The Paradox of Charity

We might call the following three statements "the Paradox of Charity":

1. In charity, we love our neighbor primarily because of our neighbor’s relation to God.

2. In the best kind of love, we love our neighbor primarily because of our neighbor’s intrinsic properties.

3. Charity is the best kind of love.

I think this paradox discloses something very deep.

Note that the above three statements do not by themselves constitute a strictly logical contradiction. To get a strictly logical contradiction we need a premise like:

4. No intrinsic property of our neighbor is a relation to God.

Now, let’s think (2) through. I think our best reason for accepting (2) is not abstract considerations of intrinsicness, but particular cases of properties. In the best kind of love, perhaps, we love our neighbor because our neighbor is a human being, is a finite person, has a potential for human flourishing, etc. We may think that these features are intrinsic to our neighbor, but we directly see them as apt reasons for the best kind of love, without depending on their intrinsicness.

But suppose ontological investigation of such paradigm properties for which one loves one’s neighbor with the best kind of love showed that these properties are actually relational rather than intrinsic. Would that make us doubt that these properties are a fit reason for the best kind of love? Not at all! Rather, if we were to learn that, we would simply deny (2). (And notice that plenty of continentally-inclined philosophers do think that personhood is relational.)

And that is my solution. I think (1), (3) and (4) are true. I also think that the best kind of neighbor love is motivated by reasons such as that our neighbor is a human being, or a person, or has a potential for human flourishing. I conclude from (1), (3) and (4) that these properties are relations to God.

But how could these be relations to God? Well, all the reality in a finite being is a participation in God. Thus, being human, being a finite person and having a potential for human flourishing are all ways of participating in God, and hence are relations to God. Indeed, I think:

5. Every property of every creature is a relation to God.

It follows that no creature has any intrinsic property. The closest we come to having intrinsic properties are what one might call “almost intrinsic properties”—properties that are relational to God alone.

We can now come back to the original argument. Once we have seen that all creaturely properties are participations in God, we have no reason to affirm (2). But we can still affirm, if we like:

6. In the best kind of love, we love our neighbor primarily because of our neighbor’s almost intrinsic properties, i.e., our neighbor’s relations only to God.

And there is no tension with (1) any more.

Disjunctive victimization?

Alice, Bob and Carl are suffering from a deadly disease. Alice possesses one dose of a medication necessary and sufficient to cure the disease. She has four relevant options. First there are:

1. Use the medication on herself.
2. Use the medication on Bob.
3. Use the medication on Carl.

Option 1 is permissible. Options 2 and 3 are supererogatory. But what Alice actually does is:

4. Destroy the medication.

Alice clearly did something wicked by failing to use the medication to save a life. But how do we describe this wicked deed?

It seems that Alice’s action was a fatal negligence of a duty towards herself, and a fatal negligence of a duty towards Bob and a fatal negligence of a duty towards Carl. But that makes it sound like three counts of fatal negligence, which is triple-counting the wrongful act.

I suppose what we can say is something like this: Alice neglected to use the medication to save a life. Whom did she act against? Maybe each of: herself, Bob and Carl. But we shouldn’t look at the action as the violation of three duties, but only of one duty, to use the medication to save herself, Bob or Carl. So she violated a single duty, to the tune of a single life, but that single duty was one she owed to three people.

Question 1: Does it follow that one can have a duty to a group which does not reduce to a duty to each member? For Alice surely doesn’t owe Bob that she save herself, Bob or Carl, and she doesn’t owe Bob that she save Bob, since she can permissibly save herself or Carl.

Answer: I don’t know. Maybe we can say:

• Alice owes herself that if she doesn’t use the medication to save Bob or Carl, she use it to save herself
• Alice owes Bob that if she doesn’t use the medication to save herself or Carl, she use it to save Bob
• Alice owes Carl that if she doesn’t use the medication to save herself or Bob, she use it to save Carl.

And so Alice wrongs each of herself, Bob and Carl. A problem with this solution, however, is that it seems to triple counting Alice’s wrongdoing, by making it seem like she fatally wronged each of three people—but she is only responsible for a single death. Maybe, though, we can say that the duty to the three reduces to the three individual duties, but that the culpabilities don’t sum?

Question 2: Does the case provide an argument that one can wrong oneself? My above description of the case as one one where Alice owes it to herself, Bob and Carl that she save herself, Bob or Carl presupposes duties to herself. What can someone who thinks there are no duties to self say?

Answer: I don’t know. Maybe she can say: Alice owes Bob and Carl that she save herself, Bob or Carl. But it would be a little weird to think that by saving herself, Alice would be fulfilling a duty to Bob and Carl.

Final remarks: I am far from clear how to morally describe the case. I think the neatest description is one where a group is non-reducibly victimized, and where there are duties to self. But that may not be the only admissible description.

Charity filter

1. Do not attribute to malice, selfishness or incompetence what you can attribute to a reasonable but mistaken judgment.
2. Do not attribute to malice or selfishness what you can attribute to incompetence.
3. Do not attribute to malice what you can attribute to selfishness.

Charity and grading

Quick note after having done a bunch of grading today: To grade student papers well, one needs to combine an ability to read very charitably with an ability to see how the paper could be read uncharitably.

Inferring an "is" from an "ought"

You tell me that you saw a beautiful sunset last night. I conclude that you saw a beautiful sunset last night. You are talking about Mother Teresa. I conclude that you won't say that she was a sneaky politician. You promise to bake a pie for the party tomorrow. I conclude that you will bake a pie for the party tomorrow or you will have a good reason for not doing so. I tell a graduate student to read a page of Kant for next class. I conclude that she will read a page of Kant for next class or will have a good reason for not doing so.

All of these are inferences of an "is" from an "ought". You ought to refrain from telling me you saw a beautiful sunset last night, unless of course you did see one. You ought not say that Mother Teresa was a sneaky politician, as she was not. You ought not fail to bake the promised cake, unless you have good reason. The student ought not fail to read the Kant, unless she has good reason.

All of these are of a piece. We have prima facie reason to conclude from the fact that something ought to be so that it is so. In particular, belief on testimony is a special case of the is-from-ought inference.

In a fallen world, all of these inferences are highly defeasible. But defeasible or not, they carry weight. And there is a virtue—both moral and intellectual—that is exercised in giving these inferences their due weight. We might call this virtue (natural) faith or appropriate trust. We also use the term "charity" to cover many of the cases of the exercise of this virtue: To interpret others' actions in such ways as make them not be counterinstances to the is-from-ought inference is to charitably interpret them, and we have defeasible reason to do so.

The inference may generalize outside the sphere of human behavior. A sheep ought to have four legs. Sally is a sheep. So (defeasibly) Sally has four legs.

I used to think that testimony was epistemically irreducible. I am now inclined to think it is reducible to the is-from-ought inference. Seeing it as of a piece with other is-from-ought inferences is helpful in handling testimonial-like evidence that is not quite testimony. For instance, hints are not testimony strictly speaking, but an inference from a hint is relevantly like an inference from testimony. We can say that an inference from a hint is a case of an is-from-ought inference, but a weaker one because the "ought" in the case of a hint is ceteris paribus weaker than the "ought" in the case of assertion. Likewise, inference from an endorsement of a person to the person's worthiness of the endorsement is like inference from testimony, but endorsement of a person is not the same as testimony (I can testify that a person is wonderful without endorsing the person, and I can endorse a person without any further testimony). Again, inference from endorsement is a special case of is-from-ought: one ought not endorse those who are not worthy of endorsement.

If is-from-ought is a good form of inference, the contraposition may-from-is will also be a good form of inference. If someone is doing something, we have reason to think she is permitted to do it. Of course, there are many, many defeaters.

It is an interesting question whether the is-from-ought inference is at all plausible apart from a view like theism or Plato's Platonism on which the world is ultimately explanatorily governed by values. There may be an argument for theism (or Plato's Platonism!) here.

God, service to neighbor and human flourishing

Suppose that there is no God, that human beings are the highest beings relevant to our moral calculus (i.e., there may be aliens somewhere else that are higher than humans, but they don't morally matter). What, then, should one take as the highest aspect of human flourishing? Surely service to fellow humans. But service to fellow humans aims at an end beyond itself, namely our fellow humans' benefit. Now this benefit to our fellow humans cannot primarily consist in enabling them to serve their neighbor, or else the highest aspect of human flourishing consists in helping others to help others to help others ..., which results in vicious regress or circularity. Rather, in the end, our collective service to one another would have to be aimed at something else than service to one another. But if there is no God, then service to one another is the highest part of our flourishing. So it seems that if there is no God, the highest aspect of our flourishing consists in our promoting other, and hence lower, aspects of the flourishing of others. And that doesn't seem right.

Here's another way to see this problem. There is something paradoxical about pursuing the flourishing of others as our central end: what if we all achieved our end? Then our lives would lose what centrally gives them their meaning.

How does the existence of God change things? Well, our service to others in itself is not the highest human good any longer. Loving union with God is the highest human good, and service to others is valuable as it is partly constitutive of one's own union with God and promotes that union for others.

Trust and faith

Aquinas tells us that human sociality is partly, maybe even largely, exhibited in our common epistemic project. Now, I think trust is absolutely central to this project. Trust is the glue that binds the individual epistemic projects into a joint project, and more generally that binds us in non-epistemic contexts. In particular, it is natural to trust others, and we always have a pro tanto moral reason to trust another. A failure to take another person's assurance of something as a reason to trust in the assured thing (a claim, a commitment, etc.) is a failure to treat the other person as a co-participant in the joint project, and is a partial denial of our common sociality.

So we always have pro tanto moral reasons to trust others. There may, of course, be overriders or defeaters for these moral reasons. Still, a habit of appropriately taking into account the moral reason to trust others because of our common sociality is a virtue. This virtue is balanced between mistrust and credulity, and we can call it "proper trust."

This, I think, makes it intelligible how faith can be a virtue. Faith is a species of deep proper trust in God—a proper trust so deep that it cannot be a work of nature. Still, like other theological virtues it builds on a natural virtue, in this case proper trust.

Interestingly, though, the theological virtue, unlike the natural, may well cease to be a mean. For there is no such thing as trusting God too much, as he is perfectly trustworthy. This is a feature faith shares with charity, which is a supernatural love for God. For while one can idolatrously overestimate the object of love for a creature, one cannot overestimate the object of love for God. So there is a sense in which charity also is not a mean (not an original view). I do not, at this point, know exactly what I should say about hope.

Charity and God

Last night, I led an Honors Colloquium on C. S. Lewis's Four Loves. Lewis's main point is that Affection, Friendship and Eros all run the danger of falling into a whole host of problems which he describes with great insight. There is only one solution: charity. It is charity that orders all the loves, keeping them faithful to themselves—keeping Friendship from usurping the role of Eros, keeping Affection from imposing on those close to one, keeping Eros from becoming a tyrant, and so on. Note that this is an empirically informed claim: it is informed by the universal human experience of the difficulties of love, and centuries of Christian experience in finding charity to be a remedy for these ills. Suppose that these quasi-empirical[note 1] claims are correct. Then we have the following plausible argument, which Lewis does not himself make in this book:

1. (Premise) Ordering one's loves in charity is a good solution to the ills of love.
2. (Premise) Ordering one's loves in a love for an imaginary being is not a good solution to the ills of love.
3. (Premise) Charity is a love for God.
4. (Premise) Either God is imaginary or God exists.
5. Ordering one's loves in a love for God is a good solution to the ills of love. (1 and 3)
6. God is not imaginary. (2 and 5)
7. God exists. (4 and 6)

This argument is closely related to this one.

Justification and love

Justification consists in God's forgiveness of our sins. What does this forgiveness consist in? At least partly in the taking away of the penalty. But what, most deeply, is the penalty? One thinks here of hell-fire. But while hell may contain fire (or it may contain great cold!), it is not constituted by fire, but by separation from God. Now, lack of charity—lack of the right kind of love for God—is at the heart of separation from God.

So: Divine forgiveness must consist, at least in part, in the removal of the penalty of separation from God, and the removal of our lack of charity. Therefore, the instilling of charity is at least partly constitutive of divine forgiveness. Hence, basic sanctification—the movement from lack of charity to the presence of charity—is not merely causally tied to justification, but is at least partly constitutive of justification. Moreover, this sanctification is not appropriate, and maybe not possible, apart from justification, since a just being is unlikely to waive punishment without forgiving.

Political gain

One not infrequently hears the claim that a politician did something "for political gain", and the claim is said in a context that suggests that it follows that there was something sordid, ignoble or even wrong about it. But why accept such an inference? Suppose that politicians promote their political capital in order to enact policies that they think are good for the country. If so, then the claim that a politician did something for political gain need not be a criticism: one might as well say that the politician did it for what he or she thought was the good of the country.

It may, of course, be that people who use that phrase are cynical: they do not believe that politicians are trying to promote the good of the country. But I doubt that such a cynical thought can be very often justified. Even if a politician is misguided, stupid, greedy or power-hungry (and most of us exhibit these traits at times), it can still be the case that the politician is nonetheless trying to promote the good of the country. Such a hypothesis is both charitable and consistent with what we know about human nature.