstance types, like alms-giving or murder or shaving, are classified as ideal, recommended, prohibited, indifferent, or as subjects of advisory “counsels.”

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The classification concerns their tendency to wellbeing, the seeking of prima facie goods and avoiding evils, which serve to fulfil the criteria of wellbeing more specifically, and identification of their mode and level of obligatory status or prohibition. Virtues are specific dispositions which perfect one’s self-mastery and self-direction of one’s lower animate capacities by directing them to higher objects of higher powers. Lastly, most concretely, is the application of these ideals, recommendations, principles, precepts, prohibitions and counsels, using decision methods and casuistry in choosing actions, in the particular case, including reference to the intent of the particular agents or parties in executing this precise action now, mentioned in or implied to be relevant by the imperative natural laws. Exponents, critics, and students of NL can easily confuse these degrees or levels of abstractions and expect that the NL theory should provide specific answer at one level, say that of precept, which can only be provided at another, like the particular case. One may mistakenly take lack of consensus at lower levels of abstraction, particular cases, for disagreement at higher level, when there is no such disagreement. For example, all NL advocates uphold the wrongness of murder and the need for peace, and avoidance of lethal force, but some rule out more specifically described “just wars” and some allow them. So, levels of abstractness and generality will be differentiated in what follows as far as is necessary. Since some NL versions are also tied up with theology, metaphysics, and ontology, and some are tied up with religion, these versions are often even more highly abstract, in the slightly different sense that they often claim to be able to generalise over all being or all contingent beings, in referring to a God. Or they may appeal to a religious historical narrative with particular historical details. When theism and religions intersect with NL, we shall attempt to track these levels of generality also. In those persons espousing the DGE variant of Natural Law meta-ethics 1-5 above, references to a God and/or the soul’s afterlife or to reincarnation and nirvana, or to a law of karma or conservation of moral energy, often figure in the moral self-understanding and description of individual saints and moral heroes, like Siddhartha Gautama, Socrates, Rabbi Hillel, Jesus of Nazareth, Gandhi, Maulana Azad, Ghaffir Khan, Martin Luther King, and many others, either speaking truth about justice to power, or showing compassion for the afflicted globally on an organised basis, such as Mother Teresa or World Vision’s Tim Costello. Many refer to and believe in supernatural entities like God and the soul which belief they deem reasonable. They act in the name of the will of God as quasi-“Father” of fellow humans equal in worth as God’s “children.” Besides challenging the complete autonomy of ethics, the Gandhi-King type of phenomenon can also entail challenges to our ideas about the scope, basis, and content of ethics and human solidarity in areas like property rights and possession, conflict, war, and nonviolence; the politics of relief of national and global injustice/repression and poverty; and our moral ideals surrounding sex, procreation, and marriage. These applications of NL are the focus of Part 2. This leads to the suggestion in Part 3’s revisiting and questioning of the case for the autonomy of ethics from theism and religion, of the admission of the ethical relevance of intentional entities whose study is based in disciplines like theology and in religious practices. Faiths and theologies need not reject or be rejected by scientific reason but do deny its completeness and claim the right to question its scope or application in normative matters. It will be assumed below in Part 3’s discussion of the saints and heroes that it is not enough to treat moral saints and heroes as simply miscalculating the danger to their own wellbeing presented by their heroism, when the record shows that even if thrust into the situation at first, they were often strongly rational about their altruistic egalitarianism, fully aware that they were

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endangering their lives for justice’s sake, instructed their followers that this was so, and that their willingness to endure any sufferings would have a causal role in the campaign. They often made the best practicable provisions to protect them and their loved ones. Their continued activity after being menaced, and attempts to silence them, might be judged stupid or reckless or even immoral, on grounds of disdaining prudent pursuit of temporal wellbeing; or on the other hand, as simply rationally required for moral perfection; and so there would then be no problem of rationality or intelligibility. But it is intuitively odd to say such things of these individuals, as naturalistic ethical systems, especially those based on enlightened temporal selfinterest, must do on their account of reason. The other main ethical theories replacing NL, such as Utilitarianism, must say martyrs simply pursue the greatest happiness of the greatest number in cases where their happiness is terminally outweighed. On the other hand, Kantian or deontological upholders of allegedly selfevident, inescapable universal moral obligations, divorced from all considerations of selfinterest, must implausibly say they are just moral agents doing their duty very well; they simply accept their morally rational duty to strive to do the maximum for bringing about “ the kingdom of ends,” in which all get their moral wellbeing-needs met and the highest good is achieved, while rationally speaking they are staring pain and death In the face, and so certainly do not meet their own duties of self-care. Despite these odd implications of secular naturalism, millions enjoy the fruits of the sacrifice of such saintly individuals and the number of such heroes around the world today is in the many hundreds at least. A few are self avowedly nonreligious, but most are believers in some kind of human transcendence or spirituality. What we have in NL meta-ethics 1-5 is a multi-tier model of morality, secular, theistic, and religious, each with different PIR, SMB, and KGR principles to drive them. The NAVE secular agnostic version of NL is basic, but the addition of theism alone should not necessarily disqualify it from being a type of NL. In advocating the doing of good and avoiding of evil, Aristotle implicitly upheld a “no harm” principle of some kind. But his commitment to equality of all persons is qualified. He does not explicitly deal with the inequality issues surrounding aristocracy, citizenship, property, servitude or slavery. He does not discuss the Golden Rule “Do as you would be done by,” although he seems to accept the latter in some form in his discussions of justice in commercial interchange. But his cosmic Unmoved Mover makes him a theist of sorts. IPRs comes in different forms which imply stronger and weaker ethical conclusions: at the weaker end, are IRP2A: “Do not do what you would not want done to you”; IRP2B:“Do as you would be done by,” more exacting comes IRP 3: “Do what you can will for all others to do in similar circumstances”; IRP 4: “Do not treat others as mere means” (Kant), and IRP5: “Seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (Mill). All these are plausibly seen as within secular natural Law. The Golden Rule: IRP7 “Love your neighbour as yourself,” seems to be stronger in requiring projection of an interior attitude/emotion of self-love, including the strongest instincts connected to self-preservation/survival, towards other persons. It is a theist and Christian variant and coexists with Divine Law’s IRP8 “Love your enemies, sinners and strangers” and Christ’s most exacting, self-sacrificial IRP 9: “Do as I have done for you” (laid down my life). As Porter (1999) argues, the medieval scholastics were challenged by, and responded to IRP 8 and IRP9, which they took to commend strong egalitarianism, with both the aesthetic monastic movement and the mendicant friars, who took Christianity to strongly require universal equality and charity for God’s sake, at least as an ideal. These movements in turn laid the ground for equality and human rights as political ideals which emerged later.

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On the other hand, the ideal version of Christian DGE gave in on unconditional pacificism and non-violence, anarchism and commune-ism with the Roman Empire’s conversion under Constantine, and with Augustine; and it gave in on capitalism and usury with the Renaissance, imperialism, colonialism and later economic rationalism and nuclearization.

Chapter 2

NEO-ARISTOTELIAN NATURALISM: ELEMENT 1) ONTOLOGY We must now recall the case for setting out at R1 level a pure, hypothetical, non-theistic or agnostic construct, NAVE, based on Aristotle’s virtue Ethics. Having cleared the way for it, its first element, its Ontology, will then be presented in this Chapter. Since the eighteenth century in the West, philosophers like Kant have rightly argued that moral insight and action, and the idea of an ethics of Natural Law, taken in the sense of an ethics based on natural reason alone is viable. Even during the integrated NL-DGE peak period, from Augustine to Erasmus, there were recognised to be tensions between unaided natural reason, and the ethics of justice as desert on the other hand; and caritas as unconditional universal love of all, even those without merit; between Natural and Divine Law; between natural virtue on the one hand, and grace, and the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, on the other. In the contemporary revival of NL, there is still some residual temptation to read the traces of theism and religious belief completely and irreversibly out of the NL ethics story, by breaking down the reason/faith and the justice/caritas distinction, with a view to integrating Ethics with naturalism; or to defend a smaller metaphysical target like “virtue ethics.” However, on the other hand, some read as much theism and religion into NL as possible without a metaphysics. This is the strategy of the New NL movement, which is rejected in Chapter 11. The approach adopted here is to recognise a “core and periphery” model of the manifestations or versions of NL with differences in levels 1-5 of the meta-ethics, especially in the scope of IRPs; and the connection between modes or degrees of ethical exactingness, on the one hand and meta-physics, and meta-ethics on the other. Many theistic believers in NL, like Augustine and Aquinas, who also believed in DGE, and Divine Law, and placed references to love of God within the scope of natural law, (S.T. 1a11ae 100) were familiar with the Abraham/Isaac Bible story, which we saw above to be a ground for a powerful criticism of religious ethics. Theology students were tested in the Middle Ages on their capacity to respond to it. Theology teachers were sufficiently bothered by the story to devote time in theology to offering defences against those treating the story as flatly disproving God’s goodness, and so God’s existence. We need not go into these multiple responses here, which included treating it as a prefiguring of Christ’s sacrifice, an instructive piece about trust in God, questioning its descriptive intent and literal historic status, suggesting the possible non-contradictoriness (imagine-ability) of the proposition that time is not one-way

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and irreversible, so God could “undo” history, or that Isaac could have been Divinely resurrected. The denial of the anisotropy of time is the claim that, like a video reversed, the depicted events could be reversed by an omnipotent being. Such possibilities are still discussed in Theodicy by continuing believers, along with the problem of evil, and “sins of the patriarchs” in the Old Testament and will be revisited in Part 3. But in the medieval period the Abraham-Isaac story was not in fact, and still is not, deemed enough to rule God out by medieval and contemporary believers. They made up a large group of philosophers, including Ibn Sinna (Avicenna), Maimonides, Scotus, and Suarez, all of whom combined a belief in NL with theistic and religious belief, adding Divine Law to NL, and claiming that God caused Nature, and so also NL. He could thus change or overrule it. In the modern period Descartes, Pascal, Leibnitz, Locke, Reid and Kant were also believers. Kant himself argued, in the last of his three Critiques, that while belief in God cannot be supported by reason, and is not necessary for ethics, belief in God can still be seen to be aesthetically “fitting” and helpful to sustain the hope that God can provide restored moral equilibrium when gaps open between justice and wellbeing, especially heroic moral action, as they often do. Kant gave a complex philosophical account of his reasons for adopting this view of the relation of reason and faith in three famous Critiques. They were based on his conversion by Hume to agnosticism with respect to the idea that we can attain ultimate certainty about reality, and his conviction that we cannot know the essential nature of “things in themselves,” whether ordinary material objects, our experienced selves, or things such as God. Knowledge, he argued, can only be of appearances (phenomena), not of things in themselves (noumena). How, if this is so, we can ultimately know who or what we humans are, or where the line is to be drawn between phenomena (experienced in perceptual knowledge by acquaintance or natural science) and noumena (ultimate metaphysical reality) is puzzling, and Hume admits being puzzled by his reflections. Indeed, the whole Kantian account is difficult to summarise, explain, or justify, except as a way of casting doubt on the ultimate reality of matter as a means to make way for faith in immaterial entities. Although it is not necessary to any version of NL, a Natural Law exponent can be taken to be a naturalist in the sense of one accepts reason as the distinctive human power, and that the 3 Rs questions are legitimate questions. However, the NL exponent does not necessarily answer them as theists and religions do, perhaps denying the existence of any afterlife or a God or religion. Some philosophers do use “Naturalism” in an even narrower sense, where it is taken to mean Physicalism. This is the position where are no super-natural or immaterial non-physical beings of any kind whatever, and none are to be countenanced. We shall argue, in Chapter 7, that this view is both inherently mistaken and exegetically not necessary for identifying an agnostic secular NL. Natural Law can also be used as it is here as a more indefinite notion and has often been taught as a partial foundation of ethics by theists, but here I will provisionally sketch a theistically agnostic core version of NL, that is: NAVE can be categorised, under five metaethical headings as noted in the Prologue. They are: 1) Ontology – a theory of being, beings with a nature, especially living beings with a good, and of truth, meaning, analogy of attribution; and an implied cosmic history, such as the mistaken geo-centric astronomy and impetus theory, or the big bang theory, or evolutionary biology; or a grand narrative -a pro or con attitude to God and to religions like Christianity or Islam. NAVE will be assumed to have only a big

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3)

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bang/evolutionary history and an agnostic theistic and no religious position. Humans will be assumed to be the highest beings. Anthropology - a theory of human being and good, usually a hierarchical/architectonic teleological anthropology of human beings’ natural capacities and activities, one in which reason is the “highest” capacity; can “rule” the others which support it; and reflect on its own success. This is called the soul, mind, body relation position of an NL variant, SMB. NAVE will be assigned a “property dualist” position. Property dualism allows that souls and minds are distinct from bodies and exist, but not that souls or minds are substances capable of surviving death. This is not the only possible NAVE position, but it is congruent with a naturalist Neo-Aristotelian account, as will be clearer when we drop the provisional assumptions of atheism or agnosticism and of most types of property dualism while applying it to cases in Part 2 Chapters 6-9. A moral psychology of evil is also to be supplied. A theory of the human good – a set of criteria for human wellbeing, and a list of ingredient human ends and need-satisfiers meeting them. These human goods imply the distinctive ends and content of NL. This is the meaning and criteria assigned to wellbeing and what they generate as the referent of wellbeing (RWB), for the will to choose as the architectonic director of the capacities in Point 2) above. NAVE will not be different on this level as to the meaning of wellbeing (MWB), but it will be taken to have a non-theist referent RWB for the highest good THG. A theory of means - a set of means to the attainment of these ends including practical and ethical general principles, or interpersonal responsiveness principles (IRP); primary and secondary precepts; and virtues, especially justice, with variable moral modalities, like permissions, prohibitions, and obligations. These articulate an Ethics, Law and Politics of the common good and the public good. Grace is not included because it is God’s gift. A theory of choice - a method of ethical decision-making, later dubbed casuistry, allows the general principles, and special precepts and virtues to inform particular ethical choice of particular actions in particular circumstances in accord with the method of object, end and circumstances called casuistry. This will carry over to DGE since it is a method, not a being.

To further understand the case for acceptance here of there being a need to distinguish a non-theistic NAVE from other NL variants or manifestations, of NL, another good place to look is Descartes. In his Meditations, he attempted to quell a sceptical thought which he himself had introduced and was later labelled “hyperbolic doubt” or extreme scepticism, with his “clear and distinct ideas” test, and with the alleged certainty of the famous: “I think, therefore I am” or “Cogito ergo sum.” The idea of God was then treated as an effect to be explained and Descartes argued that it could not have come from matter but only from God. This was his answer to his own “evil genius” hypothesis, given in the seventeenth century. He was a Christian, attempting to close down a line of sceptical thought begun more than three centuries before him, with medieval theological speculation about God’s omnipotence, which had long strayed into speculation about abusive or diverted, supernatural powers in general, like Satan’s capacity to deceive, or God’s power to suspend the natural laws of physics.

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The Muslim theologian Al Gazzali, in the eleventh century, was a precursor of Hume, not for the sake of theological scepticism, but for the opposite purpose of defending Islam from philosophical and scientific atheists. In The Incoherence of the Philosophers, he had started the sceptical enquiry when he suggested that we could always put the words “possibly not...” in front of any axiom of natural science, and the result would not be an explicit logical contradiction. If science is about essential connections, which are ultimately causally contingent, then an omnipotent God could change contingent NLs or their application, if He willed. This is so even when natural science incorporates mathematics and logic to express, test, and predict the logical connections between entities described in the hypotheses, which it has verified. The “maxim of admissibility” read: “What is imaginable is possible.” Others suggested that perhaps God could reverse the course of history and time, if no contradiction could be found in the supposition, as some authors like Nicholas of Autrecourt and Peter Damiani suggested (Weinberg 1964). More alarming was the possibility that the NL of morality could also be changed if God willed it. The pre-Cartesian answers tended to distinguish God’s absolute from His ordained providence, and within the latter such changes would be a contradiction and so impossible. But if history was reversible, the doubt remained about the absolute possibility. It was later mooted that Satan could perhaps cause one to mistakenly believe that one had abstract intuitive knowledge, or even intuitive knowledge of an individual as individual, when through supernatural action, the object of this knowledge did not actually exist. The question hung in the air till belief in theism itself, and its attendant problems, started to dwindle, when in the eighteenth century, Descartes’ cogito solution was attacked by Hume. Ironically, and probably unwittingly, Hume used without naming the same “maxim of admissibility” invoked by Gazzali in the attack on Philosophy to save religious belief from agnostic science and philosophy, but now in the service of a perilous project divorcing anthropology and rationalistic science from religion. This was the decisive moment when something like NAVE began to be relevant. Kant tried to save faith in God and religious belief with a version of Ethics not including God, like NAVE, in several works including his Critique of Practical Reason. Other radical solutions to the epistemological doubts, like Idealism, emerged with Berkeley. Nearly two more centuries passed before scepticism receded and rationalism reason recovered with the post1950s ordinary language and phenomenological movements associated with G.E. Moore, J.L. Austin, and Wittgenstein (1953) and set out by Dreyfus and Taylor (2015). But the people involved in these “reason restoration” movements were often disinterested in reviving old fashioned realist or moderate realist Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics, since they thought that the sceptical enquiry had been from the first incoherent, not needing and not worth Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum” rebuttal, which had spurred Hume into scepticism. On the continent, and in international law circles, NL did survive from Al Gazzali and Hume to the recent recovery of reason, with the help of Kant, and especially in Catholic quarters through Scholasticism and Thomism. Although his ontology and epistemology was non-Aristotelian, Kant’s categorical imperative gave new coherence to the idea of moral and legal reasoning without a God or faith. Kant tried to show any doubters that NL in secular form could generate some universal moral rules in a new way based on practical reason requiring self-consistency. In fact, NL had always had the potential to generate moral universals, as Chapter 3 and 4 will show. But Kant made this potential much clearer, at the cost of abandoning realism in metaphysics, which as a realist position, NAVE will not accept as compatible with NL.

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In the mid-twentieth century, widespread efforts were made to restore Natural Law as an ethical framework by Thomists like Gilson, Maritain, and Owens, by historians of philosophy and politics like D’Entreve (1951) and Copleston (1956); later by self-styled “Analytic Thomists” like Kretzmann (1999) and Haldane (2010); and by “New Natural Law “theorist like Grisez and Shaw (1988) and Finnis (1980), The limits of this attempted revival are not yet clear. But Nygren (1932), Bradley (1997), and others have argued that it is, and will remain, an incomplete effort, in that it does not sufficiently distinguish natural from theological or divine law; justice from agape and caritas. The viable agnostic version of NL to be sketched now can work without God or revelation, an NL without any account of knowledge of God, or what was dubbed KGR earlier, being assumed as conclusive. But it will be suggested, beginning in Part 2, where NAVE is applied, that some intuitively compelling moral actions are hard or impossible to rationalise on naturalistic grounds alone. Natural Theology and religious extensions of NL are not altogether unreasonable, particularly if one’s definition of the “reasonable” is broad enough to allow questions to be asked and reasons to be given other than those applying in natural science, and existence is not restricted to the types of entities posited in natural science. The provisional exclusion of reliance on theism and the concept of an absolute necessary being in the construct is done for the sake of proceeding with an attempt to first justify ethical claims as far as possible within a naturalistic, secular NL approach. Theological considerations will be allowed back into the discussion from Chapter 6 onwards, in such a way as to allow the reader to see what changes they can make in one’s ethical judgment. For example, in discussions of war, ideal non-violence is usually qualified in secular accounts and many theistic ones, with more “realistic” just war and policing permissions allowed for states, often endorsed by religions within state borders. In discussing individual duties to give in the global ethics debate, a universal humanism is often posited, going beyond family, community, and national interests. We shall later identify the possible role of restoring the subtracted theological and religious elements in supporting the idea of universal duties of justice and charity. For simplification purposes, Utilitarianism and Kantian accounts are located within this constructed secular account of NL, as being compatible variations, sharing much common ground. The discussion of the relation of naturalism, theism and religious belief, and the preliminary defence of the rationality in some non-scientific sense of ordinary individual experience and of religious belief claims is now hopefully sufficient to have removed obstacles to considering the strong case for naturalism without throwing out the case for theism and religious belief, and to clear the way for the exposition of NAVE as a naturalist construct. In this Chapter, Elements 1) Ontology, the first items of the meta-ethical template 1)-5), as set out earlier in this chapter, is filled in for NAVE. In the next Chapter, Chapter 3, the exposition continues with the exposition of NAVE and deals with elements 2) and 3) respectively. By the end of Chapter 5 there will be: 1) an updated NAVE version of Aristotle’s Ontology, and concept of good, truth, and evil 2) Aristole’s “folk” or prescientific Philosophical Anthropology, with the notion of humans as rational animals, a description of capacities and their goods, and how evil action occurs 3) an account of wellbeing and seeking wellbeing of their capacities

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Theistic and religious ‘overlays” are clearly not necessary features of NAVE meta-ethics or of its normative morality. NAVE is a description and a “stipulative” definition of the nuclear elements of a naturalistic version of NL, drawing in part on Aquinas’ account, but based on an Ontology without his God or Christian theology, without some aspects of his anthropology and ethics, yet accepting Aristotle and his overall meta-ethics of wellbeing. In some respects, Aquinas is a good guide to a possible agnostic NL, or NAVE as his account is one of the most developed specimens of the core features of NL.

ELEMENT 1) METAPHYSICS, ONTOLOGY AND “ONTOLOGICAL GOODS” IN THE SCALE OF NATURE We have long given up much of Aristotle’s particular cosmology, his account of what sort of Universe and Earth exists, what he believed in Ontology. But we still can understand and share some of his criteria for existence, and also accept the existence of some things his criteria for graduating things as “existing” or as beings suggest. When we say the Unmoved Mover does not exist, we mean largely the same thing as Aristotle by “exist” ie that there is no such agent, acting in this way, with such perfection. For him, the highest goods in the Universe are also the highest beings: he thought God or the Unmoved Mover was an immaterial substance, but under the terms of our NAVE experimental construct, we will for now dismiss these superhuman candidates as the highest beings, and the highest goods, the paradigms of being, and leave the space blank for the referent of “the highest good” (THG); or treat it as filled by humans, not gods. For Aristotle, those with life, and the most continuous power to rationally bring about changes, and their own good, are the exemplary beings. We can agree that humans meet this text. Animals and plants also obviously exist in a lower degree as non-rational agents with a good. In Aristotle’s terms, and they too are called “first substances.” The most inclusive concept of existence is: what exists is “anything we can talk about.” That would include fictions like unicorns, and it would mean “unicorns have horns” is as true as anything else that is true and that unicorns exist. This would not be acceptable to Aristotle himself, as his paradigm existents are real substances. We can narrow the existents to select “real” existents by means of defining criteria which we can stipulate. We might stipulate that one must be able to determine if a real existent has any given property or not. If the author of a play, like Shakespeare, does not tell us in the script, we cannot answer whether Hamlet was blonde or redheaded, so that any fictional entity has indeterminable properties, and does not really exist. That test of “determination in principle” would be acceptable to Aristotle. We might then add some further restriction on the method of deciding the question about a property: perhaps it must be a matter of observation if it applies or not. That will restrict our discourse more severely, and too severely for Aristotle. When we say truly that an entity, object or event X “is,” then “is” in Neo-Aristotelian terms, means primarily: the term X is a subject (grammatically) and denotes an individual (real being)

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with some individualised determinate properties, defining or accidental. If we say the individual a has the property F, in an assertion or other speech act, we ascribe the appropriate propertyconnoting words for its cluster of properties, like “cat” or “ginger,” symbolised by upper case letters, like F, to the denoted nameable existing thing, and attribute the property to the individual, usually symbolised by lower case letters, as in Fa. One important case of such attribution for Aristotle is where we say, “a is an S” which means that some individual, a, is a specimen or instance of a species or type S, where S is a noun for a substance-denoting word, like ‘gold’, “tree,” “cat” or “woman,” defined by a cluster of conceptual terms. So-called ‘first substances” are particular real instances of such potentially definable species or types of things, especially those having an internal principle of motion, those which can do things, and make things happen. When we say: “a is F,” or “The nameable individual a, which is of type S, is F,” or symbolically, “Sa & Fa,” this means: the subject, a, has the predicated property, and the existent object, denoted by “a, has the real property F connoted by the concept or term for F in the given language; or in the latter case, a has both S and also F. They are “said of” the individual, a. Possibly F could be a defining characteristic or an accident of a’s substance; but all terms in the “categories” (see Analogy of Attribution below) including words for types or species can be “said of” a, any existent. The use of “is” to ascribe a property is called the “predicative” use, as opposed to just saying: “X exists,” implying, but not ascribing X any properties. The existence of a is symbolized separately by a quantifier. Any individual will have some identifying properties, even if they are not mentioned. There are also for Aristotle “second substances” which are the abstracted species or types of the first substances, which exist in a secondary way; and there is our concepts or ideas of the meaning or dictionary sense all the terms we have used so far as they occur in our thoughts as we discuss existence, properties and truth. Thus for Aristotle, things “exist” in different senses/ways: in reality; instances of entities denoted by category terms; as conceptual meanings and second substances, and in our occurrent thoughts. In short, there exist multiple senses of “exist”: as applied to a particular specimen or token of a species or kind, type/kind as such; and to our concepts and thoughts about them. There are other sense of “is” and tests for existence that Aristotle does not theorise about: identity between individuals, usually symbolised today as “a=a,” meaning “a has all properties the same as a”; and constant correlations of various types where there is an interdependent relation between the truth values of propositions other than causality, symbolised by , the biconditional. Causality, a causes b, he does discuss and presume to be part of reality and our understanding reality.The modern predicate calculus and connecting of individual identity and self-identity to existence, are not found in Aristotle’s ontology, nor the “possible world “approach to necessity in Modal Logic, but the Stoics brought us the propositional calculus, and we can co-opt it into NAVE, along with the basic distinctions of subject and substance from predicate and property; existential and predicative use of “is.” These conceptual tools are present and sufficient to discuss topics like the identity theory of mind and matter as they affect NAVE ontology and anthropology as will be suggested in Chapter 6. There is a scale of natures, in species or kinds, and science seeks definitions of their essence, and to understand their components and causes, gradations, and powers. It includes the types of mineral, plant, lower animal, higher and human animals, and celestial bodies. For Aristotle, the highest beings of all are the Unmoved Movers of the planets, especially the Unmoved Mover of the outermost sphere he calls God. For him, the prime cases of being are

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immaterial, God and reason. But everything else is material except the human agent intellect. Since by stipulation in designing NAVE we are throwing out the necessity of an Unmoved Mover, or God, in favour of an agnostic position on the reference of THG. In NAVE discourse, material objects, like ensouled human bodies, are grammatical subjects and in reality, prime substances; they fall under descriptors for types or kinds or species; and possess their individual/individuating accidents or properties, described by the terms in the “categories” and types of predicate in which things are “said of” substances. For the present we shall ignore the cosmology/astronomy, but we need not throw out the whole ontology. We can accept the questions raised in metaphysics about ontology. The latter discipline is still accepted in the sense that those Aristotelian “categories” of action, passion, quality, quantity, relation, time, and place are still part of our speech, reflected in proper names and pronouns, telling us who is in question; nouns, and count nouns telling us what the type of subject is (substance/quality); what its nature and activities are through verbs of action or adverbs like those which tell one how something is or was done; and to what degree; when (time) and where (place). When we ask Who, What, Why, Where, and When in identifying circumstances of action, we are following part of the structure of this Aristotelian ontology. The doctrine of circumstances is loosely based on these categories. The circumstances are: Who? something that assumes a human substance; What? elicits the nature of a thing or action, such as human or animal or an act like speaking, and applies to both subjects, predicates, and predicative relations; Why? elicits the end or purpose of the thing or action; How? elicits the means and methods; When ? the time and Where? elicits the place (Aristotle NE I, 1, 6, 1096a15ff; 11,6. 1106b36; III, I, 1110b 24-33; V,2 113024ff; Aquinas 1a-11ae 7.4;12.4;13.3;18-21). Unlike Aristotle, Neo-Aristotelians accept there are other criteria for being, or ways of defining, “being,” than being a specimen of a kind of substance, and of treating assertions about existence. The weakest ontological test is whether we can talk about the entity; or whether a proposed entity has some properties. This loose criterion will include God and unicorns and fictional characters. It can be tightened up by deciding that the entity must have determinate properties such that, for all its properties, it can be determined if they have that property or not. That rules out fictional entities with properties unspecified by the author. It might rule out God. Or we might insist on the strong criterion that properties be decided to be present by some specified procedure or method of decision, like one tied to sensory perception or observation; or again some broader notion of experience including inference. We will go into this issue again in Chapter 6. For now, we can note that there are multiple criteria, with different things graduated by each, but always prime substances make the cut, especially living agents capable of bringing about change. Instances of things in the categories of predication also exist, but not separately from substances. NAVE adherents favour first substances but accept that not everything we can talk about exists in the same sense e.g., persons, numbers, concepts, propositions, thoughts; fictional characters, and events. But NAVE does preference living substances as paradigms of existence. Whatever else makes the cut, persons, animals, and plants do. They are “first substances.” They have inner sources of movement and direction, and can bring about change, enabled by a physical substructure. Beings in the other categories of action, relation, and quality etc can be said to exist analogically (see Analogy below). Stronger criteria, like identification and reidentification by scientific testing have sometimes been proposed but led their proponents to

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cut off the branch they sat on because their stricter “principle of existence” could not itself be verified scientifically using their experimentally testable principle of admission to reality.

Evil and Being There is in NAVE also the notion that bad things and events exist as “ontological evils” which is a privation or disorder in a good thing, not a separate evil being. A paradigm case of a being is any living thing. Blindness in humans and animals is a privation of sight, in the living subject, not separate from the animal. There can also be disorders in the body’s autonomic system, and in the voluntary sensory/motor systems, like illness, or addiction, or intemperance. The disorders can also be moral disorders. A privation is the absence of a species power; a disorder in a power assumes the power exists, but in a disordered way. Neither evils exist independently. In the human case, humans who exist or live are good in the sense that they can act independently and exercise specific powers. In NAVE ontology, any “being,” as such, is good, qua better than nothing. In this unfamiliar use, cancer cells are still good qua existents, while, qua disrupting parasites on living bodies which they render ill, they are bad. Evil is the privation of being and order, and in the case of evil, its flourishing leads to its demise. The illness called cancer disappears with death of the host. Wicked behaviour exists, in virtue of the being of the wicked person whose behaviour it is, but it is a privation of proper order, causing privation in harmed victims, and privation of excellence in the perpetrator. People are also better than snails or minerals. Bad people are still good qua living existents, but their disordered behaviour is bad. Intellect and will both exceed powers of digestion or respiration in flexibility (being flexible at will via attention); in spatiotemporal scope/range of intentional objects (past and future); in directive command of causality as well as flexibility. In the ontological order of consideration, these abilities are measures of ontological good or power of capacity. In the scala naturae, humans are “higher” than animals and plants in virtue of these capacities, and if there are higher powers and species than humans like aliens, God, or angels in this sense they would be better than us qua being but could be worse qua disordered behaviour. If they not well disposed to us, we would have no reason to treat them as morally better, only more powerful and capable of doing or bringing about more evil. The connection of being to good and to “good order” absent in evil, is part of the teleological account of Aristotle and Neo-Aristotelians. An important aspect of human teleology is the notion of good as a final cause as one alongside formal, efficient and material causes. If X is a final cause of Y then Y is “for the sakeof X. Another way of saying this is that X is architectonic with respect to Y. Architects, builders, and labourers; navigators, helmsmen, and sailors are given in Aristotle as examples of architectonic directors of operators and enablers. Modern writers using the concept of the architectonic relation include Lawrence (2006) and Polanyi (1968). In such a relation, a capacity can outrank another capacity regarding a given order, A, (e.g., final, formal, or efficient causality), but be outranked by that same capacity in order B, e.g., material causality. Ontological power and status is measured by scope of direction, operation, and enablement across time and space, voluntary flexibility, and finality. The architectonic relation will be outlined further and featured in the Anthropology set out in Chapter 2.

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Theory of Truth and Meaning The theory of truth in NAVE is a correspondence theory. An assertion is true if it corresponds to or “fits” the state of the world. In the Speech Act Theory of Searle (1983) in knowledge of truth, the fit is “word to world.” If the word (sentence/statement/assertion) does not fit the world, the assertion is not true but false, and knowledge is absent. In a command, the fit is “world to word.” If the command is obeyed, then the world has been changed to fit the desire expressed in the command. In Kant’s epistemology, our concepts do not in any case map onto the world as it is in itself, but as it appears to us, and it is not ultimately a moderate realist position. But he still talks of NL as theoretically true and making sense of moral appearances and his categorical imperative is “known” in that sense. But certainly up till Kant, most NL theorists were moderate realists who believed in the correspondence theory. A foundational principle in any Neo-Aristotelian realist ontology is the Platonic principle of non-contradiction: a proposition and its negation cannot both be true at the same time and on the same respect i.e., (P &-P); an individual a, cannot have a property F, and not F, or symbolically –F, at the same time symbolised as: (Fa & -Fa). Another is the causal principle: “Every event has a cause.” The non-contradiction principle is often invoked to rule out some propositions or assertions, and to reject the so-called Maxim of Admissibility: the idea that anything imaginable is possible. Some imaginable events or objects can be proved impossible and if so they are not then even really imaginable. The causal principle is invoked in ontology and natural science. These principles turn out to be quite significant in ontology and some reject them, but they are accepted here. They cannot be proved but dialectical argument can be offered against someone not following them. They will fail to persuade in a discussion if they contradict themselves.

Analogy of Attribution The neo-Aristotelian theory of meaning is basically that common nouns like “gold” or “fish “or “bed” or terms for kinds of substances stand for or connote the corresponding idea of the subject or substance in question. But not every term is like this. Some connote action, power, relation, quantity, or quality. Aristotle discusses analogy of attribution in two passages, at Metaphysics 1003aff and Nicomachean Ethics 1096aff. In order to apply it later to natural persons and artificial organisations a sketch follows. In the first passage, the idea is that a property like “health” can be attributed to a paradigm case or primary referent, or body state, and also to its causes, effects, symptoms, and signs, but in different but analogous senses. Healthy medicine, healthy complexion, healthy urine, healthy exercise and healthy complexion are “healthy” in different, but related, ways but not themselves “in good health” or in a “healthy body state.” The “healthy medicine” inherently, not metaphorically, has some causally effective “health making” properties, so it’s not just a metaphor. In the second passage, he says that one can apply a term, primarily attributed to an individualised substance, like Socrates, a term like “exists,” or “good,” also, by analogy, to instances of terms in other categories like relations, actions, and qualities of Socrates,which are also said to exist or be good; and in the case of an individualised quality, like the state of “health” of Socrates’ body, to effects, causes, signs and symptoms of health, in an analogous

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sense, not entailing presence of primary substantial existence or health in the analogue quality or relation or action itself. “Good” like “being” exemplifies equivocation by reference to a paradigm. Broadie (2007) restricts THG to a kind of human life, or standard or “maker” of virtuous life, not a theoretical metaphysical entity. Lawrence (2006) goes with Politics and political wellbeing as the best version of eudaimonia but allows free time for contemplation broadly conceived. But “God or reason” are clearly also said to be THG in the text at Nichomachean Ethics (NE), 1096a151096b3; and contemplation of God the highest activity in Books VI and X at 1177a2ff. An argument is made in Part 2 that the concept of “human wellbeing,” and what is good for humans, is the paradigm from which analogical equivocal quasi-personal uses of terms like “person” and “exists” and “good,” in their paradigm existents, organisations are the analogues or quasi-persons, grounding collective ethical responsibility in organisations and states. The cause of being and the highest being, whatever it turns out to be, is the paradigm case of being, but paradoxically we can speak about it only analogically using notions of our own agency. This will be important when we look at reopening the God question in Part 3. Such analogies of attribution are found throughout NL descriptions. For example, in descriptions of human nature in terms of our will’s control over our capacities, we might think of decisions and choices to execute as like self-addressed commands, in accord with selfgoverning principles or rules; but we say that we or leaders literally rule over organisation, and nations. Persons’ deciding about things, and choosing to self-control their capacities, in an analogical way “quasi-rule” their capacities. But they can, by invoking the concept of “authority” in groups, collectively cause real rules to be explicitly made, creating and ruling organisations as “quasi-selves.” This creates enhanced power, often prodigious, and possible “longevity,” which a series of persons then run as role incumbents. The collective quasi-selves, or boards, who really and literally rule organisations are not individual persons but their personal effects and analogues, and the “ruling” we as real selves do over our capacities in controlling them with respect for imperative rules, is analogical. The causality exercised by intellect and will is real, and so is the collective causality of role incumbents, but that in turn is achieved only by authority i.e., what one ought to do in the role. Instances of essential and accidental properties and relations really exist, and we designate them with proper and common names; and say things about them using categorical terms. We describe their actual properties as existing, and extend existence talk to their causes or effects, signs, or symptoms. Their potential, action, quality, quantity, relation, place, and time do not exist or act independently of them, as independent separate substances. But their instances still really exist. Terms for particular instances of entities in these kinds of categories, for example, instances of the quality “health,” have a primary referent (a state of the body) and analogical extended reference like healthy food, medicine, exercise, complexion or urine. Substances both also are and have a good. Ontological good is present when something exists and exists with the full set of specific identifying powers of that type of thing, and the specific powers are present or developed to threshold use level, or better. Things can be graded as greater or less than those of other beings. These doctrines of substance and category; higher and lower being; evil as privation and disorder; principles of non-contradiction and causality; real being and beings described as existing by analogy of attribution, will be revisited several times in different contexts in following chapters. These doctrines turn out to be useful as tools for reconciling so called methodological individualists and their critics for example; for making sense of anthropological

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talk about personal self-governance and state political governance of citizens; of organisational and state political moral agency, and the morality of groups; and they help to make sense of theological and a-theological descriptions of the highest good/God. This conclude the description of NAVE’s metaethical element 1), its Ontology. Its Epistemology is tied to its theory of being by the Platonic notion that when we know something our belief is true and we have conclusive evidence for it; and the Speech Act Theory notion that in true assertions our words fit what exists in the world. It would be classified today as “moderate realism,” or the notion that we discover, learn about, and pass down in education the truth about being or what is. It excludes Humean empiricism and scepticism with respect to science and knowledge where only custom, habit, and association warrant our assertions about being and causality. Moderate realism will be revisited in Chapter 6 and several other places. In the next Chapter we will look at NAVE’s s Anthropology and theory of wellbeing.

Chapter 3

NAVE ELEMENT 2) ANTHROPOLOGY AND ELEMENT 3) THE WISH FOR WELLBEING AND ITS INGREDIENTS NAVE ELEMENT 2) ANTHROPOLOGY In NAVE’s “folk psychology/anthropology,” intellect is taken as capable of real knowledge. We know some things with certainty about the world through experience, observation, and rational inference. Along with this, reason and the body are taken as distinct and dual powers in the SMB relation. It posits capacities of will/choice, conscience, memory, imagination; sense–perception and voluntary movement; and the autonomic powers, working together in a unified 3-level architectonic system.

Level A Capacities: Intellect and Will of the Self Intellect/reason and rational desire (will) are “at the top” in a hierarchy of directive power, finality, flexibility, scope, and complex, self-unifying diachronic features. The Natural and Social sciences, run by intellect/will, treat the other powers, and the self or soul’s intellect itself, as explananda. The project of natural/social science, the work of reason at basic R1 level, is to describe and link explanatory laws operating at the hierarchical levels of human power and specificity. In more recent centuries, there have been many believers in some form of secular or naturalistic ethics who were implicitly or explicitly agnostic or atheistic humanists, with some rejecting equality (Nietzsche) and a human essence (Sartre), but many accepted NL in some form, and many non-theists have believed in a concept of human good, from Feuerbach and Marx to Singer. The version chosen as a vehicle for articulating the naturalistic/secular account of Natural Law Anthropology is Aristotle, whose Unmoved Mover we have omitted from NAVE. Humans have intellectual capacities whose scope exceeds that of animal reason. Animals do not raise the 3-R questions. Scope here means temporal and spatial scope (infinite regarding capacity to conceive past and future, time and place), and to self-reflect consciously. Aristotle

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also has a maxim to the effect that every human seeks what it seeks under the aspect of a good. A fallible reason, such as that of humans, will sometimes lead to mistaking a means to the good but the choice will still be perceived to be good by the agent (quidquid appetitur appetitur sub specie boni). We exercise voluntary causality. Causality includes formal causality (since our thoughts and desires define us, they are central to personal identity), finality (in assessing choiceworthiness, we compare ends e.g., when lower powers such as limbs must be amputated for the sake of the whole), and efficient causality (the agent uses them to decide how best to nurture the lower capacities in the ontological hierarchy of capacities e.g nutritive digestion, with food vs poison, not vice versa). Human will, qua directed to indefinite human good and amorphous “universal good” - roughly meaning “the good as perceived everywhere”- and not to any particular good object, has the capacity for free choice of any good. This part of NL, which we are taking mainly from Aristotle, and his largely reliable but occasionally inaccurate commentator, Aquinas, with points added by Searle (1983), is a Philosophical Anthropology of human capacity for wellbeing arrived at by speculative or theoretic reason. This is a more systematised version of what we now call “folk” anthropology, and was taken to be the descriptive explicandum of natural and social science - the foundation which determines the meta-ethics, and ethics. Phenomenology aspired to provide this sort of data in modern times, along with Neo-Thomists from Gilson (1941) to Stump (1995). At the highest level of capacity, intellect and will, the conscious human soul/self has a psychological capacity for fully understanding, and directing voluntary choice of abstractly conceived ends, informing its directing acts as an agent, ideally ordered to its wellbeing. The self, and its “higher” distinctive capacities of intellect and will, and their highest and best good, is superior, in the sense of being “that for the sake of which” other capacities exist and operate. Intellect’s concept of the master end of wellbeing is practically architectonic to the other lower capacities, such as sensory power and the power of movement; and the body’s autonomic system. The self’s capacity is exercised at differing levels: 1) the self’s full waking consciousness, when present, is fully flexible, but full consciousness is not constant, because sleep is needed. It can be involuntarily ceased for a period, by medical anaesthetic. But when present, it is directive through intellect and will; it is attention-flexible, capable of intelligent/theoretic, practical, moral judgement, and of willed/deliberate free choice 2) there is capacity for intuition, understanding concepts, propositional contents, speech acts, formal and informal reasoning; concepts formed into propositional contents are embedded in speech acts by speakers e.g., in assertions, there is an understood fit between word and world (Searle 1983) and correlative verification of success 3) the self’s intellect has necessary support capacities: moral conscience, logic, memory and imagination; use of decision procedures of reasoning/literacy/language, organisational ability; discovery, play, creativity, contributions in: art, science, drama, music, making of products;

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Level B Capacities: Sensation of Pleasure and Pain, Perception, Limb Mobility, Reading, Writing, and Speech At an intermediate operational level: there are flexible, voluntarily directed operations of: 1) sensory capacities: perceptual capacities of seeing, touch, taste, smell, hearing; and 2) movement of limbs; reproduction/sex; walking/talking. Type 1. perceptions produce sensations, with affects and emotion following upon these activities. Emotions are pleasant or unpleasant natural responses to immanent internal bodily, perceptual, and intellectual activity or to external activities causing psychological sensations and feelings.13 Here flexibility is mixed with some inflexible bodily based limitations of capacity, as in reflexive anger or fear, and scope of content or use is more restricted/specific than that of intellect and will.

Level C Capacities: Automatic Physical Substructures and the Autonomic System At the lowest level, there are supportive enabling social and physical capacities which are autonomic in whole or part, these are: 1) learnt flexible language skills, once acquired, have an inflexible physical neural base and a socially determined or pre-existing syntax and semantics 2) aspects of some physical capacities that have limited flex-control and mostly passive awareness: respiration, elimination; unbidden feelings/sensations of hunger/thirst; physical pain/pleasure; tiredness/vigour 3) natural unconscious non-voluntary autonomic systems: respiration, elimination, digestion, hair and nail growth, circulation, immune system, cell growth etc. Level C capacities are the most important level in one order of consideration: enabling survival of the life of the body and its properties. Eating poisonous food kills. The intellect is the directing capacity to identify poison and nutritious food, and the will is the capacity to eat nutritious food. These acts the lower powers cannot do alone, and in the order of perfection, they are the most important. An architectonic relation is one in which entities are related to each other in some specifiable respect as director, operator, or enabler, with operator and enabler as directee. In this director, operator and enabler structure or DOES the directing, operational, and enabling relata can be within one entity, as intellect/will is architectonic to limb movement, in signalling a left turn, to hand movement and hands; or between several agents, as navigators are architectonic to helmsmen and tillers/wheels, or architects to builders and tools. In the second sort of case there is often a distinctive enabling artefact and a practice built around making the artefact, e.g., a tiller or cement mixer. The director’s end is, in some specified respect, and order

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Immanent inner and transeunt (overt/external) activities are distinguished; these are discussed in Chisholm (1976). A distinction is also drawn between elicited acts of will, commanding/directing, and commanded acts of will.

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of consideration, “that for the sake of which” the directees, operators, and enablers act or produce or serve (finality); it informs the content of an intention or plan; causes/commands their act/product in that respect (efficient cause). A director in one respect may be a directee in another, as an architect is directee qua commissioned by a commissioner. An end user of the product is also ‘that for the sake of which” the making act occurs, but not the directing maker/actor/cause of the result. The DOES structure can be replicated in the directee entities as they accept the remit from the director. Where there is an architectonic relation there is an act, activity, performance, or practice, with an end result, with personal and/or social consequences produced by capacities within the DOES structure, personal or collective. The organisational analogue and the role of authority to collective action is discussed in Chapter 7. The differential features of intelligibility which are often cited, such as concept and proposition formation; understanding of “direction of fit” and of causality, speech acts of assertion or command, and verification of their success, are ontologically good capacities, and have no immediate moral/normative tone. They can be used by saints and villains. But one can voluntarily decide to check or speak the truth or not and apply the truth or success conditions in a judgement, and these voluntary acts do have moral tone. The Philosophical Anthropology provides a definition and description of human nature (the rational animal homo sapiens) and nature’s essential differential species, capacities, their ends and objects, and their virtues. All voluntary capacities come with some affective/emotional tone or feeling/sensations. To each such capacity there is an inclination or appetite, indefinite if rational/voluntary; and definite if a physical capacity. Rational Level A Capacities have: 1) “formal end/objects” expressing the necessary conditions of actualisation - what must be true de facto if the capacity is actualised at all, like intelligibility for intellect; perceived desirability for will 2) differential end/objects, which are the goods only this power can deliver, like knowledge of truth for intellect; nutrition for eating or digestion; making love and procreation for sex 3) ideal or “perfecting” objects, which are the highest of these differential distinctive goods which a capacity can attain, like knowledge of truth for intellect; attainment of truly good ends of wellbeing for will. These are dominant ends only in the sense of being best when sought and attained, not always sought. They tell us what the needs of the capacity are, and the corresponding need-satisfiers which are the goods 4) natural/normal end/objects of threshold ie level operations of capacity (Nussbaum 1995), such as basic sight, speech and literacy; and lastly there are 5) particular, real, object/ends of capacity, which are those specific and concrete objects which contingently inform the capacity, like a particular thought or wish about an object X or belief/wish that S is P. This is the “matter” known or attended to. Human needs are traceable to the three levels of capacity: directive, operational, and enabling; the need satisfiers are the human goods. Since Maslow, (1962;1987) debate has arisen about the hierarchical relation of needs, and whether physical, social, and personal needs tend

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to be satisfied in that order, or whether personal choices by higher powers of intellect and will can devise a unique preference or ranking of needs.14 The differential and ideal ends of higher, (Level A), powers are indefinite objects, and when attained, what is apprehended or assimilated is a particular real object. For example, the formal object of intellect is “the intelligible”; the differential end is knowledge of truth about being in general; the perfecting/ideal end of intellect is knowledge of truth about the good or true good; and it is attained via apprehending embodied universals and knowledge of the highest human and other goods, and ultimately the individual’s good. Aquinas thinks the ideal highest ontological good object is God, and God is also, in a unique sense, the “highest” real desirable object. NAVE anthropology is a teleological system. In living things, a telos or goal is an inclination or orientation to the distinctive “good,” goal, or end of the being concerned, the flourishing of its essential capacities, and of the attainment of the component sub-goals that constitute its essential telos. Such goals of capacity are immanent, permanent/ongoing, and ultimate in that, when achieved, they perfect, sustain, and suffice for the individual living thing of the kind concerned. Its active inclinations and potencies are fully matured and actualised. An artificial “good” thing has no immanent goals but is said to be good in an analogous sense as an effect and means to the goods of living things with a telos. We use our intellect/reason to discern the set of distinctive capacities of natures, including our own human nature, by reference to their acts. In this prescientific folk-anthropology, human capacities and objects include: intellect and will or rational desire, with their end/objects being truth and good respectively; memory and imagination, with objects being the past and the imaginably possible; the major sensory capacities of perception have objects like sight, sounds, tastes, smells, and tangibles; flexible limbs have mobility: and the non-voluntary capacities of the autonomic system like respiration, digestion, elimination; circulation and immunity, skin and hair growth have their own defining objects. Natural Law takes it that what we should do ethically is to be determined by what we need and want for developing and using our capacities for our enhancement: general human flourishing or wellbeing, (eudaimonia, beatitudo, happiness). This is the inescapable but indeterminate master goal or telos characteristic of our human species. Our theoretical and practical reason works out what the ideal goals of members of the human species are, for one wanting to live well, to live a “congratulate-able” life, and the means needed to satisfy our needs and sub-goals.

Knowing the True Good One of the first common human goods of wellbeing is understanding/knowledge by intellect of truth, especially the true good. The desire for common knowledge is satisfied in Natural and Social Science. The phrase “common good” has two meanings in the context: goods all humans desire or should desire; and goods which require common action or restraint and artifice in the public domain to exist, of which science is one. We are all curious, and in the sense that knowledge as enjoyable, so discovery, apprehension, and learning is a common good. But not all knowledge requires overt common action or restraint, though most of it does. There is an individual, private sphere, and there are self-regarding desires and non-common goods not shared and not of concern to all others, or dependent on cooperative action at least 14

Needs are discussed by Maslow (1962; 1987); Burton (1990); Galtung (1996); Doyal and Gough (1991); Brock (1998; 2009) and Walsh (1997).

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directly. But this private enjoyment of publicly generated or private goods in the private sphere, can be impinged upon by lack of public goods requiring cooperation or restraint/constraint, like lack of law and order, so private and public common goods are causally interrelated.

Assimilating the Goods Another good is giving and receiving of respect and love, and enjoying friendship with others, through our will (rational desire) choosing the good for them, expressed for instance in partnerships, marriage and procreation of children. Another common good is collective social abundance, comfort, need-satisfaction, through order, peace and secured survival, expressed in the rule of law. The means to these goods require creative planning and building and creating co-operation and restraint, in and through collective political actions. Morality comes in here with common shared principles, precepts and rules handed down inter-generationally, targeted at the key means of fostering both private individual wellbeing and the common good, together with moral education seeking to find rational incentives to the acquiring of the good dispositions (virtues like wisdom and fairness/justice) needed to enable individual enjoyment, by all equally, of the preserved common goods of wellbeing; and including the more selfregarding virtues like temperance. Moral virtues require some measure of external social peace, justice, and love, so the line between private and public virtue is not sharp. Private vices can cost communities dearly. Virtuous communities can need collective courage to defend and preserve freedom to enjoy the immanent individual goods of capacity (Walsh 1997).The meta-ethics, applied to emerging science, increasingly if slowly determines and specifies folk anthropology, with scientific and other facts, and facts about the good, supplying the further content of the Philosophical Anthropology and of a teleological Ethics, and the list and content of virtues in Ethics. A stipulated “rational reconstruction,” of the Philosophical Anthropology, interpreted as a moderate “property dualism,” assuming mortality, modified to reflect changes since Aquinas’ 1270s version, is assumed above. It drops “inner sense” and some of the original language (vegetative powers) but preserves superiority and partial non-materiality of the intellect and is meant to be broadly congruent with Aristotle’s intent. It follows him in recognising in its folk anthropology a set of non-material capacities as in architectonic relations to each other. In this version of NL, which we have dubbed NAVE, the Philosophical Anthropology posits a unifying architectonic human self or soul described as having capacities not obviously possessed by physical objects, which may eventually be explained by physicalists but which are not at present, and these are as follows: Individuation Individuation of material objects by reference to their accidental material properties of shape and size and weight is possible. This makes them uniquely different in each instance of the form of such an object. Aristotle does not seem to worry about what makes people different apart from their bodies, but it is presumed here that he would have said their souls and minds, and their individual actions and activities, plus their bodies. His medieval Arab interpreter Averroes (Ibn Rushd) thought he meant that since thought was immaterial, and could not be physically individuated, there was one immaterial Agent Intellect for all men. This threatened Islam’s teaching of personal responsibility and caused an upheaval at the time. Al Gazzali in part wrote the Destruction of the Philosophers to refute it. We will presume that peoples’ individual souls while animating a body as part of a composite, have different intellects and

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wills with different intentional contents and their actions differ, causing different histories and personalities. Will’s differential object is voluntary action in pursuit of what is perceived as desirable for human wellbeing; its ideal object is the true good or actual wellbeing; and its moral virtues include courage, temperance, and justice. Its natural object is choice and enjoyment of such perceived goods. The joint highest good of both intellect and will is the apprehension and enjoyment of that good, a state described as “the true highest human good” (THG). What verifies this description is a separate matter for metaphysics ie either a definite real object, identified in judgement after reasoning, or a set of these objects. In accord with our above Level A i.e. the theological stipulation, we need not in constructing NAVE follow Aristotle in holding that contemplation of the Unmoved Mover turns out to be THG. Will’s highest good, its real denotation, for Aristotle, does in fact turn out to include the Unmoved Mover. But what is essential is that Intellect’s virtues are theoretical and practical wisdom focused on the highest good, whatever it is, even if that is humanity, not God, as will be supposed here. There is a detailed account in Aristotle, well summarised in Aquinas (ST 1a-11ae, QQ. 123), of the formation of human actions by the powers of intellect and will, starting from wish, then the developing of an intention of an end via deliberation about means; consent, and then choice. This is followed by a command to execute the choice by use of the subordinate powers and ends in enjoyment of an attained end. The inner, immanent and elicited act is distinct from the external observable act, and acts of different types can be viewed as embedded in circumstances of various types. These types can be instantiated in act-circumstance tokens or particular cases. The type of act in its circumstances determines the “object” or what- it-is, of an act, and the end of the type of act, and puts it in some quasi-“species” of a genus, like manslaughter in the genus of killing. In the Philosophical Anthropology account, again well provided by Aquinas (S.T.1a QQ 79-84), in an individual person, Aquinas suggests that the architectonic conscious self, in search of wellbeing and quality of life, uses its capacities of intellect, will, memory, and imagination, to direct/rule/govern operational capacities of sense perception, sensation, and limb movement and reproduction; and to tend the enabling autonomic system through virtues. One capacity or function, conscious understanding, is primus inter pares. It is mutually dependent on others but has the last word in some respects or orders of consideration. The ontological good, or scala naturae ranking of human capacities, decreases as volition, flexibility and scope decrease, with descent, from level A to C in the hierarchy. But even at the top, consciousness intellect and will are “natural,” partly inflexible, powers at Level A, with intellect bound by conformity to the world, and will’s inescapable orientation to wellbeing indeterminately conceived. The ideal object is conceived as an indefinite master-end of wellbeing, with some objective criteria or marks, as noted below. The analogical use of the will’s “rule,” in describing human actions, and as exhibiting good or bad “self-rule,” invokes the architectonic relation. It presupposes a logical and arguably potentially real distinction, between the intellectual self/soul and its capacities. The soul’s life is in some way the form, finality, and efficient cause of the latter’s activities, while matter (the body) is architectonic to the soul and the intellect in other respects, such as enabler, and orders of consideration, such as material causality. Human conscious selves are seen as living entities, “self-ruled” through intellect/will and theoretical and practical reason in an architectonic relation.

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For example, there cannot be activity of conscious understanding in a person without the will, and understanding though intellect provides the following elements of cognition, couched in contemporary terms, drawn from Searle’s speech act theory (1983) and explained below: 1) the conceptual and propositional content (phrastic) of desires and speech acts (see Glossary) 2) the understanding and use of semantic markers/words for some different possible modes of operation on phrastics expressing direction of fit and direction of causality in commands, assertions, and exclamations etc. In commands, intentions cause action; in knowing the world causes understanding. 3) the understanding and application of success/truth conditions of all willed speech acts; and, 4) the verification of their success as good speech acts and activities, all things/parties considered. Updating Aquinas, using the Searlean idea of different “onus of match”, and “direction of causality” in Searle’s speech act terminology, conscious intellect has a capacity for recognising different directions of fit for propostional contents or phrastics; and also directions of causality with specific modal operators on propositional contents, as in the assertion: “It is the case that: S is P”; “Make it the case that: S is P”; where “Make it the case” forms a command; “Is it the case?” makes a question, and so on. Specific assertive judgements about X, or “It is the case: that S is P,” presuppose a concept of X or a propositional content, that S is P, as 1) above asserts. Each kind of speech act in Searle’s typology i.e. assertions, promises, questions, commands, exclamations, has its own direction of fit. Direction of causality also varies with distinct specific operators on associated propositional contents or phrastics, and its own success conditions, as noted at 2) above. These “success conditions” are understood by a speaker, at level 2., above, and can be judged, as truly fulfilled or not, by “assertive” judgements by theoretic intellect ultimately, at level 4) above.(See Glossary on phrastics and Speech Acts). In that sense, assertion/truth is still “the ultimate object of intellect.” If these “success conditions” can ideally, but need not, be judged as truly fulfilled or not, ultimately by “assertive” judgements by theoretic intellect, then in that sense, assertion/truth is still “an ultimate object of intellect” despite modern language studies of the Searle variety showing great multiplicity of sub-functions. Theoretic/assertoric intellect has a kind of ontological superiority and inherent worth. Conscious understanding is in some way the ultimate human power, and primus inter pares, but depends on will for its focus, on perception and sensation for much of its content, and on the autonomic system for its temporal continuance, in a natural “quasihierarchy” of capacity. The architectonic relation between the three capacity levels in Chapter 3 A-C above, between directors, operators, and enablers, is literal, causal control and direction and interaction, natural and voluntary, or lack of control. But one can speak analogously using the organisational/political metaphor of the sovereignty, rule, or authority of intellect and will in a quasi-hierarchy.

Moral Psychology The main causes of natural or ontological evil in NAVE are incapacity, pain, injury, sickness, mental privation, and death. Of moral evil, the causes are, imprudence, ignorance, incontinence, weakness of will, and malice, including “ignore-ance” of what we know or half-

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know, by adverting from some line of consideration which we think will lead us elsewhere to the good. In addition, there is the factor of good or bad luck, which can drastically alter one’s prospects of attaining temporal wellbeing. As moral virtue consists in finding the mean in passion and action, and positive virtuous dispositions have to be cultivated over time with voluntary self-discipline, it is in some ways easier to get it wrong than to get it right in those areas where strong emotions are involved, especially where involuntariness is present, sometimes by our own carelessness. However, free choice is a real capacity of will and allows one to control one’s wants strategically through prudence within limits and attain both virtue and the goods of wellbeing.

NAVE ELEMENT 3) THE WISH FOR WELLBEING AND FINDING ITS INGREDIENTS Rational desire or will is oriented to the good in general or everywhere and especially human wellbeing. It is assumed normal persons universally have an indeterminate, and in that way a weak, orientation or wish to apprehend and assimilate what they perceive as being their wellbeing and act for the sake of attaining it. This vague natural inescapable wish is then specified further in different ways by different persons forming different beliefs about the true good and so different habits of action. This presupposes the idea of an architectonic structure or relation between listed human capacities with characteristic specifying objects and goods, such as knowledge, sensation, and digestion, in hierarchical relations. The maxim that we always choose to act under the aspect of a good has been mentioned already. It means that we are not normally free to evade this constraint and must think we will be better off even in choosing suicide. It means also that in this teleological ethics, moral choices of the right and the obligatory are perceived as in some sense for the sake of the overall good, and not vice versa as in Kantian deontology. It also clarifies the point that the meaning of naturalism in this construct is not connected with Moore’s twentieth century contrast between natural and “nonnatural” moral properties.15 Rather the contrast is with God and religion or the “supernatural.” In architectonic relations, one directing entity, x, is the final cause, telos, or goal of another, y, in some respect, R, in some order of consideration, O. For example, sailing by a boat operator is the final cause of rudder building and of the choice of materials in respect of speed or steering, in the order of finality. In the order of material causality, the material of helms and rudders is a respect in which boat helms and rudders are architectonic to steering and sailing. Aristotle cites navigators and helmsmen; architects and builders to illustrate the paradigm relation. But think of the relation of Physics of sound to the physiology of hearing and speech; of this to Phonetics; Phonetics to Grammar, Grammar to Semantics; Semantics to speech acts of assertion or command; of these to human purposes, like particular successful assertions of meaningful truth, or fulfilling needs; and of truth-getting about the common good and wellbeing studied in Ethics. This is an architectonic structure of brute facts relative to some higher normative institutional pragmatic or moral level of success.

15

The idea of a moral “non-natural property” contrasted with a natural one, was a response to the claim of believers in the Naturalistic fallacy that one cannot get a moral claim out of a factual one.

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Human wellbeing is an architectonic principle as defined above. It is not “for the sake of” anything. Word-sounds and meanings are for the sake of truth seeking and wellbeing attainment. The studies of the enabling physical and syntactic substrate of intellect are ruled by those of the psychological, practical and contextual. Substrates cannot fully comprehend and explain this directing and operational capacity-sovereignty. In voluntary human acts, according to dualistic interactionism of the Neo-Aristotelian type, the enabling body is operated by the directing intellectual soul or self. The goal of the will of human capacity-endowed individuals, as instantiated human specimens, is “Human wellbeing” (eudaimonia). This is an indefinite but significant master-goal of humans as natural persons with differential natural human capacities, which we ill dub: Ha. It is the object of at least idle wish unless interference occurs. At its vaguest, wellbeing is “living and doing well” (NE 1095a16-20; 1184b 9). Slightly more specifically, it is “a complete and sufficient good, fulfilling desire, and free of evil,” or “happiness in the common notion” (Aquinas, Pars Prima 1-11ae QQ 1-5). The sense of wellbeing/happiness in the common notion is still indefinite, but a sufficient good of one’s nature can be further specified by reference to the capacities and their objects and needsatisfiers as set out above. It also has some overlapping and reinforcing criteria or marks taken from Aristotle, according to NAVE, not known to all but still true of wellbeing. Aristotle uses a set of criteria for wellbeing but does not list them. Aquinas later collects and formally lists the marks of wellbeing/happiness in the Summa Theologicae Pars Prima and Pars Secunda Secundae QQ180. A candidate goal presenting as an ingredient end or goal of wellbeing as an inclination exemplifies: 1) engagement of the “higher” rational, immanent capacities 2) with the highest/best goods; (NE 1177a1-11; 1178b7-8; 1179a32); Aquinas (1-11ae, 2, 4 and 6) 3) an intrinsic or ultimate end, not merely instrumental; (NE 1095b13-1096a10; Aquinas 1-11ae 2.5 and 7) 4) a good which is perfect/complete; (NE 1153b17; 1328a37-38; 1219a35; Aquinas ST 1-11ae, 2, 4) 5) lasts for a while, or as long as practicable (Aquinas 1-11ae, 3, 2; 5, 4). 6) promotes cumulative immanent self-development/enhancement/ perfection (Aquinas, 1-11ae, 5) 7) preserves self-sufficiency; (N.E.1097b20-21); Politics (1360b, 14-17; Aquinas 1-11ae, 2, 4, 7); 8) can be enjoyed at leisure; (NE 1177b, 4) The completeness or perfection concepts, prominent in marks 3, and 5 above, imply freedom from evils, such as pain/harm/death; ignorance; and malice, and in Aquinas’ version of the Aristotelian marks this is explicitly said to be part of the” common notion “of wellbeing. (1a-11ae Q 5, 3; II-IIae 180)

Table 2. A Neo-Aristotelian model of the Ethics, Politics, Organisational Relation

Capacities of Humans (A)

Needs for attaining Human Good (Wellbeing) (B)

Theory of Human Nature (1) (Philosophical Anthropology) The Good for Humans: human wellbeing

Ethics (2) Morally Ideal, “Right” and permissible Action and Virtues ordered to (1) (A) wellbeing.

Politics (3) ‘a just state’ Designed to meet Needs (1) (B); Rights and Duties, with defined sectors and domains

(a) Intellect/reason/conscience/ memory/imagination; Will/selfcontrol and choice (directive capacities); (b) Sense Perception/Movement (operational capacities); (c) Autonomic System (enabling capacities) used in acts on patients; affecting other persons; in a social community. Formal and ideal “objects and ends” of each.

Ideal ends of capacities (a) – (c) in column (1), determine rules and virtues, reciprocity principles, rules and decision-making methods for the highest good and collective wellbeing; e.g., casuistry. Governance of/by a selforientated wellbeing in a way consistent with the common good of all Wise self-governance via respect for persons, principles and roles of interactional response/reciprocity via social justice as defined by general justice* in 5 point analysis (a) – (f) below

Constitutional Powers of a just state Terms of governance given in analysis of social justice and “common goods” requiring co-operation as sub-set of all ideal goods in cell (B)(1).

Knowledge/Self-actualisation Information, Friendship, Food/shelter, Culture/meaning, Decision procedures, Clean habitat, Autonomy, Health, Security

*For an analysis of justice see Element 4) Chapter 4.

Wise and just leadership of collective quasi-person. Ethical rule of others by “self “accountable for ‘the common’ good in accord with particular justice e.g., provisions for election to office

Political Economy and Social Policy (4) under the implicit social contract; institutions and professions match needs in (3). Structures and settings of political economy to be crafted in accord with analysis of social justice, guided by the institutions of various practices in sectors.

Organisations/ Corporations (5) Designed to attain (1)-(4) by sector, domain, and ends warranted by ethics as admirable. Constitution or purpose statement. Roles fitted to goals by sector:     

Actors, Institutions, and Practices by sector in accord with justice* Ends and institutions of practice defined e.g., business corporations

Public Private – business voluntary Professional Non profit NGOs

Officers/articles of incorporation Rules for meetings, disclosure to members, audit Norms governing structures, needs, powers, culture

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We earlier designated this set of marks of wellbeing (MWB). Using these criteria as the analysis of indefinite wellbeing, a particular good, attainable by capacities with perfecting dispositions (virtues) can be put on a list as specific ingredient ends of wellbeing, the specification of the analysis, (Austin 1967); Williams (1962), or the reference of wellbeing, if they meet the criteria of the marks, MWB. Any particular chosen end/good, Hi, can then be canvassed and contingently chosen, as a practical reasonable means to wellbeing, if they appear on the specification list, and do not violate other ethical principles or precepts. If G is a particular end or goal meeting the specification, it is abstractly morally permissible, but further types of circumstance appended may defeat a claim to moral status. Things which meet the criteria Hm and get on the list, Hs, include: understanding, science, knowledge, reason, friendship, intimacy, respect for persons, trust, wealth, health, security, peace, fairness of treatment, freedom, equality of treatment, art, music, education, sport, meaningful work, health, and nutrition. These are critical reference points in moral decision making in the areas of applied ethics like sexuality, violence, welfare and justice in politics, discussed in Part 2 Chapters 9-11, and procedures like casuistry, at the intermediate level where rules can be made and followed, as will be explained in Chapter 4 and 5. They help to identify needs and need-satisfiers which virtues target. The orientation to wellbeing is typically expressed by desire to avoid passive suffering of bodily discomfort or ill-health like pain from disease, hunger or injury; death; ignorance or boredom; or freedom from the evil attention of others like violence, fraud, theft, or rape; or dispossession of habitat. Positive good prompts active pursuit of imaginable goods is expressed in curiosity to identify the true goods: understanding, knowledge, (immanent), repute, friends, the pleasure of giving pleasure or helping/sustaining loved ones as long as possible, (permanence), now and in the future. Aristotle’s Ethics is teleological and the meta-ethics features wellbeing. Human wellbeing is what the goal of Ethics is taken to be, and it is a partly indefinite goal. But the anchoring notion of wellbeing is not totally indefinite, empty, or insignificant. Aristotle, and the bestknown Neo-Aristotelians, like Aquinas, offer (similar) accounts of human nature (capacity); criteria of wellbeing, principles and precepts of ethics, casuistry, virtues as tending to wellbeing, and accounts of natural law. The deeper ethical differences between Aristotle and later NL thinkers like Aquinas, which concern the list of ingredient ends of wellbeing, graduated by their different ontologies, and include some different virtues, a different idea of God, the highest good, and Providence, do not prevent us using the marks of wellbeing they both shared. For supporters of NAVE, a relation of this kind obtains between the disciples of Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics. The wellbeing of an entity with a human nature (abstracted from yours, mine, ours) is the architectonic end in the order of finality/intention with respect to Ethics. This is illustrated in Table 2. To further explicate the thesis Table 2 suggests that the practices, institutions and sectors, reasoned to by leadership in an intentional community, like a just state, should use ethical politics and a regime of rights and duties as indicated under columns 3 and 4, to determine their ethical content for organisations at column 5. From the anthropological “species wellbeing” within the meta-ethical scheme, indicated in Table 2, Column (1), ethics is derived via the informal “method of determination” (Aquinas’s term for practical, non-deductive argument). Practical reason moves across the columns from left to right. Ethics, politics, political economy and social policy, and organisational design, all depend on philosophical anthropology as ethical foundation. The primary referent of the terms

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“human,” “person,” “wellbeing,” and “need” is a human person as Philosophical Anthropology or “folk psychology” describes this, and justice refers primarily to a relation between persons.

The Will and Evil: How Evil Action Happens NAVE treats immanent natural desires arising in capacities of the body’s autonomic system (like digestion, circulation, and respiration) and semi-autonomous systems (like perception, elimination, and movement) as prompting each other, and interacting with intellect and will at immanent and overt levels. The self, through will, and slow but continuous cultivation from childhood on of restraint, and of the virtues of each capacity which fulfil human needs, controls their activities and through actions directs them to the ingredient goods which according to the marks or criteria of wellbeing (MWB) are the referents of wellbeing (RWB) and the highest good (THG). If there is no self-direction or misdirection of capacity, say through pursuing some sensory pleasure excessively in an uncontextualized way without regard to normal moral and social limits, wellbeing will not result and more and more repetitive sensory indulgence will only decrease satisfaction. Addiction can then follow. The orexis or prompting inclination will be disordered, and enjoyment of higher goods will no longer be wanted and steadily erode. The marks or criteria for choice of goods, such as those of self-sufficiency, serenity, inherent desirability, and continuous enjoyment, no longer dominate and the person becomes nonvoluntarily turned on only by the addicting pleasure. Plato suggested all evil was done in ignorance. Aristotle thought there was also weakness of will. NAVE followers since Aquinas believe that wrong action is mainly due to ignorance and weakness of will but there is also “ignore”-ance of what we know in temerity and malice. In his De Malo, Aquinas analyses the rejection by Satan of God’s providence, and links it to discussion of our human malice as a form of temerity or recklessness; not ignorance, but “ignore”-ance. Satan knew much, but knew he did not know all things, yet proceeded. He wished to have omniscience like God. Morally wrong acts occur when we advert from the consideration of the likely consequences of our actions but go ahead anyway by willfully not attending to the line of reasoning which we half-know that we could pursue, but also half-know or suspect that if pursued, might lead to the conclusion that we should not proceed. We attend to the attractive aspects of the present deed, considerations in its favour such as our advancement or pleasure and hoped for consequences. This can turn into habitual self-deception, especially about the havoc we are causing to ourselves overall and the harm we cause to others. Since the genocide of the Jews, Ruanda, Cambodia, and elsewhere, we have discovered that evil is banal ( Arendt (1963)) and even the most heavily involved instigators and perpetrators of mass murder seldom feel any guilt because they have deceived themselves so successfully by simply not going down discomfiting paths of reflection. This theory of evil is one example of the accomplishments possible within the scope of NAVE which are often forgotten in our own era. NAVE supports at least the partial autonomy of ethics as real but holds it to be relative to Philosophical Anthropology or human nature theory. Anthropology it is itself partly also relative to Metaphysics, conceived broadly as “what human reason or cognition can know using their higher powers about their highest objects.” That indefinite description refers to desire capacity and is partly definitive of human nature. NAVE as an ethics cannot be completely indifferent to any suggested referents for this description. It is committed to human

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understanding, reason, and knowledge of truth. Epistemology suggests the referent of the description would be partly determined through a general, law-like, process, involving universal concepts as ultimate basis for judgement and so for choice. Given this meta-ethics, to evaluate the claim that one has a duty of any kind, whether to those close to us or to strangers, we must know what duty’s content is; the way its discharge will impact on the human wellbeing of self and others; its basis in ethics; and the person(s) or ‘quasi-person’ (one’s workplace, organisation or the state) to whom it is owed. Different duties can be owed to, or discharged through, persons and collective quasi-persons like states and organisations as their effects, in different sectors and domains. Locating an agent’s domain often helps one to specify the content, rationale, and target of the duty concerned. By domain here is meant an arena of personal action and/or interaction like homes, public spaces like roads, workplaces, and wildernesses. Where and in what domain we are will sometimes explain or give rise to some relation or role, from which a duty arises. This can be important to locating to whom and/or with whom we are obliged. In Figure 2 below, domain (2) is made up of family/kinship domestic sites like homes; domain (3) of civic/state/government sites, like roads and hospitals; (4) of organisational sites, like workplaces, voluntary associations’ offices; and political parties; domain (5) of semiorganised fields, like markets, shops, restaurants, and patrolled beaches, and the internet, which allow some freedom and anonymity within limits; and domain (6) of the rest of the nonsocialised world including the natural world of sea, forest, mountain or desert wilderness. More difficult to place are: international institutions and their offices and facilities for example, the global postal union, commerce and travel, the UN; and also NGOs dedicated to world poverty relief. They straddle the civic and organisational domains. The private domain, e.g., one’s home or apartment (1), in which we groom ourselves, or enjoy solitude, is in a way a degenerate case of interaction if we are only interacting with our own body and material objects as impersonal patients. Each of 1-6 has appropriate norms and lays different claims on our moral sensibility as we enter and leave them. Where we can do so permissibly, we can incur duties though selfinvolving ourselves through contracts and promises. They can also sometimes overlap, as in personal acts performed within semi-organised fields and civic settings. Much of our lives we act in and through organisations, not as mere individuals, and our duties are variable by domain, and restricted and interrelated in complex ways. Duty is domain-sensitive, and the duty of poverty relief to distant needy others is an instance. Arnhe (ca1992) in Agency and Organisation, usefully identifies a category of semiorganised fields like markets and malls as a category alongside those in Figure 2. Families are basic. As infants we are helplessly dependent on kinsfolk. Later we can attain more goods in a first order family or kinship community. As an adult one can enter the political or organisational domain and can retire from the community into the private sphere; or remain in the first order community, in the family or kinship domain, or the natural, organisational or civic domains. In aged infirmity, we again depend on others, and with death, the state will note our passing. The family and kinship domain is typically at both ends of the life cycle. In their accounts of Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics most philosophers, including Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and Mill, go into some detail to offer a cross-domain description and ranking of human capacities and/or desires, ranked by object and worth, either based on intuition, appeal to the experience of the majority, citing the capacity’s defining object, causal centrality, flexibility, and scope; or the superiority of the capacity to those shared with other animals. General Ethical principles and precepts must straddle all these domains, and judge the

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ethics of entry, conduct and exit. There is no universal duty to enter all of them, and no choice but to enter some. One has no duty to marry, have children, or choose a career, these being the most significant of choices, still less to choose this one here and now. To determine my duty, there must be some independent notion of human wellbeing’s plural ingredient goods, and of right and wrong, grounded in moral values or imperative principles, about what one should do, avoid or pursue, in a given type of circumstance. These values and norms of being and having will conflict in some circumstances. We will have to choose the best or most suitable/right means of action on some cognitive, as far as possible rational, decisional basis, like law, principles, rules, plus casuistry. Admirable, saintly acts do not fall under duty, but are above and beyond its call. In abstracting from an individual’s other personal, domain-relative ties, including unique idiosyncratic duties of persons arising from morally unforced choices like partners and jobs, and the ethics of private self-care. Some omnibus approaches appear to generate both an ethical overload problem, and to omit to specify a means of computing and weighing claims arising with regard to utilities emerging from unique personal and other domain obligations. These can be caused by individual involvement in multiple domains and associated state and organisational roles. The circumstances: “who?” and “where” are easily overlooked in deploying omnibus principles focusing on what is done, its universalisation, or its consequences for the greatest number.

6. The ‘natural world’ 5. Semi-orgnisational fields 4. Organisational 3. Civic/State

2. Family-kinsfolk 1. Personal

Figure 2. Domains of personal action.

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The domain, sector, practice, and institution matrix of ethical duty and the concept of moral distance of moral agents from each other, reflected in organisational reality, will turn out to be relevant when one considers the organisational duties to the needy poor in teasing out the organisational implications of ethics, and where reference to different models of business corporations, which are classified by Dine (2000) as contractual, ‘communitaire’, and concessional, can be helpfully made. In the ‘concessional’ model, which is the one favoured here, the corporate entity has a ‘constitution’ (Bottomley, 2007) designed in part to reflect a concession by the sovereign within the broader state constitution, and both are reasonably seen as results of some sort of wider social contract (Donaldson and Dunfee 1999; Rawls 1971). Social contract theory combines elements teleology (wellbeing) and deontology (prima facie duty, fidelity to promises and agreements) for the sake of the common good and human rights. Taken together, the unitarist hybrid ethics NAVE, the quasi-personal model of organisations and the constitutional/concessional models, can rationally support the notion of corporate moral agency within a welfare state capitalist system. There is ethical reason for defining the ethical telos of business and modifying the popular contemporary “stakeholder” model of organisations in a more unitarist direction, and treating the corporation and its essential interests, as distinct from some of those of its external stakeholders. This determination is made by reference to the notion of just action.

Chapter 4

NAVE ELEMENT 4): PRINCIPLES, PRECEPTS, AND VIRTUES Chapter 2 and 3 set out Elements 1) 2) and 3) of NAVE: its ontology, anthropology, and theory of wellbeing. In the last case, we looked at the architectonic status of an indefinite notion of wellbeing as the master end of will. We turn now to NAVE Element 4): Natural Law itself and the moral rules as means to the human good. Under Element 3) it was asserted that wellbeing/happiness in Aristotle/Aquinas is the object of rational appetite or will. At the most abstract level it meant “living and doing well” (Austin 1967). All men are ascribed an indeterminate wish for this end. In the “common notion” (Aquinas), a happy life connotes “complete and sufficient good, fulfilling all proper natural desire, and free from evil.” There are further marks of wellbeing, not known to all or pursued by all, set out by Aristotle, but codified by Aquinas at ST IIa-IIae 180. The ingredient goods are those which meet certain criteria of wellbeing noted previously and are now repeated and slightly embellished. Happiness (eudaimonia; beatitudo; wellbeing) is attributable to one who: 1) engages intellect and will, the “higher” rational, immanent capacities, and directs these differential/characteristic/defining capacities to focus on their highest objects/goods (N.E.1177a1-11;1178b7-8;1179a32); Aquinas (1-11ae, 2.4 and 6) 2) achieves enjoyment of or delight in these goods of understanding and knowledge of “the highest goods of the highest powers”;.(N.E.1095b13-1096a10; Aquinas 1-11ae 2.5 and 7). 3) seeks those goods which are ultimate goods, desirable for their own sake, not just instrumental goods; (1095b132-1096a10) 4) such a good is perfect/complete; (N.E.1153b17;1328a37-38;1219a35; Aquinas ST 111ae,2,4.) 5) seeks goods which last for a while, and ideally permanently (Aquinas 1-11ae,3,2; 5, 4). 6) seeks goods which develop cumulatively in quality/access like skills; and which promote cumulative immanent self-development/enhancement/perfection 7) seeks to preserve self-sufficiency; (N.E.1097b20-21); Politics (1360b14-17; Aquinas 1-11ae,2,4.)7; is self-sufficient/free enough to direct, rule, and develop his/her 8) Enjoys such goods at leisure; (N.E. 1177b 4).

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David Ardagh The “completeness” or perfection concepts, prominent in marks 3. and 5 above, imply freedom from evils, such as pain/harm/death; ignorance; and malice, and in Aquinas’ version of the Aristotelian marks this is explicitly said to be part of the” common notion “of wellbeing. (1a-11ae Q 5, 3; II-IIae 180)

There are other implied marks of wellbeing mentioned like: 1) being lucky to have a healthy body from birth, and freedom from early unwilled catastrophes; 2) being free from violence of others. enjoys serenity and inner immanent peace, at rest/leisure. Good luck and peace and freedom from fear of injustice and violence is a necessary condition of such goods and part of happiness/wellbeing. “A is peaceful” is a “multi-place” predicate. A person, A, may be a person or community which is inwardly or overtly peaceful in one respect, R, in one order of consideration, O, or in domain D, and not another. For example, one individual may do well in (5), but, through poor self-rule, not so well in (3) above. A peaceful person can enjoy both intra-personal/inner, and overt/social peace. Interpersonal peace is associated with positive just institutions (Galtung 1996). One can be happy in one respect, but not in another e.g., one’s relation, but not its duration, quality, or amount; or in one order of consideration: e.g., existence, but not degree of attribute possession; in theory or principle but not practice; description and verification, but not intention, command, or execution; or in one domain, but not another, such as personal, domestic, organisational, communal/social/ public/civic/environment/national/global. We saw earlier that from the marks of wellbeing a list of ingredient goods can be drawn up which meet the criteria: ingredient goods include knowledge, contemplation, truth, science, education; beauty, art, music, culture; love, friendship, intimacy, conviviality; freedom from harm and for need-satisfaction, health, security, and social order; and evils to be excluded are such things as pain, death, ignorance and the malice and evil doing of others. This analysis, together with the object/ends of capacities outlined in the Element 3) description of Anthropology in Chapter 2 grounds the inventory of ingredient ends of wellbeing and the general principles and “primary precepts” of natural law. The general principles are such things as “do good and avoid evil”; “Be rational/just”; and the Golden Rule. Such primary precepts as those against murder, theft, adultery, fraud, and perjury, which threaten life, truth, health, achievement, friendship, freedom, knowledge, and fair exchange. An action type and a type of circumstance is picked out and prima facie prohibited or required by the relevant term e.g., “knowing and deliberate killing an innocent person” is murder. These precepts are allegedly the same for all and known to all. Secondary principles concern fewer uniform matters, like punishment regimes, and are not the same for all. The ingredient list also grounds virtues which direct our natural inclinations and aversions, and their emotional substrates like fear/courage; anger/restraint; desire/temperance; hate/love and other emotions of appetite or revulsion, towards acts and activities which will attain wellbeing. The director, operator, enabler (DOE) structure of the self’s capacities outlined in Chapter 2 as Element 2) suggest the powers and needs can be ranked in given respects in given orders of consideration as personal, social, and physical (Walsh 1997) and thence their need-satisfiers. Aristotle and Aquinas both mention master inclinations; life, survival, and security; self-perpetuation and

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social interaction for physical need-satisfaction, and the personal exercise of higher powers with respect to society and higher powers/God. The moral virtues, said to be seated in the will, are courage, temperance, and justice. Prudence is a bridging virtue to the intellectual virtues of understanding, science, and wisdom. All goods are enjoyed individually, but they are fostered socially and inter-generationally. Justice is focussed on the common goods, which are those most dependent on the cooperation and restraint of others, like public health and safety in social contexts; science and culture. The basic IRPs or interpersonal response principles which go with justice are proportionality, equity, and reciprocity, reflected IRP 1-5 (in the Abbreviations list), given Aristotle’s analysis of retributive, distributive, and fairness in interchange justice between citizens. Although limited to unequals via the citizenship condition, the conceptual analysis of the concept’s meaning is that justice is operative in our free pursuit of wellbeing and freedom from evil; equality of respect for other persons and their opportunity to pursue wellbeing and share public benefits; recognition of effort, contribution, desert or merit; and although Aristotle preceded the welfare state he might well have allowed a basic welfare floor of some sort as a matter of public good.

JUSTICE: A MULTI-CLAUSE ANALYSIS The following features are offered as broadly Neo-Aristotelian and found in some of the later literature about justice (Campbell 2001; Shaw and Barry 2007; Sterba 1988) and about beneficiaries of just relations. In such relations the parties: 1) are free to pursue satisfaction of their perceived needs provided they do no harm to others and allow such freedom to others 2) are free from harm by others 3) enjoy and show equal i) respect for others; ii) equal access to information, decisionmaking regarding the shaping of their wellbeing, and iii) opportunity to share in public distributed goods 4) receive rewards for desert/contribution and access to positions are impartially administered 5) attain basic threshold levels of capacity-needs-satisfaction (Nussbaum and Sen 1996) 6) follow a principle of interpersonal responsiveness to acts of others like the golden rule of reciprocity which ideally guides interpersonal and market interchanges exchanges. The last feature is indeterminate and variable in exactingness as different standards and values are understood to be implied in applications of the principle of interactive responsiveness. Some “candidate principles” of personal interaction of increasing ethical demanding-ness are now reviewed again: IRP1.A:

“Do as you have been done by” or “Do good in return for good,” and “Do not exceed “Tit for Tat” in retaliation” (an eye for an eye). At the “low demand” end of the moral spectrum, this correlates with the distributive justice

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IRP 1B: IRP 2A: IRP2B IRP3: IRP4: IRP5: IRP 6 A: IRP 6B:

principle “From each according to their ability to each according to their ability” It would be undemanding ethically as a response/reciprocity principle “Do no harm” “Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you” (sometimes called the Silver Rule) “Do as you would be done by” (The Golden Rule) “Do as you would will all others to do in similar circumstances” (Kant’s Categorical Imperative) “Respect persons as ends not mere means” (Categorical Imperative, alternate version) “Seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number” (Mill’s Utilitarianism) “Better to suffer than do injustice” (Socrates, in Republic of Plato) “Relieve suffering when possible” (Principle of Humanity)

In constructing NAVE, it is reasonable to ascribe to it IRP 2A and 2B , the Silver rule and the Golden Rule, which are found globally. These are broader more empathetic principles of interpersonal or inter-actional response than tit for tat, and arguably more defensible, if the enlightened, broader, long term social concepts of wellbeing is agreed to be the basis of ethics, and the ‘respect for persons’ principle (3) (i) of justice mentioned above, or IRP 4, is taken as being rational. The Golden Rule ideal at IRP2B is curiously understated in Aristotle’s ethics outside the context of friendships. Aristotle does not offer any general principle parallel to the Golden Rule, (or the Socratic principle “better suffer than do injustice”). That is a reason for accepting, with Walsh (1997), a more explicit “respect for persons as ends” principle as a supplement to NAVE. Aristotle does recognise common humanity with slaves but seems to excuse the practice, perhaps on the basis of desert, in the justice analysis (4) above. The most plausible IRPs to ascribe to NAVE are those expressing a “moderate” hybrid position - a “justice as reciprocal respect” principle, based on the Golden Rule, and extending roughly from IRP 1-IRP 5 or 6, reflected in the “just war” tradition recognised by states, which depends on the idea of a just order, like a state with authority, legally policing, and itself exhibiting, a moderate response/reciprocity principle. The overarching response/reciprocity principle to being harmed would be something like: 1) When offended or harmed, first seek peace, non-violence and non-retaliation, not the law courts, but acknowledge the necessity of limited force (police or state coercive force, including lethal force, if necessary). Use force only under a set of listed conditions, known as just war permissions. Do not accept immoral humiliation or violent treatment of innocents. Use only proportionate and discriminating force. 2) From (1) we can argue that if people are stakeholders in an organisation or state, or have a duty to contribute to, work for, or take risks on behalf of some joint enterprise which benefits them, they have rights to equal information, decisional power, and benefits arising from, the contribution they jointly make to others by agreement regarding that work or contribution. They can expect not to be harmed by the entity and if they are harmed, can expect retribution or compensation. In commercial interchange, they can expect reciprocal benefits like price received for sale of products or services given. The other side of this is that they bear responsibility for compensating victims of their misdeeds and deserve retribution. If they now benefit

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from past misdeeds of entities they belong t, like states, they should contribute in some way to restorative justice (Pogge 2007; Thompson (1991). 3) Beyond justice, under benevolence, it is reasonable to ascribe to naturalism an interpersonal responsiveness principle something like the following, relieve suffering, and show kindness and compassion to others, where you can. A maxim like this one is close to a “principle of humanity” (IRP6B), of the sort discussed by Campbell (2010) and other authors in edited anthologies, like van Hooft and Vandekerche’s (2010) Questioning Cosmopolitanism and in Freedom from Poverty as a Human Right edited by Pogge and Horton (2007). But these sorts of general maxim are, like other IRPs, quite open ended and abstract imperatives. Moral primary precepts like those against murder are more specific and preserve intergenerational wisdom by commanding behaviour which avoids obstructing the ingredient ultimate goods, forbidding things which tempt us to put our short-term personal gain ahead of long term communal need satisfaction. One shows respects to others and benefits from knowledge and social peace via justice/ethics in free interchange (commerce), making and social recognition of desert/contribution to society or lack of same (retribution), equality of respect, opportunity, share of public benefit, and need-satisfiers (distributive). The marks of wellbeing leave open the identity of the true highest good, all things considered, in the sense of the ultimate cosmic highest good, beyond humanity, which is the referent of this definite description, or its ultimate cause. What best meets the criteria is not deducible from the criteria themselves without some ontology, metaphysics, and anthropology. Aristotle and Aquinas both think the highest good is some kind of supreme necessary being, a type of God or Reason. We will not at present explore this issue but will pursue this in Chapter 7. But the idea of wellbeing is central to all forms of NL and to most concepts of Divine law.

Practical Reasoning Depends Systematically on Assertoric/ Theoretic Reasoning This section of the chapter uses teleological virtue ethics (NAVE) as the organon for presenting the analysis of knowledge of the human good and ethics in terms of levels of abstraction or specification. Moral decision making is a kind of ends-to- means or principle to instance practical reasoning, which develops increasing specification or determination of the end/act proposed, ending with an intention and choice. Moral reasoning is a type of practical reasoning. Both theoretical and practical reasoning begin from idealisation, but in different ways and in different senses. The former begins from conceptually expressed particular assertions of fact about individuals, implicitly presupposing law-like universal or general tendency ascriptions, or from explicit generalisations about the facts. The second start from more or less unspecific vague human wishes, values, goals, and normative imperatives associated with realising a set of human goods. In the practical case, ends are often abstract in the sense of being both indefinite and normatively ideal. Since Aristotle, and especially in the last century, our understanding of the relation of theoretical or assertoric reasoning on the one hand and practical or imperative reasoning has improved. As Kenny showed, (1966) following Hare (1958) theoretical reason and practical are systematically linked through the notion of a

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propositional content or phrastic of the form “that S is P” which represents the core of both cognitive and affective judgements and acts (See Glossary). Some of the relations of the two spheres of reasoning are captured in Table 3 below. Theoretical/Assertion It is true that (the cat is out of the house). It is true that: (the cat has been put out of the house). If (the food bowl is in the garden) then (the cat is not in the house).

Practical/Fiat I wish (the cat were out of the house). Would that: (the cat were out of the house). Put (the cat out of the house). If you want (the cat out of the house) then (put his food bowl in the garden).

Table 3. Relations between theoretic and practical intellect Theoretical [Assertoric] Objects/End Truth/Knowledge 1. Onus of Match Assertions are to fit the state of the world. 2. Exemplary Principles Principles of identity, excluded (General) middle, non-contradiction, causality, probability. 3. Examples of Primary Established mathematical and Principles natural science principles. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9

10. 11.

12. 13.

Practical [Imperative] Good/Satisfactoriness The world ought to fit the state of affairs projected by the wish, intention, command, plan. "The Good is to be done" “Do as you would be done by" “Do no harm" "Do not murder" Do not steal" "Be fair" "Do not perjure"; Sound political, organisational or business" imperatives Successful Use Expresses a fact or truth (what Expresses satisfactoriness relative to a goal or is). Logic of satisfaction is requirement to carry out an action (what ought to be). based on truth preservation. We go from ends to multiple possible means and choose the most satisfactory. Mood Indicative: Has the form "It is Imperative: Has the form: Let it be the case that: the case that." Would it were the case that: Make it the case that: No imperative premises needed for sound conclusion At least one imperative premise needed for sound conclusion. Operator Est Fiat Main Inference Rule Est P entails Est Q; and Est P; If P entails Q, and Fiat Q, then Fiat P together these entail Est Q. This is called "The Mirroring Effect" MODE Of Deduction/induction. Not Determination/specification. Defeasible (e.g., by added INFERENCE defeasible by addition of new desires, conflict of desires, or change of heart; more premises. Deductive inference information about situation/context). Formal deduction possible. not sufficient even where possible. Context Dependent Soundness of an argument not Context dependent (e.g., time and resources); context dependent. considerations to be ranked in impact. Certainty? Premises and conclusion can be Plans neither true nor false. certainly or conclusively known Satisfactory means is relative to changeable goals and to be true. situational perceptions, truth value determines satisfaction. Virtue True belief/knowledge or Practical wisdom of action in the world (prudence) or wisdom in the mind. disposition for such action (justice). Inconsistency To be avoided. Always (possible Pragmatic inconsistency cannot be totally avoided but and desirable). only contained by hierarchical prioritisation of goals.

Kenny (1966) represents row 7 assertions and ‘fiats” as sharing this common phrastic or propositional content differing as this is governed by a "fiat" or an "Est" operator (See row 5 and 7-8 of the comparative table). Some systematic relations of the formal logic of satisfaction and the informal logic of satisfactoriness relative to a goal can be mapped. As the table suggests, phrastics, or “that clauses,” can be embedded in an assertion like: “It is the case that S is P, ’or in a command like “Make it the case that S is P.” Each has a different fit to the world. The

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assertion is false if S is not P in the world. A command like “Make it the case that S is P” is satisfied if the world is made to fit the words in the command. Each has a different fit to the world. The assertion is false if S is not P in the world. The command to make S to be P is not satisfied if S is not P, but the command is unsatisfactory relative to a goal G if making S is P true will not bring about G. Searle (1992; 2001) following Austin (1962) has identified other speech acts, and directions of fit; and also their semantic correlates: expressives, commissives, and interrogatives. Despite the impossibility of formal deducibility of value from fact, on which Hume rightly insisted, the discovery of the mirror relation (see row 8. above) still seems important. Practical reasoning builds on theoretic and this gives assertoric reasoning an ultimate edge. It is known that there is a systematic relation between the (a) the “satisfactoriness” of a plan, wish, or order (e.g., Put the cat’s food bowl in the garden) relative to a goal (the cat’s being out of the house) on the one hand: and (b) the truth of the corresponding conditional assertion (e.g., If you put the food in the garden, the cat will not be in the house) on the other hand. If P is true, Q is true (symbolically PQ), then, if I want Q, I should choose P i.e., Fiat Q  Fiat P. Moral reasoning is a type of practical reasoning. It directly concerns what we are to do or make, not believe. In this it resembles reasoning in those disciplines or subjects like art, carpentry, engineering and architecture which wish to, plan for, and/or do bring something into being. This is different from theoretical subjects like natural sciences or the social sciences which primarily try to describe and explain connections between things which exist already. Kenny (1975) has shown that practical and theoretic reasoning are different but related systematically, as the satisfactory to a goal (practical) to the satisfied (theoretical). Although much progress has been made this century, practical logic - the logic of practical reasoning – will not be formalised in a finite set of rules of inference and axiom. Searle (2001) agrees for slightly different reasons that practical reasoning will not be formalised. Kenny following Aquinas, recognises goods and beings can be assessed in various “orders of consideration.” Some such orders of consideration are: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8)

Power/operation/perfection, inherent and consequent Intention/Execution Time and Duration Dependency/Independence Theory/Practice etc. Discovery/Teaching Divine/human Inherent worth/desirability.

Moral reasoning as a type of Practical reason involves increasing levels of informal determination or specification. There are vague marks of well-being (of its component goods) such as ultimacy, self-sufficiency or autonomy of the person. The vaguest description possible of this human well-being is “living and doing well” in one’s life considered as a whole (Ardagh 1975; Austin 1967). Slightly more determinately, the good life is a life of “activity in accord with virtue,” which: (i) finds room for the pursuit of the highest objects/goods by the highest (most distinctive) human powers; (ii) it is delightful/ecstatic; (iii) it affords and uses

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leisure/play; (iv) it includes goods relatively permanent in their possession; (v) it perfects the person’s own powers in a cumulative way one can build upon (and is immanent in them); (vi) it consists of the attainment of ultimate goods not goods sought merely as means (vii) it is selfsufficient.16 Though not purely Western, neither are these marks part of a universal human consensus either. They are vague enough to allow for a range of different specific cultural embodiments; embodiments which can be revised in the light of scientific progress; and respect for our ignorance where appropriate. The “highest goods of the highest set powers” test will certainly graduate the perfecting object/ends our capacities, such as truth for intellect. Human beings will also make it on this test. For believers, angels or aliens and other Beings with Very High IQ/well-disposed to humans; and God will be candidates for THG. Table 4. The Roles of Reason in Teleological Virtue Ethics 1. Practical/Imperative Universal wish for optimal human realisation (eudaimonia) vaguely conceived as 'optimal wellbeing' with some added criteria'*& ends making up content of wellbeing. Master inclinations to selfpreservation; self-perpetutuation; and social selfdevelopment 2. Charactera) Expressions of desire, commands, precepts, laws istic Objects and other imperatives, self-addressed and addressed to others conceived as part of search for: b) Specific goals of powers and needs satisfiers required given the list of ingredient ends (content/means) of true well-being (Eudaimonia's ends or goals as we conceive it to be). c) Attaining means of achieving eudaimonia so conceived 3. CharacterApplication of moral notions and precepts in istic Ethical choices: Activity a) to real and familiar (old) cases b) hypothetical cases c) to real but 'unprecedented' new and complex cases 4. Central Primary precepts of natural law, e.g., Don't murder Ethical Focus (cross-cultural). Secondary precepts - culture relative e.g., murderers to be executed. 5. Relations of Applied principles taking into account facts and Most Relevant circumstances disclosed by disciplines to the right. Disciplines 1. Starting Point

2. Theoretic/Assertoric Apprehension (inchoate) of truth about one's human nature and its goods & apprehension of facts about ends of wellbeing and wellbeing's satisfiers.

a) Assertions of fact and true law - like generalisations about the world, including human nature (the person), and human good (eudaimonia). b) More specific content of good inferred from the marks of wellbeing. Devising of a vocational adaptation by the individual given his/her unique circumstances. c) Identifying means to Eudaimonia Apprehension of content of moral notions and evidential basis of practical precepts; comparative assertoric reasoning re similar cases of types 1, 2, 3 of column 1. Rationale for these precepts in tendency to advance or hinder eudaimonia for all citizens of the community. Natural and social sciences esp. anthropology, political economy, law, ontology.

The marks of wellbeing can be thought of entering the reasoning procedure at row 2 above as part of the meta-ethics of NAVE. Master inclinations to self- preservation, self-perpetuation and social self-development at row 1 are expressed in the list of graduated ends, which meet the marks above in the theoretical order at row 2. These select worthwhile/ideal goods call for appropriate need-satisfiers in four main categories: conflict resolution/law to prevent wanton violence against the physical person; inter-generational, succession-ensuring ethical/ educational culture measures (Thompson 1991); distributive justice and care for infants, the aged, sick and the powerless; and decent natural/environmental habitat. 16

As noted in Chapter 2, the marks of wellbeing are collected from Aristotle and usefully listed by Aquinas at Pars Prima Secundae Q2, 4-8, 2;5, 3-4; and Pars Secunda Secundae, Q180,1. They overlap largely with the marks of the organising principle in an architectonic relation. They are drawn from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.

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The abstract, ideal set of ingredient ends or goods which the wise voices of the virtue-ethic tradition tell us, in the light of these criteria, actually compose the most worthwhile life include things we often don’t recognise in our youth as being worthwhile - learning, service, creatively bringing good into being rather than just enjoying it passively: abstinence, ceremony, intimacy, scientific discovery, social contribution, and spirituality. Broadly they meet our physical, social and personal needs. An alleged quasi-hierarchy of human powers with formal and perfecting object/ends, and such higher powers as intellect and will at the top, perception and movement in the middle and the autonomic system at the bottom, generates a hierarchy of good ends and needed means by reference to the marks of happiness. Ends/needs cluster into three broad groups: physical, social and personal. In order of urgency, one’s needs require fulfilment in that order. But as noted above Kenny (1975) has drawn attention to the important limitation arising from the notion in Aquinas that any piece of practical reasoning can be assessed in different orders, with respect to (secundum) different considerations. The inherent worth of an object or end differs from its ontological status, its “height” in the chain of beings or nobility. The fineness of the good can differ from the urgency of the need for the good in question. Other examples: the intention vs. execution of the relevant action, the order of efficient causality vs final causality; and so on. An object may have a different ranking with respect to two orders. To take the intention/execution case, what is temporarily first in intention and/or worth may be last in execution and time (prius in intentione sit serius in executione). Or what is inherently or theoretically more ideal may not be worth pursuing in practice at a particular time; or it may be better (when it is sought), but sought less often, or less urgently, e.g., meditation or creative artistic work. Paradoxically, relentless pursuit of what is best is not always good. What is best or better when it is good than anything else whatever, may not always be good, or best pursued relentlessly. Although physical needs are inherently less distinctive of humans and their fulfilment in a sense less worthwhile than those of higher powers, such as intellect and will, their need satisfiers do require more constant attention. In the order of material causality, they are indispensable to all life and so the moral demands of respect for physical integrity of the person are most urgent and the strictest of all. Moral and legal codes usually forbid lethal violence more strictly even than lies. Also, social justice and opportunity to self-empower socially in a just and peaceful state take precedence in this sense over the life of the higher self/mind as its causal necessary condition for the same reason, and despite their being less distinctive. Thus, given this “inversion” in moral urgency of the order of inherent choice-worthiness by that of material causal dependency, two features of this ethics are particularly notable: 1) the master need for empowerment through intellectual and moral virtues entails an urgent ethico-practical need for peace, supportive culture and institutions of justice, equal opportunity; and 2) there is an urgent need for a healthy physical environment with respect to air, water, etc. The moral implications of this line on practical reasoning are interesting. The states of social peace, justice, and love/knowledge are correspondingly ordered in urgency. But in terms of the idea of orders mentioned below, the order of intrinsic worth is the reverse 1, 2, 3.

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Virtue tends to wellbeing, other things being equal, but we can be unlucky enough to attract the attention of the wicked by our virtue and there are other luck factors like poor health or birth into a vexed situation. In the first of these cases however the response of inflicting evil on these aggressors and/or wickedness on our own part will not necessarily make things better. NAVE proponents link virtue as perfection of capacity to needs and need-satisfaction, conditional nonviolence of the IRP 1-6 variety. Threatening harm as a deterrent may be acceptable in accord with reciprocity, but it may sometimes be necessary to absorb a wicked attack rather than inflicting evil on others. Ordinary morality or decency strikes a balance between vengeance and non-violence, egoism and altruism. Ethical rules concern only the band of moral activity not permitted, or required, not the other important moral modalities of praise, recommendation, and supererogation distinguished by Urmson (1968), Chisholm (1968), and others. The process of casuistry allows for consideration and variable ranking of the same entity in various orders such as: causality, time, divine versus human consideration, intent/execution. The paradox of inversion between the order of urgency and inherent worth can make physical need the strictest of obligations. The rules against physical violence are typically the strictest in any civil society. The highest goods need not be always be pursued but retain their superior worth. Seeking a mean or balance point in passion and action between too much feeling and too little emotion is the mark of the moral virtues, illustrated by the difference between the virtue of courage and vices of rashness (too strong a response to danger) and cowardice (too little). Justice is a mean only in an extended sense - a mean between taking too much and too little. NAVE can offer arguments against taking any good as supreme or to be relentlessly pursued. The criteria of wellbeing/happiness in Chapter 2 include self-sufficiency, but not luxury. NAVE will rule out unlimited pursuit of material possessions because that will not verify any of the eight marks of wellbeing. Even contemplation is not to be relentlessly pursued even if when it is good it is best. Since the body is a necessary enabler of all capacities its health and wellbeing is to be prized over luxury. This has ecological implications, as does recognising the real good of animals and plants. A wicked person who does materially well out of malice may seem to have attained wellbeing, but the NL tradition argues that there will be one person who knows his own worth to be poor: the aggressor, and he must keep his sins dark and his lies straight, paying a heavy toll in self and other deception.17 The argument is in a way categorical, in a way unlike Kant’s categorical imperative. NL precepts are not just an ordinary hypothetical of the form: “If you want X, do Y as a means.” This is because, according to the theory, if wellbeing is found in a good X, wellbeing requires X, and it is cited in the antecedent as a necessary good end, doing Y as a means to it may be necessary and not-Y may not be a wise option. Nor is it a categorical of the Kantian type: “Do X, e.g., follow the moral rule, no matter what.” Lawrence (1995) has thoroughly explored the sense in which one ‘must” (rationally speaking) be morally involved to attain wellbeing in a teleological theory of this type. Given one can locate warranted desires i.e., some of the ends which qualify as ideal goods, requiring “needs” satisfiers as means, one can offer reasons for moral precepts and negative prohibition of considerable specificity e.g., those against spite, murder, bias, fraud or theft. These are nearly exceptionless, “defeasible” only by some specific countervailing consideration because the type of act/feeling in the specified circumstances-type is inimical to 17

Bernard Mayo (1986) elaborates on this topic in The Philosophy of Right and Wrong.

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wellbeing, and the wish for wellbeing is inevitable. Typically, moral rules involve emotions or actions of a certain type in a type of circumstance which is important to our wellbeing, and one in which we are tempted to go astray. Casuistry can deploy practical reasoning to show the necessity for more specific precepts than those prohibiting murder, theft, and fraud, such as intermediate norms or particular measures for addressing problems within a domain like that of the state or organisation. Likewise, for sectors such as the public sector, social policies may be needed to address particular socially constructed injustices, and environmental vandalism. However, the range of principle, precept, and rule is limited. For the rest, appropriate dispositions of character and the use of casuistry by conscience have to suffice. There are approximately ten value/moral modalities listed below in the next section. Good/bad and right/wrong, though different notions, are related, because right action/virtue tends to wellbeing. If X is good or bad for wellbeing this abstract categorisation clings to it even if it is morally cancelled e.g., killing is bad even when it is justified as right morally; sexual orgasm is good, even if judged morally wrong as in adultery.

THEORETIC AND MORAL MODALITY In NAVE, in the theoretical order of consideration, both beings and modal propositions are necessary, possible, probable, or their opposites. In the practical order, multiple moral modalities or “signs of will” are recognised as qualifying practical moral claims and judgements. At an abstract level, there is some “moral free space.” Abstract act-types, embedded in circumstance-types, can be deemed to be prohibited, discouraged, permitted, neutral or morally indifferent, recommended, obligatory, or supererogatory. How an individual uses abstract moral “free space” will have concrete moral results for her wellbeing, and so there may be little or no moral freedom for that individual with respect to the act type in her particular circumstances. Aquinas rightly says no particular act of a person act is completely irrelevant morally, but abstractly considered “scratching one’s ear” as an act type is prima facie neutral morally in a taxonomy of moral modalities, whereas “murder” is prohibited. This variability is partly tied to domains like the family, kinship group, the state, and the organisation, so that what is obligatory for an individual or role incumbent with respect to family or fellow citizens may be supererogatory with respect to strangers; and partly to the decision procedure used in applying the precepts. Modality partly underpins the difference between primary and secondary precepts. Not every act is a matter of duty or prohibition. Many are permissible or supererogatory/heroic/saintly or inhabit moral free space. To evaluate the claim that a person or quasi-personal entity has a duty of any kind, whether to God, the state, or those close to us or to strangers, we must know what duty’s content is; to whom it is owed; who is the relevant authority; the way its discharge will impact on the human wellbeing of self and others; its basis in ethics. The person(s) or ‘quasi-person’ (one’s workplace organisation or the state) to whom the duty is owed can change the modality. One man’s role duty may be another’s prohibition. Different duties can be owed to, or discharged through, persons and collective quasi-persons like states and organisations as their different sectors and domains. Locating an agent’s domain in Figure 2 of Chapter 3 above is required to specify the content, rationale, and target of the duty concerned. By domain here is meant an arena of personal action and/or interaction like homes, public spaces like roads, workplaces,

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and wildernesses. Where and in what domain we are will sometimes explain or give rise to some relation or role, from which duty arises, e.g., domestic or political duties. This can be important to locating to whom and/or with whom we are obliged. Ideal heroic humans create great science and literature, art and music. Moral heroes do not need to show the extraordinary dedication in those making discoveries in natural science. They are activist agents of social justice and compassion, taken as ultimate ends, taking extraordinary non-obligatory social justice actions on behalf of the oppressed or needy. The key virtues are practical wisdom, courage, hope, and love. Here one may leave a legacy through making an un-required contribution. In the intra-personal domain, one is immanently serene, repents one’s own evil, reforms/rehabs/restores in order to self-forgive. In the social domain, one is overtly community oriented, forbears from evil acts/revenge; forgives/is merciful; finds and supports just causes/forestalls evil. In both, one is just, peaceful and loving. No adequate meta-ethics can fail to recognise the levels of abstraction in the content of wellbeing (general/specific/particular) or the different levels of virtuous moral engagement or scope of application and motivation. Yet Kant, the famous moral philosopher, comes close to saying we should not ever directly seek our own wellbeing, and pursue only the happiness of all. He believed that we all have imperfect duties even in the free space modality isolated below, recognised by conscience and good will, requiring imagining ourselves as reasoning universal legislators, focussed on respect for persons and the kingdom of ends i.e., the happiness/ wellbeing of each as a person of ultimate worth and on all as members of this ideal kingdom. But it is not demonstrably rational to believe in the existence of a universal “voice” of conscience in this sense, or that we have a sufficient temporal motive for following it, or that this hypothetical kingdom of ends will ever come about. To see this, it may be helpful to focus on examples of virtuous pursuit of wellbeing in the various moral modalities. The work of Chisholm and others suggests there may be as at least 10 common moral modalities:

Moral Modalities 1) Most desirable/fine/choiceworthy e.g., assimilation of the highest good ecstatic/ineffable bliss 2) Heroic e.g., clinging to the good in face of a great evil/danger/acting beyond the call of duty 3) Praiseworthy/worthy of honour/admirable, morally or non-morally 4) Required/Obligatory/Compulsory/Duty 5) Encouraged/Enjoined/Commended/Advised 6) Permitted/Allowed 7) Indifferent and in moral free space 8) Discouraged 9) Prohibited/Forbidden 10) Disgusting e.g., Unspeakably Bad or wrong At 9, the very strictest negative moral and legal rules are those against damage/harm/ injury/violence to life and physical integrity of people, or to their means to basic physical need satisfaction. Positive rules at 4 and especially 6 are indispensable to this kind of moral system,

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but not the whole focus. Ideal end/objects of power for example are not required to be relentlessly followed or the goods norms protect to be exceptionless and universally obeyed. Goods need not be pursued as dominant ends or perfectly attained e.g., omniscience is unnecessary for intellect. No rule requires perfect satisfaction of need, even physical, only normal/basic level of satisfaction. Often no explicit rules exist against type 10 acts, or for types 1-3. They are simply exhortations or counsels of perfection/excellence. Worthwhile/warranted goals include all of 1-6. We are free to select means from a manifold of permissible goods only partly constrained by ethics.

From Consensus to Controversy: The Good of Life and the Badness of Killing This section sets out a suggested way of understanding the extent of the moral consensus with respect to the example of killing a person. It does this by reference to the notion of levels of abstraction already mentioned. It offers a rational reconstruction of how we might understand consensus breakdown in terms drawn from the vocabulary of Natural Law/Virtue Ethics and casuistry. It assumes that it is possible to sidestep the objection that there is no consensus in Philosophical Anthropology by reference to a notion of “folk anthropology” prescientific descriptions of the human explandum and levels of explanation based on the work of Polanyi (1968), Schumacher (1977), Charles Taylor (1964) Searle (1992; 2001) and other nonreductivist but non-immaterialist accounts. The idea is that certain “horizontal” conceptual connections between human phenomena are part of folk psychology i.e., the data is to be explained, and will never be explained away completely from below by “vertical” causal accounts from the material sciences of the brain and nervous system. Hungry people will still want food and drink eg and fear is a desire to avoid some evil/danger. Intellect will decide when a satisfactory material theory of mind has been presented, and it will not succeed if it is totally reductive of mental appearances/phenomena as illusory. In the first part of this section, the example of “killing people,” is held to be a type of act which tends to have evil results and to be regarded as cross-culturally evil, even when excusable or permissible. So, it is seen as prima facie or presumptively unethical/wrong. This is used to explicate the idea that there exists some such ethical data. Precepts discouraging killing as in some way regrettable, especially killing people and higher animals, are cross-cultural givens. Prior to the abattoir, this regret was shown even when killing animals held to be necessary for human survival, as was the case with native peoples in most lands. Precepts against killing people travel well across time and place and are good examples of ethical principles and precepts. In other words, they exemplify an important part of the prescriptive/imperative structure and content of ethics. However, this section contrasts the likelihood of consensus associated with consideration of the nuclear act of killing, in different circumstances and at differing levels of abstraction. At a highest level of abstraction, as noted above banning the killing of plants or cells or anything on the phylogenetic scale would be senseless and impossible, and there is no such moral principle, or consensus. Even “harming an animate being” of which killing is a quasi-species is something many cultures permit. But it is widely seen as a worse thing to do wantonly, with no reason, and prima facie wrong (to be avoided) as we move up the scale to the higher animals. It’s much less abstract subtypes, like “mercykilling” or euthanasia of a person are not part of the consensus and controversial. We quite

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reasonably alter our judgment on the possibility of consensus depending on this choice of level of generality or abstraction, words qualifying the evidential authoritativeness of assertion, like “X is prima facie” wrong or ruling out some degree of rational consideration of circumstances, like ‘the “wanton killing of Xs.” In the ethical assessing of a type of act, the process of increasing “specification” has to do with restricting the class of the object/end of the act or feeling and dropping words like the disclaimer "wanton" (for no good reason); or with removal of qualifiers like “prima facie” associated with the notions of presumption and defeasibility and/or ceteris paribus background assumptions of normality and absent interference. Most often it involves adding in types of circumstances to describe the type of act we call killing; and the particular details of the token, instance or individual case at hand. This is a process associated with the word “casuistry.” It will be set out in Chapter 5. Some argument will be offered for some of the points in this section, but it will present some concrete prescriptive data as data, not try to draw it out as a conclusion from other deeper premises. It will not offer a conclusive argument for the truth or completeness of that data. In other terms, it locates a part of the data or explicandum of ethics, not its explanation. Hopefully, if this section is acceptable, then the argument will not be dismissed as either too banal by the empirical social scientists or too full of contentious generalisations by the “particularists” and the post modernists.18 The suggested way through this sort of dilemma is as suggested to advert to the key role of the notion of “levels of abstraction” and determination or specification. Virtue Ethics which deploys this contrast is both ancient and plausible. Our undeveloped capacities and vague orientations conceived at a high level of atruth-telling is normally encouraged and lies discouraged. As children, we are curious by nature. We want to be informed and not lied to; and so when we grow up and reflect, we recognise that, if we value the truth about things and being told the truth, so do others; and if we and others do actually tell the truth, we are more likely to be told the truth than if we all seek to be “free riders” on the system. Lying cannot be the norm. Likewise, for having bodies with a capacity for pain, we all tend to want to be safe from harm; and normally accept a general imperative against harming others. We have social capacities and desires which ground our not wanting to be cheated and defrauded; thus the imperative to be just; have rules to express the wish not have one’s goods stolen; and rules against fraud. There are, in short, some ethical values and principles, like truth and life, fairness and the Golden Rule, which travel well across space and time. Against this incomplete sketch of the background, let us begin then on the exposition of the idea of different levels of specification. At the highest level of abstraction, human beings with basic human capacities and inclinations seem to accept some basic ends are good and follow a general practical principle like: Principle Level 1(a) “Seek human good and avoid evil” (b) “Human life (existence/true good) is good for humans”

In terms of the above discussion of theory and practice, assertion and imperatives, and modes of discourse or speech acts, the good in Principle 1(a) above can denote all and any of

18

In fact, the idea is to get between the horns of the dilemma: either you are “discovering” specific new empirical truths from an armchair or you are ignoring the uniqueness of each situation in favour of some vicious abstraction.

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the components of the fulfilling good of our nature, including beauty/truth/unity/ friendship/health. The human good, and the capacity for it, is part of the good everywhere, a good also potentially found in natural living things, and artificial entities made by rational beings like humans. Let us call this following the medieval usage: “the universal good.” We are curious about the good in this sense and do at least idly wish for our own good as we see it, and so medieval writers thought that to be rational, we should seek what we believe to be truly good for humans as a norm. They believed that we do act in the belief that our act will bring this good, even when we are mistaken or wicked - (quidquid appetitur sub specie boni). Pursuit of perceived good is alleged to be something we tend to actually do, if read as the assertion: "We seek the perceived good." In Principle 1(b), abstractly considered, the being, capacity, and wellbeing of any person is, as such, a good for that person. It is a good also for many other persons, and some would say “a good thing” just so described compared to that of a plant, animal or stone. It is intuitively better than that of an animal plant or stone; and/or it is better than non-existence; or a void. In Chapter 1 and 2 we called this ontological good.19.To adapt the famous runaway trolley example, one should choose to spare the person rather than the cat if one must die. Again, sacrifice a kidney or a toe rather than an eye or part of one's brain function. A type of “hierarchy of being and goodness” of the type set out by Kretzmann and Stump (1991) is suggestive but not necessary to ground the idea of the good of/respect for minds or persons as such. The idea is that this being respect is warranted to a greater degree for sentients than non-sentients. 20Nor is it necessary to explain the claim that any human has some inherent worth qua human, despite bad action. It might follow from other premises such as their potential to develop; or to contribute to others, or to be objects of compassion, or as commanded by an imperative of conscience to value persons as such; or their being children of God. But the “chain of being” or scale of nature idea might help here. In any case, both the greatest happiness of the greatest number and universalisability principles take the principle “that each person is to count for one” seriously. They thus capture the intuition of respect for persons. The goodness of the human life of any person, conceived as being either inherent ontological, or instrumental, or divinely conferred, is taken as part of the universal good and a basic datum in ethics. Even Hitler was once a child, and in this abstract sense, a good being qua person. So wicked was much of Hitler’s later moral behaviour that it would have been better, for the rest of us, had he died of his injuries inflicted in W.W. I. But would a pre-emptive killing of him as a briefly blinded, hospitalised soldier in this war have been justified? The imperative principles are master imperatives of practical reasoning, which operates as a self-addressed ideal. The ancient and medieval virtue moral philosophers, perhaps presuming the principle of reciprocity “Do as you would be done by" to be reasonable, took the active variant “Do good and avoid evil” to be a first principle of such reasoning about feeling, doing and making things. “There are clues or marks of this sought after wellbeing. Other people are also part of the good just as people, in this sense. If we move from this very high level of abstraction to the more specific moral realm - the realm of principles and precepts for guiding deliberate human action and interaction in respect of persons - we arrive at general value claims and principles like:

19

Kretzman and Stump (1991), following Aristotle and Aquinas, make a good case for this notion of ontological goodness, and an approach in terms of a graduated scale or “chain of being and goodness.” 20 This connects back to NAVE ontology in Chapter 2.

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David Ardagh Principle Level 2. Act reasonably and justly; “Do no harm”; and the Gold and Silver Rules (IRP 1B; 2A and 2B)

These principles come from the philosophical anthropology and criteria of wellbeing mentioned generating need-satisfiers like knowledge, companionship, beauty, culture, fair treatment, security and healthy habitat. Principles at Level 2 ask us to “treat like cases alike,” and depend on an analysis of justice on terms of freedom to pursue wellbeing, avoid harm, be respected equally as a person, not discriminated against, and have one’s survival needs met. We arrive at some IRPs of the sort like the above as ‘justice principles.” They seem intuitively attractive. The IRPs 2A and 2B, the Silver or Golden Rule, cannot be easily be derived deductively from any more foundational imperative principle. Ancient philosophers after Plato said of basic (or “first”) practical principles, like those in (2) above that only dialectical, informal21 arguments are available for the truth and/or utility of such principles, and also of the parallel theoretical or assertoric principle of non-contradiction; “A thing cannot be F and Not-F at once”; or, “A proposition, P, and its negation, Not-P, cannot both be true at once.” These informal arguments appeal to the self-denying futility of the rejection of such principles. Rejection of these principle causes paralysis and frustration with respect to systematic science and co-operative work for mutual benefit and tends to lead to intellectual incoherence.22 Setting special contexts aside, rejection of the law of non-contradiction for assertions; or of the golden rule as an imperative for practical reasoning, leads to perceptions by others of folly, inconsistency, unfairness and hypocrisy. Such rejections bring these perceptions about by at once denying and relying upon what is known with respect to defining what the most worthwhile human life looks like and how we might jointly attain it. There is a pragmatic contradiction (Levy 2002). If we do reject this sort of futile, intellectual and moral scepticism, then we do (and therefore can) attempt to give an abstract account of human well-being given the reciprocity reading of the Golden Rule, and some data about our common needs. From “Do as you would be done by,” and the account of “What we would” i.e., what we wish to attain in terms of our own well-being given our species’ capacities, we can generate more specific precepts and virtues. There is thus a “reciprocity” requirement at the heart of any ethical scheme. To illustrate the notion of levels of abstraction/specification and diminishing consensus in assessing the good/rightness of an act type, (which forms the basis of the ethical decision process called casuistry), let us look at the example of killing as a species of the genus “harming.” If living beings are ontologically and/or instrumentally good, wanton extinguishing of any person's life, and to a lesser degree other animate beings is prima facie wrong. Even in the case of Hitler, it is Hitler’s bad moral behaviour we primarily condemn, and his birth consequently because it was a necessary condition of that subsequent ocean of evil moral activity, itself in turn the expression of “disordered” or defective moral dispositions of character. But we can still recognise or assign value to his life. So we arrive at a more specific principle than the Level 2 Principle, “Do no harm” viz: 21 22

Dialectical and ad hominem arguments. See Aquinas Summa Theologiae, I-IIae 100, 1-4. The law of non-contradiction does not hold in a number of specific contexts: where a term is vague; where a special interpretation of words like “true,” “is,” “or” and “not” is stipulated within a particular formal system; or the implicit restricting conditions “at the same time and in the same respect” are not met; or the condition that the terms involved must be determinate or the context be extensional and is not met. In the intentional context: “They believed/wished that they were in Rome,” the truth-value of “They were in Rome” is independent of that of the belief/wish.

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Principle Level 3. “Do not wantonly kill animate beings, especially people”

Because we wish not to be harmed/killed, and given the Silver and Golden rules, Principles 2(i) and 2(iii) above, wanton killing of living beings and persons is prima facie wrong i.e., unless there are further extenuating circumstances. The precept: “Do not kill” has presumptive validity and the onus is on the killer to overthrow or “defeat” this presumption. For this reason, such precepts are said to be “defeasible.” This suggests the next step of specification: locating the specific objective and end, what and why, of a human act type give it its prima facie “quasinature/substance.” But descriptions of human act-types like “wantonly killing humans,” without further circumstances noted, presuming only some intent or other and some motive sufficient to cause death, are universally thought bad, not good or indifferent, in our abstract understanding. One can say that, without further circumstances being specified, prima facie and abstractly, killing is bad, especially for humans, and perhaps that all wanton killing wrong. At the next stage of specification we can fill in some more precise circumstances to move to. Principle Level 4. The primary precept: “Do not murder,” where murder is: “the knowing and deliberate killing of an innocent person who has done no harm, or threatens no such harm.”

Here is an almost exceptionless precept with travels well across time and cultural differences. The decision on rightness expressed in: “This is to be sought/permitted”; or on wrongness: “This is to be condemned/avoided,” is based on the type of act in the type of circumstance understood at this step. The recognition of the inherent badness of killing, and its wrongness if wanton is unchanged, and consistent with the cultural relativist point about former acceptance in some cultures of now abhorrent practices e.g., of voluntary ritual sacrifice or headhunting to acquire tribal strength from the cannibalised foe, or child sacrifice to appease the anger of the gods. These were indeed once thought acceptable mores by some groups of people. These were based on specific factual beliefs which, if we had shared them, we might well have seen these practices as reasonable responses to such “facts.” And perhaps their intent and false beliefs show that they did not murder their victims. Also, at this level, lack of knowledge and or intent is often excusing, although not if one ought to have known. Lawyers will argue that when we consider killings in such circumstances as do, or at least might, overturn the presumption against wantonly killing people in Principle (3) above, circumstances, which do arise, it seems possible to excuse killing in several kinds of circumstance. For example, when "killing a person" is unforeseen, accidental, unintended. If the excusing conditions are self-induced through alcohol abuse, most will condemn the killer. In law, a corporation can be held liable for unintended killing through strict liability provisions, but this is not uncontroversial or a universal norm. Principle Level 5. It is permissible to apply the “just war” and other relevant exceptions in some circumstances.

As we come down further from this still abstract level to the next more specific level we begin to lose consensus, and principles and precepts are increasingly hard to formulate. Humans enter into domains like families, states, organisations and markets. Organisations fall into broad sectors such as public, professional; and private with specific need satisfiers as their

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focus/agenda e.g., security for police and military; due process and client confidentiality for lawyers; consumer satisfaction for business. And this is reflected in more specific controvertible principles and norms at levels below 4. Police and military will argue that it is permissible for killing to be done as the last resort to save one’s own life, or that of innocent others, or the nation. So-called just wars, (such as many believe the war against Hitler to have been); police actions; and capital punishment come under Principle. (5) We have lost consensus. Proponents of non-violence, and pacifist Quakers, do accept “accident” cases of killing as excusing, but do not accept type 5 “just war” exemptions. Even those who allow them in principle may question particular state arrangements for capital punishment, or those who doubt whether the conditions of a just war can actually be met in the modern age, will not agree with the majority, who do approve of these killings. This is so even if they are alleged to have been carried out under conditions which just war supporters are prepared to spell out, such as the so-called criteria of the "just war" i.e., right intention, just cause, legitimate authority etc. Further, there are several kinds of circumstances in which even an act/circumstance cluster, which meets the conditions, defined by “murder” (the knowing and deliberate killing of an innocent) at Principle (4) may yet be permissible because a term's reference is unclear, or because further circumstances are added. Some of these hard cases are: (a) where one can question the reference of a key term: the object of killing is a living, human being who will become a mature person unless prevented but is alleged by some party to not yet be a person on some purported criterion (the abortion question). Many citizens and some medical professionals feel that families and even states should be entitled to terminate unwanted pregnancy. (b) Added circumstances: the object of the killing is a person but there has been added four further circumstances: 1. the person has asked to be killed 2. the person faces imminent death and will not recover their powers 3. the reason in (i) is to avoid some grave evil e.g., excruciating pain, catastrophic costs to relatives (the euthanasia debate). The killing of terminally wounded buddies in a just war might be cited.23 4. competent independent and/or professional authorities have been consulted and agreed on (ii) above. Once again, these matters are alleged by some to be sector and domain-“sensitive,” subject to social and professional norms. (c) Breaking the rule to attain its point: there is a near-certainty that many more will die if a few are not deliberately sacrificed e.g., the (true) case of a naval officer who, following a sinking, admitted only those who could row to a life-boat built for half the number in the water prior to a storm. He cast those incapable of rowing adrift. These people drowned and the rowers survived. The court found him guilty of murder, but dealt out no punishment. (d) Double effect: innocents are killed “accidentally” as “collateral damage” in a “just war.”

23

I am indebted to Col. W. Huxtable for the example.

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Thus e.g., 6(a) “Abortion is wrong” or 6(b) “Euthanasia is wrong” is a (contestable) but more specific moral precept than “killing is wrong” or even “murder is wrong. But its wrongness can conceivably be outweighed, or its status as a murder questioned on the ground that a foetus is not a person or there is an implicit cause in the definition of murder “against one’s will.” The ultimate in specificity is, of course, particular cases where principles are impossible almost logically-the particular agent in the particular case, e.g., Dr. A “killing this foetus here now or injecting this particularly circumstanced patient now” or Officer B saying: “I will cast this (otherwise healthy) non-rowing person adrift.” (This is the sort of judgement which outweighs the one made at step 4 in the casuist process to be explained presently). To say X is morally wrong is to say that this imperative precept ought to be part of the consensus, not that it is. But moralists must be concerned if the consensus drifts too far away from reflecting the ethical data and the ordinary moral presumptions, and moral philosophers should be trying to bring about a consensus around what they take to be morally correct. Consensus can be found for some important Level (1)-(4) imperatives, but not beyond Level 5. It is impossible to go further, even if (as is unlikely) everyone might or would have judged the same in this unique case. Individual judgements in individual cases cannot turn upon actual consensus. Counter factual like “Anyone would have approved the same decision in such a case as this” can be claimed but this quasi-Kantian ex post universalisability claim is not an antecedent standalone test which can substitute for casuistry. One might try to make up a complex maxim to deal with future cases like 6c above but this will not be practically useable. We have reached the practical useable limits of moral generalisation. At the highest level of abstraction, Principle (1) “Doing evil” is to be avoided on principle. At the next level, Principle (2), wanton harm, irrationality, and injustice are to be avoided, and reciprocity is required, intellectually and morally. At the next, more specific level Principle (3), wantonly killing animals and people is bad, and prima facie or presumptively morally wrong. And further circumstances can lead at level (4) to a more specific precept: “Do not murder,” which is, or is very close to being, exceptionlessly wrong, and positively to a general judgement that accidental killings can usually be excused. But at Priniple (5), with just wars and police use of lethal force, we lose consensus, and the consensus tends to break up even more sharply around war, especially nuclear war; abortion or euthanasia being wrong. At the individual level, this killing of this human being here now in these particular circumstances i.e., the rules have done all they can to settle the issue, but they cannot judge and they can conflict. It is qua individual case that conscience must make a decision on unique, idiosyncratic particulars, invoking the lesser evil principle and perhaps others like double effect. Down to Principle 4, the prohibition of murder/excusability of accidents, we increased specificity, passed judgement on a type of act in a type of circumstance, and did so without destroying broad moral consensus. The decisive role assigned to circumstances is first noted by Aristotle, and will be set out further below.24Cicero lists circumstances also 25 and the list is consolidated by Aquinas26 as Who? To whom? What? Where/When? By What Aids? Why? How/How much? Aristotle’s original doctrine is one, which assumes the existence of types of act, and the lists the types of circumstance. It treats circumstances like “accidents’ of the 24

In Nichomachean Ethics, II, 6, 1106, 36 to 1107 a25; II, 9,1109a1-15ff; III, 1, 1110b24-1111a3-7; and V, 2, 1130, 24ff. 25 In On Rhetoric, I, 24. 26 In Summa Theologica, Ia IIae. Q7, 4; and 18-21.

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“substance” of action-type undertaken, as for example “knowing” and “deliberate” might be contingent circumstance-types of “killing” as a type. One can kill by accident, and/or without wanting to. Such circumstances of action types are teased out by giving answers to the above set of circumstance-questions.27 Within the circumstances, the questions What? and Why? are the crucial questions. In the final decision on the actual or contemplated individual/real act, the actual contingent/accidental circumstantial intent and motive of this (the instance or token of the act performed by this agent here and now) is decisive. This is what he/she is doing in performing the type of act; it is the instance or token of the type, and thus settles the remaining circumstances. This idiosyncratic account of the unique intent (what) and motive (why) provides the description of the act to which the answers to the other questions, like where and when, provide further circumstances. This casuistic method is spelled out further in the next chapter on NAVE Element 5. In her monograph Intention (1958) and an article called “On Brute Facts” Anscombe (1968) usefully distinguishes “leaving some potatoes on my doorstep “as a brute fact” relative to “the grocer supplied me with potatoes” and “I owe the grocer $10 for the potatoes.” The latter two sentences make more assumptions and in that sense are progressively more specific descriptions, based on, but irreducible to the former plus some added factor. Clearly, we are capable of agreeing on the brute facts in institutional contexts against an implicit background of social practices which cannot be made explicit. We do so without articulating or agreeing on the more specific descriptions relative to which this fact is “brute.” Example: “moving a piece of metal” is brute relative to “moving a handle up and down”; and these to “pumping water”; “poisoning the inmates of the house” and so on. Her point is that this process cannot go on to infinity. We just do agree at some point, or the analytic process cannot begin. There is and must be a possible consensus about acts even though we cannot finitely list all the things which can go wrong. Some of these are ethical judgements are about types of act in a type of circumstance.

PRINCIPLES AND PRECEPT: HOW THEY ARE KNOWN TO BE SELF-EVIDENT BY CONSCIENCE In NAVE, “self-evident” principles in Natural Law Ethics include the Golden Rule in the form “Do as you would be done by” and the negative Silver Rule. (The stronger: “Love thy neighbour” or the life sacrificing Christian IRP 8 and 9 are excluded from NAVE here by design.) Natural law affirms a relation between, on the one hand; the descriptions of the human explanandum, that is: 1) human nature’s description in Philosophical Anthropology, a description which tidies up what we might dub “folk anthropology” i.e., the un-theorised description of the phenomena of human capacity and activity including the ascribed desire for wellbeing indeterminately conceived as living and doing well. The marks of wellbeing were not known to all but only the wise; and,

27

The types seem to partly overlap with Aristotle's substance-categories distinction for objects.

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2) the imperative general and primary principles of NL ethics. It is not a formal or deductive relation. Despite there being some reasoning involved, in that it is grasped as a result of elementary practical reasoning, the general principles and some primary precepts of NL are said to be “self-evident’ to conscience as part of intellect. They are about, and somehow based upon, the common good as conceived ingredients of wellbeing in humans. If we take Aquinas as a specimen of a NL theorist, amongst the general principles are: “Do good and avoid evil”; “Be reasonable,” “Act justly.” He adds his theistic version of the Golden Rule: “Love God and your neighbour as yourself” for which we will substitute the non-theistic: “Do as you would be done by.” More specific primary precepts, known to all and the same for all, include: “Do not murder” and “Do not steal another’s goods”; “Do not engage in perjury against your neighbour”; and “Do not commit adultery.” Adultery or murder are moral notions (Kovesi 1963) defined by types of act in types of circumstances. For example, murder is the knowing and deliberate killing of a person who is innocent, i.e., has done no wrong. Adultery is having sex with somebody else’s spouse. Secondary precepts are not the same for all or known to all, such capital punishment regimes, and for the rest there is casuistry, described below in Chapter 5. If an informal practical reasoning is involved, calling such imperatives “self-evident” does not mean that they are analytic or a priori. Is it that no argument is needed? Or none is possible? That seems implausible. I believe it means that they are the practical analogue of axioms, so basic, obvious, and intuitively wise that only dialectical arguments, in one of several sense Aristotle mentions in Topics, can be offered for their acceptance. The anchor of all practical reasoning is wellbeing. Argument is possible based on the “categorical” status and definition and role of wellbeing as inescapably wanted, as has been spelled out above in Chapter 3. Humans have in fact a certain common desire for wellbeing in some sense and not others, as a common end or goal. Dialectical arguments, in this sense, can be given, for “Do good and avoid evil” somewhat like that given for the principle of Non-contradiction: “Not (P and not P),” where P has exactly the same determinate meaning in all occurrences at a given time and the properties ascribed to the subject in proposition P are the same in every respect. One might point out to the denier of this principle that he is forced to accept it to make his point, to avoid contradicting himself; or in order to be understood. In fact arguments do occasionally break out between philosophers about the principle, but often because there might be some doubt about the meaning of P in the first and second occurrences, not the principle, or denial of the axiom “P or Not P” being an assumption about whether true and false are the only two possible truth values or there can be three or more-adding undetermined, undeterminable etc. A child might not grasp it, so it would not be evident to them. But the principle is selfevident, unprovable, but not because it is dubitable, but because it is practically indubitable under conditions assumed. It is just intuitively obvious that it is practically and normatively rational and necessary. C.S. Pierce allegedly somewhere said it was the first principle of “the Ethics of the intellect.” Similarly, “Do good and avoid evil” and “Murder is wrong” are unprovable but self-evident. Human wellbeing and good, “living well and doing good,” which is the nuclear notion in NL ethics, has some specific content. Aristotle (eudaimonia) and Aquinas (beatitudo) spell out a set of marks of happiness or wellbeing, fairly abstract at first blush but considerable enough

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specificity to be invoked to describe and defend their concept of worthwhile human lives – lives which are “congratulate-able,” as achievements in “life-manship.” Wellbeing would connote fulfilled human potential, enjoyment of goods like play and friendship which we value for their own sake; or which make us wiser and better; and goods which last. It excludes being killed or robbed. Achieving wellbeing implies the avoiding of violent death at the hands of others. Most adults of sound mind believe that the act of choosing some act-circumstance type as a means, such as murder, will obstruct it, which informally suggests the imperative to avoid murder. Where H = humans; W = wellbeing (the desirable life); M = murder, the structure is something like the following schema, we will dub a natural law determination, or NLD. 1) All H wish for W as they perceive it to be as a goal or end. 2) W has a vague commonly understood conceptual analysis. 3) W’s analysis has a true specification, one based on the object/ends and needs of the hierarchy of common human capacities of the species, and the marks of W, which are known to the wise. 4) Not all know the correct specification of the ingredients of W. 5) The true goods of wellbeing include life, health, delightful sensory experience, creative work, friends and knowledge The corresponding evils, which nobody wants to suffer, are death, illness, pain, injury, violence and dispossession by enemies, having no play, no friends, and ignorance. 6) Acts of type M (in fact, objectively) tend to destroy life, a basic human good listed in 5, and so in that way cause (not W). 7) So: for all H, M is inherently undesirable when the W of the victim is passively considered. 8) Do not do as you would be not want to be done by. 9) So: All H should avoid choice of acts and circumstance of type, M. 10) So: The primary imperative precept: “Do not murder” is self-evidently rational, and following it is wise. Points 1-7 are factual claims. Points 8 -10 are imperatives. They presuppose “Seek good and avoid evil” and “Do no harm.” Perhaps also “Be rational” and “Be just.” This is not formal deductive proof, and imperatives 8-10 are not based on an argument from brute empirical facts about the present case alone. Premises 1and 6 are arguably factual tendency or dispositional assertions of theoretic reason, which seem evidently true. NLD is a simple, plausible, tract of end-to-means practical reasoning. It is a non-deductive, informal argument type which Aquinas calls “determination.” But not all individuals of type H will believe 3, which is true, as they should, so not all H will in fact desire or choose to avoid M in their acts. Thus ‘should avoid” replaces “do avoid” in 7. Avoidance is a satisfactory practical means to a desirable common end-W. But is point 10 rational, true, and self-evident? We discussed “self-evidence” before in the Prologue. One meaning was “evident to the wise.” What about the immature, or uneducated, person? And if 10 above is rational, must it be true? What about the conclusion being a negative practical imperative, neither true nor false, but about an act being unsatisfactory, based on a tendency attribution of “unsatisfactoriness” to “wellbeing”? In the earlier discussion we set out the argument that there is no violation of the Naturalistic Fallacy. Regarding self-evidence, “Avoid murder” will be self-evidently rational to most, but not to some. Self-evidence in

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propositions is a function of content, context, and/or the maturity of the agent. We can stipulate a meaning in which or according to which self-evidence will be present. For example, “If whenever the content of such a claim is grasped or asserted to be true, no educated person who understands it, would deny its rationality.” In that sense it is self-evident. In some theoretical cases the evidence will come from the conceptual content alone being analytic, sense f) in the account of self-evidence in Chapter 1. There are some analytic conceptual truths. “A bachelor is not married”; “A triangle has three sides.” Or a stipulated definition can be given. For example, on Euclidian plane geometry assumptions, the line is the shortest distance between two points, even though on other geometric assumptions involving spheres, the shortest distance is an arc. The theorems of Euclid are still self-evident where the clear, verifiable assumptions are instanced by a plane surface. In Peano’s axiomatic system, for the systematising of Arithmetic, likewise, “O is a number” and “the successor of a number is a number,” are self-evident assertions in arithmetic. Even if we are not using Euclid or Peano, and if they would falsify the data if applied outside their assumptions, their assumptions are intelligible and often verifiable, and in both cases the theorems follow from their axioms selfevidently. Common general truths of fact or “synthetic a priori truths,” like the causal principle that every event has a cause; the assertion of the “one-way” direction of temporal processes; the fact that in mirror images, right and left are reversed; these are all self-evident in some way. Also, negatives like: “In normal circumstances, a thing cannot be red and green all over, at the same time and in the same respect” or “a man cannot jump 100ft in the air, on earth, unassisted.” These are general self-evident truths better known than their explanations. Particular cases we would assert to be self-evident include:” I am drinking tea from this cup” or “I am reading the thermometer.” Under normal conditions, one could be wrong given additional circumstances, but such intuitive knowledge is the basis of science.

The Practical Moral Analogues of Theoretic Self-Evidence There are some similarities and systematic relations between theory and practice. In both there are some assumptions about normality, although they can are different in detail; there are propositional contents (that S is P) in both cases, made up of concepts of S and P common to both spheres; and there is verification of success in both orders of consideration - truth and satisfaction/satisfactoriness for wellbeing. The shift from indicative to imperative is often condemned as invalid. It might be said: “You cannot get an imperative conclusion from an indicative premise.” Also, “You cannot get an ought from an is”- the maxim of those supporting the so-called “naturalistic fallacy.” But the claim is not that one gets imperative conclusions from indicatives alone, but from combining indicative and imperative premises. Since the argument is not formal, or logically deductive, the criticism misses the mark. Proponents of NL can recognise this informality without abandoning the NL project because ends or goals do not need to entail their own means for a given type of means to be practically reasonable or satisfactory to the end in fact, generally or in a set or type of circumstances. Theoretical and practical reason are different rational capacities and reason follows different procedures. A key difference, pointed out by Searle (1983), is that theoretical assertions and imperatives have different “directions of fit” between what Searle calls “the world” and “the

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words,” and direction of causality operates differently in commands and assertions. Forming an intention or giving an order causes an action or change in the world, and an imperative succeeds if the world changes in the way the propositional content of the order specifies. “Post the letter” succeeds if the letter gets posted. An assertion is true on the other hand if it reflects the way the world is, and its truth is passive to and caused by the world. Given logical or material implication is the sense meant, adding a premise, even a false one, to an assertion which entails another will not invalidate a valid theoretical argument. Adding another desire or command alone to the list of wants in the premises always invalidate a practical argument involving the satisfactoriness of the means to the desired end. Also, changes in command or the world can render practical arguments and conclusions unwise in a way the basic laws of physics are not often upset. Practical conclusions arrived at by what Aquinas calls “determination,” not deduction, are often “defeasible” (Hart 1961). Deduction depends on unchanging stipulated meanings of “exists,” the logical connectives like all or “if-then” and the terms used. Determination depends on the worth of intentions about ends in the context and the causal satisfactoriness of the means to them. Yet the satisfactoriness of types of means to types of end ends can often be a factual matter. Another way of putting the difference is that the end to means relation, so often found in stretches of practical reasoning, involves setting out more than the circumstances of time and place required in physics. The truth of a theoretical law-like indicative assertion like “Water boils at 100C under normal conditions of temperature and pressure” will usually not require more than reference to the classic circumstances of time and place (where and when) and factual tendency descriptions or assumptions about natural normality for water, not any reference to psychological facts like who is making it true, why, or how it fits into a specific plan to achieve a goal. In the practical context, on the other hand, the satisfactoriness of a means to an agent’s end will always require specification of that voluntary agent and such further circumstances of what is to be done, why, (the end) and the means (what, why and how). One of the ways theory and practice differ is that what is called “referential opacity” is characteristic of intentional practical contexts, which are not so common in teaching theoretical matters like natural science. The indicative theoretical laws of natural science link natural objects in non-intentional contexts. Water boils a 100 degrees C. We don’t usually have to say:” A believes: “All S is P” in physics. We just state a law of the form: “All A is B” or F(xy). Intentional terms, like “desires,” ‘wants,’ “believes,’ have objects which are expressed in propositional contents like: “that the cat is (to be) on the mat” or “that the letter is posted” or, generalising, of the form: “that S is P.” We can assert truly or falsely that the “cat is on the mat.” But if we put an intentional term before the object or propositional content, as in “John desires, orders, or believes the cat is on the mat” then we cannot infer that the assertion “that S is P” is true, and any entailments established between the propositional content of “the cat is on the mat” and any another propositional content, cannot be inferred in the new utterance. We cannot infer that John believes the assertion of the second propositional content from his believing the first one. Imperative moral principles can be informally obvious and self–evident and rational as NL requires. The utterance: “Murder is wrong (to be avoided)” is grammatically indicative and has the form of an truth claim or assertion, but we gave an informal argument (with structure NLS) for it above so it can be denied without contradiction, (it’s not analytic); it does not follow deductively from some self-evident axiom, and someone might believe otherwise. Or believe that, as a complex proposition with the embedded imperative (is to be avoided), it has no truth

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value, being neither true nor false. On the other hand it is a universal law in all nations in fact; it seems obvious to most rational adults; even ISIS executioners probably think the Infidels they kill have done something wrong (wilfully disbelieving in Allah) so they are not innocent, and they believe (falsely) that they do not murder them. Even ISIS is arguably not rejecting the self-evident prohibition or murder, but falsely assuming their victims are not innocent. The best option here is to say that the imperative enjoining avoiding murder or theft, or prohibiting them, is self-evident in the sense of being universally “practically rational” as a strategic policy to attain wellbeing based on its tendencies of the relevant type of behaviour. Given the content of wellbeing, killing and theft are evidently incompatible with wellbeing. Not all may recognise the self–evidence due to the necessity for some to grasp the analysis of murder as the knowing and deliberate killing of an innocent who has done no wrong - and associated dialectical reasoning and determination of NLS type above. One can believe murder is wrong and self-evidently so, and still commit murder due to malice or weakness of will. But that does not entail murder is not wrong, however understandable the mitigating circumstances of the offence. It still obstructs wellbeing. There can often be excusable killing, by accident, in just war or policing where the victim is not innocent. But for murder to be excused we must add extreme ad hoc additional circumstances like the victim’s request to avoid extreme irremovable pain. Wellbeing is said to be the object of agency, its content supplied by will in the hierarchical anthropology at directive capacity level A, spelled out in Chapter 2. Wellbeing can be taken abstractly and indefinitely as connoting “living and doing well”; a good or flourishing human life. More specifically, there are some marks or criteria of wellbeing mentioned in Aristotle: the ultimate end of other ultimate ends, the highest object of the highest powers, found in the most permanent goods, and consisting in ends which delight the soul more continuously and cumulatively; and more specifically it is found in specific goods like knowledge, friendship, exercise of skill in work or play, or physical health and security; or again at particular level, e.g., my present health and safety. It can be taken as the focus of self-regarding moral virtues like prudence, temperance, and personal courage to face evils. It is thus the focus of duty in the sense of duties of self-care. These virtues are necessary, and tend to result in wellbeing, unless bad luck intervenes, but are not sufficient for wellbeing, since bad luck can intervene; and full wellbeing also requires some other-regarding virtues, like fairness, fidelity and kindness. Other-regarding virtues focus on the same abstract goods and specific goods as selfregarding ones, but they can involve e.g., courageously risking one’s own life under some circumstances for others and common security; securing the right to minimal need satisfaction and benefit of fellow citizens; fairness and restraint of greed and violence; and the favouring of reciprocity, honesty, and benevolence. These socially necessary virtues, and other-regarding duties, require cooperation and are less within our personal power to deploy successfully. The virtues of wisdom, prudence, and courage have a social focus in this domain, and can call for difficult immediate sacrifice for long-term wellbeing. They are threatened when neglected by “free riders,” criminals, and terrorists. For the success of such virtues in bringing wellbeing one needs, a secular faith that others will practice these virtues is needed. For them to deliver wellbeing, the institutions of politics and coercive law must work. They will not necessarily ward off bad luck and evil resulting from wicked and violent acts of others.

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The relevance of precepts of NL and associated moral rules is low at the most abstract level of consideration; highest at middle or intermediate level: and once again low at the case level closest to reality. This concludes the description of Element 4) of NAVE. We now turn to the NL method of integrating these levels - the method of determination or casuistry.

Chapter 5

ELEMENT 5) OF NAVE - THE METHOD OF DETERMINATION IN MORAL REASONING The systematic relation of assertions to imperatives, and to its philosophical psychology underpins neo-Aristotelian approaches. Chapter 4 above traced the correlation of the waxing and waning of moral consensus in evaluative classification and moral judgement with the level of abstraction or specification, using killing as an act type as an example. There is no consensus that killing plant cells is wrong. There is consensus that wanton killing of animals and of innocent humans is wrong, and that murder is wrong, but this fades with yet more detail as in the case of abortion and euthanasia, or when we ask of the particular action in a set of particular circumstances: is this actor here and now in further added circumstances doing inexcusable wrong? If we imagine a graph with one axis representing vagueness with respect to the object/end of an act-circumstance type and the other degree of consensus, the correlation of the two forms a bell curve. This section tries to explain how and why. It suggests that universalists, who believe in absolute rules, and “particularists,” who question the idea of exceptionless rules, each look at different parts of the same process. The method of determination and casuistry helps to explain the phenomenon of perceived ethical disagreement, while still having a place for universal precepts like “Lying is wrong ceteris paribus” or “Child molestation is wrong, period.” Particularists/subjectivists look at the last levels/steps, or parts of the spectrum, while universalists look at the intermediate level. It is suggested in the conclusion that each is in a way correct. The starting points of practical reasoning are, as universalists say, sometimes specific intermediate ones - common ends, principles and rules which travel well across cultures, places and times. “X is morally right/wrong” implies X is right/wrong ought to be part of the moral consensus. Particularists focus on the actual decisions in the particular case; on this particular agent’s motive/intent in the token of the type, this act by this person here and now. Also, in many types as well as concrete cases there is plainly no moral consensus now, even though some acts go from one set (no consensus) to the other (consensus) over time e.g., slavery. Confusion of different moral modalities also accounts for much pseudo-disagreement about universal moral consensus.

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PRACTICAL MORAL REASONING AND CASUISTIC DETERMINATION The above steps of “determination," in which we passed from the vaguer rule about doing no evil to doing no harm; to not wantonly killing and not killing people; and thence to the more specific rule about "not murdering,” in Chapter 4, is an application of the procedure of casuistry. This will now be explicated briefly. The section presents an account of casuistry, an analysis of the method of determination, best known from Aquinas Treatise on Happiness and human action; and his Treatise on Law, and NL precepts both in ST, Pars Prima Secundae, QQ 18-21; and QQ 91,3; 95, 2, but known more widely as a term for informal practical judgement applied to cases. Determination guides practical reason in practical, including moral, matters. Practical reason moves from more or less vague ideals and goals, and very general imperative principles to the selection of relatively final and subordinate ends, and means to these, in types and instances of circumstances, propelled by a wish for wellbeing. It can use as a guide specific moral precepts, where available, which antecedently cluster act types with circumstance types, together with precedents and hypothetical cases, based on historical cases. On this sort of account, it is assumed as a background belief that virtue tends to happiness or wellbeing unless interference occurs, and precepts should be followed ceteris paribus. Enhancing object/ends of the human capacities are the targets of virtues and their final causes. Development of human capacity is at the heart of morality (Galtung 1996; Nussbaum 2000; Sen 1999). Sometimes the means to cultivate moral virtues are captured by moral or practical precepts, specifying certain act-types in types of circumstance. Deceptive lies, fraud, theft, and adultery are prohibited to protect knowledge, truth, love, and means of sustenance. But eventually, decisions must be made on particular tokens which may embody the types in question, but which are ultimately unique in their description. This last is because the precise intent and motive (interior will) of this particular agent in performing the token here and now will be idiosyncratic. The object/end of this agent in performing an act of this type (with an end in the sense of a typical result or upshot) may differ from that of another. We now review the steps in the casuist procedure. The casuist procedure set out in S.T., I-IIae,18ff, begins by asking for the object/“What” of an act-type and asking for the end/“Why?. This is like asking for the “form” of the act as a quasi-substance.

Step 1 Locate the object/end of the act or emotion: What? Why? Identify a kind or type of act or feeling, using the word which best describes it, and supplying where appropriate grammatical expression of its object. For example: “Speaking the truth” is a kind of action. In “speaking the truth,” the verb “speaking” marks the kind of act/“the truth” is the completing object of the verb. “Speaking truthfully” would be an equivalent form using a participle plus adverb form. In the jargon of casuistry “that the truth be spoken” would express the “object.” “Let it be: that the truth is spoken” would capture the abstract “end” of the act - something close to the result normally implied when one asserts the completed act occurred.

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One can perform parallel analysis on “giving money,” into “giving” and “money” and “let it be: that money is given.” In the case of emotion, for “compassion for/a bereaved widow,” the object and end of the emotion of compassion might expressible by: “Let it be: that the widow not suffer unbearably” or “that her grief should pass.” Other examples of types of act or feeling with object/ends are: fear of (snakes); driving (on the footpath; killing (a person); scratching (one’s beard); walking (home); watching (a sunset)

Step 2 Assign intuitively the object/end of the abstract type of the act or feeling a prima facie status with respect to its tendency to advance or retard or to be indifferent with respect to the attainment of human wellbeing. At this step “wellbeing” is conceived vaguely and abstractly. But this intuitive judgment can be guided by one’s notions of the human good as measured by the slightly less vague criteria for wellbeing 1-8 discussed in Chapters 3 and 4. For example, it may be a state in which one exercises and enhances one’s distinctive human powers, such as intellect and will, about their highest and best objects, whatever these turn out to be. One enjoys autonomous exercise of the dispositions which perfect these and other powers; and attains in some measure those enduring ends like creativity, knowledge and friendship which have more than instrumental, ultimate value and are capable of cumulative development (Ardagh (1999). One assesses intuitively prima facie tendencies of each type of act or feeling to promote wellbeing i.e., the peak exercise (highest goods) of the relevant human capacities of agents and patients in the context. A hierarchy of powers such as A-C above can be uncovered by reference to the relations of efficient, final and material causal dependence between them, and by reference to these vague criteria, optimal and neutral desires and needs can be selected. For example, to take the examples listed in Step 1 above, truth is a peak outcome for intellect, a higher power, both efficiently and finally, so “speaking the truth” looks prima facie to be good; “giving money” is usually a voluntary act of will which normally empowers people to meet the needs of either the donor or the recipient with respect to their wish for wellbeing. “Feeling compassion for a bereaved person,” judged by the Golden Rule seems prima facie good; “fear of snakes” would seem to be indifferent, till we know if it is a venomous snake, but if it is, then some degree of fear is reasonable if the bodily capacities will be impeded by a bite and fear is ideally targeted on warding off real danger; “killing a person” and “driving on the footpath” would seem abstractly and prima facie to be a bad thing to do; “scratching one’s beard” and the remaining candidates above seem prima facie to be indifferent till we know more. None of these un-contextualised possibilities are definitive moral judgments yet; but only judgments of good/bad/indifferent based on prima facie tendencies to exercise capacities well and so to advance persons toward a worthwhile life, toward natural human “species – wellbeing,” flourishing, happiness or wellness. Killing other humans is bad for them; destroys human potential; and does no direct good for the person of the killer. Even if and when it is morally justified as in self-defence, this badness remains, and presumptive wrongness. And if an act is basically good, its goodness also inheres in it even if other circumstances render the complex wrong morally. This judgement is

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made at a level of abstraction slightly less than Step 1 above; it applies the notions of harm, rationality, reciprocity and fairness.

Step 3 Add the other circumstance types and review the object/end of the act. Here we add further information about the type of circumstances with which the act or feeling type is surrounded, using Aristotle’s list, which has now become the journalistic template: Who/to or with Whom? What? Why? How/how much? Using which instruments? When? and Where? This is the “matter” of the case. It will allow us to embed, and then evaluate, the type of act/feeling in a type of circumstance; to arrive at a preliminary abstract moral judgment; and occasionally if there is a rule for that matter at a near decisive one: for example, “the deliberate and knowing killing of an innocent person” specifies what, whom and how the killing takes place. It has a name: murder. This is a recurrent and important cluster of act/circumstances, where we have done our deciding once and for all, and have deemed that it is presumptively wrong, i.e., the act of murder was and still is judged morally wrong. It is not yet thereby decided if all abortions or acts of euthanasia are wrong because there is dispute about personhood in the first case and further circumstances re consent and terminal illness can be added in the second. In monogamous societies having sex with someone else’s spouse is adultery; giving money to a public official to obtain unfair advantage is bribery; unpermitted taking of the property of another is theft; and presumptively wrong. More often than not, however, there will be no such name for the act/circumstance type of cluster or “recognitor” (Kovesi 1963), but if one follows this process one will at the least know what one is doing and why. For example, the recognitor “appointing a friend on a basis other than qualifications to a job advertised as requiring qualifications” may not have in a particular culture or language a precise name like murder, but it smacks prima facie of “cronyism” in ours; “jailing without due process” or “destroying a forest for profit in timber” have strong moral overtones and that is an excellent protection against moral recklessness. Absent added circumstances, they are wrong because of conflict with higher goods/rules. What results from this step is what Kant calls the “maxim” of the act: e.g., hiring a person who is a cousin on a basis other than merit for nepotistic reasons for a job advertised as open to talent. Precedents and paradigm cases are relevant here (Calkins 2001). But they are not the essence of casuistry. In a society in which nepotism is an accepted practice qua a tribal expectation, this maxim may not be easy to evaluate morally. The test will be: is this sort of thing the best use of the human potential of all the persons involved in this case, given some latitude must be allowed for customary differences of practice and provided the basic end of the practices and norms is humanly worthwhile. The level of abstraction is intermediate. Kant’s formula for evaluating the maxim of an act would be the counter-factual: "What would happen if everyone did this sort of thing in these sorts of circumstance as a practice?" But the circumstance who? is not considered to be strictly relevant by Kant except as it shows some general features. For casuistry, however, the question Who? is always relevant. The issue here would be: what happens to the people actually involved and those immediately affected, if the relevant agents actually do this sort of thing? In this kind of analysis, the question What? goes first to the question of the immediate, direct result brought about by the act, What must logically or

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causally have taken place for the act to be truly said to have been performed, and not to indirect later consequences. If the window was opened the window is now open (result), but the room may or may not be cooled as a consequence. It may be foreseeable/probable, actually foreseen, or intended that the consequence follow, and indeed various combinations of these three conditions may obtain. But they are not essential to the act/result itself for the casuist, and do not necessarily outweigh the immediate act in moral relevance. This result/consequence difference is widely assumed by some ordinary language philosophers and philosophers of the Utilitarian school of ethics to be only one of degree. Casuistry denies this.28 One adds further information about the type of circumstances with which the act or feeling type is “surrounded,” using Aristotle’s list, which has now become the journalistic template: Who/to or with Whom? What? Why? How/how much? Using which instruments? When? and Where? This will allow us to embed and then evaluate the type of act/feeling in a type of circumstance, arrive at a preliminary abstract moral judgment, and occasionally at a near decisive one: for example, “the deliberate and knowing killing of an innocent person” specifies What, Whom and How the killing takes place. It has a name: murder. This is a recurrent and important cluster of act/circumstances, where we have a specific precept as discussed in Chapter 4 because we have done our deciding once and for all, and have deemed that it is presumptively wrong, i.e., the act of murder was and still is judged morally wrong. Murder tends to result in evil, not wellbeing. All the primary precepts at NL fit here.

Step 4 Revisit the object and end of this agent here and now. This is the most important step, giving the moral intent of the agent in doing the token of the type of act in a particular token set of circumstance types such as Step 3 above. Here one canvasses the two key circumstances What (intent/object) and Why (motive/end) over again in the particular instance, token, or example in order to check that this agent (as identified in answer to Who?) does not have a further intent/motive in performing the act as identified at Step 3 above which alters the presumptive reading. In Chapter 4 we looked at the case of buddy killing, which is murder (deliberately killing an innocent) but arguably permissible. Likewise, particular euthanasias and abortions. We now have a reading on the moral status of the agent in acting. This is the actual moral judgment on the actual instance/case29 based on the end of the agent in achieving the end (result) of the act. In clear cases we can locate a moral notion and thereby a relevant precept of morality. For example, let us suppose that Noah’s diabetic Uncle Harry is wealthy and ailing, but has made a will in Noah’s favour leaving him all his money. Let us suppose that Noah is impatient to benefit, and his mafia creditors have threatened him. While on a “compassionate” visit, he offers to assist the uncle in medicating himself. He injects his uncle with a deadly but near-undetectable poison instead of insulin and kills him in the hope that his crime will be undiscovered and he will inherit his uncle’s money sooner. When we locate the nuclear act – “killing a human” – at Step 1 it is a bad type of action qua extinguishing the uncle’s life; then, at Step 2; and further consideration of the key circumstances of intent (What?) and motive (Why?) canvassing these 28 29

For an exhaustive treatment from a contrary view see Bennett, (1996) The Act Itself. The end of this agent in doing this action now as distinct from the end of the act.

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turns it into a prima facie immoral deed, since if we ask the question: What? – the answer is that the result of the action is “killing his uncle intentionally, by deliberately injecting him with cyanide,” (the How and by which instruments), and the answer to Why? is “to get the money sooner and pay his creditors.” At Step 4 the question who in particular? is answered by Noah as agent and his uncle Harry as innocent patient; and the circumstances or place and time are not such as to introduce any change of moral status or species here. It is clear that this act falls under the Kovesian "recognitor" for murder, and is wrong, because Step 4 reveals no extenuating circumstances, in the intent of the agent in murdering his uncle. However, we seldom have such a clear type of case with a name for the moral notion involved and a precept to match. An inquiry using casuistry regarding “driving on the footpath” for example would suggest that it is prima facie bad, since such actions would tend to be dangerous to humans. If, however, the context is that an ambulance driver is using the footpath because an earthquake has destroyed the roadbed, and he is rushing an earthquake victim to hospital, then the act would be excusable. Only if there was some further personal venal intent behind the act would it be wicked (i.e., the end of the agent, at Step 4 as opposed to the potential “end” of the act at Step 3, is defective). A famous case is considered by Plato and embellished over the centuries by Kant, Newman and others in which a drunken, jealous, and enraged husband comes to the door after one has hidden his terrified wife in the basement at her request. He asks for the return of the axe, which he lent you a week before, and whether you have seen his wife. He tells you that he will use the axe to behead her for infidelity. Do you tell the truth and return borrowed goods? Let us run this case through the process.

Step 1 & 2 Telling the truth is the proposed nuclear act (good) and not telling the truth is bad considering the end/object of intellect. Returning borrowed goods is prima facie good. Step 3 Telling the truth to an angry drunk who says he will use the axe to kill someone, and returning the borrowed axe, in the further circumstances, is assisting in a murder, and looks wrong on both counts. Saving a life by not telling the truth to conceal the intended victim looks permissible with respect to the doctrine of multiple orders of consideration, specifically the inverse order of causal urgency and worth between life and truth explained in Chapter 4. "Just war" permissions will help to resolve the collision of rules. The conditions for inflicting harm by lying and withholding property here, and generally for overriding the “no harm principle,” are spelled out by the just war tradition as these: the situation must demand the harm done is: The product of right motive/intent i.e., a response to aggression; there must be unavailability of alternative options; there must be a strong likelihood of success; there must be proportionality, discrimination and reversibility of harm/intent to reverse must be considered. Extent and duration of harm must be considered against the finality of the good protected; there must be authority for the agent deciding to use harm. The evil chosen must be the lesser evil. Step 4 The final casuist check: The end of this agent in doing this deed here and now. The casuist says: in these circumstances, provided this agent intends to save life, and has no better option,

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it is mournfully necessary to break the trusty “no lies” and “return borrowed goods” rules, because although it is (simpliciter) prima facie wrong, and qua denial of truth, and denial of property, per se presumptively to be avoided (wrong), given the agent’s intent is good, this wrong is defeasible with respect to (secundum) the causal necessity of preserving of his wife’s life now. There is an assumption that a causal order and an ordered hierarchy of powers described in Chapter 2 exists, and that acts can be assessed in (secundum) different “orders” with respect to various criteria and for different purposes: efficient, formal, final, and material causality; urgency; time; inherent ontological worth; intent vs execution. The possible token of truth telling here is a lesser good, and her life more important than telling him the truth now. The very high probability of extinguishing her life now irreversibly from a causal standpoint extinguishes for her and her loved ones, including the inquiring agent, any present or possible future good that the abstractly higher (per se) good of truth, (justice, or rights) might bring. The value of truth on the other hand is not irreversibly overridden. The husband might be told the truth later, and why he was denied it at the time. This permission accepts the inherent evil tendencies, and the presumptive wrongness of lies. But this case is not like the paradigms of lying like lies for concealment of wrongdoing, advancing selfish interests or incriminating others. The notion of a hierarchy of causes and goods in different orders of consideration outlined above permits one to outweigh this still inherent evil, and the lesser evil principle prevails. The hierarchy of human powers, inclinations, and needs can be spelled out using the metaphor of rule or control. It is roughly one of vegetative/autonomic; animate/perceptual/ mobile; and cognitive/voluntary powers being controlled or ruled by the last two as architectonic organisers of the lower capacities in order to meet needs which are broadly physical (survival), social (self-perpetuation/affiliation) and personal (achievement) in that order. The extinguishing of life, a lower physical good in finality terms, is nonetheless supremely bad in respect to causally overriding at the material level the wife’s power as an efficient and final cause in the order of causality. Her death would cause the irreversible extinction for her any possible good that truth or rights might bring. But given the superior finality of intellect and truth, her husband should be told the truth later and why he was denied it at the time. This permission allows that telling lies is always bad and gives no purchase to a generalised standing permission to lie, or even necessarily to create a general exception to truth telling in the case of all “perceived intending murderers.” As in the lifeboat admission case, in Chapter 4, 6c, it is too cumbersome to construct a maxim and too hard to generalise on the basis of such “abstract subjective” perceptions. Indeed, such a category is an almost contradictory notion, at once particular/subjective and general/objective. Nonetheless, there is within such an approach the capacity to acknowledge that particular circumstances do excuse, extenuate and even justify the breaking in extra ordinary circumstances of moral rules designed for the type of act/circumstance. In the standard cases one will require to make one’s own judgment of conscience about the type of act/circumstance and the token or instance. As a unique token it cannot be the subject of a universal rule, and this under pain of an infinite regress. There cannot be such a rule about how to apply the rule. We are speaking of moral judgment, conscience, intuitive moral cognition or some equivalent. At Step 4 we canvass the two key circumstances What (intent/object) and Why (motive/end) over again, this time for the particular instance, token, or example in order to check that this agent (Who?) does not have a further ulterior or external intent/motive in performing the act as identified at Step 3 above which alters the earlier presumptive reading at

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Step 3. We now have a reading on the moral status of the agent in acting. This is the actual moral judgment on the actual instance/case; the end of the agent in doing the act. Circumstances can be added or subtracted from the act-circumstance cluster. For example for murder one might add “to meet a request from a terminally ill patient suffering from ineffective pain relief (euthanasia) or the particular agent might try to argue that a conceptus is not yet a person (abortion). The process in Steps 1-4 can be followed by a collective quasi-personal entity like a corporation or state. The better known ad bellum and in bello criteria of the just war are a neat summary of the sorts of criteria one would use to deal with difficult cases in private/personal action contexts. Under the circumstance: Why? One might ask: Does one/the state have a just reason or ethical intention for the proposed act? Or proper authority? Give proper notification? Under the circumstance How?: Is there an alternative or is this the last resort? Is this means proportionate to the evil to be redressed or prevented? Is this means discriminate enough to avoid killing innocent parties? The just war criteria are devised for quasi-persons, but by the doctrine of analogy they can be transposed back and forward to evaluate natural and artificial persons’ purposes, intentions, means, and the proportionality and discriminatory nature of the act-type alternatives, and their inevitability as last resorts. In this kind of analysis, the question What? goes first to the question of the immediate result of the act, what must have taken place for the act to be truly said to have occurred, and not to later consequences. In an earlier example it was said that if the window was opened the window is now open (result), but the room may or may not be cooled as a consequence. It may be “foreseeable/probable,” “foreseen,” or “intended that the consequence follow,” and indeed various combinations of these three conditions may obtain. But they are not essential to the act/result itself for the casuist, and do not necessarily outweigh it in moral relevance. This result/consequence difference is widely assumed by some ordinary language philosophers and philosophers of the Utilitarian school of ethics to be only one of degree. As noted above casuistry denies this. The topic is complex, but the issue is vital to casuistry if it is not to collapse into a very rubbery ethics where one can subjectively “intend” any consequences one likes from one’s acts. Consider the “collateral damage” of which military spin doctors speak; or the “intent not to have to use nuclear weapons” or their “intent that there not to be deaths from nuclear weapons.” All such talk is acceptable to many forms of total or act utilitarianism, which work backwards from aggregated outcomes to causes to assess morality. But for casuistry it is always logically possible and necessary to ask: consequences of what? And casuists assign special weight to the nature and tendency of the act itself and its results from the time it is identified at Step1. At Step 2, in assigning a prima facie good/indifferent/bad evaluation to the act itself, one thereby assigns the initial onus of proof. Step 3 gives the preliminary reading on the agent’s intent and motive and a first take on its morality before performance; and as suggested by the murder example and some of the examples below intent and motive can sometimes presumptively almost nearly determine the moral status of the act as “wrong, unless….” They do this before any consequences are considered. Consequences are not strictly speaking capable of being immediately/directly intended. They are foreseeable, capable of being strategically planned, of being wanted, and indirectly brought about. Thus, they are morally relevant, but only after and in the light of consideration of, the nuclear act itself. Results cannot be subsumed into an aggregated pool of results and consequence as if they are equally significant at the end of the day. Acts are like substances/essences; consequences like accidents.

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Chapters 1, 2 and 3 on NAVE distinguished the essential human subject from its human capacities, dispositions including virtues, and activities. A capacity is not as concrete as a virtue or its particular exercise in activity in circumstances, as casuistry at Step 3 and 4 explicates it. Intellect/will (I/W) is an architectonic capacity relative to lower powers like perception, movement and sex in the ontological scala naturae order, according to the anthropology. Intellect/will ought normally to rule all capacities for wellbeing and the highest good (THG) and in that sense apprehension and enjoyment of THG ought to be inseparable from them, as their directing target. Thus, NAVE also does favour some sort of de facto inseparability of essential powers, like conscious rationality and animality. If some such essential power or property is ascribed to the subject of an individualised essence, it is taken to be unchangeable. Description of the capacity itself and its ideal end alone, does not however supply us with its ideal virtuous uses, applications, or its ideal real objects in real circumstances. Reproduction/procreation is indeed stated in Aquinas, to be the end of sex, and inseparable from it de facto and de jure in some sense. But in fact it is not inseparable from it de facto in the same way as truth is de facto essential to conceptual/propositional ability or identifying and applying the truth conditions of success in a speech act. Absolutely universal de jure moral prohibition of lies fails to follow “logically” or reasonably from the formal, necessary, differential and ideal features of intellect. The normative “inseparability” of some multiple ends of intellectual/voluntary capacity in different orders of consideration, in the logical and real senses, and in ultimate moral, and ontological assessment, would be recognised in this version of NAVE as prima facie important, but not as morally decisive. A capacity-defining, formal, differentiating, ideal, normal end alone will not always settle a moral judgement, especially one using the lens of casuistry Step 4. Such judgements are very concrete, given we have essential, necessary, natural, differential, and ideal ends, and necessity is relative to operations with respect to propositional content and direction of fit/causality, in a social background or context. We always need to sort out basic and ancillary functions, necessary, differential, and ideal functions, for intellect and will in different respects and orders of consideration, in a type of “act in a circumstance” and then the token of case instantiating the end at Step 4, rather than identifying assertive judgement to be the differential end of theoretical intellect, and then trying to deduce a universal absolute moral precepts banning jokes and dramatic assertions as untrue. The method of casuistry (object, end and circumstances) still generates some moral universals. These are not derived from procedures like applying the greatest happiness principle or the categorical imperative alone, but can be guided by them and the Golden Rule to generate near exceptionless precepts, which are defeasible only by adding further (usually extraordinary) circumstances, as in the Chapter 4 euthanasia and abortion examples, or appealing to some socially sanctioned professional exemption. To summarise, the table below displays how rules and particular circumstances interrelate in some familiar types of act in a circumstance type. What was dubbed Step 1 above in the procedure is captured in the central column, with an action/feeling type, with an object, and an end. By furnishing added circumstances at Step 2, this act/feeling type will fall to the right or to the left as indicated by the arrows. Consider “dismemberment” in the central column of the first row of the table. At Step 1 we pick out an act type. Of dismemberment. At Step 2 it is clearly prima facie bad. One flourishes the poorer without any limb. At Step 3, if the limb, e.g, a leg, has gangrene and only a surgical operation by a competent surgeon under proper medical conditions will save the life of the patient, then

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the act is permissible at Step 3; and if that is here and now the actual object/end of the particular actions at Step 4, then the act is morally acceptable and even commendable. The “maxim” is to save life by dismembering a diseased limb as safely and skilfully as possible given there are no alternatives, therefore an amputation is performed. If we move to left in the same row and specify at Step 3 the circumstance that the leg is not diseased; the intent is to inflict pain on a victim by some criminals simply to induce disclosure to the criminals by the victim of where he has hidden his valuables, then the act is one of mutilation and is wrong. Its “principle” or in Kant’s terms, the maxim of the act is not permissible. The step of determination at Step 3 of casuistry is further illustrated for several cases of act/circumstance type. It is no accident that there are negative prohibitions covering all the moral notions in the left column. The method generates moral universals which are not derived from procedures like applying the greatest happiness principle or the categorical imperative, but can generate near-exceptionless precepts, which are defeasible only by adding further (usually extraordinary) circumstances, appealing to some socially sanctioned professional exemption. If we look at “giving money,” it begins as prima facie good or indifferent qua apparently willing the empowerment of another to give effect to their purposes. If at Step 3 we move to the left, it becomes clear that the principle is “money is given to an official to attain preferred access to a service that should be free or to obtain some public preferment or advantage,” so we have a bribe and that is prima facie wrong. But cases can be constructed in wartime where one might excuse paying off an official to escape from gaol or from the train to the death camp, which would be excusable. And if we move to the right of row 2, a donation to charity will presumptively be good, unless there is a long-term venal intent, e.g., being seen to be generous in the eyes of one whom one hopes to seduce or a covert indirect bribe. In the other cases in the table, as the arrows indicate, one can see that circumstances determine the moral species of all the acts listed in the central column according as one moves right or left from the central column which can often establish the initial onus of excuse. The reader is invited to examine the table further in the light of the suggested four-step analysis. There are near universally negative prohibitions covering all the moral notions in the left column of the table. Column 1 represents Steps 1 & 2; the flanking columns, Step 3. In clear cases we can locate a moral notion and thereby a relevant precept of morality. In the background here are the general principles mentioned in chapter 4 above, such as the so-called “first principle” of practical reasoning - “Do/seek good and avoid evil to the greatest degree practicable” and other general principles of morality like the reciprocity principles, the principle of benevolence, be kind to others, and the Golden Rule, “do as you would be done by,” “act justly”; and “do no harm.” They can be invoked at this step where relevant and helpful. Aquinas sees them as expressions of synderesis whose act is conscience at ST Q. Ia-79; IaIIae 100). They themselves are not axioms or theorems of the system, or supreme tests that operate quite like the greatest happiness principle or the categorical imperative. Each in the end is traced to the rational capacity to satisfy human kinds of need: personal, social and physical. Contrary to the particularist thesis, moral rules cover a large “band” of possible actions of moral relevance, but there are some act types that are not subject to rule. In any case, one still has to apply the rule by reference to one’s own individual conscience without resort to further rule i.e., by means of intuitive moral and practical judgement. One way of explicating the power and limits of rules is to see them as necessary but not sufficient conditions of teaching virtue, and themselves products of this method of “object, end and circumstance.”

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Table 5. How Circumstances Determine Moral Status Moral Notion designating Questionable and Morally Wrong Type of Act/Passion in a kind of Circumstance Mutilation

Bribery

Adultery Theft

Cheating

Murder Perjury or defamation (slander or libel)

Spite Envy

Destructive fury

Pride

Lust

Hatred of a good person

Additional Circumstance

Of a healthy limb to induce pain by torturer To obtain an unfair advantage re a public service With someone else’s spouse Without permission of the owner

“Nuclear” Act or feeling with Presumptive Value Quality (prima facie good), bad or indifferent (neutral) relative to well-being Dismemberment (bad)

Giving money (good)

Sexual intercourse (good) Removing property (bad)

To convey one’s opponent has an ace seen in a mirror Who has done no wrong deliberately Known to be false or damaging to their repute from spite

Signalling to another card player (neutral)

With evil to settle a grudge To be possessed without effort or consent Vented on innocent others

Paying people back (good) Desire for another’s superior good(s) (neutral)

In an excessively self-important way when one has not met a standard Of an excessive kind, directed at unwilling persons in an uncontrolled way Extreme detestation expressed in hurtful action

Feeling good about ones accomplishments (good)

Killing a person (bad) Saying or writing something about someone’s action (good or neutral)

Anger (neutral)

Sexual desire (good)

Feeling dislike for something/some-one (neutral)

Additional Circumstance

Moral Notion for Permissible or Commendable Act/Circumstance Types

Of a diseased limb to save a life by a doctor To a charity/as a gift/tip/or tax

Amputation

With one’s spouse With consent as a favour to the owner To make a bid e.g., in bridge

Charitable donation/gift/tip/tax payment Marital love Kindly helping to move house for a friend Fair play

To repel an armed attacker To guide or assist her career development or recognise her contribution Returning a good in kind To be acquired by oneself by personal effort Expressed verbally to violators of rights Which have actually helped others or achieved a good Directed at one’s spouse or partner

Self-defence

That is evil or wicked or painful

Hatred of evil/injustice/righte ous indignation

Honouring or constructive correction of a colleague Gratitude/Reciproci ty Noble ambition or sincere admiration Righteous indignation

Self-respect/self confidence

Spousal love

When wedded to a philosophical anthropology with place for a hierarchy of goods and some general imperatives, casuistry not only throws light on the genesis of the moral rules by generalisations over cases, but can also explicate why and how we assign imperatives and expressions of desire varying “moral modalities” - from condemned, through permitted to required, recommended, or ideal - to any proposed type of action or feeling in a type of

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circumstance, not just the required or prohibited so often picked out by rules. Ethical rules are of use at several but not all levels of moral modality. Many other kinds of act or feeling can be the object of counsel, encouragement, admonition, or idealisation in story or proverbial sayings. Given the account of practical reason in Chapter 4 moral reasoning from the centre to left or right in Table 3 is “defeasible,” not apodictic; dialectical, not deductive; determinative of greater specification, not formally demonstrable as assertoric reasoning can be. Practical reasoning (of which moral reasoning is a species) proceeds on the basis that the connection of the truth to the good is systematic even if defeasible. If one wishes to travel to Melbourne, and a travel plan P will assure this outcome unless a range of unknown, undesired or uncontrollable factors intervene, or one changes or adds to one’s desires, that travel plan is (absolutely) practically rational and, relative to those conditions, absolutely satisfactory. If one’s wish will be satisfied if this satisfactory plan is carried out then the plan is satisfactory relative to those wishes. Both Kenny (1975) in Will, Freedom & Power and Searle (1984) in Intentionality, detail these concepts. Somewhat similarly, if in a legal system allowing only monogamous marriage to a particular person fidelity alone will assure a good ingredient of wellbeing like intimacy and companionship, unless unforeseeable interference occurs, then the marriage is right and good, and adultery is wrong. Ethical choices follow this basic pattern, with many complications of course. When imperative logic has done all it can, it ultimately operates in sets of circumstances to produce a casuist judgement. Chapter 4 outlined how consensus breaks down as we descend to particulars, and an otherwise evil act considered with respect to (secundum) urgency sometimes must prevail over one with greater intrinsic worth. Although it was suggested that broad consensus exists up to the precept level an overwhelming majority agree at that level, the existence of a respectable minority who hold that all intentional killing is immoral, shows it is arguably possible that an act is inhumane and morally wrong even if there is no consensus that it is so. Conversely, there can be local or communal consensus that what is immoral is moral, such as the 1933 broad but imperfect German consensus regarding “getting rid of” the Jews. The process of gradually increasing determination or specification conducted by casuistry, which was illustrated in the passage from consensus to debate is the real situation we are in as moral agents. To judge an act “morally wrong” seems to entail that the judgement that it is wrong ought to be part of the consensus, but not that it is in fact. Slavery, child sacrifice and were once near universally accepted practices in some countries and eras, but the consensus has changed. So, it not part of the meaning of morally right that there actually be such a consensus. Moral judgements are not based on consensus alone, but on a theory of some sort regarding what is of ultimate value given human capacities and what should be added to the human consensus. There is no consensus on where exactly or why consensus evaporates, but there is nevertheless a consensus that it extends to the level of murder being wrong and that it is sometimes wrongheaded to assume it could exist at particular level, to this case here and now. Specific precepts of morality are suspended, as it were, from the good objects and ends of human powers – their perfective objects. For example, taking “truthfulness” as a virtue, the rule against lying is suspended from the fact that the perfecting object/end of assertoric (theoretic/speculative) intellect is truth. Deliberately saying what you know to be false with intent to deceive is prima facie wrong because it tends to undermine truth. The “No (physical) harm” principle protects the physical body/autonomic systems; the “Avoid offence” principle protects certain of the emotions; the reciprocity and justice principles, the socially ordered capacity to freely co-operate for a common good. Finnis (1982), Brock (1998), Bok (1995),

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and others have drawn attention to the considerable cross-cultural human unanimity with regard to such principles, and institutions for resolving conflicts without violence where reciprocity and no harm principles are insufficient. Virtue-ethics tries to identify and articulate the “higher,” more indeterminate ideals and goods composing “the good or happy life” (denoted by the terms for the marks of wellbeing) as far as possible. It takes for granted that we want the best life possible and tries to figure out its content from the marks or criteria of such a life, and express them in cultural stories, icons and myths. There is also a safety valve provided for the worst-case scenario of conflict of moral principles and rules. These permissions are often cited in ordinary interpersonal moral counselling situations to relieve the pressure created by the master principles we noted above. For example, the general “no harm” principle is offset by what are now best known as the socalled just war provisions, but which can apply interpersonally. An inflicted harm, while always bad, can be morally excused if it meets all or most of these conditions: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7) 8)

“The harm is done only as a defensive response to aggression. There are no alternatives. There is likelihood of success. The harm is of finite extent and duration, proportionate to the harm averted, ideally reversible. The harm is discriminatory, avoids impact on innocent third parties. The intent is to save a good greater in finality/worth than the evil allowed. The perpetrator has some authority to inflict the harm. The harm is the lesser of two evils.

These criteria are almost identical to the conditions for a “just war.” We will return to them in Chapter 9, the chapter on the application of NAVE to violence.

CONCLUSION NAVE is not just a principle/rule morality. But contrary to the view of cultural and moral relativism, at intermediate levels of abstraction there are some “self-evident,” uncontroversial widely, indeed almost universally, accepted data concerning human capacities, desires, basic goods, needs, and the human condition (Alkire 2000; Bok 1995; Braybrooke 1987; Brock 1998; Brown 1991; Doyal and Gough 1991; Finnis 1980;1998; Nussbaum 1990; 1993; 1995; 2000)30.There is also a small but significant corresponding body of agreed understanding of the facts about ethics and a body of presumptive universal ethical imperatives: principles, precepts and rules (Gert 2004). As one becomes more specific about the meaning, denotation or embodiment of key terms in these imperatives and ethics discourse, this consensus evaporates. But we can identify some of our molar human capacities and desires, and their essential ends/objects, that is, their characteristic inclinations, targets and perfecting states, performances, and activities. Intellect, for example, targets truth and knowledge, and is perfected by wisdom. Some vague but not insignificant clues to the content of the human good 30

As in many other non-mathematical/scientific subject areas, there is no single accepted ethical “theory” about the completeness and consistency of this attitudinal and behavioural data, or about how it originates.

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or wellbeing, abstractly conceived, allow evaluation of more specific human ends to take place by reference to the clues or marks noted above. Some ends fail to match these marks and can be discarded as ingredients of a good human life, such as pleasant states achieved only by ingesting strongly mind-altering or addictive substances which take away one’s autonomy. A set of ingredient human goods can be graduated as parts of wellbeing. We can thence arrive at some understanding of the way in which we reason from ends to act-types as means in types of circumstance and thereby generate some evaluative principles and imperatives of an indeterminate but non-trivial kind, and we can come to an understanding of how useful precepts are generated. It is also possible and useful to note some of the connections and distinctions between this actual consensus and morality. There is a definable level of specification and particularity at which such a human ethical consensus exists and evaporates. It is worth marking out the consensual material, and marking it off from where it is just a conceptual mistake to look for a consensus, not a regrettable failure of human minds to meet on questions of value. For example, each culture is essentially constituted by its different means of embodying the same ends. Means to ends are essentially multiple, and at the level of unique particularity/idiosyncrasy of motive and intent with respect to a token of an act-type, which will be explicated more fully below in the model presented it is simply a mistake to look for consensus, not a proof of relativism. But unlike the particularist concept of ethics, NAVE does strive for what it regards as possible consensus, coherence and consistency, and insists that it is wrong to deny the crucial role of rules. They reflect a broad actual or potential consensus. Such rules of morality can only be breached if casuistry permits, through educing of particular additional circumstances which defeat the rule and render excusable a particular breach. These circumstances must truly/actually exist in the case. If we are in fact inconsistent in our moral practice, this is as regrettable as an inconsistency in science or theoretic reason and should be corrected where discovered, not accepted meekly as inevitable. Virtue ethics has the advantage that it has a place for passion as well as universality, objectivity, and principle. Principle and rules which specify types of circumstance or context can help to guide and control the passions through virtue for the sake of wellbeing without exhausting the scope and motive of morals. Thus, universalism at an abstract level is offset at particular level by use of practical “determination” in a way slightly different from Kantian formalism. Kant’s universalisabilty peters out at the level of universalisable maxims. Post-modernists, deconstructionalists, and particularists are frustrated even by this degree of universality, but they cannot claim that their own universal negative: “There are no universal moral principles” is true without self-contradiction. It is wrong to imperialistically expand the scope of rules but equally wrong to restrict it since rules do play crucial roles in their proper level of use. Ideals, values, principles and rules of morals can assist persons to use their powers well for the sake of attaining their wellbeing. Principles and rules play a helping role in practical reasoning (determination), but casuistry is needed to apply them in particular cases. Casuistry is needed when and where there are no rules, or rules conflict; or when ideals are realised by particular choice in matters going beyond the obligations presented or recommended by rule. At the highest level of personal moral modality, saintly and heroic self- commitment, as in marriage or vocation choice, rules are silent. If the ends of action-types under consideration for possible adoption are left vague or undetermined, only the mildest significant evaluative or moral quality can be assigned to the relevant proposed act types.

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For example, we saw that "killing" as a generic genus of possible action with no object specified other than living thing, which includes cells and plants has only the vague connotation of badness - a weak prima facie suggestion of being "bad" for humans as an abstract act-type of act. To live is to be for living things and for them to live is good. Killing foetuses is bad, but not necessarily wrong. Killing plants is abstractly neutral and killing cancer cells is good. There is no consensus that killing anything (alive) is wrong. But as one adds a subject of the act, or agent, object/ends of this agent, and other circumstances to the genus “killing” to get the quasispecies of “the deliberately killing of people," one reaches a level where wide consensus can be elicited (e.g., in circumstances where the person deliberately and knowingly killed is innocent, killing is murder and wrong). If one adds yet more specification/determination (the agent has been asked by a terminally ill patient in excruciating pain, under a number of specific further conditions for soundness of mind and informed consent by family and subject, after checks on the terminal diagnosis, etc.) this consensus again disappears (mercy killing). Again, particular motive/intent of this agent in performing the type of act matters decisively. If we think of the levels of abstraction and the four steps within casuistry as points on a ladder running from very general and abstract ends/principles to the specific and thence to the particular means, then we can think of each of the levels as grounding some perennial proverbial truths such as the following: 1) All/most humans ultimately wish at least idly to be well, other things being equal. 2) Given a plausible analysis of human capacities and their wellbeing, using widely shared marks or clues of wellbeing humans should want the same ends, and approve the same general norms re: harm avoidance; rational, reciprocal behaviour; and fair opportunity for pursuit of good in a number of categories. 3) Physical life is the indispensable requirement for wellbeing, and strict prohibitions of wanton killing are and should be required by rule of law. There are some universal life preserving/enhancing precepts e.g., against murder and violence. 4) At another order of consideration, (finality) social and personal goods are life’s ultimate goods; and social life calls for such goods as justice in opportunities, truth and friendship. 5) Ethical norms vary in application with beliefs about the ontology of the person, culture, and other circumstances. 6) In clear cases where two conflicting rules are relevant, breaches of one can be sometimes be excused ad hoc by reference to further circumstances in accord with determination/specification and casuistry. The bad of some act types e.g., lies is still inherent and the wrongness of lies presumptive. Every effort at repairing the inherent evil should be made and occasions for future lies avoided. 7) In the end, rules apply in only a few of the moral modalities listed in Chapter 4. In the heroic modality, they run out; in some contexts they collide, requiring particular choice; and in any case even clear choices are still particular choices by agents of particular tokens, and in that sense unique, agent-relative responses to agent neutral norms. There is a set of levels of cognitive abstraction and normative ideality, running from very general, uncontextualised vague prima facie or presumptive judgements of good/bad ends/objects of acts and feelings. These guide prima facie judgements in casuistry’s Steps. They

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are reflected in presumptively binding general imperatives and are also reflected in the kinds of maxim or precept which one can develop using casuistry at Step 3 (defeasible, but strong moral claims). But at the next level of particularity, we encounter an as yet non-consensual zone exemplified by the cases cited like war, abortion, euthanasia, and other matters. At particular level we reach the unique intent/motive of this agent/here/now we saw at Step 4 of casuistry. The last can be rule guided only up to the point where rules exist and can in some sense only be idiosyncratic. Universalists believing in the possibility of general knowledge of both fact and value have taught us much about our common humanity. Agent neutral norms are indispensable to moral education at the several levels of specification noted and reflected in the content of precepts falling under moral modalities 4, 6, and 9. Such are the prohibitions of murder, theft, and fraud. Particularist are interested in intuitive cognition of the unique individual as individual rather than abstractive cognition, In different ways Scotus, Kierkegaard, Buber, Foucault, Stocker, and Derrida have taught us about the limits of abstraction and the dangers of over generalising and stereotyping in the human case. In between are people like Aristotle, Augustine, Erigena, Aquinas, Husserl, Mill, Buber, and the later Wittgenstein, who try to hold theoretic and practical reason together in the way outlined without completely assimilating them, and who strive to suggest increasing specification as a holistic reasoning process in ethics. It is with the last group that this paper is in closest alignment. Perhaps it is concentration on the last stage in the process of determination in the levels of abstraction, Step 4, which underpins the quite proper existentialist and postmodernist insistence on the limits and dangers of abstraction and generalisation. This is indeed the ultimate step. Perhaps this underlies the oft heard adage: "In the end, everybody has different ethics." But hopefully this chapter has shown that this step is preceded by attending to more general considerations, sometimes involving rules. Such proverbial sayings as: "when it comes to ethics, we all disagree" or "silence or disagreement of rules shows ethics is “a-rational subjectivity" are only half truths based on over concentration on one of the seven non-rule bound modalities in Chapter 4; or the levels distinguished here or on conflating levels of specification in the casuistic process. Points 1-7 above are all true at their appropriate level, but not scandalous. We must hold on to the notion that moral rules both exist and presumptively bind at the appropriate levels set out in the table of moral modalities. The hard work needed to sort out disagreement regarding euthanasia, abortion, and so on can only be done using the process of determination, fertilised by the best account of the nature of persons and the best possible good uses of our human capacities to keep working toward a possible future consensus in our ideals in which rules will play a part. The above Chapters 2-5 have hopefully shown that NAVE can recognise the moral relevance of all the factors canvassed by other theories: intention, purpose; and the other circumstances. There can be some exceptionless prohibitions in NAVE if as seems clear added circumstances will not change the judgement, as in deliberate and knowing child sexual abuse, or the use of nuclear weapons. Putting the word “wanton” in front of many types of actcircumstance cluster like lying one can also achieve an exceptionless precept, but that is less significant. This concludes the exposition of NAVE.

Chapter 6

PHYSICALISM IS NOT PROVEN We have concluded the review of NAVE and naturalism as the core version of natural law, where NL is taken as having the sense of an abstract meta-ethical position with five elements, filled in with the naturalism of NAVE. In this Chapter we attempt to ward off the most challenging alternate version of naturalism-Physicalism-, which if proven would close the NL project down completely because the concept of free choice and moral responsibility would be invalidated by physical determinism and even reductive physical indeterminism. We will then look briefly at the implications of restoring the assumption of God’s existence, but without Religion, in Chapter 7. Finally, in that chapter we will look at the case of Divine Glory Ethics (DGE) and Belief. In basic NAVE, the highest good assumed to exist is humanity-rational animals. If, as in Theism or in DGE, the reference of THG changes to a God, and divine providence, what changes in the content of NAVE? First it is necessary to defend the possibility of “supernatural” or immaterial realities being candidates for THG. They must be shown to be a coherent possibility, and against this stands the doctrine of Physicalism with respect to the entire Universe and especially the human soul/mind/will, as set out in the anthropology in Chapter 3. Physicalism denies all non-material entities exist. In describing NAVE we were assuming the doctrine of property dualism according to which the mind is capable of action, and interacts with the body’s brain and nervous system, as a non-material property of the human composite, but not necessarily a separate or separable substance. To introduce the case against supernatural entities having existence or reality, one can begin with the case against the reality of free choice, which up to now was assumed possible in order to describe human anthropology without settling the separability of a soul issue.

DEFENDING THE SMB ACCOUNT OF SOUL, MIND/WILL/FREE CHOICE AND BODY GIVEN ABOVE IN ELEMENT 2) AND 3) All we have posited so far is challenged by contemporary reductive Physicalism, as version of Naturalism, especially the idea of a “matter-transcending” mind or will capable of freedom of choice. Something needs to be said to allow us to proceed. First will be a short synopsis of the arguments against the idea of personal agency and free choice, and the reasons adduced by its opponents for discarding the belief in transcendent selves and minds with distinctive powers

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and with will and free choice. Then will follow a discussion of the meaning of the claim that the mind is a physical object subject to physical law and so we cannot have free will/choice. Finally, we will offer arguments for the possibility of free will and the falsity of Physicalism. The conclusion will be that moderate substance dualism is plausible, without regard to theism or religion. But the latter can be a support for it and vice versa.

According to Physicalism 1) the world is just a physical world - a unified but complex, causally operating system, whether or not the things which are causally related, or correlated, are related in a largely predictable way at macro-level, or at micro-level in a partly indeterminate manner (Heisenberg indeterminacy principle) 2) at the macro-level, where we live and choose, it is a closed finite system despite the existence of what we call “chance outcomes” which we cannot always predict; and the existence of some potential mathematical infinities, such as pi 3) the human mind either is, or is controlled by, the brain and nervous system. In Philosophical Psychology, these assumptions form the basis for reflection on their negative implication for the “libertarian” doctrine of free will/choice - that we are sometimes free to choose our actions and that in such cases it will be the case that, without alteration of any conditions, prior to the choice, at the moment of choice, we could have chosen otherwise than we in fact did choose. Although up until the end of the Middle-Ages, around 1500 AD, it was assumed there is no absolute free will, in the sense that we all inevitably want what we each perceive to be our wellbeing and to be happy, in an indefinite sense of “the desirable human good,” it was held, and still is by many, that we do have free will in the sense of choice of ingredient ends and means of wellbeing. We are free to choose sub-ordered ends and means to wellbeing, conceived indefinitely as fulfilment of rational desires, and can be held responsible for this choice. The libertarian gloss of such free choice i.e., we could have done otherwise than we in fact did at the choice moment, is not common ground to all believers in free choice. Some would hold we are creatures of habit, so at that moment of choice it might well be false that we could have chosen otherwise. But most libertarians agree that many prior individual acts, forming the habit, would have had to be free for responsibility to be attributed to an agent. We are free to edit and change our first-order desires and to condition ourselves to be compelled to act virtuously or not (Frankfurt 1971. We can choose to drink to the point where we are then unfree, but still responsible. And for libertarians, these prior choices are not all imposed or preconditioned by our bodies, brains, and nervous systems, as Physicalists argue. In our present society, we are held responsible for proper exercise of our free choices in our actions, good and bad, on the grounds, according to libertarians, that we could have done otherwise. The three materialist assumptions mentioned above do indeed raise problems for this doctrine and succeeding modern doctrines of free will and free choice. If teleological intentional relations between thought, goals, means, plans, intended and executed action were to turn out ultimately to be of a law-like, natural scientific type, found in Physics, and if the physical world were causally closed (all true beings are physical, and we are only physical beings), then neural and nervous system causal forces would as it were “flow through” our

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conscious wills and choices like electricity, without our control. Despite the “phenomenological” appearances to us, of informed (and uninformed) free choice, we would have no effective agency or choice, although there may be some indeterminacy in the microworld, (the indeterminacy principle of Heisenberg), or exemplified by pi being infinite, since even Lotto winning numbers had to be what they are given antecedent conditions. We would be incapable of voluntarily following or disobeying moral norms; and therefore not to blame for our bad actions. We would be either governed by strict mechanical determinism or by the objects subject to the indeterminacy principle, both outside our conscious mental/volitional control/flexing. So, the problem posed in the paper by Physicalism is indeed real. The solution suggested by Physicalists is to alter our ideas about voluntary action and punishment. This was suggested by Menninger in The Crime of Punishment (1968). The notion of a non-physical, immaterial, self with a will, and the libertarian doctrine of free will (we can do otherwise than we in fact do), must be given up, since our actions have such physical causes as mentioned. Punishment need not be abandoned totally just because it is now based on voluntary action caused by intention and choice. It can be based on observable behaviour, which is caused by physical factors and punishment regimes can be justified by other than the present mental/intentional factors and associated moral positions. This possibility of punishing behaviour without reference to intent is illustrated by the case of Oedipus, who was blamed for killing a man he did not know was his father. Humans have used punishment regimes based on non-intentional factors before and can still do so. The alternative punishment regimes have included those with rationales of racial purification, celebration of victory over the vanquished, deterrence, and control of revenge reactions. Some Physicalists propose we use the sociologist G.H Mead’s concept of the “generalised other” to explain the phenomenon of individual moral conscience, conscientious judgements, and some of our present moral responses. Unconscious processes e.g., fluid processes which do stuff around language; and those which sometimes gain control of consciousness can do the work now assigned to “the free self.” The metaphor of a coalition of inner factors, contending for control of the behavioural output of the self (brain), is argued to better captures reality than the libertarian self. This is only a sketch of how the appearances/phenomena of freedom is presumably to be explained away reductively, and the way the reductive project will eventually unfold if Physicalism were correct. We are invited to accept the truth of the claim: “the mind is just the brain and nervous system at work.” There is no immaterial self with non-physical free will capacity, transcending the physical world. Minds and free wills are unneeded intermediate variables in explaining human behaviours, since brains are minds, and minds are brains; or at least, minds are caused by brains and nervous systems. At first blush, this appears to be counter-intuitive. If something is intuitively understood, it is manifest (Forrest 2004) like our understanding that pain is unpleasant and connected to complaining about pain. If we did not have such reliable intuition, total scepticism would ensue. This not an inference from a theory. Conscious persons (people, selves, egos, souls, psyches) manifestly have capacities to think, (minds, intellect) and capacity to want and apparently freely choose (wills) in some sort of on-going temporal identity relation with a physical/material body, within a composite subject with mental and physical properties. They are apparently capable of intelligent “voluntary” rational action. Mental properties, like thoughts, can in turn have some physical properties, like duration, but not others like height and depth (extension) or colour (Lewis 1971; Forrest 2004). Persons can normally flex and move their limbs, use their senses, feel pleasure and pain, eat, and sleep. Physical objects do not have selves,

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consciousness, self-consciousness, future plans for goals or move at will. They do not remember, imagine, laugh, or satirise. There can be different senses attached to the claim that mind and body are “the same,” as in the claim “The mind is a physical entity.” This statement can mean: mind and body are identical, in the Leibnitzian sense of identity, that they have all their properties in common. But it could mean, more plausibly, that they are united or conjoined or causally interactive as two objects or one composite with two kinds of power-dualism. Besides identity claims using “X is Y,” there is attributive/descriptive/predicative senses of “is” (exists) as in: “Socrates is a bald man.” This is not strictly an identity claim, but a description of an identifiable individual to whom properties are attributed. “Socrates is alive” is a false existence claim, not an identity claim. Some existence attributions ascribe individualised or sortal quality, quantity, action, or relation to subjects. This allows existence to be attributed to them analogically. In general, a propositional content, “that S is P,” can appear in an asserted correlation, exemplification, causality claim, and contingent identity claim which is true, but quite accidentally so. To pursue this reflection on free will further, there also needs to be some definition of the mental phenomena to be explained in physical terms alone: first, knowledge by sensory acquaintance, linguistic symbolic communication, or objective scientific confirmation. Some distinctions need to be made in the discussion of the mind/body problem between the mental i.e., intentionality and knowledge and consciousness; and the physical i.e., the kinds of physical existents like atoms and sub-atomic particles, prehuman mind independent physical objects, with no inherent colour, and later human consciousness of such hitherto mind-independent objects, dispositional properties like visibility, which have partly mind-dependent existence; and physical objects overlaid with agent causality, such as artefacts or manufactured goods. We need to review the kinds of existence/existents; and the status of the results of linguistic/syntactic/semantic speech acts using entities like phonemes, words, sentences, assertions with inherent, but also conferred contextual meaning, and assertions with a truth value. This prompts three questions: 1) What exactly is the psychological phenomenon or datum denoted by “mind,” “mentality,” “cognition” or “intellect,” which is being explained and perhaps to be reductively explained away as bodily activity; and eventually to be discarded? We will call this the M question. 2) What is a physical object? How is it related to a human body? Is it matter, and in what sense? We will call this the P question. 3) What is meant by the claim the mind and free will exist, or do not really or ultimately exist? We will call this the E question.

The M Question A simple working description of mind would be: a self/person with knowledge, through sensory acquaintance, symbolic language, and science; manifested in intentionality and its presuppositions. This covers a large suite of human capacities: consciousness/self-conscious awareness; intellect/mind, reason, and belief and the powers it requires of memory, imagination, and language; will, desires and choices; intelligent action, and sense perceptions. If we start with intelligent action, practical and moral reasoning, which informs will and (alleged) free choice, is teleological, arising from wants. It is predominantly future focussed,

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either “ends to means” or “imperative practical/moral precept or principle to case.” In what has been called the pre-scientific or pre-explanatory data of “folk “psychology or “folk” anthropology, which describes the mental facts and human appearances to be explained, the so called phenomenology or mental explicandum, “mind” roughly connotes the following phenomena. M i) Consciousness: people are often aware/conscious; M ii) Introspection and Empathy: recognition of the feelings of others are manifestly real. People can be aware that they are conscious; and can meditate on their thoughts. M iii) Memory: People have a conscious unity of some sort, with (sometimes life-long) memories of incidents in the past, when cells in their bodies have “turned over” physically many times since; M iv) Second-order Choice: People can make “second order” choices to change their own present wants and choices over time in the future (Frankfurt 1971) M v) Phrastics and noema: through intellect, will, and sense perception, they are aware of propositional contents or phrastics, about which they think, believe, desire, feel, judge, or choose; senses focus on visual or auditory or tactile equivalent noema. The linguistic marker of such cognition is not identical to the cognition itself. M vi) Sense data: People experience/perceive sense data, like green patches of colour; they see green trees which are not inherently green but look green to us M vii) Qualia: People feel pain, tend to avoid it; and see pain in others; they choose steps to avoid it. Perceptual sensations give us reasons to act, and these reasons are causes of human action of a special kind; what is seen depends on what is known. M viii) Interpretation of signs: the same physical objects or action, e.g., a box, which is moveable, and is visible, can be seen as a seat or a potential part of a ladder. Animals tend to freeze such perceptions as one or the other. An arm raised can be seen as a left turn or a wave, depending on interpretation. These are eight markers of the mental for which Physicalism must provide physical explanation and indeed a purely reductive explanation. Criterion Mv) above is the simplest of these marks of human cognition. The essential core of thinking, ordering, questioning, wondering, promising and explaining is a propositional content or phrastic of the form “that S is P’. All speech acts have such core, to which is added a mood and a mood operator indicator like: “It is the case that S is P,” for the indicative mood in the case of assertions and descriptions: “Make it the case that S is P” for commands; “I promise that S will be P,” for promises, and so on. Human cognitive activity is “directed at an object” in this way/sense, and so is “about some object” in this sense, whether or not the speech act is successful- whether e.g., the assertion that S is P is true; of the command that S will be P is prudent or obeyed. In a complex speech act, the nuclear act of consciousness is apprehension of the meaning or sense (conceptualistion) of S, P and the “is,” in the phrastic or noema “that S is P.” Directedness on an object or noema31 is the mark or defining feature of understanding/mentality, made possible by individual concepts in relation. Brentano (1874) and Husserl (1938) called this mark of the mental “intentionality.” So, we have an answer to 1) above. Physicalism presumably must claim to explain the intentionality of the terms in a phrastic or noema, and thence the other mental acts 31

On noema see Glossary.

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listed above into which it enters, as the core or nucleus of consciousness, self-consciousness, belief/desire; and perception, in terms of physical behaviours. We now have a list of mental phenomena which it would be task of Physicalism to explain in purely physical terms. We turn now what “physical’ means in such a context.

The P Question “Physical object” is an equivocal descriptor with at least these meanings: P i) inanimate physical micro-objects and events studied in physics, and subject to law-like generalisation, like electrons, strings, atoms, gravitational forces, mass, energy, and speed; X-rays and ultra-sounds; P ii) these make up macro objects like brains, animals, flowers, cereals, hills, lakes, minerals, lights, and events like combustion. Such mind-independent, physical objects, are composed of Pi) entities. These would have been a) potentially observable to as yet non-existent fauna, insects, and humans; and these are b) now really observable, the subjects of broader human physical sciences like Botany, Biology, Bio-chemistry, Physiology, and Zoology; later with humans we have Psychology and Anthropology with at least some physical elements. P iii) mind-dependent objects like sense–data caused by interaction between humans and P ii) type mind–independent objects. These are broadly correlated with the entities in M v) above-perceivers. P iv) subjective kinaesthetic bodily experiences of passivity, resistance, and limited, willed, flexing capacity. P v) artefacts, like statues, the results of acts on non-intentional objects like clay, wood, or stone. P vi) physical realisations of willed intentional objects, like the paper or screen you are reading now. Physicalism presumably tries to explain P iii) sense data, P iv) somatic experiences; mental overlay on artefacts, P iv) and P v) objects, like interpretative paintings, songs, and philosophy papers, as physical objects/events, or effects of such objects, or caused by brains, and it seeks to explain minds away as mere appearances or epiphenomena because they are really ultimately of type P i)-ii). On this account, in a sense, a physical/material object is not observed directly. It is a construction from observed sense data, positing the continued existence of something now unobserved, as at levels P i) and P iia) and not therefore depending only on our observation. Parallel to folk psychology, we have a “folk physics” posited as describing the physical explicandum: we have subjective bodily experiences of passivity, resistance and malleability; ability to flex limbs but not livers; we see rocks, fauna, walls, faces, cheese balls, cats on mats. And in cases like M v) seeing writing – here intellect and sense are fused together in a unity, yet intellect can operate imperfectly without sight or hearing. What you see is governed by your education, so a trained astronomer sees more in the night sky and the cell biologist sees more in the lab slide than the novice. It is the same for sounds of birds and music. According to the doctrine of Part One, these observed phenomena are to be ultimately explained by the natural physical sciences, like bio-chemistry and neurobiology, as far as possible described in “objective,” third person terms.

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P i) and P ii) also have mental features of type P iii) like visibility, and this fact calls for granting these mental properties of Physical objects some sort of existential status or categorisation in any explanatory ontology to be offered. For the sake of the argument, to avoid a huge detour, our kinaestheic knowledge of our bodies’ limb positions and other bodily capacities and limits on flexibility and scope can be (a little awkwardly) squeezed under P iii). We will also pass over the fact that subatomic entities, like electrons, though quantifiable, have properties which border on qualities, like direction, intensity, roundness, and adjacency. (Forrest 2004). We now turn to the issue of identity and existence.

The E Question As to the connection between existence, truth, and knowledge, recall that, in assertions, knowledge and truth are logically connected to the concept of existence, set out in Chapter 1, and there are many senses of “is” or “exists.”32 E i) the sense of “S is” when ‘is” is being used as a copula in a statement, such as: “S is identical to P.” In this case, a mental state, a, “being” physical, could be symbolised as: Ma=df Pa, where identical individuals are taken have all properties in common; E ii) The sense of “S is P” could be a property ascription, like “a is white”; or Pa causes Ma; or P is a necessary condition of M (if M then P) or a sufficient condition (if P then M) or P is correlated with M (P iff M). or This Ma is P, (ad hoc); “Ss are always/necessarily Ps,” or “Ss necessarily cause Ps,” and so on. E iii) there is also the sense which follows from “S lives” being an independent substance with internal characterising principles of action, such as growth in animals, capable of action for a duration, acting and bringing about change; E iv) existents can also connote objects in the categories of substance, like a particular action, potential, quality, quantity, relation, time, place, and so on which really exist, but not as substances; they are predicable of substance in an analogous sense; E v) there are senses of “S exists” as: S has properties of a type which are determinable by some procedure; or are so in principle, even if not actually, determinable;” E vi) Ss have properties which are presently determined, or now observable; E vii) S has properties some of which cannot be determined, but S is “able to be talked about.” Fictional objects are examples which fit here, and for Physicalists, mental states. This creates a messy but workable ontology. Humans clearly exist because they can meet E i)–E iii) and so can arguably act consciously/knowingly/voluntarily, although we shall be examining the claim of Physicalism, which denies that this free choice is more than an appearance to be explained away. If an electron with a path has particular mass, charge and spin, that particle exists for an instant, and it would arguably exist in senses E v) and E vi). Human cells, and atoms seem to meet these determination criteria. Fictional existents, like Prospero in The Tempest, only qualify as existents under criterion E vii). Physicalists want us to put immaterial selves in this fictional category. The physicalist can allow minds and free wills to “exist” in senses E i) if either identity is meant; or causality; if the effect is reducible to the cause; and sense E ii), if reference to wills 32

See Glossary entry under Existence.

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and volition is deleted. They hold that statements of the form S is P, where S is a physical existent and where P is a mental predicate or property, must be understood to mean either that “S is the same as P” or that P exists only dependently, as a property of S. It is unclear if they can allow minds to exist in sense E ii)-as properties of substances in sense E i). There are strong and weak forms of materialist monism, some of which allow for “dualism of properties.” For the materialist, minds probably cannot exist in senses E iii) iv) or E v), since the procedures to determine the properties would have to be physical or present sensory observation, but we can talk about them (E vii)).The copula is to be understood in the sense of identity, or physical to mental causality, not interaction as the libertarian holds, and perhaps constant correlation, but always with the requirement that the mental variable is always derivative, dependent or “epiphenomenal.” This position would rule out some forms of “compatibilism” i.e., that the idea that M and P entities are correlated constantly or contingently, but not causally related. We now have a coherent sense for: “The mind is the body”; because: 1) We have in M i)-viii) above, a description of a mental entity of which free choice is a specimen, can be obtained by taking the idea of a modally specified phrastic/noema/propositional content, like: “that S is P,” as the nucleus and mark of the mental; it is produced by consciousness, and capable of being an object of selfconsciousness, through intellect/will/sense, and sensation, and can be manifested in sense perceptions, artefacts, writing, or pain. 2) We have analysis of Physical, material objects, meaning primarily P i) and ii) above, but perhaps including P iii)-v) providing they are conceived as dependent on P i) and P ii). 3) We have an analysis of Existence in terms of E i) - vii) and the types of copula; identity, description, analogical equivocation, correlation, and causality. The question “Is the conscious mind/will free and transcendent or itself physical?” resolves itself into: “Which of the above sorts of entity in the three categories M, E, and P, described above is to be used to do the explaining and which is be explained away? The presumed Physicalist answer is: M i-v) are to be explained by P i) and ii), possibly with the aid of P iii v), and the conclusion will be that mind is body in the sense of identity; or brains cause mental events, or if there is a correlation, M will be an intervening variable and ultimately reductively analysable into a statement of unity with P. P in the sense of physical objects indicated explains M in the senses indicated. But: How exactly is the mental phenomena of intentional, conscious, “free will” to be explained as really being ultimately a set of physical objects? Providing clear answers about this matter is part of the challenge to be made here. What would such an explanation look like? Are we looking at bridging laws between M (mental phenomena) and P (physical phenomena)? If so, how would that lead to the identification of M with P, (M=df P) and the elimination of M as an appearance, and the denial of free will, rather than some sort of a correlation or interactive causal account, (M iff P or Sometimes P causes M, and sometimes M causes P)? The physicalist says mind and body are either the same thing (strong reductionism) or the body causes all mental activity (supervenience) or the relation between them is represented by the biconditional, M iff B, and, as all bodies fall under the causal principle, so also do minds as effects. We could have an appearance of constant correlation, but only physical objects are substances which really exist and mental properties are to be explained in physical terms.

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Some Critical Responses The Reality of Persons’ Selves/Psyches and Minds If the soul/self of a composite person is partly or in some way non-material, it is not to that extent subject to physical laws alone, as are P i) and P ii) objects. The eight marks of the mental listed under the meaning of mental especially concepts, phrastics, numbers, meaningful assertions, and truth, appearing in descriptions of mental entities and events, are simply not physical objects, but the real product of selves/souls, persons, psyches as their effects. So, persons/souls create some abstract non-physical things, and they act as reason-using agentcauses (see section E below) at least in this way, in the intentional sphere. Intentional objects can be said to exist by analogy of attribution. These intentional entities are indispensable to successful speech acts, including the Physicalist theories of mind, which presuppose these nonphysical entities, and like all scientific theories, are the effects of minds, which have some physical properties, like duration in time, and some loose connections to the brains, and to whole bodies. But propositional contents or phrastics and numbers are not physical objects in any of the above senses P i - P ii), which most plausibly fall under Physical laws about electrons and chemicals and cells. Only if materialism is proven right (the mind just is the brain alone, and intentional objects are really only Physical in senses P i) - ii) alone, would brain entities, like neurons, necessarily fall under such physical laws alone. This would beg the question at issue against the libertarian. If assertions about Physics by souls/minds of composite persons employ non-physical universals in relations like “representing/signifying,” they are not clearly just physical objects. We have a case of non-identity: mental and physical entities are not the same. If we think about water, steam, and ice for example, it has constant physical properties like being H2O but considering water used in cooking or heating or cooling, the actions in which water is embedded and its physical properties are now overlaid with intentionality, and the enabling necessary condition of water, as it is studied in physics, does not sufficiently determine or explain the superimposed voluntary actions. By now it is clear that NeoAristotelians/libertarians tend to deny material theories of mind because they are usually deterministic. Non-Identity and Non-Reducibility In Chapter 2 we discussed NL ontology, and one of its criteria of existence was being a substance, and another was self-identity. The relation of mind to body cannot be indiscernibility (Leibnitzian identity). If two things are identical, then they have all their properties and instances of those properties the same; if they have some different individual properties, they are not identical individuals of the same type. This is Leibnitz’s notion of the identity of “indiscernibles.” If a defining property of a type is different, they are not the same type of thing. This is an assumed principle correlative to the so called law of non-contradiction, for propositions: not (P and not P) and, for individuals: not (Fa and not Fa), used in Metaphysics, Ontology, and Logic. The principle is difficult to prove without circularity, but intuitive and dialectically defensible as ethically necessary for science. Privacy and subjectivity of sense data are not attributable to physical objects and events to which they are allegedly reducible, so the identity of sense data and matter fails. “Stop!” can at once be: a physical sound, a written word in an asserted formula; a hand gesture; a sign which

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means “Come to rest” (semantics); it can be used in a command or imperative speech act with appropriate truth/success conditions; and it can be obeyed/effective/justified. The first two or three occurrences might be physical objects, but their identity with the other entities here is not a case of terms denoting the same individual, meeting the criterion for Leibnitzian identity of indiscernibles. Another categorical difference telling against identity is that we have privileged access to our own thought/conscious states of mind (mental entities) accessed and described in first-person terms, which is not available to us with respect to the states of our brains and neurons (physical entities), or to other physical objects or states perceived; or to other people’s minds. We know when we are or are not thinking something, in pain or in doubt without inductive observation or inference, even if scientific law of physics and physiology or other objective fact in a third-person descriptive sense says we must be the opposite. We have no privileged access to physical science, its objects of study, or entities it posits in law-like explanations.

Multiple Description, Reduction as Explanation, and Qualia It is alleged by some that minds are “explained by” physical laws or that they are “reducible to” physics; or that they are “supervenient” on bodies, as a dot-matrix portrait is supervenient on just the dots, not a separate entity; or water is H2O. But supervenience is a recent notion and a contested one, borrowed from Ethics, and exemplified differently by different Physicalists. Reduction and reductive explanation can take a range of quite different, “hard” and “soft” forms. It can be weak or strong depending on the paradigm chosen: water and ice; brute facts and moral obligations, physics and inorganic chemistry; semantics, syntax, and phonetics. The idea of reducing even the other physical sciences mentioned in P i) – ii) above to Physics is a promissory note in the cases other than that of Physics to Chemistry, which is not the most challenging case. The “unity of science” is a project, and not a fact. The key case here is Neurobiology to Psychology, but it is possibly an impossible project. It appears that a conscious living agent forming an intention (mental event) can possibly cause a physical event, and perhaps the physical world is not causally closed. There seem rather to be causal relations between two types of entity with some overlapping properties like duration. Brain surgery to remove cancer or restore neural connectivity assumes causal connection between brain and mind, as two different entities causally interrelated, with pain and pleasure sometimes caused by body e.g., hunger, disease or injury, or a fine meal; and sometimes by mind e.g., worry/mental stress or anticipation or excitement/achievement. Brains do not worry or exult. Minds don’t get cancer. Brains are de facto necessary conditions for human life/minds in our ordinary experience and observation, as shown in dementia and death, but we cannot be sure if they are absolutely necessary in all circumstances. Prima facie, physical and mental properties do seem to differ, even when correlated. For instance, matter as described in physics (atoms, electrons, particles/waves, position, mass, velocity, strings, spin, charge etc.) has no meaning, purposes, goals, or intentions of its own; and no wellbeing/experiences of pleasure or pain as people do; no taste, pains, chills and other mental/sensory sensations. The so called non-inherent “secondary” qualities of colour, posited in classical empiricism are caused by the bodies perceived, but they are subjective, not intrinsic to these stimulus-bodies. Subjective qualia or sense data, do not interact with other bodies at a publicly observable location in the ways intrinsic to physical objects. They cannot be defined solely in third person behavioural terms. Such “qualia” are mind-dependent, and have “raw feel” not captured in descriptions (Jackson 1982; Robinson 2004). A blind person’s

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complete knowledge of the world, including their knowledge of opthamological science, would lack something. Brains are physical parts of bodies. They have primary qualities: exist in space and time and change/are changed by their immediate surroundings; they have extension, but no capacity for smell or taste, seeing colour. P i) and P ii) objects have primary qualities: exist in space and time and change/are changed by their immediate surroundings; they have extension. Subjective qualia or sense data, do not interact with other bodies at a publicly observable location in the ways intrinsic to physical objects. They cannot be defined solely in third person behavioural terms. Such qualia are minddependent, and have a raw feel not captured in descriptions (Jackson 1982; Robinson 2004). A blind person’s complete knowledge of the world including opthamological science would still lack something - the raw feel or experience of sight, so visual raw feels are entities which really add something to reality, while still being subjective and mind dependent, not physical objects. These are major differentiating properties. Brains are physical parts of bodies. Even non-reductive, but “naturalist ” philosophers, like Searle, who thinks we will eventually scientifically explain minds, agrees we will retain a concept of the self and that consciousness is indeed a mystery at present. As the idealists of the 17th -19th century Berkeley and Bradley point out, consciousness of mind-independent physical objects of type P i) P ii) at P iii) is itself mind-dependent, and concepts of such objects are both like, yet distinct from, that of other mentally dependent objects, like worries and pains. There are also many other kinds of knowable beings/intentional objects than physical objects in the above five meanings, P i -v), which are entertained in consciousness (kinaesthetic bodily experiences of flexing our limbs; passivity or resistance to pressure; recognition of other person’s faces and feelings, personality traits, numbers, phrastics, theories, propositions etc.). In the case of physical objects like tables, a physical object is one which will produce “table–like” sense data in a mind or self of some sort, if the self has attended to it, under specific conditions of light, temperature, and other normal conditions. It has dispositional properties which necessitate reference to a self. One cannot get a notion of “physical object” from physics and mathematics alone. Rather than tables, walls, and balls being logical constructions out of the entities disclosed in physics and mathematics alone, electrons and atoms are extrapolated from our ordinary ideas about particles and waves, and the circular movements of macrobodies. The language of energy, protons, quarks, mass, spin, speed, gravity, extension, and strings will only be accessible to one who has experienced bodily resistance/flexibility in ordinary physical space and time using their apprehensive faculties of perception, at least touch, all of which presuppose a dependency on qualia and the truth of some version of the causal principle. The so-called primary properties like extension are actually secondary in the sense of being derivative abstractions from probability claims about the causes of qualia. (Robinson in Gocke 2012).

The Problem of Analysing the Conceptual Meanings (Representational Significance) of Words Words and signs in speech acts (examples of mentality/intentionality) are not identical to, or the effects of, physical objects and events of type P i) and P ii) above alone. As semantics cannot be explained in terms of phonetics and syntax alone, because of the need for and fact of communication about human need-satisfiers, this suggests language and signs with common semantic meanings arose from this human source, before syntax and phonetics were subjected to rules, so anthropology/psychology cannot be explained in terms of neuro-physics and

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chemistry alone. Physical objects like electrons, hydrogen, or water, do not have inherent meaning (intentionality) with relevance or reference to human life. Mental abstract concepts and the language in which they are expressed have semantic meaning, understood against a social background of presupposed normative and habitual assumptions and purposes common to both speaker and hearer. Information is information to someone, who interprets it in a human social context. A sign or symbol is not a sui generis impersonal entity, object, state of affairs, or probabilistic event of the sort found in physics alone. Persons interpret the meaning of signs, what the signs or symbols are about. They “selfcreate” and can change an idiosyncratic subjective persona, or self-identity narrative, or soul, over time through self-interpretation. They seek pleasure and avoid pain via complex conceptualisation and seeing Xs as meaning Ys (interpretation). Humans minds can respond non-mechanically to stimuli in a way insects, apes, and other animate beings cannot. What they individually see is sometimes a function of what they can signify in language and know, not exposure to stimuli or physical fact alone. Conceptual meanings of terms, including the concept of causal interaction between objects and behaviours, is only describable in abstract non-physical-universals and abstract numbers, joined in propositional contents or phrastics, and asserted in statements/propositions or other speech acts. They are presupposed in, but not explained by, Physics. Unlike Philosophical Anthropologists, physicists and brain neurobiologist themselves usually make no comment on their own presupposed use of notions like direction of fit or causality in theories of truth in discussions of intentionality, knowledge, truth, and existence, in their “normal” mathematical and scientific explanations; nor do they attempt a general description or theory of their abstract account of “physical reality,” which uses universal concepts (that are non-physical) when describing consciousness and its mood designated phrastic objects. The bases of their specific discoveries are statements or generalisations about universal abstract concepts composing knowledge, linked by “principles” like those of non-contradiction, mathematics and logic, and of probability/causality, which are not peculiar to physics or biology. These are not just dispensable conventions but appear to reflect a wider “objective” metaphysical reality, and to compel voluntary (free) normative intellectual submission, to what Pierce called “ethics of the intellect.” Non-idealist think there are some true synthetic a priori (metaphysical) principles and examples e.g., time is one-way, and cannot be reversed; mirrors reverse right and left. These really apply to reality. Our idea of change or becoming assumes that as things approach the present, they become gradually actual, from being merely possible. Syntactical processes and procedures manipulating letters or algorithms alone do not and could not cause or generate meaningful concepts or such normative rational principles or the semantic conceptual meanings inherent in signs and making up phrastics and cognition/knowledge of physics.

Teleological Practical Reason and Agent Causality There may be a teleological type of causality different from other event to event causality viz. reason driven agent causality from intentions to actions. We can normally in our actions a) control our cognitive attention’s focus on propositional contents/phrastics, b) focus on reasons pro and con or not at will, and directly choose modes of the various kinds of speech act which critical thinking discloses; form intentions based on reasoning; issue and follow prescriptions; c) direct our perception; mentally cause the movement of our limbs; and d) nurture the autonomic system’s capacities with food and rest. There is a vertical architectonic causal structure and sequence from reason, i.e., formed intention to action when the hand moves the

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staff. The” bottom-up” material causality of ingested food support for brain activity is a simpler form of enabling event to event causation (Taylor 1964). According to proponents of agent causality, reasons are causes of my behaviour, but other causes just happen to me. Goals, intentions, imperative principles and precepts cited in present day teleological explanations of behaviour, and in the practical reasoning into which free choice enters, are not like physical descriptions and laws, and the bridging laws are a loose fit to the standard physical laws. They are ultimately end-related, and based (as was argued in relation to casuistry in business ethics) on the perceived tendencies of the type of acts set out in the precept to advance or retard human wellbeing. Ends or goals arise from needs of human mental and bodily capacities, needs, and need-satisfiers, with emotional tone associated with our animal/animate inclinations and tendencies. Physical objects like atoms, computers, and neurons have no “perceived human wellbeing”; no desires or fears, pains or pleasures; so no agent- reason-causality. Human ends are shaped and further specified by perceived reasons. Human cognitive choices of goals usually follow temporally upon some specification and shaping, from indeterminate wellbeing seeking, and at least momentary and sometimes protracted deliberation. Once the chosen action specified in the propositional content/phrastic is self-commanded, there is always an implicit ceteris paribus clause to the effect that the intention, plan or execution is satisfactory to the end, unless further circumstances or factors are adduced by reason, further factors intervene, or the end is qualified/outweighed by new/other considerations apprehensible by practical reason. Reason metaphorically “weighs” the means entertained for the end consciously against the agent’s own master end of perceived wellbeing. Such reason canvasses the multiple respects forming the content of any plan for the future of relevance to human wellbeing, and gives rational considerations to the pros and cons, risks and opportunities, including the emotional/affective factors correlated with the phrastic/object. It then decides, and directs or commands action of the operation of limbs enabled by its nurture of its autonomic system. In terms of our discussion above, in Chapter 4, of practical reason, it is imperative in mood and operation on the phrastic. A command is not a description, indicative assertion, or formal-logical/deduction; mathematics or inductive, probabilistic; or natural scientific (hypothetico-deductive reasoning. Although practical reasoning can, and often does, incorporate stretches of all these within an enveloping ends-means or imperative preceptinstance structure, and it can in turn be incorporated as a step within stretches of theoretic reasoning about facts, it is basically imperative, emotional, and prescriptive (Franklin 2009). If this prescriptive-imperative sequence or tract of reasoning is a distinctive element, to be explained by physics, focussed on physical objects of type Pi)-ii) above, its teleological structure must be outlined as an explicable datum in physical terms. Yet physical descriptions and theories and texts, and proponents of Physicalist’s reductions of mind, do not offer any reductive analyses of the relation between consciousness, phrastics, mood operators, imperative speech acts, intentional goal seeking and self-directing commands. The hierarchical DOE structure discussed chapter 1 and in Business Ethics is simply ignored.

Teleological Laws Are Better Predictors of Behaviour Than Physical Laws Despite 50 years of promises, robust bridging laws linking practical reason and physical laws are still wanting. The necessary bridging laws of a generalised type between neurons and meanings have not emerged. Facing this serious problem, the absence of any plausible physical reductivist account of the relation between the elements mentioned in the M, P, and E questions,

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above. We began this Chapter with the mention of efforts to cut out intentionality, and a list of possible punishment regimes where punishment would not be based on will, intention or choice, but physically observable behaviour. It would not be necessary to investigate offenders’ states of mind since they are only brains/nervous systems in a causally closed physical system, determinate or indeterminate, and either way operating beyond the knowledge and will of the offender. But we are not given an explanation of how physics or syntax can explain the semantic content of phrastics beyond vagaries like semantics emerge causally from signification behaviour. In the absence of a clear reductive argument, the list given in the paper of alternative punishment regimes, many unethical by our present standards, is not an argument for dispensing with our actual one, which assumes voluntary responsibility as the norm and nonphysicalist indeterminism. Like others, Physicalists too presuppose teleological reasoning in their work of research, discovery, teaching, and application (Goetz and Taliaferro (2008); Stump, (2003); Nagel (2012). Intentionality and the complex linguistic relations examined under Speech Act Theory, with different directions of fit and causality resulting from different mood operators on phrastics, which are about a signified meaning/topic, resulting in different speech acts, and tacitly assumed background expectations and norms, and the hierarchy of words and sentences from phonetic, syntactic, semantic, to pragmatic/truth verification. These relations do not easily map onto any mathematical, formal-logical, physical, scientific/probabilistic, or algorithmicsyntactical relations, which might be linked to electrons, strings etc. by means of possible future inductive bridging laws. Identity, self-identity, having determinate properties, knowledge, and existence are close in sense, appearing in all seven criteria of “exists” we canvassed in the E question. At present most mind/body correlations are not one to one, but one to many, and contingent. Often results disclose mental states to be contingently identical with physical ones, and mental states are often architectonic, permitting bio-feedback and extension of voluntary flexing of capacity. For example, when researchers cause bodily reactions, subjects usually know they are not producing them. The identity issue raised above, under the seven possible senses or meanings of “is,” makes assessing the identity of body and mind difficult. A constant correlation or causal interaction is not proof of identity, especially if the underlying analogy chosen to express the relation is not clear. The mind body connection looks to one-many, not one to one, as identity would suggest, and to be contingent. The exponential complexity and number of enabling physical brain activities supporting thoughts, etc do not easily map onto the comparatively rough and vague, often quite simply described, mental states enabled/supported by them. Many researchers into brain and mind connectivity who are scientists, and some who are broadly “naturalists,” do not accept physicalism/reductionism or mind–body identity, but are “dualisticinteractionists,” not physicalists (Eccles 1994; Eccles and Popper 1977; Eccles and Robinson 1984; Penrose 1989). Many scientists question the complete causal closure of the Universe, the idea that it is a unified causal system with no chance events, and total conservation of all energy, and they allow for as yet unmapped types or manifestations of mental energy. Discourse in neurophysiology of the brain is just a special case of intentionality, where the speech act is: “explaining,” and the contents of the phrastics are made up of a) concepts used in descriptive laws and predictions about physical and biological realities encountered in brain and nervous system; b) psychological tendency or state ascriptions, with some inductive track record of success; c) bridging laws between these. A good explanation of a person’s mind and will would offer bridging laws, or tendency attributions, linking brain-states and neural entities to

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psychological states. We already have quite a few such causal connections, established mainly through the study of many types of abnormalities, causing aberrations in types of function, like memory loss. But they are often not stated as determinate law-like or recursive functions. They show however that the brain contingently enables thought, but not that it is the directing, causing thinker, who consciously notices her loss of capacity. Worry and stress (mental entities) cause illness (physical entities); bad ingestion habits (physical) cause headaches and pains (mental). It does not make sense to say we will eventually discover that, despite the strong appearances to us of normal conscious mental control or lack of it, and of free choice, we will turn out to actually have had no effective free minds or wills, if and when we complete such an explanation. The proposed use of Mead’s (1934) “generalised other” to explain conscience arising, and the attempt to construct an explanation of the self and its action in terms of a mix of conscious and unconscious processes, “fluid processes which do stuff around language” and “sometimes gain control of consciousness,” is too sketchy to do the work of analysing the role of the self or ego and giving a new justification of punishment and penal reform on physicalist assumptions. Even Searle, a committed naturalist, denies we can get rid of a self. The final metaphor invoked of a person observing and/or managing a coalition of various entities, some under voluntary control, some unconscious, and some not always so, leaves us wondering which entities are in which category. A coalition is an interpersonal relation of fully personal entities. The subentities canvassed as causes of behaviour are clearly not persons. If they are personal in an analogical sense, we need an account of this analogical attribution that leaves the self as a directing agent, with intellect and will, and of Ethics. The metaphor of an interpersonal coalition does not fit the description of contending impersonal factors given.

Circular and Contradictory The Physicalist implies that each alternative punishment regime intends some outcome – revenge control, celebration of victorious slaughter of enemies, deterrence, or race purification, so it is a circular argument which does not explain away intentions. It studiously avoids making moral judgement on several regimes which are morally obnoxious; and does not mention a current morally defensible one of major importance-reform/rehabilitation of the presumedvoluntary offender. Physicalism has these very undesirable results for moral responsibility which should be recognised as a reduction ad absurdum of the whole physicalist project, not meek acceptance of Laplace’s physicalist/determinist account of persons. Physicalist philosophers of a reductionist hue, like Dennett (1969) in the Philosophy of Mind, tend to go where physicists fear to tread. They do not like the idea of abstract objects like universal concepts, numbers, phrastics and propositions, existing or having inherent meaning not caused to arise from physically objects or observable behaviour. But these disparaged intentional objects and dispositions are (inconsistently) still used by physicalists to explain away intentionality, through physicalist reduction. Physicalists strive to avoid circularity but inevitably tend to deny inherent intentionality and make use of presuppositions about the relation of syntax to semantics, information to knowledge, previous knowledge to new information. Dretske (1984) treats a signal r carrying information s is F and receipt of “s is F” as a probably/causal claim, resulting in increased knowledge. But if the idea is to explain propositional attitudes like belief and knowledge with information, there should be no reference to belief, or the mind of the receiver of the information. The occurrence of events with unit probability cannot as such constitute knowledge of them. (Robinson 1997) The receiver must

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apprehend/know the causal relation to receive the information. One cannot jump from physical events or images to meaningful signs to syntactical markers, or from signs to their interpreters/receivers. According to Armstrong (1968), we allegedly assign meanings to things with no meaning as if they had meaning, but the process of assigning “as if meaning” is not explained without reference to existing propositional attitudes like belief. The allegedly “epiphenomenal,” physically caused beliefs, wants, and reasons were supposed to be analysed away or reductively explained in the new materialist epistemology, but they are not. Encoding of physical signs and decoding them are conscious intentional acts (Tallis 1991). Some physical objects have representational significance or sense, but it is not a physical property of the object itself. Persons interpret the object as indicating or communicating a message about something – the phrastic (not a physical object)- to the interpreter in a context. The Physicalist says (or should or must say): 1) Everything real is physical or caused by physical objects like brains and viewed trees etc. 2) Physical objects have observable quantifiable extension. 3) Instances of the property “being Physical” are true of them. 4) Properties are mental entities, and truth is a mental entity. 5) Mental entities do not exist and are not real (from 1 above). 6) Propositions 1-5 are not physical objects. 7) So propositions 1-5, including the concept of truth, are not really real and do not really exist. So Physicalism cannot be true, and is actually self-contradictory.

The Reduction Ad Absurdum Argument against Physicalism The oldest argument against deterministic Physicalism is the reduction ad absurdum argument to the effect that accepting Physicalist-determinist assumptions does indeed lead to the abolition of praise and blame and of responsibility/punishment, and so it leads logically to social chaos and moral collapse. The conclusion is socially absurd. So, some premise in the set of materialist assumptions must be false. Hard physical reductionism must be wrong somewhere, since its social consequences would be catastrophic (Aquinas).

CONCLUSION ON FREE CHOICE The conscious self/mind/soul seems intuitively to be a simple psychological substance, with some physical-like properties, such as duration but unified in time by memory. A stream of consciousness including colours and sounds (qualia) seems to occur in a self or ego which can be, in a way not normally discussed in physics of relativity, dealing generically with energy, speed, and mass. Selves can also be “self-conscious”- conscious that they are conscious. In short, human consciousness and self-awareness is not public, not divisible into physical parts with definite size shape and location but is in some way temporal. Awareness is immediate and not inferred, flexible at will, and incorrigible in the sense we have “privileged access” to our ideas and “appearances” even when we are mistaken about facts. We alone know how it seems

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to us. The hierarchical, “hylomorphic” organisation of the brain and nervous systems at different levels which emerges in brain physiology (e.g., reptilian, limbic, cerebral cortex), is not reducible to parts, or by reference to bits with only different syntactical-physical properties. The universal concepts in definitions (semantics); propositions; and numbers, and used in these physical theories of mind, are not just physical objects, but clearly exist in some way and explain physical entities better than vice versa. Physics is changing rapidly all the time, so we cannot identify Physics with today’s account of matter (conceived either as universally indeterminate or determined) and be certain where it will end up. The natural science project is distinct from the physicalist project. It might disclose that there are what are, presently considered “super-natural” powers, as mobile phones would be to previous generations. If we accept metaphysical possibility and impossibility along with logical and causal possibility and ethical norms of the intellect, there is no contradiction in the idea that one’s body might undergo molecular or radical change while one remained the same person if one’s memories and character were the same, perhaps “embodied” in different stuff.

PART 2

Chapter 7

BRINGING BACK GOD AND RELIGION We have now removed some of the general reductive physicalist obstacles – physical determinism and indeterminism- to this project of rehabilitating theism and religion. Nonmaterial objects exist, either as exotic properties of brains (Property dualism) or as separable substances/agents (Substance dualism). A defensive consideration or line of thought favouring the legitimacy of theistic R2 and religious R3 level discussion might be drawn from the ultimate dependency of natural science and human history and psychology, on individual human intuitive knowledge and experience, and on knowledge, and reports of experiences of others, including reflection on the notion and role of trust in testimony (Coady 1992). Natural science reasoning does not exhaust reason. The simple apprehension of individual concepts often requires reasoning; the grasping of phrastics or propsitional contents, modal operators, and directions of fit applications in contexts, working out speaker meaning and success in speech acts; all these are not exercises of natural science reasoning. Tracts of Philosophical or Ethical reasoning are not applications of natural scientific reason. History is not natural science. Reflecting on oneself or a loved other person in the I-Thou mode of Buber is not natural scientific reasoning. All this is self-evident and obvious but easily forgotten when we are told that natural science has proved the falsity or irrelevance of a whole class or class of facts, such as the facts about the soul, free choice, or an afterlife. Adopting the NAVE “moderate realist” position, we used it to establish the reality in some way or sense of immaterial thought. We assumed that some extended objects, like trees and ants, can exist, even when not observed, and are also dispositional “permanent possibilities of sensation,” possibilities actualised provided only that other macro-objects can simultaneously be apprehended, tacitly but successfully, apart from subjective experiences being involved. We say: “If you have normal vision, and look north from the pier on a clear day, then you will see (have the visual experience of) the bridge.” The antecedent first clause mentions sighting - the act of looking; a direction “north from the pier” and place; and assumes a known public location. It is not just a propositional report of a bundle of passive sensory experience of eye/head direction, and of a pier, followed by a reported bridge-ish experience. The last clause is about subjective sense data but not the antecedent clause, which assumes a background of a healthy body capacity, light conditions, an “objective” place, and public objects, and a tacit normality. “Turning to look” is an action we do, not just a passively experienced impression. It would not be the same to say:” If you have a visual experience a and b, then it will be followed by you having an experience c.” No causal predictions can be made from mere reports of

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clusters of correlated sense-data alone without some posited objects apprehended in a nonsubjective background. A reductive account of all the terms into sense data events in the above example would be completely unintelligible and /or useless. Hume notoriously casts doubt on our knowledge of ourselves, as continuous objects, because we only experience an episodic self. He inconsistently treats actions as impressions “we knowingly give rise to,” not passively received sense data. But one might well wonder how this sort of passive self “gives rise to” impressions and why the self, which wonders about the inner imperceptible essence of material objects, acknowledges its ignorance, uses its memory to actively investigate that essence by manipulating objects in experiments, and will judge any tendered explanation complete or unsuccessful or impossible, can or must, for that reason, take itself also be a mysterious, noumenal, merely posited object, because not perceived by the senses (Yandell 1990). Atoms and electrons in turn are posited to explain the posited continuing physical macro objects, like eyes, piers, and bridges, but their inner invisible spatio-temporal properties are not presumed to be experientially known, as that of the disposition-attributed, experienced macroobjects usually are. As to knowledge of the micro entities in Physics, their descriptions have to be translated into ordinary language and at some point instruments trained on data concerning micro-explanations, have in turn themselves to be perceptually checked, and the instruments themselves like electron microscopes are macro objects, like the tree, ant, or table. If therefore reference to an experiencing mind cannot be completely eliminated from micro-applications of “physical” terms, whether at macro or micro levels, in referring to the abstracted notions of matter and material objects, then the complete reductive elimination or dismissal of the superor meta-physical cannot be consistently pulled off. This argument for the ineliminable reality of the mental and the mind-body non-identity or causal relation is set out in Chapter 6. On this moderate realist account, close to Idealism but different from it, no “material object’ can be defined or identified without a mind to do the identifying, even if minds turn out in the end to be physical. When, as seems certain, one day there will be no humans, there may still be what humans used to identify as material objects, but they will not then have many of the human co-dependent abstracted “material” properties, like colour, but only potential or dispositional/subjunctive counterfactual ones. Till our extinction, even if minds in turn can be proved to be wholly “physical” objects, we will still need to mark a distinction between mental and physical, and there will remain a concept of the relation of mind and object, as distinct entities. Hume and Kant throw doubt on aspects of our knowledge of macro objects because we do not know their complete micro nature as material objects. If the knowledge of the macrolevel object at normal level, based on past observation of activity and memory, depends on tacit knowledge, which is never absent in perception, and is not destroyed by ignorance of the perceived object’s inner micro-essence, this sort of perceptual knowledge by a self can persist, and the self along with it (Dreyfus and Taylor 2015). So, our experience of knowing is of immateriality and materiality combined, not matter alone. The second strand of the general theistic belief defence is that there is no general knockdown argument against testimony about experience of supernatural or religious events (Coady 1992; Yandell 1993; Alston 1991). In fact, we naturally accept historical narrative truths and natural knowledge of our collectively remembered past, despite our possible fallibility and our episodic consciousness; we experience interruptions of consciousness in our continuous life; and we posit or assume a continuous living self in some ways like the way we posit a continuous chair to explain episodic perceptions of chairs. We can accept correction

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from the record or by others in some cases. But while we are conscious, the self is not inferred but directly and infallibly experienced. The alleged problem of the self’s existence and selfknowledge cannot be not generated by reference to the episodic nature of consciousness alone. A sleeping unconscious self is still a self. It is illegitimate to make sceptical generalisations from instances of false and unreliable or uncheckable memory; or sincere but mistaken testimony regarding one’s past behaviour and/or macro-objects. Such mistakes only warrant inductions not deductions and are not found in the non-inferential statement: “I am having the experience of seeing an ant now” whose truth establishes the existence of the self who has the “perceiving an ant” experience, as Descartes claimed, and Augustine before him. Testimony is about human experiences, usually about the past, and its truth just is possible. If the historical past does not exist, then how do we correctly remember and know it, as we do in fact? In Aristotle, time is a category of being, analogically attributed being. Its existence is a question of Epistemology, and of Metaphysics. It raises in turn further questions concerning historical evidence, the types of evidence and standards of evidence, the reliability of memory, the relation of time to space, energy, motion, and light; the relation of experience and trust; and differences of logical and real possibility and probability. These are not just Physics questions, but they are all logically well-formed, and answerable in principle. Resort to generalised scepticism about human testimony about the non-material on the grounds of there being no visible self or many instances of failed memory and misidentification, does not help to rule them out or answer them. They seem prima facie intelligible. Scepticism about religious claims or questions cannot be inferred from general scepticism because there is no case for general scepticism, which will pick out religious questions, experience, or historical testimony alone as especially dubitable. Even though many people question whether we can have any confidence that such Why? questions or causal questions, as theism and religion suggest, are meaningful, they can still be applied to truth itself, or to causal reasoning itself. Many find them to be valid and answerable in ways which they take to be coherent, and important enough to persist with theological answers and religious ethics. Theological revelation of the divine will for humans, is usually alleged to be disclosed in some historical scriptures and religious revelations as conceived by an institutional body like a church. This church or religious institution claims to hand down its history through “apostolic succession” and testimony about significant events. It passes on the faith or revelation in a creed or testimony-based tradition with distinctive practices. In the theist and religious treatments of Natural Law, its content is sometimes but not always regarded as subject to and limited by faith, and some sort of claim to over-ride its imperatives, if God commands. These grand narratives or total interpretations alleged to be passed on though apostolic succession are coherent, and they are believed by many moral saints and heroes. There are many reasons against the added supposition of theism, and of the historical actions of supernatural entities, but it will be argued in Part 3 that given the many testimonies available about higher powers, the objections are not conclusive or demonstrative. Articles of “naturalist faith”, such as that “others will be moral if one is moral” or “I should be moral although most others are acting immorally,” play a key role in the secular NAVE and NL foundations. Theism can in theory include any gods describable in so-called Negative Theology, non-omniscient and non-omnipotent gods, pantheism, deism or creationism. In a theistic natural law, TNL, which will discuss God, the higher being(s) may be said to exist in a different sense or mode of existence, or as objects of reason in a different sense or application of reason than the natural

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scientific. In Anthropology, a naturalist may be a reductive physicalist – one believing that persons are ultimately just physical objects, and souls and minds are either physical or nonexistent epiphenomena. This stipulative definition of nature unfairly attempts to rule out the project of this book as logically contradictory. But in the usage adopted here, a naturalist may be a non-physicalist, a property dualist/interactionist who thinks of humans as composites, or a substance dualist. The property dualist has the view that minds do exist, but after interacting with brains and nervous systems in life, when people die, they cease to exist, since their bodies, necessary for them to live, cease to do so; or in a broader non-exclusive sense of naturalist, a naturalist can also be a substance dualist, who believes humans are composite natural beings but that the soul/mind is an immaterial/immortal subject, which is now the form of a body, but may still survive death in some other form. We look first at how admission of R2 questions and Natural theology, NL with god but without religion, result in a TNL positing a God, without a Revelation of intent; and then at what the metaethical implications of admitting such a God of the philosophers turn out to be. Such talk about God is mostly analogical-God does not exist as an instance of a species or type, but as cause of all types of existent; although rational qua cause of rational effects, He is not literally a composite person, so not good in precisely the same way as we are; not literally knowing as we are or loving as we are. His creatures love others. Confessional religions often over-assimilate human and divine justice and love, and atheists often invoke maximal altruistic IRPs without knowing their historical and theological roots. The analogical turn makes possible the acceptance of real but imperfect similarity between Gods and men, and the truth of both “God exists” and “God does not exist” in different senses and respects. The first difference theism makes to NAVE metaethically is we now can ask causal questions about the whole metaethical structure of NAVE – the five elements of: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Existence/Being Human Beings The good of human beings The means to the good of human beings The decision-making method for choice of the existent means to human goods.

Moving from 1-5 is a procedure which represent increasing specification, one which humans can follow in their practical rational actions, using casuistry, and it will mention entities which can be caused The entities at all five levels and the entire set of phenomena cited in the procedure is now treated in Natural Theology as a phenomenon to be explained- as an effect to be explained by some cause, beginning with Ontology -1) above. Aristotle had asked in natural science what caused motion. Aquinas now asks “What causes Being?” The additions in ontology allowed by questions of this type, we will dub the R2 level entities. The reflections which R2 might permit, and are normally consistent with natural science, dubbed level R1, are these:

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ONTOLOGY OF TNL From R2, we can get the question: “Why is there anything at all?” A believer might answer that it is reasonable to posit (but not prove) the existence of a creating God who is a necessary being, or beyond being as science knows it, arguing from an alleged effect (the entire cosmos or world) to a cause (God). This sort of argument is developed by Thomists like Gilson (1941), Owens (1958) and Kretzmann, (1999) and by analytic Thomists like Haldane (2010), and can be combined with NAVE. Those allowing R2 based arguments for the existence of God accept an argument like this: 1) Every event has a cause, ultimately traceable to an existing substance. This principle is a universal necessary,” synthetic a priori” truth of fact, applicable to contingent events. 2) A mark of mind’s scientific knowledge is necessity, generality, and universal truth. This is shown in relations between universals, (Aristotle’s secondary substances) and between timeless entities, like lines and triangles; or between the number one, and the square of 1 the cube of 1, etc; or between motion and time. In mathematics/logic/ geometry systems, their axioms necessarily entail their theorems. In physics, generality is shown in applications of law - like probabilistic theories, whose true tendency claims; or strong probability assertions/laws, enable successful prediction in accord with premise 1) above. 3) The Universe is a complex set of finite substances and caused events, possibly infinite in time (eternal) which exhibits a mind-friendly “fine-tuned” structure, and necessary connections and rational order/intelligibility, amazingly apprehended by mind through mathematics, logic, and law-like causal/probabilistic reasoning. 4) We can ask of this Universe: “Why does it exist”? rather than nothing, or rather than a differently fine-tuned world, one where e.g., time elapses very much faster or water is not always H2O. Why are the physical events on earth paced at a speed sufficient to be mind-friendly, permitting scientific success? 5) The cause/effect is in some analogous respect like the effect/cause. Effects are in some respect (categories of quantity, or quality, relation or action) like or similar in some respect to their cause. The Universe (effect) contains rational beings and rationally discernible order. 6) The Universe has to have an infinite cause, ultimately a rational substance. Its explanation requires a timeless, necessary being. 7) The cause of the Universe is: ordered, necessary, rational, being, but it cannot itself be material, since if material, it would be a composite, and need a cause, ad infinitum. 8) What causes/creates mind, also exhibits mind. A purely material object could not create the mind-friendly Universe. 9) The ultimate source of the Universe is an ordered, immaterial, minded, necessary being who causes/creates all non-necessary (contingent) beings, including minded immaterial free subjects. This argument is just a sample of the sort found in Natural Theology, made up here to suggest what goes on there. Whether it is persuasive, there are many philosophers who believe

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some version of it is sound, and so immaterial, freely-choosing subjects are not problematic to them (Cottingham 2008; Davies 1984; Haldane 2010; Schlesinger 1988; Swinburne 1995; Yandell 1990)33. They say the onus of proof lies on the materialist, not the theist, since causality is a normal principle, now just being applied to the whole cosmos. If such an immaterial being exists, it can create immaterial souls with free will. But they still worry about free will for nonphysicalist reasons, because the argument might suggest that minded acts are caused by an omniscient and omnipotent God, so they work to defend the argument and still assure free choice is only enabled, not causally determined by God. We leave them to it for the present. DGE exponents have indeed tried to down-play the lack of proof in religious grand narratives and other differences with naturalism by arguing that God and faith claims are not less credible than our assumed knowledge of other minds. It is argued for example that one cannot prove one’s own existence; or that one cannot prove scientifically that of one’s friends exist either, which has been claimed by Plantinga (1967) in his God and Other Minds. God’s existence is no more improbable than that of other minds. However clever the argument, this is strongly counter intuitive, and not in alignment with NAVE or Thomist realist epistemology. Some have also defended philosophical Idealism as a general truth with the same aim. It is said that we do not have any reason to favour the existence of material objects over mental objects, since both are taken to be real objects ultimately based on sense-perceptions. On this view, one tries to then prove God is a Supreme Mind necessary for all knowledge of existence, and then deduces what the range and nature of our minds must be, qua our being images of God’s mind or vice versa. An account of this type was given by the 18th century philosopher George Berkeley and more recently by Keith Ward (2017). Again, though inherently plausible, this line of thought is foreign to NAVE epistemology. There are, from a NAVE and a Thomist standpoint, intuitively strong reasons for accepting scientific truths, and R1. In modern terms, the testing of hypotheses by reference to observation and repeated predictable observation is good reason to accept the relevant hypotheses. The claims of theistic metaphysics depend on acknowledging natural science as successful, and then posing the question: “Why is that so?” There is no contest of science and theist ontology at this point. The analysis of why science succeeds has to be based on realism in epistemology and the NAVE and Thomist view about how one knows that trees and artefacts like tables exist, is the same. In Chapter 1) on the 3Rs and Chapter 3 on free choice, and the beginning of the Chapter we saw that Neo-Aristotelians can affirm moderate realism. It denies that a single sense perception itself is explicable in terms of other sense-perceptions alone, without presuming the real existence of some macro-objects like trees and tables, and a background as ultimate. Compare: “If you stand over there near the wall, you will see (have the experience of) the whale”; and “if you have the experience of willing to stand near the wall, and of standing near the wall, you will have the experience of seeing the whale.” The latter is not assuming the existence of eyes and walls and whales. The case for the rationality of R2 is best made in some way that does not threaten reason R1 being accepted as in some way as the ground of successful science, and also the source of R2 and R3s’ support, yet not their complete source. Because R2 and R3 accept but go beyond R1, they are not necessarily either contradicting R1’s superiority in its own sphere; or conceding its superiority in theirs.

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See the website Christians in Science and Technology for some interesting surprises

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Owens (1958) in his The Doctrine of Being in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, draws attention to the fact that Aristotle takes motion as requiring an ultimate cause, but not being. Aquinas on the other hand distinguishes esse (being) from essence (substantial nature), and thinks esse is contingently separate from essence in all beings except God. He has, like Aristotle, a category of beings like celestial beings, for him angels, which are necessary, in the sense of eternal in one direction-the future, but only God is absolutely necessary as creator of all contingent beings, including such eternal ones. In addition to the causal story of the genesis of human life from sperm and ovum, each person’s soul is joined to its body in a composite by its own given “act of being,” which is a metaphysical gift it then exercises. As Deck (1967) pointed out, the problem is that while we can (perhaps) imagine “nothing,” being changed to something, all change we know of is not a transition from nothing to being, but the coming to be of one being from another. Speech is the closest analogue. We do not l make assertions out of pre-existing words, but words do pre-exist. The creation ex nihilo found in the three religions of the Bible, is possibly imaginable as a change from a dark or light void, but we have no real idea of this state of affairs, or whether it ever existed. On the other hand, it does seem intelligible to wonder if the sperm and ovum story of human creation is complete, and whether even eternal objects, which might need to be immaterial as a condition of their eternity, still need to be brought into being eternally by some immaterial source, and that this absolute cause of causes might need to be an eternal, necessary, non-composite, immaterial being. Gilson, Owens, Kretzmann and many other Thomists, think that a state of affairs with nothing else than God existing as a necessary being, followed by His creation of the nonnecessary existent world ex nihilo, is a sort of “explanation” of the world’s coming into existence, and is intelligible. God is a subsistent necessary immaterial being in whom alone being and essence are identical. As noted, the historical Plato and Aristotle were both theists of sorts. Aristotle extolled contemplation of his God, the Unmoved Mover of the outermost heaven, and the other celestial movers, as the best activity, that is, the most choice-worthy from the standpoint of wellbeing: the highest object of the highest power. Intuition, understanding, reason, and science are also higher goods. Aquinas’ “creator-God” takes over the THG spot from Humanity. Without adopting the existence of God assumption as a further bridge to the R3 level alleged revelations about an afterlife and its qualifying conditions, and to the adoption of IRPs 6-9, it is not clear that adopting Theism by itself, without confessional religion, has a significant impact on Ethics, either in content or motivation. What is different is first the notion that possibly God, if conceived or somehow shown by analogical causal argument to be infinite, immaterial, necessary, omnipotent, or omniscient, a cause of created being, taken as “good” in the sense of better than nothing, but subject to privation and disorder, has divine powers over us. But if we do not know what these powers are or what He wants from us, we might well conclude as the Biblical character Job in the book of the same name does: “The Lord has given, the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” In other words, accept that the gift of life is pro tanto normally better than nothing; its removal is normally regrettable, but the whole thing is a mystery. The classic problem of evil can arise for Natural Theology as well as Revealed Theology. The analogy of attribution doctrine in NL metaethics assists in making sense of God talk and petitionary prayer talk as analogical-not mere poetry and not literal ascription. God is not a good existing natural person in the same sense as one’s moral heroes and saints, but as cause

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of Nature(s) and of all being and good we can infer something significant about God’s “nature.” He can be “personal” in having a mind/will of some sort.

TNL’S ANTHROPOLOGY OF CAPACITY Once again, the added question is: “Why are there human beings?” “Why do they act via a teleological rational ends-means-choice- act structure.” This is regarded as not being fully answered by a physical causal account of the emergence of the species. In NAVE, humanity was assumed as THG. It was taken that the capacities of rational animals have an architectonic teleological structure we referred to as the DOE structure: capacities as directors, operators and enablers. If we press this question about the teleology of human capacity, we might ask: “Why is it so?” If we grant that there is a possibility of freedom of choice and self-governance; of knowledge of the highest causes and goods; and enjoyment of the true goods, this ability seems to be worthy of some reflection on its conditions and possibility, which is infinite or indefinite and non-material in the senses we reviewed in Chapter 3. Chapter 6 considered the idea that mind is immaterial and it is was also just suggested above in the cosmological argument for God’s existence, premises 8 and 9. It is common for people to attribute the same qualities of knowledge and love in humans to humanity’s alleged cause, God, in supreme or perfected form-omniscience and omnipotence, so God is certainly at least an ideal projection of humans, as Feuerbach (1855) held in The Essence of Christianity. If God actually created humans, it is possible that the cause is like the effect in some way and so the effect is like the cause - an image of God. Analogy of attribution would allow some limited knowledge of God as cause of humans with the DOE structure - perhaps as having quasi-directive (fatherly), operational (filial/cooperative) and enabling (spiritual) aspects. The existence of an immaterial God as agent-cause of all could support the existence of the human soul as a separable substance over its being only a property of human bodies. This suggests a second consequence of Theism is in regard to individuation. The replacement of THG by an omnipotent God does have the effect of allowing for alleviating the problem of individuation of immaterial beings raised in Chapter 2 for property dualism, by allowing for possible invocation of an omniscient divine creation of individual souls, and to the extent that substance dualism suggests the need for an individuated substantial immaterial agent-self with an idiosyncratic history as discussed in Chapter 3, an omnipotent creative God’s existence helps along with DNA to form a bridge to R3 level revelation. The end of the geocentric universe with Copernicus shook Dante’s type of belief, as expressed in the Divine Comedy, but Christianity survived the collapse of the Ptolemaic universe, and later of Darwin, because it was never wholly about natural science or prehistoric cosmology. Co-discoverer of the human genome, Collins, and those believers on the Christians in Science and Technology website who take the success of mathematical physics to be a sort of miracle, do draw comfort from theism in the sense of Natural Theology, but they treat science as only confirmatory of belief.In allowing an immaterial supreme being, the idea of an immaterial human soul, self-governing and self- creating, and substance dualism, as opposed to property dualism, is rendered more plausible.

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On the negative side, the divine attributes of simplicity, immateriality, eternity, perfection, omnipotence, omniscience inferred in Natural Theology present some difficulties for understanding the relation between creatures and creator, such as how we are free to act when God must know what we will do; and for DGE how the God of Scripture can “change his mind” about Isaac or Jonah, yet be immutable; or create an imperfect world with suffering and wickedness while being perfect. We will return to these issues in Part 3.

THE HUMAN GOOD AND WELLBEING IN TNL There need not be a change of criteria for the description of the molar ingredients in wellbeing, but a theist might say that if the highest object of the highest power is God, contemplation of God will figure in human wellbeing. Any divine-like experiences, like seeing traces of the action of God in every creature, mystical union, answers to prayer, and possibly miracles, and transcendent “I-thou” relations may be graduated as ingredients of wellbeing. If God is immaterial and eternal, immaterial souls may be also created to have an after-life, and there is possibly such a thing as eternal wellbeing. As Part 3 will show a main atheist argument is drawn from the existence of a natural and moral evil. How can a good and omnipotent God permit or allow evil in her creation? Once we allow the question: “Why is there successful science and human wellbeing?” there is also a “question of the good” and the question arises how good and evil are related, and whether finite good being can exist without evil. Why is our level of human wellbeing generally possible?

PRINCIPLE, PRECEPTS, AND VIRTUES For theism alone, there need be no change in precepts except as necessary to protect contemplation and prayer in those versions of theism allowing for its effectiveness. A purely rational “god of the philosophers” would not necessarily support significantly different content in precepts unless it could be shown to be well-disposed to humans, and have a message for them to change their ways.

CASUISTRY For theism alone, casuistry is only altered where the correlative account of wellbeing is altered by the positing of God, and an account of his attitude to humans is added. The Deists God of the seventeenth and eighteenth century could fit in here as THG, and any contemporary theist philosophical schools, provided that they have no religious or confessional addenda, because we are excluding them for the moment to discuss theism only. Even if one can show God’s nature and will is good and well-disposed to humans, the main changes to the moral content in these cases is modest. It only elevates contemplation of God in preference to other intellectual activities. In the “meaning of life” literature, (Seachris 2014) it is sometimes suggested that since God is in some way personal, an existent God who is aware of humans as part of His creation, this gives significance to the human project. But it is far from

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clear that even if present, this Divine awareness alone adds anything indispensable to naturalism without an account of divine interaction with humans. Further, Mackie talks of “the miracle of theism” and a medieval satire had a sultan convert to Christianity because the church was so corrupt that it could not have lasted miraculously without divine help. Perhaps, the existence of an intelligible universe is indeed miraculous, and awesome, but it is a big step from there to accepting religious practices and belief and IRP 6-9 morality. That brings us beyond theism to DGE.

THE DGE DIFFERENCE If we now admit R3 questions and religious answers based on alleged revelations we can now ask: if there is a God, “How is She disposed to humans?” “How can we know?.” At this level, dubbed the R3 level, Aquinas best represents the case for an extended NL or Divine Law associated with religion and integrated with NAVE. Rather than expounding his ST in detail, we will take the short cut of building onto NAVE, indicating where his additions would come in and why. Our constructed DGE is just Thomism in a different form. From now on we allow the 3R questions we earlier dubbed R2 and R3 and see how they might interface with NL’s five elements. They do offer some theistic and religious answers, and they can add something at all five levels to the NAVE story. We will not at this stage accept or reject the answers they give. In no case are the proposed propositional contents of these beliefs, which we are treating as addenda, probable scientifically or provable in R1 terms. The claim of the believers in DGE themselves is that they are deliverances of Reason-type R2 and R3.

Adding Religion: An Overview of Aquinas Summa Theologica The First Part of this Summa deals with God, creation, and angels. Man’s nature is dealt with in QQ 75-89. The Second Part deals with Man’ wellbeing QQ 1-5; acts, 6-21; passions, 22-48; habits, 49-54; virtues 55-70; principles of ethics and law 90-108; and then grace 109-114. The Third Part deals with Christ and the Sacraments. NL in the Aquinas DGE version is mainly discussed in the Second Part, Questions 90-108, on which the addenda here are based. For our purpose we need only pick out some key relevant points.

Ontology We have already noted in the discussion of self-evidence and NL in Chapter 1 Aquinas’ Five Ways arguments at ST 1a, 2, and article 3 for God’s existence and the way he (debatably) identifies the entity concluded to there: the uncaused cause, Unmoved Mover, exemplar of goodness and so on, with the Christian creator-God. The argument for God’s existence we set out above in the ontology of theism would be endorsed by Aquinas. We already discussed under theism how the idea that esse or being as such and contingent beings with essences as well as motion needs a creating cause, alters the notion of God and leads to a set of problems/questions about foreknowledge and evil.

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In answer to the R3 question, Aquinas’ added extensive faith claims or religious beliefs, about the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus, which are not scientifically provable at any level, but they are still possibly reasonable, since science does not exhaust the scope of reason. One can reason from one personal observation or experience or intuition to another; from testimony about experiences given by others; from single unrepeated historical events and alternative axioms to those of the best science at the time. Intuition can be of individuals as individuals or more abstractly of individuals as specimens or tokens of species or types. A version of the inconclusive argument presented under theism above, using causality and analogy is explicitly given for God, and is now supplemented by faith claims about revelations documented in Scripture or the Bible. With R3 and religious belief, the rationality of the case is different from R2. Religious belief usually does presuppose some form of theism, but it also is based on religious experience, claims based on testimony passed on via apostolic succession regarding history, the alleged power of prayer, and mostly on testimony about “supernatural” events and beings like the Holy One or avatar, and not just on NL, natural science, or metaphysics. Religious faith hopes to be “normally” consistent with natural science but recognises that many miraculous events which testimony asserts to have happened, appear to be the work of higher powers and contradict natural science laws. For them, that shows science has limits. As to the possible moral addenda from allowing the R3 question, there is a very challenging teaching about agape we discussed at the start of the book, like compassion represented by IRP 6-9. Such teachings are based ultimately on religious experience, testimony, and prayer, none of which is easily integrated into NAVE. However, feature of DGE needs to be recognised as present alongside NL, as it was for many centuries, and will emerge again in Part 3. The religious grand narrative tends to refer to activities of immaterial spirits and what we now call Psychic Phenomena. Those claiming reason supports theism and religion nearly always also believe in an afterlife and disembodied souls. In defending free choice in Chapter 3 we listed eight arguments against reductive Physicalism. There is also some contestable anecdotal evidence for post–death life based on such things as that: psychics have extraordinary powers, and from the contested programmes of Psychical Research, at Edinburgh, Stanford, Princeton, Virginia, Duke and Arizona Universities that indicate that humans have untapped powers to control their bodies via mental exercises e.g., concerning stopping of breathing for an hour along with above normal success in transmission of thoughts or finding bodies. There is also anecdotal evidence from post mortem sightings that souls or soul-remnants can exist after death; of “autoscopy” from near-death experiences (NDEs) of patients; from some spiritualists’ uncanny successful location of dead bodies; from documented premonitions or remote contemporary experience of catastrophic disaster; especially among twins; recall of plausible minutiae of claimed reincarnations in past lives, some under hypnosis; some from abnormal psychology of hysteria; alleged better than chance transfer of concepts/image and even pains in twins at a distance and miraculous healings, all of which suggest that “supernatural” powers, beings or entities exist (Almeder 1990; Murphy 1992). While clearly emerging from matter and interacting with it, and our dead bodies’ returning to matter, our souls/minds may be such persisting entities realised otherwise than in familiar embodiment as an undiscovered energy form or in some other way. The failures of “controlled” empirical studies made by the researchers above of a general hypothesis about psychics may reflect the fact that the spirits in question to be experimented on, or about, are not controllable, but free.

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The admission of religious experience, testimony, apostolic succession, and “I-thou” relations open up the possible truth of Scipture and its revelations, based on reason of the weakest kind.

The Anthropology The taxonomy of capacity in NAVE was based on Aquinas’s ST Part I, QQ 75-89, but not his view of the intellectual soul as being capable of resurrection with the resurrection of the body. What if anything, can considerations R2 and R3 add to further the idea that human souls are immaterial in some way? Perhaps that they are substances in their own right, with possible afterlives, and not just the properties of bodies. The biblical addenda suggest the doctrine of humans as images and likenesses of God. In the description of NAVE the principle of individuation was mentioned and a problem about what makes a person as opposed to a purely physical object to be unique. The Glossary entry under individuation mentions the way the problem continued through Al Gazzali, Aquinas, and especially Scotus’s concerns about personal responsibility. Christians like Descartes and Pascal address this somewhat inconclusively, and later Christian existentialist writers like Kierkegaard, the novelist Dostoevski, and the poet G.M. Hopkins expose the failure of philosophers to address the self-reflective or self-conscious element in individual human nature in the course of their attempts to deal with individuality. Rather than modelling our selfunderstanding on substance in general as Aristotle does, Kierkegaard thinks we should treat the personal, self-conscious individual as the only important category, the explanandum which all categories are posited to help us to explain, not something to be explained away by Physicalism in the manner described in Chapter 3 and Chapter 6. The existence of a God who created immaterial souls, a substantial self, might make as good sense of the emergence of an immaterial property of mind as does the story that it is an emergent property of matter, with which account divine creation could possibly co-exist. The soul’s coming to be as a subject of agency, and a substance, fits the creation and religious narrative. If the argument in Chapter 3 establishes an immaterial soul as property or substance, we can perhaps ask: “What caused it to exist?” and argue that its cause too must be immaterial, and speculate about its possible purposes. From R2, perhaps the eight arguments against Physicalism can be pushed further: the soul is not just an immaterial property of evolutionproduced bodies and especially brains in a composite, but, if created by a God, the soul could be an independent immaterial substance with its own agency and with a possible afterlife. This is consistent with the R3 focus on unique personal experience, and even mystical experience, prayer, and testimony, congruent with the Christian belief in the soul’s afterlife. Instead of writing off personal experience, and especially mysticism, because few have such experience, we should recognise that such experiences may reveal some visionary breakthroughs and recall that even scientific truths are often first discovered by then uncorroborated unique personal experiences.

Moral Psychology Aristotle talks about malice and incontinence, in his technical sense of self-restraint but the account of malice in NAVE does not as deeply investigate either extreme good or sanctity, or the most extreme evil, e.g., that of genocide, to the same extent as Moral Theology. Hannah

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Arendt (1963), offering a broadly NAVE account, fills the gap in NAVE, but there seems to be a more comprehensive approach in the post-Holocaust literature from Jewish and Christian theologians, partly due to its adding to the “problem of evil” for religious belief. Christians like Aquinas offered accounts of malice at ST 1-11ae 78 and elsewhere, to explain the fall of the angels, who were seen as wanting to be as God in some respects, but their temerity could not be blamed on simple ignorance or incontinence. It had to be a disorder of will, some sort of “ignore-ance,” not mere desire. It will be argued in Part 3 that DGE has a fuller and better account of malice than NAVE, and the phenomenon of extreme evils such as ethnic cleansing, helped by its more comprehensive 10 point spectrum of moral modality canvassed in Chapter 2.

Wellbeing and Its Ingredient Goods This element of NAVE was based on Aristotle’s NE texts outlined in Chapter 3, but his view of the criteria was shared by Aquinas at S.T. 1a -11ae 1-5. He collected the marks of wellbeing at IIa-11ae Q 180 from the NE and Politics. Aristotle treats contemplation of the highest beings and goods as the intellect’s most delightful outcome. At the scientific level R1, we might think of the pictures of the moon landing of Armstrong and of Earth; or the jubilation of a team of medical researchers putting together the last steps in mapping the human genome. This is not itself reason to favour theism, but it shows a human capacity for selflessly altruistic cooperative intellectual study of the truth over a long period and confirms the possibility of episodic perfect bliss derived from exercising “higher powers” of humans. For Aquinas, contemplation of God is the highest object/use of the highest power in this life. But the key difference with NAVE here is his faith in individual immortality, and a possible vision of God in Heaven for the virtuous and a place in Hell for the wicked. He relies ultimately on religious beliefs, especially about resurrection of the body for this. Building on scientific curiosity, the R2 question is: “Why is this sort of success based on immensely improbable odds having delivered a planet with fine-tuned features permitting such study possible?.” Aquinas gives his famous Five Ways or arguments for God on an argument for God like the one just presented. But for him, R3 questions can only be answered on the basis of Scripture and religious experience, experiments in prayer, and traditional testimony. There are reports by mystics in all religious traditions of episodes of spiritual ecstasy, and some sort of ongoing transcendence or transfiguration of those in receipt of such experiences. There are “I-Thou” relationships; experiences of the sublime and the beautiful (Kant); and numerous reports of extraordinary experiences of seeming suspensions or breaches of natural scientific law, healings, prophetic dreams and intuitions, near–death experiences, and encounters with spirits of the dead. Whatever we say about these, they challenge our conceptions of our capacities, of our human nature. Paradoxically, for some, lack of bliss can be a spur to belief. Many experience a strong feeling of frustration with the quest for wellbeing as we described it in terms of the marks of wellbeing in Chapter 4, yet cannot shake off the restless quest for delight, permanent, immanent, self-sufficient, ultimate, and perfecting goods. The awareness of death inevitably bringing temporal life and relations with loved ones, simply overwhelms them with dread. They can conclude that life is pointless, or that it has a further point than temporal wellbeing. Aquinas says of the sufferings due fear of death that it would be odd if we were the only creatures not to attain our natural telos or wellbeing, which every other animal does, for the most part, so by induction, we probably will do so, but elsewhere in an afterlife.

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Principles, Precepts and Virtues NAVE’s account in Chapter 4 of these elements was partly based on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and part on the parallel account of Aquinas in the second part of the ST at QQ55ff. Aquinas there adds the theological virtues of faith hope and charity and the power of grace at QQ108ff. as necessary to fulfill Divine Law. They are necessary to obey the injunctions of Jesus, expressible in IRPs 7-9. 1. IRP 7 is: “Love God, and love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:30). Aquinas claims this imperative to be part of NL at ST 1a-11ae 100. We have been assuming that God and his existence are not part of NAVE. If the NL precepts are self-evident, and God’s existence is not self-evident to everyone. but only self-evident to the wise, then there is a problem for Aquinas here in having God appear in a precept of NL There is a strong egalitarian message in parables of the Good Samaritan, and Dives and Lazarus, the themes of non-attachment, the dangers of wealth, and of compassion for the poverty or suffering of others. 2. IRP8 is: “Turn the other cheek” (Matt 5:38 and Luke 6:27).34 “Suffer rather than inflict unjustly imposed harm” as an unconditional policy was IRP 6 A; “Vengeance is for God.” The Parable of the wheat and tares discourages vengeance on wicked. If NAVE is only compatible with IRP 1-5, and perhaps IRP 6 B, this goes way beyond NL. “God is Love” (John 4:8-9; ‘Render good for evil’; “Love your enemies” “Forgive your enemies” (Luke 27-28; Matt 18:21-35). The love of strangers, and forgiveness of sinners, (John 3:16; Rom 5:8) and infinite forgiveness of others (1Timothy 2:1; Matt 6:14-15; Luke 17:3-4). “Who, without sin, will cast the first stone at the adulterous woman?.” All these teachings clearly go beyond the meaning of both reciprocity and justice, and would render capital punishment impossible. In the Sermon on the Mount to all this is added the demanding notion that one should avoid even wanting to do the wrong thing, such as lusting after someone else’s spouse, not just doing it, under pain of going to Hell. To lust is already to have committed adultery in one’s heart. We saw earlier that this is not a NL position and we will return to this enormously difficult teaching in Part 3. 3. IRP 9 is: what many consider the absurdly altruistic Christian injunction: “Do unto to others as I have done for you” i.e., laid down my life for my friends, (John 13:34). This is expressed also in John 12:25, as ‘He who loves his life in this world will lose it, while he who hates it will keep it for eternal life”; and in Luke 14:26: and Matt 10:37, “He who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.” This teaching is clearly inviting self-sacrificial love, and goes well beyond justice. Jesus expected to see the good thief crucified with him in Paradise (eternity). There are other resurrection/atonement narratives in non-Christian cultures such as Osiris, but none like this.

Saints and martyrs very often do heroic things for private religious reasons. DGE claims they are often enabled to do so by faith, hope, and charity as theological virtues, and by Grace or supernatural power. They practice non-violence and caritas in unconditional form. Adding some theistic and religious considerations actually requires the concept of Grace and 34

See W. Wink (1984) Naming the Powers for analysis of this text.

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theological virtues. Such virtues enable the performance of superhuman virtuous actions, going beyond rules. This challenges us to consider whether a purely naturalistic morality is able to sustain the kind of motivated sustained virtue which these campaigners exhibit in their heroic and saintly lives. They are very often threatened with death but courageously persist in the virtuous activities because they are confident of Divine reality and their redemption in an afterlife. Universality and exception-less-ness are not necessarily marks of DGE precepts. One can produce a plausible universal prohibition of a type of act by prefixing the word “wanton” or “unreasonable” before the relevant term: “Wanton killing is universally prohibited” is universal, but not informative about the euthanasia case. DGE goes well beyond NAVE, in content, scope, motivation, but it looks doubtful if some of the Sermon on the Mount injunctions about seeking perfection before family could possibly be universal rules or laws of obligation. The temptation to think that the DGE-NL difference is mainly about the difference between universal divine commands and natural prima facie rules of thumb must be resisted. NL too can generate universal prohibitions, using the categorical imperative, the Golden Rule, or greatest happiness principle. Saints and moral heroes often do not see themselves as bound by rules of any kind. NAVE can generate universal precepts condemning pederasty, nuclear deterrence, and perjury. The difference between DGE and NAVE is also in their content and moral modality - recommended, duty, or ideal.

Casuistry The method described in Chapter 5 would remain the same, as it is drawn from 1a-11ae QQ 18-23, with different content. What is distinctive is the way by Aquinas’ time the leadership groups and heads of hierarchical organisations, including the Church, now had to employs moral judgement in some methodical group way. Wellbeing is now conceived as fulfilling a natural desire including one for eternal happiness in Heaven, and the restlessness of the human soul or cor inquietum was taken a mark of being human, as Augustine claimed, not a condition to be lamented as terminal. Anytime it was asked if a type of act in a type of circumstance advanced or retarded “wellbeing,” we would have reason to judge the testimony of believers about supernatural happiness as a relevant fact when assessing eternal wellbeing. The method of determination requires checking the tendency of a proposed or accomplished action type for its tendency to wellbeing at all four steps as set out in Chapter 5. In Section 3, Wellbeing and its ingredient goods, above, if we alter the content of wellbeing to allow eternal happiness, we may well get different results if there is a God ordering some more exacting actions for some more long-lasting wellbeing. The point of this brief overview of the possible integration of NL with DGE is that, when we look at applications of NL, it helps to keep in mind the overlays or extensions, which are the focus of DGE. We have used the 5 point meta-ethical template for a Natural Law account to relate NAVE to DGE. Once the five elements are filled out with the faith-based data of level R2 and R3 and treated as possible effects, requiring a cause or reason, the moral scope of religious demands becomes a little more intelligible. As the next chapter will suggest, Aristotle has of course no treatment of many institutions that emerged after him with Constantine and especially the Church and its institutions such as parishes, abbeys, schools, universities, hospitals, and alms houses. The early Christian NL writers in Europe and Britain work out a modus vivendi with the state and its bureaucracies, professionals, armed forces, and courts; its commercial and criminal laws, and property and tax

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matters, all with an eye on making sure DGE is enabled to do the work of Salvation for individuals. It is impossible to discuss this adequately in this book but these profound change in the scope of NL must have brought to a head the need to explore the morality of groups in a more detailed way than Aristotle had envisaged, and as time went on, the demand for equal voice in organisations must have increased the need for resolutions like voting on agenda. It must be granted to atheism that adding a further layer of abstraction, the introduction of contestable theistic or religious considerations, conceived either as superstructure or substructure, in the form of existence claims about “the highest good” for humans, does indeed always threatens to strain the consensus about the fundamental status of humanism, when controversy over God and religion reaches boiling point, as it did famously in the West in the late Middle Ages Reformation, Renaissance, and beyond. The different R3 level accounts of the point of the universe’s creator in world religions are problematic. Although partly overlapping they are also vastly different. One thinks of Hindu creation stories, Australian Aboriginal accounts; and the creation ex nihilo stories in the three religions of the Book. Yet the dialogue between the three manifestations of NL, naturalist/secular, theistic, and religious, continues unabated, and is coherent, as will be illustrated on chapter 11 by the invocation of NL by the Roman Catholic Pope Paul VI, in the area of sexuality, fifty years ago in the encyclical letter Humane Vitae on contraception. Its looks as if the Pope took his Roman Catholic authority to interpret Divine Law to authorise additions to NL, which produced understandable consternation. Post reformation theology had put to rest the kind of abrogation of power of a Pope Boniface VIII claiming to be a Caesar and Emperor. Whenever the dialogue has failed, the differences have often been manifested in reality in wars, as perhaps it was by the 9/11 attack on the U.S., partly motivated by resentment of the country seen as the symbolic and real leader of the Western capitalist global secular international world order. Ironically, the post-World-War Pax Americana, with its created international law court enforcing universal human rights, was the descendant and partial outcome of NL, which Muslims share. It had been embedded in a theist and religious conceptual scheme for a millennium and was widely held in Europe and the Middle East, then preached along with Christianity by colonialists in North and South America, Asia, and Africa as noted above. But capitalist-driven colonialism of Spain and Northern Italian city states after Dante required changes in the NL ethics of lending money. Huge sums were needed to be available up front for long risky sea voyages to distant lands to be seized for Empire. These had to be borrowed from Jews, who permitted interest taking and usury when dealing with Gentiles. The eventual change in the Christian ethics of lending were not accepted in Islam, and may have hindered Muslims participation in the emerging capitalist-imperialist-colonial order, which then went into a more and more secular NL mode after the Cordova Caliphate collapsed. A final concession at this stage must be to concede to the atheist that most religions have internal fissures between their strict and ordinary, ideal and normal versions. There is a deeper fissure between NAVE on the one hand and strictly orthodox Christianity or DGE than the normal versions. Besides being enjoined to follow NL, Christians were also taught to believe in trying to follow the more exacting teaching about wellbeing in the Sermon on the Mount in the New Testament, Matthew 5-7, with its call to a self-sacrificing ethics, underpinned by grace, featuring imitation of a human incarnate God, Jesus Christ, as exemplar of what it was to be a good moral person. This astonishing concept, captured in the Abbreviations as IRP 7-9, held sway for those thousand or more years; and even in the West today, the view is still held by many Christian believers. Its high point of acceptance as an ideal was perhaps the mendicant

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friar period of St Francis and St. Dominic in medieval times. Some of its more exacting features were non-acquisitiveness/voluntary poverty, and prayer; duties of repentance and reform for wrong doing; acceptance of strangers, forgiveness of the wicked and enemies; mercy for wrongdoers, respect for the unworthy, the undeserving or unmeritorious, and unconditional non-violence. For collective groups, it spurred practical organisations devoted to ideals like prayer (monasteries), care of the sick (hospitals), and education (schools and universities); and political policies of compassion for the afflicted and alms-giving; and restraint of state lethal coercive force. Some of these notions have since continued to be been taken up by some NL theorists as ideals, but by others they are seen as things best divorced from NL and even to be avoided, for individuals or states. There is a spectrum of acceptance of this theistic and religious ideal with dwindling numbers of non-mendicant friars and monastics trying to realise it most seriously. The majority either follow some conditional version, e.g., just war theory, with nonviolence to be waived in specified circumstances; or merely taking parts of it to be a practical first step in a strategic policy to be applied pragmatically on a case by case basis. NL is thus continuously in dialogue with theism and religion. There are parallel calls to follow non-acquisitiveness, self-suffering, chastity, compassion, and non-violence, in the main Eastern religious cultures of Hinduism and Buddhism, with metaphysical grounding in the ideas of God(s) and the soul, or in the Buddhist case, karma and the soul alone. The differences between theisms-creationism, panentheism, (see glossary), pantheism, deism; between mysticism and negative theology and creationist theism, become critical in understanding the extent of human unity on these matters. In ethics, the same qualifying process, with the ideal toned down to be really possible, has gone on in Eastern religions e.g., in Hinduism with the division of the “greater vehicle’s” more liberal and the “lesser vehicle’s” more exacting teachings, espousing as ideal either hermit, mendicant, or monastic practice; individual or universal scope; and with different levels of realistic exactingness (Smart 1968). Confucianism celebrates reverence for ancestors, and some of its beliefs are parallel to Western orthodox theism and NL virtue ethics but it is not associated with the type of strong self-sacrificing altruism found in Christianity, Jain Hinduism, and some forms of Buddhism. For states, although lip service was and still is sometimes paid to DGE ideals as ideal values, they have seldom been found in practice. We now have the gospel of “global welfare state capitalism,” a useful term of the atheist humanist Kai Neilsen (2002), the rule of law and order, and just war theory. Four formerly avowedly theistic and largely Christian Western states (U.S. Russia, France, U.K.) are nuclear armed, and also the de facto largely theistic Jewish state of Israel. In truth, the exacting teachings have rarely been practised in full-strength form, even by Christian individuals, since the Apostles and early Christian martyrs. As in the West, at state level, nuclear armed Hindu India is still heavily class divided, caste-based, and Buddhist Myanmar and Sri Lanka having appalling records of minority treatment of Rohingyas and Tamils. The presence of the Non-violence teaching in some later, Islamic texts, although urged by some like Page, Ananda, and Gilliat (2001), is debated, unpractised by Iran and nuclear armed Pakistan, and some other Middle Eastern states. “Islamism” drives the terrorism of ISIS and its affiliates.

Chapter 8

SELECT APPLICATIONS: ORGANISATIONAL AGENCY AND ETHICS: STATES, CHURCHES, CORPORATIONS In this chapter, an application of NL is made to organisations and to organisational and political ethics, including that of religious institutions. The point is to demonstrate its potential to solve a contemporary problem about the morality of groups. On this issue, the contrast of NAVE with the DGE alternative, as two manifestations of NL, is on the face of it, comparatively slight. The demonstration of the possibility of collective moral agency using NL meta-ethical notions of analogy of attribution in this chapter would be common ground to all NL occurrences, NAVE, TNL and DGE, since in trying to show the utility of NL, the contrasting notion in contemporary theory is the reductive theory of “methodological individualism” and corporate/organisational amorality, which all three NL systems of law reject. Since TNL offers no difference from DGE here I will leave it out of consideration. According to methodologicala individualism, organisations do not strictly speaking exist or act. Every joint actor or act is really nothing but an aggregated set of acts of individual persons in roles, following procedures, with the same goal, in a joint act, and every real being or agent is only an individual, with an individual part or role to play. Organisations are not real beings, agents, moral agents. The issue arises whether you can still explain group morality/immorality if you reduce talk of group moral responsibility to those individuals’ joint acts, shared ends, and only their following of decision-procedures or not. The contrasting view, which both NAVE and DGE share rejects such an individualism and says that to identify an individual as an incumbent in an organisation, or which organisation she is in. or which organization is causally and morally responsible, for what act, on what, with whom, in all the circumstances outlined in Chapter 5, there is need to recognise the intended goal and authority structure of the whole collective entity as an entity. This will require one to identify a Leader Group as an entity distinct from its own incumbents, and other role incumbents. They are a quasi-mind and quasi-will, with shared organisational beliefs and desires; which rationally, through the role structure they design, do things in the “agent-cause” sense we looked at in Chapter 6. Reference must be made primarily to the organisational authority or warrant of these joint actors as distinct realities from other stakeholders. It is necessary first to identify the job descriptions of all role incumbents doing the work producing the product or service; the reason for, the causal effectiveness, and the worth of the authorisation rules of co-operation between these internal role groups; the special relevance,

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claims, and the authority relation between and ontological status of internal stakeholders as organisational entities, like the leadership group, managers and staff, and enabling investors and suppliers. Then one must turn to external stakeholders like end-users, other players in the practice like competitors, community and state representatives. Only the study of, and contact with the whole organisational entity and its internal and external stakeholders can furnish the truth about the identity and role of the individual incumbent and their degree of responsibility via their job description designed and authorised by the leadership. From this alone one can decide if they have acted ultra vires. Finally, one needs to turn to actual organisational performance and execution of the joint and presumably morally permissible goal, which is not just an individual matter, and we must run the joint organisational act through the casuistry process outlined in Chapter 5. Assessing the aggregated activities and the worth of individual performances of role incumbents is not sufficient till we apply a quasi-personal model of the organisation. To find out if an incumbent officer has acted morally, one must refer to the group goal of the leadership in all the circumstances. Nobody is saying that organisations are free-floating independent collective agent-minds and wills, or separate and real persons, but only that organisations exist: they are real actors, entities with minds-like properties, and they do exist in several important ways mentioned under existence in the Glossary, such as having determinate properties, bringing about results; being capable of being attributed properties in the categories of action, passion, quality, quantity, relation, time, and even place- the organisational headquarters. Their Leader Group (or groups) constitutes and develops the shared and unshared goals and tasks; use characteristic organisational ways of designing and directing, morally, the increased power of the whole entity as leadership group incumbents in authority with power over their subordinates. Leaders causally and morally direct staff and enablers through their acceptance of leader authority. Leader Groups are quasi-minds and wills primarily responsible, in a division of labour and separation of powers structure, for proper methodology in the way collective decisions are made; leader monitoring and accounting for the different resultant effects of group acts on internal and external stakeholders, and responsible compliance with duties and proper use of powers stemming from the social warrant and support offered by the state in return for concessions, like tax breaks and law enforcement. DGE and NAVE can both offer a contribution to the resolution of this individual/collective moral agency issue. It was noted at the beginning in Prologue and Chapter 1 that individuals do not have some powers and responsibilities which organisations and states do have, and vice versa. We are initially only concerned with the claim that organisations, like persons, can be seekers of wellbeing and also moral agents.This is so provided they seek justice in the modest sense of IPR 1-5, or NAVE which cover Utilitarianism and Kant, without necessarily involving the DGE belief in theism and religion and the altruism expressed in IPR 7-9. Only some nuclear ethical content and ontology is required to run the NL meta-ethics of wellbeing and the organisational ethics acronym proposed here. However, it is not necessary that we accept Aristotle’s essentially secular ethics or NAVE completely; or the extreme altruist DGE stance. We need only show organisational moral agency and ethics to be possible, not give a comprehensive account of its scope. NL recognises higher and lower capacities and the possible enhancement of personal, higher capacities of intellect and will in knowledge, culture, friendship, and love, in a social/political community, as being at the core of human need-satisfaction and wellbeing.

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However, it is worth noting that Western Philosophy is indebted in part to both NL in the management of the Roman army and empire and DGE in the shape of the Church’s Canon law for its efforts to define group moral agency for non-state actors, and the moral agency of individuals and organisations within states. One strong impetus to a theory of collective corporate activity was given during the period when the Roman Empire was being invaded and people wrote to Augustine seeking answers as to what the appropriate response of Christians, and religious institutions, as believers in non-violence, should be to the pillage wrought by the Goths as they invaded the empire, looting, burning libraries, and raping citizens. Augustine, nowadays credited with the initiating of the so-called “just war theory” for states, wrote back that sometimes it was mournfully necessary to use violence in defence of innocents. In an about-face, Constantine and his mother Helen had adopted Christian belief and the state had stopped persecution of Christians, who were now co-opted into the state orbit. Augustine made a famous distinction between the City of Man and the City of God. In the former, violence is inevitable and had to be dealt with: in the latter, it will be no more. This raised the question: “What is the place of the Church now?” On Augustine’s theory of the two cities, the Church as a collective group organisation, has a supernatural goal of saving individual souls for Divine Glory. That means it has to face the difference between IRP 1-5 and its own vocation to somehow help individuals to seek to follow IRP 7-9 for the sake of DGE. From Paul and the Fathers onward the search for a suitable model of the Christian church had begun. It was suggested in metaphors like the church as Bride of Christ, or members of the church as Body of Christ. The concepts of “the church militant” versus “the church triumphant,” and the church as a means to perfection, were canvassed. Even today and especially since the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s, theologians discuss which metaphors are preferable, as in Dulles’ Models of the Church (1974). Given that Christians were now able to live normal lives, worship in peace, work for the state, and even be soldiers, there began to be a state of affairs where it was sometimes an advantage to be a baptised Christian in the job market. There was now a need to explore the difference between personal, church (organisational) and state matters, made clear by the clash of the Sermon on the Mount teachings and ideals with the reality of state coercive lethal force, given the state now afforded a better temporal life for believers within the Roman Empire. Augustine’s distinction between the two cities, City of God and City of Man, was a vital part of a solution in terms of ideals and realistic goals, and distinguishing organisational and state ethics from individual ethics. The so called “just war theory” crafted for DGE purposes for individuals begins here, and it makes a permanent contribution to NAVE on the state, as well as to its religious extensions. While giving up its commune-ism, non-violence, and anarchism, at state level, Christianity still continued to stand for its own community and its members and for individuals making the option for extreme altruism, and at least some curtailment of temporal state power in favour of preserving Christian values. Although now acceptance of the state was possible because it was protector of the Church, still personal religious ideals could be distinguished from necessary public duties and practices, with one’s belief allowed sway in the private sphere and the Church and one’s civic/social and political duties determined in part by secular organisations and the state. The state was not expected to follow the Sermon on the Mount. The source of NL’s contribution via DGE to the moral agency of groups was the later coming into being and institutionalising of an increasingly powerful institutional “Church,” with its own Canon Law, needing to coexist with state law. It had to be decided, as it was in

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the Sutton Hospital case in English law, what the status of hospitals and other church bodies was relative to the Crown. By the eleventh century, the Church was a huge property owner across the whole of Europe, and decisions on minor matters of property and ecclesiastical matters were referred back to Rome. It is now one of the most powerful organisations in the world, and it has both secular and spiritual goals, which can be assessed morally for their worth and implementation. It was noted at the start that individuals vary in their take up of reciprocal justice of the IPR 3 and IPR 4 type, versus the “extreme altruist” life-risking teaching found in Theistic and Religious Divine and extended NL variants of IRP 7-9. NL after Augustine had the advantage that in its further millennium of history as” Christendom”, it was necessary for Christians to evolve a way of understanding the justice/kindness/extreme altruism differences in institutional and personal terms. IRPs 1-5 are not “selfless” and altruistic in the extended sense of following IRP 7-9. Under DGE, individuals are invited, not required, to believe, and to adopt IRPs 6-9 under Divine Law and the Sermon on the Mount teaching. Yet there is the logical possibility of extending the ideal of justice and kindness, in the sense of IRP 6-9, to organisations and states, one which is still under-theorised in contemporary social and political ethics texts and essays, as Part 3 will suggest. Contemporary treatments of collective moral agency tend to attempt to reduce groups to sets of individuals, to deny agency to groups, and reject the notion that organisations as such can have goals and actions, be just or kind. But a root concept in NL is analogy of attribution, allowing transposition of some but not all features of a concept such as “person” from paradigm to analogue. An individual person is the paradigm of ethical action, but organisations and states can still act as quasi-persons and be ethical in different but related ways, with roles substituted for capacities; leadership groups for intellects/wills, and organisational goals for personal goals. For example, an individual can prioritise her own security or behave in a strongly altruistic way, say by risking her security or life for others’ safety, following IRP 6-9. But a state must have public safety as a goal, and accept risking some of its members’ security, like soldiers or police, for the common security if they are security-providing role incumbents. The state’s continued existence depends on achieving that goal, through actions of its role incumbents, following ethical rules and ideals. As an analogue, or quasi-person, it has no life of its own to risk. It cannot be as altruistic in the way individuals can, but one can still make sense of organisational or state justice or altruism in terms of the organisation or state adopting a just or an altruistic goal, as persons understand it, and requiring some its professional members also to do so in their organisational roles. The state is initially focused on justice. It can adopt some benevolent humanitarian welfare and educational goals, but it may have no standing duty or right to do so in some areas, especially to the point of “laying down its life” for them, since as a socially constructed analogue, it has no life to lay down, and is supposed to help others avoid the choice. An organisation can be a moral agent if it seeks justice, or a charitable goal through joint acts authorised by its leadership group. The list of goods from which an organisation or state receives its grant of authority or warranted goal or goals is the same as canvassed in Chpter 3, common to individuals, organisations, and states, and the ethical decision procedure of casuistry is the same. Only the IRP need be different: states cannot follow IRP 7-9 in the sense that their standing goals include identifying citizens for select treatment, punishing the wicked and defence against enemies. But the same four steps we examined in Chapter 5 can be taken collectively as well as individually. There is one user in the individual case, and many takers

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in the group case. Individuals exercise their capacities. Organisations exercise authority via roles through grants of authority to appointed roe-incumbent individuals. Their actions are both individual and collective, but in both cases goals, intended acts, decisions equally measured against a human good or goods, and results for end users, in a place or sector or domain are to be found. If strong altruism is an ideal for individuals, not a requirement, an organisation can be dedicated to an ideal altruistic good goal, like providing medical help to children, aged or combatants in a war zone; it can be taken as behaving in an ideal moral manner, and its organisational goal may then in a sense be its self-elected moral duty. The concept of strong altruism, imagined as applicable to states and organisations, will perhaps resemble that for individuals, but may not do so in all respects when analogically applied. Organisations cannot marry but can merge; decide to enter the civil but not the household domain as set out in Chapter 4. They can even say they are sorry. This Chapter will postpone the issue of organisational and limited state altruism till Part 3, and simply introduce and defend a NL case for organisational and state collective ethical agency and justice, summarise the main presuppositions of the affirmation of its possibility. It will then defend them sequentially. The presuppositions are: a property or substance-dualist interactionist Neo-Aristotelian teleological anthropology and virtue ethics; the doctrine of analogy of attribution; the application of something close to Aristotle’s concept of justice through group casuistry, and a stakeholder theory adjusted to suit his position. I will suggest an acronym for the application of organisational ethics/justice – GRAEOS – based on the presuppositions outlined in Part 1. To introduce the topic, contemporary news was about North Korea’s nuclear posturing, and about some of the largest internet corporations’ being named and shamed for tax evasion. In these reports, the news presenters rightly used moral language about states and organisations, attributing blame to them quite freely, mainly directed at the leadership. Yet from the late 1970s till recently there has been a continuous debate in Applied Ethics about whether collective entities can be said to be moral or immoral, with the negative side insisting that organisations, and presumably states, as in part “organisations of organisations,” are “strictly speaking” amoral, not “really” existent, or non-agents. For a small sample, see (Danley 1999; Miller 2002; Velasquez 1982). It is a debate which should have been over years ago, because states, cities, and organisations, composed of persons, while not persons, clearly exist as their personal effects, and can do good/wrong. Organisations alone are discussed here. They singly and jointly do good and bad things primarily through CEOs and Boards of Directors, but also through other internal role incumbents like operators (managers and workers) and enablers (investors and suppliers), in an ideally unified teleological structure. Incumbents can be said to have moral attributes like justice and fairness displayed in their role, as can the organisation as a whole, by analogy, to varying degrees, depending on the causality co-exercised by incumbent agents in authorised roles. As argued elsewhere (Ardagh 2011; 2012; 2013) responsibility for specific actions composing collective organisational acts can be sheeted back to the organisation via select individual role incumbents, internal stakeholders, jointly wielding designated organisational role power/authority, in some respect, to some degree, relative to their specified role. If a board, as the “highest” authority/power, that of quasi intellect/will of the organisation, behaves badly, so does the organisation also, in that way and to that degree. Both role incumbents and the whole organisation are real causal and normative agents in different ways with associated responsibilities. This paper retraces some of the arguments which were adduced previously,

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and deploys them in support of an acronym for organisational ethics, based on the quasi-person model of organisational agency. In the earlier papers, the limitations of both “methodological individualism,” and full “corporate personhood” (French 1979; 1992) for legal and ethical attributions of ethical responsibility, are spelled out. The “imaginative projection model” of Goodpaster and Matthews (1982) and the idea of organisational action being allowed “in a secondary sense” (De George 1996; Donaldson 1982; Donaldson and Werhane (2007) are much preferable, and allow for talk about corporate “conscience,” reputation,” “citizenship.” But these conceptions are not described in detail and grounded in the General Ethics of individual persons, or in Philosophical Anthropology. The alternative Quasi-Personhood Model (QPM) of organisation supports the last two projection/secondary sense accounts but allows for a fuller and better meta-ethical understanding of the coherence of Organisational Ethics and Business or Professional Ethics as sub-disciplines. The acronym GREAOS, its explanation set out below, helps to identify which organisational power is being engaged, why, how, and by whom; which organisational act is occurring. Using Aristotle’s doctrine of analogy of attribution, it was argued, against the reductionist case, that the criteria for judging the worth of organised collective/corporate bodies and artificial persons are clear and systematically related to those of general ethics for judging natural persons. The latter act by voluntary choice and are normally responsible for their ethical behaviour. They exercise directing, operating, and enabling capacities, in a context. Natural persons have directing intellects and wills, capacities with objects, like the ingredient goals of wellbeing in the case of will, which can be symbolised as G; with other operating sensory and mobility capacities and enabling autonomic capacities which make up a repertoire, in a architectonic teleological structure, R. The self’s intellect directs operations of perception, sensation, and mobility, enabled by the body’s autonomic systems. Persons use ethical decision procedures, like casuistry, E, to choose to perform actions, A, with results in a context or domain; with consequences for other persons and players, O; and for the wider community/state, S, which enables them. If all these features are ethically acceptable, the person’s acts are ethical. Organisations are not natural persons, but the effects of persons. As artificial persons, they have analogues of each of these six GREAOS properties (and others not discussed). Organisations are personal effects of groups of leading, authorised persons, (LGs) who adopt a goal, G; design a related role-structure, R, something like a natural person’s repertoire, with analogues of the other features of direction, operation, enablement, in the role structure; they engage in ethical decision making, E; authorise joint action, A, in a context; with impact on other stakeholders, O; and on the communities and organisations represented in and by the state, S. Leader or director groups, (LG) as directing quasi-minds and wills, are the primary organisational actors. They create lines of authority or reporting chains over operatives (managers and workers) and enablers (suppliers and investors), through which they can act in complex morally assessable organisational action or activity. This paper recaps and builds on the previous arguments. Once the stakeholder model, presented below, and suggested by the underpinning analogy, is accepted, an acronym for organisational ethics, similar to the acronym POLC in management theory (Planning Organising Leading Controlling) widely used to introduce the essentials of Management, can be used to evaluate Organisational Ethics. The suggested acronym is GREAOS, explained in the paper, and defended against the alleged amorality of business corporations, and amorality of organisations in other domains.

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Neo-Aristotelian Virtue ethics (NAVE) can drop from Aristotle’s own account his doctrines of the “natural place” of physical bodies, slavery, patriarchy, and aristocracy; cosmic geocentricism and God as outermost Unmoved Mover. It can, has been, but need not, be extended to include some sort of God. But as Chapters 1-5showed, the ethics and meta-ethics pivots on an account of human wellbeing, and the virtuous means to it, whatever the highest in the set of goods and beings turns out to be, and not necessarily God. For atheists, NAVE and natural law has secular content, motive, and scope. Even today, if we graph human independence and age, we can imagine a bell curve graph of age and independence, having low independence points at birth and old age, and high points in the middle of life. Social groups as wholes must consider the common good and take care of the dependent groups like families with children and the aged flanking the large centre in order to survive and flourish via cross- generational Ethics managing survival, perpetuation, science, and culture through families (parents/elders and children) via NAVE precepts. What is morally right can still reasonably be taken to be what tends to produce this common good: the natural goods of true human wellbeing, as exhibited in the ideal/best “congratulate-able” human lives, reflectively assessed on the whole in the long run, on the basis of some appealing and plausible shared criteria of wellbeing which are noted below. One criterion or mark of wellbeing for example is enjoyment of perfected human capacity, as in knowing the true good, the highest and best beings, and generally knowing the score, even if bleak. Ethics seeks to articulate imperative principles, precepts, and decision procedures to guide virtuous practice in need-satisfaction of persons, families, and communities, balancing individual and group need. In NAVE, justice as set out in Chapter 4) tends to collective wellbeing. It is the bridging virtue of this interpersonal and intergenerational project or process, and connotes the ideas of: 1) a principle of reciprocity; such as the golden rule; 2) equality of respect for fellow citizens and person, of opportunity to satisfy needs to participate in public goods/benefits 3) freedom from violence and harm and freedom to pursue wellbeing; and 4) reward for contribution and merit. This NAVE agenda is expressed in persons and in different domains or arenas like single or family homes, organisational offices and workplaces, semi-organised fields like markets, public/civic spaces, or the natural wilderness, all balanced in modern times by state as a political authority. These are the contexts in which the decision procedure of casuistry to be explicated below operates to nominate the type of good in the type of circumstance. The organisational domain, as one of several noted in Chapter 1 above, includes public sector bureaucracies, professional bodies, business corporations, and co-operative non-profits, each with a set of differential practices, intrinsic goods, and institutions with cognitive social and moral relevance (MacIntyre 1981). Each will have different set of stakeholders in several categories to be outlined below when the Quasi-person Model (QPM) model is applied. Justice pertains to ethical preferences, and to action regarding others, wise apportioning or distribution of social burdens and benefits by political leadership groups. Ethical principles and precepts seek to maximise free and equal attainment by citizens of capacity enhancement, and so of wellbeing, ideally at least to threshold levels of need-satisfaction, with imperatives like: “Act reasonably/justly”; general principles like: “Do as you would be done by”; positive

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injunctions to positive behaviour like: “Do no harm,” “Be honest,” or “Be compassionate”; statements of obligation/duty, like: ”Pay your taxes,” and strict prohibitive rules against harms/evils like murder, fraud, theft, and perjury. These injunctions, obligations/duties, principles, precepts and prohibiting rules are applied though virtuous dispositions and decision making methods like casuistry. Casuistry as set out in Chapter 5 is the central method/decision procedure of teleological ethics. It is not the same as sophistry of the type pilloried by Pascal, or legal extrapolation from precedents; and not the same as the later Kantian version using the “universalisability” test. The relevant questions based of the categories are: Who/Whom? (that includes: with whom?); What? (that includes: to what/whom?); Why? (that includes intent and motive); How? (by what means?) When? and Where? The questions are loosely based on the Aristotelian categories. Socrates (Who?) is a substance; with an essence (humanity) defined by qualities (rational animal); with relational qualities and properties like being a husband; quantifiable traits like baldness and capable of acts like criticising the authorities (action); suffering execution (passion), in Athens, (Where?) in 399 B.C. (When?). In contrast to Kant, much of ethics is not wholly about “universalisabiity,” duty, even imperfect duty, nor subject to prohibition or requirement by rule, but is expressed in recommendation, injunction, or deemed either heroic or saintly or “above and beyond duty” (supererogatory); or is condemned as an ad hoc evil, a type of evil in a type of circumstance, or as an evil too egregiously disgusting to be explicitly banned; or taboo. This is partly due to the variability of modality (must, ought, may, etc) relative to circumstances, and the range of moral modalities itself (Chisholm 1968; Jonsen and Toulmin 1988; Urmson 1968). Virtue builds discernment as one descends from the abstract end of types of act and relevant principles if any to particular cases. For detailed application to particulars, the ethical decision procedure adopted in NAVE, based on an overt teleological philosophical anthropology above, works roughly as follows: First, identify what the type of act under moral scrutiny is by reference to is object and end result. Second, address the prima facie tendency of the end/object of the type of act to human “wellbeing-enhancement.” This abstract state will be good, bad, or indifferent. Third, add the other circumstance types like how, when, and where, and repeat the question of tendency to wellbeing of the token of the more specific act-circumstance type, checking for any relevant moral notion, principle, precept, or law relevant to the wellbeing of others and the wider community. Fouth, identify intent and motive of this agent in doing this token act in this particular act/circumstance, here and now, adding any ulterior motives or any added circumstances in the agent’s mind or in the situation. This concludes the introduction of the general claim that organisations can do right or wrong acts. Much has been presupposed, and the above presuppositions can be summarised under four headings which we now review. The four struts of the Quasi-Person Model (QPM) of Organisations are: 1) The notion of the wellbeing of the human entity as possessing and developing a set of hierarchically ordered higher and lower capacities within the Neo-Aristotelian Philosophical Anthropology of natural persons. 2) Analogy of attribution in the Neo-Aristotelian doctrine, which allows this extrapolation from natural causal relations between capacities within persons to causal and authority relations between role incumbents in artificial persons/organisations as effects, and the use of the language of organisational existence/being, goodness,

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causes, communication, and rule/authority to describe organisational relations. Location of the analogues of the six “personal” features of natural persons’ ethical acts, we identified above, is picked up in the organisational ethics acronym GREAOS to be spelled out presently. This would be an Ethics analogue of POLC and POSDCORB in general Management. 3) Justice in Neo-Aristotelian ethics is incorporated into QPM which provides, via the same analogy of attribution doctrine, and an account of justice, a justification for making a conceptual and logical connection between a virtue ethics approach to personal ethics, and the ascription of political justice to cities and states if they pursue the common good, and the idea of justice (specific forms of equality, freedom, desert, need-satisfaction) in the context of collective groups of organised agents. The domainrelative feature of organisations, such as the market and the corporation in the case of business, are rendered more intelligible by reference to the goal of the organisation the G in GRAEOS. Just as casuistry in the service of the goods making up wellbeing is the heart of personal ethics, it is also the heart of organisational ethics. 4) A revised stakeholder model in QPM is required for identifying types of agency and vulnerability and grading degrees of organisational and role-incumbent responsibility on the basis of degrees of architectonic causal and authorised activity. It suggest a need for operator (manager and worker) and enabler, (investor and supplier) “voice” in governance. Taking and defending these four points in turn:

USE OF A NEO-ARISTOTELIAN PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY OF WELLBEING AND HIS META ETHICS IN NAVE-AND NL ETHICS In Philosophical Anthropology, Aristotle was a kind of “dualist interactionist,” not a monistic physical reductionist. The position attributed to him in NAVE, was outlined in Chapter 2 and defended in Chapter 6. According to mind-body interactionism, the human intellectual soul “rules” the body in different ways and is ruled in others. It is architectonic to voluntary activity. Philosophical Anthropology gives us a “folk anthropology”– a pre-scientific, intuitive account of human persons’ nature and wellbeing -as explanandum, in terms of the set of human capacities, their characteristic optimal objects and ends, their enhancing dispositions at the three levels mentioned above, in an interactive complex hierarchy of powers: directing cognitive/affective capacities of intellect and will; operating sensory/limb using mobile capacities; and the enabling capacities of the vegetative/autonomic system, each with different levels of flexibility at will, and characteristic needs and need-satisfiers. For example, for cognition, intelligibility is the necessary object, curiosity the inclination, and truth is the optimal need-satisfier, with wisdom/knowledge as its virtue/perfection, and the key norm that of non-contradiction, - (P & -P). Such things as exercise and nutrition are perfecting elements of mobility and of the body’s autonomic system respectively. As Chapter 2 suggested, at the top of a hierarchy, intellect and will are most flexible, in requiring no intermediate aids to operate, and their scope is almost infinite - the conceivable and the conceivably desirable, considered as embracing all events and objects, across space and time.

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One cannot conceive contradictory states of affairs, but can possibly desire an imagined realisation of them. But that is the only limit on the intelligible. Second-level operational powers are less flexible, in that such things as the visible and the audible are more limited in scope than the intelligible/desirable/imaginable, and mobility develops and declines with age. The autonomic powers of digestion, respiration or circulation, are either only slightly flexible or inflexible. Let us call this the DOE structure, or repertoire of capacities in architectonic/hierarchical teleological relation, and this capacity-set, Hn. Aristotle describe, and Aquinas codifies more formally, the teleological immanent relations between human capacities; between wishes, desires, choices and actions; between practical reasoning/deliberation about means, and resulting choice of ends and executed action. The human capacities are architectonically related at three levels- directive, operational or enabling. A similar three level structure can be found or designed into organisations and used in extrapolating from natural persons to artificial quasi persons and organisational structures. As noted, in Neo-Aristotelian Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics, General Ethics is concerned with identifying practices which facilitate a good human life (wellbeing) for any and all persons, and the rationale for these. This presupposes the idea previously introduced of an “architectonic” structure or relation between listed human capacities with characteristic specifying objects and goods, such as knowledge, sensation, and digestion, in architectonic relations. In such relations, one directing entity, x, is the final cause, telos, or goal of another, y, in some respect, R, in some order of consideration, O. For example, sailing by a boat operator is the final cause of rudder building and of the choice of materials in respect of speed or steering, in the order of finality. In the order of material causality, the material of helms and rudders is a respect in which boat helms and rudders are architectonic to steering and sailing. Aristotle cites navigators and helmsmen; architects and builders to illustrate the paradigm relation. But think of the relation of Physics of sound to Phonetics; Phonetics to Grammar, Grammar to Semantics; Semantics to human purposes, like successful assertions of meaningful truth, or filling needs; and of truth-getting about the common good and wellbeing studied in Ethics. This is the example of architectonic structure we met in Chapter 2 on the anthropological element of NL metaethics -the hierarchy of capacities. Wellbeing is not for the sake of word sounds and meaning; they are for the sake of truth seeking and wellbeing attainment. The studies of the enabling physical and syntactic substrate are ruled by those of the psychological, practical and contextual, and cannot fully comprehend this directing and operational capacity sovereignty. In voluntary human acts, according to dualistic interactionism of the Neo-Aristotelian type, the enabling body is operated by the directing intellectual soul or self. As Chapter 2 explained, the goal of the will of human capacity-endowed individuals, as instantiated human specimens, is “Human wellbeing” (eudaimonia). This is an indefinite but significant master-goal of humans as natural persons with differential natural human capacities, which we will dub: “Ha.” It is the object of at least idle wish unless interference occurs. The sense of Ha (happiness in the common notion) is indefinite wellbeing, a sufficient good of one’s nature. It has some overlapping and reinforcing criteria or marks, Hm. Any candidate goal presenting as an ingredient end or goal of Ha exemplifies engagement of the “higher” rational, immanent capacities i.e., those with the highest/best goods; an intrinsic or ultimate end, not merely instrumental; a good which is perfect/complete; lasts for a while or as long as practicable; promotes cumulative immanent self-development/enhancement/perfection; is selfsufficient; enjoyed at leisure; free from evils of pain/harm/ignorance and malice. Using these

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criteria in Hm as the analysis of indefinite wellbeing Ha goods attainable by capacities with perfecting dispositions (virtues) can be put on a list as specific ingredient ends of wellbeing, the specification of the analysis, Hs (Austin (1967; Williams 1962), if they meet the criteria of the marks, Hm. Any random chosen end/good, Hi, can then be canvassed checked for the marks, and contingently chosen as a practical reasonable means to Ha. If G is a particular end or goal meeting Hm, it is abstractly morally permissible, but further types of circumstance appended may defeat a claim to moral status. Aristotle’s Ethics is teleological and the meta-ethics features wellbeing. Human wellbeing is what the goal of Ethics is taken to be, and it is a partly indefinite goal. But the anchoring notion of wellbeing is not totally indefinite, empty, or insignificant. Aristotle, and the best known Neo-Aristotelians, like Aquinas, offer (similar) accounts of human nature (capacity); criteria of wellbeing, principles and precepts of ethics, casuistry, virtues as tending to wellbeing, and accounts of NL. The deeper ethical differences between Aristotle and later NL thinkers like Aquinas which concern the list of ingredient ends of wellbeing, some different virtues, a different idea of God, the highest good, and Providence, do not prevent us using Aquinas’ description of human capacity or Aristotle’s meta-ethics as a guide in understanding organisational ethics, despite some major different specific ethical judgements which they also made.

ANALOGY OF ATTRIBUTION AND ORGANISATIONAL ANALOGUES The Aristotelian doctrine of Analogy of Attribution was set out in Chapter 2, but in order to apply it to natural persons and artificial organisations to explicate the acronym GREAOS, a sketch follows. Basically, the idea is that a property like “health” can be attributed to an object or state, and also to its causes, effects, symptoms, and signs, but in different but analogous senses. Healthy medicine, complexion, urine, and complexion are “healthy” in different, but related, ways but not themselves “in good health” or in a healthy state. The healthy medicine inherently, not metaphorically, has causally effective health making properties. One can apply a term, primarily attributed to an individualised substance, like Socrates, a term like “exists,” or “good,” by analogy to relations, actions, and qualities of Socrates; and in the case of an individualised quality, like the state of “health” of Socrates’ body, to effects, causes, signs and symptoms of health, in an analogous sense, not entailing presence of primary existence or health in the analogue itself. The concepts of “person” and “human wellbeing,” and what is good for human persons, is the univocal paradigm from which quasi-personal uses - analogical uses - of wellbeing, including its application to effects of persons like organisations, are suspended. This doctrine is used here to claim that organisations, as effects of persons, really exist and have analogues of natural person’s qualities, in particular the six personal qualities highlighted in the proposed acronym GREAOS, and so organisations are personal in six specified senses, i.e., they can exist, and be good, in different ways than substances exist and are good. Qualities, acts, and relations of substances can exist and be good in this transferred sense. We can apply terms with paradigm application to natural persons in analogous sense to and artificial organisational persons. Casuistry itself treats actions as entities or beings with qualities and relations but not as substances.

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David Ardagh Applying the acronym first to a natural individual person’s act, we get: G: In an ethical act, of a real natural person, the paradigm case of persons, there will be intention of an at least “possibly permissible” goal or good, G, chosen from the list of wellbeing ingredients Hs constructed using the marks of wellbeing Hm, as explicated above, in the mind of the person at some level of abstraction. R: The act will be chosen in an exercise of dispositions/virtues of a capacity or repertoire, R, as means to G, in a structure governed by intellect/reason and will/choice in the sense of intentionally caused by them as directing powers of the self. E: The choice to act is made by intellect and will after use of an ethical decision procedure/ethical deliberation, E, using general principles, primary and secondary precepts, a notion of justice, and casuistry. A: The person’s will issues a direction through an executed, inner immanent or transeunt overt, act, A, expressing the choice at E. O: The act will have overt results for the agent, and any others impacted, O; and consequences which may be foreseen or not, welcome or not. S: The act will be performed within a community and state, S, and its consequences will follow.

The fit of GREAOS to the steps of casuistry is variable but significant. G and R canvass the same ground as Who, What and Why and How at the two early abstract steps, and then when these questions are further specified as to When, Where, and With/to Whom again at more specific steps. E and A will presuppose the crucial step of assessing the tendency of the “act-circumstance type” against the criteria of wellbeing set out above. Answers to O and S will presuppose those to E and A, and interlock with Step 4 of casuistry. The third party judgment can be either on the intended or the executed act. Following this analogical strategy applied to organisations, we get the following result. The organisation can be said to have a quasi-mind and will, memory, imagination, and conscience, and to be a good or bad quasi-citizen. Operators and enablers, as internal and external stakeholders, like workers and investors, should have a “voice” in organisational decisions as they do in co-ops like Mondragon. As a natural person has these capacities, and causes their analogues in artificial persons, the latter though not persons are quasi-persons and personal. They can have goals, a repertoire, use ethical procedures, act, canvass impact on others and observe community and state norms. Using GREAOS as a check list of morally relevant features, one can pass moral judgment on organisations. The nub of the argument is that collective entities like corporations are artificial quasipersons with six (or more) personal features in common with natural persons selected and discussed, summarised in the acronym: “GREAOS,” which can be applied to cases such as the Exxon Valdez disaster as an example. It is also claimed but not argued here that the acronym can be applied to public sector organisations and even to states. The QPM model leads to the possibility of an acronym for organisational ethics in any sector, GREAOS, corresponding in the procedure of Ethics reasoning and assessment to POLC, POSDCORB, and SWOT 35in the prudential sphere. The acronym suggests canvassing of six steps with associated questions about the organisation’s ethics: 35

Strengths, Weaknessness, Opportunities, Threats.

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G What are the identifying goals of the organisational entity in general and in this case? Are they prima facie morally permissible? R What is the role structure designed by the leadership group (LG) as quasi intellect and will for attaining the goal through direction/decision/authority? Is it effectively and responsibly constructed? Does it respect the director, operator, enabler structure? E What ethical decision methods with respect to justice are employed by the LG in forming its intent/planning? Post execution assessment? A What organisational act was or should have been performed/executed, by or with whom, to or on whom? O With what results and consequences for relations with other parties in the context, sector, practice or domain? S With what results and consequences for relations with the wider community or state? The claim is that if a planned organisational policy or past policy enactment for the purpose of G is considered at the step E or A, and subjected to this acronym as a screen, it can be assessed as passing as an ethical organisational act or not, qua the acts of its LG as quasi intellect/will having goal G and agents within the authority structure R; its immediate result, and its consequences for others in the practice, O, and for wider communities and the state, S. The sector or domain of the practice will be disclosed at the first step, G, and the E step under the questions what, why and where, and again at step O.

ASSESSING JUSTICE AND CASUISTRY IN PERSONAL, POLITICAL, AND ORGANISATIONAL CONTEXTS This capacity to shuttle between individual and group attribution via analogy of attribution is the main outcome of the QPM Model. We can apply moral terms like fair or unjust to persons, states, and organisations, and the acronym GREAOS reflects this and helps it along. Persons have desires for goods as need–satisfiers, some of which arise from the bodily autonomic system’s needs for shelter, food/nutrition, rest, and exercise. Many social and personal activities are aimed at nurturing the autonomic system, which is architectonic to the higher powers in material causality but subservient to them in efficient and final causality. We must eat to live but intellect distinguishes poison and nutritious food and will must order and execute the eating for the body to persist. But once met, to a healthy threshold level of operation, the needs of the two higher levels on the natural person’s DOE structure, generate their own additional social and personal needs which we saw at G above motivate ethical restraint and reciprocity. Natural persons’ ethical actions with respect to justice can be assessed with the acronym GREAOS. With slight and arguably insignificant shifts in the denotation, and GRAEOS can be applied in similar fashion to the organisational analogue. In natural persons, the nature and direction of causality is such that the intellect and will direct the other capacities of the self with intentional agent causality. The self, as “governing” or directing agent, produces an event, rather than it being only an “event to event” type of causality, which it also can be. Organisations have no desires of their own but they can have goals and needs. General Ethics governs the identification, choice, achievement, and right and just proportioning of such physical, social, and personal goods, goals, or need-satisfiers of human

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capacities at the three DOE levels - direction, operation, enablement noted above. In organisational artificial persons, the “self” the same criteria of reciprocity, freedom, equality, desert and need satisfaction can we applied to its governance. Justice is for Aristotelians, a personal virtue of the will, but one can also be selective regarding entirely agreeing with Aristotle’s account. Because of his doctrine of moral virtue as a “mean,” he claims that justice is a mean between the vice of graspingness and being taken advantage of, which we may be a little forced. But it nails the essence of morality: navigating cases where my wellbeing is not the same as the common wellbeing, and looking for a proportionate share of the good is the task at hand. We can still agree with him that justice can be a personal virtue and also, as reflected analogically in institutions of the polis as effects if persons, can have retributive, distributive and exchange applications in which reciprocity and “right proportion” play key parts. Justice governs interpersonal as well as personal relations, and it serves the common good of the polis, even if we must recognise that the tiny polis or city-state of Athens, on which Aristotle bases his account, is no more. By modern standards, the Golden Rule of reciprocity - “Do as you would be done by” is surprisingly understated in Aristotle and its acceptance only implicit, but it is nowhere discarded. Even where moral rules are to hand, however, they will not always reach down to particular idiosyncratic level, and often there are no governing rules as, ex hypothesi, we descend to unique idiosyncratic particulars. Contemporary deontological/Kantian and Utilitarian theories of ethics, even in their “rule” versions, notoriously struggle to address this sort of choice, where values conflict, within their different but often metaphysically agnostic Humean or Kantian frameworks. Not venturing to have a descriptive anthropology as NL does, or a way of canvassing circumstances, with universalised principles like “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” or variants of the categorical imperative like “universalizability,” the principles are very indeterminate. Even the Golden Rule instance: “Give as you would be given” will not work for those who have no assets to enter into reciprocal relations of giving and being given.The highly contestable moral psychology of their authors, like Bentham, Hume, Kant, or J.S. Mill, is often unknown to, or selectively rejected by, those advocating use of these principles, and the way they are supposedly applied to difficult cases, or to global problems of poverty. There is a potential problem of “duty overload” for universal moralities like Singer’s “preference Utilitarianism” (Perry 2014) where supporting philosophical anthropology of qualitative good is not developed; or morality is not situated in family, community, or polis context, and global, universal commitment outside of them is not theorised properly in Political Economy. By contrast, if Part 1 is accepted as an account of justice, the justice of organisational acts can be canvassed in applying GREAOS:

Step G Check the justice of the identifying personal, organisational, political goals in the context At this G-level of ethical assessment, the key question is: “What is the goal of the entity?” G has some level of abstraction/specification which can be increased, like Google map. Symbolically: if entity X wills that S is P. then the propositional content, “that S is P,” is

Select Applications X’s goal. The evaluation will sometimes enable the rejection of some types or goals in some types of circumstances, but it often cannot yet be conclusive till we go further. Compare: The organisation is selling oil, or the more specific: discovering, extracting, transporting, marketing etc; extracting coal/oil (ethically passable) or the organisation is causing climate change via pollution; selling drugs or selling psycho-active drugs; smuggling illegal immigrants or smuggling asylum seekers: performing computer hacks on other businesses or hacking state enemies in a just war. Some goals might be suspect prima facie: making cigarettes or making nuclear/chemical warheads; making child abuse pornography. Usually G will be a legally permitted good abstractly described but too indefinite to read off a value judgement till more circumstances are supplied, as required by Step E below. Like its natural counterpart, organisational G will progress through different levels of abstraction from intention of the end to forming a specific plan, and then performing a particular act. The organisational goals of an ethical organisation, as an artefact of architectonic intelligence, need to be on the list of ingredients of human wellbeing for natural persons, Hs. Corresponding to wellbeing as the indefinite master good of natural persons, the artificial goal/good of the organisational entity as artefact will have identifying more specific constitutive, institutional, and contingent goals focused on organising means to one or more of the Hs ingredients as architectonic. Its directing LG will seek to develop a role structure, R, relative to the domains (family, market, other organisations, environment, state etc) into which the organisation is interfacing as a means to such goods, and attaining them using practical reasoning. These goals will vary in abstractness or specificity, with constitutive goals more abstract than contingent goals, but ought ethically to be either be on, or derived from, the same list Hs as for natural persons, and subject to the same now joint casuistic assessment as natural agents’ actions in types or sets of circumstances.

Step R G directs the design of R. Who or What is the agent or organisational agency, with the G above? What is its repertoire of capacities and/or role incumbents in the authority line? How do they propose to attain G? and are they focussed properly of the just Goal? (There may be multiple agents with whom, to whom, for whom they act). Is the directing, operating, enabling DOE structure in place? As group artefacts, organisations have no brain/nervous system with an orexis or autonomic desires or needs, or immanent intentions. But they can be about collectively satisfying their own quasi-needs and needs of persons and the higher emergent needs of higher human powers, like education, as parts of the common good, and so should be ethical. The same rationale is available from natural person ethics, as described above under G above, to the LG but the reasoning invoking principles, precepts and procedures like casuistry is joint and determines the type of action to be done as means to some ethical G in a set of circumstances. There must be added a joint procedure such as discussions at LG/Board meetings and voting rules. It is critical that the G is enacted ethically by incumbents in R, through choice of means to the G, at whatever level of variable specificity the matter is being considered. A far-sighted LG will take into account both internal and external stakeholders in their plans, and the entity’s domain-relative norms of a practice or sector, such as caveat emptor, limited liability, global supply chains, the concessional status of the business corporation in the business domain.

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Steps E and A First individual incumbents if roles of, leaders/boards, as quasi minds/wills, should locate the abstract type of action and end/object type to be assessed: e.g., firing a weapon; for organisations, running hotels, extracting, refining, and selling oil; administering state welfare, providing education; making and selling artefacts; defence of the realm. The G step will supply this from the organisation’s constitutive goal. This step is unlikely to be morally decisive. But after supply of the types and types of circumstance, and in particular the intention/motive of the agents involved in the particular act, it will usually be possible to give a definitive moral assessment. Teleology contrasts with the meta-ethics of Kantian formalism, both because agent wellbeing is featured, and by the use of its wellbeing dominated version of casuistry. The process of casuistry ends with a judgment about a particular person’s act and particular intent/motive, in particular circumstances, without reference to conformity with an imagined, possible, willable, “universalisable” maxim. Neo-Aristotelianism is more realistic and preferable to formalism for practical reasoning and ethics. It allows exceptions to common moral maxims, e.g., prohibiting lies, in particular cases, without the Kantian requirement of willing that everyone must thereby will a whole class of exceptions to the no-lies rule. For example, on a teleological account, one can lie to a particular intending murderer to save his intended victim under some particular circumstances without generalising the judgement without having to say that lies are not in general wrong or willing that all “telling lies to perceived killers to save their intended victims “become a universal moral law.”

Steps O and S The steps in organisational casuistry assessing justice at O (others) and S (the state) are dictated by the stakeholder model outlined below. QPM requires a Revised Stakeholder model, and this is available for application at steps O and S of GRAEOS. Current Stakeholder Management Theory (SMT) is inadequate to underpin corporate moral responsibility in its present form. SMT was originally devised in the early 1980s to remind us that general ethics applies in business, and businesses have moral duties to non-shareholders. The model of the firm-stakeholder relation was pictured as below as a wheel or web with the firm in the middle as “hub” and stakeholders at the end of the ‘spokes’. In a 2002 piece in the Blackwell Guide to Business Ethics called ‘Stakeholder Theory: The State of the Art’ (p 20) it is still depicted diagrammatically. The stakeholders are: financiers, suppliers, employees, communities, customers and other stakeholder groups.

But confusingly, all parties in the diagram including the agents or managers and the firm itself, meet any of the current standard definitions of stakeholder, presently thought of as being anyone outside the firm. Such are: “a party affected by or affecting the business”; or “with an interest/influence” “who makes a contribution,” “one who has a right to benefit/to be consulted,” “one who takes or is at risk.” A combination of these into a normative concept like: “one who has a right to a voice and to benefit on the basis of having taken a risk, or being put

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at risk; having done their duty, or made a contribution to the organisational entity,” deploying the analysis of justice will suggest we should describe internal agents like directors, managers, shareholders and employees as stakeholders too. Thus, the original and the revised definition both graduate more stakeholders than the original theory wants to allow. On the QPM a stakeholder is one having a claim on the organisation, QP/O (QuasiPerson/Organisation), based in justice either a) as an active contributing party in the architectonic action structure of QP, deserving positive freedom and equality of treatment by QP/O, and a variant of the responsiveness principle such as reciprocity, in virtue of directing, doing the work of, or enabling QP/O, and their contributory role/position “inside” the firm; or b) as a group entity, outside the firm, causing or caused a benefit or harm (intended, unintended, foreseeable etc.) to its freedom or equality, or need-satisfaction rights through commutative or exchange justice, not based on structured contribution to QP/O.

Figure 3. Revised stakeholder model.

This model in Figure 3 allows for the intuitive notion of degrees of organisational responsibility based on architectonic status of causal activity and authority level, with Boards and their incumbents shown as primary and ultimate organisational agents, whether the Board is single or compound as in the case of a co-operative like Mondragon. Operatives and enablers

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have some significant responsibility decreasingly so. Second it locates the DOE role incumbents as the joint actors performing the organisational action, and the internal stakeholders having a right to a voice in governance or at least some consultative relation to the Board through its CEO. Although the needs of end users as external stakeholders are focal and set the standard for the normative part of the organisational ethical judgement, they do nothing, and the organisational act will be judged on the basis of the DOE performance, not that of customers or clients. Lastly the ethical casuistry procedure will have basically the same goods in view as natural persons do and can be collectively performed with the addition of collective voting procedures. There are no absolute corporate or organisational rights or duties which are not derived from General Ethics, and whatever concessions are given by the state to professionals or other sectoral exemptions, these cannot directly frustrate the interests, needsatisfiers, and goods of natural persons, and the moral principles designed to preserve them, since the idea of human wellbeing is the architectonic good from which all ethics is suspended, including the ethics and politics of the state. Corresponding to natural capacity or repertoire in individuals, and the DOE structure, organisational structure is an artefact of individual persons, acting collectively, under a Board or other the LG direction identifying and authorising group incumbents in architectonic directing roles, to act on behalf of the organisation at “self”-directing, operational management, and enabling levels, such as suppliers, as in natural persons the mind/will of the self “directs” operational capacities of sensation and movement, and indirectly the autonomic capacities. As an effect, by analogy of attribution, the organisation is personal in virtue of the Board having parallel directing, operational and enabling roles, the Board of Directors or equivalent group, without being a person. If the role structure is morally inadequate, non-existent, or its design is mishandled the organisation can be ethically at fault. More often, in immoral cases, it exists but is negligently operated by someone at director level, with authority or an operations manager, in the organisational analogue of the causal DOE role structure.

CONCLUDING SUMMARY OF STEPS IN GRAEOS 1) Step G: This is supplied by locating which organisation, its LG’s directing organisational “Mission and Goals.” It tells us what the organisation is attempting to enact for what purpose relevant to wellbeing and guides structural design for operational and enabling internal stakeholders. Because it corresponds to the first step in the casuistic procedure for natural persons, the what and what for, this goal can be very indefinite but not completely so. It can be made more specific at will by a process like zooming on a Google map, and must be complete by step E below. It will usually nominate a type of activity-circumstance cluster, prima facie aim at a goods of HS, and must be prima facie morally permissible. 2) Step R: This answers what the incumbents in the organisation LG is capable of doing to whom and with whom. It tells us how the goal is to be achieved. LG must check organisational repertoire or role structure for fit of incumbents in roles to the goal, and the effective authority/responsibility linkage. Can and does the organisation know what it is doing?

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Good organisational design will enact the DOE structure and assure voice in governance and communication and authority chains are effective between the three main internal levels, with managers and workers and investors and suppliers given a voice in organisational governance. Joint actions will require verification, auditing and accounting. Step E: Use of ethical decision procedure in the service of justice. This will require use of group casuistry as exemplified in Chapter 5 and an analysis of justice in terms of reciprocity, freedom, equality, desert and need –satisfaction of the sort set out in Chapter 4. Step A: Check the action to see if the quasi-self, the organisation, does in particular fact know what it has done/is doing. What is it actually doing to bring about the means to G? This intended act is the same organisational act decided upon under E, as executed in reality by incumbents in the DOE structure. On the stakeholder model set out, they are the internal stakeholders. There are infinitely many ways of getting this cooperative ethical act wrong and fewer options for getting it right. The goal in the circumstances has to be achieved using practical reasoning by agents at all three levels in the DOE structure following board direction conscientiously. Minimally, no moral law is broken. The impact on external stake holders like end users (customers, clients, patients) may be swift enough to be included here as the result of act A but may not show up immediately. Step O: Checks for impact on other parties in the context/practice. On whom are results falling? What is the impact on external stakeholders including end-users, competitors, co-professional, or co-providing government agencies, and local communities? All these parties are passive, yet relevant to the ethics of forming of the organisational intention in a plan of action, especially end users. Their good and needs architectonically set the standard for quality of product or service. If their specific needs in the context of transaction are not met, when measured against wellbeing, the organisation and its act at A fails totally. End users must figure in the description of the corporate end in intention, G, but are not agents of the organisation, and in assessing the ethics of the act, figure only in the questions: “on/to whom the act result impacts and how?” This step will require recognition of domain/sector differences, and correlative norms if this has not yet emerged at E and A. Step S: Check the relation of the action to the wider society/community and the state. Again the good of the state, qua guardian of the common good, even where the state is passive in the organisational act, (not always) sets the standard against which to measure the organisational act, including those of state agencies. The main thing to check here is the concept of social and political justice, and the law governing the domain and sector. Governments concern is need-satisfaction and retributive, commercial, and distributive justice. They have authority to grant concessions to, and supervise, other parties. In the public sector organisation, the goal is nearly always a public good, at step G, like health, welfare, education or security. But a government bureaucracy still has to comply with state law, respect separation of powers, facilitate democratic representation, and avoid corruption like conflicts of interest. It may be tempted e.g., to use immoral means of torture to further security. Practitioners in different sectors should have differentiating concessions and privileges, but in no case

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Possible application can be made of the acronym GREAOS for Organisational Ethics to public, private, professional, and non-profit sectors/domains. The 2012 (Ardagh) paper includes an extended discussion of the concessional view of business, setting out the nature and purposes of the practice of business; its structures and institutions like limited liability; its morally distinctive practices; and its external stakeholders like competitors and state tax departments. As Dine (2000) and others have argued, business is granted a social concession to operate by the state in which the latter benefits from business activities and in return provides a legal enforceable framework. As Ardagh (2011) argued, the telos of business is not or need not be, financial profit alone but profit more widely in the sense of “weal” as opposed to woe: needs-satisfiers for human capacities; providing training and meaningful work, enabling funds for workers, suppliers, and investors as internal stakeholders; quality goods and services for end users as external stakeholders; developing innovative, quality products which endure, and excellent services; making life easier, and so enabling leisure, entertainment, and selfsufficiency; and meeting the other marks of wellbeing set out above in the business practice. If applied to the case of the Exxon Valdez disaster, the organisational goal abstractly considered, and the abstract type of action undertaken will pass G, but not the way it was enacted in the circumstances. In the acronym’s application at Step R, i.e., the chain of role responsibility, is broken by the captain’s drunkenness, the HR department failure to remedy his behaviour, and in the act of the first mate circumstances as judged by casuistry, at Step E and A, would be immoral and negligent. The devastating impact on the other relevant players, especially local fishermen is picked up at Step O, and the State of Alaska’s lax environmental provisions were known to but connived at by key board members of the Board of Exxon. GREAOS can apply to organisations in practices in all sectors. In the public sector the path to the LG is ideally political or other election, and in the public and professional sectors the G will more easily pass assessment qua aimed at community need–satisfaction, such as health, education, security, employment, etc. In those sectors, the incumbency of LG in the DOE role structure will be based on democratic representation; operations will usually be bureaucratic; and use line and staff structures. Financial enablement will be by taxation. Public sector external stakeholders are citizens, not customers. But the process including the S Step can still work for a government department with a G of implementing the state’s policy. As foreshadowed at the start of this chapter, NL, in the forms of NAVE and DGE, together have provided a useful model of organisational, institutional, and state ethics. It was largely through the emergence of a conflict between church and state that the idea of corporate, state, and church “quasi-personhood” took shape, and has been argued that the analogy of attribution concept, taken from Aristotle, and applied in natural and confessional theology in the middle ages, proves to be suitable for importation into the current debate on NL in both variants. It provides a coherent challenge to contemporary methodological individualism and to the alleged amoral status of collectives by explicating the idea of corporate agency without resort to freefloating collectives. The meta-ethical 5-point framework for NL utilised in Chapter 1-5 can be selectively employed to generate a quasi-personal account in which the end of the collective entity, and its actions, can be judged morally by reference back to the morality of the individual, making sense

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of our actual “natural” use of moral language in connection with organisations, states, and religious institutions.

Chapter 9

APPLYING NATURAL LAW TO VIOLENCE: THE NAVE AND DGE POSITIONS Part 1 of this chapter outlines a spectrum of positions on Philosophy of Non-violence (NV) and Nonviolent resistance action, from Unconditional prohibition of lethal force (agape/ahimsa), labelled UNV; through conditional positions like the “just war” position, i.e., conditional non-violence, (CNV); to merely pragmatic prohibitions of violence (PNV). Part 2 sketches a history of major contributions to NV practice, by locating parties roughly on such a triadic spectrum. Part 3 correlates this moral spectrum with the threefold model of applied reasoning, labelled R1-R3, associated with the 3Rs question outlined in Chapter 1’s discussion. A threefold taxonomy of types of reason is suggested. Reason can be scientific, (R1), metaphysical, (R2); and experiential and interpretative, (R3) - in application. It is suggested that while unconditional NV is hard to rationalise on Naturalistic secular social scientific grounds, (R1), extreme altruism becomes more plausible on theological/metaphysical grounds, and on the grounds of the “total interpretations” or “grand narratives” expressing religious beliefs. The latter can be allowed to be rational in some sense but not demonstrative, on the triadic model of reason presented. In order to understand this Chapter it is helpful to revisit the graph on p 18 designated Figure 1 mapping the two notions of altruism and ontological commitment via rationality. Despite obstacles to religious belief, experience of idiosyncratic “I-Thou relations” (Buber (1937) between individuals as individuals, can also support religious intuitions of the possibility of agape and human transcendence. A limited ADR rationale based only on PNV, natural and social science, and agnostic metaphysical assumptions, R1, could stand alone, but a comprehensive, historically more accurate one, might include theology and religious studies in order to understand UNV and the more commonly accepted CNV, and also to interpret current Middle Eastern realities (Moore (2007).

PART 1: INTRODUCTION Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) is now an accepted practice in most Western states, institutionalised and supported by the rule of law at sufficient levels within Enlightenmentbased, secular nations. About three hundred and seventy years ago, European religious wars

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ended in a truce at Westphalia. It was agreed by the warring parties that the God which all the parties claimed to revere would not allow the killing of other believers for the purpose of maintaining specific dogmas. This was a momentous triumph of NV, debatably attributed by some wholly to retreat from religion or theism. It was actually partly achieved by the ascendancy of previously underplayed interpretations of Scripture, i.e., those emphasising Divine forgiveness, tolerance, and non-killing; the waning of Papal secular authority; and growing agnosticism respecting the detailed content of God’s ordained providence. The parties did not abandon their theism, belief in higher powers, or differing confessional beliefs, but only killing for them. The secular order had been largely accepted by religions like Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism and by Christianity in some form at least since St. Augustine in the fifth century. It was extended by post-religious war agreement in the seventeenth century to permit religious tolerance. This development has not progressed in a democratic direction in some Muslim nations in the Middle East, and these nations are now convulsing for want of a solution of this problem of a NV kind, extending the secular order, and democracy, in accord with religious reason. As Diana Moore (2007) suggests, attempts to resolve these kinds of conflicts are still not adequately informed by an understanding of religion and religious difference, using the relevant handles to be found within the creeds of the warring parties, rather than imposing the Western ideal of the democratic state from without. Theism has many versions: a God creating the cosmos ex nihilo, pantheism, panentheism, process theology, negative theology, mysticism, and paganism. Negative theology and Mysticism deny God’s existence and our knowledge in any familiar sense, and partly converge unwillingly with secular agnosticism. Theism is challenged by agnosticism and atheism relative to each of its six version. Religion, and its liturgical practices, covers creational theisms like Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, with creation stories, but includes the other five versions, and atheisms/panentheism like Buddhism and Jainism. Belief in the possibility of eternal happiness in an afterlife is largely supported by theism, theistic and atheistic religion, spiritualism, and philosophical dualism. This belief in eternal human transcendence underpins unconditional NV as a belief and practice. This chapter presents in Part 2 a lightning history of the Philosophy of NV, mainly of the Unconditioned version of Non-Violence (UNV), defined here as one absolutely prohibiting any deliberate use of lethal force on persons (pacifism), absolute respect for the person, even that of enemies, and absolute commitment to universal justice and peace. This history suggests there has always been a spiritual, usually a religious, component to its robust practical enactments in deep conflicts, those occurring in the most vital sub-set of cases, where it is being practised by persons or groups in circumstances where life and wellbeing is known by the practitioner to be clearly on the line, for the sake of justice or peace, positively conceived. We saw in the previous chapter how the distinction of individual, group, organisational and state moral agency both spurred and was further spurred by Augustine’s decision to warrant the curtailing of the universal pacifism and anarchism of the early church with the Two Cities doctrine, the legitimising of the institutional Church, and the new permissions which eventually turned into the just war permissions of lethal force for states which became just war theory. This fateful change brought Christianity into alignment with NAVE as we have described it: a conditional altruism within the matrix of a secular NL justice-based approach. By the time of Aquinas, the just war criteria for a state’s going to war were established as ideals: the ad bello criteria of proper authority, justice and peace as the intent; exhaustion of all alternatives; chance

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of success; the inbello restrictions on indiscriminate killing of non-combatants and disproportionate or indiscriminate weapons used as means. Today, most people, including Christians, and DGE followers, only affirm and practise NV in a conditional, circumstance-defined, form CNV. Practitioners of CNV can use collective NV strategically, and often go to jail or die although aware of the risks, for justice’s sake, e.g., defending democratic secularism, itself often based on agnostic or atheistic metaphysical assumptions. But they cannot consistently and rarely do, practise or affirm UNV in its unconditional spiritual form, as in Gandhi’s ahimsa, or Jesus of Nazareth’s notion of agapeforgiveness and love of enemies and of the wicked, as transcendent fellow-creatures, for God’s sake or for the sake of eternal happiness. The history of NV presented here will however also include both religious and non-religious versions of CNV and pragmatic/strategic versions of non-violence, PNV.

Positive Nature of Non-Violence Despite the negative form of its name, NV is a positive creed, even in its weaker PNV form, but especially in its unconditional UNV form. In secular Ethics, unlike negative duties not to harm others, positive and blanket interpersonal “duties to love” are possible, but rationally more problematic without theistic or religious assumptions. They go beyond limited benevolence and family duties, to parents, children, and siblings; contracts, promises; and indefinite “good will” towards colleagues and virtuous fellow citizens. An ethics of temporal happiness, and specific obligation in a context, based on the common good of society, and the virtue of the parties, is basic in secular ethics/politics of an Aristotelian or Neo-Aristotelian hue. National service qua citizen can in many nations be a duty. But nobody must, on that same basis alone, yield their “moral free space” (Chisholm 1968; Taylor 1989; Urmson 1968) to an open-ended love and care of the totality of persons, or volunteer for just, but dangerous, social projects. Some social duties, like those of the military or the fire service sectors, may generate roleduties entailing risking death, but secular ethical reason’s generalisation of principles and rules, based on maximising collective temporal happiness (Utilitarianism), personal rational selfconsistency (Kant/Deontology) or the Golden Rule, “Do as you would be done by” recognise that a matter may be “above the call of duty” or “supererogatory” for that person. One often cannot close the gap between: “Somebody should speak up or do/stop this” and “I should speak up or do/stop this” without further enabling “supernatural” assumptions. It may involve opting to face an immediate death threat for truth’s sake; caring for distant strangers in mortal danger; or resisting/forgiving wicked enemies as a human shield. Sometimes only a believer in higher powers and Divine Law or immortality in some form can renounce their life and think they have a moral duty to put themselves in harm’s way for the sake of God, forgive their wicked enemies, or leave vengeance to God. Socrates, Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and their like were not pursuing temporal happiness as their ultimate goal. They consciously yielded up their moral free space to take on otherwise supererogatory projects, and subordinated temporal wellbeing to the highest, transcendent Good, Truth, or God.

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The Three Types of Non-Violence: Explicating the Preliminary Triadic “Screen” for Constructing the History William James says somewhere that history is “an avalanche of murders.” Others have noted that history is written by the victors. A more hopeful, balanced account is that history aspires to accurately records our human ancestry, including our mistakes, and, in a sense, attempts to preserve ourselves across time from total extinction. So, we value our individual reputation; and that of organisations, institutions, communities, and States, in obituaries and other historical narratives preserving their achievements in cultures, arts, and the traditions they express. For this lightning history I have used a triadic screen to identify NV parties and movements divided into: unconditional (UNV), conditional (CNV) and pragmatic (PNV) nonviolence. Table 6. Spectrum of Non-violence (NV) Unconditional NV

Conditional NV

Pragmatic NV

No Lethal force/Agape

Conditional lethal force

Pragmatic NV

No Capital Punishment/War

Just punishment/war

Tactical and strategic

Pacifism/Commune-ism

Justice, Law, and Order

Principled Negotiation

Normal dispute resolution practice (DR) would fit under CNV and PNV and presupposes that state/communal law and order is in place to prevent lethal violence and enable the parties with perceived needs, perceptions of possible unfairness, and election of DR intervention as a possible means of achieving agreement on remedies, to convene in peace. After this meeting has occurred, the verification of success and possibly enforcement is likewise assured by the state provision of enveloping national peace, and shared enjoyment of regional international peace. When the state itself is in civil or international disorder or conflict; or itself corrupt or repressive; or just incompetent, then DR practitioners, such as negotiators, need to take more risks; have more dedication; and sometimes show heroic courage and compassion. UNV In the incomplete history of this historical movement in Part 2 the contribution to the Philosophy of NV is taken to embrace both theory and practice as equally important. It will mean here, primarily the rationale for prohibition of deliberate lethal force against human persons unconditionally, and unconditional NV or UNV. In this UNV tradition, justice is presupposed as the end, and personal and social peace as part of justice. Justice is seen as both the end result of UNV resistance activity (satyagraha), and UNV is seen as the absolutely necessary means for just peace. Positive law is not the same as justice, and illegal activity in the cause of revolution is not ruled out. A strict notion of “Nonattachment” to temporal goods essentially, accompanies the practice, including ranking voluntary poverty/non-acquisitiveness, and a chaste, celibate, mendicant, ashram, or monastic life, over practical engagements, including family life; and, less often, celebrating tribal or village commune-ism, and vegetarianism. UNV is the absolute version of NV.

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UNV based resistance for the sake of positive peace and justice or satyagraha includes: legal and illegal sit ins; boycotts; marches attempts at stopping trains or trucks by “lie-ins”; human shields; banned publications; social media; strikes; picketing; rallies and demonstrations; street theatre; fasting and hunger strikes; slow-downs; self-defence arts; withholding taxes; refusal of induction to armed services. So, now we will turn to its conditional counterpart, CNV. As an ideal, UNV is seldom followed in practice; yet seldom rejected outright, even by its critics. Nearly all people follow CNV, which is basically a NL position, typified by “just war theory,” which can be warranted by and large by NAVE and includes permitted use of personal lethal force in specific circumstances, such as in policing aimed at preserving community law and order, and using deterrent lethal force against state enemies. CNV includes those who in principle accept capital punishment in extremis; and state use of standing professional armies using deterrence. UNV cannot accept these exceptions or permissions. But rather than seeing conditional non-violence as totally opposed to NV, I will be assuming that a CNV ideal is still NV. Even though it does not absolutely require UNV, it will be assumed that CNV is still a species of NV, especially suitable for communities and states, and still allowing personal conscientious pacifism. Even some individual UNV proponents have either waned in their zeal (Hennacy, Kagawa) or finished up in or close to the UNV camp, after practising CNV for a long period (Tolstoi, Mandela). This illustrates the way there is and continues to be dialogue between NAVE and DGE. Furthermore, some CNV practitioners absolutely reject capital punishment and some lethal weapons like chemical and nuclear devices. There are unconditional elements within such conditional positions. In a CNV position, such as the “just war/just punishment” position, proportionate, limited violence against killers is permitted as necessary, or a last resort, with the intention and for the sake of peace or justice restoration, only in some cases; and for some agents, e.g., self-defence or defence of innocents by the police; or just war by the army of the just state. Obviously, the just war criterion that innocent non-combatant persons be discriminated from the non-innocent, cannot be met by nuclear and chemical weapons, so they are unconditionally prohibited in this sort of view (Ardagh 1990). These “law and order” or “just punishment, and “just war” style parties, will be taken here to commend and support NV, but conditionally. There are also, within CNV, general supporters of NV who still allow for unique circumstances to permit an individual to overrule the unconditional norm and killing of a murderer. CNV permits in addition the application just war criteria (JWC) permission for use of coercive force/violence. In sum, for States: States must have proper authority; just intent; NV methods are to be tried first and violence is the last resort; there is no alternative; proportionality (the good achieved probably will successfully outweigh evil caused); discrimination of innocent noncombatants and prohibition of killing them; only discriminatory weapons in combat; ambassador safety; and there is probable success. An analogue for persons and organisations would be: there must be just or humanitarian intent; NV methods tried first, and violence is the last resort; proportionality (the good achieved probably will successfully outweigh evil caused). Despite their slightly different modalities, PNV will be rolled in with CNV for the purpose of this discussion.

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In the following taxonomy of arguments for and against NV the NL position is reflected in the CNV side of the argument. Both UNV and the other views share a robust vision of communal peace, enabling personal need satisfaction, in a just state generally and indefinitely conceived. One main difference is that UNV rules out one means to the same end of justice and peace, and the other views do not rule out violence absolutely. This is reflected in their modal moral status: for one group, violence is in the modal category: “prohibited absolutely in all circumstances.” For the others, UNV is an ideal to be striven for, but violence is in the modal category: “permissible under some specified circumstances; and forbidden in all others” (CNV); or only select positive exclusions of lethal violence like murder are listed (PNV). In the lightning history in Part 2, the first two positions are highlighted, because they speak about NV as a presumptive policy, not a tactic, and will say less about the third. It cannot rationally accept deliberately placing oneself in lethal harm’s way or refraining from inflicting it, unless the context allows one to demonstrate or rationally believe independently that there is positive duty of active universal brotherly love. Forgiveness of enemies or the wicked is not a standard topic in secular Political Philosophy, save as a possible strategy under PNV. The other two views of NV condemn all lethal violence absolutely (UNV) or some lethal violence not meeting explicit excusing criteria categorically (CNV); enjoin love and forgiveness as the first word; and call for NV and presumptive dispositional love of others, as required or ideal, on grounds going beyond those which are based on “tit for tat” reciprocity and are scientifically reasonable. Unlike PNV, UNV and CNV both claim to be “reasonable” on some metaphysical, non-natural, spiritual grounds, and my interest will be in them, and the other correlative neglected, non-scientific, senses of “reasonable.” The pros and cons of both UNV and CNV positions are illustrated below. The basic two sides are often expressed on practical, imperative, injunctions, not in assertions of truth. These cannot be formally contradictory. Where they are in the form of assertions, they rarely contradict each other formally. The time frame of possible response is often the issue and that is clearly somewhat elastic in many circumstances. There is truth in both positions. For example, preventative measures which have been talked about but not tried are hard to evaluate rationally as to their probable success. A NV national defence strategy was advocated in the 1970s by Lanza del Vasto (1974), and in the 1980’s for Australia by David Martin (1984), with a small armed force and national service consisting of training in how to collectively sabotage and befuddle an invader on the Norway-Nazi model. Since this alternative has not been tried, the truth of the corresponding claims is indeterminate. If it were tested and proved viable, it would apparently demolish the case for many expensive weapons like strike fighters and submarines. So, the dialogue below glosses over some of the empirical probability issues, while trying to convey the flavour of the main branches of the NV movement. In the history which follows, the taxonomy of arguments below is in the background.

A Taxonomy of Arguments against and for UNV The arguments for the both sides of the CNV-UNV argument are outlined below in Table 7.

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Table 7. Arguments of the CNV-UNV debate Conditional NV 1. Self-defence, and defence of innocent third parties often requires force, No absolute prohibition of a means (violence) or of an abstract act-type or end(killing), is rational; or “more moral” qua exception-less. 2. Consensus building needed for NV- resistance is too slow and in in urgent cases useless. This is rejected by proponents of UNV. 3. Just war criteria (JWC) are clear and workable. Democracies can apply the JWC. When criteria are met, there is no alternative; humanitarian intervention is justifiable. 4. NV works only when violence is possible. 5. No world order exists with resources to prevent unjust war and violence. 6. World order to ensure peace would have concentrated power and is possibly dangerous 7. Ruthless dictators crush peaceful protests/resistance early; this makes UNV impossible. 8. Nuclear deterrence has worked for 70 plus years.

9. It is sometimes permissible to threaten what it would be wrong to do. 10. Trust needed for total “de-nuclearisation” is not present. 11. Secular reason and ethics of reciprocity suffice to contain violence. 12. Religion divides; Universal love cannot be commanded; Golden Rule and limited benevolence suffice for global ethics.

Unconditional NV 1` No use of lethal force is ever permissible. One must act one step at a time. Identify the issues in dispute and build a consensus; ask for redress, then apply NV pressure. Casualties reduce when one acts in numbers. 2` NV resistance process is speedy enough, experimental/reversible. Non- fatal damage can be reversed. 3` A reign of terror can follow successful “just war”; often leaves a legacy of hate; alternatives always exist. Just war criteria are always abused/extended. “Smart” weapons often kill many civilians. States are modern entities often unjustly imposed 4` Public avowal of UNV to person of oppressor allays fear/hate. 5` Proactive NV is best for needs-satisfaction. There are organisations dedicated to reforms of global governance. 6` UN type reformed body need not be fascist Theology can promote global cosmopolitanism. 7` Recorded successes of NV Resistance with dictators documented (Sharp (1973). 8` If nuclear weapons are used again, possible human extinction will follow nuclear winter. The just war criteria have failed; choice is NV or non- existence (Martin Luther King). 9`. Threats of moral wrong are wrong. 10` Trust can and must be built. 11`Theology/religion can cross cultures and stem violence and nationalistic militarism. Only distortions divide. 12` Fatherhood and Love of God and caritas commanded in DGE and religion support UNV. Risks of UNV can be offset in an afterlife

We turn now to the third and last position: PNV

Pragmatic Non-Violence Finally, and still, l under the NV banner, there are the “tactical-strategic-pragmatic” NV supporters, such as the “principled negotiators” of the Harvard School, typified by Fisher and Ury (1981) in Getting to yes. designated here as PNV upholders. PNV types need not necessarily invoke or mention justice, rights, or morality as essential to DR, and tend to exclude only positively listed types of lethal force. This version of NV has no general or absolute or unconditional principled objection to killing people. It condemns deliberately killing innocents (murder) and some other illegal specific types of lethal force; but has no objection in principle to legal executions and imprisonment or to a broader philosophical position on war or revolution or moral position outside of what is relevant to the negotiation of intra-state win/win outcomes for parties of (roughly equal) status to meet their needs, as is possible for citizens in a state with adequate law and order provisions.

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There is however enough ethical consensus between UNV believers and CNV or PNV agnostics on core issues and NV to allow for a common core curriculum for Ethics, Peace Studies, and Dispute Resolution, based on social justice; and for discussion of the case for UNV as an open matter. The model of applied reason presented in Part 3 allowing for three applications or spheres of reason, elicited in response to iterated “Why?”-questions, yields: natural scientific, theological, and interpretative experiential religious reasons, labelled R1, R2, and R3, moralities. It suggests UNV can be rational a different way and explicates where consensus can and cannot be expected between Neo-Aristotelian ethics, and transcendental ones. In the historical period covered in the list below, an asterisk to the name of parties mentioned warns that CNV or PNV, not UNV is in play, and it must be remembered that many parties on the list given in Part 2’s history moved along the spectrum from UNV to pragmatism or back the other way in the course of their career, like Tolstoi, Hennacy, Mandela and Kakawa. This makes the story longer to tell, so it will not be possible here. Consequently, your indulgence is asked for such an over-simple, imperfect but hopefully useable history. Space requires that in most cases the NV person or group is simply named, and the reader can refresh their understanding via the internet or elsewhere.

PART 2: THE HISTORY OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF NV AND THE NV SPECTRUM In the history presented below a clear line has been drawn to exclude terrorism from CNV that is deliberately pursued for national liberation or social revolutions, even for humanistic reasons; or incitement of open-ended violence as a means to such ends, like the vague exhortations of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution. An asterisk in front of some names indicates a CNV or PNV position. In this indicative review I have not attempted to provide scholarly referencing in this lightning history. References to almost all of the named persons or groups up till 1960 are omitted, but in all cases the World Wide Web will supply these.

Prehistory Humans date from 2.5 million years ago, and modern Homo sapiens from about 200,000 years ago. Prehistorically, it is estimated that Australian indigenous peoples; their culture; and its oral traditions have flourished in this country for about 50,000 years before the British occupation. In such oral traditions “The law” is featured and governs intra- and inter-tribal relations. Given evidence of farming yams and fish, and about 200 geographically located cultural groups, it is reasonable to assume there would have been an implicit “folk anthropology” based ethics, used as a base for discouraging tribal and family violence, and cultural practices to protect life and satisfy need like rituals for establishing peaceful contact without alarming others- a precursor of the custom: “ambassadors are safe.” The idea of savages living on terra nullius invented by colonialists was always a convenient British fiction to

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lubricate violent and lethal dispossession. Australia today is built on this original violence to Aboriginal people.

History: From c 2000 B.C. till About 6 BC   

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Jainism: There are explicit versions of UNV by Mahavira, a Jain teacher. Hinduism: Unconditional non-violence is at least strongly commended in some Hindu scriptures: e.g., Yahir Veda and Valmiki’s Ramayana. Judaism: In some Judaic texts: Isaiah/Micah/Hosea there is prophecy of lions lying down with lambs and swords beaten into ploughshares when the Messiah comes; the Ten Commandments forbid killing, theft, and adultery. But killing is interpreted more narrowly as killing innocents deliberately or murder and communal punishment allowed for execution. Deuteronomy says vengeance is for God. God creates ex nihilo. Buddhism: Buddhist texts attribute UNV to Gautama/Siddhartha; the teaching is atheistic or panentheistic but adopts transmigration of soul/reincarnation. Taoism and Confucianism both commend UNV as an ideal, not a universal requirement. Plato/Socrates: “It is better to suffer than inflict harm”; Demiurgos shapes matter; there is a World Soul; Mind/body dualism; immortality of soul. Aristophanes’ comic play Lysistrata, about a sex strike to stop the Peloponnesian war, may have been implicitly anti-war; Early notions of NL beyond convention, latent in Plato and Aristotle, explicit in the Stoics and Cicero, pre-figures global ethics. There is a supreme Logos. Primary precepts prohibit murder and theft. Secondary include ambassadors are safe and some other limits on war conduct. Sacred Mount demonstration by Plebs is an early example of NV Cineaus is said to have challenged Pyrrhus of Thessalonica regarding ultimate ends of war and “Pyrrhic victories”

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Jesus of Nazareth, as portrayed through the Canon recognised by the time of Eusebius, in the 4th century; relevant expressions of PNV include: 1) “Love God, and Love your neighbour as yourself” (Mark 12:30) 2) “Turn the other cheek” (Matt 5:38 and Luke 6:27).36 “Suffer rather than inflict unjustly imposed harm” as an unconditional policy. Vengeance is for God. Parable of wheat and tares discourages vengeance on wicked. 3) “God is Love” (John 4:8-9; “Render good for evil”; “Love your enemies” “Forgive your enemies” and ‘Forgive seven times seven times” (Luke 27-28; Matt, 18; 2135). The love of strangers, forgiveness of sinners, (John 3:16; Romans 5:8) and infinite forgiveness of others (1 Tim 2:1; Matt 6:14-15; Luke 17:3-4). “Who, without sin, will cast the first stone at the adulterous woman?” All this clearly goes

See W. Wink (1984) Naming the Powers for analysis of this text.

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beyond the meaning of both reciprocity and justice, and would render capital punishment impossible. 4) There is an egalitarian message in parables of the Good Samaritan, and Dives and Lazarus, the themes of non-attachment, the dangers of wealth, and of compassion for the poverty or suffering of others. 5) And finally, what many consider the absurdly altruistic Christian injunction: “Do unto to others as I have done for you” i.e., laid down my life for my friends, (John 13:34).This is expressed also in John 12.25: “He who loves his life in this world will lose it, while he who hates it will keep it for eternal life”; and in Luke 14:26: and Matt 10; 37; “He who loves his father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.” This teaching is clearly inviting self-sacrificial love and goes well beyond justice. Jesus expected to see the good thief crucified with him in paradise (eternity). There are other resurrection/atonement narratives in non-Christian cultures such as Osiris, but none like this. St. Paul would appear to teach the UNV doctrine. Adopts and adds to Natural Law, upholds immortality of soul; stresses love/agape/charity. Early Christians and sects till about 300AD (Clement of Alexandria; Justin Martyr; Origen; Marcion; Irenaeus) The preceding three tend to be UNV pacifist/anarchists and perhaps commune-ist.

c. 300 AD-1845 

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St. Augustine, in 5th century says that sometimes war is a “mournful necessity”; Western CNV (“Just war” theory begins); Cities of God (ideal) and City of Man (real) doctrine outlined in Chapter 8. some early texts of Islam, 7th century, commend NV; Sufi mysticism. Cathars, 11th century, rejects Augustine; Waldo/Waldensians, 1173; in 13th century, St. Francis of Assisi preaches NV. St Thomas Aquinas: caritas(agape) is a theological virtue; UNV ideal and required for clergy only; Dante follows; John Wyclif 1361; Jan Hus d.1415; Unity of the Brethren; Meister Eckhart (mysticism) 14th century; Peter Chelcicky; Moravians 1457; Chaucer, Melibee’s Tale; Erasmus; Conrad Grebel, Swiss Brethren; Anabaptists, 1524; Montaigne/de la Boetie On Voluntary Servitude, 1550; Hutterites 16th; Menno Simons; Emeric Cruce,1640; B de la Las Casas 1560; late Shakespeare plays e.g., A Winter’s Tale Vitoria; Suarez; H. Grotius,1645. G.J. Fox 1620; Quakers; Amish 1660s; 1755 Dukkhabors; Church of the Brethren 1770s; Shakers 1780; J. Commenius (universal education); J. Wesley Rousseau; Bentham; Locke; Spinoza; Toland; Hutcheson; Hume; Kant (on Perpetual Peace); the early critique of standing armies, 18th century; Wilberforce (RSPCA and Anti-slavery Act 1833); Kierkegaard: Works of Love.

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1845-1945    

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Seventh Day Adventists, 1860, and Christadelphians are pacifist. * Victor Hugo, recommends a U.S. of Europe; Dostoevski/The Idiot and Grand Inquisitor story within Brothers Karamazov; Tolstoi advocates pacifism/The Kingdom of God is Within You. Supporters of CNV or PNV include Shelley; Emerson; Thoreau, W.L Garrison, F. Douglass, Mark Twain The War Prayer. UNV is back with Adin Ballou, Christian Non-Resistance; Dickens A Christmas Carol; Tale of Two Cities; Henri Dunant develops The Red Cross. Nobel Peace prize instituted in 1901; the Geneva Convention; Fellowship of Reconciliation, 1914; Opponents of WW1 included pacifists Ben Salmon, Keir Hardie, Evelyn Underhill and Emma Goldman and socialist Eugene Debs. Suffragette movement (Wyoming, Utah, New Zealand, South Australia) via the Women’s Social and Political Union achieves; 19th Amendment, included hunger strikes as strategy, as did several Irish rebellions in the 1920s period. Toyohiko Kagawa produces antiwar critiques in Japan 1928-35; R. Gregg writes The Power of Nonviolence (1935) and A. Huxley defends NV in 1938. In 1930s-40s Gandhi is a pivotal figure promoting NV in South Africa and sarvodaya in India until 1948 with the help of likeminded Muslims, like Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and the Ahmadiyya community; Vinoba Bhave and the atheist Lavanam. His NV repertoire included self-suffering (tapasya) of hunger strikes. Other major figures in this period were the pacifist nun Dorothy Day of Catholic Worker movement, and Albert Camus. *In WWII, it is arguable that the allies fought a just war. Some claim that, despite appearances, the Christian alleged attempted assassination of Hitler by D. Bonhoeffer, and the Jesuit Rosch, were basically non-violent, but like Kierkegaard, Bonhoeffer allowed “teleological suspension of the ethical” of the Abraham/Isaac type. F. Jagerstatter is hanged by Hitler for opposing war service. Fire-bombing of Dresden and nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki condemned by Catholic philosopher E. Anscombe, and many others.

1945-2001 In the early 1900s, Gandhi had read Ruskin’s Until This Last and Tolsoi and after an uneven South African campaign, meets success in India with UNV in 1947. Pax Christi forms in France 1945. *The UN is formed in mid-1940s, with Trygve Lie and Dag Hammarskjold as first two Secretary Generals, and used to support conditional NV, but the world? was drawn swiftly into the Korean War. Otherwise able to navigate the Cold War in Vietnam and elsewhere and mount credible peace-keeping forces and agencies thereafter in Africa, e.g., Angola; in Central America, e.g., Haiti; in Asia and the South Pacific, e.g., Timor, in Europe e.g., Croatia and the Middle East e.g., Cyprus. This influences James Bevel (Southern Christian Leadership Conference) and M. L. King till his death in 1968; also Cesar Chavez in California, Corazon Aquino in the Phillipines, Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana (1957); Julius Nyerere in Tanzania and others successfully use NV

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tactics in revolutions noted in Gene Sharp’s historical review The Politics of Non-violent Action (1973) and Contemporary Conflict Resolution by O. Ramsbotham et. al., (2012). There follows a long period of joint UNV/CNV/and PNV reflection, too complex to disentangle, on the holocaust of Hiroshima/Nagasaki. Aldous Huxley was a prominent pacifist in the period. After the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, strong interest emerges in avoiding nuclear mutual assured destruction (MAD). But nuclear strategy rapidly switches to the more dangerous Nuclear Strategy and Tactics, (NUTS). After Pope John XXIII’s epic Pacem in Terris, Roman Catholic, Uniting Church, and other official church documents appeared supporting CNV, stopping just short of condemning NUTS outright for failing the “just war” permissions. Along with atheist Lord Bertrand Russell, Roman Catholic, Elizabeth Anscombe, and the Quakers’ Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, (CND), there emerged many concerned PNV anti-nuclear writers like Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, Thomas Schelling, Howard Raiffia, John Burton, and Johan Galtung. Burton is known for his stress on the role of needs, and Galtung for supporting others in pushing the case for attacking the “white violence” of injustice, also exposed by Liberation Theology of Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff, Helder Camara, et alia. In the U.S., Daniel Ellsberg whistle-blows on the origins of the Vietnam War; the Jesuit priests known as the Berrigan brothers are just two of many UNV Anti-Vietnam War protesters in the US. Another CNV opponent, *Sydney Lens, picks up the phrase “the military–industrial complex” from Eisenhower and criticises its role in sustaining militarism. John Lennon and Yoko Ono and many song writers and musicians espouse pacifism and/or condemn the Vietnam War e.g., Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, et al. Mohammad Ali refuses induction. Scores of national liberation struggles in colonial empires use a mix of UNV and CNV. Fred Lundberg’s (1968) The Rich and the Super-Rich begins a sharp critique of inequality of global wealth which persists to today with the work of Thomas Picketty and Branko Milanovic. The *World Order Model Project/World Policy Institute worked at world peace. Saul Mendlovitz along with Richard Falk produced many works on world governance. Also contributing to parallel peace initiatives are Ken and Elise Boulding. A mix of UNV and CNV writers follows: George Lakey, Joanna Macy, Joan Bondurant, and Barbara Deming; anti-war defenders of CNV resistance, and peace like Petra Kelly, A.J. Muste, A. Hennacy, H. Arendt, N. Chomski, and Judith Hand. UNV is again propounded by Lanza del Vasto of L’Arche, D. Dolci, T. Merton, E. F. Schumacher, and John Dear, continue this effort. The Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, is a public exponent of UNV. Post World War II, the Irish Bobby Sands, and some Cubans again used hunger strikes in National Liberation related struggles. The Christian, Cecil Jackson-Cole founds Oxfam in 1948 and expands it till his death in 1979, by which time it is flourishing. In 1971 Medecins Sans Frontiers was co-founded by Raymond Borel, Bernard Kouchner and several others and went global under Claude Malhuret from 1979 onwards. Secondary and Tertiary Peace Studies/Education grows from the 1970s with help from International Peace Research Association’s Chadwich Alger, Elise Boulding and others. Amnesty International, and Christians Against Torture are started by P. Berenson; Greenpeace is co-founded and named by the author of The Jesus Sayings, Rex Weyler. President Carter tries hard to raise peace consciousness. Mother Teresa receives Peace Prize in 1979. The Philippines had a nonviolent revolution 1983-86; In ADR, at the practical level, from the 1980s onward, many bodies, like Stella and Helena Cornelius’ Conflict Resolution (CR) Network in Australia, “operationalise” and enable CR/ADR at a more personal and organisational micro

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level, with a curriculum of twelve skills of CR; with Wendy Faulkes, Community Justice Centres appeared in NSW. The authors in Essays for Peace ed. M Salla et al., such as Keith Suter, keep the issues alive. 1989 saw the Czech Velvet Revolution. In U.S., Brian Willson of Veterans for Peace loses both legs when run over by an arms train while protesting Reagan’s arming of the Contras. Fisher and Ury promote principled negotiation; Adler, Moore, Bush and Folger, mediation. In the late 1980s, M. Gorbachev, a self-confessed atheist fan of Francis of Assisi, signs the partial denuclearisation Intermediate-Range Nuclear treaty 1987, and frees up Eastern Europe in 1989, receiving the 1990 Peace Prize. Nelson Mandela achieves the end of apartheid in South Africa. Also on the “positive peace” front are many books on structural or “white” violence by Galtung and Freire; the environmental crisis, by Rachel Carson, D. Suzuki, Al Gore, and on development, by D. Goulet, Amartya Sen, and notably P. Berger’s Pyramids of Sacrifice, F. Lappe’s Food First,, and S. George’s The Debt Boomerang. Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy is influential.

2001-2016 The 9/11 incident and terrorism continues to be focal in the literature. “Cosmopolitanism” is fostered through the Journal of Global Ethics, and building local CR strengths emerges from P. Freire’s followers like A. Curle and the Mennonite writer, J. Lederach. Edward Azar develops a complex model for analysis of intractable conflict, featuring preserving cultural identity and meeting needs, clashing with post-colonial economics, and weak imposed state authority. Some excellent textbooks appear, such as Contemporary Conflict Resolution by Ramsbotham, Woodhouse and Miall as noted above. The UN now has a Restorative Justice Working Group. Academic centres have flourished in the UK (Bradford; Manchester) and the US (Georgetown; George Mason; Matsunaga Institute, Hawaii). Contemporary groups include Waging Peace; International Committee to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN); International Solidarity Movement (ISM) founded by Ghassan Andona; Waging Non-violence; Ploughshares Fund and Jody Williams’ campaign to ban landmines (ICBL).The Sydney Peace Prize winners since 1998 including Mohammed Yunus, Desmond Tutu, Hanan Ashrawi, Noam Chomski, Arundhati Roy, John Pilger, Irene Khan, Noami Klein, and Joseph Stiglitz, and they reflect a gradual shift towards realisation that we are one planet under threat from racism, religious fanaticism, inequality of opportunity, industrial pollution and climate change, Western imposition of democratic state model on all, and loss of spiritual self-rule.

PART 3: TYPES OF REASON AND DEGREES OF NV Looking back over the rich complex history of the human project with respect to conflict resolution and control, the descriptions of NV and the rationales offered for world peace and global ethics, the place of theism and religion is clear. Only in the last of our five periods, 20012016, has religion lost the dominance which it enjoyed even in the modern age. The main types of theism, creationist and pantheist, are well represented in human moral development, together with theistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and atheistic religions like Buddhism. The three main versions of NV i.e., UNV, CNV, and their differences from PNV, are on display.

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Comparing the history in Part 2 with the accounts in the best contemporary textbooks on the resolution of social conflict, the latter lack any analysis of theistic or atheistic religion, or a dedicated, thorough treatment of the rationale for NV and the differences listed in the three versions regarding the Ethics of NV. It is as if neither NL nor DGE does not exist, especially the latter. What they do say is comparatively abstract and “thin”: a cluster of abstract “principles”: Impartiality; mutuality, sustainability, complementarity, reflexivity, consistency, accountability, universality (Ramsbotham et.al. 2012). Philosophers offer conceptual analysis, not answers. Applied Ethics is often thought to be a spurious discipline, but it is practised widely. Journals publish its findings, and usually authors do more than conceptual analysis. They apply analyses of justice to real social problems. The Applied Ethics philosopher Tom Campbell for instance defends a “principle of humanity” viz. “Relieve suffering where you can.” In the best secular accounts there is some anthropology of human needs. But the UNV and even the NL roots of the CNV positions are usually not featured. By contrast, Alisdair MacIntyre (1999) after his Marxist period, and since 1980 or so, sees the theology issue as central. In his works and also in Charles Taylor’s books Sources of the Self (1989), A Secular Age (2007) and the The Ethics of Authenticity (1992) where he deals with some of these global issues, his cross cultural “hypernorms,” which closely follow NL primary precepts, and some of its theistic extensions, are better explicated than by general or universalising theories. This is because his hypernorms are linked to a “thick” description of Philosophical Anthropology, the data on multiculturalism in other Social Sciences, and with a place for belief in theism and non-secular institutions. To explain the fact that the vast majority of the UNV and CNV figures in the above history are theists or religious, and the basis of CNV and UNV debate is just war theory, which arose from St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas at the height of DGE ascendancy, we will need to advert to Natural Theology, and Religious Studies and Figure 1 on altruism and reason. Our 3R questions in Chapter 1 and 2 were: “Why do particular things in the Universe do the things they do?” The answer seems to be: they follow law-like patterns of regularity, described and verified by natural and social scientific reason. We called this application of “Why?” an exercise of natural science reasoning, R1. The laws of natural and to a lesser degree social science, are tested, predict outcomes verified by observation, and are replicable. Then we can ask: “Why is this in fact so?” “Why is science successful in understanding the infinite cosmos by means of universal mathematical physics and causal laws?” “Why does the Universe exist at all?” “Why is the universe so fine–tuned?” “Is science itself a miracle calling for explanation?” “What is the ontological status of Minds and science?.” These questions occupy Natural Theology. Some since Plato, Augustine, and Descartes suggest that Mind/Reason/Soul on the one hand, and the material bodies they prima facie direct on the other, are distinct entities and there must in some analogous way be a necessary uncaused quasipersonal spiritual being or entity, whose Reason (and Will) accounts for the spectacularly cosmos-wide fine-tuned order discovered by human reason R1, and reflected in the “e-ternal” quality of law discovered by human reason itself. Perhaps Reason/Logos itself exists in some way apart from and within humans and continues after life. Demonstrable prediction and confirmation of such answers by observation is impossible given the terms of reference of Question R2 “Why is science successful in understanding the infinite cosmos by means of universal mathematical physics and causal laws?,” but the question stands and is coherent. We called this sphere of rational operation the level of reason R2. However inconclusive, science cannot rule this enquiry out, if it is regarded as itself the

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explicandum. For the answer to Question R2 about the success of science - we would have to turn to Natural Theology, including positive and negative verdicts from pantheism, panentheism, or atheology. The reasoning at level R2 concerned the nature, completeness, and limits of explanation, causality, and possibility; and allows for possible mind-body dualism. We can then ask, of the answer to R2: “What does the entity, or entities, posited in the R2 enquiry suggest about a possibly existent higher power or powers?” “Why does this probably non-material entity operate to create and sustain the R1 level laws which it supposedly creates?” and/or “What is that entity’s quasi-reason (and will) in doing so, and its will towards us, here and possibly hereafter?.” These are the topics of Religion and Religious Studies. We called this the R3 level; and for answers to Question 3, R3, “Why does the Universe exist at all?,” we can turn to religious experience and the “grand narratives” or “total interpretations” of the major religions mentioned above, and studied in Religious Studies. These are challenged in atheist and non-religious counter-narratives. One reason offered in answer to the R3 question might be: to give humans freedom to experience the joy and skill of bringing good out of evil. The evidence in this application of reason is based on religious visionary and prophetic experience, and alleged miracles and testimony about alleged revelations. The atheist reply might be: such testimony is worthless and the whole R3 project requires the posited God-figure, omnipotent but permitting cruelty like child abuse, and so is immoral. I pursue these issues further in Part 3. But now I want to return to the discussion of R3 reason in relation to the diagrammatic model (Figure 1) of the types of reason and NV from an earlier Chapter. R3 reasoning is based on dialectical/pragmatic considerations, intuition/experience, or testimony-based arguments. These activities rely on a broader conception of reason and challenge the limitations of the NAVE IRP 1-5 moral horizon. They issue to everyone an ethical invitation to a more exacting moral ideal on indemonstrable but rational grounds. Non-believers are justified in using naturalistically demonstrable R1 truths, theoretical and moral, to support naturalistic ethics and question/challenge/evaluate and reject if necessary alleged miracles, divine commands, or strong agapistic moral claims, based on R3. Many religious beliefs are demonstrably false or unethical. Others are paradoxical (Abraham–Isaac case). The model only makes clearer how R2 and R3 enter our disagreements and can underpin self-commitments. It helps to see how one can ground such as unconditional commitments/ideals, and argue tolerance for them. They are not demonstrably false. R3-based claims are embedded in “total interpretations” ultimately based on unique experiences or testimony, giving them some rational credibility. The fundamentalist Islamists we now most fear cannot even be talked to if their religion is dismissed as irrational, not seen as dependent on R1 as a complement, permitting use of R1 as a possible corrective to extreme R3 claims. R1 is the province of natural and social science; empirical verification/falsification of hypotheses; enumerative and eliminative inductions; mathematics and mathematical physics; and synthetic a priori necessary truths of fact if any. R2 is the province of philosophy of mind/science, modal logic, metaphysics, natural theology, and the study of metaphysical and alleged empirical evidence for supernatural/transcendent entities, if any. R3 is based on a total interpretation, and its basis, includes evaluation of testimony and of alleged religious experiences if any. If we think of these positions as on a spectrum of graduated permeable intervals of increasing degrees of belief, in metaphysics and “higher powers” or transcendence; or of invocation of the supernatural, sustained by progressively expanded applications and forms of reason, with quality metaphorically measured by quantity, we get the constructed graph with this spectrum as a horizontal axis.

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In Figure 1, the “3-R graph” correlating altruistic moral commitment with ontological commitment, the vertical axis showed increasing degrees of moral commitment to altruism correlated with increasing belief in supernatural moral demands and divine providence, divine reason and goodness and human transcendence based on reason. The diagram can be filled out in more detail. The furthest points on the horizontal axis as one moves to the ‘absolute’ end of that line, are marked by increasing reference to the notion of a God of some sort, with a Providential Will; or a transcendental World–Soul or truth-force (Satyagraha or Tao); a law of conservation of moral energy (karma); or a notion of personal transcendence (reincarnation/ immortality); and are correlated with increasingly exacting moral requirements like nonattachment, absolute non-violence, non-acquisitiveness, and self-suffering. The vertical axis represents a spectrum of moral commitment, but now seen vertically. It runs from pragmatically based “tit for tat” of PNV through minimal justice reciprocity of CNV to stronger unconditional altruism, UNV, not based on tendency to temporal wellbeing alone. In some way and to some degree, the differences outlined here between UNV, CNV, and PNV have to do with different estimates of the likelihood that, by confronting evil, one will jeopardise one’s temporal happiness, and yet possibly further one’s eternal happiness. As noted, if a peace keeping law and order background is absent, the NV warrior or DR practitioner is often at risk of temporal pain and even death. At the top of the left vertical axis in the 3-R (Figure 1) are the UNV absolutists, such as the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount (“turn the other cheek and love strangers, sinners and enemies”). In the Figure, Jesus, Gandhi, King, and others would appear at B, the intersection of R3 and A, along with Quakers, Tolstoi, the religious mystics of Judaism, Islam, and other religions such as Jainism and Gandhi. In the middle of the left vertical axis would be those who go further than R1 to admit angels, God and souls, via R2, but not necessarily endorse any R3 narrative. They would uphold the use of legalised violence by nation states; standing armies, law and order measures like courts, police, prisons and capital punishment; the concept of hereditary property; the “just war” theory of mainstream Christianity since Augustine; and an institutionalised church supplying chaplains in “just wars.” There is at least quasi-theistic belief, some idea of ‘Divine Justice’, in an afterlife. Towards the base of the vertical line are the many forms of pragmatic secularism of a Neo-Aristotelian sort. Taking Aristotle as an example, in the first level enquiry, he uses reason of type R1, as conceived by Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics (NAVE). Aristotle’s own version of NAVE, driven by R1 and a version of R2, is theistically impersonal, an Unmoved Mover, “thinking on thinking,” and a very thin concept of an afterlife for the agent intellect. Reason seeks to discover “the highest good” (THG), whatever it turns out to be, for him the Unmoved Mover. Ethics celebrates knowledge and friendship between citizens and especially virtuous aristocrats, and conditional justice. The Golden Rule is implicit at best, and not explicitly applied to slaves and aliens. NAVE treats our limited understanding of THG as showing similarity with some of our human powers (intellect) as themselves “higher” than others, architectonic with respect to others in animal mentality/intentionality, range or scope, capacity for diachronic time conception, ultimate finality, flexibility, and directional power, at least in specific orders of consideration. But there is no clear immortality or R3 story, and morality is bounded by aristocracy and scientific elitism. So, in Figure 1 Aristotle would straddle the R1 and R2 sectors. Taking another example, many forms of Jainism, Buddhism, Taoism, Paganism, Shamanism, and Pantheism deny a God creating ex nihilo, of the sort posited by religions of the Book (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) with revelations at level R3. They are harder to place

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in the diagram exactly, and arguably would not be ‘full strength” theists. There is less sign of the R2 question being posed, or answered. But atheism is relative to type of theism e.g., one with or without a creation, an atonement, or Hell story; and need not be full strength. Forms of pantheism, panentheism, and paganism are sometimes mistaken for atheism, when they only deny creation ex nihilo. There is often a World Spirit and cognitive life is still the central miracle. There is often a non-creating artist as in Plato, a Demiurge working pre-existing matter, and a “conservation of moral energy” principle or karma, and some non-creating god-like, angelic eternal beings. They can still appear as partly accepting the R2 level on the horizontal axis given their acceptance of reincarnated souls and some quasi-divine transcendent beings. The “un-know-able-ness” of God as “beyond being” in R2 types of religious mysticism (Erigena, Eckhart, Sufi, and Kabbala) is in some ways very close to atheism. They deny that God, qua cause of types, exists in any ordinary sense as an instance or a token of a type. Thus, Buddhist belief in transcendence via reincarnation and non-acquisitiveness arguably straddles or fits under both R2 and R3. Some Humanists may see theistic projections of non-existent gods as a means to advance the human project (Feuerbach); or on the other hand, religion may be seen as a means to the same project by theists (Liberation theology). The nature, being and causality of the God entity, posited at level 2 by R2 in Chapter 7 to explain laws of nature, is such as to permit God to suspend or override these created scientific laws, at least on an ad hoc basis, as in miraculous healings, without incoherence, despite miracles being contrary to scientific law. They must be scientifically attested as being beyond scientific explanation, yet they can be attested by experience or testimony without incoherence. Their being inexplicable by R1 is a good prima facie general reason to doubt their truth, but not their possibility. If one rejects R2 and R3, they are simply surds. If one accepts the latter, they are potential evidence of higher powers. However, in so far as UNV depends on Christianity, and that on R3, we need to take a hard look at R3 deliverances, using the joint secular and theistically grounded Golden Rule. For the UNV religious believer, what is for secular reason operating at the R1 level an act of, charity, is seen by the believer as asked in divine justice at level R3. If you only pay your debts, return borrowed goods, obey the law but do not adopt agape, imitate Christ, and forgive your trespassers, you cannot be friends with the Christian God, or with the potential recipients of the charity, here or in an afterlife. There is a weak case in R1 and in R2 for “conservation of moral energy” and an afterlife, but if it is within the R1 scientific dimension, weak, and needs to be based on R3 considerations, it will not be sufficiently “generalise-able” for acceptance by most philosophers. If, as Buddhists and many Hindus believe, there is “conservation of moral energy” and all harm which one introduces can bounce around forever to possibly harm someone I love, or my later reincarnated self, then I should avoid it. But Hindu or Buddhist karma is not provable at level R1 since it is closely tied to physical observables. If the “observables” are such only to the soul or psyche, which is not itself observable by the senses, it is beyond the scope of R1. For R2 believers like Gocke et alia (2012) reductive materialism is being increasingly challenged. However, another possible way of thinking about R3 possibilities is provided in Kant’s third Critique of Judgement discussion of the beautiful and sublime in art, music and nature, and in Buber’s distinction of “I-It” and “I-Thou” relations, attitudes, or realities developed from Spinoza. Natural science or R1 success in the understanding of “I–It” relations is necessary and good in itself and also provides the explicandum of R2. If R1 is confined to description and generalisations about the world and includes only actual generalised human value preferences,

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it is formally silent on normative matters of Ethics. For how we ought to live, we will need ethical norms, even though these can be informally and dialectically reasoned to from R1 data about temporal wellbeing. These arguably yield the desirability of reciprocity and limited altruism, a just war stance, but not agape/ahimsa/caritas. Perhaps if R2 and R3 accounts take what Buber dubs the “I–Thou relation” as part of the human data and “the highest human good”–one of the key elements in describing wellbeing and the basis of Ethics-as their joint explanandum, they are capable of supplying some reason for practising UNV. The idea of experiencing self-transcendence and applying absolute selfsuffering agape to one’s partner or child or parent or friend, makes good sense. R3 religious narratives depend on belief in some form of immortality/eternity at R2. The left end of the horizontal “a-area” represents belief based on perception/observation used to test physically verifiable hypotheses of natural and social science. The capacity to do this declines as we move along the axis to belief in the results of the study of the non-physical or metaphysics. In the R2 zone, answers will not be confirmable by experimental hypotheses and replicable observations. The data are the successful laws themselves. Likewise, R3 narratives are not reports on physical experiments. The “c-area” is designed to reflect the gradually increased ontological commitment associated with cumulative answers to repetition of the “Why?” question, introduced in Chapter 1 and 2 and generating Levels R1-R3 of the 3R questions. Looking at the base line of ontological commitment, it is suggested that the extent to which reason is thought possibly applicable to generate reasons for recognising beings, natural R1, and supernatural R2 and R3 -the intervals R1-3- generates a continuum. At the left is belief based on perception/observation used to test physically verifiable hypotheses of natural and social science and the capacity to do this declines as we move along the axis to belief in the results of the study of the non-physical or metaphysics. In the R2 zone, answers will not be confirmable by experimental hypotheses and replicable observations. The data are the successful laws themselves. Likewise, R3 narratives are not reports on physical experiments. The graph is only suggestive of a very complex intellectual territory. Under R3 would fall both dharma (action) and bhakti (worship) versions religious practice. The axis is constructed to reflect the gradually increased ontological commitment associated with cumulative answers to repetition of the why? question, asked three times in succession. Unconditional altruism might be supported by Dualism in Philosophy of Mind, religious experience or testimony, spiritualism, or tradition; or the conservation of moral energy/karma. R3 accounts also usually depend on the idea of God from R2. R1 can exist without R2 or R3. But empirically unconfirmed intuition, the non-scientific one-on-one personal knowledge, especially the knowledge of intimate partners in “I-Thou” relationships, is not strictly speaking on the radar of natural science. Religious experience, intuition of other persons as persons and/or apprehension of harmony through meditation techniques, or other personal and interpersonal historical testimony, may be capable of bringing us knowledge of higher powers. R1 alone does seem incomplete. R3 accounts also depend on the idea of God from R2. R1 can exist without R2 or R3.

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CONCLUSION As David Martin (Martin 1984) argued, secular rational defence of some form of strategic non-violence, even for states, is not out of the question given the threat of nuclear annihilation of the species. But absolute non-violence, and agape, especially for states with police and armed forces, is not rationally demonstrable by using R1 and/or R2 alone. Secular charity, tied to R1 and physical observables, albeit observed by the psyche or soul, is usually limited to the worthy poor, and the state’s own strategic good, not unconditioned caritas. On the basis of R1, one can assume only conditioned moral principles can be rationally argued on General Ethical grounds as part of wellbeing and justice. The more generous Socratic, Thomistic, Martin Luther King (caritas or agape) or Gandhian non-violence (ahimsa) approaches, are based on type R3 rational grounds, presupposing R3 rationality. If the basic accuracy of this often bloody history of sacrifice by saints and heroes for the ideal of UNV, and the three-tier model of reason is accepted, then R1-R3 are not necessarily mutually exclusive but can be seen as different, interlinked, and complementary. The data of R1 is the explicandum of R2 and likely to be seen as part of God’s revelation in theistic R3 accounts. The step to UNV can facilitated by R2 and can be bolstered by R3. But the way R3 is rational is far from determinate. It is unparalleled in our “I-It dealings and an elusive type of rationality based on tradition, testimony, and particularly intimate experience. But as we saw in the comparative taxonomy of arguments in Figure 1 there are some independent considerations to favour it. If the model is accepted, global peace will not only have to be the work of the UN or its successor but will have to be partly the work of something like Hans Kung’s (1993) foundational work on a common inter-religious ethics; A Global Ethic: The Declaration of The Parliament of the World’s Religions.

Chapter 10

GLOBAL POVERTY: THE MORAL OBLIGATION OF PERSONS, ORGANISATIONS AND STATES TO RELIEVE POVERTY This chapter first sketches a secular or naturalistic moral case for organisational and state relief of extreme poverty apprehended in personal, intra-, and inter-state contexts. It seeks to identify presuppositions of a justice-based argument for this duty. One is the idea of human wellbeing as development of human species-capacity, requiring needs-satisfaction through virtue, social justice, and political community, within a domain-relative account of justice. To link the contexts above, a centrist position on the autonomy of ethics from theology is adopted, and a centrist analysis of justice is given within, which it is argued that some variant of the Golden Rule: “Do as you would be done by” is defensible as a guiding responsiveness principle for persons, organisations, and states supported by a Neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, (NAVE). More exacting interpretations of justice as an ethical responsiveness principle in general, secular and religious, and of the limits of the Golden Rule as a reciprocity principle in particular, are discussed. Many altruist activities fall into the category of agape or charity. An account of justice arguably acceptable to religious and secular ethics and to centrist views in political economy is offered to ground a limited natural-justice-based duty, without prejudice to an unconditional religiously-based response-principle such as caritas or agape. As Sir David Ross, in translating the Nichomachean Ethics, noted in the 1920s, Aristotle encouraged imitation of the noble, fine and virtuous man, and love of virtuous friends. But he had no concept of absolute moral obligation to other human beings as persons, of a Kantian, post-“Enlightenment” or Utilitarian kind. One might add: nor one of a Thomistic kind. In the era of medieval Christendom, under the influence of Aquinas’ interpretation of Aristotle, Aristotle’s teaching was assimilated to Stoic, Augustinian and other NL views and ascribed a wider, more humanitarian scope. The “imitation of Christ,” as an ideal person, exhibiting unconditional charity even to the wicked, and enemies, was deemed to be also required, at least to some degree, or as an ideal, for eternal happiness and salvation. Kant later makes the centrepiece of his Ethics the ‘respect for persons as ends in themselves” principle, together with the ‘universalisability” version of the categorical imperative, as the “omnibus” principle: “Do as you would will others in like circumstances to do.” All this he claimed to be shown “within the limits of reason alone,” (not relying on belief in God, or in an afterlife). Mill is both theologically agnostic, but strongly egalitarian, insisting that “each is to count for one” in

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applications of his omnibus principle: “Seek the greatest happiness of the greatest number.” Both are thus agnostic on whether natural or revealed theology, and belief in the afterlife are crucial for morality and justice, but are committed to an omnibus egalitarian principle of some kind. In the 1990s, Peter Singer, Peter Unger, and others suggested on broadly Utilitarian grounds that we have duties in justice to the extremely poor to “give till it hurts,” if we sacrifice nothing of comparable importance. Singer believes the cost to us compared to the need of the absolutely poor entails we have such strong obligations to give very generously. Pogge has argued more recently, on broadly Rawlsian grounds, which assimilate ethical to institutional political justice, that political and economic sanctions should apply to unjust regimes, and e.g., that credit should be denied to gangster governments. Such governments appropriate mineral extraction royalties due to the poor citizens of these countries, exporting minerals n global markets. He also advocates a resource tax which would fund the U.N. Millenium Goals. Perry (2014) supports the intent of Singer, Unger, Pogge et alia but challenged Singer’s position as overloading obligation on a naturalistic basis alone, and Analytical Thomists like Haldane also represent a contemporary Christian view that we do have religious duties to help the extremely poor. It thus appears we have convergent interest from agnostics and theists, NAVE and DGE, on the need to intervene in free markets and trade to make them fairer, and also on the need to help the absolutely poor. But the metaphysics of both camps is different, and as we shall see, there should be recognised to be some differences of content regarding the duty. Thomism is of course built on an idealised “Aristotle.” I wish to explore how far one might develop Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics (NAVE) in a more expansive and exacting direction than Aristotle, using his meta-ethics, being the idea that ethics is for the sake of and tends to assist human wellbeing, and taking into NAVE the Golden Rule: “Do as you would be done by” more explicitly. This principle, with some supporting premises, can generate a naturalistic account of our duties to strangers, and the very poor of other nations. Such a hybrid ethics, importing from Kant his “respect for persons” principle, and an understanding of the need to cultivate an admirable empathy, compassion and kindness as virtuous dispositions, needed to discharge duties of general justice, will take us some way towards an account of our duties with respect to the absolutely poor. We do have (naturalistically grounded) duties to the distant needy poor. But the use of abstract principles in the manner of Singer-Unger alone will not take us very far. At some point on the continuum from natural justice to supernatural charity, from natural love and kindness, to divine justice and caritas, the limits of natural justice must be identified, their anthropological and metaphysical presuppositions identified, and differentiated from theological ones. More exacting forms of responsiveness principle used to guide interpersonal justice, and associated virtues, including Divine justice and charity, must have their foundations supplied from theology. I want to get clearer about what the issues are between the theistic and agnostic approaches to the joint goal of relieving absolute poverty, and to give reason for thinking that there is a way of marking out the territory using NAVE which will agree that we can have naturalistic ethical duties but hold that they are more modest than agnostics believe. Table 2 A Neo-Aristotelian Model of the Ethics, Politics, Organisational Relation sketches what I mean by a Neo-Aristotelian Meta-Ethics being an anchor for other disciplines and social practices. It turns on the idea of an architectonic relation. An architectonic relation as expl;ained previously has three features: first, one entity or activity, let’s call it the “autarch,” rules or governs or directs the other normatively in a “top-

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down” way, as a formal, final/intentional, or efficient cause, in some respect. An example would be the will directing the hand that moves the steering device in a vehicle; second, the ruled entity is thus subordinate to and “for the sake of” the ruling one in that respect, even where it is its operational means or enabling material basis of action/execution; and third, the ruled entity governs, or causes/constrains the ruler (autarch) from the “bottom-up” in some way, like enabling material causality, in some different order or respect from that in which it is ruled, e.g., finality, perhaps as a necessary means. The relata are related in finality and mutually dependency in different orders, but the “most final” ruling autarchic entity is more important all things considered, since the ruled operator or enabler serves/should serve the ruler’s ends. Examples are: drivers, vehicles, and steering devices; horse-riding, galloping, and bridle making as practices; commissioning of buildings, architecture and brick laying; pragmatics, semantics or syntax, and phonetics in theory of meaning; and I would argue mind/will, perception, and voluntary limb movement, on the one hand, and the autonomic functions of the human brain, nervous system and molar bodily powers like respiration, circulation and digestion on the other, in Philosophical Anthropology (Schumacher 1977; Polanyi, 1968). One eats to live, not vice versa. The relation of organisational leaders to staff is also architectonic. In Chapter 3 on Anthropology, I called this he DOE structure. NAVE would seem to be oriented in this way to a naturalistic secular ethics, based on metaphysics not orthodox religious belief, but not to the point of excluding religious ethics. It can ground a conditional altruism and limited human benevolence in justice matters, based on a naturalistic anthropology. Possibly a God, or a highest good, can be argued to in natural theology or a God disclosed in a revelation. But “the highest good for humans” whatever it turns out to be may for NAVE be just the human species. The construct NAVE in Chapters 15 is silent on the matter, but still capable of generating a duty of poverty relief without prejudice to the possible more exacting extension of such a duty on religious grounds, and the introduction of more exacting moral demand from revelation like “Love your enemies” or ‘Forgive sinners” or “Be prepared to die for your faith/friends.” For NL, one cannot derive norms of General Ethics as conclusions out of Politics and Social policy or Organisational theory alone, since in their architectonic relation one presupposes the concepts of “person” and “wellbeing” from Anthropology and, from Ethics, of “justice” in understanding politics and organisation theory and justifying ethical loyalty to states and organisations. Nor can one excuse ethically defective organisational or political arrangements by dismissing ethical claims. General ethics guides and directs the specifications of organisational ethics, as argued in Chapter 8. But as part of an architectonic relation the content of organisational ethics is not adequate alone without data from politics and economics and domain specific norms to provide concrete expression and support to general ethics on granting of special organisational prerogatives and duties, such as professional privileges or limited liability. In Table 2 it is being suggested that the domains themselves are interrelated, and now it is suggested that some of these may be architectonic relations. For example, our human existence depends on the existence of planet earth with respect to material causality, even if we are not for the sake of the planet. Indigenous cultures have always treated the Earth with respect like that accorded human bodies.

Table 8. A Business organisational quasi-person on an implicit social contract view: What a “good corporate citizen” does (A) Nature And Purposes

(B) Rule Governed Practices

(C) Institutions

(D) Actors/Agents/Roles

(E) Issues

(Unranked)

(Examples)

(Examples)

(Examples)

Social Responsibility

(i)

(i)

Governments e.g., regulating corporations, monopoly and contracts Businesses/Business Corporations Partnerships Banks/Money (central banks and the mint) National law (courts) and international courts Markets Shops Private property Stock exchanges Limited corporate liability Professional bodies Fair trade tribunals Agents of government economic policy Trade associations WTO (Global trade policies), World Bank, IMF Business ethics code promulgators (UN, CAUX, OECD, Global Compact and Global reporting initiative Universities and TAFEs Business round tables

Global/national Business Corporations Small to medium enterprises Insiders who do or control the work: of corporations: Owner-managers Board of directors Corporate Managers Corporate accountants/lawyers Company Secretaries Employees Active Shareholders Enablers | Passive shareholders Institutional investors Suppliers Customers Commercial bankers Creditors Unions Outsiders The State Treasury; inspectors and officers (Tax, Customs, Police)Financial advisers Insurance providers Local government Lobbyists

Means of Regulation Creative accounting Industrial safety Privacy at and after work Hiring policy Informed consent Comparative remuneration of CEO and staff s Promotion criteria Dismissal/’downsizing’ Hiring Affirmative Action/EEO Human rights Industrial democracy Rights to sell resources Fair trade vs free trade Externalities Environment Tax avoidance vs minimisation Whistle-blowing Arms business Nuclear power Commercialisation of science, medicine, including Indigenous Ecology

To make manage or exchange needed, worthwhile or permissible quality goods and services for consideration or money (buy, barter and sell). (ii) To create wealth, profit and prosperity. (iii) To serve the interests of the founders of the business, the community and the shareholders (Dual Concession Theory/Dine). (iv) To make life easier, enable leisure. (Aristotle; Solomon) (v) To meet consumer and select human needs of people eg. Leisure and play. (vi) Give consumers choice (vii) To leave a legacy or make a difference/contribution (Covey) (viii) Provide identity and meaningful work. (ix) Provide or purchase education and training. (x) Stimulate and exercise practical innovation/creativity.

Creating/buying/selling a product or service (ii) Borrowing/lending for investment in product or service (iii) Structuring and coordinating cooperative division of labour/specialisation via corporate board, union, and management meetings; HR functions; training and vocational education. (iv) Marketing of product or service. (v) Offering, purchasing/supplying shares. (vi) Corporate diversification and growth at national all levels (subsidiaries,franchises, supply chains). (vii) Celebrations/Award ceremonies. (viii) Research and Development of technology and market environment. (ix) Supplying components

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Casuistry as set out in Element 5) Chapter 5 demands actual circumstances be supplied. Yet if the argument of Chapter 8 is sound, the special ethical prerogatives and duties of organisational officers, while more specific than ordinary moral permissions, cannot contradict the general precepts of interpersonal ethics. They can be extended by specifying their limits and scope. A defence lawyer’s privilege of silence is not a licence to lie. The species of organisational ethics - (professional, business, bio-ethics etc), although not shown in Table 5 would be suspended in a further column - from anthropology, and the general ethics, of the kind which could be generated in a first order kinship community. Table 8 uses the example of business as a practice to express the idea that the ends of business should be given to it by ethical Politics and Social Policy and they in turn depend on Ethics and Anthropology. Its designed institutions should reflect this. If the action, policy or omission of a state or a business corporation harms the human wellbeing of a person or group then it is wrong ethically. Some policies of some nations and corporations do harm extremely poor humans, and are wrong. It does not follow that all persons, nations, and corporations have open ended moral duties not traceable to the ends in Column (A) or thee structures in (C) e.g., to provide work to citizens of another state or society or to relieve the extreme poverty of any humans unconditionally. In the left column (A) (ii) “profit” can be used as reinvestment in the entity, return to shareholders, to pay taxes, wages, and buy supplies. It can mean simply advance in a good purpose, as in the Biblical “What does it profit a man if he gains the world and loses his soul?” Given this meta-ethics, to evaluate the claim that one has a duty of any kind, whether to those close to us or to strangers, we must know what the duty’s content is; the way its discharge will impact on the human wellbeing of self and others; its basis in ethics; and the person(s) or “quasiperson” (one’s workplace organisation or the state) to whom it is owed. Different duties can be owed to, or discharged through, persons and collective quasi-persons like states and organisations as their effects, in different sectors and domains. Locating an agent’s domain often helps one to specify the content, rationale, and target of the duty concerned. By domain here is meant an arena of personal action and/or interaction like homes, public spaces like roads, workplaces, and wildernesses. Where and in what domain we are will sometimes explain or give rise to some relation or role, from which a duty arises. This can be important to locating to whom and/or with whom we are obliged. In Table 8 domain (2) is made up of family/kinship domestic sites like homes; domain (3) of civic/state/government sites, like roads and hospitals; (4) of organisational sites, like workplaces, voluntary associations’ offices; and political parties; domain (5) of semi-organised fields, like markets, shops, restaurants, and patrolled beaches, and the internet, which allow some freedom and anonymity within limits; and domain (6) of the rest of the non-socialised world including the natural world of forest, mountain or desert wilderness. More difficult to place are: international institutions and their offices and facilities for global union in communication, commerce, and travel; the UN; and also NGOs dedicated to world poverty relief. They straddle the civic and organisational domains. The private domain, e.g., one’s home or apartment (1), in which we groom ourselves, or enjoy solitude, is in a way a degenerate case of interaction if we are only interacting with our own body and material objects as impersonal patients. Each of 1-6 has appropriate norms, and lays different claims on our moral sensibility as we enter and leave them. Where we can do so permissibly, we can incur duties though selfinvolving ourselves through contracts and promises. They can also sometimes overlap, as in personal acts performed within semi-organised fields and civic settings. Much of our lives we

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act in and through organisations, not as mere individuals, and our duties are variable by domain, and restricted and interrelated in complex ways. Duty is domain-sensitive, and the duty of poverty relief to distant needy others is an instance. As noted earlier, Arnhe in Agency and Organisation, (ca1992) usefully identifies a category of “semi-organised fields,” like markets and malls, as a category of domain. Families are basic, and as infants we are helplessly dependent on kinsfolk. Later we can attain more goods in a first order family or kinship community. As an adult one can enter the political or organisational domain and can retire from the community into the private sphere; or remain in the first order community, in the family or kinship domain, or the natural, organisational or civic domains. In aged infirmity, we again depend on others, and with death, the state will note our passing. The family and kinship domain is typically at both ends of the life cycle (Figure 2 in Chapter 4). In their accounts of Philosophical Anthropology and Ethics most philosophers, including Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and Mill, go into some detail to offer a cross-domain description and ranking of human capacities and/or desires, ranked by object and worth, either based on intuition, appeal to the experience of the majority, citing the capacity’s defining object, causal centrality, flexibility, and scope; or the superiority of the capacity to those shared with other animals. General Ethical principles and precepts must straddle all these domains, and judge the ethics of entry, conduct and exit. There is no universal duty to enter all of them, and no choice but to enter some. One has no duty to marry, have children, or choose a career - the most significant of choices, still less to choose this one here and now. To determine my duty, there must be some independent notion of human wellbeing’s plural ingredient goods, and of right and wrong, grounded in moral values or imperative principles, about what one should do, avoid or pursue, in a given type of circumstance. These values and norms of being and having will conflict in some circumstances. We will have to choose the best or most suitable/right means of action on some cognitive, as far as possible rational, decisional basis, like law, principles, rules, plus casuistry. Admirable, saintly acts do not fall under duty, but are above and beyond its call. In abstracting from an individual’s other personal, domain-relative ties, including unique idiosyncratic duties of persons arising from morally unforced choices like partners and jobs, and the ethics private self-care, some “omnibus principle” like Utilitariaism or Kantian approaches appear to generate both an ethical overload problem, and to omit to specify a means of computing and weighing claims arising with regard to utilities arising from unique personal and other domain obligations. These can be caused by individual involvement in multiple domains, and associated state and organisational roles. The circumstances: “who?” and “where, are easily overlooked in deploying omnibus principles focusing on what is done, its universalisation, or its consequences for the greatest number. The domain, sector, practice, and institution matrix of ethical duty and the concept of moral distance of moral agents from each other, reflected in organisational reality, will turn out to be relevant when one considers the organisational duties to the needy poor; in teasing out the organisational implications of ethics; and where reference to different models of business corporations, which are classified by Dine (2000) as contractual, ‘communitaire’, and concessional, can be helpfully made. In the ‘concessional’ model, which is the one favoured here, the corporate entity has a “constitution” (Bottomley 2007) designed in part to reflect a concession by the sovereign within the broader state constitution, and both are reasonably seen as results of some sort of wider social contract (Donaldson and Dunfee 1999; Rawls 1971).

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Social contract theory combines elements teleology (wellbeing) and deontology (prima facie duty, fidelity to promises and agreements) for the sake of the common good and human rights. Taken together, the unitarist hybrid ethics NAVE, the quasi-personal model of organisations and the constitutional/concessional models, can rationally support the notion of corporate moral agency within a welfare state capitalist system. There is ethical reason for defining the ethical telos of business and modifying the popular contemporary “stakeholder” model of organisations in a more unitarist direction, and treating the corporation and its essential interests, as distinct from some of those of its external stakeholders. This determination is made by reference to the notion of just action.

FROM JUSTICE AND DUTY TO COMPASSION AND BEYOND Marx’s ideal “primitive communism,” in which there was no freedom, no surplus, no violence, and no alienation, may be overly simplified and mythical but there is ample evidence that intra-tribal ethics can and did precede inter-tribal ethics, and that communal ethical judgements were made and enforced many thousands of years before the technological age. What is the general ethical analysis of justice and the particular, more determinate sociopolitical analysis in NAVE, as a basic NL which is to be applied to the question of duties to the present and distant needy? The generic analysis of justice presented in Chapter 4 of NAVE, with any IRP in the range IRPs 2-5, reproduced below, will generate obligations/duties within the province of General Ethics according to NL. More particular rights and duties are generated within the province of political justice and law. For purpose of this discussion, l recall the general notion of justice in Chapter 4 and Chapter 7, which captured a broad range of views, drawing on Shaw and Barry (2007) without saying which notion prevails if they compete in a given case. The central feature of justice was said to be the principle of inter-action responsiveness called the Golden Rule, (IRP 2B). This has many variants and is not a stand lone principle but depends on which wants or ends are ethically permitted or noble according to the ethics and meta-ethics, and a context of socially desirable and permissible roles and domains with a specific set of norms. Aristotle is followed here in marking the differences between exchange justice, retributive justice and distributive justice. Murphy and Nagel (2002) point to the weaknesses in our understanding of and rationale for ownership. Any inter-actional response or reciprocity principle must presuppose property in some form and indicate how we deal with good or evil acts of others (retribution); what is a fair deal (exchange); and who should get what share of any public benefits (distributive justice).

Justice: A Multi-Clause Analysis As noted earlier in Chapter 4, the following features are found in just relations: the parties are: 1) free to pursue satisfaction of their perceived needs provided they do no harm to others and allow such freedom to others;

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David Ardagh 2) free from harm by others 3) enjoy and show equal respect for others; equal access to information, decision-making regarding the shaping their wellbeing, and opportunity to share in public goods 4) enjoy rewards for merit/desert/contribution and access to positions are impartially administered 5) their basic threshold level needs-satisfaction is assisted 6) there is recognised a principle of interpersonal responsiveness to acts of others like the Golden Rule of reciprocity, which guides interpersonal exchanges.

The last two features are indeterminate and variable in exactingness as different standards and values are understood to be implied in applications of the principle of interactive responsiveness i.e., IRP. When discussing NAVE, it was decided that it can warrant IRPs 1-5 at least, and 6A as an ideal. The resultant ‘moderate’ hybrid position is a ‘justice as reciprocal respect” principle, based on the Golden Rule, and reflected in the “just war” tradition recognised by states, which depends on the idea of a just order, like a state with authority legally policing, and itself exhibiting a moderate response/reciprocity principle. This response/ reciprocity/mutual respect principle would be something like what we called CNV in Chapter 9: When offended or harmed, first seek peace, non-violence and non-retaliation, not the law courts, but acknowledge the necessity of limited force (police or state coercive force, including lethal force, if necessary). Use force only under a set of listed conditions, known as “just war permissions.” Do not accept immoral humiliation or violent treatment of innocents. Use only proportionate and discriminating force. From these we can argue that if people are stakeholders in an organisation or state, or have a duty to contribute to, work for, or take risks on behalf of some joint enterprise that benefits them, they have rights to equal information, decisional power, and benefits arising from, the contribution they jointly make to others by agreement regarding that work or contribution. They can expect not to be harmed by the entity and if they are harmed, can expect retribution or compensation. In commercial interchange, they can expect reciprocal benefits like price received for sale of products or services given. The other side of this is that they bear responsibility for compensating victims of their misdeeds, deserve retribution, and if they now benefit from past misdeeds of entities they belong to like states, they should contribute to restorative justice (Thompson 1991; Pogge 2007). This is the point where justice trails off into kindness, and principles like: 





“Show kindness and compassion to others, even strangers”; and “Love God, and your neighbour as yourself.” According to Aquinas, the second command is part of the selevident portion of NL, but we have given reason to doubt that claim. It is found in the Old Testament. The kindness principle asks what to many goes beyond justice in asking for love. But if interpreted as being an attitude like “good will” in Kant, such love may not be outside the scope of justice, conceived as the Golden Rule. IRP 6: A more exacting response or reciprocity principle asks us, with Buddha, Jain Hindus, Socrates, Jesus, Tolstoi, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, “Suffer rather than inflict unjustly imposed harm” as an unconditional policy. A notch further up is: IRP 7 and 8 a) “Render good for evil” and (b) “Love your enemies” “Forgive your enemies” (Luke: 27-28; Matthew, 18; 21-35) Some think these go beyond the meaning

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of both reciprocity in the specific sense and justice. It will depend on the definitions of reciprocity and justice but does seem to be beyond justice, while it is a principle prescriptive of a response to evil and in that sense it is a principle of reciprocity. IRP 9: “Love God and your neighbour as He (Christ) has loved you” (John 13:34) Christ’s invitation: “Do to others as I have done for you” i.e., to lay down our lives for our friends, is clearly self-sacrificial and goes well beyond justice. Non-violence and non-attachment to temporal goods was reflected in the mendicant friars rejection of family, and their duty of non-violence, and was part of Gandhi’s ahimsa. In medieval times, such a degree of caritas was an ideal, a duty for only a few, not a universal duty.

How far can NAVE go along this continuum? In the analysis of justice, NAVE could warrant as justice principles IRP 1-5 and perhaps “Love your neighbour as yourself,” especially if love means only offer a prima facie “good will’ to all in the context. Meeting human needs to threshold level where practicable is arguable required, at least as an ideal. Principles of this exactingness, as a strategy with exceptions, could be justified as an ethical ideal. From a NAVE standpoint justice on the above account is thus about liberty, with constraints; about neither being harmed, nor harming others wantonly; equal respect for persons as persons and respect for autonomy and self-sufficiency. Distribution of information, participation in decisions, and public collective goods is to be prima facie on the basis of equality. Equal treatment is to be modified qualification and contribution (desert) or lack of same, applied impartially and by respect for entitlement, though the exact basis of property is murkier. Reciprocity and fairness are enjoined in interchange, in strong or weak form, with the Golden Rule being the most reasonable principle, interpreted without the explicit theological references embedded in IRP 7-9.

Religions and the Choice of Response or Reciprocity Principles If we exclude IRP 7-9 from the analysis of justice, as based on identification of God with Christ in faith, based on particular testimony, or some transcendental assumptions, it evidently makes a difference to one’s drawing the boundary between justice, compassion, and charity whether one follows a reciprocity principle of “tit for tat” justice, the Golden Rule, Kant’s categorical imperative, a just state or just reward approach; or a Rawlsian maximin formula on the one hand, or on the other hand, the more exacting Buddhist, Jain, or Christian principles. It is argued in Part 3 that without a philosophical anthropology, a less abstract account of “total happiness,” talk of universal “rights,” “universalisability” and justice, secular natural law and Utilitarian and Deontic hybrids’ moral appeals alone will not take one as far as a duty to “give till it hurts if one sacrifices nothing of comparable moral importance” Singer 1972; 2004). There are too many presuppositions about individual moral motivation, disbarred qualitative ranking of goods, and utilitarian happiness metrics; and about the role of economic selfsufficiency as a condition of charity, the limits imposed on domain-relative duties; the fragility of global politics, and questions about economic effectiveness, in the analogies drawn from obligatory saving of drowning babies to obligatory gifts to Oxfam. Galtung, who is a borderline religious adherent, a self-described humanist, pagan, with a dash of Buddhism, wisely uses needs as a basis for rights talk: an account of “wellbeing of persons,” including a moral psychology of needs. He has stated that if in standard cases, a

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person or group, A, is bearer of a right, R, against B to an object or content C, enforceable by D, we should ask: what are the values of these variables? Bearer A can be an individual, group, organisation, or state; R can be a right (informal permission/official permit/licence or trumping claim), to a positive good or freedom from harm or basic needs-satisfaction as the content, C. But there may be no explicit group debtor B, with correlative duty; nor an obligated enforcer D in the context, local or global. The contextual questions: Who? To/With Whom? To What? Why? How? How much? Where? When? can be decisive for assessing justice, and also kindness/compassion. The Golden Rule or IRP2B is naturally read as `being about reciprocity, but if so, the extremely poor have nothing to give, or give back, to enter the virtuous giving circle or society. Following IRP2B will not in this case advance the extremely poor or propel any thrust towards equality of economic wealth by those who cannot enter because they have nothing with which to enter the circle of reciprocity. Likewise, the very rich may normally have no unmet physical or social needs, and so not want to enter the reciprocity circle, where they might incur social debts, or the domain in which they will encounter the needy other. Gated communities of people rich and possibly with unexplained wealth are often a deliberately designed means of evasion of the opportunity to exercise the Golden Rule. The principle is also invalid if you want to give me either what is wrong or what what I do not want to be given. A sadist may fail to find a matching masochist. Aristotle, not being an egalitarian, does not put the Golden rule front and centre, even if he evidently presupposed it in his treatment of commercial or interchange justice. Once we allow these questions, the argument for charity and philanthropy gets harder without a theory of right desire and virtue which Singer’s preference utilitarianism lacks without qualitative ranking of desires; or we need a culprit and an enforcer in cases other than those Pogge has identified. Appeals to abstract omnibus principles of justice like those of Rawls who only has a list of primary goods, and not a theory about kindness, will be insufficient. The universalisability test, or reciprocity readings of the Golden Rule, must be supplemented with specific analyses of both “just” and ‘kind’. One needs also an ontology and philosophical anthropology; an account of organised group action; a domain and sector sensitive ethics, a politics, and some study of practical feasibility of relief options, which may have little to do with philanthropic giving. The IRP 1-5 principles can be rationally argued on General Ethical grounds as part of justice. But the more generous Socratic, Thomistic (caritas or agape) or Gandhian non-violence (ahimsa) approach in IRP 7-9 are also ideally rational and ethical strategies, at least for individual non-state actor adoption. As compassion shades off into altruism, I cannot see a way to positively support more than a modest conditional altruism, as part of justice alone, on the basis of NAVE without ontological addenda (God, afterlife, revelation). That would go beyond partial autonomy of ethics mentioned above. One would also need a credible very exacting national aid to the poor policy and a defence training in non-violence to replace armies. There is a secular case for vigorous assistance, drawn from enlightened self-interest invoking the danger of environmental catastrophe and the responsibility of the affluent, but I will not try make it here, and it would not capture the unconditional call of agape/caritas. This analysis of justice using (or plus) the Golden Rule will however be more than enough, without reference to religious extensions or natural catastrophe speculations, to ground some duties to the absolutely poor on the basis of the analysis and principles 1-5. It is perhaps clearest in the case of negative freedom and the Silver Rule. Any person has the right not to be killed arbitrarily, or polluted out of existence. If I want this state of freedom for myself I must, under

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pain of hypocrisy, I must avoid doing evil, but this will not rationalize a policy do what I can to assure it for all, personally and through vicarious organisational and state agents. This may also have nothing to do with giving till it hurts. It may have to do with active involvement in improving world order though a World Order Model Project as mentioned in Chapter 9 (Falk 1995) and world government arrangements to promote self-sufficiency and human rights, as Amnesty International tries to do, and voting for the party most committed to foreign policy aimed at enhancing autonomy and reducing pollution and tyranny. Positive freedom, information and political freedom, sharing common goods and avoiding common evils, rewarding ethical contribution though international prizes, and punishing genocide are the kinds of responses suggested by the analysis, not large donations. Principles IRP 7-9 as unconditional principles are not clearly a requirement of natural justice, or of the compassion of the Golden Rule. “Love your neighbour as yourself” is an ideal, or strategic option and IRP 6-9 are heading towards charity and well beyond justice. Aquinas suggests there are natural and supernatural versions of happiness, and both justice and charity (Bradley 1997). I assume despite the good effects on wellbeing of altruism and forgiveness claimed to be empirically demonstrable by positive psychology and by Post and Nelmark (2007) and others, one still would require faith in the good will and restraint of others and in a cosmic just order of some kind exemplified by beliefs such as those of Buddhism, Christianity, or a revelation passed through religious tradition, in order to sign up for strict prescriptive Nonviolence and non-attachment or perfect altruism, supported by religious institutions. Such a more exacting moral approach would need to show either the possible veracity of the relevant scriptural accounts of transcendental experience/revelation, or a law karma or “conservation of moral energy principle,” and/or a transcendental account of the human spirit. If as Buddhists believe all harm which any person introduces can bounce around forever to possibly harm someone they love, or one’s later reincarnated self then one should avoid it. But this is not at R1 level of reasoning demonstrably true. A secular rational defence of some form of policy for “giving till it hurst” or strategic nonviolence even for states is not out of the question given the threat of nuclear annihilation of the species. Unfortunately, the biggest threat to the human project comes in part at present from “state terrorism” in the form of the nuclear armed powers and nuclear terror-deterrence; and from religious fundamentalist terrorist forces wedded to institutionalised forms of religious worship, a cousin to the same religious sources as non-violence. All the major religions have a pacificist wing, but Socrates was executed by Greek religious conservatives, as an atheist; Jesus by Rome at the behest of conservative Jewish religious authorities; and Gandhi was shot by a Hindu fundamentalist. Not surprisingly, some sort of moderate religious agnosticism or at best ecumenical universalism and liberalism, and just war approaches, seem to be preferred by most people. The Good Samaritan “put himself in the shoes” of the man he came upon and helped, and acted kindly and admirably. He did not fulfil a standing pre-existing duty to all needy travellers in a specific complex type of further circumstance, but made an admirable compassionate moral decision. Kindness and compassion are natural ethical virtues of the ideal person. What Kant calls the ‘maxim’ of his act, for universalisation purposes, and for duty specification, would have been hard to construct, and to imaginatively rehearse, in order to test for consistency with his other practice. There is in any case no need for considering the facts of this other hypothetical generalisation situation. Yet if he had ignored the suffering traveller in the story, Golden Rule thinking suggests he would have acted without compassion, and arguably unjustly

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in the broader general sense equivalent to failure of virtue as a good person or uprightness, in all the circumstances, including his actual capacity, adequate means, other options not being available to the victim, and so on. The organisational and state analogue of a good Samaritan is possible and quite similar. Perhaps as Pogge (2007) suggests of the pharmaceutical company with the only cure for River-blindness, if in canvassing the circumstances of a proposed act, (under the circumstance Who?), you are, or the company in this case, “the salient one,” in the actual set of circumstance. What is abstractly charity can become obligatory for you as a moral agent, in these circumstances. On a NAVE only account; supplemented by elements from convergent Utilitarian, moderate Neo-Kantian or Neo-Rawlsian Social Contract points of view, even without the aid of the second set of supplementary more exacting and more transcendental arguments or accounts in IPR 6-9, it is unwise as well as unjust, for the rich not to pay attention to the poor for their own sakes, and for their children’s safety, health and wellbeing. Given reciprocity principles, we see that Everybody needs justice and compassion as a consumer, even if not as a supplier. With credible (and without unprovable extreme) ecological danger arguments, on pain of irrationality, pragmatic inconsistency, and social chaos, the very rich have reason to respect and obey the state laws regarding distributive social and ecological justice, along with those of property protected by the police. We have the same human nature, wellbeing; we mostly had nurturers, families, kinsfolk of some kind; some organisational and state contact; and planetary habitat as domains. Today the enlightened collective self-interested argument is growing stronger. The situation of the extreme poor can through modern communications and the internet be made known to all in a globalised world and their plight taken up by NGOs. Acts of greedy environmental vandalism can be lethal for the children of the rich themselves in the end. Climate change following deforestation does not discriminate. Permitting such acts by oligarchs, advancing the interests of greedy actors, allowed by dictators, in extremely poor nations is now more patently stupid and dangerous, not just unedifying. But it is often very dangerous to one’s temporal wellbeing to confront evil doers, and weakly motivated on either the enlightened self-interest account of ethics and wellbeing, where duty is a means to “unmoralised” human wellbeing of Aristotle; or on the moralised Kantian account, and the Kantian kingdom of ends.

CONCLUSION This chapter has sketched a secular or non-theologically based case for personal, organisational, and communitarian duties of kindness and poverty relief at various levels. The concrete case for the justice of local, national, and global poverty relief must be made at each specific level. The duty of persons, states, and organisations outlined here is more limited in scope in who it claims should do what, about absolute poverty than Peter Singer’s well known, more open-ended teleological Utilitarian case for poverty relief falling on all affluent northern citizens, but based on a passing individual’s duty to rescue a drowning toddler from a pond. On the other hand, NAVE can warrant even coercive organised governance reform of infrastructure at national and global level. Singer’s omnibus principle driven argument leads him to chide the inactive non-contributing affluent countries and citizens of the North for not giving till it hurts when “they do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance.” But the phrase

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“without sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance,” is too sweeping and indeterminate given the demands of each domain i.e., family, civic, work must be met also. Just computing how much a parent needs for children’s education is a challenge. While NAVE as set out here can accept the idea of an abstract universal human moral “right to welfare,” stemming from the equal right of anyone to pursue their individual wellbeing via justice as described in clause (1) of the analysis of justice, it is not basically a deontological or formalist ethics, nor a strictly consequentialist ethics of totalising utilities generating rights against all others. It does not accept that a “right of need satisfaction pursuit” creates in specific or in all others a concrete duty to deliver the object of the right; or that it grounds rights against anyone in particular or an omnibus duty of need-satisfaction in or for every person, organisation, or state, to meet the need. NAVE takes roles, domains and moral modality seriously, and distinguishes an abstract individual moral right to pursue needs-satisfaction from positive institutionally encoded rights against others backed by coercive enforcers. NAVE sees the sphere of distributive justice limited to interchangeable commodities, to meeting basal needs of community members; to opportunity creation for participating in public goods, and to provision of opportunity for capacity building-equalities due to justice in clause (3) above. As Walsh argues, impartial implementation of the desert and qualification conditions and honours-giving in the subjective sphere advancing e.g., esteem and honours should be social policy. NAVE allows a way to accept and address the real difficulties stemming from the present absence of ethically-driven global, international, and national political rightsenforcement structures. Only such structures could implement Pogge’s (2007) specific proposals for global measures like a resources tax on countries lucky enough to have oil, coal, or gold, and denial of credit to corrupt regimes. The case for constructing these global institutional reforms of international governance can benefit from a specific ethical rationale like NAVE. At the same time, NAVE can ground and support select calls for changes in global and state infrastructure based on the rightness of action to remove absolute poverty arising from physical need deprivation due to injustice as defined against justice defined in (1)-(4) above and applying reciprocity of approximately “Golden Rule” strength. Yet treating wellbeing as ranging over both moralised wellbeing (and if one has faith an eternal wellbeing in an afterlife) and accepting the possibility and coherence of theological readings of the Rule like IRP 7-9, permits political-economic and secular-religious ecumenical discussions of such universal even absolute ethical obligations and duties. More exacting Socratic, Buddhist, and Religious ethics, driven by response/reciprocity principles like IRP 7-9 need not be thought of as cancelling or competing with more “autonomous” or secular ones, nor sweeping secular ethics away, nor requiring one to engaging in stalemated debate on ultimate foundations. But the presuppositions cited in this paper must be in place about the underpinning virtue ethics, personal and organisational self-governance capacity, and the other circumstances. NAVE can agree with Singer and Pogge that persons can have and acquire moral obligations to relieve the poverty of fellow citizens and even strangers in other lands. As they argue, this duty is clearest if they are capable of easily relieving such poverty, can do so without further injustice, or have themselves caused it or benefited from social arrangements which caused it, like imperialism or slavery. If they are stakeholders with voice within an organisation, they must use it ethically. But in the absence of world order governance structures, effective poverty relief obligations following earthquakes and tsunamis are not simple, clear, easily or immediately met, nor are they universal, or “omnibus” ones (for all); nor unconditional

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standing, open-ended, or even clear prima facie duties of all individuals. The capacity requirement can curb some policy responses to State incurred duties of imperialist nations to redress past wrongs while avoiding further injustice. Reparations can often only be implemented vicariously, and over time. There is a danger of an “overload of obligations” and an “allocation” problem created by affirming blanket human obligations to relieve the suffering of the needy other without specific linkage to their actual power to enforce rights; their circumstances, domains, roles, and their extending claims to organisational actors, and accountability to stakeholders. An account has to be given of several presuppositions of a conditional moral obligation to relieve poverty, including a description of the sources, bearers, and scope of associated role-duties. Organisations in some practices and institutions, including business, are specific enough to ground specific organisational duties to relieve such poverty. Political organisations and states can have such duties and increase them by “self”-commitment of their leaders. States are often prime bearers of such duties due to their capacity, social remit, past actions, or present commitments. Global organisations can also have such obligations. Religious organisations too can supplement this by enjoining followers to help the temporal needy to attain their own eternal wellbeing. If the presuppositions of agape/caritas can be shown to be true (God, afterlife, incarnation and revelation) then we must to gain God’s friendship. There are conditional but real justice-based duties of persons, organisations, and states to the poor, but according to NAVE: 1) They are subject-relative, and domain relative, not omnibus principle based 2) only circumscribed secular compassion/love, is a duty of justice, not unconditional love. 3) unconditional love requires a loving God to enable it. If NAVE is taken to exclude from the giving of a rational account of unconditional altruism appeals to Natural theology, or Grand Narratives, such as the testimony of the Church, then if NAVE falls short of the need in supplying a rationale for serious poverty relief, a faith going beyond R1 reason is still going to be necessary for the task and points to the need for the love in (3). Even a good argument for a God as best natural explanation, and for the reality of an afterlife an in TNL is not enough. So far as NAVE was characterised in Chapters 2-5, God and religion were subtracted. There it was said that the 3R -questions arise within the natural scope of human curiosity, but only the answers of natural science to how things work within the world were deemed part of our agnostic construct. The metaphysical questions only surfaced in the doctrine of a hierarchy of ontological goodness, which was accepted as helpful to understanding talk of higher and lower human capacities, which is nigh impossible to edit out of NAVE. In Part 2, we have so far looked at three issues through a NAVE/NL lens, but now allowed the second and third of the 3R R-questions to be admitted as questions, yet as before still presumed to be substantially without answers. On each issue, along with NAVE’s application, Divine Law and religious extensions or manifestations of theism were seen to have potential relevance for improving the case and scope for moral responsibility beyond the individual to organisations and states, and beyond justice to active kindnss at state level and personal agape/caritas.

Chapter 11

NATURAL LAW APPLICATION: SEXUALITY AND MARRIAGE In this Chapter we apply NAVE and DGE to the area of sexuality. In this case we find some overlap and some significant differences. Starting from a review of the bests outcomes of capacity for sexual intercourse and the procreative/sexual capacity, measured against its differential, ideal, and operational objects and ends, together with the marks of happiness set out in NAVE at element 3) of the meta-ethics, and the list of goods we labelled Hs, we shall take a look at a few of the sex issues: mainly contraception, pornography, and homosexuality. For NAVE, one looks for “the best distinctive/characteristic outcome of capacity” to work out an ethics of the capacity’s activity. The sexual/procreative capacity’s distinctive goods, meeting the marks of wellbeing, like delight, self-sufficiency, engagement with higher powers, ultimate or intrinsic good, and permanence are: a) intimacy and commitment between the partners; discovery and enjoyment of the I-Thou relation; b) sensory delight and pleasure in interpersonal love-making: c) procreation and species and social preservation/perpetuation, through begetting and nurturing of loved children; and possibly integration with a wider notion of personal and social creativity d) happy intergenerational extended family life.. Most take the public declaration of ongoing committed unity of the parties before the two united families to love each other exclusively, and any future children, in an institutionalized marriage, to be an ideal ritual, strengthening and cementing a)-d). Marriage is one, perhaps the only, successful social means to these ends. The potential associated evils are: painful one-sided break-downs of unity and fidelity with partners, jealousy, STD disease; coerced prostitution, rape, violence, sadism, child neglect; child sex abuse, pornography associated with sexualisation of children, sadistic violence, and female reductive objectification. Many activities fall short of the ideals in a)-d). Leaving aside incest and bestiality here as activities prima facie failing the best outcome test but raising particular issues too complex for the treatment they need, there are six other main types of sexual expression, other than marital, to which the criteria a)-d) above, suggested by the “best capacity outcome” test, generated in NAVE, from application of its criteria for wellbeing and its principles, can be applied. These practices are:

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David Ardagh 1) Masturbation: qua generally solitary, it has no inherent unitive or procreative potential of types a)-d); the end is usually sensory pleasure or self-love, but it can be part of IVF and it might possibly figure within coital love. 2) Use of Pornography: as for 1, the intent is usually solitary sensory pleasure, taken in written or visual material depicting sexual activity for this purpose. Non-violent erotica is different in content from those where there can be added concern about the taking of pleasure in content depicting acts which are non-consensual or violent; and/or about the compromised consent of actors in making the material. The end being sensory, portrayal of women as persons is often degrading and abstraction of sex from personal contexts often renders its content depersonalised and dehumanising. 3) Homosexual sex: there is no procreative potential, and it can be promiscuous, but long term faithful interpersonal love is now through legalization more possible, and makes possible the nurturing of adopted children. 4) Fornication: sex between non-spouses. Pre-marital sex was till recently disparaged socially, but the indispensability of marriage has been questioned as contraception became technically efficient. Fornication can be promiscuous or include ongoing nonmarital interpersonal love, but love may not be present. Preventing procreation of usually unwanted children was the good aimed at in the prohibition; the often uncommitted nature of the sexual union threatened to create unplanned children at fertile times unless sexual intercourse was non-genital, contracepted, or interrupted. 5) Adultery: if vows of monogamy have been made, a breach of monogamous marriage commitment by spouses is usually secretive and in that way wrong; possible interpersonal love is only contingently assessable against the harm to the spouse; preventing possible children is good if the assumption is that the married party or parties already have or plan children. 6) Prostitution: Many prostitutes are duped into the industry and then coerced by pimps. If uncoerced, it adds the exchange of money to the above considerations, which entails scrutiny of its interchange justice quality; and the coercive possibility adds dangers of violence.

From a NAVE perspective, practice 1) was traditionally assumed to be bad qua nonprocreative and till the homuncular nature of the semen was disproved they were viewed as quasi homicide. Even after this was rejected for many centuries it has been condemned as being, qua solitary, not ordered to a)-e) or unloving of others, impersonal, possibly addictive, nonprocreative, or as allegedly leading to self-centred habits. Practice 2), pornography, is blamed for encouraging voyeurism, displacing or being incompatible with, developing respect for women as non-sex objects, and displacing with 2-dimensional or virtual objects, the caring dispositions, self-control, and personal commitment needed for deeper reciprocal interpersonal love-making, and nurturing of possible children. Self-satisfaction in 1) and 2) is thought to tend to displace partner satisfaction. There was an argument we visited in Chapter 2 about self-sufficiency and control by higher capacities. By lack of emotions in voyeuristic sensory pleasure pursuit, self-control was allegedly eroded. If stimuli are indiscriminate and volition has habitually been abandoned to addictive impersonal sensory desires, it can be hard to recover, possibly encouraging the promiscuity associated with 3-6. Neuroscience suggests displacement of normal sex is caused by a repeated quest for a physical rush, which then fades with familiarity and requires further

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novel additions like coercion or violence. Pornography is sometimes associated with nonconsensual practices or associating sexual pleasure with other non-consensual or cruel sadistic practices wrong on independent grounds, so sexualisation of these is wrong. Homosexuality has no procreative potential, and as for 1) and 2) can be expressed in a depersonalised search for physical promiscuity. But unlike them, it does have possible l interpersonal unitive and intimate potential; and also, child-nurturing potential. Given the recent global change on the part of many legal systems to accepting that some people are born homosexual, and decriminalising homosexuality, and legalising same sex marriage, the traditional moral position on this, as on 4) and 5), is changing. However, from the nineteenth century, libertarians and utilitarians who are akin to NAVE as teleologists have a strong view on the right to freedom and privacy and the onus being on those interfering in the personal sphere if no harm to others can be shown. There are alleged to be counter-examples to the claims about each of these matters, e.g. it is claimed that pornography need not be self-harmful, dehumanizing, or that prostitution is not necessarily coerced even economically or even incompatible with marriage; or that once their habitual forms are distinguished from episodic occurrences, the objections to 1) and 2) will not be subject to most of the criticisms. Practices 4) and 5) can also, but usually do not, have the possible object of begetting and nurture of children, which arguably requires marital fidelity, for enabling future care of accidentally conceived possible unconditionally loved children. Fornication was formerly discouraged as splitting commitment from love-making, and risking production of unwanted or unloved children, but the libertarian will again object that no harm need be done to third parties, and contraception is effective. Adultery is assumed wrong as a breach of monogamous marital fidelity, again with bad results for possible children. Prostitution is thought to undermine marriage and degrade the prostitute’s dignity and capacity for a steady relationship and children. These are all contestable considerations, claims, norms, and assumptions, but the rationale of the negative positions, and the libertarian replies are not implausible. As contraception becomes more technologically effective, the relevance of the procreative risk in 4) and 5) diminishes. Homosexual activity was formerly ruled out on the grounds that it had no procreative potential. It would always be to that extent “ontologically” less than perfect from the NAVE standpoint, but on the casuistic defeasible model that step in the evaluation process is only the first, and never morally decisive. Heterosexual use of increasingly effective contraception will allow further splitting procreation from sex and reduce this argument’s effectiveness, although it does not remove or exclude the procreative potential, while same sex does. DGE takes a stronger stance on point a) above in that the parties vow in the context of absolute Divine commands in the Sermon on the Mount about lustful thoughts being adultery in the heart, although similar reasons to those here are also adduced to those of NAVE. The libertarian argument for 1 and 2 is discarded in DGE. Only marital sex, with monogamy, or for Muslims limited polygamy, is permitted. Marriage is in DGE a sacred event, (a sacrament). Divorce is very restricted, but annulments are not. The church or institution as an organisation with self-accredited moral authority generally tends to prohibit all these activities on further scriptural and theological grounds and link them to risking a future happy afterlife.

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CASE 1: CONTRACEPTION Contraception is relevant in practices 4 and 5. In practice 4, fornication, use of effective contraception would alleviate the main threat of harm from unwanted pregnancy. In practice 5, adultery, contraception would help for the same reason but there would remain the problems of infidelity, jealousy, and harmful confusion for children. In order to get a sense of the content of secular NL teaching on sex, and how it differs from its enveloping Divine law and religious extensions, we now will examine an important religious document, Pope Paul’s 1968 encyclical Humanae Vitae (HV), and then apply our constructed secular version of NAVE to its teaching. We will find that NAVE does not support the teaching in that document as it stands. Even when God and revelation are thrown in, as they are by Thomism and DGE, and as they are by the author in this case, we need support for these theistic religious claims, and an account of how the addenda warrant their conclusion. If that is not forthcoming, we are entitled to reject the teaching in so far as it claims secular NL backing. In fact, the Pope explicitly claims theistic NL as backing, but it fails as such and is quite a difficult task to provide arguments for thinking God and revelation help to support the conclusion. Let us see why. There was some expectation in Roman Catholic circles that the Church’s teachings on sexual behaviour was about to change in the light of discoveries concerning ovulation. There had over centuries been changes of church teaching on such matters as crusades and nonviolence, slavery, clerical celibacy, usury, papal infallibility, religious freedom, and Jewish “deicide,” but conservatives downplayed these as relevant precedents. When published, the encyclical declared that, sex always had to be “open to procreation.” Love-making, or sexual unity, and procreation, were to be seen as normatively inseparable, particularly when procreation was possible in the fertile period. Love and procreation were not to be separated by action of the parties, using physical interventions like sheaths, loops or pills to separate love making from active pro-creational possibility. There was, however, a statement that a spouse could refuse sex in the fertile period if the will to make love was absent due to sickness. It would be wrong to have intercourse without love in such cases. But this right of refusal was apparently based on appeal to a principle of non-separation of love-making and procreative life-making having no reference to the “separation by the action of the parties” clause. This apparently broadens the inseparability principle to ban any sex without joint love-making and procreative potential, which probably inadvertently, also rules out sex in the safe period, postmenopausal sex, and the basis of natural family planning. As to the alleged impossibility of change, there were changes: no references was now made to older concepts like “paying the marital debt,” “remedies for concupiscence,” or to earlier teachings about procreation being the primary goal of sexual intercourse. Amidst such attendant confusions about the exact scope of the inseparability principle, HV entered a context of perennial debate between believers about the relation of reason and faith, faith and papal authority; and also one between believers and external non-believers. Some believed that if a claim explicitly contradicts itself or an “evident” or certain deliverance of reason, then it cannot and/or should not be believed. A logical self-contradiction seems certainly false or futile. But some apparent contradictions (e.g., “a Euclidian triangle can be a line”) might be argued not to be (when one corner angle of a triangle is infinite); and many things imaginable and free from contradiction have turned out to be proved impossible. The limits of our knowledge of nature are partly indistinct. We try to distinguish the imaginable

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from the true, but the boundaries of the imaginable and the knowable or truth, while usually clear, are not always so. It often takes time to prove some imaginable theory like alchemy is wrong. If a God caused nature and its laws, He is the supernatural cause of nature, and can presumably control and alter nature or suspend its laws on occasion. In a sense, the limits of NL have been changed as science has grown. So, in that way they are not certainly known. But reason in the sense of logical self-consistency does seems necessary for faith; adding empirical confirm-ability seems necessary for natural science, and most agree that minimal self-consistency and coherence with other truth is not sufficient for faith in revelation/salvation. Some believe faith is not dependent on any belief about reason or its scope, and so is not dependent on reason in that sense. Presumably however, some conceptualisation and apprehension of propositional content, at least of the articles of faith, is required for faith, even if belief in e.g., the NL conception of moral reason (or any other theory of reason), is not required. The Pope says that the church can say what is required in the domain of reason and morals for faith, and apparently claims authority to pronounce on any implications of this claim, especially for the scope of reason and NL. But if faith must be minimally intelligible, in the sense of not being manifestly self-contradictory or overtly in contradiction to any certain moral truths, the Pope must be expected to respect the principle of consistency or freedom from contradiction, and consistency with natural moral reason in that sense, and to be judged by that principle. The discussion below takes this position and attempts to steer a middle ground between Mobbs’ (1997) claim that the Pope cannot say anything infallibly about the content of NL when pronouncing on contraception, and NL’s content is not necessary for faith, on the one hand; and the view that all faith contents of credos etc. must be judged by natural reason alone. Any claim to over-rule or directly contradict all natural moral reason conclusions with faith based revelation is not acceptable, but it is accepted that the scope of natural reason, while considerable, is not infinite, and that it does not exclude the existence of God, or some more exacting extension of natural moral law, perhaps based on religious considerations and motives. The argument to be considered will be based on the idea of human capacities having objects, ends/goods, needs, and virtues. The goods associated with sexuality are sensory pleasure; expression of consensual, mutual, active and passive love, intimacy and commitment; and in some ways most importantly, the begetting of children. The evils include jealousy, diseases, un-consensual intercourse/rape, and neglected children. Children are an ideal outcome, and the most spectacular, of several goods or ends. They are not essential to the exercise of the sexual capacity itself; nor are they the morally required normative end, of all sex, as post-menopause sex shows. On the other hand, divorcing sex from love and procreation has its inherent dangers. Taking sex as an end in itself, uncoordinated with other ends, or a dominant ultimate end, is a recipe for obsession, rape, pederasty, and other loveless actions and practices. It will be a naturalistic analogical argument for the conclusion of HV prohibiting artificial contraceptives like loops, sheaths, and pills, one which might be constructed from traditional NL materials, familiar to the Pope but explicitly utilised only in part. This will not be the so-called New Natural Law (NNL) argument of Grisez (1988), Finnis (1980) and others, which is quite unlike the one offered by the Pope and the one offered here. NNL would require another book to deal adequately with this topic, and cannot be properly discussed here because, besides not being used by the Pope, it is subject to some significant objections. It claims that religion, and implicitly God, is one of ten “basic human goods,” of

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which life is one, which cannot be rank ordered, and then introduces a contentious new list of “modes of moral reasoning” aimed at “integral human fulfilment” to deal with the problem of choosing between alleged non-integrate-able incommensurable goods. It treats artificial contraception as quasi-homicide of the possible person that may arise from intercourse in the fertile period, having a right not to be killed, because contraception obstructs the basic good of life. Since NNL is a challenge to the account of NLwhich has been given in Chapters 1-5, I will take a moment to explain why it is excluded. Grisez, Finnis and others use a version of NL to support HV, and have worked hard to defend a particular Christian doctrine of marriage based on their version of NL with some success. They associate some of the worst aspects of the sexual revolution with the rejection of HV. The view has been widely canvassed since the late 1960s and the position which has developed over 50 years, is complex, and not easily summarised. There are allegedly ten intuitively apprehended self-evident “basic goods”: life, health, knowledge, aesthetic experience, skilled work, play, friendship, marriage, harmony with God, and harmony between choice, feeling, and behaviour. Practical reason is sometimes put on the list, and sometimes operates upon it. These are alleged to be intuitively self-evident nonmoral goods of human persons, which are incommensurable and cannot be ranked in a hierarchy. There are also “modes of moral responsibility,” moral principles and precepts which are directed at integrating all the ten goods into a human life in such a way as respect their integrity as goods, and not trade one for the other or for another non-basic good. Principles of practical reasonableness include developing a coherent plan of life, no arbitrary preference of values or persons, limiting the relevance of consequences, respecting the basic good in every act, following conscience and obeying the requirements of the common good. Moral oughts and imperatives about right and wrong are relevant only for deliberating about which basic goods to instantiate and are there to integrate the all the goods into the community of persons and assure one such good is not made instrumental to another, and/or another non-basic good. These modes can help in making moral judgements, and can be expressed in principles, like the Golden Rule or the three versions of the Kantian categorical imperatives and universalisability test, or “the end does not justify the means.’ They are about the same level of determination as Aquinas’ level 3 (i) principles like “act justly” or “do no harm.” The level of specificity is apparently less than the propositional content of primary principles at Aquinas’ 3 ii) prohibiting adultery and murder-knowingly and deliberately killing an innocent person, or his secondary precepts, but these precepts are not self-evident and are inferred from the basic goods via the principles of practical reasonableness. Moral responsibility for actions depends on deliberate intention to realise goods, and means chosen, not on actual consequences. Intentions cannot be deduced from observed results/actions. This is partly because the latter can be beyond the agent’s control. In realising one basic good one forgoes another, so some good is not realised. Basic goods may get damaged even though one has followed the modes of responsibility and intended/tried to integrate the basic goods. Proponents of NNL argue that life is a “basic” and “incommensurable” non-moral good, and contraception users intend to prevent a possible person’s life; a basic good, and this is morally evil and wrong. The prospect of a new possible person is a reason for an agent, engaged in sex, to act for his/her coming to be, and not use contraception. “Contraceptors” act immorally for the sake of an end. If this is done allegedly for another basic good, that is rationally unjustifiable and impossible, since such basic ends are incommensurable.

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Incommensurability seems to mean that basic goods cannot be measured on a common metric as more or less good, or treated as a hierarchy of qualitatively similar goods. If the basic good is considered at concrete level, in a person, one cannot kidnap or kill this healthy person for research (knowledge) or their organs to save another concrete “better” life. Any basic good, as part of the good for persons, is not a mere means to an end. It is an ultimate good, intuited by any human as such. If it were to be sacrificed or obstructed for another basic good or non-basic good end, there is again no rational decision procedure for comparing life or prevented life with, say: relief from financial burdens. Contraception is contrary to a reason which cannot be outweighed. Rational comparisons of what is truly good for free person to choose are impossible because live persons are open ended goods and they simply trump any such goal considerations absolutely. Comparisons of possible futures do not establish their preferability in rational terms. There is no rational measure or means of making a choice rationally between basic goods. Billings or natural family planning, NFP, need not necessarily be contra-life, proceeding from a contra-life will. ABC–type contraception proceeds from such a will in preventing results their intercourse naturally brings about. But contraception is broader than sex acts, and amounts to quasi-homicide, which is distinct from the marital act even if conjoined with married sex. In non-contraceptive NFP, the agent in abstaining from causing the baby to be, does not choose the baby not coming to be or not wanting the baby one might have. There is a difference between wilful excluding the coming to be of the baby (contraception) and choosing not to realise a good NFP. For NNL, the HV inseparability principle (unity and procreation) follows from their account, and their account is not dependent on or derived from it. But it largely overlaps with the HV teaching. It is hard to know how to respond to this comprehensive, innovative, and radical proposal. I will try to sketch a critique under four headings. 1) God and reason: In NL, speculative reason is sovereign in Aristotle and Aquinas’s anthropology and crucial to Aquinas’s ethics. The structure of the argument for God being “the highest object/good of the highest power” as an ingredient within human wellbeing on criterion 2 ii) in Aquinas is: God is in truth the ultimate end of man but recognised as such only by the wise. There is an eliminative deduction, beginning from the marks of wellbeing at NL level 2. above, together with the celebrated “five ways” to show the reasonableness of God’s existence, and concluding God is our summum bonum, and that eternal happiness in the next life is possible. Aquinas does not repeat the natural human desire for God thesis of the Summa Gentiles, Book III, in ST, and along with NL i.e., Divine law distinction, distinguishes perceived and true temporal from theological grace based eternal wellbeing. In NNL, however, “reason” and “reasonable” are used without recognition of the dependency of practical on speculative reason, the equivocal senses of the term “reasonable” as it is used of reasoning done in the multiple systems of formal and informal logic; formal mathematics; the multiple types of imperative, moral, and practical reasoning, from ends to means or principles to instances; the different models of scientific and metaphysical reasoning, such as the hypothetical-deductive method or use of statistical frequency-probability; or the use in modal logics of possible world metaphysics/ontology. In NNL, the teaching about God and wellbeing is not reasoned to on metaphysical grounds. Religion is just evidently a basic good.

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With no definition in these matters, it is unclear how practical reasonableness principles and modes of moral responsibility like “have a coherent plan,” differ from moral principles. A vicious drug tsar will have a coherent plan. Aquinas would have held that the moral was a subspecies of the practical, and practical reason is subordinated to speculative. But the first moral principle of “integration of basic goods in a community” apparently is distinct from the practical reasoning involved in getting the list of basic goods together, even granted each is allegedly self-evident. The listing of the ten goods and the modes of NNL theory is definitely not itself self-evident, nor the differences between modes of moral responsibility and practical reasonableness principles. 2) Incommensurability and Moral Absolutes: Exactly what “incommensurablility” means to NNL authors is unclear because the level of specificity at which it supposedly cuts in, is unclear, and the basic goods are in different ontological categories. The abstract objects, states, or practices denoted by nouns like “life” or “health,” “work,” “play,” or “knowledge” or “marriage” are indeed in some sense incommensurable, in the sense that they are too abstract to be immediately compared and rated or ranked without any further context, as are all abstractions. They are also incommensurable because in different Aristotelian categories: harmony with God and within persons (relation); marriage (performative activity in practices and institutions); work and play, knowledge and friendship, reasoning, religion, aesthetic experience (states of psychological disposition, belief/action, and life, health (physical/bodily state). But as was indicated above, NL’s three level architectonic structure, capacities, dispositions, virtues, and their end/objects, are not incommensurable and can be ontologically ranked by object, flexibility, and scope; and their associated needs compared in different respects and with respect to different considerations, such as execution/intention; urgency, indefiniteness, and practicality. The NNL terms for the basic goods can occur in plausible, comparative statements like: “Life is prior in importance and causality to learning” or in expressing concrete preferences. One might give up skilled work or a form of play or a friendship because it is too time intensive and impedes marital duties or is risky to health. Aquinas thinks contemplation of God is better than other goods of the practical life. If NNL does not mean to deny this, how is it to be understood, if strict incommensurability is posited? In NL of a NAVE sort, the kidnap and dismemberment of innocents for research or transplants is prohibited at Step 3 under casuistry by the primary precept against murder, the golden rule, by justice and love as virtues, plus in DGE the fifth commandment, while recognising the admitted good of research or transplants. As Chapter 4 showed, all intentional killing is not prohibited, as it is NNL. The incommensurability of basic goods principle, by introducing a new type of casuistry leads to the NNL doctrine that all intentional killing is absolutely wrong, as opposed to being, as it is, on the traditional view of casuistry, a moral ideal to be striven for. Killing a person is prima facie wrong, but casuistry allows for its wrongness to be outweighed in self-defence and defence of innocent third parties; by accident; and in “just wars”; and though there is no consensus, even euthanasia can be seen as a case where added circumstances can allow the ultimate finality even of a primary precept about murder (as deliberately killing an innocent person) to be put on the table for discussion of a permission for euthanasia and mercy killing in war, where added circumstances like failed

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analgesics, or lucid patient expressed wishes, or fatal war wounds will entail hours of agony, are relevant even if too impractical/dangerous to legislate as permitted, as has been the view in most states. 3) Casuistry and Act-circumstance Types: All steps of casuistry as set out above require reference to the tendencies of act types to wellbeing as a concept, with an indefinite but significant sense, and prima facie choice-worthy status. They are, often but not always subjected to some principle/precept operating as a moral standard. If a basic good is taken to be concrete, say as embodied in a type of action, an instance of a basic good for a real person, commensurability is still more clearly possible. If we are at Step 4 of a casuistic process of the sort above, we will have often have assessed the prima facie good of an act type and implicitly compared and rated preference for one basic good over another at a high level of abstraction. At lower level, e.g., one can allow saving life here and now in the particular circumstances to prevail over knowledge, and speaking truth, goods at a higher level of abstraction (drunken husband, war spying). If we are talking about a real person’s concepts of basic goods or concrete instances of them, or types of action which tend to or away from a basic good, they are abstractly comparable at Steps 1-3 in their prima facie tendency to wellbeing of specific human capacity as an indefinite but effective standard or measure. This prima facie status can be outweighed and change as the above casuistic process shows. In some sense, casuistry actually generates a rational dialectical support for universal primary precepts about adultery, even though Aquinas says they are self-evident. Universal precepts can be explained as summaries of iterated casuistry, and they guide on the basis of induction in that sense, as well as intuition. They are not completely a priori, posited on the basis or practical reason in Kant’s sense. Types of act, considered at Step 3 of casuistry, are quasi-substances with some incomplete specification of what and why, intentions and choices, and circumstances as accidents. The theory of analogy of attribution of Aristotle at NE 1096a and Met 1003a can be used to support the proposition that act-circumstance types exist in a category other than substance. As existents, their tendencies can intelligibly be described and assessed. Organisations and states are architectonic quasi-substances with personal attributes like habits which can be evaluated like those of persons as good or bad, virtuous or not. Clearly any basic good will be pursued in a set of circumstances and the circumstances How? and How much? when canvassed may show the pursuit of a basic good is excessive (too much) by reference to the circumstance How? from a rational standpoint, and such judgements that moderation is necessary will requires impeding the natural desire for them by appeal to some outweighing basic or non-basic good. Given there exists the moral modality of “moral heroism,” there is some moral “free space.” No individual has any moral obligation to partake in all basic goods and integrate them all into her life. She cannot marry, and join a silent order of nuns discouraging friendships other than with God. So casuistry of the sort explained is indeed in the NL package, and it can be used to question the NLL new version of casuistry’s appeal to supposedly incommensurability and invariant “modes of moral responsibility” such as the principle: “The end never justifies the means.” The NNL account is radically different from NL. It does not appeal to teleological hierarchies of capacity as in the metaethical Anthropology element 2 of NL above; or formal and ideal objects

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of power; the marks of happiness at NL element 3 are not central; and it makes little use of NL element 5 casuistry. It offers its “basic goods,” “incommensurability” and “modes of moral responsibility” account to support HV, with regard to the inseparability of procreative intent and sex, but the line of argument that ABC necessarily intentionally and directly attacks the basic value of life in some important way that NFP does not, is arguably wrong. Critics have posed the question why sex between naturally sterile married couples would not be implausibly ruled absolutely impermissible on the basis of the NNL argument and they have doubted the damage to marriage allegedly done by contracepted sex. The fact that the sterile couple do not bring the sterility about is what is meant by the teaching, but that addition means the inseparability principle will need an added clause with this explicit condition, and it needs some justification if the claim is not to be circular. The “modes of responsibility” are quite abstract: one should have a coherent plan; avoid arbitrary preferences regarding persons and values; be faithful to commitments; and show respect for basic goods, community, conscience and so on. The end is not to justify the means. But that is only true when the end is moral, which we are meant to be in process of discovering though the modes, so the procedure is circular. No hierarchy of basic good ends is allowed to help us here. There is a long literature from Abelard and Kant to contemporary consequentialism on the “intention-act-results and consequences” problem. We noted Aquinas’ subtle account of the evolution of action in Chapter 4 and 5, from wish to performance and the treatment of the result/consequence difference in the casuistic context. Aquinas follows Aristotle in rejecting the strong version of the NNL view, which favours the intention over the consequences, and holds for irrelevance of consequences. Aquinas holds that while intention of an end is the form of the act, it includes description of the intended result, and one can be responsible for results, foreseen and foreseeable, and sometimes for unforeseen consequences, if they are nonaccidental to the act, and should have been seen as coming from disproportional assessment of means relative to the act. There are many other differences between Aquinas and NNL on the nature of the ultimate end for humans. Aquinas takes God to be that end. For NNL, the ultimate end to be striven for is not God alone but an integral communal fulfilment i.e., a community of persons capable of integral fulfilment, which includes religion as a basic good and God, in the kingdom of heaven. All things considered, this is a comparatively vague account of moral decision making compared to that of Aquinas’ S. T. 1-11ae 12 -23 outlined in Chapter 5. 4) The Possible and “Possible persons”: Objects and their properties are possible in different senses or ways depending on the nature of the attribution of possibility concerned, the entity ascribed possibility, and the background context of enabling causes. Whether x is a “possible person” depends on whether we are talking about a parent’s prior concept or idea of such a child, an intentional objects; or real objects, like sperm, inseminated ova, zygotes, the conceptus, embryo, or an infant/born baby. Talking about logically, causally or really possible persons differs as we have in mind really possible active potencies for, or of, persons; or beings relative to the objects or tendencies of real objects. Potentia dicitur ad actum. Potentiality is contrasted in one sense to necessity - what always happens; or whose denial is contradictory, or what must happen.

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Water can and will boil at 100C under normal pressure and other conditions. It has an active potential to boil, or freeze, or evaporate. A person who deliberately boils water overlays and exploits the natural potential causal agency, and activates one of the three main inherent potentials, boiling, perhaps to cook a meal. The boiling water does not entail or define the person’s act of boiling, or the cooking. Water has some real continuous potential for boiling; a weaker potential for being deliberately boiled; a weaker potential still for being involved in cooking. A French speaker who wants to, can and will speak French, using its syntax and semantics, and her vocal apparatus. Once learned, she has a disposition or active potential to speak or not. Its exercise is not entailed by that potential. When it is used, the speaker can overlay the syntax etc in the speech with a further “speaker meaning” (Grice, 1958) and purpose, like asking for food. Syntactic and semantic well-ordered rule guided French has a weak potential for making possible this actual request; spoken French has a stronger potential for the agent’s request; but less than the real speaker giving the words meaning in context imposing a mode on the propositional content. An ejaculated sperm, call it a., will not become a conceptus, under normal conditions of temperature and pressure, but only if in addition b., it is placed into a suitable female physical receptacle c., during the fertile period d., adjacent to/united with an ovum e., insemination occurs f., a woman allows the insertion at b., to happen and takes no preventative action. As conditions a-f are progressively supplied, the sperm has an increasing active potential, but before b. with use of a pill, loop, or condom, its “possible person potentiality” is zero, or infinitesimal. The abstract law regarding the potentiality of water to boil for cooking, learned French to be spoken in requesting food, and sperm emission to cause a person will have roughly the form (x (Fx. Gx. Hx. Ix) entails Px), where F, G etc are “potential strengthening” properties/states, and P is an active potential for/of/x. If any conjunct in the antecedent is absent/false, the potentiality for Px weakens or vanishes. In the case of male sperm, we have the generalisation: if a, ejaculation; b, suitable receptacle; c, co-location of sperm an ovum; d, in the fertile period; e, resulting in insemination f; parties do not prevent - then we have an active possible conceptus/embryo/baby. Procreation is not a basic act like raising an arm. The parents must overlay the descriptive NLs with their intention to bring the variables together with others or conjoin them, and not prevent any single one, in accord with their intentions in doing so, to realise a real Px, Pa. If active prevention is used via successful ABC, then the potential building can be halted before or at the start, at step b., even if the NLs governing the processes are not changed by choice. The possibility of a person is then theoretically zero if ABC is successful (which it may not be). So, the successful intending ABC user prevents a zero possibility of a person proceeding further to becoming a real possibility. It is a logical and abstractly a real possibility, if antecedent conditions are met. Here they are intentionally/deliberately not met and there is no possible person waiting for a soul. The intent of the intellects of the married parties defines the action, and cannot be deduced from the law expressing the combinatorial facts expressed in the formula with the variables. Like cooking and conversing in French, the nature of their action cannot be deduced from the law-like physical facts alone, and only with reference to naming the stage attained in the process a-f. Clearly the later the stage the more real the possibility, and at some stage well before delivery, the NNL authors are right that it will exist. Only if the assumed background normal conditions or ceteris paribus conditions like “unless interference occurs,” which must be met to enable possible entities to be active potencies, are also agreed to be required by the NNL

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authors, who say a possible person is prevented in ABC, but not by NFP, will we be able to determine the possible status of a possible person prevention, as to its being conceivable, intentional, or logically possible or a real tendencies of an actual object in the given context. Also, a “person” can denote a human entity with DNA of the species homo sapiens, which will include zygotes, anencephalic babies, clinically dead people; and mature adults with all powers at levels A-C in the NL Anthropology in Chapter 2. The combination: “possible innocent person” combines these and adds “innocent,” itself a term equivocal as between “having done or threatening no evil voluntarily”; and “innocent but involuntarily threatening another life. The “possibility” of causing a conceptus and causing a person varies in strength with circumstances of ovulation, time, and place of action. As one adds contextual enablers, like intercourse, ovulation, and the fertile period, the possibility from ejaculation increases steadily from merely being a logical possibility to being a real possibility or tendency. This ambiguity shows how difficult it is to run either a restrictive or permissive line on contraception without tackling the metaphysics of possibility more generally and the “possible person” idea, as it plays out in parallel with abortion issues. The particular application to contraception of his position on possible person prevention by Grisez has been criticised by Kevin Rickert (1992) in Lyceum. He suggests i) the possible person prevented, not being a real person, cannot be the object of a homicide. In this sense, the contra-life will is not a will against a basic good. In terms of the above discussion, the possible person/life is only abstractly life, but is not a concrete life. The evil of homicide does not just consist in removing a future good, or having an intention to kill a possible being, but killing a real person. Rickert also ii) questions the idea that the NFP agent, in choosing to abstain, chooses/does not do something, while the “contraceptor” chooses to do something. He argues that abstinence is a deliberate action, and also that the double effect principle cannot be used to explain and justify NFP if the end of avoiding children, like reducing the financial burden, are judged to be immoral. He also suggests less convincingly that iii) unmarried couples using ABC may think they ought to will the end with the propositional content: not having a child out of wedlock. They may want directly, not to prevent a life, (life is always a good not to be prevented), but to prevent “causing a baby out of wedlock.” The latter is not always good, so it can be permissibly prevented. This last argument is more debatable, turning on a concept of what the difference is between de facto and legal marriage which is too complex to discussed here. The first two considerations are added to by Noonan (1968), who observes there are no souls waiting to be born, and that procreation is always to be tied to education and nurture of children as the ideal end. There is much more to be said here about intention/results/consequences; the possible, persons, and innocence. In one sense NNL is correct to say that on any account, either Aquinas’s original NL, or the proposed meta-ethical revision, or NNL, contracepted sexual intercourse in the fertile period with the other causal conditions in place, does actually prevent a really possible life in a more than logical sense, and more than in solitary or homoerotic acts, even if NNL’s basic goods and moral modes schema is rejected. But for the reasons given concerning how this possibility arises, but still fails to be homicide, that is not an immoral action. This line of reasoning radically diverges from the metaphysics and theology of the older NL, which treats morals as based on facts about realising human wellbeing of an integrated architectonic capacity structure and a common good; its metaphysics centrally features intergood comparisons of species, rankings of human capacities, and ranking their goods; and it

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does not treat “possible persons” as real one’s with rights to life/be born. God is the supreme existent cause of causes, and God is The Good, who creates all other being and good, and is posited as setting down moral laws in the Old testament, creating the immaterial soul of persons when the physical substrate is sufficiently developed; and creating species with graded and ranked capacities in various orders of consideration. A secular NL argument based on NAVE for the teaching of HV is now presented.

The Argument for HV Doctrine Being Based on NAVE The starting point from this NL perspective would be human nature i.e., the set of human capacities, their object/ends and needs. An indicative sketch of a possible NL approach to contraception follows. If the evolutionary causes of rational human beings were themselves brought into being by a rational being or beings, or God, as Christians believe, there may be discernible some (at least indeterminate) “maker’s instructions” for humans to obtain their wellbeing, inferable from the structure of their human capacities and characteristic activities. That would be to invoke theism and DGE so is off limits to NAVE. But even if evolution is just a brute fact, we can speculate on what the structure of the human procreative apparatus suggests. 1) Persons are made up of an interactive architectonic hierarchy of capacities at three levels, directive, operational and enabling. Each capacity has defining objects and correlative sensations and affects oriented to wellbeing. At the highest level, minds direct operational capacities and nurture enabling brains and nervous systems; operate flexible limbs and perceptual capacities, through which they receive bio-feedback, and direct their molar behaviour in a process of mutual psychological and physical interaction in pursuit of wellbeing. In NAVE “folk anthropology,” intellect has the object of truth/knowledge; will of good/wellbeing; sight and hearing have colour and sound; limbs have movement; sexuality has love and life; stomachs are for eating food; hearts are for circulating blood. Intellect and will can directly flex limbs in exercises of mobility and operation of perceptual capacities like sight and taste; they can nurture, but cannot voluntarily flex, their enabling autonomic systems, such as digestion, immune system, and hair growth; and they can normally do so only partly or indirectly in the case of respiration, elimination, and circulation. Minds can ‘flex” brains, but in a different way to eyes and limbs. A researcher can ask a subject to use an artefact like a machine with a screen depicting their brain activity, to put themselves in a specific brain state, perhaps by conjuring up a psychological emotion, and observe brain changes, or using the limited control of respiration, but this is a very indirect flexing, and one that is not like moving one’s head to see better. In all levels of interaction of brain and mind, direction, operation, or enablement, minds interact with bodies, as shown when brain damage obstructs thought and action, and worry causes head-aches. 2) The enabling human bodies and brains supporting minds, limbs, and all other capacities, are all initially produced by sexual intercourse. Procreation as a human capacity could not (until IVF) be exercised without sexual intercourse. 3) All human capacities, including intellectual, non-physical ones, have characteristic objects, ends, virtues and depend on physical life, created through coitus or

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David Ardagh insemination. The end of the sexual capacity is human life or procreation, the ultimate, characteristic/defining, natural, ideal object of sex. 4) The human mind’s higher capacities of knowledge and desire or will are naturally inseparable from each other, with desire normally requiring apprehension of an object, or a state of affairs expressible in a propositional content; and intellect’s objects normally having some at least slight affective tone. They also have ultimate, characteristic, natural ideal objects. Intellect requires intelligibility, propositional content, truth, knowledge, wisdom and fitness to reality or fact. Will requires desirability, perceived wellbeing or goods like friendship and love, choice-worthiness, temperance, and other virtues; and that the world be made to fit its desires. So these two are inseparable capacities, with some inseparable ends, and elements in common, like concepts, objects and propositional contents, and some different types of fit or correspondence between words and the world (Searle 1983). The higher directing capacities are ideally inseparable from each other and direct operational and enabling capacities, each with an inseparable end. 5) If intellect has truth, will has friendship/love, and procreation has life, as ultimate final defining ends, then lies, which obstruct truth; killing and violence which obstruct love, and contraceptives which obstruct life are wrong. As every statement should be open to truth, and every act of will, should be open to the good/love, so every sex act should be open to the normatively inseparable goods of life, and the truth/love ends of directing capacities of intellect and will, with their twin psychological goods of truth and love/friendship. 6) Physical expressions of love in intercourse should not at the same time obstruct procreation when it is naturally probable, in the fertile period, even for good reasons based on considerations of health, economics, or capacity to nurture existing children. Practical considerations against procreation should ideally be given due weight but there remains a relevant difference between artificial obstruction of procreation before, after, or during intercourse on the one hand; and deciding to avoid intercourse when procreation is likely in order to prevent procreation for good reason.

This is the basic argument which would seem to support HV. The effect of the normative inseparability principle invoked in the encyclical is to make the normative conditions for sexual intercourse in the fertile period more restrictive than before, in that both unitive and procreative ends were now required to be present to warrant sex in the fertile period. One could no longer appeal to the procreative end alone. The Pope does not use this exact argument, but one similar. He does also rely on some further unstated assumptions about marriage, which he presumably would believe to be supported by NL Once a child is born, with the help of midwives/doctors and families, long traditional or inter-generational experience suggests its generators should provide, in a parental role, recognised publicly, for its being fostered and nurtured. Public traditional ethical institutions, like marriage, with monogamy, or limited polygamy or polyandry, support this outcome. The idea here is that marriage will best support the result of good child nurturing coming about after successful procreation. These dependency relations and connections of truth, love and life are discernible in moral philosophy, discussed for example in NL under the heading of anthropology and ethics. Prohibitions of adultery are examples of such moral principles based on long term results, designed to avoid jealousy, conflict, and uncertainty regarding children’s progenitors.

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Some Questions about the Argument The first observation that seems relevant is that procreation (having children) is not a personal moral duty, like honesty or acting justly. A social duty to see that someone contributes to the species or to social self-perpetuation is one which might fall on a community or political authorities and elders. If there is no individual duty to procreate, it seems less likely that can there be a duty to procreate in a certain way and not another. Let us now look at some specific issues. The intellect and will seem to be architectonic to and sovereign over the procreative power, which is a capacity operating mainly at the middle operational/intermediate level of what we called the DOE structure, along with limb mobility, perception, and sensation. Starting with the un-flexible autonomic elements in sex like female menstruation and ovulation and male semen production, these are overlaid in a voluntary act to produce solitary male seminal emission, intercourse, insemination, or a fetus with combined DNA at the physical level; to express affection at the psychological level; and/or at (or after) the fertile period, to produce babies by engagement at all three levels. This intellectual sovereignty is exercised in moral judgements, which the genitalia alone cannot make when they and their operations are simply the “matter” to be judged upon. That the sovereignty of intellect and truth can be outweighed is illustrated in suggesting why not all lies are wrong, but there is really a more general point, which also raises difficulties for the “maker’s instructions” consideration. The question: “Where should procreative/sexual power fit in this “folk anthropology”/hierarchy of capacity?” seems to be one which is a matter for moral judgement by intellect and will alone. One need not see physical restriction of food appetite or use of intravenous “feeding” or the eating of less than nutritionally optimal food as immoral. A less than optimal use of sex as procreative power would seem permissible. Truth, love, and life are human ends identified by intellect, as the highest capacity, to be defining goods of relevant capacities, which are, like persons, in a non-moral sense “goods,” and as in some sense inseparable ends, but life alone is not itself, as an abstract good, an unconditional moral good. Neither is truth or love, and neither is sex or procreation. When the physical elements of procreation are overlaid, to produce solitary male seminal emission, intercourse, insemination, or a fetus with combined DNA at the physical level; to express affection at the psychological level; and/or at (or after) the fertile period, to produce babies by engagement at both levels, the sexual base is altered and thereby a couple’s moral status. If the basis of human morality is ultimately human wellbeing, assessed by the intellect and will of the person, the highest powers in the hierarchy, assessing the tendencies of all relevant types of ends, objects and actions in types of circumstances, against criteria for wellbeing, including engagement of the highest powers with the highest goods, with friendship, selfsufficiency, perfection, enjoyment, and permanence, is there a duty, following the normative inseparability principle, to always intend both procreation and unity in sexual intercourse, or not prevent procreation in the fertile period, even if for example there is a near-certainty of genetic deformation or genetically disease in the fetus; or the extreme poverty of the parties preventing adequate nurture? The procedure of casuistry, examined in Chapter 5, conducted by conscience/intellect as highest power asks us to consider: 1. Step 1: the identification of the what and why of the type of act to be assessed which settle the intent and end of the act type at a very high level of abstraction;

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David Ardagh 2. Step 2: the tendency to produce wellbeing; 3. Step 3: in the other circumstances than what and why like: to (and with) whom, how much, where, when, and how, and so on; and also 4. Step 4: the object and end of the token of the act-type in the circumstances, at the more specific intentional level, after these particular circumstances are added.

As one descends to particulars adding who, how, where and when, it is posited in casuistry that a particular agent’s intention in doing the act so specified and individuated is the ultimate arbiter of its moral status. An otherwise blameless act can be wrong and an otherwise wrongful act can be excusable. At Step 1, if we take the act-type as “sexual intercourse,” it is prima facie good for wellbeing at Step 2. If we add at Step 3: in the fertile period, it still looks good; if we add with procreation blocked, it still seems good. If at Step 4, we add the intent is love of the parties it still seems good. Even if God made humans, and if they have been intentionally given a natural desire for wellbeing, (which NAVE would not allow), judged by intellect and will as the higher directing powers using principles, precepts and the method of casuistry, then the power of procreation and its end, i.e., life - is not, any more than truth or love i.e., an absolute value. As chapter 5 suggested, it is subject to moral assessment, in the actual circumstances of the agents in context, sub-ordered to wellbeing considerations. That sufficient numbers of humans procreate to sustain the life of the species is indeed required. But this does not allow one to read off a general or universal duty to procreate with sex, still less an individual duty, by a specific method as means. The question also arises for DGE: Can such a duty be seen to be part of Divine law as revealed? No individual has a duty to procreate. There is a moral case for giving up any supposed right to procreate given the planet carrying capacity is finite, and many wars are caused by lack of territory for expanding groups. Nobody has a duty to procreate in a specific manner in virtue of one’s humanity. The third observation, regarding the analogy with intellect, “lies” are definable both generically and specifically, and are told in circumstances which sometimes permit them. The generic part of the definition connotes “lack of fit of mind, proposition assertion, to reality” in “the saying of what is false.” This sort of defect due to wrong word choice at the level of meaning/grammar/syntax; propositional content and mood; or fit to the world/reality, is a defect of the power and end of intellect “ontologically.” As yet it does not include intention to deceive. This generic action, with the ontological defect of fit or correspondence, has no absolute wrongful moral status; and even when deceptive intent is added, we need to know the motive of the deception itself and that such lies are selfish or wrong, in order to judge that the lie is wrong. Deception often seems to be excusable. Circumstances alter application of norms. Poetic fictions or humorous lies, lies to deceive intending murderers or national invaders, lies by spies in war, to preserve confidences or secrets, and some medical lies to at risk patients and research subjects, all seem permissible. Lies do not crucially depend on, though their scope is altered by, artificial means of obstructing truth. The best outcome of intellect, in this context, supposedly the apprehension of God or contemplation, may continue to be the highest good accessible to the power, yet not be one to be always relentlessly pursued, rather than lesser practical goods which make up a good life; it is good it may be the best, but perhaps it is not always good. Contemplation might be made impossible by pursuit of the latter, yet the latter could be very good and required. Children can

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be the best outcome of the use of sex without procreation needing to be a relentless goal or continuous goal. Finally, the non-wrongful intention “to avoid procreation” (AP) can be realised both by total abstinence from sex and the more specific intention embodied in natural contraception methods, using actions like taking temperatures and calendar checking as part of strategic abstinence in the fertile period (NFP); or by the use of artificial methods of physical interference, (ABC), separating possible or probable procreation from unifying goals. The two means to the same intended end, avoiding procreation (AP), are NFP and ABC and seem to be morally equivalent, in so far as neither produces overt harm. The normative inseparability principle (no separation of love and life making by action of the parties) does not clearly enough distinguish more and less specific intentions in the practical cases. In NFP, the parties take action; and conceivably give caresses without intercourse, which are expressions of love, yet are not conjoined with procreative intent, while ABC combines intercourse and artificial prevention using a physical intervention or obstruction.

Some Possible Responses to the Objections Putting the teaching of HV in a positive form, it says that the ideal of sexuality as a capacity – its best successful distinctive outcome - is expressing unconditional love through and for the sake of creating unconditionally loved children. But saying that, failing to attain this ideal is morally wrong has not attracted acceptance. Since 1968, the reaction within and without the Roman Catholic Church has been negative and unaccepting. If we replace the inseparability principle with the idea that directly separating and preventing the procreative end of the capacity in the fertile period is less than ideal, but not bad or wrong, we might get better acceptance. If we go back to the analogy with intellect, it can be agreed that ideally intellect is for finding and apprehending truth and knowledge and wisdom, indulging curiosity about the cosmos, meditation and contemplation of THG. Ideally, to attain the highest and best outcome open to the use of this capacity, there should be no deliberate falsehood or deceit: truth is the best distinctive outcome, and truth matters. Let us call this the best-capacity-outcome test. There is no need for every speech act or assertion to be true, truthful or sincere under pain of wrongness. Jokes often depend on falsities; there are life-saving lies; lies to the very ill and dying, including the mentally ill and suicidal; researcher’s lies and evasions about placebos; and literary lies, satires, surprise parties, and comedies, where unbelief is suspended, at least to the final curtain bow. There are also secrets whose preservation requires deceit for moral motives; spies are often lying for the sake of defending the state in war. At Step 4 of casuistry, what looks to be prima facie wrong can turn out to be right. If the moral modality of the teaching that intercourse “should be open to life” is not taken as stating an obligation, which was the Pope’s intention, but treated as describing an ideal, combining love and loved children, based on the best-capacity-outcome test, but not requiring conjunction of intent or action, under pain of sin, there may be some valuable points made which can be sustained. A moral teaching can theoretically be assigned a moral modality from prohibited, through permitted and required to recommended, admirable, and ideal. The difference between a procreation policy conceived as an ideal, and procreative consciousness as a duty, would allow recognition of the essential spirit of the encyclical: the claim that like God’s creation, our actions as images of God, in co-creation of another person, should ideally

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reflect His unconditional and uncompelled love, signified ideally by non-prevention and by not obstructing the “natural” action of love-making. Further to this account, treating the teaching as ideal, on the analogy with lies, the ontological evil in the generic lack of preferred syntactic, semantic or reality “correspondence” or fit of word to world is ontologically speaking bad - a defect of power-use. Adding to this the deceptive criterion, in the defining of lies, explains its being discouraged as prima facie morally to be avoided as wrong, although not banned absolutely. In the ontological sense of good and bad correlated to species-power, lying is bad, or less than perfect, even if outweighed in the excusing moral context; deceptive lies are prima facie wrong, but not always wrong. Likewise, the temporal or physically constructed prevention of procreative potential in the fertile period, conjoined with love, might still be deemed bad in the sense of less than perfect, and prima facie best avoided, even it may turn out not to be wrong at all, all things considered. If however the moral modality of the teaching that intercourse “should be open to life” is not taken as stating an obligation, which was the Pope’s intention, but treated as describing an ideal, preserving the conceptual ethical connection between sex, love, and life but not requiring obedience under pain of sin, artificial contraceptive activities could still be regarded as less than ideal for most people, most of the time; the disputable but plausible arguments against fornication could remain, as negative “counsels” of morality; and those against adultery as prohibited, would also remain. There would on this view be some valuable points made in HV which might be sustained. As Chapter 4 argued, in NAVE a moral teaching can theoretically be assigned a moral modality from prohibited, through permitted and required to recommended, admirable, and ideal. The difference between a procreation policy conceived as an ideal, and procreation as a duty, would allow recognition of the essential spirit of the encyclical: the claim that like God’s creation, our actions as images of God, in co-creation of another person, should ideally reflect His unconditional and uncompelled love, symbolised ideally and if possible by not obstructing the “natural” action of love-making. Further to this account, treating the teaching as ideal, on the analogy with lies, the ontological evil in the generic lack of preferred syntactic, semantic or reality “correspondence” or fit of word to world or world to word, is ontologically abstractly speaking bad. Failure to conceive when you want to express your love for your partner and gratitude to God in creating a child are abstractly bad things. Adding to this ontic failure of correspondence in the truth case, the deceptive criterion in the defining of lies explains why untruths and lies are generally discouraged, although not banned absolutely. In the ontological sense of good and bad correlated to species-power, lying is bad, or less than perfect, even if this imperfection is outweighed, in the excusing moral contexts. Deception is prima facie abstractly bad at Step 3 of casuistry, but without further circumstances being added, it is indecisively wrong at Step 4. Likewise, the temporal or physically constructed obstruction of procreative potential in the fertile period, conjoined with love, might still be deemed ontologically inferior, and less than perfect, even if not wrong. If “deceptive intercourse” could to be taken to be like lying in some way, perhaps the argument would go through. It suggests or connotes use of insincere love talk, failing under the unitive criterion. Although there is no strict analogue of lying, false deceptive sex, there can be loveless, and in that sense “unmeant” or insincere sex. Nobody reading HV is advocating that. The issue is the correlation of sincere love making with its other probable outcome being prevented. The activation of procreative power itself, as a shared physical cooperation, only has physical action and results, but its activation can be an intentional personal act, as speech activates the tongue, in private or in a public forum. The better analogy

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with intellect would be making an assertion of truth in private/secret, while not wishing it to have its “natural” result, of probably being disseminated publicly, and so deliberately encoding it or shutting the door to other parties. Such secretive action can be faultless or even morally right.

Possible DGE Responses Sex is not a stand-alone good, but one in need of direction to the ideal goods of partner love and loved children, mentioned at the start, even where both cannot always be realised together. Artificial contraception may symbolise or signify a reasonable and practically justified dispensation from this normative connection but there is arguably a danger that total separation of the concept of procreative from love-making intent may ease the way to loveless sex and loveless children. In DGE, the triad of goods of marriage was said to be fides or fidelity; proles, children; and sacramentum, or perfection in holiness. Perhaps the take-away good in the encyclical is that loving sex is potentially sacred, can signify, with specific intention, divine creation and co-creation of children, and loving care and development of the them, and of the partner, so its integrity needs preserving. What would emerge with such a weakening of moral prescription from required to ideal would be a retained focus of the love and welfare of the partners and the children, with stronger affirmation of their autonomous right to procreate or not. The feared opening of the floodgates to loveless sex and adultery can still be avoided but now more by emphasis on the necessity of the intimate relationship of the partners, our good a) above, about I-Thou rekations, and the nurture of any existing children with exemplary love. Homosexual marriage with adopted children would not necessarily be ruled out, as it is in HV.

CASE 2: APPLYING NAVE AND DGE TO MAKING INDUSTRIAL PORNOGRAPHY If we accept Buber’s contrast between the “I-Thou relation” and the “I-It relation,” set out in Chapter 1, then pornography is morally wrong, and in the sort of way the primary precept against adultery works to affirm the wrongness of sex in the circumstances specified in the moral notion or recognitor “sleeping with the spouse of another” (Kovesi 1963). Pornography either disconnects the two dimensions, as when “I-Thou” attributes are subtracted, e.g., there is no emotional narrative or foreplay, and here it reduces the “I-Thou” relations to their physical “I-It” substructures; or it writes a new narrative over them, which distorts their inherent capacity to express the best sort of love at the “I-Thou” level. If we think of Buber’s point as capable of being defended as part of NAVE, which may be questioned by the religious and even the theistic person, then naturalism can provide a critique of pornography. In Chapter 1 however it was suggested that “I-Thou” experiences were indicative of a higher dimension in a spiritual or religious sense. DGE can more easily provide a critique of some bodily pleasures as being of less worth than their higher order counter-parts, drawing on the sorts of consideration we saw were at the heart of HV regarding Divine creativity being imitable. If we accept the point in the last paragraph of section 1) above, then the measure of pornography would be its potential to advance or retard the best outcome of sex, which includes the possible loving nurturing of children and the parties own loving “I-Thou” relation. In the

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moral philosophy literature there is serious discussion of what is wrong with bestiality given preference Utilitarian of the Singerian type, and the best answers seem to talk about contributing to the ideal of “the human project.” This is quite helpful, but Buber’s answer also seems to be a strong support for the old taboo. The sharp end of the pornography issue is the use of the internet, but the data are still too new and diffuse to treat it in that domain. Instead we will take a step back to the premillenium scene.

Business Ethics of A.T. & T’s Porn-Movie Manufacturing Division Using or viewing pornography is not the same as making it, and the content can be more or less harmful in proportion to whether violence and non-consensual sex is featured, although the viewing and making are clearly related. The word usually covers so-called non-violent erotica (NVE) or material but sometimes depicts some sort of violence. The latter is prima facie problematic for NL as NAVE in possibly violating the “Do no harm” principle. In a documentary shown some time in the 1990s on SBS called ‘American Porn” it was made clear from the testimonies of the U.S porn-movie makers covered, and from business statistics cited from the public record in the documentary, that the industry has grown exponentially since the Clinton Presidency, and the parallel growth in use of the internet. The Attorney General under President Clinton, Ms. J. Reno, perhaps better known as responsible for the raid at the Waco Davidian complex, a raid made in the attempt to stop alleged child sexual abuse, severely cut back on the vigorous prosecutions, which had previously occurred under the Reagan Presidency. Large listed business corporations, including for some time A.T. & T, have subsidiaries wholly devoted to the manufacture of porn movies made for costs under $50,000 at the time. These retailed for about $30 each, and recovered costs with a little over 1600 sales in a country then of about 270 million. A U.S. producer says in the documentary that they make weak, soft core and strong hard core versions of each film in order to cater for the non-violent erotica beginner, through to the jaded porn user, including rape scenes for example as a matter of course, in the strong versions. A brief example of filming a rape scene is included in the documentary itself to confirm the point. In the documentary, Larry Flynt claims there is no credible or defensible boundary between acceptable and unacceptable products, so censorship is futile. His many customers apparently agree. But is it so? Should we be concerned whether it is so? A broad working definition of “pornographic movie” in this context might be: a film promising and attempting to produce sexual excitement in the viewer as its sole or main objective. Some typical features and concomitants of the consumption of these commodities are: 1) They are usually but not always viewed in private, by a solitary viewer, as a sex stimulus. 2) At least in films that do not qualify for the weaker rating of “non-violent erotica” (NVE), or its equivalent, and also in some that do so, there is often but not always behaviour depicted explicitly which challenges sexual conventions, e.g., extra-marital sex or partner sexual infidelity. In other cases, there is often activity in one or more of these categories: group sex, teen sex, child sex, incest, rape, sadism, masochism, and bestiality.

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3) The plot often involves the infliction of some form of humiliation, indignity, deceit, or physical harm, on a character. 4) The indignity or harm in 3, often including simulated rape or violence, is inflicted either i) against the character’s will, sometimes on the basis of extortion or blackmail, drugs or alcohol; or ii) the character is depicted as “willing,” as in couch-casting, or through a very unrealistic fictional device. In this case, some sort of contrived account is given of their “willingness” e.g., desire to get or keep a job or a boyfriend; or an originally abducted victim inexplicably warms to her captor. In a third genre, which raise peculiar and complex issues which we will not further discuss in this account for the sake of simplicity, the characters are depicted as harming each other but as iii) mutually consenting because sharing a recognised abnormal sexual preference, e.g., sado-masochists. 5) The viewer is invited to take pleasure in and implicitly approve the features noted in 2-4) above. This is often made explicit in the promotional material. Each of features 1-5 will be discussed in turn. We will be looking at points 3-5 in particular for signs that there is potential harm to wellbeing as spelled out by NAVE and DGE, which of course have differences of moral precept content of the sort indicated in earlier Chapters. DGE is more exacting in its content and - has an additional suite of Virtues and means to wellbeing. Re.1: the prevalence of the habitual private consumption of such porn movies is not a major moral consideration in the minds of some commentators. They argue, that taking solitary pleasure in this sort of content prevents actual public harm occurring and diverts people from executing in reality what would be wrongful deeds in categories 3 and 4(i-ii). But others argue that it may still pose a problem if viewers are suggestible enough to see the “action” as a previously un-imagined possibility, and now want to enact the deed depicted. This seems to cause a prima facie stalemate in the argument. As we shall see later, this alleged stalemate may be broken, and the stalemate claim is actually debatable. There may be a further problem if the secondary audio-visual sexual stimulus displaces an individual person’s orientation or capacity for first order interpersonal sexual fulfilment. On a NAVE account, loss of scope or range of capacity is bad. In the non-porn film Being There, Peter Sellars plays such a character who “likes to watch.” The overtures of Shirley Maclean’s character are spurned, and she is understandably hurt. Without visiting the relevant psychological literature on the incidence of this type of displacement, if there are even a few instances of this sort of sexual anaesthesia being induced by these products, then some people are harmed. The wellbeing of such persons is at least morally relevant. But this whole private consumption point will not pick out porn movies from other erotic material, and so is not a distinctive or decisive counter consideration. Re.2: In the non-NVE movie products, there is often a shock scene or three in which some conventional norm or taboo is transgressed. Although challenging and ridiculing sexual custom is not bad, it depends on the custom. For example, ethnic sexual sensitivities and norms ought not to be ridiculed, and taboos like those against incest can be defended. Some taboos strictures are dangerous to ridicule or overthrow e.g., sex with minors. Many of these norms, treated as taboos, and so not even to be rationally discussed, are in fact capable of being rationally and morally grounded. Take the least shocking and most common transgression of convention, one challenging the custom of mutually promised conventional fidelity: adultery. This norm is not a taboo but discussed and condemned in most cultures. Many reasons can be adduced against

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it, most connected to its usual required conjunction with deceit, jealousy, confusion of existing children, and possible accidental unwanted conception. In a porn movie, adulterous or promiscuous action will often be explicitly assigned to a main character, often in multiple instances. That activity is depicted to give the viewer pleasure; the character is held up for approval, and the act shown to be desirable. This can be inferred from the camera work and lack of any reference to any of the bad consequences which typically attend actual unfaithful behaviour of this type. Although stimulating, this activity is still implicitly promise breaking, and promise breaking in this context is prima facie morally wrong. Infidelity does not usually lead to everyone living happily, as non-porn treatments of it attest. This example alone arguably supports a prima facie rational moral challenge to Flynt’s sweeping assurance that no critical rational evaluation of his products can be made which might ground moral concerns or legal restrictions on his products. Arguably it is wrong to seriously entertain and enjoy the thought of doing what it would be wrong to do. As to taboos and laws against rape, sadism, bestiality, incest and abuse of children and school age teenagers, the taboo or law is there because sometimes “the wish is father to the deed,” the deed is shameful and/or harmful to others; and it is best not only to avoid not only the deed itself, but to even the thought of doing it. Re.3-5: It is here that the real difficulty for Flynt or the advocate of the expansionary porn industry’s claims to respectability, typified by the porn industry business ethics of A.T.&T. really lies. In the course of the narrative or drama describable as 3-4(i-ii), we are being invited to take pleasure in the scene in which a character is sexually abused, often protractedly. This is tantamount to approval. Given such scenes have the same intentional content, that a person is abused, as the corresponding act, we are not only invited to approve and enjoy the transgression of the convention or taboo; we are invited to take vicarious pleasure in the idea of the abuse itself. This is likely to affect our sex orientation and character. Like infidelity, rape can be portrayed in a non-porn work in a non-porn way without offence. But in the latter context, the viewer is not encouraged to enjoy the depiction of the rape or the rape itself and the real results and probable consequences, are explored, often thoughtfully marking sad unexpected outcomes, explicitly or through satire. In the porn version, we are asked to enjoy vicariously the idea/depiction of e.g., abusive sex visited on others unwillingly and or engaged in consensually, and to advert from any of the bad results actually liable to attend the real thing. We are being seduced, pandered to, and co-opted. But it may be said this all hangs on a virtue-ethics NAVE account of morality. On a nonAristotelian, non-virtue ethics account, the guiding ethical principle of liberalism of a utilitarian hue, particularly popular in the U.S. is: “One should be free to do as one wants unless it hurts others.” Even if as suggested we are ourselves coarsened by the pleasure we take in the vicarious harm, only upholders of virtue ethics, not liberalism, will complain. If, however the habitual viewing of vicarious harmful acts in conjunction with sexual pleasure comes to be for some people a routine cause of pleasure, and seen as socially approved, this may not be a harmless private interaction with no results with respect to the wellbeing of others. As we noted in Re.1 above, the other side of the Peter Sellars’ displacement to mere watching, is someone who may well over time progressively cease to be indifferent to whether the intentional content is physically realised or not. As one producer explains in the documentary, the soft and hard core versions are needed because customers move from soft-core to hard-core fiction. Some may become jaded enough with the secondary stimulus to prefer the primary to the secondary

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stimulus; and thence the realisation of the hard core content. Now actual harm will become associated with the pleasure and harm to others, and so wrongful behaviour will results. If such movies send a message that such behaviour is pleasurable, is this not approving it, and is it not likely some few at least will be curious to see if it is really so? Does this ever happen? There is evidence from convicted serial rapists that it sometimes does. If there is evidence that it ever does, does this not ground a case against such porn movies as do have content of the type described in Re.3.and Re.4. above? There are plenty of them. Of course, it will be said, there is no “causal connection” here. I am unsure what people mean who say this. In normal voluntary human behaviour rarely is a stimulus such as to necessarily produce a response, as inanimate causes produce their effects with necessity. In persons, belief and choice intervene. Even hard drug addicts are not zombies. Addicts do have a choice, although often their capacity to resist is at vanishing point. It is conceivable and plausible to think that in some cases there is a parallel spectrum of control and habituation in sex activity, and some increased tendency for suggestible individuals who would otherwise not do so, to commit offences depicted in such movies. This is a matter of moral concern. Often cited at his point to oppose any kind of restriction or condemnation or classification are analogies to driving, drinking, and gambling, considered alone and as interactive. There are several steps in the argument. 1. We allow the design and production of motor vehicles, alcoholic drinks, and roulette wheels. 2. These deliberately made artefacts are prima facie good, considered in abstraction. They have their inherent and resultant benefits, and delights for their users. 3. Yet we know in the car case that many will involuntarily die in accidents from mistaken or reckless judgement, despite vehicle designers’ best efforts to prevent them. As it happens, accidents are often due to not just to vehicle failure and fatigue, but drugs and alcohol or inappropriate risk taking in the drivers. In the drinking/gambling case, lives can be ruined by consumers acquiring irresistible addictions not desired by or intentionally built in by publicans and casino managers. 4. But despite reasonable efforts to prevent them, and against the will of all parties, the risk of accidental death, or contracting the addictions, which is known and not separable from driving, gaming or drinking, is considered acceptable. Car driving, drinking alcohol, and gaming are legal and morally permitted. 5. Reckless driving, drinking to excess or reckless gambling are problematic. The abuse of the car or bottle or dice is wrong per se, and not designed or wanted by the maker. Advocacy or approval of such abuse things is wrong, but their mere depiction or depiction of their consequences is not. On the contrary, the clever TV commercial against reckless driving of a few years ago was praised by many as effective. So, i) depicting the use and even the bad uses of the artefact is morally neutral; ii) doing so in a bad light with a message and intent to discourage the abuse is morally good; and iii) only using fiction to advocate the abuse by showing it in a good light is wrong. 6. consensual sex involving no thought of harm to anyone, like wine drinking, travel in motor cars, and gaming is pleasant, and abstractly a prima faci good. There may be some unintended cases of enactment of harm which are associated with, but not caused by, viewing the porn product. But depicting them is likewise prima facie innocent,

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Given this argument, the question is: What if anything is different about the sub class of movies of type 3, 4(i-ii), and 5 in the porn movie case? Is the porn-movie of the types under consideration off the ethical hook? Let us take the point of comparison in turn: There are several points at which the analogy with cars etc. breaks down. At step Re.1) and Re 2) of the argument, the relevant comparable product in question here is not real consensual harmless sex. As 3, 4 (i-ii), and 5 above describe them, we are taking about the depiction of vicarious inflictions of indignity or harm, either on an unwilling character, or an implausibly contrived as willing, fictional character. That is the part of the intention of the producer, the character assigned to perform the harmful act, and the willing or co-opted viewer. Unlike the known but unwanted association in the alcohol etc cases, there is contrived and deliberate association of depicted sexual activity, viewer pleasure, and vicarious harm infliction on an unwilling or dubiously willing subject. There is also the unwanted but known and accepted possibility of an increase in pleasurable association of this event with voluntary real harminfliction, at least in a small number of cases. This means that the depicted harm is implicitly approved. So, the porn movies meeting the presence of harm conditions listed under 3, 4 (i-ii), and 5, fail to meet the exculpating conditions for innocence; fail to meet the unavoidability condition and conditions 6) after all. Nor in addition is the real harm occurrence which occasionally happens accidentally, as in the road accident or problem drinker case. The viewer is asked to willingly suspend his disbelief that the harm is actually happening, i. e. to believe that it is real, and so in this sense to approve the real act. In the car etc. cases, where their abuse has not correspondingly been accepted or advocated, there is no harm done. But the designed connection of these factors in the porn movie of the type indicated is deliberate and avoidable, shows approval by inviting the viewer to take pleasure in the act, and is voluntarily contrived by the producer in the knowledge, but probably not with the desire, that this conjoining will increase the incidence of the harm depicted. It is as if the defenders of the porn industry producer of these types of movie try, but fail to successfully, to use the principle of double effect to paper over the producers’ bad faith. Producers want to make money out of depicting certain kinds of immoral activity as pleasurable, and that alone is wrong morally. They hide behind the sophistical use of an analogy to disguise the real possibility of their inciting a wish to enact harm in a viewer, and that this can occasionally even lead to an enacted harm on others.

CONCLUSION DGE has the view that sex should at least ideally mimic God’s creation in some way in always being loving. It has a far more negative or condemnatory position on masturbation and pornography than NAVE in that while the Decalogue explicitly condemns adultery and coveting another person’s spouse absolutely, the Sermon on the Mount goes further and condemns any mental lusting after another non-spouse, not only actual fornication and adultery, so in practice it apparently condemns lusting in toto, including after virtual persons, not just

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real persons, including married ones. DGE in practice still usually rules out habitual masturbation as displacing the proper objects of sex, and both fornication and pornography are ruled out in toto at the immanent action or intentional stages, not only as overt acts, on religious scriptural grounds. Homosexual sex is ruled out, although the position is in flux. As to NAVE, much turns on whether Buber’s insight about the I-Thou relation and its implications is accessible on naturalistic grounds as well as religious grounds. If NAVE is conceived as embracing it as suggested above under the goods of sex, a)-d), NAVE will condemn adultery as deceitful; and the depicting of non-consensual sex for pleasure on the grounds that it harms the consumer. The NAVE argument about sexuality has implicitly relied on the best capacity outcome test. Whereas in the contraception case, at its strongest, it shifts the moral modality at best from forbidden to “less than perfect,” in the pornography case, the arguments canvassed against industrial pornography suggest pornography is inherently problematic, even for NAVE. The argument here leaves out of the account many other erotic and many pornographic products. For example, one assumes that there may be bestiality oriented products where no overt harm is depicted as being visited on a person. We have also mentioned here but not discussed e.g., so called non-violent erotica. The former are arguably harmful even if they do not depict or violate mutual consent. Mutual consent does not make all conduct right. The “NVE” label covers a great many items which do not fit it, such as use of very young actors. But, if accepted, the argument here at least shows that, despite their claims to have done so, A.T. and T and the Larry Flynt type of industrial producer have not successfully moved the ethical goal posts. They have not changed the fact that an ethical line can be drawn which should result in strong ethical discouragement of the products in question and their business. NAVE does not entail a total ban but it does justify maintaining some sort of censorship in the sense of being an argument for maintaining classification, and perhaps also devoting thought and resources to damage control measures for prostitution parallel to but different from needle exchange and safe drug-shooting spaces. In the chapter we have examined an issue where both NAVE and DGE have something to say, and unlike in the case of organisational agency where we have found substantial overlap, here we find some sharp divides. We have failed to find a NAVE argument for the conclusion that contraception was wrong according to NL, made in HV by Pope Paul VI, possibly through conflating DGE with NAVE, and we found at best a possible DGE argument for its imperfection. We have also shown significant convergence, and the capacity of NAVE and DGE to challenge the innocence of industrialised pornography of Larry Flynt. But NAVE will not rule out all masturbation, fornication, homosexuality and pornography. In the next two chapters and Part 3 we visit some applied ethics issues where there again seems to be overlap and some differences between DGE and NAVE and explore the idea that DGE ethics does sometimes add something of value to NAVE.

PART 3

Chapter 12

CONCEPTS OF JUSTICE, BENEVOLENCE, AND AGAPE We have seen in NAVE Chapters 1-5 that theology is not necessary to articulate the basic NL idea that there are both descriptive and imperative “natural laws” about humanity. For example, there are-general descriptive principles, like “Humans tend to choose goods they perceive as being aspects of wellbeing at the time” (description); and prescriptive ones like: “The good is to done and evil avoided” or “Act reasonably.” There are more specific primary precepts the same for all and known to all, like prohibitions of murder, theft, fraud, perjury, and adultery. These principles and precepts are common to NL and DGE. They can guide agents in acquiring virtues common to both these NL systems, like prudence, courage, temperance and justice. These virtues lead to the common good of individuals as individuals, and of individuals as citizens, in areas where rules are available. In the Part 2 discussions of NL applications, we have seen the importance and relevance of specifying the nature, goal, and domain of the agent or agents as depicted in Figure 2; the goal of a type of action in a type of circumstance to enable assessment of its tendency to wellbeing. This settles the level of specification of an ethical issue and affects possible ethical generalisation. But as the graph in Figure 1, correlating DGE, and ontological commitment suggested, the implications of ontological or metaphysical claims made about God, freedom, possible afterlives and religion is that it changes the scope and stringency, or moral modality, of IRP claims of obligation e.g., the scope of the duty to be fair or kind or nonviolent, or altruistic, will vary and increase with belief in God or religion. NAVE will not support IRPs 7- 9. Alleged individual personal revelation or faith will often be claimed to influence which principle of responsiveness is entered into the analysis of justice, kindness, and caritas/agape. This determines the duty/ideal difference in regard to what was dubbed extreme altruism. For believers who accept Neo-Aristotelian meta-ethics and NAVE, but want to build DGE onto it, as noted in Chapter 7, God’s existence is rational, and is thereby graduated into the NL Ethics, and grafted on to NL Ethics, or held superior to it as Divine Law, via the meta-ethics of wellbeing. For such theists, contemplating or interfacing or interacting in any possible way with God meets one of the common criteria of human wellbeing listed in the elements of wellbeing i.e., apprehension of the highest objects of the highest power. Such contemplation and prayer is “graduated” as appropriate to be the focus of DGE Ethics. DGE also presents extended altruism as a challenge for individuals. Outstanding works of courageous justice seekers; artistic, musical, and cultural creations inspired by religious belief; and works of compassion

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are considered to be based on non-scientific evidence of the reasonableness or truth of their religious beliefs. NAVE has a problem we have not underlined up to this point. In Aristotle’s original aristocratic patriarchal version, he had no place for social equality of need-satisfaction for all citizens, and non-citizens were excluded from many benefits and rights, as were slaves. The idea of the sanctity of the human person as such, regardless of their sins, gained traction from the post- Constantinian alliance of church and state associated with Augustine. NL, in the form of NAVE plus the DGE extensions, now has a central place for radical egalitarianism, justice as equality, and human rights due to the doctrine of creation of immaterial individual souls by God and agape. Once egalitarianism in some form became widely understood and accepted, by the eighteenth century, Kant and Mill both felt entitled to presume, without reason other than deference to Humean scepticism, that God can be subtracted from ethics, and this done without damage to egalitarian ethics. Kant’s IRP 4- the respect for persons principle-is just asserted without more that the argument that it alone can be willed as a law for all. But it was initially due to the DGE doctrine of the equality of all persons and agape teaching that equality is now the focus of greater attention, not Aristotle’s aristocracy. Can NAVE or Kant deliver such a strong case for equality? In NAVE, strong equality applies if we are talking about the equality of worthy individuals alone, not the sinners, the wicked, and enemies. There is less place for the equal sanctity of individual persons as such, although the doctrine of the transcendentals (see Glossary) that being and good are conjoined is found there without the argument that God is supreme exemplar of Truth, Being, Good, Beauty, and Oneness. This potential development is blocked by the “principle of individuation problem” which arises in Aristotle because he treated all science as the linking of universals, and matter as the individuating principle of real entities, as mentioned in Chapter 2 on NAVE. The individual, apart from the unindividuted agent intellect, is a material concatenation of instantiated universals- an I-It object. The problem was first identified by Arab philosophers following their understanding of Aristotle’s immaterial agent intellect. They asked: How can immaterial minds be individuated by matter? Averroes, a contemporary of Al Gazzali, in the twelfth century concludes there is one agent intellect for all humans. Later arises the related problem of the ultimate unreality of mental entities for Physicalism. The Christian idea of the idiosyncratic uniqueness of the individual person as individual, makes little sense if people are just clusters of types of brain and body matter. The notion of and the problem of absolute human transcendent worth as such is not Aristotelian but comes from DGE. The problem was at least confronted by Aquinas with his unique, God given actus essendi, for each soul, and later the DGE followers of Duns Scotus, the Scotists’, concept of a special species for each person and an individuating form with its own individuating principle of “thisness” (haeccietas); and much later the doctrine of “the individual as the only category” in Christian Existentialists like Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. The response by DGE to the Physicalist challenge has had the good effect of locating new and better accounts of unique personal identity based on one’s continuity of psychological history and memory, not just DNA. As Part 1 Chapters 3-5 explained, in a teleological ethics like NL, the good and good action is connected to goals of wellbeing, and the highest good (THG). At the level of casuistry dubbed Step 1 above in Chapter 5, descriptions of actions and object/ends alone, without circumstances, even the abstractions life, truth, and justice, do not have enough richness of meaning to be pronounced anything more than abstractly prima facie good, as opposed to bad, or indifferent. At Step 2 of the casuist procedure one is still not capable of sustaining practical moral consensus

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or decision making. At Step 3, with circumstances added, rules become possible and where possible and available not only make sense, but encapsulate the perennial wisdom of the ages, passed down in “defeasible” rules, like those against lies, theft, or adultery. But at Step 4, the idiosyncratic intent of the person in acting in a type of way in these circumstances, here and now, with added circumstances, and thus case uniqueness, again precludes universality and generalisation, as the ultimate level of reality in ethics. Degrees of abstractions vary the moral relevance of a concept description and ascription. Intermediate abstractness is the basis of simple rules, and of moral education through principles, precepts primary and secondary, and defeasible precepts. And in concrete applications of casuistry, generalisation is inappropriate. Judgement on particularity is the ultimate end of the method. So NAVE casuistry respects particularity and idiosyncracy, but its semi-materialist ontology and anthropology is essentialist, and not very much concerned with agape. DGE on the other hand is ontogically individualist, strong on agape, but normatively universalist and absolute, so not readily allowing exceptions, yet generally advocating the casuistic method of determination. Fletcher’s Situation Ethics (1966) picked up on the uniqueness point in agape and implicitly on I-Thou, and weds it to the sanctity of the individual person motif in Christianity, but drops the absolute universal and exceptionless aspect of DGE. Ideal also has another sense, based on variable moral modality. Ideal moral heroism is at the top of the scale we examined in Chapter 2 - that of moral modality. Here rule-governed morality is being exceeded as rule-governed norms are intermediate and midway between permissible and the very best conduct. Heroism/sainthood is the highest moral modality, going beyond the call of duty and rules. We saw it in the discussion of violence and forgiveness, the argument made against ahimsa and satyagraha (truth force) against injustice that they do not work on ruthless tyrants, a view based on generalisation, but due to heroic counterexamples, these tendency clams have been undermined by historians like Sharp (1973). In the global poverty case, appeals to “give till it hurts” based alleged general claim about the pleasures of helping others sometimes are not compelling. Omnibus Utilitarian or Kantian principles do not sufficiently address partiality based on particular family commitments, and other local ties when they come into collision with ruthless power. Unique extraordinary experience can be warranted in many ways, provided it is selfconsistent. R1 is not an obstacle to R2 and R3 but on the contrary R1 is a prima facie anchor of non-scientific knowledge, and ultimately, when collective and consensual, also a reinforcement for science itself. According to Chapter 6, NAVE alone, and property dualism, is somewhat indefinite on the relation of soul/mind and body/brain. Searle defends the self as a necessary entity but thinks it can eventually be physically explained. But that is just a promissory note based on induction. If a good case can be made for an immaterial self, as has been attempted by Gocke (2012) and others, then some extensions or alternate versions of NAVE, like Thomism, can add an analogically described God, complex overlays of Divine law, and a doctrine of revealed Providence in which each soul is individually created, to the NAVE base. This entails some important differences from secular ethics in the motive and scope of morality. Although mention has already be made of it, in Chapter 7, and its relevance acknowledged, we did not presume the truth of Aquinas’s doctrine of theological charity, based on Divine revelation, which if accepted, would give a matching but different rationale and scope for social justice and global poverty relief to Singer’s (2004) better known effort. While Aquinas is usually an excellent guide to Aristotle’s meaning when discussing NL and virtue, his own theological addenda and his theocentric faith agenda, occasionally get the better of his exegesis,

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and were treated in NAVE as optional, if defensible, extras (Porter 1995; 1999). As Porter and other writers on NL have acknowledged, while Aquinas accepts a NL position and is fairly faithful to Aristotle, he often goes beyond him in obvious ways which cannot be treated as necessary to acceptance of any natural law/virtue ethics account. Most of the later (postAristotle) NL variants have in fact recognised a “God as lawgiver” notion, and the Biblical version of the reciprocity principle: “Love thy neighbour as thyself,” but these are addenda to NAVE. In Part 2 Chapter 8, the relation of individual and collective moral agency was explored, and collective ethics defended; the goal of an organisation being public, business, non-profit or charitable, was said to govern what they are expected and permitted to do as moral agents. DGE inspired institutions like Churches, Universities, and hospitals were formal organisations long before business corporations, and historically many were religious in inspiration, not merely state bureaucratic or business. NL was invoked to articulate their higher purposes, like learning or alms giving. Their purposes were means to the common goods of health, benevolence, and knowledge determined in Ethics. Financial profit was a sub-goal, not a defining goal. City and state bureaucracies and armed forces, and even professions, were till recently similar in looking beyond present generations via a moral, intellectual or social contracted monopoly, to assure the state’s or community’s perpetuation, although professionals were dependent on individual financial and physical needs. Today’s non-profit organisations are hybrids, often of theologically or religiously propelled ideal goals and practical business necessity. NL has been there for ages as the models for understanding collective action, and religious goals were often added as the ends of organisation. In Part 2, a shifting line between justice and charity, duty and ideals, emerged in all the applications mentioned: organisational ethics, the containment of violence, accounts of sexuality, and global poverty remediation. Justice/charity lines move in accord with metaphysical and theological belief and practice. “Just war” permissions were originated by religious NL defenders, (St. Augustine, and then developed by St, Thomas), and later taken over by secular international law and secular NL-governed armed forces and legal systems; only to be again challenged by religious individuals like Gandhi, the Berrigan brothers, and Martin Luther King. Institutions like armed forces and churches try to balance realism and idealism, concrete and abstract, by the use of rules as moral guides pitched at Step 3 of the casuist procedure as described in Ch 5. The City of Man is not the City of God (Augustine); the Kingdom of God or the kingdom of ends (Kant) do not exist on earth. We do not want to give up ideals, so we have rules to guide us in real circumstances in which the heat is on. But mediating institutions themselves and their own justification as institutions can be questioned. We saw that Jesus and Buddha treat what most regard as ideal, agape, as required for eternal wellbeing. If there is no afterlife or God, both avatars and churches and temples are unjustified. If strictly obeying even “just war” restraints and permissions of exception depends on following out God’s justice commands, and there is no God, then such institutions are at least lacking an important additional warrant for asking soldiers to be willing to die in battle for the nation. Religious differences do cause wars, but secular differences have also caused two World Wars. In chapter 7 we saw the preponderance of UNV supporters were self-styled religious, but there are proponents and practising exponents of CNV with strong atheistic credentials like Russell, Camus, and Sartre, and some of Gandhi’s associates. In this Part 3

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treatment, an effort is being made to sort out some of these difficult motivational and metaphysical differences. The basic line suggested here is that theism and religion make extreme moral demands but through their sanctification of the human person in Divine Creation they can offer some reasons for their extreme altruistic claims. Secular and religious schools of thought on NL ethics both make a distinction between ethical ideals and obligations, but they draw it in a different way and at a different place. Religions tend to treat some goods and imperatives regarding kindness as having an obligatory status stemming from there having been divinely approved or transcendently commanded, or strongly commended. While agreeing there is an altruistic claim, secularists do not recognise its motivations are most often theistic, and its unconditional scope comes from belief in an absolute. This is either because they question the questions the theists ask, or their answers, or the goodness of the behaviour commended by religions or because they agree that the behaviour is good but it cannot be reasonably regarded as a duty in some set of circumstances where the religious person affirms its obligatory status. To explain the incongruity posed by moral heroism, such as knowing and deliberate, courageous public confrontation of tyrannical injustice, facing near-certain death, and to defend it as a realistic ideal, it may be necessary to appeal to transcendental, theist, or religious grounds to commend such radical altruism. Many saints and heroes speak as though they have had experiences of enlightenment which have led them to a visionary project on behalf of justice and beyond to caritas. It is less clearly a secular duty to do such things, although they are often chosen for the good of future communities. It often looks not to be even an ideal policy if the heroic path is defended only on grounds of the long-term temporal wellbeing of the activist, who may have no long term to enjoy, especially given the absence of a robust comprehensive global community or moral order. It may be necessary to reinstate some of the hypothetically excluded transcendental, theist, religious narratives as morally relevant, and to qualify the thesis of the autonomy of ethics with respect to the insulation of naturalistically or atheistically based ethical systems from assumptions about perennial issues in metaphysics, theology, and religion. The discussion in Moral Philosophy of the details of campaigns for social justice by moral heroes, like Gandhi and Martin Luther King and of the many similar courageous practical crusaders against global injustice and poverty, has been limited, compared to that of the concepts of justice and obligation and theorising about them. Discussion of the moral psychology of the large numbers of nameless individuals in anti-dictatorship campaigns, fights against institutionalised injustice and corruption, and efforts in developing countries to secure land reform, in the quest for improved economic and social equality, many of whom are murdered for their cause, are rarer than the reports of their death. Those academics asking why the extremely poor should not receive aid from affluent nations, especially prominent theorists such as Pogge (2007), Singer (2004) and Unger (1996), and writers in relevant academic journals in the West, such as Global Ethics, have tended to try to wring robust ethical duties out of justice as conceived by post-Kantian humanism of self-consistency, Mill’s Utilitarian “greatest happiness of the greatest number” principle, Singer’s “Preference Utilitarianism,” or Pogge’s Rawlsian social contract hybrid. They have tended to avoid discussing the tendency of justice and equality seekers to suffer severe reprisals from institutional power representatives and for very good, truly exemplary moral people, like Gandhi and King, to die, many prematurely; or they have tended to avoid naming the relevant courageous activities as “saintly/heroic”; or making appeals to the virtue of charity based on theism or religion

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In order to preserve a liberal/libertarian consensus, in their discussion of just institutions as part of a social contract theory, Liberals like Rawls favour “thin” accounts of primary goods of human nature, where humans are ascribed a minimal set of concerns and overall enlightened self-interest as a motive, and then one asks what we imagine would happen under a veil of ignorance. It is claimed that we would want to help the least advantaged in such imaginary circumstances. This avoids more contestable “thick vague” accounts, like those the NeoAristotelian Nussbaum (1988; 1993; 1995), or those of communitarians like C.Taylor (1989), Sandel (2005), Walzer (1983), and Etzioni (2010). But there are costs in so preserving the autonomy of ethics in this way by assimilation of Ethics to Game Theory. Communitarians and NL advocates invoke architectonically related, qualitatively ranked, human goods; wider ontologies, or theology or religious grand narratives in order to defend strong justice and welfare policy, kindness, and collective altruistic moral practice. Minimising detail about anthropology and metaphysics to further the doctrine of the autonomy of ethics can result in the weakening of ethical rationales for altruism. In the confusion in public debate about the proper Western response to Islamic State atrocities, and about the extent to which religion-based ethics is to blame, an examination of the relation of secular ethics and religious ethics is timely. There are points of continuity stemming from the days of the Cordova caliphate, in which Natural Law was enforced to great effect in keeping Jews, Christians, and Muslims at peace. All these religions and the NAVE agnostics together condemn terrorism and agree substantially regarding the analysis of ethical and political justice. But there are also differences regarding duties of justice and kindness and non-violence. A response to terrorism which rejects religious based ethics out of hand is unhelpful, and besides caricaturing religious ethics, risks rejection of a strong religion based motivation to bolster a principle of humanity with the “fatherhood of God” doctrine, which could ground the pursuit of an egalitarian global justice for His “children” beyond national borders and strengthen the case for global relief of extreme poverty. Despite the recent disrepute into which Christian, Judaic and Islamic theism and religion have fallen in the West over publicised clerical abuse, expropriation of the territory of incumbents, and extensive fundamentalist violence, in some cases a religious belief and practice can inspire execution of both just and compassionate activity, and extend their scope. Religion and theism are clearly not indispensable or necessary for practising all types of justice and compassion; but neither are they incompatible with them. It will depend on the sense assigned to the key terms in context, and on the types of each activity or religious belief considered, and most of all on the individual person. The relation cannot be boiled down to the over-simple assertion that theism and religion merely gives some further motivation for some people for the same moral content or morality as secularism, although theism and religion can indeed do that. The four concepts of justice, benevolence, theism, religion, are distinct in sense or meaning. One can think of instances of just behaviour or just policies without these also being instances of compassion or kindness; of kind or compassionate acts which are not unjust, but go beyond justice; of just acts done with or without theistic belief; of theism without religious practice or religious belief in immortality or transcendence of some sort; and of religious practice, without theistic belief, as in Buddhism and some indigenous religions. An important case, not always recognised by religious fundamentalists, is the case of secular state political justice and international law between groups, without reference to theism or religion. The latter was brought home to Europeans only about three centuries ago at the end

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of their brutal religious Seven Years War in Westphalia. Another important case, not always recognised by secularists, is the case of religiously motivated ahimsa by Gandhi, and satyagraha with acceptance of the possibility of martyrdom, or knowingly risked for the sake of divine justice; or agape as invoked by Martin Luther King, and the ideal of non-violence which squarely faced the risk to them and their loved ones in speaking truth to power, but relied on religious faith in God or belief in some form of afterlife, conservation of moral energy, or human transcendence, while also accepting and pressing for secular justice in the name of divine justice. The border between justice and compassion in some such cases is sometimes indistinct. There are concepts closely related to compassion, like kindness, benevolence, and charity, which in some forms can be considered part of justice, e.g., duties of kindness to family members. But some extended forms of compassion however, such as M.L. King’s Christian theological virtue of agape or caritas, or Gandhi’s ahimsa, do seem to require a belief in a supernatural base, whether religious or theistic. A transcendental belief system or position, one in which the idea of knowingly risking the giving up one’s temporal life for the sake of one’s eternal life is not regarded as insane and is part of the rationale for the theological virtue of caritas. Arguably these particular forms of compassionate activity are to be regarded as rational in some sense. Theistic and religious beliefs are not rational in the same sense as scientific beliefs, based on probability assessments and experiment. But if religious experience and testimony is allowed, and it is rational to doubt if science knows everything, especially about our consciousness of our own relation to our bodies, and to ask why science succeeds where it does; or to acknowledge some people do have religious experiences, and so to offer a religious “grand narrative,” or interpretation, as an answer, then perhaps religious beliefs can be rational in another sense or in another way, as the claim that there can be a level of reasoning dubbed R3 above suggested. Charity, in the broader, ordinary sense of kindness and benevolence, does not require a religious rationale. Compassion can simply mean empathy, or a kind of sympathetic humane emotion arising from seeing another in need, but not necessarily leading to non-verbal relief action; or that same emotion, plus limited ad hoc kind or benevolent responsive action to another person in need; or it can include a more willful ongoing dispositional virtue of kindness and benevolence, abstractly targeted on all people, or all worthy people, either indefinitely or more specifically. But agape/caritas in the theological sense can be extended to include compassion towards those who are not worthy or deserving; towards strangers and immigrants and asylum seekers, not friends, relatives or family relatives; towards the wrong doers, not their wrong doing. The Christian virtue of caritas, or agape, the love or forgiveness of strangers, enemies, and the wicked, is a differentiating, (and astonishing) teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, seen by Christians as a theological virtue needed not for temporal wellbeing but for eternal happiness, requiring enablement by God’s grace, and going beyond secular humanist non-theistic concepts of compassion, justice, and of benevolence, of the sort to be to be found discussed in Aristotle, Hume, and Mill; in so called deontologists like Kant or Sir David Ross (1930); or in mixed views like those of Hart (1961) or Rawls (1971). Currently the global order is being shaken by refugees fleeing massive genocidal violence and injustice like the Rohingas and Yazidis. The remedies are not being found in traditional NAVE-type ethics of desert. Christian agape or Gandhian non-violent ahimsa is an example of

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an unconditionally altruistic virtue in this religious category. Such notions are part of a wider religious narrative about God, about the “conservation of moral energy” through a law of karma, or a divine providence; and in all cases a form of afterlife or immortality of the soul or reincarnation is posited even where God’s existence is not as in Buddhism. More distinctive is the practice of prayer and worship, and virtues beyond contemplation as conceived by NAVE, like piety, religious attendance and sacraments. The latter is connected to the idea of God- given grace and theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity.

THE COMMON GROUND: 1) THE CONCEPT OF JUSTICE Assuming that religious ethics of agape or ahimsa cannot be simply skittled out by the problem of evil and related considerations, we need to locate them in relation to non-religious and non-theistic ethics. It may therefore be helpful to examine the convergence of secular and religious social activism and to remind ourselves that as set out above justice as a concept is common ground to all parties in the sense that it connotes: freedom to pursue one’s human wellbeing without harm to others; freedom to associate with others and make commitments to them; freedom from coercion and violence; b. equal prima facie respect for the humanity of all persons; for their equal opportunity to pursue needs and exert rights to public space, voice in and benefits from public arrangements made for welfare; c. desert, merit, or contribution are the criteria for distribution of rewards and honours, or punishments and restrictions. There should be some form of proportionality in measuring quality of desert, merit, or contribution as far as possible; d. according to some, e.g., Nussbaum and Sen (1996), the common good of needsatisfaction for human capacities, their need of resources to attain threshold levels of operation, should be a just state’s target. Rawls (1971; 1999) thinks the least enabled should also benefit in some degree from policies benefitting the affluent. This is his so called “maxi-min” principle. e. a principle of reciprocity and consistency of principle like the Golden Rule or categorical imperative or IRPs 1-6 should ground the administration of a)-d) above. a.

Secular, theistic, and religious writers can and usually do accept the universal duty to act justly in the above sense a)-e), and for states to reflect this in the criminal, commercial, and contract law. Although not explicit, the implication is that just states as quasi-personal entities will uphold interpersonal justice in this sense, within a global order.

THE COMMON GROUND: 2) KINDNESS, BENEVOLENCE, COMPASSION Compassion is more ambiguous than justice as defined above, and ranges over both feelings of empathy alone, such feeling plus action; active friendliness, kindness, benevolence, and it also includes caritas/agape. But caritas/agape cannot simply be common ground to atheists and non-religious people, as justice is. One will need to distinguish ordinary

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compassion as passion, as passion and action; and ordinary kindness and benevolence, from theistically inspired, extraordinary, self-surrendering agape or related concepts, like Gandhian non-violence, ahimsa. Kindness, unlike compassion, does not presuppose hurt in the receiver or need satisfaction deficit on the part of the recipient, but neither does it exclude it. Kindness can just be an act of kindness, or a disposition to do good to others. Benevolence also seems to connote doing kind acts and the disposition to do so. A suggested conceptual analysis of ordinary compassion/kindness follows. It includes at least the following: a. b. c. d.

sympathy arising ad hoc from seeing others are in human need, e.g., in pain or danger benevolent action motivated by wish to satisfy the recipient’s relevant need steady disposition and policy to be kind to those in need in such cases presumptive posture of good-will and respect for justice as described above, with the prima facie assumption of the Golden Rule in some form.

We noted that Campbell speaks of a principle of humanity prompting the relief of suffering in others as far as practically reasonable. On this account, there is still no strong division suggested among theists and atheists so far. Compassion presupposes justice and reciprocity. But the scope or object of a)-d) above could be specified further in ways which will bring out divisions. A scale can be imagined beginning with kindness to close relatives.

THE UNCOMMON GROUND: 3) COMPARING NORMAL TO EXTRAORDINARY KINDNESS/SACRIFICE The circumstances: “to whom?’ of what type? for what purpose? and “for how long?” are important in understanding how differences arise. Kindness can be shown to: I. II. III. IV. V. VI.

close relatives friends of similar intellectual stature and cognitive interests; and virtuous, worthy friends friends of social convenience and fellow citizens, immigrants/aliens and strangers, all humans who are prima facie innocent or worthy; all humans including one’s personal or state enemies, and even the unworthy, nonmeritorious, or wicked (kindness can be episodic or dispositional.)

Types i-iii seem to be different from types iv-vi. Since its inception, the Journal of Global Ethics has dealt with the differences between claims of a duty of relief of global poverty based on principles of justice, and their relation to rationales based on principles of humanity. The latter would state that we all have a moral duty to relieve human suffering and promote wellbeing, if we have the capacity to do so. Some believe that a principle of humanity or care can be universal and even ground or be grounded by a human right to be helped to escape extreme poverty (Pogge 2013) which is of comparable stringency to national justice claims. It would be based in part on the reciprocity principle above; Rawls’ maxi-min principle, and on the idea we nearly all have a debt to our carers as infants and young adults.

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But there is as yet no consensus about the grounds for, and especially the scope of, such a principle and its relevance to global justice, and many like Nagel have expressed doubt that the relief of global poverty can be grounded in a state duty based in classical political philosophies of justice and the state like those of Hobbes and Rawls, especially in the absence of robust global governance or World Order of the relevant type. If a principle of humanity is indeed to begin the discussion, (humanity before justice), we need to work out and agree on its content, what conditions it presupposes, and how it can help to articulate the part which justice plays in national justice and the case for humanitarian policy of poverty relief. This project has begun, and underpinned the Millennium Goals. It is covered rationally within NAVE in the project of secularism described in Part I. But it is too early to describe the naturalistic rationale-giving project based on NL or Natural Rights by itself as successful. Divisions exist over Philosophical Anthropology (What is human? Do we have free choice? Is physicalism false?) and over the scope of compassion. Even if the Gold and Silver rules, principles IRP 2A and IPR2B, are self–evident, an abstract principle always requires specification and supplementation by more specific rules and circumstances to be ethically useful in deciding individual cases. One arguably has universal justice duty in the sense of justice noted in the analysis of Chapter 4, in clauses a) and b) in the analysis above, to respect the freedom of all persons to pursue wellbeing, and respect for the person of others to the degree possible without damage to other goods, and to reciprocate kindness. But there is not in Aristotle, or Mill, or Kant an obvious or well argued for duty of justice or benevolence to do positive good to all fellow citizens, let alone all other humans, including strangers, the wicked, the unworthy, and enemies, as opposed to refraining from harming them, and show a modicum of fairness and good will. One would exhaust one’s wealth and time very rapidly if there were an unthinking open-ended duty of all, to attain justice in the stronger sense above, for all, in an “on-going” way, and thus try to assure desert is recognised and all needs are satisfied. This is would be the omni-benevolence requirement, and too stringent a duty, a point reminiscent of the claim about God not needing to be “omni-benevolent” to be Good, and the world not needing to be “the best world” absolutely, but only relatively so to be examined shortly. There may be a duty of justice to be kind (to do good to) to some others, like one’s children, and to those in need in our local context, who are innocent, especially if we have a contractual history with them. Kindness looks to be an independent virtue, but not a justice duty. Cases will divide some religious theists from those atheists who reject such parts of the teaching of Christ and his alleged divine providence. On a purely temporal wellbeing basis, we can set the tithing duty bar quite low on the grounds that we need a buffer of insurance to maintain our families and insure against bad fortune. As we increase the tithe duty by 10%, 20, 30, 40, to 50% etc., the duty to tithe starts to look quite weak.

Going the Extra Mile and Consensus Loss: Caritas and Agape Defenders of caritas, however, themselves need to avoid the “overload–omni-benevolence problem.” What kind of compassionate act is done, by whom it is done, and for how long can also be relevant to deciding if kindness is a human duty and to what degree. In the Christian parable of the good Samaritan, this was an example of compassion of type iv), kindness to strangers, a crime victim who was a stranger, treated kindly for a period of time till healed, by

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the gift of another unrelated individual, and seems to have been seen as part of the justice ideal of equal respect for one’s fellow humans noted, in the analysis of justice above. The kind traveller was obviously a reasonable affluent proto-capitalist. But the story was told by Jesus in answer to the question: “Who is my neighbour?” in the context of a divine injunction to love (treat) one’s neighbour as oneself. This last counsel, taken literally, and as active love, is perhaps a more exacting one than illustrated in the parable, and love of neighbour or fellow citizens is not a normal duty of justice, like respecting his/her privacy, or of justice of type a) set out above-the analysis which included freedom, equality of opportunity, desert, and reciprocity. The good Samaritan’s kindness however will arguably fit within the scope of the Golden Rule: “Do as you would be done by” or categorical imperative: “Do as you would will all others in like circumstances to do,” but will graduate as social policy to be adopted by states, only barely, perhaps as an ideal. Standing continuous long-term welfare or emergency relief provided to victims of crime by the State or by relief by the UN after large scale humanitarian disasters might also be argued to be parts of a reasonable ongoing global strategic justice policy for a State, not merely calling for an individual kindly act like the Good Samaritan case. Such compassion as those of the good Samaritan, the State, or the UN, all arguably fall within the scope of a humanitarian secular rationale, appealing to the ideal of a developing global community and global justice, with restorative justice and future reciprocity the motive, or expected outcome from the kindness, spelled out in a)-d) above. But it appeals to an ideal, not a personal duty. Many philosophers like Singer, Unger, and Pogge have held that relief of extreme poverty by monetary or other means can be required as a duty from present people, especially those who have inherited benefits from the injustice of their ancestors or others, still visited on the presently poor, a requirement to give till it hurts or would destroy some comparable good. Examples of past injustice are many. For example, chronic poverty in African countries due to resource theft, even now fuelled by arms sales, both in Africa and elsewhere, but happening for centuries; and enjoyment by first world people of the fruits of deliberate tyranny over formerly colonised people in South America, India and elsewhere in Asia. Present economic global arrangements which are unfair to third world countries are also to be redressed by moral individuals and States as a matter of justice, not merely kindness. Where a benefit of affluence is the product of past injustice by some other person it is surely impermissible to enjoy it without relieving poverty produced by those who produced the present benefit at the expense of the victims. But even if such a case can cover some people and areas it supplies little ground for standing serious justice duties of positive relief of extreme poverty going beyond respect for humanity to active need-satisfaction and care on the part of un-implicated and modestly affluent individuals. The duties of response are still indefinite regarding to whom, for how long, and why. Positive personal or State duties cannot be easily wrung out of rational consistency, respect for others, or reciprocity. This is so partly because the extremely poor have nothing to give in hope of reciprocity. Kindness goes beyond justice and partly because States as quasipersons must be just, but they cannot easily be subjects of duties of non-strategic instrumental global kindness, unlike individuals showing personal caritas/agape/ahimsa. States exist to police law and kill unjust enemies in just wars and punish wrongdoers, with lethal force if necessary, and not to forgive them for God’s sake. Their non-violence is limited by their target of just peace, although it can persist through role-division of subgroups within its borders. The Pogge argument combining a global economic theory of institutions with the

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reciprocity principle and with a Rawlsian “maximin” theory of justice and select historical data, is a good start on the secular defence of the ideal of extreme poverty relief by States and individuals. But it does not squarely enough face the differences in sense, scope, and circumstances, of justice, compassion, and charity for particular individuals in unique circumstances. Theological/religious rationales offer grounds for a personal duty of standing open-ended unconditional kindness and caritas to all even the unworthy. They are based not only on the idea of state duties or duties to donate money to the poor and historic injustice between generations and States or on the idea that human wellbeing ideally requires a world order based on equality, self-sufficiency, and need-satisfaction, yielding a duty expressed in donations. The ground is also the “Fatherhood of God” and the equality of each and all souls in worth before God, plus a duty of caritas, including the teaching about forgiveness and non-violence on the part of the individual believer as part of a grand narrative about Divine forgiveness, atonement, and agape as necessary means to afterlife beatitude and the meaning of life, a narrative, which atheists must reject. This non-violence doctrine was seen as a requirement of the Jesus message before Constantine’s Christendom, even if breaches were tolerable and excusable, and even now it is for many a practical moral ideal. It would be a pity if protagonists of world justice were to ignore or reject religious belief as unnecessary or toxic without acknowledging the phenomenal potential of such religious belief to animate believers in a duty of world justice. Believers see recipients as objects of agape/caritas and so of Divine Justice. Secular global justice advocates might carefully distinguish religious pathologies and bigotries from agape/caritas/ahimsa and heroic/saintly religious activism. The two concepts of secular temporal and religious eternal wellbeing are coherent and can coexist. A secularist need not accept the premises of the theist/religious person, but can and should, grant the possible truth of the religious and transcendental belief underpinning the concept of eternal wellbeing. The latter cannot be proved scientifically, and empirical evidence, for it is weak as measured by that yardstick. As Franklin (2009) states, “What science knows” includes knowledge that science is itself limited. We might add: science has created many evils along with its goods, and is necessarily silent on why we have a moral duty to fix these problems because as science it does not engage in moral reasoning. There remains the possibility of a coherent religious grand narrative, offered to explain all the data in some other rational way. With this understanding, the ideals of ahimsa and agape remain important, reasonable options. The argument of Buber from “I-Thou” experiences, the possibility of religious experiences, and the appeal to testimony of witnesses of miracles can all be considered to favour theistic religion.

Chapter 13

JUSTICE AND SATYAGRAHA/AGAPE: THE RATIONALITY OF UNCONDITIONAL NON-VIOLENCE (AHIMSA) If we turn from caritas to ahimsa as aligned with satyagraha (truth force) or non-violent resistance, political regimes sometimes respond to criticism of their governing activities or of their silence about misdeeds with intimidation of media outlets which publish this, or try to prevent criticism by monopolising the narrative presented in its education institutions. For example, the story of early European imperialist dispossession of Indigenous people for intended settlement, in the Americas and Australia, is far from complete, and till recently recognised very cursorily in British, Australian, and American school texts. In the last 200 years, colonial, neo-colonial, and even post-colonial educational regimes, in every continent of our globe have edited the story of their national foundation, by distorting the history of displaced Indigenous peoples or minority groups in occupying the country concerned; or they have intimidated the critics of their current policies with unfounded claims e.g., that they are threats to national security, worthy of incarceration or worse. From the 15th century onwards, Europeans rationalised slavery, Nazis rationalised genocide, and Soviets the gulags; Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot effectively silenced their critics or opponents similarly; and presently Russia, Syria, Egypt, and other countries in the Middle East are repressive in this particular way. Those “speaking truth to power” in such contexts are prime examples of what we mean by altruistic moral heroes and/or saints, and, although mostly nameless, they are universally celebrated when their heroism is known, as in the cases of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. Both advocated unconditional non-violence. From the first voicing of moral objections on behalf of “the other” to the relevant unjust ruthless regimes or practices, like apartheid, identified as unjust in being against freedom, equality, and need-satisfaction, our heroic protesters expect to endure slander, vilification as traitors, in the severe cases torture, imprisonment, abduction/rendition and murder; and other harms to their own person. Or they expect harm to their families and loved ones, at the hands of the oppressor. Often the regime will declare its support for human rights and democracy, while covertly entrapping them with the aid of agent provocateurs and otherwise disposing of its critics and opponents. Even self- styled democracies like the U.S. and Israel have occasionally engaged in mistreatment of whistle blowers, or those exposing and criticising their war policies or weapons programs e.g., the torture and rendition around Guantanamo, or the abduction and false

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imprisonment by Israel of Mordecai Vanunu for revealing its nuclear bomb program. But in the worst cases, protesters were systematically “disappeared” for speaking truth to power, as in the cases of Stalin’s gulags, Hitler’s genocide program, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot, Pinochet, and Assad. For all such heroes and saints, virtue and temporal or natural wellbeing come apart. Let us now ask: “How can such deliberate and conscious, dangerous/courageous and noble, conduct by whistle blowers, and/or by justice seeking critics and leaders of justice seeking movements in such cases, be rationally understood or reconstructed, and commended?” The first thing to be said is that in normal circumstances, where the evil to be addressed is public, but not caused by or impacting directly or specifically on our saints and heroes, such confronting activity is beyond the call of duty. It belongs in the top moral category of heroic or saintly, and in many cases our heroes have got there by following IRPs 7-9. In ethical practice, as Chapter 4 showed, there are different positive and negative general moral principles, like the Golden Rule of reciprocity or “do no harm” principles; specific precepts, like “Be truthful” and laws against murder and theft; and particular casuistic judgements of conscience. The imperatives can be classified generally as an object of counsel, an indicative good, recommended, strongly enjoined, required/obligatory; admirable, ideal, and beyond the call of duty, heroic, and saintly; or deemed alright, permitted, excusable; or discouraged, prohibited, strictly forbidden, and execrable, or evil beyond words. Conscience is concerned with morality, which guides the self in its pursuit of wellbeing at individual, real, particular case level, and the right identification and choice of particular goods ordered to human wellbeing of persons by means of such modally inflected imperatives, applied to specified circumstance types and instances. In this moral taxonomy, Gandhi and King and many of the countless others in question, are non-violent moral heroes condemning violations by governments of moral prohibitions, in their pursuing of enactment of just norms, both required and commendable, and following ideals above and beyond the call of duty in their call for implementation in circumstances of repression. Their conduct in doing so is itself right, just, and commendable and also ideal and beyond the call of duty. It is not clearly obligatory; indeed, it is clearly not obligatory. We assumed at the start that these actors are not just stupid miscalculation makers, unaware of the risks they took. In NAVE Aristotelian or Utilitarian terms, moral actions are taken to be rationally required in the form of virtuous dispositions to advance the common good conceived by reference to human nature’s needs and/or defend one’s long–term enlightened temporal wellbeing, and that of our loved ones. For Aristotle, wellbeing is made up of plural goods, many not commensurable on a common scale. As we saw, for him some goods are capable of inspiring heroic action, and some are not. So, he has a place for moral heroism in a teleological scheme. But he would not and could not rationally have prized much heroic behaviour beyond military contexts. Although pursuing “the greatest happiness (pleasure, preference) of the greatest number” is suggested as defining the other teleological theory of ethics - Utilitarianism, if we deny the commensurability of goods of the same preference utility scale, and if the injunction is not thought of as relative to a context of limited agents and specific values, in a specific state and community, “the greatest happiness possible” would be impossible, like the highest number. It is too open ended to measure precisely, and too demanding unless limiting context is specified. Relentless pursuit of total happiness via “omni-benevolence” creates an overload problem. The

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greatest happiness of the greatest number principle is designed to explicate the motives of the normally endowed, decent person, not moral heroes and saints. Ex hypothesi, if these heroes are criticising a ruthless political opponent, then they are aware that they will probably be ruthlessly repressed and so will their friends and loved ones. Although probably hoped for, often no improvement in the common good can necessarily be expected to result directly from heroic acts of saints risking disappearance or extinction; nor can their eventual or long term enlightened self-satisfaction be expected to come from their moral activity. They value the good of present and future others more than their lives. On the basis of NAVE, active public challenge to misused unjust power in the face of imminent death threats could be admired, but how could it be required/obligatory? Given temporal wellbeing is the summum bonum, what could their moral motivation be? The negative result regarding rationality of exemplary moral action follows on these sorts of NeoAristotelian and Utilitarian accounts. Most forms of both these teleological theories are agnostic about the claim that justice will eventually prevail, and especially about Divine Providence or an afterlife. Yet for outsiders, they require faith.Ordinary ethical performance can be grounded in enlightened self-interest based on recognising the abstract need for collective restraint and social trust; the tendency of moral virtue to attain it; and the fact that habitual virtuous response sustains it. But that will not motivate one “here and now” facing ruthless power. No Moral Philosophy based on enlightened virtuous self-interest, such as Neo-Aristotelianism or RuleUtilitarianism, or its variants, can rationally justify their actions being prudent let alone obligatory. A similar gap emerges on the non-Utilitarian account of Kant, and so called “deontological” Ethics. On the Kantian account, based on respect for persons, and the categorical imperative, any mere welfare calculus, depending on consideration of their own or loved ones’ happiness, not their obligations - what they ought to do/undertake as their duty, must be set aside. Since Kant, many have thought that Ethics and its object of study- normative ethics, is ultimately about the right thing to do, about duty/obligation, and autonomous with respect to the good, and does not depend on empirical facts about human happiness or wellbeing alone, e.g., the tendency of truth-telling to power to result in cruel, immoral reaction causing death to self or loved ones. Belief in the transcendent in the form of God or the soul is unnecessary and goes beyond the scope of reason qua about non-material judgement of wicked souls hereafter. We need only to grasp the “universalizability” principle - the categorical imperative: “So act as you would will all others in the same circumstances should act” and act consistently with this principle, which guides the formation of our moral precepts, moral maxims, and our judgments of conscience. But again, our obligation, here and now, to confront this evil regime with truth while at risk of my essential welfare and possible extinction, and even the heroism of such action, is left unclear and puzzling. The more specific accounts of morality by twentieth century rule-deontologists in Moral Philosophers such as Gert (1970) and Ross (1930) are likewise incapable of motivating such behaviour. Gert’s rules of morality are: 1. Do not kill 2. Do not cause pain 3. Do not disable 4. Do not deprive persons of freedom 5. Do not deprive of pleasure.

6. Do not deceive 7. Keep your promises 8. Do not cheat 9. Obey the law 10. Do your duty

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These are alleged to be all the moral rules, but in the non-rule governed sector, one wonders how altruism is to be treated. There is no trace of kindness or a positive commendation of conditional altruism. Ross (1930) lists, in rank order of importance, some prima facie moral claims: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7)

Refrain from physical harm to others Make reparation Keep commitments Repay benefactors Treat others at least as well as they deserve Do some unrequited good Improve yourself

Rubric 6 is arguably close to conditional altruism, but like Aristotle, Ross is largely silent on the moral psychology and moral rationale for any duties of human kindness, especially to those who are not virtuous friends. But if the moral heroism above is not justifiable or derivable from the categorical imperative or the greatest happiness of the greatest number principle, or some intuitively evident sets of sub-rules like these above, then it seems that moral heroics are not morally rational on either of these theories with only naturalistic premises provided. Even if our heroes must, or even can, with Kant “will that others ought to do likewise in similar circumstances,” or put their lives at risk in such contexts, the motive supplied by the theories to do so, in the face of danger of imminent self-extinctions of one’s self or family, is obscure and abstract. The problem for “universalizability” approaches is that particular circumstances are particular and idiosyncratic by definition, not general and universalisable. Thus, it is unclear on the Teleological and Deontological approaches to Modern Moral Philosophy37-the Big Two- as they are jokingly called, what motive moral heroes have to pursue “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” in such contexts, or to use the categorical imperative universalisation test, where they are knowingly or unwittingly sacrificing their own temporal and spiritual wellbeing and that of their loved ones, by bringing themselves into extreme danger. Perhaps they are taken to set the bar too high for pursuers of temporal wellbeing of self or family. But these two theories have their own internal difficulties: unless a specific group of agents is picked out as the relevant moral reference class, and some notion of practical possibility “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” abstractly is an unreachable state of affairs, like the highest possible number; nor is it derivable from the universalizability principle, which flows from self-consistency and non-hypocrisy, If Utilitarians believed in some form of transcendent moral order, in which their efforts will eventually be fruitful, then their action might be more intelligible, but Modern Moral Philosophy does not recognise any need to invoke such metaphysical beliefs. According to Modern Moral Philosophy, our moral heroes like Gandhi and King, are exemplary moral persons, but on the other hand, neither of the main approaches to moral philosophy can rationalise their activity, and neither Gandhi nor King invoked the two main theories discussed above in their own accounts of their moral springs of action which did make metaphysical ontological assumptions. According to the two main types of theory, if they believed in God,

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Title of a seminal article on this topic by Elizabeth Anscombe

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as seems to have been the case, they are at best a-rational, and the belief in transcendence is quite unnecessary for rationalising their moral activity. But although Kant explicitly denies that any belief in transcendence and transcendent objects like God and souls is necessary for morality, he goes so far as to say that it is aesthetically more “fitting” to have such beliefs about unknowable “things in themselves (noumena)” which go beyond appearances/phenomena in his Critique of Judgement (2009). His reasons for confining the scope of knowledge to appearances “to make room for faith,” as he puts it, or for beliefs about noumena, are complex. We recall Kant’s testimony concerning how Hume “awoke him from his dogmatic slumber” by showing we do not know things in themselves but only appearances. But not all accepted the reasons Hume advanced for that claim that we know only appearances and so for rejecting God and the soul, even in his own day. Thomas Reid was a contemporary critic, and in our own time, Haldane, Swinburne, Yandell, Geach, Ward, and Cottingham, have all taken aim at Hume’s epistemology. They reject Kant’s bargain or trade off with science confined to appearances. They have questioned Kant’s approach and suggest that Kant might have considered whether belief in transcendence is needed to rationally reconstruct how our moral heroes go beyond a minimal morality of obedience to common moral principles and precepts- ordinary “journey-man,” decent morality. The counter to Hume is broadly to challenge the position he holds on knowledge of reality. He is a proto-Physicalist who takes sense impressions alone to be the ultimate fundamental bedrock of our knowledge of the world. On such a basis, no account of the world, even the natural scientific world is coherent, and Hume’s application of his physicalism to the self as well as objects and God results in a chaotic muddle in Psychology and Ethics (Yandell 1990).

AGAINST RELIGIOUS ETHICS There is often however understandable debate over the place of such theistic or religious belief within human social justice activity. The first objection, is the strangeness of the Jesus sayings on altruism, clearly based on this idea of eternal wellbeing: “Love your (temporal) life and you will lose it”; “Love one another even as I have loved you (laid down my life for your sake and atoned for your sin)”; “If your eye offend you, pluck it out” and “Do not commit adultery even in your heart (by merely thinking of doing it).” There are other more familiar but still confronting, difficult sayings, some suggesting the family as an obstacle to perfection and sanctification. There is the teaching on non-violence towards enemies, the wicked, and strangers; non-acquisitiveness and nonattachment to worldly things; and unconditional altruism. The ideal of voluntary poverty that goes with the caritas or ahimsa ideal, and with many other religious narratives like Buddhism, presents a difficulty also in that it seems to its critics to be unfair. The mid-to late medieval monasteries may have been prosperous farms/vineyards, selfsufficient economically (one might recall St. Benedict’s “laborare est orare”; to work is to pray) and welcomed strangers up to point. But the desert fathers, in hermitages, and early Celtic hermitages and monasteries, preached flight from the world, and sought personal nonattachment and non-acquisitiveness through prayer. Late monasticism’s acceptance of charging for prayer, which offended Luther, potentially adds an unfair burden of support to others in the

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outside community, and to the burden of the poor in any community. Do we not need to be, or at least to have, successful capitalists and a capitalist system to generate a surplus, which may then be used for distribution to the poor and lift them out of extreme poverty? The Good Samaritan was affluent enough to pay the innkeeper. If all became celibate mendicant friars, the human race would die out. Second, past evils done by Christians like the burning of heretics, Inquisitions, pogroms against Jews, massacres of Jews in Meinz on the way to the crusades, of Protestants by Catholics on St. Barthomenew’s Day, Seven Years and other religious wars, clerical pederasty, extreme religious fundamentalism of ISIS, or violence in the name of orthodox Hinduism or Buddhism against Muslims, are also cited by critics to reject religion and portray religion as a stimulus for bigotry and injustice, and to argue for its not being nor desirable to ground social justice policy. In recent times the story of Genesis is taken to have encouraged environmental degradation when man was told to increase and multiply, using the resources of the earth. Third, the general “problem of evil” has also been recognised by theists since the Book of Job, compounded by the story of Abraham’s willingness to kill his son Isaac to prove his faith in God. The stories explore the possible non-existence of God, God’s seeming cruelty, and lack of worship-ability as a loving god. The permission of human and natural evil is said to prove the non-existence of an all-good God, and this consideration can be added to the atheist argument for the scientific improbability and incredibility of the Gospel miracles. There are philosophical difficulties with Divine Simplicity, eternity, omniscience and freedom, and with religious dogmas of Incarnation, Atonement, and Hell.

THEIST/RELIGIOUS RESPONSES Taking these objections in reverse order, the problem of evil is usually posed as showing a contradiction between a good God and natural and moral evil in His creation. To see the problem, first the case for God’s existence must be made. It goes in part along the lines presented in Chapter 6, where free choice was defended. Free choice comes as an issue into Philosophy in a historical NL/Theology package, with God, omniscient foreknowledge, and the immaterial soul. Since God as discussed in Chapter 7 is an omnipotent, necessary, uncaused, immaterial, being, He can create immaterial minds/souls with infinite, non-physical choice. If God exists, so can freewill. Some arguments for God’s existence can be applied to defend free will. But if he knows our future, it is determined before we act. The positive argument for God went roughly as shown in Chapter 7 where we introduced TNL. The problem of evil is first dealt with in the Judaic writing called the Old Testament Book of Job, where in reply to Job’s question why God introduces preventable evil if He is all good and omnipotent, God asks Job what he/we know about world creation “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?.” The author of Job implies that we are not, like God, privy to all metaphysical possibilities or the meaning of “omniscient’, ”omnipotent”, and “perfectly good”, so we do not know what the principles of cosmic creation are, if there are any. If there are, what do these principles require in the way of self-consistency? Do humans as a species have an ultimate right to be/have being? Their right to life within creation; or to a precise minimal degree of existent comfort, is not knowable. Later theodicy of Aquinas and Leibnitz asserted that created contingent being/life needs grounding in necessary uncreated being, or

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being which” cannot not exist”, and that being and life is good and “better” than nothingness. We looked at this ontological good thesis in Chapter 2 on ontology, and in discussing the transcendentals good and being equivalent. They suggested further that some natural evil may be necessary for moral good and love to be freely chosen, perhaps as part of some divine moral education and self-creation project (Hick 1966; 1989). If all natural temporal evil can (theoretically) be compensated for eternally in an afterlife, including the temporal evil done to innocents by immoral persons, enabled and allowed by an omnipotent good God, for the sake of such a Providential project, the mere existence of moral evil need not be regarded as demonstrating God’s evil. At one level, all voluntary moral evil is chosen by humans. It is carried out by individuals as human artefacts in organisations and states. Non-voluntary natural evil may be necessary for moral good to be possible. But must it include animal pain? This is the so called “free-will defence”. If God is posited in part to explain the existence and nature of freely choosing persons, as cognitive and voluntary beings, and of the principles of human scientific and social success, including moral development, the charge is that He should have done better than He did. But how do we know this? It will need to be proved if our freedom is real and requires possible natural and moral evil. If God is not omnipotent enough to create a man uncreated by God and violate the law of non-contradiction, He has limits on His power. We have little idea what the other limits of omnipotence are. Although the best possible world, like the highest possible number, cannot exist, this may the best world relative to a set of actual conditions unknowable by us, perhaps unchangeable, which define the providential project. Voltaire in Candide scoffed at the idea that this world was the best possible in the sense of the best imaginable, but perhaps the relevant sense is real possibility in the sense captured in synthetic a priori propositions like the causal principle or irreversibility of time. If these are in place, once she has created, they constrain any agent engaged in further world creation in the world so ordered. We are not world creators so we would not know what has to go with freedom of choice. God’s ordained providence relative to this given world may be different from absolute omnipotence. If all natural temporal evil can (theoretically) be compensated for eternally in an afterlife, including all the temporal evil done to innocents by immoral persons, enabled and allowed by an omnipotent good God, for the sake of such a Providential project, the mere existence of moral evil cannot so easily be regarded as demonstrating God’s absolute evil. At one level, all voluntary moral evil is chosen by humans. It is carried out by individuals in organisations and states. Non-voluntary natural evil may be necessary for moral good to be possible. Plantinga (2000; 2011), Stump (2016), Stump and Murray (1999) and others have over many years presented answers to the problem of evil along the lines that if those who suffer innocently are rewarded with eternal bliss, they are blessed overall. If this line of justification works, the warrant for the discarding of the transcendental metaphysics may require an alternate naturalistic reductive metaphysics, established independently, and not just rely on the alleged failure of present theodicy. The issue of miracles being naturally impossible, and therefore scientifically disproving religious truth, is exceedingly complex, depending on whether the definition of miracle is a supernatural intervention upsetting a scientific NL; whether any NL is to be held necessary, or exception-less, or a universal regularity; or NL is an axiom appearing as part of the best system of explanation. In the first case, miracles are often thought to be logically possible, but a supernatural power must be posited for their actuality; in the second case, science is taken as

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complete enough to judge miracles to be impossible, and superpowers will not be able to overthrow enough NLs; and in the third case miracles are again logically possible, but improbable. Provided they are infrequent, NLs could still be laws, but possibly not acts of a godly supernatural power. The upshot seems to be that miracles are logically possible, and scientifically improbable in varying senses, but if as R2 level reason suggested above science does not explain its own success, and is incomplete, there are no conclusive reasons against miracles. If this whole anti-metaphysical project is seen to be at least questionable, or in doubt, and in fact many before it have proved incoherent (e.g., logical positivism in the 1950s), then, in the example of the Abraham-Isaac paradox of faith-testing, this paradox might be partly resolved if Abraham had belief in an afterlife and God, and he trusted God could and would intervene at the last minute or trusted in Isaac’s capacity for resurrection by an omnipotent good God, though clearly more needs to be said. We mentioned the higher criticism of the scriptural texts in the Prologue. Even the literal reading of the claim of Jesus to be God can be understood in terms denying the literal truth of the Trinity and Incarnation. If one selectively discards teachings and also Aquinas and Leibnitz’s metaphysical ontology, concerning God as necessary being, as an atheist might, it may only be possible to demonstrate God’s non-existence from moral evil by using some general and independent moral intuition, which must be independent of metaphysics and applied to natural and moral evil, strong enough to judge creation and its creator as transcendentally evil. But what is this universal moral intuition? Augustine suggested God is so great he can bring good out of evil. On the second objection, on past evils, there is no possible denial of evil committed in the name of religion. One can only say such evil occurs under atheistic, theistic, and religious regimes. All moderate religions condemn pederasty, expropriation of territory, and fundamentalism and many rulers who were very cruel and unjust were either not religious or anti-religious, from some of the Roman Emperors, to Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. They were resisted by religious people under their rule and otherwise; and there are many ethical, social justice-oriented, religiously-affiliated hospitals and educational institutions, and bodies like Childfund, World Vision, the Salvation Army and St Vincent de Paul. Granted the cruelties of historic European imperialism 1750-1980, some Christians have been amongst the founders of groups like Amnesty International and Greenpeace. Thus, justice and religion can converge even if religion is not, as agreed above, necessary for justice. A very strong duty with respect to justice, kindness and a more extended scope of social justice may all be supported by appeal to Christian, Gandhian Jain Hindu, Judaic, Muslim, or Buddhist teaching. On present ecological indifference, NAVE can offer an argument from wellbeing as concerned with higher goods and not wealth; and against infinite accumulation and growth, and DGE can offer “ecological theology” as a serious growing branch of theology in which the injunction to increase and multiply in Genesis is offset with many scriptures about the duty of stewardship of creation, and many Church documents and encyclicals on the necessity to be ecologically responsible. Because NAVE is incorporated or subsumed into DGE, DGE adherents can agree that if the human body absorbs all the toxins which capitalism allows to be pumped into the atmosphere and ocean and into animal and vegetable food, it can eventually harm and kill our species. So DGE is not committed in any strong or inseparable way to planetary destruction. It can be open to all scientific claims about climate change being caused by human industry.

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On the third, or “strangeness,” objection, the philosophy of non-violence/nonacquisitiveness, is strange indeed. But it can co-exist with both “just war” theory and moderate state welfare capitalism, which can not only promote secular justice, defined below, but allow more exacting ideals like non-violence to be voluntarily practised as ideals, by individual citizens and subgroups groups within its secular borders protected by armed forces and police. Non-violence is rightly praised as an ideal, even in military circles; and its many witnesses against war and capital punishment and unjust secular evil regimes is widely acknowledged. In the taxonomy of arguments presented in Chapter 9 for and against UNV, there were no formal contradictions, no contradiction between secular justice and pacifism. Each directs us to different areas of consideration, which could be restated as contradictions, but they look more like considerations favouring real versus ideal policies. Perhaps to get around the strangeness problem, Aquinas treated the duty of absolute caritas and non-violence as the province of the celibate friars like himself who were mendicants originally, not a duty for soldiers of the state. The latter were permitted to use lethal force in “just wars.” Or the agape teaching may be an ideal, not a duty. There are clearly a few larger questions here to which the reader might return, but distinguishing duty from ideal behaviour apparently gives us a good start on a response to the strangeness problem, especially if an afterlife is possible. Saints, monasteries and state welfare capitalism have co-existed and can conceivably continue to coexist. The cluster of philosophical problems associated with God’s simplicity, immateriality, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience on the one hand and Atonement, Hell and other Biblical themes are too many and difficult for this work to tackle. But one strategy is to follow in large part the ingenious line of defensive argument found in Stump’s (2016) work The God of the Bible and the God of the Philosophers, pp60ff using a theory of “ET simultaneity” she explains and defends to describe the time-eternity relation in such a way as to permit interrelations humans with God without change in God. If God is posited in part to explain the existence and nature of freely choosing persons, and if Heaven and Hell are posited, with a Hell permitting repentance and spiritual development, as part of a deterrent-reward system, aimed at us as cognitive and voluntary beings, with a possible feature of redressing all unmerited evil, then the obstacle to belief of Hell is slightly lessened. God as the philosophers conceive Him can in some way explain the principles of human scientific and social success, including moral development. The charge that He should have done better than He did, will need to be proved if our freedom is real and requires possible natural and moral evil. Although the best possible world, like the highest possible number, cannot exist, this may the best world relative to a set of actual conditions unknown by us which define the providential project. Voltaire rightly scoffed at the idea that this world was the best possible in the sense of imaginable, but perhaps the relevant sense is real possibility in the sense captured in synthetic a priori propositions, universal truths of fact. The warrant for the discarding of the transcendental metaphysics may need to be more than Humean agnosticism and actually require an alternate naturalistic reductive metaphysics, established independently, not just from the failure of theodicy. But if this anti-metaphysical project is in doubt, and in fact many before it have proved incoherent (e.g., logical positivism in the 1950s), then in the example of the Abraham-Isaac paradox of faith-testing, which earlier we said proved the autonomy of ethics, the paradox might be partly resolved even if the story is not just a teaching tool about trusting god, but alleged fact. Abraham had belief in an afterlife and an omnipotent loving all good God, and he conceivably either trusted God could and would

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intervene at the last minute or trusted in Isaac’s capacity for resurrection by an omnipotent good ontology concerning God as a necessary being, it may not be possible to demonstrate God’s non-existence from moral evil by using some general and independent moral intuition, which must be independent of metaphysics and applied to natural and moral evil, strong enough to judge creation and its creator as transcendentally evil. As noted, Non-violence is rightly praised as an ideal, even in military circles; and its many witnesses against war and capital punishment and unjust secular evil regimes is widely acknowledged. There is no contradiction between secular justice and pacifism. Given the idealduty distinction in Part 1: Chapter 5, the nonviolent and agapistic ideal, along with the life of non-acquisitive poverty can be taken to be non-binding but commendable, even under Divine Law, while justice will remain as an obligation.

THE 3R QUESTIONS: FOR THE LAST TIME In Chapter 1 and 2, and again in discussing alternative dispute resolution in Chapter 8 we discussed three kinds of “rational applications of reason” (the circularity is inevitable), designated R1-R3. They can be relevant to avoiding sharp conflict here. Each arises from asking a “Why?”-question in a cumulative fashion. First, one can ask the question: “Why?” about how the Universe works in a scientific way. The hypothetico-deductive and inductive methods yield laws governing its contents, and the appropriate taxonomies of entities in each discipline. Applied to cosmic, planetary, and human origins; to human ethical practices, including “phenomenologically apprehended” human wants and needs; and ethical aspirations for wellbeing (folk anthropology), this scientific account yields Ontology, with its sub-ordered natural and social sciences like Anthropology. The ethical “practical science” of wellbeing emerges, which grounds “right/duty” discourse. Practical reason is not formal/demonstrative, but defeasible. The descriptive premises about wellbeing, higher capacities’ goods, the collective goods (available only to mutual respect and restraint); and modal imperative principles in “applications,” used in Ethics arguments, are seen as rational imperatives which can be outweighed in a given set of circumstances, but retain their good or bad properties even when outweighed. Call this the R1 account. R1 is primarily focussed on the general, objective, replicable/confirmable, not the idiosyncratic individual or subjective experience, but it can give a partial account of particularity and advert to theoretical laws and practical precepts to make rational judgements on particulars. R1 leaves open a second meaningful question, (R2): “Why is R1 successful?” “Why is there something rather than nothing?” “Why are these ontological, anthropological/ethical findings in fact true, and known through physical laws, many of which seem to hold across the entire cosmos?.” Traditionally suggested answers, some based on “fine-tuning” arguments, causality or analogy of attribution, have included the idea that it is due to creation by a necessary, intelligent, uncaused immaterial being, a God; and/or that intelligent life/free choice may be the entry point to a further life, within the disciplines of Natural Theology; or that it is due to chance. Natural theodicy argues God may be essentially good, without needing omnibenevolence, and some form of soul/body dualism and afterlife are at least coherent notions; for atheistic materialists, they are not.

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We can then ask a third level question: (R3): “If a personal God, and perhaps afterlife, may figure in the answer to R2’s question about R1’s result, what more specifically is this entity’s “will” toward humans?” “How is it to be ascertained and followed?” and “What is this so-called “after-life”?.” Answers have traditionally been sought in a religious “grand narrative,” or “total interpretation,” sponsored by a religious culture or institution. For example, God’s will may be said to include her partial self-replication in humans as potential “images” of God. Religious Studies considers such data, captured in systems of beliefs like Indigenous religions, shamanism/paganism, Hinduism, “greater/lesser vehicle” versions of Buddhism, and the religions of the Bible or Holy Book (Judaism, Christianity, Islam); and of course, in atheistic Buddhist narratives. Naturalistic a-theologies, and “grand counter-narratives,” attempt to rebut the theistic ones point for point in their own counter-narrative about matter, chance, or infinity. Both sides reason, albeit informally/inconclusively. The three applications of reason successively generate: (i) Ontology, Anthropology, and Ethics; (ii) Natural Theology/A-theology; and (iii) Faiths and Religious Studies of faiths/Atheologies. The theistic “grand narratives” are the result of asking the R3 question, applying R3, to the results of R2. They claim to yield a “reasonable” faith, providing a “total interpretation” of the meaning of life, and in most cases an account of the afterlife (Ward, 1998; Haldane, 2010; Cottingham, 2009). Within major religious cultures, there are overlapping calls to unconditional loving-kindness, and contemplative, non-acquisitive, non-violent ideals. Less exacting “journeyman” versions are also devised. R1 is only secondarily concerned with idiosyncratic/anecdotal cases and personal/private subjectivity and transcendental grounding of reason’s success. R2 takes them to be focal, and problematic for R1. R2’s results are informal/analogical and less “demonstrable” than R1s, but reasonable. R3’s is less demonstrable than either. But truth can be rational yet indemonstrable: based on dialectical argument, appeals to experience, intuition of particulars, interpretation or testimony. Only if atheism or agnosticism were demonstrable by R1 would R2’s and R3’s questions, and answers, be irrational. I have been suggesting above that no such purported demonstration succeeds. As individuals settle on the result of their use of R1–R3 in establishing ‘the highest good’ (THG), in NL and its ultimate referent, thus disclosing what reason says is accessible as THG to the power of intellect, we get various hybrids of NL. In Chapter 6 we contrasted NAVE and DGE as part of the same line of thought. In NAVE/R1, which is common to all versions, but extended by Theism (R2) and Religion (R3). NAVE general imperatives include: “Do good and avoid evil”; “Do as you would be done by”; “Act reasonably/justly”; and “primary precepts” forbidding murder, adultery, and stealing (allegedly self-evident to conscience). Precepts like “murder is wrong” are within the province of secular and General Ethics, including some principles of general justice. More particular rights/duties are domain-relative, specified in Special Ethics, such as professional codes. If added circumstances obtain, they are defeasible. On most important particular moral judgements (career/spouse choice, children), there are only prima facie rules, and rules “underdetermine” these choices. If “reason,” as the highest differential human capacity, can be applied to the universe as a whole, to ask questions about its “highest good”; its workings; its (and science’s) possible creation; and its creator’s possible benign goal, then natural theology and confessional religious belief should feature in discussing questions about the highest human good. If the quasipersonal creator’s goal for us turned out to be learning compassion, to imitate His/Hers, this might bolster the case for loving-kindness in relief of suffering/poverty. If there is a Providence with such a good will for humans, possibly there is a more than accidental connection between

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certain kinds of extra-ordinary kindness to the poor by many human agents, and their experience of/belief in higher than human powers/providence and revelation. The possibility of similar kind actions by nonbelievers in supernatural/transcendent realities, theism and/or religion is not denied. Nor is a view about their comparative incidence asserted. But their rationale and scope may differ, as I suggest below. Secular justice exemplifies but does not exhaust IRP 1-9 responsiveness. As different entities are taken to be THG, and different capacities, values, and standards are understood to be implied in applications of the principle of interactive responsiveness, the justice spectrum can expand into limited benevolence, human kindness, and beyond that into self-sacrificing agape/ahimsa. What for secular NAVE/R1 is charity, can be for DGE or NAVE/R3 divine justice. Being inclusive as before, several candidate principles of personal interaction of increasing ethical demanding-ness are possible. The response spectrum runs from widely accepted abstract omnibus principles of general ethics to specific justice norms such as minimal reciprocity, through natural benevolence, to divine justice as requiring love and strong altruism. If, in the analysis of justice, we accept R1’s agnostic rejection of R3 above, as Aristotle would have, and only R1 and R2 are accepted, then agnosticism in confessional theology follows: a version of NAVE driven by R1 and possibly R2. As discussed in Chapter 1, Agape – unconditional kindness and dedicated non-violent selfsacrifice for God’s sake – is not then a scientifically reasonable responsiveness principle and not part of justice or ordinary kindness. The rationale of “agapistic” heroes, as revealed in their autobiographies, is very often religious as well as naturalistic/nationalistic. They often knew they would be targeted for assassination but also vindicated in death, temporally in the actual improvements achieved by beneficiaries, and/or the fact their communities and loved ones would remember them; but also eternally, many believed in conservation of moral energy; and/or that they contributed to the relief of suffering/injustice through non-violence as selfavowed images of God, wanting friendship with God in a putative afterlife. Not all apparent acts of moral heroism, secularly or religiously motivated, especially those consciously driven by non-violence, can be reduced to false risk assessment, over excitement, or to self-deception. Some people are not mistaken, carried away, or self-deluded, but are consciously motivated by non-violent caritas and religious expectations of friendship with and gratitude to God. What they are doing is rational; and in that sense shows the potential of theism and religious belief for justice, love, and poverty-relief. Such agapistic people contribute much to poverty and injustice relief. This subgroup can exemplify a significant extension of the rationale for relief of suffering/poverty. As Anscombe (1958) suggests, their under-theorised status is traceable to Modern Moral Philosophy. Figure 1 representing the correlation of moral commitment and ontological commitment in Chapter 1 presented the suggestion that the territory between natural justice and kindness; and religiously motivated justice and self-consciously dedicated love of sinners, enemies, and strangers – for God’s sake, can also be correlated with the known risk of loss of temporal happiness as one goes higher on the vertical axis. The horizontal axis represents the differences accorded to the scope of rationality/ontology. It pictures the continuum from naturalism to theistic and religion-friendly rationality. The diagonal suggests that there is some correlation between the progressively expansive applications of reason, R1-R3, to include theism on the one hand, along the lower axis; and expansions in scope of justice and kindness ideals, along the vertical axis (i)–(vii) on the other. R3’s applications are the least cognitively demonstrable; and principle (vii) is most morally demanding, but both can be rational. There can be ‘outlying’

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individuals, acting under (vii)’s non-violence on the basis of R1, without theistic beliefs or invocation of R3. But given their reliance on testimony, and/or successful “experiments with truth,” the heroism of most self-avowed non-violent religious individuals can best be rationally explicated/re-constructed by reference to a rational belief in R2/R3, not reductionist dismissal of their self-avowed moral psychology as irrational. The argument is not that we should all actually aspire to be R3/(vii) types (non- secularists), or that secularists cannot act selflessly, but that the areas b and c describe real populations of individuals with non-demonstrable but rational beliefs in transcendent entities and ideals as described. Their beliefs are based on dialectical/pragmatic considerations, intuition/experience, or testimony-based arguments. These groups rely on a broader conception of reason and challenge the limitations of the NAVE/R1 moral horizon. They issue to everyone an ethical invitation to a more exacting moral ideal on indemonstrable but rational grounds. Non-believers are justified in using naturalistically demonstrable R1 truths, theoretical and moral, to support naturalistic ethics and question/challenge/evaluate and if necessary, reject alleged miracles, divine commands, or strong agapistic moral claims, based on R3. Many religious beliefs are demonstrably false or unethical. Others are paradoxical (Abraham–Isaac case). The Figure 1 only makes clearer how R2 and R3 enter our disagreements and can underpin selfcommitments. It helps to see how one can ground such unconditional commitments/ideals and argue tolerance for them. They are not demonstrably false. R3-based claims are embedded in “total interpretations” ultimately based on unique experiences or testimony, giving them some rational credibility. The fundamentalist Islamists we now most fear cannot even be talked to if their religion is dismissed as irrational, not seen as dependent on R1 as a complement, permitting use of R1 as a possible corrective to extreme R3 claims. Aquinas suggests there are natural/temporal and eternal/supernatural concepts of happiness, and correspondingly of both justice and charity. For the religious believer, what are, for secular-R1-reason, acts of charity, are seen as asked in divine justice. The line between justice, limited benevolence, and unconditional loving/virtuous kindness, will vary in reference or application as R1-R3 are taken to be normative. If you only pay your debts, etc. and do not adopt IRP 6-9, imitate Christ, and forgive your trespassers, you cannot be friends with the Christian God. There is a (weak) case in R1 and in R2 for “conservation of moral energy” and an afterlife, but if the law of karma is not R1 demonstrable, based only on R3, it will not be sufficiently generalise-able for acceptance by most philosophers. On the basis of NAVE/R1, for strict prescriptive non-violence, non-attachment, or absolute/unconditional/perfect altruism, one still would require faith in an eternal cosmic just order of some kind, exemplified by beliefs such as those of Buddhism, Christianity, or a revelation passed through religious tradition, supported by religious institutions. I am assuming despite the good effects on wellbeing of altruism and forgiveness claimed to be empirically demonstrable by positive psychology and by Post and Nelmark (2007) and others, only naturalistic principles can be rationally argued on General Ethical grounds as part of justice The Journal of Global Ethics concentrates largely on developing secular R1 rationales for duties of relief of extreme global poverty by institutions and states within the emergent discipline of Global Ethics. The ideals of the liberal agnostic enlightened West, omnibus imperatives, and universals like “autonomy,” “universalizability,” “rights,” “freedom,” “justice” and “equality,” all rightly get a good mention in its pages, and elsewhere (Singer, 1972; O’Neill, 1975; Raz, 1994; Nussbaum and Sen, 1996; Pogge, 2002; Caney, 2005; Gould, 2006; Spence, 2007; Brock, 2009). The presumption in many submissions is that justice-based

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laws, principles, rules, and decision procedures/methods, are means to overall collective and individual wellbeing; or a moralised notion of wellbeing in consistency demands justice for all. If we can show an injustice in current world governance or state arrangements, and these arrangements contribute to the evil of extreme poverty, then there is an ethical duty in justice to give something to relieve the plight of the extremely poor. So far, the argument for this indefinite conclusion is sound. But we can ask what the global world order is and what the consequent justice-duty is: Whose is it (individuals, states, organisations)? Why? How? How much poverty is to be relieved? Only a few writers, like Nussbaum and Sen (1996), offer thick vague anthropologies; or like Galtung (1996), have treated rights as “multi-place relations” involving a content, bearer, and “against whom” party, and an enforcer. “If I give you what I owe to you, I am not being kind or benevolent, and if I give you what I owe someone else, I am being unjust. On the other hand, if I give you what is due, and more than that to another for less work, I am not unjust” (Vineyard Parable). To ascertain which situation obtains (whether I owe you and what), I must know if I am robbing Peter to pay Paul, as some think the UN did in creating Israel with Palestinian land. To judge, one must have a viable international law and coherent global political ethics of “states’ rights,” and know the reasonable giving/justice options in context; our places and rights in our domains and sectors, like family, work, town or nation; whether we are in public space, or in a particular region of the globe. Arguably since we are all located in the largest domain – the Universe, we should know or have some rational belief about that, and the identity of THG. Answers to some of the contextual, or circumstantial, questions are emerging. Others will come from one’s personal unique commitments and contractual relationships, and involuntarily incurred duties, as a child of parents, or as an Australian citizen. I can rationally/voluntarily choose to self-commit to marriage, career, profession, a reform movement/project, a God/or a religious institution on grounds other than R1-based duty, rules, or justice clauses (a)-(d). Such motives include a desire to leave a legacy (Covey, 1994), or make a contribution to the human project, or find and cherish someone or something worthy of our self-gift (Becker, 1974); or obey/please God in gratitude for graces. Duties are often relative to self-involvement in domains like families, work, markets, civil society and the state; and ultimately to what we take THG to be. For many, that is God. For some, kindness and compassion do motivate poverty relief, but are not seen as duties or rule-governed in the same way as justice duties. It may be that we will tend to be more just if we are kind, and so we should be kind in part, for justice’s sake (Kant’s “imperfect duty”). But loving kindness, like heroism, can be supererogatory – distinct from following moral rules, and above the call of duty (Urmson, 1968; Chisholm, 1968). It does not preclude hope of reward/fulfilment. There is in loving kindness often an element of having a vision/story about an enduring, good cosmic order or karma, with which one can blend. Within this, one can locate a particular needy individual or group. There is a sense of being passively moved or carried away by a non-romantic love or compassion to apply a principle of humanity beyond reciprocity; to give ‘unconditionally’, in imitation of an exemplary/ideal prophet or avatar, not on the basis of desert, friendship, or expected reciprocity but gratitude for a divine gift one simply “channels” like a tube. Some donors go beyond limited compassion and give from what Anders Nygren (1953) calls agape, the strong conscious non-attachment to temporal goods; consciously dedicated non-violent self-sacrifice on behalf of others, motivated by love of God.

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Nygren contrasted agape with eros. Agape is unconditional love of strangers, sinners, and enemies; and forgiveness of enemies often requires non-violence and temporal self-sacrifice, based on a philosophical anthropology open to theism or religion. Recipient worth is God-given with personhood, and good behaviour is not a condition of, or qualification for, compassion and receiving/giving aid. On the other hand, valid secular justice claims, though limited, are the most rationally secure. The above analysis of justice and compassion, using the Golden Rule will be enough, without reference to religious extensions, to ground some strong duties to the absolutely poor. But who and which persons/institutions have the duty must be weighed against other moral/political considerations. Secular justice is not trumps. Justice-grounded compassion may be discharged via a modest 1% tithe, or actions which have nothing to do with philanthropic “giving till it hurts.” It may have more to do with actively rejecting philanthropy to enable justice. Singer would presumably welcome this expansionist justice approach, but his famous work (1972) did not reflect this concern, and it is in any case a sketchy/incomplete, and empirically contestable development strategy. Improving the justice of the world order (Falk, 1995; Pogge, 2007) and world government arrangements, actively supporting organisations like Amnesty International, voting for the party most committed to foreign policy aimed at world economic reforms like Pogge’s resource tax, Tobin taxes,38 and reducing tax evasion, pollution and tyranny, will best enact justice, not “giving till it hurts.” That remedy is in any case hard to justify solely on enlightened self-interest NAVE/R1 grounds, and the courage of Gandhi or King, which might be required to pursue justice “even unto death” against a venal state, is not obviously R1-rational. Most aid-recipients are religious, and their donors are grossly unequal in wealth and status. Their relation is usually institutionally mediated by NGO professionals. Most NGOs target the “worthy” poor, because institutional donors quite properly want “conditionality”/ accountability. Aristotle and other philosophers have given us descriptions of friendship and benevolence, but these have tended to concentrate on friendships between virtuous persons, or fellow citizens, and less on distant others, strangers, or the welfare of the “unworthy” poor, who it will be said have self-abuse to blame for poverty, even if that abuse is caused by the donors’ nation. Agape treats “worthiness” as irrelevant, and recrimination as secondary. But absolute agape and non-violence is not R1-rational. The ideals in Figure 1 (iv-vii), above, are rationalised on transcendental grounds. They are ethical strategies for individual, non-state actor adoption, targeting even the “unworthy poor.” But not for secular states/organisations founded on R1 alone. The current literature has too little to say about these differences and connections between individual, organisational, and state duties, and their connections are under-theorised. Only a secular rational defence of some form of strategic non-violence for states is plausible under NAVE/R1 given the threat of nuclear annihilation of the species. Absent state nuclear disarmament, a more exacting moral approach to confront nuclear and chemical arms would need to show the sort of personal courage the Berrigan brothers and some Buddhists have shown. Theirs was grounded in the believed veracity of the relevant scriptural accounts of transcendental experience/revelation handed down by a Church, or a law of karma or “conservation of moral energy principle,” and/or a transcendental account of the human spirit, re-incarnated or not. 38

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CONCLUSION In an increasingly borderless world, it may be wiser not to hang the whole case for world peace, justice, or poverty relief on secular justice and targeted “conditionalized” state and organisationally based required donation to the “worthy poor.” There are real but conditional, secularly based, justice-duties of persons, organizations, and states to the extremely poor, and grounds for peaceful humanitarian interventions on behalf of justice. But according to NAVE/R1, they will tend to be conditional: agent/subject-relative; domain-relative; institution/state-relative and circumstance-relative. Often the worthiness and good response of the recipients matters. Omnibus principles alone do not generate concrete rights against all others, in abstraction from capacity, agency, and context. Nor do secular reciprocityresponsiveness principles IRP 1-5 of NAVE/R1 ground a positive universal “right of need satisfaction” or its pursuit, creating in all others an abstract or concrete duty of someone to deliver the object of the right. Warranted abstract rights cannot be pressed, without circumstances supplied, against anyone particular or everyone on an on-going basis. Absent world community, it would be an impossible overload. Only vigorous institutional reform and circumscribed compassion/benevolence of type IRP 2-5 is a duty of natural justice, and limited benevolence, not giving till it hurts, continuous care, or even unconditional love. NAVE/R1 will support Golden Rule-based justice and compassion, and ad hoc “Good Samaritan” actions. NAVE/R1 and development theory support vigorous international organizational justice on the Falk and Pogge ‘World Order’ models, plus limited benevolence like modest tithing. But if you were to look to your comparably important moral duties, giving till it hurts might be of low import. R2- and R3-based moralities claim to re-occupy the “moral free space” left by NAVE/R1, providing a theistic/religious motive for unconditional aid. But they also exhibit descending demonstrability in their truth claims, along with this ascending moral exactingness in their ideals. To R2 and R3 supporters, building a “law-like” component into the definitions of “reason” restricts reason arbitrarily and underplays certain human propensities associated with conscience: guilt, forgiveness, redemption, and loving kindness. For theistic R3 types, like Smart (1958), Hick (1989), Swinburne (1996), Haldane (2002), Yandell (2001), Ward (2008) and Cottingham (2005), THG refers ultimately to the entity named as uncaused in R2. This referent of THG is placed within the best “total interpretation” or most reasonable “grand narrative” or “total interpretation” through R3, mediated by R2, and is not accessible by R1. Thus, is in the end a leap of faithful reason, perhaps spurred by Augustine’s cor inquietum, Pascal’s wager, or Kierkegaard’s dialectical psychology is required. However, consistent with reason, or based on reasonable faith, unconditional love (agape/caritas) does require an absolute loving God, revealed in faith experience, to enable believers, powered by divine grace and R2-R3, to perform caritas/agape driven acts. And there’s the rub: as Dostoevsky says in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, in a sly dig at Tolstoi on universal love: “You cannot make rabbit soup without rabbits.”

EPILOGUE At the start, it was asked whether there could be two types of wellbeing, natural and temporal, and divine and eternal, and asserted that some moral heroes were driven by belief in the latter. It was suggested that Natural Law could play a stronger part in remedying global problems if it was seen as linked by reason, in some sense of reason other than logical or scientific, to Divine Law, theism, and religion. The global issues and problems mentioned included those arising from individualism lubricating all moral responsibility, to the neglect of enhanced collective group power, agency, and responsibility, lubricating acceptance of the ideas of corporate, organisational, or state amorality and non-reality. Pollution and environmental damage from unlimited growth and resultant climate change cannot be sheeted home to any intended act of an individual, or allegedly to non-agent, unreal groups, and so unintended consequences go unchecked. In Chapter 8 an attempt was made to say that both organisations or collectives and individual incumbents are responsible in different ways and that NAVE and DGE as variants of NL metaethics can show the balanced way good and bad actions occur for both natural persons and artificial quasi-persons. Global tax evasion through hidden assets in labyrinths of shell companies deprives tax payers of their due and is condemned by both NAVE and DGE. Capitalist ideology as a usurping shaper of political economy now in fact directs most states in a hybrid “state welfare capitalist” system of some sort with different settings on public and private, and private ownership on the rise (Neilsen 2002). The state, which still relies to a great degree on NL, and the church which invokes Divine Law, have both to some degree been captured by the capitalist paradigm since the fifteenth century changes on the morality of usury. I have not shown that this is so, but given its open-ended meta-ethics, NL is clearly not immune from such social and technological changes. We have found however that NL, as a meta-ethical doctrine of what ethics is and what it should deliver, is still influential and effective. In its minimal NAVE, theologically agnostic, form, it is coherent, relevant, and can develop persuasive arguments. It and its specific norms based on the marks of happiness, rule out infinite material acquisitiveness and repudiate greed, unlimited exploitation, violence, and injustice in all its forms. As a normative ethics, in the search for a global ethics, its commitment to IRPs 1-6 should be an important reference point. At this major level, which falls within the R1 zone of reason, there is much ethical convergence with DGE. In the metaethical account of NL at the ontological level, the core teaching of Aristotle was ascribed to both NAVE and DGE, that being or existence is equivocal by reference to the

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paradigm case of substance, and the doctrine of analogy of attribution applies to being(s). This means that individual first substances, like humans, which have self- movement, and instantiate types or kinds, are treated as paradigm cases of an existent, and organisations and states are not existents in this same technical sense. But as argued in Chapter 8 they, and most other things, still exist, and act well or badly. Human actions and qualities and relations of substances, and their causes do exist in the analogical sense. There is a continuum of other existents, at the low end of which are imaginary and fictional entities we can talk about, and at the other any entities admitted into the paradigm class of first substance. The debates between a) physicalists and dualist; b) methodological individualists and collectivists, and c) atheist and theists turn out to be largely about what exists, or how we should use the term existence. This realisation of the extent to which linguistic stipulation and conventional decision about the meaning of the word ‘existence” determine our “reality” and “truth” should take the heat out of these three polarisations, with space opened for the rationality of discourse e.g., about in what sense/way nano-particles exist, but not as first substances; how organisations exist, but not wholly independent of their role incumbents; or of the supernatural as an exploration of the limits of the natural, not a warrant for its derisive dismissal as belonging with discourse about witches. Fictional archetypes and characters have identities, existence, even enduring for centuries. But they fail the test for substances and full determinability of identity. Numbers have means of determination, but are not felt or observed, do not act or change. Theological entities have identities which permit arguments for or against their being substances or good. Analogy of attribution allows a rational discussion of what can be attributed to a natural entity as a cause from its effects, and to a supernatural entity from its natural effects if it is allowed as a cause. Analogy permits one to recognise that there are substances other that prime substances. Churches and states can act, well or badly, and be assessed in Ethics and Law. God must exist in a different way to other things. We distinguished two normative ethical systems, NAVE and DGE, falling within the metaethical framework of NL, with DGE adding IRPS 7-9, and commending them at least for individuals. These two belief systems were described and applied. We found one applied ethics area where both NAVE, and DGE offered an overlapping challenge to contemporary writers, with regard to organisational and state ethics. There were some areas where they differed, like sexuality (fornication, contraception, pornography, and homosexuality), although we did not canvass internal differences now appearing within DGE on divorce, homosexuality, and about contraception; or the convergence of DGE attitudes and secular feminist critiques of pornography. Even in the sexuality area we found some areas where they partly overlapped (industrial pornography depicting harm, and the wrongness of pederasty and adultery), and the distinction which Buber drew between “I-It” and “I-Thou relations.” If the I-Thou relation is added into purely secular teaching of NAVE, which I have cautiously denied on grounds it reveals super-material transcendence, it would bring both accounts into further alignment. This issue is in my account in the middle zone of rationality dubbed R2, but at the R3 end. It lies somewhere between NL and DGE, depending on how far one stresses its aspects of transcendent possibilities. A transcendental humanism is not far from a humanistic theism of man as the image of God, imago dei, or Feuerbach’s notion that in worshipping God we worship what is best in ourselves. The doctrine of the transcendentals - that beauty, oneness, being, true, and good - are convergent, can underpin the idea any existent person is pro tanto good and beautiful and worthy in God’s sight. This means that even the unworthy are good, and that is the basis of agape and the strategy of satyagraha applied to enemies thought unjust. It can be

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used to assess or oppose exploitation of all sorts, and IRP 7-9 is thereby wedded to IRP 1-6, to confront all unjust economic, political, and personal practices, including promiscuity and pornography. Further, if a distinction of ideal and required is observed, the gap is less sharp even in the contraception case. But there are still examples of a clash between NAVE and DGE, as in the complete acceptances of homosexuality being denied by many DGE believers, following traditional or orthodox DGE, on the ground that it is not the best outcome of the capacity possible; or more often on alleged and debatable scriptural grounds. As an NL meta-ethical variant, DGE has the resources to distinguish ideal and permissible and let fact determine and change value by reference to wellbeing. But many DGE representatives have been slower to accept as fact that homosexuals and transgendered people are basically born not made; and that even if choice remains a factor, the meta-ethics and NAVE still do not support moral condemnation, once the inseparability of procreation and love principle is given up in the two areas where NAVE and DGE did clash: contraception, and homosexuality. The whole case for wrongness in both cases would now seem to rest on the insufficient “best outcome” test; DGE grounds of some debatable scripture, and some future evaluation over many decades of recent homosexual legalised partnerships/marriages, and their success in childrearing. There have been cases of child abuse, but not at significantly higher rates than heterosexual child abuse. There were also some marginal theoretical conflicts of NAVE and DGE in two other areas: non-violence and global poverty relief. Their actual practice however is usually the same in fact. In the violence case, although some religious institutions condemn nuclear deterrence outright, the Roman Catholic Church, most Christian churches; the Hindu dominated Indian congress; Muslim Pakistan, and Israel have not explicitly condemned it. They apparently accept the “just war” doctrine. Australia hosts the nuclear monitoring and potential weapons systems at Pine gap and North West Cape; and joined with the US in the invasions of Korea, Vietnam, Libya, and Iraq. But there has remained a significant anti-war and anti-nuclear wing within all the national western Churches since World War 2, a we saw in Chapter 9. In other areas involving violence, many religious majority states also have not explicitly condemned capital punishment. Most secular states take very harsh measures against immigration which is not legalised. Christian Churches seem to accept quite severe restrictions on immigration, and Australia and the Australian Church has accepted a policy of deterrence with grisly conditions and indefinite detention, of asylum seekers by boat. Yet there are some outstanding individual dissenters from orthodox religious complacency in these matters. On the poverty issue, and inequality, the idea/real difference again emerges, but as for violence, coexistence and complementarity with the state are clearly normal. Since they share criteria for human wellbeing, NAVE and DGE share the non-theistic precepts of the Decalogue concerning murder, theft, adultery and perjury; the ideals of compassion, equal respect, and the Golden Rule. All of IRP 1-6 are common ground. The DGE adherent has extra motives and reasoned faith in Divine help for temporal life/wellbeing-risking interventions for justice sake; and for loving care of the poor, and forgiveness for the unworthy ; the wicked; and enemies involved in IRP 7-9. As the chapter on global poverty argued, there is real potential for more cooperation on his issue. One neglected strategy is the Tobin Tax proposal that would take a less that 1% levy from all bourse or stock exchange transactions, and put it toward the Millennium Goals of the UN. This could be advanced from its present Utopian status to reality with help from DGE believers and institutions.

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An important area which was not touched on in this work is animal welfare and killing of animals for food. It comes up in connection with the impact on climate change of methane emissions, and also the issue of environmental destruction through over-fishing and overgrazing, and industrial deforestation of primate habitat. It is reasonable to assume that at one time killing animals for food by hunter-gatherers was a human imperative, but we now know that we can survive without industrialised meat production, and probably without industrialised milk production also. Again, the capitalist apostles of unlimited growth prevail over those of material sufficiency in both NAVE and DGE camps. The argument that DGE favours growth (increase and multiply) can be balanced by the theology of stewardship voiced elsewhere in the Bible, and NAVE cannot be deemed more or less complicit in the rise of capitalism’s relentless quest for growth. Islam was and to some degree though the Grameen miracle remains, a powerful untapped force against unbridled capitalism’s interest taking, and the stewardship theme in ecotheology remains a potential resource for ecological reform. Irenaeus is attributed the saying: “The glory of God is man fully alive” because man is an image of God. Augustine says that “God’s greatness is best shown in his power to bring good out of evil.” The biographies of King, Gandhi and other moral heroes and saints suggest they accomplished moral improvements through belief in and experience of transcendent realities, and felt compelled and enabled to adopt ethical stances with respect to evil persons and policies going beyond the assumption that the worthy people alone deserve respect for their personal humanity. The question they pose is: “If saints and moral heroes like these are not explicable in terms of NAVE alone, and are not deluded, how are they possible?.” That was the challenge implicitly examined in this review. If one accepts such moral exemplars’ convictions about the transcendent basis of agape or ahimsa, and the stricter interpretation of its moral modality and content, it is a condition of moral perfection that one actively show compassion, forgiveness of enemies, and respect for the humanity even of the wicked; that one “give till it hurts” in Singer’s phrase, but for DGE reasons he seems to reject. We do need scientific reason to evaluate the claims of moral exemplars and detect false prophets and messiahs. But there is also potential for good in seeing naturalism, theism and religion as rational to different degrees and in different ways; as complementary, and as capable of dialogue, using the five point NL metaethics we have used throughout. Theists can agree with the naturalist that God as cause of everything else does not exist in the way that familiar things do, and that we can only talk about God very indefinitely via analogy of attribution. It means also that using the criterion “by their fruits you will know them,” both secular political and religious institutions focussed on their members or adherents only or the worthy poor or on the law-abiding worthy citizens alone, are not the best places to look for best moral practice. NL endures partly because it is not just an ideology with specific tenets. It has a metaethical structure based on ontology, anthropology, and human wellbeing which permits openness to discovered change, balanced by an attempt to anchor ethics in the constant of a humanity which we all share, however that humanity is best understood. Naturalism is not the same as Physicalism. As yet, the conscious mind or reason’s desire cannot be reduced to the matter of brain and nervous system which undoubtedly at one level, in an architectonic structure, enables it. In one order of consideration, material causality, that is so. In another order of consideration, form and finality, and at a higher level, mind/will directs that enabling matter and other capacities in a radically different way.

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We said above in Chapter 2 that R1 is the province of natural and social science; empirical verification/falsification of hypotheses; enumerative and eliminative inductions; mathematics and mathematical physics; and of necessary truths of fact if any, such as: “The past cannot be changed (time is “one-way”)” ” “Left and right are reversed in the mirror” “Nothing is red and green all over in same conditions” “All events are caused.” R2 asks the innocent looking questions: “Why is science successful?” “Could these things and laws and principles be caused by some Necessary Being-cognitive, and itself uncaused?” “Could the laws be otherwise than they now are?” Sometimes the R2 question is supported by the contentious claim that what is imaginable is possible. This “maxim of admissibility” is used by both Algazzali and Nicholas of Autrecourt to posit God by challenging natural science, and for invoking faith in divine necessity, infinity; and omnipotence; and the same maxim is also used later by Hume to challenge theism, so there are reasons to doubt a principle pointing opposite ways. If there are necessary truths of fact or causality (synthetic a priori truths); and cases of discovered proofs of impossibility of previously imagined possibilities within the world, shown not to be possible from the necessary truths, then the universality of the imaginable/possible maxim is questionable, and this cuts against both theism and atheism. The argument that all non-divine things are contingent will need to stand on some other ground than that we can imagine the Universe not existing. It might be that the cosmic universality of the causal principle can do the job in some form of reasoning like that presented in Chapter 7. But even if the causal principle is indubitable, we need an account of a necessary being which would evade it, i.e., an uncaused cause of all being. Aquinas seems to offer some such argument, with his idea that God is subsisting being itself, whose essence is to be, and necessary to explain beings not identical with their essences, and this taken up by Thomists like Gilson, Haldane, Stump and Kretzmann. The problem with such R2 approaches which reject the maxom of admissibility is that “the possible” can include: the imaginable, the logically consistent; that which has latent causal potential; or has an active disposition or tendency, and much more. It is a notion relative to some subject, standard, context, respect, or order of consideration. Reality is the measure of the possible in the most important sense. There is for example, “internal “possibility of something, relative to the given i.e., what we know now (de facto), versus the possible in the sense of the possible result of possible changes within the structure of this world. But the possible expands exponentially when the possibility is allowed of other imaginable or logically possible worlds, and worlds we can talk about (de dicto), but which may not be really possible. These questions are the province of modal logic, metaphysics, natural theology, and include the study of evidence for supernatural/transcendent entities if any. The existence of God is generally argued on the basis of the alleged need for an uncaused cause of causes - a cause of the existence of the being of all contingent things by some necessary being. The argument for such a being usually appeals to the notion of causality itself, applied to the universe as a whole object or set of events, which is taken to be contingent. If there were a clear enough need for an answer to the question: “Why are there any beings at all? or “Why are there just the things and law-like connections of the type we find in science?,” the argument might proceed, as I believe it should. But agnostics ask: what is the need to ask? The answer may be: science is a miracle or mystery, but we do not know where to go from there. Or that we can never know because that question/argument depends on the analysis of knowledge and causality, whose range of

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application might be limited for all we know, as Hume and Kant held. Yandell (1990) has well argued that the argument of Hume using imagination admissibility is muddled by his doctrine that in all knowledge we copy sensory impressions, and that he is even inconsistent in not extending his scepticism to the full, which would exhibit the incoherence of his position. Reason seems not to be limited in the relevant way, so the onus is prima facie on the doubter, even if agnostics will insist we do not know and cannot prove where the onus lies. Christianity must show that an afterlife is coherent and plausible for supernatural beings, and we are in some way or partly such beings. That task has been afoot since Plato, Augustine, Descartes and the Dualists, and was examined sympathetically in Chapter 6. It is made recently by several authors in Gocke (2012) and again the case is not closed. It has been said that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. One can argue that God is good on the transcendental assumption that being, especially life, is good as such, albeit a contingent good, and evil is only a privation or perversion, of being; that evil is required as necessary for the ends of the ultimate necessary being. Stump argues that if each innocent victim of evil is rewarded with eternal bliss, the problem of evil is sufficiently addressed. Perhaps God is free to create beings less perfect than Himself since as perfect highest good, He need not duplicate himself but can create a lesser good. But we can surely ask whether the evil we experience is necessary, in the many senses that we noted regarding the possible. As Dostoevsky and others have suggested, free choice seems to entail some evil and we would not appreciate good without it. Animal pain is not explained thus, but our knowledge is limited. It has been suggested that our knowledge of God is like animal pets’ understanding of their masters: dim but significant. And we are in fact well- disposed to our pets even if they don’t realise it fully. The case is not closed. One promising line of defence is to compare the situation to our unpayable debt and duty to our parents as our part creators and our incomprehension till maturity of their possible reasons for bringing us into being. Job is told that as a mere creature he does not know enough about principles of and constraints on cosmic creation. Some theologians and philosophers like Kierkegaard think we are here to learn forgiveness. This runs into the question: “What we are to make of the whole creation/fall/Providence story.” R3 is the study of comparative religion total interpretations and its basis includes evaluation of testimony and of religious experiences. At the R3 level there arises the question noted above, about natural and moral evil, as features of cosmic design, and various ingenious possible solutions to the problem of evil and God’s omnipotence have also been proposed. Atheism and agnosticism can provide and might even require a counter to alleged R2 and R3type reasons with an “a-theology” and irreligious “grand narrative” to make its challenge effective. But there remain stubborn problems for UNV Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount as a type of R3 grand narrative, and to the extent that R3 reasons presuppose R2, any problems for both are interrelated. The unfamiliar types of reason introduced in the book were R2 and R3. Christianity is one of three “Religions of the Book” (Old and New Testaments of the Bible and the Quran) with a creation ex nihilo story, which has an interest in the viability of R2 reason’s concluding the world is not self-explanatory, and that one needs to posit a necessary being. It also has an interest in defending the viability of an R3–type “grand narrative” about God’s Providence and good will towards humans, e.g., with an Original Sin story, Incarnation, Atonement, and Salvation (eternal happiness) depending on humans showing forgiveness. This last task is the most difficult of all.

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One ingenious way which might help would be to work back from the Revelation about forgiveness being an absolute requirement. When we seek forgiveness, it must come from the person offended. That person may not accept our apology or even be around after our offense, but God is, and if we believe He can eternally know we have offended the person without Himself being passively altered or harmed, as Stump argues, then expressing our desire for forgiveness can still be effectively addressed to Him, and vicariously accepted or if immortality is accepted really accepted by the offended immortal person. This sort of reflection does not show why Christ became human, died and rose again to forgive human sin, but if we allow that since the narrative as a whole is the subject of faith, we are entitled to bring in all the metaphysical elements to an attempted theological solution. The whole original sin/atonement/Hell part of the DGE story is possibly separable from DGE or capable of “soft” interpretation, or application of the higher Biblical criticism reinterpretation invoking the “hermeneutic” circle, which argues that the scriptures are postevent, communal documents, shaped by and reflecting the grief and local needs of their communities. As it stands, the whole narrative is hard to believe. The story depends on a notion of our collective responsibility for a past Original Sin of earlier human/s, and of Satan and the fallen angels, punished by death and toil. This “responsibility for the past” doctrine, while coherent in principle, and invoked in modern affirmative action arguments and in our alleged responsibility for global poverty as beneficiaries of imperialism and slavery arguments, might be re-interpreted as a comment on the present universal sinfulness of humans. But it is debatable, even if we throw in from science and history our evolutionary-driven violence and our enjoyment of benefits acquired by imperialist slaughters conducted by our ancestors mentioned in the Prologue and by Pogge in Chapter 10. Along with the points mentioned in the account of Jesus, and often in the same context (Matt 5:17-48), are references to plucking out one’s eyes to avoid temptation to adultery, needed to avoid Hell as eternal punishment for failures. This raises the question of how a God, who loves sinners and wants us to forgive and love them, can Himself punish them as sinners, having involuntarily inherited a wound of nature through original sin, with eternal torments in the Hell He created, a Hell worse than having one’s eyes plucked out, if they do not forgive their trespassers. Can God Himself not forgive the sinner, as He has asked us to do, and still be consistent or the same loving God? The last line of the Our Father is: “(Father) Deliver us from evil.” Does that include sparing us from a God-created Hell? Efforts are made by Philosophers of Religion, the best by Stump, to answer this, but they are not completely persuasive. As we cannot both show mercy and justice in the same respect at the same time, but only mercy after justice, perhaps God cannot either, but will possibly eventually show mercy to Hell residents. One might say that it is God’s will that nobody goes to Hell, and God’s will is never frustrated, so nobody will go to or stays in Hell. But the Sermon on the Mount suggests the easy path of the majority leads there. Or, one might weaken the idea of Hell to mean: Hell is the state of realising that you have missed the point about love, or a garbage dump for loveless lives, and there is always some possibility of getting out of Hell if one repents. It is not an eternal irreversible torture chamber, but more like the Catholic Purgatory, available for all but the most fiendish. And there is the idea that the wicked simply cease to exist (conditional immortality). But the paradox remains. If everyone were to follow the call for abandoning all things for the sake of agape, there would be no families and no businesses, and no inherited property. Plato’s dream of avoiding political corruption in rulers in Republic by prohibiting guardian families and property would

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be realised. Alas, the UNV Cathars we met in Chapter 9, as pacifists, who were condemned by the Church as heretics, exterminated by Simon de Montfort at Carcassonne, were strongest on the doctrines of Non-violence, Atonement, Hell and Non-acquisitiveness, and against work. In short, there are problems about creation, evil, and continued non-physical life; collective responsibility for the past, Hell and consistency in Jesus’s account of God’s teaching and goodness, and about the practice of extreme poverty. Some of these issues can be resolved by appeal to the ideal/real or state/individual distinctions. Others may be soluble by adding or subtracting non-essential assumptions, using the non-literal “hermeneutic” interpretation of scripture arguments of the higher Biblical criticism movement, but there are severe difficulties arising directly from the Sermon on the Mount text itself. Most self-styled Christians today, who think of themselves as DGE followers, would accept the Church’s practical position, which features Purgatory, “just wars,” and is in fact CNV, and NL- based, not UNV, based on the extended DGE model, except perhaps as an ideal, or a duty for some only. They have accepted state positive law and local police, criminal punishment, including capital punishment in principle, till recently; and the “just war” teaching, spelled out by Augustine and Aquinas. They place the highest value on love within the family, especially of children; and they would deny that this could clash with following God’s will to the unconditional limit as the Sermon on the Mount text suggests. They accept a) Love God and your neighbour - in some qualified form and perhaps: b) Suffer unjust harm rather than impose it; c) Render good for evil if you can, and d) The egalitarian project in principle if not practice. Most are willing to donate to global charities. They do try and sometimes succeed in love or forgiveness of the wicked and enemies, but certainly do not follow: “Lay down your life for humanity for Christ’s sake.” Perhaps they would accept UNV as an ideal. They accept liberal state welfare capitalism, wealth pursuit, inheritance of property, and legal punishment, and decline the invitation to give away their wealth and follow Jesus. Their actual practice shows a position on the Jesus teachings which is much closer to NL than to the UNV/unconditional altruist version of DGE, or the unconditionally extended duty of poverty relief. Admitting the huge gap between ideal and practice is not fatal to the DGE case, nor to the NL case. The concept of different levels of abstraction and moral modality in NL, illustrated in the NL meta-ethics and casuistry, and hopefully in the book as a whole, and the allowance of some modal moral difference between individual and social morality without denying the reality of both social and political morality, repeatedly allows one to find a way though apparent contradictions and paradoxes, and thereby to keep the dialogue between NLs and divine commands going. The next big step in the dialogue will have to be to address the environmental problems cited at the start, global tax evasion, and religious fanaticism and fundamentalism. These are the strengths of NL, and there are also resources in Eco-theology to condemn overdevelopment and reinterpret the emphasis on stewardship. The other big step is nuclear disarmament, and the doctrine of UNV is a strength of Divine Law and DGE. The case against nuclear deterrence from “just war” theory is conclusive, and a good example of a joint project of Natural and Divine Law advocates with which to end this work.

GLOSSARY Agape: Altruistic love discussed in the Bible as love of an extended or extreme type extending to strangers, sinners and enemies, and made possible only by God infusing it and without it necessarily being sought or seen as a means to the individual’s own salvation and eternal happiness. Contrasted by Nygren (1969) and others with caritas, which is also given by God, but consciously sought and practised as a means to the agent’s wellbeing crowning the search for wellbeing or eros. Agnosticism: see Theism Atheism: see Theism Analytic: An assertion is analytic if its truth is determined by reference to the meaning of the words alone, as in a correct definition of a term. Opposite to an assertion whose truth is determined by reference to experience or observation of the world or “synthetic”; and to “synthetic a priori” - always true but based on experience e.g., right and left are reversed in a mirror. Analogy of Attribution: This is part of a theory of meaning and part of the doctrine of Categories of being in Aristotle: the latter are: substance, action, passion, relation, quality, quantity, posture, possession, place, and time. Entities have being (or goodness) analogically if they are denoted by terms appropriate for such categories, said of a prime substance, without it being necessary for them to exist in the same independent way that the substance of which they are predicated exists. That way is the exemplary or paradigm case of an existent, and other existents exist by reference to the substance of which they are parts. Acts, relations etc and other states of the substance do truly exist as dependent properties of the substance in question in reality when truly predicated of the substance. Effects, signs or symptoms of these states can also be denoted by the same term, as “healthy” is said of medicine, exercise, urine, or complexion, which are not themselves the health of the body. An organisation can exist, as an effect of persons, and be “personal” without being a person. Bekker Numbers: These are used to identify the passages from Aristotle’s works and are quoted e.g., 1003a 15-30 Best Capacity Outcome Test: The concept of taking the characteristic or distinctive operation of a human capacity’s perfection or its best outcome as an indicative part-standard to assess morality of its use, e.g., truth for intellect or procreation as the best outcome of sex. Neither need be present in every exercise of capacity, nor is non-perfect use wrong, but capacitygoods should be only be obstructed for a reason.

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Caritas: See Agape Casuistry: Sometimes called “the method of determination” or “the method of object, end and circumstance.” A method of making practical moral decisions outlined in Chapter 5 featuring end to means to choice of action reasoning in a set of circumstances and assessing the tendency to wellbeing of types of action. Rules are followed ceteris paribus, not absolutely. The circumstances roughly correlate with the Aristotelian categories. One begins with whether the proposed act/object tends generally and abstractly to wellbeing; then specifies the act type in its circumstances, and checks for relevant rules and finally looks at the good of the particular instance of the act type in the actual circumstances, especially the agent’s intention in performing the action. The word is elsewhere used in a derogatory way as by Pascal to connote: a device for making insincere excuses using sophistry in reasoning or useless hair-splitting distinctions, privileging the letter over the spirit of the law. Lawyers reasoning from precedents in case law are sometimes said to be engaging in casuistry in a non-derogatory way. Categories: The doctrine of Categories of Aristotle: they are terms said of/predicated of prime substances, those which have a nature or essence, and can do things independently. Words designating such substances, and their dependent action, passion, relation, quality, quantity, posture, possession, place, and time. Substances are subjects of which they are said. They correlate roughly with casuistry questions eliciting circumstances who, with whom, what, why, to whom, how (by what means), how much, where, when. Deism: God caused the world, but there is no revealed religion. The world once created does not depend on God’s continuous intervention. Direction of Fit and Causality: see Speech Act theory Dualism: Minds and bodies are distinct entities and co-dependent or causally interactive; minds may be just a distinct property of body, but more commonly a separate agent/substance. Divine Glory Ethics: An Ethics in which God is taken as The Supreme Good, human wellbeing is potentially eternal, and unconditonal/extreme altruism is required or ideal for eternal wellbeing. A Revelation narrative about Providence is supplied. Epistemology: Study of definition, degrees, and types of knowledge; and of their relations, including reason, existence, and truth. Often an epistemological theory will favour one type or application of knowledge, etc. as primary, exemplary, or foundational, and others as secondary. Three main types of position are: Realism - we know many things about the world, based on perceptual experience and cognitive/scientific study of the nature of material substances; Idealism - we know many things but there is no sharp mind–matter distinction, since matter is ultimately a mental construct; and the transcendental philosophy of Kant which says our knowledge is limited to our subjective but common categorisation of appearances or phenomena presented in perception. Scepticism denies we know anything. Physicalism says everything knowable is material. Existence: In a Neo-Aristotelian typology of NL usages of words for being; for the types of “is”: (real, true, known, fact, the case), when we say truly that an entity, object or event X “is,” then “is” in Neo-Aristotelian terms, means primarily: the term X is a subject (grammatically) and denotes an individual (real being) with some individualised properties, defining or accidental. If we say the individual a has the property F, in an assertions, or other speech act, we ascribe the appropriate property - connoting words for its cluster of properties, like “cat” or “ginger,” symbolised by upper case letters, like F, to the denoted nameable existing thing, and attribute the property to the individual, usually

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symbolised by lower case letters, as in Fa. Aristotle himself predates the logical study of these usages. There are also for Aristotle “second substances” which are the abstracted species or types of the first substances, which exist in a secondary way; and there is thirdly our concepts or ideas of the meaning or dictionary sense all the terms we have used so far as they occur in our thoughts as we discuss existence, properties and truth. Thus for Aristotle, things “exist” in different senses/ways: in reality; instances of entities denoted by category terms; as conceptual meanings and second substances, and in our occurrent thoughts. In short, there exist multiple senses of “exist”: as applied to a particular specimen or token of a species or kind, type /kind as such; and to our concepts and thoughts about them. There are other senses of “is” and tests for existence that Aristotle does not theorise about: identity between individuals, symbolised today as “a=a,” meaning “a has all properties the same as a”; and constant correlations of various types, where the “is” an interdependent relation between propositions’ truth values, or means that they have the same truth value. In causality, a causes b, Aristotle does take causality to be a real relation. In: “It’s a fire” on seeing flame/smoke; this can mean: Gb is causally necessary, given Fa: or Fa is sufficient conjoined with Gb. Causality is a case of “a is related to b,” and causes exist as real in the category of relation in the way categories are real, but not substances. See Analogy of Attribution above. Extreme Altruism: This is a form of altruism going beyond natural kindness to others following the Golden Rule and following an IRP such as: IRP 8 “Love your enemies,” where love or respect is unconditional, not based on merit, worth, contribution, or on natural gifts, attractiveness, or family ties, or reciprocity, or moral virtue. Grand Narratives: Religious “total explanations” with a story about creation, God’s will, revelation, death, and meaning of life. Identity Theory: see Physicalism Interpersonal Responsiveness Principle (IRP): An imperative principle indicating how one should respond to others. (See Abbreviations for IPR1-9). Individuation: What makes an individual object or person to be unique or idiosyncratic thing. Matter in Aristotle is the principle of individuation for material things, but an individual divine “act of being” is needed for persons according to Aquinas, and a species specialissima and haeccietas or “thisness” according to Scotus. Christian existentialists Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Manley Hopkins and Gabriel Marcel, insist that matter alone is not sufficient for individuating persons. Justice: A virtue or perfecting disposition of character; and also a property of institutions. As the former, fairness in interactions involving exchanges and sharing of common goods; following moderate altruism of the Golden Rule, IRP 2 or 3; as the latter, justice is: freedom of opportunity to seek wellbeing, avoid harm; have equality of respect, right to avoid discrimination re public benefits; recognition of contribution, merit or desert, and survivalneed-satisfaction. Justice is reflected in Aristotle’s distributive, retributive and exchange notions of justice. Maxim of Admissibility: Unless a proposition explicitly contradicts itself, or the law of noncontradiction (see below) “Whatever is imaginable is possible.” Attributed to the Muslim school of Mutakallimun, including Al Gazzali, and used to preserve Islamic faith from Scientism. Hume, perhaps unwittingly, and ironically, uses the same maxim to question theism and the causal principle.

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Meta-ethics: A theory about what sort of thing Ethics is, and what we should expect from its study, as opposed to the specific norms of an ethical system. Models of Rationality: There are several possible models of the nature and scope rationality. According to the first, there is ultimately only one type of rationality. This is the level of natural and social science-probabilistic scientific reasoning, marked by physical observations of events predicted successfully as repeatably occurrent or made to occur experimentally according to some law-like generalisation which they confirm. On another model, it is permissible to then ask at level 2): Is there an ultimate uncaused cause of this systematic predictive success? Can this cause be attributed the knowledge which it causally enables, in some superlative degree or qualitatively different form? On this model there are two types of rational application. On a third model, one may go on to ask: does the entity given in answer to 2) have personal features or good or bad disposition to humans? If so can we affect a good outcome in this matter? The “3-R model” as used in this work allows all three levels of rational application. The process from R1 to R3 is one of decreasing demonstrative certainty, but Metaphysics and Natural Theology at R2 level still uses understanding and experience, and procedures of reason/causality about reason/causality itself, asking what its limits might be. At R3 level we are dependent on the being(s) searched for to self- disclose in our experience. Modality, and Assertoric, Imperative, and Moral Modes: The mood of an assertion is indicated by mood indicating words like: “It is necessary, probable, possible, unlikely, impossible that etc.,” indicating speaker confidence and knowledge. The mood of a command is indicated by words like: “It is required, desirable, permitted, forbidden, illegal that, etc.,” indicating a wish to make it the case that something be done or not. Moral Modalities include: prohibited, permitted, obligatory, required, advised, recommended, ideal, heroic etc., are sub-species of such imperatives. Mood indicating prefixes like: “It is necessary, true, prohibited, etc. that ….” These are sometimes called “neustics.” Muslim Microfinance: Muslims, following Aristotle, rejected charging interest on loans, sometimes called usury, and later usury was taken to only mean charging “excessive” interest. After the 1500’s, colonialist acceptance of interest-taking, but continued Muslim rejection, split Islam from capitalism to some degree, and today persists in different banking practices. Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank, which charges very low interest, is an example of this difference. In part, 9/11 may have been a symbolic rejection of Western capitalist abandonment of its own earlier and of strict Muslim rejection of interest taking. Mysticism: see Theism Mystical Religion: see Theism Neo-Aristotelian Virtue Ethics (NAVE): An Ethics based substantially based on an Aristotelian rationale without dependence on theological or religious beliefs. Naturalism: The belief that no supernatural entities exist. Minds have some apparent immaterial properties but cease with death. Negative Theology: The view that we can only meaningfully predicate negative attributes to God, including existence and knowledge. See also Theism Non-Contradiction: The “law” of Non-Contradiction goes back to Plato. It is: “A proposition and its negation cannot both be true at the same time, in the same respect.” Symbolically: – (P. -P); or equivalently, “A determinate property or predicate or predicative relation cannot be attributed to and denied of the same individual(s) at the same time and in the

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same respect.” Symbolically - (Fa. -Fa). The rule cannot be proved but is intuitively selfevident and denial renders discussion pointless. Dialectical ad hominem argument for it is possible. It can be invoked to rule out imagined possibilities allowed under the Maxim of admissibility - whatever is imaginable is possible. Some “imagined to be possible” states of affairs can be proved to be contradictory and so impossible. Fictional or meaningless or vague/indeterminate ascriptions are not covered; nor are assertions like: “What I am saying now is false.” Buddhists sometimes say such contradictions point to ineffable reality which both cannot be said to exist and can be said to exist. A system’s background assumptions and range of application alters truth value, e.g., lines are straight on Euclidian plains, but not on spheres. Ontology: Ontology studies: “What exists?” or being; and also knowledge, and what is said of subjects /substances. The context will often show which use of “real/exists/true’ the writer is adopting. One important case of such attribution for Aristotle is where we say “a is an S” which means that some individual, a, is a specimen or instance of a species or type S, where S is a noun for a substance-denoting word, like ‘gold’, “tree,” “cat” or “woman,” defined by a cluster of terms. So-called ‘first substances” are particular real instances of such potentially definable species or types of things, especially those having an internal principle of motion, those which can do things, and make things happen, like humans. A property, P, could be a defining characteristic or an accident of a’s substance; but all terms in the “categories” (see above) can be” said of” an existent, and themselves also instantiate substance dependent existents. The use of “is” to ascribe a property is called the “predicative” use, as opposed to just saying “X exists,” implying, but not ascribing X any properties. Any individual will have some identifying properties, even if they are not mentioned. Pantheism: God is the Universe, expressed in attributes of extension and mind, or an attribute of Nature. Panentheism: God interacts with the Universe, the world is in God and vice versa, God is super personal. Associated with Hartshorne’s Process theology. Phrastic: A word used to denote the core content of a proposition, which can also appear in a speech act that is not an assertion of something that can be true or false. Before Speech act theory, propositions were defined as entities which can be true or false. Since then it has been realised that their core content can be embedded in other non-truth-stating contexts. The core “that-clauses” common to assertions and commands or other speech acts (also called a “sentence radical” or “propositional content”) have been identified apart from propositions. The proposition is now seen as one type of speech act, one where the phrastic is asserted. An example will help explain: “that the window is open” is common to the following: It is true: that the window is open (Assertion); Make it the case: that the window is open (Command); Is it true: that the window is open? (Question); Wow! It is amazing: that the window is open (Exclamation); I promise to make it the case that: the window is open (Promise). (See also Speech Act Theory). They also appear in modal contexts (See Modality) like: It is necessary, probable, possible impossible that… And in imperative moral contexts like: It is prohibited that…obligatory that.…etc. Physicalism/Identity Theory: The concept or thesis that the relation of soul, mind, and body is such that humans are one physical entity, and soul and mind are reducible to bodily states. Also called physical monism, as opposed to dualism (Mind and body are distinct substances) or property-dualism (Mind and body are different properties of one entity)

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Principle: A general injunction or guideline in the indicative or imperative mood. If practical or moral, something like the general imperative “Act rationally; “Good is to be done, evil avoided,” Do no harm.” If indicative or descriptive, something like: “Every event has a cause”; It is false that (P and not P) can be true. Reason and Theoretic Knowledge: A person knows an object or proposition if they consciously experience or observe it, and in the theoretic sense, if it is an assertion, if it is true, they believe it, and they have adequate supporting reason to believe it. Intuitive experiential reasoning is just the understanding of concepts and their being applied to experience. Inferential reasoning in a general sense is the discovery, evidential support for, or application of, knowledge derived from experience, or the marshalling of evidence as a means to truth and knowledge. Practical reasoning can be used without any conscious assertion of truth, but usually presupposes some propositional truth. It is never demonstrative, and its conclusions are defeasible/cereis paribus Religion: Institutionalised community of belief and practice centred on supernatural powers with historical narrative, scripture or revelation, places of prayer or worship Secularism: The belief that religion is not necessary for ethics, law, or politics; and religion must be divorced from State power. Speech Act Theory- see also Modality and Phrastics: Speech Act Theory of Searle asserts we do things with words using different “directions of fit” and of causality between word and world, or world to word in each of these modes. This alters the relevant truth-conditions of the speech act. An assertion is false if word does not fit the world. Command is unfulfilled if world does not fit word. Summa Theologica: Is abbreviated as ST and referenced as: Part, Article, Question and Reply, e.g., Ia.Q79,2, ad 3 Synthetic a priori: For those who use this term, there are a) analytic a priori statements about meanings which are universally true regardless of the further facts, e.g., a triangle has three sides, bachelors are unmarried men; (Analytic above); b) Synthetic statements of fact e.g., This cake is a triangular shape; and c) Synthetic a priori claims: Universal truths which are about the facts e.g., When you look in the mirror, right and left are reversed; a thing cannot be red and green all over; every event has a cause. Theism: The belief that there is a God. In orthodox religions of the Book, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the belief that omniscient and quasi-personal. There are several other versions: Pantheism see above and Panentheism see also. In Negative Theology, according to John Scot Erigena and Pseudo Dionysius, God is beyond being; and so also beyond knowledge. For Mystical religion, found as a branch within all main religions, God is ineffable, but Mysticism allows for an ineffable experience of God. Atheism says there is no God. Agnosticism says we do not and probably will not ever know whether there is a God or not. Tobin Tax: A proposed levy on all stock exchange transactions of some fraction of 1%, proceeds to be put toward the Millennium goals of the United Nations, Global Governance report into world poverty. The Transcendentals: The transcendentals are: Being, Good, Truth, Oneness, Beauty. If one is present, so allegedly are the other four. If some object exists, it is good in that respect; it is a unity in some respect; it is beautiful in that respect; it is true that it is good. In God, all five transcendentals are perfectly realised. Humans as such are good qua existing (better than nothing; ontological good) and this good remains even if they are morally bad. With

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the idea of evil as a privations of being, the doctrine partly underpins the agape-related maxim: “Hate the sin, love the sinner.”

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Ardagh did his undergraduate study at St. Andrews University, and his graduate study at University of Windsor, Ontario, and University of Washington, Seattle. He has taught Philosophy at University of Wisconsin, Madison, University of San Francisco, and Business Ethics at Charles Sturt University. He is the author of Business as a Profession? (2010); a chapter in Human Resource Management: Ethics in Employment (ed. Pinnington, Macklin, and Campbell 2007); and journal articles in International Philosophical Quarterly, Professional Ethics, and Business and Professional Ethics Journal. His current interests include the application of the Nussbaum and Sen Capability approach to economic and political development theory and practical applications of nonviolence to dispute resolution.

INDEX # 3-R questions, xxviii, 16, 37

A Abraham–Isaac story, 15 absolute human transcendent worth, 218 abstract principles, 176 accountability, 188, 243 acronym, xv, 134, 137-138, 141, 143-145, 152, 269 active need-satisfaction, 227 afterlife, xviii, xxi, 9, 13, 21-22, 26, 115, 121, 125129, 156, 161, 170-171, 175, 184, 187-188, 191, 220, 223-224, 228, 231, 235-241, 250 agape, vi, xviii, xx, xxi, xxii, 9, 11-13, 17, 20-21, 29, 125, 155, 157-158, 164, 171-173, 175, 184, 188, 217-220, 223-224, 226-229, 237, 240, 242-244, 246, 248, 251, 253-254, 259, 266, 270-271 agent causality, 98, 106-107, 145, 271 agent neutral norms, 93-94 agnostic construct, 25, 188 agnostic version of NL, xxviii, 23, 29 ahimsa, xviii, xx, 17, 155, 157, 172-173, 183-184, 219, 223-225, 227-229, 233, 240, 248 Alkire, 91, 261 alms-giving, xxii, 21, 131 alternative dispute resolution, 155, 238 altruism and ontological commitment, vii, 18 altruistic moral commitment, 169 Amnesty International, 166, 185, 236, 243 analogy of attribution, 16, 26, 34-35, 103, 121-122, 133, 136-138, 140-141, 145, 150, 152, 197, 238, 246, 248 analytic thomism, 6 Ananda, 131, 266

anthropology, v, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvii, 7-8, 10, 12, 27-31, 33, 36-38, 40-43, 47-50, 53-4, 57, 60, 65, 68, 72, 77, 87, 89, 95, 99-100, 105, 118, 122, 126, 137-138, 140-142, 146, 168, 177, 179-180, 183184, 195, 197, 200, 202, 219, 222, 226, 238-239, 243, 248 anthropology of human needs, 168 anti-dictatorship campaigns, 221 apostolic succession, 14-15, 117, 125-126 Aquinas, Thomas, 164, 168, 262-263, 265, 270-271 architectonic, xxv, 8, 27, 33, 37-39, 42-45, 48, 53, 60, 85, 87, 106, 108, 122, 138, 141-142, 145, 147, 149-150, 170, 176-177, 196-197, 200-201, 203, 248 architectonic relation, 33, 39, 42-45, 60, 142, 176, 177 Arendt, Hannah, 127 argument which would seem to support HV, 202 Aristotle, xv, xviii-xxiv, xxvi, 6-7, 9-10, 12, 23, 25, 29-34, 37-38, 42-43, 45-46, 48-50, 53-57, 60, 67, 71-73, 77, 82-83, 94, 117-119, 121, 126-128, 130, 134, 137-139, 141-143, 146, 152, 163, 170, 175176, 178, 180-181, 184, 186, 195, 197-198, 218219, 223, 226, 230, 232, 240, 243, 245, 253-257, 261-262, 266-268, 270-271 artificial persons, 86, 138, 140, 144, 146 Augustine, xxii, xxiv, 3, 6, 9-10, 13, 21, 24-25, 94, 117, 129, 135-136, 156, 164, 168, 170, 218, 220, 236, 244, 248, 250, 252 Augustine to Erasmus, 25 Austin, J. L., 261 Averroes, 42, 218

B basis for rights, 183

276

Index

benevolence, vi, xx, xxii-xxiii, xxv, 57, 77, 88, 157, 161, 177, 217, 220, 222-224, 226, 230, 238, 240241, 243-244 best-capacity-outcome test, 205 bests outcomes of capacity, 189 Billings, 195 Bok, 90-91, 262 Bradley, D., 262 brahmacharya, xx Brentano, F., 262 Brock, G., 262 Brown, D., 262 brute facts, 45, 72, 104, 261 Buber, M., 262 Buddhist, xx, xxvii, 131, 163, 171, 183, 187, 236, 239 business organisational quasi-person, ix, 178

C caliphate, 130, 222 Campbell, T., 262, 269 canon law, 6, 135 capitalist system, 52, 181, 234 caritas, xx, xxi, xxii, 9, 11, 17, 25, 29, 129, 161, 164, 172-173, 175-176, 183-184, 188, 217, 221, 223224, 226-229, 233, 237, 240, 244, 253-254 casuistry, xxv, 8-9, 17, 21-22, 27, 30, 46-48, 50, 6263, 65-66, 68, 71, 73, 78-80, 82-84, 86-90, 92-93, 107, 118, 123, 129, 134, 136, 138-141, 143-145, 147-148, 150, 152, 179-180, 196-197, 203-206, 218-219, 252, 254, 261-262, 264, 270 categorical imperative, xv, xxiii, 19, 28, 34, 56, 62, 87-88, 129, 146, 175, 183, 194, 224, 227, 231-232 categories, 31-32, 34, 35, 60, 72, 93, 101-102, 119, 126, 134, 139-140, 196, 208-209, 253-255, 257 causal principle, 11, 34, 75, 102, 105, 235, 249, 255 charging for prayer, 233 children of God, 13-14, 67 Chisholm, R., 262, 269 Christendom, xi, 136, 175, 228 Christian existentialists, 14, 218, 255 Christianity, xxiv, 6, 10, 13, 21, 23, 27, 122, 124, 130-131, 135, 156, 167, 170-171, 185, 219, 239, 241, 250, 258, 263, 270 Christians in Science and Technology, 120, 122, 262 Cicero, 6, 71, 163 circle of reciprocity, 184 circumstances, vii, xv, xx, xxiii, xxv, 4, 14, 21, 23, 27, 32, 43, 50, 56, 60, 62-63, 65-66, 69-71, 73, 75-77, 79-85, 87-90, 92-94, 104, 107, 131, 133134, 140, 146-148, 151-152, 156, 159-160, 175, 179-180, 186-188, 196-197, 200, 203-204, 206-

207, 218, 220-222, 225-228, 230-232, 238-239, 244, 254 Circumstances, vii, 86, 89, 204 City of God, 135, 220 City of Man, 135, 164, 220 Coady, C., 262, 269 collective organisational acts, 137 communitarians, 222 conditionality, 243 Confucius, xxvii conscience, xix, 37-38, 47, 63-64, 67, 71-73, 85, 88, 97, 109, 138, 144, 194, 198, 203, 230-231, 239, 244, 261, 264, 266 consciousness, 38, 43, 97-99, 102, 105-107, 109110, 116, 166, 205, 223, 263, 271 consensus, xix, 3, 13-14, 22, 60, 65, 68-72, 79, 9094, 130, 161, 196, 218, 222, 226 contraception, 13, 130, 189-195, 200-201, 205, 207, 213, 246-247, 265, 267 contradictions, 192, 237, 252, 257 corporate personhood, 138 correspondence theory, xxiv, 7, 34 Cottingham, J., 262, 269 Covey, S., 262 criteria for being, 32 Critique of Judgment, 16 Critique of Practical Reason, 28, 264

D Damiani, Peter, 15, 28 Davies, B., 262 Deck, J., 263 Declaration of Human Rights, 5 defeasible, 58, 62, 69, 76, 85, 87-88, 90, 94, 191, 219, 238-239, 258 degrees or levels of abstractions, 22 Demiurgos, 12, 163 designed means of evasion, 184 DGE (divine glory ethics), v, xv, xxiv, xxvi-xxviii, 6, 8-15, 20, 22, 24-25, 27, 95, 120, 123-125, 127, 129, 130-131, 133-136, 152, 155, 157, 159, 161, 168, 176, 189, 191-192, 196, 201, 204, 207, 209, 212-213, 217-220, 236, 239-240, 245-248, 251252, 254 dialectical, xix, 5, 20, 34, 68, 73, 77, 90, 169, 197, 239, 241, 244, 257 differential features of intelligibility, 40 Dine, J., 263 directedness on an object or noema, 99 direction of causality, 43-44, 76, 145 direction of fit, 8, 10, 40, 43-44, 87, 106 director, xxv, 27, 39, 54, 138, 145, 150

Index Divine Law, xi, xviii, xx-xxiv, xxvi-xxviii, 9-10, 23, 25-26, 57, 124, 128, 130, 136, 157, 188, 192, 195, 204, 217, 219, 238, 245, 252, 266 doctrines of li, 14 DOE structure, 107, 122, 142, 145, 147, 150-151, 177, 203 domain, 13, 17, 41, 47, 49-51, 54, 63-64, 70, 77, 137-139, 141, 145, 147, 151, 175, 177, 179-180, 183-184, 187-188, 193, 208, 217, 239, 242, 244, 267 Donaldson, T., 263 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 14, 218, 244, 250, 255 Doyal, L., 263 Dretske, F., 263 Dreyfus, H., 263, 270 dualist interactionist, 137, 141 Dulles, A., 263 Dunfee, T., 263

E Eccles, D., 263 enabler (DOE) structure, 39, 107, 122, 142, 145, 147, 150-151, 177, 203 ends of business, 179 end-users, 134, 151 equality of each and all souls in worth before God, 228 equality of worthy individuals alone, 218 especially human living natures with a good or telos, xxiv esse or being as such, 124 essence, xxiv, xxvi, 10, 13, 17, 31, 37, 82, 87, 116, 121-122, 140, 146, 249, 254, 263 ethical decision procedure, 136, 138, 140, 144, 151 Etzioni, A., 263 evil done to innocents, 235 experiences of enlightenment, 221 external stakeholders, 52, 134, 144, 147, 150-152, 181 Exxon Valdez disaster, 144, 152

F false risk assessment, 240 family as an obstacle to perfection and sanctification, 233 fatherhood of God, 222, 228 Fatherhood of God, 228 Feuerbach, L., 263 Finnis, J., 263 Fisher, R., 263

277 Fletcher, J., 263 Flew, A., 263 folk, 29, 37-38, 41-42, 48, 65, 72, 99-100, 141, 162, 201, 203, 238 folk anthropology, 42, 65, 72, 141, 162, 201, 203, 238 folk psychology, 37, 48, 65, 100 Foot, P., 263 Forrest, P., 263 Frankfurt, H., 263 free-will defence, 235 future reciprocity, 227

G Galtung, J., 264 general principles, xxiii, xxv, 4, 21, 27, 54, 73, 88, 139, 144 Gert, B., 264 Gilson, E., 264, 270 global ethics, 13, 29, 161, 163, 167, 221, 241, 245 global world order, 8, 242 Gocke, B., 264 God, v, xv, xviii, xxi-xxiv, xxvi-xxviii, 4, 7, 9-16, 18-23, 25-33, 35-36, 41, 43, 45, 48-49, 55, 57, 60, 63, 73, 95, 115, 117-131, 139, 143, 156-157, 161, 163-165, 169-173, 175, 177, 182-184, 188, 192198, 201, 204-206, 212, 217-220, 223-224, 226227, 231-244, 246, 248-258, 261-264, 266-268, 271 God as quasi-, 22 Golden Rule, xv, xxiii, xxv, 18, 23, 30, 54, 56, 66, 68-69, 72-73, 81, 87-88, 129, 146, 157, 161, 170171, 175-176, 181-185, 187, 194, 224-225, 227, 230, 243-244, 247, 255, 272 Good Samaritan case, 227 Goodpaster, K., 264 Gough, I., 263 grace, xxii, xxv, 9-11, 25, 27, 124, 128-129, 131, 195, 223-224, 244 grand narratives, 17, 21, 117, 120, 155, 169, 188, 222, 239, 255 GREAOS (goals, roles, ethical decisions, actions, impact on others), xv, 138, 141, 143-146, 152 Grisez, G., 264 group casuistry, 137, 151 Guantanamo, 229

H habitual self-deception, 49 Haldane, J., 264

278

Index

happiness, xv, xxiii, 6, 19, 23, 41, 45, 53-54, 56, 6162, 64, 67, 73, 80-81, 87-88, 129, 142, 146, 156157, 170, 175, 183, 185, 189, 195, 198, 221, 223, 230-232, 241, 245, 250, 253, 261, 271 Hare, R., 264 Hart, H. L., 264 Hell, xxi, 11, 12, 127-128, 171, 234, 237, 251-252 heroes, xviii, 22-23, 64, 117, 121, 129, 173, 221, 229-233, 240, 245, 248, 268 Hick, J., 264, 270 highest being, xxv, xxviii, 27, 30, 31, 35, 127 highest good, xi, xvi, xxvi, xxvii, 30, 42, 57, 60, 81, 177, 239, 250, 262 Hinduism, 13, 131, 156, 163, 234, 239 homosexuality, 13, 189, 191, 213, 246-247 Horton, K., 266 human explandum, 65 human needs, xx, 40, 48, 178, 183, 262 human wellbeing (eudaimonia), xviii, xix, xxv, 21, 27, 35, 41-42, 45, 47-50, 53, 60, 63, 73, 81, 107, 123, 139, 142-143, 147, 150, 175-176, 179-180, 186, 195, 200, 203, 217, 224, 228, 230, 247-248, 254, 261 Hume, 4-5, 11, 26, 28, 59, 116, 146, 164, 223, 233, 249-250, 255, 268 HV (Humanae Vitae), xv, 192-195, 198, 201, 205207, 213 hypernorms, 168

Islam, xvii, xxiv, 7, 12-13, 21, 27-28, 42, 130, 156, 164, 167, 170, 239, 248, 256, 258, 266 Israel, 131, 229, 242, 247 I-It and I-Thou Dimensions, vii, 17 I-Thou relation, xi, 155, 189, 207, 213, 246

J Jain Hinduism, xx, 131 Jesus of Nazareth, xx, 22, 157, 163, 223 job, 82, 121, 133-135, 209, 234, 249-250 Journal of Global Ethics, 167, 225, 241, 268, 271 Judaism, 13, 21, 156, 163, 167, 170, 239, 258 just war, 13, 17, 21-22, 29, 56, 69-71, 77, 84, 86, 91, 131, 135, 147, 155-156, 159, 161, 164-166, 168, 170, 172, 182, 185, 196, 220, 227, 237, 247, 252 just war theory, 131, 135, 156, 159, 168 justice, vi, xviii, xix-xx, xxii-xxiii, xxv-xxviii, 8, 1213, 17-23, 25-27, 29, 30, 42, 46-48, 55-58, 60-62, 64, 68, 85, 90, 93, 118, 128, 134, 136-137, 139, 141, 144-146, 148-149, 151, 156-164, 166-168, 170-171, 173, 175-177, 181-188, 190, 196, 217231, 233-234, 236-244, 247, 251, 255, 261-262, 265, 267-271 justice/caritas distinction, 25 Justinian, 6

K I identity between individuals, 31, 255 imaginable, 28, 34, 48, 121, 142, 192, 235, 237, 249, 255, 257 imitation of Christ, 175 imperialist dispossession, 229 incarnation, xxiii, xxiv, 10, 125, 188, 234, 236, 250 inclusive concept of existence, 30 incommensurability, 195-197 incommensurable, 8, 194, 196 indeterminable properties, 30 indigenous cultures, 177 inquisitions, 234 internal stakeholders, 134, 137, 150-152 interpretation of signs, 99 introspection, 99 IRP (Interpersonal Responsiveness Principle), xv, xxii-xxiv, xxvi-xxvii, 9, 18-19, 21, 23, 27, 55-56, 62, 68, 72, 124-125, 128, 131, 135-136, 169, 181185, 187, 217-218, 226, 240-241, 244, 247, 255 IRP claims, 217 ISIS, 20, 77, 132, 234

Kantianism, 3, 5, 15 Kenny, A., 264, 270 KGR (Knowledge of God and religion), xv, xxiv, xxvii, 9, 23, 29 kinaesthetic bodily experiences, 100, 105 kindness, xix, xxi, 18-19, 57, 77, 136, 176, 182, 184186, 217, 221-228, 232, 236, 239-242, 244, 255 King, Martin Luther, xi, xviii, xx, 22, 157, 161, 173, 182, 220-221, 223, 229 Kretzmann, N., 264-265 Kung, Hans, 173

L Lawrence, G., 265 leader groups, 134 level A capacities, 37, 40 level B capacities, 38 level C capacities, 39 level of abstraction, xxviii, 21, 65-67, 71, 79, 82, 144, 146, 197, 203 Lewis, H. D., 265 Lisska, A., 265

Index logical self-consistency, 193 logically possible worlds, 249

M MacIntyre, Alisdair, 168 Mackie, J. L., 265 Maimonides, 26 Marcel, Gabriel, 14, 255 marks of wellbeing/happiness, 46 Martin, David, 160, 172 martyrs, 23, 129, 131 Matthews, J., 264 maxim of admissibility, 28, 249, 257 Mead, G. H., 265 memory, 37-38, 41, 43, 47, 98-99, 109-110, 116117, 144, 218 Mencius, xxvii Menninger, K., 265 meta-ethical framework, 246 meta-ethics, xi, xxiv-xxviii, 6, 7, 9-10, 14-16, 22-23, 25, 30, 38, 42, 48-49, 60, 64, 134, 139, 143, 148, 176, 179, 181, 189, 217, 245, 247, 252, 256 methodological individualism, 133, 138, 152 millennium goals, 226, 247, 258 mind-dependent objects, 100 Mobbs, F., 265 modal operators, 44, 115 modern moral philosophy, 232, 240, 261 modes of moral responsibility, 194, 196-197 modes of responsibility, 194, 198 moral heroism, 17, 197, 219, 221, 230, 232, 240 moral modalities, xxv, 27, 30, 62-64, 79, 89, 93-94, 140, 256 moral psychology, xxv, 12, 27, 44, 126, 146, 183, 221, 232, 241 moral reasoning, v, 7, 57, 59, 79-80, 90, 98, 194, 228 multiple description, 104 Murdoch, I., 265 Murphy, M., 265, 271 Murray, E., 267 mutually dependency, 177

N Nagel, T., 265 naturalist faith, 117 nature, xi, xix, xxiv-xxvii, 3, 5-13, 16, 18, 21, 26, 30, 32, 35, 40-41, 46-49, 60, 66-67, 69, 72, 86, 94, 116-118, 120-124, 126-127, 141-143, 145, 152, 157, 169, 171, 178, 186, 190, 192, 198-199, 201,

279 217, 222, 230, 235, 237, 251, 254, 256-257, 265266 NAVE (Neo-Aristotelian Virtue ethics), v, xv, xxiv, xxvi-xxviii, 4, 6-13, 15, 18, 20-21, 23, 25-34, 3637, 41-46, 48-49, 52-53, 56-57, 60, 62-63, 67, 72, 78-79, 87, 91-92, 94-95, 115, 117-120, 122, 124130, 133-135, 139-141, 152, 155-156, 159, 169170, 175-177, 181-184, 186-192, 196, 201, 204, 206-210, 212-213, 217-220, 222-223, 226, 230231, 236, 239-241, 243-248, 256 NAVE anthropology, 41 NE (Nicomachean Ethics), xv, xxiv, 32, 34-35, 4546, 60, 127, 197, 263 near-death experiences, 15, 21, 125 Neo-Aristotelian model of the Ethics, vii, 47 new natural law, xv, 6, 9, 29, 193-200 NL (Natural Law), xi, xv-xxviii, 3-16, 21-23, 25-30, 34-35, 37-38, 41-42, 48, 53, 57, 62, 65, 72-73, 7576, 78, 80, 83, 95, 103, 117-118, 121, 124-125, 128-131, 133-137, 141-143, 146, 152, 155, 157, 159-160, 163-164, 168, 175, 177, 181-182, 188189, 192-197, 200-202, 208, 213, 217-222, 226, 234-235, 239, 245-248, 252, 254, 261-265, 270271 NL-DGE peak period, 25 NNL (New Natural Law of Grisez and Finnis), xv, 9, 193-200 noema, 99, 102 non-identity, 103 non-violence doctrine, 228 not their wrong doing, 223 noumena, 26, 233 Nous, 12 Nussbaum, M., 266 Nygren, A., 266

O omni-benevolence requirement, 226 ontological argument for God, 13 ontological commitment, 19, 169, 172, 217, 240 ontological evils, 33 ontology, v, xxiv, xxvii, 7-12, 19, 22, 25-26, 28-34, 36, 53, 57, 60, 67, 93, 101, 103, 118-120, 124, 134, 184, 195, 219, 235-236, 238-240, 248, 257 onus of match, 44 operator, 39, 45, 54, 58, 99, 141-142, 145, 177 orders of consideration, 43, 54, 59, 75, 84-85, 87, 170, 201 ordinary language, 28, 83, 86, 116 organisational amorality, 133 organisational authority, 133 organisational relation, vii, 47, 141, 176

280

Index

overload problem, 50, 180, 230 overload–omni-benevolence problem, 226 Owens, J., 266, 271 ownership, 181, 245, 265

P Page, G., 266 Palestinian land, 242 panentheism, 131, 156, 169, 171, 257, 258 Pascal, 14, 26, 126, 140, 244, 254 past evils, 234, 236 Paul of Tarsus, xx Penrose, W., 266 phenomena, 15, 16, 26, 65, 72, 97-100, 102, 118, 233, 254 phenomenological, 28, 97 phrastic, 43, 58, 99, 102, 106-107, 110, 257 phrastic or propositional content, 58 physical object, 42, 96-105, 107, 110-111, 118, 126, 271 physicalism, v, 26, 95-97, 99-101, 108-110, 125-126, 218, 226, 233, 248, 254-255, 257, 263-264, 267, 271 Plantinga, A., 266 Plato, xv, xxiii, xxvi, 3, 5-7, 12, 49, 56, 68, 84, 121, 163, 168, 171, 250-251, 256 Pogge, T., 266, 270 political economy, xxviii, 47-48, 60, 146, 175, 245 politics, vii, xxii-xxiii, xxv, xxviii, 6-7, 12, 17, 22, 27, 29, 35, 46-48, 53, 77, 127, 150, 157, 165, 176, 177, 179, 183-184, 258, 267, 272 Popper, K., 263 porn industry business ethics of A.T.&T, 210 pornography, 147, 189-191, 207-208, 212-213, 246247 Porter, J., 266 positive law, xvii, xxi, xxii, 3, 5, 158, 252 possible persons, 198, 201 pragmatic prohibitions of violence, 155 prayer, 12, 14, 121, 123, 125-127, 131, 165, 217, 224, 233, 258 precepts are common to NL and DGE, 217 primary precepts, xix, xxiv, xxv, 4-5, 54, 57, 60, 73, 83, 163, 168, 197, 217, 239 principle of humanity, 57, 168, 222, 225-226, 242 principle of interpersonal responsiveness, xxii, 55, 182 principle of non-contradiction, xix, 34, 68 privacy, 103, 178, 191, 227 problem of evil, 21, 26, 121, 127, 224, 234-235, 250 profit, 47, 82, 152, 178-179, 220 property dualism, xxvii, 27, 42, 95, 115, 122, 219

propositional contents or phrastics, 44, 99, 103, 106 prudence i, 55 psychic phenomena, 125 Purtill, R., 267

Q Qualia, 99, 104, 264 qualitative ranking of goods, 183 quasi-mind, 133, 134, 138, 144 quasi-personal model of the organisation., 134 quasi-rule, 35 quasi-selves, 35

R Rawls, J., 267 real but imperfect similarity, 118 reason recovered, 28 reason restoration, 28 reciprocity, xxii, xxv, 17-18, 20, 47, 55-56, 62, 6768, 71, 77, 82, 88-90, 128, 139, 145-146, 149, 151, 160-161, 163, 170, 172, 175, 181-184, 186187, 220, 224-225, 227-228, 230, 240, 242, 244, 255 Reid, T., 271 relief of extreme poverty, 175, 222, 227 religious experience, xxviii, 13, 14, 17-18, 20-21, 125-127, 169, 172, 223, 228, 250, 268 religious narratives, 172, 221, 233 repertoire of capacities and/or role incumbents, 147 representational significance, 105, 110 respect for persons as ends in themselves, 175 responsibility for the past, 251 revelation, 9, 29, 117-118, 122, 173, 177, 184-185, 188, 192-193, 217, 219, 240-241, 243, 251, 255, 258 revised stakeholder model, vii, 141, 149 Rickert, K. G., 267 Robinson, D., 263 Robinson, H., 267 Rohingas, 223 Ross, W. D., 267

S saints, 22, 40, 117, 121, 129, 173, 221, 229-231, 237, 248, 268 sanctity of the human person as such, 218 Sandel, M., 267 satyagraha, vi, 20, 158-159, 170, 219, 223, 229, 246 scala naturae, 33, 43, 87

Index scale of natures, xxvii, 31 Schlesinger, G. N., 267 scholasticism, 28 scope and stringency, 217 Scotus, 9, 14, 17, 26, 94, 126, 218, 255 Searle, J., 267, 271 second substances, 31, 255 self-evidence, xix, 5, 74, 75, 124 self-evident, xix, xxiv, 4-5, 9, 21, 23, 72-77, 91, 115, 128, 194, 196-197, 239, 257 self-sufficiency and human rights, 185 semi-organised fields, 50, 139, 179-180 sense data, 99, 100, 103-105, 115-116 Sermon on the Mount, xx, xxi, 10, 21, 128-130, 135136, 170, 191, 212, 250-252 shamrock, 10 Sharp, G., 267, 271 Silver rule, xv, xxiii, 15, 56, 68, 72, 184, 226 Singer, Peter, 176 SMB (The Soul-Mind-Body relation), xv, xxv, xxvii, 9, 23, 27, 37, 95 social contract theory, 5, 52, 181, 222 soul/self of a composite person, 103 Spectrum of Non-violence, vii, 158 Speech Act Theory, 8, 10, 34, 36, 108, 257-258 ST (Summa Theologiae), xvi, 7, 43, 46, 53, 68, 80, 88, 124, 126-128, 195, 258, 271 St. Augustine, xx, 9, 156, 164, 168, 220 St. Dominic, 131 St. Francis, 164 St. Patrick, 10 stakeholder model, 138, 148, 151 stakeholder theory, 137, 148 stoics, xvii, xxvi, 6, 7, 31, 163 strangeness, 233, 237 strangers, xi, xv, xxi-xxiii, xxviii, 18, 21, 23, 49, 63, 128, 131, 157, 163, 170, 176, 179, 182, 187, 223, 225-226, 233, 240, 243, 253 Stump, E., 262, 265, 267 subjectivity, 94, 103, 239 substance-denoting word, 31, 257 supererogation, 62, 262 supernatural experiences, 14-15 Swinburne, R., 267, 271 synderesis, 88

T Tallis, R., 267 Tao, xxvii, 20, 170 tapasya, xx, 165 Taylor, Charles, 65, 168, 263, 267-268 temerity, 49, 127

281 temporal happiness, xviii, 18, 20, 157, 170, 240 the highest good (THG), xi, xvi, xxv-xxviii, 9, 12, 23, 27, 30, 32, 35-36, 42, 47-48, 53, 57, 60, 62, 64, 87, 95, 121-123, 130, 143, 170, 177, 203-205, 218, 239-240, 242, 244 theological virtues, 9-10, 21, 25, 128-129, 224 theory of right desire, 184 Theory of Truth and Meaning, 34 Thomism, 5-6, 8, 28, 124, 176, 192, 219 Thomists, 6, 29, 38, 119, 121, 176, 249 Thompson, J., 268 Tit for Tat, xv, xxiii, 21, 55 tithing duty, 226 Tobin taxes, 243 total interpretation, 20, 117, 155, 169, 239, 241, 244, 250 trinity, 10, 236 truth force, 219, 229 tubes of grace, 11

U unconditional altruism, ix, xx, xxiv, 20, 170, 172, 188, 233 unconditional non-violence, vi, 21, 131, 163, 229 Unger, Peter, xiii unindividuted agent intellect, 218 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, xxviii universal duties of justice and charity, 29 unmoved mover, xxv, xxvi, 7, 9, 12, 23, 30-31, 37, 43, 121, 124, 139, 170 Urmson, J., 268 Ury, W., 263 utilitarian, 6, 83, 86, 146, 175-176, 183, 186, 208, 210, 219, 221, 230-231 utilitarianism, xv, xxiii, xxvi, 3, 6-7, 15, 23, 29, 56, 86, 134, 146, 157, 184, 221, 230-231, 266

V van Hooft, S., 268, 271 vision of God, 127

W Walsh, A., 268 Walzer, M., 268 Ward, K., 268, 272 wellbeing is, 45 Westphalia, 156, 223 Wittgenstein, L., 268

282 world order, 130, 161, 166, 185, 187, 226, 228, 243244 world order model project, 166 world soul, 12, 163 worthy poor, 173, 244, 248 wrong doers, 223

Index

Y Yandell, K., 268 Yazidis, 223 yi and ren, 14