I affirm the resolution
I value morality as ought implies a moral obligation
Moral reasoning can be understood as either explanatory or explicatory.
SORAN READER explains the distinction
A second distinction emerges when we ask what is the point of describing ethics as natural in either sense? Some
take it that showing how ethics is natural enables us to explain and even justify it. We can call these
'explanatory' approaches. Others take it that showing how ethics is natural simply explicates it? no
external explanation, justification or 'grounding' is required; and seeking one involves a
misunderstanding. We can call these 'explicatory' approaches.5
However any attempt at ethical reasoning will require ethics to be explicatory. Reader 2 explains
What is the alternative? To understand ethics in its own terms. This deprives us of explanatory naturalism .
We can't without error
expect to understand ethics in any terms but ethical. This has seemed to many philosophers to be unduly
The
problem of displaying the rationality of ethics in a com pelling way is real. But it is also general. It is the
same as the problem of displaying the rationality of all the other things we do: playing games,
conducting scientific enquiry, writing philosophy papers. We might be able to make connections between
activities using an analogy with another game, say, to illuminate the game of chess for someone. But all we will ever be able to lay
our hands on in the activity of explaining, is more of the same: parts of our life. The idea of our being able to
use 'the world as it is in itself to explain any of our activities is practically contradictory. And the idea
that rationality supernature, rather than first nature can be used to explain ethics in this way, involves a similar
error. The way we think acquire beliefs, deliberate, justify ourselves is also part of our life. It is as 'fundamental' in
that life as ethics is, but no more so, no more knowable 'in itself , as Aristotle, in the grip of a similar error to our own, would
have put it, than it is 'to us', here and now, living as we live. So explanatory accounts of ethics,
whether they invoke first-nature or super natural reason, are mistaken. Explicatory naturalism is as far as we
can go. And as far as we need to go.
restrictive, and to threaten relativism.8 But in fact it does not lead to these difficulties ? or, more accurately, it doesn't exac erbate them.
I will contend that virtue ethics alone supplies us with the qualities to achieve an explicatory
system of ethics.
First Barnard Mayo explains the core issues between virtue ethics and other theories.
If we wish to enquire about Aristotle’s moral views, it is no use looking for a set of
principles. Of course we can find some principles to which he must have subscribed—for instance, that one ought not to commit adultery.
But what we find much more prominently is a set of character-traits, a list of certain types of
person—the courageous man, the niggardly man, the boaster, the lavish spender, and so
on. The basic moral question, for Aristotle, is not, What shall I do? But, what shall I be?
The question of what we shall be however alone can be a truly explicatory system of ethics.
First virtue ethics alone provides an ideal to which we can attempt to appeal to. This is necessary
to be able to identify and say this is how we ought to act.
Mayo 2 explains
Imitation can be amore or less successful. And this suggests another defect of the ethics
of principles. It has no room for
ideals, except the ideal of a perfect set of principles (which, as a matter of fact, is intelligible only in
terms of an ideal character or way of life), and the ideal of perfect conscientiousness (which is itself a character-trait).
This results, of course, from the “black-or-white” nature of moral verdicts based on rules. There are no
degrees by which we approach or recede from the attainment of a certain quality or virtue; if there were not,
the word “ideal” would have no meaning. Heroes and saints are not people whom we try to be just like,
since we know that it’s impossible. It is precisely because it is impossible for ordinary human beings to
achieve the same quality as the saints, and in the same degree, that we do set them apart from the rest of humanity.
It is enough if we try to be a little like them.
This basis for a moral ideal is key to creating a system of ethics non explanatory but explicatory
Reader 3 explains
Virtue is a free disposition to act in certain ways under certain conditions. Virtue ethics claims that
what is to count as a good action or what is a good outcome is conceptually dependent on claims about
the virtue of an agent. How is this dependence supposed to work? Where those after an explanatory account seek a conceptual
connection with something like a normative 'in itself, virtue ethicists instead explore the concrete dependence of
moral activity on the possibility of learning from already virtuous agents. They hold that the key to moral
rationality is found in moral education. Ethics begins with the apprentice moral agent: the
child, or the foreigner, or the damaged person in rehabilitation are all examples. These beginner-agents learn from
the experienced, wise moral agent by copying, by mimicking in their actions the actions of the virtuous agent.
This mimicking, or 'going on in the same way', does not presuppose that the learner agent acquires any
representations of how the world is (i.e., beliefs), nor that they acquire the ability to report on or
provide justifications for what they do. Virtue is learned by cottoning on to virtuous ways of doing things, going
on to do the same, then going on to do the same in new ways, once they have mastered the skill. 16 The way virtue and character is supposed to
be basic here is simply displayed in the analogy: there is and can be nothing 'behind' the expertise of the
phronimos which can explain or jus tify it (any more than there is anything 'behind' the expertise of the doctor or the
navigator, to use Aristotle's examples at NE 1104b7-l 1). Of course, plenty more can be said about it, and shortcuts can be found to aid the learn
ing of those who have already mastered other skills (so competent rule-fol lowers can learn from being given rules, just as competent
grammarians can learn a new language from the grammar). But we should not confuse what it is possible to say about the skill of being moral,
with what constitutes it.
Second Virtue ethics alone supplies a coherent approach explicatory approach to ethics. Mayo 3
explains
the fundamental moral question is just “what ought I to do?” And according to the philosophy of
moral principles, the answer (which must be an imperative “Do this”) must be derived from a conjunction of
premises consisting (in the simplest case) firstly of a rule, or universal imperative, enjoining (or forbidding) all actions of a certain type in
situations of a certain type, and , secondly, a statement to the effect that this is a situation of that type, falling under the rule . IN practice the
No doubt
emphasis may be on simply only one of these premises, the other being assumed or taken for granted: one may answer the question “what ought I
[I]f I am in
doubt whether to tell the truth about his condition to a dying man, my doubt may be resolved by
showing that the case comes under a rule about the avoidance of unnecessary suffering, which I am
assumed to accept. But if the case is without precedent in my moral career, my problem may be a soluble
only by adopting a new principle about what I am to do now and the future about cases of this kind. This second possibility
offer a connection with moral ideas. Suppose my perplexity is not merely an unprecedented situation
which I could cope with by adopting a new rule. Suppose the new rule is thoroughly inconsistent with my existing
moral code. This may happen, for instance, if the moral code is one to which I only pay lip-service, if…
its authority is not yet internalized, or if its final rejection awaits a moral crisis such as we are assuming to occur. What
I now need is not a rule for deciding how to act in this situation and other of its kind. I need a whole set of rules. A
complete morality, new principle to live by. Now, according to the philosophy of moral character, there is another way of
answering the fundamental question “what ought I to do?” instead of quoting a rule, we quote a quality of
character, a virtue: we say “be brave,” or “be patient” or “Be lenient.” We may even say “be a man”: if I am in doubt, say,
to do?” either by quoting a rule which I am to adopt, or by showing that my case is legislated for by a rule which I do adopt…
whether to take are risk, and someone says “Be a man,” meaning a morally sound man, in this case a man of sufficient courage. (compare the
very different ideal invoked in “be a gentleman.” I shall not discuss whether this is a Moral ideal.) Here, too, we have the extreme cases, where a
man’s moral perplexity extends not merely to a particular situations but to his whole way of living. And now
the question “what
ought I to do?” turns into the question “What ought I to be?”—as, indeed, it was treated in the first place.
(“be brave.”) It is answered, not by quoting a rule or a set of rules, but by describing a quality of character of a
type of person. And here the ethics of character gains a practical simplicity which offsets the greater logical
simplicity of the ethics of principles. We do not have to give a list of characteristics or virtues, as we might list a set of
principles we can give a unity to our answer. Of course we can in theory give a unity to our principles: this is implied by speaking of a set
of principles. But if such a set is to be a system and not merely aggregate, the unity we are looking is a logical one, namely the possibility that
some principles are deductible from others, and the ultimately from one. But the attempt to construct a deductive moral system is notoriously
difficult, and in any case ill-founded. Why should we expect that all rules of conduct should be ultimately reducible to a few?
we can readily give a unity to our answer, though not a logical unity. It is the
unity of character. A person’s character is not merely a list of dispositions; it has the organic
unity of something that is more than the sum of its parts. And we can say, in answer to our morally
perplexed questioner, not only “be this” and “be that,” but also “be like so and so”—where so-and-so is
either an ideal type of character, or else an actual person taken as representative of the ideal, as exemplar. Examples of the first are
Plato’s “just man” in the Republic; Aristotle’s man of practical wisdom, in the Nicomachean Ethics; Augustine’s citizen
of the City of God; the good community; the America way of life (which is a collective expression for a
type of character). Examples of the second kind, the exemplar, are Socrates, Christ, Buddha, St. Francis, the heroes of epic
writers and of novelists. Indeed the idea of the Hero, as well as the idea of the Saint, are very much
the expression of this attitude to morality. Heroes and saints are not merely people who did
things. They are people whom we are expected, and expect ourselves, to imitate. And imitating
But when we are asked “what shall I be?”
them means not merely doing what they did; it means bring like them. Their status is not in the least like that of legislators whose laws we
admire; for the character of the legislator is irrelevant to our judgment about his legislation. The heroes an saints did not merely give us principles
to live by (though some of the did that as well): they gave us examples to follow.
Thus ethics of principles can never provide an expletory of how to act in situations without
precedence except by already attaching a principle of explanatory properties to your ethical
theories while the ethics of virtue avoids this problem.
Thus the standard is bringing out individual virtuous character.
I contend that only by treating juvenile as adults can we return to a world where we provide
juveniles the status necessary to ensure developed moral agency
Sub point a is the uniqueness.
Children have lost their picture of innocence. Marie Winn1 explains
In their everyday demeanor, the language they use, the things they know and above all in their relations with the adult world, children have
changed. This was confirmed in almost every one of hundreds of interviews with fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh graders . The ease and aplomb
these children demonstrated in their talks with an interviewer were quite as indicative of change as anything they actually said, although some of
their testimony about marijuana, sex and pornographic movies on cable television would have deeply shocked parents a decade or two ago. The
reticence and shyness once associated with childhood have clearly gone the way of curtsies and pinafores. As a Denver fourth-grade teacher
reports, ''Kids are a lot freer now. Even in the 10 years I've been at this school, there's been a change. The other day, a very innocent-looking little
boy came up to me and casually asked me whether a certain sexual act was 'for real.' He used a crude word for it. I asked him to whisper in my
ear what he thought the word meant. Well, he knew more details than I myself knew until about five years ago.'' The greatest change of all,
however, is not that children have lost their innocence. (An article on that subject, ''What Became of Childhood Innocence?'' by Marie Winn,
appeared in this magazine Jan. 25, 1981.) It is a change in our conception of childhood itself .
We have seen, in an amazingly short span
a transformation of society's most fundamental attitudes toward children. Where parents once
felt obliged to shelter their children from life's vicissitudes, today, great numbers of them have come to
operate according to a new belief: that children must be exposed early to adult experience in
order to survive in an increasingly uncontrollable world. The Age of Protection has ended. An Age of Preparation has set in.
And children have suffered a loss. As they are integrated at a young age into the adult world, in every way their
lives have become more difficult, more confusing - in short, more like adult lives. We are
beginning to hear a bitter reaction from that first generation of children to grow up in the new era - today's young adults. In
a recent issue of a newsmagazine, a college student writes: ''We are the kids who were 'so adult.' ... Our parents
expected us to understand their problems and frustrations ... . What we missed was the
chance to be childish, immature and unafraid to admit we didn't have it all together.''
of time,
This is caused by the social discord created when juveniles commit violent felonies. Titus
explains
commentators argue that children are increasingly “without childhood” (Winn, 1983) and
suggest the passing of childhood’s innocence (Elkind, 1981; Postman, 1982; Suransky, 1982). Although juveniles are
primarily victims, not perpetrators of vio- lence (Snyder & Sickmund, 1999), intense media scrutiny has skewed the
public perception of delinquency and youth violence (Acland, 1995; Baer & Chambliss, 1997; Glassner, 1999;
Modern
Parker, Miller, Donegan, & Gilliam, 2001; Schissel, 1997; Shepherd, 1998). Despite a proliferation of official statistical reports showing that
1
THE LOSS OF CHILDHOOD [Author of the book. Children without Childhood. Bronx H.S. of Science, Radcliffe College, Columbia U] . May
8, 1983. New York Times Magazine. Online. http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/08/magazine/the-loss-of-childhood.html.
juvenile crime is at its lowest level in 25 years (Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics, 2003),
the vast majority of
the public believes that violent juvenile crime is on the rise (Dorfman & Schiraldi, 2001; Guzman, Lippman,
Moore, & O’Hare, 2003). Researchers have linked such misperceptions to the news media’s distorted coverage of youth and its skewed reports on
juvenile justice policy debates (Alequin, Florence, Medoza, Ware, & Vazquez, 2001; Dorfman & Schiraldi, 2001; Males, 1999; O’Hare, 2003;
Parker et al., 2001; Soler, 2001; We Interrupt This Message, 2001). By
the early 1990s, there was a fermenting body
of opinion that juvenile justice (and penal liberalism) had gone too far (Soler, 2001). A “moral panic”
(Cohen, 1972, pp. 1-15) was constructed through a public “discourse of fear” (Altheide, 1997, p. 648) that portrayed atypical
and extraordinary cases as expressions of the dangerous lawlessness of children. Although only a small number of crimes
committed by juveniles are classified as violent (Snyder, 2003, p. 4), such crimes tend to emerge
sensationalized. The media described a “mounting terror of the anarchy and uncontrollability of unfettered youth” (Pilkington, 1994, ¶
6), and experts predicted that because these young offenders were “distinctively malevolent”
(Zimring, 1998, p. 7), we are “facing a potential bloodbath of teenage violence in the years ahead” (Ellis, 1996,
p. 97). Conceptions of youth became equated with notions of criminality, and a dangerous and threatening
character was taken to be their inherent ano- mie (Males, 1999). Young people were more than just
dangerous, they were “full of mur- derous rage” and “brutality” (Philips, 1993, ¶ 7, 8) and were described as “turning feral”
(Jeffs & Smith, 1996, p. 1). The panic that ensued from this “dramatization of evil” (Tannenbaum, 1938, p. 19) was a moral one, in that there was
The public
responses of fear, hostility, and condemnation became heightened when the perpetrating “folk devils”
(Cohen, 1972) were identified as young, morally weak, and dabbling in evil. Rhetorical framing of
juvenile offenders as “super-predators” (DiIulio, 1995, p. 23) characterized their actions as
intentional, sinister, and lacking (childish) innocence, and attributed their crimes to primal dark forces intrinsic to
a perceived threat to values held sacred by society, a destabilizing “threat to the social order itself” (Thompson, 1998, p. 8).
them. “[T]he Child has never been seen as such a menacing enemy as today. Never before have children been so saturated with all the power of
pro- jected monstrousness to excite repulsion—and even terror” (Warner, 1994, p. 56). When
confronted with (innocent)
children and (evil) horrific crimes defying conven- tional categorization, society repositions
the accused as an outsider, an “Other,” “distanced, yet inseparable, from the social order”
(Acland, 1995, p. 19). In the essentializing news media reports of child murderers, a particularly demonic image of
childhood was constructed. Statistically, child murderers are rare, with juveniles involved in 10% of murder arrests (Snyder,
2003, p. 1), and of those juveniles arrested for murder, only 12% are under age 15 (Snyder, 2003, p. 3). Such rarity itself declares the aberrant
status of a child mur- derer, and the effect is magnified through their distorted presence in the media discourse (Kunkel, 1994) and reports of an
“unprecedented epidemic” of killer children (Cook & Laub, 1998, p. 27). The rhetorical framing of juveniles as evil delineates them as distinctly
sacrificable, through a conversion of their status as “Other.” This creation of the “Other” is integral to a notion of “little monsters” (Warner,
1994, p. 43) and the “politics of spectacle” (Acland, 1995, p. 20) within which their monstrousness emerges. Media dwell on the bru- tality
of the crimes, and the public views the child’s presumed monstrosity to be confirmed by the character and rarity of the very offences they are
accused of having committed. The increasing public disquiet over violent children contributed to the institutionalization in law and policy of
offending children’s symbolic expurgation as folk devils. Aspects of this process were displayed when a murder in the United Kingdom of a 2year-old boy by two 10-year-old boys unleashed a moral outrage. Young (1996) has shown how the media set the concept of good, innocent
childhood against the aberration of the kill- ing. The victim, James Bulger, represented the quintessential child, exemplifying child- hood ideals
(e.g., small, trusting, affectionate, vulnerable), an allegory for the innocence of childhood. Juxtaposed, his killers personified the oppositional
categories of evil and dan- gerousness. Hay (1995) explains that we were “confronted by the implications of the real- ization that those formerly
confirmed a belief that
“children may look like angels but still be devils underneath” (Warner, 1994, p. 57). Having betrayed an
conceived of as innocent victims might pose a profound threat in and of themselves” (p. 201). They
abstract myth about proper childlikeness, the murderers’ trial and media coverage “revealed a brutal absence of pity for them as children”
Headlines announced the “death of inno- cence” (Bedell, 1993, p. 23), and
reporters accused the boys of having “killed not just a child but the idea of childhood”
(Warner, 1994, p. 45).
(Morrison, 1997, ¶ 1). The conjoined descriptions of the “embryo-angel” and “infant fiend” that expressed parents’ feelings about their children
in the 17th century (Greven, 1977, p. 28) are reflected in our contemporary dual imagery of the angel-monster child. According to the “myth of
pure evil,” people identify with the good of innocent victims against the evil of perpetrating others (Baumeister, 1996, p. 60). Baumeister (1996)
argues that this way of constructing evil is persuasive because it provides us with some certainty about our own goodness, as well as a scapegoat
Such a good-evil dualism allows groups to vent their
moral panic by providing the ability to categorize, judge, and express the revulsion that
proves their social power to control the threat.
on which to blame perceived disruptions in the social fabric.
B is the link
Only by treating juveniles as adults are we able to undue this construction of children as losing
their innocence Because Treating children like adults in the criminal justice system is a way of
saying that these children are inconsistent with our normal conception of childhood, serving to
actually reinforce the conception of childhood innocence that we hold. Allison James and Chris
Jenks2 write,
Within these quotations two kinds of 'Otherness' can be identified: (a) the child possessed of an inherently evil nature; and (b)
the
composite creature, the 'adult-child'. Both are highly transgressive images, at once wilful, bizarre and demonic. In that
these images[is an] instance acute fracture from the commonplace idea of 'the child' as it is
understood within western society, they both constitute a powerful, and volatile, ambiguity in public accounts of childhood.
Anthropological work on social classication enables us to understand such a response as one emitting from a people whose cosmologies are under
the identification of anomalies, whether in the form of people,
plants or animals, is integral to the establishment of social order. Anomalies are, in essence, the byproducts of systems of ordering. Through their remarked differences, ironically, they work to firm up
the boundaries which give form and substance to the conceptual categories from which
they are excluded. In this sense, by refusing children who commit acts of violence
acceptance within the category of child, the public was reaffirming to itself the essence of
what children are. That is, it was a way to restore the primary image of the innate goodness
of children through relegating some would-be children (those who commit acts of violence)
to another category essentialized through images of evil or pathology.
threat. As Mary Douglas (1970) has shown,
Secondly the act of expelling the violent juveniles and separating them from others by making
them adults is key to returning conceptions of childhood to a status quo of innocence.
Titus further explains
The operation of exclusivity allowed for Bulger’s killers to be cast out from child- hood. The
killers’ “Otherness” was their media-ascribed nonhumanness; they were referred to as animals, beasts,
freaks of nature, savages, and monsters. There was a strong display of associating the killers with Christian ideas of evil. They were “from hell,”
“products of the devil,” who had the “Satan bug inside them” and the “Mark of the Beast” on them; indeed, “Demons had invaded the innocents”
(Haydon & Scraton, 2000, p. 425). The judge de- clared that the boys were “cunning and wicked” and had perpetrated “an act of unparalleled evil
and barbarity” (Pilkington, 1993, ¶ 3).
Their anomaly served not only to allow for their segregation from other
Allison James and Chris Jenks, “Public Perceptions of Childhood Criminality,” The British Journal of Sociology
Vol. 47, No. 2 (Jun., 1996), pp. 315-331, http://www.jstor.org/stable/591729
2
children, but also for a viewing public to demand to “kill them,” and “hang them” (Pilkington, 1993, ¶ 16). The child who
kills becomes devalued and made a “monstrous double” (Girard, 1972/ 1977, p. 272) for the innocents they imitate. The
sacrificial victim who is significantly different ensures that the public is less likely to
sympathetically identify with that “monster” (Girard, 1972/1977, p. 270). Subsequent institutional
responses sought to reaffirm a tradi- tional construct of childhood’s innocence whereby
(good) children are protected and evil youth who are disruptive of the social order are
sacrificed for the beneficial effects of their surrogacy. By virtue of their dehumanization and monstrousness, child
criminals then can be exposed to the violence of law without fear of reprisal because their sacrifice will not entail any act of vengeance.
C is the impact
Retaining the juveniles image of innocence generally is key to reforming and developing their
character. Its important to associate children with innocence. Society when it expects children to
not be children and instead to lose their innocence and gain maturity ends up causing great harm
to children. Marie Winn3 explains.
''innocence, once considered the right of children, may be seen as
simply the absence of weight and burden. Maturity, meanwhile, may be defined as the capacity to carry a burden successfully.
But if you are given the heavy burden of knowledge before you have the capacity to deal
with it -and knowledge is burdensome, because it requires mental and psychological work to deal with it - the results may be
those distressing signs parents and teachers are observing among children today: confusion, fear, feelings of
incompetence. Children grow up not really able to deal with difficulties, and they learn that
the best way to deal with problems is to escape, through drugs or drink or whatever.'' Because of
the precocious knowledge, independence, assertivenesss and ''adultness'' that characterize so many
children today - especially, it appears, those who have had to ''grow up faster'' because their parents have divorced or are both absorbed
in their careers, it is easy to get the impression that children are also more mature these days.
Moreover, Annie Hermann continues,
Indeed, the child growing up under more protective, old-fashioned circumstances may seem more ''bratty,'' more ''spoiled,'' more demanding than
But while a certain level of sophistication is inevitably achieved
true
maturity, defined by an ability to share, to sacrifice, to be generous, to love unselfishly, and to nurture and
care for children of his own, may prove elusive, and in its place, attention-seeking and narcissism become the characteristics that
define his adult life. While those children whose childhoods are enriched by a bounty of adult
experiences end up the poorer for it, those ''poor'' protected children have received a treasure
in disguise - one, however, that will reveal itself only when they have grown up.
the hardy, self-sufficient child of absent parents.
when a child is forced to take care of himself much of the time, it is not the same thing as maturity. As the child grows older,
Second, retaining the concept of the innocent child allows adults to have the ability to understand
the virtue to which they must aspire Allison James and Chris Jenks4 write,
to abandon a shared category of the child is to confront a daunting paradox. If as adults
we do just that, what happens to the concept of 'childhood' through which we, as adults, see
ourselves and our society's past and future? If, as we have argued here, the concept of'childhood' serves to
But
3
THE LOSS OF CHILDHOOD [Author of the book. Children without Childhood. Bronx H.S. of Science, Radcliffe College, Columbia U] . May
8, 1983. New York Times Magazine. Online. http://www.nytimes.com/1983/05/08/magazine/the-loss-of-childhood.html.
Allison James and Chris Jenks, “Public Perceptions of Childhood Criminality,” The British Journal of Sociology
Vol. 47, No. 2 (Jun., 1996), pp. 315-331, http://www.jstor.org/stable/591729
4
articulate not just the experience and status of the young within modern society but also the projections, aspirations,
longings and altruism contained within the adult experience then to abandon such a
conception is to erase our final point of stability and attachment to the social bond. In an
historical era during which issues of identity and integration (Giddens 1991) are, perhaps, both more
unstable and more fragile than at any previous time, such a loss would impact upon the
everyday experience of societal members with disorienting consequences. Only by interrogating the
possessive adhesion of adults to the concept of childhood in the context of postmodernity can we begin to understand the fear behind those
distorted masks of hatred and retribution that disfugured the faces of the crowd outside of the courthouse in Liverpool during 1993 where two
sad little boys were being charged with the murder of a third.
Contention 2. Rehabilitation does not link to the framework.
There are two different forms which alter how people act. The medical and the moral
only ones deals with the person real character the other deals merely with states of affairs. C.S.
Lewis5 explains the distinction.
morality
claims to be a technique for putting the human machine right, I think you would like to know how
it is related to another technique which seems to make a similar claim-namely, psychoanalysis. Now you want
Before I come down to details there are two more general points I should like to make. First of all, since Christian
to distinguish very clearly between two things: between the actual medical theories and technique of the psychoanalysts, and the general
philosophical view of the world which Freud and some others have gone on to add to this. The second thing-the philosophy of Freud-is in direct
contradiction to Christianity: and also in direct contradiction to the other great psychologist, Jung. And furthermore, when Freud is talking about
how to cure neurotics he is speaking as a specialist on his own subject, but when he goes on to talk general philosophy he is speaking as an
amateur. It is therefore quite sensible to attend to him with respect in the one case and not in the other-and that is what I do. I am all the readier to
do it because I have found that when he is talking off his own subject and on a subject I do know something about (namely, languages) he is very
ignorant. But psychoanalysis itself, apart from all the philosophical additions that Freud and others have made to it, is not in the least
contradictory to Christianity. Its technique overlaps with Christian morality at some points and it would not be a bad thing if every parson knew
When a man
makes a moral choice two things are involved. One is the act of choosing. The other is the
various feelings, impulses and so on which his psychological outfit presents him with, and
which are the raw material of his choice. Now this raw material may be of two kinds. Either it
may be what we would call normal: it may consist of the sort of feelings that are common to all men. Or else it may
consist of quite unnatural feelings due to things that have gone wrong in his subconscious. Thus fear of
something about it: but it does not run the same course all the way, for the two techniques are doing rather different things.
things that are really dangerous would be an example of the first kind: an irrational fear of cats or spiders would be an example of the second
Now what
psychoanalysis undertakes to do is to remove the abnormal feelings, that is, to give the man
better raw material for his acts of choice: morality is concerned with the acts of choice
themselves. Put it this way. Imagine three men who go to war. One has the ordinary natural fear
of danger that any man has and he subdues it by moral effort and becomes a brave man. Let us suppose
that the other two have, as a result of things in their sub-consciousness, exaggerated,
irrational fears, which no amount of moral effort can do anything about. Now suppose that a
psychoanalyst comes along and cures these two: that is, he puts them both back in the
kind. The desire of a man for a woman would be of the first kind: the perverted desire of a man for a man would be of the second.
5
Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. Collins, 1942. Print.
position of the first man. Well it is just then that the psychoanalytical problem is over and the moral problem begins. Because,
now that they are cured, these two men might take quite different lines. The first might say,
"Thank goodness I've got rid of all those doodahs. Now at last I can do what I always
wanted to do-my duty to the cause of freedom." But the other might say, "Well, I'm very
glad that I now feel moderately cool under fire, but, of course, that doesn't alter the fact
that I'm still jolly well determined to look after Number One and let the other chap do the dangerous job
whenever I can. Indeed one of the good things about feeling less frightened is that I can now look after myself much more efficiently and can be
much cleverer at hiding the fact from the others." Now this difference is a purely moral one and psychoanalysis cannot do
anything about it. However much you improve the man's raw material, you have still got something else: the real, free choice of the man, on the
material presented to him, either to put his own advantage first or to put it last And this$ free choice is the only thing that morality is concerned
with. The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be
cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral
choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in
God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C .
When a man who has been
perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little
kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at
by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up
life itself for a friend.
This means rehabilitative effects don’t link to the framework. Rehabilitation is not concerned
with the moral qualities of a person but with the mental makeup. Instead we must foster active
wills by bring up and providing an environment for moral choice not rehabilitative cure. G.K.
Chesterton6 explains
But the point is that a story is exciting because it has in it so strong an element of will, of what theology calls free-will. You cannot finish a sum
how you like. But you can finish a story how you like. When somebody discovered the Differential Calculus there was only one Differential
Calculus he could discover. But when Shakespeare killed Romeo he might have married him to Juliet's old nurse if he had felt inclined. And
Christendom has excelled in the narrative romance exactly because it has insisted on the theological free-will. It is a large matter and too much to
this is the real objection to that torrent of modern talk
about treating crime as disease, about making a prison merely a hygienic environment like a hospital, of healing sin
by slow scientific methods. The fallacy of the whole thing is that evil is a matter of active
choice whereas disease is not. If you say that you are going to cure a profligate as you cure
an asthmatic, my cheap and obvious answer is, "Produce the people who want to be asthmatics as
many people want to be profligates." A man may lie still and be cured of a malady. But he
must not lie still if he wants to be cured of a sin; on the contrary, he must get up and jump
about violently. The whole point indeed is perfectly expressed in the very word which we
use for a man in hospital; "patient" is in the passive mood; "sinner" is in the active. If a
man is to be saved from influenza, he may be a patient. But if he is to be saved from
forging, he must be not a patient but an IMPATIENT. He must be personally impatient
with forgery. All moral reform must start in the active not the passive will.
one side of the road to be discussed adequately here; but
6
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton. 1908