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Do Dolphins Carry the Cross Biological Moral Realism and Theological Ethics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Michael S Northcott
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In Dependent Rational Animals Alasdair MacIntyre advances the case for a realist account of the moral life over against the unsituated Enlightenment account of the good. The normative foundation of his proposal is narratives of the dependent rather than autonomous character of human existence from birth through childhood to old age and death, and analogies between human biological and emotional dependence, and child development, and the rich moral lives, and nurturing behaviours of dolphins and some other animals. This approach represents a significant revision of MacIntyre’s earlier espousal of a principally Aristotelian - and hence heroic - account of the virtues. His setting of dependence as an ordering contingency of rationality brings him much closer to Christian narratives of the good life. The problem however with attempts to read off moral narratives from anthropological accounts of human embodied and social life, or from ethological narratives of other animals, is that they involve the attempt to found Christian theology and ethics on other than Christian foundations, and they therefore lack a true ontological foundation. In what follows I will suggest that narratives of the morality of embodiment, whether human or nonhuman, do find a legitimate place in Christian theological ethics but that this place is subject to the ordering narrative of the scriptures, and in particular the narratives of Christ crucified and risen. The narratives of the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ teach Christians to interpret dependence, embodiment, illness and even death, as aspects of biological existence which find correlates in the vulnerability of God.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 84 , Issue 994 , December 2003 , pp. 540 - 553
Copyright
Copyright © 2003 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 A danger which Richard Dawkms recognizes in The Selfish Gene (London: Penguin, 1976). See also the philosophical welcome given to the selfish gene hypothesis in J. L. Mackie’s ‘The law of the jungle’, Philosophy 53 (1978) and Mary, Midgley’s critique, ‘Gene-Juggling’ in Ashley, Montagu (ed.), Sociobiology Examined (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar.

2 John, Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta Books, 2002), p. 37Google Scholar.

3 Gray, Straw Dogs, p. 82.

4 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World (London: Penguin, 1986). And see also my discussion of this issue in Michael, S Northcott, The Environment and Christin Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 55-7Google Scholar.

5 Alasdair, MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999), pp. 6-8Google Scholar. See also the account of ethological methods and insights in my Environment and Christian Ethics, pp. 209 - 215.

6 See for example John, Milbank’s critique of MacIntyre in his Theology and Social Theory (Oxford Blackwell, 1990), pp. 327-332Google Scholar.

7 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, p. 22.

8 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, pp. 87 - 89.

9 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, p. 92. 10

10 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, p. 108. 11

11 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, p. 117. 12

12 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, pp. 117-8.

13 MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, pp. 143 - 4.

14 Michael, J. Gorman, Cruciformity: Paul S Narrative Spirituality of the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2001)Google Scholar.

15 To the extent that philosophy in America is practiced as a public academic discourse, and religion is understood as a private and personal discourse or set of practices, we may be able to account for MacIntyre’s silence on the doctrinal, liturgical and scriptural mediation of the theological virtues in Aquinas.

16 Though in his foreword to Craig, A.Carter, The Politics of the Cross: The Theology and Social Ethics of John Howard Yoder (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2001)Google Scholar Hauerwas declares that, however he may have been read or misread by his friends and others, he ‘shares Yoder’s realism’: ‘Foreword’ in Carter, Politics of the Cross, p. 10.

17 In their review of Dependent Rational Animals Don Browning and Alexander Campbell claim that it contains no reference to religion or Christianity. But of course in his reliance on Aquinas, as well as on modern ethologists and feminist philosophers, MacIntyre does indeed reveal a substantial debt to a Christian narrative of the world. But despite MacIntyre’s recent conversion to Roman Catholicism, this debt is still under- acknowledged in his work: Don Browning and Alexander Campbell, ‘Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues: The Philosophy of MacIntyre’, Christian Century, May 17, 2000, pp. 580-1.

18 Galatians 5.22 - 24.

19 Environment and Christian Ethics, pp. 174-9.

20 Amitai Etzioni argues that the ‘parenting deficit’ which characterises late modern societies is a consequence of the corrupting invasiveness of market relations into other forms of human relationship and community including the family: Amitai, Etzioni, The Parenting Deficit (London: Demos 1993)Google Scholar.

21 For a more extensive discussion of the question of biology and sin see Stephen, Clark, Biology and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

22 We probably can never know the answer to this question. The level of knowledge scientists now have of dolphin communication is such, according to MacIntyre, that we may reasonably judge that if we could interpret it we would actually know what they meant whereas he concurs with Wittgenstein that we can be less certain of this with regard to lions, and certainly with regard to bats: Dependent Rational Animals, pp. 58 - 9.

23 John Howard Yoder, ‘The hermeneutics of peoplehood’ cited Carter, The Politics of the Cross, p. 69. See also von Loewenich, W., Luther’s Theology of the Cross, transl. Herbert J.A. Bouman (Belfast: Christian Journals, 1976)Google Scholar.