Brian Hamilton

A Common View of the Good

These selections from Oliver O’Donovan are long, but eminently worthwhile. He names here a straightfoward distinction between types of moral reasoning which recovers a depth often forgotten in ethics, and clearly identifies the value of recovering that depth. The closing statement is actually something of a thesis for the remaining lectures, which track Augustine’s understanding of a people as ‘a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love.’

“For reason to be ‘theoretical,’ in the sense of concerning itself wholly with the truth of things, it must abstract, hypothetically, from the loving orientation to reality that is really the condition of our knowledge…. Equally, however, ‘practical reason,’ which carries us through to decision, is an abstraction. ‘Thinking morally’ is a much wider activity than thinking toward decision. It includes an attention to the world which is both affective and evaluative…. Our whole world of beings and events is known to us only as we love and hate. At the foot of moral thought is a necessary taking-stock of the world, a discrimination prior to any decision we may subsequently make to influence the world. We shall call this taking-stock ‘moral reflection,’ to distinguish it from moral deliberation, which is directed towards decision. The metaphors conatined in these two words suggest the distinction: ‘reflection’ is ‘turning back’ to look on something that is already there, an existing reality, ‘behind you,’ as it were; ‘deliberation’ is ‘weighing up,’ facing an alternative, looking at possible courses of action that have not yet occurred. This distinction underlies the famous difference between value-words and obligation-words in ethics, between the ‘good’ and the ‘ought.’ ‘Ought,’ ‘right,’ and so on are the vocabulary of deliberation; ‘good,’ ‘fine,’ and ‘beautiful’ are the vocabulary of moral reflection.

“Moral reflection is not without a practical significance, but it is not oriented to any action in particular, but to the task of existence itself. In reflection we answer the question ‘how shall we live?’ not ‘what shall we do?’ And these are different questions. The first is not merely a generalized summary of the second. It asks about our placement in the world, our relation to other realities. And by answering this kind of question we are not merely accumulating a store of provisional orietations that can be called on later in the even that some decision requires them. We are determining ourselves as fellow occupants of the universe. In a language that is as common as it is unhelpful, we are shaping our ‘identities.’ Actually, an ‘identity’ is not something we shape, but is given us by God, prior to any existential reflection of our own. But what becomes of our identities is the result of moral discrimination, by which we understand and confirm ourselves as God has given us to ourselves—or, of course, refuse to. By relating ourselves cognitively and ffectively to the good and evil that we see within the created world around us, we adopt a posture that is the source of all our actions, but i not itself another action, or a summary of actions, but an affirmation of what we are….

“[M]oral reflection, the identification of objects of love, has effect in organized community. The value of the reflective enterprise is seen in the corporate shape that it confers on our collectives, in the creative miracle that by sharing a common view of the good, we become a ‘multitude’ no longer, but a ‘people,’ capable of common action, susceptible to common suffering, participating in a common identity.”

— Selections from Oliver O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love, pgs. 11–22. These were initially delivered as Stob Lectures at Calvin College.

7 September 2007 |
tags: Augustine, Oliver O'Donovan, Theological Ethics