Aristotle, MacIntyre, and Virtue Ethics 61
To Aristotle, life itself has a final purpose for each person. It is in the very nature of the person, and it is not something that the person subjectively assigns to the self or that anyone else imposes on the person.
The good life for each person is about moving toward that perfection.
Aristotle saw the essence of a person as being his or her human soul, which has both irrational and rational elements involving three tiers.
Humans share with animals an irrational element that he called its “veg- etative faculty,” which is associated with nutrition and growth. This is the first tier. The second tier is the “appetitive faculty,” which gives us joy, grief, hope, and fear. These emotions and desires are a mixture of irrational and rational behaviors. The irrational behaviors are pure animal behaviors, and the rational is the logic that we exercise to control our dysfunctional irrational behavior. The third tier is the “rational calculative,” which is the focus of morality. It conjoins moral virtue and contr ols desires with contemplative reason and logic. The mastery of such reasoning is called
“intellectual virtue” (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2001).
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predecessor and would probably disagree with many that came after him.
For example, he did not advocate a teleology that fits with creation, design, and providence, which is central to Christian, Muslim, and even Platonic thought. His was not a mechanistic world picture (Johnson 2002).
Nevertheless, his views were teleological and therefore subject to critiques arguing that there is no end purpose to life or to humans. One can see teleology in Aristotle’s concept of nature where he notes that the end of a thing is also its function. For example, plants and animals have natural existence. An acorn has an inherent tendency to grow into an oak tree, and thus the tree exists not by chance or craft but rather by nature.
In Eudemian Ethics, Nicomachean Ethics, and Politics, Aristotle argued that humans also have a natural function. For example, part of human nature is that humans are political and adaptive to life in the city-state.
Thus, for Aristotle, political naturalism is a foundation of his political philosophy (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2004).
To Aristotle, anything that inhibits the fulfillment of the complete attainment of the telos is bad or at least dysfunctional. To him, nature operates for the sake of an end, and that end, by definition, is good.
For example, sleeping is natural, necessary, and beneficial. For human beings, the ultimate good or happiness consists in perfection of the full attainment of the human natural function, which is the full realization of the soul through reason. He recognized that his notion of the ideal is generally impossible to realize, and his fallback position was to argue for the attainment of the ideal as much as possible. To Aristotle, the good was objective and independent of human wishes, but it was also relative to the organism’s natural end (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philos- ophy 2004).
Modernism and Postmodernism
Modernism greatly influenced Western culture, with its focus on doubt arising out of René Descartes’ (1596–1650) famous statement: “Cogito ergo sum,” meaning “I think (doubt), therefore I am.” In other words, the only thing that anyone can know for certain is one’s own existence and nothing else. With this landmark logic, modernists subject everything to doubt and demand the most careful inquiry possible to create what they accept as knowledge in the form of theory that they always subject to challenge.
This extremely careful methodological approach is the hallmark of modern science and is the basis of the so-called scientific method that has brought so much progress to humankind. Auguste Comte (1798–1857) created a version of modernism called positivism or empiricism by building not only on Descartes, but also on the work of Francis Bacon (1561–1626), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), and John Locke (1632–1704).
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Locke and others challenged the basic assumptions of virtue ethics.
Any normative ethical theory is logically built on assumptions, and all assumptions except one’s own existence are subject to doubt according to the logic of Descartes. Locke focused his doubt of Aristotle on the concept that essence determines the function of the object. According to Aristotle, each object, including people, have an essence, and the extent of maximization of that essence determines whether the state of the object is poor, acceptable, good, or excellent. As previously noted, the “good life,” to Aristotle, was the attainment of human excellence, which meant self-actualization.
Locke took issue with the concept that an object has an essence that could reflect a quality. Philosophers refer to Aristotle’s assumption that an object has a distinctive natural goal as telos. Locke rejected the Aris- totelian essence of an object or telos by using the concept of intersubjec- tivity. Locke said, “To return to general Words, it is plain, by what has been said, That General and Universal, belong not to the real existence of things, but are the Inventions and Creatures of the Understanding, made by it for its use, and concern only Signs, whether Words, or Ideas”
(III.iii.11). In other words, Locke argues against Aristotle’s notion of telos by stating that general and universal natures do not exist, and therefore the concept of telos is nonexistent because it makes no sense. Instead, species, such as humans, are merely abstract ideas of our minds. Thus, they cannot have an essence (Sahakian and Sahakian 1993).
Logical Positivists and Postmodernists
The modern empiricist employs experience instead of logical reasoning per se as the source of knowledge. In particular, British empiricists argued that a community of scholars, or even one scholar, must base all knowl- edge or truth upon experience, such as careful observations, rather than using pure logic as a technique for understanding knowledge. In the early and middle 20th century, Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) argued that only assertions affirmed by the rigorous methodology of science were and should be considered knowledge. Thus, all value judgments, including ethics, goodness, beauty, truth, and morality, cannot be considered knowl- edge but are merely emotions and consequently are not verifiable. Clearly, this very strong and influential argument significantly dismissed ethics in general and virtue ethics especially.
In the middle of the 20th century, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) helped develop postmodernism. He argued that our individual and group values place us within logical sets of beliefs called paradigms. One can logically exist and argue right and wrong within a paradigm with its specific values, but one cannot logically argue across paradigms. You
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cannot say another person is wrong if they adhere to a different set of beliefs and values. Thus, only moral relativism is possible, and theorizing about a universal code of proper conduct in pursuit of a “good” life is logically impossible (Fox and Miller 1993). Wittgenstein’s very influential argument dismisses universal approaches to ethics such as virtue ethics (Sahakian and Sahakian 1993).
Critical Analysis of the Critics
This section looks more carefully at the logic of the arguments proposed by Locke, by logical positivists such as Russell, and by postmodernists such as Wittgenstein. As noted by Sahakian and Sahakian (1993), the problem with Locke is that his arguments contain two fallacies. He used an intuitionist argument building on the reasoning of Descartes. The fact that one cannot, without a doubt, say that the reality of some general and universal nature exists does not mean that the opposite is true — that it does not exist. It just means that you cannot prove it. This is simple logic.
On all matters beyond one’s own existence, faith and its opposite, doubt, are a part of the human existence called life. Both exist and are needed for us to exist in life. Even the notion that one is awake rather than dreaming requires some faith that one’s assumption is correct. How- ever, to keep an open mind, one must also allow some doubt to exist because one may indeed be dreaming. The solution to maximizing cer- tainty in life is to use a methodology that narrows the necessary leap of faith and thus minimizes the application of doubt given the conditions under investigation. That is the wisdom underlying the scientific method.
A second fallacy of Locke’s position is inconsistency in his argument.
In one section of his thesis, Locke argued that all natural thinking has a real constitution of its parts. Thus, he refuted the intuitionist position in one place, but in another place he assumed an intuitionist position. Logic precludes having it both ways. Either one takes or does not take an intuitionist position. Locke’s argument fails because of this inherent contradiction.
The antivirtue-ethics arguments of some positivists and logical positiv- ists also fail due to their flawed logic. Both groups embrace the scientific method as the way to define knowledge. However, there is a difference between knowledge and certain knowledge. Reasoning from Descartes, there really is a scale of certainty from knowing your own existence to
“knowledge” that is based entirely on faith assumptions. This distinction is important. The fact that one cannot determine a fact or concept as
“certain knowledge” does not automatically and necessarily mean that the concept is not accurate and is therefore false knowledge. This is the logical error of the positivists and logical positivists. Instead, it merely means that
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doubt is particularly appropriate for that given fact or concept that we take as possible knowledge.
Consider the problem of a bridge that is used to move traffic across a river. We do not know for certain that the bridge will not collapse with our weight. Given that we do not have certain knowledge of the safety of the bridge, we could simply refuse to use the bridge. However, under normal circumstances, almost all of us would employ our faith and assume that the bridge is safe and cross over the river. Nevertheless, doubt should always remain in our mind. For example, if we see danger signs such as the poor condition of the construction of the bridge, doubt rather than faith might reasonably prevail, and we would decide to not use that bridge.
In other words, faith and doubt are both appropriate, and which prevails is, or should be, a matter of judgment.
The scientific method is merely a methodology. Its value is that it helps us narrow the gap for the leap of faith we take when we use our judgment.
The problem with this methodology is that the strictness of its approach can often mean that it cannot be employed in all circumstances where we need to be certain about our knowledge. For example, we cannot run a $100,000 scientific test on a bridge every time someone wants to cross it. We can test it after it is built and occasionally during its useful life, but absolute certainty that the bridge is safe at a specific moment in time becomes an impossible standard to meet. If the bridge is to be useful to society, some degree of faith is needed that the bridge is safe.
There are some occasions where the community would be wiser to accept a longer leap of faith rather than employ doubt in arriving at what is accepted as “knowledge.” In other words, the scientific method might occasionally be dysfunctional. That certainly appears to be true for practical inquiry involving ethics. Just because one cannot scientifically prove beauty, love, and virtue does not mean that they do not exist and are not important in our lives.
As a practical matter and for purposes of inquiry, we can assume that objects have an intersubjective quality, such as being a chair. This does not dispute the pure intuitionist point, because the asserted quality is merely an apparent consensus on what is “chairness.” Of a practical concern is that others, such as interior designers, can use “chairness” to create forms of chairs for varying circumstances and tastes. In the same vein as “chair,” we can assert, as did Aristotle, that there is something called “humanness.” We can also build on the scholarship of Maslow and accept certain qualities as “acceptable knowledge” that describes “human- ness.” Thus, the work of Maslow does serve to reinforce Aristotle and helps us identify a human telos.
The arguments of postmodernists against virtue ethics also fail. For instance, assume that there is a strong desire to avoid violence in settling
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disputes. If postmodernism is correct, then people arguing with logically different value paradigms cannot resolve their disputes with logic. With some forms of postmodernism, society essentially gives each person ethical permission to be extremely hedonistic, even to the point of killing and stealing, as there is no logical way to assert what is right and wrong behavior. In a society of law and order, the legal system would curb killing and stealing. However, without the added social and individual incentive of ethical norms in society, the legal system would find more people resorting to killing and stealing to advance their hedonistic or other agendas. Thus, there would be an increasing likelihood of a break- down of civilization. In this example, the postmodernist preference for moral relativism is dysfunctional.
For purposes of discussion, let us agree with the postmodernists that language is a barrier to intersubjective agreement on the meaning of such concepts as the “essence of humanness.” However, even this agreement with the postmodernists is not saying that leaders and intellectuals in the world can never reach a practical and working agreement on what they call the “essence of humanness.” To say otherwise would be to fall into the same fallacious logic of Locke and some positivists and logical posi- tivists. If those groups have in common some basis to reach such a consensus, then there is a reasonable hope that a telos can be defined.
If a practical telos can be accepted, then an intersubjective, global virtue ethics is possible.