Bradley J Thames
Department of Philosophy
University of Notre Dame
Dissertation Proposal (Draft: 19 March 2007)
Working Title: “Historicity, Contingency, and Virtue, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tradition”
This is a draft of a proposal to address a powerful objection to virtue ethics by considering the work of Charles Taylor and Hans-Georg Gadamer and the ways they might be able to supplement the work of those working more directly on virtue ethics. What follows is a) a brief account of the objection; b) the need to adequately respond to it; c) the inadequacy of relativism/skepticism, etc. (critics of modernity) on the one hand, and prominent contemporary moral theory in the Kantian or consequentialist traditions (survivals of modernity) on the other; d) a restatement of the challenge, and certain problems with contemporary virtue ethicists, specifically Foot, Hursthouse and MacIntyre; e) Taylor’s contribution; f) Gadamer’s contribution.
A) One of the strongest objections to an understanding of ethics grounded in the virtues – as opposed to deontological rules, consequentialist principles, etc. – is what Solomon has termed the ‘contingency objection’.[1] The objection might run as follows: according to a virtue ethics account, moral knowledge and moral action both depend on having the kinds of dispositions or character traits that enable the agent to perceive what kinds of actions and reactions a particular situation demands. Understanding what these character traits (i.e., the virtues) are, and the possession of such traits, depends upon a lengthy habituation process, involving the right rational frameworks, the attunement of our affective capacities, and the right relation between the psychological faculties, analogous to the way in which making a good judgment about the quality of a vintage wine requires a lengthy process involving an understanding of what kinds of qualities make a good wine, and the capacity to recognize those qualities on the nose and palate. But in the case of ethical thought and practice, the right kind of habituation is a process almost entirely out of our control, depending instead on the community into which we are born, the environment in which we are raised, and perhaps even certain biological/genetic factors. This seems to undermine the special nature of the moral as something for which an agent can be held responsible, making virtuous behavior instead largely a matter of fortune. An adequate morality must make it possible for any agent, regardless of his or her history or circumstances, to do the right thing. This sort of objection has its roots in Kant, of course, and so finds some of its most vociferous heralds in that tradition of thought. But the underlying presumption of universality seems to be shared by those who are otherwise critics of Kantianism themselves. Due to the dependency of good moral judgment on factors beyond any particular agent’s control, we will call this aspect of the contingency objection the ‘problem of moral luck’, in order to indicate its affinities with the long-standing debate by that name.
There is a related objection as well, namely, that the virtue ethicist’s view of things makes genuine self-evaluation, as well as moral debate between substantially different ways of thought, very difficult if not impossible. Consider the following: understanding practical demands requires having the right kind of disposition to see a situation as one calling for certain sorts of behavior. I.e., whether or not we see certain features of a situation as morally salient will depend on whether or not we’ve acquired certain character traits, a certain conceptual framework that structures how we see the world. The only way to make moral judgments at all is from within some such framework, and these frameworks are themselves products of our environment (in the broadest sense of the term). Again, whether or not we make right moral judgments depends on whether or not we have acquired the right kind of conceptual frameworks; but how, then, can we make a judgment about the frameworks themselves? That is to say, I can only judge the merits of one framework from within that or another such framework, which is one way of saying that I cannot possibly step outside of them altogether and pass judgment from a ‘neutral’ point of view. My judgments are contingent upon the frameworks which I happen to have acquired, and the truth of those judgments can be nothing more than ‘relative’ to my religion, culture, society, or other such source of my understandings. This is hardly compatible with the sense that at least some moral judgments are true, that some ways of acting are right and others wrong, where these terms are taken to transcend the contingent parochialisms of any particular way of life and thought. We will call this aspect the ‘problem of irreducible pluralism’.
B) Each of these problems has been a hindrance to thinking about morality in terms of the virtues, and motivated either a continued striving towards finding and formulating moral rules of a traditional deontological or consequentialist sort, or abandoning the notion of moral truth altogether, and with it the classical notion of the virtues as dispositions that enable one to understand and act accordingly. Defenders of an Aristotelian understanding of ethics, then, must be able to satisfactorily respond to such an objection for this approach to have philosophical merit.
Moreover, the kinds of contingencies to which virtue ethics is supposedly committed leads to several worries beyond the question of philosophical merits, which I can only gesture to here. The witness of the past century’s horrors brings both a skepticism about any kind of universality to morality, at least at the epistemic level (‘if moral rules really are universal, how could so many people have gone so terribly wrong?’), and yet a pressing need to pass judgment, both to honor the victims (‘what happened really was evil’), and to provide the tools that will ensure nothing like that happens again. According to the contingency objection, virtue ethics can neither respond adequately to the rising skepticism, nor provide the needed preventive tools. It is, of course, an open question whether these are necessary responses to the 20th century’s mania; but that experience does seem to make the alternative responses to virtue ethics (discussed below) seem more attractive.
Another problem concerns the response to the growing rift between liberal, secular culture and (religious) conservatism. The most notable instances of this problem are those having to do with the clash between fundamentalist Islam and the West. But we find this problem increasingly surfacing in many other domains: as Western culture permeates the Far East more rapidly than its people can assimilate it; as Western society itself finds itself less and less able to proceed constructively on the challenges that it faces as a result of greater technological innovation, expanded rights and freedoms, weakening of traditional social structures, and the like; in the ambivalence between respect for dignity and respect for difference with regard to, e.g., the historically marginalized and 3rd world cultures. The list could go on. Once again, an increasing need for the resources for dealing with such conflicts and problems meets with greater skepticism about moral philosophy’s capacity to provide them by proceeding in the way it has for the past few hundred years, that is, under the presumption that we can escape our parochial circumstance and find the ‘truth’ about the right and the good. But again, as Heidegger discerned in the request once made of him to ‘write an ethics’,[2] when the threats to our well-being posed by the modern predicament seem to loom larger than ever, and the traditional sources of moral authority (viz., religion) can no longer claim widespread allegiance, we hold onto the hope that reason and truth, and not the sword or the dollar, will finally prevail. It is moral philosophy’s task to carry the mantle and ensure that this hope can be fed.
C) The claim that almost all moral norms, and practical reason itself, is a product of our environments has actually become rather widely accepted, from neo-Nietzschean and post-modern philosophers to those entrenched within Enlightenment modernity; the wide variation exists with regard to the related questions of how far down this conditionedness goes, and what that means for moral theory and discourse. On one side are those within the broad way of thinking that includes what has been called relativism, subjectivism, historicism, perspectivalism, and so forth. While there are of course many figures in Continental philosophy we could discuss, not to mention literary theory, sociology, anthropology, and other humanities, I will focus primarily on figures who’ve received notable attention in Anglo-American philosophy, in particular Rorty and Williams, as well as ‘analytic relativists’ such as Harmon and Wong. In general they see conditionedness, at least insofar as normativity is concerned, as going all the way down, taking a very strong position against the possibility of any sort ‘escape’ from the frameworks that condition our ethical conceptions and judgments. Any neutral or universal ground from which to test normative validity, adjudicate moral disputes, formulate and apply moral principles, and so forth, is deemed a fiction. As such, they tend to be very skeptical about the notion of moral truth, considering that to be a relic of a bygone age in which essentialism about human nature or religious dogmatism ruled the day, and often regard claims to moral knowledge and truth to be forms of domination in a Nietzschean sense.
On the other side are those who refuse to abandon the modernist hope of transcending our contingent situatedness and finding that neutral, or at least common ground on which to base universal and absolute moral claims. Those in the Kantian tradition argue that from the conditions of practical reason as such (Korsegaard, Nagel), discourse (Habermas), social cooperation (Rawls, Scanlon), or other universal features of human life we can derive those principles that can transcend contingencies and overcome the problems mentioned above. The scope of such principles tends to be quite narrow, and its content meager, with the result that these philosophers tend to draw sharp distinctions between the ‘domain of the moral’ and the domain of the (merely) ethical. Corresponding to these domains are such dichotomies as that between the objective and subjective, the absolute and relative, the binding and optional, the unconditional and conditional, and many other “realms of bifurcation”.
There is a related way of drawing a distinction between the domain of the moral and that of the ethical by those of a more consequentialist perspective. The universal morality would involve something like maximizing happiness, preference satisfaction, or value realization. But few continue to follow the classical utilitarians in thinking that there is some universal yardstick by which to determine for all humans what counts as ‘happiness’ or ‘valuable’; rather, many consequentialists simply leave it to individuals to determine for themselves. We should always act in such a way that the most people can be as happy as possible, according to whatever makes them happy; we should always act in such a way that the most people’s conceptions of what is valuable to them can be realized. Once again, the modernist ideals of universality and absolutism with regard to moral judgments is relegated to a very narrow sphere.
D) The point of view of the representatives of ‘modernity’ that I have briefly gestured towards certainly does better justice to the moral phenomenology and the truth-claims involved in almost all relatively substantial moral judgments, as compared with the historicist (as well as most non-cognitivist) views. And yet it does so at the cost of fragmenting and compartmentalizing human life, which is to say nothing of the spuriousness of the arguments. The failure to find a solution that doesn’t cover over the moral phenomena and yet avoids the pitfalls of the more modernist approaches might in large part account for the growing popularity of a kind of pragmatism, in which morality becomes prudence, and philosophy becomes subordinated to politics. All substantive ethical claims, and particularly claims to truthfulness, become privatized, while public discourse and practice is guided not by what is right, good, or true, but by what best lets us solve problems. This is supposed to let us continue to think in terms of the traditional standards of validity, so long as this does not impinge upon the public realm.
One might take pragmatism as the inevitable outcome of the modernist project: as the ‘universal’, the ‘absolute’, the ‘objectively true’ becomes more and more removed from what is ‘merely contingent’, the only thing left are emaciated conceptions of what is ‘useful’ or best keeps us from interfering with one another’s private business (something like this may explain Rawls’ movement in the last 20 years of his life). Or it might be taken to be the inevitable outcome of the historicist (etc.) side of things: if there really is no sense to the notion of intersubjective normative truth, then the only real way to guide our intersubjective lives cannot be in terms of that, but rather, again, according to what best allows us to get on and to cope with each other. This is certainly the sort of thing both pragmatists and historicists (who are often, but not always, one and the same) can be found saying. But as the consequence of the modernist project or that of its critics, it is the consequence of the bifurcating of self and community, of implicitly (and insidiously) subverting almost all traditional conceptions of self, world, and what is significant while raising its own banner without the need to justify itself (for those traditional modes of justification themselves have been subverted), of forcing the self more and more inward, darkening its horizons and covering over its own identity as extending out into its community – past, present and future. If this seems a bit hyperbolic, a more modest way of putting it might be that pragmatism is not something that most people would want to accede to, but rather is something many are seeing themselves forced into by the growing recognition of our social and historical contingency.