Kraut (2006) How to Justify Ethical Propositions: Aristotle’s Method (2)

Kraut R. (2006) How to Justify Ethical Propositions: Aristotle’s Method. In: The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. Edited by Richard Kraut. Oxford: Blackwell.

 

4. Finding and Explaining Errors

Aristotle says that our first priority should be to preserve all of the endoxa; that is, to find a way to show that apparently conflicting views are really in agreement, when their ambiguities are recognized. But he realizes that a search for ambiguity may properly come to the conclusion that there is none, and in that case, at least one of two conflicting reputable opinions must be false. (Aristotle allows for this possibility when he says, at NE VII.1.1145b5: “if not all, then most.” That is, if we cannot prove that all of the endoxa are true, then our second-best alternative is to prove that most of them are true.) In these cases, we have to make a decision: which of the two contradictory endoxa are we to accept? How does Aristotle think we should go about answering that question?

He says: “if not all, then most, and the most authoritative” (VII.1.1145b5–6), but what makes certain reputable opinions most authoritative (kuri¯otata)? When we look at what Aristotle’s writings do, when they encounter conflicting reputable opinions that cannot be reconciled by the recognition of ambiguities, what we find is that he evaluates the strength of the arguments that can be found for and against the conflicting options. For example: some say that pleasure is the good, but the arguments they use merely show that it is a good, not the good (NE X.2.1172b23–8). Aristotle does not say “this reputable should be accepted and that one rejected because the first seems more plausible than the second.” He does not appeal to some notion of intuitive plausibility. Rather, he argues for one position and against the other. So, for an endoxon to be “most authoritative” is simply for it to be the one that is best supported by argument. Its authority comes from the fact that it wins us over.

But Aristotle thinks there is more for us to do, after we have decided which of two conflicting appearances to accept as true. For even if we have made the correct decision about where the strongest argument lies, it may reasonably be asked why those whose views we reject have gone wrong about this matter.

After all, they have some claim to credibility – otherwise what they think would not have been counted as an endoxon. And so, if we want to be completely confident that we are right to reject their view, we should find a good explanation of what has led them astray. As Aristotle says: “One should not only say what is true but also what causes error. For this contributes to confidence. For when it becomes apparent why something that is not true seems true, that makes one all the more confident . . .” (NE VII.14.1154a22–5).

He then continues with an explanation of why it appears to certain people that the pleasures of the body are the ones that are always to be chosen over all others. Such pleasures, he says, are over-valued because they drive out pain, and those who over-estimate their worth cannot experience different kinds of pleasures (VII.12.1153a26–13.1153b21). It is common for mistakes to be made by those who concentrate on too limited a range of cases; that often leads them to accept a generalization that does not in fact hold true of other sorts of cases. 

Those who have some minimal degree of familiarity with a subject are very unlikely to be entirely mistaken about it (Meta. II.1.993a30–b7), and when they do make mistakes, some thing is distorting their judgment or preventing them from seeing the truth. A student of a subject should be able to give a good explanation of what is misleading those who are the victims of false appearances. He should be able to say not only “they give bad arguments” or “they give no arguments,” but also “here is what they are right about” and “here is why they have not been convinced by the arguments that lead to the right conclusions.”

When each conflicting appearance can be accepted as in a way correct, though in a way incorrect, we already have an explanation of why there is disagreement and error: the conflicting parties have not recognized the ambiguity of the terms they use. But, as we have seen, Aristotle thinks that sometimes one of two conflicting appearances is true and the other false. In these cases, ambiguity is not the cause of error, but it will turn out that there is some other explanation of why what seems to be the case to a competent adult who has some experience of a subject is not the case.

None of this commits Aristotle to saying that those whose views are mistaken can or should be led by students of a subject to acknowledge their errors. It is one thing for A to have a good explanation about why B’s views are defective; another for A to change B’s mind, or to be able to do so. B may stubbornly insist that he is right and refuse to re-think the matter with an open mind; or his experience may be too limited, and he may resist recognizing that fact; or he may lack the mental acuity needed to recognize a point of view superior to his own.

Someone who uses a term that is said in many ways may fail to recognize the ambiguity, even after it is pointed out to him; he might insist that what he says is unequivocally true and that what his opponent says has no merit. Aristotle’s method requires students of a subject to investigate that subject with an open mind, and to give a fair hearing to different points of view, but that does not mean that they must convince everyone else who has a view about the matter, or that those others be persuadable.

 

5. Can There be Proof in Ethics?

One other term that Aristotle uses in NE VII.1.1145b2–7 calls for comment: the goal of his method is to prove that something is the case. “One should . . . set out what seems to be the case [ta phainomena] and, in this way, prove . . . the reputa ble opinions . . . for if the difficulties are solved and the reputable opinions remain, adequate proof has been given” (1145b2–7). The goal of his method is to bring about a transformation in one’s mind: one starts entirely with what merely appears to be the case (ta phainomena), but in the end the propositions one is left with have all been proven (deiknunai and dedigmenon are Aristotle’s words here) to be so.

The Greek words Aristotle uses here, an infinitive and participle derived from deiknumi, are not technical terms of logic or philosophy.

When I deiknumi a proposition, I show that it is true. This showing or proving is the payoff of all inquiry: investigation is a goal-directed process that aims at transforming appearances into propositions that have earned greater confidence because they – at any rate, the ones that have made it through the process – have been proven.

The fact that what students of a subject begin with has, at that stage, the status of an appearance does not mean that, at that point, those students are or should be in doubt about whether those appearances are true. Some appearances may be uni versally accepted and utterly plausible; even so, at the beginning of the process of inquiry, they have not yet been shown to be the case. They acquire that status only when one’s inquiry has come to a successful conclusion, and all of the puzzles of a field have been resolved.

We can see why Aristotle thinks that someone who has inquired in the way he recommends has made considerable intellectual progress. Such a student has consulted a wide range of opinions, and has sought conflicting points of view. From all of this diverse and sometimes conflicting material, he has constructed a consistent body of beliefs. He now has a better understanding of the truth than he had before because he has detected ambiguities that are hidden below the surface of language. Because of his open-minded encounter with conflicting beliefs, he has been forced to sort out truth from error by evaluating the merits of conflicting arguments. And when he comes to the conclusion that some people are mistaken, he has arrived at an explanation of why they have failed to arrive at the truth, as he has.

But has anything been proved? It might be thought that in ethics proof (as we use that notion) is simply not possible, and that moral philosophy is never entitled to use that word about what can be achieved by even the best of methods. According to this way of thinking, beliefs about ethical matters may be justified to a degree, and some people’s beliefs might be more justified than others. But in order to prove anything in ethics, one would have to do more than what Aristotle’s endoxic method can do – and, it might be claimed, ethics is not a field in which more can be accomplished.

Someone who thinks that ethics is circumscribed in this way will find some support for this view in a well-known passage near the end of the first chapter of John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism. Speaking of his “Utilitarian or Happiness theory,” he says that he will give “such proof as it is susceptible of,” but then adds immediately: “It is evident that this cannot be proof in the ordinary and popular meaning of the term. Questions of ultimate ends are not amenable to direct proof. Whatever can be proved to be good, must be so by being shown to be a means to something admitted to be good without proof.” Later in the paragraph, he softens his stance:

There is a larger meaning of the word proof, in which this question is as amenable to it as any other of the disputed questions of philosophy. The subject is within the cognisance of the rational faculty; and neither does that faculty deal with it solely in the way of intuition. Considerations may be presented capable of determining the intellect either to give or withhold its assent to the doctrine; and this is equivalent to proof. (Mill 2002: 236–7)

That puts Mill in a precarious position. He is not merely conceding that the arguments he will be using are not compelling; rather, his claim is that there can be no compelling arguments here – even though there can be (and he will himself offer) arguments that are sufficiently persuasive. But if, as Mill insists, it is possible to give good arguments about what one’s ultimate end should be, then how do we know, in advance, that there can be no arguments about this topic that are conclusive and compelling – arguments that anyone would call a “proof” in the “ordinary popular meaning of the term”?

It is important, in any case, to see that Aristotle does not downgrade the intellectual credentials of ethical inquiry, as Mill does. He takes himself to have a general method of establishing what is true – general in that it applies to many subjects, not just to ethics – and believes that there is nothing about ethics that makes it a subject in which argumentation, by its very nature, has a lower claim to acceptability than argumentation in other areas. He concedes that there are many who cannot be persuaded by ethical arguments (NE X.9.1179b4–20); but that, he thinks, shows the defects of the audience, not of ethical theory itself. Whatever he means by saying that the goal of the endoxic method is to prove (deiknunai) that something is the case, he believes that such an achievement is no less possible in practical philosophy than it is in other intellectual endeavors.

Mill’s “proof” of his principle is achievable only by lowering the standards of what can be expected of a proof. Aristotle, by contrast, sees no reason to admit that in ethics we must work with a lower standard of justification than is used in other fields of inquiry.

He is well aware that others disagree. “Fine and just things, which are what political science studies, have much variety and variation, and so they seem to exist only by convention, and not by nature” (NE I.3.1094b16–17). Aristotle accepts the premise – there is considerable variation among fine and just things – but rejects the conclusion, drawn by others, that all such matters are arbitrary human inventions that lack a grounding in anything that exists independently of our customs, beliefs, and feelings. (That is what it would mean for them to exist by convention alone, and not by nature.)

The claim that ethics rests on convention alone is nonetheless an endoxon: this is the way it seems to some people, including those who have a reputation for wisdom. (A sophist of the fifth century, Antiphon, took the demands of justice to be merely conventional, and contrasted them with the urgent demands of nature.) And so it is not a view that Aristotle can or wishes to dismiss without a hearing.

But to show that conventionalism in ethics is mistaken, and why it is mistaken, requires the whole of his ethical theory. We will come to see, when we study this subject, just what sort of variation there is in this field. And, if Aristotle’s treatment of the subject is successful, we will come to the conclusion that, in spite of this variation, we are no less able to establish ethical truths than we are able to establish truths in other fields of inquiry.

The test of a claim made about “fine and just things” is not whether it accords with the laws or the accepted customs of this or that community (as we would have to agree, if these things exist only by convention), but whether it can survive the same intellectual tests that the endoxic method prescribes for every inquiry. Ethical beliefs can be proven, no less than can mathematical, biological, or astronomical beliefs.

It might nonetheless seem that Aristotle is, after all, downgrading the level of justification achievable by ethical inquiry because, soon after he notes that such matters seem to rest on convention alone, he insists that “we must be satisfied, in speaking about such matters and proceeding from them, to show [endeiknusthai] what is true roughly and in outline, and when discussing matters that hold for the most part, and proceeding from them, to arrive at conclusions of the same sort” (NE I.3.1094b19–22). He goes on to say that it is the mark of an educated person to seek as much precision in each field as the nature of the field allows: we should not accept mere persuasiveness from a mathematician nor demand demonstrations from an orator (b24–8).

That might make it sound as though Aristotle, like Mill, is asking his audience to place lower intellectual demands on the arguments of ethical inquiry than those of other studies. But we should be careful here.

Aristotle is not judging the credentials of ethics and other fields by applying to them all a single kind of measure or standard. On the contrary, he is asking us to have different expectations of different fields: not higher standards for some fields and lower for others, but different standards.

An orator who addressed his audience by putting everything into the form of deductive arguments would fail miserably – he would be a worse orator, not a better one – but this does not mean that the intellectual standards by which oratory is to be assessed result from a lowering of the standards used elsewhere.

Similarly, although ethics must be judged by the same endoxic method used to prove truths in every other field, we should recognize that it is a field in which some of what is shown to be true holds only for the most part.

Aristotle has already given two examples in NE I.3: to show his agreement with the thesis that political science studies a subject in which there is great variation, he notes that “some have been destroyed by their wealth, and others by their courage” (1094b18–19). Wealth and courage do not generally result in death – but they sometimes do. Ethics is a field in which we must expect to find many generalizations of that sort, but Aristotle’s point is not that we must therefore think the less of the power of ethical argumentation. Ethics, when it is assessed by the endoxic method, is not made inferior to other subjects by the fact that many of its statements exhibit this kind of imprecision.

 

6. Foundationalism

Aristotle believes that an ethical inquiry, like any other methodical intellectual investigation, should impose a hierarchical order on the propositions it studies. That requirement is imposed in the following terms:

Let it not escape our notice that arguments from starting-points differ from those that are towards starting-points . . . For one should start from things that are known, but things are known in two ways: for some are known to us, others known without qualification. Presumably, then, we should start with what is known to us. (NE I.4.1095a30–b4)

When Aristotle says here that “we should start with what is known to us,” he is presumably referring to the first stage of the endoxic method, in which an inquirer sets out what seems to be the case by taking careful note of the reputable opinions. To say that these things are “known to us” is to give them a low cognitive status – one that is compatible with their being false. Aristotle simply means that we are familiar with or can easily become familiar with these sorts of starting-points; that is precisely why this is the best place to start an inquiry.

Our passage then says that we should proceed from these humble beginnings to something else that also deserves to be called a starting-point (arch¯e: “principle” is an alternative translation). That second starting-point – the one toward which we proceed – will be something that has higher credentials, as an object of cognition, than the lowly appearances with which we began.

If someone acquires knowledge of that higher starting-point, his state of mind counts as knowledge in the strict sense. (Here again we should draw a contrast with Mill: in saying that the principle of utility cannot be proved, he is implying that it cannot be known in the strictest sense.)

That highest starting-point, toward which inquiry moves from its humble origins, is the sort of thing that can shed light on all of the other parts of our inquiry. It is precisely because it has this great power to illuminate that an inquirer who comes to understand it must be credited as having knowledge in the strict sense.

This is what Aristotle is getting at when he calls our attention to the difference between proceeding toward and proceeding from a starting-point: after we use our initial starting-points to arrive at the highest principle, we do not stop there, but proceed in the opposite direction, using our understanding of the highest principle as a way of acquiring a better understanding of those initial assumptions from which we began. The analogy Aristotle uses in this passage (omitted from the quotation above) confirms that this is what he has in mind: “just as the path on a race course goes from the starting line to the far end, or back again” (I.4.1095a33–b2). Here he is referring to the fact that races were run up and down a linear path, the “far end” being the place at which the competitors would reverse course and race back to their initial starting-point. This implies that after an inquirer reaches the starting-point that is knowable without qualification, his next step is to return to the material with which he started. There would be no point in doing that unless his understanding of the starting-point that is unquali f iedly knowable can give him a better grasp than he once had of the humble starting-points of his inquiry.

Rather, Aristotle’s idea is that ethics as a whole does have a fundamental starting-point, the understanding of which will illuminate the entire subject. It is not enough for students of ethics (or any other subject) to iron out inconsistencies and decide which among conflicting opinions is better supported by argument. They must also arrange their beliefs in an architectonic order: lower-order beliefs must be supported by their relationship to the fundamental principle of the entire subject.

There is no mystery about what Aristotle has in mind: the fundamental starting-point that must be understood by the student of ethics, the concept on which all others depend, is the good of human beings. In order to understand the linchpin of the whole subject, the student must make his way through the endoxa and aporiai.

He must show how the aporiai can be solved by a proper understanding of the human good, and how most, if not all, of the endoxa can be preserved; but, in addition, he must return to the starting-points of his inquiry – the endoxa he used as stepping stones on his path to the good – and come to a better understanding of them.

This is the program carried out throughout the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle begins with one of the phainomena, that is, with what seems, or is thought, to be the case: “every craft and inquiry, and similarly every action and decision, seems [dokei; “is thought” is an alternative translation] to aim at some good” (I.1.1094a1 2); and he soon adds many more. He notes that the widely accepted opinion that happiness (eudaimonia) is the highest good leaves unresolved the conflict between different ideas about what happiness is (I.4); and he then surveys some of the most prevalent conceptions of happiness (I.5), giving considerable attention to the view, held by some of those who have a reputation for wisdom, that the good is what all good things have in common (I.6). He uses some of the phainomena as premises in an argument for the conclusion that excellent activity of the rational soul is what happiness is (I.7). And, in the chapters that follow, he claims that by upholding this conception of the human good, much of what is said about happiness can be preserved (I.8), several aporiai can be solved (I.10–11), and explanations for erroneous views can be found (I.8).

But Aristotle does not think that the task of defending a conception of the good has been completed by the end of Book I, for the systematic ordering that he thinks any legitimate subject must exhibit has not yet been achieved.

The student of ethics, having moved from humble starting-points to the grand principle of the subject, and having seen that principle pass several important tests, now has to reverse direction, and undertake an elaborate investigation of the things that were taken for granted but not well understood at the beginning of the inquiry.

It was assumed, in Book I, that such things as virtue, pleasure, friendship, and the like, were good, but at that point there was only a partial understanding of what these things are, and therefore only a partial understanding of why they are good. Aristotle’s project, in the rest of the Nicomachean Ethics, beyond Book I, is to use his conception of happiness as virtuous activity supported by adequate resources [적절한 자원에 의해 뒷받침된 덕 있는 활동으로서의 행복] to illuminate all of the other topics that belong to the subject. It is only when that elaborate project comes to an end that the full merits of its foundational premise – the thesis that the human good is virtuous activity [인간의 선은 덕 있는 활동이라는 논제]– can be fully appreciated, and it is only then that the student of ethics can be said to have knowledge in the strict sense.