One of the strongest objections to an understanding of …bthames/docs/Thames proposal.doc · Web viewHermeneutics is very much a practical endeavor, one that shares much with Aristotle’s

Bradley J ThamesDepartment of PhilosophyUniversity of Notre DameDissertation Proposal (Draft: 19 March 2007)Working Title: “Historicity, Contingency, and Virtue, Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tradition”

This is a draft of a proposal to address a powerful objection to virtue ethics by

considering the work of Charles Taylor and Hans-Georg Gadamer and the ways they

might be able to supplement the work of those working more directly on virtue ethics.

What follows is a) a brief account of the objection; b) the need to adequately respond to

it; c) the inadequacy of relativism/skepticism, etc. (critics of modernity) on the one hand,

and prominent contemporary moral theory in the Kantian or consequentialist traditions

(survivals of modernity) on the other; d) a restatement of the challenge, and certain

problems with contemporary virtue ethicists, specifically Foot, Hursthouse and

MacIntyre; e) Taylor’s contribution; f) Gadamer’s contribution.

A) One of the strongest objections to an understanding of ethics grounded in the

virtues – as opposed to deontological rules, consequentialist principles, etc. – is what

Solomon has termed the ‘contingency objection’.1 The objection might run as follows:

according to a virtue ethics account, moral knowledge and moral action both depend on

having the kinds of dispositions or character traits that enable the agent to perceive what

kinds of actions and reactions a particular situation demands. Understanding what these

character traits (i.e., the virtues) are, and the possession of such traits, depends upon a

lengthy habituation process, involving the right rational frameworks, the attunement of

our affective capacities, and the right relation between the psychological faculties,

analogous to the way in which making a good judgment about the quality of a vintage

1 Solomon (1988).

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wine requires a lengthy process involving an understanding of what kinds of qualities

make a good wine, and the capacity to recognize those qualities on the nose and palate.

But in the case of ethical thought and practice, the right kind of habituation is a process

almost entirely out of our control, depending instead on the community into which we are

born, the environment in which we are raised, and perhaps even certain biological/genetic

factors. This seems to undermine the special nature of the moral as something for which

an agent can be held responsible, making virtuous behavior instead largely a matter of

fortune. An adequate morality must make it possible for any agent, regardless of his or

her history or circumstances, to do the right thing. This sort of objection has its roots in

Kant, of course, and so finds some of its most vociferous heralds in that tradition of

thought. But the underlying presumption of universality seems to be shared by those who

are otherwise critics of Kantianism themselves. Due to the dependency of good moral

judgment on factors beyond any particular agent’s control, we will call this aspect of the

contingency objection the ‘problem of moral luck’, in order to indicate its affinities with

the long-standing debate by that name.

There is a related objection as well, namely, that the virtue ethicist’s view of

things makes genuine self-evaluation, as well as moral debate between substantially

different ways of thought, very difficult if not impossible. Consider the following:

understanding practical demands requires having the right kind of disposition to see a

situation as one calling for certain sorts of behavior. I.e., whether or not we see certain

features of a situation as morally salient will depend on whether or not we’ve acquired

certain character traits, a certain conceptual framework that structures how we see the

world. The only way to make moral judgments at all is from within some such

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framework, and these frameworks are themselves products of our environment (in the

broadest sense of the term). Again, whether or not we make right moral judgments

depends on whether or not we have acquired the right kind of conceptual frameworks; but

how, then, can we make a judgment about the frameworks themselves? That is to say, I

can only judge the merits of one framework from within that or another such framework,

which is one way of saying that I cannot possibly step outside of them altogether and pass

judgment from a ‘neutral’ point of view. My judgments are contingent upon the

frameworks which I happen to have acquired, and the truth of those judgments can be

nothing more than ‘relative’ to my religion, culture, society, or other such source of my

understandings. This is hardly compatible with the sense that at least some moral

judgments are true, that some ways of acting are right and others wrong, where these

terms are taken to transcend the contingent parochialisms of any particular way of life

and thought. We will call this aspect the ‘problem of irreducible pluralism’.

B) Each of these problems has been a hindrance to thinking about morality in

terms of the virtues, and motivated either a continued striving towards finding and

formulating moral rules of a traditional deontological or consequentialist sort, or

abandoning the notion of moral truth altogether, and with it the classical notion of the

virtues as dispositions that enable one to understand and act accordingly. Defenders of

an Aristotelian understanding of ethics, then, must be able to satisfactorily respond to

such an objection for this approach to have philosophical merit.

Moreover, the kinds of contingencies to which virtue ethics is supposedly

committed leads to several worries beyond the question of philosophical merits, which I

can only gesture to here. The witness of the past century’s horrors brings both a

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skepticism about any kind of universality to morality, at least at the epistemic level (‘if

moral rules really are universal, how could so many people have gone so terribly

wrong?’), and yet a pressing need to pass judgment, both to honor the victims (‘what

happened really was evil’), and to provide the tools that will ensure nothing like that

happens again. According to the contingency objection, virtue ethics can neither respond

adequately to the rising skepticism, nor provide the needed preventive tools. It is, of

course, an open question whether these are necessary responses to the 20th century’s

mania; but that experience does seem to make the alternative responses to virtue ethics

(discussed below) seem more attractive.

Another problem concerns the response to the growing rift between liberal,

secular culture and (religious) conservatism. The most notable instances of this problem

are those having to do with the clash between fundamentalist Islam and the West. But we

find this problem increasingly surfacing in many other domains: as Western culture

permeates the Far East more rapidly than its people can assimilate it; as Western society

itself finds itself less and less able to proceed constructively on the challenges that it

faces as a result of greater technological innovation, expanded rights and freedoms,

weakening of traditional social structures, and the like; in the ambivalence between

respect for dignity and respect for difference with regard to, e.g., the historically

marginalized and 3rd world cultures. The list could go on. Once again, an increasing

need for the resources for dealing with such conflicts and problems meets with greater

skepticism about moral philosophy’s capacity to provide them by proceeding in the way

it has for the past few hundred years, that is, under the presumption that we can escape

our parochial circumstance and find the ‘truth’ about the right and the good. But again,

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as Heidegger discerned in the request once made of him to ‘write an ethics’,2 when the

threats to our well-being posed by the modern predicament seem to loom larger than

ever, and the traditional sources of moral authority (viz., religion) can no longer claim

widespread allegiance, we hold onto the hope that reason and truth, and not the sword or

the dollar, will finally prevail. It is moral philosophy’s task to carry the mantle and

ensure that this hope can be fed.

C) The claim that almost all moral norms, and practical reason itself, is a product

of our environments has actually become rather widely accepted, from neo-Nietzschean

and post-modern philosophers to those entrenched within Enlightenment modernity; the

wide variation exists with regard to the related questions of how far down this

conditionedness goes, and what that means for moral theory and discourse. On one side

are those within the broad way of thinking that includes what has been called relativism,

subjectivism, historicism, perspectivalism, and so forth. While there are of course many

figures in Continental philosophy we could discuss, not to mention literary theory,

sociology, anthropology, and other humanities, I will focus primarily on figures who’ve

received notable attention in Anglo-American philosophy, in particular Rorty and

Williams, as well as ‘analytic relativists’ such as Harmon and Wong. In general they see

conditionedness, at least insofar as normativity is concerned, as going all the way down,

taking a very strong position against the possibility of any sort ‘escape’ from the

frameworks that condition our ethical conceptions and judgments. Any neutral or

universal ground from which to test normative validity, adjudicate moral disputes,

formulate and apply moral principles, and so forth, is deemed a fiction. As such, they

tend to be very skeptical about the notion of moral truth, considering that to be a relic of a

2Heidegger (1947).

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bygone age in which essentialism about human nature or religious dogmatism ruled the

day, and often regard claims to moral knowledge and truth to be forms of domination in a

Nietzschean sense.

On the other side are those who refuse to abandon the modernist hope of

transcending our contingent situatedness and finding that neutral, or at least common

ground on which to base universal and absolute moral claims. Those in the Kantian

tradition argue that from the conditions of practical reason as such (Korsegaard, Nagel),

discourse (Habermas), social cooperation (Rawls, Scanlon), or other universal features of

human life we can derive those principles that can transcend contingencies and overcome

the problems mentioned above. The scope of such principles tends to be quite narrow,

and its content meager, with the result that these philosophers tend to draw sharp

distinctions between the ‘domain of the moral’ and the domain of the (merely) ethical.

Corresponding to these domains are such dichotomies as that between the objective and

subjective, the absolute and relative, the binding and optional, the unconditional and

conditional, and many other “realms of bifurcation”.

There is a related way of drawing a distinction between the domain of the moral

and that of the ethical by those of a more consequentialist perspective. The universal

morality would involve something like maximizing happiness, preference satisfaction, or

value realization. But few continue to follow the classical utilitarians in thinking that

there is some universal yardstick by which to determine for all humans what counts as

‘happiness’ or ‘valuable’; rather, many consequentialists simply leave it to individuals to

determine for themselves. We should always act in such a way that the most people can

be as happy as possible, according to whatever makes them happy; we should always act

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in such a way that the most people’s conceptions of what is valuable to them can be

realized. Once again, the modernist ideals of universality and absolutism with regard to

moral judgments is relegated to a very narrow sphere.

D) The point of view of the representatives of ‘modernity’ that I have briefly

gestured towards certainly does better justice to the moral phenomenology and the truth-

claims involved in almost all relatively substantial moral judgments, as compared with

the historicist (as well as most non-cognitivist) views. And yet it does so at the cost of

fragmenting and compartmentalizing human life, which is to say nothing of the

spuriousness of the arguments. The failure to find a solution that doesn’t cover over the

moral phenomena and yet avoids the pitfalls of the more modernist approaches might in

large part account for the growing popularity of a kind of pragmatism, in which morality

becomes prudence, and philosophy becomes subordinated to politics. All substantive

ethical claims, and particularly claims to truthfulness, become privatized, while public

discourse and practice is guided not by what is right, good, or true, but by what best lets

us solve problems. This is supposed to let us continue to think in terms of the traditional

standards of validity, so long as this does not impinge upon the public realm.

One might take pragmatism as the inevitable outcome of the modernist project: as

the ‘universal’, the ‘absolute’, the ‘objectively true’ becomes more and more removed

from what is ‘merely contingent’, the only thing left are emaciated conceptions of what is

‘useful’ or best keeps us from interfering with one another’s private business (something

like this may explain Rawls’ movement in the last 20 years of his life). Or it might be

taken to be the inevitable outcome of the historicist (etc.) side of things: if there really is

no sense to the notion of intersubjective normative truth, then the only real way to guide

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our intersubjective lives cannot be in terms of that, but rather, again, according to what

best allows us to get on and to cope with each other. This is certainly the sort of thing

both pragmatists and historicists (who are often, but not always, one and the same) can be

found saying. But as the consequence of the modernist project or that of its critics, it is

the consequence of the bifurcating of self and community, of implicitly (and insidiously)

subverting almost all traditional conceptions of self, world, and what is significant while

raising its own banner without the need to justify itself (for those traditional modes of

justification themselves have been subverted), of forcing the self more and more inward,

darkening its horizons and covering over its own identity as extending out into its

community – past, present and future. If this seems a bit hyperbolic, a more modest way

of putting it might be that pragmatism is not something that most people would want to

accede to, but rather is something many are seeing themselves forced into by the growing

recognition of our social and historical contingency.

So the challenge to virtue ethics presented by the contingency objection is to take

seriously the phenomenology of the ethical life – including its truth claims and that

special sense of intersubjective bindingness – and provide for the possibility of some kind

of transcendence that makes intercultural dialogue and self-criticism possible, all while

acknowledging the historicity of the self and the inescapable embeddedness of all moral

thought in received conceptual and linguistic frameworks.

Certain writers on the subject of virtue fall short in one or both of these aspects of

a desirable account. Foot and Hursthouse, for instance, propose an updated version of

Aristotelian naturalism, giving an account of practical reason in terms of what it means to

be a well-functioning human being; they further argue that, just as there is something

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wrong with a free-riding wolf, a heart that doesn’t pump blood, etc., so there is something

wrong with a person who fails to keep promises, e.g. While structurally promising, this

kind of approach leaves open the issue of how the notion of a ‘well-functioning human

being’ is to be filled in. The room for variation becomes rather unsettling as cultures

clash, and as the notion of a well-functioning human being itself is taken more and more

to be a matter of personal preference.

McDowell’s famous “Virtue and Reason” falls short in the other dimension. In

arguing for a genuinely cognitivist account of normativity which is at once Aristotelian

and Wittgensteinian, he insists that the virtuous person – and only that person – is able to

‘perceive’ the moral demands of a situation by recognizing its morally salient features.

While this is a splendid articulation of a certain aspect of the virtuous practical intellect, it

is just the sort of account to which the contingency objection might be directed: if our

perception of saliences depends upon ‘whirls of organism’, it is not unreasonable to

wonder what makes this account anything more than perspectivalism. While McDowell

seems to dismiss such worries as “vertigo” and often “philistine scientism”, one hopes

that a virtue ethics can offer something a bit more satisfying in response to such worries.

MacIntyre has addressed these sorts of problem by identifying the frameworks

we’ve been discussing with traditions of rational enquiry, and attempting to give an

account of how we might be able to recognize that (or those) traditions within which truth

is most properly revealed and passed on. A tradition in this view is an historically

extended and socially embodied argument about the good, and by entering into that

argument we avail ourselves of certain conceptual resources; the capacity of these

resources to meet and overcome various internal and external challenges indicates the

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extent to which the judgments that emerge from that tradition might be regarded as true.

This doesn’t provide us with one unique perspective from which to make moral

judgments, but it does narrow down the range of alternatives, eliminates perspectivalism

and relativism as legitimate alternatives, preserves a kind of transcendent truth, and

indicates ways in which a tradition might be able to evaluate itself and engage in dialogue

with other traditions without having to exercise a feat of self-transcendence.

I will mention two potential worries with this sort of approach. The first might

claim that there are very few contemporary instances of anything that might qualify as a

‘tradition’ in his sense. Where once, when communities were more isolated and survival

depended more on shared ways of life, this would have been a much more viable

approach. But as communities merge and fragment, as individuals become more self-

sufficient, and as information becomes more disseminated and accessible, ‘traditions of

enquiry’ become more of a conceptual fiction than a reality. There is even dispute as to

how much of a ‘tradition’ Catholic Augustinian-Thomism, with which MacIntyre

identifies, really is. This isn’t to say, of course, that traditions don’t exist, or that the

ideal of moral reasoning is that it take place within a coherent tradition of enquiry. The

worry, rather, is that it is quite indeterminate what constitutes a tradition, or to put it

differently, where one tradition ends and another begins; and if that is indeterminate, we

must face the problematic possibility that nearly everyone in 20th century western society

is left morally dumb, so to speak.

E) Even if we were to broaden the notion of a tradition enough that many of us

can identify with one (but probably multiple) traditions, the second worry is that we have

to contend with the fact (at least, I will stipulate this as a fact for now) that we are all part

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of the liberal modernist tradition, no matter how much criticism we catapult at it.

Modernity has its own sets of virtues, its own conceptions of the good life and the ‘well-

functioning human being’, some of these survivals from pre-modern times, and others

rather new forms. Charles Taylor has done valuable work in tracing the history of the

conceptual frameworks or ‘horizons’ that have come down to us in western society and

articulating them from this historically-extended perspective. While MacIntyre offers a

similar kind of narrative, Taylor’s intention is not to demonstrate how things went

terribly wrong with modernity, as MacIntyre’s is sometimes taken to be, but rather to

engage in a kind of rehabilitation of these horizon-frameworks.

Although Taylor is not commonly regarded as a ‘virtue ethicist’,3 his project can

be seen as another kind of response to the challenge that virtue ethics must face. By

acknowledging that the ideals and virtues of modernity – authenticity, emphasis on

ordinary life, human dignity, and so forth – form part of our horizons, he gives more

weight than MacIntyre to the ‘thrownness’, to use Heidegger’s term, of the moral agent.

In this way he is able to give a somewhat different response to the contingency objection.

First, to address the question of how frameworks might be at once “inescapable” (as

Taylor puts it) and yet not impermeable, viz., how our contingencies not only do not

preclude, but might actually enable an encounter with transcendent normative truth, we

must first consider how it is that we – the ones asking that question – are able to do this.

But this requires an honest acknowledgement of our identity as inheritors of the dialectic

3 It’s true, however, that Taylor, MacIntyre and many of those in the Aristotelian tradition are frequently lumped together under the label ‘communitarian’. This indicates the affinities which these approaches have with one another; however, recognizing this does little to illuminate the particular problematic we’re concerned with. The criteria for being a ‘communitarian’ are rather vague and indeterminate, and applying this label to various philosophers does more to obscure what they have to say and their respective similarities and differences with one another, than any useful function it might have. For this reason, I will ignore the term in hopes that it will go away like some pesky fly.

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of modernity, and asking how beings like us can avoid being entirely bound to one

particular way of thinking, even if we cannot escape into the realm of neutrality or some

such. Articulating and understanding the sources of our disparate and often contradictory

ethical conceptions – both at local and wider levels – is a necessary part of understanding

ourselves as moral beings and the demands that identity imposes upon us.

Second, Taylor forces us to question the question itself. What are the

presuppositions underlying the contingency objection? Why is it that such an objection

did not have the force in premodern times that it does today? Once again, certain ideals

and values characteristic of modernity have provided the background upon which such an

objection can be raised. But simply presupposing such ideals and values, particularly

when they remain unacknowledged as presuppositions, determines the range of possible

responses. It is partly due to this failure to recognize and articulate the underlying

presuppositions that many of those in mainstream ethical theory simply presume that an

ethics of virtue cannot possibly succeed, that the objection cannot be answered.

Therefore, following Taylor, we must draw out the roots of our ethical conceptions not

only to answer the worries about situatedness and contingency, but to simply pose the

worries in the right way.

F) Taylor is clearly more influenced by Heidegger than MacIntyre or any of the

other prominent figures in contemporary virtue ethics. This influence not only come

through Heidegger himself, but through the development of Heidegger’s thought in

Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Moreover, Gadamer’s work to overcome the prejudice against

traditions has clearly aided MacIntyre’s own efforts, and Gadamer engages more directly

with the Classical tradition than does Taylor. Two important and fruitful ways of

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addressing the contingency worry, then, share a debt to Gadamer, albeit in somewhat

different ways. Because of this, working out an adequate response to the contingency

objection can greatly benefit by considering his account of hermeneutics.

Interpretation, Gadamer maintains, always proceeds from a

“wirkungsgeschichtliches Bewußtsein” (historically-effected consciousness), never, as it

were, from the ‘outside’. And yet as hermeneutical inquiry proceeds, we get drawn more

and more towards an understanding of what the text has to say to us. He emphasizes the

circular nature of understanding, not in the sense of a closed or vicious circle, but rather

as a kind of spiral or ratcheting as our conceptions and prejudices are brought to light by

the text, challenged, modified by that encounter, and then brought anew to the text.

Hermeneutics is very much a practical endeavor, one that shares much with Aristotle’s

phronesis, and serves as a valuable model for enquiry into the virtues. Working through

a Gadamerian account of how our received horizons are necessary for understanding

what it means to live ethically, enable rather than restrict genuine moral dialogue, and do

not ineluctably bind us as the objectors suppose, will enable us to see more clearly the

kind of responses Taylor and MacIntyre provide. This in turn addresses a perceived

deficiency and stumbling block to the tradition of virtue ethics, and can enable that

tradition to go forward unimpeded.

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Chapter outline:

1. Identify the problem

The first part of the chapter will be similar to sections A and B above, somewhat

expanded, particularly with regard to a basic account of an ethics of virtue. This I will do

only in a cursory manner, leaving the details to be filled in throughout the discussion,

because one of the primary aims of the project is to articulate an ethics of virtue in a way

that can respond to the contingency objection. One of the themes that I will end up

emphasizing is that the modern approach to ethics has made it difficult to deal with this

sort of problem due to the presumption of a set of bifurcations. As I intend to bring out in

the second part of this chapter, these are bifurcations that an Aristotelian ethics needs to

reject. These bifurcations ground the kinds of dichotomies on which the contingency

objection rests, such as absolute/relative, objective/subjective, cognitive/non-cognitive,

real/anti-real, neutral/prejudiced, and so forth. Thus, the objection itself is in part a

consequence of failing to recognize that the claims made by virtue ethics involve a

rejection of those bifurcations. Later we will see how the Heideggerian-inspired position

elucidates just what is involved in rejecting these distinctions, which will then give

credence to an ethics of virtue which involves such a rejection.

As we consider the development of ethics through Hume, Kant and Mill in

particular, I will point to three such bifurcations that tend to characterize their projects –

at least as they have been commonly interpreted – and which are either rejected or

subordinated by an ethics of virtue: 1) subject and object (or subject and world); 2) is and

ought; and 3) fact and value.4 4 What the reader should note with regard to each of these bifurcations is the radical form they take within modern morality. That is to say, in no way does an ethics of virtue refuse to acknowledge anything like these distinctions. The difference between the radical and moderate forms should become clear in the course of the discussion.

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By rejecting (1), virtue ethics maintains that the moral agent is always embedded

within a world, a product of her environment, culture, community, family, and other such

sources of the frameworks which provide our understandings of norms and values, and

out of which we engage in practical reasoning. Most modern morality, I will argue, bases

its theories on a presumption of ‘subjectivity’, which presents the problem of how we get

from the ‘inside’ to the ‘world’ in which moral action takes place. The possibility of

objectivity and associated ideas in morality is a matter of bridging this gap, either by

supposing that the ‘world’ has certain properties which it is the task of moral reasoning to

perceive and manipulate (intuiting, maximizing, etc.), or by locating morality entirely

within the subject (pure practical reason, attitudinal states, etc.). Many of the worries

with the notion that the virtuous agent ‘perceives’ the things to be done implicitly

presume this distinction, as I will argue.

The rejection of (2) is involved with the return to an Aristotelian teleological

conception of human nature in which there is no sense to ‘human nature’ as simply an

account of what humans happen to be (a stand-alone ‘is’) without a corresponding

account of what they ought to be (the telos). Within this schema, the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’

are drawn together, since the ‘ought’ is that which enables humans to achieve their telos.

What this involves, as I will explain, is a conception of the being of each human as

temporally extended, such that the ‘present’ condition (what I happen to be ‘now’) is

unintelligible apart from its past (my history, what I have ‘become’, where I’ve found

myself, the habits which I have developed, etc.) and its future (my possibilities, including

my telos, which are at least partly determined by my history). Modern morality, as I will

argue, has tended to be atemporal when it tries to found morality squarely on the ‘is’.

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Trying to derive an ought – which is clearly temporal (i.e., having to do with future

possibilities) – on an atemporal ground (the ‘is’) has proved very difficult indeed, as

Hume famously argued. By temporalizing the ‘is’ in its return to the Aristotelian

conception, virtue ethics has effectively solved the is-ought problem. But not without a

price: if the foundations of morality are atemporal, it seems much easier to maintain that

they are universal (i.e., not dependent on historical contingencies) and absolute (applying

at all times), and in this way escape the problems of historicity and situatedness.

Temporalizing the human subject blocks such an escape; but unless we presume that the

‘ought’ can only be derived from a timeless, non-contingent ‘is’ if there is to be an

‘ought’ at all, we need not recourse to the claim that moral judgments are mere

expressions, are merely relative/subjective, etc.

The final modernist dichotomy that virtue ethics rejects (and by doing so opens up

its own can of worms) is the fact/value distinction. The presumption is that ‘facts’ are

entities or properties of the world that are independent of any of those human

contingencies which lead to disagreement about values. In other words, moral

disagreements are due to a mistaking our parochial and contingent value judgments with

the way things ‘really are’. While there are of course important differences between

‘Humeans’ and ‘Kantians’ (broadly considered), they each insist that there are certain

kinds of value judgments which are based on our particular contingent circumstances,

and as such have an importantly different kind of cognitive status than those which are

not contingent, but in principle discernible by anyone. Virtue ethicists vary somewhat in

their position vis-à-vis this cognitive/non-cognitive divide, but in general they tend to

maintain, first, that normativity is ‘perceived’ rather than merely ‘felt’, and second, that

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there is no non-contingent point of view (the view from nowhere, so to speak), from

which we can discern normativity. Critics typically maintain that the conjunction of

these two positions either entails a radical perspectivalism or entails that our capacity to

discern normative truth is radically dependent on fortuna. Either we should embrace one

or both of these entailments, or continue to strive for a more precise demarcation between

facts and values – the non-perspectival and perspectival – and work out our moral theory

accordingly.

Again, by focusing on the rejection of these three modes of demarcation, we will

be able to see more clearly just what is involved in the ‘contingency’ of the virtue ethics

position and how this is seen as an objection by the practitioners of modern moral

philosophy.

2. Analysis and critique of alternative responses to this sort of objection.

Up to this point I will have been speaking in somewhat general terms; this chapter

will focus in on particular thinkers and their responses to the recognition of historicity

and situatedness.5 The contention will be that none of these is a satisfactory response,

which will motivate the claim in later chapters that these sorts of responses are

unnecessary.

There are two main types of responses that I will focus on. The first will be those

who try to maintain the aspirations of modernity, while nevertheless acknowledging our

situated embeddedness and the effect of historicity and finitude. The ‘Kantians’ that I

will pay particular regard to will be Korsegaard and Habermas; on the ‘Consequentialist’

side I will highlight Pettit and Singer. In their respective attempts to hold onto

5 Thus, there will be little discussion of those who don’t think that situatedness is very important.

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universality and objectivity of morality in the modern sense, each of these, I will argue

(in the spirit of Williams and many others), ends up deflating and ‘thinning out’ this

morality. As the Kantians try to sift out that aspect of human life which is universal, they

end up having to isolate to a greater and greater degree that aspect of a person’s ‘moral

identity’ from the rest of her identity, resulting in a greater fragmentation of the self.

Consequentialists, in their attempt to indicate just what it is that should be maximized,

end up having to resort to vague and empty notions like ‘preferences’ or ‘values’ without

any kind of specification. In the course of these critiques, I will be drawing on the

framework of bifurcations provided in chapter 1, to show how each of these failures

connects up with that tendency. The implication will be that virtue ethics, by rejecting

those bifurcations, avoids such failures.

The second response will be what I will call contingency theorists (unless I think

of a better term). I call them that because of the way in which they understand

contingency as inescapable in a stronger sense than virtue ethicists maintain. I discuss

these figures in later chapters.

3. Prominent virtue theorists and their inadequate responses to the challenge.

This chapter will evaluate the responses to the contingency objection given by

some important figures in this tradition, and argue that these responses are not adequate

to the objection. This will then motivate the importance of considering the Heideggerian

tradition as it is carried through in Taylor and Gadamer, not so much as alternatives to the

virtue ethicists’ project, but rather for the ways in which they can clarify, articulate and

refine what it is that the virtue ethicists are trying to do.

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First, I will consider the naturalism of Foot and Hursthouse and argue that, while

a promising sort of approach, naturalism by itself, like many of the other approaches we

will have considered, does not yield substantial ethical views apart from the kind of

framework provided by those contingent aspects of a person’s situation and tradition. I

will explore the limits of an Aristotelian naturalism and the extent to which we must have

recourse to contingent features of one’s situation to complete the concepts involved.

Next I consider McDowell’s arguments that moral judgments can be cognitive –

that is, a form of knowledge – despite their uncodifiability and dependency on the ‘whirls

of organism’. Once again, I will point out the limits of his argument in addressing the

objection, and argue that, while McDowell’s approach is not necessarily flawed, more

must be said about the relation between these whirls of organism and the possibilities for

their transcendence.

Christine Swanton has recently offered a ‘pluralistic’ view of virtue ethics, which

will have to be addressed. At this point, I’m not familiar enough with her argument to

say anything about it here.

The bulk of the chapter, however, will consider MacIntyre’s argument, focusing

especially on the notion of the ‘epistemological crisis’ in WJWR. This gives the clearest

and most promising articulation of a response to our problem. I will first reconstruct his

arguments from this section of the book in a form that most directly responds to the

problems articulated in the earlier chapters. From there I will raise two worries, as I

mentioned above: the first is whether an account rooted in the possibilities of a

substantial, coherent tradition of enquiry, with the criteria for such a tradition that

MacIntyre articulates, is a possibility for us in the modern west. This, I will explain, is a

19

worry both because the mingling of various traditions makes it difficult to identify any

approach as within one tradition rather than another, and in a similar way, because the

variation within single traditions due to increased exposure to alternatives renders the

notion of a tradition as an actual entity problematic. These problems feed the further

worry that what gets passed off as a coherent tradition of enquiry, and therefore having a

special claim to truth, is more often than not a hopeful fiction.

The second worry, once again, is that by trading in the notion of a tradition,

MacIntyre (so an objection might go) is blind to the modernist sources of his an others’

own views as well as to the possibilities within modernity for moral thinking. This gives

rise to the perception of tradition as having its head stuck in the sand and the archetypical

traditionalist as the ‘stodgy old fuddy-duddy’.

Regarding each of these two objections, I will clarify some important and

common misunderstandings that they presume. At the same time, they expose the need

for the kind of approach offered by Taylor and Gadamer, not as alternatives to

MacIntyre's project, but as themselves vehicles for a better understanding of what his sort

of project involves.

4. “Heideggerian Aristotelians”: Gadamer, Taylor

Having explored and developed the problem of contingency as it emerges and is

dealt with in a sampling of contemporary ethics, we now turn directly to Gadamer and

Taylor. We will spend some time first on Heidegger, especially on those parts of his

work most relevant to working through the kinds of bifurcation described in chapter 1,

and whatever else is most directly influential on Gadamer and Taylor.

20

The three aspects of their thought on which I will focus will be, first, the notion of

frameworks (Taylor) and the wirkungsgeschictliches Bewußtsein (Gadamer), not simply

as inescapable, but as positively necessary to make sense of the significance of ethical

life. Second, we will consider the notions of ‘strong evaluation’ (Taylor) and

‘prejudices’ (Gadamer), showing how these features of human life are incompatible with

the supposed fact/value distinction. Third, I will elucidate the notion of the ‘best

account’ (Taylor) and the hermeneutical circle (Gadamer), each of which is their answer

to the worry that we can never break free of our particular situations.

From there we will be in a position to address the contingency objection directly.

The task will be to draw together these three aspects of their thought into an account of

how it is that we are finite, historically situated beings. This will turn out to be a

development of Heidegger’s notion of authenticity into something like ‘open horizons’.

This, as I hope to show, involves an open and critical embracing of our own contingent

points of view (thus responding to the problem of luck) and the pursuit of a ‘fusion of

horizons’ (thus responding to the problem of pluralism). If this is successful, it should

show at once that the alternatives views which involve something other than this sort of

picture are impossible, and that they’re not necessary in order to meet the challenge of

contingency.

5. Not historicism

Further elucidation of these approaches can be gained through a consideration of

what they’re not, but what they’re commonly taken to be (e.g., both Habermas and Rorty

have supposed that Gadamer is a Rortian of sorts). So this chapter aims to clarify the

difference between the positions of Gadamer and Taylor, on the one hand, and a variety

21

of positions at the historicist extreme on the other. The figures I intend to discuss are

Rorty, Stout and Williams, since they present the most well-known, and perhaps well-

reasoned alternatives to the approach to situatedness I am advocating. In effect, they

maintain that, with regard to ethical views at least, the notion of truth does not pertain in

the way modernity (and even pre-modernity, to a large extent) supposes, and thus should

be jettisoned in its intersubjective or intercultural form. This chapter will seek to

rehabilitate the notion of truth in light of chapter 4, and show that the figures discussed

here suffer from a version of the same presumption as the critics of Aristotelianism on the

other side.

6. Back to virtue

This chapter will focus on drawing together the discussions of chapters 3-5 by

bringing the virtue ethics tradition, and in particular MacIntyre, into more direct dialogue

with the themes we will have discussed in Gadamer and Taylor. In particular, we will re-

consider MacIntyre’s notions of tradition and the epistemological crisis in light of the

arguments from chapter 4. While there will no doubt be important differences to point

out, I hope to motivate the claim that MacIntyre presents a more particularized version of

the ontology and ‘method’ found in Gadamer and Taylor. In other words, they provide

the support and underpinning for a project like his, and more generally, for a viable ethics

of virtue.

7. Conclusion

The final chapter will suggest some practical possibilities in light of the foregoing

discussion. While the precise subject matter is still open to determination, a topic of

particular importance to me personally is the current rift in the Anglican church between

22

what I take to be the hard-line traditionalists and the anti-traditionalist ‘progressives’.

This is very fertile ground for exploring an understanding of tradition that stands at once

rooted to its past but open to its future.

23

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Mill, UtilitarianismNietzsche () Genealogy of Morals–––––– () Beyond Good and Evil

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Other Relevant Works: Blackburn, Simon (1998) Ruling Passions. Oxford University Press.Dancy, Jonathan (2004) Ethics without Principles. Oxford University Press.Geuss, Raymond (2004) Outside Ethics. Mackie () Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong Moore () Principia Ethica. Prichard () “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?”Ross, W.D. (1931) The Right and the Good. Oxford: Clarendon.Sidgwick, Henry () The Methods of Ethics. Stevenson C.L. () “The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms”Searle, John (1964) “How to derive an ought from an is.” Philosophical Review 73:43-58.

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