Finite and Infinite Goods: A Framework for Ethics, by Robert Adams, Oxford University Press, 1999, 424 pp.; $45

Alfred North Whitehead memorably described the history of Western philosophy as "a series of footnotes to Plato." Perhaps this is even more apt as a description of the history of Christian philosophy. Christian Platonism is a venerable tradition indeed, with St. Augustine himself as its most distinguished exemplar. In the seventeenth century, the Cambridge Platonists, including such stalwarts as Benjamin Whitecote and Ralph Cudworth, used Platonism to defend Christianity against the emerging mechanistic atheism linked to the scientific revolution. "Plato was right all along," exclaims the old professor in C. S. Lewis's The Last Battle, when the true Narnia has been discovered and it has been realized that all that was good in the old Narnia was merely a copy of the real thing.

Despite this distinguished heritage, Platonism has not been popular for the last century, since the demise of Absolute Idealism (F. H. Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet) at the hands of the "new realists" (Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, though, oddly enough, Moore's own theory of "good" as a "non-natural property" certainly looks like Platonism). I still remember very well one of my graduate seminars at Yale, in which my professor (Casimir Lewy, a Polish logician who had been a student of Moore's) defended the claim that propositions exist as ideal objects, independent of their expression in human languages. (The argument in favor of this of course rests on the fact that it seems we can express the same proposition in different languages.) Another professor of mine who was auditing the class protested incredulously that this position "amounted to Platonism." A more damning indictment could hardly have been made. Lewy's response was equally revealing: "My dear sir, of course no one wants to be a Platonist. It's like believing in God—a great intellectual sin in the eyes of the academic world. But alas, what is one to do when the logical facts drive you to Platonism?"

It is therefore a matter of some note and also a cause for celebration that Robert Adams, one of the most distinguished contemporary Christian philosophers, has offered us a magisterial ethical theory that clearly takes up the mantle of Christian Platonism. In Finite and Infinite Goods, Adams, formerly at UCLA and now chair of the philosophy department at Yale, develops a comprehensive account of ethics that is both deeply Christian and clearly shaped by Platonic inspiration. (In saying the former I mean that the book is Christian in inspiration and consistent with Christianity in its conclusions; Adams nowhere presupposes any Christian doctrines or even argues for any specifically Christian claims.) It is a book that is both deeply original and in critical dialogue with rival contemporary ethical theory.

Adams begins, after a brief introduction, with a quote from Plato's Symposium:

For whoever has been educated to this point in the things of love, beholding the beautiful things in order and rightly, coming now to the completion of the things of love, will suddenly perceive something astonishingly beautiful in its nature. All his previous labors, Socrates, were for the sake of this.

In this passage, Plato has Diotima explain to Socrates that the beautiful things we see in nature and the arts "participate in" or copy a transcendent Beauty: the Beautiful itself. The Beautiful is closely linked to another Platonic ideal: the Good. The Beautiful is in fact simply one aspect of the Good. All that has worth and value does so for Plato because of its link to the Good.

It is remarkable that Plato never seems to have linked the Good to God, but Christian Platonists were not slow to make the connection. Adams's central thesis is that this identification is sound: God is not merely good; God is the Good, an infinite transcendent, though fully personal reality. Finite things are good because they resemble God and to the degree that they do so.

Moral goodness is by no means neglected by Adams. The book contains a well-developed divine command theory of moral obligation, to be discussed shortly. However, the Good that is identified with God is not merely the morally good. Nor is the Good to be identified with "well-being," or what is good for humans and other sentient creatures. The Good "is rather the goodness of that which is worthy of love or admiration," a quality that Adams says we have no distinctive term for in English, though he often calls it "excellence." The human longing for the good is also therefore richer than a longing for moral goodness; following in Plato's footsteps, Adams identifies this longing as Eros.

Though C. S. Lewis is never referred to in Finite and Infinite Goods, this theme in Adams reminds me of the quest for "Joy" that Lewis describes in his autobiography. Lewis there relates some intense experiences from his childhood: a memory of a toy garden brought into the nursery, the "idea of Autumn" imbibed from the Beatrix Potter book Squirrel Nutkin, and a snatch of poetry ("Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead") that evoked the wildness of "Northernness." These all engendered in the young Lewis a longing for Joy, an experience he cannot really put into words: "before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison."[1]

The search for Joy becomes the theme of Lewis's life. Though it was not until his Christian conversion that he believed himself to have understood what he was seeking, Lewis eventually understood the God who had become incarnate in Christ to be the object of that longing. He finds joy in mythology, in Wagnerian music, in the simple beauties and wild glories of nature. It is no accident that Aslan in Narnia is "not a tame lion." I think the Eros that Adams discusses is close to the "self-abandonment to an object which securely claimed this by simply being the object it was" that Lewis identifies with the glory of God and that he found dimly intimated in the wonders of Nordic mythology and Wagner's music.[2]

It is not possible to do justice to the riches of a book as original and comprehensive as Finite and Infinite Goods in a brief essay. Here I can do no more than hit a few high notes. The first important achievement of Adams is a robust defense of realism in ethics against every form of emotivism, expressivism, and relativism. What is good is good independently of what we humans believe or feel.

Adams deploys a sophisticated semantic theory to defend the claim that God is in fact the Good against a standard objection. It is easy to see that "God" and "the Good" do not have the same meaning. One can meaningfully question whether God is really good at all. Adams argues, however, that these semantic facts do not undermine his thesis. He freely admits that "good" does not mean "resembles God." However, it is also the case that "water" does not mean "H2O." People recognized and drank water before the chemical structure of water was understood. In the same way, "good" (in the sense of "excellence") may mean something like "property of that which is to be admired or appreciated" and we may know the meaning of this term without realizing that it is in fact God and that which resembles God that best satisfies this role.

But can religious Platonism do justice to the personal character of God? Does God merely become a symbol of an abstraction, whether that be termed "the Good" or "the Beautiful"? Adams makes powerful use of the personal character of God. His account of moral goodness roots moral obligation in the commands of a loving God. What is good is good because of the excellence it possesses. However, duties and obligations have their roots in personal relationships, and the supreme and over-riding obligations we call moral duties stem from the fact that God commands them. Without the commands of a personal God, there might be excellence, but there would be no duties.

Divine command theories of moral obligation are typically criticized for making morality arbitrary. (Would murder and rape be right if God commanded us to do them?) Adams overcomes this objection by rooting his theory of moral obligation in his broader theory of the Good. It is not just any God whose commands constitute moral duties; an amoral Zeus could and should be disobeyed. The duty to obey God is rooted in the character of God; God deserves our obedience because he has created us and because he is himself loving and good. (Adams includes in this section an interesting and nuanced account of the case of God commanding Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.)

The personal character of God also comes to the fore in the notion of vocation or calling, which Adams makes central to ethics. Our task in life is not merely to follow general principles of morality; it is certainly not merely to maximize happiness or other forms of goodness. It is rather to become the creatures God intends us to become, the creatures he calls us to become. Having a calling makes the ethical task both easier and harder. It is easier in the sense that I do not have to assume the weight of the governance of the world; I can leave that to God and merely take up the role he offers to me. It is harder because that role is not exhausted merely by adherence to general principles of morality; I must reflect on the specific circumstances of my own life to discern what God has for me to do.

The theistic character of Adams's ethic is reflected at many other points. There is a subtle and insightful discussion of how the love for an infinite God can be related to the love of finite things. Adams gives important roles to the concepts of grace and the sacred, as that which it is a "moral horror" to violate. God has no obligation to create the best possible world. Rather, he loves the particular creatures he has freely made and gracefully lavishes gifts that are not apportioned according to desert. Some of the value in the world so closely reflects the divine as to merit the title "sacred." Torture and murder of humans are not merely wrong, but are moral horrors, because such things are a violation of the image of God.

Adams also argues, against the grain of "postmodern" culture, that it is good for us humans to have a structured hierarchy of values. We should not view our goods as merely heterogenous collections; in some sense God, as the supreme Good, introduces order and harmony into our valuational lives, at least as an ideal. Supreme devotion to God is not only permissible but obligatory, since to be for God is to be for the good, though Adams notes that there are many who give a cup of cold water in the name of the good without realizing it is God whom they thereby serve, and that there are many who give lip service to God but have in fact little love for the Good. And Adams adds a cautionary, Tillich-inspired account of idolatry in which any finite good that inspires total devotion becomes a dangerous idol (though Adams has a far better grasp than Tillich of the importance of the personal character of God). The book concludes with an admittedly sketchy discussion of what the theory might mean for politics, and with an account of moral epistemology that stresses the value of general revelation while holding open the possibility of special revelation. In the last chapter, Adams discusses "moral faith," which is both an analogue to and a component of religious faith.

Finite and Infinite Goods is a tour de force, the result of a lifetime of careful thinking and rigorous scholarship. As such it will deservedly be a central focus of discussion among moral philosophers, Christian and secular, for many years. Nevertheless there are of course questions that the Christian community will wish to pose, as well as challenges certain to come from the secular audience to whom much of the book seems addressed. At certain key points I felt that Adams's self-confessed "moderately liberal Protestantism" surfaced, sometimes with happy results and sometimes with more questionable outcomes. I shall mention just two of these latter points.

The first is a worry that seventeenth-century Puritans voiced about Cambridge Platonism. Does this view do full justice to the depth of human sinfulness? Adams recognizes both badness and moral evil, and he sees that moral evil is not merely a lack of goodness but is in some sense opposition to the good. However, his general view of the human race strikes me as having a sunny and optimistic tone. This is apparent, for example, in his moral epistemology, where he may underestimate the effect of human depravity on our moral knowledge by insisting that by and large our ethical knowledge must be on track: "Though we are often misguided in Eros, I think we cannot always or even usually be totally mistaken about goodness."

Similarly, though Adams affirms the possibility of moral knowledge coming through special revelation, it appears that in his view such a revelation must presuppose and in some way be based on general revelation, since to recognize a special revelation as valid we must already have some reliable ways of knowing what is good. But is it not possible that, even though we are not totally bereft of natural moral knowledge, our moral knowledge might be pervasively and massively distorted, to a degree that without special revelation it is unlikely that humans will get the main things right?

My second question concerns the relation between Adams's theistic ethic and the kind of natural law theory that is such a prominent part of the history of Christian ethical thinking. One might suppose that an account of what is good for humans would focus on human nature. To recognize a good golf club, one must know what a golf club is and what it is for. Similarly, one might think, to have an understanding of what a good human being is, we must know what human beings are and what kinds of activities allow them to actualize their potential and fully become themselves. Such a line of thought certainly seems congenial to Adams's view, which generally grounds goodness in the being of a thing.

Surprisingly, however, Adams shies away from the natural law tradition, because he thinks that the concepts of "nature" and "the natural" are "not useful" for ethical theory today. He is certainly right to note that the terms have become problematic; much work is required to rehabilitate them. But I believe there is a cost to their dismissal.

In Adams's discussion of human persons as sacred, for example, it seemed to me that a richer concept of human nature would have given depth and content to his claims. His actual discussion of moral horrors emphasizes that the taking of life and the violation of a person's body are objectively horrible. Thus, murder and torture are moral horrors. Beyond that, what is morally horrible seems linked to consent; what is done to me against my will may be morally horrible. This does not seem to allow for the possibility, surely not merely hypothetical, that a person might consent to what is objectively bad for the person, and bad in a horrible and degrading manner. The provocative and rich concept of "moral horror" turns out on Adams's account to coincide roughly with what is perceived as deeply wrong on standard liberal accounts: it is wrong to kill me, torture me, or do other things to me without my consent. A richer conception of human nature might allow that there are things that are morally horrible even if done with consent; perhaps it is a moral horror when a person allows herself or himself to be morally degraded, even if the person welcomes the degradation.

It also seemed odd to me that traditional positions on the morality of homosexual actions are dismissed without much serious consideration or debate. Adams says that "homosexual practice is not essentially violative of persons" and that "same-sex unions can and often do realize most of the personal benefits and moral excellences to which traditional heterosexual marriages aspire." Of course a good case can be made for such a view. However, it did not seem to me that Adams gives sufficient attention to the case on the other side, whether that case be rooted in natural law theory or his own divine command theory of obligation. If the latter type of theory has any bite at all, we must at least consider the possibility that what is morally right will not always coincide with what is politically correct at a given time.

Such critical questions, however, should in no way undermine the stunning quality of Adams's achievement. Finite and Infinite Goods is a work that every Christian philosopher and theologian concerned with ethics simply must read. It has been a long time since I have read a book with such a bold and original vision, coupled with careful argument and insightful reflection on particular problems and issues. Though a very different kind of book, Adams's work has the same kind of fundamental importance I would attribute to Alastair MacIntyre's After Virtue or Alan Donagan's The Theory of Morality. In a perfect world it would inspire the same kind of extended discussion that followed John Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Alas, we live in a world where Platonism, particularly theistic Platonism, is unlikely to be taken so seriously.

C. Stephen Evans, as of September 2001, will be University Professor of Philosophy and the Humanities at Baylor University.

1. C. S. Lewis, Surprised By Joy (Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1955), p. 16.

2. Surprised by Joy, p. 77.

NOTE: For your convenience, the following book, which was mentioned above, is available for purchase:

• Finite and Infinite Goods, by Robert Adams

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