Virtue and Reason by John McDowell - Essay Example

In “Virtue and Reason”, John McDowell addresses some ancient accounts of virtue ethics that, despite their age, still retain a fair amount of relevance to modern discourse about morality. The primary focus of his paper is the relationship between knowledge and virtue, which is a meta-ethical question that gets to the heart of how a virtuous agent manages to perceive and react to events virtuously. McDowell’s notion of a virtuous agent depends on the “sensitivity” of the agent to see what a virtue requires (for instance, what constitutes prudence in a certain situation). This sensitivity arises in a virtuous agent when he or she is faced with the particular details of states of affairs. It is a perceptual awareness of the right reasons for acting in certain ways. Because such sensitivity amounts to getting things right, McDowell claims that this sensitivity is a form of knowledge, and since this sensitivity is a virtue, virtues extend directly from moral knowledge. As McDowell puts it, the reliable sensitivity constitutes knowledge and it is also a necessary condition for virtue. Accordingly, McDowell is claiming that knowledge is a necessary condition for virtues. But one can conceive of a person of who has moral knowledge, or virtues, but is unmotivated to act virtuously, which is a person that McDowell logically dismisses as impossible. However, it is a clear and intuitive possibility that simply because a person has moral knowledge, he or she is not necessarily motivated to act upon it. McDowell responds by claiming that a person who fails to act virtuously, even though he knew what amounted to virtue, failed to do so only by clouded judgment or a desire to do otherwise. This is the Aristotelian answer to the objection. However, what this response leads to is the rejection of virtue as anything more than sensitivity. Although McDowell has been claiming that virtue is more than sensitivity (it is also about acting upon the virtue), this reply to the objection of the unfocused, clouded desire implies that the failure to act is not due to the one’s lack of a thing that the virtuous person has. The virtuous person and the non-virtuous person have the same sensitivity to what virtue requires, so as a result, it cannot be the case that knowledge of what virtue requires is what separates the virtuous from the non-virtuous. Socrates overcomes this problem by claiming that the difference between a virtuous person and a non-virtuous person is ignorance. Unlike Aristotle, Socrates does not need to account for this objection with the existence of a desire or a clouded judgment, which is the approach McDowell takes as well. Instead, McDowell dismisses Socrates’ answer as extreme and favors instead the response given by Aristotle. A second premise inherent in McDowell’s “Virtue and Reason” is the concept of the unity of the virtues. This is the thought that no virtue can be possessed except by a virtuous agent: who, of course, has all of the virtues. McDowell uses the example of the habit of gentleness and the virtue of kindness. In other words, if an unintentional, simple propensity for gentleness cannot be distinguished from the virtue of kindness, then they are part of one sensitivity to the right reasons for acting. It is impossible, therefore, for a person to be virtuous with respect to courage but also lack the virtue of temperance. Rather, as McDowell and others have claimed, they are manifestations of a single sensitivity, which is virtue. Individual concepts of virtues, like courage and temperance, merely serve to differentiate between certain applications of sensitivity to what virtue requires, under this view. It is this single sensitivity, McDowell claims, that leads to a moral outlook. An important qualification to McDowell’s premise that the virtues are unified is to say that it is not necessarily the virtues themselves that are unified, but our knowledge of them. McDowell’s essential claim in “Virtue and Reason” is that the virtues are firmly rooted on a foundation of knowledge and that sensitivity which constitutes moral knowledge. Because the moral knowledge is foundational, saying that the virtues are unified is a misnomer. It is actually the epistemological bases of those virtues that are unified. In fact, McDowell says that the virtues are not a batch of independent sensitivities. Phrasing it in this way, McDowell means that recognizing what virtues requires is not different for courage, kindness, temperance, and the like. This is not the same as the claim that one cannot act with courage while acting intemperately, which is implied by the classic phrase “the unity of the virtues”. The advantage of McDowell’s claim is that it deals with thought and knowledge, rather than how people act (or refuse act, as was the case with the objection to McDowell’s first premise). McDowell’s third premise is another controversial claim: the anti-codifiability thesis. McDowell is against the attempt to reduce one’s conception of what virtues requires to a set of rules, on the basis that what virtue requires is an empirical observation—a perception—of what a particular situation entails. There are no absolute, thoroughly-definable rules for how one should act in any given situation. An appropriate analogy is a quarterback in football; that is, a quarterback does not memorize a list of things to do in certain situations before a game. That would be impossibly burdensome. Inevitably, a mechanical application of that code will always, in some cases, lead to a course of action that strikes one as wrong. Rather than relying on a code, the good quarterback relies on his sensitivity to what is required of him during a game to perform well and be a good quarterback. Analogously, the virtuous agent does not rely on codified rules to respond virtuously to particular situations. Rather, he relies on his sensitivity to what virtues require and he acts upon them. McDowell’s reasoning leads to the larger point that ethics should not strive, as other meta-ethical approaches do, to normatively prescribe rules that guide actions. Instead, ethics should strive to understand what human beings should be, which leads to explanations of good character and ethical conduct. This understanding of what human beings should be is not necessarily codifiable because it relies heavily on variable psychological states. The problem with this third premise is that an uncodifiable code of ethics means establishing modes of conduct in society is extremely difficult. Instead of having people guided by a roughly similar notion of what it means to be ethical, it is a group of individuals acting under the assumption that their sensitivities are rational. If a person’s sensitivity (or sense of what amounts to virtue) conflicts with one’s own, it is a matter of subjective evaluation who is actually right. The inability to implement an anti-codifiable ethical code is troublesome if the approach expects to overtake action-centered approaches for deciding what actions are right and which ones are wrong. What one ends up arriving at is a foundation of moral subjectivism: where no one’s particular sensitivity (knowledge of what a virtue requires) has any moral right over another’s. With a moral exemplar (for instance, Socrates or Jesus), one could provide an objective standard for what a particularly virtuous person would do under these circumstances, but the further question in that case is what makes a certain individual a moral exemplar. The question of whose virtuous sensitivity is most respected leads also to a charge of cultural, or moral, relativism. The essence of this criticism is that different cultures embody and respect different virtues. In an extreme case, one can dream up an example of a totalitarian society in which dishonesty (e.g. selling out one’s neighbors in order to distract attention from oneself) could be a virtue when, in normal cases, honesty is the actual virtue. In that instance, the question arises for McDowell and other virtue theorists about whether rules created with respect to virtues will pick out categories of actions as normatively good or bad only relative to a particular culture or social structure. However, this is a problem common to any meta-ethical approach, whether it is agent-based or action-based. In order to address it for the case of virtues, one might choose a moral exemplar (the perfectly virtuous agent) who exemplifies the virtues of all possible cultures, assuming all possible cultures are not mutually exclusive in their virtues. Additionally, there seems to be a tension between McDowell’s first premise and third premise. In Plato’s Meno, Socrates meets the claim that people only act for what they think will maximize value. A lack of wisdom is what produces a bad choice, and the presence of wisdom results in the making of a good choice. Although this leads to the thought that wisdom can be taught, it seems at odds with the anti-codifiability thesis, which states that virtuous conduct cannot be broken down into propositional knowledge and communicated. Although McDowell differs from Plato and Socrates by agreeing with Aristotle that poor judgment, and not ignorance, gets in the way of the virtuous choice, it seems at least a person could be taught to have good, unclouded judgment. But since good, unclouded judgment is part of the sensitivity which is foundational for virtue, it contradicts the anti-codifiability thesis which states that virtues cannot be taught. John McDowell’s “Virtue and Reason” is an important step toward a greater understanding of the epistemological underpinnings of virtue ethical reasoning. Although his arguments are derived from centuries-old philosophy, his conclusions are inventive and relevant to modern philosophers. However, there are significant problems with differentiating the virtuous agent from the non-virtuous agent simply in terms of their knowledge (or “sensitivity”) of what is required by a particular virtue. More broadly, it is difficult to understand what exactly amounts to a virtue: that is, if all of the virtues are unified, how do we come to understand the single sensitivity in the abstract that McDowell refers to without reference to courage, temperance, or kindness? In addition, there are significant challenges to overcome with respect to not being able to write down and implement ethical codes of conduct for societies, if our ethical codes are pluralistic and heavily dependent on the situations we find ourselves in as individuals. Indeed, further philosophical investigation is needed in order to fully understand its consequences. Read More