Edward Feser's Blog, page 3

Preventive war and the U.S. attack on Iran

Last week Iargued that the U.S. should stay out of Israel’s war with Iran.  America has now entered the war by bombingthree facilities associated with Iran’s nuclear program.  Is this action morally justifiable in lightof traditional just war doctrine? 

War aims?      

Let us note,first, that much depends on exactly what the U.S. intends to accomplish.  A week ago, before the attack, PresidentTrump warned thatTehran should be evacuated, called forIran’s unconditional surrender, and stated thatthe U.S. would not kill Iran’s Supreme Leader “for now” – thereby insinuatingthat it may yet do so at some future time. Meanwhile, many prominent voices in the president’s party have beencalling for regime change in Iran, and Trump himself this week has joined this chorus.  Ifwe take all of this at face value, it gives the impression that the U.S. intendsor is at least open to an ambitious and open-ended military commitmentcomparable to the American intervention in Iraq under President Bush. 

As I arguedin my previous essay, if this is whatis intended, U.S. action would not be morally justifiable by traditional justwar criteria.  I focused on two points inparticular.  First, the danger such interventionwould pose to civilian lives and infrastructure would violate the just warcondition that a war must be fought usingonly morally acceptable means. Second, given the chaos regime change would likely entail, and thequagmire into which the U.S. would be drawn, such an ambitious interventionwould violate the just war condition that amilitary action must not result in evils that are worse than the one beingredressed.

However, itis likely that we should not take thepresident’s words at face value.  He hasa long-established tendency to engage in “trash talk” and to make off-the-cuffremarks that reflect merely what has popped into his head at the moment ratherthan any well thought out or settled policy decision.  Furthermore, even when he does have in mindsome settled general policy goal, he appears prone to “making it up as he goes”where the details are concerned (as evidenced, for example, by his erraticmoves during the tariffcontroversy earlier this year).  My bestguess is that he does not want an Iraq-style intervention but also does nothave a clear idea of exactly how far he is willing to go if Iran continues toresist his will. 

As I said inmy previous essay, this is itself a serious problem.  An erratic and woolly-minded leader who doesnot intend a wider war is liable nevertheless to be drawn into one by events, and can also cause otherharm, short of that, through reckless statements. 

But so far,at least, the U.S. has in fact only bombed the facilities in question.  Suppose for the sake of argument that this limited“one and done” intervention is all that is intended.  Would this much be justifiable under just wardoctrine?

Preemptive versus preventive war

This bringsus to an issue which I only touched on in my earlier essay but which is obviouslyno less important (indeed, even more important) than the two criteria I focusedon: the justice of the cause forwhich the war is being fought, which is the first criterion of just wardoctrine.  The reason I did not say moreabout it is that the issue is more complex than meets the eye.  I think Israel can make a strong case that itsattack on Iran’s nuclear program meets the just cause condition for a just war.  But it is harder for the U.S. to meet thatcondition, even on a “one and done” scenario.

Tounderstand why, we need to say something about a controversy that arose duringthe Iraq war and is highly relevant to the current situation, but hasn’treceived the attention it ought to.  Irefer to the debate over the morality of preventivewar, which ethicists often distinguish from preemptive war. 

In bothpreemptive war and preventive war, a country takes military action againstanother country that has not attacked it. And in both cases, the country initiating hostilities neverthelessclaims to be acting in self-defense.  Thismight seem like sophistry and a manifest violation of the just cause criterionof just war doctrine.  How can a countrythat begins a war claim self-defense? 

But there isa crucial difference between the two cases. In a preemptive war, country B is preparingto attack country A but has not in fact yet done so.  Country A simply preempts this coming attack by striking first, and can claimself-defense insofar as country B wasindeed going to attack it.  Bycontrast, in a preventive war, country B was not preparing to attack country A. But country A attacks country B anyway, claiming that country B likely would pose a threat to A at some pointin the future.

Now, it isgenerally acknowledged among ethicists that preemptivewar can sometimes be morally justifiable. But preventive war is muchmore problematic and controversial.  Thereare two main traditions of thinking on this subject (a useful overview of whichcan be found in chapter 9 of Gregory Reichberg’s book Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace).  On the one hand, there is the natural lawtradition of thinking about just war criteria, associated with ScholasticCatholic writers like Thomas Aquinas and Francisco de Vitoria, Protestants likeHugo Grotius, and more recent Thomists like the nineteenth-century Catholic theologianLuigi Taparelli.  According to thistradition, preventive war is flatly morally illegitimate.  It violates the principle that a person orcountry cannot be harmed merely for some wrong it might do, but only for some wrong that it has in fact done.

The other mainapproach is the “realist” tradition associated with Protestant thinkers likeAlberico Gentili, Francis Bacon, and (with qualifications, since he also drewon the natural law tradition) Emer de Vattel. As Reichberg notes, whereas the natural law approach takes theinternational order to be governed by the moral law just as relations betweenindividuals are, the tendency of the realist tradition is to look at the internationalarena in something more like Hobbesian terms. And the realist tradition is thus more favorable to preventive war as atool nations might deploy as they negotiate this Hobbesian state ofnature. 

As Reichbergalso notes, Vattel put the following conditions on the justifiability of some countryA’s initiating a preventive war against another country B.  First, country B must actually pose a potential threat to country A.  Second, country B must threaten the very existence of country A.  Third, it must intend to pose such a threat. And fourth, it must somehow have actually shown signs of evildoing inthe past.  Vattel adds the condition thatcountry A must first have tried and failed to secure guarantees from country Bthat it will not attack A.

Much of thecontroversy over the Iraq war had to do with whether a preventive war ismorally justifiable, and the Bush administration did sometimes say things thatimplied that the war was preventive in nature. But as I argued at the time, this particular aspect of the debate was ared herring.  The main rationale for thewar was that Saddam had not complied with the terms of the ceasefire of theGulf War, so that the U.S. and her allies were justified in re-startinghostilities in order to force compliance. Whatever one thinks of this as a rationale, it is not an appeal topreventive war.  Hence any criticism ofthe Iraq war should, in my view, focus on other aspects of it (such as theintelligence failure vis-à-vis WMD and the folly of the nation-buildingenterprise the war led to).

The case of Iran

What mattersfor present purposes, though, is the relevance of all this to the war withIran.  Now, it was Israel rather thanIran that initiated the current hostilities. Was this morally justifiable?

It seemsclear to me that it was justifiable by Vattel’s criteria for preventivewar.  But as a natural law theorist, I don’tthink preventive war can be justified, so that that particular point ismoot.  However, that does not entail thatit was wrong for Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear program.  For it can plausibly be seen as a justifiablepreemptive rather than preventive attack.  To be sure, Iran was not preparing a specificnuclear attack operation, since it does not actually have nuclear weapons.  But Israel can make the following argument: Iranhas already been in a state of war with Israel for years; its leadership hasrepeatedly threatened Israel’s destruction; if it acquired nuclear weapons, itwould actually be capable of carrying out this threat; and it has for yearsbeen trying to acquire them.  Destroyingits nuclear program is therefore not merely a preventive action, but in the relevant sense an act of preempting an attack (in its very earlieststages, as it were) that Israel has good reason to think Iran actually intends.

This seemsto me a strong argument, so that I think that Israel can indeed make the casethat it has a just cause, at least insofar as its aim is simply to destroy Iran’snuclear program.  (A more ambitious goalof regime change would be much harder to justify, for the same reason that, asI said in my earlier article, it would not be justifiable for the U.S. toattempt regime change.  But here I amjust addressing the more limited aim of destroying Iran’s nuclear capability.)

However,this does not entail that the U.S. isjustified in attacking Iran.  Note firstthat the recent U.S. bombing was not carried out in response to any act of waron Iran’s part against the United States. True, some have pointed out that U.S. and Iranian-backed forces havebeen involved in various skirmishes in recent decades.  But it would be dishonest to pretend that thathad anything to do with the recent U.S. action. If Iran’s nuclear program had not been in the picture, Trump would nothave ordered the bombing.  Hence, if theU.S. is claiming to be acting in justifiable self-defense, it could plausiblydo so only by the criteria governing preemptive war or preventive war.

But in fact,it cannot plausibly do so.  Note first that the U.S. action does not meeteven Vattel’s criteria for preventive war. For even if Iran already had nuclear weapons, it would not pose a threatto the very existence of the United States (the way it would pose a threat to the very existence of Israel).  For one thing, Iran lacks any plausible meansof getting a nuclear device into the United States; for another, even if itcould do so, it would hardly be able to destroy the country as a whole.  Hence, any “preventive war” case for U.S. self-defense is fanciful.  And if that is true, then it is even moreobvious that the U.S. cannot plausibly meet the more stringent criteria for a preemptive war case.  Iran simply cannot plausibly be said to havebeen in the process of planning a nuclear attack on the U.S., even in thelooser sense in which it might be said to have been planning such an attack onIsrael. 

I concludethat no serious case can be made that the U.S. attack on Iran was a justifiableact of self-defense.  However, there isone further way the attack might seem to be justified.  Couldn’t the U.S. argue that, even though itcouldn’t plausibly hold that it was defending itself, it was justifiably helping its ally Israel to defend itself?

Certainly itcan be justifiable to help an ally to defend itself.  But whether it ought to do so in anyparticular case depends on various circumstances.  For example, suppose Iran actually had a nuclearweapon and it was known that it was about to deploy it against Israel and thatonly the U.S. could stop the attack.  Iwould say that in that sort of scenario, the U.S. not only could intervene to stop such an attack but would be morally obligated to do so.  And it would also be morally justifiable forthe U.S. to intervene in order to help Israel in other, less dire scenarios.

But we arenot now in a situation remotely close to such scenarios.  Thereare various ways Israel could stop Iran’s nuclear program by itself – as,it appears, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has acknowledged.  Meanwhile, there are serious potentialdownsides to U.S. involvement.  Americantroops could be killed by Iranian retaliatory strikes, the U.S. economy couldbe hit hard if Iran closes off the Strait of Hormuz, and if the Iranian regimewere to collapse the U.S. could be drawn into a quagmire in attempting tomitigate the resulting chaos.  Yes, suchthings might not in fact happen, butthey plausibly could happen, andkeeping one’s fingers crossed is not a serious way to approach the applicationof just war criteria.  If Israel doesn’tstrictly need the U.S. to interveneand intervention poses such potential risks to U.S. interests, then the U.S.should not intervene.

Hence I aminclined to conclude the following about the U.S. attack, even if (as we canhope) it does indeed turn out to be a “one and done” operation.  Was American bombing of Iranian nuclearfacilities intrinsically wrong?  No. But did it meet all theconditions of just war doctrine, all things considered?  No.

Shields on Aquinas on the Unmoved Mover

My review ofDaniel Shields’ important recent book Nature and Nature’s God: A Philosophical andScientific Defense of Aquinas’s Unmoved Mover Argument appears in theJuly 2025 issue of The Thomist .

The U.S. should stay out of Israel’s war with Iran (Updated)

Let me sayat the outset that I agree with the view that it would be bad for the Iranianregime to acquire a nuclear weapon.  Howclose it is to actually acquiring one, I do not know.  I do know that the claim that such acquisitionis imminent has been made for decades now,and yet it has still not happened.  Inany event, it is Israel rather than the U.S. that would be threatened by suchacquisition, and Israel has proven quite capable of taking care of itself.  There is no need for the U.S. to enter thewar, and it is in neither the U.S.’s interests nor the interests of the rest ofthe region for it to do so.

YetPresident Trump has this week indicated that the U.S. is joining theconflict.  He has said that“we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” and that “weknow exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding… we are not goingto take him out (kill!), at least not for now.” The “we” implies that the U.S. has already entered the war on Israel’sside.  He has said:

Iran should have signed the “deal” I told them to sign. Whata shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEARWEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuateTehran!

Taken atface value, this indicates that the U.S. will participate in an attack thatwill threaten the entire city of Tehran. And he hascalled for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”  Meanwhile, Israel is indicatingthat regime change is among the aims of its war with Iran.

There aretwo criteria of just war theory that the president is violating, at least if wetake his words at face value.  First, fora war to be just, it must be fought using only morally legitimate means.  Thisincludes a prohibition on intentionally targeting civilians and civilianinfrastructure.  To be sure, just wartheory allows that there can be cases where harm to civilians and civilian infrastructurecan be permissible, but only if (a) this is the foreseen but unintendedbyproduct of an attack on military targets, and (b) the harm caused tocivilians and civilian infrastructure is not out of proportion to the good achievedby destroying those military targets.

It is thestandard view among just war theorists that attacks such as the atomic bombingsof Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombing of Dresden, violated thiscriterion of just war theory and thus were gravely immoral.  They are manifestly immoral if the intentionwas to kill and terrorize civilians.  Butthey were also immoral even if the intention was to damage military targets,because the harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure was massively out ofproportion to the good achieved by attacking such military targets.

Now, forPresident Trump to warn that “everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran”indicates that the U.S. and Israel intend a bombing campaign that will causemassive destruction to the city as a whole. It is hard to see how that could be consistent with the just warcondition of using only morally legitimate means.  This is true, by the way, even if (as isunlikely) the nearly ten million people of Tehran could in fact beevacuated.  Civilian homes and otherproperty, and not just civilian lives, must, as far as reasonably possible, berespected in a just war.

The call for“unconditional surrender” is also highly problematic.  As the Catholic philosopher ElizabethAnscombe said of Allied war demands during World War II in her famous essay “Mr.Truman’s Degree”:

It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was theroot of all evil.  The connection betweensuch a demand and the need to use the most ferocious methods of warfare will beobvious.  And in itself the proposal ofan unlimited objective in war is stupid and barbarous.

When acountry tells an enemy’s government and citizens that it will settle fornothing less than their surrender with no conditions at all – thereby puttingthemselves entirely at their foes’ mercy – they are obviously bound to fightmore tenaciously and brutally, which will tempt the threatening country tosimilarly brutal methods of warfare in response.

The secondcriterion of just war theory most relevant to the present crisis is that inorder to be just, a military action mustnot result in evils that are worse than the one being redressed.  Now, as the history of the aftermath of thewars in Iraq and Afghanistan shows, regime change in the Middle East is likelyto have catastrophic consequences for all concerned.  Both of those conflicts resulted in years ofcivil war, tens or even hundreds of thousands of casualties, and, in the caseof Afghanistan, a successor regime hostile to the U.S.  As Sohrab Ahmari arguesthis week at UnHerd, similarchaos is bound to follow a collapse of the Iranian regime.  Regime change thus seems too radical a waraim.  More limited measures, like those thathave for decades now kept Iran’s nuclear weapons program from succeeding, arethe most that can be justified.

As they routinelydo, Trump’s defenders may suggest that his words should not be taken at facevalue, but interpreted as mere “trash talk” or perhaps as exercises in “thinkingout loud” rather than as final policy decisions.  But this helps their case not at all.  War is, needless to say, an enterprise ofenormous gravity, calling for maximum prudence and moral seriousness.  Even speaking about the possibility must bedone with great caution.  (Think of thechaos that could follow upon trying quickly to evacuate a city of nearly tenmillion people, even if there were no actual plan to bomb it.)  A president who is instead prone to woolly thinkingand flippant speech about matters of war is a president whose judgment aboutthem cannot be trusted.  (And asI have argued elsewhere, he has already in other ways proven himself tohave unsound judgment about such things.)

It alsoshould not be forgotten that for Trump to bring the U.S. into a major new warin the Middle East would be contrary to his own longstanding rhetoric.  For example, in 2019 he said:

The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fightingand policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died orbeen badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTOTHE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE.....

But then, contradictoryand reckless statements are par for the course with Trump.  For example, Trump has portrayed himself aspro-life, but then cameout in support of keeping abortion pills available and of federal fundingfor IVF.  He promised to bring pricesdown, but haspursued trade policies that are likely to make prices higher.  His DOGE project was predicated on the needto bring federal spending under control, but now he supports a bill that willadd another $3 trillion to the national debt. And so on.  His record is one thatcan be characterized as unstable and unprincipled at best and shamelessly dishonestat worst.  This reinforces the conclusionthat his judgment on grave matters such as war cannot be trusted.

I concludethat Trump’s apparent plan to bring the U.S. into Israel’s war with Iran is notjustifiable and that he ought to be resisted on this matter (as he ought to beon other matters, such as abortion and IVF).

UPDATE 6/19:UnHerd’s Freddie Sayers interviewsJohn Mearsheimer and Yoram Hazony on the Israel-Iran war.  It’s a superb discussion – sober,intelligent, nuanced and well-informed, precisely the opposite of mostdiscourse about these issues.  Thoughcoming from very different perspectives, Mearsheimer and Hazony agree that itis better for the U.S. to stay out of the conflict.

While somehave claimed that only the U.S. can take out the Iranian facility at Fordow,Hazony disagrees.  Moreover, itis uncertain that America’s “bunker buster” bomb really would destroy Fordow.  And even if it did, Fordow could be quickly rebuilt,one expert opining that an attack “might set the program back [only] six monthsto a year.”

Today, WhiteHouse press secretary Karoline Leavitt claimedthat Iran can now within just a couple of weeks produce a nuclear weapon thatwould “pose an existential threat not just to Israel but to the United Statesand to the entire world.”  Yet she alsoannounced that President Trump would be taking a couple of weeks to decide whatto do.  Needless to say, her firststatement is very hard to take seriously in light of her second statement.  Moreover, Trump’s own Director of NationalIntelligence Tulsi Gabbard hadrecently stated that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and SupremeLeader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons program he suspended in2003.”

In short,both the case for U.S. intervention, and the administration’s credibility onthe issue, appear to be falling apart.

The U.S. should stay out of Israel’s war with Iran

Let me sayat the outset that I agree with the view that it would be bad for the Iranianregime to acquire a nuclear weapon.  Howclose it is to actually acquiring one, I do not know.  I do know that the claim that such acquisitionis imminent has been made for decades now,and yet it has still not happened.  Inany event, it is Israel rather than the U.S. that would be threatened by suchacquisition, and Israel has proven quite capable of taking care of itself.  There is no need for the U.S. to enter thewar, and it is in neither the U.S.’s interests nor the interests of the rest ofthe region for it to do so.

YetPresident Trump has this week indicated that the U.S. is joining theconflict.  He has said that“we now have complete and total control of the skies over Iran,” and that “weknow exactly where the so-called ‘Supreme Leader’ is hiding… we are not goingto take him out (kill!), at least not for now.” The “we” implies that the U.S. has already entered the war on Israel’sside.  He has said:

Iran should have signed the “deal” I told them to sign. Whata shame, and waste of human life. Simply stated, IRAN CAN NOT HAVE A NUCLEARWEAPON. I said it over and over again! Everyone should immediately evacuateTehran!

Taken atface value, this indicates that the U.S. will participate in an attack thatwill threaten the entire city of Tehran. And he hascalled for Iran’s “unconditional surrender.”  Meanwhile, Israel is indicatingthat regime change is among the aims of its war with Iran.

There aretwo criteria of just war theory that the president is violating, at least if wetake his words at face value.  First, fora war to be just, it must be fought using only morally legitimate means.  Thisincludes a prohibition on intentionally targeting civilians and civilianinfrastructure.  To be sure, just wartheory allows that there can be cases where harm to civilians and civilian infrastructurecan be permissible, but only if (a) this is the foreseen but unintendedbyproduct of an attack on military targets, and (b) the harm caused tocivilians and civilian infrastructure is not out of proportion to the good achievedby destroying those military targets.

It is thestandard view among just war theorists that attacks such as the atomic bombingsof Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the firebombing of Dresden, violated thiscriterion of just war theory and thus were gravely immoral.  They are manifestly immoral if the intentionwas to kill and terrorize civilians.  Butthey were also immoral even if the intention was to damage military targets,because the harm to civilians and civilian infrastructure was massively out ofproportion to the good achieved by attacking such military targets.

Now, forPresident Trump to warn that “everyone should immediately evacuate Tehran”indicates that the U.S. and Israel intend a bombing campaign that will causemassive destruction to the city as a whole. It is hard to see how that could be consistent with the just warcondition of using only morally legitimate means.  This is true, by the way, even if (as isunlikely) the nearly ten million people of Tehran could in fact beevacuated.  Civilian homes and otherproperty, and not just civilian lives, must, as far as reasonably possible, berespected in a just war.

The call for“unconditional surrender” is also highly problematic.  As the Catholic philosopher ElizabethAnscombe said of Allied war demands during World War II in her famous essay “Mr.Truman’s Degree”:

It was the insistence on unconditional surrender that was theroot of all evil.  The connection betweensuch a demand and the need to use the most ferocious methods of warfare will beobvious.  And in itself the proposal ofan unlimited objective in war is stupid and barbarous.

When acountry tells an enemy’s government and citizens that it will settle fornothing less than their surrender with no conditions at all – thereby puttingthemselves entirely at their foes’ mercy – they are obviously bound to fightmore tenaciously and brutally, which will tempt the threatening country tosimilarly brutal methods of warfare in response.

The secondcriterion of just war theory most relevant to the present crisis is that inorder to be just, a military action mustnot result in evils that are worse than the one being redressed.  Now, as the history of the aftermath of thewars in Iraq and Afghanistan shows, regime change in the Middle East is likelyto have catastrophic consequences for all concerned.  Both of those conflicts resulted in years ofcivil war, tens or even hundreds of thousands of casualties, and, in the caseof Afghanistan, a successor regime hostile to the U.S.  As Sohrab Ahmari arguesthis week at UnHerd, similarchaos is bound to follow a collapse of the Iranian regime.  Regime change thus seems too radical a waraim.  More limited measures, like those thathave for decades now kept Iran’s nuclear weapons program from succeeding, arethe most that can be justified.

As they routinelydo, Trump’s defenders may suggest that his words should not be taken at facevalue, but interpreted as mere “trash talk” or perhaps as exercises in “thinkingout loud” rather than as final policy decisions.  But this helps their case not at all.  War is, needless to say, an enterprise ofenormous gravity, calling for maximum prudence and moral seriousness.  Even speaking about the possibility must bedone with great caution.  (Think of thechaos that could follow upon trying quickly to evacuate a city of nearly tenmillion people, even if there were no actual plan to bomb it.)  A president who is instead prone to woolly thinkingand flippant speech about matters of war is a president whose judgment aboutthem cannot be trusted.  (And asI have argued elsewhere, he has already in other ways proven himself tohave unsound judgment about such things.)

It alsoshould not be forgotten that for Trump to bring the U.S. into a major new warin the Middle East would be contrary to his own longstanding rhetoric.  For example, in 2019 he said:

The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fightingand policing in the Middle East. Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died orbeen badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTOTHE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE.....

But then, contradictoryand reckless statements are par for the course with Trump.  For example, Trump has portrayed himself aspro-life, but then cameout in support of keeping abortion pills available and of federal fundingfor IVF.  He promised to bring pricesdown, but haspursued trade policies that are likely to make prices higher.  His DOGE project was predicated on the needto bring federal spending under control, but now he supports a bill that willadd another $3 trillion to the national debt. And so on.  His record is one thatcan be characterized as unstable and unprincipled at best and shamelessly dishonestat worst.  This reinforces the conclusionthat his judgment on grave matters such as war cannot be trusted.

I concludethat Trump’s apparent plan to bring the U.S. into Israel’s war with Iran is notjustifiable and that he ought to be resisted on this matter (as he ought to beon other matters, such as abortion and IVF).

Immortal Souls in Religion & Liberty

In the Summer2025 issue of the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty ,David Weinberger kindly reviews my book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature .  From the review: “Feser combines… rigor with histalent for making difficult ideas digestible… An admirable feature of Feser’streatise is how thoroughly he engages opposing positions.”

Riots should be suppressed swiftly and harshly

In anarticle at Postliberal Order, Iargue that the Trump administration has the right under natural law tointervene to suppress riots of the kind seen in Los Angeles this week.

MacIntyre on Hegel on human action

Phrenologywas the pseudoscience that aimed to link psychological traits to the morphologyof the skull.  Physiognomy was thepseudoscience that aimed to link such traits to facial features.  In his Phenomenologyof Spirit, Hegel critiques these pseudosciences.  Since they are now widely acknowledged to bepseudosciences, it might seem that Hegel’s critique can be of historicalinterest only.  But as the late AlasdairMacIntyre pointed out in his essay “Hegel: On Faces and Skulls,” Hegel’s mainpoints can be applied to a critique of today’s fashionable attempts to predictpsychological traits and human actions from physiological and genetictraits.  (The essay appears in thecollection Philosophy Through Its Past,edited by Ted Honderich.)

That ideaalone makes Hegel’s arguments worthy of our consideration.  For it would certainly be of interest if itturned out that the fundamental problems with pseudosciences like phrenologyand physiognomy had to do, not with their inadequacies vis-à-vis the empiricalevidence, but with deeper philosophical assumptions they share with purportedlymore empirically plausible and respectable versions of materialistreductionism.  The arguments are not,however, presented with maximal crispness. But they are suggestive and worth trying to tease out.  What follows is an attempt to do so (and itsfocus is on Hegel as MacIntyre reads him rather than on Hegel’s own texts).

The appeal to the past

MacIntyrenotes several ways in which Hegel takes there to be a mismatch between brute anatomicaland physiological facts on the one hand, and human thought and action on theother.  But it seems to me that there aretwo main lines of argument identified by MacIntyre.  The first, as I understand it, goes likethis.  Scientific explanations, includingphysiological explanations, appeal to general propositions, such aspropositions of the form “For every x, if x is F then x is G.”  For example, we might explain why aparticular glass of water froze by saying “For every x, if x is water then xwill freeze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.” Our predicates F and G refer to universals, and we explain theparticular phenomenon by simply noting that it is an instance of a completelygeneral truth.

However,Hegel argues, human actions cannot be understood in this way.  Suppose, for example (mine, not Hegel’s orMacIntyre’s), that you have a fight with your brother over some longstandinggrudge between the two of you.  Properlyto explain this event requires reference to particular earlier events in yourhistory, such as a promise to you that he once broke, or an occasion when youpublicly insulted and embarrassed him. And those events will in turn be explicable in terms of yet other andearlier particular events.  Understandingthe character of these events will also involve attention to a variety of contextualdetails, such as who exactly was present on the occasion you publicly insultedhim, and exactly what it was he had promised to do and why it was significant.  Furthermore, it will involve attention to howall the relevant parties conceived ofthese various details.

Thesecircumstances, thinks Hegel (as presented by MacIntyre) simply cannot becaptured in general propositions of the kind to which scientific explanationsappeal.  In particular, there are no truegeneralizations to the effect of “For every x and every y, if x and y arebrothers and x breaks a promise to y, then x and y will get in a fight severalyears later” (or whatever).  What makesthe sequence of events intelligible, in Hegel’s view, is not that it is aparticular instance of a general pattern, where all events of the one kind willbe followed by events of the other. Rather, that you acted in light of certain particular, contingent historical circumstances is an ineliminableaspect of the story, and cannot be captured in general or lawlikepropositions.  You are responding to those circumstances qua particular, notto just any old circumstances that happened to be of that general type.  As MacIntyre writes, “to respond to aparticular situation, event, or state of affairs is not to respond to any situation,event, or state of affairs with the same or similar properties in some respect;it is to respond to that situation conceivedby both the agents who respond to it and those whose actions constitute it asparticular” (p. 329).

What shouldwe think of this argument?  I’m notsure.  Certainly it would need muchtightening up before it could be judged compelling.  However, it does seem to be at least in thegeneral ballpark of arguments that I think are powerful.  For example, it is reminiscent of DonaldDavidson’s famous principleof the anomalism of the mental, according to which there can be nostrict laws by which mental events might be predicted and explained.  (Though Davidson’s argument too needstightening up.)

The appeal to the future

What seemsto me to be a second, distinct Hegelian argument discussed by MacIntyre (albeitnot characterized by him as such) is expressed in this passage:

From the fact that an agent has a given trait, we cannot deduce what he will do in any givensituation, and the trait cannot itself be specified in terms of somedeterminate set of actions that it will produce… [T]he crucial fact aboutself-consciousness… is, its self-negating quality: being aware of what I am isconceptually inseparable from confronting what I am not but could become.  Hence, for a self-conscious agent to have atrait is for that agent to be confronted by an indefinitely large set ofpossibilities of developing, modifying, or abolishing that trait.  Action springs not from fixed and determinatedispositions, but from the confrontation in consciousness of what I am by whatI am not. (p. 331)

The ideahere seems to be that to be conscious of oneself as an agent is, of its nature,precisely to be conscious of the possibility of an indefinite number ofalternative choices.  By contrast, tounderstand an anatomical or physiological feature is to know it as limited to acertain specific and relatively narrower range of effects in might have.  Whereas, in Hegel’s first argument, the ideais that a reductionist physiological explanation cannot account for thesignificance of one’s past, in this argument the idea is that it cannot accountfor the openness of one’s future.

To make thepoint a little clearer, consider this passage from earlier in MacIntyre’sessay:

The relation of external appearance, including the facialappearance, to character is such that the discovery that any externalappearance is taken to be a sign of a certain type of character is a discoverythat the agent may then exploit to conceal his character. (p. 325)

The pointhere seems to be this.  Suppose someonetold me that he could, from my facial expressions, read off my character andthus predict my future actions.  Knowingthis, I could make sure that in the future I avoid the facial expressions Iwould otherwise normally be inclined toward, so that my interlocutor will bethrown off and his predictions will fail. Similarly, suppose someone told me that, based on what he had determinedfrom scanning my brain, he predicted that I would make a cup of coffee in thenext half hour.  Even if I were inclinedto do so, I could now choose otherwise simply to prove him wrong.  There’s an openness to alternative possibilitiesin the behavior of human beings that differentiates them from the rigidbehavior of merely physical systems, including those that comprise the micro-levelparts of human beings considered in isolation from the whole.

This line ofthought calls to mind the similar argumentdeveloped by Jean-Paul Sartre in Beingand Nothingness.  He famously draws adistinction there between being-in-itselfand being-for-itself.  Being-in-itself is the kind of reality had bya mere physical object as it exists objectively or independently of human consciousness.  It is simply given or fixed.  By contrast, being-for-itself, which is thehuman agent, is consciousness as it projects forward toward an unrealizedpossibility.  Unlike being-in-itself, itis open to different possibilities rather than entirely fixed or determined.  To deny free will is essentially to conflatebeing-for-itself with being-in-itself, but this cannot be done, because theyare simply irreducibly different.  Naturally,Sartre’s argument, and Hegel’s too, would require tightening up if we are to makethem compelling.

Now, thegeneral idea that the conceptual and logical structure of thought are simplyirreducibly different from, and inexplicable in terms of, any collection ofphysical facts and their causal relations, is something I defend rigorously andat length in chapters 8 and 9 of my book ImmortalSouls.  I take it that Hegel’sfirst argument is aiming at something like that conclusion.  And the general idea that human action isirreducibly teleological, and in particular that it cannot be analyzed in termsof efficient-causal relations (of the kind that obtain between physiologicalphenomena, for example) is something I defend in depth in chapter 4 of thebook.  I take it that Hegel’s secondargument is aiming at something like that conclusion.

Hence I am,in a very general way, sympathetic at least to the basic idea of the kind ofposition MacIntyre attributes to Hegel. I leave as a homework exercise the question whether there are, in thatposition, ingredients for a line of argument that is both compelling and independentof considerations of the kind I set out in the book.

Lamont on Trump, abortion, and Ukraine

In anarticle at One Peter Five,philosopher John Lamont warns his fellow Catholics and traditionalists that on issuessuch as abortion and Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine, Trump is not an ally and must beresisted.

What is ideology?

What doesthe pejorative use of “ideology” amount to, and what is it to be an “ideologue”?  I consider some common accounts beforedeveloping my own in my latest essay atPostliberal Order.

Alasdair MacIntyre (1929-2025)

AlasdairMacIntyre has died. His classic AfterVirtue had a tremendous effect on me when I was an undergrad and still inmy atheist days, greatly reinforcing the attraction to Aristotelian ethics Ihad even then. (The spine of the light mauve cover of my copy, like that of prettymuch any copy printed in the 80s, has long since turned green.)  It was, of course, part of a larger body ofwork which had a similarly great impact on so many people, in philosophy, theology,and beyond. RIP.