>>Dr. Linda Zagzebski: From ancient Greece through the end of the
Medieval Period, philosophers adopted a view of the good life and human virtue, then connected
it with their belief in a natural order. The social environment and each person’s role
in that environment was assumed to be part of that order. There were differences of opinion
about the structure of nature, the social order, and the virtues that lead to being a thriving
human person. But there was remarkable agreement about the basic features of human nature and
human happiness, as well as basic agreement about the human virtues. The advent of Christianity
altered the idea of the human end and some of the virtues of the persons most admired.
But there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that there is such a thing as nature, and
such a thing as virtue, and that even though human happiness is elusive, we know that it
is closely connected with being a morally good person. But what happens when the social
order begins to break apart and the leading minds of the age begin to doubt what had always
been the bedrock of the moral life? In the space of a few hundred years, people stopped
talking about virtue. Many doubted that there is any human nature to guide a moral framework
and determine the kind of life that would be fulfilling for each person. Virtue ethics
faded away and the word virtue became antiquated. After philosophers stopped talking about virtue,
mention of virtue continued somewhat longer among religious writers and in some English
novels. So today, when you ask somebody what they think when they hear the word virtue,
most will say that the word sounds old-fashioned and calls to mind something they heard a long
time ago in a sermon or read in a novel by Jane Austen. What led to the disappearance
of virtue? The reasons lie in early modern history and you already know the main historical
changes in that period. But I want you to think about the effect of those changes on
virtue ethics. First, the Protestant Reformation lead to debates about the extent to which
Aristotelian ethics could be adopted without detriment to the Cristian faith in the form
it took in Aquinas and other medieval philosophers. The scientific revolution unseated
Aristotle’s dominance in beliefs about nature. In the minds of some people, if Aristotle
was wrong about nature, he must have been wrong about human nature and, therefore, human virtue.
Disease and war broke down the social order. The Black Death of the Fourteenth century
led to a catastrophic reduction in population that hastened social and economic disorder
and led to numerous peasant rebellions. The enormously expensive Thirty Years War was
devastating, leading to many deaths, social upheaval, and the collapse of the Holy Roman
Empire. There was a sense that life was broken. The major philosophers starting with Descartes
undermined the metaphysical beliefs of the past and ushered in an age of skepticism.
Finally, this was the era of global trade. With improvements in mapping and ship design,
trade flowed between Europe and China, India, southeast Asia, and the colonial lands of
the New World. People also started to move around much more than in previous centuries
as commerce grew. Once people were interacting with strangers, and even foreigners, they
had to figure out how to get along without agreeing about human nature, the virtues,
or what a good life was like. That led to the development of a new way of doing ethics
that put aside questions about the best human life, and focused instead on the minimal conditions
for getting along with other people. The social contract theories of Hobbes and Locke proposed
a basis for morality in shared self-interest that did not refer to anything about the potential
of human nature and how to reach it. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, two main
approaches to ethics became the leaders, continuing through the twentieth century and into the
twenty-first. First, the ethics of Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century made duty,
not virtue, the focal concept. The theory was designed in a way that made minimal assumptions
about human nature and was focused on the demands of rationality. Demands that any rational
being could understand and would be forced by their own rational nature to accept no
matter who they were and where they lived. Kant wrote about virtue also, but that work
was less influential on subsequent philosophical ethics. The second major ethical theory of
the modern period was Utilitarianism. Proposed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in
the nineteenth century. The basic idea is the right thing to do is to maximize happiness
for the greatest number of people, where happiness does not mean Aristotelian eudaimonia, but
the subjective state of pleasure. Which in Mill’s form of utilitarianism, included
higher pleasures of the intellect and aesthetic sensibilities in addition to sensory pleasure.
Since utilitarianism was not based on a controversial theory of human nature and was simple in form,
it had great influence in law, politics, and economics. We like to think that in the modern
world each individual has more power than in the Medieval world. We get to chose our
own roles and we get to decide what is important to us. We give our own lives meaning by making
the choices we make. But do we really believe that? Do we get to choose what is fulfilling
and what is not? Have you ever had the experience of choosing something you thought would be
fulfilling, but when you got it it wasn’t fulfilling at all? Even if we know better
than others what we find fulfilling, that does not mean that we can be just anything.
We may value a society in which people have maximum personal choice and minimum constraints
for morality, but we also want something more. Next week we will look at the push-back from
virtue ethics which reappeared in some new forms, as well as some familiar forms in the
later twentieth century.