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The Advantages of Moral Diversity*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 January 2009

Amélie Oksenberg Rorty
Affiliation:
Philosophy, Mt. Holyoke College

Extract

We are well served, both practically and morally, by ethical diversity, by living in a community whose members have values and priorities that are, at a habit-forming, action-guiding level, often different from our own. Of course, unchecked ethical diversity can lead to disaster, to chaos and conflict. We attempt to avoid or mitigate such conflict by articulating general moral and political principles, and developing the virtues of acting on those principles. But as far as leading a good life — the life that best suits what is best in us — goes, it is not essential that we agree on the interpretations of those common principles, or that we are committed to them, by some general act of the will. What matters is that they form our habits and institutions, so that we succeed in cooperating practically, to promote the state of affairs that realizes what we each prize. People of different ethical orientations can — and need to — cooperate fruitfully in practical life while having different interpretations and justifications of general moral or procedural principles. Indeed, at least some principles are best left ambiguous, and some crucial moral and ethical conflicts are best understood, and best arbitrated, as failures of practical cooperation rather than as disagreements about the truth of certain general propositions or theories.

This way of construing ethical conflict and cooperation carries political consequences. It appears to make the task of resolving ethical conflicts more modest and, perhaps, easier to accomplish. But it raises formidable problems about how to design the range of educative institutions that bridge public and private life.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Social Philosophy and Policy Foundation 1992

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References

1 Compare Walzer, Michael, “Political Action: The Problem of Dirty Hands”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 2, no. 2 (Winter 1973).Google Scholar

2 “Ethics” derives from the Greek ethos: habit, accustomed way of doing things. It is a form of the verb etho, generally used to indicate that the action designated by a conjoined verb is habitual, frequent, or customary. “Morality” derives from the Latin mos, moris, used by Cicero to refer to traditional or ancestral ways of doing things.

3 I shall stay with an old-fashioned terminology, parasitically relying on others to provide useful analyses of dispositions, habits, and patterns of salience. Contemporary classifications of personality types are latter-day descendants of classical theories of the humors or temperaments. See Theophrastus, , Characters (Baltimore: Penguin, 1967)Google Scholar; Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy (New York: Vintage, 1977)Google Scholar; Butler, Samuel, Characters (Cleveland: Case Western University Press, 1970)Google Scholar; Kagan, Jerome, Unstable Ideas, Temperament, Cognition, and the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Flanagan, Owen, Varieties of Moral Personalities (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

4 Compare Rorty, Amélie and Wong, David, “Aspects of Identity and Agency”, in Identity, Character, and Morality, ed. Owen, Flanagan and Amélie, Rorty (Cambridge: MIT, 1990).Google Scholar

5 Compare Rorty, Amélie, “Two Faces of Courage” and “Virtues and Their Vicissitudes”, in Mind in Action (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988), esp. pp. 301–2, 316–17.Google Scholar

6 For instance, an aggressive person tends to see the behavior of others as oppositional, and to do so in a way that elicits her own confrontational responses. Similarly, someone attentive to issues of power need not want it for herself: she might, for instance, be an egalitarian obsessed with overcoming existing power structures. Still, whatever her principal commitments may be, the realization of her other values will be affected by her sensitivity to issues of power.

7 To call ideological commitments and avowals “rhetorical” is not to belittle or mock them. It is, after all, something for a person to exhort herself to act on a certain principle or ideal, to recognize failures, and to attempt to correct and make some restitution for the harms they bring. Ethical conflict is, after all, sometimes an advance over unconflicted vice: like hypocrisy, ethical conflict can sometimes represent the homage that vice renders to virtue.

8 Compare Rorty and Wong, “Aspects of Identity and Agency”.

9 Compare Rorty, Amélie, “Solomon and Everyman: A Problem in Conflicting Moral Intuitions”, American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 3 (1991).Google Scholar

10 Compare Gardner, Howard, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983)Google Scholar, for distinctions among relatively autonomous strategies and competencies. Jerry Fodor distinguishes general-purpose from modular, context-specific processors and faculties; see his Modularity of the Mind (Cambridge: MIT/Bradford, 1983). But there are also studies of patterns of correlation among traits: see Adorno, Theodore, The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper, 1950)Google Scholar; and Brown, Roger, Social Psychology (New York: Free Press, 1965).Google Scholar For critiques of personality theories, see Mischel, Walter, Personality and Assessment (New York: Wiley, 1968)Google Scholar; Hartshorne, H. and May, M. A., Studies in the Nature of Character (New York: Macmillan, 1928–30)Google Scholar; and Owen Flanagan, Varieties of Moral Personalities, pp. 301–2, 316–17.

11 Compare Hampshire, Stuart, Innocence and Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar

12 For example: whatever their initial inclinations, urban policemen tend to become alertly suspicious of anything that might indicate criminal activity; even indifferent teachers acquire the habit of reading facial expressions of interest or boredom, puzzlement or disagreement; and city-planners become attentive to ways that spaces are defined and used.

13 Kant, Immanuel, Education, trans. Annette, Churton (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), pp. 8385, 96–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 In “A Dialogue”, usually appended to the Enquiries, Hume ascribes differences in national character to differences in national experience, history, and geopolitical status. See Hume, David, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, 2nd ed., ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), pp. 334–35.Google Scholar “In a word”, Hume says at the end of his essay on the Skeptic, “human life is governed more by fortune than by reason, and is more influenced by a particular humour than by general principles”.

15 Mill, John Stuart, “On the Connection between Justice and Utility”, in Utilitarianism, ed. James, Smith and Ernest, Sosa (Belmont: Wads worth, 1969), pp. 8283.Google Scholar

16 Compare Nehamas, Alexander, Nietzsche: Life As Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).Google Scholar

17 Berlin, Isaiah, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, “The Diversity of Goods”, in Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)Google Scholar; and Stuart Hampshire, Innocence and Experience.

18 Compare Larmore, Charles, Patterns of Moral Complexity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

19 Compare Goldman, Alvin, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Kitcher, Philip, “The Division of Cognitive Labor”, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 87, no. 1 (January 1990), pp. 522CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Stich, Stephen, The Fragmentation of Reason (Cambridge: MIT, 1990).Google Scholar

20 Gutmann, Amy and Thompson, Dennis, “Moral Conflicts and Political Consensus”, Ethics, 1990.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., pp. 64, 76. Gutmann and Thompson leave it for others to investigate the social and political conditions necessary to assure that such respect is substantively realized in the social practices that affect the sense of entitlement, and the skills, necessary to participate in public discussions on genuinely equal terms. We shall return to a discussion of whether the liberal program is practically, though not conceptually, circular: the conditions that are necessary to assure fair and just debate in the public sphere appear to presuppose the happy outcome of just those debates.

22 There are often also political and practical reasons for introducing special-interest groups — ethnic or racial representatives, the elderly, women, farmers, educators — onto committees whose decision-making charges affect such groups: their experience and expertise is centrally relevant. The advantages of ethical diversity require only that moral diversity also be represented: it does not follow that such diversity must be the only qualification for membership on decision-making bodies.

23 There is, as Bernard Williams has argued, nothing incoherent about the position of an intractable egoist. The kinds of considerations that might argue against rigid egoism come from thought experiments about what it would be like to live such a life. The ordinary practices of consistent narrow egoism would be so impoverished that no one would sensibly choose it. Or alternatively, the actual practices of such a life, when constructed in such a way that a reasonable person might choose it, are radically different from its theoretical program. Compare Williams, Bernard, Morality (New York: Harper, 1972).Google Scholar

24 Neo-Kantians try to show how Kant's deontology can accommodate Aristotelian virtue theory. See Herman, Barbara, “Mutual Aid and Respect for Persons”, Ethics, 1984Google Scholar; Schneewind, J. B., “The Misfortunes of Virtue”, Ethics, vol. 101 (1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Autonomy, Obligation, and Virtue: An Overview of Kant's Moral Philosophy”, forthcoming in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth Century Philosophy; Wood, Alan, “Unsociable Sociability”, Philosophical Topics, 1991Google Scholar; and Onora O'Neill, “The Practices of Justice and Virtue”, unpublished paper. Neo-utilitarians try to include deontological constraints on the demands of beneficence or to give consequentialist accounts of the development of character traits and virtues. See Railton, Peter, “Alienation, Consequentialism and the Demands of Morality”, Philosophy and Public Affairs, vol. 13, no. 2 (1984)Google Scholar; Scheffler, Sam, The Rejection of Consequentialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982)Google Scholar; Liam Murphy, “The Demands of Beneficence”, and Thomas Pogge, “Can Morality Be Productive?” (unpublished papers).

25 But despite the fact that there is often disagreement about when constructive opposition has, in a particular case, degenerated to destructive power politics, there are general objective guidelines for distinguishing them. Constructive opposition leaves all the parties better off, within the general terms set by each of their original projects; manipulative bullying closes the options available to one of the parties, in such a way as to frustrate that party's projects.

26 Compare Lovibond, Sabina, Realism and Imagination in Ethics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Maclntyre, Alasdair, “Relativism, Power and Philosophy”, in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael, Krausz (Notre Dame: Notre Dame Press, 1989)Google Scholar; and Wong, David, “Coping with Moral Conflict and Ambiguity”, Ethics, 1992.Google Scholar

27 It is extremely difficult for fallibilist minimal realists to draw the line between what is objectively determinate and what remains indeterminate, between the constraints set by moral realism and the openness assured by its minimalism. It might seem as if, in talking about the advantages of ethical and moral diversity, I am committed to a specific moral system, to a consequentialist (if not actually a utilitarian) moral system. But fallibilist minimal realism does not, I believe, entail any particular moral system. It represents a meta-ethical philosophical position about the interrelations among moral systems. The arguments that can be advanced for the “advantages” of diversity, can be rephrased as showing “reasons for” diversity, or revealing the “virtues” of diversity, or its “justice”, or its being grounded in “natural law”, or in “the original constitution of our natures”. Indeed, I would be more suspicious than I am of the “advantages” of ethical diversity if I did not think that the arguments for them could be rephrased in the terms of most traditional moral systems.

28 Compare David Wong, “Coping with Moral Conflict and Ambiguity”.

29 Compare Williams, Bernard, “Consistency and Realism”, in Problems of the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), esp. pp. 205–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).

30 Lewis, David, “Dispositional Theories of Value”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 63 (1989), p. 119.Google Scholar

31 Hume's story suggests a strategy for promoting agreement in practice. First, set the conditions for people to work on projects whose outcome is satisfied by the same state of affairs, however they may be described. With luck — and it takes the luck of the coincidental compatibility of distinct projects — the parties may develop sufficient mutual understanding to formulate certain general rules for the coordination of their activities. They might even develop a set of shared general ends, if only those of maintaining their symbiotically supportive coordination. With even greater luck, they may acquire increasingly overlapping ends, realizing that they would be well served by cooperating as well as coordinating their activities.

32 But traditional moral systems differ about what sorts of actions and demeanor substantively constitute respect.