My summer semester is officially complete! I have a 10-day summer break until the Fall semester starts, so I’ve lit my incense in thanksgiving and dove into my pile of books–which simply had to begin with Edward Butler’s recent Polytheism in Greek Philosophy (a work I have been eager to finish, and am now quickly filling with highlights and notes!). As much as I am enjoying grad school, I miss the freedom to read and write as I please. But, with only 4 semesters left, I know that day is coming. My hope is that it will do good for future polytheists to have more representation in academia.

I had two final papers. My Modern Philosophy paper challenged Husserl’s notion of ‘presuppositionless science’ as self-defeating, and proposed C.S. Peirce’s theory of semiotics as a solution. I don’t expect that will pique many of your interests.

My Ethics final paper was on David Oderberg’s Morality, Religion, and Cosmic Justice, which his list of articles actually links to here. Oderberg had argued that the administration or serving of ‘cosmic’ justice is not only required by a fully orbed, objective morality, but that the only plausible candidate for one capable of accomplishing this distribution of reward and punishment is an agent suspiciously like God. To this, I raise something like a Socratic account according to which reward and punishment are actually self-administered. This position is particularly developed and pressed by Boethius.

But, I think Oderberg was on to something: “serious” morality, as he calls it, can seem hard to make sense of outside a religious context. This may not be on account of the sure distribution of rewards and punishments, but I think it is on account of something else: rectitude. Part of being wrong, I submit, is a cry for rectification. But if existence is, as Oderberg calls it “Russellian,” that is, wholly materialistic, governed by impersonal forces, and lacking any objective meaning or purpose, then this simply never happens. Thus, even granting the self-administration account of rewards and punishments, there is still something about “serious” morality that just does not sit right without appeal to some kind of religious context.

The argument can go something like this:

1. Every wrong ought to be righted.
2. Whatever ought to be righted can be.
3. But some wrongs cannot be righted unless the world is not Russellian.
4. So, the world is not Russellian.

That was a challenging and fun one to write. But it is also far too long for this site. For this post instead, I wanted to share a smaller piece that I got to develop on a pet topic my longtime readers will surely recognize: Thomas Aquinas and the Problem of Reproduction. Enjoy!

Thomas Aquinas and the Problem of Reproduction

Thomas Aquinas held that the rational soul could not be made in any other way than by creation ex nihilo. But this implies that it is impossible for rational animals to reproduce. That is, on this view of the soul, rational animals cannot under any circumstances produce offspring with rational souls, for the power to create ex nihilo will never be theirs, either by nature or by grace. All they can contribute, by Thomas’ lights, is the proximate matter in the form of a brute animal that is properly disposed by providence to receive a rational soul—should God so will it. Our purpose here is to ask a simple question in regard to this result: if we cannot reproduce our species, can we still be ethically ordered toward doing so?

That Thomas Aquinas held to what may be called creationism about the rational soul is not controversial. He staunchly rejected Traducianism and says bluntly in various places that the “rational soul can be made only by creation.” ¹ In tandem with this, he maintained that the body of man is crafted in view of, and so properly disposed for, reception of the rational soul. ²

On the one hand, this order in the body toward rational ensoulment should alleviate any concern that there is something arbitrary about this miracle befalling us. For, however technically true it may be that this gift could have been bestowed upon any (animal) nature, it remains that our constitution is supposedly uniquely fitting for rational use. ³ On the other hand, it should be kept in mind that however necessary this ordering turns out to be, it is still impossible for us. That is, whether or not it is conditionally necessary for God to fulfill the task he gave himself of pairing rational souls to human bodies, as Thomas may have put it, the effecting of this miracle would still remain completely out of our hands.

The claim being made here is that, given Thomas’ view of the soul, we are incapable of reproducing our species. Note that this does not commit one to saying that we can or do produce non-rational offspring. It may very well be that the pairing of every human body with a rational soul occurs at the moment of conception. But in that case, it is not that we only ever produce rational animals, but that what we produce always gets turned into rational animals. Still, it is worth noting that until the advent of recent biological discoveries, Thomas himself and many of his school held the more traditional theory of delayed ensoulment. This serves to illustrate not only that it is consistent with Thomistic metaphysics to hold that we cannot sexually reproduce our species, but that if we were to sexually produce, our offspring would be non-rational in actuality.

With that background in mind, let us turn to asking a simple question: if we cannot reproduce, can we still be ethically ordered toward doing so? After all, surely we cannot be obligated to do anything that is impossible for us to do?

That we are thought to be so ordered is widely held by Thomists, who have long championed Natural Law theory-based arguments for controversial positions in sexual ethics. The Old Natural Law theorists, of course, infamously employ the perverted faculty argument not only against homosexual acts, but even masturbation and the use of contraceptives. But even the New Natural Law theorists recognize reproduction, and the union it takes, to be basic goods. ⁴ Indeed, many, many substantive positions fall out of our being ordered toward reproduction, such as those centering on the nature of marriage and the dignity of the family, to the bioethics of IVF, surrogacy, and stem cell research. All this is to say that it is quite uncontroversial that Thomism takes us to be broadly ethically ordered toward reproduction.

But as we have seen, it is impossible for rational animals to reproduce. As such, even granting the whole of the rest of Thomistic philosophy, it cannot be the production of a rational animal that we are ordered to. This simply is not an end that we can ever be directed toward fulfilling—even with divine assistance. Rather, if anything, we must be ordered toward the production of a properly disposed non-rational organism; a plant or a primate, perhaps. Maybe the Thomist can say that God looks dearly or with mercy on this contribution, and is even conditionally necessitated to quicken this offspring. Perhaps the offspring never temporally precedes being quickened. But whatever the facts turn out to be, that would all be on God: it is a miracle in the strictest of senses. Our sexually relevant teloi simply do not have as their primary end a state of affairs that is impossible for us to bring about.

Perhaps one will respond that for Thomas, “the natural law is nothing else than the rational creature’s participation of the eternal law.” ⁵ This participation or “share of Eternal Reason” just is its having the “natural inclination to its proper act and end” that it does. ⁶ The rational animal’s apparent natural inclination to reproduce, then, could perhaps be explained as an order imbued within us by God toward a complex act and end that he ordained as proper. That is to say, nothing necessitates that the complete and proper end toward which we are ordered is the production of a properly disposed body. Rather, Thomas might say, God is free to declare this contribution to be a radically incomplete portion of a greater organic whole that he deems to be the complete and proper end to order us toward participating in bringing about.

But this rescue attempt seems confused, because however we want to package the effect that we are ordered toward bringing about, it will not be the act that God brings to the table. It will always remain simply the production of a non-rational organism. God may elect to take up this humble end of ours, and link it as in a chain to a higher-order effect, but that simply does not place any of those higher-order effects within our power.

Perhaps the answer is that God’s choice of rational ensoulment dignifies the otherwise non-moral creature that we otherwise we birth. That is, because of what it is in potency to become, it cannot be just an animal. We are not so much ordered toward producing non-rational creatures, then, but toward producing potentially rational animals. But there is no such potency in the animal itself; it is, for Thomas, wholly an active potency on the part of God. It is no more potentially a rational animal, therefore, than anything else–even given a special, ‘singling-out’ fiat.

This argument has sought to raise the issue that if Thomas is right about the rational soul, then sexual ethics is impossible. The path back from this dead end would involve saying either that the soul does not have to be caused at all, or that if it does, then it does not have to be caused ex nihilo. But either of these views will have dramatic effects on Thomas’ philosophical and religious system.

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1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 90, 2. ↩︎
2. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I, 91, 3. ↩︎
3. Though one must wonder if evolution on Earth will yield better poised bodies, or whether such bodies already obtain elsewhere in the cosmos. ↩︎
4. See Melissa Moschella’s Sexual Ethics, Human Nature, and the “New” and “Old” Natural Law Theories for an excellent representation. ↩︎
5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I-II, 91.2. ↩︎
6. Ibid. ↩︎