Reason (But Not Reason Only)

Hopefully I’ll have something more substantive to post in due course, but, urgh, everyone’s favourite ‘Christian’ philosopher-blogger is at it again – who would have guessed, but he’s pro-torture!  (Well, pro-torture when a partisan Republican crew are in charge at least…)  I’m not sure what I find more depressing – the mini article itself or the comments, including those to the ‘heads up’ post on Feser’s personal blog.  True to form, Feser comes to denounce a patient interlocutor as a ‘nasty piece of work’; an apology is quickly forthcoming – from said interlocutor to Feser! – which Feser then ignores for a long time before finally replying to it with scorn, a scorn that only encourages the pro-Feser commentators in their attempts to bully the interlocutor.

Anyhow, a passage from Adorno’s lectures on Kant’s moral philosophy comes to mind:

If we were to attempt to explain why on earth it would be wrong to torture people, we would encounter all sorts of difficulties … In all such moral questions, the moment you confront them with reason you find yourself plunged into a terrible dialectic.  And when faced by this dialectic the ability to say, ‘Stop!’ and ‘You ought not even to contemplate such things!’ has its advantages.

According to Adorno then, morality should be considered ‘permeated by reason’ (ethical living requires critical reflection upon living, in short); but notwithstanding this, ‘reason is not the sum total of morality’.  Adorno goes on:

This aspect is expressed in the commandments of religion, as contrasted with philosophy … however problematic their moral norms may be, there is something valid in the religions, and the injunction ‘Go, and do thou likewise’ contains something that, formally at least, is no less essential a part of moral theory than the rationality that requires me to be able to explain why I should go and do likewise.

[From Problems of Moral Philosophy (Livingston trans.), p.97.]

Update (7/5/09): looks like it’s now all sweetness and light between Feser and Mark Shea (the ‘interlocutor’ mentioned above), albeit without the former explicitly taking back any of the hateful things he had said and allowed to be said.  Obviously, petty squabbles about the morality of torture are ultimately nothing when the disputants are on the same side of the ‘tenth crusade’, comrades in arms in the struggle for ‘Christendom’ and ‘civilisation’ against ‘jihad’ and ‘liberalism’.  (Oh, and in the unlikely event Shea himself comes across this — don’t worry, my original post did not have the intent of applauding you as such…)