Unlike typical introductory textbooks, Peter Kreeft’s Ethics for Beginners: 52 “Big Ideas” from 32 Great Minds (South Bend: Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, c. 2019) focuses on the “big ideas” mulled over by the greatest thinkers in human history. The 52 questions ultimately collapse into three really big ones. First, we wonder what’s the “greatest good” or “ultimate end” or “meaning in life”—what’s really, really good, the “summun bonum.” Secondly, we want to know what kind of persons we should be in order to live ethically, virtuously. As Socrates said, “a good person does not worry much about whether he lives or dies, but only about the one big thing: whether he is a good person or a bad one” (p. 8). Thirdly, how should we treat others? How do we fulfill the second of Jesus’ great commandments, loving others as we love ourselves.
Notably absent in Kreeft’s list of great ethicists are his contemporaries. He takes a dim view of current conditions, sharing Albert Camus’ evaluation of modern men—“they fornicated and read the newspapers.” But the pre-modern world nourished philosophers who sought to know what’s right and wrong within a coherent metaphysical (or theological) perspective. They looked to the wisdom of the past for direction and never imagined, as would Nietzsche (an architect of modern thought), of “creating a wholly new moral system, a ‘transvaluation of values, as he called it, in which arbitrariness, self-indulgence, egotism, cruelty, injustice, force, deliberate lying, and arrogant, sneering superiority were virtues, while wisdom, self-control, altruism, kindness, justice, reason, honesty, and humility were vices” (p. 23). Though some of the ancient and medieval thinkers were fideists, hedonists, emotivists, or deontologists, most of them were teleologists. They believed there were logical ends, reasons for right behavior. And their names are impressive—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, and Aquinas to name the finest.
We cannot avoid thinking about ethics! Day-by-day we make decisions in accord with our ethical (or moral) views. So history gives us wonderful sources to consult while doing so. Kreeft devotes insightful chapters to ethicists in Asia such as Confucius and the Buddha. He also notes the importance of Moses as the lawgiver whose 10 Commandments are one of the most important ethical compilations ever recorded. Following him, “The Jews are God’s collective prophet to the world, His reminder of what everyone innately knows is His will: Be Good!” (p. 42). The Jewish tradition was elevated by Jesus, who declared “Agape as the Heart of Ethics” (p. 44). Thus Christians believe “that (1) the meaning of life, the summum bonum, and the nature of ultimate reality is Jesus; and (2) the truly human being is Jesus; and (3) the way to live and treat others is Jesus’s way” (p. 44).
Nourishing the Judeo-Christian ethical perspective, ancient Greeks provided enduring insights. First came Socrates. “No philosopher in history has ever made more of a difference than Socrates. No one ever changed the face of philosophy more” (p. 51). He was, above all, an ethicist. And also a logician! To know the truth and follow it, to be a lover of wisdom as well as a clear thinker, defined him. His student, Plato, systematized his master’s thought, setting forth a “theory of forms” which enabled him to justify “the objective reality of moral values, as the basis for what was later called an unchanging and objectively real ‘natural moral law’ in opposition to the Sophists, who were moral relativists and subjectivists” (p. 58). His “forms” quite akin to ideas in the Mind of God. To Plato, there “are the ‘natural laws’ (logos) that all things obey. E.G., ‘If you are unjust you will be unhappy, for justice is to the soul what health is to the body’—which is the main point and conclusion of the Republic. They are not invented, they are discovered, in ‘the nature of things’” (p. 59). Plato’s student, Aristotle, both embraced and modified many of his views. Both insisted that to be happy you must be good, living virtuously. But Aristotle was more down-to-earth, working out a “common sense” ethics rooted in the “golden mean.” What’s good is usually avoiding extremes, walking a balanced life in the center of the road. “Nothing too much” typified his approach. Though other philosophers in the ancient world merit mention, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—absolutists all who advocated a “natural law” morality— “were perhaps the three greatest philosophers who ever lived” (p. 71) and merit sustained attention.
Equally important for Kreeft are three medieval saints: Augustine; Anselm; Aquinas. They generally embraced the positions of the ancient Greeks but made love for God and neighbor the basic principles of their ethics. They saw no conflict between faith and reason and looked to Revelation as well as human wisdom for guidance in life: “For God is the author of both human reason, which He designed as part of ‘the image of God’ in man, and of faith—i.e., the Faith, what He revealed. This is the mainline answer of medieval thinkers, especially Augustine and Aquinas” (p. 76). Aquinas, importantly, emphasized four kinds of law: eternal; natural; divine; human. And he explained why the seven foundational virtues (wisdom; courage; moderation; justice; faith; home; charity) blend the four “cardinal” and three “supernatural” virtues that constitute the ethical life. (Kreeft has published several books on Aquinas and it’s clear that for him the “angelic doctor” is The Philosopher.)
Moving from the medieval to the modern era, we encounter influential thinkers, architects of the Enlightenment, who no longer looked to religion for moral guidance. So there is Machiavelli (called “the Devil’s son” by some) declaring that “the end justifies the means.” Akin to Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes thought only the material world exists. Consequently: “Man is nothing but body, mind is nothing but brain, truth is nothing but picturing, and goodness is nothing but the power to get what satisfies our desires” (p. 76). Then Jean-Jacques Rousseau rejected the rationalism of the Enlightenment, making “feelings” the best guides for ethics. Though different in most respects, the English empiricist David Hume actually agreed with Rousseau in making morality “a matter of feeling and subjective desire. And [Kreeft declares] this is the single most popular ethical philosophy in modern Western culture. In fact it is probably this idea, more than any other, that most radically distinguishes our culture from all others in the history of the world” (p. 76). So, in the words of Shakespeare’s Polonius (a character in Hamlet), “There is nothing right or wrong, but thinking makes it so.”
Au contraire! Nothing could be more wrong than following your feelings, said Immanuel Kant, advocating “a non-metaphysical moral absolutism” rooted in human reason. To be good is to do your duty, acting as you think everyone ought to act. Just as we understand the world in accord with our mental “categories,” so too we know what’s right by consulting our own conscience, which gives us a “categorical imperative.” You must do what’s right, without regard for consequences. Yet John Stuart Mill and the utilitarians disagreed, saying only consequences matter! “The greatest good for the greatest number” is a utilitarian motto widely accepted by many Americans, including our many of our political and judicial leaders.
During the past two centuries other ethicists deserve mention. There were existentialists (Kierkegaard; Nietzsche; Sartre), Christian personalists (Gabriel Marcel; Dietrich von Hildebrand), and analytic philosophers (A.J. Ayer; G.E. Moore; Ludwig Wittgenstein). Finally, and rather importantly, Kreeft notes the significance of Alasdair MacIntyre, who moved from atheism to Catholicism, from Marxism to Thomism, ultimately despairing at the catastrophic triumph of barbarism in our culture. “‘We possess indeed some simulacra of morality,’” he lamented, “‘we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have very largely, if not entirely—lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality’” (p. 135). Though Kreeft hopes a sunnier view, replicating that of Aquinas, will emerge, he ends his treatise significantly agreeing with MacIntyre. Illustrating this is “the historically unprecedented radical, sudden, and nearly total change in public opinion concerning homosexuality and same sex marriage” (p. 134). We are, in many ways, living in the “The Wasteland” T.S. Eliot explored a century ago.
Ethics for Beginners is short and interesting, a book clearly designed to appeal to thoughtful folks without much background in philosophy. But it also helps those of us professors who have devoted many hours to the subject to reflect on the elementary but essential truths we need to live by.
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Half-a-century ago universities offered courses and majors that no longer exist. In many schools, for example, students can no longer major in classics or philosophy—and English majors know no Shakespeare! Revered disciplines have disappeared! One of the world’s premier ethicists, Oliver O’Donovan, fears the same will happen to his discipline. Indeed, some elite universities have “filled chairs of moral philosophy with economics” (p. 7). So he wrote a scholarly treatise entitled The Disappearance of Ethics: The 2022 St. Andrews Gifford Lectures (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, c. 2024). Launched in 1887, the Gifford Lectures, devoted to natural theology, have featured highly distinguished thinkers—including William James, Alfred North Whitehead, and Karl Barth. O’Donovan is considered one of the world’s premier Christian ethicists, so his appraisal of his discipline merits attention, though his prose requires considerable patience and acuity. (His lectures are obviously designed more for professors than beginners in philosophy!). He doesn’t think we will cease thinking about and making ethical decisions. But he fears there will no longer be an intellectual discipline devoted to the subject. He believes: “Morality unsupported by argument loses its authority; moral argument without sufficient base in reasoned reflection loses its conviction. Ethics defends the reflection that makes moral reasoning fruitful and moral practice credible. A society without ethics is exposed by the poverty of its moral vocabulary and the rigidity of its moral arguments to the destructive forces of conflict and loss of tradition” (p. 8).
O’Donovan endeavors to explain what’s happened and then propose finding a solution in distinctively Christian Ethics. To discover what’s Good and to devise ways to implement it have ever been ethicists’ calling: “Practical reason succeeds in its task when it grasps some real good, some possibility of fulfillment and realization implicit in the real world, that can be made explicit” (p. 18). Such reason functions well when rooted in a “moral realism” that finds both creation and human conscience attuned to a deep fountain of ethical principles. Moral realism, rightly framed, can inform the modern mind, which for various reasons (think Hume, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche) tends to reduce morality to personal preferences. To find a better way leads us back to “the mainstream of Catholic Christianity, fed by the Gospels and Christians antiquity,” best summed up by “the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth about the ‘heart,’ the moral subject from which all explicit performances, good or evil, sprang” (p.68).
Thus, as St Paul wrote, “Christ is the end of the law” (Rom 10:4). “Ethics must point to Christ and cry, ‘Ecco homo!’” (p. 135). Following Him, listening to His Spirit, enables Christians to live rightly. We’re to cooperate with Him, doing His work in our world. We’re not God and He ultimately rules, but we are privileged to give ourselves to Him and His Kingdom. “So let us speak . . . of a cooperative agency of God and man in shaping history. The Creator acts and the creature acts, though with unequal initiative; they are aligned in pursuit of purposes that are common to both” (p. 147). Thus theology provides the foundation for ethics. To prevent the disappearance of ethics in the academy requires the revival of Christianity in society.
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Two evangelical philosophers, David A. Horner and J.P. Moreland, professors at BIOLA University, have co-authored Metaethics: A Short Companion (Brentwood, TN: B&H Academic, c. 2024). Horner is no doubt the primary author, while the more renowned Moreland joined him in finalizing the project, writing a text for teachers and well-grounded college students. “Ethics as discipleship is a key theme throughout Scripture,” say Ben Mitchell and Jason Thacker in the book’s preface, “and one the church must elevate as we seek God’s face in then academy, in our churches, and especially in our personal lives as transformed creatures made in the very image of God” (p. 18). “Metaethics” (a term used only by academic philosophers) refers to basic questions such as: “Is morality something grounded in the nature of things, or is it a human construction? Are moral values objective, or are they relative to different individuals or cultures? Does morality depend on God, and if so, how?” Big questions! Questions deserving serious thought! The authors identify four crucial metaethical questions: “(1) questions about what exists (moral metaphysics), (2) questions about language (moral semantics), (3) questions about mental states (moral psychology), and (4) questions about knowledge and justification (moral epistemology).”
The book begins by citing an essay by Joel Marks, a professor who taught moral philosophy for many years only to conclude there’s actually “no morality!” He was teaching a subject which had no content! Indeed, if nothing’s right or wrong what’s to teach? Technically his position is called Nihilism. Marks “describes his loss of faith in morality as an outgrowth of his atheism: ‘I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander.’” As Dostoevsky’s character Ivan, in Brothers Karamazov famously said: “If God does not exist, anything is permissible.” Professor Marks, it seems, “is far from alone among philosophers in holding these sorts of metaethical views, though he’s more explicit than many in identifying their worldview connections.”
To know what’s right and wrong one must find something firm and Very Real beyond personal preferences or societal perspectives. So throughout history various forms of philosophical realism—assuming there are realities apart from our minds that we can know—have thrived. It’s a common sense view that millions of folks simply assume. To G.K. Chesterton, “the consensus of ideas and values and practices that prevails over generations and centuries reflects a collective vote of confidence—a ‘democracy of the dead’—that cries out to be acknowledged.” Common Sense Realists such as Aristotle tell “‘us to follow the appearances. It directs us to think that things really are as they seem, that appearances match reality—until we have excellent reason for doubt.’” Given this tradition, “Metaethicists of all stripes appeal to the phenomenology of moral experience: the way we experience morality, as reflected in our moral intuitions, concepts, language, and behavior—our common moral experience.”
A subset of philosophical realism—moral realism—claims “that some things are right and some things are wrong (or good or bad), regardless of people’s beliefs, preferences, or attitudes regarding them.” There is a solid link between what one thinks and what IS. In the physical world there’s the second law of thermodynamics that explains why things decay. There are also, in the metaphysical world, laws of morality that we can understand and should heed. These moral truths are objective, rooted in a Reality apart from us. Thus we know it’s wrong to torture children and right to be kind. Doing so we cannot but think about “the nature, status grounding, underlying presuppositions, and philosophical commitments of morality itself.” We cannot help searching for metaethical truths linked to enduring realities. “In more technical terms, moral realists understand moral judgments to be propositions or truth-claims, statements that are ‘truth-apt’( capable being true or false), whose actual truth or falsity depends. On their correspondence to reality, which, in turn, is an objective matter, no more dependent on human opinion, preference, or endorsement than the law of gravity.”
Despite its distinguished pedigree, moral realism has been discarded by many ethicists. From the 18th century onward various forms of subjective morality have flourished. David Hume, a naturalistic thinker who believed only empirical details could be known, concluded we have moral sentiments that are nothing more than that—sentiments that shift with the times and situations. For him, “morality is about the feelings and sentiments one experiences, and these are entirely nonrational, noncognitive, and contingent matters.” As he declared: “Reason is, and ought only be be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” Follow your feelings, wherever they lead you! Hume most probably was a full-fledged atheist, though he avoided the label. But his ethical views are generally shared by thinkers who think the material world is all there is. Thus A.J. Ayer, a leader of the logical positivist school in the first half of the 20th century, set forth an “emotivist” explanation for ethical standards. If you feel murder is wrong it is, but if think it’s just OK then it is!
Another naturalistic alternative to moral realism is “moral constructivism.” Pivotal thinkers forging modernity are Francis Bacon (and his intellectual heir Karl Marx) who wanted to reshape the world rather than understand it. Even Immanuel Kant, one of the most influential modern philosophers, was a constructivist, Horner thinks, since he declared that ethical principles are discerned within our own minds rather than in any objective world beyond them. To constructivists, what we think in our minds can take form in the world, transforming it for our own ends. They are relativists inasmuch as there are no eternally valid ethical truths. “What all forms of constructivism share,” Horner and Moreland say, “is the conviction that moral status is conferred by us as human subjects—by our psychological or volitional activity of falling, prescribing, endorsing and the like.” Years ago I read Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and subsequently re-read it, finding it quite informative and confirmed by own experience. He began the book thusly: “There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative. If this belief is put to the test, one can count on the student’s reaction: they will be uncomprehending. That anyone should regard the proposition as not self-evident astonishes the, as though he were calling into question 2 + 2 = 4. These are things you don’t think about.” There are certainly things that are right and wrong—but they vary with the situation. Slavery can be fine in one era but wrong in another. Child sacrifice may—or not be—right. It all depends! Whatever society approves is right.
Recurrently, throughout Metaethics, Horner and Moreland stress the difference between naturalism and supernaturalism. “Naturalism is the chief worldview rival to Christianity and other forms of theism today and is the chief motivation behind antirealist metaethical theories.” For the past century in America, philosophical naturalism has ruled, especially when thinkers take “evolution through natural selection” as their guide. To illustrate, William Provine, a professsor of biological sciences at Cornell University, said: “There are no gods, no purposes, no goal-directed forces of any kind. There is no life after death. When I die, I’m absolutely certain that I aim going to be dead. That’s the end for me. There is no ultimate foundation for ethics, no ultimate meaning to life, and no free will for humans, either.” In short: everything can be reduced to atoms-in-motion flowing through space, making the world as it is. Though not all ethical naturalists are as straightforward as Provine, none of them find any transcendent, non-material source for ethical norms. “As Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga puts it, ‘[Naturalism’s] Achilles’ Heel (in addition to its deplorable falsehood) is that it has no room, for normatively. There is no room, within naturalism, for right or wrong or good or bad.’”
After finding ethical naturalism inadequate, the authors take us back to moral realism as the only sound metaethical view. There are good reasons for living a moral life, reasons embedded in the very fabric of Reality. Living rightly—following the rules set forth by God and His Law—is good for us as persons and for our society as well. God is Good and doing His will, following the truths revealed in creation and scripture, is good for us.