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Précis of Knowing Better: Virtue, Deliberation, and Normative Ethics
Author(s) -
Star Daniel
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/phpr.12346
Subject(s) - deliberation , virtue , normative , star (game theory) , citation , sociology , philosophy , epistemology , computer science , library science , law , political science , physics , politics , astrophysics
How is it possible for there to be genuine normative reasons that ordinary virtuous agents are able to rely on to determine what they should do, given that they are, generally speaking, ignorant of fundamental ethical principles of the kind that interest philosophers, and the reasons such principles purport to specify? It is naturally tempting to suppose that they are able to do this by responding to reasons that are of a non-fundamental or derivative kind. The fact that a friend is experiencing grief is a reason for you to console her, but we do not expect the basic principles of a normative ethical theory to refer to grief. The fact that an act would be a lie is a reason not to do it, but not even Kantian normative ethicists would view such a claim as fundamental; it might be said that all lies involve disrespecting the rational capacities of the person being lied to, but, even if this were true, it would not be facts concerning (actual or potential disrespecting of) rational capacities that we expect ordinary virtuous agents to be directly responding to when they avoid lying. Not everyone will accept that there is a genuine philosophical problem here. On the one hand, some dogmatic ethicists, both consequentialist and non-consequentialist, will insist that the genuinely virtuous do know, or are committed to, the correct ethical theory (perhaps “implicitly”, which is an easy thing to say, but a difficult thing to make sense of). Others, especially those drawn to utilitarianism, will claim that we should reject the idea that the virtuous reliably act on or for the right reasons. Still others will endorse a particularism about ethical principles that holds on to the traditional thought that the virtuous reliably act on the right reasons, but gives up on the central project of modern normative ethics. I recognize that some philosophers will wish to respond in one of these ways, and I do say some things in Knowing Better about why I think this would be a mistake (in Chapter 1, especially), but the main aim of the book is not to persuade people who wish to get off the boat this early on that they should not do so, but rather to provide a satisfactory response to what I hope many philosophers will take to be a genuine problem. A couple of convictions stand behind this project. The first is that ordinary virtue is often on a more secure footing than philosophical theorizing—it seems odd to me when moral philosophers purport to believe very general normative theoretical principles, as distinct from purporting to believe, say, that they should normally keep their promises.