Category Archives: Virtue

Can collectivities be virtuous?

24 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by in Action, Buddhism, Christianity, Epistemology, Foundations of Ethics, Humility, Philosophy of Science, Politics, Social Science, Virtue

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There’s been a great discussion going on in the comments to last week’s post on humility and science. This week I’m going to focus on only one of the themes mentioned, which takes us in a different direction from that post but is interesting in its own right.

My post recounted Carl Sagan’s claim that although “religions” claimed an ideal of humility, science was actually more humble; I argued that the two were in fact very similar. A comment from Ben acutely pointed out something I had been missing, a way in which Sagan was right that the tradition was different. Sagan, Ben points out, is defending “not the humility of individuals, but the humility of the whole tradition.” Science as a whole is able to admit when it is wrong, in a way that Christianity and Buddhism are not. In a following dialogue, Ben and I agree that science maintains an institutional humility that “religious” traditions do not, though those other traditions likely do a better job of promoting individual humility.

Other commenters took issue with this agreement, however. If you follow the comment threads on this site with any regularity, you will know that Thill and Jim Wilton do not usually agree on very much. But this time, they unanimously condemn the point shared by Ben and myself: “There is a category mistake here,” says Thill. “Traditions cannot be said to be humble or arrogant. Only individuals can be said to be humble or arrogant.”

And this is a question that well deserves further philosophical exploration. Can an institution or a tradition possess a virtue? Can a government be courageous? Can a corporation be honest? Can a tradition be humble? Continue reading →

Humility in science and other traditions

17 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Christianity, Humility, Philosophy of Science, Social Science

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I’ve lately been reading and enjoying The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan‘s manifesto against pseudoscientifc beliefs (such as alien abductions). One of the more enjoyable and thought-provoking sections of the book is a discussion of scientists’ humility: “I maintain that science is part and parcel humility. Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find. We are aware that revered scientists have been wrong. We understand human imperfection.” (32) The ideal scientist humbles herself before the truths about the natural world that she finds in her work. He quotes his wife Ann Druyan to the effect that science “is forever whispering in our ears, ‘Remember, you’re very new at this. You might be mistaken. You’ve been wrong before.'” (34-5) I hadn’t thought of science in these terms before, but I think Sagan is quite right about this – to an extent, as I’ll discuss below. Sagan repeatedly and rightly stresses the importance of uncertainty for a scientist; to live up to the ideals of scientific research requires the ability to admit we are wrong. A scientist must never be too confident in her own rightness; what first seems obvious is often exactly what turns out to be wrong, overthrown by the evidence. I think this is excellent advice for scientists to follow – or anyone else.

After quoting Druyan, Sagan proceeds immediately to add: “Despite all the talk of humility, show me something comparable in religion.” And this is where he goes astray. Continue reading →

Is compassion a virtue?

20 Sunday Mar 2011

Posted by in Christianity, Compassion, Confucianism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Mahāyāna, Pleasure, Virtue

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Thill makes an important point in response to my recent post on virtue and pleasure (as well as to a commenter named Bob). The post articulated the view, attributed to Aristotle via Julia Annas and Lorraine Besser-Jones, that the fully virtuous person will take pleasure in virtuous action. Against this position, Thill claims: “Even if you want to kill a dog or a horse in order to put it out of misery and you do it skillfully, it would still be a gross distortion to describe this act as one which gives pleasure to the agent.”

Thill is, I think, getting at an important philosophical debate here: over the value of compassion. Most of us, were we to be faced with the necessity of euthanizing a horse, would feel a painful emotion occasioned by its suffering – that is, compassion. The same would happen if we needed to discipline a child – even if, in either case, we had all the best reasons to believe that this action was the best action to take. But there is still a question: is this feeling a good thing? Continue reading →

The problem with the trolley

27 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Metaphilosophy, Morality, Prejudices and "Intuitions", Virtue

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Suppose a trolley is hurtling down a track, on which are placed five innocent people with no chance to escape in time. You are standing beside a switch that will redirect the trolley onto a track where stands one innocent person, who also has no chance to escape. Should you flip the switch, and thereby kill one to save five?

Now suppose there is no track onto which the trolley can be redirected; the five innocents will be in its path no matter what happens. Instead of being beside a switch, you are standing on a bridge over the tracks, beside a very fat man looking down over the action. You can push the man over the bridge, knowing his enormous girth will stop the trolley’s movement before it hits the innocents. Should you push the man, and thereby kill one to save five?

Michael Sandel begins his famous course on Justice with this action scene, and it’s a great way to start such a course. This trolley problem, ingeniously introduced by Judith Jarvis Thomson and the late Philippa Foot, is a wonderful way to shock beginning students out of their ethical complacency. For nearly all people faced with this problem agree they would kill one to save five in the first situation but not the second. After hearing one case they think there’s an easy principle by which to decide the right action; after hearing the second, they are forced to admit that there isn’t. Continue reading →

The pleasures of virtue

20 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by in Confucianism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Pleasure, Psychology, Virtue

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What is the connection between virtue and pleasure? The question came up in my discussion with Elisa Freschi on the previous post, and is in some respects a central question in the early history of Western ethics. At December’s Eastern APA conference, Lorraine Besser-Jones gave a really interesting talk on Aristotle’s approach to this connection, informed by some discussions in contemporary psychology. For Aristotle, she claimed, pleasure is an intrinsic part of virtue: nobody would call a man generous who does not enjoy acting generously. Besser-Jones wished to dispute this claim, on the grounds that virtuous activity is often not pleasurable. Continue reading →

Is happiness the purpose of life?

13 Sunday Feb 2011

Posted by in Early and Theravāda, East Asia, Epicureanism, Flourishing, Greek and Roman Tradition, Happiness, Pleasure, Serenity

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Blogger Penelope Trunk describes herself as having Asperger’s Syndrome. Her obsessive Aspergian interest seems to be in the nature of her own life – which makes her a dedicated follower of Socrates’s maxim that the unexamined life is not worth living. So while her blog is supposedly about career advice, it often winds up being highly philosophical. Recently, she’s said a fair bit about one of the most enduring philosophical questions: happiness.

Aristotle tells us everyone agrees the purpose of life is eudaimonia. It was once the standard to translate this term as “happiness.” This translation has started to fall out of favour, to be replaced by “flourishing” – and rightly so. For it’s pretty clear that whatever eudaimonia is – and I think Aristotle deliberately makes it hard to pin down – it is not what we usually understand by “happiness.”

Consider: near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle tells us that everyone agrees that eudaimonia is the ultimate purpose of human life; we just don’t agree what constitutes it. But if this eudaimonia were happiness, how would we explain someone like Trunk, who has spent a great deal of time thinking about happiness – only to reject it? “I don’t want to be happy,” she says. “I want idle time to let my mind wander because the unhappy result is so interesting.” Continue reading →

Is there certainty beyond logic?

15 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Logic, Meditation, Philosophy of Science, Reading and Recitation, Truth

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Responding to my post on doubt, Jim Wilton agreed that “truth established through thought and logic is always subject to doubt.” But he suggested that not all knowledge or truth is a product of logic – and, he claimed, perhaps this non-logical knowledge can be certain, indubitable.

I agree that not all knowledge is a product of logic. This is one of the reasons I have spent a great deal of time discussing what Thomas Kasulis calls intimacy worldviews, background approaches to philosophy that are not derived from direct argument. I agree with the thinkers in such traditions that truth is not merely something expressed in linguistic propositions.

Where I disagree strongly, however, is on the view that such non-logical knowledge can be a source of genuine certainty. Continue reading →

Living with doubt

05 Sunday Dec 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Certainty and Doubt, Courage, Fear, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Leadership, Philosophy of Language

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I’d like to say some more about questions of doubt and certainty, which were central to my recent discussion of Wittgenstein. I explored this question at greatest length in the post called “Certain knowledge”, but the conclusions there were tentative – which is to say, not certain.

To recap a little first: This question was Descartes‘s biggest passion. He wanted one and only one Archimedean point, one firm foundation that could not be doubted, on which he could build the rest of his philosophy. And to doubt that he was doubting would be self-contradictory, so the existence of his doubt and therefore of his own existence became certain. “I think, therefore I am.”

But Descartes was wrong: the existence of the thinking self can be, and is, doubted all the time. Almost all Buddhist tradition rests on just such a doubt: the self is not real. If there is an indubitable Cartesian foundation, one must take it back to “There is thinking, therefore there is being.” But is there even this? Descartes argues that to doubt one’s own doubt (or doubt one’s own thinking) is self-contradictory. To establish this point for certain, however, does require that one accept the logic law of non-contradiction – and accept it as an absolute law, brooking no exceptions ever. Graham Priest’s dialetheist epistemology denies this very point: only by allowing that certain contradictions can be true, he says, can we successfully resolve the liar paradox or Zeno’s paradoxes. Continue reading →

A little bird told me he’s fine, thanks

24 Wednesday Nov 2010

Posted by in Christianity, Confucianism, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Honesty, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, Rites, Truth, Vedas and Mīmāṃsā

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Edward Feser has a fascinating post up on the ethics of lying. Feser, perhaps not surprisingly to his regular readers, follows Augustine in taking up a position in some respects even more extreme than Kant’s: a lie is always wrong, and a lie by omission – like Aśvatthāma the elephant – is just as much a lie.

Not agreeing with Feser’s Augustinian presuppositions, I also don’t agree with his conclusions. I do think that some unambiguous lies can be right because of their consequences, at the very least in extreme cases like the murderer at the door who asks you whether you’re sheltering his next victim (to which Feser refers, as did Kant). But that’s not what’s interesting about Feser’s post, nor is it his point (at least, not directly). Rather, he’s asking what a lie actually is. For him this question is vital because it directly implies which behaviours with respect to the truth are ever permitted and which are not. But it’s still an essential question for those of us who believe that there is something merely bad about all lying, even if that badness can on occasion be outweighed by other factors. Which speech acts possess that intrinsic badness?

Feser says many profound and interesting things in response to this question, but I was particularly struck by one of the first, on pleasantries, and I’m going to spend today’s post riffing on that point. According to Feser, it is not a lie to say “I’m fine, thanks” in reply to “how are you?” when you are not feeling fine, for in such a context “I’m fine, thanks” does not actually mean that you are feeling fine or doing well. Continue reading →

Politics as ethical analogy: Plato and Candrakīrti

27 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by in Confucianism, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Mahāyāna, Metaphilosophy, Politics

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Even if one accepts Śāntideva’s idea that political participation is harmful to a good life, that doesn’t mean that one must be finished with political thought. For there’s another key way that politics enters into reflection: as analogy. The politician has often appeared in ethical texts as a figure for the individual; we learn what is good or bad in a single human life by examining what is good or bad for a king or a state.

The most famous use of this analogy between individual and state is likely in Plato’s Republic. In Book II, Socrates reminds Glaucon that one can typically see bigger things more clearly than smaller things. Similarly it is easier to observe justice in a state than in an individual, so we should first ask what justice is in a state, and then we will be more able to see what it is in an individual. The city or state is larger than the individual; “perhaps, then, there is more justice in the larger thing, and it will be easier to learn what it is.” (368)

Plato’s approach, of using the state to illuminate the individual, is not obvious or natural; it was not taken by the Confucians, as far as I can tell. Confucius in Analects I.2 says that those who behave well toward their parents don’t start revolutions; Mencius argues for benevolence over profit by arguing that a state of benevolent people will flourish. Here – not so surprising given the early Confucians’ social context – the point seems to be to figure out how to run a state, and individual conduct is addressed for its relevance to that goal, rather than the other way ’round.

But one can find a similar approach to Plato’s in a more surprising place, where it plays a different role: the work of the Buddhist thinker Candrakīrti (whom I also discussed last time). Continue reading →