MORAL TRUTH
There is a school of thought dealing with moral questions in such a manner as to deny the very possibility of truth or falsehood in judgments that are ethical in nature, i.e. in judgments concerning whether a human action is either morally good or m orally evil. A variety of names are assigned to this manner of thinking by contemporary philosophers. Some call it "emotivist ethics," while others would call it "non-cognitive" ethics.
Both designations seem to be apt because they both express the fundamental principle of this school of ethics as follows: "Moral judgments can never be legitimately classified as either true or false, because they are nothing more than expression of subjective preference of an individual or of a collectivity of individuals." If we were to grant this premise, it would follow that moral judgments can only be studied, to the extent that they can be studied at all, by the social sciences, and espec ially by psychology and sociology.
The following is a statement of this philosophical position by one of the champions of this school of thought, i.e. Alfred Jules Ayer, the contemporary English philosopher:
We shall set ourselves to show that in so far as statements of value are significant, they are ordinarily "scientific" statements, and that in so far as they are not scientific, they are not in the literal sense significant, but are simply expressio ns of emotion which can be neither true nor false. . . . What we are interested in is the possibility of reducing the whole sphere of ethical terms to non-ethical terms. We are enquiring whether the statements of ethical value can be translate d into statements of empirical fact. . . . . . . . The presence of an ethical symbol in a proposition adds nothing to its factual content. Thus if I say to someone, "You acted wrongly in stealing that money," I am not stating anything more than if I had simply said, "You stole that money." In adding that this action is wrong I am not making any further statement about it. I am simply evincing my moral disapproval of it. . . . It merely serves to show that the expression of it is attended by cer tain feelings in the speaker. . . . If now I generalize my previous statement and say, "Stealing money is wrong," I produce a sentence which has no factual meaning. It is clear that there is nothing said here which can be true or false. Another m an may disagree with me about the wrongness of stealing, in the sense that he may not have the same feelings about stealing as I have, and he may quarrel with me on account of my moral sentiments. But he cannot, strictly speaking, contradict me. For in saying that a certain type of action is right or wrong, I am not making any factual statement. I am merely expressing certain moral sentiments. and the man who is ostensibly contradicting me is merely expressing his moral sentiments. So that ther e is plainly no sense in asking which of us is in the right. For neither of us is asserting a genuine proposition. . . . In every case in which one would commonly be said to be making an ethical judgement, the function of the relevant ethical word is pur ely "emotive." It is used to express feeling about certain objects, but not to make any assertion about them. . . .We can now see why it is impossible to find a criterion for determining the validity of ethical judgements. . . .. . . And we have s een that sentences which simply express moral judgements do not say anything. They are pure expressions of feelings and as such do not come under the category of truth and falsehood. . . .The task of describing the different feelings that the different ethical terms are used to express, and the different reactions that they customarily provoke, is a task for the psychologist. There cannot be such a thing as ethical science, if by ethical science one means the elaboration of a "true" system of mo rals. For we have seen that, as ethical judgements are mere expressions of feelings, there can be no way of determining the validity of any ethical system, and, indeed , no sense in asking whether any such system is true. All that one may legitimately e nquire in this connection is, What are the moral habits of a given person or group of people, and what causes them to have precisely those habits and feelings? And this enquiry falls wholly within the scope of the existing social sciences. (LANGU AGE, TRUTH, AND LOGIC, 1936)
Answering Ayer, we must attempt to show the possibility of the human mind verifying moral judgments as objectively true. In order to do this we are going to attempt to make clear an order of truth that is distinct from the truth of such disciplines as science and math, and yet one that deserves to be called "truth" just as much as the truths of science or mathematics.
The following pages are a brief summary of Thomas' analysis of the two modes of intellect in the human being, i.e. speculative and practical. Having explained this distinction we will then go on to the distinction between the two modes of the practica l intellect, i.e. the intellectual vision of the artist and that of the person possessed of the capacity to both see how to do their life wisely in the concrete circumstances of the here and now, and to command the wise doing of their lives. (SUMMA TH EOLOGIAE, I-II, QQ.57-58)
Following Aristotle, Aquinas distinguishes between the intellectual act in which the knower simply attempts to see for the sake of seeing, and those acts of intellect in which the knower attempts to see either how to make something well, or how to do a moment of their life wisely.
The first mentioned intellectual act is called speculative, while the second is called practical.
The goal of the speculative intellect is simply to see for the sake of seeing, and examples of this type of thought are theoretical science and pure mathematics, as opposed to applied science or applied mathematics. The pure mathematician simp ly wants to see the resolution of the quantitative relationship that he is reflecting upon. The goal has been reach when he declares the correct answer to the problem. In this order of intellectual endeavor, knowledge is sought not as a means to somet hing beyond it, but for its own sake. In both the Greek and Roman intellectual traditions of our civilization , HOMO CONTEMPLATIVO, i.e. contemplative man, represents a supreme attainment for humanity. A human being can be a seer of truth! Un der this aspect of our intellectual lives, our minds must be receptive of reality, and this receptivity requires a silence resulting in awe. Once seen, the seer then declares to others how things are.
The goal of the practical intellect, on the other hand, goes far beyond the act of seeing for the sake of seeing. In this order of intellectual activity, the intellect's vision becomes a principle of activity that goes out from the seer's mind into th e real world of things made and lives lived.. A person is capable of seeing in order to make something, or in order to live his life wisely. It seems obvious that just as a person can make something well or poorly, so too a person can choose to do their lives intelligently, or stupidly. For the moment we will concern ourselves exclusively with the positive aspects of a person either making artifacts well, or of reflectively choosing to do their live wisely.
First of all, in this order of the practical intellect, a human being has the capacity to become an artist (or artisan). His intellect allows him to become a maker of things. Sometimes the things he makes are useful, and sometimes they are simply beautiful. The fruit of this power within a person includes art, craft, production skills, organization skills, mastery, manipulation, control, and the ability to predict the interaction of material things.
Secondly, in the order of the practical intellect, a person has the capacity of consciously reflecting, and freely choosing how to do their life, with the result of becoming either a good or an evil person. The same tradition refers to the firs t, (i.e. the artist or artisan), as HOMO FABER, i.e. man the maker of artifacts, and to the second as HOMO SAPIENS, i.e. man, the one who does his life wisely, and in so doing, becomes a wise person.
Concentrating on the positive fruits of these capacities, the three glories of being a person are to become, by virtue of the activity of their own mind, the seer of truth, the creator of the useful and the beautiful, and, perhaps most im portantly, the wise doer of their own lives, who, be doing their life wisely, becomes a good person.(1)1
We will, for the moment, put the speculative order of intellect to one side as we concentrate of the nature of the practical intellect and its capacity for art and wisdom. For the moment, we will also put out of our minds, the human being whose judgments are false, who destroys rather than builds, and who becomes vile by reason of their own choices of how to live.
In other words, we want to consider the activity of the practical intellect in it capacity to regulate both the making of things ("recta ratio factibilium"), and the wise doing of life ("recta ratio agabilium").
There is an analogy of proportionality between the proper use of the practical intellect in the production of an artifact, and in its use relating to the wise doing of one's life. The reflectively conscious and freely chosen doing of one's life is to the the moral self that the person comes to be, as the act of the artist (worker, craftsman, politician, warrior, parent, etc.), is to the artifact. In somewhat the same way as Michelangelo's David begins to emerge out of the marble under the repeated bl ows of the artist with his hammer and chisel, so too a moral or immoral personality begins to emerge as a consequent of how a person reflectively and freely chooses to live their lives.
But in the exercise of an art, the goodness is not that of the artist but of the artifact. The proper activity of an art terminates in the thing well made. It manifests an aptness in the artist to make something well but not necessarily to be a good person. The artist sees in order to make something well. The quality of the seeing is judged by the quality of the artifact, not in the moral quality of the artist.
The exercise of practical wisdom, on the other hand, involves both the vision of how to do my life in order to become the moral self that I am capable of becoming, and the will to actually command the living of that vision. The final pr oduct of this life of practical wisdom is not an artifact, but the virtuous person that I am charged with the responsibility of bringing into existence. Aquinas says: "Making something and doing something differ in that making is an action passing int o outward matter, whereas doing is an action abiding in the agent." (Ibi.)
Unlike the artifact, the self is never done, and is always in the process of being brought into being by reflective free choice. The process ends only with death. A human being is a person, i.e., a being that can will its own fulfillment or destructio n. What an artifact becomes has been done to it. What a person becomes, (precisely as a person with its own ability to will fulfillment), is not, and cannot be something done to the them but rather something done by the person.
This being true, we should always strive to promote that people become the active agents of their own lives. We should always avoid trying to make them into something. In this order of moral activity, a person has the capacity to see, to some extent, in order to know how to do their own life, and the product of this doing is the moral self that comes into being. Some options objectively offer fulfillment, while others cause the debasement of the person.(2)2
We will, for the moment, leave the issue of moral truth aside. We will come back to it later. The verifying of that kind of prescriptive truth that is moral, is our ultimate concern, and if we have given priority to the development of the idea of pre scriptive truth as applied to the world of art, it is solely in order to facilitate our attempt to establish an order of prescriptive truth involving the moral order.
Our conviction is that an analysis of the intellectual life of an artist amounts to a pursuit of prescriptive truth. It involves an attempt, on the part of the artist as an intellectual, to see what he ought to write if his artistic work is to succ eed. In our opinion the answer to the "is/ought" conflict is given in this analysis of the distinction between the speculative and the practical intellect.
What we will now attempt to do is to show that in the development of the doctrine of the practical intellect we become aware of the intellect pursuing prescriptive truth in the sense of moral truth. In this reflection we will be concerned with the practical intellect of a person concerning itself not with how it ought to act in order to render an artifact either useful or beautiful, but rather with how they ought to choose to live in order to become a good person.
(1)1 The ancient world defined man in terms of spirit and saw the fulness of his existence as essentially contemplative. It promoted the idea of a leisure class supported by the work of slaves and women. This idea remains a powerful mode of thought i n the modern world, e.g. the world of education
The modern western world tends to define modern man in terms of intelligence, and his consequent productivity. It is, therefore, inclined to despise the world of menial work. In its moral scepticism, it simply denies the possibility of the virtuous l ife resulting from a person's consciously reflecting and freely choosing to do their lives well. Hannah Arendt's conclusion is that we have become a civilization of "job holders," who have given up on the pursuit of the true, the good, and the beautiful. THE HUMAN CONDITION, Hannah Arendt.
(2)2 The following represents the application of this thought to the world of work. Human work has two products. The primary product is the moral self that I become in the exercise of my work, and the secondary one is the artifact that I produce.
Production requires that a person make use of the material order, as well as the instruments or work and discovery. The human person is essentially a maker of things. It is largely in the world of work, planning and jointly building the world, that p eople actualize the moral self that they become.
When work is seen under the aspect of it being a process of self-realization, then its principal product is the person working, and the secondary product is the artifact produced. When work is viewed exclusively as a process of production then the ar tifact is primary. This second vision is a truncated vision oblivious to the distinction between things and people.