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Virtue Rules and Thick Concepts
Julia Annas
Virtue ethics guides us to act. In the jargon of ethical philosophers it provides an account of right action. It does this by pointing out our use of ‘virtue rules’ or ‘v-rules’, first brought to attention in the contemporary debates by Rosalind Hursthouse.[1] A number of philosophical issues are raised by our use of virtue rules, which I won’t be able to explore today.[2] Here I will take up only one, namely the point that virtue rules use virtue terms like ‘generous’, ‘brave’ and so on, and also vice terms like ‘greedy,’ ‘stingy’ and the like. This is obvious common sense, but common sense can become philosophically problematic, and the problem here is that these terms pick out what philosophers call thick concepts. ‘Thick concepts’ is a philosophical term, and I shall be looking, in this short paper, at a philosophical debate, but the debate has, as I shall point out at the end, implications for the psychology of virtue development and our study of it. I will not be able to do more than raise these implications here.
What are thick concepts? The term was introduced into ethical philosophy by Bernard Williams.[3] Williams took it over from the ethnographer Clifford Geertz, who was himself influenced by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s contrast between ‘thick descriptions’ and ‘thin’ ones, so the term has a mixed ethnographic and philosophical origin. The term has figured in many debates over the last twenty-five years, which have done much to clarify it.
The root idea is that a thick concept like cowardly or generous has a lot of content; to say that someone is cowardly is to say something specific, which requires similarly specific backing-up in terms of the person’s actions, reasons and (expressed) thoughts. Contrasted with these are thin concepts, which have little or no content; to say that an action is right or good, or that you ought to do it, is not to make the same kind of specific claim.
The contrast is not merely that of rich versus meagre content, though. Thick concepts are those which ‘seem to express a union of fact and value’,[4] and this is the important point. A thick concept is not only ‘world-guided’, in Williams’ terms, but also ‘action-guiding’[5]; it not only provides description of how the world is but also motivation to act on the world in some way. A term like ‘refrigerator’ has a lot of descriptive content, and its correct use is determined by looking at the way the world is; but it is not a thick term in this sense, because when we use the term ‘refrigerator’ we are not saying anything evaluative. A thick concept is one which is used to pick out an item in the world in an evaluative way, with implications for our attitude and motivation. Calling an action (even more, a person) cowardly, is not to pick it, or her, out in a neutral way, like calling something a refrigerator, but to pick it, or her, out in a way which also involves a negative evaluation of it, with implications for our attitude and motivation. Thin concepts, in contrast, are those whose use is evaluative, but not via descriptive content. If I’m told that an action is the right thing to do, or that I ought to do it, I get the point that some attitude or motivation of mine is in play,but I have so far been told nothing about what it is that is the right thing to do, or what it is that I ought to do.
Debates about thick and thin concepts are distinct from debates about virtue and virtue ethics, but it’s easy to see why virtue terms give us prominent examples of thick concepts. Virtues (and vices) are obvious examples where in applying a descriptive term we also make an evaluation, as with cowardly just now. Virtue (and vice) terms are obvious examples of our use of thick concepts.[6] Here I shall mention three points at which virtue ethicists should note that virtue concepts stand out as a distinctive kind of thick concept, and, in two cases, are not subject to some objections that are often made about thick concepts in general.
Thin content
Whatever their other disagreements, and whether or not they think that there is a division, or a difference of degree, between thick and thin concepts, people in debates over thick concepts agree that what most clearly marks out thin concepts is their poverty of content. What’s striking is that philosophers discussing thin concepts generally give a list like, ‘goodness, badness, rightness, wrongness, obligatoriness,’[7] in which good and bad figure alongside deontic terms like right and ought. There is clearly an assumption here, namely that just as you are told practically nothing when you are told that an action is the right thing to do, so equally you are told practically nothing when you are told that an action is a good one, or a good one to do. However, from a virtue ethics perspective there is an important difference here.
Firstly, as has been continually stressed ever since the early work of Philippa Foot, the apparently bland and unspecific term ‘good’ is not in fact available to be attached indiscriminately to just anything. ‘Good’ is not a virtually contentless term which can be attached to anything on the grounds that what it does is just to commend, or express liking or approval. ‘Good’ functions to evaluate the kind of thing that is said to be good, according to the criteria for goodness of that kind of thing. There are criteria for the goodness of cacti, trees and lions, criteria we recognize and make use of all the time. People, traits and actions are also good (sometimes); so there are criteria for the goodness of people, traits and actions – though of course these are more complex and variable than in the case of other kinds of living being. Sometimes philosophers evade this obvious point by talking of people, traits and actions as ‘morally good,’ assuming that our grounds for applying the term in these cases are quite different from the kind we use when applying it in the other cases. There are no independent grounds for this claim about ‘good’, however. Moreover, this claim implies that ‘good’ is systematically ambiguous between its uses as applied to people (and traits and actions) and it uses as applied to cacti, animals and plants. However, it is clearly false to claim that ‘good’ is ambiguous in this way.[8]
With deontic terms like ‘right’ and wrong’, however, we can learn to apply them without having any clear independent idea of why they function as they do. While ‘good’ always implies some content, ‘right’ and other deontic terms do not. If I say to you, for example, apropos of nothing, ‘You ought to jump out of the window,’ this is an outrageous thing to say, but has a perfectly good, precise sense, although absolutely no grounds have been given for you to jump out of the window. If I say, again apropros of nothing, that you have a good window, I need to then come up with some grounds for saying this. Perhaps it is convenient, well-made, and so on. These are perfectly general points about goodness and rightness, but they show why for virtue ethics ‘good’ is not on the thin side of the thick/thin distinction.
Secondly, we can see even from everyday usage that ‘good’ carries implicit further content. In the 50s children were urged to, ‘Be good!’ and knew perfectly well that this injunction was not at all contentless: they were to be good children, understood as children behaving in the conventionally disciplined ways of the time. We can see the amount of implicit content conveyed when we reflect that at that time, ‘Be a good boy!’carried quite distinct implicit content from, ‘Be a good girl!’, given that being a good boy had quite different content from being a good girl. ‘Right’ and ‘ought’ do not have this kind of implicit content. ‘Behave as you ought/should,’ or, ‘Do the right thing,’ tells you nothing until you are told what it is that you should do, or what the right thing to do actually is.
We can put the point in terms of relation to context. ‘Be a good girl,’ tells you (if you are a girl) a lot about how to behave in any context. ‘Right’, ‘ought’ and ‘should’ have no implicit content to unfold in any context. In general, deontic terms indicate that you should act on the result of your deliberations, but they do not do so by introducing content evaluatively. This is one reason why they do not introduce a distinct kind of reason for acting that should be part of those deliberations.[9]
Although not all participants in debates on thick and thin concepts do use good and bad as examples, there is to my knowledge no discussion of the ways they contrast with the deontic terms. From the virtue ethics point of view, however, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ don’t belong with deontic terms at all. Deontic terms are thin, but ‘good’ and ‘bad’ belong with the thick virtue terms. We could perhaps express this point by saying that the deontic terms are essentially thin, but once the point is made it is probably better to carry on with the usual terms and just call them thin.
Thick concepts and virtue terms
Thick concepts are well thought of as having descriptive content with an evaluative aspect. Putting it this way discourages the thought, which still has some supporters, that thick concepts are not unities, but can be ‘disentangled’ into a purely descriptive part and a purely evaluative part. It’s because of this thought that thick concepts have had such prominence in contemporary ethical discussions; this issue, namely whether terms that ‘unite fact and value’ can be decomposed or disentangled into a purely factual, value-free bit and a purely value, fact-free bit, is central to many long-running problems in ethics, especially meta-ethics.[10] Some contemporary philosophers are still producing ingenious ways of disentangling an evaluative bit and a descriptive bit in thick concepts.[11] I take it that these attempts are doomed, but can’t argue fully for that here. It is worth point out, however, that prior to espousing a theory there is no good reason to think that a thick term is decomposable into these two quite distinct bits. Those who carry on trying to decompose them have a theory about distinctness of fact and value that requires them to do this. It is not something that is thrust on as a problem by the way we employ the terms.[12]
Virtue concepts, then, are thick concepts. They contrast with deontic concepts, which are essentially thin, and so they do not contrast with all terms regularly considered to be thin in thick-thin debates (especially not ‘good’). They have specific descriptive content which has an evaluative aspect. This evaluative aspect is in some way action-guiding, but there is a variety of ways in which it might guide action. Not every use of a virtue term is such as to provide a reason for acting right away; finding that someone is disloyal might guide you to change your attitude to them, for example, rather than doing anything there and then.
Among the issues which arise for thick concepts there are two where virtue concepts turn out not to be liable to problems raised for thick terms in general. These problems and their resolution are, I think, interesting for psychological as well as philosophical research into virtue, since they both concern the ways we can study the use of virtue terms, and whether they are amenable to empirical study of the kind thought appropriate to the use of factual or descriptive terms.
The evaluative point of view
One point which figures largely in debates about thick terms is that when we consider the use of such a term from an outsider’s point of view, it becomes clear that the correct use of a thick term can’t be picked up simply from an external point of view, one in which the observer is ignorant of, or does not share, the agent’s evaluations.
Someone from another culture unfamiliar with English-speakers might first learn that ‘brave’ is applied to those who engage in conflicts with opponents, particularly in fights and battles (mostly fictionally, on screen). Such a person would likely be baffled to find that ‘brave’ is applied also to people who persist when they are physically challenged, or persist against obstacles which are not physical, as when defending a controversial thesis in print, or resisting pressure to change the results of scientific research to please a wealthy patron. A native speaker has no problem in using the term ‘brave’ of behaviour in all these very different situations, and in refusing to use it of behaviour which is merely aggressive, or resistance to intellectual pressure which is merely stubborn. Someone in the role of the visiting anthropologist would, however, be hard put to learn the use of the term until they got the point that behaviour is brave if (very roughly) it involves resistance to or endurance of danger or threatened harm for the sake of a worthwhile goal. This point has long been made to counter the idea that thick terms in general can be successfully disentangled into a purely descriptive bit and an evaluative bit. For it is only when we understand the agent’s evaluations from the agent’s point of view that we can properly discern whether what she does is brave or not. Regardless of whether this point holds of all thick concepts or not, it is certainly true of virtues.
This point, that to grasp the use of virtue terms we need to grasp the agent’s evaluative point of view, and indeed that we have little hope of grasping it if we focus just on the situations in which it is used, has actually been raised as an objection to use of thick terms. Simon Blackburn puts the point sharply. ‘[T]hinking in terms of thick concepts does a disservice to ethics. It discourages critique.’[13] His example is that of a group happy to call women cute. If we regard ‘cute’ as doing one indissoluble thing, namely picking out certain women descriptively, but with an evaluative aspect to doing so, then appreciating women as cute will be inseparable from using the term in the way accepted as correct. This is taken to be an objection because it becomes hard to see how someone who has learnt this correct use of the term can come to see what is objectionable about using this term, or persuade herself and other people who do this to change, or to produce articulate criticism, and so forth.