David Solomon’s Moral Vision

“There is such a difference between life and theory.”
Anthony Trollope, Phineas Finn

The community of philosophers, and of Catholic and Christian intellectuals, mourns this week the death of W. David Solomon. He was laid to rest last Friday at Cedar Grove Cemetery at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught for almost fifty years until his retirement in 2016. Very few could rival his importance to the renewal of Catholic education and the Catholic intellectual tradition in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This influence, reaching thousands of students and colleagues, and extending to institutions across the world, is even more remarkable when one remembers that for almost all of his life David was a Southern Baptist, only converting to Catholicism in May of last year. It falls to all of us whom he leaves behind, and who loved him, to grieve his loss, celebrate his memory, rejoice in his hoped-for reward, and rededicate ourselves to his cause.

David arrived at Notre Dame in 1968 alongside other young faculty hired to move Notre Dame to the forefront of Catholic philosophy departments. For most of his career, David devoted himself to moral philosophy, especially bioethics and the tradition in twentieth-century analytic philosophy that came to be known as “virtue ethics.” Virtue ethics was inspired in the 1950s by Elizabeth Anscombe, the Catholic convert and student of Wittgenstein whose protest against awarding an honorary degree to Harry Truman granted her an international reputation.

In one of his last papers, appearing in 2019 in a book of essays written in his honor, David reflected on the argument and philosophical legacy of Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy,” one of the most influential philosophical articles of the twentieth century. There, Anscombe criticized Anglophone moral philosophy for assuming a position she called consequentialism, according to which there are no acts so awful that they may never be performed, no matter the circumstances. As Anscombe noted, this position is “quite incompatible with the Hebrew-Christian ethic,” which teaches “that there are certain things forbidden whatever consequences threaten.” An important example was the deliberate bombing of civilian populations in wartime, such as Truman’s destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Anscombe also criticized modern philosophers for their impoverished moral language. She argued that moral norms should be articulated with words like “honest,” “just,” “chaste,” and “courageous” rather than merely “good” and “bad,” “right” and “wrong,” “permissible” and “obligatory,” “ought” and “ought not.” That is, we need to recover concepts of virtues, traits of character that govern feeling and action and are the basis of a flourishing human life. Indeed, according to Anscombe one place the notion of a “norm” can do real work in moral philosophy is in characterizing what human flourishing involves. For example, think of how we can say how many teeth “a human being” has, meaning not that all human beings have this many teeth but that those with a different number are missing teeth or have some extra. Likewise, Anscombe argued, we may say of our species, “regarded not just biologically, but from the point of view of the activity of thought and choice in regard to the various departments of life,” that it is natural for us to have certain virtues, and that a human life that is lacking in these will be in some way defective.

As David observed, the flurry of responses provoked by Anscombe’s article was maddeningly diverse. Many philosophers tried to bring virtue concepts into the frameworks of standard consequentialist or deontological accounts of morality, while others tried to build theories of moral obligation that were centered on the concept of virtue. This was not Anscombe’s intention: She had argued instead that “the expressions ‘moral obligation,’ ‘the moral ought,’ and ‘duty’ are best put on the Index, if [we] can manage it”; and that philosophers should try “banishing ethics totally from their minds” until they had worked out an adequate “philosophical psychology.” In other words, normative ethical theory required a more fundamental philosophical basis than was available to philosophers in the 1950s. It was just this basis that Anscombe started working out in her seminal monograph of 1957, Intention. 

David agreed with Anscombe on these things. Over the decades he followed Anscombe, as well as his friend and colleague Alasdair MacIntyre—whose 1981 After Virtue marked a high point in the recovery of the concept of virtue—in defending what he called a revolutionary form of virtue ethics. By “revolution” he meant not mere change, but a return to something lost. David sought to reject the terms set by modernity and modern moral theory, with its abstracted and individualized notions of moral obligation and practical rationality, and instead situate ethical reflection within the “concrete features of human practical life,” understood to include local communities and contingent relationships with friends and family, as central to moral concern and moral education. Indeed, the term “virtue ethics” itself is inadequate and misleading, for this project is most properly an attempt to recover and extend a classical approach to ethics. In this approach, virtue is understood in a way that incorporates reference to moral principles and the judicious consideration of the consequences of our acts. None of these components is treated as more foundational than the others.

The other great change in mid-twentieth-century moral philosophy was a turn toward serious engagement with pressing social issues. In one of his papers, David recalled the previous era, which he witnessed as a graduate student at the University of Texas. Back then, David wrote, if someone needed an example to illuminate an abstract ethical argument, it would be something like “whether library books should be returned on time—and why—and what one should say to elderly aunts who asked to comment on the beauty of their outrageous hats.” But in 1971 John Rawls published A Theory of Justice, confronting substantial moral and political questions in the spirit of Immanuel Kant. Around the same time, philosophers like Peter Singer defended utilitarian responses to questions of abortion, animal rights, and global poverty. (A 1974 article by Singer published in the New York Times bore the triumphant headline, “Philosophers Are Back on the Job.”) Thus was born the subdiscipline of philosophy that we know today as “applied ethics.”

That philosophers would turn their minds to the urgent moral problems besetting our society sounds at first like a healthy development: Surely we can make some rational progress on these questions, perhaps even answer some of them. But this is not what happened. In 2013, after observing up close the birth and growth of bioethics, David observed that “as arguments on both sides become more sophisticated and more comprehensively articulated, the disagreements become deeper and more intractable.” According to David, this was because the contributions of academic moral philosophy usually reflect the broader culture out of which they arise, and so deepen our cultural divisions rather than helping to work through them: “It seems hardly too much to say that philosophers helped our culture to move from ‘mere’ normative disagreements to the much more malignant culture wars that now beset us.”

Partly in response to this situation, David established two vitally important institutions at Notre Dame. The first, beginning in the mid-1970s, was an annual conference in medical ethics that brought physicians together with philosophers and theologians to discuss practical moral questions. The second was the founding in 1998 of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, which David directed until 2013 and which today is one of the most important institutions in the world for reflection from within the Catholic intellectual tradition. David’s mission for the center was inspired by the vision of Pope John Paul II in what David called the three great encyclicals: Veritatis Splendor, Evangelium Vitae, and Fides et Ratio. A central part of that vision was a focus on cultural renewal—the reform of politics and the academy would, in time, naturally follow.

The Center’s annual fall conference quickly became its signature event. Students and faculty, philosophers, theologians, doctors, social scientists, artists, writers, members of the public, families with their children, priests, nuns, and laity, came together every year to reflect on matters of contemporary concern within the context of that intellectual and cultural tradition that is sustained by a Catholic university. This was not the detached and rarefied philosophy that David learned as a graduate student, nor was it an occasion for credentialed academics to peddle their “expertise” on moral matters or questions of public policy. Instead, it was a way of fully engaging philosophy, and the academy more broadly, with human life and culture in all of its richness and depth.

That conference remains today a profound symbol of David’s life and work. His remarkable gift for friendship, his generosity of spirit, and his extraordinary ability to encourage all those around him have animated each gathering from the beginning. The conference has become the embodiment of the connection between thousands of students, teachers, scholars, and all those drawn to David who likewise desired the renewal of all deeply human things. For David sought above all to foster genuine community—beginning with the warmth and kindness that he and his wife Lou showed to the generations of students and colleagues whom they welcomed into their homes over the years. Today, the macrocosm of this domestic community stretches broadly around the globe, encompassing the Catholic Studies movement under Don Briel at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, the transformation of Baylor University in Texas (David’s undergraduate alma mater), the heirs of Anscombe in Oxford and elsewhere, and the followers of St. Thomas Aquinas introduced to David by his close friend and colleague Ralph McInerny. It is a community that includes a place for the very young as well as the old, those who labor in the fields as well as the academy. In its own way, and alongside others like it, that community may prove to be the seed of a moral philosophy worthy of the name.

Image courtesy of University of Notre Dame Archives. Image cropped.