Ethics After Aristotle

Brad Inwood

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674369795
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

From the earliest times, philosophers and others have thought deeply about ethical questions. But it was Aristotle who founded ethics as a discipline with clear principles and well-defined boundaries. Ethics After Aristotle focuses on the reception of Aristotelian ethical thought in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, underscoring the thinker's enduring influence on the philosophers who followed in his footsteps from 300 BCE to 200 CE.Beginning with Aristotle's student and collaborator Theophrastus, Brad Inwood traces the development of Aristotelian ethics up to the third-century Athenian philosopher Alexander of Aphrodisias. He shows that there was no monolithic tradition in the school, but a rich variety of moral theory. The philosophers of the Peripatetic school produced surprisingly varied theories in dialogue with other philosophical traditions, generating rich insight into human virtue and happiness. What unifies the different strands of thought—what makes them distinctively Aristotelian—is a form of ethical naturalism: that our knowledge of the good and virtuous life depends first on understanding our place in the natural world, and second on the exercise of our natural dispositions in distinctively human activities. What is now referred to as "virtue ethics, " Inwood argues, is a less important part of Aristotle's legacy than the naturalistic approach Aristotle articulated and his philosophical descendants developed further.Offering a wide range of ways of thinking about ethics from an ancient perspective, Ethics After Aristotle is a penetrating study of how philosophy evolves in the wake of an unusually powerful and original thinker.

1

Working in the Wake of Genius

Aristotle has always been a hard act to follow. His philosophical and scientific achievements spanned a wide range of disciplines, many of which he could easily claim to have founded. In the fields to which he devoted his principal efforts, his breadth of vision, acuity, and good judgment set a standard which lasted for centuries. And in the fields in which he did little work himself—I am thinking of mathematics and astronomy, musical theory, medicine, mechanics, and geography—Aristotle proved to be strikingly well informed and often provided an articulated framework for investigation and explanation that served as a guide for others. This book is about the impact of Aristotle’s achievement in ethics, but it won’t hurt to begin with an acknowledgement that his genius cast a very long shadow over many fields—logic, semantics, rhetoric, dialectic, cosmology, natural philosophy, biology (or, more precisely, zoology), psychology and epistemology, metaphysics (both high and low, the study of the best and most distinctive form of being and also the most finely grained analysis of all beings), cultural and literary history, political theory. . . . The list could go on, of course, but even when it does it won’t include botany, and theology will have to be taken as a special case. As we all know, Aristotle’s own theories about god didn’t connect well with the intuitions and prior commitments of his culture and it was a long time until his contributions could be brought back into serious dialogue with other theologies, whether philosophical or not.

Whether you think of coming along after such a figure as standing in his shadow or on his shoulders, the historical situation is distinctive. Without, I hope, falling prey to the usual clichés about epigoni, we can surely recognize a pattern in the history of many intellectual and cultural disciplines. After the “great man,” then what? In our understanding of the history of philosophy we have long acknowledged the situation: it would be useful, though tedious, to catalogue all the post-thises and neo-thats which mark our awareness that unusually powerful and influential thinkers leave a recognizable wake in the generations which follow them (and which inevitably go on to do their own work).

My purpose in these chapters, as it was in the lectures they are based on, is to conduct a preliminary exploration of the aftermath of Aristotelian ethics.¹ There are several reasons for focusing on ethics. First, it is a field which Aristotle founded as a discipline. I don’t mean to claim that no one had indulged in constructive (or destructive) thought about ethics before Aristotle, any more than one would claim that no one had indulged in structured reasoning or reflected on it before Aristotle founded logic. But as with logic, Aristotle was the first to set relatively clear boundaries to the field of ethics, to identify with some precision high-level principles that define it and provide a framework for working within it, and to make distinctive claims about the field which have had enduring importance. Plato and others had of course said a great deal about ethics, but whereas Plato left the relationship of ethics to metaphysics complicated and murky, Aristotle successfully isolated it and wrote at least two distinct treatises on ethics and thereby established a new genre of philosophical writing. One might think, as some Platonists certainly did, that ethics is ill served by being so sharply distinguished from metaphysics; or that Aristotle underestimated the importance and intimacy of the relationship between ethics and politics; or that ethics needs to be more tightly connected to an understanding of human biology and psychology than even Aristotle realized. But there is no denying that it was Aristotle’s example and influence that made ethics into the distinct discipline it still is. His contemporary and sometime rival Xenocrates first divided philosophy tidily into three fields, physics, logic, and ethics.² But it was Aristotle who made ethics a field of its own.

But a much stronger motivation for choosing to focus on ethics is the enduring importance of Aristotle’s approach to the subject. His Nicomachean Ethics has been the most consistently studied treatise in the history of ethics; it has done more than any other text to give the field whatever unity and cohesion it has. Beyond that, in the last generation or two an approach to ethical enquiry which owes explicit allegiance to Aristotle has come onto the scene. In the nearly six decades years since Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy”³ and largely as a result of her stimulus⁴ something recognizable as an Aristotelian approach to ethics has re-emerged alongside of and as a challenge to what had been, in the mid twentieth century, the two main approaches to the subject. What we now typically regard as the deontological approach to ethics (an approach whose practitioners typically look to Kant as inspiration) and what Anscombe herself (op.cit. p. 12) dubbed “consequentialism” were then dominant and were thought to exhaust the field of plausible approaches to ethics. For Anscombe, as for a large and still growing group of moral philosophers, Aristotle’s ethics represents a distinct approach to the subject, one that promises a way forward on many problems which seemed intractable or unresolvable in the framework of the mid twentieth century. “Virtue ethics” is the most familiar tag for this movement, but it also bears the label “neo-Aristotelian,” and not without reason. One of the questions which I will be asking is this: what is it that most properly characterizes an approach to moral theory as Aristotelian? But I will be asking the question in the historical context of ancient philosophy: what most properly characterized an ancient moral theory as Aristotelian?

For a relatively uncontroversial account of why an Aristotelian approach still matters, I turn to a familiar authority: the opening paragraphs of Rosalynd Hursthouse’s article on “Virtue Ethics” in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. According to Hursthouse, when virtue ethics emerged in Anscombe’s article, it

crystallised an increasing dissatisfaction with the forms of deontology and utilitarianism then prevailing. Neither of them, at that time, paid attention to a number of topics that had always figured in the virtue ethics tradition—the virtues themselves, motives and moral character, moral education, moral wisdom or discernment, friendship and family relationships, a deep concept of happiness, the role of the emotions in our moral life and the fundamentally important questions of what sort of person I should be and how we should live. . . .

But although modern virtue ethics does not have to take the form known as “neo-Aristotelian,” almost any modern version still shows that its roots are in ancient Greek philosophy by the employment of three concepts derived from it. These are aretē (excellence or virtue), phronēsis (practical or moral wisdom), and eudaimonia (usually translated as happiness or flourishing).⁵

Hursthouse also points out that neo-Aristotelianism has been a useful stimulus in many areas of contemporary moral philosophy. This has produced a renewed motivation for the study of Aristotle’s ethics, in the first instance the Nicomachean Ethics (NE), which has had the greatest historical impact, though appreciation for the contribution of his other major treatise on ethics, the Eudemian Ethics (EE), is growing.⁶ But despite the short list of relevant Aristotelian themes supplied by Hursthouse, it is by no means clear what it is that warrants calling this strain in moral theory “Aristotelian” or “neo-Aristotelian.”

Simply talking about virtue, practical wisdom, and happiness is not enough to make an ethics Aristotelian; others besides Aristotelians embraced those themes, as a study of the wider ancient eudaimonist tradition confirms.⁷ Nor is it clear that contemporary neo-Aristotelianism uniformly embraces several other features of Aristotle’s own moral theory which are often thought to characterize it. Here I am thinking of the role played by activities alongside dispositions (the good life is an energeia of some very particular human dispositions), the central place of friendship,⁸ a preoccupation with the analysis of various kinds of goods and their role in the happy life, and a detailed analysis of the phenomena pertinent to moral psychology—all of which are correctly identified as salient aspects of his theory. So, if much of what contemporary moral theorists regard as Aristotelian was shared by other schools in the ancient world and if much of what was distinctive of Aristotle’s own moral theory is not in fact routinely embraced by modern neo-Aristotelians, then we evidently do need to ask what it is that is supposed to make a theory Aristotelian in the first place.

It will perhaps help to recognize that neo-Aristotelianism in ethics is both much older and more complex than is currently appreciated. Versions of Aristotelian ethical theory have been revived repeatedly in the western tradition, the most influential such revival before the twentieth century being its transformation by Thomas Aquinas. But long before that Aristotle’s own followers, the Peripatetics, also developed innovative contributions to moral theory along broadly Aristotelian lines. My plan is to bring these ancient neo-Aristotelians into the story, to draw on their philosophical innovations to help us achieve a fuller grasp of what in the end has been distinctively and persistently Aristotelian about neo-Aristotelian ethics and of how we can best use it today.⁹

It is worthwhile to anticipate one of the key features of the account that I will be offering. Although, as I have indicated, one of the most currently influential features of Aristotelian ethics derives from his account of the role of the virtues in a good human life—Aristotle really is, in a way, the founding father of virtue ethics—I will be directing far more of my attention to what I am referring to as his naturalism, to the distinctively Aristotelian view that we learn more about ethics and human happiness by focusing on our relationship to nature than by analyzing the particular virtues recognized in our own (or any other particular) culture. I should perhaps digress a bit to explain why.

The complicated role played by virtue in Aristotle’s ethics was outlined synoptically and economically by Crisp and Slote in the introduction to their 1997 collection Virtue Ethics,¹⁰ but the basic insight is relatively simple. We are urged to follow Aristotle’s example and organize our moral theory around the notion of human virtues or excellences rather than around more “abstract” concepts such as utility or duty. On this approach, we are to focus on living according to the virtues and to look, as Aristotle did, to the achievement of a good life in that sense as the reference point of moral theory. We may or may not find it easy to agree on what the virtues actually are or on their relative importance, but that is where the main debate is supposed to be focused.

But Aristotelian ethics is also supposed to be a model for a kind of ethical naturalism. In Nicomachean Ethics 1.7 Aristotle notoriously deploys something called the “function argument,” which claims that human beings, like other animals, have natural functions, the fulfillment of which constitutes their telos, their success conditions as living things—and the achievement of that success condition for humans bears the label “happiness” or eudaimonia.¹¹ (The situation is similar for many tools and artifacts, though their function is established by us rather than by nature; that is why they make such clear and useful analogies.) And our function, like that of other animals (and plants as well, perhaps), is rooted in our nature, a set of essential and defining traits whose presence and relevance in our lives is taken to be not open to debate. It is our nature that makes us what we are, and in Aristotle’s teleological view of the natural world it simply doesn’t make sense to ask why one would want to fulfill one’s function, what the goodness of doing so would be, or how to justify a living life according to one’s nature. As Philippa Foot,¹² perhaps the most influential exponent of this general view, puts it, there is “no change in the meaning of ‘good’ between the word as it appears in ‘good roots’ and as it appears in ‘good dispositions of the human will.’”¹³ Goodness in human moral terms and goodness in any relevant biological application stand in the same relationship to the nature of the species in question. With or without the refined account of how this is metaphysically rooted, which Michael Thompson provides in Life and Action¹⁴ (using a theory of “Aristotelian” natural-historical “categoricals”), this provides a powerful challenge to other accounts of what human goodness consists in. If it works, it constitutes a kind of preemptive strike against nonnaturalist theories. For if the evaluative preferability of (say) various prosocial behaviors can be explained successfully as a function of our species’ natural makeup, then explanation in terms of anything more complicated or posterior (such as a debatable conception of utility or some contentious notion of unconditional goodness) will be otiose and to that extent intellectually unattractive.

These two aspects of Aristotelian ethics from which contemporary moral theory is thought to benefit stand in an interesting relationship.¹⁵ Clearly they are independent of each other in principle. One could argue for the centrality of the virtues in moral evaluation while rejecting naturalism of any kind. The virtues we might put at the center of our theory could be defined by a nonnatural prescriptive theory (think here of the theological virtues); or they could be those recognized in and by a particular culture, virtues which we would learn about largely by gathering information about and reflection on the relevant society and from an analysis of its stable practices of praising and blaming, rewarding and punishing. And such virtues could be significantly different in different societies and subcultures. The courage of a Spartan may not be the courage of an Athenian; the generosity of a contemporary Russian plutocrat may well differ from that of the Ethiopian peasant farmer (which of these would be more like the “generosity” Aristotle recognized in his own world or we in ours is a question I think better left unasked). Of course, it is also possible that there would be human universals to be found among such culturally determined virtues, but the way to discover them would be inductive, by a bottom-up procedure of analysis seeking commonalities among superficially different norms. Universality across our species or across the centuries could not be taken for granted and would certainly not be criterial. It would be the effectively functioning norms in a given society which determine what counts as a virtue. Natural teleology need not come into it.

And conversely, a theory of natural goodness need not generate a set of norms and values for human beings which maps at all well onto any of our favorite normative theories or onto the actual functioning of known societies that we happen to approve of. Many of us would no doubt hope that an acute understanding of the nature of our species might explain the apparent value of generosity and courage; and there is no doubt at all in my mind that the desire to get human nature to match up to familiar virtue...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Working in the Wake of Genius
• 2. Flirting with Hedonism (It’s Only Natural)
• 3. The Turning Point: From Critolaus to Cicero
• 4. Bridging the Gap: Aristotelian Ethics in the Early Roman Empire
• 5. Alexander and Imperial Aristotelianism
• Notes
• Note on the Ancient Texts
• Bibliography
• Source Index
• Subject Index