After Virtue: 11-18

September 10, 2003 - 17 minutes read - 3610 words

Chapter 11: The Virtues at Athens

Many moral debates in real societies find context in the heroic tales
1. Plato
  1. Is not showing error held by Athenians
  2. Is showing conflict in the inherited political / moral discourse
  3. Removing Homeric vocabulary from Athenian moral debate (purging)
2. Disconnect between Homeric values and Classical values as explored by Sophocles in Philoctetes
  1. Odysseus displays Homeric virtues
  2. Ultimately resorts to deceit, a trickery praised by Homeric virtue schemes
  3. Neoptolemus disagrees, thinks this is immoral, represents the Athenian / Classical Model
  4. Sophocles exploys deus ex machina to resolve (Heracles)
  5. Orestes is civic obligation versus familial obligation
The Athenian debate is not simply a result of familial versus state context
1. Kinship nations survive and aristocratic society’s values endure
2. Virtue becames detached from any particular person (Hector’s virtue virsus Virtue)
The separation of virtue from any particular person was an Athenian invention
1. Involvement in the greatest polis demands we know “good citizen” vis-a-vis a “good man”
2. What do Athenians share?
3. Dikaisune has differing competitions, is it cooperative or competitive (justice)
4. Athenians inherit this lack of clarity
5. Athenian views were not homogeneous
6. Four individuals address the incoherence of Athenian moral code: Plato, the Sophists, Aristotle, and Sophocles
  1. Each reacts with certain purposes
  2. ALL assume that virtue must be expressed in a polis
  3. All shore a notion of competition
    1. Never learned from the Iliad
    2. only makes success the goal of action
  4. Each asks how to order the virtues
  5. While the accounts differ the virtues are always exercised as part of agon, and within a polis
  6. The Sophist Thrasymachus see success as defined within a particular city, a city-by-city
    1. That causes problems for them (see the Encomium of Helen)
    2. He appears to redefine X but uses the ’traditional’ definition of X in so doing
  7. Plato
    1. Socrates’ Gogias and Polus get caught in the dichotomy described above
    2. Callicles does not
      1. He accepts the deductive result, to dominate by intellect is permissible
      2. He and Socrates agree that which produces happiness and satisfaction of desire must be the result of pursuing virtue - Socrates is bound
    3. Desire must be satiated in the ideal city (Thus, Republic is written)
    4. As virtue’s pursuit creates more good men, the actual virtuous city becomes a myth, regrettably. They pursue politics, not philosophy. Philosophy properly metes out the parts of the soul and their influence, reason is critical to the achievement of the republic
  8. Reason specifically nets us.
    1. Each part of the soul behaving properly
    2. Justice is keeping the soul bounded (daikaisune)
    3. Plato rejects relativism
    4. Rival goods cannot battle each other
Tragic drama is the art form that pits reason’s best suggestion for moral behavior against sittlichkeit-codified morality (Sophocles)
Accounting of Antigone
Platonic: Virtue’s necessity and the presence of all 3 parts
Human desires cannot be unified into one moral scheme
Sohpoclean model
1. There exists a moral order.
2. We cannot bring it into harmony with our daily lives
3. We must choose, but we shall be made to bear the punishment
4. Individuals exist within the community who transcend it (as the winners who lost of the Iliad could not)
5. The Sophoclean protagonist’s life follows a pattern like that of an epic hero.
6. To Sophocles, life was a dramatic narrative, to the Heroics, life was an epic poem (note, both are teleological narratives to life)
Sophocles is not simply a battle of people but of whole ethical systems
The Sophoclean victim transcends and is bound by the rules of the community. Emotivists are not
1. This ends the Heroic moral Era
2. Assumes a moral order does in fact exist
3. Aristotle addresses this split

Chapter 12: Aristotle’s Account of the Virtues

Aristotle does not see himself as the historical point. Aristotle in history comes only in the Scholastic era. Aristotle has little sense of historical perspective.
We consider the Nicomachean Ethics
1. His account is an elucidation of the ethics embedded in tho polis
2. Humans are functional objects
3. All human activity aims for a good
4. The state of human good is ’eudaimonia'
  1. The state of being well
  2. Aristotle does not enumerate the content
  3. The virtues are qualities which enable / assist movement to eudaimonia
  4. Right action issues from virtue’s exercise
The virtues and reality
1. What is good for a man versus short-term happiness
2. We must judge how to do the right thing at the right time in the right fashion
3. Accords very few rules
4. The rules that are to be followed are the rules of the polis, everything else is virtue
5. The virtues find their exercise in a properly constituted state (Anne Frank paradox)
  1. States embrace virtues that enable their purpose
  2. States punish accordingly for sabotaging these purposes
  3. States would rate the virtues and the gravity of offenses
  4. 2 types of failure
    1. Failure to act properly
    2. willful injury
  5. Both failures undermine the constitution of the state
6. Crucial link between the law and virtue. The law can only by applied by the just
  1. Law and morality are unified
  2. The just man can recognize the law’s spirit and apply it to the particular when th elaw is insufficient
7. Excellence requires intelligence (practical reason)
  1. Aristotle sees the latter as enabling the former
  2. Modern society follows Kant: a good bureaucrat can be stupid
  3. Practical intelligence =~ justice + virtuous education
Friendship
1. The bond between citizens in a community that seeks eudaimonia for its citizens
2. Constitutes the polis
3. In small communities political exercise assisted the goals of the polis
4. It is not a private affair, it is public
5. Choice between friends and countrymen is not possible, the existence of one ore the other precludes this difficulty
6. The modern city is countryless masses banded for utility, nothing like a polis, nowhere is Aristotle’s friendship
7. Conflict
  1. Eliminable
  2. Agon is disliked
  3. Tragin heroes have tragic flaws, not lives in tragic societies
  4. Dialectic fades to treatise
8. Friendship has 3 types
  1. Mutual utility
  2. Mutual pleasure
  3. Pursuit of shared goals (the basis of friendship)
9. Barbarians
  1. non-Greek
  2. Incapable of friendship, he is outside a polis
  3. Barbarians and slaves have fixed and flawed natures
  4. Not addressing these outsiders need not undermine Aristotle’s scheme
10. Two key points
  1. Enjoyment comes from excellence in an activity. We cannot pursue simply pleasure in itself
  2. Statements of man’s finding X useful are set qua an animal, not qua a man
  3. Virtues cannot be defined in terms of the pleasurable or the useful
Aristotle on pratical reason is right, and his account has key features
1. An action is the conclusion of a syllogism
2. Practical Reason has 4 essential elements
  1. The wants of the agent
  2. Wanting X is beneficial to a Y of such-and-such type
  3. Asserts incident I is a situation of this type
  4. Action
Practical reason and the virtues: The virtues provide the premises upon which practical reasons builds its syllogisms leading to action.
Aristotle is in dange on
1. What if there is no metaphysical biology, does teleology crumble?
2. The polis is gone, we are all barbarians, does is scheme survive
3. How to resolve Antigone’s bind?
4. Do these questions get resolved in Medieval Aristotelianism?….next chapter

Chapter 13: Medieval Aspects and Occasions

Synopsis: Aristotle encounters Christianity and the Christians try to adopt him into their virtue structure. The narrative to this life is the Medieval quest where virtues are the tools which enable one to overcome the snares as one works to attain one’s goals. Ultimately this opens up Aristotle to everyone, even outside the polis, but changes the telological structure from metaphysical biology to “You must achieve your quest”.

Aristotle’s model was assimilated unto diverse ideologies during his time and after
1. Strong inherited influence of the hero-culture, this is not outright supplanted
2. Works to tie pagan and Christian virtues (Constantine)
3. Conflict with Biblical knowledge as the Bible claims to be all-encompassing
  1. Martyrdom
  2. How does a Christian relate to daily life in terms of virtues
    1. Justice
    2. Prudence
    3. Temperance
    4. Courage
  3. How to practice? As thelogical virtues
    1. Faith
    2. Hope
    3. Charity
Abelard’s Interpretation of Aristotle
1. Pagan view is incomplete
  1. Inadequate conception of good
  2. …of will viz good and evil
2. Defects of character (vice) and divnine Law (sin)
3. True arena of morality is will, a recurrence of Stoicism
  1. Abandon telos
  2. Do right for its own sake
  3. Paradoxical: universal law versus community’s ethos
  4. Stoicism waxes when the centrality of virtues wanes
4. How can virtueless design focused on will operate
Allan of Lille sees the gap between Stoicism and a telos-less world
1. Virtues define political life
2. Coupled with charity the virtues do God’s work
For what type of society was Lille’s philosophy designed?
1. One without social order institutions (university, courts)
2. Such preserving dialog extends lifetimes of key dynamics:
  1. Loyalty and Justice
  2. military virtues
  3. patience and purity
3. Loyalty and Justice
  1. Becket v. Henry II, both shared polis live view of society but in the Christian era you are always community bonded by God’s community
  2. Each understood the weight of tcheir decisions to face off
  3. Henry and Becket both understood the same grounds, Henry VIII had lost the grounds of the battle.
4. The Classicist/ Christian setup intervention brought conflicts that Aristotle could never understand
  1. You could not befriend a ‘bad’ man
  2. Forgiveness is foreign
  3. Charity
  4. No recognition of a last-minute confession
  5. No notion of an enacted evil, all evils are privations
  6. ASIDE: A particular view of virtues is bonded to a particular narrative structure: in this case the medieval quest
  7. Maintains a teleological character different from Aristotle
    1. none is excluded from attaining eudaimonia
    2. adds historical perspective
  8. The virtues enable men to surmount evil in their historical journey
  9. Aquinas has problems addressing (the zenith of this mode of thought)
    1. Odd tables of virtue
    2. Does not address the valuation of rival goods – critical 7.3 from previous chapter
The real achievement was putting historical perspective with Aristotelian morality, but this does not address sufficiently Aristotle’s weaknesses from section VII of the previous outline!

Chapter 14: The Nature of Virtue

Synopsis: MacIntyre finishes with his historical recounting and tries to take the Aristotelian setup and define these terms in the modern era. We will be looking to create a modern setup of Aristotelianism that is: teleological, open to all, free of a polis, and allows us to resolve rival goods.

Key features of virtue systems discussed
1. List of virtues varies widely
2. What is a virtue varies widely
3. The many hold institutional hegemony
4. We argue for a multifaceted answer
Aspects of the conceptual thread of virtue
1. Virtues always have a social and moral context to which they find explanation. This dictum is rooted in 3 aspects.
  1. Existence of a practice
  2. Narrative order to life
  3. Moral tradition
2. On Practice
  1. Practices are the place of primary exhibition of a virtue
  2. Caveat
    1. Virtues can be exercised outside of a practice
    2. Practice is a term of art
  3. Practice Defined: A complex, coherent and socially established cooperative human activity
    1. Goods internal to this act are realized in doing the activity “excellently”
    2. Excellently is self defining and self modifying
    3. Human conceptions of the goods are augmented
  4. Practices can be contingent or necessary
    1. Chess playing for candy (contingent)
    2. Playing chess to win, to be a winner, to be a player
    3. Internal reason
      1. Can be spoken of only in terms of the activity
      2. Con only be understood by those competent in the practice
  5. Practices involve standards, obedience to rules, achievements of goods
  6. External goods involve scarcity, X has more Y, Z has less Y.
    1. External goods are competed for
    2. There exist winners and losers
    3. Success in making internal goods is good for the community as a whole
    4. A virtue is a quality that enables us to produce internal goods apropos of a practice
  7. A practice has 3 core virtues
    1. The goods of a practice can only be had by subordinating to a reality based on 3 core virtues:
    2. Justice: what is due
    3. Courage: what is risked
    4. Truthfulness: what is success, what is short of the mark
    5. Therefore: courage, justice, and truthfulness are the core virtues of any practice
  8. Practices cannot flourish where the virtues are not valued
  9. A practice is not equivalent to an exercise of skill for itself
  10. Entering a practice yokes one to the practice’s past and its current practitioners’ judgments
Institutions
1. Are concerned with external goods
2. Sustaining human community is a practice
  1. Bonded to virtue’s exercise
    1. Determinate attitude to social and political issues
    2. It is always within a particular community that we learn to exercise virtues
  2. Political community that requires virtue’s instruction
  3. A practice’s survival depends on the way virtues are exercised is sustaining the institutions that bear the practice
  4. Certain institutions foster / threaten virtue
  5. Without virtue we can only recognize external goods
Virtues are required to define internal good, they aren’t necessary and are possibly negative in getting external goods
Conformity to Aristotle
1. Teleological sans metaphysical biology
2. Flaws in determinate good (rival goods) is not exclusive to human error, they can be weighted within the historical / socia-political constitution of the practice.
3. Strong match to Aristotle
  1. Depends on Aristotle’s vocabulary: voluntariness, intellectual virtues
  2. Accepts Aristotle’s definition of pleasure and enjoyment
    1. the activity itself is pleasurable
    2. external goods as exclusive result is utilitarianism - falls short of the explanation of why we do things
    3. virtue should be exercised without regard to result
  3. Evaluation and explanation are rationally bonded
    1. To identify an action’s lack of virtue always entails an explanation, not just an evaluation
    2. Modern sociologists, not just evaluation forbids " X was courageous", yet such utterance is critical to Aristotle’s explanations
There may exist evil practices
What is the place of virtue outside of a practice
1. What would a human lifespans virtue look like
2. It would be conflict-ridden, too arbitrary
3. We should be able to choose between conflicting goods
4. Without telos, moral utterance is weakened
5. How do we order virtues?
What is live without a telos?
1. Arbitrary mishmash
2. Cannot contextualize the virtues
3. integrity / consistency cannot be defined
Is there a telos?

Chapter 15: The Virtues, the Unity of a Human Life, and the concept of a Tradition

Human Life with telos has 2 difficulties:
1. Social obstacles partition human life into silos
2. Philosophical obstacles derive from….
  1. Conceiving behaviour as atomic actions
  2. When individual is separated from his roles a. Cannot keep Aristotle’s virtue model b. Narrative quality of virtue’s exercise is lost c. Virtue is intelligible only with a structure
Human life achieves unity in a narrative
1. X is doing Y, why?
  1. Can be answered in terms of long or short term time horizons
  2. Can be answered in terms of the setting (i.e. X’s roles)
  3. We must know primary intentions
2. Intentions
  1. Must be ordered causally and temporally
  2. Identification of actors’ belief is essential
3. We explain all action with a1, a2, B, and role in the history of settings
4. Narrative history is the essential means for characterizing human action
5. This is against analytic philosohpy
  1. Actions as non-sequitr are legitimate
  2. How to divide atomic actions? Bake a cake versus break five eggs and put in a bowl
  3. Humans are asked to account for actions
  4. Only narrative can make action intelligible
6. Conversation is the form of human endeavour
7. If human life is narrative, tragedy is the genre
  1. Life’s roles may be embedded in one another
  2. We enter the scene in unclear circumstance
  3. Each of our roles constrains others
8. Action requires narrative and vice versa
  1. Sartre denies this
  2. A list of vacuous happening devoid of sense
  3. Mersault’s narration of The Stranger
There exists a present uninformed by the future
Sense of self in a life-as-narrative
1. Man is a story-telling animal
2. We enter conscripted into social roles, stories tell us how to act (Schopenhauer)
3. The self inhabits a character whose unity is appropriate to a character (i.e. belief is equivalent to action)
4. Requirement of a narrative concept of selfhood
  1. I am the interpreted character of my life as story
  2. I am the subjcet of my own history
  3. Thus i am accountable for the path of my actions
  4. Thus I can demand an explanation from others
5. Narrative structure and self as such are mutually defining
The Unity of human life is the unity of a narrative quest which has 2 features
1. Conception of telos
2. A search for something not already characterized
The virtues
1. viz practices:
  1. Sustain them
  2. Assist in the achievement of their internal goods
2. viz us
  1. Sustain us in a quest for the good
  2. Enable us to overcome challenges
  3. Increase our knowledge of the good
  4. The good life for man is the life spend seeking the good life and its enabling virtues (…and practicing said virtues as part of the seeking)
  5. A third aspect of the virtues exists, in addition to qua a practice or qua the good life for a man
  6. Virtues are not only expressed qua individual but also qua my social roles
The Concept of a Tradition
1. Practices always have histories that are required to understand it
2. Traditions shape practices’ histories
3. A tradition is the historically extended argument discussing the goods of the practice
4. Traditions thrive by exercise of their goods
5. Lack of justice, courage, and honesty corrupts traditions and practices
6. Powerful virtue is the recognition of one’s place in traditions
Tradition in Practical Reason
1. Tradition allows us to see possibilities for the practice
2. ‘Special virtue’ allows one to act for the good even in the case of a dilemma
3. Such dilemmas are not just like the insolubles as seen in Chapter two
  1. Austen
    1. Rival and Incompatible goods XOR tho good life for man
    2. No, we can have the good life but must choose the ‘better’ good
  2. Unlike tragic good, moral incompatibility - here some Good is done
  3. To do better / worse is valuated qua individual and his extant social roles
  4. What is better / worse is chosen by the character of the intelligible narrative
  5. Our culture (liberal and bureaucratic individualism) changed the concept of virtue and how it degenerated.

Chapter 16: From the Virtues, to Virtue, and After Virtue

The problem
1. Virtue’s conception changed
  1. List of virtues
  2. Conception of virtues
  3. Virtue itself
2. 2 Concepts that ground virtue were lost
3. Narrative structure
4. Concept of a practice
anti-Traditionalists (Sartre, William Gass)
1. Contrast art and life
  1. Exempts art from morality
  2. Prevents art’s self-reflective power
2. Death of practices with internal goods
  1. Production moves outside household
  2. Household production teches community production
  3. Once outside, we work for institutionalize pleonexia, we pursue only external goods
3. Changes to this model
  1. Social capitalization: Everything is a means to satisfaction
  2. Change of the virtues’ focus
Virtue’s Change
1. Move from the Virtues to Virtue
2. They remain praised
3. They expressed life’s passions XOR curbed destructive effects of passions
4. Virtues became conceived as altruism, a fix to egoism, not passions according to Aristotle
5. Hume thinks that we will be moral due to long-term utility (already discarded elsewhere)
6. 3 features of 18th c. philo.
  1. Character of particular virtues is necessary as a means to perpetuate ideas without referent
  2. A new relationship between virtues and rules. Virtues are characteristics that allow us to follow the rules versus Aristotle where virtues and law were more distinctive
  3. From The Virtues to Virtue
Stoicism floursihed with an emphasis on rule-following in teleology’s absence. Thus one asks “which rules to follow?” Curbing anarchy by rules, not be the desire to build a common practice.
The Humeans already see society as a place to extract gratification, nothing more.
Republicanism (The Reign of Terror) sought to restore the Classical model of a society of brothers sharing common goals
Austen’s attempt to rescue
1. Her heroines seek the good via good marriage
2. She extends the Classical tradition
  1. Preoccupied with counterfeits of the virtues
  2. Self-knowledge is essential
  3. Praises ‘constance’ a means for providing a narrative to a live versus Kierkergaard’s aesthetic life which is merely a series of unfettered moments
3. anti-Charm, pro-substance
4. The virtues allow us to overcome challenges (Medieval)
5. The last representative of classical virtues
Public life winds up depending on one virtue: Justice

Chapter 17: Justice as a Virtue: Changing Concepts

Justice is fundamental (Aristotle) yet we have battling concepts
1. Liberal socialist redistribution to account for political disenfranchisement
2. No taxes on my stuff
3. Totally incompatible
4. No means to reconcile
Rawls and Nozick parallel (N=>I.A, R=>I.B)
1. Their claims are based on fantasises that are insoluble
2. Neither refers to desert,. Both of them are ignorant of society pursuing collective goods
3. They share social premises
  1. Individual sans bonds is primary
  2. Acquisition is dirty as on one has things fairly (i.e. acquisition occurs sans history)
A&B in joining Rawls or Nozick with desca appeal to the corrupted Aristotelian or Christian tradition.
Too many rival concepts of virtue – especially Justice
We cannot achieve moral consensus
Supreme Court
1. Dworkin: They exist to invoke consistent principles
2. Mac: It exists to display even-handedness
3. It Exists (politically)
  1. For society’s peace
  2. Suppress debate of moral conflict
Patriotism is dead
1. We have no patria
2. As it doesn’t represent moral community, our relationship to it is unclear at best. There is no teachable concept of patriotism
Modern government
1. It is at variance with virtue
2. It praises individualism, acquisitiveness, the market
3. Justice has no consistent base save its recognition of its baselessness

Chapter 18: Nietzsche or Aristotle: Trotsky and St. Benedict

Nietzsche or Aristotle
1. Central premises
  1. Morality and its language is in disorder
  2. Attempts at rational justification for morality fail
2. Aristotle
  1. Modern morality is Aristotle’s vestiges
  2. enlightenment’s rejection was that of a whole
3. Nietzsche cannot undermine Aristotle
  1. Canonical Aristotelianism can be sketched
    1. Reject ubermensch
    2. Ubermensch cannot exist as he must be outside all moral institutions; he cannot exist in Aristotle’s world
  2. An escape fantasy
Conclusion
1. No rational defensible explanation of individual points of view
2. Aristotle can restore intellect and rationality to our moral and social attitudes and commitments
Detraction
1. No proof yet (next book)
2. Interpretation of Classical tradition may me overly short
3. Marxism could surrogate?
proto-Trotsky; anti-Marx
1. Marx has a bad rap and never explains how free individuals enter collectives
2. Maxism became Weberian, becoming our Emotivist world
3. Trotsky sees Marxism as escapist
  1. Becomes pessimistic
  2. No political or economic structures to supersede capitalism
We have been besieged and we must guard ourselves through the Dark Ages