Anglican Mainstream

Following the (non) reaction to my post about the ‘legality’ of the Iraq war, I wanted to return to the question of law and modern society. This is an area where I feel two issues arise. One is that Christians ought, from their unique perspective of the gospel, to have something radical to say. The other is that this issue highlights what I believe to be the increasing incoherence of modern society.

Incoherence
Why do I speak of ‘incoherence’? The reason lies, I believe, in the tension between what I will call moral demand and material narrative.

On the one hand, we see a continuing moral demand for justice and, with it, an expectation that law can be so framed as to produce that justice. Hence, according to some modern commentators, Tony Blair must not merely be condemned but ‘arrested’ for starting the Iraq war because what he did was ‘illegal’.

On the other hand, we have the prevailing material narrative which undergirds our understanding of the nature of existence. That narrative, quite simply, is that human beings are just one amongst many meaningless products of meaningless processes. We are distinct from animals —or rather from the other animals —only in degree, not in kind, and our much-vaunted ‘ethical’ values are nothing more, ultimately, than the product of evolutionary forces written into our genes by natural selection.

What is justice?
Thus, whether we realize it or not, there is a contradiction between what we believe we want and what we believe we are. The ethicist Peter Singer puts it like this:

Justice is not, as often thought, a sacrosanct moral principle imposed on us by a divine being, nor is it somehow engraved into the bedrock of the universe.

His first point is, of course, gladly embraced by most of our leading moral commentators. There is no God, therefore moral principles have no divine sanction.

What is generally missed is his second point: neither do moral principles derive from the fabric of the material world. You may look down through a microscope or up through a telescope, but you will see nothing that tells you what you ought to do when faced with a so-called ‘ethical dilemma’. What, then, is ‘justice’? Singer continues,

Justice is neither more nor less than a set of conceptual tools for making Tit for Tat work in the real world. (Peter Singer, How are we to live? [Oxford: OUP, 1997], 176)

Tit for Tat (or Doing unto others as they have Done unto you) is, quite literally, Singer’s basis for ‘moral’ behaviour, advocated because it ‘works’ in producing what Singer argues is the best outcome for everyone (and is therefore the ‘best’ outcome). In all this, Singer is thoroughly reductionist — the proof of Tit for Tat morality is in game theory and the ‘Prisoner’s Dilemma’, and when we see it applied in human society we should recognize we are doing nothing basically more than chimpanzees grooming one another for fleas — but on it he wishes to rest the whole edifice of moral living. Read more