The Order of Love

This Protestant inversion of the order of charity coexisted with many habits of mind and speech rooted in the older view, particularly with the reassertion of Aristotelian scholasticism among Protestants in the decades after the Reformation. But the radicalism of early Protestantism continued to percolate. The 17th-century Reformed mystic Samuel Rutherford agonized over the possibility that he might love “Christ’s love” more than he did Christ himself. The reappropriation of late medieval “Rhineland mysticism” and its idea of “gelassenheit” by the Pietists gave a further boost to the idea that true holiness consisted of renunciation of the “self” at every level, even the most spiritual.

Jonathan Edwards provided the most influential restatement of the idea of “unselfish” love in the 18th century. In his Dissertation concerning the Nature of True Virtue, Edwards argued that the only true virtue consisted in “benevolence toward being in general” which meant, primarily, love of God. Any “particular” love of one’s own family or nation  or one’s own well-being, while imperfectly good, was potentially at odds with true virtue and thus not inherently, truly good. Among Edwards’ followers, this led to the catchphrase “disinterested benevolence.” Abolitionism and other 19th-century reform movements took their inspiration from this Edwardsean principle that true, virtuous love would have no regard to the closeness of the beloved to oneself.

The greatest good for the greatest number

A secular counterpart to Edwardsean “disinterested benevolence” was the utilitarian ethic of “the greatest good for the greatest number” promoted by Jeremy Bentham. But secular accounts of disinterested virtue faced a difficulty that Edwards and his followers did not. Edwards, as a Calvinist Christian, was quite sure that God had revealed what true virtue looked like. For Edwards, as for Aquinas, to love one’s neighbor was first and foremost to desire their union with God. (That for both Aquinas and Edwards–as for Luther and Bucer–there was a sense in which God himself did not desire this for all people is one of the reasons why many heirs of Edwards eventually turned toward Arminianism, which would have horrified Edwards.)

In the secular versions of disinterested benevolence, the problem my Thomist friend pointed out in Bucer recurs with a vengeance. What is the good that we will for our neighbor? Various versions of utilitarianism (and other secular ethical systems) have given different accounts of what it is that we want to maximize and whom it is we want to maximize it for. Is it the presence of pleasure or satisfaction? Are some pleasures worthier than others? Is it the absence of pain or suffering? How does one weigh pleasure against suffering? When is a life full of suffering worth living, and when isn’t it?

View from nowhere

Perhaps the most influential version of modern utilitarianism, championed by Peter Singer for much of his career, is “preference utilitarianism.” In this view, a morally good action is one that maximizes the ability of other beings to carry out their own preferences or desires. This grasps the nettle pointed out by my Thomist friend. goodness is, in fact, a respect for the preferences and desires of others. This is an ethic that can coexist with a plurality of concepts of the good. But it still requires some system for deciding whose preferences count in a conflict. And, notoriously, it led Singer in particular to argue that not only unborn fetuses but newborn infants had very little moral claim because they were not yet capable of conscious preferences.

In Singer’s ethic, our relationship to a being has no bearing on the effort we should make to do good to that being. In an interview, Singer admitted that he didn’t carry out his principles consistently in practice, because he spent thousands of dollars on care for his mother in a nursing home. In principle, he thought he owed her no more than anyone else. But his practice was different. I agree with Richard John Neuhaus that Singer’s practice is more admirable than his theory. As Neuhaus puts it, Singer’s ethic is a “view from nowhere.” It assumes a complete impersonality that belies what it means actually to be a human being embodied in a set of relationships.

A Thomist response to Vance (to be continued)

Vance is talking nonsense when he claims that “the left” actually treats strangers as worthy of more consideration than those close to us. It’s a perspective bias–if you actually try to treat everyone equally, it will look like you are preferring those farther off to those closer to you. But it’s true that many (not all) progressives do have an ethic that is fundamentally a “view from nowhere,” whether or not they agree with all the particulars of Singer’s version. And I agree with Vance and Neuhaus that this kind of ethic is mistaken. It leads to conclusions (such as that I should spend no more money on my own parents or children than on anyone else) that are either impossible or monstrous or both.

But I also believe that Vance is perverting the concept of the “order of charity” in order to justify not treating “outsiders” with justice, let alone charity. In a second blog post, I’ll unpack a Thomist response to Vance. I’ll explain why Vance’s interpretation of the “order of charity” is mistaken and indeed profoundly evil.