Brad Thames
Phil 671
17 December 2004
On Virtue and Authenticity
One of the distinguishing features of the resurgence of contemporary virtue ethics
is its rejection of various forms of modernity that underlie the standard deontological and
consequentialist theories that have dominated most of the past few hundred years. In its
inception, especially, with Anscomb and MacIntyre, we find the claim that the ethical
concepts and assumptions of modernity have been removed from the context in which
they originally had their meaning, thereby rendering these projects incoherent and
doomed to failure. Thus they advocate a wholesale abandonment of the enlightenment
projects in favor of a return to more classical ethical frameworks. Yet many of the
contributions to virtue ethics nevertheless maintain, consciously or unconsciously, some
of these modernist features and conceptions. This is a problem. Without a general
agreement on what counts as a product of modernity, and what, if any, role such features
could or should play in a virtue ethics, it seems that the worries of incommensurability
between ethical conceptions that occupies MacIntyre and Anscomb and their ilk as they
criticize modern ethics would potentially plague virtue ethics as well. Though it is
certainly the case that many virtue ethicists have similar ways of talking, as the field
develops there is the risk that those who continue to employ modernist concepts and
those who reject them completely will find themselves talking past each other. If virtue
ethics is to be a viable alternative to deontology and consequentialism, this is a problem
that needs to be dealt with. Too often those who contribute to this field don’t recognize
or don’t address how they employ concepts that had no place in the classical world.
Should we follow MacIntyre in his general eschewing of modernity and its concepts? Or
are their features that are desirable and should be maintained? If so, how should we
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approach them to avoid the sorts of salient problems various forms of modernity have
created for the ethical life? While this is far too broad a question to address here, what
follows is a contribution to working out such a problem.
In Rosalind Hursthouse’s book Virtue Ethics, she includes the concept of making
a virtue ‘one’s own’. I maintain that though this is a concept which is characteristically
modern, articulated in the right way it can be a legitimate and valuable feature of a virtue
ethics. This essay, then, is not a critique of Hursthouse, rather I refer to her as an
important instance of just the problem I am talking about.1 Without further articulation,
the concept of making a virtue one’s own is in danger of collapsing into the pernicious
forms of modernism; however, this concept has much in common with Charles Taylor’s
notion of authenticity, and so it will be by applying his notion to Hursthouse’s that I hope
to illustrate one way in which certain features of modernity can be embraced by the virtue
ethicist.
Hursthouse claims that making one’s values one’s own is crucial to acting for the
right reasons. Her project in this section of the book is to explicate the connection
between doing what is virtuous and acting for the right sorts of reasons, when we no
longer identify the latter with deontological rules or consequentialist principles, for
instance. Acting virtuously, she argues in the tradition of Aristotle, involves doing a
virtuous action ‘for its own sake.’ She explains further that “ ‘the virtuous agent chooses
virtuous actions “for their own sake”’ means ‘the virtuous agent chooses virtuous actions
Another instance that I won’t be able to refer to further occurs in Christine Swanton’s Virtue Ethics: A
Pluralistic View [Oxford: OUP, 2003], when she talks about self-love as requisite to genuine virtue. Selflove, like ‘making one’s own’, carries connotations that should worry those concerned with the aspects of
modernity those like Macintyre criticize; but also like ‘making one’s own’, it need not have this
connotation, but could be worked out in a way analogous to the way I will work out Hursthouse’s concept
and thus made a plausible component of a virtue ethics.
1
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for at least one of a certain type or range of reasons, X’.”2 There is no formula or method
for determining the appropriate X reason for an action, rather she appeals to the sorts of
reasons virtuous people normally give for acting in a virtuous way: reasons such as ‘it
was the honest thing to do’ or ‘because she is my friend’ or ‘the child would die if I
didn’t run into the burning building.’ “They all show, or indicate,” she explains, “what
the agent took as relevant or salient, advantageous or disadvantageous, good or evil,
decisive or compelling, about the action or the situation or both.”3 They distinguish the
virtuous person from a non-virtuous person who happens to do the same action,
indicating, for instance, the sort of character that the person has who performs such an
action. Moreover, X reasons are importantly different from the sorts of principles or
rules that Michael Stocker criticizes as often intuitively poor reasons for action. He
famously calls to our attention the difference between visiting a friend in the hospital
because she is my friend (what else would I do?), and visiting the friend because ‘it is my
duty’ or some such formulaic conclusion. Although Hursthouse does not put it this way,
X reasons seem to be largely internal inasmuch as they are a reflection of character, not a
derivation of an independent rule or principle and not an external compulsion (being told
to do the action, or doing the action out of fear of Hell, for instance).4
X reasons, for Hursthouse, cannot be the sorts of reasons that are “contrary to
their deeply repressed desires and views about what is worth pursuing and having.”5
Thus, if a person does an action because she feels that God commands it, or because it
2
Hursthouse 127
Hursthouse 129
4
It’s important to note, however, that they are not internal in the sense that they are a product of mere
reason, or that they are merely subjective. Though this will come out more in the course of the essay,
‘internal’ here is perfectly congruent with a naturalistic and teleological ontology, lending it a sort of
objectivity.
5
Hursthouse 134
3
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conforms to the social standard of her community, and yet has contrary desires and
inclinations, she is not acting virtuously, that is, she’s not acting for X reasons.6 A
virtuous agent with the right sorts of reasons and motivations, then, must be “really
committed to the value of her [virtuous] acts.”7 So what does it mean to be committed in
this way? This is where Hursthouse claims that such values must be one’s own.
Hursthouse further explicates the commitment as one which “goes ‘deep down’” and
“governs and informs her whole life and conduct,” a “fixed and permanent state;” that is,
the agent “possesses the virtue in question.”8 So we see already that this idea of making
values one’s own is essential to possessing virtue, making it essential to her whole
project.
The idea of making one’s values one’s own has implications on two levels. It
affects the way that we evaluate the actions of children and the mentally handicapped, as
well as how we evaluate the actions of generally bad people. Children, for instance, may
do V acts, and may give X reasons; that is, they act in ways that virtuous people would
act, and when we ask why they did that, they give the same sorts of reasons a virtuous
person would give (and may even have those reasons in mind). But, typically at least,
they are not morally motivated in the way that a virtuous person would be. Why?
Because the X reasons they give are ones that they have in a sense acquired from their
parents or community: but they are not yet ‘their own’. The case is the reverse for
people who are, for instance, followers of a wicked religious system or social ideology.
6
This echoes an argument by Holly Smith that an ethical theory that is not sufficiently action guiding
threatens authenticity in that one acts according to principles other than the one’s most deeply held and
valued. However, this similarity is only superficial, in that authenticity as we should conceive of it within
the context of a virtue ethics actually undermines the whole idea of action-guiding principles as an essential
component of an ethical theory, although unfortunately I won’t be able to defend that view here.
7
Hursthouse 135
8
Hursthouse 135-136.
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Suppose someone who adheres to these values nevertheless does the sort of action a
virtuous person would do and likewise gives the same sorts of X reasons, and perhaps
does this sort of action reliably and consistently. Nevertheless, such people are likewise
not adequately morally motivated, she maintains, because they have made wicked values
‘their own’.9 Hursthouse goes so far as to boldly claim that “such people have no virtues
at all; that the Nazism or racism or religion (supposing them to be very bad) has poisoned
their characters to such an extent that no character trait they have can count as one.”10
On this latter point, things are not so simple, however. An honest look at nearly
any historical period and its individuals reveals an inconsistency between the virtuous
character we often judge them to have and the sorts of vicious practices, institutions and
ideologies that are also embraced, too often uncritically. And those historical periods, of
course, include our own. Responding to this problem, Hursthouse offers the following:
“difficult as it may be to do, and admitting that many cases are simply indeterminate, we
can sometimes draw a distinction between view and attitudes prevalent in a society that
any ordinarily decent person within it could reasonably be expected to see through, and
those that only exceptional and extraordinary people might see through.”11 Perhaps, as in
the bold claim above, certain prevalent views and attitudes are inexcusable, and anyone
who embraces them is simply wicked. However, in some cases we might want to
distinguish between people who are virtuous relative to the society they live in, and those
who are “exceptionally virtuous”, seeing through the injustice and inherent contradiction,
maybe, and thus acting in those ways that the society would take to be strange or antisocial but that we would see as displaying an exceptional character. Further, Hursthouse
9
Hursthouse 142-143, 146-147
Hursthouse 147
11
Hursthouse 148
10
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supposes that in some cases, people acting contrary to the wicked norms of their society
might act ‘inversely akratically’, acting contrary to their best judgment (the judgment
informed by the norms), but in so doing reflecting in their character a deeper sensibility
to the good.12
To tie up the issue under consideration, Hursthouse has given an account of
virtuous reasons and motivation that supposes a particular relation of one’s values to
those of one’s society, family, cultural environment, and so forth. This relation entails
one of making those values ‘one’s own’. Most children and mentally handicapped
persons inculcated with virtuous sorts of sentiments and ideals have not the capacity or
moral development to achieve this. Neither has this been achieved by those who act
merely under compulsion or upon the demands of their religious or social doctrines, out
of fear of punishment, reproach or the like: even if the values called for are the right
sorts, to be virtuously they must be ‘one’s own’. But to make the wrong sorts of values
‘one’s own’ disqualifies a person’s actions as virtuous, even if those actions and the
reasons resemble those of virtuous people; unless, of course, the wrong values are part of
one’s character only at a superficial level, the level of self-evaluation for instance, such
that the nobler values that constitute one’s deeper character end up motivating one’s
actions more reliably (that ‘inverse akrasia’ of Huck Finn, et. al.). Accordingly, given the
substantial importance of this idea to Hursthouse’s virtue ethics, that is, given the
importance of this to her account of virtuous character, and given its peculiar modernist
12
Hursthouse 150-152. She draws this idea from an article by Arpaly and Schroeder, who illustrate this
phenomena with “Huck Finn’s ‘failure’ (by his own lights) to turn in the runaway slave Jim;
Neoptolemus’s ‘failure’ to cheat Philoctetes; and Oskar Schindler’s ‘failure’ to make as much profit as
possible from the Jews working for him.”
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connotations, a critical understanding of what this may entail is now called for, as is an
exploration into the plausibility of this concept.
To begin with, there is an obvious assumption implicit in this idea about the very
possibility of having one’s ‘own’ values. This is the assumption that we have the
capacity to escape the cultural conditioning that forms our being, even as mature adults.
If this capacity was to be called into question, then on one hand, the difference between
the virtuous agent and the child or mentally handicapped would be, ultimately, illusory.
And on the other, the grounds for holding those adhering to the values of a wicked
society blameworthy or declaring them “utterly wicked” would be tenuous at best. So if
we take a more deterministic conception of human values, holding that whatever values
and ideals we embrace as individuals is ultimately a function of the circumstance into
which we have been brought up, then we seem to be forced into a sort of cultural
relativism about virtue. That is, one is merely virtuous inasmuch as one consistently
performs according to the values and doctrines of one’s society, over which whose
influence on us we have no control. There is no fundamental difference between acting
according to external compulsion by society or religion and acting according to deeply
embedded values and sentiments, for the latter are themselves the result of a more subtle,
perhaps, but no less compulsory power of society, religion, or whatever. The basic idea
is that one has to suppose an inherent freedom of the individual to accept, embrace,
reject, or whatever, those aspects of his or her conditioning that inform one’s character.
Fortunately, we need not concern ourselves too much about the strong sort of
determinism implied by this worry. The onus certainly seems to be on the determinist to
account for the plethora of cases in which individuals inculcated into their society’s or
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religion’s values have turned away and embraced alternatives. If these cases are genuine
examples of a certain level of freedom, then one could suppose that even individuals who
maintain the values of their upbringing have the capacity to reject or modify them, and
that by nevertheless maintaining them they demonstrate the possibility of somehow
having made them their own.
But this still does not explain just what making something one’s own means. Nor
does rejecting a sort of strong determinism alleviate the more fundamental worry: that
even if this strong determinism is not tenable, neither is a sort of strong existentialist
freedom to determine one’s values for oneself. We have learned from philosophers on
the Continent like Hegel, Heidegger Gadamer and anglophiles like Quine, Kuhn and
Davidson, that there is a fundamental embeddedness to all our reasoning and character in
the language and culture we find ourselves. Absolute self-determining freedom is simply
an illusion. To even grasp what that freedom would mean, we would have to have
recourse to a conceptual vocabulary and framework of meanings, a giveness that shapes
the way in which we would even begin, much less carry out the development of making a
set of values one’s own. That is, if we take Hursthouse’s point that children typically
cannot be sufficiently morally motivated because they have not had the requisite
development of ‘their own’ moral values, then it naturally follows that before they begin
this process and as it goes on, they are receiving and inculcating the values and modes of
thinking of their family, culture, and so forth. For both of these reasons, we cannot
suppose that there is a moment in which this transformation of value status takes place
(barring perhaps some sort of profound religious conversion or the like). Rather,
whatever it means to make values one’s own would seem to certainly be, at least
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generally, an ongoing, gradual process of adoption and assimilation.13 Furthermore, we
should reject the sort of Cartesian foundationalism which supposes that for values (or
beliefs more generally) to be genuinely one’s own, they must be built upon indubitable
first premises, or some such variation of that theme. For, again, countless philosophers
have pointed to the fact that such premises are fraught with presuppositions, and the
process of formulation likewise brings in even more presuppositions about what a
relatable methodological procedure should be, how we judge the conclusions of these
procedures, etc. Even, I would add, a much more moderate version of this, perhaps
whatever is meant by the slogan ‘thinking for oneself’, must guard fastidiously against
any illusions that we are fundamentally independent beings who can escape the
prejudices of what Gadamer calls our ‘historically affected consciousness’. Rather,
making values one’s own seems to be ineluctably tied to a self with certain inbuilt
prejudices and modes of thinking.
But again, the question still remains: what does it mean to make values one’s
own? We’ve briefly seen that it must entail, against the deterministic viewpoint, the
capacity to genuinely reject those values that one has acquired through one’s upbringing
and enculturation. It also must be a gradual process, and one which is shaped and formed
(even if not determined) by one’s upbringing and enculturation, and which does not
suppose that one ‘arrives’ at them through one’s own fully independent reflection. It
recognizes the situatedness of this process, that we are always shaped and formed in
certain ways as we seek to be genuinely virtuous people.
Hursthouse refers approvingly at one point (165) to McDowell’s invocation of the Neurathian procedure
for forming a conception of the good life, which is quite congenial to the account here. In this procedure,
also favored by Quine, we change our conceptual scheme ‘bit by bit’ along the lines of repairing a boat
while adrift at sea. It’s neither wholesale replacement nor are we stuck with the conceptual scheme which
we are given.
13
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The final condition one making values one’s own that I would want to include in
the elucidation of Hursthouse’s claim that virtuous people act from values that they have
made ‘their own’ (though I make no claims that this is the final condition) follows largely
from what I have discussed already. To embrace a value as one’s own, the agent should
recognize it as having some sort of extra-subjective ground. This follows naturally from
the examples Hursthouse gives of individuals who have mistakenly made ‘their own’ the
wicked values of their society or religion. That is to say, if we reject value-determinism,
as I’ve claimed we should, and go on to claim that people who have non-deterministically
embraced the values with which they have been inculcated may thereby be ‘utterly
wicked’, then we have supposed that they should have the wherewithal to recognize, at
least to a minimal extent, some objectively valid sorts of values that stand in contrast to
the ones of their society or religion. Otherwise, it makes no sense to call these people
wicked. Indeed, we may qualify this and call them wicked from our perspective,
admitting to a sort of value-relativism. But I hardly think that many of us would be
content with this assessment of Nazis and members of cults that ritually rape children.
Aside from these intuitive considerations, this also bears on how we describe the cases of
inverse akrasia. What, indeed, grounds the difference between akrasia—which is
commonly attributed to cases of wrongdoing against one’s judgment, when one’s
perverse desires override, for instance—and inverse akrasia, which Hursthouse
(following Arpaly and Schroeder) considers a case of doing the right thing against one’s
better (read: bad) judgment? If moral values do not have some sort of extra-subjective
grounding, then such distinctions are pointless: each points merely to an instance of
acting on latent sentiments or desires, perhaps, that run contrary to the judgments made
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according to the values and standards of one’s society. These standards, moreover, must
be supposed to be appropriable by the subjective self. That is, they cannot be merely a
Platonic ideal that remains essentially distinct; rather, we suppose them to have their full
being by becoming embraced by the subject, thus giving them concrete reality.
So what we need is a concept of making values one’s own which avoids the
extremes of determinism and radical individualism, and which recognizes a source of the
good outside subjectivity but nevertheless resonates with the subjective self in a way that
indicates the individual’s subjective appropriation of this good, reflectively and
practically. This is largely what concerns Charles Taylor as he articulates an ‘ethics of
authenticity,’ and it is thus my contention that contemporary virtue ethics can benefit
much from Taylor’s work. In his book by the same name,14 Taylor argues that the
modern consciousness is inextricably constituted by the ideal of the authentic self. As we
come to an understanding of what Taylor means by authenticity, we will see that this
authentic self articulates much of what Hursthouse has in mind when she describes the
virtuous agent who acts according to her own values and is motivated by virtue that goes
all the way down.
The last few hundred years, Taylor explains, have seen a turn away from premodern forms of self-conception, for a variety of reasons, into a recognizably modern
one that has then shaped our social practices, institutions, and language to such an extent
that any attempt to return to a pre-modern self-conception would entail virtually
destroying all these forms of modern life with which the idea of authenticity is
interwoven. Instead of a wholesale turning away from this aspect of modernity, Taylor
argues that though the ideal of authenticity has “degraded”, it is “very worthwhile in
14
Taylor, Charles. The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991.
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itself, and indeed…unrepudiable by moderns.” Thus he advocates a “work of retrieval,
through which this ideal can help us restore our practice.”15 This, he recognizes, is all the
more important given the ease with which authenticity slides into atomism, selfindulgence, relativism, instrumentalism, and fragmentation, all interrelated consequences
of a slide which has lamentably been the dominant form of this ideal in our society and
leads to those characterizations that I argued we must avoid when we articulate
Hursthouse’s claim (and which people like MacIntyre draw our attention to). But again,
this slide, he argues, is not necessary. Rather, Taylor argues that we can (re)capture an
ideal of authenticity rooted in the essential intersubjectivity of the person, grounded in a
teleological conception of the good. The dialectic, then, between the essential
intersubjectivity of the authentic subject forms the confluence relevant to our problem of
how the values that underlie moral motivation become one’s own for the virtuous agent
without sliding into the modernist problems I articulated.
In tracing and analyzing the development of the ideal of authenticity, Taylor is
thus interested in highlighting the changes that made an ethics of authenticity both
constitutive of the modern self and society, and an appealing alternative of previous
modes of being. Part of this was the breakdown of hierarchies and rigid social orders that
defined the identity of its members, usually without recourse to the individual’s own
character and achievements. On the one hand, this challenged the sorts of adverse
inequalities inherent in many of these hierarchies (including race, gender, and class
relations, as well as the often severe oppression they justified). However, when these
socially-defined identities became less operative and people sought new sources of
meaning and identity, society tended towards a sort of individualism—atomism, as
15
Ibid., 23
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Taylor calls it—where each subject has to self-impose her own value and meanings as a
sort of identity self-creation. Taylor calls such ‘anthropocentric narcissisms’ ‘deviant’
and ‘trivialized’ modes of the authenticity ideal. And so, I would argue, should we
consider any similar conception of value-appropriation: “The good life for a human
being, in this non-anthropocentric perspective, requires acknowledgement on the moral
agent’s part, however tacitly, of the authority and desirability of goods that we regard
ourselves as discovering more than inventing.”16 That is, we will come to see that the
challenge presented to the formation of the modern identity, including value
appropriation, by the breakdown of socially imposed forms, often but not inevitably (and
certainly not ideally) leads to these deviant forms of identity formation that take the
individual, atomistic self as the ultimate source of identity and values.
To continue the story, the breakdown of potentially oppressive inequalities leads
to what Taylor calls the “massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of
inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as being with inner depths.”17
Taylor suggests that this can be seen, at least in its original forms as “a continuation and
intensification of the development inaugurated by Saint Augustine, who saw the road to
God as passing through our own reflexive awareness of ourselves.”18 Tracing the
development through Rousseau, Kant, Herder, and others, the modern consciousness has
come to believe that “there is a certain way of being human that is my way.” If I am not
true to myself, “I miss the point of my life, I miss what being human is for me.” “Being
true to myself means being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can
Kerr, Fergus. “The Self and the Good: Taylor’s Moral Ontology.” In Charles Taylor, ed. Ruth Abby.
Cambridge: CUP, 2004, p. 90
17
Taylor (1991), 26, my emphasis
18
Taylor (1991), 26-27
16
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articulate and discover. I articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a
potentiality that is properly my own.”19 With the right sorts of understandings that I
mentioned before and will elaborate presently, this becomes quite relevant to an
understanding of virtue as a deep form of the character of a self-conscious agent. That is,
the subjective turn opens up the depths of character to self-examination and critique.
How we respond, the shape that that character takes in the ethical agent’s life, in short,
the agent’s identity has come to acquire an important dimension of practical selfdetermination. Taylor holds that authenticity involves “creation and construction as well
as discovery, originality, and frequently opposition to the rules of society and even
potentially to what we recognize as morality.”20 (Thus Nazi who embraces the wicked
values of his society has failed in this ideal.)
This is key to the understanding of what it means to make values and ethical
ideals one’s own. But in Taylor, this understanding is heavily qualified in ways that
address the concerns mentioned on pages 7-11. Just as important to authenticity, Taylor
adds, is an “openness to horizons of significance (for otherwise the creation loses the
background that can save it from insignificance) and a self-definition in dialogue.”21
This latter point emphasizes the claim that we are authentic only through relationships.
Taylor alludes in this to Hegel’s notion of the socially-constituted self, the self who is self
by virtue of certain relationships in which it is embedded, and as such it becomes an
argument for the importance of an ethical frame of reference. For one thing, “we become
full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining an identity,
through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.” Moreover, “no one
19
Taylor (1991) 28-29
Taylor (1991) 66
21
Ibid., my emphases
20
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acquires the languages needed for self-definition on their own.”22 The sort of selfdefinition we are concerned with, then, must first recognize the essentially social
character of the languages with which we articulate and understand the values and ethical
perceptions we make our own.23
This highlights the essentially social and dialogical character of authenticity. Tied
to this is the fact that when we speak of becoming authentic, of making our values our
own, there is an underlying demand for significance and meaningfulness to that process.
Hence those sorts of self-determinations which assume that the authentic self must selfcreate her own values fall into incoherence. As Taylor puts it, “modes [of authenticity]
that opt for self-fulfillment without regard to the demands of our ties with others or to
demands of any kind emanating from something more or other than human desires or
aspirations are self-defeating, in that they destroy the conditions for realizing authenticity
itself.”24 This is because “self-choice as an ideal makes sense only because some issues
are more significant than others…What issues are significant, I do not determine. If I
did, no issue would be significant. But then the very ideal of self-choosing as a moral
ideal would be impossible.”25 This connects in a crucial way to the understanding of
moral communities. For as we saw before, following Hursthouse those whose X reasons
merely fall back unreflectively on the norms and standards of society or are motivated by
socially- or religiously-derived compulsions and fears, are not genuinely morally
motivated: virtue cannot be something one passively receives. However, this is far from
22
Taylor (1991) 33
Note that Taylor uses “languages” in “a broad sense, covering not only the words we speak but also other
modes of expression whereby we define ourselves, including the ‘languages’ of art, of gesture, of love, and
the like” (33).
24
Taylor (1991) 35
25
Taylor (1991) 39
23
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saying, as some forms of modern liberalism suppose, that mere choice is sufficient for
value-ownership. For my choice to be worthy of recognition, for it to give rise to
virtuous character, it must be made within the “shared horizon of significance.”
Otherwise it collapses into either a form of nihilistic social deconstruction (which he
attributes to some forms of postmodernism) or atomistic anthropomorphism (which is the
malady of ultra-liberalism). “The agent seeking significance in life, trying to define himor herself meaningfully,” Taylor insists, “has to exist in a horizon of important questions.
That is what is self-defeating in modes of contemporary culture that concentrate on selffulfillment in opposition to the demands of society, or nature, which shut out history and
the bonds of solidarity.”26
So authenticity involves choice and creativity informed by this shared horizon of
significance within which we come to “discover and articulate our own identity”27. A
nice way to capture the difference between authentic and non-authentic ways of making
values one’s own is to consider Taylor’s distinction between self-definition of manner
and that of content. As Taylor explains it, when the ideal of authenticity concerns the
manner of self-fulfillment, it becomes “self referential” in the sense that we are
considering: it is concerned with one’s own orientation towards the ends or forms of life.
However, this need not then carry over into the content of the ideal. That is, it need not
presume that the content must be self-referential: “that my goals must express or fulfill
my desires or aspirations, as against something that stands beyond these.”28 The
confusion of manner and content, Taylor argues, “lends legitimacy to the worst forms of
26
Taylor 40
Taylor 81
28
Taylor 82
27
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subjectivism.”29 It “closes off the kind of exploration that could make certain demands
from beyond the self more palpable and real for us.”30 “If authenticity is being true to
ourselves, is recovering our own ‘sentiment de l’existence,’ then perhaps we can only
achieve it integrally if we recognize that this sentiment connects us to a wider whole.”31
The teleological picture that we can now see taking shape in this discussion of
Taylor reveals once again the sympathies between Taylor and many modern forms of
virtue ethics that are often marked by a return to Aristotelian conceptions of the human,
especially those that, unlike Taylor, advocate for a more thoroughgoing rejection of
modernism. This return often becomes the focus of much opposition to virtue ethics,
often complaining that it is simply anachronistic. The modern individual and society,
some might say, has irrevocably moved away from anything like a teleological point of
view, and hence we must satisfy ourselves with talk of rights and oughts and so forth, but
not ‘goods’, or at least not objective and/or superior goods. Taylor, however, argues that
the ideal of authenticity which characterizes much of modern self-conceptions, which
motivates such opposition, and which nevertheless underlies the notion of making values
‘one’s own’ in Hursthouse’s virtue ethics, is an ideal that is not necessarily at odds with
the teleological picture of virtue ethics’ Aristotelian roots; and indeed presupposes
something like it in its genuine forms.32 When we distinguish, as Taylor suggests,
between the manner and the content of value-ownership, we come to locate “moral
29
Ibid.
Taylor 91
31
Ibid.
32
See Kerr (2004) 86.
30
Brad Thames
On Virtue and Authenticity
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sources outside the subject…through languages which resonate within [the agent], the
grasping of an order which is inseparably indexed to a personal vision.” 33
In this image of linguistic resonance, I think, we have a powerful image of what it
means to make values one’s own. They resonate at the core of one’s being, and allow
one to be an interlocutor in the dialogue by which these values take their shape within the
dynamics of society. A child, the mentally handicapped, a person operating merely under
the coercive force of her socially or religiously imposed values, has not entered into the
dialogue. The Nazi and the racist have entered into the dialogue, perhaps, but have done
so without opening themselves up to broader horizons that would reveal the essential
wickedness of their creeds; they have a view of the intrinsic properties of the objects of
their “moral” reactions that is “unsustainable in the light of human history.”34 Thus,
neither group has realized the ideal of authenticity. Neither group is morally motivated in
the way the virtuous agent is.
33
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: the Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989, p. 510, my emphasis.
34
Quoted in Kerr 95