Does Virtue Help Make Us Aware of Our Vices?

Some time back -- while I was grading some student essays from the Spring 2014 semester -- I posted an insight one of my students had expressed, but not entirely developed, on my Facebook page.  It then spurred a short but very pregnant discussion with one interlocutor, one which I decided I ought to keep, file away, and then return to think out more later on.

It's now later on -- time to revisit this interesting original remark, "virtue works in ways that makes non-virtuous people aware of their viciousness," as well as the comments and questions by my interlocutor, and my own off the cuff remarks.  But first, let's take a look -- and give a read to -- the conversation under discussion:

Are the Virtues Already In Us?

In my Ethics classes, one type of assessment and exercise I routinely require my students to engage in is what I call an Application Assignment.  I provide them with a complex, morally ambiguous, problematic scenario, which they then have to analyze along various lines.  I'll write more about those parameters in a follow-up post, and discuss just how the assignments work to foster student learning at several different levels.  For now, what I'd like to focus on is one very interesting, common, and revealing mistake I see some students make semester after semester.

A key component of the assignment is competently applying three of the moral theories we've been studying to the case in question.  This requires that the students do a bit of explaining about the key concepts of the theory, and then go on to particularize these to the characters of the narrative.  Students do all right with Egoism, with the authoritarian Might-Makes-Right theory, and often enough with Utilitarianism.  Many of them run into problems with Virtue Ethics, and there are a variety of distinct misunderstandings and misapplications.  I'm particularly interested in one recurring way students get matters wrong.  Some students interpret Virtue Ethics as asserting that the virtues lie within each and every person, ready to be used when situations call for them.

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?

What Do Students and Teachers Deserve?

Down the years, and more recently than in my earlier career, I've had the happy experience of being thanked and acknowledged in various ways by the students who I've taught in my classes.  When you consider the alternatives -- and they are most definitely live, often-experienced and -witnessed alternatives, ranging from being entirely ignored until a student wants something (a grade, an explanation, an exception, what's going to be on the exam), through suspicious arms-length-maintenance, or wariness of instructional idiosyncrasy, unpredictability, even malevolence, all the way to the outright contempt displayed in some settings -- the exhibition by students of a grateful and gracious attitude becomes deeply gratifying to any instructor who understands the value and process of education in which they are involved.

I have to admit at times feeling a bit bewildered by my students' responses to and admissions about my teaching and how it affects them -- and that, I suppose, is due to a remnant of the pedant still within me -- the part of myself which far more attentive to all that has been left out by a student's robust but still rudimentary presentation or reflections upon some item or idea of study than gladdened by just how much distance has been traversed, how much potential has been brought to actuality and consolidated within the mind, the soul, the memory, even the heart, of the young man or woman charged to learn with me for the space of a semester.  That competent but sterile, and in some sense dense or tone-deaf, part of myself responds all too easily by raising all sorts of other related matters, at risk of contextualizing away whatever spark of excitement, whatever haven for learning, whatever inertia newly-directed along a path of ongoing reflection that the way I structure and run my classes has afforded my students.

Is Partisanship a Vice?

We're near the end of the long-dragged-out forced march of another national election season -- though "season" has become a misnomer for a process that now takes well over a year.  The main debates are finished -- those two-side televised contests, a lion's share of limelight going to the presidential contenders, a healthy share taken by their sidekick cubs, with scraps, offal, trimmings, and marrowless bones left for the publicity-starved third-party debaters to wrest away or share -- whatever they may decide. I must register my partial relief now that the debates are finished -- merely partial though, because it takes almost no time in our media-saturated environment for the assessments of these back and forth staged deliberative discussions to proliferate.

And, it actually would not be that bad if in fact most of what passes for commentary actually did comprise something like "assessments" -- even admittedly biased ones. What is so galling, so irritating, and so . . . downright depressing is the spectacle, repeated almost endlessly of people I thought I knew better -- and thought more highly of -- blithely in some cases, snidely and smugly in others, and in yet others accompanied by vitriol, rabidity, fear-mongering and ultimatums, engage themselves in what is really just pure partisanship, plain and simple -- all the while concealing that very behavior from themselves, and projecting it onto their political opponents.  Not only is there a visible, palpable viciousness (in the general sense) coloring both their filters and their statements -- there's also a distinctively moral slippage, a continued and unmarked failure, a different and more troubling viciousness --expression of which, and encounter with which, is rapidly becoming a nearly unavoidable dimension of everyday existence.

Is "Ethical Hacker" An Oxymoron? (part 1 of 2)

According to a recent Forbes piece, Exploding The Myth of The "Ethical Hacker", there have long been ongoing discussions and debates bearing upon the question whether that term or concept really makes sense.  Perhaps, like Martin Heidegger quipped about "Christian philosophy" (a stance, incidentally, whose flaws many pointed out) being as coherent as the notion of "wooden iron," there's something to the almost logical repugnance that many seem to feel arise when "ethical" and "hacker" are conjoined.

The article, contributed by Conrad Constantine and Dominique Karg -- the latter of whom bears the title "Chief Hacking Officer" -- makes some decent, well-articulated arguments against the propriety or prudence of speaking of some hackers as "ethical hackers."  They're raising, or spilling over into, some very interesting moral issues of wider scope, which are worth noting, even exploring a bit here.  The deeper question about connections between terminology, good or bad actions, personality and dispositions, and moral evaluation is one with a long history in moral theory -- addressed, explored, examined by philosophers ranging from Plato and Aristotle, to Confucius, Thomas Aquinas, and Jeremy Bentham.

Hate and Anger in Aristotle

When we come to what are often called "negative emotions" -- things like fear, jealousy, anger, hatred -- feelings, affective responses, moods -- there seems to be a strong tendency in our contemporary society, particularly when it's a matter of politics or culture -- to do three different but connected things.  One of these is to easily, even automatically, project these onto others, typically others against whom we sense ourselves as being opposed.  Another is to deny or rename them on our own parts, or failing that, to excuse them in ourselves by displacing responsibility to those other people who "started it," i.e. who provoked the reactive emotion on our own parts.  The third is to employ and invoke language or concepts of emotions and morality in careless, uncritical, simplistic ways.

A prime example of this is the indiscriminate use of the term "hate."  As of late, the Left has proven itself more effective than the Right in misusing this term and notion, extending it to their opponents, whether real, assumed, or only imagined -- but they certainly don't have a monopoly upon it.  With a few exceptions -- typically those glorying in it -- it seems most people are willing to take for granted that "hate" or "hatred" is always bad, so accusing another of it, or being accused oneself, takes on a status almost of a logical deduction.  Hate is bad.  So-and-so hates.  Thus, So-and-so is bad (and we're justified in hating them, or maybe just expressing our outrage, or disapproval, or pity, or. . . )  Aristotle said several useful things about hate -- and about the closely associated emotional dynamic of anger -- which would well be worth considering in our current cultural situation.

Are "Vices" Good For Us?

I use Twitter fairly extensively, for a variety of different purposes, one of which is to keep my ear to the ground, so to speak, or if you like a different analogy, to see what might come across my virtual desk. Spam or self-promotion aside, most of it is pretty good stuff.  At times, the articles linked to might be rather idiosyncratically, even misleadingly headlined, but in general, they provide a decent picture about what knowledgeable people in a variety of fields, professions, and communities are talking about. Given my own predilection for matters of morality, discussions of virtues and vices, it's no surprise that an article caught my attention: 10 'Vices' That Are Actually Good For You.  I suppose I ought to have known or at least suspected as soon as I saw the MSN Health logo coming up that it would be fairly ill-conceived, poorly-informed, disappointing the hopes the intriguing title raised -- despite what people tend to think, its tough to write well and competently on moral matters without a strong intellectual background and some practical experience in the field of Ethics.

How Do We Get It Wrong? Four Ways Aristotle Addresses

In the piece I started yesterday, I promised to talk about how and why a contemporary virtue ethicist and a classic virtue ethicist distinguish different types of moral failure from each other.  Discussing the contemporary, Alasdair MacIntyre, I placed more focus on the why -- the reasons we ought to be concerned not only whether we've done wrong, but to what degree, for what reasons -- and what we learn about ourselves in the process, including how -- like a bus that has left the road for short-cut dirt paths and is now bouncing over unfamiliar, dusty, and trackless terrain -- we might discern not only the overall direction we need to steer back towards, but how we might discern where trails run, which grooves and ruts we need to avoid and which might lead us back onto the straighter, more reliable roads towards the good.

As the post got longer and longer, I had to defer my promise to discuss Aristotle -- one of the worthies among the Virtue Ethics's classic thinkers -- since the whole goal of Virtue Ethics Digest was to have shorter pieces than those you might find on my other blog, Orexis Dianoētikē.  So, here it is, with more attention tonight to the how and less to the why in Aristotle's works -- though I don't want to give that short shrift, and will accordingly discuss that first.

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.

New Yorker: Wild Animals Don't Want to be Owned

The news earlier this month about Terry Thompson’s ill-fated decision to release the exotic, wild, and in many cases dangerous animals he had acquired — and then to kill himself — crossed my path in the same way as it did for so many others:  brief reports without much detail, announcing that among others, Lions and Bengal Tigers had been released near, and were now roaming into, an Ohio town.  Then more substantive follow-up reports and opinion pieces began to pop up, as the media swung to focus on the owner, the sheriff and deputies, the town’s residents, and the animals themselves.  One of the more interesting, and well-balanced pieces is by Susan Orlean.  She asks about the tragic situation the key question:

A small, drowsy town in Ohio, a pile of dead Bengal tigers. How did it come to this? The blame should be doled out carefully. Very little of it should fall on the sheriff of Zanesville, who did what was probably the only thing he could do: give a kill order when darkness fell and Terry Thompson’s wild carnivores were still prowling around town

This Field Required: Poverty and Virtue Ethics

Here’s an interesting blog posting by Pamela Stubbart, exploring the implications of a concept that’s being talked about quite a bit in psychology and some in ethics:  will-power depletion.  The general idea is that each human being has, at any given time, a certain amount of willpower — capacity to stick to or follow through on a difficult decision or action, also, in the older ethical literature, known as “self-control” — on reserve, and it can be exhausted as it gets used over time making decisions.

There have been some empirical psychological studies, which seem to indicate — you should always be rather skeptical of “studies show… ” until you’ve looked carefully at how the study was carried out and what reasoning the researchers employed — that there is something to this idea of “willpower depletion.”  And, this in turn has some implications for those in poverty:

the less money you have, the more sit­u­a­tions you will encounter in which you must restrain your­self and make dif­fi­cult pur­chas­ing trade­offs, and this means you’ll have less willpower left­over later to deal with other sit­u­a­tions in which you might need it