Virtue in a time of depraved ideals

ABSTRACT

Aristotle owned slaves and held racist and misogynist views. If anyone today engaged in the same practices or held Aristotle’s views, that person would be judged harshly. However, we do not judge Aristotle particularly harshly. Should we? What standard of virtue ought we apply in judging the characters of people who lived in remote times and places? This is the question I discuss in this paper. I consider and reject several alternatives and then propose a new one.

KEYWORDS:

• Virtue
• comparative standard
• consequentialism about virtue
• epistemic situation
• universal virtue standard

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I should note that there is a lot more controversy surrounding famous figures from US history than there is in the case of someone like Aristotle. Consider, for instance, the case of Andrew Jackson, the man whose followers started the Democratic Party but who was strongly against abolition. There is a debate regarding Jackson’s legacy. See Cheathem (2011). For my answer to the question why that is, see the last section of this paper and footnote 19.

2 This case comes from Mark Twain’s (1885/1994) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Jonathan Bennett drew attention to this case initially, though I note that Bennett (1974, 126) references an earlier paper by Michael Sidnell (1967). The Huck Finn case has, since Bennett, received a lot of attention on the part of philosophers. See, for instance, Arpaly (2003, 2015), Goldman (2010), and Markovits (2010).

3 This idea was suggested to me by [deleted to preserve anonymity].

4 See also Mannix (2003, 140). Mannix does not provide a primary source reference and though Pinker relates the story without a note of caution, I must point out that Pinker's evidence is insufficient, and I am unable to independently verify the authenticity of the anecdote.

5 Of course, even today, some oppose torture – for instance, of suspected terrorists – merely on the consequentialist ground that it doesn't work.

6 Virtue consequentialism can be traced back to Hume at least – Hume's maligning of the monkish virtues was motivated by the thought that those virtues benefit neither the person who possesses them nor those around him. More recently, an account along these lines has been defended by Foot (1978, 1–18) and Thomson (1997). For a critical take on virtue consequentialism, see Langton (2001).

7 See also Bradley (2005).

8 Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting a possibility along these lines.

9 I thank an anonymous referee for this point.

10 There is a blog discussion on Slingerland's essay, featuring an interesting commentary by Rachana Kamtekar and comments by a number of philosophers, including David Sobel, Manyul Im, Dan Boisvert, etc., plus a response by Slingerland himself. See Sobel (2011). The focus of the discussion is whether Slingerland is correct that Confucian ethics offers resources to respond to situationism. I shall have something to say about this at the end of this paper.

11 See Doris (2002) and Harman (1999). Harman and Doris drew on social psychology, primarily on the work of Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett. See Nisbett and Ross (1980) and Ross and Nisbett (1991). For some responses to Doris and Harman in philosophy, see, Kupperman (2001), Kamtekar (2004), Kristjánsson (2008), Bates and Kleingeld (2017), and Alfano (2013, 2018).

12 Note that this is not the same as pronouncing Aristotle morally respectable on the ground that (many of) his contemporaries thought him so. The point is that we do, but only because our purpose is to compare him to others in a similar situation.

13 It must be true, more generally, that evolved norms are emancipated from what may have initially led to their development. Compare: our norms of politeness may have evolved as ways of curbing aggression, but the reasons you have to be polite to someone today have little to do with fear that you may get punched in the face for being rude.

14 See Shweder and Bourne (1984, 178) quoted in Flanagan (1991, 281).

15 For another attempt to defend the disunity of virtue thesis, on grounds different from mine here, see Sreenivasan (2009). [Deleted for the purposes of blind review] suggests that at least in the case of some virtues, for instance, marital fidelity, we expect perfect consistency and refuse to attribute the virtue to anyone with a less than perfect record. I am sympathetic to this point, but it is consistent with what I say here: my claim is not that no virtue requires perfect consistency but simply that our standards of virtue ascription are sensitive to what can be reasonably expected of people. It is reasonable to expect perfect fidelity but not reasonable to expect helpfulness on each and every occasion. And even when it comes to fidelity, it is reasonable to expect a spouse to never act on attraction to people other than one's spouse but probably not reasonable to expect him or her to never have thoughts about and attractions to other people.

16 See Milgram (1963). The results of the Milgram experiment have been subject to heated debate. I reference some of that debate in footnotes 10 and 13 above. For additional discussion plus recent research, see, Sreenivasan (2001), Weber’s (2006) response to Sreenivasan, as well as Sreenivasan’s (2008) report. See also, Sabini and Silver (1983, 2005), Sabini, Siepmann, and Stein (2001), Grzyb and Dolinski (2017), and Burger (2009).

17 This helps explain why, as mentioned earlier (see footnote 4), someone like Andrew Jackson may be judged much more harshly than Aristotle: the epistemic situations of Aristotle and Jackson were different. There was an abolitionist movement in Jackson's time, and we can assume Jackson knew at least some of the arguments for abolition. Not so in the case of Aristotle.

18 Slote, of course, does not want to suggest that we may be mistaken about all humans’ possessing human rights. Quite the contrary, he starts by noting, much like I do, that some of our famous predecessors believed slavery (an egregious human rights violation) was justified but were wrong about this. He then, in an attempt to avoid smugness on our part, argues that our moral beliefs too may be wrong, just like those of our predecessors. Fair enough. But unless we suppose we are right about human rights or at least about the wrongness of slavery, we cannot assert that our predecessors were wrong on that score.

19 It is imaginable, for instance, that our successors will come to view such practices as meat eating or putting people in prison to be morally horrendous. My prediction is that if this happens, they will judge us less harshly for engaging in these practices than they will judge their own contemporaries who did the same.