Sunday, August 31, 2008
'Wanting to flourish' as a basis for "ought," praise, and blame
On p.7 of Deadly Vices, Taylor points out that it is often easy to overemphasize the importance of the will because talking of virtue and vice “indicates candidates for praise and blame.” Here I take it she is arguing that praise and blame are appropriate even if the complexity of character traits limit our control over possession of virtue and vice. Even this limited amount of control is sufficient for moral responsibility. I wonder whether praise and blame really are appropriate for a virtue theory that does not, like Aquinas, make claims about how life ought to be lived. Here I am talking about praise and blame being merited by an agent, not as used instrumentally to encourage or discourage behavior in another individual. Praise and blame seem to be merited by certain responses to matters of moral significance. That is, whether praise or blame is applicable depends on whether one acts appropriately (perhaps also responds emotionally, has appropriate attitudes and desires) when faced with moral decisions or other moral responsibilities. On p. 29, Taylor tells us that unlike Aquinas, she only assumes “that we are agents capable of leading a life, and that individual agents want to flourish in that life.” Taylor rejects appeals to external standards for judging whether one is viciously slothful. She asks us to judge vice in terms of the assumption that one wants to flourish. Here it seems strange to use praise or blame because it suggests that moral significance is tied up with the want to flourish. Even if Taylor thinks the moral realm encompasses more than what can be discussed in terms of virtue and vice, ‘what one wants’ seems to be an odd basis for moral responsibility. It makes sense to say we are morally responsible for acting certain ways in response to moral obligations or prohibitions because it is already granted that we ought to do (or not do) these things. That is not to say it is easy to come up with an account and justification of what is morally obligatory or prohibited as an alternative to Taylor’s virtue theory. But it seems odd and lacking justification to say we “ought” (in a moral sense) to do what we want to do.
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I think that Lauren makes many good points here, but I think she is misunderstanding what Taylor claims. My understanding of what Taylor is claiming here is not that we should do what we want to do, but rather, that (1) we are each individual agents, (2) that as individual agents we each necessarily have a good available to us (flourishing) that we automatically are inclined to pursue, and that (3) it is self-destructive to interfere with this automatic inclination within ourselves. The reason that I think Taylor follows this to the idea that, morally, we ought to pursue this inclination is that the possession of these goals is an essential part of being an individual agent, and to interfere in this necessarily involves interfering in our own capacity as an individual agent. We morally “ought” to pursue this inclination because, again, it is an essential component of being an individual agent to have this good available to us – pursuing the good is, at least in some sense of the term, self-evidently desirable, and one good that is necessarily available to us to be pursued is this flourishing.
In this sense, vices are morally bad because possessing them interferes in one’s own pursuit of the good, as well as being instrumentally morally bad because practicing vicious behaviors tends to be bad for oneself and others – while virtues are morally good because possessing them aides one along toward the good, while also being of benefit to others and oneself indirectly.
An admission: I can’t point to a particular place in Taylor where my understanding is supported over Lauren’s, it’s more a read-between-the-lines subtext that I gleaned from all the readings of her that I’ve so far done.
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