"When the English actually believe that they know 'intuitively' what is good and evil, when they therefore suppose that they no longer require Christianity as the guarantee of morality, we merely witness the effects of the dominion of the Christian value judgment and an expression of the strength and depth of this dominion: such that the origin of English morality has been forgotten, such that the very conditional character of its right to existence is no longer felt. For the English, morality is not yet a problem."

-- Nietzche, Twilight of the Gods, 1888

Anything may go, but as a non-academic sort I still feel uncomfortable presuming to criticize a book of ethics by a professor of philosophy. Yet my gut, if guts are to be taken into account -- and, actually, that's McGinn's point -- tells me the professor's argument is something less than "good". Furthermore, as a layman who tends all too frequently to making unqualified opinions, I would suggest the the author is better at Second Things than First.

What McGinn really wants to talk about is how moral reality is easier to apprehend through narrative experience than by teaching a list of rules. This is the "fiction" part of the book, and it's a great point. It's the same one that William Bennett was insisting on with his Book of Virtues and Moral Compass books -- that the experience of story puts us inevitably in touch with moral and -- at least this was Bennett's point -- spiritual reality. Because he believes in God, Bennett could start his books with the foundation of his ethics settled. McGinn, on the other hand, must delay getting to the main point of the book until he's spent many pages trying to prove that objective morality exists, even if God does not. And this is what I mean when I say he is better at Second Things than First. His First Things strike me as unfinished -- like that Gilbert Stuart painting of George Washington that suddenly stops short.

For example: McGinn notes that just because we can't track right and wrong with the tools of science, that doesn't mean they aren't there. Neither can we, he points out, scientifically examine free will, human meaning, abstract mathematics and logical presupositions. This seems a logical defense, but it must be noted that it also logically defends the existence of space aliens and fairies. McGinn's argument seems to be that if we believe in human meaning, then we also should believe in moral "ought". Other thinkers have taken the exact opposite tack, it must be noted, placing fairies and "ought" in the same catagory.

Of the attempts I've seen by really smart people trying to defend moral reality without recourse to Transcendent Being behind them, I like Noam Chomsky's the best. Chomsky, who has been described as "the smartest man in the world," made a name for himself in two fields, media criticism and linguistics, being pretty much the Einstein of the latter. Yet in a discussion with postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault -- no slouch himself -- Chomsky's defense of moral ideals ended with him confessing that while he still insisted on an absolute basis for justice, "if you press me too hard I'll be in trouble, because I can't sketch it out..."

If that's the best argument of the smartest guy in the world, then Colin McGinn has his work cut out for him. McGinn, in fact, uses Noam Chomsky as example to support his own approach -- though not for Chomsky's admittedly vague defense of moral absolutes, but for the linguist's famous theories about language. Chomsky's breakthrough assertion in the late 50s was that underlying all languages lay a set of principles which are innate in human beings, enabling them to learn and use language. McGinn references Chomsky in what is in many ways an ethical verision of the same theory: according to McGinn, humans possess an inborn set of moral principles. The problem for McGinn, as a professional ethicist, is that he must now try to spell out how this works in a way Chomsky avoided in the debate with Foucault. After observing how Chomsky was backed into the corner by the late philosopher, I suspect the French Deconstructo-nator would have absolutely crushed Colin McGinn's defense of moral absolutes.

However, once McGinn gets beyond First Things -- defending the existence of The Good -- and shifts into Second -- the business of defending human intuition of The Good -- he sounds very much like the C.S. Lewis of The Abolition of Man. In that classic work, Lewis spoke of the object of human ethical intuition as "the Tao" -- the universal moral law, those values recognized in all times and all places: "It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are." (Abolition, p. 29) Now listen to McGinn:

"There is in fact a huge amount of basic agreement between cultures and epochs about simple morality, say about promise keeping..." (p. 48)

"Indeed, the fact that people disagree, rather than just expres different preferences, already shows that they take those to be some truth over which they are contending." (49)

"I strongly suspect that sociologists and anthropologists have grossly exaggerated the variations in the moral attitudes of different societies, partly out of misguided philosophical relativism, but also in order to confer greater interest on the practice of those diciplines; for they would hardly seem as full of facinating surprises if all cultures actually converged on their views of life."(49)

Meanwhile, any discussion of morality and fiction must soon get around to talking about the unusual relation between ethics and aesthetics, and here we get to the heart of the matter. There is a curious confluence of goodness and beauty, McGinn notes, which becomes apparent in our frequent judgments of art as "good" and our judgments of human behavior as "ugly" or "beautiful". When we make such judgments, wonders the author, are we uttering falsehoods or making silly catagory mistakes? Neither, he concludes. McGinn plots the mysterious but real link between art and morality in an "aesthetic theory of virtue," or ATV, which he says reflects "our implicit commitment to the view that goodness and badness of character are allied to aesthetic qualities of the person." (93) His explanation waxes Platonic, suggesting that physical beauty is really an echo of our attraction to real beauty, which is ultimately moral. This is also where Lewis was headed -- though as a Christian, Lewis avoided the Platonic mistake of denegrating the physical for being "unspiritual".

The problem with McGinn's Platonic view of an ideal morality is the old difficulty of someone presuming to describe the unseen for the rest of us. The author's easy gliding between judgments of morality and judgments of art (ala Matthew Arnold and his followers up to the present including Allan Bloom) will raise all the red flags such judgments have always raised, especially among artists. Too bad McGinn didn't include any specific examples of what he thinks fit in the catagory of "immoral" art, even if making such specific claims is the kind of thing that starts riots.

At the risk of doing just that, I'll weigh in with my own unqualified opinion that there is such a thing as "immoral" art, even if it is aesthetically "good". I'll limit myself to a safe example, the by some measures "beautiful" Nazi film, Triumph of the Will. We're touching here on something Lewis himself saw as a "baffling phenomenon": the notion something might be "good" in one way and "bad" in another. Yet despite my uneasy agreement with Professor McGinn on this point, he nevertheless made me more uncomfortable in places with his sometimes too easy equation of moral evil and aesthetic "ugliness". "The face of the enraged and violent man is not a pretty sight," he writes, "and how could this stem from inner beauty?" (101) Yeah, but my own intuition is that the face of a woman in labor wouldn't launch a thousand ships, either. Nor by that external measure could the face of a Christian martyr on the rack be considered "beautiful". Or even Christ himself on the Cross. Or Mother Teresa, now as much a symbol for "good" as Hitler has traditionally been for "evil".

Obviously, McGinn is quite cognizant of the possibility of inner beauty residing in external ugliness and vice versa. His discussion of the book A Picture of Dorian Gray revolves around this distinction. But his insistence that beauty puts us in contact with "norms", moral laws, even though there is no Lawgiver to fall back on as the final authority, would seem unavoidably to leave moral judgments in the eye of the beholder. And there are both too many beholders who disagree, and too many more who insist that surface is all that matters anyway. And to what Final authority does McGinn appeal to go over their heads?

C.S. Lewis also believed in a mysterious connection between art and moral reality. His theories of myth and story also insisted that these media put the reader in contact with Transcendent moral and spiritual reality. But as a Christian, Lewis's views have several advantages over McGinn's -- not the least of which is the fact that grounding ethics in the character of a Supernatural Being seems to be the only defensible approach to objective value. Just as important, Lewis factored into his views two important elements missing from McGinn's ATV. First, the traditional Judeo-Christian notion of a "Fall of Man": our falleness means humanity's apprehension of moral reality, while persistent and universal and real, has been impaired and is not always reliable. Second, there is the fact that the Christian Ideal was never just an abstract Idea, but embodied in a Person.

The personal nature and example of the Christian "Ideal" makes all the difference in the world. Christ voluntarily left the perfection of the Platonic heavenlies to descend to a fallen fleshly world, leaving eternal beauty to assume a visage of human ugliness for the very purpose of redeeming that world. In the Christian vision, moral absolutes are absolute -- but the individual who has fallen short has a means of redemption, too.

Christ's embrace of his own human limitations in the Incarnation, along with his embrace of those limitations in others -- the outcast, the crippled, the blind, i.e. the ugly, is both evidenced his "beautiful soul" but also may be in fact the one thing that can prevent the ATV from becoming twisted into an ideology that ends in promoting violence in the name of purity or beauty. I have always suspected that a direct line of descent could be traced from eager young ghetto workers who hung pictures of the original "arts for arts sake" gurus on their bedroom walls to zealous Progressives, eager to use science and legislation to clean up poverty, disease and, er, the unfit... The slope may tilt down from beauty as an end to the gas chambers as a means.

Positing a moral order without God also shows its weakness in McGinn's book in the chapter on "evil", in which the author asks us to imagine "G-beings" (who feel pain when others do) and "E- Beings" (who feel pleasure when others feel pain). He admits altruistic behavior poses an unsolved riddle to evolutionary theory, but seems satisfied with a cartoonish division between "G" and "E" and his narrow definition of the latter. Why, I would question, and the author doesn't even ask, if we have an innate faculty for good, don't we follow it involuntarily the way we seem to follow our innate faculty for language? The Christian notion of the irrational gravity of evil ("It's pure evil, don't touch it!") and the ordinary reality of "sin" goes farther in accounting for the world as we find it than reducing the world to G and E beings -- especially when seemingly included among McGinn's E-beings are preachers who warn someone they're headed for Hell, and people who enjoy and participate in contact sports.

The most convincing, and my favorite, part of the book is McGinn's insistence that encountering moral reality is less likely to happen in abstract reasoning about good and evil than in existential experience -- through literature and film:

"My general position is that the human ethical sensibility works best when dealing with particular persons in specific contextes; abstract generalities are not the natural modus operandi of the moral sense... One of the reasons we are drawn to fictional works is precisely that they combine the particular and the general in ways we find natural and intelligible..." (3)

McGinn uses as examples Dorian Gray and other stories. And while I don't always agree with his interpretations in the details, in broad strokes I think he's on to something here -- intuitively. Indeed, McGinn's intuition is a good starting point for his ethical explorations. His repugnance to relativism has launched him on a quest to ground his intuition philosophically, and logically. But logic, if followed unflinchingingly, would seem to lead away from the idea that an impersonal objective good exists into another direction entirely.

Along these lines we pause to observe that within the past few months Noam Chomsky has announced that he has revised his groundbreaking language theories to work in this current working hypothesis: that the origins of human language stem from the intervention of some external intelligence which in one stroke gave humans the power of language (see "A Changed Noam Chomsky Simplifies His Revolution" in the New York Times, Dec 5, 1998, p. B7). Apparently, the smartest guy in the world has decided it makes better sense to posit outside intervention in understanding how humans acquired language. Less smart guys like me wonder why it's taken him so long to posit an External Intelligence as a way to account for moral reality and how humans intuit that reality. Chomsky calls his new approach his "Minimalist Program," or "Minimalism," which sounds to me like he's taken to grounding his theories in a First Thing: in this case, apparently, a version of Aristotle's Prime Mover.

Those suspicious of grounding human views of reality in "Grand Narratives" and "Foundations", on the other hand, continue to insist that there really are no First Thing except the eye of the beholder. This sort of "minimalism" has played tragic havoc with -- not just the history of art and morals -- but with human history -- human values, meaning, and society -- over the last century or so. For those who share Colin McGinn's intuitive repugnance for such relativism, those who've experienced the tug of moral reality in story, its not so easy to explain away the idea of a "Grand Grand Narrative," a "truth Out There", to which the radar of our heart, however flawed, unfailingly points.

Of course, we then face the frightening question, what -- or Who -- is that truth "out there"? As C.S. Lewis put it, concluding his discussion on the matter, "What is the first thing? The only reply I can offer here is that if we do not know, then the first, and only truly practical thing, is to set about finding out."

Written for Cornerstone Online, Imaginarium #5, first posted 4/30/99
© 1999 Cornerstone Communications, Inc.