What Do Poles Tell Us?

The Poles of Reason

Ancient philosophy knew of a polarity which it described in various ways and sometimes found troubling; one common terminology spoke of “the pleasant” and “the honest,” another of “ends of good and evil” (fines bonorum et malorum) and “obligations” (officia). “Good” and “evil” represented the order of value that we find in the objective world; “right”—and its opposite, “wrong”—represented the obligation that determines the scope for action lying before us. But the dialectical relation between these two poles could, they feared, too easily fall apart. Cicero, who often reflected on the problem, explained how the good and the right could become disconnected, with disastrous results. “There are several schools of thought whose initial assumptions about the ends of good and evil effectively subvert their account of obligation. Posit a supreme good disconnected from virtue, conceive it in terms of assets rather than right, and stick to it consistently without reference to natural decency, and you will have no friendship, no justice, no generosity.”9 And again: “Once pronounce anything to be worth pursuing, once reckon anything as a good other than what is right, and you have extinguished the very light of virtue, which is simply what is right. You have overthrown virtue entirely.… Either this point must be firmly maintained that what is right is the sole good, or it is absolutely impossible to prove that virtue constitutes happiness, in which case I do not see why we should trouble to study philosophy.”10 Speaking here through the mouth of Cato the Elder as a representative of Stoic principles, Cicero assumes that “happiness” is the same as our experience of “the good,” and on that basis makes three claims: (i) that there cannot be two distinct and unconnected sets of principles, one about what is good, the other about what is right; (ii) that a distinction between “the right” and “the good” can only be a conceptual one, since in all concrete judgments the two must coincide; and (iii) that the right, which he calls the “light” of virtue, is epistemologically decisive, while the good, the happiness which virtue “constitutes,” has ontological finality. So, Cato argues, we learn what is good for us simply by consulting our duties, not vice versa. The right and the good are like Prime Minister and monarch: the right is devoted to serving the good, while exclusively dictating policy.

Why can we not have two distinct sets of moral principles? We may, it would seem, go through life comfortably enough, pursuing happiness where possible and doing our duty when it thrusts itself on us without ever resolving in our minds the relation between the two. We do some things because we want to, others because we ought to; these two practical reasonings are different, and we hope for a life in which a certain balance can be struck between them. This view has had some recent popularity. But it does not help us think about the struggle of duty and inclination, which is a major feature of moral experience. True, we may not experience this struggle much of the time, and we may form the impression that some people (though hardly the most admirable) never experience it; yet the very fact that we distinguish these terms as opposites shows our awareness that a struggle may arise. We would not say, “This is my duty,” if we did not mean, “I am not doing this just because I want to!” And there are some whose life for one reason or another is a constant struggle, those who can never visit a restaurant without conscientious inquiries whether what is set on the table was organically grown, humanely reared, and fairly traded. These may look for more guidance from moralists than the banal observation that their duty lies with free-range organic farming, their happiness with the skills of the chef. Not to interest ourselves in how the right and the good relate is simply to live the unexamined life. Human beings may do it, but philosophers may not collude in it. They have a responsibility for the unification of the moral field, bringing some order to the different claims.

To achieve that order requires some slackening of the stiff Stoic insistence that our duty is always plain to us, and we lack only the motivation to do it, a view which interprets the struggle wholly as one of will, not of reason. Is it not sometimes the other way round, that our duty is obscure but we know with reasonable certainty what will make us happy? Many critics, ancient and modern, have been willing to repose great confidence in the evidential value of human desires. Some have reposed too much. For even if I could get a clear view of where my own happiness lay simply by consulting my desires, that would still leave the happiness of the rest of the world out of account. In fact, of course, desire is an inconclusive guide even in my own case, for it is too unstable and inconsistent. So there is no more reason to expect that the good will be self-evident than there is to expect that duty will be self-evident. Lack of self-evidence is the essential reason that morality cannot depend on intuition, but always involves thinking. Yet moral thinking cannot ignore desires any more than it can ignore the sense of duty. Neither the one nor the other may afford us self-evidence, and yet they each afford us indications.

If the thesis that the right is epistemologically decisive fails, what of the claim that the right and the good converge? John Milbank has recently pressed the view that this, too, must be abandoned. The right and the good, he thinks, represent alternative metaphysics between which we must simply make up our minds. If we do so on Christian theological grounds, we shall conclude that the good overcomes the right; God’s gift in history requires us always to take an open and welcoming, not a closed and controlling attitude to the emergent future.11 The difficulty with this, as with the more overt antinomianisms which it seeks to qualify, lies in its unwillingness to take the status of obligation seriously, which leaves ethical discussion an artificially narrow range of things to talk about. What alarmed Cicero’s Cato about the idea of unreconciled principles was that it overthrew virtue, i.e., left unresolved the question whether at any point the right thing was to be done. “If they were consistent,” Cicero again remarked, “these schools of thought would have nothing whatever to say about obligation.”12 But we do persistently have things to say about obligation—Milbank himself does.

Goodness is an aspect of what is, rightness is what is to be done. If we call something “good,” we cannot simply conclude that it is “right” without qualification. Right for what purpose? For whom? When, and in what circumstances? Not all that is good demands to be realized at this very moment in time, or by some action of ours. Bach’s music is preeminent, to be sure, but does that mean that I put down my writing, or whatever else I happen to be doing, to listen to his music now? And is it never to be Mendelssohn or Elgar, those admitted lesser luminaries of the musical firmament? Evidently, there is a time for not listening to Bach. Yet there must be some practical implications of thinking Bach’s music preeminent. It must be right to encourage musicians to include Bach in their programs, and listeners to have Bach on their ipods. A Member of Parliament once tried to persuade the British House of Commons to ban Shakespeare in schools on the ground that he was too good a writer to allow the young to have him spoiled for them by the rigors of the classroom. This bizarre proposal had the merit, at least, of raising the question of how general admiration for the playwright might, and might not, shape an education syllabus practically. The goodness of good things constitutes a reason why certain acts at certain times are right; the badness of bad things constitutes a reason why certain acts at certain times are wrong. But there is a journey of thought needed to focus the wide-spreading “is” of value upon the narrow “ought” of an obligation to perform a given deed at a given time. Practical reason correlates the actions we immediately project with the way things are; it is to think, as the Psalm puts it, “upon his commandments to do them” (Ps. 103:18).

It follows that practical reason cannot be intuitive reason; it cannot pocket its ball in one shot. It has to negotiate a way between the two poles of description and resolution, the one determinate and the other indeterminate, one in the sphere of the actual, the other in the sphere of the possible. “Memory looks back, intention forward; the one must be knit to the other,” wrote Augustine.13 A pattern of argument familiar from the Epistles of the New Testament asserts a truth about God and mankind and makes it the basis for a command or recommendation: “Since, then, you are risen with Christ, seek those things which are above” (Col. 3:1); “since, therefore, Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same purpose” (1 Peter 4:1); or even, “I appeal to you, therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice” (Rom. 12:1), where “therefore” connects the whole doctrinal argument of the first eleven chapters of Romans to the sequence of practical exhortations that occupy the remainder of the book. The New Testament constantly announces truths that are to direct our practical deliberations, especially truths about the goodness and severity of God and the death and resurrection of Christ. It expects us to take these truths as the ground for practical demands, and to return to them when those demands need confirmation or clarification.

When we try to describe this movement of practical reason between its two poles, a misleading analogy suggests itself. Theoretical reason, too, is discursive. An argument proceeds deductively by inference from premises to conclusions, and having reached its conclusions, rests in them, having run its course. Its conclusions, if validly reached, are just as secure as its premises were. So conclusions to one argument may supply premises for another, and in this way theoretical reason extends its kingdom inference by inference. It is tempting to construe practical reason on the same model. If theoretical reason proceeds from the known to the unknown, why should not practical reason proceed from the determined to the undetermined? The scholastics, Saint Thomas among them, were attracted by the analogy. They suggested that each of the two types of reason had its own set of first principles, or axioms, from which conclusions were drawn. Their operations were thus parallel and independent.14 The influence of this conception on Kant’s formulation of practical reason can hardly be overstated.

Yet it is mistaken. Practical reason is not deductive, but inductive. The parallel between the progress from the known to the unknown and the progress from the determined to the undetermined is merely apparent. Practical reason is not an inference from premises to conclusions. It has no premises, no points from which an uncontroversial start may be made, and it has no conclusions, on which its trains of reason come to rest. No premises, because the knowledge of the world on which practical reason turns is always contested knowledge, not agreed. No conclusions, because practical reason terminates in action, not in belief. The descriptive accounts of reality that afford an entrée for action are not agreed starting-points. They are complex readings of the world, and as such arguable from the beginning. Moral reason has, of course, its commonplaces and formal rules—“the good is to be pursued, the evil avoided,” etc.—which work just like the formal rules of logic in theoretical reason. But these are not the substantive readings of the world and its order on which our judgments of the good are based. Disputes about the world mark all of our moral thinking this side of the vision of God; such are the cognitive conditions of the age of Ethics. Nor are the resolutions reached by practical reason resolutions in thought. They are moments of action which punctuate thought without bringing it to a final cadence. At a certain point the thinker lifts his head from his hands, sighs, and says “Well, there is nothing else to be done!,” then picks up a pen and signs a document—or whatever it is he has been thinking about doing. The more climactic and self-conscious moments of this kind we call “decisions,” and philosophers have sometimes spoken of decision as an “eruption” into the midst of thought. We need not be so dramatic. Not every moment at which thought passes into action is a Rubicon crossed or a die cast. So we speak more generally of “resolutions,” a word that includes longer-term determinations, broad policies of action, the pursuit of general principles for living, some of which may never actually come to the point of being consciously decided on, but simply form in the mind. Yet whether climactic or incremental, resolution is action and not thought. It does not round off a train of practical thinking in the way that a logical conclusion does for a theoretical argument.

When Fermat’s last theorem was finally proved, what was left for mathematics to do but contemplate the proof? The proof is everlasting; the question once disposed of is disposed of forever. But of no practical question is this true. When the document has been signed, we may still go on asking about the rights and wrongs of signing it. The deed itself is beyond correction, so that the question has ceased to be deliberative, and has become reflective. Yet in its new form it continues to be put: should it have been signed? That phrase “should have been” has not received half the attention it deserves from moral philosophers. We are hugely, and perhaps dangerously, comfortable discussing what should and should not have been. Of course we may pull ourselves together, and say, “There is no point in asking that anymore!” But to stop asking is itself a decision, for we are perfectly able to go on asking the question and may sometimes be unable to stop. And since other deliberative questions may turn on the answers we give to this reflective question—not least whether, and how, we should repent of what we have done—it retains a practical significance.

So practical reason is not deductive, which is to say, unidirectional, moving from a point established to a point still to be attained. It moves to and fro between the world of realities and the moment of action; it correlates a description of the one with a determination of the other. We have introduced two terms which refer conveniently to the two directions of practical thought, from description to resolution, and from resolution back to description. We have spoken of deliberation and reflection respectively. The metaphors contained in these two words suggest the contrast clearly: “reflection” is “turning back” on something that is already there, “behind us” as it were; “deliberation” is “weighing up,” facing an alternative, looking at possible courses of action that have not yet been resolved. More simply, we may speak of “thinking about” and “thinking towards.”

To clarify what should already be clear: the distinction between deliberation and reflection does not correspond to the distinction between practical and theoretical reason. Practical reason includes both these movements of thought, reflection as well as deliberation. Deliberation cannot stand on its own without reflection, nor can reflection stand on its own without deliberation. On the one hand, any thinking-towards needs some thinking-about as a springboard from which to take off. One may act without thinking at all, but one cannot think-towards acting without thinking-about some truth of the world in which one will act. One cannot think-towards a policy of buying fair trade tea or coffee without thinking-about the problematic balance of power in the world’s tea and coffee markets. The question “what am I to do?” means, “what am I to do in this state of affairs?”—and so always presumes an answer to the question “what state of affairs?” Practical reason, as we have said, has its own stake in descriptions of reality. If I ask whether pains in the left side of my chest are the first signs of a heart attack or merely an acute costochondritis, I have a strong practical interest in a truthful answer. Similarly, reflection points on towards deliberation. The proposition that God loves the world is in itself a work of reflection, a determination of the truth of things, not a decision to do something, yet we have not grasped its full significance unless our minds are led on to how we may conduct ourselves in a world that God loves. The same is true of propositions that have no reference to a transcendent reality, but deal with any important reality, with famine, art, politics, or whatever. Reflection in isolation becomes, as we say, “abstract” or “theoretical,” and unless we are subject to the discipline of a discourse authorizing abstraction—a theoretical discourse such as theology, aesthetics, politics, etc.—we regard it as lacking semantic legitimacy, and call it “insincere,” meaning that it is careless of the real significance of what it speaks about. What has happened when we think and speak insincerely is simply that we have not thought—or if we did think, we have stopped thinking too soon.

9 Cicero, De officiis, 1.2.5: “Sed sunt non nullae disciplinae, quae propositis bonorum et malorum finibus officium omne pervertant. Nam qui summum bonum sic instituit, ut nihil habeat cum virtute coniunctum, idque suis commodis, non honestate metitur, hic, si sibi ipse consentiat et non interdum naturae bonitate vincatur, neque amicitiam colere possit nec iustitiam nec liberalitatem.”

10 De finibus, 3.3.10f.: “Quidquid enim praeter id quod honestum sit expetendum esse dixeris in bonisque numeraveris, et honestum ipsum quasi virtutis lumen exstinxeris et virtutem penitus everteris.… Nam nisi hoc obtineatur, id solum bonum esse quod honestum sit, nullo modo probari possit beatam vitam virtute effici; quod si ita sit, cur opera philosophiae sit danda, nescio.” The term honestum is, perhaps, not quite as narrow as “right,” conveying less suggestion that there is just one right thing to be done in any situation.

11 John Milbank, “Can Morality be Christian?” in The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 219–32.

12 Cicero, De officiis, 1.2.6: “Hae disciplinae igitur si sibi consentaneae velint esse, de officio nihil queant dicere.”

13 Augustine, City of God, 7.7: “Necesse est a memoria respiciente prospiciens conectatur intentio.”

14 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 2–1.91.3.

O’Donovan, O. (2013). Self, World, and Time: Ethics as Theology (Vol. 1, pp. 25–32). William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company.