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Aristotelian Virtue and Its Limitations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Christipher Cordner
Christipher Cordner
Affiliation:
University of Melbourne.
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Extract

‘Virtue ethics’ is prominent, if not pre-eminent, in contemporary moral philosophy. The philosophical model for most of those urging a ‘virtues approach’ to ethics is of course Aristotle. Some features, at least, of the motivation to this renewed concern with Aristotelian ethical thought are fairly clear. Notoriously, Kant held that the only thing good without qualification is the good will; and he then made it difficult to grasp what made the will good when he denied that it could be its preoccupation with or attention to anything in the world. The idea of the good will then seems to be an idea of something which transcends the world, and therefore to be no easier to make sense of, or to believe in, than Plato′s form of the good is usually thought to be. The first obvious attraction of Aristotle′s ethics, then—at least to those of an empiricist or worldly cast of mind—is that it promises an understanding of the ethical which locates that robustly within the world. Aristotle′s virtues are real this-worldly existences. They are, moreover, qualities whose place in our lives seems to be explained readily, and attractively, in Aristotelian terms. Moral virtue is essentially connected with eudaimonia, a concept variously construed as happiness, as living well, or even as flourishing. Morality is important because of the contribution it makes to the living of a fully human life. And a ‘fully human’ life is characterizable in what modernity calls ‘humanist’, or sometimes ‘naturalistic’, terms: it requires no invocation of transcendence or other-worldliness.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 69 , Issue 269 , July 1994 , pp. 291 - 316
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1994

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References

1 Reductionist, or instrumentalist, interpretations of Aristotle, and more generally of the virtues, are rife. Among them are: Terence, Irwin, Plato′s Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), and Aristotle′ First Principles (Oxford University Press, 1988);Google ScholarJames, Wallace, Virtues and Vices (Cornell University Press, 1978);Google Scholar (sometimes) Philippa, Foot, Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978),Google ScholarKathleen, Wilkes, ‘The Good Man and the Good for Man’, in Essays on Aristotle′s Ethics (University of California Press, 1980) esp. 354–356; and (sometimes, and quite subtly)Google ScholarRichard, Kraut, Aristotle and the Human Good (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

2 Two recent accounts of Aristotle from which I have greatly benefited are: John, Casey, Pagan Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990);Google Scholar and Raimond, Gaita, Good and Evil (London: Macmillan, 1991), especially 87–91.Google Scholar

3 All quotations from Aristotle are from the Penguin Edition of the Nicomachean Ethics, translation by J. A. K.Thomson.Google Scholar

4 John Casey (op. cit.) is the only contemporary writer who comes even close to endorsing this valuation of courage.Google Scholar

5 Here and elsewhere my use of ‘we’ (and of ‘our’) involves an appeal to (what I think to be) features of a common Western cultural understanding. It is then to be understood as an invitation to agreement on the reader′s part.

6 The broad terms of my objection to much appropriation of Aristotelian ethics find justification in particular cases below. There is of course a different, older tradition of Aristotle criticism, which holds that Aristotle′s ethical concerns are very different from our modern concern with ‘morality’. This difference was often counted against Aristotle. In Shame and Necessity (University of California Press, 1992) Bernard Williams attacks various 'progressivists' who argued thus (often about Greek ethics generally, as well as about Aristotle). I agree with many of his criticisms, but not with his own final view. (See endnote 5 below, and the closing pages of this paper.) In a way my own view belongs to this older tradition, though not (I hope) to the unacceptable expressions of it which Williams ably criticizes.Google Scholar

7 Shame and Necessity is an interesting and complex exception to my charge against some recent moral philosophy. Williams′s broad project is to revive the claims of shame over guilt as a pre-eminent ethical concept. This involves him in showing that the resources of shame, so to speak, are much greater than is usually acknowledged, since those resources are usually identified through the distorting lenses of what Williams calls the ‘morality system’, with its preoccupation with guilt. Then shame appears to be the expression of a heteronomous self-conception, and to involve a concern only with the appearance, and not with the reality, of virtue. I agree with much of what Williams says in rejecting such an understanding of shame. More generally, Williams wholly avoids the relatively superficial endorsement of Aristotle which I have criticized, and he brings out very well the errors in thinking of Aristotle (and of wider Greek thought) as embracing either a ‘heteronomous’ or an ‘egoistic’ conception of moral virtue. Still, I think Williams mistaken in supposing that we fundamentally share the Greeks′ ethical views—in particular their sense of the centrality of shame as against guilt—and in holding that it is only because of our philosophical corruption by the idea of the ‘morality system’ that we mistakenly think we do not share them. My disagreements with Williams on this matter I shall present briefly below.

8 Sarah, Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (Oxford University Press, 1991), 93,Google Scholarwrites: ‘The agent who does A because it is noble to do it does A as one who, by the doing of this independently right action, renders himself noble or fine.’ The trouble with this is that it tells us nothing about what A thus renders himself as, in rendering himself noble. How, for instance,Google Scholar

9 Williams presumably thinks both that this is a proper motive for genuinely virtuous action, and that deep down this is something we all really believe.

10 ‘Man’, rather than ‘human being’ or ‘person’, here and mostly elsewhere, because for Aristotle the highest moral virtue is available only to men.

11 In this connection see also Howard, Curzer, ‘A Great Philosopher′s Not So Great Account of Great Virtue: Aristotle′s Treatment of ‘Greatness of Soul’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 20, no 4 (December 1990), 517–538.Google Scholar

12 Op. cit., 147.Google Scholar

13 If that is so, then when Wallace (op. cit., 77) says of courage that it ‘is not a motive’ he is speaking of a modern idea significantly different from Aristotle′s. (Wallace does not claim to be elucidating Aristotle′s idea.)

14 It is overlooked even by Urmson in his admirable Aristotle′s Ethics. Noting astutely that the term ‘valour’ is a better translation of ‘andreia’ than ‘courage’ is, Urmson comments only that ‘Aristotle′s concept is narrower than ours’. His discussion wholly misses the wider significance of that ‘narrowness’—the essential connection, for Aristotle, between andreia and the noble, which includes a proper concern with appearing before others in a certain sort of way.

15 Broadie (op. cit.) hardly discusses courage at all. Kraut (op. cit., 336–337) writes: ‘The truly courageous person is someone who wants to lead a political or a philosophical life, since his ultimate end is to use reason well, and this is the right reason for mastering one′s fear and withstanding enemies on the battlefield.’ This makes it hard to see why courage is itself noble, and it does not afford an adequate understanding of why what we are wont to call ‘moral courage’ plays no part in Aristotle′s account.Google Scholar

16 As far as I can determine this dimension of what, according to Aristotle, is involved in the exercise of practical reason is recognized, among contemporary commentators, only by Casey and Gaita in the works cited above.

17 ‘Utilitarianism and Moral Self-Indulgence’, reprinted in Moral Luck (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 45. Williams's discussion of moral self-indulgence is not concerned with Aristotle.Google Scholar

18 We might equally say ‘unworldly’. The contrast in the text brings out a subtlety which is usually missed in discussion of whether Aristotle′s ethics are egoistic. We can elicit it by considering remarks of Sarah Broadie′s (op. cit., 95):Google Scholar

19 It is a considerable task to elaborate this different ideal. I have broached it in my forthcoming book, Becoming Good.

20 Op. cit., 72–74, 84–85.Google Scholar

21 Historically, the idea of such pride was located in Christian thought. But I do not think it essentially dependent on any specifically Christian beliefs. I do not see, for instance, that anything I have said up to the mention of pride in the text depends upon such beliefs. See Gaita op. cit., Chapter 12, for a strong defence of this view, which I cannot argue for here.

22 This catalogue of the errors of the morality system comes from Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 196.Google Scholar