Justice as Intrinsic & Instrumental in Plato's Republic

I am interested in the relationship between justice as a means and as an end because those aspects separately and their standing with respect to one another are integrally—that is to say inseparably—involved in how we think about ethics generally and in specific cases.

For instance, recent, disturbing race-related violence by police officers toward certain citizens in the United States and then the assassination of 5 Dallas officers and the wounding of many other police and civilians raised complicated questions about what is right, fair, and valuable in itself, about the nature and extent of contemporary prejudices, and about the use of violence in service of conceptions of justice.  Similarly, the recent decision by the U.S. Justice Department and its Federal Bureau of Investigation not to indict Hillary Clinton despite the overwhelming evidence of her violations of standard federal security procedure strikes many observers as unjust. This is so not only because the decision seems to contravene obvious desert (the FBI does not doubt what she did), but also because, notwithstanding Director Comey’s (knowingly erroneous) denial that positive intention is required for a violation of the law, it raises questions about whether some supposedly greater purpose like social and political harmony in an election year outweighs the upholding of the law for its own sake or even as a deterrent to future security mismanagement.  Is justice, we might wonder, something good in itself and to be pursued for that reason, or because of the ranked purposes that it may serve?

United States citizens in 2016 are not the first persons or society to entertain these questions.  The ancient Greeks anticipated contemporary Anglophones in this as in many areas, particularly Plato.  It may be timely and to our profit then to ask this:  Is justice in his Republic an intrinsic and an instrumental good, as Socrates promises to prove to his interlocutors? Or does he only show that it is an instrumental good, in which case Glaucon's ventrilloquism for Thrasymachus (i.e., voicing the latter’s position for the sake of argument) is more on the mark?

In what follows I wish to explore this important question about justice as an instrumental and a final good through the lens of Plato’s Republic.  Socrates contends that justice is both intrinsic and instrumental.  How does he argue for that conclusion? How might this help contemporary societies understand both justice and the proper relation and pursuit of various ethical, social, and political goods?

The Flourishing of Alasdair MacIntyre

In Conversations on Ethics (2009), the discussion that Alex Voorhoeve has with Alasdair MacIntyre is perhaps as good an entry into the vast corpus of the latter's thinking as anything available in his own words of comparable length.

In the discussion, Prof. MacIntyre explains how and why he came to regard Aristotelian philosophy (supplemented by Thomas Aquinas) as essentially correct.  I am most interested in the Scottish philosopher's idea of human flourishing, or excellence -- what Aristotle called eudaimonia -- and its relation to practical intelligence, or phronēsis. This topic, the intersection of eudaimonia and phronēsis, of flourishing and practical wisdom, is particularly relevant to this blog.  Its title is, after all, Feeding Phronēsis.

My reading of MacIntyre has broadened and deepened (and I hope been more finely tuned) since I first began this post two years ago.  The draft has lain in abeyance for that long despite my intent to return to and polish it.  Rather than start afresh now in exploring Prof. MacIntyre on practical rationality, let me revisit what he has to say principally in his particularly thorough conversation with Voorhoeve.  In due course in the future I am sure that I will return to reflect more critically and constructively on other intersections of MacIntyre's thinking and my own, especially on practical rationality.

At present, what follows is in many respects my attempt to assemble critical elements of MacIntyre's account of flourishing and practical rationality.  It is largely descriptive because it is largely an exercise in mental organization.  I find compelling in MacIntyre's discussion the limits of moral rules, the necessity of wisdom, the embeddedness of human flourishing in practices of communities and traditions, the unavoidability of dependency on others (especially friends), and the storied nature of flourishing as a quest.

Emotions & Morals, pt. 5b: Reflections -- British Sense Theorists

Hutcheson, Hume, and Smith in their own distinctive ways were attempting to explore what counts as moral and -- although less explicitly or directly in their writings -- what should count as moral.  They did so by seeking to discover how human psychology worked and by giving due attention to the observation that we humans respond to moral matters powerfully and initially with our emotions.  They were engaging in an interdisciplinary study of ethics and psychology in light of Newton's recent findings of natural laws, and they saw a connection between the way that humans worked and what was proper or fitting for them to do or say in certain situations.  The precise basis for their normative claims is open to question, and the mechanics of human moral psychology are still being explored three hundred years later.

As I reflect on the relationship between emotions and morals through these three British sense theorists, an important consideration emerges, which is the nature of an emotion and its power in and over humans.  Hume seems to view emotions, or passions, as equivalent to but distinct from physical sensations, which is why he posits a separate faculty to process their moral content.  Emotions for him are given in the way that perception of an apple on a table is given. Are they really sensations like that?  Smith seems to have recognized that our feelings are not just given; they are malleable.  That is the basis, in fact, for his view of sympathy, or imaginative exchange with another person, and the device of an impartial spectator to evaluate and to question what was the proper passion to feel morally in a particular situation.  Smith's goal was emotional conformity to the impartial spectator's objective moral assessment of propriety and, to a secondary extent, utility.

Among many things that could be said, let me, in conclusion, mention only two. One relates to the passivity or activity of emotions, and the other pertains to the  narrative structure that emotions imply are connected to ethics.

Emotions & Morals, pt. 5a: Reflections -- British Sense Theorists

Since introducing this short series of posts on the interplay between emotions and morals, I have taken a brief look at how the major British moral sense theorists -- Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith -- addressed that question. It is now time for some reflections, which I will break up into two parts.

Each of the moral theories of these thinkers is subject to critique.  It is worthwhile to mention some limitations.  For the most part, however, I want to focus on what I think is perceptive and valuable in these theories and to note some areas that I think deserve additional consideration both in their own right and in their potential application to life.

Emotions & Morals, pt. 4: Adam Smith -- British Sense Theorists

Adam Smith is the last of the three major British moral sense theorists that we will examine in this series.  Smith was a friend of David Hume's, whom we discussed last time. Smith, much like Hume before him, saw himself engaged in moral science, the empirical description of how we as humans think about morals, how we make moral judgments, and how we assess the motivations, words, and actions of others.

Emotions & Morals, pt. 3: David Hume -- British Sense Theorists

Francis Hutcheson importantly influenced fellow Scot David Hume, although Hume would argue against Hutcheson's particular view of benevolent affections (see prior post on Hutcheson here). Before analyzing closely some places where Hume's moral theory differs from that of his mentor Hutcheson, what, first, is the main area of agreement between them?

Emotions & Morals, pt. 2: Francis Hutcheson -- British Sense Theorists

In the previous post that introduced this series on the British moral sense theorists, I noted that these eighteenth-century Scottish thinkers raise fascinating questions about the role of emotions, or passions, in moral judgments.  Some went so far as to posit a separate moral sense, a distinct faculty that engages those subjects, persons, actions, or thoughts that we judge to pertain to the moral sphere. One of those moral sense theorists is Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746).

Emotions & Morals, pt. 1: Introduction -- British Sense Theorists

Have you ever wondered about the interaction between emotion and reason in forming moral views?  The cartoon below reflects interactions that I am sure we have all had, just as it also reflects a presumed dichotomy between fact and value, reason and emotion, that I have in many ways come to question. Still, it humorously points to the "fact" that reason is not always the only or the strongest influence on belief.

What about our moral beliefs, those pertaining to what we consider virtuous? Our daily conversations with others presuppose the need to provide justification for our beliefs. But what exactly counts as justification?

Indeed, what will legitimately serve as adequate grounds for our beliefs and actions is often disputed. Many times the contention revolves around what one party thinks is based on reason (i.e., conclusions reached by deduction or induction from concepts or empirical data) rather than emotion (i.e., internal sentiments, impulses, or feelings). And the other party might take sentiment to be quite adequate grounding, or at least part of it.

Emotionally Invested in the Union

Yesterday Scotland voted on the question of whether it would remain in the United Kingdom or secede to become an independent nation.  Today the results showed that the "No" vote -- no on separating -- carried by a margin of approximately 55% No to 45% yes.  Historic, yes this vote was. But I am writing because of the mystery surrounding how personally I took it.

It was personal in a way that I cannot fully explain.  I was pleased with the outcome.  I wished for Scotland to remain in the union.  But why?

I have Scottish heritage, but I also have English and Irish and French.  I am an American citizen, and so I had no say in the matter regardless.  I do not have living relatives who live in Scotland or England or Northern Ireland and therefore who would be directly affected.  So why was I so anxious leading up to the vote?  And why was I so pleased when I woke this morning early and read before 5 am that Scotland had voted to remain in the union?

I have reflected on my emotional investment for some time, at least in the weeks leading up to yesterday's vote.  The key question was why.

I have long appreciated the Scottish contribution to much of enduring influence.  There is, in no certain order, the valuable legacy of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith to moral philosophy.  There is Smith's broader contribution to global economics.  There is Thomas Reid's common sense realism, which affected so much of certain strands of western epistemology and even Christianity (particularly among Presbyterianism on both sides of the Atlantic).  There is golf.  There are tartans.  There is the brogue.  There is Sean Connery.  There are the picturesque Highlands, poets like Robert Burns, haggis, and contemporary philosophers like Alasdair MacIntyre.  And there is, of course, single malt Scotch, smokey, peaty pleasure in a wee dram -- or more than just a wee dram.

But this appreciation, maybe even nostalgia, could equally tend toward favoring Scottish independence.  Why then did I favor union?

It is hard to say.  I agree with Alan Greenspan that a vote for independence would have "surprisingly negative economic consequences."  The unknown -- unknown challenges, unknown blowback -- is a greater risk than the certainty of sovereignty.  Symbolically, at a time when Europe is struggling to preserve its own political/military experiment which is the European Union (and let us not forget that the EU is ultimately an economic union designed to prevent military conflict among countries where there has been so much of it through the centuries), it would have been antithetical to the rhetoric coming out of Brussels to preserve union if a member country, Great Britain, experienced a secession.  (Yes, Britain is not part of the monetary union, but it is part of the political union.)

So maybe it is loving the idea of Scotland and its distinctiveness but also wanting the best for Scotland and believing that independence would have brought hardship beyond the naive aspirations of certain older generations (mostly in Glasgow) and the excitable youth.  Maybe there is some desire to see Britain Great, and realizing that England and Scotland would likely be less if they were not connected beyond sharing a land mass.  David Cameron had a fair point, namely, that parties in power will come and go, but a vote to separate would be irreversible at this point.  And hasty actions of great consequence, especially when they involve such far-reaching effects as reconstructing (or doing it from scratch) a national security apparatus, choosing and implementing a currency, and looking beyond the potential immediate boon that North Sea oil assets would provide.  What happens generations from now?

Maybe it is realizing the something great would be lost if there were Scottish independence that made me want to preserve that greatness by preserving the union.

It remains difficult to say.  And maybe it will always be inexplicable.  In any event, tonight I raise my wee dram to 300 more years of united greatness for Britain.

Making Sense of Wilson, pt. 10: Character

This is the last post in my series dedicated to reflections on James Q. Wilson's The Moral Sense.  The subject, broadly speaking, is character.

In approaching this topic in this final installment, I thought that I would underscore a number of things that stood out in my reading of Prof. Wilson's book.  These are some matters that I think are particularly important and will likely stay with me for some time to come.  They do relate to character, but some of the strands themselves might not immediately seem to have much to do with it.  My catalog of them may even seem a hodgepodge.  Maybe it is.  By the end, however, the tiles of the character mosaic will, I hope, have come into view, and I will have pinpointed some areas where Prof. Wilson's book has prompted me to think most.

Two separate spheres of life?

Why does a blog ostensibly about "cultivating wisdom, prudence, and virtue" comment on and provide links to articles about political-legal topics such as termination of human life or Congress' powers to regulate it?

This is a fair question worth pondering.  Two recent sets of posts relate to these topics.

The question, it seems to me, probably reflects a critical assumption:  morals, morality, and moral evaluations -- those things tethered to virtue of mind and action -- have very little, if anything, to do with politics and law.

The reasoning behind such an assumption might go like this:  "If those two things, morals and politics, did have something to do with one another, then I could understand why you might mention them in this forum.  But I'm not really sure that they do go together.  Isn't morality just a private matter while politics is public?  Aren't these two separate spheres of life?  That's how I tend to think about it.  So I need some help understanding why you've raised those topics here, when you want to promote right practical thinking and action that are in accordance with virtue."  We might respond by posing a question of our own.

Are morals really separate from politics?

This is a well-traveled moral and political philosophical question.  It arises, for instance, in classical Greek thinking.  One encounters the matter in the dialogues of Plato and the writings of Aristotle.  It evolves in their successors, the Cynics, the Stoics, and the Epicureans.  I touched on it in my inaugural post.

Another way to frame this question is to ask:  Do morals and morality transcend social structures, or are morals and morality determined by them?  Is doing right (morality) distinct from faring well (socio-political pursuits in community)?  This matter is not only well pedigreed in classical philosophy; it is also a matter that tangibly affects daily life today -- including the propriety of content in blog posts such as this one.

It is a mistake, I submit, to divorce questions of morals from questions of politics.

It is erroneous, in other words, to separate decisively considerations of virtue in individuals from considerations of society's governing policies that form the communal environment in which these individuals find moral pursuits a matter of daily experience.  To separate them so, at least, is to reconfigure radically social community.

In a previous post, I noted that some people explain political differences in terms of different conceptions about the structure and function of the family:  the morality that informs approaches to the family gets mapped onto the government as family.  The guiding moral framework of the microcosm (the family) becomes the guiding moral framework for the macrocosm (the political state).  People tend to see the government as family, and they wish for those principles operative in the one sphere to prevail in the other.  This is just one theory (that of George Lakoff in Moral Politics), and it is not perfect.  It does, however, posit one vivid way in which morality and politics are connected:  the role and moral principles of the family understood subsequently as those of the government.

Morals and politics may be connected not only from the perspective of cognitive linguistics but also from the perspective of philosophical reasoning.

In his A Short History of Ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre makes this observation while discussing the supposition that "there are two distinct spheres of life, one for 'morals,' the other for 'politics.'"

But, in fact, every set of moral evaluations involves either neutrality toward or assent to or dissent from the social and political structure within which it is made.  And insofar as dissent is concerned, the moral evaluation will involve some degree of commitment to an alternative.  (MacIntyre, Short History, 97)

This connection between the two was the case for Plato and Aristotle, the Notre Dame professor argues, because they assume that the proper role or duty of an individual is inextricably intertwined with that individual's role and duty in the polis.  That is, these philosophical giants take for granted their particular social structure in deriving norms for practical guidance in pursuit of virtue. Therefore, the "Greek moral vocabulary is not so framed that the objects of our desires and our moral aims are necessarily independent.  To do well and to fare well are found together in a word like eudaimōn" (85).  And they are found together, moreover, in the daily context, the rough and tumble world, in which they both occur.

Additional reflection on Prof. MacIntyre's larger treatment of Greek ethics could help to shed light on multiple angles of this topic, particularly how morality neither completely transcends social settings nor is wholly subsumed by them.  To explore his treatment, however, would take us far afield.  The point I find most germane now is the moral evaluation that necessarily takes place in one's disposition toward a certain social and political structure.  We might simplify this structure and call it policy.  Professor MacIntyre identifies assent, dissent, and neutrality.

I am not always entirely sure whether neutrality in the strict sense, without a slight preference for one policy or the other, is in fact possible.  Even if it were, the person displaying neutrality would still be involved in a moral evaluation based on some sensibility, and that person would still be assuming a commitment to an alternative, a third thing, something either not on offer or not yet proposed.  Neutrality in this sense would also be dissent from the social and political structure (or policy), a lack of assent to this but desirous of "something else."

My concern is not indifference or neutrality per se; rather, it is that approval of, disapproval of, or even neutrality toward a particular socio-political structure involves a moral evaluation of it.  The one socio-political structure or policy is approved or disapproved because it is judged to be right, or just, or not.  If one is neutral, one is either unsure whether it is just (itself a part of moral reasoning) or has a framework in which what is right is judged to be based on different criteria (because, from an alternate moral sensibility, the policy is not clearly right or wrong as other partisans suppose).

Therefore, it does seem that morals are connected to politics; the two are not separate from each other.  To say this is not to identify them; they are distinct but not separate.  It is just to affirm that politics have an inextricable moral dimension, and our moral sensibility is what causes us to think and feel the way we do about politics.  Our moral sense, to use the phrase that is the title of James Q. Wilson’s valuable book, is what prompts our assent to, dissent from, or neutrality toward a governing policy or regime.  We are involved in judging whether we think it is right.

What is the payoff of these reflections?  This point is important to make because there is a tendency with some currency to divorce moral questions from political ones.  This proclivity may be subsiding somewhat.  The oft-rehearsed appeal to "social justice" explicitly introduces moral questions into political discussions.  But we need to realize that differences on questions that may relate to "social justice," on the one hand, are not necessarily a matter of one side's being moral and the other's being immoral, the one just and the other unjust.  It is, on the other hand, actually to underline that the political topic is a moral one and that the disagreement is about the nature of justice, precisely the moral principle in question.

Second, this is, in fact, to bridge the two things that sometimes are divorced, the norms of virtues like justice and the social and political structures in which the norms find expression.  It is to recognize the uniting thread of doing right and faring well, morality and politics.

It is, third, to admit that discussion about policy measures that we might characterize as questions of "social justice" may involve us in discussions about more basic questions of morals, morality, and moral evaluation.  We may have to back all the way up to comprehensive moral frameworks.  We must be prepared for those more difficult soundings in our conversations with one another.  We cannot raise the political matter and shy away from discussions of the moral matter.  More to the point, in raising a political topic we implicitly welcome moral questions.  We cannot cry foul if we are pressed to explain ourselves and our guiding moral convictions and assumptions.  This may be the only way to make real political progress in such conversations.

Finally, we must also train ourselves to engage in these discussions both respectfully and thoughtfully.  Not only in ancient Greece but also in our own day, to probe the moral questions that lie underneath surface questions of politics is what responsible individuals do, as a key component of their role, in social community.  This sort of communal self-understanding and sense of responsibility is something that we would do well to reclaim.

Enduring Classical Benefits

In a recent post, I drew attention to a political and ethical tension:  the government's position in the United States to permit gendercide (or female foeticide), which is legal, and the ostensible position of the United States government with respect to other countries regarding the same permitted termination of life, which the Secretary of State has said should be prohibited.

Shortly after making that blog entry, I ran across the following discussion of ethical matters in ancient Greece.  It has to do with the development of moral theory and practice from Homeric myth to fifth-century Athens.  In his A Short History of Ethics, Alasdair MacIntyre discusses the tug of war between nomos (law, custom, convention) and physis (nature), the order of society and the order of the universe, as it relates to one's understanding of virtue and moral expressions within cultures and across them.  I take it that this tug of war is parallel to the tension in the U.S. domestic approach to gendercide through selective abortion and its foreign approach to the same question.

I mention Prof. MacIntyre's discussion for another reason.  It is often asked, Of what benefit or enduring significance are the humanities and especially the study of classics?  One answer might be that such study helps us to understand ourselves, our institutions, and our moral theory and practice -- and to make informed judgments about them -- in ways that we might not do without classical knowledge and some reflection.

I offer the following, then, as evidence of the enduring benefits of a classical education.  The tension in the U.S. is not new.  The Athenians, too, were conflicted.  Who knew, right, that an account of the development of moral reasoning in ancient Greece could be, well, just so relevant to contemporary discussions?  It is.  What, then, might we learn about justice from their experience and moral investigations that can help to improve ours?

Between Homer and writers five centuries later there is a great change in Greek myths about the order of the universe.  The Homeric myth does reflect, though with much distortion, the workings of an actual society in which a close form of functional organization is presupposed by the moral and evaluative forms of appraisal which are in use.  The later assertions of order in the universe reflect not a structure that is, but one that was, or one that is struggling to survive.  They are conservative protests against the disintegration of the older forms and the transition to the city-state.  The myths themselves cannot but open up the question of the difference between the order of the universe and the order of society.  But above all, this question is sharpened by a widening awareness of radically different social orders.

         The impact of the Persian invasions, of colonization, of increase in trade and therefore in travel, all these brings home the fact of different cultures.  The result is that the distinction between what holds good in Egypt but not in Persia, or in Athens but not in Megara, on the one hand, and what is the case universally as part of the order of things becomes overwhelmingly important.  The question asked about any moral rule or social practice is, Is it part of the essentially local realm of nomos (convention, custom) or of the essentially universal realm of physis (nature)?  Linked to this is of course the question, Is it open to me to choose what rules I shall make my own or what restraints I shall observe (as it may be open to me to choose which city I shall live in and what therefore shall be the nomos by which I live)? or does the nature of the universe set limits upon what I may legitimately choose?  (MacIntyre, Short History, 10-11)

… Different cities observe different customs and different laws.  Does and should justice differ from city to city?  Does justice hold only within a given community between citizens? or should it hold also between cities?  The Athenians condemn the character of Alcibiades because he did not observe the restraints of dikaiosune in his behavior within the Athenian state.  But their own envoys behave just like Alcibiades in their attitude toward other states.  That is, they equate what is morally permissible with what the agent has the power to do. (MacIntyre, Short History, 11-12)