Abstract
Moral deliberation is usually characterized as one kind of mental process which provides us convincing reason to make morally right choice by clear reasoning, forming judgments, or explicit self-reflection guided by moral principles. However, this kind of understanding renders an intellectualist illusion: one can acquire moral quality only by reasoning skillfully. In this chapter, by re-reading Socrates’ thesis and following suggestions of philosophers such as B. Williams and John McDowell, the author explores the intrinsic connection between deliberation with perception, as well as connection between deliberation with disposition: one can make deliberations morally, which can be regarded as the natural result produced and released by the person who has been already morally cultivated and therefore is equipped with such moral perception. Similarly, a good performance of deliberation tightly relies on or even is rooted in a well-formed disposition which prevents deliberator from being distracted by disturbing “deliberation.”
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Notes
- 1.
Hegel (1986).
- 2.
Dewey (1996) (see Chapter 1 The Nature of Moral Theory; Chapter 5, §3 Sensitivity and Thoughtfulness).
- 3.
- 4.
Here I use this word in the philosophical meaning but not in the medical. It is in Meno that Plato develops his theory of recollection (“anamnesis”): learning as rediscovering knowledge in the past. By this I allude to how deep this proposition is as well as to the epistemological motivation rooted in our memory about Western philosophy.
- 5.
“Over the years, this question has met with quite different responses. Some see it as a dialogue about virtue; others have claimed …the real topic is inquiry, discovery or knowledge!” Scott (2006, p. 3).
- 6.
Williams (2006)
- 7.
McDowell (1979, p. 331).
- 8.
Williams (2006 [1985], p. 4)
- 9.
I will take this as a main text, but not restrict myself to it, and instead also include his later essays Eudaimonism and Realism: “Incontinence and Practical Wisdom in Aristotle” that are relevant to the present context.
- 10.
McDowell (1979)
- 11.
Aristotle (2009).
- 12.
It is imaginable that if the young Meno attends the Aristotle’s lecture, he would be treated in different ways than at first. He was to be perceived in terms of his maturity in moral growth, and based on this Aristotle can start his dialogue differentially.
- 13.
Mandelbaum (1955, p. 48).
- 14.
Audi (2013, p. 160). One strong argument seems to me his distinguishing between “focal perception” and “peripheral perception”: “Focal perception may tend to yield belief, but need not; and merely peripheral perception may tend not to yield it, but may” (ibid., p. 18). I think that his comparative statement casts light on our judgment: the focused and intensive consciousness sometimes might rather destroy or impede the deliverance of moral perception than facilitate spreading them. And the deliverance of moral perception almost relies on that how well the peripheral perception can be triggered, but not how intensively the focal perception can be thought.
- 15.
Blum (1994).
- 16.
The term of “minimal notion of deliberation,” which I coined, can be compared with McDowell’s statement: “I said that the result of habituation, properly conceived, can be seen to be already a perhaps primitive form of practical wisdom” (McDowell 2009, p. 55). I think his “primitive form of practical wisdom” is coincident with my proposal. By weighing the “primitive” and “minimal,” however, I think that the former tends to the “uneducated, rudimentary, original” state, while the latter seems more suitable to describe the exercise of human intelligence in trivial nuances and particular appearances, especially as it expresses the idea that “it can be still termed as deliberation although without taking a paradigmatic form of explicit formulation.”
- 17.
Disposition, as actual existence of value and moral reality, situates in a particular natural environment and is linked with some particular geographical factors. It is another manifestation of “materiality” of disposition as virtue. For example, the people live together in the same region or are situated in the same race or class usually share the same recognizable common characteristics with respect to psychology or spirit. Correspondingly, people living in different regions and classes differ from each other in their unique temperaments here, perhaps because of geographical factors and the associated lifestyle habits and activities arising from different experiences and perhaps also because of diet, climatic conditions, and natural properties arising differently. It is highly identifiable that the coast differs from the inland; the island differs from the mainland, although this term is not precise or accurate; and the characteristics of people between different regional characteristics are not absolute. However, by comparing the relativity and similarity in different areas, the opposite characteristics between them can be distinctively remarked and detected fruitfully.
- 18.
“Appetite ” describes the human nature in the orectic state which is an irascible and concupiscible power. However, according to Plato, appetite and desire mean the decomposition and pollution of pure awareness in morality.
- 19.
Plato, Republic, 361A-C., as cited in Williams (1993, pp. 98–99).
- 20.
In this writing, I use disposition and character together without distinguishing them. However, disposition is not the character and personality, especially in modern psychological sense. Being restricted by the length of this writing, I am not able to unfold the significant differences and therefore point out two of them briefly. (1) As with character, disposition is also the stable structure and compressed part of human nature. However, it still remains itself unformed, as an animating and generative power, it refreshes our mode of living consistently. (2) In addition to this, disposition is deeper and more active than mere habit. It is neither the simply conventional program, mechanism in behavior, nor the passive properties like cold or hot, per contra, disposition is usually edified by deliberative choice and trained after many times of shaping and reshaping.
- 21.
In Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy, Heidegger compares the process of individual acquires cultivated disposition as “transposes itself dispositionally into a new way of being disposed” with “I enter into gladness only by virtue of the fact that I am glad” (Heidegger 2009, p. 38).
- 22.
Tiberius (2002).
- 23.
Heidegger (2009).
- 24.
“Thus if we interrogate Aristotle’s basic concepts according to their conceptuality, it is necessary that we understand how this conceptuality holds the aforementioned aspects together, where they genuinely belong; where basic experience, claim, and tendency toward intelligibility are indigenous.” See Heidegger 2009, pp. 12–13.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 184
- 26.
James (1922).
- 27.
“Now the particular difference of temperament that I have in mind in making these remarks is one that has counted in literature, art, government and manners as well as in philosophy. In manners we find formalists and free-and-easy persons. In government, authoritarians and anarchists. In literature, purists or academicals, and realists. In art, classics and romantics.”(James 1922, p. 9)
- 28.
Honneth (2002).
- 29.
One of the examples shown by John McDowell himself is the title of his writing: Incontinence and Practical Wisdom in Aristotle, (John McDowell 2009). And other numerous pieces of literature in the fields of psychology, organizational theory, and so on. For example, Kinsella and Pitman (2012). But my discussion here suggests that in some cases, Phronesis even can be replaced by other way of translation such as “practical perception .”
- 30.
Hegel (1986).
- 31.
- 32.
See Deigh, John. “Ethics”. In Audi (1995)
- 33.
In Begriffsgeschichte als Philosophie (Gadamer 1993, GW Band 2, p. 77) Gadamer holds that approaching “Problemgeschichte” from “Begriffsgeschichte” is a very important “handwork” in the historical-philosophical study.
- 34.
Aristotel (1924, 1022b)
- 35.
Aristotel (1924, 1022b 10-12)
- 36.
Achtenberg (2002, p. 111–112).
- 37.
Phronimos can be related roughly to “knowing through consideration,” but according to Williams, phronimos deliberations always know with something, even with doing: “the phronimos comes to know when he comes to see what to do” (Williams 2008, p. 195). In addition to this, Williams says that the way of knowing of phronimos is not different from that of “crafts” (ibid.).
- 38.
Piaget (1948, p. vii).
- 39.
Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1991)
- 40.
See Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1991).
- 41.
Simon (1986).
- 42.
As is well-known, “virtue” is a traditional notion to resort to when people discuss moral issues. However, “…it fell out of discussion for some time” (Williams 2006, p. 9). In this context, I suggest considering this “interval of virtue” in discussion as parallel phenomenon with the “oblivion of hexis” I define. And many authors associate this with the process of modernization (ibid.).
- 43.
McDowell (2009, p. 55).
- 44.
According to this survey, we can find a persistent effort that McDowell makes in his earlier writing to later writing. In Virtue and Reason, by insisting on the “uncodifiability” of moral knowledge, he proposes the “head-on approach”: “But the thesis of uncodifiability excludes a head-on approach to the question whose urgency gives ethics its interest. Occasion by occasion, one knows what to do, if one does, not by applying universal principles but by being a certain kind of person” (McDowell 1979, p. 347). And in Eudaimonism and Realism, he makes a connection between the “Neurathian picture” and moral development: “I have been urging a Neurathian picture of reflection on an ethical out-look. One benefit of this is that it points to a way of understanding why it is so tempting for modern readers to credit Aristotle with a different picture of the sort of validation an ethical outlook needs” (McDowell 2009, p. 37). Now we can read them together with his interpretation of “practical wisdom” in explaining the process that human being grows from animal condition and enters into the moral-rational space: “So ‘practical wisdom’ is the right sort of thing to serve as a model for the understanding, the faculty that enables us to recognize and create the kind of intelligibility that is a matter of placement in the space of reasons” (McDowell 1996, p. 125). Most commentators recognize the shift McDowell makes, for example, Axel Honneth says, “McDowell’s concept of ‘ethical character’ like Aristotle’s, occupies a middle position between mere habit and rational deliberation. …we understand virtue to be the result of a socialization process through which the practical intellect of human beings” (see his essay: Between Hermeneutics and Hegelianism, in Reading McDowell, edit. by Nicholas H. Smith, Routledge, 2002, p. 251). It is not wrong and even quite correct to point out that ethical character is the “result of a socialization process.” But this way of reading plays down the power of McDowell’s thought. The crucial point of his argument is that this is an accrual process which seems mysterious. The fruitful edification of good character and the release of correct behaviors are a complicated process whose mechanism remains partly unknown. It is why McDowell says that we finally become sensitive to the value, but there is no epistemic urgency to know its mechanism: “whether we know it or not, and our eyes are opened to them by the acquisition of ‘practical wisdom’” (McDowell 1996, p. 125).
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Yuan, C. (2018). Sensitive Perception, Stable Disposition and Deliberation: Starting from “Virtue Is Knowledge”. In: Practical Intellect and Substantial Deliberation. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-8651-9_3
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