The History of Philosophy, page 59
Hare returned to Oxford to complete his studies, and became a Fellow and tutor of his college, Balliol, until being appointed to the White’s chair of moral philosophy. He taught a number of people who became distinguished in British philosophy in the twentieth century’s second half – Bernard Williams, David Pears and Richard Wollheim among them. A supportive and engaged tutor who maintained the Oxford tradition of reading parties with students, Hare is alleged to have discouraged those who were not very good at philosophy by asking, halfway through their reading an essay to him, ‘Have you considered a career in the civil service?’
In addition to accepting, with reservations, the force of the emotivist argument, and its corollary that there are no empirical moral facts, Hare was also persuaded by Kant’s view that moral discourse is subject to reason, and has a logical structure. Whereas the meaning of factual discourse is descriptive, in that its meaning is governed by truth-conditions, the meaning of moral discourse is prescriptive, which Hare defines by saying that a prescriptive statement is one that entails at least one imperative: ‘do such and such … do not do so and so …’ True to Hume’s claim that no statement containing ‘ought’ can be derived from any number of purely descriptive statements – ‘no is can entail an ought,’ meaning that facts can never settle what choices one should make about how to act – Hare accepted that moral reasoning can issue in prescriptive conclusions only if inferred from premises containing one or more prescriptive statements. The action-guiding aspect of moral discourse lies in the choices we make about how to regard the descriptive aspects, as can be seen by this example: suppose you are standing in the path of an oncoming bus. This fact is not enough to entail that you ought to get out of the way, because you might be standing there by choice, wishing suicidally to be knocked over. Whether to get out of the way or not depends on a prescriptive commitment lodged in the reasons you have for choosing either course of action.
In Hare’s view, moral terms such as ‘good’ and ‘ought’ commit those who use them to regarding prescriptions as universalizable, that is, as applying to everyone in any relevantly similar situation. The caveat is that the judgments expressing the prescription must themselves contain only universal terms – that is, they must not be indexed to particular agents. This is because the same action performed by different agents may invite different evaluations according to circumstances. Suppose Jones trips up Smith as Smith is running past him. Jones will be doing wrong by tripping up Smith in order to prevent him winning a race, but Jones will be doing right by tripping up Smith as Smith tries to escape with stolen goods.
As always, the question arises: ‘How do we judge which choices to make, which prescriptions to universalize?’ Hare’s answer is a utilitarian one: the ones which in the given circumstances will satisfy the preferences of the majority of those involved.
An aspect of Hare’s theory that it shares with other non-cognitivist views is that it regards questions about the objectivity of values as spurious. Hare says he has never met anyone who knows what the question ‘Are values objective?’ means. When people disagree about values, they are not contradicting one another, they are negating each other’s opinions, which is just what claiming that someone else is wrong comes down to. His main argument is this: consider two worlds, in one of which there are objective moral values and in the other of which there are none (for the sake of the example you could imagine that the second world once had them but they have been annihilated). People will continue to talk and behave just the same in both worlds; there is no difference between them. So the idea of ‘objective values’ does not work; it is empty.
Even someone who agrees with Hare that there are no objective values can think that the two-worlds argument does not work, on the grounds that there is a big difference between what the inhabitants of the different worlds take to explain their value-judgments – why they make them, where they come from – let alone what supports or justifies them, if anything does. Critics also say that his theory leaves out almost everything that makes a moral theory a substantive one. A universalizability requirement should itself identify the moral grounds for why the principle it embodies should apply in all relevantly similar cases. Moreover, deciding on what makes relevantly similar cases relevantly similar also requires a grasp of what makes them morally so.
The view that there are no objective values constitutes the base-note of ethics in Analytic philosophy since the rejection of Moore’s intuitionism. The first sentence of J. L. Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977) says exactly that: ‘There are no objective values.’ The title of his book tells us where our non-objective values come from: we invent them. His book was galvanizing because, although the problem of how we think of values and how we justify our value-judgments was of course familiar, his discussion gave a handle to sharper ways of articulating and debating non-cognitivist and cognitivist viewpoints, the debate shifting from questions exclusively about metaphysics – the existence or non-existence of values independently of thought – to questions about whether moral discourse is ‘truth-apt’, that is, capable of truth-value. Cognitivists say it is, non-cognitivists say it is not. It might be thought that cognitivism and objectivism go hand in hand, but they only do so if the cognitivist is a moral realist also, that is, thinks there are mind-independent moral facts or properties which make moral judgments true or false. But a moral anti-realist or subjectivist can be a cognitivist too, in holding that propositions about attitudes or emotional responses are truth-apt; or she can hold an ‘error theory’, which says that propositions conveying moral judgments are indeed truth-apt, but are all false. This last is Mackie’s view.
John Mackie (1917–81) was an Australian from Sydney. His Scottish-born father was a professor at Sydney University and a leading figure in education in New South Wales. His mother was a schoolteacher. After graduating from Sydney University as a prize-winner in philosophy Mackie went to Oxford, graduating just as the ‘phoney war’ period of the Second World War came to an end. He joined the army and served in the Middle East, afterwards teaching in New Zealand and Australia until returning to the United Kingdom in 1963 as professor at the then newly founded University of York, and afterwards at Oxford.
Mackie’s reason for holding an ‘error theory’ about moral discourse is that it presupposes objective values – it refers to them, talks about them, asserts their presence or absence, assumes them – but because there are none, all such discourse is false. He then proceeds to set out how thinking and theorizing about ethics can be successful without having to presuppose objective values.
What Mackie means by ‘objective values’ is best exemplified, he says, by Plato’s Forms, which give a ‘dramatic picture of what objective values have to be’. In addition to existing in the way they do, they are also intrinsically action-directing; merely to be acquainted with them tells one how to act, no further motivation being required. But why should this be so? There could be objective values which are non-necessarily motivating; many people acknowledge that they know the right thing to do, but do not do it.
But the very idea of objective values does not, in any case, withstand investigation. Mackie gives two chief reasons for this. First, there are many and sometimes great differences in moral outlooks, and the differences are often intractable. The best explanation for this is that moral outlooks are associated with a way of life and culture, and cultures differ. It is implausible to think that one culture has correct or privileged access to objective moral values and others do not. He cites the example of cultures which differ in their views about marriage, one monogamous and the other polygamous. It is far more plausible to think that their opposite moral views are the result of cultural-historical factors than that one of them has it right and the other has it wrong about an objective truth of the matter.
Secondly, whatever objective values are supposed to be, they are decidedly ‘queer’ things, says Mackie. If we think of them metaphysically, we have to imagine them as a sort of property completely different from anything else in the universe. If we consider the matter epistemologically, we have to credit ourselves with a special faculty for detecting and tracking the presence of these queer things, a faculty quite different from those we employ in normal perception of the world. In short, it makes no sense to think that values are ‘part of the fabric of the world’.
Critics respond to the first argument – the ‘relativity argument’ – by saying that moral differences of outlook might not really be as great as at first they appear. In a Western society one might honour and care for one’s aged parents by buying them a cottage at the seaside, while in a traditional society one might do this by killing and eating them so that they continue to survive within oneself. The superficial differences are enormous, but express the same underlying principle.
The argument from queerness seems to be no argument at all. There are many things in the world that appear queer on first encounter merely because we are not familiar with them – kangaroos, many extremely weird-looking species of deep-sea fish, occurrences on the event horizon of a black hole, quantum entanglement – so merely being ‘queer’ relative to what is familiar is no argument that something does not (still less cannot) exist. More to the point is the problem of how, if objective values exist, we detect them. We can leave aside the point that the absence of a faculty for detecting X does not, without further argument, entail that X does not exist, because of course the moral objectivist thinks that we do detect X, and Mackie’s question about how we do so is legitimate. We could make it plausible that we do so by citing the example of the entities and properties referred to in mathematics, which we encounter by reason. This thought might redound to Mackie’s advantage, however, for in the case of mathematics agreement on axioms and rules will invariably produce agreement about the outcomes of their use. Such convergence is considerably less common in ethics.
Mackie says his view can be described as ‘moral scepticism’ or ‘subjectivism’, but this must be understood as a metaethical or ‘second-order’ position, not a normative or ‘first-order’ position, where differences and disputes about the good life will remain, but where there are still things that might be said of use to deciding how to achieve such a thing. He is frank in acknowledging that a good life consists in the ‘effective pursuit of activities that [an individual] finds worthwhile’ either intrinsically or as instrumentally benefiting himself or those he cares about; and this means that ‘egoism and self-referential altruism will together characterise, to a large extent, both his actions and his motives.’
Egoism speaks for itself; we are naturally concerned with our own welfare and prospects. ‘Self-referential altruism’ captures the idea of what Hume described as ‘confined generosity’, the restriction of our concern to those who are close to us. Accepting these realities means accepting that there will therefore be competition and conflict between individuals and groups. These pragmatic views would, says Mackie, be obvious if it were not for the efforts by both religious and humanist traditions to urge the opposite view, that ‘the good life for man is one of universal brotherly love and selfless pursuit of the general happiness,’ which Mackie argues is impracticable and in any case implausible even as an ideal. But this can be tempered by the point that ‘any possible, and certainly any desirable, human life is social,’ and this means that cooperation is a significant value, with all it entails, not least its corollary that extreme individualism is not the answer to the implausibility of universalism.
It was mentioned at the outset that Aristotle, Hume, Kant and utilitarianism loom over ethical debate, but of course the general thrust of the outlooks they each influence is significantly different from the others. One can identify three species of outlook. One is deontology, a rule-based ethics which seeks to identify our moral duties and says we must obey them no matter what the consequences. Kant was a deontologist. The second is consequentialism, a results-based ethics which says the right thing to do is what will have the best consequences, however we identify these: ‘maximising happiness (or “utility”) for the majority’ is the nub of the utilitarian version. The third is virtue ethics, a person-centred ethics which says that the fundamental ethical question is ‘What sort of person should I be?’ and therefore emphasizes moral character rather than acts or their consequences. The fountainhead of thinking about virtue ethics is Aristotle.
The first two views dominated philosophical ethics in the modern era, that is, from the time that ethical debate resumed in the eighteenth century after more than a millennium during which the dominance of Christianity had silenced discussion of moral principles – the divine-command morality of the scriptures being assumed, or claimed, to settle all matters of right and wrong and how to live. But in a seminal paper published in 1958, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001) argued that both deontology and consequentialism assume a foundation for ethics in the concept of obligation, which makes no sense in the absence of a lawgiver which or who (such as the deity of religious morality) imposes it. A foundation for ethics must therefore be sought in a quite different place: in the concept of virtue.
Anscombe’s paper is now regarded as the starting-gun for a renewed interest in virtue ethics, though in fact it mainly addresses the shortcomings of deontology and consequentialism, especially the latter’s permissive view that any action is acceptable if its anticipated outcomes benefit a majority. She also attacked the lack of clarity in concepts key to ethical theory, such as desire, intention, action and pleasure. Her recommendation is that philosophy should go back to Aristotle to think again about the human good, but that before doing so it should engage in a preparatory psychological clarification of these concepts.
Three concepts central to Aristotle’s ethics, and therefore central to virtue ethics, are those of (a) virtue itself, which Aristotle called arete and which can be translated as ‘excellence’, especially ‘excellence of character’; (b) ‘practical wisdom’, in Aristotle’s Greek phronesis; and (c) flourishing or happiness, in Aristotle’s Greek eudaimonia. Consider each in turn.
Virtues are character traits such as honesty, integrity, courage, prudence, kindness, a sense of justice, self-restraint or continence and the like. From these character traits flow the virtuous behaviour associated with them. A virtuous person keeps promises and honours obligations not because it is a duty to do so or because the consequences are preferable to those that follow from not doing so, but because she is a person of integrity.
Virtues are not all or nothing; some people are more honest than others, some more courageous than others. Being virtuous in one respect does not entail being virtuous in all; a courageous person might not be a kind person, or a continent one. However, in this case there is a danger that courage might in fact turn out to be cruel or rash, so the idea of the unity of the virtues becomes an attractive one.
This latter point is connected with the idea of practical wisdom, phronesis, which in contemporary terms can be thought of as sober good judgment of the kind you would expect to find in a sensible, reflective, mature person with experience of life. Aristotle indeed thought that experience and maturity are required for virtue, but clearly there can be young people with practical wisdom who accordingly can be courageous, kind, continent and the like.
For Aristotle eudaimonia attends the living of a virtuous life. The translations of this term into ‘happiness’ and ‘flourishing’ are unsatisfactory because dogs can be happy and forests can flourish, whereas eudaimonia is the achievement of a rational life, reason being the highest and most distinctive feature of humanity. Reason plays central roles in the other two species of ethics, of course; for Kant moral laws are rational laws, and for utilitarians judging how to act requires working out and anticipating consequences. In virtue ethics, however, it is not recognizing and obeying a principle or calculating an effect, but possessing practical wisdom, that enters constitutively into the good life. And the good life itself has a character, no doubt different in its details for each individual, but common in what it shares: the quality of eudaimonia.
One of the strengths of the virtue-ethics approach is that when one considers what is required for recognizing one’s duties and seeing how to act in accordance with them, as deontology requires, or determining what rules to follow in the hope of maximizing utility, as the rule-utilitarian view requires (act utilitarianism only has one rule: ‘maximize utility in this case’), it is necessary to apply thought, imagination and the lessons of experience – in short, phronesis – to do so. One can therefore cut out the theorizing about duties and consequences and see that cultivation and possession of the virtues which turn on phronesis is sufficient of itself. This rebuts the criticism, often directed at virtue ethics, that it focuses solely on the agent herself and not on what she does, thus addressing only the question of what kind of person one should be rather than any questions about what one should do when faced with a necessity to choose. As the insistence on phronesis shows, the account of what one is incorporates already an account of what one therefore typically does.
Leading figures in the development of virtue ethics included Philippa Foot (1920–2010) and Alasdair MacIntyre (b. 1929). The former once began a lecture by saying, ‘In moral philosophy it is useful, I believe, to think about plants.’ Her reason is that there is much in common between evaluating whether plants are healthy and flourishing and evaluating whether a human individual is so. The idea of a conceptual structure of evaluations plays its part; the underlying ‘grammar’ of talking about a healthy human being and a eudaimonic human being have much in common. It is part of human flourishing to be an effective practical reasoner, rather as it is an aspect of being a healthy human that one’s knees and stomach are in good working order. Identifying virtues is in part a matter of recognizing what the ‘way of going on’ as a human being tells us. Think of the example of another species – wolves, say: wolves hunt in packs, and keep themselves going by doing so. A wolf which does not contribute to the hunt but helps to eat the prey is a freeloader, and therefore defective in the required kind of wolfishness. Analogously, part of the way humans ‘go on’ is by making and keeping contracts. The implication is that breaking contracts is a defective – non-virtuous – thing to do.
