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The Specter of Relativism: a Critique of Rosalind Hursthouse's on Virtue Ethics

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The Specter of Relativism: a Critique of Rosalind Hursthouse's on Virtue Ethics THE SPECTER OF RELATIVISM: A CRITIQUE OF ROSALIND HURSTHOUSE'S ON VIRTUE ETHICS A Thesis Submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of Philosophy University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon By Ahmad Ghadyani Copyright Ahmad Ghadyani, November, 2016. All rights reserved. PERMISSION TO USE In presenting this dissertation in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Master’s of Arts Degree in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this dissertation in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my dissertation work was done. It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this dissertation or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my dissertation. Requests for permission to copy or to make other use of material in this thesis in whole or in part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of Philosophy 9 Campus Drive University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon, SK Canada S7N 5A5 i ABSTRACT Virtue ethics has been a major ethical theory from Antiquity to the present. Despite its persistence on the philosophical scene, in recent years (especially after the publication of After Virtue in 1981) it has been severely criticized for being open to the charge of relativism. In this thesis, I focus on Rosalind Hursthouse’s reconstruction of Aristotle’s enterprise. In the first chapter I examine her aspiration to explain right action solely in terms of the virtuousness of moral agents. Unless Hursthouse concedes, at least to some extent to the moral relativist, I conclude that it is not possible to articulate the rightness of action on a virtue-based account. Hursthouse also rejects the very existence of second order rules and principles which guide moral agents when moral virtues and their corresponding v-rules have an adverse claim upon us. I will demonstrate that Hursthouse’s rejection of the codifiability thesis, again, forces her to concede even more to moral relativism. The inability to fill the gap between the virtuousness of a moral agent and the rightness of her action is not the only aspect of Hursthouse’s version of virtue ethics that is open to relativism. She also fails to provide a viable procedure for validating moral virtues. In the second chapter, I concentrate on Hursthouse’s reconstruction of Aristotelian ethical naturalism which is one of the most significant attempts to ground moral virtues independently of any moral rules and principles. I demonstrate that the naturalistic validation of moral virtues is susceptible to the cultural context in which virtues are supposed to be validated. In the framework of ethical naturalism, we are social animals. When normative virtues are presumed to be based on our being, it is inevitable that our sociality, and thus our cultural background, permeates the naturalistic moral virtues. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge the incredible support I have received over the progression of this thesis. Above all, I wish to thank my family for their unwavering support throughout the course of my life. I was away from my home country while writing this thesis. Nevertheless, my mother and father raised me in a way that I was able to take the risk of putting aside my previous degrees and work experience in Engineering to devote myself to study philosophy and engage more deeply with personal questions. The focal question of this thesis was born of my discussions with my wife, Marzieh. The thoughtful discussions with her, her love, and support were crucial for the completion of this thesis. I am enormously indebted for the financial assistance received from St. Thomas More College Graduate Teaching and Research Fellowship which eased the financial hardship for the completion of this project. I would also like to express my appreciation to Department of Philosophy at University of Saskatchewan for granting me partial funding for the first year of my studies at the graduate level. I also wish to express gratitude to my fellow graduate students. They provided tremendous insights, thought-provoking discussions, and personal support without which the writing of this thesis would not have been possible. Thank you to Brandon Murray, Clement Ng, and Derek Sutherland. Faculty members of the University of Saskatchewan’s Philosophy Department taught me, an engineer who had only dabbled in philosophy, what systematic thinking in philosophy is. Thank you to Phil Dwyer, Eric Dayton, Emer O’Hagan, Daniel Regnier, and Karl Pfeifer for teaching such wonderful courses and guiding me to write my philosophical thoughts in a foreign language. iii I had the unique chance to have a weekly discussion on various philosophical (and non- philosophical) topics with my supervisor Prof. Daniel Regnier. These discussions provided philosophical inspiration for this work and are more than partially responsible for the completion of this project. I would like to express my gratitude to my advisory committee: Dr. Emer O’Hagan and Prof. John Liptay. Their time, support, and philosophical knowledge mirrored in their recommendations, substantially improved the philosophical rigor of this thesis. Daniel Béland kindly agreed to be my external examiner. I would like to thank him forhis thoughtful feedback during the defence. Last but not least, special thanks to Rhonda Anderson who meticulously proofread the second chapter of this thesis. Her suggestions vastly improved the readability of that chapter. iv Table of Contents PERMISSION TO USE ....................................................................................................... i ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................................ ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ................................................................................................................ v Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1: Am I Doing the Right Thing? That Is the Question! ...................................... 12 1.1 Introduction ......................................................................................................... 12 1.2 Virtues: A Skill Analogy .................................................................................... 19 1.3 Conflicting Moral Virtues: Virtue Ethics and Rejection of a Foundational Picture of Rationality ............................................................................................................. 28 1.4 The Ideal Type of Virtuous Person ..................................................................... 39 Chapter 2: Ethical Naturalism and Openness to the Cultural Relativism ......................... 40 2.1 Who is the Virtuous? What is Virtue? ................................................................ 40 2.2 Function Argument and Hierarchy of Life: Revisiting Aristotle’s Naturalism .. 43 2.3 Plato’s Requirement on the Virtues .................................................................... 50 2.4 How Virtues benefit Their Possessors? .............................................................. 54 2.5 The Aristotelian Teleological Evaluation of Plants and Animals: A Discredited Approach ................................................................................................................... 69 2.6 Incommensurable Forms of Life and Virtuous Character .................................. 79 v 2.7 The Third Thesis of Plato’s Requirement the Virtues ........................................ 88 2.8 Conclusion .......................................................................................................... 90 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 92 vi Introduction For more than two millennia, before getting eclipsed by deontology and consequentialism, virtue ethics was the only grand theory in moral philosophy.1 However, in the second half of the twentieth century, virtue ethics, after almost two hundred years of being latent, gradually came back to the main stage of ethical philosophy. The starting point of its revival is widely considered the publication of an essay by G. E. M. Anscombe titled “Modern Moral Philosophy.”2 Nonetheless, the most elaborate defenses of virtue ethics have been articulated by other philosophers. Some of these defenses come from Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, Julia Annas and Rosalind Hursthouse. After the publication of After Virtue in 1981, a controversial and influential book by Alisdair MacIntyre, it is noteworthy that a provocation of discussion and debate on virtue ethics occurred. As interest in his tradition-based version of virtue ethics has dwindled,3 other approaches have been developed. Now virtue ethics, as a
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