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Promises and Contracts
Although there are good reasons for being suspicious of egoism of any stamp, Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was a psychological egoist, which was essential to his moral and political theory. Hobbes argued that there are two fundamental facts about human beings: (1) we are all selfish, and (2) we can only survive by banding together. You may have heard Hobbes’ famous dictum that human life outside of a society – that is, in his imagined “state of nature” – is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” We form groups for self-interested reasons because we need one another to survive and prosper. But the fact that we band together as selfish beings inevitably results in tension between people. Because resources are always scarce, there is competition, and competition creates conflict. Accordingly, if we are to survive as a group, we need rules that everyone promises to follow. These rules, which may be simple at first but become enormously complex, are an exchange of protections for freedom. “I promise not to punch you in the nose as long as you promise not to punch me in the nose” is precisely such an exchange. You trade the freedom to throw your fists wherever you please for the protection of nit being punched yourself. These rules of mutual agreement are, of course, called laws, and they guarantee our protection or rights. The system of laws and rights that make up the society is called the social contract.
Social contract theory builds on the Greek notion that good people are most likely encouraged by a good society. Few social contract theorists would argue that morality can be reduced to societal laws. But most would insist that it is extremely difficult to be a good person unless you are in a good society with good laws. Hobbes argued that the habit of exchanging liberties for protections would extend itself into all dimensions of a good citizen’s behavior. The law is an expression of the reciprocity expressed in the Golden Rule – “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” – and so through repeated obedience to the law we would develop the habit, Hobbes thought, of treating others as we would like to be treated.
The most famous American social contract theorist was John Rawls (1921-2002). Rawls argued that “justice is fairness,” and for him the morally praiseworthy society distributed its goods in a way that helps the least advantaged of its members. Rawls asked us to imagine what rules we would propose for a society if, when we thought about the rules, we imagined that we had no idea what our own role in that society would be. What rules would we want for our society if we did not know whether we would be poor or rich, African-American or native Indian, man or woman, or a teacher, plumber, or famous actor? Rawls imagined that this thought experiment – which he called standing behind “the veil of ignorance” – would guarantee fairness in the formulation of the social contract. Existing social rules and laws that did not pass this test – that no rational person would endorse if standing behind the veil of ignorance – were obviously unfair and should be changed or discarded.
Strictly speaking, social contract theory is not a moral code. But because so many of our moral decisions are made in the context of laws and rights, we should understand that the foundation of those laws and rights is a system of promises that have been made, either implicitly or explicitly, by every citizen who freely chooses to live in and benefit from a commonwealth.
A RETURN TO THE GREEKS: THE GOOD LIFE OF VIRTUE
In the 20th century, many philosophers grew increasingly suspicious of the possibility of founding a workable moral system upon rules or principles. The problem with moral rules or principles is that they self-consciously ignore the particulars of the situations in which people actually make moral decisions. For the dominant moralities of the 20th century, deontology and utilitarianism, what is moral for one person is moral for another, regardless of the many differences that undoubtedly exist between their lives, personalities, and stations. This serious weakness in prevailing moral systems caused philosophers to turn once more to the ancient Greeks for help.
Aristotle (384-307 BC) argued that it does not make sense to speak of good actions unless one recognizes that good actions are performed by good people. But good people deliberate over their actions in particular situations, each of which may differ importantly from other situations in which a person has to make a moral choice. But what is a good person?
Aristotle would have responded to this question with his famous “function argument,” which posits that the goodness of anything is expressed in its proper function. A good hammer is good because it pounds nails well. A good ship is good if it sales securely across the sea. A bad ship, on the other hand, will take on water and drift aimlessly across the waves. Moreover, we can recognize the function of a thing by identifying what makes it different from other things. The difference between a door and a curtain lies fundamentally in the way they do their jobs. Human function, the particular ability that makes mankind different from all other species, is the ability to reason. The good life is the life of the mind: to be a good person is to actively think.
But to pursue the life of the mind, we need many things. We need health; we need the protection and services of a good society; we need friends for conversation. We need leisure time and enough money to satisfy our physical needs (but not so much as to distract or worry us); we need education, books, art, music, culture, and pleasant distractions to relax the mind.
This does sound like the good life. But how does the thinking person act? Presumably, Aristotle’s happy citizen will encounter moral conflicts and dilemmas like the rest of us. How do we resolve these dilemmas? What guides our choices?
Aristotle did not believe that human beings confront each choice as though it were the first they ever made. Rather, he thought, we develop habits that guide our choices. There are good habits and bad habits. Good habits contribute to our flourishing and are called virtues (Aristotle’s word, arête, may also be translated as excellence). Bad habits diminish our happiness and are called vices. And happily, for Aristotle, the thinking person will see that there is a practical method for sorting between virtues and vices built into the nature of human beings. Aristotle insisted that human beings are animals, like any other warm-blooded creature on the earth; just as a tiger can act in way that cause it to flourish or fail, so human beings have a natural guide to their betterment. This has come to be called Aristotle’s “golden mean”: the notion that our good lies between the extremes of the deficiency of an activity and its excess. Healthy virtue lies in moderation.
An example will help. Suppose you are sitting in the classroom with your professor and fellow students when a wild buffalo storms into the room. The buffalo is enraged and ready to gore all comers. What do you do? An excessive action would be to attack the buffalo with your bare hands: this would, for Aristotle, show the vice of rashness. A deficient action would be to cower behind your desk and shriek for help: this would show the vice of cowardice. But a moderate action would be to make a loud noise to frighten the buffalo, or perhaps to distract it so that others could make for the door, or to do whatever might reasonably reduce the danger to others and yourself. This moderate course of action would change if an enraged tomcat came spitting into the room. Then the moderate and virtuous choice might be to trap the feline with a handy trash basket.
Aristotle’s list of virtues includes courage, temperance, justice, liberality or generosity, magnificence (living well), pride, high-mindedness, aspiration, gentleness, truthfulness, friendliness, modesty, righteous indignation, and wittiness. But one could write many such lists, depending on one’s own society and way of life. Aristotle would doubtless argue that at least some of these virtues are virtuous for any human being in any place or time, but a strength of his theory is that others’ virtues depend on the when, where, and how of differing human practices and communities. One appeal of virtue ethics is that it insists on the context of our moral deliberations.
But is human goodness fully expresses by moderation? Or by being a good citizen? And what about people who lack Aristotle’s material requirements of health, friends, and a little property? Aristotle is committed to the idea that such people cannot live fully moral lives, but can that be right? As powerful as it is, one weakness of Aristotle’s virtue ethics is that it seems to overemphasize the importance of “fitting” into one’s society. The rebel, the outcast, or the romantic chasing an iconoclastic ideal has no place. And Aristotle’s theory may sanction some gross moral injustices – such as slavery – if they contribute to the flourishing of society as a whole. Aristotle himself would have had no problem with this: his theory was explicitly designed for the aristocratic way of life. But today we would insist that the good life, if it is to be truly good for any of us, must at least in principle be available to every member of our society.
Feminism and the Ethics of Care
Psychologist and philosopher Carol Gilligan discovered that moral concepts develop differently in young children. Boys tend to emphasize reasons, rules, and justifications; girls tend to emphasize relationships, the good of the group, and mutual nurturing. From these empirical studies Gilligan developed what came to be called the “ethics of care”: the idea that morality might be better grounded on the kind of mutual nurturing and love that takes place in close friendships and family groups. The ethical ideal, according to Gilligan, is a good mother.
Gilligan’s ethics of care is compelling because it seems to reflect how many of us make our daily moral decisions. Consider the moral decisions you face in a typical day: telling the truth or lying to a parent or sibling, skipping a party to take care of a heartsick friend or going to see that cute guy, keeping a promise to another student to copy your notes or saying “oops, I forgot.” We often confront the moral difficulties of being a good son, sister, friend, or colleague. Generally speaking, we do not settle these moral issues on the basis of impersonal moral principles – we wonder whether it would even be appropriate to do so, given that we are personally involved in these decisions. Should you treat your best friend in precisely the same way you treat a stranger on the street? Some moralists would say, “Of course!” Yet, many of us would consider such behavior odd or psychologically impossible.
The feminist attack on traditional ethics does not accuse one Western morality or another, but indicts its whole history. Western morality has insisted on rationality at the expense of emotions, on impartiality at the expense of relationships, on punishment at the expense of forgiveness, and on “universal principles” at the expense of real, concrete, moral problems. In a phrase, morality has been male at the expense of a female. Thus, the feminist argues, a radical rethinking of the entire history of morality is necessary.
As a negative attack on traditional morality, it is hard to disagree with feminism. Our moral tradition does have a suspiciously masculine cast; it is not surprising that virtually every philosopher mentioned in this appendix was a man. But feminism has struggled to develop a positive ethics of its own. Many consider Gilligan’s ethics of care to be the best attempt so far, and it works well in family contexts. But when we try to extend the ethics of care into larger spheres, we run into trouble. Gilligan insists on the moral urgency of partiality (as a mother is partial to her children, and even among children). But you would object if you were a defendant in a lawsuit and saw the plaintiff enter, wave genially to the judge, and say, “Hi Mom!” The point, of course, is that in many situations we insist on impartiality, and for good reasons. And we all agree that people we have never met may still exercise moral demands upon us. We believe that a man rotting in prison on the other side of the world ought not to be tortured, and maybe that we should do something about it if he is (if only by donating money to Amnesty International). Everyone deserves protection from torture for reasons that apply equally to all of us.
PLURALISM
When the German philosopher Nietzsche famously proclaimed that “God is dead,” he was not proposing that the nature of the universe had changed. Rather, he was proposing that a change had taken place in the way we view ourselves in the universe. He meant that the Judeo-Christian tradition that has informed all of our values in the West can no longer do the job for us that it used to do. Part of that tradition, Nietzsche thought, was the unfortunate Platonic idea that there is an answer to the question “What is the good?” There is no more one “good” than there is one “God” or one “truth”: there are, Nietzsche insisted, many goods, like there are many truths. Nietzsche argued the moral position that we now call pluralism.
Pluralism is the idea that there are many goods and many sources of value. Pluralism is explicitly opposed to Plato’s insistence that all good things and actions must share some quality that makes them all good. But does this make the pluralist a relativist? No, because the pluralist argues for the moral significance of two ideas that the relativist rejects: (1) that some aspects of human nature are transcultural and transhistorical, and (2) that some methods of inquiry reveal transcultural and transhistorical human values.
When we look at human history, we see goods that repeatedly contribute to human flourishing and evils that interfere with it. War is almost always viewed as an evil in history that has consistently interfered with human flourishing; health, on the other hand, is almost always viewed as a good (with the exception of aberrant religious practices like asceticism). “Avoid war and seek health” is not a moral code – although it might go further than we think – but it does provide an example of what a pluralist is looking for. The pluralist wants concrete goods and practices that actually enrich human life. For the pluralist, the choice between Plato’s absolutism and moral relativism is a false dichotomy. Just because there is no absolute “ good” does not mean that all goods or values are relative to the time, place, and culture in which we find them. Some things and practices are usually bad for humans, others are usually good, and the discovery and encouragement of the good things and practices is the game the smart ethicist plays.
For this reason, pluralists emphasize the importance of investigating and questioning. Is our present culture enhancing or diminishing us as human beings? Is the American attitude toward sexuality, say, improving the human condition or interfering with it? (And before we can answer that question, what is the American attitude toward sexuality? Or are there many attitudes?) The ethical contribution to the history of philosophy made by the fascinating 20th century movement called existentialism is its insistence on this kind of vigorous, ruthlessly honest interrogation of oneself and one’s culture. The danger of hypocrisy and self-deception, or what the leading existentialist Jen-Paul Sartre (1912-1984) called bad faith, is rampant in every culture; challenging our values is uncomfortable. It is much easier for us, like the subjects of the nude ruler in H.C. Andersen’s fable The Emperor’s New Clothes, to collectively pretend that something is good (even if we know there is really nothing there at all). Thus, the project of becoming a good person becomes not just a matter of following the rules, doing one’s duty, seeking happiness, becoming virtuous, or caring for others. It is also the lifelong project of discovering if, when, and why the apparently good things we seek are what we ought to pursue.
SUMMARY
After reading this appendix, a reasonable student might ask: “But which of these moralities is the rightone?” Admittedly, philosophers are better at posting problems than solving them. But the lesson was not in demonstrating that one or another morality is the one a person ought to follow. Rather, this appendix has attempted to show you how different people have struggled with the enormously difficult questions of ethics. Many people think they simply know the difference between right and wrong, or unreflectively accept the definitions of right and wrong offered by their parents, churches, communities, or societies. This appendix tried to show that there is nothing simple about ethics. To understand ethics means to think, to challenge, to question, and to reflect. Accordingly, being a good person might mean attempting your own struggle with, and attempting to find your own answer to, what we called Plato’s knotty question of goodness.
QUESTION: Are there any drawbacks to Aristotles "Virtue Ethics"? If so, then what are they? How do Virtue Ethics stack up against Christianity?