The Good Life of Teaching

An Ethics of Professional Practice

Chris Higgins

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444346510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

The Good Life of Teaching extends the recent revival of virtue ethics to professional ethics and the philosophy of teaching. It connects long-standing philosophical questions about work and human growth to questions about teacher motivation, identity, and development.

• Makes a significant contribution to the philosophy of teaching and also offers new insights into virtue theory and professional ethics
• Offers fresh and detailed readings of major figures in ethics, including Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Bernard Williams and the practical philosophies of Hannah Arendt, John Dewey and Hans-Georg Gadamer
• Provides illustrations to assist the reader in visualizing major points, and integrates sources such as film, literature, and teaching memoirs to exemplify arguments in an engaging and accessible way
• Presents a compelling vision of teaching as a reflective practice showing how this requires us to prepare teachers differently
  

PART I

The Virtues of Vocation: From Moral Professionalism to Practical Ethics

Chapter 1

Work and Flourishing: Williams’ Critique of Morality and its Implications for Professional Ethics

Many philosophical mistakes are woven into morality. It misunderstands obligations, not seeing how they form just one type of ethical consideration . . . [It] makes people think that without its very special obligation, there is only inclination; without its utter voluntariness, there is only force; without its ultimately pure justice, there is no justice. Its philosophical errors are only the most abstract expressions of a deeply rooted and still powerful misconception of life (Bernard Williams, 1985, p. 196).

Much contemporary moral philosophy . . . has tended to focus on what it is right to do rather than on what it is good to be, on defining the content of obligation rather than the nature of the good life; and it has no conceptual place left for a notion of a good as the object of our love or allegiance . . . So much of my effort . . . will be towards enlarging our range of legitimate moral descriptions, and in some cases of retrieving modes of thought and description which have misguidedly been made to seem problematic (Taylor, 1989, p. 3).

INTRODUCTION

In order to understand professional ethics, we first need to understand the nature of ethics itself. This assertion seems straightforward enough. But what if we, in modernity, have forgotten a large part of what ethics is? To put it more precisely, what if we have come to mistake one part of the ethical for the whole? Could we be suffering from an acute case of moral myopia? It is this very idea advanced by Williams and Taylor who take their place in a long tradition. In trying to help us see what a ‘peculiar institution’ modern morality is, Williams (1985, p. 174; cf., 1993 [1972], p. 9) echoes Hegel’s critique of Kant (Hegel, 1977 [1807], pp. 211–409; Hegel, 1991 [1821], sections 2–3), Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality (e.g. Nietzsche, 1969 [1887]), and Bradley’s defence of ‘My Station and its Duties’ (Bradley, 1988 [1876]). Even in the Anglophone, analytic tradition, the critique of the modern, moral truncation of the ethical realm and recovery of a more robust conception of ethics has been underway for half a century: from the groundbreaking early essays of G. E. M. Anscombe (1958), Philippa Foot (1958a, 1958b), and Iris Murdoch (1956) through Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue (2007 [1981], chaps. 1–9).1 Meanwhile the project of retrieval called for by Taylor has been advanced on multiple fronts: with the reassertion of the priority of the good and the ethical importance of the shape of a life as a whole; with the recovery of ancient conceptions of happiness, virtue, and practical wisdom; with the return of the thick language of so-called ‘secondary’ ethical terms and the reintegration of social, historical, spiritual and aesthetic questions into ethics.2 Ethical inquiry has of late become both more idealistic (exploring visions of human flourishing) and more realistic (attempting to reconcile ethical notions with human desire and a liveable moral psychology).3 As we work toward an expanded notion of professional ethics, let us take Williams as our chief guide, reconstructing his distinction between ethics and morality. When helpful, I will supplement Williams’ account with details from Taylor’s critique of modernity’s ‘cramped and truncated view of morality’ and his retrieval of substantive ethics (Taylor, 1989, p. 3).4

RETRIEVING SOCRATES’ QUESTION

For Williams, the fundamental ethical question is neither ‘How ought I to act?’ nor ‘What are my obligations to others?’ Both of these questions, Williams argues, are far too narrow. If we are to capture the full range of the ethical, we need to return to Socrates’ question in Book I of the Republic: ‘It is not a trivial question’, Socrates chides his interlocutors, ‘what we are talking about is how one should live’.5 For Williams, this remains the most ecumenical invitation to ethical reflection ever offered. Socrates’ question, Williams writes, is ‘entirely non-committal, and very fruitfully so, about the kinds of consideration to be applied to the question’ (Williams, 1985, p. 5). It invites you to think about the shape your life is taking and to consider what it would mean truly to flourish as a human being, but this may translate into any of a variety of concerns, from the richness of one’s experiences to the nobility of one’s actions. One person may wonder if her work is truly original, while another wrestles with whether he has been generous to others. Others will respond in terms of authenticity, responsibility, wisdom, or piety. Part of what the question is asking is which ethical terms should be central in your deliberations, which ideals reflected in your choices.

In itself, Socrates’ question contains only two major assumptions: that ethics is practical, and that it is reflective. As a ‘particularly ambitious example of a personal practical question’ (p. 18), Williams argues, it is closely related to questions such as ‘what should I do now?’ and ‘what is the best way for me to live?’ (p. 5), and therefore retains their ‘radically first-personal’ quality (p. 21). In other words, it is an important fact about ethical questions that they are always asked by a particular person, and it is understood that nothing would count as an answer that did not speak to that person. This is because the ethical agent is motivated by a concern for her own eudaimonia, by her desire to flourish.6 Someone might very well come to think that his flourishing was tied up with the cultivation of certain other-directed virtues, like kindness or compassion, but no ethical deliberation, in Williams’ sense, would ever lead someone to sacrifice his eudaimonia in the name of altruism. For Williams, a course of action ‘has to appeal to that person in terms of something about himself, how and what he will be if he is a person with that sort of character’ (p. 32). As a species of practical deliberation, then, ethical reflection is essentially partial, linked inextricably to a particular agent’s desires and aspirations.

At the same time, the reflectiveness of Socrates’ question makes it more ambitious than our everyday practical questions in two respects. The question of how one should live, Williams suggests, leads beyond a mere moment of decision ‘to press a demand for reflection on one’s life as a whole’ (p. 5, emphasis in original). Ethical reflection may be prompted by a specific choice I have to make, but its defining question is not, What is the right thing to do in this situation? Ethics is better represented by questions such as: Who do I hope to become? What is worthy of my time and effort? and, What is the best sort of life I can live? As you will recall, though, Socrates’ question was not ‘How should I live?’ but ‘How should one live?’ This is an important difference since, in the latter form, I am reminded that while this question is mine, it is also everyone else’s. Thus, ethical reflection not only pushes me to generalize beyond a particular context for action, but also invites me to generalize beyond my own experience. As Williams explains, Socrates’ question ‘seems to ask for the reasons we all share for living in one way rather than another’; it provokes us to think about ‘the conditions of the good life . . . for human beings as such’ (p. 20, emphasis in original).

For Williams, then, Greek ethics is constituted by the tension between its practical pull toward the personal and its reflective push toward the universal. To our modern eyes, this may look more like ambivalence about morality than ambiguity within ethics. This, Williams argues, is due to our modern moral prejudices, our tendency to equate egoism with the ‘narrowest form of self-interest’, and to reduce self-interest to the ‘pursuit of pleasure’ (p. 15).7 Hedonism is certainly one possible response to Socrates’ question, but as Greek ethics amply bears out, it is far from the only—or even the most likely—response. As Williams explains:

Neither Plato nor Aristotle thought of the ethical life as a device that increased selfish satisfactions. Their outlook is formally egoistic, in the sense that they have to show to each person that he has good reason to live ethically; and the reason has to appeal to that person in terms of something about himself, how and what he will be if he is a person with that sort of character. But their outlook is not egoistic in the sense that they try to show that the ethical life serves some set of individual satisfactions which is well defined before ethical considerations appear (p. 32).

Greek ethics has an irreducibly first-personal quality. Even when one is reflecting about other-regarding virtues, Williams says, ‘it is still his own well-being that the agent in Socratic reflection will be considering’ (p. 50). Williams calls this egoism ‘formal’ to head off the mistaken impression that Socrates’ question calls for answers which are egoistic in content, inviting agents to think only of themselves. Once we distinguish between these varieties of egoism, we can see the practical pull and reflective push of ethics as a productive tension rather than a troubling contradiction.

Still, such a formally egoistic ethics may seem, if less crass, too individualistic. Here, too, anachronism blurs our vision. As MacIntyre and Taylor have convincingly shown, while ethics is rooted in the existential predicament and moral psychology of the individual, this hardly makes it individualistic in the modern sense. MacIntyre shows how the distinction between self and social role, definitive of modern individualism, is incompatible with virtue ethics (see e.g. MacIntyre, 2007 [1981], chaps. 3 and 15). Meanwhile, Taylor traces the rise of the modern self as atomized and interiorized; once we have come to see the self as a container, it becomes difficult to conceive of the good as something independent of the moral agent (Taylor, 1989, esp. chap. 11).

Another possible misunderstanding of the formal egoism of eudaimonistic ethics is that because everyone must answer Socrates’ question for themselves, that they could or should somehow answer it by themselves. This misunderstanding is aided by the tendency, in modern values-talk, to exaggerate both the amount by which people differ from each other on normative questions and the ease of taking a relativistic stance toward another. To bring discussion to a crashing halt, just utter the magic words: ‘these are my values’. What thinkers such as Taylor and MacIntyre have shown, though, is that even the most private deliberation is conducted in a relatively public language. Ethical reflection always takes place in a particular language, a language we learn from and share with others.8 Each language will have its particular qualitative vocabulary and ethical emphases, but this means that normative differences are more likely across social groups than between individuals. Indeed, as Taylor shows, even these social-cultural differences are relatively trivial compared to the tectonic shifts in our visions of human flourishing over time. Sources of the Self outlines a series of epochal ethical horizons from Greek antiquity to the present (Taylor, 1989, parts II–V). One lesson to be drawn from this is that, at any one time, our views on the most important matters (and especially on which constitute the most important matters) are remarkably uniform. Furthermore, when disagreement does occur, it is only meaningful against the backdrop of a shared tradition. Indeed, modern individualism—the idea that one should strive to become one’s own person, to challenge received ideas, and to think for oneself—is itself just one powerful, widely shared ethical tradition among many others.9

The other point to make here is that the individual differences we do find are all the more charged for their rarity. Modern values-talk would make it seem as if rival answers to Socrates’ question could rest comfortably side by side. In fact, it matters very much to us whether family, friends, neighbours, and public figures hold different views of the good life. What appears to be moral relativism is often the scrupulous practice of a specific virtue, namely tolerance. And even those who do make a practice of not judging the actions of others with their own ethical norms tend to be far less forgiving of themselves. Nothing provokes a fresh encounter with Socrates’ question like learning that someone whom we respect and with whom we identify has a different understanding of what is most worthwhile in life. This is why, even though everyone has a personal understanding of what is good and where they stand in relation to that good, it is exciting and profitable (if also frightening and dangerous) to engage in dialogue with others about these understandings.

In sum, ethics grows out of first-personal, practical questions about who I want to be and how I should live. Ethics can be interpersonal, insofar as we reflect in dialogue and by means of a shared language, but it is never impersonal. It is rooted in the existential challenge that each of us must figure out what to do with the particular life we have been given. There is a push in ethical reflection to generalize beyond the present moment of a personal decision to consider one’s life as a whole, and to think about what constitutes the good life for human beings in general. At the same time, ethical ideals are always embodied in concrete ways of life and ethical language is inescapably thick and qualitative.

MODERN MORAL MYOPIA

I have already highlighted some of the ways in which this older tradition of ethics is hard to reconcile with our modern moral mindset. The eudaimonistic outlook may strike us as too religious, too aesthetic, too psychological, or just plain too self-centered to be considered properly ethical. This is because modern ethical thought has developed in what Williams calls a ‘peculiar’ direction. Indeed, Williams finds ethics so altered, and so narrowed, in modernity that he coins a separate term for it. He retains ‘ethics’ as his name for the older and broader tradition of thinking about the normative, and uses ‘morality’ to designate the newer and narrower approach. According to Williams, morality constitutes but ‘one particular variety of ethical thought’ (Williams, 1985, p. 174). As intriguing as this claim may be, it poses three immediate difficulties.

The first lies in seeing modern moral thinking as one thing, as a unified whole. After all, in the current scene we find not harmony but tense debates (abortion, euthanasia, etc.) and rival camps (consequentialism, deontology, contractarianism, etc.). Williams does acknowledge that morality ‘embraces a range of ethical outlooks’ and thus cannot be considered ‘one determinate set of ethical thoughts’ (ibid.). At the same time, he maintains that there is a common ‘spirit’ that cuts across such divisions and debates (ibid.). It is simply that we are too close to perceive it readily. As Williams puts it, ‘morality is so much with us that moral philosophy spends much of its time discussing the differences between those outlooks, rather than the difference between all of them and everything else’ (ibid.). Thus, such seeming adversaries as consequentialism and deontology turn out to have more in common, relative to eudaimonistic ethics, than they have differences. In Kant and Mill, in the original position and the trolley problem, we ultimately find the same ‘general picture of ethical life’ (ibid.).10 For Williams, then, morality is ‘the outlook, or, incoherently, part of the outlook, of almost all of us’. Morality is our current ethical horizon, in the sense that a horizon cuts off one’s vision but also gives one the impression of surveying the whole landscape.

This brings us to the second difficulty. For now that we have started to see the unity of morality, it becomes difficulty to see it as one ethical system among many, since it seems to occupy the whole territory of the ...