Situationist Critiques of Virtue Ethics

In her NDPR review of Mark Alfano's new book, Neera Badhwar begins as follows:

Mark Alfano's book adds to the growing literature on empirical challenges to Aristotelian notions of virtue and other character traits. In its most recent avatar, this literature argues that our innate cognitive biases and other flaws make the central moral and intellectual Aristotelian virtues, as usually understood, impossible for the vast majority.

My reason for this post is: But isn't that what Aristotle thought, too? (Isn't that what many virtue theorists think?)

Response: "But if ought implies can and these studies (or the situationists' readings of them) are correct, then it makes no sense to say, to most people, that they ought to be virtuous. Virtue ethics as a normative ethical theory (for general consumption) is thus unworkable."

But I've never thought that was the right way to make sense of virtue ethics. An ideal is to be aimed toward, if never met perfectly. Some ideals are always ever in the distance. We don't need to be able to travel to the North Star in order to navigate the world by referring to it.

Check-In from the Hills

I've gone a bit AWOL. I should have time this semester to tease out a few ideas that have been dancing around in my head, especially regarding Murdoch and my ongoing work on patience. Recently, I've been re-reading closely Seneca's On Anger while revising a chapter on Seneca and (vs.) Aristotle on anger. I noticed that Leiter has a link up to a new talk by Nussbaum on anger that I need to watch. The blurb suggests that she is quite close to Seneca's view, but given her past rejection of Stoic ideas (although very sympathetic with Seneca's ideas about anger in The Therapy of Desire), I will be interested to see whether she gets into what dividing line, if any, there is between her position now and Seneca's.

In the therapeutic part of On Anger (Book III), he mentions that, "Pythagoras used to play the lyre to settle his mind when it was upset" (III.9.2).

That's an academic lead-in to the confession that I've also been short on blogging because I bought a banjo over the holiday break. I have been learning to do what some people call "frailing" and others call "clawhammer" (so, not Earl Scruggs' style, if that means something to you), and amassing mountain banjo music albums from the EKU and Berea College libraries. (This is a nice place to be for that.) I've always liked certain old-timey kinds of music (though never actively sought out this kind of music) and the sound of the banjo (though not so much the hard-driving bluegrass stuff). I went into the local music store actually looking to replace a long-broken harmonica (I played guitar and harmonica quite a bit in high school), looked at a couple banjos while there, went home, stewed, researched, looked around some more, and got an open-back banjo. Still haven't gotten the harmonica...

(My wife thinks I've lost my mind...the banjo is so misunderstood. Perhaps I should have opted for the lyre.)