Abstract
Terry Horgan and Mark Timmons’ work implies four criteria that moral phenomenology must be capable of meeting if it is to be a viable field of study that can make a worthwhile contribution to moral philosophy. It must be (a) about a unifed subject matter as well as being, (b) wide, (c) independent, and (d) robust. Contrary to some scepticism about the possibility or usefulness of this field, I suggest that these criteria can be met by elucidating the very foundations of moral experience or what I call a moral ontology of the human person. I attempt to partially outline such an ontology by engaging with Robert Sokolowski's phenomenology of the human person from a moral perspective. My analysis of Sokolowski's thought leads me to five core ideas of a moral ontology of the human person: well-being, virtue, freedom, responsibility, and phronesis. Though I do not by any means boast a complete moral ontology of the human person, I go on to demonstrate how the account I have presented, or something like it, can go a long way to helping moral phenomenology meet the criteria it requires to be a viable and worthwhile pursuit.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
In 2008, this journal dedicated an issue to the emerging theme of moral phenomenology. This paper is largely motivated by the works published there.
Horgan and Timmons (2008) go some way to defending moral phenomenology against these criticisms, though their replies are rather general and they themselves admit that a good deal more work is required to make a more substantive rebuttal.
Henceforth, all references to this work will be made in the main body of the text with the page number only.
Sokolowski generally defines the phenomenological method as the attempt to theorise the human conversation and all that shows up within it (3). This is a rather idiosyncratic definition, yet it does not contradict the more generic understanding of phenomenology as the description of first-person experience. The reason behind Sokolowski’s novel definition, which centres on the idea of the “human conversation”, is that he wishes to illustrate the public nature of phenomena and the primacy of language in constituting thought. See Section II below.
From a Husserlian perspective, Sokolowski’s account of the default condition is remarkable. While Sokolowski agrees with Husserl that syntax is not innate but instead established through our interaction as infants with the world of objects, he thinks Husserl’s description is inadequate for it gives the impression that the infant achieves syntax on its own. Though I cannot present his account here, what Sokolowski wishes to highlight is that syntax is established through interlocutors in that it is something a speaker does for a listener. In other words, he believes that syntax originates in the medium of words whereby mature agents manifest the world to an infant through predication, allowing the latter to internalise the structures of language and so establish reason (58–61).
To take an example, for Sokolowski, smiling, laughing and smirking are all accidental ways in which the human property or capacity of risibility can be actualised. Yet, he holds that risibility or any other property of the human person is ultimately explicable by its essence.
James Hart (2010) interestingly points out that what Sokolowski refers to as the default condition has an element of contingency about it as some people, such as feral children or the mentally handicapped, may never be in a position to properly inhabit this default condition. Importantly, however, such individuals are not the less persons for this misfortune since Sokolowski would define them as persons, like all things, by what they are at their best.
Note that I am not equating well-being with what Aristotle refers to as blessedness. To achieve the fullest state of well-being, Aristotle believes that man needs not only to be virtuous but also to possess a host of external goods such as financial security, friendship, social standing, etc. However, such things are largely out of the human person’s control. What is central to the well-being of the human person is his virtue or, on Sokolowski’s account, the proper expressions of veracity.
One might wonder about the methodological merits of distinguishing between the desire for truth and the desire for well-being if they ultimately collapse into one another in constituting veracity. As I already mentioned in my outline of veracity, Sokolowski likes this term because it suggests that there is something morally good about fulfilling the desire to be truthful. I submit that the reason why it makes sense to talk about veracity as a moral concept is because human well-being is inextricably bound up with it. When we focus on veracity as the desire for truth, we are emphasising the nature of human manifestation. However, when we highlight the desire for well-being we are revealing what makes our truthful manifestations important and morally good.
Not wishing to provide a full account of Aristotle’s notion of virtue, it will suffice to say that he considers a right or virtuous action to consist in striking the mean between two extremes of vice, specifically excess and deficiency (1984: 1106a24-27).
While Sokolowski identifies Sincerity and Accuracy as the virtuous mean between vices of excess and deficiency, he does not name these vices. I consider hypocrisy to be the excess of sincerity with dishonesty as its deficiency. Accuracy, on the other hand, is excessive when pedantic and deficient when indiscriminate.
One blind reviewer has suggested that Williams, from whom we remember Sokolowski adopted the terms Sincerity and Accuracy, might object to my characterization of these virtues here. Williams is suspicious of attempts to ‘reduce all ethical considerations to one pattern’ (1985:16). Such “thin moral concepts”, he believes, are too simplistic to deal with the diversity of moral life for which we need a wide range of “thick concepts”, like courage, promise, brutality, etc. that are more concrete. Yet, as I have noted, I do not believe that the way I have interpreted Sincerity and Accuracy in any way reduces the need for thick concepts in moral theorising. The effect of the former is not to explain away the richness of our moral life but rather to help identify the minimal structure running through moral life. It allows, I contend, for a potentially infinite range of complex moral experiences and requires a corresponding vocabulary.
Following Sokolowski, I would like to avoid the image that tends to be present in traditional philosophy where the agent assesses his action as good and bad in his mind and then makes a choice that he then carries out. Instead, Sokolowski insightfully proposes that evaluation is a much more public affair where my assessment of something as good or bad is going on while I am doing it. He gives an example stating that I do not simply see the cake as good and then eat it, but that my evaluation of the cake as good goes on as I am eating it (1985: 58).
For example, the salesman may not be engaging his desire to sell cars when not at work, but if he overhears someone interested in buying an expensive car on his evening off his dispositional desire to sell cars could become activated, in which case his wish becomes a purpose.
This is an important point to note if we are to avoid an overly voluntaristic account of human desire. Compared to weak evaluation, with which we guide our everyday pre-reflective activities, strong evaluation is infrequent. The person who achieves moral excellence on this account should not be thought of as someone who is all the time confronting his immediate situation as a strong evaluator. Rather, like everyone else, he is usually involved in his situation on the basis of his habituated first-order desires and his well-trained weak evaluation. What makes these desires, and the actions ensuing from them, free is that the agent has on some previous occasion(s) reflectively endorsed these desires.
The relationship of responsibility to the capacity for freedom can be captured with an example of intuitive moral sentiments. When we find a boorish person at a party—eating rudely, pushing, interrupting, not listening, etc.—we tend to think that he is responsible for his actions because he has either freely chosen to be this way or he has failed to exercise his freedom by attempting to bring his behaviour in accord with what is best. However, if we later learn that this person is mentally ill or cognitively hampered in some way our attribution of responsibility will be at least mitigated, if not retracted completely. We recognise that this person may not completely possess the sophisticated syntactical skills to formulate and act in accord with second-order desires.
To help illustrate this point, we can see the breakdown in communication when one individual places no trust in the word of another. In such a case the listener either completely ignores the speaker or gives no heed to his word. The former has no reason to listen to the latter. If everyone was completely mistrustful of one another, believing in the constitutional deceitfulness of human persons, then it is hard to see how communication could be established. Indeed, the importance of trust for human development is famously highlighted by psychotherapist Erik H. Erikson (1994) who identifies a basic sense of trust as the first achievement of the individual—before the child can even speak—that serves as the basis for the success of all future developments.
When a workman does a shoddy job or a politician takes bribes, they are both showing up the world in a way that others could take as truthful, if the latter place sufficient trust in the former. The apprentice, if not careful, could see the shoddy jobs of the head workman as acceptable and go on to emulate this, just as the politician could create a culture of bribery because of the influence his actions have on others. The diligent workman and the honest politician in cultivating their veracity inspire others to do the same.
In an unpublished paper attempting to tease out Sokolowski’s conception of trust, Kristyn Brown (Unpublished data) perceptively distinguishes between the elementary trust constitutive of the default condition briefly discussed above and Sokolowski’s implicit understanding of what she refers to as discursive trust. The latter, notes Brown, has to do with the mature agent of truth in his attempt to discern, through interaction with others, between those who are trustworthy and those who are not. In effect, Brown claims that the degree to which the mind of a speaker can influence the mind of a listener is ultimately conditioned by the degree of trust that the latter places in the former.
Indeed, Sokolowski has dedicated substantial space in Phenomenology of the Human Person and some of his other work (1978) to that special function of reason that allows agents of truth to think of things in their absence.
It is important to recognise that while the agent is responsible for others and derives his responsibility for himself through his responsibility for others, it is the moral categoriality of the individual agent(s) that establishes all relationships of responsibility. What is crucial is that the workman recognises his responsibility to those his actions affect and to act sincerely and accurately in light of this.
Indeed, in Moral Action, Sokolowski recognises that moral categoriality is ‘value-free’ in the sense that all it does is to establish a moral transaction between agents. He insists that it is only judgemental categoriality that can determine whether an action is right or wrong (1985:151–2). However, as I now make clear, we are not interested in judgemental categoriality here nor in the moral categoriality of the bad man—what Aristotle calls ‘cleverness’ (1984:1144a26-29)—but the moral categoriality of the good man, what Aristotle calls phronēsis.
The formula for this example is roughly taken from Dreyfuss (1992: 92).
This I consider to be a novel application of Aristotle’s contention that it is not enough for the virtuous man to appear virtuous—he must also have chosen to be virtuous (1984: 1105a30-1105b4). On my view, our desires can only be considered morally good if they have been chosen by us. This is not to say that an individual cannot have a good desire that he did not choose, e.g., the desire to exercise. However, such a good desire only becomes properly moral when it has been chosen through strong evaluation. There is a qualitative difference between the man who exercises because that is what he has always been inclined to do and the man who does so because he has decided for himself that exercise is good and that he wants to be the kind of person that participates in this good. The latter, in attempting to determine the truth of things, is engaging his veracity more fully than the former.
References
Annas, J. (2008). The phenomenology of virtue. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7, 21–34.
Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics. (1984). Barnes, J. (Ed.), Ross, W.D. & Urmson, J.O. (Trans.). In: The complete works of Aristotle, Vol. 2. UK: Princeton University Press.
Dreyfuss, H. (1992). Being-in-the-world: a commentary on Heidegger’s being and time, division 1. New Baskerville: MIT Press.
Drummond, J. J. (2008). Moral phenomenology and moral intentionality. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7, 35–49.
Erikson, E. H. (1994). The life cycle completed. NY: Norton.
Gill, M. B. (2008). Variability and moral phenomenology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7, 99–113.
Gill, M. B. (2009). Moral phenomenology in Hutcheson and Hume. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 47(4), 569–594.
Hart, J. (2010). Review of Phenomenology of the human person, by Robert Sokolowski. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 41, 115–129.
Heidegger, M. (1997). Plato’s sophist. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Heidegger, M. (2005). Being and time. MacQuarrie, J., & Robinson, E. (Trans.). UK: Blackwell.
Horgan, T., & Timmons, M. (2005). Moral phenomenology and moral theory. Philosophical Issues, 15, 56–77.
Horgan, T., & Timmons, M. (2008). Prolegomena to a future phenomenology of morals. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7, 115–131.
Kriegel, U. (2008). Moral phenomenology: foundational issues. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7, 1–19.
Popper, K. (1963). Conjectures and refutations: the growth of scientific knowledge. NY: Routledge.
Rawls, J. (2005). Political liberalism (Expandedth ed.). NY: Columbia University Press.
Sinnott-Armstrong, W. (2008). Is moral phenomenology unified? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 7, 85–97.
Sokolowski, R. (1978). Presence and absence: a philosophical investigation of language and being. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sokolowski, R. (1985). Moral action: a phenomenological investigation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sokolowski, R. (2008). Phenomenology of the human person. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Taylor, C. (1976). Responsibility for Self. In A. O. Rorty (Ed.), Identities of persons (pp. 281–300). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Taylor, G. (1985). Pride, shame and guilt: emotions of self-assessment. Oxford: O.U.P.
Williams, B. (1985). Ethics and the limits of philosophy. London: Fontana.
Williams, B. (2002). Truth and truthfulness: an essay in genealogy. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lacey, J. Moral phenomenology and a moral ontology of the human person. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 51–73 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9249-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-011-9249-4