Virtue and Meaning: A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective [Hardcover ed.] 1108477887, 9781108477888

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VIRTUE AND MEANING

The revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics can be seen as a response to the modern problem of disenchantment, that is, the perceived loss of meaning in modernity. However, in Virtue and Meaning, David McPherson contends that the dominant approach still embraces an overly disenchanted view. In a wide-ranging discussion, McPherson argues for a more fully re-enchanted perspective that gives better recognition to the meanings by which we live and after which we seek, and to the fact that human beings are the meaning-seeking animal. In doing so, he defends distinctive accounts of the relationship between virtue and happiness, other-regarding demands, and the significance of linking neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics with a view of the meaning of life and a spiritual life where contemplation has a central role. This book will be valuable for philosophers and other readers who are interested in virtue ethics and the perennial question of the meaning of life.     is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Creighton University. He is the editor of Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge, ).

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VIRTUE AND MEANING A Neo-Aristotelian Perspective DAVID McPHERSON Creighton University

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University Printing House, Cambridge  , United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, th Floor, New York,  , USA  Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne,  , Australia –, rd Floor, Plot , Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – , India  Anson Road, #–/, Singapore  Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge. It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/ : ./ © Cambridge University Press  This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published  Printed in the United Kingdom by TJ International Ltd, Padstow Cornwall A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data : McPherson, David (Assistant Professor of Philosophy), author. : Virtue and meaning : a Neo-Aristotelian perspective / David McPherson, Creighton University, Omaha. : Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY, USA : Cambridge University Press, . | Includes bibliographical references and index. :   (print) |   (ebook) |   (hardback) |   (paperback) |   (epub) : : Meaning (Philosophy) | Aristotle. | Virtue. | Ethics. | Happiness. :  .   (print) |  . (ebook) |  /.–dc LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/  ---- Hardback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For John and Fiona

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Contents

Acknowledgments

page ix

Introduction: Toward Re-Enchantment 



The Human Form of Life



Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism: The Disenchanted Version The Human Difference: Rationality The Standpoint from within Our Human Form of Life: The Space of Meaning Strong Evaluative Meaning Going Further: The Way Forward



    

Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning



The Instrumentalist Account The Constitutive Account: Strong Evaluative Version The Constitutive Account: Weak Evaluative Version Virtue Apart from Happiness? Virtue, Loss, and the Meaning of Life



    

Other-Regarding Concern



MacIntyre on Other-Regarding Concern Intrinsic Worth: Dignity and Sanctity Fully amongst Us: Solidarity with the Severely Afflicted and Other Marginalized Humans Moral Absolutes Spheres of Other-Regarding Concern: Universal and Particular



    

Cosmic Outlooks



Hursthouse’s Three Theses and Williams’ Challenge Identifying What Is Noblest and Best Against Quietism: The Need for a Moral Ontology Rival Cosmic Outlooks A Poker-Faced Universe?

    

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Contents Homo Religiosus



What Is Spirituality? What Kind of Naturalism? Human Beings as Homo Religiosus The Contemplative Life Theistic Spirituality Objections and Replies

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     

Conclusion



References Index

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Acknowledgments

In the last chapter of this book I discuss G. K. Chesterton’s view of the importance of taking things with gratitude rather than taking things for granted. It is my pleasure here to acknowledge with gratitude all those who have contributed to making this book a reality. I thank the College of Arts and Sciences at Creighton University for a Summer Faculty Research Grant and for other support (including several course releases) that enabled me to complete this book in a timely manner. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Philosophy Department at Creighton for a supportive and intellectually stimulating environment. I would like to thank especially Ross Romero, Patrick Murray, Jeanne Schuler, Richard White, Amy Wendling, and Anne Ozar for many good discussions. I am also grateful to all the students in my courses who have helped me to think through many of the issues discussed here. I offer my heartfelt thanks to John Cottingham, Fiona Ellis, SophieGrace Chappell, Chris Toner, and my spouse Kirstin for generously reading the whole manuscript and providing very helpful and insightful feedback that enabled significant improvements. I also thank Richard Kim for reading part of the manuscript and for a number of helpful conversations, which led to improvements. There are others whom I would like to thank for beneficial conversations: namely, Tom Angier, Greg Beabout, Tal Brewer, Tom Cavanaugh, Brad Cokelett, Paolo Costa, Tony Cunningham, Howard Curzer, Cora Diamond, Sam Fleischacker, Jennifer Frey, Owen Goldin, Stephen Grimm, Andy Gustafson, John HackerWright, Ryan Hanley, Stan Harrison, Celeste Harvey, John Houston, Chris Kaczor, John Kekes, Ian James Kidd, Kristján Kristjánsson, Arto Laitinen, Simon May, Francis Petruccelli, Doug Rasmussen, Bob Roberts, Dan Russell, Joshua Schulz, Lucas Scripter, Roger Scruton, Sara Shady, Meghan Sullivan, Charles Taylor, Candace Vogler, Brandon Warmke, and Mark Wynn. I would also like to thank audiences at Saint Louis University, University of Notre Dame, Providence College, College of Saint ix

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Acknowledgments

Mary, Viterbo University, Bethel University, Saint John’s University, University College Dublin, University of Oxford, University of Leeds, Heythrop College, and Creighton University for helpful feedback on material related to this book. Chapter  is a revised and much expanded version of an essay that originally appeared in International Philosophical Quarterly : (): –. Chapter  is a revised and much expanded version of a book chapter that appeared in David McPherson (ed.), Spirituality and the Good Life: Philosophical Approaches (Cambridge University Press, ). I am grateful for the permission to re-use and re-work this material. I thank my editor at Cambridge University Press, Hilary Gaskin, for all her good advice and support for this project. I also thank Hal Churchman, Lisa Carter, YassarArafat Abdulnasser, Liz Steel, and Katherine Koopman for their assistance in bringing this book to press. I want especially to thank John Cottingham and Fiona Ellis for all their support, encouragement, and friendship over the years and for their example in being humane, spiritually engaged philosophers. I have dedicated this book to them in gratitude. Finally, I would like to thank my family. In particular, I thank my parents for all their love and support over the years. My deepest love and gratitude goes to my wife Kirstin, who is my dearest friend and my life companion, and who has profoundly shaped my moral, spiritual, and intellectual outlook to my great betterment; and to our children, Clare, John, and Peter, who bring so much joy to our lives and help keep us oriented toward what is most important.

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Introduction: Toward Re-Enchantment

This book, not unlike many other works of philosophy, grew out of a sense of dissatisfaction. In particular, while I have been drawn to the Aristotelian tradition of virtue ethics and find much that is congenial in the revival of this tradition in the last half-century or so, I have also been dissatisfied with a flatness in the dominant approach among neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists. This dominant approach emphasizes an observational (or disengaged) standpoint rather than a participative (or engaged) standpoint, as seen in the stress it puts on an analogy between human flourishing and the flourishing of other living things, and thereby it overlooks many of the meanings by which we live and after which we seek. In other words, the dominant approach fails to account properly for our distinctive nature as the meaning-seeking animal. And it has thus offered an overly disenchanted understanding of our human form of life. This book seeks to overcome this constriction and argues for a re-enchanted Aristotelian perspective; that is, it aims to give better recognition to the meanings by which we live and after which we seek. Although I believe the dominant approach has been overly disenchanted, at the same time it is also the case that neo-Aristotelians have been concerned to respond to the modern problem of disenchantment, that is, the perceived loss or at least threat of a loss of meaning or value (used equivalently), especially due to the rise of the modern scientific worldview. In the field of meta-ethics, this problem has expressed itself in the supposed fact-value divide – the divide between is and ought – which informs prominent subjectivist accounts of value. But, more generally, the problem of disenchantment arises from the prevalence of various forms of scientism in modern intellectual life. In responding to the problem of  

I borrow the term “the meaning-seeking animal” from Sacks : ch. , though I fill it out in my own way. The concept of “disenchantment” is derived from Weber  [].



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Virtue and Meaning



disenchantment, all neo-Aristotelians can be seen as seeking varying degrees of re-enchantment (and so none endorses a completely disenchanted perspective). The central task of this book then is to articulate and defend an even fuller kind of re-enchantment than is found in any of the major views on offer. I distinguish my position from two main strands of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. The first is the sort of ethical naturalism that was suggested by Elizabeth Anscombe and subsequently defended by Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, Alasdair MacIntyre, and others. It is the dominant approach and the one I am most concerned to go beyond. Those who adopt this approach can be seen as seeking a minimal form of reenchantment in that they attempt to overcome the supposed fact-value divide by defending a conception of natural normativity according to which ethical evaluations of human beings are understood on analogy with our evaluations of other living things with respect to whether they are good specimens of their kind. The second strand is the sort of expansive ethical naturalism that is defended by John McDowell, who appeals to an account of an acquired “second nature” that brings into view normative demands that are seen as being “there in any case,” and he explicitly regards this account as seeking to keep nature “partially enchanted.” My position has most in common with McDowell’s position, but I also seek to go beyond it in a number of important ways. The key thesis that I seek to defend is that any adequate neo-Aristotelian ethical perspective must take account of the way in which human beings are fundamentally and distinctively the meaning-seeking animal. I focus on three aspects of meaning-seeking here: First, it is distinctive of our human form of life that we seek meaning in life, and in particular strong evaluative meaning, that is, meaning or value that involves qualitative distinction (e.g., between higher and lower, noble and base, sacred and profane, etc.) and specifies that with which we ought be concerned and that toward which we ought to orient our lives (e.g., the higher, the noble, the sacred, etc.). Since these strong evaluative meanings – the noble, the sacred, etc. – require a certain life-orientation, there is, secondly, a concern with a meaningful life, that is, the concern is with the overall meaning of



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On strong evaluation, see Taylor : Introduction and chs. –; : pt. I. As will become clear, my approach in this book – especially in regard to philosophical anthropology – is indebted to Charles Taylor’s work in significant ways, though he himself does not engage much with contemporary neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics.

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Introduction: Toward Re-Enchantment

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our lives. Finally, it is also distinctive of our human form of life that we can be and often are concerned with the meaning of life; we are concerned with how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things and whether there is a cosmic or ultimate source of meaning to which we must align our lives. I show how this concern for the meaning of life is rightly connected to a concern for meaning in life and a meaningful life. Given this account of our being fundamentally and distinctively the meaning-seeking animal, we can see why the problem of disenchantment – the perceived loss or at least threat of a loss of meaning – is such an acute problem. In this context meaning-seeking will thus need to involve seeking re-enchantment. My own account of what this should look like will emerge over the course of the book, but a few clarifying remarks are necessary here at the outset. First of all, seeking re-enchantment does not mean a return to a premodern worldview. Modern, post-Galilean natural science has made progress precisely by offering mechanistic explanations of empirical phenomena rather than the sort of teleological explanations that were central to the pre-modern idea of a meaningful cosmic order (as in the idea of the “Great Chain of Being”; see Lovejoy ). Whether we can do entirely without teleological explanations is an issue we will have to consider. But the process of disenchantment so understood in many ways constitutes an improvement in our understanding of the world. However, it also brings with it difficult challenges related to how we are to understand our experiences of meaning or value. On one view of disenchantment, which we can call “extreme” or “total” disenchantment, the loss of the premodern idea of a meaningful cosmic order entails that all of our experiences of meaning or value are to be regarded simply as subjective projections onto a meaningless or value-neutral universe. The most extreme version of disenchantment combines such projectivism with a mechanistic view of human beings according to which our experiences of meaning or value are explained reductionistically in terms of our genes, or our brain “wiring,” or a stimulus-response mechanism, or something else of the sort. However, many want to resist such total disenchantment views – including the neo-Aristotelians under consideration here – and doing so can be understood in terms of seeking a kind of re-enchantment. As Charles Taylor puts it: “‘re-enchantment’ . . . doesn’t undo the ‘disenchantment’ which occurs in the modern period. It re-establishes the nonarbitrary, non-projective character of certain demands on us, which are firmly anchored in our being-in-the-world” (b: ; cf. a: ch. ). One of the key issues to be explored here concerns how these

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Virtue and Meaning



perceived normative demands (i.e., objective values or meanings) are best understood and defended. A second clarification: The language of “re-enchantment” is potentially misleading insofar as it might suggest that the world is completely disenchanted (i.e., devoid of meaning or value) and so we must create, bestow, or otherwise bring about meaning or “enchantment.” However, re-enchantment, as I understand it, is rather a matter of discovering (or recovering) something that is already there to be discovered in the world: namely, non-arbitrary, non-projective normative demands. The world is precisely not completely disenchanted and so seeking reenchantment is a matter of defending the validity of these normative demands against the total disenchantment view. This will often also involve overcoming the ways in which these normative demands have been neglected and occluded by prevalent forms of scientism in modern intellectual life, which privilege a disengaged (or third-personal) standpoint that prescinds from our engaged (or first-personal) experiences of the significance of our lives and the beings around us. Despite the possible misleading nature of the language of disenchantment and re-enchantment, I use it here because of its place in the literature on modernity and also because, when properly understood, it can illuminate a central concern in the revival of Aristotelian ethics, and we can then consider what is the best path toward re-enchantment. In seeking to articulate and defend an even fuller kind of re-enchantment than is found in any of the major views on offer, my goal is to articulate and defend a fuller account of non-arbitrary, non-projective normative demands in terms of the strong evaluative dimension of meaning. In Chapter , “The Human Form of Life,” I seek to establish the claim that we are fundamentally and distinctively the meaning-seeking animal through an exploration of the engaged standpoint from within our human form of life, where it can be seen that our human form of life is shaped by strong evaluative meaning, including the strong evaluative category of the noble, which is integral to Aristotle’s account of acting virtuously. I also show how this dimension of meaning is overlooked by the dominant neo-Aristotelian approach because of its emphasis on an observational 

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Closely connected to defending the validity of objective value or meaning, seeking re-enchantment can also be seen to involve an aspiration to self-transcendence, where this means transcending a “lower,” more enclosed mode of selfhood for a “higher” one that is properly responsive to such normative demands. Thus, we can say that if the process of disenchantment – especially in its most extreme forms – pushes toward self-enclosure, then re-enchantment must involve a move toward greater self-transcendence in concern for such normative demands.

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Introduction: Toward Re-Enchantment

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(or disengaged) standpoint on our human form of life rather than a participative (or engaged) standpoint, and thus it does not provide us with an adequate philosophical anthropology and, along with this, it does not provide us with an adequate account of our reasons for the life of virtue. Moreover, I seek to counter a disenchanting move made by such neo-Aristotelians that involves denying any special realm of obligation. There is such a realm, I argue, and it is the whole realm of strong evaluative meaning, which includes more than just the domain of “the moral,” narrowly construed as concerned with what we owe to others. In Chapter , “Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning,” I show how this account of strong evaluative meaning allows us to overcome problems in prominent views among neo-Aristotelians of the relationship of virtue to happiness (e.g., instrumentalist accounts) by enabling us to regard virtue as constitutive of happiness understood as a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life, and which I show is in keeping with Aristotle’s own view of eudaimonia. I engage here especially with Philippa Foot, since she has endorsed each of the prominent views I consider throughout her career. In making the case for my constitutive view I also seek to avoid McDowell’s problematic claim that “no sacrifice necessitated by the life of excellence . . . can count as a genuine loss.” My account of a meaningful life aims to address the problem of loss in human life, which I argue requires us to address the problem of cosmodicy: that is, the problem of whether we can affirm life in the world as worthwhile in the face of evil and suffering. This problem is taken up further in Chapters  and . In Chapter , “Other-Regarding Concern,” I discuss how strong evaluative meaning makes an important difference for a proper account of the nature and extent of the demands for other-regarding concern. The dominant neo-Aristotelian approach has regarded the other-regarding virtues (e.g., justice, generosity, honesty, etc.) as virtues primarily because of their role in promoting the “good functioning of our social group,” which is seen as important for achieving our own flourishing as rational social animals. I focus especially on MacIntyre’s account of other-regarding concern as rooted in social networks of giving and receiving in his book Dependent Rational Animals. What is overlooked in the dominant approach is the strong evaluative sense of human beings as being worthy of our concern for their own sake due to their inherent dignity (or sanctity) and that a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life can be achieved through such concern. I seek to show the difference this makes for ensuring that we regard all human beings as fully amongst us, for

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Virtue and Meaning

making sense of and defending moral absolutes, and for properly responding to the demands for universal and particular concern. In Chapter , “Cosmic Outlooks,” I make the case that neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists need to address the question of the meaning of life, that is, the question of how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things and whether there is a cosmic or ultimate source of meaning to which we must align our lives. I examine Bernard Williams’ forceful challenge that evolutionary science has done away with the sort of teleological worldview that is needed in order to make sense of an Aristotelian ethical perspective. I consider Hursthouse’s response to Williams’ challenge and argue that it is not sufficient. I also argue against McDowell’s quietism according to which we should remain content with the strong evaluative meanings that arise for us within a particular acquired ethical outlook (e.g., our sense of the noble) and not seek to provide any ontological grounding or justification for them beyond appealing to our second nature. I contend that what we need is in fact a teleological worldview. Against Williams, I argue that there is no necessary incompatibility between evolutionary science and a teleological worldview. Indeed, there are a number of recent and contemporary scientists and philosophers who argue against Williams’ sort of tragic cosmic outlook and instead see the cosmos as purposive in giving rise to life and then to conscious intelligence. I consider both theistic and non-theistic views of the meaning of life and seek to show how they offer support for a strong evaluative conception of what is most admirable about us as human beings. If all such accounts of the meaning of life are rejected, then, I suggest, we must accept Williams’ view that a neo-Aristotelian ethical perspective is no longer viable and only a significantly reduced form of ethics remains possible. In Chapter , “Homo Religiosus,” I build on the preceding discussion of cosmic outlooks and explore the place of spirituality within a neoAristotelian ethical perspective. Among neo-Aristotelians this issue is often either ignored or excluded from consideration, which is strange given the place of spirituality in human life. I discuss why this is and also why it is problematic. More positively, I suggest how spirituality can play an important role in a neo-Aristotelian account of the good life. By “spirituality” I mean a practical life-orientation that is shaped by what is taken to be a self-transcending source of meaning, which involves strong normative demands, including demands of the sacred or the reverence-worthy. I argue that through an exploration of the strong evaluative standpoint from within our human form of life as meaning-seeking animals we can come to appreciate better the importance of spirituality for human beings throughout recorded

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Introduction: Toward Re-Enchantment



history up to the present and why we can be described as homo religiosus. In addition, I argue against the anti-contemplative stance of many neoAristotelians (in which they depart from Aristotle) and for the integral importance of contemplation for human life, and for the spiritual life in particular. I also discuss the draw of theistic spirituality, even though my account allows for both theistic and non-theistic forms of spirituality. In the Conclusion I summarize my case for a re-enchanted Aristotelian perspective and suggest that if one rejects this perspective (or something like it) then this would constitute a significant loss, precisely because of our being the meaning-seeking animal.

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The Human Form of Life

Elizabeth Anscombe’s  essay “Modern Moral Philosophy” (reprinted in Anscombe ) is widely regarded as having provided a key source of impetus for the revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics in the last half-century or so. In this essay she criticizes modern moral theories, such as Kantianism and utilitarianism, which focus on providing action-guiding moral principles. She argues that such views depend upon a notion of moral obligation that is in fact merely a survival from an earlier divine law conception of ethics. The word “ought” continues “to be spoken with a special emphasis and a special feeling,” but it has lost the framework that originally made it intelligible (: , –). Anscombe contends that this notion of moral obligation should be jettisoned by secular moral philosophers since it is only harmful without its original theistic framework, and she suggests that it “would be a great improvement if, instead of ‘morally wrong’, one always named a genus such as ‘untruthful’, ‘unchaste’, ‘unjust’” (, ). Whatever one may think about the specifics of Anscombe’s criticisms of modern moral philosophy, one of the most important aspects of her essay is the suggestion that we would do well to move away from the narrow focus on action-guiding principles and instead take a more holistic approach that seeks to identify ways of being or types of character traits – the virtues – that contribute to a flourishing or good human life. In short, her recommendation is that we should seek to recover something like Aristotle’s account of ethics. However, what has not been properly appreciated is that Anscombe is making a disenchanting move in suggesting that we should abandon – at least if we are not theists – a special “moral” sense of “ought” that is supposed to contain some sort of “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force (–). In other words, she wants us to acknowledge the full extent of the disenchantment that she thinks in fact occurs if we have

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abandoned theism. At the same time, Anscombe wants to block a further kind of disenchantment that would involve rejecting all claims of objectivity in ethics, that is, claims that we can derive an ought from what is the case or value from a fact about the world. She suggests that we can recover an ordinary (i.e., non-peculiar) sense of “ought” by focusing on what a human being needs in order to flourish qua human being, where the virtues are thought to be central to what a human being needs. So this sense of ought can be expressed as follows: If you want to flourish qua human being (and it is thought that any rational human being should want to flourish qua human being), then you ought to cultivate the virtues. However, whether a neo-Aristotelian ethical perspective is in fact viable depends in large part on answering a challenge that Anscombe poses at the end of her essay. She writes: “it can be seen that philosophically there is a huge gap, at present unfillable as far as we are concerned, which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human ‘flourishing’” (). It is not entirely clear why Anscombe thinks that this gap is “at present unfillable,” since she herself has done much to fill the gap. In any case, the challenge is one that has been taken up by a number of philosophers. The dominant way in which neo-Aristotelians have sought to respond to this challenge is by articulating and defending a version of “ethical naturalism” that is basically in line with the approach suggested by Anscombe and which seeks to found ethics on an account of human  

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As I will discuss in Chapter , Anscombe seems ultimately to recommend a theistic ethic. In speaking of this “at present unfillable” gap, Anscombe seems to be referring back to her claim at the outset of the essay: namely, that it is “not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking” (). Later she writes: “In present-day philosophy an explanation is required how an unjust man is a bad man, or an unjust action a bad one; to give such an explanation belongs to ethics; but it cannot even be begun until we are equipped with a sound philosophy of psychology. For the proof that an unjust man is a bad man would require a positive account of justice as a ‘virtue’. This part of the subject-matter of ethics is, however, completely closed to us until we have an account of what type of characteristic a virtue is – a problem, not of ethics, but of conceptual analysis – and how it relates to the actions in which it is instanced: a matter which I think Aristotle did not succeed in really making clear. For this we certainly need an account at least of what a human action is at all, and how its description as ‘doing such-and-such’ is affected by its motive and by the intention or intentions in it; and for this an account of such concepts is required” (; cf. ). I say that Anscombe has done a lot to fill the gap not only because of what she discusses in the essay under consideration, but also because the year before she published her book Intention ( []). We might also question here whether it makes sense to separate philosophical psychology from doing ethics in the way that Anscombe suggests. Can we really understand human action, intention, etc., apart from the ethical context of aiming at the good? In other words, it seems we need a holistic approach rather than the piecemeal approach suggested by Anscombe. On this point see Brewer : –.

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Virtue and Meaning

flourishing (or well-being) that is understood on analogy with the flourishing of other living things. In other words, the focus is on providing a quasi-scientific account of human nature and human flourishing that can ground an account of the virtues that would contribute to such flourishing. I will refer to this as the disenchanted version of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism – even though it seeks a minimal form of re-enchantment in defending objectivity in ethics – as a way of contrasting it with the reenchanted version that I will be articulating and defending. This dominant version is disenchanted in virtue of its appeal to an “ordinary ought” (in contrast to any special, set apart realm of obligation), and as a result of its focus on a third-personal, observational, or disengaged standpoint (as contrasted with a first-personal, participative, or engaged standpoint). In this chapter I will outline this disenchanted version of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism and argue that those who adopt it do not go far enough in exploring the phenomenological or engaged standpoint from within our human form of life and thus do not provide us with an adequate philosophical anthropology and, along with this, they do not provide us with an adequate account of our reasons for the life of virtue. In particular, they do not adequately account for the meanings that shape the internal standpoint of our human form of life. Many of these meanings involve what Charles Taylor calls “strong evaluation,” that is, qualitative distinctions of value in terms of higher and lower, noble and base, admirable and contemptible, dignified and undignified, sacred and profane, and so on that are seen as placing normative demands upon us, whether or not we are responsive to them. Here I will also seek to counter the disenchanting move of denying any special realm of obligation that contains a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force, that is, that places demands upon us that are set apart from other sorts of concerns. There is such a realm, I will argue, and it is the whole realm of strong evaluative meaning, and indeed some strong evaluative meanings, such as the sacred, are especially set apart. I will also show how in her later work Anscombe recognizes this realm. The chapters that follow will build upon the account offered here of our human form of life as shaped by strong evaluative meaning, where human beings are understood as the meaning-seeking animal.

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Anscombe seems to use “peculiar” and “mesmeric” in ways that are for her pejorative, but I mean to use them in a positive, non-pejorative way here. “Peculiar” can mean odd, but it can also mean special or set apart in some way. “Mesmeric” can mean hypnotic, but it can also mean compelling or attracting our attention.

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Neo-Aristotelian Ethical Naturalism: The Disenchanted Version All neo-Aristotelians accept some version of ethical naturalism that maintains that ethics is to be founded on claims about human nature. More specifically, all neo-Aristotelians seek to articulate an account of what it is to live well as the kind of beings that we are, where this involves living in accordance with a certain understanding of the virtues. In doing so they follow Aristotle’s procedure in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he begins with an argument for a particular conception of the human “function” (ergon) – namely, to live well as rational social animals – and then moves on to specify an account of the virtues that fulfill this. Most neo-Aristotelians no longer accept anything like Aristotle’s “metaphysical biology” that underpinned his function argument, but many still seek to found ethics on biological considerations. In particular, neoAristotelians such as Philippa Foot, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Alasdair MacIntyre seek to found a virtue ethic on an account of what it is to flourish or be good qua human being, where this is understood on analogy with what it is for plants and non-human animals to flourish qua member of their particular species. In other words, they seek to found a virtue ethic on considerations of human beings within the “natural, biological order of living things” (Hursthouse : ). Here we have a further specified understanding of ethical naturalism, where it is seen as a quasiscientific approach to ethics that appeals to a quasi-scientific account of human nature and human well-being. I say “quasi-scientific” because it takes a kind of third-personal or observational approach that is akin to that which is adopted in the natural sciences. Hursthouse writes: “[If] there is any truth in ethical naturalism, our ethical evaluations of ourselves ought to exhibit at least a recognizably similar structure to what we find in the botanists’ and ethologists’ evaluations of other living things” (). In other words, our ethical evaluations of human beings are analogous to  

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On Aristotle’s “metaphysical biology,” see MacIntyre  []: –, –, –. Foot distances herself from the language of “flourishing” as applied to human beings because she thinks it “has too special a connotation, in that it suggests untroubled success” (: –). She prefers to speak instead of being good or defective qua human being. However, I don’t think the term “human flourishing” needs to have this connotation, and when I use it in what follows it should not be taken to have such a connotation; rather it should be taken to mean being good or living well qua human being. Hursthouse, Foot, and MacIntyre are all careful to make it clear that they are not trying to make ethics into a science, but they are adopting a quasi-scientific standpoint in stressing an analogy between human flourishing (or well-being) and the flourishing of plants and non-human animals (see, e.g., Hursthouse : –, –).

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judgments about plants and non-human animals being “good, healthy, specimens of their kind” (). Likewise, in her account of ethical evaluations of human beings, Foot appeals to what she calls “Aristotelian necessities” (i.e., “that which is necessary because and in so far as good hangs on it”), which apply equally to humans and other living things (: ). She borrows this idea of Aristotelian necessities from Anscombe, who spoke of it, for example, in an essay on promise-keeping, where she writes: “getting one another to do things without the application of physical force is a necessity for human life, and that far beyond what could be secured by . . . other means” (: ). Similarly, Peter Geach says that human beings “need virtues as bees need stings” (: ). Building on these remarks, Foot writes: We invoke the same idea when we say that it is necessary for plants to have water, for birds to build nests, for wolves to hunt in packs, and for lionesses to teach their cubs to kill. These “Aristotelian necessities” depend on what the particular species of plants and animals need, [in] their natural habitat, and the ways of making out that are in their repertoire. These things together determine what it is for members of a particular species to be as they should be, and to do that which they should do. And for all the enormous differences between the life of humans and that of plants or animals, we can see that human defects and excellences are similarly related to what human beings are and what they do. . . . [For instance], in that we are social animals, we depend on each other as do wolves that hunt in packs, with cooperation such as our own depending on special factors such as conventional arrangements. . . . And it will surely not be denied that there is something wrong with a free-riding wolf that feeds but does not take part in the hunt . . . These free-riding individuals of a species whose members work together are just as defective as those who have defective hearing, sight, or powers of locomotion. I am therefore, quite seriously, likening the basis of moral evaluation to that of the evaluation of behaviour in animals. (: –)

In developing their accounts of what it is to flourish or be good qua human being, Foot and Hursthouse both begin by providing an account of the flourishing of plants and non-human animals. Foot articulates this in terms of the species-specific modes of living out the natural life cycle of maturation, self-maintenance (i.e., survival), and reproduction. Following Michael Thompson (; ), she refers to these species-specific modes as “Aristotelian categoricals,” which should not be confused with “Aristotelian necessities” – “that which is necessary because and in so far as good hangs on it” – though they are connected. Aristotelian categoricals “tell us how a kind of plant or animal, considered at a particular time and

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in its natural habitat, develops, sustains itself, defends itself, and reproduces,” and so will inform us of what are its Aristotelian necessities (: ; see –). In Hursthouse’s words, they tell us about a particular species’ “characteristic way of going on.” And in doing so, they embody a “natural normativity” by enabling us to evaluate whether a particular living thing is a good or defective member of its kind. In the case of human beings, the virtues are what make us good qua human being (recall that they are Aristotelian necessities: human beings “need virtues as bees need stings”), and vices are what make us defective. For instance, given that we are social animals that characteristically are susceptible to many kinds of hardship and depend upon cooperation with others, we are going to need virtues such as courage, temperance, justice, charity, honesty, and so on if we are to live well. For her part, Hursthouse discusses the natural ends of plants and nonhuman animals and builds up to an account of the natural ends of social animals: namely, () individual survival; () the continuance of the species; () characteristic freedom from pain and characteristic enjoyment; and () the good functioning of one’s social group (: ). Whether a particular social animal can be regarded as a good or flourishing specimen of its kind depends on whether it is well-fitted in its emotions, desires, and ways of acting to attain these four naturalistic ends. In the case of human beings – who are rational social animals – it is important that these ends be pursued in a “rational way” through the use of practical reason and the exercise of the virtues (). And we can see how what Hursthouse calls the “standard list” of virtues – courage, temperance, justice, honesty, loyalty, generosity, charity, etc. – make us well-fitted for attaining these natural ends and thereby make us good qua human being (see –). Both Hursthouse and Foot maintain that when it comes to our ethical evaluations of human beings the main concern is with how well we act from reason. As Hursthouse puts it: “[It] is primarily in virtue of our actions from reason that we are ethically good or bad human beings” (: ). Likewise, Foot writes: “[To] call someone a good human being is to evaluate him or her only in a certain respect. . . . For to speak of a good person is to speak of an individual not in respect of his body, or of faculties such as sight and memory, but as concerns his rational will” (: ). But she also maintains: “[There] is no change in the meaning of ‘good’ between the word as it appears in ‘good roots’ and as it appears in ‘good dispositions of the human will’” (). Similarly, Hursthouse says that the attributive adjective “good” doesn’t undergo a “mysterious change when we started doing ethics”: “What goes for ‘good cactus’, ‘good knife’,

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‘good rider’, also goes for ‘good human being’ even when we use that phrase in ethics” (: ). Here we find a disenchanting move in line with the one that Anscombe makes in suggesting that we abandon a special sense of obligation that is supposed to contain a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force. At the same time, as with Anscombe, there is an attempt to block a further kind of disenchantment that would involve rejecting all claims of objectivity in ethics by recovering an ordinary sense of “ought” that relates to facts about what a human being needs in order to flourish or live well, where the virtues are thought to be central to what a human being needs. All neo-Aristotelians have been opposed to moral subjectivism and have sought to offer an alternative to it, and so, as previously stated, can be seen as seeking at least a minimal form of re-enchantment. It is noteworthy here that in an interview Foot describes how hearing the news of the Holocaust was formative for her opposition to moral subjectivism: “[In] the face of the news of the concentration camps, I thought, ‘it just can’t be the way Stevenson, Ayer, and Hare say it is, that morality in the end is just the expression of attitude’ . . . [There] is no way, if one takes this line, that one could imagine oneself saying to a Nazi, ‘But we are right, and you are wrong’ with there being any substance to the statement” (: –). There is a question here of whether we can make sense of the kind of evil involved in the Holocaust without appealing to a special sense of obligation – rooted in a belief in the sanctity (or special dignity) of human life – that involves a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force; that is, can we make sense of it without a fuller kind of re-enchantment? I don’t think we can, but I will have to return to this issue later. For now, I want to discuss a third important neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalist who has also been significantly influenced by Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy”: namely, Alasdair MacIntyre. He has taken a somewhat circuitous route to arrive at conclusions similar to those of Foot and Hursthouse. His most well-known book, After Virtue (MacIntyre  []), can be read as a book-length development of some of Anscombe’s critiques of modern moral philosophy, especially her claim that modern concepts of obligation are “survivals” from an earlier, premodern time period and so have lost the original framework that made them intelligible. MacIntyre argues that the “Enlightenment project” of  

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She is attributing these ideas to Foot with agreement. On “good” as an attributive adjective, see Geach . MacIntyre acknowledges his debt to Anscombe in After Virtue ( []: ). It is worth noting that Anscombe was not the first to state the “survivals” or “fragments” thesis. Consider C. S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man: “This thing which I have called for convenience the Tao, and which others

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providing a rational vindication for morality apart from any teleological conception of the human good or any divine authority has failed because of its inability to secure rational agreement. The result of this failure, he contends, is the rise of an “emotivist culture” in which the appearance of rational argument masks what are in fact attempts to manipulate others in service of one’s arbitrary preferences. In After Virtue, MacIntyre seeks to overcome emotivism (and moral subjectivism generally). However, he does not think we can simply return to Aristotle’s views because he does not think we can accept his metaphysical biology. He is also not optimistic about the prospects for a less metaphysical version of ethical naturalism. This is because any such view “ignores the place in our cultural history of deep conflicts over what human flourishing and well-being do consist in and the way in which rival and incompatible beliefs on that topic beget rival and incompatible tables of the virtues” ( []: –). He proposes instead a “socially teleological account” of the virtues where they are understood in terms of their role in practices, traditions, and the narrative order of a human life. According to this account, the virtues are first of all needed in order to achieve the goods internal to practices (e.g., productive crafts, artistic activity, intellectual activity, games, and the making and sustaining of family life and human community) through which our “human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved are systematically extended” (). Secondly, the virtues are also needed to sustain our “narrative quests” in which we seek, along with those others with whom we share in community, an answer to the question: What is the good for our lives as a whole? Thirdly, because the starting points for our enquiry are always provided by our communities and their particular histories, which constitute the larger narratives wherein we find our individual narratives, the virtues are likewise needed to sustain a

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may call Natural Law or Traditional Morality . . ., is not one among a series of possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgements. If it is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained. The effort to refute it and raise a new system of value in its place is selfcontradictory. There has never been, and never will be, a radically new judgement of value in the history of the world. What purports to be new systems or (as they now call them) ‘ideologies’, all consist of fragments from the Tao itself, arbitrarily wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their isolation, yet still owing to the Tao and to it alone such validity as they possess. . . . The rebellion of new ideologies against the Tao is a rebellion of the branches against the tree: if the rebels could succeed they would find that they have destroyed themselves” (: –). Perhaps this passage had an influence on Anscombe, who certainly knew of Lewis’ work (they were both at Oxford and had a famous debate). I will return to this challenge in Chapter  and engage with Bernard Williams, who has articulated this challenge in an especially powerful way.

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tradition, that is, “an historically extended, socially embodied argument” about the nature of the good life for human beings (–). The problem is that MacIntyre does not offer here any specific account of the good for human life as a whole, except for saying that “the good life for man is the life spent seeking the good life for man, and the virtues necessary for the seeking are those which will enable us to understand more and what else the good life for man is” (). But even if shared rational enquiry into our good is indeed part of our good, it cannot be the whole of it, since it is not clear what we would be seeking if the seeking itself is all that there is to our good. Indeed, we need to know “more and what else the good life for [human beings] is.” The account of goods internal to tradition-informed practices does fill this in somewhat, though it seems either to involve a conventional relativism or to require completion in objectivist terms. The latter is suggested by MacIntyre’s remark about the systematic extension of our “human powers to achieve excellence” through achieving goods internal to practices. The very talk of human powers and of the good life for human beings – and not just for this or that particular human being – appears to presuppose some account of human flourishing. It is thus not surprising that MacIntyre should eventually come to defend the sort of ethical naturalism that he had rejected in After Virtue. This ethical naturalism is articulated and defended in Dependent Rational Animals (), published around the same time as Hursthouse’s On Virtue Ethics () and Foot’s Natural Goodness (). There he writes: [When] we speak of dolphins flourishing or failing to flourish qua dolphins or of gorillas flourishing or failing to flourish qua gorillas or of humans flourishing or failing to flourish qua humans, we use the various parts of the verb “to flourish” in one and the same sense. . . . What it is to flourish is not of course the same for dolphins as it is for gorillas or for humans but it is one and the same concept of flourishing that finds application to members of different animal – and plant – species. And correspondingly it is one and the same concept of needs that finds similar broad application. What a plant or an animal needs is what it needs to flourish qua member of its particular species. And what it needs to flourish is to develop the distinctive powers that it possesses qua member of that species. (MacIntyre : )

For MacIntyre, as for Foot and Hursthouse, what human beings especially need in order to flourish qua human being (i.e., qua rational social animal) is the virtues: namely, justice, generosity, courage, temperance, honesty, practical wisdom, etc.

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In his most recent book, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, MacIntyre offers what is essentially an updated version of his argument in After Virtue: The updates include a defense of the ethical naturalist position put forward in Dependent Rational Animals and rejected in After Virtue, and taking expressivism rather than emotivism as the subjectivist target. Against expressivism, he argues for an Aristotelian account of “good” as providing an “authoritative standard, external to and independent of an agent’s feelings, concerns, commitments, and attitudes” (: ). What is good or virtuous is what conduces to one’s flourishing qua human being; what is bad or vicious is what conduces to the opposite. In filling out his account of human flourishing, MacIntyre identifies “a set of goods whose contribution to a good life, whatever one’s culture or social order, it would be difficult to deny”: namely, good health, a decent standard of living, good friendship and family relationships, sufficient education, productive and rewarding work, worthwhile leisure activities, and the exercise of rational agency in ordering one’s life (). According to MacIntyre, “what matters for the good life is not so much which choice is made as the way in which such choices are made, the nature and quality of the deliberation that goes into the making of them,” which requires virtues of the sort largely identified by Aristotle (; cf. MacIntyre : ). So again, like Hursthouse and Foot, we are primarily evaluated as being good qua human being according to how well we act from reason.

The Human Difference: Rationality The neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalists discussed in the previous section all stress an analogy between human flourishing (or living well) and the flourishing of other living things. But they also acknowledge an important difference between human and non-human animals: namely, our rationality. Indeed, we have seen that they believe that ethical evaluations of human beings should be primarily concerned with the rational will (i.e., with how well we act from reason). We need to begin exploring here just what difference rationality makes for our human form of life. I will ultimately suggest that it makes a much bigger difference than the disenchanted version of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism recognizes, because our rationality opens our eyes to the strong evaluative dimension of meaning and this fundamentally transforms our understanding of our human form of life and suggests a strong disanalogy between human well-being and the well-being of other living things, since human beings are distinctively the meaning-seeking animal.

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Foot rightly observes that there is a “sea change” that occurs when we transition from considering the good of plants and non-human animals to thinking about the good of human beings, since, as rational creatures, “we can look critically at our own conduct” (: –). MacIntyre makes a similar point in his account of our capacity to become “independent practical reasoners,” that is, we are able to step back from our desires and reflect upon what we have good reason to desire and then desire and act accordingly (: chs. –). Foot also rightly notes that “speech is crucial here in marking the difference between [non-human] animals and humans”: A child gradually comes to use words not only to get what [he or she] wants but also to speak about what [he or she] is going to do; and comes to understand and use locutions by which choices are debated and actions explained, justified, and recommended. . . . When we say that human beings are able to choose on a rational ground as no other animal can, it is . . . because humans use language . . . [While non-human] animals go for the good (thing) that they see, human beings go for what they see as good. . . . Human beings not only have the power to reason about all sorts of thing in a speculative way, but also the power to see grounds for acting in one way rather than another; and if told that they should do one thing rather than another, they can ask why they should. (: –)

For her part, Hursthouse remarks: “[We] do not have characteristic ways of going on in the same way that the other animals do. . . . Ethical evaluation cannot be a branch of biology or ethology because neither we, nor our concepts of ‘a good human being’ and ‘living well as a human being’, are completely constrained by nature” (: ). The fact that we are not completely constrained by nature, but can stand back from our desires and ask what it is good to desire, opens up a field of possibility in terms of the varieties of ways of life for human beings. Nevertheless, Hursthouse maintains that we still do have a characteristic way of going on: Our characteristic way of going on, which distinguishes us from all the other species of animals, is a rational way. A “rational way” is any way that we can rightly see as good, as something we have reason to do. Correspondingly, our characteristic enjoyments are any enjoyments we can rightly see as good, as something we in fact enjoy and that reason can rightly endorse. ()

She acknowledges that this construal of our characteristic way of going on is obviously a normative one and it “is clearly going to yield judgments to

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the effect that many human beings are not going on ‘in the way characteristic of the species’ and are thereby defective human beings” (). Hursthouse also notes that once we have adopted this normative construal of our characteristic way of going on it can be asked whether this is still a form of naturalism. She thinks it is: “it is still the case that human beings are ethically good in so far as their ethically relevant aspects foster the four ends appropriate to a social animal, in the way characteristic of the species,” that is, in a “rational way.” Appeal to the four natural ends of social animals – () individual survival; () the continuance of the species; () characteristic freedom from pain and characteristic enjoyment; and () the good functioning of one’s social group – she thinks “really does constrain, substantially, what [one] can reasonably maintain is a virtue in human beings” (). She illustrates this by considering whether impersonal benevolence of the sort championed by Peter Singer, which does not recognize ethical significance in species-boundaries and special relationships such as familial bonds and friendship, is a virtue. Hursthouse says that such impersonal benevolence is suspect as a virtue when we consider the natural ends of the continuance of the species and the good functioning of the social group: “[On] the face of it, it rather looks as though the species and familial bonding that are part of our biological, animal nature, and make us ‘partial’ to our own species and children, play an essential role in sustaining these two ends. . . . [Our] natural tendency to bond to other human beings and our children seems to be serving us rather well” (–). As John Hacker-Wright puts it, such appeals to human nature for Hursthouse, as well as for Foot, serve to “define what it is to reason well,” which means that “practical rationality is species-relative” (: ). But at this point we must ask: Why should someone be concerned with being good qua human being, which is to say, why be concerned with 

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Hacker-Wright continues: “Our reasoning cannot ignore what we need as human beings and yet still claim to exhibit practical rationality. Hence, Hursthouse can claim that as rational animals we are freed from a certain kind of obedience to nature, while maintaining that nature has some normative role for us; nature is normative over our reasoning, but not directly over our action. When Foot states that human beings go for what we see as good rather than the good that we see, she adds that what we see as good is inevitably informed by a conception of our form of life” (). Regarding the relationship between nature and reason, Julia Annas makes a helpful distinction between a weaker relation view that “holds that our four ends [as put forward by Hursthouse] that we have as social animals form a robust constraint on the exercise of our rationality, and thus give it a weaker ability to transform them than the stronger view holds,” whereas the stronger relation view holds that “our human nature is simply the material that our rationality has to work with” in the way of a skilled craftsperson (: , ). Annas affirms the latter view (see also Annas ). My own view will come out in what follows.

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cultivating and exercising the virtues that enable one to achieve this? Both Hursthouse and Foot speak of acting from reason as a matter of acting on what we see as good. But why should I, as an individual, see as good – in a way that provides authoritative reasons for action – the fulfillment of the naturalistic ends of social animals that Hursthouse identifies above, or the “Aristotelian necessities” of social animals (rooted in “Aristotelian categoricals”), such as co-operation, which Foot identifies? As Foot puts it, this is a question of “the rationality of doing what virtue demands” (: ), or, as it is often put, it is a question of “why be moral?” To fill out the challenge here, consider John McDowell’s thought experiment of the rational wolf in his essay “Two Sorts of Naturalism.” McDowell asks us to imagine a wolf that acquires reason and so is able to step back from his or her immediate inclinations and consider “possibilities of behaviour other than what comes naturally to wolves” (: ). The rational wolf might then consider whether those things that are thought to be needed in order to flourish or be good qua wolf, such as cooperativeness in hunting with the pack (something which comes naturally to wolves), really in fact contribute to his or her living well as an individual wolf. Indeed, the thought might arise: “Why not be a free-rider on the pack if one can get away with it?” The rational wolf may consider the following Aristotelian necessity: “Wolves need to pool their energies, if their style of hunting is to be effective” (). But it is unclear why this should be authoritative for a rational wolf: “from ‘Wolves need such-andsuch’ and the fact he is a wolf, our wolf cannot conclude that he needs such-and-such” (–). McDowell writes: With the onset of reason, then, the nature of the species abdicates from a previously unquestionable authority over the behaviour of the individual animal. . . . It would not be surprising if the deliberating wolf thought reason requires him to transcend his wolfish nature in pursuit of his 

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Foot raises this challenge in two places in Natural Goodness. In one place she writes: “There will surely be objection to the idea that a natural form of life characteristic of humankind could determine what you or I ought to do. What does it matter to me what species I belong to? Should we not protest on behalf of individuality and creativity against bringing in the human species when asking what I myself – this particular person – should do?” (: ). Later she says: “Now I come face to face with an apparently unanswerable objection, which is that human beings as rational creatures can ask why what has so far been said should have any effect on their conduct. . . . The skeptic will surely ask ‘But what if I do not care about being a good human being?’ . . . [The] question is not whether we have reason to aim at being a good human being, but rather whether we have reason to aim at those things at which a good human being must aim, as for instance good rather than harm to others, or keeping faith. The problem is about the rationality of doing what virtue demands. And it has seemed to some to be an especially difficult problem for anyone who has an objective theory of moral evaluations as I do myself” (–).

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individual interest, exploiting the less intelligent wolves who continue to let their lives be structured by what wolves need. No doubt the transcendence can be only partial, since the idea that free-riding might be a good plan depends on its being a way to secure things that naturally matter to wolves, such as plenty of meat to eat, not having to exert oneself if one can avoid it, and so forth. But a deliberating wolf might still take large parts of the natural pattern in the life of wolves to have no rational bearing on what he should do. . . . Of course he may be quite wrong in thinking his project is workable, or in thinking it will be satisfactory to him, wolf that he is. But perhaps he is not wrong; and if he is, we cannot show him he is by reaffirming the facts about what wolves need. There is nothing there that he needs to dispute. (–)

McDowell then draws the following lesson: “even if we grant that human beings have a naturally based need for the virtues, in a sense parallel to the sense in which wolves have a naturally based need for co-operativeness in their hunting, that need not cut any ice with someone who questions whether virtuous behaviour is genuinely required by reason” (). One response to this challenge from McDowell is to try to make the case that the virtues that make us good qua human being are also in our individual self-interest, at least in the long run (and we might speak here of “enlightened” self-interest), and so we can say that it is rational to be virtuous. Hursthouse, for example, adopts this sort of approach as one aspect of her overall view. As she puts it, the virtues that make us good qua human being are “the only reliable bet” for achieving our own individual happiness because of our nature as rational social animals (: , ). I think there is something to be said for this view, even though I also think it has its limitations: Above all, it does not seem to provide authoritative reasons for everyone. We will have to wait until Chapter  to explore the question of the relationship between virtue and happiness in more detail. For now, the point to see is that the introduction of rationality doesn’t necessarily mean that we can abandon concern for flourishing or being good qua human being, since this may in fact be in our enlightened self-interest, and it is part of the difference rationality can make to be able to show that this is the case. Early on Foot also adopted the enlightened self-interest approach to ground the rationality of the virtues (see “Moral Beliefs” [–], in Foot a), but in Natural Goodness she took a different tack and instead – under the influence of Warren Quinn (see Quinn ) – sought to show  

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I will discuss Hursthouse’s overall position in more detail in Chapter . I will return to discuss this further in Chapter .

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how “acting morally is part of practical rationality” (Foot : ; cf. –). She writes: As I see it, the rationality of, say, telling the truth, keeping promises, or helping a neighbour is on a par with the rationality of self-preserving action, and of the careful and cognizant pursuit of other innocent ends; each being a part or aspect of practical rationality. The different considerations are on a par, moreover, in that a judgement about what is required by practical rationality must take account of their interaction: of the weight of the ones we call non-moral as well as those we call moral. . . . I want to say, baldly, that there is no criterion for practical rationality that is not derived from that of goodness of the will. (; cf. –)

Foot focuses on goodness of the will especially with regard to virtue: “It is in the concept of a virtue that in so far as someone possesses it, his actions are good; which is to say that he acts well” (). Those who possess the virtues, such as justice, charity, courage, and temperance, “possess them in so far as they recognize certain considerations (such as the fact of a promise, or of a neighbour’s need) as powerful, and in many circumstances compelling, reasons for acting” (). Humans are then judged as being good or defective qua human being in terms of whether or not they possess the virtues, or their opposites, the vices. As mentioned earlier, Foot maintains that “human defects and excellences are . . . related to what human beings are and what they do” (), that is, they are related to “our characteristic way of going on” as rational social animals (our Aristotelian categoricals) and the Aristotelian necessities that follow from this. The idea here is that if we are good, non-defective human beings, then we will act from right reasons, which means acting morally. A good, non-defective human being with respect to the rational will thinks: “‘How could we get on without justice?’, ‘Where would we be if no one helped anyone else?’,” and so on. “Anyone who thinks about it,” Foot says, “can see that for human beings the teaching and following of morality is something necessary. We can’t get on without it” (–). Now, this might sound like an appeal to enlightened self-interest, but Foot does not mean it that way. The point is about what human beings characteristically need for things to go well (i.e., it is about Aristotelian necessities), even though this might not always be in an individual’s selfinterest. And Foot maintains that each individual human being has reason to act according to virtue here. She writes: Considerations about such things as promising, neighbourliness, and help for those in trouble have, I maintain, the same kind of connection with

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reasons for action as do considerations of self-interest or of means to our ends: the connection going in each case through the concept of practical rationality and the facts of human life. . . . On a “practical rationality” account, a moral judgment says something about the action of any individual to whom it applies: namely, something about the reason that there is for him to do it or not do it, whether or not he recognizes that, and whether or not, if he does recognize it, he also acts on it as he should. Moreover, it can explain moral action in an individual who knows that he has reason to act morally; because acting on reasons is a basic mode of operation in human beings. This, too, is part of my account of the way in which morality is necessarily practical: it serves to produce and prevent action, because the understanding of reasons can do that. (; cf. )

On this account, a human being who is a free-rider – benefiting from human cooperation but not contributing to it (à la McDowell’s rational wolf ) – is a defective human being in virtue of having a defective rational will, even if being a free-rider is in his or her self-interest. As Foot says (in a passage cited earlier): “free-riding individuals of a species whose members work together are just as defective as those who have defective hearing, sight, or powers of locomotion” (). She goes on to say: “No special explanation is needed of why men take reasonable care of their own future; an explanation is needed when they do not. Nor does human cooperation need a special explanation. Most people know that it is, for instance, unreasonable to take benefits and give nothing in return” (). So what should we make of Foot’s attempt to build morality (i.e., virtue) into an account of practical rationality? I think the basic move – of building morality into an account of practical rationality – is the right one, but Foot does not go far enough with this move. She does not tell us enough about why and how we should “see as good” acting in ways that will make us good qua human being by fostering what human beings characteristically need – namely, the virtues – for things to go well, even though (in her view) this might not always be in an individual’s selfinterest. She asserts that someone who does not see a reason for acting here is defective qua human being, but this is not likely to convince the person who thinks being rational means pursuing our enlightened self-interest most effectively. Moreover, Foot fails to convince or bring light when she says that just as no special explanation is needed for why people “take reasonable care of their own future,” so human cooperation needs no special explanation, since “[most] people know that it is, for instance, unreasonable to take benefits and give nothing in return.” But the question is whether it is unreasonable – whatever most people think – to act

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contrary to virtue when it is in our apparent self-interest to do so. Many people may think it is generally reasonable to act according to virtue insofar as they accept something like Hursthouse’s claim that virtue is a best bet (or rational gamble) for things to go well for oneself. However, when the going gets tough, it is not as clear why they should persevere in virtue. This does seem to require some explanation. I think we should persevere in virtue, and I will return in Chapter  to explain why. But before then we need to provide a more adequate account of our human form of life.

The Standpoint from within Our Human Form of Life: The Space of Meaning The main complaint that I want to lodge here against the foregoing ethical naturalist accounts, whether they take an enlightened self-interest approach or Foot’s morality-built-into-practical-reason approach to the rationality of virtue, is that they do not go far enough in exploring the engaged (i.e., participative, first-personal, or phenomenological) standpoint from within our human form of life, and thus they do not provide us with an adequate philosophical anthropology – which includes an account of the nature and extent of our differences from other animals – and along with this they do not provide us with an adequate account of our reasons for acting according to virtue. They suffer from an inarticulacy about the life of virtue because they do not adequately account for the realm of meaning – especially what I call “strong evaluative meaning” – 

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Hacker-Wright offers an interesting Kantian-esque approach. He maintains that the virtues that promote Hursthouse’s four natural ends are ultimately justified as conditions for the possibility of rational agency, with which we are necessarily concerned: “[The] fact that we are agents, I think, is particularly important since it is an essential part of our self-conception. Defensible norms must allow us to achieve that which we must rationally take ourselves to be. Human beings can only reliably become rational agents under certain conditions, and the norms we propose for our species must be responsive to facts about how we cultivate rational agency. For example, we need a significant input of care from one or more adults if we are to attain rational agency” (: ). He sees this view as also consistent with Foot’s approach, saying: “the demands of protecting and promoting human agency define what it is to be a good human being, and the four ends [identified by Hursthouse] help to flesh out that conception of human goodness” (; see also Korsgaard ; ; Hacker-Wright ; ; Lott ). I think regarding the promotion of the four ends as a condition for the possibility of rational agency is too indeterminate with regard to how these are to be pursued, and without a more substantive picture of rationality (namely, one involving strong evaluative meaning) it appears compatible with an “enlightened” self-interest approach that may set aside the requirements of virtue whenever they are not seen as necessary for promoting and protecting our rational agency. I also think it is problematic to justify other-regarding concern in terms of promoting our rational agency (see Chapter ).

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that shapes the internal standpoint of our human form of life. Instead, they tend to focus on an observational or disengaged standpoint (what McDowell calls a “sideways-on” view) on human life with their quasiscientific accounts of Aristotelian categoricals (or characteristic ways of going on) and the Aristotelian necessities that follow from them, and thereby they accede too much to the scientism that is prevalent in modern intellectual life. In developing my own approach, I want to build on McDowell’s work. I think he takes us in the right direction, though ultimately I will argue that we need to go even further than he takes us. McDowell raises his thought experiment of the rational wolf in order to challenge attempts to ground the rational authority of ethics on “independent facts, underwritten by nature, about what it is for a human life to go well” (: –). Not only does this fail to provide us with authoritative reasons for acting in accordance with the virtues (as illustrated in the rational wolf thought experiment), he thinks it misses an important Aristotelian idea: namely, that virtuous actions are regarded by a virtuous person as worth performing for their own sake, which is also expressed in the thesis – largely ignored by Hursthouse, Foot, and MacIntyre – that a virtuous person acts “for the sake of the noble” (–). Here nobility is not an end separate from virtue, but rather it represents an evaluation inherent in the concept of virtue whereby it is viewed as a normatively higher mode of life. McDowell writes: “A virtuous action’s appeal to reason is captured by an evaluation, ‘noble’, which is internal to the standpoint of someone who already accepts that virtue’s demands on reason are real. Accepting that, and accepting that ‘for the sake of the noble’ gives a reason for acting, are the same thing” (). In other words, to understand the normative authority of ethical considerations we must already be engaged participants within a particular acquired ethical outlook or “space of reasons,” as McDowell calls it, and which we can also call the “space of meaning,” since he says that here we are in “the realm of intelligibility that is proper to meaning” (: –).



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In exploring the possibility of “norms” in human virtues, Anscombe does suggest that we should consider human beings not just biologically “but from the point of view of the activity of thought and choice in regard to the various departments of life” (: ; see also Hacker-Wright : ). I am suggesting that this point of view has not been explored enough, especially with regard to the meanings by which we live and after which we seek, and the focus is still largely on the observational (or disengaged) standpoint (see, e.g., Hacker-Wright : –). On the idea of acting “for the sake of the noble” in Aristotle’s work, see NE II., b–a; II., a–; III., b–; IV., a–; X., b–.

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For McDowell, this means adopting a “Neurathian” approach. Drawing on the metaphor of Neurath’s ship, which has to be rebuilt while at sea, he writes: [One] can reflect only from the midst of the way of thinking one is reflecting about. So if one entertains the thought that bringing one’s current ethical outlook to bear on a situation alerts one to demands that are real, one need not be envisaging any sort of validation other than a Neurathian one. The thought is that this application of one’s ethical outlook would stand up to the outlook’s own reflective self-scrutiny. (: ; see also : –, –)

“The ethical,” McDowell goes on to say, is “a domain of rational requirements, which are there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them,” and what is needed to recognize such ethical demands is to acquire the conceptual capacities that open our eyes to “the very existence of this tract of the space of reasons” (: ). For instance, when we have acquired the concept of the noble we can then see the world in light of the demands of the noble, where certain ways of being are regarded as more noble than others. Such normative demands, McDowell says, “are not alien to the contingencies of our life as human beings. . . . [Ordinary] upbringing can shape the actions and thoughts of human beings in a way that brings these demands into view” (). The resulting habits of action, thought, and, we can add (as McDowell does elsewhere), sensitivity are what he calls “second nature” (). Against scientistic naturalism, which attempts to understand the world in a way that is independent of our experience of the meaning of things for us, McDowell defends a more sophisticated version of naturalism, namely, a “naturalism of second nature,” which can account for the space of reasons (i.e., the space of meaning) in terms of the development of our human potentialities as rational, linguistic animals within a particular form of life. He writes: “We tend to be forgetful of the very idea of second nature. I am suggesting that if we can recapture that idea we can keep nature as it were partially enchanted, but without lapsing into pre-scientific superstition or a rampant platonism” ().



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We will see in Chapter  that Hursthouse seeks to incorporate aspects of McDowell’s Neurathian approach along with her ethical naturalist approach discussed in this chapter. But it will be argued that she does not go far enough in exploring the evaluative standpoint from within an acquired ethical outlook.

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McDowell distinguishes between two kinds of “platonism”: a “rampant platonism,” which we see he wants to reject, and a “naturalized platonism,” which he endorses as key to keeping nature “partially enchanted” and which he sees as part of a properly understood Aristotelian perspective. Like a number of other neo-Aristotelians, McDowell wants to overcome moral subjectivism while also avoiding any form of supernaturalism, especially what he is here calling “rampant platonism,” where “the rational structure within which meaning comes into view is independent of anything merely human, so that the capacity of our minds to resonate to it looks occult or magical” (). By contrast: Naturalized platonism is platonistic in that the structure of the space of reasons has a sort of autonomy; it is not derivative from, or reflective of, truths about human beings that are capturable independently of having that structure in view. But this platonism is not rampant: the structure of the space of reasons is not constituted in splendid isolation from anything merely human. The demands of reason are essentially such that a human upbringing can open a human being’s eyes to them. ()

An essential part of such an upbringing is our initiation into a particular linguistic community. McDowell writes (in a key passage worth quoting at length): [Human beings] are born mere animals, and they are transformed into thinkers and intentional agents in the course of coming to maturity. . . . In being initiated into a language, a human being is introduced into something that already embodies putatively rational linkages between concepts, putatively constitutive of the layout of the space of reasons, before she comes on the scene. This is a picture of initiation into the space of reasons as an already going concern; there is no problem about how something describable in those terms could emancipate a human individual from a merely animal mode of living into being a full-fledged subject, open to the world. . . . Human beings mature into being at home in the space of reasons or, what comes to the same thing, living their lives in the world; we can make sense of that by noting that the language into which a human being is first initiated stands over against her as a prior embodiment of mindedness, of the possibility of an orientation to the world. . . . [A] natural language . . . serves as a repository of tradition, a store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what. The tradition is subject to reflective modification by each generation that inherits it. Indeed, a standing obligation to engage in critical reflection is itself part of the 

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McDowell uses the lower case here to suggest a resemblance to Plato’s views rather than a connection to anything Plato specifically says.

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inheritance. . . . But if an individual human being is to realize her potential of taking her place in that succession, which is the same thing as acquiring a mind, the capacity to think and act intentionally, at all, the first thing that needs to happen is for her to be initiated into a tradition as it stands. (–)

There are several important things to comment on here. First of all, this passage makes it clear that we only achieve what is most admirable and distinctive in our humanity through our upbringing within a particular tradition-informed cultural life. Indeed, McDowell makes the provocative suggestion – at least to some modern readers – that tradition emancipates us by enabling us to come into rational self-consciousness. We also see here McDowell’s Neurathian approach. We do not begin by trying to reinvent the wheel in the ethical life but rather by being “initiated into a tradition as it stands” in order to learn from “the best which has been thought and said,” as Matthew Arnold put it ( []: ). We also learn from the best ethical exemplars of a tradition, as we see in Aristotle’s appeal to the person of practical wisdom (see, e.g., NE VI., b–; see also Zagzebski ). The kind of learning at issue here requires a significant degree of docility (i.e., teachability) where we are dispositionally open to learning from the “store of historically accumulated wisdom about what is a reason for what,” as this comes to us from parents and other family members, teachers, exemplars, elders, ancestors, and the laws and customs of our communities. But this is not the end of the story: Although we begin from a certain degree of passivity, as we learn and mature we become active participants in our tradition-informed cultural life – as a living tradition – and we may come to criticize and seek to reform parts of our inherited form of life that seem defective. Indeed, as McDowell says, “a standing obligation to engage in critical reflection is itself part of the inheritance.” McDowell is here seeking to avoid the possible charge that he is merely affirming a kind of conventional relativism. The critical Neurathian test for any such cultural form of life and ethical outlook is whether it can coherently be seen – by our best lights when we are engaged within it – 

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Cf. NE X., b–; II., b–; I., b–. As Martha Nussbaum discusses, Aristotle’s philosophical methodology begins from the “appearances” (phainomena), which includes taking account of what “the many” and “the wise” have thought about a particular topic (“What is virtue?,” “What is happiness?,” etc.), and then trying to “save” what is true in them. Aristotle “insists that he will find his truth inside what we say, see, and believe, rather than ‘far from the beaten path of human beings’ (in Plato’s words) ‘out there’” ( []: ). In a similar vein, Myles Burnyeat writes that, according to Aristotle’s view of moral education, “practice has cognitive powers, in that it is the way we learn what is noble and just” (: ).

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as revealing our ethical demands, which are thought to be “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them.” What McDowell is suggesting is that “immersion in a tradition might be a respectable mode of access to the real” (: ). I will return later (in Chapter ) to explore how we should understand the ethical reality that is supposed to be accessed here, and I will argue that we need a teleological worldview for making sense of ethical demands that are “there in any case.” But it is important to see that what we cannot do is completely throw off our tradition-informed cultural life, since this provides the means by which ethical demands come into view in the first place and by which we can live well and do well. Thus, when something seems defective in our traditioninformed cultural life, we will need to make piecemeal modifications, where we seek through practical reason to overcome what seems problematic while also preserving what seems good. A final point that I want to bring out from the above passage concerns the transformative effect of language acquisition on our human form of life by enabling us to inhabit the space of meaning. It is through acquiring conceptual capacities that our eyes are opened to the space of meaning, including ethical demands that are regarded as being “there in any case.” Language enables the possibility of having a “world” (as opposed to a mere “environment,” as with non-rational animals) that is open to understanding in light of the meanings that arise for us within it. The role of language in human life has generally been underexplored by neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalists, though we did see Foot acknowledge the connection between language and acting from reason: “When we say that human beings are able to choose on a rational ground as no other animal can, it is . . . because humans use language” (: ). MacIntyre likewise sees language as enabling us to step back and reflect on our desires and consider what we have reason to desire (see : –, –, –; : –, –). But neither MacIntyre nor Foot say much about what exactly these reasons are and how they are constituted by the space of meaning that language enables us to inhabit. Hursthouse also leaves a lot unexplored when she briefly considers whether our ability to “communicate with each other by means of language” has something to say about our characteristic way of going on, and she remarks: “[There] is something very significant about that fact about us as a species. But it is not easy to see what the significance is” (: ). 

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I have developed these ideas further in McPherson a. I have drawn some from this essay here.

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To fill out the transformative effect of language on our human form of life we should consider here the work of Charles Taylor, especially his recent book The Language Animal. As he points out, Aristotle’s classic definition of human beings as zōon logon echon, “animal possessing ‘logos’,” is ambiguous. The word “logos” has often been translated as “reason” so that our human distinctiveness is seen in our being the rational animal (and we have seen that this is the approach of most neo-Aristotelians). But “logos” can also be translated as “word” or “discourse” so that our human distinctiveness is seen in our being the language animal, or the “animal possessing language” (: ). Obviously these two interpretations are closely connected, but it is important not to neglect the significance of the latter. In bringing out the significance of our being the language animal, Taylor makes the case for what he calls a “constitutive” view of language, which he contrasts with a “designative” or “enframing” view. He calls the latter view an “enframing” view because “the attempt is made to understand language within the framework of a picture of human life, behavior, purposes, or mental functioning, which is itself described and defined without reference to language” (). He also calls it a “designative” view because words “are introduced to designate features which have already in one way or another come to our attention” (). Language is seen then as a kind of tool by which we encode information, which can then be communicated to others and used for facilitating our acting in the world and taking control of our lives. By contrast, on the constitutive view, language makes possible “new purposes, new levels of behavior, new meanings” and thus it is “not explicable within a framework picture of human life conceived without language” (). We are distinct from nonlinguistic animals not only in having greater means by which to communicate and control our lives, but also in having a fundamentally different kind of experience or awareness of the world and with this different kinds of purposes. Our entering the “linguistic dimension” therefore makes possible a fundamentally different way of being from that of non-linguistic animals: Linguistic beings are capable of new feelings which affectively reflect their richer sense of their world: not just anger, but indignation; not just desire, but love and admiration. For human beings an emotional response is inseparable from a certain characterization of the situation which elicits it. . . . [Linguistic] beings can be sensitive to distinctions which are lost on prelinguistic animals. Important among these are distinctions involving moral or other values. Prelinguistic animals treat something as desirable

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or repugnant by going after it or avoiding it. But only language beings can identify things as worthy of desire or aversion. For such identifications raise issues of intrinsic rightness. They involve a characterization of things which is not reducible simply to the ways we treat them as objects of desire or aversion. They involve a recognition beyond that, that they ought to be treated in one or another way. ()

The possession of language, we might say, enables a transfigured vision. We can experience the world in the light of a conceptual framework whereby certain things are seen as being worthy of our concern and fit to be valued in specific ways (in terms of nobility, dignity, sanctity, etc.): the world is seen as making normative demands upon us. As Taylor puts it, language makes possible “metabiological” meanings that shape our human purposes: “these meanings arise for us when we seek to find meaning in our lives, when we strive for a certain communion with loved ones, when we seek moral rightness or ethical virtue,” and so on (). There is thus a close connection between our being the language animal and our being the meaning-seeking animal. The kind of metabiological meaning that I am most concerned with here as it relates to the account that I want to develop of our being the meaning-seeking animal is what I call “strong evaluative meaning,” which is a conception of meaning that I will develop on the basis of Taylor’s account of strong evaluation, and which can also be seen as operative in McDowell’s account of ethical demands (his appeal to the noble, as we will see, is a strong evaluative appeal). Articulating and defending this strong evaluative dimension of the space of meaning is crucial for going further in the direction of re-enchantment than what I have called the disenchanted version of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics: As we will see, it challenges the attempt to do away with a special realm of obligation that contains a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force, that is, that places demands upon us that are set apart from other sorts of concerns.

Strong Evaluative Meaning In contrast to weak evaluation where something (e.g., a particular flavor of ice cream) is judged to be good – a “weak good” – simply in virtue of being desired, in strong evaluation something (e.g., the life of virtue or human 

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Cf. Aristotle: “[Man] alone among the animals has speech. . . . [Speech] serves to reveal the advantageous and the harmful, and hence also the just and the unjust. For it is peculiar to man as compared to other animals that he alone has a perception of good and bad and just and unjust and other things [of this sort]; and partnership in these things is what makes a household and a city” (P I., a–; emphasis added).

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dignity) is judged to be good – a “strong good” – according to qualitative distinctions of value in terms of higher and lower, noble and base, admirable and contemptible, fulfilling and unfulfilling, dignified and undignified, sacred and profane, and so on that are seen as normative for our desires. Or, as Taylor puts it, strong evaluation involves “discriminations of right or wrong, better or worse, higher or lower, which are not rendered valid by our own desires, inclinations, or choices, but rather stand independent of these and offer standards by which they can be judged” (: ). There are two specific features of the strong evaluative dimension of meaning (or value) that I want to highlight here. The first is the categorical feature, which concerns the way in which strong goods are normative for our desires. If someone shows a lack of concern for such goods, this does not mean that their normative demands no longer apply, but rather this person is judged as being ethically deficient (see Taylor b: ; : , –). For instance, if courage is a virtue and is a fit object of a strong evaluative judgment of being noble or admirable, then it is something that we ought to cultivate and put into practice in appropriate situations, and if we don’t do so then we can be blamed for being a coward. Likewise, if human beings have intrinsic dignity that ought to be respected, and if we fail to do so, then we can be judged as ethically deficient in being insensitive to the dignity of others (a kind of moral blindness). We can see this categorical feature in McDowell’s account of “the ethical” as “a domain of rational requirements, which are there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them.” And we have seen that for McDowell the primary strong evaluative category is “the noble,” and it is for the sake of this that the virtuous person acts. As previously stated, here “the noble” is not an end separate from virtue, but rather it represents an evaluation inherent in the concept of virtue whereby it is seen as a normatively higher mode of life. And if we are not responsive to the demands of virtue, then we show ourselves up as base, corrupt, morally blind, or otherwise ethically deficient. The second feature of the strong evaluative dimension of meaning is the incommensurability feature: Strong goods are incommensurable with weak goods; that is, strong goods are of incomparably higher worth. For instance, imagine a modern day Good Samaritan who is on his way to get an ice cream cone and comes across a stranger in dire need: As a virtuous person the Good Samaritan will obviously forego his desire for ice cream in order to help the stranger, since the stranger’s life and well-being 

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See also Taylor a: Introduction and chs. –; b: ch. ; : pt. I; .

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and the Good Samaritan’s leading a life of virtue (which includes compassion and charity) are of incomparably higher value than the enjoyment of ice cream. Something similar can be said about wealth, comfort, social approval, and other kinds of weak goods: The virtuous person will be ready and willing to sacrifice these for the sake of strong goods (the virtues, moral integrity, human dignity, etc.) when they come into conflict (see Taylor b: –; : ). It is important to note that such sacrifice cannot be simply a matter of strong goods outweighing weak goods. Unlike weak evaluation where one may seek to weigh various desires and then attempt to achieve the greatest overall satisfaction, in strong evaluation the idea of weighing strong goods and weak goods is regarded as mistaken. There is no common measure between them, as a weak good is based merely on what we happen to desire and a strong good is a desire-independent normative standard. Weak goods must therefore be judged in the light of strong goods; for example, given that we strongly value modes of life involving integrity, courage, justice, and kindness, we thus judge a life devoted solely to the pursuit of sensual pleasure, wealth, comfort, or the approval of others to be base, contemptible, or unworthy. This does not mean that these weak goods have no place in a human life, but they should not have primacy. Moreover, when there are conflicts between strong goods and weak goods the considerations that might otherwise have led one to pursue weak goods should be set aside as irrelevant or as counting for nothing (see Taylor : ). McDowell also recognizes this incommensurability feature, since he believes that for virtuous agents ethical considerations pertaining to a sense of the noble should “silence” (rather than simply override) non-ethical considerations (see : –, , –, –, –). As we have seen, the disenchanted version of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism has sought to do away with a special moral ought that is supposed to contain a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force and which is often regarded – by modern moral philosophers – as being in a separate domain from other sorts of considerations in that moral considerations are thought always to override non-moral considerations. The rejection of this sort of special sense of obligation, I said at the outset, is a disenchanting move. I want to resist this disenchanting move here because I think it neglects the 

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Cf. Aurel Kolnai on “moral emphasis,” which he describes as “the peculiar, sharply characterized tone attaching to every experience of what strikes us as morally relevant, a tone of warning, urging, vetoing and commanding with an ‘absolute’ and ‘unconditional’ ring of ultimate gravity about it” ( []: ).

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whole domain of strong evaluative meaning. However, there may indeed be something objectionable about the thesis that moral (or ethical) considerations always override (or better put, following McDowell, silence) nonmoral considerations if the domain of the moral is interpreted in a narrow way in terms of what we owe to others. This is often how the thesis of moral overridingness is understood, and it is on this basis that neoAristotelians have critiqued it. But the realm of the moral of course does not have to be understood in such narrow terms, as neo-Aristotelians have sought to show, while often still seeking to avoid attaching any “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force to the moral ought. Consider, for example, Foot’s take on the matter. As we have seen, moral evaluation, for Foot, has to do with the goodness of the rational will, but this can include considerations pertaining to others as well as to oneself, and which considerations are deemed most important and thus as providing compelling reasons for action in any given situation will depend upon an all things considered judgment. She writes: “[It] is not always rational to give help where it is needed, to keep a promise, or even, I believe, always to speak the truth. If it is to be said that ‘moral considerations’ are always ‘overriding’, it cannot be these particular considerations that we refer to, but must rather be the overall judgement about what, all things considered, should be done” (: ). Foot does say that “a good case can be made out for a limited moral absolutism by which certain . . . actions are held to be such as to rule out circumstances in which it could ever be right to perform them” (). In fact, she endorses a much more limited form of moral absolutism than is accepted by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Anscombe, who include adultery and lying among things that are absolutely prohibited, which Foot does not include. The example she gives of an absolute prohibition that she accepts is the prohibition of torture: “If the frequently unchallengeable description ‘torture’ applies to an action, then, whatever the circumstances, it is in my firm opinion morally ‘out’” (). But she goes on to say: “‘moral absolutism’ of this ilk does not support any general theory of the overridingness of those reasons for action that could be called ‘moral reasons’ in [the sense of having to do with what we owe to others]” (). I will return in Chapter  to discuss the issue of 

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Foot goes on to write: “I do not . . . much care how the word ‘moral’ is used. But it seems important to recognize as virtues of the will (as volitional excellences) a readiness to accept good things for oneself, and to see the great importance for life of the self-regarding aspect of virtues such as hope and a readiness to accept good things. And on the negative side, we might want to use the description ‘moral fault’ in thinking of the kind of timidity, conventionality, and wilful selfabnegation that may spoil no one’s life but one’s own. That we tend to speak in moral

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moral absolutism and whether it can be supported by the kind of ethical naturalism advanced by Foot, Hursthouse, and MacIntyre (I don’t think it can), but it is important to note here that Foot does not tell us why torture is in her “firm opinion morally ‘out’.” She does not appeal, as one might expect, to the strong evaluative notion of the sanctity (or special dignity) of human life, which seems to be the kind of thing that needs to be invoked here to make sense of an absolute prohibition of torture. Moreover, the realm of strong evaluative meaning is not invoked in her appeals to all things considered judgments about what is to be done, where we weigh both other-regarding and self-regarding considerations, and so it is not clear why some considerations outweigh others. We have seen that she appeals to “reasons for action” or what we “see as good,” but without an appeal to the realm of strong evaluative meaning there remains an inarticulacy about what is involved here. As discussed, McDowell does appeal to the strong evaluative category of the noble, and this is behind his judgment that ethical considerations “silence” non-ethical considerations. He also does not understand the realm of the ethical in a narrow way where it only concerns what we owe to others. The examples of ethical considerations to which he appeals are the



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philosophy only of volitional faults that impinge particularly on others gives the whole subject an objectionably rigoristic, prissy, moralistic tone that we would hardly care to take up in everyday life. It also tends to cloud understanding by suggesting that there is a special meaning for words such as ‘ought’ in such contexts. In fact ‘ought’ is very close to ‘should’, and if we speak of ‘a moral context’ this usually simply indicates the presence of a reason for acting that has to do with others rather than oneself” (: –). In a later essay Foot describes a “moral action” as “something done by someone who (let us suppose rightly) believes that to act otherwise would be contrary to, say, justice or charity; or again not done because it is thought that it would be unjust or uncharitable to do it” (: ; cf. –). This suggests that “moral action” has to do with other-regarding concern. In “Morality, Action, and Outcome” (), Foot does speak of “a morality which refuses to sanction the automatic sacrifice of the one for the good of many because it secures to each individual a kind of moral space, a space which others are not allowed to invade,” which it does by virtue of a “demand for reciprocity” (b: ). She goes on to say of this moral perspective that “it seems to define a kind of solidarity between human beings, as if there is some sense in which no one is totally to come out against one of his fellow men” (). In a footnote she says: “Perhaps it is this idea that is partly responsible for the peculiar outage that we feel about torture” (, n. ). However, in regard to the “moral space” that others are not allowed to invade, I think it is best not to see this as being “secured” by reciprocal agreement, but rather as being a matter of the inherent sanctity (i.e., inviolability) of every human life. This seems needed for making sense of our outrage or horror when this moral space is violated, and also for providing a firm grounding for the demand for reciprocity and solidarity. In another place Foot does say that the virtue of justice makes a person do well “where the reasons are about, e.g., promising, property, or respect for life” (b: ; see also : ; : ). But she doesn’t says why human beings are to be regarded as respect-worthy, and thus she does not illuminate for us the nature of the reasons for “respect for life” that the just person is supposed to possess. And she does not explain how this fits with her brand of ethical naturalism. She also speaks in various places about people’s rights, but it is not clear what their basis is.

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demands of the virtue of temperance, which he says can silence the attractions of sensual pleasure, and the demands of the virtue of courage, which he says can silence concern for “security of life and limb” (: –, –). The first case – regarding the virtue of temperance – does seem to be an instance of a contrast between a strong good (the nobility of temperance) and a weak good (the attractions of sensual pleasure) that highlights their incommensurability. However, the second case – regarding the virtue of courage – is problematic since one’s own life and bodily integrity should be regarded as strong goods, as things we ought to care about, even if we don’t. Such goods cannot be silenced. Here we have a conflict between strong goods that McDowell is not properly recognizing, since his account of ethical considerations is still too narrow to recognize adequately the whole domain of strong goods. This is at least partly because he holds a Stoic (or quasi-Stoic) view of the demands of virtue, as he maintains that “no sacrifice necessitated by the life of excellence . . . can count as a genuine loss” (). But in the case of sacrificing life and limb there is a genuine loss of strong goods. I will return in Chapter  to discuss further the problems with McDowell’s Stoic view. Another possibility is that we could take the realm of “the moral” (or “the ethical,” used equivalently) to be coextensive with the whole realm of strong evaluative meaning, and if we take this view, then we can say – as suggested by the incommensurability feature of strong evaluative meaning – that moral (i.e., strong evaluative) considerations (e.g., about human dignity or the life of virtue) silence non-moral (i.e., weak evaluative) considerations (e.g., a preference for a particular flavor of ice cream). Taylor in fact suggests such a view: “Morality” . . . can be and often is defined purely in terms of respect for others. The category of the moral is thought to encompass just our obligations to other people. But if we adopt this definition, then we have to allow that there are other questions beyond the moral which are of central concern to us, and which bring strong evaluation into play. There are questions about how I am going to live my life which touch on the issue of what kind of life is worth living, or what kind of life would fulfill the promise implicit in my particular talents, . . . or of what constitutes a rich, meaningful life – as against one concerned with secondary matters or trivia. These are issues of strong evaluation, because the people who ask these

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This is not to deny that certain sensual pleasures can be informed by strong evaluative judgments, as, for example, in the experience of fine dining (or feasting) or in sexual communion with one’s beloved.

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questions have no doubt that one can, following one’s immediate wishes and desires, take a wrong turn and hence fail to lead a full life. To understand our moral world we have to see not only what ideas and pictures underlie our sense of respect for others but also those which underpin our notions of a full life. (: )

The category of “the moral” (or “the ethical”) can thus be regarded as including any qualitative distinction of value in terms of higher and lower, noble and base, admirable and contemptible, fulfilling and unfulfilling, dignified and undignified, sacred and profane, and so on that is seen as normative for our desires. Perhaps this stretches the category of “the moral” too far, though I don’t think it ultimately matters whether we identify the moral with the realm of strong evaluative meaning, since it is the latter that does the needed work. One reason someone might think we are stretching the category of the moral too far in identifying it with the realm of strong evaluative meaning is that the latter also includes the aesthetic domain. Through strong evaluation, for example, we judge that we ought to be appropriately responsive to great works of art and stunning scenes of natural beauty, and that doing so is constitutive of a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. Of course, we also often think that such aesthetic demands pale in comparison to certain moral demands narrowly construed; for example, if we are on our way to the symphony and come across someone in dire need, we should obviously give priority to the latter. As this suggests, strong goods can and must be weighed against each other, even if strong goods and weak goods cannot be weighed against each other, since strong goods always silence the appeal of weak goods when they conflict. In weighing strong goods with other strong goods we find that there are some that are regarded as being especially important, and can be so in different ways. In fact, in a certain way aesthetic contemplation can be of great importance for a meaningful human life, as we see in the following remarks by Aurel Kolnai: “If certain churches or certain regions or street-corners in certain cities I peculiarly admire and love did not exist, it ‘wouldn’t make much difference.’ Yet it is in their contemplation and tangible nearness, undoubtedly an aesthetic experience, that I seem somehow to become aware of the ineffable goodness of existence more deeply and vividly than in any experience of benefit or thriving, or even of moral virtue” ( []: ). In other words, although such objects of aesthetic contemplation may not seem to “make much difference,” in fact, they make all the difference in the world. In Chapter  I will return to discuss the importance of contemplation in human life. And in Chapter 

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I will return to discuss in more detail how we might think about ordering the plurality of strong goods that we recognize within an overall conception of the good life. What I want to bring out here is how the two features of the strong evaluative dimension of meaning that I have discussed – namely, the categorical feature (i.e., the normative demand) and the incommensurability feature (i.e., strong goods cannot be weighed against weak goods) – give expression to a special sense of ought (whether we call it a “moral” ought does not really matter) that contains a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force, that is, it places demands upon us that are set apart from weak evaluative concerns. As we saw, Anscombe suggested that we get rid of this sort of ought if we don’t believe in a divine lawgiver and adopt instead an ordinary (i.e., disenchanted) sense of ought that concerns what we need in order to flourish qua human being. But it is worth noting that Anscombe herself ultimately did not accept this disenchanting move. As will be discussed more in Chapter , in “Modern Moral Philosophy” Anscombe was also concerned to defend absolute prohibitions against consequentialist forms of ethics, and she expressed doubts about whether the sort of Aristotelian ethics that she recommends to non-theists can adequately ground such absolute prohibitions. And in her later work Anscombe appeals to what she calls “mystical perception” in order to make sense of certain normative demands upon us (including absolute prohibitions) that in fact appear to contain a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force. Such perception seems to express a kind of strong evaluation that pertains to that which is seen as sacred or reverence-worthy, which involves normative demands (e.g., demands of inviolability) that are especially set apart from other sorts of concerns. Anscombe thinks that this perception is “as common as humanity”: for example, we find it in the perception that we dishonor our bodies in casual sex, in our sense that we owe respect to someone’s dead body, and in our horror at the evil of murder (: –). In light of this, Anscombe distinguishes between two kinds of virtue. Some virtues, such as temperance in regard to food and drink and honesty about property, “are fundamentally utilitarian in character.” “Utilitarian” here just means that they are instrumental to things going well for us 

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Anscombe does say: “[sexual] actions are not sacred actions” (); however, I am not sure what she means by “sacred” here. According to my usage of sacred, we can say that there is something sacred about human sexuality insofar as we regard it as being reverence-worthy and as having demands of inviolability. We can see this sacred value perhaps most clearly in cases where it is violated (i.e., in the horror of sexual violence).

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(i.e., they are “Aristotelian necessities”). By contrast, some virtues, “though indeed profitable, are supra-utilitarian and hence mystical.” One example is chastity. Anscombe writes: “Not that this virtue isn’t useful: it’s highly useful. If Christian standards of chastity were widely observed the world would be enormously happier. . . . But it . . . is a supra-utilitarian value . . . [This] is what comes out in the perception that the life of lust is one in which we dishonour our bodies” (–). We might say that there is something fundamentally sacred or reverence-worthy about human sexuality to which the virtue of chastity (understood as right intention in sexual matters) is responsive. Another example of a “mystical” or suprautilitarian virtue is what Anscombe describes as the virtue of “respect for life.” Although the prohibition on murder certainly “makes life more commodious,” she says: “everybody perceives quite clearly that the wrong done in murder is done first and foremost to the victim, whose life is not inconvenienced, it just isn’t there any more. He isn’t there to complain: so the utilitarian argument has to be on behalf of the rest of us. Therefore, though true, it is highly comic and is not the foundation: the objection to murder is supra-utilitarian” (). Again, I think this can be framed with more clarity in terms of the sacredness or reverence-worthiness of human life. And it is something like this that I suggested was missing in Foot’s acceptance of an absolute prohibition against torture, and it is also important for making sense of her response to the great evil of the Holocaust, which was mentioned earlier. We cannot make sense of this evil simply in terms of how it prevents human well-being; rather, the horror of this evil is that it violates the sanctity of human of life – it violates that which should be regarded as inviolable and which makes normative demands upon us that contain a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force. I contend that it is not just the sacred or the reverence-worthy that has supra-utilitarian value, but rather, all strong goods have such value. For instance, when McDowell, following Aristotle, appeals to the strong evaluative category of the noble, for which sake we ought to act, he is appealing to a supra-utilitarian/non-instrumentalist value. We see this in his rejection of instrumentalist accounts of the virtues. In Chapter  I will discuss this issue more fully.

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See Adams : ch.  for a helpful discussion of the link between moral horror and a sense of the sacred.

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Going Further: The Way Forward I have suggested that McDowell’s partial re-enchantment constitutes a significant improvement over the sort of ethical naturalist perspective of Foot, Hursthouse, and MacIntyre. In particular, McDowell does a better job of avoiding the scientism that is prevalent in modern intellectual life, especially as expressed in the focus on a disengaged or “sideways-on” view of human life. His account of a “naturalism of second nature” allows him to give better recognition to the space of meaning that shapes the engaged standpoint from within our human form of life. This includes recognizing a crucial dimension of this space of meaning that I have called strong evaluative meaning, which involves a special sense of obligation containing a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force, that is, it places demands upon us that are set apart from weak evaluative concerns. In my own effort of seeking re-enchantment I want to take on board these elements of McDowell’s work, but I will also argue that we should go further and realize a fuller kind of re-enchantment than that which is on offer either with McDowell or with the sort of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism of Foot, Hursthouse, and MacIntyre. We can do this through a more in-depth exploration of the realm of strong evaluative meaning. I will outline here key ways of realizing a fuller kind of re-enchantment for which I will argue in the chapters to come: ()

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We should recognize other strong evaluative categories besides the noble (which contrasts with the base or the ignoble) – we have seen that this is the focus for McDowell, following Aristotle – by which we identify strong goods. The discussion of Anscombe’s account of “mystical perception” suggests that the strong evaluative category of the sacred or the reverence-worthy (which contrasts with the profane) is especially important, and this will play a key role in what follows (namely, in the discussion of other-regarding concern in Chapter  and the discussion of human beings as homo religiosus in Chapter ). We can also talk about higher and lower, profound and superficial, fullness and lack, admirable and contemptible, dignified and undignified, worthy and unworthy, meaningful and meaningless, and so forth. There can be overlap in various strong evaluative categories, but they highlight different things. We also need to recognize a plurality of strong goods and different levels of strong goods. Some strong goods are more fundamental than others. Taylor calls these “constitutive goods,” which he says are

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“features of ourselves, or the world, or God” that are worthy of our love, admiration, respect, reverence, awe, allegiance, etc. (a: ; see also : chs.  and ). In other words, they provide an answer to questions such as: “What is worthy of my love?,” “What commands my respect (or reverence)?,” and the like. And answering these questions helps us to answer the questions “What ought I do?” and “How ought I to be?” The key idea in regard to constitutive goods is that, as the name suggests, they constitute the strong goods that define for us the good life (i.e., a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life). While it is true that any strong good is worthy of our love, or admiration, or respect, or reverence, etc., the point is that constitutive goods are worthy in a fundamental way in constituting the strong goods that define for us the good life. For instance, if we regard some conception of our own human potential as a constitutive good – and so as demanding admiration and respect – then we can see how this constitutes certain goods that make up the good life for us: namely, the virtues of character and intellect whereby we fulfill this human potential. We might regard this as the standard Aristotelian conception of a constitutive good (see Chapter ). () We also need to be attentive to the ways in which others can be constitutive goods for us, which has tended to be overlooked by neoAristotelians (as will be discussed in Chapter ). For instance, other human beings can be seen as love-worthy, respect-worthy, or reverence-worthy in virtue of their inherent dignity or sanctity and so as constituting certain goods that make up the good life for us: namely, other-regarding virtues such as friendship, justice, generosity, kindness, loyalty, etc., and the experience of love (or communion). There are also non-human others that can be constitutive goods. For instance, non-human animals can be seen as respectworthy (even if not to the extent of human beings) in virtue of the value of sentient life as instantiated in each specific life-form with its distinct capacities, and so they can be seen as constituting certain goods that make up the good life: namely, virtues such as compassion and friendliness with regard to non-human animals. Likewise, we can regard the environment as being worthy of awe, wonder, and respect due to its beauty, grandeur, intricateness, etc., and so as constituting certain goods that define for us the good life: namely, virtues such as care and respect for the natural world and proper awe and wonder. And if we are theists, then we will regard God as being worthy of our love, reverence, and allegiance due to God’s perfect goodness, love,

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wisdom, etc., and so as constituting certain goods that define for us the good life: namely, virtues such as piety, humility, existential gratitude, and loving devotion. In each of these cases the virtues can be seen as modes of proper responsiveness to constitutive goods, which involves concern for them for their own sake but which also contributes to a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life (i.e., the good life). () Our strong evaluative experience of these various goods seems to presuppose some ontological background picture that can make sense of them. In other words, our “moral phenomenology” seems to presuppose a “moral ontology” that can make sense of it (see Taylor : –; ). We can see this, for example, in our strong evaluative experience of human dignity as a constitutive good, which seems to presuppose some picture of human beings and their place in the cosmos that makes them worthy of respect and concern: One might say that it is something about having the capacity for rationality, morality, spirituality, creativity, love, or whatever else, which are seen as capacities for a higher mode of life. Sometimes this is framed in a religious way, such as by saying that human beings are made in the image of God, and sometimes it is framed in a non-religious way, though this will still require some picture of the place of human beings in the cosmos (what I will call a “cosmic outlook”). McDowell denies the need for such a moral ontology (apart from his account of our second nature capacities) for grounding our moral phenomenology, and thus endorses a “quietist” position. I will challenge this position in Chapter  and argue for the importance and viability of a teleological worldview. () The account given here of strong evaluative meaning is key for thinking about the way in which human beings are distinctively the meaning-seeking animal. As discussed in the Introduction, there are three key aspects of meaning-seeking in my account: First, it is distinctive of our human form of life that we seek meaning in life, and in particular strong evaluative meaning. Since these strong evaluative meanings require a certain life-orientation, there is, secondly, a concern with a meaningful life, that is, the concern is with the overall meaning of our lives. Finally, it is also distinctive of our human form of life that we can be and often are concerned with the meaning of life; we are concerned with how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things and whether there is a cosmic or ultimate source of meaning to which we must align our lives. I will seek to

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show how this concern for the meaning of life is rightly connected to a concern for meaning in life and a meaningful life (see Chapters  and ). I will also make a case for understanding happiness (or what Aristotle calls eudaimonia) in terms of a meaningful life and for seeing this as the ultimate aim of human action (see Chapter ). () The way in which we are distinctively the meaning-seeking animal is also connected, I contend, with our being homo religiosus, that is, naturally drawn to spirituality, which I understand as a practical lifeorientation that is shaped by what is taken to be a self-transcending source of meaning, which involves strong normative demands, including demands of the sacred or the reverence-worthy (see Chapter ). The issue of spirituality is something that has been generally overlooked by neo-Aristotelians, despite the prominent place of spirituality in human life throughout recorded history up to the present. This is an oversight I seek to correct through a deeper exploration of the realm of strong evaluative meaning – especially the sense of the sacred – that arises for us from within our human form of life as meaningseeking animals. As a part of correcting this oversight, I will also counter the anti-contemplative stance of most neo-Aristotelians, where they break strongly with Aristotle. () Lastly, I will explore (in Chapter ) the draw to theistic spirituality in particular, which if embraced would constitute a further kind of re-enchantment. The general tendency of disenchantment is to push toward a view of the world as an impersonal order, and thus coming to embrace a theistic spirituality can be regarded as a form of re-enchantment, as theism regards the world as a personal order. The theist holds that the ultimate nature of reality is personal rather than impersonal due to having been created by a person (God) and for the central purpose of love, which is most fully realized in communion between persons (both human and divine). With these signposts in place, let us now turn to explore the question of the relationship between virtue and happiness and the difference that the account of strong evaluative meaning developed in this chapter makes for how we understand this relationship.

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Virtue, Happiness, and Meaning

In his  essay “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life,” David Wiggins remarks: Even now, in an age not much given to mysticism, there are people who ask “What is the meaning of life?” . . . [They] suppose that questions like that of life’s meaning must be among the central questions of moral philosophy. The question of life’s meaning . . . [is] not at the centre of moral philosophy as we now have it. . . . [Philosophy] has put happiness in the place that should have been occupied in moral philosophy by meaning. ( []: –)

I am fundamentally in agreement with the sentiment expressed here that the question of life’s meaning should be among the central questions of moral philosophy, and this book attempts to show what it looks like to treat the question of life’s meaning as a central question of moral philosophy. Wiggins is right that moral philosophers have more often focused on happiness rather than meaning. However, in this chapter I want to suggest that there is a conception of happiness that is equivalent to a strong evaluative conception of a meaningful life, and that such a conception is important for properly addressing the ancient philosophical question of the relationship between virtue and happiness, and the related question “Why be virtuous?” Aristotle’s term eudaimonia has typically been translated as “happiness”; however many contemporary Aristotelians have been dissatisfied with this, as happiness is often popularly understood in subjectivist terms, such as in terms of enjoyment or desire-satisfaction (see Hursthouse : –; cf. Haybron ). Thus, as we have seen, neo-Aristotelians have often preferred to speak instead of human “flourishing,” where this is understood as analogous to the flourishing of other living things. However, there are several problems with this. First, Aristotle himself sees a strong disanalogy between the good for human beings and the good for other living 

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things, as he says: “[We] regard neither ox, nor horse, nor any other kind of animal as happy [i.e., eudaimon]; for none of them can share in this sort of [noble] activity” (NE I., b–, cf. X., b–). Second, as we saw in Chapter  with McDowell’s thought experiment of the rational wolf, we might question why human beings as rational agents should be concerned with flourishing qua human being. What is needed, it seems, is a strong evaluative conception of what is most admirable or noble about human life and thus what it is to live well as a human being, where this is understood as a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. As we just saw, Aristotle understands eudaimonia in such strong evaluative terms when he characterizes it as a life of “noble activity,” or as a life of activity “in accord with virtue” (NE I., a–). To talk of “a meaningful life” is of course a modern way of talking, but I think it is a way of getting at what Aristotle and Aquinas (and others) were after when they enquired into the ultimate end of human action and gave it the name eudaimonia (in the case of Aristotle) or beatitudo (in the case of Aquinas). Using a strong evaluative conception of a meaningful life as a way of thinking about happiness allows us to avoid subjectivist understandings of happiness, as it enables us to speak of true and false happiness, since it is possible for a life to be objectively meaningful or lacking in meaning. Aristotle also suggests as much when he remarks: “Happiness . . . is not found in amusement; for it would be absurd if the end were amusement, and our lifelong efforts and sufferings aimed at amusing ourselves. . . . Rather, it seems correct to amuse ourselves so that we can do something 

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I put “noble” in brackets here because the previous sentence speaks of “good people who do noble actions.” It should also be noted – as an etymological point – that the language of “flourishing” in fact has a botanical rather than zoological origin. As Robert Adams says: “The origins of ‘flourishing’ are botanical, connected with flowering or blooming, but the origins of eudaimonia are connected rather with religion, evoking the idea of a favorable daimon or supernatural being” (: ). He sees the attraction to the use of the language of “flourishing” among some neo-Aristotelians as having metaethical motivations, namely, naturalist ones (of the disenchanted sort): “If what it is for a type of creature to flourish is in general a natural fact of the sort it is the business of biologists to know, then what it is for human beings to flourish will presumably be a natural fact. Then if the virtues are defined as traits . . . that humans need, in a general way, if they are to flourish as social creatures, a trait’s being a virtue will also be a natural fact” (). However, Adams says that Aristotle seems to proceed in the opposite direction, “from the recognition of the virtues to an understanding of living well”: that is, he starts “with judgments about what sort of activity are fine or noble [kalos], and hence virtuous, and [draws] from them conclusions about eudaimonia or human good” (–). At the beginning of the first section of Chapter  I said that all neo-Aristotelians “follow Aristotle’s procedure in the Nicomachean Ethics, where he begins with an argument for a particular conception of the human ‘function’ (ergon) – namely, to live well as rational social animals – and then moves on to specify an account of the virtues that fulfill this.” This is how Aristotle moves in the text, but it doesn’t gainsay Adams’ point that Aristotle in fact already has the different virtues in mind with his account of the human function in NE I..

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serious” (NE X., b–). In other words, we should aim at doing something meaningful. Since Wiggins wrote his essay “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life,” there has developed a significant body of literature in the Anglophone philosophical world on “the meaning of life,” or in many cases on “meaning in life” or what constitutes “a meaningful life.” However, contemporary neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists have generally not engaged in these discussions on meaning in life when discussing happiness or flourishing, which is somewhat strange since in many ways they are barking up the same tree. In this chapter I aim to overcome this neglect of the question of life’s meaning among neo-Aristotelians, and, as already stated, show its significance for thinking through the question of the relationship between virtue and happiness. With the introduction of this third category of meaning, the question then becomes: What is the relationship between virtue, happiness, and meaning? Some of the most prominent figures in the meaning in life literature, such as Susan Wolf and Thaddeus Metz, have sought to make the case for “meaningfulness” as a third distinctive dimension of value that is important for a good human life along with happiness and morality by showing that although it can overlap with the latter two dimensions it need not. In other words, one can have a meaningful life but be unhappy and/or immoral/vicious, one can be happy but have a life lacking in meaning and/or be immoral/vicious, and one can be moral/virtuous but be unhappy and/or lack meaning. Against such views, I will seek to show the 

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The questions raised in this literature were raised earlier by existentialist philosophers on the European continent (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, etc.). For a while questions about the meaning of life or what constitutes a meaningful life were dismissed as “nonsense” by Anglophone philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century due to the disenchanting influence of logical positivism. But this dismissal has itself now been dismissed, and subsequently Anglophone philosophers in the latter half of the twentieth century and now in the twenty-first century have devoted significant attention to questions related to meaning in life (see Hanfling ; Klemke ; Cottingham ; Benatar ; ; Holley ; Wolf ; Goetz ; Metz ; Seachris ; May ; Baggett and Walls ; Seachris and Goetz ; Kass ; Landau ). Dan Russell, however, defends a conception of happiness in line with Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia and says of this: “It is the sort of good life that is good for the one living it, a life experienced as rewarding and rich, and in which one finds one’s existence meaningful” (: ; see also Bielskis ). Jennifer Frey and Candace Vogler have also recently conducted a multiyear grant project on “Virtue, Happiness, and the Meaning of Life,” though the project engages more with literature in positive psychology on self-transcendence and meaning in life than the philosophical literature (see Frey and Vogler [eds.] ). Nevertheless, the project does demonstrate an increased interest in the field of virtue ethics in exploring the question of life’s meaning. See Wolf b; : –, –, –, –;  []: , –; and Metz : –, , , .

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connection between virtue, happiness, and meaningfulness. I have already said that I want to characterize “happiness” in terms of “a meaningful life” (understood in strong evaluative terms). And as I have already indicated by my appeal to Aristotle’s remark about eudaimonia as a life of activity “in accord with virtue,” I want to suggest that virtue is constitutive of happiness so understood. In making this case, I will contrast my position with other prominent positions in contemporary virtue ethics, focusing particularly on the work of Philippa Foot, since she has endorsed each of these other prominent positions throughout her career. Indeed, the question of the relationship between virtue and happiness and its connection to the issue of the rationality of acting virtuously have been the dominant concern of her work throughout her career (see Foot a: ix–x). There are two general accounts of how virtue relates to happiness: an instrumentalist account and a constitutive account. An instrumentalist account (which Foot endorses in her – essay “Moral Beliefs”) regards the virtues as a means to achieving other things that we want, the obtainment of which is thought to bring happiness for oneself (understood in subjectivist or desire-satisfaction terms). I will argue that this fails to provide a strong basis for the life of virtue and it also does not provide us with the right reason for acting virtuously, which should be for its own sake (though this doesn’t exclude acting for other considerations as well). A constitutive account, by contrast, regards the virtues as being constitutive of happiness. In other words, virtue is its own reward. Here we do act virtuously for its own sake, but doing so is also regarded as what happiness consists in. There are two main versions of the constitutive account: a strong evaluative version and a weak evaluative version (the latter is endorsed by Foot in her  essay “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives”). I will argue in favor of the former. I will also consider Foot’s final settled position (as expressed in Natural Goodness) that is based on her account of practical rationality, which was introduced in Chapter  and according to which acting virtuously is seen as part of practical rationality itself. Although the virtues characteristically enable things to go well for us, nevertheless, virtue and happiness can come apart and, when they do, Foot maintains that we still have reason to act virtuously. I will take issue with the way she thinks that virtue and happiness come apart here by appealing to a strong evaluative version of the constitutive account where happiness is understood as a meaningful life. However, I also reject the claim that there is no loss in the life of virtue, which is endorsed by some thinkers, such as D. Z. Phillips and John McDowell, who also hold a strong evaluative version of the constitutive account but take it in a Stoic

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direction. In the last section I will discuss the problem of loss in human life and also, in light of this, the importance of thinking not just about meaning in life, but also about a meaningful life and the meaning of life (i.e., an ultimate or cosmic source of meaning that enables us to find our place in the cosmos). The latter especially tends to be neglected in contemporary discussions about meaning in life, though I will seek to show why it should not be neglected. It is particularly important for avoiding the most debilitating sort of loss: namely, where we lose our grip on our strong evaluative framework altogether, which is where virtue and happiness do come apart because we lose a strong evaluative conception of happiness understood in terms of a meaningful life. Here I begin to address the issue of the meaning of life, but a fuller exploration of the meaning of life will have to wait for the last two chapters.

The Instrumentalist Account Let us begin by considering the instrumentalist account of the relationship of virtue to happiness (where happiness is understood in desire- or preference-satisfaction terms). Such a view is usually in the mind of people who say things like “Honesty is the best policy,” or “It pays to be good.” No doubt there is some truth in such maxims. For instance, in the world of commercial transaction it is hard to do well if one has a reputation for dishonesty, and the same is also true in the realm of personal relationships (namely, in friendship and romantic relationships). But what if we could have a reputation for honesty, but on some occasions, with cunning, act dishonestly and get away with it and thereby enhance our monetary advantage? It seems this can’t be ruled out, and indeed there are numerous examples of people acting in this way. It is perhaps harder to pull this off in the realm of personal relations, but again some manage to do it. In her early essay “Moral Beliefs” (–; reprinted in Foot a), Foot advanced an instrumentalist account. There she seeks to show how we have reason to act in accordance with the virtues – particularly the “cardinal virtues” of prudence, temperance, courage, and justice – no matter what else we want in our lives. She thinks that the case can be made out easily enough for prudence, temperance, and courage, since these are primarily self-regarding virtues that anyone needs for living well whatever his or her particular desires and interests happen to be. Matters are not as straightforward, however, if we understand prudence (i.e., practical wisdom) as something more than a form of instrumental rationality (i.e., efficiency in matching means to ends), temperance as

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aiming at what is noble in the realm of sensual pleasure, and courage as in part constituted by other virtues such as justice and moral integrity. The plausibility of her claims here depends upon a rather thin profile of these virtues. But where Foot thinks the difficulty especially lies is with the virtue of justice (which “covers all those things owed to other people”), since it is an other-regarding virtue and thus a potential source of conflict with a person’s self-interest as defined by his or her desires (). Here Foot sees herself as taking up the question of Plato’s Republic: Is justice, rather than injustice, most beneficial for individual human beings no matter who they may happen to be? The crucial question, she says, is the following: “Can we give anyone, strong or weak, a reason why he should be just?” (). And she takes it that this means showing someone “the way to something he wants” (). In this essay Foot thinks that the challenge can be answered on these terms such that justice can be shown to be the most rational course of action for all human beings. Her strategy is to show how difficult it would be to adopt injustice as a course of action for one’s life: Presumably the happy unjust man is supposed, as in Book II of the Republic, to be a very cunning liar and actor, combining complete injustice with the appearance of justice: he is prepared to treat others ruthlessly, but pretends that nothing is further from his mind. Philosophers often speak as if a man could thus hide himself even from those around him, but the supposition is doubtful, and in any case the price in vigilance would be colossal. If he lets even a few people see his true attitude he must guard himself against them; if he lets no one into the secret he must always be careful in case the least spontaneity betray him. Such facts are important because the need a man has for justice in dealings with other men depends on the fact that they are men and not inanimate objects or animals. If a man only needed other men as he needs household objects, and if men could be manipulated like household objects, or beaten into reliable submission like donkeys, the case would be different. As things are, the supposition that injustice is more profitable than justice is very dubious, although like cowardice and intemperance it might turn out incidentally to be profitable. (a: )

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This is what she says about them in this context: “Obviously any man needs prudence, but does he not also need to resist the temptation of pleasure where there is harm involved? And how could it be argued that he would never need to face what was fearful for the sake of some good?” (Foot a: –). The same is also true for other other-regarding virtues such as charity, which “attaches us to the good of others” and is concerned with rendering assistance to those in need (see Foot : –; a: , , ).

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In other words, if we are choosing among life-plans, then a life-plan that includes acting justly as part of it seems like a better bet than one that doesn’t for ensuring that our lives go well. As she puts it in another essay published five years later: “moral virtues [namely, courage, temperance, and justice] are qualities necessary if men are to get on well in a world in which they are frightened, tempted by pleasure and liable to hurt rather than help each other” (a: ). But given the terms of Foot’s discussion – where she is trying to show how justice helps our lives go well whatever it is that we happen to want in life – can she really rule out that there are some situations in which a lifeplan that involved some injustice or even complete injustice would be most beneficial? Although it is not difficult to see the utility of acting justly in many situations, it also seems that there are situations where it does pay to be unjust. In response to Foot, D. Z. Phillips points out that, for example, “it is easy enough to imagine a ruler having such power over his subjects that any relaxing of his ruthless rule would lead to a loss of profit” (–: ). If she is going to be consistent, Phillips thinks, Foot has to acknowledge that such a ruler “leads the best life he could lead” (). However, Phillips says, “many people would want to say that the ruler was not living the best life he could lead, and that despite the fact that he found injustice profitable, he ought to deal justly with his subjects” (). In filling out why someone might take such a view he appeals to Jesus’ famous question in the Gospels: “what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Mark :, KJV; cf. Matthew :; Luke :). Or, putting it in a more secular key, Phillips says: “one could ask whether it profits a man to gain the whole world by committing despicable deeds?” (). Such rhetorical questions suggest a rival view of “what constitutes profit in a man’s life”: There is no dispute over the obvious profits which the ruler’s injustice has brought him: wealth, gratification of his desires, ease, comfort, and so on. 

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Hursthouse also endorses this position when she speaks of the virtues as the “only reliable bet” for individual happiness in the long run (: ), and when she says that we should teach our children that they should expect some “decent returns” from a life of virtue (). This instrumentalist account is combined with what appears to be a weak evaluative version of the constitutive account, as seen, for example, when she writes: “[We] may be surprised by the realization that, personally, our answer to the question ‘Why should I be virtuous/moral?’ may be ‘I want to be – that’s the sort of life I want to live, the sort that I think is a good and successful and rewarding one’” (). I will discuss Hursthouse’s views on these matters in Chapter . In her essay “Virtues and Vices,” Foot describes virtues as “correctives,” as each virtue stands “at a point which there is some temptation to be resisted or deficiency of motivation to be made good” (a: ).

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But a judgment is being passed on these profits which calls them unprofitable. This judgment is a moral judgment. Its possibility shows conclusively that the relevance of morality does not depend on whether it pays or not [in a non-moralized sense]. Mrs. Foot has tried to find a non-moral justification for moral beliefs, and such an attempt always fails; it distorts the kind of importance which moral considerations have for us. ()

In other words, Foot overlooks the strong evaluative judgments according to which virtue is its own reward and vice is its own punishment.

The Constitutive Account: Strong Evaluative Version On the basis of the foregoing remarks we can identity two main problems with the instrumentalist account of the relationship of virtue to happiness (or individual benefit) that Foot puts forward in “Moral Beliefs.” The first problem is that the instrumentalist account does not provide us with a strong basis for the life of the virtue, since it cannot rule out that for some people and at least on some occasions it would be more beneficial to be vicious. The problem here is only exacerbated when we recognize that our human nature is something of a mixed bag, since human beings – evolved creatures that we are – have natural tendencies toward both virtue and vice. The second problem, which relates to the first, is that the instrumentalist account does not provide us with the right reason for acting virtuously. We do not need to deny that virtues are in many ways instrumentally beneficial. But if we are virtuous or are to become so, then we should act virtuously for its own sake because virtuous actions are inherently good; that is, as Aristotle would say, they are inherently noble (kalos). Aristotle distinguishes “the noble” from “the pleasant” and “the useful” as one of the three objects of choice and maintains: “[actions] in accord with virtue are noble, and aim at the noble” (NE II., b–a; IV., a–). In other words, performing virtuous actions for their own sake means performing them “for the sake of the noble, since this is the end aimed at by virtue” (NE III., b–; cf. II., a–). As aforementioned in Chapter , here nobility is not an end separate from virtue, but rather it represents a strong evaluation inherent in the concept of virtue whereby it is viewed as a normatively 

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I will return in Chapter  to discuss the issue of our mixed bagness further and in light of the evolutionary challenge that Bernard Williams puts forward, where he describes our nature – as formed by Darwinian processes – as “a rather ill-sorted bricolage of powers and instincts.” In Irwin’s translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, which I am using here, “to kalon” is translated as “the fine.” I have substituted “the noble.” Both terms are often used in translations of “to kalon.”

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higher, more meaningful mode of life. In other words, virtue understood in this way is constitutive of happiness (eudaimonia). Hence, as we have seen, Aristotle defines the good for human beings (i.e., eudaimonia) as a life of activity “in accord with virtue,” that is, as a life of “noble activity” (see NE I., a–; I., b–; X., b–). Here we have a strong evaluative or moralized view of happiness: It is a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life that is constituted by virtue and is something with which we ought to be concerned. This contrasts with the non-moralized view of happiness that is operative in Foot’s instrumentalist account, where virtue is regarded as a means for getting what it is that we happen to want, which expresses a desire- or preference-satisfaction view of happiness. The moralized view can be seen as operative in what Phillips is getting at when he speaks of a moral understanding of what “profits” a human being or of how it “pays” to be good that can challenge the view of profit taken by the unjust ruler. According to this moralized view, virtue is its own reward. McDowell also holds this sort of view, as he writes: “it is because a certain life is a life of exercises of human excellence, or, equivalently, because it is a life of doing what it is the business of a human being to do, that that life is in the relevant sense the most satisfying life possible for its subject” (: –). What it is “the business of a human being to do,” he says, is to be understood according to a “value-loaded” conception of human nature, where we identify what is most admirable about us as human beings (). The idea of a “constitutive good,” introduced in Chapter , can help us to fill out this constitutive account of the relationship of virtue to happiness. To recall, a constitutive good is a fundamental kind of strong good that is worthy of love, or admiration, or respect, or reverence, etc., and when we respond appropriately to constitutive goods in feeling and in action, then they constitute the strong goods (namely, the virtues) that define for us the good life (i.e., a strong evaluative conception of happiness). On my account, the virtues are constitutive of happiness understood in strong evaluative terms precisely because they are modes of being properly responsive to constitutive goods and it is this that makes them virtues. For instance, we can identify a constitutive good in our human potential, where some conception of our potential as rational social animals is seen as commanding our admiration and respect, and when we respond appropriately to this potential through exercising the virtues (e.g., justice, courage, temperance, and practical wisdom) that fulfill it, which involves acting “for the sake of the noble,” we then achieve a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. As will be

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discussed more in Chapter , there are other constitutive goods besides our own human potential: for example, the intrinsic dignity of other human beings. Indeed, I think it is part of other-regarding virtues such as justice and kindness to be properly responsive to human dignity, and it is in so doing that we realize a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. Whatever the constitutive good may be, it requires that we are concerned about it for its own sake, but it is the nature of the kind of good that it is that proper responsiveness to it also constitutes for us our happiness understood as a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. It is important also to highlight here the whole life focus of this view. The concern is not merely with meaning in life (or with “happy moments”) but with a meaningful life. A concern for strong evaluative meaning in life cannot be disconnected from a concern for a meaningful life because strong goods (the virtues, human dignity, etc.) demand a particular life-orientation: namely, that we orient our lives in light of these strong goods and seek to become virtuous and act virtuously in proper responsiveness to these goods. Thus we see ourselves as moving toward or away from what we understand to be the good for our lives as a whole (see Taylor : ch. ). And thus our lives can be understood in narrative terms, as a “narrative quest” to realize the good in our lives (see MacIntyre  []: ch. ). Aristotle affirms such a whole life view in his account of eudaimonia as a life of activity “in accord with virtue,” as he also adds “in a complete life”: “For one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day; nor, similarly, does one day or a short time make us blessed and happy” (NE I., a–; cf. I., a–). I maintain that one can have a meaningful or happy life even if it is cut short, and I will argue for this in what follows. But the point I want to make here is that we can best assess our happiness (eudaimonia) and that of others at the end (though we can also make along-the-way assessments). Hence, when we understand such happiness in terms of a meaningful life we can find ourselves concerned with what our “deathbed reflections” will be like (will we be able to say that we lived a good life, i.e., a meaningful life?) or with what will be said about us at our funeral (will we be deserving of a proper eulogy, i.e., a “good word” about a life well lived?). This strong evaluative conception of happiness where we act virtuously for its own sake and where this is seen as constitutive of happiness understood as a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life ensures that the virtues are not merely a “best bet” for happiness in the long run – which would allow that in some cases acting virtuously might

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not be in one’s (non-moralized) self-interest – but that the virtues are necessary for happiness, precisely because such happiness is already understood in moralized or strong evaluative terms as constituted by virtue. Virtue is not a means to an end, but it is the end. In “Moral Beliefs,” Foot does appear to recognize the need for the virtuous person to act for the sake of virtue in order to avoid the view that one could adopt a general life-plan of acting justly but make exceptions in particular circumstances where it is not beneficial to act justly. She writes: It is perfectly true that if a man is just it follows that he will be prepared, in the event of very evil circumstances, even to face death rather than to act unjustly – for instance, in getting an innocent man convicted of a crime of which he has been accused. For him it turns out that his justice brings disaster on him, and yet like anyone else he had good reason to be a just and not an unjust man. He could not have it both ways and while possessing the virtue of justice hold himself ready to be unjust should any great advantage accrue. (a: )

But does such a view make sense on the instrumentalist account of the relationship of virtue to happiness? I don’t think so, for reasons given by Phillips in his comments on Foot’s remarks: A mysterious gap exists between one’s initial choice of the way of justice, and one’s acceptance of death as its result. . . . It is as if Mrs. Foot were saying, “Once you choose justice you must accept what justice brings.” If I ask why, the answer is simply, “Because you are just.” The reason why I am just, namely, because I expect justice to pay, now seems to disappear in the background. . . . If, on the other hand, the likelihood of profit remains our reason for acting justly, I see no reason why . . . there could not also be people who, at some time or other in their lives, question whether the initial justification for acting justly, namely, that it generally pays to do so, applies in their case. . . . Unless one is prepared to say that one must accept the path of justice even when one’s reasons for choosing to walk it have now been proved to be false, one cannot give an intelligible account in terms of Mrs. Foot’s argument of why anyone should die for the sake of justice. (–: )

For his part, Phillips takes a rather Stoic view of the matter, as he does not accept Foot’s view that if someone’s just action brings about his or her death, then this constitutes a disaster: “She fails to see that for anyone concerned about justice, death for the sake of justice is not a disaster. The disaster for him would be to be found wanting in face of death, and to seek the path of injustice and compromise. Mrs. Foot cannot give an account of anyone who sees death as a good; who dies for the sake of justice” (–).

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Later, he says: “The man who chooses justice may not profit as [a rogue does] . . . Nevertheless, . . . in the only sense relevant to morality, he has accomplished all” (). McDowell also puts forward a similar view when he says that the person who inhabits a strong evaluative conception of human virtue (centered on the strong evaluative concept of the noble) will be equipped “to understand special employments of the typical notions of ‘prudential’ reasoning – the notions of benefit, advantage, harm, loss, and so forth – according to which (for instance) no payoff from flouting a requirement of excellence, however desirable . . ., can count as a genuine advantage; and, conversely, no sacrifice necessitated by the life of excellence . . . can count as a genuine loss” (: –). The attraction of such a Stoic view is that it makes virtue not only a necessary condition for happiness understood in strong evaluative terms (as I have claimed it is), but also a sufficient condition (wherever there is virtue there is happiness). However, I think there are problems with this sort of view, which I will return to discuss later in this chapter. For now, I want to explore the further developments in how Foot has understood the relationship between virtue and happiness and its connection to the issue of the rationality of acting virtuously.

The Constitutive Account: Weak Evaluative Version As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Foot’s position on the matter has changed several times throughout her career. Her final settled position receives its fullest expression in Natural Goodness (), though she began working her way toward this position in the s (b: ). However, before considering her final settled position, we need to consider an important intermediate position that she held. By the s Foot abandoned the claim, advanced in “Moral Beliefs,” that reasons for acting virtuously can be given for every person whatever his or her circumstances (e.g., even when in a “tight corner”) and whatever his or her desires may happen to be (see a: ix, xvi, ). We can see this in her  essay “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives.” As the title suggests, at this point in time Foot maintains that morality is not a system of categorical imperatives that make rational claims on every person no matter his or her circumstances and no matter what his or her desires happen to be. Rather, the claims of morality apply only if we already have an interest in being moral (i.e., virtuous). And hence morality, on her view, is a system of “hypothetical” (i.e., conditional) imperatives: for example, if you want to be a just person, then you ought to render what

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is due to others. Someone may act as justice requires not because of recognizing a categorical ought, but rather because he or she “[loves] truth and liberty, and [wants] every [person] to be treated with a certain respect” (a: ). Foot writes: “A cause such as justice makes strenuous demands, but this is not peculiar to morality, and men are prepared to toil to achieve many ends not endorsed by morality. That they are prepared to fight so hard for moral ends – for example, for liberty and justice – depends on the fact that these are the kinds of ends that arouse devotion” (). Here we can see Foot endorsing a kind of constitutive account of the relationship between virtue and happiness (where virtue is its own reward), but it is based on weak evaluation rather than strong evaluation, that is, something is judged as good and part of our conception of happiness because we happen to care about it, rather than because we see ourselves as recognizing a desire-independent normative standard for what we ought to care about. This means that in the case of the person who does not happen to share our care for morality or our devotion to justice, there is really nothing that can be said to convince him or her; we can only “note the character of the [person] concerned” and “take what measures [we] can to stop [him or her] from doing harm” (, n. ). Foot acknowledges that many people might think that such a position is destructive of morality, but she disagrees: [It] is interesting that the people of Leningrad were not struck by the thought that only the contingent fact that other citizens shared their loyalty and devotion to the city stood between them and the Germans during the terrible years of the siege. Perhaps we should be less troubled than we are by fear of defection from the moral cause; perhaps we should even have less reason to fear it if people thought of themselves as volunteers banded together to fight for liberty and justice and against inhumanity and oppression. ()

Later Foot says that we should see ourselves as volunteers in the “army of duty” rather than as conscripts (, n. ). And as she puts it elsewhere (around the same period):

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Foot does not say anything here about why human beings should be regarded as respect-worthy. Regarding charity, she writes: “It will surely be allowed that quite apart from thoughts of duty a man may care about the suffering of others, having a sense of identification with them, and wanting to help if he can. . . . If this is what he does care about, then he will be attached to the end proper to the virtue of charity and a comparison with someone acting from an ulterior motive . . . is out of place” (). And regarding honesty: “[Why] should the truly honest man not follow honesty for the sake of the good that honest dealing brings to them?” ().

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Things might get better, not worse, if we recognized that the reasons men have for acting justly and charitably depend on contingent human attitudes, and the identification of one man with another in society. For then we would see that it is up to us to cherish these things, and (above all) that it is no good treating people despitefully and divisively and then demanding morality of them with an alien “ought”. (a: –, n. )

Foot is not all that worried about there being enough volunteers in the army of duty, because, as it happens, the demands of morality do in fact arouse devotion in many (though not all) people, rational social animals that we are. As she puts it: “Considerations of justice, charity and the like have a strange and powerful appeal to the human heart” (xvi). But, on Foot’s account, at any time we want we can defect from the army of duty without flouting any objective requirement. There is something disconcerting about this. Foot thinks that to be worried here “betrays a lack of confidence which oddly does not often trouble people when their devotion is to causes other than those of morality” (, n. ). But this just shows that people’s experience of the cause of morality is not like their experience of other causes they happen to care about and which don’t involve strong evaluation. (I should note that Foot’s example of the people of Leningrad defending their city does not strike me as a case where people are devoted to what they see as a non-moral cause or a cause that does not fall under objective normative demands; indeed, it seems reasonable to wonder if their efforts could have been sustained without seeing them in light of objective normative demands.) To experience proper devotion to the cause of morality is to experience oneself as recognizing categorical demands, that is, normative demands (e.g., about justice and charity) that are, as McDowell puts it, “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them.” Foot acknowledges that we can “feel we have to behave morally, and given the psychological conditions of the learning of moral behaviour it is natural that we should have such feelings” (–). But she does not think this supports the idea that we should regard morality as a system of categorical imperatives; rather, it shows that our devotion to morality is completely contingent on our particular moral formation and personal propensities. The problem is that coming to see our devotion to the cause of morality as completely contingent has a deflationary effect on our moral experience insofar as this experience involves a sense of moral necessity (the necessity of acting in accordance with the categorical demands of justice, integrity, etc.), and it would not be surprising if this leads to some – occasional or continuing – defection from the army of duty. But we can stave off such defection if we can see our

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moral formation as revealing to us categorical moral demands, as opposed to revealing the complete contingency of our moral beliefs. As we saw in Chapter , McDowell offers such a revelatory picture of our moral formation in his account of second nature. Toward the end of “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” McDowell in fact offers a counter to Foot’s idea of being volunteers in the army of duty along these lines. He writes: Those who serve in duty’s army do not just happen to care about certain ends; we can say that reason reveals the dictates of virtue to them as genuine requirements on a rational will. The reason that effects this revelation is their acquired second nature. . . . [Those] who serve in duty’s army are kept loyal not by goals they happen to pursue but reason’s dictates as they rightly see them . . . One might be tempted to object that this represents the soldiers in duty’s army as conscripts, not volunteers. But reason did not order them to join up; they were not in a position to hear its orders until they were already enrolled. It is their continuing service that is obedience to reason’s categorical demands. (: –; cf. –)

I think such a picture of the way in which moral formation can reveal to us categorical demands is of great importance for our ability to remain loyal and steadfast in the army of duty, especially when the going gets tough.

Virtue Apart from Happiness? As already indicated, Foot herself came to reject the position she advanced in “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” seeing it as expressive of a “despairing mood” when she was “ready to deny that for everyone, always, it would be rational to act morally” (a: x). She got into this fix because she “held a more or less Humean theory of reasons for action, taking it for granted that reasons had to be based on an agent’s desires” (: ). Her final settled position, developed in the s and most fully defended in Natural Goodness, rejects this account of practical rationality and instead, as we saw in Chapter , seeks to show how “acting morally [i.e., virtuously] is part of practical rationality” (: ; see also –; b: ch. ; ). Her idea is that if we are good, non-defective human beings then we will have reason to act in accordance with the virtues (namely, justice, charity, courage, temperance, etc.), just as good, non-defective wolves will hunt with the pack rather than be free-riders. The virtues are understood here as qualities of character and of intellect that human beings as rational social animals characteristically need in order for things to go well (i.e., the virtues are “Aristotelian necessities”). Although the virtues will often be in our enlightened self-interest (given

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that they are what human beings characteristically need for things to go well), they may not always be, and so on this account virtue and happiness can come apart. Nevertheless, even in such cases, Foot maintains that human beings still have reason to act according to virtue. And this means that virtue, and with it practical rationality, can at times require us to engage in self-sacrificial activity where we act for the benefit of others rather than for our own benefit. Foot writes: “there is no good case for assessing the goodness of human action by reference only to the good that each person brings to himself” (: ). Later in the sixth chapter of Natural Goodness, she also writes: “Happiness is not the universal aim of action. Brave people choose great and immediate evils, such as certain death, in order to rescue or defend others. And even in their choice of lives some reject happiness for the sake of some other goal” (). In this sixth chapter Foot discusses a number of different conceptions of happiness, for example, where it is understood in terms of enjoyment, gladness, joy, contentment, and so on, which leads her to conclude that happiness is “a protean concept, appearing now in one way and now in another” (). Thinking of happiness in terms of enjoyment, for example, seems compatible with a life of wickedness, and so happiness understood in this sense should certainly be sacrificed when it comes into conflict with the requirements of virtue. However, Foot complicates the foregoing picture of the relationship of virtue and happiness when she writes that we also “find in our own thought a way of understanding human good and even human happiness that does not allow of such a combination [of happiness with wickedness]” (). Here she distinguishes between human goodness, which “belongs to those who have the virtues” (i.e., those who are good qua human being), and human good, which is what benefits individual human beings (see –; cf. ). And what she wants to suggest is that there is a way of thinking about happiness as our human good and such that it is also “conceptually inseparable from virtue,” that is, human goodness (). But even here she thinks virtue and happiness can come apart. Foot illustrates this with the real life case of “the Letter-Writers,” who were courageous – and deeply religious – men and women (and some young people) who opposed the Nazis (she seems to have had them in mind when she wrote earlier of brave people who “choose great and immediate evils, such as certain death, in order to rescue or defend others”). She learned of them from the book Dying We Live (Gollwitzer, Kuhn, and Schneider [eds.]  []), which collects their letters from prison that were written to their loved ones with knowledge of their

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impending execution, or at least with a good sense that this may be their fate. Foot comments: The letters give the impression that those who wrote them were especially well fitted for the enjoyment of the best things in life: for great happiness. So one may very naturally say that they knowingly sacrificed their happiness in making their choice. And yet this does not seem to be the only thing we could say. One may think that there was a sense in which the LettersWriters did, but also a sense in which they did not, sacrifice their happiness in refusing to go along with the Nazis. In the abstract what they so longed for – to get back to their families – was of course wholly good. But as they were placed it was impossible to pursue this end by just and honourable means. And this, I suggest, explains the sense in which they did not see as their happiness what they could have got by giving in. Happiness in life, they might have said, was not something possible for them. It may seem that one can get to the bottom of this matter simply by thinking about the shame that men of the Letter-Writers’ calibre would no doubt have felt, in later life, had they gone along with the Nazis. This is of course important, for they might have felt that everything that came later was corroded by the fact that it had been gained by acting in this way. Yet this is not the heart of the matter. For supposing that they had been offered a “Lethe-drug” that would have taken from them all future knowledge of the action? They would not have accepted. And there would have been a way in which they would not have felt that happiness lay in acceptance. (: –)

But is it really true that the Letter-Writers thought that happiness in life “was not something possible for them”? In a footnote, Foot acknowledges that readers of the letters “have been struck by the extraordinary sense of happiness that they radiate, which has perhaps to do with the fact that practically all the writers were devout Christians who thought of themselves as carrying out a task laid on them by God” (–, n. ). I think it is in fact best to interpret the Letter-Writers as thinking not that happiness was impossible for them, but rather that the only happiness that was possible for them involved taking such a courageous stand. And I don’t just mean happiness in an afterlife, but in the here and now, including in the act of dying for justice (by which I mean acting justly in a way that leads to death). 

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Foot also discusses (in a similar way) Dying We Live in “Rationality and Goodness” (), and she cites these remarks from “A Farm Boy from Sudetenland” that appear to give some basis for her interpretation: “Dear parents: I must give you bad news – I have been condemned to death. I and Gustave G. We did not sign up for the SS, and so they condemned us to death. You wrote me, indeed, that I should not join the SS; my comrade, Gustav G., did not sign up either. Both of us would rather die than stain our consciences with such deeds of horror” (Gollwitzer et al. [eds.]  []: ). But I think this is also compatible with and indeed better understood in terms of the

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To explain what I have in mind here, I want to go back to Foot’s remarks about how virtue and happiness (or self-interest) can come apart and yet still we have reason to act according to the requirements of virtue. As we saw, her idea is that if we are good, non-defective humans then we just will have reason to act in accordance with the virtues. But, as remarked upon in Chapter , Foot does not tell us enough about why and how we should “see as good” our choosing to act in ways that will make us good qua human being by fostering what human beings characteristically need – namely, the virtues – for things to go well, even though this might not always be in an individual’s self-interest. What I want to take issue with here is the claim that virtue and happiness can come apart in the way Foot suggests. As I have already indicated, I accept the strong evaluative version of the constitutive account of the relationship between virtue and happiness, where virtue is seen as its own reward. And, as mentioned, this means accepting a strong evaluative or moralized view of happiness: It is a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life that is constituted by virtue and with which we ought to be concerned. Understood in this way, happiness should be regarded as the ultimate end of human action. By contrast, the view of happiness that Foot ends up endorsing is that it consists in “the enjoyment of good things, meaning enjoyment in attaining, and in pursuing, right ends” (). Here “right ends” at least means ends that are not in conflict with virtue, especially those that do not involve wickedness. But Foot says: “I do not . . . accept McDowell’s apparent identification of happiness with a life of virtue, or his idea that loss incurred through an action necessary for virtue is ‘no loss at all’” (). I think she is right to reject McDowell’s claim that “no sacrifice necessitated by the life of excellence . . . can count as a genuine loss,” and I will explain my reasons for rejecting this claim in the next section. However, I also think Foot is wrong to reject the identification of happiness with the life of virtue where such happiness is understood in the strong evaluative terms of a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. It should be noted that Foot does explore the idea of what she calls “deep happiness,” though she puzzles over what this might mean. She thinks the idea of deep happiness cannot be adequately understood apart from the objects or sources that make for deep happiness, and she thinks that the “possible objects of deep happiness seem to be things that are basic in human life, such as home, and family, and work, and friendship” (). But Foot thinks thought that acting as they did was the only happiness (i.e., truly meaningful or worthwhile life) that was possible for them.

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that such deep happiness could be compatible with wickedness (). If that were the case, then it would demonstrate the need for a better conception of deep happiness. I think the adjective “deep” here should be understood as a strong evaluative concept, which contrasts with being “shallow.” For instance, we should consider a pleasure-seeking life (i.e., a life centered on pursuing mere sensual gratification, as against noble pursuits) as shallow because it does not realize what is integral to our humanity. When we speak here of what is integral to our humanity, we are depending again upon what McDowell calls a “value-loaded” conception of human nature: that is, we are identifying through strong evaluation what is most admirable and important – we might say profoundly or deeply important – in our humanity. It is that without which our lives would be lacking in some significant way – lacking, we might say, in depth. Aristotle affirms this sort of value-laden conception of what is integral to our humanity when he says that those who pursue a pleasure-seeking life “appear completely slavish, since the life they decide on is a life for grazing animals” (NE I., b–). We also see a rejection of shallowness in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics when (in a passage quoted at the outset of this chapter) Aristotle says: “Happiness . . . is not found in amusement; for it would be absurd if the end were amusement, and our lifelong efforts and sufferings aimed at amusing ourselves. . . . Rather, it seems correct to amuse ourselves so that we can do something serious” (NE X., b–; emphasis added). The reference here to seriousness is another way of getting at what we are trying to get at when we talk about what is profoundly important in human life, and which we are also trying to get at when we talk about a meaningful human life. These remarks from Aristotle also indicate that the strong evaluative conception of happiness (eudaimonia) that I am putting forward – and which Aristotle also puts forward when he talks about eudaimonia as the life of activity in accord with virtue, that is, a life of noble activity – is compatible with a life that also contains a significant amount of hardship. Indeed, Aristotle’s suggestion is that our conception of happiness (eudaimonia) must be such as to show that our “lifelong efforts and sufferings” have been worthwhile, that our lives are not absurd, and that – as he frames the issue elsewhere (see EE I., b–a) – we are glad to have been born rather than never to have been. Foot seems to be operating with a different view of happiness; for example, when she discusses Wittgenstein’s deathbed remarks: “Tell them I have had a wonderful life.” Foot comments: 

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I discus this strong evaluative concept of “deep” at length in my essay “Deep Desires” ().

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“The example should teach us not to be too ready to speak of every good life as a ‘happy life’: Wittgenstein surely did not have a happy life, being too tormented and self-critical for that” (: ; cf. ). But I am not sure about this: I think we can speak of a happy (i.e., eudaimon) life here if we mean by this a meaningful or fulfilling life. We see this way of thinking about a happy life in the case of another tortured soul, the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who is reported to have said on his deathbed (apparently as a life-assessment): “I am so happy, so happy” (Hopkins : xxxi). It makes perfect sense for someone to speak this way on his or her deathbed, even when he or she has had what is in many respects a difficult life. Life can be difficult but still meaningful; indeed, we might go even further and say that if life is not difficult in some measure then it cannot be meaningful. Aristotle does affirm that there are cases of crushing loss or hardship that can destroy happiness or the worthwhileness of a life, though in many cases of hardship he thinks nobility can still “shine through” and make a life worthwhile (i.e., meaningful). I will return in the next section to discuss this. The tendency to separate meaning and happiness – a prominent position in the meaning in life literature, as mentioned earlier – often depends upon a weak evaluative, desire- or preference-satisfaction view of happiness, where it is understood as a matter of enjoyment. But if we understand happiness to be the ultimate good that we are seeking for ourselves in our lives, and as that which gives us a reason to affirm our own existence against non-existence even in the face of hardship, then we have good reason to reject such a view of happiness. Instead, we have reason to accept a strong evaluative conception of happiness understood in terms of a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. Let us return now to the case of the Letter-Writers. The foregoing remarks help us to make sense of my claim that it is best to interpret the Letter-Writers as thinking not that happiness was impossible for them, but rather that the only happiness that was possible for them involved taking the courageous stand that they did in opposing the Nazis. The act of dying for justice – and we should also say for love, especially given their Christian beliefs – was the only way that their lives could be seen as meaningful or worthwhile (in a strong evaluative sense) with integrity, given the tragic circumstances in which they found themselves. Indeed, in some sense, it 

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Dan Russell writes: “Sometimes even dying can be the best way of getting on with the business of one’s life: for the sake of giving ourselves a good life, some of our ends need to be ends we find worthy dying for in order to find them worth living for in the first place” (: ). I think this is right, though I want to add that the act of dying for something (say, for justice or love) can itself be

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seems, they achieved a higher, more meaningful life in the act of dying for love and justice and by maintaining their integrity (though it also came with great loss). This is suggested by the title of the book in which their letters are contained, Dying We Live, which has a strong biblical resonance. Consider St. Paul in  Corinthians :–: [As] servants of God we have commended ourselves in every way: through great endurance, in afflictions, hardships, calamities, beatings, imprisonments, riots, labors, sleepless nights, hunger; by purity, knowledge, patience, kindness, holiness of spirit, genuine love, truthful speech, and the power of God; with the weapons of righteousness for the right hand and for the left; in honor and dishonor, in ill repute and good repute. We are treated as impostors, and yet are true; as unknown, and yet are well known; as dying, and see – we are alive. (NRSV)

Moreover, consider again the passage from the Gospel of Mark cited earlier but with the two preceding verses included: And when [Jesus] had called the people unto him with his disciples also, he said unto them, Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel’s, the same shall save it. For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Mark :–, KJV; cf. Matthew :–; Luke :–)

The suggestion here seems to be that true life (and not just in an afterlife, though there is suggestion to that effect as well) begins when we “die to self” – to a lower mode of selfhood with its lesser and more selfish concerns – and achieve a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of selfhood in doing God’s will and living in accordance with the demands of virtue (including love and justice). In the Gospel of John, following the way of Christ (i.e., the way of Christ-like love) is said to lead to “abundant” life (John :). Later, Christ says: “These things have I spoken unto you, . . . that your joy might be full. This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John :–, KJV). We can see how – given that they were serious Christians – these passages would likely have informed the outlook of the Letter-Writers

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an expression of this good (i.e., meaningful) life and not merely an unfortunate consequence that can attend a life worth living for. See also John :–; Romans :–; Galatians :; and Philippians :.

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and why it seems reasonable to interpret them as thinking that the path they took was the only kind of happiness that was possible for them, where this happiness is understood in a strong evaluative manner as a meaningful or worthwhile life. To cite just one example, consider the following remarks from the Jesuit priest Alfred Delp: It is glorious now, this midsummer ripening. From the fields comes the enchanting song of the swishing sickles and scythes. I like this so much, the ripe fields and then the harvest itself. Somehow or other, this of course is the meaning of our lives – becoming ripe, and then being cut down and stored in the barns. The world is full of beauty and goodness, and after all it is the goodness and beauty of God that gives the world all this. . . . The outcome of this time can be only a great inner desire for God and for his glorification. I must meet him in a new and personal way. I must beat down the walls that still stand between him and me. The tacit reservation must be completely cleared away. . . . The divine life existing in me in the form of faith, hope, and charity must grow, intensify. . . . Universal fate, my personal condition, . . . everything coalesces into this one precept: Man, give yourself up to your God, and you will find yourself again. . . . Adoro and Suscipe – you two root words of life, you are the straight path to God, the gates of fulfillment. . . . God has stationed me. Now it is a matter of living up to my post, come what may. . . . God’s strength accompanies me in all ways. But sometimes it is a little difficult for me. Georg [Delp’s pseudonym] has at moments been nothing more than a bleeding, moaning mass. But Georg has always tried to bring this moaning into proper relation with the only two realities that make existence worthwhile – adoration and love. . . . [It] is only now that I have become a human being, inwardly free and far more genuine and more truthful, more real than before. (Gollwitzer et al. [eds.]  []: –, –, )

As we can see, Delp strongly emphasizes love and devotion to God, come what may, as being constitutive of a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life. But this is clearly connected with a devotion to acting with love and justice toward others, which is also a constitutive part of a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life. In general, we can see the Letter-Writers as responding to a number of constitutive goods: namely, God; one’s own human potential for acting with love and justice even in tragic circumstances; and the human dignity of others (which religious believers like the Letter-Writers would understand in term of being made in the image of God). In each case we can see the Letter-Writers as acting for the sake of strong goods or normative demands that are constitutive of happiness understood in strong evaluative terms as a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life.

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I think this strong evaluative or moralized conception of happiness also enables us to respond to a common concern about viewing happiness as the ultimate end of human action: namely, the concern is that this is problematically egoistic or self-centered (something Foot seems to assume). The view that I have offered is not self-centered (as will become even clearer in Chapter  on “Other-Regarding Concern”). To adopt an image from the Gospel of Matthew, we should be as the birds of the air and the lilies of the field and not be overly concerned with securing good things for ourselves. Instead, if we are theists, we should follow Jesus’ injunction: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto to you” (Matthew :, KJV). Or, if we are not theists, we might instead frame the injunction as: “Seek ye first the kingdom of virtue and its righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto to you.” Either way, the point that I want to make is that we should first seek righteousness (i.e., the life of virtue), but in doing so happiness – understood as a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life – will be “added unto” such a life of righteousness, precisely because righteousness is constitutive of such happiness. Part of seeking righteousness here is seeking to be properly responsive to strong goods (the virtues of love and justice, human dignity, etc.) for the goods that they are (i.e., for their own sake). But being the goods that they are means that they are also constitutive of a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life when we are properly responsive to them. Of course, such a strong evaluative judgment about what constitutes a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life implies an inseparable relationship between (strong evaluative) meaning and morality, which has been denied by prominent philosophers who have written on meaning in life, such as Susan Wolf and Thaddeus Metz. The point here again is that a meaningful life has to be a meaningful human life, which implies a “valueloaded” conception of what is integral to our humanity, where we identify through strong evaluation what is most admirable and important in our humanity (see Cottingham : –). And the further claim here is that our ability to act with moral integrity and our ability to act with love and justice are among the most admirable and important features of our humanity.

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The Gospel passage is addressing concern for food and clothing, but I think it makes sense to extend the point to address the general human concern for happiness.

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Virtue, Loss, and the Meaning of Life I want now to discuss where I part company with Phillips and McDowell and why. What I share with both of them, as we have seen, is a strong evaluative version of the constitutive account of the relationship of virtue and happiness, where virtue is seen as its own reward and happiness is understood in strong evaluative or moralized terms. Where I part company with them is in their Stoicized version of such a constitutive account. As we saw earlier, when discussing dying for the sake of justice, Phillips claims, contra Foot (of “Moral Beliefs”), that “death for the sake of justice is not a disaster,” but rather disaster “would be to be found wanting in face of death, and to seek the path of injustice and compromise.” He even says that death can be seen here as a good for the just person in such circumstances. Putting the issue in more general terms, Phillips says: “The man who chooses justice may not profit as [a rogue does]. . . . Nevertheless, . . . in the only sense relevant to morality, he has accomplished all.” Likewise, we also saw that McDowell claims: “no sacrifice necessitated by the life of excellence . . . can count as a genuine loss.” In regard to Phillips’ claim that “death for the sake of justice is not a disaster,” I want to agree with this in a qualified way: It is not an unmitigated disaster, or at least it doesn’t have to be (and it isn’t in the case of the Letter-Writers). This is because, as I have argued, there is a kind of happiness (understood in strong evaluative or moralized terms) possible for those such as the Letter-Writers who die for the sake of justice. The Letter-Writers lived meaningful lives, and their final act of dying for justice contributed to the meaningfulness of their lives. However, I think we should not deny that there is some real disaster or tragedy here; or to put it in McDowell’s terms, I think there is genuine loss in the life of virtue. And this means that we cannot necessarily say, as Phillips does, that the just person “has accomplished all.” One of the main problems with Phillips’ and McDowell’s views is that they do not properly recognize the plurality of strong goods in human life and how they can come into conflict and at times some strong goods must be sacrificed for the sake of others. In regard to the plurality of strong goods, consider the following examples of strong goods: there are different aspects of our own human potential (e.g., for intellectual, ethical [in a sense having to do with character traits], relational, artistic, and athletic achievement) that are especially admirable; other human beings are worthy of our concern both in general (because of the claims of human dignity) and also in particular (because of individual merit or valuable qualities,

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because of the particular relationship we have with someone, etc.); beauty in art and nature also make demands upon us for our appreciative attention; and if we are theists, like the Letter-Writers, then we will recognize God as making especially important demands upon us for love, devotion, and worship. In light of this plurality of goods, it is easy enough to see how there can be conflict or tension between them: for example, between universal concern for humanity and particular concern for loved ones; between developing our own talents and other-regarding concern; between total devotion to God in a life of prayer and contemplation and the more “mundane” yet valuable activities of family life, political life, and so on (which of course can also be pursed with a spirit of devotion to God). We can affirm that the virtuous person is the one who knows how to recognize and weigh correctly these various strong goods and properly order them within his or her life as a whole, but this does not mean that there won’t be genuine loss when some strong goods are taken to override others within the particular circumstances of one’s life. We can see this in the case of the Letter-Writers. As a matter of good conscience, acceding to the demands of justice and human dignity (respect for which is included in the demands of justice) and fidelity to God for them, given their tragic circumstances, meant having to be parted from their loved ones, even though deep, loving relationships are rightly regarded as strong goods, that is, they are something with which we ought to be concerned and which constitute a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life. It also meant forgoing their own life, and life itself is rightly regarded as a strong good that ought to be protected, and, as I will argue in Chapter , we should never intentionally destroy innocent human life. I see no sense in claiming, as Phillips does, that death can be seen as a good for the person who dies for the sake of justice. What is good is not death, which is itself a bad thing (i.e., a genuine loss) in that it takes away the good of life; rather, what is good is seeking first righteousness, come what may. 

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Some of the most heartbreaking letters are those addressed to the Letter-Writers’ children. For instance, consider Paul Schneider’s instruction to his children about their prayers: “I know that God hears you, and that your little prayers help to strengthen the firm wall around us, so that no one can hurt a hair of your father’s head unless it be the will of God. . . . Even if God keeps us waiting awhile for the fulfillment of our prayers, we must not think that he does not hear us, and we must not tire because it takes so long” (Gollwitzer et al. [eds.]  []: ). Such letters make clear that anyone who says there is no loss in the life of virtue is very mistaken. Aristotle follows common sense – unlike some philosophers such as Epicurus – in seeing death itself as a bad thing and as the most terrible kind of loss: “death is the most frightening of all, since it is a boundary, and when someone is dead nothing beyond it seems either good or bad for him anymore” (NE III., a–). But later we will see that he does allow for the possibility of a

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We should note that McDowell’s claim that “no sacrifice necessitated by the life of excellence . . . can count as a genuine loss” is connected to his claim (discussed in Chapter ) that the demands of the virtues “silence” (rather than simply override) other considerations. This idea of silencing makes sense when we are talking about a strong good in relationship to a weak good: for example, it seems to work well in his case of the virtue of temperance, where its demands are said to silence the attractions of sensual pleasure in certain cases. But the silencing claim is not convincing when it comes to his account of the demands of the virtue of courage silencing considerations relating to one’s life and bodily integrity, since these should be seen as strong goods (i.e., as things we ought to care about). Such goods cannot be silenced. We can say something similar about the demands of justice in relation to one’s life and bodily integrity, or in relationship to concern for one’s loved ones. The demands of justice may override such strong goods in some circumstances, but it cannot be a matter of silencing, and when we sacrifice one strong good for the sake of another there is indeed genuine and sometimes heartbreaking loss. Thus, while weighing is out of place between strong goods and weak goods, between strong goods such weighing must be done. And as I have suggested, the virtuous person (understood in an idealized sense) is the one who correctly recognizes and weighs the various strong goods there are and properly orders them within his or her life as a whole. What might this look like in general outline? First of all, we should note that, given the limits of time, energy, resources, circumstances, and so on, it is not going to be possible to bring fully into our lives a proper relationship in feeling and in action to every strong good that there is. So, we need to identify those that are especially important. Some are especially important in the sense that they are central to one’s overall life-orientation. For instance, the theist will believe that devotion to God is most important, and so this should certainly have a prominent place in his or her life. But such devotion also needs to be integrated with other important goods, such as family life and friendship, and seeking the betterment of one’s community and humanity as a whole (and such integration is made easier if we see these as matters that God rightly wants us to be concerned with). Some strong goods are also especially important because they identify things that are never to be done: for example, if we regard human life as something sacred or reverence-worthy, then this means we must never intentionally “noble death” in courageously dying for the sake of a noble cause. Here death itself is not noble, but rather the noble activity that results in death is what is noble.

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destroy innocent human life. This is required in all circumstances of one’s life. But as this suggests, such absolute requirements (which I will defend in Chapter ) are largely, if not entirely, negative in nature (i.e., they give us “thou shall nots”). Not all strong goods impose such absolute requirements; nevertheless, as discussed in Chapter , they are “categorical” in that they make normative demands upon us. But given that it is not possible to pursue every strong good in one’s life, what can this categorical feature mean? At the most minimal level, the categorical feature of strong goods requires us to be disposed to appreciate or respect any possible strong good that we may encounter. For instance, we may not be familiar with every great piece of music, but, given that beauty and aesthetic appreciation are strong goods, we should seek, as best we can, to appreciate the valuable qualities of the music that we do encounter. Similarly, we might not strive to be a great (or even a good) artist, perhaps not having the requisite talent or interest ourselves, though we should respect such talent. However, in some cases appreciation or respect is not enough: for example, we should admire the virtuous character of another, but we should also seek to cultivate and exercise the virtues for ourselves. But here and elsewhere there is still a great deal of practical discretion: for example, in regard to how far we go in exercising the virtue of charity (or generosity) or cultivating our talents, or choosing a career or whether to get married and have a family, and so on. Given the contingencies of our circumstances, including our personal proclivities and aptitudes, we have to seek through practical reason to determine how best to pursue the various strong goods that we recognize in our lives in order to shape a meaningful life. Again, since one cannot pursue every strong good, the pursuit of some will have to be sacrificed, and this does entail some genuine loss. However, for the most part this does not constitute a great loss since, on the whole, if all goes well for us, we are able to pursue a great variety of strong goods and we can consider ourselves as living a meaningful life. Where great loss does occur is when we are forced, due to tragic circumstances, to choose to  

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I am indebted to Arto Laitinen here, who – drawing on Joseph Raz’s work – makes a distinction between “engaging” and “respecting” strong goods (Laitinen : ). The view I have developed here is broadly in keeping with Charles Taylor’s way of thinking about how to order various strong goods within our lives. He writes: “[The idea of leading a life] involves both the sense that one’s life is moving somewhere, . . . and that one is trying in some degree to guide this movement . . . [Insofar] as we have some sense of our lives, of what we are trying to lead, we will be relating the different goods we seek not just in regard to their different importance, but also in the way they fit, or fail to fit, together in the unfolding of our lives” (: ; see also Taylor : pt. I and conclusion, esp. at –, , –, –).

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sacrifice a centrally important strong good in our lives, such as was the case with the Letter-Writers. Sometimes it also happens that no choice is involved, but rather some misfortune occurs that takes away such a good in our lives. But even here I want to maintain that we can still live a meaningful life, that is, that there is still a kind of happiness that is possible, as I argued in the case of the Letter-Writers, even though this happiness also involves significant loss. Aristotle acknowledges that there are cases of significant misfortune that “oppress and spoil [one’s] blessedness, since they involve pain and impede many activities,” but he says that nobility still “shines through” when we nobly bear such misfortune by continuing to act virtuously (NE I., b–). However, he also says that there are rare cases of crushing loss, as in the case of Priam, the king of Troy who seemed to live a basically virtuous life but who had his family, friends, city, and resources destroyed in war. Aristotle remarks: “If someone has suffered these sorts of misfortunes and comes to a miserable end, no one counts him happy” (NE I., a–). The idea here seems to be that Priam’s ability to act virtuously is so impeded because of his losses that he cannot be thought to be living well. Later Aristotle says: [No] activity is complete if it is impeded, and happiness is something complete. That is why the happy person needs to have goods of the body and external goods added [to good activities], and needs fortune also, so that he will not be impeded . . . Some maintain, on the contrary, that we are happy when we are broken on the wheel, or fall into terrible misfortunes, provided that we are good. Whether they mean to or not, these people are talking nonsense. (NE VII., b–; cf. I.–)

It is certainly true that being tortured (“broken on the wheel”) is a horrible situation, and the same can be said for the situation that Priam ends up in. No one in his or her right mind would desire such situations for their own sake. But, since Aristotle understands eudaimonia as a whole life 

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Nussbaum writes: “The story of Priam is a good test case for Aristotle’s ethical theory . . . For it begins with a person who had, presumably, developed and maintained a stably virtuous character through life, had acted well and according to excellence – but who was then deprived by war of family, children, friends, power, resources, freedom. In his final pitiable state Priam’s capacity to act well is very much diminished; for he cannot, given the constraints upon him, exercise many of the human excellences for which he was previously known. We deeply pity Priam, feeling that he has lost something of great importance in losing his sphere of activity . . . Against the opponent of luck [Aristotle] will insist on luck’s real importance, exploring our belief that it is possible to be dislodged from living well. At the same time, he shows us that, given a conception of good living that values stable excellences of character and activity according to these, such drastic upsets will be rare” ( []: –).

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assessment, should we say that anyone who comes to his or her end in such a situation has not lived a worthwhile or meaningful life? Should we necessarily think that it would have been better for him or her never to have been born than to suffer such a fate? I want to resist such conclusions. Perhaps a person got in this horrible situation because he or she lived a life of integrity and thought “what does is profit a person to gain the world but forfeit one’s soul?” and therefore sought righteousness above all. This was the case with the Letter-Writers, who certainly had their activities impeded through their imprisonment in the concentration camps and eventual murder at the hands of an evil Nazi regime. But their lives seem highly meaningful in part because of their righteousness in dying for the sake of justice and as a witness to the demands of the sanctity of all human life. Aristotle also affirms that one can die for noble causes, and seems to affirm that this adds to the worthiness of the life lived, as we see in his account of the virtue of courage. He maintains that the courageous person is someone who is willing to face death for the sake of doing what is noble (e.g., fighting to defend one’s country or city in war): “someone is called brave if he is intrepid in facing a noble death and the immediate dangers that bring death” (NE III., a–; cf. III., b–). Aristotle might say that this case of dying is different from the Priam case and the case of being “broken on the wheel” since the soldier who dies defending his country or city dies engaging in noble activity, rather than having had his activity impeded. But death itself is a major impediment to action (to say the least!), and it also seems myopic only to consider whether the final act of one’s life involved unimpeded action or not, since what we should ultimately be concerned with, by Aristotle’s own account, is a whole life assessment. The Letter-Writers’ lives may have ended with impeded action, but that was the result of leading a life of integrity and acting righteously, and a whole life assessment should certainly regard them as having lived meaningful lives, even though they also suffered great loss. Happiness understood in terms of a meaningful life comes in degrees, which correlates with the extent to which we have realized the good in our lives. We have seen that Aristotle also allows that eudaimonia comes in degrees in that as he thinks that we can still be eudaimon in the face of hardship if we preserve in acting virtuously, though our eudaimonia is marred to some extent. But Aristotle does have a higher threshold for a eudaimon life than I affirm. I have maintained that eudaimonia for Aristotle can be understood in terms of a meaningful life, though he requires that it be a life that has fulfilled our human potential to a significant extent

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through the exercise of the virtues without too much loss or impediment. I certainly affirm that we should aim to fulfill our human potential as best we can and doing so contributes to the meaningfulness of life, but I also want to affirm that a life can still be meaningful or worthwhile, even when its potential has not been fulfilled and even when a life has been drastically cut short. Indeed, I want to affirm that every human life is objectively meaningful or worthwhile simply in virtue of being a human life (given the inherent dignity or sanctity of every human life), while acknowledging that a greater meaningfulness is achieved and experienced in realizing our human potential through the exercise of the virtues. Thus, even in the most horrendous cases where children are killed, such as in the Holocaust, I want to affirm that such lives are still worthwhile. There are of course some (indeed many) – and I think Aristotle is amongst them – who would want to say that for such children it would have been better for them never to have been. But this again is a conclusion that I want to resist. Here we confront what we can call the problem of cosmodicy: Is life in the world worthwhile in the face of evil and suffering? This is in a sense a more fundamental problem than the problem of theodicy, which raises the question of whether we can justify God’s ways in the face of evil and suffering. The problem of cosmodicy is a problem for theists and nontheists alike, and the problem of theodicy is downstream from this since theistic views seek to offer a way of living meaningfully in the face of evil and suffering, but they have their own special problem of justifying God’s ways. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov his character Ivan Karamazov raises this problem of cosmodicy, and he does so in light of the horrible things done to children. In a discussion with his younger religious brother Alyosha, Ivan the atheist says: I want to see with my own eyes the [deer] lie down with the lion, and the murdered man rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly finds out what it was all for. All religions in the world are based on this desire, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I going to do about them? That is the question I cannot resolve. . . . [If] everyone must suffer, in order to buy eternal harmony with their suffering, pray tell me what have children got to do with it? It’s quite incomprehensible why they should have to suffer, and why they should buy harmony with their suffering. . . . [If] the suffering of children goes to make up the sum of suffering needed to buy truth, then I assert beforehand that the whole of truth is not worth such a price. . . . [They] have put too high a 

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I borrow the term “cosmodicy” from Guignon : xxx. See also McPherson  for further discussion.

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Virtue and Meaning price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. And therefore I hasten to return my ticket. ( []: –)

Ivan does not think that we should consent to being a part of a world that contains such evil and suffering, since he thinks it makes us an accomplice to it. Accepting for argument’s sake that there is a God, Ivan remarks: “It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept” (). There is a great existential danger present in the various ways that we may experience or observe the misfortunes and horrors of human existence, which is that we may come to lose our grip on our strong evaluative framework altogether and experience existential vertigo or a sense of meaninglessness. We can come to think that the universe is pointless and therefore that our own lives are pointless. In other words, there can be a threat of nihilism or complete disenchantment here. This would amount to the most debilitating kind of loss and a failure of cosmodicy. Moreover, for those who have experienced such a loss it does seem that happiness and virtue do come apart since they have lost a strong evaluative conception of happiness, understood as a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. It is especially in confronting crushing loss or horrible evil that we can see that the issue of (strong evaluative) meaning in life and a meaningful life cannot ultimately be separated from our view on the meaning of life, that is, on whether there is an ultimate or cosmic source of meaning by which we can find our place in the world. For instance, it makes a difference whether or not we can affirm a world-view or cosmic outlook that holds that there is an ultimate source of meaning and purpose according to which tragedy does not have the final word. The most obvious instance of such a cosmic outlook is theism, which affirms what John Cottingham calls the “buoyancy of the good.” He writes: [A theistic perspective] encourages us with the hope that the pursuit of virtue, difficult and demanding though it often is, contributes however minutely to the establishment of a moral order that the cosmos was created to realise. To act in the light of such an attitude is to act in the faith that our struggles mean something beyond the local expression of a contingently

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For instances of attempts to side-step this issue of the meaning of life – where we are concerned with how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things and whether there is a cosmic or ultimate source of meaning to which we must align our lives – in the meaning in life literature, see Wolf a;  []; and Metz .

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evolving genetic lottery; that despite the cruelty and misery in the world, the struggle for goodness will always enjoy a certain kind of buoyancy. (: –)

Such a perspective certainly seems to have animated the Letter-Writers and made a difference for their willingness to act virtuously even in the face of death. Cottingham also remarks that a theistic view allows us to see life as “a precious gift, not merely ‘accidental’, but bestowed, stemming from a source that is generative of truth, beauty, and goodness” (). Likewise, Dostoevsky sought to respond to Ivan’s rejection of the world through the religious perspective of the character Father Zosima, whose fundamental teachings are that “life is paradise” and “we are responsible to all for all.” Such a view allows us to say of every human life: “It is good that you are here; it is good that you exist.” And there may also be non-theistic cosmic outlooks that can offer a different sort of cosmodicy. These sorts of issues will be taken up in Chapters  and . There I will explore further the importance of connecting meaning in life and a meaningful life with a conception of the meaning of life. But having now discussed the relationship between virtue and happiness I want to turn to consider how other-regarding concern should fit into the view developed so far.

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Other-Regarding Concern

In Chapter , I developed an account of the relationship of virtue to happiness according to which we act virtuously for its own sake and where doing so is also constitutive of happiness understood in terms of a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. One concern that often arises here with regard to the Aristotelian focus on an agent’s own virtue and happiness – which I briefly raised and discussed in Chapter  – is that it can seem fundamentally and problematically self-centered or agent-centered (see Toner ; Annas ; Angier ). Certainly those who work within the Aristotelian tradition will affirm many otherregarding virtues (justice, generosity, honesty, etc.), but the question is: Do these ultimately derive their value from promoting our own happiness or sense of nobility? In other words, just as there is an objection to the instrumentalist account of the relationship of virtue to happiness that it does not provide us with the right reason for acting virtuously, one might similarly object that Aristotelians may treat other-regarding concern in an overly instrumentalized way, and thus fail to show proper concern for others for their own sake. So we must ask: Can we combine the Aristotelian concern for happiness with the idea that we should show concern for others for their own sake? I believe that we can, and the clue for how to do so is found in the constitutive account of the relationship of virtue to happiness. I want to argue here for a constitutive account of the relationship of other-regarding concern to our own happiness or fulfillment: The idea is that we should show concern for others for their own sake on the basis of a strong evaluative sense of their intrinsic worthiness for such concern (i.e., because of inherent human dignity or the sanctity of human life), and doing so appropriately is constitutive of a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. I will also seek to show the difference this makes for ensuring that we regard all human beings as fully amongst us, for making sense of and defending moral absolutes, and for properly responding to the 

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demands for universal and particular concern. This constitutive account is overlooked by neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalists for whom the otherregarding virtues are seen as virtues primarily because of their role in promoting the “good functioning of our social group,” which is seen as important for achieving our own good as rational social animals. In other words, as rational social animals we can only achieve our own flourishing through the shared practice of other-regarding virtues that promote the good of others and the common good of our communities. The best account of this, I believe, is given in MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals. I want to begin by outlining his account, and then I will discuss how we need to go beyond it.

MacIntyre on Other-Regarding Concern MacIntyre’s account can be seen as filling out Aristotle’s view that human beings are by nature “political [i.e., communal] animals” because of our lack of self-sufficiency for developing and achieving our fullest human potential, which is only made possible by living in community with others. Aristotle says of the polis (i.e., the political community): “while coming into being for the sake of living, it exists for the sake of living well” (P I., b–). MacIntyre begins by noting the various ways that we are all vulnerable to affliction (e.g., sickness, injury, disability, malnutrition, aggression, and neglect), and thus we depend upon the protection and care of others for our survival as well as our flourishing. This dependency is most obvious in early childhood and old age, but it can also be present at different points throughout our lives, and some people are afflicted with severe disability for their entire lives. MacIntyre therefore contends that, in order to achieve our good as human beings, we must participate in “a network of relationships of giving and receiving”: We receive from parents and other family elders, from teachers and those to whom we are apprenticed, and from those who care for us when we are sick, injured, weakened by aging, or otherwise incapacitated. Later on others, children, students, those who are in various ways incapacitated, and others in gross and urgent need have to rely on us to give. Sometimes those others who rely on us are the same individuals from whom we ourselves received. But often enough it is from one set of individuals that we receive and to and by another that we are called on to give. (: ) 

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The phrase “good functioning of our social group” is adapted from Hursthouse : .

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MacIntyre appeals here to a normative expectation of asymmetrical reciprocity. We incur a debt in virtue of what we have received, but often we will have to pay it forward. Even where we give back to those from whom we have received, what we will need to give might be very different: as with adult children caring for their elderly parents. Moreover, sometimes what we are called upon to give can be much more demanding. And we don’t always know to whom we will be called upon to give or what they will need: We can set in advance no limit to those possible needs, just as those who cared for us could at an earlier time have set no limits to what our needs might have been. . . . And the kind of care that was needed to make us what we have in fact become, independent practical reasoners, had to be, if it was to be effective, unconditional care for the human being as such, whatever the outcome. And this is the kind of care that we in turn now owe or will owe. ()

In addition to appealing to the moral claim that it is “in virtue of what we have received that we owe” (), MacIntyre supports such unconditional care for others with an appeal to empathetic identification. He writes: “Of the brain-damaged, of those almost incapable of movement, of the autistic, of all such we have to say: this could have been us. Their mischances could have been ours, our good fortune could have been theirs” (–). According to MacIntyre, for each of us to achieve our own good what is required is that others make our good their own, and we must do the same in turn, though again this will often involve an asymmetrical reciprocity. And so this cannot be strictly a matter of calculated advantage. Someone who “consults the good of others, only because and insofar as it is to her or his good to do so,” is someone who is “deficient in the virtues” (). So we must become the kind of persons who make others’ good our own good and who can participate appropriately in a network of relationships of “uncalculated giving and graceful receiving” (). This will require acquiring and exercising “the virtues of acknowledged dependence.” While gratitude is the key virtue of acknowledged dependence with regard to receiving benefits from others, the key virtue with respect to giving to others is “just generosity.” This is a form of generosity that “I owe to all those others who also owe it to me”: “Because I owe it, to fail to exhibit it is to fail in respect of justice; because what I owe is uncalculating giving, to fail to exhibit it is also to fail in respect of generosity” (–). MacIntyre develops upon Aquinas’ view of how a single action can exemplify different virtues, and he says that what just generosity often requires is

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actions that “are at once just, generous, beneficent, and done from pity,” and involve “attentive and affectionate regard” for the person in need (–). Although “the practices of receiving and giving informed by particular just generosity are primarily exercised towards other members of our own community related to us by their and our roles,” MacIntyre says: “it is important to the functioning of communities that among the roles that play a part in their shared lives there should be that of ‘the stranger’, someone from outside the community who has happened to arrive amongst us and to whom we owe hospitality, just because she or he is a stranger” (–). The scope of just generosity also extends to being responsive to the dire need of any human being, and here just generosity includes the virtue of “humanity” (or humaneness), which is a virtue “without which we will be defective in our social relationships” (). Aristotle also recognizes something like this in his account of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics when he speaks of a friendship for humanity (i.e., “philanthropy”): “One may also observe in one’s travels to distant countries the feelings of recognition and affiliation that link every human being to every other human being” (NE VIII., a–). Another important virtue here, MacIntyre thinks, is what Aquinas calls misericordia, that is, pity or compassion, which is connected to charity or love of neighbor and also extends beyond one’s community. We see this illustrated, for example, in the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel of Luke (:–), which I will discuss later. MacIntyre writes: Misericordia has regard to urgent and extreme need without respect of persons. It is the kind and scale of the need that dictates what has to be done, not whose need it is. And what each of us needs to know in our communal relationships is that the attention given to our urgent and extreme needs, the needs characteristic of disablement, will be proportional to the need and not the relationship. But we can rely on this only from those for whom misericordia is one of the virtues. So communal life itself needs this virtue that goes beyond the boundaries of communal life. ()

Misericordia recognizes that the urgent and extreme need of another, even a stranger, “provides a stronger reason for action than even claims based upon the closest of family ties.” Following Aquinas, MacIntyre says: “Misericordia is grief or sorrow over someone else’s distress . . . just insofar as one understands the other’s distress as one’s own,” which may occur “because of some preexisting tie to the other – the other is already one’s 

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This translation is by Martha Nussbaum in Nussbaum .

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friend or kin – or because in understanding the other’s distress one recognizes that it could instead have been one’s own” (). For MacIntyre, then, a key index for the well-being of any community based on a network of relationships of giving and receiving through which human beings achieve their good is how its members treat the young, the old, the severely afflicted, the stranger, and those in dire need (regardless of having any prior relationship to them or not) (see –). There is much that is important in the foregoing account, however I want to argue that we should go beyond it. I will discuss four key limitations of it having to do with: () intrinsic worth; () solidarity with the severely afflicted and other marginalized humans; () moral absolutes; and () universal and particular other-regarding concern. The latter three points build on the first. Although I am focusing on MacIntyre’s account, the limitations that I will discuss can also be seen as applying to accounts of other-regarding concern provided by other neo-Aristotelians, such as Foot and Hursthouse, who seek to found ethics on a quasi-scientific understanding of human nature and human flourishing, which stresses an analogy between human flourishing and the flourishing of other living things. As mentioned, I focus on MacIntyre because I think he provides the strongest account of other-regarding concern within this strand of neoAristotelian ethics.

Intrinsic Worth: Dignity and Sanctity My fundamental complaint with this strand of neo-Aristotelian ethics is that it does not go far enough in exploring the engaged (or first-personal) evaluative standpoint from within our human form of life. In regard to the issue of other-regarding concern, what is conspicuously missing in MacIntyre’s account and that of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalists of his ilk is something that should be a key part of our ethical experience: namely, the strong evaluative sense that human beings are intrinsically worthy of concern for their own sake. This intrinsic worthiness can be characterized in terms of the strong evaluative categories of dignity (which conveys a respect-worthiness) or sanctity (which conveys a reverence-worthiness), as when we speak of intrinsic human dignity or the sanctity of human life. 

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Claims about human dignity are often regarded as the basis of human rights claims. In After Virtue, MacIntyre says: “there are no such rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns” ( []: ). Lest one thinks that he may have had a change of mind over the years, we should also note that MacIntyre makes a similar claim in his most recent book: “My quarrel [with those who advocate for human rights] . . . is with their advancing the thesis that appeals to human

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In either case we see ourselves as recognizing a normative demand upon us for attitudes and actions that are properly responsive to the special value of human life. Moreover, this normative demand is seen as being “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to it,” and it calls upon us to show concern for others for their own sake. But this is not opposed to our own fulfillment. Rather, as in the case of acting for the sake of the noble (discussed in Chapter ), acting for the sake of others (in light of their intrinsic dignity or sanctity) is constitutive of a normatively higher, more fulfilling, more meaningful mode of life. So we can say that we act both for the sake of others and our own. We can fill this out by appealing to the idea of a “constitutive good,” which I introduced in Chapter . As discussed there, constitutive goods are a fundamental type of strong good. They provide answers to questions such as: “What is worthy of my love?,” “What commands my respect (or reverence)?,” and the like. And answering these questions helps us to answer the questions “What ought I do?” and “How ought I to be?” The key idea in regard to constitutive goods is that they constitute the strong goods that define for us the good life, that is, a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. For instance, if we regard some conception of our own human potential as commanding our admiration and respect, then we can see how this constitutes certain goods that make up the good life: namely, the virtues of character and intellect whereby we fulfill this potential. Such virtues are the virtues they are precisely because they are modes of being properly responsive to our own human potential as a constitutive good (i.e., they properly respond to the admirableness of what a human being can become) and thereby they realize a normatively higher, nobler, more fulfilling mode of life. We can regard this as the standard Aristotelian conception of a constitutive good. However, we can and, I am contending, we should also see other human beings as constitutive goods, that is, as love-worthy, respect-worthy, or reverence-worthy, and as also constituting certain goods that make up the good life: namely, other-regarding virtues such as justice, generosity, kindness, loyalty, friendship, etc. Exercising such other-regarding virtues involves being properly responsive to the love-worthiness, respect-worthiness, or reverence-worthiness of other human beings, and in doing so we rights, understood as rights attaching to each and every human individual qua human individual, provide justification for asserting and enforcing [unconditional] prohibitions. Such appeals could only function as justifications, if there were sound arguments for asserting the existence of such rights. And there are no such arguments” (: ). But MacIntyre does nothing here to explore why one might believe he or she has good reason to recognize the claims of human dignity.

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realize a normatively higher, nobler, more fulfilling mode of life. Specifying how other human beings are constitutive goods will require saying what it is about human beings and their place in the cosmos that makes them worthy of love, concern, respect, or reverence: for example, we can say that it is something about having the capacity for rationality, morality, spirituality, creativity, and love, which are seen as capacities for a higher mode of life. Sometimes this is framed in a religious way by saying that human beings are made in the image of God, and sometimes it is framed in a non-religious way, though this will still require some picture of the place of human beings in the cosmos. (In Chapter , I will explore further the relevance of our cosmic outlooks for the moral life.) The focus here is on how human beings can be constitutive goods, but we should note (as I also did in Chapter ) that non-human beings can be constitutive goods. For instance, non-human animals can be seen as respect-worthy – for example, in virtue of the value of life itself as expressed in each individual life-form and its distinct capacities – even if we think that the respect (or reverence) owed to human beings is greater. Non-human animals as constitutive goods can constitute virtues such as compassion and friendliness with regard to non-human animals as goods that make up the good life for human beings. Likewise, we can regard the environment as a constitutive good, that is, as being worthy of awe, wonder, and respect due to its beauty, grandeur, intricateness, etc., and so as constituting certain goods that define for us the good life: namely, virtues such as care and respect for the natural world and proper awe and wonder. If we are theists, then we will also regard God as a constitutive good, that is, as being worthy of our love, reverence, and allegiance due to God’s perfect goodness, love, wisdom, etc., and so as constituting certain goods that define for us the good life: namely, virtues such as piety, humility, existential gratitude, and loving devotion. We can also speak of the truth as being a constitutive good and an object of devotion, respect, and even reverence. Honesty, for example, is a virtue not only because it shows respect for others but also because, properly understood, it shows respect for and devotion to the truth itself. Truth as a constitutive good is 



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In Chapter , I will take on McDowell’s “quietism,” which denies the need for any ontological account of human beings and their place in the cosmos for validating and making sense of our ethical sensibilities. The standard neo-Aristotelian virtue ethic approach to environmental ethics adopts a humancentered approach to the environment, where concern for the environment has to do with how it affects our flourishing as human beings (see Rolston ; Sandler : –; Hursthouse b: –, –).

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also constitutive of the good of forms of life that seek to know and make manifest the truth. In the final chapter I will discuss one such form of life: namely, the philosophical life. In each of these cases we can see how the virtues are modes of proper responsiveness to a constitutive good, which involves concern for it for its own sake and which contributes to a normatively higher, more fulfilling mode of life (i.e., the good life). This account of constitutive goods allows us to go beyond instrumentalized accounts of the other-regarding virtues, which the quasi-scientific strand of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism tends toward. We see this in Hursthouse’s account of other-regarding virtues promoting the “good functioning of our social group,” which is seen as important for achieving our own good as rational social animals. The other-regarding virtues are also said to make possible “one of our greatest sources of characteristic enjoyment” as social animals, namely, “loving relationships” (: ). MacIntyre’s account of a network of relationships of giving and receiving and the virtues of acknowledged dependence that sustain them is also ultimately justified in terms of promoting our own good. He does affirm that when we acquire the relevant other-regarding virtues we will perform them for the sake of others insofar as we have identified our good with their good: “[Acts] of generosity, justice, and compassion are done for the sake of others and are worth doing in and for themselves. It is therefore always at the level of practice a sufficient answer to the question: ‘Why did you do that?’ to reply ‘Because it was just.’” However, MacIntyre goes on to say: “at a more theoretical level we may and must respond to the question ‘Why is this a sufficient answer?’ And what makes it a sufficient answer is that it is only through the acquisition and exercise of the virtues that individuals and communities can flourish in a specifically human mode” (: ). So the ultimate justification is instrumental and there is no indication that these others are to be treated in certain ways in virtue of their intrinsic human dignity or sanctity. Such talk of “human dignity” or “the sanctity of human life” has not generally had much of a place in Aristotelian ethics, going back to Aristotle himself, and Aristotelians who have appealed to such concepts have often drawn on non-Aristotelian sources in doing so, such as Jewish, Christian, Kantian, and Stoic thought. We see this, for example, with Martha Nussbaum, who draws on Kantian and Stoic sources in her appeals to human dignity (see ;  []: xviii–xxiv; : –). Another interesting case is the recent attempts to appropriate Stephen Darwall’s Kantian account of “the second-person standpoint” (;

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) for an Aristotelian virtue ethic by defending a two-tiered account. The idea here is that, because we are social animals and can only be fulfilled in social relationships, we have reason to adopt the second-person standpoint – where we have an “I-Thou” relationship – and recognize the moral claims that others make on us from that standpoint. So on one level – the second-person standpoint – we recognize the claims others make upon us. However, our reason for adopting this standpoint is justified on another level: namely, our desire for happiness or fulfillment as social animals (see LeBar ; ; Russell : –). But given that our ultimate reason for adopting this standpoint is our desire for our own fulfillment, it does not seem to give proper recognition to the claims of human dignity as making demands upon us that are “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them,” or whether or not we adopt a second-person standpoint. Some have seen Aristotelian virtue ethics as incompatible with recognizing the claims of human dignity (see Cokelet ; ). However, I see no reason why appeals to human dignity or the sanctity of human life cannot be incorporated into a broadly Aristotelian framework that aims at the good life through cultivation of the virtues and which seeks, where possible, to “save the appearances” (e.g., regarding human dignity) that arise for us from within a properly formed evaluative standpoint. Indeed, I am arguing in this chapter that they should be incorporated, and this adds a further element of “enchantment” to my version of Aristotelian ethics: It amounts to recognizing a self-transcending source of meaning or value, which is “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to it,” but to which we ought to be responsive. However, I also think this requires that we go beyond the quasi-scientific strand of neo-Aristotelian ethics represented by Foot, Hursthouse, MacIntyre, and others, which identifies the virtues as those traits which are conducive to our flourishing as human beings, where this is understood on analogy with the flourishing of other living things. Some of these neo-Aristotelians do sometimes give recognition to the claims of human dignity or the sanctity of human life, which I think is not surprising given how the experience of human dignity or the sanctity of human life is central to proper ethical experience, or so I am arguing. For 



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Darwall writes: “By the ‘second-person standpoint,’ I mean the perspective you and I take up whenever we address (putatively valid) claims or demands to someone, whether explicitly, in speech, or implicitly, in thought, whether to others or to ourselves (as in self-addressed feelings of guilt)” (: ). See fn.  in Chapter , where I cite Nussbaum’s remarks on Aristotle’s philosophical methodology of beginning from the “appearances” (phainomena) and trying to “save” what is true in them.

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instance, in an essay entitled “Human Dignity and Charity” (a), which was published after On Virtue Ethics, Hursthouse endorses a view of human dignity that human beings are said to possess simply in virtue of being human and which she sees as having its roots in the Christian tradition rather than the Greek tradition. However, in this essay she does not attempt to explain how this view fits with the ethical naturalism that she defends in On Virtue Ethics (she also does not appeal to such an account of human dignity in the latter). Consider also Anscombe: She suggested the disenchanted or quasi-scientific approach (at least for those who are not theists), but she does not ultimately take this approach herself. We have already had occasion in Chapter  to mention her remarks on “mystical perception,” which recognizes a special, non-instrumental value – what I think can be called “sacredness” – in human life and human sexuality, and which is a perception she thinks is available to everyone (“it is as common as humanity”) and grounds “supra-utilitarian” virtues, that is, virtues that are not defined merely by their conduciveness to one’s flourishing qua human being (: –). But this seems precisely to 

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Hursthouse writes: “At least one big difference [for] Western thought that the development of Christianity made was that however wicked and debased you might have made yourself, you still had not lost irrevocably, the thing that made you, as a human, different from other animals. Every human being is to be loved, is worthy of love, simply because they are human, made in God’s image . . . [This is] something that the ancient Greeks would have regarded as quite insane” (a: ). Hursthouse is not religious, though she says: “I came to this conversation [about human dignity] in favour of the Greek strand [of thought about dignity] but . . . came away from it in favour of the Christian one” (). She does not explicitly say what is the basis of human dignity, but presumably for her it is rooted in our distinctiveness as rational animals (see –). This essay perhaps marks a development in her views. In her earlier essay “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” Hursthouse tried to sidestep the issue of the moral status of early human life as a “metaphysical question” that is too “recondite” and “simply not relevant to the rightness or wrongness of abortion” (: ). But she also writes: “The fact that the premature termination of a pregnancy is, in some sense, the cutting off of a new human life, and thereby, like the procreation of a new human life, connects with all our thoughts about human life and death, parenthood, and family relationships, must make it a serious matter. To disregard this fact about it, to think of abortion as nothing but the killing of something that does not matter, or as nothing but the exercise of some right or rights one has, or as the incidental means to some desirable state of affairs, is to do something callous and light-minded, the sort of thing that no virtuous and wise person would do. It is to have the wrong attitude not only to fetuses, but more generally to human life and death, parenthood, and family relationships” (). Still, Hursthouse allows that abortion can be the right decision if having the child would be overly burdensome, even though by cutting human life short “some evil has probably been brought about” (–). However, in taking this position she clearly is presupposing some view of moral status since she is not saying that new human life has no moral status, and she is also not saying it has as much status as an infant, since she would not allow for infanticide when someone discovers a newborn is more burdensome than he or she had realized (see Lu : –). But insofar as we think (as with “the Christian strand” of thought) that human beings have a special dignity simply in virtue of being human and not only because of what they achieve, then the unborn should be seen as having the same basic moral status (Hursthouse a: – does seem to indicate a stronger opposition to abortion). See Anscombe’s remarks in what follows.

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involve an appeal to a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” ought, which in “Modern Moral Philosophy” she thought should be jettisoned in favor of a more disenchanted Aristotelian approach, at least by those who have rejected a divine law conception of ethics. It is worth considering here two other occasions where Anscombe maintains that respect and reverence are owed to human life. One pertains to the issue of abortion, and the other has to do with the issue of euthanasia. In “The Dignity of the Human Being,” she writes: So a woman of today may find a possibility of becoming pregnant, letting the baby grow to twenty eight weeks (because bigger ones are worth more) and then going somewhere where they will pay her for a late abortion, which yields the foetus for resale, say, as valuable material. If you act so, are you not shewing that you do not regard that human being with any reverence? Few will fail to see that. But the same is true of one who has an abortion so that she can play in a tennis championship; or for any reason for which someone might choose to destroy the life of a new human being. This lack of reverence, of respect for that dignity of human nature so wonderfully created by God, is a lack of regard for the one impregnable equality of all human beings. Lacking it, you cannot revere the dignity of your own human-ness, that is the dignity of that same human nature in yourself. You may value yourself highly as a tennis player or a natural scientist, but without a change of heart you cannot value yourself as being a human, a Mensch. For you have shewn the value you set on a human life as such. You are willing to extinguish it as suits you or as suits the people who want you to do so. (: )

And in “Murder and the Morality of Euthanasia,” Anscombe writes: Whatever blasphemes the spirit in man is evil, discouraging, at best trivializing, at worst doing dirt on life. Such is the considered recommendation of suicide and killing in face of suffering. . . . [Propaganda] in favour of death as a remedy . . . is irreligious, in a sense in which the contrasting religious attitude – one of respect before the mystery of human life – is not necessarily connected only with some one particular religious system. Propaganda puts in the mouth of the potential suicide: “I belong to myself, and I can set conditions on which I will consent to go on living”. Life is regarded as a good or bad hotel, which must not be too bad to be worth staying in. To the man of religious feeling the claim lacks reverence and insight. A religious attitude may be merely incipient, prompting a certain fear before the idea of ever destroying a human life, and refusing to make a “quality of life” judgment to terminate a human being. Or it may be more developed, perceiving that men are made by God in God’s likeness, to know and love God. . . . Such perception of what a human being is makes

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one perceive human death as awesome, human life as always to be treated with a respect which is a sign and acknowledgment of what it is for. (: –)

The issue that I want to bring out in regard to these passages has to do with the sort of conceptual resources available to us as we think and debate about other-regarding concern. In particular: Do we have a way of thinking about human life as such as deserving of respect or reverence in virtue of its inherent dignity or sanctity? These are ways of thinking that seem lost or overlooked among most neo-Aristotelians because of their focus on how the virtues are conducive to one’s flourishing. And perhaps one might think they are lost for us if we no longer affirm a religious worldview, as Anscombe’s appeals to God in these passages could suggest. However, although Anscombe refers to the “respect before the mystery of human life” as a “religious attitude” or “religious feeling,” she does say that this “is not necessarily connected only with some one particular religious system.” Moreover, the appeal to this “religious attitude” or “religious feeling” seems equivalent to Anscombe’s appeal to “mystical perception,” which, as we saw, she thinks is available to everyone, whether or not one is religious in a conventional sense. I want to try to bring out how we can come to see human life in this way by focusing on the issue of the care we should have for those with severe affliction, which we have seen is a concern for MacIntyre. However, I want also to suggest that his account for why we should care for those with severe affliction leaves something to be desired.

Fully amongst Us: Solidarity with the Severely Afflicted and Other Marginalized Humans As we saw, for MacIntyre the reasons why we can come to owe unconditional care for those with severe affliction (e.g., severe intellectual disability) have to do with asymmetrical reciprocity (i.e., we owe in virtue of what we have received, but what we owe can be very different from what we have received and to whom we owe may be different from those from whom we have received) and empathetic identification (where we have the thought with regard to those who experience misfortune: “it could have been and could be me”). Both contribute to a social network of giving and receiving, which enables individuals and communities to “flourish in a specifically human mode.” However, there is no appeal here to the equal intrinsic dignity or sacredness of human beings qua human being, and I want to suggest this omission is significant.

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Virtue and Meaning

In A Common Humanity, Raimond Gaita discusses his experience of working at a psychiatric ward when he was seventeen. The patients, he says, “appeared to have irretrievably lost everything which gives meaning to our lives” and “had no grounds for self-respect insofar as we connect that with self-esteem; or, none which could be based on qualities or achievements for which we could admire or congratulate them without condescension” (: –). In fact, the patients were often treated as less than fully human: for example, when they soiled themselves, as sometimes occurred, they were told to undress and step under a shower and were then mopped down “as zoo-keepers wash down elephants” (). Gaita notes – with admiration – that there were a few psychiatrists who worked to improve the patients’ conditions and “spoke, against all appearances, of [their] inalienable dignity” (). But then one day a nun came to visit the ward: [Everything] in her demeanour towards them – the way she spoke to them, her facial expressions, the inflexions of her body – contrasted with and showed up the behaviour of those noble psychiatrists. She showed that they were, despite their best efforts, condescending, as I too had been. She thereby revealed that such patients were, as the psychiatrists and I had sincerely and generously professed, the equals of those who want to help them; but she also revealed that in our hearts we did not believe this. (–)

Gaita marvels at the power of the nun’s love – as expressed through her demeanor – “to reveal the full humanity of those whose affliction had made their humanity invisible” (). It is important to note that Gaita, who is not religious in any conventional sense, does not think this revelation of full humanity depends upon sharing the nun’s religious views, such as the belief that the patients “were all God’s children and equally loved by him” (). While many religious people might appeal to the idea that all human beings are sacred in order to explain what is motivating the nun’s behavior, Gaita thinks that only a religious person “can speak seriously of the sacred,” though “such talk informs the thoughts of most of us whether or not we are religious, for it shapes our thoughts about the way in which human beings limit our will as does nothing else in nature.” Later he says: “Because of the place the impartial love of saints has occupied in our culture, there has developed a language of love whose grammar has transformed our understanding of what it is for a human being to be a unique kind of limit to our will.” However, Gaita thinks that the non-religious person will often have to find some not fully adequate

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substitute for the religious language of the sacred, such as that all human beings are “inestimably precious,” “ends in themselves,” “owed unconditional respect,” or “possess inalienable dignity.” For Gaita, “these are ways of trying to say what we feel a need to say when we are estranged from the conceptual resources we need to say it” and none of them has “the simple power of the religious way of speaking” (–). I don’t think it is entirely right to say that only a (conventionally) religious person “can speak seriously of the sacred,” since the language of the sacred can be used to describe that which is experienced as reverenceworthy and thereby regarded as irreplaceable and inviolable (“a unique kind of limit to our will”). As suggested by Anscombe, we can say that even a (conventionally) non-religious person is capable of a kind of religious feeling or mystical perception in recognizing the reverence-worthiness of human life, though we might also say that to have such feeling and perception is to be religious in a broad, non-conventional sense. There are of course questions that can arise about what world-picture or cosmic outlook can best ground and make sense of this moral phenomenology (this issue will be taken up in Chapter ), but here we are simply seeking to attend to the phenomenon. What I want to focus on in Gaita’s discussion of the nun’s saintly love is a key lesson that he came to derive from this encounter. He writes: Later, reflecting on the nun’s example, I came to believe that an ethics centered on the concept of human flourishing does not have the conceptual resources to keep fully amongst us, in the way the nun had revealed to be possible, people who are severely and ineradicably afflicted. Only with bitter irony or unknowing condescension could one say the patients in that ward had any chance of flourishing. Any description of what life could mean to them invited the thought that it would have been better for them if they had never been born. Later, such thoughts about such lives were commonly voiced, first in discussions of abortion and then in discussions of euthanasia. It would be no fault in any account of ethics if it failed to find words to make fully intelligible what the nun revealed, for she revealed something mysterious. But there are philosophies that leave or create conceptual space for such mystery, and there are some which close that space. Most do not even see the need for it. (; my emphasis; cf.  []: –)

In these remarks, Gaita certainly has Peter Singer in mind, who is notorious for his permissive utilitarian stances on human killing, including countenancing the intentional killing of what he calls “defective infants,” provided a quality of life assessment determines that their lives are not

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worth living (Singer  []: chs. –). Singer clearly has no conceptual space for a sense of the mysteriousness or sacredness of human life, as we see when he remarks: “The traditional ethic [that endorses the sanctity of human life] is still defended by bishops and conservative bioethicists who speak in reverent tones about the intrinsic value of all human life, irrespective of its nature or quality. But, like the new clothes worn by the emperor, these solemn phrases seem true and substantial only while we are intimidated into uncritically accepting that all human life has some special dignity or worth” (: ). Gaita sees a kind of moral (and we might also say spiritual) blindness here. Elsewhere he says of “those practical philosophers” – and he surely has Singer in mind – “who have been in the forefront of the argument to relax the conditions under which it is permissible to kill people”: They have “no sense of awe in the face of the questions they have raised, and no sense of humility in the face of the traditions they condescendingly dismiss. They are aggressively without a sense of mystery” ( []: ). But it is not only utilitarians who appear to have no conceptual space for a sense of the mysteriousness or sacredness of human life; this also seems to be the case for neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalists who define the virtues solely with reference to a conception of human flourishing that is understood on analogy with the flourishing of other living things. As I have said, among those who adopt this approach I think MacIntyre provides the best account of other-regarding concern with his appeals to asymmetrical reciprocity and the empathetic thought that someone else’s affliction could have been (or could be) mine. However, without also appealing to the intrinsic dignity or sacredness of all human life, it seems that we lack the conceptual resources for fending off the thought that it would have been better if those with severe affliction had never been born. Moreover, if our concern for others is ultimately justified through an appeal to our own flourishing, then it is difficult to see how we can “keep fully amongst us” those who are prevented from flourishing qua human being. It seems that the quasi-scientific form of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism closes the conceptual space for appeals to the intrinsic dignity or sanctity of all human life, and those who adopt this form of ethical naturalism appear



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The language of “defective infants” was used in the first edition, but he switched to speaking about “disabled infants” in the second edition. For more on this, see Laing . I should mention that Aristotle also notoriously endorsed the practice of infanticide for infants with disabilities; see Politics VII.; see also Lu .

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not to see the need for such a conceptual space (otherwise they would go beyond such a quasi-scientific approach, as we see Anscombe does in her appeals to mystical perception and religious feeling). I think Gaita’s appeal to the example of saintly love offers one important route into appreciating this conceptual space and toward ultimately inhabiting it. But there are other routes. In her essay “The Importance of Being Human,” Cora Diamond, for example, appeals to works of literature, such as the novels of Dickens and Dostoevsky, in order imaginatively to bring into view the special value of humanity. Here she speaks of “[the] sense of mystery surrounding our lives, the feeling of solidarity in mysterious origin and uncertain fate: this binds us to each other, and the binding meant includes the dead and the unborn, and those who bear on their faces ‘a look of blank idiocy’, those who lack all power of speech, those behind whose vacant eyes there lurks a ‘soul in mute eclipse’” (: ). Unfortunately, we must add that the special dignity or sanctity of human life is something that we can come to recognize not only through witnessing acts of saintly love or experiencing human solidarity, but also through experiencing remorse or horror at actions that violate such dignity or sanctity. Indeed, we need an account of the ethical life that can make sense not only of great good (e.g., saintly love) but also of great evil (murder, rape, torture, etc.), and for both it seems we need to make appeal to the concept of the sacred or the reverence-worthy.

Moral Absolutes These remarks point to another area where I think we need to go beyond the quasi-scientific, disenchanted form of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism: namely, we should recognize a realm of moral absolutes. This form of ethical naturalism has had difficulty accommodating moral absolutes, and I will suggest that this is because it has not made conceptual space for the sacred or the reverence-worthy. As aforementioned, the idea of sacredness 

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Doug Rasmussen and Doug Den Uyl refer to this as the issue of “big morality.” They raise the concern that there is perhaps something too tame about an ethical perspective founded solely on the concept of human flourishing, as it does not seem able to account for the extremes of good (e.g., Jesus and Socrates) and evil (e.g., Hitler and Stalin), since “promoting [or attaining] flourishing” does not seem to capture the goodness of extreme good and “impeding flourishing” does not seem to capture the badness of extreme evil (: ). Raimond Gaita would second this concern; see the chapters “Goodness Beyond Virtue” and “Evil Beyond Vice” in Gaita . I raised this issue earlier (in Chapter ) with regard to whether Philippa Foot’s ethical naturalism can make sense of the horror she felt at the Holocaust, which led her to oppose moral subjectivism, and I argued that it cannot.

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carries with it a sense of inviolability; it conveys a kind of boundary marker that ought never to be crossed (i.e., it is “a unique kind of limit to our will”). In what follows I will focus on moral absolutes understood as absolute prohibitions: I want to defend the view that there are some actions – for example, murder, rape, torture, etc. – that are never to be done. In other words, there is something that should be regarded as inviolable here. In the following section I will also explore whether there are some actions – for example, helping someone in dire need (as in the Good Samaritan case) – that are strictly to be done. I want to suggest that there are, but such cases are informed by the particularities of circumstance in a way that absolute prohibitions are not. But I think we can also speak of a moral absolute here if we mean by this a kind of moral necessity. In exploring the issue of absolute prohibitions, I want to return to Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy.” As discussed in Chapter , Anscombe makes a disenchanting move in this essay when she suggests that secular moral philosophers should jettison any special “moral” sense of “ought” that is supposed to contain some “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force, since she thinks that this sense of moral obligation is derived from a divine law conception of ethics. In other words, she wants us to acknowledge the full extent of the disenchantment that she thinks in fact occurs if we have abandoned theism. But she does not think that we need to accept the more extreme form of disenchantment that would involve rejecting all claims of objectivity in ethics. Rather, she suggests that we can recover an ordinary sense of “ought” by focusing on facts about what a human being needs in order to flourish qua human being, where the virtues are thought to be central to what a human being needs. This suggestion for a recovery of something like Aristotle’s conception of ethics has proven to be the most influential aspect of Anscombe’s essay. However, this isn’t Anscombe’s greatest concern in the essay, which instead has to do with consequentialist thinking that rejects absolute prohibitions. One of Anscombe’s main theses in “Modern Moral Philosophy” is that “differences between the well-known English writers on moral philosophy from Sidgwick to the present day are of little importance,” because, in essence, they are all consequentialists of some form and thus show a “corrupt mind” (: , ). She writes:



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Note that I am focusing here on actions. If we think instead about life-orientations, then it seems pretty straightforward and non-controversial to say that it is a moral necessity that we orient our lives toward the good.

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[Every] one of the best known English academic moral philosophers has put out a philosophy according to which, e.g., it is not possible to hold that it cannot be right to kill the innocent as a means to any end whatsoever and that someone who thinks otherwise is in error. . . . Now this is a significant thing: for it means that all these philosophies are quite incompatible with the Hebrew-Christian ethic. For it has been characteristic of that ethic to teach that there are certain things forbidden whatever consequences threaten, such as: choosing to kill the innocent for any purpose, however good . . . [It] would [take] a certain provinciality of mind not to see this incompatibility as the most important fact about these philosophers, and the differences between them as somewhat trifling by comparison. (–)

In referring here to the “Hebrew-Christian ethic,” Anscombe is appealing to a divine law conception of ethics. But does she allow that other conceptions of ethics, such as the disenchanted form of Aristotelian ethics that she recommends to secular moral philosophers, could also reasonably affirm absolute prohibitions? Anscombe is in fact skeptical. Toward the end of the essay, Anscombe raises the question “whether one might ever need to commit injustice, or whether it won’t be the best thing to do?” For her, a paradigm case of injustice is the intentional taking of innocent human life (she also mentions the judicial condemnation of someone known to be innocent as another paradigm case). Among the different possible replies to this question, Anscombe mentions the following: One man – a philosopher – may say that since justice is a virtue, and injustice a vice, and virtues and vices are built up by the performances of the action in which they are instanced, an act of injustice will tend to make a man bad; and essentially the flourishing of a man qua man consists in his being good (e.g. in virtues); but for any X to which such terms apply, X needs what makes it flourish, so a man needs, or ought to perform, only virtuous actions; and even if, as it must be admitted may happen, he flourishes less, or not at all, in inessentials, by avoiding injustice, his life is spoiled in essentials by not avoiding injustice – so he still needs to perform only just actions. That is roughly how Plato and Aristotle talk. ()

Plato and Aristotle do indeed appear to acknowledge absolute prohibitions. For instance, Plato has Socrates say in the Gorgias that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil (c), which is an idea central to any view embracing absolute prohibitions. Similarly, Aristotle remarks: “there are some things we cannot be compelled to do. Rather than do them we should suffer the most terrible consequences and accept death” (NE III., a–). He mentions the act of killing one’s own mother as such a case. Elsewhere

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Aristotle qualifies his view of the virtues of character as consisting in attaining the mean between excess and deficiency in some feeling or action by saying: “[Not] every action or feeling admits of the mean. For the names of some automatically include baseness – for instance, spite, shamelessness, envy [among feelings], and adultery, theft, murder among actions. For all of these and similar things are called by these names because they themselves, not their excesses or deficiencies, are base. Hence in doing these things we can never be correct, but must invariably be in error” (NE II., a–). There is a lot left unexplained in these remarks. For instance, what explains the baseness of murder (i.e., the intentional killing of an innocent human being) such that it always ought to be avoided? It does not seem enough to say that it undermines the “good functioning of the social group” (and the virtues that maintain this) and runs counter to our social nature (and the virtues that fulfill this), though these claims are true; rather, the baseness seems related to the violation of the inherent value of human life, which should be regarded as inviolable, irreplaceable, and reverence-worthy. Murder, we might say, is a fundamentally “impious” or “irreligious” act, and even more so in the case Aristotle mentions of killing one’s own mother (given that piety or reverence is especially due to the sources of our existence): Rather than do this “we should suffer the most terrible consequences and accept death.” Moreover, if as living in accordance with such absolute prohibitions is properly seen as necessary for our own fulfillment (eudaimonia), it is, I maintain, because we have accepted a strong evaluative understanding 

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Hursthouse affirms that a neo-Aristotelian ethic should acknowledge some absolute prohibitions, though she does not explain their basis, except to appeal to Aristotle’s remark that the names or descriptions of certain acts “connote depravity” (or “baseness,” in the translation I used) (: –, , –). But what we need to know is: In virtue of what is something depraved? We see the same problem in Hursthouse’s remarks on the wrongness of killing: “What is wrong with killing, when it is wrong, may not so much be that it is unjust, violating the right to life, but, frequently, that it is callous and contrary to the virtue of charity” (). This agent-centered explanation gets things backwards: Someone is callous in this case because he or she fails to be properly responsive to the value of human life (i.e., to its dignity or preciousness or sacredness). As we saw in Chapter , Foot also affirms a “limited moral absolutism” according to which “certain . . . actions are held to be such as to rule out circumstances in which it could ever be right to perform them.” Although she disagrees with Aristotle, Aquinas, and Anscombe with respect to some of what they rule out (e.g., adultery and lying), she does suggest that torture should be absolutely prohibited: “If the frequently unchallengeable description ‘torture’ applies to an action, then, whatever the circumstances, it is in my firm opinion morally ‘out’” (: –). However, she doesn’t explain why this should be so, though the most natural explanation would involve an appeal to human dignity or the sanctity of human life (see fn.  in Chapter ). Earlier she remarks: “Except in certain fairly rare cases, for instance of great suffering in a terminal illness, suicide is contrary to the virtue of hope” (, n. ). Again, there is no appeal to anything like human dignity or the sanctity of human life, which could generate a moral absolute here.

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of it, for example, in terms of a righteous, holy, noble, upright life. But if we do away with appeals to a special moral (i.e., strong evaluative) ought and only accept an ordinary (i.e., disenchanted) ought, where virtuous actions are ultimately justified by their conduciveness to our flourishing as human beings, where this is understood on analogy with the flourishing of other living things, then it seems difficult to see how certain actions could be ruled out as such. Indeed, Anscombe continues the previously cited passage as follows: [It] can be seen that philosophically there is a huge gap . . . which needs to be filled by an account of human nature, human action, the type of characteristic a virtue is, and above all of human “flourishing”. And it is the last concept that appears the most doubtful. For it is a bit much to swallow that a man in pain and hunger and poor and friendless is flourishing, as Aristotle himself admitted. Further, someone might say that one at least needed to stay alive to flourish. Another man unimpressed by all that will say in a hard case “What we need is such-and-such, which we won’t get without doing this (which is unjust) – so this is what we ought to do”. (: –)

In other words, it seems that there could always be exceptions made for the sake of the end of flourishing (this parallels a similar common critique of rule-utilitarianism). And so here Anscombe points to a fundamental inadequacy in the disenchanted Aristotelian view, given that she thinks justice requires acknowledging absolute prohibitions. In light of this inadequacy, she suggests the following as another possible reply to her question “whether one might ever need to commit injustice, or whether it won’t be the best thing to do?”: The man who believes in divine laws will say perhaps “It is forbidden, and however it looks, it cannot be to anyone’s profit to commit injustice”; he like the Greek philosophers can think in terms of flourishing. . . . [If] he is a Jew or Christian, he need not have any very distinct notion: the way it will profit him to abstain from injustice is something that he leaves to God to determine, himself only saying “It can’t do me any good to go against his 

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Peter Geach provides what might be seen as an addendum to Anscombe’s remarks: “[Somebody] might very well admit that not only is there something bad about certain acts, but also it is desirable to become the sort of person who needs to act in the contrary way; and yet not admit that such acts are to be avoided in all circumstances and at any price. To be sure, a virtuous person cannot be ready in advance to do such acts; and if he does do them they will damage his virtuous habits and perhaps irreparably wreck his hard-won integrity of soul. But at this point someone may protest ‘Are you the only person to be considered? Suppose the price of your precious integrity is a most fearful disaster! Haven’t you got a hand to burn for your country (or mankind) and your friends?’ This sort of appeal has not, I think, been adequately answered on Aristotelian lines” (: ).

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Virtue and Meaning law”. (He also hopes for a great reward in a new life later on, e.g. at the coming of Messiah; but in this he is relying on special promises.) (; cf. )

Given Anscombe’s concern to combat consequentialism and given that she expresses strong doubts about the disenchanted form of Aristotelian ethics that she recommends to secular moral philosophers being able to ground absolute prohibitions, though she thinks a divine law conception of ethics can, it seems reasonable to conclude that Anscombe’s ultimate aim in “Modern Moral Philosophy” is in fact to recommend a divine law ethic, at least as a needed supplement to an Aristotelian ethic in order to ground absolute prohibitions. It is noteworthy that MacIntyre does the same in an essay titled “On Being a Theistic Philosopher in a Secularized Culture” (). There he draws the following lesson from the famous claim made by the character Ivan Karamazov in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov that if God does not exist, then everything is permissible: Dostoievski through Karamazov was not saying, that atheists are free from all moral constraints, that, if atheism is true, anyone is morally free to do anything at any time. . . . [What] Dostoievski . . . was saying, was that, if we take atheism to be true, then there is no type of action, no matter how horrifying, of which we can be sure that we could never find good reason to perform it, that it would never be overwhelmingly and overridingly in what we took to be the general interest to perform it. Dostoievski . . . was not predicting Auschwitz or the Gulag. He was predicting the fire-bombing of



Julia Driver () notes that the dominant reading of Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” has been “to read it straightforwardly as an indictment of the moral theories prevalent in the s and a subsequent argument for the development of an alternative theory of morality that does not postulate a legislator, but then also does not try to keep the defunct legislative structure that naturally falls out of religiously based ethics. On this view we need to develop an alternative that is based on moral psychology, moral virtue, facts of human nature, and an account of the good for humans based on this approach.” She supports an alternative reading where the article is seen “as a modus tollens argument intended to establish the superiority of a religious based ethics,” understood as follows: : : :

“If religious based ethics is false, then virtue ethics [understood in the way of the dominant ethical naturalist approach] is the way that moral philosophy ought to be developed.” “It is not the case that virtue ethics [so understood] is the way to develop moral philosophy [because it cannot account for moral absolutes].” “Therefore, it is not the case that religiously based ethics is false.”

This seems to me the right reading as indicated by what I have said in this section. I think it was often taken the other way because many philosophers were already committed to a non-religious outlook (and Driver agrees).

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Dresden and Tokyo, the saturation bombing of the Ruhr and the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was predicting not the crimes of the obviously wicked, but the crimes of the apparently good, types of action that it is rational to prohibit unconditionally only if one is a theist. But it [is] just this kind of position that will appear at best groundless, at worst unintelligible, to those whose presuppositions are those of our secularized culture. (–)

MacIntyre thinks that the reason why it is rational for the theist to regard certain actions as absolutely prohibited is because on the theistic view “we are unconditionally bound to obey a certain rule not in spite of our interests and natural inclinations, but because of them . . . [Our] nature is such that our end is such that we cannot achieve it except by respecting a law to whose giver we are accountable” (). What should we make of Anscombe’s and MacIntyre’s appeals to divine law in order to ground absolute prohibitions? They do fit with what Sabina Lovibond identifies as an “element of anti-naturalism” in the idea of absolute prohibitions: “To say fiat iustitia, ruat caelum [‘let justice be done though the heavens may fall’] is to give hostages to fortune: if there is even so much as one moral requirement that we are seriously going to treat as absolute, i.e. as a requirement that is never to be called into question, then this policy is liable sooner or later to produce consequences which, by any normal human standards, will count as disastrous” (: ). We can also see this “anti-naturalism” or “other-worldliness” of absolute prohibitions in the “worldliness” of Callicles’ response to Socrates’ claim in Plato’s Gorgias that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil: “Tell me Socrates, are we to take you as being in earnest now, or joking? For if you are in earnest, and these things you’re saying are really true, won’t this human life of ours be turned upside down, and won’t everything we do evidently be the opposite of what we should do?” (c). There is certainly truth in this response, as there is a sense in which absolute prohibitions do run counter to the “ways of the world,” though we might regard this as counting in favor absolute prohibitions. And such prohibitions are also difficult to make sense of from within an ethics centered on the sort of disenchanted account of human flourishing that is put forward by a number of neo-Aristotelians. It is, thus, unsurprising that we find some who think that absolute prohibitions can only be grounded from within a religious framework.

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See Gaita  []:  and ch.  (titled “Ethical Other-Worldliness”).

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But how exactly are we to understand Anscombe’s remark that “[it] can’t do me any good to go against [God’s] law,” or MacIntyre suggestion that we cannot achieve our interests “except by respecting a law to whose giver we are accountable”? One possibility is suggested by Anscombe: Following God’s law is a necessary condition for obtaining some “great reward in a new life later on,” whereas failure to do so is subject to divine punishment. However, there seems to be something shallow about following God’s law simply for the sake of reward and to avoid punishment. A better possible understanding for the claim that “[it] can’t do me any good to go against God’s law” is that it has to do with faith in divine providence, where God is seen as creating the world for good and as being on the side of the good and thus as working to ensure that good ultimately triumphs over evil. Thus, following God’s law, which includes certain absolute prohibitions, is a matter of aligning ourselves with the will of God and ensuring that we are also on the side of the good and are helping to bring about the ultimate triumph of good over evil. Relatedly, it can also be a matter of achieving a right relationship with God, which the theist takes to be our highest good. These considerations no doubt give the theist compelling extrinsic reasons to live in accordance with absolute prohibitions (e.g., never intentionally kill an innocent human being), provided they have been divinely decreed, but they miss what should be seen as the intrinsic reason for these prohibitions: namely, that they concern things that are sacred or reverenceworthy and thus should be regarded as inviolable. For instance, the reason why we should never intentionally kill an innocent human being is because doing so violates the special dignity or sanctity of human life. The other theological considerations may provide additional motivational support, but unless a theist embraces theological voluntarism – where something is thought to be right or wrong simply because God willed it to be so, which would render morality arbitrary and undermine God’s praiseworthiness and so should, I think, be rejected – he or she will believe that God decreed certain absolution prohibitions because they concern something that is sacred or reverence-worthy and thus should be regarded as inviolable. So there is a special moral (i.e., strong evaluative) ought here – an ought that 

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Candace Vogler mentions faith in divine providence as a basis for upholding absolute prohibitions, though she leaves the appeal somewhat vague (: –); I have tried to clarify such an appeal here. Elsewhere she discusses the case of Thomas More and says of his choice to side with fidelity and obedience to God over King Henry VIII (which cost him his life): “It is a matter of siding with knowledge of one’s nature, one’s right relations with others, and the relation between humans and God” (: ).

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contains a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force in that it makes unconditional demands upon us – not simply because something has been commanded by God, but because we can identify through strong evaluation a constitutive good: for example, human life as something inherently reverenceworthy for which we ought to show reverence, where doing so is constitutive of a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life. If this is so, then it is not clear that a non-theist could not have experiences of the sacred or the reverence-worthy that could ground absolute prohibitions. In fact, the force of Anscombe’s argument against consequentialism seems to depend on our having such experiences of the sacred or the reverence-worthy. Without this we might wonder why the consequentialist rejection of absolute prohibitions is so significant. We might imagine that a modern, secular moral philosopher, such as Peter Singer, could respond: “So what? We are well past such a superstitious conception of ethics and are better for it.” Such philosophers often regard their moral views as “enlightened” in comparison to traditional views that affirm the sanctity or special dignity of human life (as we saw in the passage from Singer cited earlier). Clearly Anscombe does not think such views are enlightened, but rather they are benighted; hence she charges consequentialists with having a “corrupt mind.” But this charge seems to presuppose that there is some common anti-consequentialist moral perception – for example, about the dignity or sanctity of human life such that “it cannot be right to kill the innocent as a means to any end whatsoever and that someone who thinks otherwise is in error” – and there is a natural potentiality to realize this through proper ethical formation, and we can fail to realize it because of corruption by bad moral theory. In “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Anscombe does apparently accept a natural law ethic according to which God’s law is “written on our hearts” (as something to which our conscience bears witness), whether or not we are Jews or Christians or whatever else. She refers on two occasions (en passant) to the “natural divine law,” though this is never filled out and deployed in the main arguments of the essay. However, she does fill out the idea of a common anti-consequentialist moral perception  

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The phrase “written on our hearts” is adapted from Romans :–. This phrasing is somewhat strange, as it seems to run together distinctions that Aquinas makes between: () the eternal law (i.e., the dictates of divine reason; the moral order of the universe); () natural (moral) law (i.e., the eternal law as grasped through human reason/conscience; it reveals our natural end); () the human (positive) law (it should be derived from the natural law and promote our natural end); and () the divine law (i.e., law revealed through special divine revelation, namely, in the scriptures; it reveals our supernatural end) (see ST I–II, q. ).

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(which can be seen as an integral part of the natural moral law that is written on our hearts) in her later work, as we have seen, with her appeal to “mystical perception,” which she says is “as common as humanity,” and is involved, for example, in the “supra-utilitarian” virtue of “respect for life,” which can be seen as part of the virtue of piety. Although the prohibition on murder certainly “makes life more commodious,” Anscombe says: “everybody perceives quite clearly that the wrong done in murder is done first and foremost to the victim, whose life is not inconvenienced, it just isn’t there any more. He isn’t there to complain: so the utilitarian argument has to be on behalf of the rest of us. Therefore, though true, it is highly comic and is not the foundation: the objection to murder is suprautilitarian” (: ). We have also seen that elsewhere she speaks similarly of a “religious attitude” of “respect before the mystery of human life” – or what we can also call the sacredness or reverence-worthiness of human life – which is “not necessarily connected only with some one particular religious system.” Indeed, we saw how Raimond Gaita, who is not religious (in any conventional sense), seeks to hold onto something like a religious attitude of reverence for human life, as does Cora Diamond in her appeal to “the feeling of solidarity in mysterious origin and uncertain fate,” which binds us to all humanity, including the dead, the unborn, and the severely afflicted. In a recent essay, “The Problem of Impiety” (), Diamond seeks to show how certain ways of acting – she discusses suicide, genetic engineering, and other issues – can be absolutely ruled out as impious without appealing to divine prohibition, and in doing so she draws on Anscombe’s discussion of “mystical perception” and the “religious attitude” of reverence for human life. These ideas, I contend, mark an important conceptual advance – over appeals to divine law – for understanding absolute prohibitions and a special moral (i.e., strong evaluative) ought. Of course it might be that appeals to “mystical perception” or a “religious attitude” of reverence for human life ultimately require some particular cosmic outlook that can make sense of them, and without this there can be a deflationary effect on our experiences of the sacred or the reverence-worthy and other strong evaluative experiences. And we might think that a theistic world-view in particular is best able to ground a sense of the sacredness or the reverenceworthiness of human life, as seems to be suggested by Anscombe when she says: “A religious attitude [of reverence for human life] may be merely incipient, prompting a certain fear before the idea of ever destroying a human life, and refusing to make a ‘quality of life’ judgment to terminate a human being. Or it may be more developed, perceiving that men are made

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by God in God’s likeness, to know and love God” (: –). I will take up this issue of cosmic outlooks in Chapter . But what I want to emphasize for now is that there is a common anti-consequentialist moral perception (namely, our sense of the sacred or the reverence-worthy) that we need to take account of. Indeed, although I have acknowledged that absolute prohibitions are in a sense “anti-natural” in that they run counter to the “ways of the world” and they are difficult to make sense of from within an ethics centered on a disenchanted account of human flourishing, there is another sense in which the recognition of such prohibitions is completely “natural” to human beings (i.e., it is “as common as humanity”) and hence such prohibitions have been a central feature of traditional conceptions of morality (see McPherson a). But might there be other ways of affirming absolute prohibitions apart from invoking the concept of the sacred (i.e., the reverence-worthy)? Sabina Lovibond – who we saw raised the issue of anti-naturalism – seeks to defend absolute prohibitions not only apart from divine law and divine promises, but also apart from appeals to the sacred or the reverenceworthy. Instead, she attempts to show how such prohibitions can be seen as an important part of a tradition-informed ethical way of life. She writes: The customs of our ethical “ancestors”, interpreted as best we can from our own historical standpoint and held up to scrutiny against the background of a constant awareness of our own limitations: . . . these seem to be the available sources for a code of human conduct within which some actions would be excluded from consideration, though not because a supreme being had given orders to that effect. . . . [Some] people . . . manage to remain at their posts – to keep the “commandments” of the morality they acknowledge – even without hope: at any rate without the hope that things 

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Lovibond is influenced by McDowell’s second nature naturalism; see her book Ethical Formation (). However, we should note that McDowell himself does not accept absolute prohibitions, since he endorses the non-codifiability of ethics where what is ethically required of us is determined in each situation by the operations of a virtuous sensibility (see : ch. ). For example, he writes: “A kind person has a reliable sensitivity to a certain sort of requirement that situations [e.g., encounters with someone in need] impose on behavior” (). But McDowell doesn’t say what it is about human beings that makes them worthy of our concern; he thinks having the relevant sensitivity is enough. I don’t think it is: What he overlooks is how our sensibility can and should recognize the special dignity or sanctity of human life and thereby affirm absolute prohibitions such that we ought never to kill (or torture or maim or otherwise gravely harm) intentionally an innocent human being. These prohibitions are “codifiable,” even though we can affirm that much else in the ethical life is not. McDowell holds that a “reasonably adult moral outlook” does not admit of codification, and he cites Aristotle’s remarks about how the best generalizations in ethics hold only for the most part (). But this generalization itself holds only for the most part, since we have seen that Aristotle does in fact affirm absolute prohibitions.

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Virtue and Meaning will turn out all right for them . . . How do they do it; what is their incentive? Perhaps it is simply that they have become accustomed, or even attached, to the post in question and lack the desire to make alternative arrangements. (: –)

This passage recalls Foot’s remarks (discussed in Chapter ) about being volunteers in duty’s army because of the way that moral beliefs are able to arouse our devotion. Stuart Hampshire also writes about how certain “conduct is impossible as destroying the ideal of a way of life that one aspires to and respects, as being, for example, utterly unjust or cruel or treacherous or corruptly dishonest” (: ). And David Wiggins writes about being “bound by our moral nature, i.e., bound by those sentiments without which . . . we should not recognize ourselves” (: ; cf. : , –). In all these cases the idea is that avoiding certain actions is a necessary condition (a “practical necessity”) for maintaining our moral identities. But we can ask the further question: Why should I have this (or that) particular moral identity? A worry can arise here about the contingency of our moral beliefs (an issue that will be explored in greater detail in Chapter ), which if recognized can have a deflationary effect. As Bernard Williams says: “This sense of contingency can seem to be in tension with something that our ethical ideas themselves demand, a recognition of their authority” (: ). Perhaps one way to get around this worry about contingency is if we can show that our moral beliefs (and thus our moral identities) are at least partially based on what we think we need in order not to fall into a state of moral anarchy where everything is permitted. Hampshire seems to take this approach when he writes: “In arguing against utilitarians I must dwell a little on these epithets usually associated with morally impossible action, on a sense of disgrace, of outrage, of horror, of baseness, of brutality, and, most important, a sense that a barrier, assumed to be firm and almost insurmountable, has been knocked over, and a feeling that, if this horrible, or outrageous, or squalid, or brutal action is possible, then anything is possible and nothing is forbidden, and all restraints are threatened” (: ). But such epithets themselves depend upon there being features of the world that make them appropriate and which demand certain responses, and they can’t just be based on the thought that without certain moral beliefs we will fall into moral anarchy, which is a consequentialist form of reasoning (akin to rule-utilitarianism) and so cannot be used to argue against consequentialism. Take again the case of murder: What is horrible about murder isn’t simply that if we allow it then we will fall into a state of moral anarchy (though this may be true, at least if it becomes widespread

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enough); rather, as Anscombe says, “the wrong done in murder is done first and foremost to the victim.” And to make sense of this wrong we need to appeal to the sacredness or reverence-worthiness of human life such that it is properly regarded as being inviolable. The objection to murder, then, is “supra-utilitarian.” My general line of contention seems to hold: In order to justify and make sense of absolute prohibitions we need to appeal to the strong evaluative category of the sacred (i.e., the reverence-worthy). Wiggins seems to acknowledge this by making conceptual space for a sense of the mysteriousness of human life (where this is equivalent to a sense of sacredness). Central to our “moral nature,” he thinks, is a capacity for solidarity that responds to the “indefinable influence” that other human beings have upon us (which recalls Anscombe’s “mystical perception” and Diamond’s comments about solidarity and its connection to “the sense of mystery surrounding our lives”). We can see this

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Lovibond seems intent on closing off this conceptual space. Consider, for example, her response to some remarks by Cora Diamond, where she is discussing Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Diamond writes: “I have a sense of something terrible when I read The Fisherman and His Wife. In the tale the Fisherman spares the life of a Flounder who is really an enchanted prince, and is then sent by his wife to get the Flounder to carry out various wishes of hers: she begins by wishing her way into a decent little hut, and ends by wishing to be God, finding it an offense that the sun and moon should rise whether she wills it or not” (: ). Diamond sees Wilhelm Grimm as depicting a kind of “unapproachable evil” here and in other fairy tales, which seems to require a distinction between “supernatural” and “natural” (i.e., ordinary, approachable) evil. However, she thinks a lot of people today wrongly avoid making such distinctions in their thoughts because of seeing this as a matter of “mere sensibleness, reasonableness, down-to-earthness, matter-of-factness, rational disdain for mystery and mysticism; in other contexts, as being fair, being liberal-minded and sympathetic” (). Lovibond responds: “[Worrying] as it is to have to suspect oneself of complicity with the merely sensible or down-to-earth, the invocation of the category of supernatural evil . . . seems subjective and uncompelling. . . . [Why] should we feel bound to endorse a psychology so impoverished as to banish to a supposedly ‘supernatural’ realm the menacing intimations of moral anarchy . . .? Why not equally well hear it as an invitation to picture ourselves as inhabitants of a pre-Christian (or post-Freudian) ‘world,’ in which ‘nature’ can encompass not just the savagery of seas and winds, but the darker and more terrible contents of the heart?” (: ). Like Hampshire, Lovibond here seems to take moral anarchy to be the primary concern with regard to human willfulness. However, I don’t think her appeal to Freudian depth psychology suffices to account for the terribleness that is at issue in the kind of human willfulness that Diamond is discussing. The worry about our willfulness is not just about the possibility of moral anarchy in which anything goes (though there is a genuine concern here); rather, it is about the terribleness of what we may transgress against, that we may violate that which should be regarded as inviolable, that is, the sacred or the reverence-worthy. And hence the evil at issue seems “unapproachable,” which may incline us to make use of the language of the “supernatural.” The phrase “indefinable influence” is Simone Weil’s. She characterizes it as follows: “Anybody who is in our vicinity exercises a certain power over us by his very presence, and a power not exercised by him alone, that is the power of halting, repressing, modifying each movement that our body sketches out. If we step aside for a passer-by on the road, it is not the same thing as stepping aside to avoid a bill-board” (quoted in Wiggins : ). It is noteworthy that Wiggins, Gaita, and

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especially in the “primitive aversion from acts that appear as a direct assault by one personal being upon another, acts such as murder, wounding, injury, plunder, pillage, the harming of innocents, the repaying of good with gratuitous evil, false witness . . . [Such] acts pass beyond the valuations bad, disappointing, . . . lamentable, and trespass onto the ground marked forbidden” (Wiggins : –; cf. , ). The failure to recognize some actions as “utterly forbidden,” Wiggins maintains, “menaces the very fabric of the ethical by threatening to destroy the basis of the ethical in solidarity” (). I take his concern here not just to be about falling into moral anarchy, but more fundamentally it is about lacking proper responsiveness to other human beings. This suggests that a lack of acknowledgement of absolute prohibitions is much more corrosive of the ethical life than MacIntyre acknowledges (as we saw in his remarks on absolute prohibitions). The sort of solidarity to which Wiggins appeals and which involves recognition of some actions as utterly forbidden is at “the root of ethical” in that it is the condition for the possibility of any genuine ethical life whatsoever: “Human solidarity is not an ordinary human pursuit. Its role is to condition, to civilize, and to humanize human pursuits” (: ). Utilitarians like Singer also depend upon human solidarity for whatever appeal their quality of life assessments possess, but they end up undermining this solidarity in their willingness to come out against their fellows whenever it serves some supposedly more beneficial outcome.

Spheres of Other-Regarding Concern: Universal and Particular The appeal here to human solidarity brings us to a final issue that I want to explore, which has to do with what we owe in terms of positive assistance to other human beings simply in virtue of being human, and how we should balance universal human concern with more particular forms of other-regarding concern, such as for family, friends, and fellow citizens. This is an area where again I think we need to go beyond the disenchanted form of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism. As we have seen, for many neo-Aristotelians the other-regarding virtues (justice, generosity, etc.) find their point primarily in promoting the

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Diamond are all influenced at key points by religious mindsets, even though they are not (conventionally) religious themselves: for Wiggins it is Weil, for Gaita it is the example of the nun, and for Diamond (in “The Problem of Impiety”) it is Anscombe on “mystical perception.” Regarding the phrase “come out against their fellows,” see fn.  in Chapter  (cf. Wiggins : –).

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“good functioning of the social group,” that is, the flourishing of the particular communities (e.g., family, friendships, local community, etc.) of which we are a part, which ultimately enables our own flourishing. However, they often allow that these virtues, once acquired, have application beyond our particular communities. We saw this in MacIntyre’s account of hospitality for strangers and compassion for those in dire need outside of our particular communities. These other-regarding virtues are often exercised for the sake of others and for their own sake (because it is what a hospitable or compassionate person would do), but we saw that MacIntyre thinks that these virtues ultimately refer back to our own communal and individual flourishing for their justification. As noted earlier, MacIntyre thinks that a key index for the well-being of any community based on a network of relationships of giving and receiving is how its members treat the young, the old, the severely afflicted, the stranger, and those in dire need (regardless of having any prior relationship to them or not). But this brings us back to the question of whether this gives us the right reason for such concern. What I will suggest is that since the disenchanted form of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism does not properly recognize other human beings as being intrinsically worthy of concern for their own sake in virtue of some view of human dignity or the sanctity of human life, it cannot be properly responsive to the demands for universal and particular human concern. However, I will also argue that the two dominant universalist ethical approaches today, utilitarianism and Kantianism, also are not properly responsive to the demands for universal and particular human concern. In exploring these issues, I want to begin by considering the Parable of the Good Samaritan from the Gospel of Luke (:–) in the New Testament. The set up to the parable is that a lawyer, who is wanting to justify himself, asks Jesus regarding the biblical commandment to love your neighbor as yourself: “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus replies with the parable: A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, which stripped him of his [clothing], and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead. And by chance there came down a certain priest that way: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. And likewise a Levite, when he was at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side. But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came where he was: and when he saw him, he had compassion on him, and went to him, and bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine, and set him on his own beast, and brought him to an inn, and took care of him. And on the

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Virtue and Meaning morrow when he departed, he took out two pence, and gave them to the host, and said unto him, Take care of him; and whatsoever thou spendest more, when I come again, I will repay thee. Which now of these three, thinkest thou, was neighbour unto him that fell among the thieves?

The lawyer responds with the obvious: “He that shewed mercy on him.” And then Jesus says to him: “Go, and do thou likewise.” What we should first note about the parable is that Jesus turns the question on the lawyer, changing it from “Who is my neighbor?” to “Who was a neighbor to the man in need?” Here the concept of “neighbor” is moralized. Rather than identifying those who live nearby, it represents a normative ideal: We ought to be a “neighbor” to everyone, including strangers, we come across. In other words, we should be ready to act with solidarity for any human being in need, since they are human beings with equal intrinsic dignity (on the biblical worldview, this dignity is due of course to their being made in the image of God). We also see here that this moralization is the basis for the widely-recognized universalization of the concept of neighbor in the parable: It is not to be limited to members of one’s own political, ethnic, or religious community. It is the Samaritan, an “outsider,” who responds correctly. But importantly, the proximity or tangible nearness of the person in need – “when he saw him, he had compassion on him” – also seems to matter here, as the concept of “neighbor” suggests. Indeed, G. K. Chesterton remarks: [The] old religions and the old scriptural language showed so sharp a wisdom when they spoke, not of one’s duty towards humanity, but one’s duty towards one’s neighbour. The duty towards humanity may often take the form of some choice which is personal or even pleasurable. That duty may be a hobby; it may even be a dissipation. We may work in the East End because we are particularly fitted to work in the East End, or because we think we are; we may fight for the cause of international peace because we are very fond of fighting. . . . But we have to love our neighbour because he is there – a much more alarming reason for a much more serious operation. He is the sample of humanity which is actually given us. Precisely because he may be anybody he is everybody. He is a symbol because he is an accident. ([]: )

We can bring out the significance of this passage by considering the contrast with utilitarian and Kantian approaches to ethics and how they might think about the Parable of the Good Samaritan. 

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I have used the King James Version here, though I’ve inserted “clothing” for “raiment.”

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Mill claims to find in Jesus’ teachings “the complete spirit of the ethics of utility”: “‘To do as you would be done by,’ and ‘to love your neighbor as yourself,’ constitute the ideal perfection of utilitarian morality” ( []: ). Of course, by “love your neighbor as yourself” Jesus hardly seems to have meant “maximize happiness (understood in hedonistic or preference-satisfaction terms) and minimize unhappiness for all sentient beings.” Mill also doesn’t bother to engage here with the clearly antiutilitarian remarks of Jesus, such as his rhetorical question (discussed in Chapter ) “what does it profit a man to gain the world but forfeit his soul?” It is clear that the utilitarian would find in the Parable of the Good Samaritan a message about the goodness of compassion that should encourage us to promote the greatest happiness for the greatest number of sentient beings (see Singer : ff ). However, there is in fact some question as to whether the utilitarian would think that the Good Samaritan acted correctly, since the care he provided for a single human being in need was rather extravagant, and one might wonder whether it is in keeping with what Peter Singer () calls “effective altruism,” which is concerned with doing the most good (understood in utilitarian terms). If we place the parable in a contemporary context, the utilitarian might think that the Good Samaritan’s time would be better spent attending to the demands of a lucrative career with the aim of donating the earnings to the most effective charities (and we might imagine that the Good Samaritan was on his way to a business meeting in which millions of dollars would be secured when he encountered the man in need). While the utilitarian would praise the Good Samaritan’s compassion in the original parable and regard such compassion as a motivational source for the utilitarian ethic, he or she wouldn’t necessarily think that going around acting like the Good Samaritan did in the original parable is the most effective use of one’s time and resources. A utilitarian or “effective altruist” would want us to be “rational” about our compassion and so a utilitarian calculation should be undertaken to determine what the most good we can do is. Here again the utilitarian seems to go against a key source of his or her own ethical life. In some cases utilitarianism requires us to deny human solidarity and steel ourselves in relation to our basic compassionate responses to particular human beings. The Good Samaritan, I believe, offers a superior moral standpoint because he does not undermine a key source of the ethical life, found in human solidarity, but rather demonstrates what such solidarity should look like in action: We should respond with solidarity to someone in dire need that we encounter face-to-face “because he [or she] is there” and we recognize a dignity or sanctity in every

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human life. To fail to do so would seem to be close to as much (if not just as much) of a failure of human solidarity and a failure to respond to the respect-worthiness of another human being as are acts that are “a direct assault by one personal being upon another.” In his reflections on the parable, Peter Winch remarks that the Good Samaritan, as he interprets him (rightly in my view), responds compassionately to “what he sees as a necessity generated by the presence of the injured man.” In other words, he experiences – in a way that the priest and Levite who passed by on the other side evidently do not – a kind of impossibility that is expressed in the thought “I can’t just leave him here to die” (: ). And this is not subject to any utilitarian calculation. I think the proper moral lesson of the Parable of the Good Samaritan is that we can be strictly obligated to help when we encounter a fellow human being in dire need (I say “can” because there may be circumstances where another consideration is overriding, such as where our own life is threatened). Again, the proximity or nearness of the person in need is important here (as suggested by the term “neighbor”). However, it remains a question whether we also owe something to others in need (dire or otherwise) who are not near to us, but instead live far off in another place. Utilitarians like Peter Singer maintain that proximity should not matter, since what is important is that we maximize happiness and minimize unhappiness for the greatest number of sentient beings. When maximizing happiness and minimizing unhappiness we should be impartial between whether it is our own happiness, or our child’s, or a fellow citizen’s, or that of someone on the other side of the globe. The key claim that Singer makes with regard to the problem of world poverty is the following: “If it is in your power to prevent something bad from happening, without 

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The quotation is from the passage from Wiggins cited earlier. Jeremy Waldron writes (in a way that recalls Wiggins on solidarity): “I believe that an element of recognition plays an important part in explaining the grip that the parable of the Good Samaritan has on us. I have emphasized proximity, and in that connection we may consider the importance of sight in the way the parable is presented – the immediate visibility of the predicament of the man who fell among thieves. The priest ‘saw’ him, the Levite ‘came and looked on him,’ and the Samaritan ‘when he saw him, he had compassion on him.’ . . . The suffering and injury they could see was close enough to make a direct appeal to their sympathy: it was there, in their face, so to speak. . . . Now, it is a fact of our common humanity that these appeals in extremis, and the mutual recognition that they express and that they evoke, . . . depend only on the sheer fact of one human being confronting another and mouthing a cry for help. . . . It is an elemental matter of morality: the unmediated (as opposed to the abstract) face of humanitarianism, the direct moral appeal of one human being to another” (: –). I am grateful to John Cottingham for a conversation that helped to shape my thinking in this paragraph. I am also indebted to his essay “Loving Kindness and Mercy: Their Human and Cosmic Significance” ().

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sacrificing anything nearly as important, it is wrong not to do so” (: ). In fact, given the impartiality requirement of utilitarianism, it seems that we would be strictly required to sacrifice our own lives or become completely destitute if this would increase the overall sum total of happiness in the world. But Singer’s principle is quite demanding as it is. Indeed, it is impossibly demanding (Singer himself acknowledges that he doesn’t fully live up to it), as attempting to help everyone would be selfalienating and self-mutilating because of undermining the particular relationships and projects that give meaning to our lives (see Williams : –; : ch. ; Cottingham ). Moreover, here again I think utilitarianism ends up undermining a key source of the ethical life. As Michael Sandel puts it: “The love of humanity is a noble sentiment, but most of the time we live our lives by smaller solidarities. This may reflect certain limits to the bounds of moral sympathy. More important, it reflects the fact that we learn to love humanity not in general but through its particular expressions” (: –). In other words, we learn to love humanity by loving the particular human beings who are there before us in our lives, such as a child, or spouse, or parent, or sibling, or next-door neighbor, or the stranger in need before us, and so on, and who may not always be easy to love. Furthermore, there is a danger in an abstract or general love for humanity in that it may lead us to neglect the particular human beings who are there before us, and thus we may love no one in particular. Charles Dickens famously satirizes this phenomenon in his depiction of the character Mrs. Jellyby in Bleak House, who neglects her own children because of her concern for far off charitable causes. Dickens says of her “telescopic philanthropy”: “[her eyes] had the curious habit of seeming to look a long way off. As if . . . they could see nothing nearer than Africa!” ( []: ; see Sandel : ). There is in fact an even greater danger that in our abstract or general “love” for humanity we may in fact come to hate particular human beings because of the ways they always disappoint us and are difficult to love, or we may see them as able to be sacrificed for some supposed “greater good.” So it is important that we learn to love humanity through its particular instantiations (i.e., that we proceed to the universal through the particular), and also that any love for humanity ultimately find expression in love for particular human beings. And when we do love particular human beings, including those who are there in our lives such as family, friends, and fellow citizens, we will form identity-constituting attachments and ways of belonging. Thus, if we were required to sacrifice such attachments, then this would again be a form of self-mutilation. And it does not suffice

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to say that we’d be better off not forming such attachments in the first place; as Sandel says: “To imagine a person incapable of constitutive attachments such as these is not to conceive an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth. For to have character is to know that I move in a history I neither summon nor command, which carries consequences nonetheless for my choices and conduct. It draws me closer to some and more distant from others; it makes some aims more appropriate, others less so” (: -). In other words, we find ourselves already morally “encumbered” by virtue of our relationships with the human beings who are there in our lives. But Sandel also says: “To affirm as morally relevant the particular communities that locate us in the world, from neighborhoods to nations [and we can add families as well], is not to claim that we owe nothing to persons as persons, as fellow human beings. At their best, local solidarities gesture beyond themselves toward broader horizons of moral concern, including the horizon of our common humanity” (: ). The challenge then is to work out in the course of our lives which normative demands should be given priority. David Oderberg provides what I think is a good rule of thumb for how we should direct our charity (i.e., our good deeds for others): “the closer the relationship and the more severe the need, the greater the obligation of charity” (: ; cf. Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. , a. ; q. , aa. –; q. , a. ). This means that in some cases we will have to give preference to the dire needs of a stranger over the less pressing needs of a family member or a friend, especially if there is a close connection to that stranger in virtue of his or her proximity (i.e., he or she is there before us). In regard to cases of more distant need, much will have to be left to discretion since it is not possible to help everyone. But “leaving it to discretion” does not necessarily mean that we can do nothing and be regarded as blameless; it means seeking to determine how best to act in the different circumstances of our lives, given the different considerations that need to be weighed against each other, and given that we accept the message of the Parable of the Good Samaritan that we ought to be disposed to be a neighbor to everyone we come across (i.e., we should be ready to act with solidarity for any human being in need because of his or her inherent dignity). And this will of course require the difficult work of practical wisdom. One problem with utilitarianism and Kantianism is that they wrongly lessen the difficulty of this work. As we have seen, utilitarianism always gives priority to universal concern, but in doing so it fails to recognize the moral significance of particular relationships and it is too demanding. Like

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utilitarianism, Kantianism also does not seem to recognize particular relationships as having moral significance as such, since it focuses on the requirement of universalization (can our actions be accepted by all rational agents?) and treating human beings as “ends in themselves” (i.e., as having dignity). But it seems to have an advantage over utilitarianism in being less susceptible to the charge of being too demanding in what it requires us to do on behalf of others. However, it is also susceptible to the charge of not being demanding enough. For Kant, beneficence is an imperfect duty. In contrast to a perfect duty (e.g., not to kill), which imposes absolute (or “strict”) requirements, imperfect duties concern actions that are not strictly required but rather are encouraged and are especially praiseworthy (Kant  []: –, –). One should act beneficently sometimes, but when to do so is up to each person (at least this is a standard reading of Kant on beneficence as an imperfect duty). A key reason why beneficence is seen as an imperfect duty, I think, is because there are so many in need and no human being can help everyone. Since “ought implies can,” helping everyone in need cannot be strictly required. However, if we consider Good Samaritan-type cases where we come across someone in dire need, is it really right to say that there cannot be a strict obligation here? When the priest and the Levite pass by on the other side and do not come to the aid of the injured man, are they really morally off the hook? Do we really say: “It’s ok. While you’re encouraged to help and we’d praise you if you do, you aren’t blameworthy if you don’t. It’s not strictly required”? That does not seem right. Again, leaving someone to die, when you are uniquely positioned to help the person by virtue of proximity and ability, seems like it is close to as much (if not just as much) of a failure of human solidarity and a failure to respond to the

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Judith Jarvis Thomson oddly uses the idea of being a Good Samaritan as an instance of supererogatory action in her defense of abortion (: –). She distinguishes between the “Minimally Decent Samaritan” (who helps someone nearby in dire need when it involves very little burden), the “Good Samaritan” (who helps someone nearby in dire need even when it involves a significant burden), and the “Splendid Samaritan” or “Very Good Samaritan” (who helps someone nearby in dire need even at risk to his or her own life). She writes: “I have been arguing that no person is morally required to make large sacrifices to sustain the life of another who has no right to demand them, and this even where the sacrifices do not include life itself; we are not morally required to be Good Samaritans or anyway Very Good Samaritans to one another” (). In saying this she is of course standing athwart the teachings of Jesus. In regard to the issue of abortion, it should also be noted that there is a crucial disanalogy with the Parable of the Good Samaritan, as the issue of abortion concerns not just whether we should come to the aid of another human being (who is one’s own child) but also whether it is morally permissible to take early human life intentionally.

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respect-worthiness of another human being as acts that are “a direct assault by one personal being upon another.” A related problem with Kant’s approach here is that he does not think we are morally required to cultivate the kind of compassionate disposition that the Good Samaritan possesses, since he maintains: “love as an inclination cannot be commanded: but beneficence from duty, when no inclination impels us and even when a natural and unconquerable aversion opposes such beneficence, is practical, and not pathological, love. Such love resides in the will and not in the propensities of feeling, in principles of action and not in tender sympathy; and only this practical love can be commanded” (Kant  []: ). But it seems clear that Jesus is enjoining the “pathological love” (i.e., love with feeling – is there any other kind?) of the Good Samaritan, and it also seems clear that it is only in light of this sort of compassionate response that we can understand the experienced impossibility of not helping someone in dire need before us, which is expressed in the thought “I can’t just leave him here to die.” Neo-Aristotelians, I believe, have an important advantage over utilitarians and Kantians in that they have more resources to account for the importance of particular attachments. For instance, in countering Peter Singer’s view of impersonal benevolence (which “knows no speciesboundaries and no special bonds of family or friendship”) as a virtue, Hursthouse writes (in a passage already appealed to in Chapter ): “it rather looks as though the species and familial bonding that are part of our biological, animal nature, and make us ‘partial’ to our own species and children, play an essential role in sustaining [the ends of the continuance of the species and the good functioning of the social group]” (: –). She also defends loyalty as a virtue – which extends beyond familial bonds to include bonds with the members of other particular communities of which one is a part – since it fosters “the good functioning of the social group and the sort of personal relationships which can be one of our greatest sources of joy” (). But, while she rejects Singer-style impersonal benevolence, she accept charity (or benevolence) as a virtue insofar as it promotes our natural ends as social animals: “Charity directed to the young and helpless particularly serves the continuance of the species; directed more widely it serves the good functioning of the social group 

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Responding to the problems associated with Kant’s account of beneficence as an imperfect duty in regard to cases of dire need, Karen Stohr offers a Kantian solution that is in line with the view I am advancing. She writes: “although we are not always required to help, we are always required not to be indifferent. When helping someone is the only way not to be indifferent to her, we are required to help” (: ).

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by fostering the individual survival, freedom from pain, and enjoyment of its members, and also by fostering its cohesion” (). Hursthouse does not provide a precise definition of charity here, but she seems to affirm something like Foot’s understanding of charity as a virtue that “attaches us to the good of others” (Foot a: ) and is concerned with rendering assistance to those in need. Given the focus on promoting the good functioning of one’s social group, we might wonder how such a conception of charity would apply to Good Samaritan-type cases where we confront someone in dire need who is not a member of our group. Hursthouse would certainly want to say that cultivating the virtue of charity, which is justified as a virtue because of promoting our natural ends as social animals, has application beyond one’s social group, and so would have application in Good Samaritan-type cases. This is even clearer in the discussion of MacIntyre earlier in this chapter, where he focuses on misericordia (i.e., compassion or pity) as an aspect of charity (i.e., love of neighbor) that “has regard to urgent and extreme need without respect of persons.” But, as we saw, ultimately this is justified as a virtue in terms of promoting our own individual flourishing through promoting the flourishing of our social networks of giving and receiving. What seems missing in these accounts is a recognition of the point that Peter Winch makes about the Good Samaritan: namely, that he responds compassionately to “what he sees as a necessity generated by the presence of the injured man” that is expressed in the thought “I can’t just leave him here to die” (: ). Like Lovibond on absolute prohibitions, Winch sees a kind of “anti-naturalism” (or “other-worldliness”) operative here, since he doesn’t think the Good Samaritan’s experience of ethical necessity can be accounted for within a naturalistic framework of the sort suggested by Anscombe and taken up by Foot, Hursthouse, MacIntyre, and others. He writes: “A naturalistic account of moral necessities would be one which treated them as limits on the possibilities of an agent’s achieving ends which, either as a particular individual or, at the other extreme, as a member of the human race, he is presumed to have. Roughly speaking, this is to treat such modalities as imposing limits not on what someone may will, but on what the will is capable of carrying into effect, given its presumed fundamental motivation” (–). The idea here seems to be that these limits are necessary precisely for best achieving pre-given naturalistic ends; they are what Anscombe calls “Aristotelian necessities.” But 

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In Natural Goodness, Foot says: “if charity is a virtue, this is because it makes its possessor’s action good in the area of aims such as the relief of poverty” (: –; cf. a: , ).

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Winch remarks: “[The] Samaritan is depicted as reacting with compassion without asking any questions. . . . It is a reaction expressing the Samaritan’s conviction that it was necessary to help the traveller, that nothing else was possible in the circumstances” (). In other words, this moral response is not derived from a determination about what will best serve pre-given naturalistic ends; rather the relationship goes the other way: Such engaged responses to the moral demands made upon us by another human being shape our conception of our ends – they are constitutive of our conception of a good human life. Winch concludes: [We] might say, the priest and the Levite saw something different from what the Samaritan saw when they came upon the injured man in the roadway. We might say: they did not see a neighbour in him. . . . My central point is that in questions concerning our understanding of each other our moral sensibility is indeed an aspect of our sensibility, of the way we see things, of what we make of the world we are living in. ()

I would add that what the moral sensibility exemplified by the Good Samaritan – and also by Gaita’s nun, discussed earlier – reveals to us is the special dignity or sanctity of all human life, which is what allows us to see a stranger in dire need as a neighbor. Without this sense of the special dignity of human life we cannot properly make sense of Good Samaritan-type cases, or ground the demands for universal human concern, or know how to weigh such demands with the demands for more particular forms of concern. Moreover, I have argued that this recognition of human dignity is important for properly showing concern for others for their own sake, for keeping all human beings “fully amongst us,” and for grounding moral absolutes. But I have also suggested that such claims about human dignity only make sense against some background understanding of our place in the cosmos, and it is to the exploration of such cosmic outlooks that we will now turn. 

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Winch seems to affirm such special dignity or sanctity when he writes: “[It] is an important fact about us that our reactions to each other are in all sorts of ways quite different from our reactions to anything else. In the present context its importance lies in its connection with our understanding of the kinds of creature we are having commerce with” (: ). Here he clearly seems to be channeling Weil and her remarks about the “indefinable influence” of other human beings on us (see fn. ). He also appeals to Wittgenstein’s remark: “My attitude to [another human being] is an attitude towards a soul” ().

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In this chapter I want to argue that neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists need to address the question of the meaning of life, that is, the question of how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things and whether there is a cosmic or ultimate source of meaning to which we must align our lives. I began to make the case for this at the end of Chapter , but here I take it up more fully, and making the case will continue into Chapter  as well. As we have seen in the foregoing, among defenders of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics one often finds appeals made to biological considerations in order to validate an account of the virtues and their importance for human life. However, I will argue that whether a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethic perspective is viable depends not just on biological considerations but also on the nature of one’s whole cosmic outlook. The point will be to show how such a perspective needs to be linked to a conception of the meaning of life. By a “cosmic outlook” I mean an understanding of the world and one’s place within it that forms the background to a person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, and, indeed, to his or her life as a whole. The relevance of one’s cosmic outlook for his or her ethical views is not as readily acknowledged today as it was among pre-modern thinkers, but I would like to suggest its continued relevance. For those of us who wish to defend a neoAristotelian virtue ethic, one thing that we must come to terms with is the significance of the fact that Aristotle held a cosmic outlook that is no longer accepted by inhabitants of the modern world who live in the wake of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, and so on. Indeed, this is part of why we must add the prefix “neo” when speaking of an Aristotelian virtue ethic  

Here I assent to the truth of the following remark by Josef Pieper: “Certain things can be adequately discussed only if at the same time we speak of the whole of the world and of life” ( []: ). This can take a narrative form, as in a story about the origins of the universe and of human life, which informs how we understand the story of our own lives.

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perspective today. However, I think this is an issue with which most neoAristotelians have not adequately come to terms. I will focus here on Rosalind Hursthouse’s account of a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethic, since she addresses the issue that I am raising more than others. In particular, she seeks to respond to the forceful challenge put forward by Bernard Williams that evolutionary science has done away with the sort of teleological worldview that is needed in order to make sense of an Aristotelian virtue ethic perspective. I will argue that Hursthouse’s response to Williams’ challenge is not sufficient. My main task then will be to show what is needed in order to meet Williams’ challenge. First, I will argue that we need to be able to identify, through strong evaluation, what is most admirable about us as human beings and thus what is the most properly human form of life that we ought to realize, which enables us to address what I will call “the mixed bag problem” of human nature that is raised by Williams. Second, I will argue that it is not sufficient just to appeal to such a normative account of human nature concerning what it is “the business of a human being to do,” as John McDowell does in championing his “quietist” position, which denies the need for appeal to any particular cosmic outlook for validating and making sense of our ethical sensibilities. More specifically, I will argue that in order to make sense of a normative account of human nature from within our evaluative standpoint we must overcome Williams’ tragic cosmic outlook according to which human life is seen as ultimately without meaning and purpose. I will consider both theistic and nontheistic views of the meaning and purpose of human life and show how they can inform a strong evaluative conception of what is noblest and best about us. If all such accounts of the meaning and purpose of human life are rejected, then, I suggest, we must accept Williams’ view that an Aristotelian virtue ethic – with its assumption of a strong correlation between virtue and happiness (eudaimonia) – is no longer viable and only a significantly reduced form of ethics remains possible.

Hursthouse’s Three Theses and Williams’ Challenge In On Virtue Ethics, Hursthouse seeks to defend three claims about the virtues: First, the “virtues benefit their possessor,” that is, they enable us to 

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Williams of course allows for subjective forms of meaning and purpose, but I have in mind an objectivist account when I speak of human life ultimately having (or not having) meaning and purpose and when I speak of the meaning and purpose of human life.

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be happy or flourish qua individual; second, the “virtues make their possessor a good human being,” that is, they enable us to flourish qua human being; and third, the first two claims are interrelated (: ). The first claim that the virtues benefit their possessor (which was discussed in Chapter , though with a focus on Foot’s work) is intended to provide a justifying reason for why the “standard list” of virtues – justice, temperance, courage, honesty, compassion, and so on – are indeed virtues: namely, because they are the “only reliable bet” for helping us to attain a life of eudaimonia, that is, flourishing qua individual (). Such a justifying reason for the standard list of virtues will be the same for all human beings then to the extent that the second and third claims can be defended. The second claim, that the virtues make their possessor a good human being, involves an appeal to a source of objectivity in ethics. This source is provided by an account of ethical naturalism. As discussed in Chapter , Hursthouse regards ethical evaluations of human beings as analogous to evaluations of members of plant and non-human animal species with respect to whether they are “good, healthy, specimens of their kind”; that is, whether they are well-fitted to fulfill the natural ends of their species (–). She writes: “[If] there is any truth in ethical naturalism, our ethical evaluations of ourselves ought to exhibit at least a recognizably similar structure to what we find in the botanists’ and ethologists’ evaluations of other living things” (). Thus, whether we are good specimens of our kind depends upon whether we are well-fitted in our emotions, desires, and ways of acting to attain what Hursthouse regards as the four natural ends of social animals: namely, () individual survival; () the continuance of the species; () characteristic freedom from pain and characteristic enjoyment; and () the good functioning of one’s social group (). Moreover, as rational social animals it is important that we pursue these ends in a “rational way” through the use of our practical reason (). Given this account, it is not difficult to see how the different virtues in the standard list of virtues could be regarded as a part of what it is to be well-fitted for fulfilling our natural ends and thus for making us good qua human being (see –). The most important of Hursthouse’s claims is her third claim that the first two claims are interrelated such that human nature can be regarded as harmonious. She writes: “It does not just happen to be the case that those character traits which benefit their human possessor, enabling her to live a satisfying and fulfilling life, coincide with those character traits which are the good-making characteristics of human beings. They benefit her in this

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way because of her nature as a human being, the sort of rational social animal that human beings are” (). One of the worries that she is addressing here is that our pursuit of the four natural ends may become disconnected. For instance, while the pursuit of individual happiness (eudaimonia) requires our survival and the achievement of certain characteristic human enjoyments, it may be done in a way that is inimical to the continuance of our species or the good functioning of society. Or conversely, pursuing the latter two ends may be inimical to the pursuit of individual happiness. At the end of On Virtue Ethics Hursthouse addresses a forceful challenge to her third claim about the virtues and its assumption of a harmonious view of human nature. This is a challenge that is put forward by Bernard Williams and it draws on a certain understanding of Darwinian evolution. Williams writes: [The] most plausible stories now available about [human] evolution, including its very recent date and also certain considerations about the physical characteristics of the species, suggests that human beings are to some degree a mess, and that the rapid and immense development of symbolic and cultural capacities has left humans as beings for which no form of life is likely to prove entirely satisfactory, either individually or socially. . . . The idea of a naturalistic ethics was born of a deeply teleological outlook, and its best expression, in many ways, is still to be found in Aristotle’s philosophy, a philosophy according to which there is inherent in each natural kind of thing an appropriate way for things of that kind to behave. On that view it must be the deepest desire . . . of human beings to live in the way that is in the objective sense appropriate to them . . . The first and hardest lesson of Darwinism, that there is no such teleology at all, and that there is no orchestral score provided from anywhere according to which human beings have a special part to play, still has to find its way fully into ethical thought. (a: –)

Likewise, elsewhere he writes: The Aristotelian approach takes for granted . . . a strong view of the harmony among themselves of human capacities and needs. This assumption does, I must confess, seem to me more plausible if you can help yourself to Aristotelian cosmology, than if you regard it as an open question whether the evolutionary success of humanity, in its extremely brief period of existence, may not rest on a rather ill-sorted bricolage of powers and instincts. This is one reason why I still think . . . that it makes a big difference to accepting Aristotle’s ethical outlook that we cannot accept his cosmology. (b: )

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In short, Williams thinks that a Darwinian view of evolution has done away with the sort of teleological cosmic outlook that is needed for making sense of an Aristotelian virtue ethic given its apparent assumption of a harmonious human nature (see also Williams : ch.  and –). What a Darwinian view reveals is what we can call a “mixed bag” view of human nature in which we have, as Williams puts it, “a rather ill-sorted bricolage of powers and instincts.” For instance, it seems to be part of our evolutionary inheritance that we have been endowed with natural tendencies not only toward kindness, compassion, reciprocity, fidelity, and so forth, but also – at least in the case of some people and to some extent – toward narrow self-concern, sexual promiscuity, dominance, violence, hatred, and the like. On a Darwinian evolutionary account it is easy to see how each of these tendencies could in different ways be said to serve an evolutionary function in the struggle for survival. But it is more difficult to work out how the good life should be understood and lived out in light of these diverse and incompatible natural tendencies. The difficulty is only exacerbated, Williams believes, by the development among human beings of “symbolic and cultural capacities.” We can think here of the Freudian point about the way in which cultural mores and institutions attempt to keep a lid on certain of our natural tendencies (e.g., the sex drive and violent propensities). We can also think of the way in which various projects and commitments can have significance for us – for example, work life, family life, friendships, humanitarianism, and so on – but are not all fully compatible. Moreover, we should note how human beings are also able to find significance in certain “dark” things, such as cruelty, revenge, humiliation, domination, and so on. 

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This mixed bag problem is sometimes framed as the “Pollyanna problem” for Aristotelian virtue ethics, which claims that Aristotelian virtue ethics is overly optimistic about human nature (see Andreou ; Millgram ; Lott ; and Kim ). One might also consider here the proto-Freudian account of the human psyche in Book IX of Plato’s Republic, though Plato certainly held out more hope for the achievement of inner harmony than Freud. It is worth noting that Plato seems to be much more attuned to the mixed bag problem of human nature than Aristotle. Williams (: ch. ) raises this issue in his well-known discussion of Paul Gauguin, though we might imagine someone who is more torn between family life and artistic achievement, or whatever else. Seiriol Morgan writes (following Kant): “what leads human beings to treat each other worst is not so much our animality as our humanity” (: ). A similar point is made by Dostoevsky through his character Ivan Karamazov, who remarks: “People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beast; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel” ( []: ; see also Glover ). In other words, it is our distinctive “symbolic and cultural capacities” as rational, linguistic animals – whereby things have significance for us – that cause greater problems for us than simply our animalistic drives. However, I will later argue that these

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We can thus better appreciate Williams’ claims that “human beings are to some degree a mess” and that “no form of life is likely to prove entirely satisfactory, either individually or socially.” Williams offers these remarks as a bit of bad news for moral philosophers. Indeed, his general cosmic outlook can be described as being tragic in virtue of the fact that our human concerns receive no cosmic support. This is expressed when he says: “there is no orchestral score provided from anywhere according to which human beings have a special part to play.” Elsewhere he writes: “We know that the world was not made for us, or we for the world, that our history tells no purposive story, and that there is no position outside the world or outside history from which we might hope to authenticate our activities” (: ). It is this tragic cosmic outlook that is behind his view about the lack of harmony in human nature. Hursthouse contends that such views are in fact “as old as misanthropy and despair” and taken seriously they amount to “moral nihilism” (: ). But it is not clear that Williams’ view can be accurately described as misanthropic, and there is certainly no necessary connection between misanthropy and judging that human nature is not harmonious in the way that Hursthouse supposes such that there is a tight link between the virtues and individual eudaimonia (as she understands them). It is true that the perspective that Williams offers is a despairing one in a sense: It despairs at least over the vision of life offered by Aristotle and others who maintain a similar harmonious view of human nature. But the most important question is whether it is true. Moreover, I do not think it is accurate to describe Williams’ position as one of moral nihilism. He does think that our human nature is underdetermined with respect to the ethical life, in the sense that our human nature is compatible with different kinds of ethical and non-ethical outlooks (see : –). And this means that we cannot show that one kind of ethical life is the best and most satisfying life for every human being. This is true even if we grant that human beings need to share a social world; as Williams writes:

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capacities can also enable a solution to the mixed bag problem because they make possible our capacity for strong evaluation through which we can identify what is noblest and best about us as human beings. It should be stated that in this paragraph I am suggesting what I think is the best way of filling out Williams’ remarks given what I know about his views. Elsewhere Williams writes: “Philosophy, and in particular moral philosophy, is still deeply attached to giving good news” (b: ). For other works on tragedy and ethics see Nussbaum  [] and Harris .

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Any ethical life is going to contain restraints on such things as killing, injury, and lying, but those restraints can take very different forms. Again, with respect to the virtues, . . . we only have to compare Aristotle’s catalogue of the virtues with any that might be produced now to see how pictures of an appropriate human life may differ in spirit and in the actions and institutions they call for. We also have the idea that there are many and various forms of human excellence which will not all fit together into . . . one harmonious whole, so any determinate ethical outlook is going to represent some kind of specialization of human possibilities. . . . The project of giving to ethical life an objective and determinate grounding in considerations about human nature is not, in my view, very likely to succeed. (: )

It can be argued that Williams overplays the extent of underdetermination here. It seems that most people today would recognize many of the virtues in Aristotle’s catalog (courage, moderation, generosity, friendship, etc.) as genuine human virtues that are important for a good human life, even if there might be some disagreement in the details (see Cottingham : –). And, in regard to restraints on such things as killing, injury, and lying, while there may be some disagreement in the details, there is also a large overlap in accepted prohibitions. In any case, we can see that Williams is in fact not a moral nihilist when he writes: We wish . . . to bring up children to share some of these ethical, as of other cultural, conceptions, and we see the process as good not just for us but for our children, both because it is part of our conception of their well-being and also because, even by more limited conceptions of happiness or contentment, we have little reason to believe that they will be happier if excluded from the ethical institutions of society. Even if we know that there are some people who are happier, by the minimal criteria, outside those institutions, we also know that they rarely become so by being educated as outlaws. As a result of all that, we have much reason for, and little reason against, bringing up children within the ethical world we inhabit, and if we succeed they themselves will see the world from the same perspective. (: )

Williams does acknowledge that reflection can destroy the force of ethical considerations for us when we “become conscious of ethical variation and of the kinds of explanation it may receive” (; cf. –, –, –). However, he seeks to show how it is possible to inhabit the “thick ethical concepts” – for example, cruelty, brutality, kindness, fairness, etc., which are seen as action-guiding and world-guided (see –, –) – that make up a particular acquired ethical outlook with confidence, which he says is “basically a social phenomenon” in that it is based

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on the confirmation that our ethical beliefs receive in our social world and the way in which they enable us to navigate this world (–). Of course, if such confidence is misplaced (and given Williams’ generally pessimistic outlook, there are reasons to think it might be), then we can see how moral nihilism could ensue. But what Williams offers is not a form of moral nihilism, but rather a significantly reduced form of ethics. Even if one does not affirm a tight connection between virtue and happiness, one can still maintain that there are better and worse ways of coping individually and socially with our diverse and competing natural tendencies and thereby achieving human satisfaction as best as we can. In defense of her neo-Aristotelian virtue ethic, Hursthouse contends that belief in the harmony of human nature is something that can only be vindicated from within an acquired ethical outlook and thus we should not expect to convince the wicked and the moral skeptic of it. She writes: “We manifest [this belief] when we try to inculcate the virtues in our children. We manifest it when we try to make ourselves (as we think) better people and try to improve our own and other people’s ethical views. We manifest it when we try to bring about social change. We manifest it by going in for ethical thought and talk at all” (: ). But she also acknowledges: The fact, if it is a fact, that human nature is, at best, harmonious is a highly contingent one. It is a contingent fact, if it is a fact, that we can, individually, flourish or achieve eudaimonia, contingent that we can do so in the same way as each other (i.e. in virtue of possessing the same set of character traits), and contingent that we can do so all together, not at each other’s expense. If things had been otherwise, ethics would not exist, or would be unimaginably different. ()

In the end Hursthouse maintains that belief in the harmony of human nature is a matter of hope. But, she says, “hope, as a virtue, is not without its own validation” insofar as it is a necessary condition for moral education, moral improvement, and moral theorizing and insofar as from within an ethical outlook the “facts about human nature and the way life goes” seem to support the claim that the virtues benefit their possessor and allow a reading of human history that “ascribes our persisting failure to achieve eudaimonia in anything but very small patches to our vices” (). Two points need to be made in response to Hursthouse’s defense. First, to ascribe our persisting failure to achieve eudaimonia to our vices does not

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The contrast with Williams’ despairing stance is clearly implied. We might say that Hursthouse wants to offer good news in place of Williams’ bad news (see fn. ).

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really answer Williams’ challenge. Hursthouse is trying here to avoid the view that our nature is intrinsically flawed. But the question arises: What explains the propensity to vice throughout human history? One might want to blame it on bad education and bad social institutions, but these themselves would need to be explained. It seems difficult to avoid the conclusion that the propensity to vice is in some way rooted in our human nature, just as is the propensity to virtue (see Midgley ). In short, it suggests that our nature is indeed a mixed bag – though we might not want to go as far as describing it as a “mess” – and so we need some way of coming to terms with this. The second point that needs to be made is in response to the seemingly untroubled way in which Hursthouse acknowledges the contingency of ethics such that if things had been otherwise with respect to our nature then “ethics would not exist, or would be unimaginably different.” This fails to appreciate an important problem that Williams identifies – in a work published after Hursthouse’s On Virtue Ethics – with regard to acknowledging the “radical contingency” of our ethical beliefs, where these beliefs are seen as being entirely dependent on the contingencies of our personal, cultural, and evolutionary histories. Williams writes: “This sense of contingency can seem to be in tension with something that our ethical ideas themselves demand, a recognition of their authority” (: ). In other words, the normative authority of ethics, as commonly understood, seems to carry with it a sense of necessity that is at odds with seeing our ethical beliefs as radically contingent. For instance, as ethical agents we do not typically experience it as a contingent fact that we should pursue kindness and compassion over dominance and cruelty, but rather we see it as something that is “categorical”: that is, we ought to pursue kindness and compassion over dominance and cruelty irrespective of what we happen to desire. To give up this sort of normativity means that only a significantly reduced form of ethics remains possible, and one that I don’t 

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One might think that the mature Foot (of Natural Goodness) fares better than Hursthouse here because she doesn’t try to advance a “best bet” claim: Although she believes that the virtues (namely, justice, charity, courage, temperance, etc.) are characteristically needed for things to go well for us, Foot allows that virtue and happiness can come apart, and yet maintains that we still have reason to act virtuously. But I have argued (in Chapters  and ) that Foot does not provide us with a compelling account of why we should persevere in virtue here. She just claims that if we are good, non-defective human beings then we will have reason to act in accordance with the virtues, just as good, non-defective wolves will hunt with the pack rather than be free-riders. If we are going to address our mixed bagness, then we need a compelling account of what exactly these reasons are and why they should be regarded as making strong normative demands upon us. I cited these remarks already in Chapter . See also Cottingham , to which I am indebted for shaping my thinking on the issues discussed here.

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think can affirm the Aristotelian view of a strong correlation between virtue and happiness. With such a reduced form of ethics there will likely still be things about which we deeply care: for example, we may deeply care about being kind and compassionate. However, the point is that this will be based merely on happening to possess certain caring dispositions – for whatever contingent personal, cultural, or evolutionary reasons – rather than on categorical judgments concerning things about which we ought to care. Insofar as such categorical judgments are linked to many of the things about which we deeply care, giving up making these sorts of judgments would constitute a significant loss; it would have a deflationary effect. Moreover, it would lessen our resources for dealing with the problems related to our human nature being a mixed bag. With these two points in mind, I want to turn now to discuss what I think is needed in order to address Williams’ challenge adequately and thereby to defend a neo-Aristotelian virtue ethic perspective.

Identifying What Is Noblest and Best Given the fact that human nature is something of a mixed bag with conflicting natural tendencies – for example, toward both compassion and cruelty – what we need, first of all, is to be able to identify through strong evaluation the features of human life that are most admirable and in light of which we can seek to transform our lives. As John Cottingham puts it: “[To] play its necessary guiding role, human nature . . . has to mean more than just a collection of contingent facts about the sort of creatures we humans have evolved to be: instead, it has to embody a normative ideal of what is noblest and best within us” (: ). In other words, we need to move beyond a merely descriptive account of human nature to a normative one according to which we identify what is the most properly human form of life that we ought to realize. In Chapter  we saw McDowell also endorse such a “value-loaded” conception of human nature when he spoke of what it is “the business of a human being to do,” namely, to exercise the virtues (: –). A key point to see here is that such a normative account of human nature enables us to establish the link between the claim that the virtues make us good qua human being and the claim that the virtues benefit their possessor. The virtues can be seen as definitive of a normative account of human nature, and so it is true by definition that the virtues make us good qua human being; that is, they fulfill what is “noblest and best” about us. This in turn makes possible an understanding of the relationship of the

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virtues to individual benefit that is not primarily instrumental (such an instrumental view is suggested by Hursthouse’s claim that the virtues benefit their possessor in the sense that they are the “only reliable bet” for achieving individual eudaimonia). On this normative account of human nature the virtues are not merely a reliable bet for achieving individual eudaimonia but rather they are directly constitutive of it insofar as they are viewed as part of a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life that realizes what is noblest and best about us. In Chapter  I referred to this as the strong evaluative version of the constitutive account of the relationship between virtue and happiness. Here happiness (eudaimonia) is understood in terms of a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. By contrast, Hursthouse seems to understand eudaimonia in terms of avoiding death, physical injury, suffering, oppression, helplessness, and so on, and attaining certain characteristic enjoyments and the healthy functioning of our body, and she also appeals to “the smile factor” (: ). Hursthouse does affirm that when we acquire the virtues we will take enjoyment in performing virtuous actions (it is a characteristic human enjoyment on her view, given our rational social nature), but this is different from seeing the virtues as constitutive of a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. As we have seen in Chapter , Aristotle’s own view of eudaimonia is a strong evaluative one: Virtuous actions are performed “for the sake of the noble, since this is the end aimed at by virtue” (NE III., b–). Nobility is not an end separate from virtue, but rather it represents a strong evaluation inherent in the concept of virtue whereby it is viewed as a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. Now, Hursthouse does in a sense endorse a value-laden view of human nature in her account of our natural ends as human beings, which she sees as specifying the ends we need to attain if we are going to be considered good, healthy specimens of our kind. She draws here on a functional usage of “good,” which is also used by botanists and ethologists in evaluating other living things. However, it is precisely this functional view of human nature that Williams challenges with his mixed bag view. Moreover, even if we accept Hursthouse’s functional view of human nature it is not clear why it should be considered normative for an individual member of the species; that is, why should it be seen as an ethical evaluation that informs us of that with which we ought to be concerned? 

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See the discussion in Chapter  of McDowell’s thought experiment of the rational wolf.

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The main problem with Hursthouse’s approach is that – like other neoAristotelian ethical naturalists who take a quasi-scientific approach – she does not go far enough in exploring the first-personal evaluative standpoint from within our human form of life. In particular, she overlooks the role of strong evaluation in human life, such as when we make judgments about what is most admirable in our humanity (compassion as opposed to cruelty, etc.). As previously mentioned, Hursthouse does acknowledge that her three claims about the virtues can only be vindicated from within an acquired ethical outlook. Here she goes beyond other neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalists such as Foot and MacIntyre, whose accounts of ethical naturalism are more third-personal or quasi-scientific, and she shows some debt to McDowell’s work (especially his Neurathian approach). Hursthouse seems quasi-scientific in her account of flourishing qua human being (recall the analogy with the botanist and the ethologist), but she appeals to a first-personal standpoint – the standpoint from within an acquired ethical outlook – in defense of her account of flourishing qua individual human being. However, she doesn’t do much to fill out and defend such an acquired ethical outlook. For instance, she writes: [We] may be surprised by the realization that, personally, our answer to the question “Why should I be virtuous/moral?” may be “I want to be – that’s the sort of life I want to live, the sort that I think is a good and successful and rewarding one.” Contemplating the lives of, say, those who are wealthy and powerful, and, apparently at least, perfectly happy, but who lie and cheat and ruthlessly sacrifice some others when it suits them, we may find that we do not regard them as enviable or desirable. ()

She goes on to say that when judging that the greedy and dishonest are “not eudaimon, not truly happy,” we are, in part, saying: “That’s not the sort of life I count as eudaimon, because it does not involve the exercise of the virtues” (). It should be noticed that these statements about “Why should I be virtuous/moral?” appear to be weak evaluative, that is, based merely on what one happens to desire or prefer rather than on a strong evaluative judgment about the life of virtue constituting an intrinsically higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life that is normative for our desires. So in addition to endorsing an instrumentalist account of the relationship of virtue to happiness (where the virtues are seen as the “only reliable bet” for achieving happiness), Hursthouse also seems to endorse the weak evaluative version of the constitutive account: The idea here is that if we have adopted an ethical outlook in light of which we care about acting virtuously, then acting virtuously will be constitutive of our

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happiness. As we have seen in Chapter , one problem with this sort of account is that it leaves us with little to say to those who do not share our ethical outlook (Hursthouse could fall back on appealing to virtue as a best bet for happiness, but this leaves it open that some might judge that for them it is not a best bet). Indeed, if we accept Williams’ claim that our human nature is indeterminate with regard to the ethical life, then Hursthouse’s weak evaluative defense, which appeals to an acquired ethical outlook, could be regarded as merely expressing a form of relativism. But those who live the life of virtue typically understand the demands of virtue in strong evaluative terms: that is, as something with which they ought to be concerned (even if one isn’t concerned) and as being constitutive of a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. I think an important reason why Hursthouse overlooks the role of strong evaluation in human life is because she does not adequately take account of something that is distinctive of our human form of life: namely, our being language animals. As discussed in Chapter , the important point here is that there is a close connection between being a language animal and a strong evaluator in that it is through language that we make qualitative distinctions of value in terms of higher and lower, noble and base, admirable and contemptible, sacred and profane, and so on. The possession of language is transfiguring (or revelatory). It enables us to see the world in a new light such that we experience it in a fundamentally different way from non-linguistic animals: We can experience the world in the light of a strong evaluative conceptual framework – for example, in terms of concepts such as the noble, the admirable, the sacred, etc. – whereby certain things are seen as being worthy of our concern and fit to be valued in strong evaluative terms. We can see then that being a rational, linguistic animal means not only that we can pursue our natural ends in a “rational way,” but also that our ends are shaped by the range of meanings made possible through language. More specifically, these ends can be conceived in strong evaluative terms, for example, in terms of realizing a higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life that is regarded as normative for our desires. We can see this in the normative conception of human nature that is based on judgment of what is most admirable about us. We should also note here an important contrast with Williams: While he sees our “symbolic and cultural capacities” as part of the problem in his view of human life as a “mess,” what I am suggesting is that these capacities can actually be part of the solution. In particular, they enable us to pick out among our natural tendencies and capacities those that represent what is most admirable about us. Moreover, this strong evaluative

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judgment about what is most admirable about us can help us to prioritize rightly the various projects and commitments that have significance for us. It may be true that we cannot fully pursue in a satisfactory way everything that has significance to us; nevertheless, we can still have a deeply meaningful and fulfilling life by living in accordance with what we regard as being noblest and best.

Against Quietism: The Need for a Moral Ontology So far I have been suggesting that in order to meet Williams’ challenge we need to be able to appeal to a normative conception of human nature, where we identify what is the most admirable and properly human form of life that we ought to realize, and that this requires a deeper exploration of the evaluative standpoint from within our human form of life than we find in Hursthouse’s work (and that of other ethical naturalists of her ilk). However, it is not sufficient simply to appeal to a normative conception of human nature. What we need is an account of what can make sense of our strong evaluative view of what is most admirable about us. It is here I think that we must appeal to some view of how our lives fit into the larger scheme of things; that is, we need an account of the meaning and purpose of human life according to which certain features of ourselves (e.g., our capacity for the virtues) can intelligibly be seen as what is “noblest and best” about us. This means, I believe, that we must reject Williams’ tragic cosmic outlook that regards human life as ultimately without meaning and purpose. This is because such a view involves the problem of the radical contingency of ethics, which, as discussed, has the effect of undermining the normative authority we ascribe to our ethical or strong evaluative beliefs. If life is indeed ultimately without meaning and purpose and merely the by-product of contingent, blind forces, then it is difficult to see how we can sustain a strong evaluative conception of what is noblest and best about human life. Thus I am in disagreement with John McDowell, who wants to affirm a “value-loaded” conception of human nature without appealing to any particular cosmic outlook. McDowell champions a “quietist” position according to which we should remain content with the strong evaluative beliefs that arise for us within an acquired ethical outlook (e.g., our beliefs about the noble) and not seek to provide any ontological grounding or justification for them beyond appealing to our second nature. He acknowledges that some may experience a sense of “vertigo” from the realization that their ethical beliefs have no grounding outside of their acquired ethical

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outlook (: –, –). However, McDowell thinks that this vertigo can be overcome and a realist view of ethics can be defended from within an ethical outlook. As we saw in Chapter , he adopts a “Neurathian” approach: If we believe that our ethical outlook alerts us to ethical demands that are real, then what matters is that “this application of one’s ethical outlook [stands] up to the outlook’s own reflective selfscrutiny” (: ). In order for such ethical demands to come into view (as part of the “space of reasons”), what is needed is a “second nature,” that is, cultivated forms of thought, action, and sensitivity. McDowell does acknowledge that Aristotle, in his appeal to the human ergon (i.e., “function”), can be read as appealing to a teleological natural order to ground his account of human virtue. He assumes that this would amount to an attempt to provide an external validation for the life of virtue (i.e., a justification that is independent of our first-personal evaluative standpoint on the world). However, since Aristotle appeals to those who have already been brought up with the right sorts of habits that have opened their eyes to demands of virtue, McDowell thinks that there is no need to appeal to any sort of “grand teleological scheme.” We only need to understand the human ergon as what befits a human being to do as understood from within a particular acquired ethical outlook (: –). McDowell claims that to interpret Aristotle as seeking to ground his ethical outlook in something outside of that outlook is to read our own “metaphysical anxieties” – which pertain to our modern loss of confidence in ethical reasons – back onto Aristotle, of which he is innocent (: –; : , ; : –). He sees this in Williams’ reading of Aristotle, where Williams holds that “Aristotle had a conception of nature, no longer available to us, in which it could serve as an Archimedean point for justifying ethics” (McDowell : ). This is also what 

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McDowell rarely discusses evolution and its relevance for ethics. On one occasion he does raise the question: “How can it come about that there are animals that possess the spontaneity of understanding?” (: ). He says that this is a perfectly good question, since there was a time when there were no rational animals, but he writes: “[This] request for an evolutionary story need not look very pressing. Evolutionary speculation is not a context in which rampant platonism [where the structure of the space of reasons exists in complete independence from the natural world] is somehow particularly tempting. Reflection about the Bildung of individual human beings should be enough to distinguish the naturalized platonism I have recommended [where the structure of the space of reasons is brought into view via second nature acquired through an ordinary human upbringing] from rampant platonism. And in this reflection we can regard the culture a human being is initiated into as a going concern; there is no particular reason why we should need to uncover or speculate about its history, let alone the origins of culture as such. Human infants are mere animals, distinctive only in their potential, and nothing occult happens to a human being in ordinary upbringing. If we locate a variety of platonism in the context of an account of Bildung that

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Hursthouse takes Williams’ challenge to be suggesting. She writes: “True, we could make [the view that the virtues benefit their possessor] ‘more plausible’ to the immoralist if there were some (unimaginable) scientific, even cosmological, facts we could appeal to (just as we could make it more plausible to him if we could avail ourselves of some supernatural ones about the way God has organized the world and our role in it). But we didn’t even try, for to do so would, yet again, be attempting to justify morality from the outside” (: ). However, we don’t have to frame the issue as a matter of external justification: Indeed, I want to suggest that it should be seen as a matter of internal justification for the life of virtue. In other words, the question is: Can we make sense of the normative demands of virtue from within our evaluative standpoint? And here it does seem to make a difference whether we can see the world as a teleological order that expresses moral purposes. In short, our cosmic outlook matters from within our ethical outlook. Following Charles Taylor, I think that what we need is to articulate and defend a “moral ontology” that can make sense of and inform our “moral phenomenology” (i.e., our strong evaluative experience) (see Taylor : –; : –). Like McDowell, Taylor appeals to an “engaged” standpoint, that is, to our experiences of the significance of things for us as purposive agents, which arise from our “being-in-the-world” where things are seen as fit to be valued in certain ways. He writes: “Moral argument and exploration go on only within a world shaped by our deepest moral responses . . . [We] should treat our deepest moral instincts . . . as our mode of access to the world in which ontological claims are discernible and can be rationally argued about and sifted” (: ). For instance, Taylor discusses how the widely shared strong evaluative judgment – which I discussed in Chapter  – that human beings ought to be respected presupposes some ontological account of the world and the place of human beings within it that makes sense of this respect-worthiness and explains insists on those facts, we thereby ensure that it is not a rampant platonism” () Here McDowell sidesteps the question of how mind emerges from non-minded nature and of how the world can be such that there are ethical demands that are “there in any case,” which are issues that we will come back to consider in more detail in the next section. John Haldane writes of this passage from McDowell: “[To] trace the emergence of understanding to the educational influence of the surrounding culture is evidently regressive. From whence in turn comes its Bildung and so on? [Moreover,] to say that ‘human infants are mere animals, distinctive only in their potential’ fails to address the point of how it can be that such a potential is possessed. . . . Thus are left unexplained the actual rationality of the culture and the potential rationality of the infant; no epistemology without ontology” (Haldane : ). Haldane thinks that we do in fact need to see nature as a teleological order.

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what it consists in, and also explains how showing such respect contributes to a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. This will involve specifying some account of our human potential for a higher mode of life in the context of an understanding of our place within the cosmos (: –; : –). Taylor writes: [The] terms of our best account [of the ethical life] will never figure in a physical theory of the universe. But that just means that our human reality cannot be understood in the terms appropriate for this physics. . . . Our value terms purport to give us insight into what it is to live in the universe as a human being, and this is a quite different matter from that which physical science claims to reveal and explain. This reality is, of course, dependent on us, in the sense that a condition for its existence is our existence. But once granted that we exist, it is no more a subjective projection than what physics deals with. (: )

When Taylor says here that the reality to which our value terms point us is “dependent on us,” though not in the sense of being merely our subjective projection, he is advocating what McDowell calls a “no-priority view” (: –). This is the view that neither the object side nor the subject side of our evaluative experience can be said to have priority in the determination of values. Rather, our awareness of strong goods arises out of our purposeful engagement with the world as human agents whereby certain objects are perceived as being worthy of our respect, concern, love, admiration, and the like, and thus as constitutive of a normatively higher, nobler, more fulfilling mode of life when we are properly responsive to them. This means that we cannot understand strong goods if we only consider the subject side or the object side of experience. Both are needed to make sense of our experience as strong evaluators since the dependence runs both ways. Nevertheless, the normative demands that we recognize here are seen as being “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them.” To fill out the object side of the experience we do need to say what it is about the world and our place within it that makes certain strong evaluative responses appropriate. McDowell often writes as though living the life of virtue is simply a matter of developing a “sensitivity” to certain situations in which one can just see that courageous acts are required in 

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Making sense here, Taylor says, “means articulating what makes these [strong evaluative] responses appropriate: identifying what makes something a fit object for them and correlatively formulating more fully the nature of the response as well as spelling out what all this presupposes about ourselves and our situation in the world” (: –).

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certain fearful situations, kind acts are required in situations where someone is in need, and so forth (see : lecture IV; : essays , , and , esp. at –). But why courage and kindness should be seen as virtues (i.e., as part of a normatively higher mode of life) and why other human beings are worthy of our concern is left unexplained. McDowell discusses the need for reflective scrutiny of one’s ethical outlook, but it is not clear what this involves beyond seeking a kind of internal coherence (namely, in avoiding contradictions). It seems that the most he wants to say is that if one’s ethical outlook “hangs together” in a “coherent scheme of life” then “that is surely some reason to suppose that the perceptions [of this ethical outlook] are veridical” (: –; cf. : –). But this judgment of veridicality is quite underdetermined without some background ontology that can make sense of the claim that there are ethical demands here that are “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them.” We might then wonder why for McDowell articulating such a background ontology is not part of what is required to achieve internal coherence. This underdetermination in fact seems to be a necessary feature of his quietist position. But it is insufficient in the face of the challenge that someone like Williams could pose here: Can we make sense of the claim that there are ethical demands that are “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them” in a world devoid of underlying moral teleology? While McDowell accuses Williams of reading his own modern anxieties back onto Aristotle, I think McDowell is in fact reading his own Wittgensteinian quietism back onto Aristotle when he sees Aristotle as only making appeal to the second nature that we acquire through our ethical upbringing. McDowell seems to separate out Aristotle’s ethics from his metaphysics in a way that Aristotle himself in fact did not. Moreover, even if we read Aristotle as holding the view that an ethical outlook can only be justified from within that outlook, this does not mean that there would not be a need – from within that outlook – to appeal to some account of human beings and their place in the cosmos in order to make sense of the strong evaluative category of the noble in human life. Indeed, Aristotle seems to offer just such an account with his view of human beings as cosmically situated between the beasts and the divine (and as containing elements of both), which informs the sense that human beings as rational social animals are capable of a higher mode of life than is possible for other 

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McDowell writes: “we have only our own lights to go on” (: ). This is obviously true, but it is not an excuse to avoid the task of sense-making, which is integral to our being the meaningseeking animal.

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animals. It is difficult to see how in a world devoid of any underlying moral teleology it could make sense to think that there are ethical demands that are “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them.” McDowell is right to note how strong evaluative beliefs arise naturally for us as human beings within our particular forms of life, but he misses the fact that they also seem to presuppose some ontological account of the world and our place within it that can make sense of these beliefs such that they are judged as fitting or appropriate responses to the world. Without some such ontological account, McDowell invites the same problem we saw with Hursthouse’s appeal to an acquired ethical outlook: namely, our ethical judgments could seem to be merely a function of being inculcated into a particular acquired ethical outlook, thereby engendering the charge of relativism. In short, these judgments suffer from the problem of radical contingency, which seems incompatible with the sort of value realism that McDowell wishes to affirm. The same problem affects those who attempt to defend an objectivist account of meaningfulness (i.e., meaning in life) while leaving aside the issue of the meaning of life (see Metz ), that is, the issue of how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things and whether there is a cosmic source of meaning to which we must align our lives, or while denying that there is any such ultimate meaning (see Wolf a;  []). But, again, does it make sense to speak of objective (i.e., strong evaluative) meaning or value in a “meaningless world” (i.e., a world without any underlying purposiveness) as, for example, Susan Wolf does? I don’t see how it does. Here I think we need to acknowledge that a concern for meaning in life and a meaningful life ultimately requires a concern for the meaning of life, as a matter of sense-making for claims of strong evaluative meaning or value, which involve normative demands that are thought to be “there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them.” It is worth noting that many who have sought to remain content with the value experiences that arise for them within a particular form of life without seeking to provide these experiences with any deeper grounding or justification have not sought to defend a realist account of value. We might think here not only of Williams, but also of the “liberal ironist” stance of Richard Rorty (), where one has to live with the irony that his or her deepest commitments find no objective support. A similar ironist stance is endorsed in the early work of Thomas Nagel on the topic of “the absurd.” According to Nagel, it is in fact difficult to remain content with the value experiences that naturally arise for us within a particular form of life – as expressed in the seriousness with which we take our lives – because it is

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also natural for us to take the self-transcending step of considering how our experiences fit within an overall view of things (see : –, ). We can regard this as being indicative of our nature as meaning-seeking animals; that is, we are the kind of beings who can become concerned – and indeed often are concerned – with addressing ultimate questions about the meaning and purpose of our lives. Nagel’s own conclusion is that life is absurd because we have reason to think our lives are cosmically insignificant even though we continue to take them seriously. At best, we must live with a sense of irony that this is the case. Although human life is cosmically insignificant in Williams’ view, he thinks it can be and often still is seen as significant from a “human point of view,” where our “concepts [including our evaluative concepts] and explanations are rooted in our more local practices, our culture, and our history” (a: –). Thus, we should focus on the significance of our lives sub specie humanitatis (i.e., from the human point of view), rather than sub specie aeternitatis (i.e., from the point of view of the universe, or what is sometimes called the “view from nowhere” or the “synoptic view”). In fact, Williams accuses those who bemoan our cosmic insignificance of “sentimental” muddle: It is a muddle between thinking that our activities fail some test of cosmic significance, and (as contrasted with that) recognizing that there is no such test. If there is no such thing as the cosmic point of view, if the idea of absolute importance in the scheme of things is an illusion, a relic of a world not yet thoroughly disenchanted, then there is no other point of view except ours in which our activities can have or lack significance. (a: ; see also : –)

What should we make of this? There in fact seems to be something of a muddle here. Williams’ main idea is that we cannot fail a cosmic test because there is no test, that is, no ultimate standard of significance. He later says (echoing the passage just cited) that it is a holdover from the “enchanted world” to think that our lives can have “absolute importance,” to think that we are “being cheered on by the universe”. But there are two ways to take this: The first is that, since (as Williams sees it) there is no moral teleology operative in the universe, we can cease to worry about our lives lining up with any such purpose. This interpretation is suggested by Williams’ remark (cited earlier) about knowing that “the world was not  

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I should note that there seems to be a tension between Nagel’s work on the topic of the absurd and some of his work on ethics, but I cannot explore this tension here. See Kekes : –; and Nagel .

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made for us, or we for the world.” A second interpretation is that there is no cosmic test because the idea of a cosmic test is incoherent; that is, “there is no such thing as the cosmic point of view” (i.e., a “view from nowhere”), but only the human point of view (i.e., a “view from somewhere”). So, again, we should cease worrying about cosmic significance (or the lack thereof ) when things matter to us from a human point of view. Both of these lines can be seen as quietist defusing strategies – they seek to defuse the worry about human life lacking cosmic significance and to maintain “confidence” in the values that arise for us from within our particular forms of life, even though these “human values” are radically contingent upon our particular personal, cultural, and evolutionary histories. Williams in fact often seems pulled between, on the one hand, a quasi-optimistic quietism where one seeks to remain content with – or “confident” in – the values that arise within a particular form of life without asking questions about the ultimate significance of these values, and, on the other, a bleak tragic cosmic outlook (as in Shame and Necessity). I think in one sense Williams is obviously right that there is no cosmic point of view in that the cosmos is not the sort of thing that can have a point of view (unless we are pantheists or something else of the sort). But we can understand the idea of the cosmic point of view in another, perfectly legitimate way: namely, it is a particular human point of view in which one forms an outlook – a “cosmic outlook” – on the wider world and his or her place within it. In other words, we can say that it is a human point of view in a wider frame. This is how I take the idea of a “cosmic point of view.” The problem then for Williams’ defusing strategies is that from within the human point of view it matters whether we can see our lives in light of a cosmic moral teleology (i.e., a purposive view of the world as an enduring moral order oriented toward the good) by which we might “authenticate our activities” and thereby discover a deeper sense of meaning in life. Williams seems to acknowledge this in his discussion of the radical contingency of our ethical beliefs, as he says: “This sense of contingency can seem to be in tension with something that our ethical ideas themselves demand, a recognition of their authority.” Williams also seems to recognize it when he puts forward the view that an Aristotelian ethic – which affirms a strong correlation between virtue and happiness (eudaimonia) and depends on teleological thinking – is no longer viable in light of Darwinian evolution. 

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I say “quasi” here because I do not want to accuse someone of Williams’ temperament of optimism.

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Rival Cosmic Outlooks We must ask: Do we have any reason to reject Williams’ tragic cosmic outlook and its supposed link to evolutionary science? Williams’ cosmic outlook, it must be acknowledged, certainly finds support among some prominent scientists of our time. For instance, the biochemist Jacques Monod writes: It is perfectly true that science outrages values. . . . If he accepts [the] message [of science] in its full significance, man must at last wake out of his millenary dream and discover his total solitude, his fundamental isolation. He must realize that, like a gypsy, he lives on the boundary of an alien world; a world that is deaf to his music, and as indifferent to his hopes as it is to his sufferings or his crimes. (: –)

Likewise, the physicist Steven Weinberg writes: [The] worldview of science is rather chilling. Not only do we not find any point to life laid out for us in nature, no objective basis for our moral principles, no correspondence between what we think is the moral law and the laws of nature . . . We even learn that the emotions that we most treasure, our love for our wives and husbands and children, are made possible by chemical processes in our brains that are what they are as a result of natural selection acting on chance mutations over millions of years. And yet we must not sink into nihilism or stifle our emotions. At our best we live on a knife-edge, between wishful thinking on one hand and, on the other, despair. ()

In the same vein, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins writes: “The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference” (: ). And, finally, we should also mention here the philosopher Daniel Dennett, who describes Darwinism as “universal acid”: that is, Darwinian explanations have a corrosive effect on the meanings by which we live and which we cherish (see : , ). We can see then that each of these authors shares with Williams the 

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Consider also the following remarks from Weinberg: “It is almost irresistible for humans to believe that we have some special relation to the universe, that human life is not just a more-or-less farcical outcome of a chain of accidents reaching back to the first three minutes, but that we were somehow built in from the beginning . . . It is hard to realize that this [earth] is just a tiny part of an overwhelmingly hostile universe. It is ever harder to realize that the present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless” (: ; see also Weinberg ).

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view that life is ultimately without meaning and purpose, and that the full acknowledgment of this has an undermining effect on strong evaluative beliefs. Are we compelled to accept such a bleak cosmic outlook? There are a number of scientists who think not, and their starting point is the fact that we are here at all. In strong contrast to the Monod passage, the physicist Freeman Dyson writes: “I do not feel like an alien in this universe. The more I examine this universe and study the details of its architecture, the more evidence I find that the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming” (: ). The physicist Paul Davies also writes: If we could twiddle a knob and change existing laws, even very slightly, the chances are that the Universe as we know it would fall apart, descending into chaos. Certainly the existence of life as we know it, and even of less elaborate systems such as stable stars, would be threatened by just the tiniest change in the strengths of the fundamental forces, for example. The laws that characterize our actual universe, as opposed to an infinite number of alternative possible universes, seem almost contrived . . . so that life and consciousness may emerge. (: )

In short, the universe (i.e., the laws of nature, the constants of physics, and the initial conditions of the universe) appears to be fine-tuned for the emergence of life and consciousness and ultimately for intelligent beings such as ourselves. Or as some have described it, the universe appears to be biophilic and noophilic: “the universe is by its nature apt to produce life and intelligence [nous]” (Cottingham : ; see also Rees ). If the appearances are indeed correct – as many scientists believe them to be – then how are we to make sense of such fine-tuning of the universe for life and intelligence? One option of course is to say that such finetuning implies a Fine-Tuner (i.e., God). Indeed, the evidence in physics for a fine-tuned universe has helped to revitalize the teleological (or design) argument for God’s existence, which was long thought to be dead after Darwin’s account of evolution based on chance mutation and natural selection seemed to explain away appearances of design in the realm of biology. A good number of philosophers and scientists now find strong 

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I take it that the point here is not that science could in principle discover objective value but just fails to do so. Rather, the point is that the scientific worldview – as conceived by these authors – has an undermining effect on the values that we do hold from within our evaluative standpoint on the world. For an extensive discussion of the evidence for fine-tuning in these three dimensions (the laws of nature, the constants of physics, and the initial conditions of the universe), see Collins : –, esp. at –; see also Collins : –.

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support for theism in the appearance of fine-tuning for life and conscious intelligence, that is, for beings like us (see Manson [ed.] ; Collins ; ). What other options are there to account for fine-tuning besides theism? There are four prominent non-theistic alternatives. First, consider what we might call the dumb luck response. According to this view, it is purely a cosmic accident that we are here at all: We are just what the cosmic cat coughed up, so to speak. In other words, we are the result of “blind,” mechanistic processes and it is sheer “dumb luck” that we are here at all (speaking of “luck” of course presumes that we think it is a good thing that we are here). But the problem with this dumb luck response is that the apparent fine-tuning of the universe seems extremely lucky (one might even be tempted to say that it seems “miraculous”). The apparent extreme improbability that our universe – presuming non-theism, non-teleology, and that our universe is the only universe there is – should have just the right conditions for life and conscious intelligence to emerge seems to call out for some explanation, as opposed to just declaring it dumb luck. Another non-theistic response, which also relies on no more than a blind, mechanistic causal story, is the multiverse hypothesis, which, as the name suggests, questions the presumption that our universe is the only universe there is. The basic idea here is that the more universes there are, the less improbable it is that at least one universe would “strike gold” and have just the right conditions for the emergence of life and conscious intelligent beings such as ourselves. As the astrophysicist Martin Rees puts it: “[The] cosmos maybe has something in common with an ‘off the shelf’ clothes shop: if the shop has a large stock, we’re not surprised to find one suit that fits. Likewise, if our universe is selected from a multiverse, its seemingly designed or fine-tuned features wouldn’t be surprising.” (: ) Rees admits that this is a rather speculative proposal, though he maintains that it is still a scientific one. The bigger problem is that it seems to pass the buck of explaining fine-tuning to whatever it was that generated these universes: This “universe generator,” it seems, would have to be finetuned so that at least one universe gave rise to life and conscious intelligence (see Collins : ). Another response is that the fine-tuning of the universe may be the result of a grand unified theory. As Rees puts it: “Our universe, along with the physical laws that prevail in it, may turn out to be the unique outcome of a fundamental theory – in other words, nature may allow only one 

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See also Rees ; ; and .

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recipe for a universe” (: xvi). Of course, we do not have any such successful theory yet. However, Rees and Bernard Carr elsewhere remark: “even if all apparently anthropic coincidences could be explained [in terms of such a theory], it would still be remarkable that the relationships dictated by physical theory happened also to be those propitious for life” (: ). A final prominent non-theistic response to fine-tuning questions the blind, mechanistic causal stories of the dumb luck and multiverse views. We can call this the non-theistic cosmic teleology view. According to this perspective, we can see the fine-tuning of the universe as an expression of a fundamental purposiveness of the universe even without God. The physicist Paul Davies (cited earlier) has advanced such a view: [The] contrived nature of physical existence is just too fantastic for me to take on board as simply “given.” It points forcefully to a deeper underlying meaning to existence. Some call it purpose, some design. Those loaded words, which derive from human categories, capture only imperfectly what it is that the Universe is about. But that it is about something, I have absolutely no doubt. . . . [The] emergence of life and consciousness somewhere and somewhen in the cosmos is, I believe, assured by the underlying laws of nature. . . . “We are truly meant to be here.” I mean “we” in the sense of conscious beings, not homo sapiens specifically. Thus although we are not at the center of the Universe, human existence does have a powerful wider significance. Whatever the Universe as a whole may be about, the scientific evidence suggests that we, in some limited yet ultimately still profound way, are an integral part of its purpose. . . . If we are alone in the Universe, if the Earth is the only life-bearing planet among countless trillions, then the choice is stark. Either we are the product of a unique 

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This is quoted in Collins : . The most well-known proponent of seeking after a grand unified theory as the ultimate goal of science is Stephen Hawking, who wrote: “[If] we discover a complete [and unified] theory [combining quantum physics with general relativity] . . . we shall all . . . be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason” (: ; quoted in Cottingham : ). Cottingham comments: “If we were to achieve a complete and unified theory of the universe . . ., such a theory would subsume all observable phenomena under the fewest and most comprehensive laws or principles; but as to why these principles obtain, this would have to remain, in Hume’s graphic phrase, ‘totally shut up from human curiosity and inquiry’. It is sometimes suggested that such a unified theory might turn out to be the only possible theory, in view of the severe constraints that must govern any model that is to be consistent and capable [of] accounting for the universe as we find it. But even if there were to be only one such candidate, it would still be merely the only possible theory given that the universe is as it is – which would still fall short of explaining why there should be a universe at all. Some cosmologists (including Hawking) have speculated that the grand unified theory ‘might be so compelling that it brings about its own existence’; but it is hard to take this seriously. A theory cannot generate a universe” (: ).

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supernatural event in a universe of profligate overprovision, or else an accident of mind-numbing improbability and irrelevant. On the other hand, if life and mind are universal phenomena, if they are written into nature at its deepest level, then the case for an ultimate purpose to existence would be compelling. (: –)

Elsewhere Davies puts the point about life and mind being “written into nature at its deepest level” more definitively: It seems to me that there is a genuine scheme of things – the universe is “about” something. But I am equally uneasy about dumping the whole set of problems in the lap of an arbitrary god, or abandoning all further thought and declaring existence ultimately to be a mystery. . . . I do believe that life and mind are etched deeply into the fabric of the cosmos, perhaps through a shadowy, half-glimpsed life principle, and if I am to be honest I have to concede that this starting point is something I feel more in my heart than in my head. So maybe that is a religious conviction of sorts. (: )

A theist will likely object to Davies’ tendentious talk of an “arbitrary god” here since most theists do not believe that God is arbitrary at all; rather, they believe that God always acts with perfect wisdom and goodness. But it is interesting to see how close Davies in fact comes to a theistic outlook: Just like a theist, he believes that the universe is “about something” and that mind is fundamental, though this fundamental mindedness is immanent within the natural world rather than transcendent to it. This seems as close as one can be to being a theist without actually being one. And it is interesting to see that Davies allows that his view may be described as a “religious conviction of sorts.” It is worth considering here another view along these lines; one which is articulated by a philosopher rather than a scientist. I have in mind the recent work of Thomas Nagel. As we saw, in his earlier work Nagel seemed to accept the conclusion that life is absurd. However, he was apparently not satisfied with this conclusion and his recent work has sought to overcome it. In an essay entitled “Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament,” Nagel argues for the need to develop “an alternative to the consolations of religion” (: ). In particular, he thinks secular philosophy should seek to address the “cosmic question”: “How can one bring into one’s individual life a full recognition of one’s relation to the universe as a whole?” To address this question positively means to seek to recover something of the “religious temperament,” which he understands in terms of the yearning for cosmic reconciliation or harmony, that is, the desire

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“to live not merely the life of the creature one is, but in some sense to participate through it in the life of the universe as a whole.” In contrast to Williams’ endorsement of the human point of view against the cosmic point of view and in contrast to quietist positions in general, Nagel writes: “the religious temperament regards a merely human life as insufficient, as a partial blindness to or a rejection of the terms of our existence. It asks for something more encompassing.” Of course, it is one thing to say that there is such a human need (which can be seen as an expression of our being homo religiosus), but it is another to think that it can be adequately satisfied. Nagel thinks it can and he gives indication of his own position when he writes: “Having, amazingly, burst into existence, one is a representative of existence – of the whole of it – not just because one is part of it but because it is present to one’s consciousness. In each of us, the universe has come to consciousness and therefore our existence is not merely our own” (). Nagel went on to develop this view further in Mind and Cosmos, where he argues for a non-theistic cosmic teleological perspective, which stands in strong contrast to Williams’ claim that “the world was not made for us, or we for the world.” Nagel writes: The world is an astonishing place . . . That it has produced you, and me, and the rest of us is the most astonishing thing about it. If contemporary research in molecular biology leaves open the possibility of legitimate doubts about a fully mechanistic account of the origin and evolution of life, dependent only on the laws of chemistry and physics, this can combine with the failure of psychophysical reductionism to suggest that principles of a different kind are also at work in the history of nature, principles of the growth of order that are in their logical form teleological rather than mechanistic. (: )

Nagel is particularly impressed with the way that the universe is an intelligible order and has given rise to beings capable of understanding it. This allows for a cosmic teleological perspective in which human beings have an important place, namely, where “[each] of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware 

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Compare Mary Midgley: “[For] some time [naïve materialism] has been running into great difficulties over the ‘problem of consciousness’ and also over [an] unrealistic attitude to purpose. The concept of matter turns out to be quite as puzzling as the concept of mind; indeed perhaps more so. . . . Perhaps there are not two radically different kinds of stuff, mind and matter, but just one great world which has both mental and physical attributes. This can then quite properly be viewed, without contradiction, from both these angles. And it would not be surprising if a single tendency, or conatus, runs through the whole, so that our kind of conscious purposiveness is only one part of it” (a: ; see also b).

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of itself” (). This gradual waking up of the universe begins with the emergence of life and consciousness, and then further develops with the emergence of our form of rational, linguistic consciousness: “The great cognitive shift is an expansion of consciousness from the perspectival form contained in the lives of particular creatures to an objective, worldencompassing form that exists both individually and intersubjectively. It was originally a biological evolutionary process, and in our species it has become a collective cultural process as well” (). Furthermore: “to explain not merely the possibility but the actuality of rational beings, the world must have properties that make their appearance not a complete accident: in some way the likelihood must have been latent in the nature of things” (). Nagel goes on to say: “I am not confident that this Aristotelian idea of teleology without intention makes sense, but I do not at the moment see why it doesn’t” (). We might indeed question whether Nagel’s view – and also Davies’ view that even without God the universe is “about something” – fully makes sense, since it can be argued that believing that the universe as a whole is expressive of a purpose requires a purposive being (namely, God) that created it. Or at least, one might argue that it is best explained in theistic terms. Nevertheless, if his non-theistic teleological view can be made compelling then I think it would provide a non-theistic account of the meaning of life, that is, it would provide a cosmic or ultimate source of meaning for human life by which we can find our place in the cosmos. The idea here is that the universe comes to consciousness in human life and our telos is found in becoming aware of the world around us and thereby participating in “the life of the universe as a whole.” This vision of the telos of human life has been expressed well by John Updike when he writes:

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Nagel confesses to “an undergrounded assumption” in not regarding theism as a real option. He writes: “I lack the sensus divinitatis that enables – indeed compels – so many people to see in the world the expression of divine purpose” (: ). He also thinks a non-theistic teleological view – if viable – would allow for “a more unifying explanation than the design hypothesis” because it does not appeal to anything beyond nature (). But it is not clear that a sensus divinitatis is needed to find theism to be the best explanation for the apparent purposiveness in the universe. It is also questionable whether a non-theistic view really can provide a more unifying explanation than a theistic one given that it appeals to a notion of purpose without intention. There are also metaphysical considerations regarding the relationship between necessary and contingent being – as in Aquinas’ “third way” – which call into question whether a non-theistic view can provide a more unifying explanation than a theistic view. For more on this issue of whether theism or atheism provides a more unifying explanation, see MacIntyre : –. I should note that elsewhere Nagel also confesses to a “fear of religion,” which is connected to a concern for individual autonomy; I will come back to discuss this in Chapter .

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Ancient religion and modern science agree: We are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention. Without us, the physicists who have espoused the anthropic principle tell us, the universe would be unwitnessed, and in a real sense not there at all. It exists, incredibly, for us. (Friend et al. [eds.] : )

Similarly, Annie Dillard writes: We are here to witness the creation and abet it. We are here to notice each thing so each thing gets noticed. Together we notice not only each mountain shadow and each stone on the beach but, especially, we notice the beautiful faces and complex natures of each other. We are here to bring to consciousness the beauty and power that are around us and to praise the people who are here with us. We witness our generation and our times. We watch the weather. Otherwise, creation would be playing to an empty house. (Friend et al. [eds.] : )

These remarks would of course also fit with a theistic worldview. Indeed, the language of “praise” seems more fitting for a theistic worldview, because praise, as a moral category that is the opposite of blame, implies someone who is worthy of praise in virtue of being responsible for the good that we are appreciating. This is perhaps why Updike tips the expression to “paying attention,” though to capture some of what was intended by invoking the concept of praise, we might say that for non-theists like Nagel and Davies, this is a matter of appreciative attention, or contemplation (in Chapter  I will explore contemplation and its role in the spiritual life in more detail). But perhaps something is lost if we can’t speak literally of praise here, since we may indeed feel a need to praise someone for the world to which we are a witness. The important point that I want to bring out here is that a non-theistic cosmic teleological view – given that it sees our rationality as an expression of a cosmic purpose – can offer support for an Aristotelian ethic centered on the good functioning of our practical reason and theoretical reason, which can be properly seen as constitutive of a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life and as informing a conception of human dignity, and thereby it can overcome the problem of the radical contingency of ethics. However, such a view does lack the strong moral dimension that theism can provide since it does not affirm that the universe expresses any moral intentions, and if we did affirm that there are such intentions, then this would provide further support for the life of virtue. 

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This lack of a strong moral dimension can be seen in these remarks from Mary Midgley: “To find the universe meaningful is . . . simply to find a continuity between its patterns and those of our own lives – enough continuity to confirm that our presence here makes sense. The point is not that the

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On a standard theistic account of cosmic teleology, the universe is seen as a moral order and as expressive of moral purposes, which are the intentions of a perfectly good Being. Consider the following remarks from John Cottingham: If there is at least the possibility of a [theistic] interpretation of reality, this would open a way for our lives to have meaning in a strong sense that would leave far behind mere local satisfactions of our contingent wants . . . It would provide a model of fulfillment that would locate our human destiny within an enduring moral framework. So far from being a cosmic accident or by-product of blind forces, our lives would be seen as having a purpose – that of attuning ourselves to a creative order that is inherently good. Our deepest responses would be seen as pointing us towards such a goal, and our deepest fulfilment to be attained in realising it. . . . The religious perspective . . . offers a possibility of meaningfulness by providing a powerful normative framework or focus for the life of virtue. . . . [What] the religious dimension adds is a framework within which [human nature] is revealed as more than just a set of characteristics that a certain species happens intermittently to possess, but instead as pointing to the condition that a Being of the utmost benevolence and care that we can conceive of desires us to achieve. Focusing on this dimension, moreover, encourages us with the hope that the pursuit of virtue, difficult and demanding though it often is, contributes however minutely to the establishment of a moral order that the cosmos was created to realise. (: , )

Because theism is personalistic – it holds that the ultimate nature of reality is personal rather than impersonal – it interprets the evolutionary process in terms of the goal of interpersonal communion, or the normative focus of love (there are certainly other goals for humans as well, such as the virtuous development of our various human capacities, but these also further contribute to the richness of communion). In other words, the theist will see a directionality inherent in evolution whereby life arises and then conscious intelligence, which leads to the emergence of beings who are capable of interpersonal communion and have a natural tendency toward it. Even though our evolutionary inheritance has endowed us with conflicting natural tendencies both toward love/communion and toward world belongs to us but that we belong to it. We do not have to think that it was designed for our benefit, nor that we can understand it completely. We only need to see it as ordered in a way that makes our presence here intelligible. And since we actually are a part of it, this is not a silly project. It explains why we are naturally disposed to respond to this world with the mixture of caution, trust and reverence that have proved appropriate for our ancestors over many aeons of hard experience” (a: ). It is not clear, however, in what sense trust and reverence are appropriate responses to a universe without God.

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various forms of self-enclosure (e.g., domination, hatred, violence, and so on), nevertheless, theism provides a purposeful framework by which we can identify our natural tendencies toward love/communion as part of what is noblest and best about us – and indeed part of what it is to be made in the image of God – and thus as what ought to be cultivated as part of a normatively higher, more meaningful mode of life. In short, the theist maintains that love is indeed “Creation’s final law,” even though nature may be – at least to some extent – “red in tooth and claw.” Such a theistic teleological view can thus overcome the problem of the radical contingency of ethics and provide support for the life of virtue by offering a cosmic outlook according to which the virtues can be seen as part of a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life. The demands of virtue, including Creation’s final law of love, are “there in any case,” despite whatever contingencies we may find in our environment and within ourselves.

A Poker-Faced Universe? Is the theistic view of the universe as a moral order really believable? One significant challenge to this view is of course the pervasive reality of evil and suffering. If this universe is supposed to be a moral order and if there is an intelligent creator of it, then one might think that we should agree with Hume and “condemn the architect” ( []: ). Or one might rather think that we should agree with Dawkins in seeing the universe as being expressive of a “pitiless indifference,” even if we agree with Nagel and Davies in seeing a cosmic teleology operative as well. Even though he is a theist, Cottingham in fact thinks that when we combine an acknowledgment of pervasive evil and suffering with the appearance of cosmic fine-tuning we are led, at least from the standpoint of a detached observer, to something of a standoff with regard to a theistic worldview: The universe appears to be “poker-faced” in that it does not conclusively tell one way or the other with regard to theism. Both atheism and theism, he says, “[appear], in a certain light, to be quite tenable on rational grounds, and it does not seem remotely plausible to think that either side has made a simple inferential error or blame-worthily failed to advert to certain 

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“Who trusted God was love indeed [/] And love Creation’s final law – [/] Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw [/] With ravine, shriek’d against his creed –” (Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.; quoted in Cottingham : ; cf. : ). For further discussion of these issues, see Cottingham : –; : –; : –.

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manifest observational facts. . . . [It] seems most reasonable to conclude that on present evidence, the honours are even” (: –). We should grant that there is something of an intellectual standoff here in the sense that we can feel cross-pressured between competing worldviews, between theism and atheism. But is it right to say that, with regard to the evidence for theism and atheism, the “honours are even”? It is unlikely that many people would think this. Most people, it seems, are “tilters”: that is, they think that the evidence tilts one way or another, and perhaps strongly so. Some might think the problem of evil and suffering makes things tilt in an atheistic direction, and perhaps they also believe that there is a convincing way to explain the appearance of design in the universe without invoking a Designer. Others might think that the appearance of design in the universe really does make things tilt in a theistic direction, especially if they think that there is a good response (or responses) to the problem of evil and suffering. There are of course a number of well worked-out theodicies (i.e., justifications of God’s ways in allowing evil and suffering) that seek to address the question of how it could be that a perfectly good, all-loving, allpowerful God allows for evil and suffering. One is the free will theodicy, which maintains that God allows evil due to the good of creating human beings with free will. This may indeed be part of any good solution to the problem of evil and suffering, but it cannot be the whole solution since it does not account for natural evil (i.e., the suffering that results from natural disasters, diseases, etc.). One might also question – as Ivan Karamazov does in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov – whether giving human beings free will was worth it given all the terrible things that have resulted from human choice. This raises the more general question of cosmodicy (which Ivan also raises) from which the question of theodicy is downstream: The question of cosmodicy, as discussed in Chapter , has to do with whether life in the world is justified or worthwhile in the face of 

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Alvin Plantinga ( []) has developed a free will defense, which is different from a theodicy in that it seeks to show a possible reason that God could have for allowing evil in order to defuse any claim that the existence of evil shows that there is no God (at least understood as an all-good, allpowerful Being), such as J. L. Mackie claims in his formulation of “the logical problem of evil,” which maintains that at least one of the following claims cannot be true: () God is perfectly good; () God is omnipotent; and () evil exists ( []: ). Plantinga maintains that there is no contradiction here, since evil can result from free will and it is good – all things considered – for God to have created human beings with free will. One might follow Augustine in thinking that all natural evils are just punishment for human sin, but I do not think that is a very attractive or compelling position. It does not seem right that the death of innocent human children from diseases or natural disasters should be regarded as just punishment for the sins of others.

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evil and suffering. It does not seem that we can answer the question of whether free will is worth it without addressing this question. Most people at least seem to live as though they think the question of cosmodicy can be given a positive answer, but whether this is the case has to be worked out in detail. Another common theodicy is the soul-making theodicy, which maintains that the experience of evil and suffering can be an important part of our moral and spiritual growth (see Hick  []; cf. Rowe  []). This theodicy seems to do more to offer a response to the problem of natural evil, however, it also seems limited because there are some horrendous forms of evil and suffering that seem soul-crushing rather than soul-making. There may be no way to show that every form of evil and suffering is necessary for achieving some greater good; i.e., we might have to acknowledge that there is evil and suffering that is genuinely gratuitous. And it can also be argued that it is wrong, at least in some cases, to try to justify evil and suffering in consequentialist terms (another point that is made by Ivan Karamazov). At the very least, the theist should say that God does not intend evil, but allows it to occur. But why allow it to occur? Michael Peterson offers one of the best ways to think through the issue. He maintains that we need to “envision God, his ways, creation, and the human venture as ‘open’ in significant respects, not ‘closed’” (a: ). This is important for there to be genuine relationship with God and one another and also for there to be genuine moral choice: “Only in a truly relational reality can certain great goods – such as love, self-giving, free choice of the good, interpersonal communion, and voluntary connection with God – be realized by finite rational-moral creatures. For the world to be genuinely relational, it cannot be readymade – or ‘closed’ – but must contain real contingency” (). According to Peterson, it is best to see God’s providence as general rather than meticulous. God creates a lawful universe that allows both stability and contingency, which enables human beings to act meaningfully in it and to 

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The evidentialist argument from evil against God’s existence (pioneered by William Rowe) assumes that all evil must be shown to be necessary for some greater good in order to vindicate God, and then it tries to show that there does in fact seem to be genuinely gratuitous evil, which therefore discredits theism. Some theists seek to respond by arguing that there is in fact some greater good for which such evil is necessary; others offer a “skeptical theist” defense that maintains that we just don’t know whether there is some greater good for which such evil is necessary. Rather than seeking to argue that all evil is necessary for some greater good (or that it may be for all we know, as the skeptical theist maintains), I think the better response, to be discussed shortly, is to question the initial assumption that theism needs to show that all evil is necessary for some greater good. This terrain is covered in Peterson (ed.) b.

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achieve great goods of relationship and moral/spiritual self-realization. However, God also “allows the world – in its physical and personal dimensions – to develop without his ensuring that only those evils occur which are necessary to some greater good” (): [The] possibility of both natural and moral evils is inherent in the structure of creation, including those evils that the world would be better off without. So, the possibility of gratuitous evil is necessary in a good type of world. . . . Articulation of God’s general policies for the governance of the universe should not minimize the suffering of individual persons as a result of how contingencies play out. . . . It is better to admit that, in a contingent and chancy world, benefits and burdens, pains and pleasures, will be distributed in ways that defy detailed explanation from an ultimate point of view. . . . [Given] the contingencies of evil, God works redemptively with what happens to us, that no ultimate harm comes to any individual for reasons that are outside of his or her control, and that God’s plan of seeking all who will participate in the Divine Life will not be thwarted. (; cf. Cottingham : –)

Obviously, this requires faith since we cannot demonstrate exactly how God will work it all out. And ultimately we have to ask whether it was good for God to create a world with this kind of contingency/openness. Peterson affirms that a world of this kind is indeed “a very great good” (a: ), and we also see this affirmed in Genesis: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good” (:; KJV). But there is a question here that both the theist and the non-theist alike confront, which is again the cosmodicy question: Is life in the world justified or worthwhile in the face of evil and suffering? Or we might frame it as: Is it good to be here? Is it good that there should be a world at all? Can we find our way to an affirmative and appreciative vision of the world and declare it “very good” even in the face of horrendous evil and terrible hardship? I will be taking this issue up in more detail in Chapter  when considering the role of spirituality in the good life, and especially when considering contemplation as a key component of the spiritual life. Considering the role of spirituality in human life is important for the foregoing discussions because, as Cottingham suggests, most of us do not decide on the ultimate questions of human existence from a purely detached observer standpoint. We are not merely detached observers of the world; we are also engaged participants in the stuff of life, experiencing great good and profound meaning as well as terrible evil and hardship. Spirituality offers a path of engagement with the world, which is also a path of transformation that can enable us to come to see the world in a

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new light, and it is open to both theists and non-theists alike. It will thus play an important role in how we tilt or where we stand on the ultimate questions of human existence, such as whether there is a God, whether suffering can be redeemed, whether the universe has an overarching meaning, and whether we can affirm the world as a whole and say that it is good, or “very good.” Let us turn then to explore the place of spirituality in human life.

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Does spirituality have a place in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics? If we consult major recent works we might conclude that the answer is “no.” The issue is often either ignored or excluded from consideration. In this final chapter I will discuss why this is and also why it is problematic. More positively, I will seek to show the importance of spirituality for a neoAristotelian account of the good life. In the first section, I will lay out my understanding of spirituality. In the second section, I will discuss why neo-Aristotelians have often ignored or excluded from consideration the issue of the place of spirituality in the good life. I will suggest that a lot turns on how one understands the “ethical naturalism” to which neo-Aristotelians are committed. In the third section I will argue that through an exploration of the strong evaluative standpoint from within our human form of life as meaning-seeking animals we can come to appreciate better the importance of spirituality for human beings throughout recorded history up to the present and why we can be described as homo religiosus. In the fourth section, I will continue this discussion by arguing against the anti-contemplative stance of many neo-Aristotelians (in which they depart from Aristotle) and arguing for the integral importance of contemplation for human life, and for the spiritual life in particular. In the fifth section, I will discuss the draw of theistic spirituality, even though my account allows for both theistic and nontheistic forms of spirituality. In the sixth and final section I will consider and respond to three important objections to giving spirituality, especially theistic spirituality, a central place within the good life: namely, () the wholeness objection; () the autonomy objection; and () the social peace objection.

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What Is Spirituality? As a working definition, by “spirituality” I mean a practical life-orientation that is shaped by what is taken to be a self-transcending source of meaning, which involves strong normative demands, including demands of the sacred or the reverence-worthy. This definition aims to capture a widespread and important phenomenon in human life, found among both theists and non-theists, and I want to try to bring it into clearer focus by filling out each of its components. First of all, spirituality is practical; it involves what we might call “spiritual practices”: for example, practices of prayer, meditation, selfexamination, repentance, mindfulness, contemplation, worship, thanksgiving, communal living, charity, fasting, keeping the Sabbath, ritual observance, going on retreats or pilgrimages, imitating saints, habituation in virtue, and so on. Thus, spirituality in the fullest sense is more than just belief in God, or a spiritual force (“fate,” “destiny,” etc.), or the recognition of something sacred. Spirituality requires actions that will bring about and express a spiritual transformation, which involves growth toward spiritual fullness. We can also describe this as a process of sanctification (i.e., making holy), where one seeks to have a proper relationship in feeling and in action to what is seen as sacred or holy or reverence-worthy. In other words, one seeks to become more God-like or virtuous in accordance with a spiritually inflected understanding of the good life. The spiritual life in the fullest sense connects up then with the ethical life, and spiritual transformation always involves ethical transformation. Indeed, on a broad view of the ethical life, where it aims at the good life, we can say that the spiritual life is a species of the ethical life. This practical aspect of spirituality, I contend, requires that we go beyond the popular slogan of being “spiritual but not religious.” What often seems to be meant here by being “spiritual” is that one has a sense of a spiritual force (e.g., an “enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness” [Arnold : ]) or the sacred or something else of the sort that entails a rejection of reductive materialism. What often seems to be meant by being “not religious” is that one does not identify with “organized” or “institutional” religion. As understandable as it might be that some people shy away from certain forms of organized religion, I think the slogan “spiritual but not religious” is misguided. Spirituality at its best, where one is intent on spiritual growth, leads to “organized” or “institutionalized” practices and often with others as one desires to be at home in the world in a communal life centered on a shared sense of the

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sacred or the reverence-worthy. In fact, it is no surprise that many people continue to be drawn to the great world religions (often in virtue of their time-tested practices and the spiritual wisdom built up within them over the ages), even if they end up with their own eclectic or syncretistic forms of spiritual practice. “Spirituality” does sometimes have the connotation of being personal (or even individualistic) and focused on the quality of inward life, whereas “religion” can have the connotation of being communal, institutional, and focused on outward expression in rituals or practices. However, people also speak of “personal religion” and there are many communal and institutionalized forms of spirituality (Catholic, Jesuit, Benedictine, Orthodox Jewish, Islamic, Mahayana Buddhist, etc.). Moreover, as should be clear, I think inward life and outward practice go together in the best kinds of spirituality. Thus, in this chapter, I make no strong distinction between spirituality and religion. Indeed, I will be arguing for the view that we are homo religiosus by discussing the draw toward spirituality in human life. Spirituality is not just practical; it is a practical life-orientation. In other words, spirituality involves a way of seeing and directing one’s life as a whole. This relates to what has already been said about spirituality aiming at spiritual transformation. We can understand this in terms of living in a certain spiritual/ethical space: We see ourselves as moving toward or away from what we understand to be the good, which connects up with a vision of spiritual/ethical fullness. We achieve fullness (or fulfillment) to the extent that we realize the good in our lives, namely, by acquiring and exercising the virtues. Otherwise put, the degree of fullness in our lives corresponds to our “placement” relative to the good. Moreover, we define our identity or selfhood in terms of the direction of our lives with respect to the good and the degree to which we have realized it in our lives. Because this orientation and degree of achievement can change over the course of our lives, our identity will be understood in terms of an unfolding story. Spirituality is thus a way of seeking to orient one’s self better toward the good and thereby to achieve a greater placement relative to it so that one’s whole life story is a movement – albeit with ups and downs – toward greater spiritual fullness. 

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The language of spirituality and religion are in fact commonly used interchangeably, for example, when people speak both of “spiritual practice” and “religious practice” without making a distinction between the two. In this paragraph I draw on ideas found in Taylor : ch. ; : Introduction. This understanding of a life-orientation gives sense to talk about “the spiritual life” and “the ethical life.”

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Given that spirituality is concerned with the orientation of one’s life as a whole, it is also fundamentally concerned with the issue of living a meaningful life. The “meaning” that makes for a meaningful life here is, as I have said, strong evaluative meaning, that is, meaning or value (used equivalently) with which we ought to be concerned and toward which we ought to orient our lives. Hence spirituality is a practical life-orientation that is shaped by what is taken to be a self-transcending source of meaning, which involves strong normative demands. The concern here with strong evaluative meaning and for a meaningful life is, I have suggested, part of what makes us distinctively the meaning-seeking animal. In other words, we have not only “material needs,” but also “spiritual needs,” namely, needs for strong evaluative meaning, which implies a non-reductionistic view of our human form of life. We are also meaning-seeking animals in that our concern for a meaningful life is often connected with a concern for the meaning of life: We are concerned with how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things and whether there is a cosmic or ultimate source of meaning to which we must align our lives. Through spirituality then we seek to find our place in the cosmos. Finally, spirituality is a practical life-orientation that is integrally shaped by demands of the sacred or the reverence-worthy. The first thing to note is that the terms “sacred,” “holy,” and “reverence-worthy” – which I use interchangeably – are strong evaluative terms. What is sacred makes normative demands on us for certain ways of feeling and acting in relationship to it; that is, it is worthy of being valued in particular ways. For example, if we regard human life as sacred – as when we affirm the sanctity of human life – then this demands feelings of reverence and concern as well as actions that protect the inviolability of human life and promote human well-being. We can also say something similar if we regard the natural world as sacred, as many deep ecologists do. And of course if we regard God as holy – as theists do – then this calls forth feelings of reverence, awe, worship, and loving devotion and requires

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Subjectivist views of value thus cannot offer a genuine form of spirituality on this definition. Also, the phrase “what is taken to be” is meant to indicate that one could be mistaken about the selftranscending source of meaning. Further, I should note that one could speak of “sources of meaning,” but for simplicity’s sake I speak of “a source of meaning,” which, as expressive of a worldview, can be seen as inclusive of different specific sources of meaning. On material versus spiritual needs, see Cottingham : ; : –; and White : –. In my view the sacred always involves a normative requirement of inviolability, but the understanding of this can differ between things that are regarded as sacred.

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actions expressive of these feelings. This idea that the sacred (or the holy) makes normative demands on us fills out what was previously said about the spiritual life being a species of the ethical life. In the spiritual life, the good life is seen as in part constituted by a sense of the sacred. We can better understand the notion of the sacred if we consider its contrast term, the profane. Sometimes this is understood as that which violates or destroys what is sacred; that is, the profane is what desecrates. However, we should consider here another meaning of the profane: namely, the ordinary or mundane. A sense of the sacred, by contrast, involves the recognition of something extraordinary, which provokes feelings of reverence, awe, wonder, and the like. Thus, it has a sense of transcendence, as something set apart from ordinary modes of human experience (see Bellah : ch. ; Taylor b). Moreover, sacred goods (the sanctity of human life, God’s holiness, one’s own sanctification, etc.) transcend in value the goods that make up ordinary modes of human flourishing, such as individual survival, growth toward biological maturity, physical health, and ordinary enjoyments (see Taylor : Introduction and ch. ). In other words, sacred goods are constitutive of a spiritual fullness, the value of which transcends that of ordinary modes of human flourishing. Sacred goods also transcend other goods such as money, power, fame, and honor. We can observe this transcendence in value of sacred goods over all of these various goods in that sacred goods can require the sacrifice of these other goods when they come into conflict. What is sacred thus imposes especially strong demands; indeed, they exceed the demands placed on us by other strong evaluative judgments, such as those pertaining to dignity and nobility. Thus, when we speak of the sanctity of human life rather than human dignity, we capture an even stronger normative demand. We can say something similar with respect to the life of sanctity and the life of nobility. The spiritual life – or the life of sanctity – makes a particularly strong demand on us to change our lives, to bring about a thoroughgoing conversion or transformation of self in alignment with what is seen as sacred or holy (cf. Cottingham : ). 

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As should be clear from my examples, one does not need to be a theist in order to have a sense of the sacred, since God – even for theists – is not the only entity that can be considered holy, sacred, or reverence-worthy. Indeed, this should not be surprising if human beings are homo religiosus. A number of recent books defend non-theistic views of spirituality; for example, see: McGhee ; Ferry ; Solomon ; Comte-Sponville ; Nagel ; De Botton ; and Dworkin . Although the terms “fullness” and “flourishing” can be used interchangeably, “flourishing” has a biological connotation, whereas ethical/spiritual “fullness” involves strong evaluation: It is a normatively higher mode of life.

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This demand for a thoroughgoing conversion is needed in part because the spiritual life is a high aspiring kind of life; it aims at sanctification – culminating in the state of saintliness – through cultivating a proper relationship in feeling and in action to what is seen as sacred or holy. Another reason why a radical transformation of self is needed – at least according to many great spiritual traditions – is because human nature, in its untransformed state, is seen as “out of joint” (or as a mixed bag). This might be captured in terms of the problem of sin – as in the major monotheistic faiths – or the problem of selfish craving (tanha) and suffering (dukkha) – as in Buddhism – or in some other terms. In short, human life is seen as in need of redemption or salvation, and this requires a radical transformation of self. With this account of spirituality in place, I want to turn to discuss why the issue of the place of spirituality in the good life has often either been ignored or excluded from consideration by neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists and why this is problematic.

What Kind of Naturalism? On the face of it, this stance of neglect or exclusion seems problematic given the prevalence and importance of spirituality in human life throughout recorded history up to the present. Moreover, it is worth noting that this stance departs from Aristotle’s own stance, as seen in his account of the contemplative life (which I will return to discuss later). For Aristotle, understanding is something we share with God and thus it is a “divine element” – or we might say “sacred element” – within us that we should seek to actualize as far as possible: We ought not to follow the makers of proverbs and “Think human, since you are human,” or “Think mortal, since you are mortal.” Rather, as far as we can, we ought to be pro-immortal, and go to all lengths to live a life in accord with our supreme element; for however much this element may lack 

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William James writes (in a lecture on “Saintliness”): “The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves have been flown for religious ideals” ( []: ). In Buddhism, the ideal in fact is one of “emptiness” (sunyata), that is, the proper recognition that we are “not-self” (anatta). We might say that this ideal of emptiness is really a matter of transcending a lower, narrower mode of selfhood for a higher, wider, more fulfilling mode of selfhood. On this interpretation, the lower mode of selfhood is seen as a mode of being a self that is dominated by selfish craving, while the higher, wider mode of selfhood is that which is achieved in communion (affective identification) with other sentient beings, as expressed in the Buddhist ideals of compassion (karuna) and loving-kindness (metta). I cannot pursue this issue in detail here.

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Virtue and Meaning in bulk, by much more it surpasses everything in power and value. (NE X., b–a)

In fact, Aristotle thinks that the political life can also be undertaken as a divine or sacred task; he says: “while it is satisfactory to acquire and preserve the good even for an individual, it is finer and more divine to acquire and preserve it for a people and for cities” (NE I., b–). As mentioned at the outset of this chapter, I think the issue of whether there is a place for spirituality in neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics turns on how one understands the “ethical naturalism” to which neo-Aristotelians are committed. As discussed in Chapter , all neo-Aristotelians accept some version of ethical naturalism that maintains that ethics is to be founded on claims about human nature. However, many go further in adopting a quasi-scientific approach to ethics that appeals to a quasi-scientific account of human flourishing. And, we can now add, many go even further in adopting an understanding of ethical naturalism that involves an opposition to supernaturalism. We can see how all three specifications of ethical naturalism can go together in the following remarks from Hursthouse: There is, of course, room for disagreement over what we are. It might be said, for example, that what human beings are are possessors of an immortal soul through which they can come to know and love God for eternity. But “ethical naturalism” is usually thought of as not only basing ethics in some way on considerations of human nature, but also as taking human beings to be part of the natural, biological order of living things. Its standard first premise is that what human beings are is a species of rational, social animals, and thereby a species of living things – which . . . have a particular biological make-up and a natural life-cycle. . . . We might say that the fifth end [of human beings] was the preparation of our souls for the life hereafter, or that it was contemplation – the good functioning of the theoretical intellect. But to adopt the first is to go beyond naturalism towards supernaturalism, and even philosophers have baulked at following Aristotle and endorsing the second. (: , )

I will return later to take issue with the anti-contemplative stance expressed here, but for now I want to focus on the anti-supernaturalism of Hursthouse and other neo-Aristotelians as a first route into addressing the neglect of spirituality among contemporary neo-Aristotelians. It is true

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John McDowell and Martha Nussbaum take issue with the second understanding of ethical naturalism (the quasi-scientific approach), but nevertheless accept a version of the third (antisupernaturalism); see McDowell : lecture IV; : ch. ; and Nussbaum . Like Hursthouse, Philippa Foot seems to accept all three understandings of ethical naturalism in

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that some people advocate for naturalistic forms of spirituality, though these are at least in tension with the quasi-scientific (or “sideways-on”) approach to ethics mentioned above. But we also need to consider here whether a commitment to ethical naturalism should imply a rejection of the many forms of spirituality that involve an embrace of some form of “supernaturalism.” In her book God, Value, and Nature (), Fiona Ellis rightly points out that what counts as “supernaturalism” and whether it is to be regarded as objectionable will depend on what kind of “naturalism,” if any, we endorse (here we are now speaking of “naturalism” as a broad philosophical position). For instance, one prominent kind of naturalism is “strict” or “scientific” naturalism, which circumscribes reality within the bounds of what can be validated by the natural sciences. Anything that cannot be validated by the natural sciences can be regarded as “supernatural” and, thus, illusory. The problem with this kind of scientism, even for those who are not religious, is that it regards certain humanly important things as illusory that are not seen to be so from within our engaged standpoint on the world. A key instance is the experience of objective values. For those who embrace scientific naturalism, these experiences are to be explained as mere projections of our subjective states onto the world rather than as recognizing certain features of the world (e.g., other human beings) as being worthy of our concern and as making demands on us. Thus, it endorses a stance of disenchantment. Many philosophers, however, are not satisfied with this sort of scientific naturalism and thus seek to articulate and defend a more expansive form of naturalism – sometimes also called “broad” or “liberal” naturalism – that can accommodate a realm of objective values that falls outside the purview of the natural sciences. As we have seen, McDowell is a prominent

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Natural Goodness. An interesting case is Alasdair MacIntyre, who is a theist but he does not address the place of spirituality in the good life in his most extended defense of a neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalist perspective in Dependent Rational Animals, which endorses the first two understandings of ethical naturalism. However, his theistic commitments are more explicit in his more recent work, as will be seen later. See fn. . Following Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, it is more accurate to call this ontological scientific naturalism, which “holds that the entities posited by acceptable scientific explanations are the only genuine entities that there are.” De Caro and Macarthur contrast this with methodological (or epistemological) scientific naturalism, which “holds that it is only by following the methods of the natural sciences – or, at a minimum, the empirical methods of a posteriori inquiry – that one arrives at genuine knowledge” (a: ). Of course, these types of scientific naturalism can also be combined. See De Caro and Macarthur (eds.) b, ; and Goetz and Taliaferro .

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example. He takes issue not only with scientific naturalism but also with the quasi-scientific form of ethical naturalism that is endorsed by Hursthouse, Foot, and MacIntyre and which emphasizes a “sideways-on” view of human life in its appeals to a quasi-scientific account of human nature and human flourishing. At the same time, McDowell wants to avoid supernaturalism not only of a theistic sort but also, as we saw in Chapter , in the form of “rampant platonism,” where “the rational structure within which meaning comes into view is independent of anything merely human, so that the capacity of our minds to resonate to it looks occult or magical.” Instead, he endorses a “naturalized platonism” based on his account of second nature (i.e., our cultivated forms of thought, action, and sensibility). “The demands of reason,” he says, “are essentially such that a human upbringing can open a human being’s eyes to them.” McDowell’s key claim here is that this expansive naturalism of second nature allows us to “keep nature as it were partially enchanted, but without lapsing into pre-scientific superstition or a rampant platonism.” In God, Value, and Nature, Ellis’ crucial move is to exploit the expansive naturalist’s argument for an expanded view of nature as including a domain of objective values for the sake of a further expansion in the direction of the divine, that is, toward a “theistic naturalism,” which means allowing for an even fuller kind of re-enchantment in which we are responsive to God. Like in the case of value, it could be claimed that the idea of responsiveness to God is “intolerably odd” or “spooky.” In response, Ellis develops a theistic version of McDowell’s idea of second nature. She writes: [We] ourselves, qua natural beings, are already open to God. That is to say that the supernatural – which here embraces both God and His communicative action – is not a spooky superstructure, extrinsic or added on to a nature which is complete in itself. Rather, it is a quality or dimension which enriches or perfects the natural world. This grants us the right to allow that man can be inwardly transformed by God. And precisely because this transformation serves to enhance his natural being – given that we are now working with a broader conception of nature – we avoid the implication that such divine action spells the destruction of man, severing any connection he might have with ordinary human life. (: )

From this passage we can note that there are two main aspects to Ellis’ theistic naturalism. First, it involves a way of thinking about the transcendence and immanence of God (see : ch. ). For Ellis, theistic naturalism is not a form of pantheism, which denies the transcendence of God and conflates God with the world. Unlike the case of value, God is

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“wholly other” and distinct from the world. However, God is not so radically separate that “God ceases to be the ‘most real thing in the world’ and becomes something whose existence is . . . irrelevant to our humanity” (). Ellis goes on to remark: [God] remains radically distinct from anything within the world even whilst retaining the most intimate connection with it. In one sense then, the natural world stands opposed to something supernatural, but this something is not a mere addition to the world which can be rejected whilst leaving everything else in its place. Rather, it is that without which the world would cease to be and without which we would cease to be properly human. ()

God is seen here as the ontological source of the world and as that which gives everything its “definitive sense” (). In short, the world is essentially “God-involving” such that the natural and the supernatural are intimately connected (). I will not explore further here the tricky issue of how the immanence and transcendence of God are to be understood, but I think Ellis’ theistic naturalism does provide a helpful framework for thinking through these issues. The term “theistic naturalism” can seem to suggest a pantheistic viewpoint, but Ellis takes care to avoid such a view, as we saw above. The term “supernaturalism,” it should be noted, is also problematic as a stand-in for theism because it suggests only God’s transcendence and fails to capture the theistic belief that God is in some sense immanent within the natural world as well. Additionally, the term “supernaturalism” fails to register the typical theistic view that God also has a nature. Setting these issues aside, I want to highlight the other main aspect of Ellis’ theistic naturalism, which involves a claim about our human capacities for responsiveness to God and for being thereby transformed and fulfilled. We might say that she is putting forward here a view of human beings as homo religiosus. I want to develop further this idea of our being homo religiosus by discussing the draw toward spirituality in human life. We will see that this does require that we go beyond scientific naturalism and quasi-scientific forms of ethical naturalism in the direction of an expansive naturalism. Later I will also consider the draw to a specifically theistic form of spirituality in human life.

Human Beings as Homo Religiosus In claiming that human beings are homo religiosus I mean to suggest that the draw to the spiritual life is something perennial in the human condition and therefore we should not expect religion to go away. We should thus

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begin by confronting those who have suggested otherwise. For instance, there is a common view of secularization that regards it as a process involving the ineluctable decline of religious faith and practice due primarily to modern science, especially Darwinian science, which, so it is claimed, has made theistic religion (and other traditional forms of religion, though the focus is on theistic religion) unbelievable for those who are welleducated and honest with themselves. This can be called the “death of God” view of secularization in honor of Nietzsche’s famous “God is dead” declaration, which he takes as meaning that “the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable” ( [/]: §, §). Later he writes: “Looking at nature as if it were proof of the goodness and governance of a god; interpreting history in honor of some divine reason, as a continual testimony of a moral world order and ultimate moral purposes; . . . that is all over now, that has man’s conscience against it, that is considered indecent and dishonest by every more refined conscience” (§). However, this “death of God” view seems premature in light of the discussion of cosmic fine-tuning in Chapter . Though perhaps it receives support from attempts to explain away religion by offering a deflationary genealogical account of religious belief and practice. One of the most famous of such accounts is that of David Hume in his Natural History of Religion, where he maintains that religious belief originally arose out of fear of unknown causes of the various things (unpredictable weather, disease, war, etc.) that affect human well-being. Human beings in their “primitive” state imagined invisible person-like powers that were responsible for these causes and they hoped to influence them through prayers, religious rituals, and the like (Hume  []: sects. II–III). Monotheism, it is claimed, arose out of such polytheism because of attempts to outdo others in the adulation one gives to a particular god (in order to curry favor), which eventually leads to the monotheistic view of God as the supreme Being who created the universe (sect. VI). The key point, for Hume, is that religious belief – or at least one common variety of it – arose not from reason but from human weakness 

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For another well-known “death of God” view, see Weber  [], which is where the phrase “the disenchantment of the world” is coined. For a more recent sociological expression, consider these remarks from Steve Bruce: “In so far as I can imagine an endpoint [to secularization], it would not be self-conscious irreligion; you have to care too much about religion to be irreligious. It would be widespread indifference (what Weber called being religiously unmusical); no socially significant shared religion; and religious ideas being no more common than would be the case if all minds were wiped blank and people began from scratch to think about the world and their place in it” (: ; quoted in Taylor : ; cf. Taylor on the “death of God” view at , , –, –).

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and vulnerability, which serves to discredit such belief (see Russell and Kraal : sect. VIII). We see a similar sort of view in Freud’s account of religious belief as “infantile” in virtue of arising out of a desire for security or protection in the face of vulnerability. Whereas the young child seeks protection through his or her parents (especially the father, according to Freud), the infantile theistic adult seeks protection in the face of continued human vulnerability by projecting a supreme parental figure: namely, God (see Freud  []: –, –;  []: –). In describing the religious person as “infantile,” Freud clearly means this as a critique and as a contrast to the properly adult stance of courageously facing up to the harshness of reality without any form of existential consolation. But of course seeking existential consolation is an adult rather than infant activity and it is only improper if we think that all such existential consolation is illusory. That it is illusory in Freud’s view is suggested by his talk of projection (or “personification” or “wish-fulfilment”). But this does not resolve the question of whether God is merely a projection, since after all there may be an objective correlate to the subject’s projection of an external source of existential consolation. As Cottingham says in response to Freud: “a religious believer can equally maintain that since our true destiny lies in union with our creator, we will naturally feel insecure and restless until we find Him” (: ). More recently there have been numerous attempts to explain (and explain away) religious belief and practice through evolutionary and cognitive psychology. Some argue that religious belief and practice are adaptive, for example, because they provide a social “glue” that enhances group fitness (see Wilson ; cf. Durkheim  []). Others argue that religious belief and practice are not adaptive (and perhaps are even maladaptive; see Dawkins : ; : ); rather they are by-products (i.e., “spandrels”) of that which is adaptive. A common appeal here is to a “hypersensitive agency detection device,” or “HADD,” as part of our cognitive faculties (see Dennett : ff; Murray ; Schloss : ff ). The suggestion is that the human brain is disposed to interpret agency where it can appear that agency might be operative. HADD is evolutionarily advantageous: for example, if one is apt to interpret the rustle in the bush as a possible predator, then this can help to ensure one’s survival. It might just be the wind, but better safe than sorry. It is thought that HADD can help to account for widespread belief in ghosts, fairies, and the like; and, so the argument goes, it can also account for the widespread belief in gods or God, as the beings or Being responsible for the forces that govern our existence (we can see this as an

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updated version of Hume’s account). Because HADD gives rise to many false positives, it is often suggested that this account undermines the rationality of theistic belief. But of course this does not necessarily follow. A lot depends on how generally reliable we think our cognitive faculties are; if they are generally unreliable then this would encourage a more general skepticism that would also affect the beliefs of evolutionary naturalists (see Plantinga : ch. ). A lot also depends on whether we think there are other reasons for believing in God, for example, reasons related to cosmic fine-tuning, religious and moral experience, etc. But the main point that I want to make is that the foregoing attempts to explain (and explain away) religion take an outsider view of the phenomenon they are seeking to explain and thereby fail to capture adequately what it is like to live a spiritual life and what it is like to be drawn to such a life, which I have described in terms of a practical life-orientation shaped by a self-transcending source of meaning, which involves strong normative demands, including demands of the sacred or the reverence-worthy. In other words, they fail to capture the relationship between our being homo religiosus and the meaning-seeking animal. 

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These accounts also overlook a key moment in human cultural development that has been called the “Axial” shift (following the work of Karl Jaspers), which marks a transition from “early religion” (i.e., “tribal” and “archaic” religion) to “higher religion” (i.e., “Axial” and “post-Axial” religion). One of the distinctive features of early religion is its predominant concern with promoting ordinary human flourishing through invoking or placating the powers that be (see Taylor : ; recall Hume’s account of polytheism). What is remarkable is that such concern came radically into question during the “Axial age” (c. – BCE) when there developed various forms of “higher religion,” seemingly independent of each other, as we see with Confucius in China, the Buddha in India, Socrates and Plato in Greece, and the Prophets in Israel (: ; Bellah : –). While in early religions the transcendent realm could be both favorable and unfavorable to our good (hence the need for placation), in higher religions it “becomes unambiguously affirmative of this good,” though this good is reconceived. Moreover, while in early religions spiritual realities were embedded in the cosmos, in higher religions the transcendent becomes viewed as either “beyond or outside of the cosmos, as with the Creator God of Genesis, or the Nirvana of Buddhism” or still within the cosmos but “it loses its original ambivalent character, and exhibits an order of unalloyed goodness, as with the ‘Heaven’, guarantor of just rule in Chinese thought, or the order of Ideas of Plato, whose key is the Good” (Taylor : ). All of this is connected to revisionary accounts of the human good: “The highest human goal can no longer just be to flourish, as it was before. Either a new goal is posited, of a salvation which takes us beyond what we usually understand as human flourishing. Or else Heaven, or the Good, lays the demand on us to imitate or embody its unambiguous goodness, and hence to alter the mundane order of things down here. This may, indeed usually does, involve flourishing on a wider scale, but our own flourishing (as individual, family, clan, or tribe) can no longer be our highest goal. And of course, this may be expressed by a redefinition of what ‘flourishing’ consists in” (–). As Jaspers says, in the Axial age “[humanity], as we know [it] today, came into being” (quoted in Bellah : ). Likewise, Robert Bellah writes: “the figures of the axial age – Confucius, Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, the Greek philosophers – are alive to us, are contemporary with us, in a way that no earlier figures are. Our

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I believe this is also overlooked in the “death of God” view of secularization. Once we reject the idea that science refutes theism (as I believe we should in light of the issues discussed in Chapter ), we can see that the “God question” is not going away because theism is able to provide one with an existentially satisfying self-transcending source of meaning (I will discuss this later in the section “Theistic Spirituality”). But this means we need a better understanding of the condition of secularity. In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor puts forward what I think is a better account: Secularity (in the West) is not simply a condition of decline in religious faith and practice or a condition where religion has been removed from public life (though both of these may be true in some cases); rather, it should be seen primarily as a situation where religious life is regarded as “one option among others,” as contrasted with “a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God.” Taylor thus maintains: “An age or society [is] secular or not, in virtue of the conditions of experience of and search for the spiritual” (: ). He also describes this as the experience of and search for “fullness”: “We all see our lives, and/or the space wherein we live our lives, as having a certain moral/ spiritual shape. Somewhere, in some activity, or condition, lies a fullness, a richness; that is, in that place (activity or condition), life is fuller, richer, deeper, more worth while, more admirable, more what it should be” (). It is in large part because of the human concern for fullness or a deeper sense of meaning in life that Taylor does not think religion or a concern for “transcendence” (namely, God or some other “enduring power, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness”) will go away. The continued draw to transcendence in our secular age, he thinks, can be seen in the “malaise of immanence,” that is, in the feeling of emptiness, flatness, loss of meaning, or lack of deeper resonance that people experience within a completely immanent, naturalistic framework, especially where there are no higher goals for human life beyond promoting ordinary human

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cultural world and the great traditions that still in so many ways define us, all originate in the axial age” (: –). Thus, my account here of our being the meaning-seeking animal needs to be understood with reference to how we have come to understand what is distinctively human as the result of our cultural development, which brought out what was latent in our humanity and seems to have been inevitable (as evidenced by the separate development of the main Axial cases). A key aspect of this cultural evolution, as discussed by Bellah, is the development of “theoretic culture,” which was preceded by “mythic culture,” and before that “mimetic culture,” and before that “episodic culture” (: xviii–xix, –, –). This theoretic culture enables us to raise theoretical questions about the world, the meaning of life, and the transcendent. The following could be seen as a response to Steve Bruce’s remarks about religious indifference in fn. .

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flourishing (–, –). We might ask, in the words of the famous song by Peggy Lee, “Is that all there is?” (). Taylor also thinks that the continued draw to a religious framework of meaning can be seen when we ask about the “meaning of meaning,” that is, when we ask the metaquestion about what all the particular projects and relationships that we are engaged in and find meaningful amount to. In other words, we are asking: “what is the meaning of it all?” (; cf. –). As I have argued, concern for meaning in life ultimately needs to be connected with a conception of a meaningful life and also the meaning of life, that is, an ultimate or cosmic source of meaning that enables us to find our place in the grand scheme of things. A key take away here is that human beings as meaning-seeking animals are not simply content with ordinary human flourishing (understood in the quasi-scientific way), but rather they seek to orient their lives in light of a self-transcending source of strong evaluative meaning that can make for a meaningful life, that is, for the experience of “fullness.” In considering here the strong evaluative meanings we live by and after which we seek, it is important to emphasize again the role of the sacred (or the holy or the reverence-worthy) in drawing human beings toward the spiritual life and a deeper sense of meaning in life. This has been neglected by neoAristotelians, often because of their quasi-scientific (or “sideways-on”) view of human life. But it has also been neglected by some, such as John McDowell, who also question the quasi-scientific approach and who go some way toward accounting for our first-personal strong evaluative standpoint (e.g., by emphasizing the strong evaluative category of the noble). The experience of the sacred (or the holy or the reverence-worthy), like other strong evaluative experiences, is made possible for us because of our human distinctiveness as language animals (to recall the discussion in Chapter ). Through language – as part of our acquired second nature – we can possess concepts like the sacred and the noble that light up the world for us in a strong evaluative manner such that we experience it in a fundamentally different way from non-linguistic animals: From our firstpersonal evaluative standpoint we experience the world in light of a conceptual framework whereby certain things are seen as worthy of our concern and fit to be valued in strong evaluative terms; that is, the world makes normative demands on us. We can say that this enables a “transfiguration” of the world. On this point, consider the following passage from John Cottingham where he describes a sense of the sacred that is found in common human experiences of natural beauty, great works of art, and the moral demand:

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[These experiences] involve not so much a revelation of supernatural entities as a heightening, an intensification, that transforms the way in which we experience the world. Terms like “transfiguration” or “epiphany” come to mind here, but not in the sense that there is necessarily an explicit invocation of metaphysical objects that transcend ordinary experience, but rather because the categories of our mundane life undergo a radical shift: there is a sudden irradiation that discloses a beauty and goodness, a meaning, that was before occluded. (: –)

While theists might interpret such experiences as “intimations of the divine reality that is the source of all truth, beauty, and goodness,” nontheists can also have these experiences; they are part of “our ordinary human birthright” (). In either case, the recognition of something sacred (or reverenceworthy), as something deeply meaningful and set apart from ordinary modes of human experience, will play a central guiding role in our practical life-orientations because of the especially strong demands it places on our lives. And within such a life-orientation a certain virtue will be crucial to human well-being that has tended to be neglected or seen as no virtue at all: namely, the virtue of piety, which, as I understand it, is the virtue concerned with a proper relationship in feeling and in action to the sacred (or the reverence-worthy). It is worth noting that Rosalind Hursthouse does briefly discuss the possibility of piety as a virtue in her version of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism. She allows that piety helps religious believers to foster other virtues that promote the four naturalistic ends (discussed in Chapters  and ), but she says: [In] so far as their piety prompts them to pray, to refrain from blasphemy, to go to church, to spend time thinking about God and trying to get closer to an understanding of Him, the atheist, by her own lights, must think that they are not acting rationally, because the right reasons they think they have . . . for doing these things, are no reasons at all. Though the character trait indeed fosters the four ends, it does not do so in the way characteristic of our species, namely in a rational way. Moreover, although . . . piety undoubtedly brings great joy and serenity to its possessors, no atheist can regard such joy as “characteristic of human beings”, that is, as something that reason can endorse. . . . Hence, employing the normative idea of “our characteristic way of going on”, our atheist will conclude that piety is not, after all, a virtue. (: )

It is not clear why the atheist must see the theist as “not acting rationally,” since one might think that reasonable people could come to different conclusions about ultimate questions, such as whether God exists or not. But the bigger problem – which is illustrative of the problems that I have

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identified with Hursthouse’s quasi-scientific form of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism – is that she narrowly construes piety as theistic piety and misses the more fundamental concern of piety with a proper relationship to the sacred or the reverence-worthy, which is a type of strong evaluative meaning that plays a central role in human life as understood from within. But this is not the only oversight. There is another area where I believe Hursthouse and other contemporary neo-Aristotelians neglect the significance of spirituality in human life and its connection with our being meaning-seeking animals, and this is in their “baulking,” as we saw Hursthouse put it, at regarding contemplation as being of central importance for a well-lived human life. I want to turn now to take issue with this anticontemplative stance.

The Contemplative Life Hursthouse does not defend her anti-contemplative stance; she simply assumes its correctness and focuses instead, as many neo-Aristotelians do, on the importance of practical reason for a well-lived human life. In describing this stance as “anti-contemplative” I am not suggesting that those who hold it are against contemplation being important for some human beings (e.g., for themselves as professional philosophers); rather, they are against regarding it as being integrally – let alone preeminently – important for a well-lived human life. This is what I want to take issue with here. In doing so I am not seeking to defend a particular interpretation of whether Aristotle thinks that the best human life would involve only contemplation if it were humanly possible (the “intellectualist” reading), or would involve a combination of the contemplative life and the political life, that is, the life of virtuous activity in human community

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For more on piety and impiety, see Diamond  and Roberts . Paul Woodruff also defends reverence (i.e., piety) as a virtue for theists and non-theists alike. But he tends to understand it in a way that makes it more like the virtue of humility. He writes: “Reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control – God, truth, justice, nature, even death. . . . Simply put, reverence is the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like gods” (: ). In my view, the virtue of piety involves awe or reverence for what is sacred and not simply for what is outside our control; indeed, it sets limits on our will with the knowledge that we can (and some people do) transgress these limits.

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(the “inclusivist” reading). I will draw on some of what Aristotle says, but the aim here is to advance a view of the contemplative life that I think is integrally important for a well-lived human life. Indeed, I want to argue that the contemplative life is centrally important for the spiritual life and our draw to the contemplative life is also indicative of our being homo religiosus. I should note that in speaking of “the contemplative life” I mean a life where contemplation has a central role and which leads to a transfigured vision of the world and our place within it. Such a life is compatible with a life of activity in human community and thus I am myself taking an “inclusivist” position on the relationship between the active life in human community and the contemplative life. Indeed, I think when we engage in the active life, the ideal is to be “contemplatives in action.” I should also note that when I speak of “the active life” I will mean this in a narrow sense where it is primarily concerned with productive activity; but contemplation of course is also a kind of activity. I want to focus on two senses of contemplation that I think are important for the spiritual life and therefore for human life: The first is equivalent to philosophizing (i.e., wisdom-seeking) and the second has to do with appreciative attention to, or a loving gaze or beholding of, something worthy of love and appreciation. I want to suggest that these two senses should be regarded as connected, as the first should lead to the second, and ultimately, insofar as there is wisdom to be found, philosophy when properly practiced should lead to a transfigured vision of and appreciative attention to reality as a whole. As this suggests, we are concerned with more than just “the good functioning of the theoretical intellect,” as Hursthouse puts it. Let us begin with the first sense of contemplation. Here the contemplative life is “the examined life” or the philosophical life: We seek to reflect on or examine our lives, which includes examining the world and our place within it. We are seeking wisdom, that is, holistic understanding that shapes a conception of the good life (i.e., a meaningful, worthwhile life) and is only fully realized when it is embodied in living it out. 

 

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On this debate, see, for example, the essays by Thomas Nagel, J. L. Akrill, and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty in Rorty (ed.) ; see also Cooper ; Kenny : chs.  and ; and Nussbaum  []: –. This is a motto of the Jesuits. These two senses of contemplation track with Josef Pieper’s appeal to the distinction between ratio and intellectus: “Ratio is the power of discursive thought, of searching and re-searching, abstracting, refining, and concluding [cf. Latin dis-currere, ‘to run to and fro’], whereas intellectus refers to the ability of ‘simply looking’ (simplex intuitus), to which the truth presents itself as a landscape presents itself to the eye” ( []: –).

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Philosophy so understood, I want to suggest, is a profoundly human endeavor as it is connected to our being the meaning-seeking animal, and when properly pursued it is also a humanizing endeavor, that is, it realizes an integrally important feature of our humanity. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates overstated the matter when he famously said that “an unexamined life is not worth living” (a), at least if by “unexamined life” he meant a life without much examination. Surely one can live a worthwhile life without much examination of his or her life: for example, by being a good friend, spouse, and parent; living a morally decent life; engaging in practices of religious devotion; engaging in productive work; etc. But I also think there is something important missing in a life without a significant place given for contemplation. What Socrates should have said, I think, is that an unexamined life (i.e., a life without a good deal of examination) is a shame, in the sense that it is a regrettable failure – whether due to social and economic circumstances or individual choice or some combination of these factors – to realize something important and distinctive to our humanity. But it is questionable that any normally functioning adult human being lives a completely unexamined life. All such mature human beings at least live some answer to many of the grand traditional philosophical questions, such as: How ought I to live? Is there a meaning to human life? What is the ultimate nature of reality? Is there a God? Why is the world “out of joint” and can suffering be redeemed? What is true and how do I know it? etc. We all live according to what Mary Midgley calls “world-pictures” (or what I have called “cosmic outlooks”), that is, “perspectives, imaginative visions of how the whole world is.” The business of philosophy, she rightly observes, is something that concerns everybody since it “aims to bring together those aspects of life that have not yet been properly connected so as to make a more coherent, more workable world-picture” (: ). In other words, the main task of philosophy is “to examine our life as a whole, to make sense of it, to locate its central confusions and resolve its big conflicts” (). Philosophy is thus not merely one academic subject amongst others, but rather “it is something we are all doing all the time, a continuous, background activity which is likely to go badly if we don’t attend to it” (). The idea here is that we all have some awareness of the answers we live to the ultimate questions of human existence, and to some 

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Compare Chesterton: “Philosophy is merely thought that has been thought out. . . . [We have] no alternative, except between being influenced by thought that has been thought out and being influenced by thought that has not been thought out” ( []: ).

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extent we reflect on such answers and try to make sure that our worldpicture is a coherent, rationally defensible one. The discipline of philosophy aims to extend this reflection and make it more systematic. And in the process of articulating and rationally defending a particular vision of the world and of our place within it, we can be led to a more refined and enriched understanding. Human beings are often forced by the circumstances of life to reflect on the world-pictures by which they live and which give meaning to their lives. When we confront some hardship or have an experience that is puzzling or disconcerting we can be forced to step back from our engaged modes of experience and reflect on our lives and the world around us and try to make sense of it all. As Aristotle famously remarks: “It is because of wonder [or puzzlement] that human beings undertake philosophy, both now and at its origins,” and they do so in order no longer to feel “at a loss” in the world. In other words, through philosophy we seek holistic understanding (i.e., wisdom) in order that we can come to feel at home in the world. I have suggested that such seeking to be at home in the world through philosophy (i.e., wisdom-seeking) is an important human endeavor, but I also want to suggest that it can be understood as an important spiritual endeavor. Through philosophy, so understood, we seek to orient ourselves in the world – which is the opposite of being “at a loss” or in a state of existential vertigo – in light of a self-transcending source of meaning that makes normative demands on us, including demands of the sacred or the reverence-worthy. In other words, philosophy, properly understood as an integrally important human endeavor, should be regarded as a “spiritual exercise” and part of a spiritual “way of life,” in line with the ancient conception of philosophy, as has been discussed by Pierre Hadot. He writes: The [ancient] philosophical school . . . corresponds, above all, to the choice of a certain way of life and existential option which demands from the individual a total change of lifestyle, a conversion of one’s entire being, and ultimately a certain desire to be and to live in a certain way. This existential option, in turn, implies a certain vision of the world, and the task of philosophical discourse will therefore be to reveal and rationally justify this existential option, as well as this representation of the world. (: ) 

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Metaphysics I., b–; the translation is Nussbaum’s, in Nussbaum  []: . These are the first lines of the Metaphysics: “All men desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses; for even apart from their usefulness they are loved for themselves; and above all others the sense of sight” (I., a–).

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 Elsewhere he writes:

Under normal circumstances, the only state accessible to [human beings] is philo-sophia: the love of, and progress toward, wisdom. For this reason, spiritual exercises must be taken up again and again, in an ever-renewed effort. . . . To the same extent that the philosophical life is equivalent to the practice of spiritual exercises, it is also a tearing away from everyday life. It is a conversion, a total transformation of one’s vision, life-style, and behavior. (: )

In referring to the philosophical life (i.e., the examined life in pursuit of wisdom) as “equivalent to the practice of spiritual exercises” and as demanding “a conversion of one’s entire being,” we are encouraged to see a close connection between the spiritual life and the philosophical life. And in both passages we see how much this centers on coming to a “certain vision of the world.” This brings us to the second sense of contemplation, which I want to suggest is the most important sense, especially as concerns being at home in the world. As mentioned above, this second sense of contemplation – which is more in keeping with the meaning of the Greek term for contemplation, theōria – involves appreciative attention to, or a loving gaze or beholding of, something worthy of love and appreciation. So understood, we can contemplate (i.e., lovingly behold or appreciatively attend to) the lovableness of a significant other (e.g., a spouse, a friend, or a child), virtuous character, the beauty in nature or in a great work of art, the order of the universe, and the holiness of God. Iris Murdoch, building on Simone Weil’s work on attention (especially in the form of prayer) for a secular context, discusses the importance of 

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In his glossary entry on theōria, Terence Irwin says that the verb form, theōrein, is “cognate with theasthai (‘gaze on’) and indicates having something in clear view and attending to it” (Aristotle  [c.  BC]: ). The phrase “loving gaze” is Josef Pieper’s, who writes: “‘contemplation’ means a loving gaze, the beholding of the beloved” ( []: ). Elsewhere he writes: “What distinguishes – in both senses of that word – contemplation is . . . this: it is a knowing which is inspired by love. ‘Without love there would be no contemplation.’ Contemplation is a loving attainment of awareness” ( []: ). The phrase “appreciative attention” is drawn from Talbot Brewer: “[Contemplation] denotes understanding considered as active and attentive appreciation rather than a mere capacity for recognition of truths” (: ; see also , , –, , –). See “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Weil . Weil writes: “The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer. . . . Of course, school exercises only develop a lower kind of attention. Nevertheless, they are extremely effective in increasing the power of attention that will be available at the time of prayer, on condition that they are carried out with a view to this purpose and this purpose alone” ().

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appreciative attention for the moral life. She writes: “[We] can all receive moral help by focusing our attention upon things which are valuable; virtuous people, great art, . . . the idea of goodness itself. . . . [Our] ability to act well ‘when the time comes’ depends partly, perhaps largely, upon the quality of our habitual objects of attention” (: ; cf. ). In other words, acting well depends on knowing what values are at issue and which are most important, and whether we know this depends on our habits of appreciative attention. She goes on to cite Philippians : (KJV): “whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.” For Murdoch, the chief moral help that we receive from such appreciative attention is overcoming our selfishness and seeing reality as it is (including the reality of beauty and goodness). She especially emphasizes the appreciation of beauty in art or nature here, since it is “not only (for all its difficulties) the easiest available spiritual exercise; it is also a completely adequate entry into (and not just analogy of ) the good life, since it is the checking of selfishness in the interest of seeing the real” (: ). Murdoch provides an example of suddenly coming to observe a kestrel, which causes a change in her consciousness from a previously anxious and resentful state of mind to a self-forgetful appreciative attention to the independent existence of another being (). Although observing the kestrel in this case was a happenstance, she notes that this kind of appreciative attention is something that we can deliberately practice and cultivate as a habit; it can be a kind of spiritual exercise. Such talk of appreciative attention as a “spiritual exercise” suggests that it is important not only for the moral life but also for the spiritual life. Indeed, it is suggestive of a practical life-orientation involving a selftranscending source of meaning or value. But is appreciative attention to the independent existence of a kestrel or a great work of art or something similar by itself spiritually enough? I think not. As discussed earlier in this chapter, through spirituality we seek to find our place in the cosmos, that is, to be at home in the world. So we need to ask: Can contemplation, understood as appreciative attention or loving and affirmative beholding, play a role here? More specifically, is it possible to adopt an affirmative and appreciative vision of the world as a whole, which can make us feel at home in the world and glad to have been born even in spite of all the hardships of human life? In other words, can it be part of a cosmodicy, that is, a justification of life in the world as good, meaningful, and worthwhile even

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in the face of evil and suffering? I believe that it can and it is helpful to begin by considering Aristotle on the matter. In the Eudemian Ethics, in one of the most stirring passages in all of his works, Aristotle raises the question of whether it is good to have been born rather than never to have been, and he seeks to address it by asking: “what of all that is found in living is desirable, and what, if attained, would satisfy our desire” (EE I., b–)? Addressing this question is important because “there are many consequences of life that make men fling away life, such as disease, excessive pain, [etc.], so that it is clear that, if one were given the power of choice, not to be born at all would, as far at least as these reasons go, have been desirable” (b–). Aristotle also maintains that merely living for pleasure is not enough to make non-existence not preferable to life (b–). The human heart needs something more. He makes a similar point in Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics when he says (in a passage already quoted in Chapter ): “Happiness . . . is not found in amusement; for it would be absurd if the end were amusement, and our lifelong efforts and sufferings aimed at amusing ourselves. . . . Rather, it seems correct to amuse ourselves so that we can do something serious” (NE X., b–; emphasis added). In the passage under discussion from the Eudemian Ethics, Aristotle appeals to the wisdom of Anaxagoras in order to address the challenge posed: “And so they tell us that Anaxagoras answered a man who was raising problems of this sort and asking why one should choose rather to be born than not by saying ‘for the sake of contemplating the heavens and the whole order of the universe’” (EE I., a–). This is of course Aristotle’s own view. Indeed, at the end of the Eudemian Ethics he puts forward a contemplative ideal as a normative standard for a good human life: “What choice, then, or possession of the natural goods – whether bodily goods, wealth, friends, or other things – will most produce the contemplation of god, that choice or possession is best; that is the noblest standard, but any that through deficiency or excess hinders one from the contemplation and service of god is bad” (EE VII., b–; cf. NE X., a–). For Aristotle, God is the most worthy object of appreciative attention, and contemplating God is also a way of contemplating the whole order of the universe, since God is the source of such order. The important 



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I have substituted “contemplating” for “viewing” here (eis theōrein: for the sake of contemplating [or viewing or beholding]). This is how H. Rackman translates the text in the Loeb Classical Library version. See Metaphysics VI., XII.–; cf. Physics XIII..

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suggestion here in this discussion is that there is a contemplative ideal that is said to provide us with a reason for why it is good to have been born and so allows us to be at home in the world. However, Aristotle does not think – given the limitations of human life – that we could achieve perfection in the contemplative life; nevertheless, as we saw above, he thinks we should strive as far as possible to live out the contemplative life (as it is a god-like activity; see NE X., b–a), and he even says that “happiness extends just as far as contemplation extends, and the more someone contemplates, the happier he is” (NE X., b–). We see a similar view advanced by Aquinas in his account of the beatific vision (i.e., the loving vision of God) as the ultimate end of human life, though unlike Aristotle he allows for personal friendship with God (caritas) and also for perfection in contemplation, though it must await the afterlife. Here and now we see through a glass darkly ( Corinthians :), and so we cannot be fully at home in the world. But in an important way, we can at least be partly at home. We can have an “imperfect happiness” here and now, and Aquinas says that this “consists first and principally in contemplation, but secondarily, in an operation of the practical intellect directing human actions and passions” (ST I–II, q. , a. ). Josef Pieper refers to this contemplation that is possible here and now as “earthly contemplation,” of which he writes: [The] object of the beatific vision can be glimpsed, however imperfectly, by means of earthly contemplation. Because the world is a creation, creatura, God is present in it. . . . Only the vision of something we love makes us happy, and thus it is integral to the concept of contemplation that it represents a vision kindled by the act of turning towards something in love and affirmation. . . . How splendid water is, or a rose, a tree, an apple! But as a rule we do not say such things . . . without implying, to some degree, an affirmation which transcends the immediate object of our praise and the literal meaning of our words – an assent touching the foundation of the world. In the midst of our workaday cares we raise our heads and unexpectedly gaze into a face turned towards us, and in that instant we see: everything which is, is good, worthy of love, and loved by God. . . . [Despite] everything there is peace, wholeness, and splendor in the depths of things. ([]: , )

Here we see the connection between contemplation and cosmodicy: Through contemplation we can come to see the world as a whole – in spite of the evil and suffering that exists – as good and worthwhile, as worthy of love and affirmation. Of course, this depends on our overall worldview, as Pieper notes: “[No] one who thinks of the world as at

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bottom unredeemable can accept the idea that contemplation is the supreme happiness of man. Neither happiness nor contemplation is possible except on the basis of consent to the world as a whole. This consent has little to do with ‘optimism.’ It is a consent that may be granted amid tears and the extremes of horror” ( []: ). If we are in fact able to see the world as a whole as good and as redeemable, that is, if we are able to turn toward the world in love and affirmation, then this can enable us to persevere in the practice of virtue even in the face of great hardship (to recall the issue raised in Chapter  about virtue and the problem of loss) and it is possible to feel at home in the world, even if some alienation or not-at-home-ness remains. Being at home in the world is a matter of being at leisure. As Aristotle puts it: “happiness seems to be found in leisure; for we deny ourselves leisure so that we can be at leisure, and fight wars so that we can be at peace” (NE X., b–; cf. P VII., a–b; VIII., b–). Leisure is not mere idleness; rather, it is a condition in which we “do something serious” for its own sake and which makes for happiness, and this serious activity should include, above all, the activity of contemplation, in both senses discussed, but primarily in the second sense of appreciative attention (see P VII., a–). In Leisure, the Basis of Culture, Pieper says that in fact idleness – just as much as industriousness – is a lack of leisure ( []: ). Leisure, properly understood, “is the disposition of receptive understanding, contemplative beholding, and immersion – in the real” (). Pieper goes on to say: [Leisure] is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit. The inner joyfulness of the person who is celebrating . . . belongs to the very core of what we mean by leisure . . . Leisure is only possible in the assumption that man is not only in harmony with himself . . ., but also that he is in agreement with the world and its meaning. Leisure lives on affirmation. . . . And as it is written in the Scriptures, God saw, when “he rested from all the works that He had made” that everything was good, very good (Genesis , ), just so the leisure of man includes within itself a celebratory, approving, lingering gaze of the inner eye on the reality of creation. ()

This account of leisure brings to mind the spiritual practice of keeping the Sabbath in the Jewish and Christian traditions, which is a prominent 

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Irwin writes: “When Aristotle speaks of leisure, he does not refer to idleness or inactivity, but to action that we gladly take on for its own sake. When we ‘deny ourselves leisure’ (lit., ‘are unleisured’, ascholein), we take on actions that we engage in reluctantly, for the sake of some further end” (Aristotle  [c.  BC]: ).

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example of being at leisure. In keeping the Sabbath, one seeks to imitate God’s own example as described in Genesis, where, as Pieper says, “he rested from all the works that He had made” and he also contemplated his creation and beheld it as being “very good,” that is, God engaged in attentive appreciation or loving and affirmative beholding of his creation. The person who keeps the Sabbath in the right spirit adopts a Sabbathorientation, where the fulfillment of all his or her work and striving is seen to reside in the restful and appreciative enjoyment of the good things of life, including the work itself. Here one ceases for a time from the effort to transform and control the world, and instead adopts an accepting and appreciating stance toward the giftedness (i.e., the given good things) of the world. A Sabbath-orientation points us toward the Sabbath-experience as the ultimate telos of human existence. As Abraham Joshua Heschel puts it: “The Sabbath . . . is more than an armistice, more than an interlude; it is a profound conscious harmony of man and the world, a sympathy for all things” (: ). The Sabbath is “the climax of living” (). Pieper says something similar about the traditional religious festival (or feast) as a key form of leisure: “The highest form of affirmation is the festival; . . . to festival belongs ‘peace, intensity of life, and contemplation all at once.’ The holding of a festival means: an affirmation of the basic meaning of the world, and an agreement with it, and in fact it means to live out and fulfill one’s inclusion in the world, in an extraordinary manner, different from everyday” ( []: –). Indeed, Pieper says: “no more intensive harmony with the world can be thought of than that of ‘Praise of God,’ the worship of the Creator of this world” (). Thus, the deepest root from which leisure draws its sustenance, Pieper maintains, is “worshipful celebration” (). One thing that I would like to add to this discussion of leisure as a break from workaday activities and as the ultimate telos of all of our work and striving is how the contemplation that is involved in being at leisure also feeds into and transforms all of our activities such that we can become “contemplatives in action.” When we come to an affirmative and 

 

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In fact, it is after completing his work on the sixth day that God beholds his creation as being “very good” (Genesis :) and then on the seventh day God rested from the work of creation (:–). But this also seems to involve a loving and affirmative beholding of his creation that follows from seeing the creation as “very good” at the end of the sixth day. Indeed, Genesis : says: “And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it” (KJV). Samuel Fleischacker similarly speaks of a “Shabbat-consciousness” that pervades one’s life (: ). The idea of festivity is developed more in Pieper  [].

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appreciative vision of the world as a whole as good and, for the theist, as having a divine source, this enables a transfigured vision of our everyday life and our various activities, where, as we saw Cottingham put it, “the categories of our mundane life undergo a radical shift: there is a sudden irradiation that discloses a beauty and goodness, a meaning, that was before occluded.” And if we are theists, this can include a sense of the sacred or the divine in all things, as was suggested by Pieper is his account of earthly contemplation. We can come, for example, to a deeper appreciation of the preciousness or sacredness of human life, and this should inspire action on behalf of our fellow human beings. We can say something similar about the natural world, where recognizing it as something wondrous – “How splendid water is, or a rose, a tree, an apple!” – should inspire us to be better stewards of the environment. And this should also inform how we conduct our intellectual activities. Furthermore, such a transformed engagement with the world around us can lead back to an enriched contemplative vision of the world. There should in fact be an ongoing dialectic here between contemplation and the various activities that we are engaged with in our lives, and hence the ideal is that we should be contemplatives in action. But ultimately contemplation has primacy; it is, as I have suggested, the telos. Many of our day-to-day activities are taken up with sustaining human life, but the ultimate end of life cannot simply be life itself. Additionally, many of the virtues of the active life (courage, justice, compassion, etc.) are concerned with overcoming natural or moral evils, and thus they are “mixed goods,” whereas contemplation is an “unmixed good.” In these cases, we aim to alleviate the problem, but if we do, then what? As Pieper writes: “All practical activity, from practice of the ethical 

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Hadot writes: “[For] Aristotle the life of the mind consists, to a large degree, in observing, doing research, and reflecting on one’s observations. Yet this activity is carried out in a certain spirit, which we might go so far as to describe as an almost religious passion for reality in all its aspects, be they humble or sublime, for we find traces of the divine in all things” (: ). As Aristotle puts it in Parts of Animals: “In all natural things there is something wonderful” (a; quoted in Bellah : ; trans. I. D. M. Balm). Sabina Lovibond makes this point by drawing on G. E. Moore’s work; see Lovibond : –. Kieran Setiya discusses how this was the issue that vexed John Stuart Mill when he fell into an existential crisis (: –). This sort of crisis, Setiya thinks, results from an over-investment in “telic activities,” that is, activities that aim at “terminal states” (–). His solution is to invest more in “atelic ends”: “Among the activities that matter most to you, the ones that give meaning to your life, must be activities that have no terminal point. Since they cannot be completed, your engagement with atelic ends will not exhaust or destroy them. . . . An atelic end is realized in the present as much as it can ever be realized. What you want from it you have right now: to be going for a walk, hanging out with friends, studying philosophy, living a decent life. . . . In effect, I am urging a philosopher’s version of a self-help slogan: live in the present” (–). In other words, we

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virtues to gaining the means of livelihood, serves something other than itself. And this other thing is not practical activity. It is having what is sought after, while we rest content in the results of our active efforts. Precisely that is the meaning of the old adage that the vita activa is fulfilled in the vita contemplativa” ( []: ). In short, all of our work and striving is fulfilled in attentive appreciation of this work as well as the world around us. This account of contemplation as attentive appreciation (or loving and affirmative beholding) and as enabling us to feel at home in the world that I have developed so far has been largely religious, and particularly theistic, in nature. The fact that the contemplative ideal – in both of the senses that I have discussed – has often been linked to a view of the world as a meaningful order, I believe, is a main reason why non-theistic Aristotelians have dropped the contemplative ideal, since many of them accept a largely disenchanted picture of the world. As G. K. Chesterton has put it, many people today are “gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones” ( []: ). In other words, many people today – due to accepting a picture of the world as being without overarching meaning – end up holding a circumscribed view of happiness where it is understood solely in terms of our sublunar pursuits of various projects and relationships, rather than in terms of an affirmative and appreciative vision of the world as a whole. But Chesterton notes that such circumscription is not native to human beings: “Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul” (). For Chesterton, it is particularly a theistic philosophy that meets this need of the human soul for praise or appreciative attention to the world as a whole; as he puts it in his biography of Aquinas: “Nobody will understand the Thomist philosophy, or indeed the Catholic philosophy, who does not realize that the

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should “live in the flow.” But what happens when our flow is interrupted by hardship? Setiya’s account does not offer an affirmative and appreciation vision of the world as a whole of the sort that I have argued is important for addressing the problem of cosmodicy. In the face of hardship, one might ask the question with regard to going on walks, hanging out with friends, doing philosophy, living a decent life: Is that all there is? Setiya needs to address questions of a sort addressed by a religious worldview, questions about existential consolation and the goodness of the world as a whole. It is also noteworthy that Mill found his way out of his crisis through a form of “poetic contemplation” that appears to have been parasitic on the religious worldviews of Wordsworth and Coleridge that Mill did not share. Lucas Scripter also points to the loss of a teleological worldview as a key reason for the neglect of contemplation in contemporary virtue ethics (“The Place of Contemplation in the Revival of Virtue Ethics” [unpublished manuscript]).

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primary and fundamental part of it is entirely the praise of Life, the praise of Being, the praise of God as the Creator of the World. Everything else follows a long way after that” ( []: –). But is such a contemplative ideal only possible for theists? Sabina Lovibond argues otherwise. She is a non-theist who seeks to recover a recognition of the significance of contemplation in human life. She develops further Murdoch’s line of thought about the importance of appreciative attention for the ethical life to address the fundamental existential question – which we saw Aristotle raise – of whether it is good to have been born “in spite of the misery of the world,” and which I have described as the problem of cosmodicy. Lovibond regards this as a key question of “non-practical ethics” (here “practical” – to recall my earlier clarification – should be understood in a narrow sense that has to do with productive activity; however, there is a wider sense of “practical” that includes the contemplative life, since contemplation is something that can be practiced and thus can be a part of a practical life-orientation). She writes: [The] only happy life is one that accepts the world as something offered to it as an object of contemplation, like a work of art in that it is not for anything, but simply lies open to our (disinterested) attention. To experience the existence of the world – of anything at all – as a miracle is to receive from it the happiness that an artist hopes to give in placing before us something beautiful; but the ability to receive this kind of happiness from simply being in the world is, again, a matter of attitude, of looking at the world as if it were a felicitous composition, and in that sense “with a happy eye”: an eye ready to be made happy in the way cultivated or replicated by art. Ethics and aesthetics are one in respect of showing us that this is enough – enough, for example, to make happiness possible despite the “misery of the world,” or to reveal the amenities of the world as dispensable, as “so many graces of fate.” (: )

There is much to appreciate in this passage (especially the emphasis on receptivity to what is of value over the production of value through willpower), but what should we make of Lovibond’s remark about experiencing “the existence of the world – of anything at all – as a miracle”? Later she also appeals to “moments of consciousness that reveal to us a value not of our own making (or in which the world takes on the aspect of a gift or a ‘miracle’)” (). As a thoroughgoing naturalist, can Lovibond really help herself to the language of “gift” and “miracle” here, which is at home in a theistic worldview? Not literally it seems. Her idea of the world as being offered to contemplation “like a work art,” “as if it were a felicitous

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composition,” can also raise the worry that she is offering an artistic depiction of the world that does not in fact capture the way the world really is. Later she appeals to the following passage from Aurel Kolnai (which I cited in Chapter ): “If certain churches or certain regions or street-corners in certain cities I peculiarly admire and love did not exist, it ‘wouldn’t make much difference.’ Yet it is in their contemplation and tangible nearness, undoubtedly an aesthetic experience, that I seem somehow to become aware of the ineffable goodness of existence more deeply and vividly than in any experience of benefit or thriving, or even of moral virtue” (Kolnai  []: ; see Lovibond : ). Lovibond acknowledges that Kolnai is a theist and that he may “hold that without God any talk of the ‘ineffable goodness of existence’ is just sentimental chitchat,” nevertheless, she thinks that this passage makes “excellent sense without benefit of any such background” (: ). But don’t we need some overall worldview or cosmic outlook that can be thought to support the sort of contemplation that recognizes the “ineffable goodness of existence”? Is the passage compatible with, say, Dawkins’ view, considered in Chapter , that in the universe there is at bottom “no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference”? We might have a sense of awe and wonder at our sheer dumb luck of happening to have come into existence through the “blind,” complex processes of cosmic and terrestrial evolution, but it is hard to see how 

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Consider also Paolo Costa’s discussion of “secular wonder” in Costa . By “wonder,” Costa does not mean the active sense that expresses itself in an agitation or restless perplexity that seeks deeper understanding. Rather, he means something more passive that involves a restful, contemplative delight in the world as a way of being “at home” in it; it is a kind of intellectual and emotional beholding and appreciating. As Costa puts it, wonder is “a stance towards things that is intentional without being appropriative” (). He goes on to say: “Wonder is an exceptionally intense way of being affectively aware of the things that surround us. . . . [In] wondering, the subject is absorbed in reality, without being its hostage or puppet. In this sense, the wonder-response always embodies a form of assent, a ‘yea-saying,’ and, having no utility whatsoever, it fosters in the subject a vague sense of joy in the very fact of being alive and of an objectless gratitude that turns outward” (, ). Later I will discuss problems with regard to an “objectless gratitude,” but Costa also acknowledges that the attitude of wonder involves not only positive experiences of awe, euphoria, serenity, and gratitude toward the “life empowering” aspects of the world, but also dread, nausea, melancholy, horror, and sheer terror toward the “life menacing” aspects of the world (–, ). Such experiences are perhaps especially to be expected in a universe that is at bottom impersonal and indifferent to our human fates, and this raises the question of how at home in the world we can be within such a worldview. See also Kristjánsson  and  for attempts to establish awe as a virtue within a secular, Aristotelian outlook and as that without which our lives will be overly flat and lacking in a crucial source of human fulfillment (given that humans have a “transcendent urge”; see : , –). Although Kristjánsson distinguishes awe from wonder (: –), his account is in fact similar to Costa’s account of wonder and I think faces similar challenges given the secular outlook. But both are nonetheless very welcome efforts of re-enchantment.

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such a worldview could support a contemplative stance that affirms the “ineffable goodness of existence.” It does seem that we need some teleological view of things, that is, a view of the world as ordered toward the good. Lovibond acknowledges that the contemplative stance by which we affirm the goodness of existence in the world has traditionally been connected to a “teleological view of nature as a whole” (as can be seen with Aristotle), but she also thinks that we can do without this (–). But it is not clear how, at least if we mean to affirm the goodness of existence as such. Perhaps Lovibond only means to affirm her own existence provided it has enough valuable experiences – especially of an aesthetic sort – which can override one’s experiences of misery in the world. But this is a wholly contingent matter, and it also doesn’t provide the sort of encompassing way of being at home in the world that spirituality seeks. Or, to put it in the terms of Thomas Nagel (as discussed in Chapter ), it does not adequately address – in a way that can provide “an alternative to the consolations of religion” – the “cosmic question”: “How can one bring into one’s individual life a full recognition of one’s relation to the universe as a whole?” To address this question in a positive way is to recover something of the religious temperament, which “regards a merely human life as insufficient, as a partial blindness to or a rejection of the terms of our existence.” We need something more encompassing. Nagel’s own answer to the cosmic question I believe can offer support for a conception of the contemplative life that takes an affirmative and appreciative stance toward the world. As we saw in Chapter , Nagel offers a cosmic teleological view according to which “[each] of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.” It is specifically through our living out the contemplative life that the universe becomes “aware of itself.” The ultimate telos here can be described as appreciative attention to the world. Or as we saw John Updike put it: “[We] are here to give praise. Or, to slightly tip the expression, to pay attention.” But, as suggested in Chapter , the appeal to praise here does seem to point in a theistic direction, since praise implies someone to whom we are giving praise. At this point, I want to turn to explore the draw to theistic spirituality in more detail.

Theistic Spirituality Theism offers what I believe is the most enchanted worldview that remains a live option. At the heart of the theistic worldview is the belief that the

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universe is a personal order, as opposed to an impersonal order. As William James puts it: “The more perfect and more eternal aspect of the universe is represented in our religions as having personal form. The universe is no longer a mere It to us, but a Thou, if we are religious [i.e., theists]; and any relation that may be possible from person to person might be possible here” ( []: –). In other words, the theist holds that the ultimate nature of reality is personal rather than impersonal since the world was created by a person (God) and for the central purpose of love, which is most fully realized in communion between persons (both human and divine). This stands opposed to a standard story about disenchantment, which sees modern science as giving rise to an impersonal order, where everything in the universe is seen as originating from “blind,” causal mechanisms, which are indifferent to our human fate (recall Dawkins’ remark about the “blind, pitiless indifference” of the universe). The discussion of cosmic fine-tuning in Chapter  provides some good reason to question this standard story. Theism provides not just a personal order, but also a teleological order. Indeed, I suggested in Chapter  that there is a good case for seeing these as connected. We saw that Nagel seeks to separate these in offering a “teleology without intention,” though he acknowledges that he isn’t sure whether this makes sense, but doesn’t see why not either. But we can question whether a non-theistic cosmic teleology makes sense, since it can be argued that believing that the universe as a whole is expressive of a purpose requires a purposive being (namely, God) that created it, or at least that it is best explained in these terms. What theism provides then is a teleological order centered on the telos of interpersonal love according to which the universe in general and human life in particular are seen as permeated with meaning; or as Gerard Manley Hopkins puts it: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God” (“God’s Grandeur” [], in Hopkins ). This offers support for a conception of the contemplative life that takes an affirmative and appreciative stance toward the world as a whole. This also meets our human need as meaning-seeking animals to address the issue of the meaning of life, that is, to see how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things in a meaningful and worthwhile way, which shapes our practical life-orientations toward strong goods, including the 

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None of this denies the value of non-persons. Indeed, theism, as seen in Pieper’s account of “earthly contemplation,” entails the view that the created world is intrinsically good. Moreover, a kind of communion is possible between persons and non-human animals, but it is not the fullness of interpersonal communion.

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sacred or the reverence-worthy. A theistic teleological worldview shapes our practical life-orientations in this way because the universe is seen as an enduring moral order that expresses “ultimate moral purposes” (to recall Nietzsche’s phrase from earlier) to which we must align our lives. This also connects up with another way in which human beings can be drawn to theistic spirituality, which concerns the deep human need, especially in the face of great suffering and evil, to believe or at least hope that ultimate reality is concerned with our fate and is on the side of the good and that tragedy does not have the final word. A theistic moral and personal order that expresses ultimate moral purposes addresses this need. William James sees this as crucial to the “pragmatic [or practical] significance” of theistic spirituality, and he remarks that a belief or at least a hope in a theistic moral order “not only incites our more strenuous moments [of working to bring about good in the world], but it also takes our joyous, careless, trustful moments, and it justifies them” (James  []: ; cf. –). Or, as Cottingham puts it, in a theistic worldview there is a “buoyancy of the good”: “despite the cruelty and misery in the world, the struggle for goodness will always enjoy a certain kind of buoyancy” (: ). We can add that this also provides support for the common spiritual practice of petitionary prayer (consider, e.g., the central Christian prayer, the “Our Father,” in this light; see Matthew :–). Another way that one can be drawn to theistic spirituality arises from the profound feeling of gratitude for existence, which we can call “existential gratitude.” This typically involves seeing life as a gift or a blessing. However, the notion of life as a gift or a blessing seems to imply that there is someone (namely, God) who is the giver of the gift or the bestower of the blessing. Such a feeling of existential gratitude seems natural for human beings – unless things have gone terribly wrong – and since theism provides a natural home for this feeling, we can see why someone might be drawn toward theistic spirituality. To fill out the case for theistic spirituality here, consider the work of G. K. Chesterton (who was already cited earlier). The chief idea of his life, he tells us, is “the idea of taking things with gratitude, and not taking

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The topic of prayer is explored in an interesting way in Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Road. In an interview about the novel, McCarthy remarked: “sometimes it’s good to pray. I don’t think you have to have a clear idea of who or what God is in order to pray. You could even be quite doubtful about the whole business” (www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/CormacMcCarthy-on-Writing).

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things for granted” ( []: ). And elsewhere he writes: “I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder” ( []: ). The sort of thanks that he is discussing here is “existential thanks,” and such thanks are “the highest form of thought” because they give appreciative attention (i.e., contemplation) to the sheer gratuitousness of existence. Chesterton brings out this sheer gratuitousness of existence in the following passage: There is at the back of all our lives an abyss of light, more blinding and unfathomable than any abyss of darkness; and it is the abyss of actuality, of existence, of the fact that things truly are, and that we ourselves are incredibly and sometimes almost incredulously real. It is the fundamental fact of being, as against not being; it is unthinkable, yet we cannot unthink it, though we may sometimes be unthinking about it; unthinking and especially unthanking. For he who has realized this reality knows that it does outweigh, literally to infinity, all lesser regrets or arguments for negation, that under all our grumblings there is a subconscious substance of gratitude. ([]: –)

We also see these ideas illustrated in Chesterton’s biography of Saint Francis, who is a man after his own heart in that Francis also seeks to take things with gratitude rather than take them for granted. As Chesterton puts it: “[The] great saint may be said to mix all his thoughts with thanks. All goods look better when they look like gifts.” ( []: ) And he goes on to describe Saint Francis’ “great fixed idea” as follows: After he had taken farewell of some of his nearest and especially some of his oldest friends, he was lifted at his own request off his own rude bed and laid on the bare ground; as some say clad only in a hair-shirt, as he had first gone forth into the wintry woods from the presence of his father. It was the first assertion of his great fixed idea; of praise and thanks springing to their most towering height out of nakedness and nothing. . . . [Saint Francis] was above all things a great giver; and he cared chiefly for the best kind of giving which is called thanksgiving. . . . He understood down to its very depths the theory of thanks; and its depths are a bottomless abyss. He knew that the praise of God stands on its strongest ground when it stands on nothing. He knew that we can best measure the towering miracle of the   

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Later he says: “The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them” (). As Patrick Toner puts it, Chesterton’s key idea is “the gratuitousness of the world and our need to appreciate it” (: ). I owe this reference to Chappell : ; see also Clark .

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For Chesterton, there is an integral connection between existential gratitude and theistic spirituality in that it is to God that our thanks are due for the sheer gratuitousness of existence. Indeed, he writes: “the worst moment for the atheist is when he is really thankful and has nobody to thank” (). Elsewhere, he considers an imagined critic who questions why someone “cannot be thankful for grass and flowers without connecting it with theology,” to which he responds: “[Such a person] cannot do it without connecting it with theology, unless he can do it without connecting it with thought. If he can manage to be thankful when there is nobody to be thankful to, and no good intentions to be thankful for, then he is simply taking refuge in being thoughtless in order to avoid being thankless” ( []: ). A non-theist might object to the charge of thoughtlessness here. Michael Lacewing (), for example, makes the case for thinking that existential gratitude is in fact possible for non-theists. He does so by questioning the common assumption, which we see in what Chesterton says (Lacewing doesn’t discuss Chesterton), that existential gratitude requires someone with good intentions who is the ultimate source of the gratuitous or undeserved good of one’s existence and to whom he or she is thankful. In contrast to the standard case of “personal gratitude,” which has a “to-for” structure (i.e., we are thankful to someone for some gratuitous good), Lacewing claims that there is also “non-directed existential gratitude,” which abandons the “to” aspect of the standard “to-for” structure: The claim is that we don’t need to be thankful to someone in order to be thankful for the undeserved good of our existence. He wants to avoid here the apparent incoherence of a kind of “impersonal existential gratitude” where gratitude for the underserved good of one’s existence is directed toward “luck” or “fate” or “the universe,” which involves a personification of these forces or entities in ascribing “good intentions” to them. Robert C. Solomon adopts this position when he writes: “[We] are the beneficiaries of a (more or less) benign universe. This should dictate gratitude, even if there is no one or nothing in particular to whom that gratitude is directed” (: ). But as Lacewing notes, for non-theists “the universe is neither benign nor cruel,” since strictly speaking it

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Chesterton attributes this statement to Rossetti (with agreement).

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expresses no intentions whatsoever (: ). However, I also don’t think Lacewing’s “non-directed existential gratitude” fully makes sense. What he is talking about seems to be better described as gladness or appreciation for the undeserved good of existence rather than as gratitude (see Roberts : ). Gratitude does not just involve appreciating an undeserved good that we have not given ourselves, but also a sense of indebtedness to someone and a desire to pay back the debt in some way. Thus, all gratitude, strictly speaking, is personal gratitude. But we don’t always have to speak strictly about gratitude (though we should think clearly about it): We can allow a metaphorical extension of gratitude for those who want to speak about life as a “gift” as a way of expressing their appreciation for the underserved good of life, even though strictly speaking they do not believe that life is a gift, but rather it is just good luck. But something is lost here if we can’t see life as in fact a gift. As Chesterton put it: “All goods look better when they look like gifts.” In other words, with regard to the goodness of existence, there is another 

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Solomon did end up changing his position because of recognizing this incoherence; he understands existential gratitude rather as a matter of “seeing the bigger picture,” where “one recognizes how much of life is out of one’s hands, how many of advantages one owes to other people, and how indebted one is or should be to parents, friends, and teachers.” And he further claims that such gratitude “expands beyond the focus on a particular object to take in the world as a whole” (: ix–x). But, as Robert C. Roberts rightly notes: “This solution seems to depend on confusing the various aspects of our life that we do owe to others with our whole life, which we cannot owe to other human beings. This is not what Solomon calls ‘cosmic gratitude’, but a broadened gratitude to people” (: ). Later still Solomon says that existential gratitude is a matter of “being properly humble about one’s own modest place in the world,” that is, “seeing the bigger picture and having a chance to play a role in it, no matter how small” (: ). But it is hard to see why this should be described as a form of gratitude at all, but rather simply a form of humility or modesty, as Lacewing points out (: ). We see that Lacewing misses this point in his response to Roberts’ suggestion that “gratitude” of a non-directed sort is not gratitude but gladness or something like it. Lacewing replies that this “fails to specify the response precisely enough – it misses out how the response picks out the undeserved and uncontrolled nature of the good . . . It is gratuitous goods that generate gratitude” (: ). There is no mention of indebtedness here. He does mention it when discussing personal gratitude (), but then it just drops out of the picture without argument. The role of indebtedness is strongly emphasized in Roberts’ account of gratitude; he writes: “Gratitude involves a construal of oneself as indebted to the benefactor for the benefice and so bound to the benefactor. . . . [If] a person is grateful to his benefactor for the benefice, then he is glad (gratified) to be so indebted and bound, and he will want to express this indebtedness by a return of a sort – not by a return in strict justice, as a tit-for-tat payment for goods received, but by a token return that acknowledges his indebtedness and bond, and his gladness in the benefice and the indebtedness and bond. . . . The grateful person looks with a welcoming eye for personal debts” (: , ). Kristján Kristjánsson seems to reject this idea in his attempt to accommodate gratitude as a virtue – he doesn’t discuss existential gratitude – within Aristotle’s ideal of the great-souled man (megalopsychos). He denies the claim that “if an emotional trait is morally virtuous, it would be best to feel it as often as possible”: “even if it is true that it would be good for a group of people (here the megalopsychos) to be so autonomous and self-sufficient that they would never have to rely upon

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dimension of goodness added when we see our existence as resulting from a loving, benevolent source in contrast to resulting from an indifferent, impersonal source. We also saw that Chesterton closely connects existential thanks and praise; indeed, they are inextricably linked and used interchangeably to convey the same fundamentally important mindset that he describes as “the highest form of thought.” Like existential gratitude, existential praise also depends on recognizing a moral agent as the source of existence (since praise and blame are only properly applied to moral agents). As we saw, the praise of existence (as a form of appreciative attention) entails “the praise of God as the Creator of the World.” We also see a linking of existential thanks and praise in the character Dmitri Karamazov in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov: “I’m tormented by God. Tormented only by that. What if he doesn’t exist? . . . So then, if he doesn’t exist, man is chief of the earth, of the universe. Splendid! Only how is he going to be virtuous without God? A good question! I keep thinking about it. Because whom will he love then – man, I mean? To whom will he be thankful, to whom will he sing the hymn?” ( []: ; emphasis added). This passage also points to a human need to be orientated toward an ultimate object of love, devotion, reverence, and even worship (the highest form of praise), which is explored throughout Dostoevsky’s writings. For instance, in The Adolescent the “holy peasant” Makar remarks: “[To] live without God is nothing but torment. And it turns out that what gives light is the very thing we curse, and we don’t know it ourselves. . . . It’s impossible for a man to exist without bowing down; such a man couldn’t bear himself, and no man could. If he rejects God, he’ll bow down to an idol – a wooden one, or a golden one, or a mental one. They’re all idolaters, not godless, that’s how they ought to be called” ( []: ). Likewise, at the end of Demons, Stepan proclaims: “The whole law of human existence consists in nothing other than a man’s always being able to bow before the immeasurably great. If people are deprived of the immeasurably great, they will not live and will die in despair” ( []: ).

people’s help, nor to exhibit gratitude, this does not mean that gratitude could not be morally virtuous when such help has, in fact, been needed and provided” (: ). The Chestertonian attitude for which I am advocating, by contrast, does not regard gifts or blessings received as mixed goods that we’d be better off without (if possible), but rather as adding another dimension of goodness in one’s life. It does affirm that it is best to feel the emotion of gratitude as often as possible, that is, to mix all of our thoughts with thanks. This seems to be essentially a religious sensibility and marks an important divide between kinds of sensibilities.

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Such a need seems to be expressed not only in the life of the devout theist, but also in the lives of non-theists who seek a “God-substitute,” whether in the form of a “religion of humanity” (à la Comte, Mill, Feuerbach, Marx, etc.), or Nietzsche’s Übermensch, or a deep ecological perspective, or whatever else. But the question is whether such “Godsubstitutes” are as adequate objects of love, devotion, reverence, and worship as a personalistic God, or instead are merely forms of idolatry, as Dostoevsky suggests. The theist argues that God is worthy of our fullest love, devotion, reverence, and worship in virtue of God’s perfect goodness, love, wisdom, and so on. As MacIntyre puts it in his book God, Philosophy, Universities (going beyond most other neo-Aristotelians today and his own account in Dependent Rational Animals): “finite beings who possess the power of understanding, if they know God exists, know that he is the most adequate object of their love, and that the deepest desire of every such being, whether they acknowledge it or not, is to be at one with God” (: –). Moreover, as the ultimate creative source of every finite thing, God answers our fundamental existential questions as philosophical, meaning-seeking creatures: Who am I? How ought I to live? Does my life have a purpose? Why is there anything at all? etc. And so, on this view, we find our ultimate fulfillment in contemplation (i.e., the “beatific vision”) of God. If these claims are accepted then this constitutes a further way that one can be drawn to theistic spirituality. 



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Elsewhere MacIntyre says that the difference between the theist and atheist is not merely a disagreement about the existence of God, but a disagreement about everything: “To be a theist is to understand every particular as, by reason of its finitude and its contingency, pointing towards God. It is to believe that, if we try to understand finite particulars independently of their relationship to God, we are bound to misunderstand them. It is to hold that all explanation and understanding that does not refer us to God both as first cause and as final end is incomplete, and that foremost among the finite particulars of which this is true are we ourselves as human beings” (: ). In his most recent book MacIntyre defends a Thomistic conception of our final end understood in terms of the beatific vision of God (: –, –, –). Like Aquinas, MacIntyre approaches the issue negatively by saying what our final end is not. It is not money, honors, power, health, pleasure, or even human excellence, since each of these must be properly ordered within one’s life as a whole, which requires some good beyond them that provides a measure. The final end cannot be a means to something else, since it completes and perfects a human life. It “constitutes our lives as wholes, as unities,” by providing an overall directedness and a narrative structure (). It is something we aim at in aiming at our other ends; it is “the final and supreme object of desire” (). The book concludes: “[There] is no particular finite good the achievement of which perfects and completes one’s life. There is always something else and something more to be attained, whatever one’s attainments. The perfection and completion of a life consists in an agent’s having persisted in moving toward and beyond the best goods of which she or he knows. So there is presupposed some further good, an object of desire beyond all particular finite goods, a good toward which desire tends insofar as it remains unsatisfied by even the most desirable of finite goods, as in

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Objections and Replies Even if we acknowledge that human beings are in some sense homo religiosus, there might still be concerns about allowing spirituality to have a central place in our lives. In this last section I want to consider and respond to three important objections to giving spirituality, especially theistic spirituality, a central place within an account of the good life for human beings. The first objection is the wholeness objection. It is based on the worry that the high aspiration of the spiritual life to a thoroughgoing spiritual transformation can threaten our wholeness as human beings insofar as it can at times require the sacrifice of our ordinary human flourishing and perhaps lead to its denigration. In other words, the concern here is that spirituality can lead to a kind of self-mutilation. This objection has been put forward forcefully by Martha Nussbaum. Her criticisms are focused particularly on aspirations to “transcend humanity,” namely, by aspiring to a god-like existence that takes us beyond our ordinary human flourishing. We can think here of the ideals of the contemplative life in Plato and Aristotle, or the theistic hope for eternal life, or even certain highly demanding ideals of saintliness that require a thoroughgoing ethical-spiritual transformation (as exemplified, e.g., by Saint Francis). Nussbaum regards the aspiration to such transcendence as in fact arising from the unease we experience with respect to the vulnerability, neediness, and finitude inherent in human life (see : , ;  []: pt. II). She believes that such an aspiration is ultimately selfdefeating: [What] my argument urges us to reject as incoherent is the aspiration to leave behind altogether the constitutive conditions of our humanity and to seek for a life that is really the life of another sort of being – as if it were a higher and better life for us. It asks us to bound our aspirations by recalling that there are some very general conditions of human existence that are also necessary conditions for the values that we know, love, and appropriately pursue. (: )

However, what is precisely at issue is whether spirituality (as including the aspiration to spiritual transformation and spiritual fullness) is in fact integral to our humanity. If this is so – and I have argued that it is because of our being meaning-seeking animals – then we should also be concerned good lives it does. But here the enquiries of politics and ethics end. Here natural theology begins” ().

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that denying a place for spirituality in human life would be its own form of self-mutilation, or threat to human wholeness. Nussbaum is right to raise the concern that certain forms of spirituality can be self-mutilating, but I do not think that the solution here is to abandon altogether a spiritual life with high aspirations to spiritual transformation and spiritual fullness. The solution, I contend, is to live the spiritual life in such a way that we best realize what is integral to our humanity and thereby achieve true spiritual fullness. It is worth noting that Nussbaum herself acknowledges that “there is a great deal of room, within the context of a human life . . ., for a certain sort of aspiration to transcend our ordinary humanity. For . . . it is all too plain that most people are much of the time lazy, inattentive, unreflective, shallow in feeling; in short, that most human action falls well short of the fully human target of complete virtue” (: ; cf. : ). The issue then is not about whether we have an ideal of transformation for human life – as very few people, if any, would want to affirm completely our “ordinary humanity” at it is – but rather it is about the nature of the ideal and whether it in fact helps us to realize best what is most admirable in our humanity. The second objection I want to consider is the autonomy objection, and it pertains particularly to theistic forms of spirituality. According to this objection, if we make God the ultimate object of our love and concern, then this threatens our autonomy as human beings. The exact nature of this objection depends on how one understands the term “autonomy.” The word itself suggests the idea of “self-legislating,” which could be seen as synonymous with a subjectivist view in which we “legislate” for ourselves what is good and bad on the basis of the desires we happen to have. We would thus be autonomous when we pursue such desires without external constraints. Such a view of autonomy would be opposed to any normative demand on us, whether it relates to God, or our own potential, or other human beings, or the natural world. However, another way of understanding autonomy is in terms of our making decisions “independently of the arbitrary will of another, acting in the full light of reason, free from internal or external interference with [our] rational processes” (Cottingham : ). This view, it seems, is fully compatible with a theistic perspective where love and devotion to God are based on our free judgment that God is worthy of such love and devotion and where following the will of God means aligning ourselves 

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See Taylor : –; : –; : –, –.

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with moral purposes according to which the good is understood as independent of God’s act of willing it. Here we reject voluntarism about the good: God wills the good because it is good; the good is not good simply because it is willed. But even if we acknowledge the compatibility between this second notion of autonomy and a theistic perspective, there are still some who see theism as threatening another kind of autonomy: namely, a freedom from divine judgment or ultimate moral accountability. Something like this seems to be behind comments that Thomas Nagel makes about the “fear of [theistic] religion,” which he thinks has motivated much of the problematic scientism and reductionism in modern intellectual life. Nagel wants to encourage his fellow non-religious colleagues to resist the influence of this fear on their intellectual life. However, he acknowledges that he is also subject to this fear of religion, which he says is distinct from the fear of the baleful effects of religious institutions. It is a “fear of religion itself.” He writes: “I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn’t just that I don’t believe in God and, naturally, hope that I’m right in my belief. It’s that I hope there is no God! I don’t want there to be a God; I don’t want the universe to be like that” (: ). Nagel refers to this as the “cosmic authority problem.” It is not entirely clear what is behind this fear of religion, but an important part of it seems to be related to the thought that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing Being who can hold us accountable for everything we think and do, even the most shameful things that we might keep hidden from others. While I think such a reaction is quite understandable, it does not necessitate that one should reject theism altogether, especially if a better view of the matter is possible. For instance, the thought that God knows what we do and think and can hold us accountable might form an important part of our sense of moral conscience (understood according to the etymological meaning of the term as “knowledge-with”). But, in order for this not to be oppressive, I believe it needs to be accompanied by a view of God as a kind of loving and merciful parent rather than a vindictive and wrathful judge. To be seen and loved for who we really are in this way can in fact be morally and spiritually liberating. 

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Roger Scruton argues (provocatively) that an underlying motive for contemporary atheist culture (especially in its militant forms) is “the desire to escape from the eye of judgment [whether human or divine]” (: ). See Cottingham : – for a helpful analogy between the believer’s relationship to God and the psychoanalytic relationship, where allowing oneself to be truly seen by a compassionate Other (i.e., God or the analyst) can be liberating rather than oppressive and it can be “a powerful vehicle

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The third and final objection I want to consider is the social peace objection. It claims that religion poses a serious threat to the modern social order, which is based on relationships of mutual benefit and is especially concerned to promote peace and prosperity. Hume offers an important example of someone who gives voice to this objection in his critique of religious perspectives that take us beyond a primary concern with maintaining a social order based on relationships of mutual benefit. We can think here of his rather uncharitable interpretation of a religious transformation ideal in terms of the “monkish virtues.” Hume gives the following odd list of monkish “virtues”: celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, and solitude. Many of these are practices or vows rather than virtues, but certainly he should have at least mentioned the primary “theological virtues” of faith, hope, and love. In any case, he writes of his list: “for what reason are they everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve to no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment?” ( []: ). One can of course contest Hume’s account of a religious transformation ideal here and the claim that a representative of such an ideal would be useless to society or this-worldly life. Certainly a Saint Francis or a Saint Teresa of Calcutta or a Jean Vanier does much to benefit others, though it is not only in the terms of the modern social order with its relationships of mutual benefit (especially economic benefit). However, Hume’s critique of religious transformation ideals in fact goes beyond saying that they are useless to the modern social order to claiming that they are dangerous to it. In his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, Hume has the character Philo respond to the claim that religion is beneficial to society by saying: How happens it then, . . . if vulgar superstition be so salutary to society, that all history abounds so much with accounts of its pernicious consequences on public affairs? Factions, civil wars, persecutions, subversions of government, oppression, slavery; these are the dismal consequences which always

for continued moral growth and integration” and allow one “to move away from preoccupation with the self and its flaws and conflicts, and to turn outwards in love and compassion towards one’s fellow creatures.”

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Virtue and Meaning attend its prevalency over the minds of men. If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. ([]: )

While one might think (as I do) that Hume (via Philo) is too extreme, polemical, and one-sided in these remarks – for they neglect how religions, through their ethical teachings, have often fostered love of neighbor, compassion, peace, etc., even if they have also sometimes been used for ill – nevertheless, it is important to note that fears about the dangers of religion are of course still very much alive today. For instance, we are often reminded of the history of religious violence, especially the “wars of religion” in early modern Europe, by liberal political philosophers in their attempts to justify a liberal political order that would privatize religion and thereby neutralize it (see Rawls : ;  []: xxiii–xxiv). There is also the view among the most militant atheists that it would in fact be best to eradicate religion completely if possible, since, for one thing, even if religion is privatized there is always the danger that it can “go public.” Such views usually maintain a strong connection between religion and violence; for example, Steven Weinberg writes: “With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil – that takes religion” (). In reply, we should note that the danger of violence is of course present with any high ideal for human life, whether religious or non-religious, as we can see in the destruction wrought by a number of atheistic or nonreligious regimes in the twentieth century that sought a utopian ideal. The solution here is not to do without high ideals for human life, since this would again be a form of self-mutilation and it would prevent the ethical and spiritual transformation that is needed in human life (given that our human nature, in its untransformed state, is “out of joint” or is a mixed bag). Rather, the solution is to articulate and defend high ideals for human life that can avoid and prevent violence and destruction (see Taylor : –). In particular, I believe such ideals should give recognition to special dignity or sanctity of human life, which many religious and nonreligious outlooks are in fact concerned to do.



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In various places Hume distinguishes between “true” (i.e., deistic or “philosophical”) religion, to which he is more positively disposed (though I don’t think he actually embraces it, despite calling it “true” religion), and “false” (i.e., revealed, historical) religion, which he often describes condemningly as “superstitious” or “fanatical.” The aspect of Hume’s critique of religion outlined here, he would hold, applies to the majority of cases of religious belief and practice in his day and our own.

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With respect to each of the preceding three objections – namely, the wholeness objection, the autonomy objection, and the social peace objection – I have argued that they do not undermine the place of spirituality in the good life for human beings. Instead, what we need is the right kind of spirituality. It is here that we need the important yet too often forgotten virtue of piety. As aforementioned, the virtue of piety is a matter of achieving a proper relationship in feeling and in action to the sacred or the reverence-worthy. This is cultivated through certain spiritual practices, which we might also call practices of piety: for example, practices of gratitude for the gift of life; practices of humility that help to avoid human hubris (the practice of the Sabbath is an example here); practices of charity, forgiveness, and reconciliation; practices of prayer, contemplation, and self-examination; and so on. These practices help to avoid problematic directions that the religious impulse can take, as identified in the foregoing objections. But more positively, these practices are important for achieving ethical and spiritual fullness.

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In this book I have tried to articulate my dissatisfaction with the flatness of the dominant approach to neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics and offer a better approach that seeks re-enchantment. Even though all neo-Aristotelians can be seen as seeking at least a minimal form of re-enchantment in virtue of responding to the modern problem of disenchantment (i.e., the perceived loss or threat of loss of meaning or value), I have sought to argue for a fuller re-enchantment than any of the major views on offer. The key to my approach has been to articulate and defend a philosophical anthropology that attempts to give full recognition to the fact that human beings are fundamentally and distinctively the meaning-seeking animal. This has involved showing how our human form of life is shaped by strong evaluative meaning, that is, meaning or value that involves qualitative distinction (between higher and lower, noble and base, sacred and profane, etc.) and specifies that with which we ought be concerned and that toward which we ought to orient our lives (the higher, the noble, the sacred, etc.). This has been overlooked by the dominant approach because of its emphasis on an observational (or disengaged) standpoint on our human form of life rather than a participative (or engaged) standpoint. My first step toward re-enchantment was to counter the disenchanting move – made by those who adopt the dominant approach – of denying any special realm of obligation that contains a “peculiar” or “mesmeric” force. I argued that the whole realm of strong evaluative meaning is such a special realm of obligation. I also sought to re-enchant our conception of happiness such that it can be understood in strong evaluative terms as a normatively higher, nobler, more meaningful mode of life that is constituted by virtuous activity and which can enable us to address properly the problem of loss in human life. Further, I sought to re-enchant our understanding of the requirements of other-regarding concern by giving proper recognition to the strong evaluative sense of human beings as being worthy of concern for their own sake 

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because of their inherent dignity or sanctity, and I sought to show how this enables us to regard all human beings as “fully amongst us,” to affirm moral absolutes, and to respond properly to the demands of universal and particular concern. I also sought re-enchantment by arguing against quietist approaches, such as that of McDowell, which seek to remain content with the meanings that arise for us within a particular form of life without articulating any cosmic outlook that can make sense of these meanings. In other words, I sought to show how an account of strong evaluative meaning in life and a meaningful life needs to be connected with an account of the meaning of life, that is, an account of how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things in light of a cosmic or ultimate source of meaning to which we must align our lives. Finally, I sought reenchantment through articulating and defending the importance of spirituality in the good life, which included recovering an integral role for contemplation and showing the attractions of a specifically theistic form of spirituality. I have endeavored to articulate and defend the most re-enchanted perspective that seems to be a live option. If we are not able to affirm such a perspective, then I think this would constitute a significant loss. The more that is removed from this perspective, the greater loss it would be. Perhaps Sartre was right to describe human life as a “useless passion” in that the meanings by which we live and after which we seek are merely an illusion. Or perhaps Camus was right to see human life as absurd when he said that human beings have a “longing for happiness [i.e., a meaningful life] and for reason” and that “the absurd is born of [the] confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world” ( []: ). I have tried to make the case for thinking otherwise. But at the very least I hope to have shown why this case should matter to us: because we are the meaning-seeking animal.

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Index

Abolition of Man, The (Lewis), n abortion, n, , , n absolute prohibitions, –, See also moral absolutes agent-centered reasons for, n as anti-natural,  and consequentialism, ,  contingency concerns,  and disengaged standpoints, , –,  in divine law, – intrinsic reasons for, – in Kantianism,  sacredness affirming,  in tradition-informed ethics,  acknowledged dependence, –,  Adams, Robert, n Adolescent, The (Dostoevsky),  After Virtue (MacIntyre), –, n Annas, Julia, n Anscombe, G. E. M. on absolute prohibitions, , –, – on Aristotelian necessities,  “Dignity of the Human Being,”  disenchanting move,  on divine law, ,  ethical naturalist approach of,  “Modern Moral Philosophy,” –, , , –,  “Murder and the Morality of Euthanasia,”  on murder, ,  on mystical perception, n, –, , , ,  on natural law ethics,  on normative demands, n on obligation, , , – on reverence, –,  anti-naturalism, , ,  Apology (Plato), 

appreciative attention. See also contemplation in being at leisure, – in cosmodicies, – defined, ,  in existential gratitude,  existential praise as,  importance of,  in non-theistic outlooks,  as the telos, –, –,  Aquinas, Saint Thomas, , , –, n, n, ,  Aristotelian categoricals, , ,  Aristotelian necessities, , , , , ,  Aristotelianism. See also disengaged (quasi-scientific) standpoint anti-contemplative stances,  anti-supernaturalist stances, – constitutive goods in,  contemplation in,  and dignity and sanctity,  meaning of life addressed in,  other-regarding concern in, , ,  problem of self-centeredness, ,  re-enchantment in,  responding to disenchantment,  teleological outlooks in,  treatment of spirituality in, , – on virtues for their own sake,  Aristotle on community,  contemplative ideal of, , –, n cosmic outlook of, ,  on courage,  on death and loss, n, – Eudemian Ethics, – on friendship,  function argument,  on good for non-human beings,  great-souled man ideal, n



,

LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9

.1 . 1 51. / 7 .1 . 1 : I C II

2/.4

D

08

8I

9A :I I I

,8C9

Index



Aristotle (cont.) on happiness, –, –, , , , – on human difference, , n,  on human nature,  on infanticide, n Metaphysics, n on moral absolutes, , , n Nicomachean Ethics, , n, , ,  on the noble, , –, –, , –, , ,  Parts of Animals, n philosophical methodology of, n on philosophizing,  on spirituality, – teleological outlook of, , ,  Arnold, Matthew, ,  asymmetrical reciprocity, , ,  “at home in the world,” , –, –, ,  atheism. See also non-theistic outlooks and absolute prohibitions,  compared to theism, n and existential gratitude,  proposed underlying motives for, n,  rationality of,  Augustine, Saint, n autonomy objection (spirituality),  awe (wonder), ,  Axial shift, n beatific vision, , n beauty (aesthetic realm), , , , , , , – Bellah, Robert, n beneficence, – benevolence,  Bleak House (Dickens),  Brewer, Talbot, n Brothers Karamazov, The (Dostoevsky), , , ,  Bruce, Steve, n Buddhism, n Burnyeat, Myles, n Camus, Albert,  Carr, Bernard,  categorical demands, , , –, , , See also normative demands charity (virtue), n, , ,  chastity (virtue),  Chesterton, G. K., , n, , – Common Humanity, A (Gaita), – community (social networks) and the contemplative life,  in disengaged approach, , 

,

LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9

giving and receiving in, –, , ,  in instrumental accounts,  in Kantianism,  and particular other-regarding concern,  spirituality in,  virtues promoting flourishing of, ,  compassion (virtue), , , , , – consequentialism, , , , ,  constitutive account of language,  of other-regarding concern, , –,  constitutive account (virtue-happiness relationship) strong evaluative version, , –, , , , ,  virtue as own reward in,  weak evaluative version, , –,  constitutive goods Aristotelian conception of, –,  fundamental nature of,  God as, , ,  and the good life, , , – human beings as, –, ,  human life as,  human potential as, , –, ,  Letter-Writers example,  non-human beings as, ,  in re-enchantment,  truth as, – and virtue-happiness relationship,  virtues responding to, –, –, – contemplation, –, See also appreciative attention, See also spirituality actions inspired by,  aesthetic,  Aquinas’ view of,  in Aristotelianism, ,  Aristotle’s views on,  and cosmic question,  cosmodicy connection,  earthly contemplation,  Greek term for,  and leisure, – in non-theistic outlooks, , – philosophizing sense, – as the telos, –, –,  in theistic outlooks, – contingency, , , , , ,  cosmic outlooks. See also teleology in Aristotelianism,  of Aristotle, , 

.1 . 1 51. / 7 .1 . 1 : I C II

2/.4

D

08

8I

9A :I I I

,8C9

Index and contemplation, – defined,  and ethical outlooks, ,  and fine-tuning, – grounding moral phenomenology, , ,  “at home in the world,” , –, –,  and the human point of view,  non-theistic cosmic teleology, –,  non-theistic fine-tuning, – ontological grounding of, – and philosophy,  “place of humans in the cosmos,” , , , , , , , –, , –, , , –, , ,  problem of evil and suffering, , – quietist position on, , – and re-enchantment,  and reverence-worthiness,  in secular philosophy, – theistic, – theistic teleological worldview, –, – tragic, , , , – Williams’ challenge regarding, – cosmodicy connection with contemplation, – problem of, –, –,  and theodicy, ,  Costa, Paolo, n Cottingham, John on “buoyancy of the good,” ,  on grand unified theory, n on human nature,  on sacredness (transfigured vision), ,  on spirituality, –,  on theism, –, –,  courage (virtue), , , , , , ,  Darwall, Stephen,  Darwinian evolution, –, , , See also science Davies, Paul, , –, –,  Dawkins, Richard, , , ,  De Caro, Mario, n Delp, Alfred,  Demons (Dostoevsky),  Den Uyl, Doug, n Dennett, Daniel,  Dependent Rational Animals (MacIntyre), , n desires in instrumental accounts, – and rationality,  strong goods as normative for,  and weak evaluation, , , , 

,

LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9



Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume),  Diamond, Cora, , , n Dickens, Charles,  dignity (human) and abortion, n and absolute prohibitions,  and Aristotelianism,  and disengaged standpoints, ,  and engaged approach, – and human rights, n ideals recognizing,  Letter-Writers example,  of marginalized human beings, – and meaningfulness,  normative ideal based on,  in other-regarding concern, , ,  in re-enchanted approach,  strong evaluative nature of, , – as a strong good, –, , , ,  Dillard, Annie,  disenchantment. See also disengaged (quasi-scientific) standpoint abandoning special sense of ought, , , ,  in abandoning theism, , ,  and contemplation,  defined,  and dignity and sanctity, – in the dominant approach, , – in ethical naturalism, – extreme views of,  and failure of cosmodicy,  and flourishing analogies, , n impacts of,  and impersonal worldview, ,  and moral absolutes, , – other-regarding concern in, – problem of, ,  and science, ,  in scientific naturalism,  and self-enclosure, n and strong evaluative meaning, – and the virtues, – disengaged (quasi-scientific) standpoint. See also disenchantment dignity and sanctity and, – as dominant approach,  failures of,  and flourishing analogies, – in Foot’s account, – human nature in, – in Hursthouse’s account,  instrumentalized accounts in, –, –, , 

.1 . 1 51. / 7 .1 . 1 : I C II

2/.4

D

08

8I

9A :I I I

,8C9



Index

disengaged (quasi-scientific) standpoint. (cont.) in MacIntyre’s account, – meaning overlooked in, , , , –, ,  and moral absolutes, – rationality in, – scientism in, ,  strong evaluation overlooked by, , – treatment of spirituality, –, – divine law, , –, n, See also theism Dostoevsky, Fyodor, , , , n, ,  Driver, Julia, n dumb luck response (fine-tuning),  Dying We Live (Gollwitzer, Helmut, Kuhn, and Schneider), –, n,  Dyson, Freeman,  effective altruism,  Ellis, Fiona, – emotivism,  empathetic identification, , ,  engaged (first-personal) standpoint. See also Neurathian approach, See also disengaged (quasi-scientific) standpoint, See also re-enchantment dignity and sanctity in, – scientism,  space of meaning in, –, – spirituality in,  and strong evaluation, , –,  environment,  eternal law, n ethical naturalism (disenchanted version). See also Aristotelianism, See also disengaged (quasi-scientific) standpoint ethical naturalism (disenchanted version) and dignity and sanctity,  as dominant approach, –, – flourishing analogies of, , – human nature claims in,  language underexplored in,  meaning overlooked in, , , , –, ,  opposition to supernaturalism in, – other-regarding concern in, , – spirituality and, – ethical naturalism (McDowell’s expansive) rationality in,  of second nature, , , , , ,  space of meaning in, – strong evaluation in, –, – Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (MacIntyre), 

,

LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9

eudaimonia. See happiness Eudemian Ethics (Aristotle),  euthanasia, ,  evil. See also suffering and loss, See also cosmodicy and absolute prohibitions, ,  and the contemplative life,  and cosmic outlooks,  cosmodicies addressing, –, –, – in the evidentialist argument, n and human nature, n Letter-Writers example, – and theistic spirituality,  theodicies addressing, – violating sanctity, , ,  virtue-happiness relationship, – evolution. See also science explaining appearances of design,  impact on meaning,  and rationality, n and religion,  theistic account of,  in Williams’ challenge, – evolutionary psychology,  existential gratitude, – existential praise,  existentialism, n expansive ethical naturalism, , ,  expressivism,  fact-value divide, , . See also ought (obligation) festivals (religious),  fine-tuning, –, ,  Fisherman and His Wife, The (Grimm), n Fleischacker, Samuel, n flourishing (human). See also happiness, See also good and goodness and absolute prohibitions, , ,  analogies with non-human beings, , –,  Aristotelian treatment of,  biological connotation, , n and dependency,  disengaged approach, , –, , , n,  in early religion, n and engaged approach,  in higher religion, n of marginalized human beings, – and ordinary sense of ought, , ,  origin of term, n other-regarding virtues promoting, ,  qua human being, n, , – qua individual, , , 

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,8C9

Index sacred goods transcending,  sacrificed in transformation ideals,  Foot, Philippa on Aristotelian necessities,  changing positions of, , – on charity,  ethical naturalism of, ,  on flourishing, – instrumentalist account of, – on language,  on moral absolutes, , n “Moral Beliefs,” , – “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,”  “Morality, Action, and Outcome,” n Natural Goodness, n, , , –, n, n on rationality, , , –,  “Rationality and Goodness,” n on virtue-happiness relationship, , n “Virtues and Vices,” n on virtues as correctives, n weak evaluative account of, – Francis, Saint, , ,  free will defense, n free will theodicy,  Freud, Sigmund, ,  Frey, Jennifer, n friendship,  fullness (fulfillment). See also happiness in other-regarding concern,  and sacred goods,  through spirituality, , ,  and strong evaluation, n Gaita, Raimond, –, ,  Geach, Peter, , n generosity (virtue), ,  God absolute prohibitions of,  and the autonomy objection, – and the beatific vision,  as a constitutive good, , , ,  image of God,  and leisure, – and moral absolutes, , – normative demands of, – personal nature of,  praise for,  in problem of theodicy, , – teleological arguments for existence of,  and theistic spirituality, – transcendence of, – God, Philosophy, Universities (MacIntyre),  God, Value, and Nature (Ellis), –

,

LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9



good and goodness. See also constitutive goods, See also strong goods, See also flourishing (human) “buoyancy of the good,” ,  contemplation affirming,  in disengaged accounts, , – fullness through,  functional usage of,  human good (good qua individual),  human goodness, –, , ,  in an open-contingency theodicy,  and rationality, , ,  revisionary accounts of, n sacred goods transcending,  in spirituality,  in theistic spirituality, ,  weak goods, –, ,  good life, the and constitutive goods, , , – contemplation in, ,  in disengaged accounts, – and mixed natural tendencies,  and spirituality, , ,  Good Samaritan. See Parable of the Good Samaritan Gorgias (Plato), ,  grand unified theory,  gratitude (virtue), , – Grimm, Wilhelm, n Grimm’s Fairy Tales, n Hacker-Wright, John, , n Hadot, Pierre, , n Haldane, John, n Hampshire, Stuart,  happiness. See also virtue-happiness relationship Aristotle’s views on, –, –, , , , – and contemplation, ,  differing conceptions of, ,  and leisure,  as a meaningful life,  as a natural end,  origins of eudaimonia term, n and other-regarding concern,  strong evaluative (moralized) view of, , , , – subjective understandings of,  utilitarian approach to, – weak evaluative (non-moralized) view of, ,  whole life view of,  hardship. See suffering and loss Hawking, Stephen, n Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 

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08

8I

9A :I I I

,8C9

Index



Holocaust, , , –, –,  homo religiosus, , , – honesty (virtue), n,  hope (virtue), , ,  Hopkins, Gerard Manley, ,  hospitality (virtue), ,  human nature in disengaged approaches, – in ethical naturalism,  functional view,  harmonious view, ,  as indeterminate to ethical life,  mixed-bag view, , –, –,  normative conception of, –, – value-loaded conception of, , , , ,  human rights, n human sexuality,  Hume, David, , , – humility (virtue), n Hursthouse, Rosalind on abortion, n on absolute prohibitions, n on acquired ethical outlooks,  anti-contemplative stance of,  anti-supernaturalist stance of, – claims regarding virtues, – on dignity,  on ethical evaluation,  ethical naturalist approach of,  on flourishing,  harmonious human nature view of, ,  “Human Dignity and Charity,”  instrumental view of,  on language,  on natural ends, , ,  On Virtue Ethics, ,  on other-regarding virtues,  on piety,  on rationality, ,  on role of bonding,  “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” n on virtue-happiness relationship, , n, –, – on Williams’ challenge, , ,  hypersensitive agency detection device (HADD),  image of God, , n, , ,  imperfect duties,  impersonal benevolence,  infanticide, n,  injustice and absolute prohibitions, – in an instrumental account, –

,

LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9

instrumental account of other-regarding concern, ,  of virtue-happiness relationship, –,  intellectus, n inviolability (sanctity), n, , , , n, ,  Irwin, Terence, n, n James, William, – Jaspers, Karl, n Jesuits, n Jesus, , , , – just generosity (virtue),  justice (virtue) and human dignity,  in an instrumental account, –, ,  Letter-Writers example,  overriding other strong goods,  Stoic views of, ,  in a strong evaluative account,  in a weak evaluative account,  Kant, Immanuel, –, n Kantianism, , n, , , – kindness (virtue), , , ,  Kolnai, Aurel, ,  Kristjánsson, Kristján, n, n Lacewing, Michael, , n Laitinen, Arto, n language constitutive account of,  designative (enframing) account of,  human difference through, ,  and normative demands,  and rationality, , ,  and the sacred,  and the space of meaning, – and strong evaluation, –,  as transfiguring, ,  Language Animal, The (Taylor),  leisure, – Leisure, the Basis of Culture (Pieper),  Letter-Writers, The, –, –, –, ,  Lewis, C. S., n liberal (broad) naturalism,  liberal ironism,  life-orientations, , , . See also spirituality logical positivism, n loss. See suffering and loss love (virtue), , , ,  Lovibond, Sabina, , , n, – loyalty (virtue), 

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Index Macarthur, David, n MacIntyre, Alasdair on absolute prohibitions, ,  on acknowledged dependence,  After Virtue, , n on compassion,  Dependent Rational Animals, , n on divine law,  ethical naturalist approach of, , – Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity,  on flourishing, ,  God, Philosophy, Universities,  on human rights, n on language,  “On Being a Theistic Philosopher,”  on other-regarding concern, –, , , ,  on rationality, ,  on spirituality, n,  Mackie, J. L., n marginalized human beings, , – McCarthy, Cormac, n McDowell, John on absolute prohibitions, n and anti-supernaturalism, n Neurathian approach, , ,  on the noble, , ,  “no-priority” view of, – on normative demands, , ,  quietist position of, , , – “rational wolf” thought experiment, ,  second nature naturalism of, , –, , , n on space of meaning, – Stoic view of, , , , , ,  on strong goods silencing, ,  on supernaturalism,  “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” ,  on value-loaded human nature, , ,  meaning. See also strong evaluative meaning aspects of, , – cosmic (ultimate) source of, , , , , , , ,  language enabling understanding, – neglected in ethical naturalism,  space of meaning, – in tragic cosmic outlooks,  meaning in life changing focus on,  connected to the meaning of life, , , ,  and immanent naturalistic frameworks,  in engaged standpoint,  neglected by Aristotelianism, 

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LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9



and radical contingency, ,  and re-enchantment,  meaning of life, the in Aristotelianism,  changing focus on, n in engaged standpoints, ,  and meaning in life, , , ,  in moral philosophy,  non-theistic accounts of, – and re-enchantment,  theistic accounts of, – meaningful life, a changing focus on, n in engaged standpoints, ,  happiness as,  and human potential,  impediments to, – and the meaning of life, , , ,  role of contemplation in, ,  in spirituality,  strong evaluative conception of, , , , ,  suffering and loss in, –, , – virtue-happiness relationship, – meaning-seeking animal, the aspects of,  and the contemplative life,  and cultural development, n existential questions of,  homo religiosus, – in re-enchantment, ,  role of language in,  and self-transcendence,  spiritual needs of, ,  Metaphysics (Aristotle), n methodological scientific naturalism, n Metz, Thaddeus, ,  Midgley, Mary, n,  Mill, John Stuart, , n Mind and Cosmos (Nagel),  misericordia. See compassion (virtue) mixed bagness, –, –,  Monod, Jacques,  monotheism,  moral absolutes, –, See also absolute prohibitions, See also normative demands, See also strong evaluation and disengaged standpoints, , – intrinsic reasons for, – limited moral absolutism, n moral necessities, , , ,  as negative in nature,  and rationality,  moral anarchy, , n moral necessities, , , , 

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08

8I

9A :I I I

,8C9



Index

moral objectivism, , , , ,  moral ontology, , – moral subjectivism, , –, , , n,  More, Thomas, n Morgan, Seiriol, n multiverse hypothesis,  murder absolute prohibitions on, – and dignity and sanctity of life, , , , , ,  supra-utilitarian objection to, ,  Murdoch, Iris,  Nagel, Thomas, , –, , –,  narrative quests, ,  natural ends of social animals, , , n, , , , ,  natural evil,  Natural Goodness (Foot), n, , , –, n, n Natural History of Religion (Hume),  natural law, , ,  naturalism, –, ,  naturalized platonism, , n,  “neighbor” concept,  Neo-Aristotelian, – Neurathian approach, , , ,  Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), , n, , ,  Nietzsche, Friedrich,  noble, the (nobility) Aristotle on, , –, , n, , , ,  and language,  in loss and suffering,  in a meaningful life, , – Stoic views on,  strong evaluation inherent in, , , ,  in theistic outlooks,  non-theistic cosmic teleology, ,  non-theistic outlooks. See also atheism contemplation in, – cosmic teleology view, – dumb luck response,  and existential gratitude,  fine-tuning accounts, – and “God-substitutes,”  grand unified theory,  multiverse hypothesis,  “no-priority” view, – normative demands. See also ought (obligation) of asymmetrical reciprocity,  based on the noble,  categorical demands, , , ,  dignity affirming, –, 

,

LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9

and disengaged accounts,  in engaged approach, ,  Kantian approach to, n ontological grounding of, – in other-regarding concern, , , ,  and radical contingency, , , ,  and rationality,  in re-enchantment,  role of language in,  of the sacred, –, – in second nature naturalism,  in spirituality, ,  of strong evaluative meaning, ,  of strong goods, ,  and tradition,  in tragic cosmic outlooks,  in weak evaluative account, – Nussbaum, Martha, n, n, , n,  obligation. See ought (obligation) Oderberg, David,  On Virtue Ethics (Hursthouse), ,  ontological scientific naturalism, n other-regarding concern balancing,  constitutive account, ,  dignity and sanctity of life in,  disenchanted approach to,  engaged approach to,  instrumental account of,  intrinsic worthiness in, – Kantian approach to, , – limitations of MacIntyre’s account,  MacIntyre’s account of, – for marginalized human beings, – and moral absolutes, – Parable of the Good Samaritan,  particular, , – re-enchanted approach to,  universal, –, – utilitarian approach to, – other-regarding virtues in Aristotelianism, , – in ethical naturalism,  and flourishing,  and human dignity, , , – in instrumental accounts, ,  responding to constitutive goods, , – value of,  ought (obligation). See also normative demands in disenchanted approaches, ,  in engaged standpoint, ,  in the fact-value divide,  in Kantianism, –

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Index in modern moral theories,  ordinary sense, –, , ,  in other-regarding concern,  through proximity, , , ,  in re-enchanted approach,  special (moral) sense, , , , , , , , , ,  in weak evaluative account,  Parable of the Good Samaritan, – compassion in,  engaged approach to,  Kantian approach to,  proximity element, n utilitarian approach to, – particular other-regarding concern in Aristotelianism,  balancing with universal concern,  in Kantianism, – and love, – in utilitarianism,  Parts of Animals (Aristotle), n Peterson, Michael,  Phillips, D. Z., , , , , – philosophical anthropology,  philosophy as a way of life,  philosophical life, – Pieper, Josef, n, n, n, – piety (virtue), , , , , –,  pity. See compassion (virtue) Plantinga, Alvin, n Plato Apology,  Gorgias, ,  Republic, , n platonism, , n,  Pollyanna problem, n polytheism,  potential (human), , , , ,  practical rationality, n, , , – prayer, n,  Priam (king of Troy),  profane, the (mundane),  projectivism,  proximity, , , ,  prudence (virtue),  quasi-scientific standpoint. See disengaged (quasi-scientific) standpoint quietism, , , –,  Quinn, Warren,  radical contingency, , , , , , , , 

,

LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9



rampant platonism, , n,  Rasmussen, Doug, n ratio, n rationality in a cosmic teleological account,  in disengaged accounts, , – in engaged accounts,  in ethical naturalism,  and evolution, n as the human difference, –,  in instrumental accounts, – and language, ,  in McDowell’s account,  in a meaningful life,  and moral absolutes,  and nature, n and normative demands,  practical rationality, , – and the space of meaning,  and virtuous living, –,  reasoning. See rationality re-enchantment in Aristotelianism,  and dignity and sanctity,  and ethical naturalism,  losses if not affirmed,  meanings emphasized in,  normative demands in,  possible misleading language of,  as recovering,  and science,  in second nature naturalism, , ,  and space of meaning,  in theistic naturalism,  and theistic spirituality, ,  ways of realizing, – Rees, Martin,  relativism, ,  religion. See also theism Axial shift, n in “death of God” secularization view,  deflationary genealogical accounts of, – fear of,  organized religion,  social impacts of, – source of meaning in, – and spirituality,  and suffering and loss, –, – and violence,  Republic (Plato), , n respect (respect-worthiness) Anscombe’s approach to, , – in engaged accounts, –,  in other-regarding concern, –,  and weak evaluative accounts, n

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

Index

reverence (reverence-worthiness). See also piety (virtue) and absolute prohibitions, , , –, –, ,  Anscombe’s approach to, –, –, – in engaged accounts, – and human life, , ,  and human sexuality, n in non-theistic outlooks, , – in spiritual practices,  in spirituality, , – strong evaluation inherent in, , , ,  Roberts, Robert C., n Rorty, Richard,  Rowe, William, n Russell, Daniel C., n, n Sabbath-experience, – sacred, the. See sanctity (sacredness) Samaritan, Parable of the Good. See Parable of the Good Samaritan sanctity (sacredness). See also reverence (reverence-worthiness), See also dignity (human) and abortion, n and absolute prohibitions, , –, , , –,  and Aristotelianism,  and disenchanted approach, ,  in engaged approach, – grounding supra-utilitarian virtues, –,  of human life, , , , , , –, , , –, , , –,  of human sexuality, n ideals recognizing,  inviolability of, n, , , , , n,  of marginalized human beings, – and meaningfulness,  in non-theistic outlooks, , – normative demands of, –, – in other-regarding concern, –, ,  and piety, , –,  and the profane,  in re-enchanted approach,  and self-transformation, ,  and special sense of ought, , –, –, – in spirituality, , –, – strong evaluation inherent in, , , , –, , – through spiritual practices,  Sandel, Michael, – Sartre, Jean-Paul, 

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LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9

Schneider, Paul, n science and ethical life, –, , – impact on disenchantment,  impact on meaning,  impersonal order in,  and objective values, n opposing tragic cosmic outlooks, – and re-enchantment,  and religion,  and scientism,  supporting tragic cosmic outlooks, – scientific (strict) naturalism,  scientism, , , , , ,  scientistic naturalism,  Scripter, Lucas, n Scruton, Roger, n second nature naturalism absolute prohibitions in, n moral formation in,  normative demands in, ,  quietism in,  role of upbringing, – space of meaning in, , , ,  supernaturalism avoided by,  theistic version of,  second-person standpoint,  Secular Age, A (Taylor),  secular wonder, n secularization (secularity) “death of God” view, ,  secular philosophy, – and spirituality,  self-centeredness, ,  self-interest, –, –, –,  self-regarding virtues,  self-transcendence. See transcendence Setiya, Kieran, n Singer, Peter, , , , –,  social networks. See community (social networks) social peace objection (spirituality), – Socrates, , ,  solidarity, , – Solomon, Robert C.,  soul-making theodicy,  speech. See language spiritual practice appreciative attention as,  keeping the Sabbath,  and piety,  prayer, n,  in spirituality and religion, – spirituality. See also contemplation and appreciative attention,  Aristotelianism’s treatment of, , –

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Index Aristotle’s views on, – components of, – defined, ,  and ethical naturalism, – in the good life, ,  humans as homo religiosus, – as a life-orientation, – naturalistic forms of,  objections to, – as practical, – in re-enchantment,  and religion,  role of contemplation in, , – role of philosophy in, – and the sacred, –,  theistic spirituality, – Stohr, Karen, n Stoicism, , ,  strong evaluation compared to weak evaluation,  in deep happiness,  defined, ,  of dignity and sanctity, –, ,  identifying the noble, – and language, –,  ontological grounding of, – in other-regarding concern, , – overlooked by disengaged approach, , –, – in quietism,  strong evaluative meaning and beauty,  categorical feature of, , , ,  and the category of the moral, – defined, , ,  in engaged standpoint, ,  and homo religiosus,  incommensurability feature of, –, –,  in loss and suffering,  in a meaningful life, , , ,  of the noble, , –, – normative demands of, , –,  overlooked by disenchanted approaches, , – in quietism, – in re-enchanted approach, –, ,  of the sacred, –, –, – and special sense of ought, , – in spirituality, , – in tragic cosmic outlooks,  strong goods. See also constitutive goods and absolute prohibitions,  categorical feature of, , ,  compared to weak goods, 

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LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9



conflict among, ,  in constitutive approach,  in the good life, , – incommensurability feature of, –, –,  life-orientation demanded by,  loss following sacrifice of, – as normative for desires,  ordering and weighing of, , – overriding other strong goods, ,  plurality of, , ,  sacred goods,  silencing weak goods, , , ,  supra-utilitarian value of,  suffering and loss. See also cosmodicy, See also evil and absolute prohibitions,  Aristotle on, n, – and the contemplative life, , – and cosmic outlooks,  cosmodicies addressing, –, –, – Letter-Writers example, –, – McDowell’s view on, , ,  in a meaningful life, –, – in sacrificing strong goods,  Stoic views on, , ,  and theistic spirituality,  theodicies addressing, – and virtue-happiness relationship, –, – suicide, , n supernaturalism, , – supra-utilitarian virtues, , ,  Taylor, Charles, , –, , n, ,  teleology. See also cosmic outlooks arguments for God’s existence,  in Aristotelianism,  of Aristotle, ,  evolution challenging, – need for, , , , , –, –,  non-theistic cosmic accounts, – in pre-modern worldviews, , ,  in theism, –,  and Williams’ tragic outlook,  temperance (virtue), ,  theism. See also religion absolute prohibitions in, – “buoyancy of the good” in, ,  compared to atheism, n constitutive goods in, , ,  contemplation in, –

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8I

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,8C9

Index

 theism. (cont.) cosmic outlooks in, , , – and cosmodicy problem, – disenchantment from abandonment of,  fine-tuning explained by,  human need for,  the language of praise in, ,  personalistic nature of, , ,  rationality of, , , – source of meaning in, – on suffering and loss, –, –, – teleological order of, –,  theistic spirituality, – theistic naturalism,  theodicy, , – theoretic culture, n theōria (contemplation),  Thomism, n Thompson, Michael,  Thomson, Judith Jarvis, n Toner, Patrick, n traditions (cultural capacities) and absolute prohibitions,  and evil, n and natural tendencies, ,  in a socially teleological account,  and the space of meaning, – tragic cosmic outlooks, , , , – transcendence continued draw to,  and meaning-seeking,  perceived threats of,  in re-enchantment, n,  and the sacred,  in spirituality, ,  transfiguration, , , , ,  transformation, , –, ,  truth, – underdetermination, ,  universal other-regarding concern in Aristotelianism, – balancing with particular concern,  in Kantianism, – Parable of the Good Samaritan,  utilitarian approach to, – Updike, John, –,  utilitarianism,  and dignity and sanctity,  impartiality requirement of,  moral obligation in,  on other-regarding concern, – rule-utilitarianism,  and solidarity, 

,

LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9

virtue-happiness relationship accounts of, – coming apart, – constitutive (strong evaluative) account, , –, –, , –,  constitutive (weak evaluative) account, , –,  Hursthouse’s theses on, – instrumental account, – Letter-Writers example, –, – in loss and suffering, –, – in a meaningful life, , – normative (value-loaded) human nature account, , , ,  in a reduced form of ethics,  re-enchanted approach,  and self-centeredness concern,  Stoic views on, –, – virtues. See also other-regarding virtues, See also virtue-happiness relationship of acknowledged dependence, – as Aristotelian necessities, , ,  cardinal virtues,  in disengaged accounts, –,  Hursthouse’s theses on, – in instrumental accounts, – as mixed goods,  as modes of proper responsiveness to constitutive goods, , –, – natural tendencies toward,  in normative (value-loaded) human nature accounts, ,  performed for their own sake, , , , , , ,  in quietism, – role in flourishing, –, –, – self-regarding aspect of, n,  silencing other considerations, , –,  and strong evaluative meaning, –, , , –,  supra-utilitarian, , ,  utilitarian,  Vogler, Candace, n, n voluntarism, ,  Waldron, Jeremy, n weak evaluation compared to strong evaluation,  desires weighed in, , ,  in constitutive (virtue-happiness) account, –,  weak goods compared to strong goods,  strong goods silencing, , , ,  Weil, Simone, n, 

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,8C9

Index Weinberg, Steven, n, ,  wholeness objection (spirituality),  Wiggins, David, , – Williams, Bernard challenge of, , – on human nature,  on radical contingency, –, – reading of Aristotle, 

,

LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9



reduced form of ethics of, – tragic cosmic outlook of, , , – underdetermination in account,  Winch, Peter, ,  Wittgenstein, Ludwig, , n Wolf, Susan, , ,  wonder (awe), , , n Woodruff, Paul, n

.1 . 1 51. / 7 .1 . 1 : I C II

2/.4

D

08

8I

9A :I I I

,8C9

,

LD 8 I C

C II LLL :8C9 : 8 8 89 8I II LLL :8C9

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2/.4

D

08

8I

9A :I I I

,8C9