Why it is your duty to stop supporting the government → ethics → practice makes perfect; virtue ethics

Sartwell wanted to explore “public virtue and moral character” by examining five of his heroes in “a kind of bootstrap operation in which the cardinal virtues of public figures emerge from the biographies, while the biographies themselves are in part constructed to display these same qualities.”

The five heroes he chose, an idiosyncratic collection, were Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, Barry Goldwater, John Fire Lame Deer, and Malcolm X. In looking at the lives of these five American leaders he admires, Sartwell attempts to discover what sets them apart. He believes that “ethics is an empirical inquiry” that is best studied by observing ethical people; and certainly people learn ethics more from exemplars than from systems.

In studying his five American heroes, he reduces their primary virtues to four: commitment to something greater than their own ambitions (and the courage that goes along with being committed to something difficult or unpopular), self-reflection, integrity, and connectedness. In addition to this is leadership, but this is partially derived from the four primary virtues and partially an artifact of how he picked his heroes.

It’s an interesting read, and an interesting project. Sartwell spends a lot of time noting the less-admirable behavior of his heroes and making the case that their most notorious vices were often just their best virtues being played out in a context where they led to unfortunate results. Alas, the biographies are so brief, and the attention Sartwell gives to this less-pretty side of things is so unsparing, that his heroes wind up looking less heroic than they perhaps ought. I would have been happier to read some more thoroughly fleshed-out examples of particularly heroic episodes in these lives.

This book may make you more interested in examining and systematizing who and how you admire.

What if all of our contemporary moral discourse were a kind of cargo cult in which we had picked up fragments of a long lost, once-coherent and -rational moral philosophy, and had proceeded forward with these fragments, not really knowing what we were doing, and had constructed a bunch of nonsense that didn’t work and could not work in principle?

Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue (1981), argues that this indeed is what happened, and this explains why our moral discourse is such a mess.

Why is it that when we argue with each other about moral issues — war and peace, liberty or equality, life or choice, family values or gay rights, what have you — we make our case in a form that seems to be one of logical, rational argument (“my point of view is true because…”), but the effect of what we say seems to be only like that of imperative statements (“Join me in supporting…”) or exclamations (“…is the bestest!”)? Why do pro-life folks and pro-choice folks (for instance) keep arguing with each other when there is no resolution to their argument?

MacIntyre believes that we are unconsciously reenacting forms of argument that once made sense, since people once did have a common ground of morality they could advance together from rationally, but that we have since lost this in a Tower of Babel-like catastrophe.

As a result, our moral arguments today are interminable because the values they express are essentially incommensurable. Though the claims of the emotivists are not universally and necessarily true, they happen to be true for contemporary moral philosophy: when people make moral arguments today they really are just making imperative statements or exclamations of (dis)approval while disguising these as rational arguments about facts.

Modern moral philosophy has adopted the idea that all moral systems must eventually descend on certain first principles that everyone must choose for themselves and for which there are no rational criteria for a correct choice: you cannot get an “ought” from an “is” as they say. As a result, the only way you can defend any results you derive from such a moral framework to someone else who does not share that framework is in a form that ultimately reduces to “my first principles are better than your first principles, nyaah nyaah.”

This means that all of this arguing is necessarily for nought. And modern moral philosophy has been absolutely unsuccessful in finding any way out of this predicament.

As a result, the emotivist explanation of moral argument is the dominant and most rational one, and so people who engage in moral arguments are essentially trying to manipulate others and at the same time to resist being manipulated, knowing on some level that there is no rational resolution, which leads to the perpetual histrionic impasse and jousting with talking-points that keeps the television news networks and political parties in business.

Although a number of modern philosophers have suggested that this is a necessary feature of moral philosophy — that there are no right answers in ethics or that the whole field of inquiry is some sort of an illusion — MacIntyre says that this state of affairs isn’t necessarily true but is really just the result of the catastrophe that shattered a once-coherent ethics.

Our current concept of “the moral” was invented in the 17^th–19^th centuries to cover “rules of conduct which are neither theological nor legal nor aesthetic.” The philosophical project of justifying these rules developed along with it. The classical world didn’t have this concept. The words we appropriated for it — moralis or etikos — meant something more like our word “character.” The failure of this philosophical project of justifying our received moral rules is “the historical background against which the predicaments of our own culture can become intelligible.”

MacIntyre works backwards through Kierkegaard, Kant, Diderot, and Hume, and says that they were unable to find a rational ground for morality in choice, in reason, or in passion and desire. Each was capable of decisively refuting some of these grounds, but each failed to show that their own best guess was capable of doing the job.

These philosophers had to fail because their project — to somehow derive morality from human nature — was incoherent and doomed.

The morality that these philosophers were trying to justify consisted of surviving remnants of morality from an earlier time. The ancestor of these morals were the virtues that Aristotle discussed in The Nicomachean Ethics, in which ethics is considered to be the science of how we govern our lives so as to best meet the ends of human living: the human telos.

This scheme was modified by the various monotheisms that became dominant, so as to make God the source of our telos, to make this telos other-worldly (the Kingdom of God), and to make what Aristotle would have called vice or error into “sin.” But still, even after this transformation, ethical statements remain explicitly statements of fact: X is good because X will help you manifest your telos and is God’s plan for you. Though the Christian philosophers thought that, since The Fall of Man, these facts were not available to us rationally, but only through the grace of God. Later, the rationalists followed suit, and said that our reason is insufficient to choose our ends but is only suitable to choose means towards ends which are chosen in some other way (that “is”/“ought” thing).

Aristotle’s ethics has this structure: 1) Human beings are untutored; 2) Human beings have a telos; 3) Ethics is the tutelage necessary for human beings to achieve their telos. Enlightenment philosophers abandoned the idea that there was such a thing as a telos for human beings, and in so doing, lost the only way of making ethical statements statements of fact. To Aristotle, an ethical statement was true if the ethical rule it described did in fact help people achieve their telos. Without reference to a telos, ethical statements don’t mean anything at all.

So instead, enlightenment thinkers, who were okay with #1 (humans are untutored) and #3 (moral precepts are designed to correct human nature) stuck themselves with the impossible task of deriving #3 from #1. (Myself, I’m not sure this is quite as impossible as MacIntyre makes it out to be. If I remember correctly, Aristotle didn’t start out with #2 as a premise, but derived it logically from his understanding of human nature, that is, from the same place he gets #1. But in any case, MacIntyre says that the enlightenment thinkers did not want to saddle people with a telos, so perhaps it doesn’t matter whether or not it is derivable.)

The insistence that you cannot get an “ought” from an “is” that so perplexed the moral philosophers is, MacIntyre insists, a bugbear that results from this same undeclared premise: that humans have no telos, no function, no purpose. For things with purposes, “is” may very well imply “ought.” This is a watch; ergo it ought to tell the correct time. A good watch tells the correct time; a bad watch is slow or fast or right only twice a day. Good or bad for watches is embedded in the very concept of watch. Similarly, if a person has a telos, he or she may be more or less successful in meeting it, and his or her actions will be more or less good, more or less ethical in Aristotelian terms, to the extent that they assist in this attempt. And what these actions are is a factual inquiry: is implies ought.

We still make our moral arguments and moral statements as if they had the form of falsifiable statements of fact, but we’ve lost the ability to articulate what makes them factual or falsifiable. To try to fill in the gap, we’ve had to resort to a bunch of fictions. For example, to replace teleology we have “utility”; to replace God’s revealed laws, we have the categorical imperative or “inalienable human rights” (or we continue to refer to God’s revealed laws but only in a way that makes them indistinguishable from the other merely emotive utterances of modern ethics). These things are all just phantasmagorical placeholders that are designed to fill in the inconvenient and embarrassing gaps in moral theory, but that have no more real existence than do things like phlogiston or the luminiferous aether, which once served similar purposes in physics to the purposes “rights” and “utility” serve in modern ethical theories.

But still we continue to argue as though one of these gambits had succeeded (though if we bother to investigate, we discover that none of them really have). And yet we suspect that all of our moral discourse is a machiavellian struggle to manipulate and deceive each other. Our moral claims are incommensurable because they have incompatible, largely fictional bases, and so there is no reality or appeal to reality with which we can adjudicate moral disputes.

This leads to petulant protest, a modern form of moral discourse, which is used because rational argument has no hope of succeeding. The other dominant variety of moral discourse today is unmasking, in which foes discover each others’ moral pronouncements to be sham façades that mask selfish and arbitrary desires (hey, what do you know, Senator So-and-so is a hypocrite!). This amounts to a parlor game, since everybody’s ethics have become incoherent and full of internal contradictions.

Along with such fictional devices as “right” and “utility,” the modern age has created “effectiveness” as a fetish in moral argument. Effectiveness is central to the character of the bureaucratic manager, who uses the myth of managerial expertise to manipulate those being managed and to justify the managers’ power. Like appeals to God, right, or utility, appeals to managerial expertise disguise the ultimately expressive or imperative nature of the utterance. The idea of managerial expertise implies a domain of real knowledge about social structures and their inputs and outputs of which the manager has specialized and true knowledge. This turns out to be a false claim. The basis for managerial, bureaucratically-controlled societies (like ours) is that the managers are thought to be value-neutral or value-independent, and actually effective at assigning means to ends (though neither is really true).

The enlightenment also led to “fact”-based natural science and empiricism in general. As part of this, the Aristotelian notion of ethics was split into two distinct philosophical disciplines: ethics (“what is good?”) and will (“how do intentions become actions?”). Whereas in the Aristotelian view, explanations of human actions only make sense in reference to a hierarchy of goods and to the telos, in the mechanistic worldview, human action must be explained independently of any goods, intentions, purposes, reasons, or telos. The social sciences of which managers are presumed to be experts are those in which the human subjects are seen in this manner.

This leads to a viewpoint from which it comes to appear as if the people being manipulated by the practitioners of the social/managerial sciences do not have any intention or purpose or telos of their own worth respecting, but the same is implicitly not the case for the manipulators and social scientists themselves, who must have intentions and purposes for their actions to make any sense at all.

Social science (which includes economics) does not actually succeed, MacIntyre says, at deriving laws with predictive power. Its “generalizations” are in no way scientific, but merely are dressed up like science. This is because human affairs are systematically unpredictable, for several reasons: It is impossible in principle to predict the effects of the sorts of radically new conceptual innovations that occur in human history. People cannot confidently predict even their own actions. Chance trivialities can have large effects (what we would today call “the butterfly effect”). Game-theory-like situations map poorly to real-life situations, and even so, they imply a necessary level of deceptiveness and recursive counter-plotting that makes real-world scientific observation and prediction difficult. (For example, during the Vietnam war, war-theorists working for the United States government cleverly created simulations and projections for victory using the best data they had at their disposal — data that was being systematically falsified by other elements of the same government who were using their own game-theory-ish reasons for using deceit in the service of victory.)

That said, there are some predictabilities in human behavior: There are some, sometimes unconscious but justifiable, expectations of each others’ behavior that allow us to engage in such social actions as scheduling and coordination. There are statistical regularities in human action. Certain regularities of nature place constraints on human possibility. Certain regularities of social life also have predictive power (for instance, if your parents have more money, you will probably have more educational opportunity).

People simultaneously want to make the world predictable (to assist in the success of their plans) and to make themselves unpredictable (to preserve their freedom). For this reason, all we really should expect from social scientists are “usually”s. Managerial pretensions to expertise (and thereby to the power and money that come with positions like President of the United States or Chief Executive Officer) are based on exaggerated and unfounded claims for the theoretical precision and accuracy of the social sciences. When somebody claims to be doing something because of managerial expertise, you can be sure they are really just disguising their own desire or arbitrary preference, just the same as if they claimed to be fulfilling the will of god, maximizing utility, or respecting inalienable human rights.

Nonetheless, the contemporary vision of the world is bureaucratically Weberian — Max Weber mixed with Erving Goffman. Goffman’s sociological point of view presupposes morals to be false or at least irrelevant. It is honor, or the regard of others, that takes its place as a motivator.

MacIntyre says that modern society found itself in much the same position as that of the Pacific islanders who had a set of taboos they were unable to explain to the missionaries and explorers who visited them. Whatever reasons had originally led to the establishment of the taboos had long since vanished, and so all they could do when asked to explain their odd customs was to say, “but to do otherwise would be taboo.” MacIntyre says that Kamehameha Ⅱ was able to abolish the taboo system abruptly and by fiat precisely because it had no foundation underneath it anymore.

(I’m reminded of Hannah Arendt’s recollection of Nazi Germany as a time and place where “…the few rules and standards according to which men used to tell right from wrong, and which were invoked to judge or justify others and themselves, and whose validity were supposed to be self-evident to every sane person either as a part of divine or of natural law.… without much notice… collapsed almost overnight, and then it was as though morality suddenly stood revealed in the original meaning of the word, as a set of mores, customs and manners, which could be exchanged for another set with hardly more trouble than it would take to change the table manners of an individual or a people.”)

MacIntyre says that for those of us who have inherited the Western moral tradition, Nietzsche was our Kamehameha. Nietzsche thought he was abolishing morality in general, but in fact, MacIntyre says, he was only pointing out the futility of the enlightenment project of providing a rational justification for the fragmentary remnants of classical ethics — our taboos.

If the classical ethical philosopher asked “what sort of person am I to become, and how?” the modern ethical philosopher asked “what taboos must I follow, and why?” It was a doomed project, because the taboos had become dislodged from their original justifications, and the whole framework in which those justifications made sense had been abandoned as part of the enlightenment. To a modern philosopher like John Rawls, for instance, the virtues are nothing but tendencies to obey the taboos, with the taboos being somehow more fundamental than the virtues.

What’s the alternative? In the background of our struggles with moral philosophy and in the virtues we sympathize with but don’t understand enough to be able to justify, there is the ghost of an earlier and more coherent ethical system. We may be able to retrace our steps and recover it.

The characteristics of “heroic” societies are revealed in the myths of antiquity — not necessarily because these myths represent the realities of the times they depict, but because the cultures that used and conveyed those myths defined their own cultures in relation to them. In these societies, everyone had a role and a purpose just by virtue of being born into a particular station in a particular society with relations to particular people. Nobody is defined by their “hidden depths” or their inner lives, but by their actions relative to their roles; a person is what a person does. Morality and social structure are the same thing; there isn’t even a concept of morality as distinct from, independent of, or superior to the particular social structure. You can’t “step outside” your society and judge its moral system in comparison to some other system. Life is a story that ends, tragically and in defeat, with death. A story like a saga isn’t just incidentally a story about a life, but is a representation of a life that is already understood to have the form of a story. Virtue is what enables you to fulfill the role you have and to conduct yourself in your story. Contra Nietzsche, the hero does not assert his arbitrary will, but accepts his role as being a real thing worthy of respect; the self is not self-created but is an incarnation or enacting of a socially-defined role.

This heroic background is refined by the Greeks in several ways, as by the fifth century B.C. it is possible to disagree about what is just (to Homer, justice was equivalent to what is in harmony with the prevailing order; later, you could ask the question “is what is in harmony with the prevailing order also just?”). The tragedians (Sophocles in particular) focus on what happens when the moral system fails to cohere, producing contradictions. A person has two contradictory ethical obligations that cannot be reconciled and the tragedy that results is just that there is no right way to proceed (for instance: my obligation arising from my role as a sister and my obligation arising from my role as the subject of a king come into conflict). The sophists insist that virtues are relative, and the right way to proceed is whatever gets you what you’re after. Plato, and later Aristotle, hope to show that the virtues don’t actually conflict and aren’t as flimsy as the sophists would have it.

From here, MacIntyre gives a recap of The Nicomachean Ethics, which, if you’ve been paying attention around here for the past few months, you shouldn’t need. He says that this ethics tightly links moral virtue and practical intelligence, such that in the Aristotelian view, there is no place for actors like a fool whose heart is in the right place or a bureaucratic manager who is efficient at matching means to ends without care for what the ends are.

But there are problems with trying to bring Aristotle’s ethics into the modern era. For one thing, Aristotle’s ethics requires a telos for human beings, but his idea of this telos was based on his now-ridiculous-seeming “metaphysical biology.” Also, if Aristotle’s virtues were closely tied to his particular society and to the roles available in it (as we have learned such virtues must be), how can these be relevant to us in our very different society today? Furthermore, Aristotle views human life as perfectible — he thinks we can ultimately remove the conflicts from it (these conflicts are flaws); MacIntyre thinks it’s more likely that conflicts are more basic, and, like the tragedians concluded, are unavoidable and, well, tragic.

In the Middle-Ages, a fragmentary Aristotelian scheme of virtues was rediscovered, but interpreted through a filter of Christianity — one which was itself influenced by the stoic notion of virtue as a singular thing, detached from telos. In this view, morally-right acting is solely a matter of will, and the results of the action and whatever virtues contribute to the action are incidental. There is also an emphasis on the divine law, which is universal (not embedded in the polis or in some particular society). Secular law had by this time lost any plausible connection to morality — it was no longer an expression of the desires of the polis, but the imposition of an empire.

By the 17^th–18^th centuries, virtues had lost their coherence altogether, and had come to be understood as a variety of altruism that we call upon to subdue our natural egoism in order to get along with each other. This would have made no sense to Aristotle, who thought of the virtues as being motivated by self-love and as being at the same time inherently supportive of friendship and community. Virtues also became mere inclinations to conform to moral laws, and, finally, got reduced from virtues to virtue, as in the stoic viewpoint.

The last great representative of the classical tradition of the virtues in Western culture was, MacIntyre says, Jane Austen, who did this by recreating something akin to the Greek city-state in a fictional upper-class family milieu.

Healthy, undecayed accounts of virtue have three things in common: a concept of practice, an idea of the narrative order of human life, and a moral tradition that develops out of these.

By “practice,” MacIntyre means some sort of occupation or activity that is deliberate and well-defined and traditional at least to the extent where it can involve internal goods — that is, rewards that exist only within the practice itself and not in terms of what the practice enables you to gain outside of it. For example, if you play chess well, the reward you get is the internal good of having played a good chess game; if you are playing in order to win a trophy, you are playing for the external good of the trophy, not the internal good of playing well.

External goods are more zero-sum, more the objects of competition. Internal goods are more about personal excellence; when we succeed in attaining internal goods, this tends not to detract from the good of those around us but to enhance them. MacIntyre says that a virtue is that which enables us to achieve internal goods.

Practices are embodied in traditions that are kept alive by institutions. But institutions are themselves focused on external goods. It is the virtues that keep practices from being corrupted by their institutions (particularly the virtues of justice, courage, and truthfulness). This doesn’t mean that all practices are good. Nor does it mean that any practice and associated set of virtues is as good as any other (for that would lead us back to the same problem as our current catastrophe). When you see that life has a telos and therefore there is a practice of life, you see that life itself has its virtues — you can extrapolate from your idea of the internal rewards of a practice to the idea of The Good in life as a whole. In this way the idea of a practice and the understanding of the narrative nature of human life lead to the development of a coherent moral tradition.

The modern view of life makes this difficult. Life is divided into stages and further into roles (“work-life” and “home-life” for instance), and we are encouraged to view behaviors atomistically rather than seeing our lives as unified and ourselves as engaged in large-scale narratives.

But human activity is intelligible and our actions are within a narrative context of history and goals. An action isn’t just part of a narrative but is part of many narratives from many points of view. These narratives are unpredictable (what happens next?) but that doesn’t mean they lack telos or that the telos is merely retrospectively assigned. The only way I can answer the question “what am I to do?” is if I can answer the question “what stories am I a part of?”

The way I read this is that when you ask yourself whether or not you are behaving ethically right, you are trying to justify yourself. You justify yourself by accounting for your behavior, that is to say, telling its story, putting it in a narrative context complete with its telos. By doing this you create a context in which the virtues will shine forth as the sort of excellences of character that advance you to your telos.

MacIntyre says that the quest is a form of narrative in which the character of the protagonist and his telos become more sharply defined over time. You start off with a vague idea of The Good, and your experiences over the course of the quest make it clearer what The Good must be. The virtues are what equip us for success in the quest.

But your narrative, whatever it is, doesn’t start from a blank slate. You start in a social context that may equip you with obligations, debts, and expectations of various sorts right from the get-go. You cannot define yourself independently of these, though you have the choice of defining yourself either in agreement with or in rebellion against any of it. We are all protagonists of the tragic variety, in that we will inevitably encounter irreconcilable ethical obligations. That said, though we cannot solve the dilemmas we encounter, we can navigate them more or less skillfully.

The concept of virtue MacIntyre has described was destroyed, he says, by the cult of bureaucratic individualism that emerged from the enlightenment. Employees, for example, do not typically engage in a practice associated with internal goods (they are motivated by salary or other external goods); the typical modern person is not a practitioner but a spectator/consumer, engaged in what MacIntyre calls “institutional acquisitiveness” or “aesthetic consumption” (consumerism, I think they call it these days).

Today, people in our culture are unable to weigh conflicting claims of justice because they are inherently incommensurable. John Rawls and Robert Nozick, for example, represent sophisticated philosophical justifications of something akin to popular quasi-socialist liberal and property-rights libertarian perspectives, respectively. MacIntyre notes that even if you accept either or both of their arguments as valid, this resolves nothing, since it is their premises that are incompatible.

(Interestingly, neither Rawls nor Nozick relies on the concept of desert, which is central in the popular versions of justice they are trying to provide philosophical support for. MacIntyre says that this is because desert requires a preexisting social context in order to make sense, and the thought experiments that Rawls and Nozick rely on assume atomistic individuals without preexisting communities or agreements on what is good. The popular notion of desert, MacIntyre says, is yet another remnant of premodern justice that shines through the cracks left after the catastrophe.)

Because there is no common ground on which disagreements about justice and morality can be argued, “modern politics is civil war carried on by other means” — nothing but power masked by rhetoric. But this is not because Nietzsche has disproved morality. He successfully defeated the various enlightenment projects of justifying morality, but he left the Aristotelian ethical framework unscathed.

The virtue tradition implies a rejection of the primacy of market values, the cult of bureaucratic individualism, and acquisitiveness. It indicts the modern political order (perhaps government in the abstract can be justified, but no existing government can).

What to do about it? Our task in this post-catastrophe world, MacIntyre says, is to construct “local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.”

Earlier this year I reviewed the Dalai Lama’s book Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World (2011). I enjoyed that book and found it very thought-provoking.

I admit I was a little surprised — I think I had associated the Dalai Lama with some of his more foggy-headed, romantic, guru-seeking fans here in California and so I approached his book with preconceptions of it being likely to be a bunch of gauzy platitudes dressed up with Buddhist nomenclature and foisted off as profundity. Instead, the book was largely methodical and precise, and also refreshingly practical in a way that many modern books on ethics are not.

I recently read his earlier book, Ethics for the New Millennium (1999), and, alas, it was more along the lines of what I had been afraid Beyond Religion was going to be. Still, there was some meat on the bone worth chewing on.

The key to Ethics for the New Millennium is the Dalai Lama’s assertion that the way to be happy and content is to develop and expand one’s own compassion. The purest and most universally-directed altruism is simultaneously the most enlightened self-interest. Similarly, the key to solving the variety of the world’s problems is for the people directly involved in the problems and their solutions to develop and nurture compassion in themselves — if they do this, the solutions will come of themselves; if they fail to attend to this, then no programs they come up with, however clever, will do the trick.

Because, according to the Dalai Lama, the happiness/suffering continuum is the primary (or even only) human motivator — as people come to understand that their happiness depends on compassion and on the happiness of others, a sort of virtuous cycle will lift all of us up into more rewarding lives.

To me, all of this is suspiciously nice-sounding, as in “wouldn’t it be nice if that were true.” But do we have any reason to believe that it is true, or are we just inclined to believe it because it sounds comforting?

For example, is it really accurate to say that people are motivated by a one-dimensional happiness/suffering continuum? Might it not really be the case that human motivations are multi-dimensional, and that these motivations might be pulling us in different directions at once — some towards less suffering and more happiness, and some just the opposite? People are driven by status and shame, eroticism and disgust, fear and pride, and so many other things besides, and at least some of these seem to map only awkwardly to the happiness/suffering continuum.

And is it really true that by cultivating compassion and empathy and exhibiting altruistic behavior that we inevitably become happier and more content? This may sound cynical, but I think there may be a confusion of cause and effect here. I know that when I am being compassionate, empathetic, and altruistic I am also usually happy and content — but might it be that when my own needs are met, when my life overflows with abundance, when I have few worries and cares, then I am most able to concentrate on other people’s needs and take the time to attend to them? It may be that my happiness and contentment and my compassion and altruism stem from a common precondition of being carefree and satisfied.

(When I put on my amateur sociobiologist’s pith helmet, I get even more cynical about this: conspicuously altruistic acts are a great way of demonstrating fitness to potential mates. They’re kind of like feathers in a peacock’s tail: “Look at how much surplus I have in my life, that I can spend so much time, energy, and/or money on the lives of other people! I must be a mighty successful fellow!”)

One thing I thought was interesting was the Dalai Lama’s suggestion that people use something akin to creative visualization to develop compassion. In a similar way to the way athletes will imagine themselves succeeding in particular athletic feats, and this act of vivid imagination will help to train their minds and bodies to cooperate in actually accomplishing these feats, the Dalai Lama suggests that we can improve our compassion by “sustained reflection on, and familiarization with compassion, through rehearsal and practice”.

Whereas Hannah Arendt centered ethics in thinking, and critics of Arendt like Arne Johan Vetlesen suggested that the emotion of empathy is the key, the Dalai Lama tries to find a middle ground with nying je, which grows out of empathy but also has an intellectual component:

Now while generally translated simply as “compassion,” the term nying je has a wealth of meaning that is difficult to convey succinctly… It connotes love, affection, kindness, gentleness, generosity of spirit, and warm-heartedness… [I]t does not imply “pity” as the word compassion may. There is no sense of condescension. On the contrary, nying je denotes a feeling of connection with others, reflecting its origins in empathy.…

…[It] is understood as an emotion, [but] it belongs to that category of emotions which have a more developed cognitive component. Some emotions, such as the revulsion we tend to feel at the sight of blood, are basically instinctual. Others, such as fear of poverty, have this more developed cognitive component. We can thus understand nying je in terms of a combination of empathy and reason. We can think of empathy as the characteristic of a very honest person; reason as that of someone who is very practical. When the two are put together, the combination is highly effective.

The process of developing nying je and of disciplining those emotions and tendencies that interfere with it, is a life-long one:

This is no easy task, and those who are religiously minded must understand that there is no blessing or initiation — which, if only we could receive it — or any mysterious or magical formula or mantra or ritual — if only we could discover it — that can enable us to achieve transformation instantly. It comes little by little, just as a building is constructed brick by brick or, as the Tibetan expression has it, an ocean is formed drop by drop. Also, because, unlike our bodies which soon get sick, old, and worn out, the afflictive [harm-provoking] emotions never age, it is important to realize that dealing with them is a lifelong struggle. Nor should the reader suppose that what we are talking about here is the mere acquisition of knowledge. It is not even a question of developing the conviction that may come from such knowledge. What we are talking about is gaining an experience of virtue through constant practice and familiarization so that it becomes spontaneous. What we find is that the more we develop concern for others’ well-being, the easier it becomes to act in others’ interests. As we become habituated to the effort required, so the struggle to sustain it lessens. Eventually, it will become second nature. But there are no shortcuts.

Thoreau’s Walden, (Wikipedia summarizes,) “is a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings” — a sort of memoir or collection of observations on man and nature, a celebration of the placid and the wild with a dose of wry skepticism about civilization. Sound about right?

Philip Cafaro thinks we’ve been mis­categorizing (and under­estimating) Walden by treating it as though it were merely some sort of romantic pastoral meditation, when in fact Thoreau intended it as a challenging book of practical, experimental philosophy.

The confusion comes because Thoreau was trying to extend a classical form of ethical philosophy that had gone out of fashion — to the extent that it had almost become unrecognizable. It was only after the virtue ethics revival of recent decades that Thoreau’s work could be appreciated for what it is.

“Because Walden is a work in virtue ethics,” Cafaro writes, “it is hard for some readers — and most contemporary philosophers — to see it as a work of ethics at all.”

Thoreau meant his book to show him trying to work out his ethical philosophy in practice, and so it discusses ethical questions in terms of concrete and specific means and ends and alternatives, and of real-life examples of choices he and his neighbors made. “Ironically, however,” Cafaro writes, “this comprehensiveness and specificity make it harder for most academic philosophers to recognize Walden as a genuine work in ethical philosophy, since contemporary ethical philosophy usually remains at a high level of generality and theoretical abstractness.”

Thoreau’s Walden retreat was not primarily from a “back to nature” impulse, but from a need to give himself enough space and breathing room to work out for himself how to live life best, without the hobbles of habit and cultural conformity. “I went into the woods,” Thoreau says, “because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

“I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” he continues. Which is to say, Cafaro believes, Thoreau wanted a flourishing life, or, as Aristotle would put it, a life of eudaimonia. Thoreau had little patience for the small ethics of thou-shalt-nots and duties to our neighbors; he wanted to explore the big ethics that included such things but only as side effects of the project of flourishing and becoming a better person and sucking the marrow out of life. Ethics is not limited to a category of life, thought Thoreau, but: “Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.”

Cafaro believes Thoreau was not only reawakening the ancient virtue ethics tradition, but was also trying to modernize and extend it. Among his contributions here was an attempt to make virtue ethics more democratic. Virtue ethics by its nature is impatient with the sort of “everyone’s a winner” denial of individual merit and championing of mediocrity that democracy sometimes encourages; but while ancient virtue ethics tends to be directed toward the aristocracy and to concern itself with the virtues of the ruling class, Thoreau’s virtue ethics is more down-to-earth and available to everyone.

Another addition Thoreau makes to the virtue ethics tradition is to incorporate an environmental consciousness into it: to make our relationship with the natural environment, and the health of that environment, a core component of human flourishing, and to promote respect for the flourishing of nature on its own terms (some of the virtues Thoreau praises are exemplified in his book by the behavior of animals, for example the “admirable virtue” of fish trying in vain to spawn up human-dammed streams). Cafaro goes so far as to call Walden “a fully developed and inspiring environmental virtue ethics” — an extension of the virtue ethics tradition that makes it especially important today.

Thoreau also insists that the virtues must be developed by the individual and for the individual. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all package or a single destiny or highest calling for everyone. We each need to build the virtues appropriate for ourselves, and this is something we have to do through real-world experimentation and practice (in several places in Walden he writes of what he is doing as an “experiment”). This, too, contrasts with the mix of theorizing and empirical observation in the Aristotelian tradition.

Thoreau also tries to reclaim the virtues from their ongoing appropriation by capitalism. He was living at a time when terms like…

“profit”

(“For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” — the Bible)

“career”

(“Rest is not quitting / The busy career, / Rest is the fitting / Of self to one’s sphere.” — John Sullivan Dwight)

“industry”

(“…people that trust wholly to other’s charity, and without industry of their own, will be always poor.” — William Temple)

“enterprise”

(“The success of any great moral enterprise does not depend upon numbers.” — William Lloyd Garrison)

“economy”

(“Beauty rests on necessities. The line of beauty is the result of perfect economy.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson)

…which had included, but not been exclusive to, connotations about money, finance, corporate behavior, accounting, and the like, began to be almost completely taken over by those uses. Thoreau pointedly and often ironically uses terms like these to try, in Cafaro’s words, “to remoralize America’s economic discourse [and] to moralize his own economic life and the lives of his readers.”

Thoreau, of course, was also a political thinker, and his contributions to political philosophy are also, I think, misunderstood and undervalued. Cafaro also discusses these, but I think his insight is weaker here. Rather than wrestling with the thoroughly radical and severe challenge of Thoreau’s actual political views, Cafaro seems to prefer to wish Thoreau had more ordinarily progressive ones, and then to criticize him for his failure to adequately justify these imagined points of view.

Thoreau complained that “There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers… To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically.” Thoreau’s work I think has made philosophers of many of his readers; and Cafaro’s may well help to make philosophers of some professors of philosophy.

Julia Annas had written most of a book about virtue ethics when, she says, “it became clear… that I was writing the wrong book.” So she scrapped it in order “to start further back and get clear about virtue.” The book that resulted from this second attempt is Intelligent Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Intelligent Virtue clears up a lot of the fog around questions like “which characteristics are virtues, and why?” and “what is eudaimonia and what role is it meant to play in virtue-oriented ethics theories?” It is a clear and well-organized account of the foundations of virtue ethics models.

Today I’ll try to summarize what stood out to me in Annas’s account of virtue:

What Is a Virtue?

According to Annas, a virtue is a feature or tendency or disposition of a person (not, that is, of an act or a non-person actor) that is:

• persisting, reliable, and characteristic
• active; developing in response to circumstances (not merely a passive disposition)
• deep; central to who that person is

Virtues prompt virtuous actions, and those actions help to fortify that virtue, in a mutually-supporting way.

A virtue doesn’t give you a “decision procedure” or instruction manual for deciding what to do. If you are skilled at a virtue, you will be able to perform that virtue well and to give an account for why you did it the way you did. But this is different from having memorized a rulebook ahead of time and applying its directives to the situation.

Virtues tend to “cluster” in groups that mutually-support each other. Annas gives the example of generosity, which requires a number of other virtues to do well. You can’t just give willy-nilly, but you need to give in the right way to the right people, which requires other virtues (such as empathy, tact, benevolence, modesty).

One virtue that underlies all the others is phronesis (practical wisdom). It supports the virtues in two ways: 1) each virtue requires phronesis in order to master it, and 2) if you have phronesis you will understand the importance of the virtues and how to develop them.

The aim of virtue is “to live well, to live a good life.”

Virtue and “Goodness”

All of the virtues support something we can call “goodness” — though Annas tries to remain agnostic as to what goodness consists of (she says that her account of the virtues is compatible with a variety of theories of goodness, from the hedonistic to the Platonic to the Christian). Virtue is a sort of “commitment to goodness” while vice is (outside of fictional villains) not so much a commitment to badness as a failure to commit to goodness. This reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s observation that the worst of evil is not done by wicked or evil people, but “by people who never made up their mind to be either bad or good.” In support of this, Annas considers the vice of the coward: Unlike the brave person looking back at her brave acts, the coward “cannot look back on his action in satisfaction, thinking that his cowardly act helped him in his overall aim to become a better coward.” (But what about a cruel person, I wonder. Are there no cruel people who come home from work thinking with satisfaction, “boy howdy, I thought I’d gotten about as cruel as I could get down at the prison, but I really turned things up a notch today!”)

Annas is skeptical that dispositions like “wittiness, tidiness, and affability” can be true virtues, since they seem to be things that are disconnected from goodness (you could be witty, tidy, or affable either as part of a commitment to goodness or without any such commitment); such things “can be exercised just as well viciously as virtuously.”

If all virtues aim toward “goodness” (however defined), you might wonder if maybe virtues derive from goodness and that we really should be looking at goodness as the foundational concept and… reinventing consequentialism instead. Annas says that the way virtues connect to goodness does not lend itself to consequentialism. “[W]hat makes a disposition a virtue is not the results it produces [emphasis mine] but, broadly speaking, the attitude of the person who has the virtue.” Or, in another formulation: “exercising virtue is a commitment on the part of the virtuous person to goodness because it is goodness: goodness is not just an outcome.”

“Virtues are dispositions which are not only admirable but which we find inspiring and take as ideals to aspire to, precisely because of the commitment to goodness which they embody.”

Goodness and Eudaimonia

Annas says that it is a mistake to think of eudaimonia, as it is used in ancient ethical theories like Aristotle’s, as a precise, well-defined thing. It’s more of a description of a thing. Annas says that our aims in life tend to “nest”. When we explain why we do something (brush our teeth) we do so by appealing to certain aims (to keep our teeth in good working order, to have pleasant breath, to avoid complications at the dentist), and we can then categorize those under broader aims (to be healthy, to be socially successful), and so on. Annas thinks eudaimonia is a label for the outermost nesting; for the place we can stop explaining because it serves as the ultimate rational explanation for our behavior. Why do I brush my teeth? Ultimately, for eudaimonia. We can try to better understand or specify eudaimonia, but we don’t need to start with a precise definition: we know it’s there, even if we don’t understand it all that well.

Eudaimonia is related to our telos; we aim for eudaimonia, and that determines our chosen telos. The human telos, then, is not preexisting, but is something we discover or determine through examining the aims we choose. By critiquing our aims and bringing them into alignment (and in alignment with our idea of what goodness consists of), we give ourselves an appropriate telos. “The final end, then, is the indeterminate notion of what I am aiming at in my life as a whole. And the role of ethical thinking is to get us to think more determinately about it, to do a better and more intelligently ordered job of what we are already doing anyway.”

Eudaimonia and Happiness

These days it’s common to fret about the word eudaimonia and how (or if) to translate it. Annas thinks the old-fashioned translation of “happiness” is fine, as long as we’re careful to avoid certain modern uses of the word. Happiness is not the same thing as “pleasure” and is not just the name of a certain sort of pleasant feeling. It’s not just a matter of having your desires satisfied or feeling satisfied with how things are going in your life right now. It’s neither wholly subjective nor wholly objective. It has more to do with “the overall end you aim to achieve by living your life well” and as such it is both individual (it’s about your life specifically) and aspirational (you aren’t happy in a static way, but you aim at happiness). “Happiness is at least in part activity”: it is a way-of-living.

How Do We Acquire Virtue?

A virtue can be best understood by looking at how it is acquired. This “involves both the need to learn and the drive to aspire.” The acquisition of a virtue is “not a once for all achievement” but involves “coming to understand what you are doing, doing it in a self-directed way, and trying to improve” so that your character develops and your understanding grows as you confront new challenges.

People do not first decide that a particular virtue is good, then decide to become virtuous in that way, and then develop a virtuous motivation. Rather virtuous motivation develops alongside our understanding of the virtue, as “educated developments of our [preexisting] unformed motivations.”

“Becoming virtuous requires habituation and experience.” We may begin to learn virtue by emulating or copying a role model, but learning true virtue demands that we aspire to understand the virtue. This involves not just learning that you do something, but learning why you do something; this allows you to apply the virtue in novel circumstances rather than just performing a standardized routine. As you learn this, you come to be able to articulate reasons for why you do what you do the way you do.

In this way a virtue is a lot like a skill. When you begin to acquire a difficult skill (piano playing, say) you have to concentrate and you have to drill yourself on particular techniques in a pre-specified way. But when you have acquired the skill, you don’t have to concentrate so much on the skill itself, but on how you are applying it in a particular situation. Instead of struggling to do it competently, you can focus on doing it most skillfully or most beautifully or to meet certain circumstances.

As we improve our skill at a virtue in new and different contexts, we flesh-out our understanding of the virtue. For example, if we are brave in a variety of situations (not just those requiring physical bravery in the face of a certain sort of threat) then we develop a broader understanding of what bravery consists of — what is common to all those responses that makes “bravery” a good description for them. This expanded understanding in turn helps us to recognize and respond to new situations in which bravery is called for.

A virtuous person cares about being virtuous. This is one way virtue is less like a productive skill, in which the point is the product rather than the process of making the product. (Performative skills like dancing or acting are more similar to virtue in this way.) That the being-virtuous is what matters brings to mind Aristotle’s distinction between a virtuous person (who is not tempted to vice because they care for virtue) and a person who is merely continent (who resists temptations to vice although they have not internalized an overriding love for virtue). Both may do the same action in the same circumstance, but the first is virtuous while the second is merely exercising self-control.

Why Is Virtue Good for Us?

The enjoyment a virtuous person feels in exercising a virtue is analogous to the pleasant flow state of someone who is fluently practicing a skill, in which: 1) the activity is valued for itself, not just for its end-goal or product; and 2) there is a loss of self-consciousness during the activity. Other aspects of flow include being “unhindered” (this does not mean without external obstacles, which can make the activity challenging in an interesting way, but without internal obstacles like reluctance or contrasting temptations); and being harmoniously-integrated (you are of one mind in the essence of what you are doing).

This also resembles Aristotle’s description in the Nicomachean Ethics of the pleasure that accompanies unimpeded activity.

Why Do People Fall Short?

If virtue is good for you and promotes happiness, why do people stop short of developing the virtues? Annas suggests that this is in part because we love company, and there’s more of it to be found in mediocrity than in being outstanding. When you separate from the pack in some particular virtue, say, honesty, you develop a sort of solidarity with other especially honest people, but you also lose some of the tolerance you used to have for people who exhibit commonplace dishonesty. The companionship you feel towards your more abstract and dispersed community-of-the-honest is not as viscerally comforting as the more immediate community you used to feel with the people you typically encounter on a day-to-day basis. Virtue can be lonely.

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A Grotesque

This is the second time in recent years when I’ve read a book published before Donald Trump’s emergence as a politician in which he was used as a throwaway example of someone of obviously low character. Here’s the quote from Intelligent Virtue:

We encourage children in schools, by means of posters, lessons, and books, to admire and aspire to be like some people and not others, and these are people whose characters are admirable and inspiring because of their commitment to goodness, regardless of whether in worldly terms they succeeded or failed, or were useful and/or agreeable to themselves or to other people. This is why it would be grotesque to have posters in elementary schools depicting Donald Trump as a hero for the young, rather than people like King, Gandhi, and Mandela.