Plato's Moral Realism: The Discovery of the Presuppositions of Ethics logic of desire: Aquinas on emotion

Introduction

1 Introduction Whenever “men of the world” have to get into a personal argument about ideas they find fault with, and are prepared to stand their ground bravely for a long time and not flee the field like cowards, a strange thing happens: they eventually become dissatisfied with themselves and their claims. That famous rhetoric of theirs somehow fades away so that they seem like children. Plato, Theaetetus 177b Homer, Dante and Shakespeare, to say nothing of Plato and Aristotle, were much more able than most people to bring things to light . . . they must have been not just excellent stylists of language but thinkers; that is, they excelled in veracity. Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person In the West we now live in a post-moral society. That may seem an extraordinary claim in view of the endless public and private debate on all kinds of apparently moral questions: on the distribution of the world’s wealth, the control of crime, the necessity or undesirability of capital punishment and of punishment in general, the rights and wrongs of abortion, of warfare, indeed on a whole range of inalienable rights, most particularly the right of choice, however to be determined. Most of this discussion, however, is free-floating, depending only on prudential or arbitrary beliefs and judgments about the good we ought to pursue. We try to engage in what is taken to be moral reasoning without recourse—since recourse is 2 introduction deemed impossible—to moral foundations. We “just know” that we can determine the right course by reference to canons of morality we erect for ourselves, while chattering of the guidance of right reason, of a moral sense, of duty or obligation, of wise and shrewd decision-making. Under one or other of these guises we seek to promote the good of some or all of the human race, and more particularly of ourselves, even though we do not know who we are and tend to assume that we are the autonomous products of a blind evolutionary process. While traditional moral thinkers, from the time of Socrates, concerned themselves both with our psychological capacity for making moral decisions and with an objective and defensible good that we want or need to pursue, their modern successors regularly wish to deduce what we want or ought to choose solely from the psychological condition in which we find ourselves from time to time, assuming that we can investigate that condition without reflecting on whether or not it would need to be very different were there objective moral foundations on which we could and must rest, objective moral goals that we might rationally pursue and discover. If we were pursuing “happiness,” as the ancient Greeks universally believe we are, we would need to identify the psychological state demanded of us as a condition of that happiness. We might have to recognize, for example, that achieving our own happiness entails pursuing the good for its own sake. Happiness, though sought, would thus be a by-product of that recognition. I argued in Real Ethics that the results of our contemporary ethical proceedings are almost daily more evidenced: as mindless in theory, intolerant, self-deluding, even brutal in practice. Logically we are confronted with two alternatives: if not a reconstructed foundationalism, then an amoral individualism in which each of us invents the right to construct his own “moral” universe and to promote the cultural consequences of that universe as widely as he deems necessary and useful. Ultimately this course is for moral nihilism , often dressed up in Western societies as democratic egalitarianism , preferably in an ignorant and therefore more “democratic” 3 introduction form: we look for techniques of survival in a value-free universe. Some, however, think to find an escape route by taking refuge in some variety of religious fundamentalism or cultish fantasy that may be of a philistine, censorious, and again even brutal sort, sharing with the nihilist option a denial of any possibility of a rationally defensible moral universe, and instead relying on the blind acceptance of the supposed will of fate or of some god or gods. Here, then, are the logical alternatives; in practice most of us indulge in fudges, adopting some intermediate (or even Laodicean) position that feels comfortable, but that not only neglects the old Socratic demand for philosophical justification, but impudently claims that “foundationalist ” justification (that is, one based on objective truth and objective...