Target Centred Virtue Ethics 2021935782, 9780198861676, 9780192606136
Virtue ethics in its contemporary manifestation is dominated by neo Aristotelian virtue ethics primarily developed by Ro
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Target Centred Virtue Ethics
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Target Centred Virtue Ethics CHRISTINE SWANTON
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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Christine Swanton 2021 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2021 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2021935782 ISBN 978–0–19–886167–6 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
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For all my boys: Michael; Julian and Eric; Zach, Sam, and Caleb; Ollie, Gus, and Jack.
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Acknowledgements I owe thanks to many organizations and people who have given me opportunities to discuss several issues related to virtue ethics. These include the American Philosophical Association for a session on psychoanalysis organized by Michael Lacewing, which gave me an opportunity to think about Nietzsche, Bernard Williams, and objectivity in ethics, and for a panel discussion on virtue epistemology where I spoke on the relation between virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. I thank also Paul Woodruff and the philosophy department of the University of Texas at Austin which hosted a conference on philanthropy; Darcia Narvaez, Nancy Snow, and Julia Annas and the philosophy and psychology departments of the University of Notre Dame for making possible an interdisciplinary conference on moral philosophy and developmental psychology; and Mark Timmons and the fifth annual Arizona Workshop in Normative Ethics at the University of Arizona at Tucson. The latter two conferences helped develop my thinking about developmental virtue ethics and particularism, respectively. I owe thanks too to Heather Battaly from whom I learned much about virtue epistemology. I am particularly indebted to Jonathan Dancy whose work on practical reason and particularism has influenced my own, and from whom I have benefited considerably through much profitable discussion and critical comments on my work on particularism and the role of thick concepts in ethics. I am also grateful to Garrett Cullity for much discussion on such topics as the metaphysics of ethics and the relation between virtue, thick concepts, and reasons. I thank him also for his useful comments on parts of the manuscript. I am also indebted to two colleagues, Julian Young and Tim Dare, for enjoyable discussion and debate over many years: the former on Heidegger, and the latter on virtue ethics, role ethics, and the relation between them. Finally, I want to thank the two referees for OUP for their thorough and thought-provoking reports. I am grateful for permission to reprint or modify material previously published elsewhere: Christine Swanton, ‘Heideggerian Environmental Virtue Ethics’ Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Special Issue ‘Virtue and Environment’ online 2009, paper 2010, 146–66, repr. in Philip Cafaro and Ronald Sandler (eds.), Virtue Ethics and the Environment (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 145–66. Christine Swanton, ‘Pluralistic Virtue Ethics’ in Lorraine Besser and Michael Slote (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics (New York, London: Routledge, 2015), 209–21.
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Christine Swanton, ‘Cultivating Virtue: Two Problems for Virtue Ethics’ in Nancy E. Snow (ed.), Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 111–34. Christine Swanton, ‘A Particularist but Codifiable Virtue Ethics’ in Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). Christine Swanton, “A Virtue Ethical Theory of Role Ethics” in Richard Hamilton (ed.), Journal of Value Enquiry Special Edition (2016) 50 (4): 687–702. Christine Swanton, “Developmental Virtue Ethics” in Julia Annas, Darcia Narvaez, Nancy Snow (eds.), Developing the Virtues: Integrating Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 116–34. Christine Swanton, “Eudaimonistic versus Target Centred Virtue Ethics,” Teoria (2018) (2): 43–54. Christine Swanton, ‘Virtue Ethics, Thick Concepts, and Paradoxes of Beneficence’ in Paul Woodruff (ed.), The Ethics of Giving: Philosophers’ Perspectives on Philanthropy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Christine Swanton, “The Relation between Virtue Ethics and Virtue Epistemology” in Heather Battaly (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology (New York, London: Routledge, 2019), 508–21.
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Table of Contents Introduction: The Basic View
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PART I: METAPHYSICS 1. A New Metaphysics for Virtue Ethics
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2. The Worldhood of Ethics
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3. The Concealment of Ethics
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4. Thick Concept Centralism and Objectivity
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PART II: NATURE 5. Eudaimonistic versus Target Centred Virtue Ethics
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6. Basic Virtue and Differentiated Virtue
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7. Target Centred Virtue Ethics and Role Ethics
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8. Developmental Virtue Ethics
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9. Pluralistic Virtue Ethics
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PART III: APPLICATION 10. Has Virtue Ethics Sold Out?
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11. A Particularist but Codifiable Virtue Ethics
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12. The Wrong Logos: Paradoxes of Practical Reason
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13. An Epistemology for Target Centred Virtue Ethics
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Bibliography Index
319 337
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Introduction
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The Basic View
Virtue ethics is by now a major player in ethical theory. Nonetheless, even now, modernity is dominated by two broad types of ethical theory opposed to virtue ethics: utilitarianism and rights-based. For virtue ethics, duties, rights, consequences are important and accommodated, but are not central. The twin poles of rights-based theory, the “ethics” of entitlement and standing on one’s rights, and the duty of respecting rights, important though they are, have been particularly instrumental in rendering invisible the rich language of virtue and vice that was once so central in ethical thought. One thinks not only of ancient and medieval philosophy but also the writings of philosophers as apparently far apart as Hume and Nietzsche. This thinning of the language of ethics has spawned a rebellion marked by a revival of the concerns of those philosophers, and the development of modern virtue ethics. The revival is characterized by two views. First, the fundamental ethical concept is living well, and for living well one needs virtues. Second, at the heart of ethics are not the “thin” concepts such as obligation but the “thick” concepts such as just, kind, generous, patient, courageous. These basic tenets of virtue ethics are compatible with a variety of types of virtue ethics. To live well is a relatively thin concept which can be thickened in several different ways, resulting in many types of virtue ethics. For Hume, to live well is basically to live a humane life exhibiting a very broad range of virtues classifiable as useful and agreeable to self and others: traits that would be approved by those having a refined and educated ‘moral sense’. In the eudaimonist tradition inherited from the ancient Greeks, living well is understood as leading a life where you yourself are flourishing, so living well is good for you. Since the Greek tradition also has it that virtues make one good as members of a kind and in particular that human virtues make a person good qua human being, the very difficult and challenging problem arises: how does one yoke together twin requirements on virtue which Hursthouse¹ calls Plato’s requirement on the virtues’: namely:
¹ Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1999), 167.
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(a) The virtues benefit their possessor. (b) The virtues make their possessor a good human being. Another option is the view that living well is living a life that is meaningful to one. For Nietzsche a meaningful life well lived is one exhibiting the ‘life affirming’ virtues of ‘cultivating what is personal’ to one, rather than being an instrument for the “common good” (a nonsense concept for Nietzsche), the State, or science, for example.² At the heart of the life well lived for Nietzsche is a life of virtuous creativity exhibiting discipline, hardness, lack of resentment, and originality (making one’s standards one’s own). The idea of a meaningful life of creativity is not a feature in Aristotelian virtue ethics, a feature which probably reflects the basic Aristotelian distinction between poesis (roughly, creative production) and praxis (action): where the latter but not the former is seen as the subject of ethics. By contrast philosophers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Ricoeur whose narrative ethics is described by him as the ‘poetics of the will’ place poesis properly understood at the heart of the life “well lived”. It is even more obvious that the second major tenet of virtue ethics, the centrality of the thick concepts, is compatible with many types of virtue ethics. Each of the types of virtue ethics mentioned above—whether Aristotle’s, Hume’s, or Nietzsche’s³—has thick concepts at the heart of their ethics, whether these concepts are applied to character traits, actions, motives, rules, or reasons. But despite the possibilities for a range of developments, contemporary virtue ethics is still dominated by one form: neo-Aristotelianism, a form of eudaimonistic virtue ethics. On an orthodox view and as I shall understand it, neo-Aristotelianism is characterized by two main theses that are rejected by target centred virtue ethics⁴: (1) Eudaimonism: it is a necessary condition of a trait being a virtue that it characteristically benefits its possessor.⁵ (2) A criterion of right action according to which ‘an action is right iff it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances’.⁶
² Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) ‘On the History of the Moral Sensations’, ‘Morality of the mature individual’, sect. 95, 50–1. See further Christine Swanton, The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), Chapter 6. ³ I defend the view that Hume’s and Nietzsche’s ethics should be regarded as forms of virtue ethics in my The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. ⁴ Unfortunately for this understanding Rebecca Stangl’s development of my target centred account of right action in her Neither Heroes nor Saints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) is called by her ‘Neo Aristotelian.’ For justification of her nomenclature see her note 6, Chapter 1. ⁵ Eudaimonism unfortunately has become a vague concept where the meaning has become stretched: see Chapter 5. ⁶ On Virtue Ethics, 28–9.
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Given the richness of resources for its modern development, including increasingly Confucianism and Humean “sentimentalism,” the time is ripe for alternative structures within which virtue ethical views can be expounded and defended. This book provides one such alternative structure; what I call Target Centred Virtue Ethics. The nature of the contemporary scene in virtue ethics raises two interesting questions. First, through what process has virtue ethics, after a long period of neglect of the virtues and virtue concepts, come to share the stage with other types of moral theory? Second, why has neo-Aristotelianism dominated the virtue ethical landscape when there are other possibilities for contemporary development? Why is neo-Aristotelianism still seen as the form of virtue ethics? These two questions should be separated. It is by now almost routinely suggested that Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’⁷ heralded the renaissance of virtue ethics. This is a fair assessment, but it does not explain the dominance of neoAristotelianism. Anscombe’s work shifted thinking in ethics towards the two central tenets of virtue ethics mentioned above; namely, the centrality of the thick concepts and the idea that the fundamental question of ethics is what it is to live well. But as we have seen, these two tenets are compatible with a range of possibilities for the development of virtue ethics. The shift that Anscombe initiated was not caused and encouraged by a love affair with Aristotle’s form of eudaimonism or eudaimonism as such but by an attack on the idea of the “moral” in a ‘special sense’ and a dubious metaphysics associated with that idea.⁸ In a positive direction, and flowing from this attack, Anscombe’s paper is also a plea for the centrality of the thick concepts (concepts such as generous, sentimental, brutal, courageous, tasteful: indeed not just those thought of as peculiarly “moral”). This way of thinking about ethics was also passionately defended by Iris Murdoch who believed that such concepts carve out an evaluative reality that is indefinitely complex to the point that our understanding of it goes well beyond the resources of “mere” philosophy, let alone philosophy in the analytic tradition. The sequel to Murdoch and Anscombe is Bernard Williams. In line with their thought he attacked the ‘morality system’ dominated by the “thin concepts”, notably moral obligation, and based on what Anscombe called ‘moral’ in a special (and problematic) sense. He defends the view that ‘morality’ should be replaced by ‘ethics’; his belief that the morality system should be replaced by deployment of the thick concepts in our ethical theorizing. This development was not intended to be neo-Aristotelian: there is no agent-centred appeal to the virtuous agent as the touchstone for ethical truth. For him the idea of natural goodness embodied in the
⁷ ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ repr. in Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 26–44. ⁸ The interpretation of Anscombe’s famous paper (‘Modern Moral Philosophy’) on which this disagreement rests is discussed in Chapter 10 ‘Has Virtue Ethics Sold Out?’
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4 virtuous agent harboured false hopes for the objectivity of ethics through what he regarded as an outdated idea of the ‘natural goodness’ of excellent human specimens. Unfortunately for future options in virtue ethics the Williams fork for potential development of a form of ethical realism in line with Murdoch’s and Anscombe’s realist understanding of the centrality of the thick concepts came to something of a dead end as far as virtue ethics was concerned. It foundered on Williams’ scepticism about the objectivity of ethics which no appeal to “the virtuous agent” could assuage. There is for him no perspective (such as that of the perfectly virtuous agent) which secures the independent external viewpoint required for genuine objectivity. The centrality of the thick concepts in ethics thus comes at a price for Williams—for him they are inevitably wedded to an “insider perspective” of culture and tradition, a position I criticize in Chapter 4. Nonetheless, Williams’ work has had the salutary effect of renewing attention to the thick concepts, though not necessarily in the service of substantive ethical theory. Virtue ethics in contemporary dress, portrayed as a third type of moral theory opposed to consequentialism and deontology,⁹ was initiated not by Anscombe but by the influential neo-Aristotelianism of Rosalind Hursthouse’s On Virtue Ethics. Contemporary virtue ethics is still dominated by the neo-Aristotelian turn to the point where textbooks in ethics even now often regard Hursthouse’s virtue ethical conception of right action as definitive of virtue ethics itself.¹⁰ Yet her criterion of right action was not intended as defining of virtue ethics: it was a substantive contribution designed originally to allow virtue ethics to compete in applied ethics with the deontological and consequentialist views that dominated the field.¹¹ How in more detail should we understand virtue ethics in general as opposed to neo-Aristotelianism? It is important to appreciate that virtue ethics is a family of views opposed to other families such as consequentialist theories. The virtue ethical family includes several genera comprising, for example, Aristotelian, Confucian, Humean, Nietzschean; and several species including the virtue ethics of Aristotle, Hume, Hursthouse’s neo-Aristotelianism, Zagzebski’s Exemplarist form of virtue ethics,¹² my version of Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Different versions may well have a different conception of targets of virtue,¹³ different exemplars, and so on. ⁹ See Marcia Baron, Philip Pettit, and Michael Slote, Three Methods of Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). ¹⁰ See for example Russell Shafer-Landau, The Fundamentals of Ethics 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). ¹¹ Originally in her influential paper ‘Virtue Theory and Abortion’ Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (1991), 223–46. ¹² Linda Zagzebski, ‘Exemplarist Virtue Theory’ in Heather Battaly (ed.), Virtue and Vice Moral and Epistemic (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 39–55; Linda Trinkhaus Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). ¹³ See Nicholas Ryan Smith, ‘Right-Makers and the Targets of Virtue’ Journal of Value Inquiry 51 (2017), 311–26.
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Virtue ethics as a family is characterized by two theses which I call Thick Concept Centralism and the Centrality of Virtuousness, specified as follows.
(A) Thick Concept Centralism (TCC) Within the network of concepts denoting features that are reasons and relations of fittingness, relatively non-evaluative features such as helping, giving pleasure, satisfying preferences, benefiting (broadly reasons of beneficence) need to be further conceptualized by a large range of thick evaluative concepts such as kind, just, callous, generous, humiliating, manipulative, for their reason giving status to be properly assessed. The same point applies to broad reasons of respect, and other general classes of reasons. Specifically, TCC claims that the general concepts of right and ought are not logically prior to and independent of reason giving thick concepts that favour or disfavour responses (such as action).¹⁴
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(B) The Centrality of Virtuousness (CV) According to CV, rightness and/or excellence are understood through the virtue/ vice notions. TCC does not entail CV for one basic reason: though the thick concepts provide evaluative shape to non-evaluative reality and thus demarcate an evaluative reality, they do not in themselves connote excellence or even pro tanto rightness. Even honorific concepts, such as patient, loyal, courageous, are not themselves strictly virtue terms: one can have the courage of a thief where the courage is put to bad ends; an assassin may display extreme patience while stalking his highly virtuous target; one’s loyalty may be blind, extreme, or misguided; one’s love foolish or destructive. What is needed to yield reasons and relations of fittingness, features which make actions right, and feelings appropriate, is the virtuousness of the loyalty, patience, love, and so forth. TCC combined with CV (henceforth TCC/CV) does not make concepts denoting virtues of character alone central; rather what is central are the thick concepts in general combined with notions of rightness and/or excellence. These concepts can be applied not only to virtues of character but also to actions, for example: a (virtuously) generous or loyal act; the targets of the virtues at which virtuous agents aim; what ¹⁴ This is a view that Susan Hurley calls non-centralism: ‘Non-centralism about reasons for action rejects the view that the general concepts of right and ought are logically prior to and independent of specific reason giving concepts such as just and unkind.’ (‘Objectivity and Disagreement’ in Ted Honderich (ed.), Morality and Objectivity: A Tribute to J. L. Mackie, 54–97, 56, cited in Bernard Williams, “What does Intuitionism Imply” in Bernard Williams, Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 182–91, 190, n. 6.) Notice that this view does not imply that the thick is prior to the thin: ‘the specific and the general concepts may be interdependent’ (S. L. Hurley, Natural Reasons: Personality and Polity (New York: Oxford University Press 1989, 14).
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6 Hursthouse calls virtue rules (the v-rules) such as ‘Be generous’; and to motives. TCC/CV does not entail that virtue ethics need offer a virtue ethical account of right action, since it is open to virtue ethics to be sceptical of such a notion.¹⁵ As stated above, TCC/CV can be seen as defining of the family of views labelled virtue ethics. Some believe, however, that virtue ethics by definition is character centred as suggested by what Watson calls “the primacy of character” thesis. For Watson . . . ‘an ethics of virtue is . . . the . . . general claim that action appraisal is derivative from the appraisal of character.’¹⁶ This claim is problematic for the inclusion of target centred virtue ethics within the virtue ethics family if Watson’s thesis is understood as the view that action appraisal is wholly derivable from the appraisal of character. This agent-centred thesis is rejected by the target centred view, but it is true that on that view we need an understanding of the virtues to know what their targets are. As stated, TCC/CV does not make concepts denoting virtues of character alone central, but they are central not only for understanding their targets but also in a variety of other important respects. For example, to conform to the virtue rules (such as ‘Be generous’) we need to know what the demands of, for example, generosity as a virtue are. The broad options within virtue ethics hinge on what counts as “virtuousness.” Virtuousness is a highly theory-laden notion and different notions are associated with different brands of virtue ethics. For example, on motive-centred accounts of rightness such as Slote’s¹⁷ the virtuousness and thereby rightness of an action depends on the admirability of the agent’s motive; on qualified agent views such as Hursthouse’s it depends on its being in line with what a virtuous agent would choose; on my target centred virtue ethics the virtuousness (and thereby rightness) of an act depends on its hitting the relevant targets of relevant virtues. Thus, for example, Hursthouse’s neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics and my target centred virtue ethics are species of virtue ethics having distinctive and different understandings of virtuousness and its relation to rightness. Turn now to Target Centred Virtue Ethics. What is distinctive about target centred views is that they subscribe not only to TCC and CV but also to the thesis of Target Centredness:
(C) Target Centredness (TC) What makes actions right, feelings appropriate, and traits of character virtues is understood through the notion of the targets of the virtues. Target Centredness is
¹⁵ I address this issue further in Chapter 10. ¹⁶ Gary Watson, ‘On the Primacy of Character’, reprinted in D. Statman (ed.), Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 56–81, 58. ¹⁷ Michael Slote, Morals from Motives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
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the distinctive feature that makes Target Centred Virtue Ethics opposed to other forms of virtue ethics, notably neo-Aristotelianism as I explore further in Chapter 5. To elaborate, according to TC what counts as good and correct forms of responsiveness to the world, whether to things, persons, animals, situations, whether in relation to feeling or action, is determined by the targets of the virtues, relative to kinds of responses, whether they be respect, love, creativity, promotion of good, and so on.¹⁸ For example, the target of a virtue of love is to have excellent loving bonds with people, neither to excess or deficiency, in the right manner, and so on according to the nature of the virtue of love, whether romantic love, friendship, filial love, or parental love; the target of benevolence is to promote the good of another in an excellent way, for the right reasons and so on; the target of a virtue of creativity is to be creative in the production of, for example, an art work with the right instruments, satisfying standards of originality and integrity, and so on. We say more about the nature of the targets of virtue, their relation to rightness, and kinds of response below (Chapter 5 section (iii)). In general, according to TC, one acts rightly (or correctly) if one hits the targets of the virtues.¹⁹ It is important to realize that for TC there are good forms of responsiveness that do not necessarily issue in right action; for example, well-motivated responses. On the target centred view, one acts in a well-motivated way if one is motivated by hitting targets of the virtues; one acts in a praiseworthy way if hitting the target(s) is sufficiently difficult and one makes a worthy effort; one acts in the way a virtuous agent acts if, in aiming at the targets of the virtues one expresses virtue; and so on. Full excellence of action incorporates not only rightness but also the expression of virtue (which includes fine motivation). It should be evident that Target Centred Virtue Ethics is a multi-layered theory. Elaborations of TCC are forms of thick concept theory; elaborations of CV are forms of virtue ethics which build on TCC, while elaborations of TC produce forms of target centred virtue ethics built on the general features of CV. The general features of the first two layers are elaborated in Chapter 2 while my account of target centredness is the main topic of Chapter 5. Suffice to say here that a path for virtue ethics, crucially a Thick Concept Centralism inspired by Williams, will be reopened.
¹⁸ A good summary of this complex relationship is to be found in Smith, ‘Right-makers and the Targets of Virtue.’ ¹⁹ This conception of rightness was first developed by Christine Swanton in ‘A Virtue Ethical Account of Right Action’ Ethics 112 (2001), 32–52, Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), and further developed in particularly ‘A Particularist but Codifiable Virtue Ethics’ in Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 38–63.
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8 For this reopening a new form of virtue ethics is proposed in three parts. Part I (Metaphysics) elaborates a ‘new metaphysics’ for virtue ethics, the basic features of which are outlined in Chapter 1, while the application of this to the nature of ethical theorizing is the topic of Chapters 2 and 3. Orthodox virtue ethics in its modern guise, neo-Aristotelianism, has availed itself of a metaphysics inspired by Philippa Foot’s ‘natural goodness’.²⁰ According to this view, the evaluative status of virtues as good traits of character is modelled on a broadly scientific and wholly naturalistic conception of goodness in plants and animals. Unfortunately it has not been clear just how this model is to be conceived. Critics of the model have supposed that this evaluative status is derivable from conceptions of natural goodness in the human animal, and this supposition has led to sceptical critiques ranging from Bernard Williams²¹ to Copp and Sobel.²² In reply Foot and Hursthouse have claimed that the model is an analogy only, but that leaves us with the problem of ascertaining just how tight the connection between ‘natural goodness’ and the evaluation of human traits as virtues is meant to be. In addition, Hursthouse has made it clear that the neo-Aristotelian project is not to be taken as a foundationalist one: rather theory justification is coherentist. This leaves it uncertain, as Philipp Brüllmann explores,²³ just how fixed is the ‘fixed point’ of natural goodness as the basis of evaluation of traits as virtues. Instead of the classic neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of natural goodness owed to Philippa Foot²⁴ and later by Michael Thompson,²⁵ and further developed in a virtue ethical direction by Rosalind Hursthouse, I propose in Chapter 1 a ‘new metaphysics for virtue ethics’. This is a form of response-dependent view inspired by Heidegger, Hume, and McDowell. In this way virtue ethicists have a choice: they may rebut or overcome the continued criticisms of contemporary Aristotleinspired ethics, or offer new paradigms inspired by other thinkers who may be read as virtue ethicists themselves (e.g. Hume) or whose metaphysics can be applied to virtue ethics. TCC as part of target centred virtue ethics is argued to be realist and naturalist in McDowell’s sense, though non-naturalist in the orthodox sense.²⁶ In brief it is committed to several broad meta-ethical theses. These are:
²⁰ Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). For an excellent book-length treatment of Foot’s views see John Hacker-Wright, Philippa Foot’s Moral Thought (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). ²¹ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana/Collins, 1985). ²² D. Copp and D. Sobel, ‘Morality and Virtue: An Assessment of Some Recent Work in Virtue Ethics’ Ethics 114 (2004), 514–54. ²³ Philipp Brüllmann, ‘Good (as) Human Beings’, in Julia Peters (ed.), Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2013), 97–113. ²⁴ See her Natural Goodness. ²⁵ ‘The Representation of Life’ in R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, and W. Quinn (eds.), Virtues and Reasons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 247–96. ²⁶ See Chapter 1 section (vii).
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(a) Factualism
There are ethical facts; they are part of the fabric of the world. (b)
Objectivism
The facts which make ethical claims true are objective in the sense that they are facts about the world and not the beliefs, preferences, desires, sentiments of the subject. (a) and (b) together constitute ethical realism. Cognitivism Ethical judgments express beliefs. (c)
Descriptivism
Those beliefs purport to represent or describe reality.²⁷
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(d) Reasons and/or Fittingness Fundamentalism.²⁸
Reasons Fundamentalism is a view proposed and defended by T. M. Scanlon. On this view ‘reasons are fundamental in the sense that truths about reasons are not reducible to or identifiable with non-normative truths such as truths about the natural world of physical objects, causes and effects, nor can they be explained in terms of notions of rationality or rational agency that are not themselves claims about reasons.’²⁹ Reasons (for actions) are understood by him as relational facts of the following form: minimally ‘for an agent in circumstances c p counts in favour of doing a.’³⁰ Thus reasons fundamentalism supposes factualism. Notice that as ²⁷ This is much emphasized by Julius Kovesi in his Moral Notions (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967) where he claims: ‘Moral notions do not evaluate the world of description but describe the world of evaluation’ (119). This is achieved par excellence through the thick concepts. ²⁸ Explicated and defended in T. M. Scanlon, Being Realistic About Reasons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). ²⁹ Being Realistic, 2. In defending Reasons Fundamentalism Scanlon argues against forms of reasons psychologism such as desire-based theories, Bernard Williams’ internal reasons thesis, Korsgaard’s view that ‘the source of the normativity of moral claims must be found in the agent’s own will’ (The Sources of Normativity, 19, cited in Being Realistic about Reasons, 16), basing reasons in an idea of rationality, and expressivist views. I shall not here investigate these rebuttals, all of which I find persuasive. ³⁰ Being Realistic, 105. Although I agree that reasons are relational facts, I do not wish to commit myself to the view that the four place analysis of Scanlon (R (p, x, c, a)) is the best way to understand the reason relation. An important objection to this schema as interpreted by Scanlon is that for him c includes what Jonathan Dancy calls enabling conditions (features that enable a favourer to favour an action) (Ethics Without Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2004)). (See Being Realistic, 31, n. 21.) Thus enablers are incorporated into the reason relation itself: the denial of the propriety of this is crucial to Dancy’s (anti-Rossian) particularism (see Chapter 11).
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Scanlon claims Reasons Fundamentalism is compatible with the idea that there are other normative fundamentalisms. Following Cullity,³¹ I believe that there is also a fundamentalism of fittingness relations, where relations of fittingness are not reducible to reasons.³² The basic metaphysics of ethics, developed in Chapter 1 and further elaborated in Chapter 3, is applied to the virtue ethical paradigm in Chapter 2. How target centredness features in Target Centred virtue ethics is the topic of Chapter 5. By the end of that chapter we have a detailed idea of the core structural and metaphysical features of a virtue ethics grounded in the centrality of the thick concepts, rather than the idea that the choices of a virtuous agent is determinative of rightness. For the reopening of the Williams’ path for virtue ethics through TCC and CV, however, we will need to combat his scepticism about the objectivity of the thick concepts and thereby the objectivity of ethics. That problem is addressed in Chapter 4. Part II (Nature) is an account of the substantive nature of our target centred virtue ethics. It begins with an account of target centred virtue ethics by comparison with eudaimonism. The remaining chapters of Part II are devoted to explaining various features of my favoured brand of target centred virtue ethics. It is a Developmental Virtue Ethics (Chapter 8); it is a Pluralistic Virtue Ethics (Chapter 9) and it is a virtue ethics that recognizes that virtue is ‘differentiated’ by a number of features which I call forms or modes of ethical differentiation, notably roles, one’s cultural and historical location, one’s stage of life, and the narrative particularities of one’s life. These neglected features of what a virtue ethics which applies to the real world should be like is built into target centredness in Chapter 6. Part III (Application) of the book is concerned with theoretical issues in the application of Target Centred Virtue Ethics. The focus is on central theoretical issues in the application of virtue ethics generally rather than on specific applications, such as virtue ethical business ethics.³³ Nor is it a critique of specific forms of applied ethics from a virtue ethical point of view: rather our attention is on keeping our own house in order. The central problem in the application of virtue ethics, much discussed, and which animates much of Part III, is the alleged impotence of virtue ethics in applied ethics. The locus classicus for what may be called the action guidingness objection to virtue ethics is a passage from Robert Louden in an article ‘On Some Vices of Virtue Ethics’: It has often been said that for virtue ethics the central question is not ‘What ought I to do’ but rather ‘What sort of person ought I to be?’ However people
³¹ Garrett Cullity, Concern, Respect and Cooperation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). ³² See Chapter 2 section (iv). ³³ However, Chapter 7 on role ethics does discuss aspects of, for example, legal and business ethics.
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have always expected ethical theory to tell them something about what they ought to do, and it seems to me that virtue ethics is structurally unable to say much of anything about this issue. If I’m right, one consequence of this is that a virtue based ethics will be particularly weak in the areas of casuistry and applied ethics.³⁴
Of crucial importance for overcoming this problem is the groundwork provided in Chapters 6 and 7 on differentiated virtue. However, there are other problems such as the alleged absence of rules and supposedly unsatisfactory accounts of right action. In short the alleged problem of impotence is due to many factors frequently deployed in critiques of the dominant form of virtue ethics, neoAristotelianism, critiques which tend to be automatically generalized to virtue ethics as a whole. The general question is: Are the problems genuine and, if they are, can Target-Virtue Ethics do better? A second theme revisits the topic of Chapter 3 ‘The Concealment of Ethics’. Chapter 12 considers how ethical views dominated by the wrong logos can distort the application of ethics by leading to paradox. I argue that these paradoxes can be solved if the logos of ethics as outlined in Chapters 2 and 3, rather than a logos suitable to science, informs ethical theory. Finally, the application of target centred virtue ethics raises the issues of objectivity and epistemology. There are two issues: that of objectivity, the topic of Chapter 4, and an epistemology suitable for target centred virtue ethics, the topic of Chapter 13. Chapter 4 is a critique of Bernard Williams’ scepticism about the objectivity of ethics, particularly an ethics reliant on the thick concepts, while Chapter 13 develops a target centred virtue epistemology. Different chapters of the book can be grouped together according to themes. The metaphysics of target centred virtue ethics is the topic of Chapters 1–3 while Chapter 4 addresses Williams’ scepticism about the metaphysics proposed for a realist conception of ethics. Chapters 5–9 expound substantive aspects of my form of target centred virtue ethics. Chapters 10 and 11 elaborate further on the target centred account of right action, while Chapter 12 considers substantive issues in relation to that account. Chapter 13 develops a target centred virtue ethical account of epistemology. This book is unabashedly offering an ethical theory. In the light of potential misunderstanding it is well to explain in conclusion what I believe ethical theory is (or is not) designed for. I wholeheartedly reject the idea that it is the purpose of an ethical theory to “tell us what to do” in our quest for answers to specific moral questions. Theories offer frameworks or maps³⁵ only for thinking about ethical
³⁴ American Philosophical Quarterly 21 (1984), 227–36, 229. ³⁵ For the idea of theory as a map see David Schmidtz, Elements of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) discussed in my The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche, Chapter 1.
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questions. The task of an ethical theory is to defend its map as offering an adequate as opposed to a distorted or misleading framework for understanding the world of ethics. The idea that an ethical theory and any conception of right action that goes with it should be seen as a framework or map rather than anything like a decision procedure is supported not only by the fact that the world to which ethical thought applies is extremely complex but also by the nature of the brain fitted to deal with this complexity. Recent findings in neuroscience show that the brain builds and stores mental maps. According to Schafer and Schiller³⁶ mental maps ‘may exist at the core of many of our most “human” capacities’ including inferences, abstract reasoning and the ‘dynamics of social interactions’.³⁷ For them, ‘Maps are not accurate portraits of the world in all of its complexity . . . ’ ‘Maps reduce a dizzying amount of real-world information into a simple, easily readable format that is useful for effective, flexible navigation.’³⁸ Similarly, an ethical theory seen as a map should not be thought of as offering an accurate portrait of the world. However, a map of an important and complex human capacity like ethical thought is not designed to simply offer a map that describes that thought as reflected in our ethical practices. It has a critical function. Misguided cultural and theoretical beliefs and attitudes will influence the building of the mental maps that enable us to navigate the world, and such influences may be criticized as, for example, rendering invisible many important ethical concepts, or downgrading emotional orientations essential to our openness to ethics. Our mental maps may be too simple, too ‘easily readable’, too emotionally impoverished. The right theoretical framework is vitally important since wrong ones (such as on my view monistic consequentialism) will distort our thought about ethics in working out what to do and the reasons for so doing. To answer ethical questions correctly there is not only a need for a satisfactory ethical framework: we very often require an abundance of relevant facts whose discovery necessitates the deployment of resources well beyond those available to an ethical theory. Even a sufficiently complex and accurate theory will never, as a map, reveal the ethical world in all of its complexity. If an ethical theory understands the nature of our cognitive cartography, a brain structure which suits the massive complexity of the world, it will not think that the job of such a theory is to tell us what we ought to do. The job of an ethical theory then is not this; its job is to offer the right kind of map for navigating the ethical world. As this book should amply attest, there are many layers of ethical complexity involved in answering questions about what is to be done. As a result the application of a framework such as the target centred virtue ethics described in this book cannot hope on its own to answer ethical questions in areas involving ³⁶ Matthew Schafer and Daniela Schiller, ‘The Brain’s Social Road Maps’ Scientific American Feb. (2020), 23–7. ³⁷ Schafer and Schiller, 24. ³⁸ Schafer and Schiller, 26.
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institutions; areas such as role ethics, policy, cultural diversity, legal, political, and economic institutions. Unfortunately, despite this, a big danger and temptation in the realm of ethical theory is that of a drive for simplicity and breadth of reach. Neither is available. Our first illustration of this danger comes from legal ethics. On some views in legal ethics a morally upright person’s practical (ethical) identity is normally built around the basic norms of “ordinary morality” and these can conflict with role obligations. One solution to this problem such as that of Markovits³⁹ is that a lawyer’s ‘overarching professional ground project’⁴⁰ is one of fidelity to client ends, and because of the absolute priority of integrity this requires a wholehearted self-effacement and identification with one’s role requirements. Opposing views have it the other way round. The fundamental problem is the drive for simplicity and breadth of reach. The view I endorse (Chapters 6 and 7) recognizes a somewhat disunified (or not wholly unified) theoretical complexity even within ethical theory. Neither role ethics nor “ordinary morality” has hegemony; neither covers the entire terrain. A second illustration comes from culturally differentiated virtue. If an oversimple ethical theory is assumed to cover the ground one will be daunted by the seeming impossibility of answering metaphysical and epistemological questions concerning the nature and discovery of the ethical facts. For example, take the exercise of cultural sensitivity in a business negotiation. The target of cultural sensitivity here is not giving offence; saying wrong things at the wrong time in the wrong manner and so on. Determining this is nothing mysterious either epistemologically or metaphysically. It involves the exercise of various epistemic virtues such as industriousness and perseverance in investigating cultural norms, and their compatibility with and integration with other desiderata in negotiation such as broad values of respect, transparency, and making timely progress. For example, determining the target of the important role virtue of efficiency in this context requires effortful thought and dialogue concerning how much time can be spent, how much progress needs to be made, and what counts as progress. All this assessment may be difficult but there is nothing mysterious. Further, many good enough solutions to various tensions may be possible. Complexity, difficulty, and controversy are no more problematic for a realist approach to ethics than similar difficulties in a realist approach to astrophysics.⁴¹ ³⁹ Daniel Markovits, ‘Legal Ethics from the Lawyer’s Point of View’, Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 15 (2003), 209. ⁴⁰ W. Bradley Wendel, ‘Personal Integrity and the Conflict Between Ordinary and Institutional Values’ in Tim Dare and W. Bradley Wendel (eds.), Professional Ethics and Personal Integrity (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 238–69, 268. See also Gregory Cooper, ‘The Role of Roles in the Normative Economy of a Life’ in Tim Dare and Christine Swanton (eds.), Perspectives in Role Ethics: Virtue, Reason and Obligation (New York: Routledge, 2020), 72–91. ⁴¹ I thank a referee for Target Centred Virtue Ethics for drawing my attention to the putative problem an allegedly ‘daunting’ epistemology might pose for a realist view, given the level of complexity advocated. Obviously, my complete answer cannot be provided in this Introduction. For the problem of indeterminacy see Chapter 12 section (iii).
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PART I
METAPHYSICS
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1 A New Metaphysics for Virtue Ethics
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(i) Introduction: The Basic Theses In the Introduction I claimed that Iris Murdoch believed that the thick concepts carve out an evaluative reality that is indefinitely complex to the point that our understanding of it goes well beyond the resources of “mere” philosophy, or for that matter mere science. There are two important points here. First, an ethics in which the thick concepts are central can be realist. Second, to grasp how such concepts are both evaluative and form the basis of a realist ethics we need to expand our thinking well beyond naturalism in the orthodox sense of analytic philosophy where ‘the natural is the domain of the natural sciences’.¹ In modern times the challenge of critiquing this dominant conception of naturalism has been taken up by John McDowell. A major thrust of McDowell’s work is to argue against restrictive conceptions of naturalism that tie the concept to the understandings of the natural (non-human) sciences.² He does this primarily by claiming that the domain of ethics has what he calls a distinctive logos, one that is not reducible to the ‘impersonal stance’ of science. For him this distinctive logos is virtue ethical, marked by familiarity with the reason-giving force of the thick virtue and vice concepts. Just precisely how a conception of naturalism suitable for ethics can be combined with a proper understanding of the thick evaluative concepts is not, however, well understood. Philosophy in the analytic tradition has long had a problem with a suitable metaphysics for ethics, a conception of realism suitable for ethics, and a notion of ethical or practical truth. For a better understanding of McDowell’s efforts to combine suitable versions of Thick Concept Centralism, realism, and naturalism we need to deploy for background some resources of Continental philosophy, notably the ‘hermeneutic turn’ of Heidegger.³ However, as noted in the next chapter, Heidegger did not explicitly address something called ‘ethics’ so for ethical applications we need to look elsewhere, including McDowell. ¹ Jonathan Dancy ‘Practical Concepts’ in Simon Kirchin (ed.), Thick Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 44–59, 48. ² See John McDowell, ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, in Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (eds.), Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 149–79. ³ See David Couzens Hoy, ‘Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn’ in Charles B. Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 177–201.
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0002
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Heidegger’s metaphysics can be described as a hermeneutic ontology and this is the notion whose basics I explain in this chapter. Fundamentally, Heidegger’s hermeneutic ‘turn’ is radical in that it is applied to ontology in general and not just texts, and is applied in a radical way.⁴ On my understanding this turn as applied to ethics is factualist, non-relativistic, realist and non-queer, and cognitivist. This and later chapters show how these features can be combined with Heidegger’s hermeneutic turn. The essential idea in the hermeneutic turn is that truth and knowledge presuppose a context of meaningfulness through which we understand the nature of entities. Meaning for Heidegger ‘involves the holistic way in which something can become intelligible as something in a web of relations’⁵ This web of relations is constituted by relations of significance. The context which provides significance makes up what Taylor calls the background of understanding constituting ‘engaged agency’.⁶ Indeed, human beings are described by Heidegger as Dasein—literally being there—that is to say, having a being which is relational; being in a world with others and with which we are engaged. Hence, to understand the nature of entities we need to understand the manner in which human beings engage with the world. We are essentially practical beings rather than disengaged theoretical observers of the world, as Heidegger’s discussion of the world of equipment in the early part of Being and Time was designed graphically to show. As Taylor puts it:
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The result [of the rejected view] was a picture of the human thinking agent as disengaged, as occupying a sort of protovariant of the “view from nowhere”, to use Nagel’s suggestive phrase. Heidegger had to struggle against this picture to ⁴ The ‘turn’ is a turn in phenomenology. Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology has been called hermeneutic phenomenology. (See Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press,1990), 2.) Phenomenology is an approach to philosophy which, as Husserl put it, exhorts us to have the following basic attitude “To the things themselves!” (“Die Sachen selbst”). (See Patricia Altenbernd Johnson, On Heidegger (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2000), 15.) Experience takes precedence over those structures of understanding, in a formal intellectualist sense, which distort the revelation of things as they are. The phenomenological approach in twentieth-century German philosophy is closely associated with Husserl. Though its basic attitude is also adopted by Heidegger, as is well known, he broke with Husserl in the way we approach the study of “the things themselves.” He supplanted Husserl’s “transcendental phenomenology” with his “hermeneutic phenomenology.” That turn is also radical. According to Heidegger’s 1925 Kassel lectures on Dilthy, as cited by van Buren, the two “decisive discoveries” of phenomenology are intentionality (as directing oneself towards) and categorial as opposed to sensory intuition (John van Buren, The Young Heidegger: Rumor of the Hidden King (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 208.) Both are radicalized by Heidegger in his hermeneutic phenomenology. Intentionality is understood as engaged comportment, and categorial intuition, notably the understanding of how beings have “being” must be understood through the “way of being” in the world, modes of comportment, proper to Dasein (human being). This way of being is called by Heidegger the existential analytic of Dasein. ⁵ Hoy, 190. ⁶ Charles Taylor, ‘Engaged Agency and Background in Heidegger’ in Guignon (ed.), 202–21. Italics mine.
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recover an understanding of the agent as engaged, as embedded in a culture, a form of life, a “world” of involvements . . . ⁷
Understanding ontology then requires on this view an understanding of the nature of Dasein—the human way of being in the world. Before elaborating this view and showing how it is compatible with a realist moral ontology, let me summarize the key elements of Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology. Thesis 1 For an entity to exist as something we can talk about it must have a certain mode of existence; it must have “being.” For example, it exists as a piece of equipment, or as an artwork, or as an object of scientific observation. “Being is that in virtue of which entities are entities.”⁸ Being in short is a mode of existence: for Heidegger being is “no class or genus of entities.”⁹ Thesis 2 For an entity to have being one must be able to intend it: we must have intentional access to that entity. To intend an entity is for some intentional state to be about or directed at something, and thereby we make sense of them. Hence there is two-way ontological dependence.
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“Being is entities making sense (to us) as entities.”¹⁰ This is a crucial thesis of hermeneutic ontology: the mode of existence of entities, their ontology, is dependent on our making sense of them as people engaged in the world in various ways. Specifically, modes of intentionality may or may not be propositional. Thesis 3 Intentional access to entities (intending entities) is gained through frameworks of significance. Such frameworks of significance are constituted by what Heidegger calls logos; logoi such as the natural sciences and social sciences, biology, theology, carpentry, art, ethics. Through logos the phenomenon (literally an entity that shows itself or is made manifest) is ‘put together’ with logos (the medium through which the phenomenon is made manifest.)¹¹ In this way an entity is ‘disclosed’. There is no independent access to what Heidegger calls the ‘factum brutum’, by a ‘pure beholding’.
⁷ Ibid. 203. ⁸ Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), foreword by Macquarrie and Robinson (xiv). ⁹ Being and Time, sect. 38, 62. ¹⁰ Ibid. ¹¹ Being and Time, sect. 28, 50.
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Thesis 4 When entities are ‘put together’ in this way they constitute what Heidegger calls a ‘worldhood’ such as the worldhood of equipment; the worldhood of ethics. A worldhood for Heidegger is ‘that referential totality which constitutes significance.’¹² Since logos is the medium through which phenomena are made manifest, the ontology of entities (their worldhood) cannot be conceived as independent of our modes of intentional access, and in particular frameworks which make entities significant to us. Thesis 5 The disclosure of entities in a worldhood enables things to matter to us; makes them available for us to engage with them. Unconcealment¹³ of entities through logos makes them ‘available for comportment’¹⁴ or involvement. Worldhood then is a worldhood of involvements. Thesis 6 There are several frameworks (logoi) disclosing entities that are not reducible to the scientific or to any other privileged framework (such as the worldhood of equipment). Thus, entities have a variety of modes of existence—a variety of modes of being, and there are thus several worldhoods. We are engaged with the world, things matter to us, in a variety of ways. We should not privilege one way of mattering, observing the world in the manner of scientific observation.
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Thesis 7 The ‘disclosure’ or ‘unconcealment’ of entities through frameworks of significance precedes epistemology. Claims Heidegger: We therefore distinguish not simply terminologically but for reasons of intrinsic content between the discovery of an entity [Entdeckheit eines Seinden] and the Disclosure of its being [Entschlossenheit seines Seins]. An entity can be discovered whether by way of perception or some other mode of access, only if the being of this entity is already disclosed.¹⁵ ¹² Being and Time, 160. See also 114–22. ¹³ Claims Wrathall ‘unconcealment’ (the usual translation of Unverborgenheit) is Heidegger’s preferred translation of aletheia (openness or truth in his special sense—see note 28). (Mark A. Wrathall, “Unconcealment” in Mark A. Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth Language and History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 11–39, 15). ¹⁴ “Unconcealment,” 13. ¹⁵ Cited in Sacha Golob, Heidegger on Concepts, Freedom and Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2014), 87.
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(ii) Intentional Access: The Logos The significance of Theses 1 and 2 for ontology was understood by McDowell who claims the following: . . . it is one thing to recognize that the impersonal stance of scientific investigation is a methodological necessity for the achievement of a valuable mode of understanding reality; it is quite another thing to take the dawning grasp of this, in the modern era, for a metaphysical insight into the notion of objectivity as such, so that objective correctness in any mode of thought must be anchored in this kind of access to the real.¹⁶
In particular, he argues, ethics is a distinctive mode of access to the real that is irreducibly normative, and that can provide ‘objective correctness’, secured on his view through the distinctive orientation of virtue. What is the nature of the distinctively ethical mode of access to the real? This question is really two:
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(1) what is a ‘mode of access to the real’, and (2) what is the nature of the distinctively ethical mode of access to the real? The next chapter answers question (2) while this chapter is devoted to answering question (1). It argues that the reality of kinds of properties is relative to a mode of intentional access to those entities (a logos) (see Thesis 3). McDowell’s views on this issue (what is a ‘mode of access to the real’?) are not well understood,¹⁷ largely because he is often misinterpreted as speaking of concepts or epistemology rather than ontology (see Thesis 7). In particular, to understand what is going on in the quoted passage we need to know what McDowell means by ‘access’ in its ontological as opposed to an epistemological sense. We need to understand how and why the more basic notion of access—openness to the world—yields an ontology. How more precisely is openness to the world understood? Properties such as being virtuous are attributed to entities within a framework of significance relations, such as that of ethics. Ontology then is not simply the entities that exist, but entities that exist as meaningfully engaged with by human beings. In this way openness through the framework of significance relations constitutes the “being” or ontology of an entity. As McDowell suggests there may be more than one mode of openness and thereby more than one mode of being, modes such as the mathematical, the ethical, and so on. ¹⁶ ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, 164. ¹⁷ A fine exception in my view is Maximillian de Gaynesford, John McDowell (Cambridge: Polity, 2004). I owe much to this work.
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Two notions of access must thus be distinguished: the epistemic and something more basic. The more basic notion is ‘openness to the world’ so that it is made intelligible through forms of conceptualization, as opposed to ‘merely inhabiting an environment’; a distinction McDowell attributes to Heidegger.¹⁸ Indeed, we need to disambiguate not only the notion of access but also that of understanding. ‘Understanding’ like ‘access’ is ambiguous between intelligibility and justified belief; between our intentional access to properties of a certain broad type such as the ethical, which is needed for the ethical to exist, and an epistemic notion where our openness to, for example, virtue or virtuous action has to be justified as accurate. As McDowell puts it, once our eyes are opened to the practical ethical world (constituting the intelligibility of ethics as something which is open to us) epistemology takes over: ‘Thereafter our appreciation of its detailed layout is indefinitely subject to refinement, in reflective scrutiny of our ethical thinking.’¹⁹ As claimed in Thesis 3 the framework of significance relations through which openness occurs is what Heidegger, McDowell, and Gadamer (whose thought influenced McDowell and who was pervasively influenced by Heidegger)²⁰ call a logos. Heidegger’s conception of logos, more elaborated than McDowell’s, is broadly understood thus:
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The original meaning of logos is . . . the connecting, the relationship . . . what holds together that which stands within it . . . Logos is the regulating structure.²¹
As we explore further below ‘regulating structure’ is a broader notion of logos than discourse, let alone language, which are narrower senses also in Heidegger. The broader sense is the meaning I assume here. What is crucial is that rather than things or facts being “brute” (a term used by both McDowell and Heidegger) they are intentionally accessed within a meaningful context. Items accessed this way are entities: trees, people, tables. For example, the table is standardly accessed as ‘ready to hand’ in a ‘worldhood’ of equipmentality which is relative to human purposes. By contrast a kauri tree or a redwood is appreciated within an environmental ethical world view as being in some way highly valuable regardless of
¹⁸ John McDowell ‘What Myth?’ Inquiry 50 (2007), 338–51, 343. ¹⁹ John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 82. ²⁰ See Joel C. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 213. In ‘What Myth?’ Inquiry 50 (2007), 338–51, McDowell acknowledges that his readings of Aristotle on phronesis ‘may have been influenced by Heidegger indirectly through Gadamer’ (340). ²¹ Cited from Aristoteles Metaphysics IX by Golob, Heidegger on Concepts, 82. See also Martin Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (revised edn) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1982), 205ff. Compare Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method 2nd edn, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989): ‘Thus the relational ordering that is logos is much more than the mere correspondence of words and things . . . The truth contained in the logos is not that of mere perception (of noein), nor just letting being appear; rather, it always places being in a relationship, assigning something to it.’ (412).
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human purposes, even holy or sacred,²² and thus as something worthy of preservation for its own sake. Virtuous appreciation of the ancient kauri’s value mandates keeping off its shallow root structure, making the effort to spray one’s boots when walking to prevent kauri dieback disease, and so on. More abstractly, entities are accessed through what Heidegger calls the “a as b” structure:²³ more precisely the b structure is the logos through which entities are intentionally accessed and made significant in some way. In this way an entity is part of a worldhood (what Heidegger calls a referential totality, an a as b structure). An action, for example, thereby has ethical being within the worldhood of ethics as well as other forms of being, within, for example, a worldhood of science. As Heidegger claims in Being and Time, ‘the function of logos lies in merely letting something be seen.’²⁴ But we must be careful with that phrase for there is potential ambiguity between openness as intentional access through a b-structure, and epistemology where representations are justified as accurate. There is a central contrast between aletheia (variously described as openness, unconcealment, disclosure, uncoveredness, and unhiddenness of the world), determining ‘worldhoods’ or modes of being of entities through logos, and epistemology. A logos then provides what Heidegger calls a Lichtung (clearing) which permits an entity to be ‘unconcealed’, to show itself, through forms of comportment. Wrathall explicates the notion of Lichtung this way: Unconcealment, when understood as the clearing, does not name a thing, or a property or characteristic of things, or a kind of action we perform on things, or even the being of things. It names, instead, a domain or structure that allows there to be things with properties and characteristics, or modes of being. This is not a spatial domain or physical entity, or any sort of entity at all. It is something like the space of possibilities.²⁵
The clearing itself is what we shall henceforth call the b-structure, not to be confused with the ‘a as b’ structure which constitutes the ontology of a as an entity having a certain kind of being. As Thesis 1 states, for an entity to exist it must exist as something; it must have “being.” For example, it exists as a piece of equipment, as an object of scientific observation, or as an object having ethical properties. It thereby has ethical being, for example. Hence, a b-structure (of ethics, say) allows an entity a to have a b-type property (an ethical property) such
²² See further Chapter 3. ²³ See The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, trans. W. McNeill and N. Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 436. ²⁴ Section 34, 58 cited in Heidegger on Concepts, 82. ²⁵ ‘Unconcealment’, 14.
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as being virtuous or valuable and thus allows entities to belong to the worldhood of ethics. Truth as correspondence, a property of judgments or assertions, being a relation of ‘agreement of the judgment with its object’, presupposes that there has been a ‘Lichtung’ within which we have a mode of intelligibility.²⁶ This conception of truth Heidegger also calls truth as correctness. Crucially, truth as correspondence presupposes aletheia (unconcealment): The correctness of seeing and viewing things, and thus of definition and assertion [truth as correspondence] is grounded in the particular manner of orientation and proximity to beings, i.e. in the way in which beings are in each case unhidden. Truth as correctness is grounded in truth as unhiddenness . . . ²⁷
(iii) The Logos: Its Nature
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We said above that to understand ontology we need to understand the nature of Dasein—the human way of being in the world. We can now summarize what this involves at the most fundamental level. Having intentional access to entities requires a framework of significance; logos. This allows entities to be ‘unconcealed.’ According to Thesis 5 unconcealment makes entities available for comportment. That is to say unconcealment of entities through logos presupposes concern (Besorge) where things matter in various modes of engagement with the world, including the theoretical stance of the natural sciences. The way human beings dwell in the world is one of absorption and engagement in a social context. It is not primarily one of detached spectator, which in its extreme form is a pathology rather than a recipe for maximal objectivity.²⁸ Heidegger thus rejects
²⁶ Being and Time, sect. 44, 257. ²⁷ Martin Heidegger, The Essence of Truth: On Plato’s Cave Allegory and Theaetetus, trans. Ted Stadler (New York: Continuum, 2002), 26. In earlier works as we saw in the above quote Heidegger regarded aletheia as a form of truth. However, this usage was criticized by Ernst Tugendhat (see Ernst Tugendhat, ‘Heidegger’s Idea of Truth’ in Brice R. Wachterhauser (ed.), Hermeneutics and Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1994), 83–97), and Heidegger eventually ceased to call aletheia ‘truth’. The main issue as Malpas sees it is whether or not ‘truth’ is legitimately applicable to what makes truth (as correctness) possible, what Heidegger would regard as its essence (Jeff Malpas ‘The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat’ Divinatio (2012)) He claims that ‘Heidegger’s later acceptance of Tugendhat’s claim that aletheia is not the same as truth has to be viewed as problematic, since it threatens to obscure the very twofold unity that is so important . . . there are, in an important sense, not two separated concepts here, but two aspects of a single structure.’ Along the same lines Wrathall claims that ‘we could say that the being of truth lies in uncovering’. (Mark A. Wrathall ‘Introduction’, Heidegger and Unconcealment, 1–8, 4). Wrathall, in a critique of Tugendhat, sides with Heidegger’s original nomenclature, and my sympathies lie with Wrathall and Malpas. ²⁸ See Sartre’s description of Roquentin’s pathological disengagement with a doorknob in his Nausea. (Discussed by Dreyfus, 47.)
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a “spectator” metaphysics dominated by perceptual analogies and paradigms²⁹ in favour of what might be called a “metaphysics” of engagement. To show this, he illustrates in Being and Time an important mode of engagement, engagement in the world of equipmentality—the world of competence with tools and other equipment. What kinds of things constitute a logos in the broad sense of “regulating structure”? How is the clearing achieved? The constituents of logos are complex. The key enablers of the clearing are Verstehen (understanding within a public discourse (Rede)), fundamental emotional orientation or attunement (Grundstimmung(en), often translated very misleadingly as mood(s)) within Befindlichkeit (contestedly translated: I favour situatedness), that is location in, for example, culture and role, which themselves have historical meaning through tradition. These, together, permit an entity to show itself. Of these the notion of emotional attunement is possibly the most puzzling and difficult to apply. Heidegger’s idea is that certain emotional orientations may be necessary for modes of being to be disclosed at all and as we shall see this was Hume’s fundamental position in relation to ethics. Alternatively certain orientations may be necessary for modes of being to be disclosed richly (as opposed to disclosed at all). One might argue that in ethics a loving orientation to the world and its people as a whole is required for rich disclosure, and in science an attitude of wonder is required for this, despite the fact that for Heidegger the fundamental orientation (‘Grundstimmung’) of science is ‘dry’, ‘monotonous’ and ‘therefore oppressive.’³⁰ Let us gain some idea of how these features apply to the b-structure—the logos—of ethics. According to hermeneutic ontology, the mode of being of ethics requires for its unconcealment a clearing (Lichtung) so that the being of ethics can be unconcealed. According to TCC/CV this clearing is provided fundamentally by the thick evaluative virtue/vice concepts. Engagement with the world of ethics, the mode of concern (Besorge) of ethics, thus requires some degree of mastery of those concepts. This mastery is not just a matter of using the virtue and vice terms in speech (even psychopaths can do this to a degree by mastering rules),³¹ but as Hume saw, it requires the fundamental emotional attunements (Grundstimmungen) of something he called the moral sense, along with its emotional conditions of possibility, notably benevolence (a desire for another’s good) that is sufficiently extensive
²⁹ See further Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 159. ³⁰ Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovett (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 3–35, 17. This is not a position I would be prepared to defend. ³¹ See further on the emotional deficits of psychopaths by contrast with their knowledge of right and wrong in relation to rules: Paul Bloom, The Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Crown, 2013), 33–40.
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through sympathy.³² For Hume, the openness of entities (people) in their ethical mode of being as virtuous (or vicious) is constituted by their “power” to excite the moral sense and its emotional conditions in this particular. Such a basic emotional orientation is not itself a concept, but is a precondition of possessing properly ethical concepts. Ethics is not even intelligible to Hume’s various moral monsters that are devoid of a moral sense, monsters such as his notorious psychopathic fictional individual of the Treatise who prefers the ‘destruction of the whole world’ to the ‘scratching of [his] finger’.³³ Armed only with ‘Reason’ understood by Hume in a narrow sense as the operations of the understanding, for him a faculty considered apart from any passions and any feelings of pleasure and pain, his eyes are not even opened to the worldhood of ethics. However, as we explore in Chapter 2, the emotional openness to the worldhood of ethics through something like the moral sense is not sufficient for ethical competence. For that we require inter alia familiarity with a wide range of thick concepts. It is important here to insert a cautionary note. The view outlined above of the emotional orientation required for the unconcealment of ethics is not to be confused with a view called sentimentalist ethics according to which empathy is foundational to ethics in a substantive sense. This view is criticized by both Bloom³⁴ and Prinz³⁵ on the grounds that such an ethics cannot account for the ethical requirements of “moral inclusion” of ‘outsiders’³⁶ and indeed for ethics in general. The kind of empathy driving Bloom’s critique is ‘the act of feeling what you believe other people feel – the experiencing what they experience.’³⁷ However, first, for Hume the moral sense is required for the unconcealment of ethics in general. He is not committed to the view that we can account for justice simply by appeal to empathy—in fact he rejects that view.³⁸ Second, for Hume, the unconcealment of ethics requires benevolently motivated empathy; what Batson calls ‘empathic concern’. For Batson ‘empathy’ means ‘empathic concern’ defined as ‘other-oriented emotion elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of someone in need.’³⁹ Whether it is correct to see empathic concern (as opposed to empathy in Bloom’s sense) as the basis of a substantive ethical view is not, however, at issue here. Target centred virtue ethics with the kind of metaphysics proposed here can be quite neutral on this issue. Indeed, on my view this neutrality should remain while the social sciences continue to debate the issue.
³² For a detailed account of Hume’s views see my The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. ³³ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968) (T 2.3.3.6/416). ³⁴ Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion (New York: Harper Collins, 2016). ³⁵ Jesse Prinz ‘Against Empathy’ The Southern Journal of Philosophy 49 (Supp. 1) (2011), 214–33. ³⁶ See Anne Jaap Jacobson ‘Hume, Bloom, and Moral Inclusion’ in Philip A. Reed and Rico Vitz (eds.), Hume’s Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Psychology (New York: Routledge, 2018), 191–207. ³⁷ Bloom, Against Empathy, 3–4. ³⁸ See The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche, Chapter 4. ³⁹ Daniel C. Batson, Altruism in Humans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 11.
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Another basic feature necessary for logos is being situated in a culture within a tradition. For Gadamer ‘understanding is to be thought of less as a subjective act than as participating in an event of tradition, a process of transmission in which past and present are constantly mediated.’⁴⁰ McDowell’s position, like that of Heidegger, Gadamer, and MacIntyre, is that immersion in a tradition is essential for intentional access to entities through the various modes of access (logoi). Logos in general, whether that of ethics, science, equipmentality, is immersed in tradition. Since McDowell himself does very little to elaborate this idea, except via the odd allusive reference to Gadamer, I turn briefly to MacIntyre.⁴¹ According to him we necessarily act within ‘settings’ which may include institutional settings, practices, or a ‘milieu of some other kind.’⁴² It is essential to the notion of a setting that it has a history. To understand an action ‘we have to understand its history.’⁴³ On a large scale the setting is our culture, and the history of our culture is our tradition. More specifically, intentional access to the normative properties of actions through the logos of ethics, most abstractly specified by the ‘space of reasons’, essentially involves settings, social and historical location, and thereby tradition. As MacIntyre puts it, ‘ . . . all reasoning takes place within the context of some traditional mode of thought.’⁴⁴ All this, of course, raises the question of the authority of tradition. As is considerably emphasized in the Continental tradition (I am thinking here of Heidegger and Gadamer) there are many resources for critiquing a tradition. Like Heidegger, Gadamer claims that what he (Gadamer) calls “bad prejudice” is overcome through questioning in a way that does not exhibit mere curiosity and surveying of opinions. (Heidegger himself distinguishes Rede (discourse or conversation) from Gerede (idle talk).) If we are as Heidegger claims essentially Beingwith-others, the nature of the ethical logos, for example, is inherently a dialogical matter where different perspectives, types of expertise, authority relations, procedures, have appropriately been taken on board. Claims Gadamer, ‘The hermeneutical task becomes of itself a questioning of things and is always in part so defined.’⁴⁵ As MacIntyre puts it ‘a living tradition . . . is an historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely about the goods which constitute that tradition’.⁴⁶ ‘Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict.’⁴⁷ Tradition is not inert. But it may also need to be preserved. Though subject to questioning and critique it (if worth preserving in its essentials) claims Gadamer, it ‘needs to be affirmed, embraced, cultivated. It is essentially preservation’ but, he claims: ‘ . . . preservation is an act of reason, though an inconspicuous
⁴⁰ Truth and Method, 290. ⁴¹ Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981) 3rd edn (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). ⁴² After Virtue, 206. ⁴³ After Virtue, 206. ⁴⁴ After Virtue, 222. ⁴⁵ Truth and Method, 269. ⁴⁶ After Virtue, 222. ⁴⁷ Ibid.
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one. For this reason, only innovation and planning appear to be the result of reason. But this is an illusion.’⁴⁸ There are virtues and vices associated with the practices of both preserving and questioning tradition. A ‘virtue of having an adequate sense of the traditions to which one belongs or which confront one’⁴⁹—that is, sensitivity to tradition— must be distinguished from correlative vices of excess and deficiency. These include what MacIntyre calls ‘antiquarian conservatism’⁵⁰ on the one hand, and an individualism which automatically sees tradition in adversarial terms, on the other.⁵¹ An aspect of that vice familiar to many of us is that of administrators for whom ‘innovation’ effectively means ‘change for the good’. Through familiarity with the logos in the rich complex sense described above, openness is direct access to things like tables, as opposed to, for example, mental representations of tables.⁵² And that access is not standardly mediated by some further entity or state. In particular, the logos of ethics provides direct unmediated access to entities in their ethical mode of being such that in the words of McDowell ‘when all goes well’ (and it often does not) ethical reality is ‘there’ for an agent; it is ‘present’ to her. Since the logos providing unmediated intentional access to normative properties are forms of rational, reason responsive, emotional construal—construal involving familiarity with relevant thick concepts which itself presupposes the basic emotional orientations of, for example, basic benevolence—being there and present is experienced in the form of both belief and motivation. The suffering of a person is “present” for me in my motivation to comfort her and all going well I do this appropriately, that is kindly, sensitively, and so on. Notice that this does not and is not intended to apply to all cases of evaluative belief/motivation. Someone may have an unconscious belief that a colleague is hateful because he is reprehensibly selfish, not doing nearly enough good for the institution to which he belongs. The belief is brought to consciousness by her accepting the interpretation of her emotions by her analyst. Let us say this interpretation is correct. The evaluative belief is not ‘present’ to her; as Adam Leite puts it ‘she doesn’t consciously occupy the subjective perspective of the belief ’.⁵³ The belief is mediated by the interpretations of her analyst. At that point having brought the belief to consciousness she may be able to understand it, as, for example, the product of unconscious resentments.
⁴⁸ Truth and Method, 281. For an application of this important truth see Viviane Robinson, Reduce Change to Increase Improvement, Corwin Impact Leadership Series (Corwin: CA, 2018). ⁴⁹ After Virtue, 223. ⁵⁰ Ibid. ⁵¹ After Virtue, 222. ⁵² See further on this view in the context of Heidegger interpretation, Golob, Heidegger on Concepts, 77. ⁵³ “Psychoanalysis and Self-knowledge: some Lessons from the Clinical Context” (paper presented to the APA Pacific Division Vancouver 2015).
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(iv) Plurality of the Logoi It is a consequence of the hermeneutic turn in ontology as explicated in Theses 1–5 that the logoi through which intentional access is gained are plural. Let us turn then to Thesis 6, the multiplicity of the logoi. Christina Lafont⁵⁴ has argued that what I have called the plurality of the logoi poses problems for the view that Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology is compatible with a single, objective world.⁵⁵ There are two alleged problems, first that each logos is insulated and secluded, and second that each is incorrigible. The charge of incorrigibility is addressed in section (viii); here and in Chapter 3 (section (iii) Relation between the Logoi) I rebut the charge of insulation. In his article ‘Heidegger and the Supposition of a Single, Objective World’ McManus discusses Lafont’s claim that Heidegger’s ontology is incompatible with the supposition of a single, objective world. It turns out however that what Heidegger’s view apparently undermines is ‘the supposition of a single, objective world independent of language’, and ‘of any particular way of conceiving it.’⁵⁶ What is undermined is ‘the idealization’ of a single objective world. And indeed Heidegger’s hermeneutic ontology does retain ‘the supposition of a single, objective world’ while rejecting that conception of it. Hermeneutic ontology offers an alternative to idealism on the one hand and a conception of reality that rejects two- way ontological dependence on the other. Nonetheless, the plurality of the logoi does raise a problem about how such a plurality can gel with the idea of a single world. This section aims to address that issue. First, let us illustrate how a single entity can be intentionally accessed by more than one logos. Recall that the b-structure of logos shows that the ontology of entities (the a-variable) is that of entities within frameworks of significance relations be they frameworks of science, ethics, artwork, production, equipment. Hence, there may be more than one logos through which intentional access to an entity a is gained. There may be more than one b-structure. For illustration consider the jug. Within physics the jug is composed of subatomic particles. Indeed, if it is a glass jug it is not even solid, for within the scientific logos glass is a liquid. Within the logos of equipmentality, a logos which dominates Heidegger’s thought in the early part of Being and Time, the jug is a piece of equipment with a certain function and is certainly solid. For both Aristotle and Heidegger, to fulfil that function, the jug has to be constructed (produced) through the logos of techne required for poesis (production). It is produced from ⁵⁴ Christina Lafont, Heidegger, Language, and World-Disclosure, trans. G. Harman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). ⁵⁵ See Denis McManus, “Heidegger and the Supposition of a Single, Objective World,” European Journal of Philosophy 23, 2, (2015), 195–220. ⁵⁶ Lafont, 230, 3.
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matter as the thing to be shaped in the productive process according to the arche of that process.⁵⁷ Heidegger puts the point this way:
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To the Greeks techne means neither art nor handicraft but rather: to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way. The Greeks conceive of techne, producing, in terms of letting appear.⁵⁸
The jug could also be an artwork. In the Critique of Aesthetics in Truth and Method Gadamer is clear that there is an ontology of the artwork that has a distinct logos, and thereby a ‘truth.’ That logos is the ‘ontology of the work of art as play’⁵⁹ broadly understood as interpretation: ‘the being of the artwork is to be interpreted—that is it exists only in interpretation.’ There is no ‘simple, correct, canonical interpretation’, indeed there are indefinitely many, though the work provides limits to interpretation.⁶⁰ According to both Heidegger and Gadamer art offers access to reality (as intentional access). If by contrast science is seen as the mode of access to the real it [art] comes to be seen as ‘artifice, appearance, and unreality.’⁶¹ As a further illustration consider an action. An entity of a broad kind such as action—important for ethics—can be intentionally accessed through a variety of logoi, just as can jugs and surf.⁶² That is one and the same action, an act of body surfing say, can be accessed as an object for ethical assessment (I have recklessly body surfed over the top of a child), as an object of aesthetic assessment—a perfect example of timing and skill appropriate to the nature of the beautiful glassy wave—or, alternatively as Dreyfus would put it, as an item of absorbed coping: the wave suddenly appears and I go for it—no propositional representation is made at all. There may be judgment that is non-propositional but conceptual, such as perceptual and emotional assessment (in terms of “shape,” “size,” “steepness,” “frightening,” “exciting,” “where breaking,” etc.).⁶³ Or the wave and ⁵⁷ See further Joseph Dunne, Back to the Rough Ground: Practical Judgment and the Lure of Technique (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 1993), 330. ⁵⁸ ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper Collins, 1975), 143–59, 157. ⁵⁹ Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 109. ⁶⁰ Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 111. ⁶¹ Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, 92. Not only is there the issue of the relation between ethics and science, but there is also the fascinating issue of the relation between ethics and art, so well explored by Iris Murdoch who says that ‘Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality’ (The ‘Sublime and the Good’ in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997), 215, cited in Priscilla Martin, ‘The Preachers Tone: Murdoch’s Mentors and Moralists’, in Anne Rowe and Avril Horner (eds.), Iris Murdoch and Morality (Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 31–42, 35. ⁶² See Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, for the distinction between aesthetic and mathematical modes of access to (intelligibility of) the properties of a circle. That is the circle has both mathematical and aesthetic being accessed through different logoi. ⁶³ This is the kind of thing McDowell calls rational ‘mindedness’. For him there is no such thing as a non-conceptual given; rather ‘our orientation towards the world is permeated with conceptual rationality.’(‘What Myth?’ 349). This rationality is constituted by the logoi through which the world
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surrounds may be vividly ethically or prudentially present for me in fear, apprehension, or concern resulting immediately in my action of suddenly pulling out of the wave (there is a child in front of me; there is a board rider catching the same wave coming towards me). These illustrations highlight the core feature of hermeneutic ontology. For Heidegger, ‘the truth relation is a comportmental relation.’⁶⁴ It is fundamentally a relation of comporting oneself well, which may be through forms of knowing how in handling equipment, fine ethical or artistic comportment, or the expression of truth as correspondence in assertions of a scientific nature. Given this variety of modes of comportment there are a variety of frameworks (logoi) through which we engage with the world. The fact that the logoi are plural raises a major challenge for the McDowell– Heidegger view of the metaphysics of ethics. The ‘a as b’ structure contains two variables. The second, b, denotes the network of significance relations through which intentional access to a can be gained. But what about a? It may be thought that there has to be an independent access to what Heidegger calls (a conception of) a as the ‘factum brutum’, intentionally accessed independently of all logoi by a ‘pure beholding’. But this is precisely what is denied by the ‘a as b’ structure. How then do we conceive of a within that structure? One option is to retain the ‘a as b’ structure, but privilege one logos such as the scientific, which gives us the true reference and ontology of a. The privileging move is rejected by Heidegger on the grounds (discussed in section (viii)) that it is ‘enframing’ and thus does not allow for a rich disclosure of entities. Rather no logos is privileged. Indeed, problems arise when one set of significance relations is illegitimately analyzed through features appropriate to another. (See further Chapter 12.) Heidegger devoted much energy in Being and Time focusing on another distortion: the failure to appreciate the worldhood of equipmentality, a form of what Gilbert Ryle later called ‘knowing how’ as a distinctive logos. Unfortunately in the view of many interpreters Heidegger elevated this logos to privileged status, eventually precipitating the ‘Turn’ of the later Heidegger. I do not think this elevation was Heidegger’s intention. But he did think that what we might call the “equipmental” in the sense of technological orientation of science privileged that logos: ‘Ready to hand’ conceptualizations (Heidegger lists ‘serviceability, conduciveness, usability and manipulativeness’)⁶⁵ create the resource-based technicist thinking of which Heidegger (and later thinkers such as MacIntyre)⁶⁶ were so critical. is open to us, something we gradually acquire through the developmental acquisition of what he calls ‘second nature.’ ⁶⁴ Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), 52–3. ⁶⁵ Being and Time, sect. 68, 97. ⁶⁶ See further my ‘Virtues of Productivity versus Technicist Rationality’ in Jennifer A. Baker and Mark D. White (eds.), Economics and the Virtues: Building a New Moral Foundation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 185–201.
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How is it possible that non-reducibility and non-privileging of logoi do not imply distinctness in realms of entities? How is it possible that there is one single objective world? Joseph Dunne provides the answer illustrating with Aristotle’s distinction between form and matter. He claims that Aristotle ‘asserts a distinction between form and matter but not a separation: so that what are analytically distinct are in fact concretely united.’⁶⁷ The same I shall argue applies to the various modes of being of an entity such as its ethical and scientific modes. When Hume says in the Treatise (T 3.1.1.26/468-9) that we cannot see the vice in the object, he is saying (on my interpretation)⁶⁸ that though the viciousness of the killing and the killing as such are to be distinguished, they are “concretely united” in the killing itself. Nonetheless (as discussed further in Chapter 2), the viciousness is not something that can be intelligibly accessed in the manner of scientific observation. It is not as if reasons grounded in vice and virtue are for the ethical realist, as Korsgaard puts it, noticed ‘as it were wafting by’,⁶⁹ as if there are observable black miasmas and golden haloes drifting about waiting to attach themselves to suitably vicious and virtuous acts respectively.⁷⁰ Though united in the one action of killing, the ethical property of its viciousness can only be intentionally accessed and thereby exist as such a property through a distinctive logos, described in Chapter 2. The viciousness of the killing and the killing as such belong together in the one action, the former a property accessed through the logos of ethics yielding normative properties and the latter through the logos of science where the killing is (say) a causal consequence of plunging a knife into the heart. To understand the idea of belonging together we need to appreciate Heidegger’s concept of identity as unity in diversity or difference. According to Heidegger the unity of identity is not mere sameness. As Joan Stanbaugh puts it, for Heidegger ‘the “is” in identity is the relation of belonging together’.⁷¹ Belonging together is not something that is metaphysically somehow independent of us but is something ‘appropriated’ by a framework (Gestell) of engagement or concern (Besorge). In this active and indeed changing process, properties accessed through differing logoi are conceived and treated in our practical lives as belonging together. This is achieved by forming bridges between the logoi as we shall illustrate in Chapter 3. In this way, different logoi may all describe a natural world without being part of each other, or part of the scientific logos. At a metaphysical level the notion of belonging together is understood through the bundle theory of objects. On this view properties of objects are seen as being ⁶⁷ Back to the Rough Ground, 329. ⁶⁸ Outlined and defended in my The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. ⁶⁹ Sources of Normativity, 44; cited in Being Realistic, 121. ⁷⁰ Compare Hurley: ‘Reason-giving concepts, with their conceptual ties to action, do not float free of the familiar physical world; they do not describe a different or queer world, but the same world, in a different way, as the site of the intelligible acts of persons.’ (Natural Reasons, 287). ⁷¹ Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1969), Introduction, 11.
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co-present rather than inhering in what Locke called an ‘I know not what’ substance. A traditional objection to bundle theories concerns the nature of the compresence relation.⁷² If properties are bound together then surely, it may be thought, that relation is just as mysterious as the notion of substance itself. However, on Heidegger’s view compresence should not be understood in terms of a mysterious property of being bound, but as properties belonging together in the sense outlined above. For Heidegger the things of which ethical and other properties are predicated are the basic concrete items of common sense: tables, mountains, people. Concrete items stand in spatio–temporal relations, can stand in causal relations, and exist contingently. These features are features in virtue of which such items are concrete. On a Heideggerian view, however, the concrete nature of things with ethical properties, for example, does not entail that the properties which make an item concrete are sufficient to account for the nature of those properties. The bundle theory of properties enables us to understand properties, intentionally accessed through various logoi, as all properties of the same concrete item; for example, properties such as the beauty and functionality of a table and the dignity and conscientiousness of Queen Elizabeth II. Ethical properties are not reducible to the concrete-making properties but belong together with those properties to concrete items. The bundle theory understood through a Heideggerian hermeneutic lens renders non-mysterious the view that one and the same concrete item can both possess concrete-making properties such as standing in causal relations, and nonconcrete-making properties such as being beautiful and dignified. This picture is, however, overly simple because it does not adequately relate the being of an entity to the regulating structure of a logos, a structure that deals with facts. To illustrate the point, consider Emile Durkheim’s notion of a social fact. Durkheim’s conception of social facts as the object of sociological study was treated with suspicion and criticized from two opposite poles: one from a reductivist direction which wanted to reduce the objects of sociological study to, for example, the levels of individual psychology, biology, or the ‘economic substratum’’;⁷³ and the other from an idealist direction in which such facts could not be regarded as ‘things’ as Durkheim insisted. For him, in short, social facts are ‘things’ as opposed to ‘ideas.’⁷⁴ That is social facts should be seen as part of the causal order; for example, according to Durkheim they can cause evil,⁷⁵ and they are external to individuals and their psychology. They come in two main
⁷² See further Jeffrey Grupp ‘Compresence is a Bundle: A Problem for the Bundle Theory of Objects’ https://praiseandlove.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/COMPRESENCEisaBUNDLE-metaphysicaJeffreyGrupp.pdf URL accessed 26/12/17. ⁷³ Readings from Emile Durkheim, ed. Kenneth Thompson, trans. Margaret A. Thompson (London: Tavistock Publications, 1985), Introduction, 13. ⁷⁴ Durkheim, ‘The Rules of Sociological Method’ from Thompson, 64. ⁷⁵ Durkheim, ‘The Division of Labour in Society’ from Thompson, 56.
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categories, social “currents”; for example, the pressure (in my own society) to learn to drive, and own and use a smartphone; or are in some way institutional such as gift giving practices in various cultures, professional roles, and so forth. As such they are both normative and to varying degrees coercive for Durkheim.⁷⁶ However, claims Durkheim, ‘we do not say that social facts are material things, but that they are things by the same right as material things, though in a different way’.⁷⁷ What is the lesson to be drawn from this? In understanding a logos we do not just understand concrete entities to which different kinds of properties are attached. The different logoi deal with different kinds of fact: facts such as biological facts, social facts, economic facts, and ethical facts. Entities can be accessed through their incorporation into a social fact (e.g., being a parent having parental roles within a culture), a biological fact (the person is male and has reproduced), through an economic fact (being a consumer and investor within a regulated capitalist economy), and through an ethical fact (he shows admirable affection towards his children). The ontology of an entity (a as b) is intentionally accessed by being incorporated as a fact—for example, a sociological fact—where sociology is the b-framework through which a is intentionally accessed. These facts, as Durkheim claims, are like material things in being external as opposed to mental and subjective, but are things in different ways. Furthermore, to understand the nature of these facts requires theoretical investigation into the nature of the logos through which the facts are understood. Sociology deals with social facts; ethics deals with (at the most basic level) reasons and relations of fittingness which are ethical facts. From now on then facts proper to the logos of ethics, disclosing the worldhood of ethics, will be called ethical facts, and investigation into their nature requires theoretical investigation into the logos of ethics and any other logos that sheds light on their nature, whether, for example, neuroscience or evolutionary biology. To see what belongs with what then we need to understand how the logoi, through which properties are intentionally accessed, can be conceived as both distinct and connected. As we explore further in Chapter 3 integration of the logoi, seeing what belongs with what, is not something easily achieved. And as Durkheim emphasized it does not require a reduction of one logos to another which alone provides the theory of the real.
⁷⁶ Thus role obligations, for example, constitute an objective reality for Durkheim (‘The Rules of Sociological Method’, Thompson 68). ⁷⁷ Durkheim, “The Rules of Sociological Method” from Thompson, 64.
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(v) Two-way Ontological Dependence As Thesis 2 makes clear, there is a two-way ontological dependence between modes of intentional access and entities. In the case of ethics, ethical facts are admitted but not facts existing wholly independently of the sensibilities of agents. As we have seen (Introduction), such sensibilities enable us to lay down cognitive cartography in the brain and there are quite different maps (indeed, cell types) for a range of human capacities and practices. Even the neural basis for a spatial mental map has an ‘abundance of cell types.’⁷⁸ In the case of ethics the relevant sensibilities necessary for an ethical mental map should not simply be seen as passive observation of ethical facts, like the brownness and hardness of tables. Iris Murdoch, also a realist in this vein, emphasized the correct emotional orientation, constructive imagination, and interpretative effort needed as part of our ethical openness to entities. Furthermore, in two-way ontological dependence there is no ontological primacy. Heidegger puts the point by claiming that openness is a ‘fourfold’ including the ‘thing [being] open to us’ and ‘we [being] open to the thing’⁷⁹ which is a ‘unity’ that nonetheless permits of analytical separation. That is, although aspects of ‘the fourfold unitary openness’ are separately describable for the purposes of understanding them, they are not separate in re. Often philosophers can emphasize one side of the two-way dependence to the virtual exclusion of the other, and this can give rise to much misunderstanding and misinterpretation. For example, Hume’s focus on ‘sentiment’—the sensibilities of the human agent required for ethics to be intelligible as ethics—has led to misinterpreting him as a subjectivist who rejects objectivist factualism. By contrast Levinas emphasizes ‘the thing (human being) being (ethically) open to us’ via the face of the other as origin of a command to us, but ‘the call of the other is not heard through any prior phenomenological, hermeneutical or even theological lens, but is the very origin and ground of being, language, and action as such.’⁸⁰ Levinas has been criticized for not appreciating the nature of the responsiveness of him to whom the command is addressed, but if the addressee is not open to the other because of unspeakable cruelty and callousness or even complete indifference, the ‘call’ of the other will not be intelligible as an ethical command. Ricoeur by contrast has been criticized for not appreciating adequately the other being ⁷⁸ Schafer and Schiller, 25. ⁷⁹ Basic Questions of Philosophy, trans. Richard Rojcewicz and Andre Schuwer (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994), 18–19. Explicit discussion of the other aspects of the fourfold is beyond the scope of this chapter, but see Christine Swanton, ‘A New Metaphysics for Virtue Ethics’ in Julia Peters (ed.), Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2013), 177–94, and Christine Swanton, “Heideggerian Environmental Virtue Ethics,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 23 (2010), 145–66. ⁸⁰ John Wall, Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 122.
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open to us as origin of the command, thinking too strongly of the nature of the addressee’s giving the other the ‘gift’ of love.⁸¹ For a contemporary example in the analytic tradition consider Dancy’s work on particularism.⁸² He focuses on the nature of the thing being (ethically) open to us with his claims that what he calls practical reality⁸³ can be “open to us” through the evaluative shape provided by thick concepts—a shape which furnishes reasons—but without those reasons being capturable in invariant moral principles. Andrew Gleeson in a criticism of Dancy⁸⁴ focuses by contrast on what is required for us to be (ethically) open to the thing, claiming not without plausibility that we need Murdochian attention to the individuality of cases and what he calls moral reactions, including an eschewal of reliance on rules, an attitude he thinks is necessary for taking responsibility for one’s ethical judgments. He then prioritizes this aspect of openness (that is us being open to the thing) arguing that Dancy’s particularism, which focuses by contrast on the thing being (ethically) open to us, is superficial, scholastic, and is built ‘on a foundation of sand’.⁸⁵ But these criticisms are beside the point since Dancy’s work on particularism focuses on one aspect of ontological dependence; what it takes for ethical properties to be open to us, or perhaps what is not necessary for ethical properties to be open to us, notably universalizability and potentiality to be captured in invariant moral principles. This claim, if true of the thick concepts that are central to the logos of ethics (and I argue in Chapter 11 that it is), is an extremely important feature of intentional access to the ethical. As noted above, in two-way ontological dependence, it is not necessarily the case that our receptivity to the object is something passive. In a picturesque metaphor Heidegger claims that uncoveredness is ‘something that must always first be wrested from entities.’⁸⁶ To let an entity be seen by incorporation into a bframework is not necessarily easy. It is not necessarily just a matter of perception or immediate apprehension: paradigms of intentional access that can mislead. An excellent example of the phenomenon is provided in relation to cosmology in a recent article in Scientific American.⁸⁷ The subject is the “hiddenness” of the ⁸¹ Ibid. 124. ⁸² Notably Jonathan Dancy, Ethics without Principles (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2004). ⁸³ See Jonathan Dancy, Practical Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). ⁸⁴ ‘Moral Particularism Reconfigured’ Philosophical Investigations, 30, (2007), 363–80. ⁸⁵ ‘Moral Particularism Reconfigured’ 377. ⁸⁶ Being and Time, sect. 222, 265. Here Heidegger speaks of truth as uncoveredness. Truth in this sense means aletheia (openness or uncoveredness; i.e., intentional access) and not truth as correspondence which is also a necessary part of what Jeff Malpas calls Heidegger’s “twofold” of truth in ‘The Twofold Character of Truth.’ In the “uncoveredness” sense, Heidegger claims that we are ‘equiprimordially both in the truth and the untruth’ Being and Time, sect. 223, p. 265. ⁸⁷ Niayesh Afshordi, Robert B. Mann, and Razie Pourhasan, ‘The Black Hole at the Beginning of Time’ Scientific American 311 (August 2014), 28–33. There are other examples exemplified by debate over the existence of dark matter, dark energy, and the nature of gravity where the ‘wresting’ of matter from ‘hiddenness’ is fraught with theoretical and empirical problems. Indeed, various problems may be so large that aspects of the very logos of astrophysics itself may be called into question. (See Sabine
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universe before the Big Bang. Beginning with Plato’s allegory of the cave where the three-dimensional world of space is hidden from the prisoners who only see the world as a two-dimensional world of shadows, the authors heroically attempt to ‘wrest’ the universe before the Big Bang from its hiddenness in what Heidegger would call the “Mystery of Being” through the logos of mathematics. This is achieved apparently through mathematical portrayal in terms of four-dimensional space, but in respect of a sensory logos that world is still hidden and incomprehensible. Contrast Plato’s prisoners upon release. The ‘a as b’ structure in relation to the universe before the Big Bang is confined to mathematics, and intentional access to that world (if secured at all) is not as yet a rich one (except perhaps to mathematically minded cosmologists).
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(vi) Response Dependence Recall that openness to entities through logos constitutes a two-way ontological dependence: as Heidegger puts it there is both the thing being open to us, and we being open to the thing.⁸⁸ In various works Heidegger focuses on both aspects of ontological dependence. Being and Time is concerned largely with the second aspect: fundamental features of Dasein (roughly human being) including the requirement of authenticity for openness. This is why Being and Time is (misleadingly) regarded as something of an existentialist work. By contrast the later Heidegger in the so-called Turn (Kehre) embodies a change of emphasis: ‘dwelling’ is a fundamental way the thing is open to us (see further Chapter 3). The realist interpretation of two-way ontological dependence presented here is thus a form of ontological response-dependence view, but unfortunately modern versions have difficulties not faced by the Heideggerian version as we shall see. The core idea behind ontological response dependence in ethics is this: sensibilities to ethical properties such as being virtuous or valuable are essential to the intelligibility and thereby the existence of those properties as ethical properties (see Theses 1 and 2). That idea can be expressed as: (I) An ethical property is response dependent if and only if the property is open to certain responses or construals in responders having appropriate sensibilities, and these responses or construals are what make the property intelligible as an ethical property. Without that mode of intelligibility, the property (such as being
Hossenfelder and Stacy S. McGaugh ‘Is Dark Matter Real?’ Scientific American 319 (August 2018), 30–5. ⁸⁸ This allows for a realist interpretation of both Heidegger and McDowell. For McDowell, see John McDowell; for Heidegger see Heidegger on Concepts.
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courageous, being generous, or being patient), could not exist as an ethical property (namely a virtuous trait).
Call (I) the Intelligibility Thesis. The Intelligibility Thesis is a thesis about the very existence of ethical properties as ethical properties. A similar thesis applied to redness as a sensory property of objects is a thesis about the existence of redness as a phenomenological ‘secondary quality’: it is not a thesis about the existence of redness as a ‘microscopic textural property’ of the surface of an object.⁸⁹ (I) has generally been construed as a claim that ethical properties are relational, rather than monadic, as in (R): (R) A person’s being virtuous consists in her virtuousness evoking some relevant response.
Call (R) the Relational Thesis. (R) conceives response-dependent properties as relational rather than monadic. To answer the question what and whose responses are relevant the concept of qualified agent is invoked. So we have:
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(Q) A person’s being virtuous consists in her virtuousness evoking suitable responses in competent, qualified responders (for example, sentiments of approbation of those with an authoritative moral sense).
Call (Q) the Qualified Agent Thesis. The Relational and Qualified Agent theses have been subjected to criticism. However, invoking the thought of Hume⁹⁰ and Heidegger, I argue that Thesis (I) does not entail either (R) or (Q). The first problem concerns the Relational Thesis. Wiggins notes after all that ‘redness is an external, monadic property of a [British] postbox.’⁹¹ ‘Red is not a relational property.’⁹² Similarly, being virtuous is an external monadic property of [some] human agents. The second problem arises when we appreciate that understanding normative properties as response dependent is not sufficient for understanding them as normative. We want to say for example that a trait V is a virtue if and only if V merits the relevant response (and does not, for example, just cause it). The Qualified Agent Thesis is then invoked to give an account of what counts as a merited response.
⁸⁹ McDowell, ‘Values and Secondary Qualities’, 112. At this point McDowell is usually (mis)read as confusing response dependence as a thesis about properties (redness) with our concept of redness. ⁹⁰ See my The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. Unlike Rachel Cohon, Hume’s Morality: Feeling and Fabrication (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) I do not understand Hume’s response dependence as subscribing to (R) nor indeed to (Q). He subscribes only to (I). ⁹¹ David Wiggins, “Truth, Invention, and the Meaning of Life” in David Wiggins, Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value 3rd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 87–137, 107. ⁹² Ibid.
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However, when we think of a property as meriting a certain type of response it seems natural to think of it as a monadic property which makes certain responses justified. What makes it the case that a trait merits status as a virtue does not seem to depend on the responses of an agent, even a qualified one, but on certain facts, such as the trait actually systematically producing good consequences. Second, competent agents may be wrong about those key facts. Competence is not the same as omniscience. Competent, indeed virtuous, agents have access to at least some of the more important and relevant background theories of human nature and have wise, relatively informed views about long-term consequences, but some of these theories and beliefs may be false or incomplete. These objections to (Q) on my view are decisive. The solution is not however to reject response dependence but to reject (R) and (Q) as an analysis of the response-dependent nature of ethical properties. ‘Virtue’ on the view outlined below is a response-dependent concept in sense (I), but (I) is deemed to entail neither (R) nor (Q) which are false. These claims rely on three central theses of Heidegger (shared by Hume and McDowell on my view) elaborated above, and which may be summarized thus:
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(1) We have ‘unmediated openness’⁹³ to the world. Such openness (what Heidegger labels aletheia) reveals the world as a whole as it is (in one or other of its broad aspects). (2) For this unmediated openness logos (the b-structure or framework of significance relations) is required. This allows for the various ways in which the world is open to us. This is not to deny that mistakes in representing the world from within such a framework cannot be made. (3) Such frameworks are multiple. Like the scientific framework, the ethical framework can constitute ethical properties as monadic. What needs to be appreciated is that just as we can understand dangerousness as meriting fear so we can say that virtuousness merits admiration. But the frameworks (logoi) within which these claims of merits are assessed and justified are not identical. As we explore further in the next section and the following two chapters, however, science can aid us in assessing claims of merit in the case of ethics.
⁹³ This useful term is used by de Gaynesford to describe McDowell’s thought (see his John McDowell). He claims: ‘There is an unmediated openness between the experiencing subject and external reality: if our experience is not misleading, we are directly confronted by worldly states of affairs’ (34). Further, like Heidegger’s concept of aletheia this is a thesis concerning intentionality (how our thoughts and so on are directed onto the world) rather than epistemology.
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(vii) The Logos of Ethics and Naturalism As noted above, on my understanding the hermeneutic turn in ontology as applied to ethics is factualist, non-relativistic, realist but non-queer, cognitivist, and naturalist in a suitable sense. Let us here make a beginning in seeing how this can be so. For McDowell, intentional access ‘includes a capacity to resonate with the space of reasons.’⁹⁴ Such access is ‘permeated with rationality’⁹⁵ it is ‘rational openness’⁹⁶ What is clear in both McDowell and Scanlon is that rational openness does not take the same form in all logoi: hence, the ‘being’ or ontology of entities has different modes. But this does not mean that realism is undermined: the modes of intentional access to such things as action and character vary, but that is part and parcel of the multifaceted natural human modes of our access to entities. In particular, the irreducible normativity of ethical reasons understood through the thick concepts within the logos of ethics does not make normative properties metaphysically queer. The shape provided by the thick evaluative concepts on the non-evaluative presupposes the evaluative point of those concepts as revealed in culture embedded in tradition, but continuously interrogated in the light of critical reflection informed by our best sciences and other knowledge. (See further Chapter 2.) Theories of virtue provide standards of virtuousness to the evaluative so understood, standards also shaped by the continual development of our psychology and social knowledge. Thick Concept Centralism combined with the Centrality of Virtuousness (TCC/CV) is able to combine irreducible normativity, a suitable form of naturalism, and the non-queerness of ethical facts. All of this will be elaborated in later chapters. Here we need to make some distinctions. McDowell rightly thought that if views such as his were labelled non-naturalist they would be thought committed to unpalatable metaphysical views. On the contrary, as de Gaynesford puts ‘it is enough to count as naturalist about the space of reasons, on McDowell’s view, that we show it to be a space into which human beings are initiated naturally, and within which it is natural for them to live.’⁹⁷ But this is not enough. For what if this naturalness was antithetical to science? McDowell makes it clear that his view is naturalist in another sense. It is not antithetical to science. Let us then distinguish two views.
⁹⁴ Mind and World, 109. ⁹⁵ ‘What Myth?’ 339. ⁹⁶ What Myth? 345. He claims in Mind and World, 26: ‘ . . . that things are thus and so is also, if one is not misled, an aspect of the layout of the world: it is how things are. Thus the idea of conceptually structured operations of receptivity puts us in a position to speak of experience as openness to the layout of reality. Experience enables the layout of reality itself to exert a rational influence on what a subject thinks.’ ⁹⁷ John McDowell, 63.
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(a) Scientistic Realism. Ultimately ‘all and only science is to count as knowledge’ and provides a theory of the real⁹⁸: other disciplines and modes of understanding such as ethics and religion count as knowledge only if in some sense they are reducible to science.⁹⁹ (b) Scientific Realism Concerning Ethics: Truth in ethics is beholden to the results of science, whether these are the natural or the human sciences. Thesis (b) is opposed to:
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(c) Non-Scientific Realism Concerning Ethics: Ethics is not beholden to the results of science, but for example to the commands of God. Notice that I do not wish to identify the bare claim of ‘scientistic realism’ (as applied to ethics) with what McDowell calls ‘empiricistic naturalism,’¹⁰⁰ where facts about virtue and vice are not only seen as entirely constituted by facts analyzed from within the perspective of science, but within the perspective of science understood in a certain narrow way by philosophers such as Charles Taylor. On this view of science, science is committed to the scientific method where claims ‘must be grounded in data that are intersubjectively univocal.’¹⁰¹ These data are what Taylor calls ‘brute’; they are ‘data which are available without any personal discernment or interpretation on the part of the observer.’¹⁰² This view of science also requires what Taylor calls ‘univocal operations’, univocal in that ‘calculations and transformations carried out on the input data’ are also ‘beyond dispute arising out of personal discernment or intuition.’¹⁰³ Much contemporary psychology and sociology, for example, are not committed to empiricistic naturalism understood thus. McDowell as well as the virtue ethics proposed in this book is committed to (b) while rejecting (a). Scientific Realism Concerning Ethics is stronger than the view that the space of reasons is a space into which humans are initiated naturally and in general is stronger than: (d) Non-scientistic Realism Concerning Ethics: It is not the case that ultimately all and only science is to count as knowledge and provides a theory of the real:
⁹⁸ Michael Hymers, Philosophy and its Epistemic Neuroses (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000), 133. ⁹⁹ There are many forms of ‘reduction’: for a discussion of the types see Jonathan Dancy, ‘Nonnaturalism’ in David Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 122–43. Investigating these forms is beyond the scope of this book. ¹⁰⁰ In ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’. ¹⁰¹ Charles Taylor, ‘Peaceful Coexistence in Psychology’, in Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 117–38, 117. ¹⁰² ‘Peaceful Coexistence’, 118. ¹⁰³ ‘Peaceful Coexistence’, 119.
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other disciplines and modes of understanding (notably ethics) are not reducible to science and yet can be factualist and count as knowledge. It is true that a view such as McDowell’s is not naturalistic in the orthodox sense. But there is another sense of naturalism opposed to nonnaturalism in a sense suggested by Dancy: Ethical nonnaturalism is the claim that ethical properties, distinctions, and facts are different from any properties, distinctions, and facts that are worth calling natural.¹⁰⁴
Thus, on this definition ethical naturalism is the view that ethical properties and so forth are worth calling natural. For a long time McDowell has argued that ethical properties, understood the way he understands them, are ‘worth’ calling natural. Unfortunately what is generally deemed worth calling natural is tied to what is subject to the law like generalizations of the natural (non-human) sciences, and this is exactly the view to which McDowell is opposed. Given the ecumenical definition of naturalism, TCC as I outline it subscribes to the following broad kind of ethical naturalism: (e) McDowell’s scientific realism concerning ethics (EN).¹⁰⁵ Evaluative and normative facts are natural facts even though there is no non-evaluative way of describing those facts, and those facts are both part of nature in a metaphysically respectable way, and intentionally accessed through ethical experience. Nonetheless (b) Scientific Realism Concerning Ethics is true.
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Two important features of (EN) are: (1) Science (even broadly conceived) is not sufficient for our understanding of the world,¹⁰⁶ and the evaluative facts of ethics, for example, are not identified as being a subject of the scientific disciplines (though beholden to its results).¹⁰⁷ (2) The fundamental modes of experience of the natural world are plural: crucially for (EN) experience can include not just observation through the five senses, but also, e.g., aesthetic, creative, and emotional experience.
¹⁰⁴ Dancy ‘Nonnaturalism’, 122. ¹⁰⁵ To be distinguished from what he calls ‘empiricistic naturalism’ which is a form of scientistic naturalism. ¹⁰⁶ See further for these features John McDowell, 49–54. ¹⁰⁷ David Copp, ‘Normativity and Reasons’ in Susana Nuccetelli and Gary Seay (eds.), Ethical Naturalism: Current Debates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 24–57, 27–8.
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(viii) Critique of the Logos The fact that we have intentional access to entities through a logos—a b-structure— creates a difficulty. How can we not be trapped within a b-structure which provides oppressive or otherwise distorting structures through which the being of entities is accessed? Could not our entire epistemology be distorted by the very b-structure within which it takes place? Can a logos itself be critiqued, and if so how? Critiquing a logos is not the same enterprise as questioning the truth of something. The distinction between openness and epistemology is key. A logos provides openness (Lichtung) so to critique a logos is to question its credentials in relation to that function. In short a logos can be criticized for failure to allow a mode of being (such as ethical being) to be richly disclosed. Heidegger calls this problem the ‘covering up’ of the being of something. (See Chapter 3.) There can be many falsehoods within a richly disclosive logos, but the point is that in such a logos epistemology can flourish to rectify areas of current ignorance. Much of this book can be seen as a critique of the present state of the logos of ethics; its narrowness, concentration on the thin ethical concepts, its failure to recognize the central importance of emotional aspects of ethical disclosure, its current notions about its metaphysical underpinnings. Here I speak more generally of ways to critique a logos. As we have seen, both Heidegger and Gadamer provide tools for critiquing a logos. There is no space for detailed exposition but let me summarize some important possibilities for critique. First, for Heidegger and most famously a logos can be critiqued for being ‘enframing’ by strait-jacketing the world as something seen through a dominating logos which itself is beyond critique, inhibiting questioning. Seeing the world as something whose mysteriousness can never be fully captured and removed by what Heidegger calls a theory of the real which renders everything totally understandable and thereby “usual,” is possibly the cardinal feature of receptivity as openness. A logos can be enframing in many ways; for example, the Catholic Church closed off scientific disclosure at the time of Galileo by coercively presenting itself as the guardian of the true theory of the real in all respects. The theological logos was the enframing logos. Heidegger, however, was much more concerned with the alleged enframing properties of science. Here the alleged enframing takes the form of revealing of the world exclusively as resource. It is an absolutizing mind-set in which the world is calculated, ordered, for this purpose alone. The kind of revealing that is enframing in this way is a ‘challenging’: that is, for Heidegger, objects are ‘unlocked’ ‘transformed’, ‘stored’, ‘distributed’, and ‘switched about’.¹⁰⁸ They cannot be left alone, let be. There is nothing wrong with things being shown up as resources for use as
¹⁰⁸ ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, 16.
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such. For Heidegger, we are working, producing creatures for whom things are ‘ready-to-hand’ and not just ‘present-at-hand.’ The problem occurs when the disclosure of things as resource becomes an absolutizing attunement, closing off other ways of seeing the world. Not only are objects ‘veiled’—not seen in all their richness—but the human being himself ‘exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth.’¹⁰⁹ In this way, Heidegger says, ‘the impression comes to prevail that everything man encounters exists only as his construct’.¹¹⁰ Even worse, perhaps, human beings are also enframed. They too are subjects of calculation, are assessed exclusively in terms of their quantitatively calculated outputs, and are described as ‘human resources’.¹¹¹ Second, a logos can be critiqued for being shallow as opposed to deep. I illustrate this aspect of critique of a logos with the depth or shallowness of Grundstimmungen (fundamental emotional attunement), a neglected aspect of logos of central importance to ethics. An emotional disclosure can disclose the world more or less richly, or as Heidegger sometimes puts it, radiantly. Not only can different Grundstimmungen “veil” ethical being (such as hate or profound boredom), but disclosive Grundstimmungen such as love can themselves be relatively deep or shallow. There are two ways in which an attunement can be deep for Heidegger. The first is indirect. Some attunements may characteristically close off or dim down a potentially rich disclosure of reality, such as profound boredom, or crippling Angst, were they to be omnipresent in one’s make up. However, if such an attunement assailed us at certain times, it may provide for what Heidegger calls ‘moments of vision’ allowing us to adopt a deeper orientation to the world. The second way in which an attunement can be deep is direct. A totalizing emotional orientation, omnipresent as a background attunement to the world as a whole, may in itself facilitate directly a rich disclosure of the world. Such an attunement may be a general orientation of love of the world as a whole, as opposed to profound boredom or misanthropy, generalized hate. The distinction between relative depth and shallowness is well illustrated in Heidegger’s discussion of boredom. He discusses three types, the last of which constitutes a Grundstimmung significant for the way we see the world as a whole. Heidegger describes boredom in general as having a basic feature of ‘being left empty’¹¹² which nonetheless exhibits itself in quite different ways in the three broad types of boredom. First, one can be bored by a specific thing (e.g., Heidegger’s example of the train station while one is waiting for one’s train). Heidegger describes this kind of boredom as ‘being held in limbo by time as it
¹⁰⁹ Ibid. 27. ¹¹⁰ Ibid., 27. ¹¹¹ Ibid. 18. ¹¹² Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 106.
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drags along’ which ‘determines and sustains’ one’s being ‘left empty’.¹¹³ In the second form of boredom, being bored by a determinate boring thing is contrasted with ‘something indeterminate that bores us’.¹¹⁴ We find we have been bored in a situation, such as a dinner party, but when we find this, we can find no beings that have ‘surrounded us in this situation’ who have left us empty. What happens here is described by Heidegger as an obstructive casualness; the casualness marked by such activities and attitudes as ‘chatting away’ and ‘letting oneself be swept along’. The obstructiveness marks our being unready to be satisfied by beings. ‘Seeking nothing more’ obstructs our being satisfied: hence we are left empty. Heidegger shows here that the boredom characterizable as ‘something indeterminate’ that bores us, may become a magnetizing disposition,¹¹⁵ where we cannot be satisfied by beings in general, and in its extreme form would be totalizing. Superficiality would then mark our relation to beings as a whole. The third kind of boredom is totalizing by definition, but in a deeper more profound way, according to Heidegger. He describes it thus:
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There is a telling refusal on the part of beings as a whole. They recede into an indifference. Everything is worth equally much and equally little. Beings withdraw from us, yet remain as the beings that they are.¹¹⁶
The idea of beings as a whole is understood temporally: they have this characteristic as present, having-been, and in the future. ‘Withdrawal’ is not seen as something that others do to one but as a way of being in the world oneself: ‘the attunement attunes in such a way that the Dasein which is thus attuned can no longer bring itself to expect anything about beings as a whole in any respect, because there is nothing enticing about them anymore. They withdraw as a whole.’¹¹⁷ The mode of ‘being left empty’ in this third way seems devastating for ethics whose central Grundstimmung is compassion to the point where Hume describes this as a condition of the moral sense without which ethics could not be intelligible. But recall the indirect notion of depth described above. Profound boredom is being in the world in such a way that there is a sense of the absence of oppressiveness, but for Heidegger this sense may be necessary for the moment of vision where we see our lives as a “burden” which we must take upon ourselves with strength. This mode of being is contrasted with one where we just see needs ¹¹³ Ibid. 106. ¹¹⁴ Ibid. 114. ¹¹⁵ Amelie Rorty, ‘Explaining Emotions’ in Amelie Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 103–26. Such dispositions ‘determine actions and reactions by determining the selective range of a person’s beliefs and desires’, and explain ‘tendencies to structure experience in ways that will elicit [a] characteristic response’ (107). ¹¹⁶ Martin Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995), 145. ¹¹⁷ Ibid. 147.
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everywhere, which are to be controlled and converted into ‘order and satisfaction’ by ‘groups, associations, circles . . . ’¹¹⁸ The three forms of boredom have their analogues in the attunement of love. Love can be totalizing or not: the former we might term lovingness. It can be relatively superficial or profound, including the totalizing forms. Love of a specific individual X is analogous to being bored by something determinate (e.g., the station). The totalizing forms, lovingness, can be distinguished as relatively superficial or profound in a way analogous to Heidegger’s second and third forms of boredom. The second form of lovingness is love not of any determinate being that may fall within one’s purview, but love of “humanity.” In its shallow form there is a bland superficiality, marked by niceness, superficial friendliness, a benign benevolence. It is analogous to boredom’s ‘chatting away’ to anyone who happens to cross one’s path in a social situation. There is, however, a deeper form of this love, human compassion marked by philanthropy and charity, driven by a sense of enormous need which you wish to do something about. The third kind of love is a lovingness that is the exact opposite of Heidegger’s third form of boredom, a way of being in the world oneself where beings ‘withdraw’, because they are no longer enticing to one. In this form, love by contrast is a disclosive emotion where the world, in Heidegger’s language, is disclosed richly or radiantly: beings are enticing and seen in their individuality, in a deep way. As such lovingness is a background attunement that has the capacity to ‘irrupt’, to come to the foreground, and in intense ways. This is possible because one has it in one to love particular human beings, even strangers, in a profound manner. This more intense manifestation may, for example, be an act of profound generosity, grace, or forgiveness when the wrongdoer is unrepentant. A third kind of limiting disclosure of concern to Heidegger in Being and Time is inauthenticity. For Heidegger our apprehension of the world is essentially public through especially our public language. But this very fact has inherent danger. As Heidegger claims ‘Discourse [Rede], which belongs to the essential state of Dasein’s Being and has a share in constituting Dasein’s disclosedness, has the possibility of becoming idle talk [Gerede].¹¹⁹ Idle talk is a form of discourse which fosters and perpetuates received interpretations. As a result ‘. . it serves not so much to keep Being-in-the-world open for us in articulated understanding, as rather to close it off, and cover up entities within-the-world.’¹²⁰ It does not do this by consciously ‘passing off something as something else’.¹²¹ Rather idle talk has the following way of ‘closing off ’: ‘the fact that something has been said groundlessly, and then gets passed along in further retelling amounts to perverting the act of disclosing’.¹²² The danger of idle talk lies in the levelling out tendencies of social ¹¹⁸ Ibid. 163. ¹²¹ Ibid.
¹¹⁹ Being and Time, sect. 169, 213. ¹²² Ibid.
¹²⁰ Ibid.
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reality expressed in Heidegger’s concept of das Man (The one, translated as the They). For Heidegger, an inauthentic Grundstimmung and practice of idle talk closes off disclosure that is not reducible to the everyday world of das Man. This form of inauthentic discourse also subverts the self, making it inauthentic. The virtue which guards against this tendency is resoluteness (Entschlossenheit, literally unclosedness). It brings us back to the realization that the comfortable and comforting disclosure of das Man is not exhaustive of our individual way of engaging with the world: the need, for example, to fully appreciate that death is something that happens to me, as opposed to people in general. In short, if an entire logos has the sociological character of ‘idle talk’ it is limiting not just in itself but in fostering inauthenticity in individuals. In brief and in summary there are a number of types of distorting, closing off, types of logoi: absolutizing, inauthentic, while others simply veil through, for example, shallowness. Absolutizing logoi are not just totalizing—that is, present a b-structure for a worldhood; rather they present themselves as the theory of the real, thereby ruling out any other mode of disclosure. Veiling is ubiquitous in ethics—notably, the veiling of the thick concepts in our discourse. Forms of veiling within the logos of ethics are a common theme of this book.
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(ix) Conclusion McDowell has done ethics a huge service by arguing that ethics is both irreducibly normative and naturalistic within a realist conception. For him there are ethical facts but not facts existing wholly independent of the sensibilities, constructive imagination, and interpretation of agents. Normative logoi provide the autonomous regulating structures and standards within which facts or properties exist as such facts or properties. I have argued that this view can be understood within a Heideggerian framework of hermeneutic ontology. The basic idea of hermeneutic ontology is that before we can represent an entity accurately or inaccurately in epistemology we must be able to intend it. The ability to intend an entity requires one to locate it within a meaningful relational context; a logos. This demarcates what Heidegger calls a worldhood which allows entities to be ‘disclosed’ or ‘open’. The next chapter investigates more deeply the worldhood of ethics. Heideggerian ontology raises three important questions. How do we understand the idea of the plurality of logoi within a realist framework? That was the topic of section (iv). Second, what is the relation between the logoi? That is a topic of Chapter 3. Third, given non-scientistic naturalism how can the logos of ethics connect with facts as revealed by scientific endeavour? How, in short, can the naturalism of ethics in the form of (EN) be a scientific realism concerning ethics? The next chapter will shed light on this issue.
2 The Worldhood of Ethics
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(i) Introduction We turn now to our answer to question (2) posed in the previous chapter: what is the nature of the distinctively ethical mode of access to the real? For an entity to have ethical being we must have intentional access to it through a framework of significance—the logos of ethics. According to the view outlined in this chapter the ‘logos’ of ethics is described at the most fundamental level by TCC/CV (Thick Concept Centralism combined with the Centrality of Virtuousness). This is the ‘b-structure’ through which the worldhood of ethics is intentionally accessed. My favoured form of CV, target centred virtue ethics, is introduced in Chapter 5. This chapter develops the thesis that TCC/CV constitutes the logos of ethics by elucidating the nature of TCC and its relation to CV. It shows how the logos of ethics understood this way is an adequate framework for conceiving ethical reality; the worldhood of ethics. To understand the nature of the distinctively ethical mode of access to the real then is to understand the logos of ethics. But ethical reality itself is not constituted by the logos of ethics—the b-structure of ethics—but by the worldhood of ethics— the a as b-structure of ethics. A logos, a framework of significance, is not a worldhood and indeed as we saw in Chapter 1 (section (viii)) the logos through which a worldhood is intentionally accessed may offer a distorted view of that worldhood. To grasp the nature of the worldhood of ethics then we need to reach beyond the logos of ethics itself by motivating a claim that the logos of ethics, on a given understanding, does not provide a distorted picture of ethical reality. This motivation will be provided by a discussion of the ‘ethical foundations’ in relation to the thick virtue and vice concepts (see section (iv)). To the extent this is successful my account of the logos of ethics will be strengthened. The ontology of ethics has long been a problem, which I illustrate with a famous passage from Hume. To set the stage for discussion of the problem let us apply the basics of the view outlined in the last chapter to this passage. Take any action allow’d to be vicious: Wilful murder, for instance. Examine it in all lights, and see if you can find that matter of fact, or real existence, which you call vice. In which-ever way you take it, you find only certain passions, motives, volitions and thoughts. There is no matter of fact in the case. The vice entirely escapes you, as long as you consider the object. You never can find it, till you turn
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0003
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your reflexion into your own breast, and find a sentiment of disapprobation, which arises in you, towards this action.¹
Within the analytic tradition the following objection to Hume by Dancy ² becomes a natural one. According to Dancy, Hume is mistaken in asking us to look hard at properties by virtue of which an action is vicious, in order to discover another property, viciousness, which is like the former properties, but normative. Hume then provokes scepticism by asserting there is no such property. A common solution to this problem is not only to turn Hume into a subjectivist but also to espouse various kinds of subjectivist ontologies for ethics. The problem is generated, however, by the tendency to assume something Hume is rejecting in this passage and rejects elsewhere; that intentional access to ethical properties is gained on the model of science and what he calls ‘matters of fact’ understood within a causal model of access. On this model, ethical properties are queer, so resort to various forms of subjectivism is the default position. The solution is to reject the assumption. What Hume is saying in the above quoted passage is that if we have the wrong b-structure for intentionally accessing the ethical being of an entity we cannot intend the entity in the relevant way. We cannot intend the action of killing as vicious if we try to intend the action through a representational metaphysics dominated by a perceptual model of cognition suitable for scientific disclosure of the world. Rather we have to turn our attention to our breast to appreciate the framework necessary for making ethical properties intelligible—the b-structure for ethics. We have to turn our attention to our breast to make the worldhood of ethics intelligible for what is necessary for familiarity with that b-structure is an emotional familiarity with the worldhood of ethics. The mistake is to think that by staring hard at something we will detect a special property such as the moral, or to-be-doneness (or not-to-be-doneness). And, of course, no such property is to be found. The logos of ethics is not defined by turning a structure of significance relations into a special property any more than the logos of equipmentality is defined by turning a different structure of significance relations into a special property of equipmentality which can be discovered by staring at say a table or hammer.³ ‘As long as you consider the object’ as Hume says, you will never find the property of equipmentality. Philippa Foot makes a similar point to Hume but with a very mundane example: I have sometimes secured recognition of this point [that ‘good’ is an attributive adjective] by holding up a small bit of torn paper in front of an audience and
¹ A Treatise of Human Nature, 468–9. ² Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 74–5. ³ Being and Time, sect. 68, 97.
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asking them to say whether or not it is good. An offer to pass it round so they can see it better gets a laugh that recognizes a logical – grammatical – absurdity.⁴
Her point is much deeper than this, however. What she has shown is that shorn from frameworks of significance ethics becomes unintelligible. And the framework of significance for ethics is not to be understood through the logos of perceptual access. True, much of that framework is understood through recognition that ‘good’ is at least often attributive. The relevant aspect of significance here is recognition of the substantive to which ‘good’ is attached, such as cricketer or table, and understanding the nature of the thing referred to by that substantive. But there may be other kinds of significance relations for the understanding of ‘good’. Understanding the worldhood of ethics by elucidating and defending an account of the b-structure of ethics and showing how it relates to ethical facts is the topic of this chapter. As is frequently noted Heidegger is not an obvious source for elucidation of the logos of ethics: Iris Murdoch goes as far as to say that ‘Dasein is curiously bereft of values.’⁵ For the application of a Heideggerian notion of logos to ethics we need to turn to those emphasizing the centrality of the thick concepts and their pervasiveness in the realm of the ethical: Murdoch, Williams, McDowell. For Murdoch ‘Moral concepts do not move about within a hard world set up by science and logic. They set up, for different purposes, a different world.’⁶ For both Murdoch and Williams (especially the former) the ethical concepts were legion permitting a rich evaluation of the particularities of the world, which is the more rich the greater the mastery of the subtleties of those concepts. McDowell, inheriting perhaps another of Murdoch’s main ideas but through an Aristotelian lens, emphasizes the unitary vision and perception of the virtuous agent. This and the next sections answer the following question: how in particular do the thick concepts ‘anchor ethical thought to the real’⁷ within the logos of ethics? To answer this question several issues need to be addressed. (A) At a fundamental level we need to have some idea of the nature of ethical facts; the nature of the worldhood of ethics. ⁴ Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press 2001), 2 n. 4. ⁵ Iris Murdoch, ‘Sein und Zeit: Pursuit of Being’ in Justin Broake (ed.), Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 93–109, 97. Here though she is referring only to Being and Time where there is emphasis of the temporality of our existence as the fundamental framework of significance for our being in the world. Nonetheless, much of ethical relevance in his discussion of authenticity with associated thick concepts can be gleaned. A broad ethical vision of ‘dwelling’ (also with associated thick concepts) is the key theme of the later Heidegger, and will be discussed in Chapter 3. ⁶ ‘The Idea of Perfection’ in The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), 1–45, 28. Compare Heidegger’s notion of Welt: I prefer his notion of worldhood since that does not suggest that the world(hood) of science and ethics are literally different worlds. ⁷ ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, 164.
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(B) We need to have some idea of the domain of the ethical: what is the region of reality embraced by the logos of ethics? (C) Given two-way ontological dependence, we need to have a conception of the basic orientations humans require in order to be open to the world of ethics. (D) We need to have a conception of the nature of the evaluative that justifies a claim that the logos of ethics (as understood here) is an adequate framework for conceiving ethical reality—the worldhood of ethics.
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(ii) The Nature of Ethical Facts Recall that according to Thesis 5 (Chapter 1) unconcealment of entities through logos makes them available for ‘comportment’. When entities are disclosed in this way they matter to us. Further, things matter to us in a variety of ways. There is not just one form of engagement with the world, observation in the manner of scientific observation. To understand the nature of ethical facts then we need to understand the ethical mode of engagement with the world at a fundamental level. What then is the mode of engagement with the world characterizing ethics? How do things matter in ethics? The fundamental feature of the logos of ethics is the construal of facts as constituting certain sorts of normative relations—reasons and relations of fittingness. Indeed, the core feature that makes the logos of ethics distinctive is Reasons or Fittingness Fundamentalism; which recall is the view that truths about reasons and relations of fittingness are (in the words of Scanlon quoted above) ‘not reducible to or identifiable with non-normative truths such as truths about the natural world of physical objects, causes and effects, nor can they be explained in terms of notions of rationality or rational agency that are not themselves claims about reasons.’ Although moral philosophy in the analytic tradition is focused on reasons, the terrain studied by moral anthropologists is not all about reasons: tone of voice and nature of greeting, for example, may be fitting or unfitting where this may be dependent at least partly on cultural norms (see Chapter 6). Within the worldhood of ethics, reasons and relations of fittingness (such as culturally sanctioned forms of greeting) are facts that favour certain responses; for example, facts that favour actions, having certain emotional responses, cultivating certain sorts of character (the virtues). Relations of fittingness, by contrast with reasons, is a neglected aspect of the normative, and such relations are to be distinguished from reasons. The importance and distinctiveness of the notion of fittingness has been recently recognized by Garrett Cullity.⁸ Cullity understands
⁸ In his Concern, Respect and Cooperation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
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fittingness to mean worthiness.⁹ To say that an action is fit for praise is just to say it is praiseworthy; to say she is fit to be loved by John is not just to say she is lovable, it is to say that she is worthy of John’s love. Of course, what makes for fittingness is at least as controversial as what counts as a reason. In the past at least, being worthy of one’s love was often deemed to be not just a matter of one’s character; but also a matter of one’s means, one’s class, one’s race. By contrast reasons unlike relations of fittingness are agent relative in two ways. First, for a fact to be a reason for an agent it must satisfy a personal relevance condition.¹⁰ There are many goods that are response worthy without there being a personal connection to me such that I have a reason to make a response. The erudition of the engineering expert makes him worthy of being listened to but having no interest in engineering I have no reason to go to his technical talk. Second, reasons are capacity dependent in the way fitness relations are not. For a fact to be a reason for an agent she must have the capacity to recognize and respond to the reason.¹¹ So there can be fittingness without reasons. There can also be reasons without fittingness. Cullity uses the following kind of example. I have reason to bow and scrape in a praising way before a menacing villain because my children are threatened, but he is no fit subject for praise.¹² The question now arises: what is it that makes a fact such as “she is hungry” a reason for an action (to give her some food). In virtue of what do things matter in the ethical form of engagement? Things matter in this form of engagement in virtue of certain properties of things which ground reasons and relations of fittingness. What are these properties? A common answer is that these properties are value properties: the value properties make things matter by grounding reasons. It matters that she is hungry and giving food serves a welfare value. Unfortunately there is a problem in the form of the controversial buck-passing theory of value. According to this thesis value is understood in terms of reasons to respond, so one cannot explain what it is that makes a fact a reason for an action, what it is that makes things matter in this way, in terms of value properties. Nothing is explained. However, the problem appears to loom large because of an ambiguity in the notion of value. In some usages things mattering is just for them to have value.¹³ Call this the broad sense of value. But in this work (Chapter 9) value is used in a narrower sense where for something to have value is for it to have one kind of fundamental feature among several which might make it the case that something “matters.” In this sense of value I am not committed to the buckpassing view since it is false that having value (in the narrow sense) is synonymous with having a reason to respond. Rather I am a pluralist about the fundamental ⁹ Ibid. 60. ¹⁰ Ibid. 58. ¹¹ Ibid. 59, 190. ¹² Ibid. 57, 189. ¹³ See Jonathan Dancy, Practical Shape (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018). Dancy thinks (87) that his view of practical reason is vulnerable to the buck-passing view since he identifies things mattering, a fundamental feature of practical reason, with having value. He thinks that everybody is subject to this problem but I here provide a solution.
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“bases” of things mattering in the ethical logos. Certainly, things matter in virtue of facts favouring certain responses as opposed to others, and what makes them favour these responses is often their value (in the narrow sense). But what makes things matter might be their status or other bases of ethical response. According to TCC assessing what matters in the ethical context requires understanding reasons in terms of the thick evaluative concepts. Facts constituting reasons and relations of fittingness need to be construed through the thick concepts for their reason-giving status to be fully assessed (which is not to say that facts not so construed cannot be reasons at all). Through those concepts we can assess the reason-giving status of such facts as ‘She is tired’ (we should be caring and helpful towards her); ‘She needs money’ (we should be generous); ‘She is in pain’ (we should be compassionate, helpful, kind); ‘She is lonely’ (we should be friendly); ‘She is not his wife’ (he should be faithful); ‘He is under attack’ ” (we should be loyal; courageous). Certainly, we can properly say that the fact of her pain is a reason to respond but that does not get us very far in determining how we should respond. A more complete account of one’s reasons is thus required for such assessment. For this to take place the description of what we may call basic reasons (she is in pain and so forth) needs to be supplemented with descriptions deploying the thick concepts. It is not enough to say that the content of the reason expressed as ‘She is in pain’ is supplemented by “My response benefits her.” For the way of benefiting may yet be cold, dismissive, uncaring, or manipulative. Hence, the fuller statement of the reason is ‘This is a kind (beneficial) way of responding to her pain (as opposed to e.g. cold or dismissive). ‘Kind’ is an evaluative term which provides evaluative shape or more complex evaluative shape to such responses as benefiting another and helping.
(iii) The Domain of the Ethical A discussion of the basic nature of ethical facts raises issue (B): what region of reality is uncovered by the logos of ethics? Heidegger speaks of regions within which entities have being but he does not offer criteria of individuation for the various normative logoi such as ethics, law, art, husbandry, education. This is not surprising since these are nested and interpenetrate. He does say, however, that our way of intending entities as something belonging to Dasein depends on the various ways aspects of the being of Dasein itself are ‘interpreted’; aspects such as ‘ways of behaviour, its capacities, powers, possibilities, and vicissitudes . . . ’¹⁴ These can be interpreted through ‘philosophical psychology, in anthropology,
¹⁴ Being and Time, sect. 16, 37.
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ethics, and ‘political science’, in poetry, biography, and the writing of history, each in a different fashion.’¹⁵ However, he is most interested in the most ‘primordial’ features of our practical engagement with the world in general, our temporality (especially in the early Heidegger)¹⁶ and our being emplaced (in the later Heidegger).¹⁷ This last feature, when understood not simply as emplacement but as emplacement in a dwelling place is of considerable importance for a richer understanding of ethics. The ‘ethics of dwelling’¹⁸ will be discussed in Chapter 3 section (iv). The question of the domain of ethics is standardly thought to mean: “What special kind of property is the property of being moral, as in (notably) a moral obligation?” Thus, if this property seems to be absent in such quotidian actions as choosing an apple over an orange that action is automatically deemed to be outside the realm of the moral. On the Heideggerian picture, by contrast, the logos of ethics does not name a special property but is a framework within which ethical discourse makes sense. Anything can be intentionally accessed through an ethical framework as well as other frameworks so a single entity such as a hammer can be accessed, for example, through the logos of equipment or that of ethics as in respectively ‘This hammer was useless for this job’; ‘He was viciously attacked with a hammer.’ Again a single action such as choosing cabbage from the garden rather than cauliflower can be accessed through a horticultural framework (the cauliflowers are not yet ready) or an ethical framework (my younger son (unlike my older son) does not like cabbage, he was made to eat it yesterday, and to cook cabbage again when cauliflower is available would be unfair and mean). On this kind of view ethics is pervasive and ubiquitous; it embraces the quotidian and everyday as well as the extraordinary and horrific. Understanding the nature of this view is, however, very murky involving as it does three major distinctions. These are: (a) The distinction between the moral and the ethical. (b) The distinctions between, e.g., the ethical, the aesthetic, the legal, the religious. (c) Midgley’s distinction between morality in the broad sense and morality in the narrow sense.¹⁹
¹⁵ Ibid. ¹⁶ Says Heidegger: ‘Time must be brought to light . . . as the horizon for all understanding of Being and for any way of interpreting it’ (Being and Time, sect. 18, 39; ‘Dasein’s being finds its meaning in temporality’ (Being and Time, sect. 19, 41). ¹⁷ For a detailed discussion see Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006). ¹⁸ See Julian Young, Heidegger’s Later Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Chapter 7. ¹⁹ Mary Midgley, ‘Is ‘Moral’ a Dirty Word’ in Mary Midgley, Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (London: Routledge, 2003), 119–53.
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Consider now (a). In his book Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy²⁰ Bernard Williams has a chapter entitled ‘Morality, the Peculiar Institution.’ Here he suggests that the chief culprit for the narrowness of our moral concepts and the excessive focus on the so-called thin moral concepts, notably moral obligation, rather than on the thick concepts such as generosity, kindness, patience, courage, amiability, brutality cruelty, is the notion of the moral itself. That notion is said to have a special sense, indeed a special force that marks it off from other common or garden practical evaluative concepts. Both Williams and Anscombe advocate jettisoning the idea of the moral in a ‘special sense’²¹ in favour of what Williams calls the ethical—a broad notion embracing a huge range of evaluative thick concepts. Anscombe attacks the notion of the moral ought; Williams that of moral obligation. Says Williams: ‘It is a mistake of morality to try to make everything into obligations’ (180). Further, morality ‘misunderstands ethical practical necessity, thinking it peculiar to obligations’ (196) and in the case of ethical conflict ‘encourages the idea, only an obligation can beat an obligation’ (180). Importantly, according to Williams, ‘ . . . the morality system itself with its emphasis on the “purely moral” and personal sentiments of guilt and selfreproach, actually conceals the dimension in which ethical life lies outside the individual’ (191). This includes ‘the forms of social organization within which they [the thick evaluative concepts that map out the dimensions of our ethical life] work’ (131). Fortunately for Williams’ conception of ethics moral anthropologists have brought ethics down to earth with their conceptions of ‘ordinary ethics’ as something having an essentially social dimension.²² By stark contrast with the narrow domain of the ‘peculiar institution’ the field of ethics studied by moral anthropologists is very broad. Ethics is not seen by them as ‘an object or as an isolatable domain of theory’²³ but as an orientation to and engagement with the world that is pervasive through life in general. It includes ‘everything from minute acts of daily greeting and our tone of voice, the quality of how we engage with others and with the world, through keeping immediate and long term commitments and callings, and from the language by which we describe our immediate conduct . . . to momentous, disruptive, spontaneous, and unique acts of physical or political courage . . . ’²⁴ For Lambek there is an ‘ethical dimension of living’ by which he means ‘living with others and over time’, where ‘living ethically is itself a hermeneutic process of interpretation and self-interpretation as
²⁰ London: Fontana, 1985. All page references to Williams in the remainder of this section are to this work. ²¹ See Williams, 174; Anscombe, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’. For further discussion see Chapter 10. ²² See, for example, Michael Lambek (ed.), Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language and Action (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). ²³ Michael Lambek, ‘Preface’ in Michael Lambek, Veena Das, Didier Fassin, and Webb Keane, Four Lectures on Ethics: Anthropological Perspectives (Chicago, IL: Hau Books, 2015), 53–126, 1–4, 2. ²⁴ Michael Lambek, ‘Living as if it Mattered’ in Four Lectures on Ethics, 5–51, 6.
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people make their way in the world, with the human capacities, cultural resources, and historical circumstances given them’.²⁵ Williams’ attack on the morality system raises the question of the relationship between the thick concepts and thin concepts such as permissibility, prohibition, obligation, duty, and requirement. TCC shows promise of expanding the ethical assessment of actions from the narrow schema of requirement and permissibility, as many writers on supererogation wish, while retaining the import of those deontic notions.²⁶ However, if no link can be found between the aretaic and the deontic this promise remains unfulfilled. Unfortunately, there has been a prevalent view that the aretaic and the deontic deal with separate realms of ethics: the former are deemed evaluative only, being about forms of goodness and badness while the latter operate in the realm of reasons for action yielding judgments about what we ought or are permitted to do. This view I shall show is a mistake, a mistake I discuss in more detail in Chapters 5 and 10. Right acts come in many stripes ranging from the admirable but not required, the merely permitted but not particularly desirable, and required. Thick concepts link with reasons for action so that the action can be judged right in any of these ways. A saintly benevolent act may be admirable but not required; a moderately generous donation to a charity may be permitted, desirable, but not required; an egregiously stingy act is prohibited. Similarly, a heroic courageous act may be admirable but not required; an act of abject cowardice is prohibited. Acts of extreme patience may be over and above the call of duty and particularly admirable, while others may be permitted but rather undesirable. Some acts of impatience are prohibited, others permitted but not really desirable (“one could do better”). Where one draws the line in these cases will vary according to context and where one has set the bar for virtuousness. These are matters of degree vagueness and reasonable disagreement. In general on my view virtue notions as applied to acts (as well as to character) are both satis and vague concepts.²⁷ To say that, for example, generosity is a satis concept as applied to acts is to say that an act is generous if it is generous enough to be properly called generous tout court. What counts as being virtuous tout court depends on whether the threshold for virtue has been met. To say that a satis concept is also vague is to say that it is indeterminate where the threshold of, for example, generosity lies. Whether or not we are sufficiently virtuous to be called virtuous depends on context.²⁸ Turn now to the second distinction, that between ethics and other areas of the practical such as aesthetics. Since I discuss this issue in relation to virtue ethics in Chapter 10 I shall confine myself to the following observation. A major point of ²⁵ ‘Living as if it Mattered’, 8. ²⁶ See further Rebecca Stangl ‘Neo-Aristotelian Supererogation’ Ethics 126 (2016), 339–65. ²⁷ See further Daniel Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues. ²⁸ See further Chapter 10 for further discussion of vagueness and the relation between virtuousness and requirement.
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Williams is to downgrade the importance of those distinctions within the broadly practical or normative and to deny that they have clear boundaries.²⁹ The third distinction, that between the moral in a narrow taxonomic sense and a broad sense that embraces the practical in general, is discussed in detail in Chapter 10 and need not concern us here. There is a common theme to these issues of delineating the region of ethics. It is characteristic of the analytic tradition to want to reduce the complexity of the moral or ethical terrain in at least three main ways: the unsituatedness of moral concepts (both in relation to context and to such things as culture and tradition (see Chapter 6)), the relative thinness of moral concepts (by contrast to the thick), the paucity of moral notions (as Jonathan Haidt put it ‘there is more to morality than harm and fairness),’³⁰ and the tendency to restrict ethics to a fixed body of rules. What more is involved in ethics has been recently explored by writers in both moral anthropology as we have seen, and social psychology. The relatively new area of social psychology called by those in the field ‘the science of morality’ has provided an antidote to the tendency to narrowness by directly asking people, away from artificial settings and thought experiments (such as trolley problems), how they think of morality in their everyday experience. By this means they have identified a number of ethical parameters within the following taxonomy:³¹ Care/ Harm; Fairness/Unfairness; Loyalty/Disloyalty; Authority/Subversion; Sanctity/ Degradation; Liberty/Oppression; Honesty/Dishonesty; Self-Discipline/Lack of Self-Discipline. To this list I would add at least four more: Love/Hate which as Hume (in Book II of the Treatise) showed are not the same as Benevolence/Malice respectively; Creativity/Lack of Creativity; Hope/Despair; and Affability/Lack of Affability. I would add too ethical dimensions of epistemology (see Chapter 13). Creativity as an aspect of the region of the ethical does justice to Kant’s moral duty to cultivate one’s talents and Nietzsche’s ethical requirement to cultivate the “genius” within one. Affability speaks to our need for sociability in contexts of relaxation, and problem solving (as long as the virtue is not confused with “niceness”); hope to our need to think of our projects as worthwhile in the context of our finitude, and so on. It is abundantly clear that to do justice to the region of ethics we need a large range of thick virtue and vice concepts which speak to various aspects of the region. Here are just a few examples: for Care/Benevolence we have generous, kind, sensitive, compassionate; for Harm we have cruel, malicious, mean, callous, reckless, negligent; for Love we have friendship, agape, tenderness, affection; for ²⁹ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 6–7. ³⁰ See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (London: Penguin Books, 2013), 109, and Wilhelm Hofmann, Daniel C. Wisnieski, Mark J. Brandt, and Linda J. Skitka, ‘Morality in Everyday Life’ Science 345 (2014), 1340–3. ³¹ See The Righteous Mind and ‘Morality in Everyday Life’.
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Fairness we have just, entitled, merited; for Unfairness (or distorted fairness) we have parasitism, what Nietzsche called “scientific fairness,” and rigorous punitivism unleavened by mercy. For Disloyalty (or distorted loyalty) we have jingoism, blind loyalty; for Authority we have obedience (to, e.g., protocols, institutional rules, bosses’ instructions), blind obedience, and servility; for Subversion we have authority complex, “playing God.” For Self-Discipline we have patience, cleanliness, industriousness, temperance, efficiency, non-procrastination; and for Sanctity we may include many of the environmental virtues of respect for nature. Virtue notions associated with affability include Jane Austin’s amiability, Aristotle’s wittiness by contrast with boorishness and buffoonery, and Hume’s cheerfulness by contrast with tendencies to “dissolute mirth.” This is but a small sample of some of the thick concepts which bear on some of the aspects of the region of the ethical. Nor do I intend to suggest rigidity here: the aspects of the ethical with their attendant thick concepts are fluid, and interconnected. Further, many thick concepts provide links: for example, we can have the courage of someone resisting oppression or the courage of a journalist reporting unspeakably vicious harmful acts in highly dangerous places.
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(iv) Ethical Orientation According to Thesis 2 (Chapter 1), for an entity to have being, such as ethical being, one must have intentional access to that entity. To “anchor ethical thought to the real” the ethical facts of reasons and relations of fittingness must be intentionally accessed within the logos of ethics. Intentional access presupposes two-way ontological dependence summarized by Heidegger as the thing being open to us and we being open to the thing. What then is the basic orientation humans require in order to be open to the worldhood of ethics? As noted in Chapter 1, certain emotional orientations are necessary for us to be able to construe facts as being, for example, reasons in the region of ethics, but emotional openness to the world of ethics through something like Hume’s moral sense is not sufficient for ethical competence. Babies, as Bloom³² has shown us, have basic reactive emotional orientations but that is not sufficient for them to have what McDowell calls a second nature; a nature which enables them to construe the world through reasons and relations of fittingness. Facts are not reasons for them since they do not yet have the capacity to construe facts as reasons. What more is required for us to be open to the worldhood of ethics? In virtuous response we respond primarily to features of individuals and situations—a
³² The Origins of Good and Evil.
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person’s welfare, her pain, her virtue, her marital status; an institution’s corruption; a system’s injustice. The question arises: exactly how should we respond to these features? In answering this question we assess types of response in terms of the thick concepts through which reasons are understood. Access to reasons and relations of fittingness then requires familiarity³³ with a wide range of thick concepts such as kindness, hope, love, pride, joy, trust, honesty, courage, and in particular the differing kinds of emotional construals³⁴ necessary for a grasp of appropriate expressions of pride and joy, when and how courage and honesty are called for, what is to be hoped for, how to be kind (as opposed to invasive say), whom to trust and when, and so on. For a highly developed account of what competent ethical openness requires, a very good source are the works of Iris Murdoch. Murdoch’s analogue of Hume’s moral sense (‘moral perception’) is for Murdoch something much more active: it is emotionally laden loving and just attention, but an attention that requires mastery of the application of the thick concepts and through a loving as opposed to a hostile gaze. That “perception” pervades the world as a whole, in its ethical aspect. For her, the work of interpreting the world to secure an ethically correct picture is pervasive, not just confined to discrete paradigmatically “moral” actions. It is not just confined to matters of obligation and duty, but incorporates the effortful interpretation and reinterpretation of people and situations continually (for ethical correctness is always ‘beyond our full grasp’)³⁵ through a vast range of thick concepts, not just those thought of as “moral” (whatever those are).³⁶ In short, construal of facts in this way thus requires mastery of the thick virtue and vice concepts. Such mastery requires fundamental emotional attunements both motivational and receptive. For Hume, as noted in the last chapter, there is a basic moral sense which allows the world of ethics to come into being (most importantly benevolence—the desire for another’s good)—but for ethical competence in the wide range of ethical concerns many more ethical emotions are needed.
³³ The idea of familiarity is operationalized in social-cognitive psychology, through the notion of accessibility and related concepts. Briefly, the ‘more frequently a construct is activated, or the more recently it is primed, the more accessible it should be for processing social information . . . frequently activated constructs, over time, should be more easily or “chronically” accessible . . . ’ (Daniel K. Lapsley and Darcia Narvaez, ‘Moral Psychology at the Crossroads’ in Daniel K. Lapsley and F. Clark Power (eds.), Character Psychology and Character Education (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 18–35, 29. Familiarity with the logos of ethics requires familiarity with a vast range of thick evaluative concepts, and related notions of excellence, so that ethical categories become ‘salient, chronically accessible, easily primed, and readily utilized’ (31). ³⁴ For the idea of emotional construal see Robert C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). ³⁵ Justin Broackes, ‘Introduction’ in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, 1–92, 64. ³⁶ For an appreciation of this aspect of Murdoch’s thought see Charles Taylor, ‘Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy’ in Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3–28.
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Recently, Jonathan Haidt called the various emotional orientations required for mastery of ethical concepts ‘moral taste receptors.’ Following Hume and the ‘moral sentimentalists’ he claims: Moral judgment is a kind of perception, and moral science should begin with a careful study of the moral taste receptors . . . Hume got it right. When he died in 1776, he and other sentimentalists had laid a superb foundation for “moral science” one that has in my view, been largely vindicated by modern research.³⁷
Haidt’s list of ‘taste receptors’ includes compassion (sensitivity to suffering), anger (at, e.g., justice), disgust (associated with sanctity and degradation), and group pride associated with loyalty to groups and institutions. Hume’s ethical reach as far as the ‘moral taste receptors’ are concerned is even more wide-ranging than Haidt’s for he also recognizes joy, hope, and love (of many kinds) and these too have associated virtues. What is noteworthy is that both Hume and Nietzsche anticipated Haidt in recognizing disgust as a ‘taste’, honing in on degradation/contamination not reducible to harm in the standard welfarist sense.³⁸ Many things are ‘disgustful’ to the person of refined educated taste for Hume, including ‘abjectness of character’ and ‘dissolute mirth’:
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Cheerfulness could scarce admit of blame from its excess, were it not that dissolute mirth, without a proper cause or subject, is a sure symptom and characteristic of folly, and on that account disgustful.³⁹
Nietzsche is even more serious about disgust; recognizing it as something to be ‘overcome’ in our search for greater strength. Rather than these thinkers treating disgust as something totally outside the range of the ethical they recognize the ‘taste’ as something not necessarily reliable; one may be too easily disgusted or one may be disgusted at the wrong things. Indeed, our emotions may often be an unreliable source of reasons: indeed, on Aristotelian accounts of virtue right emotional dispositions are informed by practical wisdom. In this way our benevolent desires are targeted at the right objects and in the right way; we are not disgusted at the wrong things; we do not express our joy (at a sports victory say) to excess, and in an unseemly way that humiliates the opposition. My agreement with Haidt’s view that mastery of the thick concepts requires something like ‘moral taste receptors’ is not to be construed as agreement with the view that moral judgment is a kind of ‘perception’. On the contrary, familiarity with the nature of the thick concepts involves a sophisticated capacity to assess
³⁷ The Righteous Mind, 135. ³⁸ Ibid. 146. ³⁹ David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals 3rd edn, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), sect. 208, 258 n.1.
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their status as reason giving in varying types of highly complex situations. Another difficulty with Haidt’s emphasis on moral taste receptors causes him to miss out on features of ethics emphasized by Nietzsche. This is the aspect of ethics concerned with the will, notably the will expressed in creativity and productivity with their associated virtues and vices. Taking seriously Nietzsche’s emphasis on the ‘ethics of creativity’⁴⁰ and dependent virtues such as discipline and hardness as central to the good productive life, encourages the introduction of another broad ethical emotion, the desire to create, be productive, and pursue projects.
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(v) The Thick Concepts and Evaluative Point We turn now to issue (D): we need to have a conception of the evaluative that justifies a claim that that the logos of ethics (as understood here) is an adequate framework for conceiving ethical reality—the worldhood of ethics. As McDowell emphasizes, openness to ethics requires the capacity to construe facts as constituting certain sorts of normative relations—reasons and relations of fittingness. Discussion of the nature of these facts brings us to the second aspect of the two-way ontological dependence characterizing ethical reality: the “thing” being open to us in an ethical way. It is not enough for us to have ethical sensibilities; we must be guided by ethical reality. We have outlined the basic nature of ethical facts, but now we must ask: how can we engage with entities not only within an ethical framework but also within a framework that is connected to ethical reality? Recall that according to TCC facts constituting reasons and relations of fittingness need to be construed through the thick concepts for their reason-giving status to be fully assessed. Acts do not merely promote welfare; they may do so kindly or unkindly, in a caring or cold manner, generously or ungenerously, graciously or with resentment. This point is made by Dancy:⁴¹ . . . the applicability of a thick concept is capable of altering, or adding to, the reasons thrown up from below. That an action is obscene makes a difference to how we should act (though not always the same difference) beyond any made by the features that make the action obscene.
The task of this section then is to understand how ethical engagement through the thick evaluative concepts connects with ethical reality. How do reasons expressed
⁴⁰ Bernard Reginster, ‘The Will to Power and the Ethics of Creativity’ in Brian Leiter and Neil Sinhababu (eds.), Nietzsche and Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007), 32–56. ⁴¹ Ethics without Principles, 17.
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in terms of thick concepts favour actions, and how does recognition of these reasons allow us to make the right kind of response? First, however, we must address an objection to the idea that the applicability of a thick concept can add to our stock of reasons, a central plank of TCC. It may be asked: if we take a particular token obscene action, and consider all of the features that make it obscene, how could the fact that it is obscene make a further difference to how we should act?⁴² The answer to this worry is that not all features which make an action obscene are reasons ‘thrown up from below’ (part of the resultance base).⁴³ It is not just the particular individual features of an obscene act that make that act obscene, it is also the shape of those features, a shape that can only be grasped by an understanding of the point and function of ‘gathering’ (to use Heidegger’s term) those disparate features under the umbrella of obscenity. This feature is extra to those comprising the resultance base, for they are the way the resultant properties are organized within a context.⁴⁴ That shape is thus not part of the resultant base, but is nonetheless something that makes acts obscene. In this way through re-description and addition to the stock of reasons, the thick concepts make salient what matters. We can turn now to our main question: how do reasons expressed in terms of thick concepts favour actions, and how does recognition of these reasons allow us to make the right kind of response? To answer this question we need to understand how facts such as she kicked the dog connect with the evaluative through deployment of the thick concepts. As suggested above, for the worldhood of ethics to contain facts intentionally accessed as reasons or relations of fittingness, it must be organized into a certain shape, namely evaluatively significant features. This is done through the thick concepts. What are such facts like? First, the evaluatively significant features such as an action’s being cruel are resultant on properties ‘recognizable as such at the natural level’⁴⁵; something is cruel in virtue of some natural properties it possesses (e.g., it causes suffering and that suffering is intended). These natural properties are the resultance base. Second, this resultance base is non-evaluatively shapeless. An illustration is provided by Little: . . . the items grouped together under a moral classification such as ‘cruel’ do not form a kind recognizable as such at the natural level . . . of the infinitely many ways of being cruel – kicking a dog, teasing a sensitive person, and forgetting to invite someone to a party might qualify – there is no saying what they have in common . . . except by helping oneself to the moral concept of cruelty.⁴⁶ ⁴² This objection comes from Garrett Cullity—personal communication. ⁴³ For the distinction between resultance and mere supervenience see Dancy, Moral Reasons. ⁴⁴ My thanks to Jonathan Dancy here. ⁴⁵ Margaret Olivia Little, ‘Moral Generalities Revisited’ in B. Hooker and M. Little (eds.), Moral Particularism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 276–304, 279. ⁴⁶ Ibid.
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Third, in providing shape to the non-evaluative (or richer shape to the less richly evaluative such as benefiting), thick concepts denote evaluative properties which are ‘genuine features of the world.’⁴⁷ This third point raises the question: how is shape provided to the shapeless non-evaluative features? Dancy suggests that we should return to Bernard Williams’ original account of thick concepts, concluding that: ‘thick concepts are evaluative because competence with them requires a general understanding of their evaluative point, including the range of their practical relevance, the sorts of difference it can make that the concept is here instantiated.’⁴⁸ The ‘evaluative point’ is what gives unity and shape to the thick concepts despite the “natural shapelessness” of the resultance base. Roberts claims then ‘that evaluation thus drives extension for evaluative terms, and that evaluative properties are genuine features of the world.’⁴⁹ Fourth, as Dancy notes, neither the ‘natural grouping’ (the resultance base) of such a concept, nor its evaluative point or ‘concern’ is ‘independently intelligible’:
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The shape of the resultance bases is invisible to those who lack the concept of the relevant concern. But the concern also has not got enough determinate content to explain the choices that are made.⁵⁰
According to Dancy, Roberts, and others the thick concepts are ‘irreducibly thick’: that is, ‘evaluation and non-evaluation are deeply entangled in the content of thick concepts, and . . . the content of thick concepts cannot be disentangled into a thin evaluative component (or components) and a non-evaluative component.’⁵¹ Hence they reject the orthodox conception of thick concepts: ‘as standardly conceived, thick concepts somehow hold together a property and an attitude.’⁵² That attitude is either ‘pro or con.’ This orthodox view is trenchantly criticized along the following lines by Dancy⁵³ using the example (following Gibbard) of lewdness. (i) Sometimes lewdness is appropriate (in carnivals of certain types: Dancy’s example is Mardi Gras). Sometimes lewdness is inappropriate. (ii) The attitudes may be complex and described by further thick concepts not resolvable into pro or con, which are thin concepts for attitudes. (iii) The attitudes may be mixed: in a carnival some forms of lewdness may be approved and other forms not. ⁴⁷ Debbie Roberts, ‘It’s Evaluation, only Thicker’ in Simon Kirchin (ed.), Thick Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 78–96, 85. ⁴⁸ ‘Practical Concepts’, 58. ⁴⁹ ‘It’s Evaluation, only Thicker’, 85. ⁵⁰ Moral Reasons, 85. ⁵¹ ‘Shapelessness and the Thick’ Ethics 121 (2011), 489–520, 507. ⁵² Jonathan Dancy, ‘In Defense of Thick Concepts’, in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein (eds.), Midwest Studies in Philosophy Volume XX Moral Concepts (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996), 263–79, 263. ⁵³ In ‘Practical Concepts’.
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(iv) The correct attitude may be a matter of debate or uncertainty even though there is no debate let us say about the correct application of “lewd.”
In short, many thick concepts do not have an attitude built into the concept such that the concept is either honorific or pejorative. It is a crucial thesis of TCC then that features such as the kindness of an act constitute reasons. Evaluative properties understood in terms of the evaluative thick concepts are genuine features of the world and are not reducible to descriptive properties or such properties plus a pro or con attitude. They provide evaluative shape to a naturally shapeless resultance base and thereby give evaluative point to our ethical classifications. The thesis that a feature such as the kindness of an act can constitute a reason has, however, been subject to criticism. In sceptical vein one might ask: isn’t the fact to which we are responding a person’s pain rather than our kindness or compassion? So how can kindness and compassion feature as part of our reason for response? Indeed, there is an argument owed to Cullity that many thick concepts such as kindness and ambition cannot function as reasons since they are essentially connected to an agent’s motive. He claims for example:
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When we say that an action is motivated by ambition, for example, we are not saying that the agent is treating her own ambition as a good reason for doing what she does. “Ambition” does not give the content of the consideration she regards as a reason: it names the agent’s state of regarding a further consideration—the opportunity for advancement—as a reason.⁵⁴
Let us now investigate this problem. I have suggested that ambition, kindness, and other thick concepts can give the content of a consideration that is a reason, for the organization of resultant properties of, for example, kindness, an organization that provides evaluative shape, is part of that content. How more precisely on my view does kindness, for example, give this content? Kindness provides evaluative shape to a highly varied range of actions, and a mature agent’s responsive structures are (or should be) primed⁵⁵ to act in ways congruent with that shape. So when a kind person responds to the suffering of another, she tends to respond in a kind as opposed to a cold or insensitive kind of way. An act is kind in virtue of its being directed at an appropriate object (such as another’s welfare), in a way that is, for example, emotionally warm, kindly motivated, and kind in manner. For an act to be virtuously kind there are more stringent requirements on the act (see
⁵⁴ Garrett Cullity, ‘Sympathy, Discernment, and Reasons’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2004), 37–62. ⁵⁵ For the notion of priming in relation to familiarity as a psychological concept see note 31, this chapter.
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section (v)). For example, the kind act cannot be foolish, deploy the wrong instruments, have motives contaminated by self-abnegation. Certainly, the kind response is a response to a need or a perceived need. We can even say that the reason for the kind act is benefiting the needy person. Thus, a fuller statement of the content of the reason for our kind action then is that it is a benefiting that is kind. This statement amounts to the claim that it is the kind benefiting that contributes to making the act right: it is not a benefiting that is insensitive, cold-hearted, clumsy in manner, and so on. This view does not entail that we respond to our kindness, or act for the sake of our kindness, let alone for the sake of our kind motivation; on the contrary we act for the sake of benefiting. But it is not the bare benefiting that makes the action right. In short, it does not follow from the fact that reason R (an act’s kindness) favours action A, that in appropriately responding to a situation (another’s pain) by performing A (a kind act), we are responding to R (the kindness of the act), let alone responding to our kindness. R favours A, for as stated above the applicability of a thick concept alters or adds to the reasons ‘thrown up from below’ such as she is in pain. But in doing A we may not be responding to R. On the contrary, as Cullity suggests we are responding to the other’s need. In summary, for Cullity kindness or ambition cannot be part of the content of a reason since one’s kindness or ambition is not something to which it is appropriate to respond. I agree that in appropriate response to another’s pain we do not respond to the reason of the response’s kindness except in special kinds of circumstances, but nonetheless the kindness of an act is part of the content of a reason, a reason providing evaluative shape to types of acts such as acts of helping and benefiting, and with which a virtuous agent’s responsive structures are congruent. Such a reason favours certain actions, even if we do not act for that reason. Return now to the question: how do we anchor ethical thought to the real? If ethical reality is accessed through the thick concepts and the evaluative shape provided by them is given by their evaluative point, which in turn underpins the nature of facts as reasons and relations of fittingness, then evaluative point is fundamental to the nature of ethical reality. But how do we determine evaluative point? The evaluative points of thick concepts are grasped through an understanding of the wide variety of basic aspects of our lives as human beings in a larger world, how and why these call for various types of ethical orientation to that world, and how the thick evaluative concepts relate to these features. Many of these features, called by Haidt ethical ‘foundations’,⁵⁶ were identified in section (ii). For example the fairness/cheating foundation ‘evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of
⁵⁶ In The Righteous Mind.
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reaping the rewards of cooperation without getting exploited’ and institutions and virtues of justice serve that foundation, providing their evaluative point.⁵⁷ The care/harm foundation ‘evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children. It makes us sensitive to signs of suffering and need; it makes us despise cruelty . . . ’⁵⁸ Hence, the points of dispositions of caring, benevolence, and non-maleficence. The loyalty/betrayal foundation ‘evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. It makes us sensitive to signs that another person is (or is not) a team player.” ’⁵⁹ The authority/subversion foundation reflects our need for social hierarchy within institutions, and roles within those institutions. In general, as noted in section (ii) the thick concepts associated with the various ethical foundations provide a more fine-grained shape to features located within those broad areas, and thus enable a more nuanced understanding of the evaluative points of those features. For example, generosity, cruelty, callousness, indifference are thick concepts which permit the making of virtue/vice distinctions within the care/benevolence/harm nexus; tenderness, neglect, clinginess, passive aggression within the love/hate nexus, integrity, nonimitativeness, authenticity within the creativity/lack of creativity foundation. As suggested above we can identify important foundations not on Haidt’s list of five, many of which are neglected, or even deemed not to be part of “morality.” These foundations too provide the evaluative points of a wide range of thick concepts. I briefly elaborate five such foundations not on Haidt’s list. First, the love/hate foundation has as its biological basis ‘an inborn attachment behaviour system that functions to enhance survival by regulating proximity to a caregiver’.⁶⁰ This feature of our natural endowment is ‘operative throughout the life span “from the cradle to the grave”.’⁶¹ In other words we are creatures that have a basic need for bonding with others. This foundation provides the evaluative points of a number of virtues of various types of bonding ranging from friendship to romantic love to parental bonds. Here as elsewhere our understanding of these virtues is enhanced by a sophisticated grasp of their point gained through social science and elsewhere. A second foundation is the affability/lack of affability foundation which speaks to our needs for sociability ranging from dialogue to solve problems to conversation for pleasure. The importance of this foundation is emphasized by Karen
⁵⁷ Ibid. 178. ⁵⁸ Ibid. ⁵⁹ Ibid. ⁶⁰ Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 315. According to Peterson and Seligman (Character Strengths: 315) attachments to attachment figures ‘can be distinguished from other types of social relationships in terms of four defining features . . . seeking to stay near to or in contact with (proximity maintenance) turning to for comfort or reassurance (safe haven), being upset by unexpected or prolonged separations (separation distress), and using the attachment figure as a base of security from which to explore and operate in the world (secure base).’ ⁶¹ Bowles (1979), 129 cited in Character Strengths, 307.
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Stohr⁶² who argues for the ethical significance of “amiability” for which good manners informed by practical wisdom is essential. The virtue of amiability she argues has embedded within it a virtuous tendency to display good manners as opposed to a tendency for one’s outwardly good manners to be expressive of snobbery or a desire to humiliate. The point of the virtues related to one aspect of the affability foundation (relaxation) was also well understood by Aristotle who claims: Since one part of life is relaxation, and one aspect of this is entertaining conversation, it is considered that here too there is a kind of social conduct that is in good taste: that there are things it is right to say, and a right way of saying them; and similarly with listening.⁶³
Within the neglected affability foundation Aristotle identifies a number of virtues and vices in relation to conversation:
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Those who go too far in being funny are regarded as buffoons and vulgar persons who exert themselves to be funny at all costs and who are more set upon raising a laugh than upon decency of expression and consideration for their victim’s feelings. Those who both refuse to say anything funny themselves and take exception to the jokes of others are regarded as boorish and sour, but those who exercise their humour with good taste are called witty, as one may say ‘nimble-witted’ . . . ⁶⁴
A third foundation not on Haidt’s list is the hope/despair foundation which addresses a fundamental human need (without which we could not go on living as Bernard Williams thinks) to think of our projects, creative endeavours, concerns, and loves as worthwhile, and for which it is necessary to avoid existential despair, Heidegger’s pervasive, totalizing boredom, and chronic severe depressive states. Virtue ethics has traditionally not been shy to accept that our lives are vulnerable to factors beyond our control which impede our abilities to lead good lives, and that dealing with these vulnerabilities and bad luck is part of ethics. As a result what constitutes a virtuous response to Kant’s question What may I hope?⁶⁵ is a debating point. On my view we should not search for a warranted object of fundamental hope for there may be no such warrant, but we should rather ⁶² Karen Stohr, ‘Manners, Morals, and Practical Wisdom’ in Timothy Chappell (ed.), Values and Virtues: Aristotelianism in Contemporary Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 189–211. ⁶³ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson, revised H. Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 1127b24–1128a11, 167. ⁶⁴ Ibid. It is important to contrast wittiness as a general conversational virtue requiring good taste in humour with being “the wit,” which is a talent relatively rarely possessed. I owe this point to Cheshire Calhoun in discussion. ⁶⁵ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (London: Dent, 1934), A 805.
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cultivate hope as a fundamental Grundstimmung through a virtue of basic hopefulness—a general orientation of hopefulness towards the world at large. If hopefulness relies on a fundamental hope, and that fundamental hope is unwarranted, there may be no licence for a general hopefulness towards the world at large, in respect of the future. ‘If hope comes from the discernment of a plot in reality and if there is no plot, then there will be no hope either.’⁶⁶ However, if hopefulness as Grundstimmung did not rely on a fundamental hope of this nature, then, one may think, a general orientation of hopefulness towards the world at large, in relation to the future, should be cultivated. Fourth, there is the creativity/lack of creativity and relatedly, productivity/lack of productiveness foundation essential not only for well-being but also to our very survival. There are a range of virtues associated with this foundation, much emphasized by thinkers such as Nietzsche, and opposed to vices such as laziness, apathy, mere imitativeness. Many of these virtues are dependent on other virtues such as hope as opposed to despair.⁶⁷ Finally, there is the knowledge/ignorance foundation discussed in Chapter 13. As I argue there, this foundation should be included in the field of ethics addressing as it does a fundamental need to acquire knowledge and understanding in relation to solving problems in areas related to the other foundations. This foundation too has associated core emotions and desires, such as the desire for truth and understanding; and virtues, labelled the epistemic or intellectual virtues. I do not pretend to have discussed or even identified all the ethical foundations. Indeed, I have missed out joy, related to an important human need and capacity for enjoyment of life and which is one of the “passions” discussed by Hume. No doubt there are other important omissions. Suffice to say that the ones identified considerably broaden the field of ethics, relative to traditional conceptions. My concern is to show the broad reach of the thick virtue and vice concepts within the logos of ethics. At the coal face of addressing specific ethical issues many questions arise about their placement within the ethical foundations. In a pluralist ethics of the form elaborated in Chapter 9, we should accept that many such questions can fall within more than one foundation, that the boundaries between them are vague, and that they overlap. Further controversy exists about the appropriateness of a given placement. For example, in animal ethics we may think that all questions fall within the harm/benefit foundation, but the widespread horror (in New Zealand) at the desecration of a corpse of a seal washed up on a beach, for food perhaps, suggests that for many the sanctity/degradation foundation is very important in ⁶⁶ John Kekes, Facing Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 28. ⁶⁷ Much could be said about this foundation but I shall not add to my The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche and ‘Virtues of Productivity versus Technicist Rationality’ in Jennifer A. Baker and Mark D. White (eds.), Economics and the Virtues: Building a New Moral Foundation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 185–201.
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animal ethics. Further, there are controversies about whether second personal, status-related ethical considerations apply to at least certain classes of animals. Can they make demands on us?⁶⁸
(vi) The Centrality of Virtuousness Issue (D) has been partially addressed. That issue, recall, is this: we need to have a conception of the evaluative that justifies a claim that that the logos of ethics (as understood here) is an adequate framework for conceiving ethical reality—the worldhood of ethics. To fully address (D) it is not enough to understand the evaluative points of the thick concepts; we need to see how they relate to virtuousness. A complete account of a reason to be loyal to someone, for example, does not simply commend a loyal act but one that is virtuously loyal. We need then to move to CV—the centrality of virtuousness. Before we start on the project of explicating CV an objection to the whole enterprise of moving from the thick to virtuousness must be dealt with. The objection is this. A thesis required by CV cannot be true. The required thesis is:
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The Necessity of Virtue Theory (NVT): Reasons for action cannot be assessed simply through the thick concepts, virtue theory is necessary.
NVT is held to be true and required by CV because, as we have seen, at least most evaluative thick concepts, even the honorific ones, do not in themselves connote goodness or excellence of acts or agents. They do not as such connote virtuousness. However, NVT may be questioned. Thick concept theory as opposed to virtue theory, it may be claimed, is all that is necessary to access reasons for action. The thick concepts provide a vast and rich evaluative conceptual armoury through which we can describe reasons for and against actions, and once these reasons are lined up we can directly through intuitive means assess whether or not actions are overall right. By contrast the list of virtues is considerably shorter than the list of thick concepts: hence, the former provide an impoverished medium through which to understand and assess reasons.⁶⁹ For example, being distasteful can provide practical shape to a complex situation⁷⁰ but ‘distasteful’ according to the objection is not a virtue or vice term. The argument against NVT has force against those who think that the virtues and vices form a relatively short list. But I am not among them. Any thick concept ⁶⁸ I thank a referee for OUP for drawing my attention to this issue. ⁶⁹ I thank Jonathan Dancy for drawing my attention to this important objection. ⁷⁰ My thanks to Dancy for providing me with this example (personal correspondence).
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that is not a pejorative vice term can be turned into a virtue concept once a notion of dispositional excellence (in the case of character concepts) or (on my account) excellence in attaining targets (in relation to action) is built in. Certainly, the pejorative thick concept of the distasteful cannot be turned into a virtue concept. This is not to deny that in some unusual circumstance being distasteful may be what is called for. However, the tendency not to be distasteful is a virtue, one with no name. The features of this elusive virtue may be better understood through the characteristics of those who go in for distasteful behaviour. Furthermore, as suggested above, pejorative thick concepts which cannot be turned into virtue terms such as dishonest, do not necessarily connote vice. Pace Kant dishonesty may be exactly what is called for in a situation, but a virtuous person is dishonest with compunction. The virtue/vice concepts understood in this way are legion. For example, an action may be wrong because impulsive: excellence in not being impulsive—a virtue of calmness⁷¹—can readily be understood as a dispositional excellence. Of course, Aristotle’s list of virtues is limited, but there is no reason to regard it as canonical let alone a total list. He discusses the ones that he considered most important for a flourishing life in his kind of society for his class. But in a highly stressed society with characteristic flaws (at least in certain areas) not of particular concern to Aristotle, such as narcissism, general ignorance in a world of ‘fake news’ and veridical news sources routinely being called “fake,” tribalism in politics, shallowness in a world of social media, and sense of entitlement in an ethical world dominated by the language of rights, we may regard other so called “nonmoral” virtues as genuine virtues: virtues such as the large array of epistemic virtues, resilience, calmness, dispositions not to stand on one’s entitlements inappropriately, dispositions not to think one is entitled when one is not, and so on. The view that the list of virtues is short is encouraged by a failure to distinguish thick honorific evaluative concepts from properly virtue notions. According to Annas ‘tidiness, cleanliness and diligence count as virtues in some theories, but in a theory of Aristotelian virtue they are just traits which virtue can direct well (or not)’.⁷² But strictly speaking it is not tidiness, cleanliness, and so on that are virtues; it is being well disposed in respect of tidiness, cleanliness, and so on that are virtues. If the objection that a list of virtues is short can be met, our next question is: what more is added by virtue theory by contrast with thick concept theory? In assessing reasons for or against action we need a second shaping: the shaping of the evaluative—itself shaped by the thick concepts—in accordance with standards of correctness or rightness, and excellence. The point of loyalty is understood in
⁷¹ I discuss such virtues in relation to Nietzsche in my ‘On the Supposed Tension between “Strength” and “Gentleness” Conceptions of the Virtues’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (1997), 497–510. ⁷² Julia Annas, ‘Conversation with Julia Annas’, Teoria (2018), 11–19, 17.
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terms of it serving the ethical foundation of the need for coalitions, teams, institutions working for a common goal. But it is not enough to be loyal; one must be well disposed in relation to loyalty. Hence, the framework of shaping within which notions of excellence is understood brings into play virtue theory. A good example of the distinction between thick concepts providing evaluative shape and the properly virtue/vice concepts is provided by Karen Jones in her discussion of trustworthiness.⁷³ She rightly objects to the “moralizing” of trustworthiness: it is not as such a virtue notion. However, it is a thick concept which provides evaluative shape to the non-evaluative, and she gives an interesting account of its evaluative point in terms of a general social need to be able to count on people. Our dependency in the form of a need to recruit others’ agency involves expectations and responsiveness to such. But those of us who think that appropriate trustworthiness is a virtue need also to give an account of what features of trustworthiness in general make trustworthiness appropriate and an excellence of character. Given that terms like ‘generosity’, ‘honesty’ and ‘tidiness’ are honorific and are in effect virtue terms because it is cumbersome to keep referring to, for example, the virtue of generosity as appropriate generosity, it is well to be mindful of the complex relationship between the properties denoted by thick concepts and virtues. I indicate a number of areas of complexity. (a) Let us say that in standard usage a thick concept is honorific, such as loyalty. We might think then that being loyal is automatically a default reason in favour of an action. However, let us say that a correct theory of loyalty shows that loyalty is in fact a vice. This is indeed suggested by Simon Keller⁷⁴ on broadly epistemic grounds: because loyalty is a driver of prejudice and epistemic distortion it is in fact a vice. Being loyal on that view would be a default reason against an action. (b) Let us say that in standard usage a thick concept such as justice and compassion is honorific, and furthermore that correct theories of justice and compassion show that justice and compassion are indeed virtues. However, as Nietzsche showed whether or not justice and compassion as standardly understood are virtues is moot. In The Genealogy of Morals in particular Nietzsche contrasts ‘that impossible and rare virtue’ justice (which includes mercy) with two justice-related vices: ‘scientific fairness’ and rigorous punitivism.⁷⁵ Being just is no guarantee of rightness if justice is wrongly conceived. Similarly, Nietzsche contrasts compassion which he ⁷³ See her ‘Trustworthiness’ Ethics Vol. 123, 1, (2012), 61–85. ⁷⁴ See his The Limits of Loyalty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). ⁷⁵ Because of the possibility of ‘serious error’ about what counts as a central case of a virtue Daniel Russell calls virtue concepts ‘model’ concepts. (Daniel C. Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 121ff.
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regards as a virtue with compassion-related vices wrongly thought to be forms of virtue: types of pathological altruism, and pity.⁷⁶ (c) Let us say that a thick concept unequivocally applies to a case: an action is clearly generous, for example. However, an act could be generous without being virtuously generous: it misses salient aspects of the mean (target) of the virtue of generosity in the circumstances (see further Chapter 5). For example, a generous act by someone in his capacity as CEO may on this occasion be vetoed by his overseas boss: to make the donation would deploy the wrong instruments for the making of authoritatively sanctioned donations (see Chapter 7). (d) Assuming the thick honorific concepts (such as being generous) are nonetheless default reasons in favour of action, how do these reasons interact with each other in a judgment of overall rightness? (This is a question for Chapter 5.) Is it possible that these reasons could change valence? This debate is alive and well in the theoretical literature on ethical particularism. Particularism is discussed in Chapter 11. Finally, what counts as an act being virtuous? As noted in the Introduction what counts as virtuously loyal, kind, honest, trustworthy, patient, links thick concept analysis to (some version of) virtue ethics. Virtuous kindness, trustworthiness, and so forth (whether in relation to character or acts) are thus theory-laden notions, dependent on one’s virtue ethics. In their understanding of the virtuousness of actions there are significant differences among virtue ethicists. As noted in the Introduction for some (notably Slote) virtuousness depends on quality of motive; for others such as Hursthouse virtuousness is understood in terms of the nature of or conformity to actions of virtuous agents acting characteristically. On my target centred view the virtuousness of an act in respect of kindness, for example, depends on its meeting contextually relevant and salient aspects of the target(s) (what Aristotle calls the mean) of the virtue of kindness in relation to action. To know what constitutes hitting the (multidimensional) mean of a virtue we need to know the point and function of the virtue and the standards of virtue as a satis concept in relation to action, and that can be complex and contested. At a structural level we can at least say this: hitting the mean includes, for example (depending on such things as contextual salience and where the standards of virtuousness are set in relation to various forms of rightness), correctness in extent, time, motive, manner, instruments, in relation to that virtue.⁷⁷ This view I develop further in Chapter 5. ⁷⁶ See my ‘Nietzsche and the Virtues of Mature Egoism’ in Simon May (ed.), Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 285–308. ⁷⁷ For an interesting case consider Slote’s example of prosecuting out of malice discussed by Steven Sverdlik, Motive and Rightness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, Chapter 7). For Sverdlik, if the prosecutor’s motives are mixed and he ‘does things by the book’ then the malicious motive does not
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(vii) Conclusion Let us summarize the view outlined in (A)–(D). According to TCC (Thick Concept Centralism), the significance relations constituting the logos of ethics are fundamentally comprised by reasons and relations of fittingness, intentionally accessed through the thick concepts. To access those reasons and relations of fittingness we need to carve the world into evaluatively significant features. Evaluative shape is provided to the world through the thick concepts. Providing this shape in turn requires that we see the thick concepts as having an evaluative point. The evaluative point of the thick concepts is understood through their connection with the various ethical foundations. In this way, we ‘anchor ethical thought to the real’ within the logos of ethics. The evaluative points of the thick concepts are plural and complex since there are several ethical foundations which are themselves complex. For example, the evaluative point of loyalty is associated with the loyalty/betrayal foundation evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions and further developed in relation to, for example, institutional roles such as that of a defence lawyer. That evaluative point determines the shape of nonevaluative features of loyalty and thus the extension of the evaluative term ‘loyalty’. CV (the Centrality of Virtuousness) supposes that notions of virtuousness provide a second shaping to phenomena labelled as ‘loyal’, namely, the virtuousness of that loyalty. This shaping will establish conceptions of excellence and rightness such that certain loyal acts, for example, are deemed virtuously loyal. Notions of excellence are elaborated and justified by all the bodies of knowledge related to the relevant ethical foundations. In general then we justify our claims about what makes for excellence in, for example, loyalty, caring, courage, generosity, by appeal to various aspects of the social sciences in particular. This, of course, raises the question of the relation between ethics and other logoi such as the social sciences—an important question that is discussed in the next chapter. TC (Target Centred Virtue Ethics) provides a distinctive view of CV. The basic precepts of TC are outlined in Chapter 5 which begins Part II. Having our eyes opened to the worldhood of ethics supposes some familiarity with the ethical logos: it does not presuppose that this familiarity is to be taken for granted as accurate. We may possess the wrong beliefs about the nature of being affect the deontic nature of the act. I concur. He does the right thing for the wrong reasons. The case is rather like Kant’s honest but not well-motivated shopkeeper. On the other hand, if the malicious prosecutor driven by maliciousness ‘cuts corners’ he in a context of justice has the wrong motive and deploys wrong instruments: we may be more willing to say his prosecuting was wrong even if the verdict itself were correct. Given combinatorial and degree vagueness concerning the contextual salience of dimensions of the mean and what it takes to hit targets on any dimension, there need not be a truth of the matter here (see my ‘Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Moral Disagreement’ Philosophical Topics 38, 2 (2010), 157–80, and Chapter 10).
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honourable or chaste, justice, humility as a virtue or vice, and a host of other things. Assuming, however, that our conceptualizations of the relations in the framework of the logos of ethics are indeed accurate, that the thick concepts in question are the right ones, they access genuine ethical reasons and relations of fittingness. The relations in this reasons/fittingness framework, claims McDowell, ‘are there in any case whether or not we are responsive to them.’⁷⁸ Openness to the irreducibly reason-providing features accessed through the thick concepts need not fix on the exact set of behaviours, motivations, or determinations of a virtuous agent. On many accounts virtuous agents are rare indeed: if, for example, understood as exemplars,⁷⁹ as having good intrinsic desires in a global way,⁸⁰ as having (considerable) practical wisdom, or as highly resistant to unusual and severe stressors, bystander effect, moods, and so forth.⁸¹ Rather the logos of ethics permitting openness to ethical properties is manifested in the public domain of involvements, in dialogical and conversational contexts⁸² and presupposes sufficient familiarity not only with thick concepts but also with external scaffolding, such as rules and procedures linked to institutions and roles. In various contexts the relatively non-virtuous have intentional access to the worldhood of ethics. Many other important features of the worldhood of ethics are reserved for discussion in later chapters. We need to relate the aretaic to the deontic, and to the rightness of acts generally. Broadly, two questions need to be addressed.
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(1) What in more detail is the relationship between the thick evaluative concepts and virtue notions on the one hand and thin concepts such as permissibility, prohibition, obligation, duty, and requirement on the other? (2) What is the relationship between a virtuous agent and the logos of ethics? Is the practical discernment of a virtuous agent constitutive of the logos of ethics, the ‘regulative structure’ which brings ethics into being? Does the practical discernment of a virtuous agent determine correctness of representations (such as right action) within that structure? The first question is a topic of Chapters 5, 10, and 11; the second is discussed in the context of TC in Chapter 5. ⁷⁸ Mind and World, 82. ⁷⁹ See Zagzebski, ‘Exemplarist Virtue Ethics’. ⁸⁰ For this view, opposed to Aristotelianism about the nature of virtue, see Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder, In Praise of Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) and my critical comment ‘Comments on In Praise of Desire: The Relation Between Desire and Virtue,’ The Journal of Value Inquiry 50 (2016), 439–43. ⁸¹ See Christian B. Miller’s ‘Mixed Trait’ view defended in Character and Moral Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). ⁸² Says Gadamer: ‘What characterizes a dialogue, in contrast with the rigid form of statements that demand to be set down in writing, is precisely this: that in dialogue spoken language – in the process of question and answer, giving and taking, talking at cross purposes and seeing each other’s point – performs the communication of meaning that, with respect to the written tradition, is the task of hermeneutics.’ (Truth and Method, 368).
3 The Concealment of Ethics
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(i) Introduction To fully appreciate the worldhood of ethics it must be revealed through logos in the richest and most accurate way. It is not, however, easy to expose the b-structure of ethics. For according to Heidegger, phenomena can not only be intentionally accessed through a clearing (Lichtung) but also ‘covered up’.¹ Ways of covering up shed light indirectly on the logos of ethics. Until we see how ethics is covered up our ethical thought is liable to suffer from various forms of distortion. So to complete the discussion of the worldhood of ethics we need to not only expose the way ethics is opened up; we need also to be aware of the way it has been and is concealed. The distortions caused by the concealment of ethics are many and various. The ethical being of phenomena can be concealed insofar as the relevant logos has been in Heidegger’s own language, forgotten, veiled, disguised, thinned down, hardened, rendered empty. Ethical phenomena, for example, can remain ‘undiscovered’, ‘neither known nor unknown.’² A phenomenon can be ‘buried over [verschuttet]’³ such that ‘it has at some time been discovered but ‘has deteriorated [verfiel] to the point of getting covered up again.’⁴ Or and most dangerously for Heidegger the being of entities can be disguised: ‘what has been discovered earlier may still be visible, though only as a semblance.’⁵ In this process of what Heidegger calls forgetting or ‘disguise’⁶ the logos may be thinned down. Thus, for example, the rich language of virtue and vice prevalent at the time of ancient Greek ethics and continuing till Hume, has in the British tradition been thinned down with a narrow emphasis on obligation, duty, rights, and consequences, and has been revived only relatively recently.⁷ However, even in contemporary virtue ¹ Being and Time, sect. 36, 60. ² Ibid. ³ Ibid. ⁴ Ibid. ⁵ Ibid. ⁶ Being and Time, 59–60, sects. 35–7. ⁷ See for discussion of this problem Sophia Vasalou, ‘Educating Virtue as a Mastery of Language’ Journal of Ethics (2012), 67–87. In general, this is what Heidegger calls the problem of forgetting in aletheia or openness, but in the case of ethics attention to Aristotle, Hume, and Nietzsche, and in recent times Iris Murdoch, is remedial. The ubiquity of the virtue/vice thick concepts in Hume’s texts is exceeded only by those in Nietzsche’s. What Murdoch calls the sickness of the language (Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953) (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), Part III) was an ongoing concern, and has two main aspects, a fixation on language itself as something disconnected from reality, and in analytic philosophy, its impoverishment. Both features are anathema to the Heideggerian conception of logos. (See further Simon Haines, ‘Iris Murdoch, the Ethical Turn and Literary Value’ in Iris Murdoch and Morality, 87–100).
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0004
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ethics the notion of virtue has been excessively abstract, over-simple, and cut off from other areas of the normative. Further, the underlying bases of virtue have been seen as monistic; for example, the flourishing of the possessor of virtue, or value. This form of thinning down will be explored in Chapter 9. Chapter 8, ‘Developmental Virtue Ethics’, highlights another distortion associated with what it is to be familiar with the b-structure of ethics. This is a neglect of the temporal, dynamic, and more specifically developmental nature of this familiarity. Finally, as argued in Chapters 1 and 2 and explored further in Chapter 10, the treatment of the ontology of ethics as an ontology of special entities or special properties has seriously disguised or veiled the being of ethics.
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(ii) Four Ways of Covering up There are four major ways of thinning down or disguising the being of ethics that I explore in this and later chapters. First is a view which is a topic of Chapter 10: the view that familiarity with the being of ethics is familiarity with a special property such as ought in a special moral sense having ‘mesmeric force’, a notion criticized by Williams and Anscombe. In this criticized sense morality is identified by Williams as the morality system: a system that demarks a highly distinctive and supremely important domain. Recall that ethical being is not a special property, but rather a mode of existence of entities within which various properties of those entities, such as virtue and vice properties, make sense as ethical properties. As Wrathall put it the sense-making b-framework (logos) provides a ‘space of possibilities’; a space (clearing) defined by its distinctive concepts, traditions, and orientations. Once this clearing exists then and only then can we speak of ethical properties. Familiarity with the being of ethics necessitates familiarity with the relevant logos. This familiarity is not a special perceptual access or quasiperceptual insight into a special property or entity such as moral force or felt compulsion. Second, a potent cause of covering up has been intentional access to ethics through a wrong logos: a cause of ‘covering up’ that will be illustrated in Chapter 12. As Heidegger puts it, ‘entities must show themselves with the kind of access that genuinely belongs to them’.⁸ Access through a wrong logos may have roots that are fundamental. Claims Heidegger: Whenever a phenomenological concept is drawn from primordial sources there is a possibility that it may degenerate if communicated in the form of an assertion. It gets understood in an empty way and is thus passed on, losing its
⁸ Being and Time, sect. 31, 61.
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indigenous character, and becoming a free floating thesis . . . there lurks the possibility that [it] . . . may become hardened . . .⁹
Heidegger is not saying here that ethical truths, for example, cannot be asserted but that if we access these truths through the scientific exemplars or paradigms of assertion—revealing what Hume calls ‘matters of fact’, facts understood through reason applied to causal relations—they become empty and ‘hardened’. As we saw in our discussion of Hume, if we attempt to understand the being of ethics through such a limiting logos, we lose sight of the necessity for the right kinds of emotional attunement for a proper grasp of the thick concepts. Such attunements are necessary if the logos of ethics is able to disclose the ethical being of phenomena at all, let alone richly and accurately. Third, and related to the problem of the wrong logos, are reductivist conceptions of the relation between ethics and the sciences. Such reductivism is a natural temptation since science is thought to offer the theory of the real, and the idea of a plurality of logoi determining the ontology of entities is seen as problematic. Hence, we need to understand how there can be bridge building between the logoi such that we can make sense of the resulting ontology. Notably, for ethics to be properly applied it is important to appreciate important relationships between ethics and especially the social sciences. This is the topic of the next section. Fourth, partly as a result of the idea that ethics is essentially morality in a special sense, there is a cutting off of ethics from other normative logoi within which ethics is embedded or with which it is closely connected. The logos of ethics may thus be limited by being disconnected from other normative logoi. These include art, law, professional and other institutions, business, politics, policy, economics, and nature. Of course, in the drive for systematicity many of these other logoi may also be distorted and ‘hardened’, for example, arguably the problematic mathematizing of economics. Of particular importance is the neglect of the relation between ethics and what the later Heidegger considers to be the overarching practical logos: that of “dwelling.” The logos of ethics is enriched if it is understood in relation to the broader environment within which we dwell. As much sociology and moral anthropology recognize more clearly than analytical philosophers (a notable exception is Bernard Williams) the logos of ethics concerns individuals’ behaviours, attitudes, and character in relation to themselves, others, institutions, and the broader environment. Too often ethics has been confined to relationship with other individuals with too little attention to the self and its narrative features; institutions in which they have roles; art, and relationship to culture and the broader natural environment. As we explore in Chapter 6 ethics is “covered up”
⁹ Ibid.
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unless it is enriched through conceptions of its integration with these broader neglected features. The relation between ethics and the natural environment in which we dwell is the topic of section (iv).
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(iii) Relation between the Logoi The four ways of covering up ethics cited above raise a central question. If application of ethics to the real world is vitiated by the separation of ethics from other logoi, whereas the relation between them is intimate though non-reductive, how should we conceive that relation? This is the topic of the present section. Its fundamental aim is to show how ethical realism can be a scientific ethical realism without being scientistic. The thick concepts are central to the logos of ethics, but entities with ethical properties can also be accessed by different logoi—notably, those of the various sciences. But if these logoi are not somehow integrated with ethics, ethics is ‘covered up’. Without the linkage to science ethics will be contaminated with falsehood. The insights of science are not adequately informing our ethics and ethics is not empirically adequate. We saw in Chapter 1 that this linkage is not obtained by privileging the or a scientific logos which gives us the true reference and ontology of a in the a as b structure. This privileging is the way of scientistic realism within ethics (see thesis (a) Chapter 1 section (vii)), but this is precisely what is denied by non-scientistic realism within ethics (see thesis (d) Chapter 1 section (vii)). Rather the linkage is obtained by subscribing to scientific realism within ethics (as opposed to scientistic realism) (see thesis (b) Chapter 1 section (vii)) which precludes privileging the logos of supernaturalist religion, or that of aesthetics, say, as providing the theory of the real.¹⁰ Rather no logos that is sufficiently well anchored to the real in its various aspects is privileged, and needless to say what counts as well anchored to the real is a subject of continuing debate. The linkage between logoi is achieved by “bridge building” between the logoi. But how is bridge building achieved? In ethics, bridge building is increasingly being achieved through collaboration with various forms of psychology, neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and the social sciences. For example, of considerable importance for the ethics of beneficence, our understanding of virtuous altruism is greatly improved through studies of forms of pathological altruism.¹¹ This is a phenomenon to which Nietzsche (the self-described ‘first psychologist’) drew our attention in his discussion of the pathologies of forms of self-sacrificing altruism.
¹⁰ Nietzsche on my view is an example of a philosopher for whom both the logos of aesthetics and that of science (but not supernaturalist theology) are extremely important for a rich and accurate understanding of ethical reality. ¹¹ See Pathological Altruism.
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In modern studies, neuroscience collaborates with a variety of types of psychology including psychoanalysis.¹² In this way a logos is continuously interrogated through the wide reflective equilibrium process embracing considered judgments, rival conceptions of concepts under interrogation, and background theories of all types. Let us concentrate in more detail on the relationship between science and ethics. How can there be a bridge between science and ethics? The problem is posed in the following way by Alexander Miller,¹³ quoting from Jerry Fodor:
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Having situated . . . the ethical . . . outside the realm of law, McDowell needs to face the embarrassing question how, by any natural process, do we ever manage to get at it?¹⁴
The ethical is ‘outside the realm of law’ because it is concerned with the ‘space of reason’: ‘the structure in which we place things when we find meaning in them.’¹⁵ For TCC we find evaluative meaning in things when they are understood through the thick evaluative concepts, but the question posed by Miller and Fodor is this: unless we can somehow link the space of reasons (and fittingness) to the realm of law we cannot avoid the charge of being wedded to a mysterious non-naturalism. The alleged problem lies in the stubborn retention of the problematic dichotomy between naturalism as identified by the realm of law and a mysterious nonnaturalism; a dichotomy McDowell was at pains to destroy. The realm of meaning is outside the realm of law but that does not mean that it is outside the purview of the natural sciences where that includes the social sciences, notably sociology and psychology, which precisely study the realm of meaning. A Heideggerian take on the bundle theory of properties (Chapter 1 section (iv)) solves the problem. Properties accessed through different logoi can be seen as belonging together within the same object whose concrete-making features are not ‘outside the realm of law’ but whose ethical properties are outside that realm since concerned with the ‘space of reason’. To understand how they belong together we need to theorize about and grasp the nature of relations between different types of facts proper to the different logoi, whether they be facts in sociology, ethics, moral anthropology, and so on. There remains the question of how we understand the bridge between logoi so that properties can legitimately be seen as belonging together. First of all the metaphor of a bridge may mislead: the links between the logoi may not be a bridge connecting two entirely separated islands; rather their conceptual structures may ¹² See Marcus E. Raichle, ‘The Brain’s Dark Energy’, Scientific American (March 2010), 28–33 for an example. ¹³ Alexander Miller, Contemporary Metaethics: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 254. ¹⁴ ‘Encounters with Trees’ London Review of Books 17(8), (1995), 11. ¹⁵ Mind and World, 88.
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interpenetrate. For example, much work in the positive psychology of Seligman and Peterson contains thick concepts but these are treated in a way that is less evaluative than in CV. Thus, an essential feature of a character strength for them is that it is morally valued across cultures rather than it ought to be morally valued. Second, bridge building is not without controversy and obstacles. For example, in certain periods in the development of the social sciences the concern with meaning is downplayed in efforts to make the science law-like; in other periods the appreciation of the human mind’s tendency to find meaning is at the forefront. Philosophical prejudices about the extreme disjointedness of logoi contribute to the obstacles. This in turn contributes to the covering up of ethics. For it would then be difficult to see how science could be integrated with ethics such that we have a scientific naturalism along the lines of (NE) (Chapter 1 section (vii)) as opposed to a scientistic naturalism. Seligman and Peterson give the following example in relation to the vicissitudes of ‘character’:
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First, a growing sophistication among psychologists about how personal values could unintentionally pervade “objective” research and theory made researchers gun-shy about pronouncements concerning the psychological components of the good life. Gordon Allport, the main personality trait theorist in 20th-century United States psychology, explicitly banished the term character from academic discourse concerning personality (Nicholson, 1998). He argued that character was the subject matter of philosophy and not psychology (Allport, 1921, 1927; Allport & Vernon, 1930). The traits he urged psychologists to study were presumably objective entities (Allport dubbed them neuropsychic structures) stripped of moral significance and linked to “adjustment” but not imbued with inherent value.¹⁶
Allport’s argument reflected the positivism sweeping social science at this time and its rigid distinction between fact and value. Fact was the province of science, and value the province of philosophy. Traits were part of psychology whereas character was not.¹⁷ However, as the humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow showed, the linking of personality to “adjustment” itself embodies an implicit ideal; one that is criticizable.¹⁸ Seligman and Peterson note that Dewey disagreed with Allport, thinking that character and virtue should be included within the proper domain of psychology, but that Allport ‘won the day’.¹⁹
¹⁶ Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 2004. ProQuest ebrary. Web. July 6, 2015), 55. ¹⁷ Ibid. ¹⁸ Abraham Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being 2nd edn (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1968). ¹⁹ Christopher Peterson and Martin E. P. Seligman, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Cary, NC: Oxford University Press, 2004. ProQuest ebrary. Web. July 6, 2015), 55.
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Another obstacle to bridge building between the logoi is that as noted the boundaries between logoi are not hard and fast: many concepts sit uneasily between more than one logos. An example is a concept on which there has been much recent discussion: feasibility. The fluidity and interpenetration of the logoi may cause philosophical problems which are resolvable once this phenomenon is recognized. Consider the problem of the ‘normative encroachment’ of feasibility ascriptions to phenomena. The problem is that according to what Southwood calls the ‘standard picture’ our feasibility ascriptions are ‘straightforwardly nonnormative’. In this sense it is feasible to save the ship by throwing passengers overboard when that is the only way to save the ship.²⁰ Yet there is normative encroachment when we claim that such an action is not feasible. The solution is to recognize that the concept ‘feasible’ can have its home within two broad logoi the scientific and the ethical, and is itself a bridge-building concept that can bring the logoi together. For example, one common usage of ‘feasible’ endorsed by many²¹ is this: something is feasible if it can be achieved without undue cost. The notion of ‘undue’ clearly signals the normative: in this sense it is not feasible to save the ship by throwing off passengers even though this can be done and is in that nonnormative sense feasible. Often as in political debate it is clear that the concept is embedded in an ethical context. There is no ‘normative encroachment’ since the concept is clearly normative in that context. In other types of context it is similarly clear that that the concept is embedded in a scientific context.²² Often, however, because the boundaries between the logoi are fluid and interpenetrate there may be, as research shows, disagreement and unclarity about which logos is salient, and this disagreement and tension is to be expected, indeed should not be seen as a problem. The ‘standard picture’ is misleading since it suggests that that the scientific embedding of ‘feasible ‘is the privileged logos for the notion of the feasible, and any normative usage is ‘normative encroachment’, indeed ‘normative contamination.’²³ In fact, however, the ethical logos is equally legitimate as a home for the concept of feasible; something may be unfeasible because though it can be done it has the undue cost of being callous. One may equally well argue that in certain contexts of disagreement it is ‘scientific encroachment’ that is the problem. On this note let us turn to the nature of the integration of the logoi in relation to the thick concepts. Consider first the thick concepts that form part of the value of the b variable within the b-structure of the logos of ethics before moving to the links with social psychology. To recall, the evaluative shape of thick concepts is ²⁰ Nicholas Southwood, “The Feasibility Issue,” Philosophy Compass Vol. 13, 8, (August 2018). ²¹ For example, David Miller, Justice for Earthlings: Essays in Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). See Nicholas Southwood (n. 20). ²² There is naturally controversy as to how the concept should be analyzed in such a context; e.g., possibility accounts, dispositional accounts. See Southwood (n. 20). ²³ Southwood (n. 20).
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given by their evaluative points. At the most fundamental level, groups of thick concepts including associated virtue notions are clustered round the various ethical foundations. The evaluative point of the cluster as a whole is given by the role of the foundation in such things as harm to the individual, to a human society as a whole, to human beings or sentient beings as such (as in climate change), or to the environment as whole. In the case of the love/hate foundation, the evaluative point of virtues and vices in the love/hate cluster is given by the role of the foundation in our fundamental need for attachment. The virtue concepts provide conceptions (often-times contested) on what it is to do well in relation to these foundations as far as individual traits are concerned (as opposed to other important factors such as institutions). In order to know what it is to do well we need to know what causes harm and promotes benefit, what damages attachment and efforts at attachment. We must note then the empirical nature of the foundations: attachment theory is needed for knowing what it is to attach well and thereby understand the virtues of attachment and love. Again, though as Hume points out the personal virtue of justice is deontological²⁴ and thus rests on a different foundation from that of harm/benefit, policy makers need to know the long-term utilities of systems of rules which a virtuous agent is expected to honour (as Hume again points out). How then does psychology reach out to ethics? Psychology is a human science whose point is given by the norms of individual development within a society. These norms in turn are driven by what constitutes a flourishing development. But since the b-structure of psychology is not that of ethics but that of a human science it does not have CV as part of that structure. But it points in that direction. For example, influential in personality psychology is the Five Factor model of personality traits (the ‘Big Five’) understood as CAPS traits (cognitive-affective personality system).²⁵ The Big Five comprise openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.²⁶ But these traits are not the names of virtues. Conscientiousness, for example, can be represented in the conscientious Nazi. Rather, these traits are causally efficacious as building blocks of virtue but can also be causally efficacious in different circumstances in the development of vice. This feature gives rise to the so-called Machiavellian objection,²⁷ since at least some of the traits could be used for both good and bad, but the objection is only an objection if the Big Five traits are proposed as virtues rather than personality traits, which they are not.
²⁴ See my Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche, Chapter 4. ²⁵ W. Mischel and Y. Shoda, ‘A Cognitive-affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing the Invariance in Personality and the Role of Situations’, Psychological Review 102:2, 246–68. ²⁶ R. McCrae and O. John ‘An Introduction to the Five-factor Model and its Applications’, Journal of Personality 60:2, 1996, 175–215. ²⁷ See Kristjan Kristjansson, Virtues and Vices in Positive Psychology: A Philosophical Critique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2013), 13.
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Seligman’s and Peterson’s Character Strengths and Virtues is still a work in psychology but gets us closer to an informed ethics through their studies of various ‘character strengths’. Indeed, they describe their work as ‘the social science equivalent of virtue ethics’.²⁸ The character strengths are classified within six core categories²⁹ each of which contains several strengths. Many would not be called ‘moral’ in any narrow taxonomic sense but all can be subsumed within the category of the ethical including creativity (a strength of wisdom and knowledge), and some of the “transcendent’ strengths such as hope, humour, and ‘appreciation of beauty and excellence’ whose associated virtues I call virtues of connoisseurship. Essential features of a character strength are that it be ‘trait-like’, ‘morally valued’ and have ‘non-felicitous opposites’ denoting traits that cannot be virtues. For example persistence has ‘non felicitous opposites’ such as a tendency to give up, vacillation, and laziness.³⁰ The term denoting a character strength is thus an honorific term while the ‘opposites’ are pejorative. But the strengths themselves are not necessarily virtues. For another example consider perseverance. This is a character strength whose denoting term is an honorific, but perseverance can lapse into vices of overly costly or unwise perseverance.³¹ Despite this, persistence is still a strength since ‘the same factors that promote costly persistence may also contribute to effective persistence.’³² The failure to appreciate a plurality of logoi which is to some extent integrated by bridge building, as illustrated above, causes misunderstanding. Because Snow gives weight to CAPs traits in her defence of virtue ethics as empirically adequate in the face of situationist psychology character scepticism,³³ Alfano³⁴ assumes that for Snow we can understand ‘traditional virtues as a subset of CAPS traits’³⁵ and criticizes her for that assumption. But we must be careful how to interpret this claim. Snow is not saying that, for example, agreeableness as personality trait is as such a virtue within the logos of personality psychology. Within the logos of ethics species of agreeable traits can be understood as virtues (or vices) (and then they have different virtue (or vice) names such as (appropriate) kindness (or “wimpishness”)). Here, we can regard the trait of agreeableness in A (manifested as a disposition of appropriate kindness and thus a virtue) as one and the same entity: they are as it were ‘concretely united’. Alternatively, person B, differently situated, may manifest agreeableness as a vice (e.g., an excessively self-sacrificing form of altruism expressing self-hate and resentments) caused perhaps by defence
²⁸ Character Strengths, 89. ²⁹ These are: (strengths of) wisdom and knowledge; courage; humanity; justice; temperance; transcendence. ³⁰ Character Strengths, 202. ³¹ Character Strengths, 231. ³² Character Strengths, 231. ³³ Nancy E. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (New York: Routledge, 2009). ³⁴ Mark Alfano, Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). ³⁵ Virtue as Social Intelligence, 31, cited in Alfano, 78.
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mechanisms³⁶ themselves caused perhaps by attachment failures. In that case the agreeable disposition is concretely united in B as a vice. Virtue ethics is assumed to be empirically adequate on the assumption that personality psychology has been integrated with the different logos of ethics. No reductive moves are in play. To summarize: there is no way of picking out a independently of a b-structure, nor is one b-structure privileged. Rather, the various b-structures must work together to assess what properties of entities belong together, and are thereby ‘concretely united’. As beings competent with concepts we hold onto what kind of properties are possessed by a through a variety of b-structures. Rather than those structures being insulated from each other in which case what a is would be wholly disunified—indeed, we could not have a concept of a at all—we can gain a richer picture of a through making links between the logoi. On the side of personality psychology we speak of personality and what causes differences in personality. On the side of ethics we have the idea of evaluative shape provided by the thick concepts, a shape which can only be given by assessing their evaluative point, and a second shaping provided by notions of excellence. This is not something that is just grasped as if by intuition; educated assessment can be hard work necessitating the deployment of epistemic virtues. We cannot assess their evaluative points in an informed way before understanding evolution, sociology, psychology, neuroscience, and so on.³⁷ Once we reach ethics we are in a position to form educated hypotheses about what counts as a virtuous character trait through our knowledge of the empirical sciences. Finally, one of the most liberating features of the bridge-building metaphor is the breaking down of sharp boundaries between the logoi. This can have very important practical consequences. One is the view that the distinction between ‘vice and mental illness must be a vague one, lying along a wide continuum.’³⁸ Both, Watkins argues are ‘passional disorders’. Indeed claims Watkins ‘the continuity of these concepts may prove liberating’³⁹ allowing us to broaden our understanding and attitudes. The example discussed by Watkins is the change of Hume’s diagnosis of a passional disorder ‘coldness’ (a ‘lack of focus and incapacity for prolonged application’)⁴⁰ as proceeding from a ‘Laziness of Temper’ to a ‘Disease of the Learned.’ From the perspective of TCC/CV the lesson to be drawn from this is that the transition from a thick concept such as coldness ³⁶ For an example of ‘false altruism’ caused by defence mechanisms see Anna Freud’s example (from The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (London: Hogarth Press, 1936) discussed by Michael Lacewing, ‘Emotions and the Virtues of Self-Understanding’ in Sabine Roeser and Cain Todd (eds.), Emotion and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 200–12. ³⁷ I am not implying here that such knowledge is necessary for a grasp of a thick concept, but only for an objectively warranted claim that our concept of, e.g., caring as a virtue and what it requires in a wide range of situations, is well founded. ³⁸ Margaret Watkins, ‘Beyond the Disease of the Learned: Hume on Passional Disorders’ in Philip A. Reed and Rico Vitz (eds.), Hume’s Moral Philosophy and Contemporary Psychology (New York: Routledge, 2018), 9–39, 9. ³⁹ Ibid. 9. ⁴⁰ Ibid. 12.
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to a virtue or vice concept such as laziness is not hard and fast, is vague, contested at the boundaries, and certainly affected by historical and cultural location. Most importantly it is affected by the state of current knowledge in relevant human science.
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(iv) The Fundamental Integrating Logos: The Logos of Dwelling Let us turn to the second way ethics is covered up discussed in this chapter. This is a lack of connection between various logoi closely related to ethics; a lack encouraged by the sharp separation between the ‘moral’ and other practical concerns. Indeed, one of the most important ways in which ethics has been covered up, as is increasingly realized, is the lack of a satisfying integration between interpersonal ethics and environmental ethics. For Heidegger the integration takes the form of a ‘dwelling’ orientation to the world at large within which ethics in a narrower sense is included. This idea is the topic of the present section. In the analytic tradition environmental ethics is characteristically understood as a species of applied ethics, but Heidegger’s views on dwelling are fundamental to his philosophy as a whole, since for him, the essence of human beings is to dwell. If we do not properly dwell, realize our essence as dwellers, we have a fundamentally wrong orientation or attunement to the world as a whole. For Heidegger all logoi including ethics (which as noted above he does not really discuss as a separate logos) are nested within an overarching logos of dwelling; on this view if ethics, art, architecture, education, husbandry, and the like are cut off from the orientation of dwelling they are to that extent distorted. Benevolence, love, kindness, and respect—prime concepts of ethics—take on enriched significance within this overarching logos. By the same token if modern environmental ethics is cut off from a dwelling orientation of ethics, art, husbandry, architecture, and the like, it too is distorted. This section takes on the task of describing the fundamental bridge-building logos: that of seeing the world through an orientation of dwelling. The view that a dwelling orientation connects the various logoi presupposes that each nonetheless has its own domain. Despite fluidity and contestedness in the individuation of broadly normative logoi, there are important markers for distinguishing many of them: central Grundstimmungen, networks of concepts, connections with different types of institution. For example, art is characterized by two broad types of Grundstmmungen: aesthetic sensibility on the part of the appreciator as well as the producer; creative will on the part of the producer and the language of art. It is also characterized by its close association with certain types of institution, the art museum, the art critic, art movements. Where a putative artwork appears disconnected from many of these key markers such as
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Duchamp’s urinal there is a distinct discomfort about the being of an entity as an object whose significance is gained through the logos of art. Ethics is characterized by fundamental Grundstimmungen of benevolence (desire for another’s good), love (forms of attachment), and respect (manifested in mutual reason giving); characteristic institutions of relationship; and the language of the thick ethical concepts. The logos of law is characterized by the impartialist orientation of the sense of justice (whereas the thick concepts of ethics have in many cases dimensions of appropriate partiality) as befits the nature of institutions of law. Before describing the nature of dwelling orientation in detail we should note the problem of environmental ethics being “cut off” from that overarching orientation. Environmental ethics is in a state of theoretical angst. A fundamental reason is that it is apparently caught in a dilemma. Here is the first horn. We believe in human species partiality as a way of making sense of many of our practices. For example, in the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development the first principle of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development stated that ‘human beings are at the centre of concerns for sustainable development. They are entitled to a healthy and productive life in harmony with nature’.⁴¹ This anthropocentric picture contrasts with the second horn of the dilemma. As part of our commitment to impartialism in ethics we should extend the principle of impartiality to other species in a version of biocentric egalitarianism of the kind advocated by Paul Taylor. According to this view, not only do all entities that possess a good have inherent worth but also they have equal inherent worth, and in particular no species is superior to any other.⁴² The horns constitute a dilemma insofar as the first horn is seen as species chauvinism, whereas the second horn is seen as unable to make sense of legitimate species partialism. However, understood in this way, the dilemma contains a presupposition. Both horns are understood as relying on a metaphysics of value according to which entities have value from a single perspective-less, impartial metaphysical view, which assigns value to entities as if there were ethical brute facts, to which our moral judgments correspond or fail to correspond. Either our species is seen as superior on such a view, or alternatively all species are equal. Neither view seems satisfactory. What we need is the recognition that an environmental ethics is appropriate to our life form without that view being seen as inappropriately partialistic and species chauvinistic.
⁴¹ Cited in Ronald L. Sandler, Character and Environment: A Virtue Oriented Approach to Environmental Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). ⁴² See Paul Taylor, Respect for Nature: A Theory of Environmental Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 155. To forestall objections Taylor proposes priority principles, but these efforts, and species egalitarianism in general, have received criticism (see discussion in Sandler, 71ff; David Schmidtz, ‘Are all Species Created Equal?’ in Journal of Applied Philosophy Vol. 15, 1, 57–67).
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Ethics in the analytic tradition, including virtue ethics, has not yet embraced Heidegger’s metaphysics/ethics of dwelling which provides a way of understanding how we can live by an ethics appropriate to our life form, without appearing “species chauvinistic”. The gist of the argument can be stated here. In traditional ethics there is a neglect of our nature as beings of limited temporality living in a world with culturally based histories (heritage), sense of place, and in general of our being in that world as one who ‘dwells’. Dwelling is a fundamental relation between humans and the world as “being in” and “being with”. Individual human nature is a nature of relation in, with, and to a world where we dwell for a very limited time. For Heidegger, one’s rationality has to be the rationality of a being that dwells. Without knowing what it is to dwell we do not know what form of rationality is proper to human beings, or how to understand the human virtues. For Heidegger, value assignments such as ‘we humans as a species are superior’ or ‘we are equal (to rats, say)’ make no sense. Why is this so? Such efforts to calculate value suppose a world of values to which rational agents are responsive—a world of values graspable from a so-called impartial perspective, outside a perspective of dwelling. Of central overall importance in his philosophy of dwelling is the idea that it is constituted by an orientation of seeing as holy, which allows us to overcome our ‘thinking in terms of values and calculation’.⁴³ It allows us to reject overly detached and disinterested models of ethics. This is, on my understanding, the main point of Heidegger’s essay ‘ . . . Poetically Man Dwells . . . ’⁴⁴ Here Heidegger discusses a poem of Holderlin’s containing this phrase, but discusses it in relation to the full line: “Full of merit, yet poetically, man dwells on this earth.” The point is that if we only measure in terms of “merits” in work, production, talents, degree of “rationality” for example, we do not fully or properly dwell; we do not take the poetic ‘measure’. As Heidegger puts it: ‘Thus it might be that our unpoetic dwelling, its incapacity to take the [poetic] measure [the poetic logos, way of seeing and understanding things], derives from a curious excess of frantic measuring and calculating’.⁴⁵ Efforts to calculate exact quantities of intrinsic value in types of “natural” entity independently of a dwelling perspective or orientation would also fall within this critique. For Heidegger dwelling is ‘in essence poetic’,⁴⁶ even if (in actual fact) largely unpoetically man “dwells”. As early as Being and Time being in the world is understood in terms of dwelling with others. He says there: ‘ . . . ich bin [I am] means in its turn “I reside” or “dwell alongside” [wohne bei] the world, as that which is familiar to me in such ⁴³ See Hubert L. Dreyfus, ‘Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics’ in Charles B. Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 345–72, 363. ⁴⁴ In Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 213–29. ⁴⁵ Ibid. 228. ⁴⁶ Ibid.
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and such a way.’⁴⁷ Our emplacement in the world is one of dwelling. Heidegger’s philosophy of dwelling flowers, however, in what is known as the later Heidegger. In ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ (BDT) he says: Dwelling is the manner in which mortals are on the earth. (BDT 146) Dwelling . . . is the basic character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist. (BDT 158)
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To say that mortals are is to say that in dwelling they persist through spaces by virtue of their stay among things and locations. (BDT 155) But what is it to dwell? Here is one way of posing the question, one that dominates contemporary political philosophy. Do we dwell as global or world citizens or as local citizens, such as members of a nation? The above question is the wrong question for it suggests an “either/or.” In Heidegger’s ethics of dwelling the claims of nature, world citizens, and the local are integrated, ‘belong together’. The attunement of dwelling qua attunement to the world as a whole is a ‘unity of difference’. This appears to be the view of Nussbaum when she claims that we all dwell in two communities: the local and the more broadly human communities, suggesting then that these two modes of dwelling should be integrated.⁴⁸ It is puzzling then that rather than see dwelling as a ‘two-fold’ of the local and the human in general, Nussbaum claims that ‘world citizenship rather than democratic or national citizenship’ should be the ‘focus for civic education.’⁴⁹ Here she privileges world citizenship,⁵⁰ a stance which precipitated a wave of defences of conceptions of dwelling as essentially a local phenomenon. “Cosmopolitanism” was accused of obscuring and denying the fundamental importance of ‘the givens of life: parents, ancestors, family, race, religion, history, culture, tradition, community—and nationality.’⁵¹ So the standoff between the “universal” ethics of humanity and globalization and the “partial” ethics of nation, family, culture, and so on is encouraged. On the Heideggerian picture by contrast to dwell, in its most fundamental sense, is to see the world as a whole as having an identity in which a number of apparently opposed features (the local and the universal; the traditional and the innovatory; humans and nature; the familiar and the mysterious and uncanny) are treated and understood as belonging together through dwelling. ⁴⁷ Being and Time, sect. 54, 80. ⁴⁸ Martha C. Nussbaum, ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’ Boston Review 19 (1994). ⁴⁹ ‘Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism’, 11. Italics mine. ⁵⁰ In, e.g., Martha C. Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), Chapter 2, and see note 2. ⁵¹ Gertrude Himmelfarb, ‘The Illusions of Cosmopolitanism’ in Joshua Cohen (ed.), For Love of Country: Debating the Limits of Patriotism (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1996), 77.
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But what in more detail is it for humans to dwell? To dwell is to belong by being open to the world through place. In this sense it is to be at home, to feel at home, to sense that place as familiar. Our manner of being open to the world through place is not through place as such but through dwelling place for Heidegger. Our emplacement in the world is to belong in a place, and to belong is for things to be ‘near’ in a specific sense that Heidegger calls ‘dwelling near’ (D-nearness). In D-nearness ‘ . . . nearness does not consist in shortness of distance.’⁵² This concept of nearness is contrasted with spatial nearness (S-nearness). The contrast is marked by Heidegger’s lament about the loss of D-nearness where ‘Everything gets lumped together into uniform distanceless-ness.’ For example, in the London riots of 2011 people trashed, looted, and set fire to neighbourhoods that were S-near but were not for them D-near. In what does D-nearness consist? To understand this idea we must investigate the fundamental emotional orientation of dwelling: its Grundstimmung. Heidegger tells us that such nearness is not something that can be encountered simply by attending to it. It is not a matter of representing an object—for example, a jug—as having a base and sides, and in this way is self-supporting as an object. It is not in short the orientation of science, or mere equipment. Rather the familiarity of D-nearness belongs together with the general orientation of seeing the world as holy. This might seem deeply mysterious to the secular mind, since holiness has religious connotations. To experience something as ‘holy’ for Heidegger however is to see it as mysterious, radiant, awesome, and not something to be totally ‘ordered about’, calculated, manipulated for our own ends. There are several emotional orientations characterizing “seeing as holy” including attitudes of wonder, awe, reverential love, seeing as mysterious, construing as sacred. Contrast the b-framework of dwelling with that of equipmentality where the fundamental orientation of that framework is seeing as serviceable (an ‘in order to’ mode of understanding); or with that of science where the fundamental practical concernful orientation is observation. The notion of holiness connotes both love as a desire for unity or as Kant would put it, a ‘coming close’, and what Kant would call a ‘keeping distance’ of respect, suggested by mystery, awe, and reverence.⁵³ This aspect of D-nearness is captured by an unfamiliar idea in Heidegger: the idea of a thing “thinging.” For a thing to thing it must be ‘gathered’ in what Heidegger calls the ‘fourfold’ of earth, sky, mortals and divinities. In this orientation we are open to the mystery of the world as a dwelling place, and as a dwelling place for Heidegger the world consists of the ‘four-fold’; ‘earth’, ‘sky’, ‘mortals’, and ‘gods’. The ‘gods’ are particularly important for instilling a sense of holiness for they are fundamentally icons which are revered, are importantly symbolic in some way, and which help impart a sense of identity and belonging to our ⁵² Martin Heidegger, ‘The Thing’ in Poetry, Language, Thought, 165–86, 166. ⁵³ For more on Kant’s notions of love and respect see my Virtue Ethics.
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dwelling place. The ‘gods’ need not be supernatural; they may be culturally significant objects, special beloved items of nature (even if never seen in the wild by the average person, such as in New Zealand the kiwi), even sports teams or everyday items. In dwelling, objects become what Heidegger calls ‘things’ in a rich sense: a thing is not just ‘an unknown X to which perceptible properties are attached’.⁵⁴ Rather it ‘gathers to itself in its own way earth and sky, divinities and mortals’⁵⁵ (the fourfold). It becomes rich with cultural and personal meanings. In this sense a thing is a ‘gathering or assembly’.⁵⁶ Let us illustrate further the overarching logos of dwelling with one of Heidegger’s most famous and vivid examples; that of the jug. The example of the jug has already been used to illustrate the plurality of logoi; here we see its relation to that of dwelling. A jug, for example, is not an isolated object but gains significance in its relationships to the fourfold. First we need to understand its ‘thingly’ nature.⁵⁷ That nature is its being as equipment. ‘The jug’s thingness resides in its being qua vessel’ (166). For the jug to so reside, it must be useful, and that in turn presupposes reliability. So the jug as an object having solid base and sides gains significance relative to its purpose as equipment, as a vessel. However, this is not enough to take the poetic measure, to see as holy in some way. For that to be the case the jug must “thing” in its specific environment. The jug’s thinging lies in its “gathering” of the fourfold of earth, sky, divinities, mortals, making them ‘belong together’ (171). [The Old High German word ‘thing’ means a gathering specifically a gathering to deliberate on a matter—a ‘matter of pertinence’] ‘In thinging it [the jug] stays earth and sky, divinities and mortals’ (175). How more precisely is the thinging done in the case of the jug? How is the fourfold gathered by the jug? In Heidegger’s example the jug gathers the fourfold in the ‘gift of the outpouring’: ‘ . . . that is drink (for mortals) where ‘mortals stay in their own way’ and libation (for divinities) where ‘the divinities stay in their own way’ (171). He continues: In the gift of the outpouring, mortals and divinities each dwell in their different ways but are enfolded into a single ‘fourfold’ so that they ‘dwell together all at once.’ (171)
There are three main linked ideas here. (i) In thinging, the thing (the jug qua vessel) makes us aware of the “four” in their distinctiveness. (ii) In gathering the fourfold, the jug in its outpouring reveals the unity of the fourfold; they are ‘enfolded into a single fourfold.’ The outpouring brings ⁵⁴ ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 153. ⁵⁵ Ibid. ⁵⁶ Ibid. ⁵⁷ See ‘The Thing’. Page references in subsequent text are to this work.
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the ‘four into the light of their mutual belonging.’ Thus there is a unity in difference. (iii) This mutual belonging, this unity in difference, occurs within and is enabled by a specific environment. Achieving this unity in difference within a specific environment is an ‘appropriation’ within the ‘framework’ of dwelling. In this appropriation, we are brought D-near to facets of the earth (as the medium for the growing of the grapes), to the sky (whose climate governs the health of the vines), to the gods in the libation. As Heidegger puts it: in thinging ‘the thing brings the four, in their remoteness near to one another.’ ‘Nearness is at work in bringing near, as the thinging of thing.’ (175) In summary, whereas the familiarity of the orientation proper to the logos of equipmentality is a matter of seeing as serviceable for one’s own ends, the familiarity of D-nearness is coupled with something quite different, seeing as “holy” in the rich sense described above. This rich sense shows that several of the ethical foundations are involved in dwelling. The emphasis on D-nearness shows that in dwelling one has a bond of love to one’s local dwelling place. Further, in caring for that place one is benefiting it as a local ecology. Finally, in treating it as holy one is treating it as sacred; as something not to be despoiled. There is a potential ambiguity in the notion of dwelling place and a related objection. We must distinguish between the idea of a homeland as a ‘‘fixed and stable’ spot on earth’⁵⁸ where one has one’s roots, and being at home in the sense of feeling at home or being at peace in one’s surroundings wherever one may be. Both notions presuppose that we are essentially emplaced but debate can remain about what it is to dwell in that place.⁵⁹ Young argues correctly in my view that for Heidegger being ‘near’ (in the sense of D-near) should be understood as essentially involving being at home in the first sense, for that is required for a fully dwelling orientation. As Young puts it, dwelling is living on a specific place on earth, under a specific sky.⁶⁰ He claims further that a central strand in Heidegger’s thinking that really demands this conclusion is the discussion of caring for (schonen). ‘Caring-for’ (‘sparing and preserving’ in Hofstadter’s translation) the fourfold is, he says, ‘the ‘fundamental character of dwelling’.⁶¹ For example, in New Zealand many people care for their local dwelling place by planting native trees in favoured but degraded areas to which they have developed bonds over time. They have become distressed over the degradation and enjoy the growth of the different kinds of ⁵⁸ Julian Young, ‘Heidegger’s Heimat’ International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 19 (2) (2011), 285–93, 290. ⁵⁹ For debate about the notion of ‘Heimat’ see Julian Young ‘Heidegger’s Heimat’ and Jeff Malpas, ‘The Place of Topology: Responding to Crowell, Beistegui, and Young’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 19 (2) (2011), 295–315. ⁶⁰ ‘Heidegger’s Heimat’, 290. ⁶¹ ‘Heidegger’s Heimat’, 291.
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native trees about which they may be very well informed. They are experienced in their nature and growing conditions (local climate, soil conditions, pests, and so on). There is no suggestion that these local efforts are or should be isolated from each other; in fact, recently there has been a call for these efforts to be coordinated in various ways and better funded on a wider scale to avoid burn out. With a dwelling orientation to things as rich with meaning, we are open to the world of the fourfold as something to care for and as something in which we have confidence that we will be cared for. Young describes “caring for” (schonen) as ‘double-aspected’: on the one hand, the dweller is the object of caring for; is “preserved from harm and danger . . . safeguarded . . . at peace” . . .’⁶² On the other hand the dweller is the subject of caring for: she is the one who “spares and preserves”⁶³ the things of the dwelling place, becoming, as Heidegger puts it, its “shepherd” or “guardian.”⁶⁴ Only if we see objects such as bridges as ‘things’ in the rich sense explicated above,⁶⁵ does our place of dwelling become ‘near’ to us, where it is not the case that ‘everything gets lumped together into uniform distancelessness,’⁶⁶ and only then can we care and feel cared for. Only then are we “at home”, and we can ‘remain, stay in a place’; ‘be at peace . . . be brought to peace.’⁶⁷ We are thus open to the world as a caring and to be cared for fourfold as a local dwelling place, local with respect to time (as a world with a heritage), and local with respect to place. Our dwelling place is our place, and is thus special to us. This feature is essential to a sense of rootedness, so important for dwelling. It might be argued first that empirical assumptions which underlie this conclusion are overstated. Here is a case where the logos of ethics needs to build bridges with social science to test these assumptions. Second, it might be argued that place-centred thinking can become exclusionary but recall, of course, that dwelling well involves exhibiting the dwelling virtues which preclude illegitimate forms of exclusion. Most importantly, dwelling orientation allows for both a universal and a local aspect of dwelling. It is not just universal in the sense that everyone must care for their own local fourfold; rather the attitude to the world as a whole must be one where it as a whole is seen as a mystery, a source of wonder, to be respected, and to be cared for,⁶⁸ even if the exigencies of caring are by and ⁶² ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 149. See Julian Young ‘The Fourfold’ in Charles B. Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 373–92, 378. ⁶³ Ibid. ⁶⁴ ‘The Thing’, 184. See ‘The Fourfold’ (n. 62). ⁶⁵ For a fictional account of a bridge in fourteenth-century England, described in this rich sense, see Ken Follett, World Without End (London: Macmillan, 2007). ⁶⁶ ‘The Thing’, 166. ⁶⁷ ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, 149. ⁶⁸ Here the idea of seeing as holy connects with the idea of the holy as Mysterium Tremendum, a notion which for Rudolph Otto is not reducible to moral goodness but contains an ‘overplus’ of meaning as denoting something ineffable. Although beyond the reach of concepts for Otto we can approach the idea of the holy through such concepts as awe-inspiring, uncanny, inspiring wonder, overpowering. See Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958).
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large, more local. Hence, we as individuals must respect the dwelling places of others and the planet (and indeed the wider universe) as a whole. For example, on the universal front we must care for our planet as a whole with the threat of global warming upon us. Indeed, it is now sometimes claimed the urgency is such that local individual efforts will no longer be enough; global mobilization is required.⁶⁹ Nonetheless, on the local front how we care for our environment may legitimately vary considerably. The nature of the regional aspects of dwelling determines the nature of the virtues of dwelling, and their proper expression in action. In particular, a central dwelling virtue is passionate devotion to regional icons reflecting sensitivity to both heritage and place. Associated vices of excess and deficiency are respectively indifference to such icons, and fanaticism, though where the line is to be drawn between fanaticism and passionate devotion is not sharp, and a matter of controversy. This regionality suggests that what is holy has an intensely personal quality (though a personal quality which is not disjoint from that of one’s dwelling fellows, and not something that is immune to the findings of science). As a result, my examples will concern my native land, New Zealand (particularly the northern region). In New Zealand, we may, indeed should, treat native forest as holy. There is a government-initiated plan to plant “a billion trees.” But should these be the fast-growing commercial pinus radiata whose slash causes major devastation in floods? Further, wilding pinus radiata is seen by lovers of native forest bush and plants as a scourge infesting our coasts and hillsides, displacing native pohutukawa whose red flowers at Christmas time make it a very special tree, and native tussock in South Island tussock country. They are to be killed where appropriate.⁷⁰ Trees as such are not equal. Even areas planted on hillsides for commercial purposes alongside native bush are seen as ruining the aesthetics of our beloved forest-clad hills. In California, however, pinus radiata would be, and should be treated completely differently. Of course, what counts as a pest weed is both vague and sometimes contested, even essentially so. Furthermore, there will be controversial policy issues. Should private landowners be legally required to eliminate certain pest plants on her land and if so which ones? Should plant nurseries be barred from selling certain plants even when popular with gardeners? There are also tensions with animal rights groups and opponents of certain poisons. A passionate conservationist of native New Zealand forest and birds may kill hundreds of (Australian-originated) possums on her own land, whereas a sentience-based ethics of benevolence not so sensitive to the regional nature of “seeing as holy” might not sanction such killings. Nonetheless, benevolence, ⁶⁹ David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth (New York: Allen Lane, 2019). ⁷⁰ What counts as appropriate is highly contextual, and quite properly beset by ambivalence and indeterminacy. And as stated above, attitudes can legitimately be highly personal. Two huge wilding pines on our semi-rural property received a stay of execution, and I have grown to appreciate them for a variety of reasons. Now they are (almost) loved.
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caring, love, as dwelling virtues are shaped by the regional nature of the orientation: ‘seeing as holy’. It is also important to consider the regionality of time and heritage, as well as place in dwelling. Even a passionate lover of native forest will feel outrage at any suggestion of killing the old (by New Zealand standards) English oaks growing among the native trees in the Auckland Domain, for these are an Auckland icon planted by the city fathers. Of great importance to dwelling then is the regionality of the past; one’s heritage. To have identity as a social being is to have a heritage. Alasdair MacIntyre is someone in the virtue ethics tradition who recognizes this, claiming: I am born with a past; and to try to cut myself of from that past, in the individualist mode, is to deform my present relationships . . . Notice that rebellion against my identity is always one possible way of expressing it.⁷¹
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To summarize: the understanding of ‘topos’ (place) in terms of dwelling place has four major features not shared by the mere notion of topos as such. (a) Dwelling is fundamentally local though integrated with the universal and associated virtues and concerns. One does not dwell in any place; one dwells in a place that is local to one. (b) Dwelling is something one does: one is not just “emplaced”; one does not just find oneself in a place. Nonetheless, as Heidegger repeatedly makes clear, we are “delivered into” a pre-existing network of significances and interpretations provided by culture, language, ongoing conversation. But that does not mean we are powerless to act well or badly within that network. (c) Since dwelling is something one does, it can be done well or badly. Or rather, since dwelling is a ‘success’ notion for Heidegger, he can both say that the essence of humans is to dwell, and deny that we dwell (for we live in a place in a manner not in keeping with dwelling in it). Hence, there are virtues and appropriate orientations associated with dwelling—these include, centrally (good dispositions of): wonder; feeling secure, safe, and “at home”; caring; letting be;⁷² passionate devotion to local icons; and, in general, seeing as ‘holy’.
⁷¹ After Virtue, 205. ⁷² ‘To let beings be . . . does not refer to neglect and indifference but rather the opposite. To let be is to engage oneself with beings’ ‘On the Essence of Truth’ 144, cited in Jeff Malpas, Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 270.
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(d) The logos of dwelling is the overarching logos within which all other logoi reside. Hence, virtues and orientations proper to other logoi such as ethics, architecture, husbandry, and for Heidegger even art,⁷³ are shaped by what is needed for dwelling. Notably, science needs to be informed by a dwelling orientation rather than that of equipmentality, where everything is considered in a technicist way as resource.
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⁷³ See ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’ in Poetry, Language, Thought.
4 Thick Concept Centralism and Objectivity (i) Introduction Chapters 1 and 2 outlined and defended an objectivist realist view of ethics characterized by TCC/CV. An important objection to the view is Bernard Williams’ scepticism about the objectivity of an ethics based on the thick concepts. Yet Williams is also famous for advocating something like Thick Concept Centralism which he contrasts with the “morality system.” Can TCC be combined with an objectivist view of ethics? Defending an affirmative answer is the task of this chapter. “Objectivity” in ethics can be understood as an ontological, semantic, or an epistemological notion. In ontology, to claim that an ethical theory is objective is to claim at least that factualism is true which recall states: 1.
There are ethical facts; they are part of the fabric of the world.
Further, for the theory to be objective in the ontological sense, the facts in question must be objective rather than subjective. That is to say:
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2.
There are “objective” facts which make ethical claims true.
Ontological objectivity in this sense is not necessarily realist. Bernard Williams puts Kant in the category of non-realist objectivist, interpreting Kant’s notion of the inescapability of the moral as a claim that a moral demand is inescapable insofar as ‘it is one that a rational agent must accept if he is to be a rational agent.’¹ He then points out that for Kant the objectivity of ethical statements ‘does not run through the relation between those statements and the world, but rather through the relation between accepting those statements and practical reason.’² For a realist theory then we need in addition:
¹ Bernard Williams ‘Ethics and the Fabric of the World’ in Bernard Williams, Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers, 1982–1993 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 172–81, 175. ² Williams, ‘Ethics and the Fabric of the World’, 175.
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0005
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3. Ethical claims are made true by objective facts in the world external to reasoning and reflective powers of agents, as opposed to the reasoning structure of the reasoning agent, even an idealized one. According to semantic objectivism Descriptivism is true. That is: 4.
Ethical claims purport to represent or describe reality.
Finally, as an epistemological thesis, to claim that a theory is objective is to claim:
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5. We can have (objective) knowledge of the (objective) facts which make ethical claims true. TCC/CV is held to be objective in all these ways. How does Williams’ scepticism threaten objectivity? According to Williams, understandings of virtue and vice through the thick concepts are relative to ‘insider’ perspectives. If virtues are ‘anchored to different cultural backgrounds or to different persons, or to different commitments copresent in a single person . . . or to different times in a single person’s life’³ they are relative to cultural and historical location, perspective, personal commitment. According to the sceptical position this relativity implies that conceptions of virtue are embedded in traditions, viewpoints, and cultures that are insulated from each other. A form of relativism threatens at the ontological level. Thesis 2 is false. Furthermore, assuming that there are facts which make ethical judgments true we cannot have objective knowledge of them. Thesis 5 is false. Subjects located in one normative region would be ‘subjects from whom we cannot learn and with whom we cannot disagree’.⁴ Such insulation results in what Williams calls ‘merely notional confrontation’⁵ so that we could not ‘rationally appraise’ a supposedly conflicting view ‘even in the minimal sense of apprehending whether it conflicts with our own.’⁶ I shall argue that the kind of relativity supposed to exist by Williams (and MacIntyre) does not have this implication. Thesis 2 can be salvaged provided we have a suitable conception of objectivity. Further, Thesis 5 resists Williams’ challenge. Serious critique can occur by an insider where major reconfiguring and re-evaluation of a thick concept is advocated. Confrontation with alternatives
³ Elijah Milgram, ‘D’Ou Venons-Nous . . . Que Sommes Nous . . . Ou Allons-Nous?’ in Daniel Callcut (ed.), Reading Bernard Williams (London: Routledge, 2009), 141–65, 147. ⁴ Carol Rovane, ‘Did Williams Find the Truth in Relativism?’ in Reading Bernard Williams, 43–69, 57. ⁵ In his ‘The Truth in Relativism’ in Bernard Williams, Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 132–43. ⁶ Rovane, 57.
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is not here notional. In this chapter I give two examples, one from Nietzsche and a contemporary example from the “leadership industry.” Before providing a more detailed analysis of Williams’ critique in section (v) and my reply to that critique in section (vi) we need to set the stage. What makes his view such a serious challenge?
(ii) Thick Concepts as Prototype Concepts In combatting Williams’ scepticism we need first to consider the facts about us and our concepts which fuel his attack on the objectivity of ethics. Some of these facts are facts about our social and biological nature as human: due to our limited cognitive capacities we are creatures with limited perspective; due to our induction into these concepts within settings that are culturally and historically situated, and the fact that their meanings are relative to those settings, we are necessarily creatures with insider perspectives. These features are discussed in section (iv). Here I ask: what is it about the thick concepts themselves that makes them particularly vulnerable to the critique represented by what I shall call the Insider Thesis expressed thus:
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Insider Thesis Our relation to the particular perspectives involving thick concepts is that of an “insider’s perspective”: that is there is no advantage point suitably external to our familiarity with the thick concepts through which they can be evaluated.⁷ Here I suggest that the nature of thick concepts as prototype concepts makes their vulnerability to the problem posed by the Insider Thesis more apparent than real. Rather than being understood as highly determinate concepts with necessary and sufficient conditions of application, thick concepts should instead be understood as ‘prototype’ concepts. Despite the continuing prevalence of classical analyses of even complex concepts such as love by philosophers, psychologists are becoming increasingly sceptical of the empirical adequacy of such analyses for many natural language concepts. For Fehr and Russell⁸ and others, concepts such
⁷ Note that the insider’s perspective need not be one of total identification, but can be ‘sympathetic but non-identified’—the ‘ethnographic stance’. (Thomas, 55). ⁸ Beverley Fehr and James A. Russell, ‘The Concept of Love Viewed from a Prototype Perspective’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60 (1991), 425–38, 426; B. Fehr and J. A. Russell, ‘Concept of Emotion Viewed from a Prototype Perspective’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 113 (1984), 464–86.
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as love are best understood as having a prototypical structure, a structure having the following features. (1) Prototype concepts do not conform to the classical view that to have or understand a concept is to know what features are each necessary and jointly sufficient for items to be properly subsumable under that concept. Rather the concept is graspable by means of knowledge of various prototypes: paradigm instantiations which ‘represent experientially basic types of situation’.⁹ These basic types of situation provide ‘good examples’¹⁰ of the concept and thereby its stable core features. Let us illustrate with love. On Hume’s view such a feature is the indefinable ‘feeling’ of love that is ‘sufficiently known from our common feeling and experience.’ For others, the basic emotional experience of paradigmatic love is ‘a highly emotional attachment relationship’ rather than a single emotion or feeling.¹¹ These ‘good examples’ or core features may be encapsulated or elevated into different types of exemplars of love. For example, where the basic type of situation is understood in terms of attachment we may focus on a particularly noble exemplar of mother love; where we focus more narrowly on romantic attachment Romeo and Juliet may provide the exemplars. By contrast if exemplary compassion is a basic type of situation which the concept of love is seen as representing, Jesus Christ may be viewed as an archetypal loving individual. (2) Items falling under a prototype concept bear degrees and kinds of similarity to prototypes, a feature that explains disagreements about the nature of that concept. The prototype approach to categorizing items under a concept ‘involves categorizing objects . . . in terms of their similarity to a good example . . . ’¹² Since there are many features of a complex property gasped through a prototype concept, and many types of good example, there are many dimensions of similarity and many ways of clustering types of similarity relation. As Fehr and Russell claim, ‘no single clustering would capture all of the overlapping and cross-cutting features of similarity in the domain of love.’¹³ For example, given a basic typology of companionate versus passionate love, similarity relations would suggest a natural clustering of six items on Fehr and Russell’s more fine-grained typology—namely, infatuation, puppy love, love at first sight, lust, passionate ⁹ Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 190. See also Paul Churchland, A Neurocomputational Perspective: The Nature of Mind and the Structure of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). ¹⁰ Jill N. Kearns and Frank D. Fincham, “A Prototype Analysis of Forgiveness,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30 (2004), 838–55, 838. ¹¹ See J. G. Allen, Coping with Trauma: From Self Understanding to Hope 2nd edn (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2005). ¹² Jill N. Kearns and Frank D. Fincham, ‘A Prototype Analysis of Forgiveness’ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 30 (2004), 838–55, 838. ¹³ Fehr and Russell, 434.
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love, and romantic love—since they all contrast with companionate love.¹⁴ However, typologies of love vary considerably. Fehr and Russell note that psychologists’ typologies divide into two types: ‘those in which the divisions are specified by abstract features and those in which the divisions are specified by the type of love object’. Folk typology by contrast ‘seems to freely mix these forms’. For example, they note, Erich Fromm’s typology is of the second type, with a division of types of love in accordance with five types of love object: brother, mother, sex partner, self, and God.¹⁵ Others such as Abraham Maslow have a typology of the first type, but his categories, ‘deficiency love’ and ‘being love’, are highly theory laden, reflecting his normative psychological theory of the self.¹⁶ As a result, note Fehr and Russell, his typology is not reflected in folk typology as measured by the subjects of their experiments. Unsurprisingly then, not only is there no agreement on those features of love which are held to be defining, there is no agreement on a typology of love. According to Fehr and Russell not even psychologists agree on a typology of love. (3) Because of the open-texturedness of the notion of similarity, a feature of prototype concepts is their flexibility. Prototype concepts are capable of being applied to cases other than paradigms through ‘imaginative extension.’¹⁷ In the application of such concepts to the world ‘our imaginative rationality is the chief means we have for dealing critically, creatively, and sensitively with novel situations that arise for us each day.’¹⁸ On this view, wisdom, rationality, or reasonableness in ethics cannot be understood independently of emotion, imagination, metaphor, narrative. For example, Hume’s concept of love as an indefinable feeling can be seen as a prototype concept having a built in flexibility permitting extension to various types of love, ranging from the affections of friendship to (for Hume) esteem founded in gratitude for services rendered to one. Some extensions, however, are more than usually controversial; for example, extension to universal love or agape. Typologies of love which include altruism as a type of love make such extension easier;¹⁹ other typologies which divide love into companionate and passionate, or exclude one’s “neighbour” as an object of love make it more difficult or even impossible. We can now see how prototype thick concepts are apparently vulnerable to the Williams’ critique, but at the same time their nature as prototype concepts suggests that this vulnerability is more apparent than real. Certainly, the exemplars, similarity relations, and imaginative extensions through which thick concepts are understood are highly relative to culture (whose evaluations are strongly shaped by their religious and other beliefs) and historical location. The cultural accretions in terms of which the evaluative properties of the world are understood ¹⁴ Fehr and Russell, 434. ¹⁵ Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (London: Unwin, 1975). ¹⁶ Toward a Psychology of Being. ¹⁷ Johnson, 190–1. ¹⁸ Johnson, 77. ¹⁹ H. H. Kelley, ‘Love and Commitment’ in H. H. Kelley et al., Close Relationships (New York: W. H. Freeman, 1983), 265–314. Here, Kelley describes three types of love: passionate, pragmatic, and altruistic.
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are so rich in meaning that on Williams’ view ‘confrontation’ with quite different understandings (of the nature of and choice of paradigms, and similarity relations) is ‘notional.’ However, the third feature of prototype concepts is their flexibility, and the ‘imaginative extension’ of a prototype concept is a rational and creative process where claims about similarity relations to earlier paradigms can be controversial and subject to critical discussion. Understandings are not insulated from each other; on the contrary, in imaginative extension engagement with rival viewpoints is possible. Certainly ‘confrontation’ may be very difficult but is attempted critique always ‘notional’? Let me give a contemporary example—a critique of the “leadership industry.” In her The End of Leadership Barbara Kellerman²⁰ argues that the ‘leadership industry’ has ignored ‘context’ in the form of history, culture and change at its considerable cost. It is predominantly ‘leader-centric’; ignores ‘followers’ (conceived as subordinates who have less power, authority, and influence than do their superiors, and who therefore usually, but not invariably, fall into line),²¹ and in so doing ignores the virtues of followers; focuses on developing good leaders rather than on how to deal with unethical and incompetent leaders; and assumes that leadership can be taught, and remarkably quickly. These features attest to the ahistorical approach to leadership in the leadership industry. For we have moved from a culture where leadership as a thick concept is tied to evaluation of leadership in terms of “leader as hero,” where there is a strongly hierarchical notion of leadership and a ready acceptance of authority, to a culture marked by increasing leadership failure and exposure of that failure, and increasing sense of entitlement and power of followers. Says Kellerman: Everywhere we weigh in, register our opinions, and express our preferences, needs, wants, and wishes. Sometimes the effect of this engagement . . . is real, of consequence. It is in any case the act of self-expression itself that matters. It further fuels our sense of entitlement and empowerment, and it further devalues those better schooled or credentialed, more informed than we.²²
Does the emphasis on ‘context’ (historical and cultural) entail that thick concepts, evaluatively embedded as they are in a context, are not criticizable? It may be thought so, for there is no external standpoint from which to criticize them (since there is normative insulation) and “insiders” are thoroughly engaged with those concepts and thereby share the evaluative point of those concepts as culturally given and historically determined. In a trenchant criticism of the leadership industry as an engaged participant with a highly credentialed expertise— ²⁰ New York: Harper Collins, 2012. ²² The End of Leadership, 37.
²¹ The End of Leadership, xx.
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Kellerman shows that such insularity is not entailed by the cultural and historical embeddedness of thick concepts. She argues that a proper understanding of leadership as a thick concept cannot be gained without understanding in a sufficiently deep way context, but that with that understanding, quite radical critique is possible. Indeed, without it proper critical perspective is not forthcoming. By contrast the leadership industry remains, says Kellerman, ahistorical, insular, narrow in focus, ignoring the virtues of followers and the problems of leadership vice, ‘self-satisfied self-perpetuating and poorly policed,’²³ narrowly professionalized ignoring broad intellectual, historical, and cultural context, and not adequately adapting to and appreciating the consequences of, major change, notably the era of social networking and mass, instant, transfer of information. Insofar as leadership is a thick concept it is a prototype concept having many (often competing) exemplars and many (often competing) similarity relations licencing many types of extensions and evaluation. And these differences fit different cultures and periods of history. Thus, Ayn Rand’s conception of the virtues of the entrepreneurial industrial leader-hero resonates with a historical and cultural era, and apparently competes with but is now replaced by a different paradigm of the virtues of “the team builder” with a proportionate upgrading of followers and downgrading of leaders that apparently suits our more egalitarian age. But the idea that leadership theorists cannot assess and integrate the strengths of the different exemplars and similarity relations is unduly pessimistic. In general those with broad knowledge of cultural critique embracing philosophers such as Nietzsche, Gadamer, Taylor, MacIntyre; sociologists such as Weber and Durkheim; political theorists such as Hannah Arendt; philosopher-psychologists such as Lear, can break down the alleged normative insulation. The pessimism is belied by the facts of broad-based critique usually outside the narrow realms of ethics in the analytic tradition.
(iii) Objectivity and Perspectivism We turn now to facts about our social and biological nature as human that fuel Williams’ scepticism. Due to our limited cognitive capacities we are creatures with limited perspective, limited by the culturally and historically situated settings in which we learn concepts and imbibe their rich meanings. The Insider Thesis claims that we are trapped within our own perspective: we cannot secure an appropriately external viewpoint from which to question that perspective. I shall acknowledge the truth of the claim presupposed by the Insider Thesis that:
²³ The End of Leadership, 169.
(P)
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(Human) knowledge is perspectival.
For (P) properly understood simply acknowledges the fact that knowledge is relative to human modes of cognition and that these modes are necessarily limited. However, I shall claim, (P) is not the death knell of objectivity. The argument is essentially this: to say that knowledge is perspectival is not to imply that putative knowledge is constituted by thinking, acting, and feeling as if one’s own perspective alone generates knowledge. To recognize that knowledge is perspectival is not ipso facto to claim that objectivity is impossible, for objectivity requires a set of dispositions concerning how one deals with that recognition. These dispositions comprise the virtue of objectivity whose main features are the topic of section (vii). Nietzsche provides a clue about its key feature in the following passage, which makes it clear that both (P) is true and (P)’s truth is compatible with a legitimate objectivity: Perspectival seeing is the only kind of seeing there is, perspectival knowing the only kind of knowing and the more feelings about a matter which we allow to come to expression, the more eyes, different eyes through which we able to view this same matter, the more complete our ‘conception’ of it, our ‘objectivity’ will be.²⁴
Given human nature (P) implies that: (V)
Even virtuous individual humans have limited perspective
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and that (H)
Humans have different perspectives.
This is the interpretation of (P) that causes difficulty for objectivity. To make room for objectivity in the face of (P)’s truth given (V) and (H) let me now offer a conception of objectivity compatible with (P), (V), and (H), and which drives our conception of objectivity as a virtue. The first step is to recognize that Nietzsche’s point is compatible with the truth of: (S)
Some perspectives are superior to others.
²⁴ Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Douglas Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), Third Essay, sect. 12, 98.
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The problem then is: what is the relation between (S) and objectivity? Does one possess the virtue of objectivity just by having a superior perspective, or perhaps even the best perspective? Nietzsche claims in the passage cited above not that superior perspectives yield objectivity, but that: (M) The more perspectives are brought to bear on an issue the more objective one is.
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(M) implies that what makes objectivity a virtue is not that one’s perspective is superior. Having the best perspective (if such exists) is not sufficient for objectivity, for one may not be open to other perspectives. Nor is it the case that being objective entails that one has the best perspective for a relatively ignorant person may be open to different perspectives such as expertise she does not possess, and thereby become ‘more objective’ to the point where she is judged as having met the threshold of being objective simpliciter. We need to then to ask: how is (M) connected with (S)? We might say that (S) is incompatible with (M) since why would one bother with a lot of inferior perspectives when one’s own is superior? “More eyes” may contaminate and corrupt a superior vision. There are several answers to this question. (a) One needs an attitude of appropriate epistemic humility towards one’s own perspective. That is a moral and intellectual virtue which is part of practical wisdom. (b) Even if the perspective of the virtuous is by and large superior, inferior perspectives overall may have something to offer, just as overall inferior theories may contain grains of truth which should be preserved. (c) Even the virtuous have limited perspectives, lacking expertise in many areas, and inevitably limited by their historical and cultural location. (d) To avoid “more (and inferior) eyes” contaminating superior perspectives, or those superior in certain respects, we need certain dialogical and epistemic virtues, notably those involved with excellence in constraint integration (see section (vi)). These virtues include courage, perseverance, frankness, openness, and kinds of strength. We have shown that (P) does not entail that we are trapped within our own perspective, that we are insulated from other perspectives. But how realistic is the possibility of genuine cultural critique, and does such critique meet requirements of objectivity as they should be understood? We turn next to possibly the most famous of all attempts to critique cultural understandings of thick concepts; that of Nietzsche in his attack on Slave Morality. We then discuss further the notion of objectivity itself by considering in more detail Williams’ critique and his
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demanding notion of objectivity. Having rejected his specific conception, we finally give an account of objectivity as a virtue.
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(iv) The Slave Revolt in Ethics Possibly the best-known critique of the thick virtue concepts as understood by a culture is Nietzsche’s attack on the Christian virtues of patience, pity, egalitarian justice, meekness, humility as interpreted within Christian culture of the “Europe” of his day. What is particularly interesting about his critique from our perspective is that he conceives of the logos of ethics in terms of TCC/CV. What is in question for him is not TCC/CV as such, but a modern understanding of the thick concepts conceived as virtues and vices. This too is a critique as an insider: Nietzsche belongs to the culture he is critiquing. He is vulnerable therefore to Williams’ critique in terms of the insider perspective and the impossibility of objectivity in ethics. However, he is an insider who deploys the perspective of psychology to confront culturally given and on his view religiously based understandings. Ironically, since this critique has routinely been understood as an attack on morality as such and a defence of immoralism, I will deploy Nietzsche’s attack on Christian ethics, as interpreted within the culture of his day, in the service of a defence of the possibility of objectivity in ethics. Certainly, Nietzsche attacks ‘morality’ but in the same general way as Williams attacks the ‘morality system’ as opposed to ethics as such. Williams deplores the virtual disappearance of the thick concepts and their replacement by the thin concepts, notably obligation. Nietzsche deplores the highly distorted understanding of the thick concepts as virtue and vice notions by the ‘weak’: those who are prey to resentment. Their understanding Nietzsche calls ‘Slave Morality’. What is interesting in Nietzsche’s critique of the logos of ethics as understood in slave morality is that the critique is based on a form of bridge building discussed in Chapter 3. That logos is confronted with concepts from a social science, psychology, in particular the concept of defence mechanisms expressing resentment. At the beginning of the Genealogy of Morals Nietzsche describes the cultural and individual etiology of resentment as a reaction of those who are powerless in the situation in which they find themselves. This is a resentment that gives birth to the revaluation of values; the “Slave Revolt” which is the origin of morality as we understand it. My understanding of Nietzsche’s conception of the slave revolt is essentially a psychoanalytic one where he accuses the slaves of reinterpreting the thick virtue concepts. That reinterpretation is a symptom, culturally expressed, of a defence: a defence against a sense of inferiority. In this way, I shall argue, Nietzsche’s attack on certain conceptions of the thick concepts is not from within
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an insider’s perspective but is rather from a suitably objective one: that arguably endorsed by human science. Let us now briefly outline Nietzsche’s critique. Nietzsche’s account of a culture based on resentment takes the form of a ‘genealogy’ having several stages. The dramatis personae are the ‘priests’ of “slave” morality, and the ‘knightly- aristocratic’ types of “noble” morality. According to Nietzsche’s genealogy of resentment, those of higher rank thought of themselves as powerful, ‘the masters’. By contrast we have the ‘forgery and selfdeception of the impotence’ of the priests: those of “slave morality”.²⁵ This powerlessness is expressed in externalized self-hate: ‘Priests are the most powerless, from powerlessness their hatred grows to take on a monstrous and sinister shape . . . ’²⁶ The ‘shape’ is ‘sinister’ because the externalized self-hate takes the form of resentment where the inferiority pole of ‘will to power’ becomes dominant, manifesting in secretive and untruthful ways. Emotionally, such a person is characterized by ‘the downtrodden and surreptitiously smouldering emotions of revenge and hatred.’²⁷ The moral/cultural manifestation of this externalized self-hate of impotence is the ‘reversal of the aristocratic value equation’²⁸ constituting the ‘slave revolt in morals’ which ‘begins when ressentiment itself becomes creative and ordains values.’²⁹ In very general terms the reversal of values has the following form: ‘the miserable alone are the good; the poor, the powerless, the low alone are the good. The suffering, the deprived, the sick, the ugly are the only pious ones . . .’³⁰ Crucially, for the moral revolution there is a reversal or change in the understanding of the “thick” concepts and even the nature of psychological and other conditions of persons. For example, not only are patience, chastity, cowardly fear, submissiveness elevated into virtues, but the understanding of their nature as virtues is thoroughly transformed., Not only is cowardly fear transformed into the virtue of humility, but the understanding of humility as a virtue is itself skewed. It is now a form of self-abasement as opposed to a sense of one’s place in the world that is not tainted by forms of overweening pride. Resentment is understood by Nietzsche as an individual neurosis, a form of psychic defence that is reinforced by the rise of Christian ethics in its cultural manifestation (whether or not this cultural manifestation expresses a proper understanding of that ethics). In what Nietzsche calls the Christian neurosis the understanding of what is required by, for example, benevolence or helpfulness is expressive of resentment. This understanding involves a form of repression where a fundamental desire to be “good” in the “aristocratic” sense is repressed because one’s manifest impotence is too painful. What is thus concealed in this defence is that painful sense of impotence. As Bernard Reginster puts it, the person of
²⁵ I, 13, 30. ²⁸ I, 7, 19.
²⁶ I, 7, 19. ²⁹ I, 10, 22.
²⁷ I, 13, 30. ³⁰ I, 7,19.
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resentment on Nietzsche’s understanding becomes inhibited by a feeling of incurable impotence, while retaining his “pride” and a desire at some level to lead a life of nobility and strength.³¹ This constitutes a dynamic conflict between two incompatible desires: a desire at some level to lead a life of strength, nobility, or achievement, and a sense of oneself as impotent and inferior. The psychic conflict created by the gap between one’s ‘ego ideal’ and one’s sense of impotence creates a need for resolution, a resolution that constitutes a defence. However, the defensive self-effacing resolution³² is distorted. In Nietzsche’s terms it is essentially an escape from one’s sense of impotence in which the ‘self wilts away’ in self-sacrificing and self-effacing behaviour, involving a reconfiguring of notions of selfishness and selflessness; egoism and altruism. The psychic conflict between that sense of impotence and expansive strivings is not resolved by a full (self-loving) acceptance of one’s objectively based weakness, which can then be worked on in processes of self-overcoming within a framework of acceptance of what cannot be changed. Rather the “solution” of resentment valorizes the weak reversal of value and understanding of virtue. At a cultural level we get ‘the slave revolt in morals’. The self-hate of resentment, as Nietzsche discusses it then, has two main features. (1) It is externalized in a hostile way, for it is manifested in forms of bringing others down, which may be subtle (as in pity), or a more overt undermining of other’s achievements or ability to take pride in them (the so-called ‘tall poppy syndrome’).³³ (2) It is a self-effacing form of defence (as opposed to expansive, to use Karen Horney’s terms), since the forms of bringing down are not through cruelty, overt aggression, or conquering. Nietzsche makes essentially the same distinction between the reactive man of resentment and the active encroaching individual of cruelty.
³¹ ‘Ressentiment, Evaluation and Integrity’ International Studies in Philosophy 27 (1995), 117–24, 118. ³² See Karen Horney for discussion of what she terms the ‘self-effacing’ solution. She has a basic taxonomy of three basic forms of neurotic solution to the psychic conflict described above, all of which are well illustrated in Nietzsche’s writings: (1) The ‘self-effacing solution’. Here, the idealized self is repressed, and the sense of oneself as inferior or impotent is dominant. Resentment is an externalized form of this type of escape. (2) The ‘expansive solutions’ of mastery. In these ‘solutions’ the sense of oneself as inferior or impotent is repressed. (3) The solution of ‘resignation’. This ‘third major solution of the intra- psychic conflicts consists essentially in the neurotic’s withdrawing from the inner battlefield and declaring himself uninterested.’ (Neurosis and Human Growth: The Struggle Toward Self Realization (New York: Norton, 1970)), 259. ³³ This phrase is common in New Zealand and connotes the metaphorical “cutting down of the tall poppy”; a prevalent phenomenon in New Zealand.
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In short, resentment expressive of self-hate but manifested in self-sacrificing altruism, pity, and so forth safeguards the subject’s sense of himself as superior, specifically superior in goodness. It is, however, a defence against the pain of psychic conflict. For Nietzsche the resentment values are thoroughly internalized. They are internalized as, for example, the requirement to love even one’s enemy and pity the suffering, the value of equality, the virtues of self-abasing humility and patience, chastity, and so on. This is not to say that hostility is not manifested as symptoms; for Nietzsche pity is a ‘subtle form of revenge’ and there may be ‘smouldering’ hatred. Rather the hostility is a depth phenomenon, not necessarily brought to consciousness; it need not be experienced as such. This does not mean there is no pain; the symptoms of self-hate are manifested in many ways.
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(v) Williams’ Critique We have considered two features which lend plausibility to Williams’ scepticism; the prototype nature of the thick concepts and the truth of perspectivism expressed by (P). We suggested using the examples of Nietzsche’s attack on Slave Morality and Kellerman’s attack on the leadership industry that insider critique is possible: we are not trapped within our perspectives; confrontation is not ‘notional’. However, the argument is not over. Williams would argue that the objectivity gained is not genuine; proper objectivity is not something attainable by ethics. What in more detail does he mean by objectivity and why does he think that ethics cannot attain it? I summarize his views in argument form via the interpretations of some of his sympathetic and astute commentators, notably A. W. Moore and Alan Thomas. The first part of the Argument which I call A concerns Williams’ requirements on objectivity; the second part of the Argument, B, shows why Williams thinks ethics does not meet those standards, while Part C constitutes the conclusions drawn from A and B. A.
Concerning objectivity in general.
(1)
One Reality Thesis.
‘All [objective] knowledge answers ultimately to a unified, substantial, autonomous reality which can in principle, be conceived as such.’³⁴ (2)
Single Conception Thesis.
‘To conceive it as such is to form a single conception of it such that, for any item of knowledge, the conception indicates what makes that item of knowledge true.’³⁵ ³⁴ A. W. Moore, ‘Realism and the Absolute Conception’ in Alan Thomas (ed.), Bernard Williams (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 24–46, 33. ³⁵ Moore, 33.
(3)
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Detachment Thesis.
This conception ‘cannot be from the same point of view as any given item of knowledge.’³⁶ (4)
Absolute Conception Thesis.
The Detachment Thesis is satisfied only by what Williams calls the ‘Absolute Conception’.³⁷ This is understood as a conception of the world ‘on which scientific investigators, abstracting as much as possible from their various perceptual peculiarities, might converge’.³⁸ (5) B. (6)
The Absolute Conception of objectivity is satisfied by the natural sciences. We now move to Part B of the Argument, concerning ethics. Thick Concepts Thesis
Ethical knowledge presupposes ‘a capacity to respond to the evaluative features of situations using an appropriate range of thick ethical concepts’ and ‘an appropriate understanding of those concepts.’³⁹ (7)
Denial of the Two-Factor Analysis of the Thick Concepts Thesis
‘Any attempt to grasp the extension of an evaluative concept independent of grasp of its evaluative point fails’;⁴⁰ the thick concepts, in particular, cannot be analyzed as consisting in separate descriptive and prescriptive components. (8)
Social Embeddedness Thesis
The thick concepts are embedded in and relative to a social perspective which the user of those concepts possesses, and from which their evaluative point (as understood through that perspective) can be grasped.
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(9)
Multiple Perspectives Thesis
³⁶ Ibid. ³⁷ On McDowell’s interpretation the Absolute Conception involves a view of ‘science as a mode of enquiry in which the facts can directly imprint themselves on our minds, without need of mediation by anything as historically conditioned and open to dispute as canons of good and bad scientific argument’ (John McDowell, Mind and World, 380, cited in Moore, 28). Thomas excoriates this interpretation claiming that reading the phrase ‘maximally independent of our conception of the world and its peculiarities’ as ‘totally independent of our conception of the world and its peculiarities’ is an ‘uncharitable’ one (Introduction, Bernard Williams, 2). Moore describes it as caricatured and unfair (A. W. Moore, ’Realism and the Absolute Conception’ in Bernard Williams, 24–46, 28). A less extreme reading is offered by Blackburn, a reading he labels ‘perspectival absolutism’ (Simon Blackburn, ‘The Absolute Conception: Putnam versus Williams’ in Callcut (ed.), Reading Bernard Williams, 9–23). According to perspectival absolutism the ‘question of whether some conception features in an absolute account of the world is the question whether we can expect convergence upon it from sensorily diverse, but rational investigators’ (Blackburn, 15). This conception is available to the natural sciences, in particular to the mathematical modelling characteristic of physics. Says Blackburn: ‘In the cases of scientific primary qualities what we can properly expect is convergence not only in possession of those concepts but in their application’ (Blackburn, 18). ³⁸ ‘Ethics and the Fabric of the World’, 177. ³⁹ Alan Thomas ‘The Nonobjectivist Critique of Moral Knowledge’ in Thomas (ed.), Bernard Williams, 47–72, 49. ⁴⁰ Thomas, 55.
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There are many such perspectives: throughout history and throughout different cultures. (10)
Insider Thesis
Our relation to the particular perspectives involving thick concepts is that of an “insider’s perspective”: that is there is no advantage point suitably external to our familiarity with the thick concepts through which they can be evaluated.⁴¹ C.
Conclusions drawn from A and B.
(11) It is not the case that ethics and the natural sciences comprise a single conception of reality. Hence: (12) It cannot be the case that both ethics and the natural sciences can lay claim to an objective conception of reality (given the Single Conception Thesis). Hence:
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(13) Since the natural sciences have the greater claim to objectivity (ethics violates the Detachment Thesis) ethics unlike science cannot constitute a form of objective knowledge. My defence of the objectivity of ethics will involve a rejection of (2) the Single Conception Thesis. This rejection is a consequence of the hermeneutic ontology outlined in Chapter 1. This will allow for the possibility that both ethics and the natural sciences can lay claim to objectivity. But is ethics objective in its own right given the truth of all theses in Part B of the Argument except on my view the Insider Thesis? The Thick Concepts Thesis is a consequence of TCC and I accept the views about the thick concepts expressed in (6) and (7), as well as the Social Embeddedness Thesis (8) and Multiple Perspectives Thesis (9). In arguing that ethics can be objective in its own right I offer an interpretation of the Detachment Thesis that is weaker than Williams’ own interpretation (that of the “Absolute Conception”). I thereby reject the Insider Thesis. There is, I claim, an advantage point suitably external to our familiarity with the thick concepts through which they can be critiqued.
(vi) Nietzsche, Williams, and Objectivity in Ethics How can we deploy Nietzsche’s conception of vices of resentment, masquerading as virtues of beneficence and so on, in the service of a conception of objectivity in
⁴¹ Note that the insider’s perspective need not be one of total identification, but can be ‘sympathetic but non-identified’—the ‘ethnographic stance’. (Thomas, 55).
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ethics? The argument against Williams deploying our discussion of Nietzsche proceeds in three steps. Step 1 The Social Embeddedness Thesis and the Multiple Perspectives Thesis do not entail the Insider Thesis. Step 2 Consequently there is a possibility that ethics can satisfy the Detachment Thesis suitably understood, and in fact ethics does so. Step 3 The One Reality Thesis does not entail the Single Conception Thesis which is false. We begin with Step 1. Nietzsche believes both that the understanding of the thick concepts is relative to perspectives and that at least some perspectives notably the theological are pernicious, a perniciousness that needs to be exposed through every means possible as Nietzsche claims in the following passage:
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Against this theologians’ instinct I wage war: I have found its traces everywhere . . . This faulty perspective on all things is elevated into a morality, a virtue, a holiness; . . . and no other perspective is conceded any further value once one’s own has been made sacrosanct with the names of “God”, “redemption”, and “eternity”. I have dug up the theologians’ instinct everywhere: it is the most widespread, really subterranean, form of falsehood found on earth.⁴²
Being relative to perspectives is compatible with the idea that some perspectives are flawed, and can be shown to be so. How can we conceive of some conceptions of ethics as flawed? Though the Social Embeddedness and Multiple Perspective theses are both held to be true, they do not entail the Insider Thesis. Perspectives through which we gain understanding can be critiqued. In arguing that the theological perspective drives the distorted conceptions of virtue and vice characteristic of slave morality Nietzsche speaks from the perspective of a psychologist. For him the valorizing of the resentment-based interpretation of the thick concepts is expressive of weakness and psychic sickness, namely a neurotic condition. Furthermore for him, the interpretation of the thick concepts in terms of resentment values is itself expressive of that sickness, and that interpretation is seen as faulty. What might be called the psychoanalytic critique of the slaves’ interpretation of the thick virtue and vice concepts arguably allows for Nietzsche’s ethical views to be what Brian Leiter calls Results Continuous with science,⁴³ provided science is understood in the broadest sense so that it incorporates the human sciences, including psychoanalysis. In short, for a trait to be a virtue, according to Nietzsche, its characteristic depth ⁴² Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), sect. 9, 575–6. ⁴³ Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (London: Routledge, 2002). Results continuity ‘requires that philosophical theories – e.g., theories of morality . . . be supported or justified by the results of the sciences . . . ’, (4).
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motivational features need to be psychically in order; neither expressive of the perversions of, for example, cruelty (which I do not discuss here) nor expressive of the various forms of neurosis such as defence against a sense of impotence, defence against the impurity and messiness of the world (as in the resignatory vices discussed in Genealogy of Morals Essay 3) and so on. Consider now Step 2. Does such a critique satisfy a suitable interpretation of the Detachment condition on objectivity? Let us concede that it does not satisfy the Absolute Conception. However, as many have emphasized from Gadamer to MacIntyre, dependence of knowledge on perspectives embodied in culture and tradition do not preclude a wondering, questioning, and argumentative stance on what Gadamer calls ‘prejudice’. This is not just a reflective stance, so emphasized in the analytic tradition, but a dialogical stance exhibiting dialogical virtues of openness, respect, facilititativeness, to name but a few of the epistemic dialogical virtues. However, one can reflect and even dialogue endlessly and yet be hopelessly wrong if one is ignorant of key facts. Appropriate detachment requires answerability to bodies of knowledge. Such answerability requires that we do not take for granted dominant current understandings of the thick concepts but that we critically assess them in the light of findings in those bodies of knowledge, in both the natural and human sciences. It may be asked: given that the human sciences themselves deploy the thick concepts how can the Detachment Thesis be satisfied? The idea that conceptions of humility, justice, helpfulness, and so on as virtues are “our” conceptions which are assumed to be shared, is a fudge. Within the same culture broadly conceived, people can have both naïve and sophisticated conceptions; conceptions formed or at least reinforced by false psychology and theology, or formed by our best human sciences. Prevalent conceptions, as Nietzsche and indeed Hume showed us, may be prone to systematic error as a result of these falsehoods. Nietzsche was a revisionist about a number of our thick concepts premised in large part on a revisionist attitude to our psychologically naïve conceptions of egoism and altruism. For Nietzsche, a familiarity with at least many thick concepts putatively referring to virtuous altruistic states and behaviour, is in fact a familiarity with certain distorted conceptions of those concepts—conceptions which describe nonvirtuous states and behaviour. As illustrated above (Chapter 5), work on pathological altruism bears this out. Let me further illustrate the possibility of critique of thick concepts with another example from Williams’ own writings. In ‘What does Intuitionism Imply’⁴⁴ Williams asks us to ‘consider a people who are filled with terror, perhaps of a rather special, numinous kind, by certain features of their environment. They have a word to pick out things to which they react in this way. It is not a blankly
⁴⁴ Bernard Williams, ‘What does Intuitionism Imply’ in his Making Sense of Humanity, 182–91.
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causal, still less a merely individual, reaction . . .’ We do not share this reaction. He asks: ‘Is the quality for which they have this term ‘there to be perceived’?’ He goes on: ‘It is part of their world; it is not part of our world. Is it part of the world? Or— we may put it another way—is it part of our world, when ‘our’ relates to a ‘we’ for which there are no others?’⁴⁵ This is where things go seriously wrong. The former kind of question is not equivalent to the latter kind. Being part of our world, even in this inclusive sense, is not necessarily being part of the world. We may all be wrong. In the case at hand, to the question ‘Is it part of the world?’ the answer is ‘No’, assuming the term purportedly picks out a property worthy of terrified response and the terrifying objects are not worthy of that response in virtue of their supposedly possessing that property. We may assume that the users of the term have false beliefs about these features of the environment that terrify them. Yes, the term for the alleged property is given meaning within a shared practice; yes we can say that the people within that practice know how to use the word, but it does not refer. The root of the problem is that a given ethical perspective that deploys thick concepts is often described as a social reality. The Multiple Perspectives Thesis is confusingly understood as a Multiple Realities Thesis. The mistake is to identify ethical reality with social practices, which are indeed multiple, reflecting different ethical perspectives, some of which are seriously flawed. Rather, ethical reality, which is part of the world (but understood through a distinctive logos), is that to which thick evaluative concepts, correctly understood, correctly apply. “Social realities” by contrast are constituted by the various social practices, and studied by such disciplines as sociology. Williams claims that we can provide answers to psychological questions that explain the practice, but ‘we can do nothing with the claim of objectivity . . .’⁴⁶ I hope to have shown that this is false. Consider finally Step 3. The Williams conception of objectivity requires the truth of the One Conception Thesis, and that is invariably taken to be that of the natural sciences to which as we have supposed, ethics is not reducible. However, multiple conceptions of One Reality exist as differing modes of intentional access to the same reality. In other words, the same reality may be rendered significant in many ways, since as Heidegger and very recently Scanlon has shown us in ways explored in Chapters 1 and 2, there are many frameworks for engaging with reality. One fundamental framework is that of the thick evaluative concepts. It is admitted along with Williams, MacIntyre, Gadamer, and McDowell who explicitly follows Gadamer that our understanding of such concepts is relative to culture and tradition. As we saw above, provision of meaning requires what MacIntyre calls
⁴⁵ Ibid. 185.
⁴⁶ Ibid. 186.
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in After Virtue a setting, which presupposes tradition. In particular, our intentional access to ethical reality (through the thick concepts) is inherently relative to perspective inasmuch as the Social Embeddedness and Multiple Perspective theses are held to be true. Nonetheless, those understandings can be critiqued through bodies of knowledge which are sufficiently detached from dominant modes of familiarity with such concepts. Among the most trenchant such critiques is that of Nietzsche, the self-styled first psychologist, one who profoundly influenced the later German psychoanalytic movement.
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(vii) The Virtue of Objectivity Our defence of TCC against Williams’ objection is not complete until we characterize a conception of objectivity appropriate to TCC/CV as the logos of ethics. It is not enough to say that objectivity in ethics is not the impersonal perspective of science: we need to give a positive account which is compatible with the truths embodied in the Social Embeddedness and Multiple Perspectives theses. In other words, we need to give an account of objectivity as a virtue which takes account of those truths. As a virtue objectivity is a cognitive excellence in humans: it is thus a disposition appropriate to human form of cognition. The Constraint on Virtue indicates that such a virtue must be congruent with what we know about human cognition including the knowledge that the brain builds and stores mental maps—a cognitive cartography rather than a massive set of precise rules. Further, insofar as human cognition is strongly affected by emotional and motivational features, a fact well appreciated by virtue ethicists, it is a virtue embracing emotional and motivational excellences, as is the broader so-called intellectual virtue of practical wisdom. What kind of cognitive excellence is the virtue of objectivity? A concept of objectivity as a virtue on which all can agree is a concept which (following Nagel)⁴⁷ might be called objectivity as (appropriate) self-transcendence; that is a possessor of the virtue is disposed to appropriately transcend the subjective; personal inclinations, attachments, beliefs, whims, and so forth. The issue is what counts as appropriate? Conceptions of the virtue will differ according to rival views on what counts as appropriate. So far I have understood “appropriate” in terms of a disposition to consider and integrate different perspectives on, for example, how to solve a problem and what beliefs are true. But we need to say more about what this involves.
⁴⁷ Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
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As is usual in the characterization of virtue, objectivity as a virtue needs to be contrasted with correlative vices: notably, vices of excess and deficiency. These vices in their general formulation I have called hyperobjective and hypersubjective vice.⁴⁸ In general, hyperobjective vice is characterized by a failure to appreciate that objectivity as a virtue is appropriate to human forms of cognition and rationality. Thus, the Detachment Thesis is interpreted as the view that objectivity proper requires that one is stripped of distinctively human characteristics:
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. . . a view or form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual’s make up and position in the world, or on the character of the particular type of creature he is.⁴⁹
As a result there is no recognition of the need to incorporate the truth of (P) (Perspectivism) within a conception of objectivity, nor of the need to give due weight to the personal in our practical lives. Hypersubjective vice is a failure to recognize facts, due to ego needs resulting in, for example, an inflated sense of entitlement, defensiveness and self-deception, arrogance, and so on. Straightforward non-culpable ignorance does not ipso facto entail lack of objectivity, although it is another route to falsehood, and wrongdoing. I hold an Austinian thesis about the nature of objectivity as a virtue. Just as J. L. Austin claimed that it is unfreedom and not freedom, unreal and not real which ‘wear the trousers’,⁵⁰ so objectivity as a virtue is not best understood through an ideal of perfection, but through a range of vices with which it can be contrasted. Perfection does not occur for two main reasons. My version of TCC/ CV (target centred virtue ethics) is a pluralistic view (see Chapter 9), so what would count as perfection is moot. Second, the imperfections and evils endemic to the world, being ongoing, will always be in tension with efforts at “perfect” integration. As the hermeneutic tradition recognizes, integrating perspectives is a process that does not terminate in overall completion, for it is done within the lived historical processes of the narratives of peoples’ lives; narratives that are characterized by ongoing tensions and conflict. In classical Aristotelian virtue theory, virtues are standardly opposed to vices of excess and deficiency. Objectivity is no exception. So hyperobjective and hyper-
⁴⁸ In Virtue Ethics, Chapter 8 I discuss the general features of these vices, and why objectivity should not be understood in terms of hyperobjectivity. ⁴⁹ The View from Nowhere, 5. ⁵⁰ J. L. Austin, ‘A Plea For Excuses’ in J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (eds.), Philosophical Papers 2nd edn (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 175–204, 180.
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subjective vice ‘wear the trousers’. We begin with hyperobjective vice, which Nietzsche describes thus: From now on, my dear philosophers, let us be aware of the dangerous old conceptual fable which posited a ‘pure, will-less, painless, timeless knowing subject’, let us be aware of the tentacles of such contradictory concepts as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute spirituality’, ‘knowledge in itself.’⁵¹
Hyperobjective vice takes at least the following forms. (i) What Nietzsche calls ‘a will to a system’, where this is taken to excesses of abstraction and systematization. (ii) A lack of recognition of the human and the personal: cultural and historical situatedness, the narrative particularities of our lives, differences between children and adults, and in short a lack of recognition of the differentiation of virtue. (iii) The emotional counterpart of the aspect of hyperobjective vice portrayed by Nietzsche in the above quote is fear of and thereby suspicion of, for example, complexity, messiness, particularity, impurity, pain, emotion in general. (iv) As a result of the vice expressed in (ii), there is a lack of recognition of multiple perspectives and thus of a need for epistemic virtues of perspective taking, and integrating well the strengths of different perspectives.
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(v) There is a view that rationality, including practical rationality, is characterized by the ‘point of view of the Universe’: “I obtain the self-evident principle that the good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view (if I may say so) of the Universe, than the good of any other . . . and it is evident that as a rational being I am bound to aim at the good generally – so far as it is obtainable by my efforts – not merely at a particular part of it.”⁵² (vi)
There is a passive, spectator, unengaged, orientation to the world.
(vii) There is a belief that, because it is limited in ways characteristic of human cognition, ‘human knowledge distorts or falsifies reality’.⁵³ This belief fails to recognize the two way ontological dependence of entities (discussed in Chapter 1); one pole of which is ‘our openness to the thing’, that is, intentional access through logos. Reality is not something that exists as a factum brutum independent of all modes of sensibility and logos. ⁵¹ On the Genealogy of Morals, Third Essay, sect. 12. ⁵² Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics 7th edn (London: Macmillan, 1907); reissued 1962, 382. ⁵³ Maudemarie Clark, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press 1990), 127.
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Forms of hypersubjective vice are: (i) (ii) (iii) (iv) (v) (vi) (vii) (viii)
Egocentricity Lack of perspective. The idea that knowledge derives from one’s own perspective. Failure to recognize one’s own lack of expertise and the importance of dialogue. Cynicism and a hostile orientation to the world, due to one’s own hatreds, and hurts. Living for the moment. Various fears (of, e.g., uncertainty, the unknown). Neediness (of, e.g., an ideology, cult, hero).
It should not be thought that the two categories of vice are unconnected. The neediness of the kind of hypersubjectivity described under (viii) can lead to the kind of inappropriate systematizing characterizing hyperobjective vice. The virtue of objectivity can now be schematically defined thus: (OV) The agent with objective virtue is disposed to understand, and appropriately integrate, multiple perspectives, ending up with a perspective that can be described as objective.
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It remains to see how objectivity as a virtue works. How does an agent with the virtue of objectivity deal with multiple perspectives? (1) By understanding the various perspectives relevant to an issue, she gains a better grasp on the constraints (broadly construed to include desiderata) operating on situations. This is necessary for determining the relevant facts, and reasonable weightings of the various constraints. As a university lecturer, for example, she does not just see things through the eyes of a researcher; she also sees things from the perspective of students, heads of departments, administrators, and even the government and policy makers. (2) She is skilled at integrating these constraints.⁵⁴ (3) She is skilled at doing this in a social context, for discovering alternative perspectives is social, and integrating constraints on solutions to problems is generally social. So an agent with the virtue of objectivity needs the dialogical virtues.⁵⁵
⁵⁴ I discuss constraint integration in my Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), in Chapter 12, sect. (ii). ⁵⁵ See my Virtue Ethics, Chapter 12 for further discussion.
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As suggested in section (iii), a person with the virtue of objectivity does not necessarily have a superior perspective at least ab initio. The most virtuous agent cannot transcend the limitations of human cognition: the facts of selective perception emphasized by such thinkers on human cognition as Andy Clark,⁵⁶ distributed cognition in our increasingly complex institutions, limited expertise, limited time, energy, and intellectual and emotional capacity. Although objectivity is part of practical wisdom it is not the whole of it. However, having virtuously discovered alternative perspectives, figured out the constraints operating on a situation, and having integrated them, she is more likely to end up with a superior perspective. Her perspective is superior to that of one with hypersubjective vice. The crucial point here is that objectivity is not monological but dialogical: the “virtuous agent as oracle” determining right action based on her virtue alone, does not possess objectivity, and therefore is not practically wise. Hence, the conception of the virtuous agent as having a special perception or intuition is not the correct model of the virtuous agent.
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(viii) Conclusion I have suggested that (P) (Human knowledge is perspectival) is compatible with the possibility of objectivity. Insiders can adopt a critical perspective on their culture’s understandings of the thick concepts in which their evaluative world view is embedded. One important vehicle for critique is bringing to bear on the current ethical understandings logoi other than the ethical; notably, those of the social sciences. Of course, those understandings may also be subject to critique; the bringing to bear on one’s perspective alternative perspectives is ongoing. Nietzsche criticized European culture, in particular its ethical perspectives as expressed through what he regarded as flawed understandings of the thick evaluative concepts and their relation to virtue and vice. How more precisely does our illustrative discussion of Nietzsche’s psychoanalytically based account of resentment as a form of psychic defence help us in resolving Williams’ problems about the objectivity of ethics? As argued in Chapter 1, Multiple Conceptions of One Reality exist as differing modes of intentional access to the same reality. In other words, the same reality may be rendered significant in many ways, since as Heidegger and very recently Scanlon have shown us there are many frameworks for engaging with reality. One fundamental framework is that of the thick evaluative concepts. It is conceded that our understanding of such concepts is relative to culture and tradition. Provision of meaning requires what MacIntyre calls in After Virtue a setting, which presupposes tradition. Nonetheless, those
⁵⁶ Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1997).
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ethical understandings can be questioned with the help of bodies of knowledge which are sufficiently detached from dominant modes of familiarity with such concepts. Such questioning can exhibit the virtue of objectivity (OV) and where it does an ethics based on the thick concepts and liable to critique in this way can be appropriately objective.
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PART II
N AT U R E
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5 Eudaimonistic versus Target Centred Virtue Ethics
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(i) What is Eudaimonistic Virtue Ethics? So far, in Part I, TCC and CV have been elaborated. It is time now to turn to TC target centredness. Part II describes the nature of the target centred virtue ethics proposed. We begin by contrasting Target Centred Virtue Ethics with a chief rival, eudaimonistic virtue ethics. The task of this chapter then is to elucidate core characteristics of two forms of virtue ethics; the dominant form, eudaimonistic virtue ethics, and the target centred virtue ethics explicated and defended in this book. As part of the defence of target centredness, it discusses possibly the most serious objection to eudaimonism, the self-centredness objection, and shows how target centred virtue ethics is not vulnerable to this objection. Let us begin with the question: what is eudaimonistic virtue ethics? The dominant form of contemporary virtue ethics has been a form of eudaimonism: neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. The relative inability of other forms of virtue ethics to make traction is due to two features: virtue ethics has been virtually defined, explicitly or implicitly, in eudaimonistic, even neo- Aristotelian terms, but even more seriously, there is imprecision in the commitments of eudaimonism and consequent expansion in what counts as eudaimonistic virtue ethics. This is the problem to be addressed in the present section. In my Virtue Ethics following Hursthouse,¹ I assumed a conception of eudaimonism which did justice to a distinctive feature of the ancient Greek tradition; namely, that in order to be a virtue a trait of character needed to characteristically benefit its possessor. Eudaimonistic virtue ethics as I understood the concept in 2003 then is committed to the following thesis: (1) It is a necessary condition of a trait being a virtue that it characteristically benefits its possessor. This thesis can, of course, be refined in various ways depending on how one understands ‘characteristically’. Crucially for my purposes, according to
¹ On Virtue Ethics.
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0006
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Hursthouse a trait can be a virtue even if it does not benefit an agent because she has been unlucky.² To assess this claim one must note the variety of ways an agent could be “unlucky.”
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(a) A virtue characteristically benefits its possessor but given the bad luck of an individual agent at a stage in her life the virtue does not benefit her at a particular time. (b) A virtue characteristically benefits its possessor but given the bad luck of an individual agent that impacts on her life as a whole the virtue does not benefit her overall. (c) A virtue would characteristically benefit its possessor if society were well ordered and not subject to structurally induced burdens caused by, for example, systemic injustice against certain groups, large-scale ignorance and lack of motivation inhibiting the solution of serious problems (e.g., climate change). (d) In a reasonably well-ordered society virtues may well characteristically benefit many of their possessors, but there are certain roles and projects legitimately undertaken by some individuals which are such that certain virtues would not characteristically benefit them, from the viewpoint of their lives as a whole. A person is as it were unlucky in her calling. This does not imply that there are no virtues (such as resilience) which enable her to deal with this form of ill luck. As far as (a) and (b) are concerned Hursthouse makes it clear that virtue just needs to be a ‘reliable bet’³ for flourishing so the situations described there are not genuine counterexamples. The types of examples supposed by (c) and (d) are more serious. Putative counterexamples to (1) (such as those provided in my Virtue Ethics, 80–1) relied on those sorts of examples. There I argued that virtuous lives may be lives dominated by virtues that are not reliable bets for flourishing: the life of a courageous freedom fighter, that of the charitable aid worker whose suffering is not mitigated by religious purpose, the virtuously creative and persevering artist whose work is avant garde and not altogether unsurprisingly is unrecognized in his lifetime, and the persevering environmentalist who is ahead of his time in foreseeing environmental disaster but is not listened to. I assumed that the lack of flourishing of these agents is not due to ill luck: one could not reasonably expect such admirable agents to flourish in worlds that are only to be expected, given the prevalence of vice, epistemic failings, scarcity, and so forth. By contrast if one claims that these agents are unlucky, one is claiming that they are
² On Virtue Ethics, 218 and passim.
³ On Virtue Ethics, 172.
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living in an unlucky world where virtues are as a result ‘burdened.’⁴ One has relegated to ill luck standard conditions, for example what Tessman calls ‘systematic sources of adversity’.⁵ Virtues are burdened in the sense that exercising those particular virtues in particular social contexts requires sacrifice of, for example, ‘physical or psychological health’.⁶ In defending eudaimonism against my counterexamples, Badwhar claims that: (2)
Virtues cannot have an inherent tendency to make people unhappy.⁷
She argues that my counterexamples to (1) are not genuine counterexamples since it is false that the unhappiness of the virtuous agents of my examples ‘is due to their virtue and not to bad luck’,⁸ as I supposedly argue. For a virtue cannot have an inherent tendency to make one unhappy. But what is it to say that a virtue cannot have an inherent tendency to make one unhappy? A plausible reading is:
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(2*)
Virtues cannot have a tendency to make one unhappy in normal worlds.
(2*) is a problem for my counterexamples to (1) on the assumption that W1–Wn are not normal worlds. If one is unhappy while exercising virtues in W1–Wn that is not because those virtues have an inherent tendency to make one unhappy for W1–Wn are assumed not to be normal worlds. This raises the issue: what is a normal world? First, it is clear that what counts as a virtue in a normal world (e.g., a disposition to be trusting) may not be a virtue in what Vayrynen calls a ‘Nasty World’⁹, —for example, a Nasty World (NW) where everyone is hopelessly untrustworthy, life is brutish and short, and so on. In that case being trusting could not be a virtue in (NW). Normal worlds are worlds which are not nasty but which are nonetheless far from utopian. In such worlds we are inclined to call traits such as justice, perseverance, kindness, charity, having a tendency to trust (instead of being completely untrusting), virtues. For example, Hume’s circumstances of justice presuppose worlds in which there is scarcity and want of extensive generosity: without such worlds there would be no need of the personal virtue of justice. Similarly, we would have no need of the virtue of intellectual perseverance if there were no obstacles to the pursuit of and dissemination of truth. Non-utopian worlds which are not versions of (NW) may be characterized by, for example, quite considerable vice, quite widespread lack of appreciation of ⁴ Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues: Virtues for Liberatory Struggles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). ⁵ On Virtue Ethics, 159. ⁶ On Virtue Ethics, 159. ⁷ See for this requirement on virtue Neera Badhwar, Well-Being: Happiness in a Worthwhile Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). ⁸ On Virtue Ethics, 153. ⁹ Pekka Vayrynen, “Particularism and Default Reasons,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 7 (2004), 53–79.
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many valuable properties, scarcity of resources, lack of cooperation. (Call these features (F1–Fn)). But (W1–Wn) are not versions of (NW). They are not Nasty Worlds. We cannot say that my counterexamples are not genuine counterexamples on the grounds that virtues exercised in (W1–Wn) are not exercised in normal worlds. Rather on my view (W1–Wn) are normal worlds. It might still be argued that I have not shown that virtues such as perseverance have an inherent tendency to make one unhappy in normal worlds granted that (W1–Wn) are such worlds. But I do not need to show this. For my point is this. I am happy to agree that it is not virtue alone that is making one unhappy in normal worlds. Rather it is characteristic features (F1–Fn) of those worlds which may cause the exercise of virtue to make one unhappy in those worlds. In that case (1) is shown to be false since it is not true that it is a necessary condition of being a virtue that it characteristically benefit its possessor. Being negatively affected by (F1–Fn) is not a matter of ill luck which by definition is uncharacteristic. Rather some or all of (F1–Fn) are endemic features of (W1–Wn). Partly because of (some or all of) (F1–Fn), an agent may characteristically be rendered unhappy while exercising a virtue in (W1) say, but that is not to say that she is rendered unhappy simply by her virtue, or simply by ill luck. In short I do not argue that the unhappiness of virtuous agents in W1–Wn is due to the inherent qualities of the virtues manifested but to the fact that their virtue is exercised in a world with characteristic problematic features—bad people, lack of resources, and so on. Virtue need not characteristically benefit its possessor. Turn now to other possible understandings of the eudaimonist thesis.
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(3) What makes a trait of character a virtue is that it benefits its possessor at least characteristically. This thesis is particularly hard to defend if one thinks as do standard eudaimonists that the point or rationale of at least most virtues is not agent benefit, but, for example, the protection and sustainability of the environment, the welfare of others, maintenance of rules that benefit society as a whole, and so on. However, on the assumption that the rationale or point of a virtue is expressed by (3), (3) has a decided advantage over (1); namely, that the necessary conditions of being a virtue do not come apart from its rationale or point. There is no disconnect between what a virtue is targeted at and its necessary conditions. However, this advantage of (3) comes at a large cost. Agent benefit has to be moralized to the point where agent benefit, understood as eudaimonia, cannot come apart from virtue, even in the presence of ill luck.¹⁰ Some features which make a trait of character a virtue (that it benefits its possessor) and other features ¹⁰ See further Brad Hooker, ‘Does Moral Virtue Constitute a Benefit to the Agent?’ in Roger Crisp (ed.), How Should One Live: Essays on the Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 141–55.
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which make a trait of character a virtue (that it benefits others, protects the environment, for example) turn out to be the same thing; or rather, benefiting others and so forth turn out at an ultimate level to characteristically benefit the agent after all. However, if agent benefit is what makes any trait a virtue, how can the target of a virtue be other regarding? In the face of this apparent incoherence eudaimonists are thrown back to the weaker Thesis (1). But now the disconnect between necessary conditions of virtue and what makes traits virtues creates another cluster of problems, much canvased in the literature. These are the problems of indirection and egoism at an ultimate level. If the point of a virtue such as benevolence is other regarding, how can it be that in order to be a virtue at all benevolence must somehow characteristically benefit the benevolent agent? To these problems I shall return. Whether or not various weakenings and expansionist meanings of “eudaimonism” have been due to the intransigent nature of problems thrown up by (1) to (3) it is undoubtedly true that eudaimonism has been associated with a number of weaker theses which deniers of (1) and (3) could accept. Let us now briefly consider a number of such weaker versions. First, we can reject (1) while still accepting what I call the Constraint on Virtue:
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(4) What counts as a virtue is constrained by an adequate conception of human development and flourishing.¹¹ The point of (4) is to ensure that virtue is understood as a properly human excellence relative to human modes of cognition, characteristic human needs, and modes of development. Thesis (4) is a potent thesis in the face of current developments in idealized versions of virtue ethics which toss aside its core strength: its strong connection between ethics and a properly human form of virtue answerable to numerous important developments in psychology, such as attachment theory, developmental psychology, and studies of pathological altruism. Thesis (4) neither entails that all virtue is targeted at the flourishing of the agent nor that it is a necessary condition of being a virtue that it characteristically benefit its possessor. A fifth thesis is this: (5)
Agents need virtue to flourish.
Thesis (5) is rather routinely confused with Thesis (1). (5) is a completely different thesis from (1).¹² A person may need virtue to flourish but this does not imply that unless a trait characteristically contributes to or is partially constitutive of the
¹¹ See Swanton, Virtue Ethics, 15, 60.
¹² Virtue Ethics, 77.
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flourishing of the agent it is not a virtue. Thesis (1) specifies a necessary condition on virtue, while Thesis (5) specifies a necessary condition on flourishing. Unfortunately, eudaimonistic virtue ethics is now often understood in terms of Thesis (5) and, if this is so, standard objections to eudaimonism such as the charge of egoism no longer apply. For example, Stangl understands eudaimonism as follows: at the heart of eudaimonistic virtue ethics ‘is the question of what makes for a flourishing human life, what virtues are partially or wholly constitutive of that end, and what actions flow from those virtues.’¹³ Non-eudaimonists such as myself need not sever all links between virtue and flourishing: after all, the idea that one needs some virtue to flourish is plausible and cogently argued by many including Hursthouse, Russell,¹⁴ Badwhar,¹⁵ and LeBar.¹⁶ The plausibility of Thesis (5), however, depends on what is the scope of ‘virtue’ in the thesis. A thorough going Aristotelian who believes in a strong version of the Unity of the Virtues thesis will be happy to accept that ‘virtue’ should be understood as ‘all virtues’ but for those who find a strong version of the Unity doctrine implausible in our actual imperfect world weaker versions of (5) need to be canvassed. One may believe that a person needs the core virtues to flourish, most virtues, most core virtues, specified virtues, and so on. Consider now weaker versions of Thesis (1). Weaker versions specify necessary conditions on virtue that are weaker and arguably more plausible than those specified by (1). For example, consider: (6)
To be a virtue, a virtue must be conducive to human flourishing.¹⁷
Or consider:
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(7)
Virtues are those qualities that further the flourishing of life as whole.¹⁸
These further weakenings of the eudaimonist position are endemic. The fudge occurs with the weakening of Plato’s requirements on virtue: it is much easier to yoke together being good qua human with being good for human flourishing in general than it is to yoke together being good qua human and being good for the agent. With the rise of environmental ethics we get a further weakening with a link between being good qua human and being good for “life.” Even the weakening to (7), however, ¹³ Rebecca Stangl, Neither Heroes nor Saints (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), Introduction. ¹⁴ Daniel C. Russell, Happiness For Humans (New York: Oxford University Press 2012). ¹⁵ Virtue Ethics. ¹⁶ Mark LeBar, The Value of Living Well (New York: Oxford University Press 2013). ¹⁷ For example: ‘the virtues in the main are those qualities that either constitute or contribute to human flourishing’ (Philip Cafaro, ‘Environmental Virtue Ethics’ in Lorraine Besser-Jones and Michael Slote (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2015), 424–44, 437). ¹⁸ Cafaro, 432.
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causes problems since not all natural values are properties of living things or even things having a good. Valuable things need not have a good, but they can be destroyed (and thence their value) by human interference and other causes; for example, sand dunes, rock formations, surf breaks. Nor is the value of these entities reducible to the ecologies that such entities may support. Better by far to reject (1), (6), and (7) altogether: necessary conditions of virtue should be tied to their rationale or point. If the point of a virtue is to respect or appreciate or love natural items then we do not need to assume that constituting or contributing to agent flourishing, human flourishing, or life flourishing is a necessary condition of all virtue. We might, however, be prepared to subscribe to the weaker thesis: (8) . . . virtues are in general beneficial characteristics, and indeed ones that a human being needs to have, for his own sake and that of his fellows.¹⁹ Thesis (8) can certainly be held by a non-eudaimonist; it is indeed an extension of (5).
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(ii) Indirection and Target Centred Virtue Ethics If we hold a view whose consequences are that putative necessary conditions of virtue (such as agent flourishing, human flourishing, life flourishing) are separable from its targets or aims (such as appreciating natural values for their own sake) then we become vulnerable to a problem which has plagued eudaimonistic virtue ethics—that of indirection. In the case of Thesis (1) we have the further problem of egoism, in the case of Thesis (6) human centredness and anthropocentrism, and in the case of Thesis (7) life centredness. Let us now explore these problems before showing how we should understand a rival conception of virtue ethics, target centred virtue ethics, and how that version of virtue ethics resolves them. What is the problem of indirection? Indirection is basically the problem to which Stocker drew our attention: what he calls moral schizophrenia.²⁰ In moral schizophrenia the motivations of the agent come apart from sources of justification. The motivational structures appropriate to one level (such as the final ends of agents which provide ultimate sources of justification) do not connect with those appropriate to everyday moral motivation (performing right and virtuous acts, such as appreciating nature for its own sake, performing just acts such as repaying a debt). If the final ends of agents (such as her own flourishing) provide the ¹⁹ ‘Virtues and Vices’, in Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 3. ²⁰ In ‘The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories’, Journal of Philosophy 14 (1976), 453–66.
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ultimate sources of justification for behaviour, then there seems to be a disconnect between two levels of motivation. This is essentially the problem of indirection. In this section we apply the problem to our target theory: eudaimonistic virtue ethics. In eudaimonistic virtue ethics indirection is a consequence of trying to evade a persistent problem with eudaimonism, the much touted self-centredness or egoism objection.²¹ To understand the charge of indirection we need to see how this problem arises. According to the basic form of the self-centredness objection virtue ethics is committed to the view that the proper motivation for acts is the pursuit of one’s own virtue since her own eudaimonia (flourishing) is what a virtuous agent pursues. For as Aristotle claims, excellence of character is the finest good for an agent and is thus the most important constituent of eudaimonia. The virtuous agent, the self-centredness objection goes, is thus primarily concerned with her own virtue, and thereby with cultivating and maintaining it. But surely she should have as her primary focus such things as caring for friends, repaying debts because that is just, being a good parent. Though the self-centredness objection has been addressed by virtue ethicists, the objection never seems to go away. This suggests it is more serious than virtue ethicists have taken it to be. We begin with a standard account of the selfcentredness objection which, as we shall see, is a cluster of objections. We then consider a deeper-level form of the objection which is not rebutted by standard replies. The standard self-centredness objection to virtue ethics is best described as a cluster of problems. There are in fact three related problems. Virtue ethics (at least in its eudaimonistic Aristotelian version) is vulnerable to what might be called “the narcissism objection,” escape from which raises “the self-effacing objection.” In order to avoid that in turn, and without re-inviting the narcissism objection in some form, it becomes vulnerable to what I shall dub “the disconnect objection,” which is that of indirection. In more detail the problem cluster may be described as follows.
(1) Narcissism objection According to the narcissism objection, the final end of a virtuous agent is taken to be her own eudaimonia (usually understood as flourishing). Since excellence of her own character is the finest good for an agent and thereby the most central component of eudaimonia, her own virtue possession is what a virtuous (or would be virtuous) agent pursues and is ultimately motivated by. For that is what
²¹ For an example of this objection see Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chapter 8.
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ultimately benefits her. This motivation is intolerably narcissistic and is surely not the mark of virtue. In reply, as virtue ethicists in the eudaimonist tradition are now tired of pointing out, the good-making or right-making features of actions are not characteristically features which promote or constitute the flourishing of the agent but the sorts of things that Bernard Williams²² calls the “X reasons.” These are reasons, associated with a virtue, which a virtuous person is characteristically motivated by, and, of course, they are many and varied, and circumstance dependent. For Williams (and for Hursthouse²³ who follows him in this respect), a person who wants to do what the virtuous person would do should characteristically be motivated not by a motive under the description “promoting my own virtue or happiness” but under the description “repaying a debt,” for example. However, this escape from the narcissism objection, it is claimed, lands the virtue ethicist with the self-effacing objection.²⁴
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(2) Self-effacing objection According to the self-effacing objection, a theory vulnerable to the objection has the following flaw. Assume it is the case that (on that theory) what ultimately justifies an action as good or right is that it is conducive to or exemplifies one’s personal flourishing (as Hurka²⁵ believes is a commitment of (eudaimonistic) virtue ethics). Nonetheless (according to that theory), the agent in aiming at the good or right must put such an ultimate justification out of her mind when she acts. For if she does not do this, she would indeed be narcissistic. Rather she should be motivated by the “X reasons” (as described above). In reply it may be claimed that even if the final end of an agent is her own flourishing that final end does not justify actions as right for the eudaimonist virtue ethicist, not even ultimately. One’s own flourishing is not part of the criterion of the right which (on the type of virtue ethics criticized) is determined by or at least co-extensive with the choices of a virtuous agent, and is not even a prima facie rational or moral motivation that has to be effaced. This reply, however, makes the eudaimonist vulnerable to the disconnect objection.
²² Bernard Williams, ‘Acting as a Virtuous Person Acts’ in R. Heinaman (ed.), Aristotle and Moral Realism (London: UCL Press, 1995), 13–23. ²³ On Virtue Ethics. ²⁴ Simon Keller, ‘Virtue Ethics is Self-Effacing’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 85, 2 (2007), 221–31; Glen Pettigrove, ‘Is Virtue Ethics Self-Effacing?’ Journal of Ethics 15, 3 (2011), 191–207. ²⁵ Virtue, Vice, and Value.
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(3) Disconnect objection According to the disconnect objection, the motivational structures appropriate to one level (the final ends of agents) do not connect with those appropriate to the other (performing right and virtuous acts). An agent’s final ends pertaining to her own virtue do not connect with her everyday motivations. In reply to the “disconnect” worry one might point out that Annas²⁶ establishes a connection by postulating that the “final end” unifies the various subordinate goals of one’s life, and by claiming that this end is eudaimonia (one’s own happiness or flourishing). However, it may be argued, if the agent’s final end is her own flourishing then her unifying ultimate motivation must be egocentric for she is ultimately motivated by what benefits her. If by contrast her motivations have only to do with the X reasons the disconnect problem re-emerges. It may seem that there is a way out of this problem. Why assume as do at least many contemporary eudaimonists that the final end of the agent is her own flourishing? If the final end (eudaimonia) is properly specified as “living well and finely” and “doing well”²⁷ then eudaimonia is merely a formal notion having no necessary connection with agent benefit. Living and acting well is a thin notion which may be thickened or interpreted in terms of a variety of non-equivalent qualities. Such a life may be admirable, flourishing, meaningful, or successful. A life may be admirable but unsuccessful, admirable but not flourishing, meaningful but not admirable or successful, and successful by normal standards but not flourishing.²⁸ On this reply to the self-centredness objection, unless the ultimate grounds of virtue lie wholly in agent benefit, not even the ultimate motivations of a virtuous agent (living well) are self-centred. However, there is another form of the self-centredness objection for which this reply does not work: David Solomon’s²⁹ “deeper level” version of the objection. According to this objection the reason for the alleged self-centredness of the agent’s moral attention and motivation lies in the logic of (eudaimonist) virtue ethics’ conception of the final end of the agent. Since on this view having virtue is the most important aspect of an agent’s final end, I as a moral agent must hold that ‘having . . . virtue is the most important thing for me; practically I must subordinate everything else to this.’³⁰ This “self-centred” feature, claims Solomon, is ‘ineliminable within virtue ethics.’³¹ Though the deeper level objection does not presuppose that what makes a trait a virtue is ultimately grounded in what benefits the agent, for virtue ethics on Solomon’s view motivation is at bottom egocentric. It is as we shall call it for short ‘personal virtue motivation’. ²⁶ Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). ²⁷ Ibid. 44. ²⁸ See Swanton, Virtue Ethics. ²⁹ David Solomon, ‘Internal Objections to Virtue Ethics’, in Daniel Statman (ed.), Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 165–79, 172. ³⁰ Ibid. 172. ³¹ Ibid.
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In order to rebut the self-centredness objection as articulated by Solomon we show that even if his objection applies to eudaimonist virtue ethics it need not apply to virtue ethics in general. Virtue ethics as such need not subscribe to the view that having virtue is the most important thing for a virtuous agent. On the contrary, if the point of a virtue is to meet its targets (a central claim of target centred virtue ethics) then what is most important to a virtuous agent is not to possess virtue herself but to meet the targets of virtue. She has as her highest commitment living a life of virtue. That life is a life of acting, being motivated, and so on as virtue demands or commends. This demand is meeting the targets of virtue. Indeed, that is what it is to live well. She is committed to attaining these targets in various situations even if she cannot as yet in many areas act in the way a virtuous agent characteristically acts. That is, at present, she cannot in these areas act from a disposition or state of virtue. She is not yet a fully virtuous agent. Certainly, a virtuous agent may value her possessing virtue above all other desirable and meritorious traits such as being a good athlete. As part of her commitment to leading a life of virtue the acquisition of virtue as a stable character trait is highly important to her since (on standard Aristotelian views of the nature of virtue) doing what virtue demands or commends optimally requires practical wisdom, and that in turn requires virtue. Without virtue or sufficient virtue, attaining virtuous ends—the targets of the virtues—on a continuing, highly reliable, and sophisticated basis is impossible.³² Thus, virtue as a character trait is indeed something to be developed and worked on, and an agent should be committed to such ongoing work. But it does not follow that for her striving for personal virtue trumps realizing the ends of virtue (such as conserving nature and looking after her children).
(iii) Target Centred Virtue Ethics: ‘Everywhere Direct’ In order to rebut the “deeper level” self-centredness objection I have questioned Solomon’s view that according to virtue ethics, for a moral agent, ‘having . . . virtue is the most important thing for me; practically I must subordinate everything else to this.’ The assumption of personal virtue motivation may be ‘ineliminable’ within eudaimonistic virtue ethics, but it is eliminable within a target centred virtue ethics. The complex of problems dubbed the self-centredness objection can be overcome in a target centred virtue ethics having the following tenets. (a) The features which make traits of character virtues are determined by their targets, aims, or point, as opposed to the flourishing of the possessor of the ³² Notice though that on my view, practical wisdom and virtue are not sufficient for this: the expertise of techne may also be necessary in many areas (see Chapter 7).
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virtues (though, of course, that may be the target of some virtues). Traits are thus directly evaluated according to their point or function as virtues of character in the life of a good human being. Some virtues are dispositions targeted at the well-being of the agent, but by no means all. Others are targeted at environmental good, the social fabric, the good of others, the raising of children, the preservation and appreciation of valued aesthetic and cultural objects, productivity, and so on. What makes a trait a virtue is determined directly by those points and functions, and it is not a necessary condition of a trait being a virtue that it at least partially constitute or characteristically contribute to the flourishing of the agent. (b) Acts are directly evaluated (as right) in terms of their hitting the targets of virtues in action. Hitting the targets of (relevant) virtues in action is what makes actions right.³³ (c) What fundamentally motivates an agent aspiring to virtue is attaining the targets of the virtues: the cultivation of virtue is secondary to this aim. (d) The field of virtue is directly evaluated as being the proper field of a virtue of character by reference to the point or function of that virtue in the life of a good (virtuous) human being. For example, on Hume’s view the point of the (personal) virtue of justice is respect for the rules of justice (essentially those that pertain to property), as opposed to general utility or personal good, even though the institutional rules themselves are evaluable in terms of long-term consequences for human good.³⁴ But that does not imply that the field of the virtue of justice is consequences for the good of humans, either collectively or individually, and for Hume it is not. A virtue ethics of this form is as Kagan³⁵ would put it ‘everywhere direct’ since what makes actions right is hitting the targets of (relevant) virtues in relation to action, what makes traits virtues is determined by their targets or aims, and what
³³ Qualified agent conceptions of right action such as Hursthouse’s (On Virtue Ethics) have been criticized for offering a criterion of rightness that tells us that right action is what the virtuous person would do as opposed to what makes actions right (see, e.g., Roger Crisp, ‘Virtue Ethics and Virtue Epistemology’ in Heather Battaly (ed.), Virtue and Vice: Moral and Epistemic (Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2010), 21–38, 24). Jason Kawall, in ‘In Defense of the Primacy of the Virtues’ Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 3 (2009), 1–21, attempts to rebut this objection by distinguishing between different notions of what makes something right. He claims that in a ‘meta-ethical’ sense the choices of a virtuous agent make actions right in the same way that (for a utilitarian) maximizing utility makes actions right. But the cases are disanalogous. For the utilitarian it is not strictly the suffering of the puppies in a particular case (to use Kawall’s example) that makes torturing them wrong; it is the fact that the suffering does not maximize utility, whereas in no sense do the choices of a virtuous agent make torturing the puppies wrong. Rather it is the fact that the suffering inflicted is of a vicious nature. ³⁴ See further on Hume’s view of justice The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. ³⁵ Shelly Kagan, ‘Evaluative Focal Points’ in B. Hooker, E. Mason, and D. E. Miller (eds.), Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000).
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should motivate an agent at both fundamental and everyday levels are these very features. The motivations which provide ultimate sources of justification for the theory (attaining the targets of virtue in right action, living a life of virtue in general), are one and the same as the everyday moral motivations of the virtuous agent living such a life: repaying debts because it is just, being a good parent, appreciating nature for its own sake, and so on. There are not two levels of motivation. What then in more detail is meant by saying that a virtue ethics is ‘everywhere direct’? To explicate this idea consider Kagan’s notion of ‘primary evaluative focal point’.³⁶ A primary evaluative focal point is a feature such as an action or a rule, which is evaluated directly in terms of that property which is the ultimate source of justification of the theory (such as consequences or character) and relative to which other (secondary) features are evaluated. On the dominant flourishingbased theories, the primary focal point is either agent centred (the flourishing of the possessor of the virtues), human centred (the flourishing of humans as a whole), sentient being centred, or more broadly life centred. On these types of theories secondary features (such as respecting the value of nature (such as rock formations) for its own sake) would have to be evaluated indirectly in virtue of their consequences for the primary features. We see this a great deal in environmental ethics where belief in (1), (6), or even (7) is the most awkward. For example, Cafaro claims: ‘If we accept human flourishing as an Ur value and accept the plausibility that certain virtuous character traits tend to further that flourishing, then the imperative to cultivate the virtues likely provides considerable action guidance.’³⁷ This broadening of the ultimate ground of virtue (to consequences for human flourishing in general) mitigates the charge of egoism, but at the cost of another—that of anthropocentrism—indeed, claims Cafaro: ‘If we protect nature solely to help ourselves live better lives, we are not acting from correct motives, which should include respect for non-human beings and attentiveness to nature’s many intrinsic values.’³⁸ We thus have the triple problems of indirection though in a different form from that suffered from agent centredness: the problem of the agent having bad motives is resolved only at the cost of self-effacement and disconnect in that agent. Cafaro replies by claiming: ‘If we broaden our account from an exclusive focus on human flourishing and take as our ground value the flourishing of all life, including non- human living things . . . we will likely generate even clearer guidance regarding what we should do to rein in environmentally destructive practices ³⁶ Ibid. ³⁷ Philip Cafaro, “Environmental Virtue Ethics” in Lorraine Besser-Jones and Michael Slote (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2015), 431. ³⁸ Ibid. See also Holmes Rolston, ‘Environmental Virtue Ethics: Half the Truth and Dangerous as a Whole’ in R. L. Sandler and P. Cafaro (eds.), Environmental Virtue Ethics (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 60–78.
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and protect nature.’³⁹ But this is still life centred; what about surf breaks, cliffs, rock formations? Action and character are still evaluated indirectly in terms of their consequences (or general systematic consequences in the case of character) on the primary evaluative feature: life flourishing. It is unclear what happens to the requirement of ‘attentiveness to nature’s many intrinsic values’: perhaps attentiveness only goes as far as assessing consequences for the primary evaluative feature, unless, of course, self-effacement occurs. Virtue ethics is conventionally thought to have a single, primary, evaluative focal point (usually an agent-centred one: the character or eudaimonia of the agent) with acts evaluated indirectly in terms of that agent-centred feature. But there is no reason why virtue ethics should be committed to such a position. On conceptions of virtue ethics where virtue notions in general are central, it is possible for acts to be the primary evaluative focal point or for there to be no primary focal point at all, as is the case with target centred virtue ethics.
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(iv) Target Centred Virtue Ethics and Right Action In this section I go into greater detail about the nature of target centred virtue ethics. Its core idea is the target centred virtue ethical account of rightness, according to which the rightness of an action is determined by its success in meeting the targets of relevant virtues. Here I give the basic account; further refinements are the topics of later chapters. We must first, however, note a problem with CV—a problem I argue is solved by TC. Recall that CV is the view that (insofar as a virtue ethics gives an account of rightness) what makes actions right is essentially their virtuousness. However, any account of rightness in terms of the virtuousness of an action is apparently vulnerable to a reductio since a contradiction is derived from plausible premises. (1)
Virtuous agents (when acting in character) always act virtuously.
(2)
If A acts virtuously, A’s act is virtuous.
(3)
If an act is virtuous, it is right.
Therefore: (4)
Virtuous agents always act rightly (when acting in character).
However:
³⁹ Ibid.
(5)
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Virtuous agents can make mistakes, even while acting from a state of virtue.
Therefore:
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(6)
Virtuous agents do not always act rightly (even when acting in character).
The contradiction depends on an ambiguity in the idea of ‘virtuous’. ‘Acting virtuously’ may mean acting well in a sense which implies that the action is good, or good in a way (for it exhibits or expresses certain excellences in inner states), even if not necessarily right. However when predicated of acts, the term ‘virtuous’ may also connote rightness in the sense of correctness. To escape the reductio one of the premises must be rejected. I reject (4). That is, I claim, virtuous agents do not necessarily act rightly since they do not necessarily act correctly. A strong intuition, shared by consequentialists, is that rightness (as opposed to goodness) is conceptually tied to correctness rather than, for example, reasonableness, moral worth, or praiseworthiness. I shall argue that a virtue ethical account of rightness, one which I have called the target centred account, can support this intuition, provided ‘correctness’ is understood in a way that does not entail and is considerably richer than the consequentialist notion of correctness. On the target centred virtue ethical account of rightness, where the term ‘virtuous’ connotes rightness in the sense of correctness, rightness is understood in terms of hitting the targets of relevant virtues. What counts as hitting the targets of the virtues? At the highest level of abstraction, hitting the targets of the virtues is what Aristotle calls hitting the ‘mean’: ‘virtue aims to hit the mean.’⁴⁰ In other words, on the target centred virtue ethical account of rightness, rightness of action is understood as meeting the requirements of virtue (in relation to rightness of action) and those requirements are to hit the mean of that virtue (in relation to action). On Aristotle’s view virtue itself as an excellence of character is a mean condition (as a character trait), and persons of virtue have practical wisdom and fine motivation, including the general aim of hitting the mean.⁴¹ But what exactly is the mean? On Aristotle’s account the mean is multi-dimensional. To fully attain the target of a virtue V and thereby the mean in relation to V involves acting (in respect of V) in the right circumstance, in the right manner, at the right time, to the right extent, for the right reasons, with respect to the right people or objects, deploying the right instruments.⁴² It may be objected that giving an account of rightness in terms of hitting the targets of virtues, and of targets in terms of right extent, right manner and so forth
⁴⁰ Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1106b16–24. ⁴¹ This does not mean that every action must have this aim as foreground motivation; many virtuous acts are spontaneous or expressive. ⁴² Ibid., e.g.,1106b18–23.
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is circular. But recall (Introduction) that the account of rightness is a framework, not a criterion. Assessing what counts as right extent and right manner—for example, in relation to a virtue V—requires knowledge of what V requires in these areas in a given circumstance. And that in turn requires an understanding of the nature of V and V’s relation to the ethical foundations. Nonetheless, the doctrine of the mean has been excoriated for being either false or trivial.⁴³ It can only be thought of as false if confused with a doctrine of moderation or (and this is not the same thing) intermediateness or mediality or if it is wrongly conceived as a mean between excess and deficiency only.⁴⁴ It should not be confused with either. The mean between excess and deficiency understood quantitatively is only one dimension of the mean. Furthermore, what counts as excess depends on circumstance: what is excessive in normal circumstances may be just the thing in others such as a feast (in relation to the virtue of temperance). Is the doctrine, however, uselessly trivial? Well, Aristotle does apply it in quite a concrete way to various virtues; for example, as follows: . . . it is easy to get angry – anyone can do that – or to give and spend money; but to feel or act towards the right person to the right extent at the right time for the right reason in the right way – that is not easy . . .⁴⁵
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. . . the liberal man will not give to the wrong persons, nor at the wrong time, nor in any other wrong circumstances, since if he did he would no longer be acting in accordance with his liberality; and if he spent money upon the wrong objects, he would have none left to spend on the right ones.⁴⁶
In general, the target centred view provides a schema for the consideration of the wide variety of reasons for and against action. For example, right manner enjoins us to consider the nature of our interactions: are they overly aggressive, overly fearful of confrontation, overly indirect or too direct, overly cold as opposed to warm emotionally. Manner is important in dialogic settings as is recognized with formal training in communicative skills in medicine. Right instruments brings up issues of justice such as ownership of instruments used, and cultural matters such as whether or not there is (in Maori culture in New Zealand) a rahui forbidding ⁴³ See Timothy Chappell ‘The Variety of Life and the Unity of Practical Wisdom’ in Timothy Chappell (ed.), Values and Virtues: Aristotelianism in Contemporary Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 136–57. Pace Chappell the doctrine of the mean is neither a decision procedure nor a criterion of right action, but a framework within which actions can be evaluated as right or otherwise. ⁴⁴ Chappell (ibid.) thinks that the doctrine enjoins intermediateness, but that presupposes that the doctrine entails that all aspects of the mean are quantitative, and that intermediateness is always required on each aspect of the mean that is quantitative. Both claims are false, as is claimed by Rosalind Hursthouse, ‘A False Doctrine of the Mean’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 81 (1980–1), 57–72. For example ‘right reason’ is an aspect of the mean that is not quantitative, and right action in relation to objects may not be intermediate. As Aristotle makes clear some objects (such as field mice) are not proper objects of fear, and some objects are not proper objects of gustatory desire. ⁴⁵ Nicomachean Ethics, 1109a25–b15. ⁴⁶ Ibid. 1120b1–24.
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the use of certain instruments in locations where there has been a drowning for instance. The mean of right extent demands that we consider such factors as time at our disposal and other responsibilities that we have. The time spent on certain projects might be excessive given these circumstances. I have claimed that the account of rightness understood in terms of hitting the mean of the virtues is a schematic framework only. But we need to say more about how the framework is to be applied. An important issue is this. How demanding is the requirement of hitting the mean if an action is to be deemed right? Given that the mean is multi-dimensional there could be two broad views about what is required for an action to be right on the target centred view. On one interpretation, Aristotle favours the highly demanding view: there is only one right action (or more only if there is a tie); namely, the one that optimally hits the mean on all dimensions. This view is suggested by a familiar passage:
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Again, failure is possible in many ways (for evil, as the Pythagoreans represented it, is a form of the Unlimited, and good of the Limited), but success is only one. That is why the one is easy and the other difficult; it is easy to miss the target and difficult to hit it. Here, then, is another reason why excess and deficiency fall under evil, and the mean state under good; for men are bad in countless ways, but good only in one.⁴⁷
This passage appears to claim that there are many ways to be in error and only one way to be correct, which suggests the demanding interpretation of rightness. However, the passage describes what it is to be right at a high level of abstraction: there is only one way to be right, hitting the mean, but there are several ways of missing the mean, and thereby being wrong. Once, however, we realize that the mean is multi-dimensional we can appreciate the importance of context in weighing success on various dimensions of the mean. Hitting the target may be a matter of actions being within an acceptable range to be right.⁴⁸ A permissible but not highly desirable act can be judged right (in the sense of “all right”) but is to be distinguished from an act which is also right but highly admirable. The latter hits the targets of the relevant virtues in a way that metaphorically speaking is closer to the bullseye than a less stellar performance. On many views on supererogation, an action may hit the bullseye—optimal in that sense—but may not necessarily be required. Less than optimal actions may even be meritorious, better than “all right.” In short, a non-required suboptimal performance may be right, ⁴⁷ Ibid. 1106b29–33. ⁴⁸ This is an interpretation of the quoted text favoured by Peter Losin, ‘Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 4: 3 (1987), 329–42. (Cited in Howard Curzer, Aristotle and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 141.) I have changed my views on this issue relative to that expounded in Virtue Ethics. I am now in agreement with Stangl subscribing to the content of what she calls the ‘less demanding interpretation.’ (‘Neo Aristotelian Supererogation’, 343–4).
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even meritorious. This variation in our conception of the rightness of actions is captured in virtue language: patient, generous, courageous actions can be meritorious without being optimal; and at the lower end of the scale we might even say that a generous enough action can be “all right,” but it cannot be stingy in which case it would be prohibited. Another issue in the application of the schema of rightness arises from the less demanding conception of rightness. Given that an action may not hit the mean optimally on all dimensions and yet be right, which dimensions of the mean are salient in the determination of rightness? Which dimensions of the mean are salient depends on context and the nature of the virtue—indeed, some dimensions of the mean may in certain contexts be deemed irrelevant. Both these features are illustrated in the following example owed to Das:
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A dives into a swimming pool to save a child, but is motivated exclusively by a desire to impress the mother as a means to sleeping with her.⁴⁹
On the target centred account of rightness, the act clearly misses the target of a virtue of benevolence on one dimension of the mean (acting from reasons of benevolence as a virtue) but hits the target of that virtue on other dimensions that are more important in this context. The act of diving and saving is an act performed at the right time (delay may have been fatal) with respect to the right person (the child in danger of drowning) in the right manner (with alacrity and competently). It is possible on target centred views to have a very demanding view of rightness according to which the rescuer acts wrongly. But this is counterintuitive on common-sense views. Nonetheless, there is no general agreement as to how success in relation to various dimensions of the mean bear on rightness. Some such as W. D. Ross claim a distinction between the right and the good arguing that rightness does not depend on quality of motive, while others disagree. What dimensions of the mean are salient depends too on the nature of the virtue. In the Das example, the relevant virtue is benevolence whose field is the welfare of others and whose aim in relation to that field is promoting welfare. So, though benevolence as a virtue minimally requires that one wish another well it is primarily concerned with success in promoting the welfare of another. Aristotle himself gives the example of justice claiming that an action can be just and right even if poorly motivated. According to Aristotle a person can perform a just act and not be just for the act is performed ‘unwillingly’ or ‘for some ulterior purpose’ ‘and yet [is] actually doing what is right.’⁵⁰ In this Aristotle is followed by Ross.
⁴⁹ Liezl van Zyl, ‘Agent-based Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Action Guidance’, Journal of Moral Philosophy 6 (2009), 50–69, 50, citing Ramon Das, ‘Virtue Ethics and Right Action’ Australasian Journal of Philosophy 81: (2003), 330–4. ⁵⁰ Nicomachean Ethics, 1144a3–24.
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Caring as a virtue by contrast is vitally concerned with the manner in which one benefits another (it cannot be clumsy or insensitive, one’s manner must exhibit warmth, and so on), and also motivation. Even if an act is beneficent, considerably benefiting another, it would be odd to describe it as caring if one is not acting for the sake of benefiting the other but one’s motives were ultimately selfish or manipulative. A problem with the target centred view of rightness needs to be addressed. The view that many of the targets of the virtues are external to the agent, and that these can be the salient aspects of the mean in assessing certain actions as right, raises the issue of what van Zyl calls ‘accidental rightness’ (and wrongness).⁵¹ It is apparently counterintuitive to claim that an act could be wrong and yet it is the case that a person makes ‘every effort to find out relevant facts and is careful in acting’ but things turn out badly (accidental wrongness). Such a person ‘cannot be criticized for acting immorally.’⁵² Again, it is counterintuitive to argue that an action is right ‘by accident’. A person makes no effort to find out relevant facts and is badly motivated but things turn out well. However, this intuition is supported by relying on the connotations of the word ‘moral’. We can agree (with Ross) that quality of motive is necessary for some forms of evaluation of an act, and in particular whether it is praiseworthy, blameworthy, criticizable, a case of acting well or badly.⁵³ But the correctness or rightness of an act differs from these kinds of evaluation in two ways. First, the notion of ‘moral’ does no work in the view proposed: target centredness addresses what Aristotle calls ‘practical truth’.⁵⁴ Second the idea of acting well (which on Aristotle’s view requires acting from a state of virtue) is not the same thing as acting rightly, a fact Aristotle himself recognizes as we have seen.⁵⁵ My view that ‘practical truth’ is determined by hitting the mean rather than by the choices of a virtuous agent receives support from a reading of Aristotle well explained by Broadie:⁵⁶
⁵¹ Liezl van Zyl, ‘Accidental Rightness’ Philosophia 37 (2009), 91–104. ⁵² Michael Slote, Morals from Motives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 34. ⁵³ For more on this issue in the context of critique of Arpaly and Schroeder see my ‘Comments on In Praise of Desire: The Relation between Desire and Virtue’. ⁵⁴ Nicomachean Ethics, 1139a16–b2. ⁵⁵ Nicomachean Ethics, 1105a9–b2. See further On Virtue Ethics, 123–6; Virtue ethics: A Pluralistic View, Chapter 11. Hursthouse makes it clear that, for example, acting for the right reasons, acting with appropriate feelings, is required for acting virtuously in her sense; that is: ‘according to virtue ethics the agent with the inappropriate feelings does not act virtuously, in the very way or manner that the virtuous agent acts’ (On Virtue Ethics, 125). For both Hursthouse and myself what is required for acting in the way a virtuous agent acts is much more demanding than what is required for acting rightly. ⁵⁶ Sarah Broadie, ‘Aristotle and Contemporary Ethics’ in S. Broadie, Aristotle and Beyond: Essays on Metaphysics and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), originally in R. Kraut (ed.), The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (Blackwell, 2006).
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Aristotle, as we all know, speaks of the virtuous person as the ethical ‘yardstick’ of the particular situation he is presented with (NE III.4, 1113a29–33). Aristotle is occasionally thought to mean by this that the say-so of the phronimos determines, in the sense of actually constituting (or ‘constructing’), the truth about particular ethical questions. I do not think that this is Aristotle’s view. He of course sees the phronimos as a good guide for the rest of us . . . Aristotle, then, does not explain ethical truth as what the phronimos reliably apprehends: he explains the phronimos as reliably apprehending ethical truth.⁵⁷
It is true that Aristotle claims not only that virtue aims at the mean but also that ‘It is virtue that makes the choice correct.’⁵⁸ This may be thought to entail, contrary to Broadie, that the virtuous agent ‘constructs’ the truth about ethical questions. First however the claim that ‘virtue makes the choice correct’ is not the same as the claim that the virtuous agent makes the choice correct. For the target centred view, ‘virtue makes the choice correct’ is the claim that choosing what virtue demands and commends, that is hitting the mean, makes the choice correct. Second, it is important to appreciate the context of Aristotle’s remark. Aristotle is speaking in this passage of the difference between reliability and unreliability in getting things right. He claims that a person can be ‘doing what is right’ fortuitously, through ignorance, or despite being badly motivated. But by comparison with the reliability of virtuous agents (the phronimoi) in hitting the mean, acts performed by the non-virtuous without practical wisdom or good motives are unreliable; poor motives and ignorance tend to ‘make’ the choice wrong in a causal sense of ‘make’. By contrast virtue ‘makes’ the choice correct in the sense that it is an underlying disposition (of wisdom, integrity, etc.) that leads (characteristically) to right conduct. Adopting Broadie’s position implies that my target centred virtue ethics has a recognitional rather than constructivist conception of practical reason. According to the recognitional conception goodness and rightness are understood independently of what is the object of rational choice: it is not the case that ‘what makes something good is that it is the object of rational choice.’⁵⁹ Reasons for action in target centred virtue ethics are fully assessable as reasons only when they are assessed as hitting the targets of relevant virtues, whether or not they are recognized as reasons by a virtuous agent. Rational choice even if virtuous may miss the targets of virtue in terms of which reasons for action are expressed; what constitutes the targets is something recognized, and not constructed by the virtuous agent. What is recognized (when it is) are facts that constitute ethical reality whose nature was described in Chapter 2. Constructivism by contrast is described by ⁵⁷ Ibid. 120–1. ⁵⁸ Nicomachean Ethics, 1144a3–24. ⁵⁹ Berys Gaut, ‘The Structure of Practical Reason’ in Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (eds.), Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1995), 161–88, 162.
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Mark LeBar as the view that ‘ . . . our true normative practical judgments represent a normative reality, while denying that that reality exists independently of our exercise of practical judgment.’⁶⁰ In virtue ethical constructivism (at least of an Aristotelian sort), such true judgments are constructed from the choices of the virtuous. LeBar, who defends a particularist eudaimonist virtue ethical constructivism, sees such a view in Aristotle:
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The picture that emerges from these elements of Aristotle’s ethics is that the standard of correctness for practical reasoning—practical wisdom—just is correctness in particular judgments of fittingness of actions to conditions of practical thought and action.⁶¹
What is distinctive about the constructivist virtue ethical position is that ‘the standard of correctness’ just is practical wisdom. It is not something that can reach beyond the capacities of the practically wise individual, whereas on my view it can be. Target centred virtue ethics also has an externalist conception of reasons. Reasons are facts that favour actions, and they may do so regardless of their connection to an agent’s motivational set. This view is compatible with a claim that ethics as a whole is naturally fitted to motivate suitably constituted agents to action. For reasons of virtue are fitted for motivation insofar as ethics as a whole (understood through virtue concepts) is intelligible only relative to certain emotional sensibilities that are characteristic of humans as a whole. Those sensibilities are connected with motivation. However, once the worldhood of ethics is in place and ethics becomes an intelligible practice refined and sustained through education and institutions of various kinds, individual agents may have reasons of virtue without those reasons connecting at all to their individual motivational sets. Reasons-externalism, therefore, is not wedded to a metaphysics of ethics where the facts constituting (external) reasons are necessarily independent of interpretation and sensibilities which make the worldhood of ethics intelligible as a worldhood of ethics. Notice that here I am not subscribing to McDowell’s account of external reasons in terms of reasons that would move a well brought up agent,⁶² for two reasons. If McDowell means that reasons should move any well brought up agent he is neglecting the condition of personal relevance of reasons. A reasons externalist, though denying that reasons are always relativized to an agent’s psychology,
⁶⁰ The Value of Living Well, 114. ⁶¹ The Value of Living Well, 187. ⁶² See John McDowell, ‘Might there be External Reasons?’ in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 68–85.
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may nonetheless believe that (external) reasons are often relative to an individual agent, in the sense that they are often relative to what is meaningful or relevant in her life, as we saw in Chapter 2. Second, a well brought up agent may not be moved by certain reasons if she is mistaken about the targets of virtue or the nature of a virtue itself. Important facts about the foundations of ethics may be invisible even to the well brought up. If rightness for Aristotle is world-focused in the way Broadie suggests, and my target centred view follows Aristotle in this respect we need to know what general features of the world constitute the targets of the virtues. Thus, theory concerning the targets of the virtues will give accounts of what is the field of a virtue, what are the normatively significant features of the items to which one responds in line with a virtue’s requirements, and what constitutes successful response. These issues are briefly discussed here. The field of a virtue is the domain of its concern or operations. The field of friendship, for example, is friends or potential friends, the field of environmental concern is the natural world, the field of charity or benevolence are items having a good: strangers, people in general, or sentient beings. Different virtues have different aims in relation to their fields. Substantive accounts of these aims may be complex, and indeed controversial. For example, one may argue that the aim of friendship as a virtue is to express affection, share intimacies, promote the good of friends, spend time with friends, including quality time. Accounts may differ about the contextual salience, importance, or necessity of these aims in the virtue. What are the fundamental normatively significant features in terms of which the targets of virtues are understood? For Aristotle’s one’s response is successful if it is fine and noble, but one is compelled to ask: what are the fundamental normative features to which agents should respond such that her response is fine and noble? For him it is the situational appreciation of phronesis which detects these features at a fine-grained level but in contemporary ethical theory as a map of the ethical terrain we seek a more general idea of the sorts of features which govern types of ethical response. According to a popular view, at the most general level of analysis, those normative features consist entirely in the value or disvalue of items in the field of a virtue, so fineness and nobility of response consist entirely in their being appropriate to the value properties of those items. By contrast to this monistic view, in my Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View I identified four fundamental normatively significant features which I called bases of ethical response. These were value, status, bonds, and the good for an individual. The fields of the different virtues focus on mainly one or other of these bases. For example, the virtues associated with love/hate are concerned with the bonds between people; the virtues associated with the care/harm foundation have targets that are concerned with the good for individuals; those associated with respect/fairness/oppression relate to status. This view makes for a pluralistic virtue ethics because the fundamental types of normatively significant features to which
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virtues are responsive and in terms of which the targets of the virtues are understood, are plural. Given that a virtue is a disposition of good responsiveness to normatively significant features of items, what are the fundamental forms of response to these features? In Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View I identified several fundamental forms of response which I called modes of ethical response. These were (at least) love, respect, creativity, expression, promotion, appreciation. What counts as hitting the target of a virtue will depend not just on the bases of ethical response but also on the mode of such response. The various dimensions of the mean apply to all these modes. Take the example of ambition. A salient response in exercising that virtue is creativity: in furthering aims serving one’s ambition one can fail to hit the mean of that virtue through non-virtuous creative response. One can be creative to excess, create the wrong objects (e.g., highly offensive ones), create in the wrong way (by being, e.g., creative in one’s corruption betraying lack of integrity, or being overly imitative and unoriginal in one’s art or writing) or deploy the wrong instruments. The same applies to appreciation and love; one can love or appreciate the wrong objects, in the wrong way, to excess, at the wrong times, and so on. As a final example consider promotion (of value) by, for example, working to preserve valuable sites. One can do this in the wrong way (by, e.g., failing to consult), to excess (one has become obsessive and is neglecting one’s children) and for the wrong reasons (one is doing this to feather one’s own nest).⁶³ Finally, we address the question of the role of the virtuous agent on the target centred view. What is the role of a virtuous agent in the determination of correctness within the logos of ethics? On McDowell’s view it seems she is determinative of correctness. ‘[V]irtue of character embodies the relevant proper state of practical logos, what Aristotle calls phronesis . . . ’⁶⁴ In ‘What Myth’ McDowell speaks of Aristotle’s ‘glossing the practical knowledge of the phronimos in terms of the idea of the correct logos.’⁶⁵ Correct logos is the ‘situation-specific conceptual articulation’ of the phronimos.⁶⁶ McDowell’s views about the centrality of the virtuous agent has helped spawn what I have called the ‘qualified agent’ ⁶⁷ view of rightness characteristic of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics; notably, Hursthouse’s view of right action cited above. The target centred account of rightness view is opposed to this view. What makes actions right on the target centred view is not that they are chosen or would be chosen by the virtuous: actions are right because they constitute a payment of a debt or are acts of helping someone in a kind manner in a way that hits the targets
⁶³ I do not discuss the modes of responsiveness in this book: this work was undertaken in Part 2 of Virtue Ethics, ‘Profiles of the Virtues’. ⁶⁴ ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, 151. ⁶⁵ 342. ⁶⁶ ‘What Myth?’ 342. ⁶⁷ Virtue Ethics, 227.
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of respectively justice and kindness. At best, Hursthouse’s account offers an extensional equivalence between right action and actions chosen by virtuous agents acting in character, but I have called this equivalence into question.⁶⁸ As I have argued elsewhere,⁶⁹ virtuous agents may miss the targets of virtues, and through no fault of their own fail to recognize reasons that favour or disfavour actions. These reasons are given by the targets of virtues, and not by the determinations of a virtuous but fallible agent. And phronesis is fallible. Virtuous agents are wise but not necessarily right. Indeed, Hursthouse herself rightly claims that for Aristotle ‘the phronimos is not infallible,’⁷⁰ even though practical wisdom is a property of someone who has ‘‘full virtue’ or ‘virtue in the primary sense’ (1144b13) [Nicomachean Ethics].’⁷¹ Indeed, she denies that the phronimos needs to have ‘encyclopaedic’ knowledge, for to demand that of practical wisdom ‘seems not only absurd but elitist, guaranteeing that practical wisdom, and thereby full virtue, is open only to the academically intelligent, those who are capable of absorbing such a vast amount of varied information.’⁷² In other words, practical wisdom cannot be defined in terms of ‘perceiving the details of situations correctly’ as some appear to accept (such as Pettigrove).⁷³ Given this feature of practical wisdom a virtuous agent can get things wrong.⁷⁴ Foot agrees: . . . there belongs to wisdom only that part of knowledge which is within the reach of any adult human being: knowledge that can be acquired only by someone who is clever or has access to special training is not counted as part of wisdom.⁷⁵
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A kind person, for example, need not have the expertise of a counselor with advanced psychological training, so one can imagine tricky cases where the kindness of a practically wise person may misfire. Walker puts the point this way: we should not be forced to say that a person can’t be really kind unless she applies herself ‘to textbooks ⁶⁸ In Virtue Ethics. See also van Zyl, ‘Right Action and the Targets of Virtue’ in Stan van Hooft (ed.), The Handbook of Virtue Ethics (Durham: Acumen, 2014), 118–29. ⁶⁹ See Virtue Ethics, Chapter 11. ⁷⁰ Rosalind Hursthouse, ‘Practical Wisdom: A Mundane Account’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 106 (2006), 285–309, 292. ⁷¹ Ibid. 285–6. ⁷² Ibid. 308. ⁷³ Pettigrove, ‘Is Virtue Ethics Self-Effacing?’, 202. ⁷⁴ Unfortunately ‘rightness’ can have different uses in the literature. Sometimes it is conceptually linked to rationality so that an agent does something right even if mistaken, because supported by evidence at her disposal. This is not the use at issue here. Unfortunately too the waters are muddied by the use of the notion “moral” rightness (a notion not at home in virtue ethics and not used in connection with rightness here) which seems often to be associated with rationality or motive-centred conceptions. The use at issue here is that where a right action is one supported by reasons and a wrong one not so; reasons construed as facts in practical reality (Scanlon, Being Realistic; Dancy, Practical Reality). (My thanks to Garrett Cullity (personal correspondence).) In this sense rightness is not conceptually tied to praiseworthiness, nor wrongness with blameworthiness. ⁷⁵ ‘Virtues and Vices’ in Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 6, cited in A. D. M. Walker, ‘Conceptions of Virtue and the Unity of the Virtues’ in Kim Chong-Chong and Yuli Liu (eds.), Conceptions of Virtue East and West (London: Marshall Cavendish Academic, 2006), 101–23, 119.
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of psychology and social anthropology and enrolls for courses of instruction in, e.g., the techniques which form part of the repertoire of professional counselors.’⁷⁶ Indeed, Aristotle himself makes it clear that a virtuous agent may need to consult experts and seek advice in areas where she lacks confidence. Though she will be wise in her manner and timing, and receptivity to advice, she may accept wrong advice, non-culpably. Not even the most virtuous agent, even when consulting experts, can transcend the facts of selective perception emphasized by such thinkers on human cognition as Andy Clark,⁷⁷ distributed cognition in our increasingly complex institutions, and the limitations of human cognition. A tempting solution to the problem of the fallibility of the virtuous agent is to idealize.⁷⁸ (Ideally) virtuous agents do have encyclopaedic knowledge; are expert in, that is have skills in, all practical domains; indeed, have perfect knowledge of the future; occupy all perspectives; and in various other ways cease to be human.⁷⁹ But real virtuous agents have limited perspective being among other things gendered, old or young, historically and culturally located, and by no means expert in all fields. The qualified agent view of rightness is thus left with a dilemma: either it idealizes and achieves extensional adequacy (there is extensional equivalence between the choices of virtuous agents and right action) in which case the choices determining rightness are not those of virtuous humans, or its account of rightness is not extensionally adequate.
(v) Overall Virtuousness
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We have outlined what it is to hit the target of a virtue. But when targets of many virtues are in play we need a conception of overall rightness. Schematically:
Schema of Overall Rightness (1) An action is right if and only if it is overall virtuous. ⁷⁶ Walker in Chong Chong and Liu, 119. ⁷⁷ Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together Again (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997). ⁷⁸ The problem of fallibility is “resolved” at a metaphysical level by Jason Kawall, through idealization. (See his ‘Qualified Agent and Agent Based Virtue Ethics’ in Stan van Hooft (ed.), The Handbook of Virtue Ethics (Durham: Acumen, 2014), 130–40.) But then the connection with the practicality of the logos is lost, for Kawall’s ‘unimpaired’ and ‘fully informed’ (139) abstract idealized agents are not real but virtuous human beings interacting in the world, bringing up children, dealing with difficult clients, deliberating with others about a collective policy, wondering what to donate to what charity, and so on. It is unclear what kind of emotional construals, outlook, and perspective such idealizations would have. ⁷⁹ See on problems of idealizing David Enoch, ‘Why Idealize?’ Ethics Vol. 115, 4 (2005), 759–87, and on problems of idealizing in virtue ethics: Howard J. Curzer, ‘Against Idealization in Virtue Ethics’ in David Carr, David Carr, James Arthur, Kristjan Kristjansson (eds.), Varieties of Virtue Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 53–71.
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Here we outline the target centred notion of overall virtuousness, bearing in mind that conceptions of rightness can be more or less demanding. Basically, overall virtuousness is a function of how reasons and relations of fittingness that favour and disfavour actions “stack up.” For simplicity I limit myself to reasons. The various ways in which reasons defeat other reasons will be set aside for now—it is the topic of Chapter 11. Schema (1) of rightness is at the highest level of abstraction and will be modified at the end of this section when various complications have been outlined. We now outline key features of overall virtuousness by first considering how reasons favour and disfavour actions. Recall that according to TCC, to properly assess the reason giving status of reasons relatively non-evaluative features such as helping and giving pleasure need to be further conceptualized by thick evaluative concepts such as kind, just, callous. Let us call reasons so described v-reasons, and concepts such as kind vconcepts. Recall too that a v-reason need not hit the target of the corresponding virtue V. A loyal act may exemplify a vice of jingoism, for example; it may not exemplify virtuous loyalty. We thus need to distinguish a v-act (e.g., honest act, kind act) from a v-act which hits the target of the corresponding virtue V (e.g., honesty, kindness). Before specifying how reasons favour and disfavour actions we need to ask: what in more detail is a v-act? In light of the account of thick concepts given in Chapter 2 we can define a ‘v-act’—an act that is specified in terms of a thick virtue concept—thus: (a) A v-act (e.g., honest act) is of a type that characteristically exhibits the evaluative point or function of, for example, honesty in relation to action. (b) A v-act (e.g., honest act) has ‘descriptive constraints’ (such as is not a lie) necessary for the thick concept (e.g., honest) to be properly applicable to actions. Notice that a ‘thick virtue concept’ as applied to acts is not a virtue concept in a strict sense since the virtue of honesty is being well disposed in relation to acts of honesty and not all honest acts exhibit or conform to the requirements of that virtue. Strictly as noted above we should call virtues of honesty loyalty and so on ‘proper honesty’ ‘proper loyalty’ and so on, but this is too clumsy for ordinary use. Notice too a further complication: not all v-acts are described in terms of thick virtue concepts but nor are they described in terms of clearly thick vice concepts. As we discuss later (Chapter 11), sentimental may be one such. But this complication will be set aside for now. As we have seen, thick virtue terms can apply to acts and yet those acts may miss the target of the corresponding virtue and fail to be virtuous in relation to that virtue. An act can be honest but not virtuously so because (too) brutally honest, or because offering far too much information in a boring manner, and so
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on. The virtue term ‘honest’ applies to the act but the act misses the target of the virtue of honesty on at least one dimension. Here is another example. A generous act may be wrong, precisely because it misses the target of generosity as a virtue. It misses contextually relevant dimensions of the mean. For example, what is for a wealthy person a generous present may not be recommended, indeed be wrong, because the present has gone to the wrong people at the wrong time. Poor relatives at a family Christmas in a public present-opening ceremony, who themselves could only afford a cheap gift and who cannot repay the generosity at subsequent Christmases, are humiliated and embarrassed by the generous gift. We would not say, however, that because the act misses the target of generosity and is thereby wrong in this case it ceases to be generous. Rather she should not be generous with her presents at this time and in this context.⁸⁰ Our characterization of a v-act has the further following important implication for a target centred conception of right action. Given that v-acts have descriptive constraints, an agent acting rightly may do something that is subsumable under a vice concept as applied to acts: she may do something ungenerous or dishonest. Given those constraints we cannot say that telling lies (even when appropriate) is a kind of honesty just because an agent rightly tells a lie.⁸¹ Although the act cannot be described as honest and can’t therefore be described as hitting the mean of honesty it nonetheless can be described as hitting the mean of a virtue V described as being well disposed in relation to truthfulness. That virtue, however, has no name. Schematically we can say that the overall virtuousness of an act depends in some way on the virtuousness of acts in different respects; for example. kindness, courage, and so forth. In light of the distinction between v-acts and acts virtuous in respect V we can now understand what it is for a reason to favour an act within target centred virtue ethics. A reason R favours act A insofar as R specifies a respect or respects in which A hits some relevant and salient dimensions of the mean in relation to action, of a relevant virtue V (kindness, say).
⁸⁰ Note that there are some conceptual constraints on non-virtuous apparently generous acts being called generous. Here is an example of R. E. Ewin: ‘The client can, through the lawyer who is handling the negotiations, be generous, but for the lawyer to take it upon herself to act in that way without instructions from the client is for the lawyer to be ‘generous’ with what is someone else’s, which is not to be generous at all’. (‘Personal Morality and Professional Ethics: The Lawyer’s Duty of Zeal’ International Journal of Applied Philosophy Vol. 6 (1991), 35–45, 39, cited in Tim Dare, The Counsel of Rogues: A Defence of the Standard Conception of the Lawyer’s Role (Bodmin: Ashgate, 2009), 78.) The boundaries between being generous but inappropriately so, and not being generous at all, are vague and contested (see further Chapter 9). ⁸¹ See further Chapter 11.
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Since according to TCC thick concepts are central in the description of reasons reason R will characteristically be specified in terms of relevant thick concepts. Hence, reasons favouring acts will generally be described in the following kind of way:
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A v-reason R (being kind say) favours v-act A (a kind act) insofar as R specifies a respect or respects in which A hits some relevant and salient dimensions of the mean in relation to action, of a relevant virtue V (kindness).
What counts as ‘relevant’ and ‘salient’ depends on the notion of rightness in question and which aspects of the mean of relevant virtues are salient in the specific context of action. The definition of rightness as overall virtuousness raises the question of whether it is possible for an act to be overall virtuous yet vicious in a certain respect. To answer this question we need a schema for what constitutes viciousness in a certain respect and overall wrongness. Following the general parameters of my target centred account of rightness Stangl offers an account of wrongness according to which an action is wrong if and only if it is overall vicious.⁸² Because she rightly claims that vices do not have targets what counts as vicious is serious failure to hit the target of a relevant virtue. Hence, a viciously stingy act constitutes a serious failure to hit the target of generosity. I basically concur with Stangl’s definition of wrongness but I would prefer ‘sufficiently serious’ as opposed to ‘serious’. In certain contexts we may criticize a donation as stingy and therefore wrong, even though it is not a serious missing of the mean, or a person for being impatient and acting wrongly even though in the grander scheme of things the impatient action is hardly serious. In other contexts (where, for example, there are some excusing conditions) we might say the action was undesirable but not wrong. Given the possibility that, for example, one may be unkind to be benevolent, or unjust (in a minor way) to be benevolent (in a relatively major way) it seems possible that acts could be wrong in relation to virtue V and yet be overall virtuous. This putative possibility raises the question: how unified are the targets of the virtues? Should we subscribe to the following thesis?
Unity of Targets Thesis (1) If an act is overall virtuous that act must hit the target of all relevant virtues.
⁸² Neither Heroes nor Saints (forthcoming).
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Can an unkind act hit the target of kindness though unkind? It would be odd to claim that an unkind act hits the target of kindness; if it did the act would surely not be genuinely unkind. Indeed, to save the Unity of Targets Thesis that is exactly what some would say. Being unkind to be benevolent is not being unkind after all; rather it is a case of being cruel to be kind, where indeed the cruelty is not really cruelty either. The virtue terms ‘kind’ and ‘benevolent’ are both held to apply and the targets of both kindness and benevolence are hit. But even if this saving move works here it will not always work. To illustrate the difficulty in the saving move, consider cases of dishonest acts (lies) of the kind described in The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.⁸³ Assume that in the mouths of the heroine Mma. Ramotse, and of her accomplice in resolving a serious case, J. L. B. Matekoni (Chapter 18 ‘A Lot of Lies’), certain of these lies are right. As noted above we cannot say that telling lies is a kind of honesty just because a virtuous agent rightly tells a lie.⁸⁴ If the act is a lie it cannot be called honest, for lying is not part of the ‘descriptive’ or ‘natural’ resultance base of honesty. We cannot, for example, call it honest but wrong because (too) brutally honest. We cannot say then that the lies are here the target of the virtue of honesty. Some might say in reply that though we cannot call the lie hitting the target of honesty it may hit the target of the nameless virtue excellence in relation to truthfulness, a target that is hit on this occasion by an act properly described by a vice concept, dishonest. Similarly, we could say that the appropriate unkind act hits the target of a virtue of excellence in relation to kindness or unkindness in interpersonal interactions. Certainly, one could make this move designed to save the Unity of Targets (1) Thesis. But the cost of this saving move when applied to a range of nameless virtues not denoted by our normal thick concepts is to destroy the notion of a v-reason where what is substituted for ‘v’ is a thick term (like ‘kind’ and ‘honest’) as ordinarily understood, and through which we have intentional access to the worldhood of ethics. Perhaps another version of the Unity of Targets Thesis might fare better. Consider:
Unity of Targets Thesis (2) If an act is overall virtuous that act cannot miss the targets of any relevant virtue. Let us say that the overall virtuous unkind or dishonest act neither hits nor misses the target of honesty or kindness as virtues. Since the act is unkind it does not hit ⁸³ Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency (New York: Anchor Books, 1998). ⁸⁴ This kind of case will be discussed further in another context in Chapter 11.
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the target of kindness but it does not miss it either since it is not an inappropriate act of unkindness in the circumstances. Nonetheless, the Unity of Targets Thesis (2) does not account for tragic dilemmas. The tragedy consists in the fact that either action in such a dilemma misses the target of a relevant virtue V in a sufficiently serious way and is vicious in respect V. There is still room on my account, however, to class one or other resolution of the dilemma as not overall vicious for (as we shall see in Chapter 11) other virtues may be in play whose targets are hit. Rejection of the Unity of Targets theses does not entail that any virtue term and any vice term could jointly be applied to an act. For example, if it is the case that a benevolent act entails that the agent intends to do good overall from benevolent motives, and a cruel act entails that the agent intends to do harm to sentient creatures from callous motives, then an act cannot be both cruel and benevolent.⁸⁵ But even here things are not clear. For ‘cruel act’ may not entail ‘acting from callous motives.’ A conservationist may recognize that mass poisoning of (Australian-introduced) possums to save native species (in New Zealand) is cruel but absolutely essential for the benevolent purpose of saving those species. On my view at least this would not be a misuse of language. In the light of the rejection of the Unity of Targets theses and the multidimensionality of the mean we are now in a position to modify Schema (1) of rightness.
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Schema of Overall Rightness (2) An action is right if and only if it is overall virtuous, and an act is overall virtuous if and only if it hits the targets of relevant virtues to a sufficient extent. Since the mean of a virtue constituting its target is multi-dimensional what counts as hitting the target is subject to incommensurability: one may act for the right reason but with the wrong instruments; to the right extent but in the wrong manner and so on. The mean is only partially hit. So what counts as overall virtuous in the circumstances depends on what dimensions of the mean are salient in the circumstances, and how the various dimensions are weighted in that circumstance.
⁸⁵ See further Jonny Robinson, ‘On Being Cruel to a Chair’ Analysis Vol. (2019), 1–10, note 16, 7–8. Notice, however, that on my view having the right motive is (part of) the target of a virtue, but it does not follow that all virtue terms are properly applied to acts only if there is a correspondingly correct (virtuous) motive. Even though ‘kind’ I believe does entail ‘kind motive’ a kind motive need not be a virtuously kind motive (see my example in Virtue Ethics, Ch. 11).
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The same considerations apply to overall rightness and overall wrongness. The threshold for sufficiently hitting the mean (or missing it) will vary according to context. In different contexts salience and weightings of dimensions of the mean will vary, as will the way the various virtues in play impact on the situation. As a result of these features rightness and wrongness are subject to both degree and combinatorial vagueness.⁸⁶ The basic features of Target Centred virtue ethics, and the differences between it and the eudaimonist view, with its qualified agent conception of rightness, have been laid down. Many features will be further explored in later chapters including the relation between thick concepts and reasons, the relation between reasons, thick concepts and (overall) rightness or virtuousness, and the relation between v-reasons and both particularism and codifiability. In this chapter the targets of the virtues have been conceptualized at a high level of generality. The task of the next chapter is to refine the theory by showing how complex it is to determine these targets, complexities provided by such factors as culture, roles, and narrativity.
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⁸⁶ For more on both combinatorial and degree vagueness in relation to right action see Chapter 10 section (vii).
6 Basic Virtue and Differentiated Virtue (i) Introduction In his ‘D’Ou Venons-Nous . . . Que Sommes Nous . . . Ou Allons-Nous?’ Elijah Milgram sums up a ‘lesson’ of Bernard Williams’ contribution to moral philosophy with the following words:
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. . . the unintended lesson of Williams’ work is that we have made an astonishing mistake about who we are. The philosophical common sense of the past halfcentury has been suitable for impossible simple minded creatures, creatures competent to live only in impossibly simple environments. Consequently, the descriptive metaphysics and ethics that have been spun out of it are useless to us.¹
It may be thought that virtue ethics with its apparent attention to the richness of our moral lives and language is immune from Williams’ criticism identified by Milgram. Not so. All too often ‘the’ or ‘a’ virtuous agent carries an impossible theoretical weight: a weight that can be born only by idealizations. Then the criticisms to which Williams subjected idealizing systematizing theories, such as Rawls’ theory of justice and utilitarianism, may well apply also to virtue ethics. What is needed as both Williams and MacIntyre saw is attention to culture, history, difference of perspective due to, for example, age, roles, gender, and the narrative shape of an individual life in which ‘projects’ have personal significance. Philosophical ethics needs to deploy the resources of the social sciences to enrich the landscape of ethics and understand fully the forms of life in which ethics is immanent. As the moral anthropologist Michael Lambek states: Persons, as social beings, are constituted through their relations with others. This is partly an intersubjective process, beginning with the mother-infant bond, but it is mediated by what society objectifies as the identities people are given (names and statuses), tasks expected of them (roles), positions they are given to occupy (offices), and programs they come to identify with callings), as well as the structures of relations in which statuses, roles, offices and callings are manifest . . . ²
¹ In Callcut (ed.), Reading Bernard Williams.
² Michael Lambek, ‘Living as if it Mattered’, 19.
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0007
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Add to this the relation to self which has its own creative projects associated with the ethical concept of integrity, of concern to Bernard Williams, the affectional bonds made by that self, and the narrative structure of that individual life as it navigates its various social identities with their sometimes conflicting requirements and expectations. And all of this takes place within cultures, national and gender identifications, and traditions. How can virtue ethics respond to Williams’ criticism as outlined by Milgram? The idea of the virtuous agent possessing what I shall call basic virtue, such as generosity or courage simpliciter, cannot stand alone: it must be supplemented by a notion of basic virtue differentiated according to such things as cultural location and roles if it is to apply to the real world. It is illegitimate to think one can gain objectivity in ethics by abstracting away virtue from its relativity to such factors as history, culture, and roles within that culture. This relativity (to be distinguished, of course, from relativism) gives rise to what I call ethical differentiation, and in the context of virtue, differentiated virtue. There are several forms of ethical differentiation. The first four are discussed in this chapter. The next two chapters are devoted to a more extended account of the last two aspects of differentiation.
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(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)
Cultural features. Historical features. The narrative particularities of an individual’s life, including her relationships. ‘Burdened’ or oppressive settings. Stage of life. Roles.
Other forms of potential differentiation not dealt with in this work are controversial: for example, are there gender-differentiated virtues? Again, is virtue, as Nietzsche thought, differentiated by such personal features as talents and personal strength?³
(ii) Taking Ethical Differentiation Seriously Any theory that attempts to do justice to the complexity of ethical life and its relativity to such things as roles, culture, and narrative particularity has to deal with the problem of the relation between those norms and something called “ordinary morality”—our basic common-sense moral beliefs understood in terms of virtues such as honesty, integrity, justice, and generosity, or duties such ³ I discuss this feature of differentiation in relation to Nietzsche in my The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche.
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as not lying, not stealing, not harming, doing good. I shall not, however, assume that our current views of what “ordinary morality” demands or permits are everywhere correct: we must make room for the possibility that moral reformers now or in the future have a superior conception of the nature of ethics. The problem to be addressed here is not the correct conception of the substantive principles of ordinary morality but the relation between such norms if true (whatever they are) and ethical differentiation. This is a fraught issue. Judith Shklar, for example, goes so far as to claim in ‘Bad Characters for Good Liberals’ that ‘ . . . we have no need for simple lists of vices and virtues’⁴ for ‘bad character’ may be just what is required in some contexts. For her there is a place for what we might call socially or culturally differentiated vice in pluralistic and role-differentiated society. As a result, we need to be fine-grained in our accounts of virtue and vice, for there may be a place in a society for a character which we would now regard as, for example, possessing the vice of snobbery. For example, a person who is ‘ceremonious—so cold and polite that no familiarity is thinkable’⁵ is claimed to have his place in the Ancien Regime. Shklar’s view can be avoided I shall argue by taking ethical differentiation seriously while at the same time retaining a view that, for example, role and culturally differentiated virtue is still virtue. For example, historical differentiation may (but not necessarily) allow for what we would now call snobbery to not be a vice in certain societies and in certain roles. And, of course, there will be much room for interpretation and disagreement even in the relevant times and places.⁶ The view I propose then takes ethical differentiation seriously while avoiding the putative need for ‘bad characters’. This I call an Integrated View. Such views are contrasted with two positions at either extreme of it. The first is the claim that ethical differentiation is just complex ordinary morality. An example is the view that role obligations, virtues, and permissions are just ‘complex instances of ordinary morality’.⁷ Reasons to act as one’s role requires are reasons of ordinary morality so even though role morality makes ordinary morality more complicated, if ordinary morality prohibits something then one cannot take refuge in one’s role. A motivation for such a view is the problem of “moral distance”: the demands of roles alienating one from one’s own true “private” moral self that deals in the currency of ordinary morality. Within the broad rubric of Complex Ordinary Morality as applied to role differentiation this problem is solved by the ⁴ In Judith N. Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 226–49, 249. ⁵ ‘Bad Characters for Good Liberals’, 246. ⁶ For example, the historian Alison Weir discusses the nuances of perceived snobbery and coldness of Jane Seymour’s treatment of her maids of honour (as opposed to her ladies in waiting) when she first became queen in her Jane Seymour: The Haunted Queen (London: Headline Review, 2018). Here there is both historical and role differentiation. ⁷ Judith Andre, ‘Role Morality as a Complex Instance of Ordinary Morality’ American Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1991), 73–9, 73.
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‘deprofessionalization view’. According to Postema, on this view the ‘solution’ to the problem of ‘moral distance’ ‘lies in a “deprofessionalization” of professional roles that would reduce all professional responsibilities to species of private morality.’⁸ This position can take a Sartrian turn where private morality is just private “authenticity,” or alternatively private morality just means ordinary or common morality where this is understood as professional role-independent universal morality. For Luban, roles are here understood as mere “lendings” such that ‘common morality is more truly moral than role morality and should win out in cases where the two conflict.’⁹ Luban criticizes deprofessionalization on two fronts. First, there is confusion between the ideas that morality attached to a role is narrower than common morality and that role morality has an exclusionary character such that if we are to avoid moral distance we need to hive it off completely. Second, there is failure to recognize the distinctive values of those worthwhile institutions in which roles are embedded and the necessity of role structures with specific role differentiated obligations and permissions within such institutions.¹⁰ At the other extreme are views we might call Reductionist. On the Complex Ordinary Morality View role ethics, for example, is elevated to ordinary morality; on Reductionist Views ordinary morality is reduced to, for example, role ethics.¹¹ Thus, in role ethics we might have the view that, as Tim Dare puts it, ‘roles go all the way down’.¹² In narrative ethics one might have the view that as one constructs the narrative shape of one’s life, so one constructs the personal ethics that goes with it. One reading of a well-known claim of Nietzsche suggests this view. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche exhorts us to ‘ “give style” to one’s character’ by fitting strengths and weaknesses of one’s nature ‘into an artistic plan.’¹³ Similarly, on a reductionist view cultural norms exhaust ethics so it is a cultural relativist view. I define Reductivist Views then as asserting that there is no self-standing normative ethical theory which provides the norms relative to which the social norms of, for example, roles and cultures can be assessed as ethically acceptable or wicked. There is no overarching moral or ethical theory from the perspective of which social norms can be critiqued. In role ethics such social norms are the role ⁸ Gerald Postema, ‘Moral Responsibility in Professional Ethics’ NYU Law Review 63 (1980), 63–89, 71. ⁹ David Luban, Lawyers and Justice: An Ethical Study (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 112. ¹⁰ Part of the blame for this may be laid at institutions’ scepticism (as inherently non-conducive to practices enhancing virtue) that can be laid at Alasdair MacIntyre’s door. (See After Virtue.) ¹¹ A pure case of such reduction is one inspired by a (contentious) reading of Confucian ethics promulgated by Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont, Jr. See, e.g., Confucian Role Ethics: A Moral Vision for the 21st Century? (Göttingen, Germany, and Taipei, Taiwan: V&R unipress/National Taiwan University Press, 2016). ¹² Tim Dare ‘Roles all the Way Down’ in Dare and Swanton (eds.), Perspectives in Role Ethics, 31–44. ¹³ Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), Section 290.
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obligations as defined by practices;¹⁴ in cultural ethics they are the norms of cultural practices; in narrative ethics they are the norms of narrative meaning as socially understood. A motivation for Reductionist Views is that social facts can be themselves social norms generating obligations and permissions. Such social facts include roles, cultural norms, and the narrative shape of one’s life. The problem with Reductionist Views emerges when we get clearer about the nature of social norms. What then are social norms? As Southwood and Eriksson¹⁵ claim, social norms such as role norms or cultural norms are social facts about what is accepted as generating requirements. One might think that what is accepted in this way is irrelevant to the issue of whether such obligations are genuine since what is accepted may be, for example, appalling treatment of children and animals. As David Enoch argues¹⁶ the same problem applies to the normativity of law. Law does not as a matter of necessity give reasons for action, for a legal system too may be seriously unjust. But things are not this simple. The law (which like roles gives rise to social norms) often gives reasons in the following way:
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. . . the law often enough succeeds in giving you reasons for action, reasons you would not have had without the law’s requirement, and that you have precisely because of the law’s requirement . . . ¹⁷
Similarly, cultural imperatives imposed on you by your membership of a society, and role obligations imposed on you by your occupancy of a role, often succeed in giving you reasons for action, reasons you would not have had without the cultural and role requirements. The role, for example, is playing some kind of fundamental role in determining one’s ethical obligations. However, the truth of this view does not entail reductionism as Integrationist Views show. Put simply, according to Integrationist Views ethical differentiation is constrained by ordinary morality. Certainly, the factors which rationalize differentiation, such as narrativity, cultural location, and role occupancy, do provide independent sources of ethical requirements and permissions. On the other hand, though the norms of ethical differentiation are not derived from ordinary morality, they are not wholly derived from these sources of differentiation either. For such differentiation is constrained by ordinary morality. Hence, Integrationist Views are not reductionist. ¹⁴ See further Dare, ‘Roles all the Way Down.’ ¹⁵ Nicholas Southwood and Lina Eriksson, ‘Norms and Conventions’ Philosophical Explorations 14 (2011), 195–217. ¹⁶ In David Enoch, ‘Reason-Giving and the Law’ in Leslie Green and Brian Leiter (eds.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Law Vol. 1 (2011), 1–37. ¹⁷ ‘Reason-Giving and the Law’, 26.
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How then is integration achieved? Integrationist views will vary according to the way they portray the relationship between ordinary morality and ethical differentiation. One type of Integrationism may be called for present purposes a Two-Level View. Broadly speaking, on the first level the social facts providing the rationale for differentiation such as professional institutions, narrativity, and cultural norms may be assessed as ethically passing muster. For example, the norms of a culture do not sanction cruelty or are not disrespectful of whole classes of its members; an institution is worthwhile since conducive to societal flourishing, the narrative structure of one’s life does not follow a trajectory of viciousness. However, on the second level, when operating within institutions and cultures, for example, one is beholden to the social norms operating within them. An example of Two-Level View is what Dare calls the “clean break” view in legal ethics¹⁸—Rawls’ distinction between constitutive and practice rules¹⁹ provides for a two-level view of ethical justification in law.²⁰ The former rules provide justifications for institutions or practices while the latter apply to individuals’ conduct within those institutions and practices. The distinction provides for a two-level view in that it does not follow from the fact that institutions and their role structures are sanctioned by the tests of ordinary morality that participants occupying roles within those institutions should appeal to those same tests when acting within their roles. Indeed on the Two-Level View they should not. A difficulty with two-level or multi-level views is this. Luban claims that on such views the following state of affairs is possible: ‘good institutions can require unsavoury roles; good roles can have unwelcome obligations attached to them; and honourable obligations can require awful actions’.²¹ On my own version of Integrationist View there is a more thorough integration between ethical differentiation and ordinary morality, allowing for reduction in dilemmas though not complete elimination. The fact that dilemmas are cross-level does not reduce the discomfort of conflict with ordinary morality. On my view the social facts providing the source of role obligations, for example, determine the role rationale for specific role obligations, but at every level including the level of individual conduct and dispositions, ordinary morality constrains virtue and obligation. The next section shows how this is done.
¹⁸ Tim Dare, The Counsel of Rogues? A Defence of the Standard Conception of the Lawyer’s Role (Ashgate: Farnham, 2009). ¹⁹ John Rawls, ‘Two Concepts of Rules’ Philosophical Review 64 (1955), 3–32. ²⁰ For further discussion see W. Bradley Wendel, ‘Crossing the Bridge’ in Dare and Swanton (eds.), Perspectives in Role Ethics, 145–59. ²¹ David Luban, Lawyers and Justice, 131.
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(iii) Basic and Differentiated Virtue On my account, integration between ordinary morality and ethical differentiation is achieved by a certain understanding of “differentiated virtue.” On this understanding what I call basic virtue such as generosity is differentiated by such factors as role requirements, narrative permissions, demands imposed by a culture. Crucially, a differentiated virtue such as loyalty qua defence lawyer has relevant basic virtue at its core; hence, there is integration with “ordinary morality.” What in more detail are basic and differentiated virtues and what is the relation between them? By “basic virtue” is meant virtue understood at a high level of generality (kindness qua human being) or abstraction (kindness simpliciter) as opposed to the kindness of a lawyer or a doctor qua doctor or lawyer. From the point of view of definition, the idea of basic virtue is not committed to either of two possible theoretical positions in, for example, role ethics. On the first view, kindness as a basic virtue is an abstraction only: what kindness or generosity demands or permits cannot be resolved until there is further specification in terms of, for example, roles (such as kindness qua doctor, qua parent of young child, or qua friend), the narrative shape of one’s life, or the nature of one’s culture. Furthermore, there is no such thing as kindness qua human being. On the second view, the basic virtue of kindness is understood as kindness qua human being and what kindness qua human being demands can be quite determinate. No role specification or even the specification of one’s culture is required for such cases. My view allows for scepticism concerning the idea of requirements pertaining to human beings as such, but is consistent with either view. What is important is that both views are compatible with the following. Debates about, for example, whether the kindness of a doctor requires empathy with or detached concern for her patient²² and how precisely we are to understand these possible requirements are undetermined or at least underdetermined by appeal to basic virtue. Similarly, resolution of debates about what, on various views about social responsibility, justice in business executives requires in relation to, for example, employees is left open. These are issues of role ethics (e.g., business ethics; medical ethics) on which virtue ethics in general is silent. Differentiated virtues are character traits associated with ethical differentiation. Thus, sensitivity is differentiated to form the virtue of cultural sensitivity, an excellence that is more specific than sensitivity in general. A sensitive person, if ignorant of culture, will not be culturally sensitive. Appeals to basic virtue alone will not explain the difference between the demands of loyalty as a basic virtue and ²² For this distinction, and a sophisticated psychologically and medically informed discussion of it, see Jodi Halpern, From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
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zealous advocacy as a role requirement of defence lawyers, or the difference between the requirements of helpfulness in general with helpfulness qua friend as a role virtue, and the further professional role differentiation between friendship as such, and friendship with a student when occupying the role of professor. (Here, special helpfulness may be seen as unfair.) Until a basic virtue is “contoured” by contextual features, such as a person’s role, historical and cultural situatedness, we characteristically cannot form an accurate conception of the target of that virtue in a particular context. Once such a contouring of a basic virtue has taken place, we have an account of what I call a differentiated virtue, such as a role differentiated virtue of generosity in a CEO, and a role differentiated virtue of loyalty (to client) in a defence lawyer—a disposition of virtuous zealousness in advocacy.²³ What is the relation between basic and differentiated virtue? First, basic virtue constrains differentiated virtue. Though accounts of basic virtues abstract away from role differentiation, for example, they are not empty. Basic virtues provide anchors for our moral thought even when contoured by role demands, narrative integrity, cultural imperatives. In this way, they provide constraints on the unfettered pursuit of goals associated with ethical differentiation, such as cultural goals, personal goals consistent with the narrative shape of one’s life, and institutional goals served by institutional roles. Basic virtue alerts us to possibilities of excess and other forms of wrongness when determining the scope of differentiated virtue. For example, zealous advocacy in a defence lawyer will be distinguished from what has been called hyper-zeal;²⁴ narrative integrity and pursuit of one’s creative goals may permit differentiation of a basic virtue such as caring (for one’s family say) in a talented artist but not to the point of total neglect and abandonment; the hospitality required in a culture will not permit lavishness to the point of endangering the welfare of the young. Such anchors are deeply embedded dispositions which provide constraints on contouring action in line with, say, role demands. Two important features of the relation between basic and differentiated virtue need highlighting. First, the fact that basic virtue constrains legitimate forms of differentiation reduces the potential for conflict between the demands of roles, narrative integrity, cultural imperatives on the one hand and “ordinary morality” conceptualized through basic virtues, on the other. Differentiation is not a form of unconstrained cultural demands, role demands, and narrative autonomy.
²³ For an early discussion of differentiated virtue, from which some of this section is adapted, see my ‘Virtue Ethics, Role Ethics, and Business Ethics’, in Rebecca L. Walker and Philip J. Ivanhoe (eds.), Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), 207–24. ²⁴ For the distinction between ‘mere zeal’ and ‘hyper-zeal’ see Tim Dare, ‘The Role of Law and the Role of Lawyers’ in Tom Campbell and Jeffrey Denys Goldsworthy (eds.), Judicial Power, Democracy and Legal Positivism (Aldershot: Ashgate Dartmouth, 2000), 371–90. Unlike Dare, however, I would describe ‘mere zeal’ as a role-differentiated virtue of zeal in advocacy constrained by basic virtue.
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Second, differentiation gives further content to and in this way puts constraints on basic virtue. Kindness in a business executive, for example, is tempered by the kind of toughness sometimes required in business. On the Integration View then, basic and differentiated virtues are mutually constraining. Rather than basic virtue providing determinate virtue rules basic virtue leaves courses of action indeterminate until differentiation by, for example, role requirements kicks in. Though accounts of a basic virtue such as loyalty provide saliences and paths to assist the development of appropriate emotional and cognitive takes on the world, they may not even provide rules that are specific enough to provide guidance of the form: ‘Characteristically you should do thus and so’. The targets of basic virtue are both made more determinate and changed by the constraints of differentiated virtue. For example, a local CEO of a firm of consulting actuaries cannot simply be generous with the firm’s funds in sponsorship deals treating them in accordance with Kant’s maxim of beneficence which allows latitude in accordance with inclination. On the contrary, she has to conform to constraints put in place by the board, the firm’s interests, and overseas bosses. Again, the basic virtue loyalty does not prescribe that, characteristically, you should stick with your employer for several years. The basic virtue honesty does not prescribe that, characteristically, you should state the bad features of your product and not overhype or exaggerate its good features when advertising or selling it. Again, given that benevolence is a basic virtue, that virtue’s associated “mother’s knee” rules such as ‘Do good for others!’ and ‘Be helpful to others!’ are not to be interpreted universally or in specific ways. What counts as excellence in regard to the field of promoting others’ welfare in business virtue requires that we consider such specific questions as the legitimacy of undercutting competitors by buying in bulk from cheap sources, and predatory pricing. Elaine Sternberg for one argues that given the business purpose and its nature as competitive, predatory pricing is legitimate.²⁵ But, again, the emotional and motivational dispositions of someone with the basic virtue will ensure that pleasure is not gained by harming others, nor will one harm others out of malice, or desire for power and superiority. Whether and how ordinary morality has been adequately integrated into ethical differentiation is in many areas a complex issue subject to much controversy. For example, in questioning whether ‘many dubious lawyerly practices’ are indeed prohibited in codes of conduct Applbaum considers the problem of apparent integration by redescription of offending practices. He makes the following claim in a note: ABA Model Rule 8.4 (c) reads: “It is professional misconduct for a lawyer to engage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit or misrepresentation,” and
²⁵ Just Business: Business Ethics in Action 2nd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
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there are numerous specific instances of prohibited deception. My response is that when the Model Rules get specific they reveal that the “dishonesty”, “fraud”, “deceit” or “misrepresentation” that is prohibited has already been redescribed. False statements about only material fact and law are prohibited, so lies about most opinions, evaluations, and future intentions do not count.²⁶
From a virtue theoretic standpoint, codes and rules cannot hope to perform on their own the required integration, even where there is compliance. The possession and exercise of relevant differentiated virtue in a variety of contexts is also needed. Finally, my version of Integrationist View proposes a distinction between two broad types of differentiated virtue: that between global and specific differentiated virtues. Global differentiated virtues are virtues whose fields are issues in relation to differentiation as such (such as cross-level dilemmas), or the specific spheres of ethical differentiation. For example, global role virtues are virtues whose fields are occupying roles; hence, the global role virtues are dispositions of being well disposed in relation to (aspects of) role occupation in general. An important example is the general disposition to obey institutional protocols. Someone with this virtue, however, does this in an excellent way: she is mindful of both the ethical and institutional legitimacy of these protocols. Global cultural virtues are virtues whose fields are being members of a culture and living among those of other cultures: a prime global cultural virtue is cultural sensitivity. Among global differentiated virtues are an important class whose field or sphere of operations is dealing with apparent or real cross-level dilemmas. In apparent dilemmas such a virtue enables a lawyer, for example, to appreciate that she should not be squeamish in fulfilling the legitimate ethical demands of her role, for she realizes that this is part of ethics. Where there is an apparent need to violate a role obligation she will be well disposed in relation to whistle-blowing, for example. Unlike the Two-Level ‘clean break’ View where the levels are insulated from each other in deliberation and action, on my integrationist position there is neither complete insulation between levels nor do role occupiers—for example, without due regard to institutional protocols and rules—directly appeal to justifications appropriate to higher levels. There is a mean therefore between performing ‘awful’ actions and not playing God. An important global differentiated virtue then is a virtue of being well disposed in relation to resolving cross-level dilemmas, by being wise in relation to whistle-blowing, disobeying protocols, and employing permitted discretion when, for example, going through protocols endangers a patient through lack of time.
²⁶ Arthur Isak Applbaum, ‘Are Lawyers Liars? The Argument of Redescription’ Legal Theory 4, 63 (1998), 63–91, 89, n.39.
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Specific differentiated virtues include all the basic virtues such as courage, patience, loyalty, generosity, justice, differentiated by ethical differentiation such as role requirements and permissions. Many examples have already been given. The field of role-differentiated loyalty, for example, may be the advocacy of a defence lawyer (it must be ‘merely’ zealous, say, but not hyper-zealous).²⁷ An example of a specific culturally differentiated virtue discussed below is the courage of a Crow fighter. According to my virtue ethical conception of the Integration view basic and differentiated virtue are mutually constraining. Let us now apply this view to specific kinds of ethical differentiation.
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(iv) Narrative Differentiation The notion that the targets of basic virtues such as generosity and loyalty are differentiated by narrative features is grounded in the idea that a life has direction and shape constituted by narrative relations. Narrative shape is given by an active shaping of one’s life in line with intentions and projects; in other words, one’s life has normative significance and meaning by virtue of (inter alia) events in that life bearing narrative relations in that life (as opposed to say episodic satisfying of preferences or pleasurable experiences). This view about the nature of a person’s life has been called narrativism. Narrativism has been defined as the view that ‘the meaning of a benefit depends on . . . the specific narrative relation between the goods and evils involved.’²⁸ Narrativism then is a view that claims that a class of social facts (namely, narrative relations that provide narrative meaning) is the ethical source of and provides the rationale for the existence of narratively differentiated virtue. Thus, the narrative shape of one’s life has or should have an ethical dimension, a dimension that is the subject of study in narrative ethics.²⁹ At the heart of narrative ethics is a view described thus by John Wall: in living one’s life the self must reconcile the fact that it is ‘caught up in a finite, unchosen, and often distorted world’ while at the same time it must exercise a capacity ‘in limited ways to transform the world creatively
²⁷ Tim Dare, ‘Mere Zeal, Hyper-Zeal and the Ethical Obligations of Lawyers’ Legal Ethics 7 (2004), 24–38. ²⁸ David Velleman, ‘Well-Being and Time’ repr. in The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991/2000), 64–84, 63. ²⁹ Narrative ethics in this sense should be distinguished from what Galen Strawson in ‘Against Narrativity’ in Real Materialism and Other Essays, 180–227, 205, calls the ethical narrativity thesis according to which it is ‘a good thing to construct a self-narrative’ (David Lumsden ‘Whole Life Narratives and the Self ’ Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 20 (2013), 1–10, 4). This is a stronger ethical thesis suggesting that creating meaning in one’s life is like creating or constructing a story, a thesis endorsed by Nietzsche on one reading of Gay Science, 290). This stronger thesis is not implied by narrativity and may be rejected in narrative ethics.
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into a meaningful world for itself.’³⁰ Where the ethics of the narrative features of one’s life takes a virtue ethical form this creative supplying of narrative meaning is shaped by narrative virtue: virtue that is differentiated according to the narrative particularities of a person’s life. On my Integrationist view such differentiation is constrained by basic virtue. Before elaborating on these claims we must distinguish narrativism from two stronger theses, the thesis of the narrative constitution of the self, and an even stronger thesis that personal identity is determined by a form of psychological continuity—namely, narrative continuity. The narrative differentiation of virtue assumes the truth of narrativism, but not the truth of the two stronger theses. Nonetheless, I find plausible the thesis of the narrative constitution of the self, and one version of that thesis, that of the disunity of that constitution (the disunity thesis).³¹ Given that the disunity thesis is assumed in what follows I shall say a little about it. First, what is the thesis of the narrative constitution of the self? According to this thesis not only is narrativism true, but also a self is constituted by the narrative relations between events in that person’s life. Since the idea of a narrative as applied to this thesis may mislead, since a narrative as a story may be entirely fictional and entirely the creation of its author, it is standardly believed that narrative constitution must satisfy what Schechtman³² calls a reality or accuracy constraint. How strong is that constraint is both vague and contested, but resolving debates in this area is not necessary for our purposes. Another important debate is that between those who believe that the self (narratively constituted) is unified and those who believe it is disunified. According to the later, there is no overarching single narrative which unifies what Lumsden calls the various ‘narrative threads’ that constitute the self,³³ such as the different roles we occupy, the various careers and projects we have, status as retired or worker. One might think that being a good person may play such a role, but here we are not speaking of an overarching narrative, but simply of a life led in accordance with virtue. Turn now to narratively differentiated virtue—narrative virtue, for short. Narrative virtue may be divided into two broad types which I call global and specific narrative virtue.
³⁰ John Wall, Moral Creativity: Paul Ricoeur and the Poetics of Possibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 25. ³¹ Endorsed by David Lumsden and Joseph Ulatowski in their ‘One Self Per Customer? From Disunified Agency to Disunified Self ’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 55 (2017), 314–35. ³² Marya Schechtman, The Constitution of Selves (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996). ³³ Thus, for Lumsden a person’s life consists of a ‘bundle of narrative threads’ and is not a ‘complete narrative unity.’ See David Lumsden ‘Whole Life Narratives and the Self ’, Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 20 (2013), 1–10, 1.
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(a) Global narrative virtues These are virtues whose fields are the narrative qualities of one’s life; for example, its overall goodness, and appropriate integrity, coherence, and truthfulness across the disparate narrative threads. These virtues are interrelated and may be grouped according to what I shall call virtues of narrative accuracy, virtues of narrative integrity, virtues of narrative transition, virtues of narrative goodness, and virtues of narrative flexibility. Virtues of narrative accuracy enable one’s narrative selfconception to satisfy the accuracy constraint. This constraint does not require accuracy in all one’s beliefs; it is rather a reality constraint in the sense that one’s narrative self-conception is not distorted by, for example, paranoid and egotistical fantasy resulting in major core falsehoods that impact on important features of that conception. The remaining global narrative virtues bear on the issue of narrative disunity and will be discussed presently.
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(b) Specific narrative virtues The second broad way in which a life exhibits narrative virtue is that it exhibits basic virtues in general, but basic virtues that are differentiated by the narrative shape of one’s life. The fields of specific narrative virtue do not pertain to the shape of one’s own life as such, or aspects of that shape, but specific kinds of things in one’s life that need to be virtuously handled. These are the normal fields of a wide range of virtues: dealing well with danger or threat (courage); the welfare of others (compassion, generosity); delays, waiting and delayed gratification (patience); and so on. Hence, specific narratively differentiated virtues include generosity differentiated by the narrative shape of one’s life, courage differentiated by the narrative shape of one’s life, and so on. For example, the expectations of courage shown when rescuing people drowning in a rip will vary according to whether one is a lifeguard or whether those threatened with drowning are one’s children. The targets of basic virtues (e.g., courage, benevolence, patience) qua narratively differentiated, are thus influenced by the narrative relations of a life. Notice, of course, that the narrative threads, such as the roles one occupies, will be impacted not just by narrative differentiation: the way that is expressed in virtue will also be determined by role-differentiated virtue, for example. I now show how the idea of narrative virtue resolves a problem for a virtue ethics sensitive to narrativity. The disunity thesis apparently poses a problem for such a virtue ethics in that virtue is classically held to be both robust and stable over a mature life as a whole. The thesis of narrative disunity presupposes that one cannot unify narrative threads by appeal to an overarching narrative since on that view such a thing does not exist. Virtue in relation to the disunity constraint thus raises questions about how a life with disunified threads can be stable in a way
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required by virtue. Disunity may be thought to preclude what Chappell and others term narrative sense or integrity:
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To be a person is to live a life, and lives can have more or less integrity or order to them: part of living well is to live a life that has narrative sense . . .³⁴
How is virtue meant to operate in a disunified self? On my view the notion of narratively differentiated virtue can solve the problem. In particular, the problem of disunity will be solved by deploying our distinction between global and specific differentiated virtue as applied to narrative virtue. It will turn out that global narrative virtues show how disunity can in various ways be virtuously handled. Specifically, the worry is allayed when we consider relevant global narrative virtues, notably a virtue of narrative integrity—a virtue we might call a disposition to lead a life of appropriate disunity—(overall) narrative goodness, and virtues of transition and flexibility. A virtue of appropriate disunity is a virtue possessed by an agent who is disposed to lead a life that is neither so disunified that she cannot handle it nor so unified that her life lacks variety or challenge. Where the mean lies in this respect will vary according to the individual and can be subject to controversy. Narrative goodness is constituted by dispositions to manifest basic virtue albeit differentiated within the various narrative threads of one’s life (such as one’s life in each of one’s roles) to a sufficient overall level to be deemed virtuous overall. The disunity thesis does not suggest that one will be overall virtuous if one is generous as a friend but mean as a colleague; the requirement of overall narrative goodness may be violated. Narrative virtues of transition consist of dispositions to transition relatively smoothly from one narrative thread to another (where possible).³⁵ Here one avoids vices of excess and deficiency. A vice of deficiency is a tendency to not transition at all: for example, one brings one’s work home like the teacher who treats his family as students, lecturing them regularly. Another vice of deficiency is a tendency to compartmentalize oneself too radically. Or one forgets or neglects some of one’s roles allowing one to completely dominate one’s life. At the extreme one’s life is unified to the point of narrative vice (consider the butler in The Remains of the Day).³⁶ A vice of excess is a tendency to transition too readily; for example, while a university teacher one is overly ready to neglect academic
³⁴ T. D. J. Chappell, Understanding Human Goods: A Theory of Ethics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 106. ³⁵ See Lumsden, ‘Whole Life Narratives and the Self ’. Smooth transitions may not always be easy or possible; such as gender or racial transitions. Further, such transitions may be ethically fraught or thought to be so, causing problems at several levels. See Rebecca Tuvel, ‘In Defence of Transracialism’ in Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 32 (2017), 263–78. ³⁶ Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day (London: Faber and Faber, 1989).
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demands in favour of a welfare role. One has a weak sense of the demands of one’s role. Finally, related to virtues of appropriate disunity and transition, are those of appropriate flexibility: dispositions to allow one’s life to be sufficiently flexible in accommodating appropriately several narrative threads. Flexibility may seem to work against integrity, but so does rigidity. Further, some narrative virtues of flexibility may be targeted at dealing with narrative disruption such as trauma, retirement, forced relocation. To further understand narrative virtue we need to illustrate how basic virtue is related to narrative differentiation. How does the Integrationist thesis apply here? Certainly, narrative meaning is given by narrative relations but giving one’s life narrative meaning does not automatically make for a virtuous life. To illustrate narrative virtue, consider the following example. Alma has a passion for cats: she rescues them, she publicly argues against and funds opposition to Gareth Morgan’s³⁷ unfriendly views about domestic cats; she publicly opposes the killing of feral cats despite the fact that the New Zealand government is funding a major campaign entitled ‘Predator Free New Zealand’. However, although her causes fit the narrative shape of her life, on the Integrationist View that fit does not necessarily make for narrative virtue. Narrative autonomy is constrained by the core virtue constraints of basic virtue including epistemic virtue (see further Chapter 13). In short, permissions and goals sanctioned by the specific passions driving the narrative shape of one’s life are constrained by relevant basic virtue. These constraints are violated if the narrative structure of Alma’s life is based on a lie: that domestic cats roaming around at night could not possibly kill native birds, and feral cats are inherently more worthy of being spared than other highly damaging species of mammal (such as Australian-introduced opposums). If one takes narrative differentiation seriously an important result occurs: one will be permitted by virtue to refrain from, or even fall well short of, maximizing the good. For example, one’s philanthropy or charity may be shaped by narratively determined concerns, such as the role specific local organizations have played in one’s personal life in helping one’s family through illness. Again, by contrast to one’s relations to an acquaintance or a colleague one may be much more patient with the foibles of a friend who has played a significant role in the life of oneself and family and with whom one has in consequence special ties of loyalty. Such factors may even generate narrative requirements which one would not have had without the social facts of narrativity as they bear on one’s life. If narrativism is true, practical wisdom, the core component of virtue on the Aristotelian view, has to be understood narratively. It is defined by Aristotle in a rather abstract way thus. It is ‘the mark of a prudent man to be able to deliberate ³⁷ A New Zealand philanthropist and conservationist who has strong views about the damage domestic cats cause to native birds.
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rightly about what is good and advantageous to himself; not in particular respects, e.g. what is good for health or physical strength, but what is conducive to the good life generally’.³⁸ But what constitutes a good life is not something static: mere conformity to ideals. Rather, since we are temporally extended beings making sense of our lives through narrative relations, that good is to some extent narratively created. As Paul Ricoeur emphasized we have to create our good in a life, integrating goals and projects in a way that coheres both with what Ricoeur calls ‘life plans’³⁹ which are themselves constrained by our stage of life, standards associated with the various roles we occupy, and the demands of relationships we forge or find ourselves in. However, on the Integrationist View, the creative aspect of narrative good is constrained by basic virtue. What is required to live well as far as narrative shape is concerned is contentious. I have suggested that such a life is one that exhibits global and specific narrative virtue, but interestingly discussion of this issue has proceeded quite independently of virtue theoretic concerns, a weakness I now explore. For Velleman the preferability of one narrative shape over another depends on whether a good or evil ‘follows or precedes hardships’ or goods—a view called ‘temporal distributivism’. According to this view the ‘temporal arrangement of atomic values non-instrumentally matters to the overall welfare value of a life.’⁴⁰ The most common version of temporal distributivism claims Kauppinen is ‘improvementism’; it is better to start with low levels of well-being and end up with high levels of well-being than vice versa.⁴¹ Consider, for example, Slote’s example⁴² of the politicians called Uphill and Downhill by Kauppinen.⁴³ We are meant to believe that though the temporal distribution of highs and lows in their lives are symmetrical, one life (Uphill’s) is better for the agent than Downhill’s since the trajectory of his life is upwards in prudential value terms. For others the substantive normatively significant properties of narrative shape can be the subject of a ‘narrative calculus.’ For example on the view of Kauppinen,⁴⁴ the ‘narrative value of events is a multiple of three main factors: their positive or negative causal contribution to the agent’s present or future goals, the value of those goals, and the degree to which success in achieving the goal is deserved in virtue of exercising agential capacities’.⁴⁵ A target centred virtue ethical view which recognizes narratively differentiated virtue differs from views such as temporal distributivism and Kauppinen’s calculus in two main ways. First, the virtue profile of the narrative trajectory of a ³⁸ Nicomachean Ethics, 1140a1–23. ³⁹ See Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, trans. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). ⁴⁰ Antti Kauppinen, ‘The Narrative Calculus’ in Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 196–220, 199. ⁴¹ Ibid. ⁴² In Michael Slote, Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 23. ⁴³ ‘The Narrative Calculus’, 196. ⁴⁴ ‘The Narrative Calculus.’ ⁴⁵ The Narrative Calculus, 197.
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persons’ life cannot reduce to the three values cited above or atomic values in general. Such a profile will be much more complex, and may even give different results in comparisons of lives from those given in a system such as Kauppinen’s. Assume that the lives of Uphill and Downhill are roughly equal as measured according to Kauppinen’s calculus. We are meant to believe that though the temporal distribution of highs and lows in their lives are symmetrical and (in Slote’s original example) both promote much value, one life (Uphill’s) is better for the agent than Downhill’s since the trajectory of his life is upwards in prudential value terms. But from a virtue perspective the lives may not be symmetrical at all. Downhill’s slide may be the result of a scandal caused by his own vice, whereas the narrative trajectory of Uphill’s life may begin with the normal situation of being in the political wilderness in early career but emerging from that wilderness in later career. Second, for virtue ethics the goodness of a life from the perspective of narrative shape is not just a matter of prudential goodness where this is measured independent of virtue. To assess the goodness of a life in examples given in the literature we need the virtue profile of the compared lives. That profile is missing in a well-known example of Velleman’s in which he compares two lives which are similar in that both ‘contain ten years of marital strife followed by contentment’ after in the one you remarry immediately, and in the other your marriage is eventually happy. In the former it is stipulated ‘you regard your first ten years of marriage as a dead loss, whereas in the latter you regard them as the foundation of your happiness.’⁴⁶ We are led to believe that the latter is automatically better because though the bad times are equally bad in both cases, in the latter case the bad times are redeemed. But what of the virtue profiles of these lives from the perspective of narrative virtue? Maybe the first ten years of your marriage is a ‘dead loss’ because you have been victim of sustained abuse and very unhappy. But in this marriage you exhibit considerable narrative virtue: narratively differentiated generosity, patience, courage, assertiveness, and care for your children before your partner changes dramatically for the better as a result of religious conversion. Maybe by contrast you regard the first ten years of your marriage as a ‘dead loss’ because you have no interest whatsoever in your children and family life, and spend all your weekends fishing or hunting with your mates and occupy your evenings with work. Then after your divorce you marry a woman who does not want children and you happily go fishing with her and your mutual friends. The first ten years of that life are singularly lacking in narrative virtue: his virtues, if present at all, should be narratively differentiated to take account of the narrative shape that marriage and children bring to his life. To conclude: for virtue ethics the goodness of a life from a narrative perspective is determined by its exhibiting narrative virtue in two broad ways:
⁴⁶ ‘Well-Being and Time’, 65, cited in Kauppinen, 201.
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(a) The life itself exhibits global narrative virtue in the sense that it exhibits virtues whose fields are aspects of the narrative shape of that life, such as its disunity. These include virtues of narrative accuracy, transition, integrity, flexibility. (b) The second broad way in which a life exhibits narrative virtue is that it exhibits basic virtues in general, virtues such as courage and generosity, but basic virtues that are appropriately differentiated by the narrative shape of one’s life.
(v) Historical Differentiation In recent virtue theoretic writings no-one more than Alasdair MacIntyre⁴⁷ has exposed the complexities of virtue. As we saw in Chapter 1 for MacIntyre the self is not only a narrative self but also one that is historically located: . . . in successfully identifying and understanding what someone else is doing we always move towards placing a particular episode in the context of a set of narrative histories, histories both of the individuals concerned and of the settings in which they act and suffer.⁴⁸
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Narrative differentiation is a history ‘of the individuals concerned’; in this and the next sections we consider ‘the settings under which they act and suffer.’ As Bernard Williams notes this feature has been neglected in contemporary virtue ethics. In his attack on neo-Aristotelian naturalism he claims that the project is excessively biological, and has not taken on board the ‘representation problem’ described by him as follows: . . . how is a phenotypic character which would present itself in other species as a behavioural tendency represented in a species which has a culture, language, and conceptual thought.⁴⁹
Since the study of human nature is ‘in good part, the study of human conventions’,⁵⁰ Williams argues, one should factor in the historical locatedness of human culture: The study of human nature is, in good part, the study of human conventions’, and ‘[H]uman conventions, at least beyond a certain state of elaboration, can be
⁴⁷ See After Virtue. ⁴⁸ After Virtue, 212. ⁴⁹ Bernard Williams, ‘Evolution, Ethics, and the Representation Problem’, in Making Sense of Humanity, 100–10, 102. ⁵⁰ ‘Evolution, Ethics, and the Representation Problem’, 103.
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understood only with the help of history . . . [T]he social sciences accordingly have an essential historical base.⁵¹
Historical differentiation may raise the spectre of relativism. How do we avoid a version of the Reductionist View where the thick concepts are entirely relative to the insider perspective? The alleged problem posed by the “insider perspective” was discussed in Chapter 4. Here we ask: how can the Integrationist View be applied to historical differentiation? A philosopher who emphasizes the integration between the old and the new is Gadamer.⁵² This integration is achieved through a process that Gadamer calls a ‘fusion of horizons’. Here ‘horizon’ is understood as a tradition which embodies what he calls a ‘life world’. However for a tradition not to be ossified and suffer from ‘inertia’ it needs to renew itself. The integrative links are provided through interpretation and reinterpretation of for example the concepts of basic virtue such as honor and charity so that they are modernized through later notions of e.g. self-respect and benevolence. However the ‘fusion of horizons’ is a back and forth process: if this does not occur the process of modernization may be seen as missing something. For example in a retrieval of charity as a virtue of love,⁵³ virtue theorists may in a critique of modernist utilitarian benevolence reach back to Christian works of Augustine and Aquinas to aid a genuine renewal rather than something seen as mere “progress” in the sense of breaking with tradition in the interests of change perceived as being for the better. In a ‘fusion of horizons’ there is both a disavowal of certain aspects of the past while as illustrated above, a taking from it. As Heidegger put it, there is a kind of ‘repetition’ a ‘reciprocative rejoinder’⁵⁴ in one’s relation to the past, but ‘repetition does not abandon itself to that which is past’ ‘nor does it aim at progress’ in the sense of breaking with it.⁵⁵ As a result for Gadamer, the fusion of horizons is an integrative process.⁵⁶ To deploy Heidegger’s notion of identity described in Chapter 1 as ‘belonging together’ the historical and the present are made to belong together creatively in the process of renewal. Global historically differentiated virtues comprise attitudes towards tradition, particularly in relation to ‘fusion’. There are virtues and vices associated with practices of both preserving and questioning tradition. Sensitivity towards tradition is to be distinguished both from what McIntyre calls ‘antiquarian conservatism’⁵⁷ and an adversarial attitude where “progress” automatically means breaking with tradition.
⁵¹ Ibid. ⁵² Truth and Method. ⁵³ See John Hacker-Wright, ‘Charity and Ethical Naturalism’ in Glen Pettigrove and Christine Swanton (eds.), Neglected Virtue (Routledge forthcoming). ⁵⁴ Being and Time, sect. 386, 438. ⁵⁵ Ibid. ⁵⁶ Truth and Method, 303. ⁵⁷ After Virtue, 223.
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Jonsen and Toulmin⁵⁸ give an example of how a ‘fusion of horizons’, involving critical questioning, takes place. As they illustrate, historical situatedness provides a rich field for debate about the contouring of virtues such as honour (concern for one’s dignity and self-respect) and charity. Consider the following practices of the Middle Ages:
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The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were times of great civil strife in Western Europe. Private vendetta, casual violence over almost any disagreement, the warfare of petty and powerful princes, contributed to an atmosphere of constantly threatening violence. Within this situation, a particularly widespread circumstance was the discrimination between “gentlemen” and the rest of the people in bearing arms; gentlemen could bear them; others could not.⁵⁹
As a result of this situation, the casuists of the times considered seriously the issue of the relevance of social status to self-defence. According to Jonsen and Toulmin ‘some held there was no shame if an equal fled from an equal or a subordinate from a superior’. Others disagreed.⁶⁰ The question arises, however, even if we disagree both with the toleration of violence and vendetta, and with the notion of a gentleman, in those circumstances (described above) should social status be relevant to the manner of self-defence? Existing social status provided a field for issues of honour, which concerns at its heart self-love; and conflicts between this notion and charity were the topic of much moral reasoning. Some claimed that ‘by right and by order of charity, the life of the neighbor must be preferred to one’s own honor’ whereas others made an exception if the choice is coerced by an evil act of the neighbor.⁶¹ We can see then that honor is not only bound up with selflove, and may form part of virtuous response on that ground, but also closely bound with one’s identity as having a social status. So, if honour bound with one’s identity as having a certain status can play out in a virtuous way, historically situated status considerations not only feature in the contouring of virtues such as excellent dispositions in relation to honour by having a life of their own, they are also involved in the contouring of charity or benevolence.
(vi) Burdened Differentiation A more general application of the notion that virtue is contoured by the settings in which people act and suffer is given by Tessman’s discussion of what she calls ⁵⁸ Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin (eds.), The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 1988. ⁵⁹ Shaun Sullivan, Killing in Defence of Private Property (Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1976), 27. Cited in Jonsen and Toulmin (eds.), 223. ⁶⁰ Ibid. 223. ⁶¹ Abuse of Casuistry, 224.
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‘burdened virtues’⁶² Burdened virtues are ‘virtues that have the unusual feature of being disjoined from their bearer’s own flourishing.’⁶³ The virtues are a burden on their possessors for they are in the service of emancipatory goals: ‘under conditions of oppression there is a . . . need for a disposition that is oddly burdened.’ Such traits ‘enable survival of or resistance to oppression (it is in this that their nobility lies)’ even though they may so deeply detract from their bearers’ wellbeing that they might be said to ‘lead a wretched life.’⁶⁴ Such virtues I will analyze as another differentiated form of basic virtue within target centred virtue ethics, but before this task is undertaken a prior issue needs to be addressed. It may appear that the existence of such virtue supports a noneudaimonistic virtue ethics but Tessman attempts to fit the analysis of those virtues within a eudaimonistic framework. What may disqualify a virtue contributing to an agent’s flourishing on that picture is an agent’s ill luck. However, as argued in Chapter 5 an agent’s living in non-ideal worlds containing oppression is not ill luck, but a state that is systematically and societally structured. Indeed, Tessman herself acknowledges that Aristotle did not perceive that the ‘bad luck that produces adverse conditions’ could be ‘systematic and unrelenting.’⁶⁵ Hence, as I pointed out with examples in Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View discussed above, Tessman is entirely correct to claim that virtues can undermine an agent’s flourishing ‘because they are self-sacrificial or corrosive or crowd out other valuable traits.’⁶⁶ Once ‘bad luck’ is defined as anything that is ‘beyond the control of the self ’⁶⁷ and can be a matter of ‘systematically patterned bad luck’⁶⁸ then the notion of ‘moral luck’ reaches well beyond its original home⁶⁹ and I start to lose my grip on the concept. Let us turn now to the analysis of burdened virtue in terms of the differentiation of basic virtue within our target centred framework. Here, basic virtue is differentiated by the nature of their burden for its possessor. With the help of Tessman’s extremely useful discussion we consider three cases introduced in my critique of eudaimonism in my Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View.
The courage of the freedom fighter The political resister, says Tessman, is in a ‘position of perpetual struggles, with a constant demand for the virtues of resistance.’⁷⁰ That is to say the courage of the
⁶² Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). ⁶³ Ibid. 4. ⁶⁴ Ibid. 95. ⁶⁵ Ibid. 5. ⁶⁶ Ibid. ⁶⁷ Ibid. 12. ⁶⁸ Ibid. 6. ⁶⁹ See Bernard Williams ‘Moral Luck’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. 50 (1976) and Thomas Nagel, ‘Moral Luck’ [Reply to Williams], reprinted in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). ⁷⁰ Tessman, Burdened Virtues, 108.
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political resister takes the form of resistance, a resistance which involves perpetual struggle. But in the differentiation of basic courage by the resistance struggles of the “freedom fighter” what form should virtuous resistance take? In the (perceived) service of emancipatory goals, should anger be seen as a virtuous emotion within this differentiated form of courage? If so, should it fuel a capacity to do harm to innocents, and even perhaps skew one’s conception of who is innocent? The Integration View would suggest not while Reductivist positions on roles such as burdened roles may suggest otherwise.
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The compassion of the heroic aid worker The compassion of the heroic aid worker is compassion differentiated by its burdened quality in the context of extreme neediness. The mean of compassion between what Tessman calls “extreme sensitivity” and indifference falls much closer to the former pole in the case of burdened virtue than it does in everyday compassion. On this view according to Tessman, Hursthouse’s account of tragic dilemmas is faulty for its lack of appreciation that we all live under continuing tragic dilemmas involving the impossibility of finding a mean between extreme sensitivity and the ‘moral wrong of indifference.’ Tragic dilemmas are not rare but are endemic and ‘horrifying’. The consequence is that our lives are marred, and flourishing out of reach.⁷¹ Not only does this view compromise Tessman’s eudaimonism, but fails to appreciate the resources of the variety of differentiated virtue. Compassion can be differentiated in ways that are not exhausted by its burdensome quality. For not everyone is required to be a cultural leader, a freedom fighter, a dedicated aid worker, and indeed some, perhaps many, are quite unfitted for these roles. Role and narrative differentiation of a basic virtue can give a virtue a burdened and demanding quality but not necessarily.
The creativity of the artist So far the differentiation of basic virtue by their burdensome qualities has been conceptualized in terms of the shifting of the mean in the direction of the pole of excess. The same might be said of the creativity of the passionate impoverished artist: burdened creativity is “excessive” creativity, resulting in damp living conditions and tuberculosis, isolation from family, and so forth. However, as Tessman suggests burdened virtue itself may ‘crowd out’ other virtues, and that might be a virtue-related burden. If we accept burdened creativity as creative virtue could it
⁷¹ Ibid. 89.
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be the case that such creativity licenses a shift in the mean of other virtues such as loyalty, towards the poles of deficiency or excess? Williams’ Gaughin example which spawned a literature on ‘admirable immorality’ can be posed anew in virtue-theoretic language. Instead of talking about admirable immorality there is integration between ordinary morality and the paradoxical notion of immorality deemed admirable, through the concept of virtue differentiated by burdensomeness. The means of a range of virtues differentiated by burdensomeness may shift in the direction of excess by comparison to the basic virtues of ordinary morality. How far this integration goes is of course a matter of controversy.
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(vii) Cultural Differentiation In cultural differentiation, sensitivity to our properties qua human must coexist with a disposition to be inducted into a specific culture, one’s own; a disposition that should be informed by a critical perspective towards that very culture. The appeal of cultural relativism (a species of Reductionist View in relation to cultural differentiation) lies in the fact that evaluative classifications differ between cultures. For example, the assumption that there is cultural and historical agreement on the prohibition of theft is false. In Captain Cook’s time, the ‘daring and stealth of Hiro, the god of theft, were . . . often emulated in Tahiti’.⁷² The permissibility of theft was grounded in a feature of Tahitian life at the time (inequality and famines) but was not without recognition of the rights of property owners: they were allowed to kill the thief if he was caught by them. Here I show how the idea of cultural differentiation of virtue can make sense of the objectivity of ethics despite ethical disagreement between cultures. In his Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation⁷³ Jonathan Lear graphically illustrates the cultural differentiation of virtue, showing that even in cultural devastation confrontation with alternatives is not notional. He claims that ‘we cannot understand what bravery is unless we grasp the goals that the bravery is in the service of ’.⁷⁴ And we cannot understand what bravery is in the service of until we understand the culture in which bravery is deemed a virtue, and the environment of that culture. As Lear describes it, ‘to strike the mean’⁷⁵ of bravery given the cultural meanings of the Crow and their nomadic but continually threatened life in the nineteenth century in their Montana and Wyoming lands, one has to know the details of those meanings and those threats. Given the potentially devastating nature of those threats (most notably by the Sioux) military courage is not just a matter of surviving by destroying the threats, but of getting the enemy to recognize your boundaries by getting them to recognize your victories and ⁷² Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, 79. ⁷³ Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.
⁷⁴ Radical Hope, 21.
⁷⁵ Ibid. 17.
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intent. Planting coup⁷⁶ sticks and ‘counting coups’, including the honour and celebration associated with these practices, were ‘culturally embedded forms of insistence’ on ‘the reality of Crow life’.⁷⁷ The cultural meanings behind counting coups and associated practices exhibited ‘a certain symbolic excess’, certainly ‘excessive from the perspective of immediate threat to survival and well-being’⁷⁸, but it was ‘crucial that the enemy recognize that he was about to be destroyed.’⁷⁹ Thus according to Lear ‘ . . . if we want to understand counting coups as a manifestation of virtue – as a paradigm of courage – we need to understand how it might nevertheless strike a mean’.⁸⁰ Lear concludes:
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If the tribe’s goal is the firm establishment of a boundary, then the act of counting coups is not excessive. It strikes the mean between the defect of wishfully thinking one has boundaries when one is unable or unwilling to defend them and the excess of slaughtering one’s enemies so quickly that one does not obtain from them recognition of anything.⁸¹
If this understanding of the point of courage in Crow society is correct, claims Lear we avoid the mistake of those nineteenth-century anthropologists who thought that counting coups was a form of reckless boasting. At this point, however, we may worry, like Bernard Williams, that an outsider perspective cannot master the thick concepts as employed by, engaged with, and providing reasons for, insiders. One might think that Williams’ position is well illustrated by Plenty Coup’s (chief of the Crows) claim that after the Crow were confined to a reservation where inter-tribal fighting was prohibited (including retaliation for horse stealing as Wraps his Tail found out in 1887), and hunting buffalo was at an end, ‘nothing happened’. Can an ‘outsider’ make sense of that perspective or is there normative insulation? Let us see how an outsider can make sense of the idea of ‘nothing happening’. Having rejected psychological accounts wholly in terms of depression and despair, Lear offers a deeply Heideggerian explanation of that idea. For Heidegger, the notion of ‘Ereignis,’ (event or happening) signifies important cultural happenings through which cultural meanings are established and sustained. But those meanings can also be lost: for the later Heidegger that has occurred more slowly and insidiously with the ‘abyss’ of modernity marked by what he calls “loss of the gods.” In the case of the Crow it constitutes ‘a breakdown of the field in which occurrences occur.’⁸² An interpretive framework which gives meaning to a way of life so that it constitutes a worldhood where things do happen, is not only ⁷⁶ French for ‘blow’. ⁷⁹ Radical Hope, 16. ⁸² Radical Hope, 34.
⁷⁷ Radical Hope, 34. ⁸⁰ Radical Hope, 17.
⁷⁸ Radical Hope, 17. ⁸¹ Radical Hope, 18.
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sustained by practices and emotional construals, but can also be lost by catastrophic environmental events, or (of more concern to Heidegger’s thought) a loss of a certain emotional orientation to the world. What was lost for him, or in grave danger of being lost, is wonder and dwelling-love, through its replacement by resource-based materialist, instrumentalist, consumerist, and technicist thinking. In the case of the Crow the interpretive framework which constituted the space of possibilities for a way of life was ruptured in a world where, for example, warfare, with its practices of counting coups, became impossible. The interpretive framework defines a ‘vibrant culture’ in the following terms: establishing social roles, establishing and sustaining standards of excellence in those roles, and ‘the possibility of constituting oneself as a certain sort of person’—namely, one who embodies the ideals of excellence in the various roles important to that culture.⁸³ Once the space of possibilities for a culture defined by a framework of roles and standards ceased to exist, the practices made meaningful through those roles and standards ‘lost intelligibility’.⁸⁴ Thus, when that framework was removed, ‘nothing happened’. This analysis suggests an insider’s perspective on the thick concepts. Yet, it is quite another matter to claim that outsiders cannot understand that perspective in more or less rich ways. Indeed, Plenty Coups claimed that the white man, Frank B. Linderman, to whom he told his story did come to know him, that he had ‘felt his heart’.⁸⁵ Nonetheless, displaying considerable epistemic humility, Linderman himself was uncertain of this, indeed remained convinced that ‘no white man has ever thoroughly known the Indian’.⁸⁶ This latter claim seems plausible, but it is a far cry from not knowing at all. I am not speaking here of the moral psychology of one who is faced with coming to grips with alien understandings of the thick concepts in the wake of cultural devastation, but of one who attempts from the outside to gain some understanding of that psychology. The former problem, according to Lear involves the ‘depressing news’ that ‘the best people of the civilization would be the least equipped’ to find ‘decent ways to go forward’⁸⁷ (though surely Plenty Coups himself is a counterexample to that generalization). In “going forward” according to Lear, one would attenuate the cultural meanings of a given thick concept, “thinning it out” rendering it plastic and thereby permitting novel understandings more appropriate to the current situation. This transformation requires a different interpretation too of what counts as a mean in virtue epistemology and rationality, a reinterpretation that underpins the novel understanding of courage, for example. In this transformation epistemic humility may be taken to be what in other contexts, may be regarded as excess. That new mean will itself be culturally differentiated, being called by the Crow ‘chickadee virtue’ having cultural resonances with the qualities of a bird. This virtue is a form of wisdom in which openness to learning takes precedence over forms of ⁸³ Radical Hope, 42. ⁸⁶ Radical Hope, 1.
⁸⁴ Radical Hope, 51. ⁸⁷ Radical Hope, 64.
⁸⁵ Radical Hope, 2.
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epistemic confidence and assertiveness, and can be seen as a global culturally differentiated virtue. It is primarily a virtue of listening. At the same time, this virtue is one of strength and not weakness: it is not that suddenly one has no selfconfidence to go on. Rather one sustains oneself in a new exploratory way requiring listening. Thus, it was that for Plenty Coups the chickadee virtue was integrated with the “warrior” qualities of the Golden Eagle whose yellow eagle feather remained a talisman.⁸⁸
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(viii) Conclusion I have argued that virtue is much more complex than has been portrayed by traditional virtue ethics. Basic virtue should be differentiated by many features if their targets are to be properly assessed. This fact hugely extends the scope of virtue ethics which to date has largely focused only on basic virtue. This chapter has illustrated forms of differentiation with some examples, but naturally a great deal more could be said about all these forms. Given that virtue is differentiated in many ways, the question remains: how are these aspects of virtue related in an individual life? Living a life of virtue is necessarily living a life that has narrative shape: our first mode of ethical differentiation. Second, that narrative shape is a shape that satisfies norms of development. Given that we are creatures who develop we should understand virtues as differentiated according to a second mode of ethical differentiation, stage of life, the topic of Chapter 8. Third, the development of a human being is a development that is both historically and culturally located. As we saw in Chapter 1 MacIntyre argued that episodes of one’s life are given narrative meaning through what he calls settings. The broadest such settings are given by one’s historical and cultural location; accordingly virtues are historically and culturally differentiated. There is a second way in which one’s own agency does not wholly determine the narrative shape of one’s life. A crucially important setting as we explore in the next chapter is provided by the roles one occupies in one’s life, the obligations of which are not a matter of one’s narrative creation. Human beings occupy roles in practices whose virtues are answerable to the internal standards of those practices. Hence, the development of a human being is one that occurs within social practices, which are themselves situated within traditions. All these modes of ethical differentiation are interconnected though not reducible to each other. Furthermore, there is a large question of the relation between the modes of differentiation and the self. All this, of course, affects our understanding of virtue. For example given the multiplicity of roles and demands to
⁸⁸ Radical Hope, 90–1.
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which a human being is subject a person needs to possess global narrative virtues dealing with that disunity. Another example, of importance to Ricoeur, involves the relation between historical differentiation and the importance of tradition as a setting for the deployment of the thick concepts, and ‘actively creating one’s narrative unity for oneself ’.⁸⁹ There is not only a creative fusion of the old and new in renewals of tradition—renewals that require global historically differentiated virtues which are also culturally differentiated—there is also a creative appropriating of goods in personal narrative differentiation within traditions. Each of the modes of differentiation of virtue deserves a separate chapter for each has its own interesting theoretical problems. Here I shall focus on just one; the topic of the next chapter. This is the application of target centred virtue ethics to role differentiation. I show how this application solves a problem within role ethics—the role dilemma.
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⁸⁹ Wall, Moral Creativity, 68.
7 Target Centred Virtue Ethics and Role Ethics (i) Introduction
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A general problem with the idea of differentiated virtue is the relation between differentiated virtue and “ordinary morality” understood here, within a virtue ethical framework, as basic virtue. One might think that either differentiated virtue is to be understood entirely independently of ordinary morality or role ethics, for example, can be understood as complex ordinary morality. The first option allows role morality, for example, to become detached from ordinary morality, thereby allowing for what would ordinarily be thought of as vice, while the latter option does not do justice to, for example, options and requirements vouchsafed by narrativity, robust role obligations, and cultural location. The last chapter resolved the problem by an Integrationist View of differentiated virtue: here we discuss the issues in greater depth where they are most salient—role ethics. We show how an Integrationist View of role-differentiated role virtue resolves the problem within a framework of target centred virtue ethics. In role ethics the problem takes the form of a dilemma of role ethics, the two horns of which are as follows. Role Ethics Dilemma: Either: (A) There is robust role-differentiated obligation. ‘Robust’ role-differentiated obligation (in law, for example) is that determined by (for example) the “Standard Conception” of the lawyer’s role (in one or other of its possible versions) as described below. Or: (B) Role occupiers are not permitted let alone required to act immorally, even when occupying their roles (except perhaps in rare cases of “tragic” dilemmas). There seems good reason to hold both (A) and (B), but (it seems) we cannot hold both. If (A) is true (it is thought) people may be permitted or required to act
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immorally, whereas if (B) is true there is no robustly distinctive ethics of roles. For example, the ‘lawyer’s role carries no moral privileges and immunities . . . if a lawyer is permitted to puff, bluff, or threaten on certain occasions this is . . . because . . . in such circumstances, anyone would be permitted to do these things . . .’¹ In this chapter I argue that virtue ethics properly conceived can show that this is a false dilemma: both horns should be accepted. A virtue ethics of roles should subscribe to robust role differentiation, but robust role-differentiated obligation does not require or permit immoral actions. Unfortunately, virtue ethics as commonly conceived (what I call the orthodox conception) is committed to the presuppositions of the dilemma and a certain resolution of it. Specifically, since (B) is held to be true there is no robust role-differentiated role obligations. Before we proceed with this argument we explain ‘robust’ role-differentiated obligation through the idea of the “Standard Conception” of the lawyer’s role.
(ii) The ‘Standard Conception’ of the Lawyer’s Role
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In his The Counsel of Rogues² Tim Dare defends what he calls the ‘Standard Conception’ of the lawyer’s role. This view can be summarized as follows. (Page references are to the above book.) (L1) Lawyers are subject to distinct, role differentiated obligations when acting in their professional capacities (29). (L2) Role obligations are themselves derived from the proper functioning of the institutions in which these roles are embedded. (L3) The function of law is distinctive, and as I shall put it institutiondifferentiated. To put the point negatively the function of law is not the broad social good; not even some distinctive aspect of that good broadly conceived, such as justice in general. I call this robust institutiondifferentiation (in relation to law). (L4) To put the point positively the distinctive function of law is to protect a legally differentiated aspect of justice: on Dare’s specific conception of the “Standard Conception” for example this aspect of justice is the protection of legal rights established by legitimate procedures by means of legitimate legal process, within a context (in Western democracies) of a need to ‘mediate between reasonable but inconsistent views about what we should do as a community’³ (74). ¹ Luban, Lawyers and Justice, 154–5, cited in Tim Dare, The Counsel of Rogues? A Defence of the Standard Conception of the Lawyer’s Role (Ashgate: Farnham, 2009), 148. ² The Counsel of Rogues? ³ As Annette Baier notes Hume had an even narrower conception of (legal) justice: that aspect of justice concerned with property rights. Institution differentiation can quite properly change with time.
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(L5) The obligations of lawyers acting in a professional capacity may quite characteristically conflict with the demands of ‘ordinary morality’. Indeed that conflict can be serious: ‘There are things one is permitted and even required to do as a lawyer which it is wicked to do as a civilian’ (12–13). “Standard Conceptions” of various roles can be generalized. What is required for a “Standard Conception” of a role such as business manager as I shall understand it is that there be robust role differentiation presupposing distinctive functions of institutions, and that such role-differentiation produces role obligations that quite characteristically conflict with ‘ordinary morality’. On such a conception one would deny, for example, that the function of business is the broad social good, or even some distinctive aspect of that good broadly conceived, such as prosperity or making life easier in general.⁴ It is producing goods and services in such a way as to increase owner value (though within constraints). In this chapter I focus primarily on the Standard Conception of the lawyer’s role (henceforth Standard Conception for short), though structurally similar arguments could apply to roles in business, for example. A supposed problem with the Standard Conception is this. A normative implication is often drawn that on that conception conflict between role and ordinary morality results in moral insensitivity, a lack of integrity, and fragmentation in the moral lives of lawyers.⁵ Hence, there is a “moral crisis” in law. I shall claim that this pessimistic view does not follow from (L5), and in particular (L5) is not incompatible with accepting the second horn of the role dilemma (B): namely, role occupiers are not permitted let alone required to act immorally. But surely (B) is straightforwardly incompatible with (L5)? Not so: for on the view to be proposed morality tout court requires integration between so-called ordinary morality and robust role differentiation along the lines of the Standard Conception. An important implication is this: morality tout court should not be identified with ordinary or broad based morality. Such identification fails to take roles seriously as part of morality. Rather role ethics should presuppose robust role differentiation. The task of this chapter is to outline such a role ethics; one that can also be understood as a virtue ethics. This task involves arguing for three theses which in the previous chapter I called Integrationist (as applied to roles). These are:
⁴ Contrast Robert C. Solomon, Ethics and Excellence: Cooperation and Integrity in Business (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). ⁵ This is not the same point as the claim (made by Dean Cocking and Justin Oakley in Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 2001)) that ‘the standard conception makes ordinary morality irrelevant to the assessment of the conduct of lawyers’ (Dare 2009: 46) for example. Dare claims on the contrary that on that conception ‘ordinary morality bears upon the justification of institutions that generate professional roles’ (47). I agree. However, Cocking and Oakley’s claim about the irrelevance of ordinary morality to the Standard Conception is intended to apply only to the conduct of lawyers acting in their professional roles (on Dare’s version of the Standard Conception).
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(T1) There should be robust role differentiation. (T2) Though the demands of roles understood thus may require action contrary to “ordinary morality” such demands are not contrary to morality properly understood. (T3) Target Centred Virtue ethics is compatible with (T1) and (T2). If (T1)–(T3) can be made out, the role dilemma is disarmed within a virtue ethical framework. The defence of the compatibility of (T1) with (T3) is the topic of sections (iii)–(v). The defence of the compatibility of (T2) with (T3) is the topic of section (vi). By then we will have elaborated a target centred virtue ethical role ethics which resolves the role dilemma. We begin with the compatibility of Target Centred Virtue ethics with (T1).
(iii) Orthodox Virtue Ethics and Role Ethics First, we need to explain the common view, shared by opponents and supporters of virtue ethics alike, that virtue ethics as such is incompatible with the (T1). The problem lies in the fact that virtue ethics is quite characteristically identified with what we may call orthodox virtue ethics and it is that particular form of virtue ethics which is arguably incompatible with (T1). We begin with what I call ‘simple orthodox virtue ethics’ which is not explicitly set up to deal with the ethics of roles, but which is still often taken to be definitive of virtue ethics.
Simple Orthodox Virtue Ethics
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Simple Orthodox Virtue Ethics I take to be defined by two theses: (1) Essential to virtue ethics is the claim that what wholly determines virtue is being good qua human being. (2) Essential to virtue ethics is the claim that ‘an action is right iff it is what a virtuous agent would characteristically do in the circumstances’.⁶ (The qualified agent conception of right action.) Simple Orthodox Virtue Ethics is thought to be incompatible with (T1) via the following claims: (3) The virtue ethical ideal of the phronimoi both makes robust roledifferentiated obligation redundant, and supplies a standard of rightness in role
⁶ Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics, 28–9.
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ethics to which the phronimoi conform. This is due both to their accurate discernment of whether or not actions conform to that standard, and their performance of acts conforming to that standard (assuming they act in character). (4) That standard ensures that role occupiers are not permitted let alone required to act contrary to ordinary standards of virtue. Appeal to the ideal of the phronimoi to show that there is no robust role differentiation—a position that appears to follow from the qualified agent criterion of right action—has a beguiling attractiveness that needs to be exposed. Such an appeal fails, ironically on Aristotelian grounds. Aristotle claims:
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. . . the field of deliberation is that which happens for the most part, where the result is obscure and the right course not clearly defined, and for important decisions we call in advisors, distrusting our own ability to reach a decision.⁷
As I have already argued practical wisdom, a property of the virtuous, is fallible. More to the point for our purposes, practical wisdom is not the same as expertise, and in particular expertise in a role.⁸ Certainly, on my virtue ethical position being a mere “technician” is not sufficient for expertise but being a technician is necessary. This is so for one central reason for Aristotle: practical wisdom is necessary for expertise in a role, but one cannot have wisdom in a role without the relevant technical excellence. For just as practical wisdom in general requires practice and experience, so wisdom in a role requires practice and experience in that role. Even were it possible to acquire technical expertise in a role quickly, it is not possible to acquire wisdom in performing that role quickly. But could we have expertise in role ethics without expertise in relevant roles? The answer is “No.” For not only is practical wisdom necessary for ethical competence in general, wisdom in a role is necessary for ethical expertise in relation to that role. And you cannot have wisdom in a role without expertise in the role. We do not want virtuous agents of practical wisdom tout court but without relevant expertise bumbling around as alleged ethical experts in the fields of medicine, law, and business. This is not to say that they cannot exercise epistemic humility taking on board loads of relevant advice. But this is really second best. Turn now to a more complex version of orthodox virtue ethics. A form of orthodox virtue ethics espoused by Dean Cocking and Justin Oakley⁹ is set up explicitly to deal with professional ethics, and accepts the need for some form of ⁷ Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, trans. J. A. K. Thomson, revised H. Tredennick (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 1112b5–26, 119. ⁸ This point is argued more fully in my ‘Expertise and Virtue in Role Ethics’ in Dare and Swanton (eds.), Perspectives in Virtue Ethics, 45–71. ⁹ Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
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role-differentiated obligation. But that differentiation is not ‘robust’ since it too rejects the Standard Conception. In accepting the Standard Conception I reject the complex version of orthodox virtue ethics as well. So what is it and how does it fare?
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Complex Orthodox Virtue Ethics (2a) Essential to legal ethics, for example, is the claim that in a judicial context an action is right if and only if it is what a virtuous judge would do in the circumstances. Essential to medical ethics for example is the claim that ‘in a medical context, an action would be right if and only if it is what a virtuous doctor would do in the circumstances . . . ’¹⁰ Claim (1) of the simple orthodox view remains intact because for Cocking and Oakley being good qua human being for a doctor includes being good qua doctor. There is no disconnect between the two. It might appear that Complex Orthodox Virtue Ethics accepts robust role differentiation through its adherence to (2a). But the appearance is illusory. According to Cocking and Oakley there is a rather direct relationship between the ‘broad values’ of ordinary ‘broad based’ morality (such as justice and promoting health) and permissions of lawyers and doctors respectively to violate their role obligations. However, according to standard conceptions of law, business, and for that matter medical practice, institution differentiation (and thereby role differentiation) is not determined simply by such broad based values. As Dare shows in relation to a number of examples, role-differentiated obligation serving goals of law is not to be identified with what ordinary morality considers is justice in general. Some aspects of what we would think of as justice is not the law’s business. Contrast Cocking and Oakley: ‘. . . given that a lawyer’s role obligations are grounded in justice in a broad sense’ it would be odd to think that role obligations could ‘lead [lawyers] to violate that broader value.’¹¹ The complex form of orthodox virtue ethics has the obvious problem that, for example, the determinations of a virtuous doctor in medical practice cannot be a necessary condition of right action: what about virtuous nurses, midwives, orderlies, cleaners of operating theatres (an extremely important role), orthopaedic surgeons as opposed to general surgeons, administrators (of various sorts), hospital cafeteria workers. This problem could be theoretically fixed, but at the cost of an indefinite list of criteria of rightness all presupposing job differentiation which need not map onto correctness of judgment in a particular case. Might not the
¹⁰ Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles, 129.
¹¹ Ibid. 126.
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good surgeon know more about a technical cleaning matter than the good cleaner? This objection may also apply to legal contexts where on the view of Solum a legally correct or lawful (judicial) decision is one ‘that would characteristically be made by a virtuous judge [i.e. a judge acting from the judicial virtues] in the circumstances relative to the decision.’¹² Application of orthodox virtue ethics to professional ethics has been roundly criticized for its reliance on the judgment of a virtuous agent the route to which may be opaque, lacking transparency, and/or for looking in the wrong place for the determinants of correctness.¹³ I have criticized the “qualified agent” virtue ethical criterion of right action above and elsewhere, basically on the grounds that it confuses issues of reliability and epistemology with that of the criteria of rightness or correctness of judgment. That criticism applies with even more force to the use of that criterion in professional ethics where accuracy and transparency are paramount. If orthodox virtue ethics is rejected the door is opened to a virtue ethical acceptance of (T1). In role-differentiated target centred virtue ethics the targets of role virtue are not necessarily the same as the targets of basic virtue. To show this we need to show how target centred virtue ethics applies to roles.
(iv) Target Centred Virtue Ethics Applied to Roles
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The virtue ethics to be proposed, one that enables us to disarm the role dilemma, has four planks as follows: (1) It comprises a specific conception of robust institution differentiation which is compatible with both virtue ethics and Standard Conceptions (of the lawyer’s and other institutional roles). (2) It applies the distinction between basic virtue and differentiated virtue to role ethics. (3) It rejects qualified agent conceptions of right action, replacing them with the ‘target centred’ view of rightness. In role ethics, rightness is determined by meeting the (contextually determined) targets of role-differentiated virtue. In particular, as we saw above the situational appreciation of a virtuous agent is not necessarily correct. Phronesis is not infallible. Even expertise combined with phronesis is not infallible. Targets of virtue may be missed though virtuously aimed at.
¹² Lawrence B. Solum, ‘Virtue Jurisprudence: A Virtue-Centred Theory of Judging’ Metaphilosophy Vol. 34 (2003), 178–209, 198. ¹³ See for example Tim Dare, “Virtue Ethics and Legal Ethics,” Victoria University Law Review 28 (1998), and R. A. Duff, ‘The Limits of Virtue Jurisprudence’ Metaphilosophy Vol. 34 (2003), 214–24.
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(4) Meeting those targets is not contrary to morality or virtue but it may be contrary to broad based or “common” morality as understood through conceptions of ‘basic’ virtue, such as compassion or justice. We consider now (1): the first plank of target centred virtue ethics as applied to role ethics. There are three broad views about the nature of institutional differentiation which I label as follows:
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(a) The Expansion Strategy (b) The Domination Strategy (c) The Constraint Strategy The Standard Conception rejects the first two strategies for they both deny robust institution differentiation; in particular, they deny (L3–L4) of the Standard Conception. Consider first the Expansion Strategy. This strategy is characterized by a tendency to expand what might be thought as the limited and distinctive purpose of an institution such as business, law, or medicine, so that the institution’s purpose is seen as comprising, for example, the good life in general, prosperity, the inculcation of morality or virtue, well-being or health very broadly understood, and so forth. This strategy is illustrated in law by versions of “virtue jurisprudence.” According to Solum, who accepts what I have called complex orthodox virtue ethics, (for virtue ethics) ‘the aim of law is to make citizens virtuous (as opposed to maximizing utility or realizing a set of moral rights).’’¹⁴ For Huigen the aim of law is to ‘promote the greater good of humanity . . . by promoting virtue.’¹⁵ Making citizens virtuous and promoting the good of humanity clearly are expansionist views relative to the Standard Conception’s idea of the function of law. The second strategy is the Domination Strategy. It undermines or weakens robust institution differentiation by privileging one type of institution using frameworks proper to that type as a model for other types of institution. The distinctive functions of institutions such as universities are swallowed up by a particularly dominant ideal of a specific type of institution such as business. In the dominance view, (B) of the role dilemma may be thought salvageable by enhancing the moral status of the dominant institutional model (e.g., the “corporate model”) and then applying that model across the board, with an ethics to match. Retrieval of the distinctive values of for example universities and the good life in general is often then achieved by demonizing that purpose in general with labels such as the “evils of neo-liberal capitalism.” The problem is not, however, neoliberal capitalism but applying that model to, for example, universities. The third ¹⁴ Solum, 181. ¹⁵ K. Huigens, ‘Virtue and Inculpation’ Harvard Law Review 108 (1995), 1423 ff. Cited in Duff, 215.
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strategy, the Constraint Strategy, is the one I espouse. It is a form of Integrationist Strategy. It accepts (in the case of law) (L3–L4) of the Standard Conception, while claiming that the pursuit of the institutional purpose is constrained by various legal and moral considerations. Planks (2) and (3) have been elaborated in Chapters 6 and 5 respectively so I shall be brief. Target centred virtue ethics understands role-differentiated obligation through the idea of the targets of role-differentiated virtue. This idea furthers the Integrationist View in relation to action within a role. For example, the target of a caring doctor in assessing a patient is not to make her feel good but to give an accurate diagnosis, but in a respectful and caring way. What is involved in both caring and respect qua doctor is controversial and involves role expertise. For example, there is debate between those supporting an ideal of detached concern and those defending a conception of empathy.¹⁶ The target of a caring friend by contrast is to make her feel good in an affectionate way. The deployment of the Constraint Strategy enables target centred virtue ethics to retain the Standard Conception but maintain (B) of the Role Dilemma: meeting the targets of role-differentiated virtue is not immoral. How does it do this? Pursuit of the distinctive institutional function is constrained by role-differentiated virtue so one cannot just directly pursue institutional goals as one sees fit. Exercise of roledifferentiated virtue is itself constrained by basic virtue. According to such constraints I shall conclude (section (vi)), role occupiers are not required or permitted by role obligations to act unvirtuously let alone wickedly, but they may act contrary to the demands of broad-based morality as conceived through basic virtue. For example, though we want our lawyer to zealously advocate on our behalf we do not want lawyers in general to be ruthlessly callous in their pursuit of their client’s interests. Zealous advocacy, as a differentiated form of loyalty as a basic virtue, manifests loyalty as an excellence of character. A version of the Standard Conception of the lawyer’s role which does not give virtue a central place (such as Dare’s) cannot rule out the permissibility of some forms of ‘hyper-zeal’ where ‘the principle of partisanship’ is taken to excess. Admittedly, Dare argues that a distinction between ‘legal entitlements and other advantages available through the law’ allows for the fact that ‘lawyers may legitimately restrict themselves to merely zealous advocacy.’¹⁷ But where there is no legal prohibition of hyperzealous advocacy through notably abuse of process jurisdiction, that distinction does not preclude the permissibility of hyper-zeal. By contrast, Kronman’s ‘lawyerstatesman’¹⁸ possessed of basic virtue will see himself as morally beholden to ¹⁶ See further my ‘Expertise and Virtue in Role Ethics’. ¹⁷ Counsel of Rogues?, 83. Italics mine. ¹⁸ See Anthony Kronman, The Lost Lawyer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1993). See also Gerald Postema (“Moral Responsibility in Professional Ethics,” New York University Law Review Vol. 55 (1980), 63–89), who argues for a closing of the gap between legal practice and ordinary practical
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merely zealous advocacy provided he is not in breach of his role obligations. Such a person, as Dare puts it, is not seen as ‘a mere technician but a person of practical wisdom and public spiritedness.’¹⁹ To complete our account of basic and role-differentiated virtue in relation to role ethics and the Role Ethics Dilemma, we need to ask: what is the relation between them? What in more detail is the relation between reasons of basic virtue (such as reasons of generosity) and reasons of role-differentiated virtue (such as generosity in a CEO)?
(v) Relations between Reasons of Basic Virtue and Reasons of Role-differentiated Virtue The question arises: in relation to action within roles, what is the relationship between reasons of basic and role differentiated virtue? Caring is a basic virtue and demands certain types of action but what is the relation between reasons of caring as such and reasons proper to the caring teacher, the caring doctor, the caring friend, and the caring defence lawyer? Such a relation may be of several types.
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1. Specification The characteristic relationship between basic and role-differentiated virtue is one of generality to specificity along the lines developed by Henry Richardson in a more general context.²⁰ The targets of basic virtue in relation to role-differentiated virtue are as we have seen underspecified: indeed, it is controversial which basic virtues (such as friendship and loyalty) are to be differentiated in relation to, for example, legal partisanship and caring in a teaching context. In any case, what is required for an account of the role differentiation of virtue is not mere phronesis but knowledge of the techne of law; for example, its telos (distinctive function), its rules, and distinctive modes of activity. But the correct specification of the targets of role virtue is not entirely insulated from the constraints of basic virtue: phronesis informs techne. The fact that basic virtue constrains role-differentiated virtue suggests that the reasons of basic virtue are at least characteristically default reasons. Such reasons can in role contexts be defeated or undercut in three kinds of ways by the judgment by appeal to lawyers with practical wisdom and who thereby are encouraged to ‘take a comprehensive view of the values and concerns at stake, based on . . . experience and knowledge of the world’ (68). (Cited in Dare, 152.) ¹⁹ Counsel of Rogues? 102. ²⁰ See his ‘Specifying Norms as a Way to Resolve Concrete Ethical Problems’, Philosophy and Public Affairs 19: 279–310.
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operation of reasons of differentiated virtue. These forms of defeat or undercutting give rise to three further relations between reasons of basic virtue and reasons of differentiated virtue.
2. Overriding The second relationship is one in which reasons of basic virtue are overridden by reasons of (more highly specified) differentiated virtue. An example in law is the overriding of reasons of caring by a role-differentiated virtue of toughness in relation to presenting a case. It would be a stretch to say in many such cases that the basic virtue of caring has been further specified by a role-differentiated virtue of caring when the tough action is called for. Nonetheless, remember that manner and form of toughness is itself constrained by basic virtue. Such virtue provides limits to morally permissible “toughness” in relation to, for example, rape cases, even if these are not (or not yet) legally recognized.
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3. Undercutting by Exclusion Another broad type of relationship is the “undercutting” of reasons of basic virtue by reasons of differentiated virtue. One kind of undercutting is by (undefeated) exclusionary reasons. Exclusionary reasons (constituted by, e.g., institutional rules, protocols, decisions, legitimate orders, collective decisions taken at meetings and bosses’ instructions) are reasons that are not weighed with what Joseph Raz calls first-order reasons (reasons which directly bear on the merits of actions) for or against courses of action, but are second-order reasons grounded (in role contexts) by the authoritative status of, for example, protocols and which may defeat the strongest first orderreasons. In general, Raz claims, ‘one ought not to act on the balance of reasons if the reasons tipping the balance are excluded by an undefeated exclusionary reason.’²¹ In that sense they are ‘absolute’ in his technical sense: that is they cannot be overridden. However, an exclusionary reason may be ‘cancelled.’²² As Raz makes clear such reasons cannot ‘strictly speaking’ ‘conflict’ with weighing reasons.²³ For that suggests that exclusionary reasons (such as it’s an order or a promise) override the strongest weighing reasons even when for example the order should not have been given because of the nature of those reasons.²⁴ For Raz we have ‘two types of ²¹ Practical Reasons and Norms (London: Hutchinson, 1975), 40. ²² Ibid. 27. ²³ Ibid. 25–6. ²⁴ See Joseph Raz, ‘Reasons for Action, Decisions and Norms’ in Joseph Raz (ed.), Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1978), 128–43. Hence, Raz’s general principle of rationality is: “It is always the case that one ought, all things considered, to act for an undefeated course of action” (‘Reasons for Action’ 133).
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assessment’ and separation of the two types of reason, even though they are ‘commensurable.’²⁵ One might ask: how can this be if we are not meant to consider a feature that is an excluded reason as a reason to act on the basis of that feature? As Raz claims, an exclusionary reason is not simply ‘a reason to avoid thinking, considering, or attending to certain matters.’²⁶ Considering ‘certain matters’ is not the same as considering as a reason to be weighed alongside other reasons, but having considered the strength of a reason one may decide that the exclusionary status of the exclusionary reason is not to be regarded as decisive. How do exclusionary reasons function in role ethics? The most salient kind of exclusionary reasons in role ethics are those provided by what Raz calls mandatory norms such as protocols and rules obligating occupiers of institutional roles, and specific orders or instructions from bosses. It is important to remember that though an exclusionary reason such as a superior’s order or instruction cannot conflict with weighing reasons, but rather excludes them, it is not necessarily decisive. An exclusionary reason may be ‘cancelled.’ There are two broad types of defeat applying to authoritative exclusionary reasons particularly applicable to role ethics.
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(1) One is released from the exclusionary reason. For example, a medical protocol is subject to discretionary cancelling conditions. (2) One justifiably disobeys the legitimate instruction which is the exclusionary reason. For example, a lecturer with heavy family responsibilities rebels against what she justifiably (or not unjustifiably) regards as basically unenforced unimportant make-work administrative requirements; someone without family responsibilities and keen on promotion may be much more reluctant to disobey administrators and justifiably so. One of the justifications for authoritative status grounding exclusionary reasons in role contexts is the desirability of coordination. As Raz puts it, ‘authority can secure co-ordination only if the individuals concerned defer to its judgment and do not act on the balance of reasons, but on the authority’s instructions’,²⁷ regarding those instructions as exclusionary reasons. Not all authoritative status is justified by coordination or cooperative needs. Promises and rights not to be violated also constitute exclusionary reasons, as are the utterances of those on whom practical authority is conferred largely on account of their age, prestige, and perceived superior knowledge or experience (such as Maori elders with special
²⁵ Practical Reasons and Norms, 44. ²⁶ Practical Reason and Norms, “Postscript to the Second Edition: Rethinking exclusionary reasons,” 184. My thanks to Garrett Cullity for alerting me to this passage and for discussion. ²⁷ Ibid. 64.
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status as Kuia or Kaumatua). Here, of course, there may be considerable but reasonable disagreement about whether such age and prestige-related institutions should be accorded authoritative status. There are attendant worries about whether a practice of treating as exclusionary reasons the advice or opinions of persons treated as authoritative counts as virtuous deference, as opposed to blind trust, epistemic laziness, or excessive epistemic humility. It is important to distinguish exclusionary reasons not only from overriding reasons but also from undermined reasons discussed next.
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4. Context-undermining A stronger kind of undercutting of reasons occurs in cases of ‘contextundermining’.²⁸ As Cullity argues context undermining is common in role ethics.²⁹ Where this occurs a default reason for an action fails in that context to be a reason at all for that action. Unlike reasons which retain their status as reasons even though excluded or overridden, default reasons in favour of an action that are undermined by context, lose their status as reasons and no longer count in favour of an act (such as communicating honestly with opposing lawyers, or marking one’s niece’s indifferent essay generously).³⁰ On this view certain role contexts such as being a defence lawyer or being a university teacher are undermining contexts. They may make it the case that reasons expressed by rules of basic virtue no longer have status as reasons in favour of an action, as opposed to being reasons, but reasons overridden by weightier reasons or excluded. It is important to distinguish exclusion and undermining of reasons from the phenomenon of silenced reasons owed to John McDowell in his discussions of the reasons of the virtuous agent.³¹ Silencing is defined thus by Denise Vigani.³² It is a phenomenon where for a virtuous agent ‘considerations in favor of acting contrary to virtue are not outweighed or overridden, but rather silenced altogether; in other words, they fail to operate as reasons at all.’³³ But what is meant here by ‘operate as reasons’? For Vigani and on the standard interpretation of McDowell, silencing is a psychological phenomenon analogous to perception where virtuous agents see features in a distinctive way. Features are silenced by virtuous agents in ²⁸ For the notion of context undermining see Garrett Cullity, “The Context-Undermining of Practical Reasons,” Ethics 124 (2013), 1–27. ²⁹ See his “Deliberative Restriction and Professional Roles” in Tim Dare and Christine Swanton (eds.), Role Ethics (Routledge, forthcoming). ³⁰ See Cullity, ‘The Context-Undermining of Practical Reasons’ for a defence of the view that such a case is a case of context undermining. See also T. M. Scanlon, What we Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), Chapter 1. ³¹ In his Mind, Value, and Reality. ³² Denise Vigani, ‘Virtuous Construal: In Defense of Silencing’ Journal of the American Philosophical Association 5 (2) (2019), 229–45. ³³ Vigani, 229.
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the process of reasoning. They are not taken into consideration. Given the fallibility of a virtuous agent it is possible she could be wrong about what counts as a reason. The psychological idea of ‘fail to operate as reasons’ must thus be distinguished from the ontological sense where features which can be reasons in one context fail to be reasons at all in another. Or they may be excluded. In this sense of ‘silenced’ (not McDowell’s) being silenced is a property of a potential reason, not a psychological property of reasoning. Here ‘silenced’ means ‘undermined’ or ‘excluded’. Similarly the overriding of reasons should be understood as different from what Baxley calls the ‘overriding view’³⁴ which is the psychological phenomenon of taking a reason to override another. Again this is a phenomenon of reasoning. On the Constraint Strategy the basic virtues, in providing anchors for moral thought, feed into our conceptions of role differentiated virtue. They provide limits to the insulation of roles from ordinary morality as understood through conceptions of basic virtue. But there is, of course, no algorithm for determining how such reasons are to be further specified in given role contexts, and when they are undermined, overridden, or excluded. Nor is it always clear what basic virtues should be differentiated in giving accounts of role virtues. For example, should we conceive of role virtue in a lawyer primarily in terms of “lawyer as (special purpose) friend”?³⁵ Concepts of basic virtues are prototype concepts, which explains the flexibility and thereby the contestability of their extension (in this case differentiation) into various roledifferentiated virtues. The way in which basic virtue concepts are extended into role virtue through similarity relationships to prototypes is thus contested. For example, friendship has been a fashionable but contested prototype for extension into doctor–patient, lawyer–client, and teacher–student relations. This does not mean that the lawyer is seen literally as a friend in the basic virtue sense; rather the role virtues of a lawyer are seen as role-differentiated lawyer-friendship—hence, the notion of ‘special purpose friend.’ The idea in Fried, for example, is to emphasize relationship rather than impartialist moral requirements to promote overall good in the role differentiated virtue. For him, partialistic relationship between persons is the relevant similarity relationship for extension of the basic virtue into the relevant role differentiated virtue. In the case of “teacher as friend” the relevant similarity relationship is different: it is caring and friendliness. However, as Peter J. Markie argues³⁶ (and I agree with him) the friendship paradigm has unacceptable costs: the lack of impartiality of friendship on account ³⁴ Anne Margaret Baxley, ‘The Price of Virtue’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88 (2007), 403–23. ³⁵ See Charles Fried, ‘The Lawyer as Friend: The Moral Foundations of the Lawyer- Client Relation’ Yale Law Journal 85 (1976), 1060–89. ³⁶ Peter J. Markie, ‘Professors, Students, and Friendship’ in Steven M. Cahn (ed.), Morality, Responsibility, and the University: Studies in Academic Ethics (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1990), 134–49.
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of friendship’s characteristic sharing of activities and acknowledgment of mutual affection through expectations and commitments.³⁷ Fairness combined with impartially expressed friendliness (rather than friendship) are deemed on such a view to be the correct prototypes for extension to the role virtues of university teaching. On this impartialist paradigm, there is a context-undermining of the reason of partialistic generosity in a teaching context where you are teaching someone to whom you are partialistically attached. Such a context is insulated from those reasons whereas on the friendship prototype this insulation would be much less marked. The relationship between reasons of basic virtue and reasons of differentiated virtue is as we have seen highly complex. Now that we have a better understanding of this relationship we can proceed to the second stage of our argument for our claim that role obligations (as understood through role-differentiated virtue) do not permit unvirtuous or immoral behaviour.
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(vi) Role-Differentiated Virtue and Immorality We move now to the second of our tasks: arguing for (T2) above: though the demands of roles may require action contrary to “ordinary morality” such demands are not contrary to morality properly understood. More specifically (T2) is deemed to be compatible with (T3); that is it is compatible with target centred virtue ethical role ethics. We have assumed that reasons of basic virtue, expressive of “ordinary morality,” can be undermined, overridden, and so forth when performing actions in accord with role-differentiated virtue. Even if this assumption is correct, expressing role-differentiated virtue is not necessarily expressing virtue tout court. Cocking and Oakley put the problem this way: ‘Traits that are vices in ordinary life are praised as virtues in the context of professional roles.’³⁸ Might it not be the case that manifesting role-virtue in law is quite characteristically immoral, vicious, and even ‘wicked’? This was indeed the view of Mandeville in relation to business who believed that “greed” was a virtue of business.³⁹ This view I believe is mistaken. Role-differentiated virtue is not a differentiated form of basic vice The highly credentialed intelligent executives of Enron were arrogant, corrupt, greedy, ruthless to the point of coercion, and intemperate.⁴⁰ To think that they displayed business virtues is to misunderstand the nature of vices such as greed and ruthlessness. Greed as a vice is fundamentally a love of getting
³⁷ Markie, 136. ³⁸ Oakley and Cocking, 1. ³⁹ Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees or Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714). ⁴⁰ See further Lisa Shaw (ed.) Sage Brief Guide to Business Ethics (Thousand Oaks: CA: Sage, 2012), 346.
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money as opposed to a love of making money through hard work and creative productivity.⁴¹ Ruthlessness as a vice manifests callousness: it is not the same as the virtue of toughness. Two considerations threaten to undermine this picture. (a) The reasons expressed by the basic virtue rules such as “Be honest” and “Be caring” are not even default reasons in the legal (or business) context, for the default reasons are by contrast, for example, “Be ruthless (and thereby uncaring)” and “Be calculating and manipulative (and thereby dishonest).” (b) Assuming that the reasons expressed by the basic virtue rules have default status, the further specification, overriding, and undercutting of those reasons in the legal context is contrary to virtue.
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Consider first (a). It is true that as we have seen some role obligations, through the phenomenon of context undermining, are insulated from the basic requirements of some virtues (such as friendship). But that just suggests that these are the wrong prototypes for extension into the role context. In taking a dishonest employee to court one is not treating him as a friend at all, even in a roledifferentiated way. One is rather exhibiting the virtue of toughness and not a vice of ruthlessness. A reason for the common view that virtue in its roledifferentiated form is basically an extension of a basic vice are the caricatures of those occupying roles in a particularly zealous and (one might think) therefore exceptionally virtuous way qua role occupier. Thus, we have the legalistic policemen described by Victor Hugo: Probity, sincerity, candor, conviction, the sense of duty, are things which may become hideous when wrongly directed; but which even when hideous, remain grand: their majesty peculiar to the human conscience, clings to them in the midst of horror; they are virtues which have one vice – error . . . Nothing could be so poignant and so terrible as . . . the evil of the good. (Hugo, 1862: cited in Robert A. Burton, ‘Pathological Certitude’.)⁴²
Role virtues in excess are not, of course, confined to literary examples. The ‘evil of the good’ applies also to the paternalistic doctor who with ‘pathological certainty’ and ‘driven by a personal unshakable ethic of what a good doctor must do for his patients’ zealously prolongs life, ‘shaming those of us who favour palliative care
⁴¹ See Ayn Rand’s account of this distinction in Atlas Shrugged. See also my ‘Virtues of Productivity versus Technicist Rationality’ in Jennifer Baker and Mark D. White (eds.), Economics and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 185–201. ⁴² In Barbara Oakley, Ariel Knafo, Guruprasad Madhavan, and David Sloan Wilson (eds.), Pathological Altruism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 131–7, 131.
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over prolongation of life at any cost.’⁴³ The phenomenon of such an ‘exuberant healer’ is ‘all too common’ says Burton, but one should not confuse extreme conscientious in a role with role-virtue. Rather, according to Burton the certainty displayed is pathological certainty resulting in a form of pathological altruism with diverse forms of distorted motivational etiology manifesting felt rather than objective “knowledge.” Those described by Hugo analogously manifest the extreme conscientiousness of punitive rigorism with the suspect motivational structures so well described by Nietzsche in Essay II of the Genealogy of Morals. We do not need to suppose then that (a) is true—we do not need to suppose that basic vices such as punitive rigorism (a vice related to justice), paternalism involving pathological certainty (a vice related to beneficence), callous ruthlessness (a vice related to tough-mindedness), and nepotistic caring or generosity (another vice related to beneficence, opposed to fairness) become role virtues when role differentiated. They do not become so even when these vices are forms of sincere role conscientiousness. Where role conscientiousness is extreme and distorted we have indeed the ‘evil of the good’: role virtue may appear to permit even mandate wickedness, and horn (B) of the Role Ethics Dilemma will appear to be false. But such extreme conscientiousness is not role virtue. What then of (b): the idea that basic virtues such as beneficence generate virtuereasons for action which are quite characteristically undermined by a role context, and when that happens, vicious action is quite characteristically permitted, even mandated? Indeed, the truth of this claim seems to follow from (L5) of the Standard Conception of the lawyer’s role. The temptation to think this I believe comes from a mistake in role ethics. The mistake is to think that roles do not form a proper part of morality. “Morality” on this view is defined in terms of basic virtue whereas distinctive institutional functions and the roles that these generate are part of our practical but not truly moral lives. On that view, something that it is ‘wicked’ to do as a civilan but permitted in a role context is thought to be vicious tout court. By contrast a virtue ethics which follows Aristotle in this respect thinks of virtue as a disposition which has an integrative function: a prime feature of practical wisdom. What I call virtue proper (see Chapter 10) is not basic virtue as such: that is, being good qua human being in a sense where roles and so forth are abstracted away.⁴⁴ Virtue “proper,” such as generosity proper, is generosity in which all fields of the practical relevant to excellence in an agent’s generosity (such as the narrative particularities of her life, her cultural location, and her roles) are integrated in an excellent or good enough way.
⁴³ Ibid. ⁴⁴ This abstraction which defines basic virtue is not to be confused with what MacIntyre calls ‘metaphysical biology’ where ‘man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles.’ ” (After Virtue, 59). No metaphysical position about the relation between individuals and their roles is assumed here.
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(vii) Conclusion
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An adequate virtue ethics of roles can and should subscribe to standard conceptions of institution differentiation. In doing this it rejects Expansionist and Domination strategies of institution differentiation cleaving to the Constraint Strategy. In virtue ethics constraints on maximizing the institutional purpose are relatively broad, and are expressed by role-differentiated virtue. Such virtue demands a role-specific wisdom presupposing expertise, and not merely the phronesis of basic virtue. The account of role-differentiated virtue needs an account of the relevant basic virtues which are role differentiated, justification for the view that so differentiated they do not turn into vices, and justification for the view that at least in characteristic cases, the context undermining, overriding, and so forth of reasons of basic virtue do not lead to immoral or vicious action. (The possibility of dilemmas from which it is impossible to emerge with virtue is not ruled out here.) A virtue ethical form of the Standard Conception of the lawyer’s role (the target centred view) shows how both (A) and (B) of the Role Ethics Dilemma can be accepted. Above all, “morality” is not defined simply through conceptions of basic virtue: to do this is to fail to take roles seriously as part of morality.
8 Developmental Virtue Ethics
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(i) Developmentalism We have seen that familiarity with a b-structure is necessary for intentional access to entities in their various modes of being. For ethics that familiarity consists in mastery of the structure described by TTC/CV. Familiarity with that structure is not something that is instantaneous, or something that is acquired simply through intellectual endeavour when one grows up. Rather it presupposes a conception of humans as developing organisms who are both capable by nature of receiving induction into that structure and for whom such induction is developmental. Recognition of this important fact has precipitated a welcome growth in the integration between virtue ethics and developmental psychology, and virtue ethics, virtue epistemology, and character education.¹ As we saw in Chapter 6 one of the ways in which virtue is differentiated is by stage of life. Such a view presupposes that we are beings that develop and decline through time. The nature of our familiarity with the b-structure of ethics and our conception of virtue should recognize this fact. Thus we can speak for example of virtues that are proper to old age.² Perhaps we can even speak of virtues in children, and if it is thought we cannot, we can certainly speak of personality or perhaps character strengths, developed in childhood, that are precursors to virtue. We might say then that a target centred virtue ethics should also be a developmental virtue ethics (DVE). This chapter shows what such a virtue ethics would look like. Post-Kohlbergian developmental psychology has recognized the philosophical contribution of virtue ethics to the reclamation of character as an object of study in developmental psychology.³ In recent times there has been a dawning realization that there has to be a corresponding development in virtue ethics. Johnson’s attack on virtue ethical accounts of right action⁴ which (he claims) cannot account for the right actions of the improver; Annas’s insistence that ‘We cannot ¹ On the latter see for example Daniel K. Lapsley and F. Clark Power (eds.), Character Psychology and Character Education (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). ² See Sara Ruddick, ‘Virtues and Age’ in Margaret Urban Walker (ed.), Mother Time: Women, Aging, and Ethics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). ³ Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley, ‘Moral Psychology at the Crossroads’ in Daniel K. Lapsley and F. Clark Power (eds.), Character Psychology and Character Education (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2005), 18–35, 27. ⁴ Robert N. Johnson, ‘Virtue and Right’ Ethics 113, 4, (2003) 810–34.
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0009
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understand what virtue is without understanding how we acquire it’⁵; the work of Snow⁶ and others have all contributed to this realization. However, the dominant canon of virtue ethics has not yet appreciated that virtue ethics itself needs to go “developmental” in a thorough-going way. The idea of a developmental virtue ethics raises the question: what is development? It has been defined thus by Valsiner and Connolly:⁷ ‘Development is a process of change with direction . . . The direction . . . does not entail progression (or regression) in relation to some ideal end state’⁸ . . . ‘The developmental perspective is based on the axiom of becoming . . . ’⁹ Schematically the idea of development holds together two ideas: ‘X . . . [becomes] Y X . . . [maintains itself as] X’¹⁰ In these developmental processes there is both relative stability and change. Valsiner and Connolly describe a developmental viewpoint in science thus: ‘ . . . the developmental perspective is a general framework of science that focuses on understanding the directional change of the phenomena under investigation. It is the science of becoming.’¹¹
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For example, if there were a developmental sociology it would study “the emergence and development of social units . . . over historical time.”¹² What is distinctive and interesting about this scientific concept of development is that development is direction of change, and there is no implication that there should be progress as opposed to regression, let alone progress towards something called perfection.
(ii) Developmentalism, Natural Goodness, and Flourishing A developmental virtue ethics, however, assumes an idea of progress in the direction of change; namely, a progression towards virtue. DVE also assumes change in what virtue demands as we mature and grow old. How does the idea of development feature in ethics and in virtue ethics in particular? What, in particular, is the idea of progress? ⁵ Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 21. ⁶ Nancy E. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (New York: Routledge, 2010). ⁷ ‘Introduction The Nature of Development: The Continuing Dialogue of Processes and Outcomes’ in Jaan Valsiner and Kevin Connolly (eds.), Handbook of Developmental Psychology (London: Sage 2003). ⁸ (ix). ⁹ (xii). ¹⁰ (xii). ¹¹ (xiii). ¹² (xiii).
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Richard Kraut has a view which he calls developmentalism ‘whose central thesis . . . is that when we consider the good of any living thing, we should look to the process of growth and development that best suits things of its kind.’¹³ ‘Progress’ then is for the good of the developing organism. Kraut’s account of the good for living things understands that notion in terms of flourishing: for Kraut ‘a flourishing human being is one who possesses, develops, and enjoys the exercise of cognitive, affective, sensory and social powers (no less than physical powers).’¹⁴ Developmentalism on this view is not just a direction of change characteristic of things of a kind; it is an evaluatively loaded view that not only links development with progress understood in terms of growth, but also growth following a trajectory that suits things of that kind. Specifically, it follows a path conducive to mature realization and functioning of powers—a functioning that constitutes or partially constitutes flourishing. Following this line of thought a developmental virtue ethics subscribes to what I called in Chapter 5 a constraint on virtue; namely: The Constraint on Virtue:
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What counts as a virtue is constrained by an adequate conception of human development and flourishing. A key constraint on adequate conceptions of virtue then is the recognition that we are developing beings. To avoid confusion about the implications of this thesis we need to make some distinctions. First, the idea that human nature is characterized by norms of development is a truth about the species, not about all of its members. Human development, where this is understood in terms of a trajectory of growth that suits us, constitutes progress towards maturity, growth in wisdom as we age, and so on. It is partly constitutive of the nature of flourishing characteristic of the human species. Such development is a form of what Philippa Foot calls ‘natural goodness’¹⁵ the norms of which are described by ‘Aristotelian categoricals.’¹⁶ Development through characteristic growth is part of the ‘life form’ of the species. What is stunted or deleterious in relation to these norms may be termed ‘defective’¹⁷ Defect then is relative to the organism’s characteristic modes of development and flourishing. For example, autism affects deleteriously one’s functioning as a human social animal, as does borderline personality. This is not to deny that some of these deleterious
¹³ Richard Kraut, What is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 136, n. 4. ¹⁴ Ibid. 137. ¹⁵ Natural Goodness. ¹⁶ Michael Thompson, ‘The Representation of Life’ in R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, and W. Quinn (eds.), Virtues and Reasons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 272–3; Foot Natural Goodness, 29. This is not to say that all Aristotelian categoricals give one norms of natural goodness which have to do with impacts on the characteristic life of the organism (Foot, 30 ff.). ¹⁷ Natural Goodness, 30.
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qualities might have some beneficial consequences for individual members of a species or of society as a whole. Note that some quite prevalent abnormalities caused by, for example, environmental deprivations or harms may count as defects. Notice too that what counts as a defect is controversial: Aristotle, for example, appeared to think that small stature was some kind of defect just as such, even where not caused by malnutrition.¹⁸ When we count some features as defects we need to be clear about what this entails in relation to both personal flourishing and virtue. What is not well appreciated is the connection (or lack of connection) between natural goodness and what is good for an individual member of the species, what is often called prudential goodness. Defects from the point of view of developmental norms characteristic of a species may not be bad for an individual agent culturally and historically situated in a certain way. This is especially so if what counts as a flourishing life is one perceived to have meaning for the agent. Various mental “defects” for example may aid creativity in a person and thereby give her life meaning in relation to her projects. This point is made by John McDowell in a critique of natural goodness conceptions of virtue. He argues that interpretation is needed to serve a characteristic mode of human functioning, giving our lives meaning. Hence, the natural goodness model of neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics cannot be seen as fully analogous to a naturalism which claims that humans need virtues for their lives to go well in the way wolves ‘need a certain sort of cooperativeness if their life is to go well.’¹⁹ We as humans are in a position to reflect on our lives and to conceive it as having purpose or meaning as agents and not just as knowers.²⁰ In particular, a rational human is able to conceive of a purpose or meaning other than what is good for it as a species; namely, what is good or right for him or her to do or be.²¹ It may thus be argued, for example, that the lives of the disabled may derive meaning from a more positive way of interpreting disability, and the life of a creative person derives meaning from her quite personal creative endeavours. To say that virtue is constrained by norms of development and that sufficiently conforming to those norms partially constitutes human species flourishing, is not to say therefore that in order for an individual human to flourish she cannot suffer any ‘defects’. Second, there is not only a distinction between natural and prudential goodness but as Foot points out, there is a distinction between natural norms and norms constituting natural goodness. Not all deviations from a species norm badly affect organisms’ development and flourishing: indeed, they may be beneficial. Such deviations would not count as defects.²² Furthermore, how we draw ¹⁸ For small people cannot be ‘well developed’ (though they can be ‘well proportioned’) and therefore cannot be beautiful (Nicomachean Ethics, 1123a31–b13, 153). ¹⁹ ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, 151. ²⁰ Ibid. 152. ²¹ Ibid.153. ²² See Foot’s example (Natural Goodness, 30) of the blue tit which lacks the blue patch on its head: we are assuming here this does not affect its desirability as a mate.
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the distinction between natural norms and norms of natural goodness is often a matter of interpretation.²³ It is not always clear how debates about whether interpretations are pernicious or self-serving, whether they conceal, sanitize, or exaggerate, are resolvable from within a framework of ‘natural goodness’. We must also distinguish conceptions of developmentalism which presuppose states of perfection as an end point of development from those that do not. The Developmental Constraint on Virtue shows that the logos of ethics is answerable to sciences of becoming in relation to humans. But views about what constitutes human growth need not subscribe to teleological views that presuppose an end state of perfection proper to the human species. A view that rejects such teleology is Nietzsche’s ethics of becoming.²⁴ The core ideas of a developmental virtue ethics, those of development, maturity, becoming, can be retained in such an ethics by emphasizing virtues that are not at the forefront of conventional ethics, including narratively differentiated virtue and virtues such as (being well disposed in relation to) creativity, productivity, and overcoming resistance and obstacles. In Nietzsche’s ethics of becoming he claims paradoxically that we must ‘become who we are’ without knowing who we are. In The Gay Science Nietzsche claims: (1)
What does your conscience say? – ‘You shall become the person you are.’²⁵
In the same work he says: (2) ‘We, however, want to become those we are – human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves.’²⁶
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He also claims: (3) ‘Becoming what you are presupposes that you have not the slightest inkling what you are.’²⁷ Thus, says Simon May ‘ . . . for Nietzsche, unlike for Aristotle, the perfect and final actualization of a clear and fixed potential is neither possible nor knowable nor should be sought.’²⁸ As Alexander Nehemas also points out, for Nietzsche, ‘becoming does not aim at a final state’.²⁹ ²³ This point is the gist of Bernard Williams’ ‘representation problem’ in his ‘Evolution, Ethics, and the Representation Problem’ where he points out that beings with a culture and language represent things in various possible ways, and ‘where there is culture, it affects everything.’ (102) ²⁴ See further The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche, Chapter 10. ²⁵ Book 3, sect. 270, 219. ²⁶ Book 4, sect. 335, 266. ²⁷ Ecce Homo, trans. Duncan Large (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), ‘Why I am so Clever’ sect. 9, 31. ²⁸ Nietzsche’s Ethics and his War on ‘Morality’, 109. ²⁹ ‘How One Becomes What One Is’, in Richardson and Leiter, Nietzsche, 255–80, 261.
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Claim (1) suggests a teleological view of human nature, but (2) suggests that there is no telos proper to human beings qua human. Rather we create ourselves in an ongoing process as individuals, and thereby we become who we are. Our lives on this view are characterized by narrativity, where the narrative is not to be supposed as terminating in an end state of perfection, or its approximation. Claim (3) also suggests that there is no telos proper to humans qua humans because if there were, how could it be desirable that we not know what this is? How can such a combination of views (namely (1)–(3)) be realized in a developmental virtue ethics? We have seen that the scientific notion of development does not presuppose a telos but merely a becoming: our problem is to square this idea with that of excellence in becoming; excellences which can constitute virtues of becoming. Nietzsche’s own ethics of becoming is an ethics of creativity which itself contains many virtues proper to a creativity- oriented conception of excellence in development. This is not the place for Nietzschean exegesis: suffice to say here that there are many options for a developmental virtue ethics that are consistent with the Developmental Constraint on Virtue. They may be eudaimonist or target centred; Nietzschean, or teleological. For some, however, the very idea of virtue presupposes some kind of ideal. For Russell virtue is both a satis and a model concept.³⁰ He claims not only that ‘ . . . it is a mistake to suppose that the idea that one need only be ‘virtuous enough’ to be virtuous is an alternative to thinking of the virtues in terms of ideal models’ but also that ‘thinking of virtue in terms of ideals is required on account of the very sort of satis concept that virtue is.’³¹ Russell is correct to think that ideal model views of virtue do not entail rejection of the satis conception of virtue, but nonetheless one can accept the satis conception (one need only be virtuous enough to be virtuous) without thinking that that conception requires an ideal model conception. Indeed, DVE may be sceptical about the idea of perfection in empirically sensitive conceptions of virtue.³² What is necessary for virtue as a satis concept within DVE is that there are norms of improvement and development in virtue. These norms need not suppose ‘a model of ideal virtuousness that both sets the top end of the scale and gives meaning to the idea that a particular agent occupies a certain level on that scale.’³³ There are multiple possible sets of worthwhile lives that could be lived by individual human beings. Any such narrative may constitute a life good enough to be virtuous. Any such life-narrative would contain its own obstacles and tensions. They are likely incomparable on any scale terminating in perfection. Many quite different and incomparable lives may be regarded as good or even
³⁰ Practical Intelligence and the Virtues, 121. ³¹ Ibid. ³² Michael Slote, The Impossibility of Perfection: Aristotle, Feminism and the Complexities of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ³³ Russell, 121.
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admirable, without there being any coherent comparable notion of a ‘top end of a scale’ or an ideal. Of these good lives we could say: Some lives are good enough to be called virtuous. Some lives are better than the merely good enough. Some lives are heroic, splendid, admirable, or excellent. These are lives of exemplary virtue.
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Standards embodied in these types of norm are all the standards we need in order to make claims of virtue. To summarize: the Developmental Constraint on Virtue is compatible with a number of theses, not necessarily associated with traditional neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics; namely: 1. Many virtues are not targeted at the good or well-being of individual agents. 2. It is not a necessary condition of being a virtue that it characteristically benefits the agent and would do so in the absence of ill luck. 3. Though the Developmental Constraint presupposes a thesis of natural goodness—namely, that norms of development that partially define characteristic species flourishing and defect—the good of an individual agent is not necessarily understood in terms of absence of defect so understood; or flourishing as conventionally understood. An agent’s good may be understood in terms of other non-equivalent concepts, such as admirability, success, and meaningfulness of her life. 4. The goodness of an individual agent is not understood in terms of that agent’s well-being or flourishing, as opposed to a number of other concepts such as those cited in 3. 5. A Developmental Virtue Ethics may be a Nietzschean (or other) form of ethics of becoming, as opposed to teleological. What is important from the perspective of DVE is that adequate conceptions of virtue are informed by findings in developmental psychological theories that investigate the good of humans in a developmentalist sense. This is an implication of the Developmental Constraint on Virtue. DVE as I shall understand it then recognizes the continuous development of humans throughout their various stages of maturation and decline and conceptions of virtue are informed by such features in a thoroughly interdisciplinary way. As I argued in Chapters 2 and 3, the logos of ethics must be enriched by findings in other logoi, notably those of the social sciences. Since development is continuous, DVE applies to development towards maturity as much as to maturity itself and senescence. In this chapter I consider the roots of virtue in babies, prosocial behaviour and its relation
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to virtue, virtue in children, virtue in the mature but improving agent, and virtue in the aged.
(iii) Virtue and Development How should virtue be understood in a developmental virtue ethics? In my Virtue Ethics I offered the following schematic definition of virtue:
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A virtue is a good quality of character, more specifically a disposition to respond to, or acknowledge, items within its field or fields in an excellent or good enough way.³⁴
Call this the minimalist definition of virtue. This minimalist definition is compatible with a great variety (if not all) rival conceptions of virtue and applies to both basic and differentiated virtue described in Chapter 6. Several features of this conception of virtue are worthy of further discussion in the present context. The notion of character as opposed to trait in general or personality trait is controversial. Miller argues persuasively for the following view: ‘A character trait is a personality trait for which a person who has it is, in that respect, an appropriate object of normative assessment by the relevant norms’.³⁵ As we saw in Chapter 2 a personality trait such as agreeableness is not necessarily a virtue since in the process of an individual’s development it may not have become an excellence or good enough to be called a virtue. It may, for example, have developed into pathological altruism. Nonetheless, it is valued since it is prosocial and could with right training and a suitable environment become an excellence. The same applies to creativity which is valued too for its innovative and constructive power, but as I argue in my ‘The Virtue of Creativity’³⁶ creativity as a trait is not necessarily a virtue. What then is it for a virtue to be a character disposition of an agent? Alfano has argued that virtue is not a monadic property of agents but ‘a triadic relation among an agent, a social milieu, and an environment . . . Each of these factors contributes something to virtue, as do the interactions among them.’³⁷ The second claim is clearly true; the first is controversial. On my own view virtue is a monadic property of an agent; environment (such as whether we are in a ‘Nasty World’) can determine whether or not a trait is a virtue; and social milieu contributes causally to the development and maintenance of virtue.
³⁴ ³⁵ ³⁶ ³⁷
19. Christian B. Miller, Character and Moral Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 15. In Glen Pettigrove and Christine Swanton (eds.), Neglected Virtue (Routledge: forthcoming). Mark Alfano, Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 177.
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If a virtue is a trait which conforms to standards of goodness the question arises how high should the bar be set? The minimalist definition of virtue is neutral on this issue. However, as stated above many believe that virtue is a threshold or satis concept. To have patience as a virtue, for example, you do not need to have the patience of a saint. Depending on where the bar is set for virtue you may think that virtue is common, or extremely rare. On the basis of empirical evidence Miller offers a ‘Mixed Trait’ view according to which ‘most people have a variety of mixed traits as part of their character and not a variety of traditional virtues or vices’³⁸, indeed, for Miller, most people do not have any of the virtues (or any of the vices) to any degree.³⁹ But maybe the bar for virtue has been set too high, requiring stability of behaviour under unusual stress or high stress not part of the usual circumstances of the human agent, or where bystander effects are powerful. For example, in the Torn Bag experiment⁴⁰ if one is in a hurry for reasonable reasons, lots of people are milling around, and the things dropped from the bag are sweets rather than passport or wallet, does it express a lack of virtue to not stop and help? For Hume, standards of virtue are set by reference to what is ‘common and usual’ in human nature and (not having met with the likes of ISIS) he has a reasonably sanguine view of that nature. Furthermore, as discussed in the next section, virtuous behaviour must be distinguished from prosocial behaviour such as helping. According to the minimalist definition of virtue, virtues are dispositions of good responsiveness to items in their fields. The question arises: to what sorts of items are responses targeted? The minimalist definition of definition of a virtue does not entail Russell’s view that: [E]very virtue is a form of responsiveness to practical reasons within its sphere of concern.⁴¹
My definition differs from Russell’s thesis in that responding well to items in the field of a virtue is not equivalent to responding to or for reasons, even though reasons may well favour or disfavour the response. As stated in Chapter 2, in responding to the world within the logos of ethics we respond primarily to features of individuals and situations, in, for example, expressive gestures of love. More generally Russell’s thesis excludes (or includes with great difficulty) some conceptions of mature virtue such as that of Iris Murdoch who claims that ‘instances of facts . . . which seem to have been forgotten or ‘theorized away’ are the fact that an unexamined life can be virtuous and the fact that love is a central concept of morals.’⁴² Chappell too emphasizes the Platonic idea of appreciative fully ³⁸ Character and Moral Psychology, 195. ⁴¹ Practical Intelligence and the Virtues, 371.
³⁹ Ibid. 41–2. ⁴⁰ Miller, 208. ⁴² The Sovereignty of Good, 1–2.
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attending responsiveness to objects rather than (or as well as) reasons.⁴³ Second, young children may respond well to parental instruction (or parents) without responding to reasons, and we may wish to praise such children as obedient, distinguishing them both from the chronically disobedient troubled with attachment problems, and from those whose obedience manifests a spirit that has been broken or damaged. This view has implications for the question whether or not we can properly speak of virtues in children (section (v)). Finally, the minimalist definition of virtue given above applies to both basic and differentiated virtue described in Chapter 6. We saw in that chapter that virtues are differentiated according to several factors. One of the modes of differentiation is a consequence of developmentalism: virtue is differentiated according to stage of life. That virtues are relative to stage of life is the view of Slote for whom ‘various facts about human life and development make it plausible to regard certain personal traits as virtues or excellences only in relation to some particular period of life, rather than as virtues, or excellences, tout court’.⁴⁴ As is the case with role virtue, narrative virtue, and cultural virtue, developmentally differentiated virtue can be divided into global and specific. Global virtues differentiated by development are virtues whose field is the developmental properties of human beings; for example, a parental role virtue of sensitivity to the stages of child development. In manifesting this virtue a parent does not expect too much of a child in relation to such things as responsiveness to reasons, emotional stability, patience, attention span; at the same time in setting boundaries, for example, one does not expect too little. Another global virtue differentiated by development concerns sensitivity to one’s own stage of life; for example, old age (see section (vi)). Developmentally differentiated specific virtues are basic virtues such as compassion and patience differentiated according to stage of life. If there are virtues of children, patience, for example, is differentiated according to stage of life as a child. Calmness may be differentiated according to stage of life as an adolescent: the norms of that differentiated virtue will be shaped by our knowledge of the adolescent brain.
(iv) The Roots of Virtue and Prosocial Behaviour Not only has post-Kohlbergian developmental psychology recognized the importance of virtue ethics as a type of ethical theory informing psychological work, it has also highlighted virtue ethical theories centring on benevolence, notably the moral sense theories of the sentimentalist tradition, particularly those of Hume ⁴³ Timothy Chappell, Knowing What To Do (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). ⁴⁴ Michael Slote, “Relative Virtues” in Slote, Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 39–59, 39.
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and Adam Smith.⁴⁵ This development has revolutionized our appreciation of the roots of virtue in babies which Bloom describes as a moral sense possessed even by babies from three months old; too early he claims to attribute to cultural influences.⁴⁶ He cites the Sentimentalist thinkers as the philosophical precursors of these findings, quoting in particular Adam Smith’s The Theory of the Moral Sentiments. What is less well known is that Hume’s sentimentalist theory as expressed in the Treatise of Human Nature distinguished benevolence as a direct passion of desire for another’s good from the indirect passion of love. Love is fundamental to attachment as one of the moral foundations, as we have seen. Accordingly, DVE in deploying sentimentalist insights should focus on love as well as benevolence in the roots of virtue, for it is love that permits bonding whether in the form of the bonds of blood relation, friendship, or the bonds of humanity in agape. How might the idea that babies have a ‘moral sense’ feature in a DVE? As Mencius puts it, the moral sense in babies is a seed or ‘sprout’ of virtue⁴⁷ rather than virtue itself: indeed, it is odd to call it a moral sense as opposed to the roots of such. Nonetheless, they have what Hume would regard as a condition of the moral sense, namely the emotional prerequisites for it. What for Hume makes the moral sense ‘peculiar’ or ‘particular’ as a moral sense (as opposed to say a sense of beauty) is the presence of benevolence as a desire for another’s good. Clearly, babies do not have the concept of another’s good, but Hume’s point is that the emotional seed of benevolence as a passion is inherent in our ‘frame and constitution’; benevolence in this way is what he calls an ‘original’ passion. This has been borne out: as Carlo claims, a ‘number of neurophysiological mechanisms have been linked to altruistic traits (e.g. empathy) and behaviours (e.g. cooperation, nurturance, sociability).’⁴⁸ Turn now to the roots of virtue as prosocial behaviour. ‘Prosocial’ is a term used by developmental psychologists to describe certain kinds of behaviour that are characteristically socially positive rather than negative. While ‘empathy-like responding is present in infants’ ‘prosocial behaviours are exhibited in children as young as 18 months of age.⁴⁹ Prosocial behaviour is defined by Carlo et al. as ‘a set of actions that benefit others, or are regarded by society or culture as beneficial ⁴⁵ See Gustavo Carlo and Alexandra N. Davis, ‘Benevolence in a Justice-Based World: The Power of Sentiments (and Reasoning) in Predicting Prosocial Behaviors’, in Julia Annas, Darcia Narvaez, and Nancy E. Snow (eds.), Developing the Virtues: Integrating Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 255–72; Paul Bloom, Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil (New York: Crown Publishers, 2013). ⁴⁶ Just Babies. ⁴⁷ Bryan W. van Norden, Virtue Ethics and Consequentialism in Early Chinese Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). ⁴⁸ Gustavo Carlo et al., ‘The Elusive Altruist: The Psychological Study of the Altruistic Personality’ in Darcia Narvaez and Daniel K. Lapsley (eds.), Personality, Identity, and Character: Explorations in Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 271–94, 275. ⁴⁹ Ibid. 276.
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to others’.⁵⁰ Operationally they satisfy one of the conditions for virtue, description through thick honorific concepts (such as helping behaviour) but they do not satisfy other conditions. It is not assumed that prosocial behaviour such as helping expresses or exhibits a disposition of helping. More importantly, though prosocial behaviour is often described (confusingly) as ‘moral’, it is not assumed that prosocial behaviour exhibits an excellence, even an excellence qua action of a child. This is so for at least two reasons. First, if a society or culture has a mistaken view about what benefits others (e.g., extreme and brutal religious cults), let alone what benefits others in a virtuous way, the prosocial behaviour (as defined by Carlo) may not be good. Second, much prosocial behaviour is seen as altruistic in the sense that such actions ‘not only benefit others but also are primarily motivated by the desire to benefit others’⁵¹ As we have seen, recent psychological work on pathological altruism has shown that not all altruistic helping behaviour is ‘adaptive’: it may be ‘maladaptive’ or ‘pathological’ in a variety of ways. In a number of articles in a collection⁵² that draws on several fields and approaches to psychology, we are acquainted with a number of such pathologies. These include addiction to the psychological pleasures of self-righteousness (Brin 2012), overzealous and distorted adherence to internal goals of the caring and justice-related professions (Burton 2012), dependency personality disorders that may make someone dysfunctional in constantly willing to make the sacrifices in a relationship (Widiger and Presnall 2012: 90); dysfunctional empathic responses caused by inability to tolerate perceived negative affect in others (McGrath and Oakley 2012: 49). Nor is such dysfunctionality confined to adults (Horney 1970).
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(v) Virtue in Children It is a feature of DVE that virtues at the beginning and end of the developmental process of growth and decline may well not be the same as virtues of humans in their prime. This section examines how virtue is differentiated according to the stage of life of childhood while the next considers mature virtue including that of old age. However, to show that virtue is relative to stage of life is not to show that children can be virtuous qua child. Developmental virtue ethics is committed to the view that virtue is differentiated according to stage of life, but it is not ipso facto committed to the view that basic virtue can be differentiated according to stage of life as a child, for it may be committed to the view that to be a virtue a trait must be a mature trait. Perhaps we can speak of the virtues of youth (young adults), the
⁵⁰ Ibid. 272.
⁵¹ ‘The Elusive Altruist’, 272.
⁵² Oakley et al., Pathological Altruism.
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virtues of those in their prime, or the virtues of the elderly, but it may be thought, states of development towards mature virtue cannot themselves constitute virtue. Can good dispositions to prosocial behaviour for example in a child constitute virtue? I shall argue in this section that developmental virtue ethics is consistent with both an affirmation and a denial that there are virtues in children. I now believe that both views are reasonable, and I shall show how this can be argued. It may be thought obvious that children cannot possess virtue since on Aristotelian orthodoxy virtue is a mature state. However, Welchman⁵³ disputes the view that ‘prior to one’s mature realization of one’s potential character, one either has no character at all or a character not truly one’s own.’ Further, since some of these character traits are excellences we should accept that there are virtues in children. In her defence of the idea that children have virtues, she makes the following points.
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1. The process of growth and education is continuous, and does not end in a state of maturity. ‘. . . the educational process is one of continual reorganizing, reconstructing and transforming.’⁵⁴ 2. Childhood is a phase of human development and is not a lack or imperfection. 3. An understanding of a virtue as a ‘stable realization of a mature human disposition’ threatens the process of growth. It is implicitly to deny that life is a continuous process of development and constructive change, for on that understanding of a mature virtue ‘traits fostering continual change threaten our virtues.’⁵⁵ 4. Children have virtues specific to that stage of life: they are not mere precursors of virtue. Developmental virtue ethics will certainly accept 1 and 2. But need it accept 3 and 4? Consider first the view that 3 and 4 are false, even from the perspective of DVE. Development is a process of becoming where mature stable dispositions can be both stable in their core features while changing in line with continued growth and the changing narrative particularities of one’s life. It can both be true that virtue is a stable mature state and that, to be a virtue, a trait must not foster rigidity. What about 4? Is it necessarily the case that virtue is a mature state? It may seem that views in developmental psychology such as Erik Erikson’s developmental account of psychological strengths favours Welchman’s view, by supporting 4. However, Erikson’s view⁵⁶ suggests that his psychological ‘unifying strengths’, are necessary for the development of virtue proper, but not wholly constitutive of it. ⁵³ Jennifer Welchman, ‘Virtue ethics and human development: a pragmatic approach’, in Stephen M. Gardiner (ed.), Virtue Ethics Old and New (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 142–55, 143. ⁵⁴ Dewey (1944), 50; cited in Welchman, 147. ⁵⁵ Welchman, 150. ⁵⁶ Erik Erikson, ‘Insight and Responsibility’ in Robert Coles (ed.), The Erik Erikson Reader (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
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Each has ‘its time of ascendance and [developmental] crisis, yet each persists throughout life’⁵⁷ These strengths (in developmental sequence) are hope, will, purpose, competence, fidelity, love, care, and wisdom. For example, basic trust gives rise to hope, as opposed to a view of the world characterized by basic mistrust. Industriousness, which requires purposiveness, can arise only where the individual is capable of producing things and of manifesting creativity. But if his life is already characterized by basic mistrust and lack of hope, shame, and (self) doubt, ‘the brother of shame’⁵⁸ this development will be stymied. Erikson’s ‘unifying strengths’ should be contrasted not with vice, but rather with weakness, whose symptoms are ‘disorder, dysfunction, disintegration, anomie.’⁵⁹ It is clear that some of these strengths, such as ‘will’, are not themselves character traits, but their preconditions. They are psychological properties described in a way which highlights the developmental sequence of these building blocks, as well as the obstacles that need to be resolved, in the various developmental stages. It is consistent with Erikson’s view, then, that maturity is necessary for virtues proper, but that these must be based on the various unifying strengths which, along with virtues proper, continue to develop throughout life. The view that maturity is necessary for virtue proper is consistent with a claim that virtues can have analogues of personal excellence in children. For example, patience can exist at the “novice stage” in children, expressible by basic emotional orientation (suitable for children) and appreciation of basic rules and instructions such as “Don’t rush,” “Sit quietly,” and “Wait for Mum to come to the table before starting your dinner.” Though close analogues of adult patience would be unseemly in a child, it is still clear that some rudimentary underpinning must be instilled. Erikson’s developmental theory of the progress of virtue is also consistent with 1 above. Like Kant, he warns against seeing a virtue as an achievement ‘secured once and for all at a given state’⁶⁰ Because of this, the idea of virtue as a stable trait needs to be consistent with the view that rigidity is a vice. Stability, or the need for it, is taken to excess. But there is a corresponding vice or set of vices—a boredomdriven need for excitement and constant change, or a perfectionistic need for continual change due to permanent dissatisfaction with the status quo. To conclude: developmental virtue ethics is consistent with a denial of 4. The basic strengths and potentialities for the development of virtue proper arise in developmental sequence, and on this view are not virtues proper. Virtue is a mature state, contrasted with excellences in children. Nonetheless, virtue should also be understood as a dynamic state. The possession of virtue is compatible with a constant process of what Nietzsche would call “overcoming” (even for the best of us) as opposed to being a once and for all achievement. “Perfect” virtue, as Kant claims, is unattainable in a lifetime. ⁵⁷ Ibid. 211. ⁵⁸ Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 1963), 253. ⁵⁹ Erikson, ‘Insight and Responsibility’, 211. ⁶⁰ Erikson, Childhood and Society, 273.
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I have shown how a developmental virtue ethics can both affirm that virtue should be differentiated according to stage of life but deny that there are virtues in children. On the other hand a developmental virtue ethics could also reasonably agree with Welchman’s view that there are virtues in children. On this view, children have basic virtue differentiated according to stage of life, and one of these stages is that of a child. We need now to show how basic virtue can reasonably be differentiated not just according to such things as roles and cultural location, but also according to stage of life as a child. Given that the link between virtue and maturity may be thought conceptual I need the conceptual tools to make that claim. The concept of mature virtue is distinguished from that of virtue as defined by the minimalist definition given above. That definition is compatible with both a conception of basic virtue as understood in Chapter 6 and that of differentiated virtue. Recall that basic virtue is virtue described at a high level of generality in terms of general virtue terms such as generosity, patience, courage, and so forth. At this level of abstraction the virtue is described in a way that is undifferentiated: when speaking of patience simpliciter it is not determined whether we are talking about patience as an excellence in a child, or patience as a mature virtue; when speaking of generosity simpliciter it is not determined whether we are talking about generosity qua occupier of role as CEO or generosity qua human being (whatever that may be). In short, it is possible for basic virtue to be differentiated in many ways: according to stage of life, according to cultural and historical location, according to role, and in a variety of other ways, including the narrative particularities of our lives. Basic virtue then is not conceptually equivalent to mature virtue. It may be possible for one to have basic virtue (differentiated in some way according to standards of good development in children) without having mature virtue. The received wisdom that children cannot possess virtue because immature is opposed by Welchman basically on the grounds that given continuous development even in mature adults it is arbitrary to deny virtue to developmental excellences possessed by those in the process of development, including children. A child has her own excellences qua child, and these excellences should not be seen merely as lacks to be endured on the way to the virtue of the mature agent, and thus not really excellences at all. Welchman’s view is supported by the educational theorist Dewey who claims that in educational theory: Our tendency [is] to take immaturity as mere lack and growth as something which fills up the gap between the mature and the immature . . . We treat it simply as a privation because we are measuring it by adulthood as a fixed standard (Dewey 1944: 42).⁶¹
⁶¹ Cited in Welchman, 148.
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Not only is there scepticism here about a conception of mature virtue as supplying a fixed standard to which all children should be trained to aspire and reach, excellences of immaturity should be seen as virtuous stages of being, in their own right. Indeed, Dewey goes as far as to say that ‘with respect to sympathetic curiosity, unbiased responsiveness, and openness of mind, we may say that the adult should be growing in childlikeness’ (Dewey 1944: 50).⁶² An advantage of Welchman’s view is that it makes sense of a claim that there are excellences proper to development, and to stages of development, and that such excellences cannot simply be read off from the properties of a mature agent. How then can we understand virtues in children? We can think of dispositions as excellent or good enough modes of responsiveness relative to stage of development as a child. We can say, for example, that a child has patience proper to stage of life as a child. She has learned not to interrupt adult conversation. She has learned not to whine and throw tantrums if she cannot immediately get her own way; she has learned to wait. There are also vices of excess here: if she follows the old adage of being “seen and not heard” she has developed a form of patience that is insufficiently assertive. Notice, however, that not all virtue in a child is the same as virtue in adults except that it is differentiated according to stage of life as a child. Some virtues in adults may be vices in children. Says Slote:
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Once one has reached a certain point of maturity, life-planfulness is a virtue of practical rationality; but the disposition to have and follow a life plan is the opposite of a virtue, an anti-virtue, (in relation to) childhood.⁶³
Life-planfulness according to Slote, then, is a ‘relative virtue’. Indeed, wisdom in general falls into this category. Although we do sometimes speak of the wisdom of a child, wisdom proper cannot exist at early stages of life. Another example of a virtue which does not have a differentiated form for children is (proper) trustworthiness. We might claim that (proper) trustworthiness is a virtue in an adult but it does not really make sense to speak of trustworthiness as a virtue in a young child. Some relative virtues, by contrast with life-planfulness, wisdom, and proper trustworthiness, are virtues in children but not adults. One such on Slote’s view is trustingness. Innocence is another possibility.⁶⁴ Not all virtues are capable of being virtues (appropriately differentiated) at all stages of life; such virtues are relative virtues. In summary, virtues in children may be relative to children in two ways. A basic virtue such as patience may be exemplified in both adults and children but be differentiated according to stage of life. Second, a basic virtue may be a virtue in an adult but not a virtue at all in children.
⁶² Cited in Welchman, 148.
⁶³ ‘Relative Virtues’, 47.
⁶⁴ Ibid. 50.
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What kind of dispositions make for virtue in children if wisdom, essential to mature virtue on my view, is not necessary? Are we here at least subscribing to a conception of virtue understood wholly in terms of the quality of (intrinsic) desire?⁶⁵ On my view some degree of competence, skill, understanding appropriate to stage of life is at least characteristically necessary. So analogues to practical wisdom are required, even though we would not describe such age-related skill/ competence as practical wisdom or phronesis. Despite this a virtue in a child may not only be admirable or excellent, but also worthy of emulation. Indeed, as Dewey and Welchman emphasize, adults need to foster some paradigmatic child-virtues, but not completely in the way a child has them. These include basic compassion, wonder and curiosity, open-mindedness, enthusiasm, spontaneity, and even innocence for those who prize innocence in contrast to cynicism or even a hard-nosed realism. We should not think of the traits of children as lacks or imperfections; they can be admirable and emulable. We do not need to share Aristotle’s view that children, like women (on his view), are intrinsically imperfect insofar as they do not possess, or are not capable of possessing respectively full mature virtue. It does not follow from a denial of this view of course that stage of life as a child is privileged or even equal in terms of time preference in the assessment of a life as a whole. As Slote argues, the goods and virtues of a child are less important in that assessment, both from the perspective of an agent and from a third-person perspective, than the goods and virtues of one in her prime. On this view then basic virtue differentiated according to stage of life as a child is genuine virtue, but all genuine virtue is virtue that is developing. In children that development is development towards mature virtue. In adults in their prime that development is marked by the transitioning of virtue into the virtues of old age. With the emphasis on virtues of those in their prime this can be missed. For example, Wolf claims that doing crossword puzzles as one’s dominant activity (apart from the basic tasks needed to keep one falling into total disrepair) is not an activity that makes one’s life meaningful for it does not attest to that aspect of meaning where worthwhile activity has to speak to something larger than oneself.⁶⁶ But it may be the case that for a relatively immobile and nearly blind old person this is just the activity that keeps him going and wards off a genetic predisposition to Alzheimer’s.⁶⁷ A virtue whose field is engaging in projects making one’s life meaningful is certainly relative to stage of life. A problem with speaking of virtues in children is that in the Aristotelian tradition at least, virtue is a character trait and character is something possessed in maturity. However, given that character is something that develops it may seem ⁶⁵ Nomy Arpaly and Timothy Schroeder, In Praise of Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). ⁶⁶ Susan Wolf, Meaning in Life and Why it Matters (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9,16. ⁶⁷ This was exactly the case with my father-in-law. Wolf softens her stance somewhat in her ‘Response’ to the very apt ‘Comment’ in Wolf (130) by Nomy Arpaly.
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arbitrary to deny that children have character that is developing just as adults have developing and, indeed, deteriorating character. Furthermore, just as we can speak of the mean in relation to dispositions of patience and anger qua young adult, so we can speak of the mean in relation to dispositions of anger and patience qua child. Throwing tantrums is in a three-year-old expressing frustration in the wrong way and to excess. When this is routinely done in the supermarket we have the additional embarrassment of wrong time and place. Modern parents say ‘Tell me what you want’, ‘Use words’; older generation parents said ‘Be quiet’ and ‘Do what I say’: both agree that such behaviour is wrongly expressive of anger and/ or anger is being felt to excess. When the disposition is entrenched parents have a problem on their hands—we here have an anti-virtue or vice in a child, which we hope ameliorates when the “terrible twos” (threes and even fours) phase is over. Given that virtue qua child is a form of development towards mature virtue it must be a form of development that is integrated with mature virtue and is not disjoint from this. When bringing up a child we do not rest content with the particular highly tuned sensitivities of a child qua child saying, lost in admiration, nostalgia, or sentimentality, that this is a wonderful child-excellence. We may, for example, need to toughen the child up, so that she can live in the real world without constantly becoming distressed or unable to stand up to bullies. The virtues of a child are integrated with those of the mature agent—it is not as if the belief that virtues are relative to stages of life is incompatible with the view that the virtues of a child are a progression to mature virtue. In summary, to understand the idea of virtues in children we need to distinguish basic virtue from differentiated virtue; we need to think of basic virtue as something differentiated according to stage of life; and we need to take seriously stage of life as a child as something with its own dispositional excellences understood through the thick concepts. Virtues in children have a mean (understood in terms of such factors as right time, right object, right manner, right extent, and right affect) relative to a child. Children can possess, for example, patience even to an exemplary degree, but, of course, lacking practical wisdom, experience, sophistication, and maturity, they cannot have patience as manifested in mature virtue. However, some virtues in mature adults cannot be differentiated according to stage of life as a child, and some other virtues which are virtues in children cannot be differentiated according to stage of life as an adult. That is, some virtues cannot even have a mature form.
(vi) Mature Virtue For virtue ethical orthodoxy virtue just is mature virtue: there is no such thing as virtue in the immature. As we have seen this claim is denied by those who believe that virtue can be relative to stage of life including immature stages: a view that
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was explored above. On that view mature virtue is virtue differentiated by maturity. For Aristotle such virtue requires practical wisdom, a view which is orthodox and with which I concur. To possess practical wisdom in turn one needs to be mature; for practical wisdom demands both experience and emotional intelligence. What is practical wisdom? Practical wisdom requires the knowledge of experience and a sophisticated sensitivity, including the emotional sensitivities of a virtuous individual. The reason for this is that one’s cognitive take on the world depends on how one construes that world, and how one construes the world depends not only on one’s grasp of facts but on one’s emotional orientation. Given that emotions are forms of concern-based construals⁶⁸ the virtuous agent of practical wisdom construes the world differently from the non-virtuous, having different concerns, patterns of salience, and attention.⁶⁹ She will not take features as reasons which are enticing to the non-virtuous: such putative reasons are silenced. A DVE will recognize that virtuous construal requires in the process of development prior excellences in the various precursors to mature virtue such as the unifying strengths. Practical wisdom does not come cheap. However, as we discussed in Chapter 5 the knowledge of a virtuous agent need not be infallible or encyclopedic. Agents with mature virtue are after all human; they have limited perspective due to their age, gender, and cultural and historical location, and the narrative particularities of their lives; furthermore they cannot be expert in all fields. As a result, an agent with mature virtue requires the dialogic virtues to make up for the shortfall in her knowledge and her perspectival limitations. She also needs these to participate in collective decision-making. The idea of mature virtue may suggest virtue differentiated according to stage of life constituting one’s prime. However, this would be a controversial claim. We might think as does Ruddick⁷⁰ that there are virtues proper to old age and these would be virtues in the mature. Furthermore there are traditions according to which one characteristically grows in wisdom as one ages at least to a certain point. On this view (unless, for example, one is struck with dementia) one would grow in maturity as one ages: those in one’s prime would be less mature in relation to wisdom. To say that at least some virtues are differentiated according to old age is not, of course, to be ageist: one is ageist only if one’s views of these virtues are mistaken, demeaning, and discriminatory as a result. It would be confused to think that because old age can be seen as ‘becoming’ in the mode of physical decline rather than growth, talk of special virtues of the aged is somehow ageist. Rather age too can be seen as an opportunity for growth in virtue. Indeed, Laceulle⁷¹ argues that gerontology should ⁶⁸ Robert C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 79. ⁶⁹ Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence. ⁷⁰ ‘Virtues and Age’. ⁷¹ Hanne Laceulle, ‘Virtuous Aging and Existential Vulnerability’ Journal of Aging Studies 43 (2017), 1–8.
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reckon with facts of inevitable decline not just by avoiding problematic views associated with that idea through a focus on how science can thwart that process, but also by becoming a humanistic gerontology. It should offer us language to address the vulnerabilities of age. It should in short offer us a language of virtue applicable to old age. There are two ways in which virtues may be differentiated according to old age. First, as Ruddick claims some virtues are ‘especially appropriate’ to old age. What does she mean by this? Why does she think that curiosity, for example, is especially appropriate to old age? She could be meaning that old age presents obstacles and temptations which make curiosity, concern for others, and so on more difficult to exhibit in one’s life. In this case the basic virtue of curiosity is differentiated by old age in that special motivations and efforts need to be made. A second way in which basic virtue is differentiated by old age is that the very field of the virtue is characterized by properties of old age. For example, a virtue of acceptance differentiated by stage of life as old is acceptance of one’s limitations wrought by old age. What Ruddick calls wise independence is independence related to aging: one may not be able to be as independent as one once was and must graciously accept help. Another virtue differentiated in this way is capacity to forgive and let go. Here the virtue is differentiated by the particular appropriateness (she claims) of ‘life review’ with the aim of overcoming and resisting bitterness. Another (putative) virtue ‘energetic anger’ is a more controversial candidate for an age-related virtue—a differentiated form of Aristotle’s appropriate anger. Here the anger is age related by the necessity to ‘protest the social insults’ ‘one suffers by dint of age.’⁷² A correlative vice is a ‘diffuse rage at the dying of the light.’⁷³ According to Russell mature virtue is an achievement.⁷⁴ We must treat this claim with caution. For DVE it is not an achievement in the sense of winning a prize or a game. Rather as Kant points out rather pessimistically virtue can ‘never settle down in peace and quiet with its maxims adopted once and for all but, if it is not rising, is unavoidably sinking.’⁷⁵ What this suggests is the importance to DVE of two neglected virtues: a virtue of self-improvement and a virtue of resistance to malign influences in the maintenance of virtue. The field of the former virtue is aspirational: strivings to improve oneself, and also to maintain those improvements against corrupting influences. The virtue consists in being well disposed in relation to this field; that is, for example, striving for improvement in relation to the right objects (such as virtue), in the right manner, with the right emotions, to the right extent, and so on. Virtue in general is differentiated according to ⁷² Ruddick, 51. ⁷³ Ibid. ⁷⁴ Daniel C. Russell, ‘Aristotle on Cultivating Virtue’ in Nancy E. Snow (ed.), Cultivating Virtue: Perspectives from Philosophy, Theology, and Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 17–48. ⁷⁵ Immanuel Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, Mary Gregor ed. and trans. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 167.
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standards appropriate to stage of life, and the virtue of self-improvement is no exception. At a crude level of generality we would expect children to be responsive to parents; late teens to be exploratory; adults with responsibilities to be responsive to items in the various fields of virtue in a more cautious way. The virtue of self-improvement is complex on many dimensions even when theorized at the level of mature virtue. Investigating the psychology of selfimprovement within a mature agent in a developmental conception of that virtue shows how practical wisdom, essential to mature virtue, should be understood in a dynamic way. As Halpern argues, what would normally be considered irrational emotional reactions such as denial and rage (in, for example, grief) ‘make it possible for a person to arrive at a more realistic emotional state.’⁷⁶ Such “irrationality” is not a mark of immaturity or even lack of wisdom but is part of development. For a failure to transition through such states may be a sign of problematic lack of affect. A virtue of resistance to malign social influences in the maintenance of virtue is very topical at the moment in relation to epistemic virtue in a ‘fact free’ age. The social forces of corruption, valorization of ignorance, and a loss of humanity in, for example, the Cultural Revolution in China often make the maintenance of virtue extraordinarily difficult requiring enormous courage.⁷⁷ Let me end with a warning about the study of maturing virtue within DVE. In much of the developmental literature ‘virtue and vice are used synonymously with moral character.’⁷⁸ This is a highly problematic assumption given that in virtue ethics virtue is an excellence-related notion embedded within conceptions of the good life. As we discuss in Chapter 10 and elsewhere, ‘moral’ by contrast is a narrow (and much contested) concept normally associated with the deontic aspects of benevolence and justice. There are at least two problematic consequences of a focus on the “moral” in DVE. One is that the “moral” goods (whatever these are) are assumed to be superior to other goods.⁷⁹ What then of the creative virtues, so important for development, but not normally thought of as moral (pace Kant’s moral duty to cultivate one’s talents), or indeed love-related virtues, also crucial for development, but often thought not part of the “moral” (because not impartial)? The other problematic consequence is the loss of the ethical salience of thick concepts and thereby virtues such as efficiency and patience important for a good life and central to some one of Erikson’s developmental strengths—notably, competence and purposiveness—which are building
⁷⁶ Jodi Halpern, From Detached Concern to Empathy: Humanizing Medical Practice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 6. ⁷⁷ See Jung Chang, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (London: Fontana/Harper Collins, 1991). ⁷⁸ Augusto Blasi, ‘Moral Character: A Psychological Approach’ in Daniel K. Lapsley and F. Clark Power (eds.), Character Psychology and Character Education (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 67–100, 96 n.1. ⁷⁹ Blasi, 95.
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blocks for a range of virtues. For example, Narvaez and Lapsley prioritize (justicerelated) skills of conflict resolution apparently denigrating the learning of ‘writing neatly, being quiet, and waiting’⁸⁰, as if this is not really part of teaching “values” or character. However, drilling these practices as part of the cultivation of patience and related virtues of consideration for others, rather than encouraging or condoning a tendency to forever thrust oneself forward, may lessen the need for conflict resolution. With the cultivation of efficiency-related virtues, things may go better in the workplace.
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⁸⁰ ‘The Psychological Foundations of Everyday Morality and Moral Expertise’ in Character Psychology and Character Education, 140–65, 158.
9 Pluralistic Virtue Ethics
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(i) Plural Grounds of Virtue Virtues have “grounds”; that is, features which make traits of character excellences as opposed to deplorable or bad. These features determine a virtue’s targets, aims, or point. A virtue itself is understood as a disposition of good or excellent responsiveness to evaluatively significant features of the world, within its field. What makes a trait a virtue then is that it latches onto these features in a characteristically good or correct way; that is, in line with its targets. Some of these types of evaluatively significant features can be regarded as both fundamental and describable at the highest levels of generality. We have called these features bases of ethical response. We could say then that virtues have but one ultimate general ground if there is but one basis of ethical response (ultimate evaluative feature to which virtues are characteristically correctly responsive), and a plurality of ultimate grounds if there are several (such as value, status, and the good for an individual). Thus, according to a monistic form of virtue ethics, for all traits, what makes that trait a virtue is that it is a disposition of (basically) correct responsiveness to the fundamental basis of ethical response (such as value), whereas for a pluralistic virtue ethics for any virtue what makes that trait a virtue is that it is a disposition of characteristically good or correct responsiveness to any or all of a number of fundamental bases of ethical response (such as value, considerations of status, and the good for). Here I shall argue that there are at least four fundamental bases of ethical response—value (properties of objects which make those objects worth respecting, appreciating, creating, preserving, loving, promoting, and so forth),¹ bonds (relationships in which various kinds of attachment and identification are expressed), status (in virtue of which individuals make authoritative demands on people), and the good for an individual.² Different virtues are characteristically targeted at one ¹ See further my Virtue Ethics. See also Dancy Ethics without Principles: ‘where there is value there are reasons of certain sorts – reasons to protect, promote, cherish, respect, tend, approve, defend, and so on’ (177). ² A radical pluralism is also offered by Garrett Cullity who sees ‘the moralities of concern, respect and cooperation as supplying three distinct and equally fundamental sources of moral requirements and expectations’ (‘Demandingness and Arguments from Presupposition’ in Timothy Chappell (ed.), The Problem of Moral Demandingness (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2009), 8–34, 12). This pluralism offers a different taxonomy of these fundamental sources, and it is not a virtue ethical pluralism. But like the latter type of theory it rejects the view that ‘welfarist, neo-Kantian, and contractualist theories’
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0010
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or other of these grounds of virtue. We must exercise virtues aimed at bonding well in say, love and amity, appreciating value in nature and art for example, doing good for self and other, and respecting legitimate status properties. It is hard to argue that the four identified grounds of virtue are the only four, and I attempt no such argument. None of these four features are reducible to another. Nonetheless, there are deep connections between them. For example, virtuous bonds are good for agents, and are also features of the world that have value: that are worthy of admiration and appreciation. Within a pluralistic virtue ethics one might argue for the centrality of one or another basis of ethical response. In this book I do not argue that any fundamental basis of ethical response is more central than another. Before elucidating the bases of ethical response two general questions need to be addressed. First, how do these bases of ethical response relate to the ethical ‘foundations’? Second, how do they relate to goodness in general? Consider each issue in turn. In Chapter 2 I identified several ‘foundations’ of ethics, broad evaluatively significant features which give evaluative point to various clusters of virtues. We now ask the question: in the worldhood of ethics are these foundations ethically linked to just one basis of ethical response (such as value), or several? On my view the ethical foundations can be classified in terms of one or other of the four bases. For example, the care/harm foundation relates to welfare—what is good for an individual. Loyalty/betrayal and love/hate are concerned with bonds; bonds to institutions and to individuals. The loyalty/betrayal foundation also gives point to virtues that respect status expressed in (legitimate) hierarchies. This is particularly important in role ethics as we explored in Chapter 7. Sanctity/degradation speaks to what is precious, what is highly valuable, and to religious and spiritual concerns. Here we respond to value, sometimes symbolic value, of things ranging from flags and other objects, such as religious objects which can be desecrated, ancient trees that can be damaged, valuable art works or magnificent buildings that can be vandalized or destroyed. The fairness foundation concerns the status of humans as being equally deserving of receiving their due (whatever that is held to be). This is highly contested and most likely has plural elements.³ At this high level of generality it might appear that I am linking foundations to bases of moral response in a rather precise one to one manner. Not so, I have already claimed that loyalty/betrayal links to both bonds and status. Furthermore, linkages are not intended to be precise. When considering the vast array of specific ethical questions it is well to remember a point made in Chapter 2: many questions may fall under more than one foundation, it may be controversial which
can offer a unified theory of the whole of morality (Cullity, 11). See also his Concern, Respect and Cooperation. ³ See David Schmidtz, Elements of Justice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
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foundation may apply (as in much animal ethics), and the boundaries between foundations are vague. Turn now to our second question: how do the bases of ethical response relate to goodness in general? I claimed above that virtues have “grounds”: that is, features which basically make traits of character good. Does not this suggest that there is one ultimate ground of virtue: goodness or the good in general? In his thoughtprovoking chapter ‘Against Modern Dualism about the Good’⁴ Talbot Brewer claims that there is but one basic notion of objective goodness.⁵ A pluralistic virtue ethics could agree with Talbot’s position provided that “objective goodness” is taken to be a schema which is compatible with a pluralistic virtue ethics admitting several fundamental kinds of “goodness” (where goodness is understood in a thin schematic sense), all of which are objective. The objection presses then: surely not all bonds and not all status properties are objectively good. Furthermore, though pleasure, for example, is in general a value (being worthy of pursuit) some forms of pleasure are surely not objectively good. Finally, what is good for the vicious is not good for the virtuous (as Aristotle recognized). We do not want to say that all that is good for the vicious is objectively good. What then constitutes the objective goodness of the bases of ethical response? In a virtue ethics it is claimed that their objective goodness is not understood entirely independently of virtue. Although this position is weaker than the claim that being valuable (for example) is wholly derivable from virtue concepts (as in Slote’s agent-based virtue ethics⁶), it does imply that though wealth, honours, pleasure are goods (as Aristotle believed), they are not, as he puts it, ‘good without qualification’. When these goods are contaminated by (or sufficiently contaminated by) at least certain vices, they cease to be in any way good. In no sense on this view is sadistic pleasure (or sufficiently serious sadistic pleasure), for example, a good. Virtue ethics in general rejects “list theories of the good” which list so-called values or goods such as pleasure understood as values or goods entirely independent of virtue.⁷ Similarly, though bonds, status, and what is good for an agent are bases of ethical response, being features essential or central to human lives well lived (in the thin sense specified above), they too are not good without
⁴ In his The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Robert Merihew Adams in A Theory of Virtue: Excellence as Being for the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006) also grounds morality and virtue in responsiveness to the “good”—a position rejected by Richard Kraut in Against Absolute Goodness. ⁵ This becomes clear in his discussion of G. E. Moore when he claims that anything that is really good for me must be objectively good (which is not to say that it is good for everyone, and nor is to say that it is something endorsed or affirmed by me to be good (as in Sumner’s position)) (214–15). This is my fourth basic kind of (objective) “goodness”: the good for an individual. ⁶ Michael Slote, Morals from Motives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). ⁷ In my Virtue Ethics I rejected what I called the Thesis of Non-Aretaic Value (34); here I expand the scope of the rejection to all fundamental bases of ethical response.
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qualification. Bonds can be pathological or unhealthy; status can be oppressive; what is good for the vicious shows defect in the vicious. For virtue ethics, there is nothing good about abusive or racist bonds, nothing good about hierarchies such as caste systems that seriously fail to respect whole classes of human beings, and nothing good for an agent in living a wholly vicious life, but one nonetheless containing lots of pleasure and wealth. We have already seen that value is aretaically dependent. In the case of sadistic pleasure, the characteristic value of pleasure does not obtain at all because of the ‘disabling condition’ of the sadism.⁸ This analysis can be applied in modified form to the other bases of ethical response. Similarly, we could say (as we describe further below) that in what we called in Chapter 5 normal worlds (as opposed to utopias or ‘Nasty Worlds’) status properties and bonds have characteristic or presumptive goodness (in the thin sense specified above). This is so because status in general, and bonds in general, like valuable things worthy of pursuit (such as pleasure) and worthy of appreciation (such as fine objects), are essential for forms of life proper to human beings, and thus to living well. However, disabling conditions in a particular case—an evil status system or an abusive bond—may make the presumptive goodness of status and bond fail to obtain in that particular case. And in a particularly nasty world these disabling conditions may be characteristic.
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(ii) Bases of Ethical Response Now let us further describe the four identified bases of ethical response. As we understood value above, value (or less misleadingly being valuable), is a type of property of an object which makes that object worthy of certain responses which are commensurate with the degree or amount of value possessed: responses such as promotion, appreciation, creation, preservation. Thus, the beauty of the sunset is worthy of appreciation in line with the degree of “wow” factor. The rarity of a bird species makes efforts to create new birds of that species and to protect existing birds worthwhile: efforts commensurate with that rarity ceteris paribus. Such value grounds many types of virtue corresponding to the types of response, virtues of benevolence, connoisseurship, preservation, creativity, and non-maleficence.
⁸ On a much more fine-grained view than I can offer here one may claim that the mode of response to a value, as well as context, are important for whether or not the disabling status of sadism applies. For example, in a specific aesthetic context of appreciation one might argue that the sadistic nature of a pleasure depicted does not act as a disabling condition of the value of the depiction.
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Darwall⁹ points to another fundamental basis of ethical response: that provided by the status of individuals to make authoritative demands on people.¹⁰ For Darwall what he calls ‘standing’ in practical authority is constituted by . . . four interdefinable, irreducibly second-personal notions that together define a conceptual circle: the authority to make a claim or demand, a valid (authoritative or legitimate) claim or demand, accountability or responsibility to someone (with the relevant authority), and a second-personal reason for acting (that is, for complying with an authoritative claim or demand and so discharging the responsibility).¹¹
Darwall explains a second personal reason thus:
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A second-personal reason is one whose validity depends on presupposed authority and accountability relations between persons and, therefore, on the possibility of the reason’s being addressed person-to-person. Reasons addressed or presupposed in orders, requests, claims, reproaches, complaints, demands, promises, contracts, givings of consent, commands, and so on are all second-personal in this sense.¹²
Darwall makes it clear that second-personal reasons are not reducible to valuecentred reasons: they ‘do not derive from the value of any state of affairs.’¹³ In a pluralistic virtue ethics that recognizes status as a separate fundamental ground of virtue, the status-centred respect based virtues are status-centred precisely because their characteristic expression is not one which is responsive to value but which recognizes second-personal authority of various types. Such an ethics can make sense of this authority as a fundamental source of virtue, but rejects the idea that this is the source of all moral obligation.¹⁴ Note that there are status-centred virtues grounded in various types of status of individuals ranging from the highly general status as rationally autonomous and not to be violated, to role properties of having authority possessed by, for example, bosses. In her Animals and Why They Matter Mary Midgley points to a third fundamental ground of virtue. She claims:
⁹ The Second-Person Standpoint. ¹⁰ Stocker in ‘Emotional Identification, Closeness and Size’, 119, is explicit about the centrality of rules and procedures to the good life but doubts that virtue ethics can accommodate that fact. I do not share that scepticism, but more work needs to be done on this issue; for example, developing a virtue ethical account of role ethics (see Chapter 7). ¹¹ Stephen Darwall, ‘Authority and Reasons: Exclusionary and Second Personal’ Ethics 120, 2 (2010), 257–78, 257. ¹² The Second-Personal Standpoint, 8. ¹³ Stephen Darwall, ‘Reply to Korsgaard, Wallace, and Watson’ Ethics 118, 1 (2007), 52–69. ¹⁴ See further Brewer, 166 ff.
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Now there are broadly speaking two types of things which can make a preference reasonable, namely value and bonding.¹⁵
Bonds have been neglected as a central feature of the ethical.¹⁶ However, bonds are a fundamental expression of two of the ethical foundations (notably love/hate and loyalty/betrayal) and thereby provide evaluative point to a number of bond-centred virtues. In its basic sense a bond is not a property of an individual but a psychological, relational property connoting an emotional tie between two or more individuals. The nature of the emotions associated with the tie will vary according to the nature of the bond, whether it is, for example, a maternal bond, a bond of romantic intimacy, a collegial bond, a bond of friendship. Bonding is not something primarily perceived or detected, but is something engaged in, more or less successfully. It manifests in selfsacrificial acts, grief, and other manifestations of love and affection. To attain a more concrete notion of the nature and importance of bonding, and what counts as successful or defective bonding we need to turn to psychology. In psychological terms bonding expresses a fundamental human need for attachment from which relationships of identification and commitment grow. The centrality of emotional bonding and love to human development is recognized in attachment theory first elaborated in the 1960s by the psycho-analytical psychiatrist John Bowlby¹⁷ who draws from evolutionary theory and ethology. Crucial to successful emotional bonding is love. Where this is absent or defective, attachment exhibits a variety of failures revealed in the seminal and well established experiments called the ‘Strange Situation Test’ devised by psychologist Mary Ainsworth for the purposes of measuring secure and insecure attachment.¹⁸ Various attachment problems are rooted in insecure or defective love, or a complete absence of love, resulting in syndromes called avoidant, resistant, or disorganized attachment. The good for an individual is the fourth kind of ground for virtue. Activities such as working on a particular project, engaging with one’s friends, relating to one’s own children, are good for one without it being the case that working on equally valuable projects, engaging with other people’s equally virtuous friends, and relating to others’ children are equally good for one or even good for one at all. Such goods are described by Cullity as ‘partial goods’ defined as goods ‘constituted by attitudes of personal partiality’.¹⁹ It is clear that at least part of what explains
¹⁵ (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), 103. ¹⁶ A notable exception is Michael Stocker (1996, 1997) whose psychologically informed work on types of identification and closeness (and related virtues, vices, and emotions) is a model for further developments in moral theory. He is explicit that central to the good life is such features, which are not reducible to value and amount of value (1997: 124). ¹⁷ Attachment (London: Pelican, 1969). ¹⁸ M. Ainsworth, M. Blehar, E. Waters, and S. Wall, Patterns of Attachment: A Psychological Study of the Strange Situation (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1978). ¹⁹ Garrett Cullity, The Moral Demands of Affluence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 129–31.
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this feature of partial goods is the human tendency to bond, and the goods of relation. Indeed, some philosophers, such as Lawrence Blum, argue that ‘particularity and partiality as manifested in various virtues, are no less fundamental features of the moral life than are impartiality and universal principle . . .’²⁰ As a consequence for them, an adequate moral theory must exhibit at a fundamental level an irreducible plurality. The good for as a ground of virtue is usually associated with what Richard Kraut has called developmentalism (see Chapter 8). As argued in that chapter a pluralistic virtue ethics can and on my view should accept both developmentalism and the stronger position (not itself implied by developmentalism) that what makes a trait a virtue is constrained by facts about proper human development. This is what I called the Constraint on Virtue. But as we have seen, to say that virtue is constrained by such facts is not to say that every virtue speaks to what is good for a human being. The good for a human being need not be the only ground of virtue.
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(iii) The Unity of the Virtues One of the major criticisms of any form of ethical pluralism including Ross’s pluralistic deontology is that it leads to fragmentation of the practical. Ross was accused of proposing something like an “unconnected heap of duties”:²¹ is it any better to propose an “unconnected heap of virtues” targeted at disconnected features of the ethical? According to D. D. Raphael, while intuitionism ‘gives a reasonably accurate picture of everyday moral judgment . . . it does not meet the needs of a philosophical theory, which should try to show connections and tie things up in a coherent system.’²² Does a pluralistic virtue ethics suffer from the same complaint? Not necessarily: such an ethics can systematize in several ways. By “systematize” I do not mean producing the kind of systematization in ethical theory to which Williams was opposed in Chapter 6 of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy: that characterizing universalistic kinds of contractualist theories (where he basically has Rawls in mind) and utilitarianism (where he discusses primarily Sidgwick). Here “systematization” results in ethical theories designed to resolve conflicting “intuitions” in ways securing general agreement²³ (99) by the deployment of ‘principles’ (99) that are ‘very general and have as little distinctive content as possible’ because theory is ‘trying to systematize’ (116).
²⁰ Lawrence Blum, ‘Against Deriving Particularity’ in Brad Hooker and Margaret Little (eds.), Moral Particularism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 205–26, 226. ²¹ David McNaughton defends Ross against this charge in ‘An Unconnected Heap of Duties?’ Philosophical Quarterly 46 (1996), 433–47. ²² Cited in McNaughton, 434. ²³ Page references in this paragraph are to Williams.
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When I say that a pluralistic virtue ethics can systematize I merely mean the following. First, it may ground the virtues in relatively few types of basic features. There are relatively few bases of ethical response. Rather than relying on an Aristotelian appeal to the fine and noble discerned by the situational appreciation of normative features by the phronimos, we can say systematic things about why traits are virtues and their connection to the ethical foundations, and why certain actions hit the targets of virtues and others do not. Second, it may legitimately regard some virtues as more important and central than others. For example, wit is a virtue in both Aristotle and Hume but there is no suggestion that wit is a virtue that is central to a good life. Third, as we have seen the goodness of the basic grounds of virtue is not entirely independent of virtue; hence, they may be partially integrated (though not unified) through virtue notions. Finally, it is virtue itself, as an excellence of character, which enables the agent to appreciate the complexities of the good life, the multiple sources of goodness, and ways to do justice to that multiplicity. In a pluralistic virtue ethics some degree of disunity will remain at the very heart of what grounds the virtues, though this does not imply that the various ways of living well and virtuously cannot be to some extent integrated in a good life.²⁴ The underlying theme of pluralistic virtue ethics as I present it is that a radical pluralism can exist hand in hand with integration. A pluralistic virtue ethics will deny the “Unity of the Virtues” thesis, but I shall now argue that such an ethics can nevertheless accept that the virtues are to some extent integrated: they are not “fragmented.” What is the unity of the virtue thesis denied by a pluralistic virtue ethics? Well here is one classic formulation: Aristotle’s claim that to have one virtue you must have them all.²⁵ On this understanding the Unity thesis may be described thus:
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The Unity of the Virtues Thesis The possession of one virtue implies the possession of all the virtues. The ground for this initially surprising thesis is that each virtue presupposes practical wisdom and practical wisdom is a rational trait which, as T. H. Irwin puts it, ‘takes a global point of view’.²⁶ Apparent conflict is resolved through practical wisdom. Hence, although virtues are individuated through their fields (domains of concern) so that at the level of concept there are many virtues, they cooperate with one another to the point that in re they are not really separable. Virtue is thus unified through practical wisdom. ²⁴ This is not to say that contemporary philosophers (such as Charles Taylor) have not advocated for the recognition of plurality and indeed fragmentation at the foundations of ethics. My point applies only to prominent contemporary developments of virtue ethics. ²⁵ See further Neera K. Badhwar, ‘The Limited Unity of Virtue’ Nous 30:3 (1996), 306–29. ²⁶ T. H. Irwin, ‘Practical Reason Divided: Aquinas and his Critics’ in Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut (eds.), Ethics and Practical Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 189–214, 199.
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The Unity thesis has been criticized by appeal to the plurality of conflicting goods. Foot claims:
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. . . so far from forming a unity in the sense that Aristotle and Aquinas believed they did, they actually conflict with each other: which is to say that if someone has one of them he inevitably fails to have some other.²⁷
It has been argued, for example, ‘one cannot possess the quality of perfect frankness and the quality of perfect tactfulness at one and the same time.’²⁸ The argument is basically that ‘if one is frank, one will have acted toward one’s friend [in the example given] in a way that isn’t entirely kind (or tactful) . . . what one has done will count as less than ethically ideal.’²⁹ Perhaps appeal to arête kuria understood as perfect virtue will solve the problem. Perfect frankness as a virtue is not maximal frankness but excellent frankness, and since that virtue is properly integrated with tactfulness, excellent frankness and excellent tactfulness are differentiated only insofar as they have different fields. The field of the former is truthfulness in communication while that of the latter is sensitivity to others. They cannot come into conflict. In reply many would argue that in the real world of imperfection, including lack of virtue, since frankness aims at the end of honesty, robustness, and efficiency in communication, whereas tactfulness aims at the end of not hurting sensitive souls, the realization of such a unified excellence is not forthcoming. Imagine a world in which lies are regularly necessary for self-protection and the protection of others. It may become really stretched to say that the frequent dishonest but prudent acts were not contrary to the virtue of honesty. An extremely pessimistic view of this nature was that of Machiavelli: ‘a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.’³⁰ Clearly, Machiavelli is claiming that being virtuous in many respects comes into conflict with the virtue of prudence. The conflict is even more serious for Machiavelli when we take into account the role virtues of leaders. Stocker also notes the difficulty of listing ‘the virtues of good people in bad societies.’³¹
²⁷ P. Foot, “Moral Dilemmas and Moral Realism,” Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983), 379–98, 397. ²⁸ Michael Slote, The Impossibility of Perfection: Aristotle, Feminism, and the Complexities of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 42. ²⁹ Impossibility of Perfection, 42. ³⁰ Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. George Bull (Harmonsdworth: Penguin, 1975, 91–2); cited in Dean Cocking and Justin Oakley in Virtue Ethics and Professional Roles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 117, n. 3. Clearly, Machiavelli is claiming that being virtuous in many respects comes into conflict with the virtue of prudence. The conflict is even more serious for Machiavelli when we take into account the role virtues of leaders. ³¹ Michael Stocker in ‘Emotional Identification, Closeness and Size: Some Contributions to Virtue Ethics’ in Daniel Statman (ed.), Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997), 118–27, 119.
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Assuming that virtue is a disposition whose excellence is linked to what I have called normal but non-utopian worlds, such relatively pessimistic views (as well as views according to which goods to which virtues aim inherently conflict) subscribe to what I call the following.
The Impossibility of Perfection Thesis At least some virtues are mutually incompatible in the sense that it is impossible to possess them to perfection. Thus virtues X and Y are mutually incompatible if it is impossible to possess both X and Y to perfection.³² I shall not take a stand on the Impossibility of Perfection Thesis but shall instead subscribe to the Integration of Virtue Thesis.
The Integration of Virtue Thesis
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(1) To possess a virtue is to possess it to a sufficient degree. (2) To possess a virtue to a sufficient degree it is necessary for that virtue to be integrated to a sufficient extent with sufficiently many other virtues. This is a moderate unity thesis akin to Watson’s thesis that “to have any particular virtue, you must at least be alive to the moral considerations that pertain to the other virtues.”³³ It accommodates the view that virtue is a satis or threshold notion so one possesses a virtue if and only if one possesses it to a sufficient degree, and not necessarily to perfection (whatever that may be).³⁴ On this view it is possible for a person to be sufficiently just to possess justice as a virtue, without being sufficiently caring to possess the virtue of caring. One can possess virtues without possessing them all. To that extent the virtues are somewhat disunified on the threshold view, and the Unity of the Virtues Thesis as described above would be false. The Integration of Virtue Thesis recognizes both the plural and conflicting nature of goods or ends, and the insight contained in the Aristotelian view that practical wisdom at the heart of virtue takes a global point of view inimical to ³² See further Neera K. Badhwar, ‘The Limited Unity of Virtue’ Nous 30:3 (1996), 306–29. Note that her version of the ‘Mutual Incompatibility of the Virtues Thesis’ (307) does not specify the qualification of perfection. ³³ Gary Watson ‘Virtues in Excess’ Philosophical Studies 46 (1984), 57–74, 60. ³⁴ For an excellent discussion see Daniel C. Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009).
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fragmentation in the good life. This view I claim lies at the heart of a pluralistic virtue ethics which wants to avoid both monistic views of the grounds of virtue and total fragmentation or disunity in the virtues. There will be vagueness, indeterminacy, and reasonable contestedness about both (1) and (2) of the Integration of Virtue Thesis but that is a far cry from any admission that a pluralistic virtue ethics admits of an “unconnected heap of virtues.”
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(iv) Plurality in a Virtue-Centred Conception of Practical Rationality In the previous section I claimed that a pluralistic virtue ethics could be genuinely pluralistic without being fragmented, involving an “unconnected heap” of virtues. To show this we need to outline an account of practical reason suited to a pluralistic virtue ethics. I argue that the fundamental plurality in types of objective goodness identified above is substantive and radical, for the way in which practical reason targets types of goodness differs quite considerably. By this I mean that there is not a single uniform method or fundamental standard of practical reason by which conflicts of reasons or rational considerations can be resolved. However, I shall argue, the plurality of modes of practical reason does not imply fragmentation; virtues including notably epistemic virtues are seen as excellences permitting rational integration of these modes. Given that our target centred virtue ethics subscribes to an account of practical reason according to which (a) reasons are (in relation to acts) considerations that favour actions and (b) at a basic level these considerations pertain to value, status, bonds, and the good for, suitably constrained by virtue—the question arises: how does such a view deal with conflicts among favouring relations? As Joseph Raz points out it is pervasively believed that ‘ . . . all practical conflicts conform to one logical pattern: conflicts of reasons are resolved by the relative weight or strength of the conflicting reasons which determines which of them overrides the other.’³⁵ There is a deep-seated reason for this monism about practical rationality. On this construal, reasons are calibrated according to the currency of value, and weight or strength is determined by degree or amount of value. On this view we may or may not have a monism about how to respond to value. The standard monistic view about response to value is that rationality demands the promotion of value as opposed say, to appreciation.³⁶ Where there is plurality in modes of response there may be incommensurability between, for example, promoting value and appreciating or creating valuable things. However, ³⁵ In his ‘Reasons for Action, Decisions and Norms’ in Joseph Raz (ed.), Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 128–43, 129. ³⁶ For a value-centred ethics which emphasizes appreciation see Brewer, The Retrieval of Ethics.
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the general idea in a value-centred conception of rationality is this: we should ceteris paribus create things of greater value rather than lesser, put effort into appreciating things of higher value in preference to things of lesser value, and so forth. I favour plurality of response to value, but that is compatible with my rejection of the value-centred, monistic conception of rationality. Rather I shall show that there are different conceptions of rationality and reasons associated with and suited to the different bases of virtuous response. There are exclusionary reasons associated with status, expressive reasons associated with bonds, and prudential reason associated with the good for one. We begin with status and exclusionary reasons. As we have seen (Chapter 7), Raz rejects weighing conceptions of rationality (whether additive or not) by appeal to the notion of exclusionary reasons according to which, paradigmatically, the status of an agent as in some way authoritative may undercut the weight of reasons. In general, recall, Raz claims, ‘one ought not to act on the balance of reasons if the reasons tipping the balance are excluded by an undefeated exclusionary reason.’³⁷ Recall too that exclusionary reasons (constituted by, e.g., institutional rules and legitimate orders) are reasons that are not weighed with what Joseph Raz calls first-order reasons (reasons which directly bear on the merits of actions) for or against courses of action. Rather these reasons may be subjected to exclusionary defeat. Exclusionary defeat occurs where, for example, a consideration (an exclusionary reason such as a promise to one’s spouse not to be generous to this man) defeats a reason in favour of an action (being generous to this man), not by favouring an opposing action for which there is a stronger or weightier reason, but through its status as an undefeated reason to refrain from acting for a reason despite that reason’s weight or merit (such as the generosity would do a lot of good). The question arises: how do exclusionary reasons interact with weighing reasons in a pluralistic though integrationist conception of practical rationality? It is one thing to say that there exists more than one kind of reason as Darwall insists in his reply to critics: Wallace says about my central example of giving someone reasons to get off your pained foot that, for all I say, “it is possible that there are two different kinds of reason for action involved in the gouty toe case” (25). Actually, I mean to be saying just that, that there are two different kinds of reason, one consisting in the fact that you are in pain and that that is bad for you (and a bad thing agent neutrally), and the other consisting in the fact that you warrantedly demand that the agent not be on your foot.³⁸
³⁷ Practical Reason, 40. ³⁸ From ‘Reply to Korsgaard, Wallace, and Watson’ Ethics 118, 1 (2007), 52–69.
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It is quite another to ask how such models of practical reason are integrated. Darwall resolves the problem of plurality in our practical reasons by insisting that morality is essentially second-personal:
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Morality involves a distinctive kind of accountability by its very nature. If I fail to act as I am morally required without adequate excuse, then distinctively secondpersonal responses like blame and guilt are warranted . . . a connection to accountability is part of the very concept of moral obligation.³⁹ . . . moral requirements are connected conceptually to an authority to demand compliance.⁴⁰
In a pluralistic virtue ethics which does not operate with Darwall’s narrow conception of the moral there is no such privileging. Value-centred reasons not connected to an authority to demand compliance are the subject of ethics and may issue in obligations of virtue just as can second-personal reasons. On a pluralistic conception all types of reason have instances inherently capable of being regarded as default reasons, reasons that can be defeated by other reasons. Consider exclusionary reasons such as the second-personal reasons constituted by orders, commands, promises, or standing on one’s rights. What can defeat (“cancel”) such a reason? There may be value-centred grounds for defeating exclusionary reasons, grounds which may be honoured in the courage of a whistle-blower, for example. In general, on a pluralistic virtue ethics, an exclusionary reason can be defeated (cancelled) if the defeating reasons sourced in bonds, value, or the good for an agent are sufficiently stringent as determined by virtue. Since the virtues may be grounded in features other than value, stringency need not be determined by weighing, but of course it may be. Nor need that cancelling constitute a virtue-centred obligation only if the defeating reason is itself second-personal. Examples are a virtuous failure to turn in one’s child who has committed a crime to an authority where the stringency of the defeating reason is based on the bonds one has to one’s child rather than value-centred considerations, and virtuously disobeying orders which, if followed in the circumstances, would cause sufficient harm to innocents. How can weighing reasons, to use Raz’s term as noted above, be understood as “compatible” with exclusionary reasons even though they cannot conflict with them? The answer to this question lies in appreciating how the correct deployment of exclusionary reasons of various types is grounded in virtue.⁴¹ That this is so is seen by examining relevant vices. Vices such as blind obedience tend to make those possessing that vice ignore the force of value-centred weighing reasons, and ³⁹ Second-Person Standpoint, 26–7. ⁴⁰ Ibid. 10. ⁴¹ This view presupposes a virtue-centred conception of rationality. A brief outline is given in Chapter 13 section (iv).
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wrongly think that exclusionary reasons in the context of obeying orders from officials and even the military have absolute status. That can be a seriously culpable deficiency as Nazis found out at the Nuremburg trials. By contrast vices associated with authority complex, arrogance, dispositions to play God, are vices of being blind to or downgrading the claims of authority, whether in the form of contracts, protocols, bosses’ instructions, procedures, rules, or authoritative determinations such as the findings of arbitration, and promises. Consider now reasons or considerations of fittingness that are expressive of bonds. Let us illustrate with the following actions:
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I ruffle my son’s hair out of affection. I hug my husband on returning from a trip. Afflicted by “empty nest” syndrome I drift into my son’s former bedroom, tarrying there a while. I am patient with my two-year-old grandson’s emptying the drawer, smiling benignly. I place a comforting arm around a suffering stranger. These actions are what Hursthouse has called ‘arational’ since there is no intention with which they are done: there is no ‘desired upshot.’⁴² Meaning and intelligibility is afforded these actions not by considering that for the sake of which they are done but by what those actions express. When I ruffle my son’s hair out of affection I do not have a further end in mind of serving some value (where ‘serve’ is understood broadly to include responses other than promotion) and nor am I regarding my son as someone to whom I owe an affectionate or tender act or who has the authority to demand it of me. Rather expressive behaviour ‘mirrors, reflects, signifies or expresses some state of the organism’.⁴³ It is ‘essentially an epiphenomenon of the nature of the character structure’⁴⁴ though intentionally directed. Call features which favour actions on expressive grounds expressive reasons, and the corresponding actions expressive actions. One type of action manifesting expressive behaviour is illustrated by the above examples of actions expressing bonds. Such actions are not done for reasons,⁴⁵ but they are not irrational. Features which make acting out of love fitting expressions of love (as illustrated ⁴² Rosalind Hursthouse, ‘Arational Actions’, Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991), 57–68. ⁴³ A. H. Maslow, ‘The Expressive Component of Behaviour’ Psychological Review 56 (1949), 261–72, 262. See further on expression Swanton, On Virtue Ethics. ⁴⁴ Ibid. 264. ⁴⁵ However, Raz claims: ‘Some expressive actions however are an interesting borderline case. I kick the table in frustration, or walk up and down. Do I do so to relieve tension (conforming to the pattern I described of satisfying an urge to get rid of it)? Perhaps, but I am also expressing my exasperation, anger, or what not, and the fact that an action has expressive meaning is a reason to perform it when such expression is appropriate.’ (Raz, Engaging Reason, Ch. 11, note 18).
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above) and thereby rational, do not function as exclusionary reasons by undercutting the weight of other reasons. Nor are they reasons that are weighed with other reasons. They support these expressive actions not by being aggregated with reasons having a weight, but simply by the fact that they are appropriate natural expressions of a bond of love. Such facts are relations of fittingness that favour expressive actions. The fact that expressive actions illustrated above are natural expressions of a bond, being “epiphenomena” of bond-sensitive character structures deemed virtues (such as tenderness, affection, friendship), provides presumptive support for such actions. That presumption can, however, be defeated if natural expressiveness is inappropriate in the circumstances, for overriding or undermining conditions may apply. Referring to the above examples my expressive actions would be inappropriate if my husband has cracked ribs; my grandson whom I am looking after is being neglected as I tarry in my son’s former bedroom; physical touching of a stranger is unacceptable in the culture to which the stranger belongs, my role as teacher forbids at least certain forms of the partiality of friendship, and thus undermines certain reasons of friendship, including expressive ones.⁴⁶ In these kinds of cases the natural expressions of the bond of love may be deemed in the circumstances self-indulgent, insensitive, unjust, and so on, and thereby unfitting. Expressive reasons of love of the kind described above are permissive. Can the bonds of love support in a distinctive way duties and obligations? In his ‘Cordelia’s Bond and Indirect Consequentialism’⁴⁷ Nick Zangwill argues that they can. It is Cordelia’s bond with her father that grounds distinctive obligations of love in a way not reducible to value properties. This is tellingly portrayed by Shakespeare in King Lear where Cordelia is portrayed as unable to say in virtue of what valuable properties she loves her father, by contrast to her sister who claims that her father is loved beyond ‘what can be valu’d rich and rare’ and thus loved in a way ‘Dearer than eyesight, space and liberty’. Cordelia by contrast is tongue-tied: she is forced to say: ‘Nothing.’ But then she finds her tongue: ‘I love your majesty According to my bond; no more nor less’: a bond that she allows grounds duties of obedience, love, and honouring. These duties for her are not founded in appreciation of value let alone recognition of values promoted, but grounded in the historical and ongoing temporality of a bond: ‘You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me’.⁴⁸ Bond-based reasons are not then reducible to reasons of value. Unless their distinctive role as reasons is appreciated we will not make sense of what has been called “the magic” in the pronoun “my” where partial actions require justification. MacIntyre, for example, quotes the following passage from William Godwin: ⁴⁶ See Garrett Cullity, ‘The Context-Undermining of Practical Reasons’ Ethics 124 (October 2013), 1–27. ⁴⁷ In Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 144–65. ⁴⁸ King Lear, Act I, sc. i.
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The illustrious archbishop of Cambay was of more worth than his valet, and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred . . . Suppose the valet had been my brother, my father or benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposition . . . What magic is then in the pronoun ‘my’, that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?⁴⁹
The ‘magic’ is indeed not in the pronoun ‘my’: it is in the idea of a bond (that of father, brother, benefactor) as a source of obligation distinct from value. Of course, some bonds, some loves, are defective, unfitting, unvirtuous, and do not generate obligations. What makes for defectiveness is part of a virtue theory of love. Note though that bond-generating duties or obligations can be defeated both by exclusionary and weighty value-centred reasons. But the reverse is also true. My Head of Department may require something of me that is trumped by the serious illness of my child. However, my obligations to teaching my small class consisting of uninterested students may not be trumped by the greater good I would do by canceling the class and canvassing in a marginal seat in the upcoming general election to help remove a bad government. Nor are those obligations trumped by the desirability of expressing my bonds to my child by going to the school athletics day at which he is competing. The rationality described here is expressive rationality—a form of rationality that can nonetheless provide objective justification for action. For the expressions can be fitting or unfitting, felicitous or infelicitous. My bond of friendship with a colleague will not permit expressive acts of affection in a setting where dignity or formality is called for. My maternal bond with my teenage son will not permit certain affectionate acts which embarrass him in front of his friends. In a pluralistic virtue ethics what counts as fitting or felicitous in expressive action is mediated through virtue concepts. Practical wisdom about appropriateness of expression is essential for virtue, and practical wisdom includes wisdom about the relation between the pull of expressive rationality and the demands of exclusionary reasons, for example. Excessively caring dispositions in the context may cause one to neglect the force of exclusionary reasons or value-based reasons. By contrast, vices of insensitivity, uncaringness, rule-fetishism, rigidity, may cause one to over-emphasize the authoritative force of contract or protocol in the case of family relations, for example. Here again the rational considerations of expressive rationality have a default status where defeat is justified through the deployment of virtue concepts. ⁴⁹ Quoted by Alasdair MacIntyre in ‘The Magic in the Pronoun “My”,’ Ethics 94 (1983), 113–25, 121–2 in a critique of Williams’ “one thought too many” argument, based on the point made here by Godwin.
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Finally, what about the relation between prudential rationality in relation to the partial goods and, in particular, value-based weighing rationality? Sidgwick famously lamented a dualism in practical reason: the rational demands of prudence grounded in the pursuit of what is good for one may conflict with “moral” goodness understood in a utilitarian way.⁵⁰ The same kind of tension occurs in a pluralistic virtue ethics where practical rationality in regard to partial goods rationally requires or permits one to foster them, whereas value-centred practical rationality may require one to both impartially assign value and to act on those assignments according to the tenets of weighing models of practical rationality. Again, virtue ethics allows one to integrate these apparently conflicting demands. To show this, consider Nietzsche’s discussion of the virtue of helpfulness in the Gay Science:
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How is it at all possible to keep to one’s own way? Constantly, some clamor or other calls us aside; rarely does our eye behold anything that does not require us to drop our own preoccupation instantly to help. I know, there are a hundred decent and praiseworthy ways of losing my own way, and they are truly highly “moral”!⁵¹
Nietzsche is not saying here that we should never help another unless that help is reasonably seen to foster partial goods of one’s own such as one’s own projects. Rather he is saying that helpfulness is not a virtue if you drop your own projects simply on the demand for help, even where the help given serves value (indeed, the value of the projects of the person helped may be greater than one’s own projects). Helpfulness as a virtue has at its core self-love⁵² and (on this view) an aspect of self-love is not to always act solely on the basis of an impartial consideration of value. Of course, helpfulness so conceived as a virtue can lapse into vice. One may have a disposition of grandiosity in relation to one’s own projects, so that one believes mistakenly that their value justifies the constant rejection of legitimate requests for help. Or one’s perseverance takes on a blind or obsessive quality where one simply does not notice the call of the other or its importance. Or one’s commitment to one’s project becomes so rigid that one fails to notice that it has become worthless, and one should spend more time bonding with one’s children.
(v) Conclusion A pluralistic virtue ethics is characterized primarily by the thesis that there is an irreducible plurality in the basic grounds for virtue, and an integrationist
⁵⁰ Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics 3rd edn (London: Macmillan, 1884). ⁵¹ The Gay Science, Book 4, sect. 338, 270. ⁵² Self-love as a genuine virtue or aspect of virtue should be distinguished from self-esteem as often conceived. See further Swanton, Virtue Ethics.
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pluralistic virtue ethics by the Integration of Virtue Thesis (section (iii)). In particular, that thesis is premised on a belief that the modes of practical rationality characterizing those basic grounds can be integrated through virtue. A correct understanding of virtues such as (virtuous) obedience, respect for authority, justice, disposition to appreciate valuable things (virtues of connoisseurship), (virtuous) creativity, loyalty, benevolence, facilitate this integration. Ethologists/biologists seem more aware of the plurality of the ethical foundations and the ethical concepts suggested by them than much moral and political philosophy, with their idealizing, abstracting, and systematizing tendencies. According to de Waal:
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Free and equal people never existed. Humans started out – if a starting point is discernible at all – as interdependent, bonded and unequal. We come from a long lineage of hierarchical animals for which life in groups is not an option but a survival strategy.⁵³
The various ethical foundations noted by de Waal provide the evaluative points of the thick concepts through a variety of bases of ethical response. For example, the foundation of creativity is ethically manifested through value and the good for, love is manifested through the bonds of affection, benevolence speaks to the good for. Goodness in those responses is understood through conceptions of what counts as virtuous creativity, virtuous benevolence, virtuous forms of love. So, where exclusionary reasons operate, for example, a relevant virtue is (excellence in) obedience; the target of that virtue is attained when the legitimate order is obeyed, and the weight of opposing reasons does not mandate the cancellation of the exclusionary reason. The evaluative point of obedience as a virtue is understood via the authority/subversion foundation which in turn is manifested ethically through legitimate status considerations generating legitimate authority relations. The obedient action, let us say, is conclusively favoured by the exclusionary reason and is overall virtuous and right. By its very nature then, a pluralistic virtue ethics embraces a vast field of moral theory ranging from ethics of love, to welfarist theories, to value theory, to statusbased theories, not to mention theories required for an understanding of virtue differentiated by, for example, roles, and narrative particularity. What is distinctive about a pluralistic virtue ethics of an integrationist kind are the beliefs that none of these fields should be thought to embrace the whole of ethics, and all of them should be integrated (though not unified) through the medium of virtue notions.
⁵³ Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
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PART III
APPLICATION
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10 Has Virtue Ethics Sold Out?
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(i) Introduction Part III focuses on central theoretical issues in the application of target centred virtue ethics. Part II has already ventured into this field with its discussion of the relation between ethics and environmental ethics, and differentiated virtue. That notion was applied to the important area of role ethics in Chapter 7 where we touched on various applied fields such as legal ethics and business ethics. But it is not the purpose of Part III to do applied ethics. The theoretical issues discussed in Part III are the notion of the moral, the link between the aretaic and the deontic, the nature of right action and the guidance of action, the relation between the thick concepts and reasons, epistemology and epistemic virtue. Of these issues possibly the most contentious for virtue ethics is the idea of right action in virtue ethics and the relation between right action and action guidance. These are the topics of this and the next chapters. Chapter 3 noted a potent form of covering up of ethics: excessive attention paid to the thin concepts such as obligation, as opposed to the thick. Some, sympathetic to forms of virtue ethics, have suggested that virtue ethics too, in contemporary manifestations, is complicit in this covering up by devoting itself to elaborating conceptions of right action. In this chapter I defend this enterprise since the thin concepts are a very important aspect of ethics (as the frequent anguished question: ‘Did I do the right thing’ attests). The problem I shall claim rests not on the notion of rightness as such but on the deleterious effects of the notion of morally right. I ultimately diagnose the problem as lying in a misinterpretation of Anscombe. Let us first put the critique of contemporary virtue ethics’ concern with right action in context. Virtue ethics has become increasingly popular as an approach to applied and professional ethics. However, theoretical dissatisfactions remain. Hostilities trap virtue ethics in a pincer movement. On the one side are those who claim that virtue ethics is impotent in the field of applied ethics: it is unable to provide action guidance. The locus classicus for what may be called the action guidingness objection to virtue ethics is a passage from Robert Louden cited in the Introduction. In its efforts to escape Louden’s criticism ‘that a virtue based ethics will be particularly weak in the areas of casuistry and applied ethics’¹ different forms of virtue ethics provide distinctive “criteria” of right action while claiming ¹ ‘On Some Vices of Virtue Ethics’, 229.
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0011
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nonetheless that strong codifiability in the form of algorithms for right action cannot, indeed should not, be provided.² But that form of escape is met with hostilities from the other side; in making these efforts virtue ethics has “sold out.” This chapter offers counterattack on one front (the latter), while the next occupies itself with the first front. The aim of these two chapters is to close down both attacks. Virtue ethics is right to provide a “criterion” of right action (though as already noted “criterion” is not the best term for what is provided), and supplies all the action guidance that is proper to provide. At the beginning of his Introduction to The Retrieval of Ethics³ Talbot Brewer has a section provocatively entitled the ‘Short Happy Life of Radical Virtue Ethics.’ The essence of the section is a claim that an approach to ethics initiated by Anscombe, ‘radical virtue ethics’, showed promise of radically changing the direction of contemporary ethics. But its life was short. Apparently, virtue ethics in contemporary manifestations has in effect “sold out.” This charge has several aspects. Virtue ethics is now insufficiently radical, no longer calling for radical reform in modes of ethical thinking. Further, according to Brewer contemporary virtue ethics is characterized by the ‘virtual disappearance of the movement’s despair over the fallen state of our culture, its distress over the inarticulacy of contemporary moral philosophy’ a despair acknowledged as a suitable response in the early 80s with the publication of MacIntyre’s After Virtue. Third, Brewer charges that contemporary virtue ethics is presenting itself as a type of theory, albeit one that is offered as a rival to what Hursthouse calls the ‘big boys’. I shall argue that contemporary virtue ethics is criticizable not for being insufficiently anti-theory but for not offering enough theory. The fourth charge, on which I focus most attention, I regard as serious, but it rests on a muddle. It is the charge that contemporary virtue ethics offers accounts of right action—something to which the alleged Urgrund of contemporary virtue ethics, Anscombe, was apparently implacably opposed. To the extent they are doing this they are selling out on the vision. The muddle is the idea that offering an account of right action is tantamount to offering an account of “morally” right action with certain dubious theoretical presuppositions. The first part of this chapter begins with this fourth charge and the muddle that underlies it. A full rebuttal of the selling-out charge requires also something more positive: an account of what virtue ethics takes itself to be doing when it links the notion of right action to virtue notions. This account I take to be radical, providing, ironically enough, virtue ethics is willing to engage in more theory than it has to date. ² Note in particular that Kant claims that the moral law prescribes only the maxim of an action: hence, prescribes ‘only the morality of that action, that is, its disposition’ [6:393] and hence not the action itself. Hence, duties of morality are ‘wide’ only, and have some latitude for ‘free choice’ in complying with the law, which is not to say that specific actions cannot be required in specific circumstances. On the contrary sometimes they are. (Metaphysics of Morals, 153.) ³ The Retrieval of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
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(ii) What Is Anscombe Claiming? Essentially, Brewer (and indeed) others⁴ have claimed that virtue ethics has sold out on Anscombe’s vision of the retrieval of virtue in what Brewer calls the retrieval of ethics. To understand this charge we need first to understand Anscombe. I shall claim she has been misunderstood. Let us begin with relevant quotations.
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. . . the concepts of obligation, and duty – moral obligation and moral duty that is to say – and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ought, ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivations from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it.⁵
Notice that it is the concepts of moral obligation, moral duty, and the “moral sense of ought” she urges ought to be jettisoned. Yet she is systematically misinterpreted as wanting to jettison the notion of ought, the notion of duty, the notion of obligation. For example, Tim Chappell claims that Anscombe denies that ought expresses a concept: it has ‘mere mesmeric force’.⁶ But this is not what she claims. Rather she says: ‘I will end by describing the advantages of using the word ‘ought’ in a non-emphatic fashion, and not in a special ‘moral’ sense’.⁷ The ‘mere mesmeric force’⁸ is ascribed not to ought as such but to ought in the special moral sense in the context of a discussion of the alleged impossibility of inferring ‘ “morally ought” from is.’⁹ Once ‘ought’ has become a word of ‘mere mesmeric force’ she claims, it ‘could not, in the character of having that force, be inferred from anything whatever’.¹⁰ So, it is the mere mesmeric force of the moral (in the special sense) that is the problem; not ought and so forth as such. The notions of obligation and ought, for example, are invested with “that peculiar force having which it is said to be used in a ‘moral’ sense’.¹¹ (We shall now simply call this the moral in the special sense). The ‘peculiar force’ is a product of the idea of being bound by law and is thereby tied to a law conception of ethics derived from the Torah.¹² Thus the ‘moral sense of ought’ and ‘moral obligation’ are ‘survivals or derivatives from survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it.’¹³ Why ‘harmful’? These conceptions are harmful because of ⁴ See John Hacker-Wright, ‘Virtue Ethics without Right Action: Anscombe, Foot, and Contemporary Virtue Ethics’ Journal of Value Inquiry 44 (2) (2010), 209–24. ⁵ ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, 26. ⁶ Timothy Chappell ‘There are no Thin Concepts’ in Simon Kirchin (ed.), Thick Concepts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 182–96, 189, n. 20. ⁷ ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ 40. ⁸ Ibid. 33. ⁹ Ibid. ¹⁰ Ibid. ¹¹ Ibid. 31. ¹² Ibid. 30. ¹³ Ibid. 26.
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the metaphysical objectification of the ‘peculiar force’ which is a residue of the rejected idea of a divine legislator. Yet this ‘peculiar force’ associated with ‘a special emphasis and a special feeling’¹⁴, this ‘compelling force’¹⁵, this ‘mere mesmeric force’ is on Anscombe’s view ‘purely psychological’;¹⁶ a feature later described by Bernard Williams in his later attack on ‘morality, the peculiar institution’ as the experience of the moral demand. As Williams points out that experience is deemed to represent the objective foundations of morality which in turn has to be captured in a peculiar metaphysics of the moral. The ‘compelling force’ is now reified and objectified as what Mackie later called the objective feature of ‘to be doneness.’¹⁷ But as Mackie claims this is a queer property, grounding Anscombe’s claim that it is a harmful residue of a rejected idea. The nature of this harmfulness is explicated in more detail in Williams attack on ‘morality, the peculiar institution’ as leading to a distorted picture of the institution of morality. Anscombe does not object to saying that something is wrong or permissible— how could she? What she objects to is this:
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We should no longer ask whether doing something was ‘wrong’, passing directly from some description of an action to this notion; we should ask whether, e.g. it was unjust; and the answer would sometimes be clear at once.¹⁸
The problem is not the assessment of an action as wrong or as an action one ought not to perform, but such assessment without the mediation of suitable thick concepts. Indeed, she refers to the ‘ordinary’ (and quite indispensable) terms ‘should’, ‘needs’, ‘ought’, ‘must’.¹⁹ At bottom the problem is the assumption that there is a ‘peculiar’ ‘compelling force’ to the representation of an action as not to be done, a representation which has become a not merely psychological but a metaphysical replacement for, or hangover from, the divine law conception of ethics. On this problematic representation we can apparently detect straight off, without understanding the action through the thick concepts, that it has a special “moral” quality of not to be done-ness, and is thus wrong. The misunderstanding of the contemporary virtue ethical project of giving an account of right action is due to the automatic assumption that if one is offering such an account one is offering an account of morally right action where: (a) ‘moral’ is used in some (tendentious) narrow classificatory sense; and (b) one is automatically importing into the account of the moral dubious metaphysical assumptions of the kind Anscombe (and Williams) criticized.
¹⁴ Ibid. 31. ¹⁵ Ibid. 43. ¹⁶ Ibid. ¹⁷ J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (London: Penguin, 1977). ¹⁸ “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 34. ¹⁹ Ibid. 30.
? 245 The misunderstanding also occurs in Hacker-Wright who makes the following claim:
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Most advocates of virtue ethics believe that achieving such a criterion [of morally right action] is crucial to vindicating virtue ethics as a normative theory. Yet the centrality of this task marks a departure from the views of at least some of the philosophers credited with the revival of virtue ethics in the twentieth century, especially from the views of G.E.M. Anscombe and Philippa Foot. Anscombe especially has sharp criticisms of the way philosophers handle the concept of morally right action along with related concepts like moral obligation. Yet the work of contemporary virtue ethicists such as Rosalind Hursthouse, Michael Slote, and Christine Swanton features little discussion of Anscombe’s criticisms or the reasons that the other virtue revivalists avoided providing a criterion of moral rightness.²⁰
He then claims that ‘Anscombe and Foot, at least . . . believe that moral philosophers from the modern period forward have given the terms ‘‘right’’ and ‘‘ought’’ an artificial and incoherent sense.’²¹ Are we to infer that this incoherence is inherited even by contemporary virtue ethical accounts of rightness? Anscombe’s criticisms of moral obligation in the special sense of “moral” are not discussed by us precisely because we take ourselves not to be offering an account of rightness possessing features (a) and (b) above. Hursthouse and certainly myself at least are giving an account of right action not morally right action, let alone morally right action in the alleged incoherent sense. Why should rightness in general be thought to inherit the (alleged) incoherence of the “moral” in what Anscombe herself calls a ‘special’ sense? To understand the nature of the moral in accounts of right action we need to undertake further investigation of that problematic notion. That is the task of the next section.
(iii) The Notion of the Moral In her ‘Is ‘Moral’ a Dirty Word’ Mary Midgley claims that the word ‘moral’ and its derivatives are ‘like a small carpet, designed to fit a room which has been enlarged’ but ‘are wrenched this way and that to cover the bare spaces.’²² Most importantly the word ‘moral’ has both a narrow and a broad sense—the narrow sense has become dominant, and there is no adequate linguistic tool to cover the important ²⁰ ‘Virtue Ethics without Right Action’ 209. ²¹ Ibid. 209. ²² Mary Midgley, ‘Is ‘Moral’ a Dirty Word’ in Mary Midgley, Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (London: Routledge, 2003), 119–53, 119.
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requirement of “morality” in a broad sense. This requirement is the need to integrate the various domains of the practical. For Midgley the two senses of “moral” are: (a) Narrow sense (the classificatory sense). (b) Broad sense (the sense in which the various domains of the practical are integrated). Midgley’s paper is devoted to rehabilitating the broad sense of moral. She paves the way for this development by displaying the need for the broad sense, and cataloguing a ‘sad development’: the history of its decline in modern British philosophy. What in more detail is the broad sense and why is there a need for it? Quoting exemplars of the broad sense of ‘moral’ from literature, Midgley answers succinctly: The job this word does is an essential job. If one talks of provinces there must be a name for the whole country, if one talks of points of view there must be way to walk between them. Could another word than moral be used?²³
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Unfortunately in our modern tradition, due to the demise of the broad sense of morality, we have no decent concept under which we can conceptualize a normatively satisfactory integration. If “morality” is used in a (contestable) narrow sense in which it is isolated from other practical domains, we will run into trouble; for example, we may uncritically think that morality (whatever that is) is overriding. Says Midgley: An isolationist morality is a bad morality. We certainly do distinguish a man’s moral principles from (say) his aesthetic, sporting or religious principles. But if that distinction is final, if there is no relation between them . . . we have a moral objection to the arrangement (136).
In the ancient tradition of virtue ethics by contrast, the notion of virtue performed an integrative function. In short it satisfies Midgley’s demand for a notion of “morality” in the broad sense. The various practical domains or “points of view” (however classified) are integrated in what Aristotle calls ‘practical truth’ which for him is the aim of virtue. The person of virtue has practical wisdom (not just moral wisdom—a concept alien to ancient virtue ethics)—and the idea of isolating sporting virtue say from “moral” virtue would be quite alien. Practical wisdom enables the person of virtue to attain the mean in its various dimensions—that is,
²³ ‘Is ‘Moral’ a Dirty Word’, 136.
? 247 hit the target or targets of the virtues relevant to the situation. She manifests her generosity in the right way, at the right times, to the right extent, for the right reasons, and with the right instruments. What counts as in the right way, for the right reasons and so on is contextually determined. In competitive sport she is generous and fair to her sporting opponent, but that does not mean that she feels sorry for her opponent and lets her score a goal against her because her team is losing rather badly, and her marker is looking depressed. I shall argue that the target centred account of right action can offer an account of rightness where ‘ ‘‘right’’ and ‘‘ought’’ are not given an artificial and incoherent sense.’²⁴ For it is the case that
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(a) The narrow sense of the moral need not be committed to the moral in the special sense. (b) The broad sense need not be committed to the moral in the special sense. (c) The virtue ethical account of rightness which I offer can accommodate the deontic without commitment to the moral in the special sense. We consider each of these issues in turn. Discussions of the moral in the classificatory narrow sense are complicated by the fact that the notion of what counts as moral is heavily contested. There is no canonical notion of the moral, and no canonical sense of the morally required. Thus, it is not a strike against virtue ethics that it offers an account of a putative canonical notion that is then deemed ‘incoherent’. Despite the disagreements about the nature of the ‘moral’, the seriousness of contestedness is very much underplayed. Theorists often have remarkable confidence in what they regard as analytic truths about the concept of the moral.²⁵ I shall argue to the contrary that there is disagreement at deep theoretical levels about the proper or best application of the concept of morally right action. What more precisely is contested? What is contested at the most fundamental level are rival core or thin concepts of moral rightness which may be thickened in various ways by different theorists to produce rival conceptions of moral rightness. In other words, I claim, moral rightness is contested at the level of thin or core concepts, and not just at the level of precisification or thickening of a (putatively) agreed upon core concept. Following Rawls²⁶ I call the thickened concepts ‘conceptions’ to distinguish these from core concepts.
²⁴ “Virtue Ethics without Right Action”, 209. ²⁵ Slote believes that it is a priori that empathy is built into the concept of the moral (Moral Sentimentalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 61) and cites the fact that Jerry Fodor once told him that it is ‘analytic that morality involves concern just for others’ (55). My point is that these views, paraded as conceptual truths, are far more theory-laden and contested than is admitted. Kant would clearly disagree with both. ²⁶ John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 5.
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Let us now specify the contested range of thin or core concepts of the morally right in the narrow sense. I do not argue that this list is complete, but the list is enough to illustrate the wide variety of core concepts. (A) Meeting criteria of success in action, in the world external to the agent’s body-cum-mind.²⁷ (B) Having good motives or intentions.²⁸ (C) Conforming to rules specifying requirements, permissions, and obligations. (D) Acting in the light of good reasons (where such action exhibits wisdom).²⁹ (E) Moral non-blameworthiness.³⁰ (F) Altruistic concern for, or action directed at, the needs, welfare, rights, and so forth of individuals other than the agent.³¹ (G) Conforming to duty or demands of virtue which includes duties or demands to self.³² (H) Conforming to types of actions that would be performed by a moral exemplar.³³
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The thin concepts (A)–(H) of moral rightness are all “thickened” in substantive moral theories, and all are quite different from each other. For example, the first, associated with classical consequentialism, ties moral rightness to external success in the practical domain; the second ties rightness to agential moral meritoriousness; the third, associated with duty-based theories ties moral rightness to the
²⁷ Standard consequentialist theories conform to this conception of right action, though it should be noted a more pluralistic conception of what constitutes practical success in the external domain may include conforming to protocol, obeying (legitimate) orders, honouring another’s property rights (by, e.g., repaying a loan, returning a book), and so forth. (See W. D. Ross, The Right and The Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930).) ²⁸ For example in Morals from Motives Slote considers as an example of (B) ‘a very simple view according to which (roughly) benevolence is the only good motive and acts are right, admirable, or good to the extent they exhibit or express benevolent motivation on the part of the (actual) agent’ and we can ‘assume actions are wrong or bad if they exhibit the opposite of benevolence and deficiently benevolent motivation in the agent’ (16). ²⁹ This at times seems to be the view of Hursthouse (in On Virtue Ethics) for whom conformity to the actions of a virtuous agent may or does imply acting for her reasons, since even to describe the act performed involves subsuming it under a description which makes essential reference to the reasons in the light of which one acts. She claims that speaking of doing the right thing for the wrong reasons can be misleading since ‘in one way’ you are not doing the right thing if you are ‘trying to impress the onlookers’ (125) (in acting in a kind manner), for example. ³⁰ See Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint for whom moral wrongness is conceptually tied to obligation, which itself is conceptually tied to blameworthiness for non-compliance. This in turn is understood in terms of a second-personal standpoint: a person is blameworthy to the extent that reactive attitudes of a certain kind are appropriate. ³¹ For example, Bernard Gert claims that: ‘Morality is an informed public system applying to all rational persons, governing behavior that affects others . . . ’ (Morality: Its Nature and Justification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 13). He excludes what he calls ‘personal virtues’ such as courage or temperance from the domain of the moral (13) on the grounds that they primarily benefit oneself. ³² This is Kant’s view. ³³ For example, Linda Zagzebski’s exemplarist virtue ethics.
? 249 deontic; the fourth to the (alleged) necessary other-regardingness of the moral; and the last to conformity to standards supplied by a moral exemplar. How can it be the case that contestants are arguing about the nature of one concept when they are not agreed on a core concept or exemplar? Moral rightness may nonetheless be a single concept as long as users agree on sufficiently many characteristic properties or criteria of application of the concept (even though disagreeing on their necessity, sufficiency, importance, or salience); agree on sufficiently many “samples” or “phenomena” of moral rightness;³⁴ or agree on sufficiently many of what Aristotle calls the ‘endoxa’ (the beliefs of the ‘many or the wise’ concerning the application of ‘moral rightness’). On this view ‘moral rightness’ is univocal even though there is no agreed thin or core concept or exemplar of moral rightness. I now show further that moral rightness is a combinatorially vague concept while being essentially contested. The notion of combinatorial vagueness was originally proposed by William Alston. Three specific conditions must be satisfied if a concept is to be what he calls ‘combinatorially’ vague. The concept of moral rightness, for example, would be combinatorially vague if and only if:
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(1) it has multiple conditions of application; (2) different fluent speakers appeal to different combinations of these conditions in applying it; and (3) there is no definite answer as to which of these combinations is necessary, or sufficient, for its application.³⁵
To say that the concept of moral rightness is combinatorially vague then is to say that all three of the above features apply to the notion of moral rightness. Favoured core concepts can be seen as contestable conditions of application or criteria of ‘moral rightness’, with no definite answer as which criterion or combination of criteria is correct, which criterion is important, or which criterion has greater weight or importance. Given theoretical contestedness at the deepest levels, what could possibly validate a claim about correct usage in the case of moral rightness? That such a claim cannot be validated is suggested by the view that moral rightness is an ‘essentially contested’ concept in a sense owed to W. B. Gallie.³⁶ Such concepts exhibit four important characteristics.
³⁴ See, e.g., Peter Smith, Realism and the Progress of Science (New York: Cambridge, 1981), 7–8. ³⁵ Heather Battaly, ‘Metaethics Meets Virtue Epistemology: Salvaging Disagreement about the Epistemically Thick’ in Philosophical Papers 37 (2008), 435–54, 441, explicating William P. Alston’s notion of combinatorial vagueness in his ‘Vagueness’ in Paul Edwards (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Philosophy 8 (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 218–21. ³⁶ W. B. Gallie, ‘Essentially Contested Concepts’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society LVI (1955), 167–98.
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(a)
Correct application or usage of the concept is contested.
(b)
Disputation about ‘proper use’ is ‘endless.’
Because there is no definite answer about which of the criteria of application of a combinatorially vague concept are necessary or sufficient for its correct application, correct application of the concept is essentially contested in the sense that ‘It is quite impossible to find a general principle for deciding which of two contestant uses of an essentially contested concept really ‘uses it best’.’³⁷ As a result, says Gallie, the question about their proper use ‘inevitably involves endless disputes about their proper uses on the part of their users.’³⁸ (c)
The endless disputation is rational.
As Gallie puts it: The disputes although not resolvable by arguments of any kind, are nevertheless sustained by perfectly respectable arguments and evidence.³⁹
The items in the contested range can reasonably be seen as legitimate criteria for the application of the concept, for all can reasonably be understood as having a point. Hence, the concept is essentially contested in the sense that the contests lie in the nature of the concept rather than just in the nature of the contestants.⁴⁰
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(d)
The concept is combinatorially vague.
The ‘achievement the concept accredits is persistently vague’.⁴¹ Indeed for Gallie any essentially contested concept is persistently vague, since a proper use of it by one person ‘affords no sure guide’ to anyone else’s ‘proper use’ of it at a subsequent time.⁴² The explanation for the importance and intractability of the disputes about the criteria of application of an essentially contested and combinatorially vague concept such as moral rightness lies in its theory-laden nature. The stage on which such dispute is characteristically waged is the theories in which the various conceptions of rightness are embedded. Rival conceptions of moral rightness are integral parts of rival theories, where many concepts form a coherent network. Here are examples of how theory can in a quite rational manner drive choice of thin concept. For Kant the treatment of personhood with dignity is fundamental to morality; treatment of oneself as a mere thing to be ‘thrown away’ is a violation
³⁷ Ibid. 189. ³⁸ Ibid. 169. ³⁹ Ibid. ⁴⁰ See further B. Clarke, ‘Eccentrically Contested Concepts’ British Journal of Political Science 9, Vol. 1 (1979), 122–6. ⁴¹ Gallie, 173. ⁴² Gallie, Note 1, 172.
? 251 of this imperative in its instantiation as treatment of self, so the ‘moral forces’ of love and respect must be exemplified not only in duties (of virtue) of love and respect to others, but also in duties (of virtue) of love and respect to self. Hence, Kant’s notion of moral rightness is a highly theory-laden thickening of the thin concept (G) above, itself deployed for powerful reasons having little or nothing to do with what “we ordinarily say.” Morality for Kant is not essentially otherregarding. By contrast a chief theoretical concern of Francis Hutcheson was the refutation of the “selfish schools” of morality for which “moral” motivation was no more than self-interest. In opposition to this view Hutcheson claims: ‘We often feel Delight upon seeing others happy, but during our Pursuit of their Happiness we have no Intention of obtaining this Delight.’⁴³ This is because we possess a fundamental moral motive of benevolence, approvable as such by a specific moral sense. Morality is in this way theoretically linked to genuinely altruistic concern: a conception of concept (F). In relation to concept (E) Darwall points to another theoretical concern while admitting that:
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Nothing depends, of course, on whether we use the words ‘wrong’ and ‘moral obligation’ in the way Mill and these contemporary thinkers say we do. We could use these words more broadly to include moral ideals or goals. However, if we did, we would still need terms to refer to the idea to which these thinkers point, namely, the part of morality that concerns that for which we appropriately hold one another responsible.⁴⁴
Assessment of a conception of moral rightness thus involves theory justification in ethics. It is not merely that for Hutcheson, Kant, or Darwall concepts (F), (G), and (E) respectively are regarded by them as important criteria of rightness; they are framework assumptions driven by their fundamental theoretical purposes. Let us leave the last word on this issue with Gallie. Since theoretical disputes are not trivial disputes about usage which could be resolved by simple agreement to conform to a single usage, such disputes have ‘permanent potential critical value to one’s own . . . interpretation of the concept in question.’⁴⁵ This is so even though there is no realistic hope of convergence on a moral theory believed (truly or falsely) to be the best. We return now to the idea that for Anscombe, as represented by HackerWright, ‘ . . . moral philosophers from the modern period forward have given the terms ‘‘right’’ and ‘‘ought’’ an artificial and incoherent sense.’ This artificial sense is associated with the core concept (C) of ‘moral rightness’ which we might call the deontic core concept. But four points need to be made. First, ‘moral rightness’ in ⁴³ An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (Westmead: Gregg International Publishers, 1969), 147. ⁴⁴ Second-Person Standpoint, 95. ⁴⁵ Gallie, 193.
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the narrow sense is combinatorially vague and indeed essentially contested. Core Concept (C) is not the core concept of rightness. Second, those who reject (C) as the core concept of moral rightness (such as contemporary virtue ethics) may still hold the view that (C) constitutes a criterion of the application of the concept of rightness that is important and should be accommodated in a conception of rightness. Indeed, this is my position. Third, the deontic, either seen as the core concept of the moral or merely as an important criterion, is not essentially tied to the ‘special sense’ of the moral. Virtue ethicists are at liberty to reject the ‘peculiar’ metaphysical commitments of the special sense, provided they can give an account of the deontic without them. I propose such an account in the next section. Fourth, if contemporary virtue ethics is characteristically interested only in, or primarily in the moral in the broad sense, the nature of the moral in the narrow taxonomic sense recedes in importance. Because of the problems with the notion of the moral my conception of rightness as overall virtuousness (Chapter 5) does not speak of moral rightness but simply of rightness. I intend ‘rightness’ tout court to mean “moral” rightness in Midgley’s broad sense of the moral. What I take virtue ethics to be doing in relation to the assessment of action as right is giving an account of the ‘country’ which integrates the ‘provinces’. In this as already indicated I follow Aristotle’s notion of a virtue and the mean at which it aims. Virtue for Aristotle as Anscombe and others make clear is not moral virtue in our sense: ‘We cannot . . . look to Aristotle for any elucidation of the modern way of talking about ‘moral’ goodness, obligation, etc.’⁴⁶ In particular as we have seen virtue aims at ‘practical truth.’ Though practical truth is conceptualized through virtue concepts (hitting the targets of virtue through aiming at the mean) there is no sense of “morally” right manner, “morally” right reason, “morally” right time, “morally” right extent in the narrow sense of the moral. There is just right extent and so forth. In short, virtue provides an integrative function through practical wisdom where the practically wise deliberate in various relevant practical domains. Separating the moral from the non-moral within the category of virtues of character at the core of all of which is practical wisdom, makes no clear sense in Aristotle. Virtue then is not isolationist. Thus, as I shall argue in Chapter 13, virtue epistemology, for example, should be seen as a branch of virtue ethics. For a genuine epistemic virtue has practical wisdom at its core; hence, presupposes good character in relation to epistemic goals. Aristotle is well known for admitting a wide range of virtues of character such as amiability, wit, virtues whose fields are getting and spending money, and handling honours. There is no narrow classificatory sense according to which say amiability and wit differ from temperance, courage, and justice. All these
⁴⁶ ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, 27.
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? 253 virtues are germane to various domains of the good life. We can then speak of the sphere of the “moral” in the broad sense in Aristotle: it is simply the sphere of virtue. On this view the sphere of virtue embraces all those excellent, good, or admirable character traits which are of greater or lesser importance in all those areas which are characteristic of a human life engaged in the practical: for example, reasoning about things, cooperation, sociability including, of course, conversation, care for self, various institutional roles, meeting danger, care for the environment, care for other human beings, leisure, productivity, parenting, friends. This notion of virtue does not imply that there is no distinction in current “ordinary language” between various categories of the practical. Rather such distinctions are extremely vague at the boundaries, are entangled, and are highly contested (as suggested above). Most importantly they are not significant at a theoretical level on an Aristotelian (and indeed Humean and Nietzschean view). This is so for one basic reason. Delineating a single trait as a virtue would need to take into account moral (narrow sense), prudential, epistemic, and other relevant aspects of the practical. A single virtue is an integration of all these features. Hence, at a deep level of analysis virtue is aimed at practical truth and not merely at “moral” or “epistemic” truth. To avoid confusion I shall where necessary call such virtue ‘virtue proper’. Crucially, a supposed aesthetic virtue or sporting virtue or epistemic virtue would not be a virtue proper and therefore would not be a genuine virtue on my view if it violated broadly ethical norms. Conceptions of virtue that are tied to isolationist understandings of excellence in specific practical domains are not conceptions of virtues proper. For example, in competitive sport the aim is to win. But a supposed sporting virtue which enabled its possessor to maximize chances of winning but by cheating and other egregious activities on the field of play, would not be a virtue proper, and therefore not a sporting virtue.
(iv) Virtue Ethical Accounts of Rightness and the Deontic Neither moral rightness in the narrow sense nor moral rightness in the broad sense is necessarily committed to the special sense of the moral. Unfortunately, the selling-out charge has other interconnected targets. To offer a criterion of rightness at all is to do “moral theory” when none should be done. Both Charles Taylor and Bernard Williams are well known for complaining that ethics is distorted by problematic theoretical assumptions; notably, the centrality of the notion of obligation. According to Charles Taylor:
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‘Morality’ is characterized by its making obligation central: that someone ought to do something, or that something is a good thing to do, finds expression if it has moral relevance at all in someone’s having an obligation to do some act.⁴⁷
Taylor goes on to say that Bernard Williams ‘points out how distortive this is of our moral experience’ for example we cannot find room for the idea of admirable supererogatory acts. Thus ‘Morality’ is ‘a misguided Procrustean operation.’⁴⁸ This claim, however, should not be seen as having theory as its target, as opposed to a certain conception of morality in the narrow classificatory sense. However, maybe the problem with “theory” as far as theorizing about rightness of action is concerned, is “offering a theory-based criterion of the right.’⁴⁹ What is the nature of this objection? The problem I think is a mistaken view about the nature of the accounts of rightness offered by virtue ethicists. It is assumed that what is on offer is a ‘criterion’ of rightness. Given the idea that a criterion may be seen as a kind of tool which can be deployed like a decision procedure to determine rightness of acts one can understand a worry about offering a criterion. As argued in Introduction: Basic View, ‘criterion’ is the wrong word to use. The target centred conception of right action does not have a determinate structure such as that of consequentialism: it merely tells us where to look for standards of rightness, and through what kinds of concepts. What is offered is a framework or map for understanding what it takes to be right. In fact that is all it can do since the notion of a virtue’s targets is understood through the notion of the mean, and that in turn is explicated deploying the notion of rightness itself—right time, right extent, and so forth. Content is given to the framework not by the framework itself but by an understanding of the virtues themselves, their point and function in relation to the ethical foundations and bases of ethical response, and what they demand on the various dimensions of the mean. Williams says that ethics should not offer alternative criteria to the wrong ones, such as consequentialist criteria, since it should not be in the business of offering criteria at all. But if the dominant theoretical framework is deemed to be a bad map of the terrain are we to be left impotent, unable to defend alternative frameworks for understanding what we ought to do? Cannot the target centred “criterion” be understood as a framework described at a high level of generality, but one which needs to come down to earth in very complex ways if we are to reach a correct view of what to do in a particular circumstance? What make actions right on my view is hitting the targets of virtues, but as I argued in Chapter 6 virtue has to be differentiated according to such features as role and
⁴⁷ Charles Taylor ‘A Most Peculiar Institution’ in J. E. J. Altham and Ross Harrison (eds.), World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 132–84, 132. ⁴⁸ Ibid. ⁴⁹ Bernard Williams ‘Replies’ in World, Mind, and Ethics, 185–224, 214.
? 255 narrativity if we are to have a clearer more determinate conception of their targets in varying kinds of context. As I made clear in that chapter, more theory rather than less is required if we are to gain greater understanding of, for example, the relation between narrativity and virtue ethics, and what narratively differentiated virtue might permit. Ironically, however, there is another form of attack on virtue ethical accounts of right action, one that comes from another direction entirely. Rather than claiming we should not be in the business of offering an account of right action at all there are those who claim that ethics needs to account for obligation, and virtue ethics cannot provide it. According to Hacker-Wright we should raise the ‘question of how we would get from the statement of a criterion of right action to definitive statements about the deontic status of kinds of action.’⁵⁰ Robert Adams expresses scepticism that this can be done, claiming that: I believe that the most important senses of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ for ethical theory are those tied to the notion of obligation, for which an adequate account cannot be given in terms of virtue.⁵¹
This claim makes two points:
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(a) The deontic notions are central to our concept of right and wrong. (b) Virtue ethics cannot give an account of the deontic. Consider first claim (a). Williams and Taylor express scepticism that the deontic is central to “morality,” but even if the deontic is not central to the broader terrain of ethics it may be central to our concept of right and wrong. I have admitted that the deontic core concept of rightness (C) expresses an important criterion of rightness: if one cannot accommodate the importance of the deontic one’s conception of rightness is flawed. Yet possibly because it is often thought that virtue ethics cannot give an account of the deontic the very notion of the deontic is treated with suspicion by those claiming virtue ethics has sold out. According to Hacker-Wright, the deontic concept of rightness is vulnerable to Anscombe’s attack precisely because it has ‘deontic implications’ ‘ . . . since someone who employs the strong sense of ‘moral rightness’ [the deontic sense] makes a definitive statement about the deontic status of a type of action, such sentences are only intelligible against a background of law.’⁵² But as we have seen Anscombe does not attack deontic notions in general, notions such as ought and wrong. She
⁵⁰ ‘Virtue Ethics without Right Action’, 215. ⁵¹ Robert Merrihew Adams, A Theory of Virtue: Excellence in Being for the Good (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 8. ⁵² Ibid. “Virtue Ethics without Right Action”, 212.
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only attacks deontic notions in a ‘special ‘moral’ sense’,⁵³ and in this sense they are encumbered with problematic metaphysical baggage. She herself shows that these notions can be shorn of that baggage. We are after all allowed to say wrong because unjust or dishonest, permissible because (in a relevant context) not unjust. What is wrong with the deontic as a stand-alone thin account of rightness is that, as a stand-alone concept it is too thin; not that it is deontic. We turn now to claim (b) that virtue ethics cannot give an account of requirement. We have already suggested that notions of rightness, requirement, and other deontic notions can be shorn from the problematic associations with the idea of the “moral.” For many, however, there is a distinction between duty imposing reasons and the aretaic, where the former ‘define acts as prohibited, permissible or obligatory’ whereas the latter ‘classify behaviour as suberogatory, neutral or supererogatory.’⁵⁴ Furthermore, it is sometimes thought these two realms of ethics are separate; one concerned with reasons and the deontic, the other with various forms of goodness.⁵⁵ I have claimed that a link between the evaluative domains denoted by the thick concepts and the notion of right action can be made through the notion of virtuousness where that is understood through the targets of the virtues suitably differentiated. We have also signposted a number of complexities in the relation between the thick virtue concepts and rightness of action, giving in Chapter 5 an account of both wrongness and requirements of virtue. We noted in Chapter 2 that in different circumstances a generous act may be required, permitted but not required, prohibited (because a CEO has not been authorized to make a generous donation with the firm’s money), admirable but not required, permitted (by narrative virtue, for example) but not highly desirable (because far better options are available). Thick aretaic concepts link with reasons for action so that actions can be seen as having a variety of deontic properties. It remains to reply to the sceptical doubts that virtue ethics can provide an account of requirement. Here I suggest a direction such an account could take. Consider Kagan’s⁵⁶ notion of requirement according to which something is required only if supported by a reason (or collection of reasons) that is (are) ‘decisive’. On the target centred account of rightness the reasons supporting actions can be understood in the way Anscombe understands them: the correct applicability of relevant thick concepts. Sometimes as she suggests herself (as noted above) such reasons are decisive as we noted above: ‘the answer [to the question of the wrongness or otherwise of an action] would sometimes be clear at once’. ⁵³ ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, 40. ⁵⁴ Karen Stohr and Christopher Heath Wellman, ‘Recent Work on Virtue Ethics’ American Philosophical Quarterly 39 (2002), 49–72, 69. See also Stangl, Neither Heroes nor Saints. ⁵⁵ See Gregory Trianosky, ‘Supererogation, Wrongdoing, and Vice: On the Autonomy of the Ethics of Virtue’ The Journal of Philosophy 83, 1 (1986), 6–40. ⁵⁶ In Shelly Kagan, The Limits of Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 64–70.
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? 257 What is it for such reasons to be decisive? A reason is decisive for Kagan only if it is a reason that outweighs all other reasons. This view need not be accepted by a virtue ethics which prefers to understand decisiveness in terms of reasons (or more broadly rational considerations) that are undefeated. Considerations of fittingness associated with expressive actions, and reasons that Raz calls ‘exclusionary’, do not sit well with Kagan’s criterion. The reasons proper to virtues of respect, including respect for the authority of rules, protocols, and people having authority may well be exclusionary (which is not to say they are absolute). The operation of exclusionary reasons is, however, characteristically decisive, and grounds requirements. Kagan considers the possibility that the condition of decisiveness is not sufficient for requirement. First, it is reasonable to think that trivial actions are not required. Second, as suggested in Chapter 5 an outweighing or defeating reason does not support (or necessarily support) a requirement if non-performance in conformity with that reason is not sufficiently bad (marked by such aretaic notions as dishonourable, base, indecent). We might claim instead that nonperformance is undesirable but not prohibited. Finally, on the target centred view we may also want to put in a content restriction on requirement where a strongly outweighing reason does not support (or necessarily support) a requirement if that reason supports an exceptionally demanding action. Maybe such actions are deemed admirable but not required. At the opposite end of the scale there might be a restriction where, in the words of Hursthouse, an action might be regarded as ‘too terrible to be called ‘right’ or ‘good’’.⁵⁷ In that case a sufficiently terrible action even if supported by reasons that are undefeated cannot be said to be required or commended, or even permitted.⁵⁸ The target centred view, further developed in the above kind of way, can account for requirement without any appeal to the special sense of the moral. Can it account for obligation understood as actions owed to another? It can, as we showed in Chapter 9 in our discussion of status as a ground of virtue. In particular, there are virtues whose fields are various forms of owing. In this way virtue ethics can account for rights.⁵⁹ Virtues whose fields are various forms of owing are (virtuous) obedience—a disposition to appropriately obey legitimate authority—
⁵⁷ On Virtue Ethics, 79. ⁵⁸ I myself do not support this content restriction since it is does not seem to me to sit well with a concept of rightness as practical truth. However, there is a real question whether targets of virtues can be found to support action in such dilemmas. Hume makes a good point in this regard claiming that there are virtues proper to ‘greatness of mind’ (even describable as ‘awful’ (T 608)) as opposed to ‘goodness and benevolence’, virtues such as courage, ‘intrepidity’ and resoluteness, which inspire ‘esteem’. Though a form of love, esteem for Hume has a quality different from the love that is excited by virtues of ‘goodness and benevolence’ (see Treatise 608, n.1). ⁵⁹ See further Rosalind Hursthouse, ‘Hume on Justice’ in Charles R. Pigden (ed.), Hume on Motivation and Virtue (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 264–76, and Christine Swanton in Pigden (ed.), ‘Reply to Baier’ 259–63.
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justice, loyalty, fidelity, and honesty. Reasons of obligation in this sense may or may not be decisive on a virtue ethical view.
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(v) Rightness and Vagueness It has been argued that moral rightness in the classificatory sense is an essentially contested concept. I have also argued that it is combinatorially vague and the core deontic concept (C) of moral rightness should be treated as an important criterion in our conception of rightness as overall virtuousness. There is, however, a difficulty in combining the ideas of essential contestedness and vagueness. Assuming that rightness is indeed combinatorially vague, how can we make sense of the contestedness of a concept such as rightness being both rational and endless? Since there are several legitimate ways of precisifying a combinatorially vague concept, should we not in the words of Gibbard ‘just specify which one we are adopting’⁶⁰ and end the debate? The reply to this difficulty, as Gibbard himself acknowledges, and Gallie emphasizes, is that there appears to be much at stake in the disagreements. As I have already argued, the explanation for the importance and intractability of disputes about the criteria of application of a combinatorially vague concept such as rightness lies in its theory-laden nature. Rival conceptions of rightness are integral parts of rival theories. How more precisely is rightness understood as overall virtuousness vague? As claimed above (Chapter 5), virtue notions as applied to acts (as well as to character) are both satis and vague concepts.⁶¹ Virtue concepts suffer from two kinds of vagueness: borderline or degree, and combinatorial vagueness. In this section I argue that the target centred view of rightness allows for both combinatorial and borderline case vagueness in the notion of meeting the targets of relevant virtues and thus there is vagueness in the notion of both the virtuousness of an act in relation to, for example, honesty, tact, or kindness and the relation between virtuousness and requirement. Such vagueness allows for reasonable but pervasive and extensive disagreement about whether actions that do not hit certain dimensions of the mean optimally or excellently should be required or right in general; about whether actions that do hit dimensions of the mean optimally should be required; about which dimensions are salient when performance on certain dimensions is well below par; and how to resolve conflict between various dimensions of the mean relative to various virtues. For example, a very unkind manner, such as a school principal reducing a delinquent student to tears, may
⁶⁰ Allan Gibbard, ‘Thick Concepts and Warrant for Feelings’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supp. 66 (1992), 267–83, 275, cited in Battaly, ‘Metaethics Meets Virtue Epistemology’, 448. ⁶¹ See further Daniel Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues.
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? 259 meet the target of benevolence, for it may be just what is needed to get her back on track. Let us now explore the many ways in which virtue concepts are vague and how this vagueness impacts on the rightness of acts. Consider first degree vagueness in virtue concepts. The virtue concepts themselves as applied to acts (such as kind, tactful, and so on) suffer from degree vagueness along various dimensions of the mean. How bad does one’s manner have to be before one’s (well-motivated) act can be said to be so deficient on the dimension of manner that it can be said to be uncaring? How clumsy does one have to be in manner before an act is deemed tactless; exactly where is ambition excessive in extent or deficient in extent in any given context? At exactly what point is a donation sufficiently deficient in extent that it can be regarded as stingy? There is standardly no such point: the boundary between generous and stingy (and thus not generous by definition) is fuzzy. Second, the application of the thick virtue concepts suffers from combinatorial vagueness. The application of a reason in favour of an act (such as its kindness) may be vague precisely because the terms denoting such reasons are success words, and success is understood in terms of success on several dimensions. As we have seen, however, success on one dimension may be combined with a less than successful performance on another. Nonetheless, one can properly call an action kind even though the target of kindness on many or even each dimension has been less than optimally hit. Further, what counts as being sufficiently kind on sufficiently many dimensions for an act to be called kind, is vague. It becomes indeterminate (and contested) at the boundaries whether acts are kind, or too harsh, untimely, or wimpish to be genuinely kind. In short, because of combinatorial vagueness there may be indeterminacy concerning the weighting of the various dimensions in various contexts. Which dimensions of the mean assume importance in which contexts, and in relation to which virtues? Third, whether or not a thick virtue concept is properly applicable may depend on whether aspects of the mean of other virtues have been hit. This point is an application of the Integration of Virtue Thesis (Chapter 9). For example, it may be said that one can’t be generous with someone else’s money. The target of another virtue, justice, has been missed. The generosity has deployed the wrong instruments to the extent that the putatively generous act is unjust, and is thus not generous at all. Fourth, even where the thick virtue concepts such as kind and generous are properly applicable there is the further problem of whether a kind, caring, or honest act is virtuously kind or honest. We may (or may not) say that Robin Hood’s actions are generous but not virtuously so (because unjust). Again, we have both degree and combinatorial vagueness. Consider disagreement about what counts as virtuous caring. Some may put less emphasis on manner and motive and more on external success; virtuous caring comes close to beneficence. For others manner and/or motive are all important.
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Fifth, there may be vagueness in the relation between virtue and vice concepts which clearly apply to a case and overall virtuousness of action. As we have seen, reasons specified by the thick concepts may conflict and there may be no determinate right answer to how to resolve the conflict. The really generous Christmas present causes consternation among the poorer members of the family. Is the present so humiliating that giving it is wrong? In cases of conflict, whatever one’s position about determinacy of resolution, there are two positions one could take on the status of the conflicting reasons. First, one could claim that reasons identified in terms of the virtue concepts (kindness, honesty, and so forth) are Rossian in nature, always having positive valence even if overridden. Second, one could subscribe to radical particularism according to which reasons interact in a holistic way. According to Dancy’s radical particularism (discussed in the next chapter), even reasons denoted by the thick virtue concepts (such as honest, kind, and so forth) are capable of having variant deontic valence. All are capable of not being right-making in a given context. In the example of being honest to the Gestapo out of squeamishness when innocent life is at stake, being honest arguably has negative valence (is wrong-making), though honesty is a strong positive default reason. This may be true even where lying to the Gestapo is also deemed a wrong-making feature of an act: being honest might be wrong-making as well as lying. Here we would have a particularist moral dilemma.
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(vi) Conclusion This chapter addressed the charge that virtue ethics has sold out by engaging with rival theories’ concern with morally right action and the deontic. In “selling out” they are allegedly making two mistakes: striking an alliance with a discredited notion of the “moral” and making a related error—attempting to link the aretaic with the deontic. In doing so it is alleged, they are engaging in problematic theory—offering a criterion of right action. In reply I argued that contemporary virtue ethics can disengage with the discredited notion of the moral in offering an account of right action simpliciter—not morally right action in a problematic sense. The virtuousness of action and thereby rightness is dependent on hitting the targets not of something called moral virtue but of virtue proper where relevant domains of the practical have been integrated by practical wisdom. I argued further that the virtuousness of action and notions of permissibility and requirement can be linked. Such linkage does not appeal to any special sense of the moral, nor does it suggest that it offers a complete way of determining what to do. Rather, the target centred “criterion” of rightness on offer is better described as a framework or map than a criterion let alone a decision procedure. Indeed, linkage between the aretaic thick concepts and the deontic is prone to both combinatorial and degree vagueness.
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We have seen that the selling-out charge is unfounded. We have also seen that a great deal more theory is required by virtue ethics, and on a variety of fronts. We need to further explore the relation between the thick concepts and virtue ethical accounts of right action. An important aspect of that relation, that between particularism, the thick concepts and rightness is the topic of the next chapter.
11 A Particularist but Codifiable Virtue Ethics
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(i) Introduction In the last chapter I claimed that contemporary virtue ethics is faced with something of a dilemma. In overcoming the action-guidingness objection it has tried to show that it can provide an account of deontic notions. Such attempts attracted the criticism that virtue ethics in contemporary form has “sold out”; a criticism I rebutted in the previous chapter. This chapter addresses the other horn of the dilemma: it has failed in these attempts. Because virtue ethics prides itself on being ‘uncodifiable’ it remains ‘impotent’ in applied ethics. Virtue ethics cannot guide action (the action-guidingness objection) because it is uncodifiable. Call this form of the action-guidingness objection the uncodifiabilty objection. Here I meet the uncodifiability objection by taking up the following challenge. It is claimed that virtue ethics cannot be codified in a way that provides guidance because it is essentially particularist. Now it is generally accepted that virtue ethics is “particularist” in an epistemological sense: acting virtuously and rightly requires the situational appreciation characteristic of a virtuous agent and not just knowledge of general moral rules or principles if there are such. But I shall argue, even if virtue ethics is particularist not only in this sense but also in the radical ontological sense developed by Jonathan Dancy¹ (which I think it is) it can still be codifiable. In clarifying suitable notions of both ‘codifiability’ and ‘particularism’ I meet the challenge of the uncodifiability objection by showing that target centred virtue ethics is both codifiable (in a suitable sense) and can subscribe to radical particularism. Let us now elaborate the nature of the challenge. For both virtue ethics and Dancy-style particularism (henceforth particularism), apparently, ethics is uncodifiable. In the case of virtue ethics that criticism takes the following form. A normative ethical theory is supposed to provide action guidance, but virtue ethics is unable to do so. The objection has been around for years, has been addressed, but never quite goes away. The problem lies in the fact that virtue ethics
¹ Primarily in his Ethics Without Principles.
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0012
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is frequently understood as subscribing to the “qualified agent” account of right action: an action is right if and only if it would be chosen or performed by a virtuous agent choosing or acting in character.² This form of virtue ethics gives rise to the action-guidingness objection for the following reason. Ethical reasons are discerned through the sensitivities of a virtuous agent. They are thus viewed as inaccessible to the non-virtuous, opaque, and even ineffable. They are viewed as inaccessible since the reasons of a virtuous agent cannot be codified in rules. As I show in Chapter 13, however, target centred virtue ethics does not subscribe to this epistemology. Nonetheless, it is thought, if it is particularist it is uncodifiable, and for that reason is vulnerable to a version of the action-guidingness objection. In the case of particularism the uncodifiability objection takes a more sinister form. It is expressed thus by Lance and Little:
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. . . killing and the infliction of pain have no more intimate connection to wrongness than do truth-telling, healing and the giving of pleasure. After all, each, in the right context, can have a positive, negative or neutral moral import. But the morally wise person, one might have thought, is someone who understands that there is a deep difference in moral status between infliction of pain and shoelace color, even if both can, against the right narrative, be bad-making.³
Particularists thus ‘flatten the moral landscape.’⁴ A major argument against particularism then is that moral education and moral predictability are impossible since the particularist, unlike the generalist, cannot account for ‘general moral minuses and moral plusses’.⁵ I shall argue that both virtue ethics and particularism are codifiable in a suitable sense, and that these criticisms can be rebutted. Most importantly the objection that particularists ‘flatten the moral landscape’ is overcome by applying the particularist thesis to virtue ethics. Virtue ethics, I shall argue, is codifiable through the “virtue rules” (‘v-rules’)⁶ in a way that displays the ‘deep difference in moral status’ between the types of reasons to which Little alludes. The v-rules ² See On Virtue Ethics. For example in his ‘Virtue Ethics and the Search for an Account of Right Action’ (Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (2010), 255–71, 255), F. Svensson claims that virtue ethics is “often associated with, in essence,” such an account. ³ Mark Lance and Margaret Little, ‘Particularism and Anti Theory’ in David Copp (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 20–1; cited in Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge, Principled Ethics: Generalism as a Regulative Ideal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). ⁴ Sean McKeever and Michael Ridge, Principled Ethics: Generalism as a Regulative Ideal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 48. ⁵ See Brad Hooker, ‘Moral Particularism –Wrong and Bad’ in Brad Hooker and Margaret Little (eds.), Moral Particularism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 1–23, 19. In similar vein David McNaughton and Piers Rawling claim in ‘Unprincipled Ethics’ (in Hooker and Little (eds.), 256–75, 273), that on Dancy’s view (which they call ‘thin intuitionism’) ‘thick moral properties have no more intrinsic moral significance than non-moral properties.’ ” ⁶ This is a notion developed by Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics.
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codify reasons specified in terms of virtue concepts as applied to action (v-reasons). To argue in addition that virtue ethics is codifiable in a way compatible with particularism, we need to understand the type of codifiability at issue, the nature of v-rules, and their relation to v-reasons.
(ii) Codifiability and Virtue Rules To argue that virtue ethics is codifiable in a way compatible with particularism, we need first to understand both the notion of a v-rule and the sense in which v-rules are codifiable. Consider now the notion of codifiability. We begin with McDowell’s well-known claim about the requirements of virtue: If one attempted to [codify] one’s conception of what virtue requires [into] a set of rules, then however subtle and thoughtful one was in drawing up the code, cases would inevitably turn up in which a mechanical application of the rules would strike one as wrong – and not necessarily because one had changed one’s mind; rather, one’s mind on the matter was not susceptible of capture in any universal formula.⁷
According to Peter Tsu the quoted passage should be understood thus:
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According to the McDowellian uncodifiabilty thesis, “one’s conception of what virtue requires” cannot be codified into a set of rules.⁸
This is not strictly what is claimed. McDowell’s thesis is not necessarily an ‘uncodifiability thesis’. Rather the claim is that if one attempts to codify ethics into a set of rules they cannot be a set of rules having a certain character. They cannot be mechanically applied and they cannot be universal and formulaic if they are to capture one’s intentions in action. It is possible that ethics can be codified in a set of rules that do not have these properties and indeed this is what I shall argue. It is odd that virtue ethics is often thought to be uncodifiable. Despite the frequently expressed claim that virtue ethicists have no truck with rules, in her pioneering work On Virtue Ethics Hursthouse allows for what she calls the ‘v-rules’ introduced in the context of combating the action-guidingness objection. These rules are prescriptions, recommendations, and prohibitions ‘generated’ by each virtue and vice concept respectively; for example, ‘Do what is courageous, do ⁷ John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’ in John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 50–73, 58, cited in Peter Shiu-Hwa Tsu, ‘Can Virtue be Codified? An Inquiry on the Basis of Four Conceptions of Virtue’ in Noell Birondo and S. Stewart Braun (eds.), Virtue’s Reasons: New Essays on Virtue, Character, and Reasons (New York: Routledge, 2017), 65–87, 65–6. ⁸ Ibid. 67.
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what is honest, do what is loyal’⁹; ‘Do not do what is dishonest, uncharitable, mean’¹⁰ The v-rules cannot be mechanically applied and apply only ‘for the most part’.¹¹ V-rules, as understood by Hursthouse, thus enjoin (or proscribe) acts described through the thick concepts. What we have called v-reasons for actions (e.g., that the action is kind) can be codified in some sense as v-rules prescribing or commending v-acts (e.g., kind acts): that is types of actions falling under virtue concepts as applied to action. In this way the v-rules may offer guidance possibly unavailable in the aesthetics case where an analogous “rule” such as ‘Be bold’ or ‘Be bold with strokes of red’ may offer no guidance: ‘the bold stroke of red that helps balance one painting would be the ruin of another (. . .)’.¹² But now there is a puzzle. What counts as doing what is honest, for example? We have called doing what is honest, what is generous, and so forth ‘v-acts’.¹³ It may seem obvious that to perform a v-act is to act virtuously, and to act virtuously is to act as a virtuous agent acts. Is it the case then that to do what is honest, for example, is simply to act as the virtuously honest agent acts? As I have already argued in Chapter 5, however, this relationship does not hold, and the appearance that it does depends on ambiguities in the notion of “virtuously.” For a start, as Hursthouse makes clear, doing what is just, for example, need not involve acting in the way a virtuous agent acts in the strong sense of expressing virtue. Might it not be the case however that performing v-acts entails doing what a virtuous agent would do in the fields respectively of justice, honesty, courage, in a sense weaker than expressing or manifesting virtue? This seems to be the view of Hudson who claims that an ‘act gets rightly called courageous when and only when it is such that the courageous person would perform’ in the type of circumstances where courage is characteristically called for.¹⁴ But as I have already argued a virtuous agent may rightly run away, lie, or do something unjust, and we cannot call such actions courageous, honest, or just, simply because they are performed by such an agent in the relevant fields. To understand v-rules then we need to understand the nature of v-acts. Let us then recall the account provided in Chapter 5. There we offered the following definition of a v-act: (a) A v-act (e.g., honest act) is of a type that characteristically exhibits the evaluative point or function of, for example, honesty in relation to action. (b) A v-act (e.g., honest act) has ‘descriptive constraints’ (such as is not a lie) necessary for the thick concept (e.g., honest) to be properly applicable to actions. ⁹ On Virtue Ethics, 80. ¹⁰ Ibid. 36. ¹¹ On Virtue Ethics, 58, citing John McDowell, ‘Virtue and Reason’ Monist 62 (1979), 331–50, 337. ¹² Margaret Olivia Little, ‘Moral Generalities Revisited’ in Hooker and Little (eds.), 276–304, 280. ¹³ See also On Virtue Ethics, 80. ¹⁴ Stephen Hudson, Human Character and Morality (Boston, MA: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 42–3, cited in On Virtue Ethics, 80.
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Despite the argument for that conception of v-act provided in Chapter 5, views such as Hudson’s have been defended by Roger Crisp in a way which undermines the particularism defended in this chapter.¹⁵ Crisp’s argument will be discussed in section (v). Meanwhile, another puzzle needs to be addressed. What is the relation between v-rules and virtue ethical accounts of right action? Despite Hursthouse’s introduction of the v-rules she does not herself offer an account of rightness in terms of v-reasons codified by the v-rules. Rather she offers instead the “qualified agent” criterion of rightness outlined and criticized in Chapter 5. By contrast the v-rules appear to play an epistemic role only in Hursthouse. On my view things are the other way round: Hursthouse’s “qualified agent” account of rightness should play a limited epistemic role only, while a correct account of rightness should be understood in terms of the v-reasons which are by and large codifiable through the v-rules. What then on my account is the relation between conforming to v-rules and my target centred account of right action? I shall argue for a particularist version of the following view. V-rules specify v-reasons (that an action is just, generous, and so forth)—reasons which at least defeasibly favour actions. What is held to make actions right (or more accurately function as contributory reasons for action) are v-reasons which count in favour of acts. Specifically, a v-reason counts in favour of an act insofar as that act hits targets of the corresponding virtue V. I conclude that the reasons codified by v-rules are default reasons which, though not having invariant positive valence, nonetheless apply ‘for the most part’ in a sense characterized below. In particular I shall argue, an act’s kindness, for example, is a default reason for an action which may be “switched off”: it is not always a reason in favour of an act (section (iii)). Default rules are generalizations which do not have the status of principles of the kind rejected by particularists (section (iv)).
(iii) V-rules and Default Reasons On the view defended in the remainder of this chapter v-rules codify default reasons; and are thus default rules. A default rule is understood as a defeasible generalization. For example, the v-rule ‘Be honest’ expresses a default that lying is wrong, and the v-rule ‘Be generous’ expresses a default that generous acts are right, unless ‘certain complicating factors intervene.’¹⁶ There are three broad kinds of ‘complicating factors’ which defeat defaults.
¹⁵ In ‘Particularizing Particularism’ in Hooker and Little (eds.), 23–47. ¹⁶ John F. Horty, Reasons as Defaults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 154.
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(a) Rebutting (or overriding) defeat. The wrongness of lying, for example, is defeated by an overriding reason that (for example) the consequences of not lying are devastating. (b) Exclusionary defeat. Exclusionary defeat occurs where, for example, a consideration defeats a reason R (generosity) in favour of an action, not by overriding R but by excluding R from consideration as a reason in the sense that it is not to be acted on (unless the exclusionary reason is cancelled (see Chapter 7)). For example, I have made a promise to my spouse not to be generous to this man. In such a case a promise is regarded as an exclusionary reason. (c) “Switching off” defeat. This kind of defeat occurs when in a particular case the characteristic positive valence of kindness, for example, has been switched off, and in that particular case kindness no longer has positive valence. There are two kinds of switching off defeat. (i) The defeated reason has neutral or even negative valence. In an example of Dancy’s¹⁷ the characteristic positive valence of considerateness is alleged to be switched off in the case of the considerate act of wiping the torturer’s brow. Here the considerateness of the act ‘hardly functions as a reason’ to wipe the sweat off. (ii) The defeated reason is ‘undermined’, no longer operating as a reason at all, whether neutral, positive, or negative.¹⁸ Note that (c) differs from (b) in that where R (generosity) has been excluded from consideration as a reason it is not assumed that the positive default status of generosity has been switched off. The overall merits of generosity in the circumstances remain intact. Those merits just cannot be taken into consideration as reasons for being generous to this man, because of the promise made. As noted in Chapter 7 exclusionary reasons are also understood as defaults: that is such reasons could themselves be defeated (cancelled) by rebutting reasons of sufficient strength. Assuming that exclusionary defeats are not reducible to rebutting defeats (an issue not discussed in this chapter)¹⁹ we can interpret some v-rules as characteristically expressing exclusionary default reasons such as ‘Be obedient’ understood as ‘Obey (legitimate) authority’ while others characteristically express rebuttable defaults such as ‘Be generous’.
¹⁷ Jonathan Dancy, “Moral Particularism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) (12), . ¹⁸ Garrett Cullity, ‘The Context-Undermining of Practical Reasons’ Ethics 124 (October 2013), 1–27. See also T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 52. ¹⁹ But see Horty, Reasons as Defaults, for a thorough discussion and what I regard as successful arguments for the claim that they are not so reducible.
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Particularist virtue ethics supposes that v-reasons are (at least characteristically) susceptible to switching off defeat. Dancy introduces the idea of a default reason of this third type in his Moral Reasons (26, 103, 230). This is a reason (for an action) that is ‘set up to be a reason in advance’²⁰ that is such reasons ‘arrive switched on’²¹ and operate as reasons unless ‘switched off if the circumstances so conspire’.²² Criticism has focused on the particularists’ apparent inability to give an adequate account of the notion of a reason “arriving switched on,” even though it is clearly important to do so to avoid the “flattening of the moral landscape” objection cited above. Indeed, Dancy himself describes his account of a default reason as ‘a bit thin’.²³ However, in his ‘Defending the Right’²⁴ Dancy offers a suggestion that seems to me to be on the right track. A default reason does not require what Dancy calls ‘some form of positive intervention’²⁵ to make it a reason, though like all reasons it requires “enablers” (conditions for the presence of reasons not themselves part of a reason) to permit the reason to operate as a reason, such as the ‘general enabler’²⁶ that an agent has the capacity to act on that reason. To show the difference between reasons that require intervening factors to make them reasons from those that do not Dancy offers the following sort of example. That John asks Tim not to do it is ‘made into a reason’²⁷ for Tim to do it by some intervening consideration such as a Parlour Game or maybe some introduced peculiarity of their relationship. In general the proposal allows us to distinguish Lance and Little’s ‘shoelace color’ example from the inflicting pain example²⁸ as reasons of different kinds when these considerations operate as reasons. Wearing green shoe laces may be made into a reason by implementing a plan to dress up in green for some agreed reason (such as its being St Patrick’s Day) when such wearing normally (unlike not inflicting pain) has no default status. Dancy concludes that ‘some features do not need to be turned into reasons by the presence of some other feature, and these are the default reasons.’²⁹ I am assuming that Dancy means here ‘the presence of some intervening feature’. If so then we can make the following claim. From the fact that default reasons do not need to be turned into reasons, that is made into reasons by intervening factors, we cannot infer that nothing makes them possess default status as reasons. That is, we cannot infer that they cannot ‘arrive already switched on.’ What is true is that what makes them default reasons (of type (c)) is not something that turns them into reasons. It is not intervening factors, but standing though not necessarily universally present features that make them arrive already switched on. Default status needs to be explained by appeal to such “standing” conditions.
²⁰ ²⁴ ²⁶ ²⁸
Ethics Without Principles, 112. ²¹ Ibid. 113. ²² Ibid. ²³ Ibid. Journal of Moral Philosophy, 4 (2007), 85–98. ²⁵ ‘Defending the Right’, 92. Ethics Without Principles, 40. ²⁷ ‘Defending the Right’, 92. ‘Particularism and Anti Theory’ (cited above). ²⁹ Ibid.
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Part of the problem in understanding this idea may lie in the fact that Dancy appears to confine the need for explanation to the “intervening factors.” He says: ‘ . . . where the justness of an action counts in favour of doing it, there is nothing to explain; in that sense this is what we should expect to happen.’³⁰ Reading Nietzsche, who thinks that the nature of that great and rare ‘impossible’ virtue justice is systematically wrongly understood in a resentment-filled culture, may make one rethink this claim.³¹ In short we need to explain what makes v-reasons arrive switched on. What in general are the “standing conditions”? We should look for an answer to this question in the nature of the feature which provides the reason; be it courage, kindness, or pleasure. In other words the explanation for the switched on status of reasons has to be uncovered through normative ethics: by investigating the evaluative point of courage in situations of danger, the point of justice in situations of scarcity, the purpose of help in the face of neediness, the nature of pleasure as pleasant. Most virtue ethicists at least require a substantive account of the reasongiving status of the reasons codified in the v-rules.³² Such accounts explain why those reasons arrive switched on by elucidating the point and function of the various virtues in relation to the various ethical foundations: virtues which contribute to the goodness of a life in the type of world in which one finds oneself. That elucidation allows us to give normative “shape” to the heterogeneous natural features judged to be kind and so forth. Various Aristotelian, Humean, Confucian, Nietzschean styles of virtue ethics will, of course, provide differing accounts both of human nature, the type of world we live in, and to what we can aspire, and the nature of virtue in such worlds. Not only is it controversial and complex what makes a virtue a virtue, and why the v-reasons thus arrive switched on, but also it is contentious what are the v-rules having positive default, and how we are to understand them. “Be meek,” “Be humble,” “Be loyal” are controversial examples of (putative) v-rules: indeed understanding the nature of meekness, humility, and loyalty, and their status as virtues (or otherwise), occupies books and articles in substantive virtue theory.³³
³⁰ Ethics Without Principles, 113. ³¹ Much of the debate concerns how to understand such seriously contested concepts as the virtue of justice. Surprisingly (for many), Nietzsche argues that a just act would have strong positive valence assuming that justice is properly understood as a virtue, and informs the evaluative point of justice as applied to acts. Justice is after all for Nietzsche that rare and impossible virtue. However, on common understandings of justice (as, for example, what Nietzsche scathingly calls in the Genealogy of Morals ‘scientific fairness’) justice is a vice because that kind of “justice” is the “justice” of the resentment filled. ³² A possible exception is Slote (Morals from Motives) for whom rightness of action is resultant on virtuousness of motive, but the reason giving status of that feature is not itself resultant on anything such as characteristic conduciveness to agent-flourishing. Rather virtuousness of motive is admirable and thereby right, and that it seems is the end of the story. For criticism see Julia Driver, ‘Monkeying with Motives’ Utilitas (1995), 281–8. ³³ See, for example, Glen Pettigrove, ‘Meekness and Moral Anger’ Ethics 122, 2 (2012), 341–70.
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Even if we are clear that a particular v-rule has positive default it may be questionable how strong is that default and why. Whatever are the standing features which make v-reasons arrive already switched on, Dancy objects to the idea that they survive as a “trace” when the default reason is defeated. He asks: ‘What is the sense in which there is a trace of the non-exceptional case in the exceptional one?’³⁴ Let us illustrate the problem with helpfulness. Consider a case where one greatly helps someone’s creative efforts. The purpose of the help is to strengthen his chance of winning an artistic competition by making his work more congenial to the conservatives on the panel. The strategy works. Now what makes being well disposed in relation to helping a virtue, and thereby also makes helping a reason for action that arrives already switched on, is that it promotes welfare in a way that expresses and strengthens bonds between people. However, in this case the help contaminates the originality and integrity of the developing work, not only dirtying the prize won but, let us say, starting a process of character corruption as the “artist’s” career unfolds.³⁵ In this case the helping is a contaminating factor: it contaminates creativity, and there is nothing good about it. It may be argued that the reasons specified by v-rules cannot function as defaults since v-rules are generated by conceptions of basic virtue and leave it unspecified what courses of action one should undertake. As I argued in Chapter 6 basic virtue needs to be differentiated by several forms of ethical differentiation if the targets of virtue are to be determined. Nonetheless, v-rules guide us to targets in the sense that when relevant differentiation occurs we may be alerted to the need to refine or even change them. For example, kindness mandates warmth. This is a quite stringent default in many contexts. Warmth in nurses and doctors is particularly desirable when dealing with a sick patient weakened and demoralized by a long hospital stay. Warmth in an accountant, however, is characteristically not mandated by kindness qua accountant except perhaps in special circumstances (a client is at her wits’ end after dealing with a major computer “upgrade” that has repeated failures). Providing accounts of the nature of v-reasons then is not only controversial but also massively complicated. Take the putative v-rule ‘Be obedient.’ This v-rule embodies prescriptions, recommendations, and prohibitions generated by the virtue of obedience understood as being well disposed in relation to the field of obeying authoritative edicts. In this autonomy-obsessed society many would find the very idea of such a rule distasteful, even repugnant. However the rule is described at such a high level of generality and abstraction that it is indeterminate whether being obedient has negative or positive default. To determine its default status we need to investigate the point and function of obedience in a good life in ³⁴ Ethics Without Principles, 115. ³⁵ Compare the case of Keating in Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: Penguin, 1952).
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varying contexts. Inter alia it will require understanding the points of relevant hierarchies in relation to various institutions, and that in turn at a deep level will require debate about one of the ethical foundations: what Haidt calls the authority/subversion foundation. That foundation reflects our need for social hierarchy within institutions, and roles within those institutions. In general, such investigations are complex for the nature of a virtue is contoured by several broad contexts including roles, cultural and historical contexts, and stage of life. This complexity applies paradigmatically in the case of obedience. In professional role ethics obedience has positive default status in institutions that are worthwhile and structured by ethically sanctioned authority relations, such as roles with their role obligations, rules, protocols, bosses’ instructions. These are themselves structured by the function of the institution in which the roles are embedded, be it medicine, university education, business, law. Justified whistle-blowing provides an example where the status of obedience as providing exclusionary reasons has been switched off or overridden. In children obedience is also a reason having positive default, but is switched off in the case of “stranger danger.” Here is another complication: the nature of the world in relation to which “standing” conditions are understood. In particular, default status is not necessarily indexed to normality. In what Vayrynen calls ‘Nasty Worlds’³⁶ which are assumed to be abnormal (unlike this world which is assumed to be good enough to be called normal)³⁷ the default status of many v-rules may switch from positive to negative; in other words the (current) v-rule would no longer be a v-rule. Nastiness (of various sorts) would no longer be intervening factors turning features into reasons but standing conditions making, for example, being mistrusting and being insensitive ‘arrive switched on’ as reasons, and thereby having positive default.³⁸
(iv) Default Reasons and Particularism My suggestion is that the v-rules, rules specified in terms of the thick v-concepts codify default reasons for action capable of switching off defeat. Understanding the v-rules in the way suggested above produces a normative ethics compatible both with codifiability and particularism. This answer may seem a bit quick. The idea that (Dancy-style) particularism is compatible with any sense of codifiability ³⁶ ‘Particularism and Default Reasons’. This is the basis of Vayrynen’s rejection of the view he attributes to Garrett Cullity (‘Particularism and Presumptive Reasons’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supp. Vol. 76 (2002), 169–90) that ‘if something is a default reason to φ, then it is normally a reason to φ’ (Vayrynen, 58). ³⁷ This is, of course, a problematic assumption. For an account of how problematic see Tessman, Burdened Virtues. ³⁸ Nicholas Everitt gives the following example: ‘The American comedian Richard Pryor recalling the tough area in which he grew up remarked crisply ‘If you were sensitive in my neighbourhood you were food.’ ‘Problems with Virtue Theory’ Philosophy 82 (2007), 275–99, 281, n.16.
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may seem astonishing. It is thus important to gain further understanding of his view and show that the “uncodifiability” reading is incorrect. Why is it so readily assumed that Dancy’s position is incompatible with codifiability in ethics? Discussions of his position are complicated by crucial ambiguities in the notions of a (moral) principle and ‘generalism.’ In his Ethics Without Principles, Dancy makes it clear that moral principles are particular kinds of generalization. He distinguishes between four types of moral principle. (1) Simple decisive principles. These are principles which permit subsumption of a particular action under a universal principle, such that we can determine from this alone whether the action is overall ‘recommended’³⁹ by which is meant ‘the thing to be done’. (2) Complex (‘Expansionist’) decisive principles. These are principles with built in exception clauses, and have the form ‘Actions with feature F are right unless they also have G’. They can be even more complex, having the form ‘ . . . unless they also have G – except when they have H as well.’⁴⁰ (3) Simple prima facie principles. These are the kind of principles exemplified by Ross’s principles of prima facie duties. They do not on their own invariantly yield judgments of rightness when applied. They ‘specify morally relevant features along with what we might call their valence or polarity (positive or negative as the case may be).’⁴¹ (4) Complex (Expansionist) prima facie principles.
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What is common to the several types of ‘moral principle’ distinguished by Dancy is that the reasons they identify have invariant status. As Dancy claims: Moral principles, however we conceive of them, seem all to be in the business of specifying features as general [i.e. invariant] reasons. The principle that it is wrong to lie, for instance, presumably claims that mendacity is always a wrongmaking feature wherever it occurs . . .⁴²
Thus, a moral principle, as understood by Dancy, presupposes a “generalist” understanding of moral reasons: Generalism, then, is best understood as the affirmation that there are moral principles which identify properties which always count in favour for or against a particular act having a particular moral valence.⁴³
³⁹ Ethics Without Principles, 3. ⁴⁰ Ibid. 11. ⁴¹ Ibid. 6. ⁴² Ibid. 76. ⁴³ Rebecca Lynn Stangl, ‘Particularism and the Point of Moral Principles’, in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 9 (2006), 201–29, 206.
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Dancy then defines particularism as the view that ‘the possibility of moral thought and action does not depend on the provision of a suitable supply of such [generalist] principles.’⁴⁴ This is, of course, compatible with the actual existence of a suitable supply of such principles. Does such a supply actually exist? It depends on what one means by a principle in a sense relevant to ethics. Dancy is clear on this: principles in that sense must be norms or rules that ‘we could hope to grasp and operate’⁴⁵, one of whose main purposes is ‘telling us why we should do the action.’⁴⁶ Recall that the logos of ethics enables us to engage with the world in a way characteristic of ethics. The sort of “principle” which Frank Jackson has in mind ‘the sort of ‘principle’ that has an entire world-description on its left hand side . . . is blatantly incapable of serving the purposes for which principles are usually required (e.g. guidance, or the specification of a reason for doing something)’.⁴⁷ Such a “principle” in other words could not be part of the logos of ethics. In particular, Dancy denies that in general the thick concepts can provide moral principles for they do not have invariant valence: ‘My own view is that almost all the standard thick concepts, such as those of fidelity, gratitude, reparation . . . are of variant valence,’⁴⁸ though they do ‘give a certain shape to what is thrown up from below . . . and in some way prepare things for overall judgment.’⁴⁹ This ‘shape’ is understood through investigations of the evaluative point of fidelity and so forth, and as argued in the previous section, this is what justifies the status of v-reasons as arriving already switched on. In this way I have suggested a virtue ethical particularism can meet the objection that Dancy’s particularism cannot account for ‘moral pluses and moral minuses.’ This position may be described thus: Virtue Ethical Particularism (VEP): Though there is in fact no suitable supply of moral principles codifying invariant reasons for action, there is a suitable supply of rules (v-rules) that codify reasons (v-reasons) characteristically having variant valence (though already arriving ‘switched on’ as argued above).
VEP must also be distinguished from three other particularist positions, as follows. Extreme Particularism (EP): Moral reasons are not expressible in any kind of (usable) rule or principle.⁵⁰ Weak Particularism (WP): The normative valence of some reasons varies.⁵¹ ⁴⁴ Ethics Without Principles, 73. Of course, ‘suitable supply’ is a vague and contested idea: what is presumably meant here is some kind of codifiability of at least a large and non-peripheral part of ethics in terms of invariant principles. ⁴⁵ Ibid. 12. ⁴⁶ Ibid. 127. ⁴⁷ Ibid. 126. ⁴⁸ Ibid. 121. ⁴⁹ Ibid. 122. ⁵⁰ A potent reason for the apparently widespread assumption that Dancy subscribes to (EP) is that the concept of codifiability is assumed to apply only to invariant principles. See, for example, Margaret Olivia Little, ‘Moral Generalities Revisited’ in Hooker and Little, 276–304, 276. ⁵¹ See Cullity, ‘Particularism and Presumptive Reasons.’
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WP simply denies that ‘a consideration cannot count in favour of any action unless it counts in favour of every action.’⁵² This position is weaker than VEP since the existence of one reason with variant valence is compatible with there being a ‘suitable supply’ of moral principles. Strong Particularism (SP): There are no normative reasons of invariant valence. VEP is weaker than SP. For example, VEP is consistent with the view that it is analytic that being one’s duty always has positive valence,⁵³ and that ‘being one’s duty’ is a reason for action (after all one of Bernard Gert’s ten moral rules is ‘Do your duty’).⁵⁴ The attraction of VEP is this. The view that morality does not depend on the truth of Generalism as defined above is compatible with the truth of a claim one might deem essential for resolving the “flattening of the moral landscape” problem; namely, that morality does depend on a suitable supply of normative generalizations having positive default, such as those capturable in v-rules. Unfortunately, there may be a serious problem with VEP. Is there ‘a suitable supply’ of v-rules? That is, are the v-reasons codified by such rules sufficiently pervasive? Call a negative response to these questions the Non-Pervasiveness Objection to VEP. There are three aspects to the Non-Pervasiveness Objection (NPO). First, many normative reasons are what Dancy calls ‘enticing’ (as opposed to peremptory) and many of these at least may be deemed to be “non-moral” with no corresponding virtues. Second, many peremptory reasons arguably do not map onto v-rules, for again there are no corresponding virtues. In the case of these types of reasons too there are allegedly no targets of virtues to which v-rules guide. There are no virtues whose study may offer grounds for the claim that v-reasons arrive already switched on. According to the third aspect of the NPO there may be associated virtues, but no v-rules having default status that are generated by those virtues. Consider first the enticing reasons. According to Dancy: Enticing reasons are to do with what would be fun, amusing, attractive, exciting, pleasant, and so on.⁵⁵
According to the first aspect of the NPO such reasons though ubiquitous are not moral reasons. Further, according to the NPO, virtue reasons are “moral” reasons and such reasons have to do with the peremptory: what virtue demands of us. What would be fun, amusing, and so on, by contrast, are not within the domain of the moral and do not ‘take us to an ought’⁵⁶ or a demand of virtue. However, as ⁵² ‘Particularism and Presumptive Reasons’, 169 (Abstract). ⁵³ See Cullity. ⁵⁴ Morality: Its Nature and Justification (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). For Gert, being a duty is not a thin moral concept, and is a genuine reason for action; however, as I understand him, though the rule ‘Do your duty’ can conflict with other of his ten moral rules it always has positive moral valence. ⁵⁵ Ethics Without Principles, 21. ⁵⁶ Ibid.
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argued in the previous chapter Aristotle and others such as Hume do not confine virtue to the “moral” which has no clear sense. Not only are there virtues and vices associated with these domains of the enticing, but they may also make demands on us. Those who think that the purpose of life is to have fun are liable to go wrong in the domain of feeling and action in relation to “being fun,” as indeed are those joyless individuals in the grip of Hume’s ‘monkish virtues’.⁵⁷ As for the amusing, both Aristotle and Hume recognize virtue and vice in this area: for Hume, as already noted, cheerfulness is a virtue whereas cheerfulness to excess in the form of ‘dissolute mirth’ is a vice. Kant itemizes a disposition to mocking banter as a vice of disrespect; Aristotle contrasts wittiness as a virtue with, for example, boorishness. Peremptory reasons apply in all these cases: for example, the appropriate virtue may require in various circumstances that one not have fun in the wrong way (through sarcasm) or at the wrong time (when solemnity is required) and so forth. The amusing, the funny, the exciting, may give rise to both enticing and peremptory reasons in all sorts of different contexts. The second aspect of the NPO is this. Many peremptory reasons do not have virtue concepts associated with them. As Dancy himself puts it, to assess the normative force of features such as telling jokes, making certain remarks, making certain gestures, one needs to bring to them some ‘sort of practical shape’⁵⁸ and this we do via thick concepts such as the tasteful or distasteful. But then, according to the objection, for a very large class of these the shape is not provided by virtue/vice concepts (including being distasteful).⁵⁹ This objection has been discussed in another context in Chapter 2. There I claimed that being distasteful is a vice concept. It is a concept that can and does generate a v-rule. Some people are distasteful as matter of disposition and may even glory in it. Here it is a vice of exhibitionism. Furthermore, it is clear that ‘Don’t be distasteful’ is a rather stringent default rule even if it is not an important rule by comparison with, for example, ‘Be just’. The third aspect of the NPO is granted. There are some virtues such as the virtue whose field is sentimentality which do not generate v-rules. I doubt that being sentimental is clearly a negative or positive default. That is ‘Be sentimental’ is not clearly a v-rule and nor is ‘Don’t be sentimental.’ Not only do some situations call for sentimentality whereas others call for the opposite, it is unclear or at least controversial where the default lies, at least on my view.⁶⁰ This is not to say that there is no (nameless) virtue of being disposed to getting things right in relation to issues of sentimentality, and thus no v-reasons associated with this
⁵⁷ See further on this point and on my interpretation of Hume here, Swanton, The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche. ⁵⁸ Ethics Without Principles, 84. ⁵⁹ A view expressed to me by Dancy in conversation. ⁶⁰ For opposed views on the nature of sentimentality as a virtue, see Robert C. Solomon, In Defense of Sentimentality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). For discussion, see Jenefer Robinson, ‘Sentimentality in Life and Literature’ in Kathleen Higgins and David Sherman (eds.), Passion Death and Spirituality: The Philosophy of Robert C. Solomon (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), 67–89.
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nameless virtue. It is just that (if I am right) there is no v-rule associated with this virtue (namely, ‘Be sentimental’ or ‘Don’t be sentimental’). Notice, however, that VEP is not committed to the thesis that all v-reasons are expressible in v-rules. The views that there is a ‘suitable supply’ of such rules, and that this supply is necessary to avoid the flattening of the moral landscape objection, does not imply that all v-reasons need be codifiable as v-rules. Not all reasons expressed by thick concepts such as ‘sentimental’, applicable to a situation here and now as reasons of virtue, need be expressible in a default rule that is here and now applicable. If I am correct, reasons for action should not be analyzed or defined as features expressible in default rules, but are simply features that favour actions as many (such as Dancy and Scanlon) believe. Far from VEP being vulnerable to the NPO I want now to suggest that VEP has the materials for guidance where there might be thought to be none—tragic dilemmas. Can the v-rules guide us even in tragic dilemmas, understood as dilemmas in which all alternatives are terrible? Indeed they can; in fact I would go as far as to say that v-rules are particularly suitable in identifying a large number of potentially relevant features in such a dilemma. A mistake in the analysis of tragic dilemmas is to focus on only a very few v-rules such as the requirement to be beneficent, and since one cannot act in accordance with those rules it is assumed that one cannot but act wrongly in such a dilemma. However, in tragic dilemmas there are many v-rules in play such as ‘Be morally serious’, ‘Be caring’, ‘Be resolute’, ‘Be courageous’, ‘Be non-maleficent,’ ‘Act with integrity.’ To be morally serious is to be disposed to appreciate the gravity of situations, and that virtue too has targets. To act with integrity involves not cooperating with evil. Sophie of Sophie’s Choice⁶¹ could neither act beneficently nor non-maleficently because her acts could not possess the descriptive features characteristic of such acts. Perhaps her actions could conform to the rules ‘Be morally serious’, ‘Be courageous’, ‘Be resolute’, ‘Act with integrity’ and even ‘Be caring’. She conformed to or could have conformed to at least the first of these rules but not the rules of resoluteness and integrity. However, one could argue that the positive default status of ‘Be resolute’ and ‘Act with integrity’ (understood in the present way) are here switched off, on the grounds that resoluteness and integrity in this kind of situation would seriously detract from Sophie’s virtue as a mother.⁶² On this view it is not that the v-rule ‘Be resolute’ (for example) is overridden by the claims of a conflicting v-rule: it is rather that being resolute, in this particular context, is thought to have negative valence, or even be undermined. Given all this, we might say that Sophie acted (or could have acted) rightly. ⁶¹ William Styron, Sophie’s Choice (New York: Random House, 1975). ⁶² Michael Slote in The Impossibility of Perfection: Aristotle, Feminism, and the Complexities of Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) claims that ‘she can’t in all conscience refuse to cooperate with evil in a case like this’ (76), but does not go so far as claiming that the v-reason of integrity (understood as ‘Don’t cooperate with evil’) here has negative valence.
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However, for some such as Hursthouse an act may be too terrible overall to be called right (though on her view one can make a right decision).⁶³ For others such as myself rightness as correctness is relative to situation: targets of virtues are relative to situation, and the contextually determined targets of some virtues may be met even in terrible situations. Whichever view one adopts, even in tragic dilemmas, some v-rules may guide one to targets of virtue, but not of course infallibly.
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(v) Virtue Rules and Decisive Moral Principles My claim that v-reasons are susceptible to switching off defeat even when expressible in v-rules is challenged by a line of thought that v-rules express decisive moral principles. Showing the falsity of this view requires an account of how virtue concepts are applied to acts, for this is contested. The view that v-rules express decisive moral principles is defended by Roger Crisp.⁶⁴ His view of v-acts suggests that v-acts are actions which conform to v-rules, which themselves should be understood as decisive moral principles, indeed simple ones. In other words a v-reason can be expressed in a decisive simple moral principle. Does the fact that an action is subsumed under a virtue concept guarantee its rightness? Appealing to the ‘Unity of the Virtues’ doctrine Crisp seems to think so. According to this view, v-reasons cannot conflict because the virtues are unified through practical wisdom. So a just act, for example, is an act in the field of justice which is right. For him then the fact that an act A is v not only implies that the fact is a v-reason for A, but that the v-reason is a guarantee that A is right. But, I shall argue, his view leads to contortions in his conception of the thick virtue concepts as applied to action. To understand this position, consider the following case, proposed by Crisp. An invigilator notices that a student is cheating. She also knows that ‘this particular student is usually quite conscientious, and that her parents are in the process of breaking up.’⁶⁵ Surely, it will be claimed, there is a conflict between kindness and justice? But this is denied by Crisp: If the right thing to do in this case is to keep quiet, then it would be wrong to speak out. Indeed speaking out, because it would be going wrong within the sphere governed by justice, would be a kind of injustice.⁶⁶
However, is it possible that an invigilator who, in her role as invigilator, fails to respect the rules of the relevant institution aimed at securing justice in the ⁶³ See On Virtue Ethics. ⁶⁴ In ‘Particularizing Particularism’. ⁶⁵ ‘Particularizing Particularism’, 45. ⁶⁶ Ibid.
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assessing process, is properly described as acting justly, and indeed perhaps as acting unjustly if she does enforce the rules of justice? Crisp has an argument for this counterintuitive possibility based on the Unity of the Virtues doctrine. Assume that keeping quiet is the action of a virtuous agent acting rightly. His argument may be summarized as follows. (1) Rightness is determined by what is virtuous in any given situation, and ‘what is virtuous in any situation is what the virtuous person would do.’⁶⁷ Hence: (2) The virtues cannot conflict: ‘On the most plausible account of the virtues, they cannot conflict.’⁶⁸ Hence: (3)
The kindness of an act cannot conflict with the justice of an act.
Hence:
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(4)
If an act is right because kind it cannot also be unjust.
In other words, for Crisp a v-act is an act that would be performed by a virtuous agent in the field of V, with the result that (perhaps discounting tragic dilemmas of the kind countenanced by Hursthouse) a v-act is an act in the field of V which is right overall. However, there are problems with the argument at several points. Consider first (1). Crisp’s conviction that (1) is true relies on what I regard as a problematic interpretation of Aristotle on the relation between right action and the actions of virtuous agents. According to Crisp, citing Aristotle, ‘virtue consists in getting it right’.⁶⁹ Inasmuch as justice and kindness are virtues, for example, this view appears to entail that justice and kindness consist in getting it right. What Aristotle claims, however (twice in the passage cited), is that ‘virtue aims to hit the mean.’ As noted above (Chapter 5), Aristotle certainly says that virtue is a mean condition (as a character trait), and persons of virtue have both practical wisdom and fine motivation, including the aim of hitting the mean. Virtue gets it right in the sense of hitting the mean of virtue gets it right. In this sense as Aristotle says ‘virtue is a mean.’⁷⁰ It does not follow that real-life virtuous agents (those of virtuous character) always get it right in action; that is, always succeed in
⁶⁷ Ibid. ⁶⁸ Ibid. ⁷⁰ Ibid. 1107a1–27.
⁶⁹ Nicomachean Ethics, 1106b16–24 (Crisp, 39.)
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hitting the mean. Indeed, as Howard Curzer points out, Aristotle gives several types of example of virtuous agents getting it wrong in action.⁷¹
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But it is especially characteristic of the liberal man to carry giving too far, so as to leave himself less than his due; because it is the nature of the liberal man not to regard his own interest.⁷² He [the patient man] is considered to err, if at all, on the side of deficiency, because the patient man is not revengeful; he is more inclined to be forgiving.⁷³
It may be claimed that in these examples the patient and the liberal man is not virtuously patient and liberal, but in these cases we hypothesize that they have met the threshold for virtue.⁷⁴ Though giving too often or too much is characteristic of the liberal person, for it is in his or her nature, it must be sufficiently rare if the agent is deemed to have the virtue of liberality. Consider now (2) the claim that the virtues cannot conflict. Aristotle is often interpreted as claiming that if you have one virtue you have them all, because to have one virtue requires that you have practical wisdom, and to have practical wisdom you will have all the virtues and will always get things right in action. But this thesis has already been questioned. As we saw in Chapter 5 the crucial claim about practical wisdom is false since practical wisdom does not entail expertise or ‘encyclopedic’ knowledge. A kind person need not have the expertise of a counselor, for example. Finally, and most importantly, we need to question the link between (2) and (3). That justice as a virtue cannot conflict with kindness as a virtue because to possess one virtue is to possess them all, does not entail that just acts cannot conflict with kind acts. Why is this? A v-act (such as a kind act) is not necessarily an act which a virtuously kind agent would perform in the ‘sphere governed’ by kindness (in the field of kindness). For v-acts have ‘descriptive constraints’ (such as, is not a lie) necessary for the thick concept (e.g., honest) to be properly applicable to actions. It may be the case that a lie is overall right and not to tell it “would be going wrong within the sphere governed by honesty.” But we cannot say that because the lie would rightly be uttered by a virtuous agent possessing the virtue of honesty the lie is a “kind of honesty” and thus the target of honesty is hit. As Dancy notes in
⁷¹ ‘How Good People Can Do Bad Things: Aristotle on the Misdeeds of the Virtuous’ in David Sedley (ed.), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy XXVIII (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005), 233–56. ⁷² Nicomachean Ethics, 1120b4–6. ⁷³ 1126a3 (see Curzer, 243). ⁷⁴ Like Daniel C. Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) I take both virtue and practical wisdom to be satis and vague concepts; that is, one can be said to be virtuous or wise if one is virtuous or wise enough (114). Furthermore, where the threshold is set is not determinate, and will vary according to context.
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opposition to Crisp, there can be reprehensible kindness, brutal honesty, and required dishonesty, all of which is denied by Crisp.⁷⁵
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(vi) The Burden of Proof I have attempted to enhance the plausibility of particularism by incorporating it within a normative ethical theory: target centred virtue ethical particularism. But why is there so much resistance to particularism, despite the well-recognized complexity of the ethical realm? Consider a Rossian and a Particularist arguing about whether kindness always has positive valence. The context is Jerry’s just presented mediocre paper and Jim’s kind praise of the paper. PARTICULARIST: We do not want kind praise when reading an academic paper: we want the praise to be wrung out by the sheer excellence of the paper.⁷⁶ ROSSIAN: Yes: one should not praise mediocre academic papers out of kindness in academic contexts, but the kindness of the praise is at least one good thing about the situation. PARTICULARIST: No: the kindness of the praise is a negative feature. Jim’s action inherently undermines the integrity of the academic purpose. ROSSIAN: No you can’t say that: there are plenty of occasions where kind praise of mediocre academic papers is called for: where a speaker is unusually anxious; where the speaker is a graduate student giving her first paper in a terrifying context, and so on. PARTICULARIST: I was not generalizing to those kinds of cases: I was just talking about Jim’s reaction to Jerry’s paper today. In fact let me put in a few more details about Jerry’s performance, and Jim’s behaviour. Jerry’s paper was not only mediocre but he was particularly arrogant and nasty to his opponents. He did not deserve kindness in relation to his paper. Furthermore, as we know, Jim is constantly self-sacrificing, but in staying behind to bestow kindness on Jerry he missed the opera. I would say that Jim’s act of kindness here is not even pro tanto appropriate. Kindness here is expressive of a vice of self-abnegation and this is a potent reason why the kindness of the praise in this particular case has negative valence. None of this, of course, suggests that kind helpfulness on Jim’s part, were James (another unpleasant individual) to collapse of heat exhaustion in the middle of yet another sneering remark, is out of order, even were he (Jim) to miss the opera, especially since Jim, among all the impractical academics on show, is the only one who has taken a first aid course. Yet, as I have discovered, there is a drive to defend Generalism in the face of examples such as these. The reason for the difficulty is that the use of examples ⁷⁵ Ethics Without Principles, 125. ⁷⁶ I owe this example to Jonathan Dancy (in conversation) but he is not responsible for the embellishments that follow.
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designed by the particularist to persuade one out of the invariance “prejudice,” fail to persuade when one is in the grip of that prejudice. This is, of course, a tendentious way of putting it. So let us say that the reason for the failure of what, for the particularist, are persuasive examples, is that the non-particularist is against particularism for serious theoretical reasons. Particularism can’t be right— it is after all ‘wrong and bad’ as Hooker says.⁷⁷ The burden of proof is therefore seen to be on the particularist, and it is hard to discharge that burden through examples. That is why it seems axiomatic to many that the v-rules express invariant moral principles (‘thick moral features . . . are guaranteed of carrying a given valence of moral significance.’)⁷⁸ So, the particularist needs to reduce the force of the theoretical objections. I hope to have shown that a virtue ethics conforming to VEP can supply rules which account for moral pluses and minuses, that the notion of a switching off default in the case of v-reasons can be explained by substantive accounts of the evaluative points and grounds of virtues—accounts which explain why v-reasons arrive already switched on—and that the ‘flattening of the moral landscape’ objection can thereby be disarmed. What about the scepticism concerning moral education of the young? The v-rules are action guiding, since they locate what matters normatively speaking (the targets of the virtues) and (unless switched off, excluded, or overridden) guide one thereby to right action. The basic v-rules initiate the young into familiarity with basic virtue. These rules then provide anchors for our moral thought and can be taught to children, but are not sophisticated enough to be targeted at what I have called ‘differentiated’ virtue.
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(vii) Conclusion This chapter has argued that there could be a codifiable Dancian particularism applied to target centred virtue ethics. The trouble with discussion of particularism so far has been that it has been conducted at a meta-ethical level so that objections such as unpredictability and so forth appear to loom large. What needs to happen and what I have attempted here is showing how particularism can be applied to a normative ethics: one containing a ‘suitable supply’ of v-rules as opposed to moral principles in the invariant sense. The v-rules guide by objective standards reflecting the evaluative point of the virtues, as explored through various types of virtue theory. Though the v-reasons characteristically codified by the v-rules as applied to action are susceptible to switching off default, some such as reasons of justice may nonetheless be near absolute. Their default status is highly stringent (as well as important). ⁷⁷ ‘Moral Particularism – Wrong and Bad.’
⁷⁸ Little ‘Moral Generalities Revisited’, 289.
12 The Wrong Logos Paradoxes of Practical Reason
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(i) Access Through the Wrong Logos Chapter 3 discussed Heidegger’s view that the worldhood of ethics is not only opened up by logos, but can also be concealed or ‘covered up’, thereby suffering distortions of various kinds. Possibly the most serious way ethics is covered up is intentional access to the worldhood of ethics through the wrong logos. The major reason for this is a prevalent attraction to the theoretical desiderata of the sciences, such as naturalism narrowly understood, elegance, simplicity. Hence, the temptation to scientistic naturalism of the kind deplored by, for example, McDowell and Charles Taylor. There are several related forms of access through the wrong logos. First, one set of significance relations is illegitimately analyzed through features appropriate to another. There is a real issue of whether in much contemporary ethics concepts belonging to the logos of ethics are being illegitimately analyzed through the wrong logos, a mathematical one, or alternatively concepts belonging to the scientific/ mathematical logos are being imported into ethics. An example of the former is a certain understanding of codifiability. Some theorists want to link codifiability as a concept within the framework of ethics with something called ‘patterns’¹ They argue against the view that ‘There is no codifiable pattern to be found in the passage from the descriptive to the ethical, and vice versa’.² For them the ‘key issue’ is not ‘whether you can grasp the descriptive similarity without grasping the moral concept, but whether there is a descriptive similarity to be grasped’.³ But there being a descriptive similarity to be grasped at all, let alone one that can be called codifiable, is relative to intentional access to those similarities via the appropriate logos. Where the logos is that of ethics that understanding requires a grasp of the various points of codification in our ethical world involvements; for example, teaching norms (understood through thick concepts) to children, and guiding action where required. The metaphysical qua semantic/mathematical notion of
¹ Frank Jackson, Philip Pettit, and Michael Smith, ‘Ethical Particularism and Patterns’ in Brad Hooker and Margaret Little (eds.), Moral Particularism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), 79–99. ² Ethical Particularism and Patterns’, 80. ³ Ibid. 84.
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0013
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pattern described by Jackson et al. fails this practical test of being something that is codifiable within ethics. Examples of the latter form of misapplication of the mathematical logos to ethics include on my view idealizations in ethics, which make sense in science through mathematical interpretations, but which cannot receive analogous treatment in ethics, and the idea of a ‘complete’ reason which terminates in a universal exceptionless principle. The process of ‘complicating’ a contributory reason in this way, claims Dancy, is (illegitimately) ‘grounded in the agglomerative thought that if a consideration c is a reason only under the condition that p, the real reason in the case is not c but c + p.’⁴ The ‘agglomerative thought’ makes sense in mathematics but in ethics a reason must be something graspable in the world involvements of ethics, such as deliberation about what to do and justification to others. It certainly cannot be something infinite or virtually infinite. A second form of wrong logos is a logos whose substantive ethical concepts are wrongly understood, since that understanding is distorted by theoretical assumptions more suited to other logoi. One notable example is one to which Philippa Foot drew our attention. In the hands of consequentialist thinkers, she argues, the thick virtue concept of benevolence became seriously distorted.⁵ Instead of it remaining a virtue term which when applied to action has multiple targets, and applied to character denotes several integrated dispositional excellences, it became oversimplified and distorted in the service of consequentialist theoretical structures. It was removed from its virtue theoretic home into a consequentialist framework more amenable to scientific/mathematical notions of additivity and calculation. More generally, of particular concern in this chapter, what might be called the ethics of beneficence has exhibited this feature of the wrong logos by its deployment of three core ideas. 1. Morality essentially concerns welfare (Welfarist Morality). 2. Welfare is understood in a way which is not essentially aretaic (Aretaic Independence of Welfare). 3. The moral agent is bound to maximize the good (understood in welfarist terms). This latter thesis is itself underpinned by three theses: 3a. The only right-making relation is that of promotion (the Hegemony of Promotion Thesis). 3b. It can never be right to prefer a worse state of affairs to a better (the “Simple Thought” Thesis).⁶ 3c. We regard as better a state of affairs in which there is more value rather than less value (the More is Better Thesis). ⁴ Ethics Without Principles, 127. ⁵ See her ‘Utilitarianism and the Virtues’, Mind 94 (1985), 196–209. ⁶ This is Philippa Foot’s term: see her ‘Utilitarianism and the Virtues’, 198.
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The modern virtue ethical tradition since Anscombe’s famous 1958 paper has had a hand in questioning all these theses. Foot has attacked the Simple Thought Thesis and the More is Better Thesis.⁷ Virtue ethical theory is a thoroughgoing critique of the Aretaic Independence of Welfare and Value generally. My book Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View includes a sustained attack on the Hegemony of Promotion Thesis. Bernard Williams, as we have seen, questions the narrow conceptions of the moral which have so blighted the analytic tradition, with his notion of the ethical, understood through the thick evaluative concepts. A third central feature of wrongness of logos is the chief concern of this chapter. Ethics has been largely dominated by the relatively thin and non-evaluative concepts that pervade the welfarist consequentialist tradition. In my account of TCC I illustrated the thesis of the centrality of the thick concepts with an example from welfarist ethics. I claimed that according to TCC:
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Within the network of concepts denoting features that are reasons and relations of fittingness, relatively non evaluative features such as helping, giving pleasure, satisfying preferences, benefiting (broadly reasons of beneficence) need to be further conceptualized by a large range of thick evaluative concepts such as kind, just, callous, generous, humiliating, manipulative, for their reason giving status to be properly assessed.
This chapter is concerned with the proneness of frameworks such as the prevalent welfarist tradition to generate paradox. We have paradoxes of supererogation, problems of extreme demandingness, underdetermination of choice of, for example, charitable endeavour by reasons, the “It makes no difference whether or not I do it” paradox of ‘pooled beneficence’.⁸ All of these paradoxes are discussed below. What is needed for the resolution of these problems is an appreciation of the distinctive nature of the ethical mode of access to the real described in Chapter 2. To recapitulate, that mode is seen as openness to an ethical reality of notably reasons, reasons identified in a rich and situated way through the thick concepts, such as kind, generous, caring, non-manipulative, humiliating, callous, and so forth. That openness constitutes the mode of being of that reality and thereby its ontology. We can thus think of this chapter as an indirect defence of TCC/CV by putting TCC/CV to work in resolving paradoxes of practical rationality, paradoxes which have their roots in the twin evils of overly thin evaluative concepts and the construing of ethics through a framework of significance relations more suitable to the natural sciences. More broadly, the chapter shows that to think of the logos ⁷ Ibid. ⁸ Garrett Cullity, ‘Pooled Beneficence’ in Michael J. Almeida (ed.), Imperceptible Harms and Benefits (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000), 9–42.
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of ethics solely in terms of relatively non-evaluative features such as helping, pleasure, and so on is to deploy the wrong logos. The temptation to “naturalize” ethics in this way is possibly the most serious form of the “covering up” of ethics. Yet that temptation persists because it is seen as the only way to make ethics nonqueer. The solution is to appreciate that practical reality is natural in the way explicated in Chapters 1 and 2, and elsewhere in this book.
(ii) Supererogation I argue in the next three sections that thinking of ethics solely in terms of relatively non-evaluative concepts leads to paradoxes which can be resolved through the introduction of the thick concepts. We begin with the paradox of supererogation. Describing the paradox is unfortunately not easy since the very definition of supererogation itself is far from clear. Consider two non-equivalent definitions to be found in Dancy’s Moral Reasons, which I quote. (a) ‘Supererogatory acts . . . lie ‘above and beyond the call of duty.’⁹ (b) ‘The idea that some actions are supererogatory is just the idea that in certain circumstances agents may choose an action other than the one that would most promote the good.’¹⁰
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Let us begin with (b) which is the formulation of the supererogatory defended by Dancy. In relation to this definition, the paradox comes about in the following way. Assume what has been called the ‘good-ought’ tie-up. The tie-up apparently makes no room for supererogation by virtue of: (1) We have most reason to produce the most good possible, and we ought to do what we have most reason to do. The paradox occurs given the additional plausibility of: (2) In ‘certain circumstances agents may choose an action other than the one that would most promote the good.’¹¹ Within consequentialist models of rationality (see the Simple Thought Thesis, the Hegemony of Promotion Thesis, and the More is Better Thesis cited above) (1) looks plausible. However, in support of (2) is the view that the result is too demanding on the moral agent. Within his more general attack on consequentialism, ⁹ Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 127. ¹¹ Ibid.
¹⁰ Ibid. 167.
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Dancy supports (2), rejecting (1) as a truth of rationality and ethics. The evaluative is understood in terms of agent neutral value and the deontic in terms of reasons. Untying the ‘good-ought tie up’ occurs according to him when it is recognized that (1) applies to agent neutral value only, but that sacrifice to the agent, generating agent relative value, affects the balance of reasons in favour of actions. Definition (b) of supererogation does not get to the heart of the problem of supererogation; namely, that under the conception originally made famous by Urmson,¹² the paradox of supererogation affects both consequentialist and nonconsequentialist theories. As I argued in my Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View, sacrifice of an extremely demanding sort can affect the agent relative as well. The paradox of supererogation can apply as readily to love and care, as anyone who cares for her severely disabled child full time with little support can attest. Turn then to definition (a) of supererogation, which allows for the paradox of supererogation to affect versions of non-consequentialism. Within a virtue ethical framework the paradox as applied to definition (a) can be reformulated thus:
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(1*) Where we have most reason to perform an action that action is a duty, and we ought to perform an action we have a duty to perform. (2*) We have most reason to perform the most virtuous action so we ought to perform the most virtuous action. (3*) We do not always have a duty to perform the most virtuous action because some virtuous actions are ‘above and beyond the call of duty’. On some views such as Marcia Baron’s Kant¹³ and Roger Crisp’s Aristotle,¹⁴ the paradox is resolved by rejecting (3*). There is a tie-up between most reason, most virtuous, and duty, so one ought to do what is most virtuous. The standards of virtue as such make no room for supererogation. Crisp claims that for Aristotle it is clear that: . . . the virtuous person’s dying for others is not supererogatory; it is virtuous, and what is virtuous is a matter of doing one’s duty . . . Similarly with generosity. If the virtuous person makes large donations to Oxfam, for example, rather than spending the money on luxuries for himself, we can conclude it is his duty.
For Crisp, Aristotle’s ‘mean’ at which a virtuous person aims is ‘a relation between circumstances and actions or feelings’ and that mean is describable as ‘what is ¹² J. O. Urmson, ‘Saints and Heroes’ in A. I. Melden (ed.), Essays on Moral Philosophy (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1958), 198–216. ¹³ Marcia Baron, Kantian Ethics Almost without Apology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). ¹⁴ Roger Crisp, ‘Supererogation and Virtue’ in Mark Timmons (ed.), Normative Ethics Vol. 3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 13–34.
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fitting or as one’s duty’.¹⁵ So for Crisp’s Aristotle we have a virtue-fittingness-duty tie-up, and thereby a virtue-ought tie-up. However, rejecting (3*) would be at the cost of an extremely demanding ethics. It is not at all clear that Aristotle subscribes to such an ethics. Like Hume, Aristotle does not expect a virtuous agent to necessarily act optimally when such an act is pardonable ‘because the alternative is too much for human nature, and nobody could endure it’.¹⁶ The question is though does such an agent necessarily act wrongly in such circumstances as opposed to not being blameable? Let us now deploy TCC to untie the virtue-duty-ought tie-up defended by Crisp. His anti-supererogationist stance puts too much weight on the thin concepts: in this case a thin conception of the link between Aristotle’s conception of the mean, rightness (understood as correctness), duty, and fittingness. The correct action is understood in a way that is insensitive to the way the thick concepts work in relation to the mean. Or so I shall argue. Certainly, there is a virtue-fittingness tie-up, but it is not clear to me that there is a most virtuous-duty tie-up. Cannot some actions conforming to the mean in action be fitting by being sufficiently meritorious because sufficiently virtuous as opposed to being most virtuous and one’s duty? On my view they can.¹⁷ The basis of the view that actions conforming to the mean can be sufficiently meritorious but not required is that a virtue-based notion of fittingness is ambiguous. ‘Being fitting’ can describe an act for which one has most reason in the sense that is best in the circumstances relative to standards of admirable exemplars of virtue. On this view the fitting action is the best action where that is determined by the standards of admirable virtue. Let us assume that these standards are set by virtue understood as virtue possessed by some exemplar of saintliness or heroism, such as Jesus, Mandela, Gandhi, or the Homeric, Spartan, or Aristotelian warrior. Let us say that these exemplars possess admirable virtue, such as courage, love, or forgivingness.¹⁸ But maybe there is a notion of fittingness that allows for relativity to agents as Nietzsche believed:¹⁹ less than fully admirable agents do not need always to emulate the admirable. I shall now argue that this is so. The complexity introduced to the notions of fittingness and duty by the introduction of virtue notions is obscured by the description of supererogatory acts in terms of prosocial behaviour, such as volunteering, giving, helping without subsuming such behaviour under appropriate notions of virtue. When such relatively non-evaluative notions are used ‘the
¹⁵ Ibid. 22. ¹⁶ Nicomachean Ethics, 1110a23–6 (see Curzer, 237). ¹⁷ For a view that is in line with my own, see Stangl, Neither Heroes Nor Saints. ¹⁸ See Linda Zagzebski, ‘Exemplarist Virtue Theory’ in Heather Battaly (ed.), Virtue and Vice: Moral and Epistemic (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 39–55. See also Lawrence Walker and Karl Hennig, ‘Differing Conceptions of Moral Exemplarity: Just Brave and Caring’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 93 (2004), 845–60. ¹⁹ See further my The Virtue Ethics of Hume and Nietzsche.
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Simple Thought’ seems to embody a rational requirement: isn’t it rational to give as much as possible, help as much as possible given that such actions are optimal? Nonetheless, I have suggested, the ambiguity in the notion of fittingness introduced by virtue notions resolves the paradox of supererogation by allowing for the fittingness of apparently suboptimal acts performed by those of less than fully admirable virtue. But this would be too quick. We still need to ask: shouldn’t all agents act according to duties set by standards of admirable virtue? It is not obvious that they should. This view has not reckoned with the idea of Developmental Virtue Ethics discussed in Chapter 8. Consider a self-improving agent aspiring to greater virtue or even admirable virtue. She may be as Nietzsche puts it, ‘convalescent’ or as Annas puts it, an aspiring, learning agent.²⁰ Should she always act according to admirable virtue? Nietzsche suggests not: as he puts it in a warning ‘Do not be virtuous beyond your strength!’²¹ There are two warnings implicit in this injunction. First, the path to self-improvement is not smooth. In particular, one should not directly emulate the most admirable exemplars of virtue on one’s self-improving path, or at least not always. Second, as Nietzsche also points out, not all of us should even aspire to the most admirable virtue. Should all of us aspire to be ‘perfect’. . . requiring us to ‘go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor . . . and come and follow [Jesus]’?²² Certainly, we should give to the poor, but should we all sell all that we have in doing this, and do the equivalent of following Jesus by living with the poorest, as do those belonging to some Christian charities such as Servants? Such a demanding ethics is liable to result in or exhibit many serious failures of self-love, as in the cases of Farmer and Kravinsky.²³ We can now make sense of the paradoxical-looking (3*). “Duty of virtue” is ambiguous between duty according to admirable or model virtue, or duty where the bar is set lower according to a threshold conception, suitably calibrated according to the nature and development of the agent. One could say that such calibration constitutes a form of differentiated virtue. (3*) can be accepted and room made for supererogation within a virtue ethical framework.
(iii) The Paradox of Underdetermination A classic problem in the ethics of beneficence and elsewhere is that of underdetermination by reason; for example, reason does not determine to whom one should give, how much, and to how many. Virtue ethics, it may be thought, is particularly ²⁰ Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ²¹ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra Part 4: 13, ‘On the Higher Man’ in Walter Kaufmann (ed. and trans.), The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin, 1976), 103–439. ²² Mathew 19: 16–21, King James Version. ²³ Discussed by Steven C. Angle in Sagehood: The Contemporary Significance of Neo-Confucian Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 90–1.
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vulnerable to the problem because virtue concepts such as generous and benevolent are vague and do not prescribe determinate action in all cases. Here is the underlying problem leading to the paradox. It is generally considered rational to do what you have most reason to do. I understand ‘most reason’ in the way it is understood by Ruth Chang: You have most reason to choose x over y if the reasons for x outweigh, trump, silence, exclude, cancel, bracket or are more stringent than the reasons for y. Your choice of x is rationally determined.²⁴
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However, for many, including Chang, it is often the case that ‘the reasons for choice underdetermine what you should do’.²⁵ You may have sufficient reason to choose either of two alternatives which may be incommensurable or (on some understandings of tragic dilemmas) ‘your reasons may fail to deliver any justified choice whatsoever’.²⁶ It is often thought that when reasons for a specific choice ‘run out’ you should simply plump for an alternative, but that seems unsatisfactory in the case of important life choices, and important decisions like philanthropic giving. Here we seem faced with a dilemma, which is our second paradox of practical reason. Because we are justified in thinking that reasons have run out, further deliberation even in important choices seems inappropriate, but because plumping also seems inappropriate in such choices continued deliberation about the merits of choices in search of what we have most reason to do seems appropriate. Joseph Raz appears to have offered a solution (in relation to the problem of incommensurability) by distinguishing between two conceptions of rationality: I will contrast two conceptions of human agency, which I will call the rationalist and the classical. In broad outline, the rationalist holds that paradigmatic human action is action taken because, of all the options open to the agent, it was, in the agent’s view, supported by the strongest reason. The classical conception holds that the paradigmatic human action is one taken because, of all the options the agent considers rationally eligible, he chooses to perform it.²⁷
He prefers the classical conception—one according to which it may be rational to choose something even if there is not most reason to perform it, even in Chang’s sense—concluding:
²⁴ Ruth Chang, ‘Voluntarist Reasons and the Sources of Normativity’ in David Sobel and Steven Wall (eds.), Reasons for Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 243–71, 248. ²⁵ Ibid. 248. ²⁶ Ibid. ²⁷ Joseph Raz, Engaging Reason: On the Theory of Value and Action (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 47.
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. . . the classical conception of human agency with its reliance on widespread incommensurabilities gains support from ordinary human experience, which teaches us that quite commonly people do not survey all the options open to them before choosing what to do. Rather, they find an option that they believe not to be excluded by reason and that appeals to them and pursue it.²⁸
But could not the way you choose what ‘appeals’ be criticizable? What if you are pusillanimous, vacillating, hugely anguished, because your choice is not rationally determined? Perhaps you have failed to attain the mean of resoluteness. Or could you not be criticizable for giving up too soon in the survey of options? Chang’s own solution is to look for a feature not itself normatively assessed (an act of creation) that rationalizes a choice even where reasons have run out. We create a reason by an act of will. We ‘take’ a reason to confer normativity and resolve the deadlock, thus creating a reason where none existed before. These are voluntarist reasons. But could not your act of will also be criticizable? Again, the problem arises because the crucial concepts deployed—will, choice, appeal, picking, plumping are too thin; they are not concepts suitable to the logos of ethics. The virtue ethical solution to this paradox outlined below does not have this difficulty for it supplies standards for so called “plumping” where reasons have run out. “Plumping,” an apparently descriptive feature, can be normatively assessed by standards of virtue. Let us investigate those virtue-based standards. Consider a case of career choice. You have been offered a very good position in an aid agency but at the same time have a chance to do a further degree in politics, economics, and philosophy at Oxford. You are tempted by the possibility of immediately doing good by accepting the aid agency offer, but you also realize that your knowledge of the world relevant to working for aid organizations will be enhanced by Oxford studies. After much deliberation you find that reasons have run out. At a party you talk to a well-known figure in aid, Jones. No further reasons are given that you had not already considered: rather, fired with enthusiasm, you choose the aid agency. But things could have been different. You do not meet Jones, but an academic friend alerts you to a scholarship at Oxford. You apply and are successful. You choose Oxford. What we have described here are two different narratives. You have gone along with the narrative flow of your life: Jones talks to you, or, on the alternative scenario, your academic friend alerts you to an opportunity. Life has taken you down a certain path. This does not constitute a reason for acting that breaks the tie between reasons. But is there not something arbitrary about this? Is this any better than “mere” plumping? Yes, if what you do conforms to virtue, specifically narrative virtue. If what you have done is within the context of the narrative direction of your life,
²⁸ Engaging Reason, 65.
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much of which is not within your control, going along with that direction can conform to narrative virtue or not. Such conforming to virtue need not be a matter of excellence in (further) deliberation. How is this possible? The answer lies in the account of narrative virtue discussed in Chapter 6. In particular, virtues of rationality are narratively differentiated. To illustrate such virtue consider our narrative again, but with this difference: Jones talks to you, but you are an obsessive deliberator unable to make up your mind. You prevaricate. You lack confidence in people and yourself. You cannot take the plunge and commit to the aid agency. We have here various narratively differentiated vices related to rationality, hope, and self-confidence. They include tendencies to obsessively deliberate when, as far as you can see, reasons have run out; tendencies to demand/want to be in full control of your own destiny; a disposition to vacillate and/or prevaricate; unwillingness to commit; lack of courage and confidence in the future—a lack of a virtue of hope. Failure to be fired up by Jones’s encouragement may manifest all or some of these vices. Alternatively, you may manifest opposite vices: you are the sort who imagines reasons have run out when they have not; maybe you are intellectually lazy, maybe you are so fearful of the future you cannot bear to think about it. Maybe you are the sort who is excessively suggestible; the moment someone makes a half-decent suggestion you go along with it. Maybe you want others to control your life. Where your plumping for the aid agency job conforms to narrative virtue your choice is fitting, even where reasons for or against that choice have run out. It is fitting since the making of the choice is not mere plumping but conforms to narrative virtue. You have gone with the narrative flow but in a way that is fitting. In summary then a core virtue of rationality broadly specified—namely, a disposition to be responsive to or act in line with reasons and relations of fittingness—is narratively differentiated. That is, it is manifested within the context of the narrative features of your life. The paradox of underdetermination by reason is resolved if we recognize that rationality includes in its narratively differentiated form a disposition to stop the search for what one has most reason to do where appropriate, and to go with the narrative flow, provided that is fitting. That in turn is determined by conformity to a complex range of narrative differentiations of the broad global narrative virtue of making choices congruent with the narrative shape of one’s life and specific narrative virtues of not being prone to vacillation and so on. Finally, notice what narrative virtue does not demand. It does not demand that quite independently of your life story, your interests, your traits, you should choose a career that is optimific on the grand scale; for example, one that maximizes your chances of being philanthropic in a grand sense, or an aid worker saving lives. Let us now apply this analysis to reasons of beneficence such as choosing a charity. If the narrative particularities of your life feature in your choice where there is underdetermination by reason, can they not also feature in your choice of
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charity even where your choice produces less overall good than other choices? Certainly, there may be much incommensurability, but is it permissible to knowingly give in a suboptimific way? Attention to evaluative features highlighted by the thick concepts, appropriate to the several foundations of ethics, shows how such giving can be virtuous. The bonds of love and loyalty, the bonds to self that drive prudence, are legitimate ethical forces within a narrative context, attesting not just to the psychology of such giving but also to its virtuousness. The expression of love, solidarity, gratitude, to a loved one or to one’s community, or to an institution such as your local Cancer Society which has provided free of charge desperately needed psychological services for yourself may legitimately determine choice of charitable endeavour. Gratitude, loyalty, solidarity, and caring are all virtues legitimizing such charity.
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(iv) The ‘It Makes no Difference’ Paradox The paradox of ‘It makes no difference’ (the ‘Making No Difference’ Problem) concerns the requirement to do what we apparently have no reason to do. In these cases people may collectively aim to provide a good or solve a problem. Such a good cannot be provided through individual action. Let us say that collective action to provide the good is realizable; the collective aim is agreed upon, as well as the method for obtaining it. Yet it turns out that it is true of each individual contribution required to secure the good that that contribution makes no difference to the securing of the outcome. There are many real-life examples of this, also concerning harms. I believe that at one point bluebells were endangered in England because they were once so plentiful that people would take a small number of bulbs reasoning correctly that “it makes no difference” that I take a few bulbs. Eventually, bluebells became a legally protected species, and numbers have recovered. In general the ‘Making No Difference’ Problem can be described thus. It makes no difference whether or not I make my contribution, avoid paying, pick this flower, dig up this bulb, and so on; so I see no reason to make this contribution, refrain from picking this flower, and so on. It will be my argument that there can be such a reason: a reason under a suitable virtue description. Nefsky claims there are two approaches to resolving the paradox. The first is to deny that in paradigm cases of the problem the description of the case as one where the act ‘makes no difference’ is false. The second, of which my solution is a version, ‘rejects the implication from ‘it makes no difference’ to there is ‘no reason to do it’.’²⁹ My
²⁹ Julia Nefsky, ‘Fairness, Participation and Collective Harm’ in Mark Timmons (ed.), Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics Vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 245–71, 246.
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version is one where the reasons are described at a fundamental level through the thick virtue/vice concepts. Call this version the Thick Concept Solution. This solution has three main parts. In a relevant case the following is true. (a) The action of not A’ing is subsumed under a relevant vice concept, such as ‘parasitical’, ‘unfair’ ‘mean’, ‘callous’. (b) Insofar as the action of not A’ing is, for example, parasitical that constitutes a reason not to do it. (c) That reason is ultimate or basic in that being parasitical is not trumped by a reason specified in a descriptive way such as my contribution, payment and so forth does not make a perceptible difference; my contribution does not constitute a share. That is to say we cannot say either that failure to A ceases to be parasitical or unfair because it makes no difference; or that my failure to A ceases to have negative valence just because my A’ing makes no difference. The Thick Concept Solution has been adopted in relation to the virtue concept fairness by Garrett Cullity.³⁰ He makes an analogy between the “imperceptibilist,” she who claims that she has no reason to make a contribution since it would make no perceptible difference, and the free-rider:
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. . . in the same way that the free rider arrogates special privileges to himself, the imperceptibilist is arrogating special privileges to herself. In circumstances in which there is a collective imperative that we ought to be meeting, she is leaving it to others to meet it, without being prepared to do it herself, and without any justification for treating herself differently from them.
Both are acting in a way that is unfair. Fairness, however, is not the only thick concept used to specify reasons in ‘Making No Difference’ cases. That concept is apt for only some kinds of cases of ‘Making No Difference’. In the light of this potential for generalization, can we provide more structure to the Thick Concepts Solution? The most general virtue that can be deployed to supply reasons for actions that ‘make no difference’ is a virtue whose field or domain of concern is doing your share or “doing your bit”. Three things need to be noted about the application of this virtue which we call being well disposed in relation to doing your share. First, not all cases of actions which individually make no difference to the production of a collective good but that collectively would cause a significant benefit would count as failure to do one’s share were the action to be omitted. Nefsky gives the following example:
³⁰ In ‘Pooled Beneficence’, 22.
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‘while large scale consumer patterns can have a major impact on the lives of people across the globe, it’s hard to imagine that a single purchase would make a difference.’³¹ Buying a dozen eggs or a cake at a café can hardly count as not doing one’s share to mitigate the harms of consumerism. Contrast the vagueness, openendedness, and indefiniteness of the “problem of consumerism” with the closed system described by Parfit’s ‘Drops of Water’ case.³² The collective good is saving a specified number of people (10,000) dying of thirst in the desert, a good which would be secured if the same number of people contributed a pint each to a water cart, the contents of which are to be distributed equally. But one such individual contribution is not enough to make a difference. Yet, surely individual failure to contribute your pint would count as not doing your share. Second, not all cases of not doing one’s share count as acting contrary to the virtue of doing one’s share. What counts as an excellence in the field of doing one’s share is highly complex. Having and manifesting the virtue is compatible with appropriately not doing one’s share in specified circumstances just as excellence in a disposition to honesty is compatible with appropriately lying on certain occasions. For example, there may be cases of failing to help or contribute when arrogating special privileges to yourself is fair and justified. This is true in Nefsky’s Small case, where ‘Small’ ‘is an adult trapped in a two-year-old’s body’³³ and will make no difference to pushing a car up a hill. Even though both in ‘Drops of Water’³⁴ and ‘Small’ contributions make no perceptible difference, in ‘Drops of Water” the failure to contribute falls under a vice concept, whereas Small’s failure to contribute does not. Here is another example. My failure to vote when my vote makes no difference is something which in New Zealand I have a right to do, and I may be exercising that right for good reason. I like none of the options, and I do not prefer any of the evils on offer to the other evils. No vice term, such as laziness, apathy, and so forth need be applicable. Third, the general vice of “not doing one’s bit” can in different contexts be given different descriptions; for example, being callous, negligent, mean, and parasitical. My failure to make a contribution for a collective good which, when taken on its own makes no difference, can be parasitical, unfair, self-indulgent, callous, depending on the circumstances. Cullity analogizes the unfairness of my failure to make a contribution to the parasitism of the free-rider. My collecting just a few bluebells for my garden from a large bluebell wood near Reading is mean when I can easily afford to buy the same number at a nursery; my picking a small bunch of daffodils (in different spots) in Hagley Park Christchurch because I find them attractive and want to have some for myself, is self-indulgent and selfish. My
³¹ Nefksy, 246. ³² Described in Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 76, and adapted by Nefsky, 247. ³³ 257. ³⁴ See Reasons and Persons, 76.
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contributing in an imperceptible way to the torture of an individual in the Parfit’s fictional case,³⁵ where each individual makes no perceptible difference to the eventual “torture” of the victim, is describable as callous, where the case is filled out in ways that make the application of that term appropriate.³⁶ Where the case is under-described, as so often happens, we cannot be sure of the correct application of a relevant thick concept: the point, however, is that it is not sufficient to properly withhold a vice term to a person’s act just because that act “makes no difference.” To describe the reasons in “making no difference” cases without use of thick concepts renders invisible important evaluative properties of one’s acts and omissions. However, the existence of a general virtue of doing one’s share which can be applicable even in ‘Making No Difference’ cases is apparently denied by Nefsky. She claims that a Thick Concept Solution, such as Cullity’s, that relies on (putatively) relevant features other than the difference you make does not work. For it still remains true that if your act won’t make a difference it cannot constitute a share in a context of participation in the production of a collective good. This is precisely because the putative share to the collective good makes no difference. We are driven back to specifying the ultimate reason for acting in terms of a causal framework, and within this framework Nefsky’s point seems undeniable: my contribution taken on its own causes no increase in the good sought. My “share” is no share so how can I have a reason to contribute? The Thick Concept Solution by contrast relies on the idea that the causal logos of making no difference as such, is the wrong logos for specifying reasons in ethics. The logos of the ethical is the logos of thick concepts. In a solution such as Cullity’s we rely on subsuming the action that makes no difference under a thick concept (fairness) where fairness has a resultance base that is shapeless. Mastery of that concept involves knowledge of the evaluative point of justice; applying that concept in a competent way involves understanding when and when not failure to contribute is or is not parasitical; when and when not resentment at putative unfairness exhibits a resentment-filled dog in the manger attitude;³⁷ when and when not one’s contribution would exhibit a problematic self-sacrificing attitude, and so on. In the generalized solution the thick concept of doing one’s share provides evaluative shape to the shapeless natural features of the varied occasions of making no difference, and that shaping is governed by the point and function of the virtue in relation to one of the ethical foundations, our need for cooperation. Further evaluative shaping is provided by notions of excellence in relation to doing one’s share. For nuanced understandings of excellence in this area knowledge of the various types of related vice is necessary.
³⁵ Reasons and Persons, 80. ³⁶ Thanks to Garrett Cullity here. ³⁷ See Jonathon Glover, ‘It Makes No Difference Whether or Not I Do it’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 49 (1975), 182.
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What makes something fair and so forth cannot be captured within a “scientific” merely causal logos where it is my making a perceptible contribution that amounts to a share, and under that description of the reason it turns out to be no reason at all. But here lies the mistake. The reasons salient and basic in the logos of ethical reality are not like this: they are the virtue/vice reasons. Furthermore, with competence with the thick concepts describing such reasons in hand, these features enable us to distinguish non-vicious from vicious cases of failing to act in Making No Difference cases. In many cases, of course, whether or not failures to act in “no difference” cases are non-virtuous is controversial. Many are relatively demanding actions or omissions which require large-scale compliance to achieve the collective good. For example, should one cease to travel overseas even for such worthwhile projects as reading papers on paradoxes of practical rationality? To summarize: in the generalized Thick Concept Solution to the ‘Making No Difference Problem, the thick concept of doing one’s share provides evaluative shape to the shapeless natural features of the varied occasions of making no difference, and that shaping is governed by the point and function of the virtue in relation to one of the relevant ethical foundations, such as our need for cooperation. Further evaluative shaping is provided by notions of excellence in relation to doing one’s share. For nuanced understandings of excellence in this area, knowledge of the various types of related vice is necessary.
13 An Epistemology for Target Centred Virtue Ethics
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(i) Introduction: The Knowledge Foundation In Chapter 2 I identified an important ethical ‘foundation’ the knowledge/ignorance foundation. I claimed that this foundation speaks to a fundamental human need to acquire knowledge germane to solving problems within the various ethical foundations. An example is the complex knowledge related to policymaking in the area of improving societal welfare: health outcomes for Maori (in New Zealand), the welfare of ‘at risk’ children, and the use of ‘Big Data’ to these ends. This view I regard as a version of David Copp’s ‘pluralist teleology’ in relation to epistemology where ‘. . . the point of epistemic valuation is to help ameliorate a problem we face . . . in our need for information.’¹ As he points out, this need is relative to problem solution; for example, the need is not truth as such let alone truth maximization, but truth that is germane to the problem at hand. The delineation of epistemic virtues in the knowledge foundation will be sensitive to this need. For Copp this epistemic need requires epistemic standards, and in target centred virtue epistemology these standards are provided by the targets of the epistemic virtues. As a whole these targets satisfy what Copp calls the ‘generic solution constraint’²; that is, epistemic problems are taken to be of a ‘general kind faced by people in general’.³ Of course, in applying the standards we might find that the target of a virtue in a specific case is something unexpected and idiosyncratic and we should not generalize.⁴ A disposition not to generalize too hastily is after all an epistemic virtue. It is well at this point to remember that a virtue epistemology provides a framework within which to think about solving epistemic problems. It does not purport to provide a blueprint for solving them. Differentiated virtue provides layers of complexity (e.g., are there cultural issues
¹ David Copp, ‘Indirect Epistemic Teleology Explained and Defended’ in Abrol Fairweather and Owen Flanagen (eds.), Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 70–91, 74. ² Ibid. 75. ³ Ibid. ⁴ The nature of practical reasoning in which those standards are applied is a topic outside the scope of this book. I favour the view proposed in Dancy’s Practical Shape where he argues that practical reasoning is non-inferential, but is nonetheless in various ways structured.
Target Centred Virtue Ethics. Christine Swanton, Oxford University Press (2021). © Christine Swanton. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198861676.003.0014
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in the use of Big Data; to what extent and how do epistemic standards become more demanding in certain roles). But such fine-grained standards still just provide a framework; they do not on their own determine correctness of action. Treating knowledge/ignorance as an ethical foundation should shift our focus in epistemology. Traditionally, in the analytic tradition epistemology has been a topic concerned with definitions of knowledge, paradoxes, scepticism. It has been the domain of philosophical logicians and metaphysicians. However, never has it been clearer to me that epistemology should have another focus; it should also become a topic in applied ethics. More specifically, ethical attention should be given to the parlous state of affairs in relation to knowledge and ignorance. In the post-Trump era, virtues whose field or domain of concern is the gaining of knowledge and the avoidance of ignorance have been singularly in abeyance. In a recent copy of Scientific American this deplorable state of affairs (in relation to science in the USA) has been highlighted in several articles. In an editorial ‘Put Science Back in Congress’ the editors claim:
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The White House and Congress have lost their way when it comes to science. Notions unsupported by evidence are informing decisions about environmental policy and other areas of national interest, including public health, food safety, mental health and biomedical research.⁵
Political processes are subverting scientific processes and those processes are themselves being subverted by budget cuts; for example, cuts resulting in the elimination of the ‘widely respected’⁶ Office of Technology Assessment. Similarly, the National Commission on Forensic Science designed to weed out forensic techniques having no scientific basis such as bite mark evidence is in danger of disappearing.⁷ In an article entitled ‘The Roots of Science Denial’ Katharine Hayhoe shows how ‘just giving people the facts’ does not work: she claims that ‘How humans interact with information is an emerging area of research that’s desperately important.’⁸ What is clear is that proper receptivity to facts is necessary for facts to be taken on board, a receptivity that heavily involves being rightly oriented emotionally and in relation to background belief. In other words, we need the epistemic virtues, and to understand how these operate and fail to operate we also need to know what inhibits the development and maintenance of these virtues. That is we should also pay attention to agnotology and what is now less politely but now
⁵ Scientific American (October 2017), 8. ⁶ Ibid. ⁷ Sunita San and co-authors, ‘Forensic Science Must be Scientific’ Scientific American (October 2017), 9. ⁸ Scientific American (October 2017), 56–8, 57.
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respectably called “bullshit” of various types which pervades our society.⁹ Agnotology is a neologism coined by Robert Proctor,¹⁰ a historian of science, broadly denoting the study of ignorance; notably, that culturally and wilfully produced. Just as there are virtues and vices related to the pursuit of knowledge—for example, virtues and vices of open-mindedness and intellectual perseverance—so there are virtues and vices concerned with the field of ignorance. For example, there are vices related to the wilful dissemination of ignorance for political and commercial ends, manifested by those who routinely call respectable media outlets ‘fake media’ for personal ends; fail to safeguard institutions designed to promote accuracy (such as the presence of stenographers); and those who sow doubt and confusion on issues such as global warming. The ethical dimensions of epistemology require an understanding of how the epistemic virtues and epistemology in general relate to correct ethical theory. Where that theory is deemed to be a version of virtue ethics we need an epistemology for that version. Providing that epistemology is the task of this chapter. To this end I first discuss what I take to be the orthodox view associated with neoAristotelian virtue ethics, a view I call Qualified Agent Virtue Ethical Epistemology, and its problems. I then discuss epistemic virtue (section (iii)), before outlining my favoured view, target centred virtue ethical epistemology (sections (iv) and (v)).
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(ii) Qualified Agent Virtue Ethical Epistemology Just as there are rival accounts of right action within virtue ethics there are rival epistemologies, but unlike virtue ethical accounts of right action which has by now generated quite some literature, the issue of the correct epistemology for virtue ethics is relatively unexplored. It may be thought that the question of the appropriate epistemology for virtue ethics has not been an issue because an answer to it is obvious. This “obvious” answer presupposes the orthodox neo-Aristotelian view of right action and comprises two steps. First, the orthodox view proposes what I have elsewhere called the qualified agent account of right action—namely, an action is right if and only if it would be chosen or performed by a virtuous agent choosing or acting in character.¹¹ Second, since on the qualified agent account of right action the rule ⁹ See Evan Davis, Post Truth: Why We Have Reached Peak Bullshit and What We Can Do About It (London: Little Brown, 2017); Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). ¹⁰ See Robert N. Proctor and Londa L. Shiebinger (eds.), Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Given current political events and the confusion wilfully promoted by powerful forces defending climate change scepticism, for example, Proctor argues that agnotology should be studied as seriously as epistemology. ¹¹ On Virtue Ethics, 28–9.
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and the measure of what is right, good, and advantageous is a virtuous agent, then if you are virtuous you are the arbiter of right action. If you are not, then you should ask a virtuous agent. Call this basic view qualified agent virtue ethical epistemology. However, this view has been subject to considerable criticism and its unpalatability for many has been a potent reason for rejecting virtue ethics altogether. Objections which have been leveled against qualified agent virtue ethical epistemology come in three types which I label thus: (a) The lack of transparency objection. (b) The monological objection. (c) The virtuous agent is not an expert objection. Consider now each objection in turn. Since reasons for action accessible to a virtuous agent are not fully captured in rules but rely on the special knowledge of those possessing practical wisdom, itself dependent on good character, those reasons are not necessarily accessible to people who do not possess good character. This objection has been particularly salient in legal ethical critique of virtue jurisprudence since transparency is regarded as a prime virtue in law.¹² According to the second objection virtue ethics is “monological.” This notion is understood thus by McMahon:
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Roughly a monological theory is one that allows for the possibility that a single individual, reasoning carefully, could arrive at a correct understanding of the requirements of morality.¹³ I do not take ‘reasoning carefully’ to mean reasoning entirely privately since any careful reasoner would recognize her ignorance of relevant facts and would consult. A theory is thus monological if careful reasoning by a single individual even in this consultative sense could be sufficient for correctness. The qualified agent view is monological in this sense since practical wisdom, which admittedly may demand consultation, resides ultimately in the virtue of the individual virtuous agent rather than arising from well-constructed dialogue.¹⁴ But according to this objection not only are virtuous agents necessarily epistemically limited, ethical decision-making in social contexts is and ought to be standardly collective. The third, related, objection relies on the idea that virtuous agents cannot possess expertise in all areas. Virtuous agents possess practical wisdom, but
¹² See Tim Dare, ‘Virtue Ethics and Legal Ethics’ Victoria University Law Review 28 (1998), 141–55. ¹³ Christopher McMahon, ‘Discourse and Morality’ Ethics 110 (2000), 514–36, 514. ¹⁴ For this kind of criticism of monological theories in this sense, see Janna Thomson, Discourse and Knowledge: A Defence of Collectivist Ethics (London: Routledge, 1998).
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expertise is not the same as practical wisdom and is required for knowledge in many areas of life. The qualified agent view of rightness is false and the associated qualified agent epistemology is therefore flawed. Even if virtuous agents were to consult there is no guarantee that they would be in a position to correctly assess all evidence germane to the evaluation of action. Possibly the most serious objection to qualified agent virtue ethical epistemology on my view has not been aired as far as I know. Call it: (d)
The shifting of epistemic responsibility objection.
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According to this objection, because of the agent centredness of traditional contemporary virtue ethics where a virtuous agent has oracular status, and the related idea that the knowledge of such an agent is a form of perception where the virtuous agent sees situations in a way where putative reasons attractive to the non-virtuous are silenced¹⁵ by the virtuous, virtue ethics has not helped itself to the considerable resources of virtue epistemology. Indeed, the rich array of epistemic virtues and vices studied by virtue epistemologists are standardly not considered “moral” and are thus deemed to be outside the scope of virtue ethics.¹⁶ Rather instead of our epistemology being basically ‘Just ask a virtuous agent’ we all ourselves should be cultivating and exercising the epistemic virtues and becoming ourselves epistemically responsible and better knowers. This should be seen as an ethical requirement. The epistemic virtues are legion, including respect for facts, open-mindedness, openness to learning, absence of bias and prejudice, intellectual humility, intellectual courage, intellectual perseverance, love of truth, curiosity, and all the dialogic virtues.
(iii) Epistemic Virtue So what should replace qualified agent virtue ethical epistemology? The rest of this chapter proposes an epistemology for target centred virtue ethics. In target centred virtue ethical epistemology the epistemic virtues are central, for the basic idea is that one must aim to hit the targets of the epistemic virtues that are relevant in the context. To flesh out this view we need to specify the basic nature of virtue epistemology, what are epistemic virtues, and what it is to hit their targets. The first two issues are the topic of this section. Let us begin with the first question.
¹⁵ See Chapter 7 section (v). ¹⁶ I have criticized this view in my ‘The Relationship between Virtue Ethics and Virtue Epistemology’ in Heather Battaly (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology (New York: Routledge, 2019), 508–21.
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What is the basic nature of virtue epistemology? I am very sympathetic to Zagzebski’s view that ‘intellectual virtues are best viewed as forms of moral virtue’¹⁷ for I shall argue that virtue epistemology is a branch of virtue ethics. One qualification to this thesis should immediately be mentioned. Battaly and Slote note that virtue epistemology has differed from virtue ethics in admitting within its scope a ‘reliabilist’ version according to which ‘virtue’ just means a cognitive excellence, and thus includes excellences that have nothing to do with character.¹⁸ My thesis will thus be restricted to those types of virtue epistemology in which ‘virtue’ has its standard meaning of ‘virtue of character’. Such theories deal with a broad range of what are called epistemic or intellectual virtues such as (virtuous forms of) intellectual perseverance, open mindedness, intellectual courage, curiosity, intellectual humility; and their relation to enquiry and its ends. Both virtue ethics and virtue epistemology understood in this way share a virtue-centred approach to excellent and right activity in the practical domain (in the latter case the practical domain of enquiry), but as argued in Chapter 10, virtue ethics should be seen as a broad field not restricted to what has traditionally been described as the rather narrow field of the “moral.” Virtue epistemology by contrast is concerned with excellent activity in relation to one important aspect of the practical; namely, enquiry designed to result in knowledge and understanding. A number of issues, such as the relation between virtue ethics and the moral, the relation between intellectual and moral virtues, and the relation between virtue epistemology and ‘traditional’ epistemology bear on the question of the relation between virtue ethics and virtue epistemology and complicate it. First, it is necessary to clarify what I am not arguing for concerning the relation between virtue and epistemology. I am not arguing that virtue is necessary for knowledge. For Zagzebski, knowledge is defined in terms of intellectual virtue, and intellectual virtues are deemed to be forms of moral virtue.¹⁹ Specifically for her knowledge is true belief arising from acts of intellectual virtue (intellectually virtuous motives and actions). These are motives and actions ‘that an intellectually virtuous person would characteristically possess or perform in the situation in question.’²⁰ Zagzebski’s notion of knowledge has been much criticized; for example, Baehr²¹ argues that intellectual virtue is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge. My arguments that virtue epistemology should be seen as a branch of virtue ethics do not rely on a virtuecentred definition of knowledge.
¹⁷ Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 139. ¹⁸ In Heather Battaly and Michael Slote, ‘Virtue Epistemology and Virtue Ethics’ in Lorraine BesserJones and Michael Slote (eds.), The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2015), 253–69. ¹⁹ Virtues of the Mind, 77. ²⁰ The Inquiring Mind, 35; Virtues of the Mind, 248–53. ²¹ Ibid. 248–53.
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On my view by contrast virtue (in particular the performance of acts of intellectual virtue) is no more necessary for knowledge than virtue is necessary for the existence of pleasure. Sadistic pleasure is still pleasure; viciously gained knowledge can still be knowledge. What is true for a virtue ethical conception of knowledge is that intellectual virtue is necessary for knowledge to be (as Aristotle would put it) ‘good without qualification’ just as certain virtues are necessary for pleasure to be good without qualification. Both knowledge and pleasure are what Aristotle would call external goods; that is (by contrast with ignorance and pain) they are characteristically worthy of pursuit, but they do not (for a virtue-centred theorist) have even prima facie value unless suitably infused with virtue, or free of certain vices. How much value would at least partly depend on just how virtuous is the knowledge; the point is that on this view the value of knowledge is not entirely independent of its aretaic value. Second, I am not arguing for what Baehr calls strong autonomous virtue epistemology according to which ‘an immediate theoretical focus on intellectual virtues and their role in cognitive life should replace or supplant traditional epistemology.’²² On my view virtue epistemology and traditional epistemology do not perform exactly the same theoretical functions: the latter is largely concerned with the definition of knowledge, scepticism, and the limits and sources of knowledge for example, while the former is a virtue-centred normative theory concerned with what it is to do well in an important aspect of a good life; namely, that concerned with enquiry. It is assumed that excellence in enquiry is an aspect of the good life that is sufficiently important and distinctive as to warrant being conceived as a distinctive form of virtue theory; namely, virtue epistemology. Similarly it is possible that a virtue-centred view of excellence in relation to our aesthetic life deserves the name virtue aesthetics. In both cases there are clusters of virtues of distinctive interest: in the former case the so-called intellectual virtues; in the latter virtues associated with creativity and connoisseurship. Such theories I shall argue should be seen as branches of virtue ethics. Turn now to the relation between virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. As argued in Chapter 10 the notion of the moral complicates the discussion. There is some plausibility in Brady’s view that the ‘moral’ and ‘intellectual’ virtues have different domains of operation. He claims that ‘moral virtues enable us to act well when faced with the question what should I do? while intellectual virtues facilitate appropriate epistemic states when we are faced with the question what should I believe?’²³ It would be a mistake, however, to attribute admirability to the exercise of moral but not intellectual virtue as Brady appears to believe. Brady claims that in exhibiting praiseworthy moral courage in standing up to a bully a
²² Ibid. 192. ²³ Michael S. Brady, “Moral and Intellectual Virtues” in Nancy E. Snow (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 783–99, 794.
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person is ‘not praised for his knowledge of his evaluative situation and of the importance of standing up for himself.’²⁴ But this is not necessarily true. In acquiring his knowledge he may have exhibited admirable intellectual courage, openness to learning, and other admirable intellectual traits. On this point I am with Zagzebski. In basic terms the notion of the moral affects the debate as follows. Virtue ethics is assumed to be concerned with the moral. Virtues are “moral” virtues whose ends are moral ends of various sorts (characteristically ends associated with justice and benevolence). Baehr’s view is representative:
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Typically, when we think or speak of “character” or “virtues” we have something distinctively moral in mind. We think of a virtuous person as one motivated by ends like social justice or the alleviation of human suffering. Such a person is fair, respectful, benevolent, compassionate, and generous.²⁵
By contrast, virtue epistemology is characteristically understood as concerned with the “non-moral” ends of truth, knowledge, and understanding. Epistemic virtues have these non-moral ends as their goals, and persons with these virtues are motivated by these ends. On this view of virtue ethics and virtue epistemology the latter is not considered a branch of virtue ethics. In earlier chapters I argued not only against narrow conceptions of the “moral” but also against ‘isolationist’ views of morality. I claimed that all genuine virtue is ‘virtue proper’. If someone with a putative epistemic virtue such as diligence characteristically exercises that diligence in a vicious way in attaining her epistemic ends that diligence is not a virtue proper and is therefore not an epistemic excellence (virtue). However, due to a certain problematic taxonomic conception of intellectual virtue, there is resistance to the suggestion that epistemic virtue is virtue proper. Drawing from readings of Aristotle virtue epistemology has tended to distinguish intellectual virtue, which is concerned with ‘truth production’ and avoiding falsehood²⁶ from “moral” virtue. This view has fed into a conception of virtue epistemology as something distinct from virtue ethics which is concerned with moral virtue, virtue that is constituted by excellence in the desiderative part of the soul, by contrast with virtue epistemology concerned with intellectual virtue constituted by excellence in the rational part of the soul. This isolationist view is not I believe true to Aristotle. Aristotle opens Book VI on the intellectual virtues by claiming that the aim of our choices is to hit the mean or targets. The targets are set not by the intellectual virtues but by the ethical virtues of character described in Books II–V. These determine, for example, what
²⁴ Ibid. 795. ²⁵ The Inquiring Mind, 1–2. ²⁶ Battaly and Slote, ‘Virtue Epistemology and Virtue Ethics’.
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counts as excess or deficiency in the various practical domains.²⁷ The aim of the so-called intellectual virtues is not truth production as such but truth production that enables us to hit the mean set by the virtues of character, what I have called virtues proper such as courage, temperance, and so forth. Truth production is not an end in itself (a good without qualification) since, for example, it might manifest various vices of excess (we spend too much time on trivial truths) or deficiency (e.g., in the realm of politics it has been claimed, we have entered a fact-free age). In short as claimed in the introductory section they would not serve ‘pluralist teleology’ in relation to epistemology. What Aristotle is claiming is that one cannot hit the mean (of virtues of character such as courage) without all kinds of factual knowledge, for which one needs phronesis and other intellectual virtues; for example, episteme (scientific knowledge). Furthermore, for Aristotle, since the ends of intellectual virtue are ethical or at least constrained by the ethical (that is by the ends of virtue proper) they are not stand-alone virtues independent of the desiderative part of the soul. They are part of virtues proper. Nowhere is this clearer than when Aristotle claims that ‘ . . . wickedness distorts the vision and causes serious error about the principles of conduct. Thus it is evident that one cannot be prudent without being good’²⁸ just as one cannot be good without prudence.²⁹ Thus, Aristotle concludes that in their highest form ethical and intellectual goodness are inseparable.³⁰ Supposed intellectual virtue used for truth production but which serves bad ends is not phronesis but mere “cleverness” (deinotes). On the Aristotelian picture then the virtues of the rational truth-finding part of the soul, notably phronesis, are not separable from virtue proper. In short, virtue epistemology is a branch of virtue ethics because in order to be an intellectual virtue a putative intellectual virtue must be a virtue proper, otherwise it is not an excellence of character. Wisdom of various kinds must be displayed in all relevant spheres of the practical. Not only is intellectual perseverance, for example, integrated with justice and beneficence, for example, but also for this integration to exist, virtues in different spheres of the practical such as pursuit of truth, relations with colleagues, role virtue as an academic or a doctor caring for patients, must be integrated with each other. In assessing whether an action is virtuous in one respect in one context (such as enquiry) then, not only must one be alive to other virtues that are in play in that context but one must also be alive to considerations that obtain in other relevant spheres of the practical, such as the roles one occupies, partialistic relations, broad social good. We turn now to our second question: what is the nature of epistemic or intellectual virtue? In virtue epistemology the intellectual virtues are not confined to, for example, episteme and phronesis but embrace such virtues as intellectual ²⁷ Nicomachean Ethics, 1138b18–34. ³⁰ Ibid. note 5, 224.
²⁸ Ibid. 1144a25–b10.
²⁹ Ibid. 1144b10–33.
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perseverance, intellectual humility, and intellectual courage. These are virtues related to the knowledge foundation serving our need for information in resolving problems. As such, they like episteme and phronesis enable us to attain the mean— the targets—of virtues of character. The intellectual or epistemic virtues may be divided into two broad types. First, there are general intellectual virtues such as phronesis and episteme needed for the pursuit of truth in general. These virtues are an integral part of epistemic virtue in general though relevant episteme at the level of expertise is not generally thought necessary for basic virtue. However, where ignorance of basic scientific knowledge impacts badly in a characteristic way on one’s beliefs and actions, that is a failing in virtue. Higher levels of scientific knowledge are necessary for forms of differentiated virtue requiring forms of expertise. Second, there are the virtues with specific fields traditionally studied in virtue epistemology. These are traits needed for excellence in enquiry given characteristic human frailties and weaknesses in the intellectual domain such as arrogance and overconfidence, tendencies to competitiveness and envy, temptations to give up in the face of boredom and difficulty, lack of skill and good will in dialogue. Virtues which are correctives to these weaknesses and temptations include intellectual perseverance, intellectual humility, intellectual courage, epistemic justice, and other dialogic virtues. Let us now illustrate the nature of intellectual virtue (within the second category) with an example. Consider a disposition of intellectual perseverance. This is defined by Battaly as follows: ‘the trait of intellectual perseverance is a disposition to overcome obstacles, so as to continue to perform intellectual actions, in pursuit of one’s intellectual goals’.³¹ Intellectual perseverance is associated with an important aspect of living well; pursuing knowledge and understanding within characteristic intellectual goals such as pursuing research projects, learning about the world through reading books, talking to experts to gain knowledge of important facts, discussing ideas, and so on. But as Battaly argues intellectual perseverance is not always a virtue. As a virtue it is contrasted with correlative intellectual vices such as intellectual slackness where one is too ready to give up in the face of obstacles, and the vice of excess she calls recalcitrance. Recalcitrance is displayed when one is excessively obstinate in the face of obstacles. Here chances of success are minimal or the opportunity costs relative to epistemic goals are far too high, but one persists nonetheless. How should intellectual perseverance be conceived as a virtue within virtue epistemology? Consider first an isolationist view of virtue epistemology. On an isolationist view where the epistemic goals are seen in isolation from other ends of a life lived well, what counts as excess and deficiency is relative to maximizing conceptions of those goals or views such as Hurka’s³² where the epistemically ³¹ Heather Battaly, ‘Intellectual Perseverance’, Journal of Moral Philosophy 14 (2017), 669–97. ³² Virtue, Vice, and Value.
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virtuous agent is one who loves truth or knowledge and these are considered to always have prima facie positive value no matter how much vice is displayed in the pursuit of those goals. There is no belief in the aretaic dependence of value. Now consider the possibility that one’s epistemic goals are best served by unvirtuous activity in relation to other spheres of the practical. A is convinced that his views are superior to his academic “rivals” (what he takes to be his rivals) and let us assume A is right in this belief. So through various techniques A discredits or suppresses the views of his rivals in entirely unvirtuous ways. Further, A is assiduous in this: indeed he shows considerable intellectual perseverance in this activity. He has success: eventually A’s rivals are discredited, A’s views prevail, and truth is maximized. Let us assume further that there is no vice of intellectual recalcitrance. On my view the intellectual perseverance A has displayed is not a virtue at all since it is not an excellence of character tout court. The target of a genuine intellectual virtue is not intellectual goals such as knowledge or truth as such but intellectual goals that are integrated with virtue in other relevant domains of the practical (such as relations with colleagues). Thus to be a virtue at all an intellectual virtue such as intellectual perseverance must also be a virtue proper. The knowledge gained and disseminated through intellectual virtue is not simply knowledge, but knowledge that as Aristotle would put it, fine and noble. Inter alia it is knowledge gained and disseminated in the right way with the right instruments, aspects of the mean egregiously violated by our anti-hero.
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(iv) Target Centred Virtue Ethical Epistemology Turn now to our third question: what is it to hit the targets of epistemic virtue? Answering that question brings us to the nature of target centred virtue ethical epistemology. According to target centred virtue ethics hitting the targets of (relevant) virtues in action is what makes actions right. It follows from the target centred view of right action that to act rightly in one’s epistemic endeavours one must hit to a sufficient extent relevant targets of relevant epistemic virtues. As stated in Introduction: The Basic View, the epistemic task of determining targets in a specific case may seem daunting, but this is true only if one operates at too high a level of abstraction and simplicity. A target of an epistemic virtue will first be described in a broad way by reference to its general field; for example, moral courage as an epistemic virtue has to do with affirming unpopular truths in (characteristically) dialogic settings or in print. In a given setting however this target must be more closely specified. Such truths need to be affirmed in the right way (e.g., not overly aggressively), in the right circumstances (in the right debates, for example) and so forth. Furthermore, differentiation of virtue also applies. For example, one’s role as an academic is particularly demanding of intellectual moral
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courage where (for example) certain philosophers are unpopular, and their views not adequately explored. Furthermore, as claimed in Chapter 5, different aspects of the target of a virtue will be more or less salient dependent on the virtue and features of context. To hit the target of intellectual perseverance one needs to hit the mean of that virtue, in relation to extent, time, instruments, manner, motives, and so on. In relation to that virtue extent is generally particularly salient: one needs to avoid the twin vices of intellectual slackness and recalcitrance. In egregious cases such as Nazi modes of gaining knowledge or the television character House’s self-indulgent desire for (diagnostic) truth, such factors as motivation, instruments, and manner become much more salient in the assessment of whether one has hit relevant targets of relevant epistemic virtue.³³ Here as elsewhere there are different views about salience. A tricky area is motivation. Traditionally, getting things right epistemically is thought to be just a matter of getting the facts straight, and one’s epistemic motivation is not normally considered relevant. For Zagzebski by contrast right motivation is essential for epistemic virtue; all epistemic virtue requires a motivation of desire for truth.³⁴ But in the House case it is clear that this motivation is not sufficient for virtue. Notice too that to hit the target of an epistemic virtue it is not necessary to possess an excellent disposition of, for example, facing obstacles in one’s epistemic endeavours; it is not necessary to possess relevant virtue. A genuinely epistemically virtuous agent is, however, likely to be more reliable in hitting the relevant targets especially if she also has relevant expertise. It is certainly a good thing to train children into epistemic virtue. Not only are the targets of the epistemic virtues multi-dimensional but also the epistemic virtues are legion. To give some idea of their variety, let me suggest a taxonomy. 1. Virtues associated with the discovery of truth: virtues such as love of truth, intellectual curiosity, wonder, sensitivity to forces promoting ignorance, receptivity to truth, attentiveness. 2. Epistemic virtues with a clear ethical core: e.g., intellectual honesty, Murdoch’s attention, integrity, moral courage in the intellectual sphere, epistemic humility, intellectual conscientiousness and perseverance. I am not implying here that some epistemic virtues are not part of ethics at all. Indeed, as I illustrate below I believe in a moderate version of the unity thesis
³³ On the vice of epistemic self-indulgence, see Heather Battaly, ‘Epistemic Self Indulgence’ in Heather Battaly (ed.), Virtue and Vice: Moral and Epistemic (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 215, 35. ³⁴ Virtues of the Mind, Chapter 4.
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according to which all virtue is to some extent integrated with other virtues, so all have an ethical aspect. The disposition to deploy analytical skill in the service of nefarious ends from bad motives is not a virtue, and hence not an epistemic virtue.
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3. Virtues associated with conceptions of rationality, such as dispositions not to commit fallacies of reasoning, abilities to trace implications, rational attitudes to risk, dispositions to avoid jumping to conclusions on the basis of insufficient evidence including excessive attraction to conspiracy theories. The notion of rationality itself is highly contested and at several levels. Discussion of rationality in any depth is well beyond the scope of this book but I should note three important oversimplifications cited by Taleb in Skin in the Game. Here he discusses three flaws in orthodox conceptions: thinking in ‘statics and not dynamics’, thinking in ‘low, not high dimensions’, and thinking ‘in terms of actions, never interactions’,³⁵ a feature which generates considerable opacity when dealing with multiple layers of complexity.³⁶ Within this basic idea I favour Cullity’s virtue-centred account of rationality.³⁷ According to Cullity “rationality is a family of evaluative standards: what ties them together is their connection to dispositions it is important for us to exercise in our thinking (or not thinking) about our reasons.’ This is what he calls a ‘standard fixing’ account of rationality. Examples of such dispositions are provided by such ‘virtue/vice rationality’ terms as ‘ “weak willed,” “gullible,” “resolute,” “procrastinating,” “efficient,” “impulsive,” and so on’.³⁸ The standards associated with virtues of rationality are not only multidimensional (for the mean is multidimensional), but they involve a host of quite varied virtues and are contested. For example, there are disputes over rational attitude to risk, with associated problems and fallacies concerning probability,³⁹ what counts as gullible, what counts as virtuously resolute in relation to various roles such as generals in war time, contested applications of mathematical models to various aspects of the real world, and so on.⁴⁰ 4. Imaginative and creative epistemic virtue needed for resolving dilemmas and difficulties in problem solving, the prime practical epistemic task.
³⁵ Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life (Allen Lane, 2018), 9. ³⁶ Virtue ethics does not purport to be a theory that deals with this kind of complexity, but at the level of action at least the target centred view supposes a multidimensional view of target, and there is no reason why virtue cannot have dynamic developmental and narrative aspects. ³⁷ Garrett Cullity, ‘Decisions, Reasons, and Rationality’ Ethics 119 (2008), 57–95. ³⁸ Ibid. 85. ³⁹ See further Taleb. ⁴⁰ For example, ‘predictive risk modelling’ and its application to the ‘vulnerable’.
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Imaginative epistemic virtue is required for a creative approach to constraint integration where, instead of seeing dilemmas in hard-edged terms one understands the nature and point of the various constraints impinging on various actions open to one and conceives novel possible courses of action showing promise of integrating those constraints.⁴¹
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5. Dialogic virtue needed for the social dimension of epistemology, virtues such as respect for alternative opinion, facilitativeness, understanding others’ perspectives, openness to learning from others.⁴² A particularly salient and highly topical epistemic virtue important for effective dialogue is (relative) absence of prejudice and bias, whether explicit or implicit. Bias and prejudice manifest in epistemic vice in two major ways. First, there is epistemic injustice where prejudice affects one’s ability to learn from others since those others are not afforded the credibility they deserve, and second, there is what I call epistemic insularity where one associates only with those who share one’s views. This vice will receive more attention when we consider social determinants of epistemic vice in section (vi). Epistemic justice is often understood as a corrective to epistemic injustice. Fricke⁴³ identifies two types of epistemic injustice. Testimonial injustice occurs ‘when prejudice causes a hearer to give a deflated level of credibility to a speaker’s word’.⁴⁴ Hermeneutical injustice ‘is the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from social understanding.’⁴⁵ Marginalization due to invisibility and powerlessness results in unequal participation of groups in the epistemic enterprise required for problem solving. As well as prejudice against marginalized groups there is the pervasive problem of tribalism. Because of tribalism there is in many quarters scepticism about attaining epistemic justice and absence of insularity as corrective virtues. According to Hayhoe we are polarized on many issues on tribal lines. For her: Polarization implies tribalism. We’ve become so tribal that if you’re on the left it’s like a statement of faith to say climate change is real. And if you’re on the right it’s a tenet to say it isn’t real.
The so-called deficit model according to which education about the facts would enable people to accept scientific facts is considered flawed because the values
⁴¹ See further my Virtue Ethics A Pluralistic View and Chapter 11. ⁴² See further my Virtue Ethics A Pluralistic View. ⁴³ Miranda Fricke, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). ⁴⁴ Fricke, Epistemic Injustice, 1. ⁴⁵ Laura Beeby, ‘Epistemic Justice: Three Models of Virtue’ in Heather Battaly (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology (New York: Routledge, 2019), 232–43, 236.
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inherent in one’s tribal orientation get in the way. ‘People with contrasting political values will draw different conclusions from the same evidence even when they are scientifically literate.’⁴⁶ What research is showing is that open-mindedness, a classic epistemic virtue, is inherently difficult to acquire because one has to reach past one’s tribal orientation where that is not in line with best evidence. However, one needs to be very careful with prevailing generalizations about tribalism. In some countries climate change is much more generally accepted, both on the right and the left. It seems to be an article of faith that voting against open borders and Brexit is/was a right-wing stance, and analogous to the vote for Trump. Similarly, a vote for reduction in immigration in New Zealand was internationally regarded as similarly right wing, and “anti-immigrant.” But the issues in both cases are quite different and not analogous to the Trump vote. In New Zealand immigration reduction, given very high recent levels, was at one point at least a policy of the left (before the general election of 2017)⁴⁷ since the housing crisis especially in Auckland where immigrants stay is directly linked to poverty and something had to be done about demand. The right by contrast saw continued very high rates of immigration as a way of enhancing GDP. For many the Brexit vote was based on an issue of sovereignty (including control of borders and resentment of interference from Brussels, a very long-standing complaint). One should not think of the five categories of epistemic virtue described above as disjoint: rather each virtue in each category is integrated with virtues in all other categories if it is to be a genuine virtue. For example, a senior teacher may need to exhibit moral courage when she tries to get buy-in for a policy on bullying in the face of hostility. Hence, the courage has a dialogic aspect. Furthermore, since the courage exhibited has to be in the service of a good end if it is to be virtuous courage, the policy on bullying must be formulated with due rational and creative epistemic virtue, with openness to learning for improvement or even rejection of the policy if it fails. Most importantly, we cannot insulate the epistemic from moral virtue as the following example clearly shows. In the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, Paul McMullan, deputy features editor of News of the World from 1994 to 2001, was quoted as saying on BBC’s Newsnight programme: ‘I’ve always said that I just tried to write articles in a truthful way. And – you know – what better source [for] getting the truth than listening to someone’s messages.’⁴⁸
⁴⁶ Brooke Boral, ‘Message Control’, Scientific American (October 2017), 58–60, 59. ⁴⁷ Conceptual confusion where ‘desire for immigration reduction’ (because infrastructure can’t cope) became being ‘anti-immigrant’ which in turn became ‘being racist’ torpedoed the conversation. ⁴⁸ Reported in The Press, Christchurch, July 12, 2011, A13.
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To further illustrate the integration of the wide variety of epistemic virtues consider a quote from a character in David Lodge’s Therapy on the difficulty of writing out a character for a TV series: I don’t care what the problem is, whether it’s scripts or castings or locations or budget, there’s always a solution – if you think hard enough. The trouble is most people are too fucking idle to make the effort. Only they call it integrity.⁴⁹ At least three interrelated epistemic virtues are at issue in this short passage. It is claimed that any problem can be solved with creativity and intellectual perseverance. But a warped view of intellectual integrity can exacerbate intellectual laziness and stymie creativity. Though integrity is an epistemic virtue there is a closely related vice: standing on principle in a way which inhibits creative efforts to find a solution.
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(v) Target Centred Virtue Ethical Epistemology and Justification So far there has been something missing in the account of target centred virtue ethical epistemology. In response to the shifting of epistemic responsibility objection to qualified agent epistemology I have claimed that all agents have a responsibility to aim to hit the targets of epistemic virtue and indeed to cultivate epistemic virtue in order to facilitate the goal of hitting those targets. But what is the role of justification in that account? It is well known that the traditional concept of knowledge is justified true belief. Ever since the Gettier problems surfaced, however, critical and indeed sceptical attention has focused on that concept. Notably, the notion of justification itself has been thought highly contested, ambiguous, even confused. Zagzebski claims: Sometimes “justification” is used to name attributively whatever it is that, added to true belief, equals knowledge, but often it is connected with substantive notions such as basing beliefs on evidence or doing one’s epistemic duty . . . or being epistemically responsible . . . , or doing any number other things that are good or right from the believer’s perspective . . . ⁵⁰
So far I have focused on the ethical dimensions of justification claiming that from a target centred virtue ethical perspective aiming at the targets of relevant epistemic virtue is one’s epistemic duty. In reply to the ‘shifting of epistemic
⁴⁹ David Lodge, Therapy (London: Penguin, 1995), 171.
⁵⁰ Virtues of the Mind, 30.
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responsibility’ objection the target centred view asserts that we all have an epistemic responsibility to do this. Many would say, however, that this ethical take on epistemology is an incomplete account. Something needs to be said about ‘whatever it is that, added to true belief, equals knowledge’. More specifically we need to say more about ‘warrant’, basing our beliefs on evidence. The present section remedies this lack in the account so far. According to Target Centred Virtue Epistemology, epistemic standards are provided by the epistemic virtues—specifically their targets. A belief is justified on this view to the extent that it is arrived at and sustained in conformity to those standards.⁵¹ But we need to say a little more about the notion of justification itself. I shall not argue that justification is an ambiguous concept ‘split’ between doing one’s epistemic duty and the idea of warrant.⁵² Rather on my view justification is an essentially contested concept, having many important criteria or ‘epistemic desiderata’⁵³, none of which should be elevated to necessary or sufficient condition status. Theorists differ on the relative importance of these criteria when they conflict. As Zagzebski puts it, theorists differ on ‘valuation.’⁵⁴ One of these criteria, inherent in the idea of warrant, is that captured in the view known as evidentialism described by Baehr as the view ‘(roughly) that the justificatory status of a belief depends on the extent to which the belief is supported by good evidence’.⁵⁵ Evidentialism has been criticized as offering neither a necessary or sufficient account of justification but that need not worry us here since I take the thesis to be an important criterion only. I shall focus on one issue, the relation between so-called moral intuitions and justification in target centred virtue epistemology. What kind of warrant do intuitions provide in that epistemology? I argue that target centred virtue ethical epistemology is opposed to the view that moral intuitions as such provide warrant, let alone foundational warrant, for epistemic claims. I use the notion of intuition broadly to cover both non-inferential beliefs which are representational, and ‘seemings’ about reasons and so on which are presentational, presenting reasons, for example, as reasons.⁵⁶ To ‘present a consideration as a reason is to present it as calling for, or favouring, a response of a certain sort.’⁵⁷ Seemings ‘qua presentational states . . . are baseless, gradable, fundamentally non-voluntary, and compelling, and they tend to make assent seem appropriate’.⁵⁸ Furthermore, they are direct in that p’s being presented to one is not being presented to one in virtue of something else being the case.⁵⁹ Finally, they
⁵¹ See David Copp, 81. ⁵² Ibid. 31. ⁵³ William Alston, ‘Epistemic Desiderata’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53, 3 (1993), 527–51. Instead of taking the essentially contested concept route Alston thinks that people are working with different concepts of justification and that the concept of justification is thus in trouble. ⁵⁴ Virtues of the Mind, 31. ⁵⁵ The Inquiring Mind, 68. ⁵⁶ See Jonathan Dancy, ‘Intuition and Emotion’ Ethics 124 (2014), 787–812. ⁵⁷ ‘Intuition and Emotion’, 795. ⁵⁸ Ibid. 792. ⁵⁹ ‘Intuition and Emotion’, 793.
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are ‘persistent, since they have a habit of surviving one’s recognition that they are misleading’.⁶⁰ Many such presentations are emotions. My visceral disgust at a remark from Trump is a compelling presentation of a reason to think of him as an unsatisfactory President of the United States. Answering questions about the evidential status of intuitions has many layers. First there are debates about the nature of our species as ethical beings. De Waal favours the view that humans have evolved to have cooperative and nurturing tendencies, hence caring and empathy are part of our basic emotional nature.⁶¹ Coupled with the view that quite characteristically our moral responses are made on the basis of ‘quick, automated intuitions’⁶² which may or may not be rationalized afterwards, de Waal’s view is opposed to the ‘Veneer Theory’ which sees human nature in a fundamentally intellectualist and egocentric way in regard to ethical matters. One may think that de Waal’s view suggests that intuitions should be trusted. However, it is also part of our social nature to have a culture, and culture can be shaped by appalling beliefs and attitudes with appalling consequences for ethical behaviour. Even where culture is relatively benign individuals within that culture may have intuitions shaped by vice and ignorance. Further, much ethical judgment concerns highly complex matters which need to be deliberated about in social contexts on the basis of hard to acquire factual knowledge. Notwithstanding my sympathies for de Waal’s view of human nature and the evolution of morality, target centred virtue ethical epistemology rejects the thesis that intuitions about rightness and wrongness, reasons and relations of fittingness, provide as such, good evidence let alone foundational evidence for ethical belief. My knee-jerk compassionate response to the beggar outside the supermarket may be very misleading as a presentation of a reason to give to him. As the supermarket notices claim I may be better off to make a donation to a relevant charity. Initial plausibility may come, however, from the reliability of agents who have the intuitions. Compassion may be a ‘virtue in excess’ in me. By contrast the ethical intuitions of virtuous agents have initial plausibility (though not infallibility) since they are practically wise and as such rightly ordered emotionally. This is the important truth in qualified agent virtue ethical epistemology. The important criterion of warrant for justification obtains according to target centred virtue epistemology if and only if the targets of relevant epistemic virtues are hit to a sufficient degree. What counts as a relevant epistemic virtue depends on context. For example, some compelling ethical intuitions may not be the outcome of epistemic injustice, prejudice, insularity, and ignorance, and there may be no reason to suspect that they are. Targets of epistemic virtue are met without one having to exercise the relevant virtues, but openness to learning, for
⁶⁰ Ibid.
⁶¹ Primates and Philosophers.
⁶² Primates and Philosophers, 55.
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example, should always be a background disposition waiting in the wings for activation as it were. Other intuitions, however, need to be tested, and this may require perseverance and the exercise of a wide range of dialogic virtues. Hitting the targets of epistemic virtue in relation to reasons for an action does not, of course, guarantee the rightness of the action evaluated. There may be warrant, performance of epistemic duty, but not necessarily rightness.
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(vi) A Problem Sceptics about virtue epistemology will downplay the importance of personal virtue or vice as opposed to social factors in determining belief and transmission of belief. For example, moral epistemic research on corruption shows how ‘social norms, the patterns of behaviour that are accepted as normal’ impact on how people behave, but erosion of values can occur when exposure to violations become widespread. According to the contagion model of the spread of virtue and vice, ‘bribery is like a contagious disease’.⁶³ In a culture where bribery is normal ‘receiving a bribe request erodes individuals’ moral character prompting them to behave more dishonestly in subsequent ethical decisions.’⁶⁴ Virtue ethics as an ethical theory does not purport to cover the normative features of the entire social domain. What Merritt calls the ‘sustaining social contribution’⁶⁵ of one’s social milieu is needed not only to engender virtue but also to support and maintain it when acquired. Otherwise it will erode. In other words the contagion model of the spread of virtue and vice is compatible with a virtue ethical approach to epistemology despite pessimism about the acquisition and maintenance of epistemic virtue. But a rival social epistemic model may cause more problems for virtue epistemology. This is the ‘network epistemology framework’⁶⁶ according to which people exercising epistemic virtues (having dispositions to seek, gather and assess evidence, for example) may nonetheless acquire many beliefs that are not supported by evidence. This is because their virtues are exercised within a social network. ‘Each individual shares their evidence with network neighbors, which also influences their beliefs.’⁶⁷ Unlike the contagion model, people are seen as exercising epistemic virtues, but outcomes of such exercise fail to attain the targets of those virtues. ⁶³ Dan Ariely and Ximena Garcia-Rada, ‘Contagious Dishonesty’ Scientific American (September 2019), 57–60, 58. ⁶⁴ Ibid. ⁶⁵ Maria Merritt, ‘Virtue Ethics and Situationist Personality Psychology’ Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 3 (2000), 365–83. ⁶⁶ Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall, ‘Why we Trust Lies’ Scientific American (September 2019), 48–55, 51. ⁶⁷ ‘Why we Trust Lies’, 52.
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Important reasons for this failure have already been touched on. Throughout this book I have been emphasizing significant but neglected concepts in ethics such as bonds and narrative. These are significant for understanding the social dimensions of epistemology too. According to Evan Davis ‘. . . in social media our disposition to believe things is sometimes a form of bonding. Not only do we tend to reside in echo chambers online, but we actively enjoy becoming closer to our friends by sharing views and agreeing with them.’⁶⁸ Hence, the epistemic vice of epistemic insularity is encouraged and it is hard to correct for this vice. Furthermore, there is ‘also the problem of narrative’: a shared narrative within the confines of which we ‘make sense of the world by imposing a structure on disparate events’.⁶⁹ These serve to solidify and confirm pre-existing beliefs, making it harder for us to exercise epistemic virtue. Difficult though it may be, however, epistemic virtue can be exercised in understanding the nature of the problems posed by the network epistemology framework, including choosing one’s networks, and assessing the merits of those networks. In other words, virtue in this area is a corrective to the vice of epistemic insularity. Influential work in epistemic justice emphasizes the role of agents’ critical self-awareness, sensitivity, and reflection, as well as motivation to strengthen and sustain epistemic virtue and act in the light of that virtue. Authors such as Fricke recognize this while fully appreciating the problems of erosion of virtue in a “post fact” age, marginalization, stereotyping, social media targeting, and the tribalism encouraged by networks.
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(vii) Conclusion I have claimed that epistemology should now be seen as an important topic in applied ethics. To this end I have deployed the riches of virtue epistemology in the service of an epistemology for target centred virtue ethics. Both ethical and evidentialist desiderata of justification are met in the theory. One has a standing epistemic duty to aim at the targets of epistemic virtues that are relevant in the context. Where it is reasonable to believe that no epistemic vice contaminates the compelling and persistent quality of certain of one’s intuitions ‘relevant’ epistemic virtue may be future oriented: one must always have a background disposition to be open to learning and correction. One has warrant for one’s beliefs and intuitions if and only if the targets of relevant epistemic virtues are hit to a sufficient degree. To apply this theory we need to know the targets of a wide range of epistemic virtues in a wide range of contexts. Roles, cultural location, the narrative structure
⁶⁸ Post Truth, 280.
⁶⁹ Ibid.
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of one’s life are all contexts which affect the targets of an epistemic virtue. For example, if one is a pathologist epistemic carefulness is paramount. Carelessness as a philosopher is unfortunate for one’s career or standing perhaps, but hardly a life and death matter. The work of investigating context is not done here but I can mention some key structural features. According to Roberts and Wood:
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Many in the modern period assume, almost without reflection, that a philosopher’s business is to regiment the concepts in a domain (say, moral concepts, or epistemic concepts . . . ) in a monistic, reductive, hierarchical, or derivational style.⁷⁰
The mean or targets of the virtues including the epistemic virtues do not have any of these theoretical features. Virtues are not hierarchically ordered, the dimensions of the mean are not hierarchically ordered. To claim this is not to be antitheory, indeed as claimed in Chapter 10 I believe that virtue ethics should provide considerably more theory than it has to date. Rather, theory concerning the targets of virtue should not have the sort of structure criticized by Roberts and Woods. Target centred virtue ethical epistemology avoids the four objections to qualified agent virtue epistemology specified in section (iii). The transparency objection is avoided since in contexts where transparency is called for, such as law and professional contexts generally, the targets of the epistemic virtues will demand transparency. For example, at least in those contexts, openness to learning will have a dialogic aspect, and an important target is that espoused views affecting decision-making and the effectiveness of communication are made transparent and disclosed. Those views cannot be hidden in strategies exemplifying moral cowardice, problematic notions of politeness, fear of conflict, fear of being wrong, and so on.⁷¹ The monological objection is avoided since not only do the epistemic virtues have a dialogical aspect but also truth is not sought through single agents reasoning carefully, even when that reasoning is consultative. Third, the objection that virtuous agents lack or may lack expertise is avoided since the target centred position explicitly allows that virtuous agents can be wrong even when acting in character. They are not the arbiter of the right. Finally, the shifting of epistemic responsibility objection is avoided since we all have an epistemic responsibility to aim at the targets of the epistemic virtues, even if we do not have virtuous dispositions. Finally, it is important to re-emphasize particularly in the area of epistemology that this is a work in virtue ethics and does not purport to embrace the whole of ⁷⁰ Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2007), 23. ⁷¹ For the importance of this feature see Viviane Robinson.
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the normative domain. A virtue is understood in its normal way as a virtue of character and is a property of individual human agents, and as such is not a property of institutions, social structures and processes, or the relations between social structures and institutions. However, as stated in the Introduction, the thick evaluative concepts apply to a broader range of objects than virtues of character. Post Rawls we have become familiar with the notion of justice applied to institutions, for example. Unfortunately, the distinction between the concepts of virtue and the thick evaluative concepts is not often well recognized. In recent work in epistemology the notion of virtue seems to have become stretched to the point where Beeby’s third way of epistemic justice’⁷² claims that ‘the virtue of epistemic justice’ ‘is located in those interactions and processes that will inevitably take place over a period of time.’⁷³ On my account there is a strong causal connection between institutions, social structures and processes on the one hand and the development and maintenance of individual virtue on the other, but virtue is not located in processes and interactions. It is consistent with Target Centred Virtue Ethics to have either an optimistic or pessimistic view about the acquisition of individual virtues and their maintenance and rehabilitation in the face of deleterious social structures. The difficulty of correcting for epistemic injustice, ignorance-promoting insularity, and other epistemic vices due to social forces perpetuating stereotypes and discriminating ideologies, makes it even more urgent to promote individual virtue.⁷⁴ All this suggests that virtue ethics as an ethical logos will be better informed about the limits of virtue, the robustness of virtue in the face of social factors, the importance of networks, the pervasiveness of ‘bullshit’, the bias caused by the relative invisibility of many groups, if it pays attention to scientific studies and controversies about the social transmission of knowledge.
⁷² ‘Epistemic Justice’, 241. ⁷³ ‘Epistemic Justice’, 241. The same problem occurs in discussions of extended cognition. In his ‘Virtue Epistemology and Extended Cognition’ in Heather Battaly (ed.), Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology (New York: Routledge, 2019), 420–32, J. Adam Carter argues that extended cognition is part of the cognitive process—a position that anyone should agree with—but he infers from this that we should admit the possibility of ‘extended intellectual virtues’ (430). Again, a process is not a character trait. ⁷⁴ This view is consistent with the personalist virtue epistemologist’s scepticism about the putative voluntary nature of virtue acquisition. Personalists believe that we may have little or even no control over our possession of good character traits, but that such traits including intellectual ones should nonetheless be classed as virtues. As a society, however, we have some control over the environment which either suits or does not suit the acquisition and maintenance of virtue (see Heather Battaly, ‘A Third Kind of Intellectual Virtue: Personalism’ in Handbook of Virtue Epistemology, 115–26).
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Index Note: ‘n.’ after a page number indicates the footnote number.
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For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Adams, Robert 255 affability 57–8, 66–7 agent see virtuous agent agnotology 298–9 Alfano, Mark 83–4, 206 Allport, Gordon 80 Alston, William P. 249 altruism 100, 107, 112, 209–10 pathological altruism 71–2, 78–9, 112, 127, 196–7, 206, 209–10 self-sacrificing altruism 78–9, 83–4, 108 ambition 64–5, 145, 259 Annas, Julia 70, 132, 199–200, 288 Anscombe, Gertrude E. M. 243, 245, 284 ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ 3, 243 the moral 55 moral obligation 243–5 the moral in the special sense 243–5 ought, ‘mesmeric force’ of 76, 243–4 ‘radical virtue ethics’ 242 right action 241–5, 251–2, 255–6 thick concepts 3 Applbaum, Arthur Isak 162–3 applied ethics 4, 10–11, 85, 262 differentiated virtue 11, 241 environmental ethics 85, 241 epistemology and 298, 316 ethics/social sciences relationships 77 role ethics 241 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 10–11, 241 virtue ethics and 10–11, 241–2, 262 Aquinas 172, 229 Aristotle 32, 57–8, 115–16, 274–5 affability/lack of affability foundation 67 epistemic virtues 304–5, 307 ethical truth 142 eudaimonia 130 hitting the mean 137, 139, 142, 304–5 justice 140–1 list of virtues 70 logos 29–30 mean 72, 137
morality 252–3 Nicomachean Ethics 137–9, 145–6, 279 phronesis 144–6, 305 phronimos 142, 145–6, 185, 228 ‘the possession of one virtue implies the possession of all the virtues’ 228, 279 practical truth as aim of virtue 141, 246–7, 252 practical wisdom 60, 137, 143, 168–9, 185, 197, 230–1, 279 right action/rightness 139, 141–2, 144, 252 supererogation, paradox of 286–7 Target Centred Virtue Ethics and 141–2, 144 Unity of the Virtues thesis 128 virtue as character trait 137, 215–16, 252–3, 278–9 virtue ethics 2 virtue as mature state 211, 215–17 virtue/vice notions 115–16 virtuous agents 146–7, 279 art/artwork 19, 222 logos of 29–30, 85–6, 95 Augustine 172 Austin, John A. 115 Badhwar, Neera 125, 128 Baehr, Jason 302–4, 313 Baron, Marcia 286 bases of ethical response 52–3, 144–5, 221–2, 254 bonds 144–5, 221–4, 226 bonds, expressive reasons associated with 232, 234–6 ethical foundations and 222–3, 238 the good for an individual 144–5, 221–4, 226–7 the good for an individual, prudential reason associated with 232, 237 hitting the target of a virtue 145, 238 objective goodness and 223–4, 231, 238 pluralistic virtue ethics 144–5, 221–2, 224–7 status 144–5, 221–5
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bases of ethical response (cont.) status, exclusionary reasons associated with 232–4, 238 value 144–5, 221–4, 226, 232 see also pluralistic virtue ethics basic virtue 155, 160, 162 basic and differentiated virtues as mutually constraining 161–2, 164–5, 190–1 basic virtue/mature virtue distinction 213 basic virtue/narratively differentiated virtue relation 168–9 definition 160, 213 relation between reasons of basic virtue and reasons of role-differentiated virtue 190–5 Batson, Daniel C. 26 Battaly, Heather 302, 306 Baxley, Anne Margaret 194 being of ethics 25–6, 75–7 benevolence 7, 46, 65–6, 152, 173, 208–9, 283 benevolence/malice 57 care/benevolence 57–8, 140–1 developmental virtue ethics 208–9, 219–20 differentiated virtue 162 Hume on 25–6, 59 moral sense and 25–6, 59 as prime concept of ethics 85–6 Bloom, Paul 26, 58, 208–9 Blum, Lawrence 226–7 Bowlby, John 226 Brady, Michael S. 303–4 Brewer, Talbot 223, 242–3 Broadie, Sarah 141–4 Brüllmann, Philipp 8 bundle theory 32–3, 79 burdened virtue 155, 173–6 ‘burdened virtues’ 173–4 compassion of the heroic aid worker 175 courage of the freedom fighter 174–5 creativity of the artist 175–6 see also differentiated virtue Burton, Robert A. 196–7 business ethics 10, 160, 241 see also role ethics Cafaro, Philip 135–6 Carlo, Gustavo 209–10 Chang, Ruth 289–90 Chappell, Timothy 138n.43, 166–7, 207–8, 243 character trait 84–5, 160–1, 206, 318n.74 bad character 155–6, 221 ‘Mixed Trait’ view 207 preconditions of 212 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 133–5, 317–18 virtue, minimalist definition 206–8
virtue as character trait 133, 137, 212, 215–16, 278–9, 302, 317–18 virtue ethics as character centred 6 virtue as excellence of character 137, 221 virtues in children 211–12 see also personality trait Clark, Andy 118, 146–7 Cocking, Dean 183n.5, 185–6, 195 codifiable virtue ethics 263–4, 281 codifiability and v-rules 264–6 default reasons and particularism 271–7 McDowell on 264 qualified agent account of right action 262–3, 266 uncodifiability objection 241–2, 262–5, 272 virtue ethics: codifiable in compatible way with particularism 264, 271–2 v-rules and decisive moral principles 277–80 v-rules and default reasons 266–71, 281 wrong logos and codifiability 282–3 see also particularism; v-reasons; v-rules cognitivism 9, 18, 40 compassion 45–6, 71–2, 215, 314 compassion of the heroic aid worker 175 concealment of ethics see covering up of ethics Confucianism 3–4, 269 Connolly, Kevin 200 consequentialism 4, 12, 235, 248–9, 254–5, 283 non-consequentialism 286 supererogation, paradox of 285–6 welfarist consequentialist tradition 284–6 Constraint on Virtue 114, 127, 201–2, 227 Developmental Constraint on Virtue 201–6 constructivism 142–3 contemporary virtue ethics 3–4 Anscombe and 242–5 critique of 75–6, 241–2, 262 neo-Aristotelianism 2, 4 right action 241–2, 244, 260 selling-out charge 242–5, 253, 260, 262 selling-out charge, rebuttal of 242, 260–1 see also virtue ethics Copp, David 8, 297–8 covering up of ethics 11, 47, 75–6, 80 four ways of 76–8 Heidegger on 43, 75–7, 282 wrong logos, intentional access to ethics through 76–7, 282 creativity 7, 145, 219–20 creativity of the artist 175–6 creativity/lack of creativity foundation 57, 65–6, 68 Nietzsche on 2, 57, 60–1, 68, 204
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Crisp, Roger 266, 277–80 supererogation, paradox of 286–7 Unity of the Virtues doctrine 277–8 Cullity, Garrett 193, 221n.2, 226–7, 309 context-undermining reasons 193 fairness 293, 295 fittingness and reasons 9–10, 51–2 thick concepts 64–5 culturally differentiated virtue 13, 155–8, 176–9 cultural relativism 176 insider/outsider’s perspective on thick concepts 177–8 see also differentiated virtue culture see culturally differentiated virtue; tradition and culture Curzer, Howard 278–9 CV (Centrality of Virtuousness) 5–6, logos of ethics 69–73 NVT and 69–70 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 136 see also TCC/CV Dancy, Jonathan 42, 49, 267, 279–80, 285–6 default reason 268–70 enticing reasons 274 Ethics Without Principles 272 Generalism 272 moral principles 272–3 Moral Reasons 268, 285 particularism 36, 260, 262–3, 268, 272–3 supererogation 285 thick concepts 61, 63–4, 273 Dare, Tim 157–9, 182–3, 186, 189–90 Darwall, Stephen 225, 232–3, 250–1 Das, Ramon 140–1 Davis, Evan 316 De Gaynesford, Maximilian 39n.93, 40 deontology 4, 227 moral rightness, deontic core concept 251–2, 255–6 virtue ethical accounts of rightness and the deontic 253–8 see also moral obligation descriptivism 9, 97 development 200 defects and human flourishing 201–3 developmental psychology 127, 199–200, 205–6, 208–9, 211–12 human development 127, 201–2, 211, 226–7 developmentalism 199–200, 227 developmental virtue ethics 10, 199–200 children, virtue in 199, 205–8, 210–16 creative virtues 219–20 Developmental Constraint on Virtue 201–6
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developmentalism, natural goodness, and flourishing 200–6 human development 201–2, 211 life-narratives 204–5 mature virtue 207–8, 213, 216–20 the moral and 219–20 Nietzsche’s ethics of becoming 203–4 old age, virtue in 199, 205–6, 208, 217–18 progress 200–1 prosocial behaviour and roots of virtue 205–6, 208–10 stage of life, differentiated virtue according to 155, 179, 199, 208, 213, 215–19 virtue and development 206–8 virtue as mature state 211–13, 215–17 virtue of self-improvement 218–19 youth, virtues of 210–11 De Waal, Frans 238, 314 Dewey, John 80, 213–15 differentiated virtue 10, 160, 179, 297–8 applied ethics 11, 241 basic/differentiated virtue relation 161–2 basic and differentiated virtues as mutually constraining 161–2, 164–5, 190–1 definition 160–1 gender-differentiated virtues 155 global differentiated virtues 163, 167 minimalist definition of virtue and 208 ordinary morality and 10, 160, 181 specific differentiated virtues 163–4, 167 stage of life differentiation 155, 179, 199, 208, 213, 215–19 talents and personal strength 155 Target Centred Virtue epistemology 307–8, 316–17 target of virtues 162, 254–5, 270 see also burdened virtue; culturally differentiated virtue; developmental virtue ethics; ethical differentiation; historically differentiated virtue; narratively differentiated virtue; role differentiated virtue; role ethics D-nearness and S-nearness (dwelling near and spatial nearness) 89–91 Dreyfus, Hubert L. 30–1 Dunne, Joseph 32 Durkheim, Emile 33–4, 102 dwelling D-nearness (dwelling near) 89–91 dwelling orientation 85–6, 91–3, 95 dwelling place 53–4, 89–92, 94–5 dwelling virtues 92–4 dwelling well 92–4
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dwelling (cont.) environmental ethics and logos of dwelling 85–6, 91, 93–4 Heidegger on 37, 53–4, 77–8, 85–95 logos of dwelling: fundamental integrating logos 85–95 regionality and 93–4 ‘seeing as holy’ 87, 89, 92n.68, 93–4 world as a dwelling place 89–90 emotional orientation 26, 35, 45–6, 58, 212, 217 depth/shallowness 44–6 Heidegger on 25, 44–6 Hume on 25–6 mastery of ethical concepts and 59–61 Enoch, David 158 environmental ethics 85–6 applied ethics 85, 241 eudaimonistic virtue ethics 128–9, 135–6 logos of dwelling 85–6, 91, 93–4 epistemic vices bias and prejudice 310, 318 epistemic injustice 310, 318 epistemic insularity 310, 316, 318 tribalism 310–11, 316 epistemic virtues 13, 84, 231, 297, 301–7 Aristotle on 304–5, 307 curiosity 215, 218, 301–2, 308 epistemic humility 178–9, 185, 192–3, 308 epistemic justice 306, 310, 316–18 as forms of moral virtues 302 intellectual courage 301–6 intellectual humility 301–2, 305–6 intellectual perseverance 125–6, 298–9, 301–2, 305–8 intellectual virtues 68, 302–6 nature of 305–7 need of 104, 116, 298–9, 318 as ‘non-moral’ virtues 70, 301, 304 open-mindedness 215, 298–9, 301, 311 practical wisdom and 252 Target Centred Virtue epistemology and 301, 308 targets of 297–8, 301, 307–8, 313, 316–17 truth production 304–5 as a virtue proper 307 see also epistemology; Target Centred Virtue epistemology; virtue epistemology epistemic virtues: taxonomy 308–11 dialogic virtue needed for the social dimension of epistemology 310–11 imaginative and creative epistemic virtue needed for resolving dilemmas 309–10
virtues associated with conceptions of rationality 309 virtues associated with the discovery of truth 308 virtues with a clear ethical core 308–9 see also epistemic virtues epistemology 297–9 applied ethics and 298, 316 epistemological objectivity 97 see also epistemic virtues; Target Centred Virtue epistemology; virtue epistemology Erikson, Erik 211–12, 219–20 Eriksson, Lina 158 ethical differentiation 10, 155–60, Complex Ordinary Morality View 156–8, 181 forms of 155, 179–80 Integrationist View 156, 158–60, 162–3, 168, 172, 174–5, 179–81 moral distance 156–7 ordinary morality and 158–9, 162 reasons for action 158 Reductionist View 157–8, 172, 174–6 social norms 157–9 Two-Level View 159, 163 see also differentiated virtue ethical facts 40 logos of ethics 34–5, 51–3, 61 McDowell on 47, 61 nature of 51–3, 61 worldhood of ethics 50, 62 ethical foundations 48, 57, 65–9, 73, 222, 254 affability/lack of affability foundation 57, 66–7 bases of ethical response and 222–3, 238 care/harm foundation 65–6, 144–5, 222 creativity/lack of creativity foundation 57, 65–6, 68 evaluative points 66, 81–2, 222 fairness/unfairness or cheating foundation 57–8, 65–6, 222 harm/benefit foundation 68–9, 81–2 hope/despair foundation 57, 67–8 knowledge/ignorance foundation 68, 297–9 love/hate foundation 57, 65–6, 81–2, 144–5, 222, 226 loyalty/betrayal foundation 57, 65–6, 70–1, 73, 222–3, 226 sanctity/degradation foundation 57, 68–9 vague boundaries between 68–9, 222–3 ethical naturalism 42 ethical properties 23–4, 33, 42 Intelligibility Thesis 38 ontological response dependence 37–8 Qualified Agent Thesis 38 Relational Thesis 38
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ethical realism 4, 9, 17, 78 ethical reality 28, 113, 284, 296 thick concepts and 61–2, 65, 113–14 worldhood of ethics 48, 51, 61, 69 ethical theory 11–13, 35 ethics of beneficence 78–9 underdetermination, paradox of 288–9, 291–2 wrong logos 283–4 see also welfarist tradition eudaimonistic virtue ethics 1, 10, 123–9 agent benefit 126–8, 132 anthropocentrism 129, 135–6 ‘burdened virtues’ 174 counterexamples 124–6 environmental ethics 128–9, 135–6 eudaimonia 126–7, 130, 132, 136 indirection and Target Centred Virtue Ethics 129–33 neo-Aristotelianism and 2, 123 self-centredness objection 123, 130–3 virtues benefit their possessor 1–2, 123–7 weakening of eudaimonist position 128–9 see also qualified agent; self-centredness excellence 5, 7, 70–1 dispositional excellence 69–70 ethical foundations 73 objectivity as cognitive excellence in humans 114 virtue as cognitive excellence 302 virtue as excellence of character 137, 221 virtue as human excellence 127, 137 virtuousness and 73 factualism 9–10, 35–6, 96 fairness 194–5 Cullity on 293, 295 fairness/unfairness or cheating foundation 57–8, 65–6, 222 ‘It makes no difference’ paradox 293, 295–6 Nietzsche: ‘scientific fairness’ 57–8, 71–2, 269n.31 Fehr, Beverley 98–100 fittingness 5, 9–10, 51–2, 61, 73–4 bonds and 234–5 Fittingness Fundamentalism 9–10, 51–3 logos of ethics and 58, 73 reasons and 9–10, 51–2 supererogation, paradox of 286–8 TCC and Fittingness Fundamentalism 9–10 thick concepts and 53, 58–9, 62, 73–4 virtue-fittingness tie-up 286–8 worldhood of ethics and 51–2, 58–9, 61–2, 73 Fodor, Jerry 79
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Foot, Philippa 145–6, 283–4 natural goodness 8, 201–2 ontology of ethics 49–50 right action 245 Fricke, Miranda 310, 316 Fried, Charles 194–5 Fromm, Erich 99–100 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 27–8, 112 ‘fusion of horizons’ 172 logos 22, 27, 30, 43 Gallie, Walter Bryce 249–51, 258 Generalism 263, 272, 274, 280–1 generosity 71–2, 162, 197 Gibbard, Allan 63, 258 Gleeson, Andrew 36 Greek tradition 1–2, 75–6, 123 Grundstimmung 25, 44–7, 67–8, 89 Hacker-Wright, John 245, 251–2, 255–6 Haidt, Jonathan 57, 60, 67–8, 270–1 ethical foundations 65–6 moral taste receptors 60–1 Halpern, Jodi 219 Hayhoe, Katharine 298, 310 Heidegger, Martin 2, 32 aletheia 23–4, 36n.86, 39 Being and Time 18, 23–5, 29–31, 37, 46–7, 87–8 belonging together 32–3, 79–80, 88, 172 boredom 44–6, 67–8 ‘covering up’ 43, 75–7, 282 Dasein 18–19, 24–5, 37, 45–7, 50, 53–4 ‘dwelling’ 37, 53–4, 77–8, 85–95 emotional orientation 25, 44–6 hermeneutic ontology 18–20, 29, 31, 47 hermeneutic turn 17–18, 29 idle talk 27–8, 46–7 Lichtung 23, 75 logos 19–37, 39, 43, 85 logos, critique of 43–7 logos, function of 23 logos of ethics 50, 85 new metaphysics for virtue ethics 8, 17–35 tradition 27–8 truth 24, 31 worldhood 20, 23, 31, 47 historically differentiated virtue 155–6, 171–3, 179 ‘fusion of horizons’ 172–3, 179–80 global historically differentiated virtues 172, 179–80 see also differentiated virtue holiness 89–90, 111 ‘seeing as holy’ 87, 89, 92n.68, 93–4
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honesty 58–9, 71, 127–51, 162, 229 intellectual honesty 308 lying and 279–80, 294 Hooker, Brad 280–1 Horney, Karen 107 Hudson, Stephen 265–6 Hugo, Victor 196–7 Huigens, Kyron 188 Hume, David 1, 57–8, 75–6, 274–5 benevolence 25–6, 59 disgust 60 emotional orientation 25–6 ethical facts 49, 77 justice 81–2, 125–6, 134 love 100 ‘matters of fact’ 49, 77 moral sense 25–6, 45–6, 59, 209 moral taste receptors 60 ontology of ethics 48–9 sentiment/sentimentalism 3, 26, 35, 60, 208–9 standards of virtue 207 thick concepts 2 Treatise of Human Nature 25–6, 32, 57, 208–9 viciousness 32, 48–9 virtue ethics 1–2, 4 Hurka, Thomas 131, 306–7 Hursthouse, Rosalind 4, 242 ‘arational’ actions 234 natural goodness 8 neo-Aristotelianism 4 On Virtue Ethics 4, 123, 264–5 Plato’s requirement on the virtues 1–2 qualified agent 6, 134n.33, 145–6 right action 4, 245, 277 self-centredness 131 tragic dilemmas 175 virtues benefit their possessor 2, 123–5, 128 virtuousness 6, 72 v-rules 5–6, 264–6 Hutcheson, Francis 250–1 idealization 29, 127, 154, 283 institutions 12–13, 74, 270–1, 317–18 authority/subversion foundation 65–6 fairness/cheating foundation 65–6 institution differentiation 186–9, 198 roles and 74, 157, 182–3 Two-Level View 159 integration (of virtues) ethical differentiation, Integrationist View 156, 158–60, 162–3, 172, 174–5, 179–81 integration of the logoi 32, 34, 81–2 Integration of Virtue Thesis 230–1, 237–8, 259
integrative function of virtue through practical wisdom 246–7, 252 logos of dwelling: fundamental integrating logos 85–95 narratively differentiated virtue, Integrationist View 168–9 role ethics, Integrationist View 181, 183–4, 188–9 Target Centred Virtue epistemology 308–9, 311–12 virtue, integrative function of 246–7 see also pluralistic virtue ethics; unity of the virtues intuition 41, 84, 118, 313–14, 316 intuitionism 227 Irwin, Terence H. 228 isolationism 246, 252–3, 304–7 Jackson, Frank 273, 282–3 Johnson, Robert N. 199–200 Jones, Karen 71 Jonsen, Albert R. 173 justice 81–2, 125–6, 134, 140–1 epistemic justice 306, 310, 316–18 kindness/justice conflict 277–80 Kagan, Shelly 134–5, 257 Kant, Immanuel 57, 67–8, 89, 162, 274–5 morality 250–1 moral law 242n.2 moral rightness 250–1 objectivity 96 virtue 212–13, 218–19 Kauppinen, Antti 169–70 Keller, Simon 71 Kellerman, Barbara 101–2, 108 kindness 64–5, 83–5, 145–7, 149–52, 270 basic virtue 160 differentiated virtue 162 kindness/justice conflict 277–80 ‘switching off’ 266–7 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 72 virtuousness 72 Korsgaard, Christine M. 32 Kraut, Richard 201, 227 Kronman, Anthony T. 189–90 Laceulle, Hanne 217–18 Lafont, Christina 29 Lambek, Michael 55–6, 154 Lance, Mark 263, 268 Lapsley, Daniel K. 219–20 law 79, 158 logos of law 85–6
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‘Standard Conception’ of law and role ethics 181–4, 188–90, 197–8 Lear, Jonathan 102, 176–9 LeBar, Mark 128, 142–3 legal ethics 12–13, 159, 186, 241 Leiter, Brian 111–12 Levinas, Emmanuel 35–6 lewdness 63–4 Little, Margaret Olivia 62, 263–4, 268 living well 1–2, 169–71 Lodge, David 312 logos Aristotle 29–30 ‘covering up’ 43 critique of the logoi 43–7 emotional orientation 25–6 enframing/absolutizing logos 43–4, 47 facts and 34 Gadamer on 22, 27, 30, 43 Heidegger on 19–37, 39, 43, 85 integration of the logoi 32, 34 ‘knowing how’ logos 31 logos: intentional access 21–4, 43, 58 logos: nature of 24–9 logos of artwork/art 29–30, 85–6, 95 logos of dwelling: fundamental integrating logos 85–95 logos of equipmentality 29–30, 49, 91 logos of law 85–6 logos of techne 29–30 McDowell on 22, 27–8, 39–40, 145 normative logoi 47, 53–4, 77, 85–6 plurality of the logoi 29–35, 40, 47 as regulating structure 22–3, 25, 33–4 response dependence 37–40 scientific logos 11, 29–30, 32 tradition and culture 27, 40 two-way ontological dependence 35–7 see also wrong logos logos of ethics 25–6, 40–3, 48 CV 69–73 as distinctive logos 17, 31–2, 77, 113 domain of the ethical 53–8 ethical facts 34–5, 51–3, 61 ethical orientation 58–61 familiarity with 28, 59n.33, 73–4 fittingness and 58, 73 Heidegger on 50, 85 logoi, boundaries between 81, 84–5 logoi, relation between 32, 34, 77–85, 105 Reasons Fundamentalism 51 TCC 61–9, 73 thick concepts 36, 50, 58–9, 61–9, 78 thick concepts, evaluative points of 61–71, 73
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two-way ontological dependence 58, 61 veiling of 47 viciousness 32 see also worldhood of ethics Louden, Robert 10–11, 241–2 love 7, 46, 57–8, 99, 145, 207–8 bonding and 226, 235–6 depth or shallowness of 44, 46 developmental virtue ethics 208–9, 219–20 expressive reasons of love 235 Hume on 100 love/hate foundation 57, 65–6, 81–2, 144–5, 222, 226 lovingness 46 as prime concept of ethics 85–6 self-love 173, 237, 288 typology 99–100 Luban, David 157, 159 Machiavelli, Niccolo 82, 229 McDowell, John 27, 40, 42, 47, 61 access to the real 21–2 codifiability of virtue 264 empiricistic naturalism 41 fittingness 61, 73–4 logos 22, 27–8, 39–40, 145 natural goodness, critique of 202 naturalism 17, 40–2, 79 new metaphysics for virtue ethics 8, 31 ontology 21–2 reasons externalism 143–4 scientific realism concerning ethics 41–2, 47 second nature 30n.63, 58 silenced reasons 193–4 thick concepts 50 virtuous agent 50, 145 ‘What Myth’ 145 MacIntyre, Alasdair 235–7 After Virtue 242 tradition and culture 27–8, 94, 113–14, 154 Mackie, John Leslie 243–4 McMahon, Christopher 300 McManus, Denis 29 McMullan, Paul 311 Mandeville, Bernard 195 Markie, Peter J. 194–5 Markovits, Daniel 12–13 Maslow, Abraham 80, 99–100 May, Simon 203 Merritt, Maria 315 metaphysics 8, 11, 24–5, 32 see also new metaphysics for virtue ethics Midgley, Mary 225–6, 245–7, 252
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Milgram, Elijah 154–5 Miller, Alexander 79 Miller, Christian B. 206–7, 215–16 Moore, Adrian W. 108 moral anthropology 57, 77–9 the moral/morality 55, 250–3 broad sense of 245–7, 252–3 as contested concept 219–20, 247 developmental virtue ethics and 219–20 isolationist morality 246, 304–5 the moral/the ethical distinction 54–6 narrow/classificatory sense of 219–20, 245–7, 253, 284, 304 notion of the moral 245–53 relative thinness of moral concepts 57 roles and morality 197–8 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 247 Williams on 3–4, 55–6, 76, 96, 105, 243–4, 253–4, 284 moral obligation 3–4, 54 Anscombe on 243–5 Darwall on 250–1 Williams on 3–4, 55, 253 see also deontology moral philosophy 51, 242, 245, 251–2 moral principles 272–3 v-rules and decisive moral principles 277–80 moral rightness 247, 250–3, 255–6, 258 combinatorial vagueness of the concept 249–52, 258 contested core or thin concepts 247–9, 258 deontic core concept 251–2, 255–6 as ‘essentially contested’ concept 249–52 morally right action 241–2, 244–5, 247, 260–1 narrow/classificatory sense 248, 251–2, 258 see also right action moral sense 1, 3–4 Hume on 25–6, 45–6, 59, 209 ought, ‘mesmeric force’ of 76, 243–4 moral theory 3–4, 227, 238, 251, 253 Morgan, Gareth 168 Murdoch, Iris 3, 17, 35, 50, 58–9, 207–8 Nagel, Thomas 18–19, 114 narratively differentiated virtue 155, 158, 164–71, 179 basic virtue/narratively differentiated virtue relation 168–9 global narrative virtues 165–7, 171, 179–80 Integrationist View 168–9 living well 169–71 narrative continuity and 165 narrative disunity 166–7, 179–80 narrative virtues of appropriate disunity 167
narrative virtues of appropriate flexibility 168 narrative virtues of transition 167–8 specific narrative virtues 165–71 see also differentiated virtue narrative ethics 157–8, 164–5 narrativism 164–5, 168–9 Narvaez, Darcia 219–20 natural goodness critique of 8, 202–3 developmentalism, natural goodness, and flourishing 200–6 Foot on 8, 201–2 Hursthouse on 8 McDowell on 202 neo-Aristotelianism 202 prudential goodness 169–70, 202–3 Williams on 3–4, 8 naturalism 17, 40 empiricistic naturalism 41 ethical naturalism 42 ethical non-naturalism 42, 79 McDowell on 17, 40–2, 79 naturalization of ethics 284–5 non-scientistic naturalism 47 scientistic naturalism 80, 282 Nefsky, Julia 292–5 Nehemas, Alexander 203 neo-Aristotelianism 2–4, 123 eudaimonistic virtue ethics 2, 123 Hursthouse 4 natural goodness 202 right action 2, 299–300 Target Centred Virtue Ethics and 2, 6–7 neuroscience 11–12, 34–5, 78–9, 84, 209 new metaphysics for virtue ethics 8–10 Heidegger and 8, 17–35 hermeneutic turn 17–18, 29, 40 Hume and 8, 25–6 McDowell and 8, 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich 1–2, 60, 71–2, 78–9, 237 admirable virtue 287–8 creativity 2, 57, 60–1, 68, 204 ethics of becoming 203–4 The Gay Science 157–8, 203, 237 Genealogy of Morals 71–2, 105–6, 111–12 objectivity 103–4, 110–16 psychoanalysis and 105–6, 111–14, 118–19 psychology and 105, 113–14 ‘scientific fairness’ 57–8, 71–2, 269n.31 Slave Morality 104–8, 111–12, 118–19 thick concepts 2 Thus Spoke Zarathustra 288 virtue ethics 2, 4 ‘non-moral’ virtues 70, 252, 274, 301, 304
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normativity 40 normative logoi 47, 53–4, 77, 85–6 Nussbaum, Martha C. 88 NVT (Necessity of Virtue Theory) 69–70 Oakley, Justin 183n.5, 185–6, 195 objectivity 9, 96, 118–19 Absolute Conception Thesis 108, 110, 112 as cognitive excellence in humans 114 Detachment Thesis 108, 110–12, 115 epistemological objectivity 97 factualism 96 hyperobjective/hypersubjective vice 115–17 Insider Thesis 98–9, 102, 105, 118 Insider Thesis 108, 110–12 ‘leadership industry’ example 101–2, 108 Multiple Perspectives Thesis 108, 110–14 Nietzsche on 103–4, 115–16 Nietzsche: attack on Slave Morality 104–8, 111–12, 118–19 Nietzsche, Williams, and objectivity in ethics 110–14 objectivist realist view 96–7 ontological objectivity 96 perspectivism and 102–5, 108, 115, 118 practical wisdom and 104, 114, 118 semantic objectivism 97 Single Conception Thesis 108, 110–11, 113–14 Social Embeddedness Thesis 108, 110–14 TCC/CV 96–7, 114–15 thick concepts as prototype concepts 98–9, 108 virtue of objectivity 103, 114–18 Williams’ requirements on objectivity 108–10 Williams’ scepticism 10–11, 96–7, 102, 108–10 Williams’ scepticism: arguments against 97–8, 110–14 ontology Heidegger: hermeneutic ontology 18–20, 29, 31, 47 hermeneutic turn 17–18, 29, 40 Hume 48–9 McDowell 21–2 ontological objectivity 96 ontological response dependence 37–40 ontology of ethics 48–50, 75–6 two-way ontological dependence 35–7, 58, 61 see also logos ordinary morality 12–13, 155–6 Complex Ordinary Morality View 156–8 differentiated virtue and 10, 160, 181 ethical differentiation and 158–9, 162 role ethics and 156–8, 181, 188, 195
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role obligations/ordinary morality conflict 12–13, 183 virtue and obligation constrained 159 orthodox virtue ethics 8, 184–7, 216–17, 309 complex orthodox virtue ethics 186–8 simple orthodox virtue ethics 184–6 Otto, Rudolph 92n.68 paradoxes 11, 284 ‘It makes no difference’ paradox 284, 292–6 practical reason, paradoxes of 284–5, 289 supererogation, paradox of 284–8 TCC/CV, resolving paradoxes of practical rationality 284–5, 287 thick concepts and resolution of paradoxes 284–5, 292–6 thin concepts and 284–5 underdetermination, paradox of 284, 288–92 see also wrong logos particularism 72, 226–7, 262–4, 281 burden of proof 280–1 criticism of 263, 281 Dancy 36, 260, 262–3, 268, 272–3 default reasons and particularism 271–7 EP (Extreme Particularism) 273 ‘flattening the moral landscape’ objection 263–4, 268, 276, 281 particularist moral dilemma 260 radical particularism 260, 262 resistance to 280–1 SP (Strong Particularism) 274 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 260, 262, 280–1 VEP (Virtue Ethical Particularism) 273–4, 281 VEP, Non-Pervasiveness Objection (NPO) 274–6 virtue ethics uncodifiability objection and 262–3, 272 WP (Weak Particularism) 273–4 see also codifiable virtue ethics permissibility 56, 74, 139–40, 256, 260 personality trait 80, 206 Five Factor model of personality traits 82 see also character trait Peterson, Christopher 79–80, 83 Pettigrove, Glen 145–6 philosophy 80, 154, 227 moral philosophy 51, 242, 245, 251–2 Plato 1–2, 36–7, 128–9 pluralistic virtue ethics 10, 237–8 bases of ethical response 224–7 criticism of 227 developmentalism and 227 disunity of virtues 228, 230–1 Integration of Virtue Thesis 230–1, 237–8
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pluralistic virtue ethics (cont.) partial goods 226–7, 237 plural grounds of virtue 221–4 plurality in a Virtue-Centred conception of practical rationality 231–7 radical pluralism 221n.2, 228 systematization in 227–8 TCC/CV as pluralistic view 115 Unity of the Virtues Thesis and 228, 238 see also bases of ethical response; integration; unity of the virtues Postema, Gerald 156–7 practical truth 17, 141–2 as aim of virtue 141, 246–7, 252–3 practical wisdom 66–7, 73, 143, 215, 228, 305 Aristotle on 60, 137, 143, 168–9, 185, 197, 230–1, 279 epistemic virtue and 252 fallibility and 145–7, 185 hitting the target of virtue and 246–7 integrative function of virtue through practical wisdom 246–7, 252 mature virtue 216–17, 219 objectivity 104, 114, 118 requirements of 217 Unity of the Virtues Thesis 228, 230–1, 252, 260, 277, 279 virtue and 133, 168–9, 197, 236, 278–9 Prinz, Jesse 26 Proctor, Robert 298–9 psychoanalysis 78–9, 105–6, 111–14, 118–19, 226 psychology 78–9, 82, 127 attachment theory 81–2, 127 b-structure of 82, 84 CAPS traits 82–4 developmental psychology 127, 199–200, 205–6, 208–9, 211–12 ethics/psychology relationship 78–84, 226 Nietzsche 105, 113–14 personality psychology 82–4 positive psychology 79–80 social psychology 57, 81–2 qualified agent 134n.33, 145, 262–3, 266, 299–300 dilemma 147 eudaimonistic virtue ethics 147, 153 Hursthouse on 6, 134n.33, 145–6 orthodox virtue ethics 184–5, 187 Qualified Agent Thesis 38 rejection of 187 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 145–6, 187 see also virtuous agent
Qualified Agent Virtue Ethical Epistemology 299–301, 314 criticism of 300, 317 lack of transparency objection 300, 317 monological objection 300, 317 shifting of epistemic responsibility objection 301, 312–13, 317 Target Centred Virtue epistemology and 312–13, 317 the virtuous agent is not an expert objection 300–1, 317 see also epistemology Rand, Ayn 102 Raphael, D. D. 227 rationality 289–90, 309 epistemic virtues associated with conceptions of rationality 309 plurality in a Virtue-Centred conception of practical rationality 231–7 see also reasons Rawls, John 154, 159, 227, 317–18 Raz, Joseph 191–3, 231–4, 257, 289–90 reasons context-undermining reasons 193–5 default reason 268 enticing reasons 274–5 ethical differentiation: reasons for action 158 exclusionary reasons 191–3, 234–5, 257, 267, 270–1 exclusionary reasons associated with status 232–4, 238 expressive reasons associated with bonds 232, 234–6 law and 158 overriding reasons 191 paradoxes of practical reason 289 peremptory reasons 274–5 plurality in a Virtue-Centred conception of practical rationality 231–7 practical reason 96, 142–3, 231–7 prudential reason associated with the good for an individual 232, 237 reasons externalism 143–4 reasons for and against action 138–9, 142–3 Reasons Fundamentalism 9–10 relation between reasons of basic virtue and reasons of role-differentiated virtue 190–5 silenced reasons 193–4 specification of reasons 190–1 undercutting by exclusion 191–3 see also v-reasons Reginster, Bernard 106–7 Richardson, Henry 190
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Ricoeur, Paul 2, 35–6, 168–9, 179–80 right action 5–7 acting well/acting rightly distinction 141 action guidance/right action relation 241 action guidingness objection to virtue ethics 241–2, 262 Anscombe on 241–5, 251–2, 255–6 Aristotle on 139, 141–2, 144, 252 contemporary virtue ethics 241–2, 244, 260 covering up of ethics: elaborated conceptions of right action 241 Foot on 245 Hursthouse on 4, 245, 277 the moral, notion of 245–53 morally right action 241–2, 244–5, 247, 260–1 neo-Aristotelianism 2, 299–300 reasons for and against action 138–9, 142–3 Swanton on 245, 251–2, 277 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 11, 134–47, 247, 254–5, 260, 307–8 thick concepts and 56, 261 thin concepts and 56, 241, 247 v-acts and 149 virtue ethics and 241, 252 virtuousness 6 v-reasons and 266, 277 v-rules and 266 see also the moral/morality; moral rightness; qualified agent; rightness rightness 5, 70–2 accidental rightness 141 application of the schema of rightness 139–40 hitting the target 134–40, 142, 254–5, 260, 266, 278–9, 307–8 the right/the good distinction 140 rightness and vagueness 258–60 Schema of Overall Rightness (1) 147–50 Schema of Overall Rightness (2) 152–3 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 187, 247 virtue ethical accounts of rightness and the deontic 253–8 virtuousness and 72–3, 252, 258, 260 see also moral rightness; right action; wrongness Roberts, Debbie 63 Roberts, Robert C. 316–17 role differentiated virtue 155–6, 158, 179, 182, 184 role-differentiated obligation 181–2, 185–6 role-differentiated virtue and immorality 195–8 role-differentiated virtue and vice 196–7 targets of role-differentiated virtue 187, 189 see also differentiated virtue; role ethics role dilemma 12–13, 180–3 disarming the dilemma 184, 187, 198 as false 182, 197
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Target Centred Virtue Ethics and 182, 184, 187, 189, 198 see also role ethics role ethics 198 applied ethics 241 Complex Ordinary Morality 157–8, 181 complex orthodox virtue ethics 186–8 Constraint Strategy 188–9, 194, 198 ‘deprofessionalization’ of professional roles 156–7 Domination Strategy 188–9, 198 Expansion Strategy 188, 198 institutions and 74, 157, 182–3 Integrationist View 181, 183–4, 188–9 morality and roles 197–8 ordinary morality and 156–8, 181, 188, 195 orthodox virtue ethics and 182, 184–7 Reductionist Views 157–8 role obligations 156, 159, 182 simple orthodox virtue ethics 184–6 ‘Standard Conception’ of the lawyer’s role 181–4, 188–90, 197–8 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 180–1, 184, 187–90 see also role differentiated virtue; role dilemma role ethics: reasons of basic virtue and reasons of role-differentiated virtue 190–5 Ross, William David 140–1, 227, 272 Ruddick, Sara 217–18 Russell, Daniel C. 128, 204, 207–8, 218–19 Russell, James A. 98–100 Ryle, Gilbert 31 Scanlon, Thomas M. 9–10, 40, 51, 113–14, 118–19, 276 Schafer, Matthew 11–12, 35 Schechtman, Marya 165 Schiller, Daniela 11–12, 35 science 39, 43–4 dwelling orientation 95 emotional orientation 25 ethics/science relationship 79–80 political processes, impact on scientific processes 298–9 scientific logos 11, 29–30, 32 scientistic naturalism 80 worldhood of science 23 Scientific American 36–7, 298 scientific realism concerning ethics 41–2 McDowell’s EN 41–2, 47 scientistic realism 41–2, 78 self-centredness 131–3 disconnect objection 132–3 eudaimonistic virtue ethics 123, 130
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self-centredness (cont.) narcissism objection 130–1 personal virtue motivation 132–3 self-effacing objection 131–2 Solomon’s ‘deeper level’ version of the objection 132–3 Target Centred Virtue Ethics: ‘everywhere direct’ 133–6 see also eudaimonistic virtue ethics Seligman, Martin E. P. 79–80, 83 sentimentalist ethics 3, 26 Hume 3, 26, 35, 60, 208–9 Shklar, Judith N. 155–6 Sidgwick, Henry 227, 237 Slote, Michael 72, 169–70, 223–4, 245, 302 virtues relative to stage of life 208, 214–15 Smith, Adam 208–9 Snow, Nancy E. 83–4, 199–200 Sobel, David 8 social perspective 33–4, 98, 113, 154–5, 179, 314 broad social good 182–3, 305 differentiated virtue and social facts 158–9, 164–5, 168 epistemology, social dimension of 310, 315–18 social context 24–5, 117, 124–5, 300, 314 Social Embeddedness Thesis 108, 110–14 social factors 315–18 social norms 157–9, 315 virtue and social influences 219, 315–18 social sciences 26, 66, 73, 118 ethics/social sciences relationship 77–80, 82–4, 92–3, 154, 205–6 Solomon, David 132–3 Solum, Lawrence B. 186–8 Southwood, Nicholas 81, 158 Stanbaugh, Joan 32 Stangl, Rebecca 127–8, 150 Sternberg, Elaine 162 Stocker, Michael 129–30, 225n.10, 226n.16, 229 Stohr, Karen 66–7 Swanton, Christine right action 245, 251–2, 277 ‘The Virtue of Creativity’ 206 Virtue Ethics 123–5, 206 Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic View 144–5, 174, 284, 286 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas 309 target (of virtues) 5–7, 221, 254 Aristotle on 137, 139, 142, 304–5 bases of ethical response and hitting the target 145, 238 basic virtue, targets of 162
differentiated virtue, targets of 162, 254–5, 270 epistemic virtues, hitting the targets of 301, 304–5, 307–8, 312, 314–16 epistemic virtues, targets of 297–8, 301, 307–8, 313, 316–17 hitting the mean/target 72, 134, 139–40, 150–1, 252 as multi-dimensional 137, 139–40, 152, 308 practical wisdom and hitting the target 246–7 rightness and hitting the target 134–40, 142, 254–5, 260, 266, 278–9, 307–8 role-differentiated virtue, targets of 187, 189 virtue proper, hitting the target of 260 see also Target Centred Virtue Ethics; Unity of Targets theses Target Centred Virtue epistemology 11, 297–8, 307–16 differentiation of virtue 307–8, 316–17 epistemic virtues and 301, 308 epistemic virtues, hitting the targets of 301, 304–5, 307–8, 312, 314–16 epistemic virtues, targets of 297–8, 301, 307–8, 313, 316–17 integration of virtue 308–9, 311–12 intuition 313–16 justification and 312–16 Qualified Agent Virtue Ethical Epistemology, objections to 312–13, 317 social dimension of epistemology 315–18 see also epistemic virtues; epistemology; virtue epistemology Target Centred Virtue Ethics 4, 11, 123 agent-centred thesis and 6 applied ethics 10–11, 241 Aristotle and 141–2, 144 bases of ethical response 144–5 ‘everywhere direct’ 133–6 indirection and 129–33 metaphysics 8, 11 modes of ethical response 145 as multi-layered theory 7 neo-Aristotelianism and 2, 6–7 particularism 260, 262, 280–1 pluralistic virtue ethics 144–5 practical truth 141–2 qualified agent 145–6, 187 reasons externalism 143–4 recognitional conception 142–3 right action 11, 134–47, 247, 254–5, 260, 307–8 rightness 187, 247 role dilemma and 182, 184, 187, 189, 198 role ethics and 180–1, 184, 187–90
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Schema of Overall Rightness (1) 147–50 Schema of Overall Rightness (2) 152–3 schema of overall wrongness 150, 153 self-centredness objection, solution to 133–6 Unity of Targets Thesis (1) 150–1 Unity of Targets Thesis (2) 151–2 virtuous agent 136–7, 145–7 virtuousness 6, 72, 136–7, 147–53 see also CV; target; TC; TCC; TCC/CV Taylor, Charles 18–19, 41, 253–6, 282 Taylor, Paul 86 TC (Target Centredness) 6–13, differentiated virtue 10 targets of virtues 6–7 TCC (Thick Concept Centralism) 5, 96 Target Centred Virtue Ethics and 7, 148–50 virtue ethics and 1–5 see also TCC/CV; thick concepts TCC/CV (Thick Concept Centralism/Centrality of Virtuousness) 5–6 Target Centred Virtue Ethics and 6–7 see also CV; Target Centred Virtue Ethics; TCC Tessman, Lisa 124–5, 173–6 thick concepts 1–2, 17, 57–8, 69, 84–5 Anscombe on 3 combinatorial vagueness 259 Cullity on 64–5 Dancy on 61, 63–4, 273 ethical foundations and 48, 65–6 evaluative points of 61–71, 73, 79, 81–2, 238, 317–18 familiarity with 17, 25–6, 28, 59n.33, 60–1, 98, 108, 112 fittingness and 53, 58–9, 62, 73–4 honorific usage of 71–2, 209–10 Insider Thesis 98–9, 178 logos of ethics 36, 50, 58–9, 61–9, 78 McDowell on 50 moral principles and 273 Murdoch on 3, 17, 50, 58–9 naturalism and 17 paradoxes, resolution of 284–5, 292–6 as prototype concepts 98–9, 108 relationship between properties denoted by thick concepts and virtues 71–2 right action 56, 261 virtue ethics 72 virtue/vice notions 69–70 v-rules and 264–5 Williams on 4, 7, 50, 55, 63 worldhood of ethics 62 see also objectivity; TCC thin concepts 1, 250–1 moral concepts 57
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moral rightness 247–9, 258 paradoxes and 284–5 right action 56, 241, 247 thinning down 1, 75–6, 178–9 Williams on 55, 105 wrong logos 284 see also moral obligation Thomas, Alan 108 Thompson, Michael 8 Toulmin, Stephen 173 tradition and culture 27–8, 172 importance of 154–5 logos 27, 40 MacIntyre on 27–8, 94, 113–14, 154 regionality of time and heritage 94 Williams on 171–2 see also historically differentiated virtue tragic dilemmas 151–2, 175, 181, 276–8, 289 Tsu, Peter 264 Unity of Targets theses hitting the target on all dimensions 150–1 Thesis (1) 150–1 Thesis (2) 151–2 see also Target Centred Virtue Ethics unity of the virtues 227–31, 277 criticism of 229 Impossibility of Perfection Thesis 230 pluralistic virtue ethics and 228, 230–1, 238 plurality of conflicting goods or ends 229–31 ‘the possession of one virtue implies the possession of all the virtues’ 228, 279 practical wisdom and 228, 230–1, 252, 260, 277, 279 Unity of the Virtues Thesis 228–30, 277–8 see also integration; pluralistic virtue ethics Urmson, James Opie 286 v-acts 148, 264–5, 279 definition of 148, 265 right action and 149 v-reasons and 150 v-rules and 277 Valsiner, Jaan 200 value 52–3 as bases of ethical response 144–5, 221–4, 226, 232 Van Zyl, Liezl 141 Vayrynen, Pekka 125–6, 271 Velleman, David 169–70 vice hyperobjective/hypersubjective vice 115–17 role-differentiated virtue as vice 196–7
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vice (cont.) vice/mental illness distinction 84–5 see also epistemic vices; virtue/vice notions viciousness 32, 48–9 Vigani, Denise 193–4 virtue admirable virtue 287–8 as character trait 133, 137, 212, 215–16, 278–9, 302, 317–18 as cognitive excellence 302 as a disposition of good or excellent responsiveness 145, 221 field of a virtue 134, 144, 207 happiness/unhappiness and 125–6 integrative function of 246–7, 252 minimalist definition 206–8 as a model concept 204 as monadic property of an agent 206 Plato’s requirement on 1–2, 128–9 practical truth as aim of virtue 141, 246–7, 252–3 practical wisdom and 133, 168–9, 197, 236, 278–9 as satis concept 72, 204, 207, 230, 258–9, 279n.74 as triadic relation among agent, social milieu, and environment 206 vagueness of virtue concepts 258–9, 279n.74 virtues benefit their possessor 1–2, 123–7 see also basic virtue; burdened virtue; culturally differentiated virtue; differentiated virtue; historically differentiated virtue; narratively differentiated virtue; NVT; role differentiated virtue; virtue proper; virtue/ vice notions virtue epistemology 178–9, 199, 297–8, 302, 306–7 contagion model of spread of virtue and vice 315 network epistemology framework 315–16 Qualified Agent Virtue Ethical Epistemology 299–301 virtue ethics/virtue epistemology relation 252, 302–5 see also epistemic virtues; epistemology; Target Centred Virtue epistemology virtue ethics 1–6 applied ethics 10–11, 241–2, 262 Aristotle 2 as character centred 6 Hume 1–2, 4 metaphysics 8, 11 moral theory 3 neo-Aristotelianism 2–3, 123 Nietzsche 2, 4
revival of 1, 245 right action and 241, 252 role ethics as a virtue ethics 183 scientific realism concerning ethics 41 virtue ethical family 4–6 virtue ethics/virtue epistemology relation 252, 302–5 see also contemporary virtue ethics virtue proper 197, 253, 304–5 development of 211–12 epistemic virtues 307 hitting the target of 260 virtue/vice notions 5, 25–6, 57, 65–6, 69–70 see also ethical foundations virtuous agent 2, 74 Aristotle on 146–7, 279 fallibility 145–7, 193–4, 217, 314 McDowell on 50, 145 motivations 134–5, 142 self-centredness 130 self-improving agent 288 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 134–7, 142, 145–7 virtuous agents getting it wrong in action 279 Williams on 3–4 see also qualified agent; self-centredness virtuousness 6, 72, 260 developmental virtue ethics 204 excellence and 73 rightness and 72–3, 252, 258, 260 Target Centred Virtue Ethics 6, 72, 136–7, 147–53 see also CV v-reasons 148, 263–4, 274–5, 277, right action and 266, 277 v-acts and 150 v-rules and 264–5 v-rules and default reasons 266–71, 281 see also codifiable virtue ethics v-rules 5–6, 263–5 as action guiding 281 basic v-rules 196, 281 codifiability and v-rules 264–6 Hursthouse on 5–6, 264–6 right action and 266 tragic dilemmas and 276–7 v-acts and 277 v-reasons and 264–6, 276 v-rules and decisive moral principles 277–80 v-rules and default reasons 266–71, 281 see also codifiable virtue ethics
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Walker, A. D. M. 146–7 Wall, John 164–5 Watkins, Margaret 84–5 Watson, Gary 6, 230 Welchman, Jennifer 211–13, 215 welfarist tradition Aretaic Independence of Welfare 283–4 ethics of beneficence: wrong logos 283–4 Hegemony of Promotion Thesis 283–6 More is Better Thesis 283–6 paradoxes and 284 Simple Thought Thesis 283–6 welfarist consequentialist tradition 284–6 Welfarist Morality 283 see also wrong logos Wiggins, David 38 Williams, Bernard 11, 67–8, 76, 96, 131, 154 the deontic is central to ‘morality’ 255–6 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy 55, 227 historical locatedness of human culture 171–2 insider perspective 4, 105, 172 the moral/morality system 3–4, 55–6, 76, 96, 105, 243–4, 253–4, 284 ‘Morality, the Peculiar Institution’ 55, 243–4 moral obligation 3–4, 55, 253 natural goodness 3–4, 8 objectivity: arguments against Williams’ scepticism 97–8, 110–14 objectivity, requirements on 108–10 objectivity, scepticism about 10–11, 96–7, 102, 108–10 thick concepts 4, 7, 50, 55, 63 thin concepts 55, 105 virtuous agent 3–4 ‘What does Intuitionism Imply’ 112–13 Wolf, Susan 215 Wood, W. Jay 316–17
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world Nasty World 125–6, 206, 224, 271 non-utopian worlds 125–6, 230 normal worlds 125–6, 224, 230 world as a dwelling place 89–90 worldhood Heidegger on 20, 23, 31, 47 worldhood of equipmentality 31 worldhood of science 23 worldhood of ethics 23, 48–9, 61, 73–4 b-structure of ethics 48, 50, 75, 84 ethical being 23 ethical facts 50, 62 ethical reality 48, 51, 61, 69 fittingness and 51–2, 58–9, 61–2, 73 intentional access to 74 moral sense and 25–6 revealed through logos 75 thick concepts 62 see also logos of ethics Wrathall, Mark A. 23, 76 wrong logos covering up of ethics 76–7, 282 ethics of beneficence 283–4 intentional access to ethics through a wrong logos 76–7, 282 misapplication of the mathematical logos 282–3 naturalization of ethics 284–5 scientistic naturalism 282 thin concepts 284 unsuitable significance relations 282–5 welfarist consequentialist tradition 284–6 see also paradoxes; welfarist tradition wrongness 141, 150, 153 Young, Julian 91–2 Zagzebski, Linda 4, 302–4, 308, 312–13 Zangwill, Nick 235