and now let's look at shayer then so on the next page let's see how uh VOA was going to explain shayer uh in comparison with this so on 81 shayer was also a strong opponent of formalism and ethics he took the position that the proper object of Ethics is solely and exclusively value or rather different values that make up the matter of human lived experiences and human feelings and willings and that all such values in human beings are connected with moral value in shaylor's view values form a distinctive a priori but one that differs radically
from the conti and a priori Kant a priori excluded all objective non-rational elements whereas shalers is based precisely on such elements values belong to objective reality but they remain concealed in it as long as they are not disclosed by a corresponding experience of a human subject object or some other subject capable of experiencing them shayer does not deal with these other subjects but the possibility of them nevertheless remains only in a particular subject's experience do values produce that distinctive a priori shayer maintains that the lived experience of values has a primarily emotional character because values
are an object of either love which enriches and expands the world of values or hate which impoverishes and narrows this world world in the view espoused by shayer the cognitive experience of values is merely something secondary to it and it too has an emotional character because it arises through an intentional feeling any possibility of knowing values in an intellectual way is excluded by shayer all right so just to pause there for a little bit um we can see that if we think back to Kant um from the standpoint of a personalist and a phenomenologist what
they're not going to like about kti and ethics is that remember what Kant tries to do that's different from Aristotle and and aquinus is that he his critique of them is that they are proceeding and this would also really apply to Plato too I think and and really any premodern but that they would proceed based on their understanding of human nature now from a a premodern standpoint um or let's say like a neot tomisic Neo aristot Alan whatever uh from that standpoint this shouldn't seem like a problem to us but within the modern schema uh
remember that Kant is worried about hume's critique basically that we only know our impressions of things but not the things themselves and so you have this distinction between how a thing presents itself to us in in our mind mind versus how it exists in reality and so Kant in trying to get away from this uh wanted to come up with an ethical system that didn't depend on those principles of human nature and could somehow exist independently from them such that regardless of how you perceive human nature and human phenomena and lived experience these rules would
apply across the board in a very let's say mathematical cold way just by pure reason alone and so this is where you would get the categorical imperative uh the sense of Duty and um this restructuring of the ACT such that uh the basic example practically would be you know you ask well who who is the better person or who has the stronger moral character according to ainus versus K so if you have someone that does the good easily is that person does is that person more or less virtuous than one who does it with difficulty
so they both do the same thing let's say the example might be um someone that struggles with intemperance so versus somebody that doesn't uh if the intemperate person resists Temptation and avoids doing uh avoids Indulgence um let's say these two people are in the same place facing the same Temptation one less one more which one is more virtuous well for Thomas it would be the one that struggled less because it means that he has a better habit right he has a better disposition he has that virtue more completely within himself uh for Kant though it
would be the other way around because for Kant the primary good really is the Good Will and you know that the will is good if it Wills what it Wills uh out of a sheer sense of Duty so for Kant it's the person that would struggle and that faces his temptation and that chooses out of Duty to do the good essentially uh this would be the better person um so I think that what shaylor is trying to do then is to bring us back uh back into the realm of Nature and experience but in a
way similar to what huro does um with intentionality and Consciousness that remember that he's trying to get us back to the pre-philosophical and not discount that so um I think that there's something similar that's going on here with with shaylor at least potentially and this is it seems to me what VOA was going to pick up to uh again rescue shayer from falling into subjectivism uh in going this direction so this would be trying to interpret him uh through as much of a realist lens as possible all right so uh let's go to the next
page here on 8 on 83 uh a little bit toward the middle but um right above so in the middle of the first paragraph um shayer is even opposed to all advice in ethic including that of the so-called Evangelical councils for advising involves influencing the will of another person only in what shayer calls moral counsel is there no suggestion associated with pointing out a value but merely straightforward information about the value which makes it easier for another person to know for himself or herself what to do this systematic dismissal from ethics of every form of
real Duty and of obligation of every re form of rule and even advice is in shaylor's eyes synonymous with overcoming the negativism and ethics that has prevailed in it sense the time of Kant and the categorical imperative we have each our own personal world of values with some specific hierarchy our own AR priori there are also however systems of values peculiar to certain epics or social groups systems distinguished by a hierarchization proper to those eepic epics or social groups by relations of highness and low and lowness intrinsic to what shaylor calls the ethos this ethos
is subject to change and development shayer does not accept the notion of a permanent finished world of objective Goods but tells us to consider the particular perspective in which morals are gradually unveiled before us as the matter of moral life he stresses that the full richness of these values cannot be encompassed within the live the lived experience of any one person or even any one historical epic we can see though that shayer is concerned not so much with encompassing all values as with grasping as correctly as possible the hierarchical relations that occur among them this
is what forms the basis for shaylor's affirmation of the Christian ethos an affirmation that is hard to miss in his Works Jesus Christ whom shayer regards as the greatest moral and religious Genius of humankind grasped the hierarchy iCal relations among values in the most correct way one could say that he achieved the most perfect organization of ethical matter as a whole this was according to shayer a work of the heart and not of reason for all progress in the realm of morality is a work of the heart and is reducible to the kind of regularity
with which emotional acts of love and feelings are involved in fashioning the ethical priori now um this this is I think reminiscent in a way uh to me this this reminds me of John Henry Newman so again another way to interpret this positively with shaylor is to correlate this with John Hen St John Henry Newman's Own thoughts about the heart as well so I think that the way that John Henry Newman talks about uh the moral value and uh especially thinking about conversion but um he stresses this importance about speaking to the hard and of
course that that's Newman's whole motto corad core loquor um so you I think you can you can draw a a nice parallel between the two here um I think that what shaylor is noticing or picking up on is uh something that we can couch along those lines and I think that's what VOA appreciates too um all right so let's keep going from there uh I'm on page 84 now toward at the bottom uh this is how shayer grasps a basic regularity that strikes a phenomenologist in connection with the lived experience of moral good and evil
could it be said though that in grasping this regularity shayer posited a normative principle or defined an ethical Norm even setting aside the fact that shayer himself would not have wanted to establish a normative principle because of the supposedly negative character that accompanies every Norm anything intended to Define and especially to inject Duty I would insist that this regularity of the lived experience of moral good and evil basically does not have the character of a norm it says nothing about what is good and what is evil but merely asserts that upon the occasion of a
certain thing some value good or evil is experienced this is however this however is a fundamental difference the regularity in question has a primarily descriptive character not normative one still it cannot be said to be purely descriptive since values do come into play furthermore a certain hierarchy of values their highness or lowness always comes into play all of this implies in a rather remote way a certain element of positing norms or situating action willing in a world of values I already Drew attention to this in a different philosophical context in my analysis of St Thomas's
views on the topic of norms now let's not forget here that uh the fundamental principle of natural law is to do good and avoid evil so I think thinking about if we consider this from a tomisic standpoint especially with those principles in mind knowing that this is a factor of natural law um then what that should tell us is that even if it's descriptive uh if there's at least a description of good or evil because of the principles of natural law it seems inevitable that it would carry some lead into the normative because of that
that basic principle of natural law that we all have namely to do good and avoid evil right so um that's what comes to mind there all right let's look at the middle of the next p page this is a a a little bit in the middle all of this is very intimately connected with the question of norms I call a norm that which in some way generates moral values and is found to some extent directly with the birth of values or at any rate makes the emergence of values possible in the human being as a
person so this helps right because this is vwa uh clarifying in a in a succinct way uh giving us the definition for Norm that he's considering all right so let's move down and look at shaylor's analysis again here according to vo the bottom of of 86 shaylor's analysis does not reveal here the presence of any subjective normative Factor whatsoever value simply arise Beyond subjective norms and independently of them and even counter to anything that could perform a normative role and contribute to the lived experience of Duty it seems that shayer was so exclusively and single-mindedly
intent on overcoming K formalism and ethics that he completely failed to see the whole positive and constructive side of norms I would even go so far as to say that he could not properly objectify them given the assumptions of his system but this again is a separate issue and calls for a more extensive and detailed analysis on the other hand an important matter that deserves at least a cursory treatment here is the emphasis that shayer placed on the significance of exemplariness in his ethical system so here we see both the contrast but also the lead
into uh perhaps where we could draw the parallel between uh shayer and this kind of realist uh to mytic ethics that um is couched in the metaphysical all right so uh let's look at the bottom of 87 now it would be hard not to notice that shaylor in this point essentially overcame kantianism appeals to the healthy humanistic traditions of Aristotle's ethics for Aristotle an essentially good person was a moral model and measure for others such an individual however was a good human being someone who realized inwardly the Perfection proper to a rational human being moral
perfection okay so let me pause there for a second so this hearkens back to what I was saying before with the distinction between uh Kant and aquinus Aristotle on the virtuous man so again I think this is the positive way that we could take shaylor's insistence on the limitations of uh ethics at least from the modern perspective specifically the contian perspective of this that actually takes us back to this premodern understanding of ethics and uh you can think for example of the very beginning of the nican ethics where Aristotle clarifies that practical science is distinct
from speculative science not just because uh it's reasoning for the sake of something so when you reason in ethics why you would undergo a practical science is essentially to inform your own Act of the Practical syllogism so in other words whatever you end up um believing through ethics and politics Will then shape your Behavior because you're trying to figure out the best way to live so whatever you think is true about that will then shape your action which we've we've also said with uh with St Thomas um that's one thing the other thing that he
says though is it's not like studying mathematics so um because it's a science you do have stable principles you have to uh so it's not all subjective but I think the point is though it's not going to have the same kind of exactness as math because basically uh lived experience so um the moral norms and principles don't change so let's say the four cardinal virtues those don't change what does change to a certain respect is how they're practiced and instantiated according to the mode and circumstances of each particular person so the easiest example that I
go to with this uh with my students is to uh for example compare um uh my own drinking habits with that of my wife so both of us are obviously called to Temperance so that's that's your non-negotiable uh both of us have to remain sober right uh well not just both of us in particular but all human beings okay but for the sake of the example both of us have that moral Norm but uh my wife being about half my size or maybe a little less than that okay um she's not going to be able
to handle as much as I can so uh if I drank uh a glass of wine quickly enough I could still be okay if as long as it's one even if I'm I'm drinking it very quickly I I can still still be okay but for my wife on the other hand if she does the same thing she's definitely going to feel it a lot more than me so let's say that kind of material difference is what we're talking about here so it's because of differences of circumstances that uh the way that this virtue is practiced
in the particular details will have to look a little bit different um between my wife and myself so the degree of exactitude that we're talking about is essentially that you know you can expect ethics to have something like okay everyone has a call to Temperance Temperance is one of the cardinal virtues however don't expect it to be so exact that uh you'll get some kind of commandment like every single human being on Earth must have this exact amount of uh alcohol and no more and no less or something like that right that would be absurd
and uh so that's the sort of thing that we get with premodern ethics that it seems like shaylor is uh actually recovering in his critique against Kant um who would have us really go more in another extreme here as a rationalist in this respect
