“It is not implausible to think we are elevated by others who are more developed than ourselves in their striving for harmonious hierarchical development and for a valuable life. We are aided and encouraged along our own path of development by their striving for self-development and purer feeling; contrast the effects on us of encountering those with a sour mixture of one-upmanship, self-aggrandizement, desire to dominate or destroy, and other festering emotions, the effects of wending our way and bending our attention, to their motivations and trajectories. Just as a cacophony of urban noise is an intrusion if you’re are trying to listen to a string quartet or compose your own, so a person in the course of his own self-improvement or development will want, if merely as a means, to help raise the developmental level of those around him (or else to move into an isolated community of like-spirited persons). He will want to help them along. Even if a person were able to maintain his level and rate of (spiritual) advance and development unperturbed by others around him [like Plotinus!], not dragged down by them no matter what their state, he would still lack the benefits of associating with others who are equally or more developed. First, there is the benefit of being helped along by good examples and good companions. We all know people, I hope, who bring out the best in us, people in whose presence we would be embarrassed to speak or act from unworthy motives, people who glow. In their presence we feel elevated. We are pushed or lured or nudged further along a path of development and perfection; rather, we are inspired to move ourselves along, in the direction shown. Second, there is the joy in encountering a like person, in the experience of the other and in the mutual recognition of the mutual joy. The most intense delights, surely, are these experiences, at least as they combine with, enrich, and transfigure other delights more frequently listed. One awful psychological deformity is the resentment of excellence, not merely the inability to delight or take pleasure in it—bad enough—but the envious desire for its absence. To avoid being the object of such envy, people will hide their own excellence and camouflage their delight in it. Not only does this deprive others of the encouragement of an example, and of the opportunity for happy mutual recognition, it also alters the person’s own experience. She does not simply feel the same delight only without expressing it; an unexpressed delight is not as delightful. Resentment and envy of moral and spiritual excellence is most awful. [….] At any rate, persons developing in value will not feel or dwell in such envy; they will seek out opportunities to share the joy of being on and moving along their path. They will aid others in their own (spiritual or developmental) advance, for the pleasure of their company. (In thus aiding, they will not focus their attention upon their own pleasure but rather upon what brings that pleasure—the developed state of the others.) There is a third reason for wanting other equally or more developed persons around: their appreciation is especially worth having. In a loving relationship with another adult, the worth of what they give, including themselves, depends partially upon their estimation of themselves—whether they give something they hold precious and valuable. [….] The developed or developing person will wish for like companions, for inspiring examples to aid him along his path, for joyous company, and for meaningful affirmation of his own worth. This is the opposite of the desire to be surrounded by submissive people less developed than oneself, the desire that they be less developed.’ [….] The developed person will want to help perfect others; this is the most important aid he can give them. We want to find a way of living whereby our best energies and talents are poured out so as to speak to and improve the best energies and talents of others. We want to utilize our highest parts and energies in a way that helps others flourish.” — Robert Nozick
What the late Robert Nozick is speaking to here, as an illustration of what David L. Norton termed eudaimonistic ethics in Democracy and Moral Development: A Politics of Virtue (University of California Press, 1991), is in the realm of everyday living, while our notion of narrative goodness involves that and more: fictional stories or idealized portraits of one kind or another which may be viewed as attempts to depict what might, can, or should occur in our attempts to be moral, to have and cultivate vigilant ethical awareness and sensibilities, to live the good life.
* * *
Reading an article online by Junaid Quadri, “Ethical Perfectionism in Fiqh: The Example of Moral Exemplars,” called to mind some earlier thoughts I’ve entertained on “narrative goodness.” The first three paragraphs from his piece should suffice to get a sense of what Quadri is proposing and what motivated my return to the topic of “exemplarist moral theory” and “narrative goodness:”
“How precisely to understand the ethical material found within works of fiqh has been a recurrent question of Western scholarship on Islamic law since its earliest period. If, in the first phase of this interest, scholars tended to find in fiqh a curious (and perhaps, objectionable) amalgam of law, religion and ethics, recent decades have witnessed a robust response. A bulk of this literature has been focused on disentangling the fiqh’s religious or ethical norms from its legal ones, often with a view to locating a place for secular reason within what has been viewed as a sacred law, or a place for liberal rights in what has often been cast as a divinely-willed deontology. This has been a productive turn that continues to generate deep insights into the inner workings of Islamic law. It has been especially successful in identifying the rational and pragmatic elements of fiqh as opposed to the purely revelatory and textual, and in positioning the sharīʿa as a viable legal system suitable for comparison with counterparts.
It is the conceit of this post, however, that there are also alternative ethical visions animating the fiqh literature that merit exploration. What if we regard the apparent commingling of law, religion, and ethics not so much as a problem to be solved, but rather a feature of a distinct normative tradition that invites investigation in its own right? I submit that this opens us up to imagining moral habits and psychological horizons that live beyond our own most immediate normative concerns. Such a reorientation would clear conceptual space for an examination of the intersections of fiqh with a different conception of ethics, a perfectionist ethics directed at cultivating certain qualities, or virtues, in the Muslim subject. This is an ethics that is much more often identified – because more readily apparent – in Sufism or falsafa, fields that are regularly placed in opposition to juristic discourse. Locating evidence of perfectionism in fiqh, then, would offer the further prospect of an overlap in ideas between otherwise distinct normative Islamic traditions, a possibility that is too often overlooked when these bodies of thought are read in isolation.
One avenue of inquiry that presents itself as a result of a shift in focus from rights to perfection is the place of moral exemplars [later Quadri explains why and how Zagzebski’s exemplarist moral theory serves his argument]. The exemplar is that figure in a normative system who exhibits a superior sense for what constitutes the good life and how to live it, and serves as a model for other moral agents aspiring to develop (or approximate) that same awareness and mode of cultivation. To be sure, the idea of a moral exemplar is not strictly speaking a requirement for a perfectionist ethics, and yet such examples as Aristotle’s phronimos and the Confucian sage [or even, and more practically speaking, the junzi] point to the vital importance of a moral model to the process of self-cultivation.”
Like Professor Quadri, I too have referenced some of Linda Zagzebski’s arguments from her book, Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2004)—albeit for different reasons and purposes (e.g., I set aside the ‘divine motivation’ part of her argument)—as critical or essential for how we might or should socialize people into fundamental moral notions and behavior, thus using stories of “moral exemplars” to provide concrete models that are compelling examples of what it means to be moral, to be good, to do, as we say, the right thing. Heretofore, notes Zagzebski, moral philosophers have tended to ground their basic evaluative moral or ethical concepts in presuppositions, assumptions, or beliefs that are non-evaluative, such as human nature, reason, or “the Good” (or, for those who are theological, the ‘will of God;’ our examples of course do not exhaust the possible sources of such grounding, as we see in the metaphysical or ontological possibilities found in classical Indic and Chinese philosophies). Her ideas can be used to appreciate the formative and fundamental role of moral exemplars (parents, caregivers, teachers …) in coming to know and appreciate what precisely is proper moral behavior (as a ‘direct reference’ theory of the good or moral virtues: ‘good person are like that’), in other words, one important part of an assessment of a moral or ethical theory involves “judgments about the identity of paradigmatically good persons.” She terms this “exemplarist ethical (or ‘virtue’) theory.” Importantly, there is a wide variation among both “perfect” and (considerably) less-than-perfect moral (and spiritual) exemplars.
“The alternative that I am suggesting is to anchor moral concepts in an exemplar. Good persons are persons like that, just as gold is stuff like that. The function of an exemplar is to fix the reference of the term ‘good person’ or ‘practically wise person’ without the use of any [other] concepts, whether descriptive or non-descriptive. An exemplar therefore allows the series of conceptual definitions to get started. The circle of conceptual definitions of the most important concepts in a moral theory—virtue, right act, duty, good outcome, and so on—is broken by an indexical reference to a paradigmatically good person.”
And thus we arrive at one of the consequences of this exemplarist ethical theory: we can fill out a notion of “narrative goodness,” one which transcends the divide between religious and non-religious worldviews, while respecting some of their differences, such as the sorts of persons who are identified as moral exemplars (and spiritual exemplars; after John Cottingham, Sudhir Kakar, and Grant Gillett our conception of spirituality extends beyond strictly religious traditions and worldviews):
“Making the exemplar a person has an even more important advantage than its aid to theory. If all the concepts in a formal ethical theory are rooted in a person, then narratives and descriptions of that person are morally significant. It is an open question [at least for some purposes] what it is about the person that makes him or her good. When we say that a good person is like that, and we directly refer to Socrates, Saint Francis of Assisi, or to Mahatma Gandhi [or the pre-school teacher, or grandma, or the character in a novel, and so forth], we are implicitly leaving open the question of what properties of Socrates, Francis, or Gandhi are essential to their goodness [here, the descriptive value of ‘thick’ ethical concepts is germane]. [….] We need to observe the exemplar carefully in order to find out what the relevant properties are. Since narratives can be considered detailed and temporally extended observations of persons, exemplarism gives narrative an important place within the theory.” [emphasis added]
In communities formed and sustained by religious worldviews, we have many instances of this: in Buddhism with the Jātaka tales (largely for children), in Christianity with the Gospel stories of Jesus’s parables, sayings and behavior, and in the Analects of Confucius, for example. In the words of the late philosopher, Robert Nozick,
“There are some individuals whose lives are infused by values, who pursue values with single-minded purity and intensity, who embody value to the greatest extent. These individuals glow with a special radiance. Epochal religious figures often have this quality. To be in their presence (or even to hear about them) is to be uplifted and drawn (at least temporarily) to pursue the best in oneself. There are less epochal figures as well, glowing with a special moral and value loveliness, whose presence uplifts us, whose example lures and inspires us.”
From an “emic” vantage point these are seen as means whereby one learns the terms and conditions of one’s religious (and to some extent philosophical) tradition, but from an “etic” perspective, we can focus on the fundamental features of what it means, generally speaking, to be ethical, to aspire to be good and so forth that, in one very significant sense, transcends the contingencies and unique articulations more or less intrinsic to specific religious worldviews. Thus, in effect, from the outside looking in were are concentrating on their common moral and ethical foci or, if you prefer, their shared stress on spiritual praxis, on therapeutic spiritual “exercises,” moral values, and ethical principles that are part and parcel to what are, in effect, instructions or lessons in the “art of living.”
For vivid examples of moral exemplars who lives are a bit messier or more realistic in comparison to those found in religious worldviews (prophets, saints, bodhisattvas, etc.), and in keeping with a more explicitly secular or widely humanistic outlook, we can look not only to individuals we regularly encounter or interact with in the intimate realm of everyday life, but also modern literature (especially shorts stories, novels, and children’s literature), the works of some playwrights as well as films (a mass media art). The moral psychology here being rather complex if not elusive, works by the French Moralists as well as adages, aphorisms, and proverbs more generally, and even poetry, may further fill out the nature of these forms of narrative goodness, which themselves, in turn, contribute to the larger end of explaining and encouraging spiritual praxis or a profound appreciation of the role of therapeutic spiritual “exercises,” moral values, and ethical principles as lessons in the “art of living.” Of course not all such modern and secular media perform this function, thus parents, critics, philosophers, psychologists and others with some measure of moral knowledge and authority, as well as a corresponding capability of exercising reliable moral judgments, can proffer their guidance in these areas by way of discriminating (thereby helping the rest of us learn how to discriminate) between the ethically availing or ethical troubling or disturbing forms of such material. Whether religious or not, such stories fall under the heading of “narrative goodness.” As Colin McGinn has argued:
“[O]rdinary people—which means all of us—find [the] story mode of moral discourse [i.e., the form which includes parable, the play, short story, the narrative poem, the novel and the film] uniquely palatable and nutritious; it seems perfectly designed to engage our moral faculties. Our moral understanding and the story form seem fitted for one another. No rote learning is necessary: it all seems to flow quite naturally. This is the way our moral faculty likes to operate. It is almost effortless to take in a story, pleasant even, though the story may be replete with moral discourse. The novel, in particular, is a text of a very different kind from the scientific treatise. It is also very different from the philosophical text, which is what philosophers, naturally, are most comfortable with. Thus the novel form has tended to be ignored by moral philosophers: it is not, for them, the place to look for canonical expressions of ethical truth. Yet, quite obviously, it is for most educated people one of the prime vehicles of ethical expression. (Film plays a similar role for the less word-minded.) In reading a novel we have ethical experiences, sometimes quite profound ones, and we reach ethical conclusions, condemning some characters and admiring others. We live a particular set of moral challenges (sitting there in our armchair) by entering into the lives of the characters introduced. [....] Stories can sharpen and clarify moral questions, encouraging a dialectical phenomenology between the reader’s own experiences and the trials of the characters he or she is reading about. A tremendous amount of moral thinking and feeling is done when reading novels (Or watching plays and films, or reading poetry and short stories). In fact, it is not an exaggeration to say that for most people this is the primary way in which they acquire ethical attitudes, especially in contemporary culture. Our ethical knowledge is aesthetically mediated.”
I think McGinn’s conclusion is largely right: our ethical knowledge is, indeed, “aesthetically mediated,” insofar as we learn about the virtues (whatever particular cluster of same our worldviews place emphasis upon), or how to be moral through narrative aesthetic forms, or at the very least, we are moved to think about “the ethical” and its converse. To the extent that such aesthetic mediation is not “spiritual” or religious, it may be less reliable or dependable as a form or medium of moral knowledge or ethical instruction, especially but not only when we are young or if we have not had the seeds of moral sensibility planted in us at a very young age. Put differently, spiritual and religious literature is ideally suited for the aesthetic mediation of moral knowledge, for learning what it means to be virtuous, for it is here we find “exemplars of goodness.” It is not the only or even primary way in which we learn to be moral, for we obviously and ideally learn to live a virtuous life, as both Confucius and Plato would remind us, from those who are responsible for our upbringing: our parents, caregivers, teachers, and others who are, it is hoped, suitable “role models,” those entrusted to take care of us until we reach the “age of reason.” Intriguingly, both Plato and Confucius appear to agree that learning to be ethical for children entails training or discipline in the arts, particular arts to be sure, but there is something about the arts that these two philosophers find integral to the habituation to virtue, as a necessary yet not sufficient condition to being moral. And even as adults, we might learn something about virtuous living from those with whom we come into meaningful personal contact in daily life.
The titles we have listed below are philosophical in orientation but their aim is to help us—more or less, directly or by implication—understand what is meant or should be meant by “narrative goodness,” in this case, distinguished from (which does not rule out the fact that it can overlap with) the use of “moral exemplars” in religious worldviews.
- Alfano, Mark. Character as Moral Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
- Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (University of California Press, 1988).
- Boruah, Bijoy H. Fiction and Emotion: A Study in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford University Press, 1988)
- Bruner, Jerome. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002).
- Dilman, Ilham. Raskolnikov’s Rebirth: Psychology and the Understanding of Good and Evil (Open Court, 2000)
- Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Duke University Press, 1999).
- Hutto, Daniel D. Folk Psychological Narratives: The Sociocultural Basis of Understanding Reasons (MIT Press, 2008).
- Hutto, Daniel D., ed. Narrative and Understanding Persons (Cambridge University Press, 2007).
- Hutto, Daniel D., ed. Narrative and Folk Psychology (Imprint Academic/Philosophy Documentation Center, 2009).
- Landy, Joshua. Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust (Oxford University Press, 2004).
- Martinich, A.P. and Avrum Stroll. Much Ado About Nonexistence: Fiction and Reference (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007).
- McGinn, Colin. Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1997).
- Murdoch, Iris (Peter Conradi, ed.) Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Penguin Books, 1999).
- Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford University Press, 1990).
- Velleman, J. David. How We Get Along (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
- Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus. Divine Motivation Theory (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
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