Christopher Cordner

Differences Between Sport and Art

(1988). Differences Between Sport and Art. Journal of the Philosophy of Sport: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 31-47.

No need to go! Workplace studies and the resources of the revised National Statement

AbstractIn their article ‘Unintended consequences of human research ethics committees: au revoir workplace studies?’, Greg Bamber and Jennifer Sappey set out some real obstacles in the practices and attitudes of some Human Research Ethics Committees (HRECs), to research in the social sciences and particularly in industrial sociology. They sheet home these attitudes and practices to the way in which various statements in the NHMRC’s National Statement [1999] are implemented, which they say is often ‘in conflict with an important stream of industrial sociological research’ in Australia. They do not discuss the recently completed revision of the NS. We undertake to show that the revised National Statement meets their concerns about research in industrial sociology, and to draw attention to the resources of the revised National Statement that engage with those concerns. A more general aim is to display the greater scope, in the revised National Statement, for researchers to show to HRECs that their research is justified by virtue of its reflecting the established methodology and traditions of their discipline. The revised National Statement, we suggest, provides for a more flexible and responsive approach than its predecessor to the ethical review of many areas of research.

Evil: A Philosophical Investigation, by Russell, Luke

effect. To be sure, the fact that duties to the poor are unlikely to be satisfied does not mean that they are not real duties. But we might wonder if arguing for such duties adequately answers the ‘urgent need’ that this collection posits for philosophers to analyze the (im) morality of global poverty. Expanding our philosophical focus beyond rights and duties might help us to do more to see the rights of the poor being better satisfied. Especially helpful here is Ann Cudd’s suggestion that we try to find (what I would call) sources of global solidarity: reasons shared by rich and poor alike to want to see global poverty eradicated. Cudd focuses on ‘instrumental’ benefits to the non-poor of poverty reduction: bringing the poor into the global economy should increase the size of the overall global economic pie, and should provide opportunities for particular people in the rich world to engage in mutually beneficial transactions with poor people previously excluded from global economic interaction. The reader might find himself wanting more on intrinsic benefits, too—wanting to know, for instance, whether our unavoidable complicity in injustice makes our life worse (say, by making it hard for us to feel fully justified in our relations with others). Cudd’s preferred poverty interventions reflect her narrower focus on straightforwardly prudential benefits, and especially on ways in which anti-poverty efforts can have positive economic effects in both the developing and the developed world. The best prescription for global poverty—the treatment that best respects the agency of the poor—is free and fair commercial interaction between rich and poor, Cudd argues. But there are reasons to be careful with this conclusion: free and fair commerce can be difficult to achieve, even with the best intentions. As Wertheimer points out, some mutually beneficial proposals are so disproportionately beneficial to one party that they may have no real option but to agree. Wertheimer argues, plausibly, that this challenge can be answered—asymmetrically situated agents can validly consent to mutually beneficial interaction; but Cudd would surely agree that we should attend carefully to power asymmetries if we want our commercially inflected poverty interventions to avoid exploitation and to respect the agency of the poor. I strongly recommend this collection to anyone interested in present philosophical debates on global poverty and human rights.

Aristotelian Virtue and Beyond

‘Virtue ethics’ is very prominent in contemporary moral philosophy. The philosophical model for most of those urging the claims of virtue ethics is of course Aristotle. Some features, at least, of the motivation to this renewed concern with Aristotelian ethical thought are fairly clear. Aristotle promises an understanding of the ethical which locates it robustly within the world. His moral virtues are evidently this-worldly qualities. Morality is a natural and not a transcendental affair.1 By moral virtues he means simply excellences of character. The place in our lives of such virtues, moreover, seems to be explained readily, and attractively, in Aristotelian terms. Moral virtue is essentially connected with eudaimonia, understood variously as happiness, as living well, or as flourishing. Morality is important most fundamentally because of its contribution to the living of a eudaimonic life.

Altruism and Moral Meaning

The next three chapters sketch some aspects of an ethical understanding which lies beyond anything acknowledged by Aristotle, which has historically been salient in Western culture at least, and which I believe still informs our deepest sense of ourselves. We do not get to this understanding, however, just by parting ways with Aristotle. As acknowledged earlier, there may be versions of virtue ethics not marked by Aristotle’s worldliness. It could be held that we find ourselves under an ethical outlook different from and perhaps incompatible with Aristotle’s, which even so is well described as a form of virtue ethics. Later I shall argue that the understanding sketched in the following three chapters resists such description. One way of revealing this understanding is via attention to neglected elements of the background to some of those concepts on which moral philosophers commonly focus. My starting point is critical reflection on the concept of altruism. Let me explain why.

Absolute Otherness and Common Humanity

The concept of a role can illuminate some of my examples so far. We could say that Lear and the earlier Ivan Ilych undertake to constitute the significance of others via the role or roles each takes himself to occupy (though we can also see Lear groping for a deeper sense of others than that). When another’s significance to one thus becomes shaped via a role then, depending on the role in question, sometimes the other will be significant because in the salient respect different from oneself, and sometimes because the same. If the role is that of teacher, for example, the other is significant as pupil, whereas if the role is that of trade unionist, the other’s significance may be as (fellow) trade unionist — not a qualitative difference in this case, but a qualitative sameness. Still, the crucial thing in both cases is that the significance of the other is constituted via their place (whether sameness or difference) within a limited moral-conceptual economy which subsumes both self and other.

Duty and Ethical Motivation

One theme of Chapter 3 was the impossibility of deriving ethics from human desires. There is therefore no ‘all-important’ step, ethically speaking, from desires registering ‘concern with self’ to those registering ‘a concern for others’. Whatever contents or objects they are allowed to have, desires themselves are not the origin of ethics. So expressed, that is a familiar enough negative theme. But there are various ways of going on from here. Kant famously contrasted actions whose source is our ‘inclinations’ — close to what I have intended by ‘desires’ — and actions motivated by duty.1 Only the latter, Kant held, have any moral worth. Kant recognized that one can do what is morally right without being motivated by duty. But doing what is right, he thought, does not of itself confer moral worth on what one does, since one might do it for the wrong reason, or in the wrong way or the wrong spirit. (One might do it simply out of fear of punishment, or to curry favour, for example.) Kant seems to think that acting from duty involves being motivated by the recognition that such and such is indeed morally required of one. Does what I have said about desires imply that the moral worth of our activity depends on its being motivated by duty?

Goodness and Vulnerability

In The Fragility of Goodness Martha Nussbaum reflects on Plato’s Symposium as presenting us, she thinks, with a stark picture of mutually exclusive ways of living life: … on the one hand, the life of Alcibiades, the person ‘possessed’ by the madness of personal love; on the other, a life in which the intellectual soul ascends to true insight and stable contemplation by denying the ‘mad’ influence of personal passion. Alcibiades’ madness is, allegedly, incompatible with rational order and stability; its vision is a barrier to correct vision. The life of the philosopher achieves order, stability, and insight at the price of denying the sight of the body and the value of individual love.1 [Plato] then shows us, through Socrates and Diotoma, how despite our needy and mortal natures, we can transcend the merely personal in eros and ascend, through desire itself, to the good. But we are not yet persuaded that we can accept this vision of self-sufficiency and this model of practical understanding, since, with Vlastos, we feel that they omit something. What they omit is now movingly displayed to us in the person and story of Alcibiades. We realize through him, the deep importance unique passion has for ordinary human beings; we see its irreplaceable contribution to understanding.

Goodness and the Classical Limits of Virtue

In Chapter 1 I explored some of the limitations (by the lights of a different outlook) of Aristotle’s ethics of virtue. But I noted that an ethic of the virtues need not centralize a concern to appear before one’s peers in a certain way, as Aristotle does. Aquinas’ picture of the virtues, for example, might be thought free of that feature, as may other — perhaps especially other Christian-influenced — conceptions of virtue ethics. There is something in this thought. I begin with it and then ask whether there is a kind of goodness that matters greatly to us which cannot be brought under virtue concepts even when these are understood as free of that distinctive Aristotelian feature. I think there is such a goodness. I try to reveal and remove some of the obstacles in the way of reflective acknowledgement of it.

Altruism and ‘the Other’

Imagine two well-to-do and well-known figures — Peter and Paul — both of whom are generous with their time and energy and money in their community. One day both lose all their money. Paul becomes bitter and resentful — or perhaps he just becomes self-absorbed, unable any longer to attend much to anyone else. Peter does not. In his own deep troubles, he is still able to respond compassionately and attentively to the needs of various others. These different outcomes point to the possibility of a very different significance in the apparently similar orientations of Peter and Paul before they lost their wealth and status.1