Recognizing A Fuller Range of Moral Distinctions (part 1 of 2)

In the course of discussions bearing on -- or even just straying into -- moral matters, you'll often hear people involved in them invoking and using a rather limited range of moral terms and concepts.  It can be ordinary everyday conversations between friends, family or co-workers.  At the other end of the scale, it might be talking heads corralled into boxes to debate each other with sound-bites on the television screen.  It can even be an Ethics class, or some other class straying into that territory

The most commonly used terms and concepts are the permissible, the obligatory, or the prohibited.  There's a host of synonyms available for these.  You can even describe them through terms like: what's allowed, what's required, and what's not allowed.  These are indeed important for moral life, decision-making, and development -- but where, I'd like to argue, a lot of people go wrong in in thinking that these three classifications provide an adequate range for the moral distinctions we need to make.

New Years Resolutions for the Blog

I typically forget to make New Years resolutions these days -- and its now long past the 1st of January -- but perhaps I'll make one now for this blog, as well as pertaining to my writing projects more generally.  Having taken on far more teaching over the Christmas break than I'd have liked -- 3 online classes, two of them of the intensive 4-week variety! -- which resulted in there really being no vacation or down-time to speak of, coupled with the usual holiday travel and festivities, I'm now just getting my head above water, able to indulge myself in some non-class-related reading and writing (between online lessons and handouts for my student, I've probably been writing a good 10,000 words per week!)

More on Virtues In Augustine's Free Choice of the Will

A few weeks back, I started discussing Augustine's conception of the (cardinal) virtues in his work On Free Choice of the Will, promising this follow-up post where I would explore and explain certain of the themes set aside for the time being in the earlier post.  Now also having shot a video delving into the topic in the meantime, and now having some spare time on my hands over Easter Break, it's about time to make good on that pledge to tell the fuller story about virtue -- and vice -- in this classic Augustinian work.

In the first post, I stuck to book 1 -- and admittedly, there's already quite a bit going on in Augustine's examination of the virtues in that early portion of the larger work.  But really, his identification and definition of the four cardinal virtues, the connection between the virtues, the will, and eternal law, even the impediments impose upon a person by the vices opposed to virtue -- these are just starting points, or better, outlines, which will be filled in and expanded in his fuller discussions about virtue and vice in books 2 and 3

The Divided Self in Plato's Republic

Last week, I led my Ethics students about as far as they are likely to go this semester (at least accompanied by myself) into the heart of Plato's Republic, that dense and lengthy tome often assigned and maligned in a whole host of classes. It is one of the great early works of western literature -- of immense imaginative scope, motley as democracy with perspectives, crammed with ideas whose entire importance one cannot realize upon first (or even perhaps on tenth, or hundreth) read, offering so many lenses and mirrors for regarding the world, the soul, society, the self.  

It's a seminal work for Virtue Ethics, one against whose articulation of virtues and vices any other moral theory that wants to claim real membership in that tradition must measure itself.  After the initial sparring of the first several books, Socrates shows his hand plain. Gone are the aporetic and ironic meanderings of earlier dialogues like the Euthyphro, the Lysias, the Laches, or the Charmides. It's as if Socrates takes heart from the city, the guardians, the education he envisions in discourse and imagination, from their certitude and intellectual familiarity with the virtues -- now those virtues can be told. . . and even to some extent taught.

Weeds in the Garden of Moral Life

When I returned, about a week and half ago, from my summer travels, a restorative period of reconnecting face to face with friends and family, it was no surprise to find the little garden I'd cleared and planted with herbs, strawberries, and peppers , now covered over with weeds, invaded and seemingly conquered at every available inch of dirt.  After all, I basically abandoned the planted plot not only to the elements of sun, rain, wind, but also to encroachments by other plants seeded within the soil, imperfectly rooted out previously, or straying past the border of bricks.  Given the garden's diminutive scale, thoroughly weeding it anew was thankfully just a matter of an afternoon's effort -- but careful, attentive work, for the weeds had been allowed to grow, as is their wont, not only over, not only within, but intertwined with the other plants.

Culling crabgrass, bugle-weed, and other invasive species out from patches of strawberry, thyme, or rosemary, demands a gardener's eye, discerning patterns of leaf, stalk, and shoot from each other, and hands that follow, gently, teasingly until the moment for pulling, separating out the good from the bad, the desirable from that which desires to choke and supplant it.  As the hours passed, more and more soil cleared of green, except for the plants originally intended for those spots, similitudes between gardening, the husbandry of soil and seed, and the processes of moral life, practice, development suggested themselves to me, tangibly, tactilely, experimentally, as much as in concept and language.  Gardening -- like related activities of landclearing and trailblazing, berry-picking and foraging, finding and transplanting plants -- can easily turn into merely utilitarian, practical activity, but it also just as much admits room, and conduces to a readiness, for contemplation.

Are Organic Foodies Judgemental?

The Atlantic recently ran a provocative -- and in certain ways tellingly misguided piece -- Does Organic Food Make You a Judgmental Jerk? Maybe by one of their health topic bloggers, Brian Fung.  Lest I be categorized too quickly for being "judgmental," however, I have to point out that Fung is just uncritically passing on the results, or rather speculative interpretations, of Kendal Eskine's recent study Wholesome Foods and Wholesome Morals? Organic Foods Reduce Prosocial Behavior and Harshen Moral Judgments. The bulk of the evaluations -- whether on-target or off-base,  carefully considered or great imaginative leaps -- stem directly from the study itself.

You can see this pretty clearly by comparing other pieces summarizing (and admittedly spinning a bit further) the same study results.  A decently representative sample of this new (anti?-)moralizing story spans the gamut of news and opinion sources: Psychology Today,  Time, Scientific American,  The Inquisitor, Jezebel, and even The Times of India. Gluten Free Spinner, who initially evinced a bit of healthy skepticism, quickly bought into the classification and characterization of jerkiness.  Reason.com went so far as to even speak of such people as being "anti-social" -- but then, after yucking it up with now seemingly obligatory references to the Portlandia granola hipster stereotype, at least brought in some dissenting voices.  The question I'd like to ask though is:  Are the critics actually pointing out the real flawed assumptions here?

Yves Simon on Moral Virtue (part 2 of 2)

Last month, I wrote a rather longish entry (at least for this blog) setting out a few themes from Yves Simon's excellent short work, The Definition of Moral Virtue, focusing in that post on two things in particular:  his identification of three moral positions common in modernity which attempt to dispense with the traditional conception of virtue, and the implications of his distinction between nature and use as modes of goodness or badness.  What I left unaddressed was another major theme of his book, the difference between mere habits and habitus.  

That the virtues -- and for that matter the vices -- are at their bases, in the sort of being which they have, habits is a standard commonplace of Virtue Ethics.  You can find that term readily used in most translations of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, or Aquinas' Disputed Questions on Virtue and Treatise On the Virtues, as well as in other classic texts of Virtue Ethics traditions of moral enquiry.  Simon cautions us against that, however, showing how the Greek hexis and its Latin translation habitus involve something more and something different than the concept "habit" which we so often unthinkingly substitute in their place -- and in telling us why, he also teaches us some important and often overlooked lessons about virtue and vice.

Yves Simon on Moral Virtue (part 1 of 2)

Recently, I had the opportunity to indulge myself in a bit of reading of an author I'd long ago enjoyed, the 20th century French Aristotelian-Thomist philosopher, Yves Simon, whose course on "Virtues," taught at the University of Chicago, was later edited into the book, The Definition of Moral Virtue, by Vukan Huic. Simon is a competent and quietly imaginative interpreter of the Aristotelian-Thomist tradition in philosophy, and his reexamination of the very notion of virtue, digging out its contours from within, scraping off the varnish-turned-plaque of certain modern reinterpretations or reductions, while at the same time connecting it unnostalgically just as much with the flows, courses, and preoccupations of modern life as with ancient or medieval modes of existence -- his work is eminently worth the hours it requires.

In addition to pointing out three typically modern responses which effectively attempt to substitute for the virtue that we human beings need in order to do well, act well, live well, Simon also introduces, or perhaps much better and more accurately put, briefly elaborates, several distinctions very useful for thinking out more fully what virtue actually is, what it does, how it works within and without it, what it calls forth from us.  Two of those in particular -- ideas admittedly stock in trade for virtue ethicists, but which, like any other inventory, lie unexamined upon the shelf -- the relationship between nature and use as dimensions of the goodness or badness of things, and the difference between mere habits and the difficult-to-translate habitus, are key for any practical, not merely academic understanding of virtue and vice. This post will discuss the first distinction, and the followup post will dig into the second, more complexly developed distinction.

Anselm, Justice, and Virtue

Yesterday, I gave a guest lecture on St. Anselm's moral theory in a colleague's Medieval Philosophy class, introducing his students to some Anselmian themes beyond the "ontological argument" they recalled from their earlier Intro to Philosophy classes.  Central among those was Anselm's understanding of justice -- or the variety of goodness distinctive to humans and other rational beings -- as rectitude or uprightness of will.

What is particularly interesting about Anselm's examination of this idea -- which he plays with throughout his works, progressively developing a more and more complex picture of moral goodness and evil -- is that early on he articulates this standard of rectitude not simply in terms of the will conforming to some standards, ideals, or rules, but in a more reflexive manner.  Justice is rectitude of will kept for its own sake (rectitudo voluntatis propter se servata).

Acedia, the Internet, and Social Media

A younger friend and colleague of mine recently decided to close his Facebook account.  It's striking, isn't it, that such a decision can be the object and occasion of considerable reflection?  Would that have been conceivable ten years ago -- leaving a virtual social network and its interactions behind?  Certainly conceivable, but rather within the realm of speculative fiction. And now, it's a practically conceivable, even for some pressing matter, no longer just a sheer possibility, but a thought-over necessity at times.

His case and process of decision-making -- narrated in an insightful and thought-provoking entry on his blog The Christian State of Life -- might be viewed as both entirely comprehensible and yet rather unique, off the beaten track of normality, divergently following a path less taken.  You see, he's a seminarian, in training and under discipline -- so, of course, he doesn't have the time, he's looking to higher things, living with one foot out of the secular world, detached from the worldly matters that we chatter about via the social media networks that seem to metastasize deeper and deeper into our lives, workplaces, relationships, perhaps even the cycle of liturgy and prayer.

HBR: The Secret to Dealing with Difficult People

Tony Schwartz, among other things a blogger on the Harvard Business Review network, recently offered advice about a common issue both in the workplace and in one’s non-work life: the need to deal with difficult people, those who fit this description:

Do you have someone at work who consistently triggers you? Doesn’t listen? Takes credit for work you’ve done? Wastes your time with trivial issues? Acts like a know-it-all? Can only talk about himself? Constantly criticizes?

Such people, of course, are not a new or unique feature of modern society.  In his Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle discussed such people, as did Plato, Epictetus, Augustine and a number of ancient philosophers in their turn.  Aristotle is particularly interesting to point to, though, because he analyses the emotional response of — and virtues and vices associated with — anger.  I've written about this in greater depth elsewhere on the web (here, here, and here), so I'm just going to mention a few features of Aristotle's theory relevant to Schwartz's advice.

Big Think: How Honor Can Remake Society

The interconnections — and at times discordances — between honor and virtue are complicated, not least because these are multifaceted moral phenomena.  Virtue is multiple and each of the virtues possesses its own determinate specificity.  Honor likewise has more than one sense, manifests in more than one manner, is understood in very different ways, is desired by different people as at times almost unrecognizably similar or analogous goods.

In our contemporary moral language, we — and every culture seems to exhibit something along these lines — possess and use numerous not-entire-synonyms for “honor”:  respect, esteem, admiration — just to name a few.  It’s tempting to try to identify moral phenomena strictly along such linguistic differentials, to say:  respect is this, honor is that — not recognizing that inn reality these blur into each other and bifurcate internally as well.