On the way to work today I was listening to a Nigel Warburton podcast on Kant’s views on morality. Kant propounded a deontological, duty-based ethic. As we have noted in prior blogs Kant’s view of morality is reductionist, treating people as essentially rational beings rather than as full-orbed creatures. For Kant all that gives our actions moral worth is doing our duty, acting purely with good will or intention, however unemotional that very rational will might be. Our desires and inclinations might motivate us to do many things commonly considered noble and “moral”, but, according to Kant, these have no moral worth at all if this is the basis on which these actions are done. Kant did not regard our emotions as obstacles to moral action. Yet while he recognised emotions as often accompanying moral actions he saw them as clouding the nature of true morality and confusing us as to the real nature of morality.
For Kant ultimate or absolute goodness is only to be found in the good will, humanistically conceived. For Christians this is found in God’s good will which is an expression, however, not of cold rationalism but of the entire nature and character of God in all his richness and fullness. If we are to live lives of God-pleasing compliance with his perfectly good will then our minds need to be transformed so that we will learn “to test’, to value and profoundly appreciate God’s will, how “good, pleasing and perfect” it truly is (Romans 12:2).
In the continuing context Paul goes on to indicate that central to the transformed mind and the experience of this perfectly good will of God is love. Near the end of the sub-unit constituted by Romans 12-13 he exhorts,
Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellowman has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “Do not commit adultery,” “Do not murder,” “Do not steal,” “Do not covet,” and whatever other commandment there may be, are summed up in this one rule: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” Love does no harm to its neighbour. Therefore love is the fulfilment of the law (Romans 13:8-10).
Kant commented on this command to love our neighbour as ourselves. He maintained that this means doing our duty towards our neighbour, no matter how unloving we might feel or even hard-hearted.
In that loving our neighbour as ourself is our ultimate and perpetual debt this does seem to approach Kant’s conception of duty. But the corresponding section near the beginning of this sub-unit indicates that Paul is not thinking in a simplistic duty-based way:
Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love (Romans 12:9-10a).
Elsewhere Paul teaches that love is the fruit of the Spirit, expressed in qualities often closely associated with emotions: “joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23). While we are responsible to love our neighbour as ourself we cannot do this just out of a sense of repaying a debt, out of a sense of duty. We know that the Lord himself, through his Spirit, must produce this ability within us. Arguably, Romans 8 is all about the Spirit’s work of making us more like Jesus, and there Paul teaches:
Those who live according to [the flesh] have their minds set on what [the flesh] desires; but those who live in accordance with the Spirit have their minds set on what the Spirit desires (Romans 8:5).
The love that the Holy Spirit engenders in us is a love that does not merely comply with some cold, rational divine will but with godly desires.
Obedience is indeed integral to the Christian life. But it is a great error to think this means that Christian ethics are essentially deontological. We are concerned to fulfil our responsibilities and obligations but our obedience is “the obedience of faith”, an obedience that consists in and is expressed by the life of faith, depending on the Lord through the Spirit to make us full-orbed people who learn to love with all that makes us human. So it is that the first and greatest commandment (to which the command to love our neighbours corresponds), as re-stated by Jesus himself, is this:
Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind (Matthew 22:37).
Posted August 29, 2008
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