Love and the Moral Precepts
[Relevant for Public Ethics, Integrity and Aptitude]
Love and the Moral Precepts
Egoistic & Altruistic Love
Here, we wish to bring into focus the more salient moments of our reflections on the subject bringing them to bear upon the topic at hand.
To recognize human interrelatedness as the immediate ontological foundation of the moral order and to act accordingly can be expressed in terms of love.
Love is therefore the existential basis of the moral order.
The primary intuitively grasped demand that human person realizes himself as a human person is particularized and concretized in moral precepts. These two can be expressed in terms of love.
Universal love is particularized and concretized, it is objectified in the moral precept. Hence, as love not just one moral virtue among others but the norm of all of the moral virtues so too love is not just one moral precept among others but it is the form of all of them. And in the same way one can hardly call the moral realization of oneself as human as an obligation.
This too taken by itself as a non-objectified sense does not oblige human person to do anything specific and there is hardly any meaning in the saying that human person should love. Love cannot be enforced so too there is hardly any meaning in it saying that human person should fulfill himself as human.
If love is the form of moral precepts and if love like human moral consciousness is a progressive affair, this means that acting according to the moral precept is acting according to love but that this awareness admits of degrees. This means that love can also be considered to be not only the beginning of the moral life but also its end. At the beginning it is present as a seed. No matter how logically we can distinguish one human faculty or aspect of human person from another human person is a totality one integrated whole.
Suffice it here to remark already that though a human person can develop one or other of his or her faculties independently of the rest or at least quasi-independently, one cannot develop himself or herself as a human person without developing the core of his or her being namely his or her love and that is not achieved by mere study and reflection although this can be very useful, but by doing.
Love is an existential relation involving my whole existence. As Scholastic say the operation is the perfection of being.
The Dynamics of Morality
Here, we examine two questions which are intimately linked. In an evolutionary vision of human person to what extent can we say that the morality that is the specification of the moral law are universally valid for all human person to what extent can we say that they are unchangeable.
If one maintains their universal validity one is charged with absolutism withholding the opinions of a static nature of human person incompatible with present day theories about man’s dynamic and evolutionary nature. If on the other hand one were to maintain a relative validity one would fall into a philosophical untenable moral relativism. Can the dilemma be overcome?
The evolutionary nature of human person and of its human consciousness has long been recognized one way or another. Charles Darwin gave the theory of evolution a biological basis. An evolutionary view of the world and of human person is today at the basis of a great deal of scientific, philosophical and theological thinking. The thinking of such human person as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, discharging and of Aurobindo comes of course spontaneously to mind.
Herbert Spencer is perhaps the best-known evolutionary ethicist. He starts by observing that both human and animal conduct consist in acts adjusted to ends. The higher we proceed in this scale of evolution, the easier it becomes for us to obtain evidence of purposeful action directed towards the good either of the individual or of the species. This purposeful activity forms part of the struggle for existence wedged between individual members of the same species or between different species.
But this type of conduct is, according to Spencer, an imperfectly evolved conduct. In a perfectly evolved conduct, which is ethical conduct in the proper sense of the word, this struggle for existence will yield a place to cooperation and mutual help.
Egoism and altruism will be both transcended. This leads Spencer to distinguish between absolute and relative ethics. Absolute ethics is an ideal code of conduct formulating the behavior of the completely adapted human person in the completely evolved society. Relative ethics is the nearest approximation to this ideal according to the more or less perfectly evolved society in which human person happens to find him or her.
Spencer adopts the utilitarian ethical principle.
In fact, he takes the happiness to be the ultimate end of life and measures the rightness or wrongness of action by their conduciveness to this end. From a nascent state when this utilitarian principle was dependent on non-ethical i.e. authoritarian beliefs, it gradually developed to become independent and as suggested by the theory of evolution, it will continue to evolve and reach an ideal limit.
Happiness however depends on the fulfilment of some conditions and these conditions are the observances of certain principles and rules which causally determine human welfare. Spencer acknowledges the existence of moral intuitions which however are the slowly organized results of experience received by the race. In other words, an induction from experience handed down from one generation to the other ends up by becoming an instinctive moral reaction. Spencer confesses that the theory of evolution has not provided as much practical guidance as he had hoped. What is peculiarly Spencer’s is his interpretation of evolution as a teleological process directed towards the establishment of a higher and higher moral order.
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