Anti-Climacus

FIRST COMMENT:

"Nick, good lead-in for a discussion, but I keep waiting for the grit of the deontological approach: for instance, how *do* you interact with the hierarchy (Kant, after all, believes that true imperatives *will never* disagree with each other--flawed, in his formulation, but if we believe the rules are God's rules, that should follow, no?) problems?

Further, as a lapsed deontologist who still believes God's commands have a priori status relative to our judgments, I'd wonder what you'd say to the following:

Christian morality is a rule-consequentialism based on rules which we follow because God can "see down the tree" perfectly and has asserted that following His instructions lead to the best conceivable consequences. We accept this by faith, and proceed to live by His commands in a manner which has *given rise to* deontological ethics *in the default of* the eschatological conscience which forms the essence of Christian morality.

In other words, deontological ethics is the post-Christian adequation of Christian morality, in much the manner that epistemology is the post-Christian adequation of Christian assurance that the universe is knowable because God wishes to reveal Himself through it."

I specifically avoided bringing in my own concept of deontological ethics because one of, I think, the big strengths of it (for political purposes) is that it's actually rather more open than utilitarianism to alternative constructions of this alternative morality--the most-socialist British bloggers in my blogroll and I can agree on large parts of foreign policy, and all think we're dealing in terms of imperatives, but just disagree on the source of those imperatives (and in this case, that's a relatively minor disagreement).

It's definitely true that, historically speaking, deontology is supposed to be a replacement for Christian ethics, because Christian ethics are supposed to be teleological. I think the latter claim is both true and false: it's certainly true that, for a Christian in Christian life, there is something like a telos to which people are supposed to be proceeding, though that telos will be at least partially differentiated for everyone, rather than one end-scenario (on earth, anyway) for everyone. I'm much more skeptical that there is actually a telos outside of Christianity. But all this talk of telos swings too far in the hard-core determinist direction, and there are two other facts which Christianity requires us to consider: first, we are free, so talk of teleology will be only a loose approximation for what goes on in our lives. Second, Christianity recognizes the acuteness of moral dilemma in a conception of the tragic quality of the world and human interaction--every life, even the more-or-less teleological Christian one, has to do with the reality of sin, and I don't think these can be considered strictly teleological elements. The Christian, I think, also recognizes the priority of the right to the good, relational duties, and moral imperatives in general, all along with the deontologist and against the consequentialist.

As for adjudicating between claims of moral rules, I'm not sure one can even do that systematically, because the relative weight given to options has to be determined at least somewhat by circumstances (Lewis and Niebuhr are right, for example, to say that in the context of total war between two sides with vastly different (one good and one evil) aims, one needs to take sides, but it's not obviously true that this follows for every armed conflict ever)--but determined by circumstances--the relative weight of moral principles--judged by something other than just their consequences. And all options can be bad ones (I would not be able to rest easy about killing Nazis, nor about letting them do what they want, though I have a clear moreal preference for the former over the latter), a position consequentialism cannot accept.

Also, one other note, about this bit:

"Christian morality is a rule-consequentialism based on rules which we follow because God can "see down the tree" perfectly and has asserted that following His instructions lead to the best conceivable consequences."

I will disagree with medieval Christian thought and Leibniz, among others, on this: God's rules lead to the rightest possible world, not necessarily the best (and if it is the best, it is only so in because it was first the rightest of all possible worlds).