Moral Measures An Introduction to Ethics West and East Aug 2000 pdf

MORAL MEASURES

  is a clear,

  Moral Measures: An Introduction to Ethics West and East

  introductory, yet critical study of Western and Eastern ethics that carefully introduces the difficult issues surrounding cross-cultural ethics and moral thought. By examining Western and Eastern moral traditions, Jim Tiles explores the basis for determining ethical measures of conduct across different cultures. This much- needed book discusses three kinds of moral measures: measures of right, of virtue and of the good. Drawing on a rich array of ethical thinkers, including Aristotle, Kant and Confucius, Jim Tiles argues that there are ethical problems shared by apparently opposed moral traditions and there is much to be learned by comparing them. is one of the first

  Moral Measures: An Introduction to Ethics West and East

  books to explore properly the relationships between Western and Eastern ethical thought. The book assumes no prior knowledge of philosophy or religion and is ideal for anyone coming to Western and Eastern ethical traditions for the first time.

  

Jim Tiles is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i at M noa.

  He is the author of Dewey (1988), also published by Routledge, and the co- author of An Introduction to Historical Epistemology (1992).

MORAL MEASURES

  

An Introduction to Ethics West and

East

J.E.Tiles

  

London and New York

  

First published 2000

by Routledge

  

11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

  

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.

  

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© 2000 J.E.Tiles

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,

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including photocopying and recording, or in any information

storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the publishers.

  

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British

Library

  

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Tiles, J.E.

  

Moral Measures: an introduction to ethics West and East/J.E.Tiles

p. cm.

  

Includes bibliographical references and index.

  

1. Ethics I. Title

BJ1012.T55 2000 99–053170

170–dc21

  

ISBN 0-203-46504-0 Master e-book ISBN

  

ISBN 0-203-77328-4 (Adobe eReader Format)

  

ISBN 0-415-22495-0 (hbk)

  

ISBN 0-415-22496-9 (pbk)

  

CONTENTS

vii

  Preface x

  Acknowledgements

  1

  1 The field of ethics—a preliminary Survey i

  something peculiar

  2 Approaching the subject: Something old,

  5 Creatures of habit: Habit, custom and culture

  ritual and ritual

  10 Impulses to approve or to condemn: Harmless cannibalism

  mutilation and abortion

  14 Conflicting responses: Foot-binding, genital

  2 Concrete moralities

  23 The revenge ethic and the

  24 Conventions, laws and climates of attitude: spirit of capitalism

  reproduction: Guilt

  29 Psychological foundations and mechanisms of and shame, ritual and myth

  as moral

  36 Manners and morals: Etiquette, diet and fashion phenomena

  40 Law and morality: Rough music and rough handling

  3 Sources of validity

  48

  their nomoi

  49 Tradition and charisma: Spartans, Socrates and

  karma and incest

  54 Nature: Ritual purity,

  submission of al-Ash ar

  59 God’s will: The impatience of Job and the

  lex talionis and reason’s aesthetic

  63 Reason: The

  4 Conflict and the search for standards

  70

  of Euthyphro

  71 Conflict: The anguish of Arjuna and the arrogance

  conduct

  76 Standards: Straight thinking and right-angled

  use of words

  82 Rational authority: Two ways to straighten the

  objects

  88 Reason and reality: Seductive and authoritative

  5 Man as the measure

  96

  and tolerance

  97 Relativism: Protagoras, conventionalism

  tao of Chuang Tzu 102

  Anarchism: Intuitions, optimism and the 107

  Skepticism: From peace of mind to ‘queer’ entities

  and distant views 111

  Non-cognitivism: Emotivism, prescriptivism

  6 Law as measure 120

  Lex and ius 121

  The lawful and the just:

  kadis, precedents 127

  Procedures, rules and particulars: Oracles and and statutes

  rule and the 133

  Equity and casuistry: A mute divinity, the Lesbian tyranny of principles

  and collective 138

  The diversity of justice: Equality, self-determination responsibility

  7 The measure of law 146

  and corporations 147

  Persons, rights and roles: God, slaves

  of nature and the flow of 153

  Natural slaves and natural law: Contours rhetoric 159

  Kant’s canon: Reason and its imperatives

  and the limits of 165

  Taking legal measures: Respect for persons coercion

  

8 The qualities of exemplary persons 175

  of beneficence 176

  Duties of virtue: Perfection of self and duties

  demotic virtues, 182

  Classical virtues and the rule of ritual: Elite and setting a good example

  and sage kings 188

  Where the standard resides: Rituals, laws

  reason and practical 193

  The analysis of virtue: Choice, the mean, wisdom

  

9 The end as a standard 203

  deliberative 204

  The role of reason: Teleology, deontology and rationality

  of what it is to live 210

  The appeal to human nature: For the standard well

  Eudaimonia and the ethical excellences: Contemplation and public 216

  service

  eudaimonia: Blending reason and ritual 223

  A Confucian take on

  

10 Pleasure as the measure 232

  pleasures? Which 233

  The protean standard of hedonism: Whose assessment of risk?

  friends and 240

  Private pleasures and public responsibilities: Selves, fellow citizens

  general happiness 246

  The universal standpoint: Concern for everyone,

  sentience and 252

  The golden rule and the expanding circle: Respect for the throne of pleasure and pain

  

11 The self as a problem 261

  virginity and 262

  Asceticism and salvation: Dependencies, holy soteriology

  an eight-fold noble 267

  Suffering as the problem: Four noble truths and path

  (apatheia) and non-attachment (anup disesa): The pathology 273

  Apathy of the passions

  early capitalists 279

  In the world but not of it: Hermits, monks and

  

12 Conclusion: Measures that fall short? 288

  versus managers of the 289

  Challenging the sovereignty of reason: Slaves passions 293

  Social animals: Associates, friends, communities

  contracting circles 297

  Concern for everyone: Charity, compassion and 303

  Character table 305

  References 315

  Index

  

PREFACE

  This book began as a collection of materials used to supplement textbooks for an introductory course on ethics. One objective I had was to make clear to students the extent to which ethics as a normative theoretical activity is prompted by and is addressed to social phenomena. A second objective arose from the emphasis placed on including non-Western traditions in the study of philosophy by the department where I have taught for the past ten years. In order to encourage this ecumenical spirit in my students at the beginning of their experience of philosophy, I assembled accounts of what I thought were instructive contributions to the subject drawn from a variety of non-Western sources. As my efforts to explain this material inevitably drew on what I knew of ethical traditions in the West, and as I found that my appreciation of what had been for me familiar traditions was undergoing some radical changes, the material grew into a series of comparative essays that functioned as the primary text for my course.

  In the course of this development, the image of a standard or measure appeared frequently in the material on which I was drawing, and that image provided an organizational principle, so that the essays acquired the structure, and suggested the argument, of a book. The result is offered to readers as a general introduction to ethics based on the cross-cultural theme of ethical standards (‘moral measures’). It includes a discussion of moral attitudes as sociological phenomena and their relationship to the phenomena of etiquette and fashion and to the institutions of law (

Chapter 2 ). It considers in detail three

  common approaches to ethical standards: (1) laws and rights, or ‘practical deontology’ (Chapters

  6 and 7 ); (2) human exemplars and their qualities, or the

  virtuous and their virtues (

Chapter 8 ); and (3) teleological or consequentialist

  ethics based on an idea of human good (Chapters

  9 and 10 ). Connected to the

  last of these is a survey of what might be called ‘the bad for man’—‘soteriological ethics,’ or ethical traditions that proceed from one or another form of the assumption that we need salvation of some kind (

  

Chapter 11 ). As a preamble to the detailed treatment of the three kinds of standard,

  there is a discussion of the reasons commonly given for thinking that there can be no rational or objective standards (

  Chapter 5 ) for our moral attitudes. I have drawn throughout on non-Western as well as Western traditions and practices, and on both historical and contemporary sources. The treatment is organized conceptually, not chronologically or geographically. There are lists of further reading at the end of all but the final chapter for readers who wish to see detailed treatments of the practices and traditions, philosophers and schools, on which I draw to illustrate the conceptual material presented here. Part of my aim has been to show that the systematic study of ethics is a highly suitable vehicle for broadening the cultural horizons of students and to contribute what I can to the momentum toward less cultural parochialism in education generally and in philosophy in particular.

  Another part of my aim has been to work for a broader perspective on the nature of moral phenomena and the responsibility we have to invest critical thought in examining our attitudes toward conduct. I have adopted a position with respect to standards that might be termed ‘methodological pluralism,’ have argued for a form of ‘naturalism’—that a conception of our own nature as a species provides the basis for measures of all three kinds—and have suggested in conclusion reasons for thinking that such a basis cannot by itself support certain common attitudes toward ethical principles without an extension of that basis in ways that bring it closer to doctrines found in a number of religious traditions. I hope that professional scholars and teachers of ethics will not only find some of the information assembled here useful but will also find some of the arguments and conclusions fruitfully provocative. The argument of the book is given in brief in the synopsis that follows. Readers who wish to see a more detailed synopsis of the argument will find at the beginning of each chapter a recapitulation of the previous chapter and a prospectus of the chapter to follow.

  

Brief synopsis

  What distinguishes the actual (‘concrete’) morality of a group of people from a mere fashion or mere matter of etiquette is their belief that the attitudes expressed in what they condone and condemn have some basis beyond the fact that as a group they hold these attitudes (

Chapter 2 ). This belief is what gives rise

  to the widespread feeling that in cases of uncertainty or conflict there ought to be measures or standards by which to determine what should be condoned and what should be condemned (

  Chapter 4 ). This image has been put to use even by some

  who reject the very idea that there can be an objective basis on which to determine what it is we should approve or condemn (

  Chapter 5 ). A fundamental

  question that the systematic study of ethics has to address is what basis, if any, there is for our impulses to approve or condemn (

  Chapter 1 ) and hence what

  basis, if any, there is for any standard or measure that might be used to resolve conflicts and uncertainties.

  Three identifiable kinds of measure or standard are found in a variety of moral traditions, which, as societies develop and become more complex, replace the three (‘pure’) sources of authority identified by Max Weber: tradition, charisma and reason (

Chapter 3 ). Tradition works to stabilize itself in forms (often general

  imperatives or rules) that give rise to the institutions of law and the ‘measure of right’ (Chapters

  6 and 7 ). Efforts are made to demystify charisma by identifying

  the characteristics (excellences or virtues) that make individuals genuinely worthy of admiration and of being treated as patterns to be followed, and these give rise to the ‘measure of virtue’ (

Chapter 8 ). Although the process by which

  an exemplary or virtuous individual resolves uncertainties and conflicts must be responsive to the particulars of the problematic situation, there is need for the guidance of a general conception of what humans should try to achieve or preserve in their lives as a whole; this gives rise to the ‘measure of the good’

  9

• – (Chapters

  10 ). (This last, it should be observed, gives a role to practical reason

  that appears to be quite unlike the institutional rationality that Weber had in mind as a source of authority ( Section 4.3 ).) The image of measuring devices to aid practice should not encourage the expectation that just one of these three measures will be sufficient to provide the guidance needed to resolve uncertainties and conflicts ( Section 4.4 ). As successive chapters explore how measures of these three kinds serve to guide judgment, support emerges for the claim that all three kinds have a role to play wherever thought is invested in the moral life.

  A wide variety of measures of all three kinds may be offered as candidates for adoption. Different rules can be formulated, different kinds of people can be admired and used as examples to be followed, and different ways of living can be aimed at as best suited to human beings. The question ‘what basis, if any, have we for approving or condemning attitudes and patterns of conduct?’ becomes ‘what basis, if any, have we for selecting any of these measures?’ A device for ‘calibrating’ measures of right offered by Immanuel Kant ( Section 7.3 ) points to an objective basis for assessing attitudes toward conduct in the difference between persons and things. The distinguishing feature of persons lies in their discursive capacities and the special kind of freedom this gives them. This feature, moreover, if its social foundations are adequately understood, can be seen to provide a basis for measures of virtue and of the good that were first advanced by Aristotle. The final chapter,

  12 , assesses to what extent this basis

  can answer questions about human relationships and support the ideas of human fulfillment and salvation that are canvassed in the previous two chapters,

  10 and

11 . The conclusion is that some common, if not universally embraced, ethical

  principles would need an additional basis, perhaps in something akin to religious belief.

  

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I was fortunate to have a sabbatical semester in the spring of 1996 (the first in what was by then a twenty-one-year teaching career), during which time I was able to give this material the shape of a book. I am grateful for the tolerance and patience of approximately one hundred students in four different sections of an introductory ethics course whose primary text consisted of one of three very differently organized and progressively refined versions of this material. I am particularly grateful for useful feedback from Bernice Pantell and Richard Otley and for an excellent suggestion from Paula Henderson regarding the overall structure of the material. At various stages in developing this I received valuable help, suggestions and reassurance from permanent and visiting colleagues who specialize in the various traditions on which this book draws—Roger Ames, Arindam Chakrabarti, Eliot Deutsch, Lenn Goodman, David Kalupahana, Ken Kipnis and Donald Swearer—and I have learned much from graduate students whose interest in comparative philosophy brought them to Hawai‘i, Donna- Marie Anderson, Steve Bein, Menaha Ganesthasan, Peter Herschock, Li-Hsing Lee, Sang-im Lee, Viren Murthy and Sor-hoon Tan. I am also grateful to Roger Ames and Daniel Cole for help with preparing the character table which appears in this book. Reports from referees for Routledge prompted a further substantial reworking of the text over the summer of 1999; I hope I have responded with sufficient imagination to their guidance. Finally, I wish to acknowledge with gratitude what I have learned over a lifetime from my father, Paul R.Tiles, about the refining of instruments of measurement and their use in both instrumental reasoning and constructive activities.

  

1

THE FIELD OF ETHICS— A

PRELIMINARY SURVEY

  [In ancient times] east of the state of Yüeh there was the tribe of K ai-shu. Among them the first-born son was dismembered and devoured after birth and this was said to be propitious for his younger brothers. When the father died, the mother was carried away and abandoned, and the reason was that one should not live with the wife of a ghost. This was regarded by the officials as a government regulation and it was accepted by the people as commonplace. They practised it continually and followed it without discrimination. Was it then the good and the right way? No, it was only because habit affords convenience and custom carries approval.

  (Mo Tzu (fifth century BCE); Mei 1929:133)

  

Prospectus: Ethics as a distinctive field of study was first conceived

  to be about the good and bad habits that people acquire in response to what pleases and pains them. A more recent common approach is to conceive ethics as concerned with the process of deliberating about a particularly compelling kind of obligation, ‘moral obligation.’ In order to expose clearly the dimension in which ethical life lies outside the individual and mark out a framework, which will enable us to relate ethical traditions and theories found in different parts of the world at different times in history, it is more useful to begin by exploring the phenomena of habituation than that of obligation. People’s habits co-ordinate to form customs, and their customs provide the material of their culture, one important aspect of which constitutes the primary phenomena of ethics. In particular, people are prone to approve and condemn the practices of other people, both those found in other cultures and those engaged in by some members of their own society. This widespread tendency influences the behavior of people in a society and helps to solidify a common culture. The central question to be addressed in the systematic study of ethics is, ‘what basis, if any, do people have for approving or condemning the practices of other people?’

1.1 Approaching the subject

  

Something old, something peculiar

  The earliest surviving books to bear the title ‘ethics’ are works by Aristotle, who lived in the fourth century BCE. He left materials from a connected set of lectures, which were compiled and edited by his associates into two somewhat different versions (the ‘Nicomachean’ and the ‘Eudemian’) under the general title ‘Ethics.’ These lectures were on concepts and questions that Aristotle regarded as important preliminaries to the study of politics. He considered, for example, such questions as what sort of life is worth-while or fulfilling for a human being? What acquired characteristics make people especially worthy of admiration? What is pleasure and what role should it have in human life?

  When Aristotle began his consideration of traits that make humans especially worthy of admiration, he singled out those ‘excellences’ (aretai) to which the adjective ‘ethical’ ( thik ) could be applied, explaining that these are acquired by habituation and suggesting that this word derives from ethos, custom, usage,

  1

  manners, or habit (1103a19). The phrase thikai aretai is also frequently translated into English as ‘moral virtues.’ This derives from the way this phrase was translated into Latin. Aristotle’s word thik was translated as ‘moralis,’ a word derived from mos (moris), which also meant both habit and custom. This is the source of our word ‘moral.’ For most everyday purposes, ‘ethical’ and ‘moral’, ‘ethics’ and ‘morals’ are synonymous. ‘Virtue,’ as a translation of aret , derives from a Latin word for exceptional strength or courage (of a man—from vir, male human being) and is now so closely associated with moral appraisal that ‘moral virtue’ is almost a pleonasm. The older sense of ‘excellence in general,’ however, survives in the English term (imported from Italian) ‘virtuoso,’ usually applied to a person from whom people have come to expect outstanding performances (especially of music).

  Aristotle contrasts two ways in which more mature and experienced people educate those who are less mature and experienced. If they are trying to pass on information or understanding, they will ‘instruct’ their pupils; if they are trying to develop excellences, including ‘ethical excellences,’ they will ‘train’ their pupils, rather than instruct them, by getting them to follow good examples and by correcting inadequate performances until certain habits have developed (1103a14–25). This is also the way a music teacher or an athletics coach proceeds, and this is not surprising as Aristotle regards excellences—ethical, musical, athletic, etc.—all as the sort of state or condition of a person which he calls a hexis (plural hexeis). This is another word that could be translated ‘habit’— in fact it was translated into Latin as habitus, which is the source of our word ‘habit.’ A person with what Aristotle calls a hexis will respond (easily, predictably)one way rather than another in a certain class of circumstances, e.g. a pianist will use fingering that either helps or hinders the smooth playing of difficult passages; a hurdler will adopt a stride that either helps or hinders stepping smoothly over the hurdles.

  What, then, distinguishes the excellence of a musician or an athlete from what Aristotle would call an ‘ethical excellence?’ Aristotle provides both a long and a short answer to this question. The long answer involves a very precise definition of ‘ethical excellence,’ which we will examine in Section 8.4 . For now, the short answer will do. What makes a hexis fall within the concern of ethics is that it is a certain way of responding to (or to the prospect of) pleasure and pain (1104b27– 8). As Aristotle puts it, ‘the whole concern both of [ethical] excellence and political science is with pleasures and pains; for the man who uses these well will be good and he who uses them badly [will be] bad’ (1105a10–13). So we can say roughly that ethics as a systematic study began by considering the good and bad habits of response that people acquire in response to what pleases and pains them.

  That was over twenty-three centuries ago, and although this way of conceiving ethics is still influential, the systematic study known as ethics has come since then to be conceived in a variety of other ways. The currently most influential alternative approach arises from narrowing the focus of concern to one important aspect of what Aristotle identified as an ethical excellence. As we will see in

Section 8.4 , an important part of every ethical excellence is responding in a way

  characteristic of a person who is able to deliberate well. Deliberation is the thought process that addresses questions of the form ‘what should be done in these circumstances?’ and concludes by endorsing some courses of action as preferable to others. Aristotle’s word for this thought process (bouleusis) suggests a collaborative activity; it and its cognates invoke the process of ‘taking counsel’ along with others. The most common approaches today, however, not only consider how deliberation should proceed without reference to the character of the person deliberating but they also frequently assume that in the typical situation people deliberate by themselves, so that cultural influences that might be shaping the process are left out of the picture along with the character of the deliberator.

  Narrowing the focus of ethical inquiry to the process of deliberation, abstracted from the culture and character of the person who is deliberating, requires answering a question similar to that about what makes an excellence ‘ethical.’ After all, people can deliberate about a great many things, such as when to take their paid vacations, what food to serve their guests, whether to buy a new or used car. What deliberations constitute the subject matter of the systematic study of ethics? The answer appears to be ‘when the deliberation is governed by reasons and the conclusion is a determination that a person has (or does not

  moral

  have) a moralobligation.’ (If the conclusion is that there is no moral obligation to follow a particular course of action then one may in a moral sense of permissibility adopt a different course of action.)

  There is, according to Bernard Williams (1985:

chapter 10 ), a ‘range of ethical

  outlooks’ embraced by this notion of moral obligation, which together constitute what he calls ‘the peculiar institution’ of morality. Some of the features that characterize the notion of moral obligation are that it must be given highest deliberative priority (184) and is ‘inescapable’ (177). People may be bound (obligare is Latin meaning to bind, tie or fasten) whether they want to be or not: ‘there is nowhere outside the system’ (178). The ‘must do’ that a moral obligation attaches to a prospective course of action is ‘a “must” that is unconditional and goes all the way down’ (188). Only another stronger and conflicting moral obligation can release one from a moral obligation (180); thus, although one cannot escape the system, one can escape particular obligations— obligations do not and ‘cannot conflict, ultimately, really, or at the end of the line’ (176). Part of the philosophical project of morality is to determine how obligations are to be systematically reconciled. Those who do not live up to their obligations are subject to blame and should feel self-reproach or guilt. Although it is not a necessary feature, there is a tendency in ‘the morality system’ to make everything into obligations and to eliminate the class of morally indifferent actions (180–1).

  In Williams’ view, the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant provides the ‘purest, deepest and most thorough representation of morality’ (174, but see Sections

  7.4 and 8.1 of this book). The overriding imperative in Kant’s

  ethics is to do one’s duty (whatever one is under an obligation to do) for no other reason than that it is one’s duty. But theorists opposed to Kant share the same outlook—many utilitarians (see Sections

  10.1 – and

  10.3 4 of this book) work for

  the good of humanity because they ‘think this is what they ought to do and feel guilty if they do not live up to their own standards’ (178). Ethical thought that survives from the ancient Greeks, most of whom operated within a framework of questions about what sort of life we should lead, does not share this outlook—an outlook that is, Williams contends, a development of modern Western culture (6).

  Williams’ personal view (174) is that we would be better off without this outlook. His sentiments are echoed by Charles Taylor (1989:85, 88), who looks askance at ‘this vogue of theories of obligatory action.’ We do not, however, need to evaluate the ‘morality system’ at this stage. It is enough to identify it so that we do not assume inadvertently that it constitutes the framework of all the phenomena that are of interest to the systematic study of ethics.

  Apart from the incoherence that Williams claims to find in this ‘peculiar institution,’ there are important aspects of ethical phenomena which it obscures: [An] agent’s conclusions will not usually be solitary or unsupported, because they are part of an ethical life that is to an important degree shared with others. In this respect, the morality system itself, with its emphasis on the ‘purely moral’ and personal sentiments of guilt and self-reproach, actually conceals the dimension in which ethical life lies outside the individual.

  (Williams 1985:191) There is the even more serious danger that if we assume that ethical phenomena have the features of this ‘peculiar institution,’ we will be unable either to recognize ethical phenomena or to understand attempts in other cultures to think systematically about it. If for example we assume that obligations ‘cannot conflict, ultimately, really, or at the end of the line,’ we will be unable to understand the ethical culture of Japan, where the obligations to the emperor (in earlier times to the shogun) (chu), to one’s parents (ko) and to personal honor (giri to one’s name) can in some circumstances be reconciled only in suicide (Benedict 1946:

chapter 10 ). To assume that the morality system structures

  ethical phenomena the world over would be like assuming that religion had to be monotheistic, so that we could not recognize the existence of religion that was not Christian, Jewish or Islamic.

  While it is not the aim of this introduction to provide a comprehensive survey of ethical traditions, it is intended to show how traditions found both in the West and beyond address common phenomena and how both the similarities and differences found in the variety of the traditions that deal with these phenomena can illuminate them for us. In the remainder of this chapter (as well as in the two chapters that follow it), the purpose will be to explore ‘the dimension in which ethical life lies outside the individual’ and to bring systematicity to the social phenomena that constitute the proper object of the systematic study of ethics. We will begin by distinguishing questions about these phenomena that are proper to that systematic study, and to do this we will return to Aristotle’s starting point, the role that habit plays in human life.

1.2 Creatures of habit

  

Habit, custom and culture

  This fact that people acquire habits is extremely important. If typing on a keyboard, finding one’s way home from work or obtaining the help or co- operation of other people did not become habitual, we could never turn our attention to new things. Everything we did in our lives would remain as time- consuming and thought-provoking as when we first took it up. If people did not acquire habits, we could not anticipate them enough to co-operate with them. And as pleasure and pain are involved in the most fundamental of the motives that prompt people to act, it is clear that the habits that we acquire of responding to pleasure and pain are potentially the most disruptive of our interactions with one another.

  Habits not only allow us to profit from experience and from other people, they also help to stabilize the social environment. In a psychology textbook written over a century ago, William James explained ‘the ethical implications of the law of habit’ in these terms: Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted, and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the professional mannerism settling down on the young commercial traveller, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the character, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the ‘shop’ in a word, from which the man can by-and-by no more escape than his coat-sleeve can suddenly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.

  (James 1890: Vol. I, 120–2) A fly-wheel is a heavy wheel that once made to turn is so difficult to stop that it will drive a machine long after its engine is cut off. Habit keeps society moving; it ensures that people will perform their roles; it preserves distinctions between occupations and social classes; it creates barriers that prevent people changing their station in life. It is because people know what to expect from one another that they can live with one another, compete with one another, frustrate one another, exploit one another. However people live with one another—in happiness or in misery, to benefit or to oppress, sharing prosperity or enduring hardship—habits constitute the fabric of human association.

  Human association requires not merely that people have habits but that they share habits. Habits that people share are called customs. Customs may be uniform patterns of behavior to which everyone conforms, such as taking off one’s shoes before entering a house. But customs may require different patterns of behavior from different people, as in the different roles assigned to different people in rituals such as getting married, celebrating mass, introducing strangers to one another, eating in a restaurant.

  A complex of customs shared by people who interact with each other on a regular basis may constitute what is recognized as a culture. Often society is sufficiently complex that groups within it share enough special customs not followed outside those groups for this group to possess a subculture. People who engage in certain occupations, as James observes, behave in distinct and recognizable ways. Everyone who moves into a new culture (or even subculture) has important adjustments to make. Our understanding of the people around us depends on our ability to anticipate what they will do. Individuals who live comfortably in one culture frequently find it difficult to move into another, even when they have been informed in advance of how customs will differ. When large-scale migrations bring different cultures into contact there is ample scope for mutual misunderstanding; commonly, tensions build up between the two groups; sometimes hostilities break out. But frequently it is only the experience of another culture that makes us aware of how deeply and pervasively our lives are structured by the habits we share with the people around us.

  To emphasize this depth and pervasiveness, it may help to stress the special uses being given to three words here: ‘habit,’ ‘custom’ and ‘culture.’ We often think of habits as patterns of behavior, which we fall into and find difficult to change even when there is no narcotic involved (as in the smoking habit). People who have the habit of brushing their teeth after they eat feel uncomfortable until they have brushed them. But habits, as James stressed, are also empowering: as a result of ‘being in the habit’ we find it easy to do certain things that other people find that they do only awkwardly, such as conduct business over the telephone or find misprints in a letter. As we mature we come to do so many things with ease, without thought, that we have no conception of the depth of the sediment of our habits. Our habits shape not only what we do but also what we perceive—for noticing (a pattern or other visual cue) often takes practice. Habits shape not only what we perceive but also what we want—for it also takes practice for an activity or experience to become easy enough to be enjoyable and thus something we are eager to do again.

  The word ‘custom’ makes one think of easily imitated patterns of behavior such as the Japanese custom of kodomatsu—placing bamboo and evergreen sprigs at the entrance to one’s house at the start of the new year. However, customs are frequently very unobvious until they have been flouted. The penalty for failing to observe a custom may be clear signs of disapproval from other people, but one may also simply be ignored, left on the outside. What may seem perfectly natural to people in one group may be something that is ‘simply not done’ in another. What one group of people pays a great deal of attention to, another group may ignore altogether. What one group of people regards as highly desirable another group may regard as silly or trivial or repulsive.

  ‘Culture’ is sometimes applied to especially refined activities and their enjoyment (opera, ballet, poetry). The complex of customs that constitute the culture of a group of people need not be especially refined activities. Paul Willis explains the sense of the word ‘culture’ that we need here:

  Culture is not artifice and manners, the preserve of Sunday best, rainy afternoons, and concert halls. It is the very material of our daily lives, the bricks and mortar of our most commonplace understandings, feelings, and responses. We rely on cultural patterns and symbols for the minute and unconscious, social reflexes that make us social and collective beings: we are therefore most deeply embedded in our culture when we are at our most natural and spontaneous: if you like, at our most work-a-day. As soon as we think, as soon as we see life as parts in a play, we are in a very important sense, already, one step away from our real and living culture.

  Clearly this is a special use of the concept of culture. In part it can be thought of as an anthropological use of the term, where not only the special, heightened, and separate forms of experience, but all experiences, and especially as they lie around central life struggles and activities, are taken as the proper focus of a cultural analysis.

  (1979:185) Ethics, as we will see, not only needs a number of concepts used by social anthropology but is also concerned with some of the same phenomena that interest social anthropologists. But the questions it asks about these phenomena are very different.

  Information about other cultures, both historical and contemporary, has long been gathered and discussed, but systematic efforts to understand that involve investigators placing their own culture on the same footing as those being investigated are a recent development. Ethics as a systematic study is much older. It was prompted by the dissatisfactions that people experience with the way others behave both within their own societies and in other societies with which they have come into contact. Ethics as a systematic study came in two general forms, depending on which of two common assumptions were made. These assumptions can be explained in terms of the traits that render individuals admirable in the way that Aristotle marks with his word thik .

  One assumption is that people naturally want to respond well rather than badly to the experiences that afford them pleasure and pain, but that it is not always easy for them to figure out what is the best response, what it is they should do. In other words, people in general can easily bring themselves to do what should be done when they know what it is; those with ethical excellence simply have a superior ability to discern what should be done. The other assumption is that clear guidance is available to everyone as to what should be done; the problem is to act as one should, for the prospects of pleasure and pain frequently exert strong pressures that lead people to do the very opposite of what they should. People with ethical excellence have no better ability to discern what should be done than does anyone else, but they have more strength than ordinary people to resist pressures and to do what should be done.

  These assumptions are not incompatible. To be the sort of person who responds to pleasures and pains in a way that merits admiration might well require both exceptional discernment and exceptional strength of will. But there has been a marked tendency to think in terms of one or the other. Aristotle, for example, did not assume that people in general wanted to respond well rather than badly, but he did assume that members of his audience were mature and not the sort ‘to pursue each successive object as passion directs…but desired and acted in accordance with discursive thought (logos)’ (1094b28–1095a17). Thus Aristotle could conceive his role as offering to people like this help in understanding better the principles that should govern their discursive thought.

  Doctrines associated with Aristotle’s intellectual predecessor, Socrates, involved the more radical (and self-consciously paradoxical) claim that everyone

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  always wants what is best and only does what is wrong out of ignorance. This makes notions of ‘strength’ and ‘weakness’ inapplicable and reduces moral excellence to the ability to discern what should be done in some area of human activity. Cowards lack, what the courageous have, an ability to discern when they should face danger; adulterers lack, what the honorable and faithful possess, a grasp of when they should avoid an affair; thieves lack, what the honest have, an appreciation of when they may not appropriate something. Kant, on the other

  3 hand, conceived virtue as a matter of strength (fortitudo; see Kant 1797:380).