5
Coming to Terms with Lives:
a Case for Modesty and Responsibility in Moral Reflection and Moral Teaching
Moral philosophy is appealing
because it is so various. One can learn a little about lots of human activities
and then think about the bearing of moral principles and moral concepts on
those activities. An introductory ethics reader might address cloning,
environmental protection, fair hiring practices, sexual relations, parenting,
engineering safety, and bank lending policies. Moral philosophy is truly the
right major subject for people who cannot decide on a major.
Because the range of possible
philosophic topics is so great, the issue of philosophic responsibility is a
serious moral question. Philosophers – and those partly initiated into the
tradition through introductory courses and general reading – feel empowered to
talk about almost anything. The argument strategies of moral philosophy allow
one to produce plausible and coherent theses about all sorts of matters with
which one has very little first-hand experience. Such theses may be importantly
different from the considered judgments of those to whom those matters are
centrally important.
In this thesis, I have explored one strategy by which
philosophers may move beyond casual knowledge:
incorporating rich accounts of lives into philosophic reflection. In the
last three chapters, I have given accounts of three different philosophical
research strategies, each emphasizing the importance of seeing lives whole as
part of responsible philosophic reflection. I will focus in my final chapter on
the contribution that such strategies can make to the responsible conduct of
philosophic inquiry, taking advantage of the suggestions developed in earlier
chapters. I will also try to model an approach that takes lives seriously in
the teaching of ethics, as a way of encouraging responsible ethical inquiry
among a wide range of decision-makers in this society.
To set the stage for this argument, I will briefly
describe two quite different kinds of philosophic work from my own recent
experience that define and illustrate the question about the relevance of lives
to philosophic investigation. I hope that these cases will be suggestive about
the contribution that a consideration of lives can make to philosophic inquiry
and about the way an examination of lives contributes to responsible
philosophic practice.
Over the last year, I consulted with
an architect on an article detailing the reasons for preserving a cluster of
buildings in Tyler, Minnesota that house the Danebod Folk School, a
transplanted Danish institution that models an alternative to the United States
university system. I developed arguments that this site embodies features of
this institution and its particular style and that important information would
be lost if the buildings were destroyed. Some months later, I approached the
architect again, with the idea of expanding the argument from this initial
article into a general account of priorities in historic preservation, giving
top priority to those structures that encode important cultural information
that cannot be otherwise recorded or reproduced. To my surprise, he was very
critical of this project. He said that people who fight to save buildings or to
enact legislation protecting categories of buildings have learned never to
propose hierarchies of value or importance, because legislators seize the
opportunity to draw lines on such hierarchical models, condemning everything
below the line to oblivion. If one wishes to avoid this use of one’s thought,
one learns to write instead about alternative rationales for
historic preservation.
This episode raised three
interesting issues. First, my architect informant made me aware that what was
for me a purely theoretical discussion might have a use in debate that would
influence whether particular buildings were saved from the wrecking ball.[1]
What I had taken to be a contribution to an academic debate was, just possibly,
also a morally significant action in the ongoing political negotiations around
historic preservation laws and policies. I had unexpected moral
responsibilities to those people who had been fighting this battle for many
years. Also, his caution raised some new and interesting philosophic questions:
what was exactly the meaning of establishing a preservation hierarchy? Did the
hierarchical picture I was constructing imply that, in times of tight money,
all items on the top of the hierarchy had priority over those lower down, or
was it some different kind of hierarchical picture? Finally, his response made
me aware in a general way of my own ignorance about preservation issues. It
seemed possible that other passionate preservationists might have other
objections to my approach, rooted in their own battles to preserve historically
significant structures. The difficulty of commenting cleverly from the outside
about matters to which serious people had devoted their personal and
professional lives became obvious to me.
Over the last few years, I have had
conversations with a lawyer who has become a leader in advocating for animal
protection among lawyers in Minnesota, most recently by founding the Minnesota
Bar Association committee on animal law. We have spent some hours discussing
various moral and legal rationales for animal protection. Recently, I went with
her on a bus tour of small beef ranches north of Minneapolis, Minnesota. We met
perhaps a dozen farmers, with various sizes of operation and various attitudes
toward the animals they were raising. I approached the tour initially with some
dread. I expected that the animals would be uncomfortable and unhappy, and that
the attitudes of many farmers would be callous and brutal. I had experienced
that sort of attitude as I grew up on a farm.
The actual range of attitude, and
the range of quality in animal care, surprised me. Small operations were clean
and efficient, and the animals seemed content and healthy. Larger operations
showed more problems, and the owners had less concern with the welfare of each
animal. As I listened to the farmers talk about what they were doing, and the
challenges they faced, I began to make distinctions I had not made before and
to reframe the central moral and legal issues for myself. It seemed for example
very important to emphasize the profound differences between small, diversified
farming operations and large factory farms, and to make consumers aware of
these differences. At the same time, I was conscious that I was seeing only a
very small selection of the farms in this one area of the state: the farms that
would fit on a plausible bus route. Further, I was aware that, for each
operation, I was getting only a glimpse of the animal husbandry practices and
the basic attitudes of the proprietor. If this selected sample and these glimpses
were making me reconsider my ways of thinking about this practice, I wondered
what a series of intense conversations with these farmers would tell me – or a
forty-year friendship with them? The task of integrating this rich biographical
material into my thinking seemed both overwhelming and utterly necessary.
From these two experiences, and many
others like them over the years, I have come to be quite worried about the
playful distance between philosophic reflection and its objects. Surely,
philosophers are not legislators or administrators; their judgments do not make
policy. However, their teaching and writing contribute to the intellectual
structures that guide policy development, and, more important, their modeling
of moral reflection in classes with titles like “Introduction to Ethics”
influences students who will acquire various kinds of power and influence on
practical affairs. At one level, this means simply: philosophers have a
responsibility to do their homework, to know their way around the topics they
choose to address, to try to get things right. At another level, procedurally,
they have a responsibility to build into their methods of inquiry and
investigation structures that will show them the extent of their own ignorance,
before that ignorance is transmuted into plausible-sounding views. At this
procedural level of responsible philosophic conduct, the reference outward to
lives and to the ways that various objects of philosophic interest are
“contained” in lives can, I think, make an important contribution.
In the introduction to this thesis, I asked about the
right place of lives – or rich accounts of lives – in practical moral
reflection and in the teaching of introductory ethics. How do biographies,
stories, meetings, and long friendships inform and enrich the morally
reflective life, and what place does a substantial treatment of the details of
individual lives hold in effective and meaningful introductory courses in
ethics? How can one connect the
necessary and commonplace reflection on one’s own life and the lives of others,
a huge part of every alert human being’s intellectual activity, to the
bordered, disciplined kind of moral reflection modeled in academic moral
philosophy and especially in university ethics courses?
Throughout this discussion, I have been conscious of
a tension between these two enterprises: the discipline of moral philosophy
requires manageable topics, carefully delimited questions, and a finite amount
of relevant evidence. Consideration of lives requires that one take account of
vast numbers of events and circumstances; this complex material lends itself to
many readings, and sometimes to endless controversy. This tension is at the
center of the works of Plato, the founding documents of the western philosophic
tradition. Plato’s dialogues provide the paradigms for contemporary moral
argument: they model the isolation and definition of discrete issues and
problems, the pursuit of one point at a time, the careful consideration of
particular arguments. At the same time, a substantial number of these dialogues
also contribute to a complex portrait of the life of Socrates, with conflicting
emphases that give rise in scholarship to many different accounts of Socrates’
attitudes and intentions. With Plato, at the beginning of the western
tradition, we see both a massive effort to isolate and define particular issues
and a massive effort to capture a significant life in all its complexity. These two efforts must have somehow been
integrated in the teaching done at the Academy. Plato’s accomplishment
challenges contemporary moral philosophers and teachers of moral philosophy to
integrate these two strands of the tradition into a coherent reflective
practice and a coherent teaching practice.
In investigating this question, I
have come to see how large it is and how many different approaches one might
take to it. I have not undertaken to take any kind of full inventory of those
approaches; rather I have looked at three central texts that contribute
important first words to this discussion. In this final chapter of the thesis,
I will attempt to bring together the insights of my three philosophic
“witnesses,” providing a foundation for further work in this rich philosophic
area.
I take the general implication of the texts I have
considered in this thesis to be this: the consideration of lives figures into
moral reflection and teaching as one way of proceeding modestly and thus
responsibly, taking due account of human ignorance and liability to error in
moral theorizing and moral advice. In this chapter, I will unpack this
conclusion, as Mill, Plato and Descartes develop it. I will then illustrate how
ethical teaching might approach three different pieces of popular moral advice:
“Do your best,” “Help those less fortunate than yourself,” and “Set a good
example.” The approach I will suggest would use lives to help students begin an
exploration of these pieces of advice without prejudging the outcome or
artificially simplifying the issues involved. This last section will sketch the
attitude toward ethical reflection that seems to me to take appropriate account
of the evidence of lives.
The Discourse on Method
directly articulates an account of philosophic modesty. Descartes entertains in
the Discourse the possibility that an incomplete train of thought or a
mistaken train of thought may convince him to act in ways that fuller or better
thinking would show to be morally wrong. He takes responsibility for his own
potential errors of judgment in advance, mapping out a plan of action that will
preserve him, at least on those occasions on which he knows his thinking to be
limited and incomplete, from courses of action he will later come to regret. In
taking responsibility for his action in this way, Descartes does two important
services for moral philosophy: he introduces the topic of provisional ethics
and appropriate intellectual modesty into moral discussion, and he sketches
some basic approaches to modesty and moral self-limitation.
It is clear that the Discourse
account is only the first word in a very long investigation. Descartes draws up
his provisional ethics in a mood of extraordinary intellectual optimism: the
questions from which all substantial perplexity arises can be identified and
subjected to new, promising deductive methods that will lead to certain
conclusions that can be known to be certain. One need not worry about needing a
provisional ethics for one’s whole life, or for generations of lives – just for
the duration of a limited inquiry. To less optimistic philosophers, some of
Descartes’ provisions seem just impossible: one cannot live an adult life
without making commitments, for example. At minimum, any rethinking of
Descartes’ project must produce strategies suitable for those in long-term,
perhaps permanent, perplexity.
Descartes formulates his provisional
ethics without any reference to moral puzzles or problems. His considerations
are quite general. Another way that his project needs to be extended is this:
one needs to take account of the actual mistakes and omissions that have been
made in moral thinking, and to provide remedies for those particular problems,
in one’s account of responsible moral thinking. One has presumably the special
responsibility to avoid those mistakes that thoughtful persons are particularly
prone to make.
Mill’s remarks in “Of Individuality” can be read as
addressing just this problem. When Mill writes in general about ethics and
public policy, he hopes to reduce the complexity of ordinary moral thinking to
some orderly procedure that promises clear and certain results. That is a
common hope of moral thinking (and moral teaching) at every level. Given that general project, Mill’s remarks
in “Of Individuality” are striking: all of one’s efforts to produce a model
society or a model life could be rendered meaningless by a quality that emerges
within lives over time: the quality of ‘inhuman-ness’ or ‘robotic-ness.’ In
admitting that such a spoiler quality could arise even in a life planned
according to best principles, Mill gives up on the hope of tidiness and closure
in moral thinking. In addition to trying to decide well, act by act, how to
proceed, one must also attend to the shape of one’s life as it emerges, to the
relationships among its elements. Mill discovers that a life is spoiled if it
is not one’s own. This affects both his ethics and his political philosophy; a
state might maximize all sorts of valuable properties by a policy that also
encouraged robotic lives. Like the ethicist, the legislator and the framer of
constitutions must study how various proposals play out in the lives undertaken
in conformity to those proposals.
The point that Mill addresses in “Of
Individuality” can be stated on two levels. At one level, it is the product of
a particular intuition about how lives have value – a requirement that actions
arise in the right way from the emotions and personalities and histories of
those who perform those actions. At another level, the point is more general:
lives may be spoiled by coming to exemplify certain properties that emerge as
various commitments and principles are lived out. Surely, Mill could not claim
that his intuition captures the only way that a life could be spoiled. Just as
Mill claims that a life that proceeds robotically is without value, Saint Paul,
in his famous letter to the Corinthians, proposes that any action, however
admirable, that is part of a loveless life is without value. Scouring the moral
literature of the world might turn up quite a number of irreducible qualities
that spoil otherwise admirable lives. It is hard to see how one would ever
achieve any kind of closure on this matter – any complete list of spoilers.
The most general consequence of this
line of thought is that any appropriately modest moral reflection or moral
teaching must consider individual pieces of moral advice both with respect to
their immediate content and implications and also with respect to their place
in the lives of those who take them seriously. The testing of principles and
points of view through a manageable, tidy consideration of some bordered set of
circumstances, some range of cases, must be supplemented by a much broader look
at how someone can live out these principles and points of view. Only with that
kind of approach can one hope to identify those emergent qualities that might
render one’s effort futile.
This line of thought connects Mill’s
discussion to Descartes’ provisional ethics. Descartes warns, in a general way,
that philosophic investigation may have surprising results, and that one must
live in a way that allows for the possibility of radical revisions of one’s
basic moral assumptions and that minimizes the risk of serious moral error.
Mill’s discovery, in “Of Individuality,” points out a specific dimension within
which moral thinking must be provisional and open to revision. It illustrates
one kind of late and unexpected result that moral thinking can produce.
Mill’s argument makes two cases for the consideration
of lives. (1) One needs to take account of lives because the connection between
impulse and emotion and action matters, morally, and that connection only
becomes visible when one comes to see the overall shape of a life, and (2) one
needs to take account of full lives because one cannot otherwise anticipate how
general features of those lives may qualify or modify one’s approval or
disapproval of particular actions and attitudes. The requirement that morally
valuable action be humane requires one kind of examination of lives, and the
worries about the uncertainty, the provisional character, of any judgment that
restricts itself to particular episodes within a life, requires a yet broader
consideration of relationships among the elements in a full, complex life.
Mill’s proposals expand Descartes’ provisional ethics
in another way; they take that ethics beyond the merely personal realm.
Descartes recommended that people attend to the lives of thoughtful persons, in
settling on their own course of action. Mill goes further; the state,
recognizing that valuable human behavior cannot be predicted in advance or
reduced to a formula, should put public policy in the service of individual
moral choice by encouraging the growth of many different thoughtful and interesting
lives from which people can learn something about the qualities of valuable
lives. Because the state cannot define
in advance the best sort of life, it has the responsibility to make many
different lives available for consideration. For Mill, provisional ethics is as
much a political problem as an individual moral problem: by enabling many
different lives to flourish, the state enables individuals to recognize
emergent features of lives that contradict conventional wisdom or established
theory. For Mill, it takes an extremely
tolerant village to safeguard an individual against moral error.
Both Descartes and Mill make
exemplary lives central to their discussions of philosophic modesty, but lives
are important to their discussions in different ways. For Mill, if people have
an opportunity to observe lives in which action arises spontaneously out of
individual impulse and emotion, they will see the value of that sort of life
and the relative poverty of conformist or robotic lives. Great lives make people
aware of admirable qualities and encourage them to strive for such qualities.
Descartes goes further; he recommends that those in moral perplexity model
their lives on the lives of sensible and modest persons.
Descartes’ suggestion separates into
two parts: (1) the suggestion that those in perplexity follow someone’s
example, model their lives on some other life, and (2) the suggestion that they
choose as models “sensible and modest” persons. As we have seen in the detailed
discussion of Descartes’ view, it is not easy to say with assurance what
Descartes’ condition on the right sort of exemplary life comes to.
It is easy to overlook the first
part of this suggestion, the recommendation that those who are conscious of
their moral fallibility model their lives on some other life. This suggestion
is not trivial or obvious. Think of people who stumble on to a moral idea, who
are in the grip of a moral argument. They may try to construct a life from the
ground up, embodying the idea or giving due weight to the argument, or they may
try to find model lives that realize the idea or give due respect to the
argument. They may move straight to implementation, or they may take their
current ideal of sensible living as a measure for selecting exemplary lives.
Henry David Thoreau, in Walden,
chronicles a stretch of life invented from the ground up. Walden is full
of assertions of originality and independence:
What
everybody echoes or in silence passes by as true today may turn out to be
falsehood tomorrow, mere smoke of opinion, which some had trusted for a cloud
that would sprinkle fertilizing rain on their fields. What old people say you
cannot do you try and find that you can. Old people did not know enough once,
perchance, to fetch fresh fuel to keep the fire a-going; new people put a
little dry wood under a pot, and are whirled round the globe with the speed of
birds, in a way to kill old people, as the phrase is... Practically, the old
have no very important advice to give the young, their own experience has been
so partial, and their lives have been such miserable failures, for private
reasons, as they must believe... I have lived some thirty years on this planet,
and I have yet to hear the first syllable of valuable or even earnest advice
from my seniors.[2]
Surely,
Thoreau is overstating here. Think about how many models Thoreau had easily
available for simple, intentional, meditative ways of life. The Christian
tradition had hermits and monks, the Indian tradition had sacred recluses and
holy people, the native people around him modeled a way of life quite close to
that which he adopted at Walden Pond, the Greeks could offer the Cynics and the
Epicureans. Thoreau sometimes acknowledges such models, but, more often, he
delights in being original, in thinking things through for himself, for the
first time. That delight is part of the charm and genius of Walden; like
Robinson Crusoe, Thoreau is inventing human life on his own terms, out of his
own ideas and experience.
Part of the charm of Thoreau’s
experiment is that he undertakes it alone, at a time when he has few
responsibilities or commitments. If the experiment fails, he harms only
himself. One is made uneasy by other nineteenth century figures living in the
same inventive and individualistic spirit: Joseph Smith has a vision, and
invents a religion, a government system, a whole society that changes the lives
of millions of people. More secular ideas produce utopian communities and
strange new ways of life. Nineteenth Century America is an incredible social
experiment laboratory, in which new thoughts are quickly translated into
actions and institutions and methods of production and social systems. A reader
of Mill’s On Liberty would find that vision realized in the United
States in a very impressive way; timid souls would have an abundance of
original lives to study and admire.
But I think it is just in the
context of that sort of social ferment that Descartes’ provisional ethics
becomes relevant. Descartes writes The Discourse on Method in full
consciousness of how strange the paths of the mind can be. Descartes imagines
that his fellow humans might be robots, that life might be a dream or the
projection of an evil deceiver, that animals might be equivalent to mechanical
toys. He has to be conscious of the danger of acting immediately and decisively
on the idea that, at the moment, seems best to oneself. It is helpful to read
the third chapter of the Discourse while calling to mind both the
incredible imaginative constructions of the Meditations and also the
social and intellectual history of Nineteenth Century America – a country that
was for many people the place where dreams came true.
What does it mean for a person
visited by strange ideas and arguments, urging impossible and unheard of
actions, to proceed responsibly? How does one allow for the possibility that an
argument that seems utterly convincing today will show its warts tomorrow? The
possibility that one’s thought will progress beyond one’s current plan is a
serious possibility, and, for anyone with influence or resources, moral
mistakes may do immense harm. That is, I think, the right context within which
to read Descartes’ provisional ethics.
Within this context, the suggestion
that one model one’s life on some other life is not at all trivial. It
establishes a research project: to find some life in which one’s current “best
idea” is lived out. Such a project will provide information, rather like the
information that the careful choosers in the Myth of Er derive from studying
the lives lying around on the ground. One will learn what goes along with this
idea, as it is lived out – what commitments it carries with it. One will learn
what kind of person one becomes, when one makes this idea the center of one’s
life. One will also find practical information about how to cope with the
difficulties this idea imposes upon one. (A close reading of Thoreau’s
biography during the Walden period makes it clear that he hiked into
Concord fairly often for a home-cooked meal.) The requirement to direct one’s
life by finding lives to emulate imposes an interesting discipline on action,
one that might indeed curtail all kinds of excessive enthusiasm and reveal
difficulties with one’s practical arguments.
The other part of Descartes’
suggestion, that one choose as one’s exemplars sensible and modest persons, is
slippery and controversial. At minimum, it might mean simply this: when one is
convinced of the truth of some practical position, one should seek out the
lived experience of those whose lives are sensible, on the standard set by that
position. Mystics should model themselves on mystics, rationalists on
rationalists, romantics on romantics. This minimal interpretation of the
“sensible and modest person” requirement is surely not empty: the moral agent
who refrains from straightaway implementing his or her bright ideas and instead
goes searching for a model will, in many ways, introduce a dose of realism and
balance and complexity into his or her moral experiments. The search for models
is plausibly a useful discipline in the service of philosophic responsibility.
As I suggested in the fourth
chapter, however, Descartes’ requirement here may be somewhat stronger. It is
reasonable to think that Descartes may take being sensible to require either or
both of these conditions: (1) uncontroversial excellence in reasoning in some
area in which results can be evaluated, and (2) an approach to practical
reasoning that follows the dictates of Descartes’ intellectual method (dividing
problems into parts, treating parts separately, reasoning from those
propositions that one is least able to doubt, and so on). If Descartes intends
either or both of these conditions, he is essentially recommending that one
search out exemplars who display some real intellectual excellence and who live
out their convictions in a thorough and consistent way.
The problem for understanding what
Descartes is doing in the third section of the Discourse is partly a
problem of imagining the state of mind of the person reading it. It is possible
that that person has encountered many skeptical arguments, has come to doubt
most of his or her received wisdom, and has not yet completed an intellectual
reconstruction of the world of the sort that Descartes models in the late parts
of the Meditations. Such a person will be like a body upon which no
force acts, expected to do things in the world, but unable to find convincing
reasons to do any particular thing. For such a person, the provisional ethics
may be read as saying: preserve your peace of mind and intellectual capacity
for thinking things through, avoid commitments you might have to undo later,
and, when you do have to act, try to model your behavior on the smartest and
most consistent people you know. That’s the best you can do.
This
model will surely fit some Discourse readers, as it surely fit Descartes
in some stages of his development. But this is not the only kind of philosophic
reader one might imagine for the Discourse, nor is it the only state
that a radical reconstruction project like Descartes’ provokes. It is common to
the point of cliché among those who begin to probe their inherited assumptions
and seek alternatives to accepted customs and habits that such folks go through
a series of conversions, with absolute certainties giving way repeatedly to new
absolute certainties, as their thinking develops, as they read more, as they
bring their ideas into dialogue with their experience. Such a reader of the Discourse
is in quite a different mood than the motionless skeptic. He or she has very definite
impulses to action, and no reason to hold back, except perhaps the thought that
yesterday’s very definite impulses to action seem mistaken today. To such a
reader, the Discourse might be “heard” to say: find the most thoughtful
models available for the life you think best and learn from them how one goes
about living out this idea in practical life. Try to live in a way that
preserves your ability to continue to think and to undertake new projects.
It is tempting to read the Discourse
as a peculiar and personal document, Descartes’ letter to himself about his
idiosyncratic intellectual project. But Descartes’ project differs only in its
greater rigor and thoroughness from projects that many initiates into the
western philosophic tradition have undertaken. The impulse to define terms, to
take nothing for granted, to work out the logical implications of one’s
beliefs, is a kind of philosophic syndrome that people catch, generation after
generation, from reading works like Plato’s dialogues and Euclid’s Elements;
Descartes captures that universal impulse in one form in his rules of
intellectual method. Likewise, the ideal of philosophic responsibility embodied
in the provisional ethics addresses a quite general moral problem confronting
those undergoing philosophic initiation: their principles of action must
somehow take account of what they know about the development of their own
reasoning over time, without condemning them to total inaction.
In treating provisional ethics in
the Discourse on Method, Descartes lives up to his responsibilities as a
teacher of philosophy. He recognizes that his reflections and his recommended
intellectual strategies will place his readers in morally dangerous waters, and
he attempts to give them some advice for navigation. I can see no important
difference between the role that Descartes takes on as teacher in the Discourse
and the role of any philosophy instructor in an introductory, general
education, ethics course. The same moral problems are routinely generated. For
that reason, Descartes’ discussion is relevant to the ethics of introductory
ethics teaching, and his suggestions deserve consideration as formative
principles in the construction of such courses.
THE CRITO:
SOCRATES DEFERS TO HIMSELF
Mill and Descartes take account of
one problem of philosophic responsibility: the issue of allowing for one’s own
mistakes, blind spots, and one-sided intellectual enthusiasms in making
practical decisions that sometimes have weighty and irrevocable consequences.
Both philosophers respond to this challenge by advocating some general
procedures and methods that bring one important information. These procedures,
in each case, involve attention to the lives available in one’s community. The Crito
is a dramatic reconstruction of a weighty decision made quickly, under enormous
emotional pressure. Like the previous discussions, the dialogue models a
procedure for gathering information that takes the decision-maker beyond the
impulses and ideas of the moment. In this procedure also, a priority is placed
on the examination of a life. But, in the Crito, the decider reviews and
consults his own life and the full range of decisions and commitments and
intellectual accomplishments that it contains.
In Plato’s Crito, the decisive word is given
to the fictional character “the Laws of Athens,” who reminds Socrates of his
long-term commitments and loyalties and who repeatedly accuses him of
attempting to destroy “the Laws of Athens,” in violation of those commitments
and in repudiation of those loyalties. The exact character of the argument is
not clear: as I suggested in chapter three, it is difficult to accept that
Plato would portray Socrates as unquestioningly granting such a fictional
character moral standing, and yet the most obvious readings of the argument
take this “granting” as an unsupported move in the argument. I do not know how
to resolve this difficulty.
I will try to give a summary of the conclusions of
the Crito that are relevant to this investigation in terms compatible
with a range of possible readings of the Crito argument:
1.
The Crito suggests that
it is sometimes appropriate, when confronted with a moral choice that depends
upon some central moral notion (like “justice” or “harm”) to rely upon those
conclusions one has reached in the past, rather than reopening the conceptual
investigation. (Socrates explicitly rehearses philosophic results about justice
and harm obtained earlier, at the beginning of his argument. He may also
be relying on his earlier attitudes toward the Laws of Athens as authority for
regarding the Laws as a being capable of receiving harm and protected by
requirements of justice from intentional harm.)
2.
The Crito
suggests that one must pay close attention to one’s particular history and
one’s particular circumstances, in an investigation of one’s obligations. The
argument makes use of facts about Socrates’ life choices that are perhaps not
true of any other Athenian: his having children at an advanced age in the last
days of a losing war, his refusal to leave Athens during a long life.
Similarly, the claim that escaping will show an intention to destroy Athens is
most plausibly understood as a point about the particular significance of
Socrates’ escape in these very particular historical circumstances rather than
as a general point about any escape by anybody to avoid legal penalties.
Socrates surveys his life as a time traveling observer might survey it, asking:
to what have I given respect, loyalty, commitment? What agreements could be
plausibly ascribed to me? And what role do I play in Athens at the present time
in history?
Both of these general approaches offer an alternative to what might seem from other dialogues to be the most natural approach: an effort to think the matter through from the beginning, from first principles. It is interesting to think about the significance of this shift. Socrates seems to acknowledge here that one’s best arguments at any given time may not be good enough, that one may have a responsibility to do better than just acting on the best idea that occurs to one at the particular moment when a decision is required. Socrates is shown taking this practical decision seriously by consulting his relevant particular judgments and general results over a lifetime of thought and response. It is as if he is calling together council composed of himself at various points in his life, to give testimony about how this last action should go. As the chooser in the Myth of Er looks over lives lying on the ground, Socrates looks over the shape of his own life, to see what last action goes together with the parts that came before. In doing this, he resists the temptation to think that his most pressing thought or argument at this moment should speak for him as a whole person.
One way of understanding what Socrates is portrayed as doing here is to think about how we imagine people responding to proposals of marriage. Normally, those who propose marriage set the stage very carefully, so that the momentary emotions of the person being asked are favorable in all sorts of ways. But it is perfectly natural for the recipient of the proposal to resist all this stage-setting and to ask for time to think the proposal over, to call to mind all the different thoughts he has had about this person, so that his final answer is one that he is entirely behind, and not just an impulse.
Another interesting comparison example is what people sometimes say to those in the midst of a suicidal depression. It would surely be reasonable to say to such a person: your feelings now represent just a tiny fraction of your life experience, of your thinking, of your desires and ambitions. At other times in your life, all sorts of other impulses have been prominent, and you have no reason to think they will not be prominent again. It is simply tyrannical and unjust to forbid those aspects of yourself any further expression or any part in this momentous decision.
In a similar way, Plato is imagining Socrates as formulating a response to this final moral question that takes account of his entire life and his entire range of thought. He is modeling quite a different procedure from that involved in investigating moral questions in the abstract and at a distance from pressing and irrevocable decisions.
The picture of moral thinking current in “Introduction to Ethics” classes is often very much simpler than that which Plato gives us in the Crito. Teachers often profess the view that students should examine the available arguments and do that action which, after some thought, seems best supported. It is seldom suggested that this procedure might be irresponsible precisely because it commits the whole person on the basis of a train of thought that is the property of one very limited life-stage. I think teachers of ethics very often worry that students are so caught up in conformity and habit that they are not open to being changed by arguments or ideas. That may indeed be true of some students, but, for others, thinking is powerful and the issues of responsible thinking, of intellectual modesty, are real and pressing.
The picture of Socrates as moral decision-maker in the Crito provides an interesting occasion for the discussion of the particular responsibilities of philosophers who engage in thought leading directly to action (especially as one contrasts the Crito with other dialogues addressing ethical topics), a model for disciplined reflection on one’s own life, and an opening for students’ own stories and reflections about their commitments, their established moral conclusions, and the entities to which they give respect and loyalty. In short, the Crito provides an introduction to the topic of disciplined self-examination and self-reflection as a dimension of modesty and of morally responsible philosophic investigation, even as the Discourse provides an introduction to the topic of disciplined reflection on other people’s lives, in the same spirit.
TAKING ACCOUNT OF LIVES IN
TEACHING ETHICS
Teaching “Introduction to Ethics” is a strange balancing act. One wants students to take ethical arguments seriously: to bring them into dialogue with their lives and convictions. One also wants students to maintain some distance from arguments: to realize that even the most plausible position is open to criticism. Ultimately, one wants to open an investigation file on some important topics in human life, encouraging students to add to the file as they gather more experience and encounter more sides of the relevant questions.
In this thesis, I have recommended that moral reflection and moral teaching take the investigation of lives seriously as a requirement of responsibly modest practice. My three philosophic witnesses, all of whom have reflected on the possibilities and limits of the enterprise of moral philosophy, have come to recommend the study of lives as a complement to more abstract reflections and as a bridge between reflection and action. In this last section of the thesis, I want to explore the place such study might have in an introductory ethics class, to show how such study might recast such a class as the beginning of life-long, responsible philosophic reflection that has some real hope of re-directing students’ lives.
I will begin with three short anecdotes, each of which serves as a window into a life:
A. A university senior has been swimming competitively since she was 7. Her father has been her biggest fan and unofficial coach. One day, she is lying on the couch, eating junk food. Her father remarks, “You wouldn’t feed a racehorse that stuff.” She responds, “I am not a racehorse. I am a girl.” She writes her senior honors thesis in anthropology on the culture of competitive swimming and its advantages and problems for the competitors.
B. A brilliant scholar and mathematician has made a fortune in the real estate market. He gives away 42 million dollars to charity, reducing his personal fortune almost to nothing. He lives on his wife’s income. He resolves to donate a kidney to a stranger. One day, he sneaks out of his house, to avoid questions from his disapproving spouse, and checks himself into the hospital to give up a kidney. As he lies in the recovery room, he thinks about what other body parts he might donate. He even considers donating his other kidney and going on dialysis.
C. John Adams, the second President of the United States, was a good friend of Thomas Jefferson for many years. They worked together in Paris, negotiating the alliance and the loans that enabled the American Revolution to succeed. When Adams ran for his second term, Jefferson opposed him, waging a bitter campaign. At one point, Jefferson hired a printer to smear Adams’ reputation in vile and unfair ways. Jefferson won the election. He and Adams were estranged for a long time. Finally, when they were both retired from public life, Adams wrote to Jefferson. The correspondence that followed re-established amicable relations between them. This reconciliation is often mentioned, even in brief biographical sketches of Adams’ life.
None of these accounts is satisfying or complete. Each invites further inquiry. In each case, one would need to know a lot about the life surrounding this central incident to understand its full moral significance.
The issues that come to mind as one reads each of these stories can also be raised in more abstract ways. Consider the implications of the first story. In ethics classes that address Aristotelian material, it is common to consider the recommendation that human beings pursue excellence in their lives. Students who have been raised to value competition often find such approaches compelling; they say, as the last ethical word, “You should always try to do your best.” The abstract idea of striving for excellence in every area, of realizing one’s full potential, has a very powerful grip on their minds. In teaching such students, one is driven to write frantic marginalia. “Why is doing your best so important?” “Are there problems with doing your best?” One feels, as one scribbles these notes, that one is just wasting ink. This picture holds them firmly captive. They cannot see any problems with the moral advice, “Always do your best.”
Recently, assisting in an ethics class that encouraged students to talk about their lives at length, I met Lauren Guzauskas, a competitive swimmer with a self-reflective impulse. Over the period of the course, she told about what it had felt like for her to develop as an excellent swimmer. She was fully conscious of the rewards of her training, both for her athletic career and also for all those other enterprises in her life that required discipline and focus and long-term planning. At the same time, she discussed the way that this pursuit had narrowed her interests, her range of friends, and, more subtly, the kinds of attitude available to her. She worried about the letdown she would experience when she stopped swimming, since most swimming careers cannot continue beyond college, even for fine athletes. These informal reflections led her to write an honors thesis in anthropology on the culture of competitive swimming and to pursue further work in sports ethics after graduation.
Having Lauren in this ethics class, telling about her career, was very valuable. Her discussion allowed people to see one way that the abstract ideal of excellence could be made the center of a life, and it showed people the many implications of having that kind of center, both throughout the time when she was competing and later, after her competitive career was over. The work she did later, collecting other swimmers’ stories and isolating common themes, seemed to me to be just the supplement I had always needed in ethics courses, to help people think in a flexible way about the ideal of excellence.
It is perhaps helpful to think about how the philosophic witnesses who stand behind my thesis might understand this story. Mill might say that the advantages of a focused, competitive life aimed at constant improvement are obvious in the abstract but that it is important to understand the kind of unity that such a life has, the relationships of its accomplishments to its motives. I think Lauren came to worry, in just Mill’s spirit, about a kind of robotic, inhumane, mechanical quality to the life she had chosen. She worried that young swimmers would be lured into this life by its obvious benefits, without noticing its overall shape.
Descartes urges that those who make moral choices in full consciousness of the limits of their understanding make those choices by attending to the lives of sensible and moderate persons. Lauren told us in the class about her struggles to distance herself from being totally possessed by the culture of swimming, about her efforts to balance her life with quite different friendships and activities. People who begin their involvement with an activity by attending to the “balancing act” of veteran participants are taking advantage of those participants’ moral experience and moral intuitions.
In some ways, as I listen to the ongoing stories of students like Lauren, in classes that make space for such stories, I feel as if the dialogue of the Crito is being re-enacted in different styles. People who seriously re-examine their commitments, especially as they decide what to do next, gradually bring the judgments and reflection and experience of their entire lives into relation to the topic that preoccupies them. Lauren examined swimming from the standpoint of a range of relationships and commitments and values, trying to come to an assessment of the value of this activity in her life, reflecting on her entire self and her entire history. As I saw that process unfold, in Lauren’s thinking and in that of several other students, I began to reflect on the value of this work as a model for moral reflection. The possibility of supplementing the momentary conviction produced by argument or example with a discipline of reflection on the relevance of one’s extended life to the topic at hand seemed to me more and more worth exploring, as a model of responsible philosophic teaching and practice in the spirit of the Crito.
This seems like a small and obvious bit of advice: give space to lives and lived commitment in introductory ethics classes. But lives are almost universally ignored in the teaching of ethics. The standard practice is this: one discusses issues at the level of principle, policy, and ideal, and the intellectual work comes to an end when people have constructed arguments and made judgments about their preferred principles, policies, and ideals. The suggestion that the reality of a moral stance is only seen in the lives of those committed to that stance is seldom made, and there is seldom class time allotted for people to tell, in detail, how a particular moral commitment plays out in various parts of their lives, over a long period. Descartes and Plato both suggest that this is essential information for responsible decisions, and my own experience in teaching ethics over many years, to many different audiences, supports this intuition.
The story of Zell Kravinsky and his amazing impulses toward sacrifice and benevolence[3] are a kind of counterpoint to one of the most powerful messages sent by introductory classes in ethics, the message that unearned advantages impose some kind of obligation on those who possess such advantages, that one should help those less fortunate than oneself. Ian Parker quotes Barry Katz, an old friend of Kravinsky, explaining the initial 45 million dollar gift that began Kravinsky’s philanthropic career:
Kravinsky had put some money aside – he had established trust funds for his wife, his children, and the children of his surviving sister. But his personal assets were now reduced to a house (on which he had a large mortgage), two minivans, and about eighty thousand dollars in stocks and cash. According to Katz, “He gave away the money because he had it there were people who needed it. But it changed his way of looking at himself. He decided the purpose of his life was to give away things.”[4]
In an interview with Parker, Kravinsky explains the motivations that led him to give away money:
We drove to a restaurant in a nearby mini-mall. He ordered a mushroom sandwich and a cup of warm water that he didn’t touch. “I used to feel that I had to be good, truly good in my heart and spirit, in order to do good,” he said in a soft voice. “But it’s the other way around: if you do good, you become better. With each thing I’ve given away, I’ve been more certain of the need to give more away. And at the end of it maybe I will be good. But what are they going to say – that I’m depressed? I am, but this isn’t suicidal. I’m depressed because I haven’t done enough.”[5]
Parker describes Kravinsky’s thoughts after donating a kidney to someone he had just met:
At that moment, Kravinsky recalled, “I really thought I might have shot it with my family.” His parents were also appalled. When Reeda Kravinsky visited her son in the hospital, she recalled, “I was so filled with anger that I didn’t speak.” Meanwhile, Kravinsky’s mind was still turning on philanthropic questions. “I lay there in the hospital, and I thought about all my other organs. When I do something good, I feel that I can do more; I burn to do more. It is a heady feeling.” He went home after four days, and by then he was wondering if he should give away his other kidney.[6]
The line of thought that argues for the moral necessity of extraordinary sacrifice, developed powerfully by Peter Singer in his famous article, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” and sketched out in a more rigorous way in Peter Unger’s Living High and Letting Die, has been a source of deep disquiet for generations of undergraduate students. Students feel the power of these arguments, and yet they realize that any serious attempt they might make to redress the natural or political injustices in the world would limit their own pursuit of happiness and fulfillment, as they have conceived that pursuit throughout their lives. Students leave ethics classes in which Singer’s arguments are prominent with a sense of frustration and guilt and, sometimes, bad faith.
What would it mean for students in such classes to look in detail at the life of someone who gave a central place to the arguments requiring extreme sacrifice? Partly, such study would make the case to students that extraordinary sacrifice is psychologically possible; this moral demand doesn’t go beyond human capacity. Beyond that, a careful look at a sacrificial life would show students something about the shape and emotional tone of such a life. The worry that students have, faced with this sort of demand, is similar to Mill’s worry about people whose lives are exemplary but also robotic: that a humane and natural and understandable life cannot incorporate this level of sacrifice. That kind of objection cannot be answered by simply rehearsing the arguments for giving more, for using less, for attending to the needs of others. The crucial information is subtle information: how does this person’s motivation work? Is it necessary to be mentally ill in order to carry through this level of sacrificial living?
It also seems important to gather information about the social meaning and consequences of such actions in the long term. How does Kravinsky’s sacrificial life affect his marriage, his relations to his children, his daily thought and experience? What is it like to be Zell Kravinsky? Any philosophic introduction to an ethics of sacrifice that does not seriously address these questions has failed to make a sacrificial a real option for students and at the same time has failed to caution them adequately about the consequences of such a life. I can see no other way of responsibly teaching this piece of moral advice, except by helping students to investigate deeply lives like Kravinsky’s.
The story of John Adams’ reconciliation with Thomas Jefferson is a classic incident in the history of the United States. It comes at the beginning of our long history of partisan conflict and disagreement, and it concerns people who knew themselves to be public figures, to be parts of the necessary curriculum of political leaders for the duration of the republic.[7] The founders of this nation had a special responsibility to set a good example, and their ways of taking account of that responsibility help to clarify what that responsibility entails.
The possible value of this story, together with the background biographies and documents that give it depth and substance, is similar to the value of the other glimpses of lives I have discussed: the story documents a human possibility, one that many people would take to be admirable and ideal. It shows how this possibility can be realized in the lives of proud, intelligent, honest persons, without self-deception or acting a part. Mill’s worry is clearly central with respect to a case of this kind: can such reconciliation happen in a plausible, humane, non-robotic way? Can it have the right sort of relationship to the motives of the lives in which it is “contained?” That is a question that only a close reading of the historical record can answer, and, if Mill is right, only such a reading will ultimately make the case that forgiveness and reconciliation are human moral possibilities. To understand whether heartfelt and sincere forgiveness is possible, one must attend to the tone of speeches like this, recalled by Adams’ secretary, Josiah Quincy:
I do not believe that Mr. Jefferson ever hated me. On the contrary, I believe he always liked me: but he detested Hamilton and my whole administration. Then he wished to be President of the United States, and I stood in his way. So he did everything that he could to pull me down. But if I should quarrel with him for that, I might quarrel with every man I have had to do with in life. This is human nature….I forgive all my enemies and hope they may find mercy in Heaven. Mr. Jefferson and I have grown old and retired from public life. So we are upon our ancient terms of good will.[8]
One possible lesson to be taken a close look at Adams’ life might be an appreciation of the preliminary moral work that makes beautiful and generous actions possible. McCullough’s superb biography of Adams pictures his persistence in diplomacy in Paris and Holland, his willingness to continue pressing his case despite snubs and rejection and years of failure. Adams’ work on the structure of the new government was similarly marked by repeated rejections and frustrations. Adams developed wide interests and friendships that enabled him to endure insults and losses without being overcome by grievance or resentment. His cordial reconciliation with Jefferson at the end of his life, documented in an extensive exchange of correspondence, was the natural consequence of a particular sort of life.
It is tempting, in teaching ethics or in thinking about ethics, to focus attention on admirable actions and to imagine that one could just resolve to do such actions from a standing start and succeed at them. One important advantage of a study of admirable lives is just that such study allows one to examine the ‘foundations,’ the psychological and experiential pre-requisites for extraordinary accomplishments. Such examination seems important for anyone with a practical interest in living up to the examples of the past and setting a plausible example for others.
This reconciliation episode has one element not shared with the other cases, an element that brings it close to the Crito in important ways. As Socrates knew himself to be a public figure in Athens, someone whose decisions would be objects of moral reflection for generations, so Adams and Jefferson know themselves to be public figures in the new United States. It is surely worth reflecting on this situation, in the context of ethics teaching. So much of the standard ethics curriculum focuses on arguments about the right decision in particular cases: should life support be withdrawn? Should this couple adopt a child or have their own children? Is it moral to eat meat? One seldom sees a separate discussion of exemplary responsibility: the responsibility to make one’s decisions in a way that others can understand, to let one’s decision be a contribution to the collective moral treasury of human beings – one’s family, one’s community, perhaps even the country as a whole. Many people provide examples for others, and the more one appreciates the importance of lives in moral reflection, the more one realizes how vital this exemplary work is in promoting good moral thinking and informed decisions. It is especially useful to study the lives of self-consciously public figures, because such people took seriously their responsibility to document their lives – to make their reasons and the shape and motivation of their actions understandable to those who might want to learn from them. It is surely useful to introduce this dimension of moral responsibility into the thinking of moral agents. The exemplary effect of John Adams’ reconciliation with Thomas Jefferson, as a model of human possibility, was likely much greater than its effect on Jefferson and others in Adams’ circle of acquaintance. However, the responsibility for setting a good example, as distinct from the responsibility to act well, is one I have never seen discussed in literature in applied ethics. Thinking about the relevance of lives to practical moral reflection makes it clear that being fully understood is sometimes morally important, and that one sometimes has a substantial responsibility to document one’s actions and the thinking that led up to them.[9]
WHAT LIVES CONTRIBUTE TO
MORAL REFLECTION AND MORAL TEACHING
In this thesis, I have brought into focus one source of information for practical moral reflection: the investigation of lives, taking account of their endless complexity and depth. I have argued that the Western tradition in ethics contains texts that model the use of such information and establish a place for the investigation of lives within a plausible model of philosophic responsibility.
It is easy, in the context in which philosophy is usually done, to neglect the question of philosophic responsibility. Philosophy papers are generally published in academic journals with a small and specialized audience, and most philosophy teaching addresses students whose active lives in the society have not yet begun. It is easy to overlook the practical consequences of philosophers’ teaching and argument. However, in an age in which fast, accurate indexing and instant retrieval make philosophic literature available for all sorts of unexpected uses, philosophers cannot afford to be naïve about the reach of their writing and speaking. Further, despite teachers’ fears that no one in their classes is listening to them, students do listen to philosophy lectures and discussions, and the points they recall shape their thinking throughout their active lives. Moral philosophers are responsible to take account of their own ignorance, not only by qualifying and limiting their pronouncements, but also by seeking out and making space for information that can provide a test of moral views, arguments, and strategies. I have argued in this thesis that rich accounts of lives and open-ended investigations of lives contribute something important to this testing of views.
The consideration of lives contributes to responsible reflection and teaching in another way as well. In their writing and teaching, moral philosophers model the development and testing of moral ideas. Their influence extends far beyond the particular topics they address; they model a way of being intelligent about action. In this modeling, as in their specific pronouncements and arguments, philosophers have moral responsibilities. Specifically, they are obliged to show students how to conduct a morally sensitive investigation, how to proceed modestly and carefully in addressing questions that matter to people. By engaging students in the investigation of lives, philosophy teachers model a responsible practice of moral reflection.
At the beginning of this thesis, I considered three teaching practices – learning circles, faculty weblogs, and community service initiatives – that seemed to me to raise questions about the role of lives in philosophic reflection. As I conclude this project, I want to return to these practices and suggest some tentative answers to those questions.
The learning circle approach, in which each student in a class is invited to respond to a question about his or her life, creates a safe and protected space for students to tell stories about their own lives, in ways that respond to topics in their courses but that are not necessarily informed by the vocabulary and theoretical apparatus of those courses. Such stories provide a way of identifying ways of speaking and thinking that are not well captured by the course’s theoretical apparatus, and a way of bringing to the surface facts about human experience that that apparatus might not accommodate. Relatively unstructured occasions for the recounting of personal stories thus provide an important check on philosophic reflection and argument.
Such occasions also underline for students the importance of giving appropriate respect to the various stages and circumstances of their own lives, rather than allowing their decision-making to be dominated by their present mood and experience. They learn to use their own lives as sources of information for moral reflection. Such modeling is very much in the spirit of Socrates’ investigations in the Crito.
Learning circles also provide students with glimpses of exemplary lives on which they may wish to model new initiatives in their own lives. If Descartes’ advice has substance – that, for the person in moral perplexity, the safest course is to guide his or her life by lived examples rather than abstract ideas – getting to know people whose lives embody attractive alternatives to one’s own is the appropriate first step toward changing one’s life. A philosophy class can point out to students what they have to learn from each other and can make morally important introductions.
Weblogs give faculty an informal vehicle for combining moral reflection and memoir. Such a vehicle makes it possible for students to see how ideas come to expression in action in their teachers’ lives. Like other life stories, such accounts serve as a kind of test of the ideas being presented. They also serve as introductions, in the way that learning circles can serve as introductions: they open up lines of communication between faculty and students about the relationships between ideas and the decisions one makes in practical life.
Community involvement activities usually present opportunities to students to get to know people whom they would not encounter in their ordinary lives. Putting such activities in the context of an ethics course communicates powerfully to students that such work is part of what is required for responsible moral thinking, that getting to know people is a part of moral investigation. Given the importance of the information from lives in moral reflection, that message is one that should be sent frequently and loudly, in the teaching of moral philosophy.
This thesis is intended to open new lines of thought about moral philosophy. The consideration of lives as contributors to moral reflection and to moral teaching encourages moral philosophers to experiment with teaching and research practices that have not traditionally been central to moral philosophy. Such consideration also opens new topics for moral inquiry, particularly with respect to the responsibility of setting an understandable example by one’s actions (including, perhaps, a responsibility to document one’s actions, in some circumstances). Finally, reflection on lives provides a way of re-reading classic philosophic texts and a way of taking seriously historical and biographical material that has generally not been part of the curriculum of moral philosophy. I take all of these projects to be worthy of further study and experiment.
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[1] My thinking on the non-academic uses of philosophic work has been greatly enriched by conversations with Ramona Ilea and by reading drafts of her forthcoming thesis from the University of Minnesota Philosophy Department on the role of philosophers as allies in social action.
[2] Henry David Thoreau, Walden or, Life in the Woods (New York: Dover Publications,.1995) 5.
[3] Kravinsky’s story is told briefly in a New Yorker article by Ian Parker, “The Gift.”. New Yorker, 2 August, 2004, page 54-63.
[4] Ian Parker, “The Gift.” New Yorker 2 August (2004): 58.
[5] Parker 58.
[6] Parker 61.
[7] Clearly, people’s lives serve as models for other people in different ways and to different extents. If one’s life is likely to be taken up widely as an example, one may have some responsibilities beyond those of more ‘private’ persons, both with respect to one’s actions and with respect to the record one leaves of one’s life. Likewise, historians and biographers may have an important place in the moral economy of a society over a very long time. In Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), W.B. Gallie suggests a complex and interesting conceptual structure for understanding the influence of exemplary lives on moral traditions, and, in A New University: A.D. Lindsay and the Keele Experiment (London: Chatto and Windus, 1960), he writes a short biography that reflects this very sophisticated understanding of the biographer’s responsibility and power. A careful study of Gallie’s work would yield rich insights about content of that most familiar piece of advice, “Set a good example.”
[8] Josiah Quincy. Figures of the Past (Boston: Little, Brown, 1819) 80.
[9] Adams’ life is exemplary in two ways; he is both a public figure and the first distinguished member of an astonishingly distinguished family. While only a few people are public figures, most people contribute to some family tradition. Attention to the responsibilities arising from one’s place in a family history seems an important element of any serious introduction to practical ethics.