Nathan Nobis

Rochester Philosophy

nobs@mail.rochester.edu

http://mail.rochester.edu/~nobs

Comments on Linda Zagzebski’s “The Incarnation and Virtue Ethics”

Society for Christian Philosophers meeting,

Saint John Fischer College, Rochester, NY, March 2-3, 2001.

Not just WWJD, but WWJDWJWD?[1]

Zagzebski’s paper ends with a passage from Iris Murdoch. While the character in the passage is Kant, who recognizes the sounds of the moral law as coming from “the voice of his own reason,” (p. 22) Murdoch’s message seems to be directed to anyone who accepts a “secular” ethic. We can understand her message as a warning: DO NOT reject theistic or Christian ethics; DO NOT fail to view Christ as the source of the moral law, for this rejection is (if I understand Murdoch correctly) one of the first steps down the road to Hell.

I will argue that Christians should take these first steps down this road (and, if fact, ride the slippery slope all the way down), but that this road is not the road to Hell. It’s the moral road that Christians should want to be on.

Christians profess to want to be like Jesus (p. 8). They want to do what Jesus would do. They want to have a character like Jesus’s. They see Jesus as (among other things) a moral exemplar and want to be like him.

This all is fine and good, but Zagzebski seems to suggest that a Christian (or, at least, a Christian philosopher or ethicist) should, not only do all this and be like this, but also have a “distinctively Christian ethical theory.” She dabbles between theory and anti-theory sentiments, but I think, in the end, she’s on the side of the theorists. Before we discuss what would make an ethical theory distinctively Christian, we should do a little to understand what ethical theories are.

There are many different ideas about what ethical theories are and what the “point” to developing them is. I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes by telling them what ethical theories really are or what the real point of ethics is, but here’s my view: ethical theories, first, are theories. Theories are, very roughly, things that we use to try to understand and explain stuff. The basic stuff or phenomena that we’re trying to understand and explain in ethics includes the nature of right and wrong, good and bad, virtue and vice, and so on. So, in doing ethical theory we’re trying to figure out what it is for an action to be right (or what makes right acts right), or what it is to be a person of good character, and what it is to be good or bad (or evil). There are many other concerns in ethics, but they tend to depend on these basic considerations that ethical theory addresses. Zagzebski says that in developing ethical theories, moral philosophers “aim to satisfy a purely intellectual desire, the desire to understand” (p. 4). But that’s not quite right. At least some people develop ethical theories because they want to find out how they should live their lives and, sometimes, doing philosophy is the best way to do this.

So what makes an ethical theory a distinctively Christian one? An ethical theory is distinctively Christian when it’s most basic or fundamental concepts or properties are those that have to do with Christ. So, here are some proposals for Christian ethical theories: regarding action, we might get the view that an action is right iff Christ would have done that act (if he were in your shoes, so to speak [?!?]; regarding character, we get that a character trait is a virtue just in case Christ displayed that trait (or would have, in your situation); regarding the goodness or badness of states of affairs, we get the view that something is good just in case Christ would be “motivated” to promote it. I think this is just another way to say that God would approve of it or be pleased by it. We could have another idea that makes use of Christ’s “narrative” or story. Question: “What should you do?” Answer: “You should do what would make your narrative, your story, most like Christ’s narrative or story (if he were you?!?).”

So, distinctively Christian ethics is a species of “virtue ethics,” a view that has gained some attention in recent decades, particularly among Christian philosophers. The idea is that considerations of virtue, character, and motive are the basic, fundamental concepts of a moral theory, and the rest of a moral theory, the parts that address the moral values of actions and states of affairs, are “derivative” or defined from these considerations about virtue.

Zagzebski thinks that Christians should adopt a Christo-centric virtue ethic. One reason of her’s seems to be an antecedent commitment to virtue ethics in general. While virtue ethics has some popularity, I am really not sure why, since there seems, to me, to be deep troubles for the view. I will discuss this soon.

A second reason seems to stem from concerns in developmental psychology and moral education. Both children and adults learn a lot from role models and through imitation. Virtue ethics says role models are important (so important that it builds a theory around them!), so virtue ethics is a good thing, Zagzebski argues (pp. 16-17). It’s true that role models are important and that we want children to imitate good people. Almost everyone should be able to agree with that. But, these facts about role models don’t seem to give a reason to think that virtue ethics is true. They gives reason to think that moral education should be virtue or character based (as many people think it should), but this is a separate issue from whether the broad virtue ethics project provides a true ethical theory.

A third reason is somewhat related to the previous but is reinforced with insights from Kripke and Putman’s work in philosophy language, specifically their theories of reference, as well as related views expressed by Aristotle. Very roughly, lets say that to successfully refer to a particular something is to talk about that thing or have that thing in mind. To use a crass but historical example (I’d rather do that then devise some outlandish example from a very distant possible world), how does one (if one were to do this) successfully refer to pornography or obscenity? A noteworthy response to this question was something like, “I don’t know, but I know it when I see it!” We can imagine this person saying this and pointing at something saying “There it is! Over there!” The point here is that even though this person couldn’t give a particularly good definition of what he was talking about—he’s never be able to define it for the dictionary, or produce an analysis that a philosopher couldn’t find a counterexample to—he knows what it is and can successfully talk about it.

Zagzebski thinks moral properties are often like this. Someone asks, “What’s a good person? What’s the definition of ‘virtuous person’?” Someone might reply, “Well, I can’t give you much of a definition, but I can point you to one.” Zagzebski thinks the Christian should be pointing to Jesus and the actions and character traits that he exhibited. She mentions other moral “saints” to point to as well. This seems right. However, it’s not totally clear what the point of this insight is. Everyone should be able to pretty much agree that we can identify sometimes good people and right actions by “pointing” them out. No plausible ethical theory says that in order even possibly discern what’s right and good, you have to have an articulated and developed ethical theory. The only view that might say that is a misinterpretation of Kant’s views. So, since the Kripke/Putnam/Aristotle insight is one that everyone can accept, it’s not clear how it provides any support for virtue ethics (or any ethical view).[2]

There are epistemological and metaphysical problems with this broad virtue-ethics view. A mistaken epistemological objection is that this kind of view wouldn’t be very helpful for hard moral dilemmas where it’s just not at all clear what Jesus would do or what his motives or character would be. But this seems to be a cheap objection since most plausible ethical theories are equally unhelpful in such cases. Here everyone hopes for the best, i.e., hopes that they are doing what their theory implies. So this objection is misguided.

On the other hand, if one wishes to build a theory based on Jesus’s life (and not so much what he said or his teachings), since Jesus’s life was so very different from most of our’s (e.g., he was unmarried, celibate, generally unemployed, and didn’t even make it to what we regard as middle age), it is very difficult to get an understanding of Jesus’s life to apply to many of our present moral concerns.[3]

A second epistemological objection is Kantian, if I remember Kant correctly. Zagzebski’s idea is that you’re looking to Jesus (or some ideal person, actual or hypothetical) to find out what’s right and good. But how do you know that Jesus is the one you should be looking at? Kant argued (maybe) that you would know to look to Jesus for moral guidance only if you knew that Jesus was a good person, and you’d know that only if you already had an idea of goodness (that you regarded as correct) to compare Jesus to and decide that he “fit” the mold. So, Zagzebski’s view is going to have to say something plausible about the epistemological bases one would have for choosing one’s moral exemplars (p. 14). If she wants to get these bases from “seeing” the exemplars, she might have problems.

The metaphysical objection to the “I can’t define to you what’s moral, but take a look at Jesus and you’ll see” approach, and ethical theory built around it, is this: it seems that Jesus was a good and virtuous person because he possessed, at a high-level, a set of good-making properties that make a person good and virtuous. Also, what Jesus did was right because his actions possessed right-making properties. While God, i.e., God the Father, did approve of or was “motivated” towards the Son’s actions, He did this because these actions were good, not because he approved of them. On (p. 18), Zagzebski seems to agree with, but this seems to just be denying virtue ethics in favor of another ethical theory’s approach.

It seems that the virtue ethics story is incompatible with these kinds of explanations because it has nothing outside of God’s approvals to “ground” any moral evaluations. So, the view (even in its non-theistic varieties of “ideal observer” theories) seems to fall prey to the kinds of problems that plague divine command theories in general; basically, either some kind of undesirable moral anti-realism or a view that doesn’t provide much understanding or explanatory power. While the “moral buck” probably has to stop somewhere, i.e., you eventually need to get to some kind of “brute” moral facts, I’m not satisfied that the kinds of moral facts virtue ethics appeals to are “brute” enough.

Zagzebski raises some difficult questions for her own view on some of these counts (p. 19), but responds that “We cannot expect a procedure for determining the answers to these questions.” All these seem to be serious questions that should be answered before anyone adopts a virtue ethics-based view. One might wonder if another non-virtue-based view would do the jobs that are said to be virtue ethics strengths—an explicit concern about character and motive—yet does not fall prey to such objections.

So, in conclusion, I’ve argued that nobody should be a virtue ethicist. So, nobody should be a virtue ethicist of a distinctively Christian flavor. If it’s true that, as Zagzebski holds, the only way to for a Christian to be a distinctively “Christian ethicist” is to be a Christo-centric virtue ethicist, then I would suggest that Christians who do ethics should just be Christians that do ethics, but not wear the label “Christian ethicists”. And I think they can avoid the road to hell in doing so.[4]