Reverence for the eternal.

Real Ethics: Reconsidering the Foundations of Morality, by John M. Rist, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 304 pp.

REAL ETHICS is a hard-hitting critique of contemporary moral theory from a realist point of view by John M. Rist, Professor Emeritus of philosophy and classics at the University of Toronto. His previous works include Plotinus: The Road to Reality (1977), The Mind of Aristotle (1989), and Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (1997). Addressing what he calls the deception, equivocation, outright lying, and humbug that pass for contemporary moral discourse--humbug that extends from the universities into the marketplace, legislative assemblies, and juridical bodies--Rist offers a defense of traditional Christian morality grounded in classical metaphysics. In forceful language he writes that there is "no need to look in the public lavatory for the lowest common denominator." The habits of what was low life morality have become the norms of moral and political discourse. "In the wake of any clear sense of what 'low life' might suggest, intellectuals are becoming 'downwardly mobile' and while losing their grip on an overall concept of virtue, often see such a direction as in itself virtuous and high minded or sentimentally as solidarity with the marginalized or dispossessed."

Despairing of any principled agreement on the foundations of morality between theist and non-theist, Rist takes the position that upholders of the realist tradition must recover its history, learning from the skills and the insights of those who advance it and from those who reject it. "Those who reject it must be forced to acknowledge their own Nietzschean parentage, a lineage that gives license to force majeure, lies, hypocrisy, and intellectual dishonesty or triviality which make it palatable to a credulous and largely pre-philosophic public." For Rist the realist tradition begins not with Aristotle but with Plato, a tradition unashamedly theological. Platonism and deception are the only moral and political alternatives available. If morality is to be more than enlightened self-interest, it has to be rationally justified, that is, established on metaphysical principles.

Rist believes that in Western societies we are confronted with ubiquitous and ill-defined appeals to the priority of choice, freedom, and human dignity, all unanchored in a coherent account of nature and human nature. Moral obligation, the only obligation clearly separable from prudence or self-interest, remains a utopian dream apart from an acknowledged theistic context. A theistic or religious context and its accompanying moral sense can only be achieved by regaining a perspective which lays bare its classical and Christian roots. Appeals to comradeliness, fraternity, and community are illusory apart from an inherited culture, symbolized for Rist by attachment to "land, village and the local churchyard where one's ancestors have lain for generations." Community entails a common commitment to the rule of law and all that such law entails--viz., due process, habeas corpus, and trial by jury. Absent an historical sense we are prisoners of our own time. One who is ignorant of the past, is likely "to assume the persona put upon him by the current fashions and pressures, which in the present age will most often mean reduction to economic man."

Rist foresees a bleak future for the West. In losing its grip on its Christian past and in the absence of a clear sense of civic virtue, Western society is preparing itself for a totalitarian democracy. Unable to choose between conflicting claims to the good and the resulting propensity to tolerate all, it is subverting the principle of toleration itself. Unfortunately, recovering a sense of the past may not be an easy task. The past can be clouded by the authoritarian or ideological mentality of academics and humanists or be rewritten or invented to promote a political agenda. Moreover, history is only one vehicle for transmitting the inherited. Whatever wisdom a society has acquired can be passed on only if it is instantiated in institutional structures designed to maintain inherited practices, beliefs, and intellectual acumen. As for the individual caught in an unrooted modernity, those apt to keep their wits in a godless future are those who possess a knowledge--however acquired--of their roots, that is, their own past and traditions.

The overarching thesis of Real Ethics is that God cannot be excluded from discussions about the foundation of morality. Rist offers a brief discussion of "natural law" as a common ground between theist and non-theist but discounts its rhetorical effectiveness. Clearly for him Platonic realism is the same thing as natural law, "for there is no doubt that Aquinas is a Platonist in that he believes in an 'external law' which is roughly the Platonic Forms seen in an appropriate manner as God's thoughts." Rist is suspicious of claims that natural law can be defended without reference to the existence of God. Here he stands in contrast to contemporary philosophers such as Henry Veatch, Alexander d'Entreves, and more recently Anthony Lisska, all of whom have presented natural law stripped of its religious and realist associations as a common ground for discourse with the secular mind. Rist holds that anyone who maintains with Aquinas that natural law participates in the eternal law must necessarily acknowledge its theistic roots and that such an acknowledgment matters. "Natural happiness" in the Aristotelian sense is not the "perfect happiness" of Aquinas that is to be found in the contemplation of God as the ultimate end of human life. In considering two possible versions of natural law theory, secular and theistic, Rist argues that "making room for knowledge of God will affect our understanding of the nature and ordering of other goods which right reason can discover." If there is no God, one is not mistaken in the pursuit of natural good without reference to the eternal.

Anyone who holds for a natural order to which man is accountable, theist or not, will recognize the force of Rist's trenchant criticism of contemporary moral theory and agree with him about the cultural malaise to which it leads. To say that this work is profound is almost an understatement. Real Ethics is the work of a mature scholar steeped in history who is also an acute observer of contemporary manners and morals.

JUDE P. DOUGHERTY is Dean Emeritus of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America and editor of The Review of Metaphysics.