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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry (00:02.286)
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Melissa Maskello, Professor of the Practice of Philosophy at Notre Dame. And we're talking about her books, Ethics, Politics, and Natural Law, Principles for Human Flourishing. Dr. Maskello, wonderful to have you today.
Melissa Moschella (00:19.95)
It's so great to be on. Thank you for having me.
PJ Wehry (00:22.874)
So, Dr. Mascalla, tell me why this book? Where did this kind of come from? What is its purpose? Why did you feel compelled to write this?
Melissa Moschella (00:33.09)
Really it came out of my experience teaching this topic to students really at all levels and you know, from philosophy majors to students fulfilling a required philosophy course who really didn't like philosophy at all, but had to take my class to graduate students who are really into this stuff, students at all levels. I've had the opportunity to talk to about a lot of important ethical issues and
I typically do applied ethical issues, so I do a lot in bioethics or in political philosophy, but I don't like to just throw hard moral questions at my students without giving them at least some framework or set of criteria for actually thinking these things through, because if not, it just ends up being a session where people talk about their intuitions or their emotions or how they feel, which ends up being
They tend to just kind of spout the dominant views that they've heard or whatever they think the right ideas are about those things. So the idea of a philosophy course in trying to investigate these questions is to actually give them some objective tools to think critically about difficult moral questions. And so that requires giving them a framework.
Basically this book lays out the framework that I think is the best framework. Obviously when I teach, I present multiple frameworks, but I want at least one of the frameworks that I give my students to be a framework that I think is true. And when I was a student, very often I found in my classes that the frameworks that were given to me in my philosophy classes all seem to be inadequate in some way. And so this book is kind of my answer to that saying, look, there's a third way here.
PJ Wehry (02:08.954)
and
Melissa Moschella (02:26.454)
between the typical frameworks that students are usually exposed to in philosophy classes. And that third framework, I think, captures the best of the dominant competing alternatives.
PJ Wehry (02:38.884)
Hmm. I loved how you're talking about they would just spout the dominant views because that's how they feel. just, and I'm not going to get the quote right, but I I've been reading Gregory of Nazanzi, I'm probably not saying that right, but and he's dialoguing with, I believe his grandmother. And she says the habits of ignorant people or the habit of ignorant people is not sufficient reason to act something like that. You know, like
Melissa Moschella (02:44.312)
Okay.
Melissa Moschella (03:05.909)
That's a great line.
PJ Wehry (03:06.212)
I was reading a log. I was reading, was like, how often do I do that? You know what I mean? It's like, well, that's what everybody does and I don't want to spend the time. People don't realize how much hard work goes into creating something like this. So off the bat, mean, not that this is controversial at all, but when you say natural law, what are you talking about?
Melissa Moschella (03:32.216)
So what I'm talking about, and this I think is a really important question because a lot of people hear natural law and they either think something like Darwin or they think something like the laws of physics or they think something like if you're thinking about ethics, whatever we spontaneously feel inclined to do, that's what natural law tells us to do. All of those, think are false conceptions of what natural law and particularly a natural law approach to ethics is all about.
So when I say natural law, what I mean is principles of morality, moral principles or moral laws, if you will, that are based on natural reason. So the natural here is kind of by contrast with...
you might say religious based, revelation based accounts of morality. And it's also meant to indicate that this approach to ethics is one that is trying to give you guidelines that are guidelines about how to act in a morally upright way. But those guidelines are also thought to be guidelines for leading a really fulfilling human life. In other words, guidelines for how you can
flourish with the kind of nature that you have as a human being. So the natural is in this twofold sense. Natural reason as opposed to revelation as the basis for ethics on the one hand and on the other hand natural as pointing us toward the fulfillment of our human nature, pointing us toward guidelines for human flourishing.
PJ Wehry (05:14.734)
I had Dr. Angela Noble, I think I'm saying that right, on. Yes. awesome. So her book was on how from the Catholic tradition, and I noticed that your whole last section is on God. in the Catholic tradition, there's some distinctions made about, or not distinctions, arguments over whether man has one end or two ends and...
Melissa Moschella (05:18.53)
Yes, Gnogle, think. Yeah, former colleague of mine. Yes, wonderful. Yeah.
Melissa Moschella (05:29.08)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (05:40.888)
So are you referencing that a little bit when you talk about natural ends? Is there kind of a supernatural end for man and natural end for man? Are you kind of on that side of it? Am I making a connection there or am I just way off base?
Melissa Moschella (05:51.682)
So that's a topic that I do not discuss at all in the book. I know, yes, Angela has some really excellent work on on that topic. I'm not sure where I come down on that very thorny issue, which is both theological and and philosophical. But yes, so this book is primarily going to be talking about what you might call the natural end of human beings, right? The end that would be the fulfillment of our nature, even
PJ Wehry (05:56.322)
Okay.
Melissa Moschella (06:21.524)
even without any kind of grace or supernatural revelation or supernatural capacities added on to our natural capacities. Now I'm also a Catholic, so I think that there's nothing that I say in the book is contrary to or in opposition to anything that might be added by supernatural revelation or by the capacities that we might be gifted through God's grace, things that would enable a flourishing that goes even beyond.
merely natural flourishing, but this book is just at the natural level, just at the philosophical level.
PJ Wehry (06:57.434)
Yeah, I mean, that doesn't surprise me. I mean, I didn't think that you would necessarily address that, but that helps me kind of, okay, so we're not going to talk about like, like you said, Jesus work on the cross. That's, mean, you're like, we're apart from like the kind of revelation based ethic. So, and I think that links up well, you talk about the common good and let me see if I wrote this down somewhere. No, I can't find it. Of course. Talk about common sense, moral reasoning.
Melissa Moschella (07:08.8)
Exactly.
Melissa Moschella (07:12.898)
Exactly.
Melissa Moschella (07:18.478)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (07:28.433)
So talk to me about your use of the word common there. I come from kind of a philosophical hermeneutic background. And so there's this whole idea of the census communis, which is a more technical version. But then there's like kind of the Thomas Reed, like this is what everybody knows. When you say the common good and you talk about common sense, what is your use of the word common there?
Melissa Moschella (07:51.82)
Well, so it's being used in different ways in common good and common sense. So let me start with common sense. So when I talk about common sense and I present the natural law approach to ethics as a kind of common sense morality, what I am trying to get at there is that there's a common sense moral picture that I'd say the vast majority of human beings
PJ Wehry (07:56.952)
Okay. Yes.
Melissa Moschella (08:22.232)
pretty much across time and history have subscribed to. There have obviously been disagreements on the margins and disagreements about difficult questions, but I think about things like even the most diehard relativist, if you cut in front of that person in line at the grocery store, they're gonna say, that's unfair, right? Or you might say you're a relativist, but if I come up and...
PJ Wehry (08:42.138)
Yeah.
Melissa Moschella (08:47.37)
and take your iPhone or if I come up and punch you, you'll say, wait a minute, that's unjust. That's my phone. Or wait a minute, you're not supposed to just assault another human being. What's going on with you? What's wrong with you? That's wrong. Right. And typically when people say that they don't actually, you know, they don't just mean, I don't like that. They do typically mean it's wrong. They think that there is an objective right or wrong, at least about some things. So
I think a common sense morality has to capture a lot of these very common, very widespread moral judgments that, again, people who, even people who say that they deny objective morality actually in their actions, they indicate that they do believe there is some objective truth. you know, so one aspect of common sense is that morality is something objective. It's not just a matter of what you feel.
or what your culture teaches you, common conventions that are commonly accepted. So the objectivity is one thing that you have to account for. The other thing is that most people think morality ought to have some connection to what's good for us, what makes us happier, what makes us flourish. It would seem odd that there would be a moral code that was completely disconnected from
PJ Wehry (10:04.164)
Hmm.
Melissa Moschella (10:12.512)
some idea of the human good or some idea that we should at least avoid harming other people and try insofar as we can to promote the good of other people. So that again seems to be very common sense, right? It's bad to hurt people, it's good to help people. Almost everybody agrees with that, right? So again, any moral theory that can't account for something so basic, I think there's something missing there in terms of common sense.
PJ Wehry (10:31.66)
Hahaha!
Melissa Moschella (10:41.29)
And then also, the vast majority of people think that there are some things that you should just never do, regardless of the consequences. Now, we might disagree about what those things are, but in our culture, for instance, and say the one, maybe the one thing that almost everybody can agree upon or one or two things or things like rape, should never do it, doesn't matter.
what the circumstances are, you know, the evil dictator puts a gun to your head and says, you know, rape this person or I'm going to do some evil thing. I think most people just say, no, you just can't do it. Doesn't matter what you think the consequences are going to be. The same thing, you know, with genocide or racist practices or slavery. Now, different cultures have had different sensibilities, but I think in our culture, at least,
PJ Wehry (11:19.118)
Yeah.
Melissa Moschella (11:35.872)
we have these bright lines that are pretty universal. And every time and place has had their bright lines. And most, and some of these bright lines are pretty common. Like don't kill an innocent human being, at least within a certain category of whoever you think counts as the relevant sort of human being, right? Then we get debates about who counts, right? Beginning of life, end of life, races, foreigners, right? We've had all sorts of confusions about that.
PJ Wehry (12:04.76)
Religion, yeah. Yeah.
Melissa Moschella (12:04.856)
throughout history, but yeah, but the basic idea of within the relevant category of the people who count, you shouldn't kill the innocent. Again, pretty universal throughout culture, throughout history, the idea that there are these bright lines. So again, common sense morality seems like it should capture and be able to give an account for some sort of moral absolutes, some sort of bright lines that it's never morally permissible.
to cross. And so I think a common sense theory has to be able to capture all of those things. That consequences matter, that the human good matters and functions as a criterion in some way for what's right and wrong, but that consequences don't justify anything, that there are some bright lines that things that we should never do, regardless of what we think the likely consequences are going to be, and so on.
PJ Wehry (13:01.026)
I'm starting a new series on the sources for Charles Taylor's The Language Animal. And I'm reading Humboldt right now, Wilhelm Humboldt. so you're talking 19th century anthropologist, linguist, a lot of critiques of other cultures that you're like, okay, that's the just prevalent racism of the time.
Melissa Moschella (13:06.69)
Yeah.
Melissa Moschella (13:12.941)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (13:28.594)
And you're like, I can just kind of wholesale cast this out. But then in the middle of that, then he's like, and obviously, like, this is a problem. These people are cannibals. And you're like, well, OK. And I started thinking of like the relevant questions of like, so why is this judgment OK across cultures? And then I'm like, immediately I'm like, or, know, these judgments aren't OK. And then immediately I'm like, well, I would feel pretty comfortable being like, hey, probably shouldn't eat each other. Right. Just about anybody. Right. like that seems like one of those big, bright lines that.
Melissa Moschella (13:54.19)
Right, exactly.
PJ Wehry (13:57.496)
you know, not everyone follows, know, not everyone has followed throughout history, but you're like, I feel like we can critique that across lines, right? Like a lot of times you'll have relatives really struggle with how they handle talking about Hitler, right? It's like, that's why he shows up in way too many philosophical arguments because everyone kind of agrees, okay, he's the big bad guy, right? You can like, you can argue about other people, but everyone agrees, you know, but well, again, everyone, but.
Melissa Moschella (14:16.365)
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Moschella (14:26.592)
Almost everybody, yes. yes. Common sense doesn't mean universally accepted, but you know.
PJ Wehry (14:26.98)
Common sense, common sense, yes. Yeah, so that, mean, this is really fresh for me. I appreciate you kind of referencing this. that's your, leads us to that kind of tagline you have, principles for human flourishing. Can you talk to me a little bit about what human flourishing is? I mean, you even have that initial section on...
human life has intrinsic value question mark. know, it's like, like, okay, common sense, right. But talk to me a little bit about the value of human life and human flourishing. What does that mean?
Melissa Moschella (15:06.328)
Right, so a small question, right? What does it mean to lead a flourishing life? Yeah, so we can just bless with that in 10 seconds, that's easy. So yeah, so human flourishing, right? So I mean, I think the first thing to emphasize is that the reason why the subtitle of the book is Principles for Human Flourishing is that I think that's what ethical principles are. They're principles that guide us toward our own flourishing and the flourishing of
PJ Wehry (15:09.42)
No, no big deal. Yeah.
Melissa Moschella (15:36.226)
the whole human community. So that's one thing. I actually wanted the title of the book to be Human Flourishing with a subtitle, you know, A Natural Law Approach to Ethics and Politics. But I had to bow to the algorithms that now require you to put all of your keywords into the main title. And so, you know, so it goes, right? But it is more important to have
PJ Wehry (15:57.178)
So sad.
Melissa Moschella (16:01.944)
people be able to find my book then to have the title that I really wanted. know, so, so the titles are it captures everything once once you put the whole thing together. But so what is human flourishing? Well, well, I think there is an objective element to human flourishing. In other words, I think if we reflect on it, we can recognize and again, pretty universally a set of
goods that we all understand to be fulfilling for us, to be kind of aspects of a fully flourishing human life. So you think about things like friends, right? Almost everybody recognizes that you can't flourish in life without good relationships. Almost everybody recognizes this empirical psychology, you know, has
found that this is true across all sorts of studies of people over time and again, different cultures, different historical time periods. I can't imagine any culture or any historical time period, any civilization that didn't think there was some value in good human relationships, right? So again, pretty universal. I mean, I think it is universal, but almost universal even in terms of recognition.
Right? Things like friendships, things like the value of knowledge, that generally to know the truth about the world is better than being an ignorance, better than falsehood, that being healthy is better, all other things being equal than being sick, that being a person of integrity is better than being a person who's a hypocrite or who's internally divided, whose emotions go one way and whose reason and judgments go the other way.
that understanding the truth about the ultimate principles of the universe, and being in harmony with those principles or with whatever being, you know, is the cause of ultimate cause of everything. If there is one again, even, think even an atheist can recognize that that quest is valuable and being in harmony with whatever the answers are to those ultimate questions. that that is valuable, right? And I call that the good of religion.
Melissa Moschella (18:30.222)
so again, these are goods, I think that we can all recognize have a really important place in a flourishing life. And they correspond to different aspects of our complex nature as human beings. Right? So you could think about the fact that, we have bodies and so the flourishing of our bodies means being alive and healthy, right? We have minds and the flourishing of our minds means, you know, we can, we can know the truth.
PJ Wehry (18:31.194)
Mm.
Melissa Moschella (19:00.046)
We are a combination of body and mind, and that also means we can use our mental capacities to both develop ourselves mentally, but also develop ourselves and coordinate our mental and physical powers in a variety of ways to, you know, skills in athletics, skills in music, skills in, you know, all sorts of
areas of professional work, right? So the idea that developing your talents and skills, coordinating your mental and physical powers to bring all of your potentialities to fulfillment, right? That that's worthwhile. And we celebrate excellences of all sorts. That's why we celebrate the Olympic games or we love to watch professional sports or...
PJ Wehry (19:32.506)
Hmm.
Melissa Moschella (19:53.262)
professional musicians and we think that those accomplishments are things that are worthy of emulating, worthy of celebrating, you know, and on down the line, right? That these things correspond to different aspects of ourselves. We're social beings and so friendships, good relationships are important for us. We're sexual beings and so good sexual relationships, marriage and family relationships are
are important for our flourishing as well. We're beings with multiple parts, if you will. We have emotions, we have reason, we have bodies, we have actions. Those things can be in harmony with each other or they can be at odds with each other. Better to be in harmony than to be internally divided. So that's another aspect of our flourishing and so on and so forth.
PJ Wehry (20:48.502)
Is there a one I really appreciate your answer. And it's very, it's full in a kind of a theoretical sense. You're going through the different areas. Is there like, feel like with flourishing, there's a, word picture going on there. And so like, we're talking about like a fruitful life. I think what I'm referencing there is like kind of the, harmony of it, right? That like a tree that is split up in its system is going to die without really producing fruit. I don't.
I'm not entirely sure what I'm getting at, but I feel like there's, is there kind of a synthesis of all those kind of together? Like, like a word that you think of like maturity or, the part of what I'm having a Dr. Hurt on to talk about, Bildung, like the, the German idea of self-formation and cultivation. do you have kind of a way of synthesizing all that, or do you, as part of the common sense, kind of more common good approach, do you keep the goods kind of separate, which I could understand that as well.
Melissa Moschella (21:36.622)
Mm-hmm. Yes.
Melissa Moschella (21:48.952)
So I think the word in the book that is used to kind of capture the whole thing, right, is integral human flourishing or integral human fulfillment. And that term integral is meant to give you the sense of the whole, right? A kind of holistic fulfillment, holistic in a variety of dimensions, right? So holistic in the sense of, you know,
PJ Wehry (22:04.282)
Mm.
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Moschella (22:17.216)
encompassing in some way all the various aspects of flourishing, even though in any individual life different things will take priority. But holistic also in the sense of not just being an individualistic thing, but because our flourishing is inherently social, being a matter of flourishing in community and seeking the flourishing of our communities as part of our own flourishing.
So that's this concept of integral human flourishing, right? The idea of the flourishing of really the whole human community, ultimately, with respect to all of these basic goods, all of these dimensions of our flourishing. Well, then how that looks in any individual life could be very, very different depending on what your particular personal vocation is. And I use the term vocation not in a religious sense, but just in a kind of general.
PJ Wehry (23:01.921)
It.
PJ Wehry (23:07.14)
course.
Melissa Moschella (23:16.694)
sense to capture the idea that everybody has a different life plan, different priorities in life, and everybody really needs to think about life in this vocational sense. In other words, what is it worth committing myself to? What is it worth prioritizing in life? And then how do I order my pursuit of the various goods that I could pursue at any given moment in line with
these vocational commitments that I have taken on in my
PJ Wehry (23:51.034)
One, let me say thank you because I think you gave a better answer than the question I asked because I just realized like I asked you what is flourishing and you gave me like all the human all the goods and I was like, what's the word for all those goods? And I was like, wait, that's what flourishing is. You're very kind. That's just realized I'm like, I mean, integral is is helpful. But I'm like, I think I just asked her like the question back again. So thank you. I think, too, you mentioned that it's not just the individual humans.
It's also the community. And I think you even touched on this with the religious side that is not necessarily even theological, but like that it's integral. Would it also be fair to say integral at a cosmic level that we are so even beyond the human community? Is that part of it as well?
Melissa Moschella (24:36.974)
Right, so yeah, the good of religion would include being in harmony with, in a sense, the broader universe, right? Having understanding what the place of human beings is in the broader universe, which I think means understanding how we relate to the ultimate causes of that universe. And then, know,
following whatever guidance we think it is that, you know, those ultimate cause or causes are providing for us about how we are to live and how we are to relate to the rest of the universe, not just other human beings.
PJ Wehry (25:23.482)
And kind of alongside that, I wanted to make sure that we didn't miss this part. When you're talking about commonsense morality, a major part of your kind of initial setting of terms is human freedom. And when you were talking about commonsense morality, you were talking about things that just everybody, like people will argue for the sake of argument and kind of skeptically, but you know, they're like, okay, I
I act this way, right? Like you're talking about relativists, they get punched and they get angry and it's more than just their feeling. And the same thing, I think too, you have at that common sense core, you talk about freedom and human agency, even the most hardline determinists say, please and thank you at the dinner table, right? Like they ask for things with the expectation you could fall through on it. And so would that be another part of that common sense core?
Melissa Moschella (26:19.566)
Right, again, I think even though some people philosophically will question it, and even though, I mean, I actually a lot of our culture is implicitly a kind of soft determinist about human behavior. There's a lot of presumption that people aren't really responsible for their actions.
We see this a lot, even in say, approaches to criminal punishment, for instance. Now, obviously, I don't mean to say that people's circumstances.
don't involve very difficult factors that can create psychological damage that undermines people's capacity for free choice or that lessens their blameworthiness for things that they end up doing. But nonetheless, I think our culture tends to implicitly accept this idea that
a lot of the blame or most of the blame for at least for the bad that we do. I'm not sure that we do this on the side of the good. But anyway, at least in terms of the bad that we do, the culture tends to say, you know, it's the fault of your upbringing. It's the fault of evil social structures. It's the fault of whatever, but not the fault of your actual free will, having made a morally wrong choice. And so in the book, I
defend the idea, which I do think ultimately is common sense, that we humans, at least humans of sound mind and relative maturity, are fully morally responsible for our actions, which means that we are free.
Melissa Moschella (28:17.496)
to do otherwise. So, you know, the buck stops with me for the choices that I make. And sure, there might be all sorts of influences that shaped my character or my psychology in ways that predisposed me toward one thing or another. But, you again, unless I'm so psychologically compromised that I don't have moral responsibility, which is possible.
But barring those circumstances, when I choose to do something,
That choice is caused only by my choosing. I mean, that's it, right? When I choose to say yes to come on the podcast, it was not psychologically determined by any set of factors. I made a free choice that I was gonna use this hour of my time to do this rather than something else. And so, you know.
PJ Wehry (29:06.871)
Ha
PJ Wehry (29:17.922)
Little did you know the subliminal messaging in my invite, right? Like you had no choice. was hypnotism. No, yeah, exactly.
Melissa Moschella (29:22.574)
Thank you.
PJ Wehry (29:28.986)
I would say too, some people might feel like that's a straw man, but I mean, I remember reading in graduate school, clearance Darrow's, I believe it's speech to prisoners in a Chicago prison. And it is astonishing the, and I don't think that's a popular opinion, I think most people wouldn't go in and just say you have absolutely like, there's such a sense of hopelessness that accompanies you have.
absolutely know like this is not your fault you are here and you didn't contribute to it at all it's like well then what control do I have right that doesn't end well
Melissa Moschella (30:04.93)
Right, right. mean, I actually think, I mean, I think there's, there's a desire to be compassionate in that approach, especially when you're dealing with criminal punishment and things like that. But I actually think it's, it's disempowering to the very people that it aims to be compassionate toward, because it basically tells them, yeah, you have no agency. And so that's the ultimate disempowerment, right? That basically means, yeah, you're stuck.
Like if you were socially conditioned to do bad stuff, well, sucks for you. Looks like you're going to have a terrible life and pretty much be in prison or do really bad things and have a horrible time of it. So why even bother? Right? As opposed to saying, you know, look, we understand you got it. You had a hard lot in life. so, you know, we can see why you ended up doing what you're doing, but you know what? You are responsible for your actions and you can change because you are free.
Right? And that's a much more empowering message. And I also think it's true. And we see lots of examples of this. I mean, there are people who respond very differently to the same sorts of social circumstances or difficult backgrounds. Some people go in a very bad direction as a result of that. Other people, heroically, often, give an incredible witness to
the goodness that human beings are capable of, even in spite of the most challenging circumstances. you know, freedom is very obvious if you just look at different lives and what happens there. And again, I think most of our common judgments presuppose this, right? You don't get angry at a boulder for falling on somebody, right? Because you know the boulder just follows the laws of gravity. The boulder has no choice. You don't even get angry at a
PJ Wehry (31:55.258)
Ha
Melissa Moschella (32:03.096)
two year old for throwing a tantrum really. I mean, you might get annoyed, but you don't really get angry in a kind of moral way because you know the two year old, like the two year old doesn't really have control, right? But you do get angry at the 20 year old who throws a tantrum because you know what? The 20 year old can choose to act otherwise.
PJ Wehry (32:29.274)
And so, and then you list beyond that the kind of common objections. so one is, and this made me think of Chesterton who in orthodoxy, he's like, I'm going to set aside the question of what he calls the Eastern, but kind of the Buddhist conception of like nothingness as an end goal. And so as you were talking about like the intrinsic human value, I automatically think of that. And then,
Melissa Moschella (32:50.094)
Thank
PJ Wehry (32:58.232)
Why not pleasure? Why not autonomy as kind of listed in that realm of goods? Do you mind talking through those objections?
Melissa Moschella (33:05.922)
Sure. So yeah, so the first objection is really about life as a basic good. So pretty much everybody recognizes that life is instrumentally good. Obviously, if you're not alive, you can't achieve any other goods. So most people recognize the value of life insofar as it gives you the ability to achieve other things, right? Like if you're alive, you can enjoy things. If you're alive, you can...
you can achieve successes that you care about and you can pursue meaningful relationships and et cetera, et cetera, right? But there are a number of philosophers, utilitarians tend to be in this camp who say that life as such, human life as such, isn't valuable such that if it turns out that your life on balance,
is gonna give you more suffering than enjoyment, and not just in the short run, but over the long run for the foreseeable future, then maybe your life is not worth living. Then maybe actually death would be a benefit to you in those circumstances. And you see these arguments play out. People don't usually express it in these philosophical terms, but if you look at movements for assisted suicide,
euthanasia and so on. Well, that's basically the underlying argument. The underlying argument is that some lives hold out no promise for enjoyment or on balance, hold out mostly the promise of suffering and very little promise of enjoyment. And so those lives aren't worth living. or at least it's reasonable for the person to decide that that life isn't worth living.
And we as a society won't treat that as irrational the way we would treat a 16 year old lovesick suicidal teenager or something like that, who wants to commit suicide because his girlfriend broke up with him or some temporary setback in life. We would treat that as a sign of mental illness and we would help the person through it and say, no, your life is worthwhile. We're gonna help you.
Melissa Moschella (35:27.79)
you'll get over this and you'll find meaning in the future and so on. But there are other cases where they'll say, no, actually we recognize that because you have this disability, because you have this terminal illness, because you have whatever, maybe you're right. Maybe your life's not worth living, right? So I address that instrumental view of the value of human life in the book and basically argue that on the one hand,
we don't really think, at least most people don't really think human life is merely instrumentally valuable most of the time. So, you know, if you think about doctors or rescue workers, right, whole professions that are dedicated to saving lives, basically, we don't think that it's baffling for a doctor to try to save a life without knowing.
how valuable that life is or without knowing whether that person is on balance, experiencing more suffering than enjoyment in their life or something like that. We do think that saving a life just as such makes sense. We don't find that crazy the way that we would find it crazy if people dedicated their lives to counting blades of grass or something like that.
And that's basically because we recognize that life has intrinsic value, that acting for the sake of saving a life, preserving a life, makes sense even if it's not ordered to anything further. So I think a lot of our common sense judgments just presuppose that. But then I also think there's a deeper philosophical error that is at the heart of the claim that human life is only instrumentally valuable as a vehicle.
for enjoyment or the achievement of some further goods. And I think the philosophical error at the heart of that is an anthropological error, basically an error about human nature, an error about the kind of thing that human beings are. And that error is what I call body-self dualism, the idea that the real me, the real I, the real self is
Melissa Moschella (37:52.724)
the thing that thinks and feels and wills and chooses, basically my psychological states. That's me. And the body is, you it's important to me as a vehicle through which I express my psychological states or a vehicle that enables me to experience certain psychological states. But it's not really me, right?
And so you get all these funny thought experiments, right? What if I could download all my psychological states onto a computer and then transfer it into another body or something with, know, where would I be in the original body or in the new thing? So anyway, I'm not going to go into all that, but, you know, there's this kind of disembodied sense of the person as a set of psychological states that merely inhabits a body. The way that, you know, I drive around in my car or something like that.
and I think that that view of the person is, is false. and you know, we, I don't have time to go into the very long and kind of torturous argument for that, but I think, you know, a basic common sense way of thinking about this is, you know, for instance, when, when we interact with other human beings, right? When I, when I see a human,
PJ Wehry (39:03.151)
haha
Melissa Moschella (39:18.722)
person on the street, I don't say, well, what I see there is a human organism. And so I can infer that inside of that organism, there is a self that has some psychological states. Right? When I see a human organism, think, there's so-and-so, right? I identify the person with the person's body.
PJ Wehry (39:45.882)
It's not like we're metaphysical hermit crabs, know, like.
Melissa Moschella (39:48.568)
Great, exactly. Exactly. You know, or we think about, you know, things like most people would think that assault, a kind of physical attack on another person's body is a crime that's worse in kind, not just in degree, than vandalism, right? Than damage to another person's property.
But if the body isn't really you, then it's hard to see why an attack on your body is categorically worse or different in kind from an attack on any other property that you own. Right? So, you know, there's a lot of common sense judgments about those sorts of things that I don't think we can make sense of unless we recognize that the body is essential to who we are.
PJ Wehry (40:27.706)
Hmm.
Melissa Moschella (40:44.31)
I also think just if we just reflect on our own operations, I mean, just think about what we're doing right here and the seamless connection between body and mind that's going on here as I speak, right? I'm kind of moving my arms and not even knowing what I'm doing. As I'm gesturing, my tongue and my lips and my vocal cords are responding to commands from my
my brain to try to put into words the concepts that are going through my head. Those concepts clearly are not physical things. They're not material things. They're, you know, they're the result of my intelligence at work, hopefully, right? But they are seamlessly being expressed through bodily signs.
that are being articulated through my voice and my muscles are all coordinating to make all that happen. And how do you explain those seamless connections if the mind, right, the thing that's thinking is not the same as the thing that is speaking and moving lips and arms and vocal cords and everything else? So, I think just common sense experience of ourselves.
as unified bodily and mental beings supports the idea that the body is me. So how does this get back to the question about whether life is intrinsically valuable? Well, I think if you deny that life has intrinsic value, you're implicitly accepting the dualist idea that the real me
is just a set of psychological states that inhabits a body. And the reason for that is that we tend to think that basically what matters in ethics, or at least one of the most important thing that matters is people, right? What's good is what is beneficial to people. And what's bad is what is harmful.
Melissa Moschella (43:00.674)
to people, right? As it got pretty simplistic, but that's, you know, generally the common sense view of things. And so if we recognize that people are embodied, right? That the body is an inherently personal thing, the body is intrinsic to my personhood, not just a thing that my person drives around in, right? Then it doesn't make any sense.
to say that the body, the bodily aspect of our life lacks intrinsic value. So yeah, I don't know. mean, this is a kind of deeper, more difficult argument, but yes, the basic idea is that you either have to recognize that life is intrinsically valuable, right? The bodily aspect of the person is intrinsically valuable, or you're implicitly embracing
PJ Wehry (43:41.038)
Yeah.
Melissa Moschella (43:56.834)
this dualist idea that the body is just a thing we drive around.
PJ Wehry (44:01.402)
I think there's, we've mentioned it a couple of times and I can appreciate that you're just willing to use kind of moral intuitions. I love the, I think kind of at the core of this too is that example of.
The kind of person who would deny, deny this doesn't act like that. Like the, they get, if they get hit in the face, they're not going to treat that as the same as you punching the wall in their house. Right? Like it's, it's not, it's like, even if you deny this, you really, it's like, it's not, it's, you don't live this way. And so you're talking, you're, you have a consistent appeal. I hear to how we live and not just.
What kind of arguments can I make? Is that fair to say?
Melissa Moschella (44:50.732)
Right. Yes. that's, mean, and this is really getting at the idea of what I talk about in the book as first principles, right? The idea that there are these first principles that underlie all of our practical reasoning. And, you know, this comes straight out of Aquinas where, you know, he talks about that in really in kind of every order of thinking.
and acting, there are a set of first principles that most, for most people remain implicit and inarticulate, but that do underlie all of their activities in the relevant order, right? So if you think about the, you know, if you think about our thinking, right? You know, the logical order, all of our thinking presupposes
certain rules of logic, you know, like the fact that if I say two contradictory statements, they can't both be true, at least not in the same respect, right? And so we can't actually prove that that's true because every proof relies on it, right? So, that's the first principle that again, most people aren't going to be able to expressly articulate it, but it underlies all of our thinking. It underlies all of the activities in the logical order.
PJ Wehry (46:08.906)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Melissa Moschella (46:20.13)
And so you could say something similar about the practical moral order, the order of free choices and actions. There are a set of first principles that underlie every choice and action. And those first principles are principles.
by which we grasp the things that are worth acting for, right? mean, action has to get off the ground by being motivated for some end, right? You don't act, I mean, you always act if you're making a free choice, you act for some reason. There's some good, there's some end, there's some purpose that you seek to achieve when you act. And so that list of goods that we talked about before, things like friendship and...
life and integrity and knowledge and so on and so forth, those are the ints that we recognize to be good. And we recognize these things as first principles. In other words, philosophically, of course, we can then kind of reflect on them and explain why they make sense and try to give justifications for them. But really you can't prove them because they are the first principles
that are the basis for everything else in the practical moral order. So everything that we do relies on them. And the reason I bring this up here is because that's why you would expect that even though people might deny them in theory or in their arguments, if we look at the way that people act, we will see that implicitly,
PJ Wehry (47:41.775)
Right.
Melissa Moschella (48:01.698)
they recognize the truth of these principles, right? And that's basically Aquinas's claim, that these principles are so basic that as soon as you understand the terms, in other words, as soon as you understand the meaning of something like friendship or something like health or something like knowledge, you just get that these things are worth pursuing. Again, not that they should take priority in life or...
You know, those are all further questions, but simply the idea that it's reasonable to act for the sake of these things and that acting for the sake of these things makes sense even if you don't have any further goal, right? That I wanna learn about, you know, the nature of the universe just because I wanna know. Just because...
I think it's worth understanding how the universe works, right? We don't think people are crazy for wanting to learn just for its own sake, right? And that it's that first principle that's being captured, right? That knowledge is a gold worthy of pursuit. And so the same thing going on here with life, right? That even if people might in theoretical arguments deny the intrinsic value of life,
you can say, but if you look at the way that people act, if you look at the judgments that people make, in most cases, those actions and judgments presuppose that they do implicitly recognize that acting for the sake of the preservation and promotion of human life makes sense. It's reasonable. It's not crazy to act just for that, even without some further purpose, right? So,
PJ Wehry (49:42.382)
Hmm. Yeah.
Melissa Moschella (49:48.462)
So that's why kind of pointing to these kind of practical contradictions, looking at the way people act rather than looking at what they say can actually give us sometimes a better glimpse into what these first principles are, into what these basic goods are than, you know, looking at the things that people claim in their arguments.
PJ Wehry (50:14.942)
There is part of it, one, thank you. I've really enjoyed the content today. There is part of it that's sad because I would have loved to have gotten into the social and the political, but the topic is so huge. I mean, this is one of those moments where, you know, I want to be respectful of your time. So I'll have one more question for you. We'll finish up, but this is why people should buy your book, right? Then they can figure out how this all, with these foundational like first principles, how this plays out in the social, the political, and ultimately.
I think you said cosmic at the beginning and then like said, like ultimately religious dimension. So kind of as we wrap up today, what is something that you would encourage our audience? Of course they should think, try and think better ethically all the time, but what is one thing that you would encourage them to think about or do over the next week that just like a specific takeaway that they could have from today's episode?
Melissa Moschella (51:12.398)
I mean, I think one thing that is helpful for all of us to do, this is something I try to challenge my students to do in some way or another, pretty much in all of my classes, is to really think about life, your own life, and really assess, are the things that I prioritize the things that actually matter? Because I think so often in our culture,
PJ Wehry (51:36.09)
Hmm.
Melissa Moschella (51:40.044)
we tend to spend so much of our time on the things that are merely instrumental. So, you know, things like money, things like status, fame, wealth, possessions, pleasure, right? Sure, these things all have their place in a good life, but these aren't what it's really all about, right? I mean, just think about it. You know, if you get
the end of your life and you have all sorts of money in your bank account, but you have terrible relationships and you look back and you think, yeah, I made a lot of money, but I actually did a lot of bad stuff to get that money. Or maybe I didn't even do a lot of bad stuff, but you know what? There was a lot of good stuff that I could have done that I didn't do because I was obsessed with making money instead of doing other things that maybe mattered more. You know, if you look back on your life,
you don't, you usually don't think, man, I wish I had spent that extra 10 hours a week at the office to make another whatever X amount of money. You usually think, gosh, I, know, I wish I'd spent more time with the kids. I wish I'd cultivated that friendship. I wish I'd made more time, you know, to, cultivate my spiritual life. I wish, you know, we, we usually from that vantage point can see, you know what, there are things that, that are
PJ Wehry (52:58.17)
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Moschella (53:09.056)
of ultimate importance. And then there are other things that matter. Yeah, you need money to feed yourself and your family and you know, you need a certain amount of money. But beyond that, money doesn't buy you happiness, right? Money isn't intrinsic to your flourishing. It's instrumental, but it's not intrinsic. And the same thing with
PJ Wehry (53:17.24)
Last I checked.
PJ Wehry (53:31.257)
Hmm.
Melissa Moschella (53:35.638)
with wealth or a nicer house or keeping up with the Joneses or, you know, what other people think of me or, you know, all the, these things that we on a day-to-day basis sometimes tend to prioritize, without really thinking about whether it makes sense to prioritize them. They're not really what matters. so I think even just kind of thinking through like, is my life ordered in a way that prioritizes
the things that really matter in a way that prioritizes goods that are intrinsically valuable and not just instrumentally valuable. And so, you know, that really means looking, thinking about that list of basic goods and saying, do I put these basic goods, right? These things that have intrinsic value first and are my commitments in life?
ordered to those goods, ordered to promoting those goods for myself and for the communities that I'm a part of? And then do I let instrumental goods have their instrumental place in facilitating the pursuit of these intrinsic basic goods? I think that's a question that it's worth it for all of us to ask from time to time, because all the messaging in our culture tends to really
PJ Wehry (54:55.446)
Absolutely.
Melissa Moschella (55:01.506)
push us in the opposite direction.
PJ Wehry (55:04.036)
Dr. Mascala, great answer, wonderful time with you today. Thank you, it's been an absolute joy having you on.
Melissa Moschella (55:10.935)
It's been a pleasure, thank you.