Download Philosophers in Jesuit Education Eastern APA Meetings, December 2011 Discussion Starter

Philosophers in Jesuit Education
Eastern APA Meetings, December 2011
Discussion Starter
Karen Stohr
Georgetown University
Ethics begins with the obvious fact that we are morally flawed creatures and that we
should try to become better. There is, for most of us, a gap between our actual selves and the
selves that we should aim to be. My topic for this evening is about the reasons that we have to
improve our own moral characters and perhaps more contentiously, about the reasons we have to
help others improve their moral characters. I say more contentiously because we tend to think
of moral self-improvement as a deeply personal undertaking, one into which other people, for the
most part, have no business sticking their collective noses. I will conclude the opposite—that
we have moral reason to try to improve not just our own characters, but the characters of our
friends as well.
The project of moral self-improvement is a practical one, aiming at bringing about actual
changes in actual human beings. As such, it must be responsive to facts about human moral and
social psychology. In traditional philosophical fashion, I will simply set these questions to the
side for now, and focus instead on the relationship between the moral ideals held up in ethical
theory—the Aristotelian phronimos, the person with the Kantian good will—and our communal
efforts to bring ourselves and other people closer to those ideals.
Socrates famously expressed skepticism about whether the ethics teachers of his day, the
Sophists, were actually capable of improving anyone’s moral character. And although Socrates
himself was put to death partly on the grounds that he corrupted the youth, he himself believed
that he was in fact making people better by exposing their ignorance and the ignorance of others
around them. The way to become better is to become wiser, and the first step in becoming wiser
is acknowledging one’s ignorance. In parallel fashion, we might say that the first step toward
becoming morally better is to acknowledge our own moral imperfections—a kind of moral selfexamination. Socrates leaves matters there, but I will rashly try to take it a step further.
In these brief remarks, I will pose two admittedly enormous questions: 1) what reason do
we have to engage in the project of moral self-improvement ourselves and 2) what role should
we play in the moral self-improvement of others? I will lead off by focusing on what Aristotle
and Kant had to say on the subject. There are many ways in which Kantian ethics and
Aristotelian virtue ethics differ, but on this matter there are important points of intersection, more
than are often appreciated. Notably, both Kant and Aristotle think that one of the main aims of
friendship is to make both oneself and one’s friends better. It turns out that for both Aristotle
and Kant, moral self-improvement is not a solitary project; it is something we do with the help of
others.
Let me begin with Aristotle. On Aristotle’s view, at least as it is expressed in Book I of
the Nicomachean Ethics, virtue is necessary, although not sufficient, for flourishing. It is
impossible to flourish without being virtuous, and thus insofar as we aim at flourishing, we must
also aim at being virtuous. This provides a ready explanation for why we should engage in the
process of moral self-improvement; given that I aim at my own flourishing, I always have reason
to become more virtuous. But of course Aristotle does not think we can become virtuous on our
own. We need parents and teachers to inculcate the moral virtues in us, and crucially, we also
need friends. Friends actually play a dual role in Aristotle’s account of flourishing. They are
one of the external goods that, in the Book I account, Aristotle defends as part of flourishing.
Aristotle says that the best good must be self-sufficient, meaning that if we have it, we lack for
nothing. And as he points out, “no one would choose to live without friends, even if he had all
the other goods.”1 A life with friends is always more choiceworthy than a life without one;
hence, friends are a component of flourishing.
But friends are also important because of the role they play in our ability to cultivate and
sustain virtue. Aristotle famously argues that the best or complete friendship is “friendship of
good people similar in virtue.”2 True friends aim at the other’s good in just the same way that
they aim at their own. In aiming at my friend’s flourishing, I must necessarily aim at her virtue,
since she cannot flourish in the absence of virtue. Likewise, my friend aims at my virtue as part
of my flourishing. As Aristotle says of good people who are also friends, “they seem to become
still better from their activities and their mutual correction. For each molds the other in what
they approve of....”3
This element of Aristotle’s ethics is reasonably well known. Less well known is Kant’s
surprisingly similar view about the importance of friends in our quest to become morally better.
In the Doctrine of Virtue, Kant argues that there are two ends that are also duties—our own
perfection and the happiness of others. These two ends form the basis of all our imperfect ethical
duties, which are duties to take on moral commitments. Kant divides the duty to adopt the end of
one’s own perfection into two duties: a duty to cultivate one’s natural talents and a duty of moral
self-improvement. The latter duty is, for Kant, a narrow one, meaning that it should take a
special priority in the agent’s moral deliberations.4
Kant specifically denies that there is any kind of direct duty to improve the moral
character of others. This is in part because improving the moral character of others is largely out
1
2
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin, 2nd edition (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999) 1155a5.
NE 1156b7
NE 1172a13
4
See Marcia Baron, Kantian Ethics without Apology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995) for a discussion of this duty.
3
of our power. I am in control of my own good will, understood as a commitment to morality, but
I cannot make it the case that anyone else is committed to morality. I do have a moral duty not
to corrupt people, but there is no imperfect duty to improve the character of others that is exactly
parallel to the duty to improve my own.
Or so it seems on the surface. But it turns out that there is another way in which I can be
obligated to help people improve their characters within the Kantian schema, which is through
the imperfect duty of beneficence. The duty of beneficence, on Kant’s view, is a duty to make
the ends of others my own. Taking seriously other people as end-setters means taking seriously
the ends that they set.
By definition, anyone with a Kantian good will has her own moral
perfection as an end. And if her moral perfection is her end, then beneficence instructs me to
make her moral perfection my end too, albeit within certain respect-based constraints.5
Indeed, Kant’s discussion of friendship makes clear that he, like Aristotle, thinks that we
need friends to sustain and support us in our efforts to cultivate our own moral perfection and
moreover, that a friendship in which this occurs is an extremely valuable thing. Within
friendship, Kant says, “it is, of course, a duty for one of the friends to point out the other’s faults
to him; this is in the other’s best interests and is therefore a duty of love.”6 Kant goes on to
acknowledge the obvious tensions that this produces within friendships, many of which cannot
withstand this kind of candor. And yet, insofar as it is my end to become better, my friend
fulfills a duty of beneficence toward me by making my self-improvement her end as well.
In these brief remarks, I have done little more than sketch out the views of Aristotle and
Kant and point to the ways in which they are similar, perhaps more than most people would
expect. Both accept not only that moral self-improvement should be a central human aim, but
5
6
I discuss these constraints in “Minding Others’ Business” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 90, no. 1 (2009): 116-139.
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) 470.
that friends should help each other in fulfilling that aim. The implications of this are, I think,
potentially quite important for us as individuals, but also as friends, parents, spouses, teachers,
and members of institutions committed to the project of moral education. We are accustomed to
thinking of a good friend as someone who loves us for what we are, but perhaps the better friend
is the one who loves us for what we could become.