[Inspired by David Bentley Hart’s All Things, I’m going to use this dialogic form from time to time in hopes that it will make some of my arguments easier to engage with. In this post, I’m attempting to set up why it’s important to understand the argument that Alasdair MacIntyre is making in his After Virtue.]
Q: Virtue? Who talks about such a thing anymore? Isn’t it just conformity to what some prig thinks is correct behavior? And why bother with ethics? Doesn’t everybody who was brought up in a more or less sane family know what’s right and wrong?
A: You’d think, right? But even if you were brought up in a normal family, you must live in a pluralistic society where there are many competing ethical and values frameworks that can be compelling and challenging to one’s familial values. How do you know which one is right?
Q: Well, I just go with my gut. If I’m wrong, I’ll find out, and lesson learned. We learn best from experience, not from books or taking an ethics class. Right?
A: Yes. Taking an ethics class is close to useless the way most are taught today. But let’s assume that you are a mature, thoughtful person. Good for you. But you’re a rare breed because we live in a society that makes it extremely difficult for young people to mature into such thoughtfulness.
Q: Mature?
A: Sure, don't you have friends who are basically good people from decent families, but who have bad judgment, who seem to make mistakes over and over again? People,for instance, who keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Or who always seem to self-sabotage or never seem to learn from their mistakes? Don’t you know lots of people who just seem stuck in some middle-school version of themselves?
Q: Sure. They seem to be living in a Judd Apatow movie as Seth Rogan or Lena Dunham wannabes.
A: Or maybe a step a from that is the the rules-breaking, self-styled uebermensch, the tough guy, the fearless man/woman of violence, the Jack Reacher or Clint Eastwood types whose only rule is to protect their friends and to destroy their enemies.
Both of these “ethics” dominate popular culture, the first on the Left and the second on the Right, because most of the people who make movies haven’t advanced beyond a middle-school level of moral maturity.
So, let me ask you: What does it mean for you to be a grown up?
Q: Well get a job, get into a committed relationship, raise a family.
A: Can’t you hear popular culture screaming at you how boring that is? Is that really the route to happiness and fulfillment? Is that a way to be free and to become your best self?
Q: Well, it works for me.
A: And good for you that it does, but what if the company you go to work for a company like Enron, Lehman, or Anderson? What if it’s a company that’s exploiting poor people who don’t have a choice but to be exploited? Or police department that’s racist or on the take. Or a media company that traffics in lies and propagnda. Or a political party that one naively became involved in for idealistic reasons and learned that dirty tricks is the coin of the realm?
Q: Well, he could quit.
A: Maybe you would, but would most people? Won’t most into buy whatever the organization’s propaganda is tho justify their bad behavior so they can keep getting a paycheck? There are always good reasons for doing the wrong thing. Most young people, especially if they tend to be idealistic, the kind who got an A in her business ethics class, get a shock when they find out how the “real world” works. They become cynical. Well if this is the way the world works, then I have to throw out my ideals, and I have to adapt. I have to stop being such a sissy boy scout. Everybody else seems to have adapted, and they don’t seem like bad people. Besides, I don’t want to be a morally smug jerk.
In other words, do you see how culture—whether it’s the culture as presented on TV and film or the cultural ethos of a one’s workplace—can justify unethical behavior for very compelling reasons—usually some variation on the “we live in a viciously competitive, eat-or-be-eaten world, and when survival is at stake, ethics goes out the window—You do what you gotta do.”
Q: Ok. Maybe. But what’s your point? Where are you going with this?
A: Well most people who find themselves adapting to this kind of justification for bad behavior may not be Seth Rogans or Jack Reachers, but they demonstrate that they haven’t really achieved any level of moral maturity. It’s not all their fault because there’s very little in contemporary American society that encourages them to grow up. Most people are stuck in what Kohlberg calls the Pre-Conventional stage of moral development—a stage most of us start to go through in the middle school years and should, if we lived in a sane society, pass out of by the time we get out of high school. But more and more young people aren’t passing out of it anymore. They’re staying stuck in middle school where their moral decision making is determined pretty much by fear of punishment or being shamed, so they do as they’re told and adapt Zelig-like to whatever the rules are as they are defined by whatever group culture they’re hanging out in.
That kind of fear-based “moral” decision making is the lowest level of moral development in the Kohlberg scheme. The next step up is the kid who has enough moxie to break rules and test limits. They still fear punishment, but they are willing to take risks to get the reward that comes from breaking the taboo. These are the cool kids in middle school and high school, but it is still middle-school behavior. They're both still in Kohlberg's "Pre-Conventional".
Q: Ok. so what does it mean to mature from that middle-school stage?
A: At the risk of over simplifying, the next step is what he calls the ‘Conventional’. It’s when kids, even some of the cool kids, realize that while the rules might be arbitrary conventions, we all need rules to live in a sane society, and so we must submit to the ones that exist, and if they’re stupid, we work to change them.
And, so long as we’re talking about what comes next, the stage after that for Kohlberg is the ‘Post Conventional’—which I’m stretching beyond Kohlberg to fit my purposes:1 It’s when you recognize that the standard by which you judge “conventions as stupid” is by an ideal grounded in the transcendental Justice, and that the only thing that matters for us as individuals is that we work gradually to get our lives into deeper alignment with it and with other transcendental ideals.
That is the work of virtue correctly understood. It’s not about being a prig, but about adopting practices that promote our becoming more densely human, if by density we mean the kind of, down-to-earth, warm, menschy moral solidity that the most morally mature among us attain. The point about the life of virtue is that is that acting virtuously is not an end in itself, but a set of practices that lead us toward a goal, a telos, for each of us to achieve, each in our own way. This movement toward the goal is what Aristotle means by eudaemonia, or so I want to argue. It’s how I think about what it means to grow in moral maturity.
But an important point to make here is that moral maturity is not something that is valued in a consumerist, techno-capitalist society. It is profoundly subversive of it, and the logic of the TCM requires that the great mass of us remain divided and conquered, endlessly squabbling about things we can never resolve—so long as there is no transcendental ideal to which we all submit. The worst thing that could happen to subvert the logic of the TCM is for morally mature people to sit down with one another and work things out. Moral maturity is the great enemy of the TCM, but clearly it has nothing to fear from it now.
BTW, MacIntyre’s After Virtue is the story, that parallels Taylors in A Secular Age, about how the modern societies have devolved into disenchanted moral incoherence, and if we’re serious about understanding what we are going through and have any hopes of finding a way through it, nothing, imo, is more important for us to try to understand. We can’t find a way out until we understand how we got in.
Note:
1. This is the most controversial of the stages, perhaps because there’s not a large sample size to draw from. Socrates? Gandhi? MLK? Dietrich Bonhoeffer? And because Kohlberg wants to remain within a social science frame, that excludes his talking about things like transcendentals, but I would argue that his Post-Conventional makes no sense without it.
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