Michael McGhee writes…
The media have looked on in delight at the discomfort of the Chapter of St Paul’s as it wavered in the face of the OccupyLSX Camp on its doorstep. As I write they have called off the legal action whose enforcement could well have brought about violent confrontation between protesters and police. Conspicuous among the banners was the What Would Jesus Do? slogan. 
It mocked the actions of those in the Chapter who wanted legal action and implied that Jesus would have been with the protesters. It was a shame the Cathedral Chapter wrung their hands about the loss of income from the tourist trade, but it was mean-spirited to compare them to the money-lenders in the Temple. What would Jesus do? Well from Isaiah in the Hebrew Bible to the Jesus of the New Testament we see passionate denunciations of the abuse of wealth and power, so we can guess where he would have stood on the issues. But what is that to us? In his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals Kant famously said that ‘we cannot do morality a worse service than by seeking to derive it from examples. Every example of it presented to me must first be judged by moral principles in order to decide whether it is fit to serve as an original example—that is, as a model’. The real question is, what would we do? Jesus is a model only if he exemplifies actions we have independent moral reasons for doing …
Dr Michael McGhee (Honorary Senior Fellow of the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool)
Stephen Clark Responds…
Well, where to begin then? Maybe at the end: wasn’t Kant just wrong? Wrong about the way we learn what it’s good to do; wrong about the reason it’s good to do it; wrong even about what philosophers said before? Plato knew very well that we may be excited and moved by particular acts and persons before we have any idea what general principle or property they all exemplify, and even if we never can deliver an adequate definition: that is how Socrates operates, after all, in rebutting the definitions he extorts from his friends or victims – everyone can see at once that the definitions don’t fit the real examples. And even if I have an articulate principle of action (as it might be: help your friends and hurt your enemies) that may not survive a sudden revelation of what helping and hurting are. So exemplars do inspire real changes of behaviour, and especially when they excite our admiring love. So the rule for many post-Platonic philosophers was that – not being Socrates – they still wished to be like Socrates, and in ways that they couldn’t and needn’t articulate beforehand. Saints and heroes and even sages change the way we act, and even the way we hope to act, by showing us a better way, a life we hadn’t thought of. And just possibly their spirit may move in us in ways we don’t just imagine for ourselves: maybe they really change us, if we let them.
So imagining to ourselves what Jesus would require and do is not of itself an error. But of course, Blake may have been right to remark that ‘the vision of Christ that thou dost see is my vision’s greatest enemy’! The Christ of ‘the social gospel’, speaking for the poor and dispossessed, was not necessarily in favour of higher wages for an organized labour force! His line, more often, seems to have been that we shouldn’t be worried about tomorrow. Those who hoard their money won’t profit from their wealth, but it’s also, equally, wrong to demand equal pay for equal work! What mattered for him, as for most philosophers as the term was once understood, was to live in beauty, in obedience. Certainly he chased the money changers, and the animal traders, from the temple forecourt, but that was because they were out of place in what was built to be a house of prayer for all people.
And why shouldn’t the Dean and Chapter mind about the loss of income? St Paul’s is a thing of beauty, a source of inspiration for Londoners and others in far worse times than these, whether or not they are Christians – and someone has to pay for its upkeep. It’s not unreasonable to hope that those who love it will contribute what they can, and not unreasonable to worry about the motives and manners of a horde of campers!
Professor Stephen Clark (Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, University of Liverpool)
Michael McGhee Replies…
Hmm …‘the motives and manners of a horde of campers’ … they are certainly a nuisance, even Giles Fraser wanted them to go, but there are symbolic values in place here and it is one thing to wish them to go and another to invoke the law, as the Chapter later realised. I wonder whether one can ‘live in beauty’ and not act if surrounded by injustice … action against the oppression of the poor would be a form of ‘living in beauty’ … the least of these my little ones … especially if one perceives a causal and systemic relationship between one’s own standard of living and the conditions of the genuinely dispossessed in Africa and Asia and so on. It would be banal and sad if the ‘campers’ were simply exercised by envy and a demand for higher wages for the labour force, though the latter phrase conceals a muted multitude of sins and private tragedies. I recall Simone Weil’s observation that denying a young person an apprenticeship can amount to sacrilege. But what about Kant? I must say that I much prefer his aesthetics to his moral philosophy and Stephen writes eloquently here about how one can be changed by the great exemplars. On the other hand, it isn’t a matter of articulating moral principles and sensibility already consciously in place, but a matter of being awakened to them. The admiration must depend upon recognition … otherwise one follows the charismatic leader blindly and without thought … we need to find some principle of distinction between those followers of Jesus who thought he was about to inaugurate the kingdom and were ready for the blood bath, and those who looked inwards because they realised what he was saying…
Stephen Clark responds…
Well, yes. There’s a remark of George Orwell too, that ‘we all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are “enlightened” all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our “enlightenment”, demands that the robbery shall continue’. So our great predecessors would have suggested that we could give up some at least of our luxuries if it would help the poor, and at least attempt to liberate our victims! It’s not even all that hard. As Paul of Tarsus wrote to the Corinthians to encourage their support of the relief fund for the famine in Palestine: ‘There is no question of relieving others at the cost of hardship to yourselves; it is a question of equality. At the moment your surplus meets their need, but one day your need may be met from their surplus’. But I haven’t heard that the Dean and Chapter ever disagreed with that – and clerics generally earn a lot less than the professional norm (let alone the norm for the financial classes). So they probably aren’t ‘the enemy’ (whom Jesus told us, by the way, to love).
On the motivation of the campers, I have of course nothing reliable to say – but that’s the point: neither had the Dean and Chapter, the Council, or any journalists. We know what some of them said, but experience and our own self-knowledge alike suggest that there are always other possibilities around. It’s not unreasonable to be nervous, even if we’re also told that true love casts out fear, nor necessarily wrong to begin to invoke the law: wouldn’t the Occupiers themselves wish to invoke the law – against financial and political corruption – if they could? It’s also not unreasonable to wonder how exactly the Occupation will encourage repentance in the financial classes (supposing them to be guilty of the wrongs of which they are accused).
Of course you’re right that we can’t always be sure we’re imitating the right thing, even if we’ve picked the right exemplar. As Plato might have said, we imitate the shadow rather than the substance, as though what mattered (for example) was looking like a philosopher (which used to entail having a beard, and going barefoot). And plenty of people get the wrong message even when they are listening carefully to the words. Blake’s comment, by the way, continued: ‘Yours is the friend of all mankind; mine speaks in parables to the blind’! But is the right way forward to find a ‘principle’, a form of words, to guide us? I’m not sure even Aristotle, who played with the notion of the ‘practical syllogism’, really thought that: what mattered was awakening a proper insight into particular cases, and bending the rules (like a literal bendy ruler!) to fit around the edges. As he said (it’s in the Nicomachean Ethics), we can’t make detailed rules for every circumstance of human life, even though we do find general rules quite useful at the start.
It occurs to me as I write that the Kantian principle (but perhaps I’m being unfair to Kant) that we should do all and only what we can imagine everyone doing without some obvious disaster is entirely adverse to sanctity or heroism alike. ‘What if we all did that?’ is not always the most helpful question. But that is probably another story.
