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Virtue, Reason, and Principle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

R. Jay Wallace
R. Jay Wallace*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6385, USA
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Extract

A common strategy unites much that philosophers have written about the virtues. The strategy can be traced back at least to Aristotle, who suggested that human beings have a characteristic function or activity (rational activity of soul), and that the virtues are traits of character which enable humans to perform this kind of activity excellently or well. The defining feature of this approach is that it treats the virtues as functional concepts, to be both identified and justified by reference to some independent goal or end which they enable people to attain (human flourishing, rational perfection, participation in practices, ‘narrative unity’ in a life). Some recent philosophers seem to have hoped that by following this perfectionist strategy, we might attain a more convincing account of our moral practices than rule-based theories of ethics have been able to provide.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 21 , Issue 4 , December 1991 , pp. 469 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1991

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References

1 See in particular the Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 7.

2 See, for example, Macintyre, Alasdair After Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1981);Google Scholar and Wallace, James Virtues and Vices (Ithaca: Cornell Unviersity Press 1978).Google Scholar

3 After Virtue, ch. 15

4 McDowell’s, views are developed in the following series of papers (which I shall henceforth refer to by abbreviations of their titles): ‘Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?’ The Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 52 (1978) 13-29;Google Scholar ’Virtue and Reason,’ The Monist 62 (1979) 331-50; ’The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics,’ reprinted in Amelie Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press 1980) 359-76;CrossRefGoogle Scholar ’Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following,’ in Holtzman, Steven and Leich, Christopher eds., Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1981) 141-62;Google Scholar ’Values and Secondary Qualities,’ in Honderich, Ted ed., Morality and Objectivity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul 1985) 110-29;Google Scholar and ’Might There Be External Reasons?’ in Altham, J.E.J. and Harrison, Ross eds., World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Moral Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press forthcoming).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 See ‘The Role of Eudaimonia.’

6 I follow McDowell in distinguishing between practical reason and practical reasoning (see ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 349, n. 22): the former refers to the broader class of cases in which motivation and action are explained in terms of reasons; the latter, to the subset of these cases in which motivation and action are preceded by an episode of reasoning or deliberation. I assume that the Kantian and the Humean take divergent positions on the broader issue of practical reason, which determine correspondingly divergent positions on the question of practical reasoning.

Note also that the Humean claim that practical reasoning has its source in an agent’s desires needn’t entail that such reasoning is instrumental or maximizing. On this point see Williams, Bernard ‘Internal and External Reasons,’ as reprinted in his Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Piess 1981) 101-13-CrossRefGoogle Scholar discussed by McDowell in ‘Might There be Externar Re.asons?’

7 The reason for this, in brief, is that motivation and intentional action are goal-directed phenomena, where such goal-directedness in turn requires the presence of desire; cf. Nagel, Thomas The Possibility of Altruism (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1978),Google Scholar ch. V. McDowell accepts this point see, e.g., his ‘Are Moral Requirements,’ 14-15.

8 The Possibility of Altruism, 29. McDowell refers to such desires as ‘consequential’ or ‘consequentially-ascribed’ desires: see ‘Are Moral Requirements,’ 15, 25.

9 For a more detailed discussion of the distinction between motivated and unmotivated desires, and its significance for the dispute between Kantians, and Humeans, see my paper ’How to Argue about Practical Reason,’ Mind 99 (1990) 355-85.Google Scholar

10 ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism,’ in Sen, Amartya and Williams, Bernard eds., Utilitarianism and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1982) 103-28CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 ‘Are Moral Requirements,’ 13, 24. Cf. ‘Might There Be External Reasons?’ §5, where McDowell represents the claim that the amoralist is necessarily irrational as ‘bluff.’ In the same section of this paper he allows that there might be a sense in which an amoral person could be considered irrational, associated with the normative claim that a virtuous agent is seeing matters ‘correctly’ or ‘aright’; but he concludes that it would be best not to describe the amoralist in these terms, as the description encourages the mistaken inference that there is a process of reasoning or deliberation that could lead the amoralist to become virtuous.

12 ‘The Role of Eudaimonia,’ esp. §§10-14

13 Cf. ‘Might There Be External Reasons?’ (esp. §4), where McDowell says that if a person has not been brought up to be virtuous, then it will generally be too late to reason with the person; what is required, to make such a person virtuous, is rather something like ‘conversion.’

14 A good account of this process can be found in Myles Bumyeat’s paper ‘Aristotle on Learning to be Good,’ in Amelie Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, 69-92.

15 ‘Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following,’ 155

16 Michael Smith, interprets McDowell, ’s complaint this way (and deftly deflates the complaint so interpreted) in his paper ‘The Humean Theory of Motivation,’ Mind 96 (1987), 43-4.Google Scholar In ‘Might there be External Reasons?’ §6, McDowell states more clearly than in his earlier papers that he does not object to the claim that reason-giving explanations are causal, only to the rigid schema into which the Humean attempts to force all such explanations.

17 My exposition in the remainder of this section relies mainly on ‘Virtue and Reason,’ which I take to contain the most developed statement of McDowell’s objection to the Humean approach.

18 ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 342-3

19 McDowell himself uses the expression ‘concern’; I take it he means by this tl:!.e kind of long-term or standing desire I characterized above.

20 ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 332-3,342-6

21 ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 343-6

22 A different Humean position would say simply that the agent should act on whichever first-order desire happens to be strongest, at the time of action. But I take it this would amount to a denial that there is anything like a conception of how to live that could guide or regulate the virtuous agent’s choices.

23 ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 345,346

24 ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 345-6; ‘Are Moral Requirements,’ 18-20, 22-3; ‘The Role of Eudaimonia,’ 372-3. McDowell attacks the idea of an ‘over-arching’ desire at the root of virtuous action, in place of the conception of how to live, in ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 343.

25 See, e.g., ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 346; ‘Are Moral Requirements,’ 19-20,23,25-6.

26 See, again, ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 345-6.

27 ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 340-2; cf. ‘The Role of Eudaimonia,’ 12, 14; ‘Values and Secondary Qualities,’ 122. In these passages McDowell is echoing Aristotle’s famous claim that generalizations in practical philosophy hold only for the most part; see, for example, Nicomachean Ethics 1097b 12ff.

28 ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 336; cf. the reference to ‘the inexorable workings of a machine,’ on 339. Indeed, mechanistic images and terminology recur frequently in McDowell’s characterization of the views in moral psychology that he opposes: for two other examples, see ‘Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following,’ 155; and ‘Values and Secondary Qualities,’ 122.

29 See, for example, Rawls, John ’Themes in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,’ in Förster, Eckart ed., Kant’s Transcendental Deductions (Stanford: Stanford University Press 1989), 81-113Google Scholar (especially §1); Höffe, Otfried ’Kants kategorischer Imperativ als Kriterium des Sittlichen,’ as reprinted in his Ethik und Politik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1979), 84-119;Google Scholar and O, Onora’Neill, ’Consistency in Action,’ reprinted in her Constructions of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 81-104.Google Scholar

30 Similar remarks apply, I think, to the version of contractualism proposed by Scanlon in ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism,’ which I have presented as a version of the Humean position. The charge of mechanical applicability might have more force against utilitarian versions of the Humean position, though even here I think the objection requires careful handling.

31 ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 340. On the point at issue see, more generally, the whole of §4 of that paper: though there are many things going on there, at least one of them is an attack on the idea that philosophical thought about our moral practices ‘should be undertaken at some external standpoint, outside our immersion in our familiar forms of life’ (341). As an objection to the kinds of principle-dependent accounts I have sketched, this complaint assumes that those accounts have foundationalist aspirations, and that is the assumption I am challenging.

32 In this connection, see Nagel’s, remarks about the ‘method of interpretation,’ in The Possibility of Altruism, 4, 18-23.Google Scholar Cf. ‘Might there be External Reasons?’ §5, where McDowell attributes to moral philosophers the desire to discover a ‘knockdown’ argument which would enable them to ‘force’ those indifferent to morality into caring about ethical ends. My point is that this characterization simply does not apply to sophisticated proponents of the Kantian approach, such as Nagel, who are under no illusions about the efficacy of their interpretations as instruments of moral reform or persuasion.

33 I have in mind here a form of intuitionism which holds that virtuous agents have a direct, non-inferential, quasi-perceptual grasp of the right or correct thing to do in particular circumstances of action (i.e. what Sidgwick called the ‘perceptional’ phase of intuitionism: see The Methods of Ethics, 7th ed. [Indianapolis: Hackett 1981], Book 1, ch. 8).

34 ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 344

35 See ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 345-6, also 334-5; and compare ‘Are Moral Requirements,’ 26-9; The Role of Eudaimonia,’ 372-3.

36 Cf. the references to aisthesis in Aristotle’s discussion of phronesis in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics. The dimension of informed perception in a broadly Aristotelian approach to practical reason is also stressed in David Wiggins, ‘Deliberation and Practical Reason,’ in Amelie Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, 221-40. Whether Aristotle himself took practical reason to include a dimension of perceptual intuition is a more complicated question, whose resolution requires (at least) an interpretation of Aristotle’s notoriously obscure remarks about nous in Book VI of the Nicomachean Ethics.

37 See, e.g., Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, eds., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell1953), §§241-2.

38 It is of course not required that the virtuous agent actually have this justification running through her head at the time when she acts, only that she be able to provide it if asked. Thus we may suppose that in the heat of action, the virtuous agent will often be able to perceive immediately what it is that she is required to do. This would support McDowell’s account of the phenomenology of salience and silencing, without requiring us to give these phenomena an intuitionist interpretation.

39 Cf. McDowell’s remarks about danger, in ‘Values and Secondary Qualities,’ 119. There McDowell suggests that the normative aspect of our responses to danger—the idea that those responses are merited by the things we take to be dangerous—shows itself in our ability to give an account of what makes certain sorts of situations dangerous (what he refers to as an ‘explanatory theory of fear’). At the end of the same article, however, McDowell denies that the account provided need take the form of a set of general principles (122-3). This lends support to the connoisseurship interpretation of his views on practical reason, which I shall develop below.

40 Thus there are several points at which McDowell commits himself to the availability of arguments or justifications for the virtuous agent’s decisions: see, e.g.,’ Are Moral Requirements,’ 21-2; ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 342; ‘Might There be External Reasons?’ §4. These passages suggest that the arguments available to the virtuous agent have a ‘rhetorical’ character, and so fall short of ‘rationally necessitating’ their conclusions; I take it the import of such remarks is to reiterate McDowell’s view that moral argument and justification cannot be reconstructed as an appeal to antecedent principles.

41 Cf. ‘Virtue and Reason,’ 331, 347.

42 McDowell is of course not the only philosopher to have emphasized the elements of non-principle-dependent, case-specific judgments in Aristotle’s account of phronesis; for another recent example, see Charles Larmore, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1987), ch. 1.

43 I am not suggesting here that correctness of judgment is constituted by convergence or agreement in judgment, on the connoisseurship model; but that a degree of convergence among the connoisseurs is at least a condition for the truth of the claim that their powers of judgment enable them to see matters correctly, or aright.

44 Cf. ‘Values and Secondary Qualities,’ 127, n. 35, where he suggests that the requirement of convergence or agreement in an account of correct judgment should be ‘radically relativized to a point of view.’

45 In this connection see again McDowell’s remarks about the ‘external intelligibility’ of the virtuous agent’s conception of how to live (discussed in Section II above).

46 In ‘Mightthere be External Reasons?’ McDowell contends that an amoral agent may have an ‘external’ reason for acting as the virtuous agent does. As he develops this point, however (see especially §6), it turns out to involve an extremely weak notion of an external reason. On McDowell’s view, the claim that the amoral agent has an external reason to act virtuously is simply a reflection of the virtuous agent’s confidence in her own ethical outlook, a confidence which is supported by distinctively ethical arguments. This sort of confidence, however, might equally be sustained by members of a number of different moral sub-communities (or by the aficionado of music of the second Viennese school, to take McDowell’s own example of a non-ethical case). To say that one has an external reason, in this sense, is to say no more than that there is a way of acting or judging which is in conformity with the (possibly esoteric) standards of some community. Even if we allow McDowell this way of speaking, however, the question remains as to the authority of an esoteric conception of morality to govern the lives of those who are not themselves virtuous already. This is the question I am raising in the text.

47 This is, I take it, one source of the continuing appeal that utilitarianism has for many people, though I myself find Kantian strategies, or Scanlon’s quasi-Humean contractualism, to be much more promising.

48 This is Scanlon’s suggestion, in ‘Contractualism and Utilitarianism.’

49 Thomas Nagel aims to establish this conclusion, in The Possibility of Altruism.

50 Though there is not the space to argue the point here, I believe this is a common failing of the following works: Philippa Foot, ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,’ reprinted in her Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Blackwell 1978), 157-73; Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 1984); Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1986); Bernard Williams, ‘Persons, Character, and Morality’ and ‘Moral Luck,’ both reprinted in his Moral Luck, 1-39; also his Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1985).

51 In addition to the works cited inn. 29 above, see, for instance, Barbara Herman, ‘On the Idea of Acting from the Motive of Duty,’ The Philosophical Review 90 (1981) 359-82; Christine Korsgaard, ‘Skepticism about Practical Reason,’ The Journal of Philosophy (1986) 5-25; Onora O’Neill, Constructions of Reason; and the papers collected in Otfried Hoffe, ed., Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten: Ein kooperativer Kommentar (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann 1989). Because of its obvious Kantian inspiration, Scanlon’s contractualism might also be considered in this connection; certainly it seems to me more promising than utilitarianism as a way of developing a Humean alternative to the connoisseurship model.

52 Conversations with Samuel Freeman, Michael Smith, and especially Wolfgang Mann were helpful in clarifying the ideas developed in this paper. I have also benefited from the very useful comments of two anonymous referees for The Canadian Journal of Philosophy. Work on the paper was supported by a grant from the Research Foundation of the University of Pennsylvania.