Moral Obligation Under Conditions of Alienation: Berry again, and others

 

I want start by  thinking about a little essay by Wendell Berry "Why I am not going to buy a computer" and the reaction to it, and his subsequent defense against some of these criticisms, "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine." I am less interested in the particular issue of the computer, interesting as that is, and more in the general idea of a moral obligation to eliminate or reduce one's dependence on practices and technologies that are destroying or corrupting that which is worth loving, preserving, caring for (the Good, for short). The computer is really an example. The deeper question is whether a practice, technology, or economic system is damaging things that are intrinsically good – land, community, family, meaningful work, truthfulness, beauty, the health of creatures and places, relationship to God for many – and if so, whether we have an obligation to reduce our participation in it? 

   In "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer," Berry's argument is often caricatured as technophobia. But his argument is not that computers are evil. Rather, he says he wishes to limit his dependence on technologies and industries whose effects he judges harmful, and that he ought to begin with his own conduct. He asks a question that is pure common sense: before buying a "solution," should I not first ask whether I actually have a problem? And if a technology contributes to harms I oppose, why should I deepen my dependence on it?

     The reaction was fascinating because many readers interpreted his refusal as an attack on them. Berry himself was surprised by the intensity of the response and suggested that he had scratched the surface of a "technological fundamentalism." His critics often argued that computers were merely tools and that his refusal was irrational or reactionary. Others focused on his description of his wife typing and editing his manuscripts, seeing it as evidence of patriarchal assumptions.

     Now, the issue that almost all these reactions missed was that Berry’s argument was not that technology per se is bad. It is more like a claim that love creates obligations. If I claim to love a forest, a farm, a community, a marriage, a tradition, or the world, then I cannot treat my participation in its destruction as morally irrelevant merely because my contribution is small. This reminds me of Hans Jones (previous entry). If our actions contribute to the possible destruction of future human life, do we not have an obligation to refrain? Berry asks a parallel question at a smaller scale: if our ordinary consumption contributes to the destruction of places, communities, and forms of life that we profess to love, do we not have an obligation to limit that participation? Both reject the excuse that "my individual action makes no difference." The obligation arises before the calculation of effectiveness.

    I understand Berry as trying to show that moral life begins in attention and affection. We learn to love particular places, people, and practices. Once we love them, certain actions become unthinkable. The point is not maximizing utility or achieving political success. The point is fidelity to what is good. In other words, we are obligated, as far as reasonably possible, not to live by means that destroy the ends we affirm. That is the moral intuition beneath his refusal to buy the computer.

 

        The strongest objection, however, is also obvious. Modern life implicates us in countless harmful systems. Berry himself admitted this. He depended on fossil fuels, markets, and industrial goods. His critics asked: where do you stop? Why reject the computer but not the truck? Why reject one form of complicity while accepting another?

Berry's answer is important. He does not claim purity. He explicitly rejects the ideal of purity. Instead, he claims that because complete innocence is impossible, one ought nevertheless to reduce one's participation in harm where one can. The impossibility of doing everything is not an excuse for doing nothing.  Thus I think the deepest philosophical question raised by these essays is not technological at all. It is about love, whether it is ‘just a feeling’ or whether it imposes practical disciplines and limits on how we live.

     I would bring in Gaita (and Plato) here. If we become like what we love (previous entry), then reducing our dependence on destructive systems is not only about saving forests or communities. It is also about preserving the soul's capacity to love rightly. The danger is not only that the beloved object is damaged, though of course that matters greatly. The deeper danger is that we become the kind of people who no longer notice the damage, or no longer care. Which is what by and large we have become. That, I think, is the deepest concern running beneath both Berry essays. It is less about machines than about moral formation. Machines are simply one arena in which the question appears. 

. . . 

Often is seems like this. A metaphor. Humanity and all the things worthy of love and care are in a large swimming pool filling up, about to be submerged. We all fill the pool by adding drops at a time. My drop makes no practical difference whatsoever to the rising water level. Do I nevertheless have an obligation to refrain from adding my drop, or to halve my drop. Berry (and I assume Gaita) would say yes. Why? 

     First, neither would begin by asking whether my drop makes a measurable difference. They would begin by asking what kind of act it is. Capitalist culture predisposes us to think that an action is morally significant only if it changes the outcome. If the pool will fill regardless, my drop seems morally negligible. Thus it doesn’t matter what I do. That is how I myself sadly act. Berry's would begin with membership and fidelity. We belong to a world of creatures, places, and communities that sustain us. The question is not merely, "Will my drop change the final water level?" but "What is my relation to what I claim to love?" If I knowingly add water to the pool, I am participating in the drowning of what I profess to cherish. To refrain is an act of loyalty. It expresses the truth of my love, even if it does not alter the outcome. It is not about maintaining a purity which I never had and cannot aspire to. It is about loving or trying to love what I profess to love.  This is why Berry writes about practices rather than results. A farmer (I always think of my great grandparents, who were farmers heart and soul) who cares for the soil may not save agriculture. A neighbor who remains faithful to a community may not stop its decline. But these acts are still intrinsically meaningful because they embody a proper relation to the good. 

    Gaita, I think, would say that morality is not fundamentally about producing states of affairs. It is about seeing reality truthfully.  Suppose someone says, "This person is going to die anyway, so what difference does it make whether I betray him?" Gaita would say that the very question misunderstands the nature of the moral reality before us. The wrongness of betrayal does not depend upon the consequences. It depends upon what betrayal is. Analogously, adding one's drop is not made innocent because the pool is already nearly full. The moral significance lies partly in what the act says about one's understanding of the good. To refuse the drop is to acknowledge the worth of what is being threatened. Thus Plato’s thought that we become what we love. Every act forms the soul's attitude. It is about what happens to my soul as well as what happens to the pool. About the connection. If I repeatedly tell myself that my contribution is insignificant, I begin to train myself into a certain stance toward reality. I learn to separate my actions from my loves. I learn to live comfortably with contradiction. Eventually, I may cease to love the threatened good at all.

     Berry would agree. For him, industrial society is dangerous not only because it destroys forests or farms but because it habituates people to living at a distance from the consequences of their actions. It weakens the connection between affection and conduct. The obligation arises from the value of what is at stake, not from confidence that one's action will succeed. I am reminded of Plato's Republic, in which justice is not merely a strategy for producing a better world but a condition of the soul. One should not commit injustice even if one could gain the whole world by it. Why? Because becoming unjust is itself a corruption. (Gaita’s lecture on Plato is great, it is on YouTube.) Even if my drop will not determine the fate of the pool, adding it may still be an act of disloyalty to the good, while refraining may be an act of fidelity to it. 

. . . 

    Another angle. I love food. I love the pleasure of eating good food. It connects me with my past and people I love who are no longer here. unfortunately much of my diet is based on cruelty to animals - I cannot always afford organic meat, which my boys depend on as well. I think that industrial meat is a de-secration / de-creation, a kind of blasphemy even, and yet I am implicated in it by my choice. And of course the effects of eating meat on global warming are terrible. I could find similar practices, including my use of the Internet and AI. I somehow cannot translate an obligation I recognize with my intellect into my will.

    I am not describing indifference, I think, but a kind of grief I suffer from. The person Berry worries about is not so much the person who cannot live up to every moral insight. It is the person who ceases to notice the contradiction at all. The industrial system works best when we no longer see the animal, the field, the worker, the forest, the river, the future child. I do see them. Doesn’t that make me worse?

     Berry says that affection is the beginning of moral understanding. Before principles come loves. Before duties come attachments. My love food is not merely as fuel but as a communion with place, memory, family, and the dead. That is actually a Berryan starting point. The problem is not that I love food. The problem is that the industrial system has attached that good to practices that violate the very loves from which it originally arose.

Berry might want me to ask about what small acts of fidelity are possible within my actual circumstances. Not how I can become pure, because I can’t. (I think of Jesus “Judge not, lest you yourself be judged.) Berry, contra critics, is not interested in purity. He was a farmer who used tractors, bought supplies, paid taxes, drove on roads, and participated in markets. He knew there was no innocent place to stand. The question is always one of better and worse forms of participation. 

   What would Gaita say? First, he does not think morality begins with conclusions from logical arguments. He thinks it begins with seeing the world and the people and things in it in the right light, the light of love / affection. Like Berry I think. A person who truly sees the full reality of a concentration camp victim, a dying child, a beloved spouse, or a suffering animal does not first infer a duty and then become moved. Rather, the duty is already contained within the seeing. That is why examples matter so much in his philosophy. Saints, parents, lovers, rescuers, and faithful friends reveal what is there to be seen.

    Now in my description I spoke of  desecration, de-creation, blasphemy. Emotionally charged language. But my loves are in tension. I love animals, my children, the traditions embodied in food, economic security, the earth. And these loves pull in different directions. That is a tragedy rather than merely a failure, though it is that, too. I experience several goods simultaneously, and they are entangled within systems that make it impossible to honor all of them perfectly. Like being caught in a spider’s web. But I am no less responsible for that.

     I think Berry would be suspicious of any moral vision that leaves a person feeling only guilt and no gratitude. The fact that a meal contains traces of injustice does not erase the fact that it is also a gift, a communion, a memory of those who loved us. Gaita might say that the recognition of moral failure is itself evidence of a relation to the good. A completely corrupted person would not experience this conflict at all. The conflict hurts precisely because the good still exerts a claim upon me. The tension might be a form of hope in that it shows that my loves have not yet been reduced to mere preferences or calculations. Indeed, I must do better. That is the thought I take from this.

    The moral life is not about achieving innocence. It is about remaining faithful to the good in a world where innocence is no longer available. 

. . . 

   Concerning the loss of purity or innocence, I cannot help but think of the myth of the Fall of Man – the loss of innocence, unavoidable complicity in structures of harm, the impossibility of finding a completely pure place to stand. In this context the biblical story of the Fall makes sense. The Fall is not really about breaking a rule, I think. It is about a rupture in the relation between humanity, God, nature, other persons, and oneself. After the Fall, every good becomes mixed with domination, anxiety, exploitation, pride, and necessity. We still encounters genuine goods, but never in pristine form. I think that is consistent with the interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas.

    I come back to my love of food. The meal remains a gift, a source of communion, memory, gratitude, and life. Yet it is now entangled with suffering, ecological damage, economic exploitation, and mortality – corporations that do to food what the porn industry does to sexuality. The goodness remains real, but it is no longer innocent.

    I recall Josef Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) in his Einführung in das Christentum. He argues that sin is not merely an individual act but a condition into which we are born. We enter a world already marked by what he sometimes calls a "network" or "web" of distorted relationships. Thus nobody begins from a morally neutral position. We are beneficiaries and victims of injustices we did not create and participants in systems we did not design. He does not conclude that therefore nothing matters. Grace enables us to live truthfully within this fallen condition. The Christian task is not to achieve innocence but to live faithfully within a history that has already lost innocence. Berry and Gaita show us how to do this.

    Hans Urs von Balthasar is another theologian important to me, though I know only a small fragment of his work. He emphasizes the dramatic character of existence. Human life unfolds within a cosmic drama between grace and sin. One of the great temptations is the desire to escape the drama altogether, that is, to seek a pure position outside history. But Christ does not remain outside history. He enters fully into a compromised world. The Incarnation therefore sanctifies involvement rather than withdrawal. Thus the answer to complicity is not flight from the world but faithful participation in it.

    Another important theologian for me is Bernard Häring. He criticized legalistic moral theology that focused exclusively on isolated acts, emphasizing rather conscience, responsibility, and fidelity. He often portrays moral life less as avoiding contamination and more as responding lovingly to God's call within concrete situations. I can hear an affinity with Berry here. The question becomes ‘What is the most loving and responsible response available to me here and now?’ rather than ‘How do I keep my hands completely clean?’

    The Orthodox view, as I understand it from Kallistos Ware, is that the Fall introduced corruption into the whole creation. Creation remains good, but wounded. The earth still manifests divine glory, yet it also groans under mortality and disorder. The fundamental human vocation is to receive the world as gift and offer it back to God in thanksgiving. The Fall is fundamentally a failure of eucharistic vision, which is to say a failure to receive creation gratefully. One consequence is that we begin to consume rather than commune. This is the idea behind my wanting to describe the corporate-capitalist food industry as a desecration, a de-sacralizing of Creation. The problem is that creation ceases to be received as sacred gift and becomes raw material.

     Though not really a theologian, Simone Weil also comes to mind. For Weil, the fallen condition means that every human action participates in necessity, force, and limitation.

Absolute purity is impossible but loving attention remains possible. Compassion remains and truthfulness remain possible. One of her deepest insights is that acknowledging one's implication in evil without either despairing or lying to oneself is itself a spiritual achievement.

    A connection to Berry. I sometimes think Berry's theology of farming is essentially a doctrine of the Fall. Not in a narrow doctrinal sense, but existentially. His essays assume

the world is good, that humans belong within it, that our relation to it has become disordered, perfect innocence is unavailable, and that gratitude and fidelity remain possible. That is  the Christian understanding of life east and west. How do I love faithfully in a world where innocence has already been lost? – that is the question. That, I think, is why Berry's difficult hope feels so religious even when he is not writing theology. It echoes the biblical conviction that creation remains worthy of love despite the Fall, and that fidelity is meaningful even when redemption is incomplete. 

. . . 

   Without finding his historical materialism very deep, I also think of the Marxian analysis of alienation, a secular version of the Fall, broadened to include other people, nature, work, community (I would add God but Marx wouldn't). The phenomenon I am trying to  describe – being implicated in systems that violate goods I affirm – is a form of alienation.

   Marx's original account in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, which made a deep impression on me as a student – distinguishes several forms of alienation. The worker becomes alienated from the product of labor, the activity of labor itself, other human beings, and his own "species-being" (Gattungswesen), his properly human nature. The last category is quite broad. Marx believed that human beings are naturally productive, social, world-forming creatures. Under capitalism, they increasingly experience themselves as powerless objects within processes they do not control.

    Now back to my food example. I eat food that you know emerges from practices you regard as cruel. I also use technologies – the computer, for example – that contribute to patterns you find destructive. I participate in an economy whose effects often contradict your deepest values. That sounds like alienation: from nature (e.g., the animal becomes an industrial object), from labor (e.g., producers are strangers from far away), from community (production and consumption are separated and human relations are transactional), from my own moral convictions (my actions fail fully to embody what I believe).

    Where I go beyond Marx is in the nature of what is being alienated. For Marx, the deepest loss is the loss of our human powers and our communal nature. For Berry, the loss is alienation from the land, from creatures, from inherited traditions, from family memory, from local communities, from the practices of stewardship – more comprehensive losses. And for Gaita or Weil, for Berry too though less explicitly perhaps, the loss becomes metaphysical, i.e. we becomes alienated from reality itself.

    That may sound strange, but Gaita often implies that morality begins in a truthful seeing of what is before us. Industrial systems permit us to consume without seeing. The animal disappears behind packaging. The worker disappears behind prices. The future child disappears behind quarterly reports. Alienation therefore becomes a failure of attention.

   For Marx, alienation is largely a social and economic phenomenon. For Weil, it is spiritual. For Berry, it is cultural and ecological. For Gaita, it is moral and existential. Yet they are all describing a world in which we become separated from realities to which we properly belong. Theologically, one could even reinterpret the Fall in these terms. The Fall is the primordial alienation from God, from nature, from one another, from oneself. I guess the difference is that Marx thinks the alienation originates historically in social and economic oppression, whereas Christianity thinks those forms of oppression are themselves expressions of a deeper disorder in the human heart. I think it is a chicken-and-egg problem. The heart becomes disordered where love fails, and forms of oppression disorder the heart.

 

 Works Cited

Wendell Berry

What Are People For?. North Point Press, 1990.

(Contains "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" and "Feminism, the Body, and the Machine.")

 

Karl Marx

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. Translated by Martin Milligan, Dover Publications, 2007.

 

Kostas Axelos

Alienation, Praxis, and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx. Translated by Ronald Bruzina, University of Texas Press, 1976.

 

Joseph Ratzinger

Introduction to Christianity. Translated by J. R. Foster and Michael J. Miller, 2nd ed., Ignatius Press, 2004.

 

Simone Weil

Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Craufurd, Routledge, 2002.

Waiting for God. Translated by Emma Craufurd, Harper Perennial, 2001.

The Need for Roots. Translated by Arthur Wills, Routledge, 2002.

 

Kallistos Ware

The Orthodox Way. Rev. ed., St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1995.

Raimond Gaita and Wendell Berry on Hope in Difficult Times

 Can't stop writing today!

    I just read a short piece by Raimond Gaita "Justice and Hope," published in a book of essays of the same title. It connects with my reflection on Jonas as while writing that I realized just how pessimistic I am about the future, which is in tension with the virtue of hope, which for me as a father and as one who loves the world is a duty. This problem has been with me for a long time. How to love the world given a realistic assessment of the state of the world and a rather pessimistic outlook on the future. I wonder just what is it about the world that makes it worthy of unconditional love and makes hope a kind of duty. 

   For Gaita "hope" is not optimism. It is much closer to a fidelity to reality. Hope is the refusal to allow evil, suffering, or injustice to have the last word in our understanding of the world. It is connected to love rather than prediction. One continues to care for justice not because one expects success, but because justice is intrinsically worthy of devotion. The publisher's description captures this well when it says that for Gaita an "unconditional love of the world" is the deepest form of hope and the source of our commitment to justice.

    I immediately thought of (for me) the deepest meditation on hope I know of and saw the connections: I mean a short essay by Wendell Berry “A Poem of Difficult Hope,” which is a reflection on a poem by Hayden Carruth (1921-1908), “On Being Ask to Write a Poem against the War in Vietnam.”

    I want to go into both essays in more detail but what is clear to me is that both men reject a hope based on optimism (or lack of hope based on pessimism). I was always want to wonder what grounds we have for believing things will get better as the basis of hope.  But Berry and Gaita are asking rather what grounds we have for remaining faithful to what is good. That is a deep shift.

    Berry begins with place. He loves a particular hillside, a creek, a field, a farming community, a marriage, a tradition. His hope grows out of fidelity to these concrete realities. He often says, in effect, that one must be faithful to the good one actually knows rather than to abstract predictions about the future. The farmer plants trees whose shade he will never sit under. He cares for the land even when he fears that industrial de-civilization may continue its destructive course. Hope, for Berry, is therefore not confidence that things will turn out well. It is a virtue of stewardship and gratitude. I can connect that to love of my children.

    Gaita begins less with place than with persons. Again and again he returns to moments when another human being is revealed as possessing a dignity beyond all calculation: the nun in the psychiatric hospital treating patients with love, the mother who refuses to abandon a disabled child, the friend who remains faithful to the dying. To his friend and “second father”, Hora, in this essay and the stories he told and the way he was present in these stories. These moments disclose what he calls our common humanity out of responses to particular (authoritative) human beings. Hope arises from faithfulness to that reality. If hope depends on forecasts, then a sufficiently bleak forecast destroys hope. If hope depends on love, then it can survive even in dark times.

    The question is whether reality discloses anything intrinsically worthy of love. For Berry, the answer is yes: the world as creation. A field, a marriage, a child, a community are goods before they are resources. They deserve care whether or not history vindicates them. For Gaita, the answer is also yes: persons reveal a goodness that commands reverence. The love of a parent for their child, his father and Hora’s unconditional commitment to live decently, these not merely useful or adaptive. Such realities reveal something about the meaning of the world, “the redemptive light they cast on the world.” This he connects with “making themselves newly answerable each day to life’s invitation – perhaps better, to its call – to wonder at the marvel of the world.”

     This is where I think both approach a fundamentally religious horizon, even when they are not making a theological argument. If the world is merely a collection of facts, then unconditional love seems irrational. One might enjoy parts of it, but why love it unconditionally? Why not conclude, as many intelligent pessimists do, that the balance sheet is mixed at best? Berry and Gaita seem to be saying that there are experiences in which the world appears not merely as a collection of facts but as a gift. Not a gift in the sense that everything is good. Berry knows ecological devastation. Gaita has written about genocide, cruelty, and moral horror. Rather, the gift lies in the existence of goodness itself: love, friendship, beauty, mercy, truthfulness.

     For me, the deepest question then becomes whether the goodness we encounter is merely a local accident in an otherwise indifferent universe, or is it a clue to the nature of reality itself. I believe the latter. Just as I resist defining a person by their worst actions, I resist letting the horrors of history, including the present, define the final meaning of reality. I see these horrors as horrors because I see them in the light of the Good, or of love. Thus hope becomes a duty. Not because we have a duty to be optimistic – I am not – but because despair can become a refusal to acknowledge the reality of the good that is already present. And what I learn from Gaita and Berry is that the duty is not to feel hopeful. It is to remain faithful to what has shown itself worthy of love, even when hope becomes difficult. That is a much sterner and, perhaps, more believable conception of hope than the modern expectation that tomorrow must be better than today. That is also I think a deep understanding of hope as a theological virtue. 

. . . 

I want to say something about Berry’s essay on Carruth’s poem, and then connect that to the Gaita essay I just read. Here is the poem:

 

"On Being Asked to

Write a Poem Against

the War in Vietnam"

 

Well I have and in fact

more than one and I'll

tell you this too

I wrote one against

Algeria that nightmare

and another against

 

Korea and another

against the one

I was in

 

and I don't remember

how many against

the three

 

when I was a boy

Abyssinia Spain and

Harlan County

 

and not one

breath was restored

to one

 

shattered throat

mans womans or childs

not one not

 

one

but death went on and on

never looking aside

 

except now and then

with a furtive half-smile

to make sure I was noticing. 

It is almost an anti-poem, a rejection of the belief that poetry – which can be a source of the love of the world, as it is for some, including me – can stop war or makes any difference whatsoever. What Carruth says is brutally simple: I have written poems against war all my life. None of them restored a single breath to a single victim. Pointless. The repeated "not one, not one" is literally painful for me to read. It strips away every romantic illusion about the political efficacy of literature. The ending is especially forceful. Death is personified mockingly. It is as though death is amused by the poet's protests. The poem contains no optimism whatsoever. It refuses consolation.  Indeed, the poem leaves us with almost nothing. The war continues, death continues, evil continues. What survives? Only fidelity. And perhaps Berry's claim is that fidelity itself is already a form of hope. Not hope that we will win or that history bends toward justice. But hope in the sense of refusing to become what the darkness would have us become.

    I think what fascinated Berry about this poem is that he did not read it as a counsel of despair. Berry's argument, I think, is that Carruth has stripped away a false hope. The poet cannot save the world by writing poems. The intellectual cannot save the world merely by writing essays even as great as Berry's. Protest itself does not restore what has been lost. Berry thought that acknowledging these realities was the beginning of moral seriousness rather than the end of it, especially as he is a poet himself (one of my most needed). For Berry, hope cannot be grounded in fantasies of effectiveness. Carruth's poem asks whether poetry can stop death and the answer is no. Berry's point is that does not relieve us of the obligation to write truthfully, care faithfully, and love what is good. The answer is no. And I think this is where his agrarian life philosophy enters. If poetry does not stop wars, then what remains? Well, faithfulness, good work, marriage, friendship, neighborliness, care for a place, telling the truth. Which is to say, the ordinary practices by which human goods are preserved.

       Can one continue to love what is good when one no longer believes that goodness guarantees success? Yes. The more I think about it, the closer both come to a fundamentally religious virtue. Not optimism, but faithfulness to goodness in the absence of guarantees. That may be the deepest meaning of "difficult hope." Hope as a theological virtue. 

. . . 

Gaita ends with a theme brought up earlier in the essay. Plato’s thought that one becomes what one loves. What does that have to do with hope and justice?

    Go back to Carruth's poem for a minute. The temptation is to conclude that the poems changed nothing. That conclusion assumes that the value of poetry lies primarily in its ability to change external events. Now bring in Plato’s thought – we become what we love. Now a different question emerges. The question is no longer whether a poem makes a difference but rather what kind of a soul does the writing and reading of such a poem help us become. Death, cruelty, and injustice do not merely destroy bodies. They also tempt us spiritually. They tempt us toward cynicism, indifference, hatred, despair, or a fixation on power. They tempt us to become their likeness.

    Thus Plato’s belief that we become what we love. If one loves wealth, one becomes acquisitive. If one loves power, one becomes tyrannical. If one loves what is noble and beautiful, one's soul is gradually ordered by those realities. Gaita takes this deeply seriously. Justice matters not only because victims deserve justice but because our response to injustice shapes our souls. If I become indifferent to suffering, or if I allow evil to determine the horizon of my vision, then something in me is diminished. Gaita asks why we should remain faithful when success is uncertain. The answer, I think he might give, is that fidelity itself is constitutive of our humanity. It is part of what it means to be a just person. And Plato explains why: because every act of love shapes the lover. 

. . . 

   Now apply this to Carruth’s poem and Berry’s reading of it. The poem did not restore a single breath but neither did it capitulate to death. It bore witness and it refused to lie. It refused to sentimentalize. It refused to look away. And in doing so it preserved something in the poet's own humanity and potentially in the humanity of its readers. It revealed our common humanity. I think this is very close to Gaita's understanding of hope. Hope is a way of refusing to allow evil to become the object of ultimate devotion. We must continue to love justice, mercy, beauty, truth, and souls because these things are worthy of love. If one ceases to love them because they seem hopeless, then we have already begun to worship power instead.

      And thus Gaita's unconditional love of the world. It means refusing to let cruelty define what the world fundamentally is. And Berry's difficult hope can be read similarly. The farmer who plants trees may know perfectly well that the larger culture is moving in the opposite direction. Yet if he ceases planting because success is uncertain, then his soul begins to form an attitude grounded in destruction rather than from the good he loves. If we become like what we love, the most important question is whether goodness remains the object of our love even when victory is uncertain. That, it seems to me, is the heart of both Berry's difficult hope and Gaita's hope grounded in justice. They are both trying to prevent the soul from being conquered by the very evil it opposes. Again, I think they are reflecting on the theological virtue of hope. 

. . . 

   What I find moving in both Berry and Gaita is that they hope without denying evil or tragedy. Neither offers the comfort that everything will work out. Yet neither allows suffering to become metaphysically ultimate. Perhaps I am so moved by their work because they are trying to show how one might remain faithful to goodness after innocence has been lost, goodness east of Eden, so to speak. They understand that hope is needed when the societies fail that the human beings with the power construct and we must decide what remains worthy of love. That is a harder hope, but also a deeper one. And it is close to the concerns that have occupied me for years: whether our encounters with beauty, love, friendship, justice, and the dignity of persons disclose something about reality that remains true even in the face of suffering, evil, and death. 

    And the soul formed by justice, hope, (faith for many), and love is itself a product of the world and makes the world worthy of love, one of the things that make it worthy of love anyway.

 

 Works Cited

Berry, Wendell. “A Poem of Difficult Hope.” What Are People For? Essays. North Point Press, 1990, pp. 87–95.

 

Gaita, Raimond. “Justice and Hope.” Justice and Hope: Essays, Lectures and Other Writings. Edited by Scott Stephens, Melbourne University Press, 2023, pp. 13-23.

 

 

Hans Jonas and Responsibility

 

When I read the argument of Hans Jonas in his Das Prinzip Verantwortung (The Imperative of Responsibility) in the early 1990’s, it struck me as coming as close to an irrefutable argument as can possibly be made in ethics. I still think so. I don’t think about it as often as I should because it is disturbing.

   First, a brief introduction of the author.  Hans Jonas (1903–1993) was a German-Jewish philosopher whose life and thought were shaped by the intellectual and political upheavals of the twentieth century. As a student, he studied under Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Rudolf Bultmann, and was deeply influenced by Heidegger's Being and Time. After Hitler came to power, Jonas left Germany and eventually settled in Palestine, where he joined the Jewish Brigade and fought against Nazi Germany during the Second World War. The murder of his mother in Auschwitz and Heidegger's support for National Socialism deeply affected him. Jonas came to believe that Heidegger's philosophy, despite its depth, was deficient in that it lacked a sense of moral responsibility. Much of his work is an attempt to preserve Heidegger's question of Being while grounding it in moral reality.

     Jonas first gained recognition through his studies of ancient Gnosticism – very interesting stuff – but his mature work focused on the meaning of life, nature, and responsibility. In The Phenomenon of Life, he argued against the modern tendency to view nature as mere mechanism, as dead raw material obeying mechanical laws, arguing instead that even the simplest living organisms exhibit a striving toward self-preservation and thus a primitive form of freedom and value (which to me recalls Aquinas). Human consciousness, on this view, is not an alien intrusion into nature but the highest development of tendencies already present within life itself – a view that I absolutely affirm. These ideas culminated in The Imperative of Responsibility, where Jonas argued that modern technology has given humanity unprecedented power over the future and therefore unprecedented moral obligations. Because human life and its capacity for freedom, truth, and responsibility possess intrinsic value, no generation has the right to gamble with the continued existence of humanity or the conditions necessary for a genuinely human life. 

. . . 

I want to try to reconstruct Jonas's argument in Das Prinzip Verantwortung / The Imperative of Responsibility.  I think it is one of the best philosophical responses to the technological age.

The argument unfolds roughly in four steps. 

I. Traditional ethics assumed limited human power

      Most earlier moral theories assumed that human actions had relatively limited effects. A farmer could ruin a field or a king could ruin a country, but no individual or generation could threaten the existence of humanity itself. Therefore, ethics focused on relations among contemporaries, that is, justice toward one's neighbors, duties to existing persons,

honesty, courage, charity, and the like. The future was largely beyond human control.     Modern technology changes this. With nuclear weapons, ecological destruction, genetic engineering, and large-scale industrial systems – and now the Internet and AI – humanity has acquired the power to affect the entire future of life on earth. For the first time, we can destroy the conditions of human existence. This creates a completely new moral situation. I do not think this can be denied.

 

II. The existence of future humanity becomes a moral duty

    Traditionally, moral duties were thought to exist only toward actual persons. Jones changes the focus to duties toward future people. True, they do not yet exist. Therefore, they cannot make claims or vote or protest. Still, our form of life, and thus the actions we take within that form of life, determine whether they will exist and what kind of world they will inhabit. This asymmetry does not remove our responsibility. As a parent I fully understand this. A baby cannot demand care, yet the parent's responsibility is obvious. The child's vulnerability itself creates the obligation. Jonas thinks humanity as a whole now stands in a parental relation to future generations.

 

III. Humanity must continue to exist

        Jonas asks whether humanity has a duty to preserve the possibility of genuine human life. His answer is yes. The reasoning is partly metaphysical. Unlike many modern thinkers, Jonas (like me and every other thinker I treasure) does not believe value is merely subjective. Life itself manifests an intrinsic striving toward being. Living beings affirm their own existence. Humanity represents the highest known realization of freedom, responsibility, consciousness, truth-seeking, love, and moral agency. If humanity disappeared, the entire space or opening for Being to disclose itself would disappear with it. (My friend and mentor, the late Dr. Georg Bluhm, put it like this: we are the only beings we know of capable of knowing and loving the universe, existence, Being.) Therefore, the continued existence of humanity is not morally neutral. It is a good that ought to be preserved. This leads to his famous reformulation of the imperative: Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on Earth. Or negatively: Act so that the effects of your action are not destructive of the future possibility of such life.

 

IV. Therefore, we may not gamble with humanity's future.

    If humanity's continued existence is a fundamental good, then no generation has the right to risk that existence for its own benefit. Jonas argued that the present generation is merely a trustee, not an owner, of the human future. The future is not our property. Hence, we may not pursue prosperity at the cost of ecological collapse. We may not pursue technological power at the risk of extinction. We may not consume irreplaceable resources as though no future generations matter. We may not run catastrophic risks whose consequences would be irreversible. Jonas calls for a "heuristics of fear" (Heuristik der Furcht), meaning that when dealing with unprecedented technologies, we should give greater weight to the possibility of catastrophic outcomes than to optimistic promises. If the worst-case scenario involves the destruction of humanity or civilization, prudence requires extreme caution. The burden of proof lies with those introducing the risk.

 

The deepest premise of Jonas’ argument is that future human beings have a claim on us simply because they are human beings. The existence of humanity itself is a good that each generation has a duty to hand on. That is why the argument often strikes readers like myself as almost self-evident once stated. To deny it seems to imply that our generation may legitimately consume, destroy, or endanger the entire human future for its own purposes. Which of course condemns our form of life root and branch. 

. . . 

The place where philosophers usually challenge Jonas is not the conclusion but the foundation. Why exactly must humanity continue to exist? Why is Being better than non-being? Why does future humanity possess moral standing before it exists? Jonas’ response rests on a deeper metaphysical intuition, one that I and I hope everyone else shares: that life, value, freedom, and responsibility are objectively good realities whose continued existence ought to be affirmed. In that respect he stands closer to older traditions (Aristotle, Aquinas, certain forms of Platonism) than to modern contractarian or utilitarian ethics. Jonas's argument ultimately depends upon the intuition that human life possesses a kind of intrinsic dignity or sacredness. Without that deeper intuition, the imperative to preserve humanity loses much of its force. 

. . . 

The argument has unsettling political implications. Jonas was not simply arguing for conservation or environmental protection. He believed that the technological powers acquired by modern humanity had created dangers so unprecedented that traditional liberal assumptions might no longer be adequate. If the continued existence of humanity is the highest political responsibility, then safeguarding that future must take precedence over values such as unlimited economic growth, unrestricted consumer choice, or even certain forms of democratic decision-making.

     One of his most discussed claims concerns what he called the "privilege of bad prognoses." When the stakes involve the possible destruction of humanity or irreversible ecological catastrophe, he argued that we should give greater weight to the more pessimistic forecast. If one side predicts inconvenience and slower growth while the other predicts civilizational collapse, prudence requires taking the latter possibility seriously, even if it cannot be proven with certainty. This leads him toward a strong version of the precautionary principle.

    A good example. Climate change is expected to weaken the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) during the twenty-first century. The scientific consensus, reflected in recent IPCC assessments, is that a significant weakening is likely, while a complete collapse before 2100 cannot be ruled out with confidence. A major slowdown or eventual collapse could have severe consequences, including altered rainfall patterns, sea-level rise along parts of the Atlantic coast, disruption of marine ecosystems, and substantial, catastrophic changes to Europe's climate.

     What makes this such a good example for Jonas is not that scientists are certain the AMOC will collapse. They are not. Rather, it is that we are dealing with a relatively low-probability but potentially civilization-altering risk. Jonas would say that if one scenario predicts inconvenience and economic costs while another predicts the possibility of irreversible climate disruption affecting generations yet unborn, moral responsibility requires that we give considerable weight to the latter possibility. His "heuristics of fear" is essentially an argument that when the stakes are the future habitability of the world, uncertainty is not a reason for complacency but for caution. The burden of proof falls on those willing to gamble with the future, not on those urging restraint.

     The AMOC case almost reads like an illustration written for The Imperative of Responsibility: we possess the power to alter a planetary system; the consequences may unfold over centuries; future generations bear much of the risk while having no voice in present decisions; therefore the present generation has a special obligation not to place that future in jeopardy merely for short-term advantage. That is Jonas's argument in its most concrete form.

     From this, Jonas occasionally drew conclusions that many liberals found unsettling. He worried that democratic societies, driven by short election cycles and immediate interests, might be structurally incapable of making the sacrifices required for the distant future. Future generations cannot vote, yet their interests may outweigh many of our present desires. I would add that we are in the grip of a global capitalist system whose inner logic has brought about the risks and which cannot be reformed without ceasing to exist. As a result, Jonas sometimes speculated whether more paternalistic or technocratic forms of governance might be better equipped to protect the long-term future than societies governed primarily by the logic of liberal states and capitalist economies. I also sense the capitalist elites feel no moral obligation to those outside their class, that indeed they are in the process of dividing humanity up into two distinct types of human, and the working part need not be taken into account.

   I don’t want to exaggerate the point. Jonas was not advocating dictatorship, nor was he endorsing totalitarian solutions. Having fled Nazism and fought against it, he was well aware of the dangers of concentrated power. Rather, he was posing a disturbing question: what happens when the requirements of long-term human survival come into conflict with the preferences of currently living populations? He never fully resolved the tension. But he understood the problem. Liberal democracies as promoters of capitalist economies are designed to protect certain rights of existing citizens and private property. But climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion, and certain technological risks raise questions on a timescale of centuries. Jonas asks whether our political institutions are capable of representing the unborn and safeguarding a future they cannot yet claim for themselves. 

 I personally like the alternatives of E. F. Schumacher, Wendell Berry, and the ideas of the alternative technology philosophy. All seems just as utopian. Berry seeks solutions through local communities, traditions, stewardship, and cultural renewal rather than through stronger centralized authority. Jonas's analysis of the danger is often admired even by those who are uneasy about some of the political implications he seemed willing to consider. In the meantime, my involuntary participation in an economy that is in stark violation of the moral principle Jonas lays out so clearly makes me guilty in any bad future my children and their children (and everybody else’s children) will inherit. Worse than dying and leaving my children with massive debts.

 

Works 

Jonas, Hans. The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity. 2nd ed., Beacon Press, 1963. 

Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. Harper & Row, 1966. 

Jonas, Hans. Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man. Prentice-Hall, 1974. 

Jonas, Hans. The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age. Translated by Hans Jonas with David Herr, University of Chicago Press, 1984. 

Jonas, Hans. Mortality and Morality: A Search for the Good after Auschwitz. Edited by Lawrence Vogel, Northwestern University Press, 1996. 

Jonas, Hans. The Religion of the Gnostics. Beacon Press, 1958. 

Jonas, Hans. The Jonas Reader. Edited by Lawrence Vogel, Northwestern University Press, 2001.

 

 

 

The Disagreement between Iris Murdoch and Martha Nussbaum over the Good (with help from Weil, Dostoevsky, and Gaita)

 

Against the critique of Martha Nussbaum (whose work I admire greatly), I would like to defend Iris Murdoch's Sovereignty of the Good, the importance of conceptual space for the Good in metaphysics as a space for the reality of the experience of the absolute in morality in life. I recall Nussbaum wrote an account of his encounter with Murdoch and finding "the Good" out of place. Her Fragility of Goodness reduces the Platonic Good to a way to protect the ego from the potential of love to hurt and the tragic nature of human life. I recall her reduction of remorse to unproductive, narcissistic self-hatred in Anger and Forgiveness. While I much appreciate Nussbaum's work on tragedy, on literature and philosophy(Love's Knowledge), on the cognitive aspect of emotion (Upheavals of Emotion), and her critique of Stoicism, her rejection of this aspect of Murdoch seems like an ax to grind for her. I think, like Feuerbach, Nietzche, and Marx on religion, she takes corruptions of the Good and the possible dangers of such corruptions for the thing itself. I will try to make sense of this, relying more on my memory of Nussbaum’s work than a recent close study.

 

. . .

 

Nussbaum seem to think that what Murdoch means by the Good is some super-ethical principle or idealization. I share the view that for Murdoch, the Good is a placeholder-word for a dimension of reality that is encountered in moral experience itself. When she speaks of "the sovereignty of Good," she is trying to preserve a space within metaphysics for experiences that many modern moral philosophies struggle to accommodate: unselfing, repentance, reverence, moral conversion, the painful recognition of one's own selfishness, and the sense that goodness transcends one's desires. When I suffer from guilt over the betrayal of a beloved person, that goes beyond being interpreted as a painful psychological state, a socially conditioned reaction, or an springboard for producing better future behavior. There may be some truth in these but none captures what remorse feels like from within. Perhaps long after any practical consequences can be repaired, I suddenly see what I did. I didn’t just violate a rule. I caused suffering, yes, but in remorse see her as a real person whom I failed to love properly. In that moment, remorse is contra Nussbaum not primarily about me. A feature of genuine remorse is that it is accompanied by a loss of self-concern. My attention is directed outward toward the reality of the other.

     This is where the importance of the Good for Murdoch can make sense. The Good is not another object among objects. It is the transcendent standard that makes truthful vision possible. The Good is what draws us away from fantasy and toward reality. In betrayal, fantasy was powerful. I might tell myself things like "I had my reasons" or “She’ll get over it” or “I could not help falling in love,” etc. Remorse begins when those protective fantasies collapse. The beloved person suddenly appears in his or her full reality. Murdoch draws on Weil’s language of attention. Remorse is an act of attention. It is the painful correction of vision. Attention is the loving, disciplined, and truthful regard for reality that seeks to see another person, thing, or situation as it truly is, rather than as our ego wishes it to be. Attention is the effort to see reality justly. As Weil put it: "Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object." This is important for Murdoch as she sees the moral life as the continuous effort to overcome fantasy and selfishness in order to see what is really there.   The Good is an attempt to say what the world must be like if what is revealed by attention – in this case to the beloved person betrayed – has any real being, is not just reducible to psychological (subjective) or social (intersubjective) conditioning structures. It is the metaphysical horizon within which this experience of the reality of the other makes sense. If there is no reality to moral vision beyond preference or social convention, what exactly have I seen? Why should the collapse of my self-serving story count as a disclosure of truth rather than simply a change in feeling? Murdoch in her thought on metaphysics and the Good is clearing the way of modern understandings to understand it as a disclosure of truth. Painful truth. Ironically, Nussbaum saw the Good in Plato as a shield to protect the ego from the pain of failed love and tragedy. For Murdoch, denying a moral reality beyond our persons, cultures, and human natures serves the same ego-protective function.

     The phenomenon I am trying to understand resembles what Plato describes in the ascent from the cave. One sees that one's previous understanding was distorted. The pain belongs to the process of seeing.  Murdoch's account also has affinities with Christian repentance, where repentance is not really self-condemnation so much as a return to reality.

      Here I also think of The Brothers Karamazov. Repentance in Dostoevsky is not self-hatred. It flows from the shock of another person who has been wrong being finally seen. Elder Zosima's teaching that each person is somehow responsible for all is often misunderstood. It is not a doctrine of neurotic guilt. It is an expression of radical attention to the reality of others. Zosima does not mean that I am causally guilty for every evil in the world. He means that no human being is simply 'someone else's problem.' Through attention and love, I come to see that I am implicated in a shared moral reality with others, am part of the world, that my own failures of love have wounded the world in some way. When I hear of a lonely old man, a neglected child, or a despairing neighbor, my ego feels that has nothing to do with me. Zosima is trying to break that spell. He is saying that the fully awakened soul no longer sees other people as strangers occupying separate moral universes. It experiences a profound solidarity with them. This has nothing to do with the neurotic who thinks everything is his fault. The point for Zosima is that everyone matters and should matter to me. Love rather than self-absorption.  Murdoch would recognize this as attention overcoming ego. The point is to deepen one's perception of reality. As attention grows, the boundaries of concern widen. One begins to see that one's life is interwoven with the lives of others. If the Good is real, remorse becomes intelligible even when it is useless.

    I find it significant that as deeply as Nussbaum as written about philosophy and literature – and I love her work in this area (Love’s Knowledge) – she has never really focused on Dostoevsky. One possible explanation is that her philosophical outlook is fundamentally Aristotelian rather than Platonic or Christian. She is thus drawn to literature that illuminates vulnerability, emotion, practical judgment, and the fragility of human flourishing within the conditions of finite life. Dostoevsky explores these themes, but he does so within a moral universe shaped by sin, repentance, grace, and encounters with an absolute Good that transcends human flourishing. His great scenes of remorse and spiritual transformation are not justified by their contribution to well-being or future outcomes but by their disclosure of moral truth. In this he is closer to Murdoch, Weil, and Gaita than to Nussbaum. Murdoch's making space for the Good – a dimension of moral reality that cannot be reduced to worldly-naturalistic categories, even in an expansive Aristotelian sense – provides a metaphysical framework that leaves space for these experiences as genuine perceptions of reality. This in contrast to Nussbaum, who always interprets them within a more this-worldly account of human flourishing. For this reason, Dostoevsky's central concerns may lie somewhat outside the philosophical horizon that has guided much of Nussbaum's work.

        I want to press the example of betrayal and remorse further. Assume that the beloved person is dead and thus the betrayal can never be repaired, thus forgiveness will never be obtained, and thus no future consequences can be altered. Does remorse still matter? I feel that it does. True, it has no practical-utilitarian value at all. Nothing is changed. I think it matters because it is true. My soul needs to stand in the truth about what happened. Murdoch's Platonism leaves space for this feeling, which I guess Nussbaum would discount as it makes no contribution to flourishing in worldly sense. The Good is what allows us to say that seeing reality rightly has value even when it produces no further outcome. Indeed, remorse is one of the clearest experiences of what Murdoch means by transcendence. In ordinary life we are constantly trying to protect the ego. Remorse is one of the rare experiences in which the ego loses. And yet what appears is not emptiness but reality. The beloved person stands before us, perhaps only in memory, with a claim upon us that we must not evade. Murdoch would say that this claim is not merely subjective. It is an encounter with the Good. Or remorse reveals that the beloved was never merely an object of our desire or affection. He or she possessed a reality, a dignity, a significance that exceeded our private interests. The pain of remorse is the pain of finally acknowledging that reality. (Again, everything I say about remorse I learned from Gaita.) Hence, the Good is what allows us to understand why remorse can feel less like self-hatred than like truthfulness. The experience says, in effect, that I see now what this person truly was, and I see now what I truly did. The Good is the horizon within which that seeing what I truly did can be understood as a form of knowledge rather than merely a feeling.

 

. . .

 

     The central claim of The Sovereignty of Good is that morality is not primarily about choice, decision, or autonomy. Rather, it is about attention to reality. The Good functions as a transcendent pole that draws us beyond the ego. Murdoch's examples – the mother-in-law learning to see her daughter-in-law justly, or the experience of beauty in nature and art – are meant to show that moral progress often consists not in willing differently but in seeing differently. What troubles Murdoch about much modern philosophy, from existentialism to utilitarianism, is that it leaves us imprisoned within the self. Even when it celebrates freedom, it often makes the self the final court of appeal. The Good is needed because moral life contains experiences that feel like responses to something beyond ourselves. We discover that we are wrong; we do not simply decide to change our preferences.

   This is where Murdoch differs from Nussbaum, I think. Nussbaum is sympathetic to many of Murdoch's concerns. She agrees that emotions are cognitive, that literature can reveal moral reality, and that ethical life cannot be reduced to rules. She argues that human flourishing is vulnerable to luck, tragedy, loss, and contingency. She is in many ways recovering the Greek tragic tradition against Stoic invulnerability. I am in full agreement. Yet Nussbaum rejects Murdoch's Platonism. Her ethical vision remains Aristotelian: we are finite creatures living within contingent circumstances, not pilgrims ascending toward a transcendent Good beyond being. Nussbaum’s worldly ethics asks how human beings can flourish within the conditions of ordinary human life. Murdoch’s other-worldly ethics asks whether moral life points beyond ordinary human life toward a transcendent reality. Nussbaum's ethics is worldly in the sense that the highest moral realities are found within human life itself: friendship, love, justice, vulnerability, tragedy, compassion, and practical wisdom. She is interested in how finite human beings can live well despite suffering, loss, and contingency. The moral horizon remains fundamentally human. Murdoch's ethics is other-worldly in the Platonic sense that moral experience points beyond the self and beyond ordinary human concerns toward the Good. Love, attention, beauty, remorse, and unselfing are not merely parts of flourishing; they are intimations of a transcendent reality that continually draws us beyond ourselves.

    The contrast is perhaps most visible in remorse. For Nussbaum, the question is: How does remorse contribute to repair, understanding, or flourishing? For Murdoch, the question is: What truth about reality is disclosed in remorse? Nussbaum looks for the highest things within the human world; Murdoch believes the highest things appear within the human world but are not exhausted by it. Neither rejects love, suffering, or moral seriousness; they disagree about whether these experiences ultimately point beyond the world or find their fulfillment within it. For me, the problem of Nussbaum's worldliness is that is it unable to account for some of the deepest moral phenomena, like remorse. In Anger and Forgiveness, Nussbaum is concerned with how self-reproach can become narcissistic and unproductive. It can be like that and probably is in many cases. Some forms of guilt are indeed forms of ego-absorption. But Murdoch would agree with Gaita that genuine remorse is not essentially self-hatred. It is a disclosure of reality. In remorse, one suddenly sees what one has done to another person. The focus shifts away from the self and flourishing in this world toward the reality of the other.

   Same logic with love. Nussbaum emphasizes the vulnerability involved in loving finite beings. Love exposes us to loss, betrayal, grief, and tragedy. Murdoch agrees completely. But Murdoch asks a deeper question: What makes love capable of overcoming selfishness at all? Her answer is that love participates in something transcendent. The Good is not merely a psychological strategy for coping with vulnerability. Love directs us toward a reality greater than ourselves and this makes our vulnerability meaningful. Love makes us vulnerable because it opens us to disappointment, suffering, and loss. Yet this vulnerability is not meaningless because in genuinely loving another person we are responding to something real and valuable beyond our own interests. Love draws us out of the ego toward a reality greater than ourselves. The pain of love therefore testifies not merely to our dependence but to our participation in something objectively worthwhile. For Murdoch, love is meaningful despite its risks because it is a response to reality, not merely a strategy for satisfying our needs. This is why Murdoch differs from views that treat love primarily as a source of flourishing or psychological fulfillment. We may be wounded by love, but if love is a truthful attention to another person, then the wound itself can reveal something of the Good. The vulnerability is meaningful because it arises from contact with reality rather than from illusion.

   A purely psychological account may also allow that love helps me transcend my ego. That could be accepted by almost anyone, including many secular psychologists. Love broadens my perspective, reduces narcissism, and makes me care about others. Murdoch thinks it is only half the story. The deeper question is why should transcending the ego count as wisdom rather than merely change? Why is attention to another person better than self-absorption? Murdoch's answer is that in loving attention we are not merely changing our mental state. We are becoming more responsive to reality. The crucial move is from "I am less self-centered" to "I see more of what is really there." For Murdoch, the reality of another person is already a hint of transcendence. The other person continually exceeds my concepts, desires, and fantasies. The beloved is not simply an object within my private world. He or she possesses an independent reality that resists my attempts to reduce it to my purposes. When I truly attend to another person, I discover something that is not my creation. I encounter a reality that places a claim upon me.

   Everything we take to be real and serious presupposes at least a vague metaphysical picture of the world. What kind of universe must this be if such claims are real? Murdoch's answer is not that every act of love contains a proof of God. Rather, she thinks that experiences of truthful attention reveal a structure of reality ordered toward the Good. Psychological transcendence means moving beyond the ego. Metaphysical transcendence means discovering that there is something beyond the ego to which one ought to respond. The first concerns the transformation of the self. The second concerns the nature of reality. The way we understand the former depends on the way we understand the latter. For Murdoch we move beyond the ego because reality itself is richer and more significant than the ego. Thus she is never satisfied with purely therapeutic accounts of love.

      Suppose I devote myself to a dying spouse. A this-worldly, psychological account at its best may tell me that this love enlarges my perspective and enriches my life. Murdoch would not deny that. But she wants to add that my love is also a response to something objectively real and valuable in that person. The value is not merely projected by your feelings. The beloved is not precious simply because you happen to care. My caring is a response to a reality that deserves care. The person before me is not merely an occasion for my self-transcendence. The person's reality participates, however imperfectly, in the Good itself. That is the metaphysical move. Actually, the conception of worldly vs. other-worldly I find distorting since it all depends on how one defines and limits these terms. I am also a this-worldly person, only that naturalistic pictures of this world, even rich ones like Aristotle’s, obscure aspects of its reality. In loving another person we discover not merely the limits of the self but the depth of reality. For Murdoch, love transcends the ego not merely because it changes us psychologically, but because it awakens us to a reality whose value is independent of our wishes; that independent value is what she calls the Good.

 

. . .

 

This points to what I think is the deepest disagreement. For Nussbaum, the highest realities are largely contained within human life itself: friendship, love, political justice, literature, practical wisdom, tragedy. The world is enough. For Murdoch, these realities point beyond themselves. The experience of beauty, truth, and goodness carries an intimation of transcendence. The Good is not one value among others but the horizon that makes moral experience intelligible. Murdoch does not claim that we possess knowledge of the Good in any straightforward metaphysical sense. Rather, she wants a metaphysics spacious enough to acknowledge that moral life contains experiences of transcendence, moments when goodness appears as something objective, inexhaustible, and greater than ourselves and our pictures of the world. Without such conceptual space, experiences of awe before goodness, radical repentance, unconditional love, saintliness, or moral conversion tend to be redescribed as psychological states, evolutionary adaptations, social constructions, or coping mechanisms. Once we begin explaining them entirely in those terms, we have explained away precisely what was most important about them. Nussbaum, despite sharing many of Murdoch's moral concerns, is ultimately less willing to grant those experiences metaphysical significance. Whether that is philosophical caution or philosophical reductionism is precisely the question that divides them.

 

. . .

 

-What does a philosopher fear? I think a question Murdoch urged. Philosophers are also driven by visions, images, loves, and fears. Behind every philosophy lies a picture of reality and, often, a picture of what would be unbearable if that reality were true.

   What does Nussbaum fear? Or rather, what philosophical dangers does Nussbaum consistently resist? I think Nussbaum fears three things. First, she fears the denial of human vulnerability. I am in sympathy with this. Throughout The Fragility of Goodness, she argues against traditions that seek invulnerability through reason, metaphysics, or spiritual transcendence. She returns repeatedly to the Greek tragedians because they remind us that even the best human life remains exposed to fortune. The danger she sees is that philosophies of transcendence can become evasions of suffering. They can promise a higher realm in which loss does not really matter. Second, Nussbaum fears the degradation of the particular person. Again and again, whether discussing tragedy, political justice, disability, or emotions, she insists on the irreducible reality of concrete individuals. She fears that the singular human being standing before us may disappear into a larger metaphysical narrative. If life in this world means little or nothing, as Socrates argues in the Phaedo, or if the love for a particular beautiful human being is an inferior, someone illusory for of a love that should be given to beauty itself, as in the Symposium, the this world and real loves are de-meaned.

     Third, Nussbaum fears wishful thinking. Her work exhibits honesty about the tragic dimension of life. Children die. The innocent suffer. Love can be destroyed. History offers no guarantee of justice. Etc. She seems unwilling to affirm any metaphysical doctrine merely because it would make these realities easier to bear. In this respect she resembles the Greeks she admires. There is something anti-consolatory about her thought.

    The strange thing is that Murdoch shares every one of these fears, which lead her in the opposite direction. She believes transcendence helps us see suffering more clearly. Nussbaum worries it may tempt us to look away from it. Attention to the Good is precisely what allows us to see the individual justly.

    Murdoch fears that reality will be reduced to the ego. She fears a world in which all values become projections, all meanings become constructions, all moral claims become preferences. She fears what she often calls fantasy: the self-enclosed consciousness that can no longer acknowledge anything greater than itself. Nussbaum fears illusion; Murdoch fears reduction. Nussbaum fears that transcendence may be a dream; Murdoch fears that skepticism may blind us to reality.

     The disagreement is therefore deeper than a dispute about Plato. It concerns what constitutes intellectual courage. For Nussbaum, courage often means refusing comforting metaphysical assurances. For Murdoch, courage often means admitting that goodness may be more real than our theories can explain. This is why their disagreement is so fruitful. Neither is defending selfishness, relativism, or cynicism. Both are trying to preserve something precious. Nussbaum wants to preserve honesty before tragedy; Murdoch wants to preserve openness to transcendence. My fear is whether Nussbaum's fear of illusion may lead her to explain away experiences that seem to disclose something real.

  

I still don’t feel like I have thought this through but it is the best I can do today. 

Perhaps the key to understanding the difference between Murdoch and Nussbaum can be found in what Gaita writes about morality as absolute, sui generis, meaning in its purer forms one is confronted with a certain reality and one must do this or that, regardless of any consequences. There can be differences about whether the absolute command comes from an honor code – for many in the military it is an absolute not to leave anyone behind – or a transcendent source. The grammar is the same. Moral imperatives are not derived from utility, flourishing, contracts, evolution, or social convention. They are simply there to be acknowledged. His examples are familiar: the sacredness of a human life, the horror of cruelty, the dignity of the severely disabled person, the meaning of remorse, the love of a parent for a child. The crucial point is that these realities are experienced as revelations of how things truly are.

    This is where he comes close to Murdoch.  With Murdoch we attend to reality and discover the Good. For Gaita, we encounter realities whose significance is absolute. Both are trying to preserve the thought that morality is not merely a human construction. The difference is that Gaita is less explicitly metaphysical. He begins with the phenomenon itself. A person sees the humanity of a disabled child, or the evil of a concentration camp guard's actions, and finds that no further justification seems necessary. But Murdoch goes a step further. She wants to know what kind of reality must this be if such experiences are not subjective or intersubjective compulsions? If they are rooted in Being itself. Her answer is the Good. Thus Gaita's notion of the absolute can be seen as the phenomenological side of Murdoch's metaphysics. Gaita describes the experience of moral absoluteness; Murdoch provides a metaphysical picture of why such experiences may disclose reality rather than merely express feeling. But both do not reduce phenomena like remorse, love, compassion, or human dignity to their consequences. They understand them first as forms of acknowledgment, which is to say, as responses to realities whose significance seems intrinsic and unconditional. The Good, for Murdoch, is what makes sense of that absoluteness.

      For Gaita and Murdoch, certain moral realities possess an absolute significance that cannot be fully explained by their contribution to flourishing or happiness (eudaimonia). The dignity of a severely disabled child, the evil of betrayal, the sacredness of a beloved person, the reality disclosed in remorse, such things matter even if no increase in flourishing results from acknowledging them. Nussbaum, by contrast,  understands moral life within the framework of human flourishing (eudaimonia), broadly conceived. Love, compassion, grief, remorse, vulnerability, and practical wisdom are valuable because they belong to, or are constitutive of, a fully human life. She greatly enlarges what counts as flourishing compared with narrower ethical theories, but flourishing remains the horizon.

  Thus the question of whether the dignity of a person is important because recognizing it contributes to flourishing, or does flourishing matter because it respects a dignity that is already there. To put it differently, is remorse valuable because it contributes to a good human life, or because it acknowledges a moral truth regardless of its contribution to a good life?  That is where the disagreement becomes deepest and I hold with Murdoch and Gaita here. Gaita writes about a mother caring for a severely disabled child or a nun tending the incurably insane in ways that seem to transcend flourishing altogether. Such actions often involve suffering, sacrifice, heartbreak, and no obvious gain. Yet they seem morally deep. Their value is not exhausted by flourishing because they participate in the Good, as Murdoch might say. Their value is absolute and sui generis, as Gaita would put it.

     Nussbaum would likely try to bring these examples back into a richer account of human flourishing. Murdoch and Gaita suspect that something essential is lost when one does so: namely, the sense that morality sometimes places claims upon us that are not grounded in our flourishing at all, but in the reality of what is before us. That, I think, is the deepest fault line between them. It is not a disagreement about kindness, compassion, or love. It is a disagreement about whether these realities are ultimately grounded in human flourishing or whether flourishing itself is answerable to something more fundamental. Nussbaum is Murdoch minus a metaphysical horizon beyond the natural human and is Gaita minus mystery.