A Simple Objection to Welfarism?
I have been reading quite a bit about welfarism lately, and have been having trouble accepting it as a plausible thesis about ethics, since it strikes me as rather fundamentally and obviously wrong. But as these things often go, I am not therefore inclined to think that it really is obviously wrong, but rather that I have misunderstood it in some critical way. Accordingly, I offer these criticisms in the hope the someone will tell me how I'm mistaken.

Criticism #1: the definition

The basic idea of welfarism should be familiar enough: some have argued that the ultimate value for ethics is perfection, others have argued that it is freedom or agency. Welfarists, by contrast, argue that it is welfare or well-being.

I actually think that describing welfarism in this way (as one sort of objection to perfectionism and agency-based theories) is more helpful than any definition I have seen so far. For example, Wayne Sumner (who seems to be a rather typical exponent) defines it as the view that “nothing but welfare matters, basically or ultimately, for ethics.” Surely any welfarist would admit that there is at least one other thing that ultimately “matters” for ethics: namely, distribution. After all, we can’t rest content just knowing that we want welfare, we also need to specify whom we want it for, and how much we want for them. Sumner seems to think that welfarism provides its own internal answer to the first sort of question, instructing us to seek welfare for welfare subjects – those capable (in some sense) of being well-off (this is supposed to be an advantage over perfectionism, which requires a rather elaborate secondary science to explain why we should only worry about the perfection of a fairly narrow range of things, such as human beings and not mushrooms). But Sumner also seems to think that welfarism is neutral with regard to the second sort of question (“how much for each?”), being compatible with aggregationist or egalitarian views, for example. This already seems to me to be a concession that Sumner’s own definition doesn’t adequately capture what he really means by welfarism, since it grants that some other independent value is in play after all.

Criticism #2: the Helen Caldicott scenario

Now we get the objection which really strikes me as devastating (but I’m very eager to hear why it’s not). If, as Sumner says, welfarism is the view that we should ultimately want the well-being of welfare subjects, then to what sorts of norms do we appeal when deciding whether or not it is a good thing to have welfare subjects in the first place?

Let us say, for example, that we are presented with the opportunity to make all presently living welfare subjects live very good lives without having children. I once heard the environmentalist and anti-nuclear activist Helen Caldicott propose (only half in jest) that we steep the world’s water supply with a combination of aphrodisiacs and prophylactic drugs, so that, as she said, “we all have a really great time as the human race gradually fades away.” She asked us, her audience, to imagine how the forests and wetlands would reclaim the cities. Wouldn’t that, she asked, really be the best thing in the end? Even if we were to get a handle on the overpopulation problem for now, we could never really trust our progeny to maintain it in perpetuity. So long as the earth is under the stewardship of human beings it is in profound danger of total destruction, just by virtue of our insatiable curiosity and competitiveness. So why aren’t we better off just seeing to the happiness of the people we have, while putting an end to the human race for good?

So put, I think it is a philosophically rich question to ask. But for now the point is, simply, that I don’t see how the welfarist could begin to answer it. Assuming that we could make actual, living welfare subjects very well off, but that we also have the option of either continuing the human race, or letting it (gradually) end, which course of action should we choose?

Sumner, as I hinted above, is an actualist about welfare ascriptions. In determining what counts as a contribution to well-being, we are not allowed to attribute it to potential or hypothetical subjects. Of course, it might turn out that some decision I make now (e.g., to drink while pregnant) affects the well-being of some future subject at some future time. But we cannot intelligibly talk about something hurting or harming someone before knowing whether she exists or is likely to exist. We cannot say that it is somehow an injury to my would-be great-great grandson Xavier that he doesn't have a chance to live. Neither, then, would it be an injury to entire future generations.

It seems to me that the welfarist might invoke some other sort of value – aesthetic or perfectionist – to say that the existence of human civilization really is (or isn’t) more conducive to the beauty or perfection of the world. But I take this sort of argument to be made in bad faith. If we are allowed to appeal to aesthetic or perfectionist reasons in deciding whether or not to put the prophylactics in the water, then I am no longer entirely clear on what ethics is in the first place. What is it, if not the system of values to which we appeal in when faced with precisely this sort of decision?

So there it is. Now, what exactly have I misunderstood about welfarism?
- posted by Justin Tiwald @ Thursday, July 28, 2005 63 comments

 
DARWALL'S EUTHYPHRO PROBLEM
If there is an odd duck among the current accounts of the nature of welfare or well-being, Stephen Darwall's rational care theory has got to be it. For Darwall, to say that something -- e.g., befriending Huang -- is "part of my welfare" is not to say that it fulfills my (fully informed) desires, nor that it gives me more pleasure and less pain than otherwise. Rather, it is to say that befriending Huang is "something that it would be rational to want for [me] for [my] sake" (2002). If this were merely a corollary to the claim that the friendship would be good for me, then it would be relatively uncontroversial: many, I think, would accept that the phrases "what you rationally want for me insofar as you care about me" and "my good" are coextensive. But of course, Darwall presents rational care not as a corollary, but as an analysis of the concept of welfare itself. We explain what it means for X to be good for me by saying that it is what another would rationally want for me for my sake. And this is precisely what makes Darwall's theory so odd, for it seems to have the order of explanation reversed. Normally, we tend to think, another caring person would want me to befriend Huang because it is good for me. But for Darwall, it is only good for me because a caring person would want it (rationally, and for my sake). Is his view defensible? For my own reasons, I am going to jump headlong into the tiny Euthyphro faction in welfare ethics, and argue that it is. We don't care because it's good. Rather, it's good because we care.

Darwall himself has something to say about this problem, but much to the chagrin of his reviewers (e.g., Brad Hooker, Christopher Heathwood), his discussion of it seems cursory in light of the fundamental importance of the problem. For starters, he makes the compelling point that "caring for Jane" cannot possibly be so straight forward a matter as desiring Jane's good, even intrinsically. I might well have an intrinsic desire for her good and yet fail to have the right attitudinal stance toward her. To truly qualify as someone who "cares for Jane," I should not just want her good, but I should also have an intrinsic concern for Jane herself. This helps us to see the difference between wanting X for Jane, and wanting X for Jane for her sake. Accordingly, we don't care for Jane simply because we want her to acquire her good -- we must also have the proper appreciation for her as a person, appreciation which serves as a reason for our care.

Of course, this only shows what's wrong with the claim that we who care about Jane want X for her solely because it is good for her. It could still nevertheless be the case that X's being good for her is a necessary condition -- one among others -- for its being worthy of rational care. And if this is the case, then the concept of rational care still presupposes the concept of welfare, and not the other way around. Darwall's answer (again, easy to miss) is to suggest that care is "something like a psychological natural kind," and therefore that it is not necessary to provide it with a definition: "Just as we can use a term like 'water’ without a prior definition to refer to the natural stuff in the rivers and lakes for purposes of an empirical theory, so likewise might we refer to care for purposes of a metaethical theory of welfare if it is a natural kind."

I suspect this strikes most readers as slippery, especially when we consider Darwall's paradigmatic case of the care as a psychological natural kind: sympathetic concern. When we sympathize with the victim of some kind of tragedy, surely we are responding to reasons for considering the tragedy bad for the person in question. If she has lost her family, we know that her life will always seem somewhat emptier to her, that she won't be able to take as much comfort in the happy illusion of unconditional love as the rest of us do, and that she is likely to undergo years of grief. If she has lost her livelihood, then we know that she will be deprived of a way of life in which she was deeply invested, and will have to reconcile herself to another. These aren't just reasons for sympathizing with her, these are reasons to think that her life has gone poorly for her. What, then, does sympathetic concern add to our concept of welfare?

I would like to suggest that we in the Euthyphro faction could, despite appearances, have it both ways here. We could concede the point that care is responsive to reasons for thinking something good or bad for a person, and yet still maintain that it adds something to our concept of welfare to think of it in his way. And we could do this, I believe, if we are pluralists about the sorts of reasons for thinking something good or bad for someone. That is, we might insist that welfare is a property shared by states of affairs of very different kinds, so that their worthiness for rational sympathy is the only consistent explanation we can offer.

This view is lent some initial plausibility, at the very least, by the intractable sorts of problems that tend to plague more traditional accounts of the nature of welfare. If we are hedonists about welfare, for example, then we are likely to have to bite the bullet on experience machine scenarios, and we will have a difficult time accounting for the sense that a person can be made better or worse when her plans for her children succeed posthumously (my intuitions about these examples are close to Chad's, in his June 1st entry below). On the other hand, if we are proponents of the informed desire view, we are going to have trouble accounting for goods that we do not desire, even rationally and with full information, or informed desires for things (such as world peace in the distant future, etc.) that do not make significant contributions to our well-being. What best captures the common feature of the diverse constituents of well-being -- whether they be posthumous goods, happiness goods, goods of which the benefactor is aware, or goods of which she is not -- is that they are all what a sympathetic observer would rationally want for her. But this is not to deny the view that our caring or sympathizing should be responsive to features that we normally understand as being constituents of well-being. In fact, it is to embrace it.

To defend the rational care theory in this way is to take a page from the unlikely playbook of Thomas Scanlon -- not because he upholds the rational care theory of welfare (he certain doesn't), but because he employs a strategy like this one against a similar "order of explanation" problem in moral contractualism. But to take this line is also to nudge our Euthyphro faction a bit closer to the Confucian philosopher Dai Zhen, who thought that we could never entirely capture what it is that makes something good for us without reference to human deliberation, and a certain kind of sympathetic deliberation in particular. The informed desire theorists already allow that welfare terms contain an ineliminable reference to human deliberation, insofar as they maintain that a person's good is what she would rationally want for herself if she were fully informed about the probability of satisfaction, opportunity costs, etc. The next question for welfare theory, then, is why the deliberation in question must be self-reflective. There are good, intuitive reasons, I believe, to think otherwise.
- posted by Justin Tiwald @ Saturday, June 11, 2005 10 comments

 
THE QUESTION(S) OF ETHICS: Read recently, but lost the reference.: “the key question of ethics is not ‘what ought I to do?’ but ‘what’s going on’?” I like this, at least when I first read it, because it appears to shift the focus of the ethical question from what I need to do to correctly assessing the question. It puts a priority on perception, as opposed to action. That’s probably a healthy corrective. The first ethical duty one may have in any given situation is not to do anything, but to perceive correctly.

But it is only a corrective. For one has to do something in response to a situation, even if that something is not to do anything at all, or to disengage (wisdom may be realizing those situations where one can actually do something and distinguishing them from those situations where perhaps someone could help, but not you).

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking that there is another ethical question we should be asking, which goes along the lines of, “how can I make this bad thing I did better?” That’s a rough way of phrasing it. We could also ask, “what are my duties of repair to this person or in this situation?” What I mean to be getting at by these questions is the fact that much of our moral lives isn’t in figuring out the right thing to do, but fixing things when we’ve done the wrong thing, as we will invariably do most of the time (in ethics, as Aristotle famously said, there are more ways to miss the target than to hit it).

Now, the question of duties of repair can’t be the primary question, for we have to know what counts as a wrong to know that we’ve done it. Of course, there is a great importance to getting things right the first time. But practically speaking, duties of repair figure much more prominently in ethical life than ethical theory would suggest. We have to apologize for the things we have done, or in other ways try to make “good” on a bad we have done. Things go wrong and situations are complicated, as Strawson said. But we will not have an excuse or justification when things go wrong. So we will have to say we are sorry.

And it is not merely saying one is sorry, there is an art to it, saying that one is sorry in the right way and at the right time. One can easily spot insincere apologies, which only make things worse and lead one to incur additional duties of repair.
- posted by Chad @ Monday, June 06, 2005 0 comments

 
WHY STUDY CRIMINAL LAW? Is this a question with an obvious answer? Perhaps there are too many obvious answers to it: one studies it because one wants to help those convicted of a crime, one studies it because one is fascinated with the evil men do, or about broader philosophical problems having to do with punishment, action, or coercion. So I guess I should rephrase my question, what makes criminal law not just interesting, but personally gripping?

I have a hard time answering this. I don’t imagine that I’ll ever commit a crime myself, nor do I think that many of my friends have or will. At least not a major crime. If I did commit a crime, I probably wouldn’t recognize myself; I would have changed so much as to be a different person. I may be speaking too soon, but I don’t see it now. This is important because it limits the ability of the study of criminal law to illuminate things about myself. Now, it may be that I see in criminal behavior in extremis some things I see in myself. Maybe. But even here it is still a stretch; we are reasoning by analogy. We are not saying that I am such that, deep down, I may be a criminal. The bad things I do don’t raise to the level of criminal liability.

Compare this with the study of tort law, which has as its focus the things we do by mistake, negligently, without meaning to. It is about the harm we cause without intending to, or even how we are responsible for harms we cause without even be so much as negligent. Now here is something that seems to relate to the things I cause in my own life: most of the bad we do is inadvertent badness. We are preoccupied with our own pain, so we don’t attend well enough to the pain of others, for example. Or we are careless, in a hurry, and get into an accident. It seems that most people’s moral lives, or at least people like me, involve wrestling with these issues: how responsible am I for those things I accidentally cause? How should I feel about them? To what extent are they about me and my life’s story? To what extent can I separate them from myself? When studying tort law these are the questions I find myself asking, and they are questions about myself and my moral life as I mostly conceive of it.

So the tort/crime law distinction for me has more than analytic meaning. It is more than just separating distinct parts of the law. For me, the distinction divides those parts of the law which grip me personally, and those parts of the law that might be necessary to learn and even philosophically fascinate me, but which leave me personally cold.
- posted by Chad @ Monday, June 06, 2005 3 comments

 
IS WELL BEING OBJECTIVE OR SUBJECTIVE? There are a number of things we need to get clear on in answer this question, one of which is whether the subjective feeling/perception/awareness of one's well-being is a necessary condition of being well off. Note that Robert Nozick's famous "experience machine" hypothetical, in which we a placed in to a box and have all the (subjective) experiences we would have if we were living a full and rich life, but are not actually living one, only suggests that subjective awareness isn't a sufficient condition for being well off. That is, we could feel all the things we would be feeling if we were well off, but we aren't really well off. Nozick's point in this seems to be true, though I'm surprised at the resistance it gets when I talk it over with friends. They are not sure, exactly, why one wouldn't opt for the experience machine, if one felt exactly the same as if one were living and full and rich real life. To be sure, why living the experience machine life would be awful is hard to articulate. We have to talk in terms of "being out of touch with the real" and "not making an actual impact on the world." These things are hard to make sense of in the abstract, they are slippery. But at the same time, I do think that they actually refer to something. Now, I brought up Nozick because even if his intution is right, the subjectivists still may have a point: they may say that awareness of one's well-being is a necessary condition of being well off. If one does not know that one is well off, then one is not ipso facto well off. (A side note, I have been using "awareness' of being well off rather than something like "feeling pleasure" to avoid attacking a simple pleasure based view of subjective welfarism). But I want to suggest that subjective awareness of one's being well-off isn't even a necessary condition of being well off, at least in some respects. That is to say, while it may be the case that many elements of well-being do require subjective awareness, that is not the case will all of them. One can be benefitted, one can be made better off, without one being aware of it.

Consider two cases. 1) The first is inspired by Thomas Nagel, in a passing remark in his essay on "Death." He says that surely we are worse off if all our friendships turned out to be not really friendships, even though they appeared to be friendships. In fact, all of our friends behind our back said terrible things about us and laughed at us. It is clear that we would not have friends in this case. Nor are we benefitted by having such "friends." In fact, we are made worse off (I would argue) even though we appear to have friends. A life with such friends is a poorer life. One is worse off. This may be the case even if one never learns that one's friends were false friends, and is sort of ignorantly happy throughout one's life.

One may wonder if this is just the experience machine case transposed to the arena of friendship. It may only show that subjective awareness is a condition, but not a sufficient condition of well being. But I'm not sure. Might one also be beneffited from having friends one doesn't know one has? Can one have friends this way (friends, objectively speaking)? And if one can have friends this way, can they benefit you just by being your friend, or do they have to benefit you in some tangible way? I don't think so. Perhaps it is enough that another person thinks well off you, even if he doesn't directly benefit you. This may be the case in forgotten friendships, or friendships one thought have ended. The other person, in fact, still thinks of you and thinks well of you, and you think well of the other person. But neither of you is aware of the other's care and good feeling. Are you thereby benefitted by it? Is it absurd to say that you could be benefitted from it?

2) And consider the fact, which I think is obvious, that one's well being can improve after one's death. For one's life consists of a number of projects and plans, not all of which can be complete during one's alloted time of life. One could have children and wishes for them, for instance, and they only can fulfil those wishes after you have died. Nonetheless, there seems to me a clear sense in which you can say: that person's life is made better by the fact that his plans worked out, that he got what he wanted, even though he wasn't around to enjoy them. And certainly there is no subjective awareness when one is dead. Yet, one's well-being can be changed and improved (or degraded) after one's death. Owen Flanagan once gave a lecture where he told of how is dog loved to play fetch and to roll around in the sun in Flanagan's front yard. When the dog died, Flanagan buried him in the front yard. I like to think that the dog was made better off by this act, that his well-being was increased by being buried in a certain way, in a certain place.

This idea of one's well being improving after death has two aspects worth noticing. First, I think it is intimately connected to the idea of one's life as a story. The only thing I emphasize here is that the end of one's story is not co-terminus with the end of one's life. There is no fixed length to one's story (consider how the story of Flanagan's dog goes even up until where the dog was buried). Indeed, one's story could even begin before one's birth. Is it a subjective matter how we date the beginning and end of one's story? My objectivist side wants to say that it isn't, that there are better and worse ways of placinging the beginning and end points of one's life. Does this become absurd at certain points? Does the fact that a play by Shakespeare has changed one's life make it the case that this is an event in Shakespeare's life, that it's part of Shakespeare's story? Surely Shakespeare's story has to end sometime, but when? (One thinks about the lives of the saints, and how their stories continue on in the miracles that they perform after they die: but does one necessarily have to believe in this kind of thing to believe that one's story goes on after one's death?)

Further, believeing that one's story can go on even after one dies may lead one to take a different view towards death. Perhaps one reason we are sad about death is that it means we will never finish all our projects, and will thereby not be benefitted by seeing them come to completion. But if we instead see our well-being as extending beyond our death, then we may be more open to letting others complete what we have started, because our story is implicated in the project, and the success of that project is our success. I wonder if the idea of subjective well-being is linked to an idea of being in control: that we are the ultimate arbiters of when we are happy or when we are made better off (only things that I have chosen or done can make me happy). One might see the idea of objective well being as showing that this is not the case, that many contingencies can make us happy or not, because one's life plan is broader than those things one controls or subjectively experiences.

Again, I enter the caveat I mentioned above. All I am saying is that welfare can't be purely a subjective concept; it can't be the case that we are only made better off if we are aware of being better off (or even could potentially be aware of being better off). There are things that make our life better even if we don't know about them, and could never learn about them.
- posted by Chad @ Wednesday, June 01, 2005 0 comments

 
TWO FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES: A couple items that struck me reading today’s New York Times.

First, there’s an op-ed on Bush’s stem cell theology. The piece begins and ends with the claim that Bush is imposing his morality on a “society with pluralistic views,” which is wrong, even though (as the opening paragraph concludes) his “convictions deserve respect.” The problem is that the rest of the editorial goes on to bash those convictions, calling them “extreme.” So I think the kind of posturing the editorial does gives respect a bad name: it makes it appear as if there’s some meta value that’s really being appealed to, when what’s in fact going on is a first order disagreement about what we should do. That is, the argument isn’t about, “who’s imposing his moral beliefs on whom?” but “whose moral beliefs are the right ones?” It’s not as if the New York Times had its way, it wouldn’t also be imposing its moral beliefs. If the reply is that it wouldn’t be imposing its beliefs on a majority of people, but only a religious minority, the counter reply is, 1) how do we know who’s in the majority? and 2) if it’s OK to impose on a minority, then wasn’t the appeal to pluralism just a mask for majoritarianism?

The Times’ editorial is just one example of a risk in political philosophy from going from plain talk to talk about talk. Recent philosophical debates about political liberalism have been phrased in terms of unreasonableness, mutual respect, and pluralism. But it’s not clear at all what these terms mean, because they are second-order terms. One isn’t reasonable, doesn’t show respect, isn’t sensitive to pluralism not because of the content of one’s beliefs, but because of their form – in this case, because Bush is “imposing his moral beliefs,” his position isn’t a viable one in a liberal democracy. Is the substantive debate advanced by this? Not that I can tell. And isn’t the substantive debate in the end all that really matters? (In fact, I don’t think it’s all that really matters, but the key point is to have an explanation of why not.)

Second, Brooks’ editorial discusses an alliance the left and the religious right might form against poverty. Of course, I’m all for such an alliance, but Brooks seems too sanguine about its possibilities. Two deep differences seem to divide left and right on poverty. (a) Left and right disagree about the causes of poverty. The left will point, first, to structural problems, say, the distribution of wealth and resources, shifts in the nature of the economy, recession, etc. The right will tend to emphasize character, e.g., one’s needing to have the right moral values, the right religion, the right work ethic. (b) The right and left will disagree about the proper nature of the response to poverty. The left will emphasize governmental action, the right will emphasize private initiatives, e.g., volunteering, church action. The relationship between the causes and the nature of the response are obvious.

These differences don’t mean that the right and left can’t forge agreement on some issues and some solutions. It’s just that such agreement will fall far short of an alliance. The two conflicting perspectives on what causes poverty and what action will end are too deep.
- posted by Chad @ Thursday, May 26, 2005 5 comments

 
ARGUING AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY: Steve Garvey, in a paper recently posted on ssrn.com, argues in favor of the proposition that it was permissible that Gov. George Ryan commute the sentences of all those on death row in the state of Illinois – not that he had to do it, but only that it was with his rights to do so, and not just his legal rights, but his moral rights. It was morally legitimate that he show mercy, though not morally mandatory. The piece is clear, careful. Sometimes it seems that thoughtful philosophy papers are hard to come by in law reviews, but Garvey’s pieces are always of very high quality.

Before commenting on Garvey’s substantive argument, I want to make a point about his strategy. He argues against the death penalty not directly, but by saying that it is incompatible with his favored theory of punishment, in his case punishment as atonement. The idea is that the death penalty doesn’t fit as an appropriate punishment given the aims of punishment. Sometimes retributivists argue this way as well – that the goals of retributive punishment don’t fit with death as a punishment. This is a harder sell than with punishment as atonement, but I’ve seen it offered as a possibility.

I think this strategy is wrong. My sense is that we should argue against the death penalty directly, by saying that it is inhumane, uncivilized, and a form of torture. This means appealing to principles outside principles of punishment, strictly speaking. And I think this is fine. Indeed, thinking about the example of torture, we don’t condemn it by saying it doesn’t fulfill the goals of atonement, retribution, deterrence, etc. That is, we don’t argue against torture by saying it doesn’t fit with our favored theory of punishment. We say torture is wrong because it doesn’t respect the dignity of human beings, etc. It seems to me that we should say the same thing, or some similar thing, about the death penalty.

In any event, Garvey’s argument is that the death penalty cuts off the possibility of atonement, and therefore the commutation of the sentences of those on death row is justified because it keeps open the possibility of atonement. Thus Garvey says, “Extending mercy and remitting an offender’s death sentence reflects a choice to preserve the possibility of reconciliation between victim and offender. In other words, extending mercy to death-sentenced offenders can be justified .. as a way to preserve the chance, however remote it may seem, that offender and victim might some day be reconciled.” (33).

Garvey here wants to justify not just the commutation of particular sentences, but a blanket commutation. But his argument seems to quick to entitle him to this conclusion. I think he needs to take more seriously the possibilities that (a) some crimes may be so bad that only the death of the offender can lead to atonement, and (b) atonement in some cases may be impossible, and not just a remote possibility. For Garvey to get the conclusion that a blanket commutation is permissible, he needs not only to show that these possibilities are remote, he needs to exclude them altogether.

Yet I am not convinced he does so. I don’t see, for instance, why death can’t be some form of real reconciliation between victim and offender (and not merely a “fleeting reconciliation” or one that is not secular, as Garvey argues), nor is it clear to me that there are no crimes which conclusively shut off the offender from the moral community, making reconciliation with him impossible. If either of these two things is possible, then a blanket commutation is not justified, only a commutation of those who are still within the bounds of moral community, and whose death is not required as a means of atonement. And note it is within the theory of atonement that such things might be necessary – perhaps another reason to prefer arguing against the death penalty directly, and not via a theory of punishment.

- posted by Chad @ Tuesday, December 02, 2003 0 comments

 
AGAINST VIRTUE: Larry Solum over at the legal theory blog has another “legal theory lexicon” entry – this time on virtue ethics. Solum repeatedly emphasizes that his entries are “quick and dirty” and “rough and ready.” Still, I think Solum gives us enough of a sketch of virtue ethics to raise some serious questions about it: questions I’m not sure a less rough and ready or quick and dirty sketch might answer, though I may be wrong.

First, the way Solum presents virtue ethics it seems excessively formal. For example, he writes that a virtue-centered theory of judging would “contend that a correct legal decision is a decision that would characteristically be made by a virtuous judge in the circumstances relevant to the decision.” I’m not exactly sure what type of guidance this is supposed to give: how, for example, does it differ from saying that a virtuous judge makes good decisions? Don’t we need to know a little more about what the good is?

A similarly excessive formalism seems to infect the definition Hursthouse gives as well. She writes that an action is right if and only if it is one that a “virtuous moral agent would characteristically perform under the circumstances.” OK: so a virtuous agent acts virtuously. But what does that mean? And how (by what criteria) are we supposed to be able to identify the virtuous agent? This reminds me of the time when a philosopher professor of mine in college, a dyed in the wool Aristotelian, spoke of the virtuous act being the one the phronimos (the practically wise person) would make. I asked him, “But how do we know who the phronimos is?” And he shot back, “c’mon, you know.” Is there any better answer we can give to this question?

Let me try to put my first worry in a little less rhetorical form. My worry is that any definition of what a virtuous act consists in might be theory-dependent – that is dependent on a prior understanding of what is good, around which we define what the virtuous agent is. And this seems to get us right back into the think of traditional moral theory. After all, what stops a law and economics theorist from defining the virtuous judge in terms of what would maximize utility (I’m simplifying here)? Couldn’t the Kantian virtuous judge just be the one who judges according to the moral law? So again, the worry is that virtue talk, unless spelled out further, is too formal: and that leaves us to supply the content, and that means going back to substantive moral theorizing. Even worse, virtue talk has seemed an unnecessary detour on the way. If we are just going to define the virtues according to our favorite moral theory anyway, why not just start by debating the merits of that theory?

Of course, we could take the virtue ethicist’s point to be more of a deflationary one. This gets me to my second question. Solum writes that “contemporary virtue ethics is distinctive … because it denies something that both deontology and utilitarianism seem to affirm – that there is a decision procedure for ethics.” The idea here is that utilitarianism and deontology deny the wrong of judgment in ethical theorizing, and that paint a distorted picture of the moral life as being solely about rules.

By now, though, this is far too crude of a dismissal of Kantianism and utilitarianism – especially given Barbara Herman’s sensitive and probing work on Kant and moral judgment. More broadly, there seems to be no barrier to utilitarians and Kantians admitting a role to be played by judgment, i.e., that there will be hard cases which are underdetermined by the moral rules. So the good moral agent will have to use his judgment to determine what the best application of the moral rules is in this case. Life is complex: nobody has to deny that.

At the same time, it would be wrong to deny that there are any moral rules at all, which is what an extreme version of the “no decision procedure” point might claim. Solum may not be making this point, and if he’s not, that’s good. We would go wrong if we denied that there were any moral rules, just as we would go wrong if we said that correctly applying those rules was never a matter of good judgment. The point here is that this is a matter of both/and, not either/or – we need both rules and judgment to get an accurate picture of the moral life. Moreover, this strikes me as a point any sensible Kantian or utilitarian would and should concede.

Finally, there is what Solum writes about “virtue politics,” which “might begin with the idea that the goal of the state should be the establishment of the conditions for the development of human excellence.” My question here doesn’t have to do with Solum’s definition of virtue politics, or whether it makes sense. My question is whether is jibes with Solum’s other big interest, i.e., public reason. Could a person who favored virtue politics be a political liberal? Ideas of human excellence, or so goes the line, are contested, and reasonably so – the state should presind from endorsing any one of them, in favor of promoting a shared “core morality.” At this level, it seems to me a virtue politics can’t be politically liberal. I wonder, further, whether a politically liberal society could endorse certain judges or politicians on the basis of their supposed virtue. This strikes me as a much more subtle and interesting question (of course, we would need a more detailed spelling out of what the virtues of particular offices are; my sense is that Solum has done this elsewhere, though I haven’t had the chance to read his work on the subject).

Virtue ethicists seem to come in two main flavors. There are those who do virtue theory, and talk about the kind of things Solum canvasses in his post. Most of the work here gets done at the abstract, meta-level. But there are also those who talk about particular virtues, about courage, honesty, fidelity, etc., and even occasionally about certain vices (contempt). From my experience, the latter group is the more interesting and ultimately more important group of virtue theorists – they do a good job of what virtue theorists say we need to do but don’t seem to do themselves: explore the rich texture of our moral lives.

- posted by Chad @ Monday, December 01, 2003 0 comments