J Value Inquiry (2009) 43:493506

DOI 10.1007/s10790-009-9191-7

Getting It Right in Ethical Experience: John McDowell

and Virtue Ethics
Anne-Marie S. Christensen

Published online: 12 November 2009

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009

Most forms of virtue ethics are characterized by two attractive features. The first is
that proponents of virtue ethics acknowledge the need to describe how moral agents
acquire or develop the traits and abilities necessary to become morally able agents.
A common way of describing this feature is by saying that they focus on the concept
of being an agent rather than the concept of right action, thereby reminding us that
we have to construe ethics in a way that makes it possible to understand how it
becomes accessible and important for us, the ethical subjects. The second attractive
feature of most forms of virtue ethics is that they are forms of moral realism. The
acquisition of virtue is considered to be a process through which we acquire the
ability to distinguish new features of the world, which serve as reason for virtuous
actions. The two features come together in the attempt to describe virtue as a
personal ability to distinguish morally good reasons for action. It follows from the
general picture of virtue ethics presented here that we cannot evaluate ethical
judgment independently of the viewpoint of a virtuous person. Being a virtuous
person plays an essential role within such theories, as being a virtuous person stands
for the possibility of correct moral judgment and exemplifies the abilities that such
judgment depends on. The ideal of being a virtuous person is vital to our
understanding of ethical reflection and judgment.
We will examine how this ideal unfolds in the realistic form of virtue ethics
advanced by John McDowell. McDowell offers a compelling description of virtue
as a natural ability grounded in human nature, while at the same time insisting that
we cannot understand the judgment resulting from virtue without drawing on that
very perspective. Moreover, he meets the need to describe how moral agents
become morally able agents by presenting us with a detailed and clear picture of
what it is to be a virtuous agent, the ideal that is crucial to our understanding of the
A.-M. S. Christensen (&)
Institute of Philosophy, Education and Religious Studies, Southern University of Denmark,
Campusvej 55, 5230 Odense M, Denmark
e-mail: amsc@ifpr.sdu.dk

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character of virtue. However, McDowells focus on the passive taking in of reasons

in ethical experience and his idea of the silencing of wrong reasons lead us to three
related problems. The first is that he cannot account for certain features of the
phenomenology of such experience; the second is that he cannot provide any
relevant epistemological criteria for correct moral judgment; and the third is that he
gives a morally objectionable characterization of the ideal of being a virtuous
person. All of these problems arise because McDowell does not take into account
the particular nature of ethical experience. If we try to resolve this problem by
dropping McDowells idea of silencing, we then have to offer another substantial
description of our ideal of a virtuous person that includes active and interpersonal
ways of evaluating concrete judgments. Proponents of virtue ethics still have to lift
this task and develop a position that does not limit ethical experience to the passive
intake of reasons.

1 McDowells View of Virtue

McDowell opens the case for his liberal form of ethical realism with the widely
accepted claim that ethical discourse, or at least large parts of ethical discourse, is
presented as a truth-guided endeavor, an attempt to uncover reality. When we claim
that something is wrong, cruel, or generous, we take it that we are saying something
about something and not just voicing certain private or cultural dispositions. At this
point, however, we reach a classic question in philosophical ethics. How do we
make room for an ethical discourse guided by truth and objectivity in the world of
modern science, a world devoid of any such normative claims? McDowells wellknown stance is to reject the basic premise. We do not have to establish room for
such a truth guided discourse within a scientific worldview, and the idea that we do,
follows from a particular, unwarranted picture of objectivity as independency of
everything human. It is often taken for granted, among non-cognitivists as well as
aspiring cognitivists, that for cognitivism to be a viable option, cognitivists are
obliged to show how ethical discourse tracks reality in a way specifiable
independently of the discourse. McDowell rejects this premise and instead turns
to an idea of philosophy as an investigation of the experience of living within the
rationally structured network of abilities for adapting reality, which we have gained
through our participation in human society.1
From this starting point, McDowell develops his form of virtue ethics. To
reconcile this with his cognitivist aspirations, he starts from Aristotles view of
virtue as a state that includes a particular shaping of ones practical intellect into
practical wisdom or phronesis. According to Aristotle, virtue is not just a virtuous
inclination, but the ability to reason correctly about how to act in particular
situations. However, this ability is not something we are born with. It requires a
1

See John McDowell, Aesthetic Value, Objectivity and the Fabric of the World, in Mind, Value, and
Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998); see also Values and Secondary Qualities,
in McDowell, 1998 op. cit. and esp. Mind and World (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1996).

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development and shaping of our capacity for practical reason and wisdom, and
McDowell unfolds this idea by means of the concept of second nature. This concept
concerns the general phenomenon that human beings, as we grow into maturity,
develop conceptual capacities, which open our eyes to dimensions of reality as
imposing rational constraints on our thinking. From one point of view, this is the
development of a passive disposition to be affected by the world; from another, it is
a process that opens our eyes to reasons for judgment and action and it thus has a
huge impact on the way we act and live. According to McDowell, such second
nature has a double source. On the one hand, practical wisdom is developed and
formed by our upbringing in a process of Bildung; on the other, we become able to
experience the world by actualizing our nature, and experience and reason are in this
sense natural. Second nature thus reconciles reason and nature in a naturalism of
second nature, a naturalism that McDowell refers to as relaxed or liberal. Sabina
Lovibond has a helpful way of putting this point when she notes that human beings
are a species to whom it is natural at the level of first, or biological, nature to
undergo initiation into a culture, that, by involving participation in a variety of
social activities, gives rise to a second, or acquired, nature.2 Human beings are
naturally norm-developing animals. This interplay between nature and culture forms
the core of McDowells view of ethics as well as his view of experience in general.
McDowells emphasis on the natural aspect of second nature may lead us to think
that he works towards an ethics of natural teleology, presenting the virtues as
necessary conditions for any successful human life. However, in Two Sorts of
Naturalism, McDowell rejects the idea of such a human telos by showing how any
concept of reason, whether based on second nature or not, implies an element of
freedom. The core of his argument is an example of an intelligent wolf. If we
imagine such a wolf, his acquired intellect makes it possible for him to choose to
behave differently than wolves normally do, and it even allows him to question
patterns of behavior such as pack hunting that wolves depend upon in order to
survive. Furthermore, we cannot stop the wolf asking such questions just by
referring to the fact that this is what wolves as a species necessarily have to do,
because we do not know what it would be for a wolf to be intelligent if it did not
have genuinely alternative possibilities of action, over which its thought can
play.3 According to McDowell, this shows an intimate connection between reason
and freedom. Genuine reflection on the world is at the same time reflection on ones
own place in it, which means that anyone capable of thinking about the world is
therefore also necessarily an agent. Besides theoretical and epistemological
possibilities, reason raises practical problems for us, as it opens the possibility of
questioning our instinctive forms of acting.
Two important points follow from this connection between reason and freedom.
The first is McDowells own, that even though reason itself is natural, the possibility
of questioning the authority of nature is an essential part of the nature of reason, and
we therefore cannot justify the rational necessity of something, for example an
ethical view or a particular way of living, just by referring to its naturalness. This
2

Sabina Lovibond, Ethical Formation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 25.

John McDowell, Two Sorts of Naturalism, in McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, p. 170.

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seems, however, to leave the virtues in need of alternative justification, but not
according to McDowell. It is a consequence of the naturalness of virtue that such
questions about the justification of its authority simply do not arise. As McDowell
writes: if the second nature one has acquired is virtue, the rationality of virtue
simply is not in suspense, though it is always open to reflective questioning. The
dictates of virtue have acquired an authority that replaces the authority abdicated by
first nature with the onset of reason.4 When we acquire practical wisdom, we
develop ethical concerns that are not imposed from outside, but are concerns of our
very own. This means that the apparent lack of a justification of ethics presents no
problem to us, because we have no need for such justification.
Secondly, the necessary connection of reason to freedom makes it possible for us
to direct the critical potential acquired with second nature at the specific historical
and cultural moral outlook, which we are given with the moral training that brings
this nature about. Such critical reflection takes the form of a piecemeal investigation
of the conditions of practical reason often described by means of a reference to Otto
Neuraths picture of a boat to be repaired out at sea: just as we may repair the boat
while afloat, we may mend and improve our culturally formed moral outlook by
using the tools provided from within this outlook. However, the fact that anyone
who acquires a second nature must make a specific moral outlook an integrated part
of the persons moral thinking means that there will always be a tendency not to
question the authority of ones cultural inheritance. To rephrase McDowells point
about the natural dimension of virtue, if the cultural inheritance acquired with
second nature is virtuous, the rationality of such inheritance simply is not in
suspense, though it is always open to reflective questioning. The problem is that we
internalize our cultural inheritance through our upbringing, and this may lessen or
even eradicate our drive to criticize it, even in cases where it is less than virtuous.
Furthermore, such an uncritical attitude may prevail, as long as it facilitates uniform
moral judgments within a culture, even if the judgments are primarily wrong,
because a widespread agreement in moral matters means that there will be nothing
to move us to self-criticism. This underlines the importance of having criteria for the
evaluation of concrete moral judgment, and whether or not McDowell provides such
criteria will be central to our discussion.
In Virtue and Reason, McDowell addresses the task of trying to grasp the
conception of right conduct from the inside out. McDowell starts from the idea of a
virtuous person and turns to the Socratic slogan that virtue is knowledge to show how
correct moral knowledge is an essential ingredient in moral living. McDowell argues
for this by looking at a commonly accepted virtue, kindness. To be kind when
required is not a question of having a rational instinct, but of responding properly in
particular situations; it is knowledge about what the world requires in terms of action.
In this way, virtue is a particular sensitivity to the requirements present in a particular
situation, a sensitivity that results in knowledge. As McDowell not only wants to
show how knowledge is a necessary part of virtue, but that it is identifiable with
virtue, he furthermore argues that an agents perception of such requirements is
sufficient to account for his reasons for action in that situation. When a kind agent
4

Ibid., p. 188.

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perceives overriding reasons calling for kind action, he will perform such an action,
and the deliverances of the agents sensitivity thus fully explain the action
manifesting his virtue. This sensitivity turns out to be what virtue is.
However, to reach this conclusion, McDowell has to point to a crucial flaw in his
kindness example. If virtue is to result in nothing but the right conduct, then to act
rightly someone will have to be sensitive to all morally relevant reasons, because
this is the only way of knowing which of the present reasons is right. In this way,
someone cannot determine whether a kind act is required before she is aware of all
the reasons present. No one can posses the full virtue of kindness without possessing
complete virtue, and the identification between knowledge and virtue thus concerns
virtue in general, the unity of the virtues. If one thinks of this in terms of cognition,
one should avoid a comparison between the virtues and a toolbox of different and
separate ways of investigating the world. Instead, the virtues are different
manifestations of a single sensitivity, and collectively they form an ability to
recognize requirements that situations impose on ones behavior.5 If one agrees
that complete knowledge of all reasons is a necessary condition of morally right
conduct, then such a view of virtue as a single, practical sensibility seems inevitable.
However, McDowells view remains controversial, as it implies that only a
completely virtuous person may acquire a correct view of moral reality. The rest of
us can only achieve incomplete or even somewhat distorted ones.
McDowell proceeds by unfolding a picture of virtue as knowledge about how to
live.6 Traditionally such knowledge is thought to arise from an interaction between
universal principles and relevant knowledge about particular situations. We picture
our ability to make ethical judgments as a practical syllogism with one universal and
one particular premise and a conclusion about what to be done. However,
McDowell thinks this picture of ethical rationality springs from a false assumption
about what it is for an act to be rational, the assumption that it has to rest on
universal principles. In contrast, McDowell argues for the uncodifiability of ethics
by reformulating the major premise of the practical syllogism. According to him,
this premise does not simply consist in a set of general principles; instead, it
involves a persons complete conception of how to live, as anything in such a
conception may influence our moral view of a situation. The knowledge we draw on
in ethical reflection thus involves too many interdependent concerns to be
hierarchically ranked or made completely explicit. It is, in McDowells terminology, uncodifiable. Moreover, in trying to figure out what to do, we are not, as it
were, simply applying a range of independent and abstract principles to a situation.
Instead we view the situation in the light of our total knowledge about the right way
to live, reaching a view of the situation that forms the minor and decisive premise of
the syllogism. A virtuous person is moved to act by virtue of his seeing this
particular fact rather than that one as the salient fact about the situation, as
McDowell puts it.7
5

John McDowell, Virtue and Reason, in McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality, p. 53.

See John McDowell, Eudaimonism and Realism in Aristotles Ethics, in Robert Heinaman, ed.,
Aristotle and Moral Realism (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998), p. 211.

McDowell, Virtue and Reason, Mind, Value, and Reality, p. 68.

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2 Raising Children and Silencing as the Virtuous Ideal

We can use an example to bring out both the appeal of McDowells realist approach
and the problems it faces. When parents try to raise a small child, they will often
find themselves in situations where they need to determine whether the right thing to
do is to let their child continue pursuing whatever the child is pursuing at the time,
or to make the child see that there are indeed limits to how far the world should and
will bend at the childs will. Many different considerations go into determining the
right view of such a situation. Parents want to encourage their child in the endeavor
to explore the world, giving the child the confidence that this world is in fact an
inviting and welcoming place, but they also want to teach the child the existence of
danger and to develop the ability to coexist with other people, in due time realizing
that other people have interests and claims which may run contrary to the interests
of the child. Young children only have a limited understanding of these concerns,
and this is why it is the moral responsibility of the parents to lay the foundation for
what will in time, hopefully, develop into adequate powers of judgment of when to
insist on ones own enterprises and when to step back from dangers or make room
for the interests of others. The weight and relative value of these two concerns
varies from case to case, or more precisely, it varies which of these concerns stands
out as the decisive one. Moreover, it seems that the only way for parents to
determine what to do is to try to get the best possible view of the particular situation
at hand.
In the example, attentiveness toward the world stands out as an integrated part of
ethical reflection, which presents a reason to favor conceptions of ethics like
McDowells that are advanced with an attempt to account for this phenomenological
foundation.8 Moreover, McDowells description of ethical experience has support in
other features of the example. First, McDowells insistence that virtue as a form of
second nature is developed by imitation, training, and a general initiation into a
culture is something that one is made painfully aware of when trying to raise a child,
who notices and develops, not just all of the virtues of his surroundings, but the
vices as well. Secondly, in the example ethical deliberation is shown to presuppose
both an idea of morally relevant features of the world and the idea that the right
perception of the features is a major part of what we are trying to achieve in moral
deliberation. Thirdly, we can use the example to support McDowells revised view
of the general premise of the practical syllogism. When parents raise a child, they
involve considerations about what is good for children in general, what kind of
person the child is and what kind of person it should become, what the goal of
parenting is, along with a wide range of more specific considerations such as the
respect for other peoples views of how to bring up children and the importance of
forming and following their own, perhaps somewhat unstable view on the matter.
All of these considerations are subject to continuous redefinition and refinement and
it thus appears that in the case of parenting, our conception of how to live is
stubbornly uncodifiable. This means, finally, that even though a persons different
concerns about how to live, or in this case working together with concerns about
8

See Amy Lara, Virtue Theory and Moral Facts, the Journal of Value Inquiry 42 (2008), p. 343.

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teaching someone else how to live, are at play in determining the morally right view
of any particular situation, such a conception alone cannot determine which feature
of a situation should move us. Instead, it seems reasonable to follow McDowells
view that the minor premise of the syllogism, the virtuous persons perception of the
situation, is the operative factor.
However, in the example, we find other aspects of ethical experience that stand
out as important as well. Even though the example illustrates a cognitive struggle to
get the right view of the situations we face as an important part of what one might
call ethical phenomenology or ethical experience, it also highlights how this
struggle is often experienced as a thoroughly complex matter. This means that in
moral judgment one feels forced to run through a whole range of considerations,
previous experiences or examples told, to find the best possible ethical description
of a situation. Moreover, having reached such a description parents may still find
themselves wanting to take not just this, but also this and this aspect of the situation
into account, even if it is impossible to accommodate them all. This and the ever
changing character of the context of such situations will often result in a sense of
uncertainty that seems impossible to eliminate.
This is not, however, McDowells way of describing ethical experience.
According to him, what happens when two people seriously disagree about the
moral requirements present in a particular situation is that at least one of them lacks
the right perception of the situation. True virtue is a not matter of weighing different
reasons for action, as this would imply that the virtuous does in fact consider the
wrong reasons. Instead, a virtuous person simply sees the right reason and a view of
the situation where the right reason is apprehended, not as outweighing or
overriding any reasons for acting in other ways, which would otherwise be
constituted by other aspects of the situation (the present danger, say), but as
silencing them.9 Virtue is a sensitivity that allows a virtuous person to take in only
one reason for acting, the right reason. Contrary to this, a non-virtuous person is
someone that has not yet acquired the motivational structure found in virtue, which
means that her understanding of what she perceives will be clouded by a wish to do
something other than what virtue demands.
What should we make of the idea that a virtuous persons perception of the
situation differs from the perception of the rest of us? In McDowells view, virtue is
knowledge, and he therefore draws the implication that for any, truly moral agent,
perfect moral knowledge must lead to right action. If one knows what the right
action is, one is motivated to perform it: a virtuous person, if placed under favorable
circumstances, will always do the right thing. A seemingly virtuous person who
does not do the right thing under favorable circumstances, turns out not to be truly
virtuous after all. McDowell thus rules out the possibility of akrasia in truly virtuous
people.10 However, he does not mean to say that all differences of action spring
from differences in peoples views of the situation. His point is much more
restricted, expressing a difference between a virtuous person on the one hand, and
9

Ibid., pp. 5556.

10

See John McDowell, Incontinence and Practical Wisdom in Aristotle, in Sabina Lovibond and
Stephan G. Williams, eds., op. cit., p. 97.

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the rest of us, continent or incontinent, on the other. A continent person sees the
same right and wrong reasons for action as an incontinent person, but a continent
person has sufficient strength of will to act on the right reasons. What distinguishes
a virtuous person is that she only sees the morally right reason as a reason at all,
which means she has no need for continence in order to do the right thing. Our
picture of a virtuous person thus primarily functions as a practical, cognitive ideal
that we may strive to attain. For example, if we experience that a newly employed
co-worker is bullied by our boss, most of us hope to be continent enough to resist
the temptation simply to ignore the bullying in order to keep a good relationship
with the boss. A virtuous person, however, will not even consider this option but
will simply look for the best way to react against such ill-treatment. According to
McDowell, she will in this way view the world differently from the rest of us. To
need continence is thus to show that one is not fully virtuous, and this account for
the fact that most of us, who are not fully virtuous, have similar moral views of the
world and still act in different ways.
We may ask, however, whether McDowells picture of the ideal of a virtuous
person and silencing really connects to the moral phenomenology that he takes
himself to be respecting. If we imagine cases, where a parent reaches or is forced to
settle for a view of what to do in a particular situation that concerns the raising of his
or her child, it seems likely that this is hardly ever due to anything that remotely
resembles McDowells idea of the silencing of the other reasons present. Alone, this
point does not present any objection to McDowells position, as he may reply that the
parents somewhat clouded vision of the situation most likely springs from the fact
that he or she has not yet reached a state of complete virtue. However, this leads to a
number of problems in McDowells account. The first is a phenomenological
problem that concerns the situation of a continent person. Even if an agent who is not
fully virtuous uses all her continence and powers of reflective scrutiny to reject the
reasons that spring from irrelevant or unimportant concerns, she may nonetheless
still face a dilemma. Contrary to the bullying example, parents may face a range of
different, but all valuable, reasons for action in the situations involved in raising a
child. But as McDowell ties correct moral knowledge exclusively to the view of
world had by a virtuous person, he has nothing to say about ordinary cases such as
these, where many right reasons may present themselves.
The only help for a continent person in such a situation is the ideal of being a
virtuous person, and this leads us to the second problem, that McDowells ideal of
being a virtuous person does not present us with any tools to help a continent
person. When McDowell identifies the perception of the morally relevant features of
the world had by a virtuous person by a reference to its unequivocal nature, to its
epistemic certainty, he fails to give an account of the special form of moral
confidence that follows from such a correct perception of the facts. This means that
from an individual perspective, one is unable to distinguish the cases where one has
achieved a true silencing of irrelevant concerns from the cases where one simply has
a strong inclination to see the matter in a certain way. In ones own case, one cannot
discriminate between virtue and simple inattentiveness or moral blindness. To
advance his particular form of moral realism, McDowell minimizes and almost
eliminates the active component in the exercise of virtues and thereby leaves no

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room for other distinguishing features of virtuous activity. Certainty becomes the
only defining characteristic of virtuous experience.
This problem is in fact epistemological. If McDowell thinks that the morally right
perception of a situation simply is the perception made by a virtuous person under
normal and favorable circumstances, this makes the case for the possibility of such a
right perception. However, it does not help one to determine whether one is
anywhere near such a perception on any particular occasion, or whether one is in
fact virtuous or the particular circumstance is in fact favorable.11 In general, we
distinguish between the norms that govern a particular area of discourse and the
judgments that follow the norms, and this means that we may ask two different
questions of any realistic account of ethical experience. How is the normative
character of moral judgments established? How do we know whether a judgment is
true?12 While we have been focusing on McDowells views on the first question, it
should be clear that a problem with McDowells position arises in connection with
the question of deciding when a moral judgment is, in fact, true. This problem is
connected to the difficulties in reaching the proper description of the morally
relevant features of a situation. The certainty that characterizes the experience
cannot in itself provide such a criterion, because that would leave us without any
way of distinguishing between being a virtuous person and simply being singleminded. Any realistic account of ethical thinking must help us to reflect on the
difference between situations where we act on the right moral facts from situations
where we simply act on the wrong moral facts with complete certainty. However,
McDowells idea of virtue as silencing blocks such reflection, and he is therefore
unable to give a concrete answer to the second question of how we determine that
moral judgments are in fact true.
Silencing thus seems to block our understanding of how we pass particular moral
judgments. One possible reason for this is that the idea of silencing really only
describes a limited part of ethical experience where there is only one remotely good
reason present. However, such cases do not present the major challenge for ethical
deliberation, because more often we struggle to pick out the right reason among a
number of relatively good ones. Part of what we learn from the example of parenting
is that even if we exclude the morally wrong or irrelevant reasons, this still leaves the
difficult task of identifying which of the remaining good reasons ought to be decisive.
What McDowells view on ethics lacks are criteria or tools to use in the evaluation of
moral judgments. The critical reflection described by the metaphor of Neuraths boat
is not relevant here. While it helps to make the case for the possibility and necessity
of an ongoing critique of the foundation of ethical thinking, what we need are
ordinary critical tools that make it possible for us to evaluate the reasons presented
herein. McDowells metaphor of silencing stresses the passive taking in of reasons,
instead of the active assessment of them, and thus excludes any active dimension
from the situations where we actually exercise our virtue.
Both of these questions point to a third problem with McDowells use of
silencing to characterize a virtuous ideal. In the Price of Virtue, Anne Baxley
11

See Jan Bransen, On the Incompleteness of McDowells Moral Realism, Topoi 21 (2002).

12

See David Coop, Morality, Normativity and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 3.

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argues that silencing represents a morally objectionable ideal, because we want a

virtuous person to be aware of the possibility that she might face valuable reasons
on which she cannot act. Without such awareness, a virtuous will not be able to
acknowledge the cost that may be involved in virtuous action. As Baxley puts it,
recognizing the value of competing (moral) options and feeling pain about the
prospect of foregone opportunities, would appear to be a condition of morally good
action.13 We see the damaging character of this argument if we reflect on the fact
that an inability to acknowledge the presence of a range of morally valuable reasons
has practical consequences. A virtuous person will act on the right reason, but she
may still have obligations rising from reasons that she did not follow or was forced
to override. If one has the opportunity to save a child at the expense of breaking a
trivial promise to a friend, a virtuous person will break the promise without
hesitation. However, a truly virtuous person will still acknowledge that she did
break a promise and take care to remedy this fact, for example by offering an
explanation or apology in return, thus responding to possible remainders of her
action. McDowell cannot adequately explain why this the case, since the promise
simply loses its status as a relevant moral reason.
The third problem reveals that McDowells focus on the central role of certainty
distorts our understanding of ethical experience. Ethical experience is not like other
forms of experience where certainty or confidence in itself can serve as a mark of
correctness. As McDowell shows, there is a necessary connection between practical
reason and freedom. However, this connection establishes a reason to distrust any
account of ethics that tempts us to be overly confident in the moral perceptions we
simply happen to have. The ideal of silencing is thus likely to further a distorted
form of practical reason, leading the individual striving to achieve virtue in a
particular area to strive to develop a particular feeling of certainty, instead of
becoming better at distinguishing the moral reasons present in concrete situations.
This means that the focus on silencing makes us unable to hold on to the positive
insight behind the attempt to develop a moral realism that moral reasoning is a form
of reasoning that concerns an attentiveness toward the world.
We may ask whether this point threatens the very possibility of an ethical
realism. The answer is that it should not, because McDowells work toward a more
liberal form of naturalism paves the way for more a nuanced view of what such a
moral realism could be. What is problematic is that many of these nuances are
omitted from McDowells position. In this way, it manifests an insufficient
appreciation of the full potential of his liberal form of naturalism: the possibility of
developing a realistic ethics without limiting this to the passive intake of reasons.

3 Virtue Ethics, Uncertainty, and Discussions in Ethics

The investigation of McDowells position shows an inherent tension between the
realistic aspirations of his form of virtue ethics and the idea that we can account for

13

Anne Margaret Baxley, The Price of Virtue, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 88 (2007), p. 414.

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morally correct judgment exclusively by focusing on the individual perspective of a

virtuous agent. The point behind McDowells form of liberal realism is that we
cannot explain moral reasoning without drawing on the abilities and the viewpoint
we develop when we acquire virtues. A virtuous person thus represents both the
possibility of such reasoning and, as a part of that, the possibility of having a right
perception of the moral reasons present in a particular situation. Furthermore, we
have learned that this ideal of being a virtuous person is important, not just
theoretically, but also because it informs our actual attempts to achieve and exercise
such virtue. This calls for a need to find a position within virtue ethics where we are
able to preserve the strengths in McDowells thinking, his realistic aspirations and
his insistence on uncodifiability, while we, at the same time, present an ideal of
being a virtuous person that does not depend on the idea of silencing. Furthermore,
we will have to show how such an ideal provides us with critical tools that we can
use in the evaluation of individual ethical judgment.
To know what we are looking for, we can again turn to parenting and develop
the example to include the ways in which we actually evaluate particular moral
judgments. Let us imagine that a parent sits in a park, watching his or her child
play. The child starts talking to an old woman, poking her knee, and grabbing her
coat. The parent examines the situation and judges that the right thing to do is to
respect the womans need for privacy and stop the child. How does he or she know
this to be true? Perhaps the right judgment was to give the child and the woman a
chance to meet without interference. In the park, the parent has a number of
available options to turn to. First, the parent is obliged to turn her attention or
awareness to the situation in order to get the facts right, for example whether the
woman seems to mind the advances of the child. Secondly, the parent can try to
remember earlier cases, where some strangers have been unsympathetic or others
have been surprisingly forthcoming toward the child, or, if the parent still has
doubts after making a decision, he or she may later tell the story of the woman to
others, asking what they would have done, or how they would have felt, if they had
been in the womans situation. All of the possibilities presented in the second
group, along with many others, are essential tools in any attempt to improve the
ability to pass true practical judgments, ethical and otherwise. They are all tools
that help us develop and evaluate the major premise of the practical syllogism, our
conception of how to live. The important point is that the parent only becomes
aware of the necessity of involving such tools on the basis of an initial
acknowledgment of an element of uncertainty in the experience of the situation.
This means that we, as a part of our attempt to become virtuous, must accept this
uncertainty and its call for active assessment of our ethical experience as an
important part of the experience, which, for example, leads us to draw in intersubjective tools in the evaluation of our moral judgments. In this way, attention to
uncertainty seems to be an essential part of the ethical experience of a virtuous
person.
What we need is a view of being a virtuous agent that allows for this. A relevant
candidate to author such an ideal is Rosalind Hursthouse. In On Virtue Ethics, she
explicitly endorses McDowells view of ethical uncodifiability, just as she thinks
ethical judgment essentially involves what she refers to as McDowells idea of

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reading situations correctly.14 The focus on the metaphor of reading seems

promising because it stresses the active exercise of virtue, instead of the passive
taking in of reasons, but Hursthouse does not develop this idea. After noting the
importance of grasping the right reasons in particular moral judgments, she leaves
the question again and turns to the question of moral motivation. The only context in
which Hursthouse discusses the evaluation of particular moral judgments is in her
opening chapter on virtue ethics and right action, where she defines right action as
the action that a virtuous person would perform, thus respecting the idea that moral
reasons can only be explained from the perspective of a virtuous person.
Unfortunately, she does not offer us any concrete descriptions of the character of
a virtuous person. Instead, Hursthouse provides us with a catalogue of what a less
virtuous person can do in order to become better at knowing what to do. We may
consult other people, more virtuous than ourselves, reflect on our knowledge of
virtuous role models or on our complicated understanding of the concepts of the
virtues. The problem with these suggestions is that they all contribute to the
refinement of our general knowledge of the right way of living, the general premise
of the practical syllogism. However, we are inquiring after a description of our
ability to fill in and critically evaluate the particular premise, how we become better
at taking in or reading right reasons for actions, but Hursthouse, very much like
McDowell, simply reduces this second question to first.
Hursthouse thus follows McDowells aims to put virtuous judgment into a
realistic frame by stressing the passive character of ethical experience, by a virtuous
person taking in objective content. The question that neither of them addresses is the
particular character of ethical experience. Contrary to judgments of sense perception
for example, it is impossible to isolate an area of experience as relevant for ethical
judgment, just as the context surrounding such judgment changes continuously.
When we try to pass ethical judgment, we move within a field where there is very
little stability to be found. We have to act in response to a changing range of
situations that concerns a indefinite range of features, and we do so while our own
ethical priorities change, hopefully slowly advancing to the better. This feature is
especially prominent when it comes to the task of raising children, since children
grow up. Just when we think that we have detected the ethically important features
involved, the child changes, opening up new questions and directing our attention to
other features of the context. This means that even if we have a good grasp of what
we would like our child to become, of what a valuable life is and of the virtues it
includes, we may still face problems when we try to identify the particulars relevant
for this goal in individual judgments. The result is that for most of us, concrete
instances of ethical deliberation are characterized by an eliminable uncertainty. This
is a good thing, because it makes us value the opportunity to discuss ethical matters
with others struggling and needing to be morally trained in a particular area. This
might be the reason why so many parents engage in ongoing discussions about the
raising of children, resulting in the permanent talk of children so inexplicable and
even annoying to the childless.

14

Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 139.

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505

This central role of discussion in ethics marks an important difference between

moral discourse and other, more basic forms of rule-following, like the ones
investigated by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations. In basic rulefollowing, such as reading or doing mathematics, we do not attach any value to
the possibility of discussing different views of the right way to go on; instead, we
simply reject such alternatives, and discussion is considered a sheer waste of time.
This is so, because agreement is a part of the very point of basic rule-following. As
Wittgenstein writes: Disputes do not break out (among mathematicians, say) over
the question whether a rule has been followed or not. People dont come to blows
over it, for example.15 Contrary to this, when we try to determine the morally right
reason for acting in a particular situation, such disputes do break out and we often
actually engage in it, because we cannot simply reject divergent views as
misunderstood. However, the most important difference from basic rule-following is
that we do not even have to consider the disagreement to be a bad thing, because we
value its outcome, a more refined awareness guiding our ethical experience.
It seems likely that both Hursthouse and McDowell would agree with this. The
insistence on the uncodifiability of ethics is among others things an attempt to
further a sense of humility in our assessment of our powers of ethical judgment and
the principles we value, and stressing the importance of ethical discussion is a call
for humility of the same kind. However, the problem that they face is that while
such humility applies to both levels of McDowells practical syllogism, neither
McDowell nor Hursthouse offer any descriptions of what such humility would
require in connection to the minor premise.
Let us evaluate the status of the three problems identified earlier. The
phenomenological problem consists in the fact that ethical experience may present
us with more than one valuable reason. This should lead us to acknowledge that the
sensibilities we draw on in ethical experience are used not only to eliminate wrong
reasons, but also to distinguish between a range of good reasons. Moreover, we have
seen that awareness of all such reasons is valuable for a virtuous agent. What is
important in ethical experience is not only the ability to identify the right reasons,
but to distinguish all the relevant reasons and how they stand in relation to each
other. The epistemological problem is a call for criteria by which we may decide
between such valuable reasons. We have seen that in establishing such criteria, we
cannot rely exclusively on a reference to the perspective of an individual, because
from this perspective there are no tools by which we may critically assess individual
ethical judgments. We find nothing with which to compare the deliverances of
ethical experience. Thus, we should not take for granted that an individuals
attentiveness to her own experience is sufficient to reveal flaws in her moral
judgment or make her see the need to critically evaluate her moral perceptions. We
cannot account for the critical evaluation of the minor premise of McDowells
revised syllogism solely by drawing on the ideal of the virtuous. Instead, we should
see that such critique is an essentially inter-subjective process, where we cooperate
with others to evaluate the correctness of our ethical judgment, in the same way as
the continual discussion between parents is directed toward the upbringing of their
15

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 240.

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particular children in their particular circumstances of life. The only criteria we may
use to evaluate the deliverances of ethical experience comes from knowledge of and
discussions about the experience of other people. Moreover, to do this we need to be
sensitive to all the reasons present in a situation, not just the reason we act on,
because only then can we discuss with others how the decisive reasons stands
compared with other reasons present, and why the reason we act on is the right one
to act on. We can only avoid the third concern that virtue ethics leads to a view of a
virtuous person as blind to the importance of a full view of the ethical significant
features of a situation, if we include this requirement in any description of ethical
experience. In this way, the epistemological and moral worries are connected.
In virtue ethics, there is a tendency to overlook the fact that we actually have
inter-subjective criteria for the correctness of the deliverances of ethical experience,
because it brings with it the idea that the development of virtue necessarily involves
interpersonal elements. However, if we ignore this fact, virtue ethics stands in
danger of succumbing to the most common charge against forms of moral realism,
the charge that it entails a lack of reflection and responsibility. This charge is well
formulated by Iris Murdoch, who diagnosed the concern as a driving force behind
much of the twentieth century non-cognitivist critique of cognitivism. Now I
suggest that there is another type of answer to the question, why not attach morality
to the substance of the world? And that is a moral answer. If you do this, you are
in danger of making your morality into a dogma; you are in danger of becoming
intolerant of the values of others, and of ceasing to reflect on your own values
through taking them too much for granted.16 This danger of furthering ethical
intolerance should be taken seriously by anyone working toward a realist position in
ethics. Therefore any such position must be combined with a more substantial
description of the particular nature of ethical experience as well as of the need for
moral discussion in our evaluation of its deliverances. Proponents of realistic forms
of virtue ethics still need to rise to this challenge.17

16
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics and Ethics, in Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker, eds., Iris
Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1996), p. 243.
17
I would like to thank several anonymous referees and Thomas Magnell, the Editor-in-Chief of the
Journal of Value Inquiry, for their valuable comments and help.

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