What’s Good? Wherefore Ought?
We all have had the experience of ought, of something that, at least in a subjective sense, renders my imminent action morally relevant, so that what I am about to do or not do is more than a mere question of what will be pleasing to me, socially frictionless, psychologically comfortable, or useful for some plan of action. But it is not only the sense of what is or is not right that we experience in the moral ought, but also what is good. What seems right also seems good, and if it didn’t, it wouldn’t feel right, indeed, it couldn’t be right at all. The good and the right seem correlative and inseparable in experience, though we can parse each out upon reflection. So, how to understand this twofold character of this moral experience? What is that makes any human action obligatory? What’s good? Wherefore ought?
There are, of course, innumerable accounts to be given of this universal experience, ranging from cavalier dismissal—as a psychological vestige of our ancestors’ primitive, taboo cultures that the Enlightenment began to expunge from our communal consciousness, but has not quite completed its task; to robust embrace—as the voice of a righteous God in the depths of the soul demanding us to act according to that righteousness in obedience to divine commandments. Somewhere in the middle of these is the Aristotelian, eudaimonistic interpretation of the moral ought as an impetus intelligently and voluntarily with which to correspond for the purpose of self-satisfaction following our natural inclination to happiness—not so much to do right but to be good, which is to say, to follow the natural, rational path to self-fulfillment, perfection, flourishing, or well-being. Depending upon one’s philosophical or cultural tastes, this could be psychological adjustment, a la stoicism or Sigmund Freud, or of virtuous activity, a la Aristotle or Benjamin Franklin. And then there is always the Kantian third-way, combining the ethos of both a divine-command and well-being ethics, but leaving out the need for any actual divine command or feeling of well-being. In other words, “Follow reason, God’s internal command in the soul, and you will be rendered worthy for happiness. . . later”—Jack Bauer from the television series 24 as a sort-of contemporary hyper-Kantian, doing his duty without quite knowing it’s his duty, and without quite knowing if he’ll ever be happy.
Which theoretical and practical interpretation of the indisputable, universal human experience of ought makes the most sense? It seems to me that there are two fundamental features of the experience that must be affirmed and explained. On the one hand, there is the sense of duty to the other, of the right, that something or someone outside or above me requires me to act in a certain way, regardless of my individual likes or dislikes, notwithstanding my understanding of how or whether the imminent act will contribute to my personal well-being, satisfaction of desire, happiness, aspirations, etc. On the other hand, there is the sense of desire for self, of the good, the attraction, regardless of any sense of duty I might also have, to things in the world that I experience as desirable simply for me, as somehow related to my own happiness, which I pursue for its own sake.
It seems to me that any explanation of the subjective experience of ought ought to encompass and synthesize both of these features. And herein lies the big problem, for these features appear to be mutually exclusive or at least in great tension with each other. If I am obliged to do something, whether this obligation comes from irrational taboo, social-contract convention, categorical reason, or God, I cannot at the same time do this action for the sole purpose of my well-being, perfection, or subjective satisfaction. But if I feel obliged as well as attracted, then I cannot be doing what I ought to do merely because I am attracted to it personally. For then my happiness has become my duty. Conversely, if I find that I am personally attracted to what I also consider my duty, then I am not doing it because it is my duty, for my duty has now become for me a desirable good and thus a means to my personal happiness.
I think the phenomenological dialectic of right and good can be resolved if we could understand what is at the heart of human moral experience; but to understand this heart we require more than what unaided, human moral experience and purely philosophical speculation on this experience can provide. My argument for this conclusion is thus: What the duty aspect of moral experience suggests is the reality of justice, which is inherently relational and thus irreducible to any interpretation of morality as mere personal fulfillment. What the happiness aspect of moral experience suggests is the reality of desire-for-the-good, which is inherently personal and thus irreducible to an interpretation of morality as mere social or divine obligation. So, any explanation of the moral ought must include both other-related justice and self-related desire, and this is precisely what is provided by a theological ethics of creation and gift: if we are creatures, then we are inherently relational, with any actions related above all to our creator; and if creation is a gift, then we are supposed to enjoy creation as a good. And if God Himself in essence is a relation of three persons eternally bestowing upon each other and enjoying each other’s perfect divine goodness—God giving-and receiving-Himself—and if humans are made in the image and likeness of this Trinitarian gift-friendship, then we have the definitive—though still inexhaustively mysterious—archetype in which the paradoxical human experience of simultaneous goodness and oughtness is to be resolved.
If God created us and the world for a purpose, then we are obliged, by definition and through our very nature, to act according to this purpose. Even if we have been given free-will to decide whether or not to correspond with our natural telos, we are not really capable of re-creating or re-designing ourselves, that is, we are inextricably purpose-fulfilling creatures, in the very fabric of our existence. And if God created the world as a gift, in imitation of His own gift-giving-and-receiving essence, then our main purpose as the only creatures that can receive a gift qua gift—and not simply as something desirable— is simply to receive this gift as any gift is meant to be received, in love and gratitude for both the gift and the giver. In short, we are obliged to be happy because we have a duty to love the gift of a divinely bestowed, happy-making existence, and we are encouraged to desire happiness for its own sake because that is precisely the way we justly show our gratitude for the good gift we have been given.
So, am I saying that only an ethics rooted in the divinely revealed truth of creation-as-gift and creator-as-love can coherently and adequately make sense of the universal experience of ought? Indeed I am. I think that purely philosophical explanations are necessary as well, for creation is replete with secondary causality, and grace and revelation can only complete nature and reason if nature and reason have a relative integrity and intelligibility. So, I am open to purely philosophical accounts that can do justice to our experience, but I have not come across any yet that both attract and oblige my soul.
If someone could effectively synthesize Plato and Aristotle, then we would have the most attractive and obligatory pre-Christian account of ethical experience, combing both a divine-order (Plato’s Good) and a happiness ethics (Aristotle’s phronemon); and if someone could only synthesize Christian revelation with this robust account. . . Well, we do have St. Augustine’s Platonic-Christian and St. Thomas’s Augustinian-Aristotelian ethics! But we don’t live in the Middle Ages, so if someone could synthesize all these treasures with the legitimate advances of modernity, such as the dignity of the human person, the extraordinariness of ordinary human life, and the integrity and relative autonomy of the temporal social and political order; and if he could add to these the insights of postmodernism, such as the tradition-and-history-constituted character of ethical enquiry, the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment “view-from-nowhere,” and the myth of the secular—well, here Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre have done incomparable work. So, perhaps the theoretical work we need in our day has already been done—and now we need a new St. Benedict to show us how to put it all into practice. Perhaps he is already in our midst.