Kant on Duty

In the Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals, Immanuel Kant sets out to find an understanding of morality that can be derived from first principles rather than from empirical experience. That is, he doesn’t think it’s enough to come up with ethics on the basis of statements like, ‘It makes me sad when people are mean to me’. Morality needs to be grounded in pure reason, i.e. not derived from our individual or human experience, but applicable to any and all rational beings. Groundwork is Kant’s attempt to come up with a purely rational ‘supreme principle of morality’, so that he can then go on to write a more detailed ethics. He starts out by discussing the idea of duty.

Kant says that the only quality which is unambiguously good is a good will. Any other quality is ambiguous: understanding, with, judgment, power, riches, honour, happiness, moderation, self-control: all can be bad when accompanied by a bad will.

A good will isn’t good because of anything it achieves or does: if I give someone a biscuit out of kindness or generosity, but accidentally make them fat, it doesn’t mean my original will was bad. Likewise, if I have kind or generous intentions, but no biscuits with which to express them, that doesn’t mean that my intentions were bad.

Kant says that if we look at human nature, it must be designed for whatever it is that human nature was intended for: just as biscuits are tasty because they’re meant to be eaten, so whatever makes humans particularly human must point us towards whatever the purpose of human nature is. Now, Kant says that if humans were meant primarily to stay alive or to be happy, it would make no sense that we were rational. Everything necessary to existence an happiness could be got by instinct, with a lot less angst. He points out that the more people use reason to try to enjoy life and be happy, the more miserable they are (How many happy philosophers can you name?), and they tend to envy ordinary people who don’t spend so much time thinking about life, and just do whatever they feel like doing. Thus, if reason’s meant to make us happy, it’s a pretty crappy tool to get us there, as if you decided to make biscuits but added a handful of cement to the mixture. Not tasty. It’s reasonable, therefore, to suggest that maybe reason has some other purpose in human nature than to keep us alive and make us happy.

Kant argues that reason must be meant to help us develop a good will. He argues that we don’t have a good will so that we can do good things, but because having a good will is good in itself (this is where the biscuit analogy breaks down, because what use is a biscuit if you can’t eat it?). But what does it mean for a will to be good? This is where the concept of duty comes in. Kant says that a person’s will is only good if they are motivated by duty and nothing else. A shopkeeper might decided to charge a reasonable price for her biscuits because it's the right, dutiful thing to do, but if her biscuits are reasonably priced only because she doesn't want her customers to go elsewhere for their biscuits, she doesn’t get any moral credit for it What matters isn’t the action, but a person’s reason for doing it.

Acting out of duty is acting in accordance with the demands of law, not for any particular goal. The will isn't good if it's motivated by any human desires and inclinations: the only principle it can act on whilst still being a good will is the universal law. Duty means that we should never act in any way that we wouldn’t want the principle we act on to be a universal law. We all have a basic grasp of what duty means, but because of the messy circumstances and tangles of desire and inclination we all find ourselves in, we need philosophy to help us understand the universal law so that we too can have good wills.

I'll go into Kant's idea of the universal law in a bit more detail another time, but for now I'd just like to point out that there are some pretty dodgy dualisms going on here. I get no credit for wanting the right thing if it's in any way contaminated by selfish reasons, and there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of room for the idea that what makes us happy might sometimes be the same thing as the right thing to do in a particular circumstance. It's also weird that Kant draws such a sharp distinction between empirical knowledge (ideas we get from our experience) and abstract rational principles, arguing that only rational principles can be the basis for working out morality, as if it's possible for us to have any ideas that aren't profoundly shaped by our individual experiences.

Photo credit: Sifu Renka on Flickr

My first ever guest blog post.

A milestone, dear readers. I recently signed up for a fun project called Open Table Theology. The idea is that lots of theology bloggers gather round a big virtual table to share their two penn'orth about a particular topic. This month is all about the image of God, and it's been fun so far, although obviously the disadvantage of the virtual table is that there is no actual tea or biscuits provided, so I'm afraid you'll have to bring your own. Check out my contribution here, and everybody else's thoughts here.

Martin Luther: The Freedom of a Christian

Martin Luther wrote The Freedom of a Christian in response to the Pope’s criticisms of his teaching. Contrary to popular belief, Luther wasn’t opposed to the Catholic Church as such, and was pretty gutted when they kicked him out; it was more that he thought they were wrong about some crucial things, and should admit the errors of their ways and agree with him instead. The Freedom of a Christian comes accompanied with a charming little letter which goes roughly like this:

Dear Pope Leo,

I want to make it clear that, while I've attacked the ungodly doctrines of the Catholic Church and your terribly corrupt See, I've never attacked you personally. Sometimes I actually stand up for you, and to show you just how much I wish you well, I've sent you this little treatise, explaining why you are wrong and I am right.

Lots of love,
Luther
xxx

Luther’s argument revolves around two basic principles:

1. A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.
2. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant, subject to all.

He says that human beings have a twofold nature: the spiritual, inner soul, which the Bible refers to as the ‘new man’, and the carnal, outward flesh, which the Bible calls the ‘old man.’ A Christian becomes righteous not by anything to do with the flesh, but only by faith in the Word of God. Only the soul can accept the Word of God, so nothing the flesh can do makes any difference. You can’t think that works get you anywhere and also have faith: as soon as you have faith you realise that you’re entirely ‘blameworthy, sinful, and damnable’, and only by trusting Christ can you become a new man. No outward work can justify a person, and nor can any outward work make a person guilty.

Scripture is divided into commandments and promises. The commandments of the Bible teach us what is good, but they don’t help us to do good things: they’re just meant to show us how incapable we are of doing good. When we despair of ourselves, then the promises come to our aid: they promise that if we only believe in Jesus, we will have all things.

Now, the greatest compliment you could have in a person is having faith in their goodness and trustworthiness, and the greatest insult you could pay a person is to be suspicious of them. The highest worship we can offer to God is to trust him, and the greatest rebellion against him is to disbelieve his promises. When we do good works because we think they’ll make us righteous, because we don’t trust God’s promises, they’re not worth anything and are worse than useless.

Faith unites the soul with Christ as a bride with her bridegroom (giggedy giggedy), and the soul becomes one flesh with Christ. This means that everything Christ has, the soul can claim for its own and vice versa, so that soul gains Christ's grace, life and salvation, and Christ gains sin, death and damnation (aw, crap). He made them his own, and suffered, died, and descended into hell to defeat them. His sinless life was stronger than death, so he defeated death and hell and set the soul free.

So, does that mean we don’t need to do good works? Well, it’s not that straightforward, sadly. Although we’re justified by faith and don’t need anything else spiritually, we still have to live on earth. The soul that has been set free by Christ wants everything else to be set free, and so disciplines the body to purify it so that it too can worship God. Works aren’t done to justify ourselves, but out of love for God. It’s a bit like a bishop: baptising children doesn’t make him a bishop, but the other way round: if he wasn’t a bishop, he wouldn’t be able to baptise children (don’t bash the bishop...analogy). A good or bad house doesn’t make a good or bad builder; a good or bad builder makes a good or bad house.

When Jesus was asked to pay taxes, he pointed out that the sons of the king are exempt from taxes; but then he freely submitted and paid taxes anyway (more tax systems should depend on fish-gold). We do good works not because we need to but out of love for God and others.

Some people might say, well, since I’m not justified by works, I don’t need to do any: I will do what I feel like and won’t take part in the ceremonies and rituals of Church. Incorrect. In the same way that we need food or drink, but they don’t make us righteous, we can’t stop doing good works. In this world, we’re still bound to the life of the body. In the same way that wealth is a test of poverty, the ceremonies of the Church are the test of the righteousness of faith. Small boys need to be cherished in the bosoms of maidens, but when they are older, maidens become a danger and a temptation, and in the same way, inexperienced young Christians need the restraint of Christian ceremony, even though for more mature Christians there is a danger that they will come to believe that they’re justified by ceremonies.

I found it interesting reading Luther, because it made me realise just how much of the theology I've heard in churches I've belonged to can be traced back to him. But I do find him pretty dualistic: can body and soul really be separated that clearly? Are we really so hopelessly depraved and corrupt that there's nothing good in us at all before we accept Jesus? For all his clever similes, I don't find him such a rich thinker as Aquinas, and it makes me sad that he sees the beauty of salvation apparently only by contrast to the corruption of everything else.

Does theology make you happy?

A sociologist called Idler once (eventually) got round to proposing four ways in which religion might have an impact on people's well being:

1. providing a sense of comfort in times of trouble,
2. providing access to a large network of potential support providers,
3. discouraging behaviour which might lead to health problems (smoking, drinking, sleeping around, taking drugs etc. This could, depending on how you look at it, make religious people either happier or sadder),
4. furnishing a cognitive framework through which people can better understand the meaning of pain, suffering and death (that's the whole set of theological explanations for why bad stuff happens, including but not limited to repeated singing of Blessed Be Your Name).

Apparently, a lot of research has been done into 1-3, but not so much into 4, so a guy called Marc A. Musick did some research into the effect of Christians' theodicy on their life satisfaction, published in the Journal of the Sociology of Religion as a paper called Theodicy and Life Satisfaction among Black and White Americans.

Theodicy is about answering the question, 'How can there be a good God when there is so much suffering in the world?' Musick wanted to find out the effect of different theological answers to this question on how satisfied people were with their lives. He did this by getting hold of information from a national social survey, and comparing people's answers to questions about their wellbeing to information about their denominational membership (different denominations tend to have different theologies about the problem of pain), ethnicity (more on that later), how often they went to church, and how much they saw the world in terms of good or evil.

Musick identified one key difference between different theodicies: whether they saw the world in as fundamentally good, or as fundamentally evil, life being seen in terms of a spiritual battle against evil forces. He came up with four hypotheses about the effects of these different sorts of theodicy:

1. "Theodicies that place more emphasis on sin and evil are associated with less life satisfaction." If you're constantly aware of the gap between the way the world is and the way God intended it to be, you're more likely to be dissatisfied, and feeling like you're constantly threatened by the forces of evil is probably not that cheering.
   

2. "The negative effects of holding a sin theodicy on life satisfaction are stronger among Whites than Blacks." This one's less obvious. In addition to demographic differences between black and white Christians (Black Christians tend to be more religiously involved and committed, to view the Church more as one of the key institutions in their lives, and to be more deprived, which leads them to rely more on the church for different kinds of support), Musick thinks that a strong sense of the fundamental goodness of the world in African American Christianity was key to black American Christians' survival of slavery, segregation, and the long and difficult process of emancipation, and that it continues to shape their worldview.
   

3. "The effects of holding such a sin theodicy vary by levels of interaction with fellow believers such that the negative effect is strongest amongst those who interact less frequently." It's like the difference between walking round the haunted house on your own or going round with a friend.
   

4. "The effects of holding a sin theodicy vary by levels of stress such that the negative effect is stronger among people experiencing stressful circumstances." Well, duh.

So, he did his research, and all his hypotheses seemed to be supported by the evidence he found, but the strongest association he found was between service attendance and life satisfaction. Moral of the story: don't skip church, kids, it will make you sad. Overall, he found that religion seems to make people both happy and sad, satisfied and dissatisfied. This reminds me of something my dad once told me, church should 'comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable'. Which perhaps sort of answers an interesting question that this research raises for me: should theology make you happy?

Photo credit: Celestial Photography on Flickr.

Heretics: Manichees

Manichaeism is a variant of Gnosticism, which is most often of interest to theology because Augustine, one of the most influential theologians of all time, spent several years as a follower of Manus, which means that those so inclined can have heated debates about whether his theology is Manichean or not. Good times.

Anyway, the Manichees basically believed in what is known as cosmic dualism: that is, they thought that the fundamental reality of life, the universe, and everything, was that two powers, good and evil, were locked in an epic battle with one other: like Luke vs Darth, Blur vs Oasis, Monsters vs Aliens, except it goes on forever. It's the meeting of the immoveable object and the irresistable force (maybe they should just get married), but one of them is nasty and the other nice.

The Manichees thought that the material world was a creation of Evil, but that at some point in this eternal punch up, Evil/Dark had damaged Good/Light so that there were tiny fragments of the divine scattered throughout the material world, and could be found in greater concentration in certain animals and plants. Humans were made up of souls (good) and bodies (bad), and could be saved by identifying themselves with their souls and rejecting their bodies. They could also eat lots of melons and cucumbers which has particularly high concentrations of divine sparks and hence considered the Manichaean superfoods. They were also supposed to abstain from sex, although, as Augustine found out, they weren't always so hot on this one.

Photo credit: Scott Kinmartin on Flickr. That's what a Manichee Manatee looks like. Ah, crap, mixed them up again.

What's right with prosperity theology?

I just stumbled across this brilliant article about what prosperity theology gets right (calm down, I'm not going to try to persuade you to buy me a private jet. Yet.), and thought you might like it:

Abundance for all

Martin Luther would approve.

John Milbank on the Four Senses of Scripture

John Milbank is one of the big names in modern theology, although sadly, like many trendy thinkers, actually trying to understand what he's on about is a bit like wading through treacle. Still, I thought it was worth trying to distill some of his treacly ideas about the four senses of scripture for your delectation, so here goes.

Milbank argues that medieval biblical exegesis was influenced by the fact that lots of the people who wrote commentaries on Scripture also wrote commentaries on Dionysius the Areopagite. Now, for Dionysius, the symbols of Christian liturgy participated in the ordered structure of creation, which in turn reflected the nature and character of the infinite God, and, as a result, was overflowing with multiple and varied meaning.

Because the words of scripture pointed to this richly symbolic world, it became to be seen as "oceanum mysteriosum Dei, ut sic loquar labyrinthum" (My Latin's pretty poor, but I think that means something like "the ocean of the mysteries of God" and then something about a labyrinth of speaking. Help me, Latin scholars!) - whatever the subtleties of that phrase, the basic idea is that within the words of Scripture are endless depths and layers and intricacies of meaning in there. Umberto Eco (most famous for his novel The Name of the Rose, a theological murder mystery) argues that the four senses of scripture weren't meant to open up a greater variety of interpretations of scripture, but actually to reduce the number of possible ways of reading the Bible, by limiting it to generally accepted traditions of interpretation.

Now, Milbank thinks that one of the things about Christ is that he embodies the endless possibilities within God. He thinks that Christ is the head and body of the Church in the sense that he kicks off a new way of living 'in Christ', but also right from the start contains all the possibilities which the Church then goes on to embody. All the different ways that the Church and Christians have embodied Christ and lived out the good news of the kingdom of God were potentially contained in Christ from the beginning, and there's no way we'll ever fully understand everything that Christ means, because to do that, we'd have to have a complete view of everything that both Jesus and the Church have done and will do in his name. To be a Christian, thinks Milbank, is actually to contribute something to the person, meaning, and body of Christ.

As a result, Milbank thinks that when we read Scripture allegorically, tropologically, and anagogically as well as literally, it becomes possible for us to read it as the story of our lives rather than just a story about dead people (and I know, Jesus is still alive, but that's Milbank's point: if we can't read the Bible in these ways, we can't read our own lives as part of the story of Jesus, so he effectively is dead anyway).

Milbank then goes on to argue that, as Protestants started (at least theoretically) to reject the possibility of reading Scripture in these multiple ways, focusing on literal interpretations and getting back to the New Testament Church, what they actually did was to shut down possibilities for reading Jesus into their own lives, and as a result, what they did was to move their understanding of salvation away from the idea of participation in Christ towards the offer of abstract grace which would somehow pay off our abstract debt to God. In addition, says Milbank, this shrinking of the range of acceptable readings of Scripture did away with the role of the Church: just as reading went from encountering symbols which pointed beyond themselves to things in the world, multiple meanings, and God himself to an activity in which the individual directly confronted the literal meaning of the text, so the sense of the individual being caught up into the rich, messy and complicated symbolisms of the rituals, actions, liturgies and symbols of the Church was abandoned in favour of a vision of the individual directly confronting God, alone with their conscience.

I hope that makes sense. If you, too, feel like you are drowing in treacle reading this, please shout and I'll see if I can destickify you a bit...