09.18.08
Liberalism and virtue ethics
Contemporary liberalism’s insistence that morality is a mere matter of rights and obligations empties life of its ethical meaning. We need a return to the virtue ethics of the pre-moderns, and a renewed conception of the good life
Eclectic restorations of pre-modern cultural artificacts never really succeed. And it is doubtful if liberalism is a ‘mere matter of rights and obligations’. Surely the experience of Marxism suggests that a moral anti-modernism attacking rights/liberties will backfire, whether from the right and the left.
The connection between liberalism and ethics was demonstrated by Kant, and he has few who can match him. His ‘empty moralism’, so charged by Hegel, led to Hegel’s conceptions of sittlichkeit, and one of the classic modern challenges to the classic liberal view, on grounds not dissimilar to those advanced in this essay.
But did ethics really survive in Hegel’s system? !!
Any system of ethical discourse has to be based in a psychology, and one that can coexist with modern science. But that is difficult if we are stuck in the Darwin quagmire. Can virtue ethics simply be grafted onto scientism?
The advantage of Kant is that he speaks comprehensively in terms of science, yet with the adjunct philosophy of freedom mediated via a special ‘critique of reason’.
Conservative premodern systems are always going to be metaphysical systems in disguise, and destined to break up on the shoals of analytic reductionism. Kant is perhaps the only survivor who has brought enough across the barrier into modernity with something left that can withstand scientism.