“When I was young,” said Clovis, “my mother taught me the difference between good and evil—only I’ve forgotten it.”
“You’ve forgotten the difference between good and evil?” gasped the princess.
“Well, she taught me three ways of cooking lobster. You can’t remember everything.”
Saki (Hector Hugh Monro),
Quoted in The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp.
An ethic of the virtues gives a guide. It does not solve every ethical problem slam-bang, which as Rosalind Hursthouse notes is no special problem—because after all neither does any other serious ethical theory. [1] Even as straightforward an ethical theory as “follow the 613 commandments of the Torah,” Hillel’s count, has not proven to be slam-bang, not even close.
Deciding whether a certain act “would be the object of choice of all rational beings” (as Hursthouse summarizes Kant) or “maximizes happiness” (as one might summarize Hume, Bentham) or “would be chosen at the social contract” (Ockham, Suarez, Hobbes, Locke, Rawls, Nozick) is no less difficult than deciding whether the act entails cowardice or hatred or injustice. Ethics after virtue is commonly more difficult to apply, not less. The stories of our culture give us models for acting courageously or lovingly or justly. The virtue-words with stories attached appear anyway to be how humans reason ethically. “A [Greek] tragedy,” Martha Nussbaum declared, “does not display the dilemmas of its characters as pre-articulated; it shows them as searching for the morally salient; and it forces us, as interpreters, to be similarly active.”[2]
The point applies to less elevated stories than Orestes and Antigone. In my 30s and 40s I used to jog long distances. I did not then tell myself Kantian or utilitarian ethical reasonings, though neither was entirely irrelevant, I suppose. The Kantian duty to step out the door on a cold morning or the utilitarian reasoning that after all it was good for me did help, a little. Kant’s maxim would not acknowledge any pleasure in the run, and Bentham’s calculation would not acknowledge any identity in it. Virtue ethics combines the two. The unity of ethical thinking was torn apart by the analysts of the 18th century. (I really cannot, though, even at a stretch, see a contractarian motive in a lone daily run. The fact casts light on a fault of contractarianism such as Nozick’s, namely, that it reduces ethics to the improvement of other people, ignoring self improvement, and ignoring also the Transcendent—unless we think, as monotheists in fact do, of making covenants with God.)
To actually keep putting one foot in front of another I told myself, as we do, little character stories, of Pheidippides running from Athens to Sparta, say, or of the game of making it to the next bridge, or of my identity imagined and actual. I was in a sense fooling myself, though aware. I learned from running how to make a change from a very overweight smoker to a somewhat overweight non-smoker. In my fifth decade, that is, I learned that the combination of temperance plus courage we call Persistence can achieve with small steps quite a lot. As they say in Alcoholics Anonymous, choose not to drink one day, or one hour, at a time. Beginnen is ondernemen, the Dutch say. Literally, “to begin is to undertake”— a journey of a thousand miles.
I had of course “known” such an obvious truth long before in the intellectual sense sufficient for Kantian or Benthamite reasoning. But to little good for weight control. That’s what’s wrong with Kantian or Benthamite reasoning. It is reasoning, not a cause for action. “Moral knowledge, unlike mathematical knowledge,“ Hursthouse notes, “cannot be acquired merely by attending lectures and is [therefore] not characteristically to be found in people too young to have much experience of life. A normative ethics should not aim to provide a decision procedure which any reasonably clever adolescent could apply,” like the chain rule for derivatives.[3] But an adolescent’s head is of course filled with stories and characters to imitate, for good or evil.
Both Kant and Bentham were sweet but notably inexperienced men. As Mill said of Bentham, “He was a boy to the last.”[4] Kant and Bentham had seen little of life. Neither of them had been married or had run a business or had carried a spear in the phalanx. Both of them supposed, with Socrates—who I have to admit had had all these experiences of life—that knowledge of the good is enough for the will to achieve it. I am not against sweet, inexperienced, and unmarried men. After all, my hero Adam Smith was one. One of my other heroes, Aquinas, was another. But, unlike Kant or Bentham, Adam Smith managed somehow to restrain the impulse to theorize much beyond human life as actually lived. And Aquinas surpassed in intellectual flexibility and a sense of lived life many a neo-Thomist.
The running so to speak changed my character to long, slow distance. I stopped thinking of my economic scholarship as a matter of the next article and started to think of it as a marathon. “Running,” said Sir Roger Bannister to the BBC cameras on the 50th anniversary of his first breaking the four-minute mile, “is only a metaphor for life.” A certain kind of life, actually. And your life becomes a metaphor for running itself. I applied the narrative of running to other parts of my life, such as slowly, slowly acquiring small Latin and less Greek, or learning to read a smattering of difficult books in the humanities. Reading The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, you see, is like a marathon, or at least like a run from Iowa City to the Lake McBride Dam and back.
Guides to ethical life, to repeat, are achieved mainly through story and example. As Robert Hariman puts it:
What to do? One typical [modern] response is to look for rules: what would any rational person do in this situation? . . . . There was another approach familiar to the classical thinkers, however, which was to look to exemplars: how have other individuals managed situations such as this one? The attention given to the particular wise person—the phronimos—is not merely a heuristic device. . . . Prudential theory [which is Hariman’s name for the Ciceronian program of virtue ethics in action] requires a bifocal perspective that alternates between impersonal norms and individual circumstances, a perspective that is similar to the reading strategy for understanding a persuasive text.[5]
Hariman is here referring to the fruitful notion of the rhetorician Richard Lanham that we should “toggle”—Lanham was using the computer term—between surface and depth, rhetoric and philosophy, practice and theory.[6]
The theoretical precepts are not useless. In baseball: “Keep your eye on the ball.” In writing: “Don’t overload your sentences.” But they are like a coach offering commentary, not the achievement itself. There are no formulas, or else such activities would not be valuable arts. They would be mere skills, easily acquired by anyone, like typing or using econometrics.[7]
Indeed, coaching itself has no formulas, or else great coaches would be a dime a dozen.[8] Ted Williams’ book, The Science of Hitting, offers precepts for life as much as for “the single most difficult thing to do in sport”—hitting a major-league fastball.[9] To achieve in hitting you need to witness and then to imitate Williams’ swing, among the wonders of mid-20th-century sports. But you need to do it, and keep doing it, supported by a boy’s myth of excellence. It was a story Williams told to himself, a story of his ethical character, not a decision-making formula. The story kept him at batting practice until his hands bled.
The character thus formed I say applies to more than baseball. In 1995 at a conference organized by the rhetorician Herbert Simons I heard a paper by Linda Brodkey about teaching writing called “Writing on the Bias.” Brodkey told how she learned to write by watching her mother sew. Her mother was a gifted seamstress and could cut cloth “on the bias” to give a dress a graceful drape. The daughter learned to write—and she writes well—by translating the virtues of dressmaking into the virtues of writing.[10]
Likewise I learned how to do academic tasks—actually any task—by watching my mother do carpentry or sewing or cooking or learning Greek irregular verbs, witnessing the virtues of hope and courage operating in them. Try learning to sew or write or hit a major league fastball by following the Categorical Imperative, or the Greatest Happiness of the Greatest Number. Try learning with those ideas to be “good” in any sense. They don’t work.
We build our characters story by story. In the romantic comedy written and directed by Harold Ramis, Groundhog Day (1993), the Bill Murray character, a self-centered jerk of a TV weatherman, is condemned to relive his February 2 of 1992 over and over and over again. At first he sins deliciously, indulging in table-fuls of food for example, three hot fudge sundaes, a big stack of pancakes, a plate full of bacon. “Don’t you worry about love handles?” Not if after the intemperance the clock is always turned back to a new 6:00 am of the very same Groundhog Day, to the same bright chatter of a wake-up show predicting c-o-l-d in Punxsutawney, PA. Phil’s motto is to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow will be today all over again.
He is the only person on the scene who remembers all his yester-todays. So by reliving the day he can correct each false move in achieving pleasure, as in his attempted seduction of his TV colleague, the Andie MacDowell character. He learns for instance that she always orders sweet vermouth on ice with a twist of lemon and always toasts to world peace. He therefore can craftily ingratiate himself by anticipating just these, getting better and better at concupiscent “love,” for his pleasure late on the day. Tomorrow won’t do, because it never dawns. The seduction fails, of course, because McDowell is pure. It is a romantic comedy.
After many hundreds of iterations of his February 2, having indulged every sin, he enters a dark night of the soul, killing himself in every conceivable way. One time he kidnaps the groundhog-of-honor and drives off the edge of a quarry. But to no avail. The curse of waking up again and again on the same February 2 in the same bed-and-breakfast hangs on, and he repeats yet again the day he knows to perfection. He knows the exact second at which the waiter will drop the tray of dishes or where exactly the slush-filled hole is located in the street or the identities and histories of every single actor in the little drama on the Nth day of its run. He has the time—all the time—to learn French, ice-sculpting, pop piano, dazzling by evening his colleagues who knew the Phil of the day before as a talentless piece of TV talent.
But having tried to make his pleasures of lust and gluttony into his gods, and having reached despair, he begins to shift, to grow in character. “I am a god,” he says at the midpoint, puzzled, “not the God, I think,” an angel, perhaps, able by repetition to know every way to prevent unhappy accidents. That he now gives a damn is evidence of his ethical growth. Phil arranges for example to arrive every morning as a little boy falls out of a tree, exactly in time to catch him, the ungrateful brat. “Maybe God is just someone who’s been around for a long time.” Yet he discovers, too, the limited power of an angel-not-God. Despite repeated shots at that same February 2 he is not in fact able to save the life of an old derelict fated then to die. By such spiritual exercises Phil’s character evolves, gradually. Bill Murray’s craft is on display here, as when he conveys even failed acting, the Phil character playing a role mechanically to some end not consistent with true character. Virtue is character, not rational maxims or parlor tricks of good-deed doing—“when someone’s watching you,” Tom Lehrer warbled long ago.
Phil becomes truly virtuous. By experimenting on a big scale he discovers, in other words, the best life for a human, the ethical laws of our nature. “There is not,” said Shaftesbury, “the least degree of certainty wanting. . . concerning the preferableness of the mental pleasures [in Phil’s case, mastery of French] over the sensual [three hot fudge sundaes]. . . and even of the sensual accompanied by good affection and under a temperate and right use [jazz piano] to those which are no ways restrained” [plotting to seduce the MacDowell character].[11] Phil discovers the balanced virtues of Love and Courage and the rest, and even a Humility quite inconceivable in Phil the Jerk.
He is able for the first time to love in the higher sense, that is, to care for someone for her own sake instead of merging hers into his own utility. MacDowell therefore falls for him, he is redeemed by love, the curse is broken, a February 3rd dawns, and they live happily ever after. I said it was a romantic comedy.
The conventions of the genre in a secular age make it impossible for him to find God in the last reel, but the story otherwise persuades. People really do prefer to be virtuous rather than vicious. Exiled tyrants like the late Edi Amin of Uganda, retired in luxury in Saudi Arabia, believe to the end of their days that what they did for their people was good—eating them, for example. Plato’s (or Socrates’) error was only in believing that sheer intellectual information about The Good would suffice. Plato was correct that if we know, really know, virtue, on our pulse, after thousands of repetitions of Groundhog Day, then we will prefer it to evil.[12] Satan’s facile formula, “Evil be thou my good,” doesn’t work in human lives any more than in angelic lives.
The movie asserts that, regrettably, most of us need experience, quite a lot of it, to become ethically educated, to be led out of lives of big and little evils. If we have the short lives of the pre-industrial world, for example, there’s no second, third, fourth act in which to set aside alcohol or violence, acquisitiveness or cruelty, in favor of the [really] good life. Seneca made this point. For many of us it takes fully three score years and ten to get even close to the ethical life. Or it takes many good movies. Unsurprisingly, there opened in early 2004 an Italian remake of the Groundhog Day plot, called È già ieri, “it’s still yesterday,” and an Adam Sandler vehicle with a similar theme, 50 First Dates. There’s a TV movie on the theme called Christmas Every Day (1996). Over and over and over again.
Or good autobiographies. Anyway inspiring stories in our culture, if we haven’t the wit to see it in our own lives. Hursthouse observes that “we do not always act as ‘autonomous,’ utterly self-determining agents,” the way the masculinist version of ethical reflection supposes. We “often seek moral guidance from people we think are morally better than ourselves,” or at any rate have gone through annealing experiences we think relevant to our own lives.[13] In a womanly way we are fascinated by ethical stories, finding them in literature, in autobiography, in gossip.
It is a fault in Hursthouse’s philosophically sophisticated exposition of virtue ethics that she does not acknowledge the river of narrative in which humans swim. She argues persuasively that an adolescent cannot be wholly ethical, that the writing of a complete ethical Code Napoléon is an unattainable goal, that in short an educated judgment must be exercised.[14] Yet how then are we to grow into such ethical wisdom? Breadth of actual life experience is clearly relevant, though commonly not sufficient. But so is breadth of hearing and watching and reading the images and stories of our culture.
A story: The prison-hardened gangbanger and thief Carl Upchurch had been in solitary confinement at the federal penitentiary of Lewisburg, Pennsylvania for two months before he noticed the little paperback book propping up one leg of the table. “I pulled it out, excited to have found something to alleviate the monotony. I turned it over and stared at the cover in disgust. It was Shakespeare’s sonnets.” He put it back. But his time in solitary was long, and “after three more days of staring at gray, I pulled it out again, muttering that Shakespeare was better than nothing.”
I don’t pretend that Shakespeare and I immediately connected. I must have read those damn sonnets twenty times before they started to make sense. . . . I had almost always been contemptuous of intellect. That book of sonnets didn’t just change my opinion—it quite literally changed my mind. . . . I wanted to ask for more books, but I didn’t have a clue where to start. At least I knew that Shakespeare had written other stuff besides the sonnets, so I requested anything else they had by him. I . . . started plowing my way through thirty-eight plays and some other poetry. . . . Caught up in the first flush of literary exploration, I was pretty impressed with myself. In retrospect, it was lucky I was in the cell alone. . . . [The] guys would have burst my bubble mercilessly.[15]
He burst it often enough himself, in further explosions of macho violence. But gradually he emerged, through what he calls “de-niggerization.” Story by story he remade his character. For example this very tough guy wept his way through Les Misérables.
Religious ritual, which seems so idiotic to the secular mind, has the same feel as Carl’s Nth chance to go straight or Phil’s Nth repetition of Groundhog Day. The words and motions of the mass give the faithful repeated chances to get it right. At the Nth repetition of “this is my blood, the cup of salvation” you for the first time grasp, really grasp, the meaning of redemption through Christ’s sacrifice. Well . . . part of it at any rate.
* * * *
If Kantianism, and its vulgar British cousin, utilitarianism, did not in fact provide guides to an ethical life, they do provide cool poses to assume, neat stories the man espousing them can tell himself.
The utilitarian can pose as Practical, a numbers man. I have said why I think this modern myth of Practical Prudence is sometimes phony or dangerous. But when the issue is in fact a matter of numbers, and the fix is not in, the Practical Man is a useful guy to have around. He can tell you very properly that this particular design of a highway off-ramp implies a certain value of human life, whether or not you are comfortable with such numbers. Grow up, he says. Face facts. If we spend thousands of dollars investigating each airline fatality and only scores of dollars investigating each highway fatality the result will be less safety. The economist says, “Shift some money from airline to highway investigations.” When you want to be practical and consistent and not waste money, the utilitarian should be listened to. Really.
The uses of Kantianism are more spiritual. The ideal Kantian is, as Iris Murdoch put it, a combination of Romantic and Puritan, a man who chooses never to stoop, but always does his duty. Compare Alexander Gerschenkron. Gerschenkron was, surprisingly to those like me who knew him only superficially, a believing Christian. But he was also the best, my boy, the bravest. Kant helps bourgeois men without a god feel nonetheless proud of who they are.
In the Groundwork Kant denied such ethical pride to women, almost explicitly: “there are many persons who are so sympathetically constituted that, without any further motive of vanity or self-interest, they find an inner pleasure in spreading joy around them. . . . In such a case an action of this kind, however dutiful and amiable it may be, has nevertheless no true moral worth.”[16] This is the kind of analysis, in which womanly people cannot be virtuous, that annoyed Carol Gilligan. “How recognizable, how familiar to us, is the man so beautifully portrayed in the Grundlegung,” Murdoch writes. He is
with us still, free, independent, lonely, powerful, responsible, brave, the hero of so many novels and books of moral philosophy. . . . He is the offspring of the age of science, confidently rational and yet increasingly aware of his alienation. . . . He has the virtue which [the bourgeois men of] the age requires and admires, courage. [17]
How noble, how glorious, above all how manly to face damnation without illusions. I called it “secular stoicism,” that god-absent virtù. Murdoch notes that from Kant to Nietzsche is “not such a very long step,” and thence to existentialism and “the Anglo-Saxon ethical doctrines [of ethics, in the early 20th century, ‘emotivism’ in particular,] which in some ways closely resemble it.” The central doctrine of secular stoicism is that ethics is not a matter of the nature of imperfect human beings, much less of transcendent ethical realism, and certainly not of God. The post-Kantian secular stoic believes that ethics is merely a matter of steady, manly, secular, human will. “In fact Kant’s man,” Murdoch observes, “had already received a glorious incarnation nearly a century earlier in the work of Milton: his proper name is Lucifer.”[18]
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Hursthouse, “Virtue Theory and Abortion,” 1991, p. 224, and her comparison of virtue theory with Kantian and utilitarian theories at pp. 217-219.
[2] Nussbaum, Fragility of Goodness, 1986, p. 14.
[3] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, pp. 18, 59. Notice that Hursthouse uses “moral” and “ethical” as synonyms.
[4] Mill, “The Mind and Character of Jeremy Bentham,” 1838, p. 317.
[5] Hariman, “Theory Without Modernity,” 2003, p. 7.
[6] Lanham, Electronic Word, 1993, p, 79ff.
[7] McCloskey, If You’re So Smart, 1990.
[8] A point made by the economist Gary Walton in Beyond Winning, 1991.
[9] Williams and Underwood 1986 (1970), Science of Hitting, p. 7.
[10] Brodkey, “Writing,” 1994.
[11] Shaftesbury, Characteristics 1713 (1732), VoL. II, p. 99.
[12] Compare McDowell, “Virtues and Reason,” 1979, pp. 144-147.
[13] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 35.
[14] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, pp. 60, 39ff, 57f.
[15] Upchurch, Convicted in the Womb, 1996, pp. 81-84
[16] Kant, Grounding, 1785, Ellington trans., p. 398.
[17] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 80.
[18] Murdoch, “Sovereignty of Good,” 1967, p. 80.