Michael Slote Encountering Chinese Philosophy

A Cross-Cultural Approach to Ethics and Moral Philosophy

Yong Huang

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350129863
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

Michael Slote is one of the most prominent philosophers working in the discipline today. By creating a two-way dialogue between philosophers specializing in Chinese philosophy and a central thinker from the Anglo-American tradition, this volume brings cross-cultural philosophy to life. From his early contributions in ethics, metaethics, philosophy of mind, moral psychology and epistemology to his recent investigations into the relationship between Western philosophy and Chinese philosophy, an international team of scholars of Chinese philosophy cover Slote's sentimentalism, his understanding of Chinese concepts Yin and Yang and explores the role Early Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism can play in his work. Each chapter extends Slote's ideas by considering them from a Chinese philosophical perspective and Slote is given the opportunity to respond to each of the contributors' interpretation of his work. Applied to Classical works such as the Zhuangzi and the Yijing, his ground-breaking thoughts on morality, care ethics and empathy are taken in new, exciting directions.

1

Michael Slote Encounters Chinese Philosophy

An Introduction

Yong Huang

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

1 Introduction

This is the first volume in our series of Fudan Studies in Encountering Chinese Philosophy. The series aims to promote dialogues between contemporary Western philosophy and traditional Chinese philosophy. Each volume, as well as each conference in preparation for the volume, features one prominent contemporary Western philosopher, who may or may not previously have known anything about Chinese philosophy. A dozen or so scholars in Chinese philosophy are invited to critically and constructively engage aspects of the work of the featured Western philosopher from Chinese philosophical perspectives, with responses from the Western philosopher. While clearly of a comparative nature, the primary purpose of each volume in this series is not merely to identify similarities and differences between a contemporary Western philosopher and some Chinese philosophical perspectives. Rather it attempts to see how insights from Chinese philosophical traditions may shed some new light on the philosophical issues dealt with by both the Western and traditional Chinese thinkers. In short, the project is primarily not historical but philosophical; not interpretive but constructive.

2 Slote as a Philosophical Sentimentalist

Michael Slote, the featured philosopher of this volume, is UST Professor of Ethics in the University of Miami. Having gained an A.B. and Ph. D. from Harvard University, he has taught at Columbia University, Trinity College Dublin, SUNY Stony Brook, and the University of Maryland, where he served as the department chair for many years. A member of the Royal Irish Academy, he served as the chairman of National Committee for Philosophy of the Academy, was President of the American Society for Value Inquiry, and a holder of the prestigious Tanner Lectureship in 1984–5.

Slote is widely recognized as a leading figure in the impressive revival of virtue ethics in the English-speaking world during the last few decades, and his contribution to this revival is unique in at least two respects. The first is his emphasis on the pure or radical or genuine form of virtue ethics, which is related to our very conception of virtue ethics. Virtue ethics is not just any type of ethics that has room for virtues, as otherwise deontology and consequentialism could also be classified as virtue ethics, since they both allow virtues to play important roles in their systems, just as virtue ethics can also allow moral rules and consequences to play some important roles in its system. What makes an ethics system virtue ethics is, to use Gary Watson’s term, the primacy of character or virtue in the system. While virtue ethics can talk about rules and consequence, they are both derived from virtues, which are not derived from anything else. This is the primacy of virtue in virtue ethics. It is similar to deontology, which can talk about virtue, but virtue is derived from moral rules or principles, which are not derived from anything else. This is the primacy of moral principles in deontology. It is also similar to consequentialism, especially utilitarianism, which also allow virtue, but the virtue here is derived from consequence, which is not derived from anything else. This is the primacy of consequence in consequentialism.

Thus measured, however, Aristotelian ethics, original or neo, are not virtue ethics, or at least not a pure or genuine form thereof. It goes without saying that virtues do play an important role in Aristotle’s ethics, but are they primary in Aristotle’s ethics? Apparently not. Slote believes that there can be two plausible ways to interpret Aristotle. According to one interpretation, while Aristotle “characterizes the virtuous individual as someone who sees or perceives what is good or fine or right to do in any given situation.… In that case, if the virtuous individual is the measure of what is fine or right, that may simply mean that she is in the best possible position to know/perceive what is fine or right” (Slote 2001: 5). Here virtue is not primary but is subservient to “what is fine or right.” The second interpretation, the one adopted by Rosalind Hursthouse, defends “Aristotle as deriving all evaluations of action from independent judgments about what a virtuous person would characteristically choose and about what counts as a virtue, but basing these latter, in turn, in judgment about, a conception of, eudaimonia” (Slote 2001:6). Here virtue is not primary either but is subservient to eudaimonia. It is in this sense that Gerasimos Santas claims that “the widespread belief that Aristotle had a virtue ethics is false” (see Santas 1997: 281). Thomas Hurka asks “the question of how distinctively virtue-ethical a theory is whose central explanatory property is in fact flourishing [eudaimonia].… This ethics would not be at all distinctive if it took the virtues to contribute causally to flourishing, as productive means to a separately existing state of flourishing” (Hurka 2001: 233).

In contrast, Slote aims to develop a virtue ethics, which he regards as agent-based in contrast to agent-prior (an example of which is Aristotle’s ethics in the second interpretation above) and agent-focused (an example of which is Aristotle’s ethics in the first interpretation above). Such an ethics, Slote claims, “is more radical and in some sense purer than other, more familiar forms of virtue ethics,” in the sense that it “treats the moral or ethical status of acts as entirely derivative from independent and fundamental aretaic (as opposed to deontic) ethical characterizations of motives, character traits, or individuals” (Slote 2011: 4–5). Using Gary Watson’s terms, Slote’s ethics is one in which virtue is primary, i.e., everything else in it is derived from or based in virtue but virtue is not derived from or based in anything else.¹

To explain Slote’s radical, pure, or genuine virtue ethics—agent-based virtue ethics, as he would call it—leads our discussion to the second unique feature of Slote’s virtue ethics. While most virtual ethicists in the revival of virtue ethics have been following the lead of Aristotle, Slote develops the sentimentalist theme in Hume. He claims that there are two types of agent-based virtue ethics, one cool and one warm. The cool type derives any sort of altruism and human concern for other people from the inner strength which is treated as ultimately admirable. Plato and Nietzsche are mentioned as virtue ethicists of this type. Slote argues that this version of virtue ethics is problematic, however, as it “treats sentiments or motives like benevolence, compassion, kindness, and the like as only derivatively admirable and morally good” (Slote 2001: 23; emphasis in the original). He prefers the warm type of agent-based virtue ethics, which treats the above-mentioned sentiments or motives themselves as ultimately admirable and morally good. Slote regards this version as sentimentalist agent-based virtue ethics “because such views are more (directly) influenced by British moral sentimentalism than by any other historical movements in ethics” (Slote 2001: 20).

The warm type of virtue ethics itself can be divided into two, that of universal benevolence and that of partial care. In the former, universal benevolence (i.e., universally directed or impartial benevolence is chosen as supremely regulative (Slote 2001: 24). In the latter, the agent-based ethical theory is grounded “in an ideal of partial benevolence, of caring more for some people than for others” (Slote 2001: 29). It is in this sense that Slote gives great attention to empathy, since it is partial: We tend to have empathy with our nearest and dearest, i.e., feel what they feel, more easily, more strongly, and more accurately than with strangers. Out of these two warm types of sentimentalist virtue ethics, Slote prefers the ethics of partial care. His main reason is that “We think highly of love and tend to think less well of someone who doesn’t love, say, her own children or spouse. But if loving and loving concern are morally called for in regard to people who are near and dear to one, then morality as universal benevolence has a problem, because of the way it mandates equal concern for everyone” (Slote 2001: 136). Slote here is somehow presenting such a scenario: love and empathy are by their nature partial. So either we live in a world with loving and empathic people, who care for their loved ones more than they do strangers, or we live in a world of people who are impartial when it comes to helping others but who have no love and empathy. Slote’s view is that the former is much preferable to the latter.

As we can see, Slote’s sentimentalism is originally developed as a normative ethics: the warm and partialistic agent-based virtue ethics. However, Slote quickly expands it to other areas. The first area of expansion naturally is metaethics. Slote argues that empathy, or more precisely what he calls second-order empathy, is “core or basis of moral approval and disapproval” (Slote 2010a: 34). Seeing someone in pain, an empathic agent feels that person’s pain and is motivated to help relieve it. This is first-order empathy. Now a third person who sees the empathic person “will feel warmly or tenderly toward” the agent (Slote 2010a: 35). Slote claims that this reflective feeling toward the empathic agent constitutes moral approval of the agent. Similarly, when seeing someone in pain, a non-empathic person exhibits a basic lack of empathy. Now a third person, empathic in the first-order sense himself/herself, “will tend to be chilled (or at least ‘left cold’)” toward the non-empathic person (Slote 2010a: 35). What the third person experiences here is second-order empathy. Slote claims that the reflective feelings the third person feels toward the non-empathic person constitutes moral disapproval of them.² In both cases, what the third person embodies is second-order empathy.

Slote’s next area of expansion in his sentimentalism is political philosophy, which is also natural but significant. Part of the reason that virtue ethics was eclipsed by consequentialism and deontology in modern philosophy is that it apparently lacks its rivals’ ability to develop a corresponding political philosophy. Virtue ethics is concerned about the character traits of individual persons, while political philosophy is focused on the social level of justice. Even if everyone in a society has the virtue of justice, this still does not guarantee that the society itself is just. Slote proposes a way of understanding the justice of laws, institutions, and social customs on the model of the justice of individuals’ actions. Just as an individual’s action is morally right or wrong if it expresses, exhibits, or reflects the empathically caring motivation (or not) of the individual, the laws, institutions, and customs of a given society are just or unjust if they express, exhibit, or reflect the empathically caring motivations (or not) of the social group making such laws, institutions, and customs. Similarly, just as an empathic person is partial and tends to care for loved ones more than strangers, a caring group of lawmakers tends to make laws that are more concerned with their compatriots than people in foreign countries (Slote 2007: Chapter 6).

Next, Slote expands his sentimentalism to epistemology to establish a sentimentalist virtue epistemology. First, open-mindedness, fair-mindedness, and objectivity regarding evidence are regarded as epistemic virtues, but Slote argues that such virtues involve some emotional states: “being emotionally open or receptive and to some degree sympathetic to views and arguments one initially disagrees with” (Slote 2014: 18). Second, belief itself contains an element of emotion or is “even nothing more than a certain sort of emotional/affective attitude toward (the content of) a proposition” (Slote 2014: 18). This is because for Slote “to believe something is to favor a certain way of seeing things over others, and favoring in general involves at least mild affect” (Slote 2016: 32). Third, Slote argues that epistemic justification in general requires receptivity, a feature of empathy. Rationalism requires us to subject everything to rational scrutiny: an unexamined life is not worthy living. However, from Slote’s sentimentalism, “the person who seriously doubts the value of their own interests and emotions shows a lack of receptivity and trust toward (the contents of) their own life” (Slote 2014: 39).

Finally, Slote expands his sentimentalism to philosophy of mind. Although moral sentimentalism and sentimentalist epistemology already involve the function of mind, in his A Sentimentalist Theory of Mind, Slote aims to provide a “more general sentimentalist treatment of the mind” (Slote 2014: 1) against the rationalist theory of mind, according to which “our unity as persons depends on the rational conditions of the unity of our mind” and that “emotions and sense perceptions can be understood in cognitive/computational or more generally in cognitive/rational terms” (Slote 2014: 2). In this general sentimentalist theory of mind, Slote aims to show not only that emotion, contra rationalism, is an irreducible and distinctive part of the mind but also tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Michael Slote Encounters Chinese Philosophy
• 2 Receptivity, Reason, and Responsiveness
• 3 Michael Slote on Yin/Yang and Chinese Philosophy
• 4 Slote’s Sentimentalist Theory of the Mind versus A Neo-Confucian Unified Theory of the Mind
• 5 Two Paths to One Goal
• 6 Belief, Desire, and Besire
• 7 The Value of Receptivity and Yin/Yang Clusters for Philosophy
• 8 Empathy, Meaning, and Approval in the Mencius and Michael Slote
• 9 Moral Therapy and the Imperative of Empathy
• 10 Slote’s Moral Sentimentalism and Confucian Qing-ism
• 11 Striving for the Impossible
• 12 Virtue Ethics, Symmetry, and Confucian Harmonious Appropriation of Self with Others
• 13 Replies to Commentators
• Index
• Copyright