If the intellectual discipline of ethics (or Ethics, as Oliver O’Donovan styles it in The Disappearance of Ethics) is receding from view in the modern university, it has mainly itself to blame. Its disappearance “requires no particular hostility from university administrators or rival disciplines” (3). The problem is that Ethics has lost sight of its own object—or worse, has found reasons actively to deny the reality of its own object. This book, made up of O’Donovan’s formidably dense yet deeply perceptive 2021 Gifford Lectures, aims to bring that object back into view in all its richness, in the hope that Ethics itself might be reanimated.
What distinguishes Ethics from its “rival disciplines” is above all its point of view. It views the world from the perspective of practical rather than speculative reason, from the first-person perspective of the agent rather than the third-person perspective of the observer. From that perspective it can see things that other disciplines cannot. As Ethics disappears, psychology or economics may appear in its wake as the new authorities on human action. Yet their point of view is fundamentally different, and the substitution of one for the other leaves an essential dimension of human existence unexamined.
What uniquely comes into view from the first-person perspective, O’Donovan argues, is threefold: the good itself, the temporal horizon of the good’s fulfillment, and the acting person who reaches toward that horizon. These are the three elements of Ethics that have tended to disappear under the reign of modern moral idealism, to the detriment of Ethics itself. These are also the three elements that O’Donovan hopes—with a little help from theology—to recover.
In the first three chapters of this book, O’Donovan illuminates the disappearance of those elements through an extended dialogue with Immanuel Kant and Max Scheler. Kant, inheriting the apophatic tradition coming out of ancient Neoplatonism and mediated by medieval voluntarism, represents the tendency of modern moral idealism to erase these elements. Ethics comes to exchange a really existing good for a formal “ought,” a normative future for a neutral sequence of events, and a living agent existing in time for an impersonal presupposition of action. Scheler represents a resurgent realism that attempts, though not altogether successfully, to challenge those erasures.
Yet this dialogue is only a point of departure, and these chapters are only fleetingly exegetical. O’Donovan’s real task is a constructive articulation of the complex relationship between being, time, and action that undergirds the successful exercise of practical reason. Already in the first chapter, as he defends the real existence of the good, he also introduces an argument about the essential temporality of real goods—the way they come into and out of being, and the way that practical reason aims at realizing some good whose existence so far is only implicit in the world. In the second chapter, as he turns to explain the temporal dynamics of practical reason, he also introduces an analysis of the desiring person—a person who is moved by a promise of a good not yet realized or fulfilled. In the third chapter, as he focuses directly on the acting person, he ties everything together by showing how the real good of personhood only becomes visible eschatologically, from the perspective of ultimate fulfillment.
Most of O’Donovan’s argument in the first half of the book is philosophical rather than theological. Yet each chapter ends with a tantalizing suggestion about how certain religious ideas and practices might complement or even complete the features of practical existence he has been explaining. The work of worship provides a way of focusing the agent on the unified reality of the good; an act of revelation suggests itself as necessary for a glimpse of history’s normative direction; the practice of confession recovers and consolidates personal agency by acknowledging where it has gone wrong. These suggestions begin to give shape to his claim at the start of the book that he intends to “bring the resources of theology to strengthen the foundations of Ethics, now manifestly itself in need of good news” (5). That ambition takes center stage in the second half of the book.
The Gifford Lectures are traditionally aimed at the development of natural theology. At the start of the book O’Donovan modestly claims that he does “not intend to add very much” to the sometimes heated discussion about the very idea of natural theology that has unfolded in these lectures over the years (4–5), but I suspect the kind of natural theology he models here will become one of the most-discussed dimensions of his argument. For O’Donovan, natural theology is essentially “an apologetic undertaking, offering the support and assistance of natural reason to revealed theology, demonstrating the place of revelation within a general framework of intelligibility” (149, emphasis in original). It cannot and does not wish to do away with the need for history or revelation in theology. But natural theology does not need to displace revealed theology to be useful. It is more than enough that it provides “a kind of conceptual map-reference, by which the revelation of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, when such is given us, may be plotted onto experience” (151) and, in fact, be shown as speaking to open questions already posed to us by the world as we find it.
The latter three chapters in the book demonstrate how revealed theology might do exactly that for Ethics. O’Donovan shows how a theology of creation does more than a philosophy of nature by grounding the “original complexity” of being, good, and time in a founding act that precedes being (chapter 4); he shows how the understanding of law given at Mount Horeb illuminates the way that history itself necessarily points at an ultimate fulfillment (chapter 5); he shows how the fundamentally cooperative nature of human agency is taken up and fulfilled by the work of the Spirit (chapter 6).
The Disappearance of Ethics offers an incisive diagnosis of the discipline by a thinker who knows it better than almost anyone. But more than that, it offers a compelling path forward. O’Donovan invites us to reconsider, directly and rigorously, the good that practical reason has in view—and how the good news of the gospel might be recognized afresh as good news for practical reasoners.
Brian Hamilton is an associate professor of religion at Florida Southern College.
Brian Hamilton
Date Of Review:
October 26, 2024
