Natural Citizens: Ethical Formation as Biological Development 9781793633514, 9781793633521, 1793633517

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Natural Citizens

Natural Citizens Ethical Formation as Biological Development

Richard Paul Hamilton

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hamilton, Richard Paul, author. Title: Natural citizens : ethical formation as biological development / Richard Paul Hamilton. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Contributing to the naturalistic virtue ethics tradition, Natural Citizens applies recent work in the life sciences to develop a form of ethical naturalism that aspires to be non-reductive yet empirically responsible”— Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022044268 (print) | LCCN 2022044269 (ebook) | ISBN 9781793633514 (cloth) | ISBN 9781793633521 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Naturalism. | Humanistic ethics. | Ethics, Evolutionary. | Virtue. Classification: LCC B828.2 .H36 2023 (print) | LCC B828.2 (ebook) | DDC 146--dc23/eng/20221202 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044268 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022044269 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Preface vii Introduction: Naturalist Humanism

1

  1 Why Should We Be Naturalists?

13

  2 Standard Naturalism, The Placement Problem, and Companion in Guilt Arguments

35

  3 Is the Natural Goodness Approach of Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson a Suitable Candidate for Liberal Naturalism?

47

  4 The Possibility of a Transcendental Naturalism

69

  5 The Myth of the Biological Given and the Developmentalist Turn 89   6 Virtues as Powers and Perfections

103

  7 Culture as Our Ecological Niche

125

  8 Virtue as Skilled Perception

149

  9 The Burdens of Attentiveness

169

10 Can There Be Bourgeois Virtues?

201

Conclusion: Radical Hope and Revolutionary Virtue

229

Bibliography 231 Index 241 About the Author

253

v

Preface

This was never supposed to be a pandemic book, but I suppose, like most academic works produced in the years between 2019 and whenever we can put all this behind us, it will inevitably be one. It is indeed fitting that a book whose main theme is the complex interconnections between biology, culture, ethics and politics and which takes as its starting point Aristotle’s insistence that we are social to the depths of our animality would come to print during a time when this has been forcefully brought home to us by events. A book which proposes a radically anti-capitalist virtue ethics will come into print at a time when the global economic system shudders under the impact of yet another “once in a lifetime” economic crisis and where large swathes of my home of Australia have been wracked by yet more “once in a thousand year” environmental catastrophes. It is perhaps a good thing that my book ends with a rallying cry for hope. This work is a call for conversation between often cloistered disciplines and subdisciplines. It is by no means intended as the last word on these matters, but I hope that for some it will be the first word. I recently remarked to a friend that if I am extremely lucky the next decade will be spent responding to overconfident (invariably male) graduate students trying to tear a strip off me. More likely, it will fall “stillborn from the press”, but unlike Hume’s Treatise it will likely remain there. As an interdisciplinary work, perhaps the greatest risk is that it will annoy everyone and please no one. Disciplinary specialists looking for the latest nuanced intervention in some small debate in a corner of their discipline will be dissatisfied. I decided a long time ago to write a book because, although several of these arguments are prefigured in some of my published articles, the standard length of a journal article did not enable me to develop my argument in the breadth needed. Of necessity, I have had to sacrifice depth and I hope that even if my presentations of views occasionally lack nuance, I have not misrepresented anyone’s position. The book is a call for conversation, it is also the product of many conversations. It began at my PhD viva many years ago, when John Dupré raised questions that I could not at the time answer. I am still not sure that I have answered them to his vii

viii

Preface

satisfaction, but I thank him for posing them and for his influence which no one will fail to notice. It is also the product of many conversations within the virtue ethics community. I spent a very happy and productive sabbatical semester in Auckland where I intended to work closely with Rosalind Hursthouse, but during my time there I came to realise that the views I was developing were closer to those of Christine Swanton, and while I continue to admire Rosalind as a philosopher and as a human being, I owe a special debt to Christine for her encouragement and never uncritical support. During that same period, I was lucky enough to spend time in Canada and it was there that I got to spend time with John Hacker-Wright. This book is above all a product of conversations with him and though we do not agree on everything I think that even where he is wrong, he is wrong in deeply illuminating ways. He has helped me to see the areas of agreement with Foot and her followers but also to clarify my precise disagreements. I spent a year in South Africa following an invitation from Pedro Tabensky at a certain centre in the university currently known as Rhodes. Though it was not exactly as happy a time as that in New Zealand, it did give me the opportunity to experience the difficulties and delights of South Africa. I cannot acknowledge the university while it continues to bear the name of one of modern history’s great criminals, nor given my publicly stated views on billionaire philanthropy can I acknowledge the centre where I was based. I do acknowledge the wonderful characters in the Philosophy Department, in particular Marius Vermaak and Francis Williamson. Though their political views differ wildly from mine we were able to have wonderful and engaging philosophical conversation and I thank them for the opportunity to teach an honours course in the history and philosophy of the life sciences. I also would like to thank another South African based academic, Tom Angier, for helping me to organize a remarkable conference in Cape Town in 2018 on Virtue and Skill. Returning home, I would like to thank Michael Levine, David Coady, Damien Cox and Michaelis Michaels for helping me cope with my paralyzing self-doubt and inviting me to ramble on to their colleagues. I thank my colleagues at the University of Notre Dame Australia, especially those who are members of the National Tertiary Education Union, current and present, and the broader Perth philosophical community, in particular Anne Schwenkenbecher and Michael Rubin who kindly commented on chapters from the first draft manuscript. I would also like to pay tribute to my students and in particular my students in the Virtue Ethics course who had to tolerate me basically thinking the ideas in this book out loud for a semester. I would also like to thank my editors and the anonymous reviewer. I doubt I have satisfied them on the many reservations they had about this work, but I appreciate the care and charity with which they approached it. Usual disclaimers apply.

Introduction Naturalist Humanism

This book defends an empirically responsible liberal naturalist virtue ethics, a position I will call, for the sake of brevity, ‘naturalist humanism’. My central claim is this: ethical formation, the process whereby we become relatively autonomous practical reasoners, appropriately responsive to ethical reasons (in particular, considerations of virtue and vice), is not a separate process from normal biological development. To develop biologically, a human being must acquire a set of skills tailored to the prevailing conditions of communal life. The virtuous excel in these skills of living and thereby become exemplars and mentors for others. This thought is commonly expressed in terms of ‘second nature’ but this can mislead us into thinking that there are two separate processes at work: our natural development and our development into a second nature. Even interactionist views, which regard these processes as complementary rather than antagonistic, remain surreptitiously dualist. I wish to combat this dualism. While it is possible to imagine beings genetically indistinguishable to us who do not develop a second nature, they are no more creatures like us than would be hominid-like aliens who did not share our evolutionary lineage. Whatever such speculations might contribute to our understanding of conceptual possibilities, they are largely irrelevant to the practical business of ethical life, the existence of which is an inescapable feature of our natural history. I am arguing for an empirically responsible ethical theory, but I am not advocating an empiricist ethical theory. While there is important conceptual work to be done that work cannot be done in isolation from our best understanding of the natural world (including human beings as an integral part of that world). Nevertheless, it is not the job of moral and political philosophers to do badly what others do well. We should eschew empirical investigation but remain in constant respectful yet critical dialogue with the sciences.1 Though the context is novel, the thoughts presented here are not. They form an attempt to work out in a modern setting the implications of two passages from Aristotle. The first of these is famous. In the Politics he remarks that “a city-state is among 1

2

Introduction

the things that exist by nature, that a human being is by nature a political animal, and that anyone who is without a city-state, not by luck but by nature, is either a poor specimen or else superhuman”.2 The second is taken from the Nicomachean Ethics and is perhaps less well known. He states that “virtues arise in us neither by nature nor contrary to nature, but nature gives us the capacity to acquire them, and completion comes through habituation”.3 We do not inhabit small city states and our concept of ‘political’ is thus radically different from Aristotle’s, as is our conception of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural’. There are notorious problems with Aristotle’s politics, which cannot be dismissed by simply regarding him as a creature of his times. Even were we to turn a blind eye to his views on the status of women, which we should not, this would still leave his elitism intact. Not only is he oblivious to the moral evils of slavery but, uniquely among the Classical Philosophers, he spent considerable ingenuity defending the institution. Sadly, we have not left sexism, elitism or slavery behind in antiquity; we therefore have to read him with an extremely critical eye. His conception of nature is also problematic, not least that he seems to mean several contradictory things when he uses the terms ‘by nature’ or ‘natural’. Even if we were to arrive at a common cluster of meanings, it is hard to escape the vast chasms separating Athenian natural philosophy from our own. Although he was a remarkably insightful natural historian and made significant contributions to the nascent life sciences of his time, no serious scientist would take his work as a guide today. Yet Aristotelianism, or at least neo-Aristotelianism, is still very much a living tradition in contemporary moral and political philosophy and this work is a contribution to that tradition. It must be a critical contribution because I believe that the tradition has gone astray in significant respects and part of getting back on track will involve recovering the key Aristotelian insights embodied in the lines quoted above. Contemporary neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics has, under pressure from alien traditions, veered away firstly from the recognition that moral and political philosophy needs to be grounded in a solid engagement with the life sciences, and secondly that doing moral philosophy without considering the political context is futile. This work aims to forcefully assert the important of both insights. Anyone familiar with the work of Alasdair MacIntyre will recognize his influence here. In fact, this work began as an attempt to develop a form of naturalistic virtue ethics along the lines signaled in his Rational Dependent Animals. In a key passage, MacIntyre repents his earlier attempt to sidestep Aristotle’s “metaphysical biology”: I now judge that I was in error in supposing an ethics independent of biology to be possible [. . .] and this for two distinct but related reasons. The first is that no account of the good, rules and virtues that are definitive of our moral life can be adequate that does not explain—or at least point us towards an explanation—how that form of life is possible for beings who are biologically constituted as we are, by providing us with an account of our development towards and into that form of life. That development has as its starting point our initial animal condition. Secondly, a failure to understand that condition and the light thrown upon it by a comparison between humans and members of other intelligent species will obscure crucial features of that development.4



Introduction 3

Although MacIntyre has continued to pursue his broader project of asserting the importance of a rational polity to the development of moral character in radical and interesting ways, the programmatic notes he develops in this passage remain unfulfilled. The first half of this book represents an attempt to make good on this promise. This work therefore has two goals: to open up a serious engagement with the contemporary life sciences and the philosophy of biology, and to push virtue ethics in a politically radical direction. The other unfortunate tendency in recent virtue ethics has been a tendency to neglect social and political questions and treat virtue as primarily an individual psychological matter. This is compounded by the fact that in our broader culture, virtue talk has been commandeered by conservatives. Too often talk of character is merely a subtle pretext for victim blaming. Though some virtue ethicists are politically conservative, and some are liberals, I wish to give a voice to those who would take virtue ethics in more radical political directions. One important resource will be the work of Lisa Tessman and her conception of ‘burdened virtues’ which provides a powerful tool for understanding the complex interrelationship between individual character formation, and the social and institutional context in which such character formation occurs.5 Most notably, the concept of a burdened virtue enables us to understand the severance that takes place, in conditions of injustice and oppression, of the normal connection that should obtain between character and flourishing. The concept of burdened virtues and the moral damage they entail, provides us with a powerful tool for analyzing precisely what is wrong with our current reality.

NATURAL CITIZENS The virtues, should we develop them, befit us to live well in organized communities, the most familiar of which are cities. We are thus natural citizens in the sense that the process whereby we acquire the skills, of which the virtues are perfections, is a process which should come naturally to us. Not all cities are equal: some forms of life are more conducive to human flourishing than others. There is thus a tension between our necessarily communal nature and that fact that many, if not most, of the cities we inhabit have been less than ideal and many have been very bad indeed. This has fostered in some romantic fantasies of a return to nature.6 We sometimes hear the claim that city living is unnatural in tandem with the claim that humans have lived as hunter-gatherers for the bulk of our evolutionary history.7 Length of time only matters to historical beings not to those beings allegedly living outside history. Thus, the only possible relevance of our lengthy history as hunter-gatherers is the idea that it is somehow encoded in our biology or alternatively that it is a powerful myth that has figured at various times in our recorded history. Neither option withstands scrutiny, or so I will argue below.

4

Introduction

ETHICAL FORMATION Reflecting upon the relationship between virtues and the communities we inhabit does press home a very powerful thought. To be virtuous is more than simply to follow the norms, rules and conventions of one’s culture. On the contrary, our paradigmatic exemplars of virtue are generally those who have swum against the tide. It is tempting therefore to suppose that being virtuous has very little to do with one’s culture and resides instead in some ahistorical capacity for rationality. This is often expressed in conceptions of ethics which gives central place to ‘persons’ understood as abstract bearers of capacities, rights and obligations rather than humans, who are the fragile product of a natural history that might well have been otherwise. This hints at a cluster of problems surrounding particularism and relativism and the possibility and limits of internal or immanent criticism.8 Sabina Lovibond, from whom I borrow the term ‘ethical formation’ raises this issue in the context of discussing the problem of recalcitrance. Any well-functioning social formation will require some conformity. At the same time, its good functioning will also require the possibility of dissent, which can manifest itself in the refusal of a dissenting self to be formed in the way the culture demands. [I]nitiation into a form of life is essential to the development of proper receptivity to the demands of reason—essential as an adjunct to the necessarily finite stock of examples, exercises, verbal explanations, and the like which are available for use in communicating a rule or “form” of thought. Those engaged in the business of upbringing must therefore take advantage of the mimetic impulse that prompts us to identify ourselves—either through primitive sociability, or in play or existential experiment—with the people around us; they must seek to harness this impulse to a creative social purpose and must condemn as recalcitrant any behavior that defies or subverts that purpose. Such recalcitrant tendencies bear witness to the enduring presence of an apeiron, or formless principle, in human nature.9

It is often hard, if not impossible, to distinguish healthy recalcitrance, the sort that is required by any healthy society, from the pathological sort. Consequently, she suggests that the proper attitude for the critical theorist (who is also a participant in the society she is attempting to critique) to adopt towards “the ethically ‘recalcitrant’” is “an (intermittently) agnostic one”. The very quick response to this problem is that the validity of recalcitrance is not something which can be determined abstractly but can only ever be determined in situ. The capacity to make that determination is part of what it means to acquire the master virtue of practical reasonableness. Cultures provide a scaffold which structures practical reason in particular ways by making certain ways of acting and responding seem normal and natural, and others illicit, unimaginable, intolerably inconvenient and so forth. A properly formed ethical subject is one who has the capacity, through properly focused attentiveness, to decide when to conform and when to set aside



Introduction 5

the prevailing norms of her culture. Later chapters will develop these points in greater detail.

BIOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT The most controversial aspect of my argument is that ethical formation is biological development. I will therefore attempt to fend off at the outset two possible misunderstandings: some may suspect yet another ill-fated attempt at reducing ethics to biology; others may hold the converse view that I am operating with a conception of the ‘biological’ so broad as to be vacuous. These apparently opposing observations share one key feature. They both have a common conception of what a biological explanation must be like. I will locate the source of this common (mis)conception in something I call the Myth of the Biological Given, which is the assumption that anything which is biological must be fixed, determined, encoded and resistant to deliberate volitional control. This assumption is rarely so baldly stated, which is why I accord it mythical status, but it structures various debates about nature and nurture and motivates a series of dichotomies which would be better discarded. It rests ultimately on bad philosophy of science, which fails to give due heed to the distinctive nature of living things and the appropriate methods for their analysis. In other words, it rests upon a particularly crude version of the unity of science thesis and an equally crude physicalism which has largely been abandoned elsewhere in philosophy. One way in which the life sciences differ from the physical sciences is the key role that concepts like ‘development’ and ‘history’ play in them. Both of these concepts involve more than simply measurable change over time and introduce protonormativity into the life sciences, or so I will argue. The concept of development provides a bridge between being and becoming and, once it is introduced into our conceptual framework, other related concepts such as ‘thriving’ and ‘decaying’ become intelligible. Obviously, there is no straightforward transition from such protonormativity to the full-blown ethical variety, nevertheless, acknowledging its presence goes a considerable way to dissolving anxieties about metaphysical queerness.

THE PERSON IS THE ORGANISM The essence of this work is captured in Tim Ingold’s deceptively simple slogan: “the person is the organism”. Ingold has spent his career attempting to dismantle the Chinese wall within his own discipline between cultural and physical anthropology which in turn reflects the persistent dualism between nature and culture that still dominates our intellectual culture. In this dichotomous view of the world, persons are the domain of culture while organisms are the domain of biology and never the twain shall meet. Ingold writes “[i]nstead of trying to reconstruct the complete

6

Introduction

human being from two separate but complementary components, respectively biophysical and sociocultural, held together with a film of psychological cement, it struck me that we should be trying to find a way of talking about human life that eliminates the need to slice it up into these different layers”.10 It might occasionally be useful to slice up the layers, but this procedure comes with perils. The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr expresses this well when he distinguishes between the licit method of ‘analysis’ and the illicit method of ‘reduction’.11 Analysis involves isolating aspects of a phenomenon for clearly defined and carefully circumscribed explanatory purposes. Reduction means doing the same in an undisciplined manner and with ill-defined goals. Analysis thus understood is an essential aspect of scientific practice. Reduction, by contrast, should have no role in the life sciences. To believe otherwise, Mayr suggests, is to succumb to a philosophical prejudice based upon taking certain aspects of the physical sciences as the gold standard and failing to acknowledge the particularity of the life sciences. Reductionism is (bad) philosophy, not science. For that reason, the slogan “the person is the organism” should be properly understood. Most emphatically, it should not be understood as stating that what we call persons are ‘simply’, ‘merely’, ‘nothing more than’ or ‘just’ organisms. Of course, to fully understand why this is the case we need to have a much broader understanding of what organisms are, such that the concept has space to accommodate what we have traditionally understood in personalist terms. Ingold suggests that the traditional view is that “every organism is a discrete, bounded entity, a ‘living thing’, one of a population of such things, and relating to other organisms in its environment along lines of external contact that leave its basic, internally specified nature unaffected”.12 In what follows I will be surveying a range of recent work in the life sciences and in philosophy of biology which challenges this traditional view of organisms and thus provides the space in which it makes sense to view persons as organisms. A central theme in this recent work is to challenge dichotomous conceptions of biological development in which the organism is understood as the product of discrete causal influences, some internal and others external. The alternative is a process view, in which what we call organism and what we call environment are interwoven in numerous highly complex and contingent ways.

THE MYTH OF THE ANATOMICALLY MODERN HUMAN The human developmental environment is socio-cultural in character. The human infant develops not as the unfolding of a pre-specified genetic program but constructs itself using the internal and external resources which are at hand. It does so in a setting imbued with meanings and significance with which his forebears have provided it. Nobody seriously disputes this and yet still there is a tendency to treat the inner biological aspects and the outer cultural aspects as standing in an external relationship to one another, even when that relationship is understood



Introduction 7

as complementary rather than antagonistic. This view also has a historical back story attached to it. It is the myth of something called “the anatomically modern human” our prehistoric ancestor who emerged in the African Savannah during the Pleistocene period. Ingold’s article, “‘People Like Us’: The Myth of the Anatomically Modern Human”, is enormously useful here. It begins with an odd question: “Why didn’t Cro-Magnon man ride a bicycle?”13 The obvious answer is that the technology was not available to them and even if it were, the terrain and conditions of life would have made cycling an unappealing option. But this obvious answer embeds certain assumptions: any obstacles that existed to Cro-Magnon cyclists were cultural; there were no biological reasons preventing him. The conclusion one should draw from this is that Cro-Magnon man was a creature very much like us biologically. A CroMagnon infant stolen at birth and miraculously transported to the twenty-first century would rapidly learn to ride bicycles and skateboards. After all, the capacity to ride a bike presupposes nothing more than bi-pedalism which is a universal ‘biological’ capacity of our species. Having summarized what he takes to be the orthodox view in both anthropology and human biology, Ingold proceeds to dismantle it. He begins with the implicit contrast between cycling and walking. Walking is understood as an entirely biological phenomenon: unless an infant suffers from some sort of developmental disorder she will learn to walk over the normal course of her development. By contrast, cycling is a cultural phenomenon, specific to highly developed technological cultures. No child instinctively knows how to ride a bicycle. He must be taught. In fact, as Ingold points out, children do not instinctively walk either. They enlist the help of adults in learning to walk. They learn in a relatively short time frame, provided that certain environmental contingencies are in place such as sensitive caregivers who afford them both protection and space to experiment. As Ingold notes “infants deprived of contact with older caregivers will not learn to walk—indeed they would not even survive, which is why all surviving infants do walk, unless crippled by accident or disease”.14 What might seem like a banal observation, namely, that a child will not survive without care is actually profoundly important. Extended infantile dependency is a brute biological fact about our species with ramifications for almost every aspect of human social life. Any child that walks will have received sufficient care. The quality of that care will, however, affect all of her future interactions. This should hardly surprise us: there is now an overwhelming body of evidence to support the correlation between extended neoteny and sociability in non-human animals.15 Suffice to say that the most complexly collaborative species on the planet also has the longest period of infantile dependency. I will develop these considerations at much greater length below. For now, let us return to the supposed contrast between walking and cycling. Someone might grant Ingold’s points and yet still insist that walking is innate in a sense that cycling is not. Clearly, something innate need not be present at birth. Nevertheless, assuming

8

Introduction

the necessary conditions which Ingold specifies, walking will emerge in the normal course of development while cycling will not. Much then turns on an analysis of the concept of ‘innateness’. The most sensible interpretation seems to rely heavily on the associated concept of normal development. Provided all the conditions for normal development are present, the child will learn to walk. It is thus reasonable to treat walking like bipedalism as an innate feature, perhaps inscribed in the genetic code. But, as Ingold points out, the set of conditions for normal development include the presence of sensitive caregivers who, inter alia, instruct the child in various ways. Equally the conditions necessary for cycling are ubiquitous in most contemporary cultures, so much so that a child who cannot learn to ride a bicycle is considered defective in similar ways to an illiterate. From this perspective, the difference between walking and cycling are differences of degree rather than kind. In neither case are all of the necessary conditions present at birth inside the organism. Ingold adds further observations. Our characteristic life activities leave “an indelible anatomical impression”. Both walking and cycling permanently alter one’s physiology. Once someone has learned to ride a bicycle, unless one sustains profound physiological or neurological damage, it is a skill one never loses: hence the colloquial expression: “just like riding a bike”.

THE FERAL FALLACY The idea of the ‘anatomically modern human’ is closely related to something that I will call “the Feral Fallacy”. The Feral Fallacy is the idea that there could be beings just like us in all relevant respects who had not acquired culture. That is, the being in question would be ‘biologically’ human but not human in any recognizable sense. We could contrast this as another inhabitant of philosophical thought experiments which is a denizen of Twin Earth who manifests many characteristically human facets such as reason, emotional responsiveness and articulate speech and yet is silicone based. We could hold a conversation with Twin Earther (perhaps via some sort of translator) but not with the Feral. It is worth noting at the outset that while the figure of the Feral is a common trope in folklore and mythology the evidence for true ferals, that is, a child who successfully matured into adulthood without acquiring a culture is exceptionally rare. This is hardly surprising: given the extent and length of infantile dependency, no feral child would survive into adolescence without some form of parental care. Of the few attested cases of genuine ferals, the children received some sort of alloparenting by other animals, such as apes. As Douglas Canland notes in his study of the intellectual history of feral children, the background assumptions of a culture have a profound bearing of how their behavior is interpreted by investigators.16 As with equivalent studies of non-human animals, we must therefore exercise caution about any extrapolations that are made about human nature.



Introduction 9

The one thing that is clear from the evidence is that no true feral has ever been able to undergo a typical human development. All had profound linguistic, cognitive and behavioral impairment and the most that could be achieved for them is a comfortable, if limited, existence. One of the more famous examples, Peter, whose fame was largely due to the fact that his discovery coincided with the early days of the Enlightenment and a fervent interest in child development, was said to have “ended his vegatory existence as a kind of very old child, in Feb. 1785”.17 Attempts at teaching feral children human language have been, if anything, less successful than similar attempts with apes and other primates. My concern here is less with the rare actual examples of feral children than with the hypothetical ones which lurk at the background of discussions of biological development. For our purposes, a feral will be understood as a being biologically identical to us but who for whatever reason has not undergone the process of initiation into language and culture. The question then turns on how coherent the idea of a being ‘biologically’ but not ‘culturally’ identical to us might be. I believe the idea is incoherent. Language and culture are not additional layers pored over like concrete on a pre-existing biological nature. They are, rather, intimately involved in the developmental process at every level. This is for several reasons. The first is that the idea of a pre-existing biological nature is utterly confused. What we would call a biological nature is an emergent feature of a highly complex developmental process. If we abandon the idea of phenotypic outcomes being inscribed in the genes, then it is meaningless to talk about something predating that developmental process: slight changes in environmental conditions can have major ramifications for developmental outcomes. The second closely related issue is that we regard proper biological development in human beings involves cognitive and behavioral developmental both of which are thoroughgoingly socio-cultural in character. A child does not develop in order to inhabit the landscape of our Pleistocene ancestors; it is raised in such a way as to integrate with the landscape inhabited by its primary caregivers. A child who fails to integrate cannot fulfil even the most rudimentary biological tasks effectively. The acquisition of culture and language is as much a biological prerequisite as is the acquisition of water and food. Biological things by their very nature might have been otherwise. Something like feral human beings are thus a conceptual possibility. Yet the fact that they are not a live possibility matters greatly. Waxing psychoanalytically, one source of the feral fallacy might be a discomfort that many philosophers have had with the brute fact of our mutual dependency. The fact that we must acquire a culture is part of the broader set of facts relating to our fragility and neediness. Were those facts different we would not have the peculiar kinds of problems we associate with morality. But they are not and therefore “the familiar considerations about other people’s happiness, etc. are bound to play a central part while Homo sapiens remains the intensely social, vulnerable, communicative creature that he (and she) [. . .] is”.18

10

Introduction

As Pedro Tabensky puts it, Alone we stand, “forked”, naked and vulnerable, often shielded by pride and the innumerable fantasies that blind us from exposure to too much reality, and yet there would be no need for such things were we invulnerable. And it is precisely because we are “skinbags” rather than gods that we reach out to others. Our deep vulnerability is the birthplace of love and, as I would like to suggest, the birthplace of ethics as well. Ethics is ultimately an ethics of love: that which allows us genuinely to relate to others lovingly or merely respectfully—the more impersonal variety of love. To respect others is genuinely to recognize them as human, as belonging to the we of humanity, and it is through our loving engagements with specific others that we can come to recognize those who do not form part of our intimate circles. It is through intimate love that we come to recognize humanity, and to recognize this presupposes the ethical. The ethical is in the first instance that which binds us to the human, the glue that constitutes the we of humanity, the protective we of frail animals creatively adapting to a largely hostile world.19

In what follows, I will be developing a naturalistic virtue ethics of fragility. It is naturalistic in that it acknowledges that our utter dependency upon one another and our various responses to it form part of our natural history. Things might well have been otherwise and for that very reason attempting to do ethics through conceptual analysis unrestrained by the messiness of the actual world is a hopeless endeavor. Even our much-vaunted rationality, which we are most likely to encounter in the guise of rat-like cunning, is part of our natural history. We are rational because we are social, language-using creatures and rationality gives that sociality its peculiar form, yet both emerge as responses to our fundamental fragility.

STRUCTURE OF THE ARGUMENT As I mentioned in the preface, this book was conceived as a whole, not as a series of journal articles. For that reason, the book stands or falls, less on its individual parts but on whether the argument as a whole hangs together. For that reason, I will work backwards from the conclusion which is that contemporary capitalism renders virtue a much rarer quality than it should be in a healthy society. A healthy society is one in which if someone fails to become virtuous it is more likely to be through lack of effort than through insuperable obstacles placed in their path. I argue that the obstacles in question are not simply barriers of poverty and lack of educational opportunities but in particular the radical challenge that capitalist consumption poses to our ability to stand in the right relation to our appetites and the threat that capitalist disruption in the workplace, often celebrated as its greatest achievement, poses to our ability to commit to long-term projects of the self and of community. This conclusion builds on the pioneering work of Lisa Tessman who developed the idea of the burdened virtues. I extend her analysis to cover attentiveness as both an epistemic and a moral virtue and suggest that in conditions of oppression and



Introduction 11

injustice attentiveness can become burdened and lead to a variety of epistemic and moral traits that are not conducive to moral flourishing. This analysis in turn depends upon the Gibsonian account of moral perception that I develop where I argue that the virtuous person is able to see the demands of virtue in a very literal sense. Such direct moral perception is only possible if we reject standard representationalist accounts of perception and opt for some form of a 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted or extended) account instead. Gibson places great store on the fact that the animal inhabits an environment and that the organism and the environment complement one another. They are co-constructed together and the animal navigates its environment by developing the requisite skills. In the human setting the primary developmental environment is socio-cultural in character and I offer an ecological reading of Marx in order to make sense of how we can understand the metabolic relationship in which human beings stand to nature and how that relationship can break down, often in quite disastrous ways. The idea of culture as our ecological niche comes from Developmental Systems Theory, and I offer an account of how we might see the traditional idea of virtues as perfections of powers in a developmentalist manner. I reject the traditional idea of powers as given, and offer instead a constructive-interactionist account in which both the human powers and their perfections come into being in the course of development by drawing on the materials at hand, often handed down from our ancestors. This rejection of the Biological Given is central to offering an ethical naturalism which is both liberal and empirically responsible. The standard contrast between real and constructed is inapplicable in the biological realm wherever anything that exists is constructed. I suggest that some traditional worries about biology and ethics can be assuaged once we adopt a developmentalist understanding of the life sciences. The need for such an empirically responsible ethical naturalism is shown by the ambivalence in the currently most popular form of naturalistic virtue ethics. I show that while many common arguments against Foot and her followers are misfires, there is a tension between the need to distance itself from Standard Naturalism and an unwillingness to seriously engage with empirical science. Empirical responsibility is a sine qua non of any naturalism worthy of the name and for that reason the sort of transcendental naturalism developed by some of Foot’s followers is unappealing. This raises the question posed by Julia Annas in her paper “Virtue Ethics: What Sort of Naturalism?” She welcomes Foot’s naturalism as an attempt to undermine a projectivist vision of human beings standing outside nature peering in and places us firmly back in the natural world along with our fellow creatures. This for many is what was attractive about Foot’s project and yet as many of her closest allies have pointed out, this may not be an accurate rendition of her project since she seems just as keen to distance us from the merely biological world, which leaves her open to several powerful objections. One solution to all of this might simply be to abandon the sobriquet ‘naturalistic’ since it has been thoroughly appropriate by those who I have referred to as

12

Introduction

Standard Naturalists. And yet, given that the Standard Naturalist position generates the Placement Problem and given also that attempts to solve it from within the parameters of Standard Naturalism as so unpromising, we need a naturalism which is liberal and which pays due heed to our distinctiveness within the living world but which is also empirically responsible in that it never loses sight of the fact that we stand in a metabolic relationship to that natural world, a world the we co-construct along with our fellow creatures, human and non-human. That is what this book attempts to provide.

NOTES   1.  Even where findings are clear and beyond dispute, which they rarely are, their relevance to human concerns are always a matter of careful philosophical analysis and debate.   2.  Aristotle and W. H. D. Reeve (trans. and ed.). Politics. IIf t: 1253a (New York: Hackett Publishing, 2006).  3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II:i 1103a, Roger Crisp (trans. and ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 23.   4.  Alasdair Macintyre (1999), Dependent, Rational Animal: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (London: Duckworth, 1999), p. x.  5. Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).   6.  Some of which is detailed in Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts: A defence of growth, progress, industry and stuff (John Hunt Publishing, 2015).   7.  For instance, James C. Scott, Against the grain (Yale University Press, 2017).   8.  Much of this is in response to the work of the Frankfurt School, especially Jurgen Habermas, see Titus Stahl, “Habermas and the project of immanent critique.”  Constellations 20, no. 4 (2013).  9. Sabina Lovibond, Ethical formation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p. 139. 10.  Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Dwelling, Livelihood and Skill (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 3. 11.  Ernst Mayr, What makes biology unique?: Considerations on the autonomy of a scientific discipline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 67–83. 12. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 3. 13.  Tim Ingold (1995), “‘People Like Us’: The Myth of the Anatomically Modern Human” Cultural Dynamics 7(2), 187–214. 14.  Ingold, “‘People Like Us’”, 191. 15.  Cf B. Holly Smith and Robert L. Tompkins. “Toward a life history of the Hominidae.” Annual Review of Anthropology 24, no. 1 (1995): 257–279. 16.  Douglas K. Canland, Feral Children and Clever Animals: Reflections on Human Nature (Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1993). 17.  Quoted in Canland (1993), p. 12. 18.  Mary Midgley, Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (London: Methuen & C. A. University Paperback, 1983), 131. 19. Pedro Tabensky, “A Virtue Ethics for Skin-Bags: An Ethics of Love for Vulnerable Creatures.” The Handbook of Virtue Ethics (Van Hooft, S. ed.) (Durham: Acumen, 2014).

1 Why Should We Be Naturalists?

In this chapter, I discuss the various ways in which the term ‘naturalism’ is used in contemporary analytic philosophy and how moral and political philosophy is something of an outlier. I suggest that the term’s status as an honorific has obscured rather than clarified. I describe the standard form of naturalism, associated with W. V. O. Quine and show that this form of naturalism inevitably leads to the Placement Problem. Spinoza had Descartes firmly in his sights when he wrote, Most writers on the emotions and on human conduct seem to be treating rather of matters outside nature than of natural phenomena following nature’s general laws. They appear to conceive man to be situated in nature as a kingdom within a kingdom: for they believe that he disturbs rather than follows nature’s order, that he has absolute control over his actions, and that he is determined solely by himself. They attribute human infirmities and fickleness, not to the power of nature in general, but to some mysterious flaw in the nature of man, which accordingly they bemoan, deride, despise, or, as usually happens, abuse: he, who succeeds in hitting off the weakness of the human mind more eloquently or more acutely than his fellows, is looked upon as a seer.1

On the surface, things are very different these days. There are few card-carrying supernaturalists in contemporary philosophy. Thus, in a survey of contemporary analytic philosophy, Brian Leiter can confidently divide the field between a dominant naturalist trend and a vanishing band of Wittgensteinian quietists.2 As Leiter notes, both trends represent a response to the idea that there is no constructive role for philosophy considered as a separate discipline from the empirical sciences. For the Wittgensteinian quietist, this entails that there is no constructive role for philosophy simpliciter. Naturalists require philosophy to draw ever closer to empirical science. 13

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It was not always thus. Like phenomenology, early analytic philosophy arose as an overt rebellion against the naturalist trends that had dominated early twentieth century philosophy. The glory days of analytic philosophy were marked by a high level of indifference to what was going on in the empirical sciences. Philosophers were in the conceptual analysis business and really did not need to bother about what their colleagues in other departments were doing. Quine changed everything. His unashamedly scientistic approach to philosophy, and the sledgehammer he took to the analytic-synthetic distinction, which had provided the intellectual foundation for demarcation of territory between philosophy and empirical science, utterly transformed the field. Consequently, almost everyone declares themselves to be some sort of naturalist these days. Partly because of its honorific status ‘naturalism’ is devilishly difficult to define. In the broadest sense, a naturalist is anyone who takes seriously Spinoza’s complaint. However, as Kelly James Clark suggests, “it is impossible to offer a single precise definition of ‘naturalism’, one that captures everything that goes by the name. Defined too narrowly, it leaves out wide swaths of human thought and experience; defined too broadly, it includes many things that naturalists hope to exclude”.3 Problems of definition are nothing new to philosophy and it is possible to have perfectly serviceable concepts that resist attempts at a precise definition. Clark suggests that we would be better attending to the diverse ways in which the concept of ‘naturalism’ is deployed in contemporary philosophy noting at least two distinct strands: methodological and ontological (or metaphysical) naturalism. Considerable tension exists between these strands since methodological naturalism is a modest and conservative set of commitments whereas the ontological or metaphysical variant has much grander ambitions. Typically, these ambitions are negative. Metaphysical naturalists wish to assert that “everything that exists is included in the natural world; there are no supernatural entities”.4 But, of course, this begs many questions, not least what we include in the category of ‘supernatural entities’. Obvious candidates involve ghosts and ghouls and miracle cures, but it has also been broadened to encompass consciousness, modality, numbers and minds (understood as anything other than brains) and most importantly, for our purposes, value. The standard form of naturalism inevitably gives rise to what Frank Jackson dubbed the Placement Problem.5 That is, how do we locate normativity in the disenchanted world described by physics? There are various responses within Standard Naturalism to the Placement Problem but none of them are hospitable to a robustly objective form of ethics. Thus, we arrive at a paradox: the sort of enthusiasm for naturalism that powers much contemporary analytic philosophy runs out of steam when it comes to moral and political philosophy. Unlike elsewhere in the field, non-naturalist approaches remain influential. Take, for instance, this representative passage from Russ Shafer-Landau’s defense of ethical realism. He takes as self-evident that any plausible form of ethical realism must be non-naturalistic because otherwise one cannot make sense of what is distinctive about ethical facts.



Why Should We Be Naturalists? 15 Put simply, it is hard to see what kind of thing a moral value could be, and this difficulty derives largely from the suspicion that values are something quite different from the commonplace, empirical facts that we encounter in our everyday experience. It is said that values have a pull on us that ordinary facts do not; that values are not discoverable as scientific facts are; that values provide justification for practices that plain facts are unable, by themselves, to supply. In short, it appears that moral values are something very different in kind from anything else that we are familiar with.6

This thought is a familiar one and it has motivated many moral philosophers to reject ethical realism as unnecessarily ‘spooky’. Shafer-Landau demurs and argues instead for his preferred version of non-naturalist ethical realism. His reasoning rests heavily upon his definition of “ethical naturalism” as the thesis that “moral facts are a species of scientific facts, discoverable in all the ordinary ways, as motivating and as normative (or not) as ordinary facts”.7 Shafer-Landau’s challenge is this: if there are such things as moral facts, they must be distinctive from other kinds of facts, but this seems to imply the sort of ‘metaphysically queer’ epistemic faculties that have troubled error theorists since J. L. Mackie. Error theorists have resolved this problem by denying the existence of ethical facts. We can spell this out in standard form: P1. Natural Facts are facts “amenable to scientific confirmation”; P2. There are only natural facts; P3. Ethical facts are not “amenable to scientific confirmation”; C: Ergo, ethical facts do not exist. Shafer-Landau rejects P2 and argues: P1. Natural facts are the kind of thing “amenable to scientific confirmation”; P2. Ethical facts are not “amenable to scientific confirmation”; C: Ethical facts are not “natural facts” but facts of a distinctive kind. The bleak dilemma naturalists face is as follows: we must either deny the existence of moral facts altogether and opt for some form of subjectivism or expressivism or we must allow into our ontology a category of fact utterly unique in the natural universe. If embracing subjectivism or expressivism is not a palatable option, for reasons I will discuss below, then the Placement Problem seems insurmountable. We seem stuck in a bind: even if we adopt the most metaphysically untroublesome version of moral realism, we cannot be both consistently naturalist and consistent moral realists. When we find ourselves at such an impasse, it is generally good philosophical practice to reexamine the steps which brought us here. Let us therefore reexamine some of our guiding assumptions.

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BASIC NATURALISM I have suggested earlier that there is a tension within naturalism between a modest and conservative epistemic stance and a grander but more problematic metaphysics. This tension between modest and expansive conceptions of naturalism runs through contemporary analytic philosophy. As David Macarthur has persuasively argued, it is present in Quine’s own work, which vacillates continually between a relatively uncontroversial form of naturalism and a far more problematic reductive naturalism. It would therefore be valuable to examine Quine’s arguments in detail. However, as Macarthur notes, Quine offers few, if any, arguments in favor of naturalism. On the contrary, he typically announces his allegiance to naturalism in a series of familiar slogans that are widely broadcast like articles of faith rather than the contestable philosophical doctrines that they are. In this respect Quine’s practice has become the norm. The terms “naturalism” and “naturalist” appear in the philosophical literature like political banners, loudly and oft repeated, but rarely explained or defended.8

Fortunately, Macarthur and Mario De Caro have done sterling work in reconstructing what such arguments might look like. Unsurprisingly perhaps, they are nowhere near as decisive as Quine’s bombast might suggest. They begin by outlining what they call Basic Naturalism, a set of minimum requirements which any approach claiming to naturalism ought to endorse. These are: 1. Anti-Supernaturalism: A rejection of any commitment to the supernatural whether in the form of supernatural entities (e.g., God, Platonic ideas) or supernatural faculties of mind (e.g., Cartesian transparency, mystical intuition). 2. Human beings are part of nature and can be properly studied by the sciences. 3. There can be what Hume called a “science of man”; a doctrine that leaves open the question whether scientific understanding can provide a complete understanding of the human. 4. Respect for the epistemic pedigree of the natural sciences. “The naturalist is one who has respect for the conclusions of natural science”.9 These are clearly very broad criteria, perhaps too broad. For that reason, I will add a further commitment, largely for the purpose of forestalling worries about causal closure style arguments. I take this from John Dupré. I will refer to point 4 as “empirically responsibility” a term that I borrow from Lakoff and Johnson.10 One can eschew empirical responsibility, but one cannot claim to be a naturalist when one does so. The context in which they articulated this idea was the cognitive sciences and a philosopher who shares their concerns, Anthony Chemero, bemoans the prevalence of what he disparagingly refers to as Hegelian arguments in the cognitive



Why Should We Be Naturalists? 17

sciences. Although he acknowledges that this term is a little unfair to Hegel himself, it does capture a widespread preference for a priori stipulation over empirical investigation. Chemero controversially claims that certain foundational arguments in contemporary cognitive science, in particular Noam Chomsky’s ‘poverty of stimulus’ argument for a Universal Grammar and Jerry Fodor’s arguments for complex internal representations, are themselves Hegelian arguments in this illicit sense.11 I will be suggesting that the most influential trend in contemporary naturalistic virtue ethics shares this unfortunate predilection for Hegelian argument and for that reason its status as ethical naturalism is open to question. 5. Minimal Compositional Physicalism: Anything which exists, and is composed of something, is composed of the sort of things which can in principle be analyzed by our best physical sciences.12 As a minimalist thesis, it is not supposed to be exciting and controversial. It can explain cricket bats and even cricket games to some extent, just not in any particularly interesting way; still, it does not require us to posit the existence of some metaphysically strange ‘gameness’ to explain them or any other normative phenomenon. To say that something cannot be explained in purely physical terms, from the standpoint of minimal compositional physicalism, is to state that the explanatory resources of the physical sciences are inadequate to its explanation, not that it is composed of some set of properties uniquely anomalous in the natural world. Lots of things that are physical in their composition cannot be explained (other than compositionally) by physics alone. Crucially, this includes all that forms the distinctive subject matter of the life sciences.

STANDARD (QUINEAN) NATURALISM The Standard Naturalist pushes the relatively uncontroversial commitments of Basic Naturalism in much more problematic directions. Unfortunately, as Macarthur emphasizes, they seldom offer much by the way of argument for this move. In Quine’s case, this move is announced in the form of what Macarthur calls “Four Credos”: 1. A commitment to physicalism, the idea that we are “physical denizens of a physical world”; 2. A commitment to there being no “first philosophy”; 3. Endorsement of the claim that philosophy is “continuous” with science; and 4. The claim that the only “responsible theory” of the whole world is scientific theory.13

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Chapter 1

The differences between these Credos and the commitments of Basic Naturalism are superficially subtle but closer examination reveals that they commit us to some pretty troubling conclusions. Let us consider each in turn. Credo 1 seems on the surface to be indistinguishable from Dupré’s ‘minimal compositional physicalism’ but the twist comes in the claim that we are “physical denizens of a physical world”. In one sense this is uncontroversial: our bodies are composed of the basic elements of physics and we are surrounded by objects similarly composed. But we are “denizens” of a world full of possibilities and duties and other things which are equally important yet seem badly explained in physicalist terms. A purely physical description of the Ashes test series or the Battle of Waterloo would leave most people dissatisfied. Even if we set aside the qualitative social sciences, which are too norm ridden for many Standard Naturalists, there are other reasons for being cautious of reductive physicalism. For we are also, as importantly, denizens of an organic world. The life sciences are well-founded scientific enterprises and yet they can only be minimally explained by physics and chemistry.14 Thus, either we are mistaken about their scientific status or strong versions of physicalism are not able to properly account for the full range of the scientific enterprise. Credos 2 and 3 very much form a pair. The rejection of first philosophy is relatively unproblematic, if it is understood as what I have called empirical responsibility. Similarly, the idea of philosophy and science being continuous with one another could be relatively innocuous, if it merely saw our work as complementary rather than in conflict. It is when we consider these two Credos in combination with the fourth one that we see the problem. Quine sees no constructive role for philosophy for the same reason there is no constructive role for any other ‘second grade’ discourse which includes the non-quantitative human sciences. Science, narrowly construed, is alone the arbiter. There is, in other words, a leap from the idea that we should respect the epistemic pedigree of the natural sciences to the entirely illicit view that only they are worthy of our attention. However, taking Quine’s Four Credos in combination places the Standard Naturalist in a tricky position: not only must she jettison the human sciences, she must also give up on large swathes of the life sciences, namely, those which cannot be adequately accounted for in purely physical terms. As Ernst Mayr reminds us, we do not get very far in understanding living things without taking a historical perspective, a perspective which is largely irrelevant in the purely physical sciences. While Mayr intended his point to relate exclusively to evolutionary biology, recent rapprochements between evolutionary and developmental perspective mean that we should consider his point in the broader context of both species and individual life histories.15 We cannot properly understand species or organisms without understanding the contingencies of their development, a prime reason why the trinity of determinism, mechanism and essentialism, which may have served classical physics well, are hopeless in the life sciences. Self-declared naturalism falls foul of the empirical reality of actual scientific practice. As Mayr points out, most twentieth-century philosophy of science was driven by a dogmatic commitment to the idea that all sciences should aim to resemble physics.



Why Should We Be Naturalists? 19

In Quine’s case, there is an unacknowledged tension between his commitment to physicalism and his view that “naturalism” just is “the recognition that it is within science itself, and not in some prior philosophy, that reality is to be identified and described”.16 If physicalism were correct, then one would have expected evidence to emerge of an increasingly monistic form of scientific practice and yet in biology pluralism reigns supreme and this is not a sign of a science in crisis but a feature of one of the most successful sciences we have. Biology is successful because of and not despite its pluralism. Monistic physicalism is not the inevitable conclusion of Basic Naturalism but an intellectual pathology. John Dupré talks of the ‘miracle of monism’ by which he means the persistence of philosophers’ commitment to monistic physicalism, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Naturalists can be consistently empiricist (in the sense of empirical responsibility I have outlined above) or they can be monists; they cannot be both. All of the arguments one has for rejecting the supernatural, namely lack of evidence, should also incline one to reject monism. It is, he alleges “a myth” and these are “just the sort of things that naturalism, in its core commitment to anti-supernaturalism, should reject”.17 What is monistic physicalism and why should we acknowledge its mythical status, both in its lack of evidence and in the power it continues to exert? Although monistic physicalism is ultimately a metaphysical thesis about the ultimate structure of reality, it is motivated in large part by a commitment to an erroneous view of both the nature and the “explanatory reach” of science which it considers “a largely continuous and homogeneous activity”.18 At its core, Dupré suggests is the lingering commitment to an ideal of the unity of science. The unity of sciences was more often a slogan than an actual thesis but we can cash it out in two distinct ways: unity of content and unity of method. Unity of content is the massively implausible claim that all sciences ultimately have the same subject matter. No serious thinker defends this view and so it can be taken off the table. More plausible then is the idea of the unity of method: individual sciences approach their different subject matters in broadly similar ways. This idea still continues to hold appeal and draws upon the felt need to delineate a ‘scientific method’ in order to distinguish genuine scientific enterprises from pseudo-scientific frauds. Dupré suggests that the most successful contender for this demarcation criterion has historically been Karl Popper’s falsificationism. It is certainly one which has captured the imagination of many working scientists, despite evidence that actual scientific practice does not adhere very strictly to it. Recall that for Popper, genuine science is constituted by its ability to generate bold hypotheses which are formulated in such a way as to be testable by falsification. Faced with obvious counter-examples, such as, evolutionary theory, Popper modified this to the much vaguer falsifiable in principle rather than practice.19 Given the enduring appeal of Popperian falsification and the lack of an alternative contender for “the scientific method” it remains worthy of consideration. Dupré identifies four areas of scientific activity and asks whether Popperian falsifiability gives an adequate account of what is going on. The most obviously Popperian

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example is that of physicists attempting to detect a new particle. The field is divided between theorists and experimentalists and the demarcation reflects a roughly Popperian line between those who propose and those who test. The trouble is, as those who have paid careful attention to the actual works of experimentalists in the field have shown, falsifications rarely occur. As Dupré suggests, “there are far too many alternative explanations of the failure of the experiment to reject the hypothesis at any particular stage of the experimental process”.20 Faced with experimental failure, scientist will exhaust a range of options before deciding that the hypothesis has been disproven and “it is typically a long and difficult process to make such experiments work and convince the community of physicists that they have worked”. For that reason, the dramatic falsifications that Popper focusses upon represent the exception rather than the norm even in the physical sciences. Turning to another example, that of molecular biologists investigating the genetics of cancer, Dupré suggests that an enormous amount of the theoretical background to this work is unfalsifiable. It is possible that persistent failure to detect the genetic basis for particular cancers may lead biology to reject the very idea of such a background but testing the background is “not part of the work of contemporary molecular geneticists”.21A Popperian might respond by pointing to the work done, testing individual hypothesis, but as Dupré points out that the bulk of actual scientific work is involved in devising procedures for identifying gene sequences and these procedures are not subject to falsification. It would seem capricious to claim that these do not count as science simply to preserve a philosophical dogma. His next example is of a coleopterist attempting to classify beetles in a new terrain. This requires the scientist to collect large numbers of specimens and either assign them to pre-existing categories or determine whether they form new subspecies. Her ability to do this successfully will depend upon her knowledge of existing classificatory schemas and the particularly taxonomical theories she endorses. These will have profound implications for how she classifies beetles and whether her work will be accepted by her scientific peers. Once again, falsification plays at best a tangential role. Dupré now turns his attention to the supposedly soft sciences, specifically hypotheses in sociology about the relationship between gender and low pay. This would generally be investigated by collecting data to establish a strong correlation between gender and pay. A large amount of such data exists and the idea that being female causes one to be low paid is correspondingly compelling and yet “just the reasons which prevent this from being conclusive evidence for the hypothesis are equally reasons why the lack of such a correlation could not refute the hypothesis”.22 One appropriately Popperian response might be to point out that the null hypothesis has been refuted and this shows that whatever relationship that obtains between gender and pay is not arbitrary. Nevertheless, it seems odd to elevate a relatively minor procedure to central status for doctrinaire philosophical reasons. As with Mayr’s observations on the biological sciences, philosophers have been so keen to tell workers in the field what they should be doing, based upon questionable philosophical commitments that they have paid nowhere enough attention to what they are actually doing and thereby violate the commitments of empirical responsibility. It is worth noting for



Why Should We Be Naturalists? 21

the sake of those skeptical of the scientific status of the social sciences, that the only actual evidence we have for what scientists do, comes from careful ethnographic investigations, very much the sort of thing that Standard Naturalists are sniffy about. Dupré’s focus on Popper was not merely to illustrate the weakness of this particular conception of scientific method. Rather, his point is the sheer diversity of scientific practices should convince us that the search for a single unified method or even set of methods is chimerical. Anything too narrow will lead to the sort of problems identified above. Anything broad enough to encompass most well-founded disciplines would have to also include areas which have not traditionally been considered sciences, such as history and literary studies. Upon reflection, unity of method seems as implausible as unity of content. Differences in subject matter necessitate different ways of investigating them. Dupré highlights the odd situation where most people working in the philosophy and sociology of science have long since abandoned a commitment to the unity of science and yet the implications of that doctrine still pervade broader philosophical enquiry.23 Such philosophers resemble Japanese soldiers who continued to fight in the jungles of South-East Asia long after the war ended.

STANDARD ETHICAL NATURALISM Let us return to the subject of moral and political philosophy. Quine had mercifully little to say on such matters. Still, paying some attention to these pronouncements is instructive for they highlight some of the serious flaws in his approach. His only ex cathedra writing on the topic can be found in a relatively obscure essay “On the Nature of Moral Values”.24 It represents an attempt to naturalize a particularly recondite subject matter in much the way he had attempted to naturalize epistemology, by incorporating it into scientific psychology. The scientific psychology in question is behaviorism, a theory he espoused, long after it had fallen out of favour elsewhere. Unsurprisingly then, his account of the acquisition of moral values focuses heavily on operant conditioning. Just as we learn to navigate the material world by trial and error and reinforcement, we navigate our evaluative spaces guided by reward and punishment. He gives the example of fishing which may initially be undertaken for purely utilitarian reasons but soon becomes rewarding for its own sake. In the case of moral values, Many sorts of good behavior have a low initial rating on the valuation scale and are indulged in at first only for their inductive links to higher ends: to pleasant consequences or the avoidance of unpleasant ones at the preceptor’s hands. Good behavior, insofar, is technology. But by association of means with ends we come gradually to accord this behavior a higher intrinsic rating. We find satisfaction in engaging in it and we come to encourage it in others. Our moral training has succeeded.25

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Quine clearly sees no distinction in the manner whereby we acquire different kinds of values. Our aesthetic preferences, our religious views and our moral values are all inculcated by systems of reward and punishment, or as Quine puts it “slaps and sugar plums”.24 Nevertheless, with little by way of argument, he rejects Bernard Williams’ view that the differences between these types of value are not categorical. The trouble for him is working out precisely how they differ. For instance, he argues that a religious fundamentalist who avoids evil for fear of hellfire does so for prudential and not moral reasons, just as the would-be criminal who fears legal sanction does. What distinguishes moral values from other types of value is the “admittedly vague” criterion that they are “irreducibly social” and this in one of two ways either they are “altruistic” concerned without ulterior motive with the satisfaction of others or “ceremonial” in that they manifest a regard for the practices of one’s culture again without any selfish consideration. This way of distinguishing matters is simplistic. Distinction requires evaluation. For instance, one might argue that even to identify something as ‘social’ involves adopting a moral point of view and that to sub-distinguish between the genuinely altruistic and the merely ceremonial is only one of a number of possible ways of so distinguishing. A deeper problem is that Quine draws no distinction between good moral values and bad ones or, to put it another way, the values that pervade a well-ordered rational polity and those which constitute a radically corrupt one. Acting ethically calls upon one to act differently in either of those settings. An SS trooper can be fanatically committed to the practices of the Reich and show unstinting regard for the satisfaction of his Volk comrades and still be irredeemably wicked, not despite but precisely because of these values. This issue is exacerbated for Quine as he seems to insist that moral values are those which are the most homogenous within a culture. Presumably one response he might make is that Nazi views, however prevalent they may have been within Germany and her satellites, were subject to broader disapproval in the international community. They were, of course, but only in some quarters. Large swathes of the English and French upper classes rather applauded them. The mere fact of a value’s having become homogenous gives it no automatic moral standing, as generations of women who have suffered under patriarchy would attest. This is no mere infelicity on Quine’s part. He backs up his argument with a cod evolutionary explanation of how the development of morality (altruism) may have served the evolution of our species. It is our ability to cooperate and act in concert which compensated for our other obvious weaknesses and led to our proliferation as a species. We are thus primed to detect and punish deviations from socio-cultural norms. Once again, this is less blatantly false than hopelessly over-simplified. Even a more sophisticated version of this account may explain why we are pro-social but leaves out any conception of the distinction between good and bad societies. We obviously need something other than the mere fact of social cooperation to account for the distinctive nature of morality. Quine ponders the problem that his theory gives rise to, namely, the threat of cultural relativism. As before, his response is to resort to stipulation. He laments the fact that there is nothing equivalent to the



Why Should We Be Naturalists? 23

sort of dispute resolution procedures that observation makes possible in the natural sciences and suggests that the best we can hope for in ethics is a coherence rather than a correspondence theory of truth. Nevertheless, he opines, “we may expect a tendency to uniformity in the hereditary component of morality, whatever it may be, and also, since the basic problems of societies are much alike, we may expect considerable agreement in the socially imposed component when it is reduced to fundamentals”.25 Even if we grant his assumption that the “basic problems of societies are much alike”, his assumption that ethics is a device for solving social problems remains questionable. For ethics creates new social conflicts and makes existing ones more difficult to resolve. We refrain from doing things which might quickly resolve a potential conflict, for example, lying, because they are not right; acting ethically may bring us into conflict with our peers. After all, J. L. Mackie suggested that one of its great advantages of error theory is that by ridding us of the illusion of ethical objectivity we would be much less likely to engage in warfare. When one thinks of moral exemplars such as Nelson Mandela or Sophie Scholl, they are not best known for their conflict aversion. The latter-day peacemaker Mandela was only such as a result of the authority he had acquired over a lifetime of troublemaking. Quine’s argument dashes over such complexities because he was intolerant of complexity in general. He frequently declares his disappointment with how intractable the subject matter of ethics appears to be. He nevertheless expresses optimism that something like utilitarianism, accompanied by the appropriate sorts of “causal reduction” will get us quite a long way. Causal reduction can serve not only in thus condensing the assumptions but also in sorting out conflicts. Thus take the question of white lies. If we once agree to regard truthfulness as good only as a means to higher moral ends, rather than as an ultimate end in itself, then the question becomes a question essentially of science or engineering. On the one hand the utility of language requires a preponderance of truthfulness; on the other hand the truth can cause pain. So one may try to puzzle out a strategy.26

The question of course is: why should we regard the value of truth-telling merely as a means to some higher end? Kant’s famous reflections on lying are meant inter alia to emphasize the categorical requirement of truth-telling which cannot be outranked by considerations of prudence or convenience. Few philosophers have followed him all the way in his conclusions, but his argument is a powerful one. The way that Quine sets up this problem entirely evades the seriousness of Kant’s challenge. For instance, he introduces the problem as being one about ‘white lies’ but then makes the much more sweeping claim that truth-telling might only be of instrumental value which presumably implies that it might be set aside, even in graver cases. Even with white lies, from a virtue-based perspective, we might decide, as Peter Geach did, that someone who habitually reaches for a white lie to spare his interlocutor’s feelings may never develop the practical reasonableness to find words that are both truthful and kind.27 Viewed thus, the attempt to circumvent the hard work of actual in situ ethical deliberation with an ethical theory is revealed to be an

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intellectually sophisticated indolence. Deliberation might be guided by theoretical considerations but can never be replaced by it. And it is precisely this need for in situ deliberation which renders ethics resistant to the kind of causal reductionism that Standard Naturalists like Quine desire. The messiness of ethical life which troubles him so much is not mere noise that can be factored out in pursuit of an illusory clarity. This is because only a person in the midst of an ethical decision can fully understand it. Determining what is noise is itself a move within ethics. Once again, distinction presupposes evaluation. For that reason, ethics (like any other complex social practice) can only truly be understood from within. An outsider’s view may help to shed light on aspects that are not apparent to those mired in an ethical difficulty but only the participants fully understand what is going on. Quine is half right therefore to emphasize the way in which ethics is a social phenomenon. But any potential insight is marred by his flat-footed understanding of social phenomena in general. His ultimate bastion against the danger of cultural relativism is his insistence that the “basic problems of society are much alike”.30 The difficulty facing anyone who wishes to push such a line is that they must satisfactorily answer the question: alike in what respect? The problems that a martial ethic in society such as Ancient Rome and Japan under the Shogunate developed to address seem a world apart from the problems which confront contemporary urban dwellers staring down the barrel of a climate catastrophe. The more detail one brings in, the less plausible Quine’s claim becomes. Of course, some differences between cultures are morally significant and others not. He seems to recognize this when he writes: Even in the extreme case where disagreement extends irreducibly to ultimate moral ends, the proper counsel is not one of pluralistic tolerance. One’s disapproval of gratuitous torture, for example, easily withstands one’s failure to make a causal reduction, and so be it. We can still call the good good and the bad bad, and hope with Stevenson that these epithets may work their emotive weal. In an extremity we can fight, if the threat to the ultimate value in question outweighs the disvalue of the fighting.28

He appeals to our intuition that ‘gratuitous torture’ by which he presumably means the infliction of physical and psychological pain for no other reason than one’s gratification is morally contemptible. Details matter. What if the ‘gratuitous torture’ in question was engaged in between consenting adults as part of their sadomasochistic lifestyle as say in the infamous R. vs. Brown case?29 Perhaps it would not then be truly gratuitous, or perhaps it might still be. Reasonable people can fervently disagree about whether and to what extent such activities are morally permissible, whether the state overreached in their response or whether, as the majority in the House of Lords ruled, that society had a right to defend itself from moral pollution. One’s view on such matters will be shaped less by one’s emotive responses than how it relates to a whole series of other concerns about bodily integrity and the right of the state to interfere in private sexual conduct between consenting adults. That is, one could



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feel revulsion at what the men in this case did to one another and still hold that the state had no business meddling. Two decades ago, US moral and legal philosophers were arguing intensely about whether torture should be permissible under certain circumstances in violation of the United Nation’s absolute prohibition. I suspect that Quine would feel that torture in pursuit of US foreign policy objectives would not count as ‘gratuitous’. One trusts that those engaged in such activities would not take any pleasure in them (though the photographic evidence from Abu Ghraib hinted otherwise). Presumably, everyone other than inveterate sadists, find the actions involved distasteful and repugnant. Someone who believes the torture to be justifiable but performed it any other way than as the discharge of an unpleasant duty would be morally despicable. Our moral evaluations are a balance of repugnance and rational justification. Those of us who maintain the universal prohibition believe that the repugnance outweighs any possible justification.33 Quine claims that when contests about ultimate values become irresolvable, we might have to fight. Let us not forget that the horrors of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay occurred during times of war. It was precisely the appeal to wartime circumstances that we used to mute the concerns raised by many at the time regarding the moral permissibility of torture. Most of us who maintained the need to retain the universal prohibition feel that events vindicated us. It is in times of war, in particular, that we need to remain vigilant about our most fundamental moral commitments. Given how awful Quine’s attempt at moral philosophy is it is reasonable to ask why we have bothered spending any time with it. As with Dupré’s take on Popper, I am less interested in Quine himself than what his essay reveals about some of the underlying problems of what I have referred to as Standard Naturalism. The cavalier attitude he displays towards the nuance and detail necessary to understanding social life that characterizes the philosophical standpoint from which it sprang. Nuance and detail matter in dealing with human beings in ways that they may not in some other disciplines. Logic is a science of form rather than content, aspiring to the highest possible levels of generality and abstraction. It is the resistance of ethics to such abstraction which makes thinkers like Quine so impatient. Doubtless ethical life would be considerably easier if we could whittle moral problems down to a few key principles, but it would then become unclear if we were actually engaging in ethics at all. The continued persistence of at least three robust competing traditions of normative ethical theory shows that pluralism and complexity will not be disappearing any time soon. A recognition of this fact is behind the radical distinction many would draw between natural science and the human, or as they were once rather tellingly known, ‘moral’ sciences. This distinction generates huge disciplinary divides within the human sciences themselves and motivates traditions within philosophy such as the aforementioned Wittgensteinian quietism in analytic philosophy, and the various offshoots of the phenomenological tradition in continental. Both of these philosophical tendencies emerge from rejection of ‘naturalism’ by Frege and Husserl and this rejection is paralleled and reinforced by the emergence around the

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same time of the Hermeneutic tradition in the human sciences associated with Max Weber and Wilhelm Dilthey.

THE DISENCHANTMENT OF NATURE It is to Weber we owe the Disenchantment thesis, the idea that the rise of modern science and its particular form of rationality imperils our traditional objective view of value. Whether consciously or not, many contemporary discussions of naturalism take place against the backdrop of Weber’s thesis. It should be obvious, however, the sorts of positions developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century are an inadequate starting point. Few doggedly hold on to the view of science that Weber was reacting to and we should be similarly wary of responses that emerged to that outmoded view. While there are good reasons to reject scientism, there is also a danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater and succumbing to obscurantism. The key move in avoiding such a trajectory is to embrace a pluralist naturalism. The challenge posed is this: any conception of naturalism needs to be rich enough to incorporate the distinctive features of humanity. This is incompatible with a view of nature as disenchanted. We are therefore left with three broad alternative possibilities. 1. Restrict naturalism to cover only those aspects of human reality fully explicable in natural scientific terms. 2. Reject the idea that there are aspects of human reality, which cannot be fully explained by the natural sciences. 3. Reject, or at least modify, the disenchanted conception of nature. Throughout this book I will be recommending a variant of 3, albeit with certain caveats in place. Before explaining myself, I will address why we should reject 1 and 2 as options. Restricting naturalism to cover only those aspects of human reality fully explicably by the natural sciences is a common move and it underpins much nonnaturalism in moral philosophy. The natural sciences are all well and good for understanding brute physical reality but are wholly inadequate to understand what we might call the spiritual aspects of human existence.34 At one extreme this is the sort of Special Creationism one finds in certain fundamentalist religious traditions. On this account, God created the universe and allows it to operate mostly along mechanistic lines but, at a crucial point, steps in and breathes a Divine spark into humans.

SECULAR CREATIONISM A secularized version of this underpins what I have earlier referred to as the African Queen view of morality. We become moral to the extent that we ‘rise above’ nature but in the absence of a tinkering creator how we do so is largely left unexplained.



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Standard Naturalism is an objectionable view but unless we adopt some form of naturalism, the question we must answer is this: if our moral life is not a fact about our nature as articulate social mammals then (quite literally) what on earth is it a fact about? I do not think there is an answer to this question that does not invoke some form of Special Creationism. The most plausible variants make an appeal to culture as that which miraculously lifts us above nature. In my earlier work I too subscribed to the view that at a certain point ‘biological’ explanations run out of steam and ‘cultural’ explanations take over. I have come to distrust this way of explaining matters. The fact that we inhabit complex cultures is a fact about our biology and not something that should be contrasted with it. When moral philosophers of a non-naturalistic inclination try to capture the distinctiveness of human ethical life, they do so in worryingly mystical tones, which only give succor to those Standard Naturalists wary of a ‘divine foot in the door’.35 As we shall see later, both non-naturalists and Standard Naturalists share a common underlying assumption that there is no way of preserving what is distinctive in human life without abandoning or at least significantly modifying naturalism. They differ only on the implications they draw from this assumption. For Standard Naturalists, the response is to preserve naturalism at the expense of the distinctively human while for non-naturalists it is to lurch towards mysticism. Let us consider a few representative examples of this viewpoint. Here is Nagel again, [C]onsciousness and cognition cannot be plausibly reconciled with traditional scientific naturalism, either constitutively or historically. I believe that value presents a further problem for scientific naturalism. Even against the background of a worldview in which consciousness and cognition are somehow given a place in the natural order, value is something in addition, and it has consequences that are comparably pervasive.36

Now, I do not share the starting assumption of Nagel’s view here that ‘consciousness’ and ‘cognition’ cannot be ‘given a place within the natural order’. They can and they should be so placed, and if they cannot, the fault lies either with our conception of consciousness and cognition or with our view of the ‘natural order’. Still, for that very reason, I endorse his claim that ‘traditional scientific naturalism’ is incapable of doing the required heavy lifting. Nagel is also broadly correct that any naturalism that cannot account for value cannot also account for the rationality required by the scientific endeavor. But there is a leap from this to assuming that rationality and value must reside outside the natural universe. In similar vein, Rai Gaita gestures towards the mystical in his account of absolute goodness. He cites with approval the following passage from his mentor R. F. Holland, “A stance has to be taken, unless it goes by default, towards the difference between judgements that are of the highest significance for ethics and judgments that are not”.37 In another place he says: “The argument here, then, is what I have called a life-form argument, and arguments of this family are powerful: so powerful that I would credit them with the capability of accounting for 90% of

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all ethical phenomena . . . they could account, I should think, for every customary and mediocre goodness. It might then look as if this were all the ethical could contain, whereas absolute value is something different and remains unaccounted for”.38 This is all wonderfully poetic stuff but rather odd when subjected to serious scrutiny. He seems to be claiming a qualitative difference between everyday morality and absolute value but by stating it as a percentage he appears to suggest that that difference is quantitative and measurable. But it is certainly worth asking if it is the case that ‘life-form’ arguments can capture the vast bulk of our everyday moral business why we should feel disappointed when it fails to capture the much rarer cases. We are not, after all, dealing in mathematics where a single exception can destroy a proof. Gaita and Holland’s concern is with the saintly and heroic. In contrast, I aim to defend the claims of “customary and mediocre goodness” believing that the saintly and the heroic have little to teach us other than the danger of societies that make them necessary. In Brecht’s The Life of Galileo the character Andrea loudly declares “Unhappy the land that has no heroes” to which Galileo replies “No. Unhappy the land where heroes are needed”. Both heroism and saintliness are associated with self-sacrifice and martyrdom. Many commentators have noted the disturbing rhetoric around heroic healthcare staff, teachers and other essential workers during the Covid pandemic. The worry here is that the rhetoric of heroism is preparing us to accept their large scale and mostly avoidable death. Umberto Eco, in a famous essay on fascism, talked similarly of its cult of heroic martyrdom. In every mythology the hero is an exceptional being, but in Ur-Fascist ideology heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was Viva la Muerte (“Long Live Death!”). In nonfascist societies, the lay public is told that death is unpleasant but must be faced with dignity; believers are told that it is the painful way to reach a supernatural happiness. By contrast, the Ur-Fascist hero craves heroic death, advertised as the best reward for a heroic life. The Ur-Fascist hero is impatient to die. In his impatience, he more frequently sends other people to death.39

Eco wrote these lines at a time when the name Al Qaeeda was known only to counter-terrorism specialists, yet they still resonate powerfully. Heroism need not necessarily entail actual martyrdom to be problematic. It may also mean extreme asceticism and self-effacement. After all, if our goal is “supernatural happiness” it would hardly be surprising that it cannot be attained by “customary and mediocre” means. The fact that virtue ethicists have had to spend endless amounts of energy attempting to refute the so-called ‘egoism’ objection shows the pull of this heroic conception of ethics on many philosophers.40



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IN DEFENSE OF CUSTOMARY AND MEDIOCRE GOODNESS By contrast then, I will be developing an unashamedly unheroic conception of virtue which celebrates the ordinary virtues. We should be concerned, above all, with the sort of internal and external conditions which might enable everyday folk to live moderately good lives, albeit with some striving. A society which requires heroism is not one which satisfies such a demand and ought to be regretted, not valorized. The preoccupation among some philosophers with the saintly and the heroic is actually a counterpart of the reductive urge of philosophers like Quine. Neither are able to properly locate goodness in the world we inhabit. A little reflection should tell us why. It is indeed difficult to find, though not for the reasons they suppose. While every life faces difficulties of some form or another, life is unnecessarily and avoidably tragic for almost everyone on this planet other than a privileged elite and it is becoming increasingly clear that even they pay for this privilege at tremendous moral cost, which no amount of philanthropy will offset. Greedy reductionism and woolly talk of ethics gesturing us towards the eternal are both in their own way evasions of the hard work involved in staring the world in its face in all its ugliness and the occasional glimpses of its beauty. The TV drama Westworld depicts a theme park populated by lifelike humanoid robots. The theme park provides an opportunity for the human characters to live out their fantasies both noble and horrific. As the season arc develops some of the robots start to display genuine autonomy and break out into the human world which turns out itself to be subject to sinister manipulation by big data. One of the lead characters, Dolores Abernethy, makes a speech in season one in which she says, “Some people choose to see the ugliness in the world, the disarray. I choose to see the beauty. To believe there is an order in our days. I know things will work out like they’re meant to”.41At this point the speech is meant to exemplify Dolores’ naiveté. It is similar to the kind of religious sentiment expressed by many poor and oppressed religious folk which Marx characterized in his ‘opium of the people’ line. She is, after all, a robotic puppet in a world entirely controlled by others. As a beautiful young woman, she is also subject to some of the vilest fantasies of the theme park’s guests. It is her growing understanding of her plight that leads her into rebellion. In season three, near the point of death, Dolores reprises this speech. The tone is entirely different. The human world has been revealed to be as illusory and unfree as the world of the theme park. She has led a bloody, and what appears at this stage, to be an unsuccessful insurrection. The emphasis now is not upon the idea that the world can be beautiful if one adopts an attitude of trust and submission. It is the fact that the world can be made beautiful by an act of rebellion. Dolores’ choosing to see the beauty is not an expression of naiveté; it is an expression of defiance. This might seem to contradict my earlier objection to a heroic conception of ethics. Still, my point stands. Dolores’ tale ends tragically and it does so precisely because she is an isolated heroic individual opposed even by other robots. The inevitable cost of heroism under such circumstances is death. The world depicted in Westworld is deeply dystopian both within and without the boundaries of the park,

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but it is contiguous enough to our own to have a moral salience. It is dystopian precisely because the only options it affords are sullen submission or heroic but futile defiance and this is a plight all too familiar to us.42 Tzvetan Todorov distinguishes between the ordinary and heroic virtues in his work Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in The Concentration Camps.43 There could be perhaps no greater example of the sorts of societies which make it impossible for ordinary decent people to live moderately good lives than Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union. Almost a century later the moral lessons that can be learned from them are still emerging. Todorov’s claim is that the ordinary virtues played at least as important a role in enabling at least some of those who survived physically to also retain some semblance of moral integrity. Todorov’s book begins with a trip to Warsaw in 1987, then nearing the end of the period of Soviet domination. He reflects upon a visit to the tomb of the martyred priest Jerzy Popieluszko, murdered for his work with the Solidarność trades union. He then discusses the interwoven and yet contrasting stories of Polish and Jewish oppression and survival. The contrast between ordinary and heroic come out most explicitly in the difference between the two Warsaw uprisings: the 1943 Ghetto Uprising and the 1944 Uprising in the whole city. Of the 1944 uprising, Todorov asserts that its leaders were heroic in the traditional sense. Where, to the eyes of ordinary people, the situation seems to offer no alternative, where it seems that one must bow to circumstances, the hero fights the odds and, through some extraordinary deed, manages to bend destiny to his own ends. The hero is the opposite of the fatalist; he is on the side of the revolutionary, never the conservative, for he has no particular respect for the status quo and believes people can attain any goal they choose, provided they have the will to do so.44

The imagery and rhetoric of the Warsaw Uprising (as with that surrounding Popieluszko) chimes with Catholic spirituality. There is much talk of purifying Poland’s shame through a sacrificial shedding of blood. This represented an embrace of martyrdom for, as Todorov notes, the aim was not to preserve the lives of individual Poles but rather to salvage an ideal of Polish nationhood submerged in the mud of German occupation. It became something drawn upon by later Polish nationalists who resisted Russian occupation. The 1944 Uprising was directed as much against the approaching Soviets at it was against the Nazi occupiers and its inevitable betrayal by Stalin was a central part of its futility. The futility of this type of heroic resistance is its point. “To the hero, death has more value than life. Only through death—whether one’s own or that of others—is it possible to attain the absolute: by dying for an ideal one proves that one holds it dearer than life itself. ‘Despair had driven them to aspire to the absolute,’ one witness says, ‘and at that level there was no solution but to die’”.45 Measured against aspirations for the absolute, real life necessarily seems an unsatisfactory compromise. As another witness observes. “Heroes are not made to live”.46



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The 1944 Warsaw Uprising seems like the archetypal heroic event even before it happened. By contrast, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, although undoubtedly an act of remarkable heroism, is not heroic in the same sense. Todorov discusses the account of one of its leaders, Marek Edelman, who found it virtually impossible to construct a traditionally heroic narrative of events until many years afterwards. Even then, he largely recounts the story of his younger self as someone desperately trying to mimic the conventional gestures and symbols of the hero. His account came under criticism for showing the flaws of its participants. One anecdote in particular, about Mordechai Anielewicz, a key leader, who as a child would help his fishmonger mother paint the gills of fish with red dye to give an appearance of freshness sparked outrage. As Todorov says, this outrage was prompted by the fact that “the public [. . .] wants its heroes heroic”.47 Edelman’s account of the Ghetto Uprising is unlike the traditional heroic literature by virtue of its unstinting willingness to paint a warts and all picture of the participants. There were prostitutes and tattooed pimps as well as more conventional heroic types involved.48 What is therefore most striking about Edelman’s narrative particularly when contrasted with accounts of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising is its ordinariness albeit in extraordinary circumstances. Indeed it is this desire to retain the ordinary decencies in the face of unprecedented threats to them which is perhaps the most important moral lesson. Edelman recounts his decision to join the Resistance. He puts it down to seeing an older Jewish man being forced by two laughing Nazis to stand on a barrel while they sheared his beard with tailor’s scissors. It was at this point that he “realized that the most important thing was never letting myself be pushed onto the top of that barrel. Never, by anybody”.49

In the realm of the ordinary virtues, there is no celebration or embrace of death. There is simply a refusal to continue living that way, a desire to preserve as far as humanly possible one’s own dignity and that of one’s fellows. In refusing to be “pushed onto the top of that barrel” Todorov argues that Edelman recognizes that there is no qualitative difference between great and small humiliations and, second, that one can always express one’s will, choose one’s actions—and refuse to follow orders. The uprising may have been nothing more than a way for us to choose our death, he says. But the difference between choosing death and submitting to it is enormous; it is this difference that separates human beings from animals. In choosing one’s death, one performs an act of will and thereby affirms one’s membership in the human race. The Jews of Warsaw took no pride in the fact that Jews in some of the other Polish cities had let themselves be slaughtered; they decided that they, for their part, would act. In so doing, they had already achieved their goal: they had affirmed their humanity.50

I will return to Todorov’s distinction between ordinary and heroic virtues later in this book and there I will be casting a slightly more critical eye on it. For now, however, I want to use these remarks as a way of tying our discussion together. The central task which confronts us is to give a satisfyingly naturalistic account of what is distinctively human or perhaps in this context it might be better to speak

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of what is authentically human. The capacity to experience humiliation and just as importantly the recognition of that capacity in others is utterly central to that humanity. Our ability to take some sort of stance towards our mortality underpins both what kind of death we might choose but more importantly, since we may well not have that much control over death, it shapes the contours of the kind of life we lead. Where I differ from Todorov here is that I do not believe that it is such facts which “separate [. . .] human beings from animals”. Rather, they help us to get a handle on the (admittedly peculiar kind) of animal that we are. If the heroic virtues celebrate death and martyrdom, the ordinary virtues focus on the day-to-day challenges of life. In Catcher in the Rye J. D. Salinger quotes the psychoanalyst William Stekel’s dictum, “The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one”.51 By this standard, the ordinary virtues are the virtues of maturity. We may need both heroic and ordinary virtues but our need for the ordinary ones vastly outweighs our need for the heroic ones, or at least it should. If not, as Brecht reminds us, something has gone badly wrong.

NOTES  1. Spinoza, The ethics, II/137.   2.  Brian Leiter, ed., The future for philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2006).  3. Kelly James Clark, “Naturalism and its discontents.”  The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism (2016): 1–15.   4.  Clark, “Naturalism and its discontents,” p. 3 (italics in original).  5. Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). The papers in the collection Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (eds.) (2004), Naturalism in Question (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), and the follow-up, Mario De Caro and David Macarthur, Naturalism and Normativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), offer an excellent overview of the contemporary debate.  6. Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defense (Oxford: OUP, 2004), p. 55.   7.  Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism, p. 55.   8.  David Macarthur, “Quinean Naturalism in Question,” p. 3.   9.  De Caro and Macarthur, Naturalism and Normativity, pp. 124–125. 10. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy In The Flesh: The Embodied Mind And Its Challenge To Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999). 11. Anthony Chemero, Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (London & Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), (A Bradford Book), p. 7. 12.  John Dupré, Human nature and the limits of science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). 13.  MacArthur, “Quinean Naturalism,” p. 3. 14.  For a full discussion of this question see Evelyn Fox Keller’s debate with John Dupré. The striking feature of this debate is that while Keller takes the affirmative stance, it is a highly qualified affirmative and one which is a far cry from what philosophers have ordinarily understood as the takes of intra-theoretical reduction to consist in. “It is possible to reduce biological explanations to explanations in chemistry and/or physics.” Contemporary debates in philosophy



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of biology (2009): 19–31; John Dupré, “It is not possible to reduce biological explanations to explanations in chemistry and/or physics.” Contemporary debates in philosophy of biology (2009): 32–47. Francisco J. Ayala and Robert Arp, eds., Contemporary debates in philosophy of biology (John Wiley & Sons, 2009). 15.  Mayr appeared to take the view that the details of functional and structural biology, being proximate explanations, could be incorporated into the physical sciences whereas evolutionary biology as the science of ultimate explanations could not. In simpler terms, physics and chemistry could account for the how of individual developmental histories but a historical explanation was needed for the why. Recent work has challenged this dichotomy and for that reason we can push Mayr’s view further. 16.  Willard Van Orman Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 69–90. 17.  John Dupré, “The Miracle of Monism,” in De Caro and Macarthur, Naturalism in Question, p. 23. 18.  Dupré, “The Miracle of Monism,” 23. 19.  A modification which somewhat dilutes the power of his initial criterion in regard to historical sciences such as Marxism. Ref. to Putnam. 20.  Dupré, “Miracle of Monism,” p. 27. 21.  Dupré, “Miracle of Monism,” p. 27. 22.  Dupré, “Miracle of Monism,” p. 29. 23.  For an excellent discussion of how this philosophical prejudice generates a range of pseudo-problems in the philosophy of mind see Steven Horst,  Beyond reduction: Philosophy of mind and post-reductionist philosophy of science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 24.  Willard V. Quine, “On the nature of moral values,” in Values and Morals (Dordrecht, Springer, 1978). 25.  Quine, “On the Nature of Moral Values,” p. 473. 26.  Quine, “On the Nature of Moral Values,” p. 473. 27.  Quine, “On the Nature of Moral Values,” p. 478. 28.  Quine, “On the Nature of Moral Values,” p. 478. 29.  Peter Geach (1977), The Virtues: The Stanton Lectures 1973–74 (Cambridge University Press). Philip Larkin, “Talking in bed,” The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, (London: Faber and Faber, 2012). 30.  Quine, “On the Nature of Moral Values,” p. 478. 31.  Quine, “On the Nature of Moral Values,” p. 479. 32.  R. v. Brown [1993] UKHL 19, 1 AC 212 (11 March 1993), House of Lords (UK) was a case involving an investigation by the Lancashire police force of extreme but consensual sadomasochistic activities between adult men. 33.  Cf. Richard Matthews, The absolute violation: Why torture must be prohibited (McGillQueen’s Press-MQUP, 2008). 34.  I mean by this what German conveys by the term Geist rather than the current popular understanding. 35. Richard Lewontin, “Billions and billions of demons,”  The New York Review of Books 44, no. 1 (1997): 31. 36. Thomas  Nagel, Mind and cosmos: Why the materialist neo-Darwinian conception of nature is almost certainly false (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 98. 37.  Raimond Gaita, Good and evil: An absolute conception (Psychology Press, 2004), p. xii. 38.  Roy Holland in Gaita, Good and Evil, p. 208.

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39.  Umberto Eco, “Ur-fascism,” The New York Review of Books 42, no. 11 (1995): p. 15. 40. Cf. Julia Annas, “Virtue ethics and the charge of egoism,”  Morality and selfinterest (2008), p. 205. 41.  Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, Evan Rachel Wood, Thandiwe Newton, Anthony Hopkins, Jeffrey Wright, Ed Harris, and Michael Crichton, 2017, Westworld, Season One, Episode One. 42.  Especially those of us working in universities and confronting tyrannical management. 43.  Tzvetan Todorov, Facing the extreme: Moral life in the concentration camps (London: Macmillan, 1997). 44. Todorov, Facing the extreme, p. 5. 45. Todorov, Facing the extreme, p. 230. 46. Todorov, Facing the extreme, p. 11. 47. Todorov, Facing The extreme, p. 14. 48.  Edelman spent his final years protesting at the ways in which the Ghetto Uprising was used by Zionists to justify their own oppression of another people, the Palestinians. 49. Todorov, Facing the extreme, p. 15. 50. Todorov, Facing the extreme, p. 15. 51.  J. D. Salinger (1969),The Catcher in the Rye (New York: Bantam), p. 103.

2 Standard Naturalism, The Placement Problem, and Companion in Guilt Arguments

Standard Naturalism inevitably generates something Frank Jackson dubbed the ‘Placement Problem’.1 Normativity just does not seem to fit in the disenchanted universe described by the natural sciences and consequently, as Huw Price suggests, we “seem faced with a choice between forcing the topic concerned into a category that for one reason or another seems ill-shaped to contain it, or regarding it as at best second-rate—not a genuine area of scientific knowledge”.2 This problem prompts two sorts of responses from Standard Naturalism: eliminativism, which seeks to deny the reality of normativity; or the attempt to translate normative properties into more scientifically tractable ones, typically as some sort of psychological item. Neither response is satisfactory, or so I shall argue. Ethics seems notoriously intractable, so it would be worth looking at an area that might seem more hospitable to a Standard Naturalist approach. More than any other science, medicine reflects the apparent triumph of culture over nature. We live longer and better lives to a large extent because of medical tampering with our bodies and a refusal to accept our supposed natural state. At the same time, and precisely because medicine deals with our bodies and our lives, the science of medicine operates in a morally charged atmosphere. Moreover, as medics from Galen onwards have recognized that our moral and medical health are closely intertwined, an observation that has only been given more credence by more recent acknowledgment of the so-called social determinants of health.3

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NATURALISM AND NORMATIVISM IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEALTH Unsurprisingly then, the philosophy of medicine is a battleground between naturalists and normativists. Since the early 1970s Christopher Boorse has attempted to develop what he sees as a truly naturalistic analysis of health and disease which purifies the concepts of their normative accretions and locates them instead on the hard ground of science. He offers a theoretical definition of the concepts of ‘health’ and ‘disease’ rather than a conceptual analysis, so the fact that his proposed definitions deviate from ordinary use need not trouble him. His aim is not to track ordinary usage but to determine rules for how the concepts should be used correctly. He begins by distinguishing ‘diseases’ which are objective pathologies from ‘illness’ which is the subjective experience of those pathologies. There is thus a disconnect between the two since we can have asymptomatic diseases and we can have illnesses with no objective pathological basis. His proposed definition of ‘disease’ is based upon a ‘bio-statistical theory’ which comprises four elements: 1. The reference class is a natural class of organisms of uniform functional design; specifically, an age-group of a sex and species. 2. A normal function of a part or process within members of the reference class is a statistically typical contribution by it to their individual survival and reproduction. 3. Health in a member of the reference class is normal functional ability: the readiness of each individual part to perform all its normal functions on typical occasions with at least typical efficiency. 4. A disease is a type of internal state which impairs health, that is, reduces one or more functional abilities below typical efficiency.4 Boorse has doggedly defended this theory for decades, refining it only slightly but sticking to his central claim that it provides a solid replacement for the value ridden everyday discourse surrounding health and disease. Critics disagree. Some of the most devastating criticisms come from William Stempsey, a philosopher with a background in pathology.5 Boorse had claimed that his was the pathologist’s definition of disease. Stempsey demurs, pointing out that pathology itself is not the pure science that Boorse would claim. Most pathologists are also clinicians and pathology is replete with value judgements concerning which tests to run and which to avoid. Moreover, as Boorse himself would concede, we should not rest our theoretical definitions on naïve usage but rather that of philosophical rigorous use, and the overwhelming majority of philosophically trained medics reject Boorse’s naturalism and favour some form of normativism. If anything, medicine has moved further in the direction of normativism in the years since Boorse began writing.



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There are numerous other problems with Boorse’s view, many of which I summarize elsewhere but to my mind the biggest difficulty is based upon his underlying idea that the life sciences provide a safe haven for naturalists fleeing in terror from the prospect of normativity.6 As we will see, the life sciences as practiced (rather than imagined by scientistic philosophers) provide them with very little shelter. As I argue elsewhere, the notion of a ‘species design’, which Boorse’s theory so heavily relies upon, does not accord with the sheer messiness of the organic world and is more of a relic of the dialogic and rhetorical context in which Darwin articulated his theories. Taking this awkward metaphor literally, as Boorse does, imports the very sort of teleological considerations into biology that he seeks to banish from medicine. My point here is not to reprise the sometimes tedious debate in philosophy of medicine surrounding Boorse’s search for an antiseptic definition of health but to ask: if the project encounters such difficulties on such seemingly hospitable terrain, what are the prospects for this sort of naturalism in ethics? The answer is: bleak. Bear in mind our primary concern is with human and not veterinary health. Boorse’s proposed definition strips away everything about us which makes us human. This might seem a licit move, since the idea of common descent should lead us to question any attempt to radically demarcate us from other animals. But here, as elsewhere, we see the Standard Naturalist preference for generality over the kind of nuance and detail required when dealing with human beings. Even on a straightforward handling of the organism-environment distinction, the sheer range of environments which one species inhabits is quite dazzling and that is before we even consider the sorts of complexities involved in a more radical understanding of that distinction. Take Boorse’s central notion of a reference class. He intends this term to denote merely ‘an age group of a sex and a species’. As Elselijn Kingma has shown, there are numerous possible reference classes that may, and are in fact chosen, in the course of medical research and clinical intervention, and those choices are, at least in part, governed by value judgements.7 For instance, what counts as healthy cardiac function in a group of Aboriginal Australian men in their fifties may be unhealthy in a group of Scandinavian women of the same age. Without some specification of environmental contingencies, the idea of a natural function is a placeholder for an explanation and whether it is possible to specify environments in isolation of the organisms which inhabit and shape them is something I will question later. The idea of a species design is closely linked to the idea of a ‘wild state’ for the gene, that is, the idea of an optimal environment but, as we shall see, that idea is deeply problematic. Taking seriously the claim that the person is the organism means that we cannot neatly demarcate the biological from the social and psychological. Yet, health is clearly a proper topic of scientific investigation and human beings can be studied scientifically from the point of view of medical science. One implication of this is that what have historically been known as “the social determinants of health” cannot be treated as an add-on-extra to medical science proper. For instance, it is now well-established that loneliness and social isolation are more destructive to our

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cardiac health than other more familiar risk factors such as smoking or alcohol abuse. The same is also becoming established for relative inequality.8 Boorse’s urgent desire to purge medicine of values (other than strictly scientific and epistemic ones) ultimately stems from the feeling that values have no place in objective science. The various contrasts he draws between say ‘disease’ and ‘illness’ rest upon the idea that the former is objective while the latter is irredeemably subjective. Values are individual and collective projections of human interests onto an indifferent universe. There may be disease in the absence of valuing subjects (at least in the biostatistical sense that Boorse advocates) but there would be no such thing as illness. But it is almost banal to point out that we engage in medical science not out of disinterested scientific concern but because our health and the health of others matters to us. This issue is a manifestation of the Placement Problem in the context of medicine, as are the various theoretical responses to it. If this set of problems arises with attempts to provide an antiseptic definition of health and illness, how much more so then for our full-blown ethical life? Boorse would doubtlessly respond that it is precisely because ethical values are contested that we should keep them out of medical sciences as far as is humanly possible. Like many polarised debates, Boorse’s normativist opponents often share many of the underlying assumptions with which he operates. For instance, there has been a movement emerging recently somewhat oddly known as Person Centred Healthcare (PCH). Most of the time, this is really only an overly elaborate way of saying that patients matter. In some of the growing theoretical literature, however, personcentred healthcare is coming to be associated with a militant hostility to the “biomedical model”. Two recent authors suggest that the “basic premise” of PCH should be a rejection of the “Cartesian framework of body-mind and embracing a holistic view of the person, instead of considering him a bundle of organs”.9 Most of us would undoubtedly reject classical Cartesian dualism as an explanation of the human person and the mechanistic conception of physiology upon which it is based. But the authors take this one step further and suggest that “holistic view of the person” means also being open to unscientific and untested complementary and alternative medicine. Such methods may have a limited role, particularly in palliative care when scientific medicine can do little either. Taken more broadly, however, PCH represents precisely the sort of thing Boorse was worried about when he formulated his bio-statistical theory of health and disease. Both Boorse and the extreme normativists apparently agree that the only way one can have a holistic view of human beings is if one abandons science. But as we shall see, science relies upon a set of epistemic, and I would argue moral, commitments that subjectivism places in peril. The debate between Boorse, who believes that value has no place in a scientific view of the world, and his normativist opponents who agree with him on that much and thus seek to restrict the explanatory reach of science, is a rehearsal of the broader debate around the Placement Problem in philosophy more generally. It is to this we



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now turn and as we shall see even here the attempt to quarantine epistemic values fares no better.

SUBJECTIVIST AND EXPRESSIVIST RESPONSES TO THE PLACEMENT PROBLEM The simplest and most parsimonious response to the Placement Problem is to embrace the fact that the universe is in fact disenchanted and that values are an entirely human affair. This is the view of Simon Blackburn who suggests that “moral properties . . . are not in this world at all, and it is only because of this that naturalism remains true”.10 Given that Blackburn would agree that human beings are “in this world”, this seems to place us in an awkward position. Even if we take the view that there would be no values without us, then it would follow that moral properties are in fact in this world, since we clearly are. Of course, Blackburn would concede that our valuing practices occur in this world; what he would dispute is the characterisation of them as “moral properties” at least as they are typically understood. They are projections of our subjective preferences rather than facts about the world as such. Suppose Blackburn is correct, and we cannot accommodate moral properties as typically understood into the world described by science. If we grant the subsidiary assumption that science is the ultimate arbiter of what there is, then this seems to leave us with two options: elimination or re-description. Elimination means refusing to accept the existence of objective moral properties in the same way serious folk refuse to accept the existence of ghosts and spirits. Re-description means explaining what appears to be objective moral properties in some more tractable idiom. So, when Ebenezer Scrooge believes he is seeing Marley’s ghost, what he is actually seeing is a result of too much cheese before bedtime or a projection of his unconscious guilt. So, too, what we take to be objective moral properties are actually a projection of our desires and attitudes, including our second order desire that our preferences might have categorically binding force. Error theorists are eliminativists while the re-descriptivists are subjectivists and expressivists. Suppose I have an outstanding tax debt. My legal obligation is straightforward, but perhaps I also feel that I am under a moral obligation, I say to myself “Ah well, I should make a payment to the ATO” and the ‘should’ here is taken to have morally binding force, something that would bind me even were I to somehow evade my legal responsibilities. Both eliminativists and re-descriptivists deny the notion of categorically binding force at play here. Both agree that what is really going on is that I am expressing an attitude of approval towards paying debts and a disdain for shirking them. The primary difference between the two is that eliminativists (error theorists and fictionalists) accept that when someone makes such a statement as “debts must be repaid” the statement does function in a truth apt manner. It just systematically fails to do so. For redescriptivists (emotivists and expressivists) moral propositions do not aim at the truth.11

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Let us consider each position in turn, beginning with eliminativism. The most common form in which we encounter eliminativism about normativity is moral fictionalism or error theory. Every moral theorist is an error theorist about some aspect of what has traditionally come under the name of ‘morality’. For instance, many virtue ethicists and consequentialists are skeptical of objective rights and duties. Indeed, fictionalists tend to be rather selective in their targets, offering a partial and one-sided account of the objective morality they seek to replace. A consistent fictionalist cannot therefore be merely a local revisionist in the way that most normative ethical theories are locally revisionist. She must be a global revisionist. But then this immediately raises a further question: why then restrict our attention merely to moral and ethical norms? Normativity pervades all domains of human endeavor and there seems no compelling reason to wish to root it out in ethics only to allow it to find a safe haven in the epistemic or the practical realm. This style of argument against fictionalism has come to be known as a “companion in guilt argument”. It takes the following form. A fictionalist will give us a list of reasons why we should take moral norms to be fiction. The companion in guilt response is to show that these reasons can apply equally to some other kinds of norms which we are reluctant to treat as fiction. If we are unwilling to abandon the objectivity of these norms, then we are encouraged to go back and consider whether moral norms are not similarly resilient. A related argument involves pointing out the ways in which the fictionalist’s case involves the use of normativity. For instance, the fictionalist appeals to certain epistemic norms: if we find that we have good reasons to believe p then we ought to believe p. If we believe that q is false, then we ought to abandon our belief that q. In many cases, the fictionalist position rests upon an appeal to the enormous epistemic authority of science. We are asked to believe that science has presented us with a view of the world which holds no place for much of what has traditionally been associated with moral norms. We should therefore discard our belief in objective moral norms on pain of irrationality. When this fact is pointed out, the fictionalist will typically respond that the ‘oughts’ and ‘shoulds’ in question do not have the objectionable features of the moral ‘ought’. However, as Terrence Cuneo points out, this response is unconvincing. Were moral and epistemic facts to exist, then they would both display what I earlier called the ‘objectionable’ features—features such as being intrinsically motivating, being categorically reason-giving, being causally idle, and so forth.12 Consider the claim, central to all robust forms of naturalism, that our beliefs about the world should track our best available scientific understanding. The fictionalist interprets this to mean that we should therefore abandon our belief in such facts. As we shall see the picture presented by science is much more complex than the fictionalist proposes (as for that matter is the nature of morality) but nevertheless let us grant him that a respectable scientific ontology does not include moral facts. This would provide very strong grounds for abandoning our belief in them. I cannot think of a better example of a categorical demand than one which says, “believe p on pain of irrationality”. It might seem to have the form of a hypothetical imperative, “believe p unless one wishes to be irrational”, one is



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unlikely to give a convincing account of what it might mean ‘to wish to be irrational’ since rationality seems a bare minimum condition of having anything that might count as wishes at all. A subsidiary fictionalist strategy is a rather unconvincing appeal to the supposed evil consequences of belief in moral objectivity. Notoriously, J. L. Mackie’s Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong ends up being rather equivocal about the supposed evils of the ‘moral overlay’. Many subsequent commentators, even those sympathetic to error theory, have noted this. He vacillates between a Humean concern with the fanaticism that belief in moral objectivity inspires and a grudging acceptance that were we to abandon moral objectivity entirely, the world may not actually be a better place. He believed that ubiquity of human selfishness meant that in the final analysis “there should be a widespread tendency to act on moral grounds”.13 Other error theorists have been bolder and embraced abolitionism. Richard Garner, in an essay in honor of Mackie, grasps the nettle. He criticizes Mackie’s view that a “moral overlay” may be required to preserve valued social practices such as truth telling, the eschewal of interpersonal violence and respect for other’s property. He suggests that many of the supposed benefits of the “moral overlay” “might better be provided by early and extensive training in empathy, by strict surveillance and strong penalties for promise-breakers, or by massive doses of advertising by celebrities”. Since we have access to these and other powerful ways to encourage promise-keeping, the abolitionist can argue that the “moral overlay may be set aside in favour of more effective and less peculiar devices, some of which are already operating at full strength”.14 This rather silly proposal raises a number of worries, not least of which is whether an Orwellian world all watched over by machines of loving grace, in which Kim Kardashian regularly enjoined us to be on our best behavior, would be in any way preferable to the one which we currently inhabit. I want to focus here, however, upon a slightly different point. Garner’s belief that we should abolish morality rests ultimately on the view that belief in it, in the face of the fictionalist argument, is fundamentally disingenuous. I doubt even he is convinced by his proposed alternative, so the argument comes down to this: it is better to live with unpalatable truths than comforting falsehoods. This sounds suspiciously like a moral exhortation. Let us suppose, however, that there is a charitable way of reading this which avoids the obvious contradiction. There are deeper problems with the position.

COMPANION IN GUILT ARGUMENTS Garner and other fictionalists rely upon the injunction that we should abandon beliefs unsupported by evidence and treat it along the lines of a logical inference in classical logic rather than the expression of an epistemic preference. But as Cuneo persuasively argues, the fictionalist gives us no convincing argument as to why this should be so other than an a priori commitment to the idea that moral norms are problematic in ways that epistemic ones are not. They therefore find themselves

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seeking a value-free form of normativity in the epistemic realm but there is no good reason to suppose that this is possible, as our brief discussion of Boorse should have suggested. One option available to the fictionalist therefore is epistemic nihilism, that is, the abandonment of epistemic norms. There are even fewer card-carrying epistemic nihilists than there are moral ones and for good reasons: epistemic nihilism has even less to recommend it than its moral counterpart. Garner is clearly not an epistemic nihilist since he believes, firstly, that there are good reasons to believe in fictionalism and secondly, and even more crucially, that one should believe what there are good reasons to believe. Consider the fictionalist argument: 1. One ought to believe only what one has good reasons to believe. 2. There are no good reasons to believe in objective moral facts. 3. Therefore, one should not believe in objective moral facts. But suppose we apply an expressivist analysis of the first premise. 1. a, There are no such things as objective epistemic reasons with either categorical force or intrinsic motivational power. Therefore, 2. b, “having a good reason to believe that p” should be taken to mean “having a favorable epistemic attitude” towards believing that p. 3. A fictionalist would presumably accept that such an analysis gives us an impoverished understanding of what people do when they claim to believe some proposition or other. To reject the companion in guilt argument, the fictionalist would have to assert therefore that 4. b, there are no such things as objective moral reasons with either categorical force or intrinsic motivational power but there are objective epistemic reasons with both categorical force and intrinsic motivational power. What I take ‘categorical’ to mean here is that they provide compelling reasons for any believer, regardless of their status or subjective motivational set. Indeed, it is a paramount feature of rationality that reasons bear upon us, regardless of whether we are inclined to see their force. The very possibility of being judged irrational depends upon the fact that reasons operate in this manner. Whether they have intrinsic motivational power is a trickier question, but it is central to the fictionalist case that epistemic reasons have this power in a way that moral reasons allegedly do not. As Cuneo argues, there is no reason to suppose that epistemic reasons are immune to the ‘argument from queerness’. Recall Blackburn’s argument that subjectivism is the price we must pay for consistent naturalism. His argument relies heavily upon how science reveals the world to be. One must be an anti-realist about ethics because that is what proper respect for the findings of the sciences entails. Cuneo suggests that many of the more complex areas of science involve positing entities which seem pretty queer, but an anti-realist may sidestep these particular



Standard Naturalism, The Placement Problem, and Companion in Guilt Arguments 43

objections. But a consistent naturalist cannot so easily sidestep the fact that science, and our incorporation of its findings into our everyday worldview, both rely upon a set of epistemic norms. The rise of virtue epistemology has rendered problematic any neat way of demarcating between epistemic and moral norms. However, let us suppose that the fictionalist has such a demarcation criteria available. Do putative pure epistemic facts escape the strictures of the fictionalist attack? Consider the following scenario. Professor Bright is the head of a research team which has just completed a project investigating nuclear fusion which has yielded positive results. After many late nights’ work by the lowly graduate students involved, a paper is submitted to Nature. Much to Bright’s chagrin, the paper is rejected by the editor. The reviewers state that the research does not meet the minimal standards of scientific work. In particular, the data set was too small and the statistical analysis which was applied to it was inappropriate. Moreover, the findings failed to establish significance. The point of this example is to highlight the very familiar situation which confronts even the most successful scientist that her research must conform to the norms established by her professional community. These are the standards to which she must conform when she transitioned from a novice to an expert scientist and these are the standards which she must inculcate in her research team. It is no coincidence, for professional formation of this sort, is only a special type of the broader ethical formation with which virtue ethicists are concerned. Mentoring and being an exemplar requires the development of professional virtues which novice scientists aspire to emulate. One might argue that this is an entirely different process from the process of inculcating moral virtues but that just seems massively implausible and would require the person attempting to make that distinction to make an actual argument as to why these special professional virtues are radically different in kind. Peer review is a notoriously haphazard process beset by all sorts of implicit and more open biases. It is also a force for conservatism in science. Nevertheless, it is the best we currently have, and it is one significant aspect of the epistemic pedigree which modern science has obtained. While it may frustrate innovation, it is also an important gatekeeper against pseudo-science and quackery. It is these organized social practices rather than some quasi-mystical method which are our only sometimes shaky protection against the frauds and charlatans. It is therefore a social phenomenon from top to bottom. If, as I argue moral norms are a type of social norm, there seems nothing suspect about regarding this as also a moral phenomenon. What I wish to draw attention to here is the obvious fact that the peer-review process rests upon a set of social (or if one wishes to nitpick institutional) norms. I am not making the debunking point, sometimes made by climate sceptics or postmodernists, that science rests entirely on institutional power. Rather, I want to argue that it is this social setting which explains, at least in part, the remarkable success of many empirical sciences. Science is a normative endeavor. Scientists are less interested in evidence per se than in good evidence, robust explanations matter much more than explanations simpliciter and so on. No serious scientist would say, as some philosophers seem wont to, that a bad explanation is better than none at all. If this was

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not obvious to an earlier generation of philosophers bedazzled by the image of heroic geniuses following ‘the’ scientific method, our generation has the benefit of several decades of naturalistic philosophy and sociology of science to correct this. In our context, something as straightforward as a peer review process involves the adherence to certain pre-established norms. The scientist should use the appropriate statistical analysis and do so in a rigorous manner. Her data set should be of the right size. If experiments are involved, the research methodology should be standardized and capable of replication. One might respond at this point that many of these norms in question are purely mathematical. But this response misses the point that before they could be mathematised, they had to be established, whether by convention or by negotiation. A scientist must in the course of her training habituate herself to those norms. ‘Ah but’, our doughty fictionalist opponent will respond at this juncture, “there is nothing metaphysically queer about such norms”. They are perfectly straightforward and transparent to members of the relevant professional community. Our fictionalist opponent is half-correct. There is also nothing queer about the moral norms and values one acquires as one becomes initiated into one’s moral community. This brings us to the second strand of the fictionalist attack: the Argument from Relativity. It has exerted a powerful influence outside of philosophy. For instance, a version of it underpins debunking forms of social constructionism. A social constructionist in effect offers us an error theory based upon an appeal to historical and cultural relativity. What we apparently took to be natural and built into the fabric of reality is unmasked as actually nothing more than a social construct. There is nothing necessarily debunking about reminding us that we are fundamentally social beings and that almost everything we do will be conditioned by that fact. Most of the interesting things about human beings are governed by social conventions which is why, as Bernard Williams reminds us, “the study of human nature is to a large extent the study of institutions”.15 To say that something is true by convention is not to deny that it is true, it is merely to specify the manner in which it is true. It is overreached to infer from the fact of something being governed by social convention to its not being a legitimate part of the fabric of reality unless one assumes that the social world is illusory. My tax debt to the ATO is conventional but very real, as my bank balance attests. To summarize and conclude the discussion thus far: I have suggested that standard forms of naturalism lead to moral fictionalism and that moral fictionalism is an incoherent view. In the next chapter I will be outlining an alternative form of naturalism which avoids this particular problem by taking as its starting point the fact that human beings are naturally enculturated and thus move around in a world saturated with norms. The obvious objection this view generates is that this is not really a form of naturalism at all. The dilemma Shafer-Landau presented us with earlier was either accept a nonnaturalistic form of ethical realism, such as he proposes, which fails the Spinoza



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test, or conversely adopt some form of anti-realism which leads us into the Placement Problem. A key assumption in his argument was the claim that if ethical facts were to be natural facts, then they would be amenable to scientific confirmation. This assumption he shares with his anti-realist opponents. They also agree that putative ethical facts are not thus amenable. In what follows, I will argue that we can avoid either of the forks in the road that Shafer-Landau offers if we reevaluate our conception of naturalism. Central to this strategy is rejecting one of the key assumptions that he shares with Mackie and that is the assimilation of natural facts to “facts amenable to scientific confirmation”. This assumption is precisely the kind of scientism which underpins Standard Naturalism. What is problematic about the assumption is not only that it assimilates a whole range of facts to scientific facts, but it fails to account for the different ways in which even scientific facts differ in their discovery and confirmation procedures. In other words, it is a hangover from an outmoded and thoroughly nonnaturalistic understanding of how the sciences operate. Few serious scholars of the sciences believe any longer in ‘the’ scientific method and thus there are few grounds for accepting an accompanying conception of ‘the’ scientific worldview. Since much of the motivation for Shafer-Landau and Mackie’s problematic is their shared belief that a certain conception of value seems forced upon us if we accept ‘the’ properly scientific understanding of the world. Dissolving this myth will get us a long way in escaping the Scylla of non-naturalism and the Charybdis of anti-realism. To do so requires us to retrace our steps and delve deeper into the foundational assumptions of Standard Naturalism.

NOTES  1. Frank Jackson, From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defense of Conceptual Analysis (Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1998).   2.  Huw Price (2004), “Naturalism without Representationalism,” in Macarthur and De Caro (eds.), Naturalism in Question (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press), p. 74.   3.  Descartes’ own dualistic metaphysics quickly came into conflict with his medical understanding. Well documented in Dennis Des Chene’s Spirits and clocks (Cornell University Press, 2018).   4.  Christopher Boorse, “Health as a theoretical concept,” Philosophy of science 44, no. 4 (1977): p. 555.   5.  William E. Stempsey, “A pathological view of disease,” Theoretical medicine and bioethics 21, no. 4 (2000): 321–330.   6.  R. P. Hamilton, “The concept of health: beyond naturalism and normativism,” Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 16, no. 2 (2010): 323–329.   7.  Elselijn Kingma, “What is it to be healthy?” Analysis 67, no. 2 (2007): 128–133.   8.  Cf. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The spirit level, Vol. 33 (London: Penguin, 2010).

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  9.  Roberti P. di Sarsina and M. Tassinari (2015), “Person-centred healthcare and medicine paradigm: it’s time to clarify,” The EPMA journal 6(1), 11, doi:10.1186/s13167-015-0033-3. 10.  Simon Blackburn, Essays in quasi-realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 174. 11.  We have thankfully moved beyond the days of crude emotivist approaches to ethics, so the most plausible formulation of these anti-realist positions is that moral claims are rather similar to legal ones (at least on certain views of jurisprudence) in that they represent an act of collective will, a decision rather than a finding of reason. 12. Terence Cuneo,  The normative web: An argument for moral realism (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 81. 13.  J. L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 124. 14. Richard Garner, “Abolishing morality,” in  A World Without Values (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), p. 219. 15.  Bernard Williams, “Evolution, ethics and the representation problem.” Making sense of humanity: and other philosophical papers 1982–1993 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

3 Is the Natural Goodness Approach of Philippa Foot and Michael Thompson a Suitable Candidate for Liberal Naturalism? In the previous chapters we have discussed why virtue ethicists might want to be naturalists but why they have good reasons to be suspicious of much of the self-declared naturalism that is currently on offer, what I have called Standard Naturalism. For that reason, naturalistic virtue ethicists tend to be liberal naturalists. The most influential current form of naturalism in virtue ethics is Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness Approach, an approach which in its mature formulation has been heavily influenced by Michael Thompson. In many ways, this approach is a promising candidate for a liberal naturalism, but it is marred by an ambivalence in Foot’s work which is amplified in some of her more influential followers. That ambivalence revolves around the question of whether virtue ethicists should engage with the empirical sciences. The tension this creates can be articulated in terms of two key commitments of Basic Naturalism, which we outlined in chapter 1. Firstly, there is what I called Spinoza’s stricture: naturalists should be wary of any approach which sets up too stark a distinction between ourselves and other animals. Secondly, there is the injunction to take the findings and methods of the natural sciences seriously, something I have referred to earlier as empirical responsibility. I counterposed empirical responsibility to Hegelian arguments. Initially this was in the context of cognitive science, but my true concern is the prevalence of Hegelian arguments among Foot and her followers. I believe they have the same limitations that they do in the cognitive sciences and that we should treat them with extreme caution. One response might be to argue that there are significant differences between moral philosophy and the cognitive sciences and that therefore Hegelian arguments have a role to play in the former that they do not in the latter. The onus would fall onto the person responding thus to show why this is the case, otherwise it is question begging and risks surreptitiously reintroducing the Placement Problem.1 47

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To speak bluntly, I think the problem is rooted in an understandable recoil against Standard Naturalism and its often crass attempt to replace genuine conceptual and transcendental concerns with empirical ones which has led to a suspicion of any kind of engagement with the sciences. I suspect that this probably reflects the lingering influence of positivism and especially the hermeneutic revolt against it.2 Like a lot of such disputes, the ferocity with which they were sometimes waged may lead us to neglect the tremendous amount of common ground that all sides shared. In our context, most partisans to these disputes agreed that there was a rigid demarcation line between genuinely philosophical and empirical questions. The most famous challenge to this demarcation was Quine’s attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction and his associated insistence on the continuity of philosophy and the sciences. This is an attractive slogan on the surface, since it seems to open up the possibility of genuine collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and a constructive role for philosophers within this collaboration. Sadly, more often than not this has been construed as a demand that philosophers remain silent and simply listen to what scientists tell us.3 I have suggested that it is both possible and desirable to be a naturalist without succumbing to scientism. In other words, one can be a Liberal Naturalist who accepts that there are genuinely philosophical questions that cannot be resolved by empirical methods. This implies a rather different way of understanding Quine’s continuity thesis and that involves the recognition that a tremendous amount of work in the natural sciences is actually conceptual rather than purely empirical. By the same token, philosophers should be open to the possibility that some of their concerns may be illuminated by scientific enquiries. I earlier expressed this thought in terms of a genuinely dialogic relationship between philosophy and the empirical sciences governed by the appropriate dialogic virtues. These involve inter alia an appropriate recognition of the fact that one’s own preoccupations may not overlap with one’s interlocutor’s. Someone who fails to recognize this risks becoming a crashing bore. In our context, philosophers will be primarily focused on the conceptual while scientists will be interested mainly in the empirical. Nevertheless, the world is a messy and complicated place, and this leaves plenty of common ground. I am not convinced that the Natural Goodness Approach, at least as it has been developed by some of Foot’s followers, provides us with the necessary resources for it. I will, therefore, at the risk of boring readers, have to spend some time outlining how the naturalist humanism that I have proposed differs from the Natural Goodness Approach. Readers who are already unconvinced by the Foot/Thompson project may want to skip the following two chapters, although it does provide me with an opportunity to clarify my own view and how it both resembles and differs from theirs. I suggested earlier that there was an ambivalence in Foot’s work, and I will suggest that the Footians (as I will henceforth refer to them) have resolved it in a particularly way. That is, they have aimed to develop a transcendental naturalism. The crux of the issue turns on whether this transcendental naturalism is a viable project. In light of my remarks at the end of the last chapter, it will need to satisfy



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the desiderata of any liberal naturalism that it sufficiently distinguishes itself from Standard Naturalism while remaining recognizably naturalistic. I suspect that it cannot meet the latter requirement. I will begin by identifying this central ambivalence and outlining the ways in which it leads into transcendental naturalism and why this has seemed like an attractive option. In the next chapter I will then move onto the larger question of whether such a transcendental naturalism is feasible. I argue that it is not, at least in terms of some of the things we require in a moral philosophy. In particular, I will suggest that there are no good reasons to prefer transcendental naturalism to the more sophisticated forms of Kantianism which can offer us a high degree of objectivity without some of the problematic metaphysical and biological commitments that have historically surrounded neo-Aristotelianism. And yet, I remain a neo-Aristotelian because I believe that, properly distinguished from Kantianism, Aristotle’s views are much more satisfying. But in order to do the proper work of drawing such a distinction, we need an Aristotelianism that is robustly and unashamedly naturalistic. That means that terms like ‘practical’ and ‘embodied’, which have too often become placeholders in contemporary neoAristotelianism, need to be fleshed out. What drew many of us to Aristotle’s ethical thought is the realism of its moral psychology. It feels like an ethics fit for creatures like us. We lose that realism at our peril.

AN AMBIVALENCE IN THE NATURAL GOODNESS APPROACH I am assuming that the broad outlines of Foot’s views are familiar to most of my readers.4 I will therefore be focussing on some of the challenges that view has faced rather than its details. Philippa Foot was a thinker of enormous intellectual integrity who would never hold onto a position she had become dissatisfied with, simply to maintain the appearance of consistency. I once heard an anecdote about Hilary Putnam. In the questions following one of his talks, a graduate student complained that she was having difficulty writing about his work, since his later writings appeared to contradict what he had written in the 60s and 70s. Putnam apparently smiled and asked “and what would you do, my dear, if you discovered you had been wrong?”5 Foot displayed a similar intellectual humility. This, however, present readers with a problem, since it can become difficult to identify the true Footian position. It seems reasonable, as commentators like Hacker-Wright have done, to distinguish between an early, a middle and a later period in her work. Even in the mature work, however, one gets a sense of her wrestling with problems as if she is confronting them for the first time. The consistency one finds in her work is a consistency of problematic, rather than a consistency of approach. It is noteworthy, therefore, that in her last major work Natural Goodness, she begins by discussing a set of issues which troubled her as a student. Like her

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contemporaries, she had been profoundly disturbed by Hitler’s crimes. She credits her response to these events with turning her towards moral philosophy. It also led her to reject utterly the prevailing metaethical theories which asserted that our condemnation of the Nazi atrocities represented nothing more than an attitude or emotion. She held this position steadfastly throughout her career, even while shifting subtly on questions such as whether the Nazis could be rational though heinously wrong. Thus, the question of how we can make sense of our revulsion against Nazis and similar horrors as something other than a strongly held preference was one that preoccupied her to the very end. It also coincided with a growing interest in the virtues and vices inspired, like many of her contemporaries, by Elisabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy”. The folklore surrounding the revival of virtue ethics is well-recounted elsewhere, so I will eschew the usual potted history.6 Virtue ethics has earned its place at the table and even critics acknowledge that considerations of virtue and vice must play an important role in normative ethics. It is common to distinguish between virtue ethicists proper, who make virtue and vice the central concept in normative ethics and virtue theorists who give it an important though not exclusive role. Hacker-Wright has made a persuasive case that considered in this light, Foot is actually a virtue theorist rather than a virtue ethicist. Nevertheless, she has exercised a profound and enduring influence upon virtue ethics, most importantly through the work of Rosalind Hursthouse whose On Virtue Ethics further develops the program Foot had introduced in Natural Goodness. In what follows, I will therefore be discussing a composite view, which I will call the Natural Goodness Approach, which is essentially Hursthouse’s explication of Foot from the perspective of virtue ethics. I will also be referring to the ‘Footians’ to indicate a line of thought which emerges from her work but which may not be faithful to her position in every regard: its foremost representatives include Rosalind Hursthouse, John Hacker-Wright, Micah Lott and Jennifer Frey.

THE NATURAL GOODNESS APPROACH Foot begins her discussion in Natural Goodness with a vivid and striking example. She recounts a discussion with a “a certain philosopher who wanted to explain ‘good’ in terms of choices, [who claimed] that the good roots of trees were roots of the kind we ‘should choose if we were trees’, this finally confirmed my suspicion of the kind of moral philosophy that was his”.7 The palpable implausibility of this claim in respect to trees should, Foot believes, also lead us to question this conception of human beings and point us towards the fact that “[j]udgements of goodness and badness can have, it seems, a special ‘grammar’ when the subject belongs to a living thing, whether plant, animal, or human being.”8 What is often overlooked here is that this is a grammatical and not a botanical observation. The term ‘grammar’ reveals the influence of Wittgenstein on Foot’s thought and, as Hursthouse comments Foot’s original title for the book Natural Goodness was The Grammar of Goodness. Had she



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retained this title, Hursthouse suggests, it would have been much clearer that “the book really doesn’t have much to do with the natural, biological sciences but is about the logical grammar of moral judgements”.9 Viewed thus, there is no change in logical tone of voice when we move from evaluating plants and animals to when we are evaluating human beings. This dissolves (in the Wittgensteinian sense) the vexing philosophical problem of how to understand the allegedly special sense of moral judgements. They clearly differ in content, in that they are about the lives of complexly social, language using beings with highly developed rationality, but they do not differ in their form. Crucially, Foot’s investigation is thus a formal or logical one, rather than empirical. It is for that reason, as Hacker-Wright says elsewhere, “we do not need to engage in empirical studies of human nature”.10 When we approach human beings we do not do so from the outside, as we would when investigating a novel animal species. We approach ourselves from within as it were, as someone already embedded in human life trying to make sense of the characteristic troubles and predicaments that life throws up. To put it another way, empirical scientific investigations operate in the third person, whereas life proceeds in the first (and perhaps as importantly second) person register. Foot’s investigation then is not a disinterested scientific enquiry into how we happen to be morally speaking. There could be interesting enquiries conducted along such lines, but they would fall under the auspices of an entirely different discipline. Moral philosophy is an enquiry into how we must be (from a moral point of view) or, to put things in a Wittgenstein inflected idiom: what things might sensibly be said about us, morally speaking. This all sounds rather austere and of very little help to those who look to moral philosophy for guidance about those things which perplex us. If moral philosophy is a purely formal discipline in this way, then it seems unlikely that it can fulfil such a role, other than perhaps providing a little more clarity about what perplexes us. This interpretation of Foot’s project places her solidly in the company of those who are suspicious of any claim that a moral theory can be strongly action-guiding. X-Phi enthusiasts notwithstanding, most of us would probably concur with the thought that it is not the job of philosophers to do the sort of empirical investigations that others are better trained and equipped to conduct.11 If that is what Hacker-Wright has in mind, then this is a fairly obvious and innocuous point. But the whole tenor of the Footian position has been to suggest that we need not engage with, and not just in, empirical investigations of the human condition. That is, a strong emphasis has been placed upon the fact that the Natural Goodness Approach is a transcendental and not an empirical project. It is worth considering the reasons why this is the case. I suggested that there is an ambivalence in Foot’s work. By that I mean there are several ways in which she can reasonably be interpreted. One way is to take her as producing a modified form of Standard Naturalism. This is essentially how a sympathetic commentator like Julia Annas takes her project.12 It is also how critical yet sympathetic commentators such

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as the Danish philosopher Hans Fink understands her.13 Perhaps most importantly, it was the risk of this interpretation which prompted John McDowell’s extensive critique of Foot’s naturalism which we will explore below. Yet as Hursthouse makes clear, Foot’s concern was with the ‘grammar’ of goodness in the Wittgensteinian sense and she rarely engaged with any empirical work in the life sciences, a tradition continued by her followers. One central issue here is the broader intellectual climate in which it is difficult to obtain a hearing for any form of naturalism other than the Standard variety. McDowell was acutely aware of this issue when he produced his lengthy critique of Foot’s naturalism in his paper “Two Sorts of Naturalism”, which initially appeared in a Festschrift to Foot.14 The first sort of naturalism to which the title refers is our old friend Standard Naturalism (which he refers to as ‘bald’ naturalism). The second, less familiar, sort is the type of Aristotelian naturalism Foot defends. He proceeds from a position of considerable sympathy with Foot. He applauds her unwavering opposition to subjectivism and the various ‘supernaturalist’ rationalisms. He fears, however, that given the prevailing intellectual climate, there may be a danger that Foot’s version of naturalism may be assimilated to that other ‘less satisfying’ variety. Central to the problem is a transformation in the understanding of the concept of ‘nature’ which has occurred in the modern period. Given this, it is hard to recover the sense of naturalism which Aristotle and Foot have in mind. The question is posed for McDowell in terms of the call that the demands of virtue have upon reason. He suggests that someone sympathetic to bald naturalism will typically see the appeal of virtue as being grounded in some considerations about what makes a human life go well, which can be specified independently of a “life lived in accordance with the virtues”. He believes this is often supported by a misreading of Aristotle which would have him attempting the same project. In fact, as McDowell points out, Aristotle’s lectures were explicitly aimed at those youth who had already received a proper upbringing and he wastes little time vindicating the virtues to the non-virtuous. Likewise, the doctrine of Aristotelian necessity outlined, for instance, in Metaphysics plays little overt role in the argument of the Ethics. On McDowell’s interpretation, the demands that the virtues place upon reason lies in the manner in which they present themselves to the suitably trained eye. Just as a skillful painter can see certain hues, unavailable to the untrained observer, the virtuous person recognizes the requirements of virtue as reasons for acting and acts accordingly. While Aristotle may be blameless of such an attempt to vindicate the virtues, a modern audience, swayed by the influence of a certain scientistic conception of reason, may feel that the virtues do require some kind of vindication. For them, the thesis that we need the virtues seems highly appealing. Nevertheless, McDowell argues, the claim that we need the virtues can only be cashed out as the observation that decent people recognize that “ethical considerations constitute genuine reasons for acting, not to give the outline of a grounding for that claim”.15 A bald naturalist would be disappointed with such a response, feeling that it was vacuous. Rather than attempting to provide a fuller response, McDowell instead offers, in Wittgensteinian fashion, an analysis of the anxiety which prompts us to feel such a response necessary.



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The acquisition of logos, which McDowell interprets as “the power of speech, the power of giving expression to conceptual capacities that are rationally interlinked in ways reflected by what it makes sense to give as a reason for what” opens up certain possibilities for both thought and action. That much is obvious. One possibility it opens up is that of standing at a critical distance from our natural proclivities and inclinations. This possibility seems crucial to ethical life as we know it. In the Discourse on Inequality, Rousseau expresses this thought beautifully, Nature speaks to all animals, and beasts obey her voice. Man feels the same impulse, but he at the same time perceives that he is free to resist or to acquiesce; and it is in the consciousness of this liberty, that the spirituality of his soul chiefly appears: for natural philosophy explains, in some measure, the mechanism of the senses and the formation of ideas; but in the power of willing, or rather of choosing, and in the consciousness of this power, nothing can be discovered but acts, that are purely spiritual, and cannot be accounted for by the laws of mechanics.16

Here Rousseau outlines one of the central problems of modern philosophy. Genuine moral action seems to require us to stand at a distance from our natural proclivities and inclinations. An animal that simply followed its desires, however benign those desires might be, could not be said to be moral. Indeed, it could not really be said to act at all. Rousseau’s observation becomes problematic in his insistence upon the ‘purely spiritual’ nature of human freedom. Problematic not for him perhaps, since he is merely expressing a view with a long pedigree in Judaeo-Christian culture and which reached its fullest philosophical articulation in Cartesianism. It is, however, problematic for us Spinozists who are unable to accept any appeal to the ‘purely spiritual’. Our challenge, therefore, is to capture Rousseau’s insight without its metaphysical baggage. McDowell would surely endorse the negative part of Rousseau’s thesis which is that no explanation based on ‘the laws of mechanics’, an explanation located within the ‘logical space of causes’, could adequately account for the requisite sense of freedom here. The pressing problem remains that the progress of science, especially Darwinism, seems to threaten Rousseau’s distinction between us and the ‘beasts’ who heed nature’s call. The question then is whether there is sufficient logical space in the hinterland between the space of reasons and the space of causes to allow for the kind of freedom that McDowell and Rousseau correctly identify as a precondition for moral action. McDowell believes there is, provided that the logical space of nature is understood to include ‘second-nature’. He illustrates this with a fable. Suppose a wolf (or more plausibly wolves) acquired logos: such a “rational wolf would be able to let his mind roam over possibilities of behaviour other than what comes naturally to wolves”.17 But more than that, it should at least open to the possibility of acting otherwise. For “a possessor of logos cannot be just a knower but must be an agent too; and we cannot make sense of logos manifesting itself in agency without seeing it as selecting between options, rather than going along with what is going to happen anyway”.18

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It is worth noting that for Rousseau our capacity for practical reason enables both virtue and vice. Interestingly then, McDowell suggests that a wolf in possession of logos might adopt a Calliclesean viewpoint. Looking on at the behavior of his fellow wolves from a position of aristocratic detachment, he figures that it befits him not to hunt as part of the pack while nevertheless benefiting from the fruits of their cooperation. No appeal to ‘Aristotelian Categoricals’ such as “look buddy ‘wolves hunt in packs!’” would convince him. As a reason qua reason, such Aristotelian Categorials are open to question by rational beings. But once questioned, it is not possible to assuage sceptical doubts by simply pointing to the characteristic life activities of the species. It is always open to the rational wolf to respond that an appeal to what wolves do cannot furnish a reason for him qua rational wolf. McDowell highlights an important distinction at play here between two senses of ‘Nature’: on the one hand, ‘mere’ nature and on the other a sense of nature which involves an overcoming or transcending ‘mere’ nature. The Calliclesean wolf can fully accede to the proposition that ‘wolves should collaborate’ indeed if his project of exploitation is to succeed, it is important that they do. Nevertheless, that fact provides no reason for him who has succeeded in transcending his lupine nature. “There is” McDowell suggests “nothing that he is denying or overlooking about the natural pattern of life among wolves”.19 McDowell is not, of course, primarily concerned with life among wolves, the conclusion of his fable is that humans as rational animals stand in roughly the same position as the Calliclesean wolf. Even if it turned out to be the case that we have a naturally based need for the virtues, this fact could not be decisive for “someone who questions whether virtuous behaviour is genuinely required by reason”.20 He rejects one possible solution to this problem. Bernard Williams has suggested that since Aristotle operated with a rich premodern conception of nature, nature can provide a rational grounding for him, if not for us. McDowell argues that the basic problem is structural, irrespective of the particular conception of nature with which one operates. No conception of nature can play a decisive role for rational creatures. Moreover, he argues, “Williams’ reading is a historic monstrosity; it attributes to Aristotle a felt need for foundations, and a conception of nature as where the foundations must be, that make sense only as a product of modern philosophy”.21 A characteristic trope of modern philosophy has been to take the dispassionate investigative stance which typifies scientific enquiry as revealing a profound insight about the nature of the universe itself. This then leads to the Placement Problem and the varying attempts at solving it within the framework of Standard (bald) Naturalism. McDowell’s solution, or better dissolution, of these problems is to reject some of the starting assumptions. While it is true that value has no place in the world as described by the physical sciences it was foolish to even believe it could be found there. Value is an objective feature of a shared human world, a world inhabited by creatures who have acquired a second-nature and thus respond to one another accordingly. Virtue’s call is issued and heeded within second-nature. Consequently, “nothing but bad metaphysics suggests that the standards in ethics must be somehow constructed out of the facts of disenchanted nature”.22



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Such a conception of virtue’s authority might trouble us. It seems to place the appeal of virtue on the same level as any other dictate of practical reason. It is tempting to contrast the apparent uncertainty in which this places ethics with the certainties of the empirical sciences. But such a contrast is mistaken. The “Neurathian predicament” in which we find ourselves is, McDowell suggests, “quite general”.23 It afflicts the natural sciences every bit as much as it afflicts ethics. It is important at this point to forestall a possible misunderstanding of McDowell’s view. Williams had suggested that he is offering a kind of postmodern relativistic debunking of the claims of the natural sciences. McDowell is keen to stress that the epistemic pedigree of the natural sciences is hard-won and turning the clock back to a premodern enchanted view of nature is simply not an intellectually respectable option. For McDowell, the only appropriate response to our characteristically modern anxiety about the foundation of morality is a therapeutic one. We should uncover the sources of the anxiety in order to quieten it. The recognition that the only basis for morality is the moral practices of those inculcated into a second-nature can seem unsatisfying. But we need to recognize that that is as good as it gets and the search for an Archimedean point is as chimerical in ethics, as it is in the empirical sciences. Only a philosophical prejudice prevents us from seeing this. Given this, the proper way to situate ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’ is as a caveat. It highlights distinctive features of our intellectual climate which would seek to assimilate any form of ethical naturalism to the bald scientistic variety. We Aristotelian naturalists therefore find ourselves contesting a small and diminishing space, like survivors fighting over life rafts on Neurath’s boat. McDowell has correctly identified both the problem and some of its sources. The challenge that confronts us is to offer an account of ethics which is satisfyingly naturalistic, insofar as it combats subjectivism and supernaturalist rationalism, and which yet avoids succumbing the siren calls of a shallow empiricist naturalism. The concept of ‘Second nature’ or a ‘proper upbringing’ provides the outlines of a solution provided that this concept can itself be understood naturalistically. The problem here is that in McDowell’s work it is a placeholder for an explanation, deliberately lacking in empirical detail. Not just any upbringing or initiation into Second Nature is as good as the other: the very possibility of becoming the kind of creature that can hear but not heed the call of nature and become the kind of being that stands in the right relationship to its appetites required by virtue requires a certain kind of upbringing. It requires not only a that of an upbringing but a how. I will be developing these thoughts at length in later chapters. Before doing so, let us return to Foot’s work in the light of McDowell’s caveats.

SOME PREVAILING MISCONCEPTIONS OF FOOT’S PROJECT Despite McDowell’s caveats, there is a strong propensity in the scholarly literature to read Foot as offering an idiosyncratic form of Standard Naturalism. This has

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generated an entire cottage industry of ‘gotcha’ knockdown objections. These generally take the form of pointing out the way in which Foot’s account is out of sync with well-founded scientific understanding of concepts like ‘species’ and ‘function’. I will consider three such criticisms, one especially egregious example and two more subtle misfires. The response from Footians to such objections is to point out that they rest upon a failure to understand that her work is not a quasi-empirical account of human nature but a logical or ‘grammatical’ enquiry but even loyal supporters like Michael Thompson has acknowledged that there is considerable ambivalence in the way that Foot expresses herself and that leaves her open to these misinterpretations.24 A common way of reading Foot is to ignore McDowell’s essay and Foot’s own disclaimers and treat her as constructing a normative ethical theory on the basis of some putative set of empirical facts about human nature before proceeding to show that those facts do not stand up to the light of biological scrutiny. One example of this is an essay by Jay Odenbaugh. That Odenbaugh takes Standard Naturalism to be the only game in town is evidenced fairly early on in the piece. He frames his argument by announcing that “[o]ne of the most challenging topics in contemporary philosophy is normativity”, specifying that “the difficulty is making sense of normativity in a wholly natural world”.25 Like all Standard Naturalists, he treats “wholly natural” to be coterminous with explicable by the natural sciences. He suggests that ethical naturalists therefore face a challenge “[i]f the only properties are natural properties (i.e., those described by the natural and social sciences) and there are no normative natural properties, then it follows that there are no normative properties”. The challenge, as Odenbaugh sees it, is to give a plausible account of normative natural properties. We should, however, sound a caveat at this point. None of the standard bearers of neo-Aristotelian naturalism proceed from this problematic. Indeed, one finds very little discussion of the metaphysics of moral properties in any of their work. In “Modern Moral Philosophy”, Anscombe famously spends a great deal of time discussing the ethics of failing to pay for a sack of potatoes one has ordered. There is not a single mention of properties, moral or otherwise. Similarly, Foot mentions ‘properties’ briefly in passing and on both occasions her interest is restricted to humdrum botanical and similar examples. Hursthouse deigns to mention them at all; nor does MacIntyre waste much of his energy on them. They are a peculiar preoccupation of a certain kind of analytic moral philosopher, namely, one who takes Standard Naturalism as the only game in town. Still, such philosophers are many, so we have to indulge them in their obsessions. Odenbaugh’s conception of naturalism is generous enough to incorporate the social sciences (though he does not specify if that also includes the qualitative varieties). Without normativity, there are no social sciences: the subject matter of the social sciences just is people acting and responding normatively. If that is all that is at stake with regard to “normative properties” then either the subject matter of the social sciences is “normative natural properties” or these are not natural properties. We find ourselves in our earlier bind. We must either deny their existence or reduce



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them to something more tractable. But most contemporary social science takes as axiomatic Durkheim’s methodological principle that one should not aspire to explain the social in psychological terms. That is why Evolutionary Psychologists expanded so much bombast attacking this principle.26 But surely Durkheim is right. One does not have to subscribe to an exaggerated holism to recognize that social norms are by their nature shared and public, and therefore inadequately explained by individual psychology. If we accept that social norms are “normative natural properties” and we also accept that the virtues are a form of refined responsiveness to social norms then any mystery about them evaporates.27 Odenbaugh obviously does not believe this and regards moral norms as peculiarly intractable. In other words, he assumes the truth of Mackie’s argument from queerness. He also regards Foot’s project as a response to Mackie’s argument, despite the fact that she has made clear that she had no interest in engaging with this type of scepticism. Odenbaugh believes that Foot is constructing a substantive quasi-empirical theory of human nature drawing on the work of Peter Geach and Michael Thompson. Geach famously compared the virtues to bee stings: bees need them, not qua individuals but because of the way stings contribute to the flourishing of the hive and thus indirectly to that of the individual bees that comprise the hive.28 Although some bees will have to be sacrificed for the common good, overall bees do better when they sting. A bee that is unable or unwilling to use its sting is thereby a defective bee. Thompson elaborates this observation in his account of Aristotelian Categorials, which Odenbaugh summarizes as follows. First, they are not equivalent to a universally quantified statement. Let B be our claim “The bobcat breeds in spring.” B is not equivalent to “Every bobcat breeds in the spring” since not every bobcat does so. And, it is still true of the species or “life-form.” Second, natural-historical judgments are not equivalent to statistical generationalizations. B is not equivalent to “Most bobcats breed in spring” since the latter can be false when B is true. Thompson claims this type of natural-historical inference is correct: If the S is F and the S is G, then the S is F and G. No such inference is generally correct for statistical generalizations. Third, natural-historical judgments are not equivalent to ceteris paribus generalizations. “The bobcat breeds in spring” is importantly different from “Every bobcat that is ______ breeds in spring.” With ceteris paribus generalizations, they hold only relative to some circumstances filling in “______”. According to Thompson, naturalhistorical judgments require the circumstances to be determined by the life-form itself. He writes, “These conditions are thus ‘presupposed’ by the life-form itself; and how the bearer comes to arrive in them will itself be described in natural-historical terms”. Oxygen being present is not determined by the nature of matches.29

For Thompson, these Aristotelian Categorials form the background conditions against which we identify an organism as being the kind of thing that it is. For instance, in “Apprehending Human Form”, Thompson discusses a marine biologist (whether a professional or an amateur enthusiast is unclear) who is investigating whether an organism is a candidate for a new species of jellyfish or a deviant

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variation of the phylum Cnidaria. The biologist decides that this represents a new kind, ‘the umbrella jellyfish’, and on this basis is able to form novel generalisations. These generalisations, Thompson asserts, take the peculiar logical form that he had earlier outlined. They are natural historical judgements which, while general in scope, are not reducible to statistical averages. They are arrived at not by averaging from observable instances but rather by locating particular examples against the backdrop of an organism’s characteristic form of life. These are the sorts of generalisations which are typical of monographs in natural history. One also finds these sort of descriptions in natural history documentaries. One hears, for example, that a certain type of swallow heads South in winter and this would be true if for some unanticipated reason the annual flight was interrupted. The claim that this swallow heads South this summer is logically dependent on the more general claim that the swallow heads South. The marine biologist’s first task is to isolate samples of jellyfish from other bits of gelatinous matter that might populate the ocean. There may (unfortunately) be large amounts of plastic debris which closely resemble jellyfish to an untrained eye. He must therefore distinguish his samples both from such detritus but also from decomposing jellyfish. In the course of refining his observations he constantly has at the background the concept of a lifeform. It is his ability to subsume his samples under that concept which enables him to give the general term ‘umbrella jellyfish’ content. Any particular observation or even set of observations is empirically defeasible. Indeed it may turn out that, as is often the case in science, ‘umbrella jellyfish’ is itself an umbrella term which requires further delineation. But in order to identify his umbrella jellyfish as a living thing rather than simply a random piece of matter, he needs to fall back on the sorts of natural historical judgements which Thompson elucidates. The empirical knowledge gained is about what kind of lifeform that the umbrella jellyfish is, not that it is a lifeform. This judgement, for Thompson, involves “a pure or a priori, perhaps a logical, concept”.30 It is that concept which enables our natural historian to identify the umbrella jellyfish qua animate being. Or to put it another way the lifeform is the conceptual framework in which we are able to form the thought that “that is a living thing” rather than determine what kind of living thing it is, the latter task being a matter of empirical investigation. Thompson is not primarily interested in marine biology. His argument prefaces a much lengthier account of what goes on when we recognize a fellow human being. His argument is levelled against what he calls an “exaggerated empiricism” and he argues that just as the marine biologist does not derive the life-form judgements she makes from observation, our ability to recognize ourselves and others as human has a logical or a priori character. I will return to these points below. For now, it is worth noting that Thompson (and by implication Foot) explicitly disavows the project of constructing a quasiempirical theory of human nature. Nevertheless, as Thompson himself acknowledges, Foot can be ambivalent on this point and so it is not entirely unreasonable for



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Odenbaugh to interpret her differently. Based upon this interpretation, Odenbaugh raises what he considers a powerful objection to her work. He draws on the work of Evolutionary Psychologists Randy Thornhill and Craig Palmer, who in a rather notorious book claimed that rape could be a psychological adaptation rather than a byproduct of a more general nubility preference mechanism. The book is notorious for good reason, partly because Thornhill and Palmer seemed to deliberately invite controversy by caricaturing their feminist opponents and partly because of the questionable nature of Evolutionary Psychological claims more broadly. I have already written at length elsewhere about the evidential weakness and conceptual muddles of this work and I have also produced lengthy criticisms of Evolutionary Psychology more broadly.31 It is a little odd therefore that Odenbaugh should choose an objection from the fringes of evolutionary theory rather than a more respectable example. In that light, it is difficult to read this objection other than with raised eyebrows. Nevertheless, there might still be something to it, so let us cautiously proceed, My objection to the natural goodness approach is this. It is possible males of our species are adapted to rape women when they cannot otherwise have sexual relations with them. However, if rape is an adaptation, and given the selected effects account of function, this behavior has the function of increasing reproductive success of low status, unchosen males. Our resulting natural-historical judgment would be roughly, “Unchosen, low status human males rape human females.” Males in those circumstances would be malfunctioning if they didn’t rape; this is what they are supposed to do. Clearly, this conflicts with our considered moral judgments regarding relationships between men and women. It is morally wrong to rape. Moral theorists agree we must find a stable equilibrium between our considered moral judgments, normative theories, metaethical views, and the sciences. My suggestion is that the natural goodness approach, evolutionary psychologists’ account of male rape behavior, and the selected effects account of functions is an unstable equilibrium.32

To clarify: Thornhill and Palmer suggested that rape is an adaptation when it involves a low status male raping a female of reproductive age. They assimilate this type of rape to ‘forced copulation’ among non-human animals and notoriously their primary data set is drawn from scorpion flies. It is unclear that the human ethico-legal concept ‘rape’ maps at all well onto the biological concept of ‘forced copulation’ and their very selective definition of rape means that there are profound problems surrounding their data set. It manifestly fails to do justice to the wide range of sexual violence, so it is at best a partial contribution to an explanation. Be that as it may, Odenbaugh believes this presents the Natural Goodness Approach with a dilemma: it is possible, if unlikely, that Thornhill and Palmer are correct and that low status males have a psychological adaptation that leads them to rape reproductive aged females. Given our ‘considered moral judgment’ that rape is morally wrong we must either abandon any appeal to natural historical judgement

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or radically revise our considered moral judgements so that we would accept that low status males who do not rape reproductive aged females are defective. The power of Odenbaugh’s objection stems from our abhorrence of rape. I have deliberately highlighted his rather injudicious choice of words around this which seems to imply assumptions he would presumably disavow. If our objection to sexual violence is based upon a “considered moral judgement”, then it is conceivable that there might be circumstances under which sexual violence might be permissible. But our objection to sexual violence is not an empirical judgement based upon carefully weighing certain facts. It is not therefore empirically defeasible but has more of a formal or logical character. While it is not logically inconceivable that there might be societies in which rape was permissible, such a society (if it could even be called that) would be so radically different from our own as to be of the same questionable relevance as Thornhill and Palmer’s favoured scorpion flies. Feminists rightly note that our political institutions are often badly out of step with our avowed moral views on this matter. Given the low rates of reporting, and even lower rate of successful prosecutions, rape is de facto permissible if not de jure. But this is a shocking fact and relies upon our shared abhorrence of sexual violence to motivate demands for changing our legal institutions and practices to bring them in line with our avowed moral views. Odenbaugh’s choice of words might simply be clumsy, but I suspect, given his broader philosophical commitments, that it is not. He proceeds from taking moral scepticism seriously and this implies that someone needs to be convinced to adopt a moral point of view. The moral sceptic also believes that a moral position that does not rest upon objective moral properties is lacking in a foundation and therefore cannot sway the unconvinced. This would seem to imply that our widespread objection to sexual violence is merely a shared preference or attitude. I want to suggest, by contrast, that it has more of a transcendental character. That is, it is a condition of possibility of anything counting as a moral view that it excludes the possibility that sexual violence (alongside torture and deliberately killing the innocent) could ever be permissible. The only people who think otherwise are rapists or rape apologists. These are sadly too familiar but their argumentative strategy, such as it is, does not rest upon denying the general prohibition but usually in questioning whether a given instance was ‘really’ rape. They concede the general point that rape is abhorrent but quibble over the details. Their argument tends to take the form “were this to be an instance of rape, then it would indeed be despicable but it is not because . . .” This is partly a legal matter and such issues may be tested in court according to the relevant legal definition and rules of evidence. However, as feminist critics have powerfully argued, the legal definition is often faulty, too often based upon erroneous ideas about what counts as consent and harking back to a time when rape was regarded as a property crime against men. There might be legitimate arguments around the definitional questions and the extent to which presumption of innocence needs to be preserved but these have little to do with the broader moral objection. Accepting that a given instance was not rape based upon the current legal definition leaves the



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moral questions entirely untouched and our transcendental stands. The issue here is whether and to what extent legal definitions ought to track moral ones. Suppose we were, however, to encounter someone who had read too much Thornhill and Palmer. He (for it would invariably be a certain kind of young man) argues that rape by low status males of reproductive aged females was not wrong because it is based upon a psychological adaptation and therefore it is, in a sense, what such men are supposed to do. Even if per impossibile, the evidence stacked up, we would be entirely justified in brushing such an odious argument aside for the simple reason that it is epistemically and morally vicious. In other words, the argument cannot even get off the ground, because to do so would have to be a move within a moral point of view, and an appeal to putative evolutionary facts is clearly not such a move. One reason why the fact-value distinction has persisted is the obvious gap between such facts and our moral judgements. Even though naturalistic virtue ethics involves a rejection of the fact-value dichotomy, it does not disregard this explanatory gap. The problem is not the appeal to facts here, it is the appeal to the wrong sort of facts. It is unlikely that the question will ever be settled empirically about how extensive sexual violence was among our ancestors and it is possible, but probably unlikely, that it was ubiquitous. By whatever circuitous route we got here, we are a society with strong prohibitions on sexual violence. As Odenbaugh correctly notes there is an internal relation between the reasons why this prohibition exists and our more general attitude to relationships between men and women. Perhaps most importantly we inhabit cultures which consider fulfilling sexual and romantic relationships as constitutive parts of a good human life. There is considerable diversity here but such fulfilment, whatever particular form it takes, radically excludes coercion and any kind of instrumental relationship to our sexual partners. We may not always live up to these ideals but the very fact that this is a cause of regret is itself indicative of the existence of that internal relationship. It is not an empirical matter and no statistical finding will undermine it. On the contrary, finding that large numbers of women suffer coercion and manipulation should be an incitement to investigate the conditions under which this happens and to radically reform them precisely because we recognize that a good human life ought to be free of coercive control. In summary then, Odenbaugh’s argument misfires badly. Perhaps, however, one might respond that it fails because of the failure of Evolutionary Psychology. Odenbaugh has correctly identified a discrepancy between Foot and Thompson’s account of human nature and the respectable scientific account. He has simply misidentified the source of that discrepancy. There is a danger of a straw man fallacy in attempting to rebut an objection based upon junk science, so in the next section I will therefore turn to some objections based upon more respectable work in the life sciences.

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FITZPATRICK AND LEWEN’S OBJECTIONS Odenbaugh proceeds from a position which misunderstands what Foot is trying to do, he also seems to take the pretensions of Evolutionary Psychology seriously. Two critics who cannot be accused of either are FitzPatrick and Tim Lewens. Lewens is well respected as a philosopher of biology and is a coruscating critic of the pretensions of Evolutionary Psychology. Fitzpatrick, a former student of Foot’s, is sympathetic to virtue ethics at the normative level, while ultimately unconvinced by Foot’s naturalism. Lewens’ arguments are relatively brief while Fitzpatrick’s are extensive, so I will begin with Lewens. I will consider some of his earlier criticisms, which to some extent miss the mark, before returning to his later work in a subsequent section where his criticisms are better aimed. In his book The Biological Foundations of Bioethics Lewens gives a brief summary of Foot’s position. He focuses specifically on her account of biological function acknowledging that she has significantly refined the position she first articulated in 1961 where she claimed that ethical judgements were a kind of factual judgement about proper function. In her later refinement and expansion of her view she locates such judgements against the backdrop of our assessment of the form of life characteristic of that species. This means that while judgements about plants, nonhuman animals and human beings share a common form (Lewens somewhat misleadingly describes them of being the same ‘kind’), they differ in that moral judgements only apply to uses and misuses of practical reason. Thus it would be absurd to call malformed roots on a tree ‘evil’ or ‘wicked’. Nevertheless, we do not enter a radically new domain of evaluation when we use such epithets to discuss human wrongdoers. Lewens concludes that Foot aims “to provide a naturalized account of ethics by means of a naturalized theory of functions”.33 Clearly, much turns on how we understand the term ‘naturalized’ here. If we take it in the Standard Naturalist (Quinean) sense, this is a deep misunderstanding of Foot’s goals, at least by the time she writes Natural Goodness. But suppose we take a looser and more charitable interpretation of Lewens here and understand ‘naturalize’ in the more liberal sense of locating ethics squarely in the natural world we share with other living things then this could be correct. Still, Lewens’ main concern remains the stark distance between Foot’s account of function and anything to be found in the current literature. He also hints at some problems with her understanding of ‘species’, a point to which he will later return at much greater length. He suggests that Foot operates with a ‘welfare’ conception of function rather than the more standard biological ‘fitness’ conception of function. Roughly speaking, the distinction is that a welfare conception assesses functionality in relation to the wellbeing of an individual organism whereas a ‘fitness’ conception assesses function in relation to how it maximises inclusive fitness. How one interprets this will depend upon one’s conception of how evolution operates and upon what, but there is no currently respectable scientific option which identifies inclusive fitness with the flourishing of an individual organism over the course of its lifespan. While the two



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sometimes overlap, they often come apart, a point which William Fitzpatrick will rely on heavily in his lengthy critique of Foot. Foot-functions as we might call them are described in terms of a set of ‘Aristotelian necessities’ such as plants need for water and sunlight and lionesses need to teach the cubs how to kill. There is a clear analogy between the appearance of a plant or animal’s living well in the sense of doing all the sorts of things that it should do and human flourishing, but in order to do any serviceable work we need more than a mere analogy. It is crucial to Foot’s project that there is no radical separation between the sorts of evaluations of animal and plant functionality we make and what we do when we evaluate a human being’s exercise of practical reason. A human being needs to exercise practical reason well in order to live well in much the same way a plant needs water. Unless one’s life is characterized by the proper use of practical reason then one cannot be truly said to be living a good life. This raises an immediate problem, which I will simply flag here and discuss at greater length below. The exercise of practical reason is only one of many things that human beings do, even though it is clearly a distinctive feature of being human. The question is this: why among those many things we do, a large number of which are Aristotelian necessities, should we single out practical reason for special attention? Well, one answer might be that it is practical reason which distinguishes us from other animals. Placing such a central emphasis upon that which demarcates us from other animals, however, sets up a tension with the avowed aim of emphasising our continuity. It consequently tends to push the Natural Goodness Approach in the direction of a rapprochement with Kantianism. This ambivalence runs throughout the NGA and it is not one that I believe has the resources to resolve. I do think such a resolution is possible within a broadly neo-Aristotelian framework, but not within the parameters set by Foot and Thompson. Let us return for the time being, however, to the question of function. There is considerable scholarly controversy about how we might understand the range and scope of Aristotle’s ergon argument,34 but it seems plausible that Aristotle did indeed have a welfare conception of function and was therefore able to see a straightforward parallel between human flourishing and that of other living things. In order to show why this parallel is not so straightforward in a modern setting, Lewens highlights the tension between the goods of individual survival and that of reproduction.35 Different species solve this problem in different ways: some like us have a relatively small number of offspring and then devote resources to caring for them, whereas others have a large number who must fend for themselves. Although it would seem obvious which species affords a higher degree of welfare for its individual members and would thus be the sort of species we should choose were we them, there is no way of specifying abstractly which is more optimal from the perspective of maximising inclusive fitness. It is highly probable that the species with the vastly higher reproductive success is more optimal, even though its individual organisms live blighted lives. Elliot Sober describes this with the disturbing image of a stud bull, cooped up in some sort of enclosure.36 Such a bull is clearly not living well and yet from the narrow

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perspective of inclusive fitness, it is doing what it should do biologically. When we intervene, as we should, to prevent such horrific abuses of animal welfare, we may well inadvertently lower inclusive fitness quite dramatically but there is no sense in which we are acting badly in doing so. One might respond that a human moral good (namely concern for animal welfare) comes into conflict with the animal’s own biological good (understood as maximising its inclusive fitness), but this seems merely to highlight the gulf separating our moral judgements from our other sorts of judgements of living things and surreptitiously reintroduces the idea of the content of moral judgements being based on our preferences. Any naturalistic ethics worth its salt must surely be based upon facts about ourselves and the natural world, which includes but is not exhausted by the sorts of things we characteristically prefer. But if our ethical evaluations are exhausted by the sorts of things we happen to prefer, it is hard to see how such an approach differs from the expressivism and projectivism which Foot and her followers have so decisively rejected. There must be objective facts of the matter about the human good, in much the same way that there are objective facts of the matter about animal and plant goods, even if the goods in question differ in their complexity. Lewens questions whether the right sort of facts actually obtain. We make what appear to be perfectly factual judgements about defective traits in plants and animals all the time. What is more, these judgements appear to make implicit reference to some standard of flourishing—what we might think of as the nature of the species. The argument presented in this chapter assumes that the onus is on Foot to explain to us what sorts of things species’ natures are, what sorts of facts might make them one way rather than another, how we might decide between two competing judgements about the nature of a given species, and so forth. A biological account of functioning based on fitness seems wholly inappropriate to serve as a basis for claims about flourishing, and Foot’s own Aristotelian account is also inadequate. So while it is true to say that we make many confident claims about what makes for organic flourishing, we have yet to be given reasons for thinking that these judgements are of a factual nature.37

William Fitzpatrick expresses similar concerns in his book length response to Foot. As I pointed out above, Fitzpatrick states that he was a former student of hers, who admires her work greatly, and is broadly sympathetic to neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics. His Road To Damascus moment came when he started to read the work of Richard Dawkins and other sociobiologists and he came to see the profound tension between a welfare based account and a properly scientific understanding of function. Fitzpatrick takes as the starting point of his criticism the fact that Foot apparently relies on a version of Aristotle’s famous ergon or function argument. It was quite plausible to suppose, as Aristotle did, that biological functions exist for the benefit of the individual organism and that therefore by extension the sorts of functions indicated in a virtue ethical analysis are also those which conduce to the welfare of the person, broadly understood. This need not be understood in terms of narrow self-interest. As Geach’s analogy with the bee sting highlights, the virtues may be more concerned with our well-being qua good citizen.



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Fitzpatrick’s objection goes deeper, however. He reminds us that from the perspective of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, the well-being of the individual, or the group to which it belongs, is only of relevance insofar as it coincides with the ‘interests’ of the genes of which it is the vehicle. That is why the natural world is full of examples such as the elephant seals which Fitzpatrick introduces where the well-being of an individual organism clearly plays second fiddle to the propagation of its genes. Bull elephant seals engage in violent battles which determine who will get to mate. These often end in severe injury or death. Male elephant seals, for example, do not go about the business of reproduction in the way that one would expect if they had been designed by a benevolent creator interested primarily in the welfare of elephant seals. They are found not merely pursuing mates in a way necessary to keep the species going (meeting what we might call the survival and reproductive needs of the species), but expending a great deal of energy fighting with one another in an attempt to win exclusive control of a harem—hell-bent, as it were, on out-reproducing their peers, even at the risk of significant personal injury.38

This goes against our intuitive understanding of how the natural world ought to work but is consistent with the ‘selfish gene’ approach to evolution. Fitzpatrick treats this interpretation of evolutionary theory as uncontroversial. The basic structure of his argument is that if the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is true, then this means that there is an unbridgeable divide between the folk welfare theory of function, upon which Foot relies, and a properly scientific understanding of function. Like all appeals to current science, Fitzpatrick’s argument is a hostage to fortune. That is, if some key element of the scientific picture upon which he relies turns out to be inadequate, then his argument is seriously undermined. His argument is indeed vulnerable in at least two key areas: firstly, the gene-centric view of evolution was already coming under serious and sustained challenge at the time he wrote the book. It no longer has the status of unquestioned orthodoxy that it once had. Secondly, his argument relies heavily on the claim that the theory of function associated with the gene-centric view, namely, the selected effects theory is the only game in town. I will argue that the situation is much more complex than he suggests. Before doing so, it is worth sounding a caveat. Even if the gene-centric account of evolution turns out to be inadequate and even if the selected effects account of function is only one of many respectable scientific accounts, this clearly does not automatically rehabilitate the welfare view of function. It is entirely possible for both to be wrong. Moreover, as we shall see below, the welfare view of function faces more severe challenges that are not so heavily reliant upon a particular piece of current scientific thinking but go to the core of the claim that one can make a strong analogy between moral virtue and good function.

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NOTES   1.  Another argument I have frequently encountered in discussions with Footians is that there is nothing to prevent them from engaging with empirical science. They could do, they should do, but generally they do not and this fact is highly indicative. One of the few attempts to engage with the scientific community was Thompson’s review of an article in BBS but rather than engaging in dialogue, Thompson appeared to use it as an opportunity for questionable humour along the lines of Derrida’s infamous engagement with Searle. Cf. Michael Thompson, “The Living Individual and Its Kind,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21, no. 4 (1998): 591–591, doi:10.1017/S0140525X98461272.  2. In the European tradition this is represented by the Hermeneutic challenge in the social and historical sciences and by phenomenology and hermeneutics in philosophy. In the English speaking world, the standard bearers were largely Wittgensteinians.   3.  A demand oddly acceded to by those Wittgensteinian quietists who agree that philosophers have nothing worth saying.   4.  For those unfamiliar or needing a refresher in addition to Foot’s own work, which can at times be unclear, John Hacker-Wright has produced an excellent commentary. John HackerWright, Philippa Foot’s Moral Thought (A&C Black, 2013).   5.  James Conant, personal communication.   6.  Any moral philosopher who has been in a coma for the last three decades and is wondering where all these discussions of virtue have come from can do no worse than to read the following potted historical summary. Anne Baril and Allan Hazlett, “The Revival of Virtue Ethics,” The Cambridge History of Philosophy 2015 (1945): 223–236.  7. Foot, Natural goodness, p. 25.  8. Foot, Natural goodness, p. 26.  9. Rosalind Hursthouse, “The grammar of goodness in foot’s ethical naturalism,” in Philippa Foot on goodness and virtue, pp. 25–46 (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2018), p. 25. 10.  Hacker-Wright, “How natural”. 11.  The enthusiasm for X-Phi seems mercifully to have waned a little. For a sympathetic yet critical account of the movement, see Kwame Anthony Appiah, Experiments in ethics (Harvard University Press, 2008). 12.  Julia Annas, “1. Virtue Ethics: What Kind of Naturalism?” in Virtue ethics, old and new, pp. 11–29 (Cornell University Press, 2018). 13.  Hans Fink, “Three sorts of naturalism,” John McDowell: Experience, Norm, and Nature (2008): 52–71. 14. J. McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” in Mind, Value and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998). I cite its origins in a Festschrift since it is often thought to be a devastating critique of Foot. As Rosalind Hursthouse pointed out (personal communication) it is unlikely that McDowell would write a piece in such a setting if he entirely lacked sympathy with Foot’s project. 15.  J. McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” p. 168. 16.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Susan Dunn ed.), The Social Contract and the Discourses New Haven: Yale University Press [Re-Thinking the Western Tradition], 2002), pp. 95–6 17.  McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” p. 176. 18.  McDowell, “Two Sorts,” p. 176. 19.  McDowell, “Two Sorts,” p. 173. 20.  McDowell, “Two Sorts,” p. 173.



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21.  McDowell, “Two Sorts,” p. 195. 22.  McDowell, “Two Sorts,” p. 187. 23.  McDowell, “Two Sorts,” p. 187. 24. Michael Thompson, “Three Degrees of Natural Goodness,” https://sites.pitt. edu/~mthompso/three.pdf. 25.  Jay Odenbaugh, “Nothing in ethics makes sense except in the light of evolution? Natural goodness, normativity, and naturalism,” Synthese 194, no. 4 (2017): p. 1031. 26. John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The psychological foundations of culture,” The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture 19 (1992). 27.  There are some issues about our epistemic access to them given standard views of perception which I will address in a later chapter. 28.  Peter Geach, The virtues: the Stanton lectures 1973–74 (CUP Archive, 1977). 29.  Odenbaugh, “Nothing Makes Sense,” p. 1036. 30.  Michael Thompson, "Apprehending human form." Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 54 (2004): 47–74. 31. R. Hamilton, “How to get real about rape: Evolutionary psychology, coercion and consent” Contemporary Issues in Law 6, no. 1 (2003): 79–91. Richard Hamilton, “The Darwinian cage: Evolutionary psychology as moral science,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, no. 2 (2008): 105–25. The most devastating criticisms are summarized and developed in David Buller’s magisterial Adapting minds: Evolutionary psychology and the persistent quest for human nature (MIT press, 2006). 32.  Odenbaugh, "Nothing Makes Sense," p. 1042. 33.  Tim Lewens, The biological foundations of bioethics (OUP Oxford, 2015), p. 169. 34. Some of the controversies are summarized in Samuel H. Baker, “The Concept of Ergon: Towards an Achievement Interpretation of Aristotle’s ‘Function Argument’.” Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 48 (2015). 35.  This is a tension Philip Kitcher had identified much earlier in Thomas Hurka’s perfectionist virtue ethics. 36.  Elliot Sober, “Evolution, population thinking, and essentialism,” Philosophy of Science 47, no. 3 (1980): 350–383. 37. Lewens, Biological Foundations, p. 174. 38. William Joseph FitzPatrick, Teleology and the Norms of Nature (Taylor & Francis, 2000), p. 72.

4 The Possibility of a Transcendental Naturalism

The force of arguments we have surveyed thus far suggest there is a straightforward competition between the account of function that Foot offers and properly scientific ones. If so, this is clearly a conflict that an armchair biologist could not possibly win. While Aristotle could not have anticipated the Darwinian revolution, a modern-day naturalist must take it into account and reject his view of biological function. The facts simply do not support it and reason requires that we abandon it. Two of Foot’s defenders, Micah Lott and John Hacker-Wright dispute this argumentative strategy. They suggest that it profoundly misconstrues the nature of Foot’s project. She does not rely upon empirical or quasi-empirical claims about the natural world and our place within it. Rather, she is engaged in an altogether different enterprise, one which Hursthouse emphasizes when she reminds us that the original title of Foot’s book favoured ‘grammar’ over nature. In their responses to criticisms based on biology, Foot’s defenders argue that her project is thus a logical or conceptual one, or in terms that Michael Thompson favours, it is an attempt to outline the conditions of possibility of ethical discourse and is thus transcendental rather than empirical. For the sake of brevity, I will summarize Lott and Hacker-Wright’s response, since they are very similar. Although Foot uses terms like ‘species’ and ‘function’ they should not be construed as being used in anything like the biological sense. They serve the goals not of an empirical biological theory but of a logical or conceptual theory. She is attempting to elucidate what one must say about living beings, if one is to make sense of them qua living beings. Crucially, this project takes logical priority over any kind of empirical investigation. In his trenchant and thorough rebuttal of Fitzpatrick, Lott argues that “A natural goodness view is not impugned by an evolutionary perspective. Nor can Aristotelian life form judgments be replaced by an evolutionary account of living things. Rather, in order to even have a 69

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topic for evolutionary explanation, we must already be engaged in life form thought of the sort described by Thompson and Foot”.1 He emphasizes that the neo-Aristotelian account developed by Thompson and Foot is a thesis about the representation of living things. This seems to suggest that any claim made within the context of that account is a purely formal one without empirical content. As we saw earlier Thompson develops this theme most explicitly in his paper “Apprehending Human Form” where he attacks what he calls “an exaggerated empiricism” with his example of the marine biologist discovering new jellyfish. He compares this investigative process with one a field linguist might engage in when trying to understand and classify a novel language. Indeed, he goes further and suggests that . . . a life form is like a language that physical matter can speak. It is in the light of judgments about the life form that I assign meaning and significance and point and position to the parts and operations of individual organisms that present themselves to me. As French or English are to the people and brains of which they take possession, so are things like umbrella jelly and cross jelly to the physical particle of which they take possession. And just as there is no speech—no discourse, no telling and believing people, no knowledge by testimony—without a language that is spoken, which is to say, without a framework for interpreting what is going on between the speakers, so there is no life without a life form, which is to say, without a framework for interpreting the goings-on in the individual organism.2

This gives logical priority to the lifeform over that of the individual organism in the same way ‘language’ allegedly takes priority over the doings and sayings of individual speakers of that language.3 Based on these considerations, Thompson then sets out to outline what he calls his “anti-empiricist theses”: The concept life form is a pure or a priori, perhaps a logical, concept. The concept human, as we human beings have it, is an a priori concept attaching to a particular life form. A mature human being is typically in possession of a non-empirical singular representation of one individual organism. Individual human beings are sometimes in possession of non-observational knowledge of contingent facts about one individual organism. Human beings are characteristically in possession of some general substantive knowledge of the human life form which is not founded empirically on observation of members of their kind, and thus not “biological”.4

He contrasts this with what he takes to be the empiricist theses which claim that we arrive at our knowledge of the human form by observation. Much turns here on precisely what Thompson understands by ‘observation’. It is also worth noting his felt need to place the term biological in scare quotes. I think that this speaks to two closely related problems which are apparent in the vivid example with which he opens the discussion. He seems to fail to distinguish between the untutored observations of an amateur and the skilled observation of someone initiated into a professional discipline such as marine biology. All of Thompson’s examples are taken



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from things like nature documentaries and textbooks, which are designed with a very specific pedagogic purpose in mind. There is a world of difference between these and the professional journals in which science actually gets done. The thought that there is something distinctive about living things is what gives the biological sciences their subject matter. This could entail some form of vitalism but acknowledging the distinctiveness of animate matter need not entail positing mysterious lifeforces and is entirely consistent with a belief in what I have earlier described as minimal compositional physicalism. Whether, and to what extent, biology is reducible to physics is debatable but one thing that most parties to that debate agree upon is that we are nowhere close yet to a successful reduction. Much of the appeal of Thompson’s argument stems from the recognition that we are doing something distinctive when we conceive of living things qua living, whether that be as armchair watchers of nature documentaries, or empirical scientists in the field. It is quite possible to see organisms from a chemical or a physical perspective and there are very important areas of science which do precisely this, but a large portion of the life sciences do not proceed from the bottom-up in this way but rather begin by recognizing that living things are not simply physical or chemical items with a peculiar structure. Living things are beings for whom to exist is to live and whose structure and organization is for the sake of living. The jellyfish scientist observes the activities of his specimen not in the way an astronomer might observe the movements of a star but rather to see how its movements integrate with its broader form of life. Is it approaching the light, avoiding a potential predator or seeking a mate. Merely physical objects (including dead organisms) do not literally ‘approach’, ‘avoid’ or ‘seek’. A vocabulary involving such terms and various others is not optional and animal behavioral studies were hampered for a generation by what Franz de Waal has called “anthropodenial”, the refusal to use terms which are perfectly appropriate in a given setting for fear of anthropomorphising one’s subject. As Ellen Crist’s work has shown this is a charge that could not be levelled at Darwin.5 Lurking at the background of all this is whether this way of talking about living things is simply an inescapable feature of our conceptual scheme or whether something about the world forces this way of talking upon us. Fortunately, it is not a question which we need to resolve here. We can remain agnostic while acknowledging that it is just not possible to conceptualise living things in purely physical or chemical terms. This is true, a forteriori, when we come to consider the distinctively human form of life, for it makes no sense to think of living human beings without thinking of ourselves as beings for whom life consists in the exercise of our embodied rational agency. This is the core of sense in Thompson’s argument, as far as I understand it. Thompson and his various followers wish to insist that this logical insight is a priori and devoid of any empirical content. For instance, in his satisfyingly comprehensive reply to Brullmann, Hacker-Wright openly acknowledges that “there are some affinities [. . .] between this form of naturalism [i.e., the NGA] and Kantian approaches which are avowedly non-naturalistic” and that this “stems from the

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importance both views place on practical self-consciousness”. The crucial difference, he suggests, is that whereas, for Kantians, that self-consciousness represents an awareness of “bare rational agency” for Thompson it represents “self-awareness of a form of life”. That self-awareness also contains within it as a constitutive part an awareness of other living things as living. It is an awareness that is obtained not by empirical observation but rather through participation in a particular form of life. In the human case, this is the life of rational agency characterized by the power of thinking. What we require in order to cash this out for the purposes of moral philosophy is not what Hacker-Wright further argues, “scientific anthropology”, but rather “a philosophical anthropology”, which differs from the former in that it “takes our embodied agency as a transcendental fixed point; thus, whatever we say about our nature, it is an elucidation of what we take ourselves to be from the standpoint of our practical self-consciousness”. In the context of developing this point, Hacker-Wright gives, in my opinion, one of the best answers to a troubling question that confronts the Foot/Thompson project. That is, even if they are broadly correct, does it have any useful implications in thinking about virtue and the good life? His answer is in terms of the distinctively Aristotelian doctrine of human powers. Unlike Kantian ethics, the aim of an Aristotelian moral theory is to demonstrate how one can come to stand in the right relation to one’s appetites through the proper exercise of practical reason. While the “Kantian approach leave us at a remove from our appetitive powers” the Aristotelian virtues, properly understood, require us “to bring our appetites, which aim at particular apparent goods, into alignment with our overall conception of the good” and this good is not a merely arbitrary preference but is built into the very nature of ourselves as embodied rational agents. He also correctly acknowledges that part of this will involve a recognition that “we cannot consistently think of ourselves as embodied agents, that is, as creatures for whom rational agency is a natural norm, without recognizing [that] certain social conditions are necessary to sustain that agency”. As should be apparent, I am wholeheartedly in agreement with Hacker-Wright here and I also agree that he has identified what is distinctive and superior about the Aristotelian approach when contrasted with its Kantian competitors. It might seem nit-picking and churlish to emphasize where my naturalist humanism differs from the Natural Goodness Approach, but I believe this is important if we are to extract the rational kernel from mystical shell that is the Thompson view. As the allusion to Marx makes clear, my issue with the Thompson view is its idealism. I will argue that it is not possible to satisfactorily distinguish the Aristotelian account of virtue from the Kantian one, in the manner that Hacker-Wright correctly feels important to do, without jettisoning that idealism, or in other words, being consistently naturalistic. In order to do this, I will begin by discussing Lewens’ response to Lott and Hacker-Wright. This is based upon a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the Foot/Thompson view than his earlier criticism and it is all the more powerful for that. Lewens approaches the question from an



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overtly Kantian perspective and thereby presses the question of how precisely the Aristotelian position represents a genuine and plausible alternative. This position represents a particular challenge when set alongside the influential work of Christine Korsgaard who has suggested that many Aristotelian insights about virtue can be incorporated into a refined Kantianism. Lewens begins his response by acknowledging that many earlier criticisms of Foot and Thomspon (including perhaps his own) are badly aimed in that they tended to take them as making quasi-empirical claims about biological function and species which are at odds with well-established scientific consensus. Nevertheless, he insists, the NGA stands or falls on whether there are objective natural norms, even if those norms are not empirically discernible but transcendental. He argues that Foot and Thompson are ultimately committed to “a broadly realist position, whereby there are facts of the matter about species natures, to which our judgements answer with greater or lesser success”.6 He recognizes the distance that Thompson and his followers insist upon between their account and strictly biological accounts of species and functions does immunise them “against refutation by appeal to biological work: they have quite distinct concerns to those of (for example) evolutionary theorists”.7 But in doing so they open themselves up to a different problem, that of underdetermination. If empirical biological facts do not form the basis of species natures “it becomes unclear what makes it a case for Foot and Thompson that a species nature is one way, rather than another” and perhaps more importantly, why? The underdetermination problems cashes out in the following way. Suppose we accept the Footians’ claim that they are doing something unrelated to what evolutionary theorists are doing and their uses of terms like ‘species’ and ‘function’ should not be evaluated by those lights. This raises the obvious question of why they should continue to use terms that have established scientific uses in idiosyncratic ways as this can only lead to confusion. Lewens suggests that one solution would be to talk about ‘T-species’ that is, lifeforms in Thompson and Foot’s sense rather than the more familiar biological usage. This still encounters problems. Lewens raises an infamous example of anti-Irish racism that Darwin approvingly cites: “The careless, squalid unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits”. Lewens points out that this judgement seems very much like the sorts of atemporal general description based upon a common noun, which Thompson appeals to. The obvious rejoinder to such examples is that biology does not recognize racialised categories. There are no subspecies among human beings, and even if there were, it is highly unlikely that they would map onto arbitrary racial categories. Suppose, however, someone was to claim that while it is true that “the Irishman” does not denote a biological species or subspecies, it does denote a lifeform in Thompson’s sense. It is unclear what grounds someone might refute this claim. Lewens comments: My general concern is that since Thompson and Foot explicitly deny that there is any simple relationship between natural historical judgements and statistical facts, and since they also deny that natural historical judgements can be understood in terms of articu-

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lating the sorts of evolutionary function claims that reduce claims about malfunction to claims about regimes of natural selection, it is unclear what makes it the case that some natural historical judgements are true, while other competing ones are false.8

One possible Footian response might be to state that the operative natural historical judgement here would be the human lifeform, understood as embodied practical reason, and this is couched at a much greater level of generality than racist statements about Irishmen. The trouble with this response is that it is hard to see how it could be detailed enough to include the virtues, without also including problematic judgements about Irishmen, since a significant part of the content of the virtues includes an appeal to a socio-cultural setting. The relevant virtues for Irishmen (including myself) need to include the virtues that were necessary to form and sustain us in a climate of racism, oppression and intergenerational trauma where statements like the one Darwin cited would be treated as commonplaces or jokes that we were expected to laugh at for fear of being thought humourless. The racist judgement above is both morally and epistemically vicious for sure but it is difficult to see how an appeal to the human form of life is sufficient to identify why that is so without bringing in significant empirical detail. That is, it is the empirical detail which is doing the required work rather than a more general conception of how human beings should live. The appeal to such a very general conception of human life runs into the obvious problem of human diversity, which itself is a more particular instance of the diversity characteristic of the living world. One way this issue presses itself on naturalistic virtue ethics is the disability objection raised by Scott Woodcock. Put simply, the objection goes as follows. Foot has suggested that we treat moral defects in exactly the same way that we treat defects in plants and other animals. But how do we then deal with the various non-moral defects that may afflict human beings? Either one bites the bullet and admits that disability is a defect in exactly the same way that a vice is, which is a clearly repugnant conclusion, or else we surreptitiously reintroduce the special sense of moral evaluation which Foot was keen to reject. The Footian response to this objection is that while judgements of defect take the same form, they differ in content. We use the same sorts of generalisations, about say human limbs, as we do about courage, but one pertains to brute physiology while the other relates solely to the will. Someone who lacks courage is obviously not defective in the same way that someone who lacks a limb might be.9 As it stands, I think it is perfectly reasonable to distinguish different ways in which we might evaluate a person’s fitness for the purpose of living a properly human life. Some of these will be shared with other animals. We do not tend to live well when deprived of nutrition or adequate shelter whatever nobility of character enduring such lack may summon forth. But there are obviously traits which distinguish us among the animals such as our capacity for articulate speech and the exercise of practical rationality. As it stands, the disability objection can be successfully fended off, if it relates primarily to physical disabilities. A person may arguably be defective with respect to some aspect of gross physiology and yet be capable of leading a flourishing



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life. To think otherwise is simple bigotry. If they are capable of living a flourishing life it is because they are able to develop the virtues despite, or even perhaps because, of their impairments. But what if the impairment in question affects their will? That is, what if there is some form of cognitive impairment that profoundly affects the ability to properly exercise practical reason. Aristotle himself was mindful of this possibility. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he talks of those who, through no fault of their own, lack the capacity to acquire the virtues. Very perceptively he suggests that this may come about through prenatal damage (or we might add congenital) or it may be a result of a brutal infancy. These ‘brutes’ differ from both the incontinent and the vicious in that they lack the capacity to fully exercise their rational will rather than a weakness or misuse of it.10 Aristotle would have no qualms about calling such people less than fully human, since notoriously he is rather narrow in which members of our species would fall under that description. But in our more egalitarian times, this presents a challenge. Clearly no one wishes to say that someone with a physical disability is less than fully human so the same ought to go mutatitis mutandis for someone with a cognitive impairment, even one that affects his capacity to exercise the virtues. The crucial difference, of course, is that viciousness is blameworthy in ways that cognitive impairment is not but to simply assert this is question begging. Given this problem of underdetermination, Lewens suggests that Foot and Thompson will have difficulty responding to the following problem: even if it turns out that we do conceive species natures along neo-Aristotelian lines, “work on folk essentialism gives no reason to think that there are any facts about these natures”.11 In other words, what Foot and Thompson have done is not discover some new set of transcendental facts ‘out there’ in the world of the kind required by a robust normative realism. At best, they have elucidated the contours of our folk psychological projections onto the natural world. This may be construed in Humean terms as merely a matter of custom and habit and thus open to the possibility of descent into corrosive relativism. Or, it could be understood along more Kantian lines as inescapable features of our shared conceptual scheme. It therefore may support a fairly robust objectivism, just not full-blown realism. Lewens proposes that his own Kantian constructivism allows us to have all of the benefits of the Foot/Thompson view without some of its problems. Above all, it allows us to retain what is the “most compelling positive argument in favour of the neo-Aristotelian position” namely the thesis that “claims about life-forms are conceptually prior to the sorts of claims that biological scientists might make, and are unavoidable if we wish to characterize some part of the world around us as living at all”.12 However, it differs from the Foot/Thompson view in denying that there are mind-independent biological facts that would underwrite our normative judgements. Rather, “we organise the unruly empirical mess of the biological world by projecting a finite number of proper developmental outcomes onto what would otherwise be an unmanageable diversity”.13

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One quick response that a Footian might make is to deny that they are seeking any such foundation. That is, she might fall back on the austere position that Foot often gestures towards and which Hursthouse endorses. Neo-Aristotelian naturalism’s only ambition is to make sense of the logical grammar of our moral judgements. Such a view sounds much more like Wittgenstein on a particularly bad day rather than anything recognizably Aristotelian. Perhaps more importantly, unless one finds such Wittgensteinian quietism compelling, which most philosophers do not, then there seems to be little to recommend such a view as a contribution to moral philosophy.14 It might, for example, help us to see how our moral judgements hang together and to identify inconsistencies and incoherence, but any normative moral theory worth its salt should do this. Indeed, it is unclear what any kind of theory brings here that is not already provided by the healthy exercise of our practical reason, an observation which motivates austerity in the first place. What seems lacking is what Nancy Snow once evocatively called “normative oomph”.15 What passes for anti-foundationalism is more often than not a healthy reaction against Standard Naturalism. Anti-foundationalists are troubled by the idea that our normative judgements might be supplanted by some appeal to bald empirical facts. I do not need to revisit the lengthy discussion we have had about what precisely is wrong with that way of seeing things only to note that the Foot/Thompson project is not strictly speaking anti-foundationalist because to take this literally would mean nihilism. They are offering a different kind of foundation, namely a transcendental rather than an empirical one. In Hacker-Wright’s very attractive version of that project, the bedrock upon which our moral judgements rest is the fact of our constitution as embodied rational agents. I think in one sense this is absolutely correct. But in order to be of any service this needs to be more than merely a slogan or a placeholder for an explanation. The best way of understanding this is to attempt to sketch a Footian response to Lewens, one which recognizes the need for normative oomph and therefore eschews austerity. Let us therefore return to the very beginning of Foot’s project and consider why she might be unwilling to accept even a highly sophisticated form of projectivism such as that which Lewens proposes. Recall that the initial impetus for Foot’s rejection of the then fashionable doctrines of emotivism and prescriptivism lay in her revulsion of the Nazi atrocities. She rightly felt that to treat our revulsion as merely a preference, however widely distributed that preference was, does not do such reactions justice. Let us consider this case in greater depth, however. It is not our ‘considered judgement’ that the Shoah was uniquely evil but something more like a precondition for anything that counts as a moral viewpoint. It is not something that we could simply agree to differ upon were we to encounter someone who did not find it immoral. Partly for that reason, as with our earlier rape example, we are more likely to encounter those that denied it took place, or that it was an intentional policy or others who accepted that it took place but attempt to mitigate its impact by placing it on the same level as, say, Stalin’s crimes. The most sophisticated version of these



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positions is represented by the so-called Revisionist historians who argue that Hitler’s policies emerged as part of a perfectly understandable desire to combat Communism. Those who dispute this need not be apologists for Stalinism. They may fully accept that Stalin was a monster but also acknowledge there is a distinct evil to the Shoah which one does not find in the clumsier brutality of the Soviet regime. Part of that evil lies in the way that Jews and others were singled out for destruction for no other reason than that they were Jews. There is some reasonable discussion to be had about whether an excessive focus on Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry can tend to downplay his crimes against Roma/Sinti and various other minorities, but the fact remains that Jews were the Nazi’s primary target about whom they had a monomaniacal focus. Moreover, it was done in a systematic and organized way that could only be possible in a country with a highly developed scientific and technical culture. It is conceivable that Hitler himself and some of those in his close coterie were mentally ill.16 Nevertheless, even if this were the case, the enterprise only took place because of accomplices and opportunists who were perfectly sane. The serious and interesting ethical questions surround those who were complicit in his evils. A key figure in this is Martin Heidegger. Apart from his most devoted apologists, the philosophical professions are divided on whether Heidegger is merely a coward or if he was truly despicable. I fall into the latter camp. Is my belief that Heidegger is despicable an objective judgement of his moral and intellectual viciousness, the sort of thing, for instance, that I could conceivably be mistaken about, should certain facts turn out to be different? What is at stake in determining whether someone like Heidegger is genuinely vicious rather than mentally ill or an unwitting accomplice is a decision about whether he has used his practical reason improperly, and in order to have any bite this must mean more than simply we disapprove of his various decisions. It is crucially a judgement which, if correct, ought to be adopted by all reasonable people and which means that his apologists are simply mistaken or deluded. In Foot and Thompson’s version of things, when I say “Martin Heidegger is a despicable human being” I am evaluating his choices and actions in relation to the characteristically human form of life. Moreover, to return to Foot’s example, when I do so, I do not adopt a different logical tone of voice from the one I use when deciding that the oak tree in my garden has some kind of blight. Just as a tree does better in the absence of blight, a philosopher does better by not enthusiastically endorsing National Socialism and then refusing to acknowledge his errors when the full scale of its horrors were revealed. Let us recall at this point, Woodcock’s disability objection to virtue ethics. The gist of the objection is this: either we should take Foot literally and treat our moral evaluations as exactly the same as our evaluation of other kinds of allegedly natural defects or we surreptitiously introduce the special sense of moral judgements that she has tried so scrupulously to avoid. The first horn of this dilemma leads us to some particularly repugnant conclusions surrounding the issue of disability. The second horn seems to fall back on the sort of prior ethical evaluation which Foot has explicitly eschewed by taking natural normativity as her starting point. The trouble with this option is that it leaves her open to the charge that her view is

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question-begging by “tacitly appealing to an independent ethical standpoint to sanitize the theory’s normative implications”.17 I think the first horn represents a genuine challenge and in what follows I am going to strengthen that challenge before attempting to respond to it. I think the second horn is less of a challenge because to some extent it involves a typical misunderstanding of what the Footians are attempting to do. However, in responding to it, Footians leave themselves open to a bigger problem which is that posed by Lewens. Foot asks us to accept that my judgement of Heidegger, if correct, is correct in the same way as my judgement about a tree’s roots. It is important to remember that in both cases, I may be mistaken. All evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, Heidegger may turn out to have been a perfectly fine fellow and what I took to be blight on my tree may actually be a harmless fungus. Remember it is not the content of any particular judgement which Foot and Thompson are concerned with but its logical form. Whether I get the content of a particular judgement right or wrong is primarily a matter of empirical fact. It might turn out, for instance, the documents reveal that Heidegger was secretly working for the resistance and used his position as cover for this. In order to maintain the subterfuge, he needed to be seen to publicly and enthusiastically endorse Hitler in his infamous Freiburg address. Even after the war, he needed to keep this fact concealed to protect others. But the criteria by which I determine what facts to take account of and which to disregard is given by a general conception of human beings whose form of life is inescapably bound up with our being embodied rational agents. If I am correct in my assessment that Heidegger is a despicable human being, I am drawing upon the fact that he misused his undeniably brilliant intellect in a particularly grotesque way. But I earlier mooted the possibility that Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich could have been afflicted by some form of mental illness, for example, paranoid schizophrenia. Were that to be the case, while I would continue to consider their actions and choices as despicable I may reserve judgement on them as human beings largely because I consider their illness the author of their actions rather than the men themselves. Different facts bear on cases in different ways. Heidegger, the highly clandestine resistance fighter, would be admirable whereas a Heidegger in the grip of paranoid schizophrenia would be the subject of our pity rather than our contempt in the way that Heidegger the overly ambitious and deeply dishonest academic was. Mental illness is a problematic concept so let us change the focus slightly. Suppose that brain autopsies revealed that Heidegger had a slow growing tumour that impinged on the parts of his brain that would normally be involved in moral reasoning. This manifests itself in a symptomatology which is indistinguishable from psychosis. Depending upon the severity of his condition, we would not consider him vicious under those circumstances since he does not meet the required threshold for agency. One of the reasons why the concept of mental illness is problematic is the fact that, as anti-psychiatrists such as Thomas Szasz have urged, the concept comes overladen with a heavy dose of normativity. Such a problem does not allegedly affect straightforward neurological defects. I think matters are a great deal more complex than such a simple distinction suggests but for now let us assume that some version of Szasz’s distinction holds.



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In my proposed example, I would want to say that Heidegger was vicious, whereas my alternate Heidegger (call him Schmeidegger) was merely damaged. But this appears to run against Foot’s insistence that my moral evaluations are no different in kind from my evaluations of other kinds of natural defects. Heidegger’s defective will is defective in the same way that Schmeidegger’s brain and the roots of a tree are defective. This is not how brains, tree roots or phenomenologist’s wills are supposed to operate. But clearly there is something different about how we evaluate the historical Heidegger from how we might evaluate a putatively brain damaged Schmeidegger. In the Schmeidegger case, a great deal would depend upon the extent to which the damage impaired his rational agency. Let us suppose that it did so in a significant way such that in its absence Schmeidegger would have been merely yet another careerist male philosopher with unpleasant political views. He would fall out of the circle of moral evaluation in much the same way a natural disaster does. His decisions and actions would be the product, not of him but of the tumour. One workable solution might focus on the ways in which Heidegger is blameworthy in ways that neither tree roots or the brain damaged Schmeidegger is. The problem here, while there is clearly something to this idea, it risks shifting the focus to the attitudes of the person doing the evaluation rather than on to the subject of the evaluation. Heidegger’s will calls forth a form of disapproval that the tree root or the Shmeiddeger’s does not. In other words, it seems to imply a form of projectivism. We are gesturing towards Hume and his “stirrings in the breast”; Foot and Thompson would therefore surely want to resist that move and state that if Heidegger’s actions are blameworthy it is not simply that a non-negligible number of observers happen to find them blameworthy. After all, something objectively blameworthy should be so, even where most people do not find it thus. What makes Heidegger vicious is that his actions stem not from a lack of certain powers as would be the case with Schmeidegger but that he has them and misuses them. Let us leave hypotheticals and return to concrete historical events. We hold our actual Nazi sympathisers morally accountable because we think that they are significantly responsible for how they use the powers that they have. Neither Heidegger nor Hitler lacked practical reason. Although Hitler was an intellectual mediocrity, he did possess considerable strategic nous and Heidegger’s stature as a great, if flawed, thinker is unquestionable. If moral blame is to have anything other than a cathartic function, it seems reasonable to go deeper and ask why someone has become vicious, how he might have been otherwise and what we might learn from it. When virtue ethicists emphasize the importance of moral exemplars, we need not restrict our attention only to the good ones. There may in fact be more to learn from the vicious as from the virtuous. If we consider Hitler and Heidegger to be vicious, it is because we consider that they made a series of bad choices. Without venturing too deeply into murky metaphysical discussions of free will and determinism: this claim seems to imply that they could and should have chosen otherwise.18 It is worth noting that our moral evaluation of Hitler and Heidegger is to some degree autonomous of our evaluation of their respective intellectual capacities. Heidegger’s superior intellect may go some way towards explaining the manner in

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which Heidegger’s viciousness differs from Hitler. Hitler and his associates were vicious in the way that rather dull and unimaginative people tend to be, whereas Heidegger was vicious in the vain and self-serving manner that only an intellectual of his calibre can be. Nevertheless, most of the work here is being done by empirical historical and biographical details (and in our Schmeidegger example, neurological). It remains unclear what work is being done by an appeal to the human form of life or to rational agency as such. Even if we grant that they form the backdrop against which moral evaluations are made. We evaluate human rational agency as it is embodied and situated in particular historical contexts. For example, we do not praise a German officer who happened to be on holiday in England in 1939 for their forbearance in not participating in atrocities in Poland. Even if we grant Thompson’s claim that we make such claims against a transcendental background of natural historical judgements the question then arises: as opposed to what? Well, one option is that our moral judgements are not mere arbitrary acts of will as the prescriptivists and existentialists supposed. The other is that they are not made against the criteria of disembodied rational agency as such as in the Kantian formulation. Why should we prefer the Foot-Thompson option over either of these? So to call this background transcendental is to claim that this is how moral judgements must be made. If there are facts to be ascertained then they are not ascertained directly by observation but form part of the background to our moral judgements. Another compelling reason to accept the Footian position is the unpalatability of its alternatives. I believe that the alternatives offered are in effect two rival versions of projectivism: an expressivist and a rationalist one. I also think that the Footians are right to reject both since they both imply a picture of the human being as in some significant sense standing at one step removed from the rest of the natural world. They both, in effect, offer versions of the Placement Problem since neither accept that normativity fits comfortably in the natural world. As Annas notes, this is particularly odd in the case of expressivism since most of its leading advocates claim to be motivated by a regard for the natural sciences and a desire to be consistently naturalistic. In the Standard Naturalist version of this, that requires us to either eliminate normativity or reduce it to something more tractable. But as we have seen, such a project places in jeopardy the very scientific norms which those who claim to be advancing a properly scientific view of the world must appeal in order for their project to even get off the ground. The Kantians have less of a problem in this regard since their project is consistently anti-realist. Their appeal is not to the world as science reveals it to actually be but to the rational norms which make our understanding of that world possible. It is those selfsame norms of rationality which also make morality possible. While there must be a real world that is ultimately responsible to and for our representations of it, our representations can only ever be approximations of it. Those representations are not arbitrary however. They are themselves subject to objective norms of correctness. So what the Kantian view offers, which the Expressivist one does not, is some guarantee of objectivity. It is not corrosive of the structure of



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practical rationality, but it comes at a cost. The objectivity in questions rests not upon some appeal to the world out there but is in an important sense internal to the structure of rationality itself. These norms are constitutive of what it means to be a rational agent in the first place. One could not will them otherwise on pain of contradiction and ultimately one’s dissolution as an agent. The moral epistemology in question is therefore coherentist. The question the Footians must therefore answer is how their version is superior, without committing themselves to some questionable claims about the biological world. A Kantian would condemn Heidegger no less vociferously than an Aristotelian would and this would be more than the vigorous assertion of a commonly shared attitude. The difference would lie presumably in the fact that for a Kantian, Heidegger’s actions and decisions offended the norms of practical reason whereas for a Footian he is defective qua human beings. The differences are subtle yet important. Consider how Korsgaard might locate Heidegger in terms of her “constitution model”. To act well, one must act in such a way as gives the fullest expression of one’s nature as a fully rational agent. To briefly summarize this, the constitutional model is contrasted with the Humean model according to which reason and the passions are opposing forces of the same kind in effect “the difference between reason and passion is pretty much the same as the difference between one passion and another”.19 As Korsgaard rightly notes, such a view fails to make sense of how an agent could ever be the author of their own actions rather than the nexus of various forces. One response to this problem from within the Humean tradition is to suggest that when reason is able to govern the passions, the person ‘gives the preference’ to reason but this implies the existence of a person standing apart from both their reason and their passions adjudicating between them. It can give no account of how that person can stand in the properly internal relation to reason and the passions that agency requires. The constitutional model suggests that the person uses the categorical imperative and the norms of rationality to constitute themselves as a rational agent. It is because of this process of self-constitution that they can legitimately claim authorship over the actions and hold themselves, and be held, morally accountable for them. Both Korsgaard and a Footian would probably agree that Heidegger failed to constitute himself as a virtuous moral agent and thereby fell into vice. A plausible account of that fact would probably explain this at least in part by the excessive influence of certain passions such as vanity and hatred. One of the interesting features of Korsgaard’s work is the way that she has been able to incorporate many insights from Aristotle into her broadly Kantian framework. So, she would presumably accept that the virtues would figure in an explanation of what went wrong with Heidegger. But if there is a distinction between her view and that of Foot, the virtues cannot be the central concept. Rather it is a more abstract concept of rational agency as such. Heidegger is a bad moral agent because in an important sense he is not an agent at all, merely an individual driven by destructive and damaging passions. By contrast, a neo-Aristotelian approach would give centrality to the vices

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which are present and the virtues which are absent and the relationships between them. There is considerable overlap between these standpoints and understandably so because Korsgaard openly acknowledges her debt to Aristotle, while HackerWright has similarly acknowledged the affinity between Foot’s Aristotelianism and Kantianism. Nevertheless, the appeal to bald rational agency overall looks less sallow when compared with a richly detailed and nuanced analysis in terms of particular virtues and vices. Korsgaard has recently discussed the relationship between virtue ethics and her own ‘constitutionalist’ account. Since she is often so tantalisingly close to the Aristotelian view, it is worth considering how she sees her own views as differing in order to see what might make the Aristotelian view distinctive and hopefully preferable. She begins with what she accepts in the Aristotelian picture. Aristotle’s conception of the moral virtues is a conception of what it means for our passive or receptive capacities to be in a good state for moral action. If we take this one way, as I myself have done in the past, this is a conception of the virtues anyone can accept, regardless of what sort of moral theory she holds, and whether or not she champions a form of “virtue ethics”.20

She differs in that she sees Aristotle as pursuing an analogy between virtue and perception according to which acting virtuously involves seeing the world (and one’s place within it) aright and acting accordingly. This view is one a Kantian cannot accept since she cannot “believe in such a power without believing in a kind of harmony between the mind and the world that Kantians do not suppose exists, or that we could ever know exists”. Korsgaard suggests instead that if there is a form of perception at work here, it is one which enables the moral agent to gain a deeper understanding, not of the world but of the relevant principles at play. When the virtuous agent acts and chooses well she not only has the thought that she ought to act in a particular way but that thought is “lit up, so to speak, made meaningful, made perceptible, by a normative conception of the world that at once embodied that principle and would be reflected in the agent’s character”. Thus, on Korsgaard’s account, moral action involves knowledge not of the world but rather of oneself. It is worth emphasising that the self-knowledge in question is not passive, in the sense of discovering a pre-existing self, but active in that the process of recognizing oneself as the sort of moral agent one is, is itself part of the process of self-constitution. It is then an act of will, albeit a rational will that is aligned with the Moral Law rather than the arbitrary and capricious will of expressivists and existentialists. Given that the process of self-constitution is rational this can supply us with much of the objectivity we seek. This then raises the question of whether the Aristotelian view adds anything to this and whether it does so without entailing unfortunate metaphysical commitments. Korsgaard’s worry is that neo-Aristotelian naturalism requires a commitment to some sort of harmony between mind and a world that Kantians like her cannot accept on epistemic grounds.



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Kantianism is a form of projectivism, of a rationalist rather than an expressivist variety. What I mean by this is that it implicitly carries within itself a rather odd image of the human person evaluating nature as if from the outside. This is also perhaps what McDowell has in his sights when he rejects ‘supernaturalist rationalism’. One is, of course, perfectly entitled to consider human beings as special and standing atop nature imposing our thoughts and values on it, but that is not an option available to those who consider themselves naturalists and take Spinoza seriously. Thus the most robust Aristotelian alternative to this view is one which emphasizes the fact that human beings are an integral part of nature, in other words a view which is naturalist rather than idealist. There ought to be facts of the matter pertaining to virtue and human flourishing that are more than mere preferences even if highly rational ones. If one accepts this, and one also finds Standard Naturalism unpromising, there appear to be two options: the sort of transcendental naturalism promoted by Thompson and his acolytes and a more empirically responsible while still liberal naturalism that I have favoured. I will attempt to defend my preferred option somewhat circuitously by showing that transcendental naturalism is neither possible nor desirable. Central to the Transcendental Naturalist view is the thesis that there are sets of natural facts which are epistemically available to us by non-observational means. That is, they are not facts like the ones that are encountered by ordinary observational means nor by the refined observational means available to natural science. They are an entirely unique set of facts. Dyed-in-the-wool empiricists notwithstanding, most of us would accept that at least some of our store of knowledge is not derived by observation. It may well be the case that Thompson is correct and we have very general a priori knowledge about living things including ourselves. The real question is what is riding on this? The Footians are clear that their claims are at the level of form rather than content and that the content of our moral judgements is supplied empirically. And yet as Hacker-Wright acknowledges, the NGA does not derive its ‘normative oomph’ from pure form but from the fact of our being embodied rational agents in specific social settings. The virtues come into play as we strive to stand in a proper relationship to our appetitive powers and those appetites have both an internal source and an external object. In other words, they involve us in a practico-material relationship to the world. It is not coincidental that the objects of our appetites are invariably other living things. So the obvious naturalistic explanation of why we make the type of natural historical judgements that we do is because of the practical material relationship in which we stand to other living things. This is implicit in some of the things Thompson says and more explicit in some of his followers, but overall, it is hard to avoid the impression that a moral theory which declares itself naturalistic often sounds rather bloodless. I have suggested above that one source of this could lie in an understandable desire to distance the NGA from Standard Naturalist competitors. In doing so the theory edges close to Kantianism.

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In particular, it becomes very hard to distinguish the NGA from an Aristotelianinflected Kantianism such as we find in Korsgaard. Since Kantianism does not require a commitment to any particular view of how the biological world works, it is less vulnerable to some of the challenges from the biological sciences that have regularly been levelled at the NGA. We could, for instance, adopt Lewens/Breitenbach’s contructivist view of biology along with Korsgaard’s constitutional model and get almost all the objectivity we are seeking. Certainly our condemnation of Heidegger would be more than merely the assertion of a deeply held preference. The crucial feature of a virtue based approach, and its fundamental difference from a Kantian one, ought to be its focus on situatedness and thus concrete, contextdependent detail.21 In other words, it is important to emphasize two terms that have become placeholders in the Footians work—’embodied’ and ‘practical’. It is partly for that reason the Footians are right to reject foundationalism which substitutes some neutral set of facts for the activity of moral deliberation. The most attractive point of Foot’s work is that she takes the fact that we are living beings as her starting point. As Annas has suggested, this emphasis opens up the genuine possibility of an ethics which emphasizes our affinities with other living beings. At the same time, it is accompanied by a hostility to any attempt to treat us as ‘merely biological beings’, that is, it wants to give full expression to the fact that we are complex cultural, language-using, rational beings whose distinctive form of life is ineluctably bound up with that fact. Insofar as this represents a healthy reaction to what I have called Standard Naturalism is laudable. But the danger is that it risks reintroducing the traditional ontological gap between human beings and ‘the animals’, something which, apart from anything else, is a parochial feature of Western intellectual culture for a relatively short historical period, rather than some deep truth about Being. This worry is compounded by the frequent references in the work of prominent Footians to the Scala Naturae, as if it were a plain matter of fact, rather than a medieval relic at odds with Darwin’s discovery of common descent. This move sounds discordant when set against their insistence elsewhere that our natural history matters. A charitable reading would therefore suggest that the Scala Naturae is not an essential feature of the Footian project. It is possible that a Footian might want to suggest that their appeal to the Scala Naturae serves different theoretical ends and is thus not in competition with the Darwinian doctrine of common descent, that since they are concerned with making sense of human beings qua rational beings common descent is largely irrelevant. Such a response, to put it bluntly, would be a cop-out. It renders entirely mysterious how we can be animals with a shared evolutionary history and yet somehow so different from other animals as to stand atop them looking down. This is not to deny the very real differences between humans and other animals. It is simply to insist that any respectably naturalistic account must have a non-mystical explanation of them. Although we are far from having a satisfactory scientific explanation, the most plausible direction we can look toward is for one to most surely be in the interrelationships between language use, sociability and rationality. In other words, to revisit Aristotle’s insistence that we are rational and political animals. Yet once again, if these play the role of Deus ex machina then there does not seem much to recommend this



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over, say, Special Creationism. What we want to avoid is what I will refer to as a Promethean conception of language, rationality and culture. In what follows I will be drawing on recent work in the life sciences and philosophy of biology to outline a non-Promethean account of how we both resemble and differ from other animals. There are doubtless some Footians who might fear that this is simply yet another ill-fated attempt at providing a biological foundation to ethics and summarily reject it. I assume that there are others who, like myself, were attracted to Foot’s project because it appeared to navigate the tricky waters between Standard Naturalism and non-naturalism and offer the prospect of a genuinely plausible naturalistic ethics. In my introductory discussion, I briefly raised the problem of Hegelian arguments, in order to better articulate my conception of empirical responsibility, which I distinguished from plain old empiricism. The original context for these ideas was in cognitive science and the burgeoning field of 4E Cognition, which I will be discussing in a later chapter, and is a direct result of the abandonment of Hegelian argument in favour of empirical responsibility. It should be clear by now that my target in introducing this idea was Thompson and his supporters. Thompson wears his Hegelianism on his sleeve. In what follows, I will be aiming to show why Hegelian arguments are no more helpful in moral philosophy than they have been in cognitive science and why they should be abandoned here too. In doing this I will aim to show how empirical responsibility should be a general constraint on any philosophical position and therefore how precisely it differs from empiricism, particularly of the shallow variety which McDowell and Thompson rightly castigate. Thus, in rejecting shallow empiricism we should not reject empirical responsibility, or at least if one does, then one ceases to be a naturalist in any recognisable sense. In my response to the Footians, I will not therefore be calling for a return to empiricism. Instead, I will be seeing Thompson’s Hegel and raising him Marx. Thompson’s central claim is that at least some of what we know about ourselves and other living things is not derived from observation. Much turns on what we mean by ‘observation’ but if we take this in a shallow empiricist sense then this is clearly correct. But this shallow empiricist idea of observation is closely allied to the idea of human beings looking at the natural world and ourselves from the outside, whereas we are embedded in it. The core of sense in the Footian’s work is the recognition that we identify our characteristic form of life not by observation but by participation. But they conceive of this in an entirely abstract manner and words like ‘embodied’ and ‘practical’ are left hanging in the air. Our ability to distinguish living from non-living matter is indeed fundamental to us but, it is so because this ability is the fundamental practical task confronting any living being. Living things are food, predators, competitors and potential mates and we fail to properly identify them, quite literally, at our peril. In the human case, we generally identify them in organized social (and therefore moral) settings and the manner in which we identify and respond to them is to some extent given by the setting. To capture this thought in terms that Marx occasionally used, we stand in the same ‘metabolic’ relationship to the natural world as other organisms but in our case it takes a particular form, that of socially organized labour. We obtain the necessities of life through labour and under capitalism through participation in the market.

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This fact has profound ramifications, which I will explore in the concluding chapter, for the very idea of standing in the right relation to our appetites. More broadly, it highlights the fact that self-constitution, if it occurs, does not occur in a vacuum. To be the author of our own actions and thus morally responsible for them, we must be more than a bundle of appetites pulling in different directions. Our appetites must be organized and structured by the requirements of practical reason. Very little of that work is done alone. It is done by and in collaboration with others. That is, to become initiated into a culture is, inter alia, to be initiated into certain habitual ways of structuring practical reason. I will be discussing this at much greater length in the later sections of this book but to fend off an objection at the outset. Acknowledging this does not entail accept a form of cultural determinism and with it relativism. The choice is not between an entirely freestanding individual constructing herself in splendid isolation and what Harold Garfinkel evocatively described as “cultural dopes”.22 What he meant by that was the idea that was very prevalent in the social sciences at the time of individuals as merely ciphers for the dominant tropes of their culture. Clearly being virtuous does not simply mean regurgitating the mores of one’s culture. But by the same token, it does not mean reinventing the wheel. Like other Classical philosophers, Aristotle places heavy emphasis upon the fact that the virtues can both be taught and learned. We learn them in part by imitation, in part by overt instruction which explicates their underlying rational principles and enables us to come to see why we do what we should do. In becoming virtuous, one learns how to respond intelligently to situations. Many of these situations will have a routine run-of-the-mill character, something which is not given anywhere near enough attention in a lot of contemporary analytic moral philosophy with its preference for outlandish thought experiments. By responding properly to such situations we hopefully come to acquire the practical and intellectual skills necessary to respond to more complex and demanding situations.

NOTES 1.  Micah Lott, “Have elephant seals refuted Aristotle? Nature, function, and moral goodness,” Journal of Moral Philosophy 9, no. 3 (2012): pp. 353–375. 2.  Michael Thompson, "Apprehending human form," Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements 54 (2004): pp. 47–74. 3.  This is commonplace in analytic philosophy of language and in linguistics. It is basically Saussure’s famous distinction between la langue and la parole (or Chomsky’s competence/ performance distinction). Because it is so commonplace it is sometimes hard to detect how oddly Platonic it all sounds. It is as if languages exist as mind-independent entities, something those struggling to preserve dying languages might take issue with. 4.  Thompson, "Apprehending human form," pp. 47–74. 5.  Ellen Crist, Images of Animals.



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  6.  Tim Lewens, “Species Natures: A Critique of Neo-Aristotelian Ethics.” The Philosophical Quarterly 70, no. 280 (2020): 480–501, p. 481.   7.  Lewens, “Species Natures,” p. 481.   8.  Lewens, “Species Natures,” p. 487.   9.  I must confess at this point that I find talk of “the will” utterly opaque unless it is shorthand for some complex set of powers that can be explained naturalistically. I will consider later how might I do so, but given that it remains fairly standard philosophical usage, we shall stick with it for now. 10.  NE VII 1, 1145a15–35, VII 5, 1148b15–1149a24 and VII 6, 1149b23–1150a8. 11.  Lewens, “Species Natures,” p. 481. 12.  Lewens, “Species Natures,” p. 481. 13.  Lewens, “Species Natures,” p. 482. 14. The fact that a stance is unpopular or unfashionable is of course not an argument against it, and an extreme quietist would argue that philosophy involves a constant battle against the anxieties which make it seem necessary that philosophy has something substantial to say, but this starts to sound suspiciously like an ad hominem fallacy rather like crude Marxist accounts of false consciousness or equally crude Freudian accounts of repression. 15.  Nancy Snow Personal Communication in Q and A during my talk at Deakin University. 16.  One of the most chilling documents to have emerged from the voluminous studies of the Holocaust/Shoah is Robert Jay Lifton’s studies of the pivotal role that doctors played at every stage. Most of these doctors presumably were not mentally impaired in any way. Robert J. Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: a study of the psychology of evil (London: MacMillan). 17.  Scott Woodcock, “Philippa foot’s virtue ethics has an Achilles’ heel,” Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review/Revue canadienne de philosophie 45, no. 3 (2006): pp. 445–468. 18.  I will be discussing the broader question around the nature and possibility of human agency, particularly in the light of Situationism, at much greater length now. For now, I will simply state that most moral philosophy and not just virtue ethics rests upon the assumption that hard determinism is false and that we can make at least some sense of the concept of moral responsibility. If hard determinism were to turn out to be true it would therefore have dire consequences for most moral philosophers and not just virtue ethicists. 19.  Christine M. Korsgaard, Self-constitution: Agency, identity, and integrity (OUP Oxford, 2009). 20.  Christine M. Korsgaard, “Constitutivism and the Virtues,” Philosophical Explorations 22, no. 2 (2019): pp. 98–116. 21.  It is for this reason that virtue ethicists have historically been reticent about producing ‘theories of right action’, something which Rosalind Hursthouse regrettably broke ranks on, albeit ‘under pressure’. 22.  Harold Garfinkel, 1967, Studies in ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: PrenticeHall).

5 The Myth of the Biological Given and the Developmentalist Turn

The position I have described as ‘Naturalist Humanism’ is one which attempts to do full justice to the kinds of remarkable animals we are: political, rational, language and tool-using animals but animals nonetheless. I have expressed this earlier in terms of Tim Ingold’s slogan “the person is the organism”. This slogan could easily be construed as yet another call for greedy reductionism: the person is ‘just’ an organism, we are ‘merely’ animals, understandable solely in biological terms. Foot and her followers evinced a similar discomfort with attempts at reducing ethics to biology and rightly so. Philosophy can and should play a gatekeeping role warning us when a thinker oversteps proper disciplinary bounds. Modern intellectual history is littered with examples of scientific discoveries generating exuberant hopes and outlandish claims from the seventeenth-century enthusiasm for clockwork to the twentieth century’s exaggerated hopes for artificial intelligence. Dualism is a characteristic response to reductionism but implies something which the scientific enterprise denies at its very foundation, the idea that there are insoluble mysteries beyond the reach of scientific explanation. The idea of setting a priori limits to scientific progress is precisely what is wrong with Hegelian arguments and why naturalists are rightly sceptical of the pretensions of First Philosophy. Obviously then, one cannot be a consistent naturalist while upholding some version of dualism, be it the classical Cartesian mind-body version or the related nature-culture or organism-environment ones. The alternative to such dualisms is not monistic physicalism but rather pluralistic naturalism. Within the context of a pluralistic naturalism, Naturalist Humanism suggests that there will be multiple complementary ways of investigating human beings scientifically and that there is no intrinsic limit to the possibilities of scientific investigation so construed, or perhaps more precisely, any limits are internal rather than imposed from the outside by philosophical arbitration. Nothing here, however, implies that the only way of 89

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understanding human beings is scientifically. It leaves entirely open the possibility of numerous non-scientific ways of understanding people, including the sorts of transcendental projects favoured by Foot and Thompson which, as their followers are keen to emphasize, are not in competition with science. The term bio-phobia was one that was routinely invoked by Evolutionary Psychologists against anyone who questioned their deeply questionable claims. It suggests an irrational prejudice whereas in fact it is entirely rational to be cautious about overexpansive explanations of the sort peddled by Evolutionary Psychologists. Nevertheless, principled objections to any kind of biological explanations of human conduct smacks heavily of irrational prejudice. One can accept common descent or Special Creation but not both. Naturalists should therefore resist bio-phobia. This, however, requires, as Ingold points out, a much richer conception of biological ontology than has often been offered. In order to develop such an ontology we need to move behind a set of influential prejudices that have dominated our intellectual culture. I refer to these as the Myth of the Biological Given.

THE MYTH OF THE BIOLOGICAL GIVEN Both enthusiasts for biological reduction and their most vociferous opponents seem to know very clearly what it means for a phenomenon to be explained ‘biologically’. These assumptions cluster around what I call the Myth of the Biological Given. It has four main elements. 1. Any complex living organism is a product of two distinct kinds of causes: internal biological causes and external environmental ones (in the human case this includes socio-cultural ones). 2. This distinction mirrors traditional distinctions between ‘inherited’ and ‘acquired’ characteristics, but even more sophisticated views which recognize the problems with this latter dichotomy still endorse some version of the broader dualism of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’. 3. Inner biological causes are relatively fixed or ‘hardwired’. 4. Outer causes are relatively variable and may be subject to direct volitional control in ways that inner biological causes are not. By calling these assumptions mythical, I am pointing to more than the fact that they are false or inadequate. I am suggesting that they exercise such a deep hold on the imagination that they cannot be easily dislodged. Any empirical discovery is as likely to be reinterpreted in the light of the Myth of the Biological Given as causing someone to discard the myth itself. As Midgley writes “Myths are not lies. Nor are they detached stories. They are imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world. They shape its meaning”.1 If we hope to dislodge a myth, we can only do so by replacing it with something equally powerful and meaningful. I believe that the views I will survey here are



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capable of offering a picture which not only helps us to make better sense of the living world and our place within it but is also a more exciting picture than the one that it seeks to replace. Midgley gives as one of her initial examples the myth that has been with us since Descartes and Newton of the world as an enormous machine. Many of our current philosophical debates, particularly in the Philosophy of Mind are structured around this image and our responses to it. It has also deeply and profoundly affected the life sciences which have struggled to accommodate the reality of biological phenomena within the mechanistic metaphor. Whenever a philosopher breathlessly embraces a biological explanation, or another sniffily dismisses it, there is a very good chance that the Myth of the Biological Given will be lurking somewhere in the wings. Consider, for example, Christine Korsgaard’s magisterial Sources of Normativity.2 One possible source that barely gets a mention is our biological nature. In fact, biology only rates three mentions in the entire work. In one very brief passage, she writes “we are biologically wired this way; pain could not do its biological job if we were not inclined to fight it. When nature equipped us with pain she was giving us a way of taking care of ourselves, not a reason to take care of ourselves”.3 There are two things notable about this passage: the first, in keeping with the Myth, is Korsgaard’s view that biology is a matter of how we are ‘wired’ and secondly that biology does not provide us with reasons for acting. This becomes even clearer in a more famous passage from this work where Korsgaard summarily dismisses what she takes to be the ethical naturalist view. Suppose someone proposes a moral theory which gives morality a genetic basis. Let’s call this “the evolutionary theory”. According to the evolutionary theory, right actions are those which promote the preservation of the species, and wrong actions are those which are detrimental to that goal. Furthermore, the evolutionary theorist can prove, with empirical evidence, that because this is so, human beings have evolved deep and powerful instincts in favor of doing what is right and avoiding what is wrong. Now this theory, if it could be proved, would give an account of our moral motives which was adequate from the point of view of explanation. Our moral instincts would have the same basis and so the same kind of power as the sexual drive and the urge to care for and defend our children. And we know from experience that those instincts can induce people to do pretty much anything, even things which are profoundly detrimental to their own private interests or happiness.

It is striking that she does not cite any actual attempts at formulating genuine evolutionary ethics which, while problematic, are not so crude. That notwithstanding, let us turn to what many take to be her decisive rebuttal of naturalism But now ask yourself whether, if you believed this theory, it would be adequate from your own point of view. Suppose morality demands that you yourself make a serious sacrifice like giving up your life, or hurting someone that you love. Is it really enough for you to think that this action promotes the preservation of the species? You might find yourself thinking thoughts like these: why after all should the preservation of the species count so much more than the happiness of the individuals in it? Why should it

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matter so much more than my happiness and the happiness of those I care most about? Maybe it’s not worth it. Or suppose the case is like this: there are Jews in your house and Nazis at the door. You know you will get into serious trouble, even risk death yourself, if you conceal the Jews. Yet you feel morally obligated to risk death rather than disclose the presence of the Jews. But now you know that this motive has its basis in an instinct designed to preserve the species. Then you might think: why should I risk death in order to help preserve the species that produced the Nazis?

This is all very reminiscent of our earlier discussion of McDowell and of Rousseau’s observations concerning our ability to disregard the call of nature. The point of this example is that it highlights the logical distinction between explanation and justification. There is a ‘justificatory gap’ between our having certain motives, whether bequeathed to us by evolution, or for that matter instilled in us by cultural conditioning and their providing us with an adequate moral justification for acting or forbearing. Strikingly, Korsgaard takes it for granted that if a motive were natural, it would be something ‘given’ to us by nature. Korsgaard’s substantive point is a challenge facing even the most sophisticated formulations of evolutionary ethics. Korsgaard herself acknowledges that the source of this idea is in Moore’s objection to Spencer’s Evolutionary Ethic. It echoes the objection we liberal naturalists have towards Standard Naturalism. What is striking about it is what it reveals about a particularly sophisticated moral philosopher’s conception of ‘the biological’. Consider the apparently innocuous phrase in the passage above about “an instinct designed to preserve the species”. Such talk would raise the hackles of neo-Darwinians. Moreover, along with her earlier talk about nature ‘equipping’ us with pain shows the hold of a thoroughly teleology infused design conception of the evolutionary process which is deeply problematic.4 Korsgaard very clearly operates with an African Queen conception of morality in which the space for ethical action is eked out of that leftover by our natural design. Contrast Korsgaard with someone who has been much more enthusiastic about the role that biology can play in ethical theory: Peter Singer. In various works from The Expanding Circle to his more recent A Darwinian Left he has urged moral and political philosophers to take on board the work of evolutionary biologists which, interestingly enough, apparently vindicates his version of utilitarian Third Way social democracy. He radically demarcates between the cognitive and the affective and while he argues that our evolved sociality takes us part of the way, it is human rationality that is the source of morality. It enables us, for example, to set aside commitments to our wives in favour of the genuinely altruistic act of working in a soup kitchen. [I]t is our developed capacity to reason that gives us the ability to take the impartial perspective. As reasoning beings, we can abstract from our own case and see that others, outside our group, have interests similar to our own. We can also see that there is no impartial reason why their interests should not count as much as the interests of members



The Myth of the Biological Given and the Developmentalist Turn 93 of our own group, or indeed as much as our own interests. Does this mean that the idea of impartial morality is contrary to our evolved nature? Yes, if by “our evolved nature” we mean the nature that we share with the other social mammals. from which we evolved. No nonhuman animals, not even the other great apes, come close to matching our capacity to reason.5

Singer then delves into the murky depths of neuro-imaging involving the trolley problem to show an apparently clear distinction between the intuitions born of our natural history and the conclusions thrust upon us by the cold hard logic of consequentialist rationality. Enough critical work has been done to show that while impartiality is an important consideration in certain areas of morality, it is far from the only game in town. Similarly, Selim Berker and others have given us principled grounds to be skeptical of neuro-talk: sometimes it is simply false; most of the time it is irrelevant.6 He concludes by endorsing a modified form of the veneer theory according to which “a morality that goes beyond our own group and shows impartial concern for all human beings might well be seen as a veneer over the nature we share with other social mammals”.7 I will address some of the problems with veneer theory below. For now, I want to highlight the persistence of the Myth of the Biological Given. Singer is less pessimistic in his assessment of the relevance of biology than Korsgaard and yet ultimately he is committed the view that our biological nature is something we must set aside in pursuit of the “point of view of the universe”, something no other animal can aspire to achieve. In other words, nature is something we must rise above, if we are to be moral. What is operative here is a very well-established contrast between the realm of the biological as that which is fixed and determinate and the realm of human activity. Given that ethics deals largely in the world of human actions, it seems self-evident that ‘the biological’ thus construed could contribute little beyond contributing to the framework in which human action takes place. I have noted earlier how when moral philosophers talk about biology, they invariably mean some combination of evolutionary biology and genetics. As Ellen Crist highlighted in the previous chapter, adopting the perspective of these disciplines involves also adopting a technical idiom which downplays the agency of the individual organisms. Incorporating a developmental and ecological perspective gives us a much more complex and nuanced understanding of the living world. Over the course of their life cycles, organisms are not passive victims but active players in their own story. There may be other criteria for denying that other animals are moral agents in the full-blown sense but passivity is not one of them.

NATURE IS GOTTEN NOT GIVEN: BEYOND THE MYTH The line above comes from Jason Scott Robert’s book Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution: Taking Development Seriously. This line and the subtitle to his book

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captures the spirit of what I will refer to as the Developmentalist Turn in Contemporary Biology. This encompasses a range of different approaches, including Evolutionary Developmental Biology as a very specific subdiscipline and Developmental Systems Theory (DST) as a broader philosophy of nature. It also includes work which I will be drawing heavily on around Ecological Niche Construction. What unites these rather disparate approaches is a newly invigorated focus on the fine-grained details of development. As the slogan indicates, development had fallen into a position of relative neglect within the life sciences under the impact of resurgent nativism. The dominance of population genetics and the neo-Darwinian theoretical framework associated with it led to a ‘blackboxing’ of developmental considerations. Roberts captures this spirit perfectly in the following passage. A decade ago, an advertisement for The Encylopedia of the Mouse Genome appeared in a biotechnology serial. The tagline read: “The Complete Mouse (some assembly required)” (cited in Gilbert and Faber 1996: 136). The parenthetical clause refers, of course, to development. As those of us who have purchased ready-to-assemble furniture know all too well, this is indeed an onerous requirement, for the assembly process may very well have the greatest impact on final outcome! What is true of ready-to-assemble furniture is also true, I contend, of organisms believed to be “ready-to-assemble” from DNA and assorted other material.8

While this was not true uniformly since developmental biologists and ecologists remained interested in developmental questions, the ascendancy of the ‘gene-centric’ view of evolution relegated them to the issue of secondary theoretical concern which could be safely left to scientists lower down the disciplinary pecking order. Many objections to putative biological explanations of human conduct are objections to some hybrid of evolutionary biology and population genetics. This idea that biological explanation is exhausted by such explanations has been given a name by Robert Lickliter and Thomas Berry. They call it the Phylogeny Fallacy and “it is the belief that aspects of development are determined by either (a) events which occurred earlier in the development of the individual, or (b) preontogenetic factors which operated on the ancestors of the individual”.9 They identify one source of this fallacy in Ernst Mayr’s canonic distinction between ‘proximate’ and ‘ultimate’ explanations. Whatever Mayr’s intentions might have been in formulating this distinction, it has become associated with the idea that phylogeny has ontological and explanatory priority over ontogenetic explanation. This fallacy also draws succor from Dobzhansky’s famous slogan, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. As Paul Griffiths has argued, many who cite this slogan have clearly not read Dobzhansky’s article carefully. For, it has a specific target, namely, Creationism. Dobzhansky’s goal was to demonstrate that one cannot explain the fact and extent of species diversity without evolutionary assumptions and thus Creationism is scientifically inadequate. Evolution by natural



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selection as a theoretical stance makes better sense of the facts of evolution than Creationism does. His argument, or at least his slogan, has however been given a much broader significance. “It is taken to mean that the structure of living organisms only makes sense when viewed as a set of evolutionary adaptations to specific selection pressures. Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of adaptation”.10 In other words, Dobzhansky’s dictum has become the rallying cry of the movement known as “panadaptationism” which presumes that any suitably complex organic phenomenon is fully explained by its adaptive history. As Griffiths, Scott Roberts, and Lickliter and Berry all argue, such an approach fails to do justice to the sheer complexity and contingency of actual developmental processes. In rejecting panadptationism, it would be equally erroneous to reject an evolutionary perspective. What is required is an evolutionary perspective which views organisms not as “things which have evolved but as things that are evolving”.11 To do otherwise, Griffiths suggests, leads one into certain paradoxes. We have already briefly discussed some of the biological literature on functions in relation to Foot and Thompson’s approach. Many of their critics have argued that their account of function is at odds with the current consensus view of biologically proper function. According to this view, one can only distinguish proper function from accidents by reference to the organism’s evolutionary history. This idea was crucial to many of the criticisms of Foot’s work which focused on her account of function which was felt to be at odds with the respectable scientific view. Griffiths points out, however, that such a retrospective account generates a paradox because the first step in determining whether something has a selected function is to analyse the contribution it made to biological functioning in the past. To show that oddly-shaped sperm have the selected function of interfering with the sperm of rival males, it is necessary to show that these sperm increased the fitness of ancestral males that produced them by interfering with the sperm of rival males. But either we can establish this without knowing the selected function of the sperm of those ancestral males, in which case we could do the same for living males, or we have to know their selected function in those ancestors, which means looking at still earlier ancestors to discover this and so on ad infinitum.12

Griffiths rejects the idea, popular among some biologists, that one can often dispense with an evolutionary perspective entirely. Non-evolutionary accounts of function tend to have the inadvertent effect of downplaying the relationship of an organism’s activities to reproduction. As Fitzpatrick’s elephant seals highlight, the activities of bulls make no sense from the perspective of the individual organism, but it is completely intelligible when viewed as a strategy for maximising their reproductive success. This does not entail what Griffiths calls “empirical adapationism” according to which “every aspect of the organism has been finely tuned by natural selection”.

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Rather we need to adopt a “life history” perspective where at any given stage in an organism’s lifecycle it must manage tradeoffs “involving different allocation of resources to growth, tissue maintenance and reproduction”.13 Crucially, “even if organisms manage these trade-offs [. . .] very badly, so that they are not particularly well-adapted, managing these trade-offs is what they are doing”. He draws the analogy with a race in which a runner staggers and falls and states “I am not arguing that all organisms are great runners: I am arguing that they are all in a race”. Taking development seriously entails treating organisms as processes rather than products. In the neo-Darwinian model, the role of the environment is primarily to provide triggers or input which initiates developmental programs. In the Evolutionary Psychological variant of this model, there is a mismatch posited between the environment, which the program developed to deal with, and our contemporary society. The most common example cited is our preference for foods high in fat and sugar rather than for healthier alternatives. This is not attributed primarily to the food industry and zoning laws which mean that some parts of the US only have fast food restaurants and no grocery stores selling fresh food. It is explained rather by the fact that our Pleistocene ancestors would have gained fitness advantages by preferring fatty and sweet food. Notice that despite official avowals of the interactionist consensus view that both environment and organism matter, the bulk of the explanatory work is being done by the putative psychological modules rather than the environment. I am unaware of any culture in which a bowl of sweetened lard is the first preference. One of things we know about food preferences is that they are heavily enculturated. Indeed, rituals around food and the very institution of sharing food with strangers is uniquely human. As Anton Brillat-Savarin put it “all animals must eat but only human beings dine”. Food is also a subject of taboos: some sensible, some utterly irrational. Some environmentalists are trying to persuade a reluctant public to switch to an insectbased diet. From an environmental perspective this makes complete sense: insects have a much higher protein yield than cows and are ubiquitous. Nevertheless, it is unlikely, barring a catastrophe, that they will become a staple any time soon. Yet we know with virtual certainty that they were a staple for our ancestors. There is no biological reason why they should provoke revulsion. The same goes for organ foods which are a delicacy in some cultures and routine fare for the migrant forebears of many modern Americans and Australians who now disdain them. This flexibility in food preferences makes much more evolutionary sense than the idea that certain preferences are hardwired into us. Even the supposed innate dislike of bitter tasting foods is easily overcome by coffee and beer drinkers. What this issue highlights is the contingency of development. Contrary to the preformationist views defended by neo-Darwinians, settings matter. We know that even in simpler organisms changes in temperature can affect biological sex. We know in the human case that sexual preferences are profoundly affected by our cultural milieu. Defenders of the interactionist consensus might at this point reply that both eating and sex are domains in which culture plays an important role and thus they



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cannot be explained purely biologically. In response, one might say that eating and sex are such obviously biological activities that if they cannot be explained purely biologically then nothing can. The field then appears to be ceded to those on the social constructionist wing of the interactionist party who believe that biology can tell us little of interest about ourselves. The DST approach advocates a more radical rethinking of both nature and culture. The information processing metaphor which still dominates much biological thinking only permits us to see cultural forces as interference, whether negative or positive. Dismantling this metaphor and with it the equally metaphorical construct of genes as ‘master molecules’ directing the show will enable us to see that “contingency is basic, whether the results are expected or surprising”.14

EXTENDED INHERITANCE Heritability studies are a key weapon in the armoury of those who seek to promote a gene-centric view of evolution and development. In popular culture and the media we are used to hearing breathless announcements with the effect that a ‘gene for’ this or that complex phenotypic outcome has been discovered. Typically, this work proceeds by inferring more or less directly the extent of the correlation between genes and phenotype in one or more populations. These methods can be as direct as molecular screening or as indirect as a study of monozygotic twins raised apart. The underlying logic is very similar across this whole range of methods: The stronger the correlation, the more the genes are said to be responsible for the trait. However, as Richard Lewontin has argued, heritability estimates are not measures of global causal importance, nor do they indicate how much a trait can be modified by environmental changes.15

If we follow standard demarcation lines such observations may lead us to suppose that phenotypic properties are more acquired than innate. DST suggests, however, that we regard this not as a bipolar process which can be easily disaggregated into genes and environment with respective causal roles neatly apportioned, but rather as a more complex systemic process in which changes to one element are likely to affect all the other elements in the system. This has profound implications for how we understand heritability. The developing organism does not just inherit genetic material from its parents. It also inherits a range of other resources. “Some of these resources are familiar— chromosomes, nutrients, ambient temperatures, childcare. Others are less familiar, despite the recent explosion of work on ‘epigenetic inheritance’ [. . .] These include chromatin marks that regulate gene expression, cytoplasmic chemical gradients and gut- and other endosymbionts”.16 Organisms also inherit an ecological niche which is constructed by their conspecifics which they in turn go on to co-construct in the course of development. This process of ecological niche construction will be crucial to my argument. I will suggest

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that we can consider the construction of a second-nature in the course of development as a form of ecological niche construction.

DEVELOPMENT AS CONSTRUCTION According to standard interactionism development is a process whereby genetic and non-genetic factors (typically environmental ones) interact in order to produce developmental outcomes. By contrast the DST approach suggests a form of “constructivist interactionism” according to which “the life cycle of an organism is developmentally constructed, not programmed or preformed. It comes into being through interactions between the organism and its surroundings as well as interactions within the organism”.17 This mirrors Marx’s famous argument in the 18th Brumaire about human beings making our own history but not in circumstances we have chosen. The difference, however, is that culture, the accumulated results of our ancestor’s actions, has been seen as quintessentially non-biological. On the DST view, culture can and should be seen as a set of developmental resources which are handed down by one generation and reworked by the next. That is not to say that this is the only, or even perhaps the most interesting way, to regard culture, but it does fulfil the Spinozistic requirement of not regarding culture as sui generis and entirely quarantined from the activities of the rest of the animal kingdom. One traditional way of demarcating human beings from the rest of nature was to regard other organisms as the passive victims of their fate, while only humans (or perhaps also a small number of other animals) could be seen as authors of their own stories. The evidence of how ubiquitous ecological niche construction is throughout the natural world vitiates any attempt to draw such a neat dividing line. Human agency is on a continuum, different in degree no doubt, but not different in kind from the attempts made by other organisms to even the evolutionary odds. Later, I will discuss the differences that institutionalized niche constructions brings to the picture.

DISTRIBUTED CONTROL The Selfish Gene metaphor has thoroughly infected the popular consciousness. One implication of this view is the idea that genes are like Machiavellian molecules directing affairs from deep within the cell. On this conception, organisms and bodies become merely passive vehicles and agency is located in the gene. I stress that this is a metaphor: no one literally believes that genes are agents. Yet the metaphor has exercised a powerful hold on the imagination nonetheless. As a consequence, we have become suspicious of organisms as agents. This is a key reason why Ingold’s claim that “the person is the organism” appears so controversial. Persons are agents by definition but on the standard view, organisms are not agents but vehicles.



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The DST alternative is that The organism helps determine which other resources will contribute to that development, as well as the impact they will have. The roles played by the vast and heterogeneous assembly of interactants that contribute to a lifecourse are system-dependent and change over time. So DST creates an inhospitable context for moves that preempt the investigation of actual processes by identifying one type of resource as controlling or directing the process, leaving other interactants to function as background conditions, raw materials, or sources of disturbance. We believe that despite the widespread talk of genetic blueprints and programs in contemporary biology, there is no scientifically defensible sense in which a subset of developmental resources contains a program or set of instructions for development.18

EVOLUTION AS CONSTRUCTION Constructive interactionism is an account of evolution as well as development. The neo-Darwinian view defines evolution as changes of gene frequency within a given population. The DST account of evolution sees it as changes in the developmental lifecycles of organisms. This has profound consequences. If evolution is change in developmental systems, then, as just noted, it is no longer possible to think of evolution as the shaping of the organism to fit an environmental niche. Rather, the various elements of the developmental systems coevolve. Organisms construct their niches both straightforwardly by physically transforming their surroundings and, equally importantly, by changing which elements of the external environment are part of the developmental system and thus able to influence the evolutionary process in that lineage.19

Neither at the ontogenetic or the phylogenetic level is the organism to be considered a passive victim of its face. What I want to argue from this fact is that if the DST perspective is correct agency and interactions are not anomalous features of nature which requires metaphysical hard labour to address. It is a basic datum. I will propose that we can regard human socio-cultural environments as our ecological niche which we receive from our ancestors, co-construct with our peers and hand on to our descendants. This is not an original thought. It has become commonplace in ecological literature. As Eva Jablonka writes Humans are probably the most creative niche constructors on the planet. Their constructions modify the abiotic environment that they inhabit and influence the evolution of the organisms with which they interact as well as their own evolution, including the evolution of traits that we identify as the hallmarks of humanness, such as language. The human niche has ecological, social and epistemic aspects, which make up what we call human culture. Human cultural evolution, the historical change in human culture, involves changes in the intergenerational transfer of ecological legacies, in the reconstruction of developmental conditions, in the transmission of behavioural and symbolic information and in the selective stabilization of practices and preferences. Human cultural evolution is therefore a

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special and extreme case of niche construction. It is different from other types of niche construction not just in scope but also because it involves deliberate and planned actions that are based on communally shared, virtual (imagined) realities that are stabilized by learning, pedagogy and social conventions. Because human niche construction is often future-oriented, and because it is stabilized by reasoning and by conventional beliefs, the potential range of constructed human niches is enormous. The actual diversification and sophistication of human constructed environments is a testimony to the special properties of human niche construction.20

That this is not a new thought is evidenced by the famous quote from Marx’s 18th Brumaire which we cited earlier. We have always known that human beings are “the most creative niche constructors on the planet”. Until now, this has been seen as the characteristic which marks us off from other organisms. The recent boom in work on ecological niche construction, while not denying the peculiar characteristics of human niche construction, enables us to see this as part of our continuity with other living beings and part of our very nature. My contribution will be to locate the virtues in this context. I have argued that the virtues can be understood as excellence of the skills required by basic social competence. Viewed in the light of niche construction theory, these skills are those which enable one to interact with and co-construct with one’s socio-cultural niche in a manner appropriate to the stage in one’s life history. Let me be clear that I am not arguing that this is the only way one can regard the virtues, and I certainly do not mean to suggest that we can exhaust discussion of their value in terms of their contribution to successful niche construction and maintenance. It is, nevertheless, a way of situating the characteristic human life activities, which most commentators agree form the foundation of the virtues, in a thoroughly naturalistic context while at the same time allowing scope for human rational agency. In the next chapter, I will return to the topic of human powers and attempt to view them not as logical givens but rather the product of an elaborate constructive-interactionist process.

NOTES  1. Mary Midgley, The myths we live by (Taylor & Francis, 2003), p. 1.   2.  Christine M. Korsgaard, Gerald Allan Cohen, Raymond Geuss, Thomas Nagel, and Bernard Williams, The Sources of Normativity (Cambridge University Press, 1996).  3. Korsgaard, The sources of normativity, p. 103.  4. Neo-Darwinians would quibble about any putative instinct benefiting the species rather than the individual’s lineage.   5.  Op. cit. p. 145.   6.  Selim Berker, “The normative insignificance of neuroscience,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 37, no. 4 (2009): pp. 293–329.   7.  Op. cit. p. 151.   8.  Jason Scott Robert, Embryology, epigenesis and evolution: Taking development seriously (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 1.



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  9.  Robert Lickliter, Thomas D. Berry (1990), “The phylogeny fallacy: Developmental psychology’s misapplication of evolutionary theory,” Developmental Review, Volume 10, Issue 4. 10.  Paul Edmund Griffiths, “In what sense does ‘nothing make sense except in the light of evolution’?,” Acta Biotheoretica 57, no. 1 (2009): pp. 11–32. 11.  Op.cit. p. 14. 12.  Op.cit. p. 18. 13.  Op.cit. p. 23. 14.  Op.cit. p. 3. 15.  Op.cit. p. 3. 16.  Op.cit. p. 4. 17.  Op.cit. p. 4. 18.  Op.cit. p. 5. 19.  Op.cit. p. 6. 20.  Eva Jablonka (2011), “The entangled (and constructed) human bank,” preface to Human Niche Construction (Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B [2011]), 366, 784.

6 Virtues as Powers and Perfections

Wittgenstein counselled philosophers to be wary of nouns. In the Blue Book he identifies the tendency to look for something that corresponds with them as the primary source of philosophical bewilderment. We do well to remember this point when we consider the virtues. Moral philosophers have tended to focus on ‘the virtues’ and it is true that we sometimes talk of Jennifer’s courage or Michael’s honesty, but, more often than not, virtue talk typically takes the forms of modifiers: adjectives like ‘honest’ or ‘courageous’ and frequently adverbials. This draws our attention to one of the key contributions that the revived virtue tradition has made to contemporary moral philosophy. It focuses our attention not only on what is done but also who does it and as importantly how. This is sometimes expressed somewhat misleadingly as a doctrine of human powers. I say misleading because while there are perfectly innocuous ways in which one can talk of someone having certain powers, when combined with the temptation that Wittgenstein warns of, there is a tendency to think of powers as something a human being has or fails to have and then it seems sensible to ask what kind of things they are, whereas such powers are not things at all. The sensible thought at the core of all this talk is that we recognize someone as a fellow human being by observing them acting and responding in characteristically human ways. It can unsettle us to meet a human being who cannot engage in articulate speech or walk unaided, and we wonder how this situation came about. The disability argument we considered earlier should remind us that this is not an all or nothing affair. When encountering someone who cannot speak, we do not suddenly decide that they are not human; we simply recognize that they are a human being lacking a characteristic that we typically associate with people. The constructive-interactionist view that I have introduced in the previous chapter offers a different way of viewing both ability and disability. Abilities are 103

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not something we have or lack but rather something that emerge in the course of a complex and highly contingent developmental process, in which the organism constructs, maintains and reproduces itself using the internal and external resources at hand. For this to go well, a huge number of factors have to be in play. It also offers part of an explanation of why the biological world is as diverse as it is. We are concerned here, however, with the virtues. One traditional way of thinking about the virtues is that they are perfections (or better, refinements) of these human powers. Hacker-Wright locates Foot’s views on this matter in a tradition going back through Anscombe to Aquinas and ultimately Aristotle: We all have the powers of thinking, willing, and desiring, and each of these powers can be perfected, giving rise to cardinal virtues of prudence (the perfection of the intellect in the practical domain), justice (the chief perfection of the will as rational appetite), courage (perfection of the irascible appetites), and temperance (perfection of the concupiscible appetites). Even if we do not accept Aquinas’ account of human powers and their correlative virtues, his work could provide a template for how to proceed in our understanding of the virtues. Whatever our powers turn out to be, the virtues are perfections of those powers. Such a traditional understanding of virtue embraces the understanding of virtue as a perfection of the powers of the human soul and so defines us in terms of our powers for realizing a certain end or set of ends.1

There is something profoundly insightful about this way of regarding the virtues. I have earlier proposed that virtues are refinements of the sort of competences we need to be minimally integrated into a culture. We might express this in terms of our having or lacking certain social powers. I also think this way of seeing things may also be potentially misleading. The insight lies in highlighting the internal relationship between powers ‘whatever they turn out to be’ and the virtues. The danger here lies in regarding the powers as things we simply have by virtue of being human rather than something that we acquire like everything else through a complex developmental process. Alasdair MacIntyre has urged us to pay attention to the details of moral development as opposed to an unfortunate tendency in the literature to treat concepts like ‘second nature’ or a ‘proper upbringing’ as purely formal concepts. This is in line with my call for virtue ethics to be empirically responsible. In what follows, I will attempt to sketch out a constructive-interactionist account of that development along the lines suggested in the previous chapter. Subsequent chapters will attempt to put flesh on these bones and most importantly look at the ways in which this developmental process can go awry. The alternative to a developmental account of the powers is one that treats them as given, either by God or by nature. In Aquinas there is a very clear and coherent account of how we come to have the various powers we have. They are endowed in us by our creator. They are also what distinguishes us from other animals and situates us in our unique place within the Scala Naturae. Overt appeals to Special



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Creation and to the Scala Naturae are inconsistent with the truth of evolution by natural selection and common descent. One does not of course need to accept Aquinas’ theistic commitments to recognize that there is something distinctive about human agency. One contemporary philosopher who has developed this idea without any obvious doctrinal commitments is Peter Hacker. In the introductory volume of a series on human nature, he outlines what he takes to be the “categorial framework” for understanding human beings, one which is strikingly Aristotelian and even Thomist. In the course of this discussion he defines powers thus Since substances are agents, they can do things and act on other things. The first-order powers of agents are their abilities to do things and to bring about (sustain or prevent) change, on the one hand, and their liabilities to change or to resist change, on the other. The philosophical investigation of such powers of substances in general and of human beings in particular is an investigation into the concepts and conceptual relationships pertaining to their potentialities (and lack of potentialities) for doing and undergoing things.2

Since Hacker regards this as a purely conceptual exploration it is perhaps unsurprising that he treats human powers as given, or at least shows little interest in an empirical investigation of how we acquire them. Hacker clearly operates with a fairly standard view of the innate-acquired distinction. Humans are living beings and share many powers with other animate creatures. We are self-moving creatures with a variety of perceptual powers; we can feel affections and have desires; hence we pursue goals, and can feel pleasure and pain. The particular ranges and degrees of many of these powers are characteristic of us as a species—part of our nature, as are their vehicles. Many can be enhanced by training. The innate distribution of the natural powers of human beings is unequal. So is the distribution of the second-order powers to acquire first-order powers by learning.3

Claims such as “these powers are part of our nature” or that their “innate distribution” is unequal as is “the distribution of the second-order powers to acquire first-order powers by learning” are offered as putative conceptual analyses but an unsympathetic critic might argue that several questionable empirical claims are being smuggled in under that guise. It also betrays the fact that Hacker labours under the Myth of the Biological Given. If the powers and their distribution are innate and part of our nature and we do not attribute them to a creator, then the obvious place for a naturalistically inclined philosopher to look is to genetics. Perhaps the powers are encoded in our DNA? These presumably develop in utero and infancy before becoming robust. We already know that virtues are unevenly distributed within populations. This could be a result either of the fact that the raw structural capacities are differentially distributed, or it could be that they are relatively uniformly distributed and different individuals are subject to different environmental pressures. For example, some have economic

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security and a good education while others do not. If the differential distribution of the virtues is a result of gross physiological differences, then all virtue would be natural virtue in which case our propensity for admiring some people’s virtues more than others needs radical revision. This is, I suspect, part of the worry many people have about genetic determinism. There is a vast and growing literature in the field of behavioral genetics which claims that many of our character traits are heritable. The “first law of behavioral genetics” states that “all human behavioral traits are heritable”.4 This has been taken to encompass a range of behavioral traits as diverse as inter alia “texting on a cellphone (52 percent heritable), being a Born Again Christian (65 percent heritable), and being supportive of property taxes (41 percent heritable). Furthermore, they often claim to have identified, via ‘gene association’ studies, specific genes that underlie this heritability and can predict, e.g., voting in a presidential election, creative dance performance, and utilitarian moral judgments”.5 Were this to be true then it would seem unlikely that a large proportion of what comes under the traditional headings of the virtues would not also comprise a substantial heritable component. Thus, being courageous would be no more worthy of praise and emulation than being tall (height is 80 percent heritable in Caucasian males) or having hazel eyes (5 percent heritable). So, should we be concerned? The answer is no for the simple reason that behavioral genetics is a fundamentally flawed enterprise. The basic problem with it can be spelled out as follows: 1. Behavioral genetics proceeds from the assumption that complex behaviors are phenotypic properties in the same way that gross physiological structures are. 2. However complex behaviors are not phenotypes in the same way that physiological structures are phenotypes. 3. Even if there was some sense in which complex behaviors could be understood as phenotypes, the relationship between genome and phenotype is vastly more complex than behavioral genetics supposes it to be, even in the case of physiological structures. Point 2 has particular ramification for our topic so I will deal with it at greater lengths below. Let us therefore work backwards. There is a certain plausibility to the idea that behaviors might be heritable in the same way that physiological structures are since natural selection operates on effects or, to put it more simply, it selects from what organisms do in certain settings rather than what they are. The most perfectly designed lungs will be useless outside of an environment with the appropriate mix of gases and they will also be useless if the organism is unable to breathe, for example, through damage to the autonomous nervous system. Lungs are only as good as their function. At the end of the day, whatever else we might say about actions, they are bodily movements and bodily movements and our physiology sets their possibilities and limits. By the same token certain characteristic forms of behavior are more effec-



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tive than others at ensuring that the organism fulfills its biological imperatives. A species that routinely approached rather than avoided prey would, all things being equal, quickly face extinction.6 Generally speaking, having such forms of behavior as habitual or instinctive reactions will be more efficient than having to invent them from scratch on each occasion. Many human actions are entirely automatic or comprise other actions which have become automatic. Some of our actions can be understood as bodily movements that occur at a subconscious or preconscious level. These seem like good candidates for heritable behaviors if anything is. Insofar as the more complex actions, which typically occupy the attention of moral theorists, presuppose these sorts of bodily movement, then if we could understand how they could be inherited then we are quite a way towards understanding the contribution biology could make to our ethical understanding. Let us explore this with two plausible candidates: a child’s capacity to imitate its caregivers, and a child’s capacity for locomotion. The capacity for imitation is highly developed in our species and at the basis of our capacity for learning and our ability to develop cultures. All neurotypical human beings in all cultures imitate one another and we believe that our capacity to do this begins at a very early age. In the context of our discussion, imitation is absolutely central to virtue ethics because it is a necessary component of training and habituation and explains the centrality of the virtuous as mentors and models to be emulated. It would be hard to imagine how even the most basic skills, let alone more complex ones, could be inculcated in someone incapable of imitating the actions of others. Yet, it represents a puzzle, since in order to imitate, one must solve what developmental psychologists have called the ‘correspondence problem’. To produce movements that match someone else’s movements, we also need to know a lot about how our bodies are similar to the bodies of other people, although we never experience our own bodies and others’ bodies in quite the same way. More specifically, the ‘inner’ knowledge that we have of our own body parts and how they move has to be accurately mapped to the knowledge we have about the body parts and movements of others. Such mappings often have to match information of one kind—for example, the visual information we get from watching another person dance—with information in a different modality—maybe a representation in memory of how it feels to make the muscle movements that we judge to underlie the dance movements that we are watching and hoping to copy.7

When expressed in these terms it is quite remarkable that human infants, whom we suppose to have a lower level of cognitive development than many non-human animals, can imitate at all. Yet, if they cannot imitate, how could they possibly learn? There are three possible answers to this question. 1. Neonates learn how to imitate; or 2. Neonatal imitation is a heritable instinctive behavior; or 3. Neonates do not imitate, or at least not until they have attained a relatively high level of cognitive development. Imitation is an emergent phenomenon of the developmental process.

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Clearly neonatal imitation, if it exists at all, is of an order of complexity much less than even that in older infants and certainly in children and adults. Even granted this, the problem with the idea that neonatal infants learn how to imitate is that it encounters a version of the Meno Paradox of Inquiry. The Meno paradox was invoked by Plato largely to support his account of innate ideas. In order to learn how to imitate, one must already in some sense be able to imitate, in which case one does not need to learn how to imitate. This paradox seems to strongly favour the idea that imitation, or at least the capacity for imitation, is to some extent innate and heritable. Is the idea that the capacity for imitation is innate supported by the evidence? The bulk of studies have involved a small set of movements, notably tongue protrusion and mouth opening. A large number of carefully constructed experiments seem to provide some quite compelling evidence that neonates can imitate tongue protrusion. This appears on the surface to imply that they are able to solve the correspondence problem: they can identify both the experimenter’s tongue and their own and also move it in an analogous way. This seems on the surface to have quite dramatic implications for ideas such as self-consciousness: many quite complex animals such as cats are not able to do this. So assuming that neonates have the capacity to imitate tongue protrusion, the first two alternatives are that it is a learned behavior or that it is inbuilt. It is unlikely that it is learned. Even if there is some evidence for a child’s ability to recognize its mother tongue through inter-uterine exposure, the neonate has had no such exposure to its mother’s actual tongue and insufficient time once born to recognize it. Moreover, as mentioned above, learning accounts seem beset by the Meno Paradox. So, this evidence gestures towards some conception of the capacity to mimic tongue protrusion being encoded in the baby’s brain. Susan Jones outlines a number of popular alternatives within the literature. These are the Active Intermodal Matching Model (AIMM) and Human Mirror Neurone System (HMNS). The AIMM posits a cognitive system whereby the infant observes the actions of the caregiver and then matches this visual knowledge with its own proprioceptive knowledge in order to successfully imitate the adult’s actions. The trouble with this model is that it is sparse on details as to how the model is instantiated and, Jones argues, consequently untestable empirically. The HMNS fares better in that regard in that there is significant evidence for the existence of mirror neurones in some primate species although the evidence for their presence in humans is so far inconclusive. More importantly, many of the alleged imitation behaviors discovered in infant rhesus monkeys could be attributed to more basic social signaling behavior which makes it difficult to conclusively distinguish genuine imitation from signaling. In the case of human neonates, there is some robust evidence of imitation, particularly in regard to tongue protrusion. However, as Jones suggests, this experimental data can also be interpreted in a radically different way. [B]abies’ tongue protruding is not specifically a response to the sight of tongue protruding as it might be if babies were imitating. Very young babies have also increased their tongue protruding when watching blinking colored lights or the looming and retreating



Virtues as Powers and Perfections 109 of a black pen or the opening and closing of a box with a bright blue lining. Babies have also increased their tongue protruding when listening to snatches of classical music, when their palms were stroked, when they were spoken to and tickled [. . .] and in a host of other everyday situations in which an interesting, moderately arousing sensory stimulus was present—and in which there was no tongue-protruding model for them to imitate.8

She also notes that tongue protrusion is a common symptom in patients with certain brain injuries and one might add that many adults manifest it (the present author included) when absorbed in an activity. So, what appears to be imitation in the case of neonates could actually be merely a response to mild excitation. Since tongue protrusion is the only activity for which there is substantial experimental evidence, it would seem highly unlikely that neonates are capable of more complex forms of imitation. Jones suggests that the best way of explaining the data is that newborn infants are not yet capable of imitation but that the capacity for imitation is an emergent phenomenon that arises in the course of interaction with attentive caregivers. One thing does seem likely: imitation is not the result of a putative genetic programs which controls its inevitable emergence in the course of development. If that is the case for a relatively simple behavior such as the imitation of gestures, the same goes a forteriori for the more complex behaviors that we are frequently told are heritable. There is, of course, a profound ambivalence in the concept of heredity which is employed in such discussions. The concept initially applied to things like property but it was adopted in the light of Mendelian genetics as an explanation for the work purportedly done by genes. Most of us recall high school biology lessons where we learned that the instructions for blue eyes or green peas were encoded in the genome and under the right environmental conditions would produce the right outcomes. This accords with the strictly deterministic understanding of the relationship between genome and phenotype which characterized the rise of genetic sciences.

ARE ALL COMPLEX BEHAVIORS INHERITED? This relationship was neatly codified by J. L. Lush in 1937 with his formula “Vp phenotypic variation = Vg genetic variation + Ve environmental variation”.9 As Moore and Shenk point out, however, while this expresses the prevailing determinism of the time, it is an odd acceptation of the concept of ‘heredity’ since it attempts to link observed variations across populations with observed variations in genomes. It tells us absolutely nothing about the causal relationship between genomes and phenotypes in individual organisms. “For example, they argue, in a large group of people with eyes of different colors [. . .] ‘Vg’ only represents the extent to which variation in the group’s DNA accounts for variation in different eye colors in that group—not whether or how DNA is responsible for the development of eye color”.10 As the authors suggest, this ambivalent formulation was bound to cause confusion, which it did. Notoriously, when dealing with the public’s understanding of sci-

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ence, a newfangled usage of a term like ‘heredity’ often bleeds into a pre-existing use of the term. If one inherits a car from one’s parents, the mechanism of inheritance is straightforward. It is therefore understandable if some people apparently think the same goes for genetic inheritance. This confusion has been confounded by the widespread use of twin studies which seem on the surface to provide a clear demonstration of the heritability of traits from parents to offspring. To further complicate matters, as Moore and Shenk argue, many scientists who one presumes would know better often commit fallacies when talking about heredity and these fall into three kinds. 1. The Group vs. Individual Flaw 2. The Environmental Flaw 3. The Biological Flaw Let us examine each of those in turn. The Group vs. Individual Flaw Recall that Lush’s formula applies to relationships between traits across populations and says nothing about individuals. Yet, often when behavioral geneticists popularise their finding they speak as if they have established a clear causal link. The authors illustrate the fallacy here with a non-biological example. Following a rash of house fires, the authorities investigate whether the presence of a particular type of heater was the cause. They discover that 100 percent of the variation in fires within the group was related to the presence of this heater and thus concluded that the heater was the causal factor. However, all of the houses in the sample were made of highly combustible wood and painted with highly flammable paint. Because the investigators focused on variation, they failed to see this. The heater in question would have been perfectly safe if the houses had been made of safer materials. So what causes individual fires? The answer is complex, and statistical variation surveys cannot address the question effectively; although all of the variation in fires in the fireravaged neighborhood can be accounted for by focusing on space heaters alone, the fact remains that multiple factors—flammable building materials, the presence of heat sources, and available oxygen, for example—are responsible for collectively causing fires. Thus, focusing on variation rather than causation can contribute to a misleading sense of how important a particular factor might be in contributing to a particular outcome.11

Returning to the biological context, the authors cite a famous thought experiment by Richard Lewontin in which someone plants ears of corn from the same cutting in various environmental conditions. If all environmental conditions are kept constant then any variation in height between the plants will be accountable for by genetic factors but if, for example, the plants are given inadequate nutrition height variation will still be 100 percent hereditary but the plants will on average be shorter than plants grown in adequate conditions. Thus, even where



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a factor is 100 percent inherited, even small variations in environmental conditions can dramatically alter phenotypic outcomes. This has major implications for our understanding of the next problem with data obtained from twin studies. The Environmental Flaw Monozygotic twin studies presume that the environments they encounter are no more similar than the environments encountered by fraternal twins. However, fraternal twins are connected to their mothers by two unique placentas whereas monozygotic twins usually (but not always) share a placenta. Thus similarities between monozygotic twins could be accentuated by the commonality of the intra-uterine environment. As the authors note, perhaps unsurprisingly, “identical twins who share a placenta as fetuses have more similar IQs and personalities than do identical twins who did not share a placenta”.12 Moreover, individuals who look alike are more likely to receive similar treatment in the course of social interaction, which can compound similarities. Behavioral geneticists have attempted to control for these factors but their success in doing so is questionable. This brings us to perhaps the most profound objection to heritability studies: the idea that outer environmental variables and inner biological ones can be taken separately either at a practical or a theoretical level. The Biological Flaw The popular view of how biological causation occurs is that a genetic program is hardwired in the genes which will in the context of the right environmental conditions produce specifiable phenotypic outcomes. I have referred to this idea above as the Myth of the Biological Given. While people will differ in the extent to which they will emphasize inner or outer causal factors the broad outlines of this myth continue to hold sway. Most importantly, they deeply colour moral and political philosophers’ attitudes to the possibility of biological explanations of human conduct. For, if one says that it is possible to explain a complex behavior in biological terms one appears to be giving some sort of explanatory privilege to biological causations over environmental ones. This whole picture depends upon the idea that inner biological causes and outer environmental ones are separable. For this to be the case, genes must play some sort of independent causal role in the developmental process but in reality, the last three or four decades of progress in the biological sciences have demonstrated conclusively that there are simply no such things as gene-only influences. Our DNA, we now know, does not contain specific blueprint-like instructions about traits; rather, DNA segments merely contribute to the production of different kinds of RNA molecules. These RNA molecules can, in turn, regulate other DNA segments, or contribute to the production of proteins that are constituent parts of cells, cells that are assembled into systems that

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manifest identifiable traits. This entire process takes place in a developmental context; DNA produces its products under the influence of signals from the environment, as well as from other DNA segments (which are in turn signaled by the environment and other DNA segments, and so on).13

This might seem like an attempt to reintroducing an outmoded Blank State theory of development, but the actual picture is vastly more complex than this. In some senses a Developmental Systems Approach expands the scope of the biological contribution to development by incorporating much of what was previously considered nonbiological. Contrary to popular understanding, people do not inherit traits from their parents. Rather, we inherit developmental resources that interact to create the person we each become. These developmental resources include DNA as well as nongenetic resources like RNAs, proteins, and the physical, social, and cultural environments in which we develop. These resources range from cytoplasmic factors in the egg to the language spoken in the home. This is not to deny the role of genetic influences: “inherited genetic variants do influence every aspect of our biological and psychological identities, but those influences are mediated and modulated by all of the environmental inheritances that constantly interact with those genetic variants”.14 The developing organism makes use of both genes and other internal and external resources in the course of constructing itself. Clearly, the availability of both will profoundly affect the developmental outcome. Clearly also, some developmental features will be relatively plastic and others more robust, but this is a matter to be determined empirically not specified a priori. As Patrick Bateson writes, “robustness and plasticity cannot be cleanly separated; certainly, one should not think of them in the same way as the discredited dichotomy of innate versus acquired. This is because plasticity in its many forms depends on underlying robust processes”.15

THE DEVELOPMENT OF BIPEDAL POSTURE AND LOCOMOTION Let us leave aside for the moment the more complex question of behavioral development and focus instead upon something apparently more tractable: the development of motor skills including the bipedal posture much beloved by moral philosophers. I have suggested above that much of what we understand by human conduct, including those areas relevant to the virtues, can be construed as bodily movements of particular kinds. That is not to say that they are merely colourless bodily movements and I will have much more to say below about what provides them with their particular hue; nevertheless, human actions are inter alia, bodily movements. It would seem plausible therefore that the contribution biology might make here is to specify the gross outlines of the kinds of bodies we have and the ways in which we might move them. The gene-centric view stipulated that the genome provided



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the blueprints for the kinds of bodies we might have. What happens then when we reject this view and take development seriously? As should be clear already, things become significantly more complicated. The capacity for bipedal locomotion is quintessentially human. Even if some other animals display it on occasions if anything is a species norm, it is this. Thus, it is a prime candidate for a human physiological universal. Moreover, the capacity to walk on two legs frees up our arms and hands for other things such as complex tool use and deeply conditions the forms of social interaction that are possible for our species. If it is not encoded in our genome, how do we come to walk on two legs? From Developmental Systems Perspective, [. . .] motor behaviors cannot be understood in isolation, divorced from the bodily, environmental, and social/cultural context in which they occur. Movements are inextricably nested in a body-environment system [. . .] The body and the environment develop in tandem. New or improved motor skills bring new parts of the environment into play and thereby provide new or enhanced opportunities for learning and doing. Caregiving practices facilitate and constrain motor development. As a consequence, differences in the way caregivers structure the environment and interact with their children affect the form of new skills, the ages when they first appear.16

This view is prefigured in the work of the great French anthropologist Marcel Mauss. In his famous essay on Body Techniques, he argues “there is perhaps no ‘natural way’ for the adult. A fortiori when other technical facts intervene: to take ourselves, the fact that we wear shoes to walk transforms the positions of our feet: we feel it sure enough when we walk without them”.17 The context in which Mauss makes this claim is in discussing the acquisition of the ‘onioni’ gait peculiar to Maori women. Women are trained and praised for their ability to acquire this in much the same way that women in Western societies have been praised or chided for the extent to which they sit in a ‘ladylike’ manner. On the surface then, Mauss may appear to be making a standard social constructionist claim that the manner in which we walk is cultural as opposed to biological, but actually this point is more profound. The type of footwear we wear, the road conditions and our habitual walking style all change our physiological structures dramatically, which in turn make certain ways of standing or walking easier. Someone may reasonably respond at this point that this is all well and good but it merely reinforces the idea that bipedalism per se is a species characteristic while the particular form bipedalism takes in any giving setting is heavily cultural. The fact that cultural practices can alter physiology seems hardly surprising in this light. The existence of a biological effect is not proof of biological causation. For instance, the fact that long-term alcohol abuse damages the body and brain is not in and of itself decisive evidence in favour of the biomedical model of alcoholism. Surely nothing that has been said thus far defeats the aim that bipedalism is a biological characteristic of human beings in the traditional sense of that word. By the standard meanings of that term, if bipedalism is a biological characteristic, then

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it is primarily the result of internal rather than external factors. But consider the following: gravity is a constant for all land-based animals. Gravity and the surrounding media (e.g., air, water, the ground beneath the feet) are so quietly pervasive, so hidden in plain sight, that these important factors are often overlooked as causal forces in development. But they are central for motor development. Before birth, the buoyant uterine environment supports a variety of postures. Large body movements—whole body flexion and extension, stretching and writhing, and vigorous leg kicks that somersault the fetus through the amniotic fluid—peak at 14–16 weeks gestation. As the growing fetus occupies increasingly more space in the uterus, the propensity for movement is masked until the fetus can no longer extend its limbs or turn its head. Many of the movements practiced by the fetus are present in the repertoire of the neonate, but after birth begins the real struggle against gravity.18

We tend to regard the development of upright posture as proceeding according to clearly defined stages. However, as Adolph and Franchak note, this is a massive simplification of an actual process in which “[i]nfants can acquire skills in various orders, skip stages, and revert to earlier forms”. The charts which delineate expected developmental stages are often heavily, if unconsciously, culture bound. There are even cultures, for instance, where children do not crawl before they walk. “Generally speaking infants’ gradual triumph over gravity precedes top down from head to feet” with the progression to seated posture representing a crucial milestone but even here cultural variation is significant. Culture in which “caregivers routinely exercise and massage their infants, the babies sit independently before 5 months of age, and they do so with such assured stability that their mothers regularly perch them on high furniture and leave the room to do chores”.19 The gradual attainment of standing posture allows the possibility of exploration of the infant’s environment which in turn makes possible more sophisticated forms of learning and social interaction. Developmental changes in postural control instigate a cascade of far-flung changes: Independent sitting facilitates more sophisticated bimanual object exploration such as fingering, transferring, and rotating, which in turn facilitate learning about the three-dimensionality of objects. Improvements in manual skills are also linked with shifts in infants’ attention to changes in object appearance, object size, multimodal information about objects, and other people’s intentions to grasp objects. The path from posture to prehension to perceptual learning is not immediately obvious, but it is there nonetheless.20

In all of this, the infant is neither a passive blank slate absorbing information from its environment nor is she a robot relentlessly churning out developmental stages in response to an internal algorithm. She is rather an active participant with her environment. As she exerts greater control over that environment, she also transforms herself.



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The transition to bipedal locomotion occurs as a result of the increased perceptual cues that sitting and upright posture make available. The presence of stepping-like motions in neonates and their apparent disappearance and reappearance has led some commentators to suggest that such behaviors may be hardwired, but, in fact, these stepping motions continue throughout infancy under a number of guises and their disappearance is a result of changes in musculature and fat distribution which make them difficult to perform in an upright posture. This is shown by the fact that babies are able to step in a number of situations in which the effects of gravity are mitigated. As with upright posture, differences in parental care can lead to significant differences in the age at which unaided walking is attained. In African, Caribbean and Indian cultures, in which massage and exercise are routinely performed, children can typically walk sooner even when compared to children of the same ethnicity where these practices are not performed. As with the upright posture, what a child inherits is not a genetic code but routine childrearing practices. We already know that a child’s ability to walk massively increases its ability to explore and manipulate its environment and thus also has significant implications for cognitive development. Let us at this stage reprise the discussion thus far. Two candidates for hardwired proto-behaviors were imitation and bipedal locomotion. A survey of some of the extant literature suggests that at the very least there are plausible alternative interpretations of the robust experimental data and these point in the direction of a complex developmental systems approach in which the developing infant draws upon the resources available as she actively constructs herself. The reasons these relatively basic features were chosen was to press the point that if such obvious candidates for putative hardwired behaviors were actually more controversial than suspected, how much more so must this be for the higher order behaviors that concern moral and political philosophy?

NEURODEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS While they differ in their details, both Evolutionary Psychologists and Behavioral Geneticists share a commitment to something like the following: cognitive function depends upon the gross structure of the brain and that structure is specified in the genetic code. Evidence for this fact is often based upon inferring backwards from various neurological defects, whether inherited or acquired, and from there specifying what a normal brain ought to look like. The assumption is that specific disorders of cognition, affect and behavior can be neatly mapped onto defects in the brain which, in turn, will ultimately cash out in genetic terms. As we saw earlier, Evolutionary Psychologists often appeal to the argument from Gray’s Anatomy according to which species, typical psychological features ought to be specifiable in the same precise detail that an anatomy textbook is able to specify typical physiological features. We have already seen how David Buller meticulously

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dismantles that analogy. The preceding discussion has suggested that the same goes even more so for neurophysiological structures, which as Buller points out, even if they have an evolutionary basis of some sort, must respond to rapidly changing social conditions. If we look at the evidence from neurological defects, particularly in children, they turn out to be precisely as one would expect given this fact. Williams’ Syndrome is a rare genetic disorder which impacts number processing in children. In a recent article, Hana D’Souza and Annette Karmiloff-Smith discuss two distinct approaches one might take in understanding this condition. The first they term the ‘neuropsychological approach’ typified by Evolutionary Psychology and Behavioral Genetics. This approach is characterized by a ‘Swiss Army Knife’ analogy of the brain according to which the brain is organized into a series of discrete functional modules or nodes. They contrast this approach with what they call “Neuroconstructivist approaches” which include Developmental Systems Theory. According to neuroconstructivism, development is a process of self-organization that results from interactions between multiple subsystems within a context. Intrinsic factors (e.g., physiological, psychological, neural) as well as extrinsic factors (e.g., informational cues, social context) constrain each other and shape the developmental process.”21 A neuropsychological approach to Williams’ Syndrome very much under the influence of studies on brain–injured adult patients would seek to identify a particular area of dysfunction and map it onto a maldeveloped part of the brain which in turn could be related back to a specific set of genes governing the construction of that area of the brain. The problem for this approach, as the authors point out, is that there are significant disanalogies between adult brain injuries and neuro-developmental disorders. Although specific patterns of network activation in the brain are relatively stable (highly specialized) in adults, they do not necessarily start out that way. Patterns of activation become increasingly specialized over developmental time [. . .] through interactions between various brain regions and through processing different types of input. Thus, although any brain injury is likely to impair multiple cognitive functions, it is more likely to cause a relatively specific deficit in the highly specialized adult brain than in the less specialized (and more plastic) infant brain. Therefore, the brain of a child with an NDD cannot be described as composed of a set of damaged versus intact parts [. . .] Instead, it can be better characterize as an atypical system developing under different constraints.22

Even if there is some merit in the neuropsychological approach to adult brain injuries, it provides a poor explanation of neuro-developmental disorders such as Williams’ Syndrome. Proponents of the neuropsychological approach characterize people with this syndrome as “having specific impairments in spatial and numerical cognition modules alongside ‘intact’ language and face recognition modules”.23 However, according to the neuroconstructivist alternative, an infant’s brain develops in a highly interactive manner and therefore “an initial impairment in one cognitive component is likely to have cascading effects on other parts of the developing system”.24 This makes it extremely dif-



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ficult to detect discrete causal mechanisms and the authors therefore urge investigators to ‘embrace complexity’ rather than evade it. One reason for embracing complexity in the case of Williams’ Syndrome is that the evidence points in that direction. Although sufferers have lower IQs they perform within the average range on facial recognition tests. This looks like prima facie evidence in favour of a specific location of damage. Evidence for functional specialization is often in the form of a double dissociation which is established “when a specific brain lesion X in Patient 1 relates to poor performance on Task A but not Task B, whereas a different brain lesion Y in Patient 2 relates to poor performance on Task B but not Task A”. Researchers within the neuropsychological framework have compared Williams’ Syndrome with Specific Language Impairment and attempted to establish such a double dissociation to provide evidence for hypotheses such as the ‘grammar module’. On this account, children with Williams’ Syndrome have avoided damage to this part of their brain and thus develop language normally. However, as the authors point out, in fact, no such double dissociation exists: although Williams’ Syndrome children do perform better than SLI children on specific tasks, overall their language ability falls well below typical levels for children in their age group. Perhaps even more surprisingly, in areas where children with Williams’ Syndrome perform tasks within the average range, “the cognitive and neural processes that support this performance in the Williams’ syndrome children are very different from those used by typically developing children”.25 Taken together this provides evidence for the neuroconstructivist approach. Complex behaviors cannot be mapped onto specific parts of the brain and then onto strands of DNA. Complex behaviors are emergent features of a bewilderingly complex interaction of physical, chemical, biological and cultural factors.

ARE BEHAVIORS PHENOTYPES? Let us take stock of the discussion so far. To this point we have considered in some detail the suggestion that complex behaviors are inherited in much the same way that physiological features are. Even if this turned out to be the case, the inheritance of physiological features is wildly different from the traditional vision of these being inscribed in a genetic blueprint. Physiological features and the behavioral capacities they support emerge as features of developmental processes in which it is neither possible nor desirable to isolate discrete causal features. Behavior in the world in turn influences and transforms underlying physiological and neurophysiological architectures. While some aspects of those architectures are more robust than others, both robustness and plasticity need to be seen as complementary rather than contradictory categories in the developmental process. In light of this we should now consider the broader question of whether it even makes sense to talk about human behavioral phenotypes encoded in the genes. If

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even relatively simple physiological and neurophysiological structures are not encoded in this manner it seems highly implausible to suggest that complex human behaviors might be. So how then do we make sense of the claim that certain characteristic human behaviors are heritable? Recall the so-called First Law of Behavioral Genetics which states that “all complex human behaviors are heritable”. From the point of view of natural selection, physiological and neurophysiological structures are only as good as the behaviors they facilitate, so there are strong intuitive reasons for supporting this law. A structure is selected for iff it affords behaviors that survive the ravages of natural selection and one of the fundamental assumptions of neo-Darwinian biology is that the more complex a structure is, the more likely that it is the product of adaptation by natural selection rather than some other factor such as population drift. Human behavior is extraordinarily complex so if it is a phenotypic property then it is most likely to be the product of an adaptation. Yet, much of the work surveyed over the last few pages has highlighted some of the problems with behavioral genetics’ conception of heredity. The project of behavioral genetics is firstly to identify significant patterns of variation within populations and then ultimately map these onto genetic variants. This has typically been pursued by the search for genetic polymorphisms through Candidate Gene Association studies (CGA). Where a correlation is established between behavioral variability and genetic variability this relationship is hypothesized as a causal one. CGA studies have focused upon a small number of genes involved in the development of neurotransmitters on the assumption that demonstrating variation in neurotransmitter development can be related to differences in behavioral outcomes. However, as Evan Charney suggests, these studies have largely been conducted on mice and in vitro and “attempts to associate these polymorphisms with actual differences in neurotransmitters in the human brain under physiological conditions have been largely unsuccessful”.26 Even more problematic is the finding that polymorphisms in these genes are associated with a vast range of behaviors. For example, polymorphisms on the same regulatory region of the 5-HTT gene that were reported to predict voting have also been associated with over one hundred different behaviors including agreeableness, alcoholism, anorexia nervosa, behavior in romantic relationships, bipolar disorder, creative dance performance, depression, gambling, gang membership, intelligence, job satisfaction, obesity, optimism, persistence, premature ejaculation, schizophrenia, seasonal affective disorder, selfesteem, sexual novelty, shyness, and utilitarian moral judgements.27 This leads Charney to comment (somewhat politely under the circumstances) that attempts to demonstrate a correlation between polymorphisms in a particular gene sequence and multiple different behaviors is likely to yield a large number of false positives. Even advocates of Behavioral Genetics have been forced to admit a huge replication crisis in CGA studies. This might lead them to refocus their attention on the whole genome. Such an approach, known as Genome Wide Association studies, however, encounters a diametrically opposing problem. Whereas claims about relationships between gene sequences and behaviors are overdetermined, claims about relationships between whole genome variability and behaviors have failed to yield sufficient evidence in their favour.



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The strategy typically adopted has been a focus on Single Nucleotide Proteins (SNP). This has led to a ‘problem of missing heritability’: “Despite the supposed heritability of all human behavior, behavior geneticists have been unable to find any substantial associations between polymorphisms in SNPs and behaviors”.28 The response has been to invoke Fisher’s “infinitesimal model”: trait heritability depends upon thousands of genes working in concert so it is impossible to identify a single gene but the hope remains that with sufficient data, patterns can be established which can be associated with gene variations. Careful statistical analysis, it is hoped, will identify the aggregate effect gene clusters. Based on this methodology, behavioral geneticists have claimed that a cluster of 9 million genes working in concert account for around 0.43 percent of heritability of intelligence. As Charney notes, this claim “lacks any independent empirical justification beyond the assumptions that the infinitesimal model is true and that genome wide heritability estimates and risk scores are valid”.29 It is also, one might add, a far cry from claims about the heritability of texting or religiosity being linked to a specific gene. One particularly disturbing flaw in these studies is that they are based upon the assumption that the role of individual genes is additive, an assumption which two researchers acknowledge to be almost certainly incorrect yet astonishingly continue to use anyway as a “workable default” in the absence of detailed knowledge of how the process of epistasis works.30 There is little to recommend this procedure over entrail divining. None of what has been said above requires us to deny the important and sometimes decisive role that genes play in the process of development. It is simply to remind ourselves that the role that genes play is in concert with a vast array of other interactants and that causation does not proceed from the lowest level of analysis to the highest but is distributed throughout the developmental system. Sometimes simplification will be a necessary evil, but it should be in the context of a broader embrace of complexity. One conclusion that several contributors to this collection made is the obvious one that acknowledgment of the complexities of development mean moving beyond disciplinary imperialism towards genuine interdisciplinary research. With this in mind, I will move onto implications of this Developmentalist Turn for the Human Sciences and for Philosophy.

WHAT IS A BEHAVIOR ANYWAY? Consider the list of putative inherited behaviors once more. These include “texting on a cellphone (52 percent heritable), being a Born Again Christian (65 percent heritable), and being supportive of property taxes (41 percent heritable) [. . .] voting in a presidential election, creative dance performance, and utilitarian moral judgments”.31 The first and most striking thing about this list is the fact that most of the items on it are not what we would ordinarily call behaviors and those that we would are very different kinds of behavior. Being a Born Again Christian does involve certain sorts of behaviors but many of these are indistinguishable from those involved in Playing a Born Again Christian in a TV drama.

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Texting on a cellphone requires certain characteristic bodily movements (though these may soon be replaced by voice operated texting). The ability to text requires a certain degree of manual dexterity which is one reason it has been preferred by younger people. Presumably, there is some evolutionary and developmental story to be told about the capacity to develop that dexterity but, as we have seen, it will be considerably more complicated than the idea that it is ‘encoded’ in our genes. Most importantly, the ability to manipulate the keys is a necessary but far from sufficient condition for ‘texting’. One needs a working telecommunications network including the relevant power and (under capitalism at least) payment infrastructure. One needs a basic command of the written language and of the turn taking system relevant to one’s culture and the ways in which it is modified in texting. There is a burgeoning field of Digital Conversation Analysis which explores the relationships and differences between sms/Whatsapp communication and ordinary face-to-face-conversation.32 Clearly text messaging piggy backs on the prior acquisition of conversational skills but the medium means that the sequential organization of conversational turns over time must be modified to take account of the media. There are also canons of appropriacy about when to use digital communication and when to prefer face to face or at least phone. One would generally be behaving badly if one broke the news of a bereavement, initiated a divorce or even asked someone out on a date by SMS. What this highlights is the multiple ways in which ‘texting on a cellphone’ can go awry and the need for participants to use repair mechanisms to keep the conversation on track. For various reasons then there are threshold conditions which must be met if something is to even count as ‘texting on a cellphone’ at all. Small children and possibly even some ape species can be taught to play at texting, but they would not be engaging in texting. This brings us to our larger question. The term ‘behavior’ betrays some of its intellectual legacy. While the cognitivist revolution discarded many of the outer trappings of its behaviorist predecessor, it retained certain of its key commitments, in particular the adherence to the idea that ‘behaviors’ are the end result of a causal chain and can be understood largely by working backwards along that chain to the prime mover. Most recent versions of this project have sought to locate that prime mover in the gene. We have seen some of the reasons why the gene is a poor candidate for such an elevated role. The real problem here is revealed when we ask: could there be a gene or suite of genes for texting as opposed to pretending to text? Suppose some ambitious behavioral geneticist succeeded in locating the cluster of SNPs responsible for ‘texting behavior’, does it seem plausible that the cluster would be responsible for ‘pretending to text’ or an entirely different cluster be involved in the latter? Consider further the difference between a child playing at texting as opposed to an adult pretending to text. In the first case the child may not know what it is doing and is simply mimicking the actions of an elder but in the second the adult has mastered the skill of texting and is pretending to text because for instance they do not really want to send



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the message they have been asked to send, or they are creating a distraction to divert attention from something else that is going on. What concerns us here is what makes something a case of ‘texting on a cellphone’ and more broadly any kind of behavior at all. I have already suggested above that behaviors have certain performance thresholds that must be attained in order to count as a behavior at all. Moreover, even relatively simple behaviors have standards of evaluation, according to which it is possible to do them more or less badly, more or less well. If we maintain the idea that behaviors are the end products of causal chains, then regardless of where that chain begins, we run into the following problem: any behavior consists of certain characteristic doings and sayings. These doings and sayings are bodily movements. Any given behavior is underdetermined by the bodily movements that comprise it, that is, the same bodily movements can constitute different behaviors entirely: a polite gesture in one setting can be an offensive one in another; what may appear to be a violent assault may actually be someone performing a life-saving intervention. Social competence consists in the ability to know what to do and say in what circumstances. The physical setting has some bearing but for the most part circumstances are constituted by the actions and reactions of others. Primarily we respond to the actions and reactions of those who are what Alfred Schutz called our ‘consociates’, those who we live alongside and who share a common space and time. We also respond to what he calls ‘our contemporaries’—those who share our time but not our space and even to our ‘predecessors’ and ‘successors’ divided from us in both space and time but whose actions affect us in the first instance and for whom our actions have consequences in the latter. These different perspectives are potentially interchangeable: I am a ‘predecessor’ to some, a ‘successor’ to others, and a ‘consociate’ can become merely a ‘contemporary’ and vice-versa. Our circumstances are thus textured in complex ways and this indicates a marked difference between the lives we lead and those of other animals. Other animals may well care for their offspring and even their grandchildren, but they do not show any concern for the grandchildren of strangers. Similarly, while there is growing evidence of at least rudimentary forms of cultural transmission among a surprisingly diverse array of animals, none of it reaches the level of sophistication that it does in humans. It would be tempting therefore to fall back on the standard demarcation and suggest that the point at which cultural transmission reaches a certain level of complexity is the point at which we cease to be merely animals. The amount of philosophical and theological energy that has been devoted to emphasising how we differ from ‘the animals’ has obscured what an odd way this is to see things. For, outside of some commitment to Special Creation there is no foundation for erecting a radical dichotomy between us and the other creatures with whom we share common descent. A constructive-interactionist account of human development frees us from the lingering hold of the Scala Naturae and allows us to be robustly naturalistic.

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NOTES   1.  John Hacker-Wright (ed.) (2018), “Introduction: From Natural Goodness to Morality,” in Philippa Foot on Virtue and Goodness (London: Palgrave McMillan), p. 11.   2.  P. M. S. Hacker (2007), Human Nature: The Categorial Framework (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 90.  3. Hacker, Human Nature, pp. 106–107.  4. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1405, doi: 10.1002/wcs.1405.  5. WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1405, doi: 10.1002/wcs.1405.   6.  The picture of course is a little more complex in the case of the ancestors of domesticated animals and in the case of some social animals where one animal will approach the predator in order to allow its group to escape. An interesting variant of this is our cute local tourist attraction, the Quokka, which will throw its offspring at potential predators to enable escape.   7.  S. Jones, “Can Newborn Infants Imitate?” WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1410, doi: 10.1002 /wcs.1410.   8.  Jones, “Can newborn infants imitate?”   9.  Cited in D. S. Moore and D. Shenk, WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1400, doi: 10.1002 /wcs.1400, p. 1. 10.  D. S. Moore and D. Shenk, WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1400, doi: 10.1002/wcs.1400, p. 2. 11.  Moore and Shenk, WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1400, doi: 10.1002/wcs.1400, p. 3. 12.  Moore and Shenk, WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1400, doi: 10.1002/wcs.1400, p. 4. 13.  Moore and Shenk, WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1400, doi: 10.1002/wcs.1400, p. 4. 14.  Moore and Shenk, WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1400, doi: 10.1002/wcs.1400, p. 5. 15.  Patrick Bateson, “Robustness and Plasticity in Development,” WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1386, doi: 10.1002/wcs.1386. 16.  K. E. Adolph and J. M. Franchak, “The Development of Motor Behavior,” WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, e1430, doi: 10.1002/wcs.1430. 17.  Marcel Mauss (1973), “Techniques of the body,” Economy and Society 2:1, pp. 70–88. 18.  Adolph and Franchak, “The Development of Motor Behavior.” 19.  Adolph and Franchak, “The Development of Motor Behavior,” p. 2. 20.  Adolph and Franchak, “The Development of Motor Behavior,” p. 3. 21.  A. D’Souza and H Karmiloff-Smith, “Neurodevelopmental Disorders,” WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1398, doi: 10.1002/wcs.1398. 22.  D’Souza and Karmiloff-Smith, “Neurodevelopmental Disorders,” p. 4. 23.  D’Souza and Karmiloff-Smith, “Neurodevelopmental Disorders,” p. 4. 24.  D’Souza and Karmiloff-Smith, “Neurodevelopmental Disorders,” p. 5. 25.  D’Souza and Karmiloff-Smith, “Neurodevelopmental Disorders,” p. 4. 26. Evan Charney, “Genes, Behavior and Behavior Genetics,” WIREs Cogn Sci 2017, 8:e1405, doi: 10.1002/wcs.1405. 27.  Charney, “Genes, Behavior and Behavior Genetics.” 28.  Charney, “Genes, Behavior and Behavior Genetics.”



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29.  Charney, “Genes, Behavior and Behavior Genetics,” p. 4. 30.  Charney, “Genes, Behavior and Behavior Genetics,” p. 5. 31.  Charney, “Genes, Behavior and Behavior Genetics,” p. 5. 32.  Robert J. Moore, “Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis: Empirical approaches to the study of digital technology in action,” The SAGE handbook of digital technology research (Sage, 2013).

7 Culture as Our Ecological Niche

In this chapter, I develop in more detail my claim that we can fruitfully locate the virtues in our ongoing co-construction and maintenance of our ecological niche. This is in contrast to standard dichotomous accounts that assume virtues are either a product of nature or a product of nurture or some curious hybrid thereof. The Developmental Systems perspective outlined in earlier chapters rejects even the consensus view that both nature and nurture are important since that consensus still retains within it a dichotomy between two distinct types of causality. The Evolutionary Psychologists got at least this much right when they said that nothing which the biological organism interacts with is non-biological to it although they drew entirely the wrong conclusion from this. I also suggested that Marx very much anticipated this view, something which should not surprise us given the key role that Marxists such as Richard Lewontin have played in its development and how it clearly draws on central themes of Marxist thought. There is, however, a popular caricature of Marx as a Promethean who celebrated the triumph of culture and technology over nature and was thus thoroughly wedded to precisely the sorts of dichotomies that we are questioning. I think there is evidence to suggest an alternative reading of him as an Epicurean naturalist who is much more conducive to the non-dichotomous view I have been defending. Nevertheless, with any writer as complex and prolific as Marx, there are ample opportunities to find textual evidence to support numerous conflicting interpretations and it certainly chimes with influential traditions which developed based upon his writings. Anyone serious about both social justice and the environment must begin with an honest assessment of the parlous record of ‘actually existing socialism’ in its stewardship of our lived environment. The Promethean Marx is no solitary figure but represents the culmination of an entire tradition of thinking about the human relationship to nature as one of domination. The Soviet Union, PRC and the Warsaw Pact countries were 125

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not therefore unusual in the contempt they showed for the environment, but based upon the reading of Marx I will be offering, it would have caused him great sadness to know that these outrages were perpetrated in his name. I will begin therefore by outlining what is the orthodox view of the nature-culture relationship in which the Promethean Marx comfortably sits, before outlining an alternative view based upon a reading of Marx as an Epicurean naturalist.

THE STANDARD VIEW: CULTURE AS THE SUPER-ORGANIC When Katherine Hepburn’s character in the African Queen addresses Humphrey Bogart’s, she expresses centuries of Judaeo-Christian tradition and in particular a Gnostic-inflected Pauline Protestant worldview. We are inclined to think of the relationship between the natural (including those aspects of ourselves that we count as natural) and the socio-cultural in such a way that it seems obvious that ethical life is a cultural achievement and as such cannot be natural. The view that I am setting out to challenge has often been assumed but rarely explicitly defended. It is a presumption so deep that its advocates probably do not feel the need to defend it. The sophisticated philosophical arguments that philosophers have developed against ethical naturalism derive at least some of their plausibility from this cultural background and therefore merely responding to these arguments has seldom been sufficient to dislodge their hold. Though few professional philosophers cite the work of A. L. Kroeber, his paper “The Super-Organic”, for all that it is verbose and archaic (at times offensively so) has been deeply influential far beyond anthropology. Even if few philosophers have encountered his essay directly (other than perhaps in an undergraduate class) the thoughts expressed therein have until very recently been the common sense of our age with respect to the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’. He forms part of a group of social theorists including Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict who turned the tide decisively against Social Darwinism and more broadly against the idea of biologicizing social phenomena. Of course, the broader political context of widespread revulsion towards allegedly scientific racism in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi genocide, gave a sense of urgency to the Boasian project of denying a significant role to biology in understanding human affairs. Kroeber’s essay represents an important attempt to take stock of the growing influence of evolutionary thought on the human sciences. Kroeber recognizes the appeal of the analogy between biological and cultural evolution yet urges caution by drawing our attention to a number of familiar contrasts. The most important of these contrasts, since it is still very much with us, is that between the acquired and the innate. The opening lines are reminiscent of the ones we quoted earlier from Peter Hacker’s account of human powers.



Culture as Our Ecological Niche 127 Everyone is aware that we are born with certain powers and that we acquire others. There is no need of argument to prove that we derive some things in our lives and make-up from nature through heredity, and that other things come to us through agencies with which heredity has nothing to do. No one has yet been found to assert that any human being is born with an inherent knowledge of the multiplication table; nor, on the other hand, to doubt that the children of a negro are born negroes through the operation of hereditary forces.1

Kroeber considers the distinction between the slow acquisition of flight by the reptilian ancestors of modern birds and human beings’ more recent acquisition of this capacity through technology. On the surface the human accomplishment may look like a more rapid version of biological evolution. In reality, however, the crucial difference is that “organic evolution is essentially and inevitably connected with hereditary processes; the social evolution which characterizes the progress of civilization, on the other hand, is not, or not necessarily, tied up with hereditary agencies”. Most importantly, biological evolution proceeds morphologically whereas cultural evolution typically need not. On Kroeber’s influential account, culture comes to stand in for biological evolution. It is, as the title suggests, “the super organic”. He concludes that “[t]he mind and the body are but facets of the same organic material or activity; the social substance—or unsubstantial fabric, if one prefers the phrase— the existence that we call civilization, transcends them utterly for all its being forever rooted in life”.2 Kroeber rejects any reduction of culture to psychology and thereby to biology. He keenly defends the autonomy of anthropology and related disciplines; it is the Super Organic which forms their proper subject matter. Kroeber therefore echoes a message which emanates from canonic figures like Durkheim that only social facts can determine other social facts. The Kroeber-Boas view came to be the dominant one in twentieth-century social science. So much so that when a bunch of young upstarts known as Evolutionary Psychologists declared all-out war on the traditional way of doing social research, they chose Kroeber as a particular target for their ire. For them he epitomized what they call the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) according to which, “the contents of human minds are primarily (or entirely) free social constructions, and the social sciences are autonomous and disconnected from any evolutionary or psychological foundation”.3 For Evolutionary Psychologists, the SSSM is only a slightly more intellectually respectable form of Special Creationism, which refuses to take seriously the radical implications of Darwinism for our understanding of human affairs. The following passage from the Evolutionary Psychologist’s manifesto The Adapted Mind augurs well, “[B]iology” is not some substance that is segregated or localized inside the initial state of the organism at birth, circumscribing the domain to which evolutionary analyzes apply. It is also in the organization of the developmentally relevant world itself, when viewed from the perspective imposed by the evolved developmental mechanisms of the organism.

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Thus, nothing the organism interacts with in the world is nonbiological to it, and so for humans cultural forces are biological, social forces are biological, physical forces are biological, and so on. The social and cultural are not alternatives to the biological. They are aspects of evolved human biology.4

It might seem at first blush that this view could not be more radically different from Kroeber and Boas’ insistence on the sui generis nature of human culture. In particular, Evolutionary Psychology is committed to the idea, which would be anathema to holists from Durkheim onwards, that culture can be understood psychologically. Culture is not causeless and disembodied. It is generated in rich and intricate ways by information-processing mechanisms situated in human minds. These mechanisms are, in turn, the elaborately sculpted product of the evolutionary process. Therefore, to understand the relationship between biology and culture one must first understand the architecture of our evolved psychology.5

While they are prepared to countenance the existence of population level effects, Evolutionary Psychologists would reject as obscurantist the idea that there exists some sort of cultural substance which exerts casual effects that cannot be reduced to the level of individual brains. The shrillness of the dispute between Evolutionary Psychologists and their Standard Social Scientific opponents can lead us to neglect the vast amount of common ground they share. This is brought out well by Daniel Dennett, an extremely sympathetic critic. He criticizes the often hyperbolic way in which Evolutionary Psychologists make their case, while acknowledging that this may be because they are forced to make it to an extremely hostile audience keen to impute sinister political motives. In Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, he agrees that the SSSM, as expounded by Evolutionary Psychologists, is absurd but posits in its place his own evolutionarily informed “Only Slightly Nonstandard Social Science Model” according to which, animals are rigidly controlled by their biology, [whereas] human behavior is largely determined by culture, a largely autonomous system of symbols and values, growing from a biological base, but growing indefinitely away from it. Able to overpower or escape biological constraints in most regards, cultures can vary from one another enough so that important portions of the variance are thereby explained. . . . Learning is not a generalpurpose process, but human beings have so many special-purpose gadgets, and learn to harness them with such versatility, that learning often can be treated as if it were an entirely medium-neutral and content-neutral gift of non-stupidity.6

This description could easily have been lifted wholesale from Kroeber. Culture for Dennett plays something of the role of Deus Ex Machina enabling human beings to partially escape from the control of our genes and forge our own path. The view that Dennett advances is in tension with something which has been referred to by De Waal as veneer theory. The idea that culture is largely ephemeral and that biology is much more powerful. Veneer theory is deeply rooted in our



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intellectual culture. I suggested above that its source may be theological, primarily in the gnostic-tinged strand of Christianity, which emphasizes our fallen natures, a theme which can be traced back to Plato. Be that as it may, it has long outgrown its Christian roots and has been a persistent feature of even the most secular thinking. Freud, an avowed atheist, endorsed a variant of it in Civilization and Its Discontents and in Totem and Taboo and despite its utter lack of scientific credibility, his view of the fragile nature of civilization still permeates the Zeitgeist. It does so to the extent that to many people it just seems like plain common sense to suggest that we are brutes in need of taming. I have earlier discussed what I call the feral fallacy; the idea that a normal biological path of human development needs not involve the acquisition of second nature. The feral fallacy and veneer theory are close companions since at their root is the idea that culture is something that needs to be imposed on the human animal from the outside. A common trope employed during the early days of anthropology was the idea that investigating hunter-gatherer peoples was a way of getting closer to our true nature. This is reflected in Freud’s ruminations on Australian Aboriginal Peoples: We should certainly not expect that the sexual life of these poor, naked cannibals would be moral in our sense or that their sexual instincts would be subjected to any great degree of restriction. Yet we find that they set before themselves with the most scrupulous care and the most painful severity the aim of avoiding incestuous sexual relations. Indeed, their whole social organization seems to serve that purpose or to have been brought into relation with its attainment.7

Freud it appears is prepared to allow that Aboriginal peoples have some sort of system of genetic hygiene even if he doubts that they can be “moral in our sense”. Sometimes this idea of native peoples living outside conventional morality is proffered from a position of disdain and hostility at others in its ‘noble savage’ variant in which it is done with nostalgic condescension. Either way it is based upon the false idea that First Nation peoples are somehow less cultural than the rest of us. It is worth noting that the etymology of culture is of a ‘ploughed field’ and the underlying assumption is that culture emerges with agriculture. This supports the idea that hunter-gatherer people are bereft of culture. But in fact, as works like Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu and Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate on Earth meticulously detail, Australian Aboriginal peoples had highly sophisticated and complex land management practices, far in advance, in fact, of the European invaders.8 Part of the problem lies with the assumptions criticized by deep historians that humanity emerges alongside material culture. This assumption turns a methodological problem for historians and archaeologists into an apparent conceptual truth: humans can only be said to have culture when historians can discover evidence of that. Yet, there is paleontological evidence of art made by Neanderthals, so it is reasonable to suppose that this was also present among our common ancestors. Ewa Jablonka and her collaborators have amassed an enormous body of data detailing the extent of cultural transmission among mammals and birds.

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Despite this, there has been tremendous resistance on the part of gene-centric biologists to acknowledging a significant role for behavioral and cultural transmission in the evolutionary process. As Jablonka and Lamb write, Culture is, in fact, still considered as a kind of “icing on the cake”, even when thinking about human evolution. It is usually excluded from the interpretations of the evolution of those fundamental species-specific human behaviors that have a significant “innate” component. So cultural inheritance is deemed irrelevant to the evolution of the ability to acquire language, the ability to have complex and multiple social interactions, the ability to control muscles and emotions, and so on. Gene differences are so obviously involved in the evolution of “innate” behaviors, that most evolutionary biologists automatically exclude any role for culture in their evolution.9

Outside of biology this thought is usually expressed in the idea that there is a certain point at which evolution stops for human beings, or at least loses explanatory relevance. It is certainly true that once behavioral and cultural transmission kicks in they become powerful forces within the evolutionary process. Nevertheless, as Jablonka et. al. argue, this is not a uniquely human phenomenon. Although no one disputes that the scale and complexity of human cultural transmission vastly outweighs that of other animals, its precursors can be found throughout the natural world. There has been some grudging acknowledgment among gene-centric biologists of this fact, but they attempt to reconceptualises it as an extension of genetic inheritance, via the extended phenotype or by an appeal to memes. However, as Jablonka argues, There is an almost unlimited supply of genetic variation in real animals, which makes it impossible to focus exclusively on cultural evolution. But this is not a good reason for ignoring the role of the cultural inheritance of habits. To do so, leaves too much unexplained. For example, how can we explain differences, such as the different song dialects of family groups of sperm whales, which cannot be attributed to differences in genes? It seems that these dialects are not related to gene differences, but are determined by evolving local traditions, passed on by vocal imitation. In a case like this, we can focus on the transmission of behavioral variations through social learning while ignoring, for the time being, the effects of any gene differences. Of course, this does not mean that genes are unnecessary and dispensable. What it does mean is that differences in genes may be irrelevant for some variation in heritable behavior, at least for a while. So, when we talk about behavioral transmission, we mean that the transmitted differences in behavior do not depend on genetic differences, but we do not mean that behavior is devoid of a genetic basis, that it is gene-free!10

The relatively short evolutionary history of the human species means that cultural and behavioral inheritance plays a much more important role than genetic variance, but this does not mean they are nugatory in the case of other animals. Most importantly, the incorporation of cultural and behavioral transmission fatally undermines the dichotomy between nature and culture upon which veneer theory is based.



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Let us examine the assumptions of veneer theory in more detail: 1. Any complex phenomenon can be the product of either biological or cultural causes or a numerically distinguishable aggregate of the two. i. Where a phenomenon is a numerically distinguishable aggregate, it should be possible to isolate and determine which causal factor has greater influence in any particular case. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

‘Biological’ means ‘encoded in the genes’. Morality is not encoded in the genes. Therefore, morality is not a biological phenomenon. Biological causation is more powerful than cultural causation. Thus, in any conflict between biology and morality, biology will generally triumph. 7. Therefore, if morality is primarily cultural in character then it will always be undermined by more powerful biological forces. I take it that 3) is an uncontroversial assumption for the same reasons that any complex phenotypic behavior is not ‘encoded’ in the genes. If assumptions 1), 2), or 5) are unsound, either singly or severally, then the veneer theory fails. All of the work that we have surveyed thus far has shown 1) to be an unsafe assumption. While it is true that any complex phenomenon is the product of multiple causes, including both biology and culture broadly construed, the manner in which they operate is non-additive. Similarly, with respect to 2) I hope that enough work has been done so far to show that the class of biological is vastly broader than the class of genetic. However, if assumption 1) and assumption 2) fail then assumption 5) becomes otiose. One might straightforwardly claim that genetic causation always trumps other kinds of causes but that is self-evidently false in most cases. If cultural causation can also be biological causation, then the contrast between the two disappears. Going back to the distinction Ernst Mayr draws between analysis and reduction it might be useful, on occasion, for clearly defined explanatory purposes to focus primarily on what has traditionally been understood as biological or cultural factors but we should avoid the temptation to get carried in the direction of reduction. If the role of these factors is nonadditive, there is little to be gained by untangling them. The line adopted by Wright and Singer is to argue that some aspects of morality are biological in the sense that we have an evolved propensity to favour kin and those closest to us. De Waal also shares these assumptions albeit taking it in a different direction. Wright and Singer both clearly believe that human rationality can overcome the influence of our supposed evolutionary programming (although Wright is rather more ambivalent on this than Singer), yet neither is able to offer a convincing account of how this is possible. They thus introduce a Promethean conception of rationality which can somehow magically absolve us of our natural sinfulness. What is the alternative to such a Promethian conception with its magical overtones? The answer is to remember that the field of human activity and all that

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accompanies it, is itself a part of nature. As Jablonka and her collaborators have shown, cultural and behavioral transmission exist throughout the natural world. Odling-Smee’s work has demonstrated that ecological niche construction is also ubiquitous. Taken together, we can see that those aspects of human existence which make us distinctive, such as highly complex culture and the capacity for toolmaking and labour, do not mark us out from the natural world; they define our place within it. It is only a dogged determination to treat natural as coterminous with genetic that prevents us from seeing that. If we acknowledge that the extension of natural is much broader than genetic and encompasses inter alia those characteristic life activities that organisms undertake in an effort to even the evolutionary odds, then there is nothing puzzling about how even these higher order human capacities are natural. This does not mean that such capacities can be explained adequately simply by an evolutionary functional analysis. Although this is not a universal truth, and too many of our fellow humans live in desperate circumstances, the hallmark of human development is a move beyond mere survival and reproduction to something like a fully human life where questions about how one lives sometimes becomes as vital as questions about whether one lives. Even this can be overstated. We are inclined to think of the lives of other animals (at least in the wild) as one of unrelenting struggle. This picture fostered in part by a misunderstanding of Darwinism, and in part by our cultural propensity to treat other animals in mechanistic terms, has probably been exaggerated by the popularity of television nature documentaries. However, as Jonathan Balcombe has forcefully argued, this view of the lives of non-human animals is a caricature. Generations of ethologists who are perfectly complacent with the idea of pain in other animals dismiss as anthropomorphism the idea that they may experience pleasure, let alone joy. Citing a particularly florid passage from Richard Dawkins in which he describes the horrors of the natural world, Balcombe comments that, Such creeping paranoia is quite out of proportion with reality. For every tragic child abduction hundreds of millions of kids get to school safely every day. And so it goes for cheetahs and gazelles. Nature is not nearly so grim as she is made out to be. A gazelle, like you and I, will die only once, and that death is usually a fairly fleeting event compared to the life that goes before. A violent end on the African savannah typically lasts minutes, at most. Tens, hundreds or thousands of days precede it, few of which are punctuated by any serious threat. The same goes for gulls, sea lions, leopards, sea turtles and guenon monkeys. Especially once an individual gets past the precarious infancy, he or she has good prospects of a long and mostly peaceful life. For every moment of fear, suffering and/or death, there are multitudes of opportunities to experience life’s calmer moments and its pleasures.11

It is reasonable to suppose that evolution endowed a range of animals with the capacity to feel both pleasure and pain and Balcombe surveys a range of physiological evidence to support this, showing that large numbers of animals have similar neuro-physiological structures that are involved in the human experi-



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ence of pain, pleasure and reward. It is just as reasonable to suppose that unmoored from the immediate exigencies of survival these enable them to experience something akin to joy and delight. When I first read Balcombe’s book, I was left with the impression of a sledgehammer used to crack a walnut: surely no one seriously denies that animals experience pleasure? Yet, as he points out, while there are begrudging acknowledgments of this undeniable fact, it is often in the context of a discourse which emphasizes the cruelty and harshness of the natural world. This in turn feeds into the veneer theory for, if nature is indeed red in tooth and claw, then Dawkins is surely right to insist that, [. . .] if you wish, as I do, to build a society in which individuals cooperate generously and unselfishly towards a common good, you can expect little help from biological nature. Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have the chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to.12

As we saw earlier, Kropotkin long ago pointed out the fallaciousness of this line of thought. In the passage cited above, he argues that the problem with trying to root an ethics in what nature is objectively like runs into the problem of nature’s sheer vastness. Should one seek cooperation, you will find it but so, too, if you seek callous indifference to the sufferings of others, you will also find ample evidence for that. The question therefore cannot simply be what are human beings naturally like but rather what can we reasonably aspire to be. For reasons I will survey in the next two chapters, the answer to that question has much to do with the kinds of institutions we can build, sustain and pass onto our offspring as part of our ongoing ecological niche construction. Nevertheless, if there are biological constraints on the sorts of institutions that are sustainable then it behooves us to know this. The intuitive appeal of the veneer theory and its persistence, despite being based upon the flimsiest of evidence, rests upon the fact that there does seem to be limits to the kind of institutions that are sustainable. The concept of ‘human nature’ is often invoked as a placeholder for an explanation of why certain types of institutions fail. So, for instance, we learned the twentietn-century experiments in state socialism failed because human nature is irredeemably corrupt and cannot brook too much equality. But as Evolutionary Psychologists are wont to remind us, the human species has spent the longest period of its existence in small hunter-gatherer bands which were egalitarian in character and our closest primate relatives also have strong sanctions against dominant individuals so, if anything, equality comes at least as naturally to us as hierarchy. The patina of scientific authority adds little to the essentially theological morality tale that is the veneer theory: humans are fallen creatures condemned to live miserable existences unless saved by the sacred fire. It matters little whether the sacred fire in question is Divine Grace or a supernatural conception of rationality. Each feeds an African Queen conception of morality, in which we were put on earth to rise above our natures. There is an important story to be told about corruption and I will attempt to sketch the outlines of it in the following chapters, but it is a much more

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complex, and consequently more interesting story than narratives about our fallen nature. Even an account based upon our inherent corruptibility needs to be able to distinguish between redeemable and irredeemable corruption. For instance, if it were indeed the case that human beings cannot naturally brook too much equality this may lead to a number of conclusions. It may be the case that we simply accept that fact, as defenders of inequality often counsel, and simply design institutions that mitigate its worst effects. Or, we can recognize that there are forces working to undermine our egalitarian ideals and build institutions robust enough to withstand them. The perceived threat posed by biological accounts of human nature stem from the identification between ‘biological’ and ‘hardwired’ or ‘encoded’. The standard contrast drawn is between social phenomena that are relatively malleable and susceptible to volitional change and biological phenomena that are resistant to such change. If, however, we abandon a dichotomous view of nature and culture and adopt instead a fluid process view of both, there is nothing necessarily riding on the fact that a phenomenon can be understood in biological terms: the question is not whether cultural phenomena are more or less malleable than biological ones since the answer would be meaningless. The question is rather, in any particular case, whether a phenomenon is susceptible to volitional change and to what degree. One obvious point to be made is that since the advent of genetic engineering, in particular CRISPR technology, even the ill-named Central Dogma of molecular biology is no longer treated with the reverence it had historically been accorded and this has been exacerbated by our increased knowledge of epigenetics, the role of RNA and other aspects of gene expression and regulation. This renders even more problematic the traditional distinction drawn in social and political philosophy between organicist and engineering responses to social problems. The organicist metaphor has historically been associated with conservatives wary of mere humans tampering with what God or nature has intended. More recently, it has become associated with a strand of radical reactionary thought under the guise of ‘classical liberalism’ or ‘neo-liberalism’. One figure that looms large is that of Karl Popper who expanded his critical ire against Marxists and others who pursued utopian projects of large-scale social engineering, preferring instead his own brand of “piecemeal social engineering” in response to concrete well-documented ills. Popper, who popularised the term ‘conspiracy theory’, participated alongside Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek in one of the most successful conspiracies of the twentieth century: that launched by the Mont Pellerin society in the 1950s to establish neo-liberalism as the dominant ideological framework in Anglo-American societies.13 Hayek popularised the idea of market societies as ‘spontaneous orders’ which he believed mirrored the reality of spontaneous order in natural eco-systems unaffected by human tampering. Left to their own devices, markets will achieve Pareto optimality in much the same way that environments not despoiled by human beings will reach some sort of happy equilibrium. This idea has been spectacularly



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successful and with mostly disastrous consequences, which is surprising given that it is based upon the flimsiest of intellectual foundations. Even as analogies go, it is lame: there is no reason to suppose that markets, which only ever exist and are sustained in complex institutional settings, are anything like eco-systems, and even if they were, there is no reason to suppose that actual eco-systems are characterized by spontaneous order. The latter view is a theoretical fantasy made popular by the rise of cybernetics and quickly disproved by actual on the ground empirical investigation. Eco-systems like markets are chaotic and only stabilized by active intervention. The basis of the analogy between markets and eco-systems is the idea that both can fruitfully be understood in information-theoretic terms. Hayek’s famous epistemological argument against central planning is based upon the premise that markets are much more efficient as information processors than individuals or even large groups of individuals. Similarly, the idea of eco-systems as self-stabilizing orders is based upon a set of assumptions about the way positive and negative feedback flows within them. The trouble with the information-theoretic approach to both markets and eco-systems is that it downplays the fact that it is an attempt to model the activities of living beings. In the case of markets, information is not a neutral medium: the way things are described and conceptualised has real-world effects upon market actors. Hence, we have seen the emergence recently of behavioral economics to fill in the gaps left by the obviously exaggerated assumptions of rational choice economics. Similarly, organisms in an eco-system are not merely the passive receptors of information. They actively interact with that information and modify their ecological niche in response to it. The balance of nature hypothesis is a dogma lacking empirical confirmation. As Wu and Louck point out in their seminal paper on the topic, the balance of nature idea and the classical equilibrium paradigm have had profound influences on applied ecology, especially on nature conservation, as they have led to the supposition that “nature knows best.” Direct evidence that ecological systems are inherently systems in equilibrium, however, is still lacking. Indeed, individual organisms may be the only systems within which homeo-static mechanisms have been demonstrated to operate.14

Yet the idea that nature as a whole is a kind of supra-organism remains influential, for example, in Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis. In advancing their alternative view, hierarchical patch dynamics, Wu and Louck argue that “neither the classical equilibrium nor the various non-equilibrium views discussed earlier are comprehensive enough to incorporate the effects of patchiness, scale, and hierarchical organization”.15 It is thus mistaken to regard local areas of nature as spontaneous orders, since they are typically in a constant process of flux between disorder and order. Stability occurs only at much larger levels and even then, it is a relatively transient phenomenon. Nature is not in constant balance, and patchiness is ubiquitous. The metastability suggested by hierarchical patch dynamics differs theoretically and structurally from

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the static stability implied by both the balance of nature and the classical equilibrium paradigm. Ecological stability is scale-dependent. Metastability is dependent on the presence of and interaction among spatial, temporal and organizational scales. Metastability or persistence for many ecological systems is usually found at the meta-scale, in contrast to the transient dynamics that have been used to characterized local and large scale phenomena. Harmony is embedded in the patterns of fluctuation, and ecological persistence is “order within disorder”.16

Thus, even if we regard social phenomenon in organicist terms there is no reason to suppose that this means they tend towards equilibrium and that efforts to radically transform them are to no avail. Not stasis but “order within disorder” is the defining feature of the natural world and if we take social phenomena to be a peculiar feature of that natural world, it is to be expected here too. Culture is indeed fragile, but this does not mark it out as something different from the rest of the natural world in which it is embedded and if it is able to survive at all it does so like every other feature of the living world by us actively attending to its preservation.

NEITHER MALTHUS NOR PROMETHEUS: MARXISM AND NATURE The idea that human beings are, as Spinoza complains, “a dominion within a dominion” can possibly be traced back to certain strands within Christian thought, in particular the idea that God has given us dominion over nature. Nevertheless, it becomes a live option only with the rise of capitalism and modern scientific technique. What I have been attempting to develop over the course of this book is a Marxist naturalism which pays due respect to its origins in Aristotle, Epicurus and Spinoza. However, one source of resistance to this idea is the belief that Marxism is itself complicit in the idea of a relationship to nature based upon domination and exploitation. This idea was given enormous plausibility by the truly dreadful environmental records of ‘actually existing socialism’ in the former Soviet Union, the PRC, and elsewhere. Understandably then, when the modern environmental movement developed in the 1960s and 1970s, it positioned itself as a radical alternative to both capitalism and ‘communism’. In what follows I want to argue that the classical Marxist tradition beginning with Marx and Engels themselves provides sufficient intellectual resources to develop an eco-socialism. I begin with a caveat. Even men of genius can say silly things and Marx and Engels wrote a great deal as did their intellectual descendants. Thus, one can find textual evidence to support a range of often conflicting interpretations of Marx. The most I will be claiming is that the readings I offer here are plausible ones. I will be arguing that Marx defends a view of human relationship to the natural world which insists, like Epicurus and Spinoza, on our being part of that world, not in a position of sovereignty over it. The idea that we are “a kingdom within a kingdom” is an ideological reflection of the peculiar relationship in which human beings stand towards



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nature in the context of capitalist productive relations. It expresses not an ahistorical ontological position but rather a very specific historical one. My interpretation owes a great deal to John Bellamy Foster and through him to Istvan Meszaros, who in 1972 was one of the first Marxist voices to call our attention both to the looming ecological crisis and the fact that there was a tradition in Marxist thought which was equipped to respond to it. Meszaros’ Isaac Deutscher lecture in 1972 was largely devoted to the threat of nuclear annihilation, but in the course of it he turned his attention to ecological concerns. Waste, he suggests, is not an incidental feature of the capitalist mode of production which can be managed with sufficient political will; it is at the very heart of capitalism. As he states, Another basic contradiction of the capitalist system of control is that it cannot separate “advance” from destruction, nor “progress” from waste—however catastrophic the results. The more it unlocks the powers of productivity, the more it must unleash the powers of destruction; and the more it extends the volume of production, the more it must bury everything under mountains of suffocating waste. The concept of economy is radically incompatible with the ‘economy’ of capital production which, of necessity, adds insult to injury by first using up with rapacious wastefulness the limited resources of our planet, and then further aggravates the outcome by polluting and poisoning the human environment with its mass-produced waste and effluence.17

Unlike Sartre, whose work Meszaros both admired and criticized, Meszaros does not see scarcity as a natural phenomenon but rather a manufactured one. The central feature of capitalism is not scarcity but rather scarcity within plenty: the efficiency of the capitalist means of production leads to a situation where we are more than capable of feeding everyone, yet millions starve and are malnourished because it is not profitable to feed them. This is not a novel observation. In fact, it is one of Marx’s key insights into the nature of capitalism. Meszaros, however, extends it to the phenomenon of environmental degradation. Waste is ubiquitous: from the waste of human creativity involved in capitalist production, through the waste engendered by such things as built in obsolescence, through the huge amounts of money wasted on such peripheral activities as advertising and marketing through to the waste created by industrial production and high-density urban living. Once again, however, this does not represent an innovation on Meszaros’ part: the basis of an ecological critique of capitalism is prefigured in Marx and Engels themselves. This can be obscured by generations of misrepresentation along with some unguarded comments made by the thinkers themselves.

AGAINST MALTHUSIANISM Meszaros’ Deutscher lecture was given a year before the publication of the manifesto of the Club of Rome and the onset of the oil crisis. As noted above, the modern ecological movement developed against the backdrop of the failure of “self declared” socialism

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and this failure was particularly notable in regard to environmental concerns. I lived for two years in Slovakia, formerly a constitutive republic of the Czechoslovak Socialist Federal Republic. This small rural country is striking for its natural beauty, and yet when I arrived in 1992 its mountains and valleys were scarred with mines and cement factories, a heavy pall of cement dust hung in the air and the tap water was undrinkable because of a high concentration of heavy metals. Industrialization, as pursued in the Stalinist countries, was like a grim caricature of capitalist industrialization in the nineteenth century. Faced with facts such as these, it seemed obvious to the first generation of environmental activists that the solution lay with neither capitalism as it was being currently practiced or its supposed alternative in state socialism but rather in some putative third way. For many environmentalists the solution lay in drastic reductions in consumption in the industrialized world and population control for the developing world. In this context, the Club of Rome’s manifesto found a ready audience, arguing as it did, that the problems of both environment and economy stemmed from the fact of overpopulation. In other words, under the guise of developing a radical alternative to capitalism and socialism, many in the burgeoning environmentalist movement seized upon one of the oldest ideas in the capitalist playbook: Malthusianism. As some of its earliest critics were quick to point out, Malthus’ reasoning was replete with errors and unfounded assumptions. Yet, his thought has been, and continues to be, a highly influential buttress in the scaffold of capitalist ideology. For Malthus, the problem was not low wages, since increasing them would only lead to an increase in population and thus exacerbate the misery of the working class; the problem was that there are natural limits on population growth that we transgress at our peril. Since it was built on the flimsiest of empirical foundations, Malthus often resorted to moralizing. By the time of the second edition of the essay in 1803 he had come to the conclusion that the upper classes were capable of restraint in regard to reproduction, but the working classes were utterly incapable of it and therefore he announced himself as the most vociferous opponent of any attempt to ameliorate their plight.18 His ideas, always cruel, had genocidal implications when taken up by those who administered Ireland during the Great Hunger. John Bellamy Foster comments, One of the harsher implications of Malthus’ argument from its inception was that since there were limits to the means of subsistence for maintaining workers in any given period, any attempt to raise wages in general would only result in a rise of prices for this limited stock of provisions—it could not procure for the workers a larger portion of the necessities of life. This erroneous doctrine—which in its more sophisticated versions became known as the “wages fund doctrine”—was then used to argue that improvement in the general conditions of workers by such means as trade union organization was impossible.19



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Among Malthus’ erroneous assumptions, which he shared with Ricardo, is that the soil has fixed limits of productivity, something that has been disproved by the agricultural revolution which was in full swing at the time he was writing. Malthus’ thought understandably attracted the ire of the great radicals of the day from William Godwin to William Cobbett, who dubbed him ‘The Parson’, a name which Marx and Engels gleefully adopted. “I have, during my life, detested many men; but never any one so much as you. . . . No assemblage of words can give an appropriate designation of you; and, therefore, as being the single word which best suits the character of such a man, I call you Parson, which amongst other meanings, includes that of Borough-monger Tool”.20 What Cobbett is ridiculing here is not Malthus’ profession as a cleric. After all, it was not unusual for educated men of the day to be men of the cloth. He is mocking his narrow moralistic outlook and the way in which it was put to the service of the ruling class. Cobbett’s concern was that Malthus’ arguments had not only influenced bourgeois reformers; they had seeped into the burgeoning workers’ movement where ideas such as birth control were proposed as a panacea for workers’ social ills. Given the influence of Malthus’ ideas, they required not only ridicule but also refutation. Marx offered a series of powerful responses. In the Grundrisse he has the following to say: Malthus’s theory . . . is significant in two respects: (1) because he gives brutal expression to the brutal viewpoint of capital; (2) because he asserted the fact of overpopulation in all forms of society. Proved it he has not, for there is nothing more uncritical than his motley compilations from historians and travellers’ descriptions. His conception is altogether false and childish (1) because he regards overpopulation as being of the same kind in all the different historic phases of economic development; does not understand their specific difference, and hence stupidly reduces these very complicated and varying relations to a single relation, two equations, in which the natural reproduction of humanity appears on the one side, and the natural reproduction of edible plants (or means of subsistence) on the other, as two natural series, the former geometric and the latter arithmetic in progression. In this way he transforms the historically distinct relations into an abstract numerical relation, which he has fished purely out of thin air, and which rests neither on natural nor on historical laws. There is allegedly a natural difference between the reproduction of mankind and e.g., grain. This baboon thereby implies that the increase of humanity is a purely natural process, which requires external restraints, checks, to prevent it from proceeding in geometrical progression. This geometrical reproduction is the natural reproduction process of mankind. He would find in history that population proceeds in very different relations, and that overpopulation is likewise a historically determined relation, in no way determined by abstract numbers or by the absolute limit of the productivity of the necessaries of life, but by limits posited rather by specific conditions of production. As well as restricted numerically. How small do the numbers which meant overpopulation for the Athenians appear to us!21

Malthus’ fundamental error is to transform a historical fact into a natural law. As Marx argues there is no abstract principle of population but rather a dialectical

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relationship between population and the means to support it. Take, for instance, the current population of Australia which currently sits around 23 million, mostly concentrated in the great urban conurbations. There are indeed serious problems of infrastructure but during the Coronavirus pandemic there was never any serious concern about Australia running out of food, since we produce sufficient food for three times the current population level. The serious and pressing question is whether it can be done sustainably and here again Marx is of interest but to see this we have to get past a fundamental misinterpretation of his views.

MARX’S ALLEGED PROMETHEANISM AND GREEN NEO-MALTHUSIANISM The modern environmental movement is a many-headed beast. In Australia, it is common to distinguish between ‘watermelons’ (green on the outside, red on the inside) and ‘tree Tories’ who are essentially romantic conservative opponents of progress. During the recent pandemic this tension came to a head with some sections of the green movement gleefully welcoming the virus with posts on social media stating that “we are the virus” and talking about Mother Nature taking its revenge. This revealed a streak of misanthropic eco-fascism in the movement which unsurprisingly was nurtured by neo-Malthusian ideas. Malthus was present at the birth of the modern environmental movement. I have already mentioned the Club of Rome. One key figure in the early green movement was Paul Erlich whose 1978 book The Population Bomb established the idea in the public mind that overpopulation was the primary factor in the environmental crisis.22 Alongside this there were a number of vociferous attacks on Marx, accusing him of Prometheanism: the idea that science and technology were the solution for all of humanity’s problems. As I have noted above, it is possible to assemble quotes to justify this view and both Marx and Engels in their more unguarded moments allowed their enthusiasm for science and technology to get the better of them. Nevertheless, if we assess their corpus as a whole, a different picture emerges. Careful scholarship by the likes of John Bellamy Foster and Kohei Sato have brought to our attention a strong theme of ecological thinking in their work. Most importantly for the purposes of this current book, Foster identifies a rich philosophical naturalism in Marx that dates back to his early engagement with Epicurus in his doctoral dissertation. Marx saw in Epicurus an alternative to Democritus’ mechanistic materialism which he then brought to bear in his critique of Hegel. Strikingly in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx rejects both idealism and materialism (understood as mechanistic materialism) in favour of ‘naturalism’. With the publication of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts many commentators sought to draw a dichotomy between the earlier humanist Marx and his later incarnation as the Promethean positivist of Capital. However, as Foster notes, this ignores the significant influence on Marx’s thought of the chemist Justus von Liebig. Liebig



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identified for the first time the problem of soil depletion which Marx makes central to his economic analysis. More broadly Liebig contributes to Marx’s delineation of a metabolic conception of human beings’ relationship to nature. This conception plays a central role throughout Capital and is entirely consistent with his earlier Epicurean naturalism. Central to the accusation of Prometheanism is the idea that Marx denied the existence of natural limits to the expansion of productive forces. But returning to the passage cited above from the Grundrisse, Marx is not denying that overpopulation can ever be a problem. His claim is that whether overpopulation is a problem depends not upon theoretical abstraction but on the correlation of concrete social factors at any given historical moment. Still the phrase “specific conditions of production” and the general tenor of Marxist thought subsequently (albeit in the distorted variant practiced in the Soviet Bloc and China) seems to imply that we can produce our way out of any crisis. Marx appears to be denying that there are inherent natural limits to production. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the answer to the question of whether nature poses limits to production depends upon one’s conception of both nature and production. If one identifies production per se with a particular form it takes under capitalism then several consequences follow from this. If additionally one’s conception of nature is static and mechanical, as it is in classical political economy, then the idea of limits seems obvious. A proper exegesis of Marx on this topic requires us to bear in mind that his method involves taking the assumptions of classical political economy at face value and testing them to destruction. If we accept, as he does, that classical political economy is not an objective science charged with the task of uncovering abstract general laws but is rather an analysis of socioeconomic relations under capitalism then a clearer picture emerges. Central to that analysis is Marx’s concept of alienation. Since the publication of the 1844 Manuscripts his idea of alienated labour is a familiar one. But the concept is much broader since not only are we alienated from the products of our labour and from our fellow human beings, we are also crucially alienated from nature. In the distorted mirror of capitalist ideology the exploitative relationship of human beings under capitalism is reified into a universal truth about the human condition. It is in this light, as a critique of political economy, that we should see Marx’s various scattered remarks about our domination of the natural world. Such passages have attracted much attention from opponents within the ecological movement. Murray Bookchin argues that for Marx “humanity is socialized only to the degree that ‘men’ acquire the technical equipment and institutional structures to achieve the ‘conquest’ of nature, a ‘conquest’ that involves the substitution of ‘universal’ mankind for the parochial tribe, economic relations for kinship relations, abstract labour for concrete labour, social history for natural history”.23 It is striking that the passage Bookchin chooses to justify this claim is from a piece called “The Future Results of British Rule in India”. This essay would have remained in obscurity were it not for a rather notorious passage in which Marx argues,

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Bourgeois industry and commerce create the material conditions of a new world in the same way as geological revolutions have created the surface of the earth. When a great social revolution shall have mastered the results of the bourgeois epoch, the market of the world and the modern powers of production, and subjected them to the common control of the most advanced peoples, then only then will human progress cease to resemble that hideous pagan idol, who would not drink nectar but from the skulls of the slain.24

It takes an extreme lack of charity not to see that Marx here is pointing out the highly ambivalent nature of bourgeois progress here. Yet it is frequently presented, as Bookchin does here, as only celebrating the progressive role of the bourgeoisie. He reads it in conjunction with this contemporaneous passage from Grundrisse. The production (by capital) of a stage of society compared with which all earlier societies appear to be merely local progress and idolatry of nature. Nature becomes for the first time simply an object for mankind, purely a matter of utility; it ceases to be recognized as a power in its own right; and the theoretical knowledge of its independent laws appears only as a stratagem designed to subdue it to human requirements, whether as an object of consumption or as the means of production. Pursuing this tendency, capital has pushed beyond national boundaries and prejudices, beyond the deification of nature and the inherited self-sufficient satisfaction of existing needs confined within well-defined bounds, and the reproduction of the traditional way of life. It is destructive of all this, and permanently revolutionary, tearing down all obstacles that impede the development of productive forces, the expansion of needs, the diversity of production and the exploitation and exchange of natural and intellectual forces.25

Bookchin presents this passage as Exhibit A in his case against Marx the Promethean inheritor of the Enlightenment project. Taken out of context, this passage does seem fairly damning. But attend to Marx’s actual words in light of what I have suggested above: Marx is concerned with the analysis of a specific form of social and economic relations viz. capitalism and he uses the assumptions of its own theorist to construct this analysis. It is, in other words, an internal critique. Critics such as Bookchin fail to appreciate the dialectical nature of Marx’s analysis. The two passages cited above are brilliant descriptions of the contradictory nature of capitalist development: progress of sorts but with enormous costs to both human beings and to the natural world. Consider the passage which comes directly after the one Bookchin cites, But from the fact that capital posits every such limit as a barrier and hence gets ideally beyond it, it does not by any means follow that it has really overcome it, and, since every such barrier contradicts its character, its production moves in contradictions which are constantly overcome but just as constantly posited. Furthermore, the universality towards which it irresistibly strives encounters barriers in its own nature, which will, at a certain stage of its development, allow it to be recognized as being itself the greatest barrier to this tendency, and hence will drive towards its own suspension.26



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The apparent escape from and domination over nature has an illusory character. Bourgeois thought imagines that we transcend nature and encourages us to see matters in that way but nature itself has the final word. What the capitalist mode of production brings with it through its revolutionizing of industry and technique is a metabolic rift between human beings and nature, one with potentially disastrous consequences.

THE METABOLIC RIFT The concept of ‘metabolism’ was introduced by Ernst Haeckel. Marx probably encountered it through his reading of Justus von Liebig.27 The German term Haeckel and others used was Stoffwechsel which several editions of Marx’s work in English mistranslated as ‘material exchange’ or ‘interchange’. This adds to the prevailing positivist misinterpretation of Marx and fails to do justice to the complexity of this concept. Central to Marx’s acceptation of the idea is his broader Epicurean naturalism. Human beings remain part of nature even though they relate to it in a distinctive way, namely through labour which is the form that our metabolic relation to nature takes. Marx describes the nature of this rift in the discussion of ground rents in Capital, Vol. III: Large landed property reduces the agricultural population to a constantly falling minimum, and confronts it with a constantly growing industrial population crowded together in large cities. It thereby creates conditions which cause an irreparable break in the coherence of social interchange prescribed by the natural laws of life. As a result, the vitality of the soil is squandered, and this prodigality is carried by commerce far beyond the borders of a particular state (Liebig).28

Marx’s debt to Liebig is obvious and duly acknowledged throughout Volume III. Liebig pointed out the fact that soil can become depleted but also that that depletion can be mitigated by careful management. We should read the following comment by Marx in the light of that observation. The capitalist mode of production extends the utilisation of the excretions of production and consumption. By the former we mean the waste of industry and agriculture, and by the latter partly the excretions produced by the natural exchange of matter in the human body and partly the form of objects that remains after their consumption. In the chemical industry, for instance, excretions of production are such by-products as are wasted in production on a smaller scale; iron filings accumulating in the manufacture of machinery and returning into the production of iron as raw material, etc. Excretions of consumption are the natural waste matter discharged by the human body, remains of clothing in the form of rags, etc. Excretions of consumption are of the greatest importance for agriculture. So far as their utilisation is concerned, there is an enormous waste of them in the capitalist economy. In London, for instance, they

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find no better use for the excretion of 4 1/4 million human beings than to contaminate the Thames with it at heavy expense.29

Marx here draws our attention to the profligate nature of the capitalist mode of production. The large-scale movement of peoples from the country to the towns and cities creates a twofold problem: on the one hand it deprives the land of the natural fertilizer provided by human and animal excrement; on the other it creates an enormous problem of sewerage wastes with their attendant health and environmental problems in the cities. In Volume I he expresses it in even more dramatic terms when he writes that, Capitalist production collects the population together in great centres and causes the urban population to achieve an ever-growing preponderance. This has two results. On the one hand it concentrates the historical motive force of society; on the other hand it disturbs the metabolic interaction between man and the earth, i.e., it prevents the return to the soil of its constituent elements consumed by man in the form of food and clothing; hence it hinders the operation of the eternal natural conditions for the lasting fertility of the soil . . . But by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism . . . it compels its systematic restoration as a law of social production, and in a form adequate to the full development of the human race. . . . [A]ll progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the morel long-lasting sources of that fertility. . . . Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the technique and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original source of all wealth—the soil and the worker.30

The means whereby the capitalists attempted to address the problem of soil depletion was by the exploitation of guano from islands off the South American coastline. In order to do so they employed Chinese ‘coolies’ as indentured servants. The miserable conditions of work led to widescale deaths by suicide and caused Marx to comment that the conditions under which these men were working was “worse than slavery”. From these quotes above it should be clear that Marx is no cheerleader for the capitalist version of progress To the contrary, whenever he points out instances of scientific and technological advance, he always does so at the same time as drawing our attention to their enormous human and ecological costs. Rather than being an unapologetic defender of the Enlightenment, Marx was always mindful to point out its limited, one-sided and often hypocritical nature. It is true that he admired the mythical figure of Prometheus and was a lover of Aeschylus’ play Prometheus Unbound, but he does so because Aeschylus portrays Prometheus as a rebel against the tyranny of the gods and the one who brought light and reason to humanity. If Marx is a Promethean then, it is of a very distinctive sort. While it is clearly the case that his enthusiasm for scientific and technological progress gets the better of him, it is worth bearing in mind that he was writing in the nineteenth century when such enthusiasm was the norm and humanity had not yet lived through the full revelation of the dark side of scientific and technological progress. Even then,



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Marx shows himself to be ahead of his time in being acutely aware of the ecological and social problems caused by industrialization. He is therefore as much a child of the Romantic revolt against the Enlightenment as he is its defender. The ideal of a society run along rational lines, which was the great hope of the Enlightenment cannot be achieved within the narrow confines of capitalism. The brute fact is that we are at a stage of scientific and technological development that the idea of putting a pause or even turning the clock back is a reactionary utopia and a highly dangerous one at that. The only way it could be achieved is through a drastic reduction in current population levels. Typically advocates of population control from Malthus onwards have been rather selective about the types of populations they want controlled. The alternative therefore is not the abandonment of development but rather rational sustainable development, something which the chaotic system of capitalist production renders impossible thereby threatening our very survival as a species. Indeed, even if we were to agree that turning the clock back to some sort of rural idyll was a desirable and viable goal, it would require a degree of control over the social and economic system that capitalism by its very nature prevents.

MARX’S EPICUREAN NATURALISM Marx always acknowledged his deep debt to classical thought, Aristotle in particular. His debt to Epicurus dates back to his doctoral dissertation and Foster makes a compelling case that it was central to his engagement with the Young Hegelians, Feuerbach in particular. Marx famously counterposed his sensuous naturalism to Feuerbach’s highly abstract and mechanistic materialism in much the same way that he counterposed Epicurus’ rich naturalism to that of Democritus. I want to suggest that it is possible and desirable to read Marx as a liberal naturalist in the way that I have suggested. Naturalist humanism will therefore be as influenced by Marx on this reading of him as it is by Aristotle, though there is no inconsistency here, given his great debt to Aristotle. To consider Marx in such a way means to reject one popular reading of him as a scientistic thinker. One traditional way of making that move is either to distinguish sharply between the earlier humanist Marx and his later incarnation. Another is to distinguish the allegedly authentic Marx from the counterfeit version purveyed by Engels. These strategies have historically been associated with the tradition known as Western Marxism which, emerged in recoil against the horrors of Stalinism, sought to rescue Marx. The reading of Marx that has been advanced here is that he is both a humanist and a naturalist. But there is ample evidence to suggest that while he was deeply respectful of the methods and findings of the natural sciences, as befits a naturalist, his naturalism was of the liberal variety and duly recognized the obvious facts of human distinctiveness. The central theoretical challenge is neither to downplay nor exaggerate that distinctiveness but rather to situate it in a broader naturalistic context.

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The ecological reading of Marx, when combined with the idea of ecological niche construction, enables us to devise a more satisfying picture of human niche construction. On this account, human distinctiveness can be explained neither in primarily genetic terms or in terms of a Promethean rationality but rather as a response to the peculiar ecological conditions which confronted our ancestors. In responding to them, they developed complex social interaction and cultural transmission which in turn presented both challenges and opportunities for their descendants including ourselves.

NOTES   1.  Kroeber, “The Superorganic,” p. 165. Despite Kroeber’s language, which may sound racist to modern ears, part of the reason for the influence of the ideas defended here is that they were articulated against the rising tide of biological racial theory. Kroeber sought to rebut this growing movement by reminding us of the central role of culture in human nature.   2.  Kroeber, “The Superorganic,” p. 212.  3. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer, found at http ://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/EP-primer.html. Accessed 20/12/15.   4.  John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations of Culture,” chapter 1 in Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby, The Adapted Mind : Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, 1992. p. 86.   5.  Tooby and Cosmides, “The Psychological Foundations” (1992), p. 3.   6.  Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (London: Simon and Schuster, 1996), p. 491.  7. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics (Routledge, 2013), p. 2.  8. Bruce Pascoe, Dark Emu black seeds: agriculture or accident? (Magabala Books, 2014). Bill Gammage, “The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia,” (Crows Nest, NSW Allen and Unwin, 2011).   9.  Eytan Avital and Eva Jablonka,  Animal traditions: Behavioral inheritance in evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 8. 10.  Avital and Jablonka, Animal traditions, p. 6. 11. Jonathan Balcombe, Pleasurable Kingdom: Animals and the Nature of Feeling Good (London and New York: McMillan 2006), p. 35. 12.  Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, p. 10. 13.  Karl Popper, The poverty of historicism (London: Routledge, 2013). 14.  Jianguo Wu and Orie L. Loucks, “From balance of nature to hierarchical patch dynamics: A paradigm shift in ecology,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 70, no. 4 (1995): pp. 439-466. 15.  Wu and Loucks, “From balance of nature to hierarchical patch dynamics.” 16.  Wu and Loucks, “From balance of nature to hierarchical patch dynamics,” p. 460. 17.  Istvan Meszaros, The necessity of social control (New York: NYU Press, 2014) (italics in original). 18.  A contemporary incarnation of this idea is the current campaign against attempts to raise the US minimum wage to a modest $15 an hour. Opponents of this idea argue that raising the



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minimum wage would lead to an immediate rise in the cost of staple goods, and fast food in particular, thereby wiping out any gains for the poor. 19.  John Bellamy Foster (1999), “Malthus’ Essay on Population at Age 200: A Marxian View,” Monthly Review, Dec 1, 1998. Found at https://monthlyreview.org/1998/12/01/malthus -essay-on-population-at-age-200/. 20.  Cited in Bellamy Foster, “Malthus’ essay.” 21.  Karl Marx (1857/1973) Grundrisse: Notebook VI—The Chapter on Capital (Penguin Books in Association with New Left Review), found at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx /works/1857/grundrisse/ (italics in original). 22.  Paul R. Ehrlich (1978), “The population bomb.” In Thinking About the Environment (Routledge, 2015), pp. 156–160. 23.  Murray Bookchin, Towards an Ecological Society (Montreal/ Buffalo: Black Rose Books, 1980), p. 201. 24.  K. Marx, cited in Bookchin, Towards an ecological society, p. 201. 25.  K. Marx, Grundrisse cited in Bookchin (1980), 202 (italics in original). 26. K. Marx, (1857/1973), Grundrisse (Harmondsworth: Penguin [in association with New Left Books]), p. 410. 27.  Understandably there is considerable scholarly controversy about the role this concept plays in Marx and more importantly whether it has had any influence on the Marxist tradition that bears his name. For a fairly hostile response to Bellamy Foster see Leigh Phillips, Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts: A defence of growth, progress, industry and stuff (John Hunt Publishing, 2015). 28.  Karl Marx (1958) Capital, vol. III, in K. Marx and F. Engels, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Press), p. 799. 29.  Marx, op. cit. p. 102. 30.  Karl Marx, Capital, vol. I, cited in Bellamy Foster at p. 156.

8 Virtue as Skilled Perception

In order to live well, one must first live. Human development calls for us to acquire the skills of living and these involve knowing how to move our bodies in the right way. Most of those skills are the skills involved in social competence. One fundamental skill is that of correctly identifying the sort of situation one is in. The criterion for whether one has correctly identified a situation is how intelligently one moves one’s body in response to the relevant features of that situation, either by acting or refraining from acting (and we should understand actions here to include our sayings and writings). I have proposed that we understand the virtues as a kind of social intelligence, as refinements of the sorts of skills involved in mundane social competence. In what follows, I will argue that the virtuous quite literally perceive the demands of virtue and vice involved in a given situation. The courageous person recognizes that this is a situation in which courage is called for and so on. In other words, I am arguing for direct moral perception. But in order for my claim to be at all plausible we need to substantially modify our understanding of perception and embrace a 4E account. Arising in part by taking empirical responsibility seriously, 4E Cognition is a rapidly developing field within cognitive science. It draws on many traditions from phenomenology and pragmatism to J. L. Gibson’s Ecological Psychology. While there are important distinctions and differences between these strands, for the purpose of this chapter, I will not be too concerned with them. I will be drawing largely on Gibson’s work because it is self-consciously ecological in character and fits well with the idea of ecological niche construction. Ingold summarizes the central feature of Gibson’s view as follows: “[t]he point of departure for ecological psychology is the proposition that perceptual activity consists not in the operation of the mind upon the bodily data of sense, but in the intentional movement of the whole being (indissolubly body and mind) in its environment”.1 He emphasizes that movement is crucial here and that 149

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consequently “if perception entails movement, then it must be a mode of action rather than a prerequisite for action”.2 Along these lines there is not a twofold process of first perceiving a moral requirement and then acting upon it but of perceiving in the course of acting. In my experience, most moral philosophers are unfamiliar with Gibson’s approach or with the 4E tradition in general, and there is as yet little work within that tradition focusing on social cognition and even less on moral cognition. I will therefore be focusing on ideas that are broadly shared within 4E Cognition and which have relevance to the question of moral perception. My primary aim is show that the claim that the virtuous directly perceive moral requirements is not as implausible as it might seem, and I will be using it to defend the deflationary form of moral realism I earlier introduced. My argument is that if there is nothing ‘queer’ about social norms there is nothing ‘queer’ about moral ones. Our epistemic access to both is embodied, practical and situated. This might seem at odds with the claim that our access to them is perceptual in character and this is where the Gibsonian account comes in as, for Gibson, all perception of our environment is similarly embodied, practical and situated. Crucially, my argument does not require a full defense of the idea of direct perception. It requires only that moral perception is no more nor less indirect than any other kind and that therefore the appeal of those anti-realist arguments which rest upon an appeal to the alleged discrepancy between moral and ordinary perception fail. The starting point of this argument is a set of observations which ought to be banal. Like all living things we are always and everywhere embedded in an environment. We stand in a metabolic relation to that environment, and we cannot step outside that environment and remain alive, although we can move between environments. As argued in preceding chapters, for human beings, that environment always has a socio-cultural character and the distinctive human metabolic relationship to our environment is mediated through socially organized labour. I have argued that this should be seen as continuous with the niche construction activities of other organisms rather than something that separates us from ‘the animals’. Like any living being we need to develop a set of skills to successfully navigate our environment. In our case these are the skills involved in becoming a person, which as Annette Baier emphasizes, is something we do communally and which depends upon our interactions with other persons, living and deceased. The naturalistic tradition in virtue ethics holds that our knowledge of virtue is participatory, it comes from our active involvement in the characteristically human form of life. This should be construed as a special case of a very general point which is that our knowledge of lifeforms is also participatory. I suggested, however, that this thought is often left hanging in the work of the Footians and there is a consequent temptation to treat this as a matter of abstract cognition. But I also argue, following Marx, that our knowledge of the world, including its social and moral aspects is sensuous and practical rather than contemplative. A living organism must be able to distinguish living from non-living matter but it does not do so in an abstract sense.



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It distinguishes them in the course of distinguishing threats and opportunities of various kinds. In the Gibsonian terminology I will explain below, it encounters them as “affordances” which invite characteristic responses. Crucially, I believe that Gibson’s approach to perception and 4E more broadly provides us with the resources to address at least some of the epistemic concerns surrounding a naturalistic account of virtue, but since perception is active rather than passive, it can also take some of the sting out of motivational concerns.

VIRTUOUS PERCEPTION The virtuous person sees the demands of a situation more clearly than the nonvirtuous. This may tempt us to think of such vision in a quasi-mystical fashion, for example, as Iris Murdoch appears to do in the following passage: Our activity of moral discrimination cannot be explained as merely one natural instinct among others, or our “good” identified with pleasure, or a will to live, or what the government says (etc.). The possession of a moral sense is uniquely human; morality is, in the human world, something unique, special, sui generis, “as if it came to us from elsewhere.” It is an intimation of “something higher.” The demand that we be virtuous. It is “inescapable and fundamental.”3

This invitation to mysticism should be declined. If it were the case that the capacity for virtue represented “something higher” in the sense to which Murdoch alludes, then it would not make sense to talk about emulating the virtuous, as opposed to admiring or even envying them. The supernaturally virtuous are no more worthy of admiration than the naturally virtuous are. In this chapter, I will argue that the best way to resist the temptations of Platonism is to eschew traditional, representationalist theories of perception and adopt something like a Gibsonian (or 4E) approach to perception, that is, a direct (non-inferential) model. On such an account, the virtuous quite literally see the moral demands of a situation. Their acting in accordance with virtue in turn provides a criterion by which we determine that they have in fact perceived the situation correctly. The form of moral perception supported in this chapter is a refined form of social perception. Social settings place numerous social demands upon the agent, such as the demands of etiquette and situational appropriateness. Moral demands or, more specifically, the requirements of virtue are those aspects of a situation that call upon us to act in ways which form and sustain an integrated moral character and enable us to lead the sort of life that a virtuous person would aspire to live should circumstances allow. They are of a greater level of gravity than many of the ordinary demands a social setting poses. In proper Aristotelian spirit, however, one should not seek to radically distinguish between the demands of etiquette and those of ethics. How one uses a knife and fork is not in and of itself ethically significant. Nevertheless, a boor, who goes out of their way to offend others

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or intentionally disregards propriety rules by, say, deliberately placing his chopsticks vertically in a rice bowl is vicious if this is the sort of thing he does habitually.4 By the same token, being virtuous is more than simply acknowledging, and acting upon, customary social norms. Someone suffering from an antisocial personality disorder may recognize social norms, including some ethical norms, because she sees how others acting in accordance with these norms may benefit from them. A conformist living in a corrupt society may follow the norms of that society unquestioningly and in doing so may become complicit in its corruption. Neither the person suffering from an antisocial personality disorder nor the conformist living in a corrupt society have cultivated a virtuous character. The virtuous person recognizes that the requirements of virtue sometimes require the observance of customary norms and at other times setting them aside in pursuit of higher demands. I begin by setting out Gibson’s original theory and introduce some objections and refinements to it. I then explore how the theory can be expanded to encompass social perception, as Gibson himself suggested.5 Broadly speaking, in Gibsonian terms, social perception involves detecting ‘affordances’ presented by social settings, that is, seeing other’s actions as calling for us to act or refrain from acting in particular ways. Following on from this, I develop my central thesis that moral perception can be considered as a refined form of social perception and how a Gibsonian/4E view of perception makes this claim intelligible and protects it against some common objections to direct moral perception. I then link Aristotle’s thoughts on training and habituation with Alfred Schutz’s insights regarding the habituated nature of mundane social knowledge and locate the idea of virtuous perception in this setting. Times of moral crisis require more than merely habitual responses. The virtuous person has acquired the requisite skills to move beyond mere habit and is able to see more clearly than the non-virtuous how to resolve the situation satisfactorily. I conclude therefore with a discussion of how my proposed approach addresses some common objections to naturalistic virtue ethics. I will not be arguing in favour of a direct theory of perception per se as I believe that work has already been done better elsewhere, to the extent that such theories are now, if not mainstream, at least respectable contenders. I will be arguing, instead, that the reasons that might incline us to accept direct theories of perception in other areas should make us equally well inclined to accept an account of virtue as direct moral perception. At the very least, I hope to show that there is no radical separation between moral perception and other kinds of complex perception. The primary advantage of a virtue as direct moral perception approach is parsimony. As Sarah McGrath has argued, defenders of inferentialist accounts of moral knowledge have to expend considerable resources to render their view remotely plausible. In defending a non-inferentialist view she suggests that “once one is sufficiently liberal about the possible contents of perceptual knowledge, to the point that we can literally have perceptual knowledge that someone is acting with a certain intention (and so on), it is hard to insist, in a principle, not ad hoc way, that moral facts must always remain on the outside looking in”.6



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Another benefit of the virtue as direct moral perception approach is that it allows for a deflationary form of moral realism which does not require us to posit bizarre entities such as “moral properties with objective prescriptivity” and thus defuses the so-called Placement Problem. Since, on the Gibsonian account, perception is the detection of meaningful ecological wholes rather than an interaction with the objects described by classical physics, there is nothing anomalous or metaphysically queer about the perception of moral norms since they form part of the fabric of our social landscape. To paraphrase an argument made by Richard Norman: if there is nothing odd about directly perceiving “a friend” or a “goal scored according to the rules of Association Football,” then there is also nothing odd about directly perceiving “a friend in need” or “a friend behaving badly who needs making aware of that fact”.7 The virtuous person follows the right norms in the right circumstances and sets aside those norms that conflict with the demands of virtue. For instance, a visitor to South Africa, who is committed to animal welfare, may be invited to participate in a traditional Xhosa cattle slaughtering ceremony. While he recognizes the need to be culturally sensitive and respectful to his hosts, he will also exercise practical wisdom to find a way of declining the invitation. He may take it as an opportunity to engage in a dialogue with them in which he explains his reasons. If both parties are operating in good faith, they may reach some sort of understanding which preserves, and may even strengthen, whatever relationship they may have. While the conformist may simply go with the flow and the sociopath will do whatever brings him the most advantage, the virtuous person will seek a just resolution which respects the dignity of his hosts and his own deeply held principles. One may accept all this but still question whether “seeing” moral reasons is an appropriate form of expression here. To this objection, I have two, admittedly quick, responses. The first is an ordinary language point. “Seeing” is a factive for which there are success criteria, e.g., one sees or fails to see something. If we were to choose some other term, such as “interpret,” then different criteria apply. Interpretations are not generally considered “correct” or “incorrect”. They are more or less plausible, more or less coherent, or more or less persuasive. In the virtue literature, there is a broad consensus that the virtuous person is recognized by their capacity to get things right. That is, most virtue ethicists are objectivists for whom it makes sense to talk about the virtuous person who gets moral judgements right. The language of seeing situations correctly conveys this much better than alternatives. Second, if we do not perceive moral character primarily through perceiving the actions and speech of others, then there must be a distinctive non-perceptual means whereby we access them. Do we access them by some process utterly different from how we access other features of the world, including the social world? Perhaps, like the Platonist may suggest, it is a faculty to access mathematical and logical truths. But this non-perceptual access has more than a whiff of the mystical about it. Iris Murdoch grasps the nettle on this and suggests that moral perception is indeed otherworldly.

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Were this to be the case, it is difficult to comprehend why the virtuous agent would be worthy of emulation if she simply possessed some quasi-mystical gift for intuiting the moral features of a situation. Supernatural virtue, like its natural counterpart is worthy of respect perhaps, but neither admiration nor the desire to emulate seems the appropriate response. Since this form of intuition is unavailable to the rest of us, then we would not possess the means of exercising it. If, however, the virtuous agent has trained herself by becoming a better observer, then this is something everyone may emulate. For these reasons, some form of perceptual account only seems plausible. What remains is the question whether such a perceptual account should be construed in traditional representationalist, inferentialist terms or direct, non-inferential perception. This chapter will recommend the latter.

J. L. GIBSON’S ECOLOGICAL THEORY OF PERCEPTION VS. THE ORTHODOX VIEW There are two broad approaches to perception and cognition. The first is the computationalist and representationalist view, which may be called the “orthodox view” since it has been dominant in the perception literature since the decline of behaviorism in the late 1950s and remains so. The orthodox view posits a gap between perception and cognition which is filled by internal mental representation. On this view, action and speech are the outputs of a lengthy process which begins when inputs from the environment are received and then processed internally. Though theories of perception within this traditional approach have become increasingly more sophisticated in the last few decades they all retain a commitment to the idea that perception is something that takes place inside the head of the perceiving subject. The second is not just one approach but a set of approaches which have gathered under the banner of 4E Cognition. “4E” stands for “embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded”. Proponents of 4E Cognition reject representationalism, albeit to differing degrees, and they regard perception as an active process in which the perceiving subject engages with the world. While 4E Cognition involves a range of diverse approaches, Gibsonian ecological psychology is central. For the purpose of this chapter, I will focus largely on the seminal work of J. L. Gibson since it is not possible to understand subsequent developments in 4E Cognition without understanding his contribution to it, and neither Gibson’s original work nor the refinements that have followed from it may be familiar to most people working in moral and political philosophy. Although the view has evolved from Pragmatism, it has clear parallels with the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and has affinities with the Marxist theory, Gibson’s Ecological Theory of Perception developed largely as a response to the experimental inadequacies of conventional indirect theories of perception. During the 1950s, Gibson was struck by the fact that traditional approaches to perception were based upon the image of a photographic or movie camera. In the introduction to his now classic work, Gibson suggests that: “[t]he textbooks and handbooks assume that vision is



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simplest when the eye is held still, as a camera has to be, so that a picture is formed that can be transmitted to the brain. Vision is studied by first requiring the subject to fixate a point and then exposing momentarily a stimulus or a pattern of stimuli around the fixation point. I call this snap shot vision”.8 However, as Gibson points out, this is far from how visual perception operates in naturalistic settings. We are told that vision depends on the eye, which is connected to the brain. I shall suggest that natural vision depends on the eyes in the head on a body supported by the ground, the brain being only the central organ of a complete visual system. When no constraints are put on the visual system, we look around, walk up to something interesting and move around it so as to see it from all sides, and go from one vista to another. That is natural vision.9

As Merleau-Ponty was also arguing around the same time, traditional empiricist accounts of vision (which are Gibson’s primary target) regard visual perception as a largely passive phenomenon.10 In experimental settings popular at the time, the subject is restrained and prevented from moving his head or body. By contrast, vision that occurs when we walk through an environment and turn our heads from side to side is what Gibson calls “ambulatory”. When we are standing still or sitting, we scan the visual field by moving our heads, and Gibson calls this “ambient” vision. According to Gibson, a flawed experimental method feeds a flawed theory of perception which then in turn generates further flawed attempts at testing it. A quick summary of that flawed view is that it fails to properly distinguish perception from sensation. According to this erroneous theory, what happens when we perceive is that our sensory faculties respond to such things as photons. From this input, we then mentally construct a model of the world. At the philosophical level, the view implies a commitment to a particularly crude form of physicalism. When we perceive the world, what entities we make contact with in the world are just as they are described by the physical sciences. Such physicalism notoriously generates numerous conceptual muddles, not least of which is the Placement Problem or how we fit back into this picture, the normativity upon which even the physical sciences depend. That Gibson’s theory of perception avoids these problems means it is something that moral philosophers should at least consider. The force of anti-realist arguments, especially J. L. Mackie’s, rests upon the idea that we should be suspicious of any form of moral realism that posits a mysterious perceptual faculty devoted to intuiting equally mysterious moral properties. As I will show in the next section, Gibson’s view removes much of the mystery here. On Gibson’s view, there is no chasm that separates moral perception from ordinary perception. If ordinary perception does not involve the sensing of the objects of physics, then the idea that moral norms cannot be found in the world described by physics should not trouble us unduly. We would be hard pressed to find friendships or football games there.

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THE FOUNDATIONS OF GIBSON’S ECOLOGICAL APPROACH Ask someone what to expect of a theory of perception and they will likely come out with something along the following lines: a theory of perception should explain how subjects make contact with objects which are in the world. Obviously, as it stands, this is rather sketchy so we require a bit of work to fill in the gaps. Who or what are the subjects? Well, obviously, they are human beings, a large range of animals, and perhaps some AI systems. The objects are the medium-sized dry goods of everyday experience. What would “making contact” with such objects look like? The traditional answer involves things like photons cascading onto the optic nerve, which are converted into signals transmitted to the brain. Once in the brain, the task is to then convert these signals into as accurate as possible a representation of the objects in the world. As Gibson suggests, this traditional answer presents itself as scientific common sense, yet it is based upon the strange idea that the environment “communicate[s] with the observers who inhabit it”. This, he suggests, is absurd: “Why should the world speak to us? The concept of stimuli as signals to be interpreted implies some such nonsense as a world-soul trying to get through to us. The world is specified in the structure of the light that reaches us, but it is entirely up to us to perceive it. The secrets of nature are not to be understood by the breaking of its code”.11 The standard view generates a more immediate conundrum: we do not perceive the objects of classical physics, points extended in space; rather, we perceive meaningful wholes. This is a teapot, that is a cup, and so forth. Nominalist accounts since the Middle Ages would have us grouping the elementary inputs under conventional labels. After all, only someone who has learned the words “teapot” and “cup” would be able to recognize these objects as such. So, it seems obvious that perception is a rather elaborate process with cognition at the very end point. In a passage which Gibson quotes with approval, one of the founders of Gestalt Psychology, Kurt Koffka, writes “[e]ach thing says what it is. . . . [A] fruit says ‘Eat me’; water says ‘Drink me’; thunder says ‘Fear me’; and woman says ‘Love me’”.10 Fifteen objects present themselves to us as things towards which we stand in actual or potential relations. Moreover, those relations are not the passive ones of “mere” observation. Though there are occasions when we merely observe things for the sake of observation. This is the exception rather than the rule, despite what standard theories of perception teach. Long before I learn that this is called a “cup,” I learn that one can drink from this kind of object. As Wittgenstein reminded us, we do not typically learn words passively;13 rather, we learn them in the course of learning those activities in which they are characteristically embedded. For example, to learn cricket is, inter alia, to learn the language of cricket. Gibson suggests that Gestalt psychology correctly identified a problem with conventional theories of perception but failed to adequately solve it.



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While he credits them with beginning the process of undermining “sensation based theories,” “their own explanations of why it is that a fruit says ‘Eat me’ and a woman says ‘Love me’ are strained”.14 In part, the weakness of Gestalt theory lies in its thoroughgoing subjectivism. Rather than challenging the subject-object dichotomy, it emphasizes the constitutive role of subjectivity in creating objects. This is a welcome antidote to the naive objectivism of conventional psychology but is ultimately inadequate for, “not even the gestalt theorists, could think of [meaning and valence] as physical and, indeed, they do not fall within the province of ordinary physics. They must therefore be phenomenal, given the assumption of dualism”.15 To say that meaning and valence are ‘physical’ sounds outrageous to many contemporary philosophers; to say that they are physical but “do not fall within the province of ordinary physics” will probably sound unhinged. Yet, this is precisely the radicalism of Gibson’s proposal. When animals perceive an environment, they do not perceive the objects described in classical physics. They perceive a world of challenges and opportunities or, in other words, a world that is replete with meaning. According to classical physics, the universe consists of bodies in space. We are tempted to assume, therefore, that we live in a physical world consisting of bodies in space and that what we perceive consists of objects in space. But this is very dubious. The terrestrial environment is better described in terms of medium, substances and the surfaces that separate them.16

Medium, substances, and surfaces are technical terms of art in ecological optics which Gibson spends a great deal of time explaining; roughly, the medium is that which supports the animal and permits it to carry out its characteristic life activities (air for avian animals, water for marine ones, and land for land-dwellers). Substances are things with which an animal interacts in various ways such as food or the bodies of other animals. The surfaces enable the animal to distinguish between different substances. Notice that the distinctions here are relative to the animal in question. For example, water is a medium for fish but a substance for a thirsty horse. It might seem that Gibson is offering us yet another subjectivist theory of perception, albeit a more empirically rigorous one, but his starting point is the rejection of dualism. For our purposes, I will focus almost exclusively on his outline of his theory of affordances since it is most relevant to the question of the direct perception of value, and moral value in particular. It is worth noting that there was substantial empirical support for his theory at the time he wrote the book and that this support has continued to grow. Gibson’s theory was, however, controversial at the time of its publication and remains so, even with many who agree with his theory. Despite the agreement, many supporters felt the need to refine it. In recent times, its insights have largely been incorporated into 4E Cognition. Nevertheless, the initial statement of the theory of affordances is clear and succinct enough for the purposes of explaining it to moral philosophers who are unfamiliar with it.

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The term “affordance” is Gibson’s own coinage. It is a nominalization of the verb “to afford” and, as it implies, attempts to describe those features of an environment which afford the animal certain opportunities or, in a negative sense, pose a threat. It is worth bearing in mind that what an opportunity is for one animal may be a threat to another while remaining objectively speaking a feature of the same environment. He proposes that: the compositions and layout of surfaces constitute what they afford. If so, to perceive them is to perceive what they afford. This is a radical hypothesis for it implies that the “values” and “meanings” of things in the environment can be directly perceived. Moreover, it would explain the sense in which values and meaning are external to the perceiver.17

The idea that we directly perceive values which are in some sense “out there” flies in the face of the subjectivism about value which has dominated much social thought and large swathes of moral philosophy for most of the last century. Simon Blackburn, for instance, contends that subjectivism about value is the price we must pay if we wish to be consistently naturalistic. For philosophers like Blackburn, it seems obviously true that the real world is disenchanted and thus we project onto it rather than find value in it.18 J. L. Mackie’s “Argument from Queerness,” to which Blackburn is in part responding, rests upon a claim about perception: if there were queer moral properties of the sort moral realists endorse, then we would require an equally queer epistemic faculty to detect them. Gibson reminds us that we did not evolve to detect the objects of classical physics. We evolved precisely to reliably detect those elements of our environment, both physical and social, which presented threats or opportunities, i.e., affordances. As I argue above, it is only a dogmatic adherence to physicalism, and with it a highly tendentious conception of the unity of the sciences, that forces us to say that the objects an animal responds to in its natural habitat are somehow less real than those described by physics. The worry here, of course, is that of a descent into radical subjectivism. But Gibson argues that affordances are neither purely “out there” in the environment nor internal to the animal. The term emphasizes “the complementarity of the animal and the environment”.19As he earlier suggests, although the physical world long predates life, there is no such thing as an environment without living animate beings to inhabit it. The existence of such beings entails a continuous making, unmaking, and remaking of the physical world. Gibson suggests that an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer. We can regard this in the light of developmental systems theory as an aspect of the constructed niche which contains developmentally relevant information.



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It is little wonder that such talk baffled the few analytic philosophers that bothered to read Gibson, wedded as most were to the very subjective-objective dichotomy he castigates. There is, however, a genuine problem with Gibson’s formulation here and it reveals his own lingering adherence to an object-oriented ontology. His inability to express his point clearly stems from the persistence in his thought of the idea that animal and environment are both kinds of things. If we see the environment not as things which relate to one another externally but rather a complex interactive process, aspects of which may be isolated for clearly defined analytic purposes (provided that we never lose sight of the impossibility of their actual isolation) matters become much clearer. We can, however, forgive him the occasional solecism. The central point is clear enough: the separation between subject and object is an artefact of analysis. In reality, subjects are always embedded in environments which shape them and which they in turn shape. Recognition of this fact has profound implications for axiology. Value is neither out there or in here. If something has value for an animal, it does so as an emergent property of the interaction between the animal and its environment. Most animals come endowed with a capacity for learning and thus, over the course of its development, an animal comes to distinguish features of its environment which offer opportunities, which pose threats and which can be safely ignored. Gibson highlights a significant difference between humans and other animals and that is the degree to which we are capable of changing our environment. “He has made more available what benefits him and less pressing what injures him. In making life easier for himself, of course, he has made life easier for most of the other animals. Over the millennia, he has made it easier for himself to get food, easier to keep warm, easier to see at night, easier to get about, and easier to train his offspring”.20 These are not new observations, but they are usually made in order to announce human beings’ radical separation from the rest of the natural world. By contrast, Gibson emphasizes our continuity. It is a mistake to separate the natural from the artificial, as if these were two environments; artifacts have to be manufactured from natural substances. It is also a mistake to separate the culture environment from the natural environment as if there were a world of mental products distinct from the world of material products. There is only one world, however diverse, and all animals live in it, although we human animals have altered it to suit ourselves. We have done so wastefully, thoughtlessly, and, if we do not mend our ways, fatally.21

The last line of this passage sounds remarkably prescient but let us focus for now on its central significance for moral and political theory. Projectivist accounts of value rest upon a series of dichotomies: between organism and environment; between mind and world; and between persons and organisms. Tim Ingold who is deeply influenced by Gibson’s work alludes to in explaining the meaning of his maxim, the “person is the organism”.22 As he notes in making this claim, it would be easy to regard this as reflecting a crudely reductionist sentiment if we do not also specify what it is we

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understand by “organisms”. They are not discrete bounded entities but nodes in an ongoing developmental relationship. When we turn our consideration to persons, we recognize that we act but we also interact. We interact with our physical surroundings, including the built environment, and when we do, we often do so using various tools and technologies that have an entire history and culture behind them. Most importantly, however, for our purposes: persons interact with other persons. The actions of others including their linguistic actions become affordances for me and vice versa. Gibson writes “[t]he richest and most elaborate affordances of the environment are provided by other animals, and, for us, other people”.23 Other animals (including people) move but they do not move in the way that physical objects move “which is to say their movements are animate”. Although animals are in a sense the subject of the laws of mechanics, “they are not governed by those laws” at least not in the way in which merely physical objects including plants are. Thus “infants learn almost immediately to distinguish [animals] from plants and nonliving things”.24

Turning then to the human realm: we recognize not only that persons are animals and move like animals but that persons qua persons have a distinctive aspect to their animal-like movement, which is to say that at least some person’s movements are made in the light of a reason. To recognize a certain kind of animal as a person is in part to recognize its characteristic bodily form and way of proceeding in the world, but it is also to recognize that it is capable of acting in the light of a reason. This seems to present a problem, for while we might acknowledge that the person’s movements are visible, her reasons are not or at least not always. We are sometimes inclined to think of reasons as internal mental causes of our actions which we infer from their doings and sayings. There is, however, a longestablished philosophical tradition which suggests that we are mistaken to think about reasons that way. It can be traced back to Aristotle and in recent times is associated with Wittgenstein and Anscombe. Briefly summarized, this view of reasons states that to see someone as acting in the light of a reason is to see that person and her action in a certain way. Suppose one sees John walking with an umbrella on a bright summer day and wonders what his reason might be for doing so, a perfectly acceptable response would be “because rain is forecast”. Now, it may turn out to be that John is in fact a Russian agent and the umbrella is laced with poison and he is walking about with homicidal intent. But then that would simply mean we have misperceived his actions. In neither variant are we positing some mysterious hidden mental mechanism and even were we to find one, it would merely embellish rather than replace, our original account of John’s reasons. Reasons are discursive and therefore necessarily public.25 They are the sort of thing we might avow or disavow when prompted. The fact that we can dissemble or be mistaken about the reasons for our action does not thereby render them necessarily private. Learning personhood involves inter alia learning what sorts of things count as reasons for acting or refraining from acting. In order to do so, one needs to distinguish



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actions from other sorts of bodily movements but we can only learn this by distinguishing them in the environment in which they occur. To identify an action correctly one must also correctly pick out the relevant features of the environment which have occasioned it. To return to John and his umbrella. For the action to be identifiable as that of “carrying an umbrella” as opposed to say “participating in a religious ceremony” or “displaying Protestant bigotry in Glasgow”, one must know the kinds of situations in which an Englishman is liable to carry such an object, otherwise the action would be unintelligible.26 Taking things in a Gibsonian direction we would say that when I see a person’s reason for acting, I literally see something in the optic array which would count as that person’s reasons. I recognize them as such because I have acquired the skills of social interaction in that social setting. Gibson appears to acknowledge this fact when he writes that: Behavior affords behavior, and the whole subject matter of psychology and of the social sciences can be thought of as an elaboration of this basic fact. Sexual behavior, nurturing behavior, fighting behavior, cooperative behavior, economic behavior, political behavior— all depend on the perceiving of what another person or other persons afford, or sometimes the misperceiving of it. . . . The perceiving of these mutual affordances is enormously complex, but it is nonetheless lawful, [in the ecological and not physical sense] and it is based on the pickup of the information in touch, sound, odor, taste and ambient light. It is just as much based upon stimulus information as is the simpler perception of the support that is offered by the ground under one’s feet. For other animals and other persons can only give off information about themselves insofar as they are tangible, audible, odorous, tastable or visible.27

There are some problems with Gibson’s choice of words: “behavior” and “stimulus information” bear the hallmarks of the behaviorism which had until only recently been the dominant view in psychology and which he had already rejected. One can, however, recognize his central point, while eschewing behaviorism. It is to be found here: “The other person, the generalized other, the alter as opposed to the ego, is an ecological object with a skin, even if clothed. It is an object, although it is not merely an object, and we do right to speak of he or she instead of it. But the other has a surface that reflects light, and the information to specify what he or she is, invites, promises, threatens or does can be found in the light”.28 If people’s actions were not identifiable in this way, we would have to posit something utterly mysterious along the lines of telepathy to account for our ability to identify them. With respect to people’s reasons, though we can misperceive them and they can misrepresent and dissemble if we were not similarly able to identify them in the course of identifying their doings and sayings, we would not even have a conception of acting for a reason in the first place.

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AN ECOLOGICAL APPROACH TO SOCIAL AND MORAL PERCEPTION Let me summarize how the fundamental features of Gibson’s theory of perception are relevant to moral philosophy. Virtue ethicists of a naturalist stripe seek a theory that is both objective and naturalistic and we are told that it is not possible to have both: we must either reject objectivity or naturalism because the world, as revealed by science, is fundamentally disenchanted and any value we find there must have been placed there, if not by us then at least by other valuing subjects. Gibson’s ecological approach is an established scientific approach that permits us to retain objectivity and naturalism in virtue ethical theory. On his account, there is, of course, no value in the world described by physics, but the environment we and other animals inhabit, except in the most trivial sense, is the world described by physics. The social world is a world of meaning and value. The reciprocal relationships between us are based upon these values, and it is impossible to recognize the basis of our relationships for what they are without also picking these out. The standard response to this problem is to treat the social world as a mental phenomenon, but this makes us lose sight of the defining feature of the social world, which is its public, rather than private, nature. It is a pity that Gibson had so little to say about social perception and nothing to say about moral perception. If we return to the orthodox computational theory of mind and if we extrapolate from it to the context of the social and moral order as I have just explained with respect to Gibson’s ecological approach to perception, then we realise that we are asked to suppose that each of us somehow carries a representation of the social world and that each individual representation is subtly different from everyone else’s. Yet somehow these representations are sufficiently similar to allow for the possibility of social order. No one has yet produced a coherent story about how this computation is carried out by perception. An explanation is unlikely since the assumptions upon which the story is based are fundamentally flawed. We do not engage with the world, or with one another, in the way that computers do, for the simple reason that computers do not really engage with the world. As Gibson points out, a reason for the plausibility of the computational theory of mind is its explanation of perceptual information as a kind of language which implies a picture of us passively processing that information in the way that a computer does.29 Famously, from the 1960s onwards, Hubert Dreyfus challenged artificial intelligence research by suggesting the field was based upon faulty assumptions and thus headed in entirely the wrong direction.30 Partly in response to Dreyfus’ critique, an entire subdiscipline of embodied cognition has emerged, and it is challenging traditional approaches to artificial intelligence. Significantly, in a recent Routledge handbook, Shaun Gallagher acknowledges the affinity between the phenomenological tradition, which Dreyfus represents, and Gibson’s ecological psychology.31 The confluence of traditions has been given a name: “4E Cognition”. The Es in question are: embodied, extended, enactive, and embedded. It is moot whether there



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should be more or less than four since in many respects what unites the approaches that fall under the banner is opposition to computational and representationalist approaches to cognition and rejection of a dichotomy between organism and environment. The embodied animal is embedded in its environment and its cognitive processes are distributed or extended into the environment rather than siloed inside the animal’s head. There is also no chasm that separates perception and action, since the two are aspects of the same process. Thus, perception and cognition are enacted in the environment rather than being inner “mental” processes as traditionally understood. What would a Gibsonian/4E account of social and moral perception be like? When we focus upon relevant features of social situations, we find that they call for certain characteristic courses of action. Suppose that a society has a tradition of ‘buying rounds’. When my turn to buy ‘a round’ for others in my group comes, I should oblige. A representationalist account would see a gap between my perception and cognition of the situation and my response. My sensory faculties would respond to the photons and sound waves which would then be interpreted by my inner cognitive processes and the final output would be me buying or failing to buy a round. To have grasped the situation successfully, I would need to know that I am in a culture like England or Ireland where round buying is the norm, rather than somewhere like Poland where buying a round would be perceived as insulting the hospitality of the person who invited you for drinks. This distinction about Polish and Irish culture is a fact and to reduce this to some ineluctable inner process would be to misconstrue the necessarily public nature of societal norms. In light of this, a key advantage of the alternative Gibsonian/4E is parsimony. It is not necessary to propose endless elaborate mental representations of the fine-grained nuances of social life. Again, Ingold puts this well Underlying the commonsense understanding of the culturally competent actor is supposed to lie a huge database of such representations, which provide all the information necessary to generate appropriate responses under any given environmental circumstances. Yet as many critics of cognitive science have pointed out, and as the failure of attempts to replicate human skills in the design of expert systems has amply demonstrated (Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1987) [. . .] By and large, these tasks are not represented [. . .] Most cultural learning takes place through trial-and-error and practice, albeit in socially structured situations, and although beginners may need to follow rules, these rules structure the situation and do not themselves form any part of the content of what is learned. For the skilled practitioner consults the world, rather than representations (rules, propositions, beliefs) inside his or her head, for guidance on what to do next. As Andy Clark puts it, why should we go to the trouble of modelling the world when “we can use the world as its own best model?” (Clark 1997: 29–30, see also Chapman 1991: 20)?32

Someone who has worked out what to do in any situation by directed attentiveness is a socially competent actor. Intuitively, we recognize the distinction between someone who is socially competent and someone who is socially awkward. From the

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phenomenological tradition, Alfred Schutz suggests that it is not necessary for someone who is socially competent to have comprehensive knowledge of the social world; rather, navigation of the social world requires a person to have a sufficient grasp of social norms. He navigates the social world using a series of “recipes”. The knowledge correlated to the cultural pattern carries its evidence in itself—or, rather, it is taken for granted in the absence of evidence to the contrary. It is a knowledge of trustworthy recipes for interpreting the social world and for handling things and men in order to obtain the best results in every situation with a minimum of effort by avoiding undesirable consequences. The recipe works, on the one hand, as a precept for actions and thus serves as a scheme of expression: whoever wants to obtain a certain result has to proceed as indicated by the recipe provided for this purpose. On the other hand, the recipe serves as a scheme of interpretation: whoever proceeds as indicated by a specific recipe is supposed to intend the correlated result. “Thus it is the function of the cultural pattern to eliminate troublesome inquiries by offering ready-made directions for use, to replace truth hard to attain by comfortable truisms, and to substitute the self-explanatory for the questionable”.33 Schutz refers to this recipe approach as “thinking as usual”. Crucial for our purposes it normally suffices. That is, acting in the social world does not normally requires a complex interpretive approach: we are not field anthropologists in our own culture. It holds so long as the following conditions apply: 1. that life and especially social life will continue to be the same as it has been so far; that is to say, that the same problems requiring the same solutions will recur and that, therefore, our former experiences will suffice for mastering future situations; 2. that we may rely on the knowledge handed down to us by parents, teachers, governments, traditions, habits, and so forth, even if we do not understand its origin and its real meaning; 3. that in the ordinary course of affairs it is sufficient to know something about the general type or style of events we may encounter in our life-world in order to manage or control them; and 4. that neither the systems of recipes as schemes of interpretation and expression nor the underlying basic assumptions just mentioned are our private affair, but that they are likewise accepted and applied by our fellow men.34 To put things in simpler terms: I know what to do in a given situation because I know what to do in such situations. A socially incompetent actor does not properly grasp what to do in a given situation, because either they lack the relevant recipe or they mischaracterize the situation. To act competently in a social setting requires both the ability to correctly identify what type of situation one finds oneself in and the ability to know what recipe is called for in such situations. The standard model of perception would posit an extraordinarily labourious process of recognition and interpretation, but central to Schutz’s observations is the idea that social life operates precisely because of its largely unreflective nature. Some of the information we use



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to confront social life comes from personal experience but the bulk of it is handed down to us by others and forms the “unquestioned but always questionable sum total of things taken for granted until further notice”.35 It is only in moments of difficulty or crisis that we engage in conscious deliberation about the way forward.

HABITUATION IN ARISTOTLE, SCHUTZ, AND THE GIBSONIAN ECOLOGICAL APPROACH I now wish to tie together Schutz’s view and Aristotle’s observations on habituation before I attempt to explain how these apply to a moral case and the Gibsonian ecological approach. Aristotle’s observations, like Schutz’s, begin with the recognition that deliberation is a relatively unusual activity. Much of our thought and action necessarily has a habitual character. The properly habituated person sees what to do in a given situation and does it. Aristotle’s view is based upon a qualified rejection of Platonic rationalism. We do not reason ourselves into a particular motivational state, but we can reason ourselves out of one, when, for instance, we recognize that our emotional response is excessive or unjustified. Aristotle’s view differs from Schutz’s view since Schutz seems to accept that we passively absorb our practical reason from our culture. Habituation for Aristotle is not a passive process. It is an interactive one. As the child matures, she is able to take greater charge of her own ethical formation. Most importantly, the truly virtuous are able to subject the mores of their culture to critical scrutiny, rejecting those which do not conform to the demands of virtue. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to think that one can dispense with the process of habituation and training altogether in favour of the explicit inculcation of correct moral principles. The capacity for ethical reflection rests upon the prior acquisition of good habits of action and thought. In order to be receptive to theories of virtue, one must first be receptive to the virtues. Receptivity to the virtues is necessary since it is possible to be clever and be a thoroughly despicable human being. In fact, certain species of vice seem to require the skillful misuse of reason. One cannot, for example, thoughtlessly engage in calculated cruelty and it is partly for that reason that we regard conscious malice in a different light from careless brutality. The idea of moral vision, particularly the view implied by Gibson’s ecological approach and Schutz’s view, actually clarifies this point. We distinguish between a trained and an untrained eye. Someone with a trained eye has a specialized skill for perceiving something that someone without a trained eye, without that specialized skill, misses, relative to the same context of activity. So, for instance, a trained eye with respect to the night sky may not necessarily be the most effective daytime birdwatcher. Nevertheless, the person with moral vision, the sky gazer, and the birder have something in common, in that they are able literally to see things that the untrained observer does not. To have a trained eye, however, is not to have mastered some theory, although theoretical understanding can contribute to the refinement of one’s vision by directing one’s attention. A virtuous person has good basic dispositions, has refined these dispositions

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through a process of training and habituation, and has at a point begun the process of theoretical reflection upon the habits she has acquired. To return to our earlier point about the relationship between virtue and social competence: the merely competent social actor does in fact resemble the person described by Schutz who follows recipes rather than thinking carefully about what to do. The real test comes when someone faces an unfamiliar or particularly complex situation in which recipes no longer suffice. To pursue the cooking analogy: the difference between the virtuous and the merely competent is the virtuous person is like an excellent cook who uses recipes as an inspiration rather than an instruction, and thus when confronted with a lack of a particular ingredient knows what to substitute because he understands the underlying principles of flavor. One of the worries about applying orthodox theories of representation to moral perception is that they seemed to downplay the rational component of ethical life. The view that I am defending here will, I hope, assuage some of those concerns. Moral demands are visible but only properly so to those who are well trained enough to detect them. Part of the process of acquiring a second nature is the acquisition of the right habits of mind. Talk of habits often worries those philosophers committed to an intellectualist conception of acting well but it need not. Bill Pollard has persuasively argued that there is no inconsistency in the thought that an action can be both habitual and rational.36 Pollard’s views are articulated in engagement with the work of John McDowell who in turn was deeply influenced by Wilfrid Sellars’ distinction between the “logical space of reasons” and the “logical space of causes”.37 Our conventional understanding of habits seems to locate them in the logical space of causes but that is largely based upon construing them in stimulus response terms. This seems to present a problem for McDowell since he has defined second nature as “habits of thought and action”. Yet, in his early work, McDowell was also committed to the view that one cannot have a reason for acting if one does not have a conception of such a reason, and habits by definition operate at a precognitive level.38 But, as Pollard points out, we can be held responsible for certain of our habits in ways that we would not be for simple stimulus-response behavior. Someone in the habit of parking badly in ways that inconvenience other drivers is rightly held to account for this. Similarly, if, like Kant, I am in the habit of taking a daily walk, I could rightly be applauded for my good sense. Consider the martial arts, which as combative sports largely exist to overcome our bad habits and inculcate more efficiently defensive ones. The fact that the skill of a martial arts master is largely based upon habituation and training does not prevent us from finding him morally praiseworthy in his devotion to his art.

CONCLUSION To summarize, I have suggested that we regard moral competence as a refined form of social competence and that both in turn can be fruitfully regarded along the lines



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of a kind of vision, albeit one not understood in traditional representationalist terms. The social agent does not perceive the objects of classical physics which she then must interpret in moral terms. The social agent inhabits a world of animate beings, most crucially among which are her fellow humans. The virtuous person is able to detect among the doings and sayings of her fellow humans, moral affordances, that is reasons for acting, or refraining from acting thus, but she does so in a way that is largely habitual. What makes her virtuous is that she is habitually able to see the demands of virtue in a given situation, and the ability that she has acquired through a lengthy process of ethical formation. Numerous objections will no doubt have arisen by now. I have not, for example, made a sustained attempt at defending the Gibsonian/4E view of perception. This is because my case rests partly on the enormous amount of work that has already been done to establish this view as a viable alternative to the orthodox view. I have argued that in the context of moral philosophy, adoption of something like a Gibsonian/4E view has the benefits of parsimony and also enables us to be consistently naturalistic while avoiding the ‘Placement Problem’. These considerations alone should make the alternative worthy of serious consideration.

NOTES   1.  Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Dwelling, Livelihood and Skill (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 166.  2. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 166.  3. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p. 26.   4.  In Japan and Korea this would be offensive because it alludes to the funerary rites where the chopsticks are placed like this as an offering for the dead person.   5.  James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Classic Edition) (New York & Hove; The Psychology Press, 2015), p. 120.   6.  Sarah McGrath, “Moral Perception and Its Rivals,” chapter 7 in Anna Bergqvist and Robert Cowan, eds. Evaluative perception (Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 161–180.   7.  Richard Norman (1997), “Making sense of moral realism,” Philosophical Investigations 20 (2):117–135. Indeed it is hard to see how one could be said to correctly perceive ‘a friend’ if one did not also perceive someone who has a special call upon one.  8. Gibson, Ecological approach, p. 1 (italics in original).  9. Gibson, Ecological approach, p. 1. 10.  Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of perception (Routledge, 2013). 11. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 57. 12.  Koffka (1935) cited in Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 129. 13.  Wittgenstein (1953/1999), §§1–20. 14. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 131. 15. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 130. 16. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 12 (italics in original). 17. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 117. 18. Blackburn, Essays in quasi-realism, p. 174.

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19. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 127. 20. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 122. 21. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 122. 22. Ingold, Perception of the environment, p. 5. 23. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 126. 24. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 127. 25.  Susan Hurley (1989), Natural Reasons: Personality and Polity (Oxford: OUP, 1989). 26.  Cf. Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe, “Under a description,” Noûs (1979), pp. 219–233. 27. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 127. 28. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 127. 29. Gibson, The ecological approach, p. 57. 30.  H. Dreyfus (1965), Alchemy and Artificial Intelligence (Cambridge, MA: Rand Corporation). H. Dreyfus (1967), “Why Computers Must Have Bodies in Order to Be Intelligent,” Review of Metaphysics 21(1): 13–32. H. Dreyfus (1972), What Computers Can’t Do (New York: Harper and Row Publishers). Dreyfus (1992), What Computers Still Can’t Do (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). 31.  Gallagher, Shaun, “Phenomenology and Embodied Cognition,” in Lawrence Shapiro (ed.) (2014), The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition (Routledge). 32. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment, p. 164. 33.  Alfred Schutz, 1976. “The Stranger: An Essay in Social Psychology.” In A. Brodersen, ed., Collected Papers Volume II: Studies in Social Theory . The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, p. 95. 34.  Schutz, “The stranger,” p. 96. 35. Schutz, “The stranger,” p. 97. 36.  Bill Pollard (2005), “Naturalizing the Space of Reasons,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 13(1): 69–82; Bill Pollard (2006), “Explaining Habits with Action,” American Philosophical Quarterly 43(1): 57–69. B. Pollard (2008), Habits in Action (Berlin): Verlag. 37.  McDowell J. (1992), Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). W. Sellars (1956/1997), Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, reprinted with Study Guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). 38.  John Henry McDowell (1978), “Are Moral Requirements Hypothetical Imperatives?,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary volumes, 52: 13–29.

9 The Burdens of Attentiveness

In creating our socio-cultural niche, we thereby create a cognitive scaffold in which the formation of future people’s characters will occur. This much is made explicit in the lines of Marx’s 18th Brumaire: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”.1 As Marx made clear, sometimes the scaffolding erected by our predecessors is no longer fit for purpose, but we cannot entirely dispense with it because, without a scaffold, the entire edifice will come crashing down. The work of a revolutionary is constructive as much as it is destructive. It involves building new and better scaffolds while dismantling the old ones. The metaphor of a scaffold brings out well the fact that the relationship between the developing individual and her culture is not a deterministic one. A scaffold guides and supports construction rather than causing it. Kim Sterelny hits the nail on the head when he writes, Moral cognition, like many other competences, is acquired through the interaction of individual cognitive adaptations with an informationally organized learning environment. That said, I agree with the nativists that the acquisition of norms is biologically prepared; but the crucial adaptations are perceptual and motivational [. . .] moral development is robust because we are biologically prepared for moral education, but I think that preparation consists in the organization of our developmental environment, through specific perceptual sensitivity, and by our prosocial and commitment emotions.2

Though Sterelny takes these thoughts in a Humean direction, I think it is helpful to read this passage alongside Aristotle’s argument with which we began concerning how we come to acquire the virtues. I suggested earlier that a better way than seeing this dichotomously in terms of an interaction between nature and nurture is that both nature and nurture should be regarded as inseparable elements of the same complex constructive interactionist developmental process. 169

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Our emotional dispositions are constructed in the process of development from the material at hand just like any other psychological or physiological feature. It is the availability of external and internal resources (including DNA) which ultimately constrains and shapes the outcome. Sterelny makes these observations in the context of rejecting the nativist view that we come into the world with an innate “moral grammar” analogous to the universal grammar posited by Chomsky and his followers. He argues instead that our moral responses are built upon our “dispositions to respond emotionally in characteristic ways to stereotypical stimuli: for example, with disgust to body products and rotting foods, or with distress and discomfort to the suffering of others (or at least those in our group)”.3 Moral norms that piggyback on these responses are much more likely to become robust than those that do not. I think there are some profound insights in this picture. The trouble with the Humean direction in which Sterelny takes them is that it pretty much rules out any non-arbitrary way in which our moral judgements could be said to be right other than as a consensus of right-minded folk, however that may be defined. For instance, our disposition of disgust for rotting foods is frequently overruled by adult connoisseurs of cheese. Sexual sadism, whether of the consensual or abusive variety, requires the capacity for empathy with the emotional distress of victims. There is a difference between a sadist and a psychopath who simply does not care about the sufferings of his victims. The sadist cares greatly that his victim is suffering. Enjoying a ripe Camembert (and more controversially consensual sadomasochism) is morally neutral, but taking pleasure in abuse is clearly morally despicable. Sterelny acknowledges that “top-down learning” can modify our basic emotional responses in more than a superficial way. The person who has learned to appreciate Camembert is not secretly suppressing his disgust, but his enjoyment is also not despite the visceral reaction that the smell brings about in him. One possible Humean option that Sterelny might endorse is that society collectively organizes our cultural learning so that we tolerate Camembert eaters and consensual sado-masochists but condemn sadistic abusers. There seems little else that a Humean could say here than this. But our cultural scaffolding can go wrong and sometimes disastrously so. We are hurtling headlong towards an ecological cataclysm because of an inability of business and political leaders to overcome the top-down learning they presumably underwent that taught them that the planet is merely a set of resources to be exploited.4 In maintaining their hegemony, they are able to appeal to a range of our most primal emotional responses from fear to disgust. We find ourselves back in the predicament that Foot found herself in during the immediate aftermath of World War Two and its various atrocities: we want to have something more to say here than that we would prefer that our descendants do not perish in floods and bushfires. I have already said enough earlier about why we should reject anti-realism in favour of a deflationary form of moral realism. In what follows, I want to press



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Sterelny’s observations in an entirely different direction than he does. In particular, I want to consider how we might take the following insight Children learn the norms of their social world by acting in their social world; they learn by doing. But that learning is structured and sustained by cultural tools: fables, moral stories, the myths of their religion; the heroes and villains of their culture; the games they play. They are born into communities that have extensive normative vocabularies, and these help make salient certain categories of act, person, and situation. [. . .] These engineered learning worlds have their developmental effects in conjunction with individual cognitive mechanisms of emotional recognition and emotional response. These mechanisms make some aspects of the child’s social world salient and mask others.5

Sterelny is correct here and he is also correct to acknowledge that we are primed by nature to attend to some things (in particular information relevant to social interaction) rather than others, although as he argues, such priming cannot be reduced to some simplistic story about genetic encoding. In the previous chapter I argue that directed attentiveness is central to the virtues. One can only be virtuous if one knows what to attend to and what to ignore. If Sterelny’s view is broadly correct then attentiveness is neither a matter of genetic inheritance or a learned behavior; it is, rather, a feature of a complex developmental process. In this chapter I want to explore the ways in which attentiveness is scaffolded. In constructing a socio-cultural niche, we scaffold habits of attention. Some of this scaffolding is done informally by customs and folkways, other aspects of it are formalised into institutions. As Sterelny suggests, the most robust features of our architecture will be erected upon our most basic emotional dispositions, nevertheless these dispositions can be recruited and mobilised in many different ways, not all of them equally good. A culture is comprised in large part by what we take for granted and sometimes only when we travel overseas or have to explain something about it to a visitor. Inattentiveness is a precondition for directed attentiveness. Much inattentiveness is therefore innocuous but some of it is not. In what follows I will be discussing the moral significant and deeply problematic idea of “turning a blind eye” to various forms of injustice. I will locate it in the context of Lisa Tessman’s seminal work on the burdened virtues and I will be suggesting that this phenomenon of burdening, which she describes, extends beyond the traditional moral virtues to encompass epistemic ones. In light of our earlier discussion of Gibsonian moral perception, I will be suggesting that ‘turning a blind eye’ should be regarded as an active rather than a passive phenomenon and it is therefore morally culpable. I will then broaden the discussion to consider the kinds of culpable ignorance and moral complicity that motivated inattentiveness can give rise to, also under the auspices of a discussion of burdened epistemic virtue. The fostering of virtue requires healthy and robust institutions in the context of a rational polity. These institutions structure our practical reasoning by directing our attention in particular ways. Careful reflection on the historical and anthropological data reveals that most humans have lived in societies which are at best imperfectly

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virtuous. Given this fact, the eudaimonistic thesis that there is an intrinsic relationship between virtue and human flourishing seems like wishful thinking. Notoriously, Aristotle articulated his conception of virtue exclusively for an elite male audience. To make matters worse, in the modern period, talk of virtue and character has largely become associated in the broader culture with conservative thought. There are real questions, therefore, surrounding whether virtue ethics can be taken in a politically progressive direction. In this chapter I draw on the work of Lisa Tessman who has attempted to articulate a distinctly radical virtue ethics. In particular, her concept of ‘burdened’ virtues in situations of oppression give political radicals a rich set of resources for a ruthless criticism of actually existing conditions. I broaden Tessman’s concept to incorporate epistemic virtues and consider situations of endemic corruption where our epistemic institutions have become increasingly unreliable. I consider the implications of this for the good life. Faced with systemic and institutionalized injustice we have basically three choices: resistance, collusion or acquiescence (and various transitional states between these). Each of these choices has implications for our character and ultimately our capacity to live a fully human life. It is tempting when thinking of systemic and institutionalized injustice to set our eyes in the middle distance and think of different cultures from our own. Most mainstream political philosophy in the Anglosphere is reformist, that is, it presumes that our current way of organizing things is more or less satisfactory and all that is required is a little tinkering around the edges. We might do more to relieve poverty in the Third World, be more alert and compassionate to the plight of refugees, endeavor to address the ongoing scars left by settler colonialism and work harder to reach whatever arbitrary goal for reducing climate change that politicians have managed to cobble together. If contemporary political philosophy had a theme song, it would be written by Bono. In contrast to such an approach I want to pursue the thought, suggested by Judith Shklar among others, that injustice is the norm. Thus, our primary moral experience is not one of edging ever closer towards a more perfectly just society but rather a primal encounter with various forms of injustice. The virtue of justice can thus be seen, like other virtues, as a corrective to ever present threats and dangers in much the same way that courage matter because of the many opportunities life presents to experience fear. This question clearly touches on the famous distinction Rawls drew between ideal and non-ideal theory. I share Charles Mills’ concerns about this aspect of the Rawlsian project. The so-called ideal theory more dominant in mainstream ethics is in crucial respects obfuscatory, and can indeed be thought of as in part ideological, in the pejorative sense of a set of group ideas that reflect, and contribute to perpetuating, illicit group privilege. As O’Neill argues, and as I agree, the best way of realizing the ideal is through the recognition of the importance of theorizing the nonideal.6



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One of the problems with the idealizing strategy is that it fails to give an adequate account of what Lisa Tessman has termed “systemic moral luck”. Moral luck has been a feature of the landscape since the famous debate between Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel in the 1970s. However, it has tended to focus on examples of incident luck. Drawing on the work of Claudia Card, Tessman suggests an important set of distinctions that needs to be drawn between such incident luck and “systemic luck” which has “its source in social systems—particularly systems of oppression; it is in this way distinguished from luck that is natural, accidental, or idiosyncratic. For example, it can be due to systemic luck (in this case, bad luck) that a person suffers from the deprivation of poverty; there is nothing about this luck that is natural, accidental, or idiosyncratic, in that one can point to its systemic source in, for instance, capitalism.7 We should be cautious about drawing too hard and fast a distinction. Those susceptible to systemic bad luck are also much more likely to fall prey to incident bad luck. As we have seen during the pandemic, an illness which might be an inconvenience to someone with the means and ability to work from home may be a disaster for someone who does not have these. Similarly, an accumulation of incident bad luck can become systemic. Aristotelian ethics has a rudimentary account of such systemic luck in Aristotle’s acknowledgment of the importance of certain ‘external goods’ in the life of virtue. Unlike the Stoics, who embraced the Socratic “sufficiency thesis” according to which virtue is jointly necessary and sufficient for a eudaimon life, Aristotle was clear that certain factors beyond an individual’s control could interfere with his power of action and consequently his ability to pursue virtue. Happiness obviously needs the presence of external goods as well, since it is impossible, or at least no easy matter, to perform noble actions without resources. For in many actions, we employ, as if they were instruments at our disposal, friends, wealth, and political power. Again, being deprived of some things such as high birth, noble children, beauty spoils our blessedness. For the person who is terribly ugly, of low birth, or solitary and childless is not really the sort to be happy, still less perhaps if he has children or friends who are thoroughly bad, or good but dead. As we have said, then, there seems to be an additional need for some sort of prosperity like this. For this reason, some identify happiness with good fortune, while others identify it with virtue.8

This conception of the role of external goods allows an Aristotelian to account for the severance between virtue and happiness which would be otherwise inexplicable. So obvious is this severance that many have found eudaimonism implausible.

EUDAIMONISM The eudaimonistic thesis states that there is a necessary connection between fostering the virtues and a good life. In its least plausible formulation, eudaimonism suggests

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the pursuit of virtue will make us happy. Call this the ‘causal thesis’. All evidence speaks against the causal thesis, since we can give numerous examples of those who foster virtue and suffer, and of the vicious apparently doing well. At a superficial level, this objection can be fended off by excluding conventional understandings of happiness. Certainly, there is much to be suspicious about conventional understandings of happiness in terms of celebrity, power or material gain. This response, however, edges eudaimonism towards what I will call the constitutive thesis: happiness, properly understood, just is the fostering of the virtues. This requires considerable revision of our concept of ‘happiness’, since for many ordinary users of the language, a happy life equates to success understood in conventional terms. For that reason, it is common to translate ‘eudaimon’ not as happy but rather ‘flourishing’. This does not really evade the biggest problem for the constitutive thesis which is that of circularity: for every virtuous wretch mired in suffering opponents drag out, the defender of the constitutive thesis can simply state that we, and perhaps they, do not really understand what flourishing means. At a deeper level, the constitutive thesis does not really sit well with Aristotle’s view, since it is really a restatement of the sufficiency thesis. It is fairly clear that Aristotle was offering a modified rather than a radically revisionist conception of a good life, one in which the external goods play an appropriate role. This however leads to a problem. The passage cited above in which Aristotle discusses the external goods reeks of aristocratic hauteur. It seems fairly obvious that for him the “well born” are more likely to live a flourishing life than the “low born” and (one presumes) rightly so. In other words, eudaimonism in its classical Aristotelian form is profoundly elitist. This, combined with its implausibility, would seem to give us prima facie grounds to reject it. It is this elitism rather than the more common allegation of egoism which renders Aristotle’s version of virtue ethics objectionable. As Tessman writes, What Aristotle’s eudaimonism really guarantees is that the leisured adult Greek males will concern themselves with each other, because they must do so in their pursuit of flourishing, but it does nothing to extend morality beyond this circle; one does not tarnish one’s virtue by directing it only at certain specified others. This eudaimonism does not collapse into psychological egoism—since concern for others’ well-being is quite central for these virtuous Greek gentlemen—but it can, without violating the requirement for what Aristotle considers to be a successful sociality, be compatible with sexism, class divisions and economic exploitation, xenophobia and nationalism, pernicious ethnocentrism, and that which, since modernity, can be called racism. It is compatible with an utter lack of concern for the well-being of those who have relatively little social, economic, and political power.9

The charges against eudaimonism seem fairly damning. Tessman, however, counsels us against rejecting the thesis tout court urging us rather to press it in more democratic and emancipatory directions. One reason for retaining a modified version of the eudaimonist thesis is that it gives those engaged in emancipatory projects a



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powerful set of tools for analyzing the moral damage that oppression, injustice and inequality creates. The eudaimonistic ideal that, all things being equal, virtue should enable its bearer to flourish provides an interesting way of thinking about liberatory political struggles, for one might portray oppression as a set of barriers to flourishing and think about political resistance as a way of eradicating these barriers and enabling flourishing. I believe that there is some notion of flourishing implicit in the projects of political resistance, for without some idea of what is a better and what is a worse life, there is no explanation of nor motivation for the commitment to change systems of oppression.10

Taken at face value this might seem like another variant of ideal theory with a hopelessly abstract conception of flourishing standing in for a hopelessly abstract conception of justice. After all, things are not equal—not even close. However, Tessman’s articulation of the very real phenomenon of burdened virtues keeps our feet on solid ground. While Aristotle merely “acknowledges” the contingent connection between virtue and flourishing, if the concept is to be serviceable in emancipatory struggle then it must be “emphasized, for this relationship is constantly disrupted under oppression”.

THE BURDENED VIRTUES OF RESISTANCE In order to resist oppression, or even merely to withstand it, a person may be forced to foster “‘mixed’ traits that deserve praise only in the qualified sense of being the best that is possible under awful conditions”.11 Perhaps the best description of such mixed traits can be found in a poem by Bertolt Brecht, “To Those Born After”, where he describes the hardened hearts and contorted faces of those who fight injustice today so that others in the future will not have to live with it.12 This recognition is a useful corrective to the romanticizing of resistance which Tessman counsels against that “imagine[s] an escape into psychological health (if not full flourishing) by way of a commitment to being thoroughly formed by a politics of resistance”.13 Resistance, even of the non-violent variety, often comes at considerable cost in terms of the well-being of the resistor. While opposing injustice is the virtuous course of action since it is clearly acting for “the sake of the noble”, the manner in which one may be called upon to act while opposing injustice may not itself be noble, as both Brecht and Tessman acknowledge. Consequently, “[o]ne should worry about who one becomes as one carries out what began as a noble commitment to justice, for the traits that are needed to actualize that commitment may be ugly ones, arising as they do out of such troubled conditions”.14 One obvious character trait which figures heavily in this discussion is anger. Unlike the Stoics, Aristotle accorded a rightful place to anger insofar as it represents a visceral acknowledgment of real or perceived injustice.15 Nevertheless, anger remains

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potentially problematic. It is a necessary resource for resistance, but it may often be difficult to maintain among subordinated groups not least because in oppressive societies, permissible anger is the exclusive privilege of the oppressor. In part, this is because anger is intimately bound up with recognition of subordinate status and that very recognition may be difficult to the point of being traumatic. In part, it is because maintaining anger runs up against other very human impulses such as compassion. A steadfast revolutionary may well regard such impulses as signs of weakness which need to be suppressed. However, as Tessman rightly notes, the existence of such compassionate impulses are evidence of the ambivalent nature of resistance and “represent interesting and worthy moments in which we revealed that despite the pressures to conform to the ideal of a political resister, something survived of the character traits that enable not resistance but what would be the flourishing of interdependent human lives if one could imagine this taking place in the absence of great oppression”.16 At the same time she also argues that such impulses must indeed be repressed if we are to generate the anger necessary to sustain projects of resistance. Yet anger brings with it costs so that if it is a virtue, it is a burdened one. Political resistors must be ever vigilant to ensure that their anger does not become excessive or misdirected. Apart from the emotional toll that being in a constant state of anger may exert, it can also form a barrier to building coalitions and recruiting supporters to the cause one is advocating. This is rather different from the standard call to moderate one’s anger. Tessman acknowledges that constant anger, even rage, may often be the appropriate and proportionate response to systemic injustice. Moderate anger is the fitting response to mild injustice. Indeed, as she points out, this recognition is actually consistent with Aristotle’s view. “Since this impressive level of anger is actually the mean relative to the circumstances, it is the virtuous, morally praiseworthy level of anger”.17 I suggested above that in an oppressive society, anger is a privilege of the oppressor. The demand that the oppressed moderate their anger can be better understood in this light. It is often presented in terms of ‘getting a hearing’. An excessively angry person is liable to make their interlocutor stop listening. An embodiment of this idea can be found in Barack Obama who throughout his political career was fearful of being dismissed as merely an “angry black man” and who developed an excessively measured speaking style, even in situations where anger would be entirely appropriate. This style drew the attention of satirists. Saturday Night Live even had a character playing an “anger translator” who conveyed their Obama character’s words with more appropriate emotion. This was more than a matter of rhetorical style: Obama’s unwillingness to become angered was apiece with his unwillingness to challenge the deep systemic injustices of US society. Nevertheless, “ignoring the desirability of moderation in anger allows one to also ignore how the resister is burdened by the imperative to carry an awesome level of anger”.18 This is the point of recognizing a virtue as burdened: it is a virtue precisely because it is situationally appropriate and “for the sake of the noble” and yet can still exert an enormous toll on the self. Since excessive anger can damage the bearer the



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resistor finds herself in a dilemma: “if one chooses to be angered only in a measured way, then one must endure the degradation of oneself or of others on whose behalf one acts, but if one chooses to develop a fully angered/enraged disposition in response to the vast injustice one is fighting, then the anger can become consuming”.19

THE LURE OF SEPARATISM There are other more subtle ways in which political engagement can be damaging to one’s character. As a lifelong socialist, I have often been struck that, alongside the numerous wonderful comrades I have known, there are innumerable oddballs who have attached themselves to left-wing causes. Although this has only become more pronounced in the age of social media, it is not a new phenomenon. Oscar Wilde apparently quipped that “the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings” with the implication that an excessive devotion to political activity can interfere with other projects necessary to being a fully rounded being. In the 1930s while still an adherent of the socialist cause, George Orwell bemoaned the horrible—the really disquieting—prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words “Socialism” and “Communism” draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, “Nature Cure” quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. [. . .] This kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.20

There is much to find offensive in this passage, not least its casual sexism and the glorification of “decent people” which too often is a thinly veiled defense of conservative nationalism. Nevertheless, Orwell clearly hits on something here: the very fact of active participation in politics, in a society where tremendous resources are devoted to depoliticizing the mass of the population, is sufficient to be considered cranky and eccentric. Left-wing politics is, by definition, oppositional and as such it is little wonder that left-wing causes attract under their banner people who are oppositional by nature. But this presents an enormous problem for a political project which requires the engagement of the broad mass of ordinary people. There may be very good reasons to want to distance oneself from a society marred by systemic injustice lest one become complicit in it. As Tessman suggests, anger can be construed as refusal to engage in dialogue with tainted interlocutors. This has been the appeal of separatist movements among feminists and persons of color over several generations. It is reflected in Steve Biko’s Black Consciousness movement and also in the meaning of the Irish words Sinn Féin (ourselves alone) which named the most important strand of militant Republicanism over the last century. The general

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thought here is that those who resist must refuse to do so on terms set by their oppressors and rely primarily on their own internal resources. In recent years it has figured in the often rancorous debates about Identity Politics on the political left. The great Irish Republican Socialist James Connolly responded to the launch of Sinn Féin with a pamphlet “Sinn Fein and Socialism” in which he is surprisingly concessive to the demands of the nationalists, even though he was an ardent internationalist. He recognizes the claims of the Gaelic language revivalists, arguing that a universal language cannot emerge over the corpse of dead ones and criticizes the complicity of many supposed nationalists in the demise of the language. But it is the principle of self-reliance embodied in the Irish phrase “sinn féin” which draws his greatest approbation. He praises “a policy of defiant self-reliance, and confident trust in a people’s own power of self-emancipation by a people”.21 This is in contrast to the “foreign aid” tradition which sought salvation from overseas. The pamphlet is not, however, primarily a defense of Irish national independence, although he pours scorn on supposed socialists who would deny Ireland’s right to self-determination; it is, rather, an appeal for socialists to take on board the same spirit of “defiant selfreliance”. The working class should rely upon its own strength and self-organization rather than aim for “foreign aid”. Militant separatism in the sense of self-reliance is thus a traditional feature of radical political organizations. Rather than building loose unstable coalitions with unreliable allies which, of necessity, must involve suppressing important political and organizational differences, the separatist demand is that the organization relies upon the resources of the community it represents. Such separatism however carries its own dangers. To quote Australia’s greatest post-war Prime Minister Gough Whitlam “only the impotent are pure”. Separatism and ideological purity carry with them the danger that in protecting the group from alien political influences, it also disconnects it from the very constituencies it needs to win in order to gain power. This is fine if the goal is simply the creation of a separatist community, but most radical movements see separatism as a means to broader transformative aims.22

BETWEEN IMPOTENCE AND COMPLICITY The story of Christopher McCandless portrayed in the film Into the Wild mentioned earlier captures a longstanding theme in political thought that we would probably be better to withdraw entirely from a corrupt society. And yet, as Gough Whitlam’s quote gestures in the other direction, political power requires participation in a possibly corrupt society. This chimes with the Aristotelian theme being pursued throughout this work that human beings cannot but live in a society. The desire to form separatist micro-communities is itself an implicit recognition of that fact. Eschewing an unrealistic level of ideological purity in pursuit of pragmatic goals risks an alternative danger, that of complicity. As the old saw has it: politics is the art of the



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compromise and yet too often those uttering this slogan emphasize the compromise, rather than the art, taking it as an excuse for rank opportunism. I suggested at the beginning of this chapter that the three attitudes which injustice might provoke are resistance, complicity and acquiescence. It is time to consider these and also the virtues and vices connected to them in the light of Tessman’s discussion of the burdened virtues. Let me introduce this section by way of an anecdote. Many years ago I was giving a lecture in a professional ethics course on the virtues and professional and personal formation. In the audience was an older white South African woman. She asked me the following question: how should a parent in a society like South Africa raise their children? She clearly had in mind the predicament of a white South African parent who may well recognize the deep inequity of the system and yet have all the normal instincts a parent has. She knows that if she raises her child to defy the system she risks the child’s livelihood and even her life as the fate of Neil Aggett very pointedly demonstrates. At the very least the child risks ostracism by her own community. As with Tessman’s examples I suggest this is a very real case of burdening. Virtue clearly demands that one raise one’s child to oppose the Apartheid system and yet to do so involves placing the child at significant risk. This issue is more pronounced than placing oneself at risk because one is taking on the risk on the child’s behalf at a time in their lives when they are unable to give properly informed consent. One is perhaps making an assumption about what a future adult may decide but even the decisions a parent makes on a question such as this have a profound impact on the structure of the practical reasoning of that future adult. Now, of course, parents make analogous decisions about things like vaccination all the time but there is a significant difference: vaccinations come with great benefits and relatively small risks. It is clear that when one decides to vaccinate a child one is doing something good both for the child and for the broader community. In the case of resisting oppression, while it may be good it is not good in an unqualified sense in the way that vaccination is. The point of my student’s question seems to be precisely that there is no obvious connection between raising the child to act virtuously and a natural concern the parent has for the child’s flourishing. In this particular woman’s case, she resolved the dilemma by emigrating to Australia. This is a move not without its difficulties and certainly not a route open to all. I will consider below the possibility of ‘internal emigration’ but here I want to move onto the question of what happens if one chooses, or is forced, to stay in a society one recognizes as deeply unjust and oppressive. The costs of resistance may be so great that one decides against it, either for oneself, or on behalf of one’s children. Such a course of action, however, assumes that the alternatives are not without their costs. Consider Steve Biko’s words: “Powerlessness breeds a race of beggars who smile at the enemy and swear at him in the sanctity of their toilets; who shout ‘Baas’ willingly during the day and call the white man a dog in their buses as they go home. Once

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again the concept of fear is at the heart of this two-faced behavior on the part of the conquered blacks”.23 This is a good example of the moral damage of oppression which Tessman discusses. The entire project of Black Consciousness which Biko advocated involved an acknowledgment of, and an attempt to counteract, the moral damage done to Black and Colored South Africans by apartheid. Such ‘two-facedness’ seems to be ubiquitous in colonized selves. George Bernard Shaw captures it acutely in his play O’Flaherty VC. The lead character is a young Irish man who signs up during World War One in order to escape the boredom of rural Irish life and an overbearing mother. He cannot tell his mother, a staunch Republican, that he is fighting for the British so he tells her that he is fighting with the French, Ireland’s traditional ally. His commanding officer Piers Madigan is the local squire. In one particularly telling scene Madigan walks around the village where he is warmly greeted by the locals. He is convinced that he is well liked and respected. Unbeknownst to him the locals mock him the second that his back is turned. Such two-facedness may be an understandable survival mechanism if we recall what was said above about anger being the privilege of the oppressor, but it understandably exerts a heavy toll on the self. Above all it makes it difficult to form genuine healthy relationships since it seems implausible to suggest that it will not leak out into other areas of the person’s life. We are now familiar with the concept of ‘lateral violence’ in oppressed communities and one possible interpretation of this phenomenon is in terms of burdening: the types of character traits one develops in order to survive oppressive circumstances color your interactions with members of your own community. John McGahern’s novel Amongst Women recounts the relationship of Moran, a widower and former IRA fighter, with his three daughters. In one particularly poignant scene, his daughter Sheila has just received the results of her Leaving certificate and she has done well enough to get into University. Moran came back from the post office to tell them that Annie and Lizzie had been singing their praises. “I told them it was nothing. What else had the girls to do but study? Anybody could do it who got their chance. They nearly beat me,” he said to the whole house, much pleased with what he had said. The girls looked at him with wide-eyed hurt. They felt that he had let them down in front of others. “They’ll think that you are running down your own children.” Rose articulated what they felt. “If I was to praise the girls in the post office, being Irish they would have to cut them down to size,” Moran argued. “Since I didn’t give them any praise, Annie and Lizzie had to do the praising instead. That way they think twice as much of the girls than if I had praised them myself.” He was very pleased with his own astuteness.24

There is a lot going on in the passage. There are clearly issues about masculinity— unsurprisingly so since masculinity is the primary theme of the novel. But read in conjunction with Shaw’s O’Flaherty VC it is hard not to discern the damaging legacy of colonialism. The characters are only one generation from Ireland’s partial independence from Britain. The desire to cut others down to size can be seen as a form



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of lateral violence between selves formed by colonialism. Putting others down in this manner can be understood as doing the colonizers’ work for them.

INNER EMIGRATION Both resistance and acquiescence therefore come at considerable cost. In the case of the South African woman discussed earlier, her solution was emigration, which is not an option open to all or even most people facing oppression. One possible option is a concept that arose among some writers in Nazi Germany: inner emigration. The term emerged post-war in debates in literary circles in response to the question of collective guilt. Writers like Thomas Mann who had emigrated were able to publicly oppose the regime from the safety of overseas whereas writers who were unable or unwilling to leave were faced with the choice of either collaborating actively or passively with the regime or resisting at enormous personal risk. Volker Berghahn describes them thus: [T]here were Germans who either fell completely silent or became associated with the regime in some more remote professional capacity, while finding covert ways to oppose it, until some of them, such as Sethe and Donhoff, became involved in forms of active resistance. Others in this category, while still refusing to join the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) and its affiliates, found it too difficult to join the active resistance because of family or other responsibilities that they believed they could not jeopardize. Simple fear was also a significant factor. After all, it was generally known what it meant to be arrested and put on trial or to be sent into the legal black hole of a concentration camp.25

As Berghahn suggests, these inner emigres were in a moral gray zone between those who actively defied the Nazis and those who colluded with them. Yet, some even felt a slight sense of superiority to writers like Thomas Mann who escaped and had the luxury of criticizing the Nazis “from the boxes or the parquet of a foreign country”.26 Such attitudes understandably provoked a hostile response from more active opponents of the regime whether at home or abroad and the general consensus appears to be that talk of inner emigration should be taken with a large pinch of salt. This is particularly the case when the aim of many repressive regimes, such as Pinochet’s Chile or Franco’s Spain, was to depoliticize the populace and encourage them to retreat to the realm of private affairs. Even in the countries of ‘actually existing socialism’ which formally encouraged political participation, the endless tedious meetings interspersed with occasional spectacles was actually a subtle means of depoliticization. In this light is there any morally significant difference between such ‘inner emigration’ and political apathy? Consider, for example, the question of voting in countries whose voting system ensure the persistence of a duopoly, often with very little ideological difference between the main parties. There is often tremendous pressure placed upon dissenting voters not to vote for third party candidates that more closely align with their own views, on the grounds that doing so

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assists the victory of the greater evil. This only further entrenches the duopoly and the absence of viable competition on their flanks only exacerbates the ideological homogeneity. In such a context, voting could be seen to tacitly endorse a system of which one disapproves and not voting or spoiling one’s vote could be seen as a protest. Whether abstaining from voting is a valid choice would surely depend upon what the person does instead. If she spent her time watching Netflix instead then her act is indistinguishable from political disengagement. If, however, she is actively building alternatives to electoralism then it could be considered a virtuous course of action. It should be clear from the foregoing that some form of political resistance to injustice is the only virtuous course of action. The form that resistance takes needs to be measured by the exercise of practical reasonableness: spectacular futile acts of rebellion, particularly those which place others in danger or alienate potential allies seem to be ruled out prima facie at least. But what of circumstances such as the Irish Easter Uprising? Launched by a coalition of nationalists and socialists it was provoked by the imminent threat of conscription which up until this point Ireland had avoided. More broadly, it was a response to Britain’s repeated failure to live up to its promises on Home Rule. At this point in history, Britain was at the height of its imperial power and even though distracted by the First World War was more than able to contain the rebellion. The rebellion was further complicated by political and tactical disagreements between its leaders and acts of open betrayal. After Roger Casement was captured trying to smuggle in weapons from Imperial Germany, the leader of the Volunteers, Eoin McNeill, countermanded the order for the rebellion which meant that it was largely isolated to Dublin and its environs. The British responded with overwhelming military force and yet despite tactical blunders on the rebels’ part such as digging trenches on St. Stephen’s Green where they could be fired on from overhead, the Irish revolutionaries managed to hold the British off for six days. Public reaction to the revolutionaries was lukewarm and even hostile. It was the clumsy and vindictive response on the part of the British, who regarded them as traitors during wartime, which turned the tide. The wave of public sympathy turned into one of militant resistance, further exacerbated by British brutality such as the use of the notorious auxiliary RIC the ‘Black and Tans’. This growing militancy combined with the undoubted tactical genius of leaders like Michael Collins forced the British to a stalemate and led to the foundation of the Irish Free State. The Free State was a world away from what those who died in the Uprising fought for. A significant part of the country remained under British occupancy and the Free State only had Dominion status. The clergy exercised an overweening control on all areas of social and cultural life making the Free State deeply unattractive to Northern Protestants and marking a stark contrast to the feminist ideals of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic for which the revolutionaries fought. Throughout the remainder of the twentieth century, despite punching above its weight culturally, the Free State (later rebadged by de Valera as The Republic) continued to stagnate socially and



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economically while the Northern counties were blighted by sectarianism, occupation and paramilitary violence. Opponents maintain that had the revolutionaries not launched the ill-fated Uprising, Ireland would have achieved Home Rule without the bloodshed and on a more solid footing but the history of other colonial struggles against British tyranny, many of which took their inspiration from the Irish events, speaks against this. The ability of a tiny band of rebels to hold off the might of the British empire emboldened better organized rebels elsewhere and ultimately led to the partial liberation of the island of Ireland from the British jackboot. Any honest assessment of the costs of rebellion needs to be measured against the costs of not rebelling.

THE BURDEN OF COMPLICITY At the end of any period of occupation the sight of collaborators, real and alleged, being dragged into the street by a mob is a familiar one. It is hard to watch such scenes without mixed feelings: how many of the most enthusiastic members of the mob were themselves complicit to a greater and lesser degree and are using their public outrage as a way of detracting attention from themselves? We contemporary philosophers look with more than a little condescension at the ancients unwillingness to condemn slavery while rarely considering their own complicity in a range of oppressive social arrangements such as the hyper-exploitation of the developing world and the closely related degradation of our natural environment.27 If emigration, whether external or internal, is not an option and resistance is difficult, then some degree of complicity becomes inevitable. Discussions of so-called dirty hands dilemmas have tended to focus on high level political actors, but the question of complicity is much more pronounced for ordinary folk precisely because they do not have that sort of power, at least at the individual level which most such discussions focus on. Such a focus obscures important aspects of complicity. Or so I will argue.

INCIDENT COMPLICITY AND SYSTEMIC COMPLICITY Philosophical discussion of ‘dirty hands’ and similar dilemmas has tended to focus on the individual charged with making such decisions. This has led to a preoccupation upon what might be described, following Claudia Card, as incident complicity: a moral agent confronted by a dirty hands type situation must decide the extent to which she might become complicit in wrongdoing. This is in keeping with the fact that the literature has been preoccupied with individuals with significant power. My concept of systemic complicity turns the focus in a

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different direction towards the relatively powerless for whom complying with wrongdoing seems the only or at least the most obvious choice. It might appear at first blush that the traditional focus on high-level complicity reflects the fact that our moral evaluations track degrees of agency: an agent who has more power, has by virtue of that fact more freedom of action and thus is more subject to moral scrutiny than someone who is relatively powerless. This response neglects two significant considerations. Firstly, power is much more diffused than this picture supposes and even high-level actors are subject to various institutional constraints. This, for example, is why concerns about Donald Trump having access to the nuclear codes were rather silly. Secondly, and closely related to this, the apparent freedom of action of high-level actors is a function of the complicity of others, including those who are relatively powerless. What makes complicity systemic? Complicity is systemic when, rather than confronting someone on a particular occasion, it is built into the fabric of their daily existence, so that it becomes difficult if not impossible to live without complying. The degree of difficulty is clearly a central consideration here. If the price of not complying is that one sacrifices one’s life or that of one’s loved ones then noncompliance may be supererogatory. But as has been stated at numerous points, oppressive regimes seldom rule by violence alone. Indeed, no regime could last if it did. The pressures that such regimes bring to bear are often much more subtle: an appeal to professional vanity in one case, the fear of missing out on a promotion in another. Add into this the dull but powerful pressures of conformity and we have a heady mix. A standard virtue ethical response to incident complicity is that the virtuous person exercises intellectual and ethical virtues in order to avoid such situations. There is implicit in this a recognition that even virtuous persons might confront irresolvable or tragic dilemma from which it is impossible to emerge unscathed. Virtue Ethicists counsel that the person should use the remorse and regret such occasions incite in the properly constituted agent as opportunities for reflection. This may be the case for incident complicity but what of the systemic form? When one’s whole life is structured in such a way that complicity is ubiquitous then it seems what one regrets is not any particular occasion but as Tessman puts it “the self that one is”.26 The structure of one’s practical reason has been formed in such a way that complicity appears to be unavoidable. Becoming a different person would entail removing oneself from the situation in which one lives, which as has been pointed out above is often not an option. One objection that might be raised here is that talk of complicity in such a situation is too vague to be serviceable. Complicity is only blameworthy to the extent that it is avoidable. When complicity is built into the fabric of daily life, it is difficult to determine individual moral responsibility. I will therefore introduce a further distinction between culpable and non-culpable complicity (while recognizing that any real case will fall somewhere on a continuum between them). If ought implies can, then it seems problematic to talk about culpable systemic complicity unless an agent has resources available to them to break with the system. The resources of any individual, especially within a highly repressive



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society, are vanishingly small. The degree of moral culpability with respect to complicity will be gauged by how much power they have to change things. The danger remains that if everyone is complicit to some degree then the concept of complicity becomes meaningless. Further work is needed to clarify the concept of complicity itself. In their book Complicity and Compromise, Chiara Lepore and Robert Goodin highlight some of the complexities and ambivalences surrounding the concept. “Complicity” is loosely employed in ordinary discourse as a catch-all term referring indiscriminately to the whole multitude of sins arising from “what . . . I . . . do by way of contribution to what you do”, when you do wrong. The generic term “complicity” is used to describe what are, in truth, several distinct practices [such as] “connivance”, “contiguity”, “collusion”, “collaboration”, “condoning”, “consorting”, “conspiring” and “full joint wrongdoing”. Lumping all those phenomena together under the generic label of “complicity” is morally misleading, as we shall show. Those terms are not all interchangeable. Each points to a distinct way of engaging with someone else who is committing a wrong; each differs not only in degree but also in kind.29

This is standard fare from analytic philosophers: ordinary language is hopelessly muddled and vague and a crack team of analytic philosophers needs to parachute in and tidy it up. A number of observations can be made in response. It is not clear that ‘complicity’ is used all that much in everyday speech. It is much more a technical term in legal and political settings. The kind of nuances that the authors wish to draw are precisely the kind found when people are struggling to make sense of their predicament. If lumping together these distinctions under the “catch-all term” is “morally misleading” the sin is generally committed by analysts rather than ordinary folk. Moreover, while the terms clearly reflect ambivalence and vagueness, this is not a semantic matter but a moral and political one: the cluster of concepts surrounding complicity are vague because they are contested. Or to put it another way: the semantic and moral ambiguities are mutually ramifying. The authors rightly note that legal attempts at defining them will be largely unhelpful, but this is precisely why philosophical attempts will also be unsuccessful: both legal and philosophical definitions of contested concepts represent definition by fiat. Their own procedure involves doing what we have counselled generations of undergraduate students to avoid and proceeding from a set of dictionary definitions of key terms. Since dictionary definitions are of necessity stipulative, it is unsurprising that they are largely unilluminating. Lurking in the background is of course the desire to formulate a decision procedure which they deliver as a formula accompanied by an elaborate table. One presumes that someone beset by a quandary about complicity simply needs to plug in the various values and the procedure will churn out an appropriate result. The formula that is pro tanto blameworthiness for complicity = (RF)(BF)(CF) + (RF)(SP) and the table is as follows:

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pro tanto blameworthiness of act of complicity = function of Badness Factor (BF) Responsibility Factor (RF) = function of Voluntariness (V) Knowledge of contribution (Kc) Knowledge of wrongness of principal wrongdoing (Kw) Contribution Factor (CF) = function of Centrality of contribution (C) Proximity of contribution (Prox) Reversibility of contribution (Rvse) Temporality (Temp) Planning role (Pr) Responsiveness of secondary agent (Resp) Shared Purpose (SP) = function of Extent of overlap (Eo) Strength of shared purpose (Ssp) Action guidingness of shared purpose (Ag)30 Some of the individual elements of this table are insightful and I will be making reference to them below but both formula and table are beset by the same fundamental problem noted above: they comprise a range of contested concepts. Consider the Badness Factor (BF). In complex cases, there could be considerable disagreement between reasonable people about whether, and to what extent, something can be described as “bad”. Most cases with which we are concerned do not fall within the category of unconditionally bad acts. One does not need to be a consequentialist to recognize that the badness of an act or event may only emerge after some time has passed, perhaps sufficient time that it is impossible to prevent or reverse it. This therefore has direct implications for one’s knowledge of wrongness of the principal wrongdoing (Kw) =. As the author correctly notes, it is a platitude that all actions fall under some description. Part of what is involved in contesting a concept is whether an action appropriately falls under its description. For instance, is something a case of “an abuse of private property rights” or “building socialism”? Someone committed to the latter project is unlikely to even acknowledge that there is such a thing as “private property rights” to abuse. Conversely, someone who gives primacy to the supposed right to private (as opposed to personal) property would not recognize “building socialism” as a valid project. Pinochet’s US backed coup in 1973 could be construed either as a “brutal attack on democracy” or “a defence of private property rights against a Marxist tyranny”. One can even begin to assess the “badness factor” of these events until one has settled that question. Consequently, whether one is a collaborator, or an ally will also depend upon the prior resolution of the appropriate description.



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KNOWLEDGE AND RESPONSIBILITY Chiara and Goodin suggest that to satisfy the Responsibility condition a person must firstly have some knowledge of the wrongness of the principle wrongdoing (Kw) and secondly of their contribution to it (Kc). In 1956 the Soviet Union sent the Red Army to Budapest to quell a popular uprising. They deliberately chose troops from the remotest areas of the country, such as Inner Mongolia, because they were less likely to feel sympathy with the revolutionaries. They were told that they were being sent to crush a fascist invasion. This intervention famously led to a split in the international communist movement from which it never really recovered between ‘tankies’—so called because they were prepared to justify sending the tanks in against a workers’ insurrection—and those who opposed it, many of whom went on to become the New Left. We apply different moral standards to evaluate international leftists and Mongolian conscripts, primarily because of their differential access to information. Although heavily filtered through veils of propaganda, the ‘tankies’ had better quality information than those manning the tanks. The tankies manifested a sort of willful blindness to the facts. Perhaps the same also applied to the tank regiments themselves once they arrived in Hungary and were better able to familiarize themselves with the events on the ground but even then, unlike Western apologists, they would have been under military discipline and therefore their ability to act severely curtailed. The tankies are therefore more morally culpable than the tank regiments.

WILLFUL BLINDNESS During my time in South Africa I met many white South Africans of my own age and older. Some of them had been active opponents of the apartheid regime but a great many others had not.31 They had simply gone about their private business, attended to their families and careers. They probably did not fall into the category of active supporters of the regime since many of these emigrated when apartheid ended. Those who remain prefer not to talk about the past but when the topic is raised the conversation takes an eerily similar form. They simply did not know how bad things were. It is more than a little reminiscent of the post-war generation of Germans who also claim not to have known what happened during the Third Reich. It is easy to dismiss such comments as mere bad faith which in some cases is probably fair. However, although apartheid South Africa was not a totalitarian regime in the full sense of the word, considerable resources were devoted to keeping the white population unaware of the true scale of the horrors being perpetrated in their name. Opponents faced harassment and worse. As always there was little any individual could do in the face of an entire political regime. History is only

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part of the story, however. The current crop of white South Africans live for the most part in an enviable economic position. The average white South African has the lifestyle of an upper middle class Australian. This is tempered of course by the very real fear of crime but, as Aristotle noted long ago, this is the price that must be paid for great inequality of wealth. South Africa is the most unequal country in the world. Two white brothers, the Oppenheimers, own more wealth than 50 percent of the population. Unemployment among black South Africans is higher now than under apartheid, a condition only exacerbated by the pandemic.32 Although official segregation has been abolished, South Africa is still socially and economically segregated. The main contact most white South Africans have with their black and colored counterparts is with their ‘domestic workers’, as employees working in menial roles or serving them in fast food restaurants and so one. Poverty and inequality come with familiar associated pathologies: alcohol and substance abuse, crime (petty and serious), lateral violence within the communities and shockingly high levels of sexual and intimate partner violence punctuated by periodic outbreaks of xenophobic attacks. In the townships (or ‘locations’ the apartheid designations which they still go by) this horror is softened by the bromides of ‘prosperity gospel’ style Evangelical Christianity with its promise that if one prays fervently enough and tithes, of course, untold wealth is in your future. I had been involved in the anti-apartheid movement in my youth and one of the most distressing features of the situation is the recognition of just how corrupt the ANC has become in the last two decades of unchallenged government. It operates in the black communities through complex networks of patronage but is also more than willing to engage in violent intimidation should members of that community question what they are getting in return for their loyalty. The most notorious example of this came at Marikana in 2012 where a group of striking miners were butchered by the police in scenes eerily reminiscent of apartheid times. Cyril Ramaphosa, now president, was the key protagonist of these events. Ramaphosa had come to prominence as a leader of the militant miners’ union, famous for stating that “there are no good capitalists” and yet once apartheid ended, he shed his erstwhile revolutionary persona like a snake sheds it skin and became one of the leading figures in the new non-racial capitalist class. Even after a short time in the country, I found myself in the predicament described by Tessman: caught between anguish and indifference. I was in the country on a philosophy research fellowship, ostensibly to write this book. I quickly found that I was unable to achieve the peace and tranquility necessary to write philosophy. It felt obscenely self-indulgent. I threw myself into political activism to the extent a non-citizen could. I became involved with a small radical group in the township, the Unemployed People’s Movement, whose leadership had faced constant intimidation by ANC linked thugs. It was a constant exhausting wave of endless activism: protesting power cuts one week, xenophobic attacks the next, sexual violence the following. At the end of the day, however, I was not a citizen. I had no longstanding connections or major responsibilities and therefore no real skin in the game.



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Politically engaged academic friends encountered the same problem I did with lack of ability to focus on purely academic concerns but unlike me they do not have the luxury of neglecting the demands of being a ‘productive researcher’ While my incessant political activism gave me some psychological relief I cannot pretend that it made any material difference. Unlike my role here in Australia, I was not part of a wider well-organized network of labour activists who can achieve tangible change, and while the challenges we trade unionists face in Australia are significant, they are tiny compared to the problems that beset South Africa. This was my predicament as an outsider. What then of a white person living in South Africa today, or under apartheid where the stakes and risks were even higher. Those white South Africans not actively engaged in politics tend to respond in a way first described by Melvin Lerner and his associates in the 1970s.33 That they are in their fortunate social and economic position is the result of sheer systemic luck. They are the winners of what Claudia Card called The Unnatural Lottery. Direct beneficiaries first of the initial act of colonial dispossession and genocide, then the ruthless hyper-exploitation of South Africa’s material and human resources under Cecil Rhodes and the other robber barons, and the final insult of the formal entrenchment and enforcement of racial inequality in the apartheid system. They are also the beneficiaries of the dirty deal which the ANC leadership did with the global and local capitalists to make only superficial changes to the structural inequality. Confronting such obvious facts runs contrary to the self-image most nonpsychopaths want to construct of themselves as decent human beings. Such a tension creates cognitive dissonance which is extremely hard to sustain. One typical response to this situation is to construct what Lerner has called “A Just World Hypothesis”. This is a cognitive bias which when spelled out explicitly is clearly absurd. It states that the manner in which benefits and burdens are distributed is merit based. This false hypothesis both explains why those with privilege have it and why those who are disadvantaged are so. I would commonly hear from white South Africans that their black and colored counterparts where lazy (black and colored South Africans do the overwhelming bulk of the manual labour) and prone to drunkenness (ironic as anyone who has spent an evening in the company of white South Africans will attest). Black and colored people were sexually promiscuous, they would claim, and consequently liable to have children they could not afford and to raise them in chaotic circumstances. The fact that the chaotic circumstances were the result of insecure work and poor housing infrastructure and the historical destruction of the African family escaped notice. When considering this, it becomes clearer how older white South Africans could claim ignorance of the full horrors of apartheid. What made apartheid horrific was its unjust distribution of burdens and benefits, but to see this one needs to acknowledge the injustice of both benefit and burden. In keeping with my earlier discussion of direct moral perception the claim that one sees or fails to see injustice should be taken quite literally. The Just World Hypothesis prevents one from doing this. Afrikaaners, in particular, were encouraged to regard themselves as the

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rightful victors of a military and cultural struggle against British colonialism and to regard their tenuous victory as imperiled by hostile external and internal forces. Combine this with the tremendous resources the National Party regime devoted to keeping the worst excesses of the regime from its support base and very real threats posed to that small minority of white dissidents and their willful blindness becomes intelligible.

THE BURDENED VIRTUES OF ATTENTIVENESS Apartheid South Africa was a uniquely horrific political system. The issues I have identified however are much broader in scope. I want to suggest that the South African case acutely exemplifies a phenomenon of the burdening of epistemic virtue. In this section I want to focus on one particular virtue and that is attentiveness as it seems to overlap the moral and epistemic dimensions. A knowledgeable agent clearly has mastery of the skills of attentiveness. She knows what to attend to and what to disregard. Under normal circumstances, attentiveness contributes to the flourishing of someone who fosters: she is able to form accurate beliefs about the world around her, including the social world. Attentiveness means both attentiveness to particulars but also the ability to situate those particulars in a bigger picture. Someone who pays too much attention to the details of driving may fail to attend to the traffic. We mark this distinction in popular idioms such as not being able to see the forest for the trees. But what about situations in which attentiveness brings dangers? Someone living next door to a violent criminal may be better off not paying too much attention to his comings and goings. The virtuous course of action would clearly be to pay attention and report them to the relevant authorities, but it is clearly fraught with significant risk. What if, for example, the authorities are corrupt, and the criminal has them in his pocket? Recently there has been significant research into the psychological wellbeing of those professionally involved in the investigation of catastrophic climate change. There is considerable evidence of depression, anxiety and other signs of severe psychological distress as a direct result of knowing too many of the facts about climate change. As with Lerner’s Just World Hypothesis, the crucial issue here is relative powerlessness. He suggests that one is most likely to succumb to a Just World delusion in such cases where one can see others suffering but are unable to relieve that suffering. One resorts to a Just World narrative to assuage one’s own cognitive dissonance. Climate scientists experience psychological distress because they are aware of the facts but are unable to effect significant change in governmental or corporate policy. There is thus a severing of the natural connection between fostering the epistemic virtue of attentiveness and the possessor’s flourishing. One might respond, as in the case of moral virtue, by advancing a version of the sufficiency thesis: the climate scientists are flourishing epistemically but just not flourishing in the conventional sense. This response seems to me to be rather glib and fails to do justice to their



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genuine psychological and emotional distress. To paraphrase Aristotle, it seems nonsensical to suggest that someone whose psyche is at a breaking point is flourishing unless one revises the concept of ‘flourishing’ to mean something like ‘righteous’. But in that case the term ‘flourishing’ becomes otiose. There are plenty of austere moral and religious traditions which emphasize the need to sacrifice our well-being in this life for the sake of our eternal one, but virtue ethics great strength is its worldliness. Pushing virtue ethics in this direction deprives it of much of its distinctiveness.

DISTRIBUTING THE BURDENED VIRTUES If virtues become burdened, then the obvious solution would be to share the burden. This is an option Tessman tends not to discuss, preferring instead to dwell on the tragic predicament of individuals facing oppression. This is a significant lacuna in her work and one which is compounded in her recent work on moral failure in which there is even more pessimism and even less focus on alternatives.34 One theme throughout this book has been that the modern revival of virtue ethics has been skewed by an overly individualistic and psychological focus, leaving virtue ethics open, for example, to the Situationist Challenge. I have argued that this is out of step with Aristotle’s understanding of virtues which is a thoroughly communal one. The sorts of predicaments outlined above all stem from the powerlessness of individuals attempting to face great injustice. The obvious response is that this is precisely the limitation of individual action and the point at which moral philosophy must transition into political philosophy. But this response is too quick. It states the problem as if it were a solution. In some respects, powerlessness simply is the inability to act as a meaningful and effective coalition and the powers that be devote enormous financial, ideological and physical resources to ensure that this remains so. Let us explore the epistemic dimensions of this. In his book The Great Endarkenment, Elijah Milgram draws our attention to the growing problem of hyperspecialization and the dangers that this poses for the democratic project. Modern democratic theory begins with the Enlightenment and in particular the Encyclopedists project of providing the average educated adult with sufficient knowledge to make informed decisions for themselves. It would seem on the surface that in the age of the internet this project may be close to fruition. But instead, something very different and much darker is occurring. We are, and are becoming ever more, a society of specialists. As recently as the early nineteenth century, it was possible for a polymath—such as, famously at the time, William Whewell—to master all of the science of his day. It is not nearly possible any longer; specialization is far more highly articulated than at any time in previous human history, and because this difference in degree has come to amount to a difference in kind, I’ll mark the newly extreme form of division of labor with the label hyperspecialization. Consequently, communication across the barriers between professions and disciplines is our own very pressing problem, and it threatens not just our more ambitious enterprises but the successful management of our day-to-day lives.35

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The fate of philosophy is closely bound up with the Encyclopedist’s ambitions: they were, after all, mostly philosophes. At a deeper level philosophy has never really escaped its designation caricatured by Voltaire’s Doctor Pangloss who is notoriously a “professor of things in their generality”. Many years ago, William Barrett acutely diagnosed the unease this conceptions caused academic philosophers who seemed engaged in an endless fruitless search for a disciplinary technique which would justify their professional standing. If Millgram is correct neither the traditional Panglossian alternative nor its technical surrogate is achievable. Millgram’s project is primarily metaphilosophical whereas my concerns here are more political. In particular, the question that the phenomenon of hyperspecialization poses is how is the average citizen within a notional democracy supposed to make the sorts of informed decisions that the democratic process requires? The answer is that we must defer to a range of experts. It is axiomatic that in complex societies with a correspondingly complex distribution of knowledge one should defer to properly constituted epistemic authorities. The question then becomes a second order one. How does one decide which experts to defer to, particularly in situations where one expert differs from another? In cases where the conflict is between fields of expertise, for example, climate science versus economics the rational person prefers genuine science over charlatanry and special pleading but what of situations where experts within the same field differ? Sometimes this is a relatively straightforward process but often it takes a high level of expertise to evaluate the expertise of others and distinguish genuine epistemic authorities from counterfeits and pretenders, particularly as is the case with economics, the pretenders often come equipped with an impressive looking array of technical accoutrements. Alfred Schutz is as insightful as ever on this point. In his essay, “The Well Informed Citizen”, which was written many years before social epistemology emerged as a distinct subdiscipline, he discusses the social distribution of knowledge. He does so by proposing three Weberian ideal types: the expert, the “man on the street” and the well-informed citizen who forms a median state between the latter. The ideal type that we propose to call the well-informed citizen (thus shortening the more correct expression: the citizen who aims at being well informed) stands between the ideal type of the expert and that of the man on the street. He neither is, nor aims at being, possessed on the other, he does not acquiesce in the fundamental vagueness of a mere recipe knowledge or in the irrationality clarified passions and sentiments. To be to him to arrive at reasonably founded opinions as he knows are at least mediately of concern not bearing upon his purpose at hand.36

Clearly this is context specific. Schutz acknowledges that one can be an expert in one domain, a man on the street in another and elsewhere simply a well-informed citizen. The ideal types differ in terms of their “systems of relevance”. The expert’s knowledge is specialized but limited by her field of expertise. The man on the street is limited by the narrowness of his horizons. The well-informed citizen system of relevance is wider than either.



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What characterizes the well-informed citizen is what I would call a virtuous acknowledgment of the expertise of others. He “considers himself perfectly competent to decide who is a competent expert and even to make up his mind after having listened to opposing expert opinions”. 37 The phenomenon of hyperspecialization have direct and definite implications for the ideal of a well-informed citizenry. If, as Millgram has suggested, it is often impossible even for experts to validate the expertise of others then how is the well-informed citizen supposed to fare? One answer is that she must place much greater store on institutions and credentialing. She trusts that the various institutions charged with awarding degrees and fellowships do their job properly and that professional bodies exercise due diligence in maintaining professional standards. Such assumptions may be safe in a well-ordered polity but what of societies in which institutions are under pressure or systematically corrupt, one in which credentials are based more upon arbitrary prestige markers than ability and in which professional bodies devote most of their energies to protecting their members from appropriate scrutiny? Universities are a key epistemic institution in modern society. They also have primary responsibility for credentialling future professionals. Their two aims ought to complement one another but in reality they often come in tension. Consider, for instance, the Australian university system which in the pre-Covid era developed an unhealthy dependency on the money from international students. Numerous academics reported experiencing pressure to accept international students who did not make the grade, for example, in their English language abilities. Many others talk of considerable pressure being applied to pass international students once accepted. More broadly, the Australian university has been starved of adequate public funding for almost three decades (which led directly to the excessive dependency on international student money) and subject to a culture of corrosive managerialism which is as petty and vindictive as it is irrational. The ability to conduct research has become increasingly tied to “impact” which is synonymous with meeting the narrowly defined needs of the business community. The imperative to meet artificial targets for research output has led to much of the teaching being farmed out to a precariat of low paid sessional staff on insecure contracts and near poverty pay, the overwhelming majority of whom have no realistic chance of obtaining secure employment. As Vice-Chancellor and Senior Executive salaries reach football player level increasing pressure is placed on staff to be “agile and nimble” with greater emphasis being placed on online delivery. While there is nothing wrong in principle with online delivery, the current management of our corporate universities see it as one more way of dispensing with the ‘externalities’ of secure, reasonably well-paid and sometimes obstreperous faculty. It also reflects the fact that many students are working virtually full time to support themselves through their studies to which they can only devote a small portion of their time. Simply put, Australian universities are at a breaking point and the culture of free and unfettered enquiry, which they are ostensibly charged with maintaining,

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is dying. In its place, corporate sponsored think tanks churn out policies to meet the demands of industry bodies while low paid sessional staff churn out ‘job ready’ graduates. The question this poses for the aspiring well-informed citizen is whether Australian universities and those credentialled by them satisfy the requirements of well constituted epistemic authorities. This is particularly acute in a culture historically marred by anti-intellectualism where ‘academic’ is a term of abuse and ‘the pub test’ is routinely invoked in public discourse. The decline of the university is a part of a much bigger picture of the decline of longstanding epistemic authorities. This has been illustrated in stark relief during the pandemic. There was a clear conflict between the advice being given by the Federal government and by its scientific advisors which led to considerable public confusion and exacerbated the spread of the disease. In the Australian case, it was fortunate that most state governments took the view that they should simply follow scientific advice. This was also the case in New Zealand. Other English-speaking countries were less fortunate. The responses in the UK and the USA under Trump were catastrophically chaotic. This highlights the breakdown of any connection between political and epistemic authority. Standard models of democracy assume a significant overlap between the two: political leaders seek out the best information and then convey it to the populace of “well-informed citizens” who then form their own views based upon that information which they reflect back through the electoral process. It is unlikely that this picture was ever an accurate representation of political realities but there is a broad perception that things have got worse in the last three decades. Part of the background to this is the hollowing out of the public sphere in neo-liberalism: politicians are meant to be little more than competent executives of an economic system so complex that it is beyond human ken. If politicians do not understand the system they administer there is no sense of their being adequate sources of knowledge about that system. Politics as a career requires little more than adeptness in marketing skills with the ability to break complex problems into threeword slogans and soundbites. This presents the well-informed citizen with a problem. The rational course of action in such circumstances is to defer to expertise. Just as management of the pandemic was best left to experts in epidemiology and public health, one quite reasonably assumes that management of the economy should be the preserve of economic and financial experts. Economic and financial analysts have all the trappings of normal science about them. They mostly deal in highly complex mathematical models and speak an arcane language which is utterly opaque to those not initiated into their guild. There are, however, crucial differences between these supposed experts and the genuine variety. We would have been highly skeptical if the primary source for advice on infection control during the pandemic had come from scientists employed by pharmaceutical companies. Yet, the bulk of economic advice given to governments came from economists, either directly employed by financial institutions or indirectly via ‘think tanks’ and



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policy institutes such as the notorious IPA. Such think tanks have come to increasingly occupy the space that was previously held by public universities.

BELIEVING BADLY FOR ALL THE BEST REASONS With our epistemic institutions under strain, in some cases to breaking point, it is quite understandable that we see a rise in what I will call “believing badly for all the best reasons” and which I take to be a form of epistemic burdening. Consider, for example, the widespread HIV skepticism that was prevalent in South Africa under Thabo Mbeki’s premiership. Not only was the Prime Minister himself trading in quackery and conspiracy theories, the height of the HIV epidemic coincided with a growing awareness of medical abuses by the pharmaceutical industry in which POCs were overwhelmingly overrepresented among the victims. It was not until May, 1997, that Bill Clinton formally apologized to victims of the Tuskegee Syphillis experiments which victimized illiterate African-American men for almost four decades. Given that black South Africans were disproportionately affected by the HIV epidemic it is not unreasonable that some black South Africans might be skeptical of the official narrative. Although some conspiracy theories are of a religious character, many appeal to apparent canons of good scientific practice such as skepticism and a distrust of authority. Yet, the reality of actual scientific practice, as has been acknowledged since Thomas Kuhn’s time, involves considerable reliance on authority within the sciences themselves. For instance, that scientific conjectures are subjected to appropriate tests is a fundamental feature of science; which tests constitute valid ones and which results count will largely be determined by the internal structure of the discipline. Conspiracy theories rarely display such methodological rigour. At the same time, however, these institutional structures notoriously foster conservativism. Barry Marshall famously had to engage in experimentation which violated the canons of his own discipline to prove his claims about the H-pylori and its role in some stomach ulcers. This encourages mavericks and cranks to think that all that stands in the way of their world-changing discoveries is institutional power. This neglects the fact that successful scientific enterprises are conservative precisely because they have a record of well-attested success undergirding them. Some of that conservatism is relatively benign but other aspects of it are more troubling. Notoriously, the scientific disciplines have not been hospitable places to women and members of various minorities. They have tended to be dominated by white men from social and economically privileged backgrounds and while this may have little impact upon the more abstract aspects of science, it has undoubtedly affected those which have a bearing upon human affairs, often to the marked detriment of the scientific enterprises. It is little wonder that many black South Africans have an understandable skepticism towards medical science. In this light, let us consider then the phenomenon of ‘believing badly for all the best reasons’. To count as such, it obviously must meet two criteria:

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1. S believes that p where -p 2. S has reasons for believing p that seem plausible given B (where B denotes biographical situation)38 Believing badly is not simply holding false propositions to be true: all of us do this all of the time. It has a normative connotation, namely, it is believing propositions that a fully rational person ought not to believe. This seems to entail a straightforward contradiction with the second criteria outlined above: if one has good reasons for believing something one ought, all things considered, to believe it. This way of phrasing things seems to suggest that someone might have and not have good reasons for believing something at the same time. This is where burdening comes in. The reasons which may compel someone to believe badly are of a distinctive kind. That is, they are biographical (or perhaps historical) in character. Someone in a situation of oppression may be inclined to believe certain claims that an abstract rational knower would not. Unless we are to collapse into epistemic relativism, the appeal to what such an abstractly rational knower believes still plays an important regulative role. In pursuing the parallel with Lisa Tessman’s discussing of the burdening of the moral virtues, I wish to hold on to the idea of epistemic flourishing precisely as an important tool for analyzing what goes wrong epistemically in situations of oppression. Clearly, we are in the realm of epistemic injustice here but the phenomenon I am describing is not straightforwardly a case of either testimonial or hermeneutic injustice. Oppression damages trust and this extends to the epistemic realm. The phenomenon of hyperspecialization makes the need for trust all the more pronounced and yet oppression undermines it often in quite subtle ways. In situations where there is a clear overlap between one’s oppressors and those who ought, under normal circumstances, to be epistemic authorities, trusting in them may expose a person to harm. Consider in this light Annette Baier’s discussions of trust. She describes trust as an attitude one adopts where the other party has the capacity to harm one adopted, in the expectation that they will not do so.39 Someone damaged by oppression can no longer safely make that assumption. She has every good reason to expect that those who have harmed her in the past, whether as individuals or as representatives of a group, are likely to harm her again. This is as much true in the epistemic as it is in the moral sphere. Those in positions of power, particularly illegitimate power, have the capacity to lie, withhold, dissemble and distort to their advantage. While they may be required to be honest among their peers, they have no such duty towards those they oppress. Withholding trust towards one’s oppressors may therefore be essential for one’s survival or to maintain a project of resistance. A resistor may also find it necessary to foster a climate of mistrust towards those in power. Human beings need to trust and be trusted and fostering distrust threatens human flourishing. In epistemic contexts, distrust undermines our capacity to be well-informed citizens. Since those in power have lied to us on one occasion there is every reason to suppose that they will do



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so on others. Once one has been deceived it is incumbent on one to warn others of the possibility of deception. A general atmosphere of distrust becomes corrosive. Consider in this light the anti-vaccination movement in which women are massively over-represented.40 Many women have either experienced abuse themselves at the hands of the medical profession or are closely acquainted with someone who has, particularly where the women are lower SES (socio-economic status) or from a visible minority.Many women have experienced high-handedness or outright contempt from medical professionals. Under such circumstances, it is unsurprising that many women distrust the medical establishment. Surely someone might interject at this point that refusing to vaccinate one’s child contrary to well established medical advice is simply a case of epistemic viciousness. This may certainly be true in some cases, but I want to argue that there are a few cases of believing badly which are not straightforwardly vicious and represent instead burdened epistemic virtue. While it is good in general to trust the authorities, it is not good for those in oppressive situations to trust their oppressors. They may feign an attitude of trust for the purposes of self-protection but the virtuous response to oppression is distrust. Nevertheless, such distrust comes at a cost since it deprives one of certain other valued goods. For instance, the earliest research into the relationships between smoking and lung cancer was conducted by scientists in Nazi Germany. Since this research was conducted following the legitimate canons of the time, some of their findings were probably legitimate. The fact that the research was conducted at all was bound up with the military ambitions of the Third Reich and the Nazi’s crankish views on ‘racial hygiene’. Suppose that German scientists had successfully established the link between smoking and lung cancer which was not properly established until the 1960s. An opponent of the Nazi regime may well doubt those findings, given their lack of trust in the regime. Refusing to accept that smoking causes cancer would, under such circumstances, constitute a case of believing badly but it would also, I contend, not fall under the category of epistemic vice since an opponent of the regime has every reason not to trust the scientific findings of Nazi scientists. “Distrust any claim for which the Nazi government is the only source” looks like a reliable epistemic maxim. Someone might respond at this point that the Nazis are not a reliable source of information for anyone and so the example is misleading. It is indeed an extreme case from which we should be cautious of extrapolating. Nevertheless, it illustrates something about the position of powerlessness others find themselves in. The cases which concern me here are those where sources which would otherwise be epistemic authorities and therefore reliable sources of knowledge are not reliable for certain persons who are in a relation of being oppressed by the selfsame political authorities. A woman in a patriarchal society or a transgender person in a society which invalidates their identity has good reasons for distrusting “the authorities” even where they are telling the truth. More broadly, this is the predicament facing the working class in capitalist society.

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NOTES  1. Marx, Karl, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1937).   2.  Kim Sterelny, in Jeremy Kendal, Jamshid J. Tehrani, and John Odling-Smee “Human niche construction in interdisciplinary focus,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 366, no. 1566 (2011).   3.  Sterelny, “Human niche construction," p. 166.   4.  I know that as a fellow diver Kim feels just as strongly as I do about the bleaching of the Great Barrier reef, and I also know that our mutual horror is more than just an emotional response modified by a bit of top-down learning. Our capacity for having the sort of response that we both do requires some form of virtue which the extractive capitalists and their hired politicians entirely lack.  5. Sterelny, “Human niche construction,” p. 187   6.  Charles Mills, “Ideal Theory as Ideology,” Hypatia, vol. 2, no. 3 (Summer 2005).  7. Lisa Tessman (2005), Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggles (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), p. 13.  8. Aristotle, NE I:ix, 1099b.  9. Tessman, Burdened virtues, p. 74. 10. Tessman, Burdened virtues, p. 3. 11. Tessman, Burdened virtues, p. 7. 12.  B. Brecht, “To Those Born After,” https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/to-those-born -after. 13. Tessman, Burdened virtues, p. 130. 14. Tessman, Burdened virtues, p. 130. 15. Aristotle (Edward Meredith Cope, and John Edwin Sandys, eds), Rhetoric, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 16. Tessman, Burdened virtues, p. 117. 17. Tessman, Burdened virtues, p. 124. 18. Tessman, Burdened virtues, p. 121. 19. Tessman, Burdened virtues, pp. 124–125. 20.  George Orwell (1937), The Road to Wigan Pier, found at https://www.marxists.org /archive/orwell/1937/road-wigan-pier.htm. 21.  James Connolly (1908), Sinn Fein and Socialism, found at https://www.marxists.org /archive/connolly/1908/04/sinnfein.htm. 22.  It is not clear that separatism for its own sake is even a laudable goal. Consider Orania, the white homeland created by those South Africans unwilling to accept the end of Apartheid. Without the mass disenfranchisement and exploitation of Black and Colored South Africans it comes closer to the ideals that original architects of apartheid claimed to espouse and yet most people would consider the idea of a white enclave in the middle of Africa profoundly problematic. 23.  Steve Biko, I Write What I Like: Steve Biko. A Selection of His Writings (Cambridge: PROQuest LLC [African Writers Series] 2005/1987), p. 78. 24.  John McGahern, Amongst Women (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), pp. 71–72. 25.  Volker Berghahn (2019), Journalist between Hitler and Adenauer: Inner Emigration to the Moral Reconstruction of West Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), p. 9. 26.  Frank Thiess, cited in Berghahn (2019), p. 10.



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27.  A point Julia Annas makes in a number of works. Julia Annas, The morality of happiness (Oxford University Press, 1999). It is a topic which she revisits in Julia Annas, Intelligent virtue (Oxford University Press, 2011). 28.  Lisa Tessman, Burdened virtues: Virtue ethics for liberatory struggles (Oxford University Press, 2005). 29.  Chiara Lepore and Robert Goodin, On Complicity and Compromise (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) p. 5. 30.  Lepore and Goodin, On Complicity and Compromise, p. 114. 31.  Perhaps the most disturbing conversation I had was with an ageing classics professor from the University currently known as Rhodes. Sharing a ride to the airport the topic turned to crime, as it invariably does with well-heeled white South Africans. The professor compared the current situation unfavourably with the past commenting that “One wouldn’t want to romanticize apartheid but. . .” his voice trailed off. It obviously had not occurred to him that his foreign interlocutor would not entertain that as a live possibility and was actually rather horrified by the suggestion. 32. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-11-12-unemployment-for-black-south -africans-is-worse-today-than-before-1994/. 33.  Melvin J. Lerner, “in the belief in a just world,” in The Belief in a just World (Springer, Boston, MA, 1980). 34.  Lisa Tessman, Moral failure: On the impossible demands of morality (Oxford University Press, 2014). 35.  Elijah Millgram, The Great Endarkenment: Philosophy for an Age of Hyperspecialization (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). p. 3 (italics in original). 36. A. Schutz, “The Well-Informed Citizen: An Essay on the Social Distribution of Knowledge, Social Research,” vol. 13, no. 4 (December 1946), p. 466. 37.  A. Schutz, “The Well-Informed Citizen”, p. 466. 38. Cf. Neil Levy (2021) Bad beliefs: Why they happen to good people (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 39.  Annette Baier, “Trust and Anti-Trust” in Moral Prejudices (Harvard University Press, 1995). 40.  See for example, Naomi Smith and Tim Graham (2019), “Mapping the anti-vaccination movement on Facebook, Information, Communication & Society 22:9, 1310–1327, DOI:  10.1080/1369118X.2017.1418406.

10 Can There Be Bourgeois Virtues?

My aim in this final chapter is to draw all the various strands of my argument together into a whole. My argument thus far has sought to situate our development into the virtues as a biosocial becoming. That is, our acquisition of the virtues is a developmental phenomenon that can only be properly understood if we grasp both its biological and its social aspects and the interrelationships between them as analytically distinguishable but ontologically indistinct parts of a greater whole. The virtues involve a form of skilled situational awareness which I have argued should be understood as a form of direct perception of moral requirements. This situational awareness, if it is acquired at all, is acquired pari passu to our acquiring the sorts of social competence one needs to be a minimally integrated member of a community. Social and cultural development, our upbringing, is not a separate process overladen onto normal biological development: normal biological development requires our acquisition of a second nature. Socially organized labour is our metabolic relationship to the natural world. My argument is thus obviously and unapologetically located within the Marxist tradition and one obvious insight of that tradition is that not all societies are equal in their capacity to meet human needs, needs which themselves are historically conditioned. There is not, therefore, a useful contrast to be drawn between nature and history but rather it is through history that we realise our nature. I suggested in the introduction that one goal of this project has been to rescue virtue talk from the political right. It might seem that there is a contradiction between virtue and the egalitarian ambitions of Marxist political thought. It is not, however, essential that any socialist project has equality of virtue as its aim. What should be aimed for is a society where virtue is a realistic goal for any moderately decent person. The hallmark of a good society is thus that it makes virtue possible, not that it makes it easy. If someone fails to become virtuous it should be through a lack of 201

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effort not through insuperable obstacles being placed in their paths. Here Marx and Aristotle are one in that we can see this in terms of resolving the problem of external goods so that people can have the autonomy necessary to focus on developing their characters in community with others. We need to remove, or at least significantly lighten, the burdens that blight the lives of so many of our fellow human beings. As the previous chapters made clear, those burdens are in part material and economic but they are importantly cognitive as well. Our political and social institutions are structured in such a way as to make our current impoverished horizons seem like the only ones available to us. Removing these burdens therefore means not only ensuring a modicum of economic security but also changing the ways in which we train and educate future generations so that they are more likely to manifest justice and generosity towards one another and towards our planet. We are clearly a long way from such a society at present. A critic might rightly respond here that there is no evidence that any of the countries of “actually existing socialism” were any closer either. Such a criticism should carry considerable weight. Any serious attempt to overcome capitalism has to begin with an honest reckoning on how and why earlier attempts failed. There is not the space to develop such a project here. It is simply to acknowledge that they did fail and to also acknowledge that one of their direst ways in which they failed was in the damage they did to the moral characters of those living through them. If it were the case that capitalism does a manifestly better job of promoting robust moral character, then this would probably be the end of the story. But while some might have believed this in the market triumphalist days of the 1990s, nobody seriously believes this now, or if they do they sound as deluded as any erstwhile defender of “actually existing socialism”. Clearly then, one does not downplay the failures of the socialist project to consider that there might be ways of organizing society better than we currently do. The problems of our society run so deep and the dangers that face us are so dire that anything other than radical transformation is hopeless tinkering. What we need above all is to recover the virtue of hope. This might be brushed aside as utopianism and not just by those on the right, but if it is, then it is infinitely preferable to the cynical and mendacious horse trading that has been passed off as realism. There is much to unsettle us in the current political climate but if there is any form of extremism that should genuinely alarm us it is that which Tariq Ali has aptly named “extreme centrism”. It is the utter failure of extreme centrism in power that facilitates the rise of reactionary insurgent populism and paradoxically this populism ultimately entrenches the hold of the ‘grown ups’ on power. But this unstable equilibrium surely cannot last and as the depth of the socio-economic crisis grows, one can only wonder in terror what new horrors are round the corner. Towards the end of her life Ursula Le Guin gave a speech at the National Book Club where she had the following to say: I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its



Can There Be Bourgeois Virtues? 203 obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries—the realists of a larger reality. [. . .] We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. . . . Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words.1

This was written in 2014. I think we can safely say that those hard times have well and truly arrived: first Trumpism and Brexit, then the pandemic all set against the backdrop of a looming climate catastrophe. Something has gone badly wrong with the ecological niche that ancestral generations have bequeathed us. It is our task to fix it and we may be the last generation able to do so. If we are to foster hope and the realism “of a larger reality” which Le Guin proposes we need to combat a mood of pessimism which cultural critic, Mark Fisher characterized as Capitalist Realism and which describes “the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it”.2

CAPITALIST REALISM The backdrop to Capitalist Realism is the historic failure of “actually existing socialism” a term coined by apologists to describe the Soviet Union and its various imitators during their dying days. The biggest problem facing opponents of capitalism during the last century since the failure of “actually existing socialism” has been the ability to propose a viable alternative. The rhetoric of “actually existing socialism” oddly parallels that of capitalist realism since it amounts to saying that we should set aside grander ambitions such as creating the new socialist man and woman and settle for what we have got. But the failure of Soviet socialism was not just a socio-economic failure. It was a moral failure. When the Soviet Union finally shuffled wearily off the stage of history and the People’s Republic of China abandoned even the pretense of building communism, they did so in an atmosphere of broken hope. In the absence of hope, none of the other virtues can thrive. It is for that reason that the most damning criticisms of actually existing socialism came not from economists or political scientists but from writers, those “engineers of human souls,” who detail the corruption and hypocrisy that pervades every aspect of Soviet life. So obvious was that moral failure that in the aftermath of the collapse of these regimes, defenders of capitalism no longer felt the need to defend free market economies. It was sufficient to simply point to what happened in Russia. capitalist realism no longer seeks to persuade us that capitalism is the system most conducive to human flourishing. Indeed, as the various dystopian images that pervade contemporary culture demonstrate it is possible to be a capitalist realist while acknowledging that capitalism is a pretty bad system. The biggest losers in all of this have not been the obviously pro-capitalist parties of the conservative right. They have rarely been committed ideologues. The losers have

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been the parties and the political culture of the official left, those prophets of capitalism with a human face. From the disappearance of parties like PASOK and the Irish Labour Party to the terminal decline of the German SPD, the British Labour Party and its Australian counterpart, all are confronted with the fact that they can offer no plausible alternative other than pretending to be more competent managers of the existing system than their opponents. This has paralleled and been exacerbated by the dismantling of the institutions of civic society, in particular the trades unions. All of these historic parties of the left were deeply implicated in the growth of neo-liberalism. In some cases as reluctant converts in the case of British Labour and others as enthusiastic torchbearers as in Australia. Thus when the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 hit and shook confidence in the system to the core, ironically it was the parties of the left who leaped to its defense and took steps to rescue it, which led to a massive increase in public debt and two decades of austerity. Brexit, Trump and the rise of the populist authoritarians are direct responses to this. The crisis of capitalism is as multi-dimensional, as was the crisis of actually existing socialism. It is as much a moral crisis as a socioeconomic one. Few could ignore the role of greed and financial recklessness in providing the initial tinder which lit the fire. For that reason there has been a recognition on the part of some defenders of capitalism that more is needed than simply pointing to the failures of actually existing socialism and that, contra Mandeville and Milton Friedman, private vice may be part of the underlying problem. As part of this there has been a resurgence of interest in the virtues. Writers like Deirdre McCloskey and Michael Ignatieff have attempted to give positive defenses of bourgeois democratic societies on the grounds that such societies are the ones in which virtue and thus human flourishing are most likely to be encountered. If one believes, as I do, that we should evaluate a society not only on its annual pig iron output but on its capacity for creating better human beings, then this is a powerful challenge. The question of whether there can in fact be bourgeois virtues is a vital one. In order to explore it, we need firstly to distinguish the different senses in which it can be asked. One way of posing it might be to ask whether someone can be virtuous even if bourgeois? That is, despite the apparent propensity of capitalism to foster unpalatable character traits, someone might be virtuous nonetheless. Alternatively, the question might be whether one can be virtuous qua bourgeois. That is, whether participation in bourgeois society makes one more likely to develop certain virtues that would not be available in a different society. This broadly is the claim of writers like McCloskey.

DOES SOCIALISM DESTROY CHARACTER The strongest argument in the conservative armamentarium is the failures of socialism, real and imagined. The idea that socialism, often vaguely defined as excessive governmental overreach, destroys character is a common theme on the



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conservative right. Here leading conservative troll, Theodore Dalrymple, obviously troubled by the resurgence of support for socialism among the young, recently penned a diatribe against this ideal, choosing Oscar Wilde as his somewhat idiosyncratic target. Socialism is not only, or even principally, an economic doctrine: It is a revolt against human nature. It refuses to believe that man is a fallen creature and seeks to improve him by making all equal one to another. It is not surprising that the development of the New Man was the ultimate goal of Communist tyrannies, the older version of man being so imperfect and even despicable. But such futile and reprehensible dreams, notwithstanding the disastrous results when they were taken seriously by ruthless men in power, are far from alien to current generations of intellectuals. Man, knowing himself to be imperfect, will continue to dream of, and believe in, schemes not merely of improvement here and there but of perfection, of a life so perfectly organized that everyone will be happy, kind, decent, and selfless without any effort at all. Illusion springs eternal, especially among intellectuals.3

The problem for Dalrymple lies in the socialist ambition of human improvement. In the article he lumps together under the description of socialism not only the regimes of the former Soviet bloc but also the moderately social-democratic Labour governments of his youth. All apparently share an unrealistic ambition of perfecting human nature. In similar vein Deirdre McCloskey writes But the bad things in a capitalist world are not all testimony to the badness of capitalism. Much of human good and evil arises from our fallen natures, and has nothing to do with the circumstances in which we are put. Or to be more exact, it “has to do” with the circumstances, but only in the sense that capitalist circumstances evoke a certain kind of greedy behavior in Ted, while socialist circumstances would evoke in him . . . another kind of greedy behavior. Ted, like you and me, is fallen. This is a crucial point. We must not tolerate bad behavior, anywhere. But we must in our moralizing not mistake human failing for specifically capitalist failing. To attribute every badness to the system is like blaming everything on the weather. It’s not smart or useful. The Capitalist Man in his worst moments is greedy. And so are you and I. And so, I note, is Socialist Man, in more than his worst moments. If capitalism is to be blamed for systemic evils, then it also is to be given credit for systemic goods, compared not with an imaginary ideal but with actually existing alternatives.4

The claim made by some on the left that one could not criticize socialism by reference to the Soviet Union because it was not really socialist, always had something of a “No True Scotsman” feel to it. By the same token, we should evaluate “actually existing capitalism” rather than some idealization created by political philosophers. Still it seems odd that both Dalrymple and McCloskey are adamant, given their insistence upon our fallen natures, that socialism necessarily corrupts character whereas if capitalism does, it does so only incidentally. This flies in the fact of a traditional defense of capitalism, associated with Bernard Mandeville and with less justice with Adam Smith, that suggests that the capitalist economy does not require a virtuous citizenry but on the contrary

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operates best by simply appealing to rational self-interest. There is a quote (attributed to Keynes) which mocks this idea that “the meanest of men, for the meanest of motives” will somehow work together in the common good. Yet McCloskey argues, freed from the heavy hand of state regulation, capitalism will not only promote economic growth, it will also encourage virtue. Markets and even the much-maligned corporations encourage friendships wider and deeper than the atomism of a full-blown socialist regime or the claustrophobic, murderous atmosphere of a “traditional” village. Modern capitalist life is love-saturated. Olden life was not loving; communitarian life was not; and actually existing socialist life decidedly was not. No one dependent on a distant god such as the Gosplan or Tradition can feel safe. Paradoxically, a market linked so obviously to our individual projects makes us safer and more loving.5

McCloskey’s views are influenced by an alternative tradition to the Mandevillian one, one which is analysed by A. O. Hirschmann in his book The Passions and the Interests.

HIRSCHMANN ON THE PASSIONS AND THE INTERESTS The seventeenth century saw a frenzied interest in the passions in philosophy and literature, partly as a concomitant to the growing confidence in scientific reason and possibly also in response to the bloody events that peppered that century. In the eighteenth century this gave way to a much more sanguine approach. The passions which were once considered the root of most (if not all) evil, were a relatively secure guide in both morals and epistemology, a view which ultimately gave birth to the romantic movement. Central to this taming of the passions was the rise of commerce and an accompanying discourse which suggested that the traditional dichotomy between passion and reason could be transcended by enlightened self-interest. [I]t is precisely against the background of this traditional dichotomy that the emergence of a third category in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century can be understood. Once passion was deemed destructive and reason ineffectual, the view that human action could be exhaustively described by attribution to either one or the other meant an exceedingly somber outlook for humanity. A message of hope was therefore conveyed by the wedging of interest in between the two traditional categories of human motivation. Interest was seen to partake in effect of the better nature of each, as the passion of self-love upgraded and contained by reason, and as reason given direction and force by that passion. The resulting hybrid form of human action was considered exempt from both the destructiveness of passion and the ineffectuality of reason.6

From the eighteenth century onwards this confidence in the civilizing powers of interest became elevated into a doctrine which reflected the confidence of the mercantile class. This doctrine of doux commerce, first articulated by Montesquieu



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and had become so commonplace by the nineteenth century that Marx and Engels frequently mocked it. As Hirschmann notes, part of the power of the idea comes from the fact that commerce comes to be understood in the broadest possible terms as any civilized interaction not merely what we would regard as commercial ones. “The term thus carried into its ‘commercial’ career an overload of meaning that denoted politeness, polished manners, and socially useful behavior in general” which Hirschmann suggests seems odd at a time when the European slave trade was at its peak, an anomaly duly noted by Marx and Engels. A central strand of Marx’s analysis of capitalism is the recognition that as a totalizing system, capitalist market relationships tend to crowd out or radically restructure other kinds of human interaction. In one of the most famous passages in The Communist Manifesto they pay ambivalent tribute to the revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie who wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.7

When read in the light of Hirschmann’s work, these remarks appear to be making a similar point, albeit from a much more critical perspective. That is, social intercourse becomes increasingly structured along commercial and quasi-commercial lines. What implications does this have for the virtues? I have argued throughout that there is a strong constitutive relationship between the virtues and the type of community one inhabits. If, as Annette Baier argues, one learns the art of personhood from other persons and being virtuous means being an excellent person, then it follows that one is more likely to become a good and indeed excellent person if surrounded by other good and excellent persons. But one never inhabits an abstract community but rather a concrete historical society, and while some of the virtues may be quite general (one cannot, for example, imagine any society in which some version of courage or honesty is not required) others seems better suited to some societies rather than others: some of the virtues that befit a Roman warrior would be ill suited to a contemporary business environment.

THE NEO-LIBERAL MOMENT Despite Dalrymple and McCloskey’s rather odd claim that we are teetering on the edge of socialist tyranny, the fact is that the last thirty years have been a virtual laboratory experiment in the sort of lightly regulated capitalism that McCloskey favours.

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Indeed, it is precisely the reaction against capitalism that this has provoked that have prompted her to leap to its defense. The idea that the market can and should take over responsibilities traditionally considered the preserve of government is, of course, the guiding thought of that system of polity which has come to be known as neo-liberalism. There is considerable debate about whether neo-liberalism actually represents a novel set of ideas: many of its most ardent defenders would characterize themselves as “classical liberals”. These days it is often taken to be synonymous with laissez-faire economics but when the terms was first promulgated at the 1938 Walter Lippman Colloque, it was intended to distinguish neo-liberals who favoured state intervention from their laissez-faire competitors. Nevertheless, in his influential historical analysis, David Harvey defines the movement thus Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. The state has to guarantee, for example, the quality and integrity of money. It must also set up those military, defence, police, and legal structures and functions required to secure private property rights and to guarantee, by force if need be, the proper functioning of markets. Furthermore, if markets do not exist (in areas such as land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution) then they must be created, by state action if necessary. But beyond these tasks the state should not venture. State interventions in markets (once created) must be kept to a bare minimum because, according to the theory, the state cannot possibly possess enough information to second-guess market signals (prices) and because powerful interest groups will inevitably distort and bias state interventions (particularly in democracies) for their own benefit.8

For many critics of neo-liberalism, there is an obvious contradiction between the much-vaunted claims to advance personal liberty and the fact that neo-liberal policies have often been pursued by highly illiberal regimes, most notoriously Pinochet’s Chile but also Deng Xiao Ping’s (and now Xi’s) China. As Harvey makes clear, however, neo-liberalism does not object to state intervention, up to and including mass murder, to promote ‘free markets’; what it opposes is intervention to promote social goods which it believes are best served by those free markets. If one such good is virtue, and if the market is a better and more reliable source of virtue than government, then this would indeed be a powerful argument in favour of unregulated capitalism. At first blush it would seem that a system McCloskey describes as “private property and free labour without central planning, regulated by the rule of law and by an ethical consensus” would seem conducive to virtue.9 The problem is that such a system does not exist nor can it, or so I will argue. Each of the key terms in the quote from McCloskey are systematically misleading. Private property in the necessary sense is not private in the sense of personal but rather private in the sense of privatized, i.e., necessarily detracting from the common good. Labour is not free but everywhere in chains. There is, in fact,



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considerable central planning just not the sort which conduces to the well-being of the majority but rather ensures their misery. While the rule of law obtains in the formal sense, once we begin to ask serious questions about who makes the laws and how, then any ethical consensus quickly begins to disintegrate.

BILLIONAIRE VIRTUE Capitalism, particularly in its neo-liberal guise, is the most efficient system humanity has ever devised for producing one thing: billionaires. For most of us, the existence of billionaires along with the rampant inequality, environmental despoilation and hyper-intensified exploitation that comes with them is a problem. Some defenders of capitalism would argue that the existence of billionaires is a price we must pay if we wish to avail ourselves of the other goods that the free market provides. But this sort of consequentialist argument, even if correct, is unconvincing for those of us concerned with virtue. What if, then, one could mount a positive argument in favour of the existence of billionaires? If McCloskey is correct and the bourgeoisie most exemplify virtue, then it would seem to follow that the most exemplary bourgeois, the ones we are encouraged to admire and emulate are therefore the most virtuous. Rather than guillotines we should be offering them laurels around their necks. For this line of argument to hold water the sorts of virtues in question would need to meet a number of criteria. Firstly, it must be the case that billionaires necessarily and not contingently instantiate certain virtues. That is, they have these virtues because they are billionaires and not despite. Secondly, it must be the case that such virtues as it promotes could not be promoted in different less destructive ways or that comparable virtues could be promoted in their place. There must be something that would be lost if we were to sacrifice these billionaire virtues. Thirdly, the promotion of these virtues cannot come at the expense of other valued projects and goals, including other virtues, or if it does then it is a price that reasonable people would consider worth paying. I will consider two such candidate virtues: one that Aristotle recognizes, namely magnificence and one that he probably would not: entrepreneurship. It seems reasonable to suggest that at least some of our current crop of billionaires instantiate one or both of these character traits, and if they are virtues, then it would follow that one can be virtuous qua billionaire. It would also follow that those who admire and wish to emulate the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are not making a moral mistake in doing so.

MAGNIFICENCE We often hear the existence of billionaires justified by the recourse to the good works they do. For instance, many people who consider themselves followers of Adam

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Smith often fail to take account of his entire corpus, focusing only on the Wealth of Nations and neglecting his Theory of Moral Sentiments. But Smith was a moral philosopher before he was a worldly one. The ultimate justification of capitalism was not that it promoted wealth for its own sake but that it enables the performance of various public goods such as the development of libraries, galleries and universities. The greater one’s wealth the greater one’s capacity to endow public works. Viewed thus, a candidate bourgeois virtue might be a certain kind of philanthropy, the type that can only be undertaken by someone with considerable means. Readers of Aristotle will immediately recognize the virtue he calls “magnificence”. Modern readers find Aristotle’s discussion of ‘magnificence’ almost as uncomfortable as his defense of slavery. Nafsika Athanassoulis summarizes modern views of magnificence thus: While liberality is a reasonable virtue, in that we can find some place for it in our conception of the good life for human beings, magnificence is a source of contention. For critics it is a prime example, along with Aristotle’s objectionable remarks on slaves and women, of the cultural relativity of Aristotle’s conception of the virtues. Even for proponents of Aristotelian ethics magnificence is a virtue at best brushed over and forgotten as a historical hiccup; it seems that in listing magnificence as a virtue Aristotle showed that even the best of us make mistakes.10

Magnificence involves large scale and very public expenditure on public goods such as monuments and festivals. Unlike liberality, which does have obvious modern analogues, magnificence involves a level of ostentation which jars the contemporary sensibility. Magnificence is the virtue appropriate to great wealth. As Athanassoulis argues, questions about distributive justice relate to the means whereby that wealth is acquired (and in the Politics Aristotle does have an account of this) whereas he is here concerned with how it is spent. If a person has acquired her wealth by legitimate means, then the operative virtues surround how she disposes of it. There are vices of excess and deficiency around great wealth and what renders them so is the wrong use of wealth. Given that one has great wealth, there is a way of spending it wisely and there is a way of spending it foolishly, or indeed of hoarding it. Magnificence is a virtue because it involves the expenditure of wealth in “support of activities that have been identified as necessary for the orderly running of the state”.11 Athasnassoulis draws the obvious connection between Aristotelian magnificence and contemporary philanthropy: Magnificence becomes relevant if we assume that at least some people have acquired their wealth legitimately and, given this assumption, the virtue allows us to understand the obligations of these people with respect to spending their wealth. In this sense, it is a very relevant virtue for present times. Admittedly there can’t be many magnificent men, but as we have seen this is not a moral problem. Being poor is a misfortune, not a vice, being wealthy is an opportunity to exercise the virtue of magnificence, not a virtue in itself. The important requirement is to respond with magnificence when magnificence is demanded by the context, not to expect magnificence from anyone, at



Can There Be Bourgeois Virtues? 211 any time. Furthermore, the acquisition of wealth is not something to be pursued for its own sake, but is determined by its use, appropriate uses being household management and spending to benefit the state. Should wealth accrue to us accidentally, either though inheritance, or a financial windfall, or whatever other means, this is not a source of pride or distinction in itself, but merely an opportunity for the exercise of magnificence.12

Much rides therefore on the assumption that any form of economic activity which enables the acquisition of massive amounts of wealth and thereby exacerbates existing inequalities can ever be legitimate. Athanassoulis appears to suggest that questions of virtue are generally prefaced by the elliptical clause “given the position one finds oneself in. . . .” One therefore has a choice to be more or less virtuous, more or less vicious in relation to one’s situation. This is all well and good as far as it goes but there must surely be limits unless we collapse into corrosive relativism. One surely does not want to say that one could be a virtuous Stasi agent or a functionary of the apartheid government. In either case, there may be individuals who are virtuous and occupy these roles, but they would only be virtuous to the extent that they subvert the normal functioning of those roles: the Stasi agent who secretly feeds information to the opposition or the apartheid functionary who is dilatory in his enforcement of the Immorality Act. Even then we might reasonably ask why a truly virtuous person would occupy those roles in the first place. Either of these roles might be optional but no one has a genuine option about occupying some sort of role within capitalist society and fundamentally one must live either by attempting to sell one’s own labour or by living off the labour of others. Part of what means to acknowledge the systemic nature of capitalism is to recognize that things like ethical consumption is at best a very limited form of ethico-political action. The same goes mutatis mutandis for the ethical consumption of others’ labour power. In a system defined by the systematic exploitation of labour power, one’s ability to be an ethical employer may be as circumscribed as the ability of Greco-Roman slaveowners. Assuming that one has acquired one’s wealth by means which are considered legitimate by the conventional standards of bourgeois democracy, questions of virtue surround what one subsequently does with it. There are obvious vices at play here: one might hoard it, use it entirely for hedonistic purposes or one might use it as Rupert Murdoch does to buy political influence and thereby distort the framework in which we might otherwise deliberate about the common good. To count as a virtue, magnificent actions must be “for the sake of the noble”. Athanassoulis identifies the moral good at the core of magnificence in the “support of activities that have been identified as necessary for the orderly running of the state”. The obvious difference between Ancient Greece and most OECD countries is that we have mature taxation systems, and they did not. Taxation was not paid on income and was generally only raised as a levy to support military expenditure. The institution of liturgy, which is so central to the account of magnificence Aristotle develops, was a voluntary alternative to taxation as a means of supporting public goods. Many modern acts of philanthropy are either direct means of minimizing

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tax burdens or use funds that have been accrued through tax minimization, if not outright tax evasion. Presumably, no such act meets the bar for genuinely virtuous action. The only acts of philanthropy which would are those where the philanthropist has already fulfilled their tax obligations but makes extra contributions to the public good without pecuniary considerations. Even then, the overweening pressure of big business on most Western governments means that meeting legal tax requirements is hardly an onerous undertaking and furthermore tax avoidance is rampant. In such a situation the truly virtuous thing to do would not be engage in ostentatious acts of philanthropy but rather engaging in activism to develop more just tax laws and end offshore tax havens. On the surface it does not seem that the possession of great wealth is a necessary requirement for such action: any responsible citizen can and should engage in such activism. Encouraging magnificence in a society which has a functioning system of taxation is problematic on a number of fronts. It distorts the democratic process of distribution by making its target a matter of personal choice rather than being decided by democratic deliberation. There is an obvious problem with any kind of democratic process that certain projects and activities will receive funding due to their popularity and others will not. For instance, a home for dogs may be more likely to receive state funding than a home for recently released sex offenders, even though their needs are at least as pressing as the canines. The idea, however, that billionaire philanthropy might be more equitable than any democratic process, however imperfect, is absurd. As I write these lines, Jeff Bezos just becomes the second billionaire to launch himself into space.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP McCloskey defines capitalism rather generously as “merely private property and free labour without central planning, regulated by the rule of law and by an ethical consensus”.13 It is a system which she argues “encourages innovation”. This she takes to be an unquestionably good thing. The standard arguments against socialism or even a reasonably progressive income tax system is that it stifles innovation. By contrast, a light touch of regulation facilitates the emergence of entrepreneurs. It seems therefore that entrepreneurship is a good thing. If entrepreneurship is a virtue, and if capitalist society promotes it better than other alternatives, then this is a prima facie argument in favour of capitalism. Clearly, not all forms of entrepreneurship are virtuous. Someone who devises a new innovation which makes a drug cheaper and more addictive, such as the various innovations that led to the ongoing opiate crisis, obviously acts badly. Someone who devises a way of making sex trafficking more efficient and harder for the authorities to detect does likewise. Judged by purely economic criteria both sex traffickers and drug dealers, legal and illegal, contribute to a nation’s GDP whereas care workers and teachers do not. So, it cannot be the case that entrepreneurship is a virtue solely on economic grounds. In Aristotelian terms, virtuous activity must be conducted “for the sake of the noble”



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Entrepreneurship then is a virtue if it leads to the promotion of some generally acknowledged good, for example, most of us, on balance, think that smartphones are a good thing to have. But this is a necessary and not a sufficient condition. Unless one takes a consequentialist line, the virtuousness of entrepreneurship cannot rely solely upon the value of the product itself. Many entrepreneurial endeavors fail. One assumes that if entrepreneurship were a virtue, it would remain so even where the endeavor was a failure. Of course, this has to balance with the understanding that for entrepreneurship to be a virtue, it would need to involve an element of prudence. For instance, someone who foolishly pursues schemes that are clearly futile, could not be said to be acting virtuously. This draws our attention in part of what makes entrepreneurship a virtue, if it is one. It involves a set of other virtues, such as courage and prudence, in the sense of having a realistic assessment and attitude towards risk. Since both of these virtues are admirable individually, it is reasonable to suppose that their combination is admirable. Entrepreneurship presumably also incorporates a set of intellectual virtues, such as the ability to properly evaluate market conditions and to organize one’s time and financial resources in an appropriately disciplined manner. There is also a virtue which lacks a name for being able to think in new and unconventional ways about a problem. In order to count as virtuous, entrepreneurial activity must find a mean between simply doing what everyone else is doing and mere eccentricity. I think we can therefore grant that entrepreneurship, or something like it, is a candidate for a bourgeois virtue. Even granting this fact, we should acknowledge that many contemporary examples of entrepreneurship do not satisfy the criteria for virtue. The overwhelming bulk of entrepreneurial activity in the current economy is devoted to financial entrepreneurship. It is concerned with either finding ways of monetizing things that were previously public goods or else improving the speed of capital circulation. This is closely related to the ascendancy of financial capital in the last fifty years. As part of this, a significant focus of innovation in the last few decades has been around AI and automation more generally. Although the speed of automation has become dazzling in recent years, it has been a social problem since at least the time of the Luddites. Marx devoted considerable energy to analysing automation and argued that it could form the basis of a transition to post-capitalist society. Automation could in principle lead to a reduction of drudgery and meaningless work but more often than not it leads to unemployment and de-skilling. In recent years this has led to the proliferation of what David Graeber famously described as “bullshit jobs”, something I will return to later in the chapter. My central point here is that entrepreneurship that leads to impoverishment and loss of livelihood, destruction of communities and environmental degradation may not necessarily be seen as “for the sake of the noble”. Defenders of capitalism here typically claim to make recourse to consequentialist arguments about overall net benefit, arguments which have a highly questionable empirical foundation. Virtue ethicists are likely to be unmoved by arguments which advocate sacrificing some for the benefit of the greater good. One promising response to this problem is to emphasize that if we are

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concerned only with entrepreneurship as a virtue then this precludes entrepreneurial activities which have socially harmful ends. This would exclude a large amount of what we are currently asked to admire and emulate but that is no bad thing. Virtue has always been suspicious of conventional accounts of success. But this in turn raises a broader question. Much of what currently counts as entrepreneurship tends to take a rather stereotypical form, namely, activities that generate income. This excludes, for instance, a large range of innovation in delivery of social programs and environmental protection that cannot be monetized. If we take as our benchmark, acting for the sake of the noble, then this sort of activity rather than making money ought to be the most virtuous. For instance, a union rep who develops a new system which streamlines organizing would not generally be regarded as an entrepreneur by current standards. Recognition of some of the issues here has led to the development of the concept of “the social entrepreneur”. The concept of ‘social entrepreneur’ is as slippery as the concept of ‘entrepreneur’ itself. In Joseph Schumpeter’s classic and highly influential definition of the entrepreneur, the idea is closely linked to his related idea of the need for “creative destruction”.14 This seems at odds with the often conservative nature of social activism. More often than not, people’s concerns are with preserving what they have rather than expanding it in novel ways. Even less so here than in the economic sphere is innovation necessarily an unvarnished good. One of the defining features of the neo-liberal moment has been that the rhetoric of ‘reforms’ has invariably come to mean a worsening of living conditions rather than their improvement. Rhetoric flourishes when terms are vague and poorly defined. Partly for that reason the concept of ‘social entrepreneurship’ has become something of a Motherhood and God concept in the literature. As one recent article suggests: Construing social entrepreneurship as necessary, even indispensable, for tackling today’s most serious ills, and framing the matter in the language of morality and rationality, forms part of a myth-making process which chiefly suggests that anyone who considers him or herself reasonable cannot but embrace social entrepreneurship. On the face of it, the conditions of today’s scholarship leave little if any space for a substantial critique of social entrepreneurship—simply because others suggest that the solution already exists. Consequently, anyone who raises questions or concerns is immediately looked at suspiciously because social entrepreneurship has, in the dominant perception, already passed the test of critical scrutiny. They also note the very real danger that social entrepreneurship is becoming increasingly invoked as a panacea which aims to solve all of the problems created by the capitalist system without addressing their root causes.15

In fact, the very need for a concept like social entrepreneur highlights a number of issues with the concept of entrepreneur itself. Couching social activism in terms of entrepreneurship raises several thorny problems. Firstly, it implicitly concedes that entrepreneurship is not necessarily socially valuable in and of itself. Indeed, as has been pointed out above, it may often do more harm than good. Secondly, it implies that the most effective way in which to promote certain valued social ends is through



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entrepreneurship and innovation. Yet, apart from the obvious tension between innovation and the need to preserve certain social institutions intact, if entrepreneurship and innovation are not necessarily good, then it does not automatically follow that the best way to pursue socially valued goals is through these means. There is a fundamental tension between the idea of entrepreneurship (including social entrepreneurship) as a virtue and the idea that in order to promote it, it must be financially incentivized. A standard explanation for the lack of innovation in actually existing socialist societies was that the egalitarian pay structure dis-incentivised people to be creative and innovative. If we want innovation and entrepreneurship, we should be prepared to pay for it. There are several problems with this line of argument. One of the major problems with the countries of actually existing socialism is not that they were in fact too egalitarian but that rather they all had a large parasitic caste of highly paid bureaucrats and nomenklatura at the top of them. The second problem is that much entrepreneurial activity relies upon a social and intellectual infrastructure that has been produced from the public purse often by scientists and other researchers working for relatively low pay. As suggested above, many of the innovations that characterize contemporary capitalism involve monetizing the work of others. This is particularly notable in the field of IT where huge amounts of development work is done as Open Source, often in the spare time of professional developers who work long hours in their paid employment. This strongly suggests that financial incentives are not, in fact, the primary driver of innovation. Rather, to recall Hegel’s profound insight, it is much more about being “a somebody” and achieving the recognition of one’s peer group.16 I suspect that the overwhelming majority of people reading this book will be professional academics or aspirants for whom this idea will make immediate intuitive sense. While some of us are driven by glory, none of us are driven by financial incentives. This opens up the possibility that at least some of the positive things we associate with entrepreneurship might be achievable in a radically different form of society. Star Trek depicts a post-capitalist society. In one episode Captain Picard discusses the question of how people can be motivated in the absence of money. He replies “The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity” Indeed, it seems plausible to suggest that much of the competitiveness inspired in our society by the pursuit of money is actually motivated more by the pursuit of recognition and status that is associated with wealth.

HEGEL ON BECOMING A SOMEBODY Hegel’s discussion of becoming a somebody occurs in the context of his critical engagement with Rousseau. Rousseau was one of the first to note the potentially corrosive effect of capitalism on virtue, arguing that it promoted desires which quickly became profligate.

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Rousseau holds that human desire in commercial societies has become insatiably expansive and increasingly detached from genuine political communities. There are two main strands to this criticism first, advanced modern economies have the tendency to expand individual, selfish desire to the point at which this desire becomes insatiable. The more these desires are satisfied, in other words, the harder it becomes to feel ultimately “complete,” and the more emphatically one must think of one self over the welfare of others. Second, this increasing selfishness undermines individual civic attachment to the common good. Individuals become so embroiled in considering what is expedient for them that they lose the inclination and even capacity to deliberate about what is good for the political community as a whole. Individuals thus cannot satisfy themselves, let alone support and participate in the community in which they live.17

Hegel is profoundly influenced by Rousseau. He recognizes that this potential for profligate desires is a very real one in capitalist society but believes that robust institutions of family life, of religion and more broadly of civic society can provide a bulwark against it. Such institutions can help to tame the wanton desires thus rendering them civilized. But, of course, not just any institution will do. Only institutions that make possible the sort of recognition that Hegel believes is central to self-consciousness can civilize our potentially profligate desire. It is this desire for recognition which comes to transcend the natural needs and make us concerned about the extent and the manner to which we can and should satisfy them. Hegel turns Rousseau’s account of amour propre as the source of social strife on its head. Institutions like the family, churches and in commercial life guilds and trades unions, if properly constituted can provide the setting in which the isolated individual can become a “somebody” in Hegel’s terms. I will argue that Hegel is wrong and Rousseau is largely correct at least in relation to contemporary capitalism. The hollowing out of political and civic institutions which has characterized the period known as neo-liberalism means that even if Hegel is correct at an abstract level, these institutions can no longer provide this civilizing function and we are all therefore at the mercy of the predation of market forces. This seems to present us with a paradox: if Hegel is correct, then in order to become authentically free individuals, we need to be able to build institutions which are robust enough to withstand the corrosive force of commercial interest. But in order to build such institutions we need individually and collectively to have some degree of rational autonomy. And it is precisely this capacity for rational autonomy which the capitalist market undermines.

VIRTUE AS AUTONOMY The worry that conservatives have about socialism (even of the relatively innocuous Scandinavian variety) is that it undermines personal autonomy and therefore also undermines character. The state comes to stand in for the self. Conservatives are half



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right. It is a condition of virtue that one is able to stand in a proper rational relationship to one’s desires. Rational autonomy is an achievement that comes about through membership of a properly ordered polity. That is, rational autonomy can only ever be relational in character. The question of how we might become virtuous overlaps the question of how we might become civilized. I will argue that the dismantling of robust civic institutions and the unleashing of market forces in their place, rather than increasing our rational autonomy, has in fact undermined it. I will argue, that as Rousseau feared, desire in later capitalism has become insatiable. The idea of standing in a proper rational relationship to one’s desires has become unintelligible and can be understood only in the form of “repression”. The idea therefore that we should submit ourselves to the imperatives of the market comes to seem like liberation. The capitalist market requires us to be constructed as a particular kind of consuming self, that is a consumer of pornography whether actual or metaphorical. The alternative to this Hegelian-Marxist view of desire stems from Hobbes and Hume. As Mary Midgley comments, “[t]here is something comic in Hume’s picture of Reason as the slave of the Passions—how is it supposed to know which of them to obey? Slaves have a bad time in such circumstances”.18 The source of our predicament is precisely because our passions come into conflict with one another, both internally and between our own and those of others, and the central question is knowing which passion should be heeded. The idea of not making decisions based upon emotions belongs in the self-help section of bookstores rather than being a serious philosophical option. The aim is not to set aside or suppress the emotions but rather to bring emotion and reason into harmony with one another. Authentic freedom does not then consist in either being a slave to the passions or in living a life devoid of them, if that were even an option. It requires us to educate our passions and desires such that we desire the sorts of things conducive to, and not destructive of, our flourishing as complex social animals. A fundamental distinction between the human animal and the other sorts is both the kind and complexity of our desires and the manner in which we go about satisfying them. The classic account of this distinction is dualistic: there are the naturally occurring desires or drives we have that are a legacy of our common descent and then there are the desires that civilized people have once these initial animal desires have been trained and subdued. Implicit in this idea is both a biological and a closely connected racial hierarchy: white European males are the closest to heaven and the furthest away from nature. The ideological justification for European colonialism was the need to civilize the “lesser breeds without the law” who were congenitally incapable of civilizing themselves. But is there a better way of thinking about desire that avoids the dualism and therefore the implicit hierarchy? I believe there is. Roughly speaking, a well-functioning animal has the sorts of desires that befit its characteristic form of life. For example, cats do not crave citrus fruit because they are capable of synthesizing their own vitamin C. Animals living in relatively stable ecological niches need to have desires that roughly track that niche. But human beings

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live in complex, rapidly changing niches and our desires need to be able to change accordingly. Were it the case, as Evolutionary Psychologists, for example, have suggested, that our desires were forged in the Pleistocene, then we would not be able to keep track of the rapidly changing social environments we do in fact inhabit and the atavistic misfit hypothesis would be correct. Development goes well if an animal develops the right sorts of desires and the appropriate skills to satisfy them. Rational animals navigating the demands placed on them by living in complex communities will require different sorts of desires and different corresponding skills. On the constructive-interactionist view that has been defended earlier, neither the nativist nor the empiricist conception does justice to either desires or skill development. Rather than being encoded or hard-wired in the genes or in neural modules, both desires and the skills required to satisfy them come into being in the course of the developmental process. As with any other developmental process, if both internal and external resources are relatively stable and reliable the outcomes will also be relatively stable and predictable. I have argued above that we can and should regard culture as our ecological niche. It shapes and forms us by structuring our practical rationality in particular ways. Skill in living consists in identifying where our habitual patterns of responsiveness are conducive to our flourishing and where they undermine it.

PORNOGRAPHIC DESIRE There is a direct relationship between the rise of the billionaire class and the decline in robust public institutions. To begin with, large scale tax avoidance starves them of the financial support they need in order to thrive. All of our public institutions have become leaner but not fitter over the last three decades. The rise of the billionaires is also a direct result in the diminishment of the power of trades unions. In addition, the overweening power of the capitalist class as a result leads to massively distorting effects on the ability of civic institutions to function in a properly democratic fashion. Starved of finances and the ability to participate properly in a healthy democratic polity, institutions wither and die. As these civic institutions atrophy the sort of world feared by Rousseau and Hegel becomes a reality. The obscenity of billionaires is only the most egregious example of a broader phenomenon of profligate desire. Virtue requires us to stand in the right relationship to our desires. But to a contemporary ear, the very notion sounds quaint. I will argue that this is due to the fact that in late capitalism, particularly in the context of neo-liberalism, the very idea of standing in the right relation to one’s desires has become unintelligible. Desire has become pornographic, by which I mean the system constructs us as desiring selves whose desires are both insatiable and dulling. While pornography may provide a brief if temporary relief, it can never satisfy us because by its very nature it cannot provide what we seek which is the recognition by and of another human being in our carnality. I am using pornography as the most dramatic illustration of something



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I take to be much more general. The dominant idea is that there is nothing either wrong or right about desires; they are themselves neutral. Provided that they do not impact unduly on another, they are not subject to moral evaluation. Thus provided the means by which one seeks their satisfaction does not impinge unduly on another’s legal and moral rights, it is perfectly licit. Consider chastity. Julia Driver proposes this as a candidate for a redundant virtue and there is much to commend that suggestion. Chastity for women is not generally considered to be a moral virtue anymore, though it certainly used to be considered one. Why the change? One popular explanation for why chastity in women is a moral virtue is provided by evolutionary psychology. If women were not chaste, men would have no confidence in paternity and would not support children. The social consequences of this would be disastrous. Yet, if this picture were discovered to be mistaken, there would be no more grounds for regarding chastity as a virtue. As this picture of the social consequences of chastity becomes discredited, so does the opinion that chastity is a virtue. Perhaps people begin to view the disutility associated with restricting women to be more socially harmful than the disutility associated with a male’s lack of confidence in paternity. Further, there is yet another explanation for why the judgment of chastity has changed. It could be the case that, in the past, this picture of the role chastity played was correct. Adopting chastity as an ideal of behavior was one strategy for avoiding social disaster. But now this strategy is obsolete. With the advent of birth control, people no longer have to worry that premarital sex will inevitably result in a bastard child. Women have more control over when they get pregnant. Also, there are ways of testing children to determine paternity if there is any serious doubt. Men can be more certain of paternity now, without the constraint of chastity being imposed upon women. If this picture is correct, we have another explanation of why chastity is no longer considered a moral virtue. Both explanations are in terms of people’s perceptions of the consequences of the trait. This is further evidence for a consequentialist virtue theory.19

The linguistic token ‘chastity’ clearly denotes a virtue that is deeply problematic in that it has historically been heavily gendered and bound up with an unhealthy attitude to sexuality. It is obviously clearly archaic. No one these days outside some obscure fundamentalist communities would take it as a term of commendation. But if we abandon the linguistic token, does this mean we no longer have a use for a concept like ‘temperance with respect to one’s sexual appetites’? The recent spate of abuses of power by prominent men that provoked the #metoo movement has drawn our attention to the fact that men in positions of power are given license to indulge their sexual appetites without restraint. A large part of the story will be about power and the various legal and institutional context which permit such abuses to occur. Most of that work can be done in terms of an enriched conception of consent which takes account of the various ways in which even explicit consent can be manipulated by structural inequality. Consent is a threshold concept. There are very good reasons why we might want to keep the legal evidentiary standards high but there is clearly a mismatch between the law and ethical considerations. For example, marital rape is still a grave moral

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offence, even in states which do not recognize it as a crime. By the same token, there are other acts which may fall well short of the evidentiary standards for rape or assault, even on expansive definitions and yet not be good. One disturbing recent study showed that a large number of women tolerate uncomfortable or even painful sex with their regular partners.18 Even though sexual intercourse in these settings may technically be consensual, the obvious question arises: why would any man want to have sex with a partner who is not an enthusiastic participant? It is in this context a range of thick virtue concepts do a better job than simply thinking about things in terms of consent. We might say that such sex was ‘gross’ or ‘icky’ or ‘distasteful’. A person who routinely engages in sex of this type would be inconsiderate both of his partner but also in an important sense of himself. What man of character would want to have sex like that? Something that I will call the “libertine defense” is often invoked in both minor and major cases. The libertine defense comes from Dominique StraussKahn, henceforth DSK, former head of the World Bank and one-time potential French presidential aspirant, who was embroiled in a range of sexual scandals. The most notorious of these involve an incident where he (allegedly) molested a hotel employee. He was found not guilty of sexual assault but later settled a civil matter out of court with the victim. Most recently DSK was again acquitted of the offence of ‘aggravated pimping’ for organizing sex parties with alleged prostitutes. We know enough about the inadequacies of the legal system to be skeptical of any outcome involving powerful white men, particularly in cases of sexual violence, but let us leave these aside for the time being. Let us assume that DSK was indeed blameless of any legal offence. I want to focus on the details of the latest case and consider some of DSK’s attempted moral as opposed to legal justification. The first strand of his defense overlaps with his legal defense and that is that he was unaware that the women were prostitutes and that he simply assumed that they were willing participants, attracted perhaps by his considerable Gallic charm. His second was what I will refer to as ‘the libertine defense’. At a certain point in the proceedings he announced with considerable outrage that while people may disapprove of his sexual activities, he was a libertine. The upshot of this defense was that those who disapproved of him were illicitly confusing a matter of taste with a matter of morality. The libertine defense appeals to an intuition that anyone who is concerned with more than the legalistic niceties around sex is repressed. I want to suggest that this intuition in turn rests upon a broader understanding of desire which has been profoundly corrupted by capitalism. Consider in this light a less problematic example, that of gluttony. Imagine one finds oneself at a buffet, perhaps at an academic conference. The table is loaded with various delicacies, sweet and savory. You proceed to fill your plate, to empty it and then return for a second and a third helping. Are you doing something wrong? There are numerous consequentialist concerns about excessive eating but many of these could be fended off. For instance, the delicacies in question might be ethically sourced vegan delights. Health concerns



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too are relevant, but health is only one value among many which comprise the good life and extreme asceticism where food is concerned is at least as morally problematic as gluttony. One gets closer to the heart of matters if one thinks in terms of waste but on many occasions like this the waste is systemic rather than occasional. That is, events often have large quantities of leftover food which ends up in landfill. Thus a consequentialist argument can easily be constructed which shows that gluttony is morally desirable. If we consider wastefulness from a non-consequentialist perspective a different picture emerges. Even though there may be no direct causal relationship between my filling my plate at the buffet and the starving of the world or the ongoing environmental cataclysm, the thought that reflection on either might make me more likely to moderate my appetites, is entirely intelligible. It is symbolic of my refusal to participate in a system which makes both possible. In other words, capitalism requires excess at the very core of its being. By contrast, William Morris expresses the socialist ideal as a commonwealth of equals where people “would manage their affairs unwastefully”.21 The waste Morris has in mind is not merely material but also spiritual in the sense of squandering the potential of countless human lives in the drudgery required by work. The two types of waste are intimately connected: it is the chaotic and unplanned growth required by capitalism that requires an endless supply of cheap labour. It also produces an endless supply of consumer goods whose final destination is landfill.

BULLSHIT JOBS AND THE STRUGGLE FOR MEANINGFUL WORK For the vast majority of inhabitants of this planet, work is the source of our livelihood. For all but a tiny minority, work is mere drudgery. This thought should stop us to pause but does not. I am not referring here to the various subtle and not so subtle forms of modern slavery that rightly attract our outrage but rather to mundane jobs that most people do. Considerable attention has recently turned to the phenomenon of what David Graeber famously described as “bullshit jobs”.22 Work is not only the means of economic survival for the vast majority of us; it is also a crucial component of our being a “somebody”.23 Our first introduction to a stranger move rapidly from “how do you do?” to “what do you do?” The person asking is generally less concerned with determining how much one earns as with seeking to ascertain what kind of a person one is. As Graeber points out, for a growing number of people, the answer to that question is profoundly depressing. What is striking about Graeber’s analysis is that a phenomenon traditionally associated with low paid unskilled labour is also afflicting professionals and for that reason, sadly, people are starting to pay attention to it. However, as the pandemic has taught us, the distinction between skilled and unskilled labour is an almost entirely specious one. It largely relates to whether the

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work in question is considered essential or peripheral to the generation of profit. Certainly, it has little to do with whether the work in question is essential to the running of society since it was almost exclusively low paid workers who were forced to endanger themselves while others were able to work from home. Low pay clearly does not correlate with the social value of work. One of the foundational myths of capitalism is that the rich have worked hard for their money, but nobody really believes this, probably not even the rich. This sometimes occurs in a more sophisticated format which combines wishful thinking with a heavy dose of moralizing. Rich people work smarter and are also able to delay gratification more than the poor. Even if this claim were empirically sound, there are a number of reasons why poverty, particularly systemic and intergenerational poverty, might jeopardize one’s ability to acquire the skills necessary to ‘work smart’. In addition, the link between the ability to delayed gratification and social stress is now well documented. Those born into poverty are already at a disadvantage, one which is exacerbated by stigma and a culture of low expectations. The “culture of poverty” thesis is inaccurate as a causal hypothesis but has some truth as an analysis of a predicament. As Graeber makes clear, the phenomenon of menial, unrewarding work is no longer the preserve of the poorest. It is now becoming ubiquitous as automation removes the need for many traditional occupations. The promise of neo-liberalism was that it would remove the heavy hand of bureaucracy from people’s working and personal life. As anyone who works in an increasingly corporatized university will tell you, it has only increased as tasks which were once managed centrally are devolved to individuals. This has generated a phenomenon known as “compliance fatigue” where the demands to satisfy accountability measures becomes more stressful and time-consuming than the actual work itself. Graeber and other commentators have noted a disjunct between the diminishing needs of the economy for labour and the political ideology of capitalism which valorizes work and fears the social disruption that idleness may bring in its wake. This has led to the proliferation of bullshit jobs. It has also led to the bizarre phenomenon in countries like Australia and the UK which impose a punitive version of the welfare system where unemployed workers have to demonstrate that they are working to obtain work. In both countries, it is a formal requirement for receiving unemployment benefits that the ‘jobseeker’ demonstrates that they are actively seeking work by keeping a detailed record of their job seeking activities. At a more subtle level, unemployed people are encouraged to act as if they are still employed, the ritual of work is no more observable than among those who don’t have a job. The irony is indicative of how the template of employment affects almost every facet of life today. Studies of unemployment reveal the sheer labor expended by those seeking a job. In her ethnographic investigation of laid off IT workers in Texas, Carrie Lane describes how these ex-employees continue to act like a quintessential worker, such as displaying leadership skills in their self-help group and replicating all of the trappings of office life in and around the home. These individuals were condemned as “dead wood” by their firms following the economic downturn, but still maintain an attitude of



Can There Be Bourgeois Virtues? 223 easy-going confidence, knowing that nobody will hire a disgruntled ex-worker. So they work hard to keep up an appropriate appearance.24

The author raises this issue in the context of discussing the phenomenon whereby those in work are often quite literally working themselves to death in order to demonstrate their worthiness. This speaks to a broader issue. It is now a feature of the modern capitalist economy, particularly as a result of automation, that people are called upon to constantly demonstrate their worthiness to remain employed. We have seen this in universities as the number of secure faculty jobs has declined and core functions are increasingly being performed by a precariat of insecurely employed and poorly paid, and yet highly skilled, educated and motivated, staff. Casual teaching which was once considered part of one’s apprenticeship before becoming a fullyfledged academic has increasingly become the norm. Not only is this situation intolerable for those facing precarious employment, it also exerts a disciplinary pressure on those of us with relatively secure jobs. In the face of constant restructures and redundancies we anxiously look over our shoulders at the growing mass of precariously employed casual staff, all desperate to secure more permanent employment. This is masked by the prevailing rhetoric of flexibility. University staff are required to be “agile and nimble” in response to the rapidly changing workplace environment, to produce the sort of research which satisfies arbitrary excellence metrics and to teach courses which are “demand rather than supply driven” and which help to create “job ready” graduates. There is little public sympathy for university staff for the simple reason that what we are currently enduring has been the norm in most other professional environments for a generation. Until recently, academia provided something of a safe haven which protected academics from the chill winds of the discipline of industrial capitalism. For many it was this which made the profession attractive and enabled some of us to write books extolling bourgeois virtue. As with our earlier discussion of burdened virtue, it is clear that certain character traits need to be developed to survive such an environment. In short, only the vicious can thrive and the academic virtues wither and die. Braggadocio is favoured in job applications and grant applications over circumspection and intellectual humility. Collegiality suffers in time poor and often ruthless competitive workplaces. The central function of universities as critical spaces where disinterested scrutiny of policy and institutions can occur is supplanted by partisan think thanks. Just as the problems of academia are only a microcosm of the problems of broader capitalist society. At the extreme end of this is the vast pool of gig economy workers, often labelled as ‘contractors’ to allow their employers to evade even the minimal protections afforded to other workers. One of the reasons why the pandemic was so disastrous is that it was able to spread rapidly among a population of highly mobile workers who had no entitlements to sick leave and could not afford to take the necessary time

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off to quarantine. Even in relatively more secure sectors of the economy, short-term contracting and labour hire increasingly predominates and, just as in the university sector, the existence of a large precariat exercises a downward pressure on the wages and conditions of permanently employed staff. Every major economy has experienced decades of wage stagnation while productivity, and the wealth accrued by large shareholders and CEOs, has massively expanded. The socioeconomic and political ramifications of all of this are well documented. I want to focus on its implications for virtue. Richard Sennett has, over the last few decades, documented the effects of the transition from relatively stable unionized communities to today’s ‘agile and nimble’ workplaces. As a former member of the New Left, he is ambivalent about the process. His earlier work was often highly critical of the bureaucratic stagnation of the New Deal/Social Democrat post-war world. He notes that ironically many of the ambitions of the Port Huron Declaration, a seminal document of the 1960s student movement was realized not by the hippies but by corporations in alliance with right-wing politicians. By 1997, which was the high-water mark of the neo-liberal period, Sennett had returned to the working communities he had earlier studied and found a deep-seated malaise. In The Corrosion of Character, he argues that the dislocation that characterizes the contemporary workscape has had profound effects on the very possibility of having a stable character. In order to have a character at all, one must be able to make long-term commitment to one’s work, to one’s community and to oneself. He suggests that this is “the problem of character in modern capitalism. There is history, but no shared narrative of difficulty, and so no shared fate. Under these conditions, character corrodes; the question “Who needs me?” has no immediate answer”.25 The development of character requires us to be enmeshed in a network of relations with others whose opinion of us matter not in the superficial sense of prestige or status but in the deep sense Hegel had in mind when he talks of our need to be a “somebody”. In the latest grotesque example of managerial NewSpeak, employees have become “talent”. This has accompanied their own rebranding of themselves. Where once we had staffing or personnel offices, and then we had HR, we now have People and Culture Divisions full of ‘people officers’, as if betraying an anxiety about the rapidly vanishing relationship to anything human or personal. This re-envisioning of employees as talent betrays something profound about attitudes towards workers. Sennett captured this brilliantly in a later work. Only a certain kind of human being can prosper in unstable, fragmentary social conditions. This ideal man or woman has to address three challenges. The first concerns time: how to manage short term relationships, and oneself, while migrating from task to task, job to job, place to place. If institutions no longer provide a long-term frame, the individual may have to improvise his or her life-narrative, or even do without any sustained sense of self. The second challenge concerns talent: how to develop new skills, how to mine potential abilities, as reality’s demands shift. Practically, in the modern economy, the shelf life of many skills is short; in technology and the sciences, as in advanced forms of manufacturing, workers now need to retrain on average every eight



Can There Be Bourgeois Virtues? 225 to twelve years. Talent is also a matter of culture. The emerging social order militates against the ideal of craftsmanship, that is, learning to do just one thing really well; such commitment can often prove economically destructive. In place of craftsmanship, modern culture advances an idea of meritocracy which celebrates potential ability rather than past achievement. The third challenge follows from this. It concerns surrender; that is, how to let go of the past. The head of a dynamic company recently asserted that no one owns their place in her organization, that past service in particular earns no employee a guaranteed place. How could one respond to that assertion positively? A peculiar trait of personality is needed to do so, one which discounts the experiences a human being has already had. This trait of personality resembles more the consumer ever avid for new things, discarding old if perfectly serviceable goods, rather than the owner who jealousy guards what he or she already possesses.26

SITUATIONISM AS A DIAGNOSIS OF A PATHOLOGY Vincente Amorim’s 2008 film Good recounts the chillingly recognizable story of an academic corrupted by the Nazi regime. The story which was originally a play by CP Taylor involves a professor of literature, John Halder. In the opening scene of the film, Nazi students burn books in the quad while Halder attempts to deliver a lecture on Proust. His lecture is interrupted by his head of department who very politely suggests to him that it would be better if he stopped teaching literature which the regime regarded as degenerate. The film continues with a series of other minor betrayals. He cheats on his wife, who suffers from some sort of mental illness and worst of all he betrays his best friend, a Jewish psychoanalyst. In one of the most chilling scenes in the film he is called into the party headquarters. Understandably fearful and intimidated he is pleasantly surprised when an affable SS officer praises his work and professional reputation. Halder had previously written a novel in which he had justified mercy killing. The SS officer suggests that he is just the man the party needs to bring the necessary “humanity” to their euthanasia program and asks him to write an academic paper justifying the policy. Halder is flattered by the attention and finds himself increasingly lured into the party. The film ends with Halder in full SS regalia in a concentration camp repeatedly seeing visions of the Jewish friend he betrayed. The title of the film is only partly ironic. Halder regards himself as a “good man” a dutiful husband, son and professor. He feels guilty for his betrayals, although never quite guilty enough to make proper amends for them or to stand up for what is right. His problem is that he identifies goodness exclusively in terms of following the norms and conventions of his society, which when his society starts to disintegrate can no longer provide him with guidance for even the minimal standards of a decent life. The worst that one can say about Halder is that he is weak. He lacks character. Lack Of Character is the book in which John Doris breathlessly introduced the findings of Situationist Social Psychologists to moral philosophy and in doing so attempted to undermine virtue ethics as a normative theory. For those already badly

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disposed to virtue ethics the work of Doris, Gil Harman and others represented a final nail in the coffin. If Doris and his colleagues are correct, accusing someone like Halder of lacking character is to commit a fallacy since few if any of us have a stable character. Like many revisionist theories, the onus is upon the Situationists to convince us that in asking us to dispense with an apparently useful concept in our everyday language the proposed technical alternative is at least an adequate replacement. There have been numerous responses from virtue ethicists to the Situationist Challenge. Some have raised powerful methodological criticisms of the empirical basis of the challenge while others have argued persuasively that even if the empirical data is robust the attack on virtue ethics is badly aimed. I have considerable sympathy with both these types of response. I have suggested earlier, however, that one reason that contemporary virtue ethics rendered itself unnecessarily vulnerable to this challenge is that it has lost touch with its Aristotelian roots in which there can be no division between ethics and politics. In this light I want to acknowledge that the Situationists are at least half right. While Situationism is wholly inadequate as an ethical theory, it is a very acute diagnosis of a contemporary pathology. Capitalism undermines the possibility of our having stable characters at all. As consumers we are like cats chasing a red spot on the ceiling, while as workers we are constantly called upon to reinvent ourselves at a moment’s notice for fearing of tumbling into the precariat. Little wonder then when investigators find that their participants, drawn almost exclusively from the inhabitants of urban late capitalists societies, show scant evidence of robust character structures. Only the heroic can survive such circumstance and even they cannot thrive. In the Life of Galileo Brecht’s Galileo responds, “Unhappy the land where heroes are needed”. The Situationists have suggested that we should focus less on character and more on conditions and they are half right. Conditions and character stand in dialectical relationship to one another. If we wish to change one, we need to change the other.

NOTES 1. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/national-book-awards-ursula-le-guin. 2.  Mark Fisher, Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? (John Hunt Publishing, 2009), p. 8. 3.  Theodore Dalrymple, “Socialism Destroys the Human Character,” https://www.nationareview.com/magazine/2019/06/03/socialism-destroys-the-human-character/. 4.  Deirdre N. McCloskey, The bourgeois virtues: Ethics for an age of commerce (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), p. 60. 5. McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues, p. 128. 6.  Albert 0. Hirschmann, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1977), p. 44.



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 7. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/ch01 .htm#007.  8. David Harvey, A brief history of neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2007), p. 2.   9. McLoskey, The bourgeois virtues, p. 14. 10. Nafsika Athanassoulis, “A defence of the Aristotelian virtue of magnificence,”  The Journal of Value Inquiry 50, no. 4 (2016): p. 781. 11.  Athanassoulis, “A defence of the Aristotelian virtue of magnificence,” p. 788. 12.  Athanassoulis, “A defence of the Aristotelian virtue of magnificence,” p. 794. 13. McCloskey, The bourgeois virtues, p. 14. 14.  J. A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1934). 15.  Pascal Dey and Chris Steyaert, “Social entrepreneurship: Critique and the radical enactment of the social,” Social Enterprise Journal, vol. 8, 2, 2012, pp. 90–107. 16.  Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, Elements of the philosophy of right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). In particular, section, § 107. 17.  Jefferey Church, “The Freedom of Desire: Hegel’s Response to Rousseau on the Problem of Civil Society,” American Journal of Political Science 54, no. 1 (2010): 125. 18. Midgley, Beast and man: The roots of human nature (London: Routledge, 2021), p. 127. 19. Julia Driver, Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 84–85. 20. https://www.abc.net.au/everyday/why-some-women-ignore-sexual-discomfort-and -settle-for-bad-sex/12549442. 21.  William Morris, “How I Became a Socialist,” found at ttps://www.marxists.org/archive /morris/works/1894/hibs/hibs.htm. 22.  David Graeber, “On the phenomenon of bullshit jobs: A work rant,” Strike Magazine 3 (2013): 1–5. 23. Hegel, Philosophy of Right. 24.  Peter Fleming, The death of homo economicus (University of Chicago Press Economics Books, 2017), p. 136. 25.  Richard Sennett, The corrosion of character: The personal consequences of work in the new capitalism (WW Norton & Company, 1998). 26.  Richard Sennett, The culture of the new capitalism (Yale University Press, 2007).

Conclusion Radical Hope and Revolutionary Virtue

I have developed and defended a form of liberal yet empirically responsible virtue ethics which I have called Naturalist Humanism. Naturalist Humanism proceeds from a recognition of the basic fact of our fragility and the need to form robust institutions in which we can collaboratively even the odds that fate deals out to us. It has historically been common to see this process as one whereby we rise above nature. I have argued that this is actually a fact about our nature: the person is the organism. This much is the naturalism. Like all other living things, we create and maintain the niches we inhabit and hand them down to those who come after us. In order to do so, we need to develop characteristic life skills. Because our niche is socio-cultural in character, the sorts of skills we need to develop are primarily the skills of a complex social creature like us needs to navigate such a niche. A substantial part of the niche we inhabit consists in the actions of others, both our contemporaries and our predecessors. This means that our environment is of a degree of complexity exponentially higher than that of even other complex social creatures. Consequently, the sorts of skills will also need to be correspondingly more complex. Taken collectively, that set of skills comprises our practical rationality. Those that excel at the skills of living are what we call the virtuous and they can become our exemplars and our mentors. Our socio-cultural niche shapes and forms us but it can also deform us. There is no guarantee that a niche developed by others in response to the conditions that they faced will serve us well nor that the niche we pass on will serve our successors. Every human being that is ever born is therefore to some extent a hopeful monster. We land in a world we have not created and could not anticipate and navigate it as best we can, with the help of others. It is clear that humanity is at a tipping point, the old ways of going no longer serve us and certainly will no longer serve those who come after us. Capitalism has failed and if we are to survive as a species, we need to find some sort of replacement that does not repeat the mistakes of “actually existing socialism”. What sort of system that might be is a topic for another book. This book was ostensibly about virtue, but the topic was often a stalking horse to discuss other related 229

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matters. I want to conclude, therefore, by returning to the sorts of virtues that might enable us to tackle the challenges that lie ahead or at least one in particular. That virtue is hope. I suggested earlier that without hope, there can be no other virtues. Hope is also the most revolutionary virtue, and it is for me best exemplified in revolutionaries like James Connolly. In the aftermath of the ill-fated Easter Uprising, Connolly was judicially murdered by British occupying forces. In the final hours of his life, he was visited by his wife and daughter. They still held out hope that he might be reprieved but Connolly did not. “England’s promises, Nora, you and I know what that means”, he told his daughter. To his wife, who asked, “Your life, James, your beautiful life?” Connolly responded, “Well Lilly, hasn’t it been a full life and isn’t this a good end?” Being executed while strapped to a chair because he was too wounded to stand would not strike most people as a typically good end to a life. It also seems to fly in the face of what I earlier wrote about the problematic nature of heroic virtues. However, as I pointed out there, the trouble with heroic virtues is that they are needed. Now, sadly, is a time for heroes. The world we need to strive for us is a world where the ordinary virtues suffice. To bring that world into being will require enormous reserves of hope and of a particular kind, the hope expressed by Connolly rather than his family. It is not a facile denial of reality but a willingness to stare reality in the face and believe that things could be and should be better than they are. It is a hope which was also exemplified by the great maverick of twentieth-century revolutions, Victor Serge. Initially an anarchist who lived among criminals, he travelled to Russia to join the revolution, becoming a party official until he started to see the direction in which the Soviet Union was headed. Unconsoled by party bromides, he ended his life as a hounded exile. And yet he never lost hope. As one of his biographers writes, Serge was not an optimist; he never saw silver linings in the dark clouds, never believed that everything would somehow turn out for the best. Not for him the “optimism of the will”, advised by Gramsci, even if combined with the “pessimism of the intellect” (whatever that might mean). What he did have was hope, which is something different, and which always carries within it the possibility of disappointment. And unlike optimism, which is just a kind of wishful thinking, hope is based on experience, and, for Serge, this was not just his own but the experience of history, that people would always strive for a better life: “The course is set on hope”, as he ended one of his poems in exile.1

Let us set our course on hope.

NOTE 1. Paul Gordon, Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope (John Hunt Publishing, 2013).

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Index

Active Intermodal Matching Model (AIMM), 108 The Adapted Mind, 127–28 ad hominem fallacy, 87n12 Aeschylus, 144 affordances, 151; perception and, 158 African Queen view of morality, 26, 92; culture and, 133–34 AIMM. See Active Intermodal Matching Model Ali, Tariq, 202 alienation, 141 altruism, as moral value, 22 Amongst Women (McGahern), 180 Amorim, Vincente, 225 anatomically modern human, myth of, 6–8 anger, 176–77 Anielewicz, Mordechai, 31 Annas, Julia, 11, 51–52 Anscombe, Elisabeth, 50, 160 anti-empiricism, 70–71 anti-foundationalism, 76 anti-realism, perception and, 155 anti-supernaturalism, 16 “Apprehending Human Form” (Thompson), 57–58, 70 Argument from Relativity, 44 Aristotle, 136; Categoricals for, 54, 57; doctrine of human powers, 72; Ethics,

52; ethics for, 173; function argument for, 64; on habituation, 165–66; logos, 53; on magnificence, 210; metaphysical biology, 2; Metaphysics, 52; the natural for, 2, 54; naturalism and, 52, 56; neoAristotelianism, 2; Nichomachean Ethics, 2, 75; on perception, 165–66; Politics, 1–2, 210; politics of, 2; transcendental naturalism and, 69–70; on virtue, 172; virtue ethics and, 174 Athanassoulis, Nafsika, 210–11 attentiveness: anti-realism and, 170–71; burdened virtues of, 190–95; hyperspecialization and, 193; Just World Hypothesis, 189–90; knowledge and, 187; moral realism and, 170–71; nature and nurture interaction, 169–70; responsibility and, 187; scaffolding and, 169–71; sufficiency thesis and, 190; willful blindness and, 187–90 autonomy: rational, 217; virtue as, 216–18 bad beliefs, 195–97; burdened virtues and, 196 Badness Factor, 186 Baier, Annette, 207 balance of nature hypothesis, 135–36 Balcombe, Jonathan, 132–33 Barrett, William, 192 241

242

Index

basic naturalism: anti-supernaturalism, 16; Hegel and, 16–17, 47; monastic physicalism and, 19 behavioral genetics, 118; neurodevelopmental disorders and, 115–16 behaviors, 119–21; definition of, 120; social competence, 121 Benedict, Ruth, 126 Berghahn, Volker, 181 Berker, Selim, 93 Berry, Thomas, 94–95 Bezos, Jeff, 209 The Biggest Estate on Earth (Gammage), 129 Biko, Steve, 177–81 billionaires, existence of, 209 biological flaws, 111–12 The Biological Foundations of Bioethics (Lewens), 62 biological good, 64 biology: ethics and, 5; human development and, 5. See also specific topics bio-phobia, 90 bipedalism, 8, 112–15; culture and, 114; Developmental Systems Theory and, 113; as form of learning, 114 Blackburn, Simon, 39, 42, 158 Blank Slate Theory, of development, 112 Blue Book (Wittgenstein), 103 Boas, Franz, 126–27 Bookchin, Murray, 141–42 Boorse, Christopher, 36–39; on reference class, 37 Brecht, Bertolt, 28, 175, 226 Brillat-Savarin, Anton, 96 Buller, David, 115–16 “bullshit jobs,” 221–25; compliance fatigue and, 222 burdened virtues, 3, 171–72; attentiveness and, 190–95; bad beliefs and, 196 Candidate Gene Association studies (CGA), 118 Canland, Douglas, 8 Capital (Marx), 140, 143 capitalism, 137; crisis of, 204; definition of, 212; doux commerce and, 206–7; Malthusianism and, 138; mode of

production in, 144; private property and, 208; situationism and, 226 capitalist realism, 203–4 Card, Claudia, 173, 183, 189 Cartesianism, 53; dualism in, 38 Casement, Roger, 182 Catcher in the Rye (Salinger), 32 Categoricals, 54, 57 causal reductionism, 24 causal thesis, for eudaimonism, 174 Central Dogma of molecular biology, 134 CGA. See Candidate Gene Association studies Charney, Evan, 118 chastity, as redundant virtue, 219 Chemero, Anthony, 16 Chomsky, Noam, 17, 86n2, 170 Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud), 129 Clark, Kelly James, 14 Classical Philosophers, 2 classic liberalism, 134 Clinton, Bill, 195 Club of Rome, 137–38, 140 Cobbett, William, 139 cognition. See 4E cognition cognitive development, 106–9; Active Intermodal Matching Model, 108; Human Mirror Neurone System, 108; Meno Paradox of Inquiry and, 108; neonatal imitation, 108–9 Collins, Michael, 182 Colloque, Walter Lippman, 208 The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels), 207 companion in guilt arguments, 40–45; Argument from Relativity, 44; epistemic nihilism and, 42; mentoring and, 43; moral fictionalism and, 44; peer review and, 43; rationality, 42; social constructionism in, 44; as social phenomenon, 43 competence. See moral competence complex internal representations, 17 compliance fatigue, 222 complicity, 178–81; Badness Factor, 186; blameworthiness of, 185; burden of, 183– 86; elements of, 186; incident, 183–86; systemic, 183–86



Index 243

Complicity and Compromise (Goodin and Lepore), 185 Connolly, James, 178 consent, pornographic desire and, 219–20 conspiracy theory, as concept, 134–35; bad beliefs and, 195 constitutional model, of transcendental naturalism, 81 constitutive thesis, for eudaimonism, 174 constructive interactionism, 99–100 The Corrosion of Character (Sennett), 224 creationism: Myth of the Biological Given and, 94–95; secular, 26–28; Special Creationism, 27, 85, 90 CRISPR technology, 134 Crist, Ellen, 71, 93 Cro-Magnons, 7 cultural determinism, 86 cultural development, Feral Fallacy and, 9 cultural relativism, moral values and, 22–24 cultural scaffolding, 4 culture: African Queen view of morality and, 133–34; behavioral transmission of, 130–31; Christian roots of, 129; deus ex machina and, 128; ephemeral nature of, 128; Evolutionary Psychologists and, 127–28, 133; feral fallacy and, 129; nature and, 130–31; Neanderthals and, 129; neuro-physiological structures and, 132–33; Plato on, 129; population level effects and, 128; Special Creationism and, 127; stability in, 135–36; Standard Social Science Model, 127–28; as super-organic, 126–36, 146n1; veneer theory and, 128–30, 133 Cuneo, Terrence, 40–43 cycling, in human development, 7

Democritus, 140, 145 Deng Xiao Ping, 208 Dennett, Daniel, 128 Descartes, Rene, 13; dualism of, 38. See also Cartesianism descriptivism, 39–40 desire. See pornographic desire determinism. See cultural determinism Deutscher, Isaac, 137 developmentalist turn, interactionism and, 98 Developmental Systems Theory (DST): alternative to, 99; bipedalism and, 113; genetic inheritance and, 112; locomotion and, 113; Myth of the Biological Given and, 94, 97; neurodevelopmental disorders and, 116; perception and, 158 Digital Conversational Analysis, 120 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 25 direct moral perception, 153 Discourse on Inequality (Rousseau), 53 disease, in philosophy of health, 36 Disenchantment thesis, 26 Doris, John, 225–26 doux commerce, 206–7 Dreyfus, Hubert, 162 DST. See Developmental Systems Theory Dupré, John, 16–20, 25, 32n14; minimal compositional physicalism, 17–18; on monism, 19 Durkheim, Emile, 57, 128

Eco, Umberto, 28 Ecological Niche Construction, Myth of the Biological Given and, 94, 97–98 Ecological Psychology, 149–50 ecological theory of perception, 154–61, 165–66 economic markets, 135 Dalrymple, Theodore, 205, 207–8 eco-systems, 135 Dark Emu (Pascoe), 129 Edelman, Marek, 30–31 A Darwinian Left (Singer), 92 1844 Manuscripts (Marx), 140–41 Darwinism, misunderstanding of, 132 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, 128 Bonaparte (Marx), 98, 100, 169 Dawkins, Richard, 64, 132 eliminativism, 35 De Caro, Mario, 16 democratic theory, modern, standard models Embryology, Epigenesis and Evolution (Roberts), 93–94 of democracy, 194

244

Index

emotivism, 46n11 empirical adaptationism, 95–96 Engels, Friedrich, 207 entrepreneurship: definition of, 214; social, 214–15; as virtue, 212–13 environmental degradation, 137 environmental flaws, 111 epicurean naturalism, 145–46 Epicurus, 136 epistemic nihilism, 42 Erlich, Paul, 140 error theory, 15; The Placement Problem and, 39–41 ethical naturalism, 15; Myth of the Biological Given and, 91 ethical realism, Shafer-Landau defense of, 14–15 ethical theory: responsible, 1; virtue ethics, 2. See also specific topics ethics: for Aristotle, 173; as biological development, 5; cultural scaffolding, 4; emotivist approaches to, 46n11; evolutionary, 91–92; formation of, 4–5; Kant on, 72; moral values and, 23; Myth of the Biological Given and, 93; naturalist, 64; recalcitrance and, 4. See also virtue ethics Ethics (Aristotle), 52 Ethics (Mackie), 41 eudaimonism, 172–75; causal thesis and, 174; constitutive thesis and, 174; rejection of, 174–75; virtue ethics and, 174 Evolutionary Developmental Biology, 94 evolutionary ethics, Myth of the Biological Given and, 91–92 Evolutionary Psychology: culture and, 127– 28, 133; Myth of the Biological Given and, 90, 96; Natural Goodness approach and, 57, 59, 61; neurodevelopmental disorders and, 115–16 evolutionary theory: constructive interactionism and, 99–100; distributed control and, 98–99; ethics in, 91–92; Natural Goodness approach and, 65; natural selection theory as part of, 94–95; selfish gene approach to, 65, 98–99

The Expanding Circle (Singer), 92 expressivism, 15; The Placement Problem and, 39–41; transcendental naturalism and, 80–81 extended infantile dependency, 7 Facing the Extreme (Todorov), 29–31 falsificationism, 19–20 fascism, 28 feral fallacy, 8–10, 129; cultural development and, 9; language development and, 9 fictionalism. See moral fictionalism Fink, Hans, 52 First Law of Behavioral Genetics, 118 Fisher, Mark, 203 Fitzpatrick, William, 62–65 flight, acquisition of, 127 Fodor, Jerry, 17 Foot, Philippa, 49–51, 55–65; intellectual integrity of, 49. See also Natural Goodness approach Foster, John Bellamy, 137–38, 140 4E cognition: moral perception and, 162–63; perception and, 154–55, 157, 167; social perception and, 162–63; transcendental naturalism and, 85 “Four Credos,” 17–18 Freud, Sigmund, 129; repression for, 87n12 Frey, Jennifer, 50 Friedman, Milton, 134–35, 204 function argument: for Aristotle, 64; welfare theory in, 65 Gaia Hypothesis, 135 Gaita, Rai, 27–28 Galen, 35 Gallagher, Shaun, 162 Gammage, Bill, 129 Garfinkel, Harold, 86 Garner, Richard, 41–42 Geach, Peter, 23, 57, 64 genetic inheritance. See inheritance genetics: Central Dogma of molecular biology, 134; CRISPR technology and, 134. See also behavioral genetics; inheritance; Myth of the Biological Given Gestalt Psychology, 156–57



Index 245

Gibson, J. L., 149–50; on affordances, 151; ecological theory of perception and, 151, 154–61, 164–65 Global Financial Crisis of 2008, 204 Godwin, William, 139 good. See biological good; moral good Good, 225 Goodin, Robert, 185, 187 goodness: customary, 28–32; mediocre, 28–32; reductionism and, 29; Todorov on, 29–31 Graeber, David, 213, 221–22 The Great Endarkment (Milgram), 191 Griffiths, Paul, 94–96 Grundrisse (Malthus), 139, 141–42

walking in, 7. See also inheritance; Myth of the Biological Given humanism: Natural Goodness approach and, 72; naturalist, 1, 89–90. See also naturalist humanism Human Mirror Neurone System (HMNS), 108 human nature, quasi-empirical theory of, 58 human powers, 126; virtues, 103 Hume, David, 41, 75 Hursthouse, Rosalind, 50–52, 66n14, 87n19 hyperspecialization, 193, 196

Identity Politics, 178 Ignatieff, Michael, 204 imitation. See neonatal imitation incident complicity, 183–86; virtue ethics habituation, 165–66 and, 184 Hacker, Peter, 126 Hacker-Wright, John, 50–51; transcendental Ingold, Tim, 5–8, 163; “the person is the organism” and, 98 naturalism and, 69, 71 inheritance, genetic: biological flaws Haeckel, Ernst, 143 and, 111–12; Blank Slate Theory of Harman, Gil, 226 development, 112; of complex behaviors, Harvey, David, 208 109–12; Developmental Systems Theory Hayek, Friedrich, 134–35 and, 112; environmental flaws and, 111; health. See philosophy of health; social extended, 97–98; First Law of Behavioral determinants of health Genetics, 118; among groups, 110–11; Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich: basic among individuals, 110–11; Myth of naturalism and, 16–17, 47; on becoming the Biological Given, 111; neonatal a somebody, 215–16; Rousseau as imitation, 108–9 influence on, 216; transcendental innateness, as concept, 8 naturalism and, 85 Heidegger, Martin, 77–82; on Hitler, 77–80 interactionism, 1; constructive, 99–100; developmentalist turn and, 98; Myth of Hepburn, Katherine, 126 the Biological Given and, 96–98 Hirschmann, A. O., 206–7 Hitler, Adolph, 77–80; moral evaluation of, internal representations. See complex internal representations 79–80 intuition, perception and, 154 HMNS. See Human Mirror Neurone Ireland, virtue of resistance in, 177–78, System 182–83 Holland, R. F., 27–28 human development: anatomically modern Irish Free State, 182 irrationality, The Placement Problem and, human and, 6–8; biology and, 5; 40–41 bipedalism and, 8; Cro-Magnons, 7; cycling and, 7; Evolutionary Jablonka, Eva, 99, 129–30, 132 Developmental Biology, 94; extended infantile dependency and, 7; Feral Fallacy Jackson, Frank, 14, 35. See also The Placement Problem and, 8–10; innateness as concept in, Just World Hypothesis, 189–90 8; myths of, 6–8; as socio-cultural, 6;

246

Index

Malthusianism, 137–43; capitalist ideology and, 138; Club of Rome and, 137–38, 140; neo-Malthusianism, 140–43; socialism and, 137–38 Mandela, Nelson, 23 Mandeville, Bernard, 204–5 Mann, Thomas, 181 Marx, Karl, 207; on alienation, 141; Capital, 140, 143; on capitalist mode of production, 144; ecological reading of, 146; 1844 Manuscripts, 140–41; The Eighteenth Brumaire of Napoleon Lack of Character (Doris), 225–26 Bonaparte, 98, 100, 169; epicurean language development, Feral Fallacy and, 9 naturalism and, 145–46; Promethean lateral violence, 180 Marx, 125–26, 131–32, 136–37, 140– Le Guin, Ursula, 202–3 43; transcendental naturalism and, 72 Leiter, Brian, 13 Marxist naturalism, 136–37 Lepore, Chiara, 185, 187 Mauss, Marcel, 113 Lerner, Melvin, 189–90 Mayr, Ernst, 6, 18, 20, 32n15 Lewens, Tim, 62–65, 72–74 Mbeki, Thabo, 195 Lewontin, Richard, 110, 125 McCandless, Christopher, 178 liberalism: classic, 134; neoliberalism, 134 McCloskey, Deirdre, 204–8 liberal naturalism, 48–49 McDowell, John, 52–55, 166; on logos, 53 Lickliter, Robert, 94–95 McGahern, John, 180 von Liebig, Justus, 140–41, 143 McGrath, Sarah, 152 The Life of Galileo (Brecht), 28, 226 McNeill, Eoin, 182 Lifton, Robert Jay, 87n14 mentoring, companion in guilt arguments locomotion, 112–15; culture and, 114; and, 43 Developmental Systems Theory and, 113; Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 154–55 as form of learning, 114 Meszaros, Istvan, 137 logic, 25 metabolism, as concept, 143–45 logical space of causes, 166 metaphysical biology, 2 logical space of reasons, 166 metaphysical naturalism, 14 logos, 53 Metaphysics (Aristotle), 52 Lott, Micah, 50 methodological naturalism, 14 Lovibond, Sabina, 4 Midgley, Mary, 217 Lush, J. L., 109 Milgram, Elijah, 191–92 militant separatism, 178 Macarthur, David, 16–18; “Four Credos,” Mills, Charles, 172 17–18 minimal compositional physicalism, 17–18; MacIntyre, Alasdair, 2–3, 104 transcendental naturalism and, 71 Mackie, J. L., 15, 23, 41, 158; moral realism modern democratic theory. See democratic and, 155 theory magnificence, 209–12; Aristotle on, 210; monastic physicalism, basic naturalism and, modern views on, 210–11; moral good 19 and, 211; philanthropy and, 211–12 monism, 19 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 136–43; on capitalism, 139; Grundrisse, 139, 141–42 monistic physicalism, 19 Kant, Immanuel, 23; ethics for, 72; Natural Goodness approach and, 63; transcendental naturalism and, 80, 82–84 Kardashian, Kim, 41 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 32n14 Kingma, Elselijn, 37 knowledge, attentiveness and, 187 Koffka, Kurt, 156 Korsgaard, Christine, 73, 81–82, 91 Kroeber, A. L., 126–27, 146n1



Index 247

Mont Pellerin Society, 134 moral competence, 166–67 moral fictionalism: companion in guilt arguments and, 44; The Placement Problem and, 40 moral good, 64; magnificence and, 211 morality: African Queen view of, 26; African Queen view of morality, 26, 92, 133–34; Heidegger on, 81–82; for Hitler, 79–80; Korsgaard on, 81–82 Moral Law, 82 moral luck, 173 moral perception: 4E Cognition and, 162– 63; recipes and, 164–65; standard model of, 164; virtue ethics and, 162 moral philosophy, 66n6, 87n16, 150; Anscombe on, 50; Natural Goodness approach and, 51; perception and, 162; Quine on, 25, 48; standard ethical naturalism and, 21 moral realism, 155; attentiveness and, 170–71 moral values: altruism as, 22; cultural relativism and, 22–24; ethics and, 23; Quine on, 21–22; torture and, 24–25 Morris, William, 221 Mott, Micah, transcendental naturalism and, 69 Murdoch, Iris, 151 Murdoch, Rupert, 211 Musk, Elon, 209 mysticism, 151 Myth of the Biological Given, 5; African Queen conception of morality, 92; biophobia and, 90; creationism and, 94–95; Developmental Systems Theory and, 94, 97; development as construction, 98; Ecological Niche Construction, 94, 97–98; elements of, 90; empirical adaptationism and, 95–96; ethical naturalism and, 91; ethics and, 93; Evolutionary Developmental Biology, 94; evolutionary ethics and, 91–92; Evolutionary Psychology and, 90, 96; extended inheritance and, 97–98; genetic inheritance and, 111; interactionism and, 96–98; naturalist humanism and, 89–90;

natural selection theory and, 94–95; panadaptionism and, 95; Phylogeny Fallacy and, 94; population genetics and, 94; rebuttal of naturalism and, 91–92; reductionism and, 89; rejection of, 11; Special Creationism and, 90; veneer theory and, 93 Nagel, Thomas, 27, 173 the natural: for Aristotle, 2, 54; as modern concept, 2. See also naturalism natural citizens, virtues and, 3 Natural Goodness (Foot), 49–51, 62 Natural Goodness approach, 50–65; ambivalence in, 49–50; Aristotelian naturalism and, 52; biological good, 64; empirical science and, 66n1; Evolutionary Psychology and, 57, 59, 61; evolutionary theory, 65; Fitzpatrick on, 62–65; humanism and, 72; Kantianism and, 63; Lewens on, 62–65; modern philosophy and, 56; moral good, 64; moral judgments in, 59–60; moral philosophy and, 51; naturalistic ethics, 64; rape and, 59–61; standard naturalism and, 51–52, 55; transcendental elements of, 51; welfare concept, 62 naturalism: in analytical philosophy, 13–14; Aristotelian, 52, 56; basic, 16–17; conceptual approach to, 13–15; definitions of, 14–15; epicurean, 145– 46; ethical, 15, 91; ethical realism and, 14; liberal, 48–49; Marxist, 136–37; metaphysical, 14; methodological, 14; Myth of the Biological Given and, 91–92; normativism and, 36–39; Odenbaugh’s concept of, 56; ontological, 14; perception and, 155; in philosophy of health, 36–39; rebuttal of, 91–92; rejection of, 25, 26; restriction of, 26; self-declared, 18–19; sorts of, 55; Spinoza strictures on, 47; standard ethical, 21–25. See also standard naturalism; transcendental naturalism naturalist ethics, National Goodness approach, 64

248

Index

naturalist humanism: conceptual approach to, 1; Myth of the Biological Given and, 89–90 naturalistic virtue ethics, 10 natural selection theory, 94–95 Nazi Germany, 76–78 Neanderthals, 129 neo-Aristotelianism, 2 neoliberalism, 134, 207–9, 222 neo-Malthusianism, 140–43 neonatal imitation, 108–9 neuroconstructivist approaches, to neurodevelopmental disorders, 116 neurodevelopmental disorders: behavioral geneticists and, 115–16; Developmental Systems Theory and, 116; Evolutionary Psychologists and, 115–16; neuroconstructivist approaches, 116; Williams’ Syndrome and, 116–17 Nichomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 2, 75 nihilism. See epistemic nihilism nominalist approach, to perception, 156 Norman, Richard, 153 normativism: modern philosophy and, 56; naturalism and, 36–39; in philosophy of health, 36–39; social norms and, 57; transcendental naturalism and, 78 Obama, Barack, 176 objectivism, transcendental naturalism and, 75 Odenbaugh, Jay, 56–57, 59–61, 67n25 O’Flaherty VC (Shaw), 180–81 “On the Nature of Moral Values” (Quine), 21 ontological naturalism, 14 On Virtue Ethics (Hursthouse), 50 Orwell, George, 177 Palmer, Craig, 59 panadaptionism, 95 Pascoe, Bruce, 129 The Passion and the Interests (Hirschmann), 206–7 PCH. See Person Centred Healthcare perception: affordances, 158; anti-realist arguments, 155; Aristotle on, 165–66;

Developmental Systems Theory and, 158; direct moral, 153; direct theory of, 152; ecological theory of, 154–61, 165– 66; 4E cognition and, 154–55, 157, 167; Gestalt Psychology and, 156–57; intuition and, 154; knowledge through, 152; of medium, 157; moral, 162–65; moral philosophy and, 162; mysticism and, 151; in naturalistic settings, 155; nominalist approach to, 156; orthodox view of, 154–55; “the person is the organism” and, 159–60; physicalism and, 155; The Placement Problem and, 153, 155; Platonic rationalism and, 165; Platonism and, 151, 153; Schutz on, 165–66; sensation-based theories and, 157; social, 162–65; subject-object dichotomy and, 157–59; of substances, 157; of surfaces, 157; virtuous, 151–54 person as organism, 5–6 Person Centred Healthcare (PCH), 38 “the person is the organism,” perception and, 159–60 phenotypic behaviors, 117–19; Candidate Gene Association studies and, 118; First Law of Behavioral Genetics, 118; Single Nucleotide Proteins, 119 philanthropy, magnificence and, 211–12 philosophy, modern: Natural Goodness approach and, 56; normativism and, 56; tropes of, 54. See also moral philosophy; political philosophy philosophy of health: Boorse on, 37; conceptual definitions in, 36; disease in, 36; holistic approaches in, 38; naturalism in, 36–39; normativism in, 36–39; Person Centred Healthcare and, 38; The Placement Problem and, 38–39; rejection of Cartesian dualism, 38; social determinants of health, 37–38 Phylogeny Fallacy, 94 physicalism: minimal compositional, 17–18, 71; monistic, 19; perception and, 155 Pinochet, Augusto, 208 The Placement Problem, 14, 47; companion in guilt arguments, 40–45; descriptivism and, 39–40; error theories and, 39–41;



Index 249

expressivism and, 39–41; irrationality and, 40–41; moral fictionalism and, 40; perception and, 153, 155; philosophy of health and, 38–39; standard naturalism and, 54; subjectivism and, 39–41; transcendental naturalism and, 80 Plato, on culture, 129 Platonic rationalism, 165 Platonism, perception and, 151, 153 the political, as modern concept, 2 political philosophy, 21 Politics (Aristotle), 1–2, 210 Pollard, Bill, 166 Popper, Karl, 19–20, 25; conspiracy theory concept and, 134–35 The Population Bomb (Erlich), 140 population level effects, on culture, 128 pornographic desire, 218–21; chastity and, 219; consent and, 219–20; libertine defense of, 220–21; rape and, 219–20 poverty of stimulus, 17 private property, 208 Promethean Marx, 125–26, 131–32, 136– 37, 140–43 Prometheus Unbound (Aeschylus), 144 Quine, W. V. O., 13–14, 16; on moral philosophy, 25, 48; on moral values, 21–22; on utilitarianism, 23. See also standard naturalism racism, transcendental naturalism and, 72–74 Ramaphosa, Cyril, 188 rape: legal definitions of, 60; Natural Goodness approach to, 59–61; pornographic desire and, 219–20 rational autonomy, 217 Rational Dependent Animals (MacIntyre), 2–3 rationalism, Platonic, 165 rationality: companion in guilt arguments and, 42; supernaturalist, 83; transcendental naturalism and, 81. See also irrationality

realism: capitalist, 203–4; moral, 155, 170– 71; transcendental naturalism and, 75. See also anti-realism recalcitrance, ethics and, 4 reductionism, 6; causal, 24; goodness and, 29; Myth of the Biological Given and, 89; standard naturalism and, 24 repression, 87n12 resistance, virtues of, 175–77; anger and, 176–77; inner emigration and, 181–83; in Ireland, 177–78, 182–83; separatism and, 177–78; Sinn Féin and, 177–78; in South Africa, 177–81 responsibility, attentiveness and, 187 Rhodes, Cecil, 189 Roberts, Jason Scott, 93–95 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 53, 215–16 Salinger, J. D., 32 Sato, Kohei, 140 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 86n2 scaffolding: attentiveness and, 169–71; cultural, 4 Scala Naturae, 84, 104–5, 121 Scholl, Sophie, 23 Schumpeter, Joseph, 214 Schutz, Alfred, 121, 152, 164–66, 192; on habituation, 165–66; on perception, 165–66 secular creationism, 26–28; standard naturalism and, 27 self-consciousness, 72 self-declared naturalism, 18–19 selfish gene approach, 98–99; to evolutionary theory, 65 Sellars, Wilfrid, 166 Sennett, Richard, 224 sensation-based theories, of perception, 157 separatism, 177–78; Identity Politics and, 178; militant, 178 Shafer-Landau, Russ, 14–15, 44–45 Shaw, George-Bernard, 180–81 Shklar, Judith, 172 Singer, Peter, 92 Sinn Féin, 177–78

250

Index

situationism, 87n16, 225–26; capitalism and, 226 Smith, Adam, 205–6, 209–10 Sober, Elliot, 63–64 social constructionism, 44 social determinants of health, 37–38 social entrepreneurship, 214–15 social intelligence, virtue as, 149 socialism: Malthusianism and, 137–38; negative aspects of, 204–6 social perception: 4E Cognition and, 162– 63; recipes and, 164–65; standard model of, 164; virtue ethics and, 162 Socrates, 173 Sources of Normativity (Korsgaard), 91 South Africa, 187–90, 198n19; virtues of resistance, 177–81 Special Creationism, 27, 85; culture and, 127; Myth of the Biological Given and, 90 Spinoza, Baruch, 13, 44–45, 136–37; on naturalism, 47 SSSM. See Standard Social Science Model stability: in culture, 135–36; ecological, 136; metastability, 136; in nature, 135–36 standard ethical naturalism, 21–25; moral philosophy and, 21; political philosophy and, 21 standard naturalism, 11–12, 17–21, 47; causal reductionism and, 24; eliminativism and, 35; falsificationism and, 19–20; monastic physicalism and, 19; monism and, 19; Natural Goodness approach and, 51–52, 55; The Placement Problem and, 54; rational agency and, 80; rejection of, 48; scientific method, 19–21; secular creationism and, 27; transcendental naturalism and, 76, 80, 83–84; unity of content and, 19 Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), 127–28 Stempsey, William, 36 Sterelny, Kim, 169–71, 198nn1–2 Stoics, 173, 175 Strauss-Kahn, Dominique, 220 Strekel, William, 32 subjectivism, 15

sufficiency thesis, 173; attentiveness and, 190 supernaturalist rationalism, 83 systemic complicity, 183–86 Szasz, Thomas, 48 Tabensky, Pedro, 10 Tessman, Lisa, 3, 10–11, 175–76, 179; on moral luck, 173; on virtue ethics, 171–72 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith), 210 Thompson, Michael, 57–59; anti-empiricist theses, 70–71; on transcendental naturalism, 69. See also Natural Goodness approach Thornbill, Randy, 59 “To Those Born After” (Brecht), 175 Todorov, Tzvetan, 29–31; on virtues, 31 torture, moral values and, 24–25 Totem and Taboo (Freud), 129 transcendentalism, Natural Goodness approach and, 51 transcendental naturalism, 48–49; antifoundationalism and, 76; Aristotle and, 69–70; constitutional model, 81; cultural determinism and, 86; expressivism and, 80–81; 4E Cognition, 85; Hacker-Wright and, 69, 71; Hegel and, 85; Hitler and, 77–80; Kant and, 80, 82–84; Lewens on, 72–74; Marx and, 72; mental illness and, 78; minimal compositional physicalism and, 71; Moral Law and, 82; Mott and, 69; Nazi Germany and, 76–78; normativism and, 78; objectivism and, 75; The Placement Problem and, 80; racism and, 72–74; rationality and, 81; realism and, 75; Scala Naturae and, 84; self-consciousness and, 72; Special Creationism, 85; standard naturalism and, 76, 80, 83–84; Thompson on, 69; underdetermination problems, 73, 75; virtue-based approach to, 84; virtue ethics and, 74; vitalism and, 71 Universal Grammar, 17 utilitarianism, Quine on, 23



Index 251

values. See moral values veneer theory: culture and, 128–30, 133; Myth of the Biological Given and, 93 victim blaming, 3 virtue ethics, 28, 87n16, 87n19; Aristotle and, 174; eudaimonism and, 174; incident complicity and, 184; moral perception and, 162; naturalistic, 10, 150; neo-Aristotelianism and, 2; social perception and, 162; Tessman on, 171– 72; transcendental naturalism and, 74 “Virtue Ethics” (Annas), 11 virtues: Aquinas on, 104–5; Aristotle on, 172; as autonomy, 216–18; behavioral genetics and, 106; burdened, 3, 171–72, 190–96; constructivist-interactionist view of, 103–4; cultural development of, 201; definitions of, 104; distribution of, 105– 6; entrepreneurship as, 213; existence of billionaires and, 209; as human power, 103; methodological approach to, 10–12; natural citizens and, 3; perception as, 151–54; requirements of, 151; Scala naturae, 104–5; social development of,

201; as social intelligence, 149; Todorov on, 31 virtuous perception, 151–54 vitalism, 71 Waal, Franz de, 71 walking, in human development, 7 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, 30–31 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 210 Weber, Max, 25–26; Disenchantment thesis, 26 welfare concept, Natural Goodness approach and, 62 welfare theory of function, 65 “The Well Informed Citizen” (Schutz), 192 Whitlam, Gough, 178 Wilde, Oscar, 177 willful blindness, attentiveness and, 187–90 Williams, Bernard, 22, 44, 54, 173 Williams’ Syndrome, 116–17 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 13, 52, 66n3, 76, 103, 160 Woodcock, Scott, 74, 77

About the Author

Dr. Richard Paul Hamilton is senior lecturer in philosophy and bioethics at the University of Notre Dame Australia, Fremantle. He gained his PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, under the supervision of Susan James and Jennifer Hornsby before taking up a permanent position in Australia, thereby condemning himself to becoming an Irish-Australian. He works in moral and political philosophy with a particular interest in the contribution that the human and life sciences can make to our understanding of the human condition. He has published widely in moral philosophy, philosophy of healthcare, and in professional ethics with a recent special edition of the Journal of Value Inquiry, co-edited with Tiger Zheng, on the work of Julia Annas, to which he contributed a paper on his other passion, traditional martial arts. He is currently working on the question of responsibility for moral character and cognitive disorders (particularly ADHD) and has a long-term book project planned on corruption and complicity. He is also an active trades unionist and general political troublemaker.

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