Abstract
In this paper I argue that excising a final end from accounts of virtue does them more harm than good. I attempt to establish that the justification of contemporary virtue ethics suffers if moved this one step too far from the resources in traditional accounts. This is because virtue, as we tend to describe it, rests on an account of practical rationality wherein the role of the final end is integral. I highlight the puzzles that are generated by the ellipsis that is “the role of a final end” in contemporary theories of virtue. The authors of these theories devise ad hoc solutions for these puzzles, puzzles that do not exist for traditional final end-based accounts. Recent critics of virtue ethics have certainly not been satisfied the explanations being offer in lieu of references to a final end. As a remedy, I recommend that the role of a final end be reintroduced in contemporary virtue ethics. I hope to explain that there is nothing to be frightened of and much to be gained.
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Notes
“Ancient and medieval philosophers—or some of them at any rate—regarded it as evident, demonstrable, that human beings must always act with some end in view, and even with some one end in view” (Anscombe 1957, section 21).
These ancient accounts come into very awkward conflict with the assumptions of contemporary philosophers developing accounts of practical rationality today. “In contemporary philosophy of action, there is a fervid debate about whether any intention action must be prompted in part by a desire, or whether it is possible to be moved by action by a belief—such as the belief that doing so-and-so is morally required—alone. The debate all takes place against the background of the assumption that the beliefs and desires are as different as gold and oxygen” (queryHurthouse 2006, pp. 15–16; also Vogler 2002, p. 1).
Hard virtue theories take the virtues to be forms of “responsiveness to reasons that one correctly identifies through phronesis” (Russell 2009, p. 413).
The following authors disagree on other fundamentals of ancient virtue theory, but not on the general role practical rationality plays in traditional accounts of virtue. Julia Annas discusses practical rationality and the intellectual component of virtue in a systematic way in The Morality of Happiness, (Oxford 1993) p. 47–134. Sarah Broadie has a chapter titled “Practical Rationality” in Ethics with Aristotle (Oxford 1991). There is Myles Burnyeat’s “Aristotle on Learning to be Good”, reprinted in the same text, p. 205–230. Originally in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Rorty (Berkeley 1980). Burnyeat writes that “Aristotle is not simply giving us a bland reminder that virtue takes practice. Rather, practice has cognitive powers, in that it is the way we learn what is noble or just,” p.210. John Cooper refers to Burnyeat’s article in his own discussion of Aristotelian virtue in “Reason, Virtue, Moral Value”, Reason and Emotion, (Princeton 1999) p. 253–280. (First printed in Rationality in Greek Thought, ed. Michael Frede and Gisela Striker (Oxford 1996, pp. 81–114.)) One further example is Nancy Sherman’s “The Habituation of Character”, Aristotle’s Ethics: Critical Essays, ed. Nancy Sherman (Rowan and Littlefield 1999). Sherman writes, “to say that we become just by doing just actions is to abbreviate a whole series of steps.” She then goes on to discuss these steps, p.247.
This distinction is how Rachana Kamtekar (2004) and others have responded to situationist complaints against virtue ethics, ones that assume that subject compliance in the most famous of the Milgram experiment iterations undermines virtue ethics itself. Most of us only partake in general moral development, or what the ancients referred to as “oikeiosis.”
In his recent summary of the situationist virtue ethics debate, John Doris rejects Christine Swanton’s interpretation of the Milgram results by pointing out that subjects that complied failed to use practical rationality. Yet on this point virtue ethicists should agree: anyone who complied failed at being practically rational. Doris has taken virtue ethics to depend on it being unusual to find people failing to be practically rational, “However terrible the obedient subjects might have felt about continuing to harm the learner, they did not put the prohibition on harm into practice at the level of a resolution to act. The right conclusion was, “I’ll stop.” The wrong one was, “I’ll go on obeying the experimenter.” The atrocious one was, “I’ll go on and on and on…”… For the person who accepts the moral prohibition on harm, continuing to obey the experimenter even one step beyond the learner’s explicit protest, let alone all the way to the end, is a clear failure of practical rationality- as we put it, a case of moral disassociation” (Doris 2010, p. 366).
This means that traditional virtue ethics should not be considered wholly incompatible with the findings of Jonathan Haidt and others (Haidt 2001, pp. 814–834).
This description can also be found in psychological research like Alan Waterman’s (1988).
It is available to those who recognize a final end to suggest that we will merely discover that a concern for our all-things-considered agency is what integrates all of our worthy projects, de facto. The ancient accounts suggest that the process is cognitive earlier on, and that this will not be discovered unless certain beliefs are had. But I consider this issue to be in the realm of the discoverable facts of moral psychology.
This means that traditional virtue ethics should not be considered wholly incompatible with the findings of Jonathan Haidt and others (Haidt 2001, pp. 814–834).
One of David Schmidtz’s objections to the idea of a final end was that it required a maximizing perspective, but it does nothing but encourage satisficing within various local components (Schmidtz 1995, p. 37).
In conversation, I’ve found that virtue ethicists who deny a final end in print don’t mind agreeing to the idea that we match norms with motivations in order to become more virtuous. (“Well, that’s just what I meant!” I’ve heard.) Why then, obscure what was, historically, so helpful about virtue ethics? When we recognize some behavior we regret, traditional virtue ethics points us to certain explanations: was the norm wrong? Were you not motivated properly?
Musonius Rufus and Epictetus provide excellent examples of such advice-giving in the ancient world.
In Hursthouse’s most recent writing on practical wisdom she concedes that the virtuous’s knowledge may be “plain worldly knowledge”, but she regards this as something she must apologize for. She regards her task to be explaining what remains so special about this “plain worldly knowledge” (queryHurthouse 2006).
Because Hursthouse emphasizes the role of practical rationality to such a degree, this alone keeps her view from being categorized as a soft virtue ethic.
Hursthouse really emphasizes it. In a recent talk she has suggested that other contemporary virtue ethicists are failing to pay proper attention to the phronimos, and she is given to making apologies for writing about ethics, since she herself is not phronimos.
Sarah Broadie’s concern about how even Aristotelian interpreters depict Aristotelian moral reasoning is helpful here. She suggests that there is “no encouragement from examples in the texts” to “depict the good Aristotelian agent as aiming to do something called “acting courageously”, “acting generously”, etc. Footnote 67, Ethics with Aristotle (1991 p. 264). In the main body of her discussion she writes that having such principles can only be a “surrogate” for practical rationality (1991, p. 249).
One reviewer teased that with Hursthouse there is always the “lurking figure of the phronimos” to contend with. Gilbert Harman’s review of Hursthouse’s book also raises this objection. http://www.princeton.edu/~harman/Papers/Hursthouse.pdf
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Thanks go to Brad Inwood and Tad Brennan for their helpful comments and discussion. Thanks to Fred Miller, Richard Bett, Patrick Goodin, Thanassis Samaras, James Mahon, and Alan Pichanick for their comments on an earlier draft. This paper was developed while I was a visiting scholar at the Social Philosophy and Policy Center in Bowling Green, Ohio. And thanks especially to two anonymous reviewers, who were each very helpful and kind.
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Baker, J. Who’s Afraid of a Final End? The Role of Practical Rationality in Contemporary Accounts of Virtue. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 85–98 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9317-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-011-9317-4