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Aristotle: A Pre-Modern Post-Modern? Implications for Business Ethics*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 January 2015

Ronald F. Duska
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Abstract

The paper asserts that the post-modern rejection of “modern” theoretical accounts including ethical-theoretical accounts as unacceptable meta-narratives would concur with an Aristotelian critique of contemporary ethical theories. Hence and Aristotelian critique will be similar to a post-modern critique. The paper sketches an account of what post-modernism in philosophy is and shows its similarity to Aristoteleanism in rejecting “modern” approaches in a significant way since an Aristotelian approach uses different criteria for what counts as ethical knowledge. The paper suggests that if one follows the lead of Aristotle outlined in Book One Chapter Three of the Nichomachean Ethics applied ethics can be seen as similar to what Aristotle called “Rhetoric,” for in the Rhetoric Aristotle shows how one should engage in discourse about issues of the just and the good. The final section addresses the problem of how an Aristotelian approach can avoid the relativism of post-modernism.

Type
Articles
Information
Business Ethics Quarterly , Volume 3 , Issue 3 , July 1993 , pp. 227 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Business Ethics 1993

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References

Notes

1 Alisdaire, Maclntyre, After Virtue, second edition, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, p. 118 and p. 111Google Scholar.

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5 By a realism I mean a philosophy that views the concept as an instrument that leads us to an understanding of extra-mental reality. Thus concepts are not the object of our knowledge nor are points of view the object of philosophy. Such a belief is involved in phenomenology, and is an outgrowth of Descartes’ beginning with the object of knowledge being the content of his ideas, Locke’s insistence that we know our ideas and Kant’s insistence that what is present to consciousness is phenomenal appearance and that we are ignorant of the noumenal. This transcendentalism is seen in Michael Dummet, when he insists that “Only with Frege was the proper object of philosophy finally established: namely, first that the goal of philosophy is the analysis of the structure of thought.” For a realist the concept or thought is not the object of philosophy but the organon, the instrument which discloses reality to us, that by which we know the subject. So the concept is not what we know but that by which we know. Richard, Bernstein Cf., Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983. p. 5Google Scholar.

6 As Bernstein says: “Relativism is the basic conviction that when we turn to the examination of those concepts that philosophers have taken to be the most fundamental… we are forced to recognize that in the final analysis all such concepts must be understood as relative to a specific conceptual scheme, theoretical framework, paradigm, form of life, society, or culture. Since the relativist believes that there is or can be a nonreducible plurality of such conceptual schemes, he or she challenges the claim that these concepts can have a determi-nate and univocal significance. For the relativist, there is no substantive overarching frame-work or single metalanguage by which we can rationally adjudicate or univocally evaluate competing claims or alternative paradigms.” (Bernstein, p. 8.)

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Postmoderns follow the lead of Nietzsche and Heidegger, but their path in repudiating modern philosophy is quite similar to the path followed by the later Wittgenstein, John Austin, and a number of their philosophical disciples in the ordinary language tradition. The difference is that whereas the disciples of Wittgenstein and Austin, at least those engaged in ethical theory, such as Anscombe, and Foot, turned toward a contemporary revitalization of Aristotelian insights, a sizeable number of their postmodern counterparts who followed Heidegger and Nietzsche in rejecting modern philosophy, with notable exceptions such as Gadamer, adopted a radical relativism.

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19 Rene, Descartes, Meditations, vol. 1 of Philosophical Works of Descartes, translated by Elizabeth, S. Haldane and Ross, G. R. T.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 144Google Scholar. Bernard Williams in a postmodern spirit in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, iterates the theme that neither ethics nor science is free of a value perspective. For science’s value is the pursuit of truth or power and ethics’ unexamined value is that the unexamined life is not worth living. Thus human valuings underlie all. So again the ground of truth is human will. From this Williams deduces his own brand of skepticism.

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21 Lyotard, p. xxiv.

22 Compare this to Richard, Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979Google Scholar, and Thomas, Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution, second edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970Google Scholar.

23 Lyotard, p. xxiii.

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26 Edith, Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990, p. xxiiGoogle Scholar.

27 Anscombe, p. 27.

28 Green, BEPP, p. 4.

29 Aristotle, , Nichomachean Ethics, translated by Martin, Oswald, New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962, 1094b12-27Google Scholar.

30 Aristotle, , Rhetoric, in The Basis Works of Aristotle, translated by Rhys Roberts, W., edited by Richard, McKeon, New York: Random House, 1941, 1359b9ffGoogle Scholar.

31 Rhetoric, 1358b8.9

32 Rhetoric, 1358bl3ff.

33 Rhetoric, Book 1, Ch. 2.

34 Rhetoric, 1356b 1-4.

35 Craig, Lehman, “Takeovers and Takeover Defenses: Some Utilities of the Free Market,” in Lisa, Newton and Maureen, Ford, Taking Sides: Controversial Issues in Business Ethics, Guilford, CT: Dushkin Publishing Company, 1992, p. 234–5Google Scholar.

36 Rhetoric, 1354al4-15

37 Rhetoric, 1355a7-10.

38 Rhetoric, 1395b20ff.

39 Rhetoric, 1355al2.

40 Wittgenstein, PI, p. 226.

41 Rhetoric, 1355al2.

43 To see how radical this shift from accepting what others have thought to Descartes’ doubting “what others have thought” we can look at what the medieval Thomas Aquinas says about Aristotle’s concern for what others have thought.

“In accepting or rejecting opinions, a man should not be affected by love or hate of those introducing the opinion, but rather by the certitude of truth, he (Aristotle) says that we should love both those whose opinion we follow and those whose opinion we reject. For both were looking for truth and helped us, in so doing. Nevertheless we should follow the opinion of him who has more certainly arrived at truth.” In XII Metaphysica, lect. 9, #2566.

In the Aristotelian and scholastic tradition, at least where ethics is concerned, there is no search for absolute certitude of the Cartesian type, for human knowledge was always limited. The search for knowledge is always a communal affair, so there is no disdain for other thinkers’ opinions. On the contrary, the opinions of others are sources of help to us in achieving the truth. For Aristotle, then, human experience is the methodological starting point, and rather than neglecting any of its aspects, he tries to put hierarchy into its components rather than mutilate it.

43a Finnis, p. 17.

44 Finnis, pp. 17-19. This again, should put the reader in mind of the kind of appeal that Wittgenstein makes to agreement in forms of life, which become agreement in the way we see things. (Seeing as). This move was employed by Kant in the Critique of Judgment, where he appeals to a sensus communis for the sake of explaining how an aesthetic judgment, involving a re-presentation of an object, through a reflexive concept, a way of getting others to see what we see rather than simply asserting that an object is beautiful according to the rule of some determinant concept, can be objective. Our claim, according to Kant, would be that we expect anyone who sees the object in the way we see it to agree that it is beautiful, not because it meets any predetermined criteria or rules for being beautiful. Getting others to see as we see is the narrative enterprise. Wittgenstein in suggesting that ethical judgments are akin to aesthetic judgments, seems to repudiate the deductive model of ethical theorists such as Kant, and suggest that appealing to perspectives we share, agreeing about the way we see things, is the way to resolve ethical disputes. Hence Aristotle’s approach through rhetoric rather than dialectic, and through induction, his anticipation of narrative, would seem to be the solution that Wittgensteinians and postmoderns alike were looking for.

45 Rhetoric, 1355al3.