Aristotle, Aquinas, And Morality

[Fidei Defensor]

I'm almost finished reading "The Last Superstition, A refutation of New Atheism" and I want to get a discussion going about Aristotle's metaphysics, Aquinas' synthesis of those metaphysics, and how they relate to morality.

 

I guess I'll start out by asking, what makes morals moral / does objective morality exist?

[arfink]

Well, without getting into too much depth, the core of Aristotle's morality (and which is also the core of St. Thomas') stems from the ideas they have about teleology. (Yes, I spelled that right, it's different from theology.)

 

Teleology is the idea that all things have a "telos," commonly translated to "cause" in English, although the concept is also usually referred to as "nature" by Thomists. This telos includes not just how a thing came into being, but also what it is meant to be right now and what it is meant to become or what it's for. So by determining where a thing came from, what it is meant to be doing now, and what it is meant to accomplish in the end, we can determine how it ought to behave in order not to violate its telos. This is also commonly discussed as the 4 Causes

 

Aristotle and St. Thomas would both say that a thing's telos is its intrinsic reality, and that how you perceive the thing does not change that reality. The causes are innate, because if they were not then things would literally not be as they seem. I believe this could be argued with the principle of non-contradiction, although I'm a bit fuzzy on that part. :P I'd have to look that one up again.

 

Now, there are post-Aristotelian ways of viewing teleology. You can completely throw it away, which is what Descartes essentially did, and what many modern and all post-modern materialists do. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are two commonly given examples of extreme opposition to teleology. There is one notable exception to this, Emmanuel Kant, but his account of teleology is a kind of reduction into identity and is, in my opinion, deeply problematic for Thomists.

Edited June 6, 2014 by arfink

[Fidei Defensor]

Thanks for that excellent summary, it really helped me to better grasp teleology.

 

Assuming this view on teleology, morality then would stem from man's innate nature of being ordered towards God? At least that's how I'm starting to understand it. Man's final cause is to know/relate to God, and so those things we view as "morals" stem from that teleos in that those things seen as "moral" further that cause to its natural end?

[arfink]

Thanks for that excellent summary, it really helped me to better grasp teleology.

 

Assuming this view on teleology, morality then would stem from man's innate nature of being ordered towards God? At least that's how I'm starting to understand it. Man's final cause is to know/relate to God, and so those things we view as "morals" stem from that teleos in that those things seen as "moral" further that cause to its natural end?

 

More or less, yes. Now, keep in mind that there's more than just teleology at work for Catholic morality. Teleology tells us what we can know just from our own nature. In other words, the natural law. But there are still a lot of other things in Catholic morality which we would call absolute but which are known from revealed truths and not from our nature. But in this case, I don't think Aristotle's system of ethics applies, since he didn't really deal with divine revelation at all.

[arfink]

Thanks for that excellent summary, it really helped me to better grasp teleology.

 

Assuming this view on teleology, morality then would stem from man's innate nature of being ordered towards God? At least that's how I'm starting to understand it. Man's final cause is to know/relate to God, and so those things we view as "morals" stem from that teleos in that those things seen as "moral" further that cause to its natural end?

 

And you're definitely on the right track here as well. Once you know the causes you know everything, and you can more or less derive the morality of any situation based on that information. The tricky part though is confirming you understand a thing's nature correctly. This is where explaining Thomism in the modern world gets really difficult if not impossible, because postmodern thinking holds that the causes are at best unmeasurable and thus unprovable, and in more cynical cases a believer in teleology would be criticized as contriving final causation entirely and intentionally deceiving others.

[Fidei Defensor]

More or less, yes. Now, keep in mind that there's more than just teleology at work for Catholic morality. Teleology tells us what we can know just from our own nature. In other words, the natural law. But there are still a lot of other things in Catholic morality which we would call absolute but which are known from revealed truths and not from our nature. But in this case, I don't think Aristotle's system of ethics applies, since he didn't really deal with divine revelation at all.

This is true. I was just interested in natural law and its correlates because it is a good place to begin conversation with someone who knows nothing of God or is perhaps anti-religion to some extent.

 

That and I took Thomas Aquinas' name for my confirmation, so I want to go a little more in depth with his ideas.

[Fidei Defensor]

And you're definitely on the right track here as well. Once you know the causes you know everything, and you can more or less derive the morality of any situation based on that information. The tricky part though is confirming you understand a thing's nature correctly. This is where explaining Thomism in the modern world gets really difficult if not impossible, because postmodern thinking holds that the causes are at best unmeasurable and thus unprovable, and in more cynical cases a believer in teleology would be criticized as contriving final causation entirely and intentionally deceiving others.

Postmodern thinking is annoying. I became quite unsatisfied with a wholly "naturalistic" materialistic explanation for the universe because it empties any objective meaning from life, and at best, makes even subjective meaning fairly pointless.

[arfink]

This is true. I was just interested in natural law and its correlates because it is a good place to begin conversation with someone who knows nothing of God or is perhaps anti-religion to some extent.

 

That and I took Thomas Aquinas' name for my confirmation, so I want to go a little more in depth with his ideas.

 

It can be a good place to start, but you need to be cautious because many people who have had an education in any kind of philosophy at all will deny the 4 causes and teleology out of hand. Many others who haven't been formally educated on the matter will still find it fishy because for hundreds of years we've been awash in ideology which is radically opposed to this view of metaphysics.
 

[Perigrina]

I'm almost finished reading "The Last Superstition, A refutation of New Atheism" and I want to get a discussion going about Aristotle's metaphysics, Aquinas' synthesis of those metaphysics, and how they relate to morality.

 

For anyone unfamiliar with the book, here is the publisher's description, just to give the context of the discussion:

 

The central contention of the "New Atheism" of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens is that there has for several centuries been a war between science and religion, that religion has been steadily losing that war, and that at this point in human history a completely secular scientific account of the world has been worked out in such thorough and convincing detail that there is no longer any reason why a rational and educated person should find the claims of any religion the least bit worthy of attention.

 

But as Edward Feser argues in The Last Superstition, in fact there is not, and never has been, any war between science and religion at all. There has instead been a conflict between two entirely philosophical conceptions of the natural order: on the one hand, the classical "teleological" vision of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, on which purpose or goal-directedness is as inherent a feature of the physical world as mass or electric charge; and the modern "mechanical" vision of Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, according to which the physical world is comprised of nothing more than purposeless, meaningless particles in motion. The modern "mechanical" picture has never been established by science, and cannot be, for it is not a scientific theory in the first place but merely a philosophical interpretation of science.

 

Not only is this modern philosophical picture rationally unfounded, it is demonstrably false. For the "mechanical" conception of the natural world, when worked out consistently, absurdly entails that rationality, and indeed the human mind itself, are illusory. The so-called "scientific worldview" championed by the New Atheists thus inevitably undermines its own rational foundations; and into the bargain it undermines the foundations of any possible morality as well.

[Dr_Asik]

I guess I'll start out by asking, what makes morals moral / does objective morality exist?

Coming late in this discussion, and I haven't read Feser's book, but without getting too technical, there is objective morality for Aristotle because human nature is something real and objective (it's what makes you a "human" rather than a "rabbit" or "bicycle"), and morality stems from human nature. So there is something universal about morality because there is something universal about humans - they're all human.

 

So that's for the "objectivity" of it. Now why do we speak of "morality" in the first place, i.e. what does Aristotle mean by that, Arfink made a good summary already. For Aristotle all things have a "final cause", something that they tend towards: for man, that is happiness, and virtue is the means towards that end.

 

 

 

[John Ryan]

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are two commonly given examples of extreme opposition to teleology.

 

How do you justify this position when Karl Marx based his entire political philosophy upon communism as the form of society that allows human beings the possibility of realizing their true nature, τέλος or essence? Marx was the ideological student of G.W.F. Hegel, and retained his understanding of essence and existence, albeit in atheistic form. 

[arfink]

How do you justify this position when Karl Marx based his entire political philosophy upon communism as the form of society that allows human beings the possibility of realizing their true nature, τέλος or essence? Marx was the ideological student of G.W.F. Hegel, and retained his understanding of essence and existence, albeit in atheistic form. 

 

Well, Marx is given as an example simply because of his rejection of "4 causes" teleology. I would also posit that, while Marx doesn't get into the details of it, Hegel does, and he actually doesn't seem to be thinking of the same thing as Thomas or Aristotle would be when he speaks of a thing's essence.

[John Ryan]

Well, Marx is given as an example simply because of his rejection of "4 causes" teleology. I would also posit that, while Marx doesn't get into the details of it, Hegel does, and he actually doesn't seem to be thinking of the same thing as Thomas or Aristotle would be when he speaks of a thing's essence.

 

I am not privy to a specific work of Marx where he specifically rejects Aristotelian Causality. However, rejection of the four causes teleology is not a reject of all teleology.