Books

God and the search for moral truths

By J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy. (Cambridge University Press, 623 pp.)

Some rooms of a house are used more than others. Some we use only to entertain special guests, and some we use only to store things that have collected over the years. The texts of our intellectual history can be regarded as such a well furnished, even overly furnished, house. Some texts are encountered regularly, while others gather dust until someone ventures by chance into the attic.

In the house of moral philosophy, particular rooms have been well frequented for a long time. The most inhabited room is the moral philosophy of the Enlightenment thinkers. Hume, Rousseau and Kant constitute much of the furniture of contemporary moral philosophy. Equally well frequented is the room of Greek and Roman moral philosophy. Reflections on the moral life by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Epicureans and their Roman students Cicero and Seneca play a continuing role in current debates. In addition, thanks to a Thomistic revival and to the Luther and Calvin renaissance in the first half of this century, the moral theologies of Aquinas and of the Reformers have become well-frequented rooms.

Among the nearly forgotten rooms are those featuring developments of the late medieval period and especially the years between the Reformation and the Enlightenment. J. B. Schneewind offers a magisterial and encyclopedic account of the intense and intricate debates about morality that took place in this period, debates hidden from us in forbidding Latin, German and French tomes in baroque print. Here we encounter such unfamiliar names as Suarez, Grotius, Cumberland, Pufendorf, Thomasius, Gassendi, Crusius and Wolff next to more familiar ones such as Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Spinoza, Voltaire, Rousseau and especially Kant. Despite the seeming strangeness and even irrelevance of some of these figures, most of them are much closer to us and our struggles in late modernity than are Aquinas, Luther or Calvin. In fact, Schneewind's history shows us the birthing room of what we have learned to call "modernity."

We can begin to see what links us to a Grotius, a Pufendorf, a Cumberland, a Wolff or a Crusius by first considering a late 20th-century document. In May 1998 the Institute for American Values released a report from the Council on Civil Society titled A Call to Civil Society: Why Democracy Needs Moral Truths. The document was signed by such prominent figures as David Blankenhorn, Senator Dan Coats, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Francis Fukuyama, William A. Galston, Mary Ann Glendon, Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Senator Joseph Lieberman, Cornel West, James Q. Wilson and Daniel Yankelovich. A Call to Civil Society identifies a disconcerting moral decline penetrating all aspects of an increasingly fragmented and polarized American society: "Here, then, is the public's basic judgement of our current predicament: growing inequality, surrounded and partly driven by moral meltdown. Declining morality is reflected primarily in a steady spread of behavior that weakens the family, promotes disrespect for authority and for others, and insults the practice of personal responsibility."

These problems go to the very heart of the American democratic project, for "the qualities necessary for self-governance take root in individuals essentially due to the influence of certain moral ideas about the human person and the nature of the good life." Self-governance, the very presupposition on which any democratic project rests, grows out of distinct ways of life that need to be identified by and supported through a public moral philosophy. Therefore, the Council on Civil Society calls for a revitalization of "a shared civic story informed by moral truth."

But what, we immediately ask, is "moral truth"? If it exists at all, where are we going to find it? Do we receive it via a particular internal or external act of revelation or a set of texts based on revelation? Do we receive it via an encounter with a moral law, common to all humans, i.e., a "natural law"? Do we encounter it via our feelings, expressed as moral sentiments? Or is "moral truth" a collective convention, maintained for the sake of sustaining social cohesion, a "truth" upheld by the power of a "moral majority"? Or is moral truth something essential to human flourishing, something we discover by fully engaging all aspects of being human--the personal, political and religious? Is it something to be covered by terms like "the common good" and "happiness"? Or is moral truth simply an illusion, a term that hides our idiosyncratic impulses and desires, our will for power, glory and pleasure?

These questions, which have a very contemporary ring to them, were precisely the questions with which the major moral thinkers of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries were wrestling. The nature of "moral truths," the possibility of human "self-governance," the moral character of laws and the possibility of a public moral philosophy transcending particular religious convictions were the issues on the top of their agenda. Most of Schneewind's protagonists were shaped by the moral, social and political meltdown caused by the atrocious and protracted religious wars that tore Christendom apart in the 16th and 17th centuries, mainly in England, France and Germany. Where could "moral truth" be found and how could it be assured when its main collective source, the Christian faith, was beset by obviously irresolvable conflicts about its main tenets?

We learn from Schneewind's history that the great majority of moral theorists in this period were not only Christians but theologians of rank. In other words, with the exception of explicit atheists (Bayle, La Mettrie, d'Holbach, Helvetius) and ambiguous characters (Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Voltaire), God mattered for how these thinkers understood their task--and not just for reasons of political survival. A deep and lasting issue for these early modern moralists was the Christian doctrine of God. Is God primarily goodness itself, so that God and humanity form one moral community insofar as God lets humans participate via knowledge in God's own goodness? Or is God first of all an omnipotent and inscrutable will, one so utterly different from humans that morality can be understood only as a contingent imposition from God onto God's creatures? The first position, "intellectualism," was Aquinas's position; the second, "voluntarism," was the position of Duns Scotus and William Ockham. Schneewind shows how this theological difference had a lasting and highly consequential impact on the moral systems of the early moderns.

Schneewind's account shows not only that God mattered but how God mattered from the time of natural lawyers like Grotius and Pufendorf to the philosopher Kant. Schneewind detects in this period an increasing move toward abstraction in the doctrine of God, in order--of course--to transcend the particularities of the conflicted confessional traditions. This attempt, in turn, increasingly marginalized God's presence in and importance for the moral life. Religion (how God saves us) and the moral life (how God wants us to live) became increasingly distant from each other until they were finally divorced completely.

The hero in Schneewind's account is Kant. In the finale of Schneewind's narrative, Kant brings the search for secure moral foundations to its end, not in an explanation but in an invention--the invention of autonomy:

Kantian autonomy presupposes that we are rational agents whose transcendental freedom takes us out of the domain of natural causation. It belongs to every individual, in the state of nature as well as in society. Through it each person has a compass that enables "common human reason" to tell what is consistent with duty and what inconsistent.

Why was autonomy an invention? According to Kant, the fact of human freedom is demonstrated by the unique experience of the "moral ought." Because we know we ought to do certain things, it is clear that we have the moral freedom to act. But Schneewind thinks "that our experience of the moral ought shows us no such thing." Autonomy is "an invention rather than an explanation." With Kant's "invention," we not only reach the end of the book but, according to Schneewind, also the end of a century-long struggle to construe a purely rational moral theory.

For Schneewind, Kant is the hero of the story precisely because he brings the process of revising the relationship between religion and morality to its completion by interpreting the core of religion as moral: