The Value Of Virtue
Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
The Value Of Virtue
Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos 0. Abstract Anne Baxley1 argues against John McDowell’s2 silencing thesis on the grounds that it not only fails as a compelling account for the Aristotelian distinction between virtue and continence, but also that it unwittingly succeeds in providing a misleading, and thereby potentially harmful, conception of what constitutes a virtuous decision. Baxley contends that the silencing thesis amounts to an unrealistic explanation of virtuous behavior, and this because she understands it as one that unjustifiably disregards the existence and relevance of valuable non-virtuous reasons for virtuous action. Baxley’s primary criticism of McDowell’s silencing thesis, in other words, is the fact that it does not allow for the notion of genuine sacrifice in its construal of virtue. In this paper, I will explain the context within which McDowell offers his silencing thesis, such that Baxley’s criticism will be properly addressed while McDowell’s larger point redeemed. As we’ll see, a slight but important amendment to McDowell’s theory will be necessary – namely, his mistaken dismissal of the Socratic thesis. Baxley, Anne Margaret. "The Price Of Virtue." Pacific Philos Q Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88.4 (2007): 403-23. 2 McDowell, John. "Virtue and Reason." Monist 62.3 (1979): 331-50. 1
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The Value Of Virtue
Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
1. Introduction McDowell’s intention is to provide an account of virtue as knowledge. He does this by explaining the particular kind of knowledge that he believes virtue would have to be, and in the process he addresses potential objections to the idea that virtue is knowledge. As one of his assumptions, he adopts the Aristotelian idea that virtue is contrasted with continence. The difference between virtue and continence, he says, is that virtue for Aristotle involves doing the right thing without inner conflict, whereas continence involves doing the right thing with inner conflict. And since McDowell understands inner conflict as potentially thwarting the demands of virtue, he concludes that the virtuous person must be one for whom the demands of virtue are the only decision-making factor. Baxley objects strongly to McDowell’s conclusion. She argues that it is possible, and sometimes even necessary, for a virtuous person to include more than just the demands of virtue into their decision-making process. She holds that virtue sometimes only counts as such insofar as it constitutes some sort of real sacrifice on the part of the purportedly virtuous agent. Baxley’s main point is that it is not reasonable to understand virtue as completely independent of non-virtuous considerations. On her account, nonvirtuous considerations are an irrevocable part of being human, and since the point of virtue theory is to guide human beings faced with questions of how they should live their lives, a good virtue theory will be one that properly accounts for all irrevocable parts of being human. McDowell’s explanation of the kind of knowledge that he believes virtue must be provides us with insight into how he might respond to Baxley’s criticism. He points to two potentially fatal objections to his ‘virtue as knowledge’ thesis: 1) the uncodifiability of 2
The Value Of Virtue
Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
rationality and 2) the distinction between volition and cognition. By the first he means the idea that, although it might seem possible to express an instance of rational thought as the deductive application of a universal rule to a particular example, it would in fact be more accurately construed as a contingent coincidence of subjectivity, communicable as rational only insofar as there is arbitrary agreement to conceive of it as such. In other words, rational knowledge is not an objective fact about the world, but rather a subjective fact about how the world is perceived. This is a problem for the thesis of ‘virtue as knowledge’ because we tend to think of rational knowledge as pertaining to objective facts about the world, and if that’s not what our rational capacity affords us then we cannot claim virtue contains it, at least not if we think of virtue as rational and of the rational as objective. As for the second – and intimately related – idea, McDowell is referring to something a non-cognitivist might say; namely, that knowledge about the world cannot on its own amount to a reason for acting, since knowledge about the world is objective and therefore ‘motivationally inert’. Instead, would say the non-cognitivist, an additional factor, subjective volition, is required, unless the objectivity of irrational reasons is called into play. This second objection, in other words, levels the challenge that virtue cannot be knowledge because the two are fundamentally different concepts, with the former essentially subjective given its evaluative nature and the latter essentially objective due to its descriptive character. Furthermore, it offers an objective explanation of behavior: namely, irrational motives. The problem with saying this is that it makes it seem as though volition is not truly volitional; in other words, it seems to reduce volition to the involuntary push and pull of pleasures and pains. McDowell resolves both objections by analyzing them and respecting whatever truth they turn out to hold, thereby constructing a stronger and more coherent theory of 3
The Value Of Virtue
Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
virtue. We’ll explore the details of the objections and his ensuing theory in later sections of this paper. For now, suffice it to say that he never wavers from his original thesis of virtue as knowledge, and that we may look to the importance he places on subjectivity as a partial answer to Baxley. This because Baxley’s criticisms seem to rest on the assumption that there can be objective facts about what constitute reasons for action, such that it would be possible for someone to do something despite an absence of ‘inner consensus’ for doing it. But McDowell stresses that the only sense in which somebody can be said to do something is in the sense that they – subjectively – could not have done otherwise, since their reason for action became so identified with its corresponding action that it ended up being the action itself. It is thanks to the strange claim with which we’ve concluded the above paragraph that we may now introduce the Socratic thesis and its relevance. The Socratic thesis is simply that knowledge is required for action and action is required for knowledge. In other words, it is the idea that knowledge and action really only count as themselves when they are interdependent to the point of being indistinguishable from each other. McDowell backs away from the strength of this claim almost immediately after proposing it as a potential solution to the problem of a metaphysical gap between volition and cognition. Instead, he resorts to the seemingly more palatable Aristotelian framework of continence and incontinence. But this is where he runs into trouble with Baxley, and for good reason. I propose that we address Baxley’s criticism of the silencing thesis by standing firm with the original Socratic notion that virtue is a synthesis of knowledge and action. This, paired with the purely subjective character with which McDowell endows this type of knowledge, will permit a proper response to Baxley and a simultaneous full redemption of McDowell’s larger point. 4
The Value Of Virtue
Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
2. Baxley’s Criticism We may now entertain some further detail of Baxley’s criticism. In her paper, “The Price Of Virtue”, she levels a compelling set of arguments against what she calls ‘the silencing thesis’, which she rightly attributes to McDowell, favoring instead what she calls ‘the overriding thesis’, which McDowell explicitly rejects. Baxley’s arguments can be understood as falling into two general categories: those based on the assumption that there is a distinction between reality and its value, and those founded on the premise that claims of value can compete with each other. The first kind we’ll blanket under ‘the descriptive-evaluative distinction’, while the second will be said to depend on ‘the evaluative-normative distinction’. Our aim in the following paragraphs will be to eliminate both distinctions and to thereby resolve Baxley’s concerns. Notably, our rejections of these distinctions will depend on our affirmation of both McDowell’s subjectivity thesis and the Socratic thesis, not to mention of the Aristotelian notion of ‘the highest good’. Let’s first present the part of her criticism that’s grounded in the descriptiveevaluative distinction. This part of her objection is directed at the following formulation of the silencing thesis: “(a) that there can be no non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue” (Baxley, p. 405). Baxley therefore understands the silencing thesis as an answer to the following question: “Does virtue silence other reasons insofar as there can be no (objective) reasons that compete with the demands of virtue?” (Baxley, p. 405) The silencing thesis, in other words, is for Baxley an affirmative reply, which she then seeks to reject by attempting to provide evidence for the existence of (objective) reasons that compete with the demands of virtue; that is, she looks to prove that there can in fact be non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue. 5
The Value Of Virtue
Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
Let us now lay out the second part of her criticism, the one that stems from the assumption that there is a distinction between evaluative and normative claims. Baxley construes this objection as a reaction to the version of the silencing thesis that says, “(b) that the virtuous person should never recognize or consider non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue” (Baxley, p. 405). In other words, this is how she takes the silencing thesis to answer the question of whether “virtue silence[s] other reasons insofar as the virtuous person does not recognize or consider competing reasons.” (Baxley, p. 405) And, as she did in her argument against the aforementioned formulation of the silencing thesis, she attacks this formulation by adopting the stance directly opposed to it. Hence, Baxley’s paper can be summarized as defending the double-claim (a) that there can be (objective) non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue, and (b) that the virtuous person should at least sometimes recognize or consider non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue. At the same time, and equivalently, her paper can be summarized as attacking her construal of McDowell’s double-claim, which is (a) that there can be no (objective) non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue, and (b) that the virtuous person should never recognize or consider non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue. In other words, Baxley defends the overriding thesis and attacks the silencing thesis. She correctly assumes that McDowell’s motivation for presenting the silencing thesis is his idea that it is necessary in order to distinguish between continence and virtue. Baxley shares McDowell’s desire to draw a distinction between virtue and continence, but she rejects his approach. Both Baxley and McDowell, however, accept the existence of pain and pleasure. Furthermore, by also accepting the Aristotelian concepts of continence and incontinence, both McDowell and Baxley affirm the apparent need to divorce the 6
The Value Of Virtue
Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
demands of pleasure and pain from the demands of virtue. They differ only in their specific accounts of the relationship between virtue and pain/pleasure. The silencing thesis holds that virtue ‘silences’ pain/pleasure, whereas the overriding thesis holds that virtue ‘overrides’ pain/pleasure. The difference between the two accounts is perhaps better understood in terms of decision-making factors: the silencing thesis claims that when a virtuous agent makes a virtuous decision, virtue is necessarily the only factor; the overriding thesis, on the other hand, claims that when a virtuous agent makes a virtuous decision, virtue is not necessarily the only factor, even though it is necessarily the deciding one. We can see how these two conflicting theses correspond to the aforementioned conflicting double-claims. In other words, since the silencing thesis holds that virtue is necessarily the only factor in virtuous decision-making, it makes sense for it to reject Baxley’s double-claim: (a) that there can be (objective) non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue, and (b) that the virtuous person should at least sometimes recognize or consider non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue. Likewise, since the overriding thesis holds that virtue is not necessarily the only factor in virtuous decision-making, it makes sense for it to endorse Baxley’s double-claim. The first part of Baxley’s double-claim can be said to correspond with her contention that McDowell’s opposing equivalent [i.e. his claim (a) that there can be no (objective) non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue] is actually a construal of the Aristotelian notion of divine virtue, rather than one of human virtue. In other words, Baxley accuses McDowell of conflating divine virtue with human virtue, since divine virtue is free from the considerations of pain and pleasure that human virtue is on the other hand burdened with. That is, Baxley takes the silencing thesis to provide 7
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Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
an unrealistic picture of virtue in failing to account for human nature. Notice that for this to be the case, it is necessary to make a distinction between the descriptive claim that pain/pleasure exists and the evaluative claim that pain/pleasure are not valuable. We return to this in Section 3. As for the second part of Baxley’s double-claim, we may take it to correspond with her contention that McDowell’s opposing equivalent [i.e. his claim (b) that the virtuous person should never recognize or consider non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue] is guilty of neglecting the role that sacrifice or loss may, and sometimes must, play in virtuous decision-making. In other words, Baxley calls out the silencing thesis for denying the possibility of a ‘price’ for virtue; a ‘cost’ that the virtuous agent might sometimes have to incur. Baxley wishes to say that there are instances when the exercise of virtue is necessarily burdened by sacrifice, and that this may even make it all the more virtuous. Note that for this to indeed be possible, a distinction would have to be made between the evaluative claim that the sacrifice constitutes a genuine cost, and the normative claim that it had to be paid. We return to this in Section 4. Before moving on to an assessment of Baxley’s two-pronged critique, I will offer a small critique of my own – against the overriding thesis. My attack will be of the reduction ad absurdum form; that is, I will assume the overriding thesis is true, and deduce from the resulting possible world a conclusion that is manifestly false. Let us begin, then, by assuming that there can indeed be objective non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue, and that the virtuous person should in fact at least sometimes recognize or consider non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue. For rhetorical effect, I will now present the resulting absurdity as a question: if the non-moral reasons truly amount to a conflict (that is, an actual opposition, such that either is equally 8
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Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
capable of defeating the other) with the moral reason that is virtue, why not just flip a coin? 3. The Descriptive is Evaluative We may now contend directly with the first part of Baxley’s double-claim. It states (a) that there can be (objective) non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue. This assumes that McDowell’s alternative fails to account for human nature, and it implies a distinction between the descriptive claim that pain/pleasure exists and the evaluative claim that pain/pleasure is valuable. Our intention is now to eliminate this distinction, and the means we’ll use to do it can be found in McDowell’s solution to a different formulation of the same problem. McDowell’s primary claim is that virtue is knowledge, and he looks to spell it out by exploring the kind of knowledge that virtue would have to be. In doing so, he runs into a potentially fatal objection: an apparent gap between cognition and volition. Reason, the objection goes, is a purely theoretical capacity; cognition, in other words, pertains to objective reality alone. Action, on the other hand, is exclusively practical; volition is exclusively an expression of subjectivity. There would seem to be a gap, then, between reason and action, cognition and volition. And it’s as fundamental of a gap as it could be, since it is a metaphysical one – cognition operates in objective reality whereas volition does so in subjective reality. How can knowledge, understood as rational content, be virtue, understood as practical manifestation? I will try to explain the gap in another way now. Consider what it means for something to be objective. It can perhaps best be understood by contrasting it with what it would be like if it were subjective instead. For something to be subjective is for it to be inaccessible to anyone other than the subject to whom it is accessible. Therefore, for 9
The Value Of Virtue
Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
something to be objective is for it to be accessible to more than just that one subject. (There are of course other possibilities to consider, such as a subjectivity that is available to exactly two subjects, but for simplicity’s sake we may here assume that subjective reality is limited to a single subject whereas objective reality is available to all subjects.) Given this characterization of the objective-subjective distinction, the gap between cognition and volition might be somewhat clearer now. Cognition, we like to think, is objective in that it is available to all subjects, such that if one subject presents another with his/her thoughts, the second subject will be able to treat those thoughts as though they were his/her own. Volition, on the other hand, is subjective in that it is available only to one subject – namely, the one exercising his/her decision-making capacity. After all, what could be more personal than the first-person experience of making a choice? McDowell’s ambition to equate knowledge with virtue, then, runs into the problem that knowledge is usually understood as valuable insofar as it is shareable (that is, to the extent that it is objective), whereas virtue is commonly understood as valuable insofar as it expresses the autonomy of the virtuous agent in question (that is, to the extent that it is subjective). So how can virtue be knowledge, in any meaningful sense? McDowell solves the problem by construing the kind of knowledge that virtue is as being subjective, rather than objective (he obviously finds the subjectivity of volition to be non-negotiable). His argument runs as a rejection of what he calls a ‘prejudice of rationality’; a prejudice that wrongly assumes that the exercise of reason represents an independently justified association of universal rules to particular examples. In other words, he denies the objectivity of reason. And he uses Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox to do so.
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The Value Of Virtue
Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
According to Wittgenstein, the rules that constitute our social reality are not grounded on anything independent of it, such that they can change based on nothing more than shared agreement for the changes. In Wittgenstein’s famous own words: “no course of action could be determined by a rule, because any course of action can be made out to accord with the rule”3. We will not here offer the kind of thorough explanation that McDowell provides, but will instead simply point the reader to it4 and move on, taking its validity as a given. Without delving into the details, then, we may focus on the more important overall point: that McDowell bridges the gap between cognition and volition by showing cognition to be subjective. Wittgenstein’s rule-following paradox precludes codifiability and thereby it also precludes objectivity. And this is all the better, for if decision-making were made codifiable then it would not be true decision-making; that is, it would not be free. Thus, we may return to Baxley’s claim (a) that there can be (objective) non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue. If we accept McDowell’s argument for the subjectivity of cognition, we can reject the implicit distinction that Baxley’s claim makes between the descriptive (objective) claim that pain/pleasure exists and the evaluative (subjective) claim that pain/pleasure is valuable. This because it turns out, on this account, that the cognition of pain/pleasure is only possible insofar as it is subjective; that is, insofar as it is an object of volition and therefore value-laden. No aspect of subjective reality is without evaluation, for the simple reason that subjectivity is inherently evaluative in nature; everything it touches it necessarily categorizes into good, bad, or neither – all of which are claims about its value. Therefore, we can reject Baxley’s claim Biletzki, Anat. "Ludwig Wittgenstein." Stanford University. Stanford University, 2002. Web. 14 Mar. 2016. <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/>. Section 3.5. 4 McDowell, Section 4, pp. 126-134 3
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The Value Of Virtue
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(a) and affirm McDowell’s alternative: (a) that there can be no (objective) non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue. And this for the simple fact that there can be no objective reasons in general. In the next section, we address the second part of the double-claim, which pertains to the possibility of there being subjective non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue. 4. The Evaluative is Normative It is time to address the second part of Baxley’s double-claim: (b) that the virtuous person should at least sometimes recognize or consider non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue. Note that this is another way for her to assert the first part of her double-claim, except this time the reasons in question are subjective rather than objective. Having fallen to the elimination of the descriptive-evaluative distinction, in other words, all that remains for the overriding thesis is to retreat into the possibility of subjective non-moral considerations; in other words, into grounds held up by another assumed distinction: this time, that merely apparent one between the evaluative and the normative. Baxley tries to defend the overriding thesis by pointing to our intuitions about the difficulty(ies) that ‘doing the right thing’ sometimes seems to entail. She gives the example of a brave soldier who feels pain at the prospect of death. I will not try to deny that there is room for the notion of sacrifice in the moral life. I will, however, deny that such a notion can itself be anything but moral. Baxley is simply mistaken in her belief that there is such a thing as non-moral value. The fact is there is only one kind of value, and morality is no more and no less than our relationship to it. Although Baxley does her best to provide her readers with compelling examples in favor of her thesis that ‘virtue can have a price’, including an interpretive argument of 12
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Aristotle, she forgets one of the most important lessons afforded by the study of ethics: virtue is priceless. Aristotle begins the Nicomachean Ethics with the confident and timetested truth that “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim.”5 Baxley forgets: all arts, all inquiries, all actions and pursuits, are aiming at the same good. There is only one, and that is intrinsic good; the good that is good in itself, without qualification, limitation, condition, or source. It is the good that is its own source and thus the source of all other good; all other good is only good insofar as it is sourced in that original and intrinsic Good with a capital G. It is indeed because of its intrinsic goodness that the Good is also inherently normative. The Good, after all, is who we are; and all that is truly required of us is that we recognize it. We’ll return to this idea in the next and final section of the paper. We may without hesitation, then, fully reject Baxley’s claim (b) that the virtuous person should at least sometimes recognize or consider non-moral reasons that conflict with the demands of virtue, and this just because there is no such thing as a non-moral reason that conflicts with the demands of virtue; there is in fact no distinction between what we regard as valuable and what we regard as a factor in our decision-making. Note that we are not denying the existence of appetitive considerations; instead, and given the aforementioned absence of a distinction between reality and value, we are giving pain and pleasure their rightful place as potential (and therefore potentially important [and therefore potentially compelling]) components of a virtuous life. 5. The Descriptive is Normative: On The Necessity Of Agent-Based VirtueEthical Action Guidance 5
Aristotle, H. Rackham, Aristotle. The Nicomachean Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1934. Print.
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The Value Of Virtue
Jose-Miguel Rosillo-Cevallos
Having indulged an analysis of the value of virtue, we might think we are now in a position to offer a strong synthesis. Yet the addition of one more ingredient remains pending. Although we have shown that the overriding thesis cannot constitute an accurate picture of our world, we have not shown that the silencing thesis can. In fact, we should deny that it can, since, if anything, we have shown that it can’t. The silencing thesis, after all, neglects the relevance of pain/pleasure by banishing them to the distinction-ridden realms of continence and incontinence. In other words, the very concepts of continence and incontinence assume a mistaken conception of selfhood and agency; namely, one devoid of unity. According to this framework, the alleged whole that is a person is divided into parts, such that it is possible for the parts to be incongruous with each other. Aristotle calls these parts the rational and the irrational, and both McDowell and Baxley endorse this division, since it motivates the need for the silencing and overriding theses. But I contend that affirming this division does more harm than good, since it creates the possibility of inner conflict. The only way to avoid this possibility is to instead affirm the unity of the self, such that it is understood as irreducible. And to do this, we may resort to the point at which McDowell fell into the mistake that allowed for, and led to, Baxley’s criticism: when he dismissed the Socratic thesis of virtue as knowledge and favored instead the Aristotelian one. In defending his claim that virtue is knowledge, McDowell came upon a potential objection. The objection is the idea that it is not implausible to conceive of two people having the same knowledge, yet only one of them acting virtuously. To meet this objection, McDowell first referenced the Socratic thesis, which states that it is simply not possible for two people to have the same knowledge yet only one of them to act virtuously, and this because the Socratic thesis holds not only that action requires 14
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knowledge, but also that knowledge requires action, such that knowledge and action essentially amount to the same thing. But McDowell dismissed this solution as too extreme, opting instead for the Aristotelian thesis, which states that the reason only one of the two people with the same knowledge acts virtuously is that the one who doesn’t act virtuously has had his/her knowledge ‘blurred’ by pain or pleasure. But our previous two arguments eliminating the distinctions between descriptive claims, evaluative claims, and normative claims, make it so that the Aristotelian thesis fails to provide an accurate picture. Instead, our equation of reality and value with virtue is perfectly compatible with the Socratic thesis, to the point of necessitating it. And note that this still leaves room to explain pain and pleasure as virtuous insofar as they are known and acted on. We may even explain them as vicious insofar as they are neither known nor acted on, which would account for our intuitions about their relevance to normativity, while at the same time respecting our conclusions about the unity of the self. To complete the synthesis, I would like to reference McDowell’s explanation of the form that his ‘virtue as knowledge’ idea takes – namely, that of a special kind of practical syllogism. McDowell’s practical syllogism consists of a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. The major premise consists of the agent’s [uncodified] conception of how one should live one’s life, the minor premise is fulfilled by a particular fact about the situation at hand (a fact that is picked out as most salient by the major premise), while the conclusion amounts to the resulting action. This picture can be understood as corresponding to a unity of description, evaluation, and command, and therefore to the necessity of agent-based virtue-ethical action guidance; we need only equate, as we have, the agent with the action and the virtue with the guidance.
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