Theism’s Answer
15
An Argument from Rationality
The fifth and last important piece of moral evidence to consider for now is the need for morality to be a fully rational enterprise. This rich topic provides the grounds for an argument from providence. In order for morality to be fully rational, or a rationally stable phenomenon, following its dictates needs to comport with a moral agent’s ultimate interests.1 Obviously, it is not always consistent with every aspect of what is in a moral agent’s interests; in principle it could lead to premature death! But unless a case can be made that morality is ultimately in one’s best interest—even if moral motivations require being motivated by something other than one’s self-interest—arguably morality is less than fully rational in that specific sense. Such notions have a rich philosophical pedigree, so in order to conduct this discussion, we would like to delve a bit into the history of philosophical ethics.
Thomas Reid, Immanuel Kant, and the Coincidence Thesis
Laying the Groundwork
To lay the groundwork for a phenomenon called the “dualism of practical reason,” which will be explained shortly, a bit of philosophical history is in order. We will forgo discussing in detail either Blaise Pascal or John Locke, except to point out one germane fact about each. Both recognized that making sense of morality requires consideration of the well-being of both adherents and transgressors of the moral law. Pascal was famous for suggesting that it is a capital mistake to draw up our ethics without consideration of whether there is an afterlife, because he considered the answer to such a question most relevant to the import of ethics. In his Pensées, the great French mathematician and philosopher asserted that the immortality of the soul is so important that one must have lost all feeling not to care about knowing the facts of the matter.2
In Locke’s case, he was well known for emphasizing the importance of rewards and punishments in moral motivation. In fact, he did this with such zeal and explicitness that he became vulnerable to the charge of equating moral motivation with the aim to produce a beneficial outcome, something more practical and prudential than anything intrinsically moral. In fairness to him, though, Locke thought that human beings can appreciate the intrinsic goodness of virtue, and even its appeal, but that this alone is inadequate to motivate virtuous behavior—especially when virtue is costly. To remedy this problem, on Locke’s view, clear and explicit sanctions are needed to ensure that the virtuous course of action will always be the more attractive option. Here we can find the precursors to the notion that morality, to make full rational sense, should conduce to fulfillment and happiness. To retain its authority in our lives, morality requires the stability of cohering with ultimate happiness.
Coincidence Thesis and Thomas Reid
This philosophical notion about moral coherence has a long history. In various ways, it is operative in the eudaimonistic theories that practically equate the moral life with deep human flourishing. To give but a smattering of examples: Hints of the idea can be found in Augustine and Anselm, Butler and Berkeley. The Stoics and Epicureans both believed that there is an ultimate airtight connection between happiness and holiness. And organic, tight resonances between godly virtue and deep joy can be found peppered all throughout the Judeo-Christian tradition. Some philosophers eventually called this happiness/holiness conjunction (or, alternatively, the individual/communal or private/public good connection) the “coincidence thesis.”3 Generically expressed, it says that the moral life is, or is at least likely to be, good on the whole for the virtuous agent. Despite the popularity of the conviction, though, what evidence is there to think that it is true?
Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, for one, saw no way to defend the coincidence of virtue and well-being apart from supposing that the world is under benevolent administration. He did not take the eudaimonistic route but rather more rigidly distinguished virtue and well-being, but he then offered a possibility for their coincidence by appeal to a sovereign and good God superintending the world. He wrote, “While the world is under a wise and benevolent administration, it is impossible, that any man should, in the issue, be a loser by doing his duty. Every man, therefore, who believes in God, while he is careful to do his duty, may safely leave the care of his happiness to Him who made him.”4 Reid thought a commitment to the coincidence thesis, though virtuous, natural, and intuitive, goes beyond the evidence in some sense. Sidgwick would later come to the same conclusion.
Immanuel Kant
The next step that this dialectic requires invokes the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Reid took the coincidence thesis as a natural sort of hypothesis to believe but wondered if he was evidentially justified to believe it. Kant approached the matter similarly but differently.5 To begin with, Kant is well known for writing that authentically moral actions require the right sort of motivation—namely, to be motivated by respect for the moral law. It is this intention animating our actions, rather than their consequences, that determines the moral status of an action. Morality is worth doing for its own sake. Kant notoriously downplayed the importance of consequences, counseling instead doing duty for duty’s sake.
At the same time, however, Kant was not indifferent to the moral agent’s well-being. He thought that human beings reside in both the noumenal and phenomenal realms—the world as it is and the world of appearances, respectively. If we were purely noumenal creatures, he argued, then commitment to virtue for its own sake and nothing else would be enough, but because we are also phenomenal creatures, we are hardwired to care about issues like our own happiness too. So, it is true that Kant thought that our moral motivations should not include our desire to be happy, but it is also true that he thought our desire to be happy is morally legitimate.
Kant thought that a rational moral being must necessarily will “the highest good,” which consists of a world in which people are both morally good and happy and in which moral virtue is the condition for happiness. Kant was less concerned with questions of happiness per se than with questions of what makes us worthy of happiness. He held that a person cannot rationally will a virtuous life without believing that moral actions can successfully achieve such an end, which requires that the world be ordered in a certain way. This conviction is equivalent to belief in God, a moral being who is ultimately responsible for the character of the natural world. Kant would reject both the suggestion that happiness is irrelevant to the moral life and the suggestion that the world features a huge disconnect between virtue and happiness. Kant thought that theism provides the best explanation of how morality and rationality are not at odds. If the coincidence thesis were not true, morality would not really make full rational sense, but he thought the thesis is actually true.6 With that, then, the stage is set for the dualism of practical reason—a new name for an old idea.
Henry Sidgwick and the Dualism of Practical Reason
In the great British philosopher Henry Sidgwick’s magisterial Methods of Ethics can be found a discussion of what he called “the dualism of practical reason.”7 It resides in the vicinity of Scotus’s distinction between affections for advantage or for justice and this recurring distinction between public and private goods. Sidgwick perceived that the problem, this dualism, poses a threat to the very heart of the ethical enterprise if it did not admit of an effective resolution. He thought that if it could not be resolved, it would show there to be a fundamental problem with ethics itself, at least understood as a rational endeavor. At worst, it reveals a sort of incoherence at the very foundation of morality. What morality dictates, on the one hand, and what rationality dictates, on the other, would be at odds.
Kant’s and Reid’s discussion of the coincidence thesis strongly bears on the discussion by Sidgwick, and the reasons should be obvious. The coincidence thesis advances the notion that virtue and well-being coincide, at least roughly and in the long term. Whereas Kant predicated a moral argument for God’s existence on the truth of such a thesis, Reid was more reticent, recognizing the difficulty of establishing the coincidence thesis. On this score, Sidgwick is a kindred spirit. He attempted to establish such coincidence on empirical grounds but finally despaired of the task. After having tried in vain to show the thesis to be true, he became convinced he was unable to do so. Among his reasons for skepticism are those aforementioned problematic times when there appears to be an intractable disconnect between happiness and virtue.
It is important, in order to avoid a misconstrual, to understand the sort of happiness that is relevant here. It is not happiness understood in a deflated or degraded sort of way. It is better to invoke the specter of what the Greeks were getting at with the idea of eudaimonia—a deep sense of fulfillment and flourishing. The experience of this sort of deep satisfaction is consistent with difficulties and hardships and even periods of profound sadness. Contemporary construals of happiness are not generally as effective at capturing this deeper sense of fulfillment that is at play in this conversation. The coincidence thesis, thus construed, pertains to whether living a moral life is consistent with the deepest joys of which human beings are capable. If morality were to preclude our highest satisfactions and deepest joy, this would pose a prohibitively high cost for being committed to morality. So much so, in fact, that it could be argued that there would be junctures at which the deliverances of morality and rationality diverge. This is to suggest that, in such cases, morality would be less than a fully rational enterprise.
This is the quandary in which Sidgwick found himself. Content with neither Reid’s effort to look to theology for a possible resolution to the dualism, nor with Kant’s predication of a discursive moral argument for God’s existence using the coincidence thesis, Sidgwick was profoundly troubled by what he considered the conspicuous paucity of empirical evidence for its truth. In his landmark work in ethics, Sidgwick advanced a classical case for utilitarianism, a consequentialist normative ethical theory that considers as relevant more than just personal happiness. All who are affected by our actions should be taken into account, he thought. Utilitarianism, especially of the sort popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, seemed to provide grounds for universal benevolence and concern.
Sidgwick, however, did not think of self-love as an impediment to such universal love and benevolence. Proper regard for the self is required if we are to muster sufficient motivation to act for the general good. To find the inspiration and incentive to universal benevolence requires developing our sense of sympathy, deepening our insight, and working hard on ourselves and our habits. As a utilitarian, Sidgwick believed the ultimate good was “desirable consciousness.” He wanted to show that rational hedonism (something like rational self-concern) is consistent with utilitarianism. He affirmed rational self-love while also arguing that such love is not the highest good, for it is too narrow, fleeting, and insecure to hold such lofty status. Universal happiness, though, is a worthy target for our highest aspirations.
Nevertheless, even though rational self-love is not sufficient to qualify as the ultimate good, its claims, Sidgwick thought, may still trump those of universal happiness. To demand a personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good and the happiness of others creates a divide between human beings whose ultimate good is happiness and those for whom it is conformity to reason. Sidgwick struggled mightily with this tension or dualism. A person may choose to pay the price and sacrifice himself and his interests for the greater good and happiness of others, but Sidgwick finally concluded that it would be no less rational for someone to privilege his own happiness instead. On some occasions, we cannot do both, and it is precisely the conflict between these incompatible courses of action that generates what Sidgwick called “the dualism of practical reason.” For a season, he failed to see the discrepancy between the natural end of seeking personal happiness and the end of duty to seek the general happiness, but eventually he came to see the tension as unavoidable and problematic in the extreme, bedeviling him for the rest of his career.
The issue he was struggling with was hardly new. Its precursors, articulated under subtly different guises, can be found in Anselm and Scotus, in Pascal and Locke, in Reid and Kant. It is an issue at the heart of the ethical enterprise, of interest both to theoreticians of ethics and to its practitioners. Is it rational to do our moral duty even when it is costly to do so? Is it equally permissible, morally speaking, to prioritize one’s own happiness or benefit over the general good? Sidgwick’s conclusion, after much reflection, is that one has a choice in some such cases of disconnect: It is equally rational to assign primacy to one’s own happiness (prudence) or to the greater good (rational benevolence). No problem even arises in cases of coincidence between self-love and benevolence, but such correspondence does not always obtain (at least in the short term). The lack of empirical confirmation of the coincidence thesis left him in this quandary and generated this dualism, which convinced him that it may well be impossible to make morality completely rational.
A Theistic Solution
Having laid out the dualism and its historical predecessors, let’s examine a particular tradition to see what resources it might bring to bear on the problem. Sidgwick himself tipped his hat toward this tradition and acknowledged its possibilities to resolve the dilemma but finally decided not to move in that direction. The tradition is a theistic paradigm according to which a sovereign and good God ensures ultimate correspondence between (to put it pithily) happiness and holiness—less pithily, virtue and fulfillment, or public and private goods, or duty and self-interest, and the like. Recall, once more, that Reid and Kant both saw theistic implications where the coincidence thesis is involved.
Sidgwick’s Resistance
Sidgwick also saw the possibility of a theistic resolution to the dualism of practical reason. In essence, a good God, classically construed, would give us reasons to think the coincidence thesis is true. The truth of the coincidence thesis, harmony between rational self-love and rational benevolence, would preclude the dualism of practical reason from coming about. Sidgwick could see that theism, thus construed, could render morality quite rationally stable after all.
Interestingly enough, however, Sidgwick did not opt for this solution. His agenda was one of trying to figure out whether ethics can be constructed independently of premises from theology or other sources. A nonnegotiable intuition, for him, as clear as any axiom of geometry, is that it is right and reasonable to treat others as we would like to be treated in similar circumstances. But he could not find an analogous conviction inseparably connecting God with our moral convictions. Whereas Kant postulated God’s existence on the basis of the coincidence thesis, Sidgwick refused to invoke a theistic effort to resolve the dualism of practical reason, leaving him with an unresolved problem. Incidentally, although Sidgwick thought the dualism intractable, he did not lose or counsel others to lose a commitment to morality but rather was led to consider lowering the demands of morality in order for it to remain a fully rational enterprise.
Theism’s Answer
Rather than adjudicating between, say, Kant or Reid, on the one hand, and Sidgwick, on the other, we will explore more fully the solution that theism can offer. If we were to offer a so-called explanandum-driven investigation, we might, as Kant did, attempt to infer God’s existence on the basis of the coincidence thesis, or at the least attempt to show that principled convictions about the coincidence thesis give theism more plausibility.
Instead, ours will be, less ambitiously, an explanans-driven exploration that delves into reasons for thinking that God, classically construed, would indeed, if he is real, resolve the dualism of practical reason, thus salvaging an important sense in which morality is rational. If our analysis is right, it would give, say, theistically minded business people compelling reasons to be willing, in their efforts at commerce, to do what they are convinced morality would dictate even if doing so appears to be costly. For if the coincidence thesis is right, such a course of action would be finally worth it and in one’s self-interest after all, at least roughly and in the long term (if only posthumously).
To get the matter started, consider again Sidgwick’s conclusion that acting in one’s self-interest would be, in those problematic cases of seeming disconnect between egoistic and altruistic impulses, just as acceptable, proper, and rational as acting for the greater good. This view subsequently stirred the ire of certain commentators. Among those who challenged Sidgwick’s view on this matter was British philosopher Hastings Rashdall. Rashdall had been Sidgwick’s student, but he demurred from his mentor about the dualism, raising this question for Sidgwick: Isn’t it the case that the altruistic impulses we have are the right perspective? Isn’t it the reasonable perspective rather than Sidgwick’s claim that the self-regarding and altruistic perspectives are equally reasonable or rational? One’s own pleasure and the general pleasure are not equally important or valuable. Or so Rashdall thought.
And not without some intuitive force. Many share Rashdall’s concern that Sidgwick’s conclusion does not ring true and that privileging one’s own happiness or pleasure over larger other-regarding duties—including those of justice—would be wrong and somehow radically mistaken. For Rashdall, the dualism does not arise, not because of his convictions about the coincidence thesis but because of what he thought was the binding authority of morality. Other-regarding moral behaviors hold primacy over egoistic impulses. That said, though, Rashdall was not unmindful of the issue of the coincidence thesis, writing this: “But if goodness be the end and without which the highest happiness is incomplete, if goodness be of the essence of the highest happiness, then it is not inconceivable that the voluntary neglect of a lower good in the pursuit of a higher may be intrinsically necessary to the attainment of that completed state of being, of a life which shall embrace both these concepts of goodness and happiness which Modern Philosophy has been accustomed to separate—the ‘Well-being’ or [eudaimonia] of ancient Ethics.”8
Interesting to point out at this juncture, then, are two theistic ways in which to argue for the coincidence thesis. One is the path of the eudaimonist, and there are echoes of that approach in Rashdall: Somehow inherent to right and good actions are features that benefit the moral actor and enable his deepest fulfillment.9 The other is a more Kantian approach: A sovereign and good God ensures that the conceptually distinct realities of happiness and holiness ultimately cohere. We set to the side for now the possibility that the two accounts are reconcilable and able to be woven together into an integrated synthesis, as interesting as such an inquiry might be.
Rashdall’s effort to forge a more intimate organic connection between virtue and happiness derives from his conviction that Sidgwick had failed to see that moral goodness—virtue and character as an element of the highest good—needs to be understood in an expansive enough way to include altruistic concerns and the rightness of promoting greater goods than those purely or mainly for oneself. There is nothing wrong with taking issues of self-interest seriously, but to cross moral lines in doing so is problematic. In those cases of, say, doing justice or benefiting self, the former trumps. For those thus convinced, there is a hierarchy here: Morality holds primacy over self-interest. The price to pay to do the right thing may be costly, especially in the short term, but we can and should be willing to make such sacrifices and not trade integrity for, say, mammon. One’s willingness to do so shows one’s account of goodness is too small.10
Immanuel Kant did not strive to locate the source of moral authority in consequences, and certainly not in whether actions generate happiness. So far, then, Kant seems to sound like one who would insist that we should not care about our happiness at all. We should simply do our duty and aim for virtue, whether the result is happiness or not. Again, though, this analysis of Kant turns out to be not quite right, because Kant did after all recognize that fulfillment and happiness are important to human beings—since we are not merely spirit or mind; we also have bodies and various needs and cannot help but want to be happy. Again, it isn’t that actions are right because they produce happiness; the relationship between virtue and joy is subtler than that. As Kant put it, we should become the sorts of persons who deserve to be happy.
If there is an ultimate disconnect between virtue and happiness, then morality might end up pointing in one direction (toward virtue), while rationality might push in a different direction (toward our happiness). Ultimately Kant believed there has to be an airtight connection between virtue and happiness if the enterprise of morality is to be a fully rational one. Our highest good—what is best for us—is the perfect blend of virtue and happiness. Reid, too, had been convinced that virtue and happiness need to coincide to make full rational sense of morality, and the solution he thought most obvious was a benevolent deity. As he put it, “While the world is under a wise and benevolent administration, it is impossible, that any man should, in the issue, be a loser by doing his duty. Every man, therefore, who believes in God, while he is careful to do his duty, may safely leave the care of his happiness to Him who made him.”11
Subsequent to Kant, as discussed, Sidgwick’s analysis tells a similar tale, except he saw so acute a problem that it threatened the very rationality of morality. Interestingly, he could see only one potential solution: theism. If a providential God ensured ultimate correspondence between self-interest and altruism, between joy and virtue, then morality could be fully rationalized. Although he himself did not follow this line of evidence in his own life, we can still find the ingredients for an argument from providence in his discussion of the dualism of practical reason.
We have been approaching this question mainly from assuming theism and asking how it could underwrite the coincidence thesis and thus resolve the dualism of practical reason. It might be suggested that such an approach lacks apologetic value, but we disagree. To the extent that something like the coincidence thesis does indeed seem a natural stance to assume, the philosophical power of Anselmian theism to make sense of it and thereby resolve the dualism of practical reason that has so bedeviled ethicists, we would suggest, adds plausibility to theism. By itself it may not render theism more likely true than false, but it’s a piece of the puzzle and to some extent makes theism more likely than it would otherwise be. It gives at least some reason to take theism more seriously, and for present purposes that will suffice. The next, and last, chapter in part 3 will better explain why this is so.
1 This may not be a sufficient condition, but arguably it is a necessary one.
2 Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford University Press, 1995), 143.
3 To be clear, by “coincidence” one does not mean a chance occurrence but rather the coinciding of two seemingly independent realities.
4 Thomas Reid, Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, intro. B. Brody (MIT Press, 1969), 256. Reid agreed with Scotus that genuine virtue requires being committed to the moral life for its own sake, not for any reward. Nevertheless, he importantly saw no way to make sense of that commitment apart from holding that there is just and benevolent administration of the world, ensuring that an agent’s virtue and well-being coincide, if not in this life, then in the next. As Reid put it, “Virtue is his [i.e., God’s] care. Its votaries are under his protection & guardianship.” Reid, Practical Ethics, ed. K. Haakonssen (Princeton University Press, 1990), 120.
5 Kant discusses respect for the moral law prominently throughout his Critique of Practical Reason and his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.
6 These reflections led Kant to formulate an argument for God’s existence. Predicated on morality making full rational sense, theism provides the best or only explanation of how this can be so. So, following “Lotze’s dictum” that says moral evidence can shed light on metaphysical matters, he inferred God’s existence on the basis of the rationality of morality. John Hare calls this Kant’s “argument from providence.” Kant gave this argument in the dialectic of the Critique of Practical Reason and at the beginning of Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason and the end of the First and Third Critiques.
7 Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. (Hackett, 1981), 404–508.
8 Hastings Rashdall, The Theory of Good and Evil: A Treatise on Moral Philosophy (Clarendon, 1907), 1:61–62.
9 Of course, not all eudaimonists and natural lawyers are theistic in their orientation, though arguably the bulk of the tradition and most of its most vocal and significant adherents have been theists.
10 Mention of a hierarchy might remind readers of Scotus and Anselm, who, recall, argued that though there is nothing wrong with an affection for advantage, it should be subordinated to the affection for justice. Subordinating the affection for justice to the affection for advantage indicates an inordinate regard for self and an abdication of moral responsibilities.
11 Reid, Active Powers of the Human Mind, 256.