social ethics questions

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Launchpad: Summary of Historical Transition to Our Modern Period Summary and Review of Virtue Ethics Last week we asked the question, what is it that makes us truly human rather than a mere animal like any other? We share certain biological needs with all other animals, and in meeting these basic needs we even share certain social and communicative traits with other species. But, according to the Aristotelian notion of humanity as a “political animal”, what makes our social nature distinctively human is our higher capabilities for creating, organizing, planning, deliberating, and sharing our social surplus in new ways that allows all members to transcend a life of mere biology, no longer enslaved like a worker bee to a given role and class position. This is the progressive kernel of virtue ethics that breaks with Aristotle's own biases and blind spots, and points toward a robust form of social justice oriented around our needs for developing these higher capabilities. This week we will read two short essays by contemporary virtue ethicists, Martha Nussbaum and Alasdair MacIntyre, who attempt to liberate this progressive kernel from Aristotle’s own day and apply it to ours. To highlight their contribution, let’s first provide a brief summary outline of virtue ethics and then flesh it out.

Virtue ethics begins with a notion of human nature as inherently social and rational, with higher capabilities for political planning and community building. The virtues are about those necessary practices and habits needed for developing these higher capabilities and their associated qualities.

This is different from certain modern Western notions of human nature as we will see, which often view humanity as a mere consuming animal with no higher capabilities to realize.

Virtue ethics is concerned with not only practices that allow individuals and collectives to mutually flourish, but also with the necessary material and institutional conditions of possibility for such practices to develop—those ways of providing

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external goods necessary for realizing higher internal goods: as social animals we can only fully flourish as unique individuals within healthy societies that encourage such.

This is why Martha Nussbaum’s virtue ethics approach concerns itself so much with the politics of distributing goods, which we will see in her essay this week.

The common good is then about the need we all have to meet not only basic necessities, but to meet these material needs in a way that allows for developing our higher capabilities for socially creative self-determination (how else would we become empowered for becoming democratic citizens, capable of actively ruling together without also the social support for such?) Justice is always social since it pertains to the meeting of real human needs for external and internal goods, i.e., basic and higher goods of individual and collective self-realization.

Moving forward: Justice for virtue ethics is best summed up as justice- according-to-need. This is an important concept of justice that will contrast with certain modern notions. Justice here means meeting the diversity of needs so that each person can equally share in the common good according to their own unique capabilities. It is opposite of those strictly punitive notions of retributive justice such as "an eye for an eye".

As briefly mentioned last week, Martin Luther King, in his last book “Where do We go from Here?”, argued explicitly for an “Aristotelian sense” of justice against certain modern notions of abstract justice as a kind of flattening equality that erases differences (where each is given the same amount regardless of actual needs). As he stated, this is because the Aristotelian sense of justice meant holistically meeting the diversity of real needs that real people, especially those marginalized, have for their social, economic, and political empowerment. We will discuss this more in a few weeks when we look at issues of racial inequality.

Justice within an Aristotelian framework then means understanding the economy as serving the objective needs for individual and collective flourishing rather than exclusively for private profit. Indeed, can a democratic society survive long term without more equally distributing goods for pursuing the good life together in a community of mutual flourishing? Can it survive if distinctively human qualities are not

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able to be pursued for their own sake in a diversity of expressions: e.g. dancing, playing, creating, researching, exploring, learning, socializing, loving?

For contemporary virtue ethics everything then hinges on the distinctively higher capabilities in our human nature, since developing and realizing these higher social qualities are what make for the good life. Alasdair MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum both carry forward, in a more critically nuanced way, an Aristotelian conception of our inherently social and rational capabilities as political animals. Thus, they both focus virtue ethics on transformative practices at a grassroots level that cultivate our distinctive capacity for “practical reason”—that capability to rationally discuss and consciously plan new forms of cooperative social relations around the common Good of individual and collective self-determination. It is important to see how their appeal to humanity’s common power of “practical reason” and its connection to the “common good” challenges how these seemingly commonplace terms are casually used in everyday discourse, often with very different meanings: think about how often "practical reason" reductively refers to an uncritical pragmatism of "whatever works", or think about how frequently a notion of “the common good” is rhetorically twisted for narrow commercial or nationalist purposes, often to manipulate our needs and desires for belonging and wholeness. So, how do these contemporary virtue theorists appeal to “practical reason” and the “common good” in a way that critically challenges the typical rhetorical spin?

Practical Reason

MacIntyre and Nussbaum both refer to humanity as inherently social and political animals who possess a distinctive capability for “practical reason” as that which makes us truly human. But what exactly do they mean by “practical reason”?

“Practical reason” is our ability to consciously plan our lives together around higher rational ends (end goals) beyond mere survival. It is "architectonic" as Nussbaum said because it is that capacity we have that allows us to organize all of our other functions around higher ideals so that we are no longer slaves to biological instincts, impulses and drives.

Here they are drawing on a distinct philosophical tradition that understands “reason” not as a mere tool like a calculating device in our heads, but rather

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as a way of life and thus a practice. And in understanding reason as a practice that we do together in order to better organize our lives together, they understand reason as inherently social.

Reason is not just an indifferent calculating tool or program hard-wired in our heads, but a practice for realizing the highest needs of community building As a practice, reason then is not just a cognitive function, but a social activity, an organizing power that we develop and only improve through socializing, dialoguing, cooperating and deliberating about individual and common goods. As a social practice reason is not a neutral capacity, but rather a purposeful capacity always oriented to the task of cooperatively determining those new and higher social ends we all share beyond basic needs and private preferences--it is therefore that capacity we have to reflect on and formulate ideas about the common good. This conception of reason as inherently practical and social therefore refers to our rational capacity as an emancipatory social practice—that capability we have to plan and create a more just society of mutual flourishing.

Practical reason here then stands opposed to what has come to dominate our modern times: a notion of reason detached from practice, social activity, ultimate purposes, and the Common good, and what is reductively referred to instead as instrumental reason (for which utilitarianism is an example as we will later see)

“Instrumental rationality” as opposed to “practical reason”: instrumental rationality holds that reason is merely a blank tool within our cognitive hardware with no general orientation to higher ends. Thus reason is not a higher capability for creating, choosing, and pursuing new rational ends beyond lower needs, it is not a capacity inherently oriented to a common good.

As a mere tool, reason does not itself choose new rational ends but is only an indifferent mechanism we use to calculate the most efficient means to predetermined biological needs, irrational tendencies, and private preferences (whatever they might be). Within this framework humanity is understood to have no universal goals, ends, or purposes but is rather only an aggregate of private

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individuals with differing tastes. This philosophical tradition of instrumental reason is a newer modern view, best summed up by certain philosophers:

David Hume: “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” Bertrand Russell: “Reason has a perfectly clear and precise meaning. It signifies the choice of the right means to an end that you wish to achieve. It has nothing whatever to do with the choice of ends”

Notice the difference: "practical reason" refers to our ability to overcome and move beyond compulsions by rationally formulating new and higher ends, whereas "instrumental reason" claims that we will always be slaves to compulsions, which means our ends are already determined for us by lower instincts and we can only try to more efficiently manage them. This instrumentalist view of reason is born exclusively from within our marketplace ethos: how to calculate and negotiate private self-interests rather than collectively deliberate about and determine our individual interests in relation to a common good that could transform our selfishness toward healthy forms of individuality.

The common good is obscured since the practical reasoning of producing together for individual/social needs (social use value) is overtaken by privatizing production for whatever trends are demanded by the market (producing for exchange values as occasion for private profit). Thus, reason is not for discovering the common good together (that’s left instead to market trends), but a mechanical/calculating device used for negotiating private irrational interests and finding whatever efficient means might best serve the private ends of money-making.

With this obscuring of any sense of the common Good, or anything regarding common goals, ends, or purposes, the notion of the "good" is now reduced to only external consumer goods, i.e. the many private irrational consumer preferences which do battle within the competition of the marketplace

--but don't we share certain higher objective needs that are objective precisely because they're more than mere arbitrary preferences?

Instrumental reason then assumes that human nature is purely selfish, with no ability to transcend private self-interest and deliberate about new

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and higher common goods (much like the Sophists held earlier in the Greek marketplace). Yet within our capitalist society and its instrumental reason, as we will further explore throughout the quarter, it seems a universal goal nevertheless remains undemocratically chosen for us. Could it be that our society uncritically accepts the end of accumulating private profit by any means as a universal goal? Could it be that we've allowed all our economic activities and individual consumer preferences to be ordered toward this end by the supposedly "invisible hand" of the market? These are questions to take with us.

Thus, without “practical reasoning” toward a common good, as MacIntyre and Nussbaum have pointed out throughout their writings, market exchange and monetary accumulation tends to take over as the only commonality. If money is the only universally shared measure of value in a thoroughly marketized society, with its pursuit as the only universally shared goal of humanity, it then becomes difficult to provide a more meaningful sense of “rights” beyond just the right to the irrational ends of consumerism and private self-interests—the right to be selfish (as we saw with Aristotle’s analysis, the accumulation of money for its own sake tends toward social fragmentation and the consolidation of the common wealth into the hands of a few, thus undermining the very idea of a society built around a dignifying sense of universal rights oriented to a substantive good life).

The Common Good

One of the main difficulties within our capitalist society is then figuring out how to build toward a common good that is more than just the common goal of money-making. Moreover, how do we pursue a notion of the common good that avoids falling into the reactionary tendencies that try to define the “common” good narrowly according to particular group memberships? If instrumental reason does not concern itself with ends or common goals, then it can be easily manipulated for any private or exclusionary nationalist/racist notions of the common good.

Against this capture of the common good by the instrumental rationality of either money or reactionary group exclusions, MacIntyre’s and Nussbaum’s work provides a

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more inclusive and expansive account of the common good based in our universal capacity for practical reason.

The reference to the common good within their contemporary virtue ethics is distinguished from superficial/reactionary rhetoric by its connection to the aforementioned sense of practical reason as a universally shared emergent power or capability to collectively create and choose new, higher ends:

we might all look different, speak different languages, have different cultural heritages, and hold different tastes, but we all have the ability to cooperatively reason about and creatively work toward a new goal of a more inclusive and diverse society in which no one has to be permanently relegated to the marginalizing statuses of slave/worker-bee/outcast.

Ethno-nationalist/racist appeals to a common good are inherently exclusionary by basing commonality on pre-rational, unchosen, unquestioned bonds of particular phenotypes, blood, soil, or a single authoritative cultural heritage, and seeking only what is “good” for preserving and protecting these characteristics against others outside them, upholding these particular traits as if they universally stood for humanity. In justifying their violent exclusionary sense of the common “good”, Ethno- nationalism/racism often appeal to social Darwinist fictions about absolute scarcity and survival of the fittest, which require necessary violence and sacrifice to protect and purify a pre-chosen group of humanity. But this simply perpetuates the belief that humans are blindly given to the fate of lower forms of brute nature, thus suppressing our higher socially creative capacities.

In this way exclusive ethno-nationalist/racist appeals deny any truly “common” good, but it is important to understand what they are denying: our universally shared practical reason that transcends our particularities —that higher socially creative capacity we all have to reorganize our production and sharing of the social surplus in such a way, beyond scarcity and violent competition, so as to make possible ever greater communities of integrated complexity and diversity.

For MacIntyre and Nussbaum, the “common good” for virtue ethics is therefore not found in particular genetic lineages, pregiven traits, majority rules, or handed down from a privileged cultural elite, but rather discovered from below within the ordinary

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work of people building communities of mutual flourishing together and the intentional planning and democratic deliberation that this involves.

The common good does not then look like uniformity and homogeneity but rather new forms of unity in diversity, new ways of including others by creating and sharing abundance together for the ever-growing diversity of needs. Virtue ethics for MacIntyre and Nussbaum emphasizes that because humanity has the higher capabilities to do such, there is then no excuse not to.

Since virtues are about empowering our most distinctive capabilities of practical reason to discover this common good of mutual flourishing together, it is not then about conforming to given, fixed roles in society. It is not about developing a specific skill set but rather a broad social capacity for individual and collective self-determination that can adjust the division of labor to humanity's own growing social needs (so that no one must remain as a worker bee).

Instead of conformity to social roles, contemporary virtue theorists such as MacIntyre and Nussbaum emphasize the need to critically transform social roles to the end goal of a holistic development of human lives (to build societies in which no one is treated as a mere tool for capital or a pawn to nationalist myths, but liberated to realize themselves as active citizens who know how to rule together).

This is an important point taken up by feminists such as Nussbaum, since if to be human is to have the distinctive power to rationally plan and create new forms of living together rather than to blindly accept biological determinism or conventional views, then society's productive and reproductive activity should be consciously organized so that no woman should feel tied to supposedly fixed biological imperatives or patriarchally defined social roles.

We will see that for virtue ethics, especially in the examples given by Alasdair MacIntyre and then in Ron Finley (in the case study video), to build a community of active participants who discover their common good together means to start from the grassroots of productive activity—communities that work together to provide for each other are more able to develop the internal capacities for deciding on the common good together. In order to produce together for social needs, there is then a need to take back common lands, common resources, common wealth, as well as a common

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notion of humanity as social rather than individualistic consumers, in order to begin taking back our higher common power for collective and individual self-determination.

Also, in thinking about the distribution of goods and resources, pay close attention to Martha Nussbaum's critique of what she calls preference-based (utilitarian) and rights- based (deontology) approaches to distribution and inequality since this provides our first look at utilitarian and deontological perspectives. In the background of her critique is that Aristotelian sense of real wealth versus false wealth, as well as the Aristotelian notion of justice-according-to-need rather than justice-as-homogenizing-fairness. We will have more to say about this sense of justice moving forward.

Background History to our Modern times This week we will do some background reading to our modern times, so that we are ready for Week 4 and beyond. Here we are simply setting the stage for the rest of the quarter. Because our modern society no longer has an economic system that is oriented around social use values, nor a politics that is oriented to a common good, we want to get a sense of how this came about. Why did modern ethics shift away from a more robust sense of the common good and practical reason as seen from our nature as socially creative, and why did it begin understanding values instead as nothing more than subjective preferences with no objective grounding in real human needs? To understand how these shifts in ethics came about, we must begin by looking at some of the historical consequences of the rise of Western capitalism in its treatment of nature and humanity. Understanding this problematic side of our history, however, should not encourage us to accept it as fate or to remain pessimistically jaded and cynical; rather we want to understand the difficulties of our history so that we can better change and move beyond them. This means especially analyzing how our economic shifts, while bringing much good, also led to such current levels of environmental degradation and social inequality. We cannot change our present for the better if we don’t know how we got here and the recurring hidden costs of that route.

Below are some brief summaries of the two historical articles:

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Carolyn Merchant: As a result of a society increasingly organized around privatizing the social means of production purely for market exchange and private profit, Merchant highlights how the modern West became obsessed with machine technology for pumping out goods exclusively for making money and turning a profit (rather than for real social needs). This in turn led to a myopic view of nature and human beings as nothing other than resources and machines to be commodified and exploited for private interests. This not only meant nature was no longer viewed as an organic community holding inherent value, meaning, or purpose, but also that human nature was understood as no longer holding higher capabilities beyond mere individualistic consumption, instead reduced to a pure pleasure machine. Correspondingly, as all social relations were increasingly funneled through impersonally competitive commercial transactions—most crucially human labor sold for a wage—society itself came to be viewed as also an artificial machine made up of an aggregate of competing individuals as if non-related, self-absorbed atoms, rather than an interrelated organic whole oriented around higher qualities.

Julia Ott: With the emergence of a growing marketization of society that treats nature and laborers as mere commodifiable stuff, and maximizes profit by increasingly trying to run down the cost of land and labor, this led to the massive devaluing of human life and the largest commercialized chattel slave trade in recorded history. The Transatlantic slave trade, as Ott argues, was not an accidental feature external to the emergence of capitalism, as if a leftover from a previous era, but historically it arose as a new directive from within the imperatives of capital accumulation itself. If slavery in the past was often considered a luxury item gained from the spoils of war and thus somewhat limited in its growth, within the early days of capitalism the slave trade grew like never before because it was now a central part of an economic system that served no other end than profit maximization precisely through the commodification of labor and unlimited capital accumulation. That is, the theft of black bodies from Africa seems to have been driven largely by the very logic of capital itself: the hunt for the cheapest form of labor possible, privately owned as commodifiable property, that can nevertheless generate the greatest output possible for market exchange. The accumulation of slaves—and especially for the growing cotton industry—Ott then argues, was the very productive source (capital) that allowed capitalism to not only get off the ground, but leap toward accumulating vast amounts of wealth whose

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consequences are still felt (as we will explore more in Week 6). There is no greater event in history for understanding the origins of our modern anti-black racism than the Transatlantic slave trade and its connection to the growth of our capitalist society.