Connection of the Good with the Christian Faith

Throughout his work Sources of the Self, philosopher Charles Taylor (1989) makes the irenic suggestion that there is no good reason to exclude agape love of the Judeo-Christian heritage as a viable hypergood for the moral self. He sees it as the highest form of human relationship. Taylor (1989) writes, “Nothing prevents a priori our coming to see God or the Good as essential to our best account of the human world” (p. 73). As a significant percentage of the world population holds to be true, “God is also one of those contemporary sources of the good in the West, the love of which has empowered people to do and be good” (1989, p. 34).

Michael Morgan (1994, p. 53), in commenting on his ethics for late modernity, claims that Taylor’s account in Sources of the Self re- establishes the plausibility of the divine-human relationship for moral experience: “God is one of those entities that has figured in our moral ontology, has provided a standard or ground of value, and has given our beliefs and actions meaning and significance”. This relationship is generally occluded in contemporary Western culture and philosophical ethics, and so it remains significant that Taylor clarifies it through his language of articulation and that he illuminates its possibilities for ethical discourse.

Taylor attempts to recover a jewel lost in Western moral consciousness in his language of moral sources. From his perspective, moral sources are not about highest principles; they are all about the quality of the will, a concept which has been largely absent in moral philosophy for over a century. For instance, the primary question for Taylor’s moral ontology is: What or whom do I love? (motivation), not What am I obliged to do? (right action). He wants to broaden and deepen the domain of moral discourse. The latter, to him, is the last question to ask, even though it is often the main concern of the contemporary ethics debates. The second question is What do I want to be? (character), a question that is in recovery in the late twentieth century through Virtue Ethics, heralded by such luminaries as Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue, 1984). Read More…

Constitutive Good Continued

According to Taylor, sources of the good tend to vary from (a) those solely external to the self, to (b) those both internal and external, to (c) those totally internal. As he notes, at one time, the good was wholly external to the self as it was perceived in Plato’s moral ontology; the good was endemic to the structure of reality. The Stoics also saw things this way. Taylor notes the big transition in moral sources in the last four centuries:

Moving from an epoch in which people could find it plausible to see the order of the cosmos as a moral source, to one in which a very common view presents us a universe which is very neutral, and finds the moral sources in human capacities. (1994, p. 215)

He takes Plato as his representative of the first. “The cosmos, ordered by the good, set standards of goodness for human beings, and is properly the object of moral awe and admiration, inspiring us to act rightly” (Taylor, 1994). This is, however, an important distinction: Taylor himself is a moral realist, but not a neo-Platonist: the view that the good is part of the metaphysical structure of the world. Platonic moral realism has been discredited because it leans too heavily on the idea of an ontic logos, a meaningful order. Nor is Taylor, on the other hand, a radical subjectivist. His view of realism lies somewhere between the Romantic subjectivist Rilke, and the Platonic objectivist. He wants to champion both the subjective and objective dimensions of the moral self, and maintain that there are sources outside as well as inside the self. Read More…

Moral Sources: the Vital Constitutive Good

One vital dimension of the quality of the will in Taylor’s moral ontology is the constitutive good (Taylor, 1989, pp. 91-107). I had to grapple with this concept for years before I grasped it. This breakthrough insight has powerful cultural  impact. The moral framework operates at two levels. At one level, there are the general life goods, those that are valued by the individual self. The life goods are things that make life worth living or the virtues they advocate: such as reason, piety, courage, freedom, moderation, respect, all features of human life that possess intrinsic worth. At another, motivational level, Taylor reveals the important category of the constitutive good; this good he also calls the moral source. With this emphasis, Taylor wants to recover the category of moral motivation for the self.  Read More…