Neo-aristotelean! Sorry, that's really flippant. You have such tendencies, because you emphasize ethics as practise, and take the awesomely Nussbaumian stance that the best kind of ethical training is training in which you are somehow forced to project your imagination into the other.
I'm a little self-conscious writing about ethics on this journal because I know that my formal coverage of it is very weak even though it's being read by people like you who study this stuff basically for a living. Is it irritating, as a reader, to read amateurish stuff in your field?
I think I'd agree with your last substantive paragraph, substituting "mythology" for "religion". Nussbaum develops an extensive theory of dramatic tragedy... essentially, certain forms of art can force a person into considering the position of others... if this is all you're looking for (something which teaches you compassion), then what we really need is a form of mythology that does this while integrating itself into our core cultural values.
That's interesting. After reading your recent post to your own journal, I've got a slightly better idea of what you mean here, and I'm less squeamish about it than I was on your first reading.
This is certainly not what I meant--I wasn't sure if you meant your comment to be a closely connected thought or paraphrase, but when I said "religion" was referring specifically to the institutions and practice of religion, not the mythology of it.
As for mythology, I'm wary about this idea, but that may be only because of the connotations of the term to me--superstition, falsehood, etc. Certainly, believing God will reward/punish you is a good motivator for moral behavior, but I don't think we want a return to that. And even a similar mythology that was designed for a different purpose--teaching compassion through identification with the characters, say--might not be worth the cost of having a pervasive cultural lie.
But when you frame "mythology" as literature, I'm much less on my guard, and am intrigued. How does Nussbaum make this work? What does she use to verify this theory? It looks to me like a descriptive psychological claim, so my first inclination here is to ask about the evidence. But it does seem plausible to me regardless, especially in light of the past week.
Does Nussbaum see this as informing any normative questions about whether/why compassion is a good thing? Or does it assume that teaching compassion is a good thing and work instrumentally from there?
And yes: these are ancient ideas, mainly forgotten in the west until Aristotle was rediscovered... again.
It's funny--I tend to be very skeptical of ancient ideas, largely because my first exposure to philosophy were political theory survey courses in which my immediate reaction to the first two thousand years of progress was "this is terribly wrong and poorly argued." So the only Aristotle I've read is the first part of the Politics, where he uses teleology to defend slavery. It was a turn off.
Now I think I may have to read his ethics, but it sounds like Nussbaum and others have managed to get a virtue ethics off the ground without the teleological crap that bothered me so much about A (and which, so far, seems absent from what little I know of Confucian ethics...) Any recommendations on contemporary virtue ethics?
it's being read by people like you who study this stuff basically for a living. Is it irritating, as a reader, to read amateurish stuff in your field?
*gasp* Oh, man. I am no expert. And I also forget that not everyone has taken mythology courses: yeah, myth=some sort of culturally central story. Here, read this, and ignore the fact that he sounds like a bit of a fruitcake in the first paragraph:
I kind of hate the way Aristotle is taught in most schools. I learned him the same way: look at his physics! It's nonsense! Look at his misogyny! His pro-slavery! It's like... tiny portions of his overall thought are extracted and analyzed from a modern perspective, without taking into account either the cultural context or the bigger issues he tackles. Yeah he thought slavery was OK... so did everyone else.
Okay so: essentially, Plato rules the roost in modern ethical theory. Both utilitarianism and kantianism have generally adopted his value monism, much to their detriment. They also seem to aim at some kind of perfection, where conflict is nonexistent and everyone holds pretty much the same values: this originated in Plato (see the Republic and the argument for raising children and holding wives communally). This was A's fundamental counter-point: conflict is part of what makes life ethically valuable, value pluralism reflects the way human beings actually are.
What neo-aristoteleans are trying to do is, in the face of what Nietzsche called these "world-hating" platonic attitudes, bring human reality back into the picture. They are trying to resist the reduction of the ethical life to a set of systematically justifyable propositions/reasons. I think to label this whole project "virtue ethics" is misleading... it's to suggest that it simply replaces the usual theoretical entities (kant's reason, mill's happiness) with a list of requisite character traits or virtues. This is to miss the point: one of the first things Aristotle says in the Nichomachean Ethics is that we are not dealing with a precise science, so any attempt to give such an enumeration will not only fail, it will distract us from the real project: making good people.
Lest that sound question-begging, Nussbaum argues that ritual mythical experience (usually in the form of tragedy) develops that most fundamental virtue: compassion or empathy. When you realize that Oedpius has unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, you're supposed to (putting yourself in his shoes) realize how fragile life is, how difficult it is to lead the good life, given all the things that are completely beyond your control. I'll send you my just-finished paper on this if you like.
The more real this mythical experience is for you, the more profound the effect will be (my thought here), so I think modern technology gives us a wonderful opportunity to create and sustain powerful mythologies. However, as Appy and Mendy love to point out, the very worldview that created those technologies is the same one that de-mythologized the world... so that when people walk out into the forest, all they see is a bunch of trees.
In the end, this isn't a refutation of the usual ethical theories, it's a changing of the subject. And I'm not sure I'm totally on board, but to quote Bernard Williams, "I think it's at least in the right part of the field." So, my ears perked up when you spoke of ethics as training or practise. It's probably high time that ethical philosophy got back into this idea... it's been thousands of years of being told to follow sets of rules, without regard to the kind of person you actually are, and how good you are at caring for others.
I'm a little self-conscious writing about ethics on this journal because I know that my formal coverage of it is very weak even though it's being read by people like you who study this stuff basically for a living. Is it irritating, as a reader, to read amateurish stuff in your field?
I think I'd agree with your last substantive paragraph, substituting "mythology" for "religion". Nussbaum develops an extensive theory of dramatic tragedy... essentially, certain forms of art can force a person into considering the position of others... if this is all you're looking for (something which teaches you compassion), then what we really need is a form of mythology that does this while integrating itself into our core cultural values.
That's interesting. After reading your recent post to your own journal, I've got a slightly better idea of what you mean here, and I'm less squeamish about it than I was on your first reading.
This is certainly not what I meant--I wasn't sure if you meant your comment to be a closely connected thought or paraphrase, but when I said "religion" was referring specifically to the institutions and practice of religion, not the mythology of it.
As for mythology, I'm wary about this idea, but that may be only because of the connotations of the term to me--superstition, falsehood, etc. Certainly, believing God will reward/punish you is a good motivator for moral behavior, but I don't think we want a return to that. And even a similar mythology that was designed for a different purpose--teaching compassion through identification with the characters, say--might not be worth the cost of having a pervasive cultural lie.
But when you frame "mythology" as literature, I'm much less on my guard, and am intrigued. How does Nussbaum make this work? What does she use to verify this theory? It looks to me like a descriptive psychological claim, so my first inclination here is to ask about the evidence. But it does seem plausible to me regardless, especially in light of the past week.
Does Nussbaum see this as informing any normative questions about whether/why compassion is a good thing? Or does it assume that teaching compassion is a good thing and work instrumentally from there?
And yes: these are ancient ideas, mainly forgotten in the west until Aristotle was rediscovered... again.
It's funny--I tend to be very skeptical of ancient ideas, largely because my first exposure to philosophy were political theory survey courses in which my immediate reaction to the first two thousand years of progress was "this is terribly wrong and poorly argued." So the only Aristotle I've read is the first part of the Politics, where he uses teleology to defend slavery. It was a turn off.
Now I think I may have to read his ethics, but it sounds like Nussbaum and others have managed to get a virtue ethics off the ground without the teleological crap that bothered me so much about A (and which, so far, seems absent from what little I know of Confucian ethics...) Any recommendations on contemporary virtue ethics?
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*gasp* Oh, man. I am no expert. And I also forget that not everyone has taken mythology courses: yeah, myth=some sort of culturally central story. Here, read this, and ignore the fact that he sounds like a bit of a fruitcake in the first paragraph:
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC12/Campbell.htm
I kind of hate the way Aristotle is taught in most schools. I learned him the same way: look at his physics! It's nonsense! Look at his misogyny! His pro-slavery! It's like... tiny portions of his overall thought are extracted and analyzed from a modern perspective, without taking into account either the cultural context or the bigger issues he tackles. Yeah he thought slavery was OK... so did everyone else.
Okay so: essentially, Plato rules the roost in modern ethical theory. Both utilitarianism and kantianism have generally adopted his value monism, much to their detriment. They also seem to aim at some kind of perfection, where conflict is nonexistent and everyone holds pretty much the same values: this originated in Plato (see the Republic and the argument for raising children and holding wives communally). This was A's fundamental counter-point: conflict is part of what makes life ethically valuable, value pluralism reflects the way human beings actually are.
What neo-aristoteleans are trying to do is, in the face of what Nietzsche called these "world-hating" platonic attitudes, bring human reality back into the picture. They are trying to resist the reduction of the ethical life to a set of systematically justifyable propositions/reasons. I think to label this whole project "virtue ethics" is misleading... it's to suggest that it simply replaces the usual theoretical entities (kant's reason, mill's happiness) with a list of requisite character traits or virtues. This is to miss the point: one of the first things Aristotle says in the Nichomachean Ethics is that we are not dealing with a precise science, so any attempt to give such an enumeration will not only fail, it will distract us from the real project: making good people.
Lest that sound question-begging, Nussbaum argues that ritual mythical experience (usually in the form of tragedy) develops that most fundamental virtue: compassion or empathy. When you realize that Oedpius has unwittingly killed his father and married his mother, you're supposed to (putting yourself in his shoes) realize how fragile life is, how difficult it is to lead the good life, given all the things that are completely beyond your control. I'll send you my just-finished paper on this if you like.
The more real this mythical experience is for you, the more profound the effect will be (my thought here), so I think modern technology gives us a wonderful opportunity to create and sustain powerful mythologies. However, as Appy and Mendy love to point out, the very worldview that created those technologies is the same one that de-mythologized the world... so that when people walk out into the forest, all they see is a bunch of trees.
In the end, this isn't a refutation of the usual ethical theories, it's a changing of the subject. And I'm not sure I'm totally on board, but to quote Bernard Williams, "I think it's at least in the right part of the field." So, my ears perked up when you spoke of ethics as training or practise. It's probably high time that ethical philosophy got back into this idea... it's been thousands of years of being told to follow sets of rules, without regard to the kind of person you actually are, and how good you are at caring for others.
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