Moral Sight

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"Chop Suey," Edward Hopper

If you've ever tried to explain a moral dilemma to a friend, you've likely struggled to fully articulate its complexity. There's so much more to difficult conversations or decisions than the basic "facts" we might use to describe them.  Should you confront a coworker about their recent behavior? Well -- it may depend on the moment, the mood, the time of day, etc. In “Literature and the Moral Imagination,” Martha Nussbaum argues that these ambiguities and particularities are best explored in literature -- in her words, “the novel can be a paradigm of moral activity.”

In Nussbaum’s view, fiction can give us a window into the complexity of moral judgment. This is both a claim about morality and a claim about literature. Knowledge of abstract universals is not sufficient to recognize what we ought to do, but even “intellectual knowledge of particular facts” will not suffice for virtue. Instead, she argues, virtue moves beyond both duty or calculation to a sort of perception of ourselves, the world, and the people in it. She summarizes: “A responsible action … is a highly context-specific and nuanced and responsive thing whose rightness could not be captured in a description that fell short of the artistic.” For instance, a character in the novel has a challenging conversation where he must speak the truth in love. It is impossible to explain why he does The Right Thing without reference to tremendous nuances of the particular interaction: the tone of voice he takes, the pauses in delivery, “the precise tonality and quality” of his embrace, all considerations which allow for the “best possibility” without reducing his behavior to “overt acts.”

This essay is a marvelous explication of Aristotelian virtue theory. As Nussbaum explains: “in good deliberation and judgment, the particular is in some sense prior to general rules and principles.” This understanding of moral action guided by prudence – a kind of perception – is far more satisfying and truer to life than the utilitarian/deontic duopoly of ethics. It recognizes the importance of particular situations, duties, and general guiding principles. And Nussbaum manages to capture some of the ambiguity and complexity of the moral life lived with a sensitivity to the particularities of the people and places we find around us. She points us to fiction as the genre that helps us study the "art" of moral decision-making.

Josef Pieper suggests a similar approach to the good life in "The Art of Making the Right Decisions" (part of this anthology). Prudence, he writes, is the mother of virtue: "the precondition for all that is ethically good." If we are prudent, we are able to see the world as it is: an "exacting and in many ways hazardous" endeavor. We are the ones who make this difficult by pre-interpreting the people and events around us rather than listening or watching. Much as in Nussbaum, it is worthless to apply rules or principles if we have not first paid attention to the particulars. But how is this done? Pieper continues: 

What is asked of us, then, is no less than this: to reduce our own interest to that silence which is an absolute precondition if we want to hear or perceive anything. Yet everybody knows -- whether we are dealing with the reconstruction of a traffic accident or trying to arrive at an adequate judgement in some dispute: Should one of the parties involved fail to see the events the way they really occured, then all further considerations become futile; the precondition for further reasoning is simply missing. The precondition for every ethical decision is the perception and examination of reality. 

Many arguments, at their essence, are about correctly perceiving a conversation or event. Without seeing or hearing the world as it is, we cannot possibly deliberate about it. Both fiction (for Nussbaum) and silence/deference (for Pieper) train our eyes to see the world and our choices as they are. As Pieper concludes: "to savor all things as they are is truly to taste wisdom."

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