Unvirtuous Ethics

Unvirtuous Ethics

 

Context: Word on the street is that beginning December 10^th, YouTube will start deleting content from users who refuse to or who are unable to monetize their uploads and posts. I am one such user, and though I cannot gauge the likelihood of this threat, a trusty friend who has been on-the-ball about this sort of stuff before has assured me that I have nothing to fret over.

But just to play it safe, I plan to re-upload many of my videos to a different platform, and to convert most of my Community Posts over to this blog. This will require much work on my part, and knowing me, plus the number of videos/posts I consider worthy of the move, along with the indexing of paragraphs and the structuring of typological emphasis never carrying over from YouTube, what needs to be done in a timely fashion will not be done in a timely fashion. So if my semi-legit fear about YouTube targeting un-monetized content turns out to be grounded in reality, some worthwhile content stands to be wiped out before I get around to giving it a new home.

By worthwhile content, I have some videos in mind, but mostly the community posts and comment exchanges. Here’s one post stimulating a fruitful exchange which should be moved ASAP. The initial post by me is fine I guess, though it’s another example of an inconsequential rando inducing ill-tempered scornfulness in me, in lieu of well-tempered engagement. Which segues nicely into what the comments are about!

Virtue Mingling

The exchange with Oleksiy inspired the title I'm running with. Even though I saw fit to use his comment as a springboard for all this, I am aware that his position is more layered than our brief exchange here lets on. Readers take note; his thoughts below are not what I'm taking issue with for the better part of this post. One thing cementing that is this reply I received from him months ago on a blog post of his. I initially set out to cover his thoughts and nothing else, but because I've been lowkey stewing over Virtue Ethics for years, I just went off and barely looked back. The points I eventually attack revolve around different themes, and some fairly arcane stuff, but it’s good for you. It’s like a cognitive Buckely’s.

The OP is not-so-arcane, but here it is anyway:

Steven Hales' full piece in Quillette. And the reply to it I included in my OP. Both are largely irrelevant for what's to come:

The below was to have been my second reply, but the comment failed to post when I tried to leave it in its entirety, causing me to throw my hands up in the air, but to stop short of waving them around like I just don't care (because I do care), and to instead move everything over to blogger.

I have serious reservations about any aretaic bits being thrown into the mix of primary components and categories of systematic ethics. When it’s normative, it starts and ends with the telic and the deontic. One has to think ultra-critically about what it means to distinguish clearheadedly between corruptible vs. non-corruptible mental activities. There are corruptible mental activities which at first blush appear innocuous, and those which are in fact innocuous, but carry the tenor of corruptibility. The moment a moral agent broaches the former territory, a telic or deontic theory has him scouted. Not sometimes, but 100% of the time. I am prepared to die on this hill, and decompose on it if need be. Things may widen somewhat once we consider Applied Ethics, but I doubt this widening will absorb anything from the Aristotelian tradition.

It is admittedly strange that I am still so unconvinced by all things aretaic belonging in the same (major) league of ethics, in that I’ve shifted toward a favorable view of the importance of Intellectual Character qua Intellectual Faculties as a property that grounds or corresponds to final epistemic value. This, in a nutshell, means that I’ve warmed up to one strand of Virtue Epistemology, and have come to think little of the “Naturalized Epistemology” family of views advanced by Quine.

But despite all this, I am as skeptical as I have ever been about the alleged importance of moral character. I don’t buy the idea that it ever contributes to first-order moral value, even though Intellectual Character does precisely this in relation to epistemic value. I’ll say more about this asymmetry at the end.

In giving moral character a seat at the first-order moral table, we would be:

1. Stacking the deck against misanthropes. Some misanthropes merit having the deck stacked against them, but not simply because they are (attitudinally) misanthropic. Aretaic criterions stack decks against even those misanthropes who disallow their genuine compulsions to influence their moral philosophy; their formulations of right action and beneficence, which may be as demanding as any people-loving non-misanthrope’s formulations of the same. Given these overlaps, the philosophically attentive misanthrope should be able to rest easy regardless of how deep his attitudinal meanness runs.

His misanthropy can own his mind in doxastically irrelevant and mundane ways; everyday thoughts and reveries, heinous as they might appear to the “people person” and to sanctimonious interpretations of moral necessity and superiority.

I’ll use myself as precedent: My misanthropy is only partly circumstantial (i.e. partly “externally driven”). I’m confident that it is also psychological or innate (don’t ask about the percentage breakdowns, I cannot hazard a guess). The point is, while I don’t rely on these tendencies to validate callous or malicious acts and assessments, I also don’t dislike my misanthropy in the slightest, and I don’t think anyone has an argument for why I should dislike it, or why I should work to mitigate it at the point of impulse. The nearest thing aretaic thinkers have to an argument here are appeals to my prudential goods (and even there, I would advise against pro-aretaic generality or universality, because people are different and their differences are disqualifying of uniform advice). But that’s immaterial, as it departs from ethics properly understood.

Just as this is applicable to misanthropes who “think” one way in one sense, and who “believe” in another way in another (hopefully analytical) sense, I see no reason why the same cannot apply to a surfeit of dispositionally-anomalous types who bask in their bad thoughts and disdainful attitudes, but who don’t behave badly as a result, or analyze crudely/poorly as a result. Only when the agent’s moral self-development becomes closed off by an internal block can sensible ethical worries be said to arise.

When I propound “belief/act > thought/affect” the picture of “>” I have in mind is absolute. I am ready to extend this absolutist formula to sadists, egomaniacs, psychopaths, pedophiles, affect-contrarians and a host of other ‘types’ I can’t think to name right now, as I imagine some in their ranks are fitting of roughly the same “belief/act > thought/affect” compartmentalization as the ideal misanthrope is. And if none are so constituted in actuality, as long as it is conceivable that some could be, that should be enough to establish the sharp anti-aretaic view.

You might conjure enough oddballs whose propositional and non-propositional attitudes aren’t neatly divided up and form a sturdy gray area, such that their aretaic-centered viciousness is neither perfectly benign nor overtly threatening. I suppose in those cases, my absolutist line wouldn’t be so absolute. But this doesn’t flatter the aretaic stance; the gray area is construed as such precisely because we are already taking stock in the telic and the deontic yardsticks as its determinants.

It’s tempting to say “But the misanthrope and all these oddball types can be taught to regret their recurrent hateful thoughts, and with enough regret, they might move towards augmenting their attitudinal profiles just enough to become blameless in the aretaic-adjusted sense of blamelessness” and this would be goody two-shoes piety plain and simple. It would border on training oneself to not find anything funny (internally) about sacrilegious, nasty, or downward-punching jokes; jokes which land because the audience is aware that the punchline is too flustering for some. When such jokes resonate, they do so within the depths of the psyche. The moral tale told by the aretaic thinker teaches that such psyches are in need of a cleansing. But they are not. If sentient meatbags can grasp that they have no soul in need of saving, they can grasp that an amoral innermost aspect of them needs no salvation.

Not every part of us needs to be moral. Self-denial is fine and well when it serves the deontic or telic spheres of ethics (with apologies to Nietzscheans and Machiavellians). But self-denial in the name of aretaic ends is, I think, indistinguishable from the religious piety we’re so quick to call out and mock. The flustered pearl-clutcher is best left unappeased.

So to all virtue ethicists, I say: I’m here, I’m unvirtuous, don’t argue with it.

Or at least don’t conflate the beneficent misanthrope’s delighting at his own cynical and contemptuous ways for a genuine minus (however small) accruing to his moral agency. The (arguable) rareness of such misanthropes isn't the point.

I can imagine more hospitable pushback in the form of “Sure, but this just means we need to de-sanctify the standards by which we evaluate moral agents’ innermost selves, and prop up the attributes of the deliciously misanthropic cynic” and I would disagree there too. The contempt, disgust, impatience and moodiness I often operate under makes me neither morally worse, nor morally better, than non-misanthropic moral agents who are estranged from such affects, but who do share my views, and who do act similarly to how I act.

Target the contributions. Leave the psyche alone.

2. We are assuming that moral character is a stable or “stable enough” array of attributes. If I’m mistaken about that being the implication, then it must be intelligible to talk of Alice’s “moral character” as superior to Bob’s “moral character” despite the instability. But how many people can you realistically do this with? Frighteningly few, because character is context-dependent and predictably unstable (in just about every person I’m familiar with, anyway). So by what unstable-standard do we rank and compare moral characters? How unstable is too unstable before rigorous comparisons of all characterological nuts/bolts become absurd and impossible?

The difficulty is there even if we zero in on public figures who (appeared to have) had remarkably stable ones, like Fred Rogers. Was Rogers’ moral character superior to that of Nelson Mandela’s? No virtue ethicist will pretend to have a solid answer for this, and for good reason.

But once we do our best to compare the two men’s individual contributions, it’s a different story. Mandela is decidedly ahead. An omnipercipient cognizer will manage to figure out whose moral performance wins out, or whose level of other-regarding moral concern was in fact weightier, far better than we can ever hope to do. But I don’t see how the same cognizer would ever manage to figure out a way to glean anything beyond that; something deeper. Something pure or de-purifying.

Now add into the mix someone acutely unrefined, like Doug Stanhope. According to character-centered thinkers, he must be morally worse, in the slightest, given his naked crudeness and unapologetic anything-goes lifestyle. But surely you're inclined to think; No freaking way! Doug is fine just as he is!

Well, ask virtue ethicists just how awesome they find him to be and you’re likely to be in for some disappointment.

So if interpersonal comparisons go out the window, what’s left of the theory?

With telic and deontic criterions, whether combined or splintered, we have some hope of determining who is better/worse as a moral agent (read: as a moral performer of some sort). With aretaic “internal” criteria, it’s hard to see how one reaches anything resembling a concrete verdict. But notice how the problem runs deeper than inaccessible information about moral agents and their impacts or intents, since that problem hinders telic and deontic evaluations as well. These questions are uniquely pressing when aretaic inputs are on trial: How many knee-jerk mean thoughts or knee-jerk hateful thoughts make someone morally worse, all else being equal?

It’s so much easier to answer this question if we substitute “knee-jerk thoughts” with “deeds” or “omissions” or “general concerns over pro-social rules being followed vs. not followed”. It’s harder, and I would argue impossible, when you re-insert habitual mental activities into it. And I mean mental activities as such, not “mental activities corruptible of the deontic and/or telic domains of ethics” because then it’s just a game of whack-a-mole. We’re not playing that game here, though I suspect virtue ethicists often play it. I imagine this goes a long way in explaining why “hateful” and “prejudicial” have been used interchangeably by cosmopolitans, xenophiles, and philosophers (in some quarters). If we could do a study on these people's moral theory of choice, after ensuring that they acquire equal familiarity with the usual candidates, would it surprise anyone to find that they overwhelmingly end up being drawn to Virtue Ethics?

Maybe it’s slightly different than what I've inferred, and they contend that wretched thoughts necessarily disrupt something in the non-aretaic realm, rendering aretaic standards as constitutive of other standards. But then why aren’t they proponents of all three big tents? Or at least two of the three? It makes no sense to say “Look! Look! We’ve shown that A is constitutive of B and C, and therefore we’re going to exclude B and C and just call ourselves devotees of A!”.

Virtue ethics being necessarily complementary to other normative theories is probably not your jam, so this is a side issue. But on the chance that you do believe it in a minimal sense, we just disagree factually. I’m my own case study.

3. If we set our sights on perspectives of moral character which have been formalized and systematized, rather than armchair talk, we incorporate Virtue Ethics into the space of credible moral theories. Maybe you were appealing to unsystematic notions of moral character while still employing the word aretaic, and so my pointed criticisms don’t hold much water. But then I’m arguing against a phantom. I need to hear more about your particular (folk?) construal of the telic-deontic-aretaic trisection. Something not captured by the first two.

Some systematized perspectives putting moral character front and center are taken to be irreligious, but you gotta know that the explicitly religious ones played a big role in influencing them. This explains why the baggage of loyalty (hello groupism) and self-control (hello prudence-not-ethics) were/are staples of Aristotelian Virtue Ethics. Pretty big strike if you ask me. And so, I take the truly irreligious ones to be heterodox (which is probably why I don’t know anything about them; they’ve been so ignored by the heavy-hitters from that tradition, you have to travel far to obtain exposure to them). If those neglected ones are the only ones you are happy to entertain, maybe I’ll learn something. But first you must agree that things get nonsensical once those explicitly religious perspectives get a foot in the door, as with the technically irreligious (quasi-religious) alternatives.

And that is why everyone should be a combiner of the telic/deontic only. It makes for a clean back-and-forth: The good is prior to the right, given the awful state of the world. But it doesn’t have to be. The less we have in the way of natural harms, the closer the right gets to being prior to the good. Insert virtue into the equation as a third-wheel and it sullies the elegance of the arrangement.

(Another way of putting it: The less natural harms one or more moral patients have to endure, the less reasons there are for a moral agent to be a welfarist. Insert virtue as such into the equation as a third-wheel and it sullies the arrangement.)

Back to Intellectual Character: I used to be as dismissive of Virtue Epistemology as I am (evidently) hostile to Virtue Ethics. But no longer! In my “November’s Best Of” post, I shared a paper whose writer sidesteps Virtue Responsibilism and embraces Virtue Reliabilism (two major strands of Virtue Epistemology). He explains how the reliabilist position gets around the problem posed by the “Situationist Challenge” and does so in ways that absolve Virtue Epistemologists of the class of attacks I’ve mounted here against Virtue Ethicists.

Prior to my discovery of this paper, I just lazily figured that ethicists’ criticisms of Virtue Ethics naturally parallel epistemologists’ criticisms of Virtue Epistemology. That was hasty. The analogue ends the moment you move past responsibilism. Epistemic Virtue Reliabilism is a thing. But “Moral Reliabilism” isn’t, and I don’t see how it could be, given the differences between Moral and Intellectual Character.

Culturally radiant example: When people mock Trump for having small hands, or for being off his rocker, or for being anxious about his manhood, or for having daddy issues, or for wearing a crapload of makeup (presumably because he feels insecure without it), they are not making a moral mistake, but an intellectual one. Consider the ripples of those jabs for a sec; bolstering sizeism, stigmatizing mental illnesses, snubbing gender egalitarianism in practice (plenty of women wear makeup because they’re insecure as shit. Why is it funny when a man feels the same way?), etc. None of this would be ammo for my purposes if the sorts of people who commonly make and laugh at such jokes didn’t also have these very societal issues as their pet areas of concern. But because they are devoted to one or several of these causes, not seeing how the jokes undermine their socially-reformist efforts reflects badly on their intellectual character (such as it is), but not on their moral one. It is not immoral, after all, to take the piss out of asshats like Trump. No joke at his expense can be rough enough in my estimation.

I could list example after example of blatant intellectual vices. It is difficult to argue that they are in some way also indicative of moral vices (moral mistakes, that is). But intellectually faultless, they are not. One can fill a book with this stuff. The internet is an endless supplier of it. Tempting as it is to continue, I’ll leave it at that for now.

Maybe I’ve missed the forest, or am engaging in undetectably motivated reasoning, as nowadays I’m rarely disgusted with people over their moral failings, but am routinely disgusted with them over their epistemic blunders (upon blunders). But I doubt that’s what’s driving any of this. I think my broader reasons are pretty airtight.

Note that there will be no shortage of thoughtful counterpoints from Oleksiy, so the reader is encouraged to consult the comment section, either here or at the community page.