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John Haldane

Thomistic Ethics
in America

The greatest institutional contributions to Catholic philosophy in the modern English-speaking world have been made in the
United States in the twentieth century. European influences have
been strong, particularly through the work of Gilson, Maritain,
Pieper, and Simon, but they served principally to stimulate generations of Americans to draw upon and reformulate Catholic philosophical thought, especially but not exclusively Thomism. University
presses, such as those of Catholic University of America, Fordham,
Georgetown, Loyola, and Marquette, have been important in the
dissemination of these ideas; however the primary critical fora of
Catholic thought have been journals. In the field of philosophy, narrowly construed, a familiar trio of periodicals spans three quarters
of the twentieth century: the Modern Schoolman founded in 1925, New
Scholasticism established in 1927 and continued from 1990 as the
American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, and the Thomist founded in
1939. (To which might be added, as favoring Catholic thought, two
general philosophy journals: the Review of Metaphysics established in
1947 and the International Philosophical Quarterly founded in 1961.)
logos 3:4 fall 2000

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Since these periodicals were established, the range of philosophical problems and approaches has widened. There is a need to
address this while also maintaining links between philosophy and
other branches of humane reflection and scholarship. This latter is,
I think, of particular importance in consequence of the trend of academic philosophy to have become increasingly inaccessible to nonprofessionals. That tendency was near to inevitable given the
scientific conception of knowledge adopted by the large American
research universities, which is now dominant in all but a few institutions. Over the same period, however, the number of issues on
which nonphilosophers and nonacademics in general seek informed
reflection and guidance has grown considerably. This is particularly
true of public policy questions. Indeed, the need of places where
there can be discussion of issues of the first importance contributed
to by philosophers, theologians, cultural historians, literary critics
and others is greater than ever before.

1.Aquinas, Contemporary Ethics, and Natural Law

Apart from the spheres of metaphysics and natural theology,
Aquinass greatest influence, and certainly the field in which his
ideas have had an impact beyond the Catholic world, is that of ethics
and politics. Thomass own principal writings in this area are to be
found in the First Part of the Second Part (the Prima Secundae) of the
Summa Theologiae, in his Commentary on Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics,
and in his Treatise on Kingship. These texts, together with commentaries upon them, served as the main model of Catholic ethics
throughout the heyday of the revival of Thomism inaugurated in
1879 by Leo XIIIs Aeterni Patris, or to use Leos own less often quoted title: The Restoration in Catholic schools of Christian Philosophy according to the mind of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelic
Doctor. With the reception of the Second Vatican Council and in
conformity with the character of the 1960s, however, Catholic moral

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theology underwent a process of critical reconstruction and this led
many to abandon the Thomistic natural-law tradition in favor of
more experientially and existentially oriented approaches.
Within philosophy, however, the situation was rather different.
There are several reasons for this. First, philosophers are generally
concerned with theoretical coherence and argumentative rigour,
and Thomass style of ethics exhibits both, whereas at least some of
the new modes appeared to exhibit neither. Second, Aquinas
grounds his moral philosophy in metaphysics in the form of the philosophy of nature, and this provides for a robust notion of objectivity of ethical judgment in contrast to the seeming subjectivity of
existentialist and sentimentalist approaches. Third, in the secular
English-language philosophy of the 1960s there had been a revival of
interest in Aristotelian ethics and more broadly in objectivist naturalism of a sort quite close to Aquinass own. Some of those responsible for the revival, such as Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach,
were themselves Catholics; others, such as Philippa Foot and Geoffrey Warnock, were not.Yet it was Foot, an atheist, who most fulsomely acknowledged the value of Thomass writings for anyone
working in moral philosophy. In the introduction to her collection of
essays, Virtues andVices, she writes:
It is certain in any case that the most systematic account [of the
virtues] is found in Aristotle, and in the blending of Aristotle
and Christian philosophy found in St. Thomas. By and large
Aquinas followed Aristotlesometimes even heroically
where Aristotle gave an opinion, and where St. Thomas is on
his own, as in developing the doctrine of the theological
virtues of faith, hope and charity, and in his theocentric doctrine of happiness, he still uses an Aristotelian framework
where he can: as for instance in speaking of happiness as mans
last end. However, there are different emphases and new elements in Aquinass ethics: often he works things out in far
greater detail than Aristotle did, and it is possible to learn a

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great deal from Aquinas that one could not have got from
Aristotle. It is my opinion that the Summa Theologica is one of
the best sources we have for moral philosophy, and moreover
that St. Thomass ethical writings are as useful to the atheist as
to the Catholic or other Christian believer.1

It may come as a welcome surprise to some readers that one of

the leading moral philosophers of the analytical school, whose career
has been divided between such bastions of secular thought as Oxford
and UCLA, should provide so ringing an endorsement of Aquinas.
But, of course, in the main it has been Christian and largely Catholic
thinkers who have studied, taught, and contributed to Thomistic
ethics. Various names stand out. Among the continental Europeans
there were those previously mentioned, viz. Etienne Gilson, Jacques
Maritain, Joseph Pieper, andYves Simon. Then there are non-American English-language writers such as Thomas Gilby and Gerald
Vann. However, among philosophers of the English-speaking world
it has been, as I said, in North America that the main and best work
has been done. This contribution divides into four partially overlapping groups: first, the generation most active in the second and third
quarters of the century, including Vernon Bourke and Henry Veatch;
second, those taught by this generation but active still, prime among
whom are Germain Grisez and Ralph McInerny; third, the succeeding generation, numbering among it Joseph Boyle, John Finnis,
and Anthony Lisska; and fourth, those in mid career. I am hesitant to
pick out individuals in this latter group for risk of unjust omissions
but I think it only fair to advert to the good work being done by
Jorge Garcia and Patrick Lee in ethics and by Robert George and
Russell Hittinger in political philosophy. Beyond this there are also
a number of very good young people, at the early stages of their academic careers, many of whom studied for their Ph.D.s at Notre
Dame under McInerny, David Solomon, and Alasdair MacIntyre.
The last named is, of course, the most widely known moral
philosopher in the broadly Thomistic tradition, but his reputation

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was made long before he turned in that direction and his intellectual formation was largely outside the Catholic fold. Although of the
same generation as Grisez and McInerny, he is, like Anscombe and
Geach, a convert to Catholicism and largely a product of the British
philosophical tradition (notwithstanding his rebellions against it).
Unlike them, however, he pursued his career in the United States,
including a spell at Notre Dame, to which happily he has returned
after a period at Duke.
There is a further reason to view MacIntyre apart from the
other figures mentioned, for until quite recently he has argued that
moral philosophy can and should be conducted without reliance
upon a general account of human nature of the sort provided by the
Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition, and which has within that tradition generally been thought to be essential for ethics. In his most
widely discussed book, After Virtue, MacIntyre goes so far as to disparage the very idea of what he there terms metaphysical biology,2
but in his most recent work, Dependent Rational Animals, published
almost twenty years later, he retracts this criticism and argues that
an idea of the good for an agent cannot be formed independently of
having a conception of the kind of being it is:
In After Virtue I had attempted to give an account of the place
of the virtues, understood as Aristotle had understood them,
within social practices, the lives of individuals and the lives of
communities, while making that account independent of what
I called Aristotles metaphysical biology. Although there is
indeed good reason to repudiate important elements in Aristotles biology, I now judge that I was in error in supposing an
ethics independent of biology to be possible. . . . no account
of the goods, rules and virtues that are definitive of our moral
life can be adequate that does not explainor at least point us
towards an explanationhow that form of life is possible for
beings who are biologically constituted as we are, by providing us with an account of our development towards and into
that form of life.3

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This issue of the relationship between virtue and nature recalls
something of the debate that has served to mark and, I have to say,
to some extent to mar the development of natural-law ethics within American Catholic philosophy in the last couple of decades. However, before discussing this issue I would like to relate the general
project of developing an adequate theory of value and conduct in the
personal, social, and political spheres, to the present condition of
American public and political culture. The link is provided by the
work of one of the principal figures in the field of neo-Thomistic
thought, viz. Ralph McInerny.

2. Ethics in American Public Life

The title of McInernys recent Gifford Lectures, given at Glasgow
University in 1999/2000 is Characters in Search of their Author.
The series and the book(s) that will emerge from it develop an interesting account of the relationship of the thoughts of quite different
individuals to the idea of perennial philosophy. Among the notions
which comprise that philosophy, and which McInerny takes to be a
constant of human reflection, is the idea that conduct admits of
rational assessment as morally good or bad, right or wrong, virtuous
or vicious. During the period of presenting his first series of Giffords
in fall 1999, McInerny also gave a public lecture at the University of
St. Andrews under the auspices of the Centre for Philosophy and
Public Affairs; its theme was Ethics and Religion in American Public Life.
One important issue that emerged in the course of that lecture,
and in the subsequent discussion of it, was the feasibility of a naturallaw-based, common, public morality. I wish to relate this issue to the
idea of ethical objectivity and to a connected theme in McInernys
writings, viz. the character and adequacy of the form of natural-law
theorizing associated with others of those Catholic thinkers whom I
have already mentioned. I have in mind in particular the discussion

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in chapter three of Ethica Thomistica, titled Ultimate End and Moral
Principles, where McInerny takes issue with the interpretation of
Aquinass moral theory offered by Germain Grisez and John Finnis
and adopted by others who identify themselves with what has come
to be known as the new natural-law theory. 4
I turn first, however, to consider the issue of ethics in American
public life as this strikes one who has become a fairly frequent visitor to the country and who has developed a great interest in it.
America has journeyed a long way in two hundred years in its public culture, further than the European societies from which it originally derived. In 1987 I was spending some months at the Center for
Philosophy of Science of the University of Pittsburgh and was
impressed by the fact that PBS (or could it even have been CBS?)
broadcast each evening over the relevant period extracts from contributions to the constitutional convention held in Philadelphia two
centuries before (so impressed, in fact, that I then paid a visit to
Philadelphia). The dialectical and rhetorical styles of these 1787
contributions were familiar: the commonsense natural philosophies
of John Locke and Thomas Reid had arrived in the New World and
were shaping its emergent public philosophy. And since behind
Locke, and guiding him, stood Richard Hooker (whose Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity earned him the title the Anglican Aquinas) one might
even say that a broadly Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of natural law was in earshot.
At the point of the conventions bicentenary in 1987 there was
still, I think, a sense in the higher reaches of American public culture
that questions of policy could and should be resolved by reference
to rational deliberation about substantive endsnot just the soughtfor fair procedures or balanced compromises that characterize liberal contractualism, but objectively right outcomes, and right
because oriented toward human goods. That may be too rosy a picture, but my sense was, and remains, that Presidents Carter, Reagan,
and Bush would all have subscribed to the view that there are truly

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objective rights and wrongs, and that these requirements are linked
to values that may be discovered by reflecting on human nature. In
fact, and this was part of Americas greatness, the presidents and the
people would not have said that these truths might be discovered but
rather that they were known and that they informed the thinking of
even the most unreflective folk. This view, and the facts it surveyed,
were again products of the eighteenth century, in this case owing, I
believe, to Edmund Burke.
Now things are certainly different in these respects and they are
continuing to change. Of course, the principal forces effecting that
change began to operate long before 1987. The demands associated
with acquiring the role of world leadership may have proved too testing of a society that was still in the early stages of development. The
civil-rights debate, Vietnam and Watergate, ill-fated and arguably
unjust foreign adventures, and, certainly not least, the corrupting
effects of superfluous affluence, all took their toll on the moral confidence and seriousness of the nation. Now we see a society whose
degeneracy is marked not so much by the activities of the president,
or of other public figures from the political and entertainment
world(s), but by the fact that, for the most part, the generation now
entering middle age apparently lacks the resources to fashion a convincing moral critique of the condition of American society. The
state of the sex and hedonism, and abortion and euthanasia debates
are but the most dramatic expressions of this decline.
For Catholic thinkers this state of affairs must not only be disturbing; it must also be perplexing. Certainly theological explanations are available, but in charity we should be reluctant to attribute
what are clearly grievous failings, to an increase of supernatural evil.
There is another, natural, explanation and one that ought to be congenialat least in its positive implicationto those who value
knowledge, which is that the most significant aspect of Americas
cultural decline is educational. To an outsider (and I emphasize that
I write this as a friendly foreigner) the most obviously discreditable

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deep fact about the public culture of the United States is its ignorance of matters that matter. Set aside for now the question of the
causes of this and consider its effects. The most evident one is uncertainty of response in circumstances where serious thought is called
for and where that requirement has been announced. The phrases
live and let live, and to each his own have given way to the immediately current equivalent of whatever turns you on and respect
my difference.
In the sense and spirit in which they are most often uttered these
are idiocies and should be met with gentle or firm correction. The
fact that they are notor are but only by the very fewconfirms
the diagnosis of cultural degeneracy. But how to rectify this? If ignorance is the problem, then education is the answer, but that only
forces the question of what, and with what authority we may teach?
Philosophers can only have one answerthe truthand not just any
truth but that which matters most; the set of general truths about the
structure of reality and about the human condition. Aquinas repeatedly affirms that what we know first are things outside ourselves and
that only by reflection do we come to know about our minds and our
inclinations. No wonder, then, that the De Ente et Essentia (On Being
and Essence) was one of Thomass earliest works, or that he returned
again and again to issues in metaphysics and natural philosophy.

3. Natural Law and Practical Reason

This priority is, I take it, part of Ralph McInernys complaint against
those who might seem to treat natural-law precepts as if they were
principles of pure practical reason rather than statements relating
action to the achievement of ends that contribute instrumentally or
constitutively to our well-being as human animals. Remember that
the Kantian phrase pure practical reason was coined by its author
to mark a separation, as he saw it, between ethics and anthropology.
Moral imperatives for Kant are wholly categorical, independent not

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only of any particular interest the agent might have and that would
give him or her reason to attend to an instrumental imperative but
independent also of any interests we all share and could not fail to
have in virtue of our human naturesinterests expressed in what he
called assertoric imperatives. Here it is worth setting out Kants
taxonomy of imperatives in his own words (as crisply translated by
H. J. Paton):
We must now try to explain what is meant by words like
good and ought, and in particular what is meant by an
imperative . . . the word good has different senses when
used in connection with different kinds of imperative. . . .
There are three kinds of imperatives. Since imperatives are
objective principles considered as necessitating, there must
equally be three corresponding kinds of objective principle
and three corresponding kinds (or senses) of good. Some
objective principles are conditioned by a will for some end
that is to say they would necessarily be followed by a fully
rational agent if he willed that end. These principles give rise
to [1] hypothetical imperatives, which have the general form If I
will this end, I ought to do such and such. They bid us to
actions that are good as means to an end that we already do (or
might will). When the end is merely one that we might will,
the imperatives are [1a] problematic or technical . . . Where the
end is one that every rational agent wills by his very nature, the
imperatives are [1b] assertoric or pragmatic. The end which
every rational agent wills by his very nature is his own happiness, and the actions enjoined by a pragmatic imperative are
good in the sense of being prudent. Some objective principles
are unconditioned: they would necessarily be followed by a
fully rational agent but are not based on the previous willing
of some further end. These principles give rise to [2] categorical imperatives, which have the general form I ought to do such
and such (without any if as a prior condition). . . . The different kinds of imperative exercise a different kind of neces-

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sitation. The difference may be marked by describing them as
[i] rules of skill, [ii] counsels of prudence, and [iii] commands
of morality.5 (The numbering is mine).

A traditional Aristotelian-cum-naturalist objection to Kants classification is that it misidentifies the nature of moral reasoning by
detaching it from considerations of what we seek by our very nature,
not as a matter of individual and variable desire but as one of essential need. Kant thereby is forced into the position of having ultimately to say that there is no reason why morally one ought, or
ought not, to act in a certain way other than that to do so would contravene the moral law, which is to say that it would be contrary to
pure practical reason. Whereas it seems natural to suppose a) that
moral claims have at least partly nonmoral grounds, and b) that
these relate to what constitutes harm or benefit to us as animals of
a certain sort. Assuming this supposition to be accepted, it then
becomes apt to query Kants classification of assertoric imperatives
as nonmoral, or equivalently to dispute the contrast between the
prudential and the moral as he defines them. In short, while it is
indeed a mistake to treat moral reasoning as hypothetical in the
sense of being merely problematic or instrumental with regard to
highly contingent and even subjective desires, it seems plausible to
regard it as instrumental in the sense of being assertoric. Indeed,
since such counsels of prudence prescribe actions directed toward
ends which every rational agent wills by his very nature, the antecedent
of the hypothetical may be dropped in contexts of human deliberation, thereby yielding imperatives of the form described by Kant as
categorical. The point remains, however, that what warrant such
prescriptions are facts about human nature and without the latter
they cannot be grounded.
Likewise in McInernys account, and in the accounts of those
such as Russell Hittinger, Lloyd Weinreb, and Henry Veatch,6 the
new natural-law theorists sever the link between nature and moral

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principle and thereby leave the latter unsupported. In what may
have been a rhetorical flourish, McInerny describes the position of
Grisez and Finnis as Humean in regard[ing] knowledge of the
world to be irrelevant to [practical reasoning],7 but it would be
more plausible, I think, to follow the thinking of the previous paragraph and to say, as some other critics do, that the new account lies
in the direction of Kantianism. For my own part, however, I actually find it somewhat reminiscent of English ethical intuitionism
exhibiting aspects both of rational and aesthetic variants of this such
as are to be found in the writings of the Cambridge Platonists, and
of G. E. Moore, Sir David Ross, and H. A. Pritchard, respectively.8
The new natural lawyers have not let McInernys challenge go
unanswered, and among the more accessible responsesin part
because it is also one of the most conciseis Robert Georges essay
Natural Law and Human Nature.9 The main point of this is to
defend the thesis that facts about human nature do not of themselves
entail moral prescriptions while yet maintaining that the latter are
grounded in facts of our nature. Although this is not the occasion to
explore the details of this extensive debate, I do want to suggest that
it may have about it something of a false opposition.
Ralph McInerny wishes to say, following Aquinas (and in saying
this I think he is following the letter and the spirit of Thomass view)
that natural-law reasoning deliberates about action in the light of
facts about (normative) human inclinations. Grisez et al. wish to
claim that rational endorsement of principles of practical reasoning
comes about not as a result of inferences from antecedent facts about
human nature but by means of rational insight into self-evident evaluative-cum-prescriptive principles. Progress in resolving this apparent opposition would best be achieved, I think, by attending to some
of the general philosophical issues concerning the varieties of knowledge and inference.

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4. Facts,Values, and Prescriptions

To illustrate just one point: the claim that the truth of certain propositions is not to be confirmed empirically but admits of a priori assessment allows of different interpretations. The most familiar derives
again from Kant and involves the idea of analyticity or equivalence of
meaningfor Kant himself, the result of the predicate of a judgment
belonging to the subject of it, either by the former being contained
in the latter, or by the two being identical.10 Quite apart from the
general philosophical difficulties attaching to the idea of analyticity
identified by Quine,11 it is hard to see how reflection on self-evident
moral principles could be other than conceptual analysis of a purely
formal sort. And if that is so, then the idea that the truth of these principles is grounded in facts of human nature (though they are not
inferable from or rationally assessable by reference to those facts)
becomes idle; an empty and perhaps even patronizing concession to
the historical origins of natural-law thinking.
But this is not the only form of a priorism (and some a priorism
must be possible if philosophy is to be distinguished from empirical
science). We might consider, for example, the Wittgensteinean suggestion that there is a form of relationship between propositions
(that of being criterial) that is neither logical nor evidential, neither
deductive nor inductive, at least as these relations are defined in
modern philosophy. Instead one set of facts (or to speak linguistically, one set of propositions) partly constitutes (or defines) another set. The principal locus of Wittgensteins development of this idea
is in the area of the philosophy of mind. Thomists prefer to speak of
the philosophy of the person and interestingly there is warrant for
this in Wittgenstein also, who writes that the the human being is the
best picture of the human soul, 12 and he does not mean by this the
human body as object of physiological study.13
For Wittgenstein, then, we have to recognize a form of intelligibility within which, while certain propositions do not entail others,
their truth is criterial for them: crying, wincing, writhing, etc., do

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not entail being in pain, so there is no contradiction in ascribing the
first while denying the second; but (as a matter of constitutive necessity) it could not in general be the case that there is pain but no relevant behavior. In other words, natural facts about human beings are
partly definitive of psychological notions: to say that being in pain
naturally expresses itself in crying or wincing, etc., is not an inductive claim vulnerable to refutation by counterexamples. This makes
weak a priorism possible, but it gives no license for the idea that
thinking about the mind is an exercise of pure reason of the sorts
favored by Descartes in one way, or by Kant in another. Natural
facts do not just provide the ontological ground for statements about
persons; they enter into the meaning of those statements and into the
warrant for making them.
Analogously I think (and it may be more than an analogy) ethical claims make essential reference to facts about human well-being,
and those facts are partly constituted by facts about human animality. The relations are not ones of entailment but they are ones of
rational derivation and they fall within the sphere of the kind of
weak a priorism I have mentioned.
This provides a response to Humes famous challenge to moral
cognitivism and objectivism presented in the form of a dilemma
concerning truth.14 Since knowledge entails truth, without the latter there cannot be the former. For Hume, truths are of one or the
other of only two sorts: i) truths concerning relations of ideas (akin
to Kants analytic propositions) and ii) those concerning matters of
fact. The test of the former is whether the negation of a candidate
proposition involves a contradiction; the test of the latter the evidence of the senses. Since, Hume supposes, no contradiction is
involved in denying that killing for advantage, say, is wrong, it cannot be a truth involving relations of ideas; and since, he argues, the
purported wrongness of such a deed is nowhere evident to the senses it cannot constitute a matter of fact. It follows, therefore, that
there is no such truth and consequently no such moral knowledge as
that killing for advantage is wrong.

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This eliminative induction can be contested on different grounds
but in light of the earlier point about criterial relationships it is here
most apt to suggest both that Humes understanding of relations of
ideas is too narrowly drawn, and that his distinction between this
kind of truth and that concerning matters of fact is too simple. The
notions of good and bad, and of right and wrong are introduced and
partly defined by reference to such examples as helping those in
need, killing other than in self-defense, admitting liability, saying
what one knows to be false, and so on. And these in turn are related criterially to claims about what is of benefit and harm to human
beings. Once these facts are brought into view, Humes distinctions
between facts, values, and requirements looks untenable.
Indeed, the idea that is and ought stand in no intelligible relation is arguably incoherent. If one insists upon it, however, and still
wishes to pursue the idea of moral truth then it seems inevitable that
one will be driven to a form of rationalism that will either fail to
complete its derivations or arrive at formal tautologies, either outcome only serving to encourage moral skepticism. The answer is to
reject the disassociation of is and ought and to recover the idea of
the harmonization of fact and value.
Philippa Foot, whom I mentioned earlier, had argued as long
ago as 1958,15 in the same year as her then colleague (at Somerville
College Oxford) Elizabeth Anscombe published the important essay
Modern Moral Philosophy,16 that there are internal relations
between description and evaluation. But she long remained troubled
by the thought that these might not be such as to give everyone reason for action whatever their desires. In effect she was troubling
about how imperatives could be moral if they were other than categorical. More recently, however, in her 1994 Hart Lecture, she has
come to diagnose her worries as misconceived. Interestingly she
does so in terms that recall MacIntyres own recent self-correction:
What then is to be said about the relation between fact and
value? My thesis . . . is that the grounding of a moral argument

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is ultimately facts about human lifefacts of the kind that
Anscombe mentioned in talking about the good that hangs on
the institution of promising, and of the kind that I spoke of in
saying why it was a part of rationality for human beings to take
special care each for his or her own future. In my view, therefore, a moral evaluation does not stand over against the statement of a matter of fact, but rather has to do with facts about
a particular subject matter, as do evaluations of such things as
sight and hearing in animals, and other aspects of their behaviour . . . Similarly, it is obvious that there are objective, factual evaluations of such things as human sight, hearing, memory,
and concentration, based on the life form of our own species.
[Likewise] the evaluation of the human will should be determined by facts about the nature of human beings and the life
of our own species. . . . moral action is rational action, and . . .
human beings are creatures with the reason to recognise reasons for action and to act on them.17

5. Conclusion
Returning to the issue of morality and public policy in the United
States, and considering the future development of Thomistic ethics,
what the foregoing suggests, I believe, is that the restoration of serious moral thinking in American public life and in the culture more
widely might be advanced by a systematic effort with regard to two
tasks. First, that of identifying and exposing invalid reasoning, inconsistency, confusion, misrepresentation, and false values; and second,
that of presenting ethical claims in terms that show their ground in
commonly known facts of human nature. Of course it is part of the
cultural problem that those facts have themselves become somewhat obscured. I think the effort to bring them back into view and
to render them vivid in phenomenological consciousness is best pursued by those possessed of literary and artistic imagination, rather
than by academic philosophers.Yet it will very occasionally happen

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that there are those such as Ralph McInerny who are equipped in
both respects. Such a combination is exceedingly rare, though American Catholicism has numbered others, such as J. F. Powers, Flannery
OConnor, and Walker Percy, who, while primarily literary writers,
have also been sensitive to philosophical issues. What are needed
more generally, however, are new fora such as Logos, the University
of St. Thomass Center for Catholic Studies, and the recently established Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, in which ideas
from different intellectual sources can be presented, exchanged and
discussed in faith, hope, and charity for the advancement of Catholic
thought and in the service of the American people. In his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics, St. Thomas writes as follows
Individuals, who are members of the family, help one another
to procure the necessities of life. In another way, man receives
help from the group of which he is a part, to have a perfect sufficiency for life; namely, that man may not only live but live
well, having everything sufficient for living; and in this way
man is helped by the civic group of which he is a member, not
only in regard to bodily needsas certainly in the state there
are many crafts which a single household cannot providebut
also in regard to right conduct.18

What he has in mind, following Aristotle, is the policing aspect

of community life, but his words serve as well to express the idea
that part of ones responsibility as a member of civil society is to provide ones fellows with moral criticism and guidance if that should
be appropriate, and to be willing to receive it in like circumstance.
The sense and exercise of such a responsibility need to be tempered
with a concern not to be overly preoccupied with the lives of others and to avoid hypocrisy in criticizing them. But it is false discretion to remain silent or to look the other way when values and
policies are adopted that one believes to be wrong and to be corrupting of human goods. It is hard to believe that anyone working in

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the area of Thomistic ethics in America today could doubt that the
society is so corrupted. What I would hope, therefore, is that more
work will be done relating Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy to
cultural and social policy issuesand not just, very important as
they are, to issues of abortion and euthanasia.19 20

Notes
1. Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell,
1978), 12.
2. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press,
1981).
3. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues
(Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999), x.
4. Ralph McInerny, Ethica Thomistica (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 3562. See also Ralph McInerny, Aquinas on Human Action (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), chap. 9.
5. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals translated as The Moral Law by
H. J. Paton (London: Hutchinson, 1948), 27.
6. Russell Hittinger, A Critique of the New Natural Law Theory (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); Lloyd Weinreb, Natural Law and Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987); and Henry Veatch, Natural Law and
the Is-Ought Question, Catholic Lawyer 26 (1981).
7. McInerny, Ethica Thomistica, 54.
8. In this connection see also Mark Murphy, Self-evidence, Human Nature, and Natural Law American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69 (1995), where he argues, in the
context of discussing the views of John Finnis, that a position which relates morality to human nature only to the extent of claiming that the latter determines what
sorts of participation in basic values are genuine possibilities is indistinguishable in
relevant respects from any other moral theory (such as that of G. E. Moore, for
example) that asserts the existence of objective goods 47576. But for a reply see
Patrick Lee, Is Thomass Natural Law Theory Naturalist?, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71 (1997): 585.
9. Robert George, Natural Law and Human Nature in Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays,ed. Robert George (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) reprinted in Robert
George, In Defence of Natural Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 8391. See
also, in regard to the issue of the relation between current positions and that of
Aquinas, Lee, Is Thomass Natural Law Theory Naturalist?, 55787.
10. Kants somewhat obscure and not altogether consistent thoughts on the issue of the
analyticity are contained in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, IV.

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11. W. V. O. Quine, Two Dogmas of Empiricism, The Philosophical Review 60 (1951), and
in Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1953), 2046; also reprinted in various anthologies including the useful collection,
Analyticity:Selected Readings,ed. James Harris and Richard Severens (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1970).
12. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe
and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), I, 281.
13. For text and interpretation see John Haldane, Wittgenstein: The Human Person as
Linguistic Animal in Images of the Human:The Philosophy of the Human Person in a Religious Context, ed. Hunter Brown et al. (Chicago: Loyola Press, 1995).
14. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book III, Of Morals Part I, various editions.
15. Philippa Foot, Moral Beliefs, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (19581959);
reprinted in Foot, Virtues andVices, 11031.
16. G. E. M. Anscombe, Modern Moral Philosophy, Philosophy 33 (1958); reprinted in
G. E. M. Anscombe, Ethics,Religion and Politics: Collected Philosophical Papers (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1981), Vol. III, 2842.
17. Philippa Foot, Does Moral Subjectivism rest on a Mistake? in Logic,Cause and Action,
ed. Roger Teichmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 123.
18. Thomas Aquinas, The Commentary on Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics, trans. C. I.
Litzinger, O.P., foreword by Ralph McInerny (Sounth Bend, Ind.: Dumb Ox Books,
1993), Lectio I, 4, (NE. 1094a56 and 14).
19. Readers interested in something of the range of public-policy issues felt to be pressing in British society, and in the potential for interaction between philosophical,
political, economic, and journalistic approaches to them, might care to look at the
essays contained in Philosophy and Public Affairs, ed. John Haldane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
20. A version of the foregoing was presented as a special lecture under the auspices of
the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture in July 2000. I am grateful to the
director of the center, Professor David Solomon.