Who Is My Neighbor?

Fellow TCT contributor Francis Maier warmed my heart last September with a favorable mention of Alasdair MacIntyre’s Dependent Rational Animals. This work is one of our most important recent philosophers’ most important contributions to moral philosophy. I’ve taught it several times in a course on human nature.

As with all great books, it reveals more truth with each new reading. This semester, I finally realized that the work as a whole is a brilliant example of the use of philosophy as human reason to understand a truth given in revelation and faith.

MacIntyre, who died earlier this year, began his career as a Marxist before “seeing the light” of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. He eventually entered the Church. He understood well the complementarity of faith and reason that Aquinas infuses throughout his work. But MacIntyre relied on human reason, rather than revelation, as the ground of his work, knowing the truth to which that reason should lead.

MacIntyre begins the book by claiming that humans are animals, and that the differences between humans and non-human animals are narrower than many philosophers have claimed. He surveys scientific studies that have investigated the behavior of higher non-human animals, especially dolphins.

Such animals, MacIntyre judges, have something like reasons for acting that many philosophers have attributed only to humans. They exhibit a pre-linguistic kind of reason.

This reminds us that we are always animals with bodies, into which the human soul is placed and to which it is joined. We never escape our animal nature no matter how intellectual or spiritual we become. We all must control our bodies and choose our reactions to fear and desire, pain and pleasure. That’s what the habits of the moral or natural virtues permit.

Great contemplatives are able, through prayer and reasoned discipline, to subdue the body’s proclivities and demands to a degree that opens them to non-physical realities and God Himself. But their animal bodies will still die, as Christ in His human nature suffered bodily on the Cross.

Aristotle observed, and Aquinas developed, the notion that some non-human animals seem to exhibit a kind of practical wisdom or prudence in making choices. Our specific human rationality lies in our capacity to reflect upon and revise our reasons for acting in ways that non-human animals cannot, and thereby to consider alternative futures and different courses of action. That exercise requires the full language capacity that pre-linguistic animals lack.

We ourselves are born pre-linguistic, and the moral concerns that occupy us stem in many ways from our pre-linguistic concerns.

MacIntyre argues that at various times of our lives – pre-linguistic infancy for all, and for many, periods of illness or injury, or old age – we are all dependent on others for life itself. During those times, we incur a debt to others that, because it stems from receiving life, is beyond all measure.

We repay that debt as we become “independent moral reasoners,” capable of evaluating our own reasons for acting independently of those who, in family and community, aided us in achieving that fully human condition of excellence or virtue. We gain that through the activities that we undertake with others, such as family life, practices such as playing chess or a sport, or working with others for a common good. Those practices have their “internal goods,” which we learn to seek with others.

To discharge the debt that we take on during times of dependence, we as independent moral reasoners need others who depend on us. We can’t be fully human without depending on others and having others depend on us.

This leads MacIntyre into an extension of the work of Aristotle and Aquinas. He explains that we need virtues of “acknowledged dependence,” according to which we accept our own dependence on others and their dependence on us. These are virtues of giving and receiving, and they should orient the family and political or social arrangements that can (but often don’t) permit us to flourish as humans.

No one word in the traditional vocabulary of ethics captures what MacIntyre is getting at. The closest example he can find is a Native American Lakota expression, “wancantognaka,” the virtue of those who “recognize responsibilities to immediate family, extended family, and tribe and who express that recognition. . .in ceremonies of uncalculated giving. . .of thanksgiving, or remembrance, and of the conferring of honor.”

As Aristotle and Aquinas knew, virtue has to be cultivated through education. We learn virtue rather than receive it by being born human (though some people seem to have a strong aptitude for it).

Our education and experiences in communities must enable us to use our independent reason to engage in:

types of action that are at once just, generous, beneficent and done from pity [misericordia, he says, captures this better than the contemporary notion of ‘pity’]. The education of dispositions to perform just this type of act is what is needed to sustain relationships of uncalculated giving and grateful receiving. Such education has to include. . .the education of the affections, sympathies, and inclinations.

MacIntyre labels this virtue, for brevity, as “just generosity.” But in my latest reading, what caught my attention was his stress on misericordia. He cites Aquinas to define misericordia as “grief or sorrow over someone else’s distress. . .just insofar as one understands the other’s distress as one’s own. . . .So to understand another’s distress as our own is to recognize that other as our neighbor.”

I realized that, intentionally or otherwise, MacIntyre presents a philosophical, extensively reasoned account of the parable of the good Samaritan, where Christ answers the question, “Who is my neighbor?”

The final chapter explains the importance of this kind of reasoned moral enquiry.

Our neighbors are those with whom we share the virtues of independent yet always dependent rational animals, the virtues of giving and receiving in community, including strangers who attract our misericordia.

No surprise: Reason supports faith.

The post Who Is My Neighbor? appeared first on The Catholic Thing.

Source link