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Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism and the Indeterminacy Objection

2014; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 23; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09672559.2014.940366

1466-4542

Scott Woodcock,

Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment

AbstractPhilippa Foot's virtue ethics remains an intriguing but divisive position in normative ethics. For some, the promise of grounding human virtue in natural facts is a useful method of establishing normative content. For others, the natural facts on which the virtues are established appear naively uninformed when it comes to the empirical details of our species. In response to this criticism, a new cohort of neo-Aristotelians like John Hacker-Wright attempt to defend Foot by reminding critics that the facts at stake are not claimed to be explanatory descriptions of the kind provided by empirical science. Instead, they are derived from a logical form that is presupposed when we categorize something as a living organism. Neo-Aristotelian naturalism is therefore said to be immune to the empirical defeaters put forward as criticism of the theory. I argue that neo-Aristotelians like Hacker-Wright can only rescue Foot's naturalism from being uninformed by exposing it to an indeterminacy objection: if claims about human virtue are grounded in facts about our species other than those derived from science, then the position becomes immune to empirical defeaters at the cost of being unable to generate informative normative content.Keywords: normative ethicsnaturalismvirtue ethicsteleology AcknowledgementsI would like to thank Louise Antony, Todd Calder, Margaret Cameron, John Hacker-Wright, Mark LeBar, Colin Macleod, Emer O'Hagan and Matthew Stacey for helpful discussions that led to drafts of this paper. Support for the paper was provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.Notes1 Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: OUP, 2001). Themes from the book appear in many of her prior essays. See Virtues and Vices: And Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 2003) and Moral Dilemmas: and Other Topics in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: OUP, 2003).2 Ronald L. Sandler, Character and Environment: A Virtue-Oriented Approach to Environmental Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Adam Kadlac, 'Humanizing Personhood', Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 13 (2010), pp. 421–37; and Stefano Canali, Gabriele De Anna, and Luca Pani, 'Evolutionary Psychopharmacology, Mental Disorders, and Ethical Behavior', in G. Boniolo and G. De Anna (eds) Evolutionary Ethics and Contemporary Biology (Cambridge: CUP, 2006), pp. 97–120.3 Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: OUP, 2002); Martha Nussbaum, 'Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism', Political Theory, 20 (1992), pp. 202–46; 'Aristotle on Human Nature and the Foundations of Ethics', in J. E. J. Athan and R. Harrison (eds) World, Mind, and Ethics: Essays on the Ethical Philosophy of Bernard Williams (Cambridge: CUP, 1995), pp. 86–131; Judith Jarvis Thomson, Goodness and Advice (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); and Normativity (Chicago: Open Court Press, 2008).4 Stephen R. Brown, 'Naturalized Virtue Ethics and the Epistemological Gap', Journal of Moral Philosophy, 1 (2004), pp. 197–209; John Hacker-Wright, 'What is Natural about Foot's Ethical Naturalism?', Ratio, 22 (2009), pp. 308–21; 'Human Nature, Personhood, and Ethical Naturalism', Philosophy, 84 (2009), pp. 413–27; 'Virtue Ethics without Right Action: Anscombe, Foot, and Contemporary Virtue Ethics', Journal of Value Inquiry, 44 (2010), pp. 209–24; 'Ethical Naturalism and the Constitution of Agency', Journal of Value Inquiry, 46 (2012), pp. 13–23; 'Human Nature, Virtue and Rationality', in J. Peters (ed.) Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 83–96; Roger Teichmann, Nature, Reason, and the Good Life: Ethics for Human Beings (Oxford: OUP, 2011); Micah Lott, 'Have Elephant Seals Refuted Aristotle? Nature, Function, and Moral Goodness', Journal of Moral Philosophy, 9 (2012), pp. 353–75. Views that differ substantially from Foot's neo-Aristotelian position but include a similarly outspoken emphasis on teleological assessments of human nature include: Paul Bloomfield, Moral Reality (Oxford: OUP, 2001); William Casebeer, Natural Ethical Facts: Evolution, Connectionism, and Moral Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); Ronald Sandler, 'What Makes a Character Trait a Virtue?' Journal of Value Inquiry, 39 (2005), pp. 383–97; and Richard Kraut, What Is Good and Why: The Ethics of Well-Being (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).5 Foot, Natural Goodness, p. 18.6 Ibid., pp. 46, 31, and 16.7 The balance between this primacy of human rationality and our continuity with other life forms is also addressed in Julia Annas, 'Virtue Ethics: What Kind of Naturalism?', in S. M. Gardiner (ed.) Virtue Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 11–29.8 See Adam Moore, 'Values, Objectivity, and Relationalism', Journal of Value Inquiry, 38 (2004), pp. 75–90; and Allen Thompson, 'Reconciling Themes in Neo-Aristotelian Meta-ethics', Journal of Value Inquiry, 41 (2007), pp. 245–63.9 Alasdair MacIntyre, 'Virtues in Foot and Geach', The Philosophical Quarterly, 52 (2002), pp. 621–31, p. 627. This is also articulated in Chrisoula Andreou, 'Getting On in a Varied World', Social Theory & Practice, 32 (2006), pp. 61–73.10 For the classic treatment of this topic, see John Maynard Smith, Evolution and the Theory of Games (Cambridge: CUP, 1982). For a more recent introduction, see Martin A. Nowak, Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).11 Joseph Millum, 'Natural Goodness and Natural Evil', Ratio, 19 (2006), pp. 199–213.12 To scratch the surface of the literature on this topic, see: P. Hammerstein (ed.) Genetic and Cultural Evolution of Cooperation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, Not By Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Lee Alan Dugatkin, The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006); and Michael Tomasello, Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).13 Millum, 'Natural Goodness', pp. 211–12. Similar points are noted in: Michael Slote, 'Review: Natural Goodness', Mind, 112 (2003), pp. 130–39; and Tim Lewens, 'Foot Note', Analysis, 70 (2010), pp. 468–73. A related argument is made against Hursthouse in Christopher W. Gowans, 'Virtue and Nature', Social Philosophy and Policy, 25 (2008), pp. 28–55.14 Scott Woodcock, 'Philippa Foot's Virtue Ethics Has an Achilles' Heel', Dialogue, 45 (2006), pp. 445–68.15 For example, xenophobic bias is compatible with the evolutionary model presented in David Sloan Wilson and Lee A. Dugatkin, 'Group Selection and Assortative Interactions', The American Naturalist, 149 (1997), pp. 336–51.16 Joseph Henrich and Robert Boyd, 'Why People Punish Defectors: Weak Conformist Transmission Can Stabilize Costly Enforcement of Norms in Cooperative Dilemmas', Journal of Theoretical Biology, 208 (2001), pp. 79–89. Even more troubling is the hypothesis proposed in Malcolm Potts, 'Cruelty's Utility: The Evolution of Same-Species Killing', Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29 (2006), p. 238.17 Contemporary reservations about the normative status of characteristically human traits date back at least as far as Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), Ch. 3. Similar reservations in the context of neo-Aristotelianism appear in: John McDowell, 'Two Sorts of Naturalism', in R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, and W. Quinn (eds) Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 149–79; William Fitzpatrick, Teleology and the Norms of Nature (New York: Garland, 2000); David Copp and David Sobel, 'Morality and Virtue: An Assessment of Some Recent Work in Virtue Ethics', Ethics, 114 (2004), pp. 514–54; Candace Vogler, 'Modern Moral Philosophy Again: Isolating the Promulgation Problem', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 106 (2006), pp. 345–62; Christopher Toner, 'Sorts of Naturalism: Requirements for a Successful Theory', Metaphilosophy, 39 (2008), pp. 220–50; and Elijah Millgram, 'Life and Action', Analysis 69 (2009), pp. 557–64.18 See Michael Thompson, 'The Representation of Life', in Hursthouse, Lawrence, and Quinn Virtues and Reasons, pp. 247–96; and Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).19 See Michael Thompson, 'Apprehending Human Form', in A. O'Hear (ed.) Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 2004), pp. 47–74.20 See Hacker-Wright, 'Human Nature, Personhood, and Ethical Naturalism', pp. 416–17.21 Copp and Sobel, 'Morality and Virtue', p. 540.22 See Sarah Conly, 'Flourishing and the Failure of the Ethics of Virtue', Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 13 (1988), pp. 83–96; J. B. Schneewind, 'The Misfortunes of Virtue', Ethics, 101 (1990), pp. 42–63; Julia Driver, 'The Virtues and Human Nature', in R. Crisp (ed.) How Should One Live? (Oxford: OUP, 1998), pp. 111–29; Philip Pettit, 'The Consequentialist Perspective', in M. Baron, P. Pettit, and M. Slote (eds) Three Methods of Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 92–174; Martha C. Nussbaum, 'Virtue Ethics: A Misleading Category?', The Journal of Ethics, 3 (1999), pp. 163–201; Thomas Hurka, Virtue, Vice, and Value (Oxford: OUP, 2001), pp. 219–55; Brad Hooker, 'The Collapse of Virtue Ethics', Utilitas, 14 (2002), pp. 22–40; David Sobel, 'The Limits of the Explanatory Power of Developmentalism', Journal of Moral Philosophy, 7 (2010), pp. 517–27; Jennifer Baker, 'Who's Afraid of a Final End? The Role of Practical Rationality in Contemporary Accounts of Virtue', Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 16 (2013), pp. 85–98.23 Nicholas Sturgeon, 'Moral Explanations', in D. Copp and D. Zimmerman (eds) Morality, Reason, and Truth: New Essays on the Foundations of Ethics (Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld, 1985), 49–78; Peter Railton, 'Moral Realism', The Philosophical Review, 95 (1986), pp. 163–207; and David Brink, Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics (Cambridge: CUP, 1989).24 Millgram memorably dubs this 'The Polyanna Problem' ('Life and Action', p. 561).25 Idiosyncratic patterns of human reasoning are notoriously catalogued in Stephen Stich's The Fragmentation of Reason: Preface to a Pragmatic Theory of Cognitive Evaluation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990). Since then, the data is most often discussed in the context of evolutionary psychology. See J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby (eds) The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (New York: OUP, 1992). For a particularly controversial theory of human reasoning, see Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, 'Why Do Humans Reason? Arguments for an Argumentative Theory', Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 34 (2011), pp. 57–74.26 A parallel dilemma is presented for Nussbaum in Louise Antony's superb paper, 'Natures and Norms', Ethics, 111 (2000), pp. 8–36. More recently, a similar problem is suggested as a problem for Nussbaum and Hursthouse in Simon Hope, 'Neo-Aristotelian Social Justice: An Unanswered Question', Res Publica, 19 (2013), pp. 157–72.27 See Hacker-Wright, 'What is Natural about Foot's Ethical Naturalism?'. Though Hacker-Wright welcomes the comparison with the transcendental emphasis on practical reason in Kantianism, he claims that the neo-Aristotelian holds an advantage over Kantian constructivist arguments when it comes to skeptical challenges regarding self-identification with our rational nature. See 'Ethical Naturalism and the Constitution of Agency', pp. 21–3.28 The most prominent of these alternatives is, of course, Christine Korsgaard, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity (Oxford: OUP, 2009). Other notable examples include: Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue (Cambridge: CUP, 1997); and Mark LeBar, 'Aristotelian Constructivism', Social Philosophy and Policy, 25 (2008), pp. 182–213.29 See Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge: CUP, 1996), pp. 139–218; Onora O'Neil, 'Kant's Virtues', in Roger Crisp (ed.) How Should One Live? (Oxford: OUP, 1996), pp. 77–97; and Robert B. Louden, 'Kant's Virtue Ethics', Philosophy, 61 (1986), pp. 473–89.30 Something like this is presupposed in Hacker-Wright's response to MacIntyre regarding the possibility of a mixed natural kind when it comes to human promise-keeping. Hacker-Wright claims that a minority of defectors must be exercising practical rationality defectively, insofar as they are exercising it at all, because 'trusting and respectful relations are an essential component of a characteristic human life' ('What is Natural about Foot's Ethical Naturalism?', p. 318). To assert this substantive claim about the uniformity of human trust and respect, one must presuppose an idealized sense of human practical rationality.31 For a similar example of disputed virtue ascription, consider the following brilliant bit of insight from Stephen Colbert regarding the announcement of a reduction of US military forces in Afghanistan: '[President Obama] has ordered a withdrawal from Afghanistan, which means Obama is a coward for leaving … or for not leaving sooner. I forget which', The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, June 23, 2011.32 See especially, Hacker-Wright, 'Ethical Naturalism and the Constitution of Agency' and 'Human Nature, Virtue and Rationality'.33 For example, Hacker-Wright notes that our condition of dependency as children cultivates a 'non-instrumental regard for self-worth' because of the direct concern for our needs required by early caretakers. This, he argues, is sufficient for a key notion of respect to be a necessary feature of our species that shapes human virtue ('Human Nature, Personhood, and Ethical Naturalism', pp. 425–7). As persuasive as this observation may be, it is sadly characteristic of our species for children to be raised to respect some agents but not others, e.g. Serbs but not Croats, Aryans but not Africans, etc. Thus, Hacker-Wright must again either rely on a naturalistic but normatively unreliable conception of the human life cycle or rely on a conception of this life cycle that is so idealized from natural facts that our only access to it is via direct intuition.34 See 'Human Nature, Virtue and Rationality', pp. 92–4.35 Consider, for example, Elizabeth Ashford's claim that demanding obligations to others result from any account of moral obligation, including those that take claims about human integrity seriously: 'Utilitarianism, Integrity, and Partiality', The Journal of Philosophy, 97 (2000), 421–39. Given this possibility, the range of norms that are potentially consistent with the proper functioning of our species is broad enough to give rise to indeterminacy.36 Prominent advocates of this position include: Michael Stocker, Plural and Conflicting Values (Oxford: OUP, 1989); David McNaughton and Piers Rawling, 'Unprincipled Ethics', in B. Hooker and M. O. Little (eds) Moral Particularism (Oxford: OUP, 2000), pp. 256–75; Jonathan Dancy, Ethics Without Principles (Oxford: OUP, 2004); and Robert Audi, The Good in the Right: A Theory of Intuition and Intrinsic Value (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). See also: Frans Svensson, 'Eudaimonist Virtue Ethics and Right Action: A Reassessment', The Journal of Ethics, 15 (2011), pp. 321–39.37 See Rosalind Hursthouse, 'Virtue Theory and Abortion', Philosophy and Public Affairs, 20 (1991), pp. 223–46; Karen Stohr and Christopher Heath Wellman, 'Recent Work on Virtue Ethics', American Philosophical Quarterly, 39 (2002), pp. 49–72; Julia Annas, 'Being Virtuous and Doing the Right Thing', Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 78 (2004), pp. 61–75; and Hacker-Wright, 'Virtue Ethics without Right Action'.38 See Robert B. Louden, 'On Some Vices of Virtue Ethics', American Philosophical Quarterly, 21 (1984), pp. 227–36.