Note: From The Disappearance of Ethics (Eerdmans 2024). Reprinted by permission of the publisher. Citations have been omitted.
John Henry Newman, speaking in 1852 on the idea of a university education, offers us our starting point: “If ethics were sent into banishment, its territory would soon disappear, under a treaty of partition, as it may be called, between law, political economy and physiology.” [John Henry Newman, On the Scope and Nature of University Education, p. 57] Newman’s conception was a familiar one. Knowledge is a plural system, both comprehensive and specialized. The pursuit of “science” as a whole thus needs the pursuit of the full range of sciences. On that ground he argued in defense of the place of theology among the university faculties. His argument assumed, of course, that we have a priori knowledge of what the “full range” of sciences is. Reality must be presented to knowledge as already parceled out into so many recognized fields of inquiry.
The evolution of academic life since Newman’s day, with new disciplinary shoots emerging constantly from parent stems, complicates his question very considerably. Are the new disciplines discovered or invented? If they are discovered, the idea of a university seems to demand an ever-ramifying, ever-expanding structure of faculties, which is a desirable prospect for researchers, no doubt, but a nightmare to funders and administrators. If they are invented, how do we distinguish the essential core disciplines, the ones the university cannot do without, from those it can either take or leave? Newman saw the problem simply in terms of an insufficient plurality of sciences, omitting essential traditions of inquiry. Since no reality can be ignored, what happens when some science is ignored is that “the other sciences close up,” to colonize the neglected field of reality. But the strategy of closing up is not an innocent compensation for the neglect. The colonizing sciences “intrude where they have no right” – that is, no intellectual competence. The rationality of the inquiry is therefore deformed, as the wrong questions are asked and the wrong analyses brought to bear.
The Peril of an Intellectual Discipline
In the Catholic University of Ireland, as in many universities since, this fate was in danger of befalling theology. Could it happen – Newman’s first illustration – to Ethics? (“Ethics” will be spelled with an initial capital where it is used as the name of the discipline, and in other uses in lowercase.) If Ethics disappears, the subject matter, human conduct, cannot disappear. But it can be taken over by law, political economy and “physiology” (mentioned as the parent faculty of psychology). That speculation seems prophetic. In our own lifetime distinguished universities have filled chairs of moral philosophy with economists. Two other illustrations Newman offers may strike us as more remote: “experimental science” could disappear into “antiquarian study,” and “history” could disappear into “metaphysics.” Those prospects are not on our horizon, but for his generation, when laboratories were a luxury and Hegel’s shadow fell darkly over all the humanities, they could have seemed more probable than the displacement of Ethics.
By “Ethics” he did not mean “morality” or “moral reasoning.” It is common enough to speak gloomily of the disappearance of moral behavior or of the diminution of moral reasoning. Philosophers discuss the “disappearance of moral knowledge” as an accepted feature of the current intellectual universe, and worry about a corresponding loss of the university’s capacity to educate the young. When I have told people the title of these lectures, they have often assumed that I was going to add to these expressions of anxiety about the vast moral losses of our age. It is a worthy and challenging theme; at other times I would gladly, and perhaps recklessly, have taken it up. My business here, however, like that of Newman, concerns the peril of an intellectual discipline, one to which I have devoted my working life. That peril may not appear quite so perilous as the other. Yet if the disappearance of Ethics as a reflective discipline does not make morality vanish from society, or moral argument from practical endeavor, it still has its alarming consequences. Morality unsupported by argument loses its authority; moral argument without sufficient base in reasoned reflection loses its conviction. Ethics defends the reflection that makes moral reasoning fruitful and moral practice credible. A society without Ethics is exposed by the poverty of its moral vocabulary and the rigidity of its moral arguments to the destructive forces of conflict and loss of tradition.
How, then, does the “disappearance” of Ethics occur? It requires no particular hostility from university administrators or rival disciplines. It occurs for reasons intrinsic to the study itself, when its practitioners lose sight of the realities they have to deal with. Ethics reflects on the living of human life, not, like anthropology or sociology, from a third-person observational point of view but from the point of view of agents who ask deliberative and evaluative questions about their practical undertakings. There is no describable field of material data that defines the study of Ethics, as, for example, the artifacts and inscriptions of ancient Egypt define the study of Egyptology. It is defined by an ambition to trace, clarify and enrich the practices of moral evaluation and deliberation. In doing so it will often make use of descriptions supplied by more empirical sciences and subject them to forms of rationality tested by theology, philosophy and law. It has its own range of descriptive categories, of course, some of which are unique to it: motives, decisions, sins, virtues, etc. But concrete practical reasoning needs other categories, too, if it is to get a purchase on the world. I cannot decide how properly to invest a sum of money simply by asking what my motive should be or what virtues it requires of me. I need an account of economic realities. That places Ethics in an exposed position in the academic ecology, lacking the power conferred on it by a closed field of data in which it is expert. Its expertise is not defined by its data, but by the distinctive lines of practical questioning that it applies to them. And it is these that are constantly at risk of deformation when it tends, as it does in both its traditional homes of theology and philosophy, to assimilate to other models of intellectual inquiry. At that point we see the proper discipline of Ethics disappear.
Strengthening the Foundation of Ethics
In these lectures I have two aims. The first is to notice three elements of Ethics that have in fact tended to disappear, and so to make Ethics disappear; the second is to explore the conditions of their reappearance. In the first three lectures I shall follow some well-beaten philosophical paths and recall a philosophical passage of arms that has now been rather forgotten; in the latter three the route is more theological, and taken more on my own responsibility.
An able younger scholar, seeking to help me overcome the confusions of old age, advised me recently to reread a book I wrote nearly forty years ago called Resurrection and Moral Order, promising that I would find “some quite good things in it.” I followed the advice gratefully, and having overcome the predictable shock of encountering a younger self with younger manners, I decided that the positions defended there were strong enough to invite some further exploration. My principal claim in that book was that Christian Ethics must be a bearer of good news. I now presume to extend that claim and suggest that it is valid for all Ethics whatsoever. In doing so I hope to engage fruitfully with Lord Gifford’s demand for a natural theology. Generations of lecturers on his foundation have found this demand sufficiently elusive, intriguing or outrageous to require extensive discussion; to that I do not intend to add very much. But I should like to suggest that among the topics grouped under the heading “natural theology,” the relationship of Ethics to theology must be somewhere very near the center. That, at any rate, was the view of A. E. Taylor, lecturing to this university on Lord Gifford’s foundation just a century ago. I have kept The Faith of a Moralist open on my desk, though his conception of the task differed from mine as greatly as our intellectual eras differ. In the late afterglow of idealism, he brought the resources of Ethics to supply a more secure foundation for theology, a legitimate project and well executed. I, on the other hand, bring the resources of theology to strengthen the foundations of Ethics, now manifestly itself in need of some good news.
In recording my thanks to the principal of St. Andrews for the honor of her invitation to deliver the Gifford Lectures, and to my colleagues in the Schools of Divinity and Philosophy for their gracious support, I must mention the conditions in which these lectures were delivered, wholly online, for reasons explained by the events that brought the world to a halt in 2020-2021. No lecturer could be imagined less suited than myself for this pioneering exercise (as it was then), and I was naturally disappointed to be confined to my study at home rather than enjoying the company of students and colleagues a few miles away in St. Andrews. By patient technological attention and careful guidance, however, the staff of the university facilitated what turned out to be an unforgettable experience, with participation from a worldwide public, much of it in remote time zones, which had grown hungry over the months of isolation for serious discussion of the most serious questions. To be the occasion for this reunion of thought was deeply moving.
Oliver O’Donovan, professor emeritus of Christian ethics and practical theology, University of Edinburgh
