Whooooo-eee! I am pretty late for this entry, my friends–I meant to post it up last friday. But it ended up being sooooo big I had to delay it to be happy with it! I think you’ll see why, because it’s nearly 40 thousand words! But I think it’s worth it, so I hope you can forgive me once you’ve had a chance to see what I’ve been up to!

Aristotle’s Curse: An Extremely Lengthy Review of Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition

If I may beg your indulgence, allow me to provide a bit of background as I start off this very long book review. This is my very first post dealing with philosophy specifically (rather than the philosophy of history or something related to it but not ‘purely’ metaphysics or ethics or another subfield of the discipline). As luck would have it, however, the book I’m reviewing today—Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism—is aimed at laymen such as myself, as Feser intends to introduce and explain many philosophical concepts to people unfamiliar with philosophy as a discipline.[1] Therefore, I hope this may earn me a bit of forbearance from any better-educated readers (in this profession anyways) as I begin my first dip into philosophical waters. And while I’m hardly so full of myself as to say I won’t make any mistakes on my first try, I do hope the proceeding essay contains a least good points here and there. I must also give thanks to several members of /r/askphilosophy who helped me craft this review by answering my questions about Aristotle: /u/Rivka333, /u/HippeHoppe, and others. With that said, I shall begin.

As you can tell from the title of his book, Feser’s intention is to disprove the claims made by several authors called “The New Atheists”—specifically, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris. He hopes to disprove their assertions that religious belief in stupid and rationally indefensible, proving instead that belief in a certain kind of monotheistic God is not only rational, but indeed can be proven beyond any doubt with nothing but pure reason.

As far as such apologetics go, The Last Superstition has been very well received, at least by believers.[2] However, Feser (who is a professor of Philosophy at a California college) aimed to do a little more than just rationally prove the existence of God. He also wanted to prove the validity—indeed, the necessity—of certain philosophical positions: Aristotelian realism, from which is derived Aristotle’s distinctively teleology-oriented moral system, from which Feser’s particular religious philosophy (that of Thomas Aquinas, or Thomism) is descended. For Feser, Aristotle’s philosophy is more than merely the correct way to make sense of the world, but the very foundation upon which Western Civilization rests: “Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought. More than any other intellectual factor—there are other, non-intellectual factors too, of course, and some are more important—this abandonment has contributed to the civilizational crisis through which the West has been living for several centuries, and which has accelerated massively in the last century or so.”[3]

This is certainly a bold claim, and Feser admits as much.[4] To his credit, he makes an equally bold attempt to back it up, spending most of the book first explaining Plato and Aristotle’s philosophies. He then does the same for Aquinas, and subsequently explains how other philosophers (Hume, Descartes, and Kant, among others, and moving on to contemporary philosophers such as Paul and Patricia Churchland), in his view, failed to refute the Greeks and Medievals. At last, he proceeds to explain how this failure also foiled the attempts of the present-day “New Atheists” to disprove God and “traditional” morality.

Feser’s efforts are muchly appreciated (by me, at least); his arguments and analyses are not only (reasonably) well-sourced but wonderfully lucid as well. I am a layman with little background in philosophy, and before you condemn me too harshly, Feser marketed this book for laymen, not only academic philosophers. From a layman’s perspective, then, he did a fantastic job: I found his explanations of Aristotle and Plato’s thought to be easily understandable, and given how obtuse and hard-to-follow philosophical writing tends to be, that Feser made it comprehensible speaks very well of his skill. He also manages to make the read quite jaunty and entertaining. While several commenters, both Christian allies and atheist enemies, have criticized the somewhat insulting and polemical tone of *The Last Superstition,* I didn’t mind it much. First, I can be and have been far nastier than Feser at his very worst, so it would be hypocritical of me to condemn him (as my friends at /r/badhistory have told me, it’s something to avoid, even if your opponent is more relentlessly annoying than anyone Feser criticizes), but more importantly, a little bit of rivalry and therefore harsh words between “intellectual enemies” can make an otherwise dry and technical philosophical monograph into engaging reading. Some of his jokes, such as the ‘plump Scotsman’ one at Hume’s expense, are genuinely amusing, though they would have been inappropriate in a formal scholarly setting. Of course, the book isn’t all jabs and insults, Feser at least has a sense of humor and pokes a few jokes at his own expense as well, which are both funny and prove he doesn’t take himself more seriously than he warrants. Combined with the clear and cogent distillation of complex philosophical topics, this book at least has convinced me that Feser would be an excellent teacher. Were I to take one of his classes at Pasadena, I’m confident I would learn a lot and have a lot of fun doing it.

Unfortunately, despite these strengths, I still wasn’t convinced by most of the arguments Feser makes. I will say, to his credit, that he successfully proves religious belief is reasonable—though I must admit my bias here, I’m not an atheist, much less an anti-theist, and I always took a very dim view of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris (I haven’t read much Dennett). However, the substantial philosophical thesis I wish to defend here is this: *Feser largely fails to prove that the God of classical Greek philosophy and, by extension, Thomism, is an absolute necessity; indeed, Feser also fails to prove such a God is necessarily the Christian one. Even worse, despite Feser’s impressive efforts, he fails to prove the necessity, truth, or usefulness of Aristotelian moral reasoning, and Aristotle’s philosophy—at least as presented in The Last Superstition—still appears, if not utterly bankrupt, unsatisfying and problematic. Needless to say, the way Feser blames (what he calls) contemporary social ills on the “abandonment” of Aristotelianism remains equally unconvincing.*

Given this thesis, let me explain for just a moment how I’ll structure this review. While I’ll skim over the first chapters and pay some attention to chapters 5 and 6, I’ll concentrate primarily on chapter 2, “Greeks bearing Gifts,” and chapter 4, “Scholastic Aptitude.” Those chapters deal most heavily with Aristotle, so I figure a demolition of them will, by extension, also undermine the arguments of Aquinas as well as Feser’s justifications of various Catholic social teachings. After I’m done with those I’ll move on to some of the historical and political arguments Feser has made, especially in reference to Communism, abortion, gay marriage, and other such matters, which means I’ll be jumping around a little over the course of this review. So please bear with me.

The preface and first chapter, being introductory, are more or less what I have summarized above—Feser lays out his aim to defend Aristotelianism, the Philosopher’s God of Christianity, and therefore Western Civilization against the philosophically ignorant (in his view) attacks of the New Atheists. There are a few interesting tidbits (the opening anecdote concerns Anthony Flew’s conversion along with some nice things said about atheists Feser actually respects, like Thomas Nagel) but otherwise they’re the “opening arguments and chapter summary” chapters. Even here, however, there are a few problems which demonstrate, in my view, a sort of methodological sloppiness which will lead us to a lot of the problems I’ll point out later on. This is also a good time to demonstrate my own approach, which is extensive quotation from Feser’s book—later on I’ll also bring in both his blog entries and a few others I found to be particularly useful, such as the Aaron Boyden’s review at Protagoras.typepad.com. Of course, I’ll also be citing a few other sources ranging from books on Marxism to particularly apropos news articles to make some of my points. I should also note that while I’ll generally follow the progression of Feser’s book, I will jump back to earlier portions now and then if they make points directly relevant to later sections, and vice versa. With no further ado, let us start our journey into the meat of the text.

In the preface, Feser tells us, in an early assault on gay marriage, “it is no more up to the courts *or* the people to ‘define’ marriage or to decide whether religion is a good thing than it is up to them to ‘define’ whether the Pythagorean Theorem is true of right triangles, or whether water has the chemical structure H2O. In each case, what is at issue is a matter of objective fact that it is the business of reason to discover rather than democratic procedure to stipulate.”[5]

There are a few things one could say in response to this—off the top of my head, I could glibly reply by saying “public opinion” might not define H2O or triangles, but scientists and mathematicians certainly can if they so desire. If a geometrist even smarter than Pythagoras was able to prove the Pythagorean theorem incorrect, or physicists and chemists experimentially verified that water wasn’t H2O, Feser would have a little less ground to stand on. Of course, that’s a little silly—such things are very unlikely to happen, obviously. There are a couple of less glib responses. First, one could easily argue that Feser is committing category errors here. He himself has proven very annoyed when “New Atheists” do the same in claiming science to be the sole determinant of human knowledge—in [this blog entry]( http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2012/05/natural-theology-natural-science-and.html), for instance, he criticizes the assumption that all questions can be boiled down to science and notes that many, especially metaphysics, *require* a philosophical approach, not just a rigidly “scientistic” one.[6] But one could argue he’s doing the same here. Formal logic alone cannot answer whether or not religion is good and gay marriage is bad (or “incoherent) because human affairs belong in an entirely different category than geometric proofs or chemical equations, both of which not only regularly but *inevitably and unerringly* follow predictable patterns, which you can’t say for people–when studying people, there are few hard and fast objective and universal truths, so one ought rely on more holistic methods, so to speak. At the very least, such holistic methods are necessary to prove whether or not a given philosophical postulate is sound (as in, factually true) as opposed to valid alone. Of course, Feser would probably say this isn’t really relevant, because (and here I preview his upcoming chapters) he has Aristotelian metaphysics on his side, which supposedly allow philosophers to arrogate the analytical rights and responsibilities of humanists and social scientists (historians, sociologists, etc). His argument relies on “Essences” and “Final Causes”—he and I will define those terms later on in this review. Suffice it to say that I believe my critique of the normative force (morally obligating force) of those concepts, even if I allow for their existence, will hopefully cast at least a bit of doubt on Feser’s thesis.

Secondly, at least from a historian’s perspective—and while I freely admit to being an utter neophyte when it comes to philosophy, let’s just say history is something I know a little better—some of his assessments strike me to be at least as glib as anything I’ve said above. On page viii, he says the New Atheist critiques of religion are “sudden…atheist chic is now, out of the blue as it were,” very popular. But this isn’t correct—a great deal of this “New Atheist Chic” was in response to 9/11, especially Sam Harris’ polemic. This might seem like a bit of petty pedantry, but the reasoning behind this omission is quite important, IMO. If the arguments of the “New Atheists” really were spurred by only a childish resentment of religion, it would be easier to dismiss them—and I say this as someone who generally dislikes their writing as well. However, when those atheists can point to a great deal of actual misery caused by religion, especially 9/11, which even [Feser himself was deeply affected by] (http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2011/09/ten-years-on.html), it becomes harder to say they might not have any sort of point at all.[7]

Part 1: Aristotle Returns

But enough of this. Let us move on to the second chapter, “Greeks Bearing Gifts.” I will say that this demonstrates many of Feser’s strengths. As mentioned in the introduction, his exposition on Plato and Aristotle is both comprehensive and understandable. However, he also displays a great deal of grace and genuine appreciation even for philosophers aside from his two heroes. He compliments the pre-Socratic philosophers for their interest in the world around them and their earnest search for truth, and also admits they played an important role in the development of Western philosophy (as Feser says, you really can’t claim philosophy is just “footnotes to Plato” when his predecessors were important too).[8] In short, Feser demonstrates an intellectual openness and a generosity of spirit that’s quite refreshing.

Still, the fact that I like Feser is no reason for me to go easy on him. I’ll skip over his descriptions of the Pre-Socratic philosophers as well as Plato himself; they are important, but not relevant to the critiques I’ll be making of their successor, Aristotle. I’ll also skip over Feser’s defense of the philosophical position called “realism” generally (Aristotelianism is one variant of it), compared to others such as nominalism or conceptualism. I don’t have the necessary background to engage with that as well as I’d like, so I am forced to concede the field to him in that respect, and operate as if he has proven the truth of realism. Instead, what I will do is start with the discussion of potentiality and actuality on pages 54-55.

Here, we learn of Greek named Parmenides who said that change was impossible. Aristotle said it *was* possible (obviously) because of “actualities” and “potentialities.” To quote Feser:

>“while it is true that something can’t come from nothing, it is false to suppose that nothing or non-being is the only possible candidate for a source of change. Take any object of our experience: a red rubber ball, for example. Among its features are the ways it actually is: solid, round, red, and bouncy. These are different aspects of its ‘being.’ There are also the ways it is not; for example, it is not a dog, or a car, or a computer. The ball’s ‘dogginess’ and so on, since they don’t exist, are different kinds of ‘non-being.’ But in addition to these features, we can distinguish the various ways the ball potentially is: blue (if you paint it), soft and gooey (if you melt it), and so forth. So being and non-being aren’t the only relevant factors here; there are also a thing’s various potentialities…even if [for example] gooeyness doesn’t yet exist in the ball, the *potential* for gooeyness *does* exist in it, and this, together with some external influence that *actualizes* this potential (e.g. heat), suffices to show how the change can occur.”

All this strikes me as fair enough, and Feser literally tells me it’s “pretty obvious.” Then he says, “Once you make the simple distinction between actuality and potentiality, you are on your way to seeing *there is and must be a God.*”[9]

Whoah, now. Well, he and I will get to that later, but here’s the next paragraph, and it raises an important issue, so I ought quote it:

>“You might think, at least if you are a contemporary analytic philosopher, that a thing is “potentially” almost *anything,* so that Aristotle’s distinction is uninteresting. For example, it might be said by such philosophers that we can ‘conceive’ of a ‘possible world’ where rubber balls can bounce from here to the moon, or where they move by themselves and follow people around menacingly, or some such thing. But the potentialities Aristotle has in mind are the ones rooted in a thing’s nature as it actually exists, not just any old thing it might “possibly” do in some expanded abstract sense…Hence, in Aristotle’s sense of “potential,” while a rubber ball could potentially be melted, it could *not* potentially follow someone around all by itself.”[10]

This sounds reasonable. But if one thinks about it a little further—yes, perhaps even with some more thought experiments, even silly ones—one might find that the analytical philosophers might not be as far out as Feser implies—and that it should give moral realists a bit of pause, for reasons I’ll expound on later. The examples of potentialities the smug philosophers gave are indeed rooted in the thing’s nature—they weren’t being as silly as Feser implies. If you were to attach a strong magnet to the rubber ball, it would follow you around if you were wearing metal (and if you say that’s not a “potentiality” of the ball itself because you had to add something to it, the ball isn’t “potentially” blue either, because you have to add blue paint to it). It’s convenient for Feser to act as if a thing’s potentialities are easy to discern, but if we’re being rigorous, we find the task might be harder than we expect. I’m not denying that potentialities exist, and that objects have a limited set of them, but the fact that we can make *errors* in discerning them—for instance, denying them where they actually do exist, as I pointed out above—means they are not a perfect way of understanding the world, and that will be important later on (I think Aaron Boyden was exactly [right to raise this point]( http://protagoras.typepad.com/adrift_on_neuraths_boat/2011/10/feser-chapter-5.html), though I do think he was a little harsh on Feser as a whole).[11]

So let us move on for now (though we’ll come back to Feser’s other three notes on the importance of potentialities when we get to the existence of God and the morality of abortion). The next important bit of Aristotelianism we come to are his Four Causes. They are explained as such:

Look at a rubber ball. The *stuff it’s made of* is it’s “material cause” (rubber). The form it takes is its “formal cause” (a ball). How it was made is its “efficient cause” (it was made in a factory or by a toymaker or something). And it’s “final cause” is the purpose for which it was made (bringing amusement to children). However, Feser said all of these also apply to artifacts in the natural world, both living and non-living. The heart, for instance, is materially made of flesh, formally in the shape of an organ, efficiently caused by evolution, and finally caused (its purpose, or function) to pump blood.[12]

The important part of this is that Feser believes modern scientists and philosophers have dismissed the concept of final causes unjustly, and that the philosopher David Hume introduced some strange ideas about causation that have really mucked things up. According to Feser, Hume believed the relationship between causes and effects was much weaker than common sense tells us—for instance, Hume postulated that a brick thrown at a window would not necessarily break the window, but might possibly disappear before hitting it, so he believed events tended to be “loose and separate” rather than “necessarily connected” through cause and effect.[13] Again, I don’t know enough about Hume to comment on that, but I did detect some problems in Feser’s defense of final causes, which we’ll get to when we get to Aristotle proper.

Before then, we come to one last important principle: That

>“cause cannot give to its effect what it does not have to give, and it can be illustrated by a simple example. Suppose you come across a puddle of water near an outdoor spigot. You will naturally conclude that the puddle was caused by the spigot, either because someone turned it on or because it is leaking. The effect is a puddle of water and the cause is something fully capable of producing that effect, since it contains water in it already. But now suppose instead that you come across a puddle of thick, sticky, dark red liquid near the same spigot. In this case you will not conclude that the spigot was the cause, at least not by itself. The reason is that there is nothing in the spigot alone that could produce this specific effect, or at least not every feature of the effect. The spigot could produce a puddle of liquid alright, and maybe even a puddle of vaguely reddish liquid if there was rust in the line, but not a puddle of thick, sticky, dark red liquid specifically. You would be likely to conclude instead that someone had spilled a can of soda pop near the spigot, or perhaps that someone had been bleeding heavily nearby it. Even if these possibilities had been ruled out and you had evidence that the puddle came from the spigot after all, you’d conclude that somehow such a thick red liquid (blood, soda, or whatever) had somehow been put into the water line, or that if it had not, then there must have been something on the ground that when mixed with water from the spigot chemically produced this thick red liquid. What you would never seriously consider is the suggestion that normal water from the spigot all by itself produced the red puddle. For there is just nothing in water by itself that could produce the redness, thickness, or stickiness of the puddle; ergo there must have been something in addition to the water that produced the effect.”[14]

Fair enough, this seems sensible. But things might get more complicated when Feser, on page 68, mentions that this principle is not disproved by the evolution of intelligence between ‘potentiality’ and ‘actuality’—and, once again, I promise to get to that when Feser does in the chapters 4 and 5. I can only leave you off with Feser’s assessment of why all this stuff is so important:

>” I have referred to final causes as “all-important” for several reasons, all of which will become increasingly evident as we see the myriad implications of this idea in subsequent chapters. One reason worth emphasizing here, though, is their inherently preeminent place among the four causes. Aquinas refers to the final cause as “the cause of causes,” and for good reason. The material cause of a thing underlies its potential for change; but potentialities, as we’ve seen, are always potentialities for, or directed toward, some actuality. Hence final causality underlies all potentiality and thus all materiality. The final cause of a thing is also the central aspect of its formal cause; indeed, it determines its formal cause. For it is only because a thing has a certain end or final cause that it has the form it has – hence hearts have ventricles, atria, and the like precisely because they have the function of pumping blood. (“ Form follows function,” you might say, though Aristotle would have been horrified at modern architecture’s simple-minded application of this principle.) And as I have said (though for reasons that can be made explicit only after we cover some more ground through to Chapter 6), efficient causality cannot be made sense of apart from final causality. Indeed, nothing makes sense – not the world as a whole, not morality or human action in general, not the thoughts you’re thinking or the words you’re using, not anything at all – without final causes. They are certainly utterly central to, and ineliminable from, our conception of ourselves as rational and freely choosing agents, whose thoughts and actions are always directed toward an end beyond themselves. Yet modern philosophers, scientists, and intellectuals in general claim not to believe in final causality. I say “claim” because, like all normal human beings, they actually appeal to final causes all the time in their everyday personal lives, and even to a great extent in their professional lives. They contemplate and act on their goals, give their reasons for doing things, explain to their children what this or that body part is for. Biologists and other scientists constantly make reference to the functions of organs, to the role various species play relative to one another in the ecosystem, to future events toward which the stars, galaxies, and other astronomical bodies are inevitably moving, and so on and on, and couldn’t possibly carry on their work unless they did so. At the same time, these thinkers are in thrall to an official ideology according to which Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes was somehow refuted by modern science. In particular, it is held that modern science shows that there are no formal or final causes, and that material and efficient causes are very different from what Aristotle and his successors took them to be. Any appearance of final causality is illusory, and descriptions that make reference to it are merely useful fictions that can be translated into descriptions that make reference instead to purposeless, meaningless, goal-free causes and effects. Let me be very clear about something. However widely accepted, these claims are, each and every one of them, simply untrue…

>”Here are the facts. First, early modern philosophers and scientists never came remotely close to disproving Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes. Some of them did (as we will see) offer some feeble and easily rebutted objections, but for the most part it was simply decided to carry on scientific and philosophical practice as if one needed to appeal only to two (at most) of the four causes, and to ignore the others… Second, this rash move immediately created a number of serious philosophical problems that have never been settled to this day, but instead have only gotten progressively worse; indeed, these problems have led contemporary philosophers to conclusions historically unprecedented in their bizarreness and absurdity. Third, the original stipulative character of this move has been largely forgotten with the passing centuries, and philosophers’ and scientists’ faulty collective memory has transformed it into the “discovery” they falsely regard it as having been. Fourth, for this reason, the bizarreries and absurdities to which contemporary intellectuals have been led by their rejection of the four causes have been embraced as further surprising “discoveries” or “results” of philosophical inquiry, rather than recognized for what they are: a reductio ad absurdum of the premises laid down by their intellectual ancestors, and thus of the entire modern philosophical picture of the world to which they are committed. That they do indeed constitute a reductio ad absurdum – a set of manifest falsehoods that refute the premises that led to them – is, as we will see by the end of this book, beyond reasonable doubt.”[15]

Quite bold, but I’m not very convinced. Here are some reasons why:

1: Aristotle (at least if Feser’s description of him is accurate) seems to be committing category errors in the way he draws comparison between human-made objects and natural ones, or living objects and unliving ones, particularly in reference to final causes (and again, I’m not an Aristotle expert, but this struck me as a very annoying trait in Aristotle’s writing when I read him).

I think Feser may be right in saying we can’t dismiss the concept of final causes so easily. However, I also think we must be very, very cautious in extending their use to the fields of morality or normative obligation in general. *Feser may be right to say (and I bold this and use caps because it really is very important) that final causes are extremely useful, perhaps even necessary, in making sense of human behavior, but that is because it is very easy to discern final causes, or purposes, through talking with people or observing their actions. For living organisms, the final cause of particular organs is equally easy to observe; you only need to remove them to observe their effect on the creature. It is therefore more difficult to observe the final causes of organisms as a whole, since you cannot ask who created them what their “purpose” is. It is also more difficult to discern the functions of things like “sexual faculties” (as opposed to just individual organs like the penis) since the term refers to a vaguer concept that can’t just be removed from the organism like an individual organ can.

For instance, in the case of the rubber ball, you need only ask the guys at the factory why they made it to discern its “final cause” (they’ll tell you they wanted to make something fun for kids). For an organism, you need only remove its heart on the dissection table to discern the heart’s function (blood will stop flowing and the organism will die). But for natural objects, or even non-vital organs in a living body, this is much harder, and it is therefore very unwise to draw comparisons between these two categories, as Aristotle did. We can observe that the “final cause” of the moon seems to be to orbit the earth, but no matter how regular and unerring our observations seem to be, we cannot know with absolute certainty that the moon is “meant” to do this, because the moon has no “creator” we can just ask the way we could with the rubber ball and the guys who made it. Perhaps the orbit of the moon is decaying imperceptibly, so that in a million or a billion years it’ll fly off into space or crash into the earth. We can’t know for sure. Similarly, there are several organs whose purposes remain unclear to this day—nobody’s sure what your appendix or tonsils do, we can apparently remove them without much ill effect, but who knows if they’re actually doing something.* Needless to say, discerning the “final causes” of people and sexual faculties is just as hard. It therefore strikes me as unwise to call things moral or immoral based on “final causes” which, even if they do exist, are hard to get right and easy to get wrong.

Perhaps Feser will say that this is a silly objection. But I’m not done with it yet, I’ll just ask him (and you, dear reader) to keep it in mind, for it’ll show up again when we get to Feser’s critique of consequentialism and utilitarianism. The same applies to my next argument:

2: Once again, even if we accept the existence of final causes, *they seem to be not objective but very much relative.* If you ask a guy at the ball factory what the “final cause” of the rubber ball is, he might tell you it’s to provide fun for children. However, if you ask the CEO of Acme Ball Corp. what its final purpose is, he’ll say it’s to be sold in stores to produce the greatest profit possible. So how do we discern what the “true” final purpose of the ball is? Is it to provide fun for children, or provide profits for toy manufacturers? Neither Feser nor Aristotle seem to give any clear answers to this question (and it doesn’t seem as easy to answer as in the case of drugs like opium, as we’ll get to later). Similarly, is the “final cause” of the moon simply to orbit the Earth, or is it to influence the tides or provide light at night? Neither Feser nor Aristotle provide much guidance in discerning this, at least not yet.

But they’ll try in future chapters, which we’ll get to after this next one. Meanwhile, Chapter 3, “Getting Medieval” is where Aquinas comes in. It starts off with an amusing anecdote on Aquinas on page 74, which (again) I’ll return to later, but it also by informs us that Dawkins and other New Atheists, in attacking Aquinas, were actually attacking straw men, and Feser endeavors to describe what the OG Thomist “actually” believed. Very well, let us see what that is.

Part II: Aristotle’s Successor

According to Feser, Aquinas never said something as jejune as “everything has a cause, therefore there must be an uncaused cause somewhere out there.” No, Aquinas was really talking about accidentally and essentially ordered causation. What are those? I’ll give the mic over to Feser:

>” Remember that for Aristotle, change or motion always involves a transition from potentiality to actuality. And since a potential is by itself just that – merely potential, not actual or real – no potential can make itself actual, but must be actualized by something outside it. Hence a rubber ball’s potential to be melted must be actualized by heat; hence the potential of an animal’s leg to move must be actualized by the firing of the motor neurons; and so forth. Remember also that Aristotle takes the immediate efficient cause of a thing to be simultaneous with it. The immediate cause of a pot’s being curved, for example, is the curved position of the potter’s hand as he molds it. Now, by the same token, the curved position of the potter’s hand is itself immediately caused by whatever events in his nervous system keep the muscles in his hand flexed in such-and-such a way.

>“But of course, we can also point to other, less immediate causes of the curved position of his hand. For example, it was remotely caused by the fact that his girlfriend asked him last week to make a pot for her; for he wouldn’t be sitting there right now curving his hand in just that way if she hadn’t made this request. This brings us to a crucial distinction Aquinas and other medieval philosophers made between two kinds of series of causes and effects, namely “accidentally ordered” and “essentially ordered” series (or causal series per accidens and per se, for you fans of Scholastic Latin). To take a stock example, consider a father who begets a son, who in turn begets another. If the father dies after begetting his son, the son can still beget a son of his own, for once in existence the son has the power to do this all by himself. He doesn’t need his father to remain in existence for him to be able to do it. If we imagine an ongoing series of fathers begetting sons who in turn beget others – and of course, such series really do exist all around us – then we can observe that in every case, each son has the power to beget a son of his own (and thus become a father) even if his own father, or any previous father in the series, goes out of existence. Considered as a “causer” of sons, each member of this series is in this sense independent of the previous members. Hence the series is “accidentally ordered” in the sense that it is not essential to the continuation of the series that any earlier member of it remain in existence. And in the same way, the potter’s curving his hand in making the pot occurs even though his girlfriend’s request happened a week ago. The causal link between the request and the hand’s curving is also “accidental” insofar as the latter exists in the absence of the former. But it would not exist in the absence of the firing of the motor neurons. Here we have an “essentially ordered” causal series, and we have one precisely because the cause in this case is (unlike the girlfriend’s request) simultaneous with the effect. The hand is held in the position it is in only because the motor neurons are firing in such-and-such a way; take away the neural activity, and the hand goes limp.

>”Or, once again to make use of a stock example, if we think of a hand which is pushing a stone by means of a stick, the motion of the stone occurs only insofar as the stick is moving it, and the stick is moving it only insofar as it is being used by the hand to do so. At every moment in which the last part of the series (viz. the motion of the stone) exists, the earlier parts (the motion of the hand and of the stick) exist as well. The stone, and the stick itself for that matter, only move because, and insofar as, the hand moves them; indeed, strictly speaking it is the hand alone which is doing the moving of the stone, and the stick is a mere instrument by means of which it accomplishes this. The series is “essentially ordered” because the later members of the series, having no independent power of motion on their own, derive the fact of their motion and their ability to move other things from the first member, in this case the hand. Without the earlier members, and particularly the first one, the series could not continue. Now an accidentally ordered series, like the fathers begetting sons who beget more sons (and indeed like the countless other causal series familiar from everyday experience that extend backwards in time), could, in Aquinas’s view, in theory go back forever into the past. He doesn’t think any such series does in fact go back forever, but he also doesn’t think it can be proved through philosophical arguments that they don’t. That is to say, he doesn’t think it can be proved, and doesn’t try to prove, that the universe had a beginning. The reason is that, since in an accidentally ordered series the members of the series have their causal powers independently of the operation or even existence of earlier members, there is nothing about the activity of the members existing here and now that requires that we trace it back to some first member existing in the past. But things are very different with essentially ordered causal series. These sorts of series paradigmatically trace, not backwards in time, but rather “downward” in the present moment, since they are series in which each member depends simultaneously on other members which simultaneously depend in turn on yet others, on so on. In this sort of series, the later members have no independent causal power of their own, being mere instruments of a first member. Hence if there were no first member, such a series would not exist at all. If the last member of such series does in fact exist, then (as the motion of the stone does in our example), the series cannot, even in theory, go back infinitely: there must be a first member.”[16]

According to Feser, for both Aristotle and Aquinas, this necessitated the existence of God. Let’s turn it over to him again:

>”For what we have here is an essentially ordered causal series, existing here and now, not an accidentally ordered one extending backwards into the past. And an essentially ordered series, of its nature, must have a first member. All the later members of such a series exist at all only insofar as the earlier ones do, and those earlier ones only insofar as yet earlier ones do; but were there finally no first member of the series, there’d be no series at all in the first place, because it is only the first member which is in the strictest sense really doing or actualizing anything. The later members are mere instruments, with no independent, actualizing power of their own. Suppose you see the caboose of a train pulling out of the station, and demand to know what is pulling it. A freight car, you are told. And what is pulling that? Another freight car. And that? Yet another freight car. All true enough; but none of these answers really explains anything, because the freight cars, like the caboose, have no independent power of motion of their own, and so no appeal to freight cars explains anything, even if the series of cars pulling the caboose went on to infinity. What is needed is an appeal to something that does have the power of movement in itself, such as an engine car. Similarly, should you see (though a hole in a fence say) a paint brush coating the fence with paint, and ask what is causing it to do so, the answer “the brush handle” will not explain anything, since a brush handle has no independent power of movement. And this wouldn’t change in the least even if we imagined that the brush handle was infinitely long. Again, the only genuine explanation would be something that did have independent power of movement and could therefore move the otherwise inert brush. The same thing is true of the sequence beginning with the moving stone. No member of the series has any independent causal power of its own, but derives what it has from something earlier in the series. As with the railway cars and the paint brush, this series too must terminate in a first mover which moves all the others, indeed moves through all the others. Now, a first mover in such a series must be itself unmoved or unchanging; for if it was moving or changing – that is, going from potential to actual – then there would have to be something outside it actualizing its potential, in which case it wouldn’t be the first mover. Not only must it be unmoved, though, it must be unmovable. For notice that, especially toward the “lower” levels of the series we were considering – the nervous system’s being actualized by its molecular structure, which is in turn actualized by its atomic structure, etc. – what we have is the potential existence of one level actualized by the existence of another, which is in turn actualized by another, and so forth. To account for the actualization of the potential motion of the stone we had eventually to appeal to the actualization of the potential existence of various deeper levels of reality. 16 But then the only way to stop this regress and arrive at a first member of the series is with a being whose existence does not need to be actualized by anything else. The series can only stop, that is to say, with a being that is pure actuality (or “Pure Act,” to use the Scholastic phrase), with no admixture of potentiality whatsoever. And having no potentiality to realize or actualize, such a being could not possibly move or change. That a stone is moved by a hand via a stick, then – and more generally, that things change at all – suffices to show that there is and must be a first Unmovable Mover or Unchangeable Changer. That is all pretty abstract, I realize; so much so that it might seem jarring when Aquinas goes on to say: “. . . and this we call God.” What he means by this is that, whatever else people might have in mind when they use the expression “God,” they mean to refer to whatever being is the ultimate explanation of the processes of change we observe in the world around us. It turns out that there really is such a being; and it also turns out that what it means for there to be such a being is for there to be a being describable in philosophical terms as “Pure Actuality,” even if this has (of course) never occurred to most people who believe in God.”[17]

For Aquinas and Feser, this God is the Christian one, and on pages 95-97 Feser tells us Aquinas spent millions of words proving it, as well as the idea that God must necessarily be all-knowing, all-good, etc. That would be a little beyond the scope of one book, and probably laymen, so Feser instead provides the work of William Lane Craig and Richard Swinburne as an introduction to the matter. That’s problematic in and of itself, but it also comes up in a later chapter, so we’ll address that when we come to it. For now, here are my objections to Feser and by extension Aquinas’ arguments—or, more specifically, my main objection.

Feser and Aquinas want us to believe that the God is to the universe as the potter is to the clay or the boy with a stick to the rock—that is to say, an essentially ordered series. Indeed, it may be better to characterize Aquinas’ God as the “Unsustained Sustainer” rather than the “Unmoved Mover.” If I understand Feser correctly, the fact that God exists is why we see any regularity in the universe at all—why there are *Laws* of physics rather than just suggestions. God is with us every single millisecond of every single day, keeping the laws of physics regular; if it wasn’t for Him, the moon would zip around the sky randomly, matches would produce lilacs instead of flame, and we would more or less live in in total chaos. He pretty much keeps the laws of physics going in the same sense a kid with a stick keeps a rock going or a potter keeps clay going.

There’s one problem with this: Why should we assume the universe is part of an essentially ordered series rather than an accidental one?

Why couldn’t the relationship between God and the universe be more like the example of an accidental series Feser gave: A father and his descendants? The father “sets things in motion” by having a son, and then telling that son to have sons of his own. The son will attempt this even after the father dies. Why would this not necessarily be possible of God? Is it not at least conceivable that something like this happened:

God creates the universe and sets the laws of physics in stone. He then tells the laws of physics, “go do your thing and maintain this universe while I go off and do other stuff, like…I dunno, create another universe or watch football or something.” This is a silly example and I know God isn’t anthropomorphic like that (I’m just adding in a bit of humor here), but the underlying question seems legitimate: How can we be sure the universe isn’t independent of God in the same way a son is independent of his father, even if the father was necessary to cause (i.e conceive) the son?

According to Feser, the reason this isn’t the case has something to do with an Aristotelian concept he calls ‘essences,’ which were mentioned in chapter 2 but I haven’t yet addressed, because they’re even more important in the next chapter. He says,

>” Your mother gave birth to you, but she’s not what’s sustaining you in being here and now; what’s doing that is going to be something like the current state of the cells of your body, which is in turn sustained by what’s going on at the molecular level, and the atomic level, along with gravitation, the weak and strong forces, and so forth – all of these things being things whose essence is distinct from their existence and thus need a cause outside themselves. In other words, what we’ve got here is once again an “essentially ordered” causal series, which, for reasons we saw earlier, must of metaphysical necessity terminate in a first cause. *Even when we consider the physical universe as a whole, then, we have something that down to its last detail consists of elements whose essence is distinct from their existence, and thus cannot account for their continued existence from moment to moment.* Hence, everything in the universe, and indeed the universe as a whole, must be sustained in being here and now by a cause outside it, a First Cause which upholds the entire series. But could this being itself be just another entity composed of essence and existence? If so, then it would not truly be a first cause at all, for it would require something outside it to explain its own existence, and the regress would continue. No, the only thing that could possibly stop the regress and explain the entire series would be a being who is, unlike the things that make up the universe, not a compound of essence and existence. That is to say, it would have to be a being whose essence just is existence; or, more precisely, a being to whom the essence/ existence distinction doesn’t apply at all, who is pure existence, pure being, full stop: not a being, strictly speaking, but Being Itself.”[18]

The bolded section is not bolded in the original, I emphasized it because it’s important to a point I make in my review of the next chapter. Suffice it to say I will address it in my criticisms of Aristotle’s “essences.” Before that, let’s jump back quickly to one more defense of final causation:

>”But there is no way to make sense of [regularities in the universe] apart from the notion of final causation, of things being directed toward an end or goal. For it is not just the case that a struck match regularly generates fire, heat, and the like; it regularly generates fire and heat specifically, rather than ice, or the smell of lilacs, or the sound of a trumpet. It is not just the case that the moon regularly orbits the earth in a regular pattern; it orbits the earth specifically, rather than quickly swinging out to Mars and back now and again, or stopping dead for five minutes here and there, or dipping down toward the earth occasionally and then quickly popping back up. And so on for all the innumerable regularities that fill the universe at any moment. In each case, the causes don’t simply happen to result in certain effects, but are evidently and inherently directed toward certain specific effects as toward a “goal.” As we saw when we first looked at Aristotle’s notion of final causality, this doesn’t mean they are consciously trying to reach these goals; of course they are not. The Aristotelian idea is precisely that goal-directedness can and does exist in the natural world even apart from conscious awareness.

“Still, it is very odd that this should be the case. One of the raps against final causation is that it seems clearly to entail that a thing can produce an effect even before that thing exists. Hence to say that an oak tree is the final cause of an acorn seems to entail that the oak tree – which doesn’t yet exist – in some sense causes the acorn to go through every state it passes through as it grows into the oak, since the oak is the “goal” or natural end of the acorn. But how can this be? Well, consider those cases where goal-directedness is associated with consciousness, viz. in us. A builder builds a house; he is a cause that generates a specific kind of effect. But the reason he is able to do this is that the effect, the house, exists as an idea in his intellect before it exists in reality. That is precisely how the not-yet existent house can serve as a final cause – by means of its form or essence existing in someone’s intellect, if not (yet) in reality. And that seems clearly to be the only way something not yet existent in reality can exist in any other sense at all, and thus have any effects at all: that is, if it exists in an intellect. Now go back to the vast system of causes that constitutes the physical universe. Every one of them is directed toward a certain end or final cause. Yet almost none of them is associated with any consciousness, thought, or intellect at all; and even animals and human beings, who are conscious, are themselves comprised in whole or in part of unconscious and unintelligent material components which themselves manifest final causality. Yet it is impossible for anything to be directed toward an end unless that end exists in an intellect which directs the thing in question toward it. And it follows, therefore, that the system of ends or final causes that make up the physical universe can only exist at all because there is a Supreme Intelligence or intellect outside that universe which directs things toward their ends.”[19]

This is a beguiling line of reasoning, one that fits all of our preconceptions, and seems true. There’s one problem, however: It’s unsound. One of its premises is factually false. Specifically this:

“And that seems clearly to be the only way something not yet existent in reality can exist in any other sense at all, and thus have any effects at all: that is, if it exists in an intellect…it is impossible for anything to be directed toward an end unless that end exists in an intellect which directs the thing in question toward it.”

Looking at the natural world, this is clearly untrue, unless we define “intellect” so broadly that just about every living thing, including single-celled bacteria, has it. Take an anthill or a termite hive—they are things that exist, but which are not “necessarily” existing, they require insects to build them *and* maintain them constantly (they turn back into dust if the hive dies) even though we humans can imagine such things. And while they’re much smaller and less complex than human buildings, they’re not entirely different from the examples Feser gives—what is an anthill or termite mound aside from a house for bugs, after all?

Yet these tiny creatures are able to create something from nothing *despite not being able to conceive of their hives, or anything else, on an intellectual level, like a human builder can plan out his home.* I mean, yes, they’re not literally doing that, the materials of their hives already existed. But they’re clearly instantiating the Form of their hives in the physical world (again, for my dear readers, I’ll explain this stuff about Form and Essence in my review of the next chapter, where they’re really important) despite having no ability to entertain the concept of Forms or Essences or whatever in their nigh-nonexistent minds. These little guys (girls, technically) really are mindless as we would understand it—they operate entirely on instinct, or at most in very primitive ways (stimulus-response, where pheromones are the stimulus, etc.). They have nothing resembling an intellect in any meaningful sense, unless Feser were to claim instinct is a form of intellect. But if he would, why, then, could not the Sustainer of the universe be such a beast? Perhaps God keeps the universe going eternally and with regularity, but without any understanding of why, or without possessing any of the divine characteristics a being of “Pure Act” has to have.

In any case, after this exposition on the necessity of a Sustainer, Feser goes on to criticize an “Intelligent Design” proponent named Paley for being philosophically jejune, and then attack Dawkins for picking on such a weak opponent. I don’t know much about ID, so I’ll demur to comment on this section. It is the last before we move on to chapter 4, “Scholastic Aptitude,” so that’s where I’ll head, with no further ado!

Part III: Eliminating Essences

I will spend the most time on chapter IV because I feel most confident in my ability to address it. I can admit I may have been out of my metaphysical/ontological depth in my criticisms of Feser’s “Unsustained Sustainer” and such, but I think I’m on much stronger ground addressing Aristotelian moral thought.

Let me thus summarize Feser’s thesis: Aristotelian “Forms” or “Essences” exist, and they thus determine what is objectively morally good, and would do so even if God didn’t exist (but of course, He does—hooray!) Why would this be so? Let’s skip back to chapter 2 quickly, just as I promised. Early on, Feser starts off with Plato:

>” What is a “Form”? It is, in the first place, an essence of the sort Socrates was so eager to discover. To know the essence of justice, for example – to know, that is to say, what the nature of justice is, what defines it and distinguishes it from everything that isn’t justice – would for Plato just be to know the Form of Justice. But what kind of thing exactly is it that one knows when one knows this or any other Form? And how does one know it? Is it a kind of physical object, observable through one or more of the five senses? Is it something subjective, an idea in our minds, knowable via introspection? Is it something conventional, a mere way of speaking and acting that we pick up from other members of our community but which might change from place to place and time to time? To the last three questions, Plato would answer with a very firm No, No, and No. To understand what he does have in mind, it will be useful to begin with a simpler example than justice. Consider a triangle; in fact, consider several triangles, as they might be drawn on paper, or on a chalkboard, in sand, or on a computer screen. Suppose some of them are small, some very large, some in between; some isosceles, some scalene, some obtuse, and so on; some drawn with thin lines, some with thick lines, some with a ruler and some more sketchily; some written in ink, others in chalk, others using pixels; some drawn with green lines, some with red, some with black, some with blue; some in fairly pristine shape, others partially erased, or with the lines not completely closed due to haste in drawing them. Now, a triangle is just a closed plane figure with three straight sides; that is its essence or nature. And it is by reference to this essence that we judge particular triangles of the sort we are taking as our examples to be triangles in the first place. But notice that all of these examples are inevitably going to have features that have nothing essentially to do with “triangularity” as such. They are all going to be either red, or green, or black, or whatever; but there is nothing in being a triangle which requires being any of these colors, or indeed any color at all. They are all going to be drawn either in ink, or chalk dust, or pixels, or some other medium; but there is nothing in triangularity as such that requires any of these things either. Nor is there anything in being a triangle which requires being large or small, or being drawn with thick lines or thin ones, or being drawn on this particular chalkboard or that particular book, this particular plot of sand or that particular computer screen. Notice too that all of our sample triangles are also going to lack, or at least not perfectly exemplify, features that are part of being a triangle. Due to damage or hasty drawing, some are going to have lines that are partially broken, or corners that are not perfectly closed. And no matter how carefully one has drawn them, every single one of them will have lines that are not perfectly straight, even if such imperfections might not always be visible to the naked eye. In short, every particular physical or material triangle – the sort of triangle we know through the senses, and indeed the only sort we can know through the senses – is always going to have features that are simply not part of the essence or nature of trianglularity per se, and is always going to lack features that are part of the essence or nature of triangularity. What follows from this, Plato would say, is that when we grasp the essence or nature of being a triangle, what we grasp is not something material or physical, and not something we grasp or could grasp through the senses.

…

>”This is even more evident when we consider that individual perceivable, material triangles come into existence and go out of existence and change in other ways as well, but the essence of triangularity stays the same. We also know many things about triangles – not only their essential features, but also that their angles necessarily add up to 180 degrees, that the Pythagorean theorem is true of right triangles, and so forth – that were true long before the first geometer drew his first triangle in the sand, and that would remain true even if every particular material triangle were erased tomorrow. What we know when we know the essence of triangularity is something universal rather than particular, something immaterial rather than material, and something we know through the intellect rather than the senses. That does not mean, however, that in knowing the essence of triangularity we know something that is purely mental, a subjective “idea.” Nor is this essence a mere cultural artifact or convention of language. For what we know about triangles are objective facts, things we have discovered rather than invented. It is not up to us to decide that the angles of a triangle should add up to 38 degrees instead of 180, or that the Pythagorean theorem should be true of circles rather than right triangles. If the Canadian parliament, say, should declare that in light of evolving social mores, triangles should be regarded as sometimes having four sides, and decree also that anyone who expresses disagreement with this judgment shall be deemed guilty of discriminatory hate speech against four-sided triangles, none of this would change the geometrical facts in the least, but merely cast doubt on the sanity of Canadian parliamentarians….

>”Now if the essence of triangularity is something neither material nor mental – that is to say, something that exists neither in the material world nor merely in the human mind – then it has a unique kind of existence all its own, that of an abstract object existing in what Platonists sometimes call a “third realm.” And what is true of the essence of triangles is no less true, in Plato’s view, of the essences of pretty much everything: of squares, circles, and other geometrical figures, but also (and more interestingly) of human beings, tables and chairs, dogs and cats, trees and rocks, justice, beauty, goodness, piety, and so on and on. When we grasp the essence of any of these things, we grasp something that is universal, immaterial, extra-mental, and known via the intellect rather than senses, and is thus a denizen of this “third realm.” What we grasp, in short, is a Form.”[20]

For Feser, “Forms” are an absolute necessity for both intellectual and daily life, and he attacks philosophical schools which deny them, such as Nominalism and Conceptualism, which I mentioned earlier. However, Feser also thinks this stuff about “Realm of Forms” is a little too abstract, and according to him, Aristotle brings things back to earth. Back to you, Ed:

>“Against Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Plato, Aristotle insists that common sense is right in affirming that the ordinary objects of everyday experience – tables, chairs, rocks, trees, dogs, cats, and people – are paradigmatically real. With Heraclitus, he holds that these real things undergo change; with Parmenides, he holds that what is real cannot be change alone; and with Plato, he holds that form is the key to understanding how something permanent underlies all change. His basic idea is this: The ordinary objects of our experience are irreducible composites of potentiality and actuality, of the capacity for change and something that persists through the change. In particular, they are irreducible composites of matter and form. The blue rubber ball is composed of a certain kind of matter – namely rubber – and a certain form – namely, the form of a blue, round, bouncy object. The matter by itself isn’t the ball; after all, rubber could also take the form of an eraser, or a doorstop, or any number of other things. The form by itself isn’t the ball either; you can’t bounce blueness, roundness, or even bounciness down the hallway, for they are mere abstractions. It is only the form and matter together that constitute the ball. Hence we have Aristotle’s famous doctrine of hylomorphism (or “matter-formism,” to convey the significance of the Greek hyle or “matter” and morphe or “form”). Now some of the forms a thing has are non-essential. A ball is still a ball whether it is blue or red. But other forms are essential. If the ball is melted down, it loses its round shape and bounciness; and for that very reason, it is no longer a ball at all, but just a puddle of goo. Those features that are essential to a thing comprise what Aristotelians call its substantial form – the form that makes a thing the kind of substance or thing that it is, its essence. Being round is part of the substantial form or essence of a ball; being blue is not. Being a rational animal is (according to Aristotelians) the essence or substantial form of a human being; having black or white skin is not part of this essence, since someone can be a rational animal, and thus a human being, whatever his skin color. As with actualities, forms come in a kind of hierarchy. There is the substantial form or essence of a thing (e.g. being a rational animal in the case of human beings); there are various properties of a thing that are not part of its essence per se but which necessarily flow from its essence (e.g. having the capacity for humor, which follows from being a rational animal); and there are a thing’s “accidental” features, those which it may have or lack, gain or lose, without affecting its essence (e.g. being bald in the case of a human being).”[21]

So ‘hylomorphism’ is how Aristotle evades the weirdness of some “third realm.” Keep in mind the distinction between accidental and essential features, though, I’m going to focus heavily on them in a bit. The most important part of these early discussions, though, which is directly related to Feser’s thesis, is his explanation of how Plato and Aristotle both believed these forms/essences were normative:

>” Now as has been indicated, the Forms, as archetypes or perfect patterns, are the standards by reference to which particular things in the world of our experience count as being the kinds of things they are. A triangle is a triangle only because it participates in the Form of Triangularity; a squirrel is a squirrel only because it participates in the Form of Squirrel; and so forth. By the same token, something is going to count as a better triangle the more perfectly it participates in or instantiates triangularity, and a squirrel will be a better squirrel the more perfectly it participates in or instantiates the Form of Squirrel. Hence a triangle drawn slowly and carefully on paper with a Rapidograph and a straight edge is going to be a more perfect approximation than one hastily scrawled in crayon on the cracked plastic seat cover of a moving bus. Hence a squirrel who likes to scamper up trees and gather nuts for the winter (or whatever) is going to be a more perfect approximation of the squirrel essence than one which, through habituation or genetic defect, prefers to eat toothpaste spread on Ritz crackers and to lay out “spread eagled” on the freeway. This entails a standard of goodness, and a perfectly objective one. It is not a matter of opinion whether the carefully drawn triangle is a better triangle than the hastily drawn one, nor a matter of opinion whether the toothpaste-eating squirrel is deficient as a squirrel. That there might be habituation or a genetic factor in the latter case is irrelevant: behavioral and affective deviations from the essence are still deviations, whatever their cause and whether or not a creature which exhibits them has come to enjoy them. If a squirrel could be conditioned to want to eat nothing but toothpaste, it wouldn’t follow that this is good for him. Nor, if there were a genetic factor behind this odd preference, would it follow that it is normal for him, any more than a genetic factor behind blindness or clubfeet shows that being blind or having a clubfoot is normal even for those people who are tragically afflicted with these ailments. In every case, the thing in question is still a triangle, or a squirrel, or a human being or whatever – not instantiating a Form perfectly doesn’t mean that something doesn’t instantiate it at all – but it is nevertheless the case, given such imperfections, that it instantiates it only more or less well.”[22]

Read the whole thing again—that is the paragraph on which virtually all of Feser’s moral arguments (which make up most of chapters 4, 5, and 6) hinge. And the problems we see here may well prove fatal—or at least significantly undermine—those arguments (At this point, I should credit /u/Rivka333 and /u/MegistaGene for explaining to me that Form and Essence are more or less synonymous, at least in this case. There are subtle differences, but for the purposes of Feser’s argument they’re not really relevant here. See https://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/4idgw5/is_there_a_difference_between_form_essence_and/).

First, Feser—and Plato and Aristotle, assumedly—seem to be mixing up different senses or usages of the word “good” (I’m not sure the ambiguity is present in Greek as well as English, but I assume so). It’s possible to be “good” in the sense of “efficient” and effective” but in a sense entirely separate from “good” as “desirable” or “praiseworthy.” If someone were to say, “the Nazis were good at mass-murder,” they would be saying the Nazis killed millions of people very quickly, but they would obviously *not* be saying the Nazis were good in a moral sense, or that being “good” at mass murder is at all desirable. In fact, most people would take it as a compliment to be told, “you’re bad at murder/racism/destructive stuff generally.”

It’s an extreme example, but it still applies to triangles or squirrels. We can say a triangle is a “good triangle” without saying it’s necessarily praiseworthy or desirable in any way. Same with the squirrel—if we say one is a “good squirrel” in Feser’s sense, we’re just saying it’s “normal,” it doesn’t axiomatically follow that we mean to say “a squirrel eating nuts is praiseworthy,” and if we see a “bad squirrel” in Feser’s sense, we’re seeing an abnormal one, and it doesn’t necessarily and axiomatically follow that “a squirrel eating toothpaste” is undesirable or blameworthy. Indeed, most people, upon seeing a toothpaste-eating squirrel, wouldn’t say “that squirrel is Poorly Instantiating the Form of the Squirrel and ought to stop/is Worse than a squirrel that eats acorns!” Hell, most of us wouldn’t even say “that’s a bad squirrel!” or “that squirrel is sick!” Most of us would simply say “Huh, that’s weird,” and then go along our day with no further thought to the squirrel. We certainly wouldn’t dwell on whether it was “bad” or “sick” or whatever.

Now, Feser would say that moral or normative questions apply only to human beings, not squirrels or other animals, and even less to inanimate objects. That’s not really relevant to my point, though—I only refute Aristotle’s supposed assertion that “something is going to count as a better X the more perfectly it participates in or instantiates the Form of X.” This isn’t actually true; when we encounter something that deviates from the Form—i.e standard—of whatever it is, we might say it’s weird, but not necessarily that it’s “better” or “worse.” The fact that we would say it’s “weird” is proof that Aristotle was partially correct—there are regularities in the world, and when something doesn’t match those regularities, it’s noteworthy—but he was wrong in saying that deviations from these regularities are necessarily bad, as in “undesirable” or “worse” rather than simply “deviant” (a point I shall return to).

Maybe Feser would respond, “but of course such deviations are necessarily undesirable! A squirrel eating toothpaste is sick, isn’t it?” That brings me to my second critique of this sort of moral realism based on Forms/Essences: *Aristotelian ethics are more or less incoherent without recourse to something like consequentialism, which Feser subtly uses here, even as he inveighs against it later on.*

Let’s go back to both of Feser’s examples. Remember how he said a hastily drawn triangle may be a “worse triangle” than one drawn with a Rapidograph? Well, so what? Who cares? Why should we want to make “good triangles” rather than bad ones? The only convincing answers to this question lie in an appeal to *consequences* rather than anything about forms. You tell a kid to draw his triangles well not because “perfectly instantiating the Form of a triangle” is good in and of itself, but because other people will recognize a well-drawn triangle better and thus more readily grasp whatever the kid wanted to convey with his triangle—i.e his efforts would lead to a better outcome. How about the squirrel? Ask anyone why a toothpaste-eating squirrel seems “bad” in the sense of “sick” or “unhealthy,” or “undesirable” more abstractly. I guarantee most of them—even Thomists—would not say anything about the “moral necessity of more perfectly instantiating the Form of the Squirrel,” though a few of them might say it’s just weird. Instead, the vast majority, I would wager, would frame the squirrel’s badness in terms of *consequences:* A toothpaste-eating squirrel (even if congenitally inclined to this) would suffer from stomachaches, since squirrels can’t digest toothpaste. That is to say, it would suffer *pain,* which is an evil in consequentialist (particularly utilitarian) ethics, *not* failing to instantiate Forms. Even if for some reason you claim it wouldn’t, the squirrel would eventually die because toothpaste has no nutritional value—and, once again, death is another evil in consequentialism, since nobody wants to die either.

Thus, we can see that Plato and Aristotle’s attempt to derive a normative code of ethics from their theory of Forms/Essences is utterly toothless without recourse to some form of consequentialism, or at least that’s how it comes across in Feser’s explanation. If there really was something undesirable or blameworthy about “failing to instantiate the Form” in and of itself, and in the same axiomatic sense the Pythagorean Theorem was true, Feser wouldn’t have to use emotional, value-laden language which specifically refers to negative consequences—words like “sick” and “unhealthy”—to convince us.

Feser attempts to answer this a little later on, with reference to Hume’s is-ought problem, but (once again) we’ll get to that later. For now, let us return to chapter 4, especially pages 120-140, where Feser extends the thesis described above in his explanation of natural law, and where he begins to run (in my view) into his most serious problems. Once again, I’ll let Feser take the stage for some time. This is a long excerpt, hopefully the longest I’ll resort to, but it’s very important so I want you to read the whole thing.

>” The “nature” of a thing, from an Aristotelian point of view, is, as we’ve seen, the form or essence it instantiates. Hence, once again to haul in my triangle example, it is of the essence, nature, or form of a triangle to have three perfectly straight sides. Notice that this remains true even if some particular triangle does not have three perfectly straight sides, and indeed even though (as I’ve repeated ad nauseam) every material instance of a triangle has some defect or other. The point is that these are defects, failures to conform to the nature or essence of triangularity; the fact that such defective triangles exist in the natural world and in accordance with the laws of physics doesn’t make them any less “unnatural” in the relevant sense.

…

>”To round out this initial reply to some standard bad objections to natural law theory, while it is true that some defenders and critics of traditional sexual morality seem to worry themselves endlessly about whether homosexuality has a genetic basis, the question is actually largely irrelevant, and they shouldn’t waste their time. For it is quite obvious that the existence of a genetic basis for some trait does not by itself prove anything about whether it is “natural” in the relevant sense. To take just one of many possible examples, that there is a genetic basis for clubfoot doesn’t show that having clubfeet is “natural.” Quite obviously it is unnatural, certainly in the Aristotelian sense of failure perfectly to conform to the essence or nature of a thing. And no one who has a clubfoot would take offense at someone’s noting this obvious matter of fact, or find it convincing that the existence of a genetic basis for his affliction shows that it is something he should “embrace” and “celebrate.” Nor would it be plausible to suggest that God “made him that way,” any more than God “makes” people to be born blind, deaf, armless, legless, prone to alcoholism, or autistic. God obviously allows these things, for whatever reason; but it doesn’t follow that He positively wills them, and it certainly doesn’t follow that they are “natural.” So, by the same token, the possibility of a genetic basis for homosexual desire doesn’t by itself show that such desire is natural.

…

Of course, that by itself does not show that homosexuality is immoral either. After all, having a clubfoot is not immoral, and neither is being born blind or with a predisposition for alcoholism. These are simply afflictions for which the sufferer is not at fault, and can only call forth our sympathy. On the other hand, if someone born with normal feet wanted to give himself a clubfoot through surgery, we would find this at the very least irrational; and if someone concluded from his having a genetic predisposition for alcoholism that regularly drinking to excess would be a worthwhile “lifestyle” for him to pursue, then we would regard him as sorely mistaken, even if he could do this in a way that allowed him to hold down a job, keep his friends and family, and avoid car accidents. Even amid the depravity of modern civilization, most people realize that the life of an alcoholic is simply not a good thing, even if the alcoholic himself thinks it is and even if he “doesn’t hurt anybody else.” We know in our bones that there is something ignoble and unfitting about it. In the same way, should it turn out that a desire to molest children has a genetic basis, no one would conclude from this that sexual attraction toward children is a good thing, even if the person who has it was able to satisfy his disgusting urges without actually touching any children. We all know in our bones that someone obsessed with masturbating to pictures of naked toddlers is sick, and not living the way a human being ought to live, even if he never leaves the darkness of his own room and his own soul. Now I realize, of course, that many readers will acknowledge that we do in fact have these reactions, but would nevertheless write them off as mere reactions. “Our tendency to find something personally disgusting,” they will sniff, “doesn’t show that there is anything objectively wrong with it.” This is the sort of stupidity-masquerading-as-insight that absolutely pervades modern intellectual life, and it has the same source as so many other contemporary intellectual pathologies: the abandonment of the classical realism of the great Greek and Scholastic philosophers, and especially of Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes. For we need to ask why there is a universal, or near universal, reaction of disgust to certain behaviors, and why certain traits count as unnatural even if there is a genetic factor underlying them. And when the “evolutionary psychologists,” “rational choice theorists,” and other such Bright Young Things and trendies have had their say, there can still be no satisfying answer to these questions that does not make reference to Aristotelian final causes – even if only because there can be no satisfying explanation of almost anything that doesn’t make reference to final causes.

…

>”Let’s back up then, and see what morality in general looks like from a point of view informed by Aristotelian metaphysics, and then return later on to the question of sexual morality in particular. Like Plato, Aristotle takes a thing’s form, essence, or nature to determine the good for it. Hence, a good triangle is one that corresponds as closely as possible to the form of triangularity, its sides drawn as perfectly straight as possible, etc. A good squirrel is one that has the typical marks of the species and successfully fulfills the characteristic activities of a squirrel’s life, e.g. by not having broken limbs, not gathering stones for its food rather than acorns, etc. So far this is obviously a non-moral sense of “good” – the claim isn’t that triangles and squirrels are deserving of moral praise or blame – and corresponds closely to the sense in which we might think of something as a “good specimen” or “good example” of some kind or class of things. But it is the foundation for the distinctively moral sense of goodness. Even from the squirrel example it is obvious that for any animal there are going to be various behaviors that are conducive to its well being and others that are not, and that these latter will be bad for it whatever the reason it wants to do them. So, to return to an obvious example from Chapter 2, if a squirrel has some genetic mutation that makes it want to lay itself out spread-eagled on the freeway, the fact that it enjoys doing this obviously does not entail that it is good for it to do so. Or, to take another but less obvious example from Chapter 2, if you somehow conditioned a squirrel to live in a cage and eat nothing but toothpaste on Ritz crackers, to such an extent that it no longer wanted to leave the cage, scamper up trees, and search for acorns, etc., even when given the chance, it wouldn’t follow that the life of a Colgate addict is a good life for this particular squirrel. The sickly thing is simply not as healthy and “happy” a squirrel as he would have been had he never got himself into this fix, even if he has (of course) no way of knowing this. And again, this would remain true even if the squirrel had a genetic predisposition to like the taste of Colgate and dislike the taste of acorns, one that was not present in other squirrels. That predisposition simply wouldn’t “jibe” with the overall structure of the natural physical and behavioral characteristics that are his by virtue of his instantiating the nature of a squirrel, however imperfectly. The predisposition would be a defect, like a puzzle piece that won’t fit the rest of the puzzle. Now, when we turn to human beings we find that they too have a nature or essence, and the good for them, like the good for anything else, is defined in terms of this nature or essence.

…

>”Unlike other animals, though, human beings have intellect and will, and this is where moral goodness enters the picture. Human beings can know what is good for them, and choose whether to pursue that good. And that is precisely the natural end or purpose of the faculties of intellect and will – for like our other faculties, they too have a final cause, namely to allow us to understand the truth about things, including what is good for us given our nature or essence, and to act in light of it. Just as a “good squirrel” is one that successfully carries out the characteristic activities of a squirrel’s life by gathering acorns, scampering up trees, etc., so too a good human being is one who successfully carries out the characteristic activities of human life, as determined by the final causes or natural ends of the various faculties that are ours by virtue of our nature or essence. Hence, for example, given that we have intellect as part of our nature, and that the purpose or final cause of the intellect is to allow us to understand the truth about things, it follows that it is good for us – it fulfills our nature – to pursue truth and to avoid error. So, a good human being will be, among many other things, someone who pursues truth and avoids error. And this becomes moral goodness insofar as we can choose whether or not to fulfill our natures in this way. To choose in line with the final causes or purposes that are ours by nature is morally good; to choose against them is morally bad.

…

>“But why should we choose to do what is good for us in this Aristotelian sense?” someone might ask. The answer is implicit in what has been said already. The will of its very nature is oriented to pursuing what the intellect regards as good. You don’t even need to believe in Aristotelian final causes to see this; you know it from your own experience insofar as you only ever do something because you think it is in some way good. Of course you might also believe that what you are doing is morally evil – as a murderer or thief might – but that doesn’t conflict with what I’m saying. Even the murderer or thief who knows that murder and stealing are wrong nevertheless thinks that what he’s doing will result in something he regards as good, e.g. the death of a person he hates or some money to pay for his drugs. I mean “good” here only in this thin sense, of being in some way desirable or providing some benefit. And that is all Aquinas means by it when he famously tells us that the first principle of the natural law is that “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided.” This is not meant by itself to be terribly informative; it is meant only to call attention to the obvious fact that human action is of its nature directed toward what is perceived to be good in some way, whether it really is good or not. But when we add to this the consideration that the good for us is in fact whatever tends to fulfill our nature or essence in the sense of realizing the natural ends or purposes of our various natural capacities, then there can be no doubt as to why someone ought to do what is good in this sense.

…

>”Now modern philosophers, over-impressed as always by David Hume, have thought that there is a frightfully difficult problem of “deriving an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’” or upholding morality in light of the “fact/ value distinction.” There are facts, and then there are values, you see, and knowing any number of things about the first – about what is the case – can (so it is said) never tell you anything about the second – what ought to be the case. To confuse the two is to commit the “naturalistic fallacy.” And so forth. The usual genuflecting to Hume’s supposed genius ensues, as does an industry of producing fruitless attempts to solve the “problem” of justifying ethical judgments in light of this purported chasm between objective reality and moral value. Well, there is such a problem if, as modern philosophers have done, one denies the reality of formal and final causes. But for those who avoid this foolish and ungrounded denial – such as Aristotle and Aquinas – there is no problem at all, and what has been said already shows why. Like everything else, human beings have a formal cause – their form, essence, or nature – and this formal cause entails certain final causes for their various capacities. So, for example, our nature or essence is to be rational animals, and reason or intellect has as its final cause the attainment of truth. Hence the attainment of truth is good for us, just as the gathering of acorns is good for a squirrel. These are just objective facts; for the sense of “good” in question here is a completely objective one, connoting, not some subjective preference we happen to have for a thing, but rather the conformity of a thing to a nature or essence as a kind of paradigm (the way that, again, a “good” triangle is just one which has perfectly straight sides, or a “good” squirrel is one that isn’t missing its tail). We are also by nature oriented to pursuing what we take to be good. That is another objective fact, and for the same reasons. But then, when the intellect perceives that what is in fact good is the pursuit of truth, it follows that if we are rational what we will value is the pursuit of truth. “Value” – or rather, as the ancients and medievals would put it, the good – follows from fact, because it is built into the structure of the facts from the get-go. 8 All of this falls apart if we deny that anything has a final cause or that there are forms, essences, or natures in the Aristotelian sense; and of course, Hume, like the moderns in general, denies just this. If there are no Aristotelian forms, essences, or natures, then there is no such thing as what is good for human beings by nature. If there are no final causes, then reason does not have as its purpose the attainment of truth or knowledge of the good. What we are left with are at best whatever desires we actually happen to have, for whatever reason – heredity, environment, luck – but these will be subjective preferences rather than reflective of objective goodness or badness. And the most reason can do is tell us how we can fulfill these desires; since there are no natures or essences of things, nor any final causes or natural purposes either, it cannot tell us what desires we ought to have. Thus can Hume say such things as that reason is the “slave of the passions,” and that there is nothing contrary to reason in preferring that the whole world be destroyed rather than that my little finger gets scratched. Thus can nearly universal reactions of disgust at certain sexual practices, which from an Aristotelian point of view are nature’s way of getting us to avoid what is contrary to her purposes, be written off as mere prejudices.”[23]

There’s a lot to unpack here, and I think this may be the most important section of the book. The objections I raise, therefore, will (again, in my view) form enough of a riposte to demolish much of the foundation for Aristotelianism.

*Major Objection 1: The heart of Aristotle’s (and by extension, Feser’s) moral philosophy hinges upon the assertion that “the sense of “good”…is a completely objective one, connoting, not some subjective preference we happen to have for a thing, but rather the conformity of a thing to a nature or essence as a kind of paradigm (the way that, again, a “good” triangle is just one which has perfectly straight sides, or a “good” squirrel is one that isn’t missing its tail) (page 139). However, there is no reason whatsoever to take “conformity to one’s nature/essence/form” as good in the sense of normatively obligating (‘desirable,’ ‘praiseworthy,’ etc). Feser’s attempt to defeat Hume’s is/ought problem with a bit of sophistry has failed.

Once again, as I explained above, Feser’s argument seems to rely on a quirk of the English language, and assumedly Greek, Latin, and the others Aquinas spoke: That the word ‘good’ can mean either ‘desirable or praiseworthy’ or ‘conforming to a standard’ is merely a flaw of these languages that leads to confusion, and really isn’t something to build a whole philosophy on. It is obvious that “conformity to a paradigm” is not and cannot be axiomatically desirable and praiseworthy. A mass murderer who kills hundreds of people is a “good mass murderer” in the sense that he conforms to the paradigmatic Essence of a mass murderer (he would be a ‘bad’ one if he only killed, say, half a dozen) but that obviously makes him *worse* from any sane moral perspective, not better.

We don’t even have to use such an extreme example—a few more from the animal kingdom will suffice. Feser’s fond of squirrels, but let’s go with something yuckier—ticks and mosquitoes.

Sucking blood is undoubtedly part of the “essence” of these gross little things. I’m sure Feser would agree, I can’t imagine anyone saying that “sucking blood” is *not* a defining feature of the critters, part of what makes them what they are (female ones, to be specific, but that’s not important). Now, let’s say we were to one day encounter a tick or mosquito that didn’t suck blood, for whatever reason—maybe its mouthparts were damaged or it just had no desire or ability to. Such a thing would be “bad” in the sense of defective, or Failing to Instantiate the Form/Essence of a Tick/Mosquito, or Failing to Fulfill the Final Cause of Sucking Blood (in order to produce eggs, specifically, but again, not important), but we would not consider it “bad” in the sense we normally consider bloodsuckers bad (that is to say, hateful and undesirable). This “defective” tick would annoy us a lot less than “more perfect” ones. In fact, we would likely call such a critter “good” (in the sense of ‘desirable’) and wish all ticks and mosquitos were like that. This is not a position contradictory to what we commonly understand as good, what Plato or Aristotle would understand as good, or what common sense or our intuitions tell us is good—what sane person wouldn’t want to live in a world where bloodsucking parasites “failed” to suck blood?

If that example was a little yucky, let’s return to Feser’s example of the squirrel eating toothpaste or laying on the freeway. As I mentioned earlier, this behavior can only be taken as “bad” in a consequentialist framework—if you ask any normal person (aside from a Thomist) why eating toothpaste or laying out on the freeway is bad, they’d tell you it’s because such behaviors harm the squirrel in the long run (death by starvation or death by car).

Perhaps Feser would try to say that this is just proof “instantiating one’s Form/Essence” really is what’s good in terms of consequences, but that’s not necessarily so. Let’s modify the example Feser gave earlier a bit. He said, “if you somehow conditioned a squirrel to live in a cage and eat nothing but toothpaste on Ritz crackers, to such an extent that it no longer wanted to leave the cage, scamper up trees, and search for acorns, etc., even when given the chance” this would be bad as the squirrel wouldn’t be instantiating its Essence. However, let’s change “eating toothpaste” to “eating nutrition pellets” or “eating peanuts” (i.e eating something that’s actually edible for squirrels, but that they don’t normally eat in the wild). This squirrel would “fail to instantiate its Form” to at least a similar extent as the toothpaste-eating one, but it’s a lot harder to argue it’s just as worse off. Squirrels in the wild, “scampering up trees,” have to worry about being eaten by owls or cats or whatever, and also starvation if they can’t find enough acorns. However, our “domesticated” squirrel (and domestication is something we’ll get back to) won’t have to worry about being eaten by predators or starving to death. Or, to put it as clearly as I can:

*In a meaningful, objective sense, the squirrel who lives in a cage eating nutrition pellets is better off than one which lives in the wild—it doesn’t have to worry about starvation or predation, and will therefore almost certainly live longer, and likely “happier” than a wild squirrel, despite the wild one “more perfectly instantiating its Form.” Therefore, at least from the example Feser gives us, there is no reason to assume “conformity to a paradigmatic Form” is necessarily what is good (desirable, praiseworthy, morally normative) for anything—squirrels, humans, whatever.

To address Feser’s thesis directly, it seems *the definition of “objective good” as merely and necessarily “conforming paradigmatically to Form/Essence” is useless in practical terms and utterly unconvincing on its own merits. Common sense and empirical experience tell us that there are many instances where “failure to instantiate an essence” is a *good* thing by any reasonable definition aside, of course, from the one Feser and Aristotle give us. Hume’s is-ought problem, therefore, remains unaddressed.*

This also applies to Final Causes, by the way. The mere fact that “Final Causes” exist does not give them any normative or obligating power; indeed, cannot, as I prove in Major Objection 3. That “good” and its cognates in European languages can mean either “fulfilling Final Causes” or “desirable and praiseworthy” is simply one flaw of the language that leads to confusion, not something to build a philosophy out of.

Major Objection 1a: Not every defection from an Essence or paradigm is necessarily bad (as in undesirable).

This is a corollary to the first major objection, so I’ll try to make it a little more lighthearted. Let’s take another animal example this time, but something cuter than ticks or mosquitoes—cats! As cat-lovers know, cats have five toes each, this is part of their “essence” along with being furry, having tails, meowing, etc. However, some cats are born with six toes (or more). According to Feser, this would be deviation from the Form of the Cat and therefore bad. However, this “defect” is not considered a bad thing at all. Six-toed cats are widely considered to be lucky, and according to Wikipedia the “defect” helps them climb and hunt rats better. How can this be, if “conformity to paradigmatic Form” is the only “good?”

Perhaps more snidely, it’s not necessarily easy to discern what is a “defect” and what’s actually a mere difference in being, or perhaps even an advantage. The six-toed-cat is an example, of course—what seems like a defect can actually be useful upon closer examination—but it applies to humans as well. When describing homosexuality as a defect, Feser compares it to several other things: “nor would it be plausible to suggest that God “made him that way,” [clubfooted] any more than God “makes” people to be born blind, deaf, armless, legless, prone to alcoholism, or autistic. God obviously allows these things, for whatever reason; but it doesn’t follow that He positively wills them, and it certainly doesn’t follow that they are “natural.” So, by the same token, the possibility of a genetic basis for homosexual desire doesn’t by itself show that such desire is natural.” [24]

In the list of defects (defined as whatever hinders one’s ‘natural purpose’), some of the entries seem uncontroversial—it’s hard to imagine being born blind, legless, or alcoholic to be good things in any sense. However, a few things on that list are a little harder to pin down. Strange as it may seem, some folks don’t consider being deaf to be a disability but rather a different way of being. I don’t want to get into this too deeply now, but look up “Deaf Culture” if you’re interested. Even more important is Feser’s choice of “autism” as a defect. Now, I’ve been chastised more than a few times on various places for using “autistic” as an insult, so I’d like to clarify I’m not doing that here—Feser is. But even on Feser’s own terms, we have a problem with this example: Is autism actually a defect? The answer to that is not necessarily obvious, especially when you consider that Aquinas is one of the heroes of Feser’s book. Aquinas himself was likely autistic, or somewhere on that spectrum. According to Feser, Aquinas was known for memorizing the entire Bible, chasing a prostitute out of his room, and being so caught up in his intellectual flights of fancy he wouldn’t notice a candle burning his hand.[25] Those all sound eerily like the symptoms of autism, and I’m not the only person who’s noticed this.[26] And if Aquinas was autistic, it seems likely he owed his intellectual accomplishments, in part, to his autism—nobody could have written 8 million words on abstruse theological and philosophical topics without the single-minded obsessiveness and attention to detail that often comes along with autism. Therefore, it seems likely, contra Feser, that God may well will some of us to be autistic, at least some of the time.

So how does one discern whether a deviation from the human norm is necessarily a “bad” (undesirable) thing? Just as a deviant six-toed cat can be better at some things, the same applies to a ‘deviant’ human, as some ‘defects’ like autism can be useful under some circumstances. You could argue (and this is a point Feser brings up a little later, which I’ll address) that some defects actually aid in fulfilling an organism’s final cause—thus, a polydactyl cat is “good” (in Feser’s sense) because it fulfills its “final cause” of hunting rats better, and that an autist…uh, autistic person like Thomas Aquinas could better fulfill his “final cause” of worshipping God. But that leads us to a tension in this Thomistic and therefore Aristotelian moral framework: Is it more important to “conform to one’s paradigmatic Essence” or “fulfill one’s Final Cause?” For instance, Feser thinks that someone who wanted to make themselves blind or cut off their own arms would be sick, because they would make themselves less able to instantiate the Form of Man, which is sighted, two-armed, etc. But what if they wanted to do so in order to glorify God, which is mankind’s Final Cause, and assumedly a higher metaphysical priority than anything else? Christ did say, after all, to take out your eye or cut off your hand if either led you to sin. Would someone blinding himself as an act of religious devotion be “bad” or “good?” How could Feser tell?

Major Objection 1b: The theory of forms/essences isn’t coherent from an evolutionary standpoint.

On a related note, the way evolution works would seem to pose a significant challenge to any meaningful conception 