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Aristotle, Christine Korsgaard, Emmanuel Lévinas, G.W.F. Hegel, Graham Harman, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, obligation, Plato, skholiast (blogger), virtue ethics
The work of Harvard analytical ethicist Christine Korsgaard is justly renowned, for her clever attempt to reconstruct a Kantian ethics in the abstract terms of contemporary analytical moral philosophy, without the philosophy of religion and other elements of Kant’s philosophy that contemporary philosophers find hard to defend. She has received less attention for her interesting takes on the history of Western ethics – which suggest to me some potential problems with her overall project.
In the prologue to The Sources of Normativity, probably her most important and influential work, Korsgaard provides what she calls a “very concise history” (her emphasis) of the connections between metaphysics and ethics in Western philosophy. I noted recently that the concept of obligation is central to Korsgaard’s philosophy, as it is to Lévinas’s; this prologue provides us with historical reasons why an obligation-centred philosophy might be a worthwhile project.
Plato and Aristotle, Korsgaard notes, had a philosophy focused on excellence (aretē, often translated “virtue”) rather than obligation, as do most of those who today reject Kantian and utilitarian ethics and are therefore usually lumped into the catch-all category of “virtue ethics.” Their ethics had much more to do more with what is good, what we should care about, than with what others oblige us to do. But, Korsgaard adds, in Plato and Aristotle this account depends on metaphysics, on a view of the way things really are. For them, a thing’s highest perfection and potential – its form – was in some sense more real than the existing particular thing as it actually is.
Korsgaard correctly notes that Christianity changed Western philosophy’s emphasis, away from excellence and toward obligation and law, with God as the lawgiver. But what if we no longer assume that God is the source of ethics? What we cannot do, she says, is go back to Plato and Aristotle’s world of excellence. “Because for us, the world is no longer first and foremost form. It is matter.” (4) By identifying ultimate reality with matter, we have separated the real from the good; we no longer look at actual things as reflecting a higher and better potential. And this means that a Platonic or Aristotelian ethics of excellence is no longer available to us.
What Korsgaard does not say, however, is that this new, hard, scientific world is entirely bereft of value. Indeed, she sees that it cannot be. (Although she does not put it in these terms, science’s claims to truth are themselves grounded in value.) She says:
If the real and the good are no longer one, value must find its way into the world somehow. Form must be imposed on the world of matter. This is the work of art, the work of obligation, and it brings us back to Kant. And this is what we should expect. For it was Kant who completed the revolution, when he said that reason — which is form — isn’t in the world, but is something that we impose upon it. The ethics of autonomy is the only one consistent with the metaphysics of the modern world, and the ethics of autonomy is an ethics of obligation. (5)
Now I think there is something very wrong with this paragraph. Korsgaard has accepted that value has a real place in the world, even the world of a modern scientific metaphysics; and she then claims that value’s place in the world is one of obligation (as opposed, by implication, to excellence). The next parts of the book flesh out her account of the ethics of obligation, but let us leave that aside for the moment. Let us assume for now that Korsgaard, in the rest of the book, succeeds in founding ethics on obligation. Isn’t there still something missing?
Korsgaard’s account of value, as provided here, derives that value only from obligation. If her account in the rest of the book were correct, it might be the case that all moral value comes from obligation. But is that the only kind of value in the world? Korsgaard never tries to argue that, and it’s hard to see how she could. She opens the prologue by saying: “It is the most striking fact about human life that we have values. We think of ways that things could be better, more perfect, and so of course different, than they are; and of ways that we ourselves could be better, more perfect, and so of course different, than we are.” (1) But things are not obliged to do or be anything, certainly not on any Kantian account of morality. Indeed if one were to imagine obligation being applied to things, it would likely have to be on something like the Greek teleological metaphysics that Korsgaard explicitly rejects: it is the purpose of a knife to cut well, therefore it is that knife’s duty to cut well.
There is, then, a yawning gap in Korsgaard’s historical account of value, even if we take her account of morality and obligation to be true. At a minimum, this ethics must be accompanied by an aesthetics. Some accounts of ethics – including those I’m most sympathetic with – do not restrict their concern to morality in the strict sense, and might therefore include aesthetics, but this appears not to be the case with Korsgaard’s. And while Korsgaard’s quote above tantalizingly lists “the work of art” along with “the work of obligation” above, suggesting the importance of aesthetics, it seems on a fuller reading that this is only apparent: when she uses the word “art” elsewhere in this passage, she contrasts it with what is natural, and so appears to mean only “artifice,” the Xunzian point that we are not naturally good but need to work on it.
And so it seems that aesthetics, at least, is missing from Korsgaard’s account. Just as we need an account of how people’s actions can be right and wrong, so we need an account of how things can be beautiful and ugly. Kant did not have this problem since he had a highly developed aesthetics, but it is not clear whether Korsgaard buys it. But it would seem, on Korsgaard’s account, that one must either adopt something very much like Kant’s aesthetics (as she does with his ethics) or return in some respect to a semi-premodern metaphysical account that sees value in the world while still taking science into consideration – as Hegel tried to do, for example. If one takes this latter route with aesthetics, however, it would seem that one is compelled to do so with ethics too.
I recently noted the strong similarities between Korsgaard’s philosophy of obligation and that of Emmanuel Lévinas. Lévinas, in one of his better-known essays, tells us that “ethics is first philosophy” – and by “ethics” he means obligation. But, I’m told, Speculative Realist Graham Harman retorts that “aesthetics is first philosophy.” I’m wondering if issues like this are what Harman has in mind: we don’t just need an account of moral value, we need an account of value as such.
In his excellent post which quotes Harman to this effect, Skholiast adds a quote from Wittgenstein that “Ethics and aesthetics are one.” I’m not sure I would go that far; but it seems to me that there must be some sort of connection between the two, a connection that Korsgaard implies only to ignore. We could, I suppose, say that axiology is first philosophy – “axiology” meaning the study of value – though that phrase doesn’t sound nearly as cutting as either Lévinas’s or Harman’s.
I am sympathetic to your concern that Korsgaard is too reliant on the deontological dimension of value at the expense of non-obligatory notions. However, I think it is too strong to say that “Korsgaard’s account of value, as provided here, derives that value only from obligation.” Even in the Sources of Normativity, there is room for value which does not derive from obligation (moral or otherwise), though admittedly it is not immediately apparent how she would understand aesthetic value.
This non-obligatory source of value is our contingent ‘practical identity,’ or what she sometimes refers to as the description under which we value ourselves. For example, my practical identity may in part be constituted by taking myself to be a vegetarian, brother and philosopher, and so on, such that identifying myself with certain roles, projects and goals gives me reason act in certain ways. This does connect up with a story about identities that we cannot forsake, and so ones that give us unconditional reasons to act that bind us with the force of moral necessity. But there is a reason-giving role for practical identities which does not rely on the deontological account which she focuses upon. I think it is a troublingly voluntarist conception of value, where something is valuable merely because we treat it as valuable, but the non-deontological account is there nonetheless.
Thanks, Tom. I just went back to reread Korsgaard’s section on practical identity, and I’m not quite sure how you get a conception of value out of it that isn’t derived from obligation. What practical identity seems to produce, on her account, is law, though in some respect a law we give ourselves. What makes us practically rational being is following such laws. And it seems to me that the nature of law (in Korsgaard’s sense and possibly in general) is to obligate.
In this context Korsgaard makes interesting references to nonhuman animals, who don’t have law and (it seems) don’t even have reasons to act, in her sense, since reason is tied up with cognitive reflection. I’m not sure that any sort of normativity applies to them – that anything can really be said to be good or bad for them – on her account.
I get the feeling I’m missing something in trying to understand her here. But what?
I think that the distinction between obligatory and non-obligatory dimensions of value is somewhat masked by the argumentative structure of the book. Practical identity is invoked in connection with integrity: those things which we could not do and remain who we are (when we say, ‘I couldn’t live with myself if I did that…’). In disobeying your deep practical identity, then you are betraying yourself and thereby disregarding a kind of obligation that stems from who you are. Korsgaard contends that all obligation can be shown to have this source. Should we dig deep enough — even down to the reflective structure of our consciousness itself — we will find that obligation is always curiously reflexive. But this sits beside the idea that our contingent practical identities both orient much of our actual practical reasoning and in large part supply genuine reasons to which correct reasoning must be sensitive.
Since Korsgaard is primarily interested in morality, and like a good Kantian takes its injuctions to be obligatory and categorical, then she emphasises those cases where my practical identity runs so deep as to be a law to me. Ultimately, she focuses upon those identities that we supposedly cannot escape, such as being a reflective agent, and whose inescapability is used to ground categorical bindingness upon us.
Yet, we have other identities that do not run so deep — those that are relatively easy to give up — which through our implicit endorsement of them gives us reasons to act, but which are not so central to who we are that ignoring them entails a serious loss of identity. For example, valuing myself under the description of ‘musician’ can give me reasons (to practice; to not sell my guitar), but in my life such a practical identity does not run so deep as to be a law to me, and requirements or shifts within my more fundamental identities might recommend or necessitate that I forsake this more shallow practical identity.
That at least is how I understand the appeal to practical identity in The Sources of Normativity. The non-obligatory dimension fades into the background though because of the thrust of the book in trying to find non-contingent identities to found morality upon; but I think it’s still there nonetheless.
Thanks, Tom. This is fascinating – pulling an aesthetics out of Korsgaard’s ethics, so to speak. In some respects it confirms my belief that Korsgaard is among the best of the analytic philosophers – even though, like any analytic thinker, she addresses her work to a relatively narrow problem (normativity), one can still see in it a larger, thoughtful worldview. I wrote a second post on Korsgaard’s prologue which I’m putting up later today, discussing her views on Christianity – I’d be very interested to hear your take on it.
Amod wrote:
Why not if you wish to? It’s arguable that the Catholic Church via Augustine and Thomas Aquinas has kept faith with Plato and Aristotle, Plotinus and Dionysius the Areopagite. The natural law theory of the foundation of moral action is based on form, substance and connaturality something that has more metaphysical weight than the psychological conditioning which inculcates the sense of duty. Not that such sense does not form part of the apparatus of the good citizen, parent, spouse etc but that it is surpassed by a deeper inalterable reality. We may also come to see that our sense of duty was misguided.
Well, we can’t very well stay with God as the source of ethics if we don’t believe he exists. (I don’t think any creator or omnipotent being could even be omnibenevolent, let alone the source of goodness. Now can we go back to an Aristotelian ethics without God? Well, I think the problem she wants to identify is that we cannot take value or telos to be not found in nature, the way Aristotle thought it was, if we wish to retain a scientific worldview. Darwin tells us that what look like purposes are actually accidents – this may be one reason why Wilber and Aurobindo are so tempted by intelligent design without having a vested interest in Abrahamic monotheism.
Now I don’t think Korsgaard is right about this. It seems to me that there is value in nature, expressed in animals’ own desires and motivations; animals, I would say, have reasons to act, and things can be good or bad for them. Korsgaard seems to say that we can only say that about beings who can reflect on goodness or badness, and that doesn’t seem justified to me.
It is the characterisation of the Christian ethical system as being based on law and obligation that I was questioning. If there is a taint of that it is due to the long Roman sojourn. I recollect from my schoolboy Latin that Virgils favourite epithet for Aeneas was ‘pius Aeneas’ which has the flavour of filial piety and loyalty to the traditions and institutions of his forebears. Other modern ethical system have an ontological aspect such as Singers which ask ‘what is it to be human’. Is evolutionism the new ontology? Is this the return of the repressed?
Christianity’s relationship to law and obligation has been complex from the earliest days – a wrestling match between Jewish law and a more Neoplatonic kind of antinomianism. You can see Paul struggling with it in the New Testament, in Galatians and especially Romans. What matters is having Christ in your heart, not the law – oh, but wait, the law still matters too somehow. Early Christians fought hard over this question, and it never goes away. More or less the same question animated the Reformation: are we partially saved by doing works that follow God’s law, or by faith alone?
This is true; but the particularly juridical mode of engaging with this hornets’ nest is (I agree with Michael) in part a function of the fact that the church in the west wound up filling a political vacuum. The law-court metaphor that became the great framing device for the church in the west is not universal. In the Orthodox world it is more common to encounter talk of the church as a hospital than a court, and the “care of souls” is less legal-sounding. E.g.: purgatory in the west is still about punishment, even though its doctrinal motive (and even its name) is clearly cathartic, not punitive. Again, numerous Eastern Orthodox spiritual writers emphasize that the fire of hell and the glory of Heaven are the same glory; the whole question then becomes the state of the soul, and damnation is not an imposed exile to some prison. I don’t say that this solves everything; nor that a medical framework is inherently and without further qualification less dangerous than a legal one — or indeed, any less “legal” — but it is a different emphasis.
Amod: “Well, we can’t very well stay with God as the source of ethics if we don’t believe he exists.”
Even if we believe in the existence of God, there is the well-known problem of determining whether something is good because God (allegedly) commands it or whether God (allegedly) commands something because it is good.
There isn’t anything absurd in holding together that (a) God exists, and (b) Ethics is independent of God’s commands, OR (a) God exists, and b) God is not a “law-giver” and does not issue any ethical commandments.
“What we cannot do, she says, is go back to Plato and Aristotle’s world of excellence.”
If this suggests or is intended to suggest that she thinks that Kantian ethics and Aristotelian ethics are incompatible, that would be a mistake.
In an interview, Korsgaard acknowledges that the two are not incompatible and actually have “deep affinities” between them.
Interviewer: In current moral philosophy there is often drawn a sharp contrast between an Aristotelian type of moral theory and a Kantian type of moral theory. Your work on Aristotle and Kant suggests that—despite some differences—there are strong similarities between the two philosophers. Would you
say that a synthesis between Kant and Aristotle is the way to a richer conception of morality answering the criticisms raised against Kant’s ethics by defenders of so-called virtue ethics?
Korsgaard: I would say that. I have never been able to see why people think that Aristotle’s philosophy and Kant’s philosophy are opposed. I myself see very
deep affinities between them. Both of them think that ethics is an expression of practical rationality…
http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/CPR.CMK.Interview.pdf
Thanks for the link, Thill. The interview is helpful for elucidating key features of Korsgaard’s thought. But it’s not quite right to say that she thinks Aristotle’s and Kant’s ethics are compatible. She thinks that Aristotle’s moral psychology and psychology of virtue – one part of his ethics – are compatible with Kant’s account of the basic principles of practical reason, a part of his. Pick and choose one part of Aristotle, and it is compatible with another chosen part of Kant. That doesn’t mean the whole thing is compatible – that Aristotle’s account of the principles of practical reason would be compatible with Kant’s – and I think this is why Korsgaard opens Sources by saying we need to move from excellence to obligation.
I don’t see that she qualifies her claim that way at least in the interview. She, in fact, makes the claim that she doesn’t see any good reason for thinking that Kant’s (moral) philosophy and Aristotle’s moral philosophy are incompatible. I suppose this implies, not that every darn statement that Kant and Aristotle made on ethics or ethical issues are compatible, but that the core, constitutive claims of their respective moral theories are compatible.
She most certainly thinks that Aristotle’s ethics of virtue and Kant’s “deontological” ethics are compatible.
As she puts it:
“I think that Aristotle gives us a brilliant theory of virtue in that sense and a very subtle moral psychology to go with it. Kant, on the other hand, gives us a better account of the basis and content of the principles of practical reason. But I think that each of these accounts is almost completely compatible with the other and together they amount to a very powerful theory.”
Speaking of obligation-centered ethics, is there anything in the West which surpasses the Gita, or better, the Bushido (Samurai ethics)of Japan?
But, then, there is the interesting Japanese movie Bushido (1964 – Bushido Zankoku Monogotari) which powerfully shows the harmful outcomes of mindless adherence to obligation or duty at the expense of important contextual details.
That’s exactly the passage I was referring to. I don’t think there’s any reason whatsoever to think that Korsgaard believes Aristotle’s “theory of virtue and moral psychology” to be exhaustive, or even close to exhaustive, of Aristotle’s ethics. The way she phrases the passage makes it pretty clear that the “powerful theory” she speaks of is a synthesis of the two – it puts together the “account” of virtue and moral psychology in Aristotle with the “account” of practical reason in Kant. And moreover one specific kind of synthesis. The passage is strongly suggestive that if one instead put together Aristotle’s account of practical reason with Kant’s account of moral psychology, the result would be disastrous.
Attractive woman to George Bernard Shaw: “We should have a child together – imagine a child with my body and your brain!”
George Bernard Shaw to attractive woman: “Yes, but what if it had my body and your brain?”
That doesn’t mean Aristotle’s account of practical reason is compatible with Kant’s, or that Kant’s account of virtue is compatible with Aristotle’s.
Korsgaard: “I would say that. I have never been able to see why people think that Aristotle’s philosophy and Kant’s philosophy are opposed.”
Notice the broad scope of the terms “Aristotle’s philosophy” and “Kant’s philosophy” here. Of course, she has in mind their respective moral philosophy, but it still a sweep and not qualified by any references to “parts” of those philosophies.
If she does think that there are significant incompatibilities between “parts” of Kant’s and “parts” of Aristotle’s ethical theories, one would like to know what exactly they are.
If you are correct in thinking that she allows for incompatibilities between the core claims of Aristotle’s moral theory and Kant’s moral theory, I would be interested in any examples she proffers to illustrate such incompatibilities.
Regardless of her views, it is clear that the notions of excellence, duty, and virtue are in fact complementary. Performance of duty or obligation is one form of excellence and has been applauded in a variety of ethical traditions as a cardinal virtue.
“Regardless of her views, it is clear that the notions of excellence, duty, and virtue are in fact complementary. Performance of duty or obligation is one form of excellence and has been applauded in a variety of ethical traditions as a cardinal virtue.”
But what about the Nazi concentration camp guards or gas chamber “supervisors” or the IDF officers and generals who commit war crimes against the Palestinians as a matter of duty? Are their scrupulous performances of their duties examples of excellence or virtue?
I am compelled to revise my earlier claim and hold that performance of duty is not necessarily equivalent to excellence or virtue. Surely, the nature of those duties, which includes consideration of consequences, determines whether the performance of those duties constitutes excellence or virtue.
Thus, just because something is an obligation does not imply that it would be morally good to carry it out.
A mercenary who breaks a contract or promise to carry out an assassination may actually be doing something morally good in breaking the promise or failing to carry out this obligation.
Schopenhauer had some interesting criticisms of Kant’s ethical theory.
You can read some of those criticisms at
http://www.animal-rights-library.com/texts-c/schopenhauer01.htm
Thanks to Thill for this link to Korsgaard’s interview. I have long thought that MacIntyre’s account (in After Virtue and elsewhere) where he starkly juxtaposes Kant & post-Kantian ethics to Aristotle & St Thomas is one-sided. I don’t dispute that there are differences, but I think there can be a real dialogue between them. Of course, MacIntyre also agrees with Michael Reidy’s point above that there is some significant continuity between Christian and pagan ethics.
I’m also interested in what Tom points out re. Korsgaard on ‘practical identity.’ This contingent and perhaps tentative set of commitments seems connected in some ways to what Kant would have called the considerations of prudence. Nussbaum as you know has a good deal to say about how Aristotle mitigated the Platonic quest for a safe or non-fragile goodness, and this mitigation transpires to a great extent precisely in the realm of the prudential, the practical, even the accidental — the approximate and not the absolute. In my opinion, even if we agree with Levinas that ‘ethics is first philosophy’, this cannot be an ethics that refers us to an abstract canon of duties. In some way, Levinas’ ethics is always grounded in the transcendence that is the particular. And there is sense in which this is very close to arete, I think.
I agree with all concerned that the gap between Kant and pre-Kantian ethics is not necessarily as big as it is made out to be. J.B. Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy is a magnificent book-length treatise that presents Kant’s thought as the logical outcome of the philosophies that preceded him. Having said that, I do think there are huge differences between Kant and Aristotle, just as there were huge differences among premodern modes of thought. (The Stoics were in many respects closer to Kant than they are to Aristotle. I think it’s no coincidence that MacIntyre barely speaks of Hellenistic philosophy in his work, and what little he does say sometimes borders on the ridiculous.)
Re practical identity: yes, this does seem to be a place where the niceties of everyday life find their way back into the philosophy. In some respects I think a thinker like Śāntideva tries to avoid letting them back in – but he can only do this by advocating a monastic way of life which reduces them as far as possible.
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