Consilium and the Foundations of Ethics

43 The Thomist 79 (2015): 43-74 CONSILIUM AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF ETHICS RAYMOND HAIN Providence College Providence, Rhode Island As often as anything important is to be done in the monastery, the abbot shall call the whole community together and himself explain what the business is; and after hearing the advice of the brothers, let him ponder it and follow what he judges the wiser course. . . . If less important business of the monastery is to be transacted, he shall take counsel with the seniors only, as it is written: Do everything with counsel and you will not be sorry afterward (Sir 32:24). (The Rule of St. Benedict, §3)1 ORAL PHILOSOPHERS have recently grown very interested in practical deliberation as a necessarily social activity. We figure out what to do, at least in part, by taking counsel with others, and this social deliberation requires that we treat one another ethically; only if the virtues characterize our relationship will it be possible for us to learn from one another what we need to learn. Jürgen Habermas, for example, has argued for “discourse ethics,”2 John Rawls and others for “deliberative democracy,”3 and, most relevant here, Alasdair MacIntyre for an “ethics of enquiry.”4 Like MacIntyre, 1 The Rule of St. Benedict in English, ed. Timothy Fry, O.S.B. (Collegeville, Minn.: The Liturgical Press, 1982), 25-26. 2 Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990), especially chap. 3. 3 For Rawls see “The Idea of Public Reason Revisited,” The University of Chicago Law Review 64 (1997), 765-807. For a good overall introduction, see Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997). 4 The best presentation of this is Alasdair MacIntyre, “Intractable Moral Disagreements,” in Intractable Disputes about the Natural Law, ed. Lawrence S. Cunningham (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 1-52. MacIntyre’s M 44 RAYMOND HAIN I believe that the most promising way to think about ethics is Thomistic, and that Thomists would do well to take to heart the socially conditioned character of human life and thought that so many have found persuasive in the wake of the Enlightenment.5 Despite MacIntyre’s work, scholars of St. Thomas Aquinas have not yet developed Thomistic ethics in the direction of an ethics of inquiry. My primary purpose here is to develop the foundations for a Thomistic ethics of inquiry by arguing that Thomistic consilium, or practical deliberation, is an essentially social activity. Though it is a commonplace that we depend on others in our practical deliberations, the nature and significance of this dependence has not been systematically addressed. I will then argue that this account of consilium has three important implications for the foundations of ethics. First, the moral knowledge available to us prior to the workings of consilium (and hence of prudence more broadly) is too vague to ground anything approaching substantive moral conclusions (that is, the content of synderesis is significantly limited). Second, if the apprehension of all but the very highest moral truths depends on a series of deliberative relationships, the nature and development of those relationships (rather than the formulation of particular abstract moral arguments) must be the central task of Thomistic Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago, Ill.: Open Court, 1999) is an extended argument that various human dependencies (including our dependence on others in order to learn what to do) are critical for understanding successful human life. An important relevant influence on MacIntyre is Herbert McCabe, Law, Love, and Language (London: Sheed and Ward, 1968). 5 Many have feared that this leads to relativism; see for example Robert P. George, “Moral Particularism, Thomism, and Traditions,” The Review of Metaphysics 42 (1989): 593-605; and John Haldane, “MacIntyre’s Thomist Revival: What Next?” in After MacIntyre: Critical Perspectives on the Work of Alasdair MacIntyre (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 91-107 (for a brief reply by MacIntyre to Haldane see ibid., 294-97). MacIntyre has argued that accepting a strong account of the historically conditioned nature of human inquiry does not lead to relativism, and I...