Aquinas the Pragmatist?

It is worth pausing to make comparison with a similar moral antinomy, much discussed in the Scholastic period: Is it right to obey a mistaken conscience? On the one hand, obeying one’s conscious is, apparently by definition, something it is always right to do. On the other hand, a mistaken conscience is, again by definition, a conscience that instructs you to do the wrong thing. So doing what a mistaken conscience tells you is to do right and wrong at the same time. There is a lesson to be learned from the deft way Aquinas, confronting this paradox of “perplexity”, thrusts it aside. “One can withdraw from the error”, he tells us (Summa Theologiae II. 1.19 ad 3). Commentators have expressed bewilderment at this, for it is, of course, not an answer to the question, but an evasion. It does not tell us what to do when our conscience is mistaken; it tells us  not to have a mistaken conscience. Is Aquinas merely saying, “If that was where I wanted to go, I wouldn’t start from here” – always a bad answer to practical questions, since “here” is where all practical questions start from? No: he means that there is something that the framing of the question has left out of account; the alternative is wrongly posed. It beguiles us into imagining a helpless innocent pathetically trapped between the devil of dutiful wrongdoing and the deep blue sea of guilt-ridden right-doing. Moral reality is simply not like that.

– Oliver O’Donovan, Church in Crisis: The Gay Controversy and the Anglican Communion (2008), p.31

In this passage, profound Christian ethicist and theologian Oliver O’Donovan points out a little lesson in philosophy, which I always thought was given voice by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Pragmatists like John Dewey and William James. O’Donovan surprisingly points out that the same move can be seen in the work of the medieval theologian Aquinas (ca. 1225-1275). Perhaps proof that there is, after all, nothing new under the sun.

The lesson is: rejecting the question. A philosophical stance towards questions, or a least a philosophical stance informed by Wittgenstein, Pragmatism (and Aquinas!) holds that not every question is a good question. Questions can be loaded and so naturally push you towards one answer; questions can set up false dichotomy’s and distinctions and so obscure other relevant options or ideas; questions can be motivated not by the neutral task of pure inquiry but by mysterious and complex psychological and political reasons.

The difference between O’Donovan’s point as sourced via Aquinas, and this idea of scrutinizing questions (and indeed the very act of asking questions), is that Christians believe that there is an objective, concrete reality which can be obscured and manipulated by bad questions. O’Donovan concludes, ‘Moral reality is simply not like that’, a phrase Wittgenstein and the Pragmatists wouldn’t want to be caught saying. However I think this moral (and probably metaphysical) realism provides a greater incentive to reject bad questions, since they genuinely can hide features of an independent reality, they genuinely can fail to latch onto the way things are.

Wittgenstein was interested in what about the human psychology motivates people to ask philosophical questions, Pragmatists were worried about how allegedly neutral questions could be political and ethical questions in a Groucho Marx disguise. O’Donovan and Aquinas are concerned that certain questions simply fail to carve out reality at the joints, to capture the richness and complexity of reality.