A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics

S. Berges

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137026644
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

A Feminist Perspective on Virtue Ethics provides of historical survey of feminist virtue ethics, and shows how the ethical theorizing of women in the past can be brought to bear on that of women in the present.

1

Origins Revisited: On the Mother’s Side

1 Digging for foundations: ancient virtue ethics

Our way of looking at the history of philosophy and of constructing a canon for ourselves has been for a long time hostile to the inclusion of female writers. We look to those we regard as significant and influential and neglect the rest. We pick a figurehead, because we judge that is enough to represent the main strains in the history of thought. This has obvious advantages: it makes it possible to hold a debate about the history of philosophy with almost anyone who has studied for a philosophy degree. Even if one specialises in the philosophy of mind or applied ethics or areas in which one does not have to engage with historical figures, one can formulate a reasonably clear view of how one’s theories fit in to the history of the subject. It also makes it easier to have something in common with other philosophers: we can all agree or disagree about Plato’s forms, Aristotle’s mean, Hume’s scepticism, Kant’s aesthetics – if nothing else. But this approach also has strong disadvantages: figureheads are picked for their influence, either at the time they wrote or later. But we know that those who are in a position of power socially are more likely to be influential and to be regarded as such. For writers to be influential, their work must be published, read, engaged with. And those with the power to do this tend to prefer those who are like them, only a little better. This means that anyone who is part of a minority group or a group that does not have authority is going to be underrepresented. This is why we have so few women in the history of philosophy and even fewer members of those groups that had less access to the kind of influence that would lead to the writing and publishing of a book.

There is no doubt what we could call a great part of epistemic injustice involved in the putting together of a philosophy syllabus.¹ Women are excluded because they are judged not competent to represent the important ideas in the history of the discipline. They are assumed to be using methods that are not philosophical – mysticism, intuition, poetry – or sometimes accused of not being truly universal in their theorising because they talk about woman’s condition, whereas their male counterparts talk of, well, man’s condition, but we’re supposed to assume that “man” here means the same as “men and women.”² Women in philosophy, as everywhere else, are not held to the same standards as men. Their arguments must be clearer, drier; they must focus on topics that are as removed as possible from anything that marks the writers as particular or gendered. This is no doubt why Anne Conway is so often called for when one needs a woman philosopher: her metaphysical writings are as removed as it is possible to be from what Warnock called “the woman question.”³

Granted that there is probably a great deal of epistemic injustice going on in the building of a philosophical canon, what can we, as philosophers interested not only in reading more philosophy written by women but also bringing a more feminist perspective on the discipline, do about it? One option is to start afresh, to admit that the past has been unfair to women philosophers and to conclude that the history of philosophy is so tainted by this injustice that it is not a good idea to go back to it at all. This is the view that Genevieve Lloyd professed in her classic text The Man of Reason, when she argued that the concepts we use in philosophy have been born out of a fundamentally sexist history and that the best we can do is to start anew with better concepts.⁴ Feminist philosophers should start afresh, begin philosophy with a new page of which they are the authors, without turning back to a past that has maligned and crippled them as thinkers. In a sense, this appears to be the case with care ethicists, at least those of them that resist assimilation with virtue ethics, and all those who, although they believe they are close to virtue ethicists, do not wish to be associated with historical figures in virtue ethics. This dissociation is very brave: it is setting oneself apart and claiming for oneself a new start, relying on no one but oneself. However, setting oneself apart does very little for the assimilation of current women philosophers; students in particular have a choice between being part of the mainstream, studying male historical figures and joining in debates that have been around for a long time, or marking themselves out as feminist philosophers, claiming no history in common with others. This is not a particularly safe way of navigating a career that is by no means easy-going at the best of times. Marginalising oneself as a woman philosopher will not help other women philosophers except if it becomes an important part of the profession. Another reason why I feel this is not the most desirable response is that it compounds the injustice done to women philosophers of the past who have not made it into the canon simply because they were women. A lot of work can and has been done to recover the works of women philosophers who were not published or distributed widely simply because they were women. New critical editions of their work are coming out, they are being discussed in research communities, and they are being included more often in philosophy curricula.⁵

The aim of the first part of this book is to contribute to the recovery project by arguing that works by women who are not usually included in history of philosophy syllabi can help create an alternative history of virtue ethics. In the second part I argue that this alternative history can serve as a background for contemporary care ethics and, because of the varieties of perspectives it presents, can help elucidate certain problems in care ethics in a way that is impossible if we insist that we must start afresh. In the present chapter, I begin by asking whether we can rescue a historical background for specifically ancient virtue ethics from the grips of Aristotle.

2 Paternity disputes: Plato or Aristotle?

The Nicomachean Ethics is still most often held up as the original textbook for virtue ethics, one which we must all refer to if we are to take part in the discipline. Increasingly, philosophers have been looking at a more varied frame of reference, reading Hume, Hutcheson and even Nietzsche, but there is very little inquiry into other sources of ancient wisdom.⁶ One omission, especially, is spectacular: we all know that Aristotle studied many years in Plato’s Academy, that he then taught under Plato. We should expect that some of his ideas would somehow be derived from Plato’s, but very little effort has been made to understand the master’s influence on the pupil as far as virtue ethics is concerned. Yet many characteristic Aristotelian themes are not only anticipated by Plato but also sometimes more effectively argued, at least in some respects. The aim of this section is to show that virtue ethics does not need Aristotle as a figurehead, that even if it needs an established figure in the history of philosophy to attach itself to, the figure can be Plato. Plato’s thought, I argue, is not gender exclusive in the way that Aristotle’s is and so is a better starting point for looking at the history of virtue ethics from a feminist perspective. Of course, this is only the first part of the project, and in sections 3 and 4, I argue that by digging a little further, we can make space for actual women philosophers in our history of ancient virtue ethics. In the present section I claim only that making more space for Plato and less for Aristotle is a first step in that direction.

Virtue ethics is typically concerned with seeking value in one’s entire life rather than in the correctness of particular acts. In that sense Socrates and perhaps Diogenes the Cynic, with their constant emphasis on the importance of living the good life, could be considered the high priests of virtue ethics, and every philosopher in ancient Greece could be seen as a practitioner. Most of them would also have shared – though perhaps in some cases to a lesser extent – two of the central tenets of ancient virtue ethics. First, this way of doing moral philosophy entails a reflection on the kind of person one is and can become; it develops the art of modelling character in an attempt to create solid, permanent traits that a person can be proud of and that will help him or her live the kind of life chosen as worthwhile. This character training happens through repeated practice; what the ancients called habituation. Secondly, central to ancient virtue ethics is the notion of progress, improvement, the goal being fulfilling one’s potential as a human being. This improvement is made possible by the acquisition of virtuous character traits through habituation, repetitively doing what one wants to be able to do with ease until it becomes a second nature.

All of this is usually and routinely attributed to Aristotle, but in fact not only were these thoughts common to many followers of Socrates and Diogenes, but the arguments Plato offers to defend them are clearly precursors of Aristotle’s. As this is not the time or place to go into a detailed comparison of Plato’s and Aristotle’s ethical theories,⁷ I limit myself to arguing that one important aspect of virtue ethics, the claim that virtues are stable character traits brought on by habituation – a claim famously attributed to Aristotle – originates in fact with Plato. The point is not merely to debunk one male figurehead to put another in his place but to do so in the hope that the new figurehead will make space for women to partake in the history and tradition of virtue ethics, something which is highly difficult if we cast Aristotle in that role.

If we are looking at how a person lives her life overall, then we are bound to focus on her character traits. Her choices, long and short term, will reflect the kind of person she is and the kind of person she is trying to become, as well as her grasp of what a good life constitutes. We need a sense that her life is how she chooses it to be, that her achievements are related to the kind of person she has made herself become. Take this example. An 18-year-old woman – let’s call her Maggie – is faced with the question of whether she should study law at university. This would reflect what her family wants for her and what she has been preparing herself for throughout her school years. There is a place for her to take up, she has passed the requisite exams, and her family has put together enough money for her to go. If she does decide to go, there will be nothing morally remarkable about her decision – she is merely following a route that has been prepared for her, and although the prospect of leaving home may scare her a little, she still feels it is the safe thing to do as opposed to, say, look for a job and fend for herself or take a year off to travel the world. Let’s imagine, however, that she doesn’t go, that instead she gets pregnant and decides to get married and have the baby. Her parents will be upset, they will feel that she has disappointed them, failed them even, and made a bad decision that she will almost certainly regret. And we might well be inclined to agree with them. But we would not be too heavy-handed in our blame: she is young, after all, and the young make mistakes. Fast-forward some years. Now in her late twenties, our young woman finds herself single and having to care for and support two young children by herself. She achieves this by working several poorly paid jobs. But now she decides that she wants a university education after all. Having seen for herself that there is a shortage of schoolteachers and that children in state schools are suffering because of it, she decides to become a teacher. So she enrols in a part-time university course, and between her jobs and caring for her children, she eventually obtains the degree she needs to become a schoolteacher.

Had Maggie gone ahead with her early plans to study law, we would not have thought she was doing something morally praiseworthy by going to university. She would have been going along a path already traced for her by her parents so that she would be in a better position to make good decisions for herself later in life. Again, when she decided to throw away that opportunity, we were light-handed in our blame: she was just a child making a foolish mistake. But when ten years later, she decides to take her life in her own hands, go back to university so that she can obtain a degree that will put her in a position to improve the world she lives in, we definitely want to praise her for her courage and concern for others. Her decision reflects strength of character; it is a decision reached in full knowledge of the risks and difficulties ahead of her.

The reference to strength of character when evaluating virtue is something we draw from chapter 4 of book II of the Nicomachean Ethics:

The agent also must be in a certain condition when he does [virtuous actions]; in the first place he must have knowledge, secondly he must choose the acts, and choose them for their own sakes, and thirdly his action must proceed from a firm and unchangeable character.

However, Aristotle’s point depends on a moral psychology elaborated by Plato in the Gorgias and the Republic. In the Republic, Plato argues that virtue comes from a certain kind of harmony of the soul: the emotions and desires must be trained to evolve in harmony with reason so that they become reliable, a source of strength rather than discord and disturbance (442b, 443c–443e, 444c). In the Gorgias he likens a soul in which desires and emotions are allowed to grow unchecked by reason to a sieve which loses more than it can contain (493a–493d). The person who has a sieve for a soul cannot be happy and must in fact live a miserable life, as desires that leak through a sieve do not remain constant enough to be satisfied by any means.

When Maggie enrols in a university course, she knows what lies ahead of her and makes an informed decision. She feels that becoming a student is the right thing for her to do. But why should her decision proceed from a firm and unchangeable character? This makes sense, again, if we are looking at the person’s whole life rather than isolated acts. Someone who simply acts a certain admirable way because she is subject to a temporary emotional state does not deserve the same praise as someone who acts in the same way because that is what she always consciously does. The father who praises his daughter to the skies because he’s just acquired a new mistress or gotten a promotion at work is not to be admired in the same way (or indeed at all) as the father who praises his daughter whenever she’s done something good. The person who comes home in a good mood after an evening out drinking and gives a large note to a passing beggar is not charitable in the way that the person who gives a little everyday is. Had the woman in our example enrolled in the teacher-training course because her friends were doing it or because she felt sexually attracted to the teacher, we would not have praised her in the same way. The analogy of the Gorgias is particularly helpful to make sense of our intuitions about the above examples. None of the spur-of-the-moment do-gooders are in a position to satisfy their desires to do good simply because these desires are not regulated by reason. So, for example, the father, instead of teaching his daughter to value her hard work, is merely adding to her sense of insecurity with his random praise. There is a good chance that the drunken benefactor is dropping his money in the hands of a teenager in need of extra cash to go clubbing rather than in those of a homeless person who has been sleeping on his porch for three months and greeting him kindly every morning. As to the woman who joins a course to be with her friends, we might expect her to drop out after a few weeks, exhausted, poorer and with even less of a sense of where her life is going.

The requirement that an agent must have firm character traits before she can act virtuously vindicates our intuition that we should not condemn too harshly an 18-year-old who makes a poor life choice. Her character traits are not yet firm. Though her parents may have taught her to make courageous and responsible choices, she may well have thought that going against her parent’s wishes by choosing a potentially more difficult life and becoming a mother was in fact a courageous and responsible decision. And indeed, in some circumstances she might have been right. The only serious objection that could have been put to her was that she was too young to be able to make such decisions for herself. Another way of expressing this is to say that her character was not yet fully formed and hence she was not yet capable of virtuous actions and so was better off remaining under her parents’ guidance for a while. Following the advice of people who are better than we are is important because it constitutes a major step in the acquisition of virtue. Aristotle famously argues that the way to achieve a virtuous character, with firm, enduring and stable dispositions to do good, is through habituation. We need to practice acting as a virtuous person would by mimicking adults as a young child, obeying rules imposed on us by our parents while we grow up and then forcing ourselves to keep up those...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: A Historical Perspective on Womens Ethical Experience, Care and Virtue Ethics
• 1  Origins Revisited: On the Mothers Side
• 2  Stoic Virtues, Christian Caritas and the Communal Life
• 3  The Paradox of the Virtuous Woman in Christine de Pizans Fortress and in Fifteenth-Century Public Life
• 4  Revolutionary Mothers, or Virtue in the Age of Enlightenment
• 5  Care as Virtue
• 6  Care, Gender and the Public life
• 7  Care and Global Justice
• 8  Looking Back and the Way Ahead
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index