Morals and Language

Extract

In his study of the tradition of thought in the early Middle Ages, a distinguished historian (Mr Richard Southern) remarks that it should be easier for us today than it was a hundred years ago to understand the fascination of logic for scholars of the eleventh century; for them as for us, ‘Logic was an instrument of order in a chaotic world’. Mr Southern speaks as a historian and a humanist, for whom thought is more immediately apprehended as an orchestral scoring of the themes of human need and of moral concern than in its own proper cogency. Yet the paradox of moral philosophy lies in just this incommensurability of the humane and the analytic: the task of moral philosophy is somehow to mediate; to explore the complexity of the humane and to map it with a disciplined fidelity.

It might very well seem that the scholastic metaphysical tradition exhibits its inadequacy more patently here than anywhere else, with its manuals of moral theology, its solutions of problems of conscience by the numerical assessment of probable opinions, its approximation of moral philosophy to a demonstrative science, and more radically, with just this very metaphysical character itself. It is this last reproach which will specially concern us here. How, it may be felt, can a metaphysics, admittedly taking its point of departure in a physics, practise a fidelity to the complexity of a moral sensibility? Such a metaphysics can only be a bogus physics, setting up a fictitious world of quasi-physical entities, the behaviour of which could only serve as an excessively crude model for the delicately particular moral decisions and options of our humane activity.