Against Virtue (Pt 2): The need for a situationist morality

by: Paul Rosenberg

Mon Sep 27, 2010 at 10:30

The previous diary began thus:

Who could be against virtue? Who could be opposed to the embodiment of what is right?

But what if that'a not exactly what I mean? What if I mean "against" as in "next to"?  And what if goodness is not necessarily best understood as emdobied?  What if it might also be understood situationally?

What if the notions handed down to us from ancient Greek philosophers like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle--especially Aristotle, the great systematizer--what if they were all wrong?

Or perhaps not all wrong, but mistaken the same way that Newtonian mechanics is mistaken compared to quantum mechanics and relativity?  And what if the world as we live in it today were very far from the conditions in which Newtonian assumptions hold good?

And ended thus:

As with the example of Newtonian mechanics compared to relativity or quantum mechanics, one needs the less obvious, but more comprehensive theory in order to be able to see just where the classical theory works well enough to be relied on, and where it starts to break down, and why.  It is only the more advanced, more sophisticated theory that can be the foundation for mediating between the two, even though both of them have their place. The classical theory is incapable of properly grasping its own limitations.

So, too, for virtue ethics and the conservative moral & political tradition embodied in it from the time of Aristotle down to the present day.  We can and should continue to respect it for the light that it sheds on what it gets right.  But it is fundamentally incapable of grasping its own limitations, and thus respect for what it does properly should never become deference concerning what it does not.

This is the fundamental insight that Obama and all his neoliberal fellow-travellers utterly and totally lack.

It stirred up a very lively discussion, and it's one that I think needs continuing, which I'd like to do with a discussion of a December, 2007 post at "The Situationist" blog, "The Need for a Situationist Morality", discussing the work of social psychologist Albert Bandura.

But before I proceed to what really interests me, I need to do a little housekeeping. One part of the previous discussion involved a few participants with a professional background in philosophy (I was a philosophy undergrad for a while in both the late 60s and then again in the mid-70s), who disputed my characterization, which was admittedly lay-oriented, but not, I believe, inaccurate.  For example, at one point, I wrote:

Virtue Ethics

Is ethics defined in terms of personal virtue as an enduring character trait, which can be cultivated over time--but which often is assumed to have a considerable inborn component.  In Kegan's typology, this belongs at Level Two--durable categories.

And PTM responded:

As I said before
I think as a factual matter this is just not what philosophers and ethicists throughout history have meant by 'virtue ethics'.  It is certainly not what current theorists in the area mean by it.  Contemporary virtue ethics might be committed to the view that we ought to try to develop those durable character traits, but it is not committed to the view either that this is likely to happen nor to the idea that any one is born with those traits or with proto versions of those traits.

I would suggest Roger Crisp's anthology 'Virtue Ethics' or Rosalind Hursthouse's book 'On Virtue Ethics' or the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on the topic if you want to get a better idea of what virtue ethics, considered as a philosophical theory of ethics is.  

Now Kegan is a psychologist, not a philosopher, and psychologists are of course allowed to use the term 'virtue ethics' however they like, as long as people realize that is a discipline specific use.  These discipline specific meanings do lead to confusion though, as the discussion on this thread shows.

In fact, the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Virtue Ethics begins thus:

Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach which emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that which emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximise well-being, a deontologist to the fact that, in doing so the agent will be acting in accordance with a moral rule such as "Do unto others as you would be done by" and a virtue ethicist to the fact that helping the person would be charitable or benevolent.

Which is exactly the way I remember things from thiry-odd years ago, and precisely what I was articulating (to the best of my ability) in terms of Kegan's schema. There is considerable room for misunderstanding where people are referencing multiple frames of reference--as I was in mentioning Kegan, for example [presenting my take on how the two subject inter-relate, not his]--but I felt it important to establish right off that I'm not totally out in left field so far as understanding what philosophers mean by "virtue ethics."

This is not, of course, a claim to be up on the latest internal issues, arguments and positions.  I haven't followed the field for over thirty years, so I'm obviously not up on all that, nor do I claim to be.  But the problems I'm trying to raise have much older and deeper roots than that, and also involve cultural practices extending well beyond the internal discussions of philosophers.  So I trust that while working  philosophers can help clarify some issues that come up, they will not invalidate the main thrust of what I have to say, which draws upon concerns that other contemporary thinkers have raised.

Bandura, Situationist Morality and Environmental Survival

With that out of the way, I'd now like to turn to the diary about Bandura's work, which begins--rather densely--thus [you may skip down the sentence I've bolded at the end, if you wish]:

In 1999, renowned social psychologist Albert Bandura published an article examining the role of "Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities." That article's abstract reads as follows:

Moral agency is manifested in both the power to refrain from behaving inhumanely and the proactive power to behave humanely. Moral agency is embedded in a broader sociocognitive self theory encompassing self-organizing, proactive, self-reflective, and self-regulatory mechanisms rooted in personal standards linked to self-sanctions. The self-regulatory mechanisms governing moral conduct do not come into play unless they are activated, and there are many psychosocial maneuvers by which moral self-sanctions are selectively disengaged from inhumane conduct. The moral disengagement may center on the cognitive restructuring of inhumane conduct into a benign or worthy one by moral justification, sanitizing language, and advantageous comparison; disavowal of a sense of personal agency by diffusion or displacement of responsibility; disregarding or minimizing the injurious effects of one's actions; and attribution of blame to, and dehumanization of, those who are victimized. Many inhumanities operate through a supportive network of legitimate enterprises run by otherwise considerate people who contribute to destructive activities by disconnected sub-division of functions and diffusion of responsibility. Given the many mechanisms for disengaging moral control, civilized life requires, in addition to humane personal standards, safeguards built into social systems that uphold compassionate behavior and renounce cruelty.

The last sentence in Bandura's abstract is what's most important for my purposes here. Bandura isn't saying that personal morality is irrelevant or unimportant--only that by itself, it is not enough.  Even if we were to assume that virtue ethics alone accounted for such morality, and that consequentialist and deontological ethics played no role, it would be obvious that, from his perspective, virtue ethics would not be an adequate foundation by itself for civilized life.

The diary then moves on to a more recent (then just-released) paper dealing with the same issues with a specific focus on issues of environmental survival:

This year, Bandura published a related article on the perpetration of environmental harm. In this more recent piece, titled "Impeding Ecological Sustainability Through Selective Moral Disengagement" (pdf here) Bandura examines how environmental harms are rendered palatable through our ability to preempt or deactivate the self-regulatory mechanisms that would otherwise condemn the behavior that leads to those harms. Understanding the human proclivity for self-justification, he argues, is a key ingredient to saving the environment that sustains us. Or, as we might put it, there is a need for greater situationist awareness and a situationist morality.

Here is a diagram from Bandura's paper, identifying distinct stages and mechanisms with which a situationist morality must contend:

I do not claim that traditional Western ethical traditions can't be applied to such problems.  Arguably they could be, and I would expect that practitioners confronted with the problems Bandura discusses would endeavor to do so.  But I do think that they are ill-suited to uncovering the problems in the first place, and then formulating them accurately and effectively for the purposes of solving them.  Rejiggering them after the fact to deal with problems they did not anticipate on their own is a less-than-satisfactory approach, I would argue, and one that's likely to continue missing further salient, emergent issues of utmost importance for human well-being and enviornmental survival.  This is the best-case scenario, however, as Bandura argues--in effect--that how such problems arise defies our common-sense understandings of human agency in its broadest dimensions (see below).

Furthermore, these approaches are not conceived in terms of the global life-threatening situation that Bandura is dealing with in articulating his approach via-a-vis the global environment.  It is a situation beyond the realm for which they were originally formulated and intended.  The very sorts of specific foci they were developed to enhance and capitalize on may well need to be reconsidered in light of the global environmental challenge that Bandura considers, and we cannot rely solely on traditions that would in any way prematurely foreclose our ability to reconsider such fundamentals.

The diary continues:

Below we excerpt a... December 5 press release summarizing Bandura's article by ScienceDaily.
* * *

We can disguise environmentally harmful practices and dress them up in words to help ease our consciences, argues Albert Bandura . . . but such practices will have a negative impact on the planet and the quality of life of future generations, no matter how we label them.

He explains that we must stop attempting to disguise our actions and switch on our environmental conscience to save the world.

As consumers we are repeatedly bombarded with messages telling us to consider the environment and to save energy in the face of global climate change. However, much has been made recently of the fact that personal economic savings on energy consumption might be offset by increased consumption of goods and services. What may at first appear to reduce the level of ecological harm that we cause, may in effect be cancelled out and possibly lead to even greater harm.

Moreover, many of us pursue practices that are detrimental to the environment but which we justify by a kind of moral disengagement. This frees us from the constraints of self-censure and we defend our actions on the basis that such practices are somehow fulfilling worthy social, national, or economic causes and, as such, offset their harmful effects on the future of our planet.

Moral disengagement equates to switching off one's conscience and there is nothing like self righteousness to exonerate and sanitize malpractice in the name of worthy causes.

Convoluted language helps disguise what is being done and reduces accountability, and also ignores and disputes harmful effects. Learning about moral disengagement shines the light not only on the malpractices of others but on ourselves, argues Bandura . . . .

Bandura, in his paper, . . . highlights how we can be selective about acknowledging the global consequences of our behaviour and points out that harmful practices, thinly disguised as worthy causes, could cause widespread human harm and degrade the environment nevertheless.

"We are witnessing hazardous global changes of mounting ecological consequence," he says, "they include deforestation, expanding desertification, global warming, ice sheet and glacial melting, flooding of low-lying coastal regions, severe weather events, topsoil erosion and sinking water tables in the major food-producing regions, depletion of fish stocks, loss of biodiversity, and degradation of other aspects of the earth's life-support systems. As the unrivaled ruling species atop the food chain, humans are wiping out species and the ecosystems that support life at an accelerating pace."

Bandura's approach elucidates both the bad faith actions of narrowly self-interested and deceitful actors as well as those genuinely concerned in one way or another, yet who continue to act in ways that contribute to the very problems they claim to be concerned about. These are, then, systematic problems that must be approached from an all-encompassing point of view that is open to consideration of all factors that may be presented.

In elucidating the contents of Figure 1 above, Bandera writes in his paper:

Figure 1 presents a schematisation of moral exclusion, the eight psychosocial mechanisms by which moral sanctions can be disengaged from detrimental practices, and the particular points in the process where they undermine and neutralise moral control. In three of the mechanisms, that operate at the behaviour locus, people transform harmful practices into worthy ones through social and moral justification, exonerative social comparison, and sanitising language. This is the most effective set of disengagement practices. Investing harmful activities with worthy purposes not only eliminates self-censure, but engages self-approval in the service of the detrimental environmental activities. Functionaries work hard to become proficient in the activities and take pride in their accomplishments.

In two of the mechanisms operating at the agency locus, people are absolved of a sense of personal accountability for harmful practices by displacement and diffusion of responsibility. At the outcome locus, the harmful effects of the practices are disregarded, minimised, or disputed. In the two remaining mechanisms operating at the recipient locus, the victims who bear the brunt of worsening ecological conditions are marginalised and depersonalised and blamed for their plight. The messengers of harmful effects and those working toward ecological sustainability also are derogated and discredited. The sections that follow analyse in some detail how each of these eight mechanisms of moral disengagement are enlisted in the service of unsustainable environmental practices. These various mechanisms usually operate in concert rather than isolatedly at both the individual and social systems level.

Bandura then immediately describes something of the workings of the mechanisms involved that underscores the inadequacy of traditional forms of moral reasoning that fail to account for how beliefs about facts, meaning and values are both socially and individually constructed:

There is no disembodied group mind doing the moral disengaging. Rather it is people acting together on shared beliefs. However, moral disengagement at the social systems level is not simply the aggregation of the moral beliefs of individual members. It is an emergent group phenomenon arising from the interactive, coordinative, and synergistic dynamics both within and between social systems. Collective moral disengagement requires a network of participants vindicating harmful practices that take a heavy toll on the environment and the quality of human life (Bandura, 1999). Groups, of course, operate through the behaviour of its members.

The exercise of moral agency is part of the broader social cognitive theory (Bandura, 1986, 2006a). In this transactional view of self and society, psychosocial functioning is the product of a dynamic interplay between intrapersonal influences, in the form of cognitive, affective and biological determinants; the behavioural practices engaged in; and environmental influences Personal agency operates within a broad network of sociostructural influences. These social systems are devised to organise, guide, and regulate human affairs (Giddens, 1984). Social systems do not arise by immaculate conception. Social cognitive theory rejects a duality of human agency and a social structure as a reified entity disembodied from individuals. Social systems are the product of human activity. The rules and practices of social systems, in turn, influence human development and functioning.

It's this sophisticated socio-cognitive view of the problem--and, in turn, of potential solutions, that makes the limits of virtue ethics most clear.  To put it most simply, the very individual self that virtue ethics assumes as its foundation is only a conditional factor in the socio-cognitive dynamic that Bandura describes.  While virtue ethics may describe how some particular desiderata may be achieved, it does not reliably orient us toward the totality of the global problems that Bandura describes.

And that is why we stand in such dire need of a situationist morality, not just for the environmental problems that Bandura engages with, but for all social problems in which socio-cognitive processes of problem-indentification are involved.