Do Dolphins Carry the Cross Biological Moral Realism and Theological Ethics

Abstract

In Dependent Rational Animals Alasdair MacIntyre advances the case for a realist account of the moral life over against the unsituated Enlightenment account of the good. The normative foundation of his proposal is narratives of the dependent rather than autonomous character of human existence from birth through childhood to old age and death, and analogies between human biological and emotional dependence, and child development, and the rich moral lives, and nurturing behaviours of dolphins and some other animals. This approach represents a significant revision of MacIntyre’s earlier espousal of a principally Aristotelian - and hence heroic - account of the virtues. His setting of dependence as an ordering contingency of rationality brings him much closer to Christian narratives of the good life. The problem however with attempts to read off moral narratives from anthropological accounts of human embodied and social life, or from ethological narratives of other animals, is that they involve the attempt to found Christian theology and ethics on other than Christian foundations, and they therefore lack a true ontological foundation. In what follows I will suggest that narratives of the morality of embodiment, whether human or nonhuman, do find a legitimate place in Christian theological ethics but that this place is subject to the ordering narrative of the scriptures, and in particular the narratives of Christ crucified and risen. The narratives of the Incarnation, Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ teach Christians to interpret dependence, embodiment, illness and even death, as aspects of biological existence which find correlates in the vulnerability of God.