im钱包官方下载|ethics of his conduct
im钱包官方下载|ethics of his conduct
历年真题经典长难句解析(八) - 知乎
历年真题经典长难句解析(八) - 知乎首发于管理类联考切换模式写文章登录/注册历年真题经典长难句解析(八)雪米米考研废人But it did so while holding its nose at the ethics of his conduct, which included accepting gifts such as a Rolex watch and a Ferrari automobile from a company seeking access to government. 1.重点词汇及短语: ethics n.道德标准 conduct n.行为,举动 automobile n. 汽车 access n. 机会;权力 Rolex watch劳力士手表 Ferrari automobile法拉利汽车 2.句子成分分析: 本句是一个复合句。句子的主干是:it did so 。it 是句子的主语,did是谓语动词,so是宾语。while引导伴随状语while holding its nose at the ethics of his conduct,主干为(it was)holding its nose...his conduct。which 引导宾语从句,其先行词为conduct,举例说明违背了道德标准的具体行为which included accepting gifts such as a Rolex watch and a Ferrari automobile from a company seeking access to government。seeking access to government为a company的后置定语。while引导状语从句时,如果主句和从句的主语一致,且 从句谓语又含有be,则从句中有时可省略主语和be, while后可以直接跟现在分词、过去分词、名词、形容词或介词短语。 3.参考译文:最高法院这样做了,但它同时对他的行为的道德标准表示嗤之以鼻,他的行为包括从一家寻求接近政府的公司那里接受项劳力士手表和法拉利汽车等礼物。发布于 2019-10-23 17:33考研英语管理类联考会计专业硕士赞同添加评论分享喜欢收藏申请转载文章被以下专栏收录管理
Ethics | Definition, History, Examples, Types, Philosophy, & Facts | Britannica
Ethics | Definition, History, Examples, Types, Philosophy, & Facts | Britannica
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ethics
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ethics
Table of Contents
Introduction & Top QuestionsThe origins of ethicsMythical accountsIntroduction of moral codesProblems of divine originPrehuman ethicsNonhuman behaviourKinship and reciprocityAnthropology and ethicsThe history of Western ethicsAncient civilizations to the end of the 19th centuryThe ancient Middle East and AsiaThe Middle EastIndiaChinaAncient and Classical GreeceAncient GreeceSocratesPlatoAristotleLater Greek and Roman ethicsThe StoicsThe EpicureansChristian ethics from the New Testament to the ScholasticsEthics in the New TestamentSt. AugustineSt. Thomas Aquinas and the ScholasticsThe Renaissance and the ReformationMachiavelliThe first ProtestantsThe British tradition from Hobbes to the utilitariansHobbesEarly intuitionists: Cudworth, More, and ClarkeShaftesbury and the moral sense schoolButler on self-interest and conscienceThe climax of moral sense theory: Hutcheson and HumeThe intuitionist response: Price and ReidUtilitarianismPaleyBenthamMillSidgwickThe Continental tradition from Spinoza to NietzscheSpinozaLeibnizRousseauKantHegelMarxNietzscheWestern ethics from the beginning of the 20th centuryMetaethicsMoore and the naturalistic fallacyModern intuitionismEmotivismExistentialismUniversal prescriptivismLater developments in metaethicsMoral realismKantian constructivism: a middle ground?Irrealist views: projectivism and expressivismEthics and reasons for actionNormative ethicsThe debate over consequentialismVarieties of consequentialismObjections to consequentialismAn ethics of prima facie dutiesRawls’s theory of justiceRights theoriesNatural law ethicsVirtue ethicsFeminist ethicsEthical egoismApplied ethicsEqualityAnimalsEnvironmental ethicsWar and peaceAbortion, euthanasia, and the value of human lifeBioethics
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Also known as: moral philosophy
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Peter Singer
Peter Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University. A specialist in applied ethics, he approaches ethical issues from a secular, preference-utilitarian...
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What is ethics?The term ethics may refer to the philosophical study of the concepts of moral right and wrong and moral good and bad, to any philosophical theory of what is morally right and wrong or morally good and bad, and to any system or code of moral rules, principles, or values. The last may be associated with particular religions, cultures, professions, or virtually any other group that is at least partly characterized by its moral outlook.How is ethics different from morality?Traditionally, ethics referred to the philosophical study of morality, the latter being a more or less systematic set of beliefs, usually held in common by a group, about how people should live. Ethics also referred to particular philosophical theories of morality. Later the term was applied to particular (and narrower) moral codes or value systems. Ethics and morality are now used almost interchangeably in many contexts, but the name of the philosophical study remains ethics.Why does ethics matter?Ethics matters because (1) it is part of how many groups define themselves and thus part of the identity of their individual members, (2) other-regarding values in most ethical systems both reflect and foster close human relationships and mutual respect and trust, and (3) it could be “rational” for a self-interested person to be moral, because his or her self-interest is arguably best served in the long run by reciprocating the moral behaviour of others.Is ethics a social science?No. Understood as equivalent to morality, ethics could be studied as a social-psychological or historical phenomenon, but in that case it would be an object of social-scientific study, not a social science in itself. Understood as the philosophical study of moral concepts, ethics is a branch of philosophy, not of social science.ethics, the discipline concerned with what is morally good and bad and morally right and wrong. The term is also applied to any system or theory of moral values or principles.(Read Britannica’s biography of this author, Peter Singer.)How should we live? Shall we aim at happiness or at knowledge, virtue, or the creation of beautiful objects? If we choose happiness, will it be our own or the happiness of all? And what of the more particular questions that face us: is it right to be dishonest in a good cause? Can we justify living in opulence while elsewhere in the world people are starving? Is going to war justified in cases where it is likely that innocent people will be killed? Is it wrong to clone a human being or to destroy human embryos in medical research? What are our obligations, if any, to the generations of humans who will come after us and to the nonhuman animals with whom we share the planet?Ethics deals with such questions at all levels. Its subject consists of the fundamental issues of practical decision making, and its major concerns include the nature of ultimate value and the standards by which human actions can be judged right or wrong.The terms ethics and morality are closely related. It is now common to refer to ethical judgments or to ethical principles where it once would have been more accurate to speak of moral judgments or moral principles. These applications are an extension of the meaning of ethics. In earlier usage, the term referred not to morality itself but to the field of study, or branch of inquiry, that has morality as its subject matter. In this sense, ethics is equivalent to moral philosophy.Although ethics has always been viewed as a branch of philosophy, its all-embracing practical nature links it with many other areas of study, including anthropology, biology, economics, history, politics, sociology, and theology. Yet, ethics remains distinct from such disciplines because it is not a matter of factual knowledge in the way that the sciences and other branches of inquiry are. Rather, it has to do with determining the nature of normative theories and applying these sets of principles to practical moral problems.
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This article, then, will deal with ethics as a field of philosophy, especially as it has developed in the West. For coverage of religious conceptions of ethics and the ethical systems associated with world religions, see Buddhism; Christianity; Confucianism; Hinduism; Jainism; Judaism; Sikhism. The origins of ethics Mythical accounts Introduction of moral codes When did ethics begin and how did it originate? If one has in mind ethics proper—i.e., the systematic study of what is morally right and wrong—it is clear that ethics could have come into existence only when human beings started to reflect on the best way to live. This reflective stage emerged long after human societies had developed some kind of morality, usually in the form of customary standards of right and wrong conduct. The process of reflection tended to arise from such customs, even if in the end it may have found them wanting. Accordingly, ethics began with the introduction of the first moral codes. Virtually every human society has some form of myth to explain the origin of morality. In the Louvre in Paris there is a black Babylonian column with a relief showing the sun god Shamash presenting the code of laws to Hammurabi (died c. 1750 bce), known as the Code of Hammurabi. The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) account of God’s giving the Ten Commandments to Moses (flourished 14th–13th century bce) on Mount Sinai might be considered another example. In the dialogue Protagoras by Plato (428/427–348/347 bce), there is an avowedly mythical account of how Zeus took pity on the hapless humans, who were physically no match for the other beasts. To make up for these deficiencies, Zeus gave humans a moral sense and the capacity for law and justice, so that they could live in larger communities and cooperate with one another. That morality should be invested with all the mystery and power of divine origin is not surprising. Nothing else could provide such strong reasons for accepting the moral law. By attributing a divine origin to morality, the priesthood became its interpreter and guardian and thereby secured for itself a power that it would not readily relinquish. This link between morality and religion has been so firmly forged that it is still sometimes asserted that there can be no morality without religion. According to this view, ethics is not an independent field of study but rather a branch of theology (see moral theology).
There is some difficulty, already known to Plato, with the view that morality was created by a divine power. In his dialogue Euthyphro, Plato considered the suggestion that it is divine approval that makes an action good. Plato pointed out that, if this were the case, one could not say that the gods approve of such actions because they are good. Why then do they approve of them? Is their approval entirely arbitrary? Plato considered this impossible and so held that there must be some standards of right or wrong that are independent of the likes and dislikes of the gods. Modern philosophers have generally accepted Plato’s argument, because the alternative implies that if, for example, the gods had happened to approve of torturing children and to disapprove of helping one’s neighbours, then torture would have been good and neighbourliness bad.
Plato’s Ethics: An Overview (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Plato’s Ethics: An Overview (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
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Plato’s Ethics: An OverviewFirst published Tue Sep 16, 2003; substantive revision Wed Feb 1, 2023
Like most other ancient philosophers, Plato maintains a virtue-based
eudaemonistic conception of ethics. That is to say, happiness or
well-being (eudaimonia) is the highest aim of moral thought
and conduct, and the virtues (aretê:
‘excellence’) are the dispositions/skills needed to attain
it. If Plato’s conception of happiness is elusive and his
support for a morality of happiness seems somewhat subdued, there are
several reasons. First, he nowhere defines the concept of happiness
nor makes it the direct target of investigation but introduces it in
an oblique way in the pursuit of other questions. Second, the
treatment of the human good varies in the different dialogues, so that
readers find themselves confronted with the problem of what to make of
the discrepancies between different works. This touches on a
fundamental problem with Plato’s work – namely, whether to
follow a ‘unitarian’, ‘revisionist’, or
‘developmentalist’ approach to his writings. Whereas
unitarians regard the dialogues as pieces of one mosaic and take the
view that Plato, in essence, maintains a unified doctrine from his
earliest to his latest works, revisionists maintain that Plato’s
thought underwent a fundamental transformation later in his life,
while ‘developmentalists’ hold that Plato’s views
evolved significantly throughout his career. While revisionism has
lost its impact in recent years, developmentalism has gained in
influence. Although there is no unanimity, few unitarians nowadays
deny that the character of Plato’s early, middle, and late works
differs in style, language, scope, and content, as is to be expected
in a philosopher who was at work for more than fifty years. Most
developmentalists, in turn, agree that it is impossible to line up
Plato’s works like pearls on a string and to reconstruct his
progress from dialogue to dialogue; where the views expressed in
different dialogues seem to disagree, there may be complementation or
supplementation at work, rather than divergence. Given that Plato
never speaks in his own voice, it is important to take note of who the
interlocutors are and what role is assigned to Socrates, if he is the
main speaker. Plato’s dialogues should never be treated in
isolation when it comes to the reconstruction of his doctrine; but
even the comparison and contrasting of ideas presented in different
dialogues is not a safe recipe for interpreting this elusive
thinker’s views (for a more detailed discussion see the entry on
Plato).
Plato’s so-called ‘Socratic’ dialogues share certain
characteristics as a group. They are short interrogations by Socrates
of the kind indicated in his explanation of his divine mission in the
Apology. They seem designed, inter alia, to undermine
unquestioned traditional views and values rather than to develop
positive accounts. The positive accounts contained in the middle, the
so-called ‘Platonic’, dialogues – that are grouped
around the Republic – treat happiness in different ways
as a state of perfection in a moral as well as in an intellectual
sense. The exact nature of this state of mind is not easy to pinpoint,
however, because it is based on metaphysical presuppositions that are,
at least prima facie, both hazy and out of the realm of ordinary
understanding. There is not, as there is in Aristotle, an explicit
determination of happiness as the actualization of one’s best
potential in a well-organized community. Instead, at least in some
texts, Plato’s moral ideals appear both austere and
self-abnegating: The soul is to remain aloof from the pleasures of the
body in the pursuit of higher knowledge, while communal life demands
the subordination of individual wishes and aims to the common
good.
The difficulties of assessing Plato’s ethical thought are
compounded by the fact that the metaphysical underpinnings seem to
change during his long life. In the Socratic dialogues, there are no
indications that the search for virtue and the human good goes beyond
the human realm. This changes in the middle dialogues that show a
growing interest in an all-encompassing metaphysical grounding of
knowledge, a development that leads to the positing of the
‘Forms’ as the determinants of the true nature of all
things, culminating in the Form of the Good as the transcendent
principle of all goodness. Though the theory of the Forms is not
confined to human values but encompasses the whole of nature, Plato, in
the middle dialogues, seems to assume no more than an analogy between
human affairs and cosmic harmony. The late dialogues, by contrast,
display an increasing tendency to assume a unity of the microcosm of
human life and the macrocosmic order of the entire universe, a
tendency that is displayed most fully in the Philebus and the
Timaeus. While these holistic tendencies appeal to the
imagination because they rely on harmonic relations expressed in
mathematical proportions, the metaphysical status of the Forms is even
harder to make out in the late dialogues than in the middle dialogues.
Though Plato’s late works do not show any willingness to lower
the standards of knowledge as such, Plato indicates that his design of
a rational cosmic order is based on conjecture and speculation, an
acknowledgment that finds its counterpart in his more pragmatic
treatment of ethical standards and political institutions in his last
political work, the Laws.
1. Preliminaries
2. The early dialogues: Examining life
2.1 The aporetic procedure
2.2 The quest for definition
3. The middle dialogues: Justice and other virtues
3.1 Human nature and its needs
3.2 Virtues of state and soul
3.3 The desire for self-perfection
3.4 The quest for method
4. The late dialogues: Ethics and cosmology
4.1 Harmony and cosmic goodness
4.2 Measure for measure
Glossary
Bibliography
Translations
Single-Authored Overviews
Anthologies
Problems of chronology
Studies on Plato’s dialogues
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
1. Preliminaries
If ethics is widely regarded as the most accessible branch of
philosophy, it is so because many of its presuppositions are,
seemingly, self-evident or trivial truths: All human actions, for
example, serve some end or purpose; whether they are right or wrong
depends on the agent’s overall aims. At least for secularists,
the attainment of these overall aims is regarded as a major condition
of the good life. What we regard as a life worth living also depends
on the notion we have of our own nature and of the conditions of its
fulfillment. This, in turn, is determined, at least in part, by the
values and standards of the society we live in. Personal ends and
purposes depend in each case not only on reason, but also on the
individual agents’ dispositions (i.e., their ingrained likes and
dislikes, which determine their personal character). The attainment of
these ends can also depend at least in part on external factors, such
as health, material prosperity, social status, and even on good looks
or sheer luck.
Although these presuppositions may seem self-evident, most of the time,
human beings are aware of them only implicitly because they lead
their lives in accordance with pre-established standards and values
that are, under normal circumstances, not objects of reflection. It is
only in times of crisis that a society’s traditions and precepts
are challenged by someone like Socrates, who sees the need to disturb
his fellows’ complacency. The historical Socrates was, of
course, not the first to question the Greek way of life. Presocratic
philosophers such as Xenophanes, Heraclitus, or Empedocles had been
critics of their times, and the sophists had argued provocatively
that, contrary to the naïve view, it is custom and convention,
rather than nature that set the standards for what is deemed right or
wrong, good or bad, in every society. But if other thinkers preceded
Socrates with moral and social criticism, he was certainly the first
to challenge his fellows on an individual basis on the ground that
‘the unexamined life is not worth living’ (Ap.
38a). Whatever position one may take in the controversy concerning the
degree to which Plato’s early dialogues are true to the
historical Socrates’ discussions, the independent testimony of
Xenophon leaves little doubt that Socrates’ cross-examinations
(elenchos) provoked the kind of enmity against him that led
to his conviction and execution. In the eyes of conservative
Athenians, Socrates’ questioning undermined the traditional
values of their society. As Socrates saw it, the ‘virtues’
– which is to say the social skills, attitudes, and
character-traits possessed by most Athenian citizens of his time
– were all too often geared towards their possessors’
wealth, power, and capacities for self-indulgence, to the detriment of
public morality and the community’s well-being (see the entry on
Socrates).
The Socratic legacy prompted Plato to engage in a thorough examination
of the nature of knowledge and reality, an examination that gradually
took him far beyond the scope of the historical Socrates’
discussions. Nevertheless, Plato continued to present most of his
investigations as dialogues between Socrates and some partner or
partners. And Plato preserved the dialogical form even in those of his
late works where Socrates is replaced by a stand-in and where the
didactic nature of the presentations is hard to reconcile with the
pretense of live discussion. But these didactic discourses continue to
combine questions of ethical, political, social, or psychological
importance with metaphysical, methodological, and epistemological
considerations. And it can be hard to assess the extent to which Plato
agrees with the pronouncements of his speakers, whether that speaker
is Socrates or anyone else. Furthermore, the fact that a certain
ethical problem or its solution is not mentioned in a certain dialogue
does not mean that Plato was unaware of it. There is, therefore, no
certainty concerning the question: “What did Plato see and when
did he first see it?” The lack of information about the order in
which Plato wrote his works adds to this difficulty. It stands to
reason, however, that he started with the short dialogues that
question traditional virtues – wisdom, courage, justice,
moderation, piety. It also stands to reason that Plato gradually
widened the scope of his investigations by reflecting not only on the
social and political conditions of morality but also on the logical,
epistemological, and metaphysical presuppositions of a successful
moral theory. These theoretical reflections often take on a life of
their own. Several of Plato’s later works address ethical
problems only marginally or not at all. The Parmenides, the
Theaetetus, and the Sophist deal primarily or
exclusively with epistemological and metaphysical problems of a quite
general nature. Nevertheless, as witnessed by the Philebus,
the Statesman, the Timaeus, and the Laws,
Plato never lost interest in the question of the conditions of the
good human life.
2. The early dialogues: Examining life
2.1 The aporetic procedure
The early ‘Socratic’ dialogues are not concerned with the
question of the good life and its conditions in general but rather
with particular virtues. Socrates explores these virtues through
discussions with persons who are regarded either as representatives
of, or claim to be experts on, that virtue. Socrates’
justification for this procedure is that a paragon or expert must know
the property that characterizes his particular virtue and must,
therefore, be able to give an account or definition of it (cf. Xenophon
Memorabilia I, 10; 16). Thus, in the Euthyphro,
Socrates discusses piety/holiness with an alleged ‘expert’
on religious affairs. In the Laches, he discusses courage
with two renowned generals in the Peloponnesian war, Laches and
Nicias. Similarly, in the Charmides, Socrates
addresses – somewhat ironically – the nature of moderation
with two of the later Thirty Tyrants, namely with the then very young
Charmides, an alleged model of modesty, and his guardian and
intellectual mentor, Critias. In the Greater Hippias, Socrates
raises the question of the nature of the beautiful with a producer of
‘beautiful things’, the sophist and polymath Hippias. In
the Protagoras, Socrates focuses on the question of the unity
of virtue in a discussion with Protagoras, the most famous teacher of
‘civic virtues’ among the sophists. And in the
Gorgias, Socrates discusses the nature of rhetoric and its
relation to virtue with the most prominent teacher of rhetoric among
the sophists. Finally, in the Meno, the question of how virtue
as such is acquired is raised by Meno, a disciple of Gorgias and an
ambitious seeker of power, wealth, and fame, who later met a gruesome
death in Persia in the pursuit of those very values.
Socrates’ interlocutors are usually, at first, quite confident
about their own competence in the discussion. And such confidence
is not unreasonable. If virtue is a kind of ‘skill’ or a special
property that enjoys general recognition, its possessor should know
and be able to give an account of that skill or proficiency. As
Socrates’ examinations demonstrate, however, such
self-confidence is usually unfounded, and the ‘knowledge’
professed by Socrates’ partners is revealed to be, at best, an
implicit familiarity. When they are confronted with their inability to
explain the nature of their cherished virtue or expertise, they end up
admitting their ignorance, but often with considerable chagrin or
anger (on the ‘Socratic’ dialogues, see the entry in
SEP Plato’s Shorter Ethical Works by
Paul Woodruff). Socrates’ purpose in conducting these sometimes
cruel-looking games is not just to undermine the false confidence of
his interlocutors but also to pave the way towards general
definitions and standards concerning the virtues. There were no widely
acknowledged standards of definition in Socrates’ time, but by
exposing the flaws in his partners’ abortive arguments in his
investigations, Socrates contributed significantly to the development
of such standards. The respective flaws vary greatly in kind and
gravity: Socrates shows that enumerations of examples are not
sufficient to capture the nature or essence of the virtue in question.
Definitions that consist in the replacement of the concept in question
with a synonym are open to the same objections as the original
definition. Definitions may be hopelessly vague or miss the mark
entirely, which is to say that they may be either too wide and include
unwanted characteristics or subsets, or too narrow so that they
exclude essential characteristics. Moreover, definitions may be
incomplete because the object in question does not constitute a
unitary phenomenon. If generally accepted ‘social
excellences’ are not simple conditions, they may be subject to
conflicting convictions. Examples of all these problems are provided
in Plato’s early dialogues, where Socrates exposes the exact
nature of the underlying deficiencies with more or less diagnostic
transparency.
Given that the focus in the early dialogues is almost entirely on the
exposure of flaws and inconsistencies, one cannot help wondering
whether Plato himself knew the answers to his queries and
had some cards up his sleeve that he chose not to play for the time
being. This would presuppose that Plato had not only a clear notion of
the nature of the different virtues but also a definitive conception
of the good life as such. Since Plato was neither a moral nihilist nor
a sceptic, he cannot have regarded moral perplexity (aporia)
as the ultimate end, nor regarded continued mutual examination,
Socratico more, as a way of life for everyone. Perplexity, as
is argued in the Meno, is just a wholesome intermediary stage
on the way to knowledge (Me. 84a–b). But if Plato
assumes that the convictions that survive Socratic questioning will
eventually coalesce into a coherent account of the good life, then he
keeps this expectation to himself. Nor would such optimism seem
warranted, given Socrates’ disavowal of knowledge. There is no
guarantee that only false convictions are refuted in a Socratic
cross-examination, while true ones are retained – for promising
suggestions are often as mercilessly discarded as their less promising
brethren. Perhaps Plato counted on his readers’ intelligence to
straighten out what is skewed in Socratic refutations, as well as to
detect unfair moves and to supplement what is missing. It is, in
fact, often not difficult to make out problematic or fallacious moves
in Socrates’ argument and to correct them, but such corrections
must remain incomplete without sufficient information about
Plato’s overall conception of the good life and its moral
presuppositions at that point in time. It is, therefore, a matter of
conjecture whether Plato himself held any positive views while he
composed one aporetic dialogue after the other. He may have regarded
his investigations as experimental stages or have seen each dialogue
as an element in a network of approaches that he hoped to integrate
eventually.
If there is a general lesson to be drawn from the many failed accounts
of the virtues by Socrates’ different partners, beyond the
particular shortcomings of individual definitions and assertions, it
is that isolated definitions of single virtues, summed up in one
sentence, will not do. The evidence that Plato wanted his readers to
draw this very conclusion already in his early dialogues is somewhat
contradictory, however. He famously pleads for the unity of the
virtues in the Protagoras and seems intent to reduce them
all to knowledge. Scholars are, therefore, wont to speak of the
‘intellectualistic’ character of the so-called
‘Socratic ethics’ because it leaves no room for other
motivational forces, such as desires and emotions. Socrates’
proof in the Protagoras that reason cannot be overcome by the
passions has, from Aristotle on, been treated as a denial of
akrasia, of the phenomenon that was later somewhat
misleadingly dubbed as ‘weakness of the will’. This
intellectualizing tendency does not tell us, however, what kind of
master-science would fulfill all of the requirements for defining
virtues, nor what its content should be. Moreover, the emphasis on
knowledge does not rule out an awareness on Plato’s part of the
importance of other factors, even in his early dialogues. Though Plato
often compares the virtues with technical skills, such as those of a
doctor or a pilot, he may have realized that virtues also involve
emotional attitudes, desires, and preferences but not yet have seen a
clear way to coordinate or combine the rational and the affective
elements that constitute the virtues. In the Laches, for
instance, Socrates’ partners struggle when they try to define
courage, invoking two different elements. In his attempt to define
courage as ‘steadfastness in battle’, Laches, one of the
two generals and ‘experts’ on courage, is faced with the
dilemma that steadfastness seems not to be a satisfactory definition
of courage either in itself or in combination with knowledge
(La. 192a–194c). His comrade Nicias, on the other hand,
fails when he tries to identify courage exclusively as a certain type
of knowledge (197e–200a). The investigation of moderation in the
Charmides, likewise, points up that there are two disparate
elements commonly associated with that virtue – namely, a
certain calmness of temper on the one hand (Chrm.
158e–160d) and self-knowledge on the other (166e–175a). It
is clear that a complex account would be needed to combine these two
disparate features, for moral skills not only presuppose sufficient
‘operative’ rationality but also require appropriate
evaluative and emotional attitudes towards the ends to be attained and
towards the means to be employed. Such an insight is at least
indicated in Socrates’ long and passionate argument in the
Gorgias against Polus and Callicles that the just life is
better for the soul of its possessor than the unjust life, an argument
that he fortifies with a mythical depiction of the soul’s reward
and punishment after death (523a–527e). But the nature of
justice, and what is required for the proper care of one’s soul,
is thereby illuminated only indirectly. For the most part,
Socrates’ interrogations focus on the incompatibility of his
interlocutors’ selfish aims with their more selfless and noble
tendencies. In his earlier dialogues, Plato may or may not already be
envisaging the kind of solution that he is going to present in the
Republic to the problem of the relationship between the
different virtues, with wisdom, the only purely intellectual virtue,
as their basis. Courage, moderation, and justice presuppose a certain
steadfastness of character as well as a harmony of purpose between the
disparate parts of the soul, but their goodness depends entirely on
the intellectual part of the soul, just as the virtue of the citizens
in the just state depends on the wisdom of the philosopher kings
(R. 428a–444e). The existence of ‘demotic’
virtues of character is thus acknowledged, but they are relegated to
second place (500d; 522a–b).
There are at least some indications that Plato already saw the need
for a holistic conception of the good life when he composed his
‘Socratic’ dialogues. At the end of the Laches,
he lets Nicias founder in his attempt to define courage as the
‘knowledge of what is to be feared and what should inspire
confidence’. Nicias is forced to admit that such knowledge
presupposes the knowledge of good and bad tout court
(La. 199c–e). In a different but related way, Socrates
alludes to a comprehensive knowledge at the end of the
Charmides. In his final refutation of Critias’
definition of moderation as ‘knowledge of knowledge’, he
urges that this type of knowledge is insufficient for the happy life
without the knowledge of good and bad (Chrm. 174b–e).
Pointing out what is wrong or missing in particular arguments is a far
cry from a philosophical conception of the ultimate good in human
life. But the fact that Plato insists on the shortcomings of a purely
‘technical’ conception of virtue suggests that he was at
least facing up to these problems. The discussion of the ‘unity
of the virtues’ in the Protagoras – regardless of
the probably intentionally unsatisfactory structure of its proofs
– confirms that Plato realized that a critique of the
inconsistencies implied in conventional values is insufficient to
justify such a unitary point of view. Nevertheless, the evidence that
Plato already had a unified conception of the good life in mind when
he wrote his earlier dialogues remains, at most, indirect.
2.2 The quest for definition
It may be helpful to begin with a consideration of the method of
ethical inquiry that Socrates is portrayed as using in the early
dialogues. A reflection on the meaning of Socrates’ quest for
definitions in the early dialogues suggests that Plato cannot have
been blind to the sterility of a purely negative way of argument, or
if he was blind at first, his blindness cannot have lasted long, for
Socrates’ quest for definitions has important consequences.
First and foremost, definitions presuppose that there is a definable
object; that is to say, it must have a stable nature. Nothing can be
defined that is of a variable nature. In addition, the object in
question must be a unitary phenomenon, even if its unity may be
complex. If definitions are to provide the basis of knowledge, they
require some kind of essentialism. This presupposition is indeed made
explicit in the Euthyphro, where Plato employs, for the first
time, the terminology that will be characteristic of his full-fledged
theory of Forms. In response to Euthyphro’s enumeration of
various examples of pious behavior, Socrates demands an account of
the one feature (Euthphr. 5d:
idea; 6d: eidos; 6e: paradeigma) that is
common to all cases of what is holy or pious. Despite this pregnant
terminology, few scholars nowadays hold that the Euthyphro
already presupposes transcendent Forms, in a realm of their own
– models that are only incompletely represented by their
representatives under material conditions. The terms eidos
and idea had preserved their original meaning of
‘look’ or ‘shape’ into the classical age, but
they were also often used in the more abstract sense of
‘form’, ‘sort’, ‘type’, or
‘kind’. No more than piety or holiness in the abstract
sense seems to be presupposed in the discussion of the
Euthyphro. There is, at any rate, no mention of any
separation of a sensible and an intelligible realm, let alone of an
existence of ‘the holy itself’, as a transcendent
entity.
The passage in the Euthyphro where Socrates asks Euthyphro to
identify the one feature that is common to all that is holy
or pious makes intelligible, however, the reason why Plato felt
encouraged to develop the conception of transcendent Forms. The
requisite unity and invariance of entities such as ‘the
holy’, ‘the beautiful’, ‘the just’, or
‘the equal’, necessarily prompts reflections on their
ontological status and on the appropriate means of access to them.
Given that they are the objects of definition and the models of their
ordinary representatives, there is every reason not only to treat them
as real but also to assign to them a higher kind of unity and
perfection. And once this step has been taken, it is only natural to
make certain epistemological adjustments, for access to paradigmatic
entities is not to be expected through ordinary experience but
presupposes some special kind of intellectual insight. It seems, then,
that once Plato had accepted invariant and unitary objects of thought
as the subject of definition, he was predestined to follow the path
that led him to adopt a metaphysics and epistemology of transcendent
Forms. The very fact that mathematics was already an established
science with rigorous standards and unitary and invariant objects
seems to have greatly enhanced Plato’s confidence in applying
the same standards in moral philosophy. It led him to search for
models of morality beyond the limits of everyday experience. This, in
turn, explains the development of his theory of recollection and the
postulate of Forms as transcendent, immaterial objects as the basis of
both reality and thought that he refers to in the Meno and
that he presents more fully in the Phaedo.
We do not know when, precisely, Plato adopted this mode of thought,
but it stands to reason that his contact with the Pythagorean school
on his first voyage to Southern Italy and Sicily around 390 BC played
a major role in that development. Mathematics as a model-science has
several advantages. It deals with unchangeable entities that have
precise definitions. It also makes plausible the claim that the
essence of these entities cannot be comprehended in isolation but only
in a network of interconnections that have to be worked out at the
same time as each particular entity is defined. Thus, to understand
what it is to be a triangle, it is necessary – inter
alia – to have a clear notion of the nature of points,
lines, planes, and their interrelations. That Plato was aware of that
fact is indicated in his introduction of the theory of recollection in
the Meno, 81d: “As the whole of nature is akin, and the
soul has learned everything, nothing prevents a man, after recalling
one thing only – a process men call learning – discovering
everything else for himself, if he is brave and does not tire of the
search; for searching and learning, are, as a whole, recollection
(anamnesis).” The somewhat mystifying claim of an
‘overall kinship’ is then illuminated by the famous
‘mathematical experiment’ (Me. 82b–85c).
The slave manages, with some pushing and pulling by Socrates, and
thanks to some illustrations drawn in the sand, to double the area of
a given square. In the course of this interrogation, the disciple
gradually discovers the relations between the different lines,
triangles, and squares. That Plato regards these interconnections as
crucial features of knowledge is subsequently confirmed by the
distinction that Socrates draws between knowledge and true belief
(97b–98b). As he argues, true beliefs are unreliable because
they behave like ‘the statues of Daedalus that easily run away
as long as they are not tied down’. The requisite ‘tying
down’ happens (98a) “by giving an account of the reason
why. And that, Meno my friend, is recollection, as we previously
agreed. After they are tied down, in the first place, they become
knowledge, and then they remain in place.” This explanation
indicates that, according to Plato, knowledge does not consist in a
mere mental ‘gazing’ at isolated models but rather in
uncovering the invariant relations and interrelations that constitute
the objects in question.
The complexity underlying Plato’s theory of the Forms as it
surfaces in the Phaedo is easily overlooked because its
discussion initially suggests that recollection is no more than the
grasping of concepts. Thus, the concept of ‘exact equality in
size’ is prompted by the perception of more or less
equal-seeming sticks and stones (74a–e). The same condition
applies to the other examples of Forms, 65d–e: “Do we say
that there is such a thing as the Just itself or not? And the
Beautiful, and the Good? […] I am speaking of all things such
as Tallness, Health, Strength, and in a word, the reality of all other
things, that which each of them essentially is.” But Plato does
not employ his newly established metaphysical entities as the basis
for working out a definitive conception of the human soul and the
appropriate way of life in the Phaedo. Rather, he confines
himself to warnings against the contamination of the soul by the
senses and their pleasures, and quite generally against corruption by
worldly values. He gives no advice concerning human conduct beyond
the recommendation of a general abstemiousness from worldly
temptations. This seems a rather austere picture of human life, and an
egocentric one, to boot, for nothing is said about relations between
human beings beyond Socrates’ exhortations that his friends
should likewise take care of their souls as best they can. It is
unclear whether this otherworldly and ascetic attitude is the sign of
a particularly pessimistic period in Plato’s life or whether it
merely reflects the circumstances of the discussion –
Socrates’ impending death. But as long as this negative or
otherworldly attitude towards the physical side of human nature
prevails, no interest is to be expected on the part of Plato in nature
as a whole – let alone in the principles of the cosmic order
(but cf. 5.1 below). But it is not only the apparent asceticism that
stands in the way of a wider perspective. Socrates himself seems to
have been quite indifferent to the study of nature. While in the
Phaedo Socrates confesses his inability to deal with the
causes of natural processes, the Apology contains an
energetic denial of any concern with natural philosophy on
Socrates’ side. The accusations that depict him as “a
student of all things in the sky and below the earth” are quite
unfounded (18c); he has never conversed on such issues at all, and the
attribution to him of the Anaxagorean tenet that the sun is a stone
and the moon consists of earth is a sign of his accusers’
recklessness (26d–e). Similarly, in the Phaedrus,
Socrates explains his preference for the city and his avoidance of
nature (230d): “Landscapes and trees have nothing to teach me
– only the people in the city can do that.” That Plato is
not distorting the facts here is confirmed by the testimony of
Xenophon, who is equally emphatic about Socrates’ repudiation of
the study of heavenly phenomena and his concentration on human affairs
(Memorabilia I 1.15–16). If Plato later takes a much
more positive attitude towards nature in general, this is a
considerable change of focus. In the Phaedo, he quite
deliberately confines his account of the nature of heaven and earth,
with its heavenly order and hellish geography, to the myth about the
soul’s afterlife (108d–114c). As he states in conclusion,
this mythical depiction is not to be taken literally but as an
encouragement to heed its moral message and to take care of
one’s soul (114d–e). This is as constructive as Plato gets
in his earlier treatment of the principles of ethics.
3. The middle dialogues: Justice and other virtues
3.1 Human nature and its deficiencies
If Plato went through a period of open-ended experimentation and
tentative suggestions, this stage was definitely over by the time he
wrote the Republic, the central work of his middle years.
Because of the Republic’s importance, a more detailed
account will be provided here in order to explain the ethical
principles set forth in that work, for these principles are closely
intertwined with Plato’s political, psychological, and
metaphysical conceptions. That the work represents a major change in
Plato’s thinking is indicated already by the dialogue’s
setting. The aporetic controversy about justice in the
Republic’s first book is set off quite sharply against
the constructive discussion that ensues in its remaining nine books.
Like the Gorgias, the first book presents three interlocutors
who defend, with increasing vigor and contentiousness, their notion of
justice against Socrates’ elenchos. Of these disputes,
the altercation with the sophist Thrasymachus has received the most
attention because he defends the provocative thesis that natural
justice is the right of the stronger and that conventional justice is,
at best, high-minded foolishness. The counter-arguments employed by
Socrates at the various turns of the discussion will not be presented
here. Though they reduce Thrasymachus to angry silence, they are not
above criticism. Socrates himself expresses dissatisfaction with the
result of this discussion R. 354c: “As far as I am
concerned, the result is that I know nothing, for when I don’t
know what justice is, I’ll hardly know whether it is a kind of
virtue or not, or whether a person who has it is happy or
unhappy.” But for once, the speakers’ confession of
aporia is not the end of the discussion. At the beginning of
the next book, two members of the audience, Plato’s brothers
Glaucon and Adeimantus, challenge Socrates: Perhaps Thrasymachus has
defended his case badly, but if Socrates wants to convince his
audience, he must do better than that. The brothers demand a positive
account both of what justice is and of what it does to the soul of its
possessor.
The change of character in the subsequent discussion is remarkable.
Not only are the two brothers not subjected to elenchos, they
get ample time to elaborate on their objections (357a–367e).
Though they profess not to be convinced that injustice is better than
justice, they argue that, in the present state of society, injustice
pays – with the gods as well as with humans – as long as
the semblance of respectability is preserved. To prove this claim, the
brothers play devil’s advocate by unfolding a scathing picture
of their society’s attitude towards justice. As the story of the
Ring of Gyges and its gift of invisibility proves, everyone who does
not have a god-like character will eventually succumb to such a
ring’s temptations (359c–360d). Instead of the wolf of
Thrasymachus’ account, it is the wily fox who is the paragon of
injustice (365a-d). He will succeed at every level because he knows
how to play the power-game with cunning. The just man, by contrast,
pays no heed to the mere semblance of goodness but rather to its
substance and, therefore, must suffer a Christ-like fate because he
does not comply with the demands of favoritism and blandishment
(361e). Even the gods, as the poets confirm, are on the side of the
successful scoundrel since they can be propitiated by honors and
sacrifices. Given this state of affairs, a logic-chopping argument
that justice is better than injustice is quite insufficient
(367b–e: logôi). Instead, Socrates must show what
effect each of them has on the souls of their possessors. As this
critique indicates, Plato, at this point, clearly regards refutation as
an insufficient way of making true converts. Whether he ever had such
confidence in the power of refutation must remain a moot point. But
the Republic shows that the time had come for a positive
account of morality and of the good life. If elenchos is used
in Plato’s later dialogues, it is never again used in the
knock-down fashion of the early dialogues. But in his treatment of
justice, Plato does not directly resort to the theory of Forms.
Instead, he develops a political and psychological model as a solution
to the problem of the nature of justice. That there is also a
metaphysical way to determine the nature of justice is indicated only
briefly and enigmatically when Plato speaks of a ‘longer
way’ that would also have been possible for him to take (435d;
504b)
A brief sketch of Plato’s inquiry into the nature of justice
must suffice here to make intelligible his distinction of justice
from the other kinds of virtue and of their role in the good life (for
a more penetrating analysis, see the entry Plato’s
Ethics and Politics by Eric Brown). This question is addressed in
a quite circuitous way. Justice is first to be studied in the
‘larger text’ of the state rather than in the
hard-to-decipher ‘small text’ of the individual soul. A
study of how a city comes to be will supposedly reveal the origin of
justice and injustice (369a). Its founding principle is – at
least at first – no high-minded concern of humankind, but mutual
economic need: “A city comes to be because none of us
is self-sufficient (autarkês), but we all need many
things. … And because people need many things, and because one
person calls on a second out of one need (chreia) and on a
third out of a different need, many people gather in a single place to
live together as partners and helpers.” The ‘need’
is, at least at this point, purely economic. The minimal city is based
on the need for food, clothing, shelter, and for the requisite tools.
It is economic efficiency that dictates the adoption of the principle
of the ‘division of functions’: It is best if everyone
performs the task s/he is naturally most fit for. This principle
determines not only the structure of the minimal, self-subsistent
state of farmers and craftsmen but also the subsequent division of
the city’s inhabitants into three classes in the ‘fevered
state’ that caters to higher demands, for a more luxurious city
needs protection by a professional army as well as the leadership of a
class of philosopher-kings and -queens. Beyond the claim that the
division of functions is more economical, Plato gives no justification
for this fateful decision that determines the social order in the
state, as well as the nature of the virtues. Human beings are not born
alike but with different abilities that predestine them for different
tasks in a well-ordered state. This leads to Plato’s principle:
‘one person – one job’ (R. 370a–c;
423d).
Because the division of functions paves the way for the definition of
justice as ‘doing your own thing and not meddling with that of
others’ in Book IV (432d–433b), it is necessary to briefly
review the kind of social order Plato has in mind, the psychological
principles he assumes, and the political institutions by which that
order is to be secured, for this explains not only the establishment
of a three-class society and the explanation of the corresponding
structure of the soul but also Plato’s theory of education and
the metaphysical underpinnings. That economic needs are the basis of
the political structure does not, of course, mean that they are the
only human needs Plato recognizes. It indicates, however, that the
emphasis here is on the unity and self-sufficiency of a
well-structured city, not on the well-being of the individual
(423c–e; 425c). This focus should be kept in mind when assessing
the ‘totalitarianism’ and the rigorous cultural
conservatism of the political philosophy of Plato’s middle
years.
The need for a professionally trained army leads to the discussion of
education and moral psychology because the preservation of internal
peace and external security presupposes the combination of two quite
different character-traits among the ‘guardians’
(‘the philosophical watchdogs’, 375d–376c):
friendliness towards their fellow-citizens and fierceness towards
their enemies. The injunctions concerning the citizens’
education are very detailed because it must combine the right kind of
‘muses’ (poetry, music, and other fine arts) with the
appropriate physical training in order to develop the right
temperament and attitude in the soldiers (376d–403d). The
organisation and supervision of education is the special task of the
third class, that of the rulers of the city (412b–417b). They
are to be selected through tests of both intelligence and character
from among the soldiers – individuals who are unshakable in
their conviction that their own well-being is intimately tied to that
of the city. To ensure that members of the military and the ruling
class retain the proper attitude towards their civic duties, members
of both classes must lead a communal life without private homes,
families, or property. When Socrates’ interlocutors object that
such a life is not apt to make these citizens happy, the topic of
happiness is addressed for the first time, but Socrates quickly
brushes it aside at this point on the ground that the political order
is designed to make the entire city happy, rather than any one
particular group (419a-e).
3.2 Virtues of state and soul
The division of functions that leads to the separation of the three
classes for the purpose of achieving the social conditions for justice
concludes the discussion of the social order (427d–434c). The
peculiar manner in which Socrates further develops his explanation of
the nature of justice can best be understood with reference to the
upshot of this discussion. The catalogue of what in later tradition
has been dubbed ‘the four cardinal Platonic virtues’
– wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice – is first
presented without comment. Piety, as the text indicates, is
nοt treated as a virtue; religious practices should, rather,
be left to tradition and to the oracle of Apollo at Delphi on the
ground that: “We have no knowledge of these things”
(427b–c). The definition of justice is to be discovered
by a process of elimination. If there are four virtues in the city,
then justice must be the one that is left over after the other three
have been identified. There is no proof offered that there are
exactly four virtues in a state, nor that they are items that can be
lifted up, singly, for inspection, like objects from a basket.
Instead, Socrates points out the role they play in the maintenance of
the social order. About wisdom (sophia) – the only purely
intellectual virtue and the exclusive possession of the rulers – little
more is said at this point than that it is ‘good council’
(euboulia) in decisions about the internal and external
affairs of the city. Courage (andreia) is the soldiers’
specific virtue. Socrates takes some trouble explaining its nature
because it is a mixture of belief (doxa) and steadfastness of
character (sôtêria). It is compared to colorfast
wool: Through thick and thin, the guardians must be dyed-in-the-wool
adherents to the laws’ decrees about what is to be feared and
what is to be faced with confidence. Moderation
(sôphrosunê) is not an intellectual excellence
either, but rather a combination of belief with a certain disposition
to support order. It is a conviction (doxa, 431e) shared by
all classes about who should rule – a conviction based on a
state of ‘order’ (kosmos),
‘consonance’ (sumphônia), and
‘harmony’ (harmonia). The state’s third
class, then, has no specific virtue of its own. Finally, the
identification of justice is due to the sudden insight on
Socrates’ part that justice is the principle that has been at
work all along in the founding of the model state – namely, that
everyone is to “do their own thing and not meddle with that of
another” (433a).
The promise to establish the isomorphic structure of the city and soul
has not been forgotten. After the definition and assignment of the
four virtues to the three classes of the city, the investigation turns
to the role and function of the soul’s virtues. The soul is held
to consist of three parts corresponding to the three classes in the
city. The lengthy argument for the tri-partition of the soul into a
rational (logistikon), a spirited (thumoeides), and
an appetitive (epithumêtikon) part (434d–441c)
can here be neither reproduced nor subjected to a critical evaluation.
That Plato lets Socrates express reservations concerning the adequacy
of his own procedure, despite his unusually circumspect way of
justifying the division of the soul’s faculties, indicates that
he regards it as an important innovation. Indeed, there is no
indication of separate parts of the soul in any of the earlier
dialogues; irrational desires have been attributed there to the
influence of the body. In the Republic, by contrast, the soul
itself becomes the source of the appetites and desires. The difference
between the rational and the appetitive part is easily justified
because the opposition between the decrees of reason and the various
kinds of unreasonable desires is familiar to everyone. The existence
of a third, a ‘spirited’ or courageous part –
different from both reason and appetite – is harder to prove.
But the phenomenon of moral indignation is treated as evidence for a
psychic force that is reducible neither to reason nor to any of the
appetites; it is rather an ally of reason in a well-ordered soul, a
force opposed to the unruly appetites. This concludes the proof that
there are three parts in the soul, corresponding to the three classes
in the city – namely, the rational part representing the wisdom
of the rulers, the spirited part, manifest in the courage of the
soldiers, and the appetitive part that motivates the rest of the
population in its quest for material gain.
The discussion of the division of the soul sets the stage for the
final determination of the contrast between justice and injustice
(441c-445e): There will be justice in the city if the members of all
three classes mind their own business; similarly, in the individual
soul, there will be justice if each part of the soul fulfills its
own function properly. This presupposes that the soul’s two
upper parts have been given the right kind of training and education
in order to control the appetitive part. The three other virtues are
then assigned to the respective parts of the soul. Courage is the
excellence of the spirited part, wisdom belongs to the rational part,
and moderation is the consent of all three parts about who should rule
and who should obey. Justice turns out to be the overall unifying
quality of the soul, for the just person not only refrains from
meddling with what is not his externally but also harmonizes the
three parts of the soul internally. While justice is order and
harmony, injustice is its opposite: It is a rebellion of one part of
the city or soul against the others, and it results in the
inappropriate rule of their inferior parts. Justice and injustice in
the soul are, then, analogous to health and illness in the body. This
comparison suffices to bring the investigation to its desired result:
If justice is health and harmony of the soul, then injustice must be
disease and disorder. Hence, it is clear that justice is a good state
of the soul that makes its possessor happy, and injustice is its
opposite. As no one in his right mind would prefer to live with a
ruined body, similarly no one would prefer to live with a diseased soul. In
principle, the discussion of justice has, therefore, reached its
promised goal already at the end of Book IV. Socrates has met
Glaucon’s and Adeimantus’ challenge to prove that justice
is a good, in and by itself, for the soul of its possessor, and
that it is preferable to injustice.
That the Republic’s discussion does not end here but
occupies six more books is due most of all to several loose ends that
need to be tied up. Apart from the fact that reason and order are to
reign supreme, little has been said about the citizens’ way of
life. This gap will be filled, at least in part, by the description of
the communal life of the upper classes without private property and
family in Book V. More importantly, nothing has been said about the
rulers and their particular kind of knowledge. This is a crucial point
because, as the definitions of the three ‘inferior’
virtues show, their quality is contingent on the rulers’ wisdom.
Socrates addresses this problem with the provocative thesis
(473c–d): “Until philosophers rule as kings or those who
are now called kings and leaders genuinely and adequately philosophize
... cities will have no rest from evils, nor will the human
race.” This thesis starts the discussion of the
philosophers’ knowledge and of their upbringing and education,
which will continue through Books VI and VII. Because they also
introduce the special objects of the philosophers’ knowledge,
these books provide the metaphysical underpinning of the entire
conception of the good soul and the good state, for the ‘Form of
the Good’ turns out to be the ultimate source of all being and
knowledge. A short summary of the upshot of the educational program
must suffice here. The future philosophers, both women and men, are
selected from the group of guardians whose general cultural training
they share. If they combine moral firmness with quickness of mind,
they are subject to a rigorous curriculum of higher learning that will
prepare them for the ascent from the world of the senses to the world
of intelligence and truth, an ascent whose stages are summed up in the
similes of the Sun, the Line, and the Cave (508a–518b). To
achieve this ascent, the students have to undergo, first, a
preparatory schooling of ten years’ duration in the
‘liberal arts’: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and
theoretical harmonics (518c–531c). Afterwards, they are admitted
to the training in the master-science of ‘dialectic’, a
science that supposedly enables its possessor to deal in a systematic
way with the objects of real knowledge – the Forms in general
– and with the Form of the Good in particular – the
principle of the goodness of all else (531c–535a). This study is
to last for another five years. Successful candidates are then sent
back into the Cave as administrators of ordinary political life for 15
years. At the age of fifty, the rulers are granted leave to pursue
philosophy, but even that pursuit is interrupted by periods of service
as overseers over the order of the state. This completes, in a
nutshell, the description of the philosopher-kings’ and
-queens’ education and activities (539d–541b).
Plato’s design of an autocratic rule by an aristocracy of the
mind has received a lot of flak. But our assessment of his politics
must here be limited to an assessment of the kind of happiness it supposedly
provides. Regardless of whether or not we find plausible Plato’s
assumption of an overall principle of the good as the basis of the
political order, his model state has, at least in theory, the
advantage that it guarantees both internal and external peace. That is
no mean feat in a society where interstate and civil wars were a
constant threat and often enough ended in the destruction of the
entire city. In addition, the division of functions guarantees a high
degree of efficiency if every citizen does what he/she is naturally
suited to do. But what about the citizens’ needs beyond those
for security and material goods? Are they to find their life’s
fulfillment only in the pursuit of their jobs? Plato seems to think
so when he characterizes each class by its specific kind of desire
and its respective good (581c): The philosophers are lovers of wisdom
(philosophoi), the soldiers lovers of honor
(philotimoi), and the workers are lovers of material goods
(philochrêmatoi). That human beings find, or at least
try to find, satisfaction in the kinds of goods they cherish is a
point that is further pursued in the depiction of the decay of the
city and its ruling citizens, from the best (the aristocracy of
the mind) down to the worst (the tyranny of lust) in
Books VIII and IX. A discussion of the tenability of this explanation
of political and psychological decadence will not be attempted here.
It is supposed to show that all inferior forms of government of city
and soul are doomed to fail because of the inherent tensions between
the goods that the different citizens aim for.
Some brief comments on Plato’s conception of happiness are in
order at this point. He clearly goes on the assumption that human
beings are happy insofar as they achieve the goals they cherish.
Though this notion seems to come close to the ‘preference
satisfaction’ for all citizens that is nowadays regarded as the
primary aim of every liberal state, Plato’s restriction of each
class to one type of good must seem objectionable, most
obviously in the case of the citizens of the third class who
supposedly covet nothing but material goods. This
‘reductive’ view of their human nature militates not only
against present-day intuitions – it should also militate against
Plato’s own moral psychology, in that all human souls consist of
three parts – a rational, a spirited, and an appetitive part
– whose health and harmony constitute the soul’s and the
state’s happiness. Why, then, reduce the third class to
animal-like creatures with low appetites, as suggested by the
comparison of the people to a strong beast that must be placated
(493a–c)? This comparison is echoed later in the comparison of
the soul to a multiform beast, where reason just barely controls the
hydra-like heads of the appetites and manages to do so only thanks to
the aid of a lion-like spirit (588c–590d). Is Plato thereby
giving vent to anti-democratic sentiments, showing contempt for the
rabble, as has often been claimed? He can at least be cleared of the
suspicion that the workers are mere serfs of the upper classes
because he explicitly grants them the free enjoyment of all the
customary goods that he denies to the upper classes (419a):
“Others own land, build fine big houses, acquire furnishings to
go along with them, make their own private sacrifices to the gods,
entertain guests, and also, of course, possess what you were talking
about just now, gold and silver and all the things that are thought to
belong to people who are blessedly happy.”
‘Appetite’ is clearly not confined to food, drink, and
sex. But apart from the granting of material largesse, the members of
the third class are quite neglected in Plato’s ideal city.
Apparently, no education is provided for them, for there is no
suggestion that they participate in the guardians’ musical and
athletic training, and there is no mention that obedience to the
rulers’ commands is not the only source of happiness for the
third class. Plato seems to sidestep his own insight that all human
beings have an immortal soul and have to take care of it as best they
can, as he not only demands in the Phaedo but is going to
confirm in a fanciful way in the Myth of Er at the end of
Republic Book X.
The lifestyle designated for the upper classes also seems open to
objections. The soldiers’ musical and physical training is
strictly regimented; they must take satisfaction in obedience to
the laws for the sake of preserving the city’s inner and outer
peace, and in the deeds of valor in war. Theirs is an austere
camp-life; not all of them will be selected for higher education. But
even the philosophers’ lives leave a lot to be desired, and not
only because they have to starve their common human appetites and
devote many years to administrative duties back in the
‘Cave’. Their intellectual pursuits are also not
altogether enviable, as a closer inspection would show. Not only do
the philosophers have two jobs – in violation of the rule
‘one person – one function’ – in that they are
responsible for both administrative work and philosophical thought.
They are also not to enjoy open-ended research but are, rather, subject
to a mental training that is explicitly designed to turn their minds
away from the enjoyment of all worldly beauty in order to focus
exclusively on the contemplation of the Forms. This is indicated by
the injunctions concerning the study of astronomy and harmonics
(529a–531d): The students are not to crane their necks to watch
the beauty of the “embroidery in the heavens” but rather
to concern themselves with the ideal motions of ideal moving bodies
in a purely geometrical fashion, and they are not to listen to audible
sounds, but to attend to the mathematics of harmonics. The universe is
not treated as an admirable cosmos – with the explicit purpose of
providing moral and intellectual support to the citizens – in the way
Plato is going to explain in the Philebus, the
Timaeus, and in the Laws. Given these limitations of
the philosophers’ mental exercises in the Republic, the
claim that their lives are 729 times more pleasant than the
tyrants’ (IX 587e) seems like a gross exaggeration, even if they
enjoy the pleasures of being filled with pure and unadulterated truths
while everyone else enjoys only semblances of the really real
(581e–588a).
For all the advances that the Republic represents in certain
respects, Plato’s ideal city must seem to us far from ideal. The
system resembles a well-oiled machine where everyone has their
economic niche and function, but its machine-like character must seem
repellent to us, given that no deviations are permitted from the
prescribed pattern. If innovations are forbidden, no room is left for
creativity and personal development. Plato seems to presuppose that
the fulfillment of a person’s function is sufficient to secure
her happiness, or at least that is suggested by the
‘functional’ argument that defeats Thrasymachus
(352d–354a). It states that every object, animal, and person has
a specific function or work (ergon). If it performs its
function well, it does well: For a living thing, ‘doing
well’ means ‘living well’ and living well is
tantamount to ‘living happily’. Though Socrates’
refutation of Thrasymachus is found wanting as a proof of
justice’s superiority, the ergon-argument is nowhere
revoked. On the contrary, it is affirmed by the principle of
‘one person – one job’ that is the very basis of
Plato’s ideal city. But the confinement of everyone’s
activities to just one kind of work seems rather a narrow one
in the case of the citizens of the third class, given that they are
not permitted to engage in politics, even if it may be economically
most efficient. These features suffice to make the ideal life in
Plato’s city unattractive to us, not to speak of certain other
features that have not been explored here, such as the communal life
envisaged for the upper classes and the assignment of sexual
partnerships by a lottery that is rigged for the purposes of eugenics.
But the feature that must strike us as strangest about Plato’s
depiction of his citizens’ lives is that he does not acknowledge
the one factor that could throw a more favorable light on the
life of the third class, the life of tailors, carpenters, doctors,
architects, sailors, i.e., that they will take pride and joy in their
own work and in what they produce, given that they each in their own
way make valuable contributions to the community’s well-being,
without which the city could not function. Plato does not seem to
acknowledge this when he addresses them, rather ungraciously, as
‘money-lovers’, indicating that he regards material gain
as the only motivating factor in their lives.
Have these deficiencies escaped Plato’s notice? Justified as
this critique must seem, it should be pointed out that Plato is
clearly not concerned with the conditions that would make his city
attractive to all citizens. His aim is rather more limited: He wants
to present a model and work out its essential features.
The same explanation applies to his depiction of the city’s and
its citizens’ decay in Books VIII and IX. Contrary to certain
critics’ assumptions, Plato is not there trying to predict and
explain the course of history. Rather, he wants to explain the
generation and decay typical of each political system and the
psychopathology of its leaders. Plato finds the basis of both in the
specific values – be they honor, money, freedom, or lust –
that are embedded in the constitutions of the different types of
state. It is unlikely that Plato presupposes that there are, in reality,
pure representatives of these types, though some historical states may
have been better representatives of those types than others. But the
question remains whether he had a notion of the fact that his
black-and-white picture of civic life in the model-state disregards
the claim of individuals to have their own aims and ends and not to
be treated like automata, with no thoughts and wishes of their own.
Though the Republic contains some suggestions that would
mitigate this bleak picture, for the sake of balancing this picture, it
is more fruitful to look at other works of Plato’s middle period
that concentrate on and prioritize the conditions of the
individual soul rather than focus on the demands of the
community. These works are the Symposium and the
Phaedrus, for though each dialogue should be studied as a
unity of its own, it is also necessary to treat the different
dialogues as part of a wider picture.
3.3 The desire for self-perfection
The Symposium and the Phaedrus are two dialogues
that focus on the individual soul and pay no attention to communal
life at all. Instead, they concentrate on self-preservation,
self-improvement, and self-completion. The Symposium is often
treated as a dialogue that predates the Republic, most of all
because it mentions neither the immortality nor the tripartition of
the soul. But its dramatic staging – the praise of Eros by a
company of symposiasts – is not germane to the otherworldly and
ascetic tendencies of the Gorgias and the Phaedo. In
addition, Plato has good reasons for leaving aside a discussion of the
soul’s separability from the body in the Symposium (a
feature it shares with the much later Philebus). He aims to
show in the Symposium that love is an incentive, not only for all humans but
for all other living beings as well. Contrary to all previous
speakers, Socrates denies that Eros is a god because the gods are in
a state of perfection. Love, by contrast, is a desire by needy
creatures (endeeis) for the beautiful and the good
(199c–201c). Socrates thereby corrects the previous
speakers’ confusion of love itself with the beloved object. This
important insight is presented not as Socrates’ own but as the
upshot of a ‘lecture on the nature of love by the wise priestess
Diotima’ (201d–212b): Eros is a powerful demon, a being
between (metaxu) what is mortal and what is immortal, an ever
needy hunter of the beautiful. Human beings share that demonic
condition, for they are neither good nor bad but desire the good and
the beautiful, the possession of which would constitute happiness for
them. Because all people want happiness, they pursue the good as well
as they can (205a–206b). In each case, they desire the particular
kinds of objects that they hope will fulfill their needs. Such
fulfillment is not a passive possession; it is, rather, the
appropriation of the objects of love that are deemed to be essential
in the struggle for self-preservation, self-completion, and
self-fulfillment (207d): “For among animals the principle is the
same as with us, and mortal nature seeks so far as possible to live
forever and be immortal. And this is possible in one way only: by
reproduction, because it leaves behind a new young one in place of the
old.” There is, then, a constant need for self-restoration and
self-improvement by procreation in the quest for an ‘earthly
immortality’ manifest in all living things (206e et
pass.). This need is explained by Diotima with an impressive
depiction of the constant flux that all organisms undergo, which, in the
case of human beings, not only affects their physical constitution but
their moral and intellectual condition as well. Without constant
replenishment, none of them even stays the same over time
(207c-208b).
In the case of human beings, these needs express themselves in
different ways. The search for ‘self-eternalization’ may
result in, or even be fulfilled by, the production of biological
children or of so-called ‘children of the mind’ (e.g.,
works of art), or even by the creation of order in the city that is
then guided by the virtues of justice and moderation (209a–e).
Diotima’s lecture is finally crowned by a depiction of the
famous scala amoris – the explanation of the refinement
and sublimation that a person experiences when recognizing higher and
higher kinds of beauty (210a–212a). Starting with the love of
one beautiful body, the individual gradually learns to appreciate not
only all physical beauty but also the beauty of the mind, and in the
end, she gets a glimpse of the supreme kind of beauty; namely, the
vision of the Form of the Beautiful itself – a beauty that is
neither relative, nor changeable, nor a matter of degree.
Because beauty of the higher kind is tied to virtue and is attained
by the comprehension of what is common in laws and public
institutions, it is clear that Plato does not have purely aesthetic
values in mind but the principles of good order that are ultimately
tied to the Form of the Beautiful/Good. The difference between the
Republic’s and the Symposium’s accounts
lies in the fact that the scala amoris treats physical beauty
as an incentive to the higher and better, an incentive that, in
principle, affects every human being. There is no talk of a painful
liberation from the bonds of the senses or of a turn-around of the
entire soul that is reserved only for the better educated. Brief as
the Symposium’s explanation of happiness is, it shows
three things: First, all human beings aim for their own
self-preservation and -perfection. Second, this drive finds its
expression in the products of their work, in creativity. Third, their
respective activities are instigated by each person’s own
particular desire for the beautiful. There is no indication that
individuals must act as part of a community. Though the communitarian
aspect of the good and beautiful comes to the fore in the high praise
of the products of the legendary legislators (209e–210a), the
ultimate assent to the Beautiful itself is up to the individual. That
message of the Symposium is not unique in Plato’s
works. The Lysis shares its basic assumption concerning the
intermediary state of human nature between good and bad, and it
regards need (endeia) as the basis of friendship.
Due to the aporetic character of that dialogue, its lesson remains
somewhat obscure, but it is obvious enough that it shares the
Symposium’s general anthropological
presuppositions.
The idea that eros is the incentive to sublimation and
self-completion is further pursued in the Phaedrus. Although
the close relationship between the two dialogues is generally
acknowledged, the Phaedrus is commonly regarded as a much
later work. Not only does it accept the Republic’s
psychological doctrine of a tri-partite soul, it also advocates the
immortality of the soul – doctrines that are conspicuously
absent in the Symposium. But this difference seems due to a
difference in perspective rather than to a change of mind.
The discussion in the Symposium is deliberately confined to
the conditions of self-immortalization in this life, while
the Phaedrus takes the discussion beyond the
confines of this life. If it shares the Republic’s
doctrine of a division of the soul into three parts, it does so for
reasons of its own: The three parts of the soul in the
Phaedrus are not supposed to justify the separation of people
into three classes. They explain, rather, the different routes taken
by individuals in their search for beauty and their levels of success.
If the Phaedrus goes beyond the Symposium, it does
so in order to show how the enchantment by beauty can be combined with
an element of Plato’s philosophy that seems quite alien to the
notions of self-improvement and sublimation through the love of
beauty. That element is abruptly identified as dialectic, the
systematic method of collection and division that is characteristic of
Plato’s later work. At first sight, it might seem that the
dialogue’s topic, Eros, is hardly the right tie to keep together
the dialogue’s two disparate parts – i.e., the highly
poetical depiction of the enchantment by beauty and the ensuing
heavenly voyage to a hyperouraneous place, and Plato’s
subsequent, quite pedestrian, methodological explanations of the
presuppositions of rhetoric (249b–c). But although the coherence
of the Phaedrus cannot be argued for in full here, the notion
that the Phaedrus is disjointed does not do justice to the
dialogue’s careful composition and overall aim.
Rhetoric, its purpose and value, is, in fact, the dialogue’s topic
right from the start. The misuse of rhetoric is exemplified by the
speech attributed to the orator Lysias, a somewhat contrived plea to
favor a non-lover rather than a lover. Socrates’ retort points
up Lysias’ presuppositions: that love is a kind of sickness, an
irrational craving for the pleasures of the body; that a lover tries
to dominate and enslave the beloved physically, materially and
mentally; and, most importantly, that the lover tries to deprive the
beloved of philosophy. Once restored to his senses, the lover will shun
his former beloved and break all his promises. This one-sided view of
Eros is corrected in Socrates’ second speech: Eros, properly
understood, is not a diseased state of mind but a kind of
‘divine madness’ (theia mania). To explain the
nature of this madness, Socrates employs the comparison of the
tripartite soul to a charioteer with a pair of winged horses, an
obedient white one and an unruly black one. The crucial difference
between the Phaedrus’ tripartition and that in the
Republic lies in this: Instead of a long and arduous
liberation through education, the Phaedrus envisages a
liberation through the uplifting force of love, a love that is –
just as it is in the Symposium – instigated by physical
beauty. That is what first makes the soul grow wings and soar in the
pursuit of a corresponding deity, to the point where it will attain
godlike insights. The best-conditioned souls – those where the
charioteer has full control over his horses – get a glimpse of
true being, including the nature of the virtues and of the good
(247c–e). Depending on the quality of each soul, the quality of
the beauty pursued will also determine the cycle of reincarnations
that is in store for each soul after death (248c–249c).
3.4 The quest for method
What is remarkable in the Phaedrus’ depiction of the
uplifting effect of beauty is not only its exuberant tone and imagery,
which goes far beyond the Symposium’s unadorned
scala amoris, but also its intricate interweaving of mythical
and philosophical elements. For, in the midst of his fanciful depiction
of the different fates that are in store for different kinds of souls,
Plato specifies, in quite technical terms, that the capacity “to
understand speech in terms of general Forms, proceeding to bring many
perceptions together into a reasoned unity” (249b–c:
synienai kat’ eidos legomenon, ...eis hen
logismôi synairoumenon), is the condition for the
reincarnation of individual souls as human beings. It is this capacity
for abstract thought that he then calls “recollection of what
the soul saw when it was travelling with god, when it disregarded the
things we now call real and lifted up its head to what is truly real
instead.” The heavenly adventure now seems to amount to no more
than the employment of the dialectical method that Socrates is going
to describe, without further mythical camouflage, in the
dialogue’s second part. The ability to work out a taxonomy,
establishing the unity in a given subject-matter and dividing it up
according to its natural kinds, is the art that characterizes the
‘scientific rhetorician’ (265d–266b). Socrates
professes the greatest veneration for such a master: “If I
believe that someone is capable of discerning a single thing that is
also by nature capable of encompassing many, I follow ‘straight
behind, in his tracks, as if he were a god’.” So the
heavenly voyage has a quite down-to-earth counterpart in the
dialectical method – a method that Plato regards as a
‘gift of the gods’, as he is going to confirm in the
Philebus (16c). At the same time, Plato’s esteem for
taxonomy explains the inner unity of the Phaedrus’
seemingly incongruous two parts as two sides of one coin, and it also
shows why Plato no longer treats the sensory as a mere distraction and
disturbance of the mind. Instead, the properly conditioned
souls’ sensory impressions are its first incentives to seek the
higher and better.
What concept of happiness is suggested by this ‘divinely
inspired’ view of human life? Individuals do not, here, find
their fulfillment in peaceful interactions in a harmonious community.
Instead, life is spent in the perennial pursuit of the higher and
better. But, in that task, the individual is not alone; she shares it
with kindred spirits. The message of both the Symposium and
the Phaedrus is, therefore, two-pronged. On the one hand, there
is no permanent attainment of happiness as a stable state of
completion in this life. In the ups and downs of life (and of the
afterlife), humans are in constant need of beauty as an incentive to
aim for self-perfection. Humans are neither god-like nor wise; at
best, they are god-lovers and philosophers, demonic hunters for truth
and goodness. To know is not to have, and to have once is not to have
forever. In the Symposium, Diotima states in no uncertain
terms that humans have a perennial need to replenish what they
constantly lose, both in body and soul, because they are mortal and
changeable creatures, and the Phaedrus confirms the need for
continued efforts because the heavenly voyage is not a one-time
affair. On the other hand, there is also the message conveyed that the
pursuit of the good and the beautiful is not a lonely enterprise. As
indicated in the Symposium and further elaborated in the
Phaedrus, love for a beautiful human being is an incentive to
search for a higher form of life, a sacred joint journey of two
friends in communion (255a–256e). The need for, and also the
possibility of, constant self-repletion and -perfection is a motive
that will reappear in the ethical thought of Plato’s late works,
a motif he sometimes presents as the maxim that humans should aim at
the ‘likening of oneself to god’ (homoiôsis
theôi in Theaetetus 176b; Timaeus
90c).
Sober philosophers have a tendency to ignore such visionary talk as a
kind of Schwärmerei that lacks the substance to be worth
serious thought. That Plato, appearances notwithstanding, is not
indulging in a god-besotted rêverie in the
Phaedrus is indicated by his interweaving of the mythical
depiction in the dialogue’s first part with his specification
and exploration of the dialectical method in the later part
(259e-279c), where Socrates attempts to determine the requirements of
‘scientific rhetoric’ (259e–279c). Artful speaking,
as well as artful deception, presupposes knowledge of the truth,
especially where the identity of the phenomena is difficult to grasp,
because similarities can be misleading. This applies in particular to
concepts like the good and the just, as witnessed by the wide
disagreement about their nature (263a–c). The development of the
‘sharp eye’ that is needed to assign each object to the
right class is the aim of Plato’s method of collection and
division, a method on which he expounds at some length in the
Phaedrus. He discusses the care that is needed in order to
“see together things that are scattered about everywhere, and to
collect them into one kind (mia idea)”, as well as
“to cut the unity up again according to its species along its
natural joints, and to try not to splinter any part, as a bad butcher
might do (265d–e).” That this method is supposed to serve
an overall ethical purpose is confirmed by the fact that rhetoric
based on truth must reflect the speaker’s knowledge not only of
the different types of souls and the types of speech that fit them
(271d) but also of the truth about just and good things (272d).
That dialectic is geared to this end is somewhat obscured in the
subsequent discussion in the Phaedrus. First of all, Plato
turns away from this issue in his long depiction of the iniquities of
contemporary rhetoricians when he contrasts their efforts with that
of the scientific rhetorician. And Plato continues this excursion with
a discussion of speaking and writing, culminating in his famous
‘critique of writing’. Second, although Plato makes ample
use of the method of collection and division in later dialogues such
as the Sophist and the Statesman, he seems to pay
little heed there to problems of ethics, with the exception of the
Philebus. But the aptness of the dialectical method in
discerning the nature of the good has already been emphasized in the
Republic (534b–c): “Unless someone can
distinguish in an account the Form of the Good from everything else,
can survive all refutation as if in battle... you will say that he
does not know the good itself or any other good.” Brief as these
remarks are, they show that the application of dialectic is of central
importance to the understanding and pursuit of the good. That the good
is nowhere subjected to such treatment must be due to the enormity of
the task involved in undertaking a systematic identification of all
that is good and in working out the criteria of distinction. Although
it is unclear whether Plato in the Republic had already
refined the dialectical method in the systematic way indicated in the
Phaedrus, the hints contained about a ‘longer
way’ (435d; 504b) to determine the nature of justice and that of
the other virtues suggest that the development of a systematic method
of collection and division was at least ‘in the works’. As
a closer look at the much later Philebus will show, the
determination of what is good about each kind of thing presupposes
more than a classification by collection and division: the internal
structure of each kind of entity has also to be determined. Knowledge
is not confined to the comprehension of the objects’ being,
identity, difference and other interrelations that exist in a given
field. It also presupposes the knowledge of what constitutes the
objects’ internal unity and complexity. It would, of course, be
rather presumptuous to claim that Plato had not seen the need to
investigate the ontological ‘anatomy’, as well as the
taxonomy, of the Forms from early on. But as the late dialogues show,
it took him quite some effort to develop the requisite conceptual
tools for such analyses.
Before we turn to the late dialogues, a final review is in order of
the kind of good life that Plato envisages in the dialogues
under discussion here. In the Symposium, the emphasis is on
the individual’s creative work, which involves others at least
as catalysts in one’s efforts to attain self-perpetuation and
self-perfection. The quality of life attainable by each person
differs depending on the kind of ‘work’ each individual
is able to produce. This is what the scala amoris is all
about. In the Phaedrus, the emphasis is on the ‘joint
venture’ of two kindred souls. True friends will get to the
highest point of self-fulfillment through the joint insights that they
attain. Just as in the Symposium, the philosophical life is
deemed the best. But then, this preference is found everywhere in
Plato, and it is not unique to him: All ancient philosophers regard
their own occupation as the true fulfillment of human nature –
as they saw it. If there are differences between them, they concern
the kinds of study and occupation that they deemed appropriate for the
philosopher. The more individualistic view of happiness espoused in
the Symposium and in the Phaedrus need, however, not
be seen as a later stage in Plato’s development than the
Republic’s communitarian conception. They may present
complementary, rather than rival, points of view, and no fixed
chronology need be assumed in order to accommodate both.
4. The late dialogues: Ethics and Cosmology
4.1 Harmony and cosmic goodness
Most modern readers of Plato tend to ignore the significance of
Plato’s late dialogues for his ethical views, for late dialogues
such as the Timaeus appear to concentrate on nature and
metaphysics — and, for the most part, drop questions such as the
nature of the virtues and the moral psychology of the soul. This
appears to be a shift in emphasis since nature and natural things are
not among the objects that concern Plato in his earlier and middle
philosophical investigations. Thus, in the Republic, he
dismisses the study of the visible heaven from the curriculum of
higher learning, along with the study of audible music. But, such
generalizations about Plato’s intentions may be misleading. What
he denigrates is not the study of the heavenly order as such or that
of harmonics; it is, rather, the extent to which humans must necessarily
rely on their eyes and ears in those concerns. Students of philosophy
are, rather, encouraged to work out the true intelligible order
underlying the visible heaven and audible music. Not only that: The
ascent out of the Cave does include recognition of objects outside,
especially “the things in the sky” (R.
516a–b). If Plato is critical of natural science, it is because
of its empirical approach. This echoes the Phaedo’s
complaint that one ruins one’s eyes by looking directly at
things, most of all at the sun (Phdo. 99d–e), while
ignoring the ‘binding force’ of the good. But what kind of
‘binding force’ does Plato attribute to ‘the
Good’? His reticence about this concept, despite its centrality
in his metaphysics and ethics, is largely responsible for the
obscurity of his concept of happiness and of what it is to lead a good
life. The philosophers’ knowledge supposedly provides a solid
basis for the good life of the entire community, as well as for that
of the – perhaps uncomprehending – majority, because all
benefit from the good order of the state. But what is ‘the
Good’ that is responsible for the goodness of all other things?
A lot of ink has been spilt over the following passage in
Republic book VI, 509b: “Not only do the objects of
knowledge owe their being known to the Good, but their
being (ousia) is also due to it, although the Good
is not being, but beyond it (epekeina) in rank and
power.” The analogy with the sun’s maintenance of all that
is alive suggests that the Good is the intelligent inner principle
that determines the nature of every object that is capable of
goodness, in the sense that these objects fulfill their respective
functions in the appropriate way. Plato does not attempt to state how
such a principle of goodness works in all things in the
Republic, nor does he indicate whether he has in mind a
unifying principle in a strong sense. That he is indeed thinking of an
internal ‘binding force’ for all kinds of things is
indicated, however, in Book X, in his elucidation of the ontological
differences that exist, respectively, between the Forms as the
products of a divine maker, their earthly copies, and the imitation of
these copies by an artist (R. 596a ff.). According to Plato,
in each case, it is the use or function that
determines what it is to be good (601d): “Aren’t the
virtue or excellence, the beauty and correctness of each manufactured
item, living creature, and action related to nothing but the use
(chreia) for which each is made or naturally adapted?”
Given that Plato does not limit this account to tools or instruments
but explicitly includes living things and human actions, he seems to
have a specific criterion in mind for what constitutes each
thing’s excellence. But what determines the ‘use’ of
a human being, and to what extent can there be a common principle that
accounts for all good things? In the Republic, this question
is answered only indirectly through the isomorphism of the just state
and the just soul, based on a harmonious internal order. The postulate
of such an orderly structure is not explicitly extended beyond the
state and the soul. In the later dialogues, by contrast, the Good
clearly operates on a cosmic scale. That such is Plato’s view
comes to the fore in his excursus on the philosopher’s nature in
the Theaetetus (173c–177c). Contrary to Socrates’
denial in the Apology, Socrates in the Theaetetus
affirms that the philosopher is to pursue both “what lies below
the earth and the heights above the heaven” (173e):
“tracking down by every path the entire nature of each whole
among the things that are.” And Socrates also concerns himself
there with the question of “What is man? What actions and
passions properly belong to human nature and distinguish it from all
other beings?” In that connection, he compares the discovery of
truth with ‘likening oneself to God’ (homoiôsis
theôi) and indicates that there is a unitary principle of
goodness. The ability to achieve this superhuman state depends on
one’s readiness to engage in strenuous philosophical discourse
(177b).
If, in the Republic, the goodness of the individual soul is
explained in terms of its being a smaller copy of a harmonious
society, in the Timaeus, Plato goes for an even larger model.
The universe and its soul now supply the ‘large text’ for
deciphering the nature of the human soul. The structure of the
world-soul is replicated in the nature of the human soul. That there
is, nevertheless, a close affinity between the Republic and
the cosmological project that Plato means to pursue in the
Timaeus and its intended sequel is clearly indicated in the
preface to the Timaeus. The tale of the origin of the
universe, including human nature, is presented as the first step
towards fulfilling Socrates’ wish to see his own best city
‘in action’ (Ti. 19b–c). From antiquity on,
this introduction has created the impression that the Timaeus
is the direct continuation of the Republic, an impression
that explains its juxtaposition in the Corpus Platonicum.
Strong indications speak, however, for a much later date of the
Timaeus. If Plato establishes a link between these two works,
his intent is to compare as well as to contrast. The continuity
consists solely in the fact that Socrates reaffirms his adherence to
his ideal city’s order – at least in principle
(Ti. 17c–19b). It is this order that Critias promises
to illustrate by a narration of the tale of two cities, of the war
between pre-historic Athens, a city that exemplifies the ideal order,
and Atlantis, a powerful tyrannical superpower (Ti.
20d–26e). However, Plato never completed this project: The
Critias breaks off after some 15 Stephanus-pages, in
mid-sentence, and the third dialogue in the series,
Hermocrates, whatever was to have been its content, was never
written at all. So, the story of Socrates’ ideal city in
action and of the life of its citizens remains untold. All we
have is Plato’s cosmic model for such a state and the soul of
its inhabitants (on Plato’s cosmology, see the entry
Plato’s Timaeus by Donald Zeyl and Barbara Sattler in
SEP).
A crucial difference between the philosophical approach in the
Republic and that in the Timaeus lies in the fact
that, in the latter dialogue, Plato concerns himself with the structure
of the visible heaven as a model for the human soul and also with the
material conditions of human physiology. What is confined to mythology
in Plato’s earlier works is here worked out – though not
without a caveat to the effect that Plato is merely offering
a likely story rather than a scientific explanation of the
structure of the universe, of the human soul, and of human physiology.
Plato’s choice of presenting his explanation of the order of the
universe as a story of creation by a so-called demiurge or
‘divine workman’ is certainly no accident. It can be
understood as a kind of ‘retractation’ of his deprecatory
depiction of the divine workman’s heavenly embroidery in
Republic VII 528e-530d, where such a product is depreciated
because of its inferiority to a model conceivable in theory. To be
sure, the Timaeus presupposes the Forms as the divine
workman’s unchanging models, and he resorts to mathematical
principles to explain the cosmic order (27d–29d; 30c–31b),
but the focus is almost exclusively on the construction of the visible
heavens. Plato now seems to have convinced himself that in order to
explain the nature of a living being, it is necessary to show what
factors constitute such a live organism.
This intention explains certain peculiarities of the Timaeus
that make the dialogue hard to penetrate, for it falls into three
rather disparate parts. The first part describes the structure of the
world-soul and its replication in the human soul in a way that
combines the general principles with those of mathematics and
harmonics and illustrates it with fantastic imagery (29d–47e).
The second part consists of a rather meticulous account of the
elementary corporeal constituents of nature, which are supposedly
formed out of geometrically constructed atoms (47e–69a). The
third part combines elements from the first and second parts in a
lengthy explanation of human physiology and psychology
(69b–92c). The first, cosmological, part of the Timaeus
greatly taxes one’s ability to relate the notion of a divinely
created world-soul to the motions of the visible heavens because
Plato offers only the barest hints concerning the intelligible,
mathematical, and harmonic structure that is to explain these motions.
By contrast, the explanations in the second and third parts are hard to
follow because of Plato’s quite unique concern with the
structure and the dynamics of the basic elements of the physical world
in general and with that of human physiology in particular.
But why does Plato burden himself and his readers with such a complex
machinery, and what does this heavenly instrument have to do with
ethics? Since the human soul is formed out of the same ingredients as
the world soul (albeit of a less pure kind) and displays the same
structure (41d–e), Plato is clearly not just concerned with the
order of the universe but with that of the human soul as well. He
attributes to it the possession of the kinds of concepts that are
necessary for the understanding of the nature of all things, both
eternal and temporal. The soul’s ingredients are here limited to
the purely general concepts and to mathematical proportions. There is
no reference to a theory of recollection of the nature of all things.
Rather, Plato is concerned to ascertain that the soul has all the
tools for dealing with all objects: (1) the most important concepts
necessary for the identification and the differentiations in the way
required for dialectical procedure; (2) the numbers and proportions
needed to understand numerical relations and harmonic structures of
all sorts; (3) the capacity of the soul to perform and comprehend
harmoniously coordinated motions. This, it seems, is all the soul
needs and all it gets so that it can perform its various tasks. The
unusual depiction of the soul’s elements and composition makes
it hard, at first, to penetrate to the rationale of its construction,
and it must remain an open question to what extent Plato expects his
model to be taken in a literal rather than in a figurative sense. His
overall message should be clear, however: The soul is a
harmoniously structured entity that can, in principle, function
forever, and it also comprehends the corresponding structures
of other entities and, therefore, has access to all that is good and
harmonious. This last point has consequences for his ethical thought
that are not developed in the Timaeus itself, but that can be
detected in some of the other late dialogues.
4.2 Measure for Measure
Plato’s concern with ‘right measure’ in a sense that
is relevant for ethics is, of course, not confined to his late work.
It shows up rather early. Already in the Gorgias, Socrates
blames Callicles for the undisciplined state of his soul and
attributes it to his neglect of geometry (508a): “You’ve
failed to notice that proportionate equality (geometrikê
isotês) has great power among both gods and men.” But
it is unclear whether this expression is to be taken in a more than
metaphorical sense; it is, at any rate, not repeated anywhere else in
Plato’s earlier work. There is also no indication that Plato
takes seriously the idea of a ‘quantification’ of the
nature of the virtues in his middle dialogues. If mathematics looms
large, then, it is as a model science on account of its exactness, the
stability of its objects, and their accessibility to reason. A
systematic exploration of the notion that measure and proportion are
the fundamental conditions of goodness is confined to the late
dialogues. Apart from the Timaeus’ emphasis on a
precise cosmic and mental order, there is a crucial passage in the
Statesman (283d–285c), where the Eleatic Stranger
distinguishes two kinds of ‘art of measurement’. The first
kind is the ordinary measuring of quantities relative to each other
(‘the great and small’). The second kind has a normative
component: It is concerned with the determination of ‘due
measure’ (to metrion). The latter is treated with great
concern, for the Eleatic Stranger claims that it is the basis of all
expertise, including statesmanship, the very art that is the subject
of that dialogue (284a–b): “It is by preserving measure in
this way that they produce all the good and fine things they do
produce.” His point is that all good productions and all
processes of generation that come to a good end presuppose
‘right measure’, while arbitrary quantities (‘the
more and less’) have no such results. The Eleatic Stranger
therefore suggests a separation of the simple arts of measuring from
the arts concerned with due measure (284e): “Positing as one
part all those sorts of expertise that measure the numbers, lengths,
depths, breadths and speeds of things in relation to what is opposed
to them, and as the other, all those that measure in relation to what
is in due measure (to metrion), what is fitting (to
prepon), the right moment (to kairion), what is as it
ought to be (to deon) – everything that is removed from
the extremes to the middle (meson).” This distinction
finds no application in the Statesman itself, except that due
measure must be presupposed in the final definition of the statesman
as a ‘kingly weaver’, weaving together the fabric of the
state by combining the aggressive and the moderate temperaments in the
population so as to produce a harmonious citizenry (305e– 311c).
But no mathematic procedure is specified as the condition of such a
‘mixing together of the citizens’ characters’ in due
measure.
The importance of ‘measure’ in a seemingly literal sense
is made explicit; however, in the Philebus, the dialogue that
is concerned with the question of whether pleasure or knowledge is the
state of mind that constitutes happiness. In that dialogue, number
(arithmos), limit (peras), and measure
(metron) play a crucial role at various points of the
discussion, and the Philebus is also the dialogue where Plato
requires that numerical precision must be observed in the application
of the ‘divine gift’ of the dialectical procedure of
collection and division (16c–17a). The dialectician must know
precisely how many species and subspecies a certain genus contains;
otherwise, he has no claim to any kind of expertise. Despite this
emphasis on precision and on the need to determine the numerical
‘limit’ in every science, Socrates does not provide the
envisaged kind of collection and division of pleasure and knowledge.
He avoids that task with the pretense that he suddenly remembers that
neither of the two contenders suffices in itself for the happy life
and that a mixture of the two is preferable. To explain the nature of
this mixture, Socrates introduces a fourfold division of all beings
(23c–27c), a division that uses the categories of
‘limit’ and ‘measure’ in a different way than
the one suggested earlier for the ‘divine method of
dialectic’. Limit now concerns the objects’ internal
structure. As Socrates states, all beings belong in one of four
classes – namely (1) limit (peras), (2) the unlimited
(apeiron), (3) the mixture (meixis) of limit and the
unlimited, or (4) the cause (aitia) of such a mixture. As the
subsequent explications concerning the four classes show, the
unlimited comprises all those things that have no exact measure or
grade in themselves, such as what is hotter and colder, faster and
slower. Although at first the examples are confined to relative terms,
the class of the unlimited is then extended to things like hot and
cold, dry and moist, fast and slow, and even heat and frost, i.e., to
all that has no fixed limit or degree. Mixture takes place when such
qualities take on a definite quantity (poson) or due measure
(metrion) that puts a definite limit on their variety. That
only measured entities qualify as mixtures is not only suggested by
the examples Socrates refers to (health, strength, beauty, music, and
the seasons) but by his assertion, later in the dialogue, that a
mixture without due measure or proportion does not deserve its name
(64d–e): “it will necessarily corrupt its ingredients and
most of all itself. For there would be no blending in such cases at
all but only an unconnected medley, the ruin of whatever happens to be
contained in it.” The upshot of this discussion is that all
stable entities represent a harmonious equilibrium of their otherwise
limitless ingredients. Since indeterminate elements usually turn up in
pairs of opposites, the right limit in each case must be the right
proportion necessary for their balance. In the case of health, there
will be the right balance between the hot and the cold, the dry and
the moist. The cause of the proper proportion for each mixture turns
out to be reason; it is the only member of the fourth class.
As Socrates indicates, divine reason is the ultimate source of all
that is good and harmonious in the universe, while human reason
constitutes order down here (26e–27c; 28a–30e).
The adoption of this fourfold ontology allows Socrates to assign
pleasure and knowledge to two of the four classes of being: Pleasure
turns out to be unlimited because it admits of the ‘more and
less’. Reason, by contrast, belongs to the fourth class, to the
causes of good mixtures. On the basis of this classification, Socrates
provides the criteria for a critical assessment of the different kinds
of pleasure and knowledge (31b–59d) and presents happiness as a
mixture of all kinds of knowledge with true and pure kinds of pleasure
(59d-64b). In a final ‘ranking of goods’, measure and due
proportion, unsurprisingly, get the first rank among the possessions
of the soul, things in proper proportion come in second, reason is
ranked third, the arts and sciences obtain fourth place, whereas the
true and pure pleasures get fifth and last place on the scale of goods
(64c–67b). If Plato in the Philebus is more favorably
disposed towards a hedonist stance than in some of his earlier works,
he is so only to a quite limited degree: He regards pleasure as a
necessary ingredient in human life because both the physical and the
psychic equilibria that constitute human nature are unstable. In a
sense that recalls the Symposium, Plato presupposes that
there is always some deficiency or lack that needs
supplementation. Because the range of such ‘supplements’
includes learning and the pursuit of the virtues, there are some
pleasures that are rightly cherished. But even they are deemed goods
only insofar as they are a compensation for human imperfection.
Given the importance of ‘measure’, there is the question
of how serious Plato is about such a ‘mathematization’ of
his principles, quite generally. Though harmony and order have been
treated as important principles in Plato’s metaphysics and
ethics from early on, in his late dialogues, he seems to envisage right
measure in a literal sense. This explains his confidence that even
physical entities can attain a relatively stable state. As he suggests
both in the Timaeus and in the Philebus, not
everything is in a constant flux. On the contrary, those things that
possess the measures that are right for their type are stable entities
and can be the objects of ‘firm and true beliefs and
convictions’ (Ti. 37b–c). This applies not only
to the nature of the visible universe but also to the human body and
mind. Plato seems to have felt encouraged to embrace such theories by
the advances of astronomy and harmonics in his own lifetime so that
he postulates ‘due proportion’ in an arithmetical sense as
the cause of all harmony and stability.
Plato’s confidence seems to have extended not only to the
physical but also to the moral state of human nature. That assumption
is confirmed not only by the emphasis on right mixture in the
Philebus but also by the discussion in the Laws
about how the laws are to achieve peace in the state and harmony in
the souls of the citizens. Plato no longer treats the emotions as a
menace to the virtues; rather, he assigns to the legislators the task
of providing for an adequate balance of pleasure and pain by
habituating the citizens in the right way (632a–643a). This
balance, through paideia, is crucial for maintaining a truly
liberal soul (I 636e): “Pleasure and pain flow like two springs
released by nature. If a man draws the right amount from the right
spring at the right time, he lives a happy life.” Suffice it to
note that the comments concerning the right measure of pleasure and
pain form the preface to the entire project. That there is a
considerable re-evaluation of the emotions in the Laws,
compared to that in the Republic, is confirmed by the fact
that, according to Laws II, education is supposed to provide
the citizens with the right habituation (ĕthos)
concerning the measure of pleasure and pain. The function assigned,
there, to the right measure of pleasure and pain in the
citizens’ sentimental education clearly anticipates the
Aristotelian conception of the moral virtues as the right mean between
excess and deficiency (II 653b–c): “Virtue is this general
concord of reason and emotion. But there is one element you could
isolate in any account you give, and this is the correct formation of
our feelings of pleasure and pain, which makes us hate what we ought
to hate from first to last, and love what we ought to love.” The
confidence expressed in the Laws in the power of due measure
culminates in the famous maxim that God (rather than Protagoras’
Man) is the measure of all things (IV 716c–d): “In our
view, it is God who is preeminently the ‘measure of all
things’, much more so than any man, as they say. So if you want
to recommend yourself to someone of this character, you must do your
level best to make your own character reflect his, and on this
principle the moderate man is God’s friend, being like him,
whereas the immoderate and unjust man is not like him and is his
enemy; and the same reasoning applies to the other vices too.”
But because Plato, like Aristotle after him, carefully refrains from
any kind of specifications of concrete right measures, we should treat
the ‘arithmetic’ of the good life with a pinch of salt.
That individuals differ in their internal and external conditions is
as clear to Plato as it is to Aristotle. This does not shake
Plato’s faith in the Laws that right habituation
through the right kind of education, most of all in the arts, will
provide the necessary inner equilibrium in the soul of the good
citizen.
Are Plato’s views of human nature and the human good more
sympathetic to democratic standards in his last works? If we look at
the requirements in the Timaeus concerning the good state of
the human soul in ‘orderly circles’, Plato seems to remain
as demanding and elitist as ever. But he no longer puts so much
emphasis on the distance between the best and the ordinary. As he
remarks in the Statesman, statesmen don’t stick out
from the rest of humankind in mind and body like the queen-bees do in
the hive (301d-e). Further, even the best of the souls of human beings
are far inferior to the world-soul, because, in the case of human souls,
their ‘incorporation’ means disorder that subsides only
gradually (Ti. 42e-44c). That this applies to all human
beings suggests that Plato has become more democratic in the sense
that he regards the ‘human herd’ as a more uniform flock
than he did in his earlier days. He retains the conviction, however,
that a well-ordered soul is the prerequisite of the good life and that
human beings stand in need not only of a careful moral education but
also of a well-regulated life. Whether a life in Plato’s
nomocracy would better please modern minds than a life ruled by
philosopher-kings is a question that would require a careful perusal
of that enormous compendium of regulations and laws, which makes the
task of reading and understanding the Laws very hard work.
But that compendium is at the same time a valuable sourcebook for all
those interested in Plato’s late moral thought (for a more
detailed evaluation of the Laws, see the entry Plato on
Utopia in SEP by Chris Bobonich and Katherine
Meadows).
Glossary
account: logos
appetitive part: épithumetikon
art: technê
being: ousia
cause: aitia
consonance: sumphonia
courage: andreia
difference: heteron
education: paideia
enthusiasm: enthusiasmos
excellence: aretê
form: eidos, idea
function: ergon
habit: ethos
happiness: eudaimonia
harmony: harmonia
kind: eidos, idea
justice: dikaiosunê
likening to god: homoiôsis theô
limit: peras
look: idea
love: erôs
madness, divine: theia mania
measure: metron; metrion
mixture: meixis
model: paradeigma
moderation: sôphrosunê
need: endeia; chreia
number: arithmos
order: kosmos
perplexity: aporia
quantity: poson
rational part: logistikon
reason: nous
reasoning: logos
recollection: anamnêsis
refutation: elenchos
sameness: tauton
self-mastery: egkrateia
self-sufficiency: autarkeia
soul: psuchê
sort: eidos, idea
spirited part: thumoeides
steadfastness: sôtêria
unlimited: apeiron
virtue: aretê
weakness of the will: akrasia
wisdom: sophia
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Chinese Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2017 Edition)
Chinese Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy/Fall 2017 Edition)
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Chinese EthicsFirst published Thu Jan 10, 2008; substantive revision Wed Mar 13, 2013
The tradition of Chinese ethical thought is centrally concerned with
questions about how one ought to live: what goes into a worthwhile
life, how to weigh duties toward family versus duties toward
strangers, whether human nature is predisposed to be morally good or
bad, how one ought to relate to the non-human world, the extent to
which one ought to become involved in reforming the larger social and
political structures of one's society, and how one ought to conduct
oneself when in a position of influence or power. The personal,
social, and political are often intertwined in Chinese approaches to
the subject. Anyone who wants to draw from the range of important
traditions of thought on this subject needs to look seriously at the
Chinese tradition. The canonical texts of that tradition have been
memorized by schoolchildren in Asian societies for hundreds of years,
and at the same time have served as objects of sophisticated and
rigorous analysis by scholars and theoreticians rooted in widely
variant traditions and approaches. This article will introduce
ethical issues raised by some of the most influential texts in
Confucianism, Mohism, Daoism, Legalism, and Chinese Buddhism.
1. Characteristics of Chinese Ethics: Practical Focus and Closeness to Pre-theoretical Experience
2. Confucian Ethics
2.1 Virtue ethics: the dao, the junzi, and ren
2.2 The centrality of li or ritual
2.3 Ren and li as relational values in contrast to values of individual autonomy
2.4 The centrality of filial piety in Confucian ethics and the doctrine of love with distinctions
2.5 Mencius's defense of love with distinctions and his theory of the roots of moral knowledge and motivation in human nature
2.6 Xunzi versus Mencius on human nature and the origins of morality
2.7 Confucianism and the situationist problem for virtue ethics
2.8 Neo-Confucian theories of morality and their grounding in a cosmology
3. Mohist Ethics
4. Daoist Ethics
4.1 Ethical perspectives drawn from the Daodejing: the “soft” style of action and social primitivism
4.2 Ethical perspectives from Zhuangzi: skeptical questioning, attunement to the grain of things, inclusion and acceptance
5. Legalism
6. Chinese Buddhist Ethics
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1. Characteristics of Chinese Ethics: Practical Focus and Closeness to Pre-theoretical Experience
In the Analects 13.18, the Governor of She tells Confucius
of a Straight Body who reported his father to the authorities for
stealing a sheep. Confucius (Kongzi, best known in the West under his
latinized name, lived in the 6th and 5th
century B.C.E) replies that in his village, uprightness lies in
fathers and sons covering up for each other. In the
Euthyphro, Socrates encounters Euthyphro (whose name can be
translated as “Straight thinker”), reputed for his
religious knowledge and on his way to bring charges against his
father for murder. The conversation between Socrates and Euthyphro
leads to a theoretical inquiry in which various proposed answers as
to piety's ousia (essence) are probed and ultimately found
unsatisfactory, but in which no answer to the piety or impiety of
Euthyphro's action is given. The contrast between these two stories
highlights one of the distinctive features of Chinese ethics in
general: its respect for the practical problem. The practical problem
discussed by Confucius and Socrates is arguably a universal one: the
conflict between loyalty owed to a family member and duty to uphold
public justice within the larger community. Confucius's response is
one dimension of a characteristically Chinese respect for the
practical problem. The nature of the problem demands a practical
response. However, another dimension of a reflective respect
for the practical problem is to maintain a certain humility in the
face of a really hard problem. It is to be skeptical that highly
abstract theories will provide a response that is true to the
complexities of that problem. A tradition exemplifying such respect
will contain influential works that will not pretend to have resolved
recurring tensions within the moral life such as those identified in
the Analects and the Euthyphro.
Confucius gives an immediate practical answer in 13.18, but the
reader and commentators have been left to weave together the various
remarks about filial piety so as to present a rationale for that
answer. These remarks quite often concern rather particular matters,
as is the matter of turning in one's father for stealing a sheep, and
the implications for more general issues are ambiguous. Do fathers
and sons cover up for each other on all occasions, no matter how
serious, and if there is a cover-up, is there also an attempt to
compensate the victim of the wrongdoing? The particularity of these
passages is tied up with the emphasis on praxis. What is sought and
what is discussed is often the answer to a particular practical
problem, and the resulting particularity of the remarks invites
multiple interpretations. The sayings often are presented as emerging
from conversations between Confucius and his students or various
personages with official positions, or among Confucius's students.
One passage (11.22) portrays Confucius as having tailored his advice
according to the character of the particular student: he urges one
student to ask father and elder brother for advice before practicing
something he has learnt, while he urges the other to immediately
practice; the reason is that the first has so much energy that he
needs to be kept back, while the second is retiring and needs to be
urged forward. With this passage in mind, we might then wonder
whether the apparent tension between remarks made in connection with
a concept is to be understood in terms of the differences between the
individuals addressed or the context of the conversation.
All texts that have become canonical within a tradition, of course,
are subject to multiple interpretations, but Chinese texts invite
them. They invite them by articulating themes that stay relatively
close to the pre-theoretical experience that gives rise to the
practical problems of moral life (see Kupperman, 1999 on the role of
experience in Chinese philosophy). The pre-theoretical is not
experience that is a pure given or unconceptualized, nor is it
necessarily experience that is universal in its significance and
intelligibility across different traditions of thought and culture.
This attention to pre-theoretical experience also leads to
differences in format and discursive form: dialogues and stories are
more suited for appealing to and evoking the kind of pre-theoretical
experience that inspires parts of the text. By contrast, much Western
philosophy has gone with Plato in taking the route of increasing
abstraction from pre-theoretical experience.
The contrast is not meant to imply that Chinese philosophy fails to
give rise to theoretical reflection. Theoretical reflection of great
significance arises in the Mozi, Mencius,
Hanfeizi, Xunzi, and Zhuangzi, but there
is more frequent interplay between the theorizing and references to
pre-theoretical experience. In Chinese texts there are suggestions
for theorizing about this experience, but the suggestions often
indicate several different and fruitful directions for theorizing to
go further. These directions may seem incompatible, and they may or
may not be so in the end, but the tensions between these directions
are real. The result is a fruitful ambiguity that poses a
problematic. Pre-theoretical experience poses a practical
problem. Apparently incompatible solutions to problems are partially
theorized in the text, but the apparent incompatibility is not
removed. Much of the value of these texts lies in their leaving the
tensions in place with enough theory given to stimulate thinking
within a certain broadly defined approach. There is more than enough
for the sophisticated theorist to try to interpret or to reconstruct
a more defined position as an extension of that broadly defined
approach. At the same time, the problematic is partly framed with the
language of pre-theoretical experience in the form of dialogue and
story, making the texts accessible to a much broader range of readers
than is usually the case with philosophy texts. The following
sections present some of the major kinds of problematic that appear
in the major schools of Chinese ethical thought.
2. Confucian Ethics
2.1 Virtue ethics: the dao, the junzi, and ren
Confucian ethics is focused around ideals of character and the
constituting traits or virtues. The most frequently discussed ideal
is that of the junzi. The Chinese word originally meant
“prince's son,” but in the Analects it refers to
ethical nobility. The first English translations rendered it
as “gentleman,” but Ames and Rosemont (1998) have usefully
suggested “exemplary person.” Among the traits connected
to ethical nobility are filial piety, a respect for and dedication to
the performance of traditional ritual forms of conduct, and the
ability to judge what the right thing to do is in the given
situation. These traits are virtues in the sense that they are
necessary for following the dao, the way human beings ought
to live their lives. As Yu (2007) points out, the dao plays
the kind of role in ancient Chinese ethics that is analogous to the
role played by
eudaimonia or flourishing, in ancient Greek ethics. The
junzi is the ethical exemplar with the virtues making it
possible to follow the dao.
Besides the concepts of dao and junzi, the concept
of ren is a unifying theme in the Analects. Before
Confucius's time, the concept of ren referred to the
aristocracy of bloodlines, meaning something like the strong and
handsome appearance of an aristocrat. But in the Analects the
concept is of a moral excellence that anyone has the potential to
achieve. Various translations have been given of ren. Many
translations attempt to convey the idea of complete ethical virtue,
connoting a comprehensive state of ethical excellence. In a number of
places in the Analects the ren person is treated as
equivalent to the junzi, indicating that ren has the
meaning of complete or comprehensive moral excellence, lacking no
particular virtue but having them all. However, ren in some
places in the Analects is treated as one virtue among others
such as wisdom and courage. In the narrower sense of being one virtue
among others, it is explained in 12.22 in terms of caring for others.
It is in light of these passages that other translators, such as D.C.
Lau, use ‘benevolence’ to translate ren.
However, others have tried to more explicitly convey the sense of
‘ren’ in the comprehensive sense of
all-encompassing moral virtue through use of the translation
‘Good’ or ‘Goodness’ (see Waley, 1938, 1989;
Slingerland, 2003). It is possible that the sense of ren as
particular virtue and the sense of comprehensive excellence are
related in that attitudes such as care and respect for others may be a
pervasive aspect of different forms of moral excellence, e.g., such
attitudes may be expressed in ritual performance, as discussed below,
or in right or appropriate action according to the context. But this
suggestion is speculative, and because the very nature of ren
remains so elusive, it shall be here referred to simply
as‘ren’.
Why is the central virtue discussed in such an elusive fashion in
the Analects? The answer may lie in the role that
pre-theoretical experience plays in Chinese philosophy. Tan (2005)
has pointed to the number and vividness of the persons in
the Analects who serve as moral exemplars. She suggests that
the text invites us to exercise our imaginations in envisioning what
these people might have been like and what we ourselves might become
in trying to emulate them. Use of the imagination, she points out,
draws our attention to the particularities of virtue and engages our
emotions and desires. Amy Olberding (2008, 2012) develops the notion
of exemplarism into a Confucian epistemology, according to which we
get much of our important knowledge by encountering the relevant
objects or persons. Upon initial contact, we may have little general
knowledge of the qualities that make them so compelling to us, but we
are motivated to further investigate. Confucius treated as exemplars
legendary figures from the early days of the Zhou dynasty, such as the
Duke of Zhou and Kings Wu and Wen. Confucius served as an exemplar to
his students, perhaps of the virtue of ren, though he never
claimed the virtue for himself. Book Ten of the Analects
displays what might appear to be an obsessive concern with the way
Confucius greeted persons in everyday life, e.g., if he saw they were
dressed in mourning dress, he would take on a solemn appearance or
lean forward on the stanchion of his carriage. Such concern becomes
much more comprehensible if Confucius is being treated as an exemplar
of virtue from which the students are trying to learn. The focus of
Book Ten and elsewhere in the Analects also suggests that the
primary locus of virtue is to be found in how people treat each other
in the fabric of everyday life and not in the dramatic moral dilemmas
so much discussed in contemporary Western moral philosophy.
2.2 The centrality of li or ritual
Analects 1.15 likens the project of cultivating one's
character to crafting something fine from raw material: cutting bone,
carving a piece of horn, polishing or grinding a piece of jade. The
chapter also stresses the importance of li (the rites,
ritual) in this project. In the Analects ritual includes
ceremonies of ancestor worship, the burial of parents, and the rules
governing respectful and appropriate behavior between parents and
children. Later the word came to cover a broad range of customs and
practices that spelled out courteous and respectful behavior of many
different kinds. Engaging in ritual, learning to perform it properly
and with the right attitudes of respect while performing it, is to
engage in a kind of cutting and carving and polishing and grinding of
the self. One of the most distinctive marks of Confucian ethics is
the centrality of ritual performance in the ethical cultivation of
character. For example, while Aristotelian habituation generally
corresponds to the Confucian cultivation of character, there
is no comparable emphasis in Aristotle on the role of ritual
performance in this process of character transformation. Yet
Confucians will say that any complete description of self-cultivation
must include a role for the culturally established customs that spell
out what it means to express respect for another person in various
social contexts. Just how that role is conceived in the
Analects is one of the central interpretive puzzles
concerning the Analects. The interpretive question of
how li is central to self-cultivation is posed in
particular about its relation to the chief virtue of ren.
In the Analects 3.3 the Master said, “A man who is not
ren—what has he to do with ritual?” The
implication is that ritual is a means of cultivating and expressing a
ren that is already there, at least in a raw or unrefined
state. This implication about the role of ritual is
consistent with passages of the Analects in which Confucius
shows flexibility on the question of whether to follow established
ritual practice. 9.3 shows him accepting the contemporary practice of
wearing a cheaper silk ceremonial cap rather than the traditional
linen cap. 9.3 also shows Confucius rejecting the contemporary
practice of bowing after one ascends the stairs leading up to the
ruler's dais, and maintaining the traditional practice of bowing
before one ascends the stairs. The implication is that the
contemporary practice expresses the wrong attitude toward the
ruler—presumptuousness in assuming permission to ascend. 9.3
suggests that it is something like the right attitude that is
cultivated and expressed by ritual. Kwong-loi Shun (1993) has called
this kind of understanding of ritual the “instrumental”
interpretation.
However, in other places of the Analects, ritual seems to
take on a more central role in the achievement of ren.
Indeed, it seems to be presented as the key. A very common
translation of 12.1 has Confucius telling his favorite student Yan Hui
that “Restraining yourself and returning to the rites
constitutes ren. If for one day you managed to restrain
yourself and return to the rites, in this way you could lead the
entire world back to ren. The key to achieving ren
lies within yourself—how could it come from others?”
(translation from Slingerland, 2003, though see Li, 2007, for a
different translation of the word wei usually translated as
‘constitutes’, with different implications for the
question of the relation between li and ren). Such
passages have given rise to the “definitionalist”
interpretation, as Shun calls it, which makes li definitive
of the whole of ren. Obviously the instrumental and
definitional interpretations cannot both be true.
Some have argued that such serious conflicts within the text
constitute reasons for thinking that the Analects is an
accretive text, i.e., composed of layers added at different times by
different people with conflicting views. To some extent, viewing
the Analects as accretive is nothing new, but Bruce and
A. Takeo Brooks (1998, 2000) recently have taken that view very far by
identifying Book 4 (and only part of it, for that matter) as the most
reflective of the historical Kongzi's views, and the other books as
stemming from Confucius's students and members of his family. The
different books, and, sometimes, individual passages within the books,
represent different time periods, people, with different agendas who
are responding to different conditions, and often putting forward
incompatible strands of Confucianism. The Brooks suggest that the
parts of the Analects most directly associated with the
historical Confucius and his disciples are the parts that
feature ren as the pre-eminent virtue and that de-emphasize
the role of ritual. The parts that are due to another trend
in Confucianism, headed by Confucius's descendants, are the parts that
elevate ritual as the key to ren. The Brooks's theory of
the Analects has drawn appreciation and disagreement (e.g.,
see Slingerland, 2000 for both). It threatens to dislodge the
assumption that underlies the dominant mode of interpreting
the Analects, which is that the text, or most of it, reflects
the coherent thought of one person.
One response to this interpretive challenge is to acknowledge the real
possibility that different sets of passages are the products of
different thinkers, but also to hold that these different people, even
if they have different pragmatic and political agendas (a factor that
the Brooks tend to emphasize), might also have had different and
philosophically substantial perspectives on common problems. One of
those problems might indeed have been the relation
between ren and
li, and at least part of the explanation of why different
and potentially conflicting things are said about that relation is
that the relation is a difficult one to figure out and that different
thinkers addressing that common problem might reasonably have arrived
at different things to say. Whether these different things are
ultimately irreconcilable remains an open question. One might take a
constructive attitude to these differences, ask what good
philosophical reasons could motivate the different approaches, and
ask whether there is a way of reconciling what all the good reasons
entail.
Kwong-loi Shun's approach exemplifies such a reconciling strategy. He
holds that on the one hand, a particular set of ritual forms are the
conventions that a community has evolved, and without such forms
attitudes such as respect or reverence cannot be made intelligible or
expressed (the truth behind the definitionalist interpretation). In
this sense, li constitutes ren within or for a given
community. On the other hand, different communities may have different
conventions that express respect or reverence, and moreover any given
community may revise its conventions in piecemeal though not wholesale
fashion (the truth behind the instrumentalist interpretation).
Chenyang Li (2007) proposes a different approach based on a different
reading of the word ‘wei’ used in 12.1 and often
translated as ‘constitutes’ to render the crucial line,
“Restraining yourself and returning to the rites
constitutes ren.” Li notes that a common meaning of the
word is ‘make’ or ‘result in.’ The relation
between li and ren need not be construed as either
definitional or constitutive, nor need it be construed as purely
instrumental. Li proposes that li functions something like a
cultural grammar where ren is like mastery of the culture.
Mastery of a language entails mastery of its grammar but not vice
versa.
Both Shun and Li are striving to capture a way in
which ren does not reduce to li but also a way in
which li is more than purely instrumental to the realization
of ren. There are good philosophical reasons for this move.
Consider the reasons for resisting the reduction of
ren to li. As indicated above, 9.3 suggests that
the attitudes of respect and reverence that are expressed by ritual
forms are not reducible to any particular set of such forms, and Shun
has a point in arguing that such attitudes could be expressed by
different sets of such forms as established by different communities.
In studying the cultures of other communities, we recognize that
certain customs are meant to signify respect, even if we do not share
these customs, just as we recognize that something that does not
signify disrespect in our culture does indeed so signify in another
culture. The fact that we can distinguish the attitude from the
ritual forms that we use to express them allows us to consider
alternative ritual forms that could express the same attitude.
Ceremonial caps that are made of more economical material are
acceptable, perhaps, because wearing such caps rather than the
material ones need not affect the spirit of the ceremony. By
contrast, bowing after one ascends the stairs constitutes an
unacceptable change in attitude. To maintain that particular ritual
forms do not define the respect and reverence they are
intended to express is not to underestimate their importance for
cultivating and strengthening these attitudes. Acting in ways that
express respect given the conventionally established meanings of
accepted ritual forms helps to strengthen the agent's disposition to
have respect. The ethical development of character does involve
strengthening some emotional dispositions over others. We strengthen
dispositions by acting on them. By providing conventionally
established, symbolic ways to express respect for others, ritual
forms give participants ways to act on and therefore to strengthen
the right dispositions.
On the other hand, there is good reason to resist the reduction of
li simply to the role of expressing and cultivating a set of
attitudes and emotional dispositions. In his influential
interpretation (1972) of the Analects, Herbert Fingarette
construes ritual performance as an end in itself, as beautiful and
dignified, open and shared participation in ceremonies that celebrate
human community. Ritual performance, internalized so that it becomes
second nature, such that it is gracefully and spontaneously
performed, is a crucial constituent of a fully realized human life.
There are nonconventional dimensions of what it is to show respect,
such as providing food for one's parents (see Analects 2.7),
but the particular way the agent does this will be deeply influenced
by custom. Indeed, custom specifies what is a respectful way of
serving food. On the Confucian view, doing so in a graceful and
whole-hearted fashion as spelled out by the customs of one's
community is part of what it is to live a fully human life.
Ritual constitutes an important part of what ren is, and hence
it is not merely an instrument for refining the substance of
ren. At the same time it is not the whole of ren. Consider
that part of ren that involves attitudinal dispositions.
Attitude is not reducible to ritual form even if acting on that form
can cultivate and sustain attitude. Moreover, 7.30 emphasizes the
connection between desire for ren and its achievement (“If
I simply desire ren, I find that it is already there”).
The achievement of ren is of course a difficult and long
journey, and so 7.30 implies that coming to truly desire it lies at
the heart of that achievement. The multifaceted nature of ren
emerges in Book 12, where Confucius is portrayed as giving different
descriptions of ren. In 12.1, as already noted, he says that
ritual makes for ren. But then in 12.2, he says that ren
involves comporting oneself in public as if one were receiving an
important guest and in the management of the common people behaving
as if one were overseeing a great sacrifice (the duty to be
respectful toward others). 12.2 also associates ren with
shu or “sympathetic understanding,” not imposing
on others what you yourself do not desire. Here the emphasis is not so
much on ritual or not exclusively anyway, but on the attitudes one
displays toward others, and on the ability to understand what others
want or do not want based on projecting oneself into their situation.
In 12.3, when asked about ren, Confucius says
that ren people are hesitant to speak (suggesting that such
people take extreme care not to have their words exceed their
actions). And then in 12.22, when asked about ren, Confucius
says that it is to care for people. Such diverse characterizations are
appropriate if ren is complete ethical virtue or
comprehensive excellence that includes many dimensions, including but
not reducing to the kinds of excellence associated
with li.
If we take the relevant passages on li and ren as
forming a whole in which a coherent view is embedded, there is a
pretty good case for regarding the observance of ritual propriety as a
constituent of ren as well as crucial for instrumentally
realizing some other dimensions of ren. But it does not
exhaust the substance of ren. If the text is as radically
accretive as the Brooks maintain, then the proposed construal of the
relation is more of a reconstruction of what the best philosophical
position might be on the nature of the relation. The reconstructive
possibility should not be disturbing as long as we recognize it for
what it is. Thinkers within a complex and vigorous tradition
frequently re-interpret, expand, develop, revise, and even reject some
of what one has inherited from the past. The fact that the
Analects itself might be a product of this kind of
engagement might usefully be taken as encouragement for its present
students to engage with the text in the same way.
The Confucian position on the importance of li in ethical
cultivation is interesting and distinctive in its own right, and this
is partly because Confucianism hews close to a kind of
pre-theoretical experience of the moral life that might otherwise get
obscured by a more purely theoretical approach to ethics. If we look
at everyday experience of the moral life, we see that much of the
substance of ethically significant attitudes such as respect is in
fact given by cultural norms and practices, and learning a morality
must involve learning these norms and practices. Children learn what
their behavior means to others, and what it should mean, by learning
how to greet each other, make requests, and answer requests, all in a
respectful manner. Much of our everyday experience of moral
socialization lies in the absorption of or teaching to others of
customs that are conventionally established to mean respect,
gratitude, and other ethically significant attitudes. So construed,
Confucian ethics provides an alternative to understanding the nature
of the moral life that is different from an understanding that is
primarily based on abstract principles, even abstract principles that
require respect for each person. This is why there is significant
resonance between Confucianism and communitarian philosophies such as
those defended by Alasdair MacIntyre (1984, 1989) and Michael Walzer
(1983). One of the distinctive marks of communitarianism is the theme
that much of the substance of a morality is given not in abstract
principles of the sort typically defended in modern Western
philosophy but in a society's specific customs and practices. In the
Analects, the ambiguous relation between ren and
li poses the problematic of how we are to understand the
relation between cultural norms and practices on the one hand and
that part of morality that appears to transcend any particular set of
norms and practices. The Analects suggests a large role for
culture, but on the reading suggested here, not a definitional role.
There is much room for theoretical elaboration on the nature of that
role.
Furthermore, in understanding why Confucians take a life of ritual
practice to be partly constitutive of a fully human life, one must
understand the aesthetic dimension of their notion of a fully human
life. Such a life is lived as a beautiful and graceful coordinated
interaction with others according to conventionally established forms
that express mutual respect. A good of the value attached to the fully
human life lies in the aesthetic dimensions of a “dance”
(Ihara, 2004) one performs with others. To better understand why the
moral and the aesthetic cannot be cleanly separated in Confucian
ethics, consider that a graceful and whole-hearted expression of
respect can be beautiful precisely because it reflects the extent that
the agent has made this moral attitude part of her second nature. The
beauty has a moral dimension. Both these themes—the importance
of contextualized moral judgment and aesthetic value of human
interaction according to custom and tradition—offer
opportunities for practitioners of, say, Anglo-American moral
philosophy to reflect on what their approaches to the moral life might
miss.
2.3 Ren and li as relational values in contrast to values of individual autonomy
Consider ren in its meaning as the particular virtue of
caring for others and li in its aspect as the valued human
dance. These values are the basis for characterizing Confucian ethics
as a relational ethic, meaning that it is in part distinguished by its
placement of relationships at the center of a well-lived life (see
Ames, 2011). Confucian ethics are often taken to stand in contrast to
ethics that place individual autonomy and freedom to choose how to
live. While there is much that is true about this contrast, it must be
carefully described so as to differentiate it from some other
contrasts. For example, the value of individual autonomy usually
includes several different dimensions that do not necessarily
accompany one another: (1) prioritizing of individual interests over
group or collective interests when these conflict; (2) giving moral
permission to the individual to choose from a significantly wide range
(within certain moral boundaries) of ways to live; and (3) emphasizing
the importance of living according to one's own understanding of what
is right and good even if others do not see it the same way.
Confucian ethics in significant part, though not in all parts, accepts
autonomy in the sense of (3) (see Shun, 2004; and Brindley,
2010). Confucius is often depicted in the Analects as
emphasizing the importance of cultivating one's own character even
when others do not recognize or appreciate one's efforts (e.g., 4.14)
and of acting independently of what is conventionally approved or
disapproved (e.g., 5.1). The texts associated with Mencius (Mengzi,
best known in the West under his Latinized name, lived in the 4th
century B.C.E.) and Xunzi (4th and 3rd centuries
B.C.E.), the most pivotal thinkers in the classical Confucian
tradition after Confucius, both articulate the necessity to speak up
when one believes the ruler one is serving is on a wrong course of
action (e.g., Mencius 1A3 and Xunzi 29.2). On the
other hand, none of these classical thinkers argue for the necessity
of protecting a frank subordinate from a ruler who is made angry by
criticism, and it could be argued that Confucianism does not fully
endorse autonomy in sense (3) without endorsing such protection for
those who wish to engage in moral criticism of the powerful.
Most interpretations present Confucian ethics as rejecting (2). There
is a way for human beings to live, a comprehensive human good to be
realized, and there can be no choosing between significantly
different ways of life that are equally acceptable from a moral
perspective (an important exception to this kind of interpretation is
provided by Hall and Ames, 1987, who interpret Confucius's
dao as a human invention, collective and individual). On the
other hand, Confucian ethics de-emphasizes legal coercion as a method
for guiding people along the way and instead an puts the emphasis on
moral exhortation and inspiration by way of example (see, most
famously, 2.3 of the Analects, which emphasizes the
necessity of a ruler's guiding his people by instilling in them a sense
of shame rather than by the threat of external punishment). While a
Confucian might believe in a single correct way for human beings, she
might endorse a significant degree of latitude for people to learn
from their own mistakes and by way of example from others (see Chan,
1999).
Confucian ethics does not accept (1), but not because it subordinates
individual interests to group or collective interests (for criticism
of the rather common interpretation of Confucianism as prioritizing
the group over the individual, see Hall and Ames 1998). Rather, there
is a different conception of the relationship between individual and
group interests. The best illustration of this different conception
is a story to be found in the Mencius that concerns
sage-king Shun. When Shun wanted to marry, he knew that his father,
influenced by his stepmother, would not allow him to marry. In this
difficult situation, Shun decided to marry without telling his
father, even though he is renowned for his filial piety. Mencius in
fact defends the filiality of Shun's act in 5A2. He observes that
Shun knew that he would not have been allowed to marry if he told his
father. This would have resulted in bitterness toward his parents,
and that is why he did not tell them. The implication of this version
of Shun's reason is that filiality means preserving an emotionally
viable relationship with one's parents, and in the case at hand Shun
judged that it would have been worse for the relationship to have
asked permission to marry. The conception of the relation between
individual and group interests embodied in this story is not one of
subordination of one to the other but about the mutual dependence
between the individual and the group. The individual depends on the
group and must make the group's interests part of his or her own
interests, but, on the other side of the equation, the group depends
on the individual and must make that individual's interests part of
the group's interests. Shun's welfare depends on his family and
therefore must make his family's interests part of his own (he
resolves to do what is necessary to preserve his relationship to his
parents), but his family's welfare depends on Shun, and therefore it
must recognize his interests to constitute part of its welfare (the
family must recognize that it is damaging itself in requiring Shun to
deny himself the most part important of human relationships).
The ways in which Confucianism values autonomy and the ways in which
it does not has implications for the increasingly discussed issue as
to whether contemporary Confucianism can recognize individual rights.
Given the way that individual and group interest are conceived as
mutually dependent and interwoven, Confucianism cannot recognize
rights that are based on the idea that rights defend the interests of
the individual against group interests (though something like
this conception of rights might be compatible with Confucianism in
case relationships irretrievably break down and individuals need to be
protected; see Chan, 1999). The way that Confucianism values living
according to one's understanding of the right and the good does
provide a basis for the idea that individuals should receive
protection when they express their convictions about these matters,
particularly when they are expressing convictions about the wrongful
or misconceived conduct of their political leaders (Wong, 2004).
Furthermore, Chinese thinkers from the 19th century onwards
have adapted the concept of rights received in interaction with the
West, and these adaptations often articulate the idea that the
individual ought to have a range of freedom of expression and action
so that they can contribute more richly and originally to the welfare
of Chinese society. Chinese thinkers such as Liang Qichao and Japanese
thinkers such as Kato affirmed both the legitimacy of the individual's
desires and the necessity to harmonize individual and group desires
(see Angle and Svensson, 2001; Angle, 2002). Emphasis on the former
would be the relatively new element in a contemporary Confucianism,
but 1B6 of the Mencius provides a striking anticipation of
this element. Here King Xuan tells Mencius that his ability to be a
true king for his people is thwarted by his desires for wealth and for
sex. Mencius replies that if the King accords the common people the
same privileges for wealth and sex, there would be no problem in
becoming a true king. Xunzi (see section 2.6) conceives of morality
as a way of harmonizing the desires of individuals so that destructive
conflict is replaced by productive harmony, and this gives the
satisfaction of desire a central role in his version of Confucian
ethics. Later on in the tradition, Dai Zhen defended the legitimacy
of self-interested desire as long as it is tempered by a proper
concern for others (see Tiwald, 2011a; and section 2.8). Rosemont
(1991, 2004) has argued that “second-generation”
“positive” rights to education and economic security are
better grounded in the Chinese tradition than they have been in the
West.
2.4 The centrality of filial piety in Confucian ethics and the doctrine of love with distinctions
Along with the emphasis on li, the centrality of filial
piety is one of the most distinctive characteristics of Confucian
ethics. The Analects 2.6 says to give parents no cause for
anxiety other than illness, whereas 2.7, as mentioned earlier,
emphasizes the need for the material support of parents to be carried
out in a respectful manner. 2.8 emphasizes that it is the expression
on one's face that is filial and not just taking on the burden of
work or letting elders partake of the wine and food before others.
Is obedience to parents always required of the filial child? What if
the child believes that parents are wrong and their wishes run
contrary to what is right or to ren? In those cases where one
thinks them wrong, what is one to do? The Analects 2.5
portrays Confucius as saying, “Do not disobey,” but when
queried further as to his meaning, he explains obedience in terms of
conformance to the rites for burying and sacrificing to deceased
parents. In 4.18 Confucius says that when one disagrees with one's
parents, one should remonstrate with them gently. Most translations
of what follows have Confucius concluding that if parents are not
persuaded, one should not oppose them (e.g., Lau, 1979; Slingerland,
2003; Waley, 1938), but it is possible to read the spare and
ambiguously worded passage as requiring instead that one not abandon
one's purpose in respectfully trying to change one's parents' minds
(Legge, 1971). In other Confucian texts, the question of whether
obedience is required has received different answers in the Confucian
tradition. Chapters 1 and 2 of the Record of Ritual (Legge,
1967, vol. 1) say that one must obey if one fails to persuade one's
parent. On the other hand, Xunzi declares that following the
requirements of morality rather than the wishes of one's father is
part of the highest standard of conduct (29.1 of the Xunzi;
for a translation see Knoblock, 1988–94) and moreover that if
following the course of action mandated by one's father would bring
disgrace to the family and not following it would bring honor, then
not following is to act morally (29.2 of the Xunzi). Xunzi's
position is supported in part by the distinction between service to
parents and obedience to them. It might very well fail to be of
service to parents if following their wishes is to bring moral
disgrace to them and the family.
Another ethical issue arising from the strong Confucian emphasis on
filial piety concerns possible conflicts between loyalty to parents
and loyalty to the ruler or public justice. Consider again
Analects 13.18, in which Confucius says that uprightness is
found in sons and fathers covering up for each other. In this case,
at least, loyalty to parents or to children takes precedence over
loyalty to ruler or to public justice. This precedence is one
implication of the Confucian doctrine of love with distinctions
(“love with distinctions” is the usual translation, but
perhaps “care with distinctions” is less misleading
because it covers both the emotionally freighted attitude toward kin
and a more distanced attitude toward strangers). Though all people
are owed moral concern, some are owed more than others, according to
the agent's relationship to them.
To introduce other kinds of problematic treated by Confucian
thinkers, it is necessary to identify a pivotal critic of
Confucianism in the classical period. Mozi (probably 5th
century B.C.E), who possibly was once a student of Confucianism, came
to reject that teaching, partly on the grounds that the Confucian
emphasis on ritual was a wasteful expenditure of resources that could
otherwise be used to meet the basic needs of the many (Mozi,
chapters 25, 32; see Watson, 1967 for a translation). A related
criticism in the text of the Mozi is that tradition does not
hold normative authority simply because it is tradition, for there
was a time when the practice in question was not tradition but new
(chapter 39). If a practice has no authority when it is new, it has
no authority at any subsequent time simply because it is getting
older. Mozi also rejected Confucianism on the grounds that partiality
toward one's own (oneself, one's family, one's state) is at the root
of all destructive conflict (chapter 16). Partiality toward the self
causes the strong to rob the weak. Partiality toward one's family
causes great families wreak havoc with lesser families (it is not
difficult to see how this thought might apply to the idea of
protecting one's own, even if they have committed serious crimes
against others outside the family). Partiality toward one's state
causes great states attack small states. Mozi advocated the doctrine
of universal love or impartial concern.
2.5 Mencius's defense of love with distinctions and his theory of the roots of moral knowledge and motivation in human nature
The substantial following that Mohism gained in the classical period
forced a response from Confucians (see Hansen, 1992, and Van Norden
2007, for a discussion of Mozi's pivotal impact on the Chinese
tradition). They responded on two subjects: first, they had to address
what is required by way of concern for all people and how to reconcile
such concern with the greater concern for some that the Confucian
doctrine of love with distinctions requires; second, they had to
address the question of what kinds of concern are motivationally
possible for human beings, partly in response to the Mohist argument
that it is not difficult to act on impartial concern, and partly in
response to others who were skeptical about the possibility of acting
on any kind of genuinely other-regarding concern. Mencius, in the text
purporting to be a record of his teachings, explicitly sets himself to
the task of defending Confucianism not only against Mohism but the
teachings of Yang Zhu. Yang's teachings seemed to Mencius to sit on
the opposite end of the spectrum from Mohism (there is no surviving
text purporting to articulate and defend Yangism). According to
Mencius's characterization, Yang Zhu criticized both Mohism and
Confucianism for asking people to sacrifice themselves for
others. Yang Zhu on this view was an ethical egoist: i.e., one who
holds that it is always right to promote one's own welfare. Mencius
positioned Confucianism as the occupying the correct mean between the
extremes of having concern only for oneself on the one hand and having
an equal degree of concern for everyone.
Mencius 1A7 purports to be an account of a conversation
between Mencius and King Xuan, the ruler of a Chinese state. Mencius
is attempting to persuade the king to adopt the Confucian
dao or way of ruling. The king wonders whether he really can
be the kind of king Mencius is advocating, and Mencius replies by
asking whether the following story he has heard about the king is
true. The story is that the king saw an ox being led to slaughter for
a ritual sacrifice. The king decided to spare the ox and substituted
a lamb for the ritual sacrifice. Thinking back on that occasion, the
king recalls that it was the look in the ox's eyes, like that of an
innocent man being led to execution, that led him to substitute the
lamb. Mencius then comments that this story demonstrates the king's
capability to become a true king, and that all he has to do is to
extend the sort of compassion he showed the ox to his own people. If
he can care for an ox, he can care for his subjects. To say that he
can care for an ox but not for his people is like saying “my
strength is sufficient to lift heavy weight, but not enough to lift a
feather” (translation adapted from Lau, 1970) His failure to
act on behalf of his people is due simply to his not acting, not to
an inability to act. What the king has to do, suggests Mencius, is to
treat the aged in his family as aged, and then extend it to the aged
in other families; treat his young ones as young ones, and extend it
to the young ones of others; then you can turn the whole world in the
palm of his hand.
The passage demonstrates one characteristic of the text that is
pertinent to Mencius's response to Mohism. In contrast to the
Analects, the ruler's duties to care for his people are more
frequently discussed and play a more prominent role in the conception
of a ruler's moral excellence. Mencius is portrayed in this text as
very much engaged in getting the kings of Chinese states to stop
mistreating their subjects, to stop drafting their subjects into
their wars of territorial expansion, and to avoid overtaxing them to
finance their wars and lavish projects. At the same time, Mencius's
assertion that the king is able to extend the kind of concern he
showed the ox toward his own people is a reply to those who advocate
Yangism on the grounds that acting for one's own sake is natural.
Mencius holds that natural compassion is a part of human nature. The
task of moral self-cultivation is the task of “extending”
what is natural. What is natural, or at least more so, is properly
acting toward the aged and the young in one's family and then
extending that to the aged and the young in other families.
Extension is necessary because natural compassion is uneven compared
to where it ought to extend. King Xuan may find it natural to have
compassion for an innocent man about to be executed or a terrified ox
about to be slaughtered, but not toward all his subjects when he is
focusing on the benefits that a war of territorial expansion might
bring him. This story of Mencius, the King, and the ox is rich
material for reflection on the nature of moral development. It seems
plausible that development must begin with something that is of the
right nature to be shaped into the moral virtues, and also plausible
that what we begin with is not as it fully should be. The questions
posed by the story is what the natural basis of morality is and how
further development occurs. Mencius's theory of the
“four duan” addresses these
questions. “Duan” literally means “tip of
something” and is often translated as “beginnings”
in this context.
What are the four beginnings of morality? In 2A6 human nature
(ren xing) it is said that no person is devoid of a heart
(the word for heart in Chinese stands for the seat of thinking and
feeling, hence often translated as “the mind”) sensitive
to the suffering of others, and to illustrate this beginning, Mencius
asks us to suppose that a man were suddenly to see a young child
about to fall into a well. Such a man would certainly be moved to
compassion, not because he wanted to get in the good graces of the
parents, nor because he wished to win the praise of his fellow
villagers or friends, nor yet because he disliked the cry of the
child. This natural compassion can develop into the virtue of
ren (in Mencius, ren is more often a particular
virtue that concerns caring and hence is often translated as
“benevolence”). A second beginning is the heart that feels
shame in certain situations, e.g., in 6A10, Mencius says that if rice
and soup are offered after being trampled upon, even a beggar would
disdain them. Under the right conditions, innate shame develops into
the virtue of
yi or righteousness—being able to do the right thing.
The third beginning is the heart that feels courtesy,e.g., the
younger sometimes instinctively knows to respect and be courteous to
the older. Under the right conditions, courtesy develops into
li, which as a virtue consists in the observance of the
rites or the virtue of ritual propriety. And finally, there is the
heart that has a sense of right and wrong (shi/fei, the
thing to do or not to do). Under the right conditions, this sense of
approval and disapproval develops into wisdom, which includes having
a grasp of the spirit behind moral rules so that one knows how to be
flexible in applying them.
It is important to note that Mencian beginnings of morality are not
just blind feelings or primitive urges to act in certain ways, but
contain within them certain intuitive judgments about what is right
and wrong, what is to be disdained and what is deferential, respectful
behavior. In the example of the beggar who does not accept food that
has been trampled upon, it seems that Mencius is suggesting we have an
original, unlearned sense that allows us to judge the sort of respect
that is due to ourselves as human beings. Similarly, in suggesting
that we have an unlearned sense of deference, Mencius is suggesting
that we have an unlearned sense of what is due to others such as
elders and our parents. Mencius's theory tallies with some of the more
recent theories of emotion that point toward the intertwining of
cognitive and affective dimensions (the theory does not necessarily
imply, however, that the affective amounts to nothing more than the
cognitive, as shall be discussed later).
The Mencius contains different metaphors that convey a view
of human nature as the basis for moral development. On one metaphor,
used in a debate with rival philosopher Gaozi in 6A2, the inborn
goodness of human nature is like the tendency of water to flow
downward. The metaphor implies that human beings develop virtues in
the absence of abnormal interference such as water being damned up or
struck so that it splashes upward. On the other way of conceiving
ethical development, the four beginnings are more like barley sprouts
that need nurture analogous to sun, water, and fertile soil (6A7).
That these two conceptions are significantly different can be seen
through the recognition that “growing” conditions for the sprouts are
not necessarily provided in the normal course of affairs.
In some passages, extension is characterized as a matter of simply
preserving or not losing what is given to one at birth (4B12, 4B19,
4B28, 6A10, 6A11), and such passages accord with the water metaphor in
suggesting that moral development happens in the absence of abnormal
interference. In other places, the thinking seems to be more in
accord with the sprout metaphor and identifies conditions for moral
development that go well beyond noninterference: kings are held
responsible for providing for their subjects a constant means of
livelihood (1A7) that enables them to support parents and nurture wife
and children; kings must also ensure the appropriate moral education
about filial piety, about the duties that rulers and subjects owe to
each other and about respect for the elder. Mencius furthermore
recognized natural predispositions other than the four beginnings that
could potentially lead human beings astray. He mentions the desires of
the senses in this regard (6A15). This is why Mencius places
responsibility on everyone to si (reflect on, turn over in
one's mind) (6A14, 6A15) the manifestations of the four
beginnings. With such reflection, human beings can recognize that
virtue takes precedence over satisfaction of potentially conflicting
desires and feelings (e.g., the priority of righteousness over the
desire for life if one cannot have both), but lack of reflection will
stunt moral development (6A9). If the deprivation of nourishing
conditions is severe enough, the sprouts can be killed off
(6A8). Thus, while Mencius is often characterized superficially by his
saying that human nature is good (6A6), he means (at least when his
thinking is guided by the sprout metaphor) that it contains
predispositions to feel and act in morally appropriate ways and to
make intuitive normative judgments that can with the right nurturing
conditions give human beings guidance as to the proper emphasis to be
given to the desires of the senses (see Shun, 1997; Van Norden, 2004,
2007).
It is not surprising that there should be the kind of ambiguity
expressed by the juxtaposition of the water and sprout metaphors in
Mencius. A very common contemporary conception of the innate comes
very close to the implications of the water metaphor, i.e., that which
develops under normal conditions. On the other hand, we are also
capable of recognizing that other things develop under a narrower or
much more contingent (not necessarily realized in the normal course of
affairs) set of conditions. A barley sprout develops only if human
beings plant it in the right kind of soil and put effort into
cultivating it. Yet it seems intuitively correct to say that its
direction of growth is innate. If the conditions for growth are
realized, it will become a barley plant, not a corn plant.
Contemporary thinking about the innate bases of morality also shows
this range of thinking. Claims that morality is constrained by an
innate universal grammar (e.g., Hauser, 2008; Mikhail, 2011) seem
closer to the idea that the moral (or its underlying universal
structure) develops under normal conditions; other conceptions
acknowledge more of a role for contingent factors (Nichols, 2004;
Haidt and Bjorklund 2008). The ambiguity in Mencius' thought, then,
anticipates contemporary swings in thinking about the relative roles
of what human beings are born with and what they acquire through
learning, experience and culture.
Much of what is fascinating in Mencius lies in his explorations of how
moral learning takes place and how this learning might also interact
with emotion. Consider now in combination the theme that the
cognitive and affective go into the constitution of emotion and the
theme that the emotional beginnings of morality can be extended
through provision of the right kind of nurture. What is necessary for
extension? Is cognitive extension, i.e., more moral knowledge,
sufficient? The answer to this question depends on the nature of the
intertwining between the cognitive and affective in emotions. Consider
again the story of King Xuan and the ox. Mencius expresses confidence
in King Xuan's ability to have compassion for his people, based on his
act of compassion for the ox. Here the question of whether cognitive
extension is sufficient emerges in the concrete. Was it sufficient for
Mencius to have reminded the king that he has even more of a reason to
spare his people from suffering than he had to spare the ox from
suffering (more reason because Mencius clearly ranks the interests of
animals below those of human beings, and because for him there is a
good moral reason for the performance of ritual sacrifices)? Logical
consistency alone cannot be expected to provide motivation, as David
Nivison has pointed out (1996), but then what is Mencius trying to do
with the King if not move him through logic?
Nowhere in the Mencius is there enough said to point to a
definitive interpretation on this matter, but various reconstructions
of possible positions can be given. Perhaps the King's innate nature
contains all the motivation he needs, and all that Mencius is doing is
reminding him that he has the motivation to spare his people. This
interpretation seems roughly in accord with Mencius' likening moral
development to water flowing downward: it will proceed unless
interfered with. Perhaps the King's nature needs some degree of
transformation that starts with the sort of compassion he can feel for
a terrified ox or an innocent man about to be executed and then
expands the scope of that compassion to more of its appropriate
objects. This interpretation seems roughly in accord with Mencius'
likening moral development to the growth of sprouts that need the
appropriate water, soil and cultivation efforts. (See Im, 1999,
Ivanhoe, 2002, Shun, 1997, Wong, 2002, Van Norden, 2007, and McRae
2011 for a range of different possible positions that could be
attributed to Mencius).
What seems philosophically fruitful about the Xuan and ox story is
that it portrays an attempt at moral teaching of the kind that
actually occurs in the moral life, and the ambiguity that it presents
to the reader is fruitful precisely because it is not a completely
theorized story. We are not told exactly what Mencius is trying to do
with the King in terms of a theory of the nature of emotions and the
relation between the cognitive and affective. Rather, we are led to
reflect on the most plausible possibilities in trying to arrive at a
reconstruction of what might have been meant by the text, as well as
what might be the most illuminating position on its own merits. The
story is particularly intriguing for those philosophers who believe in
the possibility that learning can influence emotion.
What about the priority of filial loyalty over loyalty to the larger
community? How does Mencius's theory of human nature address this
point of contention between the Mohists and the Confucians? Mencius's
response to the Mohists draws from his theory of human nature as
containing not only the beginnings of affective motivations for being
moral but also intuitive judgments about what is right and about what
deserves the feeling of shame. His question to a Mohist, Yizi, is how
Yizi can justify providing his deceased parents a special burial when
the Mohist prescriptions are for a plain burial for anyone. Yizi's
reply is to quote from the Book of History: the sage-kings
treated all their subjects as if they were their new-born children.
Yizi's interpretation of this saying is that there should be no
distinctions in one's concern for people, though the practice of it
may begin with one's parents (this may be an expression of the
distinction between having equal concern and accepting practice that
allow unequal treatment as long as the total system of practices can
be justified on the basis of equal concern for all). Mencius's
counter-reply is to ask whether Yizi really holds that a person loves
his elder brother's son no more than his neighbor's baby. This is not
just an assertion about what people tend to feel but also an assertion
about what people intuitively hold to be right to feel and to do. Then
Mencius makes a puzzling remark to the effect that Yizi is singling
out a special feature in a certain case: “when a new-born babe
creeps toward a well, it is not its fault.” This last part of
Mencius's response is puzzling because Yizi did not say anything about
a baby and a well. One possibility is that Yizi may have obliquely
referred to Mencius's claim that all have the original and unlearned
feeling of distress at seeing a child about to fall into a well. In
other words, Yizi might have been challenging Mencius by asking,
“Does not your own postulated unlearned compassion require us to
treat that child the same way, regardless of whose child it is?”
This way of taking Yizi helps makes sense of Mencius's reply. First,
he points out what he takes to be the indisputably greater affection
one feels for elder brother's son over one's neighbor's baby. Mencius
grants that we all respond to a child about to fall into the well with
alarm and distress, and it doesn't matter whose child it is. However,
one cannot infer from this one special situation that we ought to have
equal concern for everyone in all situations. The case of the
child about to fall into the well has a special feature that makes it
relevant to treat it as one would any child. That special feature
seems to be innocence.
The Mencian position is premised on the principle that it is right to
treat all people alike only when the ways they are alike are the most
ethically relevant features of the situation. We should do the same
thing only when the similarities between two cases are the most
ethically relevant features of the situation. Mencius believes that
in many instances, the presence or absence of a family relationship
to a person is the most relevant feature (in deciding which children
to give gifts, the fact that one child is one's elder brother's son
and the other child is one's neighbor's child may be the most
relevant feature). In other types of situations, such as a child
about to fall into a well, it is the innocence that children share
that is the most relevant feature. That is why it is proper to feel
alarm or distress toward any child in that situation. The implied
application of this idea to the sage-kings' treatment of the people
is that these kings treated all people alike insofar as they did not
deserve the harm about to befall them.
Two issues arise from this response to Mohism. One issue is whether
Mencius has sufficient warrant to trust the kinds of intuitive
judgments he attributes to human nature. Mencius holds that the
beginnings of morality are sent by Heaven, but in the absence of such
a metaphysical warrant, can these intuitive judgments be accepted,
particularly the ones that underwrite love with distinctions? Doubt
about the metaphysical warrant may not doom Mencius's response to
Mohism, however, if one holds that all normative theories ultimately
depend on intuitive judgments and if one has no good reason to be
skeptical about these judgments. Thus one might hold that whether or
not there is a metaphysical warrant, there is a great deal of
plausibility to the intuitive judgment about owing parents more
concern because they are the source of one's life and nurturance. Of
course one might also hold, as Mencius appears to hold, that people
are owed concern in virtue of their being human, and the possibility
for conflict of duties arises from these different sources of
concern. The second issue is how the Mencius text deals with
conflicts of the sort exemplified by the sheep-stealing case in the
Analects.
The text contains themes embodying the theme of filial loyalty, and
as in the Analects, such loyalty takes precedence over
public justice. 7A35 tells a story about the sage-emperor Shun that
illustrates this theme. Because Shun was renowned for his filial
piety, Mencius is asked what Shun would have done if his father
killed a man. Mencius replies that Shun could not stop the judge from
apprehending his father because the judge had the legal authority to
act. But then, Mencius says, Shun would have abdicated and fled with
his father to the edge of the sea. 5A2 and 5A3 describe the way that
Shun dealt with his half-brother Xiang's conspiring with his father
and stepmother to kill him. He enfeoffed Xiang because all he could
do as a brother is to love him. At the same time, Shun appointed
officials to administer the fief and to collect taxes and tributes,
to protect the people of Youbi from Xiang's potentially abusive
ruling. That is why some called Shun's act a banishment of Xiang.
However, the Shun stories exhibit a complexity that differentiates
them from the story of the sheep-stealing coverup in the
Analects. Though filial loyalty is clearly given a priority
in each story, there is in Shun's actions an acknowledgment of the
other value that comes into conflict with filial loyalty. Though Shun
ultimately gives priority to filial loyalty in the case of his
father, his first action acknowledges the value of public justice by
declining to interfere with the judge while he is king. While Shun
declines to punish his half-brother, he protects the people of
Xiang's new fiefdom.
These Shun stories illustrate that an agent's response to a situation
in which important values come into conflict need not be a strict
choice between honoring one value and wholly denying the other. While
some sort of priority might have to be set in the end, there are also
ways to acknowledge the value that is subordinated, but how exactly
that is to be done seems very much a matter of judgment in the
particular situation at hand. The Shun stories are an expression of
the Confucian theme that rightness cannot be judged on the basis of
exceptionless general principles but a matter of judgment in the
particular situation. It is difficult to see how this theme can be
taught except by the way it is done in the Mencius: through
exemplars of how it is done, and where the situation is presented
through some kind of narrative.
The characteristic form of reasoning in Mencius is analogical
reasoning. Starting from what seems true in one case and
“extending” similar conclusions to another case that has
similar conclusions. The trick in doing analogical reasoning
correctly, as suggested earlier, is to extend the similar conclusions
only when the two cases share ethically relevant and decisive
features. The Mencius 4A17 shows a similar concern for
treating like cases alike. Mencius grants that to save the life of
one's drowning sister-in-law, one of course suspends the customary
rule of propriety prohibiting the touching of man and woman when they
are giving and receiving. Another philosopher proposes to apply this
idea of suspending the usual rules of propriety to save something
else from drowning—the entire Empire! Mencius replies that one
saves one's sister-in-law with one's hand but cannot save the Empire
from drowning in chaos and corruption with one's hand. The Empire can
only be pulled out by the Way. Mencius is rejecting the analogy
between compromising on ritual propriety to save the country and
compromising on propriety to save one's sister-in-law. There is a
relevant dissimilarity between the case of the drowning sister-in-law
and saving the country: one cannot save the Empire through
compromises of ritual propriety, but instead by following the Way,
which itself involves following ritual propriety.
So what do we do when we confront a problematic case in the present
and we do not automatically know what the right thing to do is?
Mencius believes we can rely on past cases in which we have made
reliable judgments about, for example, what is right and shameful.
These reliable judgments made in past cases serve as paradigms or
exemplars of correct ethical judgment. In encountering new
problem situations, we determine what sort of ethical reaction to the
new situation is correct by asking which of the cases in which we've
had paradigm judgments are relevantly similar. We then determine what
reactions to the new situations would be sufficiently similar to the
relevant paradigm judgments. Analogical reasoning is careful
attention and comparing to a concrete paradigm. The pool of
paradigm ethical judgments we have not only includes cases from our
own personal experience, but also include the experience of others,
especially those who serve as models of wise judgment. The stories of
sage-king Shun in the Mencius text seem to give us such
paradigms. Shun's judgments on what to do about conflicts between
filial loyalty and public justice are perhaps meant to serve as
paradigm judgments. The conception of moral reasoning found in the
Mencius offers important material for reflection on the
process of moral judgment, especially for those who have come to
reject the simple model of judgment as deduction from premises
including a general moral principle and a description of the
conditions that make the principle applicable to the situation at
hand. The Mencian picture includes general moral considerations or
values that bear on the situation at hand, such as the importance of
family loyalty and public justice, but the picture also suggests that
judgment in difficult situations includes finding a way to adequate
recognize and realize the values in play. “Finding a way”
seems much more a matter of imagination and ingenuity rather than
deduction, but the Mencian picture also suggests that we can be
guided by exemplars of wise judgment. Identifying the relevant
similarities and dissimilarities between these exemplars and one's
present situation seems a matter of perception and close attention
rather than deduction from principle.
2.6 Xunzi versus Mencius on human nature and the origins of morality
In the Xing E (“[Human] Nature is Bad”) chapter, Xunzi
explicitly opposes his position on human nature to Mencius's. He
asserts that far from being good, human nature is bad because it
includes a love of profit, envy and hatred, and desires of the eyes
and ears that lead to violence and anarchy. To avoid these
consequences of indulging our spontaneous desires and impulses, it
takes wei (conscious activity or deliberate effort), models
and teaching, and guidance through observing ritual and yi
(standards of righteousness). Through such efforts, natural emotions
and desires are transformed as a crooked piece of wood is steamed and
then straightened upon a press frame. All rituals and standards of
righteousness are sheng (generated, produced) by the sages.
These are generated from the conscious activity of the sages and not
from their original nature. Just as the vessel made by a potter is
generated from his conscious activity and not his original nature, so
the sages accumulated their thoughts and ideas and made a practice of
conscious activity and precedents, thereby generating rituals and
standards of righteousness.
Part of Xunzi's argument against Mencius is that human nature is not
what is produced by conscious activity but rather that which is
already there in human beings independently of conscious activity.
Since it is clear that human beings are not already good but must work
at it, it is clear that human nature cannot be good. When Mencius is
attributed the water-metaphor view of the human inclination toward
goodness, Xunzi's criticism has a point. Becoming good does not seem
to be merely a matter of not interfering with what will unfold in
normal circumstances. However, when Mencius is attributed the
sprout-metaphor view, the differences between him and Xunzi are more
subtle. On the sprout-metaphor view, effort and reflection must be
put into the project of extending the sprouts to where they should be.
It might be thought that one of the real differences between Mencius
and Xunzi is that the former believes the necessary effort lies in
growing or extending what lies in human nature, whereas the latter
beieves that the effort lies in remaking and reshaping what lies in
human nature. Perhaps one believes that we can go “with the grain” of
what we are born with, and the other believes we must go “against the
grain.”
Each thinker emphasizes one of these opposing directions,
but it is a credit to the subtlety and power of their views that each
also takes into account the direction that the other
emphasizes. Mencius acknowledges that moral development is hindered
when a person pays more attention to the “small” parts of the self
that include desires for sensual and material satisfaction and fails
to use the heart-mind to reflect on the great parts that have
normative priority. In the chapter on rituals, Xunzi identifies
natural and powerful emotional dispositions such as love of one's own
kind that rituals must give expression to and that seem to form more
of a positive basis for moral development. Such natural love is
expressed in love for parents and intense grief upon their deaths,
which must be given appropriate expression in mourning and burial
rituals. Thus Mencius acknowledges that there are natural parts of
the self that must be disciplined and held in check while Xunzi
acknowledges that there are natural parts that are largely congenial
to morality in the sense that they are the natural basis for taking
great satisfaction and contentment in virtue once one has gotten the
self-aggrandizing desires and emotions under control.
Another disagreement between Mencius and Xunzi has to do with Mencius'
claim that human nature contains moral predispositions. As indicated
earlier, such Mencian predispositions appear to contain moral
intuitions (e.g., about what is shameful and right or wrong). On one
plausible interpretation of Mencius, morality is part of the order
imparted to the world by tian or heaven. By contrast, Xunzi
seems to rule out the existence of natural predispositions with moral
content when he claims that the sage kings generated ritual principles
and precepts of moral duty. One natural interpretation of “generated”
is “created” or “invented.” On these interpretations of each thinker,
the contrast between Mencius and Xunzi exemplifies the contrast
between a robust moral realism that has moral properties such as
rightness existing independently of human invention and a
constructivist position that makes moral properties dependent on human
invention.
The interpretation of Xunzi as a constructivist does not
necessarily commit him to a denial of the objectivity of morality or
to the denial that there is a single objectively correct morality. It
is possible to see Xunzi as a constructivist about morality but also
as an objectivist (see Nivison, 1991). On the constructivist
interpretation, Xunzi holds a functional conception of morality,
according to which it is invented to harmonize the interests of
individuals and to constrain and transform the heedless pursuit of
short-term gratification for the sake of promoting the long-term
interests of the individual and the group. Ritual principles and moral
precepts are invented to accomplish such a function, and human nature
constrains which of the possible principles and precepts are better or
worse for accomplishing that function. Xunzi's point about the
mourning rituals prescribed by Confucians being suited to the nature
of human love for one's parents is a case in point.
Xunzi's functional theory of morality bears added interest for those
exploring the possibilities of a naturalistic approach to morality.
One fairly common interpretation of Xunzi's conception
of tian or heaven is that it is an order-giving force in the
cosmos that is neutral to whatever human beings have come to regard as
right and good. In fact, a translation that better conveys such a
meaning for ‘tian’ is “nature,” which
is the translation given by Knoblock's valued translation of
the Xunzi. Textual passages that support this interpretation
stress that tian operates according to patterns that remain
constant no matter what human beings do or whether they appeal to it
for good fortune (chapter 17). It is the proper task of human beings
to understand what these patterns are in order to take advantage of
them (e.g., so that they may know to plow in the spring, weed in the
summer, harvest in the fall, and store in the winter).
Such a view of the difference between Xunzi and Mencius, however,
depends on interpretations that been disputed in favor of alternative
interpretations. Roger Ames (1991, 2002) defends an interpretation of
Mencius that gives the greatest role in shaping the direction of moral
development to human “creative social intelligence” rather
than tian conceived as a force operating independently of
human beings. For a contrasting view, see Irene Bloom (1994, 1997,
2002), who, sometimes in response to Ames, defends a greater role for
biology in her interpretation of Mencius while also leaving an
important role for culture. The Xunzi text is also
susceptible to very different interpretations, partly because of the
originality of its synthesis of several streams of thought:
Confucianism, Daoism, Mohism, and the Jixia Academy. When Xunzi
asserts that tian is unresponsive to human supplication and
ritual sacrifice, it looks as if he might be drawing from Daoism (see
below), but when he refers to the tian-given faculties human
beings should exercise to solve the problem of conflict, he might be
interpreted as implying that tian conferred these faculties
upon human beings for the purpose of solving the problem of
conflict and realizing fulfilling human lives together (see Eno 1990;
and Machle, 1993 for an exploration of the rich interpretive
possibilities regarding Xunzi's conception of tian). While
it might still be possible to interpret Xunzi as a constructivist on
the origin of morality, this alternative interpretation might suggest
that Xunzi's tian had a blueprint it intended human beings to
fulfill. Under alternative interpretations of Mencius and Xunzi,
then, the differences do not disappear, but they might form even more
subtle contrasts.
Even some of the theoretical difficulties that Xunzi has are
instructive. In pressing his case against Mencius for the badness of
human nature, he stresses the self-serving drives of human nature.
Unlike Hobbes, he does not accept that human beings are inevitably
motivated by self-interest, and he does not try to base adherence to
moral norms on the basis of self-interest alone. This arguably is a
promising move, given the heavy criticism that can be directed
against the Hobbesian project and subsequent attempts to carry it out
its basic idea (see Gauthier, 1986 for such an attempt; see
Vallentyne, 1991 for criticism). Xunzi rather argues that the
problems created by unrestrained self-interest point to the need to
transform human motivation. People can come to love moral virtue and
the rites for their own sakes, and this is necessary, on Xunzi's
view, for a stable solution to the problem of conflict between
self-interested individuals. At times, Xunzi suggests that the
intellect can override the desires arising from the natural emotions,
but it remains unclear as to how self-regarding motivations can
become a love of virtue and the rites simply because the intellect
approves of them. The parts of Xunzi asserting a more complex picture
of human motivation suggest a solution. If human beings are capable
of genuine compassion and concern for others, as the chapter on rites
suggests, then the ritual principles and moral precepts invented by
the sage kings have some motivational leverage for the birth of a
love of virtue and rites. Such a solution draws from what
are arguably some of the most plausible positions of Mencius: that
human beings are capable of altruism and compassion even if they are
motivated much of the time by self-interest; and that moral
transformation is a matter of cultivating and extending a
motivational substance that is congenial to morality.
Mencius and Xunzi, then, offer sophisticated theories that expand the
range of possible ways of understanding moral knowledge, motivation,
and the nature of morality itself. Mencius presents an interesting
conception of the way that we reason by analogy from intuitive
judgments and also a plausible conception of innate predispositions
that are compatible with a major role for learning and upbringing in
the development of character and virtue. Those who are more
naturalistically inclined in their approach to morality (at least
insofar as this involves resisting the idea of a transcendent source
of moral properties) may find Xunzi's functional conception of
morality appealing, especially if it allows for a degree of
objectivity regarding the content of morality.
2.7 Confucianism and the situationist problem for virtue ethics
In recent years, Gilbert Harman (1998–99, 1999–2000) and John Doris
(2002) have pointed to the influence of situations over attitude and
behavior as a problem for virtue ethics. Citing empirical work in
social psychology, Harman and Doris claim that the extensive and
surprising influence of situational factors undermines the commonsense
idea that people possess stable character traits that explain what
they do. Some of the classic psychological studies used in this
argument appear to show that ordinary respectable American citizens
will administer dangerous electrical shocks to an innocent person when
urged to do so by an experimenter in a lab coat (Milgram 1974), and
that being late for an appointment is the most influential factor in
whether a seminary student will stop and help someone who seems to be
falling ill, even if the appointment is to attend a lecture on the
Good Samaritan (Darley and Batson 1973). Such studies pose a problem
not only for the commonsense conception of character traits, but also
for virtue ethics, which appear to assume the possibility of
achieving stable character traits that are virtues. Perhaps human
beings are inevitably creatures who are influenced by the situation in
which they act and not by any characterlogical dispositions they bring
with them to the situation. If so, it appears that the ideal of
attaining virtues is misguided.
There are good reasons to expect Confucianism to offer some
distinctive resources for dealing with this problem. First, as
pointed out in 2.3, Confucians appreciate the relational nature of
human life: who we are as persons very much includes our social
context: the people with whom we are in relationship and our
institutions and practices. So they are very much in a position to
appreciate situational influences on how human beings think, feel, and
act. Second, they appear to hold something like a conception of
virtues as stable character traits that are resistant to undue
situational influences. As noted in 2.3, and this pertains to the
challenge posed by the Milgram study, the Confucians emphasize the
importance of living according to one's own understanding of what is
right and good even if others do not see it the same way. Third, as
noted at the beginning of this entry, Chinese philosophy in general is
distinguished by a focus on the practical. This is illustrated in the
Confucian case by the tradition of scholar-officials who not only
wrote about and taught the importance of the ethical to the political
life, but strove to enact this importance in their own careers. As a
consequence, they were very much concerned with specifying in
practical terms how one could go about cultivating the virtues in
oneself. Fourth, and this is very much in response to the combination
of the previous points, they describe a long and arduous program of
ethical training to inculcate the virtues.
As Edward Slingerland (2011) has put it, Confucianism is in a good
position to appreciate the “high bar” challenge of situational
influence to the project of cultivating the virtues in oneself and
others. In response to this challenge, their program of ethical
training includes study of the classics (after the ancient period, the
classics came to include, of course, the Analects and
the Mencius), memorized and rehearsed until they become fully
internalized and embedded in the unconscious patterns of thought that
are so powerful in shaping what we do in everyday life (see
Slingerland 2009). This is one characteristic pattern of Confucian
self-cultivation: one consciously, deliberately and assiduously
undertakes a program that inculcates dispositions to have ethically
appropriate emotional responses and patterns of conduct. The intent
is to make the dispositions for these responses reliable and resistant
to undue situational influence.
Furthermore, the Confucians very much appreciated the power of models
to inspire, to make one want to transcend one's present self. The
psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2003) has given empirical evidence for an
emotion he calls “elevation,” which is something like awe and
admiration upon contemplating the morally admirable.
The Analects, in fact, has been read as a record of how a group
of men gathered around a teacher with the power to elevate, and as a
record of how this group created a culture in which goals of
self-transformation were treated as collaborative projects. These
people not only discussed the nature of self-cultivation but enacted
it as a relational process in which they supported one another,
reinforced their common goals, and served as checks on each other in
case they went off the path, the dao. They were each other's
situational influences. See Sarkissian, 2010 for the argument that
Confucius shows how one can turn the power of situations on people's
attitudes and behavior toward positive ends; if situations can
influence people, one can through small details of comportment and
attitude be a situational influence on others that tilts
things toward a better course.
Training in ritual, li, takes on another dimension of
importance in light of the situationist problem. As noted in section
2.2 Confucian rituals help to express attitudes of respect and
reverence for others that can exist independently of the rituals
themselves, but rituals provide conventionally established, symbolic
ways to express these attitudes toward others. Ritual forms,
therefore, give participants manifold and (just as importantly)
regularly recurring ways to act on and therefore to strengthen the
right attitudes and behavioral dispositions. Given the renewed
appreciation in contemporary psychology for the power of emotions to
influence attitude and behavior, the resource offered by ritual
training should not be ignored by anyone concerned about the problem
of how to resist undue situational influence.
Finally, Confucianism points to the possibility that individuals,
under the right circumstances and encouragement, can enhance their
reflective control of their own emotions and impulses. Mencius'
conversation with King Xuan can be conceived as an attempt to get the
king to nourish his moral sprouts by reflecting on them, to become
aware of what his moral emotions are (such as compassion) and to take
action to grow them. It should be noted that contemporary psychology
is exploring some possible venues for the regulation of one's
emotions and impulses. See Walter Mischel's by-now classic study
(1989) of children who are able to defer gratification for greater
reward in the future (here's one marshmallow; if you can wait fifteen
minutes before you eat it you can have another one). It turns out the
effective delayers use strategies of diverting their attentional focus
from the marshmallow sitting in front of them. Projects are underway
to teach children these strategies. See Lieberman (2011) and Creswell
(2007) for studies indicating that meditation focused on cultivating
compassion in oneself can be effective through enhancing one's ability
to identify and gain better control of one's emotions.
Finally, in considering why robust character traits that could
qualify as virtues are so rare, we should consider the perspective
that very much informs the self-cultivation projects of Confucius and
his students. They were very much aware of the lack of virtue as a
social and political condition and not merely as an individual
condition that just happened to be widespread (Hutton 2006 makes this
point). There is a reason why Confucius and Mencius after him sought
to have kings adopt their teachings. If in fact the achievement of
robust virtues requires long and hard training, supported and guided
by others who have taken similar paths before, and if as Mencius 1A7
holds, people cannot engage in such training until they have the
material security that enables them to take their minds off the sheer
task of survival, then it is no mystery at all why there are no such
traits in societies structured to achieve very different
goals. Ironically, the situationist psychological experiments do not
take into account this underlying relational factor that might deeply
influence the ability of people to form robust virtues, and neither do
the philosophical critics of virtue ethics who rely on the
situationist experimental evidence.
2.8 Neo-Confucian theories of morality and their grounding in a cosmology
Zhu Xi (1130–1200) reinterpreted ethical themes inherited from
the classical thinkers and grounded them in a cosmology and
metaphysics that had absorbed the influence of Buddhism, particularly
as it transformed in its interaction with Daoism when entering China
(see the chapters on Zhu Xi and Wang Yang Ming in Ivanhoe, 1993 for
the neo-Confucian reaction Buddhism and Daoism). Zhu established the
Confucian canon that served as a basis for the Chinese civil service
examination, including the Analects and Mencius,
along with the Great Learning (Da Xue) and
Doctrine of the Mean (Zhong Yong). In fact, he had
his greatest influence through the commentaries he wrote on these
texts (see Gardner, 2003 for a discussion of the influence of Zhu Xi's
reading of the Analects). Zhu affirmed the Mencian theme that
human nature is good, with greater emphasis on that vein of thought in
the Mencius that stresses that goodness is internal to human
beings and will develop in the absence of interference. This reading
of Mencius is unsurprising given the influence of Buddhism on the
Neo-Confucians, and it meant the demotion of Xunzi within the
influential Neo-Confucian reading of the tradition. Much of Zhu's
metaphysics centers on the relation between li (in this case
not ritual but principle or pattern or the fit and coherence between
things) and qi (the material force or energy stuff from which
objects emerge and return at the end of their existence). How Zhu Xi
conceived this relation is a matter of interpretive debate. Some view
him as holding a dualistic metaphysics in analogy to the way that
Plato's distinction between the Forms and the sensible world is often
taken to embody a metaphysical dualism (Fung, 1948, chapter
25). However, others interpret Zhu's li not as ontologically
prior to qi but rather as being a pattern or deep structure
that is immanent within and expressed by qi and delineates
the range and possibilities of qi's transformations (Graham,
1986; Thompson, 1988). Others have noted that li appears to
have both subjective and objective aspects: it lays down the lines
along which everything moves in a way that is independent of personal
desires; but on the other hand, it is related to the pattern of one's
profoundest responses to things (see Angle, 2009, for an attempt to
reconcile these aspects). With regard to qi, Zhu Xi held
that even though goodness is within human nature, individuals differed
with respect to their native endowment of energy stuff, and that this,
togther with differences in their family and social circumstances,
affected the development of their good natures.
Zhu Xi saw one's self-cultivation as a matter of apprehending the
li of one's own mind, largely through meditation practice,
and, at the same time, investigating the li or patterns of
things not only as revealed in texts such as the Analects
but as embodied in concrete situations, including the patterns in
relationships between persons. Both kinds of activities must be
conducted with jing, which in Zhu's thought means respectful
attention. Zhu is sometimes characterized as a kind of scholastic,
but he emphasized study of the texts in conjunction with acting, with
observing li in external situations and relationships, and
realizing the correspondence between the li of one's own
mind and the li of texts and of situations and
relationships. Apprehending li in a concrete situation in
order to respond appropriately to it was not a simple matter of
absorbing generalizations from texts and applying it to the
situation, but rather a matter of bringing to bear a mind that has
been cultivated by meditation and by study of the texts and by
observing and acting in previous situations. Such a mind can take
into account relevant ethical considerations and is disciplined in
attending to the situation (see the chapter on Zhu Xi in Ivanhoe,
1993; and Gardner, 1990).
The other Neo-Confucian whose influence rivals that of Zhu Xi is Wang
Yang Ming (1472–1529). Wang saw Zhu's emphasis on the
investigation of patterns in external things as overly scholastic and
leading to abstract speculation rather than practical guidance. He
rejected what he saw to be the intellectualization of personal
realization, and identified the mind with li (xin ji
li or mind is pattern or principle). This means that the
dispositions to judge properly the appropriate action in various
situations constitute the mind's original pure state. Li is
not to be sought as a pattern residing in an independently existing
external world but embodied in judgments of the mind (this seems to
commit Wang to an identification of the world with the experienced
world and to a denial of a mind-independent world). Wang's version of
the Mencian theme that human nature is good is therefore even more
innatist than Zhu Xi's (see Ivanhoe, 1990, for a
comparison of Mencius and Wang Yang Ming). Original goodness does not
need completion through learning about the external world. Then why
aren't all people fully good? Why are some very bad? Wang's answer is
that selfish desires cloud the sun of the complete and perfect moral
mind, and that the task of human beings is to eliminate selfish
desires and recover that mind (Chan, 1963, sections 21, 62).
One of Wang's better-known themes is the unity of knowledge and
action. There can be no gap between knowing what to do and doing it.
Genuine knowledge is necessarily practical. Selfish desires and
emotions get in the way of achieving genuine knowledge. One way of
understanding this identification is to take knowledge as a knowing
how to act that is expressed in acting. One expresses one's knowing
how to ride a bicycle by riding, not by articulating propositions
about how to ride a bicycle that one might not be able to act upon.
Furthermore, knowledge is particularist and context-sensitive in
nature and is expressed in intuitive reactions to the present moment.
Knowing how to ride a bicycle is continually reacting by shifting
one's body first this way and then that way to the changing center of
gravity of one's body in tandem with the bicycle. The moral life, on
Wang's view, is like that rather than applying a static set of
generalizations one learns before encountering the situations in
which one needs to act. Notice also that the kinesthetic sensations
blend seamlessly with the bodily responses to those sensations that
help one to go forward and keep one's balance on a bicycle. In
genuine moral knowledge, perception of the situation at hand blends
seamlessly with the right response to it.
In emphasizing that the ultimate ideal is a kind of spontaneous and
intuitive perceiving of the situation and the right response to it,
Wang Yang Ming joins with Zhu Xi. However, this does not mean that
there were not important dissenting voices. Dai Zhen defended an
ethical ideal in which deliberative reflection on the right thing to
do continues to play an important role and not just at stages in which
one is a considerable distance from realizing the ideal. Dai
particularly emphasizes the necessity for imagining the effects of
one's actions on others, which might help one better share their
sorrows and joys. Whereas Zhu equated spontaneous and non-conscious
identification with others as a reflection of the wholeheartedness of
one's motivations, Dai counters that needing to deliberate over the
right thing to do is compatible with a wholehearted acting on one's
judgment when one arrives at it. Dai is inclined to give desires for
the self a legitimate place in ethical reflection because he holds
that one's valuing of relationships can be strengthened when one
understands that the other's flourishing is tied up with one's own
(see Tiwald 2010, 2011a, 2011b).
3. Mohist Ethics
Mozi, as indicated earlier, advocated the doctrine of impartial
concern. The Mozi text does not make clear what this
doctrine amounts to in practice. Mozi criticizes partial-minded
people who do nothing positive for others if these others are not
related to them in the right way. Does this mean that to have
impartial concern is to have equal concern for others no matter what
one's relationship to them? Mozi's opposition to Confucianism might
be taken to imply a positive answer to this question. However, some
of Mozi's argumentation also presupposes that it is one's duty to see
that the needs of one's family are provided for. He discusses filial
piety as a virtue. This might suggest that one has special
responsibility for one's family and parents.
One way to reconcile these comments is to distinguish the requirement
that one have equal concern from the requirement that one treat
others equally. We might reasonably attribute the former to Mozi but
not the latter, so as to leave open the permissibility of individual
agents treating people unequally (this seems to have been the
position adopted by later Mohists in the so-called Mohist
Canons; see Fraser, 2007). This might be permissible if agents
are acting within a system of practices that can be justified as a
whole on the basis of equal concern for all people. For example,
suppose we have a system in which families have the resources to
satisfy the needs of their own members, or, if families or
individuals lack such resources on their own, they are given aid from
some common pool of resources. Chapter 19 makes explicit reference to
the need to provide for those without family to care for them. This
arrangement might seem morally acceptable from the standpoint of
equal concern for each person and at the same time allow for
individual agents to make extra efforts on behalf of their own family
members. Thus construed, Mozi's ethics is a kind of consequentialism
that measures rightness in terms of consequences, where each person's
welfare is to be considered equally, and where what is judged to be
right might be a practice as well as particular actions.
Because Confucian care with distinctions requires the extension of
care to non-kin, and because a reasonable interpretation or
reconstruction of Mozi's impartial concern would allow special
treatment of one's kin, there is not as dramatic a difference as one
might first think between Confucian and Mohist ethics on the
practical level. However, there might indeed be significant
differences when loyalty to kin and commitment to public justice come
into conflict, and certainly differences on the value of ritual
performance (though many Confucians might be unhappy with the Mohist
portrayal of their tradition as insisting on extravagantly expensive
ritual with musical accompaniment). One source of that difference
lies in the plurality of sources of duty in Confucianism, in contrast
to monistic Mohist consequentialism, where value comes down to the
promotion of benefit and avoidance of harm, where benefit and harm
are specified in fairly narrow ways. By contrast, consider the kind
of reasons given in the Analects for filial actions. One
reason is the duty to reciprocate great benefits. This reason emerges
in Analects 8.3, in which Zengzi is portrayed as near death.
He bids his students to look at his hands and feet, and quotes lines
from the Book of Odes to convey the idea that all his life he has
been keeping his body intact as part of his duty to his parents. In
17.21, Confucius defends the traditional three-year mourning period
for the death of parents, implying that a period shorter than three
years is inappropriate given that a child is completely dependent on
his parents for three years. For the Confucians, special
relationships create special duties that necessarily differ in their
source from duties to strangers outside the family and outside one's
state.
The Mozi is quite explicit in its consequentialism. Chapter
35 names three fa or standards for judging the viability of
beliefs and theories. One standard is of usefulness. In applying this
standard, one assesses the viability of a belief or theory according
to the beneficial or harmful consequences of acting on it. Another
standard is that of consulting the origin, which is the historical
record on the actions of the sage-kings. One determines whether the
belief or theory being judged accords with those actions. The third
standard is looking at evidence provided by the eyes and ears of the
people. This seems to refer to observations that garner some degree
of intersubjective consensus. Each standard is presented as if its
validity might be independent from the others, but there are
indications that the standard of usefulness is the most basic one.
For one thing, consulting the record of the sage-kings' actions
hardly seems to be a good idea in Mohist terms given the Mohist
objection to valuing tradition for its own sake, unless
these actions are good guides because they produced good results, a
historical judgment that was commonly accepted by otherwise disputing
philosophical schools. Furthermore, arguments given in the
Mozi that are purportedly based on intersubjective
observation seem extremely dubious, e.g., that ghosts exist because
stories are told about them very often. At one point in chapter 31,
in fact, the possibility that ghosts do not exist is explicitly
admitted, but sacrifices to spirits are justified on the grounds that
they produce good effects among the living. Ghosts in general are put
to good use in the text: their primary activity is to avenge
themselves upon the living persons who have done them wrong. The
standard of usefulness guides application of the other standards.
Even the attempted justification of the standard of usefulness by
reference to the will of tian or Heaven (in chapter 26) has
a suspect circularity to it. We are to promote benefits and avoid
harms because that is the will of Heaven, and Heaven's will is to be
relied upon because it is the wisest and noblest of all agents. But
what could be the criterion for a being's being wise and noble
exception the promotion of benefits and avoidance of harms?
Furthermore, the will of Heaven is demonstrated by the fact that
wrongdoers are punished and the virtuous rewarded. Again, the
evidence seems highly selective and is guided by the very standard of
usefulness that it is supposedly being justified.
Is Mohist consequentialism comparable to Western utilitarianism? They
are alike in that both kinds of ethic stress impartial concern and
judgment of what is right in terms of promoting benefit and avoiding
harm. Disanalogies are important here also. There is no attempt to
make explicit in the Mozi how exactly the consequences of alternative
actions or practices are to be compared against each other in
deciding what to do. This contrasts with contemporary forms of
utilitarianism that explicitly make maximizing the net greatest sum
total of good over bad the criterion of right action or practice (but
neither Mill nor Bentham were very explicit about this matter
either). Another difference is that Mozi's conception of benefit is
very concrete and relatively narrow, lacking in any psychological
dimension such as happiness. To promote benefits is to relieve
poverty, increase the population, and promote stability and order.
For some philosophers, Confucian acceptance of the plural sources of
moral duty is the right position, and they will see the Mohist
position as implausibly reductive of the complexity of the moral
life. However, one burden placed on such a position is to explain how
conflicts between these different sources of moral duty can be dealt
with, and it is not clear from the Analects how the
Confucian junzi makes the right choices in the face of such
conflicts. The Mohist position promises a foundational standard for
dealing with such conflicts—promoting benefits and avoiding
harms, with each person being counted equally. The standard is vague
on how benefits and harms are to be aggregated in judging the
rightness of actions and practices, and one might well raise
questions as to how benefits and harms are ultimately to be
distributed across persons, and whether a purely consequentialist
distribution really provides morally acceptable results. On the other
hand, Mohists may claim that they have at least provided some
standard to work with.
Other important questions arose in the debate between the Confucians
and the Mohists. Much of the debate that took place had to do with
skepticism about the ability of human beings to act on the doctrine
of impartial concern. Isn't partiality toward one's own natural and
inevitable? One Mohist response (chapter 16) to this question is that
there is no particular problem in getting people to act in this way
once the facts are brought before them. One such alleged fact is that
people respond in kind to the treatment they receive (curiously,
reciprocity serves as a norm for Confucians, it serves as a
generalization for Mohists). So, if one wishes others to
confer benefits on oneself, one confers benefits on them. If one
wishes good for one's family, one will confer benefits on other
families so that they will confer benefits on one's own family.
Another Mohist response is that the sage kings practiced impartial
concern, so it must be possible. Still another response is that
rulers can motivate their subjects to do even very difficult things.
The Mohist theme that no transformation of human character is needed
to act on the right values stands in striking contrast to the
Confucian theme that intellectual and emotional self-transformation
of character is required to follow the dao.
It may appear that the Mohist arguments for acting on impartial
concern are rather superficial and invite quick refutation, but
Confucians could also be accused of glossing over the difficulties of
getting people to have concern for all (if not equal and impartial
concern). As Analects 1.2 has it, the achievement of proper
relationships within the family is the basis of the achievement of
proper relationships to those outside the family, but this is not
only to neglect the possibility that it is much easier to develop
concern for those with whom one is interdependent but also to neglect
conflicts of the sort illustrated by the story of Shun's father
murdering a man. In circumstances where concern for family regularly
comes into tension with concern for those outside the family it may
be very difficult indeed for filial concern to develop into concern
for all.
4. Daoist Ethics
4.1 Ethical perspectives drawn from the Daodejing: the “soft” style of action and social primitivism
In the Daodejing (the text is associated with Laozi and is
thought to have originated sometime in the period of
6th-3rd century B.C.E.) and Zhuangzi
(a text associated with the historical Zhuangzi who lived in the
4th century B.C.E.) the focus shifts from the human social
world to the cosmos, in which that human world often appears to be
tiny and insignificant or even comically and absurdly self-important.
It may seem that such a distanced and detached perspective has no
ethical content or implications, but that is to assume an overly
narrow vision of the ethical. In its own way, Daoism addresses as
much as Confucianism does questions as to how one ought to live one's
life. Daoist ethics emphasizes appropriate responsiveness to the
broader world that shapes and enfolds the human social world.
The nature of the vision of the broader world is open to dispute. A
traditional interpretation of the Daodejing is that it
conveys a metaphysical vision of the dao as the source of
all things, and that this source is specially associated in nonbeing
and emptiness as contrasted with being, perhaps suggesting that the
dao is an indeterminate ontological ground in which the
myriad individual things are incipient. Some contemporary
commentators hold that the traditional interpretation is an
imposition on the text of later metaphysical concerns (Hansen, 1992;
LaFargue, 1992). Others hew closer to the traditional interpretation,
citing passages such as those in chapter 4, where Dao is described as
being empty, as seeming something like the ancestor of the myriad of
things, as appearing to precede the Lord (di).
However that issue is resolved, it is apparent that a certain
conception of the patterns of nature is embedded in the text and
informs its ethical recommendations. Consider the characterizations
of natural processes as falling into one or another of opposites:
there is the active, aggressive, hard, and the male, on the one hand;
and there is the passive, yielding, soft, and female, on the other
hand (later these forces were much more explicitly associated with
yang and yin). Conventional “knowledge”
and “wisdom” dichotomizes processes into one or another
of these categories and values the first over the second. The
Daodejing extols the efficacy of the second. Whereas the
first is associated with strength, the second, it is often said,
possesses a deeper, underlying strength as demonstrated by water
overcoming the hard and unyielding (chapter 78). Hence a
“soft” style of action, wu wei (literally,
“nonaction” but less misleadingly translated as
effortless action) is recommended, even as a style of ruling. For
example, chapter 66 says that one who desires to rule must in his
words humble himself before the people, and that one who desires to
lead the people must in his person follow them. Chapter 75 says that
rulers eat up too much in taxes and therefore people are hungry.
Rulers are too fond of action and therefore the people are difficult
to govern. Setting too much store on life makes people treat death
lightly. The last point brings out the related theme that striving
after something often produces the opposite of the intended result.
One of the more prominent themes in the Daodejing is the
rejection of moralism: a preoccupation with and striving to become
good or virtuous. Chapter 19 says to exterminate ren and
discard yi (righteousness or rectitude), and the people will
recover filial love.
One crucial ambiguity of the text is whether the “soft”
wu wei style of action is meant consistently to be extolled
over the “hard” style (as Lau claims in his introduction
to his translation of the Daodejing, 1963), or whether the
reversal of valuation is merely a heuristic device meant to correct a
common human tendency to err in the direction of consistently valuing
the hard style (LaFargue, 1992). The second alternative is consistent
with a theme plausibly attributed to the text: that all dichotomies
and all valuations based on them are unreliable in the end, even
evaluations that are reversals of the conventionally accepted ones.
Prescriptions to follow the “soft” style, taken as
exceptionless generalizations, are no more reliable than the
conventional wisdom to follow the “hard” style. On the
other hand, many of the prescriptions in the Daodejing seem
premised on the conception of there being genuine human needs that
are simple and few in number, and that desires going beyond these
needs are the source of trouble and conflict. Prescriptions for the
ruler seem to be aimed at bringing about a reversion to a kind of
primitivist state of society where no “improvements” are
sought or desired. Carried to its logical limit, this primitivism
implies the existence of a natural goodness with which human beings
ought to become attuned. Indeed, the first of the three treasures of
chapter 67 is ci or compassion. The ethics of the
Daodejing is in these respects less radical and iconoclastic
than some of its anti-moralistic language might suggest. If we are
not to strive after goodness, it is there nevertheless as something
that we must recover.
4.2 Ethical perspectives from Zhuangzi: skeptical questioning, attunement to the grain of things, inclusion and acceptance
On this point the Zhuangzi often sounds a much more
skeptical note. In the second (“Equalizing All Things”)
chapter of that text, the following questions go unanswered:
“How do I know that to take pleasure in life is not a delusion?
How do I know that we who hate death are not exiles since childhood
who have forgotten the way home?” (translation from Graham,
1989, 59). The human pretension to know what is true and important is
lampooned by comparing it to the pretension of the cicada and turtle
dove to know by their own experiences of flight the possibilities of
how high creatures can fly. There is no vision of a primitivist
utopia here either. Rather, the dominant attitude towards the
possibility of large-scale social change for the better is pessimism.
It is a dangerous task for the idealist to undertake, and one that
will probably end badly for the idealist because rulers don't like to
be lectured on their failings.
Yet if there is no natural goodness that makes possible a social
utopia, there still appears to be a grain of things to which human
beings can become attuned. A pessimistic Confucius tells his
idealistic student Yan Hui that he will probably get himself killed
in trying to change the ways of a callous and violent ruler, but
Confucius goes on to say that if he insists on trying, Yan Hui must
refrain from formulating plans and goals. Such preconceptions will
only interfere with seeing the ruler as he is and how he must be
dealt with (there is a grain, then, unique to each human being to
which one must become attuned to deal with him or her). So Yan Hui
must prepare not with plans but by fasting and emptying his mind.
Elsewhere in the text, there are happier references to activities
that involve attunement to the grain of whatever is at hand. These
forms of activity are presented as supremely satisfying. The most
prominent example is that of Cook Ding, the cook who is able to wield
his knife so skillfully in cutting up oxen that it flows without a
nick through the spaces within the joints. Cook Ding has gotten past
the stage where he sees with his eyes while cutting the ox; instead
his qi or vital energies move freely to where they must go.
The kind of phenomenology to which the Zhuangzi refers is
one in which there is no self-conscious guiding of one's actions but
rather a complete absorption with the matter of hand. The efficacy
and effortlessness of such activities might appear to suggest
privileged veridical access to the situation and material at hand.
Complete absorption in the matter at hand seems to involve the
ability to keep one's desires from interfering with one's attention.
The Daodejing contains epigrams about the desirability of
being desireless, but chapter 1 of the Zhuangzi includes an
entertaining story that conveys this lesson. Huizi tries to figure
out what to do with the shells of some huge gourds he had grown. He
tried using them as water dippers and water containers, but they are
too large and heavy for those purposes. Not being able to discover a
purpose for them, he smashes them to pieces. Zhuangzi chides his
friend for having underbrush in his head and not realizing that he
could have lashed the gourds together to make a raft for floating
about on the lakes and the rivers. A recurrent theme throughout the
first chapter is that we are ruled by our preconceptions of the uses
of things, which keeps us from being able to recognize the usefulness
of the “useless.” When performing skill activities such
as Cook Ding's, preoccupation with the “uses” of these
activities can interfere with our ability to perform them well.
Woodcarver Qing (chapter 19 of the Zhuangzi) makes marvelous
bellstands. When he goes to make one, he fasts in order to still his
mind. As he fasts, the distracting thoughts of congratulation and
reward melt away, honors and salary, blame and praise, skill and
clumsiness, even his awareness of having a body and limbs. Only when
he is able to focus does he go into the forest to observe the nature
of the wood, and only then does he have a complete vision of the
bellstand.
Interpretations of the Zhuangzi tend to give primacy either
to the skeptical passages or to the passages suggesting special
access to the grain of things. On the first option, Zhuangzi simply
appreciates the many perspectives on the world one could have, the
many ways of dividing the world up by sets of distinctions, none of
which can be shown in a non-question-begging manner to be superior to
the others (Hansen, 1992, 2003). On the second option, Zhuangzi is
often taken to hold in a kind of ineffable and nonconceptual access
to the world, an access that makes possible the efficacy of
activities such as Cook Ding's (Ivanhoe, 1996; Roth 1999, 2000). A
third possibility is that the text demonstrates a kind of continuing
dialectic between skepticism and the conviction that one has genuine
knowledge, and that the dialectic has no envisioned end. The
dialectic includes a stage of skeptical questioning of whatever one's
current beliefs are, but the aim is not merely to undermine but to
reveal something about the way the world that is occluded by one's
current beliefs. However, one is not allowed to rest content with the
new beliefs but is led to question their comprehensiveness and
adequacy precisely because they are suspected of occluding still
something else about the world (Wong, 2005).
However one might try to reconcile the tension between the skeptical
questioning and the claims to special knowledge, the stories about
skill activities such as Cook Ding's arguably exemplify certain kinds
of activities that human beings across cultures and historical
periods have experienced to their great satisfaction. These
activities involve the mastery of the many sub-activities that
constitute a complex activity with goals that challenge abilities of
the agent. The activities of master musicians (e.g., the technique of
fingering on a flute), artistic performers (e.g., the placement of
the toes in the pirouette of a dancer) and athletes (e.g., bringing
the bat through the optimal plane while swinging it to hit a
baseball) correspond rather closely to Cook Ding's mastery of the
sub-activities of cutting through the ox. In all these activities the
agent does not need to pay conscious attention to performance of the
sub-activities, and this enables attention to be focused on matters
that escape the apprentice. Just as Cook Ding's skill in the motor
execution of the motions of cutting allows him to fully focus on
where the joints and spaces are, the flutist is able to concentrate
on the music as she is making it and not her fingering technique (see
Csikszentmihalyi, 1990 for a study of such activities).
One interesting and realistic detail in the cook's story challenges
the reading of the skill stories as extolling the possibility of
nonconceptual access to the grain of things. The cook says that
whenever he comes to a complicated place in the ox, he sizes up the
difficulties, tell himself to watch out and be careful, keeps his
eyes on what he's doing, works very slowly, and moves the knife with
the greatest subtlety until the pieces fall away. Clearly there is
conceptualization going on here, and in fact it is implausible to
deny that the whole activity is being guided by a conceptualized
goal! There is a difference between self-conscious conceptualization
of experience and the application of concepts without awareness of
applying them. One mustn't confuse the latter with nonconceptualized
experience. While there may be some way of squaring this part of the
story with the interpretation that nonconceptual experience is
celebrated in the Zhuangzi, the virtue of the story is that
it is realistic and captures aspects of supremely skilled activities
that are part of the experience of many people. Insofar as the
Zhuangzi recommends such activities as part of a good life,
it very much presents an ethic.
It also presents an ethic in supporting the idea of inclusiveness and
acceptance. Here skeptical questioning of what we think we know,
especially what we think we know about people and who is good and has
something to offer to us are questioned in the chapter featuring
stigmatized individuals, often with feet amputated (a common criminal
punishment of the time), who turn out to be masters drawing as many
students as Confucius. The Zhuangzi also urges
identification and acceptance of the whole and of any and all of the
changes that its creatures undergo. We should not be so sure that
life is great and death is evil, and accept everything that comes our
way, marveling at the possibility that upon our death we might be
made into a fly's foreleg the next time around. The
Zhuangzi, like the Daodejing, calls upon human
beings to identify with the whole of the cosmos and its
transformations, and such identification involves acceptance, even
celebration of death and loss, because in dying one participates in
the next transformation of the cosmos and becomes something else to
marvel at, such as a fly's foreleg. Such a call may hold deep appeal,
especially for those who cannot see any form of monotheism as a
viable object for belief and yet desire some sort of spiritual
connection that stretches beyond the merely human community.
However, such a call also raises challenging questions about human
possibility. Can human beings really accept the loss of their selves
and their loved ones with the kind of equanimity that identification
with the whole requires? The Zhuangzi presents stories that
represent different possibilities for conceiving of the nature of
this equanimity. In the stories of the four masters, death is
accepted without the slightest shiver. In the story of the death of
Zhuangzi's wife, a more complex emotional story is told, whereby
Zhuangzi first feels her loss but comes to accept it as yet another
transformation. This story suggests that one may retain one's
attachments to particular people and yet maintain resilience in the
face of their loss because of one's identification with the whole
(see Becker, 1998 for an discussion of resilience in the face of loss
in the context of developing a contemporary Stoicism). But how is
such identification psychologically possible? In the
Zhuangzi, it seems based on a spirit of restless and joyful
exploration of the richness of the cosmos. In the end, it embodies
the emotion that is perhaps most fundamental to philosophy, and that
is wonder.
There is one more ethical implication of Daoism ethics that is more
of an implication that could be drawn by contemporary philosophers
than one that was drawn in the foundational texts. The
Zhuangzi's lampooning of human pretension and arrogance,
together with call to identify with the whole and with the nonhuman
parts of nature, has appealed to those seeking philosophical
perspectives within which to frame an environmental ethic (see
Girardot, Miller, and Liu, 2001). A Daoist perspective offers both an
alternative to an instrumentalist approach that would ground an
environmental ethic solely in the idea that it defeats human beings'
interests to foul their own environment and to an intrinsic value
approach that would ground duties to nature solely in a value that it
possesses apart from its relation to human beings. A Daoist approach
might point to the way that the human traits are conditioned by and
responses to the nonhuman environment, such that these traits cannot
be specified independently of the environment. In other words the
Daoist self is not a substantial independent existence but a
relational one whose boundaries extend into the conventionally
nonhuman, and from a Daoist perspective that is reconstructed to be
oriented toward the problem of the environment, we would do well to
acknowledge the ways in which whatever we value in ourselves is
connected to the nonhuman (Hourdequin and Wong, 2005). Treating the
environment correctly is not purely a matter of satisfying
conventional human interests such as conserving resources for our
future consumption, nor need it be a matter of recognizing a value
that the environment has in complete independence of its impact on
us. It can be a matter of recognizing that who we are cannot be
cleanly separated from the nonhuman environment. Moreover, there is
much to be gained from being open to the transformation of our
interests if we remain open to new sources of satisfaction in the
nonhuman environment that currently escape our conceptions of the
“useful” (recall Huizi and the gourds).
5. Legalism
Legalism is perhaps best introduced as the opposite reaction to
Analects 2.3, in which Confucius says that guiding the
people by edicts and keeping them in line with punishments will keep
them out of trouble but will give them no sense of shame; guiding
them by virtue and keeping them in line with the rites will not only
give them a sense of shame but enable them to reform themselves. In
the most prominent Legalist text, the Hanfeizi (Hanfei lived
during the 3rd century B.C.E.), the people are
characterized as far too swayed by their material interests to be
guided by a sense of shame. People must be guided by clear edicts and
strong punishments. Furthermore, rulers must be wary of their
ambitious ministers and take care not to reveal their own likes and
dislikes so as not to be manipulated by their scheming subordinates.
As to rulers themselves, it is a mistake to found government on the
presumption that they are or can become virtuous. While exceptionally
good and exceptionally evil rulers have existed, the vast majority of
rulers have been mediocre. Governments must be structured so that it
can run satisfactorily, because that is what rulers will be like
almost always.
The Confucians held that the remedy to China's turmoil and chaos lay
in wise and morally excellent rulers—that moral excellence
would ripple downwards from the top and create harmony and
prosperity. The Daodejing upholds a vision of an original
harmony that human beings once had, a way that consisted in living in
accord with the natural grain of things, and that involves seeking
only what one truly needs, not in multiplying useless desires that
only agitate and ultimately make us unhappy. The Legalists rejected
moral and spiritual transformation, of either the Confucian or Laoist
kind, as the solution to China's troubles. Most human beings will
remain unlovely beings to the end, and governmental structures must
be designed for such beings. The sort of structure recommended is a
highly centralized government in which the ruler retains firm control
of the “two handles” of government: punishment and favor
(chapter 7). By making sure he always has his own hands on these
handles, the ruler remains in firm control of his ministers. If a
minister proposes a way to get something done, measure his
performance on whether he gets it done in the way he says he will. If
not, punish him. The ruler is to hold his officials strictly to the
definitions of their role responsibilities, so that they are punished
not only when they fail to perform some of those assigned
responsibilities but also when they do more than their assigned
responsibilities.
Some of the most interesting parts of the text consist of arguments
supporting the necessity of governmental structure and the folly of
depending on the character of rulers. The “Five Vermin”
chapter (49) presents an important and provocative argument that
threatens to undermine the basis of virtue ethics. It is argued there
that social harmony and prosperity is an achievement requiring
fortuitous circumstances. The chapter does not dispute an assumption
that is commonly held across Chinese philosophical schools—that
the sage-kings of ancient times were virtuous and ruled over a
harmonious and prosperous society. It is disputed, however, that
their virtue was the primary cause of this golden age. What about
those kings in more recent times who were ren and
yi, benevolent and righteous, and who got wiped out for
their trouble? Virtue is not the explanation of success or failure.
The explanation has much more to do with the scarcity of goods in
relation to the number of people. This argument has in fact been
repeated in contemporary analytic moral philosophy by philosophers
drawing from “situationist” psychology, which highlights
the importance of situations rather than “global”
character traits in causing behavior. Global traits involve
dispositions to behave in certain ways regardless of the situation or
at least across a wide range of situations. One of the most striking
experiments marshaled in favor of situationism was conducted in a
theological seminary, where students were set up to encounter a
person slumped in an alleyway. The experiment was to see what factors
influenced a student's decision whether to stop and offer aid. It was
found that by far the most influential variable was whether students
were in a hurry for the next appointment, rather than the nature of
students' commitments to religion or the nature of the tasks in which
they were engaged at the time, even if the task was preparing a
sermon on the Good Samaritan (Darley and Batson, 1973)! Philosophers
Gilbert Harman (1998–99, 1999–2000) and John Doris (2000)
have used studies like this to argue that global character traits are
a myth and that the type of situation has much more to do with how
people behave than any supposed character or personality they
possess. Hanfeizi, then was the first situationist. The way that
Hanfeizi's situationism threatens Confucian virtue ethics is that it
disputes the possibility of the junzi, noblepersons who
possess firm and stable excellent characters.
Confucians can give replies to such arguments. The most obvious reply
is that they never promised virtue would be easy. Indeed, the
canonical texts all stress the difficulty of achieving full virtue.
Mencius in particular conceives of moral development as extending the
natural beginnings of virtue to situations where they ought to extend
but do not currently extend. The experiments in psychology marshaled
in favor of situationism, moreover, typically do point to a minority
of subjects who show a more desirable consistency of behavior in the
experimental situation. Confucians might also object that good
results will follow from the kind of structure described in the
Hanfeizi only if persons of good-enough character staff it.
The Hanfeizi sometimes implicitly acknowledges this point
and integrates it with a reasonable stress on structure and
impersonal administration. In chapter 6 there is discussion of what
is necessary to compensate for a mediocre ruler: getting able people
with the right motives to serve that ruler. Institute laws and
regulations specifying how these people are selected: not on the
basis of reputation alone, since that will give people an incentive
to curry favor with their associates and subordinates and disregard
the ruler; not on the basis of cliques, since that will motivate
people only to establish connections rather than acquire the
qualifications to perform in office. Specify the qualifications
clearly in laws and regulations, appoint, promote, and dismiss
strictly according to these specifications. The law, not the ruler's
personal views, must form the basis for these actions. In chapter 43,
consideration is given to the suggestion that those who take heads in
battle should be rewarded with desirable offices. This is rejected in
cases where the office requires wisdom and ability rather than
courage. In the end, one wonders whether a good number of such
persons of right motive, competence, courage, wisdom and ability are
enough, given the highly centralized nature of the government
recommended in the Hanfeizi. A lot depends on the ruler who
wields the “two handles” of government. Taken in moderate
doses, Hanfeizi arguably provides a needed corrective to the
Confucian emphasis on character. Structure can be designed with an
eye to the realistic possibilities for mediocre and bad rulers. The
Confucian emphasis on discretion in judgment is obviously subject to
abuse that can be checked by structures that provide a degree of
impersonal administration and consistent application of relatively
clear laws and regulations. The American legal experience seems to
show, however, that no set of laws can interpret itself with an eye
to complex situations that are unforeseeable when laws are framed.
Ultimately, stable character and wise discretion are needed.
The strongest challenge that Legalism raises to virtue ethics is not
that stable virtues are impossible to achieve, but that they are not
realistic possibilities for most persons, and that therefore lofty
virtue ideals cannot provide the basis for a large-scale social
ethic. Even if these ideals are directed only at an elite that is
then expected to lead the rest of the people, the question arises as
to what influence this elite can have on the rest if the majority do
not have some attraction to virtue. It is dubious, however, that the
solution lies in seeking to make character irrelevant.
6. Chinese Buddhist Ethics
Buddhism is not indigenous to China, and it has a long and rich
tradition of thought and practice in India and in areas other than
China. This brief section will focus on ethical aspects of the most
distinctive form of Buddhism that developed once it was introduced to
China: Chan Buddhism, or as it came to be known later in Japan, Zen.
It should be noted, however, that prominent forms of Chinese Buddhism
also include Tiantai and Huayan. All three forms of Chinese Buddhism
developed in interaction with indigenous Chinese thought, especially
Daoism. Chan developed partly as a response to the perception of some
Chinese Buddhists that Tiantai and Huayan had developed in overly
scholastic directions with proliferating metaphysical distinctions
and doctrines that hinder rather than aid Enlightenment.
The immediate focus of Buddhist ethics is the problem of suffering,
and a conception of the self is at the heart of the Buddhist response
to that problem. The self is conceived as a floating collection of
various psychophysical reactions and responses with no fixed center
or unchanging ego entity. The usual human conception of self as a
fixed and unchanging center is a delusion. Our bodily attributes,
various feelings, perceptions, ideas, wishes, dreams, and in general
a consciousness of the world display a constant interplay and
interconnection that leads us to the belief that there is some
definite ‘I’ that underlies and is independent of the
ever-shifting series. But there is only the interacting and
interconnected series. Human suffering ultimately stems from a
concern for the existence and pleasures and pains of the kind of self
that never existed in the first place. Recognition of the
impermanence of the self can lead to release or mitigation of
suffering, but the recognition cannot merely be intellectual. It must
involve transformation of one's desires. The belief on some abstract
level, for example, that there are no permanent selves is a belief
that can co-exist with having and acting on intense desires to avoid
death, as if death were some evil befalling some underlying
‘I’. Similarly, the intellectual recognition that none of
the “things” of ordinary life are fixed and separate
entities, anymore than the self is, can lead to recognition of all of
life as an interdependent whole and to the practical attitude of
compassion for all of life. But if the latter recognition is again
merely intellectual, one can still have and act on intensely
self-regarding desires at severe cost to others. In both cases a
transformation of desire is what is required in order to go beyond
the merely intellectual and to achieve true Enlightenment and
meaningful recognition of one's true nature as impermanent and as
interdependent with all other things.
Recall the practical focus and the closeness to pre-theoretical
experience that are distinctive of indigenous Chinese philosophy.
These traits interacted with Buddhism as it was introduced into
China. The ‘Chan’ in “Chan Buddhism” comes
from the Sanskrit ‘dhyana’ which means
meditation. Though meditation practice is not the only practice
employed in Chan, its central role does illustrate the focus on
achieving transformation of one's desires through experience of the
self and the world. This kind of transformation is different than
reaching intellectual conviction through textual study and
understanding of argumentation, and also different than escape from
the world of suffering through obliteration of one's consciousness as
an individual being. Chinese Buddhism in the form of Chan was
especially influential in putting forward this conception of
Enlightenment as lived in this world rather than escape from it.
Daoism in particular has themes that make it especially appropriate
for interaction with Buddhism. Recall the theme that one must keep
desires from interfering with one's attention to the matter at hand.
Correspondingly, a major theme in Chan is that all forms of striving,
especially the very striving for Enlightenment, interfere with
attention to one's true nature (Hui Neng, 638–713, Platform
Scripture). Hence the reason for the otherwise puzzlingly harsh
reactions of Chan masters to the earnest strivings of their students
to reach Enlightenment (Yi Xuan, d. 866, The Recorded
Conversations of Linji Yi Xuan) especially if such strivings
have any tinge of the academic or doctrinal about them (Huang Po, d.
850, The Transmission of Mind). Recall also the theme in
Daodejing concerning the dao as the source of the
myriad things. The Buddha's insight into the nature of the many
things brought him to recognize the Many as also the One. Finally,
recall the skeptical theme in Daoism about the limits of
conceptualization. The Buddha's insight into the Many as also the One
does not mean that the Many are really only One, but rather Many and
Once at once, and if we have difficulty making sense of that, it is
founded in the limits of our conceptualization. Finally, there is the
same possibility for ambiguity as to whether there is some ineffable
and nonconceptual access to an ultimate reality or whether there is
skeptical question that goes all the way down (or all the way up?).
In the Zhuangzi this ambiguity is quite apparent. And though
Chan is usually taken to affirm a foundation in ineffable access
(Kasulis, 1986), there are those who argue that a thoroughgoing
skepticism is truer to its spirit (Wright, 1998).
Since the self is a bundle of changing psychological and physical
attributes whose boundaries are conventionally established, and since
its attributes exist only in relation to other things outside its
conventionally established boundaries, it ought to dampen attachment
its self-regarding cares and concerns and widen the boundaries of its
concerns to embrace all life. This Buddhist reasoning certainly is an
interesting way to ground impersonal concern, and it may appeal to
those of us who see little plausibility in the idea of Cartesian
substances as fixed ego entities. On the other hand, this reasoning
may seem to drain all passion from life, and it requires that we
dampen the attachment we have not only to our selves but also to
particular others such as friends and family members. Buddhism is
especially well known for its advocacy of detachment, not only from
material possessions, worldly power and status, but also from
particular people and communities. For example, in Ashvaghosha's poem
on “Nanda the Fair,” the Buddha explains to Nanda that
delusion alone ties one person to another (Conze, 1959, 110). The
argument is that a family is like a group of travelers at an inn who
come together for a while and then part. No one belongs to anyone
else. A family is held together only as sand is held in a clenched
fist. Issues as to the desirability and realistic possibility of such
a detached attitude arise here, and not surprisingly, the issues are
similar to ones raised by Daoist identification with the cosmos. As
the discussion of Zhuangzi and wife made clear, it may be possible to
distinguish as an alternative to the pure and complete detachment
exemplified in Ashvagosha another kind that is consistent with
emotional involvement with others for as long as they are given to
us.
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ETHICS在剑桥英语词典中的解释及翻译
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C2 the study of what is morally right and what is not: He took a broad range of courses in sociology, religion, ethics, political thought and more. We studied that case in our ethics class. 相关词语
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Virtue Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Virtue Ethics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
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Virtue EthicsFirst published Fri Jul 18, 2003; substantive revision Tue Oct 11, 2022
Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative
ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes
the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that
emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the
consequences of actions (consequentialism). Suppose it is obvious that
someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact
that the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being, a
deontologist to the fact that, in doing so the agent will be acting in
accordance with a moral rule such as “Do unto others as you
would be done by” and a virtue ethicist to the fact that helping
the person would be charitable or benevolent.
This is not to say that only virtue ethicists attend to virtues, any
more than it is to say that only consequentialists attend to
consequences or only deontologists to rules. Each of the
above-mentioned approaches can make room for virtues, consequences,
and rules. Indeed, any plausible normative ethical theory
will have something to say about all three. What distinguishes virtue
ethics from consequentialism or deontology is the centrality of virtue
within the theory (Watson 1990; Kawall 2009). Whereas
consequentialists will define virtues as traits that yield good
consequences and deontologists will define them as traits possessed by
those who reliably fulfil their duties, virtue ethicists will resist
the attempt to define virtues in terms of some other concept that is
taken to be more fundamental. Rather, virtues and vices will be
foundational for virtue ethical theories and other normative notions
will be grounded in them.
We begin by discussing two concepts that are central to all forms of
virtue ethics, namely, virtue and practical wisdom. Then we note some
of the features that distinguish different virtue ethical theories
from one another before turning to objections that have been raised
against virtue ethics and responses offered on its behalf. We conclude
with a look at some of the directions in which future research might
develop.
1. Preliminaries
1.1 Virtue
1.2 Practical Wisdom
2. Forms of Virtue Ethics
2.1 Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics
2.2 Agent-Based and Exemplarist Virtue Ethics
2.3 Target-Centered Virtue Ethics
2.4 Platonistic Virtue Ethics
3. Objections to virtue ethics
4. Future Directions
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1. Preliminaries
In the West, virtue ethics’ founding fathers are Plato and
Aristotle, and in the East it can be traced back to Mencius and
Confucius. It persisted as the dominant approach in Western moral
philosophy until at least the Enlightenment, suffered a momentary
eclipse during the nineteenth century, but re-emerged in
Anglo-American philosophy in the late 1950s. It was heralded by
Anscombe’s famous article “Modern Moral Philosophy”
(Anscombe 1958) which crystallized an increasing dissatisfaction with
the forms of deontology and utilitarianism then prevailing. Neither of
them, at that time, paid attention to a number of topics that had
always figured in the virtue ethics tradition—virtues and vices,
motives and moral character, moral education, moral wisdom or
discernment, friendship and family relationships, a deep concept of
happiness, the role of the emotions in our moral life and the
fundamentally important questions of what sorts of persons we should
be and how we should live.
Its re-emergence had an invigorating effect on the other two
approaches, many of whose proponents then began to address these
topics in the terms of their favoured theory. (One consequence of this
has been that it is now necessary to distinguish “virtue
ethics” (the third approach) from “virtue theory”, a
term which includes accounts of virtue within the other approaches.)
Interest in Kant’s virtue theory has redirected
philosophers’ attention to Kant’s long neglected
Doctrine of Virtue, and utilitarians have developed
consequentialist virtue theories (Driver 2001; Hurka 2001). It has
also generated virtue ethical readings of philosophers other than
Plato and Aristotle, such as Martineau, Hume and Nietzsche, and
thereby different forms of virtue ethics have developed (Slote 2001;
Swanton 2003, 2011a).
Although modern virtue ethics does not have to take a
“neo-Aristotelian” or eudaimonist form (see section 2),
almost any modern version still shows that its roots are in ancient
Greek philosophy by the employment of three concepts derived from it.
These are arête (excellence or virtue),
phronesis (practical or moral wisdom) and eudaimonia
(usually translated as happiness or flourishing). (See Annas 2011 for
a short, clear, and authoritative account of all three.) We discuss
the first two in the remainder of this section. Eudaimonia is
discussed in connection with eudaimonist versions of virtue ethics in
the next.
1.1 Virtue
A virtue is an excellent trait of character. It is a disposition, well
entrenched in its possessor—something that, as we say, goes all
the way down, unlike a habit such as being a tea-drinker—to
notice, expect, value, feel, desire, choose, act, and react in certain
characteristic ways. To possess a virtue is to be a certain sort of
person with a certain complex mindset. A significant aspect of this
mindset is the wholehearted acceptance of a distinctive range of
considerations as reasons for action. An honest person cannot be
identified simply as one who, for example, practices honest dealing
and does not cheat. If such actions are done merely because the agent
thinks that honesty is the best policy, or because they fear being
caught out, rather than through recognising “To do otherwise
would be dishonest” as the relevant reason, they are not the
actions of an honest person. An honest person cannot be identified
simply as one who, for example, tells the truth because it is
the truth, for one can have the virtue of honesty without being
tactless or indiscreet. The honest person recognises “That would
be a lie” as a strong (though perhaps not overriding) reason for
not making certain statements in certain circumstances, and gives due,
but not overriding, weight to “That would be the truth” as
a reason for making them.
An honest person’s reasons and choices with respect to honest
and dishonest actions reflect her views about honesty, truth, and
deception—but of course such views manifest themselves with
respect to other actions, and to emotional reactions as well. Valuing
honesty as she does, she chooses, where possible to work with honest
people, to have honest friends, to bring up her children to be honest.
She disapproves of, dislikes, deplores dishonesty, is not amused by
certain tales of chicanery, despises or pities those who succeed
through deception rather than thinking they have been clever, is
unsurprised, or pleased (as appropriate) when honesty triumphs, is
shocked or distressed when those near and dear to her do what is
dishonest and so on. Given that a virtue is such a multi-track
disposition, it would obviously be reckless to attribute one to an
agent on the basis of a single observed action or even a series of
similar actions, especially if you don’t know the agent’s
reasons for doing as she did (Sreenivasan 2002).
Possessing a virtue is a matter of degree. To possess such a
disposition fully is to possess full or perfect virtue, which is rare,
and there are a number of ways of falling short of this ideal
(Athanassoulis 2000). Most people who can truly be described as fairly
virtuous, and certainly markedly better than those who can truly be
described as dishonest, self-centred and greedy, still have their
blind spots—little areas where they do not act for the reasons
one would expect. So someone honest or kind in most situations, and
notably so in demanding ones, may nevertheless be trivially tainted by
snobbery, inclined to be disingenuous about their forebears and less
than kind to strangers with the wrong accent.
Further, it is not easy to get one’s emotions in harmony with
one’s rational recognition of certain reasons for action. I may
be honest enough to recognise that I must own up to a mistake because
it would be dishonest not to do so without my acceptance being so
wholehearted that I can own up easily, with no inner conflict.
Following (and adapting) Aristotle, virtue ethicists draw a
distinction between full or perfect virtue and
“continence”, or strength of will. The fully virtuous do
what they should without a struggle against contrary desires; the
continent have to control a desire or temptation to do otherwise.
Describing the continent as “falling short” of perfect
virtue appears to go against the intuition that there is something
particularly admirable about people who manage to act well when it is
especially hard for them to do so, but the plausibility of this
depends on exactly what “makes it hard” (Foot 1978:
11–14). If it is the circumstances in which the agent
acts—say that she is very poor when she sees someone drop a full
purse or that she is in deep grief when someone visits seeking
help—then indeed it is particularly admirable of her to restore
the purse or give the help when it is hard for her to do so. But if
what makes it hard is an imperfection in her character—the
temptation to keep what is not hers, or a callous indifference to the
suffering of others—then it is not.
1.2 Practical Wisdom
Another way in which one can easily fall short of full virtue is
through lacking phronesis—moral or practical
wisdom.
The concept of a virtue is the concept of something that makes its
possessor good: a virtuous person is a morally good, excellent or
admirable person who acts and feels as she should. These are commonly
accepted truisms. But it is equally common, in relation to particular
(putative) examples of virtues to give these truisms up. We may say of
someone that he is generous or honest “to a fault”. It is
commonly asserted that someone’s compassion might lead them to
act wrongly, to tell a lie they should not have told, for example, in
their desire to prevent someone else’s hurt feelings. It is also
said that courage, in a desperado, enables him to do far more wicked
things than he would have been able to do if he were timid. So it
would appear that generosity, honesty, compassion and courage despite
being virtues, are sometimes faults. Someone who is generous, honest,
compassionate, and courageous might not be a morally good
person—or, if it is still held to be a truism that they are,
then morally good people may be led by what makes them morally good to
act wrongly! How have we arrived at such an odd conclusion?
The answer lies in too ready an acceptance of ordinary usage, which
permits a fairly wide-ranging application of many of the virtue terms,
combined, perhaps, with a modern readiness to suppose that the
virtuous agent is motivated by emotion or inclination, not by rational
choice. If one thinks of generosity or honesty as the
disposition to be moved to action by generous or honest impulses such
as the desire to give or to speak the truth, if one thinks of
compassion as the disposition to be moved by the sufferings of others
and to act on that emotion, if one thinks of courage as mere
fearlessness or the willingness to face danger, then it will indeed
seem obvious that these are all dispositions that can lead to their
possessor’s acting wrongly. But it is also obvious, as soon as
it is stated, that these are dispositions that can be possessed by
children, and although children thus endowed (bar the
“courageous” disposition) would undoubtedly be very nice
children, we would not say that they were morally virtuous or
admirable people. The ordinary usage, or the reliance on motivation by
inclination, gives us what Aristotle calls “natural
virtue”—a proto version of full virtue awaiting perfection
by phronesis or practical wisdom.
Aristotle makes a number of specific remarks about phronesis
that are the subject of much scholarly debate, but the (related)
modern concept is best understood by thinking of what the virtuous
morally mature adult has that nice children, including nice
adolescents, lack. Both the virtuous adult and the nice child have
good intentions, but the child is much more prone to mess things up
because he is ignorant of what he needs to know in order to do what he
intends. A virtuous adult is not, of course, infallible and may also,
on occasion, fail to do what she intended to do through lack of
knowledge, but only on those occasions on which the lack of knowledge
is not culpable. So, for example, children and adolescents often harm
those they intend to benefit either because they do not know how to
set about securing the benefit or because their understanding of what
is beneficial and harmful is limited and often mistaken. Such
ignorance in small children is rarely, if ever culpable. Adults, on
the other hand, are culpable if they mess things up by being
thoughtless, insensitive, reckless, impulsive, shortsighted, and by
assuming that what suits them will suit everyone instead of taking a
more objective viewpoint. They are also culpable if their
understanding of what is beneficial and harmful is mistaken. It is
part of practical wisdom to know how to secure real benefits
effectively; those who have practical wisdom will not make the mistake
of concealing the hurtful truth from the person who really needs to
know it in the belief that they are benefiting him.
Quite generally, given that good intentions are intentions to act well
or “do the right thing”, we may say that practical wisdom
is the knowledge or understanding that enables its possessor, unlike
the nice adolescents, to do just that, in any given situation. The
detailed specification of what is involved in such knowledge or
understanding has not yet appeared in the literature, but some aspects
of it are becoming well known. Even many deontologists now stress the
point that their action-guiding rules cannot, reliably, be applied
without practical wisdom, because correct application requires
situational appreciation—the capacity to recognise, in any
particular situation, those features of it that are morally salient.
This brings out two aspects of practical wisdom.
One is that it characteristically comes only with experience of life.
Amongst the morally relevant features of a situation may be the likely
consequences, for the people involved, of a certain action, and this
is something that adolescents are notoriously clueless about precisely
because they are inexperienced. It is part of practical wisdom to be
wise about human beings and human life. (It should go without saying
that the virtuous are mindful of the consequences of possible actions.
How could they fail to be reckless, thoughtless and short-sighted if
they were not?)
The second is the practically wise agent’s capacity to recognise
some features of a situation as more important than others, or indeed,
in that situation, as the only relevant ones. The wise do not see
things in the same way as the nice adolescents who, with their
under-developed virtues, still tend to see the personally
disadvantageous nature of a certain action as competing in importance
with its honesty or benevolence or justice.
These aspects coalesce in the description of the practically wise as
those who understand what is truly worthwhile, truly important, and
thereby truly advantageous in life, who know, in short, how to live
well.
2. Forms of Virtue Ethics
While all forms of virtue ethics agree that virtue is central and
practical wisdom required, they differ in how they combine these and
other concepts to illuminate what we should do in particular contexts
and how we should live our lives as a whole. In what follows we sketch
four distinct forms taken by contemporary virtue ethics, namely, a)
eudaimonist virtue ethics, b) agent-based and exemplarist virtue
ethics, c) target-centered virtue ethics, and d) Platonistic virtue
ethics.
2.1 Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics
The distinctive feature of eudaimonist versions of virtue ethics is
that they define virtues in terms of their relationship to
eudaimonia. A virtue is a trait that contributes to or is a
constituent of eudaimonia and we ought to develop virtues,
the eudaimonist claims, precisely because they contribute to
eudaimonia.
The concept of eudaimonia, a key term in ancient Greek moral
philosophy, is standardly translated as “happiness” or
“flourishing” and occasionally as
“well-being.” Each translation has its disadvantages. The
trouble with “flourishing” is that animals and even plants
can flourish but eudaimonia is possible only for rational
beings. The trouble with “happiness” is that in ordinary
conversation it connotes something subjectively determined. It is for
me, not for you, to pronounce on whether I am happy. If I think I am
happy then I am—it is not something I can be wrong about
(barring advanced cases of self-deception). Contrast my being healthy
or flourishing. Here we have no difficulty in recognizing that I might
think I was healthy, either physically or psychologically, or think
that I was flourishing but be wrong. In this respect,
“flourishing” is a better translation than
“happiness”. It is all too easy to be mistaken about
whether one’s life is eudaimon (the adjective from
eudaimonia) not simply because it is easy to deceive oneself,
but because it is easy to have a mistaken conception of
eudaimonia, or of what it is to live well as a human being,
believing it to consist largely in physical pleasure or luxury for
example.
Eudaimonia is, avowedly, a moralized or value-laden concept
of happiness, something like “true” or “real”
happiness or “the sort of happiness worth seeking or
having.” It is thereby the sort of concept about which there can
be substantial disagreement between people with different views about
human life that cannot be resolved by appeal to some external standard
on which, despite their different views, the parties to the
disagreement concur (Hursthouse 1999: 188–189).
Most versions of virtue ethics agree that living a life in accordance
with virtue is necessary for eudaimonia. This supreme good is
not conceived of as an independently defined state (made up of, say, a
list of non-moral goods that does not include virtuous activity) which
exercise of the virtues might be thought to promote. It is, within
virtue ethics, already conceived of as something of which virtuous
activity is at least partially constitutive (Kraut 1989). Thereby
virtue ethicists claim that a human life devoted to physical pleasure
or the acquisition of wealth is not eudaimon, but a wasted
life.
But although all standard versions of virtue ethics insist on that
conceptual link between virtue and eudaimonia,
further links are matters of dispute and generate different versions.
For Aristotle, virtue is necessary but not sufficient—what is
also needed are external goods which are a matter of luck. For Plato
and the Stoics, virtue is both necessary and sufficient for
eudaimonia (Annas 1993).
According to eudaimonist virtue ethics, the good life is the
eudaimon life, and the virtues are what enable a human being
to be eudaimon because the virtues just are those character
traits that benefit their possessor in that way, barring bad luck. So
there is a link between eudaimonia and what confers virtue
status on a character trait. (For a discussion of the differences
between eudaimonists see Baril 2014. For recent defenses of
eudaimonism see Annas 2011; LeBar 2013b; Badhwar 2014; and Bloomfield
2014.)
2.2 Agent-Based and Exemplarist Virtue Ethics
Rather than deriving the normativity of virtue from the value of
eudaimonia, agent-based virtue ethicists argue that other
forms of normativity—including the value of
eudaimonia—are traced back to and ultimately explained
in terms of the motivational and dispositional qualities of
agents.
It is unclear how many other forms of normativity must be explained in
terms of the qualities of agents in order for a theory to count as
agent-based. The two best-known agent-based theorists, Michael Slote
and Linda Zagzebski, trace a wide range of normative qualities back to
the qualities of agents. For example, Slote defines rightness and
wrongness in terms of agents’ motivations: “[A]gent-based
virtue ethics … understands rightness in terms of good
motivations and wrongness in terms of the having of bad (or
insufficiently good) motives” (2001: 14). Similarly, he explains
the goodness of an action, the value of eudaimonia, the
justice of a law or social institution, and the normativity of
practical rationality in terms of the motivational and dispositional
qualities of agents (2001: 99–100, 154, 2000). Zagzebski
likewise defines right and wrong actions by reference to the emotions,
motives, and dispositions of virtuous and vicious agents. For example,
“A wrong act = an act that the phronimos
characteristically would not do, and he would feel guilty if he did =
an act such that it is not the case that he might do it = an act that
expresses a vice = an act that is against a requirement of virtue (the
virtuous self)” (Zagzebski 2004: 160). Her definitions of
duties, good and bad ends, and good and bad states of affairs are
similarly grounded in the motivational and dispositional states of
exemplary agents (1998, 2004, 2010).
However, there could also be less ambitious agent-based approaches to
virtue ethics (see Slote 1997). At the very least, an agent-based
approach must be committed to explaining what one should do by
reference to the motivational and dispositional states of agents. But
this is not yet a sufficient condition for counting as an agent-based
approach, since the same condition will be met by every
virtue ethical account. For a theory to count as an agent-based form
of virtue ethics it must also be the case that the normative
properties of motivations and dispositions cannot be explained in
terms of the normative properties of something else (such as
eudaimonia or states of affairs) which is taken to be more
fundamental.
Beyond this basic commitment, there is room for agent-based theories
to be developed in a number of different directions. The most
important distinguishing factor has to do with how motivations and
dispositions are taken to matter for the purposes of explaining other
normative qualities. For Slote what matters are this particular
agent’s actual motives and dispositions. The goodness of
action A, for example, is derived from the agent’s motives when
she performs A. If those motives are good then the action is good, if
not then not. On Zagzebski’s account, by contrast, a good or
bad, right or wrong action is defined not by this agent’s actual
motives but rather by whether this is the sort of action a virtuously
motivated agent would perform (Zagzebski 2004: 160). Appeal to the
virtuous agent’s hypothetical motives and dispositions
enables Zagzebski to distinguish between performing the right action
and doing so for the right reasons (a distinction that, as Brady
(2004) observes, Slote has trouble drawing).
Another point on which agent-based forms of virtue ethics might differ
concerns how one identifies virtuous motivations and dispositions.
According to Zagzebski’s exemplarist account, “We do not
have criteria for goodness in advance of identifying the exemplars of
goodness” (Zagzebski 2004: 41). As we observe the people around
us, we find ourselves wanting to be like some of them (in at least
some respects) and not wanting to be like others. The former provide
us with positive exemplars and the latter with negative ones. Our
understanding of better and worse motivations and virtuous and vicious
dispositions is grounded in these primitive responses to exemplars
(2004: 53). This is not to say that every time we act we stop and ask
ourselves what one of our exemplars would do in this situations. Our
moral concepts become more refined over time as we encounter a wider
variety of exemplars and begin to draw systematic connections between
them, noting what they have in common, how they differ, and which of
these commonalities and differences matter, morally speaking.
Recognizable motivational profiles emerge and come to be labeled as
virtues or vices, and these, in turn, shape our understanding of the
obligations we have and the ends we should pursue. However, even
though the systematising of moral thought can travel a long way from
our starting point, according to the exemplarist it never reaches a
stage where reference to exemplars is replaced by the recognition of
something more fundamental. At the end of the day, according to the
exemplarist, our moral system still rests on our basic propensity to
take a liking (or disliking) to exemplars. Nevertheless, one could be
an agent-based theorist without advancing the exemplarist’s
account of the origins or reference conditions for judgments of good
and bad, virtuous and vicious.
2.3 Target-Centered Virtue Ethics
The touchstone for eudaimonist virtue ethicists is a flourishing human
life. For agent-based virtue ethicists it is an exemplary
agent’s motivations. The target-centered view developed by
Christine Swanton (2003), by contrast, begins with our existing
conceptions of the virtues. We already have a passable idea of which
traits are virtues and what they involve. Of course, this untutored
understanding can be clarified and improved, and it is one of the
tasks of the virtue ethicist to help us do precisely that. But rather
than stripping things back to something as basic as the motivations we
want to imitate or building it up to something as elaborate as an
entire flourishing life, the target-centered view begins where most
ethics students find themselves, namely, with the idea that
generosity, courage, self-discipline, compassion, and the like get a
tick of approval. It then examines what these traits involve.
A complete account of virtue will map out 1) its field, 2)
its mode of responsiveness, 3) its basis of moral
acknowledgment, and 4) its target. Different virtues are
concerned with different fields. Courage, for example, is
concerned with what might harm us, whereas generosity is concerned
with the sharing of time, talent, and property. The basis of
acknowledgment of a virtue is the feature within the virtue’s
field to which it responds. To continue with our previous examples,
generosity is attentive to the benefits that others might enjoy
through one’s agency, and courage responds to threats to value,
status, or the bonds that exist between oneself and particular others,
and the fear such threats might generate. A virtue’s
mode has to do with how it responds to the bases of
acknowledgment within its field. Generosity promotes a good,
namely, another’s benefit, whereas courage defends a
value, bond, or status. Finally, a virtue’s target is
that at which it is aimed. Courage aims to control fear and handle
danger, while generosity aims to share time, talents, or possessions
with others in ways that benefit them.
A virtue, on a target-centered account, “is a
disposition to respond to, or acknowledge, items within its field or
fields in an excellent or good enough way” (Swanton 2003: 19). A
virtuous act is an act that hits the target of a virtue,
which is to say that it succeeds in responding to items in its field
in the specified way (233). Providing a target-centered definition of
a right action requires us to move beyond the analysis of a
single virtue and the actions that follow from it. This is because a
single action context may involve a number of different, overlapping
fields. Determination might lead me to persist in trying to complete a
difficult task even if doing so requires a singleness of purpose. But
love for my family might make a different use of my time and
attention. In order to define right action a target-centered view must
explain how we handle different virtues’ conflicting claims on
our resources. There are at least three different ways to address this
challenge. A perfectionist target-centered account would
stipulate, “An act is right if and only if it is overall
virtuous, and that entails that it is the, or a, best action possible
in the circumstances” (239–240). A more
permissive target-centered account would not identify
‘right’ with ‘best’, but would allow an action
to count as right provided “it is good enough even if not the
(or a) best action” (240). A minimalist target-centered
account would not even require an action to be good in order to be
right. On such a view, “An act is right if and only if it is not
overall vicious” (240). (For further discussion of
target-centered virtue ethics see Van Zyl 2014; and Smith 2016).
2.4 Platonistic Virtue Ethics
The fourth form a virtue ethic might adopt takes its inspiration from
Plato. The Socrates of Plato’s dialogues devotes a great deal of
time to asking his fellow Athenians to explain the nature of virtues
like justice, courage, piety, and wisdom. So it is clear that Plato
counts as a virtue theorist. But it is a matter of some debate whether
he should be read as a virtue ethicist (White 2015). What is not open
to debate is whether Plato has had an important influence on the
contemporary revival of interest in virtue ethics. A number of those
who have contributed to the revival have done so as Plato scholars
(e.g., Prior 1991; Kamtekar 1998; Annas 1999; and Reshotko 2006).
However, often they have ended up championing a eudaimonist version of
virtue ethics (see Prior 2001 and Annas 2011), rather than a version
that would warrant a separate classification. Nevertheless, there are
two variants that call for distinct treatment.
Timothy Chappell takes the defining feature of Platonistic virtue
ethics to be that “Good agency in the truest and fullest sense
presupposes the contemplation of the Form of the Good” (2014).
Chappell follows Iris Murdoch in arguing that “In the moral life
the enemy is the fat relentless ego” (Murdoch 1971: 51).
Constantly attending to our needs, our desires, our passions, and our
thoughts skews our perspective on what the world is actually like and
blinds us to the goods around us. Contemplating the goodness of
something we encounter—which is to say, carefully attending to
it “for its own sake, in order to understand it” (Chappell
2014: 300)—breaks this natural tendency by drawing our attention
away from ourselves. Contemplating such goodness with regularity makes
room for new habits of thought that focus more readily and more
honestly on things other than the self. It alters the quality of our
consciousness. And “anything which alters consciousness in the
direction of unselfishness, objectivity, and realism is to be
connected with virtue” (Murdoch 1971: 82). The virtues get
defined, then, in terms of qualities that help one “pierce the
veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really
is” (91). And good agency is defined by the possession and
exercise of such virtues. Within Chappell’s and Murdoch’s
framework, then, not all normative properties get defined in terms of
virtue. Goodness, in particular, is not so defined. But the kind of
goodness which is possible for creatures like us is defined by virtue,
and any answer to the question of what one should do or how one should
live will appeal to the virtues.
Another Platonistic variant of virtue ethics is exemplified by Robert
Merrihew Adams. Unlike Murdoch and Chappell, his starting point is not
a set of claims about our consciousness of goodness. Rather, he begins
with an account of the metaphysics of goodness. Like Murdoch and
others influenced by Platonism, Adams’s account of goodness is
built around a conception of a supremely perfect good. And like
Augustine, Adams takes that perfect good to be God. God is both the
exemplification and the source of all goodness. Other things are good,
he suggests, to the extent that they resemble God (Adams 1999).
The resemblance requirement identifies a necessary condition for being
good, but it does not yet give us a sufficient condition. This is
because there are ways in which finite creatures might resemble God
that would not be suitable to the type of creature they are. For
example, if God were all-knowing, then the belief, “I am
all-knowing,” would be a suitable belief for God to have. In
God, such a belief—because true—would be part of
God’s perfection. However, as neither you nor I are all-knowing,
the belief, “I am all-knowing,” in one of us would not be
good. To rule out such cases we need to introduce another factor. That
factor is the fitting response to goodness, which Adams suggests is
love. Adams uses love to weed out problematic resemblances:
“being excellent in the way that a finite thing can be consists
in resembling God in a way that could serve God as a reason for loving
the thing” (Adams 1999: 36).
Virtues come into the account as one of the ways in which some things
(namely, persons) could resemble God. “[M]ost of the excellences
that are most important to us, and of whose value we are most
confident, are excellences of persons or of qualities or actions or
works or lives or stories of persons” (1999: 42). This is one of
the reasons Adams offers for conceiving of the ideal of perfection as
a personal God, rather than an impersonal form of the Good. Many of
the excellences of persons of which we are most confident are virtues
such as love, wisdom, justice, patience, and generosity. And within
many theistic traditions, including Adams’s own Christian
tradition, such virtues are commonly attributed to divine agents.
A Platonistic account like the one Adams puts forward in Finite
and Infinite Goods clearly does not derive all other normative
properties from the virtues (for a discussion of the relationship
between this view and the one he puts forward in A Theory of
Virtue (2006) see Pettigrove 2014). Goodness provides the
normative foundation. Virtues are not built on that foundation;
rather, as one of the varieties of goodness of whose value we are most
confident, virtues form part of the foundation. Obligations, by
contrast, come into the account at a different level. Moral
obligations, Adams argues, are determined by the expectations and
demands that “arise in a relationship or system of relationships
that is good or valuable” (1999: 244). Other things being equal,
the more virtuous the parties to the relationship, the more binding
the obligation. Thus, within Adams’s account, the good (which
includes virtue) is prior to the right. However, once good
relationships have given rise to obligations, those obligations take
on a life of their own. Their bindingness is not traced directly to
considerations of goodness. Rather, they are determined by the
expectations of the parties and the demands of the relationship.
3. Objections to virtue ethics
A number of objections have been raised against virtue ethics, some of
which bear more directly on one form of virtue ethics than on others.
In this section we consider eight objections, namely, the a)
application, b) adequacy, c) relativism, d) conflict, e)
self-effacement, f) justification, g) egoism, and h) situationist
problems.
a) In the early days of virtue ethics’ revival, the approach was
associated with an “anti-codifiability” thesis about
ethics, directed against the prevailing pretensions of normative
theory. At the time, utilitarians and deontologists commonly (though
not universally) held that the task of ethical theory was to come up
with a code consisting of universal rules or principles (possibly only
one, as in the case of act-utilitarianism) which would have two
significant features: i) the rule(s) would amount to a decision
procedure for determining what the right action was in any particular
case; ii) the rule(s) would be stated in such terms that any
non-virtuous person could understand and apply it (them)
correctly.
Virtue ethicists maintained, contrary to these two claims, that it was
quite unrealistic to imagine that there could be such a code (see, in
particular, McDowell 1979). The results of attempts to produce and
employ such a code, in the heady days of the 1960s and 1970s, when
medical and then bioethics boomed and bloomed, tended to support the
virtue ethicists’ claim. More and more utilitarians and
deontologists found themselves agreed on their general rules but on
opposite sides of the controversial moral issues in contemporary
discussion. It came to be recognised that moral sensitivity,
perception, imagination, and judgement informed by
experience—phronesis in short—is needed to apply
rules or principles correctly. Hence many (though by no means all)
utilitarians and deontologists have explicitly abandoned (ii) and much
less emphasis is placed on (i).
Nevertheless, the complaint that virtue ethics does not produce
codifiable principles is still a commonly voiced criticism of the
approach, expressed as the objection that it is, in principle, unable
to provide action-guidance.
Initially, the objection was based on a misunderstanding. Blinkered by
slogans that described virtue ethics as “concerned with Being
rather than Doing,” as addressing “What sort of
person should I be?” but not “What should I do?” as
being “agent-centered rather than act-centered,” its
critics maintained that it was unable to provide
action-guidance. Hence, rather than being a normative rival to
utilitarian and deontological ethics, it could claim to be no more
than a valuable supplement to them. The rather odd idea was that all
virtue ethics could offer was, “Identify a moral exemplar and do
what he would do,” as though the university student trying
to decide whether to study music (her preference) or engineering (her
parents’ preference) was supposed to ask herself, “What
would Socrates study if he were in my circumstances?”
But the objection failed to take note of Anscombe’s hint that a
great deal of specific action guidance could be found in rules
employing the virtue and vice terms (“v-rules”) such as
“Do what is honest/charitable; do not do what is
dishonest/uncharitable” (Hursthouse 1999). (It is a noteworthy
feature of our virtue and vice vocabulary that, although our list of
generally recognised virtue terms is comparatively short, our list of
vice terms is remarkably, and usefully, long, far exceeding anything
that anyone who thinks in terms of standard deontological rules has
ever come up with. Much invaluable action guidance comes from avoiding
courses of action that would be irresponsible, feckless, lazy,
inconsiderate, uncooperative, harsh, intolerant, selfish, mercenary,
indiscreet, tactless, arrogant, unsympathetic, cold, incautious,
unenterprising, pusillanimous, feeble, presumptuous, rude,
hypocritical, self-indulgent, materialistic, grasping, short-sighted,
vindictive, calculating, ungrateful, grudging, brutal, profligate,
disloyal, and on and on.)
(b) A closely related objection has to do with whether virtue ethics
can provide an adequate account of right action. This worry can take
two forms. (i) One might think a virtue ethical account of right
action is extensionally inadequate. It is possible to perform a right
action without being virtuous and a virtuous person can occasionally
perform the wrong action without that calling her virtue into
question. If virtue is neither necessary nor sufficient for right
action, one might wonder whether the relationship between
rightness/wrongness and virtue/vice is close enough for the former to
be identified in terms of the latter. (ii) Alternatively, even if one
thought it possible to produce a virtue ethical account that picked
out all (and only) right actions, one might still think that at least
in some cases virtue is not what explains rightness (Adams
2006:6–8).
Some virtue ethicists respond to the adequacy objection by rejecting
the assumption that virtue ethics ought to be in the business of
providing an account of right action in the first place. Following in
the footsteps of Anscombe (1958) and MacIntyre (1985), Talbot Brewer
(2009) argues that to work with the categories of rightness and
wrongness is already to get off on the wrong foot. Contemporary
conceptions of right and wrong action, built as they are around a
notion of moral duty that presupposes a framework of divine (or moral)
law or around a conception of obligation that is defined in contrast
to self-interest, carry baggage the virtue ethicist is better off
without. Virtue ethics can address the questions of how one should
live, what kind of person one should become, and even what one should
do without that committing it to providing an account of ‘right
action’. One might choose, instead, to work with aretaic
concepts (defined in terms of virtues and vices) and axiological
concepts (defined in terms of good and bad, better and worse) and
leave out deontic notions (like right/wrong action, duty, and
obligation) altogether.
Other virtue ethicists wish to retain the concept of right action but
note that in the current philosophical discussion a number of distinct
qualities march under that banner. In some contexts, ‘right
action’ identifies the best action an agent might perform in the
circumstances. In others, it designates an action that is commendable
(even if not the best possible). In still others, it picks out actions
that are not blameworthy (even if not commendable). A virtue ethicist
might choose to define one of these—for example, the best
action—in terms of virtues and vices, but appeal to other
normative concepts—such as legitimate expectations—when
defining other conceptions of right action.
As we observed in section 2, a virtue ethical account need not attempt
to reduce all other normative concepts to virtues and vices.
What is required is simply (i) that virtue is not reduced to
some other normative concept that is taken to be more fundamental and
(ii) that some other normative concepts are explained in
terms of virtue and vice. This takes the sting out of the adequacy
objection, which is most compelling against versions of virtue ethics
that attempt to define all of the senses of ‘right action’
in terms of virtues. Appealing to virtues and vices makes it
much easier to achieve extensional adequacy. Making room for normative
concepts that are not taken to be reducible to virtue and vice
concepts makes it even easier to generate a theory that is both
extensionally and explanatorily adequate. Whether one needs other
concepts and, if so, how many, is still a matter of debate among
virtue ethicists, as is the question of whether virtue ethics even
ought to be offering an account of right action. Either way virtue
ethicists have resources available to them to address the adequacy
objection.
Insofar as the different versions of virtue ethics all retain an
emphasis on the virtues, they are open to the familiar problem of (c)
the charge of cultural relativity. Is it not the case that different
cultures embody different virtues, (MacIntyre 1985) and hence that the
v-rules will pick out actions as right or wrong only relative to a
particular culture? Different replies have been made to this charge.
One—the tu quoque, or “partners in crime”
response—exhibits a quite familiar pattern in virtue
ethicists’ defensive strategy (Solomon 1988). They admit that,
for them, cultural relativism is a challenge, but point out
that it is just as much a problem for the other two approaches. The
(putative) cultural variation in character traits regarded as virtues
is no greater—indeed markedly less—than the cultural
variation in rules of conduct, and different cultures have different
ideas about what constitutes happiness or welfare. That cultural
relativity should be a problem common to all three approaches is
hardly surprising. It is related, after all, to the
“justification problem”
(see below)
the quite general metaethical problem of justifying one’s moral
beliefs to those who disagree, whether they be moral sceptics,
pluralists or from another culture.
A bolder strategy involves claiming that virtue ethics has less
difficulty with cultural relativity than the other two approaches.
Much cultural disagreement arises, it may be claimed, from local
understandings of the virtues, but the virtues themselves are not
relative to culture (Nussbaum 1993).
Another objection to which the tu quoque response is
partially appropriate is (d) “the conflict problem.” What
does virtue ethics have to say about dilemmas—cases in which,
apparently, the requirements of different virtues conflict because
they point in opposed directions? Charity prompts me to kill the
person who would be better off dead, but justice forbids it. Honesty
points to telling the hurtful truth, kindness and compassion to
remaining silent or even lying. What shall I do? Of course, the same
sorts of dilemmas are generated by conflicts between deontological
rules. Deontology and virtue ethics share the conflict problem (and
are happy to take it on board rather than follow some of the
utilitarians in their consequentialist resolutions of such dilemmas)
and in fact their strategies for responding to it are parallel. Both
aim to resolve a number of dilemmas by arguing that the conflict is
merely apparent; a discriminating understanding of the virtues or
rules in question, possessed only by those with practical wisdom, will
perceive that, in this particular case, the virtues do not make
opposing demands or that one rule outranks another, or has a certain
exception clause built into it. Whether this is all there is to it
depends on whether there are any irresolvable dilemmas. If there are,
proponents of either normative approach may point out reasonably that
it could only be a mistake to offer a resolution of what is, ex
hypothesi, irresolvable.
Another problem arguably shared by all three approaches is (e), that
of being self-effacing. An ethical theory is self-effacing if,
roughly, whatever it claims justifies a particular action, or makes it
right, had better not be the agent’s motive for doing it.
Michael Stocker (1976) originally introduced it as a problem for
deontology and consequentialism. He pointed out that the agent who,
rightly, visits a friend in hospital will rather lessen the impact of
his visit on her if he tells her either that he is doing it because it
is his duty or because he thought it would maximize the general
happiness. But as Simon Keller observes, she won’t be any better
pleased if he tells her that he is visiting her because it is what a
virtuous agent would do, so virtue ethics would appear to have the
problem too (Keller 2007). However, virtue ethics’ defenders
have argued that not all forms of virtue ethics are subject to this
objection (Pettigrove 2011) and those that are are not seriously
undermined by the problem (Martinez 2011).
Another problem for virtue ethics, which is shared by both
utilitarianism and deontology, is (f)
“the justification problem.”
Abstractly conceived, this is the problem of how we justify or ground
our ethical beliefs, an issue that is hotly debated at the level of
metaethics. In its particular versions, for deontology there is the
question of how to justify its claims that certain moral rules are the
correct ones, and for utilitarianism of how to justify its claim that
all that really matters morally are consequences for happiness or
well-being. For virtue ethics, the problem concerns the question of
which character traits are the virtues.
In the metaethical debate, there is widespread disagreement about the
possibility of providing an external foundation for
ethics—“external” in the sense of being external to
ethical beliefs—and the same disagreement is found amongst
deontologists and utilitarians. Some believe that their normative
ethics can be placed on a secure basis, resistant to any form of
scepticism, such as what anyone rationally desires, or would accept or
agree on, regardless of their ethical outlook; others that it
cannot.
Virtue ethicists have eschewed any attempt to ground virtue ethics in
an external foundation while continuing to maintain that their claims
can be validated. Some follow a form of Rawls’s coherentist
approach (Slote 2001; Swanton 2003); neo-Aristotelians a form of
ethical naturalism.
A misunderstanding of eudaimonia as an unmoralized concept
leads some critics to suppose that the neo-Aristotelians are
attempting to ground their claims in a scientific account of human
nature and what counts, for a human being, as flourishing. Others
assume that, if this is not what they are doing, they cannot be
validating their claims that, for example, justice, charity, courage,
and generosity are virtues. Either they are illegitimately helping
themselves to Aristotle’s discredited natural teleology
(Williams 1985) or producing mere rationalizations of their own
personal or culturally inculcated values. But McDowell, Foot,
MacIntyre and Hursthouse have all outlined versions of a third way
between these two extremes. Eudaimonia in virtue ethics, is
indeed a moralized concept, but it is not only that. Claims about what
constitutes flourishing for human beings no more float free of
scientific facts about what human beings are like than ethological
claims about what constitutes flourishing for elephants. In both
cases, the truth of the claims depends in part on what kind
of animal they are and what capacities, desires and interests the
humans or elephants have.
The best available science today (including evolutionary theory and
psychology) supports rather than undermines the ancient Greek
assumption that we are social animals, like elephants and wolves and
unlike polar bears. No rationalizing explanation in terms of anything
like a social contract is needed to explain why we choose to live
together, subjugating our egoistic desires in order to secure the
advantages of co-operation. Like other social animals, our natural
impulses are not solely directed towards our own pleasures and
preservation, but include altruistic and cooperative ones.
This basic fact about us should make more comprehensible the claim
that the virtues are at least partially constitutive of human
flourishing and also undercut the objection that virtue ethics is, in
some sense, egoistic.
(g) The egoism objection has a number of sources. One is a simple
confusion. Once it is understood that the fully virtuous agent
characteristically does what she should without inner conflict, it is
triumphantly asserted that “she is only doing what she
wants to do and hence is being selfish.” So when the
generous person gives gladly, as the generous are wont to do, it turns
out she is not generous and unselfish after all, or at least not as
generous as the one who greedily wants to hang on to everything she
has but forces herself to give because she thinks she should! A
related version ascribes bizarre reasons to the virtuous agent,
unjustifiably assuming that she acts as she does because she
believes that acting thus on this occasion will help her to achieve
eudaimonia. But “the virtuous agent” is just
“the agent with the virtues” and it is part of our
ordinary understanding of the virtue terms that each carries with it
its own typical range of reasons for acting. The virtuous agent acts
as she does because she believes that someone’s suffering will
be averted, or someone benefited, or the truth established, or a debt
repaid, or … thereby.
It is the exercise of the virtues during one’s life that is held
to be at least partially constitutive of eudaimonia, and this
is consistent with recognising that bad luck may land the virtuous
agent in circumstances that require her to give up her life. Given the
sorts of considerations that courageous, honest, loyal, charitable
people wholeheartedly recognise as reasons for action, they may find
themselves compelled to face danger for a worthwhile end, to speak out
in someone’s defence, or refuse to reveal the names of their
comrades, even when they know that this will inevitably lead to their
execution, to share their last crust and face starvation. On the view
that the exercise of the virtues is necessary but not sufficient for
eudaimonia, such cases are described as those in which the
virtuous agent sees that, as things have unfortunately turned out,
eudaimonia is not possible for them (Foot 2001, 95). On the
Stoical view that it is both necessary and sufficient, a
eudaimon life is a life that has been successfully lived
(where “success” of course is not to be understood in a
materialistic way) and such people die knowing not only that they have
made a success of their lives but that they have also brought their
lives to a markedly successful completion. Either way, such heroic
acts can hardly be regarded as egoistic.
A lingering suggestion of egoism may be found in the misconceived
distinction between so-called “self-regarding” and
“other-regarding” virtues. Those who have been insulated
from the ancient tradition tend to regard justice and benevolence as
real virtues, which benefit others but not their possessor, and
prudence, fortitude and providence (the virtue whose opposite is
“improvidence” or being a spendthrift) as not real virtues
at all because they benefit only their possessor. This is a mistake on
two counts. Firstly, justice and benevolence do, in general, benefit
their possessors, since without them eudaimonia is not
possible. Secondly, given that we live together, as social animals,
the “self-regarding” virtues do benefit others—those
who lack them are a great drain on, and sometimes grief to, those who
are close to them (as parents with improvident or imprudent adult
offspring know only too well).
The most recent objection (h) to virtue ethics claims that work in
“situationist” social psychology shows that there are no
such things as character traits and thereby no such things as virtues
for virtue ethics to be about (Doris 1998; Harman 1999). In reply,
some virtue ethicists have argued that the social psychologists’
studies are irrelevant to the multi-track disposition (see above) that
a virtue is supposed to be (Sreenivasan 2002; Kamtekar 2004). Mindful
of just how multi-track it is, they agree that it would be reckless in
the extreme to ascribe a demanding virtue such as charity to people of
whom they know no more than that they have exhibited conventional
decency; this would indeed be “a fundamental attribution
error.” Others have worked to develop alternative, empirically
grounded conceptions of character traits (Snow 2010; Miller 2013 and
2014; however see Upton 2016 for objections to Miller). There have
been other responses as well (summarized helpfully in Prinz 2009 and
Miller 2014). Notable among these is a response by Adams (2006,
echoing Merritt 2000) who steers a middle road between “no
character traits at all” and the exacting standard of the
Aristotelian conception of virtue which, because of its emphasis on
phronesis, requires a high level of character integration. On his
conception, character traits may be “frail and
fragmentary” but still virtues, and not uncommon. But giving up
the idea that practical wisdom is the heart of all the virtues, as
Adams has to do, is a substantial sacrifice, as Russell (2009) and
Kamtekar (2010) argue.
Even though the “situationist challenge” has left
traditional virtue ethicists unmoved, it has generated a healthy
engagement with empirical psychological literature, which has also
been fuelled by the growing literature on Foot’s Natural
Goodness and, quite independently, an upsurge of interest in
character education (see below).
4. Future Directions
Over the past thirty-five years most of those contributing to the
revival of virtue ethics have worked within a neo-Aristotelian,
eudaimonist framework. However, as noted in section 2, other forms of
virtue ethics have begun to emerge. Theorists have begun to turn to
philosophers like Hutcheson, Hume, Nietzsche, Martineau, and Heidegger
for resources they might use to develop alternatives (see Russell
2006; Swanton 2013 and 2015; Taylor 2015; and Harcourt 2015). Others
have turned their attention eastward, exploring Confucian, Buddhist,
and Hindu traditions (Yu 2007; Slingerland 2011; Finnigan and Tanaka
2011; McRae 2012; Angle and Slote 2013; Davis 2014; Flanagan 2015;
Perrett and Pettigrove 2015; and Sim 2015). These explorations promise
to open up new avenues for the development of virtue ethics.
Although virtue ethics has grown remarkably in the last thirty-five
years, it is still very much in the minority, particularly in the area
of applied ethics. Many editors of big textbook collections on
“moral problems” or “applied ethics” now try
to include articles representative of each of the three normative
approaches but are often unable to find a virtue ethics article
addressing a particular issue. This is sometimes, no doubt, because
“the” issue has been set up as a
deontologicial/utilitarian debate, but it is often simply because no
virtue ethicist has yet written on the topic. However, the last decade
has seen an increase in the amount of attention applied virtue ethics
has received (Walker and Ivanhoe 2007; Hartman 2013; Austin 2014; Van
Hooft 2014; and Annas 2015). This area can certainly be expected to
grow in the future, and it looks as though applying virtue ethics in
the field of environmental ethics may prove particularly fruitful
(Sandler 2007; Hursthouse 2007, 2011; Zwolinski and Schmidtz 2013;
Cafaro 2015).
Whether virtue ethics can be expected to grow into “virtue
politics”—i.e. to extend from moral philosophy into
political philosophy—is not so clear. Gisela Striker (2006) has
argued that Aristotle’s ethics cannot be understood adequately
without attending to its place in his politics. That suggests that at
least those virtue ethicists who take their inspiration from Aristotle
should have resources to offer for the development of virtue politics.
But, while Plato and Aristotle can be great inspirations as far as
virtue ethics is concerned, neither, on the face of it, are attractive
sources of insight where politics is concerned. However, recent work
suggests that Aristotelian ideas can, after all, generate a
satisfyingly liberal political philosophy (Nussbaum 2006; LeBar
2013a). Moreover, as noted above, virtue ethics does not have to be
neo-Aristotelian. It may be that the virtue ethics of Hutcheson and
Hume can be naturally extended into a modern political philosophy
(Hursthouse 1990–91; Slote 1993).
Following Plato and Aristotle, modern virtue ethics has always
emphasised the importance of moral education, not as the inculcation
of rules but as the training of character. There is now a growing
movement towards virtues education, amongst both academics (Carr 1999;
Athanassoulis 2014; Curren 2015) and teachers in the classroom. One
exciting thing about research in this area is its engagement with
other academic disciplines, including psychology, educational theory,
and theology (see Cline 2015; and Snow 2015).
Finally, one of the more productive developments of virtue ethics has
come through the study of particular virtues and vices. There are now
a number of careful studies of the cardinal virtues and capital vices
(Pieper 1966; Taylor 2006; Curzer 2012; Timpe and Boyd 2014). Others
have explored less widely discussed virtues or vices, such as
civility, decency, truthfulness, ambition, and meekness (Calhoun 2000;
Kekes 2002; Williams 2002; and Pettigrove 2007 and 2012). One of the
questions these studies raise is “How many virtues are
there?” A second is, “How are these virtues related to one
another?” Some virtue ethicists have been happy to work on the
assumption that there is no principled reason for limiting the number
of virtues and plenty of reason for positing a plurality of them
(Swanton 2003; Battaly 2015). Others have been concerned that such an
open-handed approach to the virtues will make it difficult for virtue
ethicists to come up with an adequate account of right action or deal
with the conflict problem discussed above. Dan Russell has proposed
cardinality and a version of the unity thesis as a solution to what he
calls “the enumeration problem” (the problem of too many
virtues). The apparent proliferation of virtues can be significantly
reduced if we group virtues together with some being cardinal and
others subordinate extensions of those cardinal virtues. Possible
conflicts between the remaining virtues can then be managed if they
are tied together in some way as part of a unified whole (Russell
2009). This highlights two important avenues for future research, one
of which explores individual virtues and the other of which analyses
how they might be related to one another.
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Acknowledgments
Parts of the introductory material above repeat what was said in the
Introduction and first chapter of On Virtue Ethics
(Hursthouse 1999).
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Rosalind Hursthouse
Glen Pettigrove
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Ethics and Ethical Behavior
Claudia Nagel2
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Introduction
Human beings are constantly judging their own actions and those of others. Good and evil, moral and amoral, and conscienceless are the respective judgments whereby we implicitly assume that “one” knows the basic difference between good and evil. Moral conduct is thus always attributed to an individual, who is regarded as being responsible for his actions and held accountable for these, i.e., he has to answer to himself, his own conscience, or an external authority or institution. Moral behavior therefore presupposes the concept of voluntariness and freedom. Conscience, freedom, and responsibility are central concepts of moral behavior and ethics as the philosophical doctrine of morally relevant behavior (Moral Philosophy).
Ethics as a philosophical discipline dates back to Aristotle, who also pursued earlier approaches, as those of Plato and Socrates. The term ethics is derived from the Ancient Greek “ethikos”: custom, habit, or tradition. Although the adjectival or...
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Download referencesAcknowledgmentThis text was translated by Gisela Rumsey, M.A.Author informationAuthors and AffiliationsNagel & Company Management Consulting, Frankfurt, GermanyClaudia NagelAuthorsClaudia NagelView author publicationsYou can also search for this author in
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Claudia Nagel .Editor informationEditors and AffiliationsUniversity of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USADavid A. Leeming (Emeritus Professor) (Emeritus Professor)Rights and permissionsReprints and permissionsCopyright information© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media New YorkAbout this entryCite this entryNagel, C. (2014). Ethics and Ethical Behavior.
In: Leeming, D.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_216Download citation.RIS.ENW.BIBDOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6086-2_216
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