Lester H. Hunt

Quandaries and virtues : against reductivism in ethics

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Literature as Fable, Fable as Argument

Kao tzu said, “Human nature is like whirling water. give it an outlet in the east and it will flow east; give an outlet in the west and it will flow west. Human nature does not show any preference for either good or bad, just as water does not show any preference for either east or west.” “it certainly is the case,” said mencius, “that water does not show any preference for either east or west, but does it show the same indifference to high and low? Human nature is good just as water seeks low ground. there is no man who is not good; there is no water that does not flow downwards.”1

Thus Spake Howard Roark: Nietzschean Ideas in The Fountainhead

The position I will be taking here will seem very peculiar to many people. I will be treating a novel as a discussion of the work of a philosopher—namely, Friedrich Nietzsche. Worse yet, I will be treating it as a discussion that is philosophically penetrating and deserves to be taken seriously. Still worse, the novel is Ayn Rand’s early novel The Fountainhead. I think it is safe to say that her reputation, among academics who discuss the works of philosophers, is very low. If the reader will only bear with me, though, I think I can make a case that Rand opens a line of inquiry about Nietzsche’s ideas and values that is not only quite interesting in itself but one that ought to be pursued further by others. There has always been ample reason to associate Nietzsche with The Fountainhead.1 He is after all, the only philosopher who is more or less directly quoted in the book.2 Beyond that, Rand’s novel has many other passages that students of Nietzsche instantly recognize as conscious references to him or deliberate echoes of his style. In addition, she revealed, in an introduction written for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, that the following quotation from Beyond Good and Evil had originally stood at the head of the book when it was still in manuscript:

Martha Nussbaum on the Emotions

When Martha Nussbaum’s Hiding from Humanity was newly published, it appeared on the “employee recommendations” shelf of the Madison West Borders Books store—probably the only book of serious philosophy ever to be so honored. One thing that has to be kept in mind as one reviews or rates these two books by Nussbaum is that they are really aimed at a wider audience than academic philosophers and their students. This is part of the value of Hiding from Humanity as well as Nussbaum’s earlier Upheavals of Thought (hereafter identified in parentheses as UT and HH). The two books are undeniably “good reads,” and I heartily recommend them as such. Here, I will focus on aspects of both books that will be of interest to readers of this journal: the account of emotion that Nussbaum presents in them and some of the ways she applies it to moral, political, and legal issues. Unfortunately, there is a great deal of interest in both books that I will not be able to discuss or will be able to acknowledge with no more than a wave of the hand. One thing that makes these books interesting, at least to me, is the way in which they address an issue that is indirectly raised by some of Nussbaum’s earlier work. In earlier writings, Nussbaum has defended a certain way in which literature appeals to one’s emotions—namely, the fact that some literature causes us to feel sympathy for realistically depicted characters—on the grounds that this tends to have a morally improving effect on the way the reader thinks about the world. This seems to amount to a defense of what one might call “emotional” thinking, in which emotions play the role of premises in an inference. This,

The Scarlet Letter: Hawthorne's Theory of Moral Sentiments

quality, it names the individual who wears it; it tells the world what she

Some advantages of social control: An individualist defense

that among the many influences on. our behavior are social conventions which proscribe and discourage us from doing things which someone does not want us to do. If the number of people who want something to be illegal is large enough to force a public discussion of the issue, then there undoubtedly already exists across some section of the population a convention proscribing the thing in question. We always have an alternative form of control, however unsatisfactory it may be. In this paper I will discuss some characteristics of the social form of control which tend to make it more efficient than the legal alternative. Of course, this does not mean that we should always choose social control, or even that efficiency considerations on the whole will be in its favour.1 In some cases, the efficiency advantages will be overwhelmed by costs which will be unacceptable on

Courage and Principle

The things I wish to say here are relatively few and simple. Reflection on certain moral phenomena suggests, by way of a rather loose dialectical argument, a certain traditional theory of the nature of virtue. This is the notion that virtue consists, partly, of acting on the basis of some principle.1 If we do not assume in advance some narrow conception of what principles are like, this theory can provide us with a plausible account of the virtue of courage. If we take it seriously and follow its implications where they lead us we can learn something, not only about virtue, but about the nature of principle as well.

Book ReviewsTara Smith, .Ayn Rand’s Normative Ethics: The Virtuous Egoist.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. x+318.

Everyone who teaches philosophy notices with some regularity students who have gotten interested in the subject by reading the works of Ayn Rand. Over the years, I have heard many express chagrin over this fact. The attitude seems to be that Ayn Rand’s writings are really subphilosophical shmoozings, and the ideas, expectations, or habits of thought that the student might have picked up from her may well have to be unlearned as part of the educational process— more work for the instructor, more obstacles on the path of learning. We can hope that Tara Smith’s book will do much to lay this attitude to rest. It is a detailed, systematic account and defense of one important part of Ayn Rand’s ethics. It does not touch on Rand’s metaethics, and its discussion of Rand’s general ethical theory, which as everyone knows is a form of ethical egoism, is limited to one chapter (this important issue is the subject of an earlier book by Smith). The bulk of the present book consists of seven chapters, one on each of the seven cardinal virtues recognized by Rand: rationality (“the master virtue”), honesty, independence, justice, integrity, productiveness, and pride. Smith concludes with a provocative chapter explaining why various “conventional” (her word) virtues (including charity, generosity, and kindness) did not make it on to this list. Though the ideas she defends are often, as she would insist, unconventional, her style and method are impeccably measured and reasonable. Not the least of this book’s virtues, in my opinion, is the possibility that it will encourage practitioners of virtue ethics to focus more of their efforts on detailed, sensitive, nuanced discussions of particular virtues. They will find a model worthy of emulation in Tara Smith. There is certainly a great deal in this book that is worth discussing and pondering. From the many possible topics I would like to comment briefly on two, simply on the grounds that they touch on matters that are particularly interesting to me. Smith remarks, in her preliminary discussion of the nature of virtue in general, that Rand’s conception of virtue differs from many traditional ones in two ways. First, many traditional theories hold that a virtue is a trait of character. In Rand’s view, she says, it is not (49). Second, many traditional views hold that virtue involves doing the “proper action with a certain spirit and inclination,” whereas Rand, she tells us, denies that “a particular feeling on a given occasion is a requirement of moral virtue” (51). The latter denial is a potentially deep difference between Rand and the Aristotelian tradition, from which she claimed to derive inspiration. It has often been remarked that a basic difference between Aristotle and Kant is that Kant sees virtue as by nature standing in opposition to “inclination” (Neigung), while in Aristotle the closest concept he has to this

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It is possible to evaluate actions in terms of their sources in the agent, the personal traits and states of mind from which they spring. It is also possible to evaluate them in terms of their results. They can be judged on the basis of their ancestry or their progeny. In everyday life, we, of course, look at human conduct in both ways, but philosophers have differed over the question of whether, as far as moral evaluation is concerned, one of these points of view, either the backward-looking or the forward-looking one, is in some way primary, so that the other one is to be explained in terms of it or reduced to it. What is now called “virtue ethics” generally gives the former, backward-looking point of view an irreducible role of one sort or other. It takes the traits from which actions spring as communicating their goodness or badness to those actions. Consequentialism takes the opposite approach: actions are good and bad because their consequences are good or bad. Julia Driver’s book is a consequentialist attack on the backward-looking approach of virtue ethics. It is also an attempt, she says, to show that consequentialism is capable of “virtue evaluation,” that it can have a serviceable conception of virtue and vice. In addition to these two goals, she also has a third one: to criticize one aspect of a particular form of virtue ethics, namely, the “intellectualism” of Aristotle. As I understand it, she uses two main arguments to achieve these goals. One of these arguments might be called “the argument from the diversity of the virtues.” It consists, mainly, of showing, by commenting on the nature of several virtuous traits, that there is no single sort of mental state that is involved in all the virtues. Generosity does seem to involve what might be described as a good intention (i.e., the intent to help someone) but whether an act is just or not does not depend on the intentions of the agent at all. Driver apparently takes this to mean that the only way to get a unified theory of virtue is to look to the consequences of virtuous action: a virtue is simply any trait of character that has good consequences more often than not. I suppose I might as well say that this argument, supposing I have understood it rightly, seems to me to be subject to at least one obvious reply. It can be true that there is no one sort of mental state that all virtues have in common, while it is also true that each trait that qualifies as a virtue might do so because it is associated with some appropriate sort of mental state. One might, in that case, generate a unified theory of the virtues by sorting the virtues into categories based on what sort of mental state distinguishes them: generosity might typify one group of virtues, which is distinguished by one sort of (good) intention or another, courage could be an instance of another group, which is distinguished by a (commendable) exercise of self control, and so forth. One could then unify one’s theory by showing why all these types of mental states have the sort of value that virtue has. There are