From the Desk of the President
President Thomas E. Dillon
Dr. Dillion is Panelist at Annual "Intentional Conversation"
(Fall 2006 Newsletter)
[Index
of Past Articles by President Dillon]
 Last
spring, President Dillon was invited to be one of four panelists
at the 3rd annual “Intentional Conversation” held at The
Huntington Library in San Marino, California, sponsored by The Saving
Remnant Society. The Society is a non-profit, non-denominational,
educational organization that promotes reflection on and understanding
of critical social issues through structured conversations with
leaders in the Los Angeles community of various faiths or no faith
at all. Dr. Dillon was given 10 minutes to address the theme, “Meaning
and Morality without God? Thinking about our Culture and Personal
Responsibility.” His remarks appear below.
Question #1: Tell us about yourself, your background, and some
of your interests.
Raised by working-class parents, I am the first in my extended
family to go to college. My parents sacrificed themselves in countless
ways for their children, teaching us all the meaning of love, and
they are, more than anyone I know, my heroes. With all my education
being conducted in Catholic schools, I graduated from college in
1968, at a time when most of my friends were repudiating their Catholic
faith. In contrast, I grew stronger in that faith the more I read
and thought about things.
Working my way through a Great Books program in college had a huge
effect on my life. In 1972, 26 years old and fresh out of graduate
school, I was hired as a teacher by Thomas Aquinas College, established
just a year earlier, and now I find myself its president. I’ve
always had a strong desire to learn and to share with others what
I have learned, so teaching was a natural career for me. In a way,
my life could be summed up by saying I have been animated by a desire
to know what is true, to do, despite my many faults, what is good,
and to apprehend what is beautiful.
I am still active as a teacher at Thomas Aquinas College in its
Great Books curriculum, which constitutes its entire educational
program. In that program, there are no majors, minors, or electives,
and there are no secondary sources or textbooks—rather, all
students read the seminal works in the principle fields of learning—for
example, Euclid, Apollonius, Descartes, and Dedekind in mathematics;
Ptolemy, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Galileo, and Einstein in astronomy
and physics; Homer, Virgil, Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Dostoyevski
in literature; Plato, Aristotle, Pascal, Kant, and Hegel in philosophy;
Herodotus, Thucydides, Plutarch, and Gibbon in history; the Bible,
St. Augustine, St. John Damascene, St. Thomas Aquinas in theology;
and so forth.
Classes are not lectures, but rather are seminars—16 students
around a table discussing a great work, attempting to penetrate
and understand its meaning in a disciplined conversation led by
a faculty member whom we call a “tutor.”
And lastly, I should probably mention that I have been married
for 39 years and have four children and 10 grandchildren, with two
more on the way.
Question #2: Tell us how you would answer the question of God in
the theme and what kinds of education, experience, and other factors
(perhaps internal and external “incentives”) you believe
contribute to the development of a moral person?
Before addressing the question “what contributes to the development
of a moral person?” a prior question must be answered: just
what is a moral person? Ordinarily, I think we understand a moral
person to be someone who acts well, who does the right thing, who
is good. This, of course, presumes that human acts are not indifferent,
that there is a better and worse in human conduct, that there are
good acts and bad acts. However, given today’s theme, “Meaning
and Morality without God?,” can we in fact make any sense of
morality without God? What precisely is the basis of the moral judgments
we make, particularly if we ourselves, or those with whom we deal,
have no belief in God?
As far as I can see, there are, at bottom, only three possible
ways in which to ground morality:
First, morality can be grounded in revelation by God Himself about
what constitutes good or bad human conduct.
Second, morality can be grounded in a consideration of our nature
as human beings—that is, in a reflection on what constitutes
excellence or deficiency in human behavior, given that we are not
only animal in our nature but also rational, and that our reason
can regulate our conduct. This, of course, presumes that there is
a human nature, that it is fundamentally knowable, and that there
are universal human goods.
Third, morality can be grounded in our desires and appetites—that
is, what is called “good” or “bad” can simply
be understood to be either getting or not getting what we want.
Now, what are we to say about these three options? Let me be clear
that I myself embrace the Catholic intellectual tradition, which
on the one hand affirms a faith in God and Revelation, but on the
other hand holds that moral standards are independently discernable
by reason and experience, and that if we can free ourselves from
the influence of our sometimes tyrannical desires, we can discover
the fundamental principles of morality.
I see, however, a great difficulty that we must confront in our
common conversation today, and that is that not only is our society
more and more rejecting faith in God, it is also increasingly rejecting
confidence in the power of reason and the possibility of the knowledge
of an objective order of morality—this is why, I think, we
tend to speak so much about “values” these days rather
than “virtues” or “morals.” The term “values”
can easily be understood to have a subjective connotation—I
have my values, and you have yours, but there is nothing objective
which is to be the measure of us both. Now if we reject God and
also reject the view that there are right desires that conform to
our nature as rational human beings or, in other words, that there
is an intrinsic human good for everyone that follows from our nature,
then aren’t we left with the third option described earlier,
namely, that calling certain acts “good” and “bad”
is nothing more than affirming our likes and dislikes, that what
we call “morality” reduces to our array of desires?
The problem with this account, however, is that morality turns
out finally to be an illusion, because there is no good or bad as
such. Furthermore, doesn’t this finally imply that the measure
of human behavior is really power, since, when there are
conflicting desires, the stronger can assert their will over the
weaker to get what they want. This, in fact, is the basic position
taken about justice by Callicles in the dialogue of Plato entitled
The Gorgias. Justice, he says, is having big appetites and
the power to fulfill them. Nietzsche affirms something similar.
Is this what we want to say?
For the sake of our conversation, let me put my own views on the
table. I do believe that God has revealed Himself to us in what
we Catholics call the Old and New Testaments, and that principles
of morality can be found in these scriptures as well as in our oral
tradition, going back to Christ as a divine moral teacher. However,
I also think, following the Greek philosopher Aristotle, that there
is an objective moral order discernible by experience and reason,
that there are knowable human goods intrinsic to our nature, and
that there are right desires for these goods that follow from what
we are. In this view, to do what is moral is the same as to live
well and to be happy, and moral excellence is what we call virtue,
that is, a habit of doing what is intrinsically good for us as human
beings.
What, then, on this account contributes to the development of a
moral person? It is the repeated doing of good acts until one acquires
the habit of doing such acts, for example, repeatedly doing just
things until the habit of justice is part of one’s character,
such that we can say that a person has the excellence or the virtue
of justice. On this view—that a moral person is developed by
habituation to the good—the right raising of children is very
important, since the habits they develop while growing up, for better
or worse, in great measure determine their character and are difficult
to change. It follows from this, of course, that good family life
is very helpful in the development of virtue, where caring parents
can help instill in their children good habits.
Good laws are also important inasmuch as they can set standards
for human behavior. Though we may not like to obey certain laws,
we choose to conform our behavior to them rather than suffer the
penalty for breaking them. Eventually, we acquire the habit of abiding
by the laws, and we come to share in the common good at which they
aim.
Question #3: Tell us what aspects of American culture today you
believe most influence, positively and negatively, our public morality,
our political life, and our individual sense of responsibility for
our own behavior and for the “greater good.”
Having read Roman history, I fear that our culture is declining
in ways similar to Rome. In my view, this country was built up by
those who were willing to sacrifice themselves for the common good.
They were committed to high principles and ready to defer personal
and immediate pleasure for longer-term goals that were beneficial
to their families, their communities, and their country. I think
that we are becoming more and more awash in a cult of materialism
and self-gratification, and that we are living off the moral capital
of our predecessors which we will, in time, exhaust. Of course,
there were problems and injustices in the past, particularly institutionalized
bigotry and racism, and, on the other hand, there are many good
things occurring now. Nevertheless, in my opinion, unless we form
succeeding generations in virtue, we cannot sustain the greatness
of this country.
Religion, of course, can play a strong role in this. The second
Roman king, Numa, fostered religious practices in order to soften
the hard, war-forged edge of the Roman people under Romulus. Likewise,
George Washington, who held that “morality is a necessary spring
of popular government,” saw that without religion impelling
men to act morally, there was little hope for a virtuous citizenry.
In his Farewell Address of 1796, he said, “let us with
caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained
without religion.”
There are other powerful influences at work in our culture; some,
like religion, encourage personal responsibility and public morality,
while others tend to discourage it. To take just one other example,
the media, while it can be an influence for good, too often exerts
a strong influence for ill. While I myself think it best that we
act according to what our reason determines is good, I think that
for the most part we act according to what our imaginations present
as good—and this is especially true with the young. Movies,
television, and music are extremely powerful formers of the imagination
and thus have a great influence, over time, on what people do.
There is, of course, much more to say about the beneficial and
harmful influences at work in our culture, but the two I have singled
out are, I think, worthy of consideration.
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Fall 2006
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