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Morality Amid the Ruins: Jeffrey Stout on the Failure of Authority and Autonomy

In The Flightfrom Authority, Jeffrey Stout traces the decline of philosophy and ethics based on authoritative presuppositions of Christian theism and the subsequent quest for an independent criterion of rationality that could replace tradition as the starting point for thought and moral choice. While the Reformation and the Wars of Religion perhaps invited a skeptical response to all religious claims, they also posed a genuine intellectual problem. No single authority remained to settle disputes between dubitable but plausible interpretations of the tradition. Protestant efforts to render it self-interpreting by the criterion sola scriptura failed, and the only recourse was the Cartesian search for selfevident truths or, later, the attempt to define scientific methods for arriving at probable truths. The course of these developments is subtle, and the results, for Stout, are mixed. On the one hand, there can be no return in public discourse to the presuppositions of traditional theism. The center of intellectual gravity has shifted, and the burden of proof now rests on those who would claim that a certain sort of God exists, with definite implications for human thought and life. "This is not to say, of course, that something was in fact proved one way or the other. It is only to say that the debate was, from that point on, profoundly different in character" (p. 151). However, the rational autonomy that replaced traditional authority has problems of its own. "Foundationalism," the pursuit of immediately justified propositions on which further structures of justified belief could be constructed, fails, which means that the Cartesian search for unquestionable knowledge and the Kantian search for moral certainty fail. The point of Stout's inquiry is less to survey the damage that modern thought has done to traditional premodern ways of thinking