Virtue and the Self

Virtue ethics is often taught very poorly. When it is taught as philosophy, it is often crammed in alongside alternative ethical views, and taught by a proponent of one of those views. I think the ancient origin of virtue ethics is regarded with deep skepticism by many contemporary ethicists.

But what if ancient advice about how to organize our lives fits very nicely with the very modern accounts of the self? There is some independent verification of virtue ethics if we find support in accounts that have nothing to do with ancient philosophy at all.

The idea that we have “narrative” or “autobiographical” selves is an account with this type of independence from any particular ethical theory. And this view has been gaining currency in a number of fields: game theory, bioethics, and psychology among them.

Psychologists have found the practice of telling stories is central to our practices and our well-being (see, e. g. Conway 1990; Fivush and Haden 2003). Myra Schechtman’s early contribution to the notion of autobiographical selves included that “a person creates his identity by forming an autobiographical narrative—a story of his life… On this view a person’s identity is constituted by the content of her self-narrative, and the traits, actions, and experiences included in it are, by virtue of that inclusion, hers” (Schechtman 1996).

That we are in part a matter of the “traits, actions, and experiences” included in the various stories we tell about ourselves is now, as philosopher Galen Strawson has recently put it, a matter of “major consensus” (Strawson 2012).

Schechtman now offers a different account, a “person-life view,” and a forthcoming book promises to explain it at length. She writes that “the basic strategy of PLV (a person-life view) is to think of a person in terms of a certain type of developmental trajectory. “ Yet it is not like her earlier view in that there is a greater emphasis on relationships helping to constitute a person.

Philosopher and economist Don Ross has a view that can be described as similarly focused on the way our relationships inform our "nature". Coming to his conclusions through years of research and "game-theoretic logic", Ross "has extensively characterized the processes by which people learn, over the course of childhood and adolescent development, to construct narrative selves."

He offers a useful list of the properties he believes we can recognize that these "selves" have:

(1) "They are adapted to local cultural expectations, so that they facilitate
location of equilibria in global games with others who share
a similar cultural background.

(2) The dimensions along which their variance is culturally salient
form the basis for a prevailing typology of personalities and linked
aptitude sets that are normatively and statistically associated with
types of economic occupations and social roles.

(3) They are attractive to others, and so encourage cooperative activities
that exploit specialized, complementary roles, to the extent
that they display creative uniqueness within the boundaries of
local normative conventions.

(4) They develop inconsistency, which tends in the limit to incoherence,
if they are not reinforced by a person’s recurrent interactants;
and inconsistent or incoherent narrative selves are regarded
by others as diagnostic of unreliability at best and insanity
at worst.

(5) Their relative inconsistency or incomprehensibility to others will
be associated with ostracism and exclusion from collaborative
projects, including opportunities for mutually advantageous exchange.

(6) Their general comprehensibility to at least a subset of the community
sufficient for maintenance of the person’s economic niche
is a precondition for material flourishing in a society based on division
of labor.

(7) They are more closely controlled and influenced, at least from
adolescence, by cohort peers than by living ancestors.

(8) They may be drastically revised in the course of a lifetime by
appeal to the occurrence of milestone events recognized as such
by culturally stable metanarratives. Examples of such milestones
in contemporary Western societies are college graduation, marriage,
first parenthood, religious conversion, and acknowledged
recovery from addiction." (Ross 2012)

How could this be fit with virtue ethics? It doesn't fit with the caricature often offered up as criticism of the view, the idea that virtues are these steely elements that reside within a person. That might be the picture we most easily conjure up, but that's not the picture we get from the careful explanations we have of the view, however. A traditional virtue ethicist is very interested in the role norms about good behavior impact us.

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Norms concern a generalized, typically third person, description of some specified behavior. Aristotle’s discussion of how to repay debts, in book nine, chapter two of the Nicomachean Ethics provides some charming examples of norms. As he writes, “To all older persons, too, one should give honor appropriate to their age, by rising to receive them and finding seats for them and so on.” Later virtue ethicists present their audience with norms like “educate one’s daughters as one’s sons.”

Ross writes that "one of the core capacities that human parents must nurture in potentiallysuccessful offspring is that of self-narration. This skill mainly consists in the ability to engage in recurrent generate-and-test cycles in social interactions, and to track shifting local norms that define the range within which distinctive styles of behavior pass from being celebrated, to barely tolerated, to resented."

Aristotle wrote that a child who is not properly cared for has little chance of becoming virtuous. (The Stoics thought terrible upbringings could be overcome.)

What a child is getting from her upbringing, with all the coaxing, and reminding, and role modeling that we do, includes practice in identifying with and following norms that we regard as ethical. These are always contextual, always a matter of one's culture (though the standards invoked can be recognized outside of it) and, as has been pointed out, we probably borrow these from our peers as much as from our parents. But wherever they might come from, to follow good norms properly is, for virtue ethics, a matter of self-identification with them.

Virtue ethics can amount to the recommendations involved in getting us to identifying with "signature" clusters of activities and knowledge. These that we explicity recommend, discuss, and point out can be called "the virtues."

References

Conway, M. (1990) Autobiographical Memory: An Introduction, Open University Press

Fivush, R. and Haden, C. (2003) Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates

Schechtman, M. (1996) The Constitution of Selves, Cornell University Press. Reissued 2007.

______(2007) Staying Alive: Personal Continuation and a Life Worth Living,” in Practical Identity and Narrative Agency, ed. Kim Atkins and Catriona McKenzie, Routledge, pp. 31-55

Strawson, G. (2012) We Live Beyond Any Tale That We Happen to Enact, Harvard Review of Philosophy18, pp. 73–90

Ross, D. (2005) Economic Theory and Cognitive Science: Microexplanation. MIT Press. See chapter 7, entitled "Selves and their Games".

____(2004) Meta-linguistic signalling for coordination amongst social agents. Language Sciences 26: 621-642.

____(2006) The economics and evolution of selves. Journal of Cognitive Systems Research, 7: 246-258.

____(2007) H sapiens as ecologically special: What does language contribute? Language Sciences 29: 710-731.

_____(2012) The Evolution of Individualistic Norms, draft available online:

http://newprairiepress.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1070&context=biy…