Love of All Wisdom

My previous post discusses the problem that academic philosophy doesn’t do a whole lot to make us better people; its main defence is that it isn’t supposed to. But then what is?

Aaron Stalnaker addresses this point in his book Overcoming Our Evil. It compares Augustine and Xunzi, two thinkers from faraway contexts who share a commonly pessimistic assessment of human nature. I had some serious methodological concerns about Stalnaker’s work in the sixth chapter of my dissertation – basically that the work isn’t as relevant to constructive ethical reflection as it claims to be – but I’ve softened a bit on those concerns since writing the dissertation. While I still don’t think that Stalnaker’s work itself makes the constructive contributions it claims to make, I do think that its categories are helpful for others who do want to make such contributions.

Specifically: what Augustine and Xunzi have in common, according to Stalnaker, is “chastened intellectualism.” While they agree that we can know a great deal of the truth about how we should live, they also agree that knowing the truth is not enough to make us act accordingly – contradicting at least some readings of Plato. Some sort of further practice is required. Pierre Hadot points out that in Roman times such practices were viewed as integral to philosophy. (Jonathan Schofer, on my dissertation committee, kept insisting that I pay greater attention to Śāntideva’s accounts of practices, and now I’m seeing why.)

I’m very sympathetic to such an account, from my personal experience. It was one thing to realize that my own attitudes and behaviours were the big problem in my life. It has been quite another to actually change those attitudes and behaviours.

But then seekers like me face a problem. Augustine and Xunzi recommend practices that are embedded within a particular tradition – Christianity and Confucianism respectively – each of which I find highly problematic. There’s a lot I disagree with in Buddhism as well; I don’t think any tradition has managed to fully grasp truth (though I also certainly don’t claim to have done so myself!) Some traditions of practice (like Goenka’s) claim to be non-sectarian techniques, but nevertheless incorporate a great deal of their tradition’s own teachings. (At the same time, Goenka’s technique didn’t do a lot for me, with one major exception.)

What then are we seekers to do? Should we swallow the practices of an existing tradition whole even while disagreeing with it, as a part of developing a necessary humility? Or should we pick and choose to make our own practice, retaining intellectual integrity but giving ourselves less chance to learn from what’s out there?

I’ve been waiting for these survey results, by philosophy professors Eric Schwitzgebel and Joshua Rust, to come out. (Schwitzgebel is a fellow blogger whom I referred to last time.) I was among the 200 philosophers they surveyed at the 2007 APA conference, identifying myself as an ethicist. The answers I gave appear to match the answers most other people gave: ethicists are not usually better people than non-ethicists. That is (respondents said when they elaborated their opinions), ethicists are not typically more conscientious, fair, generous, honest, kind, selfless or thoughtful than other philosophers, or than non-academics.

Schwitzgebel and Rust surveyed philosophers as the people who presumably knew ethicists the best. Obviously there are problems with the extremely non-random sample in the survey methodology (whoever wanted a cookie or candy at the conference filled out the survey). Still it’s useful because the result is, on the one hand, pretty obvious to anyone who hangs around philosophy departments (I had no doubt the results would turn out as they did), and on the other hand, somewhat troubling. If studying ethics doesn’t make us more ethical, in some sense, then is it worth doing?

The question is unfair to some extent. Many ethicists focus on the application of ethics to very specific contexts, where it’s not obvious what the right thing to do is. Others focus on the nature of ethical claims: how can we really say something is good or right, in the first place? Answering either of these questions isn’t really supposed to make us more virtuous people, any more than studying sociology or physics is.

And yet there’s still a problem here. What if we do want to be better people? Academic ethics, at least in some cases, should teach us what it is to be a good person. But that doesn’t make us good people, any more than we become good soccer players just by knowing what a good soccer player does. It might help, but really we need something else. What is that something else? I’ll try to say more in my next post.

Rosalind Hursthouse has an entry on virtue ethics in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where she tries to explain why “happiness” is not an adequate translation of the Greek word eudaimonia (human flourishing, blessedness, good life). The trouble with “happiness,” she says, is that in contemporary English

it connotes something which is subjectively determined. It is for me, not for you, to pronounce on whether I am happy, or on whether my life, as a whole, has been a happy one, for, barring, perhaps, advanced cases of self-deception and the suppression of unconscious misery, if I think I am happy then I am — it is not something I can be wrong about.

I think Hursthouse is severely understating matters here. (continue reading…)