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The Journal of Value Inquiry

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29.07.2020 | Original Article

Equality of Authority as the Aristotelian Common Good

verfasst von: Mark LeBar

Erschienen in: The Journal of Value Inquiry | Ausgabe 3/2021

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This paper reconsiders the relationship between the personal and the common good within an Aristotelian conception of the virtuous and happy life. Thinking about that relationship requires that we face up to a central tension in the Aristotelian ethical outlook. That approach is rooted in the value of eudaimonia — of living well, of happiness. That is something like the personal good. At the same time, Aristotle and those who are inspired by him are clear that no form of human life can be good if it is not one we can live with others of our kind. That requires something like a common good. As the history of moral philosophy has shown, it is very difficult to spell out both those ideas in such a way that they fit together well, to yield a consistent account of what we have reason to do and why. Nonetheless, I believe that Aristotle’s framework (although not the specifics of his own theory) offers us the best prospects of doing so, and I aim to sketch a way of connecting the personal and common goods within that framework. …

Vorheriger Artikel Introduction to Special Forum on “Politics and Virtue”

Nächster Artikel A Virtue Politics for Liberal Democracy

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For discussion, see (inter alia) LeBar 2017.

There is obviously also descriptive content to the concept, and the relationship between these descriptive and normative elements are not simply reconciled. See McDowell 1980, LeBar and Goldberg 2012.

Nicomachean Ethics I.7, 1097a36.

NE I.7, 1097b15.

For Plato and the Stoics, it was also sufficient. But in Aristotle’s view, it was merely necessary, not sufficient; some supply of “external goods” was also necessary for happiness.

NE VI.5, 1140b5.

De Anima II.2.

NE VI.12, 1144a8.

NE VI.13, 1144b30-1145a2.

NE V.1, 1129b26.

NE VI. 2, 1130b2.

I develop these critiques at greater length in Just People (ms.), and LeBar forthcoming.

Republic I 331-2.

I owe this point to John Hacker-Wright.

Williams 1981.

NEII.6, 1107a1-3.

Eudemian Ethics7.10, 1242a20-23, Inwood and Woolf translation.

Curzer2012, 287.

Although Kant sometimes does say the object is our wills that give that law (see for example Groundwork Ak. 440). As I read Kant, he can be understood to maintain that persons are the appropriate objects of respect only insofar as our wills are identified as our “true selves” (Kant 1785/1997, Ak, pp. 451-2, 457).

A complication here is that we ourselves are persons worthy of — and rightful objects of — respect as well, so there is a reflexive component to this virtue, again in contravention of Aristotle’s own view. But for sake of simplicity I will not take up this complication here. See Russell and LeBar, forthcoming.

For discussion of the relevant emotional components, see LeBar, Just People (ms.).

See for example Kant 1785/1997, Ak. pp. 389, 452.

See for example De Anima II.2, NE I.7.

I thank Tristan Rogers for discussion of this point.

This is a key part of Kant’s conception of justice as well: what he calls the principle of “innate equality”, which he understands as “independence from being bound by others to more than one can in turn bind them” (Kant 1797/1991, Ak. 237).

NEII.9, 1109a28.

I am grateful to Lisa Tessman for pressing this point.

Smith, Adam. 1759/1982, 224 (III.iv).

I take perfect virtue here to be something like a regulative ideal. If there are perfectly virtuous people, they certainly do not exist in sufficient abundance to underwrite the process I describe here, which is one of continued marginal improvement on imperfect understandings of what recognition of equal authority — and thus the virtue of justice — requires. Moreover, the interactions of these non-ideally virtuous agents take place in concrete particular form, and those interactions provide the object of joint scrutiny and negotiation. I thank Tristan Rogers for pressing this point.

NE I.4, 1095b5.

I have in mind here precisely the kind of contrast Rawls uses in presenting his concept of an “overlapping consensus” (Rawls 2005, xxxii). In the present case, however, the right kinds of reasons are those that flow from the virtue of justice and the recognition of equal authority.

Here I have in mind a specific version of the sort of picture of moral improvement envisioned in Walker 2008, ch. 10. I thank Karen Stohr for pointing out this connection.

Darwall 2012, 337. Darwall does not cast the obligations in question as obligations of justice either, but the subject-matter is effectively the same.

Tomasello 2016, 40, 80.

Tomasello 2016, ch. 3.

Tomasello, ch. 4.

Hayek’s account of group selection faded into the twilight as group selection itself was thought suspect amongst evolutionary biologists, but in recent years that mechanism has returned to credibility as a form of explanation of the evolution of culture and determinant of cultural effects on human biological evolution. See David Sloan Wilson 2002, ch. 1; 2005. Jonathan Haidt builds on Darwin’s Descent of Man, Wilson and others in making an extended case for group selection (as part of a multilevel selection process — a process going on both between groups and within groups) in Haidt 2012, ch. 9; see also Haidt and Kesebir 2010, pp. 817-18, Tomasello 2014, p. 121.

Hayek 1973, vol II, 13.

Hayek 1973, vol. II, 3.

Hayek 1973, vol. 16, 21.

Haidt cites private correspondence by evolutionary psychologist Lesley Newson that makes precisely this point:

I think it is important not to give readers the impression that groups competing necessarily meant groups being at war or fighting with one another. They were competing to be the most efficient at turning resources into offspring. (Haidt

2012, 253)

Tomasello 2014, p. 84.

Of course, other social virtues are called into play as well in interactions across groups. My claim here is that the virtue of justice plays a distinctive and necessary role in constraining the kind of conduct that is inimical to cooperation and coordination.

This is due to the fact, known since Adam Smith, that the productive advantages of the division of labor increase with the size of the market. The more extensive the network of trade, the more efficient the use of resources (Smith 1776/1981, I.I.III).

Hayek 1973, vol. I, 74-5.

Hayek 1973, vol. I, 43. In earlier work, Hayek says of the “moral rules of conduct”:

Next to language, they are perhaps the most important instance of an undesigned growth, of a set of rules which govern our lives but of which we can say neither way they are what they are nor what they do to us: we do not know what the consequences of observing them are for us as individuals and as a group.

(Hayek1960, 64).

Hayek 1973, vol. I, pp. 74-5.

NE VIII.9, 1160a13; Pol. III.12, 1282b16;

Pol. III.6, 1278b22;

Pol. III.7, 1279a27.

Pol. III.13, 1283b43.

Pol. VII.8, 1328a28.

Cooper 2010. 229.

Cooper 2010, 243.

Cooper 2010, 244.

Cooper 2010, 245.

Riesbeck 2016a, 45, 80.

Riesbeck 2016a, 52-3.

Riesbeck 2016a, 55-6; 2016b, 72-3. I think as a matter of fact Riesbeck is mistaken about the nature of exchange: there needs be no mutual benefit motivating the activities of the parties. We can imagine a Glaucon-inspired contractarian, thinking that just exchange is but a poor second-best to doing injustice, but afraid of the consequences, exchanging on just terms with absolutely no interest in mutual benefit. This is precisely Adam Smith’s point with the metaphor of the invisible hand (Smith 1776/1981, §IV.ii.9).

Compare the forms of community Aristotle surveys in Pol I.2. These, in my view, are just the tips of the iceberg, and include all sorts of community of different forms within the political community, and across the boundaries of political communities.

Owens 2012.

Hayek makes a point of this similarity in Hayek 1960, 153.

NE I.1.

Pol. I.2, 1252b30.

NEV.1, 1129b14-19.

The contrast between law and legislation as forms of rule was an important theme of Hayek’s also; see Hayek 1973, ch. 4.

Pol. VII.14, 1332b27; see alsoEEVII.10, 1242b28;Pol. III.4, 1277a26;Pol.III.6, 1279a8;Pol.VI.2, 1317b1.

My thanks to Michael Bukoski, John Hacker-Wright, Matt Jernberg, Marc Kaufman, Daehyun Kim, Matthew LeBar, Paul Martin, Tristan Rogers, Karen Stohr, Matt Taylor, and Lisa Tessman for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed Barnes (Princeton Univ. Press).

Cooper, John. 2010. “Political Community and the Highest Good,” in Lennox and Bolton, eds. Being, Nature, and Life in Aristotle (Cambridge Univ. Press), 212-64.

Curzer, Howard. 2012. Aristotle and the Virtues (Oxford Univ. Press).

Darwall, Stephen. 2006. The Second-Person Standpoint (Harvard Univ. Press).

Darwall, Stephen. 2012. Bipolar Obligation. Oxford Studies in Metaethics 7: 333–359.

Haidt, Jonathan. 2012. The Righteous Mind. New York: Vintage Books.

Haidt, Jonathan, and Selin Kesebir. and Kesibir 2010. “Morality,” in Fiske, Gilbert, and Lindzey (eds.) Handbook of Social Psychology (Wiley & Sons), 797-832.

Hayek, Friedrich. 1960. The Constitution of Liberty (Univ. of Chicago Press).

Hayek, Friedrich. 1973. Law, Legislation, and Liberty, vols. 1 and II (Routledge).

Kant, Immanuel. 1785/1997. Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Gregor (Cambridge Univ. Press).

Kant, Immanuel. 1797/1991 Metaphysics of Morals (Cambridge Univ. Press).

LeBar, Mark. 2013. The Value of Living Well (Oxford Univ. Press).

LeBar, Mark. 2017. “Eudaimonism,” in Snow, Nancy (ed.) Oxford Handbook of Virtue (Oxford Univ. Press), 470-87.

LeBar, Mark. Forthcoming. “After Aristotle’s Justice,” Oxford Handbook of Normative Ethics 10.

LeBar, Mark. Just People. Manuscript.

LeBar, Mark and Nathaniel Goldberg. 2012. “Psychological Eudaimonism and Interpretation in Greek Ethics,” in (Kamtekar, ed.) Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary Volume, 287-319.

McDowell, John. 1980. “The Role of Eudaimonia in Aristotle’s Ethics,” in (Rorty ed.) Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Univ. of California Press), 359-76.

Owens, David. 2012. Shaping the Normative Landscape (Oxford Univ. Press).

Rawls, John. 2005. Political Liberalism (Columbia Univ. Press).

Riesbeck, David. 2016a. Aristotle on Political Community (Cambridge Univ. Press).

Riesbeck, David. 2016b. Aristotle and the Scope of Justice. Journal of Ancient Philosophy 10: 59–91.CrossRef

Russell, Daniel, and Mark LeBar. Forthcoming. “Doing Justice to Oneself,” in Pettigrove (ed.) Neglected Virtues (Routledge).

Smith, Adam. 1759/1982. The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund).

Smith, Adam. 1776/1981. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund), vol. I.

Tomasello, Michael. 2014. A Natural History of Human Thinking (Harvard Univ. Press).

Tomasello, Michael. 2016. A Natural History of Human Morality (Harvard Univ. Press).

Walker, Margaret Urban. 2008. Moral Understandings (Oxford Univ. Press).

Williams, Bernard. 1981. “Justice as a Virtue,” in Moral Luck (Cambridge Univ. Press), 83-93.

Wilson, David Sloan. 2002. Darwin’s Cathedral (Univ. of Chicago Press).

Titel: Equality of Authority as the Aristotelian Common Good
verfasst von: Mark LeBar
Publikationsdatum: 29.07.2020
Verlag: Springer Netherlands
Erschienen in: The Journal of Value Inquiry / Ausgabe 3/2021
Print ISSN: 0022-5363
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0492
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-020-09758-x

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