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For Connie and her children
Foreword
People don’t just like stories, they need them. We get embroiled in narratives that enact the tragedy and comedy of our human condition, showing us the implications of our values and actions. We form relationships with the characters in stories and novels, hoping the best for some, fretting over their impending loss, injury or death. We want things to work out for the best. We want virtue to be rewarded and vice punished. We want to follow different characters to see where their personalities, values, virtues and vices lead them in life. Stories do matter for our lives, showing us possibilities for meaning, thought and action.
Even the most rabid censors and book burners implicitly recognize the power of narratives to shape our lives. Narratives are experiments in living, for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, until death do us part. John Gardner knew this, arguing that the moral cultivation and edification we encounter in stories come not through narratives that moralize and preach at us, that is, moral propaganda, but rather from an honest exercise in moral imagination, the exploration of the meaning of values, traits of character and relationships that constitute our moral understanding.
This book carries forward the tradition defined by works like John Gardner’s Moral Fiction, Martha Nussbaum’s Love’s Knowledge, Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, Marshal Gregory’s Shaped by Stories, Alex Keke’s The Enlargement of Life, and Richard Eldridge’s On Moral Personhood . The basic theme running through such works is that a certain type of narrative fiction provides an experimental workshop for the development of moral perception, understanding and values. The goal is to understand how we are both shaped by stories that interrogate the meaning of our human situation and also how we can learn from stories to critically assess and improve our deepest values.
Rethorst has an excellent grasp of a large number of literary works and an admirably broad knowledge of relevant empirical research, coming from several fields, on the nature of moral understanding, judgment and growth of deliberative capacities. He brings mature reflection and a breadth of life experience to his readings of different kinds of narratives. Underlying his explicit analyses and arguments is a
deep conviction in the power of narratives to contribute to our moral development, especially the ethical growth and nurturance of children.
The crux of Rethorst’s view is that narrative, by virtue of its attention to character, judgment, perception, virtue and vice, courage and cowardice, selfishness and altruism, can be far more illuminating and psychologically realistic than most philosophical and scientific treatments that seek ultimate moral principles or a single conception of “the good.” What distinguishes fiction as a site of moral growth is what Rethorst aptly calls “moral density,” illuminating character, values, motivations, vices, and virtues most fully realized via narrative, given the narrative structure of our lives. We live in narrative, which explains why stories are best fitted to capture the character and moral density of our lives.
Challenging claims to moral universality and absoluteness, Rethorst argues for a nuanced, deep, expansive and rich account of our moral experience within particular situations. Having explained the allure of alleged moral absolutes and universal principles and values, he shows why such views cannot be adequate to the complexity of our moral problem-solving. Consequently, he argues for replacing a hortatory, moralizing stance with a deepening and enrichment of moral understanding.
A major part of this project is an argument for moral particularism, moral perceptiveness and moral imagination, which he develops in successive chapters. Martha Nussbaum nicely sums up the drift of this kind of argument: “The subtleties of a complex ethical situation must be seized in a confrontation with the situation itself, by a faculty that is suited to address it as a complex whole. Prior general formulations lack both the concreteness and the flexibility that is required. They do not contain the particularizing details of the matter at hand, with which decision must grapple; and they are not responsive to what is there, as good decision must be.” This kind of moral cultivation requires the exercise of what John Dewey called moral imagination, as a way of imaginatively following the implications for experience of different values, character traits and principles. This form of imaginative inquiry into problematic moral situations is more like artistic exploration than it is a matter of fixed values and moral rule following.
The argument for the necessity of a moral particularism is very convincingly developed, but Rethorst then proceeds to find an appropriate role for moral principles, not as absolute moral laws, but rather as reminders of factors that have proven useful in the prior moral problem solving of a culture. We are foolish to ignore the results of previous cultural experiments in moral deliberation, but they are, at best, suggestions of what we ought to include in our moral deliberations rather than given moral absolutes.
The chapters dealing with examples of such moral fiction are profoundly illuminating, showing how detailed attention to the complexities and particularities of events in life, and as explored in narrative fiction, can provide a cultivation of moral perceptiveness and deliberative insight. All of this gradually builds up to a plea for a rethinking of moral education. Rethorst makes a strong case against moral indoctrination as a vehicle of moral education, and he is also critical of the idea that movements in educational theory such as Values Clarification are alone sufficient, insofar as they lack an adequate critical perspective on both our own values and the
values of others—a perspective that narratives with moral density are well-suited to elaborate.
This all eventually builds up to a plea for the moral density of narrative as key to moral illumination. The goal is to cultivate moral perceptiveness by letting students (and readers generally) engage the particularities of character, conflict and values. The overarching philosophical framework for this argument is, quite correctly, John Dewey’s conception of morality, which Rethorst develops in considerable detail and exemplary clarity over the course of the book. He expands on Dewey’s argument that moral deliberation is an artistic achievement, an activity of aesthetic appreciation and the making of aesthetically meaningful situations. The culmination is an account of how children (and adults) should be assisted in engaging complex moral narratives, in which they simulate the events and deliberations of the characters. The point of such education is not to preach the values of the elders, but to develop a deep appreciation of character, values and their consequences. Besides tracking Dewey’s view of moral growth, there is excellent treatment of Aristotle’s conception of virtue and a life of well-being and well-doing that constitutes human flourishing.
Rethorst appreciates Dewey’s view of the role of habit in the formation of our moral sensibilities and biases, and he draws convincingly on Dewey’s account of the reconstruction of habits, the expansion of sympathies, the sharpening of nuanced perception and the working of imaginative reflection in resolving moral problems. What emerges is a form of virtue ethics rooted in moral density.
Running through every chapter is the stressing of the importance of the cultivation of moral imagination that is necessary if our children are going to manage the moral complexities that will confront them in this troubled world of ours. However, when it comes to the need for a certain kind of moral edification and cultivation, this applies, not just to our children, but to everyone, since our moral education is and must be a lifelong ongoing journey of self-discovery and self-transformation.
Mark Johnson
Philip H. Knight Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Emeritus Department of Philosophy
University of Oregon Eugene, OR, USA
Preface
Back when life was simple, or at least easy, I was a sailor on an icebreaker in the U. S. Coast Guard. One day as we prepared to leave Boston for Greenland, I watched as the ship’s engineer oiled and adjusted our gyroscopic compass. Turning at 8,000 rpm, it synchronizes with the earth’s rotation to point north.
He finished his work, closed the lid and turned it on, and we looked through the plexiglass window on top as it gained speed. I couldn’t help but notice that it was pointing nowhere near north, and said so. “It finds north,” he replied. “Takes about four hours.”
I am reminded of this by current discussion about the ‘moral compass’ we have and how to engender and nourish it. If you blindfolded the ship’s engineer and spun him around in a room, then asked him to point north, he wouldn’t be able to do it better than you or I could. Yet he knows how to find north, using a mechanism informed by science.
That’s what this book is about, but by science I do not mean psychology or evolutionary biology, although they both have something to say. I mean to remember Quine’s observation that philosophy is continuous with science. The sublime clarity of good philosophy is just what we need to discern how moral perception occurs and how to make use of that perception to lead more decent lives and show our children how to do the same.
The eminent American philosopher John Dewey, one of my primary sources, cautioned against art and literature that attempts moral education as its didactic purpose, thereby rendering it art of secondary quality. My argument, instead, favors art that does not intend to teach but rather to illuminate, examples including Middlemarch, Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Jane Austen.
San Diego, USA
John Rethorst
Chapter 1
Utility, Principle, Virtue
Beauty is truth, truth beauty.
—John Keats
If this epigraph only rarely escapes English class, something like it has fascinated philosophers for a long time. Iris Murdoch remembers that “Kant said that beauty was an analogon of good, Plato said it was the nearest clue.”1 I want to go further and posit that our means of perception of the aesthetic and the ethical share an organic connection, an understanding of which will help elucidate moral perception, a critical component of moral education.
Or, moral education as it should be. But what currently counts as such is, directly or almost directly, simple instruction. I ask why this does not work. I ask why Jane Austen said “We all love to instruct, though we can teach only what is not worth knowing.”2 She did not mean that training in a skill is not worth having; rather, that life’s larger questions are not amenable to direct instruction. I ask whether in this sense the traditional idea of moral instruction is fatally flawed. Traditional education in ethics speaks in entirely general terms and teaches entirely general rules. These can be topics of instruction, but cannot provide what I call moral illumination.
Let’s explore how to create this illumination, by developing a theory of ethical perception with conceptual building blocks gained from the thinking of Aristotle, John Dewey, Iris Murdoch, and several fine contemporary philosophers, neurologists, linguists and psychologists. The first several chapters here form a theoretical framework that explains and supports the belief of Dewey and Murdoch that teaching art is teaching ethics. I was astonished to read these theorists and realize that their points of view had not been thoroughly explored and critiqued by their followers, given the potential importance of a conceptual structure that would allow society, finally, to have a way effectively to teach ethics to young people. This book undertakes that objective, and develops an original idea that I call moral density, which adequately explains for the first time the deep relation between art and ethics.
There’s more on offer here. Dewey and Murdoch, exceptional philosophers by anyone’s standards, tend in my opinion to contemplate a topic and arrive at brilliant insight. However, they spend less time constructing a clear and detailed argument
and comparing several points of view so that the argument is more accessible and convincing to more people of different backgrounds and frames of mind. What I will suggest is something worth keeping in mind by anyone teaching art or literature, and will take time and attention on the part of teachers and students in school, from junior high through college. Asking for that much time from anyone requires a careful argument and clear direction. That is, art as moral intimation is not a new topic, but has never been supported with sufficient rigor to justify an influence in actually modifying the school curriculum. That’s an expensive and fraught undertaking, both by itself and because adding something to the classroom hour requires deleting something else.
But this book will not suggest that somehow simply teaching art has the effect of teaching ethics. While the relation between them is profound, it is far more subtle and abstruse than direct instruction could reach. Nor is this a book of educational theory; its questions, sources and arguments are those of philosophy, in this case in the service of education. This kind of enquiry has notable precedents: Aristotle’s wonderful Nicomachean Ethics, while a cornerstone of Western philosophy, was intended as, and largely is, a practical manual of moral education, with philosophical insight sometimes a matter of reading between the lines.3 Speaking of the value of ethical habituation, Aristotle says “It is not unimportant, then, to acquire one sort of habit or another, right from our youth; rather, it is very important, indeed allimportant.”4 Dewey’s work, while including significant contributions to metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics, is also in substantial part an expression of his strong interest in education.
This book spends much of its time exploring thinking from these and many more theorists. But this is not philosophy for philosophers: it’s intended for a literate general audience. Jargon is minimal (any technical terminology is defined in the Glossary at the back of the book), and a background in the area is not assumed. I hope this work has something to offer to everybody who realizes that ethics needs to be learned, that young people need guidance to grow up to be good people, but also that our world has not yet put into practice an effective and reliable means to do this.
“How can I be moral?” is a deceptive question, because it can be taken two ways. It can mean, how can I act in a certain manner and not another, where some actions are encouraged, others tolerated, and still others circumscribed according to rules, laws, or prescribed principles such as seeking the greatest good for the greatest number or resolving to treat others as ends rather than means to an end. Further, should I act that way because I perceive benevolence, or because of fear of punishment? But the question can also mean, should I be disposed to act in certain ways more than others: should my emotions point me in one direction and not another? These two ways are much different, and it’s not hard to see that the second interpretation requires context that the first does not. The question is not only how precisely to be ethical,5 but also why should one be so to begin with.6 I will show that logic alone does not provide the tools necessary to answer the latter question. A certain kind of insight must be
present, and the task for educators is a nourishment of conditions that encourage that elucidation.
How would this work? Consider that the initial choice a person has is not whether to be moral, but to acknowledge that the choice to be moral is one to be taken seriously. What kind of reason can we offer the agent to make this choice? David Hume says that we don’t act because of reasons—instead, we act because of our feelings, which may give us reasons7 —and Søren Kierkegaard argues that the choice to be ethical must precede reasons to be so; otherwise, no reason can have any force. To every reason given the agent to be moral, she can simply ask why that should count as a reason.8 But if a kind of illumination generated by either direct or vicarious experience can occur first, reason can subsequently delineate and adjudicate decision procedures. It is no criticism of logical reasoning to say that at this point it cannot do all the work. Something must precede it. We may for the moment call this something virtue. Aristotle defines virtue as the state “that makes a human being good;”9 Nancy Sherman adds that it encompasses emotion and governs action, as both a correct and sensitive response to a particular situation.10 Hume confirms that “The final sentence ...which makesmorality an active principle . . . depends on some internal sense or feeling [of benevolence], which nature has made universal in the whole species.”11 (Note that Hume does not argue that the feeling exists to the same degree in all members of the species.) Murdoch says that “virtue is being in love with good.”12 Dewey finds that “A disposition of virtue is a means to a certain quality of happiness because it is a constituent of that good, while such happiness is means in turn to virtue, as the sustaining of good in being.”13
None of this conflicts with moral directives such as utility: seeking to provide the greatest good to the greatest number, nor with principles of fairness and duty such as Immanuel Kant’s: treating the other person as an end, not as a means to an end. Either of those two theories may appeal to an individual to a greater or lesser degree, but both are calculations, i.e. we want to do x, so here’s the best way to do x, where x is one of many theories guiding behavior. But first we must want to do x. That aspiration may be a reflection of virtue. It may also, for example in the case of utilitarian or consequentialist theories, be a means to cost-effective governance, in which case only a calculation, since they prescribe performing actions a, b and c so that outcomes x, y and z may be realized, where x, y and z are desirable and external to a, b and c, which themselves may be pleasant or odious. Steven Fesmire sums up what we need for calculations: “the dominant contemporary moral philosophies in the United States and Britain share a quest for an irrecusable principle or system of rules regulating human conduct. This can be seen in the two most prominent examples in philosophical literature: utilitarianism . . . and Kantianism . . . Behind surface differences, there lies a shared strategy: pursuit of a bedrock principle”14 from which to calculate.
A difficulty with any calculation is presented by Hume, with his argument that determination of what anyone deserves in a given situation is a hard calculation to make.15 Law agrees that certain actions may be regarded as criminal and entail punishment, but takes mitigating circumstances into account. Which circumstances should count how much, relative to other transgressors’ circumstances, becomes
difficult to calculate. We would need to know the complete details of everyone’s life to fairly award each what she deserves. Otherwise, Fesmire writes, “moral education is reduced to training in cost–benefit calculations of self-interested actors striving to maximize their individual satisfactions. Any role for imagination is utterly missing. The account is descriptively inadequate and prescriptively bankrupt.”16 Because the body of thinking created by Aristotle that we call virtue ethics (VE) does not make calculations, it would thus be an error to consider VE as not more than another moral theory. It may be fair to consider it a deeper conception of ethics. Further, virtue—dispositions based on emotions, suitably habituated—obviates what Martha Nussbaum calls a crudeness of moral theories that are based on general principles.17 It does not preclude adoption of such a generalist theory, of which there are many, but neither does virtue specifically require adoption of one. It simply seems to be prior, in considerations of what we mean by ethical. As such, it provides less of an algorithm or recipe for calculation of right action than do generalist theories. Julia Annas explains that “we find it natural to make a number of demands on a moral theory which ancient theories [e.g. VE] do not make. It is a common modern assumption that a moral theory should help us to decide what it is right for us to do,”18 i.e. provide a structure within which we can make a straightforward calculation. Classical theories such as Aristotle’s do not do this. Rather, Annas says, they:
assume that the moral agent internalizes and applies the moral theory to produce the correct answerstohardcases;but theanswers themselves arenot part of thetheory...Thus for ancient theories it is true that there is not much to be said in general about hard cases. Modern theories often see it as a demand they be able to generate answers to hard cases in a comparatively simple way; and to this extent ancient ethics fails to meet modern demands on casuistry . . . Ancient ethics accepts no such demands; we shall see that the intellectual model it finds appropriate for ethical understanding is quite different . . . Ancient theories do not have the strong structure which we find in many modern theories, especially those which are consciously based on a scientific conception of theory.19
However, virtue is the set of dispositions resulting from educated, habituated feelings, not simply the feelings we might otherwise happen to have. Sherman argues that the formation of moral habits is anything but non-rational; rather, it is cognition guiding and instructing desire and thereby developing character. Quality of character and practical wisdom—how to live—are in the end inseparable, according to Aristotle.20
Recent work by Sherman, Nussbaum and others explores this claim of an intimate and organic relationship between the emotions and a perception of moral obligation, a claim not always acknowledged in traditional moral education. There, the direct instruction that is often more in favor is a pedagogy that requires devotion to principle (see for example Wynne and Ryan21 and other practices discussed in Chap. 9). I will show how moral theories based on principle, and the ways those can be taught, fall short of providing the illumination we need.
For instance, principles are often treated in moral discourse as if they required no explanation or justification for their acceptance. “Abortion is murder, and murder is wrong” and “A woman has the right to reproductive freedom” are two sides of an exasperating argument, vexing because no generally-acceptable solution has been
demonstrated . Each principle is presented as though it were an expression of the divinely ordained, which is entirely what principles used to be. We can no longer count on that. As Alasdair MacIntyre explains, “If the deontological [i.e. related to duty] character of moral judgments is the ghost of conceptions of divine law which are quite alien to the metaphysics of modernity and if the teleological [i.e. with an idea of purpose] character is similarly the ghost of conceptions of human nature and activity which are equally not at home in the modern world, we should expect the problems of understanding and of assigning an intelligible status to moral judgments both continually to arise and as continually to prove inhospitable to philosophical solutions.”22
Thus, with a theology that enjoys universal currency, the choice of principle is not at issue. But when no such universality obtains, Julian Baggini points out that the choice between two contradicting principles has not only to be made but be established as legitimate.23 How can we do this in, for example, the abortion argument? We can see that it’s a serious question: in 2008, presidential nominee Barack Obama said that “anybody who tries to deny the moral difficulties and gravity of the abortion issue, I think, is not paying attention.”24 Then, can we find a ‘metaprinciple’ that will govern the correct choice of all other principles, or will such a meta-principle be subject to just the same need for establishment? Absent a supreme law or will, such a first principle becomes difficult to find or to justify. Kant may have come closest with his requirement that, to be moral, a principle must be categorical, that is, have universal application—for all people at all times—but it has been shown that principles can be so universalized while having no clear ethical content.25 I will suggest that no such argument has succeeded because of what Gilbert Ryle26 might have called a category-mistake, in this case of thinking that a moral principle is an expression of timeless apriori truth, rather than a statement of what is laudatory, acceptable, traditional—in short, an agreement after the fact. Blaise Pascal writes that what we conceive of as reason owes a greater debt to custom and habit than we might imagine,27 and discussion by John Rawls28 and others asks whether principles of grammar in language don’t provide a useful analogy to principles in ethical theory. Grammatical principles exist in plenitude, and are nowhere properly seen as trivial or useless, but neither can they be demonstrated to be expressions of what is inherent to human nature or thought (linguists’ search for an original grammar is fascinating, but there is as yet less than compelling evidence that such a thing ever existed or, if it did, that it took a necessary rather than an arbitrary form). Rather, a grammar book is a history book, arriving at what is useful for the purpose, with variations according to place and time. What does not vary is the underlying reason such rules are necessary and useful, that is, the need of both individual and group to survive— in this example by communication and understanding. So principles are not trivial, arbitrary or relativistic, but can most effectively be seen as agreement after the fact, or results of a society’s ethical deliberation—description as much as prescription.
Moral and grammatical principle are both, secondarily, prescriptive: both kinds of principle are good things to teach to people who are not yet in a position to understand why people speak or act as they do, and so need to begin habituation in correct speech and action. In that respect, the teaching of principle could form a part
of moral education at the elementary level. At the point where a young person is able to ask why one principle must take precedence over another, though, another answer must be forthcoming. As Nussbaum29 and Jonathan Bennett30 agree, rules are useful guides to action, perhaps especially for young people, since they have yet to develop practical wisdom and so are fortunate to benefit from perceptions and judgment of those with more experience, but rules cannot be relied upon any further.
An ethics of virtue provides, in Thomas Kuhn’s31 sense, a much different paradigm, or way of seeing the big picture. While a principle entails an injunction, a virtue suggests an inclination to do a certain specific thing in a certain particular situation—an inclination, even if it presents itself so strongly as to be felt as obligation. What is required of virtuous action must be more than that required of principled action, because action and situation can never be described completely enough to transcend the limited vision of principle. The constraint of the latter is entirely satisfied by obeying the law; demands of the former include an account of perception I believe is vital to morality.
Sherman defines Aristotle’s practical wisdom as having three capacities: moral perception, choice-making, and collaboration.32 Perception, according to Nussbaum’s reading of Aristotle, is a complex response to a particular situation, rather than anything to do with general precepts.33 She speaks of the difficulty in understanding what we see in such concrete situations, and in choice of how to act. So, calling a certain choice ‘good’ rather than ‘right’ acknowledges the complexity, rather than a clear cut, black and white simplicity to which any situation with an ethical question can be distilled enough to fit an abstraction.
Such a mapping of an action onto an abstraction is easy, but only if you don’t mind that it doesn’t completely fit. Because Aristotle does mind, saying basically that no abstraction can cover or describe circumstances adequately to provide enough information to choose what to do, his concept of practical wisdom defends both imagination and emotion as ingredients vital to the exercise of reason in moral thinking. Imagination, I will contend, is of profound importance to moral development and choice, and it just does not make sense to speak of instructing imagination. I will instead speak of nourishing it, and how that might be achieved. Aristotle says that seeing correctly comes with maturity since it takes time to have the experience that teaches us how to see.34 I will ask whether ways of nourishing imagination can let us vicariously live through different moments of life to gain enough experience to support, at least to a degree, the illumination that we need.
If imagination is this important, then the way it works, and how we can address that, become the heart of the issue. I will show that art and literature work to nourish imagination to a degree that little else can, and that the vicarious quality of this aesthetic experience is not a limitation on its efficacy. Marshall Gregory even says that “Story is first of all a form of experience, not a form of intellectual discourse”35 and “narratives’ ethical visions help us think about [experience] in richer ways than if we had to rely solely on our own firsthand experience.”36
The first part of this, although still at odds with the larger part of traditional moral theory, has received a good deal of support from diverse thinkers. Adam Smith found substantial value in literature as counsel in ethical matters,37 not long before the poet
Percy Shelley provided Dewey with the inspiration for his transcendental final chapter of Art as Experience, both he and Shelley saying that exceptional moral illumination is available from the arts. It may be that literature is particularly well suited to this kind of edification, a point I will consider in Chap. 7. However, the appeal of one or another art form is dependent on the individual, and the mature novel is for some people, especially young people,38 a relatively inaccessible genre. That said, there is a wide range of novels that can, with sympathetic introduction, appeal powerfully to a great number of young people. Those with significant ethical content include Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, and everything the adult Jane Austen wrote. I will discuss why these works offer significant moral illumination in terms of philosophy, and I will apply that thinking to my goal in education. I will offer analysis of what works of literature like these can do in junior high, high school, and college settings and how they can do it, and I will suggest ways to approach the study of art and literature.
So I would like to start by discussing three constituents of VE, necessary to realize the disposition we seek:
• Particularism: Aristotle’s idea that general moral law or principle is deficient because it cannot take into account the myriad particulars of a specific case, which may have important bearing on judgment. We need to acknowledge the primacy of the particular to truly see the essence of an ethical situation.
• Perception: Aristotle’s idea again: how clearly and deeply we can see another’s specific circumstance has everything to do with how we judge her. Cognitive science—the study of how we make sense of the world—bears on this as well.
• Imagination: my primary sources here are John Dewey, America’s preeminent philosopher, Iris Murdoch, a fine philosopher with the special vantage point of a good novelist, and several excellent contemporary theorists.
With an understanding of these three elements, we can then explore how the moral agent can use them to realize illumination of what is good. This discussion will concern:
• The aesthetic: I again depend on Dewey and Murdoch, and on Nelson Goodman’s theory of art. Metaphor, now gaining vital support from the science of neurology, shows us a powerful, organic relation between art and ethics.
• Density: and Dewey’s interest in primary experience and moral imagination.
• The literary: why literature may be the most accessible of the arts for the purpose here. Psychology’s Theory of Mind shows us the special value of literary fiction. I explore that fiction and continue with what deserves its own chapter, the novels of Jane Austen as seen through the lens of Aristotelian theory.
This book concludes with consideration of dialog with young people, keeping in mind their well-founded suspicions that adult ‘morality’ is often just another means of hypocrisy and excessive control.
Chapter 2
Particularism
Up to what point and to what extent a man must deviate before he becomes blameworthy it is not easy to determine by reasoning . . . such things depend on particular facts.
—Aristotle
The primacy of the particular in ethical thinking, a concept with a genesis in Aristotle,39 has been affirmed by much recent work in philosophy, notably by Julia Annas,40 Carol Gilligan,41 Mark Johnson,42 Iris Murdoch,43 Nel Noddings,44 Martha Nussbaum,45 and Nancy Sherman,46 work that concludes that the specifics of a situation with a moral dimension take priority over general ethical principle, which by its process of logical deduction and abstraction may omit something important. George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, agrees that “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow feeling with individual fellow-men”47 : generalism, although throughout much of history the dominant mode of ethical thinking, cannot always provide complete justification for moral choice. It misses something. This approaches a great divide in moral philosophy: generalism hearkens back to Plato, particularism to Aristotle, and not much consensus has developed since then.
To explore this division, I will consider ethics of general principle in Kantian and in utilitarian terms because much moral theory as discussed in government, social sciences and education uses these terms. This is not to say that theory, especially within the academy, has not evolved substantially since the writings of Mill and Kant. It has, and I will use as one example Barbara Herman’s modern, sophisticated exegesis of Kant.48 Rather, it is clear that many in the world, including in education, reason about morality as a matter of priority of principle. However, some of the theorists whom I most respect argue against this kind of thinking, which they define in largely Kantian or utilitarian terms. They are not attacking ancient and irrelevant theory; they are making impassioned and persuasive arguments against the way much of the world reasons ethically.
A cogent introduction to the debate is Sherman’s Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue,49 which attempts to reconcile major features of the Aristotelian and Kantian traditions. She seems to me to do anything but sell short either tradition, and it is noteworthy that she treats Kantian theory in essentially the
form in which Kant developed it. This would not deny that complex modifications have been made of it, by John Rawls50 and others. For Sherman to mention Rawls only twice in her text and in five footnotes is not to say that she thinks Rawls or other current theorists are lacking or wrong, if anything only that their work cannot be considered the default interpretation and development of Kantian deontological theory.
How is generalism deficient? Note that a principle must exclude reference to details. “It’s wrong to tell a lie” would, if it admitted of exceptions, only be weaker. This is the basis for Kant’s defense of this principle at all times and under all circumstances.51 He gives the remarkable example of a man who has run from a murderer and is now hiding in your house. The murderer comes to your door and asks you if you know where his intended victim is. According to the principle of absolute honesty that Kant holds, you must tell the truth because “To be truthful (honest) in all declarations is . . . a sacred and unconditionally commanding law of reason that admits of no expediency whatsoever.”52 It is difficult to understand the point of Kant’s further, at times consequentialist, supporting arguments that suppose e.g. that the intended victim had, unknown to you, left by the back door and, if you had lied to the murderer who had then continued down the street, he would have seen the victim when otherwise not, and so on. Such possible benign consequences to the truthful statement have nothing to do with Kant’s categorical reasons for arguing its necessity. In response to a charge by his contemporary philosopher Benjamin Constant that following an absolute duty always to tell the truth would render society nonfunctional, and that the significance of a lie must be measured by its harm to another, Kant says “a lie always harms another; if not some other human being, then it nevertheless does harm to humanity in general, inasmuch as it vitiates the very source of right.”53
In response, Murdoch says “Kant resented the hold which history has upon ethics. He attempts to make of the act of moral judgement an instantiating of a timeless form of rational activity . . . Kant does not tell us to respect whole particular tangled-up historical individuals, but to respect the universal reason in their breasts ...Kant’s view of ethics contains no place for the idea of tragedy . . . We are supposed to live by exceedingly simple and general rules: suppression of history, suspicion of eccentricity.”54 She concludes that he would like to build a moral structure consisting entirely of general rules, which would then allow no consideration for the complexity we often find in real-world ethical questions.55 That is, to live by rules is to miss what can be complicated, often subtle, sometimes important, and on occasion the heart of the matter. Morality and life are simply too complex for a rational activity that generates timeless imperatives that admit of no exceptions. Fesmire concludes that the thinking of Dewey and others “rejects [Rawls’s] geometric paradigm inasmuch as idealized matrices for moral reasoning oversimplify the richness and complexity of moral experience as lived .”56
It is also noteworthy that Kant’s arguments, as do those of many moral philosophers, happen to reflect just the contingencies of culture that rationality claims to transcend. Thus Kant’s Lutheran Pietist parents taught him that morality required telling the truth in all circumstances. By contrast, Bantu parents teach their children
not to tell the truth to strangers, in regard for the safety of the family. If one practice is more rational than the other, Kant has not shown us this, because each practice can be consistently universalized.
It is in fact astonishing how much history, culture and language contribute to what we think of as purely logical thinking. René Descartes, who spoke of “une pomme rouge” (literally, “an apple red”), thought in a language that first addressed substance, followed by determination of attribute: in French, the adjective follows the noun. Across the English Channel, John Locke talked of “a red apple” in a word order that by considering attributes arrives at a notion of substance. The difference in syntax runs parallel to the philosophical traditions of continental rationalism and British empiricism, and studies show that this kind of linguistic distinction may be more than coincidentally related to systems of thought.57 As well, the rise of British empiricism occurred just as the Restoration succeeded in re-securing metaphysics from the hands of upstarts and re-establishing its control by the church. As Richard Boyd notes, there was nowhere else for secular thinkers to go but into an empiricist tradition.58
Alasdair MacIntyre presents an effective argument that rationalities occur in traditions of thought, and that the ready accession of any one tradition to a universalizable quality is a fiction.59 In the formation of such a quality, the Enlightenment intended to establish standards of rationality and thus principles by which all aspects of human behavior could be judged, a development guided only by ratiocination. Thus followers of Enlightenment thinking established a hierarchy between those with access to a supposed timeless and universal reason, and those unfortunately more encumbered with cultures and traditions, for a central tenet of Enlightenment rationality is transcendence of culture, tradition and history.
This is a misleading supposition, because Enlightenment theorists found unexpected difficulty in establishing the moral principles that would be supported by every rational person. The ideal of ethics informed by pure rationality seemed impossible to realize.60 Theorists could elude failure only if a moral theory based on principle could on its own terms demonstrate that other conceptions of rationality, such as derive from Aristotle, were mistaken. This they have been unable to do. The debate has shown no signs of mitigating in over two hundred years. Nor has any generalist theory convincingly discredited Classical theory or more recent work in virtue ethics, for example, or feminist ethics. For instance, to show that only useful maxims can be universalized, MacIntyre argues that Kant has to use:
notoriously bad arguments [and make] large mistakes. It is very easy to see that many immoral and trivial non-moral maxims are vindicated by Kant’s test quite as convincingly –in some cases more convincingly – than the moral maxims which Kant aspires to uphold . . . ‘Let everyone but me be treated as a means’ may be immoral but it is not inconsistent and there is not even any inconsistency in willing a universe of egoists all of whom live by this maxim. It might be inconvenient for each if everyone lived by this maxim, but it would not be impossible and to invoke considerations of convenience would in any case be to introduce just that prudential reference to happiness which Kant desires to eliminate from all considerations of morality.61
Further, Dewey criticizes the Kantian denial that consequences have anything to do with morality, that ‘meaning well’ is the sole criterion, because such a kind of internal feeling is contemptible insofar as it “shrinks from accepting any responsibility for actual results. It is negative, self-protective and sloppy. It lends itself to complete self-deception.”62
Utilitarianism is another family of popular generalist theories. Its argument that ethics consists in providing the greatest good to the greatest number entails an attempt to simplify an at times bewildering complexity of heterogeneous, incommensurable values—such as family, friends, health, success and money—into greater or lesser quantities of a single kind or single standard of worth, called ‘good’. Such commodified quantities can then be maximized in a way that heterogeneous values cannot. Utilitarianism depends for its coherence on this idea, and economists speak of “utils”: single units of value into which seemingly entirely disparate values can be distilled. But distillation omits a great deal. Mark Johnson argues that “In its quest for the one, absolute, scientific criterion of morality, utilitarianism lost touch with the rich, complex and varied character of human moral reasoning. In order to sustain even the pretense of scientific objectivity, utilitarianism had to adopt a set of absolutist concepts and assumptions the likes of which have seldom been witnessed together in one place. The result is an utterly one-dimensional view of reason as ‘economic rationality’, a merely calculative reason that focuses exclusively on determining the most efficient means to pregiven ends.”63 This criticism of utilitarianism is reminiscent of Murdoch’s criticism of Kant, above. Both point out what and how much is lost in a quest for universality and simplicity. Murdoch, Nussbaum and Johnson all contend that the loss of complexity may entail a loss of legitimacy as a guide to action.
Utilitarian theory came to have logical difficulties as long ago as John Stuart Mill. He finally resolved some of the difficulty with Jeremy Bentham’s unified concept of pleasure as the good by revisions such as defining higher and lower pleasures, but he could not disregard the fact that people at different times and places want and need different and incommensurable things. Aristotle believed that there is a highest good, the end or point of human life, but that this required widely disparate components that could not be reducible to a single standard or traded off one for another. Each component must be pursued for its own sake. This non-consequentialist phrase ‘for its own sake’ is necessary because, if the various components are only tools to produce something else, the generalist can still claim that the something else is susceptible to a single standard of judgment.
The allure of a single standard is easy to see: it greatly simplifies the most difficult areas of choice in human life. In ethics, in the impoverished modern use of the term to identify a decision procedure between clearly delineated right and wrong, the appeal of a quasi-scientific procedure is hard to resist. But it must be simplistic, because in thousands of years of moral thinking no such decision procedure has been shown to be able to meet adequately the often-bewildering intricacy of human situations. Thus do current theorists often prefer the word ‘good’ to the word ‘right’, the former acknowledging a necessary complexity.
Conversely, the arguments for Kantian theory and utilitarianism seem simply to talk past each other. Their arguments can without difficulty contradict one another. ‘Always tell the truth’ is one principle; ‘Provide the greatest good to the greatest number’ is another, and these two can easily conflict. If a decision procedure could be devised to evaluate these and other principles, that procedure could not in itself be based on any principle, because it would recursively depend for its own validity on its own findings. No value of any such meta-principle has effectively been shown, a telling weakness. But what can an alternative moral theory suggest?
Particularism is such a point of view, one with broad support from a range as diverse as Classical and feminist ethical theory, developed by Aristotle. An important part of his theory holds that particularity can never simply be dismissed in favor of general maxims. David Gallop points out that “Aristotle recognizes that practical judgment must always be exercised in particular circumstances. Intellectual theorizing cannot by itself enable us to deliberate wisely, or move us to perform any action whatever.”64 Universal laws apply to universal persons, but those do not exist: instead, we have individuals with specific cultures and histories. Aristotle’s thinking does not conform to the necessarily general science that modern moral philosophy has become. Algorithms for action implied by ethical principles may fall short of sufficient guidance: Sherman explains that virtue does not exist in the abstract, but only in a particular action performed by a particular person at a particular place and time, not dictated by universal theories.65
The argument thus considers whether generalist thinking may yield a result that is inadequate as a guide to moral action. I contend that it does. The ethical agent must be able to distinguish between situations that are in general terms like each other but which differ in details or background, some of which may not be easy to see. The question is whether the general similarities trump the particular differences. While Aristotle holds that a universal statement by definition cannot always be correct, neither he nor my other sources mean to imply that the universal and the principled are not of great importance and value to decision and action; we do argue, however, that there must be something prior, recognition of which depends on attention to the particular.
Particularism gained popularity in current thinking, for instance in feminist ethics, as an outraged response to the deficiencies of generalism. Carol Gilligan clarifies the value of attention to particulars:
Hypothetical dilemmas, in the abstraction of their presentation, divest moral actors from the history and psychology of their individual lives and separate the moral problem from the social contingencies of its possible occurrence. In doing so, these dilemmas are useful for the distillation and refinement of objective principles of justice and for measuring the formal logic of equality and reciprocity. However, the reconstruction of the dilemma in its contextual particularity allows the understanding of cause and consequence which engages the compassion and tolerance repeatedly noted to distinguish the moral judgments of women. Only when substance is given to the skeletal lives of hypothetical people is it possible to consider the social injustice that their moral problems may reflect and to imagine the individual suffering their occurrence may signify or their resolution engender.66
Hypothetical ethical dilemmas typically include a minimal description of faceless, timeless people. Each could be anyone, and that is all that a general rule, or the law, requires. More than that, generalist ethics requires exactly that these people be any people, with a moral agent hidden from them behind something like John Rawls’s original position, a “veil of ignorance.”67 Conversely, particularism requires that there can be no complete answer to a dilemma involving hypothetical, faceless people. The moral agent has to see the specific faces and perceive the specific feelings, to reach a satisfactory resolution to the dilemma; general rules are not enough. It is, in Gilligan’s words, a “contextual particularity” that allows the “understanding of cause and consequence” that is “made in real situations” which is necessary for adequate moral judgment. This way of giving substance to skeletal lives is what particularist theory finds necessary to the resolution of an ethical quandary. Nel Noddings concurs:
Faced with a hypothetical moral dilemma, women often ask for more information. We want to know more, I think, in order to form a picture more nearly resembling real moral situations. Ideally, we need to talk to the participants, to see their eyes and facial expressions, to receive what they are feeling. Moral decisions, after all, are made in real situations; they are qualitatively different from geometry problems. Women can and do give reasons for their acts, but the reasons often point to feelings, needs, impressions, and a sense of personal ideal rather than to universal principles and their application . . . because of this “odd” approach, women have often been judged inferior to men in the moral domain.68
(In Chap. 5 I will introduce moral density, a central idea in this book, but should point out in this discussion of feminist ethics that in my conversations on density I have found that women grasp the idea more readily than men do.)
Notions of cause and consequence in human endeavor make sense only when given such substance as Gilligan and Noddings prescribe; Edmund Pincoffs criticizes the favorite but useless and obnoxious notion of an ‘ethical quandary’, e.g. in the lifeboat, do you save your child or the medical genius?—which is useless because in practice in moral education, this is the kind of question that cannot have a right answer.69 It is, however, very effective at alienating the people to whom you put the dilemma, especially if they are young people.
Sherman and Nussbaum make an effective argument for the kind of question that can be answered, based on Aristotle’s contention that anything as universal as law is thereby necessarily limited. For him, Sherman says, equity depends on considering an action in the specific time and place it occurred and with specific persons involved: abstraction of any of these limits our comprehension of blameworthiness.70 Nussbaum concurs, remembering Aristotle’s point that principles may be correct only as far as they acknowledge and consider particulars.71 I think of general statements of principle as historical summaries of judgments of particulars: without the specific context, general statements can nonetheless be useful in formal reasoning. They can also be good guidelines to action, if we remember their genesis in the cognizance of original contexts.
Thus the values of context and complete rendering of a situation are central to this discussion. Plainly, perception is necessary to context. The generalist does not require the moral agent to see very many details: a comprehensive rendering is superfluous.
However, Sherman argues, “compulsion, duress, ignorance of particulars, unforeseeable consequences all may conspire to limit ascriptions of responsibility. And the presence of these conditions is often grasped only upon a complete account of what happened.”72 Such an account can never be captured in a general description of circumstances, which by definition leaves out so many of the specifics.
Nussbaum approaches this when she explores Plato’s moral theory, with its heavy emphasis on generalism, as contrasted to Aristotelian theory and its equally strong emphasis on particularism, the latter often seen as a more difficult, less immediately appealing, position on ethical choice. It is less appealing for the reason that it lacks the generalist argument’s relative simplicity and certitude. As argued by Plato’s prophet Diotima, priority of the general is just much easier.73 But even in law, consider the empirical truth that general rules or principles never cover all the bases. The legal scholar H. L. A. Hart acknowledges this aspect of the fitting of general laws to specific cases:
If we are to communicate with each other at all ...thenthe generalwords we use...must have some standard instance in which no doubts are felt about its application [but] human invention and natural processes continually throw up such variants on the familiar [so] situations do not await us neatly labeled, creased, and folded . . . if a penumbra of uncertainty must surround all legal rules, then their application to specific cases in the penumbral area cannot be a matter of logical deduction, and so deductive reasoning . . . cannot serve as a model for what judges, or indeed anyone, should do in bringing particular cases under general rules.74
This agrees with Aristotle about the limitations of the general. Any rule, principle or law is stated in only so many words, and our system of justice requires a judge to decide whether the unique circumstances of a particular incident are covered by the words composing the law. Thus do judges so strongly oppose mandatory sentencing: judicial discretion must be added to legislative intent. If a court is meaningfully to have the ‘last word’ in actual application of the law, a judge must see her duty as more than simple direction of the finding of fact and application of a rule to a unique circumstance.
In a similar vein, Pincoffs75 holds in his contrast between the legal and the ethical that what concerns the law is what anyone should do in circumstances relevantly similar to those that governed the passage of a specific law. Abstracting the general omits the innumerable and specific contextual referents that provide a moral dimension to a situation. To judge by general guidelines is to leave out the particular connotation that describes an individual’s character and portrays why she might, on an ethical basis, refrain from doing something that would be legal to do and which on general principles would be moral to do. The willingness to step beyond an abstract definition of an ethical problem and its equally abstract ‘correct’ solution illuminates not only Pincoffs’s view but also the fact that moral character is always a matter of degree. Thus arises the consensus in current exegesis of Classical theory against unity of the virtues: the thinking that a person is either all good or all bad. To the extent that we ask what one might do in a given circumstance, the introspector only has guidance insofar as her actual experience is coextensive with the situation given. This is why the simplistic ethical quandaries, such as the lifeboat mentioned above, that traditional moral instruction presents to students, are discomfiting, even offensive.
The application of general rules to particular cases requires extensive attention to context. Thus Nussbaum explains Aristotle’s conviction that “The subtleties of a complex ethical situation must be seized in a confrontation with the situation itself, by a faculty that is suited to address it as a complex whole. Prior general formulations lack both the concreteness and the flexibility that is required. They do not contain the particularizing details of the matter at hand, with which decision must grapple; and they are not responsive to what is there, as good decision must be.”76 I think “responsive” is the right word. How could “prior general formulations” begin to be responsive to real dilemmas of real people?
Another telling argument for the priority of the particular lies in the question, where do general principles come from? What would it mean for the generation of a principle in a person’s mind to precede any of the experiences that give rise to a person’s support of that principle? The sequence does not make sense. Rather, a wealth of experience engenders a sense of right and wrong from which principles are then distilled. I cannot argue in favor of any principle until I have had experience of particular situations that provide insight into why a given principle might be justifiable. The other sequence, where principle precedes experience, has its basis in religious traditions in which an all-knowing god or gods list commandments. So, if we cannot all agree on which god and list to obey, we will have to find something else.
Note that many religious proscriptions are based on that religious community’s particular worldly experiences. Observant Jewish and Muslim people do not eat pork for, originally, reasons of health. Many cultures’ prohibition of incest would have been based on observation that children of parents with close genetic ties tended to suffer from ill health or lower intelligence. Principles come from experience, but experience cannot simply be discarded once a principle is realized. As the poet Percy Shelley more tersely puts it, “Epitomes have been called the moths of just history; they eat out the poetry of it.”77 I will discuss Shelley and literature in later chapters; for the present, note that the observations above concur with my reference in Chap. 1 to the comparison between rules of morality and rules of grammar, both as history books.
The innumerable particular situations in a person’s experience requiring moral perception and action can subsequently lend themselves to distillation and summary, with a result that serves much like precedent in legal reasoning. To the extent that a present situation is like a past one, the discernment that served in that case will be a useful start in this one. The mistake is not in using principle and precedent in moral deliberation, but in assuming that they are sufficient by themselves. Aristotle specifically discusses law and its limitations, saying first, the law is incomplete; second, legislative intent is important; third, a fair interpretation of the law further requires considering the possibility that legislative intent was mistaken or incomplete, and lastly that judgment of the particulars is necessary in any case.78
A complete account allows for the contingencies and exigencies of human life, everywhere from jurisprudence to the daily workplace. A given action might violate a principle, but the community’s interest in why the actor chose to act as she did is
telling. That’s almost everyone’s first question, upon hearing of a purported transgression. A victim is just as deceased when the crime is involuntary manslaughter as when it is first-degree murder; motive is the only difference. In seeking to understand motive and context, the community questions the legitimacy of motives that can either mitigate or magnify culpability for a given act. Understanding must precede good judgment, and understanding human action can never only be a matter of logical deduction.
A criticism of particularism is that it lacks a warrant for moral judgment, because a myriad of particular facts and an attention to them not governed by general, logically realized justification, can lead anywhere the agent wants—from relativism down the slippery slope to fascism, Boyd has cautioned.79 The particularist with an agenda can dismiss the requirement of justification as so limiting as to be irrelevant to the crux of moral reasoning. Harvey Siegel80 warns along these lines that a moral judgment needs the mandate of rationality to be legitimate. It’s a respectable criticism: without a warrant, how is moral judgment distinguished from simple personal preference?
The word ‘good’ can compound this quandary. The difficulty that nineteenth century writers had in defining it led to the culmination, in the early twentieth century, of a theory called emotivism, and G. E. Moore’s and the Bloomsbury Group’s finding that ‘good’ was a word that did not have an inherent referent. It was used instead to express a non-natural quality of attitude, feeling or personal preference, accessible only through intuition. Note that as such, it is exempt not only from rational discourse but also from being a valid indicator of community of experience. Emotivism may thus be considered a theory not of the meaning but of the use of certain expressions, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ among them.81 This implies a system of ethical thought that has since obtained wide currency. Someone’s decision that x is “right for me” or that x “just feels” like the right thing to do, underpins a great deal of moral reasoning in the vernacular. Is this reasoning a legitimate descendant of Aristotle?
Clearly, no. As Anil Gomes remembers, “[Iris] Murdoch, [Philippa] Foot, [Mary] Midgley and [Elizabeth] Anscombe—that wonderful generation of women philosophers—all rejected this idea of morality. The lessons of the [recent Second World] War seemed to be that there is such a thing as getting it right or wrong, and that it mattered that one get it right.”82 As well, Aristotle, Murdoch, Nussbaum and Sherman all categorically disallow the step from particularism to emotivism. As Karl Hostetler explains, “For her part, Nussbaum does not deny the need to warrant particular judgments. She could agree with Siegel’s claim that the ‘epistemic dimensions of rationality/reasonableness are primary’. Her intention is not to replace reasons with perceptions and emotions but to show how these are themselves good reasons for belief and action, or at least essential aspects of good reasons. Her point is that what is not primary among ‘epistemic dimensions’ are general standards such as impartiality and universality.”83
A further difficulty with emotivism is given by Johnson in an example of how much fun good philosophy can be:
I agree with G. J. Warnock (1962) that Moore’s view leaves us with a realm of sui generis moral qualities that are supposedly indefinable and yet attach themselves to certain states of affairs, even though we cannot give a rational explanation of why those states of affairs
manifest goodness. This makes moral debate about the ultimate values pointless. I would also add that if you find Moore’s notion of good as a non-natural property that just happens to alight on certain states of affairs completely unhelpful, then I suggest that you should have correspondingly deep doubts about morality as having supernatural origins in the mind of God, because these views amount to the same thing, from the perspective of analysis, critique, and justificatory explanation. They are both, as I have suggested, equally immune to criticism or rational reflection. As Plato taught us long ago, either something is moral because the gods declare it so or else there is some reason why it is the moral thing to do, and providing the appropriate reasons requires assumption of some shared framework of justification.84
So information unique to the particular, including perceptions and emotions, adds an important element to moral reasoning; it does not replace reasoning. Emotions play an essential role in cognitive ethical thinking, rather than replacing cognition. Sherman concurs with this,85 and I argue that this is at times necessary to adequately see what we need to see. This is not a limitation. Aristotelian morality acknowledges that, to the extent that untutored or unhabituated emotions can blind us to perspective and justice, they are not helpful. The point is not that emotions can or should replace cognition and reasoning, but that they are critical components of legitimate moral thinking.
The role of the emotions in cognition provides a basis for a distinction between the Kantian conception of sympathy as only incidental to morality and the stronger claim of Aristotle that the emotions constitute part of moral reasoning. Sherman says that for the Kantian theorist, sympathy simply can not play a role in moral choice.86 Herman confirms this, arguing that acts motivated by sympathy can be morally right but the connection between sympathy and moral choice is entirely fortuitous.87 She has been interpreted to mean here that sympathy cannot provide the entirety of moral perception, but I fail to see that she says that sympathy can provide any of it. Sympathy can, as I understand her argument, provide an amoral or immoral motive as often as it can a moral one: sympathy and morality are simply not related. Perceptions driving sympathy simply cannot inform moral choice at all. Her position even supports the inference that the sympathetic disposition can in practice obstruct moral choice, by introducing a kind of static into what would otherwise be a clearer perception of obligation.88
All this suggests a claim that emotion and cognition are not closely linked. Aristotle contests this in his Rhetoric, saying that we cannot feel anger unless we realize that we have been treated unfairly, or feel fear without a perception of danger: I cannot be afraid of a tiger on the loose unless I believe that it’s dangerous. Knowledge is necessary to produce the emotion.89 Other theorists argue that emotion and cognition are yet more closely linked, that the distinction between them is as yet not completely determined: Dewey goes so far as to deny the phenomenal difference between cognition and emotion, arguing that we recognize them as different only after we’ve had them and identified their reference.90 As well, a key and relevant point in Aristotelian theory is that the emotions are educable, and need to be educated, to contribute their necessary component to moral perception and judgment.
This does not entirely answer the concern that particularism is unguided, warrantless, or selfish. A further response is available in Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean as
it relates to moral reasoning. A mean between two extremes is worth nothing to pure rationality. Nussbaum shows that Kant found himself at a loss to make sense of it:
Kant thought Aristotle’s conception empty of content precisely because these obscure claims are never fully fleshed out: see Doctrine of Virtue, Akad. p.s 404 n.: “This mean between two extremes, who will give it to me?” Similarly, p. 433 n.: “The proposition that one should never do too much or do too little says nothing, for it is tautological. What is it to do too much? Answer: More than is good. What is it to do too little? Answer: To do less than is good . . . If this is the wisdom we are to seek by returning to the ancients (Aristotle) as being precisely those who were nearer the source of wisdom . . . then we have chosen badly to turn to their oracle.”91
It is true that “too much” and “too little” are, by themselves, open to rational attack. But when the definitions are given the support of human nature and history, they become better founded. We realize that we are creatures with a specific nature, much as a creature of any species, such as a dog or a cat, has a specific nature. This supports a golden mean: for example, there are environments that objectively are too hot or too cold for a dog or a cat or a human being. As well, hindsight can show us a great deal about what counts as too much or too little. The warrant that Siegel finds lacking in particularism could then be found in what history makes of given perceptions and emotions. As the world grows smaller, that tradition will increasingly come to be seen as the human tradition rather than that of a specific culture, obviating relativism. Kwame Anthony Appiah makes this point, arguing that although every problem may have its own special situation, it is nonetheless an incident of a human problem,92 and Philip Kitcher agrees that “Discussions of anthropological relativism make plain how easy it is to impute variable ends by failing to allow for the possibility that common goals are articulated differently in different circumstances [e.g. different cultures].”93
But what empirical evidence can we cite for particularism? It requires attention to context; why should that count as moral? Kantianism, testing maxims for universalizability, does not agree at all and utilitarianism, seeking a greater and a common good, does not agree either. How can particularism trump either of these moral traditions?
A first suggestion is that more parts of particularism correspond with what we can see to be true about people. Markate Daly writes that “there are observational data suggestive of an innate empathic urge to help others in distress that is regulated by inhibition. For example . . . the existence of a behavior pattern, exhibited by normal adults responding to experimentally rigged emergency situations, described as ‘impulsive’ helping. A helping action is characterized as impulsive if it is a rapid, reflex-like response that appears to be insensitive to the possible costs to the helper . . . [it] appears to be nonrational and noncalculative.”94
Impulsive helping illustrates particularism well, because an agent could not first see a situation where someone possibly needs help, second, map it against a structure of principle (a necessarily reflective undertaking), and third, feel compelled to act. Impulse undeniably precedes reflection, both because of contingency in time and because it provides a reason to reflect: something of a meta-reason to find or to have reasons. Daly continues:
The opposite supposition is that a person in his or her natural state is socially inert, and that social contact is begun or called forth by a particular event. In one possible theory of social organization the presence of another person acts as a social stimulus which calls forth a social response or triggers a social mechanism. However, pulling the trigger never loads the gun. There must be an underlying social instinct held in readiness in case an appropriate stimulus appears...ratherthansuppose the social instinct to be either absent or quiescent, it is more likely that it is continuously operating unless inhibited. No start-up power is then needed, and control of social contact is left to the discretion of the person who fine-tunes, damps or inhibits it entirely.95
There must be a reason of some kind to value the principles one holds, whatever they might be, given the historical and cultural variation. That reason could not itself be a product of ratiocination, as Hume said in his Enquiry.96 It must be a meta-reason that is itself not the same kind of thing as the reasons it supports, obviating recursion. Otherwise, we can justify one principle or reason with another endlessly; the final justification remains infinitely far away.
A difficulty in teaching a particularist form of moral education is that it relies on perception, to be discussed in the next chapter, and on experience that is not yet available, at least directly, to young people. Aristotle points out that “it is thought that a young man of practical wisdom cannot be found. The cause is that such wisdom is concerned not only with universals but with particulars, which become familiar from experience, but a young man has no experience, for it is length of time that gives experience.”97
Is there then any point in arguing the priority of the particular in moral reasoning, as applied in moral education, if practiced judgment of context is not yet available? Yes. Representing good moral thinking as other than particularist does a disservice to the student. In practice today, young people are given principles to follow as though those principles had their own justification, instead of being results of experience. Ostensibly principled reasoning also often effectively serves hypocritical interests. But seen as summaries of particular perceptions given by experience (with caution as to their ultimate legitimacy), principled reasoning can be helpful. However, if people not yet possessing practical wisdom need only follow rules without question, the view of school-as-mind-control-machinery retains the support it needs. It’s true that the younger the person, the more guidance will be beneficial, but I contend that it is equally true that the young person should be offered, at as early an age as possible, insight into the genesis of general precepts. The idea of anticipating novel features, which most children may discover on their own, is worth a good deal of discussion, best done before the child has a chance to develop a cynical attitude towards the moral guidance adults offer, for this cynicism may evolve earlier than we realize. Children are astoundingly perceptive—to insincerity and hypocrisy as much as to anything else. The often-unexpressed truth that the heart of morality is not in generalism should be offered to young people at a fairly early age.
Chapter 3
Perception and Representation
The decision rests with perception. —Aristotle
Following this epigraph,98 theorists of particularism emphasize its requirement for keenness of perception. It is nothing less than a necessary component of Aristotelian practical wisdom, defined as virtue. Sherman argues that how we construct an understanding of a particular situation is itself a moral act, necessarily preceding judgment.99 How we see something is part of our response to it.100 Murdoch agrees that perception is not ethically neutral: it is part of our evaluation of a situation.101 This is close to Dewey’s thinking, as shown by Welchman,102 Boisvert103 and Johnson, who explains “Many moral theories mistakenly assume that we typically encounter a clearly defined moral issue, and then we must find the right moral standard or principle under which it falls. Dewey observed that often the relevant character of our situation is initially not clearly defined, and so it is a crucial stage of our deliberation to define the problem in the right way.”104
As Kathryn Schulz says of George Eliot, “Her perceptiveness is a huge part of the pleasure of Middlemarch, but for Eliot, it’s as much means as end. Perception is a necessary component of sympathy; if you don’t see, you don’t care.”105
Critics respond that a requirement of perception for moral deliberation is not unique to particularism. Even Kant must perceive an act to be a theft or a lie, and utilitarianism needs to know when people are happy. In either case, perception is required and must be evaluated and recognized as fitting a given category of human action, need or emotion. Particularists reply that the depth of perception required is much different. In her work most condemnatory of utilitarianism, Poetic Justice, Nussbaum details how:
In its determination to see only what can enter into utilitarian calculations, the economic mind is blind: blind to the qualitative richness of the perceptible world; to the separateness of its people, to their inner depths, their hopes and loves and fears; blind to what it is like to live a human life and to try to endow it with a human meaning. Blind, above all, to the fact that human life is something mysterious and extremely complicated, something that demands to be approached with faculties of mind and resources of language that are suited to the expression of that complexity. In the name of science, the wonder that illuminates and
