Abstract
One of the most prominent strands in contemporary work on the virtues consists in the attempt to develop a distinctive—and compelling—account of practical reason on the basis of Aristotle’s ethics. In response to this project, several eminent critics have argued that the Aristotelian account encourages a dismissive attitude toward moral disagreement. Given the importance of developing a mature response to disagreement, the criticism is devastating if true. I examine this line of criticism closely, first elucidating the features of the Aristotelian account that motivate it, and then identifying two further features of the account that the criticism overlooks. These further features show the criticism to be entirely unwarranted. Once these features are acknowledged, a more promising line of criticism suggests itself—namely, that the Aristotelian account does too little to help us to resolve disputes—but that line of objection will have to be carried out on quite different grounds.
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Notes
By ‘ethical,’ ‘moral’ and their cognates I simply mean to mark out considerations that bear on the question of how best to live.
Robert Merrihew Adams makes the same point about internal conflict, seeing it as “not only a vexation and a potential hindrance to resolute action” but also “a wellspring of vitality and sensitivity, and a check against one-sidedness and fanaticism” (Merrihew Adams 1985, p 11).
Nicomachean Ethics 1105a27-33; hereafter “NE.” All Aristotle translations are from The Complete Works of Aristotle (Aristotle 1984), the Revised Oxford Translation.
Many of the relevant papers have been collected in Mind, Value & Reality (McDowell 1998), hereafter “MVR”; I shall refer to their reprinted versions.
Others have queried the exegesis, suggesting that Aristotle is not the particularist that McDowell makes him out to be. See Irwin 2001. I do not find this line of criticism convincing, but there would be a point in addressing the objection concerning disagreement either way. For one could embrace the essentials of McDowell’s account even if one were convinced it lacked the pedigree he claims for it.
There are appreciable differences between Hursthouse’s account and McDowell’s but they share the features that have triggered the line of objection I wish to consider (Hursthouse 1999). These features also figure in Martha Nussbaum’s reading of Aristotle as found in The Fragility of Goodness (Nussbaum 2001) and Love’s Knowledge (Nussbaum 1992). (Nussbaum may no longer identify with the Aristotelian view. See Clarke “Nussbaum and Moral Theory,” forthcoming in The Philosophy of Martha Nussbaum.) David Wiggins has contributed to the relevant readings of Aristotle, see especially Wiggins 1980. Sabina Lovibond has developed McDowell’s account with an eye to its political implications in Ethical Formation. Iris Murdoch’s reconstruction of Plato’s ethics also shares the relevant features of the Aristotelian view and, as I will argue, helps to bring out one of its latent features. All of the Aristotelians at issue wish to revive Aristotle’s moral psychology rather than his particular list of virtues or specific political beliefs (about women and slavery, for instance). (For this reason they are sometimes called, or call themselves, “neo-Aristotelians.”)
Wiggins shows how the ideas of uncodifiability and upbringing work together: “[I]f you try to transpose ideals or principles that the phronimos appeals to into self-sufficient injunctions, instructions or prescriptions of the form ‘it is always right, or it is always just, when so and so (when…), to do such and such act (the act---)’—if you forget the outlook or mentality itself and concentrate instead on verbal expressions in which those subject to some non-Aristotelian system of moral education might supposedly be catechized or trained—then the resulting form of words will be false and will remain false (open to counterexamples) however lengthy you make the specification of the so-and-so or the such-and-such (---)” (Wiggins 2004, pp 481–482).
“The result of habituation is a motivational tendency, but one with a conceptual and hence rational aspect” (McDowell 1996a, p 30). Specifically, “someone who has been properly brought up has been habituated into seeing the appropriate actions as worth going in for in the specific way that is expressed by bringing them under the concept of the noble” (ibid., p 23).
“Virtue and Reason,” MVR, p 73. Similarly: “As Aristotle consistently says, the best generalizations about how one should behave hold only for the most part. If one attempted to reduce one’s conception of what virtue requires to 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 was not susceptible of capture in any universal formula” (ibid., p 58). Principles may be universal without being general, and vice-versa, so one might wonder which property McDowell wishes to target with the thesis of uncodifiability. I think he has in mind ordinary types of precepts—‘Don’t lie’—which are both generalizations (they apply over a range of cases) and universal (they apply to all agents). As I explain in the main text, he is concerned with what is required for the successful application of such rules of conduct. Hare 1972 discusses the difference between universal and general principles.
“The idea [of codifiability] is that a conception of doing well (the virtuous person’s correct conception among others) can be spelled out as a set of rules of conduct, presumably in such form as this: ‘In such-and-such conditions one should do such-and-such.’… If we had a set of rules of this kind, there would be no problem about what it would be to apply them correctly, as it were by their own lights; that would be a matter of deduction” (“Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology,” MVR, p 27). See also McDowell 1996a, §VII. Hursthouse 1999 discusses the idea of codifiability in slightly different (but helpful) terms, pp 39–42 and 56–59.
“We might gloss ‘reading situations correctly’ as: seeing them in the light of the correct conception of doing well. …Actions can reveal the shape of a way of seeing situations in the light of the end. It is precisely by doing this that they display the character of their agent” (McDowell 1996a, p 26, emphasis added).
This is the position Kant takes in some of his remarks (e.g. Grounding 391 and 403) though it does not seem to be his considered view, as growing attention to Kant’s doctrine of virtue makes clear. (See for instance Engstrom 2002.) J. S. Mill employs this sense of codifiability when he attributes to Bentham the aspiration to devise a code of laws “containing within itself all that is necessary for its own interpretation” (Mill 1969, p 243).
J. B. Schneewind spells out one such notion of ‘discretion’ with reference to Grotius, the idea being that discretion operates where principles are indeterminate, without however representing an exercise of moral insight. “He [Grotius] does not think the laws of nature determine what we are to do down to the last detail. Where the law is indeterminate, however, what operates is not insight but discretion. In such cases we choose freely among permissible acts.... The virtuous are simply those who obey the law where it is specific, and stay within the bounds of the permissible where it leaves room for choice. In the Grotian morality … there is no room for any special cognitive ability arising from virtue” (Schneewind 1997, p 184). Irwin 2001 attributes another such notion to Aristotle himself. McDowell criticizes weaker versions of codifiability in “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology,” MVR, pp 34–35, n. 22.
Cf. Lovibond 2002, pp 29–31. In her illuminating study, Lovibond emphasizes the extent to which codifiability and its opposite are indexed to divergent views about the role of culture (socialization) in explaining good moral practice. I don’t dispute this, but I emphasize the role of character because it is a necessary and sufficient condition for good moral practice on the Aristotelian view, while proper upbringing is only a necessary condition. In short, virtue guarantees good practice, but the best upbringing doesn’t guarantee virtue (which is why virtue and vice are still categories of voluntary agency for Aristotle).
Gary Watson notes that codifiability would seem to be a matter of degree, and that this makes it difficult to evaluate the thesis (Watson 1990, p 453). I take it to be a scalar concept that nevertheless marks an important distinction. See also n. 39 below.
Akin in particular to the capacity to perceive secondary qualities; see “Values and Secondary Qualities,” MVR.
Thoughtful discussion of this aspect of the view is found in Darwall et al. 1992, pp 154–160.
“Virtue and Reason,” MVR, esp. p 71. Cf. Hursthouse 1999, pp 174–199 and Foot 2003, pp 96–98. Hursthouse, like Foot, takes a more straightforwardly naturalistic approach to the virtues. So while she agrees with McDowell in essentials on this point, she also allows for more overlap than he does between the virtuous and the vicious person’s notions of the good life. This makes her more optimistic about the prospect of grounding the virtues in an account of human flourishing.
The features of the view noted in this paragraph can be found throughout the ethical writings collected in MVR, perhaps most readily in “Virtue and Reason,” “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” and “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology.”
Lovibond encourages this way of thinking when she speaks of uncodifiability “draw[ing] us toward a conception of moral rationality that dispenses more or less completely with general principles” (Lovibond 2002, p 50). Compare: “however good our principles, they will not make us act well unless we are alive to the detail that endows them with relevance to this or that episode of lived experience” (Lovibond 2002, p 29).
I take the point to be worth stressing because overlooking it makes it easier to suppose that the Aristotelian has an ‘anything goes’ account of practical rationality that flies in the face of our ordinary practices (which do involve appeals to principles) and I believe this supposition to be deeply mistaken.
For one helpful discussion, see Gottlieb 1991.
As for instance when Robert Louden says, “Within the context of a polis … the strategy of pointing to a phronimos makes a certain sense. However, to divorce this strategy from its social and economic roots and then to apply it to a very different sort of community—one where people really do not know each other all that well, and where there is wide disagreement on values—does not. And this, I fear, is what contemporary virtue ethicists have tried to do” (Louden 1997, p 213).
Murdoch, in The Sovereignty of Good, provides the best explanation of why learning goodness cannot be a matter of mechanical imitation when she reminds us that the virtues as exemplified have a deeply individual nature. One person’s courageous action cannot be another person’s courageous action because of the differences in their life histories and circumstances. “It is all very well to say that ‘to copy a right action is to act rightly … but what is the form I am supposed to copy?” (Murdoch 2001, p 29).
No doubt there are stages of moral development to be distinguished in connection with more and less thoughtful kinds of imitation. What to make of Aristotle’s conception of habituation is a subject of controversy. For one overview, see Kristjánsson (2006). McDowell defends an interpretation consistent with the conception of habituation operative here in “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology,” MVR and in “Deliberation and Moral Development.”
As Wallace notes, McDowell distinguishes Kantian and Humean versions of principle-centered views. On the Kantian version, the reason is rationally compelling because it is an application of the moral law understood as a universally accessible law of reason. On the Humean version, the reason is rationally compelling because it is straightforwardly derived from a desire anyone could be expected to share, such as the desire that people related to oneself should not suffer (ibid., §II).
See McDowell, “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” MVR, §6 for one discussion.
McDowell suggests that we might speak of such an agent as ‘missing a reason’ without, however, displaying ‘irrationality’ in “Might There be External Reasons?” MVR, §5. Cf. Korsgaard 1986, §5.
This is the moral of “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” (MVR).
The continent person’s grasp of situational requirements does not, on this reading, match that of the virtuous person. See “Virtue and Reason,” MVR, §3; “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology,” MVR, §14 and McDowell 1996b, esp. §§4–5.
McDowell does not dispute that Aristotle himself may have been complacent in his views, but he maintains that this is not a structural feature of Aristotle’s theory or the Aristotelian model he derives from it. (See for instance McDowell 1996a, pp 31–32 and McDowell 1996c, pp 80–82.) The criticisms I consider are directed specifically at the Aristotelian model. Van Alstyne 1998 seeks to defend Aristotle himself from the charge of complacency.
For Aristotle these points include ‘brutishness,’ ‘immaturity’ (such as found in children), ‘softness’ and ‘resistance,’ the ‘incontinent’ and the ‘continent,’ with most people falling somewhere between incontinence and continence (NE 1150a15, NE 1152a25–26). One might see this as the briefest sketch of the possibilities.
Schneewind 1997, p 200. Bentham was quite alive to this concern; see his wittily caustic footnotes in chapter 2 of An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 1789. As Postema notes, it was precisely Bentham’s belief that judgments of utility, and only these, are universally (and readily) intelligible that led him to embrace the principle of utility (Postema 2006, esp. pp 30–31).
“The Power of Example,” O’Neill 1989, p 172. See also O’Neill 1996, pp 78–89. O’Neill identifies her target as “Wittgensteinian” or “particularist” approaches to ethics, but there is no doubt it includes the approach here under consideration. On the Wittgensteinian aspects of McDowell’s view, see for instance “Virtue and Reason,” MVR, §4; “Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following,” MVR; and Lovibond 2002, esp. chapters 1–2.
David Bostock criticizes Aristotle’s own view in these terms and usefully dramatizes O’Neill’s worry in the process. “Let us take a modern example, where opinions genuinely do differ, say chastity: is this a virtue or not?... It may well be that I think that chastity is a virtue, and that this is mainly because I was brought up many years ago, when this opinion was common. But you may think that it is not, for you are younger, and have been exposed to rather different influences. Is there any way of settling our disagreement? According to Aristotle’s proposal … there should be, for reasoning can be applied. So we can call in the aid of our practically wise friends, and we can all sit down to engage in an investigation of whether chastity does or does not conduce to eudaimonia. But … this investigation must fail. For we will discover that we all have different conceptions of what eudaimonia is, and that these are given simply by our different education, so that there is simply no more to be said” (Bostock 2000, p 97).
Ibid., pp 101–102. Blackburn does not make clear why the view that others ‘don’t see’ aright is any more conducive to smugness than the view that they ‘don’t respond’ aright to what is universally seen. It is true that the Aristotelian can always charge her disputants with blindness, but why shouldn’t the non-cognitivist rebuff hers with the charge of an incurable pathological defect? Nor is it clear why there should be less normative force to the criticism that someone doesn’t see what to do than that they lack the proper attitude. For discussion, see Ross and Turner forthcoming.
Williams 1985, p 218, n. 8. As an alternative, Broadie suggests giving ground on the thesis of uncodifiability: “In multicultural societies, or in the context of a world-community, less can safely be left implicit, because different groups differ in many of their implicit assumptions…. It is a task of equipping practical agents with what they now need for ethical intercommunication when their previous, homegrown, resources in this regard are no longer adequate for all their interactions with others. Un-talked-over principles are fine in some communal situations, like that in which Aristotle lived by comparison with modern society. On the other hand, Aristotle as a practical philosopher might well have been willing to engage in a lot more ethical codification had he lived under different historical circumstances” (Broadie 1997, p 129). This appears to misunderstand codifiability in two respects. The Aristotelian position is that codification is not possible beyond a certain point given the complexity of the demands moral requirements make upon us. And, as I will argue, uncodifiability is consistent with discursive justification. It seems sensible to suppose, in keeping with the spirit of Broadie’s suggestion, that the degree of codifiability that is possible will vary according to historical and social conditions. It is not obvious, however, that the more multicultural a society, the greater its capacity to codify its norms.
Capacities so acquired form our ‘second nature,’ discussed by McDowell in 1996c, pp 66–87, and “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” MVR, p 188ff.
Wallace also adduces a comment of McDowell’s in support of a relativist interpretation (Wallace 1991, p 487, n. 39). As I understand it, the comment supports only the idea that different communities will have different phronimoi. This does not lead to relativism in the relevant sense unless we assume, further, that the different local norms the phronimoi represent are necessarily incommensurable. Hursthouse suggests that the charge of relativism follows from the admission that rational argument cannot necessarily bridge the gap between the virtuous and the non-virtuous, but I’ve suggested above that there are additional aspects of the view to encourage such a charge (Hursthouse 1987, pp 232–233).
Politics 1269a3-4. See also Sabine 1963, pp 17–18.
Nussbaum 1993; McDowell 1986, §§5–6. Julia Annas notes that this combination of social embeddedness and aspiration to objectivity is characteristic of classical virtue theories, and that the aspiration half of the combination has been frequently overlooked by critics (and in some cases proponents) of contemporary virtue theory (Annas 2005, p 523).
Having just summed up the doctrine of the mean, Aristotle notes, “Hence … it is no easy task to be good. For in everything it is no easy task to find the middle, e.g. to find the middle of a circle is not for every one but for him who knows; so, too, any one can get angry—that is easy—or give or spend money; but to do this to the right person, to the right extent, at the right time, with the right aim, and in the right way, that is not for every one, nor is it easy; that is why goodness is both rare and laudable and noble” (NE 1109a24-1109a29).
“Virtue and Reason,” MVR, p 73. McDowell views Plato’s metaphor of the Forms as a likeminded attempt to acknowledge the “colossal difficulty of attaining a capacity to cope clear-sightedly” with ethical reality and so as “a kind of response to uncodifiability” (ibid.). In other words, what Plato conveyed more dramatically with the Forms, Aristotle conveyed with the more prosaic image of the mean, but both concepts aim to help to keep in view the acute fallibility of moral judgments while encouraging our aspirations to objectivity.
Wallace considers this as a reading of McDowell’s view in Wallace 1991, pp 484–487.
E.g., “It is not to be supposed that the appreciation of the particular instance … is a straightforward or easy attainment on the part of those who have it; that either, on casual contemplation of an instance, one sees it in the right light, or else one does not, and is then unreachable by argument…. Admitting the dependence on appreciation does not imply that, if someone has the sort of specific determination of rationality we are considering, the right way to handle a given situation will always be clear to him on unreflective inspection of it” (“Virtue and Reason,” MVR, p 65). Similarly, in the Platonic case, as McDowell sees it, “being in touch with the Forms is not meant to be a substitute for hard thinking about what to do” (McDowell 2000, p 113).
McDowell elaborates: “One exploits contrivances similar to those one exploits in other areas where the task is to back up the injunction ‘See it like this’: helpful juxtapositions of cases, descriptions with carefully chosen terms and carefully placed emphasis, and the like. (Compare, for instance, what one might do and say to someone who says ‘Jazz sounds to me like a mess, a mere welter of uncoordinated noise’).” “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?” MVR, p 85.
See particularly “The Idea of Perfection” in Murdoch 2001, pp 1–44.
What is it to achieve virtue, then? The implication is that the virtuous person is highly advanced in a developmental process that, while never finished, admits of appreciable stages.
This is one reason why, as Hursthouse notes, an ethics of virtue is more at home with the notion of ‘good’ action than of ‘right’ action (Hursthouse 1999, p 69).
McDowell 1996c, p 40. This remark makes a wider point in context, but it includes, and expresses perfectly, the present point.
Lovibond 2002 carefully discusses the wherewithal of agents to perform this kind of critique.
As when O’Neill criticizes McDowell’s account for having too little to say when disagreement appears (O’Neill 1996, p 88).
J. E. J. Altham, for instance, rejects the idea that character functions cognitively partly on the grounds that it cannot help us to distinguish moral truth from moral illusion, thereby leaving “the epistemological work to be done.” He simply assumes that this work is to be done by moral philosophy (Altham 1986, p 283).
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Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Melissa Merritt, Paul Muench and Valerie Tiberius for very helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. I also wish to thank two anonymous referees for their comments.
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Clarke, B. Virtue and Disagreement. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 13, 273–291 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9197-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-009-9197-z