Alasdair MacIntyre - Moral Relativisms Reconsidered

welcome to our today's keynote presentation for this conference to what end my name is Jim Kelly I teach in the law school and it's been my great pleasure to along with Peter wicks and Margaret cabinets and the person I'm just about to introduce to have spent some time organizing this conference and seeing you all here as a tremendous tremendously exciting my job here is simply to introduce the person who will introduce our keynote speaker and in this crowd it's really no need for me to do so because David Solomon has had a long and storied career here at Notre Dame and for many many people in the audience he's a great friend for a great number of our wonderful presenters here he has been an incredible mentor and and valued a guide as they've embarked on their life of inquiry and so with that I will turn it over to Professor David Solomon to introduce today's keynote speaker [Applause] thank you Jim and I want to thank all of those people who brought this event together it's not easy to put an event like this together lots of scholars from all over the world diverse perspectives and they're all smart and ready to get involved in arguments and it's a wonderful occasion I want to thank them for putting it making this happen let me just say it's a great honor for me to introduce Alastair McIntyre to this audience on this occasion of the celebration of his life and career I note at the beginning the Professor McIntyre has issued an edict that forbids us to call it a birthday celebration which he might otherwise but will more of that possibly later so perhaps you will allow me to call it simply a special occasion and it surely is special professor McIntyre published his first piece of professional philosophy in 1950 in the down side review it was a philosophical essay entitled analogy and metaphysics and was 16 pages in length there were a number of signs even in this early piece however a features characteristic of the man and his work a concise and clear way of expressing himself philosophically and a combative and engaged manner of addressing the most fundamental philosophical issues the one also notes the characteristic humility he demonstrates in the closing lines of this early paper written after all before he was 21 years old the article concludes with this thought McIntyre says these remarks are elicited by a dissatisfaction with much contemporary writing these are the first words he ever wrote and a philosophical article we do what was coming after and also of their tentative and unsatisfactory nature I'm only too well aware the humility professor McIntyre's next significant publication follows three years later and was his remarkable monograph Marxism and interpretation published in 1953 by the student Christian movement press between his 21st birthday and his 24th he had also submitted his MA thesis the significance of moral judgments to Manchester University to fulfil the requirements for his master's degree in philosophy as all of you who have read that remarkable document recognize it prefigures many of the most important in substantial themes in professor McIntyre's work especially his work in moral philosophy it's devastating critical discussion of the work of the most significant classical metathesis of the early 20th century especially more richard stephenson and hare provides a springboard for his comprehensive assault on a motive is culture this assault is carefully articulated in many of his early papers and culminates in his revolutionary chapter three of after virtue emotivism social content and social context I promised not to carry this Chronicle the professor McIntyre's philosophical career through to the present day and assure you that but suffice it to say that much has happened between professor McIntyre's earliest philosophical publications in post-war England in the early 1950s and today's conference and this special occasion but to bring you things up to date very very briefly and I will be brief freshmen MacIntyre presently serves as a senior research fellow at the center for contemporary Aristotelian studies of ethics and politics case F at London Metropolitan University and a senior distinguished research fellow at Notre Dame's center for ethics and culture he's the author of 30 books including the influential quintet of books after virtue whose justice which rationality three rival versions of moral inquiry and dependent rational animals his most recent book to finish the quintet published in 2016 epochs in the conflicts of modernity an essay on desire practical reasoning and narrative published by Cambridge University Press continues to pursue an understanding of the modern condition from a neo Aristotelian orto mystic perspective and it argues that domestic Aristotelian ism informed by Marx's insights provides us with resources for constructing a contemporary politics and ethics which both enables and requires us to act against modernity from within modernity those are professor McIntyre's words although this book may seem to bring this overall project to a kind of completion one suspects that more is coming and we certainly all hope so frezzer MacIntyre just to conclude the list here is a member of the american philosophical society and has served as president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association and he is taught at Oxford Princeton Boston University Brandeis Wellesley Vanderbilt Duke and most recently the University of Notre Dame where he was the John a O'Brien senior research professor in the department of philosophy although he retired from teaching in 1910 professor MacIntyre remains domicile at the Notre Dame center for ethics and culture where he continues to write and to conduct his research in his paper this afternoon he revisits an issue that he has often discussed the title of today's paper is relativism z' reconsidered and just let me say in closing and it says closing although we're not allowed to return to that earlier point to call this week's conference a birthday celebration partly because it's not the very day but we are surely allowed nevertheless to deduce deduce by simple math that since professor McIntyre celebrated his 80th birthday 11 years ago in Dublin at another conference attended by many of us in this room this week's special occasion is as I said very special indeed I would invite all of you to join me in recognizing the remarkable career and accomplishments that Professor Alistair McIntyre [Applause] I have always thought that if people applaud vigorously in the beginning it's because they have a dark suspicion they won't want to do it at the end let me begin by expressing my gratitude to all of you who are here to the many among you who have used my work in a variety of ways constructively and critically and thereby carried forward a project that is much more important to mine there are people in this room David Solomon London but also Calvin Knight christopher Lutz who actually could tell you what I think more accurately than I can and then I'm very grateful for having explained to me on occasion what I think I also owe many of your poverty's but this is a time of day in which I am normally asleep and I have had the husband buy energy and organize myself to be here and so I've been absent for most of this conference and a lot of people would hope to speak with me haven't been able to and I'm sorry about that and about not have been able to make time for people if I do fall asleep while giving the talk just leave the room quietly about the paper itself this is a sequel to two other works one is the paper called moral relativism truth and justification and many of the issues that are raised in an incidental way in this paper or dealt with more systematically there it's to be found in the first volume of my selected essays it is a paper that was written as part of a collection to honor Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter geeks second work is one or less likely to know professor yang Liang Shang of langu University in China and I had an extended conversation on relativism which has I believe been published in Chinese and many of the things I take up in this paper were initially developed in that conversation and I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Jung liang for having initiated some of these frames of thought I took it however that relatively few of you probably read the Chinese literature assiduously and so that they didn't matter that I was taking up some things again those public figures who make speeches deploring the present moral condition of the adolescent young in the United States are apt to accuse him of moral relativism I never quite sure of what it is of which the delinquent yang are being accused and they have my sympathy since I too find myself recurrently accused of relativism if therefore seems worthwhile even at this late date to ask once again just what moral relativism is or rather just what moral relativism in the plural are since the number of significantly different positions have been advanced with that title I'd gained with views of the anthropologist Ruth Benedict Benedict student of France Louis at Columbia and friend of Margaret Mead did her fieldwork among our number of Native American peoples including the Serrano of California lazuli of the Southwest the Apache and the Blackfoot peoples of the Great Plains she was impressed by the distinctiveness of each of these different cultures by the contrasts both with each other and with the various invasion of Hispanics speaking cultures of North America each inculcated a distinctive type of personality and each culture is a type of personality writ large she wrote each treated its own moral imperatives as authoritative and the moral imperatives and valued traits of anyone may be incompatible with moral imperatives and valued traits of others every morality is the morality of some particular culture in 1934 Benedict published patterns of culture in which he not only presented this account of cultures and morality but argue that there is no standpoint independent of cultures from which we can evaluate let alone judge between the rival and incompatible moral claims advanced from different cultural standpoint about this relativistic thesis two points need to be made the first is that in advancing it then addicted indeed speak from a standpoint independent of the cultures which provided her inquiries with her subject matter the standpoint of the academic anthropologist but from that standpoint she made what was at once an anthropological and a philosophical claim its anthropological insofar as it relies on Benedict's descriptions of a variety of cultures its philosophical it is denial that we can identify moral imperatives or values that would have to be acknowledged by rational agents as such this latter thesis is as Benedict was well aware a nonrelativistic claim the claim that relativism as she has characterized it his true true stamp litterateur a second point is this if Benedict's account of morality and cultures is true then she like everyone else is committed to respect for the moral imperatives and values of her own culture but now notice an important characteristic of many perhaps even all model cultures covered Gerrits who did much of his fieldwork in java courts the Javanese are saying to be human is to be Javanese the Javanese like the English the French the Americans like many others take some deviations from the standards of their own culture to be a mark of failure as a human being so Benedict was committed quince apologist noting that no moral culture can be judged superior to any other and claim or Allegiant to quarreling with those in her own culture who took their own morality to be superior to the moralities of different and rival cultures what we need to learn from Benedict's example is then twofold first it seems that every consistent assertion of moral relativism must be like hers in this but it's advanced from some nonrelativistic standpoint and our evaluation of such assertions will ever involve and identification of and evaluation of that standpoint secondly we need to ask whether different versions of moral relativism advanced from whatever anthropological or philosophical or other such standpoint do not always require some kind of moral commitment as an agent within that agent own culture consider another very different example of a moral relativism Gilbert Harman developed his philosophical account of and defensive moral relativism over a long academic career from the work that issued in his book the nature of morality in 1977 to his book explaining value and other essays involve philosophy in 2000 Harmons starting point was to ask whether it was necessary to invoke some of objective moral facts that's independent of our judgments to explain how evaluative a normative judgments come to be made and respected his reply was that it was not but the vast empirically grounded explanations that we have give us no reason to think that there are such facts although there are are observably different moralities each with its own frame of reference and what is taken to be morally required by the adherence of one may be taken to be morally forbidden by the adherents of another so if someone asserts that such and such a type of action is wrong while someone else denies this it may well be that they are not contradicting each other for it may be that one makes her judgment relative to this particular frame of reference while the other makes his judgment relative to some quite other frame of reference by advancing moral judgments individuals provide themselves and each other with what they take to be motivating reasons for acting in one way rather than another and what motivates the member of one group may be very different from what motivates the members of other groups so underlying the facts of moral divergence or psychological facts about individuals and groups Harman is well aware that what individuals take themselves to be saying and doing when the outer moral judgments may often be at odds with his account of what they are in fact saying and doing Harden agrees with Benedict but there is no independent standard by appeal to which we may judge between the claims of rival morality although on different grounds as with Benedict he takes his claims about moral relativism to be true simpliciter but he speaks as a philosopher through drawing on the findings of some social sciences if on his do we understand what type of action small judgments are and what moral disagreements are we will not on Hartman's do be able to avoid relativistic inclusions moreover he judges that all humans that all attempts to identify a single morality apt for human beings as such have failed the notion of human flourishing is too indeterminate and the psychological evidence on his view shows that the stable character trace needed for any conception of the virtues required for human flourishing or a fiction Harman is thus able to understand his own moral judgments relativistically without inconsistency and so it may seem that here we have an example for moral relativism that involves no particular moral commitments on the part of its author but this is only because Harmons relativism is incomplete for he supplies no sufficient answer to the question either of how individuals ought to choose between frameworks when on occasion they have to do so or what it is to decide to commit oneself to the judgments required by some particular frame of reference he does indeed tell us too little about how frames of reference are to be characterized and without answers to these questions Harmons moral relativism remains incomplete how might it be completed one possible answer has been supplied by Harmons distinguished student David Wong Wong's natural morality is published in 2006 his subtitled a defense of pluralistic relativism there are amongst view a number of notably different moralities no one of which can be justifiably presented as the one true morality since he takes it if there is no one set of principles or values or ordering of principles of values that provides what human agents need by way of a morality morality czar complex solutions to complex problems to the problems of how human agents can best cooperate with each other and if I each of us can order our lives managing the tensions between various self-regarding and other regarding motive some moralities provide better solutions to some of these problems than to others this or that respect but if we're to prosper morally we need to be able to learn from morality other than our own and on occasion to accommodate ourselves to continuing disagreements Wong's examples of different moral schemes that it's important to take seriously include both Western and Chinese examples he's impressed by the Confucian emphasis on participation in ritual as a means of changing behavior but also by certain features of Aristotle's account of happiness and if any valuating moralities he draws on evidence from psychology from evolutionary theory and from history his own standpoint is thus both philosophical and empirical but it's also moral for one it is morally important that we should be his kind of moral relativist and his works applies an answer to a question that neither Benedict nor Hartmann posed if someone were to find her himself in a situation of conflict in which the adversarial proponents of two rival and incompatible moralities each advance their claims how should such a one decide between them but note that if the reply to that question is that such a body should learn from Wang and take what is best in each then the reply to that reply must be that Wong's pluralistic relativism has now itself become just one more contending morality with its own claims and that we need to know how to decide between one and the other contending parties one answer to this question that has to be rejected is this but just because we now have to make a choice between those standards that are between rival sets of standards that are to govern our moral choices we are condemned making a higher order choice that cannot itself be covered by standards judging from within our morality it may be said we appeals to standards provided by what Harmon calls a frame of reference but when judging between alternative realities we can only make a criterion less of a frame of reference a conclusion that was argued for by Sark a long time ago or we then condemned to be existentialist I think not for it's never true that we are compelled to make criterion estoy psa's of this kind why not every rational agent has cannot but have some conception of her is good perhaps in Quaid inadequately spelt out indeterminate to varying degrees but every such agent confronted by the claims upon her or him of some particular morality has it in them to ask would it be for my good to live like this and the answers elicited by this question will vary from agent to agent and from morality to morality north now something often unnoticed about relativists and by relativists they are agents who have suppressed in themselves for the moment at least any inclination to ask this question and the self whom they envisage has committed to no particular morality as able from a standpoint external to all moral commitments to compare and contrast morality to choose between them is an imaginary self for every actual self in virtue of its conception of its Gordon is already inclined in one direction rather than another this myth of the morally neutral self is a powerful and recurring one in modern intellectual and academic life it gives one more expression to the characteristically modern conception of the self as autonomous as recognizing no authority external to itself and it's often presented in disguised form in versions of the claim that the Social Sciences Sciences that study human agency in it's institutionalized forms can only be objective if they are valued free value neutral it's a presupposition of all those who in presenting some version of relativism from some non relativistic standpoint take that standpoint to guarantee their own act objectivity and neutrality but it's a myth any agent confronted by the incompatible claims of rival moralities has the resources to ask first what reasons do I have for deciding that it would be best for me to acknowledge the authority of this set of claims rather than that and secondly if they can identify no sufficient reasons for arriving at such a decision to ask what it is they must first learn in order to be able to make such a choice what skills must be acquire what qualities of character must they develop if there are no marks they are to know how to deliberate and to make choices in a relevant way to these questions the most interesting answer is Aristotle's we sometimes forget that Aristotle and his Greek contemporaries themselves had to decide implicitly or explicitly between the claims of rival moralities rival principals rival understandings of the virtues rival orderings of goods if the smartin conception of the relationship between soldier and citizen of courage understood in one particular way as the preeminent virtue of how decisions should be made that is laconically was correct and the Athenian democratic way of life and the Corinthian oligarchical and commercial way of life were deeply flawed if either the Athenians or the Corinthians conceived of human excellence rightly and the Spartan way of life had to be rich so Aristotle faced the question practically as well as philosophically of what it was that had to be learned if one was to evaluate the rival claims of these cities what had to be learned was on his view three four first we have to become able to distinguish between genuine Goods and mere objects of desire we have to discover the doing or getting what we initially want maybe that for us and that our desires in key instances have to be redirected towards what we've learned to identify as genuine goods this stage of learning through habituation occurs first in the households and family and then in those practices in and through which we're educated to recognize and value there is kinds of good and excellence and activity secondly we then have to become able to decide which goods it's best for us to pursue as we are in our particular situation here or now but to do this we need to become able to deliberate with others others who will correct our one-sidedness others whose cooperation we will need if we are to achieve our common and our individual ends so we have to have a particular kind of relationship with those others one informed by truthfulness and justice and other virtues we have to learn that certain kinds of action are wrong as such destructive of those relationships on which we and others depend for the achievement of our and their ends thirdly those kinds of learning require not only a redirection of our desires but the development of dispositions to judge rightly in particular cases that is the judgment accordance with practical reason they require a remaking of ourselves as agents only through such remaking do we become able to make justifiable choices between rival sets of moral claims only by acquiring the virtue of prudent as well as those of courage temperate nurse of justice will we be able to identify what is at stake in making choices between rival sets of moral claims but these are s the trillion theses that will of course be an immediate indignant and obvious objection by anyone impressed by the arguments of Benedict Harman or Wong the problem to be solved was that of how to judge between the rival and incompatible claims of a set of different moralities each with its own standards but it will be said at once the proposed Aristotelian solution is question begging for it requires us to commit ourselves to the standards of one particular morality that articulated by Aristotle prior to engaging in the evaluation of the various rival claims including those claims advanced Aristotle this is not to solve the problem it's to walk away from it and to this the Aristotelian reply is to agree his response to the problems posed by the relativist is indeed and has to be question begging but so the Aristotelian contends this is confirmed by the everyday experience of learning to make moral choices imagine somebody who does in fact find themselves in the course of everyday life torn between two rival sets of moral claims perhaps someone living at a time and in a place where two cultures contend for the allegiance of the young so each individual has to ask do I continue to speak and consort in my native language with the speakers of an older oral culture with its storytelling and its songs working at the farming or the fishing living out traditional patterns of life or do I become an English speaker acquiring the skills of the literate and finding a better paid job in a factory or even going on to higher education or is there some third way because the first question the Chowan asked is what is it best for me to do her his second question has to be how do I learn to judge what is gluten best no theoretical or philosophical answer Aristotelian or otherwise is likely at this stage to be ready use for questioners like this who will almost certainly be innocent of philosophy they will only learn how to answer that question if everyday life somehow or other happens to supply the relevant conditions conditions which enable them to recapitulate in their activities something that comes close to the stages of moral development identified by our aesthetician theorists so having subjected themselves to the discipline of some practice in which their teachers in the course of inculcating skills and habits of work had taught them how to redirect their desires they may learn how to distinguish good outcomes from bad ones and how to bring about good ones such practices may of course be very different kinds work at farming and fishing construction work weaving and embroidery musical and mathematical work training in various games and sports all work which develops certain qualities of character justice so the agents know what they owe to others courage so they know which risks to take temperate nurse so that they are not the victims of their own desires and fantasies prudence so they can apply general precepts to particular cases notice now how many of the practices that I've identified as means to moral education would not have been recognized as such by Aristotle their practices engaged in by productive workers by women in many societies by slaves and indeed were it not so Aristotle's account of the virtues would be irrelevant to most of humanity to most of those whose tell us a nature Aristotle claimed to be identifying those educated this way we then enter upon a second stage of their moral education during which they learn or fail to learn how to identify the particular goods that it's best for them being who they are to achieve and the means to achieve those goals whether they're able to learn this or not whether they're able to become sound practical reason errs once again we depend on others and on the kind of relationship they have with those others they need to deliberate so far as possible only in the company of perceptive and truthful others if they're to learn how to correct their own partialities in one seismics if they're to identify and learn from their mistakes it's only after they have become tolerably adequate practical reason errs that they will be able to reflect on what they have learned and to understand what conception of the moral life it is to which they become committed what those precepts are to which they can't but a corridor thority and what those qualities of character are which they can't but account excellences it's only from a standpoint informed by and afforded by good moral practice but the difference is between good and effective practice can be perceived let alone understood it's the actuality of everyday lived experience and not just something a theory like Aristotle's that rules out the possibility of a standpoint that is neutral between standpoints remember now that it's crucial for Aristotelian that their theoretical claims should be vindicated in this way by reflective practice what our institutions claim is that the account of the moral life Advance Paris novel is in essentials true good moral practice is practice in which reflective agents engage and practice which issues and their flourishing and what it is for human beings to flourish his own Aristotelian view a matter of fact something which relativists must be committed to denying and which Hartmann explicitly denies here there is an interesting contract contrast between what characteristically goes without seeing in our culture now about members of some other animal species and what is taken to be controversial about human animals if I assert that what it is for individual wolves or particular wolf pack's to flourish as a matter of fact I'm unlikely to be challenged nor will I will I be challenged if I make the same assertion about individual dolphins or particular dolphin herds but with human beings it's otherwise what it is for human beings to flourish is it's often contended always debatable indefinitely debatable yet even those who assert this have no problem with allowing that some characteristics of human flourishing or uncontroversially identifiable good health freedom from affliction by mania depression and the range of other disorders ability to question to inquire and correct errors responsiveness to aesthetic achievement the list goes on what he tried him in this list names is something without which human beings are in unable to develop and to exercise their powers for the flourish is for human beings as for wolves and dolphins to develop and exercise the distinctive powers of their species but now the question becomes inescapable what must the social or moral relationships of human beings be if individuals are to develop and exercise those powers so it each achieves her or his own good it's in answering this question that Aristotelian distinguished themselves relativists either in systems that are true and false answers but Aristotelian czar not alone in this return to Gerrits his remark on the Javanese they like so many others take the moral structures of their own social order and culture to be those through which soon potentialities are to be realized indeed it's difficult to find them our Lord order protagonist say otherwise although there are of course cultures which are scenes of conflict where what is at stake is in part how the good and the writer to be understood if human potentialities are probably realized so when Aristotelian is engage in debate with the protagonists of various small rural cultures what does it speak is not generally whether there is some true account of human flourishing but rather whose account is true so it was in the debates in ancient Greece in which Aristotle himself participated so it was in 12th century Seville and 13th century Paris so it is now but those debates all have this in common but by then nothing has been finally settled they had no decisive outcome and except why not first of all there turn out to be just as the relative is claimed no standards of argument that are genuinely neutral between rival moral stand points by appeal to which the issues of which the protagonists of those standpoints differ might be rationally resolved and secondly the contentions advanced by their estate agents who engage in these debates are of a different kind from those advanced by their opponents for once again the Aristotelian must seem to beg the question to in fact take the question up to a point their opponents advance arguments designed to sue but their account of human flourishing is true the Aristotelian czar concerned to explain why it is only those who have enjoyed a particular kind of practical and moral training and education the kind that I described earlier were able to make relevant judgments in this area and as I also took note earlier that kind of practical and moral training and education already presupposes the truth of an Aristotelian account of human flourishing notice once again that eras periods relativists concurred in rejecting the claim advanced by some moral philosophers but there is some set of principles whose rational justification should be compelling to every rational adult no matter what her his initial commitments perhaps this makes less surprising not on occasion statements of an Aristotelian position such as my own should of attract accusations of relativism concern now an example of disagreements that seemingly can't be resolved but in an important way can't be rationally resolved the dates about truth-telling of lying there are at least three different and incompatible views that have been and are taken of what is required of us by way of truth telling and of the place that truthfulness has in our lives begin with one widely held modern view that proposed by John Stuart Mill what are Mills do is wrong with and I quote any even unintentional deviation from truth is that it contributes to by quote again weakening the trustworthiness of human assertion which is not only the principle support of all present social well-being but the insufficiency of which does more than any one thing that can be named to keep that civilization virtue everything on which human happiness on the largest scale depends does it follow that all lying is wrong no Mill asserts in facts taken Lee that all moralists have acknowledged a do acknowledge but there are exceptions he takes the chief of those exceptions to be when and I quote again the withholding of some fact would save an individual especially an individual other than oneself from great and unmerited evil and when the withholding can only be effected by denial here is a type of case where we are not only permitted but may be required to lie contrasts with this the view advanced by Aquinas who following a gasping held that all lying is wrong for Aquinas someone lies when she or he intentionally asserts what she or he believes to be false whether or not there is any intention to deceive many lies told either in order to avoid inconvenience or in order to abuse or entertain or not grave false lies total they are false lies told with a malicious intention always are nonetheless all lies are forbidden why so if we were to understand the pinus position we need to take note of the place that on his new truth and falsity have in our lives we are liable to fail to be what we have it in ourselves to be and we are on earth liable to be unable to come unable to become what we have it in ourselves to become insofar as our thoughts and judgments are false truth is a relationship between agents mind and the realities about which that agent judges to lie is to treat the truth about things as though it were of secondary importance to our own immediate purposes and so to be directed towards something other than our good we damage others by being untruthful to them all Aquinas in view but what no call the trustworthiness of human assertion is valuable just because truth is valuable so Aquinas and mill both moral rigorous differ in their justification of truthfulness but in practice the two views are very close bill takes justified lies to be very rare modern followers of a finest sometimes take their to be one and only one type of justified like that it provides the only means by which the life of some innocent other may be saved from an unjust death still they do differ but both differ even more from the dominant modern standpoint on that view there are several types of justified lie and being able to tell such lies persuasively is a valuable social skill in public life diplomats and intelligence officers are professional liars deception by omission is among the arts of the advertiser and the public relations executive and those who are unable or unwilling to lie persuasively are apt to appear clumsy and even on charitable conversation lists moreover the compartmentalization of Contemporary lights is such that the norms governing lying and truth-telling candor and reticence theory from area to area what is taken to be required by way of honest disclosure when dealing with one's lawyer or accountant is not the same as what is required in conversations in the competitive work these let alone during those social occasions where what matters is to be entertaining rather than accurate so how might an intelligent person decide between these competing views that of the follower of Aquinas believes that it's always bad to lie or perhaps there is one that is very rare type of justified life that of follower of mil all certain rare occasions we are not only permitted but required to lie but only on rare occasions and that of the follower of the prevailing fashion this is certainly a question for philosophers but it's also a question for every parent and it's that one is clear that what both parents and philosophers confront are not only competing conceptions of truthfulness of why it matters but also competing conceptions well-being is because the protagonists of each of these stand points understands human well-being as they do but they take the view of truthfulness that they do so how are we to judge between them it's an observable fact that when disagreements between protagonists from each of these views are articulated or more fully spelt out there's little or no movement towards agreement heeds contending party has its own conception of what well-being is and of the part that achievement should play in our lives each is more or less immune the objections advanced against them so how are they how are we to proceed perhaps by reminding ourselves yet once more of Aristotle's chart insistence that judgments concerning well-being are not made by impersonal agents without to history so in book tools and Michael McKean ethics he tells us that what we are pleased and pained by as a matter of how we were brought up and in book three but what we take the human tell us to be depends upon what kind of person we are from an Aristotelian point of view all moral choices including choices of what moral standpoint to adopt depend on prior commitments so it's not just that there are disagreements about truthfulness and well-being but those who engage in debate bring to the debate prior understandings about how such disagreements should be resolved yet if this is the Aristotelian view it's now clear that it's very close also to that that should have been taken by Ruth Benedict if she had been consistently for in her view anyone attempting to resolve the disagreements between morality will already have been formed by the standards of whatever a particular morality it was in which they mean educated so their personality would give expression to the standards of that particular morality this parcel coincidence could be an Aristotelian characterization of how it is when someone takes on the task of evaluating the claims of rival and incompatible morality and a relativistic characterization of how it is at least if the relative is dis Benedict is not uninteresting it perhaps is another part of the explanation of why Aristotelian are sometimes accused of relatives but there remains one more difference of a striking kind between Aristotelian and relativists consider what was involved in Aristotle's critique of the Spartan Athenian and Corinthian ways of life it was not just that each had misunderstood the virtues that each had retorted conception of human excellence he was not just that heat regime from Aristotle's account of the best sort of regime for human agents it was that in so misunderstanding the virtues and in so deviating each was and Aristotle views at odd with what human agents as rational animals need from a way of life if they are moved to move towards becoming what such animals have it in them to become there is that in human nature to which they fail to give the expression that which they inhibit or otherwise prevent from finding expression considerateness respect the differences between societies that differ in their norms of truth-telling and of the importance of group telling what for example is the key difference between a modern society such as our own in which individuals make up their own minds about what types of lying are permissible weighing the effects of telling some type of lie against the attacks of refraining from lying and a society in which except on the rarest of occasions the type of occasion that few people ever encounter all lying is taken to be wrong in the latter type of society it's not the lies are never told but when someone lies she or he has to acknowledge certainly to her himself and perhaps to others a serious moral feeling consequently when individuals deliberate together about how to identify and to achieve their common goods each can be reasonably assured that they're not being lied to by the others but can take seriously what they assert without suspecting those others of lied in order to manipulate them and if such a one turns out to be is taken and those who lied we pay the penalty of being in the future excluded from such deliberations by contrast in societies such as our own this is not so if someone reckons that by lying they will achieve a significantly better outcome than they would by truth-telling then they will characteristic take it but it is permissible perhaps even obligatory to lie there are as a result few if any public offices or social a ship's from which known liars are excluded what then if someone in our society were to hold middle of you but lying can be justified with the good effects of telling a particular life outweigh the bad effects of lie even though this is only rarely the case such a one might indeed find the acceptance of lying as abhorrent as any follower of a finance would as male himself would have done yet their view would not exclude as Aquinas knew does that whole mode of thought according to which it is for each of us to calculate and weigh effect rather than to acknowledge the authority of unconditional precepts what then has been lost in societies such as our own what is it which may have been inhibited so that agents are unable to come that which honor other conditions they would have had it in them to become the answer must be but certain kinds of relationship which require unconditional trustworthiness become impossible and with them the possibility of identifying and achieving certain types of common good a certain weariness a certain suspicion in facts social life so the unconditional commitments appear contrary to reason societies which lacked that wariness will appear to be societies in which one will be to actively deceived and they are indeed societies in which trust is sometimes misplaced and betrayed but their shared affirmation of the wrongness of lie opens up possibilities that are denied to us what then am I saying in this quarter to my overall argument that we need to compare not moral cultures in the abstract but social and cultural orders as giving expression to moral codes and in so doing during this evaluation we need to pay particular attention to the defects and limitations of those orders to what it is that they lack to what it is that they make impossible for those who inhabit them by making this kind of comparison one that emphasizes limitation and defect we find a measure of those orders we find reason for criticizing and rejecting them just as Aristotle criticized and rejected the moral cultures of Spartans Athenians and Corinthians and by so doing we as Aristotelian distinguish ourselves from relativists once more moreover we race of other set of questions for if we are right and the objectivity and neutrality of the inquiries of anthropologists such as Benedict and if the loss of her such as Harmon is put in question by describing morality and moral frames of reference as they do they omit they concealed from view crucial aspects of morality z' and frames of reference those aspects which are their defects their limitations but those questions I must leave for some other occasion [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] sorry sorry to take the first position I wasn't intending so first of all it was very nice to hear your talk today addressing this topic for which I'm very grateful I wanted to ask you about your conception with of morality with the capital M from ethics in the conflicts of modernity because it seems that to me that you take it from Bernard Williams that he is quite the relativistic philosophers philosopher in many regards and he you seem to accuse modernity with thinking that the morality of modernity that more modernity thinks that the morality of modernity is the morality everywhere where it very whereas that's not so and this kind of seems to let overlap with what you have ascribed to Ruth verdict today so I think that many people might misunderstand you there in ethics of the conflicts of matter morality as more of a relativist than you might actually be as I seem to read some of your first actually I've been already asked in a in a peer review that you kind of criticizing universalism in moral universal in in that book so my question is a clarification whether you could clarify that in relation to today so thank you very much in my book I used the word morality with a capital M has the name of what I take to be the morality of contemporary advanced societies and I characterize that morality in such morality with the capital M in such a way that it becomes plain that this is what many contemporary moral philosophers take it the morality has to be that is to say the morality of contemporary societies I take to be a blend of an oscillation between a kind of Contin ism and a kind of utilitarianism now that's just one morality among the many Ruth Benedict confronted a situation in which the morality of her time was made to put very different in important ways from morality with a capital M Oh its historical predecessor and she was well aware that her contemporaries including her philosophical contemporaries took this to be what universal morality as such was but she quite rightly said no just this is the morality of one particular culture if you like the culture of people who happen to live in a particular part of New York this particular subculture so her a relative ization of what's taken to universal morality in time was I think quite correct and my treatment of morality with capital M involves a similar kind of relative ization that's right you can say thanks I can't hear ya trouble is I can't actually see let me lean forward yes Thank You woody hello my name is Ruby Chou and I'm an aspiring practical philosopher and intellectual historian and going to the origins of your lecturers wondering from your vantage point how could we draw on the resources of the Western and Chinese traditions in order to overcome the challenge from relativism to produce scholarship that would help show people that there is in fact a universal ethics I think that it's extremely important that people who have a well-developed moral culture should engage in to be able to engage in dialogue with people who represent quite different cultures if they don't aren't able so to engage unfortunate things happen let me give you an example there have been at various times immigration to the United States from China not just with individuals and families but official numbers of individuals and families together that they have constituted themselves within the United States as Chinese Americans who still carry forward immoral culture informed by among other things Confucian values and unfortunately when that has happened it has normally happened in such a way that there hasn't ensued a real conversation between that community and other American communities about the relationship between the values embodied in Confucian modes of thought and the values embodied in contemporary American way support and what about many other cases where it's important that those who inhabit one kind of moral culture do engage in conversation with neighbors and conversation that may result in the discovery of there were two unrealized common ground and also the discovery of hitherto unrecognized conflicts and then very interesting things happened that's the way youngsters who has to begin hi my name is Steve and Evanson I'm a student at the University of Notre Dame studying philosophy and theology I wonder if you could help clear up for me a perceived tension between two different claims that you have made I think in after virtue at one point you said that to be outside a tradition is to be I'm in a state of intellectual and moral destitution it's to be a stranger to inquiry and then today you in this talk you mentioned something to the effect of those outside traditions don't need to be existentialist they don't need to make a criterion list choice whether they can look at a tradition and ask them the TV effect of that will that tradition contribute to my flourishing will it be good for me am i misunderstanding those claims no I take it that someone who is genuinely outside a tradition I mean if a were such a person who's perhaps this would be in a rather helpless condition position when I talk today Miriam when I talk about me like I talked about somebody brought up in a situation in which they lived on the edge between two cultures their problem wasn't they had no traditions but they had to and the question was which way they should go and this was a situation that in fact many people in the culture I come from my own family faced two generations ago three generations ago when you had to decide are you going to go on speaking Irish or Scottish Balak are you going to go on inhabiting a particular kind of culture working on the farming and the fishing and doing various things or are you going to start being an English speaker and beginning the speaker is not a thing that I think is enormously nice actually I don't become an English speaker and take a road to different kinds of training different kinds of social relationship and here you put somebody who as as it were got to decide what their own good is having had an education up to a point that enables them to choose between them so this is a very different case from the case of the person I picked return after purchase thank you thank you father James Dominic Rooney from st. Louis University PhD student philosophy thank you very much for your talk I was wondering about a sort of a clarification of your position in the paper today it seemed to me one of the the points you've been making a number of times is that there's no standard common to two different traditions no common standard of rationality to decide between them because all standards of rationality are internal to a given tradition it seems like though the sort of difference between the Thomas Aristotelian in there and the relativist that you highlighted is that there is something that seems to be common to traditions to which the Aristotelian thinks there is some standard and it's the existence of human nature something like that I was prompted to think that it seems like in this case we have a parallel to for example in epistemology internal ISM and external ISM is sort of the parallel I came to there's no internal quality of my mental states that indicates that I have knowledge but it might be something there's some external reliability or something like that common to states that our knowledge so I guess I was wondering in this case it seems like the Aristotelian Thomas is positing a common standard for determining between traditions but what is the connection between that and the actual mode of deciding between traditions it seems like there is something like a common standard even though it's not a common internal standard of rationality something I'm very grateful to for asking that Western because it's a question that I get asked I've been asked out of every five years or so my career and it's a question which immediately makes it clear to me why I never call myself a toe mister sighs it only atomistic Aristotelian it is very clear that tome ism has by many domestic writers i all by many being developed in such a way that there should be on their view such a ground that in fact in principle at least everybody ought to be able to be made to recognize that the term is to count is true and then you have the interesting fact that number of people who are actually convinced by termism is minuscule and so why if in fact the term missed account provides a common ground for people to work out their differences and so on do people in fact not become feminists they manifestly don't and the answer is of course that actually there is not common but with common ground in the sense required I completely agree I think Aquinas is a counter to human nature I think it is the development of Aristotle that is in fact better than Aristotle I mean it gives us much more of what we need and Aristotle gives us and in this sense I believe that he discloses things about human nature which underlie my thesis which was in the background in this paper which I've developed elsewhere that people who are not Aristotelian czar in an important way in contradiction with themselves my last book I thought about this but I don't think that tourists have been able to provide a framework within which rational disagreements about human nature can be resolved and I think this is been simply shown by this proof of debate thank you I'm Paul radish and I'm at the Catholic University of America working on my PhD and in the talk thank you very much in the talk it seemed you use the the test case of lying quite a bit and and in your writing as well and I I wonder to what degree there are many other things we could have used other moral failings of other other virtues we could go against and I wonder if in in picking that as a test case it perhaps reveals something about us as human beings as far as I know there aren't any dolphins or wolves that participate in lying you know but they might they might do other things and and so I'm thinking of Robert so Sokolowski x' work on the the public nature of reason and participating in truth and as a as a side anecdote I understand that on the island of Cuba perhaps because of the conditions there someone made the comment that because of the official market and the black market and resources the word mentira though the Spanish word for lie has actually dropped out of the language that the assumption is that everyone is is not being truthful that everyone is doing whatever they have to do to survive and and so it's a very sad situation but but you made one comment in the about two-thirds of the way through the talk about truth-telling and the common good and so I'm fascinated by the relationship between the theoretic life and the conformity with truth and the role that that plays in in the common good I think the one very interesting thing philosophically is that discussions about the nature of among philosophers take place in one area of inquiry and discussions about truthfulness lying tend to take place in another area and the two don't get related and one of the most striking things about Aquinas his treatment of lying you'll notice that he thinks that the wrongness of a lie does not primarily or even at all necessarily have to do with the intention to deceive and that strikes some people who read him I think is very odd but what he wants to emphasize is the sheer importance of having true beliefs and even if I'm not intending to deceive if I intentionally say something that is false I am getting in the way of somebody being in possession of truth now why is it so important that people are in possession of the truth because without a shared possession of the truth we cannot have any other kind of satisfactory relationship if you and I are to agree on what our common goods are or how we should cooperate about our individual goods this can only be if we have a shared understanding of about each of us about the goods and so on and the for truthfulness becomes part of the virtue of justice that is in fact indispensable to any relationships that are going to be informed by an adequate understanding of the good and therefore truthfulness becomes has a quite different kind of importance than most people assigned to it it used to be the case that many people in Western cultures to call line to be wrong but they have lost sight of the rationality when Kant defended wrongness of all lying he why he didn't have to worry about people thinking look something wrong with that I mean that was then take a bull for granted but of course it very soon ceased to be taken for granted so I take it the absence of truthfulness that this place in the virtues is very important when I was preparing this talk I thought to myself should I at this point say something political I'm not an American citizen something which I'm enormously thankful though for it would be quite wrong I thought myself to say something political for example it would be quite wrong for me to suggest that either to vote Democrat or to vote Republican is to be a morally corrupt person who doesn't care about truth for us so I decided I wouldn't say that thank you hi I'm Chris Wolfe I teach politics at University of st. Thomas and you mentioned a prominent myth of autonomy in modern life is that a form of relativism or is that something that encourages a belief in relativism what I was talking about Hill and are you I used to work I don't remember I probably did use word myth yes I did and I think of this as a myth because it appears in various forms as a doctrine something much more worked out but what's crucial is the picture of I mean the back to the relativist go back to perfectly competent and good relative is the relative this says look here are all these different moralities or Benedict or your Harmon and you just provide these different things and then you talk about the individual having no good reasons to decide between them deriving their reasons and so they from the particular morality they happen to inhabit now the notion here is in one way perfectly okay but it suggests that the relativist who stands outside and looks at this is themselves not involved is autonomous has no commitments unless they happen to decide to have them and it's this that I was pointing towards does that make sense hello dr. McIntyre my name is twigs McGuire I'm coming from st. Louis University one thing that's come up several times in this conference is talk about the common good versus common goods and several people have said it's incredibly important for you that you talk about common goods versus the common good some I'm very curious to hear your your take on the difference between those two notions and similarity between them especially in life of some of the political comments you did not make today I mean I I hope I've got the point of the question there are there are many goods which can only be achieved as common goods let's take obvious example you play the flute or you play the saxophone and you want to play in an orchestra or a band and you want to gather with others to produce certain kinds of music that you take to be excellent and you are engaged with those others in achieving a goal and that achievement is a shared and common good indeed it becomes a shared good of those who listen to your playing as well as that so there are all these activities in which we join with others for goods that we cannot achieve on our own they cannot be merely individual goods because of the kind of activity and this is clearly the kind of good that is achieved in inquiries such as those of the sciences or philosophy whatever is achieved is achieved through individuals engaging in inquiry with each other and converse with each other and insofar as the good is achieved it is never Michael nor your good got a common good so the notion of common goods in the plural is totally hung mysterious now when we speak of the common good we can speak of the common good off and then we've got to put in whatever it is for common good off and here I will make any two remarks and we need to come out further very well both Aristotle and Aquinas think that there is such a thing as the common good of political society that a particular people have in the political inhabit in a political society that will their political life they should be aiming at achieving a common good which is the common good of all in this society hi al old and of course this is immensely controversial that the moment you introduce the state of the market in their modern forms you cease to have political society in the traditional sense and there is no such thing as the common good in the sense in which the once was but we may also speak and from time to time there is theological writers rightly speak about the common good of humankind and here again this is very clear that there is a notion of the common good which all other goods if they are real goods will contribute and insofar as something doesn't contribute to it it's not a good at all but both those thoughts need a lot more development than I'm able to get from here I have actually two questions but the first is just a clarification can't we distinguish between relativism de jure and relevance of de facto that you could prove that there is no way forward an argument there's nothing I could ever say that would move the art and forward moving to a different level talking about the the the effect of lying on the relations even when people aren't lying they can never make the kind of move seems extravagant ambitious and you know just unreasonable on the other hand there are many circumstances in which I know perfectly well but I might as well not make an argument because I'm going to dismissed as a member of the basket of deplorable or the dregs of society tea is two words that come to experience the talk about politics recently on the other hand there's some people that I think in the phrase of GMs gonna have a crop of mind either because they were brought up badly or because they've lived wicked lives and when these things happen we do have a kind of de facto relativism but we can't expect to be resolved the sight of jordan the second question is actually there's something worse than wine called why you can correct where there are websites devoted to fake news is a step beyond it is the normal discourse of academic administrators as well as many politicians and I am once making this argument I was accused of picking out a bomb up but I'm not a lots of other people who engage in and that strikes me as one step deeper into sin then anyone just playing garden-variety of why I answered you know this question to be welcome thank you um I have never met a de-facto relativist I recognized various forms of moral indeterminacy vagueness in people but I've met theoretical relativist too already theoretical rather twists while they were still undergraduates this is rare but it has happened but but being a relativist requires I mean any sort requires you to recognize that there are different what common cold frames of reference and being a de facto relativist would I suppose mean you would oscillate between these I've just never come across this I'm trying to imagine it I'm saying it that's all thank you my name is Tristan Rogers I teach philosophy at California State University my question has to do with so you've identified the problem of choosing between different moralities of different cultures so that's kind of an inter inter morality problem and you said a little bit about choosing between the moralities of a bicultural situation within a single society and my question is whether you think the same problem affects might affect a culture intercultural culture forward questions about how to improve the practices and institutions of the culture so do you think that's the same structurally the same kind of problem yes I mean I'm sure you're right about this the example I chose of someone brought up in a culture which is now squidding where people are going in different directions and where they have to choose which direction which to go but it's they obvious that in something that is a very well-developed culture that could be forms of conflict and mechanic your bizarre forms of conflicting cultures in which people would be forced to behave in a rather similar way and that support but I mean I wish I did but I wish we at the time now it was it were to develop this further but it seems to be an important board one that needs taking forward Thanks my name is Phil tamai I'm with the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and I want to talk a little bit about the relationship between the emphasis on truthfulness and the ability society to face certain problems I thought immediately when you mentioned the point in relation to Aquinas James Baldwin has a quote that goes along lines of something like one society is willing to lie to itself about certain things there's very little that it can talk about and and Collinwood also similarly has talks about the corruption of consciousness when truthfulness isn't really dealt with in a serious way the ability to correct it all breaks down both shared kind of a similar idea that the beginning the possible beginning of addressing this is with a certain kind of art certain kind of narrative art I want to see if you could talk a little bit about the possibility or the limitations of that to to address societies that may not be as committed to truthfulness good the can you've raised a very important question that would take a lot of work to get going but let's talk about why it's so important its characteristic of all cultures or August all that in any particular culture there will be things that don't get talked about now you learn not to talk about them and after a time you don't realize that you've learned not to talk about them and if these tabooed subject matters are in fact raised then people will in fact become evasive and very often untruthful in order to be evasive and this is something that I've written about in my paper on a social structure and moral agency where the example I give is that of the train driver in Nazi Germany who does his job as a for the railways in a routine way and never asks what his train is carrying over the years because just the question never gets raised by him and its objective not to raise it the connection between silence on certain subjects and untruthfulness about them is a variable I mean this is a very important one and it needs to raised in a very important way let me give an example it's a good way it's a it's good example but in a way it's about it bad to raise an example of raises so many questions the notion of racism is thrown about a good deal in our society and some people are accused of racism and others tend themselves against charges of racism and some people they clearly are are in every sense of the word racist but the problem with the whole discussion what he said about racism is there is a background to this namely the way in which in North American society now people's lives are organized so that by and large they are able to invade the facts about race relationships however people are able to behave 99% of the time as though these extraordinary facts about the relationship between race is a bad word for this between different even it don't even know what word is the best word to use between african-american communities Hispanic communities white communities so one very interesting question I mean of two questions that I would like to ask I like to ask Americans but I have the good sense not to one is during the course of your life how many strong relationships have you had with somebody who belongs to another ethnic group or how far do you lead your life within the confines or and there are of course places where people interact at work at school in a variety of ways then the interesting question is how far does this affect the fabric of their lives and overall that's the important question the second is an academic sort of question how many people here have ever read Albert Murray the question that people who've heard me talk with a burning ask before so there'll be some people who say I've heard al bukhari because I heard you asked this question before but put up your hands how many people here know who out what our ears good I mean that thing although Marie is possibly in my view the most important American writer of the late 20th century how about Marie was black he went to college with Ralph Ellington the novelist he went into the United States Air Force and finally retired with the rank of Major only in his little forties and with a pension that enabled him to become a writer and he wrote a great deal a very large book called the Omni Americans and run small but excellent book called the hero and the Blues and the thesis is a very simple one the thesis of the army Americans is that you aren't really an American unless you realized with part of your self you're a New England Yankee with particle self you're a bit Westerner of sorts and with particle self you're an african-american and unless you understand the relationship between these you won't understand what it is to be an American the hero and the blues explains why the Western culture begins with Sophocles it carries on in such a way that in the end the glue starts over again what self-police was doing and in fact you don't understand if you're an American what Western culture is unless you understand the whole inheritance from Sophocles to the blues and that are a dead now for a couple of decades but a very great writer indeed and I don't know if anyone who's ever read Albert Murray who doesn't think him highly important what's very interesting is people don't read him and they don't read him or talk about him because the thought would be too uncomfortable they took it seriously so I end without tribute to someone from whom I learned a very great deal indeed thank you [Applause] [Applause] well this I've shared a platform with for many occasions pressure magnet error and I've never found anybody who exceeds him with regard to generosity and clarity and helpfulness in answering questions as you show this once again today and thank you all and fresh marinara thank you for what you've all given us today thank you [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture ndethics

Views: 9,683

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, virtue, ethics

Id: Zr2uI3oJUT0

Length: 91min 56sec (5516 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 02 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Repentant_Revenant]

Listening to this surprisingly reminded me of Sam Harris' Moral Landscape. The only component Harris is missing is teleology, which is what this kind of objective morality lives or dies by.