THE HUMAN GOOD

In Chapter Two, we interpreted Christian Realism as a version of ethical naturalism and distinguished it from Christian ethics understood as an exemplification of universal moral rationality or as the unique expression of the values of a community shaped by the Christian narrative. That theoretical clarification suggests that the Christian Realist's moral choices begin with an idea of the human good, but it may tell us less than we want to know about what that good is.

That frustration is in part characteristic of ethical naturalism. Unless naturalism takes a reductive form that treats the human good as some single thing to be observed, quantified, and compared, it must accommodate substantial differences over what the human good is and how it is to be described. A large part of the discourse of ethical naturalism is about which of the many things that persons value are actually part of the human good, whether there is a single way of life that best realizes that good, and so forth. Christian Realism, because of the expanded attention it pays to the social and religious dimensions of experience, suggests a particularly complex view of the human good. Most of us assess versions of naturalism in large part by the ideas of a good life they hold out to us. We want to know what sort of persons we would be and what kind of communities we would build if we lived as they say we should. An ethical system that tries to tell us that we will be better persons by living in ways that are unrecognizable or repugnant to us will have a difficult case to make.