Tag: virtue ethics

Julia Annas on the Many Ways of Life Consistent With Virtue

More weighty is the claim that to make human nature the basis for ethics is to accept something unacceptably constricting: the imposition of a single form of life and preferred set of dispositions on everyone. Nagel is right that we have reason to reject this picture; from the viewpoint of my own deliberations I know that an ethical theory cannot be right that would impose a single way of life on me and everyone else just on the grounds that we are human.

However, what is this ‘singleness’ of the ethical way of life grounded in human nature? Nagel and many other modern critics clearly think that it is something which constrains the range of specific activities in a single life and implies that individuals, however diverse, should aim at the same specific goal. If this were the case, criticism would be easy; but it is not how we find the actual ancient appeal to nature functioning. We have already seen that reflecting on our final end does not prescribe one range of specific human activities against another. The importance of reflecting on my life as a whole lies in the opportunity for clarifying and rethinking my priorities and the ordering of my values. To be told that one way of doing this, as opposed to another, is natural, in accordance with human nature, is to be told two things. One is that there are constraints which my reflection must respect and priorities which are not up to me to settle. If it is true, for example, that human nature is so constituted as always to seek only pleasure, then this rules out certain theories as to how I should live—the Stoic and Aristotelian, for a start. It also directs me as to where to discover mistakes in my life. If it is true that I cannot help seeking pleasure in all I do, and if I do not seem to be very successful in this, then I must be making mistakes as to what pleasure is and how to achieve it; and searching for these mistakes, and rectifying them, is bound to revise my way of life.

But the appeal to nature is also an appeal to an ideal, an ethical ideal, articulated by ethical theory, in terms of whic hI can locate, criticize and modify those elements in my ethical beliefs which rely merely on convention. For beliefs which I have acquired in an uncritical way from my social environment cannot be relied on to take me in the righ tdirection; indeed (depending on how revisionary the theory in question is) they can be taken to be faulty and misleading. Appealing to nature gives me an ethical ideal in terms of which to reject those of my beliefs which turn out to conflict with it, and better to understand those beliefs which are in fact in conformity with it. For what is natural about me is objectively so, whereas many of my beliefs may rest on nothing better than convention. But we plainly do not, just from a conception of human nature (as aiming for pleasure, say) conclude that we should all do the same specific things in life.

Ancient theories, then, do not use the appeal to nature to establish a single specific way of life, or to encourage people to ignore their individual differences.

From The Morality of Happiness, by Julia Annas. I’m not a fan of how she uses the word “values” here, but in context she makes it clear it’s not the same thing as subjective valuation, which is what we typically associate with the word today.

See Daniel Russell on why the nature-as-ideal is necessary in ethics, and how it works in practice.

This post also provides further exploration of naturalism of this sort.

On By Adam GurriIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

Ancient Wisdom and Modern Toolkits: A Review of Economics and the Virtues

On By Adam GurriIn Economics4 Comments

Economic theory today exists entirely within the narrow confines of utilitarianism, and positivism still reigns as the accepted philosophy of science. In philosophy itself, the former has been almost entirely abandoned as unworkable, and the latter has been completely demolished.

In a way, that makes the accomplishments of economists all the more amazing, given the materials they were working with. But these philosophies were discredited for a reason—they have serious problems which they lack the resources to resolve. You can see this in the critiques that economists themselves largely agree are merited, such as the results of behavioral economics. With the notable exception of prospect theory, it has proven unfeasible to integrate the insights of behavioral economics into economic theory.

When your theories lack the resources to overcome persistent problems, it doesn’t hurt to start looking at how other frameworks might address those problems. In this regard, the forthcoming Economics and the Virtues, edited by Jennifer Baker and Mark White, proves an invaluable resource.

The collection brings together thirteen different authors, some economists and some philosophers, who each make their attempt to bring the narrow framework of economics into dialogue with broader philosophical questions. As the name of the volume implies, this focuses primarily on virtue ethics, but not exclusively. Mark White’s essay, for instance, attempts to bring Kantian considerations into economic analysis, though he does do so through emphasis on the kind of person necessary to follow Kantian imperatives, bringing it closer to virtue. And Jason Brennan’s essay simply approaches the question of whether markets corrupt our character, a topic he has focused on a great deal lately.

But the rest of the essays focus particularly on how virtue ethics can be used to bring valuable insights and much needed sophistication to economic theory. One essay I would call out as likely to be of special interest to economists is Andrew Yuengert’s “The Space Between Choice and Our Models of It,” a powerful treatment of the limitations of economic models and how Aristotle’s conception of practical reason can fill the gap. Yuengert is the author of Approximating Prudence, where this and related topics are treated in greater depth.

The collection includes a great deal of history of thought in addition to attempts to synthesize different frameworks with economic theory; Eric Schliesser’s essay, for instance, details the way in which the subject matter of economics and moral philosophy went from being treated as one and the same, to distinct.

One criticism I would make of the collection would be that there were several essays that were stronger in their presentation of the history of thought they were interested in than in laying the grounds for a synthesis. The first essay, by Christian Becker, provides an excellent overview of economic rationality in Aristotle and in modern economics, but ends with talk about a “virtue of sustainability” and other such things. This seemed an awkward marriage of the modern notion of sustainability with the ancient notion of virtue—one that improved neither.

This does not, however, detract from the fact that the collection is a valuable source of insight, especially for economists used to operating within only one framework. For anyone looking to enrich their economic analysis with insights from frameworks that have been discussed for thousands of years, the essays in this book are an excellent place to start.

Economics and the Virtues will be out in March.

Responsiveness to Reasons

On By Adam GurriIn Philosophy4 Comments

The ends do not justify the means. Getting the right results does not automatically make you a good person. Depending on what you did, and why, it might even make you a pretty bad one. A good person doesn’t just have good goals. He also acts the right way, given the circumstances, and for the right reasons.

What does it mean to act for the right reasons?

Consider a parent who breaks their back every day, working long hours at a job they hate so they can save up enough to send their daughter to college. This seems admirable, right?

But consider different sorts of reasons for doing this. Imagine if they want their daughter to be able to make more money because they feel entitled to whatever she earns—that is, they’re treating this like an investment for their own long-term earning potential. Or imagine the parent who desires the status among their peers that a college educated kid brings, or to avoid the embarrassment of a grown child without a diploma. That’s a better reason than personal gain, but it isn’t great.

Now imagine a parent who simply wants a better future for their daughter, as well as for her to develop as an independent person capable of making her own choices. These are admirable reasons, and the parent who is truly responsive to them is worthy of their role as parent.

Responsiveness to the right reasons is an important part of virtue as such. This is about much more than an intellectual exercise. Prudence (or phronesis, practical wisdom) as an intellectual virtue does involving being able to grasp what the right reasons are. But courage, temperance, charity, faith and hope all involve at least an element of wanting to do the right thing for the right reasons. It comes more naturally to some than to others. But often those who struggle at first end up the most virtuous further down their journey, for they had to grapple with the difficult task of making the path of righteousness their own. Those who have it given to them sometimes wander off and are less certain how to find their way back again. This is precisely Aristotle’s distinction between natural and true virtue, this element of making it your own as opposed to being born with it.

Like Aristotle, and Julia Annas and Daniel Russell, I think that you must grasp the reasons in order to become fully virtuous. Unlike them, I think a substantial part of this understanding—the largest part in fact—is tacit, rather than explicit. This does not mean they are completely inexplicable; it’s just that people vary in their ability to articulate their reasons, and it has not been my experience that eloquence and clearness of explicit thought go hand in hand with goodness. Often such people are able to talk themselves into perfectly ridiculous perspectives, or worse. The USSR and Maoist China were creations of highly educated people capable of being very articulate about their reasons, and equally capable of filling mass graves with the bodies of the innocent dead.

It is the rightness of the reasons, and the responsiveness to them, that matters. The ability to explain and defend them is absolutely a valuable quality, and especially crucial in a liberal democracy where talk and persuasion are paramount. But that does not detract from the fact that many truly good people are bad at rhetoric, and many skilled in that art are quite rotten.

How do we know what the right reasons are? Our whole lives are a joint investigation and negotiation of the answer to that question.

From childhood, parents and other adults, peers, and all of the stories we are exposed to, attempt to impress upon us an understanding of what the right reasons for acting are in a variety of situations. We are increasingly expected, throughout the course of our lives, to take more and more responsibility for grasping it in a given situation and acting accordingly.

Adulthood just is the moment when we take full responsibility for our part of any situation, for acting for the right reasons and doing the right thing. To rely on others to determine this for you is in some sense to remain a child.

That does not mean that there are no authorities that you defer to on rightness or any subject. It does mean that you hold no one responsible for this deference, and the trust that it implies, other than yourself. If your trust is misplaced, it was you who misplaced it.

Trust, and therefore faith, is the foundation upon which our grasp of “right reasons” rests. We have to trust not only the people we consider authorities, but all the people who are and have been in our lives and influenced our notion of goodness. Most of all, we must have faith in ourselves. The most central and unwavering faith of the Enlightenment was faith in one’s own ability to read the evidence and make a rational judgment. If our faith on this score is and should be more tempered than that, we still ought to believe in our own ability to become knowledgeable, to learn from mistakes and advice alike, and to become a good person.

If faith is our footing, hope pushes us forward. Hope that we will obtain an appropriate understanding of the right reasons to act in a given situation, and that we can act on them the way a good person would. Hope that if our trust is ever misplaced or abused, we will learn of it and learn from it, without losing our ability to trust entirely.

Gaining experience so that we can develop our grasp of the right reasons for acting over the course of our lives, working to be the sort of person who wants to respond to the right reasons, trusting and believing in our potential for goodness—these are the beginnings of virtue.

 

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Incomplete Virtue

On By Adam GurriIn Hermeneutics, PhilosophyLeave a comment

In his essential book on virtue ethics, Daniel Russell advanced two arguments that I found highly novel and provocative.

The first is that the virtues are what he calls vague satis concepts, something I explore in depth here. The short version is that they have a threshold beyond which “virtuous enough” just is “virtuous in fact.” And this threshold is vague, in the sense that there are boundary cases that cannot be resolved simply by increasing your level of precision. One example of this is the threshold beyond which one goes from having thin or receding hair to being bald. More significantly, the concept of personhood is a vague satis concept, with boundary cases including long term coma patients, the severely brain damaged, and embryos.

In such cases, Russell argues, we need a model. This model is not simply an averaging of the most representative cases. As he puts it:

When we try to say what personhood really is, we construct a theoretical model of what we take to be the essential features of personhood, in some kind of reflective equilibrium, and realized to the fullest degree, since the model must illuminate the central cases, not just join their ranks. This model, we should note, is an ideal, and therefore not merely a central case: you or I could stand as a central case of personhood, but not as a model of personhood, since particular persons always have shortcomings in some dimension or other of personhood, a shortcoming that the model is to reveal as a shortcoming.

The second argument of interest is that virtue ethicists need a limiting principle on the number of virtues there are. The Stoics and Aquinas resorted to a very limited set of cardinal virtues of which all others were but aspects. Aristotle, however, offered no limitations at all, and most modern virtue ethicists follow him in this. Russell finds this unacceptable. This argument flows from the first one—we need a model of the virtuous person. If the number of virtues approaches infinity, then how could we ever hope to model such a person?

It is this second argument I wish to disagree with. Russell thinks virtues need a limiting principle because the model of the virtuous person that he has in mind is a formally specifiable model. But this is precisely what Aristotle’s notion of phronesis, with its radical particularity, precludes.

What Russell seeks is explanation, rather than understanding, when the latter is more appropriate.

Let us say that virtue is like the infinite, fractal coastline of a finite island. How could we model such a thing?

Simply demanding the subject matter be finite will not help. Pointing out that there is more context than we can take in does not mean that the quest for more context is a bad thing—Russell himself makes a similar argument about all-things-considered rationality:

But committing to making all-things-considered judgments is not the same as committing to the (rather queer) life-project of becoming the best maker of all-things-considered judgments there can be. That project, like every other, consumes resources and opportunities, and can no more be assumed to be a rational one than any other project can. That is a fact about practical rationality: when it comes to making all-things-considered judgments, at some point it is reasonable to stop considering, choose, and hope that the choice is one we can live with, or perhaps grow into. Indeed, trying to become persons who do consider all things before acting is something that we have all-things-considered reasons not to do.

My argument is that even the constructing of the ideal itself follows a similar rationale.

Consider my recent exposition of the hermeneutics of novels:

After finishing a given chapter of a novel, we no doubt have certain expectations about what the book as a whole will be like, based not only on the chapter itself but on our understanding of the genre conventions the novel is operating within, maybe even of our familiarity with the author herself or what other people have insinuated about the book. Once we have completed the novel, however, our understanding will have changed—not only of the novel as a whole, but even of a given chapter and its significance. Rereading the novel, we may find the chapter discloses things to us that it didn’t the first time—and these new disclosures, in turn, inform our understanding of the whole novel. In this way, even after we have read the whole book, we can learn from parts of it.

Even something as seemingly finite as a novel we can only understand incompletely. Summarizing Derrida, Jonathan Culler adds to this picture of incompleteness by arguing that meaning is determined by context, and context is boundless. We can always revisit the context and find some new aspect which sheds light on a different meaning.

But Gadamer’s take on this incompleteness is much more optimistic than Derrida’s. It is also ultimately more optimistic than Russell’s, for the latter is forced to ask for models and limiting principles we do not have, implying that we haven’t had much of an idea about how to live virtuously until now.

For Gadamer, it is less about models than about stories. One such story would be the story of the good life. The same story, told differently, is the story of the virtuous person. People have been contributing to this story for thousands of years. Contra Russell, most people already understand virtue and the good life, their understanding is simply and necessarily incomplete. This understanding can be improved, and we should strive to be lifelong learners in this matter, rather than finding a particular understanding and then clinging to it out of a desire for a false certainty. A courageous virtue ethics is one that asks us to accept our inability to complete it, and the necessary day-to-day role that faith must play in filling in the gaps.

The Singular of Data

On By John David Duke JrIn Social Science, Storytelling2 Comments

My friend Jeff told me a story in response to a comment I made. I had just mentioned the travails of kid sports, especially since I enrolled my kids in a hockey program which includes one third more ice time than last year’s program. I sighed, “All consuming, you know.”

Jeff leaned back and intoned a story about his brother-in-law, whose boys were raised on the road to become hockey stars, but they were only so close to making it into the professional ranks, and now the anxiety is upon them, as young men in the late teens and early twenties, to acquire a meaningful vocation.

I said, “Can you imagine investing that much money and that much effort (giving away so much of the family life, in effect) toward a goal which has such a small chance of realization?”

Jeff shifted in his chair and recounted the tale of a dear friend of his who was a bona-fide rock star, in his own mind. He did nothing but play his guitar and practice with his band of fellow-travelers, living up the hedonistic ideal, touring Europe and Japan every year. “If you buy him a sandwich, he’ll take it home to his mom’s basement, where he lives, and save half of it for dinner the next day.”

Jeff rarely answers any question  with a propositional statement; he’s all stories, all the time. His experience is wide and varied, so I guess he can. What makes him especially delightful is that he doesn’t tell stories to fill empty space in a conversation, he’s answering a question. One story gives the answer, and then he’s done, no stringing endless tangential episodes ad infinitum.

I saw somewhere recently (and, forgive me, I can’t remember the context) someone mention that the Affordable Care Act might be screwing over huge numbers of people, but a) those numbers are still marginal, and b) the fundamentals of ACA are forged in good policy. I take that to mean, in other words, that as long as the proper number of people are served by this public policy, those who are hurt (ground to dust, more like it) by the same public policy are data. I’m under the impression that that number doesn’t even need to rise to a majority; it just needs to meet some data-triggered threshold which satisfies its designers. All others should be able to conform, no? If not, then selection has taken its course, alas.

It’s not that I’m against science, God forbid; it’s that I’m against its magisterial application in all aspects of the human experience. Public policy, public morality, public religiosity (for lack of a better word), public everything falls under the hegemony of science, as though science were some sort of impersonal absolute extracted by innumerable university studies from an easily-accessible material world. Science, in this manifestation, never serves; it is always master.

Okay, I yield the point: “ground to dust” is too much; there are worse things on this earth than ACA. Nevertheless, I will not yield the larger outcry, namely that this sentiment is a resistance to the notion that in our story-less data-gathering, individuals are being sorted in a grand perversity of science-wielding masters so that they lose their individuality, and thus their ability to serve on another. We don’t learn to serve each other by means of data; we learn by means of experience, which is brought forward through civilization through stories, wherein are the ties of myriad strands of data.

Queen Elizabeth was finally convinced that the monopolies, though they appeared to buy consolidation of her throne, were costing her far more than an open market would. The data had always been there, but the stories hadn’t trickled up to the throne.

Get Thee To a Nunnery

On By John David Duke JrIn Art, PhilosophyLeave a comment
On the descent into madness

The contest for the greatest play in the English language comes down to one of two Shakespeare plays: Hamlet and Macbeth. Both of these plays delve deeply into the psyche of ordinary men and women who enter the realm of madness. The plays themselves and the characters therein resonate deeply, crossing boundaries temporal and cultural. In our contemporary culture, the descent into madness is the theme of two of the most popular record albums ever recorded, Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon and The Wall. The former used to rival Michael Jackson’s Thriller for worldwide sales, and is still the second most selling record of all time. I’m sure that as soon as either David Gilmore or Roger Waters dies (Rick Wright, RIP) many new fans will restore the rivalry at the top of the all-time charts

Shakespeare draws a picture for us: Hamlet, young Hamlet, possessed by the ghost of his father to avenge his death, has been veritably banished by his uncle to England, whereupon he will be murdered, as everybody knows. By some twist of fate and the adventuring spirit of young Hamlet, he escapes, making his way back to Elsinore. Upon his arrival at the outskirts, he stumbles across an open grave. Holding up the skull of Yorick, his father’s jester, and a favorite person from his childhood, he says, “I knew him.”

Linear perspective insists that all parallel lines converge upon the horizon. Well, here at the open grave, the horizon been brought dramatically forward, and Hamlet experiences the confrontation which is a response to his melodramatic soliloquy: what dreams may come after we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.

Hamlet 1948 réal : Laurence Olivier Laurence Olivier Collection Christophel
Hamlet 1948: Laurence Olivier

Not for long, for the grave is not passive; it is active, yawning, galloping, devouring. In a brilliant interpretation of the subtlest kind, Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet, when he hears the approaching funeral procession, tosses the skull of Yorick back into the grave, just in time for old Yorick to receive the recently deceased and politically important Ophelia.

All the powers of the earth are here converging, with love, politics, royalty, vengeance, and that always-pressing anxiety intersecting over a grave. War is ever on the horizon, hemming everyone within easy reach of the same.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun

But it’s sinking

Racing around to come up behind you again

Banquo’s ghost won’t rest, either, charging up from the grave to confront, wordlessly, the ambitious Macbeth.

Here’s a curious aside: Richard Burton, an actor of some note, refused to play Macbeth because, as he says, he cannot be dominated by a woman in that way. The irony is captivating once you come to the understanding that he drove himself to drink over his treacherous divorce in order to win for himself the great prize, Elizabeth Taylor, who dominated him.

The descent into madness, and its appeal to popular and literary culture, is not limited to obsessive thoughts concerning the grave. “This is the end. There is an end to me. Life has no purpose, no meaning.” No, that’s maudlin stuff. Pap. Child’s play. The descent into madness is the lonely individual coping with the active, ongoing confrontation of the grave, that all our evil deeds and the evil deeds of many others manage to wriggle free from death’s strong bonds in an effort to possess us ahead of time.

Ordinary people have a fascination with the exploration of the descent of ordinary people into madness. A playwright or musician will set the scene in extraordinary circumstances, by my reckoning, to sell tickets on the entertainment value. The literary value, i.e., its meaningfulness to the paying ordinary public, is its deep-seated commonality, the themes which grasp a deep-seated anxiety, an anxiety which many people would declare possesses us all. Some of us, for various reasons, cope better with that anxiety than others.

The meaning of life, in other words, is a question of how to maintain meaningful behavior even while under possession of the grave.

Richard Burton’s Hamlet gestures toward Ophelia’s womb, saying, “Get thee to a nunnery.”

subhumans-from_the_cradle_to_the_grave

What Then Are the Bourgeois Virtues?

On By Adam GurriIn PhilosophyLeave a comment

What then are the bourgeois virtues? You ask me to preach. I’ll preach to thee.

The leading bourgeois virtue is the Prudence to buy low and sell high. I admit it. There. But it is also the prudence to trade rather than to invade, to calculate the consequences, to pursue the good with competence—Herbert Hoover, for example, energetically rescuing many Europeans from starvation after 1918.

Another bourgeois virtue is the Temperance to save and accumulate, of course. But it is also the temperance to educate oneself in business and in life, to listen to the customer humbly, to resist the temptations to cheat, to ask quietly whether there might be a compromise here—Eleanor Roosevelt negotiating the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

A third is the justice to insist on private property honestly acquired. But it is also the justice to pay willingly for good work, to honor labor, to break down privilege, to value people for what they can do rather than for who they are, to view success without envy, making capitalism work since 1776.

A fourth is the Courage to venture on new ways of business. But it is also the courage to overcome the fear of change, to bear defeat unto bankruptcy, to be courteous to new ideas, to wake up next morning and face fresh work with cheer, resisting the despairing pessimism of the clerisy 1848 to the present. And so the bourgeoisie can have Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Courage, the pagan four. Or the Scottish three—Prudence, Temperance, and justice, the artificial virtues—plus enterprise, that is, Courage with another dose of Temperance.

Beyond the pagan virtues is the Love to take care of one’s own, yes. But it is also a bourgeois love to care for employees and partners and colleagues and customers and fellow citizens, to wish well of humankind, to seek God, finding human and transcendent connection in the marketplace in 2006, and in a Scottish benevolence c. 1759.

Another is the Faith to honor one’s community of business. But it is also the faith to build monuments to the glorious past, to sustain traditions of commerce, of learning, of religion, finding identity in Amsterdam and Chicago and Osaka.

Another is the Hope to imagine a better machine. But it is also the hope to see the future as something other than stagnation or eternal recurrence, to infuse the day’s work with a purpose, seeing one’s labor as a glorious calling, ing, 1533 to the present. So the bourgeoisie can have Faith, Hope, and Love, these three, the theological virtues.

That is, the bourgeois virtues are merely the seven virtues exercised in a commercial society. They are not hypothetical. For centuries in Venice and Holland and then in England and Scotland and British North America, then in Belgium, Northern France, the Rhineland, Sydney, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Bombay, Shanghai, and in a widening array of places elsewhere, against hardy traditions of aristocratic and peasant virtues, we have practiced them. We have fallen repeatedly, of course, into bourgeois vices. Sin is original. But we live in a commercial society, most of us, and capitalism is not automatically vicious or sinful. Rather the contrary.

“Bourgeois virtues” is no contradiction. It is the way we live now, mainly, at work, on our good days, and the way we should, Mondays through Fridays.

-Deirdre McCloskey, The Bourgeois Virtues

Unifying Moral Philosophy With Virtue Ethics

On By Adam GurriIn Philosophy4 Comments

One of the things that is apparent when you begin reading virtue ethicists is that they seem to find arguments that rely on pointing out consequences alone to be distasteful. You can see why someone like Deirdre McCloskey would take that tone, when she works in economics, that last stronghold of utilitarianism. But such arguments often provoke dismissal—“virtue would be nice in an ideal world, but down here on the ground we have to deal with practical concerns.”

The distaste for argument-by-consequences isn’t held by virtue ethicists alone of course; it is also characteristic of many schools of deontology. The intellectual descendants of Kant believe that you should do your duty just because it is your duty. Virtue ethicists, however, argue that mere rule-following is not all there is to ethics. Aristotle pointed out that the very particularity of circumstances made the possible combination of factors too great to boil down to general rules. Navigating such particularities requires lived experience, and the development of phronesis; practical wisdom, translated into latin as prudentia, which became the English word prudence.

Virtue ethics as I understand it takes the best of consequentialism and deontology and integrates them into a much more human framework. Prudence, in the older sense of broad practical wisdom, includes within it the more modern sense of prudence, which is concerned solely with consequences and interest. As Albert Hirschman argued, even our notion of “interest” used to be much broader than it is now. Broader even than so-called “enlightened” self-interest which takes the long term into account, as opposed to myopic self-interest which is merely opportunistic. Given the unity of the virtues, a virtue ethicist ought to hold that consequences do in fact matter, they are just not all that matters.

Among the original cardinal virtues, and Aquinas’ famous seven, is justice; the virtue of always giving what is due. This seems to me to be the virtue of recognizing and acting on principles that have deontic authority—that is, the virtue of performing our duties. McCloskey’s recent paper on institutions has a good treatment on such deontic principles, which she argues are conjective in nature. Being able to distinguish the deontic from the merely suggested is, I think, also an important part of (the older sense of) prudence.

But why should anyone care about either consequences or duty? At bottom our desires and our reasons, no matter how seemingly rational, are grounded by some sort of faith. Some basic things we take for granted or hold dear to us, some things that cannot be rationally justified because they are themselves the basis of your justifications.

Prudence, justice, faith, courage, temperance, charity, and hope—ingredients for a meaningful life, for being the sort of person you can look in the mirror without shame. While seeing the wisdom in the accomplishments of consequentialist and deontologist thinkers, I believe that virtue ethics provides the best framework for grounding and making the best use of those accomplishments.

Character, Moral Education, and the Good: A Response to Joseph Heath’s Dismissal of Virtue Ethics

On By Adam GurriIn Philosophy2 Comments

As some of you are aware, I am currently working on a business book based on the virtue ethics framework. Knowing this, Samuel Hammond recommended his very favorite book on business ethics: Morality, Competition, and the Firm: The Market Failure Approach to Business Ethics by the formidable Joseph Heath.  From the very beginning of the book, I suspected Sam was up to something—I’m no fan of Pareto-type reasoning in moral matters, and that is basically all of what Heath had originally intended to offer on the subject of business ethics. I did greatly enjoy the chapter (which was originally this paper) in which Heath argued that we should treat agency theory (and by implication, most of game theory and economics) as a branch of critical theory. That is, we need not treat it as revealed truth, but rather as a series of thought experiments from which we can draw valuable lessons. Thus, while there is far less opportunism than agency theory would predict, the “fault lines” of major corporate scandals fall right where agency theory would lead us to believe they would be. This is a profoundly McCloskeyan perspective.

But when I got to the chapter on virtue ethics, I realized that old Sam had laid a trap for me, and I had walked right into it. Heath is ruthless in his dismissal of virtue ethics, calling it “debunked” and essentially no better than “folk psychology”. Ensnared in Sam’s machinations, I feel at this point helpless to do anything but see his diabolical scheme to completion. That is, I’d like to offer a response.

Heath offers three critiques: first, that psychology has demonstrated that character as virtue ethics understands it does not exist. Second, that sociology has demonstrated that the process of moral learning virtue ethicists embrace is at odds with reality. And finally, that the notion of the good in virtue ethics is at odds with liberal neutrality.

The Situationist Critique

Heath’s criticism from psychology is largely the same situationist argument that has been lobbed at virtue ethics for years, pursued especially by John Dorris. The long and short of this argument is that hundreds of psychological experiments have shown that people’s behavior is highly sensitive to situations. Moreover, people who seem to have a virtue in one area show little correlation with displaying the very same virtue in another area—the clearest case of this being Harshorne and May’s study demonstrating that many students who are honest in one context are frequently deceitful in another.

My response to this critique cannot compete with the many virtue ethicists who have already risen to the task. But I will draw on their responses, and defend them as decisive.

Heath argues that good behavior in an area where we have settled habits don’t “correlate in any significant way with behavior in other types of situations, even ones that are only slightly different.” This is odd, given that Harshorne and May’s finding was that there was typically a .23 correlation between any two areas where honesty was called upon, a correlation which I should think would be considered quite large in most areas of social science research. Situationists have a tendency to focus on the fact that those apparently influenced by the situation comprise a supermajority, and neglect the fact that a substantial minority do not fit this narrative. Those who invoke the Milgram experiment, for instance, forget that 45% of the participants refused to complete the experiment.

These experiments, moreover, have a few serious defects if the goal is to “debunk” the psychology behind virtue ethics. First, other than the Harshorne and May experiment, most of these were one-time affairs. The virtue ethics of Aristotle, and of people such as Julia Annas who emphasis the skill analogy of virtue, has moral learning as one of the central components. The problem with one-shot experiments is that we don’t get to see whether those involved took anything away from their own actions, once the point of the experiment was revealed. Second, in order for these experiments to have “debunked” virtue ethics, it must be supposed that virtue ethicists believe that most people have achieved complete virtue.

Aristotle certainly did not believe such a thing. Deirdre McCloskey may believe something like that, but I follow Christian Miller in thinking that most of us have merely developed a variable range of local character traits, but only a minority manage to develop global character traits—that is, most character traits for most people are domain-specific. Nevertheless, there is nothing about this which suggests that the domain cannot be expanded, and eventually become global. Moreover, this possibility is suggested by the minority of participants in psychology experiments who do exhibit good character in a number of circumstances.

Local character traits also answer another point made by Heath—that if full virtue is indeed rare, then:

Of course, it is then incumbent upon the virtue theorist not only to show that such rare individuals do exist, but that other people are able to identify them reliably (so that emulation of these persons can serve some kind of useful function in everyday morality).

But if the path to complete virtue (which most people never finish) involves developing a lot of local character traits along the way, then everyday morality would by and large involve learning from virtue as it is observed in local contexts. And indeed Annas emphasizes just this, without using the terminology of local character traits. In Intelligent Virtue, she argues that we grow to recognize courage in a variety of specific contexts—on the one hand, seeing one’s parents chase off a vicious dog, on the other, watching a video of the passive resistance tactics used during the civil rights movement. Two very different types of courage; each possible to develop in a local way. But the locality of each does not preclude the possibility of developing them into a more global character trait, with time and experience.

Following Annas, I also think that Heath significantly misunderstands what she calls the “intellectualist” aspects of Aristotelian virtue. Once it is understand that practical wisdom unifies the virtues through a combination of habituated dispositions and reasoning, Heath’s argument loses a lot of its bite. To quote Annas:

Doris gives an example where a colleague invites you to dinner when your spouse is absent, and an attempt at seduction is clearly in the offing. Only the situationist, he thinks, will have the intelligence to avoid the dinner at the outset; the person who relies on character feels ‘secure in the knowledge of [their] righteousness’ and goes along – only for it to be probable that their reliance will turn out to be misguided. Doris misses the point that the virtuous person would have an intelligent understanding of what fidelity requires, and would do just what Doris says the situationist would do. Only somebody clueless about what virtue required would rely on the force of habit alone.

“Lead me not into temptation” is a prudent, time-tested strategy for preserving one’s virtues.

This is particularly relevant to Heath’s observation that how people behave often has more to do with construal of a situation than with anything objective about the situation itself. He suggests that business ethicists could more productively focus on influencing how their students construe particular situations. But if this is possible—that is, if a professor is capable of teaching a student how to construe future situations in such a way that makes them behave ethically when they would not have—how can this be described as anything but a persistent character trait in the student? How is such a thing in any way at odds with the traditional conception of practical wisdom? Aristotle’s phronesis is quite literally the ability to read a situation—to determine how to do the right thing, in the right way, in relation to the right people.

The student-teacher relationship brings us to the second part of Heath’s criticism.

Peers Are More Persuasive Than Teachers

On the subject of moral education, Heath argues:

The concern raised by criminological studies is that virtue theory, despite being social, may be social in the wrong way. It emphasizes the “vertical” dimension of behavioral transmission, from parents or authority figures to children, instead of the “horizontal,” from one peer to another. It also assigns greater importance to interactions in the past—on the grounds that they produce habits, which sediment to form character—over interactions in the present. Criminological research suggests that this puts the emphasis on the wrong set of social interactions. When it comes to determining criminality, horizontal interactions appear to be far more important than vertical ones.

To the extent that virtue ethicists have over-emphasized the role of parents, teachers, mentors, and authority figures in general in moral development, this is an appropriate criticism. Like Protagoras, I believe that we spend all our lives teaching and being taught how to be virtuous by everyone we encounter. Our peer group is always much larger than our mentor group, and since we are of the same status it is them that we are expected to emulate (though our mentors obviously prefer us to emulate only the best of them).

Annas observed of skills in general that “Skilled dispositions are not static conditions; they are always developing, being sustained or weakened” and further argued that it is all too common for skills to “ossify and decay” when allowed to. Given the important role that peers within our skilled community play in providing points of reference for, and sometimes constructive criticism and error correction, it makes sense that our skills may languish if we fall into a peer community with low standards and a poor ethic when it comes to the maintenance of the skill in question. Practical wisdom is the skill necessary for the exercise of the virtues, and a peer group that lacks wisdom can inhibit one’s ability to hone and maintain that skill, or acquire it in the first place. Again, this is implicit in the important role that Aristotle gives to friendship and community, and explicit in MacIntyre’s own formulation.

Nevertheless I don’t think that crimonology is the best basis for drawing conclusions about people in general. Heath does, because of the conclusions about character he drew from psychology (which I contested above) and because he buys into Hannah Arendt’s theory that evil is banal, inspired by a patently false understanding of Adolf Eichmann’s character. The Milgram experiment is frequently invoked in discussions of the banality of evil, this in spite of the fact that the participants who went along with their instructions were often agitated and shell-shocked by what they were doing. They were hardly simple yes-men who were blasé to the apparent suffering they were inflicting or the possibility that they were doing something wrong.

A Neutered Liberalism

Heath’s final argument is that virtue ethics flies in the face of modern democratic liberalism because it posits a substantive notion of the good. Heath embraces Rawls’ “reasonable pluralism” and calls for neutrality “with respect to all ‘big-picture’ views” in political matters.

This is perfect rubbish. Liberalism is a notion of the good, and it must be. Otherwise, why not be neutral with respect to people’s choice to form a community of pedophiles, or a community where murder laws are not enforced? Attempts to take the very historically specific compromise under which modern liberal states emerged and justify them in terms of neutrality is a fool’s errand. John Rawls failed in the task, and so will anyone else that attempts it. The idea that a political order must be justified by some sort of consensus—real or the result of some ethical autoCAD—is itself a substantive idea of the good of politics. Equality, which Heath holds up as a cardinal liberal political virtue, is as far from neutral as it gets—and this goes for both the ideal of equality before the law and the ideal of equality in outcomes.

There are certainly pragmatic reasons to argue for greater or lesser variety in the conceptions of good that people are allowed to pursue within the bounds of the law. But we need a substantive conception in order to draw those boundaries—or else we fall into the problems found in pure narratives of federalism, where we find ourselves with no rationale for opposing slave-states and other horrors.

If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You a Saint?

Heath concludes the sociology section with the following:

Again, it is always possible to design a more sophisticated, cognitivist version of virtue theory, which would avoid any commitment to these discredited common-sense ideas about bad upbringing and deviant values. Yet this is an uphill battle, because the traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of virtue is the primary source of these common-sense ideas in Western societies. Rather than trying to rehabilitate the old-fashioned vocabulary, there is a lot to be said for starting from scratch, with the empirical evidence, and developing a vocabulary that is better suited to accounting for what we know and understand about norm-conformity and social deviance.

In business, when you work closely enough with someone on a regular enough basis, it doesn’t take long before you can anticipate how reliable they will be in a number of respects. Will they recognize moments where they can take initiative in a valuable way, and do so? Will they do the bare minimum of what is asked of them? Will they fail to even do the bare minimum, and simply come up with an excuse after the fact?

These are observable regularities. The fact that I cannot show Heath or anyone else these regularities in perfectly sterilized and controlled experimental conditions does not eradicate their existence. Evidence is important but like McCloskey I believe that our idea of what should count as evidence is often excessively narrow. If the only perspective that is allowed to count is one that self-consciously steps outside of life as it is lived and puts people in highly contrived scenarios that they frequently have little prior context for, then human nature is going to look very unrecognizable indeed—because that is not the perspective from which most human lives are lived.

In short, I think Heath significantly overplays the extent to which the core of virtue and character have been “discredited”, though I do not think we should ignore the enormously valuable contributions of the researchers that Heath draws upon. I also reject his remark that most virtue ethicist responses to situationists make virtue ethics unfalsifiable—though I hope he doesn’t have an overly positivist idea of what falsifiability entails. Christian Miller’s response opens the door to a number of possibly fruitful avenues of experimental investigation.

As a parting thought, I’d like to suggest that “starting from scratch” in ethics has rarely worked out very well, and that perhaps the “old-fashioned vocabulary” has persisted for a reason.

If You Can Fake That, You’ve Got It Made

On By Adam GurriIn Philosophy1 Comment

My cousin, a diligent grandson, gave me a lift down to Virginia this past Saturday so that we could celebrate our grandmother’s 90th birthday. We drove back the next morning, meaning that we spent a lot of time with one another and no one else that weekend. We held up a conversation through most of it, so it was time well spent.

We kept circling back to the concept of authenticity. Jon, a film editor, spoke of attitudes towards it in film, but also in rap, and artistic creation in general. Authenticity—not originality.

On my mind was Julia Annas; a not uncommon occurrence since I read her tremendous history of Hellenistic ethics, The Morality of Happiness. The book on my mind this past weekend, however, was Intelligent Virtue, which I am currently in the middle of.  Rather than a history, it is a positive contribution to modern virtue ethics. A large part of her framework involves the idea that virtue is analogous to a skill. This is simple comparison; Annas dives deep into what it means to acquire and exercise a skill.

This section in particular was floating in my mind while Jon and I talked:

What the learner needs to do is not only to learn from the teacher or role model how to understand what she has to do and the way to do it, but to become able to acquire for herself the skill that the teacher has, rather than acquiring it as a matter of routine, something which results in becoming a clone-like impersonator.

And while describing this to my cousin something dawned on me. I always took the line “good artists borrow, great artists steal” to mostly be about originality, but if that’s all it was about, the distinction kind of eluded me. Both “borrow” and “steal” imply that the artist is getting their stuff from somewhere else, but what’s the difference between the two?

Thinking in terms of Annas’ explanation of the process of learning a skill, it finally made sense. The good artist is still learning their voice; when they take inspiration from other artists they merely borrow because their art is still fundamentally someone else’s. It is like “becoming a clone-like impersonator”. The great artist, on the other hand, steals in the sense that they make the art their own. This does not mean that they do “original” work; they still take it from somewhere, just as the pianist must acquire their skill from a teacher.

This concept of making something your own is a bit of a black box, where the human experience is concerned. The chasm between merely copying your teacher and the beginning of real understanding—how do we bridge it? Yet we all did it as children, and adults everywhere are doing it every day with new skills they acquire out of a desire to or for their work.

Authenticity is when you have made a skill, and your work, your own. That doesn’t mean it’s any good, of course—you can be authentically bad. But it’s a necessary achievement on the road to mastery.

The phronimos, person of practical wisdom, is one who has made their life their own and mastered the art of living well.