Virtue ethics and deontic constraints

Ethics

Volumn 119, Issue 4, 2009, Pages 642-671

  LeBar, Mark ^a  

^a OHIO UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 70349513043     PISSN: 00141704     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/603649     Document Type: Article

References (94)

1. Virtue-ethical theories are a kind of ethical theory which makes virtues the primary locus of moral assessment. Of course, most other plausible kinds of ethical theory also make a place for virtue (or virtues), but they do so without making that place primary. In the context of this essay, "virtue-ethical theory" will refer to theories of the first sort.
2. Plato, Republic, trans. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 442e-443a.
3. In Gorgias, where a similar account of virtue is offered, such violence is part of the menu of proscribed activities, at least insofar as these are the upshot of wanton satisfaction of desire. See, e.g., Plato Gorgias 469cff. On the other hand, Plato's just person might engage in lots of practices we would not accept: infanticide, the subordination of women, and slave owning, to name just a few. In more than one way, we need not accept the ancient conception of the virtuous life as canonical. I thank Roger Crisp for this point.
4. Plato Republic 443c-e.
5. This distinction comes from Bernard Williams. Formal egoism is the position that the sources of reasons for a person to act in a certain way or to be a certain kind of person must "appeal to that person in terms of something about himself, how and what he will be if he is a person with that sort of character" (Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985], 32).Substantive egoism, on the other hand, involves a particular "satisfaction-based" conception of the human good. Arguably, it is the content of these conceptions of the good that provoke most of the offense in egoism, and Plato and the ancient eudaimonists roundly reject such conceptions. Much of the force of the concern about egoistic theories seems focused in the thought that the welfare of others cannot be given the right status in such accounts. But the concern for welfare differs in important respects from the problem of deontic constraints, and I will not concern myself with it here. For an account that addresses the welfare problem for eudaimonist virtue accounts (partly on the basis of the formal/substantive distinction in egoism).
6. Julia Annas, "The Good Life and the Good Lives of Others," Social Philosophy and Policy 9 (1992): 133-48, esp. 137.
7. Samuel Scheffler, HumanMorality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 116-17.
8. See also Samuel Scheffler objection along the same lines to Philippa Foot's virtue account, in his Consequentialism and Its Critics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 255.
9. Compare Eric Mack ("Deontic Restrictions Are Not Agent-Relative Restrictions," Social Philosophy and Policy 15 [1998]: 61-83).
10. Nicholas Wolterstorff ( Justice: Rights and Wrongs [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008], 176-79).
11. Gerald Gaus, who says, "Our moral relations with such strangers must be centered on what actions and forbearances we owe each other. . . . Seen against this background, neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics is a rejection of modernity rather than a solution to its problems" ("What Is Deontology? Part Two: Reasons to Act," Journal of Value Inquiry 35 [2001]: 179-93). (Pubitemid 33397749)
12. The objection that eudaimonism generally requires the wrong reason for ethical action is pressed by Christine Swanton ("Virtue Ethics and the Problem of Indirection," Utilitas 9 [1997]: 167-81);
13. Thomas Hurka (Virtue, Vice, and Value [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 248-49).
14. Dennis McKerlie ("Aristotle and Egoism," Southern Journal of Philosophy 36 [1998]: 531-55).who claims that, interpreted eudaimonistically, Aristotle must renounce the aim of "explaining the rightness of actions" (536).
15. The label "WKR" is applied by Wlodek Rabinowicz and Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen to a problem for certain accounts of the nature of value ("The Strike of the Demon: On Fitting Pro-attitudes and Value," Ethics 114 (2004): 391-423). The problem to which I apply the label here is distinct but closely related, in ways I will discuss in Sec. V, and it is a type of WKR problem repeatedly raised by Darwall.
16. Francis Kamm, "Non-consequentialism, the Person as an End-in-Itself and the Significance of Status," Philosophy & Public Affairs 21 (1992): 354-89, 355.
17. Francis Kamm, "Harming Some to Save Others," Philosophical Studies 57 (1989): 227-60, 244.
18. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 3.
19. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, 2006, Ibid., 7.
20. Stephen Darwall, The Second-Person Standpoint, 2006, Ibid., 6.
21. I frame the distinction here as Thomas Nagel does in The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 152.
22. Nagel himself borrowed the terminology from Derek Parfit in Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 143.
23. Though the distinction wasmade earlier in terms of "objective" and "subjective" reasons in Nagel's The Possibility of Altruism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970).
24. For a critical survey of the use of the distinction, see Michael Ridge, "Reasons for Action: Agent-Neutral vs. Agent-Relative," in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, 2005), http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2007/entries/reasons- agent/.
25. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 76-77.
26. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, Compare ibid., 77ff.
27. He says, "The role of second-personal attitudes and the second-person stance in mediating (mutual) accountability in Kantian and contractualist ethical conceptionsmarks a deep difference with the ethical views (frequently ethics of virtue) of thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Hume, and Nietzsche (to give four prominent, but quite different, examples), for whom evaluation of conduct and character does not take a fundamentally secondpersonal form" Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, ibid. 77.
28. The phrase "crucially important" here glosses over an important disagreement in ancient eudaimonism-whether virtue was both necessary and sufficient for living well (the Stoics and Plato, at times) or merely necessary (Aristotle).
29. This argument parallels an even more succinct version of the same case in Gorgias, although there self-discipline (sophrosune) rather than justice is the master virtue.
30. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter NE) 1.7.
31. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, Ibid., 2.1.1103b14-25.
32. See also Plato Laws, bks. 1-2.
33. Aristotle NE 2.4.1105b5-8.
34. See also Plato Laws, 1-2, Ibid., 2.3.
35. See also Plato Laws, Ibid., 5.
36. See also Plato Laws, Ibid., 5.
37. See also Plato Laws, Ibid., 5.
38. Modern virtue ethicists have stressed this point as well. Acquiring a virtue, Rosalind Hursthouse says, "brings its own reasons for acting, and acquiring the virtue involves learning to act for those reasons" (Beginning Lives [Oxford: Blackwell, 1987], 243).
39. John McDowell has made a consistent theme of the idea that virtue involves a kind of sensitivity which should be regarded as a sort of knowledge-knowledge that the particular conditions of specific situations mandate a certain way of conducting oneself in them (see esp. "Virtue and Reason," Monist 62 [1979]: 331-350, secs. 3-4).
40. How we settle this matter will rest on how we individuate the virtues and, of course, how we characterize them, but I cannot settle those questions here. For discussion of this point, see Daniel Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). That the ancient accounts of the virtues need supplementation in one way or another to include second-personal relations I take to be an upshot of the frequency of the complaint that they cannot accommodate The Intuition underlying The Objection. I thank an anonymous editor for prompting this observation.
41. Darwall seems to acknowledge the possibility of and need for just this sort of process, at least in particular cases. See Second-Person Standpoint, 141-42.
42. For an excellent example of the kind of argument I have in mind, see Hursthouse, Beginning Lives, 226-228.
43. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 278.
44. Compare Aristotle NE 6.13.
45. This example is adapted from T. M. Scanlon, What We Owe to Each Other (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 164-65. Scanlon's example is not in defense of "second-personal reasons" but of something very closely related, which is that each other is "owed justification . . . in his or her own right."
46. I defend this view in "Good for You," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 85 (2004): 195-217.
47. Aristotle NE 1.7. In this Aristotle develops a line of thought that apparently begins with Plato (Philebus 20b-22c) and carries through into the Hellenistic schools.
48. Aristotle NE 8.1.1155a3-5.
49. Scanlon seems to take a similar line in arguing for the value of what he calls relations of "mutual recognition," which are tantamount to the sort of second-personal perspective Darwall defends. Scanlon says of such recognition: "Standing in this relation to others is appealing in itself-worth seeking for its own sake. A moral person will refrain from lying to others, cheating, harming, or exploiting them, 'because these things are wrong.' But for such a person these requirements are not just formal imperatives; they are aspects of the positive value of a way of living with others" (Scanlon, What We Owe, 162).
50. I thank an anonymous referee for pressing this challenge.
51. Aristotle NE 6.13.
52. Ibid., 2.9.
53. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 278.
54. For an alternative model, one which imagines duties without the sort of secondpersonal accountability involved in rights, see Joel Feinberg, "The Nature and Value of Rights," Journal of Value Inquiry 4 (1972): 243-257 Both Feinberg's and Hobbes's models open up the bare conceptual possibility of rational agency without second-person relations, which is my main aim here, and, like Hobbes (though to a lesser degree), Feinberg thinks his model reveals how undesirable life without that accountability would be. I thank Daniel Groll for discussion of this point.
55. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. McPherson (New York: Penguin, 1982), chap. 14.
56. Could a Hobbesian strategic agent reason himself or herself into taking on the second-personal commitments in this way? If my view is right, certainly he or she has reason to do so if it is possible at all. But doing so involves giving up the merely strategic thinking that Hobbes believes is characteristic of us. It involves seeing others as reasongiving in ways that do not simply reflect their instrumental value to our self-preservation. I take up this point at length in Sec. V. I thank an anonymous referee for raising it.
57. In effect, what I propose is congruent with Philippa Foot's famous suggestion that morality is a system of hypothetical imperatives (cf. Philippa Foot, "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives," in Virtues and Vices [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978], 157-73). However, she later came to hold that the "hypothetical imperative" of morality is "indigestible" (61). I believe that what she takes to be "indigestibility" reflects the empirical inescapability of the second-person standpoint rather than any basis for rejecting the reasons we see from within it as hypothetical.
58. Compare Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), lecture 3.
59. With this Darwall certainly agrees. Compare Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 278.
60. Korsgaard, Sources of Normativity, 10.
61. This is how a eudaimonist virtue-ethical theory meets what Gary Watson calls the "congruence requirement": "A fully satisfactory account of the authority of morality must show how living under that authority is congruent with living well" ("Morality as Equal Accountability: Comments on Stephen Darwall's The Second Person Standpoint," Ethics 118 [2007]: 37-51, 47).
62. Brad Majors (unpublished manuscript, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2009). I take this to be a tidy representation of attitudes that are very widely shared among ethical theorists.
63. R. Jay Wallace, "The Deontic Structure of Morality" (unpublished manuscript, University of California, Berkeley), 1, http://philosophy.berkeley.edu/file/2/Deonticstructure .pdf
64. In this sense, my account of second-personal obligation as hypothetical is quite different from Foot's original account. The point in saying that my reasons are hypothetical is that the normative status of their demands is contingent on the satisfaction of some antecedent condition, not that they depend on any of my subjective attitudes. I thank Daniel Groll for discussion of this point.
65. Compare Plato Gorgias 458a; Aristotle Eudemian Ethics 1.1.1214b5, for examples. I defend the "moralized" conception of our good, as mentioned in the text, in my "Good for You" and argue for a method of "wide reflective equilibrium" in settling on such a conception in my "Prichard vs. Plato: Intuition vs. Reflection," in "Reasons to Be Moral Revisited," ed. Sam Black and Evan Tiffany, special issue, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming.
66. Darwall is committed to the soundness of this point. He maintains that it is not only possible but important to consider what sort of reflective endorsement the presuppositions of the second-personal standpoint merit: "Even if we can't avoid [the presuppositions of the second-person standpoint] when we take up a summons, we can step back from these and ask whether, on reflection, we should still accept them" (Darwall, Second- Person Standpoint, 278, see also 291). Moreover, he explicitly countenances possible (but mistaken) forms of practical rationality that do not recognize others as affording secondpersonal reasons (cf. 227ff.).
67. The significance of the distinction between these kinds of justificatory arguments is brought out by Gregory Kavka in "The Reconciliation Project," in Morality, Reason, and Truth, ed. David Copp and David Zimmerman (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), 297-319.
68. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 26 (Ak. 415-16).
69. Compare Mark Schroeder, "The Hypothetical Imperative," Australasian Journal of Philosophy 83 (2005): 357-372
70. Mark Lance and Heath White argue that our seeing others as engaged in moral community is the point of our seeing them as persons, rather than the other way around; in this way, personhood is the product of a certain sort of stance we take with others ("Stereoscopic Vision: Persons, Freedom, and Two Spaces of Material Inference," Philosophers' Imprint 7 [2007]: 1-21). If they are right, this would explain our puzzlement over what to say about those on the boundaries of such communities.
71. Locke claims that when someone attempts to "get another man into his absolute power," in an important sense he ceases to be a member of the moral community: we may not only kill him but kill him as we would a wolf or a lion, "because such men are not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule, but that of force and violence, and so may be treated as beasts of prey, though dangerous and noxious creatures" ( John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, secs. 16-17). I think Locke is not right about particular acts of hostility; we may certainly kill in self-defense, but that is compatible with recognizing the attacker as a member of the moral community. On the other hand, I believe Locke is right about the withdrawal of that recognition when the hostility reflects not just a single wrong moral judgment but a settled disposition to see others merely strategically, as does the psychopath or sociopath-that is, a general refusal to enter into second-personal relations. On my view, the claim that we must regard these others as in moral community with us should be rejected. This does not mean we may do just anything we like with such individuals: we may not do just anything we like to corpses, but that is not because corpses are in moral community with us.
72. Gary Watson, "Responsibility and the Limits of Evil," in Responsibility, Character, and the Emotions, ed. Ferdinand Schoeman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 256-86.
73. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 104, see also 57, 59, 192, 221.
74. H. A. Prichard, "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" Mind 21 (1912): 21-37. It is perhaps not irrelevant to observe that Prichard treats showing that morality "is profitable" and "will make one happy" as the same thing as showing that it is "something we want or should like" or "will satisfy our desires" (23).
75. I leave vague this notion of "attitudes involved in responding to reasons" so as to allow for a variety of views about just what sorts of attitudes are involved.
76. Compare Darwall: "[The right kind of reason] must be a fact about or feature of an object appropriate consideration of which could provide the basis (someone's reason) for a warranted attitude of that kind toward the object" (Second-Person Standpoint, 66)
77. Compare also Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen, "Strike of the Demon," 414.
78. "Socrates" is an ideal wise and virtuous agent, and I will focus on the way in which reasons are represented in his rational economy because that is the clearest case. This not should be construed to imply that only perfectly wise and virtuous agents are capable of so representing second-personal reasons.
79. One might be tempted to abandon the "formal" egoism here and suppose that it is just Socrates' judgment about what to do, as that of a wise and virtuous agent, that does all the justificatory work. (I thank an anonymous referee for this suggestion.) But this way of proceeding offers no explanation of why it is that the wise agent would find this course of action (as opposed to alternatives) to be warranted-indeed, it claims that a demand for such an explanation is misguided. The line I take is necessary as against the concern that the standards of the virtuous agent are arbitrary. The ancients thought choices of the wise agent were not arbitrary but justifiable and defensible, in light of the ultimate end of living well (see, e.g., Aristotle NE 6.2.1139a29-31).
80. Darwall himself deploys this notion of "seeing-as," in explaining what more there is to the second-person perspective than mere awareness of the facts about an interlocutor available to a purely strategic thinker: "I must be able to see her as responding (more or less rationally) to my address, which she also regards as an intelligible response or address to her" (Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 44, emphasis added).
81. Compare Annas: there is no thought that "its forming part of my good is the reason why I should care about the good of others" ( Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995], 224). For related reasons, I think it is a mistake to think that the necessity or "demandingness" of the reasons given by the autonomy of others is part of the contents or objects of the reasons-attitudes we have toward them in the second-person standpoint. These are not themselves second personal. Instead, the sense of necessitation and the force of the demand is an aspect of the reasons-attitude toward those contents itself-either the phenomenology of being subject to rational requirements or the justification for thinking we are so subject. What is second-personal is the recognition of the nature of the other, such that we are capable of relating to each other as free, rational, and accountable to each other. I thank Dan Layman for pressing this concern.
82. I thank Matt Zwolinski and an anonymous referee for encouraging me to think about these comparisons.
83. Philip Pettit, "Consequentialism and Moral Psychology," International Journal of Philosophical Studies 2 (1994): 1-17, 15.
84. Elinor Mason, "Do Consequentialists Have One Thought Too Many?" Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 2 (1999): 243-61, 258ff. In fact, Mason is explicit that the route she defends is one that prizes apart motivation and justification.
85. Peter Railton marks the distinction as one between the "truth-conditions" of consequentialism and its "acceptance- conditions" in various contexts ("Alienation, Consequentialism, and the Demands of Morality," Philosophy & Public Affairs 13 [1984]: 134-71, 155).
86. In this way, my view also squarely avoids the "schizophrenia" with which Michael Stocker charges modern moral theories ("The Schizophrenia of Modern Ethical Theories," Journal of Philosophy 73 [1976]: 453-66).
87. It is perhaps worth noting that the dispositions of the virtuous agent involve somethingmore than the dispositions that Railton or Mason ascribe to the consequentialist agent, in that they explicitly involve rational recognition of the relevant reasons; they are passions and desires guided in the appropriate way by reason (cf. Aristotle NE 6.2). Since consequentialism is rarely framed in terms of reasons for action, it is not obvious that anything like this claim is available to consequentialists. This point also distinguishes my view more generally from "two-level" theories requiring a "transparency principle" to transmit rational justification from a disposition to particular actions, of the sort Michael Thompson considers (Life and Action [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008], chap. 10). There is no normative property (e.g., "rationality") being passed to or expressed by the actions that one has reason to undertake in virtue of taking up the second-person standpoint. Instead, what transpires is that one comes to see reason-giving force in the dignity of others: one sees reasons where one otherwise would see none, or at least would see only reasons of a significantly different sort.
88. Darwall, Second-Person Standpoint, 16.
89. This story isn't just confined to instrumental reasons: it applies equally to final reasons (certainly the sort of reasons we are concerned with in recognizing the secondpersonal authority and reason-giving nature of others). Following David Schmidtz, call "maieutic reasons " those reasons which give rise to new, final reasons (Rational Choice and Moral Agency [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995], chap. 3). Maieutic reasons are likewise mundane. Schmidtz gives the example of someone (call her "Kate") who has chosen to become a surgeon and to do so as a final end. Schmidtz's point is that the goal of finding a worthwhile career is maieutic, in the sense of giving rise to a new, final goal (becoming a surgeon). Now, a process of moral education to take up the second-personalstandpoint (if one has not done so already) is similarly maieutic, though of course both process and outcome are different than in the career-goal case. Kate's maieutic reason for seeking a career is self-extirpating; it disappears after she settles on becoming a surgeon. But someone's reason for being virtuous or for endorsing a disposition to take up the second-personal standpoint with others persists because our reasons for wanting to live well are comprehensive and enduring. However, the point stands that there is nothing especially remarkable about reasons coming to be for us through the undertaking of our own agency.
90. Prichard, "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" 29. Indeed, Prichard insists that the demand for an answer to the "Why be moral" question cannot be satisfied, and this is in no small part because the demand is illegitimate (34).
91. Darwall also targets "indirect" strategies for accounting for the motivations of moral agents (Second-Person Standpoint, 103, 192). Such accounts provide motivating but not normative reasons for acting, as on the two-level consequentialist accounts mentioned earlier. But, as also noted earlier, my account is not of this form.
92. Since Darwall's own defense of the second-personal standing of others involves lots of non-second-personal reasons, the demand that a justification for seeing others second-personally not invoke a higher-order justificatory structure that is not itself second personal is one his own account would violate. We ought not to read Darwall as suggesting that this is problematic.
93. I thank an anonymous referee for this way of framing the concern here.
94. It may even be able to contribute to contractualism by offering a structured framework for thinking about the first-personal reasons which bear on the reasonable acceptance or rejection of proposed practical principles. In this sense, it is an alternative to the Kantian constructivism Darwall argues may be used to flesh out the normative requirements of contractualism (Second-Person Standpoint, 296). But that is a project for another day.