GROUNDING VIRTUE: A METAETHICAL ANALYSIS OF NEO-ARISTOTELIAN VIRTUE ETHICS A ...

42 Pages·2016·0.78 MB·English

GROUNDING VIRTUE: A METAETHICAL ANALYSIS OF NEO-ARISTOTELIAN
VIRTUE ETHICS
A thesis submitted to the faculty of
San Francisco State University
In partial fulfillment of
the requirements for
the Degree
A5
Master of Arts
^ ((,
6
In
PH'L
Philosophy
by
Daniel Elgin Mattox
San Francisco, California
May 2016
Copyright by
Daniel Elgin Mattox
2016
CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read Grounding Virtue: A Metaethical Analysis of Neo-Aristotelian
Virtue Ethics by Daniel Elgin Mattox, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria
for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree
Master of Arts in Philosophy at San Francisco State University.
Kevin Toh, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Shelley Wilco/, Ph.D.
Professor of Philosophy
Justin Tiwald, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Philosophy
GROUNDING VIRTUE: A METAETHICAL ANALYSIS OF NEO-ARISTOTELIAN
VIRTUE ETHICS
Daniel Elgin Mattox
San Francisco, California
2016
My thesis examines and criticizes Rosalind Hursthouse's claim, informed by Philipa Foot,
that a good human life is composed of four distinct ends met in a characteristically
human way, i.e. rationally. I challenge Hursthouse on her commitment to this view by
arguing that the capacity for reflective and rational thought belies a fifth end to human
life that is based on the full engagement of our rational abilities, the end of life-
satisfaction. I conclude by rejecting that life-satisfaction is supererogatory or susceptible
to systematic problems because of deception.
I certify that the abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis.
Chair, Thesis Committee
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to offer my sincere thanks to my thesis chair Kevin Toh and to my wonderful
readers Shelley Wilcox and Justin Tiwald. They have offered challenging and helpful
criticism that fostered my growth and development as a philosopher. I would also like to
think my patient and loving friend Kyle Hager for his commitment to discussing and
proofreading drafts of my work throughout my writing process.
V
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction 1
Evaluations of Goodness 2
Kind Membership and Good Specimens 12
The Four Ends of a Eudaimon Life 19
Life-Satisfaction as a Fifth End 23
Two Possible Problems with Life-Satisfaction 30
Works Cited 38
VI
1
Introduction
One of the distinctive features of Aristotelian ethics and contemporary Neo-
Aristotelian virtue ethics (NAVE) is the belief that ethics has the two-fold goal of making
us good qua human beings and making us have lives that are characteristically good for
humans. When Neo-Aristotelians work on developing a metaethical framework for virtue
ethics, the main goal is to explain what the teleological ends of human nature are and
how those ends relate to the ability of individual humans to live characteristically good
lives. Among Neo-Aristotelians, the account of human ends developed by Rosalind
Hursthouse from the work of Philipa Foot is one of the most well-developed. In what
follows I will argue for the view that life-satisfaction is a central component of a
eudaimon life, and therefore eudaimon-based ethical theories, by building on the central
concepts of Foot's Natural Goodness and Hursthouse's On Virtue Ethics.
The first part of this view will be an analysis of what it means to evaluate
something as good or bad. In this section I will argue for the position Foot outlines in
Natural Goodness that 'good' is an attributive adjective that judges an individual as 'good'
insofar as it is a good member of its kind. The second section of my paper will explore
the relationship between individuals and their kind membership. In this section I will
explain how different kinds of living organisms have different ends based on their
capacities. This will then serve as the basis for the third section of the paper which will
examine human-specific capacities and how they relate to the teleological ends of human
life, i.e. what makes a human good qua human, and offer an argument for Hursthouse's
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theory about eudaimonia, i.e. what is required for a characteristically good human life. In
the fourth section of the paper I will offer an augmented version of Hursthouse's theory of
eudaimonia that is based on the importance of life-satisfaction as a component of
characteristically good human lives. In the final section of the paper I will consider
possible counter arguments against my view that life-satisfaction is a teleological end of
human life. Specifically, I will argue against both the view that life-satisfaction can be
reduced to a type of human pleasure and the view that life-satisfaction is, like good
health, supererogatory and not a necessary feature of a eudaimon human life.
Evaluations of Goodness
One of the main features of virtue ethics is that it aims to show that humans who
possess virtues, good character traits, and exercise them well are good people and live
good human lives. If we are to make sense of these sorts of claims, then we must know
what we mean when we judge certain character traits, people, and lives to be good. Once
we can identify what it is for something to be good, then we can begin to further look at
how the virtues are grounded in human nature—i.e. how the virtues make a human have a
good life or become a good human. I will begin by describing Foot's view, then I will
develop a defense of this theory about normative judgments.
Foot begins her discussion about evaluations of goodness by following Peter
Geach in claiming that judgments of the kind “F is good” or “That is a good F” use the
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word 'good' as an attributive adjective.1 This means that whether something is a good F
depends on what is substituted for F. Unlike predicative adjectives like 'blue' or 'square'
that have a fixed meaning regardless of the noun or noun phrase they describe, attributive
adjectives change in meaning based on the noun or noun phrase they are attached to.
Consider, for instance, the attributive adjectives 'large' and 'small.' If I were to describe
some F that is six feet tall as 'small,' then the appropriateness of the adjective is
dependent on what is substituted for F. If F were an elephant, then six feet may indeed be
small, but if F were a mouse, then six feet would be large. Therefore, when something is
described as good or bad, the judgment is based on the class of thing that is being
described.
In order to show this view is a reasonable analysis of normative judgments I will
analyze its application in the cases of a stapler, a city, a plant, and a president. This list
purposefully considers a wide variety of things we pass normative judgments on—
objects, associations, lifeforms, and social roles. Since judgments of goodness are
judgments about individual things relative to the kind of thing that they are, these
examples will allow us to examine exactly how the kind of thing each individual object is
informs its normative evaluation.
First we will consider the case of my stapler. My stapler is plastic and lightweight.
It can hold a very limited number of staples (about 50) and cannot effectively staple more
1 Philipa Foot, Natural Goodness, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 2-3.
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than ten pages at a time. It also has a spring in the staple holding area that is so tight that
it often launches the staples out of the stapler when I reload it. If someone were to ask me
if I had a good stapler at my house, then I would tell them that I have an awful stapler and
often have to borrow my roommate’s stapler for most tasks. When I make these
judgments about my stapler, I could really be making two kinds of judgments. I could
either judge the stapler to be bad because it does not serve my purposes or I could judge it
as bad because it is bad for a stapler, that is, it is a bad specimen of its kind. There may be
other kinds of judgments we could be making when we say something is 'bad,' but those
sorts of judgments do not seem to make sense in this context. I, for instance, do not seem
to be claiming my stapler is evil. I also do not seem to be claiming that the stapler is
vulgar like I would be suggesting if I claimed someone was using “bad language.” This
leaves only the first two possibilities: either I am judging the object relative to my desires
or I am judging it according to its type.
If, however, I were to take the question about owning a good stapler as a general
question about my stapler and not a question about my relationship to my stapler, then I
should give a judgment about the stapler in terms of its own qualities independent of my
desires. This seems to distinguish questions like “do you own a good stapler” from
questions like “do you like your stapler.” The former question concerns the nature of the
stapler itself, while the latter question is about how someone relates to the stapler. Thus,
judgments of whether objects are good or bad seem to be judgments about the objects