#preliminaryconclusions

Yes, I giggle and cringe slightly at Midgley’s comparison between plumbing and philosophy. As she says, many find it at first “undignified”. Yet, she has convinced me: both are logical structures hidden beneath and expanding with the complexities of society, both are oft only acknowledged when their subject matter starts working badly, both require specialization due to system size.

“When the concepts we are living by work badly, they don’t usually drop audibly through the ceiling or swamp the kitchen floor. They just quietly distort and obstruct our thinking.”

Mary Midgley constructs (and yes *flushes out*) this simile to clearly delineate the practical, reality-rooted purpose of philosophy. And, I am so thankful she did. In my graduate applications, I struggled over and over again to articulate this reality principle of conceptual work. I was trying to find the words to explain to MD-PhD committees what I had seen as a necessary link. Such is the self-concealing nature of concepts that are working, that i would then struggle to explain what I took for granted but which many (adcoms and philosophy profs at my undergrad) found unintuitive. One needs to have well-working concepts of life and action to act in ways that perpetuate life.

“Philosophy must emerge from its self-imposed solitude and return to …the world of flesh-and-blood human beings, with concrete moral and conceptual problems which need sorting out.”

The problems that dazzle me include the gap between declarations of death by a physician and actual death, how to practice medical aid outside of colonial structures, what 'intimacy' is and why can be painful, what psychiatric diagnoses do as a speech acts, etc. I firmly believe that all of these applied problems glaring me down need conceptual analysis and practical input. While policy provides a specific course of action, conceptual work provides resolution and the tools to face unprecedented situations.

I managed to convince some MD-PhD programs, but Mary Midgley states it much better:

my thoughts on Julia Driver from maybe two years ago.....beware

Driver proposes some proponents of utilitarianism fit special relations into the framework by arguing that they are a helpful fiction. This is much akin to Jackson's 'sector argument' by which typical relative value arguments are reconstructed to be found useful via their consequences. I found the parallel between the cognitive tactic of attention (like the cocktail party effect) and the use of special obligations to direct utility-based efforts interesting to chew on and turn over.

Given a utilitarian framework, where every decision is moralized, where even just the leftover change from buying a bagel can leave the actor surmounted with finite resources but infinite alternative routes that have differing methods of maximization and increasing utility. Convinced via fiction that your relatives are of special obligation for you to increase the utility of allows the actor to make faster decisions and not be struck inactive by deliberation that could decrease utility. This of course, is an ad hoc argument. Instead of doing mental gymnastics to make the most common social phenomenon (ie having or feeling one has special obligation to family) fictitious, I turn to the more obvious intuition that impartial utility understood from the consequentialist view is not the sole intrinsic good.

The goal of classic virtue ethics is to have a virtue (an 'excellent trait of character') become a disposition (an entrenched way of being core to the person themselves; a part of the personality). Yettttt, one overarching concern I have for narrow theory of virtue ethics is that the grouping of virtues and persisting dispositions seems arbitrarily defined.

There is a metaphysical issue here: neuroscience, psychology, and philosophers only can agree to the fact that we haven't the foggiest comprises the self -- let alone how whatever-it-is persists. I love to romanticize virtue ethics for the plot -- magnanimity makes for such a regal character arc imo-- but the steady-state of a personality or character is arguably best suited for actual fictional characters.

There is also an epistemological issue: beyond that many virtue theories give contradicting categories, beyond that personalities are a highly contested entity, the conceptual ambiguity of 'virtue' (and thus 'vice') allows for insidious biases. Appealing to dispositions (or character) is often a cop-out that leads to all sorts of responsibility-negating confuddlements like Fundamental Attribution Error. This bias is the tendency to overweight dispositions and underweight contextual influences. Virtue ethics may then lead us to this sort of bias as a default.

Rachana Kamtekar's work articulates this well:

"in practice, we often attribute behavior to character traits when for some reason we don't want to understand the behavior in rational terms or from the agent's point of view" (Kamtekar 461).

As a concrete application of this cop-out, Sartre (Anti-Semite and Jew, 1946) described appealing that anti-semite rhetoric relies on a fictitious "metaphysical essence" to build up a view of the Jew that would otherwise "be entirely incomprehensible" as a coherent, villainized group because the anti-semite "refuses to engage in a rational understanding of the Jew as another human being". Instead, the fictionalized Jew, and other stereotypes, are reduced to static personalities with traits.

Whether in regard to a vice or virtue, appealing to a disposition (character, or personality) seems to decentralize agency of that specific human and instead call upon some sort of pre-conscious or pre-decisional essence. Both Kamtekar and Sartre show that disposition-reliant language is a liability that allows us to stop looking for reasons. It is an epistemological blindfold. When we negate the reasons a person has, we negate the dynamic, embodied person in reality. Not to mention, our ethical work can become sloppy.