THE DIFFICULT·GOO.

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lÁ Thomistic Appro. a~h

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· to Moral Conflict and
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Human Happiness

DANIEL MCINER_NY
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Copyright © 1006'' F'ordham .university- Pras.

'All .r1ghts reserved. N'o part :o f this pubficatfon may·'be.
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quQtations i.n· printed revi~s, wi~our th~_ príot
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permission of the publíslttr., .'. ~-.
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Moral Philosophy and ~oral Theology, No~ 6.. .. :
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ISSN 1517-jZ}X. , -··

·,·.J:'
Library ·of Congress Cataloging-in-Publicarion para ·. 1

. Mclnerny, Daniel • ¡~

The dífficult goo~ . : a Thomistic appr.oaéh :t~ monl.

conflkc and human happiness I Daniel Mdnemy·
p. ·. ·cm.-. (Moral philosophy at)d moral theofogr.~
ISSN 1527-5.2,X;.no~. 6)..
·Indudes bíbliographical rcferences-and mdei:
I~BN-13: 978-0-8232~2621~ (alk papcd' -
ISBN--10: 0~8232~2.621·2. (alk.. -~)"
1-~Thomas; Aqumás~ Saint, 1225?~ri:;+ .
2. Good and ·evit' ·3~ ·.Righ;t·~d ~ng~.
4, HapvinCS$~ I.. Title~ . u. ~:ri~--
,BJ1491•..Mu i~·.·
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.tntr.oduction ·
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THE _on=rn:uLI GQOD

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~ Within its depths 1 saw ingathered, bound
l by love in · ·
one volume, the scattered leaves of ali the universe;
'f
substanc~ ~d accidents and thefr relations., a5 ·though
together fused, after such fashlon that what 1·tell of is one
. ~ simple flame .
.· '.}
. } . -Dante, Paradiso, Canto 33 (trans. Wicksteed)

When in Canto 33 of the.Paradiso Dante finally· be~olds the Love that

moves the sun and the other stars, his qu.est for that which· wholly
satisfies human desire :· achieves its end. Hls -disordered love for l~~
rhan-perfect goodness is now transforined into ~ _love perfecdy ~rdered
.f to God,_the summum bonum, ·as its _highest ·object.. Sigp.ificainly> thi~ ·
transformation is achieved by Dant~ through .a series ·of conflicts, _a
serie~ that beginS'·in t!ie D~rk W~od atid. conti11:ues through_Hell arid
Pur~atory~and, presµmably, after his pdvilege4 visio~ is o~et~, .
Indee([, one way·of unders.tanding Dante?s.. q_uest is.as .·a ~~gl~ con-
".l ~ict. through. which; Dante. g~ows iri his . .appr~ciation of the r~g1'~ ord~
~1 íng_of_goods to on~ another, and 'to..the - ab~ol.utely"hig~cst gQOét- .íbe.
-i final - ~esol~tio~ of f~·: CQhflic~ .~o~~.dru.tes hl~journ'er~~ énd~ ~~ 4~m.o;
.
;~-~ nization o( aU ~omp~ting:·. ~'fr¡in~s-. Qf d~~-ire,· ¡jnt~ -~n.~ . magpi~entJ?r-.
• 1

Dante's jOurney c,inb~dieS a ptlfticUlar ~~ei'S!~ding Qf the ~an

quest -~or happít\~ss,, ~ove aJl, ·his .jóurney t~~iJfi~s\-i~ ··~9~ .PP~h~c:. : s~~-: ·/

.
-ce~.s -of that_qUC,§t,·.U t humart:wc;~~-ss · ~nd)ni~foft:~rl~· d6.th~i,t·~~~·~,, . · ·'. J
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st1ll~ the fuu tr~sl0.i~aúbn ._af óUi.~¿itl.Ud Jh~-~ilJO~e~t ci·pt~t~t-

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'happi:ne~ setmín possiblt; t.k ts · ssehtfallytonifo: fn Oant(S.C()smtis;

a lar~· part o{ · _hAt k. ~~ this comk: po slbitity -ope_n is . th~ (U~da~·n~
t~ ·: .harn16 -'·:o"r·integthy .o •, the huma.ti goo.d · an irttegt1o/·tWiztd in~~
1
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. hi m hic.:il .·.· rderi g of ·..··. odn .·ss s culmitt.tting ifi die ultlmaú ·good..
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n · ··: t 'i1(' " d-_ This lü,· :a '.hl :~ 11 _ordering ·of multlpfe goods · ~to~"
. th ,i.·ab\HtJ' of le s-than-p ·r~ et goo~ , an~· the ·doirabifitf
d t..~kili · ~n. no perfection. 1t·expfaJns-Dantt!"1.Íove·.
thi11gs; as well ~s how such loves ditect» him.·to·th
l-·, mal thing.
li - ·und.ersta.itding of the human good, howé'.Vet;. ís not"·one·
t S\\ta.y ·o er much contemporary moral rcftectio,n. For .m~ny·
· ...... thc.drama of human life is better characterizcd as a ttagedy thm: ·
. ed , or, at least, as a drama that is forever vulnerable to rragic
-"'""~.....,,.:cs.
. What those who claim this mean .is not simply that human
. -~
. · ·lcd with sorrow and pain. Nor that happiness is- wholly beyond · • "!,

ur :gnsp. What the tragic outlook means for many today is tha:
. . ~~ happiness is fragile, and that among its fragilc items- js.· moa!
"'r,,~~~"" -which in principie is compromised by the awful w.ay thc ·
d can soIDctimes be. Life, in other words, is such as to generatc
~n..r-r conR~ conflícts in which ''an agent can jwtifiably· thlnkihat
wn~tevcr_ he ~ will be wrong: that therc are· conflicting moral .r~
QUl!l:ea:ien:t , md .t hat ncither of them succeeds. in ovcrtiding or ou~
g _ odter. ~'J
derSt:andjng of the human predicamcnt sees ·o'1f li c:S;
:·
flGJ.~riea·, _ by n~ · ,i,ty th n w~ ever ac.knowled . ·: by.Jl>J
.·.

~~·~vil, w4 .m~rn phUosophy, This id~ or·~(~e \~· ~ .: .

O •w:>l irlJ-- . r i . r

it~ root both in' an ·i nt re~.k.- wr~t .fS a,nd in Ni.:-. . ~­

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. ~ . ·~ .. m nct, that M.nha .·u(sb ·m . pWn.· u~. th ·. -~ I~ _~ - ~

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-ale ·trUé to~ ~th~ is; to ._ i,·· ootitin\}Ous_hlStoti(il thididoj¡ of
. human eth.ical·exp~nence ~~~t .has not.be·•n · .,··:.:t.~ .·d:• · 1·· -_,~ ..
- ·· · · . · ·"' · ~ w~r . ·isp ace ·· or· d· -: . · ·.

irreve.rsihly..altered by the Supternaty ófi:hristián (íahd-lGilt~)

téachtng. 2

What Nienschflaw:, accordin~ to NUssbaum, is the Gteeks unen.<.

·, ·
cumbered by cent~ies .o f )udco-9Jirist1an~not .to me(nion MUsli~
assimilation. Hence Nietzsche saW the Greelcs "more t~ly/' and
-,

because we have finally unencumbered o.ursclves· from th~e same refi-.

gious traditions aricl their. philosophiCal counterpatts, we too are able
co see the Greelcs more truly. We and Nie~che and the Greeb.aiSt
,more or less together in the same ethical space.
So we muse return to "the _Greeks/' But who are they? For Nietzsche
they are the Greeks ofthe archaic ~odd,' not the Greelcs oithe philo-·
sophical age. Nietzsche' s condemnations of Plato, less so of Aristod~
are exercises in vitriol: "Ultimately my mistrust of Plato exten$ to the
very bottom of him: 1 find P.im deviated so far from ali the fundamen~
tal instincts of the Hellenes, so morally infected ... that 1 sho~d prefer
to describe the entire phenomenon 'Plato' by the .harsh term ·":higher
. die. '"3
SWI.n
In more tempered language but.in the same spirit Ber11ard W~ams
has seen fit to draw a line between H~mer, Sophodes, and _Thucrdides,.
on the one side, and Plato, Aristotl~,_ Christianity, ·Kant, ~d -Hegel~ o~
the other: "In· importani: ways, · we are, in our ethical si~ation, more
like human beings in- antiquity than·any Westerri p~ople_ hav~ been ~
the meantíme. More particul~ly, we are like thosc who) from .the_6tth
century and earlier, .have l~ft . ~s tra~cs o( a, consc;:io~sness .t hat had--~ot
yet beco touched by Plato's and Aristotle's attempts (Q .make ~ ethi-
cal relations.to.the wo.rld fully intelligiblc/'4 · . . ,,
Tbe problem with ·Plato and Aristotl~. aM with Jewi~ :~~·
and Cfuísthui assiinilatiom apd eXtenSiooS ()ftheir tlu~u.~t., .,_~~
afrempt to. make "oµi ethical telado11s. t-0 ·~- warld.·:6dlr intelligibf~, •·
What do~~:- this rnea~l · _· _ . . _ -_ . - ·. · · . · ..~: ..'·.·, ·
.
on -.p~tos . ; · . ·. d Ar .ti ,. ' ' . noftéaly. inl~t~ ·Vi~ tht. hwn~ .·
ao ·. · 1stQ es,.pul'r ~ .. · 'th wQdd hip~ t\l
qu~t fot happi,nes.s wfl)eh<>W: ·6ts -well ~l.th ·~º~' ·-~- -. ~ · .. ;:·. :~, < .•...
b·e,:_ (SpecialJy . ~ ·thosct
· · . ,_ - ·· ;-wi~h. - ."··· d. ~-.1·t:·b·.,' ·:.-1Uoess
··. · · ·ne~sStl'-l~S::7 ·)anotan.~'- s.c.t _etty ·
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of resource"s~iliat_-· threaten· to:.un4~rmii:ie· ·_our · wetl-be~ng... On-:.~~ese . >. ·. . :

older ethical \i'iews; th.is "6tneSs;;. betWe~n .ottt ethical .teiatiótJs'..~ .~ .· 1 j :

wo~ll :is' .btokered·.by a, t~leologkal ~~ception of ~ature ..Jn, Jno~e·~h '. :f

mo~al philosophy it' .is b.rokered by a 'concéption of i~p~rsoiial rá~~ri~~- . ..:- ~
ityi.·But according to Williams, and· ~ictzsche· befor~ - him, '~·we_'~~w~ .. '. :... ¡
enlig~t~ed postmoderns-have. no.· reason to :~htnk that .there· js..- any: "·.... ~
concq>tion of n~ni:rc; God, or impersonal mo·raliry that can res~fVe ~-. _'·. i
the untidiness of life ·a used by na~re'. s nccess~ty, t:rat can máke ·~ur .: 11

ethical aspirations "fü" the world. Necessity may always come .álong · .• -~
and.crush our happiriess, sometimes even force U:S to do wron~ .and:po · ~ .. " 1..

appeal to nature, s goals, divin~ providence, or the categorical impe~-i- · .~

.tiv~save at the risk of self-delusion or falsification of what is pro~rly . · . ~i
human-cm save us from this fate. 5 · · i:
.... ~
So we live, as .it were, after the fall, exiled from the garden, but with . ~;
. !.
no possibility of grace to redeem us. r. .·. . ¡ :_

Tbe aim .of this book is to engage this deb~te· about the vulnera~i ity . J
ofhU.man agents to necessity, and indeed to tragic necessity. In p~ru~ . . {:
" ~~ .
lar, I will be concerned with the question of tragic conflict, whedier . ~,,
human action is in fact ·vulnerable to it,. and what 't he answer to that .. · "
.
f -~~ ·

question means for the possibility of living alife ofmoral integrity~ .ot · ..'-f:
. being ronsistently true to the genuine vision of the hu~an good~ In . ~
·sho~ 1 will be arguing that tragic coriflict is not a "naturaf nec~ity~6-' ... J
for human beings (though it. sometimes seems to be)~ and that ·the · "" /
' 1 't ~

opposín:g view.is generated by a mistaken . understanding of the h~ : .";'t.

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lt- míght thus seem appropriate to say that what 1 am off~ag-is: ~ ·)i
.romic, ·oanrescan u.nde~s.tánding of human h~ppin~ss and iu· refatk>~~, : . ~.~ T
ship to Conffict, But here things become more complicated. lf this:~. : . ; ~
f. a Christian dte0logical account, thén l could su·ait;htfQrwardlf .Pm;~: · !>. [
J: ·:a oo.Jlli(( 1Jnders~nding .ofhuman happiness, Whlie J 'V-ould_~v~· -~~: · :: ~·
r. my ínterlocurors that human being6Iive in a conditiao ~(Jt~ th .:~~ ·· ·>f:
, I tould arguc·that by d~nt of divine gra.ce hLJm;uJ bei'W ~· ~~ ~ · >4
re5oJve tbe confficis that a.re ()ne.· of t'.he .etrects>ofsiñ. ·. Bqt·· ·1liisJ~· n~2 · ,. '. l
p¡eánf tQ b~ a C'.:4riSf~q :rbeQJogit;al ~~éÓ~t¡ A~~~é~ ~ :(h,~~ ./J
·. sitlJal~-:~r ln<ÍÍfiry ~ r~re~cnee· tó p~~l~~~ . cO~nJi'diii 4nd.~o_.:~~.' . . j
·N~4ss~u.~.?s ·r~Je'?tÍÓ-'1. ~-(J~isli', ~~a. .ch~ist·~~n:-. ~thi~at~ta~í~Q?§~ _,Wt'l . ·<J:
·. · · · · ·· · ,· .<.·r"l
'r:... · ~· .
 .i:nt,,~·~lli'J~ ··l .
. :·: urdy philosóphita;l fuq~)iito ~é:: ,~~~-.
. ·~ .··~ 1:0 .hu~ hap~:in~ thc]>hil0soplii~ . ~~~~j
..ot . . . : ': ·' ~ . : ' --.,und~~~nding~. hut.: one that _d~ ~ot··;4c~rtd:.
·rll·,·
.· : ·purd·. philosophiod point of vicW,' l will da4ri .
i~ n t inhercndy con8i~ed~·· ~-d· :tbu~ - that. _~( ·.
pennantnt pmsibility ·fut human bcings~ h is oot thé
____. . . .,.,. in othtt worcts to devate a human nature ·that•.át
.rrupttd that it is no longcr well~fitted to morcll·~cy~
l . .· ,: : ll cr..uy at the root of human natúre is an order· to a harmom-
~
~,.,._._... . . . . . . . . css that e\ en in oui broken condition,. can ~ affiancd..Ancf '

- . iruke th t affumation is the central purpose of this hóok..

I affirming ·this, however, 1 in no way mean to suggest that .happi-
n~ . something easily attainable, or always attaillable, or· even that
when attained it can he enjoyed at its greatest ~ible fid611ment~
Quite the opposite. . The human good by definition is, in Aquinas's
plrr-.ase a bonum arduwn, a udifficult good,» a goocf beset _by obstácles
bod1 inside and outside us, obstacles ~ch malee a drama out of om.
aesire for happin~ by creatitig co~as:· confficts benv~ ourselves
and orhers, confficts between ourselves ·and physical narure, confficts
ha\\een the better and worse angels of our spirirual nature, and con-
. . ,,
~

:": - ~~ ffia:s between our own most sincere opinions about what is best. fur.us.. . . (

Bar rithout denying the ·significance of the suffering such co~cts

C4USC~e daily burden of hard ·work, the darkne.sS of ignorantt> tbe
tyrann¡" of unjust politlcal power, che pressure of sWce. rciources, the·
~· of .Physical páin, ~en to ~e point of death-~y ·ci>ntenÓon
remallts that it is. always póssible fo.r thcSe con8icts·eich.er to·· be .ovCt-·:
,come or endured widiout compromising m~~ integ1"i~~- ·In ~ w,:ay 1"'
hope _
ro show, at' lea$t.
rld, f)~ •
in -pan,' bow · otu ·ethical .Upjrat\t>ns '~fi~t . the. I '

·¡

. .Easly in the lasr ceqtury the :Germ¡m Thonfüt J~Pk~~~a

. ;

lttde trearlse Oll Ülhfrtue ()Í furtirude, aÜ'.Ciltise {neant t{) ~ ~ Í'eSp<)Í\~
to what Pkper . 1Ni: as tbc asPira(jop oflibmli~ tó" s.ubdut ~vit ue~ .

::;:~0~.~~~tic~?·.A~rdie~'º Pie~~! c~e ··~~~~

~ .gCQu opuuusQJ of Jlle h~~. ~d~l~: '"1~ fQr.~t~: ~P .i
'1
~

· ~ ol~¡tUde. :p{ctj11éty;.lJC~uSe ·~ ¡$. .~rJd,lfii~~~ ·~ . . .t

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"unboundcd · árthlyuptirll.i$m' 1made it i~possible fur hiih to,re&g~

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ni te -di~ inductahle,' metaphysicat fact of evih .' . ' ,. . . .'. '

Enlight n-ed hberalistn dos~ its eyes,to the evit in th~ ~otl~: to-
r- 'r

,. '
.rh · d" inunic powet of '·'our advers~ryu c~e P~il~ the ~vi~_.On~,.: ... ·; . ~:
as · 11 s to the n1ysterious powet_of human delusíon and pervet~. ·
. ·st n of wiU · at wor~t, thc liberal imagines· che power of evil to b~ ·.
not so i~g-ravdy'' dangerous ·that one. could º negorlateº ór "com~- ·
ro-. ten1is' with it. The ,uncomfortable, merciless and inexoraMe
uNo . · a sclf-evident reality to the Christian, ·has·been oblitera~e_d
&om the :U.bcralistic world view. The ethical life of man has · ~. .
come fulsified into an unheroic, unthreatened way of existencc
,&ce from sorrow and harm. 8
. -~ ·-J;
·Traditionally, however, the vinue of fonitude is that vinue required to .· ~:.
~ in conffict with those evil necessities that can neve~ be wholly. 'f
Subdued. Christian heroism, for example, recognizes that death and .r
other furms of suffering are part of the human conditio.n, and tba:t to · ~.:·
. - ,·:

kttp.aiming for, or holding onto, the good in the face of thein is a· · _- f~

aucia1 riequirement of a fiourishing life. 9 'f/:
Piepcr wrote his book as a response .to the aspirations ":hat w~ of ' )~
cm caU dassical liberalism. He did not perhaps foresee the ~bility .·. J
of a more dwtcned, less ambitioús liberalism, ~:me that vicws itsdf. ~· ·. i,;.'
. ·'~ .
having.· ~ned from Nietzsche about the quixotic task of .trying ~o ·
. ~\ ~
··~ ,
.1.·•

F
makc our ethk.al undcr.s~ding "fit the world.,, B·u t it is this li~iSDl . '
- . ;~:· d:tat is.ofcen che polítical backdrop for contempora.ry theoties_Oí tragi~ · ··:., ·
COl.i6ict.w Aa;ording to tbís liberalism, thc human gQ.().(i is alSo . in a . · ~ J
~> ;~·

~~.-a· dtlOOJ!t g~. ihough k .is a good who~~ lntegfiry do~~ ~t '·:.· f•
1

al~ayJ ·~dl-s.taÍld Jife' s .diffkulties., So .in arguing, lhat t-he h~~n So04~:- · ··.\:·f
'.~~ a·&Bicuk good, Cán t>.~ ac:hi 'Ved whh«:nu n.~essad~y CQ~l~~s~ . ~· ·:':;·J:
Uag .the j~tq~#ry· ·~f human ageot,. f.wUl. have to ~~·tend .Pjepe·.~,:_ ch~~-~ , · . . :.:.:j·
'. ~ ~f.. fottitudie to. bt~t~ .~dceq rhe nC'w·di~(~r(·on whk~ libe.t\ij_., ~J i ·..
't.__ ,, · ~~t ~, . . . . . . . - . . .. t
'~ ~n~ . .. .· . ._ . " ·. . ·" i'.:
·Jlle"(Qu~i'?'J,.ºf_ ~Y· ~-~ . -Jru.lqt¡ h~wey -"~~.:· wttt~" jJefl :·. ~. · ~ft~· . . . '.< .f'
~;hi ~iaii~r,13{lding~'~ huQiAA~~·f~l\d~ill~: . •"i:
..fo·rtri-~r Jlan·~,.-~d_pblló.~~~lf .~n~ .tb -~~ij~tll)(l>~:. Pief~i; 1~~;" <<t
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. · · · in um · thar'.it .is ..the · · rde~ o(hµ~ ·tunuré ·to t~~-ná~~al

~ ;:;~· .. ·. · s th t enable out ethial telatioriuo ihe worl<l to bt ··
. .1¡· · ·bl -t and. ·,th. ···{ :(n ,n~ttaa
tntí l Ol
4
.i ·)·· onfüct ~ha.
.O · .
t _··we might caU.~ eyen
· '· . . . .
.hilos . hica.ll. . 'divin · n1_dy ' i _. one of the. chiéf ways.- in whícb ..
iliat in · ·Ui ·. · . ifüy l · tought ro light. .
:-e f m~ r-.ither ~ eeping thesis demands treatment _o fa.wi.dé·
,.ari .0 mnpli ated issues but my sccondary aim wfrh this boo~ is.·
;;>.,.~, an initial sratement of my theme, ratber than the full
fii\ . ro\·ide onh' J .
:~ . :·~
. ·' mfhoni treatment. To switch my metaphor: 1 -want to show the
. la-e f.oonfüct ~ithin the drama of human happiness as a whole, and
l ll-0 i\ristode in thinking that the integrity of a drama is best
grasped within fairly constricted boundaries of time · and space. Yet
because I ant to tell a long and complicated story within a relatively
sbon space many peninent issues-for example, issues concerning the·
policial ramifications of my argument-will have to be presented in
ourline fonn, or left out altogether.
The presenration of my argument will be aided by the following
''. . . l'
:.'"
.. ~>
brief, preliminary mapping of the issues. 1 begin With ~ account of
.' j

:i rhe narure and structure of the human good, a structure that is hierar-
chial in character, consisting of a variety of ultimate goods, or ends,
'Ordered to on~ absolutely ultimate end-God-that governs .all the
r.est. The attainment of any ultimate, or final, end .provides· human

beíngs wirh some measure of happiness, and so the attainmcnt ·of the
absolutily ultimate end provides human beings with the most perfect
iuppine&s 2vaílable in this life.
Thls natural híerucbical ordering is the source of ~~e fundamental ·
uníty of i:.he human good. An unde~tanding of this unity, boweve:r, is
never fully fransparent to us. It unfolds graduallyas we undenake
nlf.l!:ai .educacion. ·gaín e1perien~, · grow in vinue--.:actiVitk~ aU • of
º"'
whL~ can_be largely characteiized as engagements ln contliq. if onty
~ wtdt ~ e>w ignQr<tnu,and lack of matµrity, Wh t we shóU.t~
ope to karn .thcough. these couflic .is t~f our ultün·.te Ond~ ·Ólost
~·' .
gencr~ al( ·· . · :. -- ·. · · .·.. , ·. - _.. __ ·.· ·. , . ·· ···-
.l
.. 'l
stood ' pe. ~' 'itr~usa d ll¡ t~9u~ d~is end mu~t .b UruJet-
... l . , anal<>pcatly,
Vlr.tJJcs tna •1 · a.«ordutg . . .Jo.' h .-b1e~cby· ·of.uhim · · · · "te;··etidS. : . Th ·· :~
co·· ir'.· ·' • ·íll~ ~ot; - -~ th~ght of a , rJ téd .an(I, 1~ t~l~ij..
. O. !Ctlno . tanab-•,111, •· , , bl . b. ·. . ··ll· . - :... ·.. . - ~, ·:· ~ . ·-, .' ~.:. _:·.
. ·, o ·· «::: .-. ,: ' " ; , ·. :·t fl . t · i . quu ·q '.': tUF:·a"n1 ~tnéál .,.L~.. 11
" • .
. . · ·. ..::.:· . .' . · · -.. ·. ··.,.. e· -.. -. ~ .. .. ': : · ~Sl~_•.·

..
:~ . \ ;, '
 . .; l ~•

• t .·' ~

ltáth t th~· ~rit-- . ·!St: ·a ·n··"st' d·· )Vid ht :~t. bitr,it:hi:ca.f t;~de·r, titn~e t~ . · . ·:..· .
~ · ~I ; . Jt\\l rroM. \.· plli :e withln thé hi tmhíctf integkity "of~' '
's •· fundí® tu lly túS ·n .tru ·. tite dtarátter ·ot dta ·vfrtde ltitd .· ,;, ·..
...;r . ·..·. '
..... ' .

.h ·w> • · ;.lm· .-.- ~-,' >.n h: t'"P··in s. . : ·~

.
. h. b'.··: . v. . t ·u ·. · ivify l prud nt ·hoke~ éh~ki ,that 1s ,~ .:. · .· "··
~ wti tt · .'htu·· ~ .sound· prac kru·teftso1dng~ . «>:ut . tbt.·:.
· l ,. a givet1 énd, 8Ut.· if delibetádon ís· solt1y ~~ ·ª
s then a a:ntrlll question for ptactitaJ tea&ort is hów · · !
;I: h out efids. One suggestion is that ends théinsdvCJ: ate · ·. . j
dcl1beracions of pr~cti~ .reason, tha~ they are socially ~t · j
n'rn~t'!Pi'm • nstrucred: But 1f th1s 1s so., as I ·1U . a~gu.e, then p~ : .
w. ·1.

+.i.a.A.:~:ft:Jf'I. 1 tS undcmuned, and the human good 1s fraa:uted>" uiso- . .

.are left with a multitude of incompatible and potenñally·· · . ~ 1 :~
..................... ,t ........."... cn-d:s out of which we must cobble together our happin~ j
mmunal life with others. The prospect of tragic confficr .. l
\oo¡"n;:is,. The · ocount of practical reason 1 offer, by concrast, confums
' .
·i ~

oossttMlttv of moral integrity by underscoring both th~· essential .~

u.m.J ttat10n of ddibcrarion to instrumental means, and the i~ponanet· ~j
· ;e di ·on gi~en to dcliberation and choice by ·the natural hiem-· j
Ch.. ' fh ·m an ~ --Ar. · 1~
§ . · .. lt . · iblc for practicaI reason always to resolve the <r:onflicts j
· ther those conflkts are du.e to our own ignO?aRCc O ·. ··,.. j
.e from die heer nastincss of tbe wo.dd? I wiff ~~~ ~~y:""
· ,.· ~~
· - irb
1
· ·. · · poruni quali6cations. that it can. But· 1 wi~ e~(l_'th . .. ._ -:-,~ j
·~ ·· 'tb dtis de~ rise of pracucal n~ason · . abil~cy to ·º"e;f , ~ : ·.· ~
~tJfli · " · ·v.eirop Dfl our .htippine s . llut wi·tn a. ts: ~-~- · c - >.: ~l
- ~ ·lrirt:u.·: . ~ ,. ··ir~ lO . ngage nflkt .in a onsnuctiv '. ~~y•.., v•rt~~ ·~ ·" ·. -: . :·:_:
. "- . . d~r ~ .. ,_ , .. onJy .be form ·d by pno.f eng~ge1ne.ot in oa~ ~. '~· · .... :··; -·~:-'.l
J l~ W.~U & ' kaJ ·f¡ .fll fh~ , ~ fflQl i~ rh~u. Hl)' . tilg\Ull~ in -, dtiÍ~ . ~t::· ". · ~. :· ,~ . :-:-·!
, , ":~~ inll!'ira ü k m NiH d .·an4 Aquti1~~ and lo4~ d ntf ~1\\~.:1$ ,.: J
<. ·'J ttie mi.r9f,tn &t ~ l Qfl:~)fh$!!'' ~ uthtn,pdtl¡:.iPaJlrAq'lit . · \\*' .·•·· J
( ·' · howevoe.r mU.dl J. ~ &9'~ br. ~!W~ iw · ~!i • m:ü~ mi - · ::~ ;!
h:::,,: ·~'< . "'~~ ·~~ ~ nd~<, ·• iu, f:i id: :t h®gh ·1 ~en ~vfff. ~ ,> ::,~l
s.~?'f ·.: , ~ ;~ · . ~ud<t4 I~ . f~n · ~p.·-~l. P,.,t~~ ' . ~- ...l:· ín, .- ~{l~S.~ ·1f..~ 4Qj~W · ~~Ji:~'.~t:« «. ::':~_:<l
"" · ':'.~t!. . . .. . -•tt .:f.'""'' . . . ' . ·. . . .. .. ' · . · oA·í~
"-~~~~· · <l:\:~ ; ·
.. ·,. .
p~nap~~r ·;q . ~,l' ,lld :mr ~ . ~,..._
. .
u\~,
.
t:tp
.
... ~. -aiw•11.:ái"·-~ftctút~ tltlu.d :,,:,~u,~ · >t~~.·~l
.. .. . .
f ""',.
...
·'
,. ')

~.·;,:3.~*,·
. ·lt··. . ' . . . ; +.¡

· ·~ (' . ·_. ;f:~. ". ' ' -".~._-~.:-'': ~.-;.1.~·:

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.,·,'._:,.: ... ..
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1
1

·. :·c-. hum211 good art4 .tbe ~ok .· p1ayed

good cui ·be more dcarly bro~t forward.
A~~ look at.the .tragic únderswiding of b~ lif'C~­
neady form·ulatC'd b~· Iris .Murdodt cas pan ·of:hér·
~--untof~~

··~"'\'. " life has. no encmal point view as -or TÉ~ ~ a

_, .. _ to argue as its opposite, and I shall simply ~n it. l. can r1,
~

- , 0 evidence to suggest tbat human life is not something.self-_

ronraínetl There are properly many pattems and purpose5 within

. e, bue cherc is no general and as it were exremally guaranteed
pancm.or purpose of the kind for which philosophers and cheo-
~ used to search. w~ are what we seem to be, transient .
moral creatures subject to necessity ·and chance. 11

urdoch does not ~ny that nature, in che form of "necessity and
rnanc~n sers some boundaries to human desire. Fortirude, for exam-
p~ annot be brute assertíveness, because the necessities of the human
condition prevent us from so definitively mastering our environment..
AJ. die ·sanie time, nature' s rather rough boundary does not deliver a
sin~e definítíon and. unity to the good: "There are .propedy many
patterns and purposes within life." Courageous action, beauty, happi~
. ~ icsdf-diese thtngs· will be ..realized díffcrcntly' by diffeHnt .hliman
bcinp ín dilrerent times and places. So in contrast to the medieval
undertifanding diat naiure is ordered tld u11um, Murdoch <>ffers a the-
ory of nature tbai: is ordercd ro multíple pattcrps and p'1t'p<>Ses thit
·~~ ·. ,.

.~ . .}
rnay cv.~n ui c.enain íils~ce ronfticr w.ith o.ne .anptber,
of ::: C{>ntetnpor~ wúteruhi · lan idea is usúally expr~dbi tctms
sur: ;om~en1urabtt11J. º' what I .shall prefct' to ali 11/Uel•nt mt;a1t~,,.rn,-
.~b1lity
. . ·i Jnr~r..·
. · ~... ~mensurab·~·. lU)' ~.tt~fi41. ·~ ·. ro l1~L~.....; tuQf"
I' . · . . .ll}' fe¡~f e... .:L. · b-.'
·utaf· t ..·~fe· -S. ·
no c.onun . ·· · ·' · · · · -- · . · _·· · · · · · ·:·
ít , ·.· <>n lllt'asttre betw~n-tw(l f;tr m~te h(m ·:.ln ethkalchst:ussi~s
is (n.eant to , ... ...1· .. ...t. b ., . . - .. . -· - . . .
. > ··· ·•. 1u8.JKate UJé ~roge~C)io/ Qf'y llJ(s. lnthe cóntctnp,ótatf
Cftnque of tht P.nllghtcntne)l~r inCDm~tts,u;at>Uity r.eferS to a·~n1· ót·.
~ntt~t ·~n posttnódern.: ~nd.'. Enltgh~ rtiríef!~ ~Unts. M1.®rit~.
• .~ • • ' .. 1 • • •
· ·lty-: For withihinkers $m:h..as ·~~and.MiUJ Wh:tt.iS <fisttD~~Ift·· ;;
"rrio.ráltty)~ .that ít :dis·cern-s a singlé.g~~d or:t4le··thar: s~~es,._:~ ·.tbe::. ~~ . :·. ·· >·~· ..

::e;~;Jo:~:~;~~:::;::~::~~~:aJP~:~:;~s;::eu!~: ~
or' ·to applfing the auegorical imperative,,. Ori these ·view.s· alf )norJ. . · ·: · ;
• .·:1

·considerations ·can be ~educed ~o one cons1dération, and·· so: ~ · m6_.áf .·.·. :.,
.considerations are commensurable. . . · . . . ·_.: . ·i
The uagic vicw so opposed to my own, then, can best be underStood · · ·.~
. . f
by cxamining. why it rejccts these commensurating strategie5-, .and :~º~-.- .· · ~
lts espousal of leveling incommensurabiliry- - . the· notion that there Is.· .· .· ~
no inherent 'order between heterogeneous values-leads td .· che am,. :.·.· ·: ·.
mation of the fragility of human goodness, most pointedly in tragic: ·::.~
conffict. This examination of the tragic outlook will lead us towarch ·. . : f
critique of the leveling incomm~nsurabili~ ~esis, a céitique ~t wíll .··. J
open up th~ way for my alternat1ve, Thom1snc account of conH~ct and .· :. .J.
.hw:Dan happiness. In turning now to ~is analysis. and ·critique, ~w:- . j
ever,, 1 do not pretend to take up all 1ssues and stlence all quesnons.... . r
'

Th.e consideration of the <:">pposing vi~oin_t is meant. chie.fly .ro s~t . ·· . · . t~.

as a foil to my own argument, a traiic prelude to the comiC possibiliñcs ... •. J

to come. :· -rt
..... ' t.
..~ '
:. f- [:.,-,

.. ! Ci\'

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 f<

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MMENSURA'BlL1TY ANO
. TRAGIC CONFUCT

. •
. '' . f-L. . . .•
G UlCSC OOUISCS IS wtthout cvu.
--!I)

-- _ eschylus. Agamnnn~ line zn (ttans. Eduard Fraenkel)

Lik.s vcry diffirult and full of surprises. At all evcnts, l've got so far ~
·cbat. To be humble and kind, to go straight ahead, to love people rather
thm pity them, to rcmember the submerged---well, one can' t do all
thcse things ai on~ worse lock, because they're so contradictory: lt's
thcn dial proportion comes in-to live by proportion. Don't begin with
proporñon.. Only pñgs do that. Let proponían come in as a last
n:soume, whcn the better things have failed, and a deadlock-GraciollS
mc, ·f vc stan.ed preachinf)
-E. , . Forster, Howtirtls Ená

The itll2cíon ofAgamemnon, fro.m Aeschylus's play of tbe same namc,

has been said \r.o present a paradjgm case of uagic coiúüct. Commandcd
by Zem to lead die Argive mnies agaimt Troy. Agamemnon 6nds
niJrud[ aod bis meo manded cm tite island of Aulis, as ·an angty gOd~
dcss. Anan: •has madc the wind. Unfavorablc fur sailing. The proPhe~
Cakhas divin . .i:fiat che only way to appease Anetnil is for Asaown-
non f9 acrific:e h·s daughter, Iphig.enia, Whar i$ ~mmo1no do? l( ·
be chooses f) . to iliic h' ~Ughter. ~n he dJ ~ k ' com-
~ B.w Jf be ' •. ' ·cp ~~ her. mm
h • a4i iGllbceftt·
~' and rhar Of hú ~. 1 . ' ¡vntai~ l$ ~ if.J~
Ots,. dafnJJedj(h~"·~· ~ .:~~t. : . ·. . - , · ·.
 .': '" 'i
....
.. . .~-." i:. "'¡o.~
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•

.ó · 'fhe. :fJ!fffe~h ..f!d_o~á, :. .: .,>:~}

. ..
·~ ·~ ~.
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1

·SoÜRCES·.OP-'ÍRAGI.c "CoNPÜC'l: .. . ,. .

c~rtftiá soÚ'~té? ·r~¡·

!

. HOw is Ag:unemnon's génefatedr .Whát is :irS Sódtt .

. .óqn'ff.ictS ~~ ·~ : ma~tcr uf° r~astl~ corifficting with·passio~~ . My·fti~nd.:~~y :»_\ .~.:
. ~k me ·to go t~ 'the movies on the _after_noon tha.t 1 have·ab ·Í":Ipor?ai1t- .. .
deadliné at W~rk. . Rea.son. tells ,m~ t.hat it .is best for ~e to sta.y in di~ . . . . ~
<>Ífice, and .fintSh my work; pass1on for a good mov1e and .a rub· o( . , . J
popcorn . tugs in the o·pposite direction. Such conAict becween reaso~:!.; ~:· ·~ i·
·and passion is a common source of conflict, to be _sure.:_B ut Agamem;;. · .. ··l
non's oonffict ·seems to be of a very different character. His commit- ..•. f
m·cnt tt) lcad the Argive armies at Troy ~d his commitment to ~e · " · t
well~being of hi~ daughter are both imponant values to ·_him,.í ·aDd ..rea: · » : i
son seems to demand that they both be upheld in these circumstances, l
~&...l"f, however, they cannot both be, and .this is ·what malees f
A~:::non's confüct a tragic conflict. ·• I
'"D~emnon's case also raises the possibility that the virtue nee,ded ·(
to win victory at Troy, and the virtue needed to protect Iphigeni~ are · I
one and the saine. Agamemnon's conception of fonitude or ~ourag~, · . i.·
in -o ther .words, ~ght be internally conflicted, such .that in .one: and· .·.·;.
the ,same set of circumstances it calls him both to kill and not to kili. .i·
his <laughter. Similar kinds of interna! ·confficts can occur in regard to . .·
other virtues, or to rules, or to goods such as life and family. Sometinles . Ír.
-a sm.ste rule may appear to command co.ntradi.·ctory forms of obe4i- . ·t
c:nee. Somerimes one's understanding of the good of family life may (
Jleave one with contradictory .. opinions about. w.. hat is owed to on_.. _e_'s... . "
. parcnts, or ont's children. So ·another source .of tragic confilct· is nof ·.;f
L between the various values we hold dear, but is internal to any orie of ·;¡
l
.· "~\: .
~()se values. . . ' ' . . .. : ~:,; ¡:
.: Jt is ·not diffietik ,to s~e how i:µcompati.ble éonceptiops. -o(.~-,~~,-. . ·~::.~- :. :
r
··_. 1>.'
~

·.·rutes,. :and. vútue$ ®' ·manif~st. du~mselvcs .not- ~nly from.··withi~._,.'dte .·. :· ·.::..·: , :Jf
,(.~

'·
l·
p~rspectjye ,o f ~n.y..~ one peffOn:'s . happiness, ·but. al~o betw~n:. p~()~:.. ·::·, -. '.~ ;. ·:
- ~(fin.~~ .-hetweC~ eritirely dlffer~ri~· moral butloo~~ l\'hªt.p}í!l~:· ..<·~ ' -'.'~·; ..:
p~rs :S(>metimes ®!·~·~Jlceptual s~hemest The fotÚt"<k }'~~-·~ ·;:;~JI
fhe : H~rii.efic ~~rfo.t'. ·~~.· fu.'1d~mt:nra1Jy . ~l c;·d~ : with the.'fQrt1~4,~.:,~~·.·. ~· ; >-::·~
1

.ders~ód, t>ran ~sh ,fu~~ri ~d ~.ne~, imagine . h'owq~f~ . :'.;•

COD8ict b~Cen clicni would a¡t~e. if ~tj' W~(~'.~() Con.fr.Qrii'Qft~ aJi,ó~~r ..:f.
 .. -.~...,_,· .t!iihi · ·~ ..: ·~1~ >:· ::· ....;.. J._ .·f,-~i;€,'é~n~ : .<'.<:J
l.

' .I'

Vlallt5·.·. =.;t~:Jt;=:=:::··
~~· . . of~~"': · .
·:·Wtd b - . ·: di~ sóurces .afconftirt·
· ·. 'on oí thc rondkring. itco;B·íS ~
· · ntb~ dmng damage tO one or of both
~'#Y · n:. ~·b :td 'f«Onci'IW-ion Of di¿.~Dfficting .
, _,.,. , . . ,. ., , b::ousc· die j~ are'dtougbt to be ina>mmensuable.
mcm?

.L ........ ,..
,._ b ·co IENSURABILITY Tllf.SIS

ddinctted threc denials dia tbe daim of inoonr

een two ()r more values involves:

.ere one curreocy in terms of ~. each oonfüa of

V:ZlllfS ·C 3ll be resoJvai

_ h is true tbar fo:r each .confüct of values, diere · is. some

·· • índependem of any of thc confficring valn~ whidi ~

be appealed to .in order to resolVe thc conflia. .
~ 4 ·. u:ue dw: for each coo:flict of values, there is some
. .. whidi can be appealed to (independent or not) in order
to resolve tbe conílict..3

Y!tl!m rakes mese den ials to be of íncreasíng strengtb> so rhat:·accept-

~ o laur.in dte lisi involvcs accepáng those earlier. The fust. of~e·
~ ~ . made againsT reductive srandards of pracrical rationality that
tak dxert ' be. one, ..and ónly one co,;md.eration, in .moral decision:-
..·- · ·~ Tbe Platonic fofl1l of die Good u such a ·rcd~cuve staDdar~
in tbt ít Ca u5 to caJJ things "gOOd'~ in a unívocal scnse. Í.(:.~ oiily
· ~ sofat as thty' ~in aM refkct dus one en~us dirninat.;
mg · pó6! ' :'. .· í,-' ·. í co:nBicúng good¡. SotTI.e forfQS of Conseq~tiabn
are SÍtnjbdy r~. ~.;le>.~ Qné tb1ng. the grea~ÚUm.~f
~rcm dl~;ll.. ~~we.Jnake.Tlili~· ~
. ;~.aJ
di· ~ ~~a,~.·
~.
i.o ~ .~fr ~t. ~QWl~s:J.~ ~
u, . ,,
. · · · .. · (,Urmiq> ¡¡¡me ~•., t1kbf~· m-~ are ~4•&&~t
. .. . ·.. 'º . . ,. . :' . . • ·. . . . .. . , . . ' ·. - . ' •

~fJÍlt ' ~~AÜ'~@~id~~c)tjs}~~~h'oth .. • • • .. • ' • • • • ' ~• ' _.- • - •: • .... ¡ . , ' : , ¡. ' : .• ~- . ¡ ·: t "--

¡ , •{
1
~ r

·,
.~ ' .. '.,.. ;
 J :( .the - D/ffi~u.it · Gt>oá . · .>->.·
. ... .

~9mparable an4:~dditivt:) :in. ~e·'way' that· perlJíÍ~~ . ~ckel~~ and.: :cll~6s . ·.>·:.
<cm be , ~coirip·are4. .andidded'_acco~d'ing to the-·single st~n~ard . o(U.$; .\ :·:·":•
t~r~ency. Practkál_-. t~asoni~g in situations _
of conflict l~ thus"-the ·scién~-. . /> .
. of de-tcrmin~itg whkh.oftwo 01.. more prima.facie conftictiog-goods · h~ · . ·. '.
-m~re br Jields ino,re ~f the one common._rnoral cµr.rency. A·third stan~:._. ·..:~ e;

dard of teductive pr~c;tlcal ~rationality . can be found in the de~ntolcigyi . ·~·:,­

or rule-based.ethic, of Kant, For Kant under$tands that all moral ca:~· 1.~· ··
sider~t-ions «.~ be reduced to the one . moral law, the categorical "impar~ ·.·-:~:. ·;.
. . • ' .<-.
!
ij

atlve ·which ·in .its own . way eliminates ali possibility of conffi~ing__ · ._-~" ~
·oonsidcrations.4 ··
Dcfunders of incommensu_rabilicy reject these reductive strategies. --
Against consequentialism, for example, they argue that inany of the ·
goods we desire resist moral calculation. What kind of quantity, for·
exampl~ could be assigned to one's love for one's spouse, orto human.
freedom? Wo~dn't it be. ridiculous to try to put these two values on a -" '·
moral "scale,, in order to find out which one possesses more .o f x,.. ·.
whatever x happens to be? Seen in this light, Agamemnon's commit~ · · ·
ment to lead the Argive armies against Troy is irreducibly different . . .
. in character than his commitment to protect his daughter. 'The eme -'
commianent is not me.rely instrumental to the other; nor is it in any-
way reducible to it. That is why one commitment does not ~iniply"
trump the other, and Agamemnon finds himself in.a tragic conflict. . ·. ·
Rdared to this first denial is the second, which dclims that there is . · · •· ·
• • • \ ¡¡ •

not for each confüct of values a third value that can be appealed to m. ·.·~
order to resolve the ·conflict. For without a monolithic con~eption :Qf . .
valtie, practica! r~on does not have_at its disposal an· all-pu~e,: -. ·. .-_~ ,.
· ready...:ro--hand arbitcr ofconflict. This is.not to deny that~ given cenáirr ·. ~ -.. "
~nti'ngericies, a· third valuc may hclp resolve a -conflict betw~n: ·~ -~ two· .,. · .
- others_. ~If a hígher salary is one's over~iding considcration, then ~e ,ic;>h. .'<<- .
~~· .o~i;. that ·brings the ·higher salary is de-arly the dtoi_ct be~~1(~~··,- 1/.~::~ .·
~r:
~ ."
. ". . ooml~¡iig _job offers_. that in·all..other respec~~--· are inco~n1c~s~~!~:·•,J·:<<:· ::
¡: ·.:·'
(' .· Yet íp:nU$t be recognlud thar this fesolution is based upon ~C·~L /'. '
Pen?·~f waqti~.s · ~i. n:c~ding ª:·higher $alary. _If'a higher ~-al'f. ce~~~~t~i:.~ ·~\\__ .·!

be. a <:oncern, or if.rhe othet potentiafemploycr ftl!lf,c;fo:nPe: ~:: ··/ ' ~•

- ~!fe~ ;~fdie ~o~her j_ob, lhei\.éonffict will"réa.Ssert itself~ ·. :. ·->-- . ...._: :"=~>:. ; . :.(
. l.~ ril~t ;dso be ,!«<>gniud that dJ.e durd val9~ ~i furáes
~ ~., :;¡,:, ·, :
-- ·:·...":::/.;~~>~- ,·~~,

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.
..-. :.• ~ ·.
 /tfr~inmrnúmi/Ú/ítj. ·,¡~J. TragÚcCarifiit( . U.

.
ttOh lS ·
~~l~e· that..by
.· a
.
its.
·-
·v-ery.~natítré'
~ . ·,
·is .qu-antifiabJé;
.
n~mely>mon~t.
· , · . · . ,
.¡

But most ifnot aÍl ofthe_values i&lv6l':'ed in our ~ost prcising.~nlliéts

are intrinsk value. (as diSciJ:íc:t frQtn tnstrume11tal vaJues lik~ Íl1®o/)•
which hy tlldr ver)' ~atu~ ·ate ·tl'ot quantifiable_. The in~~odbCtio~ Of a .
third intrin.si wlue tQ an alr ~dy exining ·conflict would..t~~s .$eeril.·t0:· 1

'l
conipli te the 1ssue creating the potential for uragié tti~letnntll· tathet
th.atl d1 1·1nma. Consider, for exainple, a .senior in.: college t-<;>rn ··not
onh b tween rwo incompatible and 1ncommensurable job .offers, ·but
aL b a third .offer-an offer to jo in the Peace Corps, .S~Y:· or ·a relí-
e5e_offe~~ are·
gi us ordér.. Imagine that in this senior' s circumstances .th_
aU three murually exclusive. To take the one job ne.cessarily . predu~
taking the otherl and vice versa. And to join the Peace Corps oi:: to
entera religious order necessarily precludes taking up any other>son·of
work~ lt seems that the third intrinsic value cannot help . resolve the
issue in these circumstances, and even if we jmagine a senior for whom.
the life of a ·religious trumps ali secular employment, and so for whom
.. · ··.
mere would be no conflict between the two job offers and él:° offe~ to
:~. ·.
·oin a religious order, such a resolution would seem· only to be ·a func-
rion of these panicular circumstances in light of this panicular senior's
hopes and ambitions.
Wharof the third denial, which denies that in confficts of values the
resoluáon may be found among the very values en~ged in the conflia?
A poliúcal pro~al to increase homeland security may only c·o me at
rhe rost ofdecreasing some people' s liberty, but it may in the long run
.. . :~
·_::.:
l ~ot only bring thc expected increase in security, but also a significint
:.'>·:·t
:1n~rease in othe~ people's libeny.s Accordin·g to· this: kind of argume,nt,-
(·.1 a r~lucíon of a ·confl.ict be~e.~n security and libeny m.ay be ·had .by
'..·.:' j
. . ~·1·~
saving lchat security, at .leau in one specific .set of circumstances. is:a
. .·' ·:.
prod_ucd~n of greater. ·liberey--as -though . secud~y . ·w~te_
~

( . ·li'
·~
means to .dte
u)~~~ura.~Ie with .bberty, · · · ·
. fhis ~till does not O.ean, how Ve~; thítt thetc ls ~I c<untueQ.s\¡\ql)ü..
icy betw · · · ·. ··· · ·: · · · · ·· ·
:tl. b
. ··
e ecn ~r~tr. and hb J'o/• As Serllard Williarpi. ar$ues _il~ not
·.

-O assumcd ..t....(I~ :rf11e b · · · ~"w ' ·.. - · · ft" L:.d. -· · " . ~l· n.
die ,. , " -. . QJ~ r _· · ~0 f_ t;~~µ~ .-·_. ,~ .a gfv~n. :0 00 lct~, ~t.W~cn J\. ~an,v-· ~...
. . ·.. ~Olil\t galqed; m ·~rqls o(Ai, (s¡y) Sre ~et d:ta.~ 'tfl~.am~úó.f~f
tn tertQs of 8' > -.L _:, . ·· ·. 2. . . ·· · ·- , . -: ~ · . · . ... ·- - ·
·r~~t · b'·i"e. .b.· "·~ .·. .\{@t : e ~eo/;
. . al"·· . . . . C(:»~
. J~·~ r.- - · h.e tw.q en ..<A. an<t . J\. · ,
. . . . .. .. ,. . -·· . ... dy: :w¡1f~._· ·: ·: . t1ea ·. "" ·
-· · -.""r tut ·:. ~,ppe . _:: t.~ ~me vª1ú~ - '~t\f.A··Qt1cf. l~:: ·sMti-':. ·Tíii ·is.-"
""~Ya

• \
-~

' . . • . • '" . .., . . .. . ·.; . • •. ··:' '· ·~' ··· ·:·J :

:•1'
 .. · . .;. J
<.'· ·1
· i'ó:~ ·The piffi.~:u/.t:. 'tjo.(}~: :~·:;< ~
. be. . . --.. •·a··1·n the rCsolutian is id ~ót1 depen4en~ "upOn -~ hOSt-é ' ; l
.~ ca.use., . ag . ., . . .. . . . . h h . . . . < , · • .i _, ,.
.·. '.. ~ . . . ·.·: '_-. .·. m>s,'tanées· and not ·on the ·fact t at t .ete<is sonie cm~.,·- ·-,~ ·l,

con.ttngent ctr~U:- .,
1
.· ~ . . . . . . . _. . , · . . , . _. . ~ - .:-:- ... , ~.. "· <
. . .,;..f
v.alue more _u · . . "" ',;) whtº ,.h-··1'·"' ·gáined by
· .
···
.
fa\Totin.g
.
,A .than
· .
by~
·
f~vor.tng. B'.
1
· -~--~:
, rahn t~theri: these three denials ~mpdse a negati~: fotmulat~ ; J
• .- • • • :-.

of .what 1 woulrt hkt.to call the-levcling Utéomm~nsurabtlny ~b~.í$.' Pe;.,.- .'.: . ·~. :.
a ~sitivc furmulátion of the theSis, consider that offered by'Jo~: .·
·Rat: -u:A: and B are i~commensurate if lt ís neither true ·t~a~ otje ·a. ·.·_.."·1
bettd than thc other nor true that they are of equal value."-7 What tfu~ _· -: "j
ddinition so sttikingly underscores is that, between certain value& in . • ' :
-cert$n circumstances, judgments of comparative .value (''bettci- than"· . . J.

~ cqual ro") are ruled out, and this is because, as th~ denials presented ·. · 1
by Williams· aim to show, the standards of companson are not av~f... ·-: .-_. ·.
ahle. 1 call this a "leveling" incommensurability thesis because there Is · _·· I
no inherent order manifest among the incommensurable values. But ·. ·1
this is not the only way to think about inc9mmensurability. As 1 will . . .:. j
anempt to show in succeeding chapters, one might espouse in~m--: ·~ · ¡
mensurability while still holding to degrees of perfection among goods. ·· . 1
A narural hierarchy of goods, for example, could manifest a wide array j
of heterogeneous g~ods that more or less perfectly satisfy basic criteria: . !
of human fulfillment. But for now, let us just note .that the lev~lin~
·incommensurability thesis serves as the so urce of tragic conflict · pre:.
cisely because it makes the tr~ic agent unable to compare the compet"."". . 1
1
~-
iDg value claims comprising his dilemma. '
l
f

But if this is the case, then the levding incommensurabilicy :tbesis .¡

' j
must face a crucial question. Given .t he facts of his conffict, how·· d~ ·
-~ -agent such as Agamemnon decide what to do? He still has. to do · ·. l
JOmedúng, despire the severe constraints on his situation. Doc:sitm_at"'. ·. ·]
~ whidi chOke he rnakes? Does practical reason have any role. to play? · · j
·.:. 1

ÚV.EUNG INCOMM~NSUMBILITV ANP THI! SPl!C'J'llR 01'. REv.TJVt~. ' ·:·_ '
What has ~ íuhe spe<;ter of a rather gross relatiVism. If ali ipti~c:~, '" ·!
. val~.,.ii 1éast, are: inW.nimemuf;tblC, ~d by that we ,ínean~ ~( Jf Y
' f~~~~. -~ --.mem, ~ - ~ . 9Jmpa~~n.ive. :j~dgm·e.o t$._ are avail~ble, then·:~~~ :¡~· · .:".1
1

~C)l~ ~~eitin~mmensura~les anyr~i~g Oth~ r.~ªº:d~e ~F~

.º: tJOll rati.onai !'Jef<~~~ thJr mere d~tre tQ .<>btain _W,llal J or;:'f":,
J
'>:.J
hap~~tQ~~<>yeof~d~a~t{ : ·. .. ·· . . ·_.. .. •.. ·· ._.·-.;: ¡
. _·r:;f1
. ',, ·";1
. ~>;.;.;¡
 Tbt.- is.rue··cr· ps up in thc"conteit ofthree .dilfcrtnt kinds of dloi'cd
. _m , ~n intonm'lens~ra~l~~· ~trst; it arJ ·t.s:, in.·thóse.. ~tw~ett .mcom~
mmsurt .J'e no .lD <xmffict, . when l ha~e ,t o de~i<f é .· how tÓ ot:dé't my
' ' •. '
Sur\da)~ .. rnoon tbat l etn ·pursue bÓth ·the .goods·of family iife.
~d m_· own aestheti · enjoym nts; ~d my circu. m.st~ces. pratilt.· .me
·•. '

,~ ~rh no real difficultics in P':1fSuing·both. Seco~d, when due th c~n

-Mai~,.n e conflict does occur berween iÍtcoinme.nsurabJcs~ but :t hc
, n .i~""t is non-tragic.. N 'o n-tr.tgic confficts, Jike tragic conflicrs,_ can
~ru:r cithei" as ·t he resu~t of my own mistaken beliefs· ot wayward dc-
~i~ or simpl} ás a .result of how the world happens to be. :Sut in a
n n-tragic confüa 1 am not forced by the.conflict to harm or dcstroy
••

~· ,
~ ! •

·,
nne of die incommensurable values in question . .1 may, for example,
h ve ro choose the lcsser of two evils, .but chis choice is understood to
legitimately uphold an imponant value, not to hann or damage one.
<). Third choice between incommensurables may occur when due to cer-
f ~

f rain contingencies I am confronted by a conflict in which, like Aga-

J
~' memnon, I am forced to act in such a way that harms or destroys one
.4 t

. ·~
·~
of my important values. This, again, is ttagic conflict. How have those
• 'SJ
·:1
vmo hold the leveling incommensurability thesis adclressed these three
•· i differem kinds of choices between incommensurables?
·~ . . .,f Inrerestingly, there has not always been an espousal of rdativism. In·
'· ,}
~in one very prominent case, that of Manha.Nussbaum, the levd..:
•··· ···
' .·.:)
,•
~ ing incommensurability thesis is combined with a ·d etailed discussion
of die non-rclative workings of practical reason and therefore of objec-
OYe comparisons between incommensurables. Let' s take a closer look
at this view. •
Thc key,to a víew of practical reason such as Nussbaum s 'is· t,llat~
1

prior to an ·agent,.s choice, 'incommcnsurablc values posscs$ n<> inhefent

o-rdering .among.·them5elves.~ My politícal commitmen~s, piy fumily -Hfe~
my philosophica.l endeavt>rs, my acsther-ic enjoyments-these iricom...
mcmurabk"valucsjn dtemselves·posses$ ·no relations.hip t.9 .9.~~ ·án.odler
besj<ies .~bat ofbCíng .~nstfruent. ''parts'' o.f mrhappiness~ My .happi-
neu" in odi~r· wor4s,. is .'~1mply ·die sum ·()f m)"°pos&e$$i.<n1 _of ·mese (an_(l.
no ·<lriubt odier) ·in~mm.cnsutabte· pa.ns',: ~- ·Nu5sbau~ ha~·: ~it~,,
.,~ ~f thé.pri.cniiy.o(the pariieu~~i\ '~e'. ~- .glve.)Íó"._ge~~~.: ~t~
coúnt of ddJ~r~tiv~": pnorities,.
. .
·~afld '~l~.O ·Jio-~.·~ft~fid
. .~ ...
.: ~c~U'1t .9~ : di~
. . -
 <';< ~
1 9. :. th~:·.Di{fic~tt:· :Goo·.J · ·:: ..-.~~:~-
, ch . -· . . : . · :.
· .ce . ntqueS·an P
d · ro ·-~edures . .·Of go ~- cd. . deÜbetatidn;.·
· .. ·., · · that . ... i-·SUfficc
. . .woUld . .
w· ·.
,..•.•·1~
...- · .. ..: ~ ~. · -···a· ·~rom·-. . d-,.,.te,....iv-e choke.'·. ín .advanct of a conr~.· t;Jnta_·tío."·.··.
' ··: .-·1
d1:scrutunate goo · ri · '"'.r '-'H . · . . . :. . 4
. . . . .. · ·· . . ~~ · . :· :'.
.w1..-th·.. 01-e
_\.. . ·ma· ·~tt·er
-.. o·fthe · ·--ase." In other words, a general account oft~e·· .:. ~- -
. . . . . .. . . . _., ..
human gorid nuy give us nec ssary cortditionsfot :icting wd4 budt _• ::., ,
. nnót.~ye '\ls suflident condidons. º . . 1
·... .. ·:. <:\.
Now, in ¡lursUin . my happiness l will have to set my values inson¡¿ .· __·.._•
sort of tolerable arrangement. And the first thing 1 wil) have ro:,, eta, · _ · ·_j
obviously, is decide what in faet my values are, a pr~~s ~at will l
·¡nchroe ddiberation both about the constituents of my 1ntr1ns1c valua .J
. "What does happiness mean for me?") and the spedfications of those · " j
.sam~ alues { How am 1 to realize my happiness here and now?.") .._Bttt
I OU\DOt pursue ali my values at once. Nor is it unreasonable that·· ¡ . ·
hn.d sorne values more important to me than others. So;, what 1 will
.havc to ~o nen., within my deliberation, is place my values in order..lf
I ~ .a Paul Gauguin, all my other activities and considerations ~­ wm
ordered to the good of artistic achievement. If 1 am an Ignatius Loyol~
evciything wiU be subordinated to the greater glory of God. For many, ._. ¡
howev:cr, there will not be a single, over-arching value to which all -i
othec v.dues are ordered. Rather, · there will probably be a _small-t<>" -. · l
mediom-sized collection of values that constitutes the chief pan of · J
happiness, a collecrion that may or may not be put in. hierarchlcal .: · ~
order. Moreover, within this select group of values, as well as in regard .. 1J
to ·die other valuable items. constituting happiness, more local ·hierar-· . j
1

dties ·may be established. The upshot is that by ordering our valucs . -

~~ ~y we a:void Jur,hing from .conflict to .conflict in our pursuit -0f ~ .-._ ¡
hap¡>í~cess_ 11
, Is .a11 of ~ e.~ugh to explain how practica! reason malees decisión~ _. J

·m.. ~ ~n.~.rdat1v1siie· way? Two substantial questions rem.ain~ Flni, ·~ : .. · _1

what ·basis ·does· one deCide which ordériog of incommcnswl~lC$ -..·_. \j

whíGh·· ~tarcliy, ü morally.approprfate? lt ca~ne>t be -dlc ease ·that·_Qly .,·.:..:.:-¡
and. ~ hieraréhies are niorally legitimate; for if they were then'.tfi_el'C: : ·]
·woµld.be·. no ·w~y to disdnguis.h a.moral from· an· immocal ordt,idg~~.~ · ···. l
Second,_. if tlj_:~c ~nfti~i .¡-~ bid.~ed ·fo·.be affirlned as ...:. · . .·• · , .
ity .(>f moral exnerictieé . th.·.. · ~·... . ·..b··. .h. . . - '. ~ gen\l!J\C r~:T.L~·· /~~;' j
fu ····. ..•··}. ...·•-_-•·' .· ;_en i~ ~~t •-e t ,e_t;asc that_i\Q 'mac~t 'f.~'' ·_., 1
rin..<:J
.
.~rar~h.r.1$ -~.tab),tshed by ,an-·tndtvidu.:.•.. n.:te·
, • • • •. h . . •. •
n·t · ... .. .. ' ·. '. : ..• . ,,..ie_f.t.':/:-. :t.~.-
~0 ;. · " :cucumsrance$. ;~•· Jl~ . : : ..
.. , • . . ..

. w~ys b( ~cb ·~~ ~ ehmce bctWee¡i gfituiii~iy~rifli~ti.n¡ ii\~aiin~~~ ·..·;:: 1

. . ' . : .-.·: i
' .. . j_~~·;. J
. ~· ~'. ·. ·~i:,'.: 1
. - ··. f .
' .
 . . . . ~

· -.itfcom:
. mtiiiu,
. .
r'.#IJ~litt--""ª
. .
: rrag·i~ :CoJtft!tf
. ..... ·:
-i9

rableS ai.n arisc. BCfore he gol' $ruc~ o.tí AtilÍs, Ag:unf!lr,nnon might have .
. }f

•,'{::f~ : . /:• .

affirmed.bis commit~ent ·.t~ th(rithe~ Argi.ve at~cs -~'- hi~ -tno,sf_irnp?r~.

ta~t ~aluc. -But ~{.h~ ·did~'·~ . feel _the. ·1nt9~.men~.uréihle :"ptill'~· · oL~s
:. . .:·~ · ~
s
conuniurient to·l¡;higcriia, protéction,.his shoation could. not::bt _ 4é...~
scribed as a tragk one~ ·so.it seems thai: the éonstruction.of hi~tárclií~~
by agents in no Way predudes the póssibility of tragedf. i.\nd '.ifthis i$
. \
: . :··:
~ : .·. :
.
~ in fati the case, then it is not clear·how the . consttucri~n of hierarchies
in itsdf dtt rmines . how agents ar~· rationally to decide be~een in~m­
rnensurables in general, and-conAicting incommensurables ··~ partic-
ular.
In response to these questions, Nussbaum ha5 put forward the·fo} . :
lowing considerations:

1. Practical reasoning· is essentially .improvisation, but the need for

moral improvisation in the face .o f chél:flging circwnstance5 holds an.
agent doubly responsible, "responsible to the history of conimit-
ment and to the ongoing structures that go to constitute _[the
agent's] context." 13
2... To affirm the priority of the particular in no way precludes the

availability of genejal principies, although ·general principie is· only

as good as its role "in the correct articulation of the ·conérete.'.' 14·
3. The trape protagonist's · recognition of tragic conflict "permits a
deeper son of fidclicy to principies" because it rigorously attends to
all ,of rhc agent' s antecedently he.Id.· principies~ duties,_ commit~
ments.15
•~ The decpest commitments of a hulnan agent are' those·;· qualities·
of good functioníng which belong to an ·human ·agents· ~Y · their ·
natu.re.l' . .
. .

~ are we to .make 9f thesc four .claims? Begin widt che .id~ of

·moral' impr~isation,' ·from.the.6rstdaim~ The ·idea.i~ .tbat -deli.bet.i~
• 1

~11 and cho~ ~e at.alpgoti$ t() the actiVity of tnlpiOvlslflg:~ a.:ror. 1

!

1n. dr~ic perf9f~~ •. Tfu: ·imprQvisathm ¡~ · n~t · ~dOm•.w~~ 1

an~ is pennitted, .quite th~ PppoJit~,- 11) fa~ti $uctessM lrñm~·
.sat1on d ··· · -· · ··· · , ···.
,,.¡_,..~ ·· · · . · . - . ·,- · ·-, ··,, · ·:
~
· · ~~n .s._':1~~n.d1e>atteritiv~n~ss'. of _
· .. the .- ~tof.-- ~W.1:-_t!l.~~Ae,. ~~gi~•t.
·scrtpt and . . . h·. ...L • .t. : . :_ . . -: . .. • . . . .. ~ . . '.
4

~ ~ :.~:, ·'< .. _. .,., -:· ... . . . .• . ,: , ;.:. .. " :.

· . ·. . . tQ~ ~ ar ,~~e · o~~t -·~to~s ·-at~ ,dolng:i&-.,~e~rG.wn. ·. 1mptq~•~:
•• 1 • ,.. ••• • .. • • -.". ... • •• '... ' ..
-..

:e " ..
. ·']
.. •t
.. .
'
....

:. ,
~1

':j

io .thl ¡J;/fictilt 7 Oóod . · · . :. . - >_J,\

..
nons. . -h..·e ·unpro.v1s1
• . T
·.
.
·h~
·. attor
1
must thereforé be 'morékeeñlf:. atlentive
. . . . . . . d. . b h, .... . . . .. ,,l7
0 . .
; 1
h: . ... .. _,._· .. ¡
. to what i~ given-.· ~y the other a~tors . an . y_·: t .~ stt_ua~~~n.. .. . t ~~~-~ if . :;~"'·~--
. . ~ 1·m
.h.e: or. ··.sh·.e···were
·<.\ · ·p· 1y· p·laying· . the. '- book. T_
. by. h. is ·attenuvcness,
. .. ., ~.. -:_· ...~;;
_ .ofth"
·~ · · · -· ··n·· ·actor ·00 draw the analogy to deliberation, ·refers_to die . ·.>
1mproyin g ' · . ·. . · . . . . . _ _0: • ·_ ,.. ... " · · ·~ · 1

· agen t" s Loc,.."i hg· b·ound co .the concreteness of h1s lived s1tuat10~~· . . . He-.. - ~tt-
. . . .. ...
.,- . 1
11

not simply do an~hing he w-ants, '_ his siJuation . being wh~t ·it. is·,·.Ht-'.-: :-.· !
must respo.rid ro this particular person .who is dernanding th~s ~fhin;t .. ·'. ,-· ~
1

~d how this particular demand impacts ot~er of his coinmitinen~.~ · ., .

Delibcration is ·not thc ability to make dedsions i~ the·face of liinjdC$S ·
possibilities, but the ability to decide well in the face of cr.ti~ limfo¡. .
tions upon .what one can do. _
The analogy to the role played by rules ~d principies in delibera~ ·
tion-the second claim above-works in che following way: just as the ._-. . _
1
:1·

imp. rovising actor brings to his improvisation his · knowledge ot ~th~

._ l
script, the performance of his fellow actor(s), and ofhis own part (bOtb 1

as written and as imaginatively inferred from the script), so too .- ~e J

human agent brings to deliberation "a history of general conceptions · ·I

and commitments, and a host of past obligations and affiliations (sorne l
general~ sorne particular), al1 of which contribute to and help to coristi- _-
tute her evolving conception of good living." 18 An imponant part.-of · .:
these past obligations and affiliations comes in the form-. of adherente
to rules, principies, and laws. Hence the very notion of moral improvi~
sari~n implies a notion of fidelity to principie.
But does this analogy to dramatic improvisation give us a satisfying
answer to the question of what makes choice_in the face of levW.ng
iru:ommensurability, and tragic choice in particular, rational? As N\ISS"' · I
- ~ herself is _well aware, the desc;:ription of human action as improvi- ~
sation_raises ._ the _concern that, at least in certain situations1 one ~iinply·· : .<;.... ·
makes it up .as one goes along. In cases .of tragic .conflict, espicW,ly>. · ·.
~ dse could improvisation mean but to pick one ()Í t~e confticting ; .·• j
choices ~d--h~pe for . die bes~? Nussba.u m addresses _
mis conc~rn· bt .· j
~~erscorifl:g the fi4elity._bo~h to_general prjnciple a~d4~ .th~-·p·~~~f.l:. ~· ..::_i
.cir~~st~~ ~f one's giv~n_ situation th~t moral iiµp_ rovisatiÓn ~~:·~. ·-· 1::~
~ º~ ronfuct requir~I ;un referring now to ~e t~ird cl~nl a'bO~· . :;
.But~-~·tb -this.:cla!~: in ni~nd: . w~ ~h~1Jld ·turn t<Lope:of Nu$~ba.u.ril~~~- ::
<>w11 ilimita.tío ns ~f tr.agk c:.hOite and ~~ dlat.siJcl.,Jid~ii;y 'h~S irs li~fs; · / ,· j
' . ' . .·. ..'¡
. : -,..;1
 '1
.¡
'. .lné(Jtn'1i~tilu1~~.Üitf .~~~-~1f·ií-·~li( . ·o';iftic.í . tt
TRAGI · H ·Ro1 ·M · w ·ic . "ittn

t the ditnsx · f ft-: ry-J~1 ~· -~ last novtl.· Tht.qoltft11- Bo-wf;,, Jame~'·s

h- me Maggi~ V4· · ·r onttiVJ· .a.gain~t ~· hatlott ; her father'i wif~
~Uld h r ·1u~ba~~s l ve·.~· h1 · _td.et to:win back her h~sbálld Pdnct-·
A.roen .. A cord'n t · Nussb1tum 1s reading of tbís ncwel. Maggie'g
·ti n~ ser\.e as h •'ini iation i.nto knówledge ofher fallen.worfd;- ~

~inn'in . · to live , ~ . is, for her, .begin·nirtg to see that meaningful'

\.'.. n1nlirn'ient. ro .a love in the world .can requirc the .sacrí6ce of
one· own moral ,purity. To regain her husband she .must damagt
:ha.done.. We are fully awarc, as is ·she, that her cruelty and dí~
. : ' .··. honescy to Charlotte are in no way purified or effaced by the
·. ·. :: t
:-. ·.
fact of Chaclotte 's own offense. Her love, unlike the ideal of the
Trist:anic lover, must live on cunning and treachery; it .requires.
die hrcaking of moral rules ·and a departure from the comfonabl.e
garden.19

.••
. . ·~1
't"'"jlo
According ro N ussbaum, Maggie' s effons in the early pan of the novel
..1
· ... ,
·.. . 1 ~o retain her umoral purity,, consist ·in t:he attempt to harmonizc ~

.J.
~-
ihe goods ofher life, making of them a single work, like a golden bowL
: Ae"INel.-like in its moral integrity. But the discovery of the affair bctwecn
her hushand and ,C harlotte sh~ws her that such intcgrity cannot always
be sustained. ~e's love for her husband and her commitmcnt to
!. .i her friendship with Charlotte cannot in thesc strained circumstanceS:
·:. .i. ; . ~ both be har~otúzed ín any way tbat would preserve the integrity of ¡
' i
·.
' .
, both comnútments. Love for her husband, Nussbaum's lnterptetatiOJ\
clainu, involves Maggi·e ~ · cruelty and .disbfJnfSI] ·tO Cha.dot1e. ~0 . M.ª .11
1
.:' .. .: .1.... acring in this w~y ioward Charlotte is· aldn t~ ·Maggit's, e~t~g; fron.i; the .
Tfee of me Knowle4ge of G"od.arid ~vil:, h ·connhutes .het .~c~ture··
~
frorn thc .gaíde11 qf ~oral, .i~no~nct ÍJlJO ~· fallen world Cb'ltaC~rli~- ..
'.

by die fr~ítf of i~mpaúble 8oods~

'. r
· .. . · .·
. Maggie Verve<~ p~~;tgefrom tÍu\o~n<;:e to: eiperl.et.1~~:.fro~:·~~
" ; Don to reallt:y, is; like any·go~'4 ·mrra~l"~' mU96' qh ~afll~~ú
•:.·Í engagemenc in.~'11iic;t, JJur:.ir .¡s f(npon .nt · to )J«)~ll!.' :~e._ l*~
· tr~. natur~ .of thJJ· @~Ri~.- .There.:~~ée.~t:·_. ~, b~. · ~ .~ay · ~~~ :~~~~· ~ t~
."!
,;· .. ·_,.' . .,

~1,¡:1- make goocf o.n ·~e $bt OW~ .~ Cmflot~ WÍfh ·.4• -~gi~ Jh~ ~ .t

" " 11 \
 .. ,·. ~
·· . ·,~:
. . ' ' ~ .. . .. ...

. . ~ :.~-:: : ~
·. . ,, .. .,
... .t. ' - "~'~
..

.~2 Ti/e . l),iffo*J¡ Ciu/J . . . . . ><.~'. .

. "·, ...· . . •. . . ·. •• ¡ . i·
· 1,1niOn Wifü her husb~d; Anti the~e seems: t~ be n?. Wa~ ·of reU~tílig ·. ·.; ;:' ~:
with ·?er hus~and .:~thQut.d~tgtng her fue11dsh1p w1tfy C~r~tte. · :;f
0
Thus .1t~ílct~ly dtstlt\~t and separate, attd .eath bas1c c~nstnit~ ot ~· : ¡ .ª
M~1e s score oí happln~s· ; ~e good of res,pe~ung Charlo1te and.dte: . . ··.:. ~·
g~ of rcunitlng with her husbánd cannot bC tcconciled withmn ..ifi. ..•: ·J
.s'olne way dan\aging. one or both of them. . . . . . - ~ ..... ~;
Yet 1f this is whafwe are supposed to learn from The Golden Bowl· . · ~·
. . . . - . .· J - '- f
there ·se· 1ns to be a disturbing fallout from the lesson. Ma~e Vcrver1 . · · '. t
·dima ne <lecision involves cruelty and dishonesty to Charlotte .Stant.. . · · ._ ·Í
'tlus indicates that an agent confronted by tragic conflict is not Jlece&- .•.. t
sari1y merely passive, nobly enduring horrible events for the sake of the: . _¡,~.­
---A, but may activdy make cho ices that undermine both the avent' s I
;:i and the good of others. The very nature of love may force us
0

tó ·.. i
aa in düs way. At . the end of the novel, Nussbaum contends, tbe.· .l,,.
demands of the Prince's revitalized love for Maggie do not, in fact, .. . },
.. t;
allow the moral luxury of clear sight and generous 'response. ro ., t
love one woman adequately he cannot always be tormented .by. {
. Í:·
consciousness of the other. He must the~, of necessity, banish .-- ~.
\:
the other~ wronging her not only, like Maggie, in act, but also in
thc depths of his imagination and vision. The demands of the
new ideal of seeing are not always compatible with an ·adequate

)
fulfillment of ea.ch of our commitments, for.sorne loves are ~clu:..
• .
,sívc ~d demand a blindness in other quarters. ·Instead of being
~,

~
'~6nely aware and richly responsible'' we may, in fact~ havc to
i'

become,- ás lov~s; grossly.insensitive and caréless with te.spect to

othq.· incompatible claims. The . merc fact of being deep~y .~""
gagcd·· fo.rce$ a blíndness. 21 · ·

.Jllot~ 6ank M dJ.e lQcutions in thiJ· passage· thc Pfin'e :q\USi <~ét .· -': '.f
n~if' l>anish C~rlone, wmoging her • i • some. lom ~.aii/ )./t
. á bij~s i~ &et quarf.ets , •:1 ·we JnaY ''have (o beCo~~·~ '~ }> ·J:
· ÜlS(riSiuv~ .., •• ~ ·mer~ fái;t of being de~ply en.gaged t•fu.ré:c:$ ·~ ,a ~~: ' ·:~t
J.\~$ •. ThlS"'is..:~hcJ~riguige _of -_trilgl.é·"neeesiirY~· · ~4·. '.fo.r N.~~~U:J1f~~~ ... .·.~ :-:l::
'ri..~~:~nd Maggi~ '.!U-~ (ragié her~es.: uili:ed11Cmed>:·' 1'V{~~..u~g i}l;#.;~ · · :~/:
:,~e~~&. 9{]~~~-~~i·i~·'En~if h.etolsl.Ü' -consi~tiln th~·. -~~é.rdse~' t)f ~. ·~~: , .·:.:'./ .
. . . . . , . ' . '' . - -.. 't.'" : .. '
, ·-~ ~~ :1 :
. \" ,~ . ..'
. ~"-){ ...
 . .i

· lrJt1im"!Ú11u_ ~ibfJ1t1. a~J. Trag1·~ Conj{ttt ·zJ

.orr f , , · · J , th~ . . .f ·1n "· r ng, no~gb ·to be·.bUnd.·to:. oite.consid·

. raum ,'f h . o '1 whil · ·-1 '~ving. · ro - noth; r/B~t ifd1is .is -ihe ~-s.~,
d1 n th .human pur·· i · f :thc. ·S. o·d~ , at lciu in certaín C:titical :in-.
~·" l · ·¡ , 1 ·l :· . ly .no tnc •. th n an ex. rtion of force• ·whethet phys·1cál~
,, xual, p"y hoto i • rhctorí al or odl rwise. . . ·
Jr . ·i i.I r -nt o · · · , Charle · Taylor .imagines a poHtidan named
J ri ,. '.ll • ar .ard n upportct f environmental causes who is al.so the
r in me r t f n cu·r 1 r our in a ooalition governmcn·t. ·Priscilla.' s·con. .
fií r i~ th r thc only mean of saving u~stantial destruction of thc rain
{ "t ~t o . her untry í to givc x 'square miles of it ovcr to a multína-
tional. r. ora ion. 2 Taylor develops a response for Priscilla ín light of
1 r con p ion ·f thc lífe · he is trying to lead, an important part of
whi b í t ' acr. effectívely as po sible for thc protection of thc natural
. nvír nment. :riven, th" , Príscilla's fríend might arguc that more can
b- don for th · ake of the rain forcsts íf Priscilla stays in her post and
-íthc::r d' e · d · t he can for the rain forcsts by overseeing the pro-
pc · c.kal r by 6.ghtíng agaín t the deal with ali the politícal powcr
a her c!Up aL 'But Pr.íscilla, according to Taylor's description, wants
t'.<J do m re than wín a polítical barde . She wants tO lívc up to her ideal

t.>f a. per ·n who l.iv. not by instrumental efficacy but by reverence for
thé natural worl<l. o do any act that undcrmincs such revercnce wo.uld
be an a.et f viotCnce agai t her very concepdo.n of hcrself.24 Prisdlla
re igru her po ein p.rowt .
But rhc that we are asked t.o learn from Prisdlla's case is that ·
a dm , given ou~ seme o( where we are in appreciating rhc .compJe..
m ntarfry of our lífeJ goodl, we may have to over·ride thc dcmands of
ne or *Om,e for the ake of rhe demands of one or 1ome other . Yet
aylt>1 giv w no te . n ca rhínk that in Priscilla' case iris_·rhe de-
rrtas . the rain for whídt mu1-t trump -.those of ~he .national . -Ol)-
t1my1 Pt' illa . ~ fo ·fo-r .th' ~ JOd ;. ju tbárt ·~n ~verwhelming ir' • º·
a-datum that mi be t p~ d wi~oui comm nt~ Jt i . jus.~ á ·~v-~itable
to Prisdlla' . pr ~ j, ali · .1 n,°· · , ·afJÓ~ - · ow.n · argum ~L . -.nud . -.-. i·r... ·
ch&~ t'Q · - · ~"t o(.d . · ca,Íi kl(I!. r u -~_,m~r~ · - ~n . :~f.pi~m'?d.n .'dte
nati :n1aJ coiw ,_ y, :d · jffti:ídy .render}·tlf '.ªt) : ~J".fl~ ·._. - ~lt . _· · d·_.
oomm - urable ~ "- a J -'. -, ·M·: t ·che .. ~t~tntDt~1:'! -- - ~º~ - r · ·· -,, ~ . :·
·(1· , ·'., di -_ .-: . -. .Ju . ·:n··r-.~ ~1:.. ·.· . . · ·,d~~~g. Jo>heJeveUt\,·-. .:m~~~
mensurabilicy theSiS, startdatdS of rational j~8tibi:ation ar.e fü he · ~iijL_ ' .· .
. in pardctilar g9.<:xts, -r~fos~ vi rules, .or cottc~pt*d ·sc~~m·es/ A panrcÜfQt~- .-,:-~· ·.:
·good, . rufo,· viít~e, ó,r. scheme Is rec:l<oned· ur -pe ;ration~h".· d:~irabft .· ... -. . ~
because otits value·as·atonstituent, ór as ·rh,e.sum total,.of orte's. ov~r~.i ...--.,' i

good, a valtie that cannot he reduc~d t~ or co~pare~ _(i~ the- cak~fatiVe .· :'.__,:~" -;
.sense) with ·any o~er válue. · Still, choice be~een incommeiisutá_b_tes ...·r · :
goci 011:. But ·h~w~. What reasons can.,be appea:led to ~h~t- are_not -al~eady: ·_ ·:.;" ·)";
bound ~p with ·one ·of the confficting values? As Nussbautn unde~~- , ;-- ~
·stands-the progression of Maggie Verver ~rom moral innocent'to fragic: <.' _. .;
heroi~e, how does the· knowledge Maggie gains reflect ·a s~andard of ·.. "·¡~
rational justification that is in sorne -sense extrinsic to her deep attach-:- · :
,mcn~ to one of the conflicting values? Without such an extrinsic st~-
dard of justification, it is not clear how Maggie Verver' s final choice"ís
~ythi~ more than an· assertion of one of the values over the other: an
aa of force. 25
But perhaps 1 am asking the wrong question. Perhaps we shoul~ net
be on the lookout for sorne ·standard of rational ju~tification extrins.ic . · ·I

.to .the values in conflict~ After ali, 1 have already noted that one of the
. ¡
daims that leveling incomrnensurability theorists deny -is . that for eadt
conffia of values, there is sorne value, independent of the conflictmg..
values, which can be appealed to iri order to resolve the conflict. This-
iridicates that the rational resolutiori of conflict, if there is to be one, . ;
must find ·its justification among the conflicting values themselves~ . _.
Wirh thís su_ggestion in hand, let us consider ·M artha N ussbaúm' s anal-·
·ysis of why Agamemnon decides to kill his daughte~,. Iphigenia..26 _ ,.

FocAgamemnon doe~ kili her, sacrificing her ·upon a rock in much·:

.die .same ~ay th~t Abraham almost sacrifices Isaac, But how · cf~s· he:
cómé to dús d.-,.oí~? Why does bis commi~men.t to ·the Ai:give -~mies ·
_ultjniatety .o~_tweígh bis .commitment to .protect his daughter"~ in~&-;· .,
~nf lií.~? .We sho~Jd not forget, Nwsba~rn _rt:minds ·US,·.that t~C-~~-:- .- '-· -;~ . 1

mafLd to .lea.d .die Argive armies is .a command Jrom :the g(ea~ Of.· .: ·.· ,
~ódst Ze~<and ~fült"t~. ~is.obey that comm.and woul9 b~· ,gross;.-l~p~~> ·.,_· ·,'.' -
~ Wdl .as díslof.~o/ · w bis feUow AfgivCs. 4bo.: ~th thC c~J,COt s~~{f , '
~f .the-- ~inds -~-ere~. ¡~·-:·~Q-- get~¡ng - 'é>ff :the-' is~and :Mtyw:~y~._ t)11.fe~:: ~~~~ .-:_,,_ :_:~ '.
:i~:'.~ppe,~~,-. ·~~. - ~n.ly· Jpbig~rífa.: bu.t . al~~· every(}ne-: c,,$e,_ ·Wil~-- ~yt~~'~. ~--. ·. ·:>;
. dí~~- -~.~~~e~;.. -#:~wowd , also .. se~nt.. tQ:.- ht°; an~..,~ct>~t ·a¡~Q~~df~ri~-;~~ <·~:·:
• ' • •A• • • • ' ." • • • • : ' • ' • ' ~- ,/ 1 0 .. . .

• • :· - - • • • .J /?. ~
• •(, • A •,

·~ .:"' ~~ ~~ . ·;-·· ~ /_¡. . 1: · .

. i. ;'.;.~JH; ,
 f~ o ;iúnsutd6llí1;- (úul 1~iJi.il :ciJn¡ifol'..j 5 .

Att mis if . ; .01 mn · 11 d _·es no .ki~l _Íphigerua, ~ild st» iil·,noc ·kiilfog·
h r A m~mnon ' ould--_. n1pound-his-impiety• . .·
AU of rhis -m3kc:s a .rtain ~- nse>·but whjr it -hould rruirip-a pr'CSum-·
.tt l)· dh in . p· hihid tl ll _a1n t tuurd.er is :not yer: explained.í. Fot again;·
- g~tm~mn n ~ ~ · n1mirmert"t ro his da_ughter, formed in patt ~ the
rri"h1bidm a inst nu1rder; is incommensurable with hís commictnent
r ..tt ack · ro ~ F r N ussbaum, howcver, leveling íncommensurabiHty
. e ~J de .: n t preclu<l a judgm~nt of comparative vaiue. The s&iaíiice of
'i
. \
Iphigeni ~ she argu is (dearly ·preferable, both because of canse~
·,
. ·.-~ ., . .

quences and beca.use of the impiety involved in the other choicer 27

This tdls us that, in Agamemnon's case at least, a comparatiVe judg-
ment between incommensurables is p~ssible on the basis of (1) conse~
quences and (2) one value outranking another (piety to Zeus
utrmking protection of innocent life). But this latter basis for a com-
param e judgment between incommensurables would seem to under-
mine the leveling incommensurability thesis itself, which predud~
such ranking.
Yet it might be retoned that nothing in the incommensurability
thesis predudes "unequal weighting" of incommensurable values. 28
Philosophy might be incommensurable with sipping a fine merlot, but
philosophy might still be considered as the ~ore valuable item. So too,
Agamcmnon mighc recognize that the mission to Troy is incommcns~~
rahle wirh his daughter's life, but that the µiission to Troy is niorc
•. if
·•
- ,,·r

valuable.
Howcver, jf there are to be defens_ ibl~ judgme~ts of ~'goodt; better~
and besr"' between goods, then. as 1 will be arguing in the chaptets.to·
·,. . ~
fotlow ~ diis can·~nly be becausc there i$·.a natural ordering of prio.rity ·
and posterioriey afl:lºn.g gaod~~recisdy. thc $Ort of o~er~g ·th t Nus~
.· · · ...,,.
. ·,, -~·.

sbaum and .other~ 4enr.. . .

That leaves for N~ssbaüQl. ·anly ·c onsequerwe.~ as a .Pl~u.si~lc b~~~ for·
Agamemnon.~ s CO:IJlpa,t;i ive judgfl:lCn~ B~t - ~hi$ ~~:. also d.,~epty .p«)~l~tn~
.ar-ic, ÍA that lf invites w.':(o -cakulate. th -r~!~live- in .dt- .of d~t a:tt~ ~':.:on.
Troy and thc contmu d ptQrcétio~ ()f 1Ph1~1\i'a~f!ifl i ~· ~~, .ha~
WQ.uld ~mS-tfV~ S~eJU. to.·he-· frí~ron\e~4rabfü, ~J\tf PlU~.)d~átU'~~bJe;·
to such caJcuÍa~~: The "'QIQiladbq '' ~f Cllflsequ ·n<;e$·that Ágl ~m~

.~ •.·'.. . .... -, )
.

v..... ·, .j
~~ :. >··.; ..,
 ".' - ,~ ... ~-

~6 .·_ Th:e _-b~ffi~u~ti _

Goo1l . .· _:-:"..;,
-nón.-, tnákes, a~<miingly;
b\n oilly_- betbe -nonrational assertió,11 •ot~." L l
of
value· th·e attack ~n Troy bvér the yalue of his daughtefs ilfe. . _ .. ·..". .' ~
ltt -hcr disc~on :ofAeschylus's Agamemnon- .Nussba~m"·-~mpfiás:~~ .·: ·:;·-<·.-
:Á~emnon'$ failure to feel regret and i'emorse a:bout his dei::ísioh;t¿, .
"kill Iph1genla. Agarriemnon wrongly _- cohstrlies the killing ~ .ntlt.:.onÍy:- -.., · _·
the t:>etter choice (undemood as the most necessary choice), but alsO as . - 1
~e right thing l'O do (Understood as moi:ally apptopríate), doing hís. . l
best to put thc image of a terrified ~hild .º~t of bis mind. Por even· '_ '1
·thouglt Nussbaum takcs Agamemnon s dec1s1on to be the ,b~tter cou.-sc · _ ,
of action, she understands lcveling incommensurability to dcmancttha ·_ ... . "
a tragic protagonist not dismiss the claims of the other value by daim-· · .-.:.· ;
ing that his choice is morally appropriate. In tragic confUcts, fo.r N~ .· -_ .'
baum, there are no right (meaning guilt-free) choices. 29
Nussbaum,s analysis of Maggie Verver's final decision in The .Go/Jm . ~
.&wl, however, presents an even m~)fe disturbing aspect of choi~ in ·
the fuce of ttagic ~onflict. Maggie had hoped to live i~ the confü~
·creatcd by the rekindling of the Prince' s love for h~r by temaining .
1
sensitive to Charlotte's situation, avoiding tragedy "inwarclly by being.
richly responsible to everything in intellect and feeling." 30 But wheú
the Prince finally says to her, i~ the final line of the novel: " ·.' See?~ _I s~ · . l
nothing but you," Maggie recognizes for the first time the ~clusiVi~ ·
of the love µie Prince o~ers her. 'There-is no question .of r~mai~g
sensitive or faíthful to the demands of Charlotte' s feelings. F~r : lo~e _
\.~
\:·.
·'~ .
somerimes dCmancü that lovers be "grossly insensitive and cardes$. wi~ .- _ j
ies~ od1er, incompatible claims." 31 Whatever we make of ·this: _" < ~
•'\\
~~·- · to

·-¡..
~/.
réading ofThe Go/ám BOwl, the principl~s edUced from it are) n'deed' < .l
~~i.ng: ar tease sorne .uagic conflicts force tragic protagonists·tO. :~-- -.· :.·..
beyo_nd thc r:emorse_of tr~gédy; that is, to· adhere to their deep~t- Jci-yf$:. _- - ~:>~~;·
i:o ·die nq-uSion .of other valµ~~~én. u :Nussbaum c:oincnds.·~ e~ -> .- _~·,.
..n.n.e s.·3i-' · · ·· ·· · ··· ·,¡-..• .· ~
U'a~ . >;· !.'\O

_ Bilt ~rhaps we are o~ly JaÍICing ab()\lt limh cases: \lefh~ ~u\~-; ·. '.
of our··dCFlsio.ns_. there .- is'- a.'ba$is for choice, that-' does -. no·t de'1~t~·.fri~~ ".. _· >·
· ~ ot~ Qf die fcm;~s eJerdsecl by :h\U1\_aR bei~~ - ~~ . '-.:
.. - m~n~~Q~-.~~t -th~ _de~Pes~ ~m.mi~n.t~_ncs_·", ~f •· : h~;tn·.- ág~:t:·-~tt)~~:~~, ·~· "·;~c·
qUalit~fS:o~ g~:d ,fuftct!oriúltf*ai ~forig ro all Ji~an' 'ªg~nti.;~-~, , /·'
~~r~the- - fo~ -~l;um, 4'~ve~
• '
l'h1~
.• .
- -~~µId ~em.
·,: . '
.~
;f 9.·:~~~. , ~li~l',~~ :, .~:,/~ ~
. . . . . . ;:¡ . . '. :~·· ~

1·.: .
. ,..
 ·-,
. ¡1
/11 ·~Jmm6~~- r11:hilhy 11.f!J. _, 'I}t1glr. ·.~.:d~flJe· ,~ · n . l
1
l
Í!;; botto11 , a. m - ~-tJt... · · (huin~n.: _ac~io~_:ei:tthi k . ~ _·: th~ . .- d~siiru ·0
at r l
hum,u1· agel1ts •.~atn ty, hutl1:'1n _natu.t·e~ Thtn.king . agairi l~<lUt.~h;e á~.il-· l
0 rv of cthkal to dramáti · 'Jt~provi · .a·ion.j· Wé -shoµld reu1e01be,: to ·ask l
wbar ín h d . .. r-ip i{?n. of-.ethkai.' itnprovis tion: cort~ ·pond~ ro .the 1
pi y, the narrttiv úpon. ~hich ali impr~isadon tá.kc · frs. impetus. a~<f 1

pomr? An·d who or wb:at orre pond to the' ·pláywrighc1 ·Even irr .thé ¡
j
rcrm of thc analogy it is nor thc actors, at ·lean ·not qua :actors, who
furoish the narrative embodied. in thc scripr, This comes. from oursid~
i

rhcm, and serves as a kind <?f ttlos, or goal, of the actors' improvisatíon .~

and as the ultimare source of wharever rules ~r principies govern the

. ·, ..
exercise. For Nussbaum the play in which human agents take . pan
J
·~
"I
is the narrative of human flourishing established by human naturc.
. -~~
. . ....;:1
Acco.rdingly, to give priority to the. particular is, in key part, to be
.. ·;..
guided by the goods to which our human nature ·directs us. But how
·.·.·•t:j does this understanding of human nature guide ·delibe_ration in a non-
relativistic way when it comes to choosing betweeri incommensurables,
especialJy in cases of conflict?

CoNFLICT ANO HuMAN NATURE

. . -~¡

. ~1 Through necessity.and chance, as Iris Murdoch _puts it, hu~an nature

( ··.
.· :' does ser .a general directíon to the human quest for the good. Though
~ rhis view of nature is h~rdly metaphysically robust, it is taken by N uss-
t' J
.; -'· .
baum to be suffic_ient to provide a non~relative oasis for- 'practical rea-
son. How so?
Ali human beings, as Nussbaum argues, share certain "grounding
experíences." Por example, the fear ·of having to face important ..
changes, and especially ·death; our .b.odily·appetites and ple~uxes; . the ·:'

need for communities to distributc: limitcd resourc~s; . the impettance

of tr:uthfulne.ss in speech and:social associatiQJ'l . o~ a playf.ul. kit_l4·:) j,. . ¡

of
These grounding ex:perJen<;es are. the ·•'givens" . our .hum~ ~atu,lC.
¡
l
the fini ·artkulatíon ,ofour.shared telos~ . . - ., .
The issue is h~w we·· mov~fro~:_a'grourtding exp~1i n.ce .to-a·· paitl~u..¡­ l
.... :. ;·~
lar j~dgmcnt about· wbai .·tu ·do·. ·Giv~n .thát··1..r~.ar - im.p9~an·t · ~~ges_, · : 1

·¡
·'

and ·espC(;ía1ly-death,·_ what. áml t~ ~~. lti;!b"~,~~ \.Vh~n ·m,e ~~~_my.::;ap~m -

• • 1,
1
. ,_·

~ve1 ·the ~ill?·u · Md.· how is tht.chó.iee.poa~t~látjve/· -.·. ·. .· . ·

· · 1,•.'

..

1
.¡
 . :: . .. ·· ..
. - . ~ ..·'. (J
·: ,
•· .. . \. ,;·' ..<~"
,J ·; .,.: • 1

~a_,.· ·,ih/-Diffo.u./t·.;Gbotl · -:·.:.>· ·

:.t ~r ·~:
.The movement fro•n ..grounding·. experi~~c~· to .ju~gmé~t . req~ít~s. ,a -~ ·: >~ >;
dialec:tlcaf ~rgument~ A·dhdeáÍcal · .argument 'is ·.an . arg·umetit .·.b~~a · ~:::'. ~'. }
upon ;~o~e reputable hypothésis or, set ,of hypotheses·~ br - whl~h·:· o~~: ·:. ·:· .-··.
tries.,to eliminate daims· that .are not so repurable.· On the .trádítio.iJaJ "·" .·,
~d rstartding of dialcctié, and by tha~ I mean· Plato's a.~d_ Ari$tPt~· ,... .:.... ·~ ;
Ji·~e<:tical arguments dea.r the ground for intellectuil - i~si.ght .in whith. . ··<,· .·:
one .per~eh~es the g nuine nature· of whatever is unde'r · inve~tigation... ·. :>,!·,;,.,
.But on thc acrount of dialectic that Nussbaum employs, no such in-.. .· ..:" ·~
sight into narurc is· possible, fur it is a fiction of metaphysicians. Nus~· . . .
haum s .. account, instead, gives credit to dialectical conclusions by
appeabng ·to thc "widc, reAective equilibrium" of a given moral com-
munity.. What a given moral ·c ommunity takes to be important is. the
ultimate ground of the conclusions reached through dialectical scru-
tiny.35
. Consider the example of fortitude or courage. An inquiry into the.
narurc of this vinue and what it requires begins with the groundíng
apcricncc shared by every human being, the experience of mortaligr:
This grounding experience gives us our first account of courage: "cour-
.age is that <{uality, x, necessary to face up to our mortality in the". best
way.." Although this "thin,, account of courage tells us nothing about
tbc aauaJ perfection -that ~ourage is; it nonetheless is the foundation
¡,
· for wbatcver objectivity is available to moral inquiry. 36 Yet how does
~ ·
•t:1 . dús "·'dün" .a ccount of courage serve as· a criterion of discerrunent be-
·.:;
;, - twem competing "thíck" specifications of the virtue, between SpanaD>
Quaka, and Thomistic courage? How does the process .of dialecti~
$peci6catíon work? .
~e. approach the díalectical inquiry into the appropriate spccifiea~
tion ofa gívcn grounding expcrience with a sense of what is umo~.!1{ . ,,
keeping w~th .Úle '~Íty ·of OUJ' evidence ~d with the t~tálitf ~ .. of . ·..·
: ~ish~ for a flo~r~hlng lífe than others. ,,,1 This· "sénseº .arnounu· to.~a.~ .
~gbten~~; nior~. 1nclmíve awueness of what modvate~· \is \Yitbin "óÚt ·.\~ ..
sbued pmndirig ~íena:J, Ir C<>rnprises 01u most ~uth~it· ~ , _..-~. ·
··of1~.1,1~le h:ypot~~.~ . · · ·· · .:.'.·~ ~·"> .
···The ·b•k. ide.Jjs' th:lt
wii~in"'o'1r· e.~p~deoce: QC'°llfe:.we .t.:3ljJ;e,)~at-." . "--:~~; ·
~n ~~ ~, io~p~~le;_ to 9ur baPplf\ess, T~~e ·y'1ú.e&:·~- -~ :;·~
·-~~rv~ a5 th:~ f"•·~ta ~r· ~.. 1clt · ~~. -~b~osc·"bet:w~n
' :·
. .~~p~tfn.g·
.
.. . . .
. ~l.l~r.. ·_; :..·,: ,
. " ' . .~ ' . . ...

· , .~ 1

~. _' . •.. . .~'!.!, .

..,_ ..
1

<~
 .-,.' · : .J

Íltcom~·tk. to •~'- · ·L ·¡·· ·.-. · .-.i _·. -

•. '\..· .fo.

. . · l
_. · - .··· ."', ,,.~ .. r 4 ul -ttftl dha ."r..<,. ~- -~ - - _. .;. 1
. ,.
. 'f '°··.
. . , ..,...... "'ªt1t :·~o.nfoct . 'i9 .l
l
v. ·- ti ons of happiness,:' ór .ariy _ of
· . ·_ ·
other Yatoe-. '.ééTíiete t ..~ . ~
· _· . · · · .. s JUst · .umatrl1fe as
h. -. '. ¡ · .... . . . .
' l.

l¡
ic is tived. But .in _ life as ·it_is Hved~ ~e do flnd a famif · ._ f. ·_ .. ·.__ · __:· · ·
· d. .· . .fu . · . -. · / . -.. . Y o .expet1ences
dusrering aroun· certa1n_, · c~i., whkh -c{}n pro\'ide ·reasbri .· bl · .. .<.: .'
points fur . .. reflt<:tion ''M As tefféCtioh pra«eds into ~e:~:·?~
courage, fur - xaffiplc, wt 6nd thát rhe crudely ácquisitiW ~tu~ .
Sparran c.ourage runs count~r to our sense.of in~er.nadonal jwdcc;:chát
:f. 1

11
th pacifism that defines Quaker courag~ ·rubs. against our unda.. .
·l
tan ing o~ thc milltary sacri6ces required for defense ofa políty. fo l
scannit1 lustory an·d che contemporary landscape we find <>ther C(lfl-·
.; .:J
_·
cepcions of courage that both confirm and challenge our own cherished
;,.:_~ values. The hope is that, as our inquiry proceeds, certain. aspects of
1. . ..
ourage will sh.ake -out, that our reflection will attain "equilibríum~ ~,
That equilibrium constitutes -our "thick" conception of courage, and
ali the revdation of its nature we can, or should, expect.
In her discussion of these ideas Nussbaum makes clear that our.·most
reputable hypotheses are to be found in the ideals .~f contemporary
ll
1.iheralism, such as racial and gender equality, ·and less_aggressive.and l~
l
warlike conceptions of manliness. These ideals ·are the ones that aré l.
'!
<more in keep.i ng with_the totality of our wishes for a flourishing life ~
than others," and so must serve as - the criteria· by which we judge
between right and wrong specifications of grounding experiences. But
1
the question remains, why are the ideals of liberalism so. reputable? ~t 1
isn't dear why these "ideals are any ·more rationally justified than .me
1
ídeals of che .ancient Spartans, or eighte~nth-~ntury Q~akers. ~e
1
come back ,t Q rhe problem of how to justify choice betwecn conftkting
incommcnsurables¡o 39
Complicating matters is che· fuct tha~ this ··dialectici.I .p~ed~
·.· ·'
.allows fur .rival, incommensurable specifications of a ~iven -~unding..
experiencc. 40 The couiage ofa Quaker and of a _soldier fighdng fo~ ~
U.S, in Iraq .may ·both be defensiblc specificatic;ins ofthe S~®(l·u1$
expcrience ~Jl«rqiQg monality. But jf t4if Is rw~. th.~ . th_is ª~~ .
of dialectica.I speciÍication only. movC. d1e 'lu,cstion. OÍ ~ladVUn\ ~ _
n.
a.no.rher locatio_ ln~i~ of c.r~pping up thd~l Qf C)Ur me>St ~·.
- · ~·-· . ·
•t
·the me(..J'fef uc
t • · ·

gras~ of. ~e humait_gp~~;. · ~he~_·gr~u~qi.~~--- ~~~-~~n~~;.,-__:.~ _::-.~~f- __ :~:.· . · ·__ ·

·rel · · · .· · · , · ~·• t ~t · .. .,.;.s·.a.r 4tlOI\ JinW:t OQ<!e
.~ !, .. · atiyism ·crop$·. up-.· at:ihe:levél -gf~itu.~:~.c.~:: ~P'~u~ . . · · .t.-: .'- · -., .. ., _.-
. . . . . . -
. ; ..
. ~

'1
·},

' . • '.' .
::.: . _ _. !' . . . :-
:.....
_. ;: ...·.j_
_;_,,,;,....,...llllllillllllÍlllll!!!!-·
!!'!'
 ; ~:
•t~·!.;,
=-. •1 J.

·. .._- ~. ,. . ~ ~~ ·we··. ·r_ca:"

. aga.iu~cu'"'
At_;0-nál
·
-lv· -t-,o t hóo e betWet
;¡ ." . ..
n ri~!tl,
..
=·
C\'Cn )ÜSitinétiVC1·
1,.
· ·.. .
~ .. :/.· . ·
.'li-¡"'~ , ..

fimions of a parfü:uiar groundirÍg expetience? . . .• . .. .· . . . ·. ~: :_ , :

One. an~·r to _:th'is:·qú~sdon seems to be~ t~_at~·~_at·_ a ceriairt. ~~~f, :w~ · . ·
.don; t.·The-r~sult ¿ ál'.lY di~écikal exerc~se . irt _sp~dfü;id~, ~~sba~ . ~: ...
·affitmS ,;might wcll be a (prob~bly smatl) pltirality acétpta~~ ~ · / or· l
ro -nts>fhese accounts may o·r maynofbe capable of bein~ substi~C'.Cf·' . . /:: . .·:.
u1~der .·a 'S.ingle ·account of greater gene~álity.'· ' 4 ~ Rela~ivism is _con~roltcd. :'_ ... ·
b the .non.·félative grasp of the grouhding expetíences and by c~nain . :. _·; t
liberal ·understandings of human aourishing. But beyond that; a ~rum ..·-,· ;. ,::
.degreC of pluralism) even of leveling incommcnsurability, .is' to-be.' ex~ . . '-: :' l
· pcttcd. lt is inevitable that following .hard upon this _situation is-- die .;· : . t,,:
. . . . . . ~'

possibility of tragic conflict. ·. · i:

Such an account of dialectical specification makes its claims to non- · {
1

rdativity doubly problematic. For, .o n the ~ne hand, it does. not j~tjfy · · ~· ·/

its specifications of human groundil)g experience, precis.ely because it_. . ·~

' f
never shows how the conclusions of such inquiry ·are not ~erely the· · .t
rondusions. of a preferred cultural understanding of human flouñsh- H;

ing. Consequently, the challenge that must .be made to this account is. ~
the same challenge that Alasdair Maclntyre has put to the thought of .;
Diderot: ·~
.,,·~
Jllst: ~use all of us have, actually or potent.ially, numerous de-
• : 1 •·

·.·.. .,

mes, many of them conflicting and mutually incompatible.,_ we

·. ~ .
. ,.
have to decide between the rival claims of
rival desircs. We ha:ve·
~l~. ·
to decide in what '4irection to educate our desires, how to otder..
:~::l): .
a varicty of impulses, felt nceds, emotions and purpos~, ~H~ce
those rules which enable us to deddc berwecn the daims ~f... and· ·
so to or<kr, our desires--including thc rules of ffioraU~no.c
dlcmselv~s be derive4 from or justified by refe.rerice to· t)le des.tÍe$:
among~ich th~y ha.ve to arbitrate, 4 ~ . . . . ..v t

- ~at · l am argo-ing.ls that rhe,appeal toºhumaii.llfe··as it 'i$:.:liVed~~~~-'°· · ·_/".

those ~demenu of :our ~perience sp impona11~ ·to us )h~j~Q~ ~ ..ó.>I
~ 4'fwli0~ :are," is no h\911u:han 11n a.¡)p~I ·to ~tl~tlte , .n~ao~~l· · ,:~
v~fY' ":'m~le~ desir~: 81.1t a
Ql\e ,mot~ 4tsif.~. the:appcal.~f; ~~Cllf ·i
stand •01.entofoth4'nleSit<11, Unless lcsJmply bc~itéa: ~·~· . · ,.!
 " •':

i (lcimfhi itU úri b;utt an;J ·T;agit. •Ó"t>njli/t Jt

all-crumping set·of desi~es~whkh i'.~_ exactly how~ ~e ·app~alJunction¡

in Nussbaum"s acrount'~f4ialet:tk .._ . . '. _. . . .
~.~~· : ·• <;
-_. .... ·· ,· ..
•
This account of dialc~tical speci~eatfon. is p~oblema_ifo, on ·dre·oth~I­
hand, because the w°.rk of spedficatlori allows .for.·rival, ··inoommensu_,
rabie condusions~ chus putting rational .justifica-don .í~ -conBkt .wíth
itself. Tbe upshot .i$ a na~rativc óf human flourishing· that is .at·.once
the mere assertion .of one v.ery genetally ~onceived. fo.frn ·of lífe over
0 1hers (the pattern laid by .our sharcd grounding expericnc~ and ·cer·

,'./'<{ tain liberal assumptions about ethics and.,politics), anda. niul~ipl~ of

inrcommensurable and often conflicting specifications .o f that foim of
:· ---., _ :.',:.:~
;
,.
. .;~.
. ~J
a
human fl.ourishing. lt is, in word, the narrative of contemporary
: . . . . ·1 liberalis~.
The condusion of all this is that we· still · do not have ·a satisfying
;'.·:.<i answer to the question of what makes choice in the face of confliáing
. ." ~ incommensurables, and tragic choice in particular, rational.
. >. . · j
. ·.t·· · -~

No RAnoNAL Ctto1cE BETWEEN CoNFLICTING IÑcoMMENSURABLES?

Joseph Raz has argued that when an agent has to choose between values
manifesting leveling incommensurability the agent i~ not,_· in fact, ut-
terly bereft of reasons for action. The very notion of conffict im.plies
that each one of the values .involved iR th~- conflict places a ratioµal
demand upon the agent~ Each value is, we might say, "~defeat~d" by
the other value in its daim to. justification. Consequently, the choice
of either value constitutes a rationally justified choice. At the same
,:: ·,·-: . .·...~~
. -

:.::."~~ ~ ..; ::~ time, howeve.r, Raz contends that the. agent deli.berating belween iri- .
_.,·...
.' . . {
commensurablcs has no reason to shun one. of the options.- in favor ~f ·
.. :;'(.~\
the other. How can this be? lt can be because there is a, difference,
between an agen·t having a reaso.n to do A,.or a reason to do .and .a.11, :S,
agent having a ~eason to do A becausc .·it is prefcrable to B.~ l~ ..ís. . ~s .
latter judgrnent, a comparati~e judgm~.nt .o f ~e vah1e ~f A ~ -~pOSed:.
to B, tha~ ~rding -to· Ra~~ ls pr~duded by the.lc:velh~g· i_ne.~Jn.men~u·
rabilíty thesís. 4~ .. ·· . · · . · · · ·. .·

This ~count _sµggestJ tbat _ir ·reaUy 49esn'.t.· m~tt'ei:- ,Y(hich. ~~ke·)~· ·
made between· ~n~ii;dng . in(;9mmchs.urab.le$, ·.~~t ~h~n ~~q~ _ 'i~.: ~cti~n ·
to pro~d.? Should :·:m -~e~r· ·sjil\p1yJlip._.f tióin, :· ~r' go' ~ith(díe_.·,~9~ce ·

~' ... ..·' .

 ·-·
. J.i -th~i-.IJ,lffi:cult ·- c-~. ºJ - -_.;·.: :~· . ,- ,;
., e ., . . . . . gly' about? The latte"r possÜ>ility Wou:ld Seem to talce '..: ..:'; •.
he rce1s more stron . . - -. . .· e flº . · . . -. , . . .
,_ . ·. f th :· d - ~:n óf the tational. The ac~mn. º! · _·1pp1.ng-- ;i.::eoin : .
choice out q e ~mcu ·. · . ._ . -· •. · "... · - · .
. . . . . ratiottal
- b. · way tO pursue a choice·wbere JUStlCt.-: lé~ft~ ·.
does seems to . e a · . . h.. · ! • .-· --

·things underd~terrnined, such aS whi~ player plays w tte In a·~eot '. ...
.- . h. ,..h team gets. the ball 6.rst in a football game. The probl~in .. . .-~ . .. .
chess, or w 1"'
-is-·that .in-the..cas ~f ait·Agamemnon or a Maggie Verver; ju~tice 'hás: -~- ." -
not left things underdetermined. Justice, in fact'. has le~ ~ngs óflt1tfe..: ..•. >: ,
tennined. Justfoe do~s not demand· that one particular s1de in·a foml~all.' .~ · .·.
game get the ball first; it leaves that up to chance. But justice .does. · .·., ..
demand of Agamemnon th·a t he__kill his daughter, j.ust as it ~eman~, .
th-at he spare her life. And the fact that justice makes these conff ictfog
demands tdls us that it is inappropriate for the tragic protagonist to
remain indifferent.
What is clear from this understanding of chings is _that in situati<:>n~
of confüct reason is indeterminate. lt cannot serve as guide to a better .
Choice. lt can only provide us with reasons to perform .(or no.t to per~:
form) each of two or more incompatible actions; and in the case ·of-· -
tragic conHict, actions that are wrong and damaging tÓ human happi--
ness.44 lf a coin is flipped to resolve the conflict, that exeréise would
not be_an operation of justice (if it were, there would .be no conflict to
.~n- with). It would rather be an admission that reason must q~t the.·
fidd and defer to sorne nonrational means of arbitration. lt is. slg11ifi-'
~-
cant, however, that neither Agamemnon nor Maggie Verver _flips -a
c:nm. The _· gravity of their situations precludes any such glih:fespotise: · . _-·:
~ut_ what ~s their' decisions, finally, is either a troublesóme.morif ·_-. · _-.,·
Calculu.s o~_ strongerfeelings of attachment to one of the values in. t~ll'"'
k~ - .
. . . . .: ' .

-CIU~IUA OP ~ Ai.TEaNATIVE AccoUNT OP CoNFÚcT-AND H~- . ~. - ·... ' '~

liAi>PJNEss · '. - . · \ .
r ...... -·_;\
-~¡-~~. '

i~ f: UMm ti! suta ~ÜÚy ·and '. 1'r4tü :f;'!itflitt J~ .

the .áltánadvé accounr."' takc'?' What-are'.--the c#tetia.-' it: w9Utd-;'have :to

meet?- .
f irst, a·súcces~ful ~t~rniitlve accouttr -wo~ld have-to :shó~ .how·-p·rat;- .
ti cal daims can he assimilated ~~- beHefs. Tha~ is, :it_would : h~~t~ to·show.
that practica( reason Can. be undetit<>od in the war thát, theóretkal .
reason is understood..,-_ a8 a·g.rasp -~f truth, _wi.th all -tfie satne-(tu.. s~~~nify
analogous) logicil dema.nds., .· in~luding those riiling·out_~on.tradíttion . ..
If rhis can be shown, ~hen. the ·experien~e of conflkt cari be red~scribed .
as prinapally an expedence ofcontradictory beiiefs, which might then
be recondled through philosophical reflection, _just as we :find .Plató'~­
Socrates attempting to do in the dialogues. ·
Second, a successful alternative accoüi:it of conflict-would J~.ave to
work out the basis for the unity of those practical beliefs, shoWing .how-
they reHect the _unity of tlie h_uman good. If the. truth that theoretical_
reasoning manifests is one, then t~e -good that practica! reasoning,looks
to achieve must be one. But in what sense are we to think of this good.
as unified? Are we to return to a mo~istic, consequentialist-schema?· Or
is the human good somehow deiivative of a single rwe, or 'ó f an inter-
nally consistent set of rules?
1 .contend that a ·successful alternative account of conflict would
-. .~: (
have to learn from the critiques óf consequentialism -and deontolo~
.,. ... .. . -~

- ' ·_1-J
- - ~
made by defenders of - th~ leveling incommensurability thesis, ·and af-
:
' _, - 4'.·
.. V firm, as a-third criterion ofits·success, the.plurality and incommensura-
hility ofthe human good. Yet this must be done without compronlising
eirher the theore_tícal character of practiCal reason or the .unity ~e of
human good. Thus my argument witl uldolately focus on a -natl.'ifal
;:· ~ : ·.~· ~mchy of goods diseernible by human reason ·through ·theor:edcal
msiglu and ·reffec-tion, · ·
Whik ít is hnpossible ·tO compá.rtmentaliu dis~ussic>n Ofthes.e -~~¡..
~u~ issucs, l Will launch ~y alternative·¡¡CCo\lllt .offunflitt. ~:~
ir ~ by Aristóde:and Aqui~, from 'che place :wllerOthes~ t~ink,eti
~~n. theír ówQ ttthkal r(BecriouS, iwrielh a1r ill~ l~ttl -~. ~¡:. ·
PlClty litld ,un1i.y qf th,e h.Uma_, ,goo4¡. · ·
. ". ~. ,, .

~· .
. . / .·
,\:'. .·::) .·
• . • , .-.· . j _, •

...,· . "' Y_,

 Hierarchy and Direction for Choice

Daniel McInerny

This essay is a response to an invitation. Robert George has recently requested from "neo-scholastics"
"a detailed account of how choosing in accordance with a principle of hierarchy is supposed to work
across a set of cases."[i] George’s invitation is put forward in a defense of what he calls "the
incommensurability thesis" and its role in giving direction to human choice. Put briefly, and quoting
George, "[t]he incommensurability thesis states that basic values and their particular instantiations as
they figure in options for choice cannot be weighed and measured in accordance with an objective
standard of comparison."[ii] This raises a crucial question. In the absence of an objective standard of
comparison, how is non-arbitrary choice between basic goods possible? For George, it is possible
because the very respect that is due to the incommensurability of the basic goods generates principles
that objectively guide human action.
What reasons does George give for rejecting a natural hierarchy of human goods? First of all, it
should be said that George does recognize certain natural hierarchies. Instrumental goods, he
acknowledges, are subordinate to intrinsically valuable goods; sensible goods are subordinate to
intelligible goods; and a fuller realization of the good is to be preferred to a meager realization.[iii]
When George speaks of incommensurable "basic" goods, therefore, at issue is not these hierarchies
but rather the set of intrinsically valuable, intelligible goods that together comprise human happiness.
Similarly for the Thomist, the argument for hierarchy principally concerns relationships between
intrinsically valuable human goods.
So why then does George reject a natural hierarchy of basic goods, and the making of moral
judgments on the basis of such a hierarchy? The reason he gives is put in the context of the following
example. Imagine a golfer faced with a decision between interrupting his best chance to break 80 and
the opportunity to rescue a child drowning in the water hazard on the adjacent fairway. Granted that
the only moral choice for the golfer is to drop his club and try and rescue the child, the question is
how this decision is reached. For George, what is clear is that the golfer does not make his decision by
acknowledging that the basic good of "life" is objectively better than the basic good of "play." Why
not? The answer is twofold: because either the notion of hierarchy places in jeopardy the common
sense belief "that one ordinarily has no moral duty to forego one’s ordinary pursuits, including
playing golf, to devote oneself to life saving or to join famine relief projects and other worthy
lifesaving endeavors in far off places," or the notion of hierarchy fails to provide a principle on the
basis of which to decide when choices for "life" are required and when they are not.[iv] In other
words, for George, either hierarchy forces us to fanatically reduce the value of lower goods in the
hierarchy in favor of higher goods, and indeed the highest good, or it simply fails to do any work in
telling us when choices in favor of a super-ordinate good are required. In either case, hierarchy seems
hopeless in providing direction for choice, while the incommensurability thesis allows for the intrinsic
choice-worthiness of basic goods even while it grounds the principles that would direct us at times to
favor one basic good over another.
George is exactly right that the incommensurability thesis runs counter to what he calls the "neo-
scholastic"-I would say principally Thomistic-understanding that the human good exists naturally as a
hierarchical arrangement-a duplex ordo as Aquinas describes it in the first lectio of the Commentary
on the Ethics-in which goods are ordered both to one another and to the absolutely ultimate end.[v] So
in responding to George’s invitation, what I aim to do in this essay is to provide an introduction, at
least, to a Thomistic understanding of how the natural hierarchy of human goods provides direction
for choice. In sum, I will be arguing that non-arbitrary choices between contending substantial, or
intrinsically valuable, goods are only possible when one of the goods is seen either as a necessary or
expedient means for the attainment of another and intrinsically more valuable good. For Aquinas, in
any line of action what is obligatory in itself is the intrinsically valuable good, or end, and that which
is for the sake of this end, the means, is obligatory on account of it, either by being necessary or
expedient to the attainment of this end.[vi] In determining, then, which of two or more choices is
necessary or most expedient to the attainment of an intrinsically superior end, deliberation must first
discern the appropriate natural hierarchy of human goods.
Several important issues hang on whether the incommensurability or hierarchy thesis wins this debate.
Most obvious is the issue of how to justify non-arbitrary choices between conflicting, substantial
goods. But analogous to this is the issue of how to justify non-arbitrary choices between entire life-
plans. Would I have non-arbitrary reasons for becoming either a butcher, baker, or candlestick maker?
This latter issue touches upon a further question. If there is indeed a natural hierarchy of human
goods, does this imply that there is one and only one "right" way of living a human life? Where in the
argument for hierarchy, in other words, do considerations of wish, talent and temperament come in?
The debate between incommensurability and hierarchy also raises the question of how to adjudicate
between the bonum mihi and the bonum commune, the good that is a personal good for me here and
now and the good that by nature is shared with those with whom I live in community. Is there a
hierarchical ordering between these two kinds of good, or are they themselves incommensurable
considerations of human agents?[vii]
But the most important-because the most fundamental-issue raised by this debate concerns the unity
of the human good. For Thomists this comes down to the question of the ultimate end, of happiness.
Thomists understand the ultimate end to have several analogous senses, the most primary of which
identify the ultimate end with God. For the Thomist, God is the principium of the hierarchy of goods,
and thus God ultimately unifies the human good by providing the ultimate direction for choice.[viii]
Defenders of incommensurability, by contrast, understand happiness solely in an inclusivistic sense;
that is, as the name we give to that miscellany of incommensurable basic goods that give us
satisfaction. While the inclusivist view does well in capturing our sense of the multiplicity of the
human good, it seems to do less well in showing us how the collection of incommensurables amounts
to anything more than the sum of various parts. Such a multiform view of human fulfillment has
serious implications for a unified conception of the human person.[ix]
I want to address these issues from a Thomistic point of view in the following way. George has asked,
in particular, for a detailed account of how choice in the context of hierarchy works across a set of
cases. I believe it would be a mistake, however, to get down to cases right away. For the differences
between the incommensurability thesis and the hierarchy thesis are differences that occur at the most
basic level of understanding of the human good, and so any constructive debate between the two
theses must first occur at this level. So, after first confronting a threshold challenge that any defender
of hierarchy must confront, I will then develop the nature of the "for-the-sake-of" relationship that
serves as the basic ligature of hierarchical ordering. This examination of the "for-the-sake-of"
relationship will quickly lead us to the central question about the nature of the ultimate end, only after
which we will be in a position to look at how hierarchy goes to work in some particular cases at
different levels of moral decision-making.
While this response to George’s invitation may not accomplish everything that George would require
of the defender of hierarchy, I trust it will provide a first rough sketch of the form an adequate
response to his invitation must take.

A Threshold Challenge

In his recent book, Natural Law and Practical Rationality, a natural law defense which, like George’s,
reposes upon the incommensurability thesis, Mark Murphy reads both George and John Finnis as
issuing the following threshold challenge to any defender of hierarchy. Any defender of hierarchy
must show first either that the incommensurability thesis applied to the basic goods is false, or that
incommensurability is consistent with hierarchy[x]
So to take up the first part of the disjunction: is it the case that the defender of hierarchy must reject
the incommensurability thesis as false? The answer, perhaps surprisingly, is no. The
incommensurability thesis is, in fact, not false if by incommensurability we mean that intrinsically
valuable goods, at least, cannot be reduced to a single genus. This is one of the points pressed by
Aristotle against Plato’s Form of the Good in the sixth chapter of Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics.
The Platonists themselves, Aristotle says, do not postulate a single form for classes of things in which
prior and posterior are found, as is the case with numbers. While there are forms for individual
numbers, there is no form of number itself, because the class of numbers is comprised of various
natures ordered to each other and to a first. And so it is with the good. Goodness manifests itself
across the categories: there are good substances, good qualities, good relations, and so on. And these
various manifestations of good, as with numbers, enjoy an order of prior and posterior. That which
has goodness in itself, substance, is prior to all those other goods that manifest their goodness only in
relation to substance. From these observations Aristotle concludes that just as there can be no
common form of number, so there can be no common form of good.[xi]
Thus it is perfectly appropriate to speak of intrinsically valuable (as opposed to instrumental) human
goods as incommensurable. For human goods are not commensurable in the sense that they are merely
different manifestations of a single kind of good. In this respect, they have no shared mensura.
Accordingly, the hierarchical understanding of good I am defending has no truck with a
commensurability thesis, or with those quasi-mathematical, maximizing strategies of practical
rationality that trade on such a thesis, and which natural law theorists like George are absolutely right
to condemn.
So, if the incommensurability thesis is not to be rejected, then we must affirm the other side of the
disjunction, namely, that incommensurability is compatible with a hierarchical understanding of the
good. Both Russell Pannier and Mark Murphy have noted that this compatibility has been implicitly
recognized by theorists such as George. As Murphy puts it, there is a tu quoque rebuff to George’s
objection to hierarchy, for George himself holds "that each person is under a practical requirement to
form a life plan that includes a subjective prioritization of the basic goods in his or her life."[xii] But
if the basic goods are such that they are amenable to subjective prioritization, then in principle, at
least, there is nothing inconsistent in thinking that the basic goods can enjoy objective prioritization.
"And if George asks," Murphy writes, "what particular requirements on choice are generated by the
goods’ naturally forming a hierarchy, the defender of that view can respond that it is the requirements
on choice that would be generated by the goods’ forming a structurally identical hierarchy through the
agent’s commitment."[xiii]
But what reasons are there for thinking that intrinsically valuable human goods actually do form a
natural hierarchy? I would like to address that question now, as the next stage in showing how
hierarchy works in providing real direction for choice.

The "For-The-Sake-Of" Relation

Earlier I referred to Aquinas’s description of the human good as a duplex ordo, a twofold order
of goods both to one another and to the absolutely ultimate end. As Aquinas also says in this lectio of
his Commentary, the order of goods to one another is made possible by their order to the absolutely
ultimate end.[xiv] So in setting up the scaffolding of an objective hierarchy of goods, the existence
and nature of an absolutely ultimate end must be established, as well as the ligatures that bind other
less-than-ultimate ends both to it and to each other. Following both Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s
procedure, I want to consider the ligatures first, the basic means-end structures that characterize the
hierarchy of our objectives.
Permit me, first, some rather rudimentary distinctions that are nonetheless absolutely necessary for the
argument to follow. Say that I have volunteered to play in a charity golf tournament. The actions that I
take in preparation for my play-practicing for the tournament, driving to the site, the play itself-are all
ends that I pursue for the sake of my overall end of benefiting some needy children. The benefit of the
children serves as the final end, the term, of my action, while the ends subordinate to it serve as means
to this final end. We already see that "means" and "ends" are relative terms. What makes the benefit
of the children the final end of this train of action is that I would desire this end even if nothing else
ever followed from it: such as public recognition of my action. All the other ends, however, at least
within this train of activity, would not be pursued unless they were somehow productive of the end of
helping the children. I might play golf for other reasons on other days, but I would not tune up to play
in a charity tournament unless I was convinced that my participation would truly help the charity.
Thus of any end we can ask whether we would pursue that end even if nothing resulted from it but the
attainment of the end in question. Would I floss my teeth if that activity had no effect on dental
hygiene? For most of us, I hope, the answer is no, and so we identify flossing teeth as a merely
instrumental activity. Would we want to play golf apart from any usefulness it may serve? Of course
we would. Playing golf is intrinsically valuable, a final end.[xv] This example helps clarify that
certain ends can be both instrumentally and intrinsically valuable, depending on the context in which
they are pursued.
The "for-the-sake-of" relationships that hold between goods exhibit what Richard Kraut has called
asymmetrical causal relations.[xvi] In Aristotle’s well-known example, bridle-making is for the sake
of riding, meaning that bridle-making helps bring riding into being and thus that riding is more
desirable than bridle-making-hence the asymmetry in the relation. Moreover, because bridle-making
is for the sake of riding, riding provides the standard or norm against which bridle-making is
regulated. Bridle-making takes the form it does because the art of riding, the craft to which it is
subordinated, takes the form it does. This is the meaning behind Aristotle’s use in this context of the
word architektonikê, "master-craft." The Greek term connotes a craft that is superior, of course, but
superior insofar as it is an archê, a ruler, over the others. Politics, Aristotle’s politikê technê, is the
master-craft of master-crafts because it dictates to all other sciences and crafts both what is to be done
in these crafts and how they are to be employed for the end of politics: the common good.
We are beginning to see how hierarchy provides direction for choice, insofar as the good for the sake
of which another good is pursued regulates the pursuit of the subordinate good. A clarification on this
point. A higher good regulates a lower good in more than one way. Commenting on the passage from
Aristotle just mentioned, Aquinas claims that politics regulates practical activities both as to
whether they should be pursued and how they should be pursued. But politics regulates speculative
activities only as to whether they should be pursued, either at all or by a particular person. Politics
does not dictate how a speculative science should be pursued-how in geometry, for example,
conclusions should be drawn from premises. For this depends on the very nature of the subject matter
of geometry.[xvii] So in the order of practice, at least, what Aquinas has to say about the relationship
between politics and other activities seems to hold generally: lower goods are for the sake of higher
goods, which in turn dictate whether and how the lower goods are to be pursued.
It is a good question whether the asymmetry in the for-the-sake-of relationship must always run in the
same direction. Can x be for the sake of y, which in turn is for the sake of x? The goods of family life,
on any Thomistic view, are ordered for the sake of practicing philosophy. But as a working
philosopher, do I not also pursue philosophy for the sake of the goods of family life? This example
quickly clarifies the point that goods are not ordered for the sake of each other in the same respect,
thus ensuring that there is no true circularity in for-the-sake-of relationships. For while it is true that
the goods of family life are ordered to philosophical wisdom, it is not true that philosophical wisdom
is ordered, as a subordinate good, to the goods of family life. Philosophy understood as
employment may be so ordered, but this is just to change the respect in which we consider
philosophy. Employment understood as a mere means is always subordinated to the goods of family
life, which in turn are always subordinated to the philosophical pursuit of truth.
For Aquinas, all intrinsically valuable goods exist in per se, that is necessary, relationships of the prior
and posterior. Prudence is a superior virtue to fortitude, according to Aquinas, principally because it
perfects that power of the soul concerned with the overall good of the agent. The hierarchy among
these virtues is a necessary feature of the human good, such that a conception of fortitude not put in
the service of and regulated by prudence would not be the genuine article at all. In the film The
Perfect Storm the members of a fishing crew lose their lives pursuing a catch straight into the teeth of
the storm of the century. True, they are down-on-their-luck fishermen, desperately in need of a good
catch. But clearly it was not worth risking their lives to catch even more fish than they had already
caught. The daring quality they exhibit in battling the storm is in some sense impressive, the film’s
marketing company may describe it as "courageous," but in the absence of prudence we can’t admit
that it’s anything other than recklessness.[xviii]
We may conclude from this that the very character of intrinsically valuable goods depends upon how
they are subordinated to and regulated by goods superior in the hierarchy. This is why to speak of
"basic goods"-even in their instantiations-as discrete, incommensurable items (George employs the
unfortunate metaphor of ’quanta’[xix]) is not to speak of real goods at all, but only of generic, ghostly
entities incapable of directing choice. Once again, it is a feature of intrinsically valuable goods (at
least, of all but one of them) that they are instrumental to higher goods, and that the whether and how
of their pursuit are guided by these higher goods. We simply don’t fully understand the good of "life,"
for example, until we understand that in certain circumstances it must be sacrificed, subordinated to,
the familial or political common good.
Of course, George and others attempt to get around this difficulty by invoking the notion of "integral
human fulfillment," an appeal to an ultimate end that brings some definition to the basic goods and
provides the ultimate direction for, and justification of, human choice. Hence it is opportune at this
juncture of the argument to consider the role of the ultimate end in serving as the principium of the
hierarchy of goods.
Before that, however, a brief digest of points made so far.
First, the Thomistic understanding of hierarchy affirms that intrinsically valuable human goods are
heterogeneous in character. These goods are thus not commensurable,
such that the many goods we perceive are merely instantiations of, or instrumentally useful for, the
absolutely ultimate end, the one and only intrinsically valuable human good and the single measure of
goodness. This kind of commensuration has been roundly repudiated by contemporary writers and
rightly so.
Second, the incommensurability or heterogeneity of the human good, its resistance to any form
of commensuration, does not preclude its being ordered according to priority and posteriority. All of
being is ordered to substance, an order which is manifest in the moral sphere in the way that the
different substantial human goods are ordered to that which is the substance of the human good in the
most perfect sense: the absolutely ultimate end.
Third, within this hierarchical ordering of goods there are many different goods which are ultimate or
final, though in a qualified sense. But the fact that they are ultimate in any sense means that they are
desirable for their own sake. We don’t just desire them because they help us achieve the absolutely
ultimate end (though they do that, too); we don’t wholly reduce them to instrumental goods simply
because they have an instrumental aspect to them.

The Hierarchy of Happinesses

It is a commonplace of much contemporary Aristotelian scholarship and even some Thomistic

that the for-the-sake-of relationship that I have been arguing is essential to an understanding of the
human good cannot be applied to the ultimate end itself. In his book on Aquinas, for example, John
Finnis speaks of beatitudo as a basic good. "But this turns out to be," he writes, "not so much an item
to be added to the list of basic human goods, as rather a kind of synthesis of them: [namely]
satisfaction of all intelligent desires and participation in all the basic human goods.and thus a
fulfillment which is complete and intergral."[xx] Elsewhere Finnis describes imperfect beatitude, at
least, as "the good of complete reasonableness in one’s willing of human goods."[xxi]
Roughly, then, we might summarize this view of the ultimate end as the activity of pursuing
the basic goods in as unified a manner as possible, according to the hierarchy we have constructed for
ourselves, without in any way disrespecting the intrinsic value of any of the goods by manipulating it
as a mere means. To act in this way is to act both from reason and from virtue-and, apparently, "for
the sake of" the ultimate end of imperfect happiness.
But it is important not to confuse the "for-the-sake-of" relationship with this inclusive
relationship described by Finnis. By an inclusive relationship I mean a formal relationship of part to
whole, as when we say putting is a part of golf, or the pursuit of play is a part of imperfect happiness.
To say that putting is "for the sake of" golf makes hash out of the phrase "for the sake of," if all that is
meant is that putting is a constituent part of golf. True enough, putting is a part of golf if we are
considering the constituent items and activities that go to make up a game of golf, like driving,
chipping and cursing. This kind of consideration is formal in character. But within this formal
consideration putting is in no meaningful sense "for the sake of" golf; for putting in this sense simply
is golf. So, the only meaningful use of the phrase "for the sake of" is when the phrase is meant to say
that one thing helps bring some other thing extrinsic to it into being and is regulated by it. Therefore,
my two-putt on 17 is good insofar as it serves as the end of my desire to play golf on a Saturday
morning; "putting" in this sense is the goal of an entire train of instrumental activities "for the sake of"
landing me on the golf course. My two-putt on 17 is also good in an instrumental sense, insofar as it
brings about, is "for the sake of," my continued play on 18 and my over-arching goal of finishing my
round in the lowest possible number of strokes. "Putting" has an instrumental relationship to the good
of "golf," if by "golf" we mean the completion of my round, not the game formally considered.[xxii]
My point here is not to deny that it’s meaningful to say, "Happiness for me is my family, my
friends, my work, my recreational activities, my devotion to God, etc." We speak in this way all the
time. My point, rather, is that this way of speaking does not refer to the primary sense of happiness,
the sense which establishes the per se order of multiple goods according to prior and posterior-and this
sense, of course, is founded upon God. Without this sense of happiness, no other sense of happiness
(including the reference to a set of constituents thereof), and more importantly, no direction for
choice, is possible.
I have no intention of canvassing here Aquinas’s arguments for the very existence of an
ultimate end, for why the ultimate end must be one and not many, and the dialectical arguments he
uses to manifest the nature of both imperfect and perfect happiness. Instead, I simply want to highlight
some features of the arguments Aquinas develops in pursuing these questions.
First, when Aquinas argues in article 4, question 1 of the Prima secundae that there must be an
ultimate end of human life, he stakes his claim on the fact that for human action even to get up and
running, whether in the order of intention or of execution, there must be a per se order of ends
culminating in an absolutely first, absolutely ultimate, end. And when in the next article Aquinas
proves that the absolutely ultimate end must be single, he tells us that the hierarchy of "for-the-sake-
of" relationships must culminate in a final end that is never for the sake of some other good, and thus
serves to regulate every other good in the hierarchy which is, in some respect (though not in every
respect) instrumental to it. In the sed contra of article 5 Aquinas glosses Matthew 6:24 ("No man can
serve two masters") as a way of saying that no one can pursue two final ends not ordered to one
another; that is, not situated within a network of "for-the-sake-of" relationships.
 Apropos of this latter text Germain Grisez has argued that "Of course, in choosing, one seeks a
good loved for itself. In this sense, one always acts for an ultimate end-that is, an end not pursued as a
means to some ulterior end. But an ultimate end in this sense need not be the complete good of the
human person, as Thomas assumed when he tried to prove that one’s will cannot be directed
simultaneously to two or more ultimate ends" [Grisez’s citation is then to ST I-II, q. 1, a. 5].[xxiii] But
it is not the case that Aquinas didn’t understand that there could be many final ends, each one
imperfectly fulfilling of the human person. It is rather that he understood these less-than-absolutely
final ends as existing in a duplex ordo to one another and to an absolutely ultimate end, in the absence
of which no pursuit of any final end would ever occur. For what gets human action up and going is the
pursuit of complete fulfillment of desire.
Human happiness is thus best defined as a unity in multiplicity, and this in more than one sense. As
governed by the precepts of the natural law, our pursuit of happiness is always for something that is,
in some sense, common. But as there are degrees of finality or perfection in goods in general, so there
will be degrees of perfection in common good. There is only one common good that most perfectly
satisfies the criteria of human happiness, and that is, strictly speaking, God himself. Accordingly, in
the most perfect sense happiness is union with God in the next life; far less perfectly, it is
contemplation of God in this life. But because we are not angels but embodied souls, this latter,
mundane happiness must include the exercise of the moral and artistic virtues as ordered to the
happiness of contemplation. This brings out the fact that a more perfect sense of happiness always
subsumes that below it: all the happiness we seek in natural goods is taken up into and perfected in
God[xxiv]; while all the happiness we seek in the practice of moral and artistic virtue is taken up into
and perfected in the life of contemplation.
Observations such as these customarily elicit two objections. The first objection I shall call, borrowing
a phrase from Russell Pannier, the "personal destinies" objection. Does this objective hierarchy of
goods leave any place for personal predilection and native talent in determining one’s happiness?
What the good obliges me to do is structure my commitments according to the hierarchical framework
of goods, rules and virtues. However, the basic framework can be instantiated, can be determined by
the judgment of prudence, in myriad ways. I may possess neither the desire, talent nor opportunity to
be a statesman, but justice will still be a good that I am bound to pursue. I may have neither the talent
nor opportunity to study philosophy in a rigorous way, but I can still make contemplative activity the
highest and best good that I pursue, perhaps by reflection on works of art, or conversations with
friends, or by prayer. This solution to the problem does not deny-indeed, it does everything to affirm-a
hierarchy of offices and duties that is not the production of individual choice. The wider a common
good a particular office or duty looks after, the more divine-like and honorable it is.[xxv] Yet again,
this does not mean that the lives of those who occupy lower offices are diminished. They are perfect
in their own order, and in their perfection make a necessary contribution to the common good of the
whole.
But what then of the related, "domination" objection? If contemplation and religious observance are
the best goods, why shouldn’t I spend all my time with them? To answer this we need to recall that
higher goods in a hierarchy do not undermine the intrinsic goodness of the goods subordinate to them.
My obligation to honor my parents, for instance, binds me to the goods of family life in a way that is
constitutive of my happiness. My other obligation to honor God in the practice of the virtue of religion
is not a rival to this obligation, even while it remains the more important obligation. The natural law
in no way requires that I pursue religious acts to the exclusion of all other obligations. The natural law
only demands that the religious obligation is given foremost respect in the tailoring of the hierarchy to
my individual circumstances. In fact, it would be contrary to the proper understanding of my religious
obligation if I did not understand the way in which it depends upon my lower obligations. The
honoring of parents and the enjoyment of the goods of family life not only have their own
requirements, but the intellectual and moral education one receives in participating in these goods is
required if the religious good is to be fully achieved.

Particular Obligations

None of this discussion has yet identified any particular obligations. So in this final section I
want to consider a bit more fully how the hierarchy I have been discussing issues in particular
obligations, and in particular, I want to look at three obligations that arise at different levels of
specificity in the order of practical reason.
Begin with the example of the golfer torn between his golf game and saving a drowning child.
George’s contention is that there is a moral rule that clearly says what one must do in such
circumstances, and that rule is the Golden Rule. But what is the nature of this rule? What justifies it?
George invokes it without explanation in the essay concerned with this golfing example. Finnis says
more, at least about the rule itself: "The principle of love of neighbor-as-self," he argues, "and its
specification in the Golden Rule, immediately capture one element in.integral directiveness: the basic
goods are goods for any human being, and I must have a reason for preferring their instantiation in my
own or my friends’ existence." But why doesn’t our golfer have a reason to prefer his life, and
his golf, to that of his neighbor? The reason can only be explained in terms of hierarchy, and in the
following way.
It is not at all contrary to my pursuit of a hierarchy of common goods to pursue some goods that are
not in any immediate sense shared with the other members of my community. To go back again to the
first lectio of the Commentary on the Ethics, Aquinas says that the whole which the polity or family
constitutes has only a unity of order (as opposed to an absolute unity of composition, conjunction or
continuity).[xxvi] A family or polity is not a substance in the strictest sense, where every operation of
a part is necessarily an operation of the whole. As a unity only of ordered parts, existing in "for-the-
sake-of" relationships, one member of the order may have an operation that is not the operation of the
whole, just as a soldier may have an activity (a furlough) that does not belong to the army as a whole.
Nonetheless, the activities of the individual members of a unity of order are necessarily subordinated
to the good of the whole. The soldier’s furlough is ultimately for the sake of the army’s victory over
the enemy, insofar as the furlough refreshes the soldier for his duties. Indeed, the good of the whole
demands that at times an individual seek a personal good both for his sake and for the sake of the
whole. In the same way, our golfer’s leisurely round is both for his sake and for the sake of his
common pursuits with other members of his family and of his polity. But in those circumstances
where a necessary feature of the common good is in jeopardy, as when a fellow citizen’s life is in
danger, a clear principle is invoked: the inferior, individual good must be abandoned for the sake of
the higher, common good.
This golfing example deals with a moral principle at practical reason’s highest level of generality, the
principle that obliges us to love others as we love ourselves based upon the hierarchy of individual to
common goods.[xxvii] Let’s look now at another obligation, this one from practical reason’s middle
range. In the argument against polygamy that we find in the Supplement to the Summa, Aquinas sets
down this principle: "Whatever renders an action improprotionate to the end which nature intends by a
certain work, is said to be contrary to the natural law."[xxviii] Aquinas then distinguishes that an
action may be improportionate either to the principal or secondary end of an action. First, on account
of something which wholly hinders the end, as a very great deficiency in eating hinders both the
health of the body (the primary end of eating), and the ability to conduct our business (the secondary
end of eating). Secondly, an act may be improportionate to either the primary or secondary end of an
action by making its attainment difficult, or less satisfactory. I take this distinction to be a restatement
of what we read at Prima secundae q. 99, article 1: our obligations under natural law bind us to
whatever is absolutely necessary or expedient for the sake of the ends to which nature directs us. Any
action out of line with this necessity or expediency is improportionate to the end, and therefore illicit.
According to Aquinas, the principal end of marriage is procreation, and its secondary end is, in a
word, the bonum fides shared between the spouses. Marriage also has a third, sacramental end,
namely, the signification of the union between Christ and the Church.
Now when it comes to the question of polygamy, a plurality of wives in no way hinders or makes
inexpedient the primary end of marriage. A man can just as well beget children from one wife or
many. But it’s a different story when it comes to the secondary end of marriage, the bonum fides. A
plurality of wives, Aquinas says, while not wholly hindering the shared life of the spouses, hinders it
greatly, as a man cannot easily satisfy the requests of several wives, and because the sharing of many
in one office causes strife. And when it comes to the sacramental end of marriage, polygamy destroys
the signification altogether. So, polygamy as a means for the sake of the primary end of marriage is
not against the natural law, and clearly this conclusion arises out of the way in which the means of
polygamy is a perfectly suitable instrument for the begetting of children. But polygamy is against the
secondary principles of the natural law because it greatly hinders the secondary end of marriage. For
these reasons Aquinas concludes that polygamy both is and is not contrary to the natural law.
Interestingly, however, the case of polygamy also helps us round out the argument by providing an
example of where obligation arises out of the deliberations of prudence. In the succeeding article in
this question of the Supplement, Aquinas goes on to discuss whether polygamy was ever lawful.
Polygamy, he says, does not trespass against the first precepts of the natural law, because it does not
hinder the primary end of marriage. But again, it does trespass against the secondary precepts,
precepts that Aquinas says hold not always but in the majority of cases, because it greatly hinders the
secondary end of marriage. Aquinas affirms that this secondary precept is framed by God and even
written on the human heart, but that it was dispensed by God through an inward inspiration to the holy
patriarchs at a time when it was expedient to dispense with the secondary precept. Why? Because the
end of the primary precept, the begetting of children necessary for building up the kingdom of God,
was, at that time, of over-riding necessity. So here we see how the decisions of prudence, in this case
divine prudence, depend upon the discernment of hierarchy: the primary end of marriage regulating
the pursuit of the secondary end of marriage in circumstances where the primary end is in jeopardy.
The understanding, moreover, of the primary good’s being in jeopardy depends in turn upon seeing
how the primary end of marriage is for the sake of, and thus regulated by, religious observance.
Conclusion

In this essay I have depended upon some central texts of Aquinas on obligation in order to
show how the concept of a hierarchy of goods gives real direction to human choice. According to
Aquinas, obligation arises first of all out of the recognition of an intrinsically valuable good to which
we are naturally ordered, and secondly out of the recognition of means that either are necessary or
expedient to the attainment of that good. Hence obligation depends upon recognition of hierarchy
among goods.
Three features of this hierarchy have been particularly important for this discussion. First, that
hierarchy fundamentally consists in asymmetrical causal relationships, in which a lower good is for
the sake of a higher good in an efficient causal sense, but which also is regulated by that higher good
in regard to the whether and how of its pursuit. Second, that this hierarchy of for-the-sake-of
relationships culminates in an absolutely ultimate end that is not merely ultimate in an inclusivist
sense, but which gives overriding direction to human choice by being the best good that we desire.
Third, and perhaps most important for the debate with George, is the fact that in this hierarchy there is
a wide range of ultimate ends that manifest intrinsic value while still being in certain respects for the
sake of intrinsically more valuable ends, and most of all for the absolutely ultimate end. The
instrumental aspect of these goods is an integral part of their nature as goods, even though it is not the
only part of their nature. Still, when it comes to choices between these less-than-absolutely ultimate
ends, between what George calls basic goods, the order brought into being by their instrumental
relations is indeed what makes possible non-arbitrary direction for choice.

NOTES

------------------------------------
[i] Robert P. George, In Defense of the Natural Law (Oxford University Press, 1999), Chapter 2, note
125, pp. 81-82.
[ii] Ibid., p. 93.

[iii] Ibid., pp. 93-94.

[iv] Ibid., p. 98.

[v] "Invenitur autem duplex ordo in rebus. Unus quidem partium alicujus totius seu alicujus
multitudinis adinvicem, sicut partes domus adinvicem ordinantur. Alius est ordo rerum in finem. Et
hic ordo est principalior, quam primus. Nam, ut Philosophus dicit in undecimo Metaphysicorum, ordo
partium exercitus adinvicem, est propter ordinem totius exercitus ad ducem." In I Ethicorum, lectio 1,
no. 1.
[vi] See especially ST I-II q. 99, a. 1, and II-II q. 44, a. 1.

[vii] The incommensurability between what he calls "agent-relative" and "agent-neutral" reasons for
action is defended by Mark C. Murphy in Natural Law and Practical Rationality (Cambridge
University Press, 2001), esp. p. 186.
[viii] ST II-II q. 26, a. 1: "prius et posterius dicitur secundum relationem ad aliquod principium. Ordo
autem includit in se aliquem modus prius et posterius. Unde oportet quod ubicumque est aliquod
principium, sit etiam aliquis ordo.."
[ix] A problem discussed by Hittinger, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory, Chapter 2,
especially pp. 73ff.; and Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., "What is the End of the Human Person? The
Vision of God and Integral Human Fulfillment," in Luke Gormally, ed., Moral Truth and Moral
Tradition: Essays in Honor of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe (Dublin: Four Courts Press,
1994), pp. 68-96.
[x] Murphy, Natural Law and Practical Rationality, p. 192.
[xi] EN I.6 1096a17-23. Cf. In I Ethicorum, lectio 6, nn. 79-80. On this point I have learned from
Kevin L. Flannery, S.J., Acts Amid Precepts (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America
Press, 2001), Chapter 4. It is interesting to relate Aristotle’s argument to Aquinas’s analysis of the
goodness of the human act. The species, or substance, of a human act, according to Aquinas, is a
form/matter composite. This composite is considered formally in terms of the end (the object of the
interior act of the will), but materially in terms of the object of the exterior act. The circumstances of
the act accrue to the substance of the act as accidents of it. Thus in the human act there is an order of
priority and posteriority, the substance of the act being prior. See ST I-II, q. 18, a. 6 and q. 7, a. 3.,
[xii] Murphy, Natural Law and Practical Rationality, p. 192. Here Murphy also references John
Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, pp. 100-105. See also Russell Pannier, "Finnis and the
Commensurability of Goods," The New Scholasticism 61 (1987): 440-461, esp. 443. Unlike Pannier,
and for the reasons already given, I do not think it accurate to refer to a hierarchical ordering of goods
as a commensuration of those goods, except perhaps in a very loose sense.
[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] In I Ethicorum, lectio 1, no. 1.

[xv] Henry S. Richardson has a nice discussion of the way Aristotle uses counterfactuals in
distinguishing final ends from instrumental ends, as well as from final ends that are also instrumental
ends. See his Practical Reasoning About Final Ends (Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 53-57.
[xvi] Richard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton University Press, 1989), Chapter 4.
[xvii] In I Ethicorum, lectio 1, no. 27.

[xviii] This kind of argument is developed in Alasdair MacIntyre’s defense of a teleological, as

opposed to a functionalist, account of virtue in his "S(phrosun(: How a Virtue Can Become Socially
Disruptive," in Midwest Studies in Philosophy XIII (1988): pp. 1-11.
[xix] George, In Defense of the Natural Law, p. 96. See also Russell Hittinger, "After MacIntyre:
Natural Law Theory, Virtue Ethics, and Eudaimonia," International Philosophical
Quarterly (December 1989): pp. 449-461.
[xx] John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political and Legal Theory (Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 85-
86.
[xxi] Ibid., p. 108.

[xxii] These remarks can also be taken as a partial rebuttal of J. L. Ackrill’s inclusivist understanding
of Aristotle’s view of the good. See Ackrill’s "Aristotle on Eudaimonia," reprinted in Amélie Rorty,
ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1980).
[xxiii] Germain Grisez, The Way of the Lord Jesus, vol. I, Christian Moral Principles (Chicago:
Franciscan Herald Press, 1983), pp. 809-10, quoted and discussed in Ashley, "What is the End of the
Human Person? The Vision of God and Integral Human Fulfillment," pp. 68-69, especially.
[xxiv] It is interesting to note in this regard that for Aquinas even the moral virtues endure after this
life, albeit in their formal, rather than material nature. See ST I-II, q. 67, a. 1. Something analogous
holds with the intellectual virtues, including, I assume, the virtues of art (ST I-II, q. 67, a. 2).
[xxv] Cf. In I Ethicorum, lectio 2, no. 30.
[xxvi] Ibid., lectio 1, no. 5.

[xxvii] Key Thomistic texts concerning this principle are ST I-II q. 99, a. 1; q. 100, a. 3, ad 1, and a.
11.
[xxviii] ST, Supplement, q. 65, a. 1.
 NATURAL LAW AND THE
POSSIBILITY OF A GLOBAL
ETHICS

Edited by

MARK J. CHERRY

Saint Edward’s University,

Austin, Texas, U.S.A.

KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS

NEW YORK, BOSTON, DORDRECHT, LONDON, MOSCOW
 CHAPTER 6

DANIEL MCINERNY

NATURAL LAW AND CONFLICT

Though it appears that St. Augustine never did say, as has been so often attributed to
him, that pagan virtues are at best splendid vices,1 the claim itself is compelling,
inviting us to inquire whether the differences between Christian and various pagan
or secular ethics, are or are not irreducible in character. While not at all denying, for
example, certain general similarities between Christ and Socrates, we may
nonetheless be tempted, after all comparative work is finished, to declare with the
political theorist Harry Jaffa that “Jesus standing silent before his judges and
Socrates demanding a state pension as “retribution for his offense” present an
irreducible difference in human types” (Jaffa, 1979, 28). So it may well seem that
the conflict between Socratic magnanimity and Christian humility is one dramatic
instance of the more general phenomenon of incommensurability between rival
moral and political cultures.
The kind of inquiry I am proposing might then see itself as trying to discover
whether or not there is some impartial standpoint, independent of two or more
conflicting ethical viewpoints, from which one might adjudicate the conflicts
between them. For it would seem that without an appeal to such an impartial
standpoint, one is not capable of doing anything more than asserting his favored
viewpoint over others.2
For Catholics in particular this kind of inquiry has often been directed toward the
theory and tradition of natural law, especially as embodied in the thought of St.
Thomas Aquinas. For it is the natural law which, presumably, affords an impartial
perspective on conflicting viewpoints precisely because it is the nongainsayable
foundation upon which all moral and political cultures are built. The natural law thus
holds out the promise of what Bernard Williams has called an Archimedean point
for the “leveraging” of moral and political truth, one which is both available to our
natural lights and serves as the first orientation to our supernatural destiny. When it
comes to the conflict between magnanimity and humility, Aquinas’s own solution
evinces an explicitly theological reconciliation (ST II-II, Q 129, a 3, ad 4). The
virtuous Christian recognizes the qualities of his greatness which he possesses by
God’s gift, while at the same time he recognizes his defects due to his fallen nature.
But Aquinas’s theory of natural law would also seem to affirm that inquiry into the

89
Mark J. Cherry (ed.), Natural Law and the Possibility of a Global Ethics, 89—100.
© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
90 DANIEL MCINERNY

basis of this virtuous Christian’s character will yield a natural core which can be
philosophically defended against its secular rivals as the measure of human action
always and everywhere. How is such an inquiry to be conducted?

1. NATURAL LAW: PROSPECTS AND LIMITATIONS

Once again, the point of my turning to the Thomistic theory of natural law is to see
if this theory provides a set of nongainsayable precepts that are first in the order of
human practical cognition, and from which we will be able to find some rational
“leverage” as we look to adjudicate between conflicting cultural outlooks.
The nongainsayability of the precepts is crucial, for if the natural law precepts
themselves were able to be coherently denied — that is, if they were not so
absolutely first in the order of practical cognition that every other practical
consideration presupposed them — then the natural law precepts would be just as
much in need of some prior rational justification as the virtues (or goods or rules)
which are the subject of the ethical conflict we are trying to resolve.
However, the fact that the natural law precepts are first in the order of practical
cognition and therefore are nongainsayable is not the first thing that should be said
about the Thomistic theory of natural law I am considering.3
When Aquinas defines the natural law in question 90 of the Prima secundae of
his Summa Theologiae, the emphasis is decidedly upon the natural law as a
theological doctrine. Aquinas makes clear that the natural law is nothing other than
the eternal law, which is none other than God’s providence, as it is participated by
human nature (ST, I-II, Q 91, a 1). Only in its aspect as an effect in the creature is
the natural law, in question 94 of the Prima secundae, considered by Aquinas as
something which is first in the order of human practical cognition. In its nature, the
natural law is a rule of reason formed in the very mind of God. This distinction is
important because without a clear emphasis upon the natural law as a theological
doctrine it is all too tempting to construe the natural law as a set of precepts which
the human mind in some way generates. As Russell Hittinger has written, “The fact
that we first perceive ourselves discovering or grasping a rule of action does not
mean that the human mind is first in the causal order, or in the ultimate order of
being” (1999, 102). When it comes to natural law, God is first in the causal order, in
the order of being, while our nongainsayable knowledge of the natural law precepts
is first in the order of our discovery, of human practical cognition.
Yet this emphasis upon the theological underpinnings of natural law would seem
to dampen our hope that natural law could serve as an impartial standard by which
rationally to resolve ethical conflict. The notions of a providential God who
promulgates His rules of reason through the inclinations of human nature presuppose
much knowledge of God that is contestable — not the least of which being the very
notion of God’s existence. But here we must underscore that quoadnos, from the
point of view of human practical cognition, it is not necessary to grasp the existence
of a providential God who promulgates His rules of reason through the inclinations
of human nature in order to grasp the nongainsayable first precepts of practical
reason. I can grasp the reasonableness of some practical rule without understanding
 NATURAL LAW AND CONFLICT 91

the cause of that rule. This being said, even our most rudimentary grasp of the
natural law precepts is a grasp of something which is an extrinsic cause of human
acts, which in some sense orders the powers of our nature to pursue some good.4 By
this I mean, following Aquinas, that for me to judge that it is best for me to nourish
myself now in order to maintain my existence, as well as perhaps to enjoy social
goods with family and friends, is the same as to acknowledge that my human powers
are ruled by something extrinsic to them and binding them. Alasdair MacIntyre has
argued, against Scotus’s understanding of the relationships between natural law,
obligation, and divine command, that
to know that God commands those precepts of the natural law, in obedience to which
one’s good is to be realized, gives one no further, additional reason for obedience to
those precepts, except insofar as our knowledge of God’s unqualified goodness and
omniscience gives us reasons — as it does — for holding his judgments of our good, as
promulgated in the Old and New Laws, to be superior to our own (1990, 154).5

Thus even in the order of human practical cognition our first grasp of the good is of
something which extrinsically binds us, whether we recognize ourselves as being
bound by a providential divine lawgiver or not. Two further features of our grasp of
the natural law precepts are important to note. First, the picture of human fulfillment
toward which the natural law precepts direct us is grasped by us as a fundamental
unity. As Aquinas argues, Aristotle’s proof at Physics VIII for the unmoved mover
has important implications for human action (ST I-II, Q 1, a 4). This is due to the
fact that ends or goods are movers, moving human desire. According to Aquinas, the
movers in the kosmos, which include the ends which human agents pursue, form a
network of necessary relations, a per se order, governed by a first unmoved mover.
Without an ultimate term of motion, an ultimate end, the motion of the other parts of
the order cannot ever be fully explained. This is the reason why Aquinas can say that
our first understanding of the good is of a unity: because our first understanding of
the good is always most fundamentally of something that is the ultimate term of our
desire. This also explains what Aquinas means by the ratio boni. The “notion of
goodness” is principally found in the ultimate end, but also in those things which
“tend to” the ultimate end, because the beginning of something is always ordered to
its completion.6 Something is called good, falls under the ratio boni, either because
it is the ultimate end or is ordered to the ultimate end.
This point is important because it entails that any description of the human good
as a mere assortment of heterogeneous and incommensurable values fundamentally
misconstrues the very notion of “goodness.” The “good” by definition indicates
order, not incommensurability. This is not to say that there is just one value — not
even for Aquinas the love of God — which practical reason “sums” whenever it has
to decide between two or more competing considerations. Aquinas would agree that
the human good is made up of many different items of intrinsic value that are
irreducible to one another in terms of their character as goods. But Aquinas would
go yet further by saying that items of intrinsic value can still be ordered one to
another, just as we find him doing when he first lays down the precepts of the
natural law at Q 94, a 2 of the Prima secundae. There Aquinas writes that “all things
to which man has a natural inclination, reason naturally apprehends as good, and
consequently as things to be pursued, and their contraries as evil and things to be
92 DANIEL MCINERNY

avoided. Therefore,” he concludes, “according to the order of natural inclinations, is

the order of the precepts of the natural law” (ST I-II, Q 94, a 2). Hence the second
important feature to note of our grasp of the first natural law precepts is that even
this fundamental grasp manifests an order, a hierarchy of goods culminating in one,
best good that is absolutely first. The situation of an intrinsically valuable good in
such a hierarchy, moreover, subordinated to higher goods, does not mean that its
intrinsic value is compromised. It is rather to say, along with Aristotle, that its value
is twofold: both for itself and for the sake of something else (Nicomachean Ethics I.
7 1097a26ff.).
With this account of our grasp of the natural law precepts, has Aquinas’s natural
law theory provided us with sufficient resources to overcome the problem raised at
the outset, and thus to find in the natural law the kind of impartial standard we need
in order to resolve cross-cultural ethical conflict? By way of approaching this
question, consider the precept governing the appropriate assessment of our self-
worth, a precept ordered, for Aquinas, to the development of both the virtues of
magnanimity and humility. Presumably, this precept belongs to that third level of
natural inclination which is appropriate to human beings as rational animals.
Presumably, too, it is a precept nested within the hierarchy of precepts which govern
all the inclinations of human nature, culminating in our natural desire to know the
truth, especially about God. Prescinding from education, habituation, and other
forms of moral development which endeavor to heed the precept and instill virtue,
the precept’s guidance is exceedingly general. At this level, all one can really say
about the genuinely appropriate assessment of self-worth is that it must have
something to do with obedience to the rest of the precepts of the natural law —
pursuing what they enjoin us to pursue, avoiding what they enjoin us to avoid. This
very general guidance, however, is the basis for our correctly founding our sense of
self-worth upon our development in virtue (rather than, say, some good of fortune
like honor). Nonetheless, this general guidance provided by the precept does not
seem sufficient to help us adjudicate between different, even incommensurable,
conceptions of virtue. We return with Harry Jaffa to the problem of the pride of
Socrates seeming to conflict with the humility of Christ. Accordingly, a possible
conclusion we have to consider, at this stage of the argument, is that the first
precepts of the natural law simply do not provide sufficient resources to overcome
cross-cultural ethical conflict.

2. ANALOGY AND CULTURAL CONFLICT

In a comparative study of the moral theories of Aquinas and Mencius, an early

Confucian of the fourth-century B.C., Lee Yearley has offered an interpretation of
how resolution of conflict between cultures might work, one which, importantly,
does not appeal to Aquinas’s theory of natural law (1990). Yearley, in fact, proposes
that resolution of cross-cultural ethical conflict only becomes possible once we
eschew such robust theoretical entities as Thomistic natural law theory. So, while
my account of Thomistic natural law theory seems to point us toward the conclusion
that the guidance of the first precepts is too “thin” to help resolve ethical conflict,
 NATURAL LAW AND CONFLICT 93

Yearley challenges my project with the claim that the first precepts of the natural
law are too “thick” to do so, that is, they carry with them theoretical commitments
which are incommensurable with the theoretical commitments of a variety of other
ethical viewpoints.
For Yearley, in order to do what he calls the comparative philosophy of religions,
one must strike a media via between, on the one hand, the “idolatry” of univocity —
i.e., seeing rival moral and political conceptions only in terms taken from one’s own
ethical tradition — and, on the other hand, the despair of equivocity, seeing the
differences between rival cultures so starkly that one gives up hope of trying to
compare them. One strikes this middle way by avoiding both the level of primary
ethical theory and that of secondary ethical theory. One wants to avoid the level of
primary ethical theory simply because on this level there is already a fair degree of
universality. Theory on this level reflects “people’s ability to cope with the normal
problems the world presents,” and the explanations it provides allows people “to
predict, plan, and thereby often control important aspects of life” (1990, 176). Thus
the ability to predict and adapt to, say, changes in the weather, is “obviously
truthful” and will appeal cross-culturally without much controversy (1990, 176).
Agreement on the level of primary theory, in short, is readily available but not much
help in assessing differing conceptions of far more substantial notions, such as
virtues.
Secondary theories come into play, according to Yearley, when some distinctive,
peculiar, or distressing occurrence or set of occurrences disrupts our ability to
employ our primary theories. Secondary theories, for example, “develop ideas about
a realm of powers or class of beings, like benevolent spirits, that clearly differ from
evident phenomena to explain or interpret those extraordinary, or even normal,
matters that primary theories cannot deal with adequately” (1990, 176).
It is because secondary theories vary so substantially from culture to culture that
Yearley does not look for the success of his comparative project at this level. He
thus distinguishes a new level between primary and secondary theory: practical
theory. When Aquinas discusses the fear of life-threatening situations, for example,
he does not simply see it, in Yearley’s phrase, as an “implacable, unrefinable part of
human character” (1990, 177). He understands this fear in the light of a practical
theory involving complex interrelationships between reason, passion, and habit,
which lead him to defend a response to fearful situations very different from that
held by most people in their primary theory. What is so beneficial about this level of
Aquinas’s analysis of courage, according to Yearley, is that it is so neatly detachable
from troublesome notions in his secondary theory, such as natural law and grace.
And it is here, when the practical theory of a thinker has been distinguished and
detached from his primary and secondary theory, that what Yearley terms the
analogical imagination goes to work. Yearley finds a guide for such analogical
imagining in Aquinas himself, as in Aquinas’s plotting of the analogical relation
between pagan and Christian notions of self-worth. No doubt, Yearley avers, there
are “strains between Aristotle’s magnanimity and St. Paul’s humility that Aquinas
either fails to highlight or slides over too easily” (1990, 186). But Yearley favorably
cites Aquinas’s analogical use of terms like “magnanimity” and “humility” when
comparing Aristotle and St. Paul. Through this use we see “how some notion of a
94 DANIEL MCINERNY

higher good must be revered by the magnanimous man and recognize how self-
confidence and a sense of personal nobility may not only fit with humility but even
be a necessary part of it” (1990, 187).
Yearley’s assessment here is surely more attractive to the Thomist than that of
Harry Jaffa, who takes Aquinas’s comment on the chapter on magnanimity at IV.3
of the Nicomachean Ethics as hardly more than a scholastic soft-shoe around the
incommensurability between Christianity and this pagan virtue (Jaffa, 1979, Chapter
6). But still, one desires greater clarity on what Yearley is appreciating in
commenting favorably on Aquinas’s analogical imagination. For any analogy or
comparison ultimately takes its meaning from the kind of proportion existing among
quantities. Analogy implies measurement. So what, we may ask, is the “scale” that
Yearley is using when he recognizes that self-confidence and a sense of personal
nobility can fit with humility? The metaphor of the scale is meant to indicate a
standard by which we are to ascertain the relevant similarities and differences
between competing viewpoints. If I examine Amish and Spartan conceptions of
courage, for example, hoping to plot analogies between them, then I need to know
on what basis I will or will not exclude Amish pacifism or Spartan militarism from
my consideration. If I decide to consign these notions to their respective secondary
theories, what am I left with? It would seem I am left with an analogical conception
of courage too thin to be helpful, at least when it comes to resolving cross-cultural
ethical conflict. “Fight for what you believe in and be prepared to suffer for it” is a
conception of courage at home in any number of conflicting ethical viewpoints. On
the question of how to discern the relevant similarities and differences between
competing conceptions of a virtue or any other value, Yearley is at his most elusive
and unsatisfying. While claiming he is searching for the true account of courage, he
also says that the locus of that comparison “must exist in the scholar’s mind and not
in the objects studied” (1990, 198). The comparison is thus “an imaginative
construction”; the theorist manipulates the different and the common, choosing
“which to highlight and which to neglect” and when to relate them (1990, 199). The
ordering power of the analogical imagination is for Yearley akin to the literary
imagination; for here too one needs to suspend normal ways of conceiving of human
action and learn how to inhabit a wholly different world of one’s own creation
(1990, 202). In describing the person of the requisite analogical imagination Yearley
invokes a version of the “good person” criterion of Aristotle’s Ethics, though he
insists that such a person’s sensibilities and judgments will be closer to the aesthetic
than the ethical (1990, 202). I can agree with Yearley that some understanding of
analogical reasoning is required for the evaluation of virtues from rival ethical
systems; and, moreover, that a significant role in such evaluation must be played by
the imagination’s ability to inhabit the ethos of rival systems (though it may be that,
like Aquinas, one is already living in one of the contending systems; see MacIntyre,
1990, Chapter 5). But it seems that just what is required to make such sympathy
fruitful in discerning relevant similarities and differences between rival viewpoints is
the recognition that secondary theory permeates every level of an ethical view. It is
simply not possible to think accurately about Amish resolve without understanding
how it is a function of a pacifist theory drawn from a certain understanding of
Christianity. Something similar can be said for Spartan courage, which reposes upon
 NATURAL LAW AND CONFLICT 95

a particular understanding of the political dimension of the human person. Yearley’s

attempt to separate secondary from practical theory is nothing less than a sundering
of the integral bond between the theoretical and practical orders in human action.
This is not to say that the influence of what Yearley calls secondary theory on
practical theory and even primary theory is in the form of fully-articulated theory.
Our cognition of the first precepts of the natural law is not the expression of a theory
in this sense, though it is important to note that this cognition is a speculation upon
the good, however rudimentary, and in fact is continuous with the more rigorous
articulation of that cognition such as we find at Summa Theologiae, I-II Q 94, a 2.
To give Yearley his due, he pronounces himself on guard against the temptation
to flatten the account of a thinker by prescinding from his secondary theory (1990,
179). His antidote, however, is simply for the theorist to remain vigilant. But what it
means to remain vigilant in not flattening an account of a thinker when the very
point of Yearley’s analogical exercise is to prescind from secondary theory is not
clear. It has something to do with remaining attentive to what is analogical between
conflicting theories, which presumably is to remain attentive enough to the
secondary levels of the theories in question (179).
But at the same time, how can it be, as I suggested above, that what Yearley calls
secondary theory is the key to assessing the relevant similarities and differences
between rival ethical viewpoints? Doesn’t the appeal to secondary theory simply
send us back to the problem of incommensurability? Once again, on my own
account of Thomistic natural law theory, the first precepts do not seem of
themselves to have the resources to resolve such conflict. So how can it be that the
natural law, or any other aspect of Aquinas’s secondary moral and political theory,
can help us with our problem? Perhaps all we have left is recourse to something at
least like what Yearley calls practical theory?

3. DIALECTIC AND THE NATURAL LAW

At this stage of the argument it is necessary to take a closer look at how Aristotle
and Aquinas address a specific problem of conflict between ethical viewpoints, an
example of which is found in Aristotle’s dialectical inquiry into the nature of
eudaimonia, human happiness, in Book I, Chapters 4-8, of the Nicomachean Ethics,
coupled with Aquinas’s comment upon it. The example is instructive because it
concerns the theoretical origins of moral inquiry and, therefore, serves as an
illustration of how resolution of conflict between entire ethical viewpoints gets
started.
But why do I call Aristotle’s inquiry into eudaimonia an inquiry into conflicting
ethical viewpoints, and how can an Aristotelian inquiry pertain to a discussion of
Aquinas’s natural law theory?
In answer to the first question, though I grant that Aristotle casts the argument
more in terms of individual desires for happiness, the inquiry can also be applied to
the problem of conflict across entire ethical theories or cultures. Aquinas says that
“Because man is most strongly influenced by the last end, it is necessary that types
of life be distinguished according to the diversity of the ultimate end” (In I
96 DANIEL MCINERNY

Ethicorum, lectio 5, no. 58). And if types of life, then also types of culture. In the
dialectical examination of the candidacies of virtue, honor, pleasure and wealth for
the ultimate end, we can see entire ethical viewpoints, ancient, medieval, modern
and contemporary, as being represented insofar as entire viewpoints are ordered to
these ends.
In regard to the second question, while I in no way want to impute to Aristotle
Aquinas’s natural law theory, I do want to argue that there is significant overlap in
their respective discussions of to agathon and lex to justify the claim that they are
mapping the same theoretical terrain. This goes back to the idea that our
understanding that something is best for us and should be pursued is in no need of
the further information that God commands us to pursue it, except in the ways
earlier specified.
For Aristotle and Aquinas, then, dialectical inquiry begins with the collection of
endoxa, the reputable opinions about a given topic, and through a critical
examination of these attempts to discover a first principle which is not simply
opined or supposed — in Plato’s idiom, is unhypothetical — and which saves what
is best in the endoxa while leaving aside all that hitherto had barred them from
reconciliation. Properly speaking, however, dialectical inquiry remains probable in
character, all the way down to its conclusions. Thus, in order to manifest an
unhypothetical first principle, something more than a dialectical argument is
required. What is needed is a grasp of self-evident principle which, along with the
probable results of dialectical inquiry, enables us to articulate the nature of the topic
in question, a nature which then serves as the standard by which we determine what
is genuinely salvageable in the endoxa initially examined. In the inquiry into human
happiness, I contend, this grasp of self-evident principle is the same as our grasp of
the first precepts of the natural law.
In Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, the dialectical inquiry into human
happiness begins with hardly more than a name, eudaimonia, for that which human
beings take to be their ultimate end. To transpose this into a Thomistic idiom, every
human being grasps the ratio boni, the notion that there is something which totally
satisfies his or her desire for good. Yet there is a variety of different understandings
of what the ultimate end consists in. In Chapter 5 of Nicomachean Ethics I, Aristotle
pursues dialectical arguments by which he eliminates virtue, honor, pleasure and
wealth as candidates for human happiness. That is, he uses other reputable opinions
about happiness to undermine the candidacies of these goods. Honor, for example,
depends upon the actions of those who confer it rather than in the person honored.
But we think happiness is something that more than anything else is proper to
human agents and not easily taken away. Thus happiness does not consist in honor
(Nicomachean Ethics I.5 1095b22-26; and In I Ethicorum, lectio 5, nos. 62-64).
Although this dialectical conclusion points the way toward the articulation of the
true nature of happiness, it nevertheless remains probable in character, due to the
probable character of the premises of the argument. What is needed is a grasp of
self-evident principle by which we will able to “leverage” an argument about the
true nature of happiness and resolve the apparently irreducible differences between
the candidates for happiness. And this is just what we find Aristotle discussing at
Nicomachean Ethics I.7, right after he finishes the dialectical examination of
 NATURAL LAW AND CONFLICT 97

opinions.
As Aquinas puts it, Aristotle begins Nicomachean Ethics I.7 by proposing
“certain common notions and conditions of happiness that are obvious to nearly
everyone.”7 The first is the fact already mentioned, that whatever else the ultimate
end may turn out to be, it is something absolutely ultimate (this is Aristotle’s
teleiotaton good). Though thin in its substance, this criterion is substantial enough
definitively to rule out certain candidates for happiness, such as wealth, from the
running. Wealth is always pursued for the sake of something else, and so it fails, on
its own terms, to satisfy the most basic criterion of human fulfillment. A second
important criterion is the notion of self-sufficiency (autarkeia), which also belongs
to the very notion of ultimate end. Whatever else human fulfillment may turn out to
be, we know that it will contain within itself everything necessary for the sake of
fulfillment, thus making us sufficient to ourselves in regard to our happiness.
Although Aquinas never refers to the natural law in his comment on this text of
Aristotle, my claim is that these two criteria, finality and self-sufficiency, are from
Aquinas’s point of view part and parcel of our cognition of the first precepts of the
natural law. As I discussed earlier, the notion of an absolutely ultimate end is
embedded within our fundamental grasp of the hierarchical order of the first
precepts. The criterion of self-sufficiency, too, is embedded within our grasp of
these precepts. For at each level of natural inclination our rational nature directs us
toward goods which render us more and more sufficient unto ourselves. At the level
of inclination which we share with all substances, we are directed to preserve
ourselves in existence — the sine qua non of any possibility of self-sufficiency. At
the level of inclination which we share with other animals, we are inclined to family
and other social goods, which provide us with the nurturing, education and
companionship by which we are able to mature into ever greater degrees of self-
sufficient activity. Finally, at the level of inclination which we possess as rational
animals, we are directed ultimately to those intellectual activities by which we are
most of all able to contain within ourselves the resources of our happiness. It is
interesting to reflect upon the fact that self-sufficiency is not understood by either
Aristotle or Aquinas as a mode of isolation from community. Community, in fact, is
what makes self-sufficiency possible and allows it to be exercised. The natural law
always directs our inclinations to common goods, and in so doing it enables us to
achieve, through the various aspects of common life with others, the self-sufficiency
so necessary to virtuous action.8
A complete discussion of Nicomachean Ethics I.7 would reveal how the criteria
of finality and self-sufficiency help Aristotle, through his famous ergon or
“function” argument, assess the nature of happiness as an activity of soul in accord
with virtue. The criteria enable Aristotle to move beyond the merely probable
conclusions of dialectical inquiry and articulate a nature, what I called earlier an
unhypothetical first principle, which provides him with a standard of truth by which
to judge what is genuinely salvageable in the reputable opinions about happiness.
Accordingly, we find Aristotle at Nicomachean Ethics I.8 confirming his definition
of happiness, as Aquinas describes it, by returning to the reputable opinions and
showing how his definition saves what is best in them.9
With the definition of happiness in hand, as Aristotle and Aquinas go on to show
98 DANIEL MCINERNY

us, inquiry proceeds toward the natures of the individual virtues. Knowing that
happiness must be an activity of soul in accord with virtue, and with the endoxa
pertaining to the individual virtues at hand, we are in position to decide the truth
about varying conceptions of courage or magnanimity or humility, and thus attain
the measure against which relevant similarities and differences between these
varying conceptions are to be assessed.

4. CONCLUSION

How does this appeal to the natural law differ, however, from the seemingly
unsuccessful appeal I considered at an earlier stage of the argument, where it seemed
the content of the first precepts of the natural law was too thin to be helpful? Well,
as I have just argued, certain criteria embedded in our natural inclination toward an
ultimate end do in fact, even in their “thinness,” play a substantially directive role in
determining the nature of human happiness. At this most general level of inquiry
into the human good, because we are dealing with an absolutely first principle which
cannot be coherently gainsaid, the natural law precepts do real work. But it does not
take long for the diversity of human opinions about happiness, and about the various
goods, rules and virtues which constitute that happiness, to come to the fore. So does
the natural law become very quickly useless? On the one hand, while in the face of
rival opinions and the conflicts which they generate a direct appeal to natural law
precepts is usually not enough to resolve the problems, on the other hand the natural
law precepts, insofar as inquiry successfully builds upon their foundation in both its
dialectical and non-dialectical modes, do play a role in resolving cross-cultural
ethical conflict.
In light of this conclusion, we can further understand Aristotle and Aquinas as
rejecting any claim for the absolutely irreducible difference between ethical
viewpoints. Aristotle’s definition of eudaimonia, for example, resolves conflicts
between seeming incommensurables by serving as a standard which is both impartial
between conflicting opinions and partial to them all. It is impartial insofar as the
self-evident principles which inform it enable the definition to transcend the
opinions in conflict. But the definition is also dependent upon the reputable opinions
in conflict insofar as resources for the construction of the definition, and most
importantly the criteria of finality and self-sufficiency, are bound up with each one
of the conflicting opinions as nongainsayable characteristics of the meaning of
human fulfillment. It is crucial to underscore, however, that the definition does not
commensurate the opinions in the hard sense of reducing all value to a single
standard. The plurality and heterogeneity of the human good is preserved, even as
the “parts” become ordered to each other and to the ultimate end.10
Finally, we can note that Aristotle’s and Aquinas’s contributions to the problem
of resolving cross-cultural conflict avoid the weaknesses indicated in Yearley’s
analogical method. Of foremost importance, Aristotle and Aquinas affirm the need
for articulating, both through dialectical and non-dialectical modes of inquiry, an
unhypothetical principle which serves as the criterion of assessment of competing
opinions. Without such a principle, we are simply lacking reasons for plotting the
 NATURAL LAW AND CONFLICT 99

analogies we do. Secondly, we have seen how in the inquiry into happiness,
knowledge of the first precepts of the natural law, part of what Yearley calls
Aquinas’s secondary theory, is in fact integrated into the search from the very
beginning. Knowledge of the natural law, in other words, is at play all the way down
to the ground of our practical thinking, even down to what Yearley calls primary
theory. Now, if Yearley’s claim is that Aquinas’s secondary theory vis-à-vis the
natural law does not enter the inquiry as fully-articulated theory, then his point is
taken. But natural law theory is bound up with the inquiry into happiness, quoadnos,
as the self-evident criteria for the determination of the happiness we human beings
seek.

Senior Research Associate

Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture
Notre Dame, Indiana

NOTES
1
I depend here upon T.H. Irwin, “Splendid vices? Augustine for and against pagan virtues” (1999, 106,
note 2).
2
For more on this point see Alasdair MacIntyre’s essay, “Relativism, power and philosophy” (1987,
especially 396-397): “I am claiming that it is only in those forms of human relationship in which it is
possible to appeal to impersonal standards of judgment, neutral between competing claims and
affording the best type of rational justification both relevant and available, that the possibility opens
up of unmasking and dethroning arbitrary exercises of power, tyrannical power within communities
and imperialist power between communities.”
3
At this stage of the argument I am especially indebted to Russell Hittinger’s essay, ‘Veritatis Splendor
and the theology of natural law’ (1999, 97-128).
4
Law for Aquinas is by definition an extrinsic cause of human acts. See ST I–II, Q 90, prologus.
5
MacIntyre continues: “The ‘ought’ of ‘One ought to obey God’ is the same ‘ought’ as the ‘ought’ of
‘To do so and so is the good such a one; so such a one ought to do so and so’—the same ‘ought,’ that
is, as the ‘ought’ of practical reasoning” (1990, 154).
6
(ST I-II, Q 1, a 6): “semper inchoatio alicuius ordinatur ad consummationem ipsius.” On this point, I
have learned from Ralph McInerny’s essay, “Grisez and Thomism” (2000).
7
Nicomachean Ethics I.7 1097a23-1097b21; and In I Ethicorum, lectio 9, no. 103: “Primo proponit
quasdam rationes communes et conditiones felicitates, quae quasi omnibus sunt manifestae.”
8
Aquinas’s definition of law includes the orientation to the common good. ST I-II Q 90, a 2. I am
grateful to Russell Hittinger for reminding me of the natural law’s direction to the common good at
every level of our natural inclination. See, for example, (Hittinger, 1999, 103).
9
In I Ethicorum, lectiones 12-13.
10
On the question of order see In I Ethicorum, lectio 1, no. 1.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hittinger, R. (1999). “Veritatis Splendor and the theology of natural law.” In: J.A. DiNoia, O.P. and
Romanus Cessario, O.P. (Eds.), Veritatis Splendor and the Renewal of Moral Theology. Chicago:
Scepter Publishers, Our Sunday Visitor, Inc., and Midwest Theological Forum.
Irwin, T.H. (1999). ‘Splendid vices? Augustine for and against pagan virtues,’ Medieval Philosophy and
Theology 8, 105-128.
Jaffa, H. V. (1979). Thomism and Aristotelianism. Westport: Greenwood Press Publishers.
MacIntyre, A. (1987). “Relativism, power and philosophy.” In: K. Baynes, J. Bohman and T. McCarthy
(Eds.), After Philosophy: End or Transformation? Cambridge: MIT University Press.
100 DANIEL MCINERNY

MacIntyre, A. (1990). Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press.
McInerny, R. (2000). “Grisez and Thomism.” In: N. Biggar and R. Black (Eds.), The Revival of Natural
Law: Philosophical, Theological and Ethical Responses to the Finnis-Grisez School. Burlington:
Ashgate.
Yearley, L. (1990). Mencius and Aquinas: Theories of Virtue and Conceptions of Courage. Albany: State
University of New York Press.
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Recovering Nature
Essays in Natural Philosophy, Ethics, and Metaphysics
in Honor of Ralph McInerny

Edited by
Thomas Hibbs and John O'Callaghan

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7
Deliberation about Final Ends:
Thomistic Considerations
Daniel McInerny
Among the orthodoxies of recent interpretation of Aristotle's ethics is the claim that deliberation must include final
ends within its scope. 1 Understood in this way, Aristotle's account of deliberation has been thought to diverge
from that of Aquinas, who traditionally has been interpreted as limiting the scope of deliberation to the
instrumental means to final endsor, as some have held, to the one final end of the Beatific Vision. On this issue at
least, Aquinas is in modern eyes a heterodox Aristotelian. Yet the arguments of Aristotle's modern interpreters are
compelling ones, and so it is not surprising that they have eventually exerted their influence on readers of
Aquinas.2 Now it is claimed that Aquinas himself holds what I shall be calling the broad, as opposed to the
narrow, view of deliberation. The point of this chapter is to evaluate what reasons there are for making this
attribution.
The impetus toward the broad view of deliberation among recent commentators on Aristotle was taken in large part
from both an appreciation of and a desire to correct the work of D. J. Allan.3 While Allan was congratulated for
dissociating Aristotle from a crude technocratic theory of practical reason, he nevertheless was criticized by David
Wiggins for not going far enough in discerning the underlying unity of Aristotle's account as it is presented in
Books III, VI, and VII of the Nicomachean Ethics. While Allan saw Aristotle torn between the basic means-end
account of deliberation and a more nuanced, rule-case account, Wiggins argued for a unified understanding based
upon a reinterpretation of the logic of deliberation.4
That reinterpretation begins with a disentangling of two "for the sake of" relations which Wiggins thinks Aristotle
never sufficiently pauses to distinguish. The first is the relation X bears to Y when X is efficacious in bringing
about Y. This is the basic means-end or instrumental relation between goods or ends. But there is also the relation
X bears to Y when the existence of X, as Wiggins puts it, "will itself help to constitute Y."5 For Wiggins, this
second, constituent-of-end relation is masked by the ambiguity of the preposi-
 

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tion pros in Aristotle's standard description of the subject matter of practical reason: ton pros to telos (III. 2
1111b27). As with its Latin counterpart, his quae sunt ad finem, this phrase has traditionally been rendered as
"means" to the end. But whatever Aquinas and other medievals understand by the Latin phrase, Wiggins and those
following him have urged a more literal translation of the Greek, one which yields a more flexible sense. What we
deliberate about and choose is that which is "towards the end," understood to comprise both instrumental means to
and constituents of final ends.
Another distinction is often made between the constituents and the specifications of an end. Wiggins defines a
constituent as that which counts in itself as the partial or total realization of an end. 6 Its simple presence, he
argues, need not be logically necessary or logically sufficient for the end. Yet its presence is always "logically
relevant" to the end in that, along with other constituents, it helps comprise a final end. In one sense we specify
something, if only in part, by naming one of its constituents, and eudaimonia as a whole is specified for Aristotle
by the range of virtuous activities which constitute it. But in another sense the specification of an end is not so
much a "part" of a given end but an embodiment of an indeterminate conception of that end. All agree, Aristotle
says, that, whatever else eudaimonia is, it is most generally the summation of our desire for the good. Differences
arise in how this general conception is specified. Some say it is wealth, others pleasure. Aristotle says it is activity
in accord with virtue. Accordingly, it might not be unfair to say that constituents are always (at least partial)
specifications, but not all specifications are constituents. In any case, Aristotle's pros seems not only to comprise
instrumental causes and constituents, but also specifications of ends. But why should we think it comprises these
latter two notions at all?
The foremost reason is that, cut off from deliberation about constituents and specifications of final ends, the
rationality of our ultimate commitments seems compromised. That is, if practical reason does not include final
ends within its scope, then the question arises as to how we are rationally to defend the adoption of one final end
over another, or one version of happiness over another. All we are able to do, it seems, is argue technically about
the most effective ways of achieving certain ends. But this hardly seems a suitable office for the prudent agent,
much less the means of distinguishing the virtuous agent from the vicious. And indeed, there are passages in the
Nichomachean Ethics in which Aristotle apparently recognizes the need for this expanded view of deliberation. In
Book II he defines virtuous action properly so-called as that which is choiceworthy for its own sake, not merely
for the sake of what might come from it. This suggests that a virtuous action can be
 

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directly deliberated over and chosen as a final end. Moreover, in Book III, Aristotle says about choice that it
discriminates characters better than actions do. For Wiggins, the only "straightforward way" to interpret this
remark is "to suppose choice to be a fairly inclusive notion that relates to different specifications of man's end." 7
Finally, also in Book III, Aristotle speaks with notorious ambiguity of the voluntary nature of virtuous action. After
repeating that ends are the object of wish and the ''means" the object of deliberation and choice, he says "Now the
activities of the virtues are concerned with what [promotes the end]; hence virtue is up to us, and so is vice" (III.5
1113b5ff; trans. Irwin). On the face of it Aristotle is saying that virtuous action has to do with "means," with what
is "towards" the end. But this statement cannot be squared with the swarm of texts citing moral virtue as concerned
with making the end right, or with the text in Book II claiming virtuous action as choiceworthy for its own
sakeunless we construe "means" in the broad sense.
Aristotle, however, explicitly states that we do not deliberate about eudaimonia (he also mentions health as
intrinsically undeliberable: 1111b27). Still, this is no problem if, like Wiggins, we take him to be saying that we do
not deliberate about whether to pursue happiness or health.8 Health is not a logically detachable constituent of
happiness. And eudaimonia just is the whole, considered broadly as "the summation of desire." So in offering us
these examples of undeliberable ends, Aristotle is in no way ruling out deliberation about constituents of ends
("Given that I desire to be healthy, what constitutes health for me here and now?") and deliberation about
specifications of ends ("What good shall I choose to specify my desire to be happy?").
One of the brightest consequences of these arguments for the modern interpreters of Aristotle is that they keep
those final ends, short of the most final end, from being understood as mere means. As these commentators have
been insistent in pointing out, eudaimonia for Aristotle is an end inclusive of a number of heterogeneous and
incommensurable ends. Hence its achievement, even granted the discussion of   theoria* at X.6 9, is not the
maximization of any one good, but rather the maintenance of a variety of potentially incompatible goods. Such
incommensurability precludes conceiving deliberation as exclusively concerned with the means to eudaimonia. A
second consequence of these arguments is that they jibe with what many take to be the emotivist, historicist nature
of the Aristotelian ethical enterprise. Unlike Aquinas, Aristotle, it is claimed, has no notion of a natural,
hierarchically arranged order of ends for the human person. At most there are generic ends, e.g. "the summit of
desire," "activity in accord with virtue"; but the question
 

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of how we specify these generic ends in a determinate conception of the moral life is one that must be left for
deliberation. 9
The foregoing account of Aristotelian deliberation leaves the Thomistic interpreter with at least three ways to go.
First, he may simply be convinced by the arguments and uphold that Aquinas, too, is a proponent of the broad
view. Hence Scott MacDonald has argued that essential to the Thomistic understanding of practical reason is the
inclusion of constituents and specifications in that which is ad finem. "Indeed," he writes, "Aquinas's account itself
seems to me to show conclusively the deficiency of means-end accounts."10 A second option is to concede that in
interpreting Aristotle on deliberation, as well as in developing his more independent account, Aquinas introduces a
critical concept foreign to Aristotle, namely, the idea of a natural, nondeliberative intellectual habit of holding the
first principles or ends of practical reason. This was the road paved a few decades back by Harry V. Jaffa,11 and
followed recently by Denis J. M. Bradley.12 Such a habit, what Aquinas calls synderesis, enables Aquinas to
restrict practical reason to the consideration of instrumental means while preserving the rationality of our desire for
final ends. The downside of this option, obviously, is that it undermines the credibility of Aquinas as Aristotelian
commentator. A third option, not necessarily distinct from the second, is to see Aquinas's account of deliberation
as fundamentally conflicted. Thus Terence Irwin has accused Aquinas of being a defender of the narrow view in
intention and often in expression, but in his understanding of how we "fix" or "determine" an end relying upon the
broad view.13
The first interpretive option for the Thomist affirms the orthodox view of Aristotle. The second and third expose
problems in Aquinas's defense of the narrow view. The second option objects to Aquinas's use of the apparently
un-Aristotelian doctrine of synderesisat least as an interpretation of Aristotle, and the third underscores the
unreliable nature of this doctrine for explaining our determination of final ends. What I propose to do is to take up
a consideration of each of these options in turn, and I shall begin by returning to the reasons given for expanding
the Aristotelian account of deliberation to include constituents and specifications.
Wiggins and others have claimed for deliberative inquiry two particular sorts of relation, the relation X bears to Y
when X will itself help constitute or specify Y. As we noted, there is for Wiggins a certain "logic" to these
relations that is not that of the means-end type. Consider the case of eudaimonia in regard to the constituent-of-end
relation. A constituent of eudaimoniasay good health or a satisfying occupation, to use Wiggins's own examples14
 

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need not be logically necessary or logically sufficient for the end. Yet it is always "logically relevant" to the end; it
is a member of a nucleus of constituents which coming together counts as the attainment of the end. We might ask,
however, what exactly is meant by the term "logic" in these expressions. In the means-end relation it is clearer
what could be meant by such a phrase as X is logically relevant to Y insofar as X is efficacious in bringing Y into
being. But in the constituent-of-end relation this is precisely the kind of logic we do not have. For here, X (along
with A, B, C, etc.) is not an instrumental means to happiness; this nucleus of final ends constitutes happiness. The
question is not, then, whether X, A, B, C, etc. are efficacious in bringing Y into being, but of how to bring X, A, B,
C, etc. themselves into being so as to realize Y.
So whatever logical relevance holds between the nucleus of constituents and the end they constitute, it is not one
which need concern the agent in deliberation. Taken simply as constituents of Y, this nucleus of ends is
undeliberable. The problem for the deliberating agent is not whether good health or a satisfying occupation will
constitute his happiness, but how to obtain these things, and this raises the question of whether deliberation can
ever be anything other than of the means-end type.
It will be objected that in fact we do deliberate about whether X, A, B, C, etc. are truly constituents of Y, and this
is just to deliberate about whether these are appropriate specifications of Y. Aquinas himself appears to endorse
this mode of deliberation in distinguishing the different ways in which human positive law can be derived from the
natural law (ST Ia-IIae, q. 95, a. 2). The first kind of derivation is that of conclusions from principles (sicut
conclusiones ex principiis), the second is that of a determination of a common principle (sicut determinationes
quaedam aliquorum communium). For this second kind of derivation Aquinas gives as analogy an artisan deciding
to determine the general form of house by constructing this or that style of house, and as example a legislator
fixing a specific punishment for a crime.
To employ Wiggins's terminology, the style of house the builder decides upon and the specific punishment the
judge hands down are "logically relevant" to their respective endsthe general goods of getting a house built and of
punishing a criminalinsofar as they are specifications of them. But again, simply qua specification of a more
general description of an end, a given item is not of concern to the deliberator. Whether a builder builds a Queen
Anne or a classic Victorian is of no consequence unless the question of style is pertinent to the question of
efficaciously bringing about that kind of house, or of that house efficaciously bringing about some further end. For
example, if
 

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one of the styles is more costly than another, and cost is of concern to the builder, then the builder will choose that
style which he is able to afford. In choosing the Queen Anne over the Victorian, the builder bases his decision on
the availability of the means to construct the Queen Anne. Conversely, he may choose the slim Victorian over the
sprawling Queen Anne because it makes better use of a smallish lot, leaving room for a garden and a two-car
garage. What about choosing a style simply because we like it? Even here, it is personal aesthetic pleasure which is
the further end for the sake of which the style is chosen as an instrumental means. 15
A builder, therefore, does not deliberate about whether the Queen Anne is a specification of "house," nor does the
judge deliberate about whether a five-year prison sentence is a specification of punishment. This knowledge comes
through other kinds of discovery. What the builder and the judge do deliberate about is whether this or that
specification is possible or the best given the available instrumental means, or whether it is efficacious in bringing
about some further endor both. Just as constituents are not deliberable qua constituents, so specifications are not
deliberable simply qua specifications.16
But while these preliminary distinctions cause us to be suspicious of deliberation about constituents and
specifications of final ends, we must still face up to some troublesome texts in Aristotle. First of all, what are we to
make of Aristotle's pronouncement at Nichomachean Ethics II.4 that of the three criteria for virtuous actions
properly so-called, the second is that the actions be chosen for their own sake (proairoumenos di'auta, 1105a32)?
Does this not suggest that we do directly deliberate about and choose a constituent of eudaimonia, namely, courage
or temperance?
At first glance, Aristotle's di'auto qualification of specifically virtuous action, i.e. that specifically virtuous action is
chosen "for its own sake," seems vacuous. For if he means that in choosing to do a courageous act for its own sake
we choose it because it is a courageous action, we have not said much by way of explanation. In fact, as Bernard
Williams has remarked in a recent essay, the claim that a virtuous person chooses virtuous acts qua virtuous is, in
general, false in a de dicto sense.17 Courageous people rarely choose a courageous act qua courageous; they
choose it to save the city, or because they see it as their duty, and suchlike. This suggests to Williams, however,
that the di'auto qualification may be true in a de re sense; in other words, that we do choose virtuous acts qua
virtuous if we understand the qualification to imply that there are certain reasons or considerations which go along
with the acts' being virtuous. "The thought of the phronimos," Williams writes, "is structurally and materially
peculiar; and this is because he thinks of
 

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"ends"we might say, more generally, considerationsthat do not occur to other people." 18 Or, if certain
considerations are entertained by the nonvirtuous agent, they will not be regarded, as they would be by the
phronimos, as overriding or relevant.
While dispensing with discussion of Williams's qualms about applying this analysis to the virtues of courage and
temperance, we can still profit from his insight that what makes virtuous action properly virtuous is the agent's
consideration of certain ends which do not occur or are not seen as relevant or overriding to nonvirtuous agents.
Most significantly, the phronimos is guided by an end or consideration which he appreciates for its own sake, an
end distinct from the external action he performs. This brings us round to Aquinas's comment on our text from EN
II.4.19 Here Aquinas notes that the di'auto qualification pertains to the appetitive power, meaning that the virtuous
agent chooses the act for its own sake when he does not act on the impulse of some passion. At EN III.8 Aristotle
speaks of a kind of counterfeit courage which is based on fear: some are "brave" insofar as they are compelled by
the fear of punishment to be inflicted upon those who desert their posts (1116a29ff.). Aquinas concludes from this
that virtuous action must be done from choice in such a way that the choice is the work of virtue and is not for the
sake of something else, as when some work of virtue is done for the sake of money or vainglory. This formulation
recognizes a distinction between a "work of virtue" (opus virtutis) and an end, a remote end, for the sake of which
it is done.
Thus the "work of virtue" Aquinas refers to in commenting upon the passage in II.4 is an action which for the
virtuous agent would beat least potentiallysufficient unto itself, but which for the nonvirtuous agent is ordered to
some gratification of passion. In the heat of battle I may pull my wounded buddy from the open field back into the
foxhole and so perform a "work of virtue." But if my overriding intention is to save my buddy only so that I can
avoid a court martial for my cowardice, then, Aristotle and Aquinas would agree, my courage is defective. What I
should treat as an end in itself, saving my buddy, I treat as a mere means. To summarize, then, in a more Thomistic
idiom: the de re sense of Aristotle's claim that the virtuous person performs virtuous acts for their own sake implies
that virtuous action properly so-called is composite action the exterior act of which is ordered as a means to the
object of the interior act, an end regarded as choiceworthy for its own sake. In the case of courage, fighting well
for the sake of a just victory is the courageous action chosen for its own sake.20
Two precisions on these points. First, as Aquinas sees it, the external act chosen by the virtuous agent is always a
means in the instrumental sense to the
 

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end desirable in itself. In aiming at victory, the general chooses some external actione.g. deploying his troops in
this position, building a barricade, creating a diversionwhich serves as a means to the "production" of victory. This
is why Aristotle says in the discussion of deliberation at EN III.3 that every action is for the sake of something else
(hai de praxeis   allon * heneka, 1112b33), for in the context of this passage the "actions" referred to are the
various alternative external acts being considered as possible means of achieving an end.
This also helps us understand Aristotle's remark that choice discriminates character better than actions do (III.2
1111b5 6). For by "actions" here Aristotle again refers to external acts, which of course include the "works of
virtue" Aquinas mentions earlier. As Aquinas comments on this text, a work of virtue might be chosen yet not
come to fruition due to some external hindrance. Or again, a virtuous deed might be performed by a nonvirtuous
agent "out of fear or some other unbecoming motive."21 Contrary to Wiggins's reading, therefore, Aristotle's
remark that choice discriminates character better than actions do implies not that we directly deliberate about and
choose final ends as such, but that sometimes the kinds of acts virtuous agents perform are chosen, by nonvirtuous
agents, as instruments for ends extrinsic to the concerns of virtuous agents.
Likewise there is no difficulty with Aristotle's apparently anomalous statement that, as Irwin translates it, "the
activities of the virtues are concerned with what [promotes the end]; hence virtue is up to us, and so is vice" (III.5
111365 7).22 The point here is not that moral virtue, which in so many texts is correlated with the end of virtuous
action, is now being correlated with what "promotes the end" in the sense of constituents and specifications of
ends, thus saving the consistency between the passages. Aristotle is simply saying that the activities of the virtues,
the actual courageous and temperate choices we make, are manifested in the choices of appropriate means for
certain final ends. Aristotle then concludes that moral virtue is voluntary, and this makes sense when we recall that
moral virtue is a habit arising from such repeated choices.
The second precision which needs to be made concerns the ordering of the means to the end in virtuous action. The
mark against nonvirtuous agents is their failure to act upon what Aquinas calls the per se principles of order which
hold among ends. To order one end to another in willy-nilly fashion, i.e., per accidens, as when a courageous act is
performed as a mere means to vainglory, is to disrupt the order of genuine human happiness. While prescinding
from a full-scale discussion of the practical syllogism, we can say that, in general, deliberation comes down to the
question of how the practical
 

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intellect orders one good to another, and so on to a final end. Indeed, having the right conception of order is for
Aquinas the key to the entire argument of the EN, and that which most separates his reading of this work from so
many of its contemporary interpreters. At least a brief sketch, then, of Aquinas's opening to his commentary on the
EN is vital for a proper understanding of his account of deliberation.
Aquinas begins the proem by distinguishing the twofold order found in things. One is the order of the parts of some
whole to each other, as the parts of a house are ordered to one another; the second is the order of things to an end.
The second kind of ordering is prior to the first in that the order of the parts of a whole to one another only exists
insofar as they are ordered to an end. 23 Now this twofold order in things, Aquinas continues, is related to reason
in a fourfold way, the third of which is the order which deliberating reason makes in the operations of the will
(ordo quem ratio considerando facit in operationibus voluntatis). A human action is a choice imbued with reason's
imposition of order, both insofar as reason orders goods to one another and to an end. Reason's imposition of order
is not to be understood in any Kantian sense; for the twofold order reason considers, Aquinas has already told us,
is an order found originally in rebus.24
This elaboration upon the theme of order is Aquinas's meditation on Aristotle's terser comments at EN I.1 regarding
the ordering of goods. There Aristotle cites a basic distinction among ends: some are activities, others are products
apart from their activities. Some groups of ends, moreover, fall under a single capacity, as when bridlemaking,
horseriding, and strategy fall under the master   techne* of political prudence (EN I.2). Aristotle ends this brief
opening chapter with the crucial remark that it makes no difference, i.e., when it comes to ordering ends under a
single capacity, whether the ends in question are activities or products distinct from the activities which produced
them (1094a16 18). Aquinas's example refers to the ordering of gymnastics to medicine. The end of medicine is a
product apart from the activity, namely health, but gymnastics, which is subordinated to medicine, is itself an
activity.25
Neither Aristotle nor Aquinas signals a change in his understanding of order when speaking of ends which just are
activities being subordinated to higher ends. The impression left by I.1 is that whenever an end of any sort is "for
the sake of" another, an efficient causal relationship is set up in which the lower end brings the higher end into
being. What follows from this is that the end which serves as the "product" in the causal relationship also serves,
qua final cause, as the "norm" for the lower activity and its end. Given the rela-
 

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tionship of military strategy to the master techne * of political prudence, military strategy takes its shape under the
guidance of a particular conception of virtuous activity. As guided by personal honor Achilles's notion of military
strategy becomes a very different thing. This is important in one way because it tells us that eudaimonia cannot be,
as it is often taken to be, a mere aggregate of intrinsically valuable goodsof pleasure, honor, a collection of Bach
cantatas, and virtuous activity. Given that virtuous activity is the ultimate end, lower goods will find their place in
the order of happiness insofar as they help bring about and are "normed" by such activity. And even among
virtuous activities there will be orderings of some to others, on up to the absolutely final end.26
To be clear, Aristotle is not saying that the subordination of one end to another renders the subordinated end
merely instrumental to the higher end. The concern of Aristotle's contemporary interpreters is that the plurality and
incommensurability of final ends can be preserved only by denying them any instrumental relation to other final
ends. For Aristotle and Aquinas final ends remain final ends whether or not they are conducive to some more final
end beyond themselves (see ST Ia IIae, q. 14, a. 2). Yet activities which are final ends can also bring about a
"product" analogously to the way in which mundane technai do. Thus courageous activity can be ordered to justice
or contemplation without in any way diminishing the intrinsic value of courageous activity.27
Successful deliberation, therefore, discerns the best means of producing, in these contingent circumstances, the
causal-normative ligatures which hold per se among ends. It is given direction by a most final end which is not an
aggregate and which "norms" subordinate activities and ends. If more than one means is necessary to achieve the
ultimate end, then these means themselvessome of which of course will be final ends in another contextwill be
ordered to each other according to the same kind of causal-normative relationship.28 But as we learn from
Aquinas's proem to the Commentary, the ordering of deliberative items to one another is due to the ordering of
them all to the final end.29
But then where, on the narrow view, does practical reason come up with its final ends? One answer is that it
doesn't. Ends, as Aristotle tells us, are determined by moral virtue, while practical reason, perfected by  
phronesis*/prudentia, concerns itself with the means.30 Without some further comment this statement would lead
us to believe that ends are wholly unavailable to the consideration of reason, and that practical reason is solely
concerned with the Humean task of pursuing the means to our desires. But for Aquinas practical
 

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reasoning also grasps the end for the sake of which it deliberates about the means, and the first principles or ends
of practical reason are held naturally by the intellectual habit of synderesis (ST Ia, q. 79, a. 12). Without such a
habit, Aquinas would say, deliberation would be set the awesome task of determining the constituent ends of
human perfection. Human reasoning would no longer be a measured measure, and the rationality of practical
reason would therefore be put in jeopardy. The disputed point, however, is whether this natural intellectual habit of
holding the first principles of practical reason is also Aristotle's view.
The ascription of synderesis to Aristotle occurs by name in the Sentences commentary and by strong implication in
the Commentary on De anima. 31 Terence Irwin, however, has argued that Aquinas backs off from attributing
synderesis to Aristotle when commenting on the relevant passages of the EN.32 Denis J. M. Bradley has recently
claimed that Aquinas imports the doctrine into his commentary, though not by name. For Bradley, there is no solid
textual evidence for a doctrine of synderesis in the EN; it is Aquinas's unwarranted resolution of what for Bradley
remains an unresolved tension in Aristotle between the cognitivist and emotivist sources of moral virtue.33 These
writers thus agree with Harry Jaffa's claim that there exists an irrecoverable distance between the pagan
understanding of morality and the Christian doctrine of natural law. But whatever differences may exist between
Aristotle's understanding of ethical first principles and Aquinas's understanding of natural law, it is a mistake to
locate a difference in the doctrine of synderesis, and this for the following reason.
What synderesis demands is that human agents in their untutored universal apprehension of the good recognize
certain things as perfective of their nature. Jaffa agrees that we intuitively recognize certain goods like intelligence,
sight, certain pleasures, and honors, as good (EN I.6 1096b16 19). Yet he contends that we do not know, not by
nature at any rate, how to use such goods for our own moral good.34 But it is precisely this distinction between a
basic recognition of good things and specifically moral obligation which is the source of Jaffa's misunderstanding.
What he has done is introduce a distinction between moral and pre-moral understanding of the good completely
foreign to Aristotelian-Thomistic thought, one which he thinks Aquinas attempts to get around by the doctrine of
synderesis. For Aquinas as well as for Aristotle, there is no distinction between something's being a fundamental
good of human nature, like intelligence or honor, and something's being a moral good. A doctrine of natural law
does not introduce any special notion of moral obligation at this level; the obligation is there in the perception of
 

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good. 35 Hence failure to recognize certain goods as genuine perfections of human nature is as basic a failure in
moral perception as a failure to perceive snow as white is in sense perception. The remedy in the former case is
punishment, not argument, while in the latter case the remedy is simply more perception (Topics I.11 105a5 7).36
The above is not an argument for the claim that the ordinary Aristotelian agent has a cognitive grasp of what
Aquinas understands to be the ontology (or theology) of the natural law. Nothing more is being attributed to this
agent in the order of knowing than the basic constituents of the good, e.g., life itself, sexual activity, social
relationships, and the pursuit of truth, especially about the highest things.37 But this is enough to allow us to say
that the ordinary Aristotelian agent has natural knowledge of himself as measured by extrinsic principles of moral
order. There is no need for him to "jump-start" himself into the moral order by deliberating about the basic
constituents of his perfection. Interpreters of Aristotle like Jaffa who claim for Aristotle a natural-right as opposed
to a natural-law theory have no problem upholding an extrinsic standard of human perfection; what they reject is
the natural habit of holding the first principles of this perfection.38 But without this natural knowledge of
principles it is impossible to make sense of a natural standard of human perfection. For if the standard is justifiable,
there must be knowledge of natural causes. And the discovery of natural causesif the Meno paradox is to be
avoidedmust repose upon principles held naturally in the sense of requiring no demonstration.
It is crucial to emphasize that these first principles or endswhat Aquinas more accurately calls preceptsare extrinsic
to man's power for practical rationality. They are the practical reason's desire for what the speculative intellect
perceives to be true about the world. This point is brought out well by Aquinas in his comment on a text in EN
VI.1. At 1139a11 15 of this chapter, Aristotle distinguishes reason into its "scientific" (to epistemonikon) and
"calculative" (to logistikon) powers, while explicitly equating the calculative power with deliberation (1139a11).
Then just a few lines later, at VI.2 1139a26 31, Aristotle distinguishes between the practical intellect, true
reasoning by which is so essential to choice (1139a21 26), and the speculative intellect. In commenting upon this
latter text Aquinas alerts the reader to a possible confusion. In both pairs of distinction Aristotle seems to speaking
about the same powers, yet in the "scientific/calculative" expression Aristotle speaks of distinct powers, whereas
the "speculative/practical" expression, as we learn in the De anima (III.10 433a15), really only refers to one power,
the power of the speculative intellect whichas Aquinas elsewhere puts it"becomes'' practical.39
 

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Aquinas clarifies the confusion by stating that practical reason's grasp of its principle in a universal consideration is
the same in subjecto with the speculative intellect. But because practical reasoning does not stop with this universal
considerationprecisely because it is concerned with an action to be performed here and nowpractical reason must
then enter into its "calculative" mode in which it deliberates about particular options and forms a judgment. And
because, as Aristotle says in De anima, the universal reason does not move without the particular, the calculative
(ratiocinativum) is considered a "different part" (ponitur diversa pars) than the scientific. 40
What these texts and arguments are intended to support, once again, is the claim that for both Aristotle and
Aquinas practical reasoning, while concerned with efficient causal "means" in its calculative or deliberative mode,
also apprehends the first principles of practical reasoning insofar as it is one in subjecto with speculative reason.
Practical reason in its deliberative mode can thus be exclusively concerned with instrumental means while
maintaining a reasoned grasp of final ends.41 Neither emotivism nor historicism, it is rather the natural ordering of
the human good which undergirds for Aristotle, and Aquinas following him, the logic of practical rationality.42
In discussing how it is that agents come up with final ends without deliberating over them, we have concentrated on
the natural apprehension of the first principles of practical reason, about which there is no inquiry. At this level of
generality we are speaking of ends shared by all rational agents. But are we then to conclude that all the rest is
deliberation, that given our natural orientation to certain ends the task of practical reason is entirely to go about
seeking the instrumental means necessary to achieve them? It would seem, given the generality of these naturally
known ends, that a good deal of specification is required in order for practical reason to be effectively action-
guiding. My natural desire for justice does me little good in deciding what to do in my particular circumstances. Is
the specification I need achieved by means-end reasoning, or is there some other mode of discovery involved? It
would be impossible to deal with these questions in all their complexity here, but some initial remarks can be made
by way of introduction to the problem.
Surely the place to start in determining Aquinas's response to these questions is the text discussed earlier, ST
Ia IIae, q. 95, a. 2. Here, as we noted, Aquinas speaks of two ways in which principles can be derived from the
natural law. The first, by demonstratio, is like the way in which conclusions in the speculative sciences are derived
from first principles, that is, by a syllogistic effort. The second, by determinatio, is like the way in which a builder
or judge specifies a general design or principle. The second way yields principles
 

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which belong exclusively to human positive law, and, as I argued earlier, operates according to means-end
reasoning. 43 As an example of demonstratio Aquinas refers to the way in which the conclusion "Do not kill," is
derived from the more general precept "Do harm to no man." Clearly this inference does not involve means-end
reasoning; it is, rather, a species of deduction. And insofar as practical reason busies itself with this kind of
reasoning, with discerning the necessary relationships between more general and more specific conceptions of good
and evil, we can say that practical reason specifies its ends without resorting to reasoning of the means-end type.
So, if it is right to call this kind of practical reasoning deliberation, then it is precisely here where Aquinas holds
common ground with so many of Aristotle's contemporary interpreters. Still, Aquinas would part ways with any
interpreter who would reject that such conclusiones bear a necessary relationship, at least at the very highest level
of generality, to naturally known first principles.
It is a question whether means-end reasoning plays any role in helping derive more remote conclusiones from the
first precepts of the natural law. R. A. Armstrong's study of the relationship between the primary and secondary
precepts of the natural law suggests some ways in which it does. Aquinas's argument for monogamy, for example,
is based in part upon the relationship between marriage and its remote end, the mutual assistance of the spouses. In
regard to the proximate end of marriage, the engendering and education of children, polygamy appears to be a
means equally as effective as monogamy. But when it comes to the mutual assistance of the spouses, polygamy is a
grossly ineffective means. Thus monogamy is the right determination of the general inclinations to sexual pleasure
and life in society.44
In general, it would seem that the more practical reasoning descends into the particular, the more it will utilize
means-end reasoning in order to act in accord with the natural law. The sphere of noncontingent conclusions from
first precepts, no matter what sort of reasoning is involved in getting to them, is remarkably constricted.
Contingency insists upon its place in the moral life at a very general level, as Socrates tried to explain to Cephalus
in challenging his definition of justice as giving back what one owes. As the refrain goes, moral principles for
Aristotle and Aquinas hold always or for the most part, and it is these principles and the means to them which most
properly comprise the subject matter of deliberation (see EN III.3 1112b8 11). Deliberation, then, concerns not so
much the discovery that murder is harm, or that honor is due to God or to parents, but rather a consideration of the
possible options for the sake of some end, in which reasoning must be of the means-end type.
 

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This sketch of how practical reason derives principles from the natural law is sufficient to reply to a charge of
inconsistency raised against Aquinas by Terence Irwin. Irwin writes that for Aquinas virtue "is focused on the right
end, not because of prudence, but because of a distinct nondeliberative intellectual state that grasps the right ends,
and this is synderesis." 45 This creates a problem. At the level of synderesis there is as yet no distinction between
the virtuous and the vicious agent (ST Ia IIae, q. 94, a. 6; De Ver., q. 16, a. 3, ad 3). Yet Aquinas seems to want
synderesis to be responsible for establishing the right, that is, the virtuous, orientation to final ends. Irwin puts the
conflict this way: "A thick conception of synderesis seems to be needed to supply something distinctive of the
virtuous person's end. On the other hand, a thick conception seems to conflict with Aquinas's normal view that
synderesis is present in both the virtuous and the vicious person."46 Aquinas's mistake, Irwin argues, is his
assumption that when Aristotle says that virtue makes the end right, he means that something independent of
prudence fixes the end. This mistake could be avoided if we understand prudence according to the broad view of
deliberation, thus allowing it a role in fixing the end.47 Then the difference between the virtuous and the vicious
agent would be precisely that deliberation about final ends which the narrow view excludes.
But what we have already said about derivations from the natural law reveals that Irwin is mistaken here in
thinking that synderesis, and synderesis alone, is sufficient to make the end right, at least in the sense which
distinguishes the virtuous from the vicious. A key text for his argument is ST IIa IIae, q. 47, a. 6, where Aquinas
explicitly states that it does not belong to prudence to fix the ends of the moral virtues, as these are fixed by
synderesis. But the response's use of the analogy between the first principles of speculative reason and the first
principles of practical reason indicates that Aquinas means this statement at a very high level of generality, as
though to say what makes moral virtue even possible is the natural orientation to the constituent ends of human
perfection shared by all agents.48
Irwin in fact misreads other texts in which Aquinas speaks of the end of virtuous action being fixed by nature as
texts which speak of virtuous action considered in its proper species, which is to say virtuous action as performed
by prudent agents.49 For example, Aquinas mentions as an end set by nature the natural desire not to divert from
the judgment of reason on account of excess fear or confidence (IIa IIae q. 47, a. 7). This end is not, however, as
Irwin takes it to be, exclusively that of the virtuous agent. Our moral assessments diverge according to the way in
which different agents pursue this end, i.e., in how they attempt to hit the mean of the virtues to which they
 

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are naturally directed. Ideally, prudence will arise in the agent's right decisions about the means necessary to attain
the various ends grasped by nature. In the real drama of human action, however, agents will depart from the path of
prudence very early, even, if some strong passion is in play, from adherence to the precepts of the Decalogue. But
to return to the case of courage, imagine an agent who mistakenly takes the ultimate end to be pleasure, and who
reasons that in order to obtain the pleasure he wants he must steal some money from his place of employment.
Having never stolen money before, he is initially seized with fear at the thought of getting caught. Yet he knows
that if he wants pleasure he must go through with the theft. In order to hit the mean of "courage" his faulty
judgment tells him that he must pull off the theft, and his "prudence"what Aristotle would call cleverness (deinotes,
ENVI.12 1144a27 28)goes to work to figure out the means of doing this without giving in either to excessive fear
or excessive confidence. The courage of the genuinely courageous agent will hit the same abstract mean, but in a
very different way. Thus Aquinas is not inconsistent in claiming that the ends of the moral virtues are fixed by
synderesis and that synderesis is shared by both the virtuous and the vicious agent. 50
We need not be reminded, in sum, that our moral education begins with conclusiones, accurately derived or not,
that we simply accept from our parents, family, and political environment. We will have learned from our elders if
not by our own lights that we ought to act courageously in the face of fear, yet misunderstand courage as mere
bravado on the battlefield. Experience, perhaps a costly one, may show us our mistake. But from Aristotle we learn
that there are acts of formal rational inquiry other than deliberation, dialectical, analogical, inferential, not to
mention the discernments of the intuitive faculty, by which we are able to discover the structure of the final ends
we naturally aim at. The paradigmatic instance of dialectical investigation of final ends is Aristotle's approach to
the definition of eudaimonia in EN I, an approach which combines with analogical reasoning and intuition in the
function argument at I.7. Analogical reasoning is also used in the determination of justice in Book V.51 Aristotle
and Aquinas's understanding of rational inquiry is thus sufficiently rich that we need never fear that in restricting
deliberation properly so-called to instrumental means we have cut ourselves off from the understanding of final
ends.
A complete discussion of these other acts of rational inquiry is no doubt required for a complete understanding of
why deliberation is restricted to means to final ends, but such a discussion extends beyond the purview of this
 

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essay. My task has been limited to an initial defense of the narrow view of deliberation by way of discussion of
three possible Thomistic responses to the view defended by the majority of today's more prominent Aristotelian
commentators. First I tried to show that Aquinas has no need to understand Aristotelian deliberation as it is often
interpreted today, not least because Aristotle himself did not do so. I argued that insofar as constituents and
specifications of ends are regarded as constituents and specifications, they have not as yet been entered as items in
a deliberative inquiry. Second I indicated some reasons why the attempt to separate Aquinas from Aristotle on the
basis of the doctrine of synderesis is inadequate, and that only with this doctrine can Aquinas and Aristotle uphold
the rationality of practical reasoning. Finally I addressed Terence Irwin's contention that Aquinas's use of
synderesis is fundamentally conflicted; here I pointed out that Aquinas's employment of this doctrine to explain the
nature of moral virtue does not compromise his commitment to the narrow view. The most attractive feature of the
Thomistic position I have defended is its appreciation of the best of the current Aristotelian scholarship, i.e. the
commitment to a nonreductive, nontechnocratic conception of practical reason. The Thomistic account of
deliberation, far from being a threat to that commitment, should rather be seen as the best way of preserving it.

Notes
1. The short list of prominent contemporary defenders of the broad view would include W. E R. Hardie, Aristotle
Ethical Theory (Oxford University Press, 1968); David Wiggins, "Deliberation and Practical Reason," in Amélie
Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980). John M. Cooper,
Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); Martha C. Nussbaum,
Aristotle's De Motu Animalium (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), esp. essay 4; Norman O. Dahl,
Practical Reason, Aristotle and Weakness of Will (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Nancy
Sherman, The Fabric of Character (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999).
2. Terence Irwin, "The Scope of Deliberation: A Conflict in Aquinas," Review of Metaphysics 44 (1990): 21 42;
Scott MacDonald, "Ultimate Ends in Practical Reasoning: Aquinas's Aristotelian Moral Psychology and
Anscombe's Fallacy," The Philosophical Review, vol. 100, n. 1 (January 1991): 31 66.
3. D. J. Allan, The Philosophy of Aristotle, rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1963); "Aristotle's Account
of the Origin of Moral Principles," Proceedings of the XIth International Congress of Philosophy, vol. 12
(Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing Company, 1953); "The Practical Syllogism," in Autour d'Aristote,
Bibliothèque philosophique
 

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de Louvain, vol. 16 (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1955), 325 40. In "Aristotle's Account of
the Origin of Moral Principles," Allan locates the modern origin of the question concerning the scope of
deliberation in the nineteenth-century debates between Walter, Teichmüller, Trendelenburg, and Zeller.
4. Wiggins, "Deliberation and Practical Reason.
5. Ibid., 224.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., 223.
8. Ibid., 227.
9. See Nussbaum, Aristotle's De Motu Animalium, esp. essay 4. For a critique of Nussbaum's attempts to mitigate
the relativism in her approach to Aristotle, see my article " 'Divinity Must Live within Herself': Nussbaum and
Aquinas on Transcending the Human, International Philosophical Quarterly (March 1997).
10. MacDonald, "Ultimate Ends in Practical Reasoning," 63. MacDonald's claims are limited, however, to his
analysis of ST Ia IIae, q. 1.
11. Harry V. Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1979), originally published by the
University of Chicago Press, 1952.
12. Denis J. M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America
Press, 1997).
13. Irwin, "The Scope of Deliberation."
14. Wiggins includes as constituents of eudaimonia not only its essential constituents (the activities of the various
virtues, and especially the virtues of phronesis * and sophia), but also its sine qua non constituents along with
certain specifications of virtuous activity ("a satisfying occupation").
15. The same analysis applies to the specification of a punishment. A judge will evaluate a range of specifications
insofar as they are possible means of taking away certain rights and privileges enjoyed by citizens, and thus as a
means of squaring the debt to society. Presumably this end could be achieved, in the most unwieldy way, by house
arrest. But deliberation asks: what is the most effective means of denying rights and privileges, as well as
protecting society from further harm?
16. This seems to be Aquinas's point at ST Ia IIae, q. 14, a. 2, ad 2.
17. Bernard Williams, "Acting as the Virtuous Person Acts," in Robert Heinaman, ed., Aristotle and Moral Realism
(Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).
18. Ibid., 20.
19. In X Ethicorum, II, lect. IV, n. 283.
20. A lucid discussion of the relationship between exterior and interior acts can be found in chapter 4 of Ralph
McInerny, Aquinas on Human Action: A Theory of Practice (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America
Press, 1992).
21. In X Ethicorum, III, lect. V, n. 433.
22. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, translated, with introduction, notes, and glossary by Terence Irwin
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985). The text at 1113b5 7 reads: "hai de  ton*   areton* energeiai peri tauta. eph   hemin*
de kai he arete*,  homoios* de kai he kakia." Irwin understands the phrase peri tauta to refer to ton* pros to telos
 at 1113b4.
23. In X Ethicorum, I, lect. 1, no. 1: "Invenitur autem duplex ordo in rebus. Unus quidem partium alicujus totius
seu alicujus multitudinis adinvicem, sicut partes domus adinvicem ordinantur. Alius est ordo rerum in finem. Et hic
ordo est principalior, quam
 

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primus. Nam, ut Philosophus dicit in undecimo Metaphysicorum, ordo partium exercitus adinvicem, est propter
ordinem totius exercitus ad ducem." The reference is actually to Metaphysics XII.10.
24. This point is pursued by Ralph McInerny, Aquinas on Human Action, chapter 10.
25. In X Ethicorum, I, lect. 1, n. 18.
26. I am much indebted to Richard Kraut's critique of Ackrill's reading of these texts, Aristotle on the Human Good
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 4.6.
27. For an interpretation of eudaimonia as an ordered set of virtuous activities, see Ralph McInerny, "Ultimate End
in Aristotle," in Being and Predication (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1986).
28. At ST Ia IIae, q. 1, a. 4, Aquinas speaks of a twofold order of ends in human action. In the order of intention,
i.e. the order of interior acts of the will, the first mover is the ultimate end, the unmoved mover. But an "unmoved
mover" is necessary in the order of execution as well. This is what deliberation concludes to be the "first means"
necessary for the sake of the end (primum eorum quae sunt ad finem). What is crucial to note here is that in both
orders, in intention and execution, ends are understood by Aquinas as movers, efficient causes, and so we must
understand intermediate ends, or means, as being moved by the ultimate end in the order of intention and as
movers toward the ultimate end in the order of execution.
29. None of this is to say that deliberation is necessary for an action to occur. On this theme see Daniel Westberg,
Right Practical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), chapter 11.
30. For example, EN III.3 1112b11ff.; VI.13 1145a2 6.
31. In III Sent., d. 33, q. 2, a. 4, sol. 4, with reference to EN VI.2 1138b35 1139a1; and In De anima III, lect. XV,
n. 826, with reference to De anima III.10 433a26.
32. Irwin, "The Scope of Deliberation," 26, n. 9. Irwin thinks Aquinas had his best opportunity to mention
synderesis in commenting upon Aristotle's discussion of nous at VI.11 1143a35 b5 (In X Ethicorum, VI, lect. IX, n.
1247)but passed it up.
33. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good, 238.
34. See chapter 8 of Thomism and Aristotelianism, esp. 170.
35. I have learned on this point from Alasdair MacIntyre's discussion of the difference between Aquinas and
Scotus on the "ought" of practical reason, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry (Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1990), 154ff. On the Thomistic approach to deriving "ought" from "is,'' see Ralph McInerny,
"Naturalism and Thomistic Ethics" The Thomist 60 (April 1976): 222 42, and chapter 3 of Ethica Thomistica
(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1982).
36. Cf. Kurt Pritzl, "Ways of Truth and Ways of Opinion in Aristotle," Proceedings of the American Catholic
Philosophical Association (1993): 241 52.
37. An excellent discussion of the promulgation of the natural law is found in Russell Hittinger, "Natural Law as
'Law': Reflections On the Occasion of Veritatis Splendor," American Journal of Jurisprudence (1994): 1 32.
Hittinger argues (19 20), based upon Aquinas's comments at In II Rom., lectio III, n. 219 (super 2:15) and ST
Ia IIae, q. 91, a. 2, that the promulgation of the natural law was sufficiently made to the Gentiles even in their
ignorance of the lawgiver, insofar as they knew the basic terms of good and evil. Whether in the order of
knowledge these terms were understood as law is a further
 

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question. According to Hittinger, Aquinas follows the patristic theologians in claiming that knowledge of the
natural law as law has become increasingly dim as a punishment for sin. Jaffa affirms the Suarezean view that
there cannot be a doctrine of natural law without explicit revelation of the lawgiver to the agent, thus confusing
the orders of being and knowing. See Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism, esp. 169.
38. To be more precise, Jaffa holds that natural right for Aristotle is a part of political or legal right, in that what is
naturally right is modified according to the contingencies of a given community. He does not deny that there is a
natural best, a natural standard, which provides the general direction for political decision-making, but this most, if
not all, actual polities will fail to attain. See Jaffa, Thomism and Aristotelianism, 182ff. Jaffa's central argument for
the mutability of natural right is based upon Aristotle's claims at EN V.7, esp. 1134b30ff. Aquinas's comment on
this text (lectio XII) takes Aristotle to be talking about the mutability of remote conclusiones derived from the
natural law with multa consideratio (ST Ia IIae, q. 100, aa. 1, 3, 11), not the first principles themselves (see n.
1029). On natural justice in Aristotle see Fred D. Miller, Jr., "Aristotle on Natural Law and Justice," in David Keyt
and Fred D. Miller, Jr., eds., A Companion to Aristole's Politics (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
39. ST Ia, q. 79, a. 11, sed contra. The expression is attributed to Aristotle, De anima III.9 433a1, though there is no
mention of this particular expression in the appropriate passage of Aquinas's comment on this work. For an
excellent discussion of this issue see Josef Pieper, Reality and the Good, trans. Stella Lange (Chicago: Henry
Regnery, 1967), esp. 47 51. For the analogy between the principles of speculative and practical reason, see ST
Ia IIae, q. 57, a. 4; q. 94, a. 2; IIa IIae, q. 47, a. 6.
40. In X Ethicorum, VI, lect. II, n. 1132: "Dicendum est ergo, quod intellectus practicus principium quidem habet
in universali consideratione, et secundum hoc est idem subjecto cum speculativo, sed terminatur ejus consideratio
in particulari operabili. Unde Philosophus dict in tertio de Anima [III.11 434a16ff.], quod ratio universalis non
movet sine particulari. Et secundum hoc, ratiocinativurn ponitur diversa pars a scientifico." Cf. In De anima, III,
lect. XVI, nn. 845 46.
41. ST Ia IIae, q. 66, a. 3, ad 3, does not pose a problem here; for in saying that "prudentia non solum dirigit virtues
morales in eligendo ea quae sunt ad finem, sed etiam in praestituendo finem," Aquinas is speaking of "end" in the
sense of the "mean" which is hit by prudence's arrangement of the appropriate means.
42. Scott MacDonald argues that Aquinas's notion of ultimate end can make a contribution to the theory of
practical rationality even without the baggage of his natural teleology. But this is just to jeopardize the rationality
of our ultimate commitments if the constituents of the ultimate end have only human choices as their measure.
43. At ST Ia IIae, q. 100, a. 8, in considering whether any of the precepts of the Decalogue are dispensable,
Aquinas argues that if a legislature were to determine a general precept to safeguard the city by ordering men from
each ward to guard the city against siege, it could dispense with this particular determination propter aliquam
maiorem utilitatem, for the sake of some greater utility. See also ST Ia IIae, q. 102, a. 1 and Aquinas's appeal to the
two kinds of order in discussing the cause of the ceremonial precepts of the lex vetus.
44. Suppl., q. 65, a. 1. See R. A. Armstrong, Primary and Secondary Precepts in Thomistic Natural Law Reasoning
(The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966), esp. 60ff.
 

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45. Irwin, "The Scope of Deliberation," 26, citing ST IIa IIae, q. 47, a. 15.
46. Ibid., 40.
47. Irwin (ibid., 41) does not think such determination usurps the role of nature in fixing ends, only that prudent
deliberation is required to "discover the character" of these natural ends.
48. At times Aquinas speaks of the natural inclinations as the seminales of the virtues, but this is just to emphasize
that they are seminales, not the virtues themselves. ST Ia IIae, q. 27, a. 3, ad 4; q. 63, a. 1.
49. The distinction Aquinas makes at Ia IIae, q. 94, a. 3 is especially illuminating in this regard. Here, in
considering whether the natural law commands acts of all the virtues, Aquinas argues that in one respect the
natural law commands all the acts of all the virtues, insofar as to the natural law belongs everything to which a
man is inclined by reason. But in another respect the natural law does not command all virtuous acts considered in
themselves, i.e. qua virtuous acts, because nature does not immediately incline to this or that temperate act
performed as the prudent agent performs it. Action born out of this higher level of understanding and habituation is
achieved only through the further inquiry of reason.
50. Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, "Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues and Goods," American Catholic
Philosophical Association Quarterly, vol. 66, n. 1 (1992): 3 19.
51. This is discussed by Ralph McInerny in chapter 8 of Aquinas and Analogy (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 1996).
 

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