What is the Emotivist Person Like?

I'm back in full swing once again teaching an Ethics course at Marist College (actually, just coming off of teaching a very intensive 4-week online Ethics course, before launching right back into Spring face-to-face courses), and we just finished discussing Alasdair MacIntyre's diagnosis of Emotivism (in After Virtue) as the moral theory that has become embedded and embodied in our late modern culture.  Last year, around this point in the semester, I wrote two blog posts focusing on that diagnosis (here and here). There's three particularly important features to MacIntyre's account -- precisely why I have my students read chapters 2 and 3 of After Virtue at the start of the semester.

First, MacIntyre does not think that many people in our contemporary culture explicitly endorse one of the academic forms of emotivism (derived from Ayer or Stevenson, Nietzsche or Sartre) -- rather their behavior, actions, expressions betray an implicit reliance on that moral theory as their default, the horizon within which they act and move and work out their being. Second, MacIntyre also does not think emotivism is remotely close to being correct or adequate as a moral theory.  But, if there are many people who on some gut-level do seem to think it the right theory, and act, judge, and communicate as if it was, that has some real implications for our moral environment.  Third, MacIntyre does not see these developments as particularly good ones -- even for the emotivist.  And, that is what I'm going to discuss here -- starting from the question: what kind of person does a lived-out commitment to Emotivism make one into?

Does MacIntyre get Emotivism Right?

Last month, I discussed a criticism of contemporary culture made by a thinker with whom I like to begin my Ethics courses -- Alasdair MacIntyre, who in After Virtue (as well as certain of his other works), maintains that we now inhabit a culture in which, like it or not, true as a moral theory or not, Emotivism has become the predominant framework within which moral discussion, and particularly disagreement, occur -- and this is bad, overall, for a number of reasons.

But it's worth asking -- particularly given the importance he accords to a moral theory attempting to get rival theories correct -- is MacIntyre himself right about Emotivism as a moral theory?  Is he representing it -- particularly in its self-conscious, explicitly philosophical form -- accurately, for instance when he claims that while "Emotivism has been presented by its most sophisticated proponents . . . as a theory about the meaning of sentences which are used to make moral judgements," if we look at it more closely, what its proponents failed to see is that it is "a cogent theory of use" of moral language, "rather than a false theory of meaning"?  In order to answer this, we have to compare MacIntyre's views on Emotivism in After Virtue against a few of Emotivism's "sophisticated proponents."

Emotivism in Contemporary Culture

My Ethics classes -- a staple course for me since grad school days -- generally start out with exploring some features the culture we inhabit and a few common obstacles or impediments to doing any serious work in Ethics.  So, we very quickly get into reading and discussing a few selections from the work of a contemporary proponent of (and convert to) Virtue Ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre -- not a lot, certainly not as much as I'd like to, or as much as my students could use -- but if my aim is to cover enough material and moral theories over the course of an-always-too-short semester, we can't afford too much time to anyone (just for comparison, Bentham and Mill get 2 class sessions each, Plato, Kant, and Aquinas 3 sessions, and Aristotle lucks out with a total of 5). 

This time around, in addition to his essay "Plain Persons and Moral Theory," my students are studying chapters 2 and 3 of MacIntyre's landmark work, After Virtue. I've used the first piece because in it, he shows how moral theory connects up with our ordinary lives, decisions, and concerns.  He also provides an introduction to three moral standpoints commonly adopted in our culture and contrasts them to the sort of standpoint articulated by Virtue Ethics.  Many people in our culture do effectively operate more or less along the lines of Utilitarianism -- determining whether something is good or bad, right or wrong, depending on its consequences for those concerned -- or Deontology -- determining the morality by the conformity of actions or motives to rules and duties.  A third possibility is to hold that moral matters -- and our judgements about them -- really boil down to our subjective preferences, to our non-rational emotions, to "criterionless choice" -- that is, to Emotivism.

Questioning Continuous Improvement (part 1 of 2)

The relatively new term "continuous improvement" is one of those buzzwords that by its very connotative penumbra manages to project a kind of positivity, and it burrowed its way into and eventually set down roots within education circles some time ago.  That's not surprising -- there's a continual back and forth flow between the worlds of education and business, along the channels of marketing, management, training, and that ever-so-ambiguous domain of "leadership."

Throughout my own career in academia, first as a student, then as a professor, a writer, and a coordinator of faculty development and assessment of student learning, a constant background  has been this discourse between the world of business and that of education, sometimes low as an almost soundless murmur, other times out in the open, seemingly subsuming all the available attention from every other kind of activity.  I'd say that in the last five years in particular, "continuous improvement" has shoved and elbowed its way to the front off the line of formulations frequently on the lips and minds of college and university administrators, trickling down to department chairs and committees detailed with laboring that concept, producing plans, reporting data, then doing the whole thing all over again.

Questioning Continuous Improvement

Recently, Harvard Business Review blogger Ron Ashkenas argued a case that It's Time to Rethink Continuous Improvement -- a very welcome suggestion.  I've noted myself, in an Orexis Dianoētikē blog post, that too much weight given to a closely related and similarly endorsed notion, "best practices," not only can easily become a substitute for real thought and good practical reasoning, becoming counter-productive in the process -- the uncritical attitude towards these sorts of buzzword concepts is often indicative of a deeper failure, one which assumes form as institutional culture.

Boethius on Mistaken Views of Happiness (part 1 of 2)

One of the essays I assign my Ethics students at the beginning of the semester is Alasdair MacIntyre's Plain Persons and Moral Philosophy: Rules, Virtues and Goods (included in the Macintyre Reader). One reason I use that short piece is that it introduces an important theme, the idea that we are all, whether we realize it or not, involved in the processes of asking and answering certain fundamental questions:

. . . on an Aristotelian view, the questions posed by the moral philosopher and the questions posed by the plain person are to a certain degree inseparable.  And it is with questions that each begins, for each is engaged in enquiry, the plain person often unsystematically asking"What is my good?" and "What actions will achieve it?" and the moral philosopher systematically enquiring "What is the good for human beings?" and "what kind of actions will achieve the good?"  Any persistent attempt to answer either of these sets of questions soon leads to asking the other.

In MacIntyre's view -- and I think he's right -- we are all of us committed to one or another -- some more some less consistently -- to one moral theory or another, whether explicitly, consciously, deliberately so, or whether only implicitly, accepting it perhaps as the default, following a trajectory of desire we have failed, avoided, or even not had the opportunity to think out.  When we see these sorts of moral matters from a different perspective, we imaginatively place ourselves in the perspective of another, rival moral theory.  When we leave one perspective behind and adopt another -- whether by a gradual process or a sudden conversions -- we shift our allegiance from one moral theory to another.

How Do We Get It Wrong? Let Us Count The Ways

One of the important aspects of a genuine Virtue Ethics approach that does not get as much discussion or examination -- and often isn't taught in Ethics courses -- is determining what ways, to what degrees, and for what reasons one has gone wrong, done wrong, morally failed.  All too often, we confine ourselves to thinking in terms of the virtues and the vices -- which, to be sure, is good, a better approach, one more adequate to the complexities of human beings and moral life than those oriented by other moral theories -- tending to confine evaluation to motives, actions, consequences, or social arrangements.

But, whether our goal is to fully understand the rich intellectual resources contained in the classic texts of Virtue Ethics, or to progressively develop and employ a coherent practical approach adequate to the complexities and demands of concrete moral life as we actually live it out, what is required is a well-differentiated grasp of how we go wrong, how we get things wrong, the range, differing seriousness, and types of moral failures.

Big Think: Chess Life, or Why Getting Beaten Can Be Good

In a recent interview with the Big Think, chess-player Maurice Ashley, celebrated as the first African-American grandmaster, briefly narrates his development in the game of chess, from novice to master.  His recollections and reflections are interesting from a Virtue Ethics perspective for several reasons.

The game of Chess is in fact one the very practices examined by contemporary virtue ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre in his seminal book After Virtue.  He didn’t pick chess by chance or whim — chess does in certain ways exemplify the sort of practices that bear important and educative analogies to traditions of moral inquiry, like those of Virtue Ethics.   A practice, in the way MacIntyre famously reconfigures the term, denotes: