Human essence, human flourishing and liberal rights.

The most important questions of ethics are, arguably, what is a virtuous behavior, and what counts as a good life.
According to a philosophy inspired by Aristotle, the answer to this question depends largely from our answer to another question, namely: what is human nature? This is because in order to live well or flourish one must exercise those activities that are characteristic of human nature to a high degree.

Many people think that human nature cannot be defined.

Other people think that, even if human nature can be defined, it has no importance for moral questions whatsoever, and even for the question "how should I live?", "how can I flourish?".

Those people are usually political liberals, who think that a human being should be free to give his life the shape he or she prefers, provided that they do not provoke serious harm in others. They also believe that if we take seriously the idea that human beings have a nature, and that questions concerning flourishing depend on them, we will sooner or later abandon liberalism, the idea that certain basic individual freedoms should be protected by the institutional arrangements of a just polity.

You will now see that illiberal consequences do not follow necessarily from thinking that the idea of human flourishing is partly determined by the idea of human nature . I shall now try to present what, in my view, was the biggest discovery of Ancient Greek reflection, and how this discovery puts us in the right direction to solve the question about the human good and the nature of the virtues, a direction that does not undermine, but on the contrary supports, the idea of a liberal community.

According to Aristotle the highest good is what is always wanted for its own sake and is never wanted for the sake of something else. This is widely agreed to be happiness. (Nicomachean Ethis, book I). But everybody can agree about this, and still disagree with anybody else about what happiness consists in. According to Aristotle, in order to answer this question we must ask ourselves what is the proper activity (function/ergon) of a human being. And this cannot be anything but that of living a certain kind of life. What kind of life? Since living is an activity, it must be the life that comprises the highest activity a human being is capable of. But what is this?

Aristotle's answer to this question was: rational activity, that is, the activity of the rational part of the soul. Aristotle, like Plato, identified the three most basic types of activity which are characteristic of a human living thing with the three parts of the human soul: the vegetative part (or activity) concerning growth and reproduction, the perceptual part or activity, and the rational part or activity. The reason why he picked up the rational part of the soul as the one in whose activity the proper business of a human being consisted is easy to see: while we share the vegetative and the perceptual function with other living things, only man (and women) can be said to be properly rational. Hence the proper function of a human being is the exercise of the rational part of the soul, and happiness consists in the excellent exercise of this function i.e. thinking and acting according to the excellence of the rational part of one's soul. (Nicomachean Ethics Book I, 7).

As an account of human happiness, this formulation, as Aristotle recognized, leaves still a lot of ambiguity. We still do not know, for example, what is the most excellent way of using the rational part of the soul consists in. As he himself put it, this is only "an outline of the good; for we must presumably first sketch it roughly, and then later fill in the details."

I think that we can follow Aristotle and start from the assumption that rationality is so characteristic of our own picture of ourselves as a species, that we should not accept any account of human flourishing which does not include the exercise of rationality understood in some way. I will now take some further ideas from other Greek authors and try to spell out a view of human nature and of human flourishing that fits most naturally with these Aristotelian foundations, and - as I hope it will be clear - can be appropriated by contemporary liberals. The view that I am laying forward - I believe - can fill some of the gaps that Aristotle's account left open, while remaining in substantial agreement with his way of conceiving the nature of such fundamental problems.

How do we know what it means to exercise the rational part of the soul well? In order to start this question, let us come back to the idea that the ideal of excellence which applies to a human being must have some connection to his nature. But what is human nature? In a way, we have already answered this question, by saying that human nature consists in the exercise of his rational activity. This is in fact what characterizes human beings in opposition to other living beings. But "rational activity" is very vague. It seems that rational activity can be the feature of a life that is very evil, and even of a life that is full of sorrow for the person who is living it.

It seems that in order to account well for the idea of human flourishing, we cannot simply identify it with the excercise of rationality. We need a thicker characterization of our object. Following Aristotle, it is natural to try to develop this thicker characterization taking it from an examination of human nature.

But here a fundamental difficulty arises: it seems that - beside human nature - human beings live in too many different ways - think about the life of an opera singer, a fisherman, a priest, the member of an aboriginal tribe, a computer programmer, a thief, a womanizer, an Islamic fundamentalist attempting to bring out some political change by means of violent means (e.g. terrorism), so that to identify one of these ways of living with human nature means to either deny the fact of human diversity, or to express some arbitrary preference for one way of life and against some other.

I believe that, at this stage of the inquiry, we cannot reject or close our eyes in front of this fundamental truth of human existence. This means, in a way, that there is no way to circumvent the problem the diversity of human ways of life presents us with. On the other hand, we should ask us whether this is really a problem for our account. Some philosophers have reached this stage and have concluded from it that the whole Aristotelian project of understanding the virtues in terms of human flourishing, itself understood in terms of the perfection of human nature is bound to fail.

On the contrary, I believe that what we have found at this stage is simply the beginning of a plausible answer. What we should do is simply to examine what is common and irrenunciable in all those ways of life for which the question whether they are valuable or worth pursuing arises at all. I shall assume at the outset that all ways of life for which the previous question can be sensibly asked.

What all these ways or project of life have in common is their being projects. By this I mean, that the way of life of the an opera singer, a fisherman, a priest, the member of an aboriginal tribe, a computer programmer, a thief, a womanizer, an Islamic fundamentalist are all ways of life in which we can presume that the subject whose life it is in question sees something in that life as good or worth pursuing, and does some short term (or even long term) planning of her actions in such a way as to achieve the desired result.

But what does it imply that one regards some goal of life as worth pursuing? It implies, at least, that one asks oneself the question whether that goal is valuable in the first place. For what distinguishes a human being from an animal, and what clearly applies to all the people which we have described, is that the main aims around which their life is adopted as an aim in virtue of the implicit or explicit recognition of its worth. The life the an opera singer, a fisherman, a priest, the member of an aboriginal tribe, a computer programmer, a thief, a womanizer, an Islamic fundamentalist is something more than a sum of instinctual responses or automatic reactions. It is a life which, even when it is not fully autonomously chosen, is still chosen in some minimal sense or at least endorsed and valued.

I believe that the following transcendental principle is true: we cannot regard a way of life or one of our life's structuring goals as good or worth pursuing if we are not able to entertain the question whether they are good or worth pursuing. A person who is not able to conceive what it would mean that his own life goal is worthless cannot be said to be able to appreciate its worth. This is not to say that a person must often or at least more than seldomly actively doubt the worth of her own life project, an attitude that certain historically minded philosophers identify with the rise of "modernity". In some extreme cases it may only mean that one is able to regard other goals as worthless or less worth, and has therefore the conceptual resources to understand what it would mean for his own life project to be worthless or to have less worth than she currently ascribes to it. (That is to say, he is able to conceive a goal as viewed, from a subject's point of view, as an unworthy goal.) Without this capacities, a person could not be said to value a life goal or project at all.

But if we concede this, we must also concede that such a person must have the capacity to question the worth of his or her own project- if only in a way that is emotionally superficial and practically ineffective. And if this must is conceded, it is not so difficult to conclude that human beings are at the most fundamental level beings whose nature is that of asking themselves the question concerning what is good and worth pursuing. For if I am not able to ask this question, I cannot have the conceptual capacity of distinguishing worthy from worthless activities, and therefore - in virtue of the former reasoning - of regarding anything as worthy at all, and of having a life which is a human life in the fullest sense.

It follows from this, that whatever goal a man or a woman has, it must also have the goal of discovering what human flourishing or happiness is.

The activity of looking for an answer for the question "what is the good life" is - I believe - the most certain among the characteristic or essential features of human nature. If this is true, we can understand why some philosophers believe in the existence of an unsurmontable "is-ought" gap. It is true that there is no direct connection between how most people live and how one ought to live. (This the only way in which there is an is-ought gap.) But this is true only because human nature is not defined by a statistical generalization about human behavior. The truth about human nature is that human beings are not born with knowledge of what is they ought to become, and that they need to conquer this knowledge, because they cannot have lives that are fully human without it.

This is, I believe, the deepest truth which was expressed in the philosophy of Socrates, and - to a lesser degree - in that of the philosophers which viewed themselves as his followers. For the ever lasting heritage of Socrate's thought was, beside the idea that a good life is a virtuous life, an even more revolutionary principle, namely, the importance of an examined life.

Someone wrote that the essence of man is that of not having an essence. This sentence is a truth hidden by a contradictory form. For we can ascribe an essence to a human being, which is, as the former statement suggests, that we need to discover what truly defines our flourishing, perfection as human beings. So we both have and do not have knowledge about the human essence, since what we know is that its essence is that of needing to discovery what its essence is.

Aristotelian philosophers believe that the notion of human flourishing is connected to the notion of human nature. Therefore, if flourishing consists in acting according to the excellence of one's nature, and a man or woman's nature is that of having to discover what flourishing is, human flourishing includes the activity of discovering what a good life is (and the virtues that are necessary for it).

Let us finally come to the question of what are the virtues. If flourishing consists in acting according to the excellence of one's nature, and a man or woman's nature is - most deeply- that one has to discover what flourishing is, a man or woman cannot reach perfection or flourish in the fullest sense without those virtues which are required for the possibility of this discovery. We can therefore conclude that the following principle is plausibly true:
V-F:
If x is a stable disposition, required for leading a life which has among its goals that of discovering what human flourishing is, x is a virtue.

This account includes traits which are related to the characteristic ways in which human beings, as a species, learn to find answers about human flourishing, namely, by joint activity and dialogue. (This is clearly an anthropological universal if there is any.) It therefore includes traditional virtues such as honesty, but also patience, perseverance, tact, openness towards others, open-mindedness, trust, intelligence, respect for established traditions, etc.

Moreover, the Aristotelian conception of flourishing which is conceived as an excellent development of one's being, leads to view the virtues are not only means but also aspects of human flourishing, because virtues can be conceived as aspect of the mind or aspects of rational activity. They are both conditions of flourishing and aspects of that which flourishes.

Notice that in this reasoning I have started from the life of a person whose actions are structured around a goal to which he or she ascribes some worth. Of course, there might be someone who spends her own life sitting in front of tv eating chips without finding anything good or worthwhile in what she is doing, keeping on on that kind of life just out of inertia, just out of lack of or inability to desire to do anything different from that. But these lives enter in our account of the diversity of human ways of living in a different way from the former ones. The life of such a couch potato is not even a "way of life" in the fullest sense, by which I mean a way of living which might challenge our beliefs about the good life and the virtues, in the same way as we might feel challenged by the other ways of life I quoted. Alternative ways of life are not cases in which action, thinking, control and meaningfulness are reduced to some minumum, but lives which are built around a goal that are different and sometimes unconciliable. They are actualized by people who are able to take that goal as a premise for action and as a source of meaning for his daily movements and actions.

We can now finally see why there is no real contradiction between this sort of Aristotelian moral theory, which grounds statements about the good in statements about human nature, and liberal institutions. For this moral theory clearly supports in its own way liberal institution: it contributes to what Rawls calls an "overlapping consensus" over the way our polities have to be ruled.

If you are an Aristotelian in political theory, you will think that that one of the goals of the community and of the government it express is that of fostering the good life of the individual which compose it, and that the "good life" in this sense is also a virtuous life. Or more succinctly, a government must not only protect the life or the interest of its members but also (and for that reason) attempt to make them more virtuous.

Many philosophers think that if you believe this, you cannot favor liberal institution. But if my account of human nature, flourishing and of the virtues is right, this is wrong. For only an institution which guarantees certain basic liberties, such as freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of political partecipation and activity does not preclude its members the most fundamental opportunities to flourish and develop the virtues, as they are conceived here. Without basic liberal rights there cannot be the soil in which flourishing human beings, who possess virtues such honesty and open-mindedness, can grow.

What is the relation between virtue and human flourishing?

In a previous post I laid forwards the basic idea of Aristotelian Constructivism. Aristotelian Constructivism proposes itself as a method of/guide to moral reasoning, and claims itself to be better in this role than alternative methods (such as contractarian reasoning, as explained by T.M. Scanlon in “what we owe to each other”).

Aristotelian constructivism holds that there is at least a certain significant part of moral reasoning in which the notion of a virtue and of human flourishing play a ineliminable role. (It does not hold that all moral reasoning must work in this way. More often than not, moral reasoning is based on premises that do not need to be made explicit.)

Supposing that we want to determine whether X (e.g. charity) is a virtue. This kind of reasoning is based on discovering or making clear to oneself what a virtue requires by connecting the notion of virtue and flourishing in the following way:

1. X is a virtue and it consist of such and such

2. X is (typically, if unconditionally exercised) necessary to the flourishing of person P

3. such and such way of acting is not necessary for the flourishing of person P

4. X is not a virtue

One big question is the character of the premise “2”. Eudaimonistic virtue ethics is normally understood as involving the following claim:

2a X is (typically, if unconditionally exercized) necessary for the flourishing of person whose virtue it is

The problem with 2 is that it allegedly cannot account for virtues such as benevolence or justice.

It is tempting to substitute 2' with some principle in which virtues are connected not the the flourishing of a single individual but to that of the community, for example:

2b X is a virtue only if its possession by a higher number of individual leads to a higher level of flourishing of more individuals in the community.

The problem with “2''” is the same as the problem of the principle of the greatest happiness for the greatest number: you cannot both aim to increase the total of happiness and the number of people who are happy. If “2'' is understood as a maximizing principle of the usual sort, so that the total level of flourishing is what counts, the principle faces all the usual problems deriving from aggregation by sum. If levels of individual flourishing are simply added this leaves open the problem of how to deal with virtues which tend to increase total flourishing at the expense of the people who are worst off in society.

One could therefore try to formulate an “altruist” version of the principle which does not look at the maximizing consequences of their existence, but at its impact on every single individual, such as the following:

2d: X is a virtue only if were everyone to lack X some virtuous person in the community would be reduced to bare living and could not flourish as an individual, or would die.

The problem with this sort of formulation is that it leads to ignoring virtues which are of some importance for human flourishing, but are not required for human existence, such as kindness. One of the strengths of virtue theory, as opposed to ethics of principle, is that it sensibly allows for an inclusion of traits of character which very much determine the way a problem is handled, such as kindness. And we do not want to loose this welcome feature of virtue theory.

Something similar applies to a “sufficientarian” formulation of 2, something along the lines of

2e: X is a virtue if any increase in the number of people who have that trait brings more people to have a satisfactory level of flourishing.

Here again, kindness would be a counter-example. Although kindness contributes to human flourishing, it hardly helps to move from the worst conditions to a “barely enough” condition.

One may imagine an “egalitarian” definition of this principle, for example:

2f: X is a virtue only if the increase of the number of people who have it leads to a more equal distribution of degrees of flourishing

This formulation suffers from all the usual paradoxes of equality. Equality is hardly a compelling ideal in itself when it can only be achieved by making everybody worse off.

Therefore, I believe that the problem of justifying the existence of virtues which are “other regarding” should be dealt with in a different way. Our starting point should be the notion of what it means of a human being to flourish, in the light of the fact that man is a social animal, and that the human condition is characterized by the fact of dependence on others, for example dependence as children, as ill people or as old people. As we have seen, the idea that developing the excellences of one's nature (that is the virtues) is part of what it means for a man to flourish is true a-priori in any form of Aristotelian constructivism. Flourishing involves not only developing the excellences of a human being qua human being, but also those excellences which are required by the execution of those roles which are normally constitutive of human nature. It can be claimed that the role of a care taker is one of these role, in so far as every one is a father or a mother, or at least some mother and father's child. A role as care takers follows, typically, for a human being, in that as a mother or a father he/she must be able to take care of a child: a child needs the care of a mother or of a father in order to flourish.

This argument will be refused by those who think that we cannot just assume that giving birth to a child is part of “typical” human life, or that, even if we concede that it is, we cannot derive any normative consequence from it. Conceding this, notice that even a person who decides – for quite legitimate reasons, as it may happen – not to have children, is the son or daughter of someone else. And it is a fact about human lives that those “someone else”, our mothers and fathers, get old, and when they are old their son and daughter must have certain virtues in order to make them flourish.

But how are the facts about human dependence to be included in a definition of the relation between the virtues and human flourishing. I propose the following:

2g: X is a virtue only if x is (typically and if unconditionally exercised) required for my flourishing or x is/would be required for the flourishing of those individuals that depend upon me /would depend upon me if I were fully flourishing.

The conditional clause “if I were fully flourishing” states that the virtues must not be defined in terms of the contingent situation of the person who happens to have them, but in terms of ideal human conditions. (The clause might be substituted with “if I were leading a fully fulfilling human life”). The conditional clause links the nature of the human virtues to a conception of flourishing and human nature which is not necessarily that of the individual whose flourishing is in question, but that of the “typical” individual of the species. It is not at all implausible to argue that – in general – a fully flourishing life includes the growth of children. This by no means entails that one has the moral duty to reproduce or have children. (No such thing as a general moral duty to do flourish makes sense.) In this formulation, even what counts as a virtue, for a person who decides not to have children, can depend on an ideal model of human flourishing, which includes having children.

This formulation allows us to include other regarding virtues which follow naturally if we think about what a young baby needs and what his parents must be able to give him. But the relations of dependency which are constitutive of an account of a fully flourishing life are not limited to having children. We might think, as Aristotle did, that a fully flourishing life includes friendship. And it might be argued that the willingness helping a friend when he is in a condition which makes him dependent on others is constitutive of our ideal of flourishing. If that is true, it allows us to include as virtues all those traits of character which are required for one's friends to flourish, and this already leads to postulating most of the traditional other – regarding virtues.

It might be argued that in this way I am giving egoistic motives to have other regarding virtues, and this is incompatible with the way these virtues are understood when they are exercised authentically. But I am not justifying other-regarding virtues upon such motives. Remember that I have said that the virtues are excercised unconditionally by those people who are flourishing (and who are responsible for the flourishing of other people.) The virtues which a good friend has – in virtue of which he is a good friend – cannot be like the disposition to do what is good for a friend only in so far as this ensures that I have more of the good of friendship. They are virtue only if they are exercised - as I stated - unconditionally.

Therefore I believe that 2g is a good formulation of the connection between the virtues of a person and human flourishing, that is to say, his own flourishing and that of other people. ù

I also believe that 2g can be supplemented by other two principles, which are in a sense implicitly included in it, namely:

2h: X is a virtue only if X is required for sustaining the growth and development of valuable practices

and

2k: X is a virtue only if X is required for a life which has among its fundamental goals that of discovering the nature of human flourishing.

A few words about 2h. 2H is not really an addition over 2g, since it only makes what is already included in 2g more explicit. For he flourishing of an individual requires that the individual takes part in practices that make him in contact with things that can be valued and are valuable. But what is a practice? A practice is not any collective technique. There are collective technique which are not practices, because the people who engage with them do it only instrumentally, for granting themselves some good which is not the good of a practice. (For example I might work as a bounty killer, or as a drug dealer, for the sake of money.) In opposition to that, an authentic practice (e.g. fishing) has something like a good which is both the goal of a practice and recognized as a human good by the people who take part in it. (Food is both the goal of fishing, and something that fisherman recognize as generally good for humans.) We can also talk about goods that are internal to a practice in a different sense, such as for example the various forms of excellent execution of skills in sport or artistic fields. (MacIntyre cites often the case of chess. Becoming acquainted with the game of chess means that we learn to recognize goods that are internal to the game of chess, such as the execution of intelligent moves. This holds even if one starts to get involved with chess for the sake of external goods, such as the pleasure which follows from winning, or, in MacIntyre's fanciful example, if one starts to play chess as a child, because one can win candies.)

The distinction between practices and mere collective techniques cannot be made in a value-free language. We have said that the idea of a practice is partly constitutive of our idea of flourishing: a person can only flourish to the extent that he partecipates to some human practice. But this means that the reverse is also true: the idea of flourishing is partly constitutive of the idea of a practice, in that the distinction between practices and collective techniques can be spelled out by means of that.

I have not talked of 2k. Let me just say that I take it to be the most sensible lesson of ancient ethics, and to arise from the most plausible formulation of Aristotle's Ergon argument.

Hence I propose the following as an account of the relation between virtue and human flourishing

2J: X is a virtue only if

a. x is (typically and if unconditionally exercised) required for my flourishing or x would be required for the flourishing of those individuals that would depend upon me if I were fully flourishing.

b. X is required for sustaining the growth and development of valuable practices; and

c. X is required for leading a life which is characterized by the activity of discovering the nature of human flourishing.

Do you find that this is a good formulation? Do you find that there are any good counterexamples?

Aristotelian constructivism in moral theory: THE MANIFESTO.

I finally graduated (Ph.D.) with my thesis on the distinction between well-being and other modes of value. Now I am cultivating a new project, which I hope I will have the chance to develop. This new idea I am going to call "Aristotelian Constructivism in Moral Theory".

THE ARISTOTELIAN CONSTRUCTIVIST MANIFESTO

1. Intro to Aristotelian Constructivism Aristotelian Constructivism in Moral Theory, like Rawls' Kantian Constructivism or Scanlon's constructivism tries to argue in favor of a type of moral reasoning, and defines moral truths as the truths which derive from that type of moral reasoning. It differs from the more famous Kantian forms of constructivism in the nature of the concepts it involves. While Rawl's Kantian Constructivism involves the idea of free and equal moral persons, the idea of the reasonable, and the idea of the social role of morality, and Scanlon's constructivism the idea of reasonable agreement among reasonable agents, Aristotelian Constructivism involves the concepts of eudaimonistic (so-called) virtue ethics.

2. Judgement The final judgement of the goodness of a theory which is a form of Aristotelian Constructivism is its ability to provide a good guide to practical deliberation which fits, in terms of wide-reflective equilibrium, with our considered judgments about what good practical deliberation and wisdom is, and with the criteria of goodness the theory itself uses.

3. A formal definition of Aristotelian constructivism. I shall therefore say that a theory is a form of Aristotelian Constructivism if it defines a form of moral reasoning based upon four concepts, namely,

• virtue: a trait of character or skill that makes a person who has it admirable for that reason

• flourishing (aka living well or having a good human life): flourishing should not be confused with well-being, if one has a narrow idea of well-being, similar to health, or if one thinks that well-being can and ought to be defined in abstraction from moral and perfectionist values. Living well, in this sense, involves the element of success and of meaning. In Aristotelian constructivism, it is a-priori that flourishing includes bare living (or surviving), as defined by biology but is not limited to it. Moreover in Aristotelian constructivism, it is a-priori that, ceteribus paribus, developing the virtues is part of flourishing. So the idea of human flourishing is partly constituted by the idea of the virtue, and that the perfectly good life features the development of the virtues to an excellent degree.

• human nature: a conception of the limits and possibilities of development of normal human being. In Aristotelian constructivism, it is a-priori that the content of human nature constraints the possible contents of the notion of flourishing. It does so in two ways: 1) the"bare-living" aspect of flourishing follows from a biological account of human nature 2) flourishing is constituted by a range of activities that are characteristic of human nature 3) flourishing cannot exclude any of the activities that are characteristic and fundamental of a life that we can recognize as distinctively human (e.g. parenting).

• Moreover the definition of human nature constrains the possible range of virtues, since a virtue ought to be an excellence that is compatible with the possibilities open to human nature. A virtue for humans cannot be the same thing as a virtue for things that do not have a body.
  

Any form of Aristotelian constructivism offers a theory of the relation between those terms, R. A classical example of R is the following:

R1: it is a necessary condition of a character trait or skill being a virtue that it contributes to the flourishing of the possessor of a virtue

But more generally, a specification of R will constist in a specification of the following universal formula:

• ur-R: it is a necessary condition of a character trait or skill being a virtue that its possession by/absence in the x-number of human beings in the K-community characteristically (partially) contributes to/undermines the flourishing of the x-number of beings in the J-community

Notice that "community" is a set of beings, whose criterial definition is a parameter to be defined in the specific Aristotelian and constructivist theory under examination. A possible research project consists in determining the right definition for R (and for community).

4. Recursivity A characteristic feature of any theory that is a form of Aristotelian constructivism is that it has a recursive element: namely, virtue . Virtue appears both as a constituent of flourishing (although flourishing involves more than virtue, namely bare living and those activities that are characteristic and fundamental in any life that we can recognize as distinctively human.) Is this circular? Not necessarily.

5. Practical reasoning Another aspect of Aristotelian constructivism, something that makes it similar to the constructivits theories of Scanlon and Rawls, is that its purpose is not the philosophical definition of a set of moral standards, but rather the philosophical definition of a form of practical reasoning.

The theory provided by the combination of these terms by means of the relation R which is a specification of Ur-R should be considered as part of a method of reasoning for determining what one should do if one is virtuous, in specific situations, but only in special cases, when one is criticized, or it is unclear what virtue requires. Suppose that one is just, and is uncertain on the question of what justice requires him to do. Let us suppose that in our theory, R is R1. He may then reason following the reasoning scheme RS-R1

1. such and such is human flourishing

2. it is a necessary condition of X being a virtue that it characteristically promotes the flourishing of the person who has it

3. performing F1 hinders my flourishing

4. a person who has the virtue X would not do F1, he would F2 in this circumstance

Discovering the right value for R means discovering the reasoning scheme R.S. which which makes sense of our considered judgments about virtue, the good life, and human nature, and which proves to be a useful and full of insights in guiding our deliberation.

The claim of Aristotelian constructivism is that there are at least certain situations in which practical deliberation taking the form of 1-to-4 is unavoidable. Aristotelian constructivism does not hold that agents need to deliberate like this all the time. Nor do they need to deny that in certain occasions it might be satisfactoty to appeal to the type of practical deliberation defined by Rawls for the political realm and by Scanlon for the moral realm (see esp. What We Owe to Each Other. Harvard University Press.) The distinctive claim of Aristotelian constructivists is that at least in certain occasions, this type of deliberation is necessary, in that it is better than the alternatives. By saying "better", an Aristotelian constructivist means "more conducive to human flourishing".

6. Anti-foundationalism Notice that according to Aristotelian constructivism the contents of flourishing, virtue, human nature, community (not R) are not based on prior metaphysical truths, but are assumed to be "learned" through moral learning, and then "slowly revised" by applying the scheme of reasoning RS in actual deliberation. This holds also for the content of human flourishing. Let us suppose that the real form of Aristotelian constructivism is given by R1. Aristotelian constructivism holds that some time it would be good (that is, conducive to flourishing) to make the reasoning 1 to 4, starting from our conception of flourishing and ending in our conception of what a virtue requires from us. But the conception of flourishing from which we start does not derive from some prior metaphysical or naturalistic truth only. In fact, we are allowed to change our conception of flourishing in order to make it fit with other considered conviction about just, corageous, etc. action through reflective equilibrium.

7. The notion of human nature is partly empirical and partly normative.

It is empirical in that biological theory, which is a partial account of human nature, gives content to the idea of biological survival of the organism, which is an aspect of human flourishing. That is to say, our best "empirical" knowledge about biology tells us what people require in order to survive in the narrow biological sense. But the notion of human nature has also a mixed empirical and normative content, in that psychology and sociology are necessary to define what makes up human living when it involves more than mere survival. And the notion of human nature is also normative and empirical in a further sense, in that in order to say what counts as human flourishing we must form a conception of those activities that are characteristic and fundamental in any life that we can recognize as distinctively human. Here "distinctively human" presupposes a judgment that is both empirical and normative at the same time, because the content of the concept of what is "distinctively human" can be adjusted in order to reach the highest reflective equilibrium with the notions of human flourishing, and with the idea that the virtues contribute to human flourishing, spelled out in details. This entails that the theory implies a blurring of the distinction between fact and value.

8. The re-evaluation of the importance of metaphysics in ethics.

Some (all?) the conceptions of human flourishing are parts of a specific metaphysics, i.e. a specific global weltanschaung or theory of everything. Since there is a conceptual relation between what counts as human nature, what counts as human flourishing, and what counts as a virtue, theories of human nature have – in Aristotelian constructivism – a normative value. It might be argued that whatever normative importance metaphysics has, it must follow from some prior normative assumption about the normative importance of metaphysics. Moral truths cannot have a metaphysical basis: metaphysical truths are truths about what there is while normative truths are truths about how we ought to act (or to think, or feel). Deriving normative truths from metaphysical truths entails a violation of Hume's law.

Against this, Aristotelian constructivists hold that Hume's law is false. First of all, Aristotelian constructivists reject the fact/value distinction. Aristotelian constructivists are not afraid to pose the existence of metaphysical truths which have direct normative consequences, because they have a post-positivistic conception of metaphysical truth, according to which metaphysical truths are truths for a being whose receptivity to truth involves, already, a non-merely passive, but a value-laden eye.

8. Questions:

A. What distinguishes Aristotelian constructivism from a version of utilitarianism, such as utilitarianism of character or motive? Answer:

It might appear that Aristotelian constructivism does not differ substantially from consequentialists: it postulates the existence of valuable states of affairs (namely states of human flourishing) which are also states of well-being or states which are good for someone, it defines the virtues as character traits that are most conducive to such states of affairs, and it finally defines right (or virtuous) action as action which follows from a virtues character.

Despite the appearances, there are some remarkable differences. First of all, standard forms of consequentialism presuppose an idea of the good that is compelling in its own right (as a conception of a state of affairs that is “worth promoting”). This state of affairs is conceptually independent from the idea of virtue, and it provides a logically independent criterion for what state is a virtue. Utilitarian, or better welfarist, forms of consequentialism, which define the good as states of well-being (states which are good for someone), also assume that we knowledge about what is ultimately good for someone should be prior to knowledge about moral virtue or human perfection, and logically or metaphysically independent from it.

Against this, Aristotelian constructivism provides a recursive definition of flourishing, one that it includes a-priori the development of those human capacities which are regarded as virtues. Moreover, from the epistemological point of view, Aristotelian constructivists do not think that our knowledge of what counts as good, and our knowledge about human flourishing can derive from intuitively plausible premises, which are independent from our knowledge about what counts as virtuous behavior.

That is to say, Aristotelian constructivists reject the idea that the account of human flourishing ought to be "normatively insulated from” an account of what character traits are admirable or count as excellent or virtuous. In other words, while utilitarianism is based on a "foundationalist" and "atomistic" idea of moral theory, based on independent but intuitively valid premises about the good, Aristotelian constructivism holds that we cannot justify a conception of human flourishing in abstraction from our conception of virtue.

B. In Aristotelian constructivism, it is a-priori that flourishing includes bare living or surviving, as defined by biology, and that the realization of more complex human possibilities adds ceteribus paribus to human flourishing. But what counts as biological health, and what counts as a human possibility, is the object of biology and social science. Aristotelian constructivist hold that all the notions of biological health and of what counts as a human possibility are in reflective equilibrium with the notion of flourishing and through this with the concept of a virtue. But since the concept of a virtue is a moral one, this makes human nature (a fact) depend (in part) from morality, that is to say, from justifiable beliefs about what ought to be done or ought to be the case. Isn't that absurd?

Answer: Aristotelian constructivism assumes that there is no clear boundary between matters of fact and matters of value. There is no scandal in revising a theory about human nature if it contrasts with a plausible account of flourishing, just as there is no scandal in revising a moral theory if it is based on a theory of human nature that is not coherent with our best knowledge of psychology or sociology.