After Virtue
Alasdair MacIntyre, book notes
AFTER VIRTUE, all words and ideas are MacIntyre's unless otherwise attributed.
Hypothesis: in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in a state of grave disorder. What we possess are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have -- very largely, if not entirely -- lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality.
There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture. Disagreements share three salient characteristics.
1) conceptual incommensurability of the rival arguments -- every one of the arguments is logically valid or can be easily expanded so as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises; but the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another; thus, moral arguments are necessarily interminable; first premises a matter of pure assertiona and counter assertion; further, it seems that underlying my own position there must be some non-rational decision to adopt that position.
2) nonetheless, these arguments purport to be impersonal rational arguments and as such are usually presented in a mode appropriate to that impersonality.
3) the incommensurable premises deployed in the rival arguments have a wide variety of historical origins
In the transition from the variety of contexts in which they were originally at home to our own contemporary culture 'virtue' and 'justice' and 'piety' and 'duty' and even 'ought' have become other than they once were.
Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rational interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved, because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present or future, can be resolved.
Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.
GE Moore's threefold discovery:
1) 'good' is the name of a simple, indefinable property, a property different from that named by 'pleasant' or 'conducive to evolutionary survival' or any other natural property; 'good' is a "non-natural property", propositions declaring this or that 'good' are what Moore called 'intuitions'; they are incapable of proof or disproof.
2) 'right' is that action which of all the available alternatives is the one which does or did as a matter of fact produce the most good.
3) personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest, and by far the greatest goods we can imagine; this is the ultimate truth of Moral Philosophy. The achievement of friendship and the contemplation of what is beautiful in nature or in art become certainly almost the sole and perhaps the sole justifiable ends of all human action.
Moore's three central positions are logically independent of each other. There would be no breach of consistency if one were to affirm any one of the three and deny the other two. The second crucial fact is that the first part of what Moore says is plainly false and the second and third parts are at the very least highly contentious. Moore's arguments at times are, it must seem now, highly defective; a great deal is asserted rather than argued. And yet it is this to us plainly false, badly argued position which Keynes treated as 'the beginning of a renaissance', which Lytton Strachey declared to have 'shattered all writers on ethics from Aristotle and Christ to Herbert Spencer and Mr Bradley' and which Leonard Woolf described as 'substituting for the religious and philosophical nightmares, delusions, hallucinations in which Jehovah, Christ, and St Paul, Plato, Kant and Hegel had entangled us, the fresh air and pure light of commonsense.'
This is great silliness of course; but it is the great silliness of highly intelligent and perceptive people.
If two observers disagree: according to Keynes, either the two were focusing on different subject matters, without recognising this, or one had perceptions superior to the other. But of course, as Keynes tells us, what was really happening was something quite other: 'In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accounts of infallibility' and Keynes goes on to describe the effectiveness of Moore's gasps of incredulity and head-shaking, of Strachey's grim silences and of Lowes Dickinson's shrugs.
There is evident here precisely that gap between the meaning and purport of what was being said and the use to which utterance was being put to which our reinterpretation of emotivism drew attention.
It is no accident that the acutest of the modern founders of emotivism, philosophers such as F.P. Ramsey, Austin Duncan-Jones and C.L. Stevenson, were pupils of Moore; it is not implausible that they did in fact confuse moral utterance at Cambridge after 1903 with moral utterance as such, and that they therefore presented what was in essentials a correct account of the former as though it were an account of the latter.
What makes emotivism convincing as a thesis about a certain kind of moral utterance at Cambridge after 1903 are certain features specific to that historical period. Those whose evaluative utterances embodied Moore's interpretations of those utterances could not have been doing what they took themselves to be doing because of the falsity of Moore's thesis. But nothing whatsoever seems to follow about moral utterances in general. Emotivism on this account turns out to be an empirical thesis, or rather a preliminary sketch of an empirical thesis, presumably to be filled out later by psychological and sociological and historical observations, about those who continue to use moral and other evaluative expressions, as if they were governed by objective and impersonal criteria, when all grasp of any such criterion has been lost.
Carnap's version fo emotivism, for example -- in which the characterization of moral utterances as expressions of feeling or attitude is a desperate attempt to find some status for them after his theory of meaning and his theory of science have expelled them from the realm of the factual and the descriptive -- was based on the most meagre attention to their specific character.
A presupposition of the scheme of development [MacIntyre] sketches is that genuine objective and impersonal moral standards can in some way or other be rationally justified, even if in some cultures at some stages the possibility of such rational justification is no longer available. This is what emotivism denies.
Emotivism rests upon a claim that every attempt, whether past or present, to provide a rational justification for an objective morality has in fact failed. What emotivism however did fail to reckon with is the difference that it would make to morality if emotivism were not only true but also widely believed to be true. That is, if and insofar as emotivism is true, moral language is seriously misleading and, if and insofar as emotivism is justifiably believed, presumably the use of traditional and inherited moral language ought to be abandoned. This conclusion none of the emotivists drew; and it is clear that, like Stevenson, they failed to draw it because the misconstrued their own theory as a theory of meaning.
Analytical philosophers had defined the central task of philosophy as that of deciphering the meaning of key expressions in both everyday and scientific language; and since emotivism fails precisely as a theory of the meaning of moral expressions, analytical philosophers by and large rejected emotivism. The resistance to emotivism has arisen from the perception that moral reasoning does occur, that there can be logical linkages between various moral judgments of a kind that emotivism itself could not allow. Yet the most influential account of moral reasoning that emerged in response to this critique of emotivism was one according to which an agent can only justifiy a particular judgment by referring to some universal rule from which it may be logically derived, and can only justify the rule in turn by deriving it from some more general rule or principle; but on this view since every chain of reasoning must be finite, such a process of justificatory reasoning must always terminate with the assertion of some rule of principle for which no further reason can be given.
The terminus of justification is thus always, on this view, a not further to be justified choice, a choice unguided by criteria. Each individual implicitly or explicitly has to adopt his or her own first principles on the basis of such choice.
To this is replied: rationality itself might supply morality with a basis and a basis such that we have adequate grounds for rejecting emotivist and subjectivist accounts. [Me: basis located in positive, functional knowledge].
It would generally be a decisive refutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its own account of the matter could never be socially embodied; and it also follows that we have not fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be.
The key to the social content of emotivism: it entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. For evaluative utterance can in the end have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the feelings and attitudes of others.
Portrait of a Lady turns out to be, in the words of William Gass, an investigation 'of what it means to be a consumer of persons, and of what it means to be a person consumed.' The metaphor of consumption acquires its appropriateness from the milieu; James is concerned with rich aesthetes whose interest is to fend off the kind of boredom that is so characteristic of modern leisure by contriving behavior in others that will be responsive to their wishes, that will feed their sated appetites. The last enemy is boredom. These are environments in which the problem of enjoyment arises in the context of leisure, in which large sums of money have created some social distnce from the necessity of work.
Weber: Bureaucratic rationality is the rationality of matching means to ends economically and efficiently. Questions of ends are questions of values, and on values reason is silent; conflict between rival values cannot be rationally settled. Instead one must simply choose -- between parties, classes, nations, causes, ideals. 'Values', says Raymond Aron in his exposition of Weber's view, 'are created by human decisions...' and again he ascribes to Weber the view that 'each man's conscience is irrefutable' and that values rest on 'a choice whose justification is purely subjective.' An agent may be more or less rational in acting consistent with his values, but the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than that of any other. In Weber, the contrast between power and authority is effective obliterated. As Philip Rieff noted, 'Weber's ends, the causes to be served, are means of acting; they cannot escape service to power' (Rieff 1975, p. 22). No type of authority can appeal to rational criteria to vindicate itself except that type of bureaucratic authority which appeals precisely to its own effectiveness. And what this appeal reveals is that bureacratic authority is nothing other than successful power. [Me: authority can only appeal to consensus criteria, values may not be rationally got, but they can be rationally unconcealed (articulated) and ordered.]
Characters are the moral representatives of their culture and they are so because of the way in whch moral and metaphysical ideas and theories assume through them an embodied existence in the social world. Characters are the masks worn by moral philosophies.
It is by way of their intentions that individuals express bodies of moral belief in their actions. For all intentions presuppose more or less complex, more or less coherent, more or less explicit bodies of belief, sometimes of moral belief. [Me: thus our moral instinct to judge agents by their intended actions; see Hauser.]
The manager represents in his character the obliteration of the distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations; the therapist represents the same obliteration in the sphere of personal life. Both treat ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness. Rieff has documented the ways in which truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.
The specifically modern self, the self that I have called emotivist, finds no limits set to that on which it may pass judgment for such limits could only derive from rational criteria for evaluation and, as we have seen, the emotivist self lacks any such criteria. Everything may be criticised from whatever standpoint the self has adopted, including the self's choice of standpoint to adopt. To be a moral agent is, on this view, precisely to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract pont of view that is totally detached from all social particularity. Anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in social roles or practices that moral agency has to be located. The contrast between this democratisation of moral agency and the elitist monopolies of managerial and therapeutic expertise could not be sharper. Any minimally rational agent is to be account a moral agent; but managers and therapists enjoy their status in virtue of their membership within hierarchies of imputed skill and knowledge. In the domain of fact there are procedures for eliminating disagreement; in that of morals the ultimacy of disagreement is dignified by the title of 'pluralism'. [Me: There is a distinction between 'the fact of pluralism' and 'the ultimacy of pluralism'.]
This democratised self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing. [Me: some roles are heavier to carry than others, some are impossible to lift, for very long or at all -- preparation has her say.]
Sartre's self-discovery is characterized as the discovery that the self is 'nothing', is not a substance but a set of perpetually open possibilities. [Me: for the self the past is closed, the future uncertain, the present constrained.]
Inner conflicts are for it necessary au fond the confrontation of one contingent arbitrariness by another. It is a self of no given continuities, save those of the body which is its bearer and of the memory which to the best of its ability gathers in its past.
The self is now thought of as lacking any necessary social identity, because the kind of social identity that it once enjoyed is no longer available; the self is now thought of as criterionless, because the kind of telos in terms of which it once judged and acted is no longer thought to be credible. [Me: social identity is too fluid and fuzzy; the solution is to establish a floor of identity, that of citizen, and define its telos; can only do this after unanimity in the original position, after a Myworld and Ourworld agreement reached during reflective room temperature.]
In pre-modern, traditional societies it is through his or her membership of a variety of social groups that the individual identifies himself or herself and is identified by others. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress -- or to fail to make progress -- toward a given end. Thus a completed and fulfilled life is an achievement and death is the point at which someone can be judged happy or unhappy. Hence the old Greek proverb: 'Call no man happy until he is dead.' [Me: Myworldline, Kahneman's prospect theory, Pynchon's 'last delta-t' -- Myworldline and the 'shadow of the future' is cast on Myworld.]
The concept of a whole human life is the primary subject of objective and impersonal evaluation, of a type of evaluation which provides the content for judgment upon the particular actions or projects of a given individual.
Nowadays: these appear to be the superstitions of teleology.
Northern European enlightenment culture: it was a musical culture and there is perhaps a closer relationship between this fact and the central philosophical problems of the culture than has usually been recognized. For the relationship of our beliefs to sentences that we only or primarily sing, let alone to the music which accompanies those sentences, is not at all the same as the relationship of our beliefs to the sentences that we primarily say and say in an assertive mode. When the Catholic mass becomes a genre available for concert performance by Protestants, when we listen to the scripture because of what Bach wrote rather than because of what St Matthew wrote, then sacred texts are being preserved in a form in which the traditional links with belief have been broken, even in some measure for those who still count themselves believers. It is not of course that there is no link with belief; you cannot simply detach the music of Bach or even of Handel from Christian religion. But a traditional distinction between the religious and the aesthetic has bee blurred.
In Latin, as in ancient Greek, there is no word correctly translated by our word 'moral'; or rather there is no such word until our word 'moral' is translated back into Latin. Certainly 'moral' is the etymological descendant of 'moralis'. But 'moralis', like its Greek predecessor ethikos -- Cicero invented 'moralis' to translate the Greek word in the De Fato -- means 'pertaining to character' where a man's character is nothing other than his set dispositions to behave systematically in one way rather than another, to lead one particular kind of life. [Me: when matched with the discoveries of Hauser and Stanovich, yet further evidence that the ancients/unsophisticated are purer, less conceptually modified, less diluted examples of human nature; a higher molarity of human nature exists in their smaller set of words; the prehistoric peoples even more so, I would imagine; this is the value-neutral observation]
The early uses of 'moral' in English translate the Latin and move to its use as a noun where 'the moral' of any literary passage is the practical lesson that it teaches. In these early uses 'moral' contrasts neither with such expressions as 'prudential' or 'self-interested' nor with such expressions as 'legal' or 'religious'. The word to which it is closest in meaning is perhaps simply 'practical'. Its subsequent history is one in which it is first perhaps most usually part of the expression 'moral virtue' and then becomes a predicate in its own right with a continual tendency to narrow its meaning, especially as it applies to sexual behavior.
From 1630 - 1850, 'morality' became the name for that particular sphere in which rules of conduct which are neither theological nor legal nor aesthetic are allowed a cultural space of their own. [Me: the question is the machinery; what neurological regions are activated during moral judgments versus other kind of judgments? -- you'll find that many things are neurologically similar to 'moral judgment' in their patterned activity.]
In Kierkegaard's Enten-Eller, the choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil. At the heart of the aesthetic way of life, as Kierkegaard characterises it, is the attempt to lose the self in the immediacy of present experience. [Me: not a complete description; the aesthetic encompasses both Myworld and Myworldline.] By contrast the paradigm of the ethical is marriage, a state of commitment and obligation through time, in whch the present is bound by the past and to the future. No reason can be offered for preferring one to the other. [Me: the real distinction is between Lebensanschauung and Weltanschauung; between the self-centering (Myworld) and the self-objectifying (Ourworld) standpoints; it is important to be clear which perspective one is arguing from; the void between the two can be bridged by contract only.]
[Me: no reason is necessary for why 'I' prefer the self-centering standpoint. I exist. By definition I am the center of my world. Neither right nor duty compels me to stand firmly in the center; it is what I am, what I do, and nothing less; the only reason to shift to the Ourworld perspective is if it becomes preferable for me to do so, if it follows from one of my self-elected Myworld premises.]
It would follow that a principle for the choice of which no reasons could be given would be a principle devoid of authority. By now the doctrine of Enten-Eller is plainly to the effect that the principles which depect the ethical way of life are to be adopted for no reason, but for a choice that lies beyond reasons, just because it is the choice of what is to count for us as a reason.
In our own culture the influence of the notion of radical choice appears in our dilemmas over which ethical principles to choose. We are almost intolerably conscious of rival moral alternatives.
Central to Kant's moral philosophy are two deceptively simple theses: if the rules of morality are rational, they must be the same for all rational beings, in just the way that the rules of arithmetic are; and if the rules of morality are binding on all rational beings, then the contingent ability of such beings to carry them out must be unimportant -- what is important is their will to carry them out. The project of discovering a rational justification of morality therefore simply is the project of discovering a rational test which will discriminate those maxims which are a genuine expression of the moral law when they determine the will from those maxims which are not such an expression. [Me: rational Myworld test -- last maxim standing?, stable over time, positive externalities, competitive success, practitioner satisfaction; also, the brain's "moral judgment" algorithm is logical; the horizontal relationships between discrete outputs are not; moral philosophy has been focused on the latter; what of the 'V'-relationships? -- the angular relationships.]
On Kant's view it can never follow from the fact that God commands us to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such.
Kant: I may propose a course of action to someone either by offering him reasons for so acting or by trying to influence him in non-rational ways. If I do the former I treat him as a rational will, worthy of the same respect as is due to myself. By contrast an attempt at non-rational suasion embodies an attempt to make the agen a mere instrument of my will, without any regard for his rationality.
The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed; and from henceforward the morality of our predecessor culture -- and subsequently of our own -- lacked any public, shared rationale or justification. In a world of secular rationality religion could no longer provide such a shared background and foundation for moral discourse and action; and the failure of philosophy to provide what religion could no longer furnish was an important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject.
AFTER VIRTUE, all words and ideas are MacIntyre's unless otherwise attributed.
Hypothesis: in the actual world which we inhabit the language of morality is in a state of grave disorder. What we possess are the fragments of a conceptual scheme, parts which now lack those contexts from which their significance derived. We possess indeed simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have -- very largely, if not entirely -- lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, or morality.
There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture. Disagreements share three salient characteristics.
1) conceptual incommensurability of the rival arguments -- every one of the arguments is logically valid or can be easily expanded so as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises; but the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another; thus, moral arguments are necessarily interminable; first premises a matter of pure assertiona and counter assertion; further, it seems that underlying my own position there must be some non-rational decision to adopt that position.
2) nonetheless, these arguments purport to be impersonal rational arguments and as such are usually presented in a mode appropriate to that impersonality.
3) the incommensurable premises deployed in the rival arguments have a wide variety of historical origins
In the transition from the variety of contexts in which they were originally at home to our own contemporary culture 'virtue' and 'justice' and 'piety' and 'duty' and even 'ought' have become other than they once were.
Contemporary moral argument is rationally interminable, because all moral, indeed all evaluative, argument is and always must be rational interminable. Contemporary moral disagreements of a certain kind cannot be resolved, because no moral disagreements of that kind in any age, past, present or future, can be resolved.
Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character.
GE Moore's threefold discovery:
1) 'good' is the name of a simple, indefinable property, a property different from that named by 'pleasant' or 'conducive to evolutionary survival' or any other natural property; 'good' is a "non-natural property", propositions declaring this or that 'good' are what Moore called 'intuitions'; they are incapable of proof or disproof.
2) 'right' is that action which of all the available alternatives is the one which does or did as a matter of fact produce the most good.
3) personal affections and aesthetic enjoyments include all the greatest, and by far the greatest goods we can imagine; this is the ultimate truth of Moral Philosophy. The achievement of friendship and the contemplation of what is beautiful in nature or in art become certainly almost the sole and perhaps the sole justifiable ends of all human action.
Moore's three central positions are logically independent of each other. There would be no breach of consistency if one were to affirm any one of the three and deny the other two. The second crucial fact is that the first part of what Moore says is plainly false and the second and third parts are at the very least highly contentious. Moore's arguments at times are, it must seem now, highly defective; a great deal is asserted rather than argued. And yet it is this to us plainly false, badly argued position which Keynes treated as 'the beginning of a renaissance', which Lytton Strachey declared to have 'shattered all writers on ethics from Aristotle and Christ to Herbert Spencer and Mr Bradley' and which Leonard Woolf described as 'substituting for the religious and philosophical nightmares, delusions, hallucinations in which Jehovah, Christ, and St Paul, Plato, Kant and Hegel had entangled us, the fresh air and pure light of commonsense.'
This is great silliness of course; but it is the great silliness of highly intelligent and perceptive people.
If two observers disagree: according to Keynes, either the two were focusing on different subject matters, without recognising this, or one had perceptions superior to the other. But of course, as Keynes tells us, what was really happening was something quite other: 'In practice, victory was with those who could speak with the greatest appearance of clear, undoubting conviction and could best use the accounts of infallibility' and Keynes goes on to describe the effectiveness of Moore's gasps of incredulity and head-shaking, of Strachey's grim silences and of Lowes Dickinson's shrugs.
There is evident here precisely that gap between the meaning and purport of what was being said and the use to which utterance was being put to which our reinterpretation of emotivism drew attention.
It is no accident that the acutest of the modern founders of emotivism, philosophers such as F.P. Ramsey, Austin Duncan-Jones and C.L. Stevenson, were pupils of Moore; it is not implausible that they did in fact confuse moral utterance at Cambridge after 1903 with moral utterance as such, and that they therefore presented what was in essentials a correct account of the former as though it were an account of the latter.
What makes emotivism convincing as a thesis about a certain kind of moral utterance at Cambridge after 1903 are certain features specific to that historical period. Those whose evaluative utterances embodied Moore's interpretations of those utterances could not have been doing what they took themselves to be doing because of the falsity of Moore's thesis. But nothing whatsoever seems to follow about moral utterances in general. Emotivism on this account turns out to be an empirical thesis, or rather a preliminary sketch of an empirical thesis, presumably to be filled out later by psychological and sociological and historical observations, about those who continue to use moral and other evaluative expressions, as if they were governed by objective and impersonal criteria, when all grasp of any such criterion has been lost.
Carnap's version fo emotivism, for example -- in which the characterization of moral utterances as expressions of feeling or attitude is a desperate attempt to find some status for them after his theory of meaning and his theory of science have expelled them from the realm of the factual and the descriptive -- was based on the most meagre attention to their specific character.
A presupposition of the scheme of development [MacIntyre] sketches is that genuine objective and impersonal moral standards can in some way or other be rationally justified, even if in some cultures at some stages the possibility of such rational justification is no longer available. This is what emotivism denies.
Emotivism rests upon a claim that every attempt, whether past or present, to provide a rational justification for an objective morality has in fact failed. What emotivism however did fail to reckon with is the difference that it would make to morality if emotivism were not only true but also widely believed to be true. That is, if and insofar as emotivism is true, moral language is seriously misleading and, if and insofar as emotivism is justifiably believed, presumably the use of traditional and inherited moral language ought to be abandoned. This conclusion none of the emotivists drew; and it is clear that, like Stevenson, they failed to draw it because the misconstrued their own theory as a theory of meaning.
Analytical philosophers had defined the central task of philosophy as that of deciphering the meaning of key expressions in both everyday and scientific language; and since emotivism fails precisely as a theory of the meaning of moral expressions, analytical philosophers by and large rejected emotivism. The resistance to emotivism has arisen from the perception that moral reasoning does occur, that there can be logical linkages between various moral judgments of a kind that emotivism itself could not allow. Yet the most influential account of moral reasoning that emerged in response to this critique of emotivism was one according to which an agent can only justifiy a particular judgment by referring to some universal rule from which it may be logically derived, and can only justify the rule in turn by deriving it from some more general rule or principle; but on this view since every chain of reasoning must be finite, such a process of justificatory reasoning must always terminate with the assertion of some rule of principle for which no further reason can be given.
The terminus of justification is thus always, on this view, a not further to be justified choice, a choice unguided by criteria. Each individual implicitly or explicitly has to adopt his or her own first principles on the basis of such choice.
To this is replied: rationality itself might supply morality with a basis and a basis such that we have adequate grounds for rejecting emotivist and subjectivist accounts. [Me: basis located in positive, functional knowledge].
It would generally be a decisive refutation of a moral philosophy to show that moral agency on its own account of the matter could never be socially embodied; and it also follows that we have not fully understood the claims of any moral philosophy until we have spelled out what its social embodiment would be.
The key to the social content of emotivism: it entails the obliteration of any genuine distinction between manipulative and non-manipulative social relations. For evaluative utterance can in the end have no point or use but the expression of my own feelings or attitudes and the transformation of the feelings and attitudes of others.
Portrait of a Lady turns out to be, in the words of William Gass, an investigation 'of what it means to be a consumer of persons, and of what it means to be a person consumed.' The metaphor of consumption acquires its appropriateness from the milieu; James is concerned with rich aesthetes whose interest is to fend off the kind of boredom that is so characteristic of modern leisure by contriving behavior in others that will be responsive to their wishes, that will feed their sated appetites. The last enemy is boredom. These are environments in which the problem of enjoyment arises in the context of leisure, in which large sums of money have created some social distnce from the necessity of work.
Weber: Bureaucratic rationality is the rationality of matching means to ends economically and efficiently. Questions of ends are questions of values, and on values reason is silent; conflict between rival values cannot be rationally settled. Instead one must simply choose -- between parties, classes, nations, causes, ideals. 'Values', says Raymond Aron in his exposition of Weber's view, 'are created by human decisions...' and again he ascribes to Weber the view that 'each man's conscience is irrefutable' and that values rest on 'a choice whose justification is purely subjective.' An agent may be more or less rational in acting consistent with his values, but the choice of any one particular evaluative stance or commitment can be no more rational than that of any other. In Weber, the contrast between power and authority is effective obliterated. As Philip Rieff noted, 'Weber's ends, the causes to be served, are means of acting; they cannot escape service to power' (Rieff 1975, p. 22). No type of authority can appeal to rational criteria to vindicate itself except that type of bureaucratic authority which appeals precisely to its own effectiveness. And what this appeal reveals is that bureacratic authority is nothing other than successful power. [Me: authority can only appeal to consensus criteria, values may not be rationally got, but they can be rationally unconcealed (articulated) and ordered.]
Characters are the moral representatives of their culture and they are so because of the way in whch moral and metaphysical ideas and theories assume through them an embodied existence in the social world. Characters are the masks worn by moral philosophies.
It is by way of their intentions that individuals express bodies of moral belief in their actions. For all intentions presuppose more or less complex, more or less coherent, more or less explicit bodies of belief, sometimes of moral belief. [Me: thus our moral instinct to judge agents by their intended actions; see Hauser.]
The manager represents in his character the obliteration of the distinction between manipulative and nonmanipulative social relations; the therapist represents the same obliteration in the sphere of personal life. Both treat ends as given, as outside his scope; his concern is with technique, with effectiveness. Rieff has documented the ways in which truth has been displaced as a value and replaced by psychological effectiveness.
The specifically modern self, the self that I have called emotivist, finds no limits set to that on which it may pass judgment for such limits could only derive from rational criteria for evaluation and, as we have seen, the emotivist self lacks any such criteria. Everything may be criticised from whatever standpoint the self has adopted, including the self's choice of standpoint to adopt. To be a moral agent is, on this view, precisely to be able to stand back from any and every situation in which one is involved, from any and every characteristic that one may possess, and to pass judgment on it from a purely universal and abstract pont of view that is totally detached from all social particularity. Anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in social roles or practices that moral agency has to be located. The contrast between this democratisation of moral agency and the elitist monopolies of managerial and therapeutic expertise could not be sharper. Any minimally rational agent is to be account a moral agent; but managers and therapists enjoy their status in virtue of their membership within hierarchies of imputed skill and knowledge. In the domain of fact there are procedures for eliminating disagreement; in that of morals the ultimacy of disagreement is dignified by the title of 'pluralism'. [Me: There is a distinction between 'the fact of pluralism' and 'the ultimacy of pluralism'.]
This democratised self which has no necessary social content and no necessary social identity can then be anything, can assume any role or take any point of view, because it is in and for itself nothing. [Me: some roles are heavier to carry than others, some are impossible to lift, for very long or at all -- preparation has her say.]
Sartre's self-discovery is characterized as the discovery that the self is 'nothing', is not a substance but a set of perpetually open possibilities. [Me: for the self the past is closed, the future uncertain, the present constrained.]
Inner conflicts are for it necessary au fond the confrontation of one contingent arbitrariness by another. It is a self of no given continuities, save those of the body which is its bearer and of the memory which to the best of its ability gathers in its past.
The self is now thought of as lacking any necessary social identity, because the kind of social identity that it once enjoyed is no longer available; the self is now thought of as criterionless, because the kind of telos in terms of which it once judged and acted is no longer thought to be credible. [Me: social identity is too fluid and fuzzy; the solution is to establish a floor of identity, that of citizen, and define its telos; can only do this after unanimity in the original position, after a Myworld and Ourworld agreement reached during reflective room temperature.]
In pre-modern, traditional societies it is through his or her membership of a variety of social groups that the individual identifies himself or herself and is identified by others. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through life is to make progress -- or to fail to make progress -- toward a given end. Thus a completed and fulfilled life is an achievement and death is the point at which someone can be judged happy or unhappy. Hence the old Greek proverb: 'Call no man happy until he is dead.' [Me: Myworldline, Kahneman's prospect theory, Pynchon's 'last delta-t' -- Myworldline and the 'shadow of the future' is cast on Myworld.]
The concept of a whole human life is the primary subject of objective and impersonal evaluation, of a type of evaluation which provides the content for judgment upon the particular actions or projects of a given individual.
Nowadays: these appear to be the superstitions of teleology.
Northern European enlightenment culture: it was a musical culture and there is perhaps a closer relationship between this fact and the central philosophical problems of the culture than has usually been recognized. For the relationship of our beliefs to sentences that we only or primarily sing, let alone to the music which accompanies those sentences, is not at all the same as the relationship of our beliefs to the sentences that we primarily say and say in an assertive mode. When the Catholic mass becomes a genre available for concert performance by Protestants, when we listen to the scripture because of what Bach wrote rather than because of what St Matthew wrote, then sacred texts are being preserved in a form in which the traditional links with belief have been broken, even in some measure for those who still count themselves believers. It is not of course that there is no link with belief; you cannot simply detach the music of Bach or even of Handel from Christian religion. But a traditional distinction between the religious and the aesthetic has bee blurred.
In Latin, as in ancient Greek, there is no word correctly translated by our word 'moral'; or rather there is no such word until our word 'moral' is translated back into Latin. Certainly 'moral' is the etymological descendant of 'moralis'. But 'moralis', like its Greek predecessor ethikos -- Cicero invented 'moralis' to translate the Greek word in the De Fato -- means 'pertaining to character' where a man's character is nothing other than his set dispositions to behave systematically in one way rather than another, to lead one particular kind of life. [Me: when matched with the discoveries of Hauser and Stanovich, yet further evidence that the ancients/unsophisticated are purer, less conceptually modified, less diluted examples of human nature; a higher molarity of human nature exists in their smaller set of words; the prehistoric peoples even more so, I would imagine; this is the value-neutral observation]
The early uses of 'moral' in English translate the Latin and move to its use as a noun where 'the moral' of any literary passage is the practical lesson that it teaches. In these early uses 'moral' contrasts neither with such expressions as 'prudential' or 'self-interested' nor with such expressions as 'legal' or 'religious'. The word to which it is closest in meaning is perhaps simply 'practical'. Its subsequent history is one in which it is first perhaps most usually part of the expression 'moral virtue' and then becomes a predicate in its own right with a continual tendency to narrow its meaning, especially as it applies to sexual behavior.
From 1630 - 1850, 'morality' became the name for that particular sphere in which rules of conduct which are neither theological nor legal nor aesthetic are allowed a cultural space of their own. [Me: the question is the machinery; what neurological regions are activated during moral judgments versus other kind of judgments? -- you'll find that many things are neurologically similar to 'moral judgment' in their patterned activity.]
In Kierkegaard's Enten-Eller, the choice between the ethical and the aesthetic is not the choice between good and evil, it is the choice whether or not to choose in terms of good and evil. At the heart of the aesthetic way of life, as Kierkegaard characterises it, is the attempt to lose the self in the immediacy of present experience. [Me: not a complete description; the aesthetic encompasses both Myworld and Myworldline.] By contrast the paradigm of the ethical is marriage, a state of commitment and obligation through time, in whch the present is bound by the past and to the future. No reason can be offered for preferring one to the other. [Me: the real distinction is between Lebensanschauung and Weltanschauung; between the self-centering (Myworld) and the self-objectifying (Ourworld) standpoints; it is important to be clear which perspective one is arguing from; the void between the two can be bridged by contract only.]
[Me: no reason is necessary for why 'I' prefer the self-centering standpoint. I exist. By definition I am the center of my world. Neither right nor duty compels me to stand firmly in the center; it is what I am, what I do, and nothing less; the only reason to shift to the Ourworld perspective is if it becomes preferable for me to do so, if it follows from one of my self-elected Myworld premises.]
It would follow that a principle for the choice of which no reasons could be given would be a principle devoid of authority. By now the doctrine of Enten-Eller is plainly to the effect that the principles which depect the ethical way of life are to be adopted for no reason, but for a choice that lies beyond reasons, just because it is the choice of what is to count for us as a reason.
In our own culture the influence of the notion of radical choice appears in our dilemmas over which ethical principles to choose. We are almost intolerably conscious of rival moral alternatives.
Central to Kant's moral philosophy are two deceptively simple theses: if the rules of morality are rational, they must be the same for all rational beings, in just the way that the rules of arithmetic are; and if the rules of morality are binding on all rational beings, then the contingent ability of such beings to carry them out must be unimportant -- what is important is their will to carry them out. The project of discovering a rational justification of morality therefore simply is the project of discovering a rational test which will discriminate those maxims which are a genuine expression of the moral law when they determine the will from those maxims which are not such an expression. [Me: rational Myworld test -- last maxim standing?, stable over time, positive externalities, competitive success, practitioner satisfaction; also, the brain's "moral judgment" algorithm is logical; the horizontal relationships between discrete outputs are not; moral philosophy has been focused on the latter; what of the 'V'-relationships? -- the angular relationships.]
On Kant's view it can never follow from the fact that God commands us to do such-and-such that we ought to do such-and-such.
Kant: I may propose a course of action to someone either by offering him reasons for so acting or by trying to influence him in non-rational ways. If I do the former I treat him as a rational will, worthy of the same respect as is due to myself. By contrast an attempt at non-rational suasion embodies an attempt to make the agen a mere instrument of my will, without any regard for his rationality.
The project of providing a rational vindication of morality had decisively failed; and from henceforward the morality of our predecessor culture -- and subsequently of our own -- lacked any public, shared rationale or justification. In a world of secular rationality religion could no longer provide such a shared background and foundation for moral discourse and action; and the failure of philosophy to provide what religion could no longer furnish was an important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject.
posted by John Aristides at 3/23/2009 10:16:00 AM
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