David Sobel

Morality and virtue: An assessment of some recent work in virtue ethics

These are boom years for the study of the virtues. Several new books have recently appeared that bring to the literature new ways of understanding virtue and new ways of developing virtue theoretical approaches to morality. This new work presents a richly interesting cluster of views, some of which take virtue to be the central or basic normative ethical notion, but some of which merely amend familiar consequentialist or deontological approaches by incorporating into them an articulated conception of the moral significance of virtue. We will focus on the more distinctive and ambitious recent theories of the former kind, theories that purport to exhibit virtue as the central or basic moral notion. This essay therefore focuses on Michael Slote’s Morals from Motives, Rosalind Hursthouse’s On Virtue Ethics, and, to a lesser extent, Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness.

Subjectivism and idealization

Subjective accounts of well-being maintain that one’s rationally contingent nontruth assessable proattitudes ground true claims about what is good for one. Subjectivists tend to acknowledge that the agent’s actual proattitudes can fail to point her toward that which would benefit her. For example, a woman may desperately want to marry her high school sweetheart, but unbeknownst to her they are not compatible, and the marriage would be doomed and unsatisfying. The moral is that getting what we actually want can fail to benefit us. Further, suppose that I would love the taste of pineapple if I were to taste it but now have no desire to do so. My current lack of desire for pineapple does not entail that I would not be benefited by eating it. The satisfaction of actual desires does not seem to correlate with what is good for one. Informed desires seem to have a better claim to do so. But is there a subjectivistfriendly rationale for looking to informed desires beyond merely getting the right answer? This article will argue that there is. What defines an account of well-being as subjective is the thesis that an agent’s desires ground what makes something good for her. On such an account, it is understood that the set of desires that plays this

Subjective Accounts of Reasons for Action

ly in its universal form; but it does always have it actually before its eyes, and does use it as a norm of judgement’’ (Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton [New York: Harper & Row, 1964], p. 71). This backs away from claiming that the categorical imperative is the decision procedure of ‘‘ordinary human reason.’’ It is unclear what ordinary people do that counts as close enough to having the categorical imperative ‘‘before its eyes.’’ I take it to be a problem if only a handful of academics have a shot at invoking an approved decision procedure. Yet the relationship between the categorical imperative and an approved decision procedure available to nonacademics seems obscure. Some have suggested to me that the common thought of ‘‘What if everyone did that?’’ might count as invoking a recognizably Kantian thought as part of one’s decision procedure. Presumably the Kantian needs a merely instrumental understanding of the relationship between the truth-maker and the decision procedure. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.162 on Thu, 11 Aug 2016 05:29:03 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Name /C1681/C1681_CH01 03/24/03 07:11AM Plate # 0-Composite pg 480 # 20 must distinguish between information that is relevant or likely to be worth the getting and information that is not. A good theory of practical rationality must come to terms with the scarcity of time, limited resources, unreliable information, and our tendency to be tempted to rig deliberation in favor of the nearer benefit. Taking such things into account will necessitate that the proper decision procedure involves heuristics and rules of thumb.35 The subjectivist’s account simply abstracts away from such problems. These added complexities in everyday deliberation make the subjectivist’s account a silly model to try to approximate when making practical decisions. What the Humean should say about how we should deal with imperfect information, time pressure, and our predictable human weakness in a rational way is an interesting question. In fact it is as interesting as the question of what actual policies the consequentialist ought to recommend after she convinces herself that morality requires us to maximize the good. In both cases, the fact that much of the work of figuring out what we must do if we are to act for our true reasons or to act morally remains to be done even after we accept such theories does not, by itself, constitute an objection to such theories. Indeed I would say that it is no criticism of an account of a truth-maker qua truth-maker that it offers no useful guidance for helping us to actually discover the truth of the matter. These considerations so far highlight the lack of connection between a subjectivist account of the truth-maker of reasons and an account of rationality. But, it might be thought, surely there must be some interesting connection between reasons and rationality. I will here canvass three attempts to forge such an interesting connection. I will be doubtful that any of these links can be sustained. First, one could offer a connection of the sort that Michael Smith champions.36 Smith offers an interesting proposal that attempts to forge a formal link between rationality and reasons. He offers a vantage point alleged to be ideal for deliberation about one’s reasons. He then claims that if from that vantage point one would want X for one’s nonidealized self, then one has reason to get X. He also claims that if one believes that one would so want X from his vantage point, then one is irrational to not desire X. Thus the connection between reasons and rationality would 480 Ethics April 2001 35. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have written much about actual human heuristics and biases. See esp. Kahneman, Slovic, and Tversky, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Such heuristics and biases will, of course, sometimes lead us to act contrary to our genuine reasons but this is not sufficient to show that adopting them as part of one’s decision procedure is irrational. It would be a drastic mistake to reject all such heuristics and biases on the grounds that even the best are fallible. 36. Smith, The Moral Problem, pp. 177–80. Gauthier (p. 31), in passing, also supports

Explanation, Internalism, and Reasons for Action

These days, just about every philosophical debate seems to generate a position labeled internalism . The debate I will be joining in this essay concerns reasons for action and their connection, or lack of connection, to motivation. The internalist position in this debate posits a certain essential connection between reasons and motivation, while the externalist position denies such a connection. This debate about internalism overlaps an older debate between Humeans and Kantians about the exclusive reason-giving power of desires. As we will see, however, while these debates overlap, the new debate is importantly different from the old debate.

WELL-BEING AS THE OBJECT OF MORAL CONSIDERATION

An adequate moral theory must take (at least) each person into account in some way. Some think that the appropriate way to take an agent into account morally involves a consequentialist form of promoting something about her. Others suggest instead that morality requires a Kantian form of respecting something about an agent. I am interested here in pursuing the former line. When we pursue the broadly consequentialist line we come to this question: what should we promote on the agents behalf when we are taking her into account morally?

Backing Away from Libertarian Self-Ownership*

Libertarian self-ownership views have traditionally maintained that we enjoy very powerful deontological protections against any infringement upon our property. This stringency yields very counterintuitive results when we consider trivial infringements such as very mildly toxic pollution or trivial risks such as having planes fly overhead. Maintaining that other people’s rights against all infringements are very powerful threatens to undermine our liberty, as Nozick saw. In this essay I consider the most sophisticated attempts to rectify this problem within a libertarian self-ownership framework. I argue that all of these responses are significantly flawed.

Pleasure as a Mental State

Shelly Kagan and Leonard Katz have offered versions of hedonism that aspire to occupy a middle position between the view that pleasure is a unitary sensation and the view that pleasure is, as Sidgwick put it, desirable consciousness. Thus they hope to offer a hedonistic account of well-being that does not mistakenly suppose that pleasure is a special kind of tingle, yet to offer a sharp alternative to desire-based accounts. I argue that they have not identified a coherent middle position.

The Limits of the Explanatory Power of Developmentalism

Richard Krauts neo-Aristotelian account of well-being, Developmentalism, aspires to explain not only which things are good for us but why those things are good for us. The key move in attempting to make good on this second aspiration involves his claim that our ordinary intuitions about what is good for a person can be successfully explained and systematized by the idea that what benefi ts a living thing develops properly that living things potentialities, capacities, and faculties. I argue that Krauts understanding of such proper development plays no serious constraining role in shaping the details of the account. If this is correct, Developmentalism lacks the potential to explain or vindicate the intuitions about what is good for us that it champions. In effect, Kraut offers us a list of things that he claims benefits a person, but he lacks a theory of what those things have in common such that they benefit him.

The Moral Importance of the Capability to Achieve Elementary Functionings

The recent ethical writings of Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen outline a powerful alternative to both welfarist consequentialist ethical theories and Rawlsian approaches. We can perhaps best see the attractions of their view by seeing how it responds to alleged problems for these rival approaches. One might urge that welfarist consequentialism cannot directly capture the strong intuition that, if we must choose, we should provide aid to a person who lacks the means to feed herself rather than to the person who has the means to feed herself but credibly threatens to not do so unless we cook salmon for her just so. We can imagine that the fussy eater really would allow herself to suffer in the same way as the person