Hegel on Rectitude and “Virtue as Such”

Many philosophers read Hegel as rejecting Kant's ethics of duty and advocating a more or less Aristotelian conception of virtue. However, in the Philosophy of Right Hegel sharply criticizes the ancient conception of virtue, or “virtue proper,” in his terms, and distinguishes it from a more modern concept of virtue, which he calls “rectitude.” In this paper I argue that interpretations that overlook or downplay the significance of the distinction between rectitude and virtue proper are wrong, and I also put forward my own positive interpretation of Hegel's views on virtue. I am mainly concerned with defending two sets of claims: (1) Rectitude is fundamentally different from Aristotelian and other ancient conceptions of virtue. (2) Hegel believes that in modern society acting with rectitude is, in all normal circumstances, superior to attempting to use virtue proper to try to figure out what one should do. I also argue that the conception of virtue I attribute to Hegel has some distinct advantages over Aristotelian conceptions of virtue.     

“Patching up Virtue”

Herdt's Putting On Virtue has two chief aims. The first is to champion the virtue tradition against Christian moral quietism and modern deontological ethics. The second is to facilitate reconciliation between Augustinian and Emersonian virtue. To accomplish these tasks Herdt constructs a counter‐narrative to Schneewind's Invention of Autonomy, in which Luther's resignation and Kant's innovation are tragic consequences of “hyper‐Augustinianism”—a competitive conception of divine and human agency, which leads to excessive suspicion of acquired virtue. This review argues that Putting On Virtue succeeds in its first aim but leaves its second intriguingly uncompleted. Despite this deficiency, however, this essay also argues that Putting On Virtue makes plausible Herdt's audacious suggestion that Augustinian and Emersonian perfectionism may be reconciled by bringing acquired and infused virtue under a single term.     

“WHY BE MORAL?” The Cheng Brothers' Neo‐Confucian Answer

In this article, I present a neo‐Confucian answer, by Cheng Hao and Cheng Yi, to the question, “Why should I be moral?” I argue that this answer is better than some representative answers in the Western philosophical tradition. According to the Chengs, one should be moral because it is a joy to perform moral actions. Sometimes one finds it a pain, instead of a joy, to perform moral actions only because one lacks the necessary genuine moral knowledge—knowledge that is accessible to every common person as long as one makes the effort to learn. One should make the effort to learn such knowledge—to seek joy in performing moral actions—because to be moral is a distinguishing mark of being human. This neo‐Confucian answer seems to be egoistic, as its conception of motivation for morality is based on self‐interest: to seek one's own joy. However, since it emphasizes that one's true self‐interest is to seek joy in things uniquely human, which is to be moral, self‐interest and morality become identical; the more a person seeks one's self‐interest, the more moral the person is, and vice versa.     

Women,Nationalism and War: “Make Love Not War”

I analyze the relationship between women and nationalism and argue that women's identity and relationship to the “Other” is different from that of men, hence even when women participate in nationalism it is in a less violent form. I argue, further, that the structures of nationalism are fundamentally homosocial, and antagonism toward women of one's own nation is one of the first forms of attack on the “Other,” and is constitutive of “extreme nationalism.”     

The effects of “phubbing” on social interaction

This research experimentally investigated the social consequences of “phubbing” – the act of snubbing someone in a social setting by concentrating on one's mobile phone. Participants viewed a three‐minute animation in which they imagined themselves as part of a dyadic conversation. Their communication partner either phubbed them extensively, partially, or not at all. Results revealed that increased phubbing significantly and negatively affected perceived communication quality and relationship satisfaction. These effects were mediated by reduced feelings of belongingness and both positive and negative affect. This research underlines the importance of phubbing as a modern social phenomenon to be further investigated.     

THE “COMPETENT COMMUNICATOR” AS A COGNITIVE PROTOTYPE

Past theories concerned with communicative competence have assumed that perceiver's evaluations of the competence of a communicative performance are based on a conception of the “ideal communicator.” Psychological theory on categorization implies that this assumption is most viable if conceptions of “prototypes” relevant to competence in general (“the communicatively competent person”) are rich in defining characteristics relative to their logical superordinate (“the skilled person”), yet distinct from other skill-related prototypes (such as “the artistically talented person”), and if conceptions of prototypes relevant to competence in specific interactive situations are also relatively rich in defining characteristics, but similar to one another. Analysis of freely elicited lists of characteristics for categories within a taxonomic hierarchy for skill support these implications, showing that people's conceptions of “communicative competence” are organized in the manner most conducive to their use as the basis for competence evaluation. Results also point out the critical role played by concrete, rather than abstract, characteristics in differentiating among general and situation-specific prototypes.     

THE “NEGATIVE” AND “POSITIVE” ARGUMENTS OF MORAL MODERATES

According to Shelly Kagan, “ordinary” or “moderate” moralists must establish the existence of “options.” Kagan considers a “negative” and a “positive” argument, which he regards as the most promising means by which moral moderates might establish their position. He offers objections to both, and he concludes that the moderate position is indefensible. I argue that Kagan fails in his attempt to discredit the negative argument. I also argue that the positive argument is so implausible that Kagan's elaborate criticism of it is unnecessary. The positive argument is interesting nevertheless, because of why it cannot serve the moderate's purposes.     

“Tell Me How That Makes You Feel”: Philosophy's Reason/Emotion Divide and Epistemic Pushback in Philosophy Classrooms

Alison Bailey has recently explored the nature of what she calls privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback or “the variety of willful ignorance that many members of dominant groups engage in when they are asked to consider both the lived experience and structural injustices that members of marginalized groups experience daily.” In this article, I want to use Bailey's argument to demonstrate how privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback is facilitated and obscured by the disciplinary tools of traditional Western philosophy. Specifically, through exploring philosophical cultures of justification and case studies, this work will reveal how students engage in privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback by deploying the reason/emotion divide and various philosophical norms and practices it underlies to protect their epistemic home turf. Then, I offer three emotion‐enhancing critical philosophical practices aimed at disrupting the ignorance‐promoting moves of privilege‐evasive epistemic pushback and, instead, engage emotion as epistemically significant.     

Anscombe and “Hume and Julius Caesar”

This article analyzes Elizabeth Anscombe's short piece “Hume and Julius Caesar” from the standpoint of traditional foundationalist epistemic criteria, and concludes that while Anscombe may be right about finding a mistake in Hume, she has also failed to fill in her own arguments in the way that her overall aim requires. Special allusion is made to the work of J. L. Austin, especially insofar as that work has to do with reformulating sentences so that they appear to meet foundationalist criteria.     

American social scientists and the domestication of “class” 1929–1955

This essay examines social scientists' newfound interest in the American class system and their changing conceptions of “class” in the years from 1929 until 1955. Specifically, it compares Robert and Helen Lynd's views with those of W. Lloyd Warner. Emphasis shifted in class analysis from occupation and income to social acceptance and cultural lifestyle, and moral outrage over the inequities enshrined in the American class system gave way to a functionalist explanation that class differences were the inevitable by-products of a complex division of labor. Once the class system was held to integrate rather than to divide Americans, classes came to be seen as rungs on a ladder on which Americans were constantly moving up and down. Divisive connotations were thus played down in this peculiarly American conception of class, and the discovery of class differences was squared with the venerable belief in American classlessness.     

Socialising epistemic risk: On the risks of epistemic injustice

Epistemic risk is of central importance to epistemology nowadays: one common way in which a belief can fail to be knowledge is by being formed in an epistemically risky way, that is, a way that makes it true by luck. Recently, epistemologists have been expanding this rather narrow conception of risk in every direction, except arguably the most obvious one—to enable it to accommodate the increasingly commonplace thought that knowledge has an irreducibly social dimension. This paper fills this lacuna by bringing issues of epistemic injustice to bear on epistemic risk. In particular, it draws on the phenomenon of white ignorance, to sketch a more social notion of epistemic risk, on which the interests of one's epistemic community partly determine whether a belief-forming procedure is epistemically risky.     

MAKING IT EXPLICIT AND CLEAR: FROM “STRONG” TO “HYPER‐” INFERENTIALISM IN BRANDOM AND PEIRCE

Abstract: This article explores how Robert Brandom's original “inferentialist” philosophical framework should be positioned with respect to the classical pragmatist tradition. It is argued that Charles Peirce's original attack (in “Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man” and other early papers) on the use of “intuition” in nineteenth‐century philosophy of mind is in fact a form of inferentialism, and thus an antecedent relatively unexplored by Brandom in his otherwise comprehensive and illuminating “tales of the mighty dead.” However, whereas Brandom stops short at a merely “strong” inferentialism, which admits some non‐inferential mental content (although it is parasitic on the inferential and can only be “inferentially articulated”), Peirce embraces a total, that is, “hyper‐,” inferentialism. Some consequences of this difference are explored, and Peirce's more thoroughgoing position is defended.     

That “Ought” Does Not Imply “Right”: Why It Matters for Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethicists sometimes say that a right action is what a virtuous person would do, characteristically, in the circumstances. But some have objected recently that right action cannot be defined as what a virtuous person would do in the circumstances because there are circumstances in which a right action is possible but in which no virtuous person would be found. This objection moves from the premise that a given person ought to do an action that no virtuous person would do, to the conclusion that the action is a right action. I demon‐strate that virtue ethicists distinguish “ought” from “right” and reject the assumption that “ought” implies “right.” I then show how their rejection of that assumption blocks this “right but not virtuous” objection. I conclude by showing how the thesis that “ought” does not imply “right” can clarify a further dispute in virtue ethics regarding whether “ought” implies “can.”     

THE AMBIGUITY OF MORAL EXCELLENCE: A Response to Aaron Stalnaker's “Virtue as Mastery”

This response draws on Saba Mahmood's work on Muslim subjectivities in order to consider how Stalnaker's conceptualization of virtue might be applied to non‐Confucian sources. I argue that when applied cross‐culturally, Stalnaker's revised definition of “skillful virtue” raises normative and metaethical questions about what counts as a skill versus a mere bodily practice, the process by how skill is acquired, and how we can both allow for the ambiguity of skills and continue to make constructive arguments about them.     

Understanding the “cognitive revolution” in psychology

In this paper it is argued that the “cognitive revolution” in psychology is not best represented either as a Kuhnian “paradigm shift,” or as a movement from an instrumentalist to a realist conception of psychological theory, or as a continuous evolution out of more “liberalized” forms of behaviorism, or as a return to the form of “structuralist” psychology practiced by Wundt and Titchener. It is suggested that the move from behaviorism to cognitivism is best represented in terms of the replacement of (operationally defined) “intervening variables” by genuine “hypothetical constructs” possessing cognitive “surplus meaning,” and that the “cognitive revolution” of the 1950s continued a cognitive tradition that can be traced back to the 1920s. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

KAUFMAN'S DEBT TO KANT: THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL IMPORTANCE OF THE “STRUCTURE OF THE WORLD WHICH ENVIRONS US”

Gordon Kaufman's “constructive theology” can easily be taken out of context and misunderstood or misrepresented as a denial of God. It is too easily overlooked that in his approach everything is an imaginary construct given no immediate ontological status—the self, the world, and God are “products of the imagination.” This reflects an influence, not only of theories on linguistic and cultural relativism, but also of Kant's “ideas of pure reason.” Kaufman is explicit about this debt to Kant. But I argue there are other aspects of Kant's legacy implicit in his method. These center around Kaufman's engagement with “observed patterns” in nature. With Paul Tillich's aid, I bring this neglected issue to the fore and argue that addressing it allows one to more readily capitalize upon the Kantian influence in Kaufman's method. This, in turn, encourages one to tap more deeply into the epistemic underpinnings of Kaufman's approach to the science–religion dialogue.     

Against “Transracialism”: Revisiting the Debate

This article critically reflects on some of the themes and assumptions at stake in the “transracialism” controversy, and connects them to important works in critical race theory: namely Rey Chow's notion of “coercive mimeticism” and Sara Ahmed's critique of white liberal multiculturalism. It argues that the analytic account of “race” that Tuvel draws upon in her article—Sally Haslanger's—is politically problematic, both on its own terms and in light of broader reflections on racialized and gendered power relations. In particular, I critique Haslanger's assumption that all racial identities exist on the same conceptual plane: that a single variable definition of “race” can be applied to any particular racialized group—including white and nonwhite racial identities. This erases racialized power relations, especially where, in liberal “multicultural” nations, whiteness constitutes the implied standard against which an appearance of “racial difference” is conjured. Finally, I extend my argument to the issue of treating “race” and gender analogously. Rejecting this move, I propose an alternative way of conceptualizing these as analytically distinct, yet constitutively interdependent, phenomena. In order to situate the debate historically, I consider an example of “racial transgression” from twentieth‐century China.