Alasdair MacIntyre: Absences from Aquinas, Silences in Ireland – FC2018

good afternoon my name is David Solomon and my job is to bring the man of the hour on the stage and I have to say it gives me great pleasure once again to introduce Alastair McIntyre to this afternoon's session of Notre Dame Center for Ethics and cultures 19th annual conference we're especially proud to recognize that Professor McIntyre has given papers at all 19 of these conferences including including I should say the first conference in October of the year 2000 the theme of that conference and many of you will remember it I'm sure was the slightly gloomy one the culture of death and professor McIntyre we started at the bottom were the professor McIntyre's keynote address was title appropriately enough the culture of death we got just to the point like virtually all of his lectures at the fall conferences videos I should say of his talks will be found on the center's splendid website they're all there here for almost all eternity things brightened up a bit in our second fall conference which we entitled from death to life also with the keynote address by Professor MacIntyre and the Sun finally shone brightly at our third conference the culture of life with Professor McIntyre's presence dispersing all bloom and we were happy to see that he I should say he's indeed spoken more frequently than any other speaker at these conferences and certainly I think more memorably he has brilliantly and persuasively pursued an understanding of the modern condition from a neo Aristotelian orto mystic perspective and has argued that two mystic aristotelianism informed by Marx's insights provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enable and require us in his own words to act against modernity from within modernity his insightful exploration of the roots of secularization and emotivist culture in modern history has influenced generations of students at Notre Dame and elsewhere as well as the legions of those fortunate enough to come into contact with his books and lectures he's the author of 30 books including the influential quintet of books after virtue his masterpiece whose justice which rationality three rival versions of moral inquiry and dependent rational animals his most recent book published in 2016 ethics in the conflicts of modernity an essay on desire practical reasoning and narrative may seem to bring his overall project to a kind of completion one suspects however that more is coming and I suspect we will see some of what's coming today in this talk we all hope so mr. MacIntyre is a member of the american philosophical society and has served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association he's also taught at Oxford Princeton Brandeis Boston University Wellesley Vanderbilt Duke and the University of Notre Dame where he was the John a O'Brien's senior research professor in the department of philosophy although he retired from teaching in 2010 professor McIntyre remains domiciled at the Notre Dame Center for ethics and culture right across campus for where we are today where he continues to write and to conduct his research as a senior research fellow at the center for contemporary Aristotelian studies in ethics and politics hey Seb at London Metropolitan University and he's also served as a senior as a distinguished research fellow at Notre Dame center for ethics and culture his lecture this afternoon is entitled absences and Aquinas silences in Ireland please join me in welcoming to the podium [Applause] three things before I begin first can you hear me oh that is if you can me if you can't hear me and you don't care just sleep but secondly I thank David Solomon for his generous words what he's really saying to you is I just talk all the time and sometimes it could suck conferences and thirdly I want to apologize to anyone who's come here hoping to hear either about Solzhenitsyn or higher powers there is I stuck in one reference to a higher power just to be respectable there's nothing else what we can say at any particular time and place depends on what words there are in our vocabulary what we can think depends on what concepts we possess this paper is in part about the cultural and conceptual distance between Aquinas his 13th century Aristotelian and brilliant thought it's vocabulary and it's concepts and 21st century thinking in our other places Dublin and Galway it's also at at the same time about the inability of the 21st century to learn from the 13th I begin with a catalogue of thoughts all too familiar to us 21st century thinkers that Aquinas and his contemporaries were unable to entertain Aquinas had for example no thoughts about religion as we understand it free had no word or words in either his Latin or his vernacular vocabulary that meant quite what our word religion means he could indeed have found such a word in Arabic had he read the Koran in medieval English the earliest citation the oxford english dictionary of religion word religion used to mean a particular system of faith and worship is from the Year 1349 word religio was the name of a virtue one defined by Cicero as consisting in I quote service and ceremonies offered to a higher nature that human beings call divine but cleanness makes it plain that it's only a virtue when directed towards God the God who is as he is Aquinas was of course well aware of the beliefs and practices of Jews of Muslims as well as of the beliefs in superior powers of pagans such as Cicero what his culture lacked was anything like our concept of religion and our use of the word religion to refer to an indefinitely wide range of different and incompatible beliefs and practices concerning matters of ultimate concern matters about which we take it the disagreement is rationally in a liminal where they were able to argue as Aquinas never does about how far someone's religious commitments should be respected by others just because they are as the seal the Lord has recently put it integrity protecting commitments in such debates Aquinas could not have participated and this not only because of the limits to its vocabulary but he knew of no way to characterize whatever it is that an agent's choices and actions presupposed about that agents final end and final good which does not already involve a judgement about how far that agents conception of her his final end and good is true or false he has that is no way of thinking about beliefs and practices from some neutral or even as if neutral standpoint some standpoints that treats their evaluation in terms of truth and falsity rationality and irrationality as for the moment at least irrelevant something made possible for us by our past and present uses of the word religion secondly Aquinas likewise had no thoughts about the state for the were no thirteenth century word or words that meant what we mean when we speak of the state not in Latin not in the vernacular languages it is at least the 15th century before lost Otto and Lake Tahoe are used in ways that foreshadow the modern use when Aquinas speaks a political society he was just the word chavita's following Augustine's Latin and translating Aristotle's Greek poleis other words that he uses when speaking of political communities such as populist and patria are always to be understood as having applications the inhabitants of policy but the modern state whatever it is is not a policy it has especially as it developed for the 19th century onwards become unlike all pre-modern forms of government in significant ways both in what it is and in what because of what it is it cannot be it imposes laws so long in written length that sometimes even legislators haven't read them and it inculcates habits afford required by those laws through its monopoly of legitimate coercive power on populations within well-defined at least frontiers he characteristic claims to rule in virtue of the consent of the governed but wolf governing and governed are well aware that such consent is a fiction it controls currency and it regulates trade he provides education and other services to large heterogeneous and often shifting populations it imposes taxes he confronts its citizens as individuals who are varying interests and preferences and it's political debates are between parties which are coalition's of interest groups and preference sharers individuals are taken to have rights but one rights they have or should have is indefinitely debatable and for all this it from time to time invites its citizens to die on its behalf the contrast with government as Aristotle Augustine and Aquinas that understood it striking for Aquinas government functions well only insofar as it enables those over who it rules to achieve or to move towards their common good but the populations of modern States are not the kinds of population that can have a common good they are too large and dispersed to heterogeneous to deprived of opportunity for shared communal reflection and deliberation two uneducated in relevant respects so if contemporary local communities were to become aware of their common good and try to achieve it they could often do so only in spite of the politics of the state to which they are subject and if they were to try to achieve their common good through the politics of the state whatever was achieved would not in fact be their common good contemporary politicians do we need sometimes use the expression the common good in their speech making but this is just one more rhetorical device for advancing whatever interests and preferences they happen to represent thirdly and perhaps now unsurprisingly Aquinas also lacked anything like our contemporary conception of a right let alone of natural rights as they came to be later conceived that is of rights belonging to individuals as such the Latin word use was then it is now used of norms governing relationships between individuals as in the expression you say only meaning a right of way and of course justice you requires us to observe norms and to refrain from harming others in a variety of ways some someone acts in accordance with use if she or he exercises some powers justice requires and we do indeed need chill to act if we were to achieve our individual and common goods but not because individuals of such have rights which we ought to respect I pause to observe that I'm well aware but in saying this I'm taking a controversial stance but I've no doubt that in essentials be sure the lay was right in concluding that nothing like our concept of a right is to be found in the High Middle Ages or earlier of course what justice towards others requires or Aquinas his view is such that we can nowadays if we so wish speak of those others as having a right to be so treated thus where the 20th century catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of the right to life of every innocent human being Aquinas insists it's always contrary to justice to take the life of an innocent human being someone may ask what then are we to say of human dignity on Aquinas is view we are individuals recognition of and respect for their dignity only insofar as they are self directed towards their final end but says Aquinas and I quote by sinning a human being departs from the order of reason and so falls from human dignity I meant respect you but only insofar as you act as a rational agent act and here there is perhaps a significant difference from some common places of contemporary church teaching keep in mind now that Aquinas takes his 13th century account of how individuals as rational agents are related to their individual and common goods to their immediate and to their final ends the hold of human beings in every century no matter what kind of social and institutional order they inhabit and consider if he is right as I believe that he is the considerable difficulties that rational agents therefore confront if they happen to inhabit the kind of social and institutional order that we inhabit for his rational agents we need to deliberate together with others if we are to deliberate well and the practical arguments that we advanced to one another in the course of such deliberation will have to begin from premises about the shared hoots at which we a Goods both individual and common premises that articulate or presuppose some shared conception of our common good and our common life take away any such shared conception take away premises that articulate or presuppose it and what were our conclusions must appear no longer as conclusions of reasoning but instead as arbitrary and unfounded theses especially to those who don't happen to share our particular preferences or interests but the modes of debate and discussion afforded and allowed by the politics of the modern state characteristically preclude opportunity for the statement of any such shared conception let alone for extended shared deliberation he provide no place in its debates for appeal to a shared understanding of some common good not only because the politics societies that you in fact have no common good but also because there are modes of rhetoric and argumentation or for quite different order what then happens when he codes are at the stake characteristically debates become debates about rights consider just one example of how this transition from one kind of debate to another they take place any group that has developed a shared of details conception of their common good will have it at some point to ask an answer the question what do we owe to the children of our particular society giving expression to a continuing concern for their flourishing want to be translated into actions that secure that flourishing physical emotional and intellectual through family school work and leisure so those children in turn become capable of caring for their society's common good as part of this adults all them protection protection while still on board while infants during the rest of their childhood and into adolescence but if adults were to take care to keep children alive yet at the same time did not actively work to ensure that they are well fed of medical care and are provided with the discipline of excellent schooling no adults would both be and be seen to be morally questionable characters imagine the following scenario I live on the coast of a dangerous sea one where the victims of shipwreck from time to time struggle with great difficulty to swim ashore many of these would drown if I didn't use my skills to rescue them but having done so I walk away and leave them exhausted and helpless of the shore so that they sometimes are crippled for the rest of their lives by their injuries in so behaving I make myself morally unintelligible for what point could there be I may be asked in caring about whether they live or die but not caring about what kind of life they then lead suppose that I were to reply in my defense but I'm a deeply religious person and that I believe that God has commanded me to save lives that would otherwise be lost all that I will achieve is that I will make it appear that God is as more of a completion unintelligible as I am imagine now another scenario some group that once had educated its children into a substantive conception of their common good becomes absorbed into a modern society and acquires the habits of mind and speech which enable them to function successfully within modernity their politics is now the politics of modernity but they retain from their past some convictions which they still defend in political debate what they can no longer do however is to present those convictions as conclusions of arguments whose premises articulate or presuppose a shared conception of their common good since such a conception is no longer shared by the participants in the debates in which they are called upon to defend their convictions the political and legal contexts in modern societies in which the rights and wrongs of abortion for example are debated are very different from those in which school funding is debated and he's again differ from the context in which what is at stake is the size of a minimum wage for a family or the financing of public transportation any stance of abortion must now now be defended without reference to all these other issues if then the convictions of such a group are not to appear arbitrary and unfounded or rather if those convictions are not to be arbitrary and unfounded they will have to support them by some alternative mode of reasoning what mode of reasoning might that II characteristically as I've already suggested they will have to appeal to some right taken to be possessed by individuals as such in the case of debates about abortion a right to life equally characteristically they will then find themselves confronted by some rival and incompatible claim about rights in the case of abortion I appeal to what has taken to be a pregnant woman's right to make the relevant choices and since there are no shared standards for deciding rationally between such rival claims about rights what will ensue will be a barren dialogue of assertion on counter assertion with no hope of identifying any common ground the outcome of such debates is of course arbitrate whoever can summon up larger number of votes wins and if the outcome of the debate is legally binding those who are defeated will find the will of the majority imposed upon them but they will have no reason to acquiesce in that outcome and as much reason as they ever had to reverse it for what has been imposed was not just nothing is to win in these two dates is as bad as to lose and the temptation to think otherwise is always a sign the one has been attracted by a doctrine that emerges and he emerges throughout political history its classical statement is by Machiavelli according to which what matters is to achieve some desired outcome no matter how or by whom it is achieved with or justly or unjustly with that seductive doctrine I can't engage here at the time has come to take leave of imaginary scenarios and to return to contemporary realities to contemporary Irish realities in June 2018 the citizens of the Irish Republic forted in a referendum to remove from their Constitution the clause forbidding abortion so almost two thirds of the electorate 40 in favor in every county but one so reversing a vote in 1983 there was a strong correlation between the age of a voter and the probability that that quarter would vote as she or he did I enlarged the young voted yes all this was remarkable as the numbers was the evident pleasure taken in their victory by those who'd campaigned for a yes vote and this was not the first such referendum in Ireland in August 2015 there had been a referendum on the permissibility of same-sex marriage that referendum resulted from the deliberations between 2012 and 2014 of a convention on the constitution in which 66 randomly selected citizens and 33 members of the Irish parliament had debated issues of constitutional reform and that convention was in turn the outcome of a remarkable attempt to engage citizens in political deliberation by two political scientists Jane Souter and David Farrell what the convention itself but even more the public response which deliberations revealed was a change of mind on many key issues in the years preceding and following the economic disaster of 2009 what caused this change the first obvious and true answer is of course the increasing secularization of Ireland in the census of 2011 eighty-four percent of those responding were self-identified Catholics well by 2016 that figure had dropped to 78 percent more importantly by 2011 the number of those attending weekly mass had dropped to 30 percent and in Dublin to 14 percent but when we speak of secularization we're speaking of a loss of or at least a change in religion as we understand it and it's perhaps worth asking how we would characterize these changes if like Aquinas we had no work religion Aquinas I suggested earlier would have characterized what we characterize as changes in religious commitments as changes in the relationship between the immediate goals day to day activities and the final end towards which those activities are directed and we truly find it illuminating to think of secularization in just these terms Ireland had changed and is changing remarkably especially in the last eight years it has prospered since the disastrous recession of 2009 as it has never done before last year its growth rate was an astonishing 7 percent unemployment was a 6 percent while in 2009 it had been 16 percent the proportion of the labor force of work in jobs requiring high technical skills has continually increased and so the gap between the kind of everyday life that many lead and the way in which they and even wore their parents were brought up is striking it's a gap that for many younger Irish people renders problematic the relationship between their own immediate ends have a conception of their ultimate and that was presupposed by that education they no longer know how to make the connection and they could really learn how to do so if they were instructed by insightful accounts of how to think about their individual and common goods but they now inhabit a kind of society which were reasons that I've already sketched lacks the resources that it would need to provide such accounts yet it's only from an adequate conception of its common good the touch of society is able to find good reasons for caring about the good of all and any of its children add to this that as I emphasized earlier but the pro edition of abortion except in rare cases is intelligible only as an expression of just such a general duty to treat all and any of our children with loving care and the outcome of the Irish referendum unsurprising especially since the most prominent advocates for retaining the ban of abortion where of course the Catholic Bishops and other representatives of the church but the greatest and most scandalous failures of the Catholic Church in Ireland and of course not only in Ireland have been its failures to care for children this is a sad story with many episodes there was an earlier period in which the Irish State handed over the care of orphans and if I married mothers and their children to religious orders while providing too little money for their care so the death rates of such infants were several times higher than normal death rates and the dead infants were buried in mass and unmarked graves speaking of this archbishop Dermot Martin has said that I quote there was a level of brutality that emerged in the church there was the occasion in 1951 when Archbishop McQuaid a man with in other respects our genuine concern from the poor declared that a scheme for providing health care for every mother and child which involved no means test was contrary to the moral law there were the many episodes in which the sexual abuse of the young by priests went undisclosed and unpunished and so continued because bishops and others took their primary duty to be that of protecting the church's reputation and all this was before the disclosed only by later government intervention so the Catholic Church's attitude has not just appeared to be one according to which abortion may be forbidden but also that the further good of children is an object of quite inadequate concern one where for long periods the maltreatment of children was a beam of no concern at all this was certainly one cause not only if the outcome of the referendum but also more generally of Ireland's secularization forgave those who had to make up their minds about the relationship between their own immediate ends of their ultimate end an excellent reason for regarding the culture of the church with deep suspicion as we should all now regard it for the moral offenses of priests and bishops were not only failures of individuals in respect of sexual behavior and respect of honesty they were failures made possible by a culture of false deference Catholic defenders of the banner of abortion thus found themselves in the position that I characterized earlier that is of having to find grounds for that ban that were independent of any general duty of care towards children let alone of any conception of such care as an essential constituent of any care for the common good so the debate became as to almost always does one in which appeal to the rights of the unborn child was matched against an appeal to the rights of the pregnant woman to make her own choices a debate in which has always the outcome had nothing to do with argument since so insofar as this was a debate about rights there could be no good arguments on either side what matters about those recent events in our Lord I shall now be arguing is in some key respects what was left unsaid in social life it's often not so much the speech even the garrulous and angry speech as the silences to which we need to attend and this not only in Ireland our silence is that we often go unnoticed because when threatened by them we start talking about something else and that we are doing this we concealed by a variety of conversational devices by changing the subject by making jokes by enquiring after some absent friend you can that is be talkative and silent at the same time talkative about this silent about that talkative about this in order to be silent about that so it was during the Irish referendum so what was it about which the Irish were and we too are silent I approached an answer to this question indirectly we perhaps do well to begin by revisiting an episode from the Irish past in 1729 Jonathan Swift Dean of st. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin published a short work entitled a modest proposal for preventing the children of poor people from being a burden to their parents and country and for making and beneficial to the public three years earlier Swift had published Gulliver's Travels and a result there were many readers waiting to read whatever he published so what was Swift's modest proposal it was that the poor should not be just permitted but encouraged to bring up children until they were one year old and then slaughter them in order to provide meat for the tables of the rich by so doing the poor would provide income for themselves and delicacies for the rich and their children would no longer grow up to be a burden of society Swift has his own suggestions as to how infant humans should be prepared for the table and he expresses his confidence that inventive cooks will provide further attractive recipes satirist speak as they do because if they smoke unsettlingly they would be ignored underlying Swift's that are his quiet rage of the contemporary treatment of the Irish poor had he spoken unser toric Lee about that treatment he would have left his readers as unmoved as they already were by moral speechify but by speaking as he does he provokes questions that he himself didn't pose why do we so confidently treat Swift's proposal as satire what is it in our attitudes and beliefs that prevents us from taking it seriously Swift target was after all a conception of utility but already in his own time informed a great deal of economic practice and that was soon to become central to economic theorizing if we agree to treat human labour as a commodity it's the shortest of steps to treat human laborers are few human laborers as commodities only to be valued as they contribute to economic well-being and if we have future laborers from the market will not be able to find employment should we recognize but there'll be more valuable as sources of protein so why is this mode of reasoning so easily acceptable in some other contexts so unacceptable in this what Swift did hope to communicate was that if we were to entertain seriously even for a moment his modest proposal we should have lost any sense of our own good what then is it about our good that makes that proposal so grossly unacceptable the answer is that our specific code is the good of rational animals each of whom Muslim potentiality of becoming a fully rational agent and we presuppose this in our activities and habits even although it may be rarely that we have the conceptual resources to formulate it in our thoughts if we were to achieve that specifically human good then we have to treat each other as just such animals as others to be fed by each other not to be eaten for without a strong sense of the needs of those others with whom we engage there and our need not only to eat but we'd together and to enjoy not only our food but also our conversation we will never develop those relationships that we must have if we were to achieve our common and individual goods dens it matters that that we are aware of each other as needy and vulnerable and act towards each other as those from we have to learn both what it is to be in need and how to respond to need rather than in economic terms so it is that we not only have a duty to educate all our children but I need to learn from them while educating subtract these considerations through our practical consciousness and as I've already suggested we will be in the kind of moral wilderness that Swift envisaged one in which almost anything may seem morally permissible but is the message that Swift had hoped to communicate still relevant to us consider another example closer in time and place on June the 29th 2018 in the United States District Court of Eastern Michigan judge Stephen Murphy dismissed a lawsuit brought by a number of students in Detroit schools those students are circuited the schools in which they were taught were in slum-like conditions and I quote functionally incapable of delivering access to literacy these assertions the judge did not dispute and he also agreed that I quote when a child who could be taught to read goes on taught the child suffers a lasting injury and so does society but it does not follow he argued that there is any right to literacy the untoward child may have been harmed but has not been wronged we all nothing to our children by way of literacy had the words that judge Murphy uttered be intended by him as Satar as a wonderful parody of an American legal decision souls astonished laughter burst out in court we might have been tempted to compare him to Swift but alas this was no satire we were not shocked by Murphy as our forebears were by Swift although we read note more happily the judge Murphy's decision has been appealed and even more happily still that there are many American cities in which local coalition's have come together to address such problems so that in Cincinnati for example there is now near universal preschool education the care for the common good is local contrast a different kind of social order between the Year 1000 and the year 1300 parts of Europe experienced remarkable economic growth growth among whose effects were increases in population longer lives and larger families forces had replaced auxin new forms of harness had been invented and the first blacksmith's made the first horseshoes the heavy wheeled plow was invented and put to work and the three field system of crop rotation was introduced water mills and mill races appeared trade increased especially to travel by River to long sea coasts fairs flourished both for trade and for entertainment commercial partnerships in trading enterprises emerged especially in seaports cities grew and flourished parishes came into being craftsmen and Merchants organized themselves into guilds cathedrals were built the new travelers included traveling friars universities were invented new kinds of entertainment came into being a nun wrote plays upper-class men and women played chess apprentices two stonemasons in Paris and Oxford learn to carve gargoyles new kinds of poetry were written unsurprisingly in this changing economic and social environment new questions were continually posed some of them economic questions about prices and property questions that resulted in extended debate of these samples are injustice in pricing some justice in the assertion of property rights by the time of Aquinas made his contribution to the discussion of these issues there have been more than a hundred years of ongoing debate and in the case of property rights at least Aquinas gave expression to a consensus one that extended from Canon lawyers to theologians and from both to civil lawyers what had been agreed was the property rights would be respected only because and insofar as respect for those rights served the common goods of humankind when gross need would not be met if those rights were respected when for example someone would starve if he didn't take food that was the property of another then by taking it they did not wrong that other and what they did was not theft justice requires that we pursue our ends so that each of us may achieve those common and individual goods that we need to achieve if were to direct ourselves towards our final ends what should be striking to us in these thinkers and in their society is a shared recognition that economic achievement is only a means to something else to something that is a common good beyond the economic they took it that we need economic growth so that more and more children can be nourished and educated we too often take it that we need to provide children with an education but primarily so we being able to put a skilled labor force to work yet at this point there is no doubt that someone will want to interject they indignantly but I'm able to praise the medieval past only by romanticizing it think they will explain of how relatively few children were educated in Italy at least remind yourself of the condition of women remember how hard the lives of peasants were imagine the bad smells of the lack of Hygiene and certainly we should heed all those injunctions but my point is a simple one I'm not claiming that everything then went well far from it but only the things were getting impressively better and not least because the standard by which needs were judged was that provided by shared conceptions of common goods and final ends conceptions that confined little or no application in many aspects of our contemporary lives just because of the ways in which modern states and economies structure and compartmentalized those lights here then are matters about which the Irish were silent in their public debates before the referendum here are matters about which we too are often silent when we debate public education and in either case unsurprisingly for if you were to insist that we will only debate abortion or public education has a sequel to extended public debate about common Goods and final ends we would find few of any opportunities for debate and few if any to debate with it is after all a common piece of our society that these are among the matters of which inch individual has to find ways to make up her his own mind and then give expression to the convictions thus privately formed in her his contribution to whatever debate she or he happens to choose to engage in for those convictions will be accounted in the modern sense religious convictions yet at this point there's a possibility but the comparison with the European Middle Ages being misleading for it might suggest that the reason why reflective agents in that time and place thought and acted in the light of shared conceptions of their common goods their final ends and the relationship between the purposes pursued in their everyday lives on those final ends whilst like almost everyone else in their culture he accepted the truths of the Christian revelation as he certainly did so why is this even if true misleading Aquinas and those who thought like him in the 13th century and of course not everyone did together we were if we were sufficiently reflective and not distracted by uneducated passions able to grasp by the natural light of Reason the nature of our individual and common goods something of the character of that final end which our actions are directed and the rules and virtues that we need if our immediate ends are to be such as our final end requires what reveal truths teach us is that we are to be judged as rational agents whose sinfulness has deprived us by our own grievous fault of our ability to move towards our final end without the gift of grace but the shared resources of secular reason or such that we can still fall upon them in public and private dispute ations about individual and common goods and how they are to be achieved it is the lack of any sense of the need for the resources that we would have to have if we were supply this in modern political societies it's the lack any sense of that need in the end of the referendum that makes modern political sciences societies in general and Ireland in particular so notably different from some European medieval societies and leaves us unable to engage in systematic discussion of our common goods so the was indeed that about which the Irish were unable to speak about which they were notably silent before enduring and since their referendum namely their own political and social common good as rational agents in this of course the Irish were not alone finally we should ask did Ireland have to develop as it did whether alternative paths into the modern world the answer for sometimes in places is certainly yes in December 1951 father James McDowell then curate on Irish speaking Tory Island who was moved by his bishop to Irish speaking then column kill in the southwest of Donegal he found the dying community the hard life imposed on small farmers ever since the family had it many negative and debilitating results among them notably high emigration rate 80% of the young people were now leaving for America as soon as they could many of them bound for Chicago only four or five marriages a year took place no one could imagine any future for the community and father Dyer made it his first task father McDowell made it his first task to catalogue the prerequisites for a viable future prerequisites that included running water and electricity for every home paved roads jobs and above all a will to act together as a community the last of these was first exhibited when he persuaded his parish council to call upon the parishioners to build a community center something that surprised them a good deal but the VA chief Byerly in 1953 with increasing enthusiasm it was to become in time a place for my quote from father Mac Iyer dances dramas and bazaars but before that could happen other problems had to be solved and many of them were solved an initial scheme for replacing individual farms by a cooperatively owned and administered farm one local support was frustrated by the refusal of government of departments to approve a necessary loon other cooperative enterprises however flourished and supplied jobs it collectively owned factory for canning vegetables grow on the farms a hand knitting cooperative and then a knitting factory a holiday village and a hotel electricity and piped water had been supplied and in 1970 a development association was born emigration was no longer the attractive alternative so a local community began to flourish and did flourish in working hopefully for its common good individuals found goals and goods for themselves and all this within the framework of the life of a parish it's true that what father mcdeere threatened his parishioners with was not so much the prospect of Hell as the prospect of Chicago although it's important to put on record the generous financial contribution made to his enterprise by some of those who'd emigrated to Chicago but the success of his of their enterprise was it turned out only to be temporary there was a need for capital investment in its various projects that couldn't in the end be met there was a need for managerial skills but no one able to supply the necessary training and so in the end this shared directedness towards the common good was no longer to be found this doesn't mean that father retires Enterprise was a failure not only was it worthwhile in itself but the 20 or more years during which it flourished in the most adverse circumstances provided just the example that we all of us need for possibility that we're too apt to forget that of the recovery of a conception off and a sense of their common good in a variety of local communities Ireland needs to remember father mccarran's bed column til and so do we [Applause] thank you very much professor McIntyre my name is hidin from Columbia University so you mentioned that this sort of debate about rights become can easily become incommensurable you can just a shouting match sort of violent dialogue without hope of common ground and the outcome is arbitrary it would in exactly what ways would a debate about common good be different sort of what are grounds for hoping that it will be more common ground and and that will be more sort of cohesive or oh yeah well that's one alternative do you just say that why why would there be more common ground or do you think that all we need is a relatively vague notion of common good that we can all agree on that's my question thank you good let me say two things first is this that in general in modern societies the identification of common goods and even of something as ambitious as the common good of this particular group begins with the identification of bad things that are happening so in a particular community people may find their schools are failing them why are their schools failing them well they have a difficult task with the children because the children's home life doesn't prepare them for school why doesn't the children's home life prepare them for school well the employment patterns are such that parents either have to travel a long distance in order to hold down a job and so can't spend time at home or wages are so low or employment is so bad that the home has very meager resources and so you find there's a problem about the school there's a problem about the home a problem about employment and you're not going to be able to solve any one of these unless you're able to do something about the others different communities have done very well in the face of certain difficulties of this kind I mentioned Cincinnati where it was discovered that they had in their schools children who were failing to learn and why because they were badly prepared when they arrived in school and so now cincinnati has as a result of the work of a political coalition working locally near universal preschool schooling kindergartens those kindergartens do things that we might expect in other communities homes to do but they don't so what I'm saying is that when people find they have to work together on different local problems that actually affect them and they're Gables then although they may not use this vocabulary at all they begin to understand that there is a common good at stake and they deliberate together as to how they're to achieve the common good the first thing to be said and I hope it's clear and it's precisely because it involved people deliberating together in the face of great difficulties and finding resources to overcome them this becomes something that creates a community when I gave the example perhaps from too distant a time in place of what happened under father retiring then column Gil it was precisely an example for community which seemed without any hope at all people coming together in the face of various difficulties and achieving something so this is what makes common good local and there's nothing vague about it it starts from very concrete considerations second thing one has to say is that just as with Glen : kill whatever you achieve they always turn out to be undermined and threatened because of the structures of our society let me just take one thing that works against common Goods and that is simply mobility if we're going to get on in our society career-wise you've got to be prepared to be mobile to go wherever the kind of job that you are pursuing is to take the kind of courses that you need for this particular ascent and so you will find yourself moving about the country from institution to institution and there's a once means that family ties are weakened it means that relatively few children have the experience of extended conversation not just with parents but with grandparents yet extended conversation with grandparents was in the past one of the things that enabled people to understand who they were and to relate to other members of their community now mobility is only one such factor we take this for granted if you were to try to get rid of mobility as we have it who knows what incredibly bad economic consequences would happen but this is the kind of thing against which you are going to have to struggle hello professor McIntyre my name is Donald chef I am from Michigan does the rebirth of community necessarily need to take place or is it more ideal to take place on an island so to speak you spoke of an island and there's been commentary and thoughts or or is there any imperative or is there a duty that that that those communities ought to be built more in the city or in urban areas I suppose sorry the reference to Tory Island was purely instead so that's where father McGarrett came from there's nothing I mean about the common good and islands that I know of the connecting clean together I could talk to you for a long time happily about Tory Island which is a very remarkable place but I'm not going to waste your time on that it's obviously for the vast majority of people in our society if they are going to identify something like the common would achieve it it's going to have to be in cities and therefore you would have to understand in urban life how things are and one of the most interesting things in cities is the relationship between where people live and where they do their work and how they are related to the people among whom they live how they're related the people with whom they work and how these two are related and if you want to look at some very very interesting studies of this then Chicago offers you by the way tremendous material for study you want to look at what happens with the southside of Chicago in the way of job opportunities and one of the sad things about south side of Chicago is that when people begin to improve their condition they generally have to do so by moving away and so one of the odd things you get is one aspect of doing well and improving is you produce the very circumstances which means that things don't go so well later on look foster from the immersive Chicago that a hellish place sorry so it wine returned to one of your earlier points about the the difference between the modern concept of State and the ancient polis it seems that at least in one crucial respect perhaps in to the nation-state can do something of what the polis did its self-governing or potentially right its self-sufficient fills that criterion and it can also restrict mobility and this of course has become recently very salient so I just wanted to hear you tease out what are the crucial respects in which the nation-state fails as a polis capable of achieving and even articulating a common good already news that I couldn't quite hear that Lawson well what are the crucial criteria for being or true Paulus by which the nation-state falls short look at begin with Aristotle and we'll see a little bit about - in a moment Aristotle the pomace is a body in which citizens participate and they participate in such a way that the police will either be a democracy or an oligarchy or a tyranny and Aristotle then talks about the ways in which it may develop into each of these and what will enable it to flourish in popular neighborhood not to flourish when a - takes over this notion he already has interesting problems because the communities in which people live and in which they are governed or govern themselves in by that period in the Middle Ages are of course very very different from the ancient world but he can still look at what's going on in Italian cities or in Paris what's going on in the countryside and here again it matters enormously that government is local this comes out very well if you look at the France of - his time and indeed later one of the things that made Louis the ninth regarded so ruler King of France was he sent out commissions to go to all the local agencies that provided justice a rule to inspect them and discover if they were being just or not and members of these commissions included a Dominican friar they had to be dispensed from the rule that normally forbad them to ride horses and do things like that so we know quite a lot about what went on but what you've got here is a society which is still essentially governed in a local way though it's moving rather fast towards being something different I hope that helps sure thank you first of all for your lecture my name is Johanna and I'm from Christendom college my question would be do you think that there is some sort of inherent connection between the prevalence of writes language and our ethical debates and emotivism for example from what I know of the fight over the 8th amendment in Ireland the yes campaign they're their primary strategy was to appeal both to rights language and to personal and very emotional arguments so do you think there's some sort of inherent connection there do you think it's mere correlation and if there is a connection um the prevalent prevalence of emotional appeals and our ethical arguments and rights language and rights language was the lost phrase I couldn't rights like right Oh much so if you think that there might be an herit connection between those two things do you think beginning to frame our ethical arguments in terms of justice and the common good will help cure the trend of emotivism I think if we really wanted to look at what was happening still is happening in Ireland in a similar way what's happening elsewhere you'd have to bring in a lot of things so there would be a lot of connections to be made and some of them it may be the kind of connection that you're talking about let me put it like this if you're long to a society that has not very well off and which has suffered from various kinds of economic and social hardship and then progress suddenly opens up it becomes enormously attractive you're able to achieve all sorts of things that apparently your parents and your grandparents would have wanted but couldn't achieve and so at this point you tend to take on the new world very happily and very uncritically and you have indeed a very strong emotional investment in so doing your conception of who you are and what you're achieving why this is so worthwhile it's very much bound up with your leaving behind what was there in the past and in this way for me well be a strong connection between that in which people invest their emotions on one hand and they're willing to take on this idiom of rights on the other I mean this idiom of rights is after all so pervasive remember the United States is founded on it and at this point to make your way in the world and yet be critical of the world which we're trying to make a way is very difficult indeed so I'm not being in the least harsh or critical of people at this point yes earlier you mentioned that mobility that we've seen nowadays is is in part responsible for lack of a common good and and you talked about the medieval era as having a keen sense of that natural common good across across generations and I I wonder how much of those two things are related in especially in contrast to to our modern society so in in medieval era you had your your ancestors and your descendants all basically expecting the same polis the same society to to be to be there to identify with and now that we have our our modern mobility where you know every generation is living in a different city practically how can we expect a a common good to to develop within a community if the community itself is constantly changing across generations and there is no there's no continuity whatsoever as far as identity I'm not sure that your question isn't itself an answer I mean that's to say it's all too easy to describe the situation as though it follows that nothing can be done and when I was writing my paper I was very conscious that I might be falling into this mistake and that's partly why I put in the passage at the end about father McCarran red collar killer because the lesson of that is not that father entire provides us with a usable example in the sense of go and do what he did but here was a situation in which it would have been very easy to conclude and almost everybody did conclude that the situation was completely hopeless and yet he turned out not so so when one looks at what goes on here contrast with many evil societies isn't really useful I mean it's worth making but it's not doesn't isn't helpful at all practically you've got to look yourself and ask where do we find people doing things that are actually working and this is why I cited Cincinnati and there are great many other cities by the way that have the same kind of beautiful initiatives and where people work together to tackle particular problems and we're very good things happen and one of the interesting things is the contrast between the success of these local initiatives in so many different circumstances and the complete contrast with standard politics our standard politics goes on as though this other world didn't exist takes notice of it at all professor McIntyre thank you for your talk my name is John Paul Gennaro I'm just wondering do you think the debate on abortion is so entrenched in the discussion of rights and the endless cycle of assertion encounter assertion do you think it is even winnable at this point and if not then what where do we go from there I think the single most important thing about the abortion discussion is that one should think about the longer-run I think that in many levels the right life movement has done well in helping to provide facilities for expectant mothers in helping to provide support for young women who find themselves pregnant all sorts of very good things but in the end this is a very barren and bitter debate and it's a debate in which in the long run you're liable to use to lose one of the things that is very impressive in Ireland is the way in which the change in attitudes has buried with age so that if the debate trends continue as they are and people were try to revive the debate about abortion in ten years time they would lose more badly than they would now now there are numerous signs that in the United States this is happening slowly in the same way have you asked how people take various kinds of stand various circumstances you will find that the young are more and more likely to do the people who have become secularized who think holy in terms of rights and the like and this is partly because of actual changes when I first came to University of Notre Dame which was in I 90 of all that long ago one of the things that I would read our students when I met them in my office was where do you come from I would then be told a story about where they came from and very often a story about their families and how their family we would talk about this and the way in which they work where they were now because of what their family had done as time went on when I asked people where they came from I would be more like more likely to get a one-word answer Miami or Pittsburgh or whatever it was without any sense that this was a question I mean this was a rather odd question for professor to ask and if I then started asking about background family it obviously seem to people a little bit intrusive but they were quite prepared to tell me and characteristically they knew much less about their family background and about where they had come from and they were very attached indeed even more attached perhaps than the earlier generations to their immediate family but they didn't have a social identity that extended beyond their own immediate relationships my impression in the last five to six years but I've not been teaching which may be at fault is that now they are defined in key part by their cell phones this is the continuation of a process that began it would be learn Thank You professor McIntyre for your talk my name is Noel Johnson and I'm a junior here at Notre Dame my question is something that I've noticed being a part of the pro-life movement in the u.s. is that rights language has ironically helped people especially on the left come around to the idea of human dignity for the unborn especially as they try to extend protections to all sorts of different groups so do you think that there's any way that the debate about the debate around rights for abortion is helpful or could the language be resuscitated to reflect a more domestic understanding it's very clearly impossible to debate abortion in a level in our society without it being a question of Rights and you have to find your way to negotiate this vocabulary this vocabulary it is important that much of what is said about rights can be translated into contentions about justice and it's very important that the moment we start talking about justice we raise broader issues that we do when we talk about rights but issues in which there's much more opportunity for constructive and larger argument so I am in favor I mean if I were to be involved in this simply tactically I would want to engage with what people say about rights on their terms but then try to transform the discussion into one about what justice requires in a community and what it requires for various people including but not exclusively the unborn because I think that it is only in this perspective that a compelling case can be made yes cool thank you so much thank you for being here professor my name is Christopher Bell Marez I'm a Notre Dame Law School student my question is you talked about the contrast between standard politics and local initiatives offering out botherer McDyess community example as something we should strive towards with the need for shared directedness towards the common good with that being said with the size of the United States and the the amount of issues that face a federal government do you believe that this is an argument for a stronger need for for state sovereignty and for a greater drive towards States focused politics it's the way that we can find a more common good this is the way an indirect answer to your question and it's not going at it head-on but it's something very important to say it there are two huge issues that confront citizens of this country one is quite simply the distribution of educational opportunity so there are all sorts of places in which if children go to school they have very little prospect of becoming more than literate and even places where they have practically no prospect of becoming really literate but on the other hand they're all parts of the education system in which people get splendidly educated in such a way that makes them eligible for going on to college and to distinguish colleges and so on and this kind of gross inequality from the beginning deprives a large part of American citizenry of any kind of first full of opportunity but also they're deprived of the means of engaging in debate they necessarily become silent they sometimes become criminal and they're forced into being inarticulate if you were to remedy this the house to be a huge change in how resources for education are distributed and in the kinds of resources that are made available and if you don't do this very bad things are about to happen secondly this is an issue on which if I went on for any length of time I would have to become technical and I won't I don't have the time to do this there's your farm prices issue of how you structure the pricing the supply chains from farms until supermarkets so that in fact farming becomes an attractive occupation the decline of the family farm is reversed farm laborers get adequately paid and at the same time food is sufficiently cheap in the supermarket's so at the moment the handling of farm prices is chaotic and irrational and again if nothing is done something very bad will happen now you might think with two such issues sets of issues like these in which the future of the society is at stake during an election candidates would have views on these things but if you look at the television locally you will find the candidates spend a great deal of time explaining what their rivals or liars and none of them ever say anything about farm prices or about educational resources and indeed one has more than a suspicion that if you were to ask them about farm prices or educational resources they wouldn't actually know what the issue was so a society in which one of the apparent prerequisites for political office is being politically illiterate it's a very peculiar Society indeed and I need laughter sir you

Channel: de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture

Views: 2,993

Keywords: macintyre, ireland, prolife, abortion, aquinas, catholic, church

Id: ZSbFvquogmc

Length: 79min 49sec (4789 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 09 2018