Mark Lance and Margaret Little: Particularism and Antitheory

Next up: “Particularism and Antitheory”, by Mark Lance and Margaret Little. This is a very helpful article (especially for people who, like me, might have the suspicion that particularists and anti-particularists are often talking past one another). It starts off by distinguishing between normative principles (principles which say which considerations are good- or bad-making) and deliberative principles (which say what procedures we can use to arrive at good moral judgments), and then gives the following three conditions on being a classical Principle:

1. Universal, exceptionless, law-like generalizations. Normative principles give us necessary and nontrivial connections involving moral properties. Deliberative principles give us procedures that guarantee the discovery of a right action.

2. These principles are informative. The features they pick out are in principle questionable, and we can use them to justify or to criticize particular moral claims, reactions to individual cases, etc.

3. These principles are part of a theoretical system, and so illuminate and give leverage on one another. (This is the fuzziest of the constraints.)

They then go through quite a nice back-and-forth between the view that moral theory should give a list of principles and an algorithm for computing moral verdicts, and the view that something like interpretation (an ability to see the morally salient features of a situation, which can’t be reduced to an ability to see the physical features of a situation) and judgment (the ability to tell what principles one should act upon in cases of competition, not reducible to any procedure for weighing the conflicting principles) is required. They also argue that those who take interpretation and judgment to be essential can defend their position by citing other properties (their example: ‘being a chair’) that aren’t reducible, but that we can employ rationally and consistently, and settle disputes about, and that don’t seem to require a mysterious extra faculty to understand; and that we shouldn’t prejudice ourselves ahead of time by assuming that only theoretical understanding can be reasonable. These points, however, can be taken up by the theorist/generalist: a theorist could think that the understanding and application of moral principles required the sort of moral knowledge that essentially included interpretation and judgment, but still think that honesty was always good-making (or that there was always a prima facie duty to be honest).

So in order to make particularism have some purchase against these sorts of positions, it has to argue that Principles really do little or no work in understanding, justifying, deliberating, etc. Moral reasoning isn’t about the application of generalizations, but the competent use of concepts: instead of noting that this is a case of lying and inferring that it is wrong, the real work is involved in building up our concept of lying-wrongly and identifying instances of it. Why might we think this?

1. Perhaps we think that the way we come to moral knowledge is by making a series of particular moral judgments, and building up increasingly sophisticated concepts that way. Building up the concept of cruelty involves being able to see that it’s bad, just as building up the concept of red involves seeing that it’s a color. Just as “this is red, so this is colored” isn’t a good explanation (it’s not illuminating to someone who has the concept of red, as they will already know that red things are colored), so “this is cruel, so it’s wrong” is not a good explanation. To assess particularism on this front, then, we’d want to know how we learn to make moral judgments, and how we employ them: when it looks like we’re using generalizations, are they just heuristics, to help us remember the key features of our concepts, or are they really linking distinct ideas?

2. Explanatory Principles are just impossible somehow (-because they can’t be systematic, as the moral landscape is too rich; or because there are no moral features with the same valence in all situations; or whatever). I’m less swayed by these suggestions.

How might we spell out the way that reasons work, so as to acknowledge the particularist push?

1. Dancy: resultance. That a painting is beautiful is the result of its colors; but those colors in a different setting might not produce beauty. Resultance is familiar and primitive; we can intuitively pick out the proper level at which to describe the resultance (-the level of colors in the painting rather than the level of brushes of paint, for example). And explanation isn’t a matter of subsuming particular cases under generalities, but of “narrative”: an explanation is supposed to help someone to see a situation as we do, not to justify by appealing to agreed-upon principles. The authors think this is a worrisome account: we should take a narrative or “resultance base” to count as an explanation only when it plays a certain epistemic role – that we take the fact that an act caused harm as the resultance base for its being cruel only when we take some act’s having caused harm to be something that generally does tell us that that act was cruel (it licenses the inference in this and in other relevantly similar situations). I’m not sure what would let us distinguish between something’s being nothing more than a resultance base and something’s being the first part of an inference, except for answers to questions like the content of the concepts involved (doing harm/being cruel, etc), or about the practice and value of practical reason.

2. “For the most part” generalizations, which aim to give insight into the nature of a concept. It is in the nature of lying to be wrong. It’s not always wrong, but when it’s not wrong, there’s a reason: there’s some other, deeper moral trouble in the area, or an agreement has been made to lie in a game. The question is now: how do we get our understanding of the nature of a type of activity, and the circumstances in which its valence can switch? If we think that this understanding is just a summary of previous knowledge, we can’t use moral principles to criticize our responses to situations, as this summary always takes our responses as inputs. But if we think that we can be led – perhaps by experience – to a grip on some sort of for the most part generalization, we might be able to use that self-critically, which would allow those generalizations to serve the sort of role Principles do (at least in that capacity).

 

Things I’d like to think more about:

-how to flesh out an understanding of rationality on which it makes sense not to demand that practical reason operate based on principles; the reasons for pushing for or against a robust role for principles in practical reason, and in particular, how this business about self-criticism lines up with the operation of principles

-whether there are “unprincipled” sorts of recognition/interpretation/judgment going on in our physical lives (recognizing a chair, etc) and, if so, whether there’s a possible analogy in the moral case

Further reading:

Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind

Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons

Julia Annas: Virtue Ethics

I bought the Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory way back in my sophomore year of college, I think. I saw it in a local Borders and didn’t buy it, but thought about it for weeks afterwards. Finally I made the trek back out, and came back with a much heavier backpack. I’ve only read bits and pieces of it, but I did a little bit of thinking about Aristotle’s ethics in the last few terms, so I’m dipping back into it.

My (quite appropriate) starting point was Julia Annas’s piece on virtue ethics, which focuses on classical virtue ethics. A virtue is a disposition to act, and to act for reasons, which sets it apart from habit: when a virtuous person acts in a way that demonstrates her virtue, she’s choosing to act in accordance with the disposition rather than reacting according to some conditioning. Moral education requires the agent to ask what the virtues are and what makes them valuable, which leads her to a deeper grasp of the virtues. We may not be able to express this deeper grasp in rules, but it will help us to act better: we’ll become more sensitive to the demands of the virtues, and to way that more and more particular and specific aspects of situations influence those demands. This is where practical reason comes in: it allows us to see a situation properly, and, upon seeing it in that way, to respond appropriately and to understand why our response is appropriate. (It’s not a matter of having specific ends and coming up with the means to achieve them; instead, practical reason helps us tell what our action in a given circumstance should be.) This stuff about the role of practical reason will, I think, come up a lot in this blog. I bought Sarah Broadie’s Ethics with Aristotle recently, and she has a very different (and philosophically interesting) view about Aristotle, which I’m still trying to come to terms with. I’m also interested in thinking about ethical particularism in general, and how (whether) it links up to this business about practical wisdom. Stay tuned.

Anyway. Annas makes an interesting point later on, about the common charge that eudaimonism leaves the virtuous person unacceptably egoistic. Here she says: “The person who aims at living a flourishing life by living in a fair, generous, and brave way is not aiming at her good, as opposed to the good of others. Still less is she aiming at some state of herself. Living in a flourishing way is an activity, the ongoing activity of a life, and living in a brave, generous, and so on way is a specification of what that is.” (522). The idea seems to be that the virtuous person isn’t directed towards anything other than virtuous action: all it is to live in a flourishing way is to live in a virtuous way, and living in a virtuous way involves a correct apprehension of the demands of the circumstances upon us, etc. etc., that doesn’t take our self-interest into account. Presumably the idea is that this apprehension has motivating force – we do this because we see it as just, not because we see it as just and think that behaving justly is the way to our own best happiness. There’s just no room for self-interested motivation in this picture.

This way of seeing the virtuous person’s action seems in some tension with the idea that the virtuous person has one final end of action, and that it’s eudaimonia. One way to get away from that might be to pick up the idea that eudaimonia is pretty strongly characterized by the virtues – that it’s contentless without them, and that it doesn’t make sense to say that someone could aim at eudaimonia in the way that we think we could aim at some ordinary end (making money, or whatever). Annas does earlier suggest something like this. She says that someone who endorses a sort of classical virtue ethics is endorsing the claim that the life in accordance with the virtues is the best specification of the eudaimon life, without necessarily knowing what either is: we take the virtuous life to be the flourishing life, and then try to figure out what that means by engaging in the sort of moral education that develops the virtues. (We notably don’t start with a set of criteria for the eudaimon life and then identify the virtuous life as that life.)

I’m on board with the idea that the virtuous person develops the virtues in some way that lacks essential reference to herself. And we might also think that this means that she doesn’t need any external motivation to become a virtuous person: it’s just part of the way she is, already, that she takes virtue to be important, or, better, that she is rationally inclined to respond as a virtuous person would. But there’s more to the story in Aristotle, at least – it looks like we’re supposed to take contemplation to be a good on par with (or dominant over) practical reason/the exercise of the virtues, and that we’re supposed to do so in recognition of its status as an excellence of the highest part of us. If that’s so, then we might think that the real reason the virtues are significant is that practical reason is an excellence of a part of our soul. So maybe the development and exercise of the virtues doesn’t involve any egoism, because we become virtuous without egoism. But if what gives value to the virtues is something like their connection with practical reason, and if what gives value to practical reason is essentially egoistic, that might make us worry a little bit (especially if we don’t think that Aristotle saw the virtues as ‘responses to intrinsic value in the world’, but rather thought that the virtues were valuable because, say, our ability to hit the mean required the exercise of, and dominance of, practical reason.) So even if the virtuous person isn’t required to invoke her own good in her justifications for specific actions, it’ll come in as the (final, reflective) justification of living as she does – the ultimate reason that living virtuously counts as a specification of the good life.

That might be too fast – I’ll have to think about this more – but it seems like something to be worried about.

[Note: I put some words into Annas' mouth at the beginning, because the piece is pretty short and encyclopedic - I hope they're words that get her right, rather than importations of Richard Kraut in some places and John McDowell in others. In any case, don't take my word for it that this is what she thinks!]

Further reading: Annas 2001, “Moral Knowledge as Practical Knowledge” (on the difference between classical and instrumental views of practical reason)

Doris 2002, Lack of Character; Harman 1999, “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error”

Sreenivasan 2002, “Errors about Errors: Virtue Theory and Trait Attribution”

Statement of Intent

I’ve got a free summer and a whole lot of reading I’d like to do before the end of it. Writing about what I read helps me think about it, and what better place to write than here?