Some Contributions of Anthropology to Ethics

SOME CONTRIBUTIONS OF ANTHROPOLOGY TO ETHICS T HE thomistic theory of natural law presents a framework upon which to build an edifice of human morality and it also points out the way in which the edifice is to be built. Nevertheless, a fundamental deficiency accompaning this theory of natural law at the time of its formulation was precisely a lack of the material without which the edifice itself could remain little more than a framework. That material was human experience. St. Thomas Aquinas, as opposed to the natural law thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, constantly insisted upon the great part played by human experience in coming to know moral matters.1 To be sure, the people of his time had considerable human experience and were also the benefactors of much human experience, but their experience was largely the unreflective kind of experience which we often term " common experience." It was for the most part not a formal, catalogued type of experience such as we find in modern critical history or the social sciences, nor was it the result of experiment such as we find, for example, in modern experimental psychology. In short, it was a prescientific rather than a scientific kind of experience. Today, on the contrary, we have a distinct advantage over the middle ages in that we have at our disposal a number of sciences which have as their goal precisely the cataloguing and analysis of various aspects of human experience e. g., history, biology, psychology, anthropology, sociology, etc. From these sciences then there is obviously an abundance of material-the collected, sifted, and measured material of human experience- '" Ostendit insufficientiam motivi propter defectum experientiae: et dicit quod ad hoc quod leges bene ponatur, oportet hoc non ignorare, quia debet aliquis multo tempore considerare et multis annis, ut manifestum .sit per experientiam, si tales leges vel statuta bene se habeant." In II Pol., 5; In VI Eth., 13; Summa Theol., I-11, 95, 2, ad 4; Sum. cont. Gent., III, 123. 174 SOME CONTRIBUTIONS OF ANTHROPOLOGY TO ETHICS 175 which should prove and already has, to a degree, proven fruitful in adding to our knowledge of human nature and man's moral being. This article has as its purpose the illustration of the possible direction and results of the way in which anthropological knowledge might prove useful to the moral philosopher. Anthropology and Ethics: Points of Influence One might wonder, at the outset, in what possible way anthropologic ~l knowledge could and should influence the thought of the moral philosopher. As a matter of fact there are several ways in which a knowledge of anthropology is of direct value to him. In the first place, the primary concern of the moral philosopher is the proper direction of human actions. The moral philosopher attempts to determine the direction human actions should take by determining the most general ends of man. He derives these most general ends of man from a philosophical analysis of the common experience of man considered simply as a rational animal. Further analysis may reveal a few of the most general means to these most general ends of man. But a problem arises at this point. The concretization of human action takes place and must of necessity take place in situations that are singular and unique. Consequently in the field of ethics the most general guides to human action prove to be the least useful to man.2 In order to remedy this situation, then, we need to know not only the most general means whereby man may secure those basic ends demanded by his nature, but also the more particular means whereby the more general means may be attained. An example will illustrate the point. The analysis of the common experience of the nature of man as a rational animal suggests to us that he is a being made for love, a love which can only attain complete fulfillment in and through a society of some kind. From this we conclude that one of the most general ends of man is to love and to be loved and that the general 2 " • • • sermones enim morales universales sunt minus utiles, eo quod actiones in...