Virtue Ethics and Moral Knowledge

Philosophy of Language after MacIntyre and Hauerwas

R. Scott Smith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351875684
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

We live in a time of moral confusion: many believe there are no overarching moral norms, and we have lost an accepted body of moral knowledge. Alasdair MacIntyre addresses this problem in his much-heralded restatement of Aristotelian and Thomistic virtue ethics; Stanley Hauerwas does so through his highly influential work in Christian ethics. Both recast virtue ethics in light of their interpretations of the later Wittgenstein's views of language. This book systematically assesses the underlying presuppositions of MacIntyre and Hauerwas, finding that their attempts to secure moral knowledge and restate virtue ethics, both philosophical and theological, fail. Scott Smith proposes alternative indications as to how we can secure moral knowledge, and how we should proceed in virtue ethics.

PART I
A POSSIBLE SOLUTION: LINGUISTIC VIRTUE ETHICS

Chapter 1

From Aristotle to Wittgenstein: Tracing the History of the Loss of Moral Knowledge

In After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre proposes a solution to what he describes as a disaster in contemporary moral discourse. In so doing, he offers a solution to the problem of the loss of moral knowledge, one that involves a return to the virtue ethics of Aristotle albeit reformulated into what he calls a ‘tradition’. Then, in Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, Aquinas has become his hero, and Thomism has become his preferred moral tradition. In both cases, MacIntyre argues for a return to the tradition of the virtues in order to escape what he sees as the crisis of our interminable moral disputes. For him, the dilemma posed by the loss of moral knowledge is a result of the many mistakes foisted upon us by the Enlightenment, chief of which is the notion that language corresponds to an extra-linguistic realm. That is, MacIntyre repudiates the metaphysical realism found in Aristotle and Aquinas, not to mention their epistemological realism, the view that we can know things as they are in themselves, even apart from language. In MacIntyre’s view, traditional metaphysics (that is, metaphysical realism) is dead.¹

Stanley Hauerwas closely follows MacIntyre in that he too believes that language and world are not related by correspondence; rather, language use in a way of life constitutes a world. His ethical writings focus on the Christian way of life and how it provides moral knowledge in the wake of the philosophical mischief inherited from the Enlightenment. Hauerwas’s major concern seems to be that a focus in ethics on disembodied, abstract agents making decisions outside of a context has severely distorted the moral enterprise. According to him, this view distorts moral action because it seeks an epistemic foundation for all moral reflection when there is none, and it also treats moral agents as autonomous, atomized selves without a history that reduces the moral life to just one of making right decisions. As a solution, Hauerwas develops in part an account of the moral agent as an embodied person in a particular context who needs moral virtues as well as a vision for perceiving the good, both of which are found in a community formed by metaphors and stories. He focuses on the Christian community, the church, as the true narrative, since it is formed around the true story of Jesus of Nazareth.

Significantly, both writers have embraced a form of virtue ethics as part and parcel of their solutions to this loss of moral knowledge. Such knowledge, they would contend, is found only within linguistically formed communities, and it is not some disembodied set of propositions somewhere ‘out there’ that anyone, regardless of their communal membership, may know. Yet, within this broad agreement, each author has his distinctiveness. While MacIntyre seeks to defend Thomism as the most rational tradition so far, Hauerwas thinks he has found the true story, period. We might generalize and characterize their philosophical relationship as MacIntyre being the one who justifies a narrative-based virtue ethic, while Hauerwas applies the theory. Yet, such a depiction will prove to be too simplistic. For instance, this does not mean that Hauerwas does not have philosophical interests. He wants to develop a narrative approach to Christian ethics, but not a philosophical system. Additionally, MacIntyre has broader concerns than just theological ethics; he is concerned with finding the most rational tradition so far, which he argues happens to be Thomism, a Christian tradition. MacIntyre’s concerns, therefore, are largely philosophical, while Hauerwas’s are theological. Alternatively, MacIntyre’s focus is more general, while Hauerwas’s is more particular (that is, Christian virtue ethics).

Since their solutions involve a return to the virtue ethics of Aristotle and Aquinas, we should first understand how Aristotle and Aquinas understood their ethics, especially in terms of their ontological and epistemological assumptions. Then, we must trace how significant philosophical shifts caused the loss of moral knowledge. At that point, we will be in a position to historically situate the views of the later Wittgenstein, who has had the greatest philosophical influence upon MacIntyre and Hauerwas and their solution to secure moral knowledge. In Chapters 2 and 3, we will be able to see more clearly the adjustments and new presuppositions being made by MacIntyre and Hauerwas in both philosophical and Christian virtue ethics.

Aristotle’s Virtue Ethics

Fundamentally, Aristotle sees humans as beings who are to be oriented toward their telos, or end, of happiness. His Nichomachean Ethics stresses the development of the moral virtues to direct us to that end. Working from his frame of reference, Aristotle does not seek an abstract definition of the good for human life, but instead particularizes it by situating the good person in the context of the Greek polis. It is in this community setting that the virtues can be fully developed and pursued. For him, the polis is prior to the individual in the sense of being more basic. Nevertheless, while his analysis of the development of virtue involves the interrelationships of members who are to live well in the polis, his explanation of virtue and character inevitably also includes an examination of the individual and what makes him or her a good person.

Most of Aristotle’s discussion in his Nichomachean Ethics (NE) stresses the use of practical reason instead of its contemplative counterpart, since ethics is a practical discipline. Yet that does not mean that Aristotle ignores his conclusions reached in the Metaphysics and Psychology. Indeed, his many references in NE to the soul, its parts and its actual and potential properties all seem to presuppose his more speculative determinations. Only now, he primarily is not concerned with that dimension of thought, but instead he focuses on the practical outworkings of his contemplations.

Metaphysically, Aristotle makes the fundamental distinction between essential properties and accidental ones, the former being that set of properties that a living thing must have in order to exist; without them, that being would cease to exist. In contrast, accidental properties may be present in a subject, but they are not necessary for its existence, and they do not exist as such apart from a subject. They reflect a thing’s capacities, which may be actualized or remain as mere potentials.² Such properties, if present in a subject, are accidental in that they are contingent and not essential.

Making use of these distinctions, Aristotle delineates the concept of essential thinghood, or ‘whatness’ (ousia), such as humanness, that all particular humans must possess and fall under.³ Such ‘grammatical subjects’ are those things ‘to which certain predicates may be ascribed, while no further subject of which in turn can be predicated’.⁴ Humanness is predicated of a pure particular in order to metaphysically individuate that person, which provides a particular human being, to use David Wiggins’s terms, his or her ‘thisness’.⁵

This individuated substance is the soul of a particular human, without which that human being would cease to exist.⁶ The individuated human being is a primary substance and is the unifier and owner of all the accidental properties. Each human being keeps his or her essence (the ‘suchness’) throughout his or her existence, and so the human is literally the same person through non-essential changes.⁷ It is this conclusion that allows Aristotelian substance dualism to support our understanding of the basic notion that a person can grow in character and still essentially be the same person through those changes. That is, the ability to mature entails that there is a continuant that exists throughout the maturation process, and not a series of different beings coming into being and perishing, one after another. Wiggins elaborates on Aristotle and explains this concept by claiming that for all beings x, at all times t, there exists a sortal concept (or essential nature) g, such that if x exists at t, then x is a g at t.⁸

The soul also is the determining teleological factor of the person,⁹ for the soul has a structure that provides the limits and sequence of changes that a human may or may not undergo. In terms of character, the soul provides the boundaries for the virtues of a mature person. Additionally, movement, ‘“qualitative change” (alloiosis) and growth are also caused by the soul’.¹⁰

Aristotle analytically divides the soul into two main parts, the rational and the irrational, and their respective faculties. The former part of the soul includes the two aspects of reason: the contemplative, or speculative, and the deliberative. The latter part includes both the vegetative-nutritive part, which relates to involuntary bodily functions, and the appetitive part, which is the faculty of desire. This faculty is voluntary and rational in that it has the capacity to obey the will, which is part of the reason. Yet, desire is also irrational in that it lacks the capacity to deliberate and form reasons for action.

Aristotle’s analysis of the parts of the soul and its faculties leads to an important contribution for his understanding of character. The soul has the full set of higher-order capacities to develop into a mature human being, although those capacities may be blocked by the privation (steresis) of lower-order capacities. For instance, the mind (nous), which is the thinking and judging faculty, ‘has no actual existence before it thinks’.¹¹ For Aristotle, this means that it must have existed potentially prior to that exercise of thought.

Similarly, the virtues, which are states of character, may or may not be realized in any given person. That is, while the virtues are qualities that are appropriate and right for us given our human nature, the capacities for them that reside in the soul as potentials will be actualized only if they are developed through habituation. The virtues, such as the four cardinal, or moral, ones of prudence, temperance, justice and courage, are developed by doing like activities, such as becoming just by performing just acts. But mere performance of an action is insufficient for moral virtue, since the actions must also be done as the just person would do them; with the knowledge that the acts are just; from the desire to do them for the sake of their being just; and from the firm character of a just person.¹² Virtue is found by a rational principle as a mean between two vicious extremes, one of deficiency and the other of excess. Courage, for example, is the mean between fear and confidence (that is, rashness). But, there is neither a mean to (nor excess in) a virtue itself. For instance, one cannot be ...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Content Page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The Problem of the Loss of Moral Knowledge
• Part I: A Possible Solution: Linguistic Virtue Ethics
• Part II: The Failure of this Answer: A Critique of Linguistic Virtue Ethics
• Part III: The Implications of this Failure and the Prospects for Moral Knowledge
• Bibliography
• Index