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Phronesis as Ethical Expertise: Naturalism of Second Nature and the Unity of Virtue

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Notes

  1. Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, Naturalism in Question (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, Naturalism and Normativity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010).

  2. We owe this useful label, as well as the following, to Irene Liu, “Elevating Human Being: Towards a New Sort of Naturalism,” Philosophy 92 (2017): 597–622.

  3. Ibid., p. 3.

  4. Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).

  5. For criticisms to Foot, see, e.g., R.M. Hare, “Off on the Wrong Foot,” in J. Couture and H. Nielsen, eds., On the Relevance of Metaethics. New Essays on Metaethics (Calgary: University Press of Calgary, 1995); R.M. Hare, Sorting Out Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); J. Lenman, “The Saucer of Mud, The Kudzu Vine and The Uxorious Cheetah: Against Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism in Metaethics,” EUJAP 1(2005): 37–50; T. Chappell, “Virtue ethics in the twentieth century,” in D.C. Russell, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 149–171. See Michael Thompson “The Representation of Life,” in R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, W. Quinn, eds., Virtues and Reasons. Philippa Foot and Moral Theory: (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 247–296; Michael Thompson, “Three Degrees of Natural Goodness,” Iride 38 (2003): 191–197; Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). On a more refined reading of Foot’s naturalistic proposal, “Aristotelian naturalism can vindicate the distinctive value of practical wisdom” by establishing a subtler connection between human nature and action. As Hacker-Wright puts it, “any candidate for practical wisdom must take into account very general facts about human beings; these facts shape what counts as good practical reflection, not because human nature is intrinsically normative, but because it is part of the inevitable background against which we understand ourselves” (John Hacker-Wright, “Skill, Practical Wisdom, and Ethical Naturalism,” Ethical Theory and Moral Pratice 18 (2015): 983–993; see p. 991.

  6. Julia Annas, “Virtue Ethics: What Kind of Naturalism?”, in M. Gardiner, ed., Virtue Ethics, Old and New (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 11–29; see pp. 15–16.

  7. The four biological goods singled out by Hursthouse are (a) individual survival; (b) continuance of the species; (c) characteristic enjoyment and freedom from pain; (d) good functioning of the social group.

  8. Annas, “Virtue Ethics,” op. cit., p. 20.

  9. Ibid., p. 22.

  10. Ibid., p. 24.

  11. The first expression is borrowed from Michael Thompson, the second from Elizabeth Anscombe.

  12. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996).

  13. John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), p.

    71.

  14. Mario De Caro and Massimo Marraffa, “Debunking the pyramidal mind: A plea for synergy between reason and emotion,” The Journal of Comparative Neurology 524 (2015): 1695–1698.

  15. Dan Russell, Practical Intelligence and the Virtues (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) offers one of the most developed and nuanced versions of the Standard View, even if he is not committed to all the problematic issues we list below.

  16. More empirically plausible accounts of virtue fare much better in this respect. See, e.g., N. Snow, Virtue as Social Intelligence: An Empirically Grounded Theory (New York: Routledge, 2009); M. Alfano, Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); C. Miller, “A New Approach to Character Traits in Light of Psychology,” in I. Fileva, ed., Questions of Character (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 249–267; C. Miller, The Character Gap. How Good Are We? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  17. Notably, J.M. Doris, “Persons, situations and virtue ethics,” Nous 32 (1998): 504–540; J.M. Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); G. Harman, “Moral Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the Fundamental Attribution Error,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series 119 (1999): 316–331; G. Harman, “The Nonexistence of Character Traits,” in A. Byrne, R. Stalnaker, and R. Wedgwood, Eds., Fact and Value (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 117–127.

  18. A widely accepted version of this thesis can be found in M.C. Nussbaum, “Non-Relative Virtues: An Aristotelian Approach,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 13 (1988): 32–53.

  19. A.D. Walker, “The incompatibility of the virtues,” Ratio 6 (1993): 44–60.

  20. This is the standard unity of the virtues thesis, which is held, albeit in different versions, by most neo-Aristotelians. E.g., T.H. Irwin, “Disunity in the Aristotelian Virtues,” in J. Annas and R. H. Grimm, eds., Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy (suppl. vol.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), pp. 61–90; J. Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); S. Wolf, “Moral Psychology and the Unity of the Virtues,” in Ratio 20 (2007): 145–167; Russell, Practical Intelligence, op. cit. Other scholars, on the contrary, deny that such mutual correlation exists, and allow that one may possess a genuine virtue while lacking one or more other virtuous dispositions: see Philippa Foot, Virtue and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978); Thomas Nagel, “The Fragmentation of Value,” in T. Nagel, ed., Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 128–141; Bernard Williams, “Conflicts of Values,” in B. Williams, ed., Moral Luck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 71–82; Walker (1993); N.K. Badhwar, “The Limited Unity of Virtue,” Nous 30 (1996): 306–329.

  21. Which stand Aristotle took over such problems, is a much-disputed issue; however, even if it is quite likely that he wouldn’t have shared our view, it lies far beyond our scope to discuss the genuine Aristotelian account of phronesis historically.

  22. McDowell, Mind, Value and Reality, op. cit., p. 51.

  23. Ibid., p. 52. Support for this thesis may come also from a view rival to McDowell’s, i.e., the virtue as a skill view put forward by Julia Annas (esp. Intelligent Virtue, op. cit.), if extended to a general expertise rather than confined to a single-domain grasp. However, in the next section we will criticize this view as for its way of accounting for habituation to virtue.

  24. H.L. Dreyfus, “Overcoming the myth of the mental: How philosophers can profit from the phenomenology of everyday expertise,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 79 (2005): 47–65; E. Rietveld, “McDowell and Dreyfus on Unreflective Action,” Inquiry, 53 (2010): 183–207.

  25. D. Jacobson, “Seeing by Feeling. Virtues, Skills, and Moral Perception,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 8 (2005): 387–409; see p. 401.

  26. Two main problems that one should discuss in detail regarding this issue are the articulation problem (concerning the deliberative dimension of ethical expertise) and the domain-specificity problem.

  27. M. Stichter, “Ethical Expertise: The Skill Model of Virtue,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 10 (2007):183–194; Hacker-Wright, “Skill, Practical Wisdom, and Ethical Naturalism,” op. cit.

  28. See footnotes 7 and 8 for a list of the main voices on the situationist side and the most influential virtue-ethical responses.

  29. L. Zagzebski, “Exemplarist Virtue Theory,” Metaphilosophy 41 (2010): 41–57; L. Zagebski, “Admiration and the Admirable,” Aristotelian Society 89 (2015): 205–221; L. Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

  30. I. Schindler, V. Zink, J. Windrich, and W. Menninghaus, “Admiration and adoration: their different ways of showing and shaping who we are,” Cognition and Emotion 27 (2013): 85–118, see p. 95.

  31. J. Haidt, “Elevation and the positive psychology of morality,” in C.L.M. Keyes and J. Haidt, eds., Flourishing: positive psychology and the life well-lived (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2003), pp. 275–289.

  32. See M. Bell, “Globalist Attitudes and the Fittingness Objection,” Philosophical Quarterly 61 (2011): 449–472.

  33. Quotations are respectively from: L. Allais, “Wiping the Slate Clean,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 36 (2008): 33-68; M. Mason, “Contempt as a Moral Attitude,” Ethics 113 (2003): 234–272; A. Ben-Ze’ev, The Subtlety of Emotions (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 82.

  34. M. Bell, M. Hard Feelings. The Moral Psychology of Contempt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp 451–452.

  35. Social psychologists have often claimed that the idea of globalist attitudes is empirically inadequate, in that it can never fit its target (Doris 2002: 23). From this perspective, the so-called fittingness objection has it that “globalist attitudes present their objects as manifesting globalist character and personality traits. The evidence from social psychology demonstrates that persons’ behavior displays cross-situational inconsistency. Therefore, globalist attitudes do not present their targets correctly” (Bell, Hard Feelings, op. cit., p. 454). The last quotation in the text is from ibid., p. 460.

  36. Donald Davidson, “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” Philosophy 66 (1991): 156–166; see p. 158; Mario De Caro, “Davidson in Focus,” in M. De Caro, ed., Interpretations and Causes. New Perspective on Donald Davidson’s Philosophy (Dordrecht: Springer, 1999), pp. 1–29, see p. 16.

  37. Donald Davidson, “Radical Interpretation,” Dialectica 27 (1973): 313–328.

  38. Mario De Caro, “Davidson’s Naturalism,” in M.C. Amoretti and N. Vassallo, eds., Knowledge, Language, and Interpretation. On the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Berlin-Boston: De Gruyter, 2013), pp. 183–202; see p. 189.

  39. The same Donald Davidson approved the idea that the principle of charity plays a role in one’s interpretations of other agents as moral (personal communication to Mario De Caro, March 1992).

  40. This natural tendency is exploited by professional cheaters, who are able to produce in their interlocutors the impression that they seriously desire to be virtuous in general and that, consequently, they are trustworthy (films such as House of games and American Hustle expose such moral-psychological dynamics in brilliant ways).

  41. See, e.g., Annas, Intelligent Virtue, op. cit.; P. Bloomfield, “Eudaimonia and Practical Rationality,” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2012: 265–286; Stichter, “Ethical Expertice,” op. cit.; J.D. Swartwood, “Wisdom as an Expert Skill,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 16 (2013): 511–528.

  42. This is not to say that other kinds of relations (e.g., peer-to-peer instead of asymmetric one) are not relevant at all for virtue acquisition.

  43. D. Carr, “Educating for the Wisdom of Virtue,” in D. Carr, J. Arthur, K. Kristjánsson, eds., Varieties of Virtue Ethics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 319–335; see p. 326.

  44. See Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory, op. cit.; M. Croce and M.S. Vaccarezza, “Educating through exemplars: Alternative paths to virtue,” Theory and Research in Education 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/1477878517695903.

  45. In conceiving of wisdom as affectively engaged, we assume an integrative view of emotions and reasons, which are seen as working synergistically – a view that is gaining traction in the cognitive sciences (De Caro & Marraffa, “Debunking the Pyramidal Mind,” op. cit.).

  46. Although the paper is the result of the common work of all authors, Mario De Caro is the author of the Introduction and of sections 4, 5; Maria Silvia Vaccarezza of sections 2, 3 and the Conclusion; and Ariele Niccoli of section 6. We thank Robert Audi, Angelo Campodonico, Gabriele De Anna, Irene Liu and Anselm Müller, for their useful comments on previous versions of this article or on the talks from which it derives.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Università Roma Tre, Rome, Italy

    Mario De Caro

  2. Tufts University, Medford, MA, USA

    Mario De Caro

  3. University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy

    Maria Silvia Vaccarezza

  4. University of Florence, Florence, Italy

    Ariele Niccoli

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De Caro, M., Vaccarezza, M.S. & Niccoli, A. Phronesis as Ethical Expertise: Naturalism of Second Nature and the Unity of Virtue. J Value Inquiry 52, 287–305 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9654-9

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