Abstract
In recent years there has been growing attention paid to a kind of human action or activity which does not issue from a process of reflection and deliberation and which is described as, e.g., ‘engaged coping’, ‘unreflective action’, and ‘flow’. Hubert Dreyfus, one of its key proponents, has developed a phenomenology of expertise which he has applied to ethics in order to account for ‘everyday ongoing ethical coping’ or ‘ethical expertise’. This article addresses the shortcomings of this approach by examining the pre-reflective ethical know-how individuals first develop and on which all later forms of ethical expertise are dependent. In the first section an account is given of the ‘ethical second nature’ which every individual develops from childhood onwards and which forms the basis of pre-reflective ethical know-how. The acquisition of an ethical second nature early on opens up the very domain of ‘the ethical’ for us in the first place and is constitutive of our sensitivity to it. The second section turns to pre-reflective ethical know-how and whether it is conceptual in nature. Just as sensorimotor understanding forms the basis of our reflective perceptual concepts, pre-reflective ethical know-how is similarly proto-conceptual and is the source of our reflective ethical and moral concepts. Finally, the third section examines the process whereby ethical second nature and pre-reflective ethical know-how are actually acquired, namely, through immersion in an ‘ethical world’. This world consists of both the web of ethical meanings and significances which has evolved in a particular society or community as well as its members whose actions and interactions continually reproduce that web.
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Notes
Varela’s discussion of ‘ethical know-how’ centres on how such a model of ethical action (vs. one of explicit moral deliberation as in the Kantian tradition) lines up well with the principles of the enactive theory in cognitive science through its emphasis on situated and embodied immediate responsiveness to a situation. (He then goes on to relate this kind of responsiveness to Confucian and Buddhist wisdom traditions and the notion of the virtual self.) The account of ethical know-how in this article differs in that it seeks 1) to examine the genesis and conditions of such know-how, and 2) to outline what an enactive theory of ethical agency might look like.
This is particularly evident in the 2007 exchange between McDowell and Dreyfus in Inquiry—which informs this article and to which I return below—and it prompts McDowell to accuse Dreyfus of perpetuating the “Myth of Disembodied the Intellect” (McDowell 2007a, 349–50). See also Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1991) where the “developmental stages” and “source of justification” of rational ethical reflection are seen as independent of those of everyday ethical coping (248).
This is a point common to both Husserl and Heidegger. For discussion of where they overlap on this point and also where they diverge, see Overgaard (2004), 10ff.
The corresponding distinction in Heidegger is between the “ready-to-hand” (Zuhanden) and the “present-at-hand” (Vorhanden). See Heidegger (1927/2010), §§15–16, 66–75.
See Part III of Thompson (2008), 149–210.
This is first laid out in Part I of Thompson (2008), 25–62.
Thompson makes his agreement with McDowell on this point (and in his rejection of neo-Humeanism) clear both in his defence of Philippa Foot’s theory of “natural goodness” (Foot 2001) as not justifying ethics “from outside” and in his rejection that “normative naturalism” could “express an unsound desire to give a sort of external ‘grounding’ to ethics, as John McDowell has put it, a grounding ethics doesn’t need and can’t have.” See, respectively, Thompson (2003), 7, and Thompson (2004), 62.
This of course does not mean that second nature is not fundamentally related to first nature, for it of course is. As McDowell makes clear: “the innate endowment of human beings must put limits on the shapings of second nature that are possible for them”, in part because second nature works on the motivational tendencies of first nature, but also because, if second nature is subjected to reflective scrutiny, first nature is one of the sources that limits what can intelligibly be a part of it. See McDowell (1998a), 190–91. An important line of inquiry would also seek to understand just how a constructed second nature meshes with an innate first nature, e.g., how much what we come to value owes to how impulses are shaped and how much to the nature of those impulses themselves. I return to this in the next section.
This naturally raises the question as to how human perceptual experience is different from non-human animal perceptual experience if, as is surely the case, both depend on and share sensorimotor understanding. It might be argued, along McDowellian lines, that it is still the case that the fact that human beings eventually develop the capacity to reflect on their perceptual experience means that their perceptual experience is still different from that of animals at all stages of development. One of the first exponents of this way of conceiving the animal/human distinction was Johann Gottfried Herder, who, in his Treatise on the origin of language, argued that the very organization of the “soul-forces” (Seelenkräfte, possessed by both animals and humans) was different in human beings, placing them in a state of reflective awareness (Besonnenheit) from the outset. See Herder (2002), 79ff. While remaining committed to a contemporary equivalent of such a view, it should also be noted that McDowell has shown a certain openness with respect to the concept of conceptuality. I only have space to provide a few comments showing how this is the case. First, in his recent exchange with Hubert Dreyfus, he maintains that there is no reason “embodied coping skills” cannot be conceptual (i.e., “minded”, but not reflectively articulate) while at the same time preceding our acquisition of concepts “in the demanding sense that connects with rationality”. Second, it could plausibly be argued that an animal that flees danger has a concept of danger, as long as we recognize that this conceptuality is different from that of a rational animal like us who has the capacity to act on a reason like danger “as such” and thus to give it as a reason for action. (For an important recent discussion of conceptuality in animals see Hurford (2007), 11ff. Hurford defends animals’ possession of concepts qua “proto-concepts” whose evidence is regular behaviour and argues for an evolutionary succession from proto-concepts to prelinguistic concepts to linguistic concepts.) And third, McDowell has recently modified his position to allow for the content of an experience to be non-propositionally structured, but to include intuitional content that is capable of becoming conceptual and discursive. The upshot is that McDowell is prepared to have a more subtle conception of human “mindedness” or rationality, while remaining committed to the view that human experience is permeated with it. References for the three comments are, respectively, McDowell (2007a), 339ff, 345; McDowell (2009b), 133–34; McDowell (2009a), 258ff.
This does not mean that non-human animals do not possess certain emotions and even a capacity for empathy as recent work in cognitive ethology demonstrates. Human animals share some of these emotions and capacities with non-human animals, and these form part of the foundation of our ethical second natures, but our capacity for (eventual) reflective conceptuality is the other part of the foundation and this we do not share with non-human animals. Some cognitive ethologists might argue, however, that just as we share proto-conceptual sensorimotor understanding with non-human animals (see note 11) that is in turn the necessary basis of our perceptual concepts, so too do we share with them not just emotions and a capacity for empathy but also a proto-conceptual pre-reflective ethical know-how which in us becomes the basis of our articulated ethical concepts. For a recent influential discussion of these issues see De Waal (1996).
Dreyfus is of course aware of primordial sensorimotor skills and bodily know-how and of how the acquisition of physical expertise depends on them (Dreyfus 1992); but instead of seeing the analogy between primordial sensorimotor skills + bodily know-how and pre-reflective ethical know-how as is done here, he focusses on the analogy between physical and ethical expertise.
This is a point which is also made by Shaun Gallagher (2007), 212ff.
The most important recent statement of the theory is to be found in Thompson (2007) which I draw on here.
This claim highlights one of the main motives of Thompson’s account of enactivism, viz., to contribute to resolving the “so-called explanatory gap between consciousness and nature” (Thompson 2007, ix–x). The most obvious way in which it does this is by undermining the view that human consciousness simply springs onto the scene out of nowhere, like a ghost in the machine. Rather, the interiority of life, starting with the single cell, is a precursor to the interiority of consciousness (Thompson 2007, 225). At a recent conference presentation, entitled “Living Ways of Sense-making”, Thompson made clear that one of his guiding objectives in the book was to argue against a certain erroneous conception of nature that is presupposed in the mind/body gap view, i.e., that nature has no place for interiority prior to the rise of mind. Presented at the conference of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy, Montreal, November 4–6, 2010.
Naturally, this requires seeing a connection between what McDowell would consider two different kinds of conceptuality. For while McDowell is ready to see embodied coping skills as conceptual in their own way, as realizing a practical concept of what to do (and not what to think) wherein the realization is precisely not reflectively or mentally directed (cf. McDowell 2007a, 339ff. and McDowell 2007b, 367ff.), the conceptuality of sensorimotor skills acquired in infancy and childhood are another matter. But if sensorimotor skills can be understood as analogous to McDowellian perceptual experiences (for on the enactive view they are of course intimately bound up together), it is plausible to see them as being capable of becoming discursive / conceptually articulated.
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DeSouza, N. Pre-Reflective Ethical Know-How. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 16, 279–294 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9333-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-012-9333-z