shared ethical principles. Yet often enough the principles themselves
are opposed. We may then try to reconcile opposing principles by
clarifying how we arrived at them. But since most of our principles
are cultural inheritances, discussions halt at a tolerant mutual
respect, even when we remain convinced that the other person is wrong.
What is needed is a method in ethics that can uncover the sources of
error. After all, even culturally inherited principles first occurred
to someone, and that someone may or may not have been biased. So there
is considerable merit to investigating the innate methods of our minds
and hearts by which we construe – and sometimes misconstrue – ethical
principles. The work of Bernard Lonergan can guide this investigation.
His opus covers methodological issues in the natural sciences, the
human sciences, historical scholarship, aesthetics, economics,
philosophy and theology. He begins with an invitation to consider in
ourselves what occurs when we come to knowledge. He then defines a
corresponding epistemological meaning of objectivity. From there he
lays out basic metaphysical categories applicable in the sciences.
Finally, he proposes a methodical framework for collaboration in
resolving basic differences in all these disciplines.
This review will begin by tracing the origins of Lonergan's approach.
Following that will be the four steps of a cognitional theory, an
epistemology, a metaphysics, and a methodology, particularly as they
apply to resolving differences in moral opinions and in ethical
principles. Finally, there will be a reexamination of several
fundamental categories in ethics.
1. Origins
Bernard Lonergan, a preeminent Canadian philosopher, theologian and
economist, (1904-1984) was the principal architect of what he named a
"generalized empirical method." Born in Buckingham, Quebec, Lonergan
received a typical Catholic education and eventually entered the
Society of Jesus (Jesuits), leading to his ordination to the
priesthood in 1936. He specialized in both theology and economics at
this time, having been deeply influenced by his doctoral work on
Thomas Aquinas and by his long-standing interest in the philosophy of
culture and history, honed by his reading of Hegel and Marx. In the
early 1950s, while teaching theology in Toronto, Lonergan wrote
Insight: A Study of Human Understanding – his groundbreaking
philosophical work. Then, in the early 70s, he published his equally
fundamental work, Method in Theology. Throughout his career, he
lectured and wrote on topics related to theology, philosophy, and
economics. The University of Toronto has undertaken the publication of
The Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan, for which 20 volumes are
projected.
Lonergan aimed to clarify what occurs in any discipline – science,
math, historiography, art, literature, philosophy, theology, or
ethics. The need for clarification about methods has been growing over
the last few centuries as the world has turned from static mentalities
and routines to the ongoing management of change. Modern languages,
modern architecture, modern art, modern science, modern education,
modern medicine, modern law, modern economics, the modern idea of
history and the modern idea of philosophy all are based on the notion
of ongoing creativity. Where older philosophies sought to understand
unchanging essentials, logic and law were the rule. With the emergence
of modernity, philosophies have turned to understanding the innate
methods of mind by which scientists and scholars discover what they do
not yet know and create what does not yet exist.
The success of the empirical methods of the natural sciences confirms
that the mind reaches knowledge by an ascent from data, through
hypothesis, to verification. To account for disciplines that deal with
humans as makers of meanings and values, Lonergan generalized the
notion of data to include the data of consciousness as well as the
data of sense. From that compound data, one may ascend through
hypothesis to verification of the operations by which humans deal with
what is meaningful and what is valuable. Hence, a "generalized
empirical method" (GEM).
Lonergan also referred to GEM as a critical realism. By realism, in
line with the Aristotelian and Thomist philosophies, he affirmed that
we make true judgments of fact and of value, and by critical, he aimed
to ground knowing and valuing in a critique of the mind similar to
that proposed by Kant.
GEM traces to their roots in consciousness the sources of the meanings
and values that constitute personality, social orders, and historical
developments. GEM also explores the many ways these meanings and
values are distorted, identifies the elements that contribute to
recovery, and proposes a framework for collaboration among disciplines
to overcome these distortions and promote better living together.
These explorations are conducted in the manner of personal
experiments. In Insight and Method in Theology, Lonergan leads readers
to discover what happens when they reach knowledge, evaluate options,
and make decisions. He expects that those who make these discoveries
about themselves reach an explicit knowledge of how anyone reaches
knowledge and values, how inquiries are guided by internal criteria,
and how therefore any inquiry may be called "objective." Such
objectivity implies structural parallels between the processes of
inquiry and the structures of what any inquirer, in any place or time,
can know and value. Lonergan proposes that these structures, in turn,
provide a personally verified clarification of the methods specific to
the natural and human sciences, historiography and hermeneutics,
economics, aesthetics, theology, ethics, and philosophy itself.
So there are four questions, as it were, that GEM proposes for anyone
seeking to ground the methods of any discipline. (1) A cognitional
theory asks, "What do I do when I know?" It encompasses what occurs in
our judgments of fact and value. (2) An epistemology asks, "Why is
doing that knowing?" It demonstrates how these occurrences may
appropriately be called "objective." (3) A metaphysics asks "What do I
know when I do it?" It identifies corresponding structures of the
realities we know and value. (4) A methodology asks, "What therefore
should we do?" It lays out a framework for collaboration, based on the
answers to the first three questions.
In the following sections, a review of how ethicists familiar with GEM
deal with each of these four questions will reveal dimensions that
directly affect one's method in ethics.
2. Cognitional Theory
GEM relies on a personal realization that we know in two different
manners – commonsense and theoretical. In both we experience insights,
which are acts of understanding. In the commonsense mode, we grasp how
things are related to ourselves because we are concerned about
practicalities, our interpersonal relations, and our social roles. In
the theoretical mode, we grasp how things are related to each other
because we want to understand the nature of things, such as the law of
gravity in physics or laws of repression in psychology. Theoretical
insights may not be immediately practical, but because they look at
the always and everywhere, their practicality encompasses any brand of
common sense with its preoccupation with the here and now.
The theoretical terms defined in GEM should not be confused with their
commonsense usage. To take a basic distinction, GEM defines morality
as the commonsense assessments and behaviors of everyday living and
ethics as the theoretical constructs that shape morality.
Each mode of knowing has its proper criteria, although not everyone
reputed to have either common sense or theoretical acumen can say what
these criteria are. A recurring theme throughout Lonergan's opus is
that the major impediment in theoretical pursuits is the assumption
that understanding must be something like picturing. For example,
mathematicians who blur understanding with picturing will find it
difficult to picture how 0.999… can be exactly 1.000…. Now most adults
understand that 1/3 = 0.333…, and that when you triple both sides of
this equation, you get exactly 1.000… and 0.999…. But only those who
understand that an insight is not an act of picturing but rather an
act of understanding will be comfortable with this explanation. Among
them are the physicists who understand what Einstein and Heisenberg
discovered about subatomic particles and macroastronomical events – it
is not by picturing that we know how they function but rather by
understanding the data.
Lonergan also notes that philosophers who blur the difference between
picturing and the theoretical modes of knowing will be confused about
objectivity. When it comes to understanding how the mind knows, they
typically picture a thinker in here and reality out there, and ask how
one gets from in here to out there – failing to notice that it is not
by any picture but by verifying one's understanding of data that the
thinker already knows that he or she really thinks.
GEM's goal of a theory of cognition, therefore, is not a set of
pictures. It is a set of insights into the data of cognitive
activities, followed by a personal verification of those insights. In
disciplines that study humans, GEM incorporates the moral dimension by
addressing how we know values that lead to moral decisions. So, in
GEM's model of the thinking and choosing person, consciousness has
four levels – experience of data, understanding the data, judgment
that one's understanding is correct, and decision to act on the
resulting knowledge. These are referred to as levels of
self-transcendence, meaning that they are the principal set of
operations by which we transcend the solitary self and deal with the
world beyond ourselves through our wonder and care.
GEM builds on these realizations by the further personal discovery of
certain innate norms at each of the four levels. On the level of
experience, our attention is prepatterned, shifting our focus, often
desultorily, among at least seven areas of interest – biological,
sexual, practical, dramatic, aesthetic, intellectual, and mystical. On
the level of understanding, our intellects pursue answers to questions
of why and how and what for, excluding irrelevant data and half-baked
ideas. On the level of judgment, our reason tests that our
understanding makes sense of experience. On the level of decision, our
consciences make value judgments and will bother us until we conform
our actions to these judgments. Lonergan names these four innate
norming processes "transcendental precepts." Briefly expressed, they
are: Be attentive, Be Intelligent, Be reasonable, and Be responsible.
But these expressions are not meant as formulated rules; they are
English words that point to the internal operating norms by which
anyone transcends himself or herself to live in reality. GEM uses the
term authenticity to refer to the quality in persons who follow these
norms.
Any particular rules or principles or priorities or criteria we
formulate about moral living stem ultimately from these unformulated,
but pressing internal criteria for better and worse. Whether our
formulations of moral stances are objectively good, honestly mistaken,
or malevolently distorted, there are no more fundamental criteria by
which we make moral judgments. Maxims, such as "Treat others as you
want to be treated," cannot be ultimately fundamental, since it is not
on any super-maxim that we selected this one. Nor do authorities
provide us with our ultimate values, since there is no super-authority
to name the authorities we ought to follow. Rather, we rely on the
normative criteria of being attentive, intelligent, reasonable and
responsible; howsoever they may have matured in us, by which we select
all maxims and authorities.
GEM includes many other elements in this analysis, including the roles
of belief and inherited values, the dynamics of feelings and our inner
symbolic worlds, the workings of bias, the rejection of true value in
favor of mere satisfaction, and the commitment to love rather than
hate.
3. Epistemology (Objectivity)
GEM may be characterized as a systems approach that correlates the
subject's operations of knowing and choosing to their corresponding
objects. Hence it understands objectivity as a correlation between the
subject's intentionality and the realities and values intended. A
subject's intention of objectivity functions as an ideal to be
continuously approached. That ideal may be defined as the totality of
correct judgments, supported by understanding, and verified in
experience. Because our knowledge and values are mostly inherited,
objectivity is the intended cumulative product of all successful
efforts to know what is truly so and appreciate what is truly good.
Clearly, we never know everything real or appreciate everything good.
But despite any shortfalls, this principal notion of objectivity – the
totality of correct judgments — remains the recurring desire and the
universal goal of anyone who wonders. In GEM's correlation-based,
theoretical definition, such objectivity is a progressively more
intelligent, reasonable and responsible worldview. Briefly put, an
objective worldview is the fruit of subjective authenticity.
Confusion about objectivity may be traced to confusion about knowing.
GEM proposes that any investigator who realizes that knowing is a
compound of experience, understanding, and judgment may also recognize
a persistent tendency to reduce objectivity to only one of these
components.
There is an experiential component of objectivity in the sheer
givenness of data. In commonsense discourse, we imagine that what we
experience through our five senses is really "out there." But we also
may refer to what we think is true or good as really "out there."
Unfortunately, such talk stifles curiosity about the criteria we use
to come to this knowledge. Knowing reality is easily reduced to a
mental look. Similarly, the notion of moral objectivity collapses into
a property of objects, detached from occurrences in subjects, so that
we deem certain acts or people as "objectively evil" or "objectively
good," where "objectively" means "out there for anyone to see." This
naiveté about objectivity condenses the criteria regarding the
morality of an act to what we picture, overlooking the meanings that
the actors attach to the act.
Beyond this experiential component, which bows to the data as
"objectively" given, there is a normative component, which bows to the
inner norming processes to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and
responsible. When we let these norms have their way, we raise relevant
questions, assemble a coherent set of insights, avoid rash judgments,
and test whether our ideas make sense of the data. This normative
component is not a property of objects; it is a property of subjects.
We speak of it when we say, "You're not being objective" or
"Objectively speaking, I say…." It guards us against wishful thinking
and against politicizing what should be an impartial inquiry. Still,
while this view incorporates the subject in moral assessments, some
philosophers tend to collapse other aspects of objectivity into this
subjective normativity. For them, thorough analysis, strict logic, and
internal coherence are sufficient for objectivity. They propose their
structural analyses not as hypotheses that may help us understand
concrete experience correctly but as complete explanations of concrete
realities. The morality of an act is determined by its coherence with
implacable theory, suppressing further questions about actual cases
that fall outside their conceptual schemes.
Beyond the experiential and normative components of objectivity, there
is an absolute component, by which all inquiry bows to reality as it
is. The absolute component lies in our intention to affirm what is
true or good independent of the fact that we happen to affirm it. It
is precisely what is absent when what we affirm as real or good is not
real or good. The absolute component lies neither in the object alone
nor the subject alone but in a linking of the two. It exists when the
subject's normative operations correctly confirm that the given
experiential data meet all the conditions to make the judgment that X
is so or Y is good. As a correlation between objective data and
subjective acts, it corresponds to Aristotle's understanding of truth
as a relation between what we affirm and what really is so. Moralists
who collapse knowing into judgment alone typically overlook the
conditions set by experience and understanding that make most moral
judgments provisional. The result is the dogmatist, out of touch with
experience and incapable of inviting others to reach moral judgments
by appeal to their understanding.
4. Metaphysics
In popular use, metaphysics suggests a cloud of speculations about
invisible forces on our lives. Among philosophers, metaphysics is the
science that identifies the basic concepts about the structures of
reality. GEM not only identifies basic concepts, but also traces them
to their sources in the subject. Thus, concepts issue from insights,
and insights issue from questions, and questions have birthdates,
parented by answers to previous generations of questions. Moreover,
the so-called raw data are already shaped by the questions that occur
to an inquirer. These questions, in turn, contain clues to their
answers insofar as the insight we expect is related to the kind of
judgment we expect. It could be a logical conclusion, a judgment of
fact, a judgment that an explanation is correct, or a judgment of
value.
Because these complexities of human wonder are part of reality, GEM's
metaphysics encompasses the relationship between the processes that
guide our wonder and the realities we wonder about. The assumption is
that when they operate successfully, the processes of wonder form an
integrated set isomorphic to the integral dimensions of reality. For
example, the scientific movement from data to hypothesis to
verification corresponds to Lonergan's view that knowing moves from
experience to understanding to judgment, as well as to Aristotle's
view that reality consists of potency, form, and act. In GEM, then,
metaphysics comprises both the processes of knowing and the
corresponding features of anything that can be known.
This metaphysics is latent but operative before it is conceptualized
and named. People who consistently tackle the right question and
sidestep the wrong ones already possess latent abilities to discern
some structured features of the object of their inquiry. With moral
questions, their heuristic anticipations show up as seemingly innate
strategies: Don't chisel your moral principles in stone. Consider
historical circumstances. A bright idea is not necessarily a right
idea. And so forth.
Eventually, these canny men and women may conceptualize and name their
latent metaphysics. Should they ask themselves how they ever learned
to discern the difference between good thinking and bad thinking, they
may look beneath what they think about and wonder how their thinking
works. They may realize what GEM takes as fundamental: Any philosophy
will rest upon the operative methods of cognitional activity, either
as correctly conceived or as distorted by oversights and mistaken
orientations. Then, insofar as they correctly understand their
cognitional activity, they may begin to make their latent metaphysics
explicit.
In the remainder of this article, some of Lonergan's metaphysical
terms particularly relevant to ethics are highlighted in bold face.
When we expect to understand anything, our insights fall into two
classes. We can understand things as they currently function, or we
can understand things as they develop over time. Regarding things as
they currently function, we may notice that we have both direct
insights and "inverse" insights. These correspond to two different
kinds of intelligibilities that may govern what we aim to understand.
Lonergan's use of "intelligibility" here corresponds to what Aristotle
referred to as "form" and what modern science calls "the nature of."
A classical intelligibility (corresponding to the "classical"
scientific insights of Galileo, Newton and Bacon) is grasped by a
direct insight into functional correlations among elements. We
understand the phases of the moon, falling bodies, pushing a chair –
any events that result necessarily from prior events, other things
being equal. A statistical intelligibility is grasped by an inverse
insight that there is no direct insight available. But while we often
understand that many events cannot be functionally related to each
other, we also may understand that an entire set of such events within
a specific time and place will cluster about some average. For if any
subset of events we consider random varies regularly from this
average, we will look for regulating factors in this subset, governed
by a classical intelligibility to be grasped through a direct insight.
Statistical intelligibility, then, does not regard events resulting
necessarily from prior events. It regards sets of events, in place P
during time T, resulting under probability from multiple and shifting
events.
This distinction affects moral appeals to a "natural law." For
example, those who hold that artificial birth control is morally wrong
typically appeal to a direct, functional relationship between
intercourse and conception. However, the nature of this relationship
is not one conception per intercourse but the probability of one
conception for many acts of intercourse – a relationship of
statistical intelligibility. If this is the nature of births, then the
natural law allows that each single act of intercourse need not be
open to conception.
Regarding things as they develop over time, there are two basic kinds
of development, again based on the distinction between direct and
inverse insights.
A genetic intelligibility is grasped by a direct insight into some
single driving factor that keeps the development moving through
developmental phases, such as found in developmental models of stars,
plants, human intelligence, and human morality. A dialectical
intelligibility is grasped by an inverse insight that there is no
single driving factor that keeps the development moving. Instead,
there are at least two driving factors that modify each other while
simultaneously modifying the developing entity.
These anticipations are key to understanding moral developments.
Inquiry into a general pattern of moral development will anticipate a
straight-line, genetic unfolding of a series of stages. Inquiry into a
specific, actual moral development will anticipate a dialectical
unfolding wherein the drivers of development modify each other at
every stage, whether improving or worsening.
a. Genetic Intelligibility
Genetic intelligibility is what we expect to grasp when we ask how new
things emerge out of old. In this perspective, the metaphysical notion
of potency takes on a particularly important meaning for ethics.
Potency covers all the possibilities latent in given realities to
become intelligible elements of higher systems. What distinguishes
creative thinkers is not just their habit of finding uses in things
others find useless. They expect that nature brings about improvements
even without their help as, for example, when floating clouds of
interstellar dust congeal into circulating planets or when damaged
brains develop alternate circuits around scar tissue.
In this universe characterized by the potency for successive higher
systems, the field of ethics extends to anything we can know. Hence,
the "goodness" of the universe lies partly in its potentials for more
intelligible organization. Human concern is an instance, indeed a most
privileged instance, of a burgeoning universe. A sense of this kind of
finality commands respect for whatever naturally comes to be even if
no immediate uses come to mind.
An ethics whose field covers universal potentials will trace how
morality is about allowing better. It means allowing not only the
potentials of nature to reveal themselves but also a maximum freedom
to the innate human imperative to do better. It means thinking of any
moral option as essentially a choice between preventing and allowing
the exercise of a pure desire for the better. Thus, the work of moral
living is largely preventive – preventing our neurotic fixations or
egotism from narrowing our horizons, preventing our loyalties from
suppressing independent thinking, or preventing our mental impatience
from abandoning the difficult path toward complete understanding. The
rest feels less like work and more like allowing a natural exuberance
to a moral creativity whose range has not been artificially narrowed
by bias.
In contrast, a commonsense view of the universe imagines only the
dimensions studied by physicists. The rule is simple: Any X either
does or does not exist. Without this rule, scientists could never
build up knowledge of what is and what is not. However, in cases like
ourselves, where the universal potency for higher forms has produced
responsible consciousness, this rule does not cover all possibilities.
We also make the value judgments that some Xs should or should not
exist. To recognize that the universe produces normative acts of
consciousness is to recognize that the universe is more than a massive
factual conglomeration. It is a self-organizing, dynamic and improving
entity. Its moral character emerges most clearly with us, in raising
moral objections when things get worse, in anticipating that any
existing thing may potentially be part of something better, and,
sadly, in acting against our better judgment.
Another key metaphysical element within the dynamism of reality toward
fuller being is the notion of development. GEM rejects the mechanist
view that counts on physics alone to explain the appearance of any new
thing. It also rejects the vitalist view that pictures a wondrous life
force driving everything from atoms, molecules, and cells, to psyches,
minds and hearts. The reality of development, particularly moral
development, involves a historical sequence of notions about better
and worse. We inherit moral standards, subtract what we think is
nonsense and add what we think makes sense. Our inheritance is
likewise a sum of our previous generation's inheritance, what they
subtracted from it and added to it. Any moral tradition is essentially
a sequence of moral standards, each linked to the past by an impure
inheritance and to the future by the bits added and subtracted by a
present generation.
Not every tradition is a morally progressing sequence, of course, but
those that make progress alternate between securing past gains and
opening the door to future improvements. GEM names the routines that
secure gains a higher system as integrator. It names the routines
within the emerged system that open the door to a better system a
higher system as operator. Within a developing moral tradition, value
judgments perform the integrator functions, while value questions
perform the operator functions. The integrating power of value
judgments will be directly proportional to the absence of operator
functions — specifically, any further relevant value questions. So we
regard some values as rock solid because no one has raised any
significant questions about them. Value judgments that are provisional
will function as limited integrators – limited, to be exact, to the
extent that lingering value questions function as operators,
scrutinizing value judgments for factual errors, misconceived
theories, or bias in the investigator.
Feelings may function as either operators or integrators. As
operators, they represent our initial response to possible values,
moving us to pose value questions. As integrators they settle us in
our value judgments as our psyches link our affects to an image of the
valued object. Lonergan names this linkage of affect and image a
symbol. (This is a term that identifies an event in consciousness; it
is not to be confused with the visible flags and icons we also call
"symbols.") The concrete, functioning symbols that suffuse our psyches
can serve as integrator systems for how we view our social
institutions, various classes of people, and our natural environment,
making it easy for us to respond smoothly without having to reassess
everything at every moment. Symbols can also serve as operators
insofar as the affect-image pair may disturb our consciousness,
alerting us to danger or confusion, and prompting the questions we
pose about values.
Although the operators that improve a community's tradition involve
the questions that occur to its members, not all questions function as
operators. Some value questions are poorly expressed, even to
ourselves. We experience disturbing symbols, but have yet to pose a
value question in a way that actually results in a positive change.
Some value questions are posed by biased investigators, which degrade
a community's moral heritage. Only those individuals who pose the
questions that actually add values or remove disvalues will function
as operators in an improving tradition. What makes any tradition
improve, then, is neither the number of cultural institutions, nor
governmental support of the arts, nor legal protections for freedom of
thought, nor freedom of religion. These support the operators, and
need to be regulated as such. But the operators themselves are the
questions raised by the men and women who put true values above mere
satisfactions.
The same alternating dynamic is evident in the moral development of an
individual. While psychotherapists expect that an individual's age is
not a reliable measure of moral maturity, those who understand
development as an alternation of operators and integrators may pose
their questions about a patient's maturity much more precisely: How
successfully did this person meet the sequence of operator questions
at turning points in his or her life? And what are the resultant
integrator symbols guiding this person today? Similarly, in theories
of individual development, what counts is what the operators may be at
any stage. Where some theorists only describe the various stages, GEM
looks for an account of a prior stage as integrator that connects
directly to the operator questions to which an emerging stage is an
answer.
b. Dialectical Intelligibility
The foregoing genetic model of development gives a gross view of
stages and a first approximation to actual development. But actual
development is the bigger story. Who we are is a unique weaving of the
mutual impacts of external challenges and our internal decisions. So
we come to the kind of intelligibility that accounts for concrete
historical growth or decline – dialectical intelligibility. We expect
this kind of understanding when we anticipate a tension among drivers
of development and changes in these very drivers, depending on the
path that the actual development takes.
Friendship, for example, has been compared to a garden that needs
tending, but the analogy is misleading. What we understand about
gardens falls under genetic intelligibility. Seeds will produce their
respective vegetables, fruits or flowers; all we do is provide the
nutrients. In a friendship, however, each partner is changed with each
compromise, accommodation, resistance or refusal. So the inner dynamic
of any friendship is a concrete unfolding of two personalities, each
linked to the other yet able to oppose the other.
A community, too, is a dialectical reality. Its members' perceptions,
their patterns of behavior, their ways of collaborating and disputing,
and all their shared purposes are the concrete result of three linked
but opposed principles: their spontaneous intersubjectivity, their
practical intelligence, and their values.
Spontaneous Intersubjectivity: Our spontaneous needs and wants
constitute the primitive, intersubjective dimensions of community. We
nest; we take to our kind; we share the unreflective social routines
of the birds and bees, seeking one particular good after another.
Practical Intelligence: We also get insights into how to meet our
needs and wants more efficiently. We design our houses to fit our
circumstances and pay others to build them. In exchange, others pay us
to make their bread, drive them to work, or care for their sick. Here
is where the intelligent dimensions of a community emerge, comprising
all the linguistic, technological, economic, political and social
systems springing from human insight that constitute a society.
Values: Where practical intelligence sets up what a community does,
values ground why they do it. Here is where the moral dimensions of
community emerge – the shoulds and should-nots conveyed in laws,
agreements, education, art, public opinion and moral standards. They
embody all the commitments and priorities that constitute a culture.
These three principles are linked. Spontaneously, we pursue the
particular goods that we need or want. Intellectually, we discover the
technical, economic, political and social means to ensure the
continuing flow of these particular goods, and we adapt our personal
skills and habits to work within these systems. Morally, we decide
whether the particular goods and the systems that deliver them
actually improve our lives. Yet the principles are forever opposed.
Insight often suppresses the urges of passion, while passion unmoored
from insight would carry us along its undertow. Conscience, meanwhile,
passes judgment on both our choices of particular goods and the
systems we set up to keep them coming.
A dialectical anticipation regards a community as a moving, concrete
resultant of the mutual conditioning of these three principles. When
spontaneous intersubjectivity dominates a community, its members'
intellects are deformed by animal passion. When practical intelligence
ignores spontaneous intersubjectivity, a society becomes stratified
into an elite with its grand plans and a proletariat living from hand
to mouth. Where members prefer mere satisfactions over values,
intelligences are biased, and deeper human needs for authenticity are
ignored. In any case, communities move, pushed and pulled by these
principles, now converging toward, now diverting away from genuine
progress.
c. Radical Unintelligibility
The idea of development implies a lack of intelligibility, namely, the
intelligibility yet to be realized. Likewise, there is a lack of
intelligibility in the distorted socio-cultural institutions and
self-defeating personal habits that pose the everyday problems
confronting us. Yet even these are intelligibly related to the events
that created them.
What lacks intelligibility it itself, however, is the refusal to make
a decision that one deems one ought to make. GEM follows the Christian
tradition of the apostle Paul, of Augustine, and of Aquinas in
recognizing the phenomenon that we can act against our better
judgment. This tradition is aware that much wrongdoing results from
coercion, or conditioning, or invincible ignorance, but it asserts
nonetheless that we can refuse to choose what we know is worth
choosing. Lonergan refers to these events as "basic sin" to
distinguish them from the effects of such refusals on one's
socio-cultural institutions and personal habits. Their
unintelligibility is radical, in the sense that a deliberate refusal
to obey a dictate of one's deliberation cannot be explained, even if,
as often happens, later deliberation dictates something else. It is
radical also in the etymological sense of a root that branches into
the actions, habits and institutions that we consider "bad."
5. Methodology
Different media subdivide ethics in different ways. News media divide
it according to the positions people take on moral issues. Many
college textbooks divide it into three related disciplines: metaethics
(methods), normative ethics (principles), and applied ethics (case
studies). This division implies that we first settle issues of method,
then establish general moral principles, and finally apply those
principles straightaway into practice. GEM proposes that moral
development is not the straight line of genetic development nourished
solely by principles but rather a dialectical interplay of spontaneous
intersubjectivity, practical intelligence, and values. So, instead of
a deductive, three-step division of moral process, GEM expects moral
reflection to spiral forward inductively, assessing new situations
with new selves at every turn. The question then becomes how ethicists
might collaborate in wending the way into the future.
In his Method in Theology, Lonergan grouped the processes by which
theology reflects on religion into eight specializations, each with
functional relationships to the other seven. As illustrated in the
chart below, the four levels of human self-transcendence – being
attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible – function in the
two phases of understanding the past and planning for the future.
Thus, we learn about the past by moving upward through research,
interpretation, history, and a dialectical evaluation. We move into
the future by moving downward through foundational commitments, basic
doctrines, systematic organizations of doctrines, and communication of
the resulting meanings and values. Our future slips into our past soon
enough, and the process continues, turn after turn, reversing or
advancing the forces of decline, meeting ever new challenges or
buckling under the current ones.
While Lonergan presented this view primarily to meet problems in
theology, he extended the notion of functional specialties to ethics,
historiography and the human sciences by associating doctrines,
systematics, and communications with policies, plans and
implementations, respectively. These eight functional specialties are
not distinct professions or separate university departments. They
represent Lonergan's grouping of the operations of mind and heart by
which we actually do better. That is, he is not suggesting a recipe
for better living; he is proposing a theoretical explanation of how
the mind and heart work whenever we actually improve life, along with
a proposal for collaboration in light of this explanation.
lonergan-fig
The bottom three rows of functions will be initially familiar to
anyone involved in practically any enterprise. The top row of
functions is less familiar, but it represents Lonergan's clarification
of the evaluative moments that occur in any collaboration that
improves human living.
The functional specialty dialectic occurs when investigators
explicitly sort out and evaluate the basic elements in any human
situation. They evaluate the data of research, the explanations of
interpreters, and the accounts of historians. To ensure that all the
relevant questions are met, they bring together different people with
different evaluations with a view to clarifying and resolving any
differences that may appear.
From a GEM perspective, the most radical differences result from the
presence or absence of conversion. Three principal types have been
identified. There is an intellectual conversion by which a person has
personally met the challenges of a cognitional theory, an
epistemology, a metaphysics, and a methodology. There is a moral
conversion by which a person is committed to values above mere
satisfactions. And there is an affective conversion by which a person
relies on the love of neighbor, community, and God to heal bias and
prioritize values.
By attending to these radical differences, GEM rejects the typical
liberal assumption that (1) people always lie, cheat and steal; (2)
realistically, nothing can be done about these moral shortcomings; and
(3) social institutions can do no more than balance conflicting
interests. This assumption constricts moral vision to a pragmatism
that may look promising in the short run but fails to deal with the
roots of moral shortcomings in the long run. Dialectic occurs when
investigators explicitly deal with each other's intellectual, moral
and affective norms, under the assumption that converted horizons are
objectively better than unconverted horizons.
The functional specialty foundations occurs when investigators make
their commitments and make them explicit. Relying on the evaluations
and mutual encounters that occur in the specialty, dialectic,
investigators deliberately select the horizons and commitments upon
which they base any proposed improvements. These foundations are
expressed in explanatory categories insofar as investigators make
explicit their latent metaphysics and the horizons opened by their
intellectual, moral and affective conversions.
Regarding ethics, investigators use a number of categories to
formulate ethical systems, to track developments, to propose moral
standards, and to express specific positions on issues. By way of
illustration below, there are six sets of categories that seem
particularly important: (1) action, concepts and method, (2) good and
bad, (3) better and worse, (4) authority and power, (5) principles and
people, and (6) duties and rights.
While commonsense discourse uses these terms descriptively, GEM's
theoretical approach defines them as correlations between subjective
operations and their objective correlatives. An ethics based on GEM
assumes that if science is to take seriously the data of
consciousness, then it is necessary to deal explicitly with the
normative elements that make consciousness moral. Because these
subjective operations include moral norms and because their objective
correlatives involve concrete values, the categories will not be
empirically indifferent. Their power to support explanations of moral
situations and proposals will derive from normative elements in their
definitions, which, in turn are openly grounded in the innate norms to
be attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible.
6. Categories
a. Action, Concepts, and Method
Interest in method may be considered as a third plateau in humanity's
progressive enlargement of what has become meaningful.
* A first plateau regards action. What is meaningful is
practicality, technique, and palpable results.
* A second plateau regards concepts. What counts are the language,
the logic, and the conceptual systems that give a higher and more
permanent control over action.
* The third plateau regards method. As modern disciplines shift
from fixed conceptual systems to the ongoing management of change, the
success of any conceptual system depends on a higher control over its
respective methods.
Morality initially regards action, but it has expanded into a variety
of conceptual systems under the heading of ethics. It is these
systems, and their associated categories, which are the focus of the
third-plateau methodological critique. On the third plateau, concepts
lose their rigidity. As long as investigators are explicit about their
cognitional theory, epistemology and metaphysics, they will
continually refine or replace concepts developed in previous
historical contexts.
Although the second plateau emerged from the first and the third is
currently emerging from the second, GEM anticipates that any
investigator today may be at home with action only, with both action
and concepts, or with action, concepts, and method. The effort of
foundations is for investigators to include all three plateaus in
their investigations. The effort of dialectic is to invite all dialog
partners to do the same.
b. Good and Bad
Where second-plateau minds would typically name things good or bad
insofar as they fall under preconceived concepts such as heroism or
murder, liberation or oppression, philanthropy or robbery,
third-plateau minds look to concrete assessments of situations. To
ensure that this assessment is sufficiently grounded in theory, GEM
requires an understanding of certain correlations between intentional
acts and their objects. This requires more than a notional assent to
concepts; it requires personally verified insight into what minds and
hearts intend and how they intend it.
The relevant correlations that constitute anything called bad or good
may be viewed according to the three levels of intentionality that
dialectically shape any community. (1) Spontaneously, our interests,
actions and passions intend particular goods. (2) Intelligently and
reasonably, our insights and judgments intend the vast, interlocking
set of systems that give us these particular goods regularly. (3)
Responsibly and affectively, our decisions and loves intend what is
truly worthwhile among these particular goods and the systems that
deliver them.
In authentic persons, affectivity and responsibility shape reasonable
and intelligent operations, which in turn govern otherwise spontaneous
interests, actions and passions. This hierarchy in intentionality
correlates with a priority of cultural values over social systems, and
social systems over the ongoing particular activities of a populace.
Thus, GEM regards human intelligence and reason as at the service of
moral and affective orientations. This turns upside down the view of
"materialistic" economic and educational institutions that dedicate
intelligence and reason to serving merely spontaneous interests,
actions, and passions.
At the same time, moral and affective orientations rely on intelligent
and reasonable analyses of situations to produce moral precepts – an
approach that contrasts with ethics that look chiefly to virtue and
good will for practical guidance. Lonergan demonstrated how
intelligent and reasonable analyses produce moral precepts in his
works on the economy (Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation
Analysis) and on marriage ("Finality, Love, Marriage").
So GEM regards the concepts of good and bad as useful for expressing
moral conclusions, provide they are rooted in intelligent analysis,
dialectical encounter, and personal conversion. GEM relies on
dialectical encounter to expose the oversights when "good" and "bad"
are used to categorize actions in the abstract.
c. Better and Worse
The complexities of one's situation involve not only its history, but
the views of history embraced by its participants. Darwinian, Hegelian
and Marxist views of history are largely genetic, insofar as they
support the liberal thesis that life automatically improves, and that
wars, disease, and economic crashes are necessary steps in the forward
march of history. GEM declares an end to this age of scientific
innocence. It regards this thesis of progress as simply a first of
three successively more thorough approximations toward a full
understanding of actual situations. A second approximation takes in
the working of bias and the resulting dynamics of historical decline.
A third approximation takes in the factors of recovery by which bias
and its objective disasters may be reversed.
First Approximation: What drives progress. We experience a situation
and feel the impulse to improve it. We spot what's missing, or some
overlooked potentials. We express our insight to others, getting their
validation or refinement. We make a plan and put it into effect. The
situation improves, bringing us back to feeling yet further impulses
to improve things. The odds of spotting new opportunities grow as,
with each turn of the cycle, more and more of what doesn't make sense
is replaced by what does. Such is the nature of situations that
improve.
Second Approximation: What drives decline. Again, we experience a
situation and an impulse to improve it. But we do not, or will not,
spot what's missing. We express our oversight to others, making it out
to be an insight. If they lack any critical eye, they take us at our
word rather than notice our oversight. We make a plan, put it into
effect, and discover later the inevitable worsening of the situation.
Now the odds of spotting ways to improve things decrease, owing to the
additional complexity and cross-purposes of the anomalies. With each
turn of the cycle, less and less makes sense. Such is the nature of
situations that worsen.
Lonergan proposed that such oversights might be rooted in any of four
biases endemic to consciousness: (1) Neurosis resists insight into
one's psyche. (2) Egoism resists insight into what benefits others.
(3) Loyalism resists insights into the good of other groups. (4)
Anti-intellectualism resists insights that require any thorough
investigation, theory-based analyses, long-range planning, and broad
implementation. In each type, one's intelligence is selectively
suppressed and one's self-image is supported by positive affects that
reinforce the bias and by negative affects toward threats to the bias.
Third Approximation: What drives recovery. GEM offers an analysis of
love to show how it functions to reverse the dynamics of decline.
* Love liberates the subject to see values: Some values result not
from logical analyses of pros and cons but rather from being in love.
Love impels friends of the neurotic and egoist to draw them out of
their self-concern, freeing their intelligence to consider the value
of more objective solutions. Love of humanity frees loyalists to
regard other groups with the same intelligence, reason and
responsibility as they do their own. Love of humanity frees the
celebrated person of common sense to appreciate the more comprehensive
viewpoints of critical history, science, philosophy and theology. Love
of a transcendent, unreservedly loving God frees a person from
blinding hatred, greed and power mongering, liberating him or her to a
divinely shared commitment to what is unreservedly intelligible,
reasonable, responsible and loving.
* Love brings hope: There is a power in the human drama by which
we cling to some values no matter how often our efforts are
frustrated. Our hopes may be dashed, but we still hope. This hope is a
desire rendered confident by love. Those who are committed to
self-transcendence trust their love to strengthen their resolve, not
only to act against the radical unintelligibility of basic sin, but
also to yield their personal advantage for the sake of the common
good. Such love-based hope works directly against biased positive
self-images as well as negative images of fate that give despair the
last word. To feel confident about the order we hope for, we do not
look to theories or logic. We rely on the symbols that link our
imagination and affectivity. These inner symbols are secured through
the external media of aesthetics, ritual, and liturgy.
* Love opposes revenge: There is an impulse in us to take an eye
for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. While any adolescent can see that
this strategy cannot be the foundation of a civil society, it is
difficult to withhold vengeance on those who harm us. It is the nature
of love, however, to resist hurting others and to transcend vengeance.
It is because of such transcendent love that we move beyond revenge to
forgiveness and beyond forgiveness to collaboration.
GEM's perspective on moral recovery aims to help historians and
planners understand how any situation gets better or worse. It helps
historians locate the causes of problems in biases as opposed to
merely deploring the obvious results. It helps planners propose
solutions based on the actual drivers of progress and recovery, as
opposed to mere cosmetic changes.
d. Authority and Power
Common sense typically thinks of authority as the people in power. GEM
roots the meaning of authority in the normative functions of
consciousness and defines the expression of authority in terms of
legitimate power.
An initial meaning of power is physical, and physical power is
multiplied by collaboration. But in the world of social institutions,
a normative meaning of power emerges – the power produced by insights
and value judgments. Insights are expressed in words; words raise
questions of value; judgments of value lead to decisions; decisions
result in cooperation; and this kind of cooperation vastly reduces the
physical power needed while achieving vastly better results. The
social power of a community grows as it consolidates the gains of the
past, restricts behaviors that would diminish the community's
effectiveness, organizes labors for specific tasks, and spells out
moral guidelines for the future. As normative, the memory and
commitments involved in this heritage constitute a community's "word
of authority."
The community appoints "authorities" to implement these tasks.
Authorities are the spokespersons, delegates, and caretakers of a
community's spiritual and material assets. Winning the vote does not
confer an authority upon them; it confers a responsibility upon them
to speak and embody the community's word of authority. The honor owed
to them by titles and ceremony does not derive from any virtue of
their persons but rather from the honorable heritage and common
purpose with which they have been entrusted.
While the community's social power resides in its ways and means, not
all its ways and means are legitimate. A community's heritage is a
mixed bag of sense and nonsense. To the extent that authorities lack
the authenticity of being attentive, intelligent, reasonable and
responsible, their power to build up is diminished. Even if everyone
does what they say, inauthentic authorities will be blind to the
higher viewpoints and better ideas needed to stave off chaos and seize
opportunities for improving life together. Their power is justifiably
called naked because it is stripped of the intelligent, reasonable,
and responsible contributions their subjects are quite capable of
making. Similarly, to the extent that the subjects lack authenticity,
they will cripple their own creativity, which otherwise would foresee
problems, overcome obstacles, and open new lines of development. At
the extremes, a noble leader of egotistical followers has no more
effective power than an egotistical leader of noble followers. Between
these extremes, the typical dynamic is an ongoing dialectic between an
incomplete authenticity of the community and an incomplete
authenticity of its authorities.
In this concrete perspective, GEM defines authority as power
legitimated by authenticity. That is, authority is that portion of a
heritage produced by attention, intelligence, reason, and
responsibility. As only a portion of a heritage, authority is a
dialectical reality, to be worked out in mutual encounter, rather than
a dictatorial iron law (a classical reality), an anarchical or
libertarian social order (a statistical reality), or a natural,
evolutionary dynasty (a genetic reality).
This definition of authority as the power legitimated by authenticity
offers historians defensible explanations for their distinctions
between legitimate and illegitimate exercises of power within a
historical period. It offers policymakers the normative categories
they need to explain to their constituents the reasons for proposed
changes in the community's constitution, laws, and sanctions. It
reminds authorities that they have been entrusted with the maintenance
and refinement of a heritage created by the community.
e. Principles and People
A commonsense use of "moral principles" usually means any set of
conceptualized standards, such as, "The punishment should fit the
crime" or "First, do no harm."
When ethicists consider how moral principles should be used,
disagreements arise. Some scorn them because principles are only
abstract generalizations that do not apply in concrete situations.
When we try to apply them, disputes arise about the meaning of terms
such as "crime" or "harm." Particular cases always require further
value judgments on the relative importance of mitigating factors,
which generalizations omit. What counts is a thorough assessment of
the concrete situation, which will result in an intuition of what
seems best.
Others reject such situation-based ethics because people have
different intuitions about what seems best in particular situations.
What is needed is a general principle that supports the common good.
Moreover, history proves that formulated principles are good things.
Because they represent wisdom gained by others who met threats to
their well being, to neglect them is to unknowingly expose oneself to
the same threats. We codify principles in our laws, appeal to them in
our debates, and teach them to our children. For children in
particular, and for adults whose moral intelligence has not matured,
principles are firm anchors in a stormy sea.
GEM regards principles as concepts that need the critique of a
third-plateau reflection on the methods used to develop them. They are
not really principles in the sense of starting points. That is, they
are not the source of normative demands. The actual sources of
normative demands are self-transcending people being attentive,
intelligent, reasonable, and responsible. Formulated principles are
the products of people shaped by an ambiguous heritage, exposed to a
dialectic of opinions, and directed by personal commitments within
intellectual, moral and affective horizons. These horizons may
complement each other; they may develop from earlier stages; or they
may be dialectically opposed, as when people who mouth the same
principles attach opposite meanings to them, or when people espouse
the principle but act otherwise.
GEM grants no exception for moral principles proposed by religions. A
religious revelation is considered neither a delivery from the sky of
inscribed tablets nor a dictation heard from unseen divinities. In its
data of consciousness perspective, GEM considers revelation as a
person's judgment of value regarding known proposals, whether
inscribed or spoken or imagined. Its religious sanction is based on a
person's claim that this judgment is prompted by a transcendent love
from a transcendent source in his or her heart.
Those who formulate specific moral principles need to understand that
there are distinct methodological issues associated with each of the
eight specialties that form a group in consciousness. This
understanding begins with men and women who think about their
intellectual, moral and affective commitments in explanatory
categories (foundations). It is first expressed in these categories as
judgments of fact or value (doctrines/policies). It expands through
understanding the relationships these principles have with other
principles (systematics/planning). It becomes effective thorough
adaptations that take into account the current worldview of a
community, the media used, and the values implicit in the community's
language (communications/implementation). These adaptations become
data (research) for further understanding (interpretation) within
historical contexts (history) to be evaluated (dialectic.)
GEM's strategy for resolving differences among principles is to
exercise the functional specialty dialectic to reveal their true
source. Investigators evaluate not only the historical accounts of how
any principle arose, but also the principle itself. GEM proposes that
where investigators overcome disagreements, the parties have lain open
their basic horizons, particularly the intellectual, moral and
affective horizons that reveal the radical grounds of disagreements
and agreements. In this mutual encounter, people concerned about
morality are already familiar with normative elements in their
consciousness and may only lack the insights and language to make them
intelligible parts of how they present their views. The strategy is
not to prove one's principle or disprove another's but to tap one
another's experience of a desire for authenticity. GEM counts on the
probability that those people with more effective intellectual, moral
and affective horizons will, by laying bare the roots of any
differences, attract and guide those whose horizons are less
effective.
Besides people who appreciate authenticity, there are people who crave
its opposite, as the history of hatred amply demonstrates. If GEM has
accurately identified the dialectic of decline as driven by an
increasingly degraded authenticity, with its increasingly narrow and
unconnected solutions to problems, then the reversal of moral evil
must appeal to any remnants of authenticity in the hater. The appeal
involves enlargements of horizons at many levels. For communities of
hatred, this enlargement will require moving from legends about their
heritage to a critical history, revising the rhetoric and rituals that
secure commitment, and rewriting their laws. At the same time, there
is also an enlargement to be expected of the communities who seek to
convert communities of hatred. This is because more comprehensive
political protocols and moral standards will be required to achieve a
yet higher integration of those portions of both heritages that
resulted from authenticity.
f. Duties and Rights
In the perspective of GEM, the elemental meaning of duty is found in
the originating set of "oughts" in the impulses to be attentive,
intelligent, reasonable, and responsible, plus the overriding "ought"
to maintain consistency between what one knows and how one acts. The
oughts issued by conscience not only provide all the norms expressed
in written rules, but also issue far more commands and prohibitions
than parents, police, and public policy ever could. It is this inner
duty that enables one to break from a minor authenticity that obeys
the written rule and to exercise a major authenticity that may expose
a written rule as illegitimate.
At first glance, the GEM view of morality may appear sympathetic to
"deontological" theories that base all moral obligation on duty rather
than consequences. While it is true that GEM traces all specific
obligations to an underlying, universal duty, it goes deeper than
concept-based maxims by identifying the dynamic originating duty in
every person to be attentive, intelligent, reasonable and responsible.
By tracing the source of any maxims about duty to their historical
origins, GEM leaves open the possibility that new historical
circumstances may require new maxims.
Moreover, insofar as any formulations of duty are consequences of past
historical situations, and as new formulations will be consequences of
new situations, GEM supports the consideration of consequences in
ethical theory. What this approach adds, however, is the requirement
that all consequences pass under the scrutiny of dialectic, which aims
to filter merely satisfying consequences from the truly valuable, and
to consider how specific consequences contribute to historical
progress, decline, or recovery. These consequences include not only
changes in observable behaviors and social standards but also any
shifts in the intellectual, moral and affective horizons of a
community.
As adults juggle their customary duties to social norms and their
originating duty to be authentic, many discover that the best parts of
these social norms arose from the authenticity of forebears. With this
discovery comes a recognition of a present duty to preserve those
portions of one's heritage based on authenticity, to critique those
portions based on bias, and to create the social and economic
institutions that facilitate authenticity.
Lonergan depicted such preservation, critique, and creativity as an
ongoing experiment of history. The success of the race, and of any
particular peoples, depends on collaborative efforts to conduct this
experiment rather than serve as its guinea pigs. Collaboration, in
turn, requires authenticity of all collaborators.
Any collaboration that successfully makes life more intelligible will
require a freedom to speak one's mind, to associate, to maintain one's
health, and to be educated. The notion of human rights, therefore, is
a derivative of this intelligibility intrinsic to nourishing a
heritage. While "rights" usually appear as one-way demands by one
party upon others, their essential meaning is that they are
expressions of the mutual demands intrinsic to any collaborative
process aimed at improving life. Any individual's claim in the name of
rights is essentially an assumption that others will honor his or her
duty to contribute to the experiment to improve a common heritage.
Conflicts of rights are often the ordinary conflicts involved in any
compromise. More seriously, they may be differences between plateaus
of meaning among a community's members. First-plateau minds, focused
on action, will think of rights as the behaviors and entitlements that
lawmakers allow to citizens. Many will conclude that they have a right
to do wrong. In contrast, GEM views lawmakers as responsible for
protecting the liberty of citizens to live authentically. Thus, while
the law lets every dog have a free bite, GEM repudiates the conclusion
that anyone has a right to do wrong.
Second-plateau minds promote the ancient and honorable notion that
rights are a set of immutable, universal properties of human nature.
GEM considers that the strength of the modern notion of rights has
been based mainly on logical consistency and permanent validity.
However, from the methods perspective of the third plateau of meaning,
GEM also recovers elements in the ancient notion of natural right that
include personal authenticity and defines these elements in terms of
personal conversion. On that basis, GEM proposes a collaborative
superstructure driven by the functional specialties, dialectic and
foundations.
In any case, GEM considers rights as historically conditioned means
for authentic ends. As historically conditioned means, rights may take
any number of legal and social forms. So, for example, the historical
expansion from civil rights (speech, assembly, suffrage) to social
rights (work, education, health care), to group rights (women,
homosexuals, ethnic groups) is evidence of the ongoing emergence of
new kinds of claims on each other's duty to replenish a heritage. As
oriented toward authentic ends, the validity of any rights claim
depends on how well it enables authentic living, a question addressed
through the mutual exposures that occur in the functional specialty
dialectic. Consequently, ethicists familiar with GEM rely less on the
language of rights and more on the language of dialog, encounter, and
heritage.
7. Summary
A generalized empirical method in ethics clarifies the subject's
operations regarding values. The effort relies on a personal
appropriation of what occurs when making value judgments, on a
discovery of innate moral norms, and on a grasp of the meaning of
moral objectivity. These innate methods of moral consciousness are
expressed in explanatory categories, to be used both for
conceptualizing for oneself what occurs regarding value judgments and
for expressing to others the actual grounds for one's value positions.
GEM is based on a gamble that the odds of genuine moral development
are best when the players lay these intellectual, moral and affective
cards on the table. Concretely, this implies a duty to acknowledge the
historicity of one's moral views as well as a readiness to admit
oversights in one's self-knowledge. Moreover, given the proliferation
of moral issues that affect confronting cultures with different
histories today, it also implies a duty to meet the stranger in a
place where this openness can occur.
8. References and Further Reading
a. Main Works of Lonergan
* Insight: A Study of Human Understanding. Volume 3 of the
Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1997. Originally published 1957.
* Method in Theology. New York: Herder & Herder, 1972.
* "Cognitional Structure," Collection. Montreal: Palm, 1967, pp 221-239.
* "Dimensions of Meaning," Ibid., pp 252-267.
* "The Subject," A Second Collection. London: Darton, Longman &
Todd, 1974, pp. 69-87.
* Macroeconomic Dynamics: An Essay in Circulation Analysis. Volume
15 of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan. Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1999.
b. Shorter Works Relevant to Ethics
* "Finality, Love, Marriage." Collection, op. cit., pp 16-55.
* "The Example of Gibson Winter," A Second Collection, op. cit., pp 189-192.
* "The Dialectic of Authority," A Third Collection. New York:
Paulist Press, 1985, pp 5-12.
* "Method: Trend and Variations," ibid., pp 13-22.
* "Healing and Creating in History," ibid., pp. 100-109.
* "The Ongoing Genesis of Methods," ibid., pp. 146-165.
* "Natural Right and Historical Mindedness," ibid., pp. 169-183.
* "Lectures on Existentialism," Part Three of Phenomenology and
Logic: The Boston College Lectures on Mathematical Logic and
Existentialism, Volume 18 of the Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan,
op.cit., pp. 219-317.
c. Other Works
* Melchin, Kenneth R. Living with Other People. Ottawa: St. Paul
University Press, 1998.
* Morelli, Mark D. and Morelli, Elizabeth A. The Lonergan Reader.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.
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