Abstract
Religious wisdom traditions offer a rich foundation for affirming the intrinsic value of non-human nature. Yet the disenchantment of modernity divests the natural world of formal and final causality: the “book of nature” ceases to tell a moral or religious tale. In these pages, I offer an immanent critique of the agnostic pieties that militate against public religious reasoning: the primacy accorded instrumental causality, the technical reduction of prudence, and the “invention” of a purely anthropocentric morality. Prudence, I argue, presumes a formal maxim of deliberation, irreducible to a technical (analytical) relation of means and ends. Such deliberation introduces elements of both formal and final causality as emergent properties, such that wisdom traditions play an integral, hermeneutical role in interpreting nature.
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Notes
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- 2.
In later writings, Rawls departs from such an “exclusive” conception in favor of an “inclusive,” and finally “wide” view of public reason.
- 3.
In Habermas’ words, “from religious truths, after the religious world views have collapsed, nothing more and nothing other than the secular principles of a universalist ethics of responsibility can be salvaged...” (Habermas 1985: 52). Habermas subsequently qualifies this subscription of religion to the pastness of the past (Habermas 2002: 67–94, Habermas 2005: 106–18, see Junker-Kenny 2006: 106–117).
- 4.
Even anthropocentric ethics, if adequately elaborated, supports an ecological ethics, inasmuch as respect for an intergenerational “kingdom of ends” enjoins care for the environment. But the technical reduction of prudence raises into question Kant’s foundational account of dignity, and, a fortiori, intergenerational responsibility.
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For Kant, the semantic indeterminacy of “happiness,” ordered to the “producible ends of pleasure,” precludes the generation of prudential imperatives as such; at best, we can speak of “consilia” (Kant: 418 (37); 1956: 36).
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Celia Dean-Drummond writes, “to suppose so-called objective truth claims, themselves subject of human interpretation and revision, are superior to other forms of truth, including religious truth, demonstrates not so much insight as hubris” (Deane-Drummond 2007: 587).
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Celia Dean-Drummond offers an eloquent defense of the place of such wisdom (and wonder) in an evolutionary perspective. Citing Jeffrey Schloss, Dean-Drummond notes that wisdom is “not mere knowledge,...but involves deep insight into the functioning, meaning and purpose of existence along with the ability to discern how to live correspondingly, that is, in accord with the way things are” (Deane-Drummond 2006: 10–11; Schloss 2000: 151–191, at 156). Prudence, conceived as practical wisdom in the phronetic tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas, provides “a means through which relationships, attitudes and motivations can be assessed” (Deane-Drummond 2004: 92).
- 8.
There is, says Williams “certainly a distinction...between regarding a man’s life, actions or character from an aesthetic or technical point of view, and regarding them from a point of view which is concerned primarily with what it is for him to live that life and do those actions in that character” (Williams 1973: 236–37).
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O’Neill, W. (2022). The Ethics of Enchantment: Spirituality and Ecological Ethics. In: Sherma, R.D., Bilimoria, P. (eds) Religion and Sustainability: Interreligious Resources, Interdisciplinary Responses. Sustainable Development Goals Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79301-2_11
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