Dmitry Chernikov’s Blog

The rich people who are successful businessmen and entrepreneurs are last on this earth, because they have created and are continuing to create much value for the consumers, while themselves refraining from spending all of their cash. They are humble servants of the public, but they themselves do not avail themselves of the fruits of social cooperation to the greatest possible extent, e.g., by dying broke. One can’t eat dollar bills. As long as they don’t spend, their money goes to finance productive activities, pay wages, and create goods for the consumers, which the businessmen themselves do not bid away from the less prosperous, thereby keeping prices low. To repeat the Mises quote found here, “the clerks and workers who boast of their moral superiority deceive themselves and find consolation in this self-deception. They do not admit that they have been tried and found wanting by their fellow citizens, the consumers.” (Human Action, 314)

And as Jesus said, “the last will be first, and the first will be last.” (Mt 12:16) Those who have served their fellow man by taking an active part in building a civilization while themselves being at least somewhat ascetic should be glorified here and will for sure be glorified in the hereafter.

It may be true that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” (Mt 19:24) But the same holds for smart people, gifted people, great artists, political leaders, etc. As Aquinas writes, “Science and anything else conducive to greatness, is to man an occasion of self-confidence, so that he does not wholly surrender himself to God. The result is that such like things sometimes occasion a hindrance to devotion; while in simple souls and women devotion abounds by repressing pride. If, however, a man perfectly submits to God his science or any other perfection, by this very fact his devotion is increased.” (ST, II-II, 82, 3, ad 3)

Entrepreneurial foresight and cunning are perfections; insofar as a person who has become rich has not spent all the profits of his company on himself but, for example, plowed them back into other businesses and finally contributed to philanthropic causes, he has not received his reward in full and is due for a reward from the Father (Mt 6:2-4).

1. Beversluis critiques Kreeft and Tacelli’s argument in Handbook of Christian Apologetics that Christianity has attracted some of the brightest minds in history. He objects: “Christianity has attracted infinitely more average, below average, and even marginal minds. … I am sure that no Christian apologist would care to draw any resounding inference from that.” I care: that is an argument for Christianity from “the miracle of conversion of half the world.” The argument from the bright folks may be called the argument from “sages and saints.” Maybe those guys knew (and know) a few things we don’t. It is true furthermore that various small charismatic cults have existed, some of which ended up with the suicide of their members. I tackle this problem in The Argument for Christianity from “Martyrdom.”

2. Beversluis goes on: “Finally, even the most cursory reading of the synoptic Gospels reveals that Jesus’s disciples seldom have the slightest idea of what he is talking about. It is no exaggeration to say that they are among the most unpromising assortment of blunderers it was ever a sage’s misfortune to endure. They are always saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, asking obtuse questions, jumping to absurd conclusions, missing the point, or otherwise putting their foot in their mouth.” Maybe so, but the one thing of which most of them are certain is that Jesus is God. They have faith. For example:

Then those who were in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.” (Mt 14:33)

* * *

Jesus said to the woman, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.” (Lk 7:50)

* * *

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”

“Yes, Lord,” she told him, “I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.” (Jn 11:25-27)

* * *

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, “Who do people say the Son of Man is?”

They replied, “Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah or one of the prophets.”

“But what about you?” he asked. “Who do you say I am?”

Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”

Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by man, but by my Father in heaven.” (Mt 16:13-17)

* * *

Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!” (Jn 20:28)

Admittedly, not all of them:

Philip said, “Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.”

Jesus answered: “Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me?” (Jn 14:8-10)

* * *

Then the disciples came to Jesus in private and asked, “Why couldn’t we drive [the demon] out?”

He replied, “Because you have so little faith. I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” (Mt 17:19-20)

So, there is both faith and skepticism in the disciples, as seems reasonable to me. As this “cursory reading” indicates, Jesus’s disciples were far from the fools Beversluis takes them for.

Unlike the moral virtues, the intellectual virtues are hierarchical: wisdom depends on knowledge and understanding. I won’t go into any deep analysis of these, simply because I haven’t done any as yet, but rather give an example found in one of my previous posts: (1) “I am late for work.” → “The boss is going to yell at me.” Knowledge means knowing the antecedent as true or false. Understanding means seeing or apprehending the nature of the connection between the terms of the implication: “the antecedent is interpreted as implying the consequent; the consequent is part of what the antecedent means. The reason for my being in trouble with the boss is that I am late for work.” Wisdom is making value judgments, ranking things, evaluating them. As wisdom is quadriform, here we need to consider its aspect of truth. It is through wisdom that we assign a value to the consequent of (1), either true or false. Once we’ve done that the truth or falsity of (1) becomes knowledge. And this cycle repeats indefinitely.

Thus,

(a) I know the truth value of “I am late for work.”

(b) I understand that the reason for why the boss yells at me is being late for work, because he wants me to justify my salary, that is, contribute to his production process more than I am paid, not miss an important meeting, etc.

(c) I judge that “The boss is going to yell at me” is true.

While any idea that conforms to the Divine reality is called “true,” some truths are ordered to and serve others. “Thus, the art of medicine rules and orders the art of the chemist because health, with which medicine is concerned, is the end of all the medications prepared by the art of the chemist. … The arts that rule other arts are called architectonic, as being the ruling arts. That is why the artisans devoted to these arts, who are called master artisans, appropriate to themselves the name of wise men. But, since these artisans are concerned, in each case, with the ends of certain particular things, they do not reach to the universal end of all things. They are therefore said to be wise with respect to this or that thing… The name of the absolutely wise man, however, is reserved for him whose consideration is directed to the end of the universe, which is also the origin of the universe.” (SCG, I, 1, [1]) Thus, the truths about making medicine in their capacity as technologies are less general or more specific and serve the truths about healing diseases.

Guilt means “a feeling of culpability for offenses” and is the opposite of righteousness. Shame is “a condition of humiliating disgrace or disrepute” and is the opposite of glory. Now righteousness is necessary for glory, though not vice versa. For example, glory and happiness are almost synonymous; but “rectitude of the will” is required for happiness, Aquinas says (ST, II-I, 4, 4); on the other hand, one may be miserable though righteous. By contraposition, guilt is always accompanied by shame, as any sin places a stain on the soul, dirtying it, thereby causing disgrace and contempt by others or oneself. But shame need not entail guilt; for example, failure in business may be shameful but it need not involve breaking any law; or indulging in heavy drinking may be shameful but it is not necessarily immoral.

If we look at my 3, we will see that a human being is a combination of essence, accidents, and subjective well-being or happiness. These correspond to his powers, habits, and acts. A distinctive ethics can be built by looking at any of these three things. If we choose to look at happiness/acts, we will come up with a 4-sided ethical theory, consisting of (1-2) rule utilitarianism and (3-4) what I have tentatively decided to call “artistic integrity.” (I have yet to work out the latter half.) But we can examine human powers in isolation from their purpose, namely virtuous acts. If we do that, we will arrive at something very close to the Rothbardian natural law ethics. I will try to show how.

In examining human powers we are struck first and foremost by the primordial fact of one’s control over one’s body. I write that “the soul commands the body as a crane operator commands his machine, infallibly; while a human master commands his human slave through mere incentives of fear and reward.” In fact, in order for a master to control his slave, he, the master, has to control his own body first, because only through it can he influence the slave. Moreover, in order to execute the master’s command, the slave, too, has to control his own body! Now a master-slave ethics is not universalizable: it divides humanity into two arbitrary groups: those who control others and those who obey. Whatever it is, it is not an ethic for man as man.

(At this point we may ask, Why is this control a good thing? And answer, Because it allows one to tend to his needs, satisfy his desires. But this would be going away from the analysis of powers and into the ethics based on happiness/acts. So, we won’t be doing it here.)

If my body is being handled or attacked by another, then I am being used as a tool or an inanimate object, while the aggressor retains his humanity. This is again not an ethic for man as such. So, this kind of coercion must not be allowed; it is immoral. It is a very reasonable deduction to enshrine the goodness of self-ownership into law, to make illegal the immoral use of force. We are led immediately to the normative evaluation that one ought to own one’s own body so as to obtain a legal recognition of the natural exclusivity of his control of it. Now controlling the body allows one to control the external environment by moving particles of matter to and fro. Therefore, controlling objects requires a person to exclude others still more, lest the controller fails in his project, that is, fails in the exercise of his powers. Thus, one comes to own things, beside his body, which he uses for some purpose to mold the world according to his designs. If the thing that a person wants to appropriate is unowned, then he harms no one in taking ownership of it. But if it is owned, then one way for him to acquire it is to take it away from its current possessor by force. But this harms the current possessor. Hence the doctrine of initial appropriation of unowned goods: whoever comes first may lay claim on something in the state of nature (for what are the alternatives?), and subsequent transfers of ownership must be by his consent. In other words, all property must be justly acquired. And on we go deriving natural rights and duties in the manner of The Ethics of Liberty.

I’d like to move a little beyond Rothbard now and propose some precepts of human nature as it is constituted by its powers. For more power is metaphysically better than less power; power is a “great-making” property; it is something that makes its possessor good or noble or magnificent or even worthy of worship. The precepts are as follows:

1) Stay healthy, so that your body serves you well. Rothbard writes of Crusoe’s eating poisonous mushrooms: “If Crusoe, on the other hand, had known of the poison and eaten the mushrooms anyway — perhaps for “kicks” or from a very high time preference — then his decision would have been objectively immoral, an act deliberately set against his life and health.” (32) This judgment can be cashed out as involving a contradiction similar to what seems to happen in a suicide, and Rothbard proceeds to do precisely that. But an alternative view is that failing to look after one’s health is a “sin,” because it diminishes one’s power over oneself and nature. One becomes metaphysically worse.

The health in question is both 1a) of the controller, the mind, and 1b) of the controlled, the body.

2) Develop technology. Note that I do not say “develop your talents,” because that is a precept for good habits, while we are talking about powers. Technology is an extension of your body, enhancing its powers. For example, no matter how strong I am, I cannot uproot a large tree. But with a chainsaw, felling a tree is easy. Technology will be both natural and social. In the latter case we learn how best to use not merely physical objects but each other for our own goals. It might be argued that one might want to enhance his power by enslaving a lot of people. But I would reply that this is inappropriate social technology, in that it stupidly treats human beings as tools and machines, failing to squeeze much of them. The most efficient way for an arbitrary person to take advantage of other people is through a laissez-faire free market economy where slavery is simply not recognized. E.g., today “industry supplies the consumption of the masses again and again with new commodities hitherto unknown and makes accessible to the average worker satisfactions of which no king could dream in the past.” (Human Action, 605) In other words, slavery “does not work.”

3) Accumulate capital. Whereas technology represents “recipes” or means-ends connections, capital is the actual means to our ends. The more productive capital we as a society have, the greater our power over nature is.

Thus, given that power is the principle of all action, increasing human power over the world is a glorious endeavor and is for that reason a moral imperative for all human beings.

“Have you ever noticed how statists are constantly ‘reforming’ their own handiwork? Education reform. Health-care reform. Welfare reform. Tax reform. The very fact that they’re always busy ‘reforming’ is an implicit admission that they didn’t get it right the first 50 times.”

In previous posts I have made two statements:

1. Rule utilitarianism is a practical concession to the limitations of our intelligence.
2. Suppose you are an act utilitarian (AU). You strive to maximize happiness, and one day you notice that your actions follow a pattern; they are lawlike. You can be said thereby to be a rule utilitarian (RU), such that the rules describe what you actually do. … On the other hand, if the acts in AU do not obey any regularities, then it is an impossible ideal. No man can calculate the consequences of his actions in a Godlike manner.

So, the reason for RU is two-fold. First, we just can’t calculate beyond our own noses. The best we can do is evaluate rules, practices, character traits, and suchlike, and even here, as Hayek argued, we must often defer to tradition, such as the common law, the reasons for which we might not fully understand. Second, even if we could foresee the future as God does, we would still find it advantageous most of the time to follow the moral law, doing which would happen to promote, for a number of reasons, the greatest good for the greatest number. A society of omniscient individuals would enjoy perfect coordination, but it, too, would involve, for example, a lawlike respect of contracts.

In Roderick’s terms, then, following rules is an internal and indispensable means to happiness. Widespread law-breaking leads only to misery, which is why society is advised to suppress criminal activities (note again the social focus of utilitarianism). He writes, “[E]ven when I choose to act morally, my choice commits me to rejecting morality in counterfactual situations… where immorality would be a more effective means to the end, and this commitment is a blot on my character now.” If by this statement he refers to lifeboat situations, then we can say with Rothbard that “a lifeboat situation is hardly a valid test of a theory of rights, or of any moral theory whatsoever.” (The Ethics of Liberty, 149) For example, Yeager quotes Richard Epstein to the effect that one of his “simple rules for a complex world” is “limited privilege in cases of necessity (’take and pay’),” such as the case of “the man who breaks into a pharmacy closed at night as the only way to get medicine to save his dying wife.” (Ethics as Social Science, 272) One would be hard-pressed to consider the man’s actions “immoral.” Illegal, sure. But no judge would throw the book at him.

If Roderick refers to cases such as described in my Secrecy and Utilitarianism, then the reply is “What are we supposed to do? Enlighten us, o great moral teacher.” Yeager replies, wisely, that “[o]ne must accept guilt for one action or another, and in accordance with one’s own moral character, but without brooding excessively about it. A moral person will accept the guilt without letting it destroy him.”

Morality in relation to utility, then, is like a box of chocolates: on the one hand, it is a producer good, because it is merely a means to enjoying the taste of chocolate, and you have to advance it further toward a consumer good by eating the candy, etc. On the other hand, it is clearly a consumer good, because it is so close to being the final good, and because it is a sine qua non for enjoying the taste.

Rothbard goes on to say that “In any sphere of moral theory, we are trying to frame an ethic for man, based on his nature and the nature of the world — and this precisely means for normal nature, for the way life usually is, and not for rare and abnormal situations.” So, normally, obeying the rules which have been tuned so as to promote overall happiness and its another internal and indispensable means, social cooperation, will end up as the most beneficial thing to do.

Suppose that the federal government enacts a bill with the purpose of “weaning us from the dependence on foreign oil” ordering everyone, instead of going by car, to fly to where they want to go by flapping their arms. Is this law valid? Legal positivism would say yes. It is made by the legitimate sovereign, using the proper procedures, it does not seem to be contrary to the Constitution or any “higher” positive law, so what’s the problem? Of course it is valid and therefore commands obedience.

The obvious absurdity of this law, however, can be picked up on by natural law theorists. Interpreting “natural law” literally as “all the causal regularities put in service to human ends,” they will say that it is impossible for humans to fly around in the prescribed manner, and since ought implies can, they ought not to fly. Now if the positive law is higher than natural law, then natural law is to be set aside and positive law enforced. But this opinion begins to look suspect when prisons start running out of room for new law-breakers. It is more plausible to suppose that natural law outranks positive law, and therefore the requirement to fly by flapping one’s arms is no law at all.

Ludwig von Mises said that the chief function of an economist is telling the government what it can’t do. Now this lack of ability does not mean any kind of legal limitation on the power of the state, useful as such things are, but the limitations of the economic law itself. For example, the government supports a banking industry which generates credit expansions. But if we want to be prosperous, credit expansion leading to business cycles is precisely the wrong thing to allow. The question is, then, must we obey the (1) legal tender laws, (2) laws forbidding banks from issuing their own notes, (3) laws giving banks immunity for keeping fractional reserves? These artifices fail to lead us to what we want, namely, a successful society. The connection is a bit more subtle than in the case of flying by flapping the arms about, but it is essentially the same. The means to our common end are inappropriate, and therefore not even the state can override the natural law linking the means to the end. The laws in question therefore lose their status as valid laws. They remain in power only because most people do not perceive them to be contrary to reason, impoverishing society and them personally, and because of the government’s ability to crush those few who do realize their pernicious nature.

Finally, consider a new law ordering all the redheads to report to concentration camps where they are to be gassed. Must the redheads obey like lambs to the slaughter, and must the police round up those who will not go voluntarily? Positive law, knowing no limit other than, perhaps, the laws of physics, must needs say yes. But everyone not corrupted by legal positivism will say that the moral law, “Thou shalt not kill,” overrides the government dictate, making it null and void.

I agree with the positivists, however, that in all these cases, while the laws being evaluated are wicked and invalid and ought to be repealed, they retain their character as human laws. It’s just that whichever non-man-made laws we pick, natural (physics, chemistry), social (economics), or moral (self-ownership, the Golden Rule), it is clear that they sit in judgment over the human law and its makers. In other words, nature, in order to be commanded, must be obeyed.

“[T]he greatest public theologian of his time” was an act utilitarian? I mean, he is right to connect AU with prudence, but actually to recommend AU as a moral theory to live by and especially in politics is nuts.

The Catholic Encyclopedia argues against the identity of grace and charity, saying that “sanctifying grace informs and transforms the substance of the soul; charity supernaturally informs and influences the will.” But what is a human being if not a union of the will, the intellect, and the (bodily) powers? It stands to reason that grace is identical to the union of the three theological virtues, uplifting them into deiformity but without changing human nature. In other words, faith, hope, and charity remain accidental qualities within the soul. The good habits that are attendant on grace and on the nature thus uplifted are the standard moral and intellectual virtues which may be inflused rather than acquired and the gifts perfecting them still further.

This account also explains how grace can be lost as a result of a mortal sin. The virtuous habits guiding a person’s actions in the state of grace disappear along with faith, hope, and charity if any of the latter is lost.

Consider also that a person’s nature is destroyed in hell; a person’s grace can be destroyed in this life throwing him back into unaided nature, both through sin; and, if you’ll let me speculate, a person’s glory can, too, be destroyed through a kind of heavenly sin which is dissatisfaction with his reward. In the latter case, I suppose, he might be reincarnated, and a life of grace for him, guaranteed.

“No,” if we are talking about actual grace or God’s transient help to act, because God’s actions always attain their end. There is a caveat, however. God can assist a person successfully by touching at least one of the will, the intellect, or the bodily powers of action. Thus,

if God has not influenced the will, then even after the grace is bestowed, one may change his mind and fail to choose the end;

if God has not influenced the intellect, then one may fail to know how to attain the end;

if God has not influenced the powers, then one may fail in his efforts to attain the end.

But actual grace can work infallibly, if God so wishes.

“Yes,” if the grace is habitual or sanctifying (the permanent state of grace), because that grace is (1) an upgraded nature (the “light of grace”) coming complete with (2) the habits to guide the workings of that new nature, that is, infused virtues and gifts. Grace is necessary, because one has the powers and the disposition to act to merit salvation which he would not have without grace, can be sufficient, because normally no actual grace is required to move one to do supernaturally meritorious works, yet be inefficacious in that one can at any time go against the disposition and sin and even lose the divine habit altogether. Having grace does not guarantee, though it predisposes one to, supernaturally meritorious acts, just as having any good habit is not always guaranteed to elicit a virtuous act.

A brilliant article by George Reisman.

Notes. 1) Reisman writes:

Other people’s means of production, other people’s capital, are the source both of the supply of the goods one buys and of the demand for the labor one sells. The greater is other people’s accumulation of capital, the more abundant and less expensive are the products available for one to buy in the market and the greater is the demand for the labor one sells in the market and thus the higher the wages at which one can sell it.

The increase in the demand for labor is due to the greater relative scarcity of labor as opposed to capital. The more capital is invested per worker, the less each additional unit of capital is useful as versus an additional unit of labor. In other words, investment in capital goods is subject to diminishing returns; on the other hand labor becomes more valuable and more in demand which causes nominal wages to rise until the marginal increase in wages furthers production as much as a marginal increase in the investment in capital goods (that is, until the marginal value product of labor is equal to the marginal value product of capital).

Now, of course, labor becomes more productive mostly due to investment in capital. Even non-capital-intensive industries compete for workers with industries that are capital-intensive and must raise the wages of their workers in order not to lose them. (For example, a butler will benefit from economic progress, because his master will fear losing him to capital-intensive projects in which he will be very productive and therefore earn more money. The butler’s wages, too, must rise along with the wages of other workers.) Now it is true that if firm A has invested heavily into capital goods, and firm B has not, then only A’s demand for labor will increase. However, we are talking about the economy-wide capital accumulation. It is when we look at the economy as a whole that we see that wages are bound to rise given a general increase in capital available for production. Once wages have caught up, new technologies and increased savings again make creating capital goods profitable. Money flows into “labor-saving” machines. Yet this makes human labor relatively cheap and eventually boosts demand for it. This cycle goes on forever and results in constantly increasing real (though not nominal, barring inflation) wages.

2) He goes on:

For example, $1 million expended by grocery stores in buying produce at wholesale will show up as $1 million of such cost within days. However, $1 million expended in the construction of a new building with a depreciable life of forty years will show up as a cost of production to be deducted from sales revenues only after the building is fully completed, and then at the rate of just $25,000 per year, as per its forty-year depreciable life.

What he means is that the rate of capital consumption differs in the case of groceries and the new building. Groceries are bought wholesale, then sold retail and are eaten by the consumers within days. There you have it, a million dollars worth of capital (wholesale groceries) has been used up, having been transformed into life energy. But a building is consumed much more slowly: only $25,000 of it disappears into the abyss every year. Hence capital consumption is smaller, but if revenues from the building are the same as from the groceries, then overall profits in the economic system are much higher.

Now investing into longer production processes from the point of view of an individual firm is possible due to lower interest payments. The costs of doing business over time are lessened. That is, the cost of time during a boom is lower than consumers prefer. Investing into more durable capital goods is one way to benefit from lower interest rates, because you lose less money from buying such goods — the money which could instead have been loaned out and earned interest. In other words, suppose you are trying to decide whether to purchase a new building or to put the money on a CD. The interest on $1,000,000 over 40 years can be quite large, but if interest rates are low (whether naturally or artificially), then the profits obtained from using the building even given the yearly maintenance expenditure of $25,000 have a better chance of outweighing the counterfactual interest return. (We are not guilty of double counting here: if you maintain the building, then at the end of 40 years you will be able to sell it for $1,000,000; if you don’t maintain it, then in 40 years it will collapse. Either way, you’ll have spent $1,000,000 + interest foregone.)

1. Pure utilitarianism is act utilitarianism, and it can succeed only by making interpersonal utility comparisons, assisted by its disinterested benevolence and intimate knowledge of each individual.

2. How does utilitarianism respect people’s autonomy? By presupposing that people know what they want and merely enabling them to achieve their ends. The ends themselves are not judged by any outsider including the impartial spectator, though they can be judged insofar as they themselves are means to the ultimate end which is happiness. Generally, utilitarianism rains truth on the good and evil alike (Mt 5:45), though if a utilitarian is in a position to deceive an evil person and thwart his plans, he can legitimately do so.

Is there a contradiction between this deference to autonomy and utilitarianism’s social approach to ethics? Not at all. The latter means that each individual’s desires and well-being are given equal weight in moral calculations. The former means that value judgments are taken as ultimate givens. Both principles can without trouble co-exist.

3. A prudent person tries to figure out not the right thing to do but the best thing to do. If doing the “right” thing is interpreted as doing what is permissible, then there are numerous right things to do in any given situation. If it is interpreted as doing your duty all things considered, then this duty is ultimately an outcome of rule utilitarian calculations.

4. Teaching the truth about the actual means-actual ends connections is itself a means towards securing general happiness. Are there other means? Assuredly; for example, producing a means is conducive to happiness. One could produce such a means for another out of charity, having sized up the utility of sacrificing his own good for the sake of his beneficiary. But, of course, that won’t work as a general way toward abundance of means. Prosperity results from capital accumulation, insofar as capital goods are means to or way stations within production processes of consumer goods. But in order to induce this process of saving and investment, all that is necessary is to teach people economics, which explains how people can use each other most efficiently in striving to achieve their own private goals. Again, we see that teaching the truth is the most crucial task of anyone who wishes to measure up to the strictures of utilitarian ethics.

5. Since the work of prudence consists of finding the most profitable course of action, one must also consider whether he has the ability to use a particular means for the satisfaction of an end he has. In other words, the considerations of power are included in prudence.

6. Is one required by pure utilitarianism to jump on a grenade to save his buddies? Since disinterested benevolence is assumed, the answer is yes, unless more sophisticated calculations show otherwise. Once again, this blithe conclusion is a sign not of the absurdity of pure utilitarianism but of its being only 1/4 of the general theory of ethics. Note that pure utilitarianism will calculate the consequences in every case anew; rule utilitarianism (which is only 1/2 of the total ethical theory) will ask whether a rule in which a soldier is supposed to sacrifice his life for the sake of the lives of N of his fellow soldiers is a good one. (E.g., you may be harmed by taking a risk that in your trench you will be closest to the grenade and will therefore incur a duty of dying to save others; but you benefit by enjoying the possibility that you will not be closest to the grenade and will be saved by another soldier. If on average 10 soldiers are saved per 1 soldier who sacrifices himself, the odds are in your favor that you will survive a grenade.)

7. Disinterested benevolence is the form charity, the greatest of all virtues, takes for NTs.

Reposting this with an update… I think I should have used standard permalinks to make reposting easier.

The source for the reason why God is masculine is Peter Kreeft’s speech “Women and the Priesthood.” He says that God is masculine, because He “impregnates” the soul from the outside with grace. I add that there are reasons why each person of the Trinity could be called masculine.

The first person, because (1f) He as Creator and in His capacity as a perfect agent or pure act created matter and imbued it with form, and that which acts is masculine, while that which is acted upon is feminine; and (2f) as Father He rewards and punishes those He loves, an activity which properly belongs to the father not the mother (or at least, to the masculine part of every human being).

The second person, because (1s) as Redeemer it belongs to the man to sacrifice himself for his bride rather than to the woman for her bridegroom; and (2s) Jesus was male (of course, this only shows the sex of His human nature not His divine nature, but it would be odd indeed if the divine Daughter was incarnated as a male).

The third person, because (1h) as Sanctifier, as Kreeft states, He gives grace which bears fruit, etc.

Update. I just realized that I already spoke on this question in my Questions About God… And Answers which seems to have aged well. I also found another reason about which I completely forgot:

Look at Gen 3:16: “To the woman he said, ‘… Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.’” That, of course, is how it works in families, normally. But God is ruled by no one but rules everything. Hence it would not be consistent with human experience to imagine God to be feminine.

Finally, Just as God is the creator of both form and matter, act and potency, so He did not need a Mother which stands for “matter” to beget a Child. His goodness and power were sufficient. But the Child is a perfect image of the Father and is therefore a “boy,” the Son.

It is written:

When he arrived at the other side in the region of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men coming from the tombs met him. They were so violent that no one could pass that way. “What do you want with us, Son of God?” they shouted. “Have you come here to torture us before the appointed time?”

Some distance from them a large herd of pigs was feeding. The demons begged Jesus, “If you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs.”

He said to them, “Go!” So they came out and went into the pigs, and the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and died in the water. (Mt 8:28-32)

Was Jesus at fault for violating the property rights of the pigs’ owner? It seems that it was the demons who violated the owner’s rights not Jesus. Jesus merely allowed them to enter the pigs. But why would He listen to the demons’ request? Are they not morally pure evil? Well yes, but before “the appointed time” demons are part of nature, and they have a purpose, namely to torment, tempt, etc. humans, and therefore have certain “rights.” Being useful (to God and even to men) is a kind of good. Insofar as the demons were good, they deserved consideration.

The problem with all the approaches to ethics I’ve seen so far is twofold. First, they fail to realize that there are 4 complementary ethical theories, corresponding the 4 temperaments. Second, they fail to consider each theory in its pure form, undiluted by the other 3 theories, each one at the same time quite inadequate on its own as a complete ethics and yet also essential and correct. Let’s consider therefore pure utilitarianism, an NT Rational theory.

Utilitarianism corresponds to the virtue of prudence, to satisfaction of desires whatever they are, to truth and ethical calculation. The first condition for utilitarianism is disinterested or detached benevolence. The second is impartiality. In deciding what to do, each person is an unbiased spectator, considering everyone’s interests and desires without privileging any particular person including oneself. You dissolve within society, become anonymous, nobody special, a dot on the disk of the totality of society. Yeager discusses “impersonal cooperation,” “the anonymous Great Society,” “common sentiment extending to all mankind.” This is obviously as anti-NF as it gets. And yet it is a crucial component of the full-featured ethical system still to be developed. Therefore, it is wrong, in considering pure utilitarianism, to argue that “[i]ndividuals can and should favor their own interests within the bounds of morality and law”; or that “[i]n intimate groups… the attitude of solidarity and altruism… are more appropriate.” (Ethics as Social Science, 193ff) These NF corrections, sensible as they are, contaminate pure utilitarianism and make it unintelligible.

The NT and SJ ethics share a property of being social; they speak not to individuals but to society as a whole. In conjunction with the SJ ethics we get rule utilitarianism, a far more robust theory than pure act utilitarianism.

Bob Murphy objects:

The fundamental problem with utilitarianism is this: Despite a succession of ingenious proponents, its advocates have yet to explain why the individual should behave morally. The fact that we are all better off if we all behave morally is utterly true and utterly irrelevant. (Such an argument violates the cherished Austrian precepts of marginalism and individualism.) The truly difficult moral issues resemble the familiar Prisoner’s Dilemma; regardless of everyone else’s behavior, the individual does better by exploiting others. It is true that a society suffering from widespread theft would be intolerable, even from a thief’s point of view, but any individual robbery has very little impact on the overall level of crime.

This objection fails to acknowledge the social focus of utilitarianism. A pure utilitarian has little to say to any individual on why he should not be a thief. But it does recommend a social policy of catching and punishing thieves. According to pure utilitarianism, one would not want exploit others, because he risks being caught and fined or imprisoned. The utilitarian idea is to structure the incentives of the legal system to minimize the total amount of violence people (including the state) inflict on one another. Utilitarianism counsels rewarding and encouraging good deeds and discouraging behavior that harms social cooperation. And that’s it! It thus addresses itself to society and its agent, the state.

But Murphy has another argument up his sleeve.

Moreover, if everyone agreed with Yeager and other utilitarians that it were foolish to sacrifice oneself in these rare instances, an element of doubt would arise in all social interactions. Although pangs of conscience might be a wonderful evolutionary byproduct, it would be in the interest of everyone to steel himself against such “irrational” feelings (while still behaving in accordance with them under normal circumstances). One’s very life might one day depend on it.

Here there is a truth-digging game going on between society and individuals. Individual soldiers will want to hide their cowardice and merely pretend to be willing to sacrifice their lives for the cause (thereby getting paid for doing no work), while society has an incentive to detect their cheating and punish them for it or, at least, refuse to hire them. Utilitarianism addresses itself both to the soldier who is contemplating whether to sacrifice himself for the greater good and to the general choosing the soldiers who, in his estimation, are most likely to follow orders even unto death. And it is an empirically true statement that people do not always behave selfishly, carefully hiding their egoism until the time comes when they are put to the test, and then to everyone’s consternation they do their own thing. Sometimes society wins; other times individuals win at the expense of society.

Murphy goes on:

Utilitarianism seems to rob the words good and bad of their specifically ethical character. The utilitarian cannot make a distinction between guilt and simple error. The person who robs a bank to achieve happiness has made a mistake in qualitatively the same sense as a person who overcooks a steak.

Once again, we don’t care about whether a thief acted virtuously or not. All that pure utilitarianism commands is that the police try to deter and minimize bank robberies as much as possible consistent with other goals. The rule according to which robberies go unpunished results in an unhappy society, despite the benefits to the robbers. (It is true that it is better to suffer than to inflict suffering. The robber does not realize that he is doing and being evil. But pure utilitarianism takes values as given. This fact is evidence not of our theory’s bankruptcy but merely of its incompleteness.) It follows that we as a society must calibrate the legal system and other methods of apportioning praise and blame so as to promote general happiness. As David Friedman writes, contrasting the economic approach to law with other approaches, “An economist points out that if the punishments for armed robbery and for armed robbery plus murder are the same, the additional punishment for the murder is zero — and asks whether you really want to make it in the interest of the robbers to murder their victims.” (Law’s Order, 8) As to the fate of the robber’s eternal soul utilitarianism is silent, unless never committing a sin is what the divine gift of counsel commands.

Pure utilitarianism teaches people how to attain their goals (which may include the goals of others toward whom they feel benevolent). On the level of the individual utilitarianism collapses into the virtue of prudence-in-act. On the level of society it also teaches people how to hinder the goals of those whose actions would destroy social cooperation if left unchecked. A utilitarian thus seeks to educate the public about the actual means to their actual ends, enhance their practical wisdom or prudence and their strategic intelligence. Utilitarianism does not consider people to be placeholders of utility; in teaching them the truth it respects people’s autonomy (the source of NT self-respect) and presupposes that they know what they want, though it is aware that prudence can be used for evil ends. In the final analysis utilitarianism attempts to spread the virtue of prudence far and wide.

If the severely mentally handicapped have (negative) rights, why not animals? It seems to me that the former have rights, because we share a common essence, humanity, and, though their intellectual virtues are on the low side, these virtues are accidents. It is dangerous to split mankind into groups, some of which will have rights, and others will not. It worsens the tone of society; it is a slippery slope; it undermines respect for human life in other situations; etc. On the other hand, animals and plants belong to different species. It might be argued that we share with them “animality” or “life,” but we can counter by saying that merely being an animal or being alive without being human is not enough for having rights. It may seem like an arbitrary cutoff point, and some religions command one to care even for insects, but this point “works.” I mean, cats usually care for kittens not puppies. Wolves hunt in packs, helping each other, but harming and killing their prey. Love and consideration seem to be limited to one’s own species. Of course, there are instances of symbiosis, such as when humans keep pets. So, my cat may be said, perhaps somewhat metaphorically, to have rights against being killed (by anyone other than me). At the very least, I have a right not to have my property, the cat, damaged. However, the cat has these rights only because I love him, i.e., this particular cat. If I were to throw him out, he would cease to be protected. On the other hand, human orphans scratching a living on the street have rights independent of whether anyone loves them, i.e., these particular orphans.

Update. Inspired by Danny Shahar.

Beversluis seeks to diffuse the C.S. Lewis’s “Liar, Lunatic, Lord” trilemma.

The first argument our author makes is that the Bible and Gospels in particular are unreliable. Well, blow me down. If the New Testament narratives “incorporate later recollections, interpolations, embellishments, fictionalizations, and ascriptions of deity,” then the implications of this go far beyond the obscure fact of the failure of C.S. Lewis’s argument. Are we even sure that Jesus existed? Is Christianity “based on a myth, mass hallucination, and even outright lies”? Forget C.S. Lewis; given Beversluis’s argument we probably have an intellectual imperative to abandon the Christian faith altogether! In other words, that the Bible is not to be trusted is an immensely strong claim which lays waste to the religion of billions. To call it controversial is hardly to do justice to it. So, it is entirely reasonable to dismiss this argument as proving too much. We must evaluate C.S. Lewis’s trilemma on the condition that the Gospels are accurate. I mean, who can doubt that Lewis himself would agree that if the Gospels recount events that never took place, then he has no case?

Lewis claims to be an expert in literary criticism and asserts that the Gospels don’t feel to him like a myth. Beversluis dismisses Lewis’s statement by saying that his expertise is irrelevant: Lewis is deluded into falsely assuming that “wide reading in a particular genre necessarily makes one’s judgment more reliable than narrow intensive reading in the same genre.” Yet earlier he thinks nothing of referring to “the opinion of mainstream New Testament scholarship generally” and to psychiatric experts. Does our author remember what he says from one moment to the next? Is being an expert valuable or not?

Beversluis goes on to claim that Jesus may in fact have been insane, since he allegedly had moral failings. Jesus curses the fig, he orders the demons to enter and drown the pigs, he takes a colt without permission, he condemns the Pharisees, he claims that wanting to commit adultery is a sin (isn’t it?), etc. Now I think that there is a reasonable explanation of these behaviors, and it is certainly not madness. But I just don’t see how anyone who falsely claims to be the omnipotent immortal God, “the way and the truth and the life,” who created the universe could be any kind of teacher, let alone a great moral one.

In order to forgive sins, Beversluis argues, Jesus need not have been God; he only needed to have been something like a Catholic priest who had the authority to forgive sins. Now if Jesus had this authority, he must have received it directly from God, for no one else could ordain him — he was the first priest. But (1) the Bible does not relate to us any story of such ordination; on the contrary, Christ says he builds his Church, that is, the Church in which he, Jesus Christ is to be worshipped; and (2) God would not favor and empower a lunatic or a fiend to be the founder of what would later become a worldwide religion. There is a much more serious problem with this, however. The Incarnation has altered the relationship between men and God. It effected a genuine change in the cosmic order of things. It is only after Jesus’s mission was completed that forgiveness of sins became possible. The Law condemned the world of sin; nobody had the right to forgive except the Father, but He was not willing, and the Son had not yet taken ownership of the world from his Father. If Jesus was not God, then he could not have been a sin-forgiving priest either.

But Beversluis makes two good points. Jesus’s moral teachings are good regardless of who he is; they stand or fall on their own. Consider, however, that Jesus taught a lot of things that dealt with heavenly affairs and divine truths. If he was merely “a man who believed that he was God (or the Son of God), but was not,” then the articles of faith revealed by Jesus have no authority, because there was no way Jesus could know them — unless God revealed them to him, which He wouldn’t, because, again, He would not have chosen a crazy man or a fiend to deliver the revelations. Second, the key to Christianity is not moral teachings; moral teachers are a dime a dozen. Once again, it is the change in the relationship between mankind and God.

His second point is that numerous controversies on the nature of Jesus animated the Church Fathers. It was not immediately clear that Jesus had two natures, fully human and fully divine, in one person, etc. Many hypotheses were entertained, and these had to be settled by extensive discussion. It follows that concluding that Jesus was God was not so trivial a matter as C.S. Lewis would have us believe; otherwise why had so many people been confused before the official doctrine was finally promulgated? Ah, but you see, we don’t know the process of reasoning by which the early Church came to what are now orthodox doctrines. Perhaps it took them so long to arrive at the truth precisely because they did not have access to the C.S. Lewis’s argument. In other words, if C.S. Lewis had lived in those days, Adoptionism and Arianism and so forth might never have arisen, so cogent his argument would have seemed to the Church councils.

So, it seems that C.S. Lewis’s trilemma is alive and well.

See also: Liar, Lunatic, or Lord; The Argument for Christianity from “Martyrdom”.

I have written on the contrast between fortitude and prudence. It remains to consider the contrast between fear of the law and justice.

It would be wrong to seek the difference between our two virtues in “law” and “exceptions from law.” For fear of the law covers all rules, whether more particular or more general and determines when exceptions to a lower law should be made in order to obey a higher law. Thus, common law may be overridden by a statute which itself must be constitutional, while even the Constitution is not “a suicide pact,” to use that much abused phrase, and can be overridden in some cases. So, fear of the law is sensitive to numerous interactions between various laws and to how to adjudicate conflicts between them.

Now in ST, II-II, 57-120 Aquinas deals with justice in society instead of justice within an individual, a grievous error. Justice is first and foremost truth to oneself, authenticity, integrity, never betraying who one is, self-hood, identity. If science is abstraction from experience, and science is the domain of NTs, then NFs deal with whatever cannot be abstracted, the unique aspects of human experiencing. Clearly then, you cannot enmesh your life entirely into laws. There are things which no law tells you to do or not to do. You must look into yourself and see if you want to do it. Now this process may be governed by the law “do whatever makes you happy,” but this law does not specify what makes you happy. It’s your own unique character and unique self which determine your desires, identity, and destiny. Just as fear of the law presupposes authority, justice often inveighs against authority, if it is perceived as suffocating to one’s individual personality.

Just as Artisans and Rationals should normally stay away from each other (while Guardians do naturally stay away Rationals; and Artisans, from Idealists, having little to contribute to each other) and cooperate only with theory meets practice, so Guardians’ traits should not contaminate Idealists, and vice versa. Fear of the law insists on obedience or on being true to the external law; justice insists on obedience or on being true to one’s own unique qualities.

Happiness is virtuous use of one’s own powers. This covers both acting-toward-rest and acting-while-at-rest, as both presuppose a power in some righteous act. But I want to consider a particular kind of happiness, namely happiness in active life. This happiness depends crucially on the four cardinal virtues. Its first part therefore is living according to (sophisticated) rule utilitarianism. One must (1) fear and follow the law created (4) prudently, in the service to producing best consequences. Its second part may be called true-to-oneself opportunism. One must (2) be a master tactician and adapt to change but do so (3) without compromising but rather in order to enhance his integrity.