Virtue Ethics

Virtue Ethics: A Survey

2011-09-23T11:39:00.000-04:00

Nafsika Athanassoulis

Email: n.athanassoulis@keele.ac.uk
Keele University, United Kingdom

Originally published: August 28, 2004

Virtue ethics is a broad term for theories that emphasize the role of character and virtue in moral philosophy rather than either doing one’s duty or acting in order to bring about good consequences. A virtue ethicist is likely to give you this kind of moral advice: “Act as a virtuous person would act in your situation.”

Most virtue ethics theories take their inspiration from Aristotle who declared that a virtuous person is someone who has ideal character traits. These traits derive from natural internal tendencies, but need to be nurtured; however, once established, they will become stable. For example, a virtuous person is someone who is kind across many situations over a lifetime because that is her character and not because she wants to maximize utility or gain favors or simply do her duty. Unlike deontological and consequentialist theories, theories of virtue ethics do not aim primarily to identify universal principles that can be applied in any moral situation. And virtue ethics theories deal with wider questions—“How should I live?” and “What is the good life?” and “What are proper family and social values?”

Since its revival in the twentieth century, virtue ethics has been developed in three main directions: Eudaimonism, agent-based theories, and the ethics of care. Eudaimonism bases virtues in human flourishing, where flourishing is equated with performing one’s distinctive function well. In the case of humans, Aristotle argued that our distinctive function is reasoning, and so the life “worth living” is one which we reason well. An agent-based theory emphasizes that virtues are determined by common-sense intuitions that we as observers judge to be admirable traits in other people. The third branch of virtue ethics, the ethics of care, was proposed predominately by feminist thinkers. It challenges the idea that ethics should focus solely on justice and autonomy; it argues that more feminine traits, such as caring and nurturing, should also be considered.

Here are some common objections to virtue ethics. Its theories provide a self-centered conception of ethics because human flourishing is seen as an end in itself and does not sufficiently consider the extent to which our actions affect other people. Virtue ethics also does not provide guidance on how we should act, as there are no clear principles for guiding action other than “act as a virtuous person would act given the situation.” Lastly, the ability to cultivate the right virtues will be affected by a number of different factors beyond a person’s control due to education, society, friends and family. If moral character is so reliant on luck, what role does this leave for appropriate praise and blame of the person?

This article looks at how virtue ethics originally defined itself by calling for a change from the dominant normative theories of deontology and consequentialism. It goes on to examine some common objections raised against virtue ethics and then looks at a sample of fully developed accounts of virtue ethics and responses.

Table of Contents

1. Changing Modern Moral Philosophy

a. Anscombe

b. Williams

c. MacIntyre

2. A Rival for Deontology and Utilitarianism

a. How Should One Live?

b. Character and Virtue

c. Anti-Theory and the Uncodifiability of Ethics

d. Conclusion

3. Virtue Ethical Theories

a. Eudaimonism

b. Agent-Based Accounts of Virtue Ethics

c. The Ethics of Care

d. Conclusion

4. Objections to Virtue Ethics

a. Self-Centeredness

b. Action-Guiding

c. Moral Luck

5. Virtue in Deontology and Consequentialism

6. References and Further Reading

a. Changing Modern Moral Philosophy

b. Overviews of Virtue Ethics

c. Varieties of Virtue Ethics

d. Collections on Virtue Ethics

e. Virtue and Moral Luck

f. Virtue in Deontology and Consequentialism

1. Changing Modern Moral Philosophy

a. Anscombe

In 1958 Elisabeth Anscombe published a paper titled “Modern Moral Philosophy” that changed the way we think about normative theories. She criticized modern moral philosophy’s pre-occupation with a law conception of ethics. A law conception of ethics deals exclusively with obligation and duty. Among the theories she criticized for their reliance on universally applicable principles were J. S. Mill‘s utilitarianism and Kant‘s deontology. These theories rely on rules of morality that were claimed to be applicable to any moral situation (that is, Mill’s Greatest Happiness Principle and Kant’s Categorical Imperative). This approach to ethics relies on universal principles and results in a rigid moral code. Further, these rigid rules are based on a notion of obligation that is meaningless in modern, secular society because they make no sense without assuming the existence of a lawgiver—an assumption we no longer make.

In its place, Anscombe called for a return to a different way of doing philosophy. Taking her inspiration from Aristotle, she called for a return to concepts such as character, virtue and flourishing. She also emphasized the importance of the emotions and understanding moral psychology. With the exception of this emphasis on moral psychology, Anscombe’s recommendations that we place virtue more centrally in our understanding of morality were taken up by a number of philosophers. The resulting body of theories and ideas has come to be known as virtue ethics.

Anscombe’s critical and confrontational approach set the scene for how virtue ethics was to develop in its first few years. The philosophers who took up Anscombe’s call for a return to virtue saw their task as being to define virtue ethics in terms of what it is not—that is, how it differs from and avoids the mistakes made by the other normative theories. Before we go on to consider this in detail, we need to take a brief look at two other philosophers, Bernard Williams and Alasdair MacIntyre, whose call for theories of virtue was also instrumental in changing our understanding of moral philosophy.

b. Williams

Bernard Williams’ philosophical work has always been characterized by its ability to draw our attention to a previously unnoticed but now impressively fruitful area for philosophical discussion. Williams criticized how moral philosophy had developed. He drew a distinction between morality and ethics. Morality is characterized mainly by the work of Kant and notions such as duty and obligation. Crucially associated with the notion of obligation is the notion of blame. Blame is appropriate because we are obliged to behave in a certain way and if we are capable of conforming our conduct and fail to, we have violated our duty.

Williams was also concerned that such a conception for morality rejects the possibility of luck. If morality is about what we are obliged to do, then there is no room for what is outside of our control. But sometimes attainment of the good life is dependant on things outside of our control.

In response, Williams takes a wider concept, ethics, and rejects the narrow and restricting concept of morality. Ethics encompasses many emotions that are rejected by morality as irrelevant. Ethical concerns are wider, encompassing friends, family and society and make room for ideals such as social justice. This view of ethics is compatible with the Ancient Greek interpretation of the good life as found in Aristotle and Plato.

c. MacIntyre

Finally, the ideas of Alasdair MacIntyre acted as a stimulus for the increased interest in virtue. MacIntyre’s project is as deeply critical of many of the same notions, like ought, as Anscombe and Williams. However, he also attempts to give an account of virtue. MacIntyre looks at a large number of historical accounts of virtue that differ in their lists of the virtues and have incompatible theories of the virtues. He concludes that these differences are attributable to different practices that generate different conceptions of the virtues. Each account of virtue requires a prior account of social and moral features in order to be understood. Thus, in order to understand Homeric virtue you need to look its social role in Greek society. Virtues, then, are exercised within practices that are coherent, social forms of activity and seek to realize goods internal to the activity. The virtues enable us to achieve these goods. There is an end (or telos) that transcends all particular practices and it constitutes the good of a whole human life. That end is the virtue of integrity or constancy.

These three writers have all, in their own way, argued for a radical change in the way we think about morality. Whether they call for a change of emphasis from obligation, a return to a broad understanding of ethics, or a unifying tradition of practices that generate virtues, their dissatisfaction with the state of modern moral philosophy lay the foundation for change.

2. A Rival for Deontology and Utilitarianism

There are a number of different accounts of virtue ethics. It is an emerging concept and was initially defined by what it is not rather than what it is. The next section examines claims virtue ethicists initially made that set the theory up as a rival to deontology and consequentialism.

a. How Should One Live?

Moral theories are concerned with right and wrong behavior. This subject area of philosophy is unavoidably tied up with practical concerns about the right behavior. However, virtue ethics changes the kind of question we ask about ethics. Where deontology and consequentialism concern themselves with the right action, virtue ethics is concerned with the good life and what kinds of persons we should be. “What is the right action?” is a significantly different question to ask from “How should I live? What kind of person should I be?” Where the first type of question deals with specific dilemmas, the second is a question about an entire life. Instead of asking what is the right action here and now, virtue ethics asks what kind of person should one be in order to get it right all the time.

Whereas deontology and consequentialism are based on rules that try to give us the right action, virtue ethics makes central use of the concept of character. The answer to “How should one live?” is that one should live virtuously, that is, have a virtuous character.

b. Character and Virtue

Modern virtue ethics takes its inspiration from the Aristotelian understanding of character and virtue. Aristotelian character is, importantly, about a state of being. It’s about having the appropriate inner states. For example, the virtue of kindness involves the right sort of emotions and inner states with respect to our feelings towards others. Character is also about doing. Aristotelian theory is a theory of action, since having the virtuous inner dispositions will also involve being moved to act in accordance with them. Realizing that kindness is the appropriate response to a situation and feeling appropriately kindly disposed will also lead to a corresponding attempt to act kindly.

Another distinguishing feature of virtue ethics is that character traits are stable, fixed, and reliable dispositions. If an agent possesses the character trait of kindness, we would expect him or her to act kindly in all sorts of situations, towards all kinds of people, and over a long period of time, even when it is difficult to do so. A person with a certain character can be relied upon to act consistently over a time.

It is important to recognize that moral character develops over a long period of time. People are born with all sorts of natural tendencies. Some of these natural tendencies will be positive, such as a placid and friendly nature, and some will be negative, such as an irascible and jealous nature. These natural tendencies can be encouraged and developed or discouraged and thwarted by the influences one is exposed to when growing up. There are a number of factors that may affect one’s character development, such as one’s parents, teachers, peer group, role-models, the degree of encouragement and attention one receives, and exposure to different situations. Our natural tendencies, the raw material we are born with, are shaped and developed through a long and gradual process of education and habituation.

Moral education and development is a major part of virtue ethics. Moral development, at least in its early stages, relies on the availability of good role models. The virtuous agent acts as a role model and the student of virtue emulates his or her example. Initially this is a process of habituating oneself in right action. Aristotle advises us to perform just acts because this way we become just. The student of virtue must develop the right habits, so that he tends to perform virtuous acts. Virtue is not itself a habit. Habituation is merely an aid to the development of virtue, but true virtue requires choice, understanding, and knowledge. The virtuous agent doesn't act justly merely out of an unreflective response, but has come to recognize the value of virtue and why it is the appropriate response. Virtue is chosen knowingly for its own sake.

The development of moral character may take a whole lifetime. But once it is firmly established, one will act consistently, predictably and appropriately in a variety of situations.

Aristotelian virtue is defined in Book II of the Nicomachean Ethics as a purposive disposition, lying in a mean and being determined by the right reason. As discussed above, virtue is a settled disposition. It is also a purposive disposition. A virtuous actor chooses virtuous action knowingly and for its own sake. It is not enough to act kindly by accident, unthinkingly, or because everyone else is doing so; you must act kindly because you recognize that this is the right way to behave. Note here that although habituation is a tool for character development it is not equivalent to virtue; virtue requires conscious choice and affirmation.

Virtue “lies in a mean” because the right response to each situation is neither too much nor too little. Virtue is the appropriate response to different situations and different agents. The virtues are associated with feelings. For example: courage is associated with fear, modesty is associated with the feeling of shame, and friendliness associated with feelings about social conduct. The virtue lies in a mean because it involves displaying the mean amount of emotion, where mean stands for appropriate. (This does not imply that the right amount is a modest amount. Sometimes quite a lot may be the appropriate amount of emotion to display, as in the case of righteous indignation). The mean amount is neither too much nor too little and is sensitive to the requirements of the person and the situation.

Finally, virtue is determined by the right reason. Virtue requires the right desire and the right reason. To act from the wrong reason is to act viciously. On the other hand, the agent can try to act from the right reason, but fail because he or she has the wrong desire. The virtuous agent acts effortlessly, perceives the right reason, has the harmonious right desire, and has an inner state of virtue that flows smoothly into action. The virtuous agent can act as an exemplar of virtue to others.

It is important to recognize that this is a perfunctory account of ideas that are developed in great detail in Aristotle. They are related briefly here as they have been central to virtue ethics’ claim to put forward a unique and rival account to other normative theories. Modern virtue ethicists have developed their theories around a central role for character and virtue and claim that this gives them a unique understanding of morality. The emphasis on character development and the role of the emotions allows virtue ethics to have a plausible account of moral psychology—which is lacking in deontology and consequentialism. Virtue ethics can avoid the problematic concepts of duty and obligation in favor of the rich concept of virtue. Judgments of virtue are judgments of a whole life rather than of one isolated action.

c. Anti-Theory and the Uncodifiability of Ethics

In the first book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle warns us that the study of ethics is imprecise. Virtue ethicists have challenged consequentialist and deontological theories because they fail to accommodate this insight. Both deontological and consequentialist type of theories rely on one rule or principle that is expected to apply to all situations. Because their principles are inflexible, they cannot accommodate the complexity of all the moral situations that we are likely to encounter.

We are constantly faced with moral problems. For example: Should I tell my friend the truth about her lying boyfriend? Should I cheat in my exams? Should I have an abortion? Should I save the drowning baby? Should we separate the Siamese twins? Should I join the fuel protests? All these problems are different and it seems unlikely that we will find the solution to all of them by applying the same rule. If the problems are varied, we should not expect to find their solution in one rigid and inflexible rule that does not admit exception. If the nature of the thing we are studying is diverse and changing, then the answer cannot be any good if it is inflexible and unyielding. The answer to “how should I live?” cannot be found in one rule. At best, for virtue ethics, there can be rules of thumb—rules that are true for the most part, but may not always be the appropriate response.

The doctrine of the mean captures exactly this idea. The virtuous response cannot be captured in a rule or principle, which an agent can learn and then act virtuously. Knowing virtue is a matter of experience, sensitivity, ability to perceive, ability to reason practically, etc. and takes a long time to develop. The idea that ethics cannot be captured in one rule or principle is the “uncodifiability of ethics thesis.” Ethics is too diverse and imprecise to be captured in a rigid code, so we must approach morality with a theory that is as flexible and as situation-responsive as the subject matter itself. As a result some virtue ethicists see themselves as anti-theorists, rejecting theories that systematically attempt to capture and organize all matters of practical or ethical importance.

d. Conclusion

Virtue ethics initially emerged as a rival account to deontology and consequentialism. It developed from dissatisfaction with the notions of duty and obligation and their central roles in understanding morality. It also grew out of an objection to the use of rigid moral rules and principles and their application to diverse and different moral situations. Characteristically, virtue ethics makes a claim about the central role of virtue and character in its understanding of moral life and uses it to answer the questions “How should I live? What kind of person should I be?” Consequentialist theories are outcome-based and Kantian theories are agent-based. Virtue ethics is character-based.

3. Virtue Ethical Theories

Raising objections to other normative theories and defining itself in opposition to the claims of others, was the first stage in the development of virtue ethics. Virtue ethicists then took up the challenge of developing full fledged accounts of virtue that could stand on their own merits rather than simply criticize consequentialism and deontology. These accounts have been predominantly influenced by the Aristotelian understanding of virtue. While some virtue ethics take inspiration from Plato’s, the Stoics’, Aquinas’, Hume’s and Nietzsche’s accounts of virtue and ethics, Aristotelian conceptions of virtue ethics still dominate the field. There are three main strands of development for virtue ethics: Eudaimonism, agent-based theories and the ethics of care.

a. Eudaimonism

“Eudaimonia” is an Aristotelian term loosely (and inadequately) translated as happiness. To understand its role in virtue ethics we look to Aristotle’s function argument. Aristotle recognizes that actions are not pointless because they have an aim. Every action aims at some good. For example, the doctor’s vaccination of the baby aims at the baby’s health, the English tennis player Tim Henman works on his serve so that he can win Wimbledon, and so on. Furthermore, some things are done for their own sake (ends in themselves) and some things are done for the sake of other things (means to other ends). Aristotle claims that all the things that are ends in themselves also contribute to a wider end, an end that is the greatest good of all. That good is eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is happiness, contentment, and fulfillment; it’s the name of the best kind of life, which is an end in itself and a means to live and fare well.

Aristotle then observes that where a thing has a function the good of the thing is when it performs its function well. For example, the knife has a function, to cut, and it performs its function well when it cuts well. This argument is applied to man: man has a function and the good man is the man who performs his function well. Man’s function is what is peculiar to him and sets him aside from other beings—reason. Therefore, the function of man is reason and the life that is distinctive of humans is the life in accordance with reason. If the function of man is reason, then the good man is the man who reasons well. This is the life of excellence or of eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is the life of virtue—activity in accordance with reason, man’s highest function.

The importance of this point of eudaimonistic virtue ethics is that it reverses the relationship between virtue and rightness. A utilitarian could accept the value of the virtue of kindness, but only because someone with a kind disposition is likely to bring about consequences that will maximize utility. So the virtue is only justified because of the consequences it brings about. In eudaimonist virtue ethics the virtues are justified because they are constitutive elements of eudaimonia (that is, human flourishing and wellbeing), which is good in itself.

Rosalind Hursthouse developed one detailed account of eudaimonist virtue ethics. Hursthouse argues that the virtues make their possessor a good human being. All living things can be evaluated qua specimens of their natural kind. Like Aristotle, Hursthouse argues that the characteristic way of human beings is the rational way: by their very nature human beings act rationally, a characteristic that allows us to make decisions and to change our character and allows others to hold us responsible for those decisions. Acting virtuously—that is, acting in accordance with reason—is acting in the way characteristic of the nature of human beings and this will lead to eudaimonia. This means that the virtues benefit their possessor. One might think that the demands of morality conflict with our self-interest, as morality is other-regarding, but eudaimonist virtue ethics presents a different picture. Human nature is such that virtue is not exercised in opposition to self-interest, but rather is the quintessential component of human flourishing. The good life for humans is the life of virtue and therefore it is in our interest to be virtuous. It is not just that the virtues lead to the good life (e.g. if you are good, you will be rewarded), but rather a virtuous life is the good life because the exercise of our rational capacities and virtue is its own reward.

It is important to note, however, that there have been many different ways of developing this idea of the good life and virtue within virtue ethics. Philippa Foot, for example, grounds the virtues in what is good for human beings. The virtues are beneficial to their possessor or to the community (note that this is similar to MacIntyre’s argument that the virtues enable us to achieve goods within human practices). Rather than being constitutive of the good life, the virtues are valuable because they contribute to it.

Another account is given by perfectionists such as Thomas Hurka, who derive the virtues from the characteristics that most fully develop our essential properties as human beings. Individuals are judged against a standard of perfection that reflects very rare or ideal levels of human achievement. The virtues realize our capacity for rationality and therefore contribute to our well-being and perfection in that sense.

b. Agent-Based Accounts of Virtue Ethics

Not all accounts of virtue ethics are eudaimonist. Michael Slote has developed an account of virtue based on our common-sense intuitions about which character traits are admirable. Slote makes a distinction between agent-focused and agent-based theories. Agent-focused theories understand the moral life in terms of what it is to be a virtuous individual, where the virtues are inner dispositions. Aristotelian theory is an example of an agent-focused theory. By contrast, agent-based theories are more radical in that their evaluation of actions is dependent on ethical judgments about the inner life of the agents who perform those actions. There are a variety of human traits that we find admirable, such as benevolence, kindness, compassion, etc. and we can identify these by looking at the people we admire, our moral exemplars.

c. The Ethics of Care

Finally, the Ethics of Care is another influential version of virtue ethics. Developed mainly by feminist writers, such as Annette Baier, this account of virtue ethics is motivated by the thought that men think in masculine terms such as justice and autonomy, whereas woman think in feminine terms such as caring. These theorists call for a change in how we view morality and the virtues, shifting towards virtues exemplified by women, such as taking care of others, patience, the ability to nurture, self-sacrifice, etc. These virtues have been marginalized because society has not adequately valued the contributions of women. Writings in this area do not always explicitly make a connection with virtue ethics. There is much in their discussions, however, of specific virtues and their relation to social practices and moral education, etc., which is central to virtue ethics.

d. Conclusion

There are many different accounts of virtue ethics. The three types discussed above are representative of the field. There is a large field, however, of diverse writers developing other theories of virtue. For example, Christine Swanton has developed a pluralist account of virtue ethics with connections to Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s theory emphasizes the inner self and provides a possible response to the call for a better understanding of moral psychology. Swanton develops an account of self-love that allows her to distinguish true virtue from closely related vices, e.g. self-confidence from vanity or ostentation, virtuous and vicious forms of perfectionism, etc. She also makes use of the Nietzschean ideas of creativity and expression to show how different modes of acknowledgement are appropriate to the virtues.

Historically, accounts of virtue have varied widely. Homeric virtue should be understood within the society within which it occurred. The standard of excellence was determined from within the particular society and accountability was determined by one’s role within society. Also, one’s worth was comparative to others and competition was crucial in determining one’s worth.

Other accounts of virtue ethics are inspired from Christian writers such as Aquinas and Augustine (see the work of David Oderberg). Aquinas’ account of the virtues is distinctive because it allows a role for the will. One’s will can be directed by the virtues and we are subject to the natural law, because we have the potential to grasp the truth of practical judgments. To possess a virtue is to have the will to apply it and the knowledge of how to do so. Humans are susceptible to evil and acknowledging this allows us to be receptive to the virtues of faith, hope and charity—virtues of love that are significantly different from Aristotle’s virtues.

The three types of theories covered above developed over long periods, answering many questions and often changed in response to criticisms. For example, Michael Slote has moved away from agent-based virtue ethics to a more Humean-inspired sentimentalist account of virtue ethics. Humean accounts of virtue ethics rely on the motive of benevolence and the idea that actions should be evaluated by the sentiments they express. Admirable sentiments are those that express a concern for humanity. The interested reader must seek out the work of these writers in the original to get a full appreciation of the depth and detail of their theories.

4. Objections to Virtue Ethics

Much of what has been written on virtue ethics has been in response to criticisms of the theory. The following section presents three objections and possible responses, based on broad ideas held in common by most accounts of virtue ethics.

a. Self-Centeredness

Morality is supposed to be about other people. It deals with our actions to the extent that they affect other people. Moral praise and blame is attributed on the grounds of an evaluation of our behavior towards others and the ways in that we exhibit, or fail to exhibit, a concern for the well-being of others. Virtue ethics, according to this objection, is self-centered because its primary concern is with the agent’s own character. Virtue ethics seems to be essentially interested in the acquisition of the virtues as part of the agent’s own well-being and flourishing. Morality requires us to consider others for their own sake and not because they may benefit us. There seems to be something wrong with aiming to behave compassionately, kindly, and honestly merely because this will make oneself happier.

Related to this objection is a more general objection against the idea that well-being is a master value and that all other things are valuable only to the extent that they contribute to it. This line of attack, exemplified in the writings of Tim Scanlon, objects to the understanding of well-being as a moral notion and sees it more like self-interest. Furthermore, well-being does not admit to comparisons with other individuals. Thus, well-being cannot play the role that eudaimonists would have it play.

This objection fails to appreciate the role of the virtues within the theory. The virtues are other-regarding. Kindness, for example, is about how we respond to the needs of others. The virtuous agent’s concern is with developing the right sort of character that will respond to the needs of others in an appropriate way. The virtue of kindness is about being able to perceive situations where one is required to be kind, have the disposition to respond kindly in a reliable and stable manner, and be able to express one’s kind character in accordance with one’s kind desires. The eudaimonist account of virtue ethics claims that the good of the agent and the good of others are not two separate aims. Both rather result from the exercise of virtue. Rather than being too self-centered, virtue ethics unifies what is required by morality and what is required by self-interest.

b. Action-Guiding

Moral philosophy is concerned with practical issues. Fundamentally it is about how we should act. Virtue ethics has criticized consequentialist and deontological theories for being too rigid and inflexible because they rely on one rule or principle. One reply to this is that these theories are action guiding. The existence of “rigid” rules is a strength, not a weakness because they offer clear direction on what to do. As long as we know the principles, we can apply them to practical situations and be guided by them. Virtue ethics, it is objected, with its emphasis on the imprecise nature of ethics, fails to give us any help with the practicalities of how we should behave. A theory that fails to be action-guiding is no good as a moral theory.

The main response to this criticism is to stress the role of the virtuous agent as an exemplar. Virtue ethics reflects the imprecise nature of ethics by being flexible and situation-sensitive, but it can also be action-guiding by observing the example of the virtuous agent. The virtuous agent is the agent who has a fully developed moral character, who possesses the virtues and acts in accordance with them, and who knows what to do by example. Further, virtue ethics places considerable of emphasis on the development of moral judgment. Knowing what to do is not a matter of internalizing a principle, but a life-long process of moral learning that will only provide clear answers when one reaches moral maturity. Virtue ethics cannot give us an easy, instant answer. This is because these answers do not exist. Nonetheless, it can be action-guiding if we understand the role of the virtuous agent and the importance of moral education and development. If virtue consists of the right reason and the right desire, virtue ethics will be action-guiding when we can perceive the right reason and have successfully habituated our desires to affirm its commands.

c. Moral Luck

Finally, there is a concern that virtue ethics leaves us hostage to luck. Morality is about responsibility and the appropriateness of praise and blame. However, we only praise and blame agents for actions taken under conscious choice. The road to virtue is arduous and many things outside our control can go wrong. Just as the right education, habits, influences, examples, etc. can promote the development of virtue, the wrong influencing factors can promote vice. Some people will be lucky and receive the help and encouragement they need to attain moral maturity, but others will not. If the development of virtue (and vice) is subject to luck, is it fair to praise the virtuous (and blame the vicious) for something that was outside of their control? Further, some accounts of virtue are dependent on the availability of external goods. Friendship with other virtuous agents is so central to Aristotelian virtue that a life devoid of virtuous friendship will be lacking in eudaimonia. However, we have no control over the availability of the right friends. How can we then praise the virtuous and blame the vicious if their development and respective virtue and vice were not under their control?

Some moral theories try to eliminate the influence of luck on morality (primarily deontology). Virtue ethics, however, answers this objection by embracing moral luck. Rather than try to make morality immune to matters that are outside of our control, virtue ethics recognizes the fragility of the good life and makes it a feature of morality. It is only because the good life is so vulnerable and fragile that it is so precious. Many things can go wrong on the road to virtue, such that the possibility that virtue is lost, but this vulnerability is an essential feature of the human condition, which makes the attainment of the good life all the more valuable.

5. Virtue in Deontology and Consequentialism

Virtue ethics offers a radically different account to deontology and consequentialism. Virtue ethics, however, has influenced modern moral philosophy not only by developing a full-fledged account of virtue, but also by causing consequentialists and deontologists to re-examine their own theories with view to taking advantage of the insights of virtue.

For years Deontologists relied mainly on the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals for discussions of Kant’s moral theory. The emergence of virtue ethics caused many writers to re-examine Kant’s other works. Metaphysics of Morals, Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View and, to a lesser extent, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, have becomes sources of inspiration for the role of virtue in deontology. Kantian virtue is in some respects similar to Aristotelian virtue. In the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant stresses the importance of education, habituation, and gradual development—all ideas that have been used by modern deontologists to illustrate the common sense plausibility of the theory. For Kantians, the main role of virtue and appropriate character development is that a virtuous character will help one formulate appropriate maxims for testing. In other respects, Kantian virtue remains rather dissimilar from other conceptions of virtue. Differences are based on at least three ideas: First, Kantian virtue is a struggle against emotions. Whether one thinks the emotions should be subjugated or eliminated, for Kant moral worth comes only from the duty of motive, a motive that struggles against inclination. This is quite different from the Aristotelian picture of harmony between reason and desire. Second, for Kant there is no such thing as weakness of will, understood in the Aristotelian sense of the distinction between continence and incontinence. Kant concentrates on fortitude of will and failure to do so is self-deception. Finally, Kantians need to give an account of the relationship between virtue as occurring in the empirical world and Kant’s remarks about moral worth in the noumenal world (remarks that can be interpreted as creating a contradiction between ideas in the Groundwork and in other works).

Consequentialists have found a role for virtue as a disposition that tends to promote good consequences. Virtue is not valuable in itself, but rather valuable for the good consequences it tends to bring about. We should cultivate virtuous dispositions because such dispositions will tend to maximize utility. This is a radical departure from the Aristotelian account of virtue for its own sake. Some consequentialists, such as Driver, go even further and argue that knowledge is not necessary for virtue.

Rival accounts have tried to incorporate the benefits of virtue ethics and develop in ways that will allow them to respond to the challenged raised by virtue ethics. This has led to very fruitful and exciting work being done within this area of philosophy.

6. References and Further Reading

a. Changing Modern Moral Philosophy

Anscombe, G.E. M., “Modern Moral Philosophy”, Philosophy, 33 (1958).

The original call for a return to Aristotelian ethics.

MacIntyre, A., After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1985).

His first outline of his account of the virtues.

Murdoch, I., The Sovereignty of Good (London: Ark, 1985)

Williams, B., Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985).

Especially Chapter 10 for the thoughts discussed in this paper.

b. Overviews of Virtue Ethics

Oakley, J., “Varieties of Virtue Ethics”, Ratio, vol. 9 (1996)

Trianosky, G.V. “What is Virtue Ethics All About?” in Statman D., Virtue Ethics (Cambridge: Edinburgh University Press, 1997)

c. Varieties of Virtue Ethics

Adkins, A.W.H., Moral Values and Political Behaviour in Ancient Greece from Homer to the End of the Fifth Century (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972).

An account of Homeric virtue.

Baier, A., Postures of the Mind (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985)

Blum, L.W., Friendship, Altruism and Morality (London: 1980)

Cottingham, J., “Partiality and the Virtues”, in Crisp R. and Slote M., How Should One Live? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)

Cottingham, J., “Religion, Virtue and Ethical Culture”, Philosophy, 69 (1994)

Cullity, G., “Aretaic Cognitivism”, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 32, no. 4, (1995a).

Particularly good on the distinction between aretaic and deontic.

Cullit,y G., “Moral Character and the Iteration Problem”, Utilitas, vol. 7, no. 2, (1995b)

Dent, N.J.H., “The Value of Courage”, Philosophy, vol. 56 (1981)

Dent, N.J.H., “Virtues and Actions”, The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 25 (1975)

Dent, N.J.H., The Psychology of the Virtues (G.B.: Cambridge University Press, 1984)

Driver, J., “Monkeying with Motives: Agent-based Virtue Ethics”, Utilitas, vol. 7, no. 2 (1995).

A critique of Slote’s agent-based virtue ethics.

Foot, P., Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).

Her more recent work, developing new themes in her account of virtue ethics.

Foot, P., Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978).

Her original work, setting out her version of virtue ethics.

Hursthouse, R., “Virtue Theory and Abortion”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 20, (1991)

Hursthouse, R., On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: OUP, 1999).

A book length account of eudaimonist virtue ethics, incorporating many of the ideas from her previous work and fully developed new ideas and responses to criticisms.

McDowell, J., “Incontinence and Practical Wisdom in Aristotle”, in Lovibond S and Williams S.G.,Essays for David Wiggins, Aristotelian Society Series, Vol.16 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996)

McDowel,l J., “Virtue and Reason”, The Monist, 62 (1979)

Roberts, R.C., “Virtues and Rules”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, vol. LI, no. 2 (1991)

Scanlon, T.M., What We Owe Each Other (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

A comprehensive criticism of well-being as the foundation of moral theories.

Slote, M., From Morality to Virtue (New York: OUP, 1992).

His original account of agent-based virtue ethics.

Slote, M., Morals from Motives, (Oxford: OUP, 2001).

A new version of sentimentalist virtue ethics.

Swanton, C., Virtue Ethics (New York: OUP, 2003).

A pluralist account of virtue ethics, inspired from Nietzschean ideas.

Walker, A.D.M., “Virtue and Character”, Philosophy, 64 (1989)

d. Collections on Virtue Ethics

Crisp, R. and M. Slote, How Should One Live? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

A collection of more recent as well as critical work on virtue ethics, including works by Kantian critics such as O’Neill, consequentialist critics such as Hooker and Driver, an account of Humean virtue by Wiggins, and others.

Crisp, R. and M. Slote, Virtue Ethics (New York: OUP, 1997).

A collection of classic papers on virtue ethics, including Anscombe, MacIntyre, Williams, etc.

Engstrom, S., and J. Whiting, Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics (USE: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

A collection bringing together elements from Aristotle, Kant and the Stoics on topics such as the emotions, character, moral development, etc.

Hursthouse, R., G. Lawrence and W. Quinn, Virtues and Reasons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

A collections of essays in honour of Philippa Foot, including contributions by Blackburn, McDowell, Kenny, Quinn, and others.

Rorty, A.O., Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (USA: University of California Press, 1980).

A seminal collection of papers interpreting the ethics of Aristotle, including contributions by Ackrill, McDowell and Nagel on eudaimonia, Burnyeat on moral development, Urmson on the doctrine of the mean, Wiggins and Rorty on weakness of will, and others.

Statman, D., Virtue Ethics (Cambridge: Edinburgh University Press, 1997).

A collection of contemporary work on virtue ethics, including a comprehensive introduction by Statman, an overview by Trianosky, Louden and Solomon on objections to virtue ethics, Hursthouse on abortion and virtue ethics, Swanton on value, and others.

e. Virtue and Moral Luck

Andree, J., “Nagel, Williams and Moral Luck”, Analysis 43 (1983).

An Aristotelian response to the problem of moral luck.

Nussbaum, M., Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)

Nussbaum, M., The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Includes her original response to the problem of luck as well as thoughts on rules as rules of thumb, the role of the emotions, etc.

Statman, D., Moral Luck (USA: State University of New York Press, 1993).

An excellent introduction by Statman as well as almost every article written on moral luck, including Williams’ and Nagel’s original discussions (and a postscript by Williams).

f. Virtue in Deontology and Consequentialism

Baron, M.W., Kantian Ethics Almost Without Apology (USA: Cornell University Press, 1995).

A book length account of a neo-Kantian theory that takes virtue and character into account.

Baron, M.W., P. Pettit and M. Slote, Three Methods of Ethics (GB: Blackwell, 1997).

Written by three authors adopting three perspectives, deontology, consequentialism and virtue ethics, this is an excellent account of how the three normative theories relate to each other.

Drive,r J., Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

A book length account of a consequentialist version of virtue ethics, incorporating many of her ideas from previous pieces of work.

Herman, B., The Practice of Moral Judgement (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993).

Another neo-Kantian who has a lot to say on virtue and character.

Hooker, B., Ideal Code, Real World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).

A modern version of rule-consequentialism, which is in many respects sensitive to the insights of virtue.

O’Neill, “Kant’s Virtues”, in Crisp R. and Slote M., How Should One Live? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).

One of the first Kantian responses to virtue ethics.

Sherman, N., The Fabric of Character (GB: Clarendon Press, 1989).

An extremely sympathetic account of Aristotelian and Kantian ideas on the emotions, virtue and character.

Sherman, N., Making a Necessity of Virtue (USA: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (IEP)

Virtue Ethics

2011-09-01T15:21:00.001-04:00

Virtue Ethics is person rather than action based. It looks at the moral character of the person carrying out an action.

Character-based ethics

A right act is the action a virtues person would do in the same circumstances.

Virtue ethics is person rather than action based: it looks at the virtue or moral character of the person carrying out an action, rather than at the ethical duties and rules, or the consequences of particular actions.

Virtue ethics not only deals with the rightness or wrongness of individual actions, it provides guidance as to the sort of characteristics and behaviours a good person will seek to achieve.

In that way, virtue ethics is concerned with the whole of a person's life, rather than particular episodes or actions.

A good person is someone who lives virtuously - who possesses and lives the virtues.

It's a useful theory since human beings are often more interested in assessing the character of another person than they are assessing the goodness or badness of a particular action.

This suggests that the way to build a good society is to help its members to be good people, rather than to use laws and punishments to prevent or deter actions.

But it wouldn't be helpful if a person had to be a saint to count as virtuous. For virtue theory to be really useful it needs to suggest only a minimum set of characteristics that a person needs to possess in order to be regarded as virtuous.

...being virtuous is more than having a particular habit of acting, e.g. generosity. Rather, it means having a fundamental set of related virtues that enable a person to live and act morally well.

James F Keenan, Proposing Cardinal Virtues, Theological Studies, 1995

Principles

Virtue ethics teaches:

An action is only right if it is an action that a virtuous person would carry out in the same circumstances.

A virtuous person is a person who acts virtuously

A person acts virtuously if they "possess and live the virtues"

A virtue is a moral characteristic that a person needs to live well.

Most virtue theorists would also insist that the virtuous person is one who acts in a virtuous way as the result of rational thought (rather than, say, instinct).

The three questions

The modern philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre proposed three questions as being at the heart of moral thinking:

Who am I?

Who ought I to become?

How ought I to get there?

Lists of the virtues

This poses a problem, since lists of virtues from different times in history and different societies show significant differences.

Most virtue theorists say that there is a common set of virtues that all human beings would benefit from, rather than different sets for different sorts of people, and that these virtues are natural to mature human beings - even if they are hard to acquire.

The traditional list of cardinal virtues was:

Prudence

Justice

Fortitude / Bravery

Temperance

The modern theologian James F Keenan suggests:

Justice
Justice requires us to treat all human beings equally and impartially.

Fidelity
Fidelity requires that we treat people closer to us with special care.

Self-care
We each have a unique responsibility to care for ourselves, affectively, mentally, physically, and spiritually.

Prudence
The prudent person must always consider Justice, Fidelity and Self-care.

The prudent person must always look for opportunities to acquire more of the other three virtues

Good points of virtue ethics

It centres ethics on the person and what it means to be human

It includes the whole of a person's life

Bad points of virtue ethics

it doesn't provide clear guidance on what to do in moral dilemmas
although it does provide general guidance on how to be a good person

presumably a totally virtuous person would know what to do and we could consider them a suitable role model to guide us

there is no general agreement on what the virtues are

and it may be that any list of virtues will be relative to the culture in which it is being drawn up.

Source: www.bbc.co.uk/ethics

The Pursuit of Happiness

2011-08-24T00:52:00.010-04:00

By Robert Darnton

Most Americans take it for granted as a natural extension of "life" and "liberty" But as the author shows, the pursuit of happiness is an idea that has long been debated - and whose meaning is still up for grabs.

Robert Darnton is Shelby Cullom Davis Professor of European History at Princeton University. He is the author of, among other books, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982) and The Forbidden Best Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995). This essay is adapted from a lecture given in Tokyo on October 6, 1993, to celebrate the opening of the Japanese Institute for Advanced Study, and draws heavily from the following works: Robert Mauzi, L'idée du bonheur dans la littérature et la pensée françaises au XVIIIe siècle (1979); Howard Mumford Jones, The Pursuit of Happiness (1953); Ursula M. von Eckardt, The Pursuit of Happiness in the Democratic Creed (1959); and Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (1982).

* * *

The idea of happiness has become so deeply embedded in American culture that it sometimes disappears from sight. It is everywhere and nowhere, an implicit assumption that colors a world view, hardly an idea at all. But an idea it very much is, and, if seen from the perspective of the history of ideas, it has a long and impressive pedigree.

It appears among the ancients in the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle and especially in the thought of the Epicureans and Stoics. The Epicureans incorporated the concept of happiness into a general philosophy of pleasure and pain, which led to an ethics of rational self-interest. The Stoics linked it to withdrawal from the dangerous hurly-burly of civic life and contentment in the minimal pleasures of life in Arcadian retreats. "Happy is he who, far away from business, like the race of men of old, tills his ancestral fields with his own oxen, unbound by any interest to pay," said Horace in the first century B.C. One could find similar sentiments scattered throughout the Augustan poetry and Ciceronian rhetoric of the Romans.

Not, however, among the early Christians. Before his death in 604 A.D., Saint Augustine characterized life on this side of the City of God as the pursuit of vanity through a vale of tears. His message corresponded to the human condition as it was experienced by most people for the next thousand years, when men and women worked the fields in a state of semislavery, ate little more than bread and broth, and died young. Theirs was an existence best summed up by Thomas Hobbes's description of life in the state of nature: "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."

By the 15th century, however, philosophers were facing a revived notion of pleasure - earthly as in Boccaccio and refined as in the court of the Medici. To be sure, the classical revival was snuffed out in Florence by Savonarola's bonfire of vanities in 1497 and in Rome by the troops of Charles V during the sack of 1527. The reformations and religious wars made happiness as a consummation to be desired this side of the grave look more unlikely than ever.

But in the Age of Enlightenment the idea of happiness revived once again, attached to other notions such as progress and prosperity. The Enlightenment philosophers took happiness to be the end of man's life as an individual and of society's existence as a collectivity. The most radical of them, Diderot, Rousseau, Helvétius, and d'Holbach, built the concept of happiness into a modernized Epicureanism, reinforced with a strong civic consciousness.

Having reached this point, philosophy in the 19th and 20th centuries could not turn back, despite the countercurrents of pessimism stirred up by figures such as Nietzsche and Freud. Jeremy Bentham's rallying cry, "the greatest happiness of the greatest number," actually was formulated by two philosophes of the Enlightenment, Francis Hutcheson in Scotland and Cesare Beccaria in Italy. Bentham worked it into a philosophy of enlightened self-interest derived from Epicurus and Lucretius and adapted to the reform politics of Britain. For Karl Marx, the prophet of socialist happiness, liberal reforms could never reconcile individual and collective interests, because class interests stood in the way. Instead, Marx imagined happiness as a historical state to be reached at the end of a dialectical process by society as a whole.

Such, in a snapshot, is how a history of the idea of happiness might look if seen at a very great distance, like the earth photographed from the moon. But from such a perspective, everything blurs into everything else. What would notions of happiness look like if seen up close? I would like to examine two such views located at what I have identified as the great turning point in the history of happiness, the Age of Enlightenment. More precisely, I want to explore two famous phrases: "We must cultivate our garden," offered by Voltaire as the conclusion to Candide (1759), and the right to "the pursuit of Happiness" proclaimed by Jefferson in the American Declaration of Independence. The effort, I hope, will shed light on that curiously quicksilver phenomenon known as "the American way of life."

The last line of Candide, "We must cultivate our garden," is the final remark in a philosophical discourse that accompanies a fast-moving, picaresque plot. Spoken by the chastened protagonist, it is meant to answer a question. But what was that question? None of the characters in the final chapter of the book ask Candide anything. They chatter past one another as they have done throughout the entire story. The question is provided by the story itself. In pursuing his true love, Cunegonde, from one adventure to another, Candide is pursuing happiness. How can happiness be found? That is the question posed by the novel, as by the entire French Enlightenment, and the answer can be reformulated as "Happiness lies in the cultivation of our garden."

Of the many glosses on the text, four stand out: Stoic withdrawal (by shutting themselves up in the garden, Candide and his companions turn their backs on politics); pastoral utopianism (the little society supports itself by farming, cutting itself off from commercial capitalism); secular salvation through work (everyone in the group labors hard, thereby staving off poverty, boredom and vice); and cultural engagement (cultivation means commitment to the cause of civilization). There is something to be said for each of these interpretations. Each fits the context of Voltaire's concerns in 1758 as he composed Candide: his quarrel with Frederick II; the horrors of the Seven Years War; the even more horrible disaster of the Lisbon earthquake; Voltaire's debate over the problem of evil with the followers of Leibniz and Wolff; and his recent decision to retire as a country gentleman to Les Délices, where he worked hard at creating a garden of his own.

The garden motif also summons up the Christian Utopia of Eden, a favorite target of Voltaire in his youth. As a freethinking man about town in Regency Paris, he celebrated the pleasures of high society or "le monde" and derided Christian asceticism. Thus, in his youthful credo, "Le Mondain," he mocked the barbarity of our mythical ancestors in a weedy, unkempt Garden. He pictured Adam as an ape-man dragging his knuckles on the ground and Eve as a foul-smelling slut with dirt under her fingernails. Instead of Eden, Voltaire celebrated the world of wit and beauty enjoyed by the rich and the well-born in "le monde." Happiness was not to be found in paradise but in Paris, not in the afterlife but in the here and now. "Terrestial paradise is where I am," concluded "Le Mondain." It was an Epicurean credo, flung in the face of the church, and it captured the spirit of salon society in the early 18th century. But it had nothing to say to most of humanity, which lived in misery outside the salons.

By 1758, Voltaire had seen more of the world. But he did not cease to delight in the good things of life. The last chapter of Candide includes a description of the hospitality offered by a philosophic Turk, whose little farm provides a model for Candide's: exquisite sorbet, a fine selection of fruits and nuts, "mocca coffee which was not mixed with the bad coffee of Batavia" (Voltaire was a coffee addict), courteous service by the two daughters of the host, and intelligent conversation. Candide had received the same kind of hospitality, though on a grander scale, from the philosopher-king of Eldorado, the Utopian society described in the middle of the novel. Voltaire himself offered it to visitors at Les Délices and later at Ferney. What distinguished this kind of good life from the Epicureanism advocated by the young Voltaire in "Le Mondain"?

The setting, for one thing. Candide settled his community at the eastern edge of European civilization, just as Voltaire established his estate at the eastern boundary of France, far from Paris and far from politics. "I never inform myself about what is going on in Constantinople," the philosophic Turk tells Candide. Of course, Voltaire worked hard to keep himself informed about intrigues in the French capital, but he had cut himself off from court life. He had withdrawn from "le monde," and he had changed his tone. A new note of anger and darkness crept into all his writing after he fled from Frederick II and Berlin. He found himself increasingly confronted with unhappiness - and, worse, evil.

Consider one of the unhappiest moments in Voltaire's life. It occurred in 1730. His beloved mistress, the great actress Adrienne Lecouvreur, suddenly died after playing the lead in his tragedy, Oedipe. Voltaire had sat by her bed in her last agony, and he may well have witnessed the unceremonious disposal of her corpse. Death struck Adrienne Lecouvreur before she had time to renounce her profession and receive Extreme Unction. As actors and actresses were excluded from the rites of the church, her body could not be buried in hallowed ground. Therefore, it was dumped in a ditch and covered with quicklime to speed its decomposition.

This obscene act obsessed Voltaire right up to the moment of his own death, when he feared that his body would receive the same treatment. It appears in some of his most impassioned poetry, in the Lettres philosophiques, and even in Candide. In chapter 22, Candide visits Paris and is told the story in all its horror. He then remarks: "That [was] very impolite." Not what we would expect by way of a comment on a barbarism that had set a lover's blood to boil.

But Voltaire filled the word "politeness" with a passion that may escape the 20th-century eye. The first characteristic Candide noticed among the inhabitants of the Utopian society of Eldorado was their "extreme politeness." He marveled at their good manners, elegant clothing, sumptuous housing, exquisite food, sophisticated conversation, refined taste, and superb wit. The king of Eldorado epitomized those qualities. Like the philosophic Turk at the end of the book, he "received them with all imaginable grace and invited them politely to supper." Utopia is above all a "société polie" or "policée," which amounts to the same thing.

The 18th-century notion of "police" could be translated roughly as rational administration. It belonged (conceptually, not etymologically) to a series of interlocking terms - poli, policé, politique - that extend from culture to politics. For Voltaire, the cultural system of the Old Regime shaded off into a power system, and the code of polite society belonged to the politics of enlightened absolutism.

The interpenetration of culture and politics is the main theme of Voltaire's most ambitious treatise, Le Siècle de Louis XIV (1751). This was a crucial work for 18th-century writers, a book that defined the literary system of the Old Regime and that created literary history in France. In it, Voltaire effectively argued that all history is literary history. Kings, queens, and generals do not count in the long run, although they attract most of the attention of their contemporaries and occupy a good deal of Voltaire's narrative. What matters above all is civilization. So, of the four "happy" ages in the history of mankind, the happiest of all was the age of Louis XIV, when French literature reached its zenith and the politeness ("la politesse et l'esprit de société") of the French court set a standard for all of Europe.

By civilization, Voltaire meant the moving force in history, a combination of aesthetic and social elements, manners and mores ("moeurs"), which pushes society toward the ideal of Eldorado, a state in which men are perfectly "polis" and "policés." So Voltaire understood politesse as power, and he saw an essential connection between classical French literature and the absolutism of the French state under Louis XIV. This argument underlies the key episodes of Le Siècle de Louis XIV. Louis masters the French language by studying the works of Corneille, he controls the court by staging plays, and he dominates the kingdom by turning the court itself into an exemplary theatre. That idea may be a cliché now, but Voltaire invented it. He saw power as performance: the acting out of a cultural code. This code spread from Versailles to Paris, to the provinces, and to the rest of Europe. Voltaire does not deny the importance of armies, but he interprets the supremacy of Louis XIV as ultimately a matter of cultural hegemony. The script for his court tour de force was written by Molière, whom Voltaire describes both as a "philosophe" and as "the legislator of the code of conduct in polite society" ("le législateur des bienséances du monde.")

However anachronistic and inaccurate, this view of history conveys something more than the chase after the good things in life in "Le Mondain." It conveys direction, purpose, power - something akin to the "civilizing process" of Norbert Elias. It also demotes kings and puts philosophes in their place as the true masters of history, and it makes the historical process look progressive - uneven, to be sure, but one in which barbarism retreats before the forces of politeness.

Candide finally joins those forces. He becomes a philosophe - not a false philosopher, like his tutor Pangloss, but a true one, who opts for engagement instead of withdrawal. His pursuit of happiness, in the person of Cunegonde, does not lead to a happy ending. When he finally marries her, she has become ugly and disagreeable. But the pursuit has taught him to commit him- self to something more substantial: polite society, or the process of civilization.

"The pursuit of Happiness" is even more familiar to Americans than "We must cultivate our garden" is to the French. It is the most memorable phrase in the American Declaration of Independence, the rhetorical climax to Thomas Jefferson's enunciation of natural rights and revolutionary theory: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." What did Jefferson mean by "the pursuit of Happiness?" And what does his meaning have to do with a subject that belongs to the history of mentalities - namely, "the American way of life"?

Analysts of political discourse often determine meaning by showing what is not said as well as what is said. "Life, liberty, and property" was the standard formula in the political debates of the English-speaking world during the 17th and 18th centuries. In substituting "the pursuit of Happiness" for property, the Declaration of Independence deviated significantly from other founding charters - the Petition of Right and the Declaration of Rights connected with the English revolutions of 1640 and 1688, for example, and the declarations of the American Stamp Act Congress of 1765 as well as the First Continental Congress of 1774. If "the pursuit of Happiness" is to be viewed as a speech act, its meaning must consist, at least in part, in an implicit comparison with the right of property. By omitting property from his phrasing, did Jefferson reveal himself to be a secret socialist? Can Americans cite him today in order to legitimate demands for social welfare legislation and to oppose the advocates of minimal, laissez-faire government?

Before tearing Jefferson out of the 18th century and plunging him into the midst of our own ideological quarrels, it would be wise to ask how "happiness" resonated in the context of his time. As a philosophically minded lawyer, he had a thorough knowledge of the natural law tradition, which went back to Plato and Aristotle and was formulated for the law students of his generation by Locke, Pufendorf, Burlamaqui, and Blackstone. The most important of these was Locke. (Jefferson had a personal distaste for Blackstone's Commentaries.) In fact, Locke was so important that many scholars have considered him the grandfather of the American Declaration of Independence, which advanced a contractual theory of government that seemed to come straight out of his Second Treatise on Civil Government (1690).

The Second Treatise certainly provides grounds for asserting a right to revolution if the government violates its contractual obligations to the citizenry. But a right to happiness? Locke kept to the usual trinity - "life, liberty, and property." In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), however, he stretched "property" into "lives, liberties, and estates," and then went on to talk of "that property which men have in their persons as well as goods." In doing so, he shifted ground from law to psychology. Property in one's person implied the liberty to develop the self, and self-development for Locke was an epistemological process. It took place when men combined and reflected on sensations, the primary signals of pleasure and pain, according to the procedure described in the Essay. Thus, the sensationalism of Locke's epistemology could be combined with the natural rights of his political theory in a way that would open the road to the right to happiness. In short, Locke, too, was a philosopher of happiness. He said so himself: "As therefore the highest perfection of intellectual nature lies in a careful and constant pursuit of true and solid happiness, so the care of ourselves that we mistake not imaginary for real happiness is the necessary foundation of our liberty."

But Jefferson did not need to combine passages from the two John Lockes, the Locke of the Second Treatise and the Locke of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, because the work had already been done for him by his friend George Mason. Mason was the one who did the most to stretch "property" into "happiness" in the philosophical deliberations of Virginia's radical squierarchy. Like Jefferson, Mason had a library packed with the works of philosophers, ancient and modern, in Gunston Hall, his country estate. Having worked through this material while participating in the agitation over the Stamp Act, Mason drafted a series of manifestos about representative government and natural rights. He discussed them with like-minded country gentlemen - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Patrick Henry - around dinner tables and through correspondence. He debated them in free-holder meetings, held in the brick courthouse of Fairfax County, in 1774 and 1775.

Then, in May 1776, the Virginians met at Williamsburg and declared themselves independent of Great Britain. Mason provided the philosophic justification for this revolutionary step by drafting a "Declaration of Rights," which included the phrase: "All men are created equally free and independent, and have certain inherent natural rights . . . among which are the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety." Mason's wording runs exactly parallel to the famous phrase that Jefferson wrote into the Declaration of Independence a month later. It suggests that happiness is not opposed to property but is an extension of it. Jefferson made no pretense to originality. He described his statement of principles as the mere "common sense of the subject." And a half-century later, when he discussed the Declaration of Independence in a letter to James Madison, he explained further: "Neither aiming at originality of principle or sentiment, nor yet copied from any particular and previous writing, it was intended to be an expression of the American mind."

"Common sense" and "the American mind" - we are entering territory the French call "the history of mentalities," and which I would prefer to describe as anthropological history. The American anthropologist Clifford Geertz has analyzed common sense as a "cultural system" - that is, as an admixture of attitudes, values, and cognitive schemata that ordinary people use to make sense of the world. Ordinary people, not philosophers. True, Jefferson, Madison, Mason, and their crowd look like American-style philosophes. And when compared with today's statesmen, they look like giants. But they were also Virginia farmers who inhabited a common-sense world of tobacco plantations, Georgian manor houses, Episcopal churches, county courts, taverns, horse races, and (let us not forget it) slavery. The plantations kept them separated from one another in semiautonomous units ordered according to patriarchal principles. The churches and courthouses drew them together in settings that reinforced the social hierarchy. The taverns and horse races gave them a chance to vent their passions and strut their status. And the slavery indicated the limitations of statements such as "all men are created equal."

This contradiction did not weigh too heavily with men who thought of themselves as successors to the slave-holding patricians of Augustan Rome. Their libraries confirmed the message of their larders. The classicism of their education echoed the classical architecture of their houses. Cicero and Seneca rang true, because they conformed with the values of order and hierarchy given off by the everyday surroundings in Virginia. So did Locke, the spokesman of a Whig aristocracy aligned against an alien, absolutist monarchy. In short, the philosophizing fit the social environment, not as an ideological afterthought but as the reflective gentleman's way of making sense of what his common sense already proclaimed. "Sense" in this respect belonged to what Max Weber called "Sinnzusammenhang," or "elective affinities": it was a way of ordering reality.

How did the Virginians describe reality in more casual moments, when they were not composing theoretical manifestos? Here is Jefferson again, writing from his country estate in 1810:

I am retired to Monticello, where, in the bosom of my family, and surrounded by my books, I enjoy a repose to which I have been long a stranger. My mornings are devoted to correspondence. From breakfast to dinner, I am in my shops, my garden, or on horseback among my farms; from dinner to dark, I give to society and recreation with my neighbors and friends; and from candle light to early bedtime, I read. My health is perfect; and my strength considerably reinforced by the activity of the course I pursue. ... I talk of ploughs and harrows, of seeding and harvesting, with my neighbors, and of politics too, if they choose, with as little reserve as the rest of my fellow citizens, and feel, at length, the blessing of being free to say and do what I please.

This is happiness, something embedded in the daily course of life. It is an American way of life - but closer to Horace and Virgil than to the America of Madison Avenue and Wall Street.

Also, it should be added, the Horatian glow dimmed during the next 16 years, a period when Monticello nearly collapsed into bankruptcy and its master felt increasingly alienated from the Jacksonian variety of politics, a speculative surge of capitalism, and an evangelical revival of religion. By cultivating his garden in Monticello, Jefferson withdrew from the world - unlike Voltaire, who used Ferney as a fortress for conquering it.

If Jefferson himself found an increasing disparity between his ideals of the 1770s and the realities of the 1820s, how did Americans see any continuity at all between his way of life and theirs during the next century-and-a-half? Horatian Jeffersonianism and industrial capitalism seem so far apart that one would think they have nothing in common. Yet they are bound together by a common thread: the pursuit of happiness.

As the intellectual historian Howard Mumford Jones has shown, that theme provides one of the leitmotifs of American jurisprudence. If, as the Declaration of Independence proclaims, I have a right to happiness, shouldn't the courts enforce it? Unfortunately, the Declaration of Independence did not become part of constitutional law, except as it was rewritten in the form of the Bill of Rights, and the Bill of Rights does not mention happiness. The state constitutions, however, do. Two-thirds of them have adopted some variant of Jefferson's phrase. So for more than a century Americans have gone to court, suing their authorities and one another over a right they believe belongs to them by fundamental law. They have claimed the right to happiness in order to set up massage parlors, sell contraceptives, and smoke opium. They have rarely succeeded, but their attempts indicate the prevalence of a general attitude - that the pursuit of happiness is a basic ingredient of the American way of life.

Of course, a great deal besides constitutional law went into this cultural pattern. The open frontier, the availability of land, the gold rush, the seemingly endless opportunities for getting rich and getting ahead - all oriented values around the notion of happiness in the 19th century. In each case, happiness appeared as something to be pursued, not something showered down from heaven; and the pursuit often led westward. In this respect, the Jeffersonian ideal also provided a jumping-off point, because the agrarian, yeoman democracy favored by Jefferson provided the ideological impulse for the conquest of the frontier. In the Northwest Territory Act and the Louisiana Purchase, Jefferson himself tried to shape the settlement of the West in a way that would perpetuate the society of farmer- philosophes he had known in Virginia. Horace Greeley and other publicists echoed this idea when they proclaimed, "Go West, young man!"

The real impulse, however, was money, money and land, the chance to get rich quick. The gold rush precipitated a general Drang nach Westen. Ever since 1848, it has seemed that the whole country has tried to move to California. I am exaggerating, of course, because the great waves of immigrants who were carried across the Atlantic during the late 19th and early 20th centuries generally washed onto the East Coast and emptied themselves in the slums between Boston and Baltimore. Many of the poor from Kiev and Naples never got farther west than the East Side of Manhattan, although their descendants usually crossed the Hudson and settled in the suburbs of New Jersey - not exactly in Jeffersonian freeholds but on their own plots of land, in houses with gardens and white picket fences, which turned into the new version of the American dream. To such people, America really was the land of opportunity, even if it took two generations to extricate themselves from the slums, even if suburbia was a far cry from the Oregon Trail.

Thus did the Jeffersonian vision become transformed into the American dream, a vision that was basically materialistic but that inflamed imaginations throughout the Old World, where millions struggled to get out and to get ahead. The dream is still alive today, although the immigrants generally come from Latin America and settle in Miami, Houston, and Los Angeles. But its realization remains an elusive goal to many African Americans, whose ancestors - who did the work on Jefferson's plantation - were legally excluded from its pursuit and who provided a living witness to the tragic flaw in the American dream.

That did not prevent the dream from gathering more force in the second half of the 20th century. Technology seemed to bring happiness within the reach of nearly everyone, because it provided the means of controlling the environment, of enjoying pleasure and mitigating pain. The point may be so obvious that we cannot see it, because we have become insulated from the pains of everyday life that existed in the age of Jefferson. If I may provide a homely example, I would cite George Washington's teeth. Washington had terrible teeth. He lost them, one by one, and finally acquired a full set of false teeth, made of bone, lead, and gold. The "Father of Our Country" and the toothache - it seems incongruous, but having read thousands of letters from the 18th century, I often think of the dread of rotting teeth, the horror of the itinerant tooth puller, the sheer pain in jaws every- where in the early modern world. Dentistry may not look like a particularly noble calling, but it has weighed heavier than many professions in the hedonistic calculus we have inherited from Epicurus and Jeremy Bentham.

To dentistry, add medicine in general, vaccination, public hygiene, contraception, insurance, retirement benefits, unemployment compensation, lightning rods, central heating, air conditioning ... the list could go on forever, because it leads through the endless array of goods we associate with the so-called consumer society and the services we expect of the "welfare state." I know that these are hard times for millions of Americans and that my remarks may sound hollow. But I have spent so much time in the 18th century that I cannot fail to be impressed with how much control man has gained over his environment in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The pursuit of happiness in America has spilled over from science and technology into popular culture, a favorite subject for historians of mentality. The most exotic varieties bloom in southern California: hot tubs, "perfect" waves, "deep" massage, fat farms, love clinics, and therapy of every conceivable kind, not to mention the happy endings that still prevail in Hollywood. This kind of popular culture can easily be caricatured, but it cannot be dismissed easily, because it has spread throughout the country and now the world. One encounters the face of "Joe Happy" - a circle with a smile in it - everywhere: pasted on windows, pinned in buttonholes, even, I have found, dotting the i's in students' papers. Along with the current greeting - "have a nice day" - it expresses the thumbs-up, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed form of public behavior that can be so annoying to Europeans, who prefer the limp handshake, the down-at- the-mouth Gauloise, and the café slouch as a style of self-presentation.

Of course, many other strains run through the patterns of culture in everyday America, and many run counter to the pursuit of happiness. In order to situate the motif of happiness within the pattern as a whole, it is important to keep three considerations in mind. First, America has always contained a vocal minority of cockeyed pessimists. The American jeremiad arrived on the Mayflower, along with sermonizing about the "City on a Hill," or colony of saints. While Thomas Jefferson expanded on Locke, Jonathan Edwards defined happiness as follows:

The sight of hell torments will exalt the happiness of the saints forever. It will not only make them more sensible of the greatness and freeness of the grace of God in their happiness; but it will really make their happiness the greater, as it will make them more sensible of their own happiness; it will give them a more lively relish of it.

Americans have been avid consumers of anti-utopian literature: 1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, and dark varieties of science fiction. They also have produced a vast amount of pessimistic literature, from Hawthorne and Melville to T. S. Eliot, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Updike. The Civil War, the closing of the frontier, the Great Depression, the Beat generation, and the antiwar activists of the 1960s represented so many stages of disillusionment with the American dream. Most young people today feel they live in a world of limited resources rather than unlimited opportunity. Public opinion polls indicate that they do not expect to do better than their parents. If they no longer worry about a nuclear catastrophe and the Cold War, they sense economic contraction and ecological disaster everywhere. In the face of the AIDS epidemic, many of them feel angry - at the government and at the world in general, for AIDS represents the ultimate denial of the pursuit of happiness as a way of life.

Second, those who continue to believe in happiness as an end often pursue it with an earnestness that looks self-contradictory. They take up extreme forms of asceticism. They diet, they jog, they lift weights, they deprive themselves of tobacco, meat, butter, and all the pleasures that Falstaff categorized under the rubric "cakes and ale." To what end? To live forever? Aging has now become a major industry in America, and the American way of life has evolved into the American way of death - that is, the subculture of funeral "homes" and pastoral cemeteries that dress death up so prettily as to deny it. But most of America's worldly ascetics have transformed the old Protestant ethic into a new cult of the self. Self magazine, the "me generation," and the appeals to building a better body and developing a more assertive or better-balanced personality all express a general egoism that looks like the opposite of the Stoical and Puritanical varieties of self-discipline practiced by the Founding Fathers.

Egocentric asceticism brings us to the third point, John Kenneth Galbraith's characterization of the American way of life as "private wealth and public squalor." Despite food stamps and Social Security, the welfare state never made much headway in the United States. True, the national parks and some of the state systems of higher education opened the door to happiness for many millions. But the consumer culture (we do not have a national sales tax) and the cult of rugged individualism (we do not stand in line at bus stops) stood in the way of state-sponsored projects to assure a minimal degree of happiness for the entire population.

Roosevelt's New Deal, launched to the tune of "Happy Days Are Here Again," provided no answer to the problems of poverty and racism. Those problems continue to fester at the center of our cities, while individuals pursue their personal welfare in the private enclosures of our suburbs. It is, I believe, a national disgrace, but it is also a general problem - one that goes back to the opposition between the private and the public varieties of happiness that were incarnated in Voltaire and Rousseau, and back even further to the Epicureans and the traditions of antiquity. While remaining rooted in the Jeffersonian tradition, the American pursuit of happiness shares promises and problems that have characterized Western civilization in general.

What to make of it all? The leitmotifs in patterns of culture do not lead to bottom lines, so I will not try to end with a firm conclusion. Instead, let me cite two examples of the pursuit of happiness I recently came upon. The first expresses the technical, commercial, and individualistic strain. Dr. Raymond West announced a couple of years ago that "happiness is a warm stethoscope," and offered a new invention to an astonished world: a stethoscope warmer, which would make health checkups more pleasurable and abolish forever the unpleasurable sensation of "ice cubes on the back."

The second example is less trivial. It expresses the collective end of the American republic as it was originally defined by Thomas Jefferson, and it comes from the inaugural address President Clinton delivered in January 1993: When our founders boldly declared America's independence to the world and our purposes to the Almighty, they knew that America, to endure, would have to change. Not change for change's sake, but change to preserve America's ideals - life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Noble words. But Clinton would do well to think of Washington as well as Jefferson - Washington the statesman and Washington the victim of tooth decay. Imagine Washington sitting down to a banquet in Candide's garden. If we are ever to bring together the two ways of pursuing happiness, the individual and the social, we should follow Washington's example, set our jaws firmly, grit our teeth, tuck in, and dedicate ourselves to the public welfare. Such, at least, is the view of one American at a moment when the welfare state looks as beleaguered as Monticello.

Source: The Wilson Quarterly (1976-), Vol. 19, No. 4 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 42-52

Moral Character

2010-04-27T23:03:00.006-04:00

By Tom L. Beauchamp, James F. Childress

(Principles of Biomedical Ethics, Oxford University Press, 2008)

Part I, 2 - Moral Character

In Chapter 1, we concentrated on the analysis and justification of acts and policies. We featured the language of ethical principles, rules, obligations, and rights. In this chapter, we concentrate on the moral virtues and moral character. Whereas ethics grounded in principles emphasizes action, character ethics or virtue ethics emphasizes the agent who performs actions. We also extend our analysis to the domain of moral ideals. These categories complement the analysis in the previous chapter without undermining principles and rules.

Often, what counts most in the moral life is not consistent adherence to principles and rules, but reliable character, good moral sense, and emotional responsiveness. Even specified principles and rules do not convey what occurs when parents lovingly play with nature their children or when physicians and nurses exhibit compassion, patience, and responsiveness in encounters with patients and families. Our feelings and concerns for others leads us to actions that cannot be reduced to instances of rule-following, and we all recognize that morality would be a cold and uninspiring practice without various emotional responses and heart-felt ideals that reach beyond principles and rules.

Moral Virtues

Some philosophers have criticized a heavy emphasis on the virtues. They see the virtues as lacking order and as difficult to unify in a systematic fashion. Though we accept the view that principles and virtues are very different in nature and are taught very differently, we believe that we can bring some order to standards of virtue. Some forms of order emerge directly from the connection between moral virtues and moral principles and rules. In addition, the goals and structure of medicine, health care, and research themselves give some order to the virtues in biomedical ethics.

We begin by analyzing the concept of virtue and considering the special status of the virtues. We then examine virtues in professional roles and explicate five focal virtues that are of particular importance in medicine, health care, and research.

The Concept of Virtue

A virtue is a trait of character that is socially valuable, and a moral virtue is a morally valuable trait of character. It is not sufficient that social groups approve a trait and regard it as moral for it to be morally virtuous. A claim or perception of moral virtue must have the support of moral reasons. Communities sometimes disvalue persons who act virtuously or admire persons for their meanness and churlishness. Moral virtue, then, is more than whatever is socially approved.

Some define “moral virtue” as a disposition to act or a habit of acting in accordance with moral principles, obligations, or ideals. For example, they might understand the moral virtue of nonmalevolence as the trait a person has of abstaining from causing harm to others when it would be wrong to harm them. However, this definition unjustifiably derives virtues wholly from principles and fails to capture the importance of motives in the virtuous person’s actions. We care morally about people’s motives, and we care especially about their characteristic motives, that is, the motives deeply embedded in their character. Persons who are motivated in this manner by sympathy and personal affection, for example, meet our approval, whereas others who act the same way, but from motives of personal ambition might not.

Imagine a person who discharges a moral obligation because it is an obligation, but who intensely dislikes being placed in a position in which the interests of others override his or her own interests. This person does not feel friendly toward or cherish others, and he or she respects their wishes only because obligation requires it. This person can nonetheless perform a morally right action and have a disposition to perform that action. But if the motive is improper, a critical moral ingredient is missing; and if a person characteristically lacks this motivational structure, a necessary condition of virtuous character is absent. The act may be right and the actor blameless, but neither the person nor the act is virtuous. In short, people may be disposed to do what is right, intend to do it, and do it, while also yearning to avoid doing it. Persons who characteristically perform morally right actions from such a motivational structure are not morally virtuous even if they always perform the morally right action.

Aristotle drew an important (although underdeveloped) distinction between right action and proper motive, which he also analyzed in terms of the distinction between external performance and internal state. An action can be right without being virtuous, he maintained, but an action can be virtuous only if performed from the right state of mind. Both right action and right motive are present in a virtuous action: “The agent must … be in the right state when he does [the actions]. First, he must know [that he is doing virtuous actions]; second, he must decide on them, and decide on them for themselves; and third, he must also do them from a firm and unchanging state,” including the right state of emotion and desire. “The just and temperate person is the one who [merely] does these actions, but the one who also does them in the way in which just or temperate people do them.”

We can conclude our analysis of the nature of virtue by incorporating Aristotle’s observations. In addition to being properly motivated, a virtuous person will experience appropriate feelings, such as sympathy and regret – even when the feelings are not motives and no action can result from the feelings. However, some virtues have no clear link to either motives or feelings. Moral discernment and moral integrity – two virtues treated later in this chapter – are examples. Here psychological properties other that feelings are paramount. We will integrate these virtues into our analysis later in the chapter.

The Special Status of the Virtues

Some writers in character ethics maintain that the language of obligation is derivative from what they view as the more basic language of virtue. They think that a person disposed by character to have good motives and desires provides the basic model of the moral person and that this model of action-from-obligation, because right motives and character tell us more about moral worth than do right actions performed under the prod of obligation.

This position is attractive, because we are often more concerned about the character and motives of persons than about the conformity of their acts to rules. When a friend performs an act of “friendship”, we expect it not to be motivated entirely from a sense of obligation to us, but because the person has a desire to be friendly, feels friendly, wants to keep friends in good cheer, and values friendship. The friend who acts only from obligation lacks the virtue of friendliness, and, absent this virtue, the relationship lacks moral merit.

Some writers in biomedical ethics also argue that attempt in obligation-oriented theories to replace the virtuous judgments of health care professionals with rules, codes, procedures will not produce better decisions and actions. Rather than using institutional rules and government regulations to protect subjects in research, they claim that the most reliable protection is the presence of an “informal, conscientious, compassionate, responsible researcher.” From this perspective, character is more important than conformity to rules, and virtues should be inculcated and cultivated over time through educational interactions, role models, and the like.

This conclusion provides a significant reason fro incorporating the virtues into biomedical ethics and into medical and nursing education, but it needs elaboration. A morally good person with the right configuration of desires and motives is more likely than others to understand what should be done, more likely to perform attentively the acts required, and even more likely to form and act on moral ideals. A person we trust is one who has an ingrained motivation and desire to perform right actions. Thus, the person we will recommend, admire, praise, and hold up as a moral model is the person disposed by character to be generous, caring, compassionate, sympathetic, fair, and the like.

A person’s character informs our judgment of the person and our assessment of his or her actions. If a virtuous person makes a mistake in judgment, thereby performing a morally wrong act, he or she would be less blameworthy than an habitual offender who performed the same act. In his chronicle of life under the Nazi SS in the Jewish ghetto in Cracow, Poland, Thomas Keneally describes a physician faced with a grave dilemma: either inject cyanide into four immobile patients or abandon them to the SS, who were at that moment emptying the ghetto and had already demonstrated that they would brutally kill all captives and patients. This physician, Keneally reports, “suffered painfully from a set of ethics as intimate to him as the organs of his own body.” Here is a person of the highest moral character and virtue, motivated to act rightly and even heroically, yet who at first had no idea what was the morally right action. Ultimately, with uncertainty and reluctance, the physician elected active euthanasia (using 40 drops of hydrocyanic acid) without the consent or knowledge of the four doomed patients – an act almost universally denounced by canons of professional medical ethics. Even if one thinks that the physician’s act was wrong and blameworthy – a judgment we reject – no one could reasonably make a judgment of blame or demerit directed at the physician’s motives or character. Having already risked death by choosing to remain at his patient’s beds in the hospital rather than take a prepared escape route, this physician is a moral hero who over time displayed an extraordinary moral character.

Judgments of agent’s praiseworthiness and blameworthiness are significantly tied to agent’s motives, which serve as sign of their character. However, in contrast to radical forms of character ethics, we do not hold that the merit in an action resides in motive or character alone. The action must be appropriately gauged to bring about the desired results and must conform with relevant principles and rules. For example, the physician or nurse who is appropriately motivated to help a patient but who acts incompetently in seeking the desired result does not act in a praiseworthy manner.

Virtue Ethics

2010-04-06T19:33:00.008-04:00

Stephen Darwall

From "Virtue Ethics", pp.1-4

Introduction

Consequentialism, contractarianism/contractualism, and deontology are all moral theories. (1) They concern distinctive moral notions of obligations, concern and respect and, ultimately, questions of right conduct: what we can be held morally accountable for doing. The approach called virtue ethics is orthogonal to these theories in both respects. First, virtue is concerned primarily with character rather than conduct – with how we should be rather than what we should do. And second, a virtue ethics can be advanced, not as a moral theory at all, but as an account of other, ethically deep aspects of human life that are, it is sometimes argued, potential rivals to and perhaps replacements for morality and its distinctive forms.

The conception of a set of universal and finally authoritative norms or laws by which all moral agents are categorically obligated is far from the only form that ethical reflection can take. (2) The modern idea of morality derives from a distinctive historical tradition, the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic idea of divinely ordained law, to which it is a secular successor. Some philosophers have argued that this conception of morality is seriously defective in various ways and that our ethical reflections might more profitably take other forms. Several who have made this argument have looked to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for more promising ethical conception. (3) For Aristotle, the fundamental question is not, as for Mill, Hobbes, or Kant, What is the fundamental principle of moral right or duty and how might this be defended philosophically? Aristotle asks, rather, What is the goal of human life? What kind of life is best for human beings?

Nonmoral Virtue Ethics

Aristotle provides a distinctive example – a paradigm, really – of a nonmoral virtue ethics. (“Nonmoral”, again, because, although his translators frequently use “moral virtue” to signal that he means excellences of character concerned with choice, Aristotle does not relate these to any conception of a moral law under which all are accountable as equals.) Virtues, for Aristotle, are dispositions to choose what is fine or noble (kalon) for its own sake, and to avoid what is base. The operative notion is what Nietzsche called a “rank-ordering” ideal with respect to which one can be better or worse, not a norm or law that one complies with or violates. For Aristotle, the operative ethical emotions are shame, esteem, pride and disdain or contempt, not guilt, respect, self-respect, and moral indignation.

Virtues are excellences, traits, that is, that make something an excellent instance of its kind. In this way, Aristotle’s theory is a kind of perfectionism. It is a virtue in a knife, for example, that it have a sharp edge so that it can cut well. In general, we reckon which traits are excellences (excellent-making) in relation to a thing’s function (ergon) or characteristic activity.(4) As Aristotle believes that the characteristic activity of human beings is action (praxis) that expresses a distinctively human form of choice, namely, of actions valued in themselves as noble or fine (kalon), he concludes that the virtues are traits of character, that is, settled dispositions to choose certain actions and avoid others as intrinsically noble or base. We might put his point by saying that human excellences are states of character concerned with choices that are themselves guided by an ideal of human excellence.

In general, any such (nonmoral) human ideal can be a nonmoral virtue ethics. Although it might involve a teleological or perfectionist view of human nature, like Aristotle’s (according to which there is something human beings are inherently for or to be), it need not. A nonmoral virtue ethics may be advanced simply as a normative view about which traits in human beings are worthy of esteem (or disdain).

Moral Virtue Ethics

Analogously, a moral virtue ethics is a theory of what is worthy of distinctively moral esteem, that is, worthy of esteem in a moral agent. The best example of such a view is the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher Francis Hutcheston. Hutcheston argued that the basic moral phenomenon is a distinctively moral esteem for benevolence, the desire to benefit others and make them happy. Moral esteem, he held, is not primarily for any outcome, but for a motive or trait of character, namely, the desire to produce good outcomes for human beings and other sentient beings.

Virtue and Conduct

How, then, do virtue ethics bear on what to do? First, nonmoral virtue ethics remind us that questions of right and wrong are far from the only, or perhaps even the most important, ethical questions we can ask, even about what to do. Thus, it might be that failing to do significantly more to relieve world hunger, although famine relief is not morally obligatory, nonetheless manifests vices of complacency and self-satisfaction. Or, for another example, even if the environment cannot be wronged or unjustly treated, clear-cutting may still manifest an inappropriate attitude towards the environment or unlovely traits that are at odds with living a fully satisfying human life.

Second, in considering what to do, it can be helpful to ask what a virtuous person, or someone with a specific virtue (say, generosity), would do. This may simply be a useful heuristic, but it may also reflect the Aristotelian view that there is no way of formulating ethical insight that can be grasped and applied by someone who lacks the wisdom or “sense” of the virtuous person. As Lois Armstrong is reputed to have said about jazz, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Third, virtue ethicists sometimes put forward conceptions of virtue, not simply as guides to appropriate (or morally right) action, but as accounts of what makes an action appropriate or morally right. Thus, it can be held that an action is the right or appropriate thing to do in some case or circumstance just in case it is what the virtuous person would (characteristically) do in that circumstance.(5) Such a view might depart from the letter of Aristotle’s position, since he identified virtues as settled dispositions to choose specific actions for their own sake (as noble). This would seem to make which traits are virtuous depend on which actions are noble, not vice versa. Nevertheless, since it would hold that no access to the appropriateness of action is possible save through the wisdom or conduct of a virtuous person, such a view would remain quite close to Aristotle’s in fundamental spirit. What is common to any virtue ethics is the idea that guidance on controversial questions of case ethics can be gained only by looking to the virtues or the virtuous person as a model.

Stephen Darwall, Virtue Ethics, Blackwell Publishing, 2003.

Notes

(1) For classical and contemporary readings on these theories, see the following Blackwell anthologies (detailed on p. ii): Consequentialism, Contractarianism/Contractualism, and Deontology.

(2) G. E. M. Anscombe argued that since, as she claimed, the conception of morality is unintelligible without the idea of divine sanction, it cannot be secularized (“Modern Moral Philosophy”). Alasdair MacIntyre also advanced a very influential critique of orthodox moral philosophy (After Virtue [Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981]). Bernard Williams also influentially criticized the idea of morality and its distinctive form of obligation (Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985]). These writers all pointes toward Aristotle as an alternative model. See also Michael Slote, From Morality to Virtue (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

(3) For a discussion of Aristotle’s ethics, see my Philosophical Ethics (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998).

(4) See pp. 8-9 of this volume.

(5) For an example of such view, see Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

Art And Morality

2009-12-22T23:11:00.027-05:00

By Prof. R. Hepburn

Argument in this area tends to cluster around either of two poles: one seeing the relation between art and morality as close and harmonious, the other more keenly aware of conflicts and tensions between them.

1. Art is taken as vital to moral health. It brings into play, expresses, ‘purges’ emotions and energies that, in real-life situations, could be harmful and destructive. It allows us, without risk, to explore in depth the essential nature and outworking of endless types of human character and social interaction—in plays and novels.

If art appreciation is essentially contemplative, attentive to the individuality of its objects, and respecting and loving them for what they are in themselves, these aesthetic attitudes are close neighbours to the morally desirable attitudes of respect for persons and moral attentiveness to their individual natures and needs. Again, art can enlarge the scope of individual freedom, by expanding awareness of our options for action and for forms of human relationship, beyond those options that are immediately apparent in everyday society. More broadly, the arts enhance human vitality through teaching a keener, more vivid perception of the colours, forms, and sounds of a world of which we are normally only dimly aware, and a more intense and clarified awareness of values.

2. Nevertheless, art has also been seen as morally dubious or harmful. At the level of theory, the Kantian and post-Kantian accounts of a disinterested, calmly contemplative aesthetic attitude have recently been facing critical challenge. It is claimed, furthermore, that art stimulates emotions better not aroused; encourages the imagination to realize in detail, and to enjoy, morally deplorable activity, thereby making that more likely to be acted out in life.

If freedom can be enhanced by art, it can also be diminished—by artworks that present current stereotypes, fashions in attitudes and action, farouche or degraded visions of human nature, as if these alone were the ‘available’ models for life-responses. There can be little ground for confidence that the sometimes desperate search for the innovative and ‘different’ in art (and the role of the complex of interested promoters of particular arts—the ‘artworld’) reliably leads to morally serious and wise interpretations of human problems.

From The Oxford Companion to Philosophy

Philosophy And Public Life

2009-12-22T00:05:00.009-05:00

Martha Nussbaum, Stelios Virvidakis

Interview with Martha Nussbaum

Martha Nussbaum discusses philosophy's capacity to influence public life; the future of political liberalism and the role of the state; and her critique of radical feminist thinkers including Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin.

Stelios Virvidakis: What do you think about the possibility of philosophy playing a more active role in public life, education, applied ethics, and so on?

Martha Nussbaum: There are many possibilities. And countries are very different. I find that the US is in a way one of the most difficult places for philosophy to play a public role because the media are so sensationalistic and so anti-intellectual. If I go to most countries in Europe I'll have a much easier time publishing in a newspaper than I would in the US. The New York Times op-ed page is very dumbed down and I no longer even bother trying to get something published there because they don't like anything that has a complicated argument. So I find the US very frustrating. At the other end of the spectrum, the Netherlands has a tremendous public culture of philosophy. They have a very large selling journal called Philosophy and my Upheavals of Thought, which is an extremely long book and is even longer in Dutch, not only sold very well in English, but was translated into Dutch a few months later and has already sold 4000 copies. So I feel that that's quite extraordinary. But it's because there are TV programmes on philosophy, things involving not just political philosophy, but things like the emotions, the mind, and so on. But one just has to cultivate that over a long period of time; the journalists, the media all have to play a role.

I have found it possible to get involved in philosophy more internationally and this was in a way a matter of luck. There is now a large and I think quite exciting association called the Human Development and Capability Association, which was launched three years ago at a conference in Pavia, Italy. Before that, there were also three other preparatory conferences; at the first, people talked about Amartya Sen's work on capabilities; the second one was about my work; the third was more general. There was a lot of interest. We were finding that young people – and not only young people but mostly – in economics, political science, philosophy, and politics were coming from all over the world. At the conference at which we officially launched the Association there were 200 hundred papers from over 86 countries. Sen was the president for the first two years; now I am the president.

But of course it is partly a matter of luck: we had the good luck to have a group of young and very talented academics who just decided this should happen. They would just not let anything stand in their way and they put in so many hours of their own work. And we now have the Journal of Human Development that is run by the United Nations Development Programme and publishes the best conference papers every year. And we're getting more and more money now to pay for the travel of people from developing countries. I think the best thing about it is that it brings people together, so that people who are working on capabilities. There are now over six hundred members of the Association, all working together, and they learn a lot about the different arguments being made. The networking between the academic and the policy world is also very strong. Our 2005 conference was at UNESCO in Paris where we had people in UNESCO participating. So I feel that's what I am now most involved in and I feel that's very hopeful.

But of course, there are dozens of other thriving partnerships in hospitals – certainly in America, but I think in many other countries – between philosophers and doctors pushing the issues of medical ethics. In the US, this changed medical practice to a great degree, particularly in the area of decision-making. There used to be an assumption that doctors know best – and they hadn't even thought about the distinction between the patient's interests and the patient's rights! When the philosophers got in, they insisted that that distinction was quite central, that deciding in somebody's best interests is one thing but giving them the right to decide is another. So now everyone understands that distinction and standards of informed consent have been refined. Now there is very sophisticated related work on emotions being done. I've just read a new paper by a psychiatrist who works in a hospital about conditions under which emotions actually remove the decisional capacity – although doctors haven't recognized that because they don't really understand how the emotions work. So in all kinds of ways this is getting to be a very major force.

I think in law, which is one of my academic appointments, it's a little bit harder because the world of the law firm is a profit-oriented world. So I can teach people about social justice, but when they go out and work with firms they're not really in a position to say, "this firm should be striving to produce social justice". Yes, if the firm takes on cases on a pro bono basis (charging no fees) they may be involved in issues of social justice, but it isn't so easy. And if lawyers go into court and talk to the judges, again they are going to be very constrained by the legal precedents and won't have much latitude to inject their philosophical perspectives. But getting people to think about these issues at all is a good thing, especially when economists are teaching them to think about other issues; one can provide a kind of counterweight to the law and economics movement, anyway.

SV: There are a lot of philosophers who contribute to discussions about law, for example Ronald Dworkin in his debates with Richard Posner. I don't know how seriously judges, and Supreme Court judges for that matter, take these things into account, or to what extent they are influenced by philosophical discussions.

MN: I think Dworkin has had close to zero influence on the actual development of the law, and the reason is partly of course that judges aren't supposed to bring in any old theory they like but to look at the precedents and the principles involved in a case. But I think there is another reason: while Dworkin is a first-rate thinker, he doesn't have much practical legal background, and in his books he doesn't talk much about actual law, so his theories need an intermediary before they can be applied to actual cases. Of course, he writes pieces in the New York Review of Books about particular cases, but those pieces are not very tightly connected to his theories. So I think a middleman is needed before that connection could become a reality. There are people who try to introduce considerations of autonomy and equity and so on in a much more hands-on way. I myself I am writing a book about religion and the First Amendment, a real law book that talks about case law but stresses some of the underlying philosophical principles that I believe run through the case law. I think that's the way you have to do it if you're going to influence actual decisions.

SV: So the other question is more concerned with political philosophy and political theory. Are you optimistic about the development of liberalism? In practice, but also after all these debates about the right and the good, and the need to supplement liberalism with some conception of the good. I take your work on the capabilities approach and the discussions about the Aristotelian element to point in that direction. Do you think that theories of liberalism have learned from this? With globalization, there's a lot of what in Greece we call neo-liberalism – though I don't know whether the term is accurate, since many liberals complain that neo-liberalism is something the Left has invented. My question is: to what extent have people like you, who really discuss the need to go beyond the austere old liberal framework, really succeeded in influencing people, including politicians, in practice. And of course, there are other people who question the republican model, which is something different, moving in a different direction.

MN: Well, there are many different ways in which a kind of quasi-Aristotelian theory of the good has entered into what we might call liberal political theory; after all it didn't start with me. It started long ago, for example in England with T. H. Green and Ernest Barker, who were perfectionist socialists. They used the Aristotelian notion of human functioning to argue in favour of compulsory education. They were an important and a clear precedent for my position. In fact, I didn't read them until much later, but anyway I now see that they were important and a precedent; their form of liberalism was very comprehensive, it was closer to something like Joseph Raz's view today. I would call that a form of comprehensive liberalism, because a notion of autonomy is used across the board to talk about lives that are well lived and so on. I think the political form of liberalism, in which we don't advocate a comprehensive doctrine of autonomy but rather certain ethical principles for the political realm, is more defensible in a world in which, for example, we have religions that don't think autonomy is a particularly great good. We don't show respect for them if we say that only autonomous lives are worthwhile. But as to the political form of liberalism, my own view is that we can defend it best if we use the idea of capabilities as our political goal, rather than thinking of the good in terms of income and wealth alone.

I think that that sort of view has received a lot of attention. Particularly through the Human Development Reports of the United Nations Development Programme, capabilities are popping up all over the place. Of course, they don't bring in the whole of my political theory, they're just using the notion of capabilities comparatively to compare wellbeing in different countries. Nonetheless, you now see that pretty much every country in the world is talking the language of capabilities and making some measurements of their populations in that way. In India there's not just a national Human Development Report, but each state has its own Human Development Report. So, this language is now very widespread. I think it's important to not just have that comparative measure but to say there are certain fundamental entitlements based on the notion of capability available to all citizens.

So that takes us to the next step of thinking about constitution making: what should a constitution guarantee and how can that be implemented? But again, I think that when people are thinking about constitution making they're aware of these ideas; constitutions such as those of India and South Africa have very similar ideas, no matter what they're influenced by. So yes, I do think that these ideas about human functioning and human flourishing are actually quite widespread. And surely were widespread before I was born: a student has told me that the Social Democratic Party in Japan was founded by a pupil of Barker who brought Aristotelian ideas of human functioning to Japan and used them as the basis for a social democratic conception. I actually believe that Sen's idea of capability had such an origin, because Indians studied in Oxford, and Green and Barker taught many generations of leaders from the developing world. And I think the kind of humanist Marxism in the various Indian Marxist parties in which Sen grew up was also influenced by a kind of Marxian version of Aristotelian idea – which are very prominent, for example, in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Wherever the ideas come from, I think the important thing is now that they do enrich the debate within liberalism and I think they should be defended in a way that's still recognizably liberal. By that I mean with an emphasis on the idea that each person is the ultimate beneficiary, not large groups of people, not even families, but each person seen as an equal of every other person. And I also think that it's a hallmark of liberalism that ideas of choice and freedom are really very, very important. Of course I think one has to stress that we don't have choice if people are just left to their own devices. The state has to act positively to create the conditions for choice. I think the libertarian position is actually quite incoherent, because there is no such thing as absence of state action. Even to defend contract and property rights, and the rule of law itself, the state must take positive action.

SV: Are you talking about so-called negative rights?

MN: Yes. If you go out into the rural areas of Bihar in India, then you see what "negative liberty" comes to. Total chaos, where nothing is being done, where there no roads, no clean water supply, no electricity, and therefore where no one can do anything, no one has anything. I am sure my colleague Richard Epstein will agree, up to a point, that a state that's going to create liberty has got to act, has at least got to protect property rights and contracts and have a police force and a fire department. But then why draw the line at that? Why not also say that the State has to create public education, has to create the systems of social welfare that makes it possible for people to access health care, unemployment benefits, and so on? So I don't see any principled way of dividing those different spheres of state action. I talk to these libertarians often, and I think the debate really comes down to the question of what's the best strategy for promoting the human capabilities. Richard Epstein actually has said to me "you know, your list of capabilities I agree with it totally, we differ only about the means. I think that private industry should be the largest agent in promoting this and you think that the state should be". I have no objection to saying that the State could sometimes delegate part of its function to the private sphere when it judges that that's sufficient, but I do want to say that the State is the one that bears the final responsibility. The State is a system for the allocation of human basic entitlements. Its job is to promote justice and wellbeing for human beings; if it's simply delegated to private industry and that doesn't work, then the State hasn't done its job.

SV: Now if I may ask you about your work on the novel, I mean literature, your work related to philosophy and literature. Do you feel that your line of ethical criticism or of using literature for ethical philosophy has succeeded in moving people towards this direction? And is the fashion for deconstruction and for very post-modern approaches somehow losing its force today? Am I right in this perception or am I being too optimistic?

MN: I think you are right. I am on the board of the School of Criticism and Theory, which is the leading, cutting edge literary theory organization in the US. When I taught in their Summer School at Cornell a few years ago I was struck by the fact that all the students were interested in law and ethics. And so were the people that founded some of these deconstruction movements. Jonathan Culler gave a lecture in which I didn't hear anything about post-modernism. It was actually mostly New Criticism, but it had an ethical element as well. I think English Departments always have problems in America, because they always feel they have to have a gimmick. Because English used not to be an academic subject – in England it was always something you were expected to know because it was your language; when you went to university you studied classics. Because English has to defend itself against people who say it's not a proper academic subject, it's prone to fads. I think we're not at the end of the fads, there'll probably be some other fad that will be again rather annoying and we'll have to fight against that one. But at present, at least, I think the post-modern one is on the way out. Whether ethics in its serious sense will become central in English departments I am not sure, because I think very few literary scholars have the patience to do the sustained hard philosophical work that's needed. Whenever they talk about philosophy, with the exception of Wayne Booth, for example, they'll talk about it in a way that seems to me quite embarrassing and amateurish. So I feel uncertain whether in English departments we are going to get revealing first-rate work of an ethical sort. But certainly through philosophy it's happening.

Now in philosophy there's always a problem, which is that many philosophers have a background that's more scientific; they don't read novels much. So you can get departments, often very good departments, where people would make fun of a literary inquiry, or think that it was not proper philosophy. In my own department, fortunately, it's not that way at all. Many people would want, for example, to teach a course on Proust. One time I found I was offering a course on Proust and somebody else was also planning to offer one. In this very tiny Department of fifteen people, there were going to be two courses on Proust and no course on a major topic in recognized moral and political philosophy. So I dropped my course on Proust and I did my course on John Stuart Mill. But you know, we all agree, and if somebody wants to do a dissertation on Proust or Henry James we are very happy. I see more and more dissertations that have a literary element. If I am advising such a student, I'll urge them not to do the whole thing on that. If, for example, they're going to write about Iris Murdoch's novels, it would be good to have some chapters that are about topics of virtue that are more mainstream. My friends in Finland organized an international conference on philosophy and literature two years ago – because in Finland philosophy is very narrow and very focused on logic and technical issues of philosophy of science, and young people who are interested in philosophy of literature and literature and ethics felt isolated. So we thought: all right, we'll bring in some of the interesting people in Europe and North America who work on this and we'll show them what a lively field of philosophy it is, and show their professors too. I think it worked really well and that there was great interest in this subject. Of course, the logicians didn't come. We can always expect it will be so. But nonetheless, it gave some encouragement to the younger people. So I think now it's a much more open field than it was when I was a graduate student, when you couldn't even write a dissertation on Aristotle's views about friendship because people would make fun of you. They would say it was too soft or something. When I wrote about tragedy, my advisor said "Oh well, for that you have to find a supervisor in the Classics Department". And I really thought no, because it is a philosophical subject I have here. It was only when Bernard Williams showed up and understood that, that I gained a sense of permission to do it and to do it within philosophy – and I am always enormously grateful to Bernard Williams for that. But I think now things are different and that there are many people whom one could turn to for encouragement.

SV: And this goes along with overcoming the analytic-continental divide?

MN: Yes, absolutely, no longer would we think that if you worked on literature or other topics in aesthetics you're non-analytic. And you wouldn't have to do it in a kind of narrow pseudo-analytic way focused on meaning or language either. So yes, it's a better time. When I was in graduate school, aesthetics tended to focus almost exclusively on visual art. So the greats of that era, Arthur Danto, Richard Wollheim, Nelson Goodman, were really talking about painting. No one was talking about music; only Stanley Cavell was talking about literature. But now that's changed, everyone is broader now.

SV: And one final question about feminism, a more philosophical question. I have always felt that you have a critical attitude towards the more extreme feminist views. I think of people like Andrea Dworkin and to some extent Catharine MacKinnon. To what extent has your intervention influenced this sort of more radical feminist? Have things changed do you think, have things become more balanced today?

MN: My view about MacKinnon and Dworkin is extremely positive, as I've said both in Sex and Social Justice and in Hiding From Humanity. I think that both are great and I have great enthusiasm for their views. I don't agree with absolutely everything.

SV: You tend to be more universal, more ecumenical...

MN: MacKinnon thinks that she is an opponent of liberalism. And she thinks that, because when she went to graduate school liberalism was very underdeveloped and wasn't thinking about women's issues at all. Especially in law, liberalism was just talking about how all principles should be neutral, and so she thought that it makes no room for affirmative action. For example, there were insurance companies that did not give pregnancy benefits and legal liberals argued that this was OK, there is no sex discrimination here, because all non-pregnant persons, both male and female, are going to get the benefits. And she thought that this was ridiculous and of course it was. But that sort of obtuseness is not entailed by liberalism. She had never studied Rawls, she had never studied Dworkin, she had never studied any of the really theoretical works that think that there's a Kantian idea of human equality and human dignity at the bottom of liberalism. She's stressed that she had studied Mill, and she thought Mill was great, you know she is my colleague so I talk to her all the time. So she really objected to a kind of neutralism that was very influential in the legal realm, that made affirmative action for women impossible and refused to take seriously these differences of power. But of course Rawls never had that failing.

My primary difference with MacKinnon is that she is reluctant to express any universal norms or ideals. I think the reason for this is her Marxist background, because she thinks we first have to have the revolution and then once the revolution has taken place, women themselves will say what they want to say. She thinks it's too dictatorial to announce ahead of time what the norms are. However, in her writings there's a very obvious normative structure. There are ideas of dignity and equality. Andrea Dworkin is actually explicit about this, and in fact MacKinnon will say "Oh yes, that's the humanism in Andrea that I always find so unfortunate." She herself will admit that Andrea is sort of on my side in this debate. But I think she herself is, when you philosophically reconstruct her views. I don't think you can do it without employing normative notions; to the extent that she does avoid them it just means that her own ideas are underdeveloped and that there's not enough of a principled structure. I think that her views about sexual harassment are very, very important. Her emphasis on differences of power in the workplace is extremely important, as is her idea that what we have to look at is not just sameness or difference of treatment but the underlying structures of power. I think it's a liberal idea. I differ with some of her specific claims about pornography. But I don't actually think that's so central.

SV: What do you think of Andrea Dworkin's book Intercourse?

MN: Oh, I think Intercourse is a great book, I teach it all the time, but it's not about pornography. Andrea Dworkin is a fiction writer really. She's not a philosopher, so she doesn't always write with a great deal of definitional precision. I wrote a piece which is in "Sex and Social Justice" about philosophers and prophets in which I contrasted myself with her with some kind of unease, because I think philosophers don't want to move to the next step until they patiently make the right distinctions. Whereas I think Dworkin is a prophet. Her mentor was Frederick Douglass, she wants to get out there and denounce an evil. And like Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, she doesn't always define her terms precisely. So what I think she really is doing in Intercourse is saying that it's not just this or that evil offender that we need to be worried about, it is social norms themselves. When men use force against women, it's not enough to say: oh well that was a bad guy, or: that was a pervert, but that the problem is intrinsic to some of our social norms. Men think they have a right to use force in certain circumstances, when they've paid for the woman and they've got drunk and so on. Actually sociological evidence shows this. Edward Laumann, who is the greatest sociologist of American sexual behaviour, in his large tome called The Social Organization of Sexuality, said that the biggest problem that emerged from his careful survey of American sexual behaviour was a tremendous discrepancy between men's perception of what is force in the sexual situation and women's. Men simply don't believe that they're using force if the woman is drunk and they just go right ahead. And then the woman does think that that was force. So I think we made progress in having a social dialogue about that. But when Andrea Dworkin wrote, we hadn't had that dialogue yet. Still in some states in America, we haven't had it. Here is one case that was decided in Illinois quite recently. A woman who weighed 95 pounds was riding her bicycle in a forest preserve. A man who weighed 200 pounds came up to her and said: "Will you come with me into the forest? My girlfriend doesn't satisfy my needs". There is no one around, and he just picks her up off the bicycle and without struggling or fighting she goes along with his sexual demands in the woods. He was first convicted of rape, but the high court threw out the conviction saying she hadn't struggled to the utmost. You see, she was alone; she probably would have died if she had struggled! That's the kind of thing Andrea Dworkin is talking about. And the best criminal lawyers are very inspired by her and try to rewrite rape law and try to make it more adequate.

I think MacKinnon and Dworkin have made great contributions. MacKinnon happens to be a very good friend of mine by now also, but she is a great thinker I believe. I think MacKinnon is misunderstood as being a man-hater and that seems to me quite wrong. It's not as if she hasn't got some of the blame to bear for that because her writings are not systematic works. They're public speeches that she delivered in the heat of the moment that were recorded and then published. If my only works were my recorded interviews I would probably be misunderstood. But she should have written a more patient philosophical book. A Feminist Theory of the State is not really that book, because it was her dissertation. It does not answer the questions that philosophers raise about her views. Her new book on international law and women's human rights is in some ways her best, because its conceptual clarity is very evident.

The ones I don't think are so very helpful are the post-modernist feminists like Judith Butler whom I have criticized very strongly. I think that her refusal to advocate any norms and her advocacy of parodic acts of resistance is a turning away from the task of real social struggle in which we used to be engaged. And when I see academic feminists saying: well we can write these elegant papers in a jargon which parody the norms, I want to know where the feminist struggle that we had is. Laws and institutions haven't changed enough, so we should have a lot more solidarity with women who are working to change them, and we should theorize in a way that is helpful to that struggle. So that's my complaint against the Butler group.

And then the Carol Gilligan group: I think their work is not so good and I think it provides a handy rationale for the exploitation of women as caregivers. So I am very critical of those two groups.

SV: Thank you very much.

Source: Cogito, Greece, 5/2006

Aristotle on Making Other Selves *

2009-12-05T18:11:00.020-05:00

[Aristotle's view on friendship]

By Elijah Millgram

Philosophy Department

University of Utah

From Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (2), June 1987: 361-376.

There is still a relative paucity of discussion of the views on friendship that Aristotle presents in the Nicomachean Ethics,¹ although some recent work may indicate a new trend. One suspects that this paucity reflects a belief that those views are not very interesting; if true, this witnesses to an unfortunate underestimation of Aristotle's account. This account is in fact quite surprising, for -- I shall argue -- Aristotle believes that one makes one's friends in the most literal sense of the verb.

Aristotle takes virtue-friendship, i.e., the friendship of virtuous people who are friends for virtue, as 'friendship in the primary way.' Other 'friendships' -- for utility and for pleasure -- are only so-called by way of similarity to friendship proper, i.e., virtue-friendship (1157a30ff). Accordingly, proper friendship must be non-instrumental, or, more carefully, not essentially instrumental, unlike the friendship-analogs that fall outside the scope of friendship proper (1157a17-20). While 'friends of utility... were never friends of each other, but of what was expedient for them' (1157a14ff), a true 'friend is taken to be someone who wishes and does goods or apparent goods to his friend for the friend's own sake' (1166a3). The theme of desiring and acting for the friend's own sake is repeated many times in the Ethics;² in the Rhetoric it is explicitly taken as definitive of friendship (1361b35-40). Since the contrast between true friendship and mere friendship-analogs is that between the not essentially instrumental (for the sake of the friend) and the essentially instrumental (using the friend as a means to pleasure or utility), a successful account of Aristotle's views on friendship must preserve and explain this contrast in all its centrality.³

In doing so, one must be careful not to take friendship for virtue in such a way as to render friends a fungible commodity.⁴ The problem is this. Aristotle believes that one loves a friend for his virtue (cf., e.g., 1171a20, 1156b6ff). But there are (one hopes) many virtuous people, and, indeed, many persons who are more virtuous than the friends one actually has. If the friend's virtue provides the reason for the friendship, it would seem that one has identical reason to love all virtuous persons, or, if this is not possible, to replace one's virtuous friends with still more virtuous persons. But it is something like a conceptual truth about friendship that one has relatively few friends (according to Aristotle, roughly the number that one can live with -- 1171a1-3). A similar truth is that one does not rush off to replace one's somewhat virtuous friends with still more virtuous acquaintances. Friends are not replaceable: even when one loses old friends and makes new ones, it is not accurate to think of the new as replacing the old; moreover Aristotle takes virtuous friendship to be (pretty much) permanent (1156b18). There are many individuals who cannot claim the prerogatives of one's friendship, even though they may share in the admirable properties of those who can. This requires explanation. Why does one (appropriately) love one virtuous acquaintance rather than another? And why can one not simply replace a virtuous friend with some other, equally virtuous person?

II

With these constraints in mind, let's turn to Aristotle's account of friendship. Certain Aristotelian expressions -- to the effect that one wishes goods to one's friend for his own sake, and that the friend is another self -- appear too many times to be dismissed as less than central.⁵ It is worth trying to take them seriously, which -- at the risk of sticking to a stuffy notion of seriousness -- suggests taking them as literally as possible.

How are we to understand these expressions? The claim that the friend is another self suggests that the right way to do so is to think about one's own self. In one's own case, one has that special concern for one's projects and one's future that expresses itself in, among other things, prudence. This special concern is often felt to be one that terminates justification: 'Why do X?' can be answered by 'X is good for me,' whereas 'Why do what's good for you?' seems like a non-question. One way of putting this fact about us is to say that one desires the good for oneself for one's own sake (rather than for the sake of anything else). When Aristotle says that the friend is another self, that one desires the good for one's friend for the friend's sake, Aristotle is at least saying that one has for one's friend the same kind of special concern that one has for oneself, that the concern for the friend is justification-terminating in the same way that one's concern for oneself is justification-terminating.

The reading that takes concern for the friend, like self-concern, to be justification-terminating is supported by Aristotle's description of one's relation to oneself as the paradigmatic case of friendship: 'one is a friend to himself most of all' (1168b9). Aristotle thinks that the defining features of friendships with others are derived from friendship with oneself, and takes as the central instance of this the desire one has for goods and apparent goods for one's own sake (1166a1-5, 15-17). '[A]n extreme degree of friendship resembles one's friendship to oneself' (1166b1; see also 1171b33). On this interpretation, friendships are not essentially instrumental, any more than one's relation to oneself is merely or essentially instrumental. Part of what it is for a tool to be (solely) a tool is that it is always used for something: there is always a reason extrinsic to the tool for what one does to and with it. This is precisely what justification-termination in the friend does not permit.⁶

We have here two apparently distinct notions: that of wanting the good for one's friend for his own sake, and that of the friend's being another self. How are they related? One might think that the fact that one desires the good for one's friend for the friend's own sake is constitutive, perhaps exhaustively constitutive, of the friend's being another self: to say that the friend is another self is just to say that one desires the good for one's friend for his own sake.⁷ As a treatment of friendship, I think this approach to have many merits; however, I doubt that it can be successfully imported into Aristotle exegesis.

There are two reasons for thinking this. Recall that we are trying to take the Aristotelian locutions as seriously (and as literally) as possible. If the friend is another self, then what makes one's friend, one's friend is the same thing that makes oneself, oneself. This can be maintained together with the reading that takes other-self-dom to be constituted by special concern provided that one believes⁸ that one's own self is (at least partially) constituted by self-concern. But whatever the merits of this position, it is implausibly attributed to Aristotle, whose account of what makes oneself, oneself, will be a far more metaphysical story. This story is likely to have to do with species form and matter, and possibly with individual forms; the issue is controversial.⁹ In any case, it is very unlikely to have much to do with concern. That's one reason.

Here's the other. If 'one's friend is another self' and 'one desires the good for one's friend for his own sake' are just different ways of saying the same thing (or if 'the friend is another self' merely abbreviates 'one desires the good for one's friend for his own sake' and some other statements about other-self-dom), then the fact that the friend is another self can no more cause, explain or justify one's desiring the good for one's friend for his own sake than synonyms can cause, explain or justify one another. Aristotle, however, thinks that the friend's being another self at least explains desiring the good for him for his own sake: 'The decent person, then, has each of these features (which include desiring goods for one's own sake) in relation to himself, and is related to his friend as he is to himself, since [gar] the friend is another self' (1166a30-32; cf. 1166a3, 15-17).

The suggestion that one desires the good for one's friend because he is another self¹⁰ raises anew the question of where justification terminates. There does seem to be an answer to the question 'Why do what's good for your friend?' -- namely, that he is another self. However, the analogy between friendship and self-love is preserved if we hear such an answer as spoken in the same tone of voice that the first-person question would elicit: 'I do what's good for me because I'm myself.' And it may be that these explanations do not provide additional justification -- in the sense of adducing a further end for which the explanandum is an instrumental means -- but rather explanation of another kind. At any rate, Aristotle seems to agree that we do desire the good for our own sakes because we are ourselves, although just what this comes to is a tricky question.¹¹ This leaves us the tasks of elucidating the 'because,' and of saying what it is for the friend to be another self.

III

Elucidating the 'because' must wait on elucidating other-self-dom, and to do this, a detour is necessary. The 'friendship of kindred and that of companions' constitute a separate class, different from other kinds of friendship (1161b11f).¹² Kinship-friendship is uniformly derivative from the love of parents for their children (1161b16f), and importantly, parental love shares with comradely friendship the feature we are trying to understand: 'A parent loves his children as [he loves] himself. For what has come from him is a sort of other himself' (1161b27-30; cf. 1161b18f). By transitivity of identity, as it were, brothers are 'identical with each other,' since they are identical with their parents. They are 'in a sense the same thing, although in separate individuals' (1161b30-35). Since kinship-friendship and companion-friendship belong together, and share the features that we are trying to explain, and since kinship-friendship derives from parental friendship, we may be able to understand companion-friendship by way of parental friendship.

One can abstract from the parent-child relation to a relation that we shall call procreation. If A is a procreator of B, then (i) A is a creator of B in the sense that A is causally responsible for B's being,¹³ and (ii) B has the same being that A does. Now before arguing that the friend-friend relation is an instance of the procreation relation, I will argue that procreation is well-suited to explain the link between other-self-dom and special concern.

Procreation -- indeed, even its creation component -- seems to cause the kind of special concern we have been considering. '[E]veryone likes his own products more than (other people's), as parents and poets do' (1120b13). In the parent-child case, this is especially clear: the parent comes to love his children as a causal consequence -- perhaps even as a side-effect -- of their being his children. Craftsmen also have this preferential attitude towards their products (1167b34f; cf. 1168a1-3). The procreative relation underlies the love of the benefactor for his beneficiary: 'the beneficiary is his product and hence he likes him...' (1168a4-6, my italics).

The explanation of this phenomenon is worth quoting in full:

1. Being is choiceworthy and lovable for all.
2. We are insofar as we are actualized, since we are insofar as we live and act.
3. The product is, in a way, the producer in his actualization.
4. Hence the producer is fond of the product, because he loves his own being. And this is natural, since what he is potentially is what the product indicates in actualization. (1168a5-10)

So far, this explains both the parent's love for his children and the potter's preferential fondness for his own pots. The difference between these can be accounted for by our second condition on procreation: The producer loves his own being, and in procreation the creator has the same being as the creature. The potter is not himself a pot, so that pot and potter do not fully share the same being (except insofar as the pot is an actualization of the potter); but parent and child are both human beings, and share the (appropriate kind of) same being.

Now I don't want to try to reconstruct here the metaphysics that makes this way of thinking about these things plausible to Aristotle; suffice it that Aristotle does find it plausible. (At Physics 202b5 he explicitly states that '[i]t is not absurd that the actualization of one thing should be in another,' giving as example the actualization of the teacher in the student. Compare Metaphysics 1058a28-32.) For now, let's just say that the creature is the procreator's 'other self' because the procreator is responsible for the creature's having the being that they share, and it is natural for the procreator to have a special concern for his creature as an actualization of his being.

IV

The next item on our agenda is the claim that one is a procreator of one's friend. To be sure, one is not one's friend's procreator in the same way that a parent is his child's procreator: generally one's friends are living flesh and blood before they are one's friends. The force of the claim is rather that, over the course of a friendship, one becomes (causally) responsible for the friend's being who he is. Now Aristotle thinks that friendships are because of or for virtue. These positions coincide if virtue is (part of) what makes the virtuous man who he is. The being of a child for which his parent is causally responsible is, we can say, his human being; the being of one's friend for which one is responsible is his virtuous being. The former is, if you like, what he is; the latter is who he is.

This line of argument involves two subsidiary tasks. We must convince ourselves that Aristotle takes virtue to be (part of) what makes the virtuous man who he is. (I'll defer this to section V.) And we should say something about the causal role that the virtuous man plays in bringing about or maintaining his friend's virtue. A partial description can be appropriated from Cooper, who provides the following account of Aristotle's 'arguments to show that friendship is an essential constituent of a flourishing human life':

[F]irst... to know the goodness of one's life, which [Aristotle] reasonably assumes to be a necessary condition of flourishing, one needs to have intimate friends whose lives are similarly good, since one is better able to reach a sound and secure estimate of the quality of a life when it is not one's own. Second,... the fundamental moral and intellectual activities that go to make up a flourishing life cannot be continuously engaged in with pleasure and interest, as they must be if the life is to be a flourishing one, unless they are engaged in as parts of shared activities rather than pursued merely in private; and given the nature of the activities that are in question, this sharing is possible only with intimate friends who are themselves morally good persons.¹⁴

To paraphrase the suggestions as crudely as possible, one's friends serve as human mirrors in which one can better see one's own virtue;¹⁵ and one's friends are the teammates one needs to play the game of a virtuous life. I agree with Cooper that these are some of the ways in which we influence our friends' virtue, although there are surely others; moral education is another prominent possibility.¹⁶ This influence plays an important role in my account, but this role is causal rather than justificatory. Our current task is to elucidate the 'because' in 'One desires the friend's good for his own sake because he is another self'; we already know that the 'because' cannot represent a means-end relation, because friendships are essentially non-instrumental.¹⁷ So these considerations cannot be instrumental reasons for having friends. But what are they, if not instrumental reasons?

My suggestion is, causes. Let A and B be friends, and let B be (partly) responsible for (at least the maintenance of) A's virtue, in that B serves as a human mirror, and is a team-mate in A's virtuous activities. Cooper takes these facts to provide A with (instrumental) reasons for befriending B. But Cooper has things backwards. The causal facts, rather than providing A with instrumental reasons to befriend B, explain B's love for A. B loves A because he is a procreator of A, and procreators love their creatures. These causal interactions make each friend the other's 'other self,' and bring about the love of the friend for his own sake. (In like manner, the symmetrical facts explain A's love for B; just as B is a procreator of A, so A is a procreator of B.)¹⁸

It might be objected that one assists one's friends in being virtuous because they already are one's friends; so that they cannot be one's friends because one assists them in being virtuous. The appearance of circularity here can be dealt with by pointing out that the instances of assistance may be distinct: a present or future favor to a friend is prompted by his being a friend now; his being my friend now may be a result of past favors to one another's virtue. These in turn may have been prompted by the friendship of a still earlier time. To this it might be objected that a regress has been substituted for vicious circularity. But it need not be the case that all my actions that assist others in being virtuous be prompted by prior friendship. Some may be due to spontaneous good will (1155b35ff, 1167a3-13; cf. 1156b26-30), and some may be the virtuous actions that one is bound to perform in the course of leading a virtuous life.

Let me review the merits of this account. It is explicitly non-instrumental. It explains why one loves the particular virtuous people that one in fact does love, and in so doing, explains the numerical constraint Aristotle imposes on the size of one's circle of friends: while there are many virtuous people, one is only causally responsible (in the appropriate way) for the virtue of a few. The self-perpetuating character of the causal relations explains the permanence of friendship (cf. 1156b18): virtuous friends assist one another in remaining virtuous, and this mutual assistance keeps them friends. While friends can be corrupted, and while long separation can sever the causal links (1157b10-14), in general friends do not cease to be one another's procreators.¹⁹ Finally, the account rules out the interchangeability and replacement of virtuous friends: A and B may be equally virtuous, but if one is causally responsible for A's virtue but not for B's, then one will love A and not B.

V

The most important piece of unfinished business is the job of attributing to Aristotle the claim that virtue is (a part of) what makes the virtuous man who he is. This claim deserves a paper unto itself, so I'm going to suffice with reviewing reasons for thinking that Aristotle did endorse it. The claim can be taken in two ways, corresponding to a stronger and weaker way of understanding the expression 'who someone is.' The question 'Who are you?' can prompt on the one hand, an answer like, 'My name's Horatio Alger,' or 'I'm the president of Alger Enterprises,' and on the other, an answer like 'I'm a Young Republican,' or 'I'm someone who clawed his way up from poverty to the pinnacle of financial success.' That is, it can elicit a response that picks out the individual himself (by name or definite description) -- this is what I am calling the strong sense -- or it can elicit a certain kind of characterization of the individual which does not necessarily apply only to him. There is strong textual evidence for the weaker version, which is the version of the claim for which I shall argue.²⁰ First, though, it is necessary to say something, however, briefly, about the force of the weak version of the claim.

Clearly, not just any characterization of an individual will do as an answer to the question, 'Who are you?' Consider the examples just given: to answer with one's party affiliation or with one's financial history is to indicate that one identifies oneself very strongly with one's political position or with the abilities and aspects of one's personality that brought one to the top of the heap. It is appropriate to answer with traits that one believes to be central to one's character, the kind of traits that someone who wants to be loved for him- or herself might regard as traits that it would be appropriate to be loved for. Of course, what one believes one's characteristic traits to be and what they in fact are may well be two very different stories. Still, who one is is largely a matter of one's character, and some traits are more central to one's character than others. To claim that virtue is part of what makes the virtuous man who he is is to say that his virtues exhibit this kind of centrality relative to his character.

This is very much Aristotle's view. At 1156a10, he says that '[t]hose who love each other for utility love not the other in himself'; and at line 17 that utility- and pleasure-friendships 'are coincidental, since the beloved is loved not in so far as he is who he is.' Utility- and pleasure-friendships are here being contrasted with virtue-friendships, so the implication is that those who love another for his virtue love him in himself, and that the virtue-beloved is loved insofar as he is who he is.²¹ If loving someone for his virtues is loving him for who he is, then his virtues must be a large part of who he is.

We can complement these inferences from contrasting cases with positive evidence. Good people, we are told, 'will be friends because of themselves, since they are friends insofar as they are good' (1157b2-3; compare 1156b8, 1157a17-20). More tenuously, 1171a19f (which speaks of being the friend of people 'for their virtue and for themselves') suggests that being someone's friend for his virtue is the same thing as being his friend for himself. And at 1112a2-3 Aristotle states that our ethical decisions -- which are either partly constitutive or symptomatic of our virtues -- make us the sort of persons we are.

If virtues are a central part of who their possessor is, we should expect them to be among the most stable of character traits; and this is how Aristotle regards them. Virtuous characters are stable (1100b13-20, 1167b5-10, 1156b13), unlike those of the vicious, who 'do not even remain similar to what they were' (1159b9; cf. 1156a20). '[V]irtuous people are enduringly [virtuous] in themselves, and enduring [friends] to each other' (1159b3f). Aristotle does admit that the virtuous can become corrupted (1165b1, 13ff). But his discussion of such cases supports the claim for which we are arguing. In justifying one's ceasing to associate with a once-virtuous but corrupted friend, Aristotle states that one 'was not the friend of a person of this sort' (1165b22f). If losing one's virtue makes one a different kind of person, then one's virtue is central to making one the kind of person one is, and is a character trait of the appropriate centrality.²²

Earlier on we said that Aristotle takes virtue-friendship to be the sole genuine form of friendship. We can now explain why. While it is plausible to think that I have causal effects on my pleasure- and utility-'friends,' and that I am responsible for maintaining certain features or properties of theirs (probably those features and properties that make them pleasurable and useful to me), these properties and features -- unlike virtues -- are not, on Aristotle's view, among those that make persons (and in particular, my pleasure- and utility-'friends') who they are. Being virtuous is a large part of what it is to be a human being, whence of what it is to be the virtuous person that one is. On the other hand, being useful to me and being pleasant to me are not a part of being who one is.²³ This is why, despite superficial similarities, virtuous friendships turn out to be related to pleasure- and utility-'friendships' in much the way that ducks turn out to be related to toy ducks.

VI

An additional strength of my view is that it allows us to reconcile Aristotle's account of friendship with his commitment to what Vlastos calls 'the Eudaemonist Axiom' (EA), i.e., with the claim that all one's actions are done for the sake of one's own eudaemonia (roughly, happiness or well-living);²⁴ and to do so without sacrificing the motivational plausibility of the EA. The difficulty is that the EA seems to conflict with Aristotle's strongly held view that one desires the friend's good for his own sake. It suggests that while 'Why do what's good for you?' may be a non-question, the parallel question, i.e., 'Why do what's good for your friend?' cannot be.

One response is to suggest that Aristotle's conception of eudaemonia is such as to reconcile the two claims. Eudaemonia is not be understood as restricted to a person's narrowly conceived interests; it is not, for instance, a hedonist's conception of happiness. Rather, it may include such things as the happiness of others. On such a construal, I can desire the good for my friend for his own sake while adhering to the EA because my friend's good is part of my own eudaemonia; whenever I act for my friend's sake I am also acting for my sake.²⁵

While I do endorse this move, it is important to see why it must be made with caution. For it seems to threaten the psychological plausibility and motivational force of the EA. The claim that one does (and should) act for the sake of one's own eudaemonia loses much of its persuasive power when eudaemonia is construed not as something like the personal happiness in which an egoist would take a healthy interest but rather as a collection containing one's own (narrowly conceived) happiness, the (narrowly conceived) happiness of others, and possibly additional unrelated items. That is, while the conflict can be resolved by broadening one's reading of eudaemonia to include the eudaemonia of one's friends, if this leaves one's eudaemonia broader than oneself, the EA will be undercut.

The doctrine of the friend being another self resolves the difficulty by giving selfhood as broad a scope as eudaemonia. In the paradigm of the procreative relation, 'a parent is fond of his children because he regards them as something of himself' (1161b18f). In a way, the relation resembles that which one has to one's parts: '[A] person regards what comes from him as his own, as the owner regards his tooth or hair or anything' (1161b23f) -- and, 'what is our own is pleasant' (1169b33). The eudaemonia of one's friends is part of one's own because, and in the same way that, one's friends are parts of oneself.

One might be troubled by the fact that this reading seems to leave little room for what we might want to call genuine altruism. There is truth in this, but the responsibility for our discomfort is Aristotle's. Aristotle's explanations of friendship are uniformly self-oriented: since 'we are insofar as we are actualized,' loving one's own being involves loving the actualizations of one's own being (1168a5ff) -- and these include one's friends.²⁶

By way of a last word, perhaps I should point out that in attributing to Aristotle the account of friendship set forth in this paper I am -- I hope not too uncharitably -- ascribing to him opinions that I myself would not care to endorse. It seems to me that self-love is playing too great, and the wrong kind of, a role. As Robert Frost puts it in his poem, 'Hyla Brook': 'We love the things we love for what they are' -- not for what we have made them.²⁷

Notes

(*) I'm grateful to Richard Kraut, Gregory Vlastos, and -- especially -- Jennifer Whiting for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, as well as to the anonymous readers provided by this Journal.

1. References, unless otherwise indicated, are to the Nicomachean Ethics (NE); the translations are generally those of Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett 1985). Throughout this paper, 'friendship,' 'love' and their cognates will be used to translate 'philia' and its relatives. A review of the difficulties in translating the term can be found in John Cooper, 'Aristotle on Friendship,' in A. Rorty, ed., Essays on Aristotle's Ethics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press 1980) 301-40.

2. 1155b31, 1156b7-10, 1159a10, 1164a34, 1166a3, 1168a34, 1168b3; cf. also 1156a13.

3. Cooper, 'Aristotle on Friendship,' argues that pleasure- and utility-friendships have a substantial non-instrumental component. This is the point of distinguishing between essentially instrumental friendships (that have non-instrumental features, as in Cooper's example of the businessman who becomes willing to do small favors for a regular customer) and friendships that are essentially non-instrumental. Although Cooper's treatment tends to assimilate the different kinds of friendships to one another (on this point, see also note 17), it is clear that utility- and pleasure-friendships fall on the essentially instrumental side of the divide. In section V we will see a more principled way of spelling out the distinction between these and friendship for the sake of the friend.

So this is not to say that (true) friends don't have their uses. Aristotle is aware that friends have instrumental value (most notably at 1099a31-b2). The friend is a benefactor in the hour of need, and an opportunity for the exercise of virtue when fortune is generous (1155a5ff, 1169b11-16). At one point, Aristotle describes having friends as 'the greatest external good' (1169b10), a characterization that may suggest to some instrumental rather than intrinsic value. It is thus worth recalling that Aristotle thinks that external goods (such as health) can have both intrinsic and instrumental value, and that the latter need not preclude the former. See note 6.

4. Now it might be objected that while this is a natural way for us to understand friendship, it is not obviously so for Aristotle. Aristotle takes friends to love one another for virtue, and since one virtuous person is, qua virtuous person, like another, friends must be, as it were, a fungible commodity. Such a position conflicts so strongly with our pretheoretical understanding of friendship and with the general tone of Aristotle's discussion of it that its only support can be our inability to find a preferred construal of the claim that one loves a friend for his virtue. As we shall see, an alternative is available. Moreover, this reading will be extremely hard put to solve the puzzle I am about to pose, i.e., to explain why one loves just those virtuous people that one does love out of the many that one might.

5. For the former, see note 2. For the latter, 1166a30-33, 1166b1, 1169b6, 1170b6f, 1171b33; cf. also 1171a20.

6. To be sure, there do appear to be instrumental uses of one's friends: Aristotle states (to translate as literally as possible) that 'many things are done just as through instruments also as through friends and political power' (1099b1f), and that 'your friend, since he is another yourself, supplies what your own efforts cannot supply' (1169b6). But in the same, somewhat stilted way, one can make instrumental use of oneself (as in 'the movement of limbs that are the instruments' -- 1110a16). It is probably more appropriate to regard this kind of instrumentality as a sort of extended agency: 'what our friends achieve is, in a way, achieved through our agency, since the origin is in us' (1112b28). See note 3.

7. Jennifer Whiting presents such a view -- although not as an interpretation of Aristotle -- in 'Friends and Future Selves,' Philosophical Review 45 (1986), 547-80.

8. As does Whiting, ibid.

9. Cf. Edwin Hartman, Substance, Body and Soul (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1977) 10-56; Jennifer Whiting, 'Form and Individuation in Aristotle,' History of Philosophy Quarterly 3 (1986), 359-77.

10. I'm not claiming that one desires the good for one's friend for his own sake only because he is another self. One might, for example, feel good will towards Masons, and so also to one's Masonic friends.

11. Before mentioning the tricky question, a caveat: Actually, we desire apparent goods for our apparent selves, and the base, Aristotle recognizes, may, in addition to mistaking apparent goods for goods, mistake their apparent selves for their real selves, as when they try to 'gratify their appetites and in general their feelings and the non-rational parts of the soul' rather than reason (1168b20; cf. 1168b30-1169a3). Moreover, the very base may not even desire goods for themselves at all -- partly because they find themselves unbearable, and partly because they may lack coherently organized personalities, i.e., full-fledged selves (1166b2-27). So, more precisely, when we desire the good for our own sakes, we do so because we are ourselves.

Now while Aristotle often enough seems to commit himself to the view that we desire the good for our own sakes because we are ourselves, other remarks indicate that we desire the good for ourselves for our own sakes on account of our own virtue. These views need not be taken as contradicting one another if the latter can be taken as sketching the internal structure of the former. Such a construal would also be convenient for the line of exegesis I am advocating in another way, since I am about to argue that it is causing the friend's virtues that makes him my friend. My attempt to be literal about the 'another self' locution should then make me want to say that it is causing my own virtues that makes me myself; and the kind of account of the relation between one's virtues and one's selfhood I have in mind would allow me to say something sufficiently like this. Providing a full-fledged account of this kind would take me too far afield, so I will not do it here. However, I'll defend a more modest version of the claim in section V.

12. Aristotle seems to be contrasting companionly friendship with that of relatives and possibly with the political friendships of the immediately preceding passages, so I take the scope of 'companionly friendship' to be what we ordinarily take as friendship, with the proviso that Aristotle would have in mind genuine, i.e., virtue-friendship.

13. After comparing the relation between parents and children to that between gods and men, Aristotle brings to our attention the crucial fact that gods and parents are respectively 'the causes of [the] being' of men and children (1162a4-7). And at 1161a17 Aristotle describes the father as 'the cause of his children's being.'

14. Cooper, 330f.

15. The phrase 'human mirror' is Cooper's, adapted from the Magna Moralia (MM). The 'human mirror' argument seems to me the more dubious of the two. First, in making it out Cooper draws heavily on the MM (1213a10-26), which should be used with caution when trying to establish the views of the NE. For even if, as some deny, the MM is authentic, it may represent a stage in the development of Aristotle's thought distinct from that of the NE. Cooper appears to regard the MM passage as a more straightforward form of the argument of NE 1169b27-1170a4 and of 1170a15-b7. But it is not clear to me 1) that the two just-mentioned passages both contain the same argument or 2) that either NE passage contains the argument of the MM passage. Indeed, the contrast between the generally admitted obscurity of the NE passages and the relative clarity of the MM passage casts doubt on the claim.

Second, Cooper prefers his view to Ross's alternative construal of 1169b27-1170a4, which he regards as circular. But it is not clear that the argument, properly understood, is circular. Cooper points out that, on Ross's construal, 'Aristotle simply assumes, altogether without explicit warrant, that the good man will have friends' (318) -- and this is an inappropriate assumption in an argument for having friends. But Cooper conflates the project of demonstrating 'the value to a person of his having friends' (318), with the distinct project of providing someone who has no friends with reasons to acquire them. Were Aristotle's aim the latter, rather than that of explaining to the virtuous person why his friends are valuable, the argument would indeed be circular. But notice that the argument, construed in this way, renders friendship essentially instrumental: a friendship formed in order to attain the pleasure promised by the argument would be one of the friendship-analogs, rather than true friendship.

If, instead, part of being virtuous is contributing to the virtue of others, and if -- as we shall see -- this has as a causal consequence that the virtuous man acquires friends, then the alleged circularity disappears. For then it is simply a fact that the virtuous man does have friends. Raising the question of the value of these friends is in such a case not at all the same as asking for reasons to make friends. So Ross-like interpretations, which do not require excursions to the MM and are thus to be preferred, remain open.

Given the foregoing, one might wonder why I adopt the 'human mirror' story at all. The reason is that even if these views were not in the foreground when the NE was composed, Aristotle may still have had 'human mirrors' in mind when thinking of the ways in which friends affect each other's virtue. There are undoubtedly many ways in which this happens, and Aristotle need not have enumerated in the NE all those he had discovered. For our purposes it suffices to supply plausibly Aristotelian examples of such causal relations.

16. Recall Physics 202b5, and see note 18 below.

17. When Cooper takes the function of these arguments to be that of 'defend[ing] the value of friendship only by showing that for human beings it is a necessary means to attaining certain broadly valuable psychological benefits' (Cooper, 332, italics mine) he is providing an unsatisfactory, because (solely) instrumental, account of friendship. And, not incidentally, an account that cannot explain the non-interchangeability of friends. Cooper's position in 'Aristotle on Friendship' seems to me schizophrenic: he denies that he is producing an essentially instrumental account of friendship, and in the first part of the paper seems more or less successful; but the latter half produces what is, denials notwithstanding, just such an account. Since the two parts of the paper were originally separately published papers (see Cooper's note 1), there may be an historical explanation for the final version's split personality. I will confine myself here to explaining why the story that Cooper gives is in fact essentially instrumental.

Mirrors - even human mirrors -- are tools used for a specified purpose; this is true despite Cooper's flat denial on p. 333. Those who cooperate with one in a shared activity are, on the account presented, instruments towards one's performance of that activity. Cooper distinguishes between shared activities like chess, in which co-participants need have solely instrumental value, and shared virtuous activities, which require intimate acquaintance in order to ascertain and apprehend the co-participant's virtue; such intimate acquaintance is, Cooper thinks, sufficient for friendship. A similar line is taken regarding 'human mirrors.'

This is an interesting argument, but its links will not bear the strain that Cooper puts on them. For one thing, intimate acquaintance is by no means sufficient for friendship (as anyone who has ever shared his living quarters will testify). For another, ascertaining the virtue of another need not require intimate acquaintance. Virtues are something like dispositional psychological states. We can imagine that psychologists discover ways of reading these states off of a person's nervous system. They then build virtuometers, which quickly and reliably evaluate a person's virtue index. (If we want to make the story less anachronistic, we can imagine that the gods, who see into the souls of men, sponsor Virtue Evaluation Oracles in downtown Athens.) Under such circumstances it is very easy for virtuous persons to find guaranteed-to-be-virtuous co-participants in virtuous activities. But it would be unreasonable to describe such people -- people like the stranger with whom I have agreed, on the basis of his 98.7 Composite Virtue Index, to cooperate in building a temple -- as friends. Such devices could also, with a little more story-telling, be made to take the place of 'human mirrors'; instead of using one's friend to study one's own virtue, one could take virtuometer readings. Stories like this one show that 'human mirrors' and co-participants in virtuous activities are, qua occupiers of these roles, simply instrumental means to an end; they can be replaced by gadgets like virtuometers or by virtuometer-certified strangers because they are already no more than tools, and any tool, qua tool, is replaceable by anything else that serves the same purpose. Cooper's account, then construes friends as essentially instrumental, and as a fungible commodity.

18. A question that might be raised is whether my account can be extended to 'civic friendship' -- the somewhat weaker form of philia that is found between fellow citizens. (Even if it cannot, this is not an objection to the account; for Aristotle thinks that 'we should set apart the friendship of families and that of companions' [1161b11f].) Now, the citizens of the Greek polis took one of its primary functions to be that of educating its citizens. This education involved not merely the transmission of skills and information but a broader mission, involving the inculcation of virtues, that we can call the shaping of character. This widely shared opinion was also held by Aristotle. (Cf. e.g., 1099b29-32, 1102a7-10, 1103b2-7, 1155a23, 1179b32-1180a15, 1180a35-b7.) If, as I have suggested, one's character, constituted at least partly by one's virtues, is at least part of what makes one who one is, then the polis is (partly) responsible for its citizens being who they are.

Of course the polis is not a person. To say that the polis is responsible for a person's virtues and character is to say that the responsibility is shared by his fellow citizens who, with him, constitute the polis. Each of this person's fellow citizens is (in a small degree) responsible for his virtues, and thus (to a similar degree) for his being who he is. If so, then each citizen is a procreator of his fellow citizens, and this will lead him to exhibit (a suitably weak form of) love towards them. Civic friendship, it turns out, can also be understood as derivative from the relation between a procreator and his creature.

19. And they do not -- barring the possibility that the corrupted friend has become another person (see note 22) -- cease to have been one another's procreators. This may explain one's residual goodwill towards an (uncorrupted) ex-friend (1165b31-35).

20. It may be possible to substantiate the claim on its second, stronger reading. While I won't attempt to do so here, it seems possible to defend the view that virtues are not merely characterizing but also individuating features, perhaps in the context of a reading that commits Aristotle to individual forms.

21. A similar implication is possibly carried by 1157a15, which describes friends for utility as persons who 'were never friends of each other, but of what was expedient for them'; one who befriends another for his virtue is, we may suppose, a friend of the other. Cf. also 1164a10.

22. If one were to argue for the stronger version of the claim (see note 20, above), one might want to treat this case as one in which the corrupted friend has become a different person, reading the passage against Aristotle's discussions of still-more-radical transformations that fail to preserve identity at 1159a9ff and 1166a20-24.

23. This may not always be true if these descriptions are given a 'rigid reading': what makes someone useful to me may be his virtues. A non-rigid reading is intended.

24. 1102a3; 1140a27 is seen as supporting the claim that the eudaemonia in question is one's own.

25. This is, if I correctly understand him, Vlastos's view. (Personal communication and unpublished notes.)

26. This reconciliation of Aristotle's theory of friendship with his eudaemonism may help to resolve an ambiguity I have been leaving open. We said that the procreator has the same being as his creature; and this is likely to prompt the reader familiar with Aristotle to ask whether the being they share is species being or individual being, i.e., whether the procreator and his creature are the same in kind or the same in number. Our discussion suggests that the more strongly one reads eudaemonism as a form of psychological egoism, the more one will be motivated to adopt the latter construal. Diogenes Laertius ascribes to Aristotle the saying that friends are 'one soul inhabiting two bodies' (V.20); on such a reading, this would literally be Aristotle's view.

27. It has occurred to me that Frost may have had Aristotle's views of friendship in mind when he wrote this poem. Frost would have shared the exegetical orthodoxy of his time in taking Aristotle to hold that things of a kind have their form in common but are individuated by their matter. Virtues are specified by the form: if brooks had forms, a brook's virtues might include being full of clear, flowing water. Frost seems to be saying that he loves Hyla Brook not for its brookish virtues (which it possesses scantily, if at all) but for the matter that makes it differ from other brooks: its dried mud and dead leaves. What we love is not the form, and the virtues specified by it, but the individuating matter (hule). (The pun on hyla and hule has been thought of by others -- e.g., Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1979], 40, 45, 64f -- and it is not extravagant to suppose that it may have occurred to Frost as well.)

On the Dedication to "That Single Individual"

2009-11-06T17:39:00.011-05:00

Soren Kierkegaard

Translated by Chrarles B. Bellinger

(please see Note 1 before continuing)

My dear, accept this dedication; it is given over, as it were, blindfolded, but therefore undisturbed by any consideration, in sincerity. Who you are, I know not; where you are, I know not; what your name is, I know not. Yet you are my hope, my joy, my pride, and my unknown honor.

It comforts me, that the right occasion is now there for you; which I have honestly intended during my labor and in my labor. For if it were possible that reading what I write became worldly custom, or even to give oneself out as having read it, in the hope of thereby winning something in the world, that then would not be the right occasion, since, on the contrary, misunderstanding would have triumphed, and it would have also deceived me, if I had not striven to prevent such a thing from happening.

This, in part, is a possible change in me, something I even wish for, basically a mood of soul and mind, which does not produce change by being more than change and therefore produces nothing less than change; it is rather an admission, in part a thoroughly and well thought-out view of "life," of "the truth," and of "the way."

There is a view of life which holds that where the crowd is, the truth is also, that it is a need in truth itself, that it must have the crowd on its side.[Note 2] There is another view of life; which holds that wherever the crowd is, there is untruth, so that, for a moment to carry the matter out to its farthest conclusion, even if every individual possessed the truth in private, yet if they came together into a crowd (so that "the crowd" received any decisive, voting, noisy, audible importance), untruth would at once be let in.[Note 3]

For "the crowd" is untruth. Eternally, godly, christianly what Paul says is valid: "only one receives the prize," [I Cor. 9:24] not by way of comparison, for in the comparison "the others" are still present. That is to say, everyone can be that one, with God's help - but only one receives the prize; again, that is to say, everyone should cautiously have dealings with "the others," and essentially only talk with God and with himself - for only one receives the prize; again, that is to say, the human being is in kinship with, or to be a human is to be in kinship with the divinity. The worldly, temporal, busy, socially-friendly person says this: "How unreasonable, that only one should receive the prize, it is far more probable that several combined receive the prize; and if we become many, then it becomes more certain and also easier for each individually." Certainly, it is far more probable; and it is also true in relation to all earthly and sensuous prizes; and it becomes the only truth, if it is allowed to rule, for this point of view abolishes both God and the eternal and "the human being's" kinship with the divinity; it abolishes it or changes it into a fable, and sets the modern (as a matter of fact, the old heathen) in its place, so that to be a human being is like being a specimen which belongs to a race gifted with reason, so that the race, the species, is higher than the individual, or so that there are only specimens, not individuals. But the eternal, which vaults high over the temporal, quiet as the night sky, and God in heaven, who from this exalted state of bliss, without becoming the least bit dizzy, looks out over these innumerable millions and knows each single individual; he, the great examiner, he says: only one receives the prize; that is to say, everyone can receive it, and everyone ought to become this by oneself, but only one receives the prize. Where the crowd is, therefore, or where a decisive importance is attached to the fact that there is a crowd, there no one is working, living, and striving for the highest end, but only for this or that earthly end; since the eternal, the decisive, can only be worked for where there is one; and to become this by oneself, which all can do, is to will to allow God to help you - "the crowd" is untruth.

A crowd - not this or that, one now living or long dead, a crowd of the lowly or of nobles, of rich or poor, etc., but in its very concept [Note 4] - is untruth, since a crowd either renders the single individual wholly unrepentant and irresponsible, or weakens his responsibility by making it a fraction of his decision. Observe, there was not a single soldier who dared lay a hand on Caius Marius; this was the truth. But given three or four women with the consciousness or idea of being a crowd, with a certain hope in the possibility that no one could definitely say who it was or who started it: then they had the courage for it; what untruth! The untruth is first that it is "the crowd," which does either what only the single individual in the crowd does, or in every case what each single individual does. For a crowd is an abstraction, which does not have hands; each single individual, on the other hand, normally has two hands, and when he, as a single individual, lays his two hands on Caius Marius, then it is the two hands of this single individual, not after all his neighbor's, even less - the crowd's, which has no hands. In the next place, the untruth is that the crowd had "the courage" for it, since never at any time was even the most cowardly of all single individuals so cowardly, as the crowd always is. For every single individual who escapes into the crowd, and thus flees in cowardice from being a single individual (who either had the courage to lay his hand on Caius Marius, or the courage to admit that he did not have it), contributes his share of cowardice to "the cowardice," which is: the crowd. Take the highest, think of Christ - and the whole human race, all human beings, which were ever born and ever will be born; the situation is the single individual, as an individual, in solitary surroundings alone with him; as a single individual he walks up to him and spits on him: the human being has never been born and never will be, who would have the courage or the impudence for it; this is the truth. But since they remain in a crowd, they have the courage for it - what frightening untruth.

The crowd is untruth. There is therefore no one who has more contempt for what it is to be a human being than those who make it their profession to lead the crowd. Let someone, some individual human being, certainly, approach such a person, what does he care about him; that is much too small a thing; he proudly sends him away; there must be at least a hundred. And if there are thousands, then he bends before the crowd, he bows and scrapes; what untruth! No, when there is an individual human being, then one should express the truth by respecting what it is to be a human being; and if perhaps, as one cruelly says, it was a poor, needy human being, then especially should one invite him into the best room, and if one has several voices, he should use the kindest and friendliest; that is the truth. When on the other hand it was an assembly of thousands or more, and "the truth" became the object of balloting, then especially one should godfearingly - if one prefers not to repeat in silence the Our Father: deliver us from evil - one should godfearingly express, that a crowd, as the court of last resort, ethically and religiously, is the untruth, whereas it is eternally true, that everyone can be the one. This is the truth.

The crowd is untruth. Therefore was Christ crucified, because he, even though he addressed himself to all, would not have to do with the crowd, because he would not in any way let a crowd help him, because he in this respect absolutely pushed away, would not found a party, or allow balloting, but would be what he was, the truth, which relates itself to the single individual. And therefore everyone who in truth will serve the truth, is eo ipso in some way or other a martyr; if it were possible that a human being in his mother's womb could make a decision to will to serve "the truth" in truth, so he also is eo ipso a martyr, however his martyrdom comes about, even while in his mother's womb. For to win a crowd is not so great a trick; one only needs some talent, a certain dose of untruth and a little acquaintance with the human passions. But no witness for the truth - alas, and every human being, you and I, should be one - dares have dealings with a crowd. The witness for the truth - who naturally will have nothing to do with politics, and to the utmost of his ability is careful not to be confused with a politician - the godfearing work of the witness to the truth is to have dealings with all, if possible, but always individually, to talk with each privately, on the streets and lanes - to split up the crowd, or to talk to it, not to form a crowd, but so that one or another individual might go home from the assembly and become a single individual. "A crowd," on the other hand, when it is treated as the court of last resort in relation to "the truth," its judgment as the judgment, is detested by the witness to the truth, more than a virtuous young woman detests the dance hall. And they who address the "crowd" as the court of last resort, he considers to be instruments of untruth. For to repeat: that which in politics and similar domains has its validity, sometimes wholly, sometimes in part, becomes untruth, when it is transferred to the intellectual, spiritual, and religious domains. And at the risk of a possibly exaggerated caution, I add just this: by "truth" I always understand "eternal truth." But politics and the like has nothing to do with "eternal truth." A politics, which in the real sense of "eternal truth" made a serious effort to bring "eternal truth" into real life, would in the same second show itself to be in the highest degree the most "impolitic" thing imaginable.

The crowd is untruth. And I could weep, in every case I can learn to long for the eternal, whenever I think about our age's misery, even compared with the ancient world's greatest misery, in that the daily press and anonymity make our age even more insane with help from "the public," which is really an abstraction, which makes a claim to be the court of last resort in relation to "the truth"; for assemblies which make this claim surely do not take place. That an anonymous person, with help from the press, day in and day out can speak however he pleases (even with respect to the intellectual, the ethical, the religious), things which he perhaps did not in the least have the courage to say personally in a particular situation; every time he opens up his gullet - one cannot call it a mouth - he can all at once address himself to thousands upon thousands; he can get ten thousand times ten thousand to repeat after him - and no one has to answer for it; in ancient times the relatively unrepentant crowd was the almighty, but now there is the absolutely unrepentant thing: No One, an anonymous person: the Author, an anonymous person: the Public, sometimes even anonymous subscribers, therefore: No One. No One! God in heaven, such states even call themselves Christian states. One cannot say that, again with the help of the press, "the truth" can overcome the lie and the error. O, you who say this, ask yourself: Do you dare to claim that human beings, in a crowd, are just as quick to reach for truth, which is not always palatable, as for untruth, which is always deliciously prepared, when in addition this must be combined with an admission that one has let oneself be deceived! Or do you dare to claim that "the truth" is just as quick to let itself be understood as is untruth, which requires no previous knowledge, no schooling, no discipline, no abstinence, no self-denial, no honest self-concern, no patient labor! No, "the truth," which detests this untruth, the only goal of which is to desire its increase, is not so quick on its feet. Firstly, it cannot work through the fantastical, which is the untruth; its communicator is only a single individual. And its communication relates itself once again to the single individual; for in this view of life the single individual is precisely the truth. The truth can neither be communicated nor be received without being as it were before the eyes of God, nor without God's help, nor without God being involved as the middle term, since he is the truth. It can therefore only be communicated by and received by "the single individual," which, for that matter, every single human being who lives could be: this is the determination of the truth in contrast to the abstract, the fantastical, impersonal, "the crowd" - "the public," which excludes God as the middle term (for the personal God cannot be the middle term in an impersonal relation), and also thereby the truth, for God is the truth and its middle term.

And to honor every individual human being, unconditionally every human being, that is the truth and fear of God and love of "the neighbor"; but ethico-religiously viewed, to recognize "the crowd" as the court of last resort in relation to "the truth," that is to deny God and cannot possibly be to love "the neighbor." And "the neighbor" is the absolutely true expression for human equality; if everyone in truth loved the neighbor as himself, then would perfect human equality be unconditionally attained; every one who in truth loves the neighbor, expresses unconditional human equality; every one who is really aware (even if he admits, like I, that his effort is weak and imperfect) that the task is to love the neighbor, he is also aware of what human equality is. But never have I read in the Holy Scriptures this command: You shall love the crowd; even less: You shall, ethico-religiously, recognize in the crowd the court of last resort in relation to "the truth." It is clear that to love the neighbor is self-denial, that to love the crowd or to act as if one loved it, to make it the court of last resort for "the truth," that is the way to truly gain power, the way to all sorts of temporal and worldly advantage - yet it is untruth; for the crowd is untruth.

But he who acknowledges this view, which is seldom presented (for it often happens, that a man believes that the crowd is in untruth, but when it, the crowd, merely accepts his opinion en masse, then everything is all right), he admits to himself that he is the weak and powerless one; how would a single individual be able to stand against the many, who have the power! And he could not then want to get the crowd on his side to carry through the view that the crowd, ethico-religiously, as the court of last resort, is untruth; that would be to mock himself. But although this view was from the first an admission of weakness and powerlessness, and since it seems therefore so uninviting, and is therefore heard so seldom: yet it has the good feature, that it is fair, that it offends no one, not a single one, that it does not distinguish between persons, not a single one. A crowd is indeed made up of single individuals; it must therefore be in everyone's power to become what he is, a single individual; no one is prevented from being a single individual, no one, unless he prevents himself by becoming many. To become a crowd, to gather a crowd around oneself, is on the contrary to distinguish life from life; even the most well-meaning one who talks about that, can easily offend a single individual. But it is the crowd which has power, influence, reputation, and domination - this is the distinction of life from life, which tyrannically overlooks the single individual as the weak and powerless one, in a temporal-worldly way overlooks the eternal truth: the single individual.

Note The reader will recall, that this (the beginning of which is marked by the atmosphere of its moment, when I voluntarily exposed myself to the brutality of literary vulgarity) was originally written in 1846, although later revised and considerably enlarged. Existence, almighty as it is, has since that time shed light on the proposition that the crowd, seen ethico-religiously as the court of last resort, is untruth. Truly, I am well served by this; I am even helped by it to better understand myself, since I will now be understood in a completely different way than I was at the time, when my weak, lonely voice was heard as a ridiculous exaggeration, whereas it can now scarcely be heard at all on account of existence's loud voice, which says the same thing.

Notes

[Note 1] This, which is now considerably revised and enlarged, was written and intended to accompany the dedication to "that single individual," which is found in "Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits." Copenhagen, Spring 1847.

[Note 2] Perhaps, however, it is right to note once and for all, that which follows of itself and which I have never denied, that in relation to all temporal, earthly, worldly ends the crowd can have its validity, even its validity as a decisive court of last resort. But I am not speaking about such things, which I pay so little attention to. I speak of the ethical, the ethical-religious, of "the truth," and seen ethico-religiously the crowd is untruth, when it is taken as a valid court of last resort for what "the truth" is.

[Note 3] Perhaps, however, it is right to note, although it seems to me to be almost superfluous, that it naturally could not occur to me to object to something, for example that there is preaching, or that "the truth" is proclaimed, even though it was to an assembly of a hundred thousand. No, but even if it were an assembly of just ten - and if there should be balloting, that is, if the assembly were the court of last resort, if the crowd were the decisive factor, then there is untruth.

[Note 4] The reader will therefore recall, that here by "crowd," "the crowd" is understood as a purely formal conceptual definition, not what one otherwise understands by "the crowd," when it supposedly is also a qualification, when human selfishness irreligiously divides human beings into "the crowd" and the nobles, and so forth. God in heaven, how would the religious arrive at such in-human equality! No, "crowd" is the number, the numerical; a number of noblemen, millionaires, high dignitaries, etc. - as soon as the numerical is at work, the "crowd" is "the crowd."

Practical Wisdom in Environmental Education

2009-05-26T23:09:00.010-04:00

David Havlick ; Marion Hourdequin

Affiliations:Department of Geography, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, US

Department of Philosophy, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, USA

Abstract

To create an ecologically literate, motivated, and engaged citizenry, environmental education must help students develop practical wisdom. We discuss three elements of teaching central to this task: first, greater emphasis on contextualized knowledge, grounded in particular places and cases; second, multi-modal learning that engages students as whole persons both cognitively and affectively; and third, stronger connections between knowing and doing, or between knowledge and responsibility. We illustrate these elements through our experience teaching field-based environmental studies courses, but also emphasize ways in which practical environmental education can be effectively incorporated into campus-based classes.

Introduction

In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle addressed the question of what constitutes a good life for human beings. Aristotle's answer was that a good life is a virtuous life. He offered a detailed account of the virtues of character, which are social virtues that allow individuals to live well in relation to other members of the community. Aristotle 's thorough discussion of these virtues, along with his account of friendship, suggests that the knowledge human beings require to flourish is deeply practical. Only in the closing sections does Aristotle call this view into question, elevating a life of philosophical contemplation and theoretical wisdom above all else, noting that contemplation comes closest to mirroring the activity of the gods.

The tension between practical and theoretical wisdom in the Nicomachean Ethics has been the source of endless academic controversy. Yet, regardless of what Aristotle intended, he at least acknowledged that insofar as we are human, we need practical wisdom: 'for our nature is not self-sufficient for the purpose of contemplation, but our body also must be healthy and have food and other attention'.(1) We first need to know how to sustain ourselves as individuals and in communities before we can be free to pursue lives of pure theoretical contemplation.

The division between the theoretical and the practical may not be as sharp as Aristotle suggested, but regardless of how one draws the distinction, practical wisdom has never been more important than it is today. We need to learn how to live well in a world plagued by environmental problems at scales ranging from local to global. We need to learn how it is possible for human beings and the ecosystems upon which we depend to flourish in an increasingly crowded world. This will require practical wisdom of the most thoughtful and sophisticated kind; not necessarily the kind of wisdom that today's higher education effectively provides.

In 1976 the United Nations identified as the goal of environmental education in its Belgrade Charter:

to develop a world population that is aware of, and concerned about, the environment and its associated problems, and which has the knowledge, skills and commitment to work toward solutions of current problems and the prevention of new ones.(2)

Nearly three decades later, only limited progress has been made towards achieving this goal world wide.

Even if applied more modestly to the college curriculum and its graduates in the USA, the UN's goal remains distant. Despite efforts to integrate environmental education into K-12 programs and college curricula, the overarching objective of creating an ecologically literate, motivated and engaged corps of graduates remains elusive.

Effective environmental education at the college level requires a move towards the practical. In order to facilitate this shift, we discuss three elements that can contribute to integrated learning: first, greater emphasis on contextualized knowledge, grounded in particular places and cases; second, multi-modal learning that engages students as whole persons both cognitively and affectively; third, stronger connections between knowing and doing or between knowledge and responsibility. We illustrate these elements primarily through our experience teaching field-based environmental studies courses, however, we also emphasize that these features can be incorporated into traditional classes on campus.

Practical wisdom requires contextualized knowledge. By contextualized knowledge we mean that concepts and skills learned in the classroom should not remain at such a high level of abstraction that they cannot be utilized in everyday thinking about what to believe and what to do; rather, they should link up with life outside the university walls. Students need to develop analytic and critical thinking skills not just to solve logic problems, but to grapple with the complexities of real world issues, for which deductive reasoning may not suffice. For philosophers this means coming down to earth, spending more time discussing cases that involve real world possibilities and less time relying on fanciful 'possible world' examples. For geographers this means helping students understand how the physical and cultural features of places influence social and environmental processes right here and now, not just on the other side of the world or in the future and the past.

Knowledge can be made practical through a variety of means. In our experience, one effective way to contextualize knowledge is to get students out of the classroom. Rather than read about the interconnections between elevation and temperature, logging and stream siltation or suburban sprawl and habitat fragmentation, students can experience these relationships for themselves in the field. Theoretical knowledge can be reinforced and made practical by experiences that allow students to explore and confirm what they read or hear in lectures. After covering the basics of the hydrologic cycle and energy flow, for example, in a recent course we brought students to the local sanitary landfill for a tour. As we stood around a settling pond filled with leachate, or 'landfill tea', our guide described the water's destiny. Once the settling pond fills, the water is pumped to the county water treatment facility, then on to nearby Jordan Lake, which supplies drinking water for several nearby communities. Several of the students who lived in these towns were astonished to learn that the waters oozing from this garbage heap flow after three short steps from their own household taps. Such experiences increase awareness and promote critical thinking, encouraging students to examine and assess for themselves the ways in which the environment and human activities are intertwined and to discuss with their peers the implications of these connections.

Moving farther from the college campus, a growing number of field-based academic programs provide intensive opportunities for students to explore environmental issues experientially. These courses, such as those we have taught for the Missoula, Montana-based Wild Rockies Field Institute, offer educational opportunities unavailable in typical classroom settings and may prove crucial in achieving the goals of environmental education. Field experiences immerse students in the natural and human histories of particular places, where students can learn inductively, starting with place-based experiential data and moving toward generalizations based on this experience. The localization and particularity of field experiences reverse the typical process of classroom learning in philosophy and the sciences, where students often learn general principles first, followed by specific examples that illustrate these generalizations. Inductive knowledge building, in contrast, does not presuppose the existence of general principles that apply to all cases. Instead, students' interactions with land managers, visits with ranchers, environmental activists and Native Americans and active work on ecological restoration projects reveal the complexity of environmental issues and challenge students to deal with this complexity, building analytical and deliberative skills needed for effective participation in environmental decisions.

Another feature of field experiences is that they engage students in diverse ways: physically, intellectually and emotionally. They encourage multiple modes of learning, which, in addition to accommodating a diversity of learning styles, help develop knowledge that is multidimensional and vivid, richer than the usual words from a text. While classroom instructors must often work hard to foster learning through multiple pathways, in the field this variety is built into the course. In our campus-based classes we find it consistently challenging to cover a large amount of material in a single semester. Perhaps nowhere is this challenge felt more strongly than in teaching world regional geography, a survey course that takes students around the world in roughly half the proverbial 80 days. By combining lecture notes, PowerPoint presentations, slides, informal discussion, small group exercises, role play, 'geography bowl' activities and brief student presentations the format can be varied, but the overall trend is one of knowledge flowing from the instructor to a relatively passive assembly of students.

In the field, although we typically spend at least as much time in advance designing the syllabus and structuring the lesson plans for a course, there are inevitably encounters that spawn spontaneous 'teachable moments' during which the group of students and instructor(s) collectively are challenged to process information and critically assess these experiences. During the hiking portion of the day we commonly stop to point out particular plants or plant associations, note the shifting forest types as we ascend or descend, discuss management policies that apply as we pass through jurisdictional boundaries (or clearcuts, rangeland, etc.) or simply scout an area for a suitable camp site. Questions often arise as students explore areas close to camp: Why is this stream so cold, what made these ruts in the trail or why aren't there any trees growing here? Although in the courses we have taught there is time set aside for structured classes (discussion, lecture or field activities), learning does not end when class is over. Field experiences soften the boundaries between 'class' and 'life', distributing the flow of information over the course of the day, with frequent opportunities to reinforce and expand on ideas through direct encounters and observation.

It might be objected that field courses, especially those set in remote locations, do not provide students with 'practical' knowledge at all. Who needs to know why certain trees grow on dry sites but not near moisture or what makes mountain streams so chilly? Today's students need to know how to design web sites, manage computer networks and write an effective cover letter, not learn the natural history of some faraway place to which they may never return. While it is true that the particular details of plant taxonomy may be neither necessary nor sufficient to promote environmental literacy, learning to know a particular place well is an important first step towards reintegrating humans into the environment and showing how human activities, from computer network management to logging to the national energy policy, actually affect the world. By interacting with the animals, plants and people of particular places, students develop the skills and insight they need to understand other places and people, including those close to home. In fact, these lessons from the field often help students to think ecologically, encouraging them to make connections that extend beyond disciplinary boundaries or single actions and to consider how various parts contribute to the whole. As we illustrated with the brief excursion to the landfill, even a short field trip can add important practical knowledge to our experiences. When these students add their garbage to the campus bins they can now reflect on how such refuse circulates back to their hometown water supply.

This brings us to our last point: the importance of connecting knowledge and responsibility. Multimodal learning and contextualized knowledge both support this third educational goal. By connecting knowledge to real world issues and by engaging students more fully and deeply in the learning process, these first two elements help connect knowing and doing. Field-based learning also fosters responsibility in other ways. Especially in backcountry courses, students and instructors form not only a learning community, but a community in all aspects of life, if for a short time. Cooking and cleaning responsibilities are shared and students learn that the safety of the group depends on the intelligent behavior of each of its members.

Although critiques such as Cronon's influential 1995 essay, 'The trouble with wilderness', point to a distancing effect where the idea of wilderness lulls society into ignoring the real challenges that exist where we live, in fact we find that wilderness-based education can link students profoundly to the importance of taking responsibility for their actions.(3) On a field course in southeast Alaska a student once ignored our instructions not to bring food into his tent and his half-eaten candy bar nearly got him expelled from the course. When we later saw a large bear working the shoreline for barnacles and mussels the course rules suddenly made sense. In this way, prescriptions for behavior in the field often come with clearer consequences than those in the classroom, whether these are focused on environmental topics, such as recycling, or practical ones, such as camping safely in bear country. Ideally, by experiencing themselves as agents whose actions matter - to their own safety, to the well-being of the group and to resident animals and plants - students gain a heightened sense of the import of their everyday decisions that can carry over to other settings.

Particularly when trying to convey complex or abstract concepts about environmental processes, ethics or management, the move outdoors to direct experience seems to awaken in many students an ability to find more direct meaning and to see themselves as part of the world they are learning about, rather than as just passive observers of it. By removing students and their instruction entirely from field or forest as we now have in most college coursework, environmental education itself becomes abstracted. In the climate-controlled environment of the average university classroom students understandably may find it difficult to link a particular lecture on energy consumption to the means of producing power and to connect greenhouse gas emissions to rising seas and increased flooding. In this setting it is not only conceptually difficult to make these connections, but it contradicts one's personal experience. The air-conditioned room feels soothing, not like a contributing element to global climate change.

In the field such topics may be more actively approached. On a Field Institute semester course on the Colorado Plateau of Utah and Arizona, for example, in the span of two days students were able to visit a Hopi initiative to provide photovoltaic arrays to isolated communities, camp on the banks of the (now) clear, cold waters of the Colorado River downstream from the Glen Canyon Dam, be guided through the dam from top to bottom to see (and smell and hear) how it produces hydroelectricity and finish off with a tour of the Navajo Power Plant, with, in passing, a glimpse of the Black Mesa coal mining site that feeds it.

The lessons learned from these experiences ultimately remain up to each individual, but as a program such field-based education can ensure that students will at least understand how some of our major energy sources are produced, and with what consequences. The intimacy of such encounters - peering into the fiery dynamo of the coal furnace or descending through the damp corridors of the dam - also presses students to both feel and think. Learning in this way has a visceral quality that tends to pierce through collegiate apathy. Of course, there is no guarantee that students will form the 'right' outlook on the basis of such experiences. However, as teachers we aim to raise questions and motivate critical thought, rather than implant a particular point of view. The vividness of field trips that illustrate the intricacies of real world environmental issues can spur students to engage with one another in earnest conversations about how power should be produced and consumed, the generation and fate of our trash and our relationship to the environment more generally.

Such visits help provide what Aldo Leopold called 'an intense consciousness of land', which he considered essential for individuals to develop a land ethic. As he wrote in his 1949 critique of the educational and economic system that prevailed then and now:

Your true modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the land and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a 'scenic' area, he is bored stiff.(4)

Leopold's lesson can apply to both 'natural' and human dominated landscapes: field-based explorations can transform a mass of shoreline 'seaweed' into a rich montage of algal diversity or show how a coal-fired power plant heats dorm rooms in Chapel Hill, links to mining in the southern Appalachians and affects air quality in central North Carolina.

We find that in the classroom students find it hard to imagine how environmental policy issues, ethics or specific practices translate to the world beyond the campus. In a course one of us recently taught on environmental ethics, students drew a blank when asked for examples of how global climate change might outpace the environment's ability to adapt. Finally, when pressed, one student constructed an abstract analogy: 'If the whole world was brown and suddenly it turned purple, the brown things would be poorly adapted to the new environment'. While that may be true, the students lacked the ability to vividly imagine how climate change might affect Colorado's aspens and Montana's whitebark pines, agriculture in Bangladesh, residents of the Maldives or native villages in northern Alaska. Had they read in more detail about these things, they might have gained a clearer picture, but even then it might have been hard for them to envision how changes in climate and landscape would affect the communities, human and non-human, of particular places.

As early as 1949 Aldo Leopold lodged this complaint against environmental education:

'[it] defines no right or wrong, assigns no obligation, calls for no sacrifice, implies no change in the current philosophy of values'.⁵

Environmental education that is abstract and decontextualized, that engages students solely through books and lectures and that does little to link knowledge to responsibility will undoubtedly continue to fall prey to this critique. We have tried to show how field-based environmental education can promote practical wisdom, by engaging students more directly and actively in learning and by showing how environmental issues are matters of real consequence to all living things.

Our intent here is not to diminish the importance of classroom learning or the instruction that takes place on college campuses, but rather to encourage a more integrative approach to post-secondary environmental education that includes both traditional forms of learning and the more open experiences afforded by field-based programs. These, in turn, may include a mix of experiences to give students a sense of the range of environments from which we can learn and whose workings we need to understand. The 'field' includes not just forests, deserts, prairies and mountain peaks, but the campus quad, the university power plant, local streams, landfills, factories, water treatment facilities and even the halls of Congress. The strongest learning will take place when students can recognize concepts as they appear in a variety of field-based situations, while also linking in the other direction from specific practices to concepts and methods mastered on campus. Ideally, the two kinds of instruction can be mutually supportive.

Even the most ambitious field-based academic programs should, and typically do, work to integrate, not replace, learning conducted inside the classroom. Programs such as Prescott College's 4 year undergraduate degree use a block-quarter calendar that allows students to participate in 4 week blocks of field courses followed by 10 week quarters usually more devoted to classroom instruction.⁶ The University of Montana's Wilderness and Civilization Program brings a group of 25 students together for a 1 year experience that begins and concludes with 10-day backpacking and canoeing expeditions, but still sends the cohort through two semesters of coursework on campus to study wilderness management, the economics of wild land preservation, environmental ethics and other subjects.⁷ This inside-outside combination not only gives students a chance to see the practical dimensions of environmental problems, but the change in venue can also provide opportunities to reflect on and synthesize learning, allowing students to return to campus (or careers) with renewed focus and inspiration.

As we have noted, the lessons gained by these field-based courses should be refreshed wherever possible in classroom coursework, just as the field courses emphasize many concepts and methods that need to come from classroom instruction. How can this be accomplished? Ultimately, we view this not so much as a matter of learning and retaining facts as it is the development of skills in critical thinking and deliberative discussion. Both inside and outside the classroom we ought to be training students to engage the world in which we all live, to inquire of ourselves and those we encounter and to be able to enter into constructive dialogue. This rests upon an ability, as Barry Lopez has suggested, to propose questions and conversations rather than impose ideas and rules.⁸ It requires that we integrate our actions with our ideas and recognize that both of these come with consequences. And, wherever possible, it should come with an educational approach that prompts students to learn in the classroom, but also learn to leave the classroom behind. For it is out there, beyond the buildings and quads of the college campus, that the vast majority of our students will need to find their way in life. We owe it to them, and ourselves, to get out there with them as part of our collective preparation. Those of us who are academics will not be hurt by the reminder that the pursuit of theoretical wisdom is deeply dependent on our having the practical wisdom to design economies and communities that can sustain us in relation to the ecosystems of which we are a part.

Environmental education that teaches practical wisdom empowers students not only to understand and appreciate the workings of the world as observers, but encourages them to learn how to live well in the world. This is not a matter of figuring out the 'right' stances to take on environmental issues, then going on with one's life. Living well is a process that requires openness, curiosity, creativity and a willingness to work with others. What contextualized, multimodal and practical education can teach is that environmental problems cannot be 'solved' and settled like equations in mathematics. Our relationship to the environment, like our relationship to other human beings, is dynamic and ongoing. Thus, in addition to a theoretical understanding of nutrient cycles, biodiversity indices and environmental engineering, we need practical skills of attention, reflection and responsiveness that are best learned through engagement with the world outside the classroom.

Published in: Ethics, Place & Environment, Volume 8, Issue 3 October 2005 , pages 385 - 392

Notes

¹ Aristotle, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, translated by W. D. Ross, revised by J. L. Ackrill and J. O. Urmson (New York, Oxford University Press, 1980), Book X, ch. 8, sec. 4.

² 'The Belgrade Charter: a global framework for environmental education', Connect: UNESCO-UNEP Environmental Education Newsletter, 1(1) (1976), pp. 1-2.

³ William Cronon, 'The trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature', in William Cronon (ed.), Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature (New York, W. W. Norton & Co., 1995), pp. 69-90.

⁴ Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 223-224 (Original work, Oxford University Press, 1949).

⁵ Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, pp. 207-208.

⁶ Prescott College website. Retrieved June 15, 2004, from http://www.prescott.edu/academics/rdp/how.html.

⁷ Wilderness and Civilization Program website. Retrieved June 15, 2004, from http://www.forestry.umt.edu/research/MFCES/programs/wi/wildciv.htm.

⁸ Barry Lopez, The Rediscovery of North America (New York, Vintage, 1992), p. 18. (Original work, University of Kentucky Press, 1990).

Emotion

2009-03-11T21:39:00.011-04:00

Austin E. Grigg
University of Richmond

An emotion can be described as a person's acute or relatively short-lived reaction that is revealed in his or her behavior as well as felt in his or her conscious experience. An emotion is generally accompanied by widespread changes in physiological functioning—increased pulse and breathing rates, for example. An emotion is usually initiated as a reaction to factors outside the individual—circumstances in his environment.

With many emotions, there appear to be two particular behavioral reactions. First, there occur well-integrated reflex patterns like those observed in smiling, crying, rage, or the startle reflex. Second, there are motivational manifestations—persistent purposive actions, such as efforts to escape an unpleasant or frightening situation, or deliberate violent behavior in response to anger. The motivational function of emotions is generally accepted by psychologists, but there is less agreement that each emotion must necessarily involve integrated reflex patterns.

Problems in Defining Emotion

From antiquity, writers have described emotions and their effects on behavior. The word "emotion" comes from the Latin emovere, which means to stir up, agitate, or excite. The language of every literate culture includes hundreds of words that describe feelings or emotions. It is easy to identify intense reactions of fear, anger, grief, or joy as emotions. There is general agreement that joy differs from sorrow and that disgust is unlike pleasure.

Nevertheless, students of behavior have faced problems in attempting to formulate a precise definition of emotion. It would seem that the person who experiences some emotion could be used as the source for an accurate description and definition of the state. However, two people experiencing joy, for example, may provide strikingly different descriptions of feeling joyful. Also, an outside observer might protest that joy was not really aroused, and that the individual was not really very happy. Thus individuals who claim to experience the same emotion may describe dissimilar feelings, and an outside observer may insist that neither is describing what the observer has in mind for the particular emotional feeling.

Late in the 19th century, scientists believed that they could solve the dilemma by studying the physiological reactions that occur during emotional experiences. Subsequent research, however, indicated that even this approach does not provide a precise definition. It has been found that different emotions show highly similar physiological reactions. In many instances the physiologist can tell that an emotional reaction is occurring but cannot determine exactly which emotion the individual is experiencing.

Another theory of emotion was proposed in the 19th century by Charles Darwin. His investigation of evolution led him to believe that humanity's behavior contains residuals of responses that had been necessary in lower forms of animals and in earlier times for humans but are no longer as essential for survival. In 1872 he compared certain emotional expressions in man to the role of such reactions in animals. He pointed out that baring the teeth was typical in animals when preparing to fight, and he saw a relationship between this and humans' tendency to bare their teeth when extremely angry. Darwin concluded that there is something very primitive about emotion. His theory has not been generally useful to psychologists.

The James-Lange Theory

The most influential theory of emotions was proposed in 1884 by William James, who was an American psychologist and philosopher. A Danish physiologist, Carl Lange, without prior knowledge of James's writings, published the same concept in 1887. The proposition came to be known as the James-Lange theory. Prior to the formulation of this theory, it had been assumed that emotions were aroused by ideas that the provoking situation aroused in the individual's mind. To use a simple example: person sees bear; person feels afraid; person runs away. James and Lange reversed the sequence: person sees bear; person runs away; person feels afraid. According to this view, the physiological reactions are an immediate reflex response to the provoking stimulus. The emotion appears only when the individual senses that bodily changes are occurring. Emotion, according to this theory, is the awareness of physiological reactions—for example, in the glands and other organs in the abdomen—that are aroused at once when the provoking situation affects the observer. Accordingly, individuals do not cry because they feel sad; they are sad because they have begun to cry. Whereas it had been assumed that physiological reactions followed some sort of judgment or appreciation of the provoking situation as safe or dangerous, good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, the James-Lange theory asserted that the physiological reactions either preceded or were at the very least simultaneous with the awareness of an emotional experience.

The Cannon-Bard Theory

Another theory of emotions, known as the Cannon-Bard theory, was first recognized by the American physiologist Walter B. Cannon in 1927 and was elaborated by another American physiologist, Philip Bard, in 1934. This theory stresses the role in emotions of the hypothalamus and other structures in the brain. Cannon's experiments with animals showed that removal of the hypothalamus eliminated the familiar patterns of emotional response. Experiments with animals also demonstrated that emotional behavior is not changed radically when the nerve links between the brain and various organs are severed, a finding that contradicts the James-Lange theory. Moreover, it was found that rather sharp differences in organic changes from emotion to emotion, as predicted by the James-Lange theory, do not seem to occur. Cannon also found that it is possible by means of drugs to produce striking organic changes but that the changes do not seem to produce emotions. Cannon felt that the abdominal organs are rather insensitive and that messages from there are so diffuse that it would be difficult to explain how specific feelings could result from such indistinct signals. The Cannon-Bard theory holds that both emotional experience and physiological changes are set off simultaneously through activation of the hypothalamus.

The Perceptual-Motivational Theory

Two American psychologists, Magda Arnold in 1960 and R. W. Leeper in 1965, arrived at a similar view of emotion, known as the perceptual-motivational theory. In her theory, Arnold stressed the judgment that the individual makes of the provoking situation. She asserted that the individual appraises the provoking situation immediately as potentially pleasant or unpleasant and that the emotion follows promptly from this judgment. This theory holds that emotion is a form of motivation, a drive to experience circumstances that are judged to be pleasant and to avoid situations that are judged to be unpleasant. Whereas the James-Lange theory holds that the body reacts reflexedly on encountering the provoking situation, the Arnold view is that the body responds to the individual's appraisal of the provoking situation.

No fully satisfactory explanation or theory of emotion has been formulated. From the psychological view, it has been difficult to establish theories of emotional responsiveness because different people may react in widely different ways to the supposedly same emotion. From the physiological view, a persistent problem has been that most of the bodily mechanisms that have been described as occurring in emotion have been known also to occur in the absence of emotion.

Action of the Nervous System

During intense emotion, the whole organism appears to be involved, but many of the most significant reactions may be traced to the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic system contains nerve groups that are located outside the brain and function with some independence of the brain and central nervous system. This somewhat self-regulated (autonomous) system is divided intotwo parts. The sympathetic system is most active during emotional states. The craniosacral division, known as the parasympathetic system, controls functions that go on during quiet states—digestion, for example. Typically, the sympathetic system works in opposition to the parasympathetic. Thus if one system accelerates the activity of some body organ, the other system inhibits the functioning of the organ.

In emotions the sympathetic system accelerates the heartbeat, whereas the parasympathetic checks the rate of heartbeat. Secretions of the adrenal gland are accelerated by the sympathetic system. Many physiological changes observed during certain emotions are responses to the sympathetic division of the autonomic nervous system: speeding of the heartbeat, increase in rate of respiration, increased perspiration, increased supply of epinephrine (adrenalin) in the bloodstream, concentration of the blood supply in the skeletal muscles, and increase in the amount of blood sugar released from the liver.

Emotions and Behavior

When an individual remains under prolonged emotional tension, physiological changes may accumulate. This condition may produce disturbances in behavior, mostly because the prolonged activation of the autonomic nervous system brings about deviations from normal physiological functioning. In 1938 the American psychiatrist Flanders Dunbar presented a strong case for the role of emotion in producing physical illness, reporting evidence that the response of the physiology of the body to prolonged emotional tension may produce psychosomatic symptoms. Such symptoms are not initiated by microbes or by other traditional causes of physical diseases but are seen as the consequences of emotional tensions. Hence, they are called psychosomatic illnesses, or illnesses of psychogenic origin.

This concept of the causal role of emotions in producing physical symptoms began to receive prominence late in the 19th century when the French neuropsychiatrist Jean Charcot reported his studies of the emotional factors in hysteria. Sigmund Freud also described the emotional basis of physical symptoms in hysteria and in other forms of neurosis. In the United States, Adolf Meyer, the Johns Hopkins neuropsychiatrist, developed during the first three decades of the 20th century what he called the theory of psychobiological parallelism. He stressed the role of emotional factors in both physical and mental health. Cannon reported his famous experiments on the physiological effects of acute emotion in 1938. During World War II, military psychiatrists reported numerous instances of profound changes in bodily function as well as in mental stability that appear to have been precipitated by intense and prolonged emotional states.

Attempts to Classify Emotions

Many schemes have been proposed for classifying emotions, but these are of little more than academic interest. Most authorities divide emotions into those that are pleasant (such as joy and love) and those that are unpleasant (fear and grief). An American psychologist, M. A. Wenger, held that most subjective descriptions of emotions can be classified along certain dimensions, or axes: undifferentiated excitement, axis of fear (for example, terror, anxiety, apprehension), axis of pain, of anger, of disappointment, of sexual excitement, and of relief.

Another American psychologist, Robert Plutchik, developed a scale of intensity of emotion based on the judgments of a large number of students who were asked to rate how strongly they had experienced various feelings. In a table of emotions based on judgments about intensity, he listed ecstasy, rage, and terror as the most intense, and annoyance and dislike as moderate in intensity.

Development of Emotional Expression

A great deal of attention has been given to the development of emotional expression in infants and throughout childhood. There is general agreement that shortly after birth the only distinguishable emotion is a kind of generalized agitation or excitement. Kathrine M. B. Bridges has shown that as the infant becomes older, an increasing number of emotions become apparent. She found, for example, that a 3-month-old infant can express delight and distress; a 6-month-old baby can express anger, disgust, and fear; and a 1-year-old can express elation and affection.

Despite variations in home background and experiences, the capacity for specific emotional reactions appears at about the same age in all children. This suggests that the capacity to display emotions develops by a process of biological maturation and that there is a reliable, biologically determined sequence of development of emotional responsiveness. A 6-month-old infant cannot express jealousy, for example, but toddlers of 15 months are often reported to display such feelings. Although the capacity to express emotions occurs through maturation, the objects or circumstances that are capable of arousing the particular emotion in a specific individual depend upon the learning experiences of the child.

Encyclopedia Americana, 2009

Also See Morality and Emotions in this blog.

The Ethics of Philosophical Practice

2009-02-20T18:23:00.005-05:00

Prof. R. W. Hepburn

Philosophical practice makes strenuous moral demands: honesty and fairness to opponents in argument; an ability to tolerate prolonged uncertainty over serious issues; the strength of character to change one's mind on basic beliefs, and to follow the argument rather than one's emotional leanings; independence of mind rather than readiness to follow philosophical fashion.

Moral respect for readers and hearers requires that a philosopher avoid non-rational persuasion, cajoling, deriding, or otherwise manipulating them into agreement. Philosophy should demonstrate that we can disagree profoundly over fundamentals without lapsing from a common reasonableness. That same respect requires a philosopher to expose the structure of his argument as perspicuously as possible, so as to encourage, not impede, its criticism.

Clarity and simplicity of style, the minimizing of technical expressions, abstaining from formal apparatus when ordinary language can be adequate, also express concern to be understood and to let argument and evidence alone carry the persuasive weight. A turgid and obscure style may veil real gaps in argument. A pretentious style may covertly work to disarm critical appraisal, replacing the authority of good argument with the would-be personal authority of the philosopher as sage.

Philosophy has a serious responsibility for language. It is one of its most important custodians—obliged to oppose terminologies that arrest or confuse thinking. Slipshod and imprecise language loses sensitivity to distinctions between reasonable and unreasonable, between good and bad argument—in any field, including the fields of personal and political morality. To impoverish the resources of language risks also impoverishing human experience, denying us the words we need to articulate its varieties.

Does a stress on style and the stewardship of language imply that philosophy is a branch of literature? In some important ways it is literature. But the rapprochement is carried too far when a philosopher lets the imaginatively vivid presentation of a slant on the world give it an appearance of self-evidence, and deflects critical alertness from the fact that categories have not been deduced and reasoned justification has been subordinated to expressing the quasi-poetic ‘vision’.

Philosophers, then, need a wholesome sense of their fallibility. It is unwise for a philosopher to aspire to the role of expert or authority; for that works towards weakening the critical attentiveness constantly needed from readers and hearers.

"The Oxford Companion to Philosophy", Oxford University Press 2005

Who are the Global Terrorists?

2009-01-26T23:22:00.011-05:00

By Noam Chomsky

After the atrocities of 11 September, the victim declared a "war on terrorism," targeting not just the suspected perpetrators, but the country in which they were located, and others charged with terrorism worldwide. President Bush pledged to "rid the world of evildoers" and "not let evil stand," echoing Ronald Reagan's denunciation of the "evil scourge of terrorism" in 1985 -- specifically, state-supported international terrorism, which had been declared to be the core issue of US foreign policy as his administration came into office.NOTE{_New York Times_, Oct. 18, 1985.} The focal points of the first war on terror were the Middle East and Central America, where Honduras was the major base for US operations. The military component of the re-declared war is led by Donald Rumsfeld, who served as Reagan's special representative to the Middle East; the diplomatic efforts at the UN by John Negroponte, Reagan's Ambassador to Honduras. Planning is largely in the hands of other leading figures of the Reagan-Bush (I) administrations.

The condemnations of terrorism are sound, but leave some questions unanswered. The first is: What do we mean by "terrorism"? Second: What is the proper response to the crime? Whatever the answer, it must at least satisfy a moral truism: If we propose some principle that is to be applied to antagonists, then we must agree -- in fact, strenuously insist -- that the principle apply to us as well. Those who do not rise even to this minimal level of integrity plainly cannot be taken seriously when they speak of right and wrong, good and evil.

The problem of definition is held to be vexing and complex. There are, however, proposals that seem straightforward, for example, in US Army manuals, which define terrorism as "the calculated use of violence or threat of violence to attain goals that are political, religious, or ideological in nature...through intimidation, coercion, or instilling fear." NOTE{_US Army Operational Concept for Terrorism Counteraction_ (TRADOC Pamphlet No. 525-37), 1984.} That definition carries additional authority because of the timing: it was offered as the Reagan administration was intensifying its war on terrorism. The world has changed little enough so that these recent precedents should be instructive, even apart from the continuity of leadership from the first war on terrorism to its recent reincarnation.

The first war received strong endorsement. The UN General Assembly condemned international terrorism two months after Reagan's denunciation, again in much stronger and more explicit terms in 1987. NOTE{GA Res. 40/61, 9 Dec. 1985; Res. 42/159, 7 Dec. 1987.} Support was not unanimous, however. The 1987 resolution passed 153-2, Honduras abstaining. Explaining their negative vote, the US and Israel identified the fatal flaw: the statement that "nothing in the present resolution could in any way prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the Charter of the United Nations, of people forcibly deprived of that right..., particularly peoples under colonial and racist regimes and foreign occupation..." That was understood to apply to the struggle of the African National Congress against the Apartheid regime of South Africa (a US ally, while the ANC was officially labeled a "terrorist organization"); and to the Israeli military occupation, then in its 20th year, sustained by US military and diplomatic support in virtual international isolation. Presumably because of US opposition, the UN resolution against terrorism was ignored. NOTE{See my _Necessary Illusions_ (Boston: South End, 1989), chap. 4; my essay in Alex George, ed., _Western State Terrorism_ (Cambridge: Polity/Blackwell, 1991).}

Reagan's 1985 condemnation referred specifically to terrorism in the Middle East, selected as the lead story of 1985 in an AP poll. But for Secretary of State George Shultz, the administration moderate, the most "alarming" manifestation of "state-sponsored terrorism," a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself" in "a return to barbarism in the modern age," was frighteningly close to home. There is "a cancer, right here in our land mass," Shultz informed Congress, threatening to conquer the hemisphere in a "revolution without borders," an interesting fabrication exposed at once but regularly reiterated with appropriate shudders. NOTE{Shultz, "Terrorism: The Challenge to the Democracies," June 24, 1984 (State Dept. Current Policy No. 589); "Terrorism and the Modern World," Oct. 25, 1984 (State Department Current Policy No. 629). Shultz's congressional testimony, 1986, 1983, the former part of a major campaign to gain more funding for the contras; see Jack Spence and Eldon Kenworthy in Thomas Walker, ed., _Reagan versus the Sandinistas_ (Boulder, London: Westview, 1987).}

So severe was the threat that on Law Day (1 May) 1985, the President announced an embargo "in response to the emergency situation created by the Nicaraguan Government's aggressive activities in Central America." He also declared a national emergency, renewed annually, because "the policies and actions of the Government of Nicaragua constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."

"The terrorists -- and the other states that aid and abet them -- serve as grim reminders that democracy is fragile and needs to be guarded with vigilance," Shultz warned. We must "cut [the Nicaraguan cancer] out," and not by gentle means: "Negotiations are a euphemism for capitulation if the shadow of power is not cast across the bargaining table," Shultz declared, condemning those who advocate "utopian, legalistic means like outside mediation, the United Nations, and the World Court, while ignoring the power element of the equation." The US was exercising "the power element of the equation" with mercenary forces based in Honduras, under Negroponte's supervision, and successfully blocking the "utopian, legalistic means" pursued by the World Court and the Latin American Contadora nations -- as Washington continued to do until its terrorist wars were won. NOTE{Shultz, "Moral Principles and Strategic Interests," April 14, 1986 (State Department, Current Policy No. 820).}

Reagan's condemnation of the "evil scourge" was issued at a meeting in Washington with Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who arrived to join in the call to extirpate the evil shortly after he had sent his bombers to attack Tunis, killing 75 people with smart bombs that tore them to shreds among other atrocities recorded by the prominent Israeli journalist Amnon Kapeliouk on the scene. Washington cooperated by failing to warn its ally Tunisia that the bombers were on the way. Shultz informed Israeli Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir that Washington "had considerable sympathy for the Israeli action," but drew back when the Security Council unanimously denounced the bombing as an "act of armed aggression" (US abstaining).NOTE{_NYT_, Oct. 17, 18; Kapeliouk, _Yediot Ahronot_, Nov. 15, 1985. Foreknowledge, _Los Angeles Times_, Oct. 3; Geoffrey Jansen, _Middle East International_, Oct 11, 1985. Bernard Gwertzman, _NYT_, Oct. 2, 7, 1985.}

A second candidate for most extreme act of Mideast international terrorism in the peak year of 1985 is a car-bombing in Beirut on March 8 that killed 80 people and wounded 256. The bomb was placed outside a Mosque, timed to explode when worshipers left. "About 250 girls and women in flowing black chadors, pouring out of Friday prayers at the Imam Rida Mosque, took the brunt of the blast," Nora Boustany reported. The bomb also "burned babies in their beds," killed children "as they walked home from the mosque," and "devastated the main street of the densely populated" West Beirut suburb. The target was a Shi'ite leader accused of complicity in terrorism, but he escaped. The crime was organized by the CIA and its Saudi clients with the assistance of British intelligence. NOTE{Boustany, _Washington Post Weekly_, March 14, 1988; Bob Woodward, _Veil_ (Simon & Schuster, 1987, 396f.).}

The only other competitor for the prize is the "Iron Fist" operations that Peres directed in March in occupied Lebanon, reaching new depths of "calculated brutality and arbitrary murder," a Western diplomat familiar with the area observed, as Israel Defense Forces (IDF) shelled villages, carted off the male population, killed dozens of villagers in addition to many massacred by the IDF's paramilitary associates, shelled hospitals and took patients away for "interrogation," along with numerous other atrocities. NOTE{_Guardian_, March 6, 1985. For details and sources, see my "Middle East Terrorism and the American Ideological System," in _Pirates and Emperors_ (New York: Claremont 1986; Montreal: Black Rose, 1988), reprinted in Edward Said and Christopher Hitchens, eds., _Blaming the Victims_ (London: Verso, 1988).} The IDF high command described the targets as "terrorist villagers." The operations against them must continue, the military correspondent of the _Jerusalem Post_ (Hirsh Goodman) added, because the IDF must "maintain order and security" in occupied Lebanon despite "the price the inhabitants will have to pay."

Like Israel's invasion of Lebanon 3 years earlier, leaving some 18,000 killed, these actions and others in Lebanon were not undertaken in self-defense but rather for political ends, as recognized at once in Israel. The same was true, almost entirely, of those that followed, up to Peres's murderous invasion of 1996. But all relied crucially on US military and diplomatic support. Accordingly, they too do not enter the annals of international terrorism.

In brief, there was nothing odd about the proclamations of the leading co-conspirators in Mideast international terrorism, which therefore passed without comment at the peak moment of horror at the "return to barbarism."

The well-remembered prize-winner for 1985 is the hijacking of the _Achille Lauro_ and brutal murder of a passenger, Leon Klinghoffer, doubtless a vile terrorist act, and surely not justified by the claim that it was in retaliation for the far worse Tunis atrocities and a pre-emptive effort to deter others. Adopting moral truisms, the same holds of our own acts of retaliation or pre-emption.

Evidently, we have to qualify the definition of "terrorism" given in official sources: the term applies only to terrorism against _us_, not the terrorism we carry out against _them_. The practice is conventional, even among the most extreme mass murderers: the Nazis were protecting the population from terrorist partisans directed from abroad, while the Japanese were laboring selflessly to create an "earthly paradise" as they fought off the "Chinese bandits" terrorizing the peaceful people of Manchuria and their legitimate government. Exceptions would be hard to find.

The same convention applies to the war to exterminate the Nicaraguan cancer. On Law Day 1984, President Reagan proclaimed that without law there can be only "chaos and disorder." The day before, he had announced that the US would disregard the proceedings of the International Court of Justice, which went on to condemn his administration for its "unlawful use of force," ordering it to terminate these international terrorist crimes and pay substantial reparations to Nicaragua (June 1986). The Court decision was dismissed with contempt, as was a subsequent Security Council resolution calling on all states to observe international law (vetoed by the US) and repeated General Assembly resolutions (US and Israel opposed, in one case joined by El Salvador).

As the Court decision was announced, Congress substantially increased funding for the mercenary forces engaged in "the unlawful use of force." Shortly after, the US command directed them to attack "soft targets" -- undefended civilian targets -- and to avoid combat with the Nicaraguan army, as they could do, thanks to US control of the skies and the sophisticated communication equipment provided to the terrorist forces. The tactic was considered reasonable by prominent commentators as long as it satisfied "the test of cost-benefit analysis," an analysis of "the amount of blood and misery that will be poured in, and the likelihood that democracy will emerge at the other end" -- "democracy" as Western elites understand the term, an interpretation illustrated graphically in the region. NOTE{For details, see my _Culture of Terrorism_ (Boston: South End, 1988), 77f.}

State Department Legal Advisor Abraham Sofaer explained why the US was entitled to reject ICJ jurisdiction. In earlier years, most members of the UN "were aligned with the United States and shared its views regarding world order." But since decolonization a "majority often opposes the United States on important international questions." Accordingly, we must "reserve to ourselves the power to determine" how we will act and which matters fall "essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the United States, as determined by the United States" -- in this case, the terrorist acts against Nicaragua condemned by the Court and the Security Council. For similar reasons, since the 1960s the US has been far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions on a wide range of issues, Britain second, France a distant third.NOTE{Sofaer, _The United States and the World Court_ (State Dept. Current Policy 769), Dec. 1985.}

Washington waged its "war on terrorism" by creating an international terror network of unprecedented scale, and employing it worldwide, with lethal and long-lasting effects. In Central America, terror guided and supported by the US reached its most extreme levels in countries where the state security forces themselves were the immediate agents of international terrorism. The effects were reviewed in a 1994 conference organized by Salvadoran Jesuits, whose experiences had been particularly gruesome. NOTE{Juan Hern ndez Pico, _Env¡o_ (Universidad Centroamericana, Managua), March 1994.} The conference report takes particular note of the effects of the residual "culture of terror...in domesticating the expectations of the majority vis-a-vis alternatives different to those of the powerful," an important observation on the efficacy of state terror that generalizes broadly. In Latin America, the 11 September atrocities were harshly condemned, but commonly with the observation that they are nothing new. They may be described as "Armageddon," the research journal of the Jesuit university in Managua observed, but Nicaragua has "lived its own Armageddon in excruciating slow motion" under US assault "and is now submerged in its dismal aftermath," and others fared far worse under the vast plague of state terror that swept through the continent from the early 1960s, much of it traceable to Washington. NOTE{_Env¡o_, Oct. 2001. For a judicious review of the aftermath, see Thomas Walker and Ariel Armony, eds., _Repression, Resistance, and Democratic Transition in Central America_ (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 2000).}

It is hardly surprising that Washington's call for support in its war of revenge for 11 Sept. had little resonance in Latin America. An international Gallup poll found that support for military force rather than extradition ranged from 2% (Mexico) to 11% (Venezuela and Colombia). Condemnations of the 11 Sept. terror were regularly accompanied by recollections of their own suffering, for example, the death of perhaps thousands of poor people (Western crimes, therefore unexamined) when George Bush I bombed the barrio Chorillo in Panama in December 1989 in Operation Just Cause, undertaken to kidnap a disobedient thug who was sentenced to life imprisonment in Florida for crimes mostly committed while he was on the CIA payroll. NOTE{_Env¡o_, Oct. 2001; Panamanian journalist Ricardo Stevens, NACLA _Report on the Americas_, Nov/Dec 2001.}

The record continues to the present without essential change, apart from modification of pretexts and tactics. The list of leading recipients of US arms yields ample evidence, familiar to those acquainted with international human rights reports.

It therefore comes as no surprise that President Bush informed Afghans that bombing will continue until they hand over people the US suspects of terrorism (rebuffing requests for evidence and tentative offers of negotiation). Or, when new war aims were added after three weeks of bombing, that Admiral Sir Michael Boyce, chief of the British Defense Staff, warned Afghans that US-UK attacks will continue "until the people of the country themselves recognize that this is going to go on until they get the leadership changed." NOTE {Patrick Tyler and Elisabeth Bumiller, _NYT_, Oct. 12; Michael Gordon, _NYT_, Oct. 28, 2001; both p. 1.} In other words, the US and UK will persist in "the calculated use of violence to attain goals that are political... in nature...": international terrorism in the technical sense, but excluded from the canon by the standard convention. The rationale is essentially that of the US-Israel international terrorist operations in Lebanon. Admiral Boyce is virtually repeating the words of the eminent Israeli statesman Abba Eban, as Reagan declared the first war on terrorism. Replying to Prime Minister Menachem Begin's account of atrocities in Lebanon committed under the Labor government in the style "of regimes which neither Mr. Begin nor I would dare to mention by name," Eban acknowledged the accuracy of the account, but added the standard justification: "there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities." NOTE{_Jerusalem Post_, Aug. 16, 1981.}

These concepts are conventional, as is the resort to terrorism when deemed appropriate. Furthermore, its success is openly celebrated. The devastation caused by US terror operations in Nicaragua was described quite frankly, leaving Americans "United in Joy" at their successful outcome, the press proclaimed. The massacre of hundreds of thousands of Indonesians in 1965, mostly landless peasants, was greeted with unconstrained euphoria, along with praise for Washington for concealing its own critical role, which might have embarrassed the "Indonesian moderates" who had cleansed their society in a "staggering mass slaughter" (_New York Times_) that the CIA compared to the crimes of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. NOTE{For extensive review, see my _Necessary Illusions_ and _Deterring Democracy_ (London: Verso, 1991) (Nicaragua); _Year 501_ (Boston: South End, 1993) (Indonesia).} There are many other examples. One might wonder why Osama bin Laden's disgraceful exultation over the atrocities of 11 Sept. occasioned indignant surprise. But that would be an error, based on failure to distinguish their terror, which is evil, from ours, which is noble, the operative principle throughout history.

If we keep to official definitions, it is a serious error to describe terrorism as the weapon of the weak. Like most weapons, it is wielded to far greater effect by the strong. But then it is not terror; rather, "counter terror," or "low intensity warfare," or "self-defense"; and if successful, "rational" and "pragmatic," and an occasion to be "united in joy."

Let us turn to the question of proper response to the crime, bearing in mind the governing moral truism. If, for example, Admiral Boyce's dictum is legitimate, then victims of Western state terrorism are entitled to act accordingly. That conclusion is, properly, regarded as outrageous. Therefore the principle is outrageous when applied to official enemies, even more so when we recognize that the actions were undertaken with the expectation that they would place huge numbers of people at grave risk. No knowledgeable authority seriously questioned the UN estimate that "7.5 million Afghans will need food over the winter -- 2.5 million more than on Sept. 11," NOTE{Elisabeth Bumiller and Elizabeth Becker, _NYT_, Oct. 17, 2001.} a 50% increase as a result of the threat of bombing, then the actuality, with a toll that will never be investigated if history is any guide.

A different proposal, put forth by the Vatican among others, was spelled out by military historian Michael Howard: "a police operation conducted under the auspices of the United Nations...against a criminal conspiracy whose members should be hunted down and brought before an international court, where they would receive a fair trial and, if found guilty, be awarded an appropriate sentence." NOTE{_Foreign Affairs_, Jan/Feb 2002; talk of Oct. 30. See Tania Branigan, _Guardian_, Oct. 31, 2001.} Though never contemplated, the proposal seems reasonable. If so, then it would be reasonable if applied to Western state terrorism, something that could also never be contemplated, though for opposite reasons.

The war in Afghanistan has commonly been described as a "just war," indeed evidently so. There have been some attempts to frame a concept of "just war" that might support the judgment. We may therefore ask how these proposals fare when evaluated in terms of the same moral truism. I have yet to see one that does not instantly collapse: application of the proposed concept to Western state terrorism would be considered unthinkable, if not despicable. For example, we might ask how the proposals would apply to the one case that is uncontroversial in the light of the judgments of the highest international authorities, Washington's war against Nicaragua; uncontroversial, that is, among those who have some commitment to international law and treaty obligations. It is an instructive experiment.

Similar questions arise in connection with other aspects of the wars on terrorism. There has been debate over whether the US-UK war in Afghanistan was authorized by ambiguous Security Council resolutions, but it is beside the point. The US surely could have obtained clear and unambiguous authorization, not for attractive reasons (consider why Russia and China eagerly joined the coalition, hardly obscure). But that course was rejected, presumably because it would suggest that there is some higher authority to which the US should defer, a condition that a state with overwhelming power is not likely to accept. There is even a name for that stance in the literature of diplomacy and international relations: establishing "credibility," a standard official justification for the resort to violence, the bombing of Serbia, to mention a recent example. The refusal to consider negotiated transfer of the suspected perpetrators presumably had the same grounds.

The moral truism applies to such matters as well. The US refuses to extradite terrorists even when their guilt has been well established. One current case involves Emmanuel Constant, the leader of the Haitian paramilitary forces that were responsible for thousands of brutal killings in the early 1990s under the military junta, which Washington officially opposed but tacitly supported, publicly undermining the OAS embargo and secretly authorizing oil shipments. Constant was sentenced in absentia by a Haitian court. The elected government has repeatedly called on the US to extradite him, again on September 30, 2001, while Taliban initiatives to negotiate transfer of bin Laden were being dismissed with contempt. Haiti's request was again ignored, probably because of concerns about what Constant might reveal about ties to the US government during the period of the terror. Do we therefore conclude that Haiti has the right to use force to compel his extradition, following as best it can Washington's model in Afghanistan? The very idea is outrageous, yielding another prima facie violation of the moral truism.

It is all too easy to add illustrations. NOTE{For a sample, see George, _op. cit._. Exceptions are rare, and the reactions they elicit are not without interest.} Consider Cuba, probably the main target of international terrorism since 1959, remarkable in scale and character, some of it exposed in declassified documents on Kennedy's Operation Mongoose and continuing to the late 1990s. Cold War pretexts were ritually offered as long as that was possible, but internally the story was the one commonly unearthed on inquiry. It was recounted in secret by Arthur Schlesinger, reporting the conclusions of JFK's Latin American mission to the incoming President: the Cuban threat is "the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one's own hands," which might stimulate the "poor and underprivileged" in other countries, who "are now demanding opportunities for a decent living" -- the "virus" or "rotten apple" effect, as it is called in high places The Cold War connection was that "the Soviet Union hovers in the wings, flourishing large development loans and presenting itself as the model for achieving modernization in a single generation." NOTE{_FRUS_, 1961-63, vol. XII, American Republics, 13f., 33.}

True, these exploits of international terrorism -- which were quite serious -- are excluded by the standard convention. But suppose we keep to the official definition. In accord with the theories of "just war" and proper response, how has Cuba been entitled to react?

It is fair enough to denounce international terrorism as a plague spread by "depraved opponents of civilization itself." The commitment to "drive the evil from the world" can even be taken seriously, if it satisfies moral truisms -- not, it would seem, an entirely unreasonable thought.

Ken Booth & Tim Dunne (eds.), Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order, Palgrave, Mcmillan, May, 2002