

























διάνοια

DIANOIA

The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College
Spring 2021 - Issue VIII

ISSN 2476-1818 (print)
ISSN 2476-1826 (online)



διανοιαDIANOIA
The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Spring 2021
ISSUE VIII



Editor-in-Chief: Noah Valdez 
Senior Managing Editor: Nicholas Arozarena
Managing Editors: Brock Daylor, Maxwell Vogliano, Melissa Mao
General Editors: Helen Chamberlin, Connor Bils, Samuel Cogen, Christian Taylor, Lucy Hanson, 
Wenyu Huang, Qihui Liu, Drew Thorburn, Jacob Browning, Matthew Francoeur
External Reviewers: Arabella Adams (Wellesley College), Jeremy Freudberg (Boston University), Tristan 
St. Germain (Brown University)
Graduate Advisor: Peter Klapes
Faculty Advisor: Ronald Tacelli, S.J.

Cover designs courtesy of Arabella Adams. 
Featuring: 
Bacon, Henry. Twilight in the Desert. 1907; obtained via Wikimedia Commons.
Yakovlev, Alexander. In the desert of Afghanistan. 1931; obtained via Wikimedia Commons.

The materials herein represent the personal opinions of the individual authors and do not necessarily 
represent the views of Dianoia or Boston College.

If you have questions regarding the Journal, would like to submit your work for review, or if you’d be 
interested in joining next year’s staff, please contact the Journal at dianoia@bc.edu.

Dianoia
The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College 
Spring 2021 Issue VIII
Boston College
140 Commonwealth Avenue
Chestnut Hill, MA 02467
https://www.bc.edu/bc-web/schools/mcas/departments/philosophy/undergraduate/dianoia.html
© 2021 The Trustees of Boston College

Printed by Progressive Print Solutions.



C
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TS  4 Acknowledgements  

 5 A Letter from the Editor 

 7  Interview with Gregory Fried

 18  Unified Foundations for Normative Education
  Alec Oakley, University of Victoria

 34  On Admiration and Wonder: Should We Accept 
Plutarch's Lives in the Platonic City?

  Gabriel Ainsa, University of Chicago

 52  The Shadow of Hegel in Kierkegaard’s Notion of 
Subjectivity

  Matteo de Donato, University of Chicago

 66  The Positive Illusion of Qualia
  Nikki Ivie, Utah Valley University

 76  Virtue Ethics and Caring: The Ethical Presuppositions of 
Taking Mortality Seriously

  Alicia Nilsson, Linköping University

 88  The Justification-Application Spectrum: Exploring 
Seyla Benhabib’s Reconciliation of the Generalized and 
Concrete Others

  Megan Wu, Swarthmore College

 98 Contributors 



4

The Editorial Staff of Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston 
College would like to extend our sincerest thanks to the following individuals for 

their assistance in making this issue of Dianoia possible:

Mary Crane, Institute for the Liberal Arts

Jacqueline Delgado, Center for Centers

Gregory Fried, Philosophy Department

Stephen Jarjoura, Information Technology Services

Peter Klapes, Philosophy Department

Peter Marino, Center for Centers

Cherie McGill, Philosophy Department

Dermot Moran, Philosophy Department

Paula Perry, Philosophy Department

Sarah Smith, Philosophy Department

We would also like to thank Dr. Ronald Tacelli, S.J., of the Boston College 
Philosophy Department, for his invaluable assistance as our advisor.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS



Spring 2021
To the Reader, 

Welcome to Issue VIII of Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston 
College! We hope that you have kept safe throughout the course of our fight against 
COVID-19, and it is our pleasure and pride to present yet another installment of our 
journal. We were humbled to receive over two-hundred submissions from ninety-
nine different undergraduate institutions around the world, and have published what 
we believe, after countless hours of reading, discussion, and editing, are the six best 
and most thought-provoking essays. The subject-matter of these works range from: 
normative education to Plutatch’s Lives; subjectivity in Kierkegaard to illusions and 
qualia; and virtue ethics to Seyla Benhabib’s work on discourse. Thus, Dianoia’s 
reputation as a diverse community of thinkers, committed to interinstitutional 
exchange, remains. Alongside these essays you will also find an interview with 
Professor Gregory Fried, who was kind enough to sit down with us last fall for a 
discussion over his book, Because It Is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power 
in the Age of Terror.

This year, the managing board chose Henry Bacon’s Twilight in the Desert (1907) 
and Alexander Yakovlev’s In the desert of Afghanistan (1931) as the journal’s front 
and back covers, respectively. The union of these two pieces—from Bacon’s isolation 
to Yakovlev’s horizon of community—is a fitting image for our gradual return to 
a pre-COVID-19 lifestyle, and we enthusiastically look forward to holding future 
publication symposia in-person, to meetings on campus, and to seeing journal friends 
again, both old and new. 

In publishing the fruit of this year’s labor, I would be remiss if I did not thank 
the journal’s various patrons, advisors, and advocates for their support. With your 
generous aid and freely-given expertise, Dianoia has flourished over the course of 
its decade-long existence, and today boasts a premier spot amongst undergraduate 
philosophy journals. To my senior managing editor, Nicholas Arozarena, and to my 
managing editors, Brock Daylor, Melissa Mao, and Maxwell Vogliano, you all have 
been nothing short of spectacular, and I am grateful for both your time and talents 
in crafting this year’s issue. To our graduate advisor, Peter Klapes, your judgment and 
sagacious input have guided the journal more times than I can count; without your 
efforts, Dianoia would be nowhere close to the institutional endeavor that it is today. 
The Philosophy Department—in particular, Dermot Moran, Paula Perry, and Sarah 
Smith—deserves our heartfelt thanks for their assistance and hospitality; furthermore, 
we would also like to thank Gregory Fried both for his openness to an interview 
and for his insightful responses to our questions. To the Institute for the Liberal 
Arts, we treasure your continued financial and legal support, and thank you for the 
opportunity, once again, to print the culmination of this year’s review. To Arabella 
Adams, our graphic designer, we are in awe of your artistry and digital adroitness, 
and greatly appreciate your patience in turning six essays into a fully-fledged journal. 
Lastly, I would like to thank our general editorial board for their incisiveness, their 
philosophical acumen, and their persistence in creating this year’s issue. All of my 
gratitude goes out to you; the managing board and I are truly in your debt. 
 

5Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

As a senior, I will be leaving Dianoia after four years of service. My time on the journal has 
been the highlight of my undergraduate career, and to any future Editor-in-Chiefs, I hope 
that you find this publication’s work as fulfilling as I have. To our readers, our submitters, 
and all of our supporters not mentioned here, we wish you all the best and eagerly await 
your thoughts on our issue. Keep safe, stay in touch, and happy reading!
 
Sincerely,

Noah Valdez, Editor-in-Chief



7Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

δι
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INTERVIEW WITH GREGORY FRIED
PROFESSOR OF PHILOSOPHY



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Gregory Fried is a professor of philosophy at Boston College. He has taught at the University of 
Chicago, Boston University, California State University Los Angeles, and Suffolk University. He 
specializes in political philosophy and has a particular interest in responses to challenges to liberal 
democracy and the rise of ethno-nationalism. He also works in the philosophy of law, especially 
law and hermeneutics; philosophy and race; practical ethics, including just war theory; public 
philosophy; the history of ethics; Ancient philosophy; and 20th century Continental philosophy, 
especially Heidegger. This interview was conducted on November 17th, 2020.

Dianoia: Professor Fried, thank you for agreeing to interview with Dianoia: The Under-
graduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College. We are very excited to discuss your book,  
Because it is Wrong: Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror. Thank you 
for being with us.

Fried: My pleasure, thank you for inviting me.

Dianoia: Can you please give us a brief introduction to your book and highlight a few of its 
central claims?

Fried: The book began as a reaction to what came out of the news in the spring of 2004. 
I think it was April of 2004 when the first word of the torture that was being conducted 
in Iraq spilled out. I was very moved and concerned by that, and I, from that time on, had 
many conversations about it with my father. He and I were working on various aspects of 
philosophical and legal responses to it, and at a certain point we said, “Why don’t we just 
do this together rather than compete with one another; let’s combine forces.” And, so, what 
that brought together were my interests in figures like Locke and Aristotle on questions of 
prerogative and law at the limit and my father’s interests in what he had seen in the govern-
ment in terms of the abuse of presidential power and constitutional issues around privacy. 
We wanted to have an overarching discussion of these concerns that had jumped out at the 
political community of the United States following the outbreak of the war on terror. So, 
the subtitle of the book is “Torture, Privacy, and Presidential Power in the Age of Terror.” 
Each of those are domains of pushing at the boundaries of either moral or constitutional 
legal norms that were put at issue by the war on terror. I think both my father and I came 
at those issues through a combination of philosophical lenses—I think most prominently a 
Kantian lens on the question of torture. We weren’t trying to force one specific philosoph-
ical lens on it, we wanted to try to analyze it with the help of philosophers who could help 
us articulate our points to make our own argument for an audience wider than simply a 
philosophy audience. So, that’s the background to the book. In the book itself we make the 
case that torture is wrong and that it should be avoided—in fact, made both morally and 
legally impermissible, as an absolute. But then we look at the questions of privacy and the 
extent and limits of presidential power within the same framework as well. What are things 
that break absolute restrictions on political or individual ethical behavior? Is the invasion 
of privacy like torture? Or, is it a different order of things? Is a president who bends or 
even breaks the law for the sake of national security the in same kind of absolute situation 
that we are facing with the question of torture? Our answer for those is that privacy is an 
important moral domain that any legitimate government should respect, but it’s not the 
absolute that the prohibition of torture is. The same, surprisingly, ends up being true of 
what we call executive law breaking, which means any person, not just a president, whose 
legitimate function within a constitutional republic is to execute the law and be respon-
sible for seeing that the law be faithfully upheld in situations where such a person might 



9Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

Interview with Gregory Fried

bend or break the law in a legitimate way. The nature of that legitimacy is very compli-
cated, and that’s what we try to address. Those are the broad parameters of the book, 
and I’m happy to spend as much time as you’d like talking about some of the details.  
 
Dianoia: Moving forward to more of a future perspective on it, what changes do you 
anticipate in the global discourse around torture? Especially when figures like Donald 
Trump or Rodrigo Duterte say that torture “absolutely works.”

Fried: First of all, those figures are not particularly credible sources for the claim that tor-
ture works. But, they play an important rhetorical role in the public’s fear that has gained 
in influence over the last decade and has come to great prominence with the success of 
Donald Trump and figures like Bolsonaro and Duterte, and other quasi to genuinely 
authoritarian leaders throughout the world. I think it’s important to note that for author-
itarian, totalitarian or dictatorial leadership, torture plays a very important role. It is a 
tool in their toolbox that they want to lay claim to, but not for the stated purpose that it 
works to prevent terrible crime. What it works for is enhancing the power of an autocratic 
regime. One can give credit, even to a figure like Donald Trump, if one wants to, to say 
that they sincerely believe that there are certain circumstances where they think torture 
will work to prevent some great wrong. That may in individual cases be what’s motivating 
them to embrace torture, but functionally, if you look at the role of torture in regimes 
that have used it, especially in the 20th century, whatever the initial intent, what ends up 
happening once torture becomes institutionalized as one of the tools of the government 
is that it plays a distinctly oppressive role in the work of an authoritarian or dictatorial 
or totalitarian (if we are going to go from bad to worse) regime. The reason for that is 
that the torture itself becomes the point for those kinds of regime. It is not what they can 
accomplish in terms of intelligence or crime prevention; it is what they can accomplish 
in terms of terrorizing a population and corrupting the forces of law that are part of the 
institutions that the authoritarian or dictator want to bring into their fold. 

There are a variety of arguments one can make against torture, some of them can be deon-
tological, as my father and I tried to do, so in other words a claim about the sheer wrong-
ness of torture in of itself, as an act, that should be avoided, but there are other kinds of ar-
guments that are consequentialist arguments that I think are also very important that have 
to do with what happens to a society when torture is institutionalized. I don’t think it is 
particularly helpful to base policy  on some fantasy or imaginary thought experiment about 
whether or not in this or that emergency situation it would be right to torture somebody to 
prevent some terrible wrong from happening. I have a very strong philosophical problem 
with using thought experiments in order to establish policy, and I can come back to that. 
But, your question was about the world that we are engaging in the future, and I think it 
is very important to bear in mind that the rise of authoritarians and quasi-authoritarians 
will be accompanied by torture regimes. Therefore, the defeat of those kinds of leaders is 
very important. So, the next five years are going to be decisive. Will Donald Trump have 
a comeback after a Biden presidency? If he has a comeback, will he come roaring back 
and thereby be able to tear down even more of the institutional and cultural norms in our 
society? If he succeeds in that, or somebody like him succeeds in the United States, it will 
pull down the barriers for world leaders across the globe to incorporate torture in their 
governance. And they will do that not because it’s good for law enforcement or prevent-
ing horrible emergency scenarios. They will do it to entrench their rule. That’s the goal.  



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

I can’t predict the future, but what I can predict is that torture is like a canary in the 
coal mine. The more it’s happening, the more likely it is that you have a political com-
munity that’s shifting from some form of democratic republican form of government 
to an authoritarian one. It’s just not the tool of a democratic regime. It corrupts a dem-
ocratic regime to use torture. So one way to think about that is once you institution-
alize torture, what branch of the government is responsible for torture? Who are you 
going to be training to do the torture?  What’s going to happen when they come out 
of the military, for example, and join the police forces. It’s very hard once you start 
down that road to contain it, as if in some toxic waste facility. That’s not how insti-
tutions and governments and cultures of governance develop. Once you change a cul-
ture of governance by bringing in a torture regime you’ve changed much much more 
than just whether or not you’re torturing some people in some black site somewhere. 
 
Dianoia: In the final chapter “learning not to be good,” you make the distinction be-
tween something being wrong because it is illegal and something being illegal because it is 
wrong. How can executive officials know where to draw the line between those two types 
of wrongs when they are faced with a dirty hands situation?

Fried: There is no formula, and that’s what makes being involved in civic life a risky 
business, and it is one reason that we should be charitable to people who go into law en-
forcement, but we also have to be vigilant about what the boundaries are. This is really the 
problem if you have a democratic regime, such as ours, where the rule of law is really im-
portant and where officers of the law are just that: servants of the law entrusted to uphold 
it for the good of the people. We have a democracy, or a republican form of government 
that involves democratic elements. The idea is that it is the legislature and the people. In 
a regime like ours, the people are sovereign, so ultimately, it is they who get to decide. 
They decide on what the rules are through their representatives who make the laws, and 
then the officers of the law, from the parking meter enforcer to the president of the United 
States, are meant to be servants of the laws as they are passed by the people. That is what 
it means to be an officer of the law. Unlike other forms of regime, where the officer of 
the law can claim to be the law, especially in a monarchy. In a democracy, by contrast, 
the officer of the law is not meant to substitute their own judgement for the judgement 
of the people acting through their representatives in their law-making function. At the 
same time, part of the duty of an officer of the law is to attend to the common good of the 
community that they are serving, and it is impossible to lay out a formula in advance to 
be able to tell such an officer when their duty to the law will come into profound conflict 
with their duty to protect their community or an individual member of their community. 
You can try to build in all kinds of safeguards for emergency situations into the law, but 
it is ultimately impossible to build in enough safeguards so that you can cover every cir-
cumstance that might come up. The answer that my father and I have to this problem is 
that somebody who is an officer of the law, whether it is a police officer or the president 
of the United States, when they are faced with such a situation, must do what they think 
is best in terms of balancing the rule of law with the good of the community, or the good 
of a particular individual. They have to then come clean about that. You do not just sweep 
it under the rug. But the degree of responsibility really depends on the context, and there 
are petty situations, like parking meter violations, in which you could imagine somebody 
who is a parking meter attendant not giving a ticket to somebody who has parked their 
car to rush in to save the lives of people in a burning building, right? You might want to 
tell your supervisor that you did that and just make sure that there’s nothing you have to 



11Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

Interview with Gregory Fried

do, to fill out some paperwork or what have you. 

But then there are much bigger issues like what President Lincoln faced, or President 
Jefferson faced, where they had to violate Constitutional norms in order to protect the 
nation. Let’s take President Jefferson, where he faced a moment where he thought that war 
with England was imminent and that the United States was unbelievably badly prepared. 
Under the Constitution, only the U.S. Congress can appropriate funds for any purpose, 
such as restocking the military. Jefferson appropriated those funds and used them to se-
cure naval defenses for the United States, because Congress was not in session to make 
this decision, even though he knew that his doing so was a violation of the Constitution. 
What he did was to go to Congress afterwards and say, “This is what I’ve done. I know 
it’s a violation of the Constitution. I think it was still the proper thing to do. If you don’t, 
punish me, impeach me, censor me, whatever it is you need to do, but if you do agree 
with me, let’s ratify this ex post facto by you making some kind of legal determination 
about it, so that we repair the rule of law after this breach.”  I think that you can imagine 
ways of institutionalizing the officer of the law’s responsibility to the rule of law even in 
the breach of law. What my father’s and my concern was, in the Bush administration, 
was there was no such acceptance of the recognition that laws were being broken and 
that the executive had a responsibility to uphold those laws.  Instead of being upfront 
about them and making the right kind of appeals to the public and to Congress, they did 
these things in secret and tried to paper them over. That was the problem, and those were 
things having to do with privacy violations. That was our concern there. Those are conse-
quentialist concerns, but even if you are a Kantian, it does not prevent you from having 
consequentialist concerns about how the government is organized and how to deal with 
these very, very difficult positions that people in executive authority may face sometimes. 
We want to give them a way of dealing with it that also provides them with an out—that 
they don’t have to feel like law breakers and then cover it up. That’s the danger that we saw. 
 
Dianoia: You frequently refer to the animalization of human beings as a negative effect of 
torture. You quote Jeremy Waldron’s claim that “torture reduces human beings to cattle,” 
and remark yourself that “torture causes us to look at the human body as a side of beef, 
ready to be flayed and butchered.” Do you think it is fair that in our culture we associate 
being an animal with being a creature that bears brutal deforming psychologically damag-
ing pain, and how would you philosophize about the value of an animal soul?”

Fried: This question posed itself to us when we were writing the book, and an analogy for 
how we could have pursued it would be what we did in the book with capital punishment. 
As we were working through the problem of torture, it became clear to my father that our 
arguments against torture were also arguments against the death penalty, which he had 
not been opposed to previously but became opposed to through working through this 
argument. What I would say is that it may well be that the argument we made has impli-
cations for the treatment of animals, and if that is the case, then our use of the language 
of animalization would have to be changed, but the whole point of it would be that what 
torture does is it renders us a kind of being that we are not supposed to be, and that is 
an intense violation of what we are and who we are. I do think that there are very serious 
critiques to be made of how we treat animals even if you do not want to go to the lengths 
of animal rights activism or veganism or even just the baseline vegetarianism. I think you 
can make such arguments. There is a very ancient set of ideas in Judaism and Islam, for 
example, the rules for keeping kosher or for keeping halal, that are in part designed to 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

protect the well-being of animals. There can be a recognition that animals are not the same 
as humans and do not have the same set of rights as humans, but that we ought to still 
behave with a minimum of cruelty towards them, and I think that’s true, although these 
religious traditions may not provide a precise argument for what the limits of humane 
treatment should be. I have made a lot of decisions in my own life that move in that di-
rection in terms of my diet. I think the question is a really good one, and it is just not the 
book we ended up writing, but I think it opens up the  question about our responsibilities 
to any form of life, in terms of the pain we cause. It should be one that we examine with 
an open mind, and my mind is certainly still open. I have not completely resolved all my 
thinking, so, there we are.

Dianoia: In the chapter “The Big Ear,” you mention that privacy, specifically the sensi-
tivity to it, is more of a modern sentiment. Relating to the scenario in which a woman 
is keeping a Swiss bank account that is separate, is today’s sensitivity to privacy more a 
matter of how citizens are perceiving their own government’s corruption, or has having 
control over one’s public image rather than a non-consensual display of one’s private life 
become more relevant?

Fried: That’s really complex. I want to say something about privacy as a more modern 
concern. By that, we do not mean to relativize it or say it should not always be a concern. 
It has just become something that is very much at the forefront of our conception in mod-
ern times about what legitimate government should respect. The way that my father and I 
present that in the book is that unless there is some zone of privacy within which one can 
retreat with one’s own thoughts and inquiries, or to which one can retreat in conversation 
with other people, the possibility of a freedom that is enabled to ask the hard questions 
about the legitimacy of one’s own government, how one might want to change it, how one 
might want to live even one’s own life apart from political questions—all that  becomes 
impossible. What we say is absolute is that, based on the technological and sociological 
state of your society, there should be an equally appropriate zone of privacy to which one 
can retreat with a sense of security to work through the questions that you might have 
about your own life or about your political life without fear of being squashed like a bug. 
That will depend on the kind of technology that’s available, and it will depend on the 
kind of society you’re living in. A mass society like we live in now is very different from 
a hunter-gatherer society, and the level of privacy that you might require in those very 
different kinds of societies to feel that you have the appropriate zone of privacy to have 
for human freedom will be very different. It’s not that there is nothing to privacy—that 
privacy is simply a modern invention. I do not think that it is. At least, the need for it is 
not simply a modern invention. 

I think what you are pointing to in part of your question is just how challenging the prob-
lem of privacy is in our modern world, given the rapidly changing technological situation 
that we are all living in. Right now, we are meeting each other through Zoom, and it is be-
ing recorded, and who knows where it is going to end up, and how much damage it will do 
to any one of us in our future lives. I cannot remember if we quoted this in the book, but 
the Cardinal Richelieu, the famous seventeenth century French statesman who worked 
for the king and had enormous power, said something like this: “Give me five paragraphs 
written by the most honest man, and I will find enough to hang him with.” Here you and I 
have been having an hour-long conversation. It is much more than five paragraphs. If this 
falls into the hands of some future government, it very well could be enough to hang me 



13Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

Interview with Gregory Fried

with, especially given the things I have said about Donald Trump and authoritarian rulers. 
To live in a free society, though, I need to feel that I have a sufficiently protected zone of 
privacy to speak my mind with you right now—to engage in the human freedom of phil-
osophical reflection and philosophical discussion. What we need given the enormous per-
vasiveness of these technologies that capture our behavior, our location, almost our every 
thought at this point, is that it not become so pervasive that we are afraid of our own free-
dom. How we are going to do that, I am just not sufficiently adept with the technology 
to know. All I know is that the risks are becoming greater and greater with every improve-
ment in the technology. The zone of privacy has to exist, but again, there’s no formula for 
what defines it at a particular point in history because that zone is so dependent on the na-
ture of the technology—and not just the technology, but also the kind of society you have. 
 
There is a famous Supreme Court case from the 1930s about whether telephone calls are 
privileged zones of privacy based on the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution and 
whether or not the government can just tap your phone lines or whether or not there has 
to be a court order. This was a case where the government had tapped the phone line in 
a phone booth in a restaurant that they knew the people who were under investigation 
would be using. The constitutional question was, was that an unreasonable search and 
seizure when they tapped that phone booth? The answer was that there is not a reason-
able expectation of privacy when you are out in the public world using public forms of 
communication. If you are in the restaurant and speaking very loudly about your plans to 
rob a bank, there would be no legitimate expectation in that sociological, technological 
situation to think that a loud conversation wouldn’t be overheard. The court said the same 
is true of a public telephone. If the phone were in their own apartment, then it would be 
different. The zone of privacy and the reasonable expectations about how its boundaries 
should be protected  would be different, but it is very hard to predict these things until 
you actually know the technological and sociological circumstances themselves.

Dianoia: Along similar lines, you start the chapter “No Beginning or No End” with the 
discussion about George Bush’s decision to break the law in response to the credible intel-
ligence that was received about Al Qaeda’s plans to develop a weapon of mass destruction. 
Would you say that there’s a reasonable threshold that, for conversation standpoint, we 
could have for determining how credible this so-called credible intelligence needs to be 
to serve as an impetus to violate the law for this public good, as you have been discussing 
this evening?

Fried: Our argument in the book was that prima facie Bush would have been justified 
in breaking the law if he had such a credible threat of such a massive, destructive event. 
He would still have to do what Jefferson did and Lincoln did, though, which would be 
to explain it afterwards and to have it publicly affirmed that what he did was acceptable 
by Congress or what have you. Your question is a much more specific one about what 
constitutes credible evidence. and I think that is almost a question for a political scientist 
rather than a philosopher, because I think it is a question of the institutions that we have 
and whether those institutions are trustworthy and what data those institutions, such as 
in the intelligence community, can legitimately count as evidence of a credible threat. So 
long as you have a minimally legitimate government with minimally dependable routines 
of processing that information, the president or other executive authorities are legiti-
mately responsible for acting on the basis of that information. How I would specify what 
the tripwire is between legitimate and illegitimate, I am just not expert enough to say, 



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according to current technology and law. I just think that epistemologically, there must 
be such a point at which it is legitimate to say, “I think I know enough now to make this 
decision.” The reason that you then make it public afterwards is to determine whether 
you improperly crossed that boundary or not. That is why as we say being a real political 
leader at a high level involves very serious risk that one takes upon oneself. We quote the 
Declaration of Independence, where the signers say that they pledge their lives, property, 
and sacred honor to the cause. The higher and higher up you get in political responsibility, 
the more important it is to remember that you have made that pledge, too, and that like 
a soldier you are risking something by taking on that responsibility. You are trusting in 
the good faith of the system that if you ever have to cross that line, and then you present 
your case for why you did it, the system will exonerate you and make good the rupture 
of the rule of law. That requires that we have a very well-functioning political society, and 
I think we can have that. The examples of Lincoln and Jefferson show that it is possible. 
Unfortunately, in the atmosphere we have now, it is hard to imagine that being the case. 
Being as fair as possible to Bush’s administration, you could understand why they would 
hesitate to proclaim their lawbreaking. Still, I think it was Bush's duty to do so because it 
is important to prevent the presidency from becoming more and more autocratic, rather 
than bound by democratic norms and limits. John Locke, whom some of you have stud-
ied with me, said, “Y'know, we need to give our rulers the authority to make those tough 
decisions to break the law sometimes.” He calls it prerogative. We also have to remember 
that it is extremely dangerous for those leaders to use prerogative, and he says in fact the 
most dangerous thing is a very good ruler who uses prerogative because then the people 
will come to trust that when a ruler breaks the law, they are doing it for a good reason and 
can account for it. Then along comes a very bad ruler who uses that same expectation to 
do very terrible things and then insist that they do not have to account for what they have 
done. That is what we have to worry about in the rule of somebody like President Trump. 

There is a really good book for those of you interested in these questions. It is called After 
Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, and it is by Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith. For 
those of you who are interested in law and politics as they intersect with philosophy, I 
really recommend this book. Jack Goldsmith is a remarkable man. He served in the Bush 
White House in the Office of Legal Counsel, which is a special office in the White House 
responsible for giving the President advice on the law so that the president doesn't break 
the law. Jack Goldsmith, at quite a young age, became the leader in the Office of Legal 
Counsel. He had taken that position after John Yoo. The name might mean something to 
you if you studied that period, but John Yoo had authored some memos saying that these 
various "enhanced interrogation techniques" did not constitute torture, and therefore if 
the president or his officers engaged in these activities they would not be guilty of torture. 
Goldsmith saw these memos and said we have to retract them. That was a very brave 
thing to do. He got all kinds of blowback, and so he is one of the people that my father 
and I talked with a lot when we wrote this book. Goldsmith co-authored this new book 
about the Trump presidency because—and he is interested in exactly the kinds of thing 
that we're interested in, which is presidential power—what kinds of problems are we now 
seeing as this fraying of the guardrails to excessive presidential power has proceeded under 
Trump well past what happened in the Bush administration. It might have been a trickle 
under Bush, but under Trump it is a torrent of lawlessness. This book is about what we do 
to bring the presidency back into the rule of law without damaging the presidency, with-
out making it so weak that it is no longer an effective part of our government. I strongly 
recommend After Trump for those of you interested in these questions.



15Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

Interview with Gregory Fried

Dianoia: At the end of the book you revealed that you and your father are not completely 
of one mind when talking about prosecuting officials, and I wanted to ask what that pro-
cess was like? How do you write with someone that you might not always see eye to eye 
with, and how were you able to cross that gap?

Fried: My father had a lot of training in philosophy when he was in law school. He has 
written works in philosophy, so at that level we could really speak the same language. I do 
not have the training in law that he has. I will tell you a very brief story. After my father 
and I finished the book, my mother told me that she had been really mad at my father for 
suggesting that we do this book together because she was really worried that we would have 
some horrible falling out over the issues. That just never ever happened, I think, because 
we each have a philosophical disposition to enjoy vigorous dialogue and we were willing 
to talk things out. Where we could not come to an agreement in that last chapter of the 
book, we incorporated the disagreement into the book! It all worked, and that was a really 
lovely experience. I have done other work like that in my professional career where I have 
translated philosophical works out of German with a colleague, and we constantly were 
going back and forth but never getting into serious arguments. When you can do that, it is 
one of the great intellectual pleasures in life. I think our solution in that book was the best 
solution, which was just to incorporate our disagreement into the life of the book itself. 
That way, the reader would be presented with this stark problem that faced the nation 
after the Bush presidency, which was, "Here are these unpunished excesses committed by 
the executive branch; do we let that lie for the sake of the unity of the nation, or do we do 
something about it to make clear that these lines shouldn't be crossed?” Now we have had 
the Trump administration, which seems to bear out my side of the argument, which is if 
you do not do something about such transgressions, they will just get worse and worse. 
 
The fascinating thing about the After Trump book is that the two authors did the same 
thing. Bauer and Goldsmith end their book the same way: by one arguing that Trump 
should be prosecuted, and the other saying no. I teased Jack a little bit about that, saying 
that he had stolen our method, but I think it is a really useful thing to have in a book 
for conscientious citizens who want to understand just how tough these problems are. I 
would say we need to do something about Trump, although I think it is likely that the 
Biden administration will not seek his prosecution at the federal level, because Biden will 
not want to fray the nation’s divides even further. But there is a big difference between the 
Trump and the Bush administration. Trump's crimes are really the crimes of a dictator, 
not of somebody who's done things that are wrong for the sake of the common good, 
which if you want to be generous, you can say about the Bush administration. That is why 
it was so difficult for us in that context because I still have sympathy for what the Bush 
administration was facing, even if I think what they did was very wrong. With Trump, it is 
nothing like that. He is not doing these things for reasons of the common good. It is pure-
ly for his own benefit. If you are not going to come down hard on that, what are you going 
to come down hard on? The difference is that because Bush was doing these things for the 
sake of the common good, these were federal infractions, and therefore, in principle, he 
could be pardoned for them if it ever came to that. For Trump, he is committing crimes in 
so many contexts, so even if Biden pardons him for federal crimes, Trump will still have 
to deal with the state of New York, and they could still take him down. That might be 
good enough. It is still not as much as I would like to see, because I think Trump’s actions 
fell so far beyond the latitude that we should grant a president Although I am sensitive to 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

the problem that our country is really torn apart right now, and this could make it even 
worse, my fear is that the next president with authoritarian ambitions will be even worse 
than Trump if we do not set the bar somewhere.

Dianoia: Now that we are some years removed from the direct issues that you were dis-
cussing when you wrote this book around ten years ago, and now that we have the COV-
ID-19 pandemic still ravaging our country, would you say that there are any applicable 
takeaways from your discussion of the necessity to take bold action in the face of an 
overwhelming threat to the nation that would help inform our policy-making. You have 
clearly alluded to the inadequacy of the Trump administration during the last four years, 
and especially during the climax of the COVID-19 pandemic, so are there any applicable 
crossovers from what you have talked about in the book?

Fried: I think the gross negligence of the Trump administration’s response to COVID-19 
was a conventional failure to face up to in an emergency. I do not think there was anything 
unconventional or illegal that was a useful option in that case. It was not like the threats 
coming from Al-Qaeda. This was a natural event. Maybe there would have been law 
breaking that a president could have engaged in order to facilitate the response. For exam-
ple, maybe seizing supplies of medical equipment in order to distribute them, assuming 
that would have been necessary. I do not know if it would have been, but let us assume 
that it was. That would be the sort of thing that we have in mind. In such a case, the pres-
ident would say, “Look, I did this. This was a crime. Congress of the United States, fix it 
by deciding either to impeach me or to confirm my actions.” The problem is that if it had 
been Obama making such choices with Mitch McConnell’s Republican Congress, they 
would have used it as an excuse to impeach him. That is what is driving this problem here. 
There is not sufficient trust between the branches of government so that a president could 
do what Jefferson and Lincoln did, which was to say, to put it in the vernacular, “Hey, I 
did this for the common good, cut me a break here.” That is what is so disturbing about 
our present moment because let us not forget Jefferson was president when he campaigned 
against John Adams. That presidential election was as vicious, if not more so, than the 
one that we just went through. The divisions between the Federalists and the Democratic 
Republicans were very serious. Again, it took courage on Jefferson’s part to expose himself, 
just as it did with Lincoln during the Civil War, when there were really serious political 
divisions that could have led to the end of their political careers. Lincoln’s re-election was 
not an obvious thing. He was facing challenges from people like McClellan, who would 
have made peace with the Confederacy. Exposing himself was a dangerous move, but I 
think it was the right one. At some point, you have to draw the line in the sand on these 
issues of presidential power because it looks to me like successive presidents are taking 
more and more and tearing out the guardrails against excessive power. Give one an inch, 
and the next one takes the mile, and the one after that is going to take a hundred miles. 
Soon, the country will be covered. That is the main lesson that I take. The fact is we do 
not yet know everything that we need to know about Trump’s law-breaking. The Mueller 
Report made very clear that Trump stonewalled them in gathering evidence at every turn. 
But I think we know enough to know Trump is deeply problematic. He has broken many 
serious laws, both constitutional and otherwise. We do not know everything, and more 
facts will emerge, I would hope, after his presidency is over —so long as he does not 
convince those Republican state legislatures to discard the popular votes in their states 
and substitute their own choice of the electors to go to the Electoral College, which is 
something that he has tried to get some of them to do. It is absolutely unbelievable. It has 



17Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

Interview with Gregory Fried

a constitutional plausibility to it, but it would be the end of democracy if he does that. I do 
not think he will get away with it, though. I do not think the state legislatures will cooperate, 
but it just shows how far he is willing to push this in the direction of dictatorship, and the 
door has now been opened to the next attempt. 

You know, my father is a refugee from World War II Europe. I grew up in a household which 
had that era very much on its mind. He became a Republican because he believed that the 
best defense against the kind of tyranny that had destroyed his homeland—he was from 
Czechoslovakia, first a Nazi tyranny, and then a communist tyranny—was to have limited 
government and a sense among the people that their lives are their own and that the govern-
ment ultimately belongs to them. For my father, that meant you wanted to have as little gov-
ernment as possible while still maintaining the common good. He was a moderate libertarian 
Republican of the type that was very common in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. With the rise 
of the new Gingrich style of Republican, that more moderate Republicanism has gradually 
been eclipsed. That is no longer the Republican party that we have now—the kind of moder-
ate libertarian Republicanism that is suspicious of big government programs and regulation 
as potentially leading to governmental overreach. But what we have seen develop instead is 
that the overreach is coming from the supposedly conservative party. For somebody like me, 
and certainly for my father, there is certainly a kind of historical whiplash that we are seeing 
now where the old categories do not seem to mean very much anymore. If I were to leave you 
with one lesson from this, it would be to ignore the categories of liberal, conservative, left 
and right, because I do not think they are particularly helpful right now in terms of thinking 
about what is in the best interest of the nation regarding pivotal issues such as  reforms to 
make voting more accessible, fixing the Electoral College, and preventing voter suppression. 
These should not be liberal vs. conservative issues. They should be American issues. We have 
really gone off-track with that at this point. How to fix the divide, I am not sure. I am not 
enough of a prophet, but your generation will probably have to be the one to fix it, not mine, 
and not my father’s.



18

δι
άν

οι
α

UNIFIED FOUNDATIONS FOR NORMATIVE 
EDUCATION

 ALEC OAKLEY

INTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTION

This paper sketches a theory of normative education according to which we gain 
normative knowledge by first becoming disposed to correctly assess normative 

situations. I introduce a distinction between what I shall call ‘perceptive’ and ‘productive’ 
virtues, arguing that the cultivation of productive virtues is contingent upon the mastery 
of perceptive ones. After some brief groundwork (§0), I introduce the distinction between 
the  two and  explore some unique features that they might exhibit (§1). I then argue 
that productive virtues require perceptive ones, and thereafter use this relation to develop a 
resulting theory of normative education (§2).  I evaluate the theory as it applies to three areas 
of normative philosophy—ethics, epistemology, and aesthetics (§3)—and then conclude 
with some suggestions about future avenues for further work (§4). 

§0 PROsPeCTs fOR a VIRTUe TheORy§0 PROsPeCTs fOR a VIRTUe TheORy
I would like to begin with a brief explanation of why it makes sense to offer a virtue theory of 
normative education. This amounts to identifying how the acquisition of non-propositional 
normative knowledge is grounded in the cultivation of virtues, and then showing how 
propositional normative knowledge can be derived from the non-propositional knowledge 
that this cultivation affords.



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Unified Foundations for Normative Education

The acquisition of non-propositional knowledge is, at least for our purposes, the development 
of a skill1. A skill is a disposition that is (at least instrumentally) valuable. This makes the 
gaining of non-propositional normative knowledge the development of a skill that is 
somehow normatively valenced. Presumably, moreover, for this skill to count as knowledge 
its valency must be positive.  The capacity or disposition to act in a negatively valenced way 
should not count as normative knowledge2. So, the gaining of non-propositional normative 
knowledge is the development of a skill that is of positive normative valency. And the 
development of such a positively-valenced skill is precisely the cultivation of a virtue. 

This reasoning identifies the acquisition of non-propositional normative knowledge with 
the cultivation of virtues. If we would like our theory of normative education to apply to 
propositional normative knowledge as well, we must show how such knowledge derives 
from the cultivation of virtues. While I believe such knowledge can thus be derived, we do 
not have the space here to give the proposal the attention that it deserves; thus,  here is a 
rough sketch about what form this derivation might take. 

It is easy to see why knowledge of propositions of the form “ ‘S ought to  in circumstances 
C’” are derived from virtues. Suppose I have some virtue—say epistemic humility—which 
is the disposition to revise my beliefs in appropriate circumstances. For instance, suppose 
that I am disposed to revise my beliefs when presented with contrary evidence by experts. If 
I am aware that I have this virtue, I can infer the proposition that ‘one ought to revise one’s 
beliefs when presented with contrary evidence by experts.’ 

In other words, the cultivation of a virtue is concomitant with implicit propositional 
knowledge that may be inferred, upon reflection, from one’s virtuous character. This 
proposal presupposes, and would follow from, the more general claim that dispositions are 
concomitant with implicit propositional beliefs that may be inferred, upon reflection, from 
the disposition. This claim has been defended by Ernest Sosa, but since we do not have the 
space to defend the claim here, I direct any suspicions to Sosa’s work3. 

§1 The PeRCePTIVe/PRODUCTIVe DIsTINCTION§1 The PeRCePTIVe/PRODUCTIVe DIsTINCTION
A virtue is productive if it is a disposition to behave in a normatively laudable way4. Productive 
virtues are familiar: in ethics, honesty is the disposition to tell the truth in the appropriate 
circumstances; in epistemology, humility is the disposition to have an appropriate level of 
confidence in one’s beliefs;  and in aesthetics, originality is the disposition to create original 
works. All of these behavioural dispositions are normatively laudable in their respective 
domains, and thus, are all productive virtues.

1 Another kind of non-propositional knowledge is sometimes discussed, namely, knowledge of a person. Since this kind of knowledge 
has little bearing on what is to come, we equate non-propositional knowledge with ‘know-how’, the knowledge of how to do something. 
2 This point is less obvious than it may seem. Indeed, it seems to presume some kind of ‘motivational internalism’ about normative 
education. That is, it seems to presume that to properly understand some normative matter, one must feel motivated to act according 
to one’s understanding. If this point fails, the acquisition of non-propositional normative knowledge is no longer identified with the 
cultivation of a virtue, but rather the cultivation of either a virtue or a vice. However, nothing of substance hangs on this point.
3 Sosa, Ernest. “The Relevance of Moore and Wittgenstein.” In The A Priori in Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.
4 The terminology here may seem unmotivated. The terms ‘productive’ and ‘perceptive’ are most intuitive as they apply to aesthetics. As 
we will see, the productive aesthetic virtues are the virtues of the producer of art, the artist, and the perceptive virtues are the virtues of 
the perceiver of art, the appreciator. An unfortunate feature of the term ‘productive’ is that it casts the other virtues in a derogatory light. 
I should warn that the perceptive virtues are not ‘unproductive’ in the sense of being useless. Anyway, I hope the terminology will start 
to feel more natural, as we go. 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

A virtue is perceptive if it is a disposition to correctly assess normative situations. For 
instance, in ethics, insight into the moral characters of others is a perceptive virtue. In 
epistemology, being unbiased in one’s credulity is a perceptive virtue. And in aesthetics, the 
virtues of artistic appreciation are perceptive virtues. Perceptive virtues are virtues “in the 
second person.” They reflect our capacity to assess other normative agents with whom, and 
situations in which, we need not be involved.

Perceptive virtues are comparatively unfamiliar to their productive counterparts, so we 
should take some time to convince ourselves that they really are virtues. As we will see, 
perceptive virtues are important for the cultivation of productive virtues, but one might 
object that this is not really a virtue if this is their only value. Perceptive virtues, this same 
objection might say, are really only instrumentally valuable, and  therefore, not really virtues 
at all. 

There is some prima facie force to this objection. Perceptive virtues reflect one’s ability to 
properly assess normative situations. But as the objection goes, being able to properly assess 
the normative facts is pointless unless one uses this information to behave virtuously, that is, 
to cultivate productive virtues.

The objection would be met if we endorsed Aristotle’s doctrine of the unity of the virtues5. 
Notoriously, Aristotle thought that in order to truly have any single virtue, say, courage, one 
must have all of them. So the situation in which one is perceptively, but not productively, 
virtuous cannot arise. But we have good reason to deny Aristotle’s doctrine. It is clear that in 
ethics, for instance, one can be honest without being brave. The disposition to tell the truth 
in appropriate circumstances does not require the disposition to take appropriate risks, so 
we should perhaps look for a solution elsewhere.

Here is what I suggest: dispositions to properly assess the normative facts are virtues because, 
even in the absence of productive virtues, they contribute to our wellbeing. The perceptively 
virtuous person has gained an understanding of some normative discourse. Since so much 
of our lives engages us in these discourses, having such an understanding of them is partly 
constitutive of human wellbeing. 

This response presumes that having an understanding of discourses critical to human life 
is virtuous and, therefore, partly constitutive of human wellbeing. While the objector is 
unlikely to accept this, denial of perceptive virtues has inimical consequences; in fact, it 
would appear to delegitimize virtue epistemology altogether. Indeed, virtue epistemology is 
motivated by the tenet that having an understanding of these discourses constitutes human 
well-being6. Given that this thesis has  led to such fruitful inquiry, it might be a good idea 
to accept it7. 

5 Telfer, Elizabeth. “The Unity of Moral Virtues in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 90 (1990).
6 Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
7 I think this objection is best understood more generally. What the objector is really concerned about is the notion of a ‘non-behav-
ioural’ virtue. Capacities, perceptual or otherwise, are useless unless they allow one to cultivate the appropriate behavioural dispositions. 
And so they are at best instrumentally valuable. The same response can be given to the general objection, since virtue epistemologists 
have demonstrated the merits of treating certain capacities as virtues.



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Unified Foundations for Normative Education

Our response to the key objection emphasizes an important feature of the perceptive virtues. 
They are ‘epistemic’ in that they concern one’s understanding of a normative discourse. 
I should stress that this does not mean that they only apply in epistemology. Rather, the 
perceptive virtues illustrate epistemic virtues to be present in all areas of normative life.

§1.1 MUTUal exClUsION aND exhaUsTION
There are more questions to be raised about the productive/perceptive distinction. First, 
are these collections of virtues mutually exclusive and exhaustive? It is clear that they are 
mutually exclusive as  productive virtues concern behavioural dispositions. A person with a 
certain productive virtue has a disposition to behave in a certain way. Perceptive virtues are 
not behavioural as they concern a capacity to assess normative situations. Since no virtue can 
concern one’s behaviour and not concern one’s behaviour, no virtue can be productive and 
perceptive simultaneously.

Despite the mutual exclusion of these classes of virtues, we sometimes use one word to refer 
both to a productive virtue and a perceptive virtue. In aesthetics, for instance, ‘creativity’ 
may refer to either kind of virtue. For the appreciation of certain artworks—especially those 
more difficult to interpret—demands creativity. This kind of creativity is a perceptive virtue, 
but one must also remember that one can be creative in the sense of an artist, which is 
distinct from the former insofar as it is productive. Moreover, one can be perceptively creative 
without being productively creative;  indeed, one can be perceptively creative without being 
an artist at all. This case demonstrates that even when one word is used to refer to two virtues 
of different kinds, the virtues can be easily discerned. So such cases are not counterexamples 
to the mutual exclusion of the productive and perceptive virtues8.

The question of mutual exhaustion, however, is more difficult to answer. For a virtue to be 
productive, all that is required is that it concerns one’s behaviour. So the question amounts 
to asking whether there are non-behavioural, non-perceptive virtues. While I cannot think 
of any examples, I am happy to leave this as a possibility. To rule this out, we would have to 
argue that the only way for a disposition to contribute to one’s well-being is for it to describe 
a laudable behaviour or a capacity to assess normative situations, and I see no reason to think 
this to be the case.

§1.2 RefleCTIVe VIRTUes
We close our exploration of the productive/perceptive distinction by identifying two 
important subclasses of the perceptive virtues. First, since perceptive virtues are dispositions 
to properly assess normative agents and situations, we can consider dispositions to properly 
assess ourselves and situations in which we are involved as ‘reflective’ virtues. They are worth 
distinguishing from the other perceptive virtues because their cultivation poses challenges 
that are unique among the perceptive virtues and because they aid the cultivation of the 
productive virtues in a unique way.

8 Another example, from ethics now, are the virtues to which ‘courage’ refers. Courage is most commonly thought of as a productive 
ethical virtue. It describes one’s tendency to take appropriate risks. But the perception of certain moral facts also requires courage. It 
takes courage, for instance, for the privileged to acknowledge their privilege.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Before exploring what is unique about reflective virtues, we have a superficial question to 
answer. Notice that every perceptive virtue determines a reflective one? If p is a disposition 
involving the proper assessment of normative agents and situations, then p’ is the 
corresponding disposition when restricted to the assessment of oneself and situations in 
which one is involved. Our superficial question is whether the cultivation of p requires the 
cultivation of p’? It is clear that someone who exhibits a perceptive virtue only in situations 
in which they are not involved is still exhibiting some kind of virtue, which we will call 
p – p’.  The question, then, is whether p – p’ is just p, or if instead, all of these virtues, 
p, p’, and p – p’, are to be distinguished. My own inclination is to say that p – p’ is not 
really a perceptive virtue, and that only when conjoined with p’ does it form a perceptive 
virtue p. This is motivated by the thought that to be a perceptive person, one must be 
good at assessing normative situations without qualification. For instance, someone who 
is insightful into the moral shortcomings of others, but is painfully self-unaware of their 
own, is not ‘really’ insightful9. Given this, the reflective virtues are not strictly speaking a 
subclass of the perceptive virtues. Rather, every perceptive virtue is in part a reflective virtue 
as well. However, we can still speak as if the reflective virtues are contained in the perceptive 
virtues since each perceptive virtue determines a corresponding reflective virtue. Nothing 
substantial hangs on this point, as it is only necessary so that we can properly taxonomize 
the classes of virtues that we have identified. 

What is uniquely challenging about the cultivation of reflective virtues is something of a 
mystery. We know from psychology that they are uniquely challenging10, which is not all 
that surprising. After all, we stand in a profoundly different relationship to ourselves than 
we do to others, so it is to be expected that the methods by which we assess ourselves will 
be different from those by which we assess others. But none of this indicates what unique 
challenges are posed. Rather than try to settle an age-old question as a lemma, let us simply 
observe that the reflective virtues pose some or other unique challenges, and thus, deserve 
our special attention in our task to become more perceptive persons. 

In addition to being uniquely difficult to cultivate, the reflective virtues are of unique 
instrumental value. Being reflectively virtuous allows one to gain knowledge of the status of 
one’s own productive virtues, and accordingly, the opportunity to  calibrate one’s behaviour 
accordingly. For instance, the reflectively virtuous person can tell when she is being cowardly 
and when she is being reckless, and this allows her to be brave. 

To summarize, the uniquely challenging and valuable nature of the reflective virtues shows 
that they are worth distinguishing amongst the perceptive virtues. In any case, they will play 
an important theoretical role in what is to come.  

9 These ‘partial’ perceptive virtues, if not bona fide perceptive virtues, are candidate counterexamples to the mutual exhaustion of the 
productive/perceptive distinction.
10 Ellemers, Naomi, Jojanneke van der Toorn, Yavor Paunov, and Thed van Leeuwen. “The Psychology of Morality: A Review and Anal-
ysis of Empirical Studies Published From 1940 Through 2017.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 23, no. 4 (November 2019).



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Unified Foundations for Normative Education

§1.3 ReCePTIVe VIRTUes
The second important subclass of perceptive virtues are the virtues that describe one’s 
capacity to be appropriately receptive to criticism. These ‘receptive’ virtues will also play an 
important role in our theory of normative education. 

It is plausible that the cultivation of the receptive virtues requires some type of non-reflective 
perceptive virtues; in fact, one of the central difficulties in the cultivation of receptive virtues 
is knowing which criticism to take seriously. In particular, then, the cultivation of the 
receptive virtues seems to require a notable perceptive epistemic virtue, namely, the capacity 
to discern credible sources of knowledge.

Since, as with the reflective virtues, the receptive virtues concern our own behaviour and 
character, their cultivation comes with similar challenges. And, as with the reflective virtues, 
the receptive virtues are uniquely valuable—cultivating any type of productive virtue 
without feedback from others is quite the task. We will see more about the instrumental 
value of the receptive virtues below when we set out our theory. 

§2 The CONCORDaNCe Of VIRTUes§2 The CONCORDaNCe Of VIRTUes1111

At this point, I would like to identify an important connection between the classes of virtues 
that we have identified thus far. The cultivation of the productive virtues is greatly aided 
by a mastery of the perceptive virtues. Restrictions of this connection to certain normative 
subdisciplines have been recognized12. But the fact that the connection holds in general has, 
to my knowledge, gone unnoticed. As we will see, the general connection suggests that there 
is a structure that underlies the virtues broadly conceived, and that this structure affords a 
theory of normative education. 

To establish the connection, consider how the perceptively vicious person would go about 
cultivating productive virtues. Say someone—let us call him Ed—wants to do well in the 
world. Ed wants to be morally outstanding, an excellent source of knowledge, and even the 
next great filmmaker. But Ed is woefully imperceptive. He gives perverse answers to ethical 
thought experiments, is more credulous toward white men, and watches Lynch movies while 
scrolling through Facebook. 

The point is that Ed is going to have a hard time. He will not know how to behave morally 
until he learns to tell right from wrong. His knowledge will not be trustworthy until he 
learns whose knowledge to trust,  and he cannot become the next great filmmaker until he 
makes an effort to learn what makes a film great. 

What this case illustrates is that in order to reliably behave in a normatively laudable way, 
we must have an appreciation of the relevant standards. Gaining an appreciation of these 
standards amounts to becoming disposed to correctly assess situations in their relevant 

11 This phrase is taken from Gomes (2009) who, in the context of aesthetics, noted the findings presented here. We will discuss 
Gomes’s paper in §3.3 when we evaluate our theory as it applies to aesthetics.
12 As we will discuss below, Woodruff (2001) and Gomes (2009) have noticed the distinction in aesthetics. It might be argued that 
Aristotle noticed this connection in ethics, but this is far from obvious. To my knowledge, the connection has gone unmentioned in 
epistemology.



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applications. To many, this will seem too trivial an observation to bother pointing out.  We 
will see that, when applied to specific normative areas of philosophy, it yields non-trivial 
consequences. Before carrying out these applications though, we should set out the theory 
of normative education that this connection furnishes. 

§2.1 a VIRTUe TheORy Of NORMaTIVe eDUCaTION
So far, we have identified two mutually exclusive classes of virtues (the perceptive and 
productive virtues) and two important subclasses of the former class (the reflective and 
receptive virtues). We have also argued that the cultivation of the productive virtues is 
greatly aided by a mastery of the perceptive virtues, which when combined with the previous 
idea, furnishes the theory of normative education provided in this section.

The gaining of non-propositional normative knowledge is the cultivation of virtues. The 
cultivation of perceptive virtues leads to the capacity to properly assess normative situations 
and agents. Once one has this capacity, one then attempts to emulate who she perceives as 
virtuous and avoids emulating those that she perceives as vicious; in other words, this is what 
the “the cultivation of productive virtues” looks like in its practical application. If one has 
also cultivated the reflective and receptive virtues, then one can assess one’s own attempts to 
be virtuous alongside constructive criticism from others. It is this reflection that calibrates 
one’s future behaviour with such assessments. 

Roughly speaking, the non-reflective, non-receptive perceptive virtues are giving the agent a 
place to start. Prior to having cultivated the reflective, receptive, and productive virtues, the 
agent has some idea of what a good person is. She has seen both examples and nonexamples 
and has tried with some success to apply these in order to make judgements in her own life. 
The reflective and receptive virtues serve to bridge the gap between these other perceptive 
virtues and productive virtues. Once one has some sense of the relevant standards, one can 
attempt to implement this understanding into one’s own behaviour. And the reflective and 
receptive virtues allow one to assess these attempts and to improve over time. 

In the following example, suppose that I am a brave person. As a child and young adolescent, 
I developed a certain perceptive virtue describing my capacity to discern cowardly and 
reckless people from brave people. Perhaps I saw my mother take the risk of leaving an 
abusive relationship, but only once she knew that she and her child would be safer on their 
own. Perhaps I saw some boys at school take needless risks and get hurt or reprimanded 
as a result. Through exposure to several similar examples and nonexamples, I came to a 
rough understanding of what it means to be brave. I implemented this rough understanding 
into my own behaviour and, having cultivated the reflective virtue corresponding to the 
aforementioned perceptive virtue, assessed my attempts. Perhaps previous experience led 
me to believe that driving fast was brave, so I drove fast. I then reflected on this action 
(or perhaps was criticized for it), and in realizing the needlessness of this risk,  refrained 
from driving fast in the future. Through several similar experiences, I use the reflective and 
receptive virtues to hone my understanding of bravery and, ultimately, to become brave 
myself. 



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§2.2 TRaDITION aND PROgRess
Our theory of normative education emphasizes the role of exemplars in the gaining of 
normative knowledge. These exemplars will often conform to some kind of normative 
tradition.  I will now explore the implications of this feature in our theory, and what specific 
implication the cultivation of productive virtues had in aiding our understanding of the 
relevant normative traditions. 

As stated, this implication may be cause for some alarm as it fails to account for some form 
of normative ‘progress’. Progress in the normative domain is, in virtue theoretic terms, an 
increase in the wellbeing of the average person engaged in the domain. For instance, moral 
progress is familiar; many White Americans used to think slavery was morally permissible, 
but now they do not. This is meant to signify some type of moral progress. 

For several reasons, which are to be outlined below, some have thought that an emphasis on 
tradition impedes this kind of normative progress. For instance, artists of recent centuries 
have been dismissive of tradition, claiming that it hinders creativity13. Similarly, in ethics, an 
emphasis on tradition has been thought to stifle moral progress. However, once we gain an 
understanding of tradition and its role in our theory, we will see that these worries are merely 
apparent. Indeed, the role of tradition in our theory provides a satisfactory explanation of 
how normative progress is possible and even affords some practical advice as to how it is 
best achieved.

Consider the following two arguments to the conclusion that tradition impedes normative 
progress14. The first argument says that normative progress is catalyzed not by rules 
prescribed from a moral tradition, but from those with a natural endowment. For one cannot 
contribute to any normative discourse simply by following rules. Since an appreciation of 
tradition can only yield a capacity to follow those rules, it has no value toward advancing 
normative progress. 

The second argument proceeds by example. It points to historical examples of the eschewal of 
tradition leading to normative progress. In ethics, the abolition of slavery can be seen as the 
eschewal of a tradition, and it goes without saying that this is a clear case of moral progress. 
In epistemology, the shift from the mythical cosmologies of Homer and Hesiod to the 
cosmologies based in reasoned argumentation of the Milesians and Eleatics was an eschewal 
of tradition, and signifies epistemic progress15. And in aesthetics, Shakespeare’s eschewal of 
the Aristotelian unities gave us King Lear, and this is a kind of aesthetic progress16. From 
these examples, we see that normative progress often requires the eschewal of tradition, and 
so an emphasis on that tradition actually impedes normative progress. 

13 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Emilio Settimelli, and Bruno Corra. “The Futurist Synthetic Theater.” In Let’s Murder the Moonshine: 
Selected Writings of F.T. Marinetti, edited by R.W. Flint, translated by R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. Los Angeles: Sun and 
Moon Classics, 1991; Pierre Albert-Birot. “Banality.” In Manifesto: A Century of Isms, edited by Mary Ann Caws. Lincoln: University 
of Nebraska Press, 2001; Noel Carroll. “Art, Creativity, and Tradition.” In The Creation of Art: New Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics, 
edited by Berys Nigel Gaut and Paisley Livingston. Cambridge University Press, 2003.
14 These arguments, along with my critiques of them, are direct generalizations of arguments and critiques presented in Carroll (2003), 
section II, in the context of aesthetic progress.
15 Stokes, Michael C. " Hesiodic and Milesian Cosmogonies1 -I", Phronesis 7, 1-2 (1962).
16 Carroll, “Art, Creativity, and Tradition."



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The first argument misconstrues the nature of the rules that constitute a normative tradition. 
It is true that there are probably no rules that guarantee normative progress, or at least 
none of which we are aware of. Moreover, it is probably true that there are no ‘algorithmic’ 
normative rules in the sense that their application can be isolated from other normative 
considerations and factors. But it does not follow from this that rules have no role to 
play in normative progress. Indeed, I claim that rules, properly conceived, do allow those 
who understand them to contribute to the relevant normative discourse. This falsifies the 
argument’s second premise.

Properly conceived, the rules that constitute a normative tradition are virtues. They describe 
normatively valuable dispositions; not a normative instruction manual, as it were. The rules 
even in the most stipulative normative traditions (for instance, twelve-tone serialism in 
musical composition) are sensitive to other factors, and their application requires subtle and 
informed judgement. Thus, in claiming that one cannot contribute to a normative discourse 
through following rules, the argument mistakes a tradition for a collection of mechanical 
rules, rather than a body of virtues. 

The second argument mistakes the role that tradition plays in the examples it cites, as none 
of them are wholesale dismissals of their respective traditions. Rather, they are revisions of 
our beliefs, and the virtues that we aim to cultivate are informed, in part, by the tradition 
that they revise.

These considerations demonstrate that tradition, properly conceived, need not impede 
normative progress. Traditions are not collections of algorithmic rules, but rather, bodies of 
virtues. And normative progress is not a result of a disregard for tradition, but rather, a result 
of a sustained engagement with tradition that leads to revision. In a familiar slogan, we must 
know the rules in order to break them.

So far, we have discussed normative progress as a result of the revision of normative tradition. 
Another kind of normative progress results from the increased coherence of the virtues 
cultivated by those engaged in the tradition and the tradition itself. The abolition of slavery 
is an example of this kind of normative progress since, even during its heyday, slavery was 
inconsistent with prevailing moral tradition. (Specifically, it was inconsistent with the social 
contract tradition of inalienable rights.) So the tradition that slave owners engaged in did 
not, as a matter of fact, endorse the owning of slaves. The moral progress signified by the 
abolition of slavery was not a revision of moral tradition, but rather, a better realization of 
an existing tradition. 

Slavery further illuminates the distinction between these kinds of normative progress. 
The abolition of slavery came with the important qualification that it did not apply to 
incarcerated persons, which as a qualification still remains in place today. Since the slavery 
of incarcerated persons is wrong, this calls for a revision of tradition. If this revision takes 
place, then this will constitute the former kind of normative progress.



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§2.3 eTIOlOgy
Our emphasis on the role of exemplars in normative education has yet another apparently 
troubling consequence. It implies that normative education requires the prior existence of 
normative agents, which suggests that our theory has no hope of providing an etiology of 
normativity.

On this point, I admit defeat. It is true that any theory of normative education in which 
exemplars play a central role will be unable, on its own, to account for how normative 
discourses were started in the first place. However, the fact of the matter is that exemplars 
do play an important role in normative education. Our moral sensibilities are irrevocably 
influenced by those close to us. The standards by which we judge our claims to knowledge 
are, in part, a product of the epistemic norms and traditions of our day. And, perhaps 
most undeniably, artists and their appreciators are forced to engage with the artworks and 
traditions that furnish the aesthetic landscape their artworks occupy.

Plainly, the fact that our use of exemplars makes the etiology of normativity mysterious 
should not lead us to deny or to ignore our use of exemplars. Rather, I suggest that we 
bracket the etiological questions until we have a fuller understanding of the current 
workings of our normative discourses are.

§3 The VIRTUe TheORy IN PRaCTICe§3 The VIRTUe TheORy IN PRaCTICe

§3.1 eThICs
We now evaluate our theory as it applies to some areas of normative philosophy, beginning 
with ethics. When restricted to ethics alone, we might say that we become good people by 
first learning how to tell right from wrong, and then apply these standards with the help 
of reflection and criticism to our own lives. The perceptive virtues describe this capacity to 
discern right from wrong, and the productive virtues describe one’s disposition to do the 
right thing in the right circumstances. The best way to shed light on this theory of moral 
education is to contrast it with another theory that shares some of its most important 
features, namely the theory presented in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. 

Aristotle famously thought that we become good people through a mimesis of the moral 
leaders of our community17. This proposal immediately raises two related issues. First, it 
seems even less able to give an etiology of ethics than our own theory, as not only does 
moral education require the prior existence of moral agents, but it also requires the prior 
existence of a moral community with moral leaders. In other words, though the use of 
exemplars requires the prior existence of moral agents, Aristotle’s use of mimesis and moral 
leaders requires the prior existence of a fully functioning moral discourse. So, though 
the prospects for our theory to provide an etiology of morals are bleak, Aristotle’s are 
definitionally hopeless18.

17 Kraut, Richard. “Aristotle’s Ethics,” May 1, 2001. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/aristotle-ethics/.
18 Of course, etiological questions would not have occurred to Aristotle, given his belief in the eternality of species.



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Second, Aristotle’s theory of moral education seems to overemphasize the role of tradition. 
Indeed, for Aristotle, an understanding of moral tradition not only helps in moral 
education—it is all that is required19. So as long as one grasps the relevant tradition, one 
can simply copy them and, in turn, become a good person. Thus, Aristotle’s theory seems 
unable to account for moral progress as it requires some discrepancy between tradition and 
the cultivation of virtues.

These problems suggest that Aristotle’s use of mimesis forces moral knowledge to be 
undesirably uniform over time. Our theory replaces the mimesis of exemplars with the 
development of a capacity to assess exemplars, and hence fares better on these problems. 
This is the central difference between our theory and a purely Aristotelian virtue ethics.

§3.2 ePIsTeMOlOgy

When restricted to epistemology, our proposal is that we become good epistemic agents 
by first gaining a rough understanding of the standards against which one ought to judge 
one’s beliefs, and then apply these standards with the help of reflection and criticism from 
others to our own belief-formations. The perceptive virtues describe a capacity to assess the 
epistemic virtues of others and the justificatory status of their beliefs. The productive virtues 
describe dispositions to form beliefs and to engage in epistemic discourse in a laudable way.

The perceptive epistemic virtues can take a moment to wrap one’s head around. Recall that 
perceptive virtues are all ‘epistemic’ insofar as they describe one’s understanding of a norma-
tive domain. The perceptive epistemic virtues, then, are ‘epistemic’ in two senses. First, they 
are ‘epistemic’ because they describe one’s understanding of a normative domain. Second, 
they are ‘epistemic’ because the relevant normative domain is epistemology. This double 
entendre is to be expected, since the theory presented, when restricted to epistemology, is a 
theory of ‘epistemic education’; that is, a theory about how we gain ‘epistemic knowledge’. 
This sounds somehow redundant, but it is not since the theory presented is a theory of how 
we gain knowledge about epistemic matters.

§3.2.1 ReassessINg INTeRNalIsM aND exTeRNal-
IsM abOUT JUsTIfICaTION

Indeed, understanding ‘epistemic education’ turns out to be crucial to the traditional ques-
tions of epistemology; specifically, the internalist-externalist debate about justification can 
be framed as a question regarding epistemic education since it regards how we gain knowl-
edge through the justification of our beliefs. The internalist says that we can always gain such 
knowledge through reflection whereas the externalist denies this. 

We can construe  this debate in terms of our theory. Dispositions to form beliefs that are 
justified correspond to productive epistemic virtues, which we will call J-virtues. Virtues 
describing one’s capacity to assess the status of one’s J-virtues, then, are reflective epistemic 

19 As with the etiological problems with Aristotle’s theory, this problem would not have occurred to Aristotle, given his unabashed 
Greek supremacism. A proper treatment of this matter would investigate the relationship between tradition and endoxa, Aristotle’s 
‘reputable opinions’ that figure so importantly in his thinking.



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virtues,  which we will call RJ-virtues.

The internalist-externalist debate regards whether there are RJ-virtues. The internalist says 
yes and the externalist says no. If there are RJ-virtues, then the justificatory status of one’s 
beliefs can be reliably determined through reflection (i.e. internalism). Otherwise, there 
is no reliable way to access, through reflection, the justificatory status of one’s beliefs (i.e. 
externalism).

This formulation of the debate is importantly different from other formulations. Specifically, 
the debate is often formulated extensionally. Internalism is the thesis that there is no belief 
the justificatory status of which is reflectively inaccessible to the believer, whereas external-
ism says that there are such beliefs20. I think that our virtue-theoretic formulation gets closer 
to the heart of what is at issue; namely, the nature of the mechanism by which we reliably 
gain knowledge of the justificatory status of our beliefs.

The virtue theory of epistemic education does not tell us whether there are RJ-virtues, but 
the proponent of the theory will likely lean toward a positive answer. She has already ac-
cepted a notion of reflective virtues corresponding to other productive virtues, and it is not 
clear what considerations would set J-virtues apart from these.  The proponent of the virtue 
theory denies the existence of RJ-virtues, which nonetheless constitutes an unwarranted 
theoretical asymmetry21.

§3.3 aesTheTICs
 
Our proposal, when restricted to aesthetics, takes on a rather different character. For unlike 
in the other normative disciplines, the cultivation of the perceptive aesthetic virtues and 
productive aesthetic virtues constitute distinct activities. The perceptive virtues correspond 
to the virtues of the appreciator, and the productive virtues correspond to the virtues of the 
artist. Given that artistic appreciation and artistic production are distinct activities, the gen-
eral connection espoused in §2 is most informative in aesthetics. It proposes that in order to 
be a great artist, one must be a great artistic appreciator.

Our theory of normative education restricts to aesthetics as follows: we become great artists 
by first learning what makes art great, and then applying this understanding, with the help 
of reflection and criticism from others, to our own artistic creations. We first become in-
sightful, perseverant, creative appreciators of art, and this affords us a rough understanding 
of what we think constitutes great art. We then implement this rough understanding into 
our own artistic creations, and through reflection and criticism from others, hone our un-
derstanding of great art in the hopes of one day becoming great artists ourselves.

In aesthetics, the connections between tradition and progress identified in §2.2 can be made 

20 Pappas, George. “Internalist vs. Externalist Conceptions of Epistemic Justification.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, January 
24, 2005. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/justep-intext/.
21 Given this, it is natural to ask what is ‘internalist’ about our theory of epistemic education. A plausible answer is found in Bach 
(1985). For Bach, internalists are focused not on what makes beliefs justified, but rather what makes a believer justified. This diagnosis is 
probably correct in our case. We are focused on J-virtues, dispositions to form justified beliefs. For this reason, the objects that are being 
assessed are agents, not beliefs. If Bach is right, this is likely why our theory lends itself toward internalism about justification.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

more explicit. For there are productive aesthetic virtues that correspond to dispositions to 
incite aesthetic progress, namely, creativity and originality. Thus, the central finding of §2.2, 
when restricted to aesthetics, is that creativity and originality are not at odds with tradition, 
but rather, informed by it22. 

§3.3.1 saVINg VIRTUe aesTheTICs
As noted above, the connection between the productive and perceptive virtues has already 
been noticed in aesthetics. It was noticed by Woodruff and developed further in Gomes23. 
They proposed the connection in order to account for the fact that aspiring artists are ad-
vised to engage with their artform as appreciators. For instance, Gomes recounts some ad-
vice commonly given to novelists: “If you want to write a book, read a library.”

Gomes presents the connection as a problem for the virtue-theoretic approach to aesthetics 
pioneered by Woodruff  and Goldie24. Gomes’s worry is that this connection, what he calls 
the ‘concordance of virtues’, is not present in ethics. Since virtue aesthetics relies heavily on 
analogies between ethics and aesthetics, if there is no structure in ethics analogous to the 
concordance of aesthetic virtues then it seems to discredit the whole approach.

One payoff of our theory is that it soothes Gomes’s worry about virtue aesthetics. We have 
seen that the structure of aesthetic virtues noticed by Woodruff and Gomes is in fact present 
in all areas of normative philosophy. Indeed, this structure is furnished by the humdrum 
observation that in order to go about becoming a good person, one must have some sense 
of what one is trying to do.

§4 fURTheR WORk§4 fURTheR WORk

This paper has been exploratory in spirit. I hope to have established nothing more than the 
fact that developing a general theory of normative education is worthwhile, and that the 
virtue theory presented is a good place to start. Indeed, the paper is best understood as a 
call for a research programme which investigates the virtue-theoretic structure underlying 
our normative discourses. The task of developing a virtue theory of normative education is 
monumental, and the required tools (especially non-propositional knowledge) have not yet 
been sharpened. For these reasons, the paper suggests several avenues for further work. We 
close by identifying some of these avenues.

22 As in note 10, this is precisely the finding of Carroll (2003), of which the thesis of §2.2 is a direct generalization.
23 Woodruff, David M. "A Virtue Theory of Aesthetics." Journal of Aesthetic Education 35, no. 3 (2001). Gomes, Anil. “Goldie on the 
Virtues of Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 1 (2009).
24 Woodruff, “A Virtue Theory of Aesthetics." Goldie, Peter, “Towards A Virtue Theory of Art.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 47, 
no. 4 (October 1, 2007). Goldie, Peter, "Virtues of Art and Human Well-Being." Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary 
Volumes 82 (2008).



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§4.1 MeThODOlOgy fOR NORMaTIVITy:
The theory presented points to important methodological questions in studying normativi-
ty; specifically, it forces us to ask whether theoretical unity is desirable, or to be expected in 
studying normativity. If theoretical unity is desirable, then this buttresses the theory. If it is 
undesirable, then this weakens the theory. If we should be ambivalent on the matter, then 
this methodological question will not affect our theory. These methodological questions 
must be answered if we are to properly assess the theory’s plausibility.

The converse question also arises: if our theory is correct, does this suggest that theoretical 
unity is desirable, or to be expected, in studying normativity? According to the theory, there 
is a structure underlying all normative education. This plausibly suggests that richer theories 
could be developed that describe normativity. While the strength of the theory does not 
depend on the converse question, if the answer turns out positive, this would be a notable 
consequence of the theory.

§4.2 RealIsM abOUT NORMaTIVITy: 
Another avenue for further work is the reassessment of realism in normative domains in 
light of the theory presented. We have offered a theory of normative knowledge, but we have 
not explicitly discussed what justifies the knowledge our theory describes. This is largely 
because the notion of non-propositional knowledge is still underdeveloped; that is,  con-
ditions on non-propositional knowledge that correspond to the justification condition on 
propositional knowledge have not yet been identified.

In light of our theory, the realist’s challenge is to demonstrate why the non-propositional 
normative knowledge gained through the cultivation of the virtues is “justified”, in whatever 
way that might mean. Hence, the full development of our theory will require a notion of 
justification for non-propositional knowledge to be identified, as well as an argument that 
the virtues afford suitably justified non-propositional knowledge.

§4.3 MORe ON PROgRess
Perhaps the section of this paper that is at once most exciting and most underdeveloped is 
§2.2 on tradition and progress. It was said that normative progress occurs when a normative 
tradition is expanded on or revised, rather than eschewed. A propitious avenue for further 
work would be to develop this idea in a way that engages with the literature on normative 
progress. There is a vast literature on moral progress and the proper assessment of the virtue 
theory presented here will require sustained engagement with this literature.



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CONClUsION
We presented a theory of normative education according to which we gain normative knowl-
edge by first becoming disposed to properly assess normative agents and situations. Some broad 
lessons regarding normative philosophy were drawn, about the relationship between our nor-
mative traditions and normative progress, as well as the etiology of normativity. We saw that our 
theory not only solves some important problems with Aristotle’s theory of moral education as 
it applies to ethics, but that it also provides some critical insight into the internalist-external-
ist debate as it  applies to epistemology. And lastly, we saw that our theory as it applies to aes-
thetics saves virtue-theoretic approaches to aesthetics from otherwise formidable objections. 
 

REFERENCES
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Christopher J. Rowe and Sarah Broadie. New 

York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Bach, Kent. “A Rationale for Reliabilism.” The Monist 68, no. 2 (April 1, 1985): 246–263. 
https://doi.org/10.5840/monist198568224.

Ellemers, Naomi, Jojanneke van der Toorn, Yavor Paunov, and Thed van Leeuwen. “The 
Psychology of Morality: A Review and Analysis of Empirical Studies Published From 
1940 Through 2017.” Personality and Social Psychology Review 23, no. 4 (November 
2019): 332–366. https://doi.org/10.1177/1088868318811759.

Fantl, Jeremy. “Knowledge How.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, December 4, 
2012. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2017/entries/knowledge-how/.

Goldie, Peter. “Towards A Virtue Theory of Art.” The British Journal of Aesthetics 47, no. 4 
(October 1, 2007): 372–287. https://doi.org/10.1093/aesthj/aym022.

Goldie, Peter. "Virtues of Art and Human Well-Being." Proceedings of the Aristotelian 
Society, Supplementary Volumes 82 (2008): 179-195. http://www.jstor.org/
stable/20619122.

Goldie, Peter. “Virtues of Art.” Philosophy Compass 5, no. 10 (2010): 830–839.

Gomes, Anil. “Goldie on the Virtues of Art.” British Journal of Aesthetics 49, no. 1 (2009): 
75–81.

Graeme, Reid. “The Trouble with Tradition.” Human Rights Watch, January 11, 2013. 
https://www.hrw.org/news/2013/01/11/trouble-tradition.

Kraut, Richard. “Aristotle’s Ethics.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, May 1, 2001. 
https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/aristotle-ethics/.

Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, Emilio Settimelli, and Bruno Corra. “The Futurist Synthetic 
Theater.” In Let’s Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings of F.T. Marinetti, edited by 



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Unified Foundations for Normative Education

R.W. Flint, translated by R.W. Flint and Arthur A. Coppotelli. Los Angeles: Sun and 
Moon Classics, 1991.

Noel Carroll. “Art, Creativity, and Tradition.” In The Creation of Art: New Essays in 
Philosophical Aesthetics, edited by Berys Nigel Gaut and Paisley Livingston. Cambridge 
University Press, 2003.

Pappas, George. “Internalist vs. Externalist Conceptions of Epistemic Justification.” The 
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, January 24, 2005. https://plato.stanford.edu/
archives/fall2017/entries/justep-intext/.

Pierre Albert-Birot. “Banality.” In Manifesto: A Century of Isms, edited by Mary Ann Caws. 
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001.

Sosa, Ernest. “The Relevance of Moore and Wittgenstein.” In The A Priori in Philosophy. 
New York: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Stokes, Michael C. " Hesiodic and Milesian Cosmogonies1 -I", Phronesis 7, 1-2 (1962): 
1-37, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/156852862X00016

Telfer, Elizabeth. “The Unity of Moral Virtues in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics”. 
Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 90 (1990): 35.

Turri, John, Mark Alfano, and John Greco. "Virtue Epistemology."The Stanford 
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, November 7, 2017. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/
fall2019/entries/epistemology-virtue.

Woodruff, David M. "A Virtue Theory of Aesthetics." Journal of Aesthetic Education 35, 
no. 3 (2001): 23-36. doi:10.2307/3333607.

Zagzebski, Linda Trinkaus. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the 
Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.



34

δι
άν

οι
α

ON ADMIRATION AND WONDER: 
Should We Accept Plutarch's Lives in the Platonic 

City?

GABRIEL AINSA 

Which mental attitudes contribute to justice? And what cultural practices can we foster 
to cultivate them? This is to say, what is the relationship between character, politics, 

and art? In Book X of The Republic, Plato’s Socrates concludes that poetry cannot be allowed 
in a just and well-functioning city since “the only poetry that we can accept into our city 
are hymns to the gods and verses in praise of good men” (607a)1.  The Platonic censorship 
of poetry may seem odd to a modern, liberal audience, especially if we are to interpret 
The Republic as a political work, but a careful reading of Plato's text reveals the censorship 
of poetry to be a crucial thesis in the dialogue with a serious philosophical defense. The 
psychological effects of art, the Platonic thesis states, corrupt the moral character of the 
individual and threaten political justice. If we are committed to ethics and politics, we 
must reject aesthetics—or so the argument goes. But those of us feeling drawn to all three 
commitments may find a champion in the first-and-second-century CE Platonist Plutarch 
and his biographical writings, the Parallel Lives. This rich and complex set of portraits of the 
“great men” of ancient Greco-Roman history pays particular attention to the interactions 
between the soul (psuche) of individuals, political structures, arts and cultural artifacts, and, 

1 Unless otherwise stated, I use the Griffith translation of Plato's Republic and the John Dryden translation of Plutarch's Lives. Citations 
of the Dryden translation are by Life and page number of the Modern Library Edition. On occasion, I will employ the Loeb translation 
or provide my own and specify which translation it is. Citations to the Loeb and Greek are by book and chapter.  



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On Admiration and Wonder

ultimately, philosophy. In this essay, I read Plutarch and his Lives as a text of moral and 
political philosophy responding to the Platonic tradition to which Plutarch feels in debt yet 
free to challenge and improve2.  As I will argue, although Plutarch's description of poetry 
(and other activities and arts, including political ones) follows Plato in his analysis of their 
psychological risks, he does not exclude them from human life. Instead his Lives seek to imitate 
those psychological effects while inviting the reader to adopt a critical attitude towards arts 
and politics. In this reading, the Lives are an exercise in cultivating wonder of the good and 
the beautiful (to kalon) through an aporetic inquiry into human psychology and community.  
 
I will begin with an overview of Plato's arguments against mimetic poetry in his Republic. I 
then turn to Plutarch in the second section, which will begin with a discussion of the Platonic 
theses that led Plato to ban poetry and how Plutarch responded to them. This second  section 
includes Plutarch's discussion of the psychological effects of poetry as well as other activities 
like rhetoric. The third section considers Plutarch's analysis of the end of politics in Numa 
and Lycurgus. I then compare in the fourth section Plutarch's aesthetics and politics, noting 
how they both cause an almost identical passion of "admiration," though in distinct ways. 
This notion of admiration becomes the heart of the discussion in the fifth section, for it is 
this sort of passion that leads Plato to censor poetry. To respond to the problems that come 
with admiration, I argue Plutarch needs to transform it into a more philosophical "wonder," 
which, like admiration, includes not only a perception of the good in the object and a 
desire to imitate, but also an inquisitive impulse to scrutinize and learn the truth behind 
all appearances. I conclude that the Lives intend to cultivate this passion towards public life 
and history, and that it presents a threat to neither human flourishing nor political justice 
 
Plato against Poetry  
We may be inclined to dismiss Plato's dislike of poetry as an outdated capriciousness that 
ought to be ignored. But a careful reading of Plato's text reveals the censorship of poetry to be 
a crucial thesis in the dialogue (if not the central one). Socrates first suggests that the Kallipolis 
should be wary of poetry early in the dialogue and eventually  returns to it in the concluding 
book. In fact, these arguments against poetry bind the dialogue together, for it is in poetry, 
or in what poetry represents, that we find the relation between "city and soul" become 
tangible. Thus, in order to grasp what we should make of the Platonic critique of poetry, 
we must reconstruct the arguments with Socrates not only one-by-one, but also as a whole. 
 
I would like to begin with the whole. What is The Republic, and what does it put forth? 
Platonic dialogues are individuated by the question into which each inquires; in this case, 
what is justice (dikaiosune)? The question, as it begins in the first two books, concerns justice 

2 As Babut (1994) concludes, the evidence for Plutarch's New Academic approach is not to be explained away as a momentary or 
instrumental approach to dismantle the arguments of the Stoics or Epicureans. This seems to be Nikoladis (1997) approach, who 
professes that in Plutarch we see a return to the Old Academy of Plato. But for the French scholar, these moments in Plutarch reveal 
a deeper philosophical commitment to Socratic inquiry, as "la marque d'une expérience authentique, l'expression d'une réflexion sérieuse 
visant à justifier rationnellement, fût-ce de manière négative, la validité d'une foi religieuse en une Vérité supra-rationnelle" (1994, 581). I do 
not commit to either interpretation and leave others to settle this issue; however, as it seems to me, Plutarch is more of a Socratic than a 
Platonist in the Lives, committed to dialectical inquiry into the good, treating Plato and the Greek philosophical tradition as interlocu-
tors on the hand and political history on the other.



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within the individual as an ethical virtue. To the extent that it inquires into the nature of 
justice as a virtue of the individual, The Republic seems to be a work of moral philosophy. 
As such, it is concerned with what individuates human beings and their character; this is a 
question of what makes them good and what makes their souls wholesome and healthy. This 
dialogue would need to look at human beings “from the inside,” to provide a psychology (in 
the literal Greek sense of an account, logos, of the human soul, psuche). However, justice is a 
predicate of an individual as well as of a political structure; as John Rawls put in his Theory 
of Justice, it is the "primary virtue of institutions." This realization early in the dialogue 
prompts Socrates to propose that in order to discover what justice is in the individual and 
whether it makes individuals happy, we must first discover what it is in the city. As such, 
they embark on the project of founding a just and well-functioning city—the Kallipolis—in 
speech. To this extent, The Republic is a work of political philosophy. Some may even use it 
as a manual for lawmakers. But somebody who reads the text merely as a political manual 
would miss that Socrates does return to his defense of the thesis that justice as an ethical 
virtue makes a person happy in itself. This is his end goal, and it is quite telling that the 
beginning and concluding books are concerned with the defense of justice as a virtue to 
be desired for its own sake, while its middle books inspect political regimes. As such, it 
would seem that Plato's political proposals merely serve an argumentative function  in his 
defense of the moral virtue of justice. Under this view, the success of The Republic is the 
application of the concepts and predicates of the Greek's political lexicon to psychology. 
If this is so, we might see the relation between city and soul to be a mere analogy3.  
 
However, I resist an interpretation that would paint Plato as an "individualist" in the sense 
of being merely interested in the "inner city" of human beings. Instead, I read Plato (and 
Plutarch) as an astute observer of human nature, who notices that things outside of us, 
whether art, politics, or personal relationships, can have a strong effect on our psyche. For we 
have good reasons to think that, for Plato, the city-soul relation is one of cause-and-effect4.  
We see this fact in Socrates’ attention to education, as it is through education that law-
makers can influence the character of the citizens. The question of what will constitute such 
an education begins Socrates’ attack on poetry (poesis). This first attack is against the poetry 
of Homer and the tragedians and takes place in Book III, where Socrates outlines pedagogy 
as part of his political project. Thus, these arguments serve to justify the censorship in a 
political community. But his complete attack does not come until Book X, where Socrates 
argues that all arts that perform "imitation" (mimesis) are problematic. I understand both 
instances of imitation to be the same,5 and while the latter argument justifies the ontological 
3 In his famous critique of The Republic, Bernard Williams (1973) seems to think along these lines. For him, the method of Plato relies 
on the assumption of the "analogy of meaning," that "the explanation of a city's being F is the same as that of a man's being F" (159). 
Along with some other premises in Plato's argument, he considers that there is a tension in the background of The Republic which 
threatens the whole project. For, in the last analysis, the contradictions he points out bring forth that "there are grave obstacles to Plato's 
reading back into the city what he needs for his political conclusions" (167).
4 In his interpretation of Plato's Republic, and as a response to Williams (1973), Jonathan Lear (2001) proposes that Plato's problems 
with poetry and Socrates' education program have to do with the psychological "internalization" of "cultural influences" and the 
importance of ensuring that the young do not have any morally harmful externals "for Plato, humans enter the world with a capacity to 
absorb cultural influences. The young psyche is like a resin, able to receive the impress of cultural influences before it sets into a definite 
shape" (171). I follow Lear in his interpretation of the causal relation between city and soul as being a dynamic process of internaliza-
tion and externalization.
5 This is the conclusion of Gabriel Richardson Lear (2011) study in which she argues that, against the standard interpretation, the 



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and psychological problems with mimesis, the former justifies why these problems are also 
political.

The argument in Book X lies in the Platonic distinction between the "reality" (to ōn) of 
the object and the "appearance" (to phainomenon) of it—an artist can only depict the latter 
(598b). This is true of craftsmen, painters, and even poets. A product of art, then, is an 
imitation of the appearance of reality. The object of the imitation of the poet is human and 
divine life and action—but this is an imperfect imitation, for "they produce an apparition 
(phantasmata) and not the reality (onta)." This ontology has psychological consequences 
in Socrates’ argument—since poets like Homer can neither depict truth nor possess moral 
knowledge, consumption of art cannot take place in the intellectual part of the soul as this 
is the part that engages in true knowledge and reasoning. Instead, when we listen to poetry 
or look at a painting, this activity belongs to the "element in us which is far removed from 
intelligence (phronesis) " (603b). It is for this reason that we may rationally grasp that human 
misfortunes are bearable and yet feel great pity for a tragic character in a play. By stirring 
up certain pleasures and pains related to these passions of anger, pity, love, and so on, art 
cultivates the more passionate part of the soul—it incentives mental habits in the audience. 
Therefore, all mimetic arts, insofar as they are in the business of appearance-making, are 
morally problematic.

Let us now turn to Socrates’ argument in Book III, where he takes on the role of city-
founder. Soon after Socrates founds his city, he turns to the education of the guardian class, 
for he needs to ensure that they will be courageous, gentle, and serve the city well. As far 
as they are asking these questions as the founders of the Kallipolis and for the sake of justice 
in the Kallipolis, the Platonic education program is a political program as well. For the 
cultivation of certain moral and physical characteristics is an institutional interest, and so, 
the fact that Socrates immediately turns to the education of the guardians is quite telling. 
The Kallipolis must provide special attention to what its students are learning if it is to raise 
them to fulfill their appropriate task. As such, we can detect the background assumption that 
certain education leads to certain characteristics; therefore, if institutions control education, 
they control character. Hence, through education, political structures mold the psychologies 
of their citizens. Socrates then starts out with the Greek model of physical and musical 
education, slowly examining what to keep and what to throw out (376d); it is here that his 
attack on Homer begins. His argument here is more specific to epic and tragic poetry: it is 
pleasing to perform and listen to because of its rhythm, meter, and musical qualities; and so, 
when students learn Homeric poetry, we risk that "enjoyment of the imitation gives rise to 
enjoyment in reality" (395c). Yet, his argument in Book III does not amount to much more 
than his later argument in Book X outlined above.

imitative poetry discussed in book III is an instance of the mimetic arts of book X. The problem, she argues, has to do with the 
"appearance-making" of mimesis and the psychological habituation it has on the audience. So, people who often listen to a performance 
of Homer's Iliad, for instance, may make a habit of finding pleasure in the courageous, proud, and violent character-type of Achilles. I 
follow her in my reading of Plato and Plutarch.



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Socrates notes that there are two reasons why they, as founders, need to pay as much 
attention to musical and poetic education: (a) music and poetry have the greatest effect on 
character because they penetrate the psyche through tunes, rhythms, and imagery, and (b) 
anybody with the right artistic education will be brought up to have a certain knowledge of 
what is good and beautiful (401d-402a). It is no coincidence that Socrates' artistic education 
program ends “where it ought to end. Music and poetry ought, I take it, to end in love of 
beauty (eis tà toū kaloū erōtika)” (403c). It is worth noting that, as some of Plato's other 
dialogues like Symposium show, this "love of beauty" is not to be considered as something 
base, as some may interpret erotic desire, but as a certain orientation of the soul towards 
what is truly worthy of one's desire, the kalon. In other words, poetry can influence one's 
desires and values, or, in a more Platonic sense, one's conceptualization of the good. And 
if a city can only be just when each citizen has an appropriate notion of what is good for 
them and the community, founders and rulers must ensure that whichever forces in the city 
may influence the intentional attitudes of the citizens do cultivate the proper desires and 
loves. Therefore, since none of the art that he has experienced truly impresses him, Plato has 
Socrates conclude that their city must censor mimetic art. Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians, 
whose authority Greece has followed for centuries, need be overthrown, for only prosaic 
writing depicting true moral knowledge can serve institutional goals of political justice.

Plutarch on Poetry  
In summary, these are the Platonic arguments for banning poetry from the city that I argue 
Plutarch engages: 

 (1) The moral character of a human soul has partial causes in external   
            forces. 

 (2) The end of politics is to cause good moral characters.6

 (3) Poetry is an external force which can cause  a vicious character. 

If we interpreted these theses as Socrates does in The Republic, we would suppose that 
censoring poetry is in the interest of those who structure the political community. Regardless 
of whether we accept them in this manner, these observations become part of the Platonic 
legacy that lurks in the back of Plutarch's works. For instance, his aesthetics suggest a certain 
critique of the arts, but unlike Plato, Plutarch seems more open to the benefits of mimetic 
poetry. And so, in his essay On How the Young Man Should Listen to Poetry, Plutarch is both 
wary of poetry's falsehoods and its damaging effects on youths who listen to it without a 
teacher and critical of those philosophers who turn their backs on poetry and do not take 
advantage of its use (15F)7. As I shall argue, Plutarch seems to believe in the three theses 

6 This thesis is also argued in the Gorgias.
7 In her study of Plutarch's essay, Gómez Cardó (1999) comments on Plutarch's attempt to reconcile his Platonic tendencies and 
poetry; for her, Plutarch asserts that the hedonic task of art is independent from morality, even though it is subservient to it. As such, 
it is the task of the reader to turn the work into something morally productive. She furthermore suggests that something similar takes 
places in Plutarch's composition of the Lives. While I agree with most of her conclusions relating Plato and Plutarch, I cannot help but 
wonder whether Plutarch really does think of himself as stirring up the irrational part of the soul as Gómez Cardó portrays Plutarch's 
interpretation of poetry.



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stated above, and yet, in a heroic attempt, he takes up the Platonic challenge "to speak 
in prose on her [poetry's] behalf" (607d-e). His Lives, as a work in itself, constitutes a 
philosophical defense of art.

How does Plutarch view these artistic forms and their influence on people—e.g. thesis (1)—
in the Lives? In this Platonic tradition, what distinguishes arts like poetry and painting is 
that they are, prima facie, mere appearances of objects8. They may represent an object that is 
real and true, and the product itself may be a physical object. But we do not say that mere 
ink on a page or colors on a frame constitute the art. Its content constitutes the art and 
individuates its causal power over our mental events. To consume art is an activity that takes 
place within the mind, and so, it is a mental state with certain intentionality. In this sense, 
art is an appearance; its essence is phenomenal. As a subjective experience, it sits in the soul 
and molds our psychology by creating certain upheavals of pleasure, pain, and passion; for 
Plato, this takes place in the non-rational part: "this [irrational] part of the soul he [the poet] 
arouses and feeds, and by making this strong destroys the rational part" (605b). This is to 
say, if we are not careful, poetry may recolor our conception of what is good and beautiful (to 
kalon), inciting desires and behaviors contrary to what justice and virtue demand.

I do not see how we could deny the phenomenology and psychology of art which Plato 
depicts. Plutarch does not, for although they evaluate poetry differently, their description 
of its powers does not differ. His most pre-eminent lawgivers, for instance, freely use the 
psychological effects of poetry for moral and political good. Note Plutarch's emphasis on 
Solon's use of poetry to “to justify his own actions, and sometimes to correct, chastise, 
and stir up the Athenians to noble performances” (Solon 108). He does not even criticize 
Lycurgus for introducing Homer to Spartan pedagogy, for “the few loose expressions and 
actions of ill example” of his poems “were much outweighed by serious lessons of state and 
rules of morality” (Lycurgus 56)9.

Plutarch even generalizes Plato's thesis—for him, though poetry is paradigmatic, any 
sort of art or activity which creates a similar impression on the mind may cause a moral-
psychological change (i.e. in beliefs or desires about the good). Although his philosophical 
ancestor shows a strong contempt for the sophists and orators, Plutarch notes both the 
psychological effects and moral advantage of rhetoric. Rhetoric is “in Plato's language, the 
government of the souls of men, and that her chief business is to address the affections and 
passions, which are as it were the strings and keys to the soul” (Pericles 215). On the other 
hand, Plutarch shows it may serve as moral motivation: "Panaetius, the [Stoic] philosopher, 
said that most of his [Demosthenes] orations are so written as if they were to prove this one 
conclusion, that what is honest and virtuous is for itself only to be chosen" (Demosthenes 

8 This is in line with Plato's ontological argument in book X of The Republic against art outlined above. He takes it further than we do 
here, for he states the painters and poets imitate not the truth of the matter but the appearance (598b). Homer and the tragedians, then, 
are "twice removed" from the actions of human beings and, as such, poetry stands too far from moral goodness to contain any moral 
knowledge (598e-600a).
9 Plutarch may be responding to Socrates' comments against Homer in book X of The Republic when he mockingly compares Lycurgus 
to Homer: "Sparta is better governed because of Lycurgus, and so are many other cities, great and small, because of many other individ-
uals. What about you [Homer]? Which city says that you are its great lawgiver, or attributes it success to you?" (599e).



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

396). Plutarch invoking the authority of a Stoic as famed for his ethical and political works 
as Panaetius signifies that he is not just moved by the illusions of an orator. Rhetoric serves a 
profound moral and philosophical function here, and it can only fulfill that function because 
it creates an appearance of virtue which, like poetry, leaves a psychological impression on 
the audience.

His Lives are full of such examples, but I will not go on. It makes sense that Plutarch would 
feature these moments, considering how rhetoric, poetry, and similar arts are esteemed 
in both his culture and in the cultures that he wrote about. But Plato lived in similar 
circumstances; in fact, he chose Homer as his target because he was such an important part 
of Greek pedagogy at the time. We must suspect, then, that his interest in these arts reveals 
something distinct about Plutarch’s psychology and politics as well as his project in the Lives.

Plutarch on Poetry  
So far, Plutarch obviously grants thesis 1, but seems to reject a strict interpretation of 
thesis 3 (though he eventually will partially accept it). Let us now move on to thesis 2. 
Perhaps Plutarch could have rejected the censorship and contempt for poetry if he thought 
that the feelings, thoughts, and mental habits of people are the business of politics; this 
certainly seems to be a view that modern audiences might be more inclined to believe. But 
quite obviously, this is not Plutarch's view. The ethical ends of politics are a background 
assumption in Plato and more explicitly stated in Aristotle's Ethics and Politics. We should 
not be surprised if Plutarch, who knows these two quite well, thinks similarly. 

Now, it is no coincidence that Plutarch chooses to write biographies of statesmen. These are 
figures whose characters and actions distinguished them because of their rarity and publicity. 
They acted in the public sphere and invited others to assess their actions10. For Plutarch, this 
is a philosophical and moral assessment; he tells us: "my design is not to write histories, but 
lives. And the most glorious exploits do not always furnish us with the clearest discoveries 
of virtue or vice in men" (Alexander 139). The Lives is an ethical inquiry, and if one is to 
examine what the best life is for a human being, the lives of people known by all is a good 
place to start.

Is it an accident that they are statesmen, then? Or does there exist an intrinsic relationship 
between politics and the human good? On the one hand, Plutarch often considers the private 
lives of his actors and examines their virtue independently of politics; on the other, as a glance 
over the Comparisons would show, his interest lies in their actions in the public sphere and how 
these actions relate to the sort of moral characters these agents have. And though any number 
of the accounts demonstrated in the Lives hides a complexity worthy of inquiry on its own, 
this does not undermine Plutarch's method of examining goodness  through political actors. 

10 I mean this is in the Arendtian sense. The Plutarchian Life is an imitation of Arendtian action in her work The Human Condition, 
which reveals the agent; and note, furthermore, the emphasis on the "public sphere" and "space of appearance" in Plutarch's choice of 
writing on statesmen. It is no coincidence that Arendt theorizes the space of appearance in which human life takes place from the Greek 
polis. Though perhaps we should respect Arendt's distinction between the imitation of character and action already present in Aristotle's 
Poetics. In this sense, the Plutarchian Life differs greatly from Arendtian action and Greek tragedy. On the other hand, Plutarch's Lives 
might problematize this distinction, regardless of his emphasis in the Alexander on character portrait rather than glorious deeds.



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But our question is not what the human good is. We are assuming that Plutarch shares the 
commitment of his predecessors to moral virtue and its cultivation as necessary for human 
flourishing. Our question here is whether politics has anything to do with such cultivation 
in Plutarch's theory, either for the statesmen or for the citizens. As such, for now let us 
focus on Lives which analyze the political projects of its protagonists as separately as possible 
from their other personal and social projects, the Numa and Lycurgus. We can read these as 
discussions of the proper ends and means of the lawgivers. 

According to Plutarch, the Romans appointed Numa following the death of Romulus, a 
Sabine, who, in his almost-absurd piety, is unwilling to enter politics. The story goes that 
his father and kinsman exhort him to political activity by convincing him that it is a divine 
command to improve the character of the war-like Romans (Numa 86). Numa's initial 
reluctance resembles that of Plato's philosopher in The Republic, who does not want to 
"return to the cave" and engage in political life, even if her city were better for it. These 
reasons convincing Numa to join politics also do not substantially differ from the kinds 
of quasi-lies that Socrates constructs in order to compel the philosophers of the Kallipolis 
to rule (520b); both appeal to a duty grander than themselves. Thus, Numa's story gives 
us an insight into the correct final cause of political activity. For Numa, this cause “of 
bringing the hard and iron Roman temper to somewhat more of gentleness and equity” 
(Numa 87) motivates his actions throughout his life. His introduction of public religion 
and such offices, his distribution of the Romans and Sabines by trade rather than ethnicity, 
the formation of his calendar, all are done with this end in mind: to instill a certain moral 
character in the individuals and the community overall. In Plutarch's account, Numa 
exceeded all expectation, thereby “[softening and charming] into a peaceful temper” not 
only the Romans, but also the whole of Italy, for "the love of virtue and justice flowed from 
Numa's wisdom as from a fountain, and the serenity of his spirit diffused itself, like a calm, on 
all sides” [emphasis added] (98-99). If Plutarch considers Numa to “join political power and 
the wisdom of a philosopher” (ibid), it is because he can construct the appropriate structures 
in Roman society so as to inspire them to “the love of virtue and justice.” Therefore, he is a 
praiseworthy statesman, for “he is the truest ruler who can best introduce it [such a moral 
character] into the hearts and practice of his subjects” (ibid). His success lies there—the end 
of politics is in the soul of the citizens.

It is no coincidence that Numa is paired with the other lawgiver whom Plutarch praises 
most, Lycurgus. When he takes over Sparta, he radically changes the structure of their polis 
with a moral end in mind. He leaves no aspect of Spartan society unchanged, affecting 
institutions, private property, and sexual relations. However, Lycurgus' greatest success lies 
with the education system that he sets up; he does not write any laws, believing that he could 
secure just citizens for posterity by merely habituating the youth well through an effective 
moral education (Lycurgus 63). For Plutarch, Lycurgus takes the Platonic model to heart: 
politics is not a matter of setting laws and policies, but of psychological conditioning. Rulers 
are the teachers of the ruled; in this model, justice and the well-functioning society do not 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

arise from a well-laid-out social contract, but from a nation raised to love and desire the right 
things. Plato's Socrates has the same attitude towards his education program in Republic 
II-III.  If we believe Plutarch, Lycurgus' heavily inspired “all those who have written well 
on politics, as Plato, Diogenes, and Zeno, have taken Lycurgus for their model” (80). Yet, 
he adds, political philosophers left merely words behind, while Lycurgus was the “author, 
not in writing but in reality” of a government supposedly oriented towards virtue (ibid). 
Philosophers contemplate the good and live according to virtue in this way, but statesmen, 
too, share in the good, for their actions need to be guided by a higher model of being. 
Plutarch goes as far as comparing Lycurgus to the Platonic God (78): Sparta is the product 
of his work as the universe is that of the Cosmic Maker. The politics of Lycurgus are world-
building with the purpose of creating the right conditions for virtuous activity. In the human 
world, this well-ordered space is as beautiful as the cosmos. There must be something truly 
fine about such a work, and therefore, the hand behind it must have a special knowledge of 
human life and skill comparable to that of the divine.

Furthermore, when Plutarch compares Lycurgus and Numa, he praises them both for their 
performances as rulers. They succeed in giving the Romans and Spartans respectively  a 
proper moral character, even though only Numa does it by persuasion (peithō) alone and 
without force. On the other hand, Plutarch seems to prefer Lycurgus, for Numa fails to 
cement these moral changes long-term—once he is gone, so is the Romans’ serenity. So, 
if Plutarch assesses  their performances according to their ability to cultivate virtue and 
their failure to sustain it, it follows that a good statesman has a functional end in the moral 
character of the citizens. In Plutarch's account, therefore, politics and laws are not to ignore 
any component of the community which could have moral-psychological effects.

Plutarch on the Art of Politics  
Given the end of politics, if we see art as an obstacle to human flourishing, as Plato does, 
should we not censor it? Plutarch's Lives offer a subtle response: this tension between arts 
and politics does not stand. Art and politics are not merely extrinsically related, but share an 
intrinsic nature. In this section, I argue that Plutarch views political activity as a sort of art 
that molds character through its phenomenological nature. 

It is worth noting that Lycurgus and Numa cultivate moral virtue in the Spartans and 
Romans not only as lawgivers, but also as examples. Had they been invisible, silent policy-
makers, behind the scenes, they would have failed. In praising Numa for not needing force 
to achieve his goals, Plutarch says: “the multitude, seeing an example of virtue in the greatly 
manifest and shining way of life of their ruler, they voluntarily follow reason and join him in 
friendship and concord” (Num. 20.8, tr. my own)11. What makes Numa a statesman close 
to Plato’s philosopher-king is not only his policies and virtue itself, but also that these are 
open to the Romans, that they see those traits they are to imitate in his “the way of life” (tōi 
biōi), qualified by the adjectives “greatly manifest” (eudelōi) and “shining” (lampōi). Numa's 
11 Since my analysis depends on my translation of the Greek, I provide my own here, "αὐτοὶ δὲ τὴν ἀρετὴν ἐν εὐδήλῳ παραδείγματι 
καὶ λαμπρῷ τῷ βίῳ τοῦ ἄρχοντος ὁρῶντες, ἑκουσίως σωφρονοῦσι καὶ συμμετασχηματίζονται πρὸς τὸν ἐν φιλίᾳ καὶ ὁμονοίᾳ τῇ 
πρὸς αὐτοὺς"



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On Admiration and Wonder

life is not just visible (delos), but "abundantly visible" (eudelos), and it stands out as a torch 
(lampas) in the night. Plutarch points us, then, to the publicity and perceivability of political 
actors.

The public, in witnessing the virtuous actions of these statesmen, experience what I call 
"admiration" (thauma)12. The topic for the remainder of the discussion will be exactly 
what admiration is for Plutarch, so I cannot give an exact definition here. For now, we can 
understand admiration as a mental state focusing on the noble qualities of some object 
that is seen or perceived in some way. This object stands out from the rest, as if it were not 
supposed to be there, because of its excellent qualities. Admiration, then, involves pleasure 
and awe. And if the object of admiration is some action, admiration also implies a desire to 
imitate. For these reasons, as we are about to see, the images of great political actors leave 
a certain impression on the souls of those who gaze at them. The end of both political and 
artistic performance is showing the good, noble, and beautiful (to kalon), even if not all such 
projects succeed (they often fail); in addition, they both leave phenomenological imprints 
on the soul. In this sense, the art of politics truly is an art like poetry.

In his preface to Pericles, Plutarch includes a revealing discussion of the difference 
between our attitudes toward artists and virtuous people. He begins with the observation 
that, since the soul (psuche) of human beings “by nature has acquired a love of learning 
(philomathes) and a love of seeing (philotheamon),” we ought not focus on objects unworthy 
of our senses but only those which are “good and beautiful” (tōn kalōn) (Per. 1.1, tr. my 
own). As the eye is nourished by the pleasantness and perception of certain colors, so 
there must exist objects which call our inner eye (dianoian theanasiv) to its “proper good” 
(to okeion auten agathon). For Plutarch, these objects lie in “virtuous deeds” (tois areteis 
ergois). He compares these to a secondary type of deed which does not cause imitation, 
artistic activity. But he describes the feeling of gazing on these two objects as “admiration” 
(thauma). Both refer to the mental state, and a pleasant one for that matter, of a person 
whose soul is contemplating a certain object which seems beautiful, colorful, and even 
good. It nourishes our inner eye through the perception of the appearance of something 
which the perceiving part finds worthy of its attention; namely, noble objects (ta kala). 
 
Regardless of the subjective similarity, there is a fundamental difference between the two 
admirations of virtuous and artistic deeds. Nobody, “at the sight of the statue of Jupiter 
at Pisa, ever desire to be a Phidias [...] for it does not necessarily follow that, if a piece 
of work please for its gratefulness, therefore he that wrought it deserves our admiration 
(thauma)”; on the other hand, “virtue (arete), by the bare statement of its actions, can so 
affect men's minds as to create at once both admiration (thauma) of the things done and 

12 "Admiration" is often a translation for the family of words of θαῦμα in Plutarch's Lives. Its semantic field is varied and requires 
some distinctions, which I make throughout this paper. Overall, it refers to the attitude of people towards an object or person when 
they perceive great and rare qualities in them, sometimes to the point of surprise, puzzlement, curiosity, or desire for imitation. 
For example, Ariadne "was filled with admiration (ἐθαύμασε) at Theseus' athletic prowess" (Thes.19.3, Loeb trans.); when Theseus 
and Perithous meet, each "was filled with admiration (ἐθαύμασε) at the beauty (τὸ κάλλος) and was astonished (ἠγάσθη) at the 
bravery (τήν τολμάν) of the other" (Thes. 30.2); in an argument between Eurybiades and Themistocles, Eurybiades is "struck with 
admiration (θαυμάσαντος) at his calmness" (Them.11.3); and so on.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

desire to imitate the doers of them” (Pericles 202). Art moves the psyche by inciting pleasure, 
by making us contemplate something seemingly beautiful. This we might call “aesthetic 
admiration.” On the other hand, “ethical admiration” stems from the appearance of noble 
actions and includes a desire to imitate the actor. Phidias built great things, but none of 
his works intrinsically suggest that he possessed virtue or motivated his audience to praxis. 
Our aesthetic admiration is for the statue of Jupiter, not Phidias, himself. Furthermore, 
if we desired to be like Phidias, we would desire to be like Phidias the sculptor, not in 
himself. On the other hand, the actions of Pericles cause ethical admiration, and, perhaps, 
admiration for the soul of Pericles himself. Thus, we would not want to live the life of an 
artist like Phidias, but we would want to observe and imitate the life of somebody who acts 
according to justice like Pericles. Or at least, that is the hypothesis tested in the Life of Pericles. 
 
And so, Plutarch, like Plato, separates aesthetics from ethics. However, Plutarch makes 
the former secondary to the latter, for the good person possesses something that the 
mere artist lacks. The noble (to kalon) present in ethics is not merely apparently good, 
but is also actually good, in the sense that it is the proper good of human beings; it is 
that thing that everybody implicitly desires. When manifested in a political actor, a 
person whose actions take place in public, it causes a sort of admiration which, unlike 
mere aesthetic admiration, inspires the spectators to act nobly and, thus, to live well. This 
explains how Numa could pacify all of Italy, even though he only legislated in a single 
city. In contrast, that noble and beautiful object present in aesthetics is more ephemeral, 
and never necessarily actual, for it is, presumably, a mere imitation of the actual good. 
 
Note that the difference between the artist and statesman is the difference between technical 
knowledge and practical wisdom13. For Plutarch, a good artist never needs to have any 
practical wisdom to be a good artist, but the technical knowledge needed to produce art that 
will inspire generations to come. A good ruler requires practical wisdom, for she needs to be 
acquainted with the proper ends of human lives and all sorts of activities in order to structure 
the polis well. The statesman inspires noble actions because of this quality. In this sense, the 
human good is more present in the political actor than in the artist. For this reason, to 
gaze upon the Parthenon gives Plutarch a sense of admiration for Pericles—who organized 
the whole project at a political level—and not for Phidias, who merely designed it. For a 
modern American audience, this admiration is akin to the awe that a visitor to Washington 
D.C. may feel when she gazes on the Washington Monument or the statue of Lincoln. 
 
Nevertheless, I suggest that once we return to the subjective point of view, this objective 
difference fades. Like aesthetic admiration and pleasure, ethical admiration is still a passion, 
an affective upheaval disturbing our spirit, desire, and impulses. Psychologically, it seems 
almost identical to aesthetic admiration, as they both play with our mental phenomena 
13 This difference is best outline by Aristotle in book VI in Nicomachean Ethics as the difference between techne and phronesis, but it 
also appears in Letter 90 of Seneca's Epistulae Morales ad Lucilium and book V of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. This is to say, there is a 
long philosophical tradition in the Greco-Roman world of making this distinction.



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On Admiration and Wonder

and appearances of the good. But this indiscernibility at a psychological level is quite 
useful for us. For if this identity does hold, which it seems to, it follows that if the arts 
are psychologically problematic, then so are politics. Plutarch shows that the psychological 
effects of politics may turn us to the good for human beings. Therefore, by this modus tollens 
argument, we have no reason to be as suspicious of art and to exclude it from human life. 
In this analysis, admiration is a passion, but one whose intentionality turns it towards the 
noble and beautiful (to kalon).

Skepticism  
Our argument states that aesthetic admiration is psychologically problematic if, and only 
if, ethical admiration is; since ethical admiration aims at the noble and beautiful in human 
actions and inspires virtuous activity, it is not problematic, but even positive. It follows 
that aesthetic admiration is not as problematic as some would make it. This argument 
sufficiently  challenges Plato's attack on poetry, which lied on the moral problems brought 
about by the psychological effects of appearance-making. But as the protagonist of the 
public stage, on the eye of all, the political actor also needs to be an exemplary figure and, 
thus, an expert in appearance-making; nevertheless, she does not cultivate vice, but virtue.  
 
It is not enough to say that a political actor is different from a tragic or epic poet in that the 
former displays the actual good for human beings while the latter mere appearance. For in 
fact, both are illusions in one way or another. Whether the admired virtue lies in real people 
or in imaginary characters is not an epistemic distinction which the audience can completely 
make. From the audience's point of view, Numa, Demosthenes, and Homeric poets are all 
performing, causing awe at their actions and pleasure in the contemplation of these scenes. Now, 
perhaps we could say that only truly good actions can cause truly unproblematic admiration; 
but still, the subjective experience of the audience would not register that as we could easily 
imagine that a person admiring Numa and another admiring Alexander could have identical 
mental states.  If they do differ, we might still object that this is not knowable to them. And 
it is in the inner upheavals that the arts reveal their dark colors. However, this response leads 
us to an even more dangerous path, so we should let an interlocutor speak on Plato's behalf. 
 
Politics, the Platonist objector proposes, is psychologically problematic. For politics 
is a space of appearances14. This creates a problem: politics is about our admiration 
for people who, because of their appearance as noble, move us towards a good life, yet 
ethical admiration can also aim at a deceptive object, as aesthetic admiration often does. 
 
For example, the Platonist objector points out, Plutarch does tell us that Pericles, in order 
“to avoid any feeling of commonness, or any satiety on the part of the people, presented 

14 I mean this is in the Arendtian sense of the word: "[the polis] is the space appearance in the widest sense of the word, namely, the 
space where I appear to others as others appear to me, where men exist no merely like other living or inanimate things but make their 
appearance explicitly" (2018, 199). However, for Arendt agents reveal themselves through action and speech in the space of appearance, 
whereas for us now, action in the space of appearance is not sufficient.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

himself at intervals only” (206). In this way, Pericles can preserve a certain mystic image 
of excellence before the Athenians. We stand at awe at his public works and oratory, but as 
far as his actual virtue goes, we have no reason to think that we have any true knowledge 
of it. It is a problem of skepticism: how are we to know that those whom we admire are 
worthy of admiration? Presumably, we could say, we can distinguish the admirable from 
the unadmirable because we have some sense of what the ethical is. But the point of ethical 
admiration in political life is to imitate good characters and learn ethics that way; if we 
already had such moral knowledge, then we would not need political actors to guide us. 
On the other hand, if we do not have such moral knowledge, then it is mere chance that 
we are impressed by the right thing. This is all to say that admiration of virtue seems to be 
necessarily prior to virtue, if Plutarchian politics is to have any purpose, but unless some 
act virtuously purely by chance, virtue is necessarily prior to the admiration of virtue. If we 
rightly admire by chance, even if we have some true opinion about those whom we admire, 
we will never know whether we properly know that such-and-such is the right object of 
admiration. This Menoan paradox, still as theoretical as it may seem, does have practical 
consequences. Younger people, for instance, are the most impressionable, but are also those 
who know the least about good character (insofar as they have not been raised yet); on the 
other hand, they are the ones whom a political leader needs to pay the most attention to in 
her activities and world-building. But once we grant this skepticism as a problem for youths, 
we may realize that, from the epistemic and ethical point of view, those of us who are not yet 
sages are effectively children. The threat materializes when we realize that we have no tools to 
distinguish between what seems good and what is good, especially when it comes to "other 
minds." As such, we are prone to confuse the two. Therefore, the Platonic argument follows: 
if our communities are to cultivate good characters, they cannot risk having deceptive 
objects like poetry, art, rhetoric, or anything that might create the semblance of the good. 
 
Plutarch sees this threat, for instance, in Alexander. Having described an episode in which 
Alexander gets into a disagreement with Aristotle over publishing some of his works, 
Plutarch tells us, with some degree of irony, that “[Alexander] was naturally a great lover 
of all kinds of learning and reading,” for he sleeps with the Iliad and a dagger under his 
pillow, “declaring that he esteemed [the Iliad] a perfect portable treasure of all military 
virtue and knowledge” (Alexander 144). The good for Alexander is disguised as military, so 
Alexander's engagement with the poem becomes an admiration for the figure of Achilles, 
“whose gravestone he anointed [...] and crowned it with garlands, declaring how happy 
he esteemed him, in having while he lived so faithful a friend, and when he was dead, 
so famous a poet to proclaim his actions” (150). It is no coincidence that Alexander's 
vices lie in his love of glory and explosive temper; perhaps had the Nicomachean Ethics 
lay under his pillow, he would have turned out differently. That Alexander thinks of 
himself as a devout lover of wisdom but also carries the Iliad around suggests the extent to 
which the problem of skepticism goes. For poetry disguises itself as presenting something 
desirable and alike to the good and beautiful, but reality might be quite different. 



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On Admiration and Wonder

 
Now the Platonist can turn our earlier conclusion against us: since admiration in art is 
problematic, then it must be in politics as well. In fact, the Lives are full of such examples 
of vicious public figures inspiring others, sometimes to virtue, other times to vice. Like 
his own hero, Alexander the Great goes down in history as admirable by many; at least 
Plutarch's Caesar, who imitates Alexsander as a hero in an imperial campaign, seems to 
think so (Caesar 206). Similarly, Demosthenes’ rhetoric inspires virtuous actions in the 
Athenians, but Demosthenes is revealed to be corrupt. While Plutarch sometimes calls 
Numa a philosopher-king, at other times he mocks Numa's ridiculous religious habits and 
his failure to secure long-term virtue in Rome. For those of us that grew up listening to 
the bravery of Columbus, it is akin to then learning of the genocides caused by European 
colonialism in America. The list of aporia-inducing ethical ironies goes on. Plutarch's 
masterful presentation of the nuances of the Lives of these so-called "great men'' invites a 
similar reading to Plato's reading of poetry; politics, like poetry, disguises itself as presenting 
something desirable and alike to the good and beautiful, but the fact may be quite different. 
Plutarch, thus, might take the third and final Platonic thesis stated earlier and generalize it 
to not only art, but also politics. They exist, after all, in the world of appearances, which feed 
our soul in ways that corrupt its conceptions of what is good.

Is Plutarchian moral and political philosophy, then, as some have recently called it, a 
“Renaissance of Spartan philosophy”?15 The Spartan response is insufficient, I suggest, for 
even Plutarch has his own doubts about the Spartan polis. Commenting on their slavery 
practices and cruelty towards the Helots, he says, “So that it was truly observed by one, 
that in Sparta he who was free was most so, and he that was a slave there, the greatest slave 
in the world” (Lycurgus 78). But, Plutarch reasons, these practices of hunting Helots, for 
instance, must have begun after Lycurgus, for Lycurgus is too virtuous to have instituted 
them (ibid). Still, with no other evidence to back this claim, Plutarch raises the question 
to the reader: was Lycurgus just because he did not hunt slaves, or did he not hunt slaves 
because he was just? In Lycurgus, Plutarch first suggests that Lycurgus did not begin the 
hunting of Helots, but he refuses to commit to his opinion, bringing this possibility back in 
the Comparison of Numa with Lycurgus, “if we must admit the treatment of the Helots to be 
a part of Lycurgus's legislation, a most cruel and iniquitous proceeding, we must own that 
Numa was by a great deal the more human and Greek-like legislator” (Comparison of Numa 
with Lycurgus 102). Plutarch intentionally leaves readers in doubt. As far as we can know, 
Lycurgus may not have been such a figure to imitate. To dismiss the Spartan objector, not 
even our best example serves to surmount this moral skepticism.

15 Liebert (2016, 226). In this political theory analysis of the Lives, Liebert suggests that Plutarch rejects all of Plato's and Aristotle's 
criticisms of Sparta for being a timocratic state with a "psychological foundation" on "philotimia" (the love of honor) (104); as such, 
Plutarch's Lycurgus' Sparta "redeems timocracy" (124). I highly respect Liebert's comparison of Plutarch's analysis of Sparta as a 
response to Plato and Aristotle, and it seems that he is quite right; furthermore, I take his theory of political form in Plutarch to be very 
insightful. But I cannot help but disagree with his reading of Lycurgus; so, I take Liebert to somewhat represent the Spartan objector 
(though his work contains more nuance).



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

On the other hand, this case illustrates how Plutarch's method may solve skepticism as a 
problem for admiration. If he cannot give a definitive answer to whether Lycurgus was a 
virtuous person and legislator in the last analysis, it is because he does not conjure him up as 
a novelist does in crafting characters. In writing historical biographies, he needs to compare 
sources and draw inferences about factual truths, from which he makes moral conclusions. 
He does not intend to construct false narratives, as we sometimes do with children when 
we need a didactic story. The Lives do not present a mere appearance, but a genuine inquiry 
into the facts of what happened in the past and how to interpret them. Plutarch may be 
writing lives, but these are historical lives. He seeks to know the actions of each figure and 
their moral worth, whether they were in fact worthy of admiration and remain as admirable. 
This is to say, we may grant to the Platonist that a fifth-century Athenian may not know 
whether Pericles is truly admirable. Still, readers of Pericles may have a better grasp of the 
morally relevant facts, dispelling our moral skepticism and thereby bringing us closer to the 
truth about the human good.

The Lives, hence, make us admire correctly. But why have this end? The preface to Timoleon 
suggests that this work is a moral pedagogy for adults; one which proceeds through a critical 
method (325):

The Lives aim to teach virtue through political history, not unlike the way in which the 
Greeks read Homer. But note that there is a selection process taking place—not at an 
editorial level as much, but at a cognitive and psychological one in the part of the reader. 
Each life in Lives requires a critical examination followed by a discriminative process of what 
we ought to learn and what we ought to avoid. For if we could just learn from Lycurgus 
what it means to be good and just, then why write Numa? Why all these comparisons? So, 
the inquiry is not merely historical, but ethical and dialectical.  For a dialectic examines the 
appearance from all sides and pierces through it to find a real, latent object. This explains 
why a reader of any “Life” can neither draw a simple conclusion nor fall in love with its 
hero. We cannot completely admire any of these men once Plutarch has planted the seeds 
of doubt. Was Lycurgus truly just? Was Numa a fool? Did Dion’s and Brutus’ bad fortune 
destroy their eudaimonic projects? The apparent good of these statesmen cannot stand 
Plutarch’s critical scrutiny. He extirpates our passion of admiration for the “great men” of 
the past, and with this gone, so is the possible skeptic confusion.

It was for the sake of others that I first commenced writing biographies; 
but I find myself proceeding and attaching myself to it for my own; the 
virtues of these great men serving me as a sort of looking-glass, in which I 
may see how to adjust and adorn my own life. Indeed, it can be compared 
to nothing but daily living and associating together; we receive, as it were, 
in our inquiry, and entertain each successive guest, view [their stature 
and their qualities] and select from their actions all that is noblest and 
worthiest to know.



49Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

On Admiration and Wonder

But Plutarch cannot turn his readers into cynics, lest we learn nothing good. Indeed, that 
deceptive admiration is gone, but Plutarch leaves us with a justifiable, philosophical wonder. 
This is the thauma familiar to readers of Plato’s Theaetetus or Aristotle’s Metaphysics. It 
borders admiration in its being a psychological predicate. For Plutarch’s language suggests 
that he judges his own work to have a certain psychological effect as well (Timoleon 325): 

 "My method, on the contrary, is, by the study of history, and by the familiarity  
 required in writing, to habituate my memory to receive and retain images [in  
 the soul (tais psuchais)] of the best and worthiest characters." 

Like Homer’s poetry, Lycurgus’ policies, or Numa’s prayers, Plutarch’s Lives are meant to 
leave certain impressions on our minds. In that sense, they have a phenomenology and, thus, 
incite passions. However, Plutarch distinguishes them from the phantoms of Democritus 
(ibid), granting his characters a greater ontology than that of Homer’s Achilles or the 
Demosthenes of the Crown. “These images of the best and worthiest” are somewhere in 
between imitation and reality and fluctuate between the two. As such, Plutarchian wonder 
is a mental state which, puzzled by the appearance of a seemingly great life, contains a desire 
to inquire and learn what lies beneath—it is an admiration transformed by aporia. As a 
sub-species of admiration, it aims at the ethical good and noble actions, but, perceiving 
the aporetic tensions lurking in human affairs, this wonder incites to seek the truth in 
moral and political life. As such, none of Plutarch’s “heroes” sufficiently portray virtue 
on their own; instead, they  collectively form an exemplar of virtue for us to recollect 
and imitate when needed. Once deconstructed, the “images of the best and worthiest 
characters” constitute a picture which an active intellect needs to put together. Arguably, 
an infinite amount of Lives would be needed to find a perfect account of goodness, but the 
asymptote nature of virtue merely confirms which attitudes we should have towards those 
who exhibit them. The right way to engage with great deeds, then, is not to merely rejoice 
in them as a beautiful painting, nor to imitate them as perfect models, but to investigate 
them. For, as Plutarch concludes his preface to Pericles discussed earlier, “the Good” (to 
kalon) inspires “the spectator (ten theaten)” and “forms his character” not merely through 
“its ideal representation (ti mimesei) alone, but through the investigation (tei historiai) 
of its work it [to kalon]” [emphasis added] (Per. 2.3, Loeb trans.). Only then can the 
appearance of goodness become something less deceiving than mere poetic phenomena16. 
 
Thus, as Plutarch teaches us to read poetry in On How the Young Man Should Listen to 
Poetry, in the Lives he teaches us how to properly admire political actors. Still, the Lives are 
not essays, but a form of literature not dissimilar from Homer. Plutarch’s writing imitates 
the ways of life, actions, and souls of human beings—he often compares himself to painters 
or sculptors creating a portrait. The Lives are more than mere prosaic hymns to good 
16 Ultimately, this interpretation would place Plutarch with the New Academics like Arcesilaus, Philo, and Cicero than the supposed 
orthodoxy of the Old Academy. This is not to say that Plutarch has no Platonist dogma, as Babut (1994) resists or Nikolaidis (1997) 
insists; rather, this interpretation is in line with Hadot (1995)'s placement of Plutarch with these New Academics (it is worth noting 
though that Hadot does not analyze Plutarch's works himself but merely follows Babut): for Hadot, what characterizes these Academics 
is a return to a more Socratic philosophical discourse that is "critique, interrogatif et aporetique" (1995, 217). We might imagine the 
dialectical examination of Lives as a "spiritual exercise" in the Hadotian sense.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

people; Plutarch embellishes his writing with his skills in rhetoric and poetry, and his subjects 
are ethically complex at best. And through this imitation of their ways of life, he provokes 
psychological upheavals, the passions of admiration and wonder. But this latter passion does 
not completely lie in a part of the soul “far from the intelligence (phroneseōs),” as Plato thinks 
all passions induced by imitative arts do. Plutarchian wonder does have a phenomenological 
nature identical to a dangerous passion, whether it aims at artistic sublimity or moral and 
political excellence; still, ultimately, this wonder is an inquisitive disposition, cultivating a 
love of goodness and wisdom in the person. It is what the Stoics called an "ethical emotion" 
(eupathos). In a word, Platonic philosophy may begin in Plutarchian wonder. As a pedagogical 
exercise in critical thinking, Socratic inquiry, and moral formation, this aesthetic work is not a 
threat to either ethical or political life. Perhaps Plato would not welcome Antony or Alexander, 
and perhaps a certain reading of the Lives would dismiss it as promoting an ideology of “great 
men”. I propose a contrary reading: the Lives critiques ideology and forms neither admirers of 
“great men” nor lovers of honor and power, but critical thinkers who want to discover what 
is good and just, and are aware of our individual moral fallibilities and epistemic limitations. 
Therefore, it also serves as a blueprint of how to engage with art and poetry, our political history, 
and, ultimately, one another. Even Homer's Iliad, American presidential debates, conversations 
at a bar, or Zoom dates may have some goodness, if done correctly. Plutarch exhorts us, on the 
one hand, to not let our admiration and love of objects mesmerize us and destroy our sense of 
what is good. On the other, he also tells us not to expel them either from human affairs, but to 
engage with these wonderful things in our everyday life as interlocutors. Certain Platonisms may 
tell us that this passionate engagement is dangerous to our mental health and communities. But 
our conversation with Plutarch's Platonism concludes that the wonder we may feel for poetry, 
politics, and even other people in our lives, when cultivated correctly, is not just conducive to 
philosophy, but to ethical flourishing and political justice as well.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition, 2nd ed. First published in 1958. Facsimile of the 

first edition with an introduction by Margaret Canovan and foreword by Danielle Allen. 
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Babut, Daniel. "Du scepticisme au dépassement de la raison: Philosophie et foi religieuse  
chez Plutarque." In Parerga, 549-581. Lyon: MOM Éditions, 1994.

Gómez Cardó, Pilar. "Plutarco y la Poesía: del Estado a la Escuela." In Plutarco, Platón 
y Aristóteles: Actas del V Congreso Internacional de la International Plutarch Society  
(Madrid-Cuenca, 4-7 de mayo de 1999), edited by Aurelio Pérez Jiménez, José García  
López y Rosa Ma Aguilar, 365-382. Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas, 1999.

Hadot, Pierre. Qu'est-ce que la philosophie antique? Éditions Gallimard, 1995.



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On Admiration and Wonder

Lear, Jonathan. "Inside and Outside the Republic." In Essays on Plato's Psychology, edited 
by Ellen Wagner, 168-201. Boston: Lexington Books, 2001. 

Liebert, Hugh. Plutarch's Politics: Between City and Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 2016.

Nikolaidis, A.G. "Plutarch and the Old, Middle and New Academies." In Plutarco, Platón 
y Aristóteles: Actas del V Congreso Internacional de la International Plutarch Society 
(Madrid-Cuenca, 4-7 de mayo de 1999), edited by Aurelio Pérez Jiménez, José García  
López y Rosa Ma Aguilar, 397-416. Madrid: Ediciones Clásicas, 1999.

Plato. The Republic. Translated by Tom Griffith. Edited by G.R.F. Ferrari. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2017. First published in 2000.

Plutarch. Lives. Translated by John Dryden. Edited by Arthur Hugh Clough. Introduction 
by James Atlas. 2 vols. New York: The Modern Library, 2001.

Richardson Lear, Gabriel. "Mimesis and Psychological Change in Republic III." In Plato 
and the Poets, 195-216. Mnemosune, Suplements vol. 328. Brill, 2011. 

Williams, Bernard. "The Analogy of City and Soul in Plato's Republic." In Essays on 
Plato's Psychology, edited by Ellen Wagner, 157-176. Boston: Lexington Books, 2001. 
Originally published in Exegesis and Argument: Studies in Greek Philosophy Presented 
to Gregory Vlastos, edited by E.N. Lee, A.P.D. Mourelatos, and R.M. Rorty, 196-206. 
Assen: the Netherlands, 1973.



52

δι
άν

οι
α

THE SHADOW OF HEGEL
 in Kierkegaard’s Notion of Subjectivity

MATTEO DE DONATO 

The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard is fundamentally the philosophy of the individual. 
Born to an affluent family in Copenhagen in 1813, Kierkegaard was greatly influenced 

in his intellectual development by the prevailing notions of the Danish Golden Age, an 
age featuring new creativity in the arts and sciences, including painting, architecture, and 
chemistry. Kierkegaard witnessed nihilism growing in spite of these achievements, however. 
Poets and literary critics such as Ludwig Tieck and August Wilhelm Schlegel used (or misused, 
according to Kierkegaard) the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte to justify their ironic 
and solipsistic relativism. The centrality of the subject in Fichte’s philosophy was attractive 
to the German Romantics, who looked for philosophical justification for their nihilistic and 
relativistic rejection of the objective world1. In an age where long-held traditions and beliefs were 
slipping away, Kierkegaard worked to revitalize the concepts of truth, faith, and subjectivity. 
 
Kierkegaard’s canon defies easy categorization. He has been characterized as an existentialist 
and essentialist, a progressive and a reactionary, a proponent of German Idealism and 
one of its harshest critics. The question of Hegelian thought in Kierkegaard's work, then, 
is one of enduring interest for scholars. Kierkegaard was the first in a long tradition of 
critics to reject Hegel’s absolute idealism as a philosophy of identity that effectively 
1 Jon Stewart, “The Crisis of the Danish Golden Age as the Problem of Nihilism,” in The Crisis of the Danish Golden Age and Its Modern 
Resonance, eds. Nathaniel Kramer and Jon Stewart, New edition (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2020), 125-127.



53Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

The Shadow of Hegel

“swallows” the individual2. The beginning of Sickness Unto Death, in which Kierkegaard 
posits that the “self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself 
to itself in the relation,” has been interpreted as parodying Hegel’s obtuse writing style. 
Other parts of Kierkegaard’s authorship appear more explicitly anti-Hegelian: in the 
Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climacus (Kierkegaard’s pseudonym) boldly 
asserts “[dialectical] mediation is a mirage.”3 In spite of this pervasive anti-Hegelianism, 
Kierkegaard owes much of his philosophical foundations to the German idealist. What 
Kierkegaard called his “Socratic task”–the task that structured disparate works across the 
authorship–is fundamentally Hegelian. Not only is it Hegel’s Socrates that Kierkegaard 
uses as his model for subjectivity, it is Hegel’s absolute knowing subject that Kierkegaard 
uses to situate this notion of subjectivity as the telos of his philosophical project. 
 
In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel interprets Socrates as the world-historical 
inventor of subjectivity. Socrates, Hegel maintains, was the first to ground the subject–as 
opposed to external social mores and laws–as the site of the discovery of the ethical. Hegel 
identifies Socrates’s daimonion as central to the invention of subjectivity. In the Apology, 
Socrates justifies his actions by explaining that when he is about to make a mistake, he is 
warned by this daimonion: an entirely negative force that is neither completely internal 
nor completely external, but is nonetheless personal4. With this concept, Socrates “posited 
the Individual as capable of final moral decision, in contraposition to Country and to 
Customary Morality.”5 The Socratic concept of maieutics, or “the art of midwifery,” 
further demonstrates the subjectivity of Socrates’s method. Socrates fashioned himself 
as a “midwife of ideas,” who, rather than promoting any specific positive doctrine, 
helped his pupils reach their own conclusions through their individual, internal reason6.  
 
The Athenians of the time, however, derived their ethics from outside of themselves rather 
than from inward reflection; to receive guidance they looked not to their own subjective 
reason, but to tradition, law, and the gods. Hegel identified “public religion” as the basis for 
the Athenian State; Athenians are bound together by their shared reverence for this objective 
source of ethics. It is up to the broad sphere of tradition, religion, law, etc.–Sittlichkeit or 
“ethical life”–to decide how an individual should behave. Sittlichkeit is built upon “Objective 
Spirit,” the objective patterns of social interactions and cultural institutions. When seeking 
direction, the ancient Athenians would ask the Oracle of Delphi for the right course of 
action7. There was no notion that ethics could be discovered through individual introspection.  
 
The invention of subjectivity, then, signified a denial of the entirety of Athenian society.  

2 Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda, The Dash: The Other Side of Absolute Knowing (MIT Press, 2018), 1.
3 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Alastair Hannay, 1st edition (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 166.
4 Plato, Apology in Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. G. M. A. Grube, Second 
Edition,2 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2002), 31c-d.
5 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Frederick C. Beiser, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume 1: Greek Philosophy to Plato, 
trans. E. S. Haldane (Lincoln: Nebraska, 1995), 346.
6 Plato, Theaetetus, ed. Bernard Williams and Myles Burnyeat, trans. M. J. Levett, UK ed. edition (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 
Company, Inc., 1992), 27.
7 Georg W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde (Mineola, N.Y.; Newton Abbot: Dover Publications, 2005) § 145 and 
G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 358.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

For this reason, Hegel diagnoses Socrates’s pedagogy as purely negative. In calling 
Socrates a “negative” figure, Hegel is not saying he has a pessimistic disposition; rather, 
Socrates rejects the validity of the world as it currently is, but does not provide a positive 
(ie., substantive) replacement. Socrates’s daimonion, for instance, functions entirely 
negatively. In Plato’s Apology, Socrates explains that it is a “voice” which “turns me away 
from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything.”8 The 
daimonion “turns away” from the false, but does not directly posit the true. The concept 
of aporia further illustrates the centrality of negation in Socrates’s subjectivity. In the 
“aporetic” dialogues, which include the Meno, Euthyphro, and Gorgias, Socrates challenges 
his interlocutors to explain their positions on truth, justice, or other philosophical 
concepts. Through questioning, Socrates reveals how the notions of his interlocutors 
are ill-conceived and contradictory. Socrates does not, however, offer a replacement 
for these mistaken judgments; rather, the dialogues end in aporia; having demonstrated 
the contradiction, Socrates provides no positive replacement for the flawed concepts.  
 
Hegel asserts that Aristophanes’s play Clouds offers a true account of Socrates because it 
demonstrates the radicality of this negative method. It seems strange that Hegel has a favorable 
judgement of Aristophanes’s work; indeed, the play viciously lampoons Socrates’s thought as 
not only buffoonish, but dangerous. It is precisely the degree to which Aristophanes condemns 
Socrates that he demonstrates “the truth of Socrates.” Hegel maintains that Aristophanes 
understood Socratic philosophy as negative and that his play elucidated the Athenian’s 
reaction to Socrates9.  In Clouds, Socrates tells Strepsiades: “If one idea comes to nothing, let 
it go, retrace your steps, then give those thoughts another good shake.”10 The word “shake” 
emphasizes the disarray caused by Socrates’s method; when Strepsiades reaches aporia–
when “one idea comes to nothing”–he must reject all his premises and try again. Socrates’s 
negativity was, to use Kierkegaard’s terminology, “absolute infinite negativity.” This sort of 
negativity does not negate “this or that particular phenomenon” but the entire social whole, 
the entire world of the object11. Aristophanes shows that this negativity was so overwhelming 
that it necessitated Socrates’s death–because it could no longer be integrated into ethical life. 
 
Aristophanes understood, Hegel contends, how this radical negativity endangered the 
totality of Athenian life. Standing in opposition to the numerous commentators before 
him, Hegel asserts that the Athenians acted correctly in convicting Socrates12. Hegel 
criticized the historian Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann for arguing that Socrates’s treatment 
was “revolting to humanity.” Hegel rejects this interpretation of Socrates’s trial because it 
downplays the radical nature of Socrates’s philosophy; Hegel believes that, based on the ethic 
of their time, Athenians were “bound to react against [Socrates] according to their law.” 

8 Plato, Apology, 31c-d.
9 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 347.
10 Aristophanes, Clouds, ed. John Claughton and Judith Affleck, Cambridge Translatio edition (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge 
University Press, 2012), lines 743-6.
11 Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Ebook edition (Princeton, N.J. Great Britain: 
Princeton University Press, 2000), 261.
12 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 350.



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13Aristophanes’s account is invaluable because it illuminates why Socrates deserved execution 
under Athenian law: his subjectivity entailed a complete negation of objective situation. 

Kierkegaard is openly indebted to Hegel’s treatment of Socrates as a negative figure. His 
doctoral thesis, The Concept of Irony, is in constant critical dialogue with Hegel’s account of 
Socrates. In his discussion of the titular concept, Kierkegaard identifies irony as a qualification 
of subjectivity, and it is in this ironic rejection of the objective that the subject is negatively 
free14. Kierkegaard’s explicit definition of irony elucidates the Hegelian connection between 
negativity and subjectivity: 

The world-historical invention of subjectivity, then, required irony’s complete negation of 
the ethical order. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard explains why “Socrates can very well 
be called the founder of morality in the sense Hegel thinks of it, and that his position still 
could have been irony. The good as task, when the good is understood as the infinitely 
negative, corresponds to the moral, that is, the negatively free subject,” clearly echoing the 
sentiment expressed in Hegel’s Lectures.15 The moral is “infinitely negative:” it contains no 
positivity within it. Hegel asserts that Socrates’s negative method could not amount to any 
sort of speculative16 philosophy, but remained “ein individuelles Thun,” an “individual 
doing.”17 Just as Hegel did, Kierkegaard saw Socrates as stopping short before speculative, 
positive, thought, because Socrates did not negate his negativity. Socrates did not reach a 
sublation, or a dialectical mediation, of the positive and the negative–of objectivity and 
subjectivity. Negativity, for Socrates, was infinite and absolute.

In reconstructing Hegel’s argument, Kierkegaard pays special attention to the anti-
speculative character of Socrates’s method. For Kierkegaard, the fact that Socrates made 
no attempt to transcend the opposition between subject and object is “the mark of truth.” 
Kierkegaard, then, largely accepts Hegel’s treatment of Socrates, with one key modification: 
for Hegel, in remaining in negativity, Socrates had erred, but for Kierkegaard, it was that 
very impasse that Socrates achieved–his aporia–that was to be emulated. For Kierkegaard, it 
is precisely this negativity which allowed for Socrates to interrogate the truth. Though they 
may differ in their evaluation of him, the Socrates of The Concept of Irony is, at its core, the 
Socrates of Hegel.

13 Ibid., 362.
14 Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 29.
15 Ibid., 235.
16 That is, providing an account of the Absolute.
17 Ibid., 227.

[W]e have irony as the infinite absolute negativity. It is negativity because 
it only negates; it is infinite, because it does not negate this or that 
phenomenon; it is absolute, because that by virtue of which it negates is a 
higher something that still is not. The irony establishes nothing, because 
that which is to be established lies behind it. It is a divine madness that 
rages like a Tamerlane and does not leave one stone upon another.



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Kierkegaard would later reject the blatant Hegelianism of The Concept of Irony. Indeed, the 
philosopher characterizes the work as a misgiving, riddled with Hegelian concepts he would 
only later discuss dismissively in the works Kierkegaard saw as comprising his “authorship.”18 
In spite of his apparent rejection of Hegel, the Hegelian notion of Socrates that Kierkegaard 
advanced in The Concept of Irony grounds his broader formulations of subjectivity, truth, and 
faith. After treating the ancient Greek philosopher at length in The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard 
continues to use Hegel’s Socrates as a model, especially in the structure of his work Either/Or. 
 
Kierkegaard divides his work Either/Or into two parts, ostensibly written by two different 
authors. The first part of the work is attributed to an anonymous esthete called A., who, 
embodying contemporary subjectivity, notes that when he became an adult he found “that 
the rich delight of love was to acquire a well-to-do girl, that the blessedness of friendship 
was to help each other in financial difficulties, [...] that piety was to go to communion once 
a year.”19 A. advances an ironic detachment from traditional conceptions of love, friendship, 
industriousness, and even faith. It is negativity that engenders this denial of the universal 
ethic of the day: “I have, I believe, the courage to fight against everything; but I do not have 
the courage to acknowledge anything.”20 Kierkegaard is clearly sympathetic to this account of 
contemporary life, especially its account of the superficiality of modern faith, which echoes 
Kierkegaard’s critique of the bourgeois lifestyle of the clergy in the last issue of The Moment.21 
 
The author of the second half of Either/Or, the fictitious Judge William, rigorously defends 
the ethic of the day by explaining the virtues of bourgeois society and morality. He defends 
the virtue of marital love as divine, in direct opposition to A.'s unequivocal, “[m]arry or do 
not marry you will regret it either way.”22 William continues his defense of the universal 
ethic in opposition to the Esthete when he lauds Objective spirit as “a social, a civic self,” 
and emphasizes the importance of ethical responsibility as it relates to civic duty.23 Just as 
Kierkegaard is sympathetic to the Esthete’s point of view, he equally accepts that of Judge 
William; many of Judge Williams’ arguments mimic those that Kierkegaard gives against the 
German Romantics in the Concept of Irony.24

The dualistic structure of the work reflects Hegel’s Socratic lesson: Judge William acts as the 
Sittlichkeit–in this case 19th century bourgeois ethics–which A. rejects. Kierkegaard does 
not favor one view over the other; rather, the two viewpoints must exist in contradiction 
despite the impossibility of their mediation. As evidenced by Kierkegaard’s other writing, 
both positions offer valuable critiques, in Kierkegaard’s mind, and to privilege one over the 
other would be foolish. Even though both positions provide insight, however, mediation 

18 Lore Hühn, “Irony and Dialectic: On a Critique of Romanticism in Kierkegaard and Hegel’s Philosophy,” MLN 128, no. 5 (2013): 
1063.
19 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Later Printing edition (Prince-
ton, N.J. Great Britain: Princeton University Press, 2000), 42-43.
20 Ibid., 39.
21 Søren Kierkegaard, “My Task” in The Moment, 10 in The Essential Kierkegaard, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Later 
Printing edition (Princeton, N.J. Great Britain: Princeton University Press, 2000), 347.
22 Kierkegaard, Either/Or in The Essential Kierkegaard, 43, 7.1
23 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or in The Essential Kierkegaard,  82.
24 See the chapter “Irony after Fichte” in The Concept of Irony.



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of the two is impossible. Kierkegaard stresses that truth appears not when an opposition 
is mediated, but when that opposition is first confronted. Indeed, the title “Either/Or” 
refers to a passage in Hegel’s Science of Logic where he stresses the importance of sublating 
a dichotomy (an “either-or”) through dialectical mediation. Kierkegaard, however, did not 
wish to go beyond the dichotomy, and suggested that truth results not from sublating or 
mediating contradiction, but from confronting it. In this manner, Kierkegaard follows 
Socrates’s emphasis on negativity, specifically aporia. There is no mediation between the two 
viewpoints; rather, they remain in irresolvable contradiction. A.’s position–in spite of its 
value–cannot be integrated into the bourgeois universal because of its inherently subjective 
dimension. The Concluding Unscientific Postscript describes Either/Or as “a polemic against 
truth as knowledge.”25 That is, the work stresses that the subjective rejection of objective 
Spirit offers an equally valuable form of truth as objective knowledge does.

Privileged among the authorship as a work to which Kierkegaard attached his real name (albeit 
only as the editor), the Concluding Unscientific Postscript offers one of the most comprehensive 
accounts of Kierkegaard’s notion of subjectivity and truth. Much of the Concluding 
Unscientific Postscript uses Hegel’s language of dialectics against itself. Even the title of the 
work may be targeting the Phenomenology of Spirit, intended by Hegel to be the beginning 
of a “science of experience.”26 It seems strange, then, to assert a fundamental Hegelianism 
in the Postscript. The relation between subjectivity and truth–that subjectivity is truth, and 
truth subjectivity–is derived from the Hegelian Socrates formulated in the Concept of Irony. 
 
Central to the task of the Concluding Unscientific Postscript is explaining the connection 
between truth and subjectivity. Climacus asserts that a certain type of truth can only be 
achieved through subjectivity, and that subjectivity can only achieve that type of truth. This 
truth is the truth of our most important personal ethical commitments, including, above 
all, faith. The author posits that, “reflection of inwardness is the subjective thinker’s double 
reflection. In thinking, he thinks the universal, but as existing in this thinking, as assimilating 
this in his inwardness, he becomes more and more subjectively isolated.”27 The individual 
considers the universal ethic (“thinks the universal”) but through her consideration of it 
becomes alienated from it. Her self-discovery requires an anti-objective form of inquiry. 
This description reflects Hegel’s notion of Socrates as not focused on particular objects, but 
on the universal. Just as Socrates is said to “know nothing” because he lacked the knowledge 
of particular objective pursuits, the “subjective thinker” is not focused on knowledge of 
particulars. In his double-reflection, that is, his reflection on his own reflection (“subjectivity 
to the second power”), the subjective thinker becomes separated from the ‘objective Spirit.’ 

Climacus’s assertion that subjectivity cannot be expressed through direct communication 
further illustrates the aporia of subjectivity. The subjective truth, Climacus contends, cannot 

25 Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Alastair Hannay, 1st edition (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 211.
26 Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Terry Pinkard and Michael Baur (Cambridge University Press, 
2019), 6.
27 Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 62.



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be integrated into objectivity through direct language–it must be expressed through indirect 
means, including art and poetry. 

Just as there was no mediation between Socrates’s subjectivity, and the objectivity of 
Athenian Sittlichkeit, to directly express double reflection is “precisely a contradiction.” 
28Climacus relates this explicitly to Socrates’s method: “Everything subjective, which due 
to its dialectical inwardness eludes a direct form of expression, is an essential secret.”29 
This assertion of not only the subjective as a realm of truth, but of the impossibility of 
mediation between subjective and objective truth, helps Climacus ground his argument on 
the importance of subjectivity in “becoming a Christian.” 

After his assertion of the truth in subjectivity, Climacus explains the steps towards “becoming 
a Christian” through an assertion of the paradox of subjectivity: Hegel’s Socrates is essential 
to this pursuit. To become a Christian, the author contends, one must first pass through the 
stage of “Religiousness A.” The subject of Religiousness A is not concerned with what is “out 
there,” but with “inwardness,” with subjectivity.30 Climacus explicitly identifies Socrates–
as opposed to the speculative Plato–as the paradigm of Religiousness A. The paradox 
of Socrates–that the individual becomes unintelligible to the external–is the paradox of 
Religiousness A. Climacus’s Socrates is Hegel’s Socrates: his negativity and subjectivity are 
preconditions for religious experience. To be open to Religiousness B–Christianity–one 
must have complete faith in what lies beyond the objective.

One of Kierkegaard’s most extended discussions of faith and morality centers on his 
concepts of the ‘knight of infinite resignation’ and the ‘knight of infinite faith’ in Fear and 
Trembling. The work, written by Kierkegaard under the name Johannes de Silentio, closely 
examines the Biblical story of the binding of Isaac to discover the relation between ethics 
and faith. More specifically, the work aims to explain the “paradox of faith:” namely, how 
the individual can be higher than the universal. The work’s discussion of the individual–as 
exemplified in the knight of infinite resignation and the knight of faith–uses Hegel’s Socrates 
as a model for the gulf between subjectivity and objectivity.

Kierkegaard’s interpretation of Abraham as a ‘knight of faith’ for man to aspire to is deeply 
indebted to Hegel’s discussion of Socrates. Though a step beyond the ‘knight of infinite 
resignation’, the knight of faith shares the former’s “movement of resignation.”31 Both 
knights are resigned from their objective situation: they not only maintain their subjective 
commitments, but also accept the gap between these commitments and the external world. 
Johannes notes Abraham’s silence after receiving his directive from God to sacrifice his 
only son Isaac: “He said nothing to Sarah, nothing to Eleazar. After all, who could have 
understood him? Hadn’t the test by its very nature extracted an oath of silence from him?"32 

28 Ibid., 63
29 Ibid., 67. 
30 Ibid., 466.
31 C. Stepehn Evans in the Introduction to Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge University Press, 
2006), xiv.
32 Søren Kierkegaard and Johannes de Silentio, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay, Reprint edition (Harmondsworth, Middle-
sex, England : New York, N.Y., U.S.A: Penguin Classics, 1986), 55.



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Abraham’s silence emphasizes the infinite subjectivity of his position: his highest duty to 
God cannot even begin to be explained to the external world. His silence is an acceptance of 
the impassable void between the subject and the object. From this discussion of Abraham, 
Kierkegaard develops his famous “teleological suspension of the ethical.” In order to act 
upon his supreme ethical commitment–his commitment to God–Abraham must rebuke 
the particular, the historical actuality. Abraham’s infinite spiritual (moral) commitment is 
irreconcilable with the objective Spirit because it is a completely subjective negation.

Kierkegaard contends that Abraham would deserve the punishment society would give him. 
This assessment seems contradictory given Kierkegaard’s praise of Abraham as acting in a 
supremely ethical manner. From an objective perspective, however, Kierkegaard maintains, 
Abraham has indeed done wrong: he intended to murder his son. According to the universal 
ethic, Abraham has broken one of the most sacred duties: that of a father to his son. 
Abraham himself recognizes the unethical nature of his divine directive and prays that God 
forgive him.33 Kierkegaard is not diminishing the duty of a father towards his son, nor is he 
advocating for a relativist rejection of universal ethics. Johannes emphasizes that Abraham’s 
commitment to his son–and his commitment to Objective spirit more broadly–while of 
utmost importance, cannot be reconciled with his equally important subjective commitment 
to his faith. He is faced with, in the most Socratic sense, an “either-or”: Abraham is at aporia.

Kierkegaard’s treatment of Socrates as an ironic and negative figure evokes his formulation 
of the ‘knight of infinite resignation.’ Johannes imagines a situation in which a knight has 
fallen in love with a princess but his circumstances prevent him from ever acting upon such 
love. The knight is simultaneously resigned to this objective situation, but does not give 
up on his subjective commitment–that is, his love–even though it can never be realized. 
Johannes describes the knight of infinite resignation as an archetype to aspire towards, a 
person who, “does not give up the love, not for all the world’s glory.”34 Just as Socrates 
rejected objective totality in favor of subjective truth, the knight of infinite resignation 
rejects the ethic of the day in favor of his own subjectivity.

The knight’s love for the princess is a denial of the objective situation. Even though he knows 
that such a love cannot materialize in this world he “does not give up on this love,” thus 
denying historical actuality. In this manner, Kierkegaard connects subjectivity to the eternal. 
The love for the princess–that purely subjective love–becomes an “expression of an eternal 
love,” an expression of the Absolute.35 This movement of resignation is a qualification for 
true inwardness. Johannes asserts, “[f ]or only in infinite resignation do I become transparent 
to myself in my eternal validity, and only then can there be talk of laying hold of existence 
by virtue of faith.” Only in this infinite resignation can the individual come to understand 
herself and her relation to the Absolute, or God. Subjectivity or “inwardness,” then, is an 
intrinsic part of knowing the Absolute. Kierkegaard forms his conception of the highest 
forms of subjectivity–the knight of infinite resignation and of faith–around the Hegelian 
absolute knowing Subject-Substance to place the individual at the center of his philosophy. 

33 Ibid., 47.
34 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay, 35.
35 Ibid., 37.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

The Absolute is necessary for true subjectivity and true subjectivity is necessary for the 
approaching Absolute.

In this explicit connection between subjectivity and the experience of the Absolute, 
Kierkegaard reveals another latent Hegelian form underlining his authorship. Kierkegaard 
uses the Hegelian “absolute knowing”–and its resemblance to the irony and subjectivity 
of Socrates–to situate the individual as the center of his philosophy. More specifically, 
the Hegelian notion of the ‘absolute knowing’ subject as the emptied subject, as illustrated 
by Slavoj Žižek and Catherine Malabou (among other contemporary commentators) 
elucidates Kierkegaard’s understanding of infinite subjective commitment. The “emptied” 
or “abrogated” subject of absolute knowing reflects Kierkegaard’s negative subject, as 
exemplified by both Socrates and Abraham. 

Hegel’s Absolute is not simply “the unity of all things” which transcends existence. It 
is in his critique of such a notion in Schelling’s philosophy that Hegel gives his famous 
description of “the night in which all cows are black.”36 Such a cancellation of all 
difference, Hegel maintains, amounts to an idea bereft of meaning. The Absolute does 
not transcend existence but is existence as a “whole” understood as a dynamic system in 
which each element relates to all the others.37 The Absolute, then, gives “grounding” to 
all being: it is the fundamental, irreducible reality upon which any concept can be built. 
 
The Absolute is not only substance, as it was for Spinoza, but subject as well. For Hegel, 
the presence of a subject necessitates the presence of an object (since consciousness is always 
consciousness of something). The fact that in the Absolute the subject and object become 
unified raises the question of what the object of the Absolute is. Hegel, following Aristotle, 
asserts that the Absolute’s object is itself. The Absolute is pure thought that, encompassing 
everything or “the whole,” thinks on itself. When philosophers discuss the ‘absolute 
knowing’ subject-substance, they refer to unmediated knowledge of “the whole.”38 In the 
Phenomenology, Hegel aims to demonstrate that all different forms of human consciousness 
have attempted to give an account of reality as a whole, through art, religion, and now 
Hegel’s speculative philosophy39. Hegel reveals that it is the telos–the end goal–of Spirit 
(roughly, a collective human consciousness) to achieve absolute knowing.

Because Hegel’s method follows a circular trajectory, the beginning of his philosophy–
the irreducible “grounding”–illuminates its end–the Absolute. Breaking from 
Descartes, Hegel does not interpret the subject’s existence as self-evident. What must 
be, Hegel believed, was only being itself. By definition, being is: existence exists. To 
be presuppositionless, philosophy must begin with “indeterminate being,” or being 
about which nothing other than its existence can be asserted. Hegel’s logic begins 

36 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 12.
37 Glenn Alexander Magee, The Hegel Dictionary, 1st edition (Continuum, 2010), 20
38 Ibid., 171.
39 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 409.



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with this “pure being” as its concept and works, dialectically, to develop all others.40 It 
is this same “indeterminate being” that is the content and form of absolute knowing.41 
In absolute knowing, the separation between subject and object is overcome in order to 
comprehend the whole; the object for absolute knowing is no finite thing, but the Absolute 
itself. For Hegel, absolute knowing is its own subject; that is, it is thought catalyzed by 
itself (as opposed to how we usually think about thought, as originated from a subject 
separate from that thought). Absolute knowing is knowledge of absolute knowing itself.42 
 
At the most basic level, Žižek’s interpretation of the dialectic resembles Kierkegaard’s notion 
of the origin of subjectivity. Žižek asserts that “the fundamental operation of Aufhebung 
is reduction: the sublated thing survives, but in an abridged edition, as it were, torn out 
of its life-world context, stripped down to its essential features, all the movement and 
wealth of its life reduced to a fixed mark.”43 Socrates, too, could be described as “torn out 
of [his] life-world context” in his denial of Athenian society’s ethics. Moreover, Socrates’s 
method involved locating the essential core of concepts such as truth and justice, not merely 
particular instances of it. This congruity between Socrates and the dialectic follows, of 
course, given that the “labour of the negative” is the process by which the dialectic functions, 
and it is this same negativity that Socrates embodies. The connection between the Hegelian 
subject of ‘absolute knowing’ and Kierkegaardian “inwardness” runs deeper, however.  
 
Žižek undermines the traditional interpretation of Hegel’s “absolute knowing” or “Absolute 
knowledge,” and advances an interpretation of the concept as a sort of “void.” Žižek 
identifies the common criticism of Hegel as a system builder whose dialectics are “bloated” 
by their integration of the entirety of reality. Žižek asserts that this interpretation does not 
fully account for the precise mechanism of dialectics. The philosopher argues that sublation 
(the process by which dialectics occurs) does not stop once the totality is integrated into 
the System; that whole itself is negated as well in “sublation’s sublation.” To avoid the 
spurious infinity of an unending sublation, the process of sublation must come to an end 
with its counter-move: to release the entirety of the content, leaving the Absolute-knowing 
subject-substance emptied. Žižek cites the end of the Science of Logic, where “reaching the 
full circle of the absolute Idea, the Idea, in its resolve/decision, ‘freely releases itself ’ into 
Nature, lets Nature go, leaves it off, discards it, pushes it away from itself, and thus liberates 
it.”44 Malabou, noting the synonymy between the verbs aufheben (‘to sublate’), befreien (‘to 
liberate’), and ablegen (‘to discard’), argues that this “abrogation” or “emptying” is not only 
subsequent to the sublation of totality, but is its immanent conclusion.45 This argument 
reflects the aforementioned “circularity” of Hegel’s logic: the indeterminate being–both at 
the beginning and the end–is “neither more nor less than nothing.”

40 Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George Di Giovanni, Reprint edition (Cambridge University Press, 
2015), §130-132.
41 Magee, 45.
42 Ibid., 27.
43 Slavoj Žižek, “Hegel and the Object, Or, the Idea’s Constipation,” Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 14, no. 0 (September 13, 
2006): 21–26, https://doi.org/10.26262/gramma.v14i0.6510, 1.
44 Žižek, “Hegel and the Object,” 1, 22.
45 Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic (Psychology Press, 2005), 156.



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

46Kierkegaard’s subjective thinkers–Socrates and Abraham among them–parallel the 
abrogated subjects of absolute knowing. The philosopher agrees with Hegel’s analysis that 
Socrates was not engaging in mere rhetorical irony when he claimed to “know nothing.”47 
The statement was not a mere rhetorical ploy to expose his interlocutors ill-conceived 
notions. While his irony did have this function, Kierkegaard contends, it is also essential 
to note that Socrates genuinely did know nothing in the sense that he had no positive 
knowledge of the object. In his quest to discover the truth of subjectivity, Socrates became 
ignorant of particulars; indeed, his aforementioned negativity must be ignorant of any 
possibility of positivity. As a subject, Socrates has been “emptied” from the knowledge 
instilled by the objective realm. Unlike the “unwise men,” however, Socrates knows that he 
knows nothing. He has a sense of what he is lacking, what he has emptied himself of, just 
like Hegel’s abrogated subject. Just as the labor of the negative does not bring the positive 
back to its starting point, but to somewhere new, the emptied subject is not synonymous 
with the subject that had never been “filled.”

This abrogation is a passive process. Žižek asks, “[i]s the subject of what Hegel calls 
‘absolute Knowledge’ not also a thoroughly emptied subject, a subject reduced to the role 
of pure observer (or, rather, registrar) of the self-movement of the content itself?” Hegel’s 
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences answers in the affirmative: “The Idea’s absolute 
freedom consists in [the fact] that it resolves to freely let go out of itself the moment of its 
particularity.”48 “Particularity” in this sense corresponds to Kierkegaard’s conception of “this 
or that thing”–the facts and ethics of the universal, the objective. Kierkegaard stresses the 
opposition between this and the individual’s absolute commitment, his duty to God. The 
subjective thinker, it can be said, “lets go” of the moment of its particularity in its denial of 
historical actuality. This further illuminates the structure of Kierkegaard’s Absolute and its 
relation to subjectivity.

Passivity characterizes Kierkegaard’s subjective thinkers; it is through this passivity that they 
open themselves up to experience the Absolute. In Kierkegaard’s “infinite resignation,” the 
subject accepts his complete inability to actualize or even anticipate the infinite. Abraham’s 
directive comes from God; he is merely a passive receiver of and actualization of His will. 
Moreover, the order goes against all of Abraham’s intuition: he would never have been 
justified to predict or actualize such a directive through consideration of his place in 
Objective spirit. Similarly, Socrates’s daimonion spoke out to Socrates as a voice, preventing 
him from making mistakes: Socrates as a subject is passive, then, subject to this force that is 
simultaneously personal but not his self-consciousness. He does not “ask” his daimonion; it 
presents itself autonomously.49 Thus, Kierkegaard’s subjective thinker is passive in that she 
accepts the absolutely ethical must come to her from without; that is, from God, excluding 
her personal intervention. In order to receive the Absolute, the subject must “empty” herself; 
she must completely negate her historical actuality. This connection illustrates Socrates’s 

46 Hegel, Science of Logic, §132.
47 Kierkegaard, Concept of Irony, 169.
48 Slavoj Žižek, Preface to The Sublime Object of Ideology, Second Edition (London: Verso, 2009), xii, xvi.
49 Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 347.



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function as a knight of infinite resignation. Unlike Abraham, however, Socrates has no faith, 
and therefore is not able to reaffirm finitude through his acceptance of the absurd. However, 
his connection to subjective truth through negativity is the same. By taking philosophical 
negativity to its absolute, Socrates rejects the universal and asserts the infinity of subjectivity. 
As a figure of philosophical discussion, then, he reflects the Substance-Subject of absolute 
knowing: he is the telos of subjective inquiry.

This passivity seems strange, given Kierkegaard’s assertion of the courage required to deny 
the universal and embrace subjectivity and the Absolute through the teleological suspension 
of the ethical.50 Hegel understands the seemingly paradoxical nature of this passivity, 
however; Žižek writes, “this utter passivity simultaneously involves the greatest activity: it 
takes the most strenuous effort for the subject to ‘erase itself ’ in its particular content, as 
the agent intervening in the object, and to expose itself as a neutral medium.”51 For both 
Kierkegaard and Hegel becoming passive, paradoxically, requires the utmost activity. To be 
passively open to God, Abraham needed the courage to actively reject his most fundamental 
objective duties.

In spite of the similarity in their concepts of the Absolute, Kierkegaard and Hegel differed 
in their beliefs on how knowledge of the Absolute is attained. Hegel believed that absolute 
knowing is achieved through time through dialectics culminating in an Absolute Spirit–
speculative philosophy–which could rationally explain totality through the mediation of the 
subjective and the objective. Kierkegaard, conversely, stresses the paradoxical potential of 
the individual to “open herself up” to an incomprehensible experience of the Absolute. Put 
otherwise, Hegel’s Absolute is a “process” of the unification of subjectivity and objectivity, 
while Kierkegaard’s is a one-sided “moment” requiring only subjectivity. 

This distinction culminates in the thinkers’ respective assessments of the concept of 
“appropriation.” Kierkegaard uses “appropriation” to refer to a certain type of subjective 
understanding; while objective truths–historical and scientific facts, for instance–could be 
taught, the individual must relate subjective truths to her own experience. An individual 
appropriates a subjective truth when she bases her understanding of herself as subjectivity 
upon it. The truth of Christianity requires appropriation. Kierkegaard was unconcerned 
with dogmatics–the “content” of Christianity–that could be learned. The importance 
of Christianity was in the individual’s subjective experience of it, ie. the individual’s 
appropriation of it. For Hegel, conversely, “A true cognition is thus not only the notional 
“appropriation” of its object: the process of appropriation goes on only as long as cognition 
remains incomplete.”52 Appropriation is incomplete because Hegel’s dialectics centers on the 
reconciliation of the subject and the object; thus, the subject should be able to be expressed 
objectively, and vice versa.

50 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Sylvia Walsh, 41.
51 Žižek, “Hegel and the Object,” 24.
52 Ibid., 23.



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At the same time, the phenomenological information that Mailer conveys is while Hegel’s 
dialectic focuses on the system, placing the subject as a constitutive element therein, 
Kierkegaard’s dialectic is the reverse: he centers the individual. Put crudely in Hegelian 
terms, Kierkegaard’s “Absolute Spirit”–Spirit which has become conscious of itself–would 
not be a speculative philosophy in which subject and object are unified, but an individual 
“leap” on the part of the subject. This is the same dichotomy that appears in Kierkegaard’s 
original extended discussion of Hegel, The Concept of Irony. While Kierkegaard borrows 
Hegel’s Socrates, he identifies Socrates’s great strength where Hegel finds his flaw: his 
unflinching negativity and resulting rejection of speculative philosophy. In spite of the 
difference in his evaluation of the ancient Greek, Kierkegaard’s Socrates is Hegel’s Socrates. 
It is this Hegelian Socrates–and Hegelian absolute knowing–that situates Kierkegaard’s 
notion of the individual as the center of his philosophy. According to Kierkegaard, it is 
only through subjectivity–the complete negation of the objective world, as first posited by 
Socrates–that an individual can examine and affirm her most important commitments: the 
commitment to the Absolute.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristophanes. Clouds. Edited by John Claughton and Judith Affleck. Cambridge Translation 

edition. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

Comay, Rebecca, and Frank Ruda. The Dash The Other Side of Absolute Knowing. MIT Press, 
2018.

Hegel, Georg W. F. Philosophy of Right. Translated by S. W. Dyde. Mineola, N.Y.; Newton 
Abbot: Dover Publications, 2005.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Terry Pinkard 
and Michael Baur. Place of publication not identified: Cambridge University Press, 
2019.

The Science of Logic. Translated by George Di Giovanni. Reprint edition. Cambridge 
University Press, 2015.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, and Frederick C. Beiser. Lectures on the History of 
Philosophy, Volume 1: Greek Philosophy to Plato. Translated by E. S. Haldane. Lincoln: 
NEBRASKA PAPERBACK, 1995.

Hühn, Lore. “Irony and Dialectic: On a Critique of Romanticism in Kierkegaard and 
Hegel’s Philosophy.” MLN 128, no. 5 (2013): 1061–82.



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The Shadow of Hegel

Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Sylvia Walsh. Cambridge University 
Press, 2006.

The Essential Kierkegaard. Edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Later Printing 
edition. Princeton, N.J. Great Britain: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Kierkegaard, Soren, and Johannes de Silentio. Fear and Trembling. Translated by Alastair 
Hannay. Reprint edition. Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England : New York, N.Y., 
U.S.A: Penguin Classics, 1986.

Kramer, Nathaniel, and Jon Stewart, eds. The Crisis of the Danish Golden Age and Its Modern 
Resonance. New edition. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2020.

Magee, Glenn Alexander. The Hegel Dictionary. 1st edition. Continuum, 2010.

Malabou, Catherine. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic. Psychology 
Press, 2005.

Plato. Five Dialogues: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Meno, Phaedo. Edited by John M. Cooper. 
Translated by G. M. A. Grube. Second Edition,2. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing 
Company, Inc., 2002.

Theaetetus. Edited by Bernard Williams and Myles Burnyeat. Translated by M. J. Levett. UK 
ed. edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1992.

Soren Kierkegaard. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Edited by Alastair Hannay. 1st edition. 
Cambridge University Press, 2009.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Second Edition. London: Verso, 2009.



66

δι
άν

οι
α

THE POSITIVE ILLUSION OF QUALIA
 NIKKI IVIE

This summer I went trail running. After a couple of miles my toe snagged on a root and I 
fell, cutting and bruising both of my knees. It hurt. As I hobbled home, I encountered 

my friend, Heidi. She commiserated with me as I showed her my bloody, dirt-covered 
knees. I am grateful to have a friend like Heidi. Once home, I took a hot shower, basked in 
the warmth, and cleaned my knees. Pain, gratitude, warmth, and regret—these are terms 
which philosophers categorize as qualia. Qualia are qualitative, phenomenal properties of 
conscious experiences. They include things such as sensory data (e.g. feeling the hot water 
of a shower), bodily sensations (e.g. the pain of bruising one’s knees), emotions (e.g. the 
regret of running on that trail), and moods (e.g. gratitude for a friend) (Tye 1995, 4). 
 
In “Quining Qualia,” Daniel Dennett challenges the assumptions regarding qualia. He 
believes, “that conscious experience [have] no properties that are special in any of the ways 
[that] qualia have been supposed to be,” and through the use of “intuition pumps,” which 
are case studies involving qualia, the reader is forced to question traditionally held views 
on qualia (1988, 43). For example, Dennett presents us with two Maxwell House taste 
testers, Chase and Sanborn. After six years of sampling coffee, Chase realizes that he no 
longer likes the coffee even though the taste of the coffee has not changed; in other words, 
his preference for the coffee has altered over time. Sanborn also realizes that he no longer 



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likes the coffee, but his reasoning is that the taste of it has changed rather than himself; it 
no longer tastes the same as it used to. In applying qualia to this situation, we find that 
Chase’s perception (or quale) of the coffee has remained the same, but that his judgment 
about it has changed. In the case of Sanborn, his judgment has remained the same, but his 
quale has changed. Dennett’s point is that it is impossible for us to know whether it is our 
qualia that have changed or whether it is our judgment about the experience; meaning, 
therefore, that we are not infallible when it comes to knowing our own experience. He 
states, “[t]he idea that people might be mistaken about their own qualia is at the heart of 
the ongoing confusion” (52). If we cannot verify either Chase’s or Sanborn’s claims, then 
perhaps their claims are empty, supporting what Dennett refers to as “theorists’ fictions” (55). 
 
In addition to our fallibility with regards to our experience, Dennett also attacks the 
definition of qualia. Instead of understanding qualia as ineffable, intrinsic, private, 
and directly apprehensible in consciousness, Dennett argues that qualia are “relatively 
or practically ineffable public properties [that] we can refer to indirectly via reference 
to our private property detectors” (1988, 74). By showing that there is no consistent 
definition for qualia and that our views of our own qualia are not trustworthy, Dennett 
effectively dismantles the concept, writing, “‘qualia’ is a philosopher’s term which 
fosters nothing but confusion, and refers in the end to no properties or features at 
all” (49). It is important to note that Dennett is not arguing against the reality of 
conscious experience, but against the existence of any properties of consciousness “that 
are special in any of the ways [that] qualia have been supposed to be special” (43).  
 
For the purposes of this paper, the question of whether qualia are real phenomena will not be 
addressed; rather, I will assume that Dennett’s claim that “there simply are no qualia at all” is 
correct  (1988, 74). The next question then must be why certain philosophers claim that we have 
qualia? After all, the experience of falling on the trail certainly felt to me like a private, ineffable, 
and intrinsic experience? How is it that we intuitively believe that we experience something 
that Dennett claims does not exist? It must be that qualia are illusions (Dennett’s “theoretical 
fictions”), and in this paper, I contend that such illusions are not only useful, but also necessary.  
 
Before proceeding, I would like to clarify that by the idea of illusion I do not mean 
something that does not exist. Clearly, the pain that I experienced when I fell was real. An 
illusion in the context of this paper is something that exists, but that is not what it appears 
to be; it is a misinterpretation on our part (Blackmore 2002, 17). For example, I may 
think that my experience of pain was private, ineffable, and intrinsic to me, but Dennett 
would argue that there is nothing special or unique about my experiences, and that I simply 
“want[ed] to reaffirm [my] sense of proprietorship over [my] own conscious states” (Dennett 
1988, 49).  In this way, the quale of pain (or of gratitude or of regret) does not really exist.  



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BACKGROUND ILLUSION
The concept of illusion is not a new one in philosophy. In “Free Will, Fundamental 
Dualism, and the Centrality of Illusion,” Saul Smilansky introduces the idea of 
“Illusionism, which claims that illusion on free will is morally necessary” (2011, 425). 
Smilansky maintains that libertarian free will (having perfect control over determining 
all aspects of one’s actions) does not exist, but yet, we are still under the illusion that 
we do have control over our actions. For example, I believe that my choice to run on 
the trail was fully within my control to make. But even if I am incorrect in my belief, 
and it was not my choice to run on the trail, Smilansky states that “illusory beliefs are 
[nonetheless kept] in place and [...] the role they play is largely positive” (433). One 
example of this might be the idea of personal responsibility, which Smilansky explains: 
 

  
 

In other words, without the belief that we are in charge of our behavior we would not 
take personal responsibility for our actions. The potential negative impact on society 
without responsible behavior is obvious. Smilansky tells us, “[h]umanity is fortunately 
deceived on the free will issue, and this seems to be a condition of civilized morality and 
personal value” (436). In this case, free will as an illusion is useful and plays a positive role.  
 
Psychologist Shelley E. Taylor has spent many years studying positive illusions, and explains 
that we have overly optimistic perceptions about ourselves, our futures, and our ability 
to impact the world (1989, 7). These perceptions (also referred to as “adaptive fictions”) 
actually promote a mentally healthy outlook (46). Because of these illusions, we believe 
that we have control over our circumstances, which improves our happiness and self-
esteem, motivates us to accomplish tasks, and encourages optimistic attitudes (59-62). If 
someone had told me that there was a chance that I would fall while running on the trail 
that morning, I still would have gone; after all, almost everything has an associated risk. “I’m 
sure it won’t happen to me,” my (optimistic) thinking might contend. Taylor explains that 
because these illusions are seen to be particularly strong in childhood, they are intrinsic to 
humans and have always been a part of our evolutionary history (44). One might respond 
that it seems strange that illusions would play such a remarkable role without our noticing 
them, but Taylor argues that such illusions go largely unnoticed because they are so effective 
at supporting mental health (229). Smilansky and Taylor both believe that illusions play a 
positive role. Illusions are adaptive behaviors that have evolved with us because they provide 

Psychologically, the attribution of responsibility to people so that they may 
be said to justly deserve gain or loss for the actions requires (even after the 
act) the absence of the notion that the act is an unavoidable outcome of the 
way things were […] Morality has a crucial interest in confronting what can 
be called the “Present Danger of the Future Retrospective Excuse,” and in 
restricting the influence of the ultimate hard determinist level (436)



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distinct advantages. But what about qualia? As illusions, do they also provide us with distinct 
benefits? I will address a number of areas where I believe the benefits of qualia are evident. 

QUALIA AS NECESSARY EVOLUTIONARY DRIVERS

Interpersonal Relationships

When I encountered Heidi after my disastrous trail run, why was I glad to see her? Why 
did I consider her to be a friend? Heidi and I have been neighbors for many years, and as 
such, we have a number of things in common: children, home improvement projects, and 
hobbies. But it is not this commonality that builds friendships; rather, it is the sharing 
of these experiences over time which builds a feeling of mutual understanding. Heidi 
and I both have a history of qualia referential to one another. Over time, these referential 
qualia often include compassion, empathy, trust, admiration, and respect. The cumulative 
effect of these referential qualia is loyalty. Because we believe our qualia are private and 
subjective, referential qualia play an important role in sustaining relationships. Does 
anyone feel the same way about Heidi as I do? She, obviously, has other friends, but I 
am led to believe that no one feels precisely about Heidi the way that I do. The subjective 
nature of qualia leads me to believe this and to give special value to that relationship.  
 
What about familial relationships? Commonly people marry after falling in love. Over time, 
the range of qualia experienced with one’s partner widens (we live, eat, and sleep together; 
we age together; we experience the vicissitudes of life together) and we build, once again, a 
history of referential qualia. This common history results in strong attachments and lasting 
commitment. Similarly, the experience that a mother has when carrying a child within 
her for nine months creates a range of referential qualia that develop into a bond with the 
child. The months and years of care following the birth of the child deepens that bond 
even further. When difficulties arise in familial relationships, we fall back on this history of 
qualia to reinforce the reasons for continued loyalty. All of these examples beg the inevitable 
question: how could any relationship possibly be sustained without the assistance of qualia?  
 
From an evolutionary perspective, the benefit of a child’s bond to its mother is self-evident. 
Similarly, the bonding amongst groups of people is beneficial for creating a social structure 
that offers its members the advantages of shared resources and mutual protection. Since all 
humans live in social structures, this trait of loyalty must have evolved with us over many 
generations. Evolutionary biologists studying group selection have developed an equation, 
the coefficient of relationship, which quantifies the strength of one’s loyalty to another 
(Harman 2010, 79). But when a parent sees that his or her child is in danger, do they first 
calculate the coefficient of relationship? Of course not. It is qualia that drive a parent to 
protect the child. Qualia are necessary to help us form, sustain, and value relationships.  
 



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VALUE AND MEANING

Because we believe qualia are private, subjective, and ineffable, they reinforce in us a 
belief in our uniqueness. The pain that I experienced when I fell on the trail was uniquely 
mine. The regret I felt afterwards about running on that trail was also uniquely mine. 
In addition, the experience of actually taking that fall was somewhat indescribable. I 
have a slow-motion picture of the experience in my mind (feeling my toe snag, feeling 
the position of my body as it is thrown forward, etc.), but the experience as a whole is 
difficult to describe. In this way my experiences are special. These two qualities of qualia—
uniqueness and ineffability—reinforce in me the idea that there is no one like me, and that 
I have intrinsic worth because of this. This understanding not only affects the way that I 
perceive myself in the world, but also how I perceive others; they, too, have intrinsic value 
because they also have qualia. This understanding creates respect and civility among people.  
 
It could be argued that individual value is not intrinsic, but that it is related to one’s positive 
contributions to the world—behaving charitably or contributing to pursuits that benefit 
humanity. It is true that these types of activities can give one’s life value, but what about those 
whose capacities are limited (i.e. infants or handicapped persons) and are unable to contribute 
in conventionally-meaningful ways? Certainly, the parent sees value in the infant. If non-
contributing individuals have value, then we must look to factors other than their ability to 
contribute. We must look to intrinsic qualities; specifically, the qualities that make them unique. 
 
In addition to value, qualia also provide us with a source for finding meaning. When 
beliefs are felt strongly, they evolve into guiding beliefs, which then in turn evolve into 
actions. If one feels strongly that racial justice is important, they will be moved to take 
action against it because of their guiding belief that “racial discrimination” is unjust. 
Likewise, if one feels strongly that being a parent is important, then one will act in 
such a way that makes parenthood a priority. These guiding beliefs direct our actions 
and will provide us with lives that are meaningful. It is the strength of the qualia that 
provide the impetus for forming a belief system that provides a person with meaning. 
 
One might claim that meaning does not require the use of qualia; rather, one can simply 
rely on reason to adopt a belief (or set of beliefs). I might believe that 1 + 1 = 2, but that 
particular belief does not give my life meaning. While meaningful beliefs can be based 
on reason, I believe that they demand more. Meaningful beliefs incorporate ideas of 
purpose and direction, which force us to introspect and evaluate their application in our 
lives. Can one imagine a vegan whose beliefs are completely void of qualia? How about 
a Christian? Or a Libertarian? These types of beliefs, I would argue, have a foundation 
in qualia. It is interesting to note that our language actually supports this idea. We say, 
“I feel strongly about…” when referring to a belief, and I would further contend that 
the relative strength of the qualia impacts the strength of the devotion to the belief. 



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But why is it important to have meaning and value in one’s life? Is there an evolutionary 
advantage to such traits? According to research, people who feel they have meaning in their 
lives are better able to cope with the challenges (and even the tragedies) of life; they are more 
resilient (Lyubomirsky 2007, 163). But it is not just mental health that benefits from having 
meaning in one’s life. In addition to being resilient, “the benefit of finding meaning in a loss 
extends to physical health as well” (163). So from an evolutionary perspective, having a life 
with meaning makes one more fit for survival as compared to one whose life lacks meaning. 
 
PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY

When I saw that my knees were scraped and cut I realized that I needed to do what I could 
to help them heal. Once home, I cleaned them, put ointment on them, bandaged them, and 
kept ice packs on them. The reason that I care for my body is because I own it. But in addition 
to owning my body, I also own all of its experiences (again, the effects of qualia being private 
and subjective). Even in extreme cases, the principle of ownership is clear: a soldier suffers from 
post-traumatic stress because the devastating experiences of combat are owned by the soldier. 
 
Because I own all of the experiences of my body, I am invested in taking care of it. I 
clean my wounds when I have an injury, I feed myself upon feeling hunger, and I put 
on more clothing when I am cold; I take ownership and act responsibly. This same 
idea can be drawn to many aspects of human life: we are responsible for the care of a 
child because of the experiences we have with that child, we are responsible employees 
because the owned experience of working at a job invests us in the work, and we are 
responsible students because the experience of getting an education is owned by us. 
 
There, however, are a couple of objections that might be voiced to this idea. First, one 
could argue that a child who sustains an injury is not responsible for his or her care; rather, 
it is the child’s caretaker who makes sure the child is safe. This sounds like a valid point, 
but then one must wonder how does the caretaker know when the child has been hurt? 
Whether it is a cry or a non-verbal indication, the child takes responsibility by alerting the 
caretaker to his or her distress; ultimately, the child is responsible because the child owns 
the experience. Second, one might argue that responsible behavior is simply the desire to see 
results (e.g., working hard at a job to earn money). But in this case, there is still the quale 
of desire (desire for money, fame, prestige, etc.) that is driving the responsible behavior. 
 
Ultimately, we must ask whether responsible behavior is possible without qualia. Would I 
go to work if I never felt the satisfaction of doing a good job or the happiness of receiving 
a paycheck? Would I clean my house if I never felt disgust with messy living conditions? 
Would I eat if I never felt hunger? Is it possible that all of these tasks could be accomplished 
without one experiencing qualia? But from a practical perspective, why would they be 



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accomplished? Humans are not robots; we need to have reasons for our behavior. I maintain 
that qualia are the driving factors behind such responsible behavior. 

ENJOYMENT

I run because it makes me feel good—it provides me with positive qualia. There are many 
things that provide me with positive qualia, but there are, of course, qualia that are quite 
the opposite effect: falling on a trail, having to take a cold shower, or experiencing the 
death of a loved one. It is the full range of qualia that gives life its richness, and a life 
without any of them would be rather empty. And because I believe my qualia to be uniquely 
mine, I take the responsibility of pursuing experiences that give me positive qualia, such 
as enjoyment. It is interesting to contemplate just how much of our time is spent with 
the preoccupation of enjoyment (e.g. where we will go for dinner, what we will watch on 
Netflix, when we will get together with friends, etc). But despite the amount of time we 
spend in such pursuits, it is not obvious that enjoyment provides us with an evolutionary 
advantage (e.g. how am I more fit because I can enjoy dark chocolate?) My claim is simple: 
a life that can be enjoyed is a life that is worth living—a life that has the drive to continue. 
A life void of these things would lack the motivation and tenacity to endure any significant 
challenges or obstacles, and thus, would fail to maintain a mentally healthy outlook. 
 
Perhaps one would respond that only in the modern era and in the West can this argument 
be made, since many parts of the world do not enjoy such a high standard of living. But 
even in remote or less-developed nations, people still have events or activities that they 
enjoy; dancing, drinking alcohol, feasting, and festivals have existed for a very long time, 
and appear to be a part of every culture. This would suggest that these traditions have 
been with us from early on because they played an important role in our evolutionary 
history. One could claim that it is the anticipation of such enjoyable events that provides 
an effective strategy for enduring times of hardship; in other words, the quale of 
enjoyment is necessary not only for human flourishing, but also for evolutionary survival. 
 
NAVIGATING LIFE 

Since my fall this summer, I have not returned to that trail.  I can still remember the experience 
of falling, and it compels me to avoid the behavior that might recreate that experience. The 
evolutionary benefit for having such a trait is obvious. One might argue, however, that 
qualia have nothing to do with my decision—that I am using reason to perform a cost/
benefit analysis and determining that the risks of running on the trail outweigh the benefits. 
But upon introspection, I do not think rational thought has anything to do with my decision 
to not run on the trail. I only have to think about the trail in order to immediately have 
a very visceral, almost stressful, response, and it is this response that informs my decision. 
 
Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has done extensive research on how humans make 



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judgments, and while much of his research is specific to moral judgments, his principles can 
be applied more generally as well. Haidt tells us, “[t]he first principle of moral psychology 
is intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second” (2012, 82). People make judgments 
quickly and intuitively, and only then do they use post hoc reasoning to rationally justify 
the judgment that they have made (64). Haidt refers to this as the doctrine of “affective 
primacy”. He also states, “[a]ffect refers to small flashes of positive or negative feeling 
that prepare us to approach or [to] avoid something” (65). These affects mingle with our 
perceptions and influence our judgments and decisions. If Haidt is correct, then it is qualia 
that initially determine our judgments (the importance of which cannot be overstated). 
I am careful running, because, in the past, I have fallen. I read books because I love to 
learn. I eat chocolate because it tastes heavenly. In this way, qualia keep me safe, enhance 
my intellect, and contribute to life enjoyment. Qualia directs the entire decision-making 
process, beginning with the initial choice, and ending with the conveyance of feedback on 
whether or not the choice was good or bad. 

CONCLUSION 

The mind has constructed the illusion of qualia, which has, in turn, aided human 
development. But these illusions are not just useful—they are necessary. Qualia are the 
drivers for much of our behavior, and ultimately, drive evolution by providing us with traits 
that are advantageous in selection; as such, they are essential to us. But is there a downside to 
believing in illusions? Does this undermine our ability to understand the world (i.e. losing my 
grip on reality)? Perhaps by acknowledging the presence of illusions one is encouraging mental 
illness? After all, mental health consists in embracing reality, does it not? According to Taylor,  
 

 
So although we may believe that mental health entails believing in a fact-based reality, this 
is not actually the case. As previously discussed, Taylor’s research confirms that illusions 
are adaptive and produce states that are more, not less, conducive to mental health. But 
even if we decided that we should encourage belief in a fact-based reality, it is not clear 
that this is actually feasible. Adam Elga has also written about positive illusions, but he is 
interested in why we do not correct our perspectives once we are confronted with evidence 
of these illusions. Referring to test subjects, he states that “positive illusions persist even 
when they are told about the prevalence of such illusions” (2005, 118). He explains 
that we have two belief states: one that is reflective and takes into account our distorted 
perspectives, and a non-reflective state that does not. And although we have this reflective 
state, which gives us a more accurate representation of ourselves and the world, it is the non-

One reason why illusion is not generally recognized as a feature of normal 
human functioning is that our theories of mental health are, ironically enough, 
derived largely from studies of mental illness. Psychiatrists and psychologists 
have portrayed the mentally healthy person, at least in part, as one who 
avoids the distortions so obviously present among the disturbed (1989, 229).  



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reflective state that we default to in our day-to-day interactions (120-21). We are not just 
disposed to believing these illusions, but these illusions are the normal state of experience.  
 
There is one final issue that I must address: when we take a step back and survey the 
landscape, the necessity of illusions looks particularly troubling. If free will is an illusion, my 
self-image is an illusion, my perception of the world and the future is an illusion, and even 
my own qualia are all illusions, then where exactly does reality lie? Perhaps illusions alone 
define life, as we can understand it. From here we can only conclude that if everything is an 
illusion, then illusion is our reality.

In summary, illusion is a core tenet in a number of different areas: free will, self-concept, the 
world, and the future. And in this paper, I have argued that qualia are also illusions. But, I 
have shown that although they are illusions, qualia are also fundamental to living meaningful 
lives, lives that have interpersonal relationships, and lives with responsibility and enjoyment. 
Furthermore, qualia play a vital role in steering our decision-making processes. If qualia 
are illusions, then they are necessary illusions vital to human life. Dennett’s argument that 
qualia do not exist is an interesting theoretical idea, but because these illusions are the only 
way to define our reality, we can use them to ensure that we continue to be careful running 
on trails, to be grateful for friends, and to enjoy hot showers.

WORKS CITED
Blackmore, Susan. "There Is No Stream of Consciousness." Journal of Consciousness Studies, 

2002: 17-28.

Dennett, Daniel C. "Quining Qualia." In Consciousness in Contemporary Science, by A. J. 
Marcel, 42-77. New York: Oxford University Press Inc., 1988.

Elga, Adam. "On Overrating Oneself...and Knowing It." Philosophical Studies, 2005: 115-
124.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion. 
New York: Vintage Books, 2012.

Harman, Oren. The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of 
Kindness. New York City: W. W. Norton & Company, 2010.

Lyubomirsky, Sonja. The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want. 
New York City: Penguin Books, 2007.

Smilansky, Saul. "Free Will, Fundamental Dualism, and the Centrality of Illusion." In The 
Oxford Handbook of Free Will, by Robert Kane, 425-441. New York: Oxford University 
Press, Inc., 2011.



75Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

The Positive Illusion of Qualia

Taylor, Shelley E. Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind. New 
York: Basic Books, Inc., 1989.

Tye, Michael. Ten Problems of Consciousness. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.



δι
άν

οι
α

76

VIRTUE ETHICS AND CARING: 
The Ethical Presuppositions of Taking Mortality 

Seriously

ALICIA NILSSON

INTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTION

In his most recent book, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free1, Martin Hägglund argues 
that life is finite and that the certainty of death endows our life and our time with intrinsic 

value. He claims that without death to relate to, all questions about value and prioritization 
would lose their relevance, and then attempts to trace the plausible and practical implications 
that would follow if we took mortality seriously both as individuals and as a society. According 
to Hägglund, the main implications of such a consideration would be the emergence of 
secular faith and the endorsement of democratic socialism. While Hägglund is clear in 
explaining both of these points, he does not explicitly discuss the ethical presuppositions 
of his theoretical commitments. He does argue, however, in ways that are compatible with 
a virtue ethical perspective, and advocates, for example, a practice-oriented view of human 
flourishing. Thus, this essay attempts to make explicit the connection between Hägglund’s 
ideas and a virtue ethical standpoint; in particular, I argue: (i) Hägglund’s position is 
more compatible with a virtue ethical standpoint than a deontological or consequentialist 
standpoint, and (ii) it is compatible with the view of caring as a virtue. The essay is divided 
into three parts: first, I will give a brief overview of Hägglund’s philosophical position; second, 
I will present the virtue ethical framework that lays the groundwork for my arguments; 

1 Martin Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, (London: Profile Books, 2019).



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third, I will attempt to  demonstrate why Hägglund’s philosophical standpoint is most easily 
accommodated within a virtue ethical framework which includes the idea of caring as a virtue. 
 

I. bRIef OVeRVIeW Of ThIs lIfe: Why MORTalITy I. bRIef OVeRVIeW Of ThIs lIfe: Why MORTalITy 
Makes Us fReeMakes Us fRee
The main idea of This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free is that life has intrinsic value 
because it is finite and that we appreciate our time because it is limited. Mortality is what 
fills our lives with meaning and value, and it keeps us committed to everyone and everything 
that we care about.2 Our motivation to sustain whatever we value comes from realizing  
that it can be lost and that, therefore, the flourishing of anything we value depends on our 
actions.3 If we were infinite, we would never feel a need to pursue any goals or to spend 
time with loved ones since we would be fundamentally indifferent to everything given the 
infinitude of immortality and possibility.4

The belief that the finite is valuable because it is unique and in need of sustenance is called 
secular faith5. Such faith must always manifest itself in practice. For example, in order for 
a friendship to exist, it is not enough to simply state that someone is your friend; that 
friendship needs to be mutual and maintained in order to both survive and flourish.6 
To have secular faith is to realize that we ourselves are responsible for the flourishing or 
withering of what we value. It is also to realize that the justification of our actions depend 
on us, and that what we value and who we think ourselves to be is expressed in what we do.7 
 
The ability to take responsibility for one’s actions in this fashion presupposes that agents 
have will, can form intentions, and possess the freedom to choose and prioritize what 
projects to cultivate and strive for (a freedom of this kind is called spiritual freedom8). It is 
also important to note that one of the preconditions for being able to ask questions about 
“who to be” or “what to do” is that there exist no determinate answers in advance. If there 
were, there would be no point in asking in the first place. Thus, to have spiritual freedom 
is to be capable of treating the material, social, and historical conditions for one’s existence 
as dynamic rather than predetermined9. This does not mean, however, that we are atomistic 
individuals. On the contrary, if we seek to transform or maintain our historic-normative 
framework, we are then bound to take a stand in relation to it and towards one another.10

The opposite of secular faith, as one might expect, is religious faith. This kind of faith 
interprets life as eternal and our earthly existence as a mere trial in the attempt to attain 

2 Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, 43–44.
3 Ibid, 45–51, 68–74.
4 Ibid, 44, 62.
5 Ibid, 46.
6 Martin Hägglund, “Utblick: Martin Hägglund och det ändliga livet”, interview by producer Thomas Lunderquist, Filosofiska rummet 
[podcast], SR, November 10, 2019, https://sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/1385980?programid=793.
7 Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, 176.
8 Ibid, 175.
9 Ibid, 176–177.
10 Ibid, 177–181.



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eternal salvation from fragility and loss.11 One of the most famous examples is perhaps 
that of Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice his son Isaac upon God’s command given 
his belief in the existence of an eternal state (i.e. “Heaven”) after death. By showing that he 
is willing to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham demonstrates how his devotion to an eternal God is 
greater than his devotion to his mortal son.12 However, the reason for Abraham’s willingness 
to sacrifice Isaac is that God has promised that Isaac will flourish if he is sacrificed. This is, 
of course, fundamentally paradoxical since it means that Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice 
his son stems from his faith in the eternal. His action is only sensible in the light of his 
implicit conviction that life is finite since only that which may perish may also flourish.13  
 
The story of Abraham and Isaac therefore demonstrates how an eternal god cannot teach us 
anything about responsibility on Hägglund’s account since such a being cannot comprehend 
vulnerability or the binding nature of commitments. Thus, religious faith inhibits spiritual 
freedom since if God’s word is law, we stand in no legitimate position to question it.14 
Another example of how religious faith inhibits spiritual freedom is illustrated through a 
thought experiment in which two children are left alone with an artwork that they are told 
not to touch. One child is told not to touch the artwork because it is unique and fragile, and 
because many would be upset if it were to be broken. The other is told that the piece is being 
monitored and that he or she will be severely punished for either touching or breaking it. 
While neither child touches the work, it is easy to discern that they are motivated for quite 
different reasons (one by a sense of responsibility; the other from a fear of punishment). 
Without the presence of a monitor, the latter child would lose any trace of responsibility since 
he or she is not taught to use spiritual freedom for personal orientation15 like the first child. 
 
In the same way that we are subordinated to the eternal in a religious faith, we are subordinated 
to capital growth in capitalism. As the Marxist argument goes, when capital growth is seen 
as the measure of social welfare, our life and our time are only instrumental and valuable 
insofar as they give birth to a productive kind of labor. Consequently, capitalism undermines 
democracy as an institution because it inhibits discussions about value, as well as those related 
to reform, since “making a profit” has already taken over as the incontestable value that society 
ought to follow.16 Unlike capitalism, Hägglund claims, democratic socialism promotes 
democratic discussions since the means of production are owned collectively by citizens, and 
social welfare is measured in terms of socially-available free time. This is time freed to cultivate 
our spiritual freedom, either by engaging in pursuits that we find intrinsically valuable, or 
by confirming and challenging each others’ perceptions about what is inherently valuable.17 
 
One particularly important idea in democratic socialism is that a person’s freedom 

11 Ibid, 52.
12 Ibid, 125–128.
13 Ibid, 134–138, 150, 164–167.
14 Ibid, 169–170.
15 Ibid, 208–210.
16 Ibid, 250–251.
17 Ibid, 275, 301–303.



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is dependent upon other people’s freedom since we cannot have spiritual freedom in 
isolation.18 Thus, the purpose of democratic socialism is to minimize alienating labour so 
that we can both spend time on what we value and become active citizens responsible for 
answering to each other. This explains, in part, the importance of collective ownership under 
democratic socialism, and is meant to replace all forms of abstract ownership where property 
can be classified as any random range of various commodities. Instead, collective ownership 
is a type of concrete ownership wherein one can only own an object if they possess a 
concrete relation to it.19 For example, in capitalism one can own artwork as a status symbol 
without actually caring about its intrinsic worth as an art piece, whereas in democratic 
socialism, only those that sincerely appreciate the artwork can be said to properly own it.20 
 

II. The VIRTUe eThICal fRaMeWORkII. The VIRTUe eThICal fRaMeWORk
The two main ideas of virtue ethics are, first, that virtues are commendable character traits 
that guide us in different situations, and second, that we lead “flourishing” lives by acting 
virtuously on a continuous and voluntary basis.21 Consequently, people’s actions are seen as 
comprehensible in light of their intentions and motives – a view which seems almost second-
nature today. To lead a virtuous life is to achieve one’s telos, which means “final end” in Aristotle’s 
Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle contends that this telos is biological and universal. He holds that 
we flourish when we use our phronesis (i.e., practical wisdom22), and claims that this means that 
there must be some natural hierarchy in society where only a small elite23 are privileged enough 
to cultivate all of their virtues. The rest are natural slaves who need to sacrifice themselves so 
that mankind, as a species, might strive towards its telos through the victories of the elite.24 
 
Contre Aristotle, Alasdair MacIntyre argues instead for a social and dynamic understanding 
of our telos. He thinks that humans are story-tellers who understand actions based on the 
historical and social situations that make their endeavours meaningful and sensible.25 This 
would mean that we interpret actions in light of the various narratives that give us context, 
and that it is in course of writing these narratives that we lead “good lives”. Additionally, one 
important aspect of such narratives is that they can never be fixed or predetermined, and 
therefore, always require some element of uncertainty in order to motivate action26. Thus, 
living the good life is to constantly search for what it is to live a good life, and the virtues 
that one gathers along the way constitute the inner compass that guide such a search.27 
 

18 Ibid, 225–231.
19 Ibid, 305–307.
20 Ibid, 319–320.
21 Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics”, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The reviewed Oxford translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2, 
Bollingen Series: 71:2, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1746–1752.
22 Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics”, 1734–1737.
23 The elite were mainly seen as the citizens of the polis, the ancient Greek city-state.
24 Aristotle, “Politics”, in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The reviewed Oxford translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2, Bollingen Series: 
71:2, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1989–1992.
25 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edition, (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame press, 1985), 204–205.
26 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 215–218.
27 Ibid, 219–220.



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MacIntyre’s view of virtues in the good life stems from his view of their role in practice, the 
latter of which being defined as such28: 

Music, for example, is a practice with internal goods. These internal goods are certain skills 
and abilities that can only be cultivated through practicing one’s instrument, and all of those 
who partake in the practice of music can develop the necessary skills and abilities of music 
(or of the musician). However, many practices also have contingent goods attached to them, 
such as money or status.29 If someone is motivated by contingent  goods instead of internal 
goods, the practice is simply an instrument for one’s own interests and treated as an arena in 
which one competes for resources.30

The alternative is to treat the practice as a social community of intrinsic value that can only 
flourish and advance through cooperation. Those who revere a practice strive for the internal 
rather than the contingent goods, and thus, have a relationship to its members, history, and 
tradition characterized by virtues like honesty and justice.31 They are active in discussing what 
the internal goods actually are and take part in the narrative development of the practice, 
which in turn reflects the practice’s unique history. If society as a whole was considered to 
be a practice, MacIntyre thinks that a capitalist society would be one in which the political, 
economic, and social focus were focused on contingent rather than internal goods constituting 
the good life.32 Thus, competition and social atomism prosper in a capitalist society since 
the idea of psychological egoism is legitimized through political and social institutions. In 
the same vein, MacIntyre criticizes the consequentialist inclinations of modern capitalist 
societies, which results in legitimizing indifference to internal and contingent goods. 33 
 
The deontological trait of modernity is also criticized from a virtue ethical standpoint. 
According to Anscombe, the idea that one should follow the law for the sake of the law 
presupposes that there exist a superior authority that can impose and enforce that law34 
(i.e. God). But since so much of modernity hinges on the non-existence of such an 
authority,35 moral duties become anachronistic and lose their relevance; in other words, 
they become  disconnected from the context that initially made them comprehensible. 
Therefore, Anscombe thinks that human beings in modernity face a dilemma: either re-
establish God as “the superior authority,” or embrace a virtue ethical standpoint based on the 

28 Ibid, 187.
29 Ibid, 188.
30 Ibid, 190.
31 Ibid, 191, 194.
32 Ibid, 226–228.
33 Ibid, 198–199.
34 Elizabeth Anscombe, “Modern moralfilosofi”, trans. Joel Backström, in Filosofin genom tiderna: Texter 1900-talet. Före 1950, 2nd 
edition, ed. Konrad Marc-Wogau, Staffan Carlshamre and Martin Gustafsson, (Stockholm: Thales, 2010), 453–456.
35 Anscombe, “Modern moralfilosofi”, 459–460.

Any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human 
activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized 
in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are 
appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity.



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assumption that our responsibility resides in our relationship with our fellow human beings.  
 
Since virtue ethics frees us from pre-established principles, it is essential that we cultivate 
virtue through practical experience. That is, we need to practice how to apply our experience 
and different virtues under unique circumstances. According to Philippa Foot, some virtues 
might also be considered more genuine if they come naturally rather than reluctantly.36 For 
example, someone whose benevolence derives from an innate sense of empathy and kindness 
might be considered more genuine than someone whose benevolence originates from a mere 
sense of  duty.37 Caring, as defined by Nel Noddings, might be considered a virtue in this 
sense. To care is to be receptive to, and wholeheartedly engaged in, another person without 
projecting one’s own preferences, feelings, or conditions onto that person38; additionally, to 
feel cared for is to feel recognized as a subject.39 When we feel recognized as subjects, our 
inspiration and motivation to pursue and to cultivate what we value can be expected to 
grow.40 On the contrary, when we are treated according to pre-established, rigid, and abstract 
principles, our reality is overlooked, and we risk being reduced to objects.41 Caring is thus an 
essential virtue in the realization that our choices and actions affect other people as subjects.  
 
While it might be easier to genuinely care for those whom we love, our motivation to 
also care for others comes from what Noddings calls our ethical ideal. The ethical ideal 
is the memory image from our experiences of caring, both shown and received.42 When 
we look inward to the ideal and remind ourselves of the affinity that we can have with 
other people, it motivates us to care. Since the ethical ideal consists of memories, it is 
not abstract, but deeply personal and dynamic.43 If we do not cultivate it, it will fade, 
and we might become more inclined to objectify others or to act in self-interest.44  
 

III. hägglUND’s MOVe TOWaRD The VIRTUe eThICal III. hägglUND’s MOVe TOWaRD The VIRTUe eThICal 
sTaNDPOINTsTaNDPOINT
Anscombe’s dilemma stems from her argument that we cannot incur moral duties if we do 
not submit to a superior moral authority, as we cannot be both superior in authority, but 
also subordinate to the mandate of that authority.45 While Anscombe says that God’s laws 
do not belong in a secular context, Hägglund holds that human beings have no choice but 
to reject God as a moral authority since God cannot teach us anything about responsibility.  
Because God is eternal, and thus lacks an understanding of fragility and commitment46, 

36 Philippa Foot, “Virtues and Vices”, in Virtues and Vices: and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy, (New York: Oxford University Press, 
2002), 8–11.
37 Foot, ”Virtues and Vices”, 11–12.
38 Nel Noddings, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, 2nd edition, (Los Angeles: University of California 
press, 2013), 14, 16, 30–35.
39 Noddings, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, 19–21.
40 Ibid, 74.
41 Ibid, 65–67.
42 Ibid, 49–51.
43 Ibid, 79–81
44 Ibid, 83–85, 113–120.
45 Anscombe, “Modern moralfilosofi”, 455.
46 Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, 169–170.



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He cannot understand mortality either conceptually or definitionally. Thus, Hägglund’s 
stance against God in Anscombes’ dilemma is clear: if morality does exist, it cannot be 
reaffirmed by God’s command without also being entirely incomprehensible to Him  
 
Having rejected divine authority as a possible source of moral authority, Hägglund opts 
in favor of Anscombe’s second alternative: we should embrace a virtue ethical standpoint 
wherein we realize that our responsibility stems from our commitment to our fellow 
human beings. This position appears quite evident in Hägglund’s advocacy for collective 
ownership since the very reason for advocating collective ownership in the first place was 
to promote a type of democratic discussion where citizens are answerable to each other.47 
The same conclusion follows from the argument that our mortality makes us dependent 
on each other for sustenance, and makes us realize that we have a responsibility to 
treasure our fellow human being’s uniqueness given their mortality and intrinsic worth.48  
 
Furthermore, Hägglund seems to agree with Anscombe that judgements should be well-
grounded, and that motives, intention, and will should matter in the assessment of any 
person’s actions (a point which rings particularly true in the case of the two children with 
the artwork). Though neither one of the children touch the work, Hägglund argues that 
the one who is motivated by a sense of responsibility and care for the fragile has a more 
well-grounded argument for refraining to touch the artwork49; that child would act just as 
carefully regardless of the presence of an external authority. But the child who acts out of fear 
of punishment is instead motivated by a thinly substantiated argument, as he or she could, in 
theory, act quite carelessly with the artwork in the absence of authority. Thus, being guided 
by spiritual freedom can be compared to giving well-founded arguments for one’s actions.  
 
The reason why one should consider aspects like motive, intention, will, or circumstance 
is that our actions are only comprehensible in light of their context, which in turn is 
grounded in the previous conviction that human activity is teleologically-motivated. When 
Hägglund says that our motivation to act comes from our desire for a future in which 
everything that we find intrinsically valuable flourishes, he argues teleologically. Crucially, 
such teleological reasoning can be interpreted as Hägglund taking a virtue ethical stance.  
 
Before such a conclusion can be drawn, it is important to note that actions are also evaluated 
teleologically from a consequentialist standpoint since consequentialists justify actions based 
on their actual or expected consequences. Hägglund’s argument about how value should be 
measured in socially available free time instead of capital growth can actually be interpreted 
as a consequentialist perspective (mainly in utilitarian terms). From a utilitarian point of 
view, Hägglund’s criticism of capitalism is that we are optimizing the wrong good, and 
not, challenging the idea of evaluating actions based on the benefits which they produce.  
 
47 Ibid, 225–231.
48 Ibid, 43–51, 62, 68–74.
49 Ibid, 208–210.



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We must not forget, however, that Hägglund says all that we value must be sustained 
in practice in order to not perish.50 For instance, Hägglund claims that the activities of 
spending time together and showing interest in one another are constitutive of friendship.51 
Friendship does not follow contingently from such activities, but is directly dependent for 
its existence on them; that is, Hägglund thinks that actions have a value in-themselves since 
they are manifestations of the things that we value. Consequentialism cannot account for 
this kind of reasoning as it focuses only on the contingent result of actions and can only 
evaluate actions in purely instrumental terminology. In general, the flourishing of that 
which we value is not a contingent result of our actions, but is constituted by the actions 
themselves. In sum, Hägglund distances himself from a consequentialist standpoint where 
the ends justify the means, and he can be rightly described as moving towards a virtue 
ethical standpoint. In advocating for socially-available free time as the true measure of 
value, he portrays ends as time-bound and as expressed rather than maximized by actions.  
 
Moreover, Hägglund opposes capitalism because it inhibits us from seeing our own 
activity as an end-in-itself. Capitalism forces us to assume an instrumental position 
in relation to capital growth.52 In Hägglund’s view, it allows us to accept a reversed 
relationship between what has instrumental and intrinsic value since the value of our life 
and our time depends on how much capital growth we generate. This Marxist standpoint 
can be reconciled with MacIntyre’s equally Marxist critique of the consequentialist trait 
in capitalism. The gist of that critique was that capitalism legitimizes a preference for 
contingent goods, like money or power, over internal goods constituting the good life.53 As 
such, Hägglund seems to share some of MacIntyre’s concerns regarding consequentialism.  
 
Hägglund also argues for a virtue ethical and teleological standpoint in his account of 
spiritual freedom.  According to Aristotle, our primary telos is to use our phronesis since it 
enables us to be virtuous and to flourish.54 Likewise, Hägglund proposes that our overall 
purpose is to practice spiritual freedom since it is this that enables us to take responsibility 
for our actions and to sustain and cultivate what we value. Aristotle’s view of phronesis as 
merely based in biology, however, leads him to conclude that there is a natural hierarchy in 
society where the elite prosper at the expense of natural slaves.55 Hägglund is not willing 
to sign on to such a biologically-grounded teleology, and he also opposes capitalism and 
religious faith as teleological determinants since they cannot account for the intrinsic 
value of human life and time given their subordination to capital growth56 or the eternal57. 
When Aristotle says that there is a predetermined hierarchy in society deriving from human 
biology, he argues in a way that is similar to the idea of seeing capital growth or God’s law 
as the predetermined purpose of society. As one might expect, Hägglund rejects this type 

50 Ibid, 176.
51 Hägglund, interview. 
52 Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, 250–251.
53 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 226–228, 198–199.
54 Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics”, 1734–1737.
55 Aristotle, “Politics”, 1989–1992.
56 Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, 250–251.
57 Ibid, 10.



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of reasoning since it prohibits us from seeing the historical-normative framework of our 
existence as dynamic and changeable.

To view the terms of our existence as biologically predetermined inhibits spiritual freedom 
and stands in direct contrast to the conviction that life is finite. If everything were already 
predetermined, we would not be able to prioritize different values or feel motivated to act 
in order to sustain and cultivate what we value. Thus, if the terms of our existence were 
rigid, it would not be possible to set out one of Hägglund’s main arguments for democratic 
socialism; namely, the argument for the interdependence of free subjects who can validate 
or challenge each other’s different perspectives and standpoints.58 The notion that human 
flourishing presupposes a natural hierarchy in which some people’s freedom is made possible 
by the objectification and alienation of other people is irreconcilable with Hägglund’s 
perspective. One person’s spiritual freedom and flourishing is directly dependent on the 
recognition of other people as subjects with spiritual freedom. If Aristotle had taken full 
account of mortality, he would have regarded the conditions of existence as dynamic rather 
than predetermined.

While a biologically-based teleology does not seem compatible with Hägglund’s account, 
a socially-based one might be. MacIntyre, for instance, says that there cannot be any 
determinate answers as to what our telos is since we are narrative beings who understand 
themselves, their pursuits, and their companions in relation to their historical and social 
situation.59 This reasoning appears to be echoed by Hägglund’s belief that humans have 
spiritual freedom which enables them to treat the material, social, and historical conditions of 
their existence as dynamic.60 There are also clear similarities between MacIntyre’s conception 
of the human telos as an overall narrative involving an element of uncertainty as a source 
of motivation and Hägglund’s description of secular faith. This description emphasizes that 
our motivation to sustain and to cultivate certain aspirations comes from realizing that these 
aspirations are dependent on our action for their existence and flourishing. While MacIntyre 
views uncertainty as a motivating force61, Hägglund views the constantly present risk of loss 
as an ever present source of motivation to act.62 

Furthermore, the entire point of democratic socialism is to give citizens the ability 
to participate in, and to influence, discussions about the very form of society and what 
goals one ought to pursue in accord with what they find intrinsically valuable (something 
that cannot be fully embraced in capitalism given that the object of society is already set 
in advance). Thus, the point of democratic socialism is for people to constantly inform 
themselves about what the good life is and what they ought to pursue. This notion 
is comparable to a socially-based teleology according to which the internal good of the 
human telos is to try to discern what the good life consists in. Democratic socialism can, 

58 Ibid, 225–231.
59 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 204–205.
60 Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, 176–177.
61 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 215–218.
62 Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, 46.



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therefore, be seen as a practice whereby its members (i.e. its citizens) strive to realize and 
to promote internal goods together. By the same token, MacIntyre says that it is virtue 
that commits us to such internal goods and that it plays a primary role in practices. They 
keep us committed to cultivating the practice and its community instead of treating it, 
or its members, as instruments for opportunistic ends.63 Therefore, virtues can be said 
to play a primary role in Hägglund’s vision of democratic socialism as a practice too. 
 
Furthermore, Hägglund actually argues in ways similar to MacIntyre’s advocacy for internal 
goods in his argument for collective and concrete ownership of the means of production. 
In concrete ownership, we can only be said to own that which we have a relationship 
to, which excludes objects that we merely have a commercial self-interest in.64 You can, 
for example, only own artwork insofar as you appreciate and value it both as an end-in-
itself and with respect to art-in-itself (i.e., not as a sign of status or riches)65. If this were 
the case, then there would be no incentive to treat art as commerce since one would not 
be able to make a profit from it. It would only be a manifestation, expression, or part 
of art as a practice, which would belong only to those truly interested in caring about it. 
 
So far, I have argued that virtues find their primary function in the striving for and in the 
constitution of the internal goods in various practices. However, I have also said that caring 
as a virtue finds its primary purpose in close relationships. Taking Hägglund’s main premise 
that life is finite, I think that caring is a virtue in-itself and should be acknowledged as such. 
Caring as a virtue is namely compatible with the idea that we should value the finite above 
the eternal since it is the fragility in the finite life that keeps us committed to one another. For 
example, viewing caring as a virtue strengthens Hägglund’s criticism of religious faith in the 
example of Abraham and Isaac. In Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, he demonstrates 
that his faith and loyalty to God are greater than his love for his mortal son, even though his 
motive appears to stem from a conviction that Isaac’s life will flourish. In Nodding’s words, 
Abraham was not wholeheartedly receptive to Isaac; he does not view Isaac as the subject in 
focus, but himself, since he projects his own preferences and beliefs onto Isaac. Even though 
Abraham is motivated by fatherly love, he treats Isaac based on a predetermined principle 
which objectifies him in favour of his own religious belief and conviction.66 He does not truly 
act with care since he does not realize that Isaac is a subject affected by his choices and actions. 
 
Furthermore, caring fosters spiritual freedom, which in turn makes us free subjects and 
enables us to take responsibility for our pursuits. One could even argue that it is by 
caring that we make our counterparts feel recognized as free subjects, which enables and 
encourages them to find motivation to grow as persons and to engage in the things or 
pursuits that they value. In capitalism, the reverse prevails insofar as capitalism commodifies 
and objectifies people, which means that our spiritual freedom is diminished both when 

63 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 191, 194.
64 Hägglund, This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free, 305–307.
65 Ibid, 319–320.
66 Noddings, Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, 43–44.



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we are not cared for and when we do not care. By not caring for one another, we are 
more easily objectified and treated by predetermined, rigidly enforced principles. 
 
Since caring is mainly expressed in the concrete meeting between two people who have a 
close relationship, one might worry whether such a virtue applies to non-interpersonal or 
institutional contexts. After all, discussions about people on the collective level are very 
difficult since it requires that we take into account the complexity of everyone’s personal 
situations and needs. In these contexts, our ability for rational problem-solving justly and 
indiscriminately seem to take center stage. So, perhaps, the same thing should also be expected 
under the conditions of democratic socialism. Nonetheless, if the main reason for advocating 
democratic socialism is that it recognizes humans as spiritual creatures who are dependent on, 
and stand in relation to, other humans, then caring should be considered to have a legitimate 
place in democratic socialism. It keeps us committed to people as subjects with spiritual 
freedom, and as such, it enfranchises citizens as subjects who have a voice that deserves respect. 
 
Although it might be too demanding to ask of members of society to care for each other 
in the same way that they might care for their loved ones, it is important to remember 
that caring as a virtue can be expressed in one of two ways: either through genuine care in 
relationships, or through the ethical ideal.67 So, in relation to those to whom we are not 
close, or to whom we do not even like, our responsibility is to act based on the ethical ideal. 
And since the ethical ideal is personal and dynamic, and requires maintenance in practice,68 
one could argue that it is the citizens’ personal responsibility in democratic socialism to 
try and cultivate his or her ethical ideal. Adherence to that ideal is required to establish 
individuals as subjects of intrinsic value, which all inevitably boils down to Hägglund’s main 
argument that life is finite, and thus, precious. 

IV: CONClUsIONIV: CONClUsION
I have presented four arguments to show that Hägglund’s position is best compatible with 
virtue ethics, or at least significantly more so than with deontological or consequentialist 
ethics. Firstly, Hägglund rejects a strictly deontological standpoint as he questions God 
as a moral authority. Duties presuppose an independent superior authority, such as God, 
but he rejects theism for all of the complications that Anscombe gives. Secondly, virtue 
ethical teleology does a better job than consequentialist teleology of accounting  for actions 
that have intrinsic value and for viewing pursuits as temporal and as dependent for their 
flourishing on human activity. Thirdly, Hägglund shares MacIntyre’s idea of a socially-based 
teleology in which humans are story-tellers, and the good life is thought of as a narrative 
with an element of uncertainty. Fourthly, Hägglund thinks that modern humans lack the 
right conditions for cultivating a virtuous approach to social practices in a capitalist society. 
I have also presented two arguments for the thesis that Hägglund’s position is compatible 
with viewing caring as a virtue. Firstly, I have argued that the fragility of the finite makes 

67 Ibid, 79–81
68 Ibid, 79–81, 83–85, 113–120.



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caring important since it is by caring that we sustain all that we value. This means that 
focusing on the virtue of caring does justice to the idea that all we have is the time that 
we spend together in this life. Secondly, caring is the virtue that nurtures and cherishes 
spiritual freedom since when we care about them, we treat our counterparts as subjects. In 
conclusion, these arguments indicate that virtue ethics, and specifically caring as a virtue, 
undergird Hägglund’s complex account that life is finite, and that democratic socialism is the 
best form of society for recognizing the intrinsic value and spiritual freedom of humanity.  

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Anscombe, Elizabeth. ”Modern moralfilosofi”, translated by Joel Backström. In Filosofin 

genom tiderna: Texter 1900-talet. Före 1950. 2nd ed. Edited by Konrad Marc-Wogau, 
Staffan Carlshamre and Martin Gustafsson, 453–476. Stockholm: Thales, 2010.

Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The reviewed Oxford translation. Edited by 
Jonathan Barnes, 1729-1867. Volume 2. Bollingen Series: 71:2. Princeton: Princeton 
University Press, 1984.

Foot, Philippa. “Virtues and Vices”. In Virtues and Vices: and Other Essays in Moral 
Philosophy, 1-18.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Hägglund, Martin. This Life: Why Mortality Makes Us Free. London: Profile Books Ltd, 
2019.

Hägglund, Martin, “Utblick: Martin Hägglund och det ändliga livet.” Interview by 
producer Thomas Lunderquist. Filosofiska rummet [podcast], SR, November 10, 2019. 
https://sverigesradio.se/sida/avsnitt/1385980?programid=793. 

MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 2nd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame press, 
1984.

Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. 2nd ed. Los 
Angeles: University of California Press, 2013.



88

δι
άν

οι
α

  
INTRODUCTIONINTRODUCTION

A  former athlete at my local badminton club recently posted an article on Medium 
alleging sexual harassment against one of the coaches at the club. Her article included 

descriptions of her personal experiences with the coach, as well as the first-person testimony 
of other teenage players at the club, who alleged that the coach had given inappropriate 
massages and made sexually suggestive comments to the teenage badminton players at the 
club. In the article, the author wrote that she had reported her experiences with the coach 
to SafeSport, the governing body that oversees athletes’ safety. Unfortunately, SafeSport 
had failed to complete an investigation into the coach at the time when the author's 
complaints were reported; local law enforcement also failed to find evidence of a crime. 
 
Almost immediately after it was posted, reshares of the article erupted on Facebook. 
Some female athletes shared the article and added stories of their own experiences with 
the coach that corroborated the narrative put forth in the Medium article. Yet others—
many of whom were the victims’ classmates and training mates—posted long Facebook 
statuses attesting to the coach’s character and asked readers to give the coach the “benefit 
of the doubt”. The overarching thrust of their argument was that judgment should be 
withheld until the coach had a chance to publish a statement in defense of his actions.  
 
Both views present compelling arguments that have been defended at length in philosophical 
literature about the rights of sexual assault survivors and the rights of the accused, respectively. 

THE JUSTIFICATION-APPLICATION SPECTRUM:
Exploring Seyla Benhabib’s Reconciliation of the 

Generalized and Concrete Others

MEGAN WU



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To be a feminist and a supporter of the #metoo movement requires that survivors of assault 
and their personal narratives be taken seriously. Yet, one might still wonder how it can be 
just to deny the accused a chance to defend their action. Contemporary problems, like the 
treatment of sexual assault in the media and popular culture, are as discursive as they are 
social because they raise questions about what perspectives are most important in a dialogue 
about each incident, and what form our public conversations about events ought to take. 
 
In particular, the responses to the article present an important tension between competing 
values: personal experiences, which come already grounded in a framework of identity 
and power central to subject positioning, and universal and purportedly identity-
independent principles that govern justice in societies. To navigate the relationship 
between both of these values, I turn to Seyla Benhabib’s work on discourse ethics. 
Refining our discourse, she argues, is the best way to mediate and balance abstract 
principles of justice with attention to non-abstract experiences, emotions, and identities. 
1 

BenhaBiB’s CommuniCative ethiCsBenhaBiB’s CommuniCative ethiCs
Seyla Benhabib, in her exploration of the embodied self, writes of two different conceptions 
of identity: the Generalized Other and the Concrete Other.2 For Benhabib, the study of 
subjectivity is an important consideration for the study of ethics because philosophers like 
Kant and Rawls have historically derived normative claims from their descriptive assumptions 
about the subject.3 In this tradition, universalist philosophers assume the standpoint of the 
Generalized Other; that is, subjects are constituted by rationality and should be subject to 
the same formal laws of reciprocity and equality that we would ask of ourselves.4 Disparities 
like those that race and gender can only be remedied by a system of norms that require one 
to abstract from their personal identities so that they can objectively consider the interests 
of others and society as a whole. However, in opposition to the universalist tradition, moral 
psychologists like Carol Gilligan have identified the necessity of adopting the standpoint 
of the Concrete Other; a subject for which individual history, identity, and desires are 
important.5 As Benhabib puts it—in the context of the Concrete Other—one views subjects 
in terms of their “concrete history, identity, and affective-emotional constitution […] we 
abstract from what constitutes our commonality.”6 The female badminton players referenced 
in the introduction spoke from Concrete standpoints, which can be corroborated through  
their use of personal narratives, emotions, and their discussion of power imbalances 
in their experiences with the coach. Those in defense of the coach took a Generalized 
standpoint wherein they drew on abstract, Rawlsian principles of justice like the rights 
of the accused and of formal legal inquiry. Though it may be compelling to think of the 
Generalized and Concrete Others as diametrically opposed conceptions of subjectivity, 

1 Seyla Benhabib, "The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan 
Controversy and Feminist Theory." PRAXIS International, no. 4 (1985): 416.
2 Benhabib, The Generalized and The Concrete Other, 415.
3 Benhabib, The Generalized and The Concrete Other, 408-409.
4 Benhabib, The Generalized and The Concrete Other, 414.
5 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 
100-101.
6 Benhabib, The Generalized and The Concrete Other, 411.



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Benhabib’s argument is that reconciling the two is necessary for any moral theory; both 
conceptions of the self are important in different scenarios. As a way of reconciling 
or navigating an interplay between the Generalized and Concrete others, Benhabib 
proposes the idea of communicative ethics, which consists of the following four principles:7 
 
 1. That participants in the dialogue inquire about what others would want if  
 they were the affected party.

 2. That there exist no epistemic constraints within the dialogue; in other words,  
 factors related to either universal principles, or to particularized, historically  
 contingent principles, ought to be recognized as important in good dialogues,  
 and ought to thereby give merit to both the Generalized and Concrete Others.

 3. That there be no restrictions on the moral domain, which is to say, that all  
 choices merit ethical consideration by virtue of the fact that one of them could  
 involve either value judgments from, or interactions with, others.

 4. That the “rules,” practices, and guidelines of the dialogue are subject to change. 
 
Benhabib defends the communicative ethics from critics in her work, “In Defense of 
Universalism: Yet Again!”, by clarifying that the act of deliberation itself sufficiently 
solves the problems that critics believe would arise in her discursive framework.8 
Benhabib’s thesis, which I will elaborate and expand on in the next section, is that 
when misrecognition of the Concrete Other occurs, having a conversation about it and 
correcting the misunderstanding is a prerequisite to resolving disagreements, both factual 
and moral. A communicative ethics is therefore an innately self-correcting system. 
 

answering asymmetriCal reCiproCityanswering asymmetriCal reCiproCity
Iris Marion Young responds to Benhabib’s “The Generalized and The Concrete Other” in 
“Asymmetrical Reciprocity: on Moral Respect, Wonder, and Elongated Thought,” wherein 
she argues that the process of universalizing, or imagining what another agent would want, 
goes awry when agents substitute their perception of another agent’s desires over what those 
desires actually are.9 In some cases, substitution may be a well-intentioned misunderstanding, 
such as a person mistakenly buying a gift that is already owned by the recipient. Other cases 
of substitution, like paternalistic substitution, are far more concerning; this would be akin to 
going on a service trip to an underdeveloped country without actually helping the country’s 
residents, but still benefiting from the appearance of humanitarianism and charitability. 
This thereby shows how models based on reciprocity can become problematic when they 

7 Benhabib, The Generalized and The Concrete Other, 417.
8 Seyla Benhabib, "In Defense of Universalism. Yet Again! A Response to Critics of Situating the Self." New German Critique, no. 62 
(1994): 176. doi:10.2307/488515
9 Iris Marion Young, “Feminism and the Public Sphere: Asymmetrical Reciprocity: on Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought.” 
Constellations 3, no. 3 (1997): 354.



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occur across imbalances of power. Young argues that paternalistic substitution causes agents 
to either impose or to assume their notion of what others want over and against the actual 
experiences, desires, and perspectives of the Other, which precludes the communicative 
ethics from striking a balance between honoring the perspectives of marginalized individuals 
in dialogues and maintaining Generalized principles like reciprocity and fairness. 
 
To resolve this issue, Young advocates for “asymmetrical reciprocity,”10 which argues that 
understanding and recognizing the other is necessary for reciprocity to work correctly. 
An asymmetrical understanding of reciprocity considers both the history of power 
dynamics present in the relationship, and the participants’ unique positions along the 
intersections of different identities like race and gender.11 Functionally, asymmetrical 
reciprocity requires prioritizing the Concrete Other over the Generalized Other 
because recognizing the asymmetries of a relationship involves giving an account of the 
relationship in terms of the Concreteness of the participants (rather than Generalized 
ways in which the participants may interact). I argue, however, that evaluating the 
standpoint of the Concrete Other prior to that of the Generalized Other is made 
functionally impossible given the complexities of different intersections between identity 
categories. I additionally defend Benhabib’s communicative ethics by arguing that their 
adherence alone is sufficient to resolve the deficiencies of Young’s asymmetrical reciprocity. 
 
The first deficiency of asymmetrical reciprocity is that it cannot account for the 
interpersonal relationships between members of a marginalized group, and between 
members of a marginalized group and another group (whether marginal or otherwise). 
Attempting to describe the relationship in terms of an “asymmetry” ultimately fails 
because the particularities of identity cannot always easily translate into a simple, scalar 
comparison of privilege. One such example is that of colorist prejudice: many in the East 
Asian community are prejudiced against dark-skinned Asians for a number of reasons 
including darker skin being associated with low-class labor, Black skin, and opposition to 
Eurocentric beauty standards.12 However, though an asymmetry between light- and dark-
skinned East Asians certainly exists, the size of the asymmetry is too difficult to quantify 
since its degree occurs on a sliding scale according to the individual color of one’s skin, 
rather than on a binary opposition between being or not being a member of a given racial 
group. Intersectionality, too, poses a problem for asymmetrical reciprocity: each person has 
a number of characteristics (e.g. economic class, gender, level of education, etc.) that make it 
difficult to clearly tell which participants are the most disadvantaged relative to others in real, 
asymmetrical relationships. Ultimately, I contend that a communicative ethics is perhaps 
the best framework for apprehending the asymmetries posed by differences in identity: 
even if recognizing one’s structural privilege relative to others’ is impossible to know, the 
first principle of communicative ethics is that participants attempt to view problems from 

10 Young, Asymmetrical Reciprocity, 343.
11 Young, Asymmetrical Reciprocity, 347.
12 Trina Jones, “The Significance of Skin Color in Asian and Asian-American Communities: Initial Reflections.” UC Irvine Law Review, 
University of California Press 3 (2013): 1114-1120.



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the standpoint of another. Not only does the first principle serve as a mechanism through 
which participants in a dialogue can abstract from their own unique positions, but it also 
allows for a better understanding of the positions of others. This abstraction avoids the 
problem of substitution because participants do not speak from the perspective of others; 
they use substitution as a heuristic for openness to others’ ideas. Additionally, participants 
avoid the problem of having to calculate asymmetries between participants because all 
participants are equally obligated to understand others, independent of asymmetries. In 
doing so, participants are then able to open up a space to understand and to consider 
problems holistically—therefore mitigating the problem of asymmetries in discourse—and 
avoid relying solely on one standpoint which might be epistemically and socially-privileged. 
 
Though it is certainly important to consider subject positioning in discourse ethics, relying 
on an understanding of subjectivity based on material features of a person’s identity can be 
infinitely regressive. Each individual can point to any number of characteristics (e.g. Chinese, 
woman, fan of Harry Potter) that they consider to be an integral part of their identity and 
classification, and it quickly becomes evident that no clear line exists for differentiating a 
person’s identity from the properties that describe them. The implication of the difficulty in 
defining or parameterizing identity is that identity then becomes an impossible, or at least 
incomplete, basis for a dialogical framework, which poses a significant issue for Young’s 
Asymmetrical Reciprocity. Furthermore, this suggests that Benhabib is ultimately correct 
to view both Concrete and Generalized standpoints as important features of ethics contra 
Young.

The ability of identity to encompass a near-infinite number of descriptors may suggest James 
Sterba’s objection that fully knowing the Other is impossible.13 In situations that require 
immediate action, or those in which specific knowledge may be necessary, a requirement 
to engage in discourse may present certain challenges. Moreover, as Sterba argues, to tell 
another participant in a dialogue one’s complete personal history and identity requires a 
level of vulnerability, trust, and time that participants may not have or be willing to share14; 
nonetheless, I believe that the communicative ethics is immune to this objection. Though 
a person’s identity properties may very well prove infinite, and full knowledge of the Other 
is impossible, participants do not need to know each other absolutely and entirely.  Under 
a communicative ethics, participants in a dialogue compelled to share their perspective 
must simply isolate or define what segments of their identity and lived experiences are 
relevant to the problem at hand and do their best to make that description fungible.  
 
Another objection to asymmetrical reciprocity is that it positions subjects with greater 
socio-political privilege in dialogues with participants that possess less power and actually 
incentivizes them to mis-substitute, or wrongly assuming the needs of the Other. Such a 
dialogue would allow malicious actors with privilege to promote positions in the name of 

13 James P. Sterba, "Benhabib and Rawls's Hypothetical Contractualism." New German Critique, no. 62 (1994): 149-64. 
doi:10.2307/488513.
14 Sterba, Benhabib and Rawls, 152-153.



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the worst off that do not actually benefit them and removes any institutional discursive 
check against this practice. For example, documented incidents of police brutality routinely 
spark societal discussions about increased police training and the use of body cameras. Police 
departments have in fact framed the need for increased funding to conduct trainings in 
terms of the goal of decreasing police violence.15 Yet, these increases in funding, despite 
claiming to be in the best interest of communities most at risk of police brutality, are in fact 
directly in conflict with the aims the recent movement to defund the police and re-invest 
into communities.16 The central issue with asymmetrical reciprocity which this example 
demonstrates is that listening to marginalized perspectives and responding to their general 
concerns does not necessarily imply that either the outcomes of dialogue will be in their best 
interest; in fact, their demands can be twisted or misinterpreted to give license to outcomes 
that contradict their goals.

On the other hand, the communicative ethics does have a structural method of restricting 
such a practice. Under the communicative ethics, participants in dialogues are allowed 
to define the terms of their engagement by sharing exactly those parts of their experience 
which they determine to be relevant to the discussion and also to define what that means 
in terms of shifts in practices and policies. Where the dialogue about police brutality has 
gone wrong is that the dialogue recognized an asymmetry without actually empowering 
the speakers whose voices had been disadvantaged: police departments generally listened 
to communities’ concerns about police violence, but did not then actively seek out, follow, 
or prioritize the leadership and policies of organizers. Should participants in dialogues 
with others give the highest credence to voices other than their own, as they do in the 
communicative ethics, participation in a dialogue can actually serve as a powerful tool that 
restores autonomy to speakers who have historically been denied agency. It allows them the 
advocacy and discursive space to reclaim ownership of their identity and desires from others. 
 
The second deficiency of asymmetrical reciprocity is its dependence on what Young 
calls temporality, which makes it challenging for asymmetrical reciprocity to guide 
judgements and actions.17 As Young defines it, temporality concerns the historical processes 
(change, continuity, and interaction with other groups) that have contributed to group 
identification;18 it is therefore essential, Young argues, that dialogue participants consider 
temporality in their comprehension of asymmetries between participants. Nonetheless, 
problems may arise when temporality plays into how groups self-identify. First, many 
identity groups have historical ramifications that must be grappled with, but under the 
framework of asymmetrical reciprocity, it is unclear what an individual’s responsibility 
for the temporality of his or her identity group should be. Tamara K. Nopper writes 
that Asian Americans first began to collectively identify as the racial group ‘Asian’ rather 

15 Matt Vasilogambros, “Training Police to Step In and Prevent Another George Floyd,” The PEW Charitable Trusts, June 5, 2020, 
https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2020/06/05/training-police-to-step-in-and-prevent-another-george-
floyd.
16 Grace Dickinson, “What does ‘defund the police’ mean, and what would it look like in Philly?” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 10, 
2020, https://www.inquirer.com/news/defund-the-police-black-lives-matter-what-does-it-mean-20200610.html.
17 Young, Asymmetrical Reciprocity, 352.
18 Young, Asymmetrical Reciprocity, 352.



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than be ethnically divided into such groups as ‘Chinese’ or ‘Japanese’ in order to give 
weight to the Model Minority Myth—a stereotype that was intentionally used to elevate 
the perception of Asian Americans at the expense of Black Americans.19 Yet, if simply 
identifying as Asian American is intrinsically antiblack, then this raises a litany of questions 
such as: which identities are acceptable and which are not, what constitutes an identity, 
and what are some of the reparations participants in dialogues may owe each other? These 
are all necessary questions to think about, but then again, only considering the context 
of “fruitful discourse” seems to stymie and to gatekeep an active and lively discussion. As 
such, navigating the complex relationships between different asymmetries makes the task 
of recognizing temporality in asymmetrical reciprocity difficult. In fact, recognizing the 
complexities of historically contingent relationships of power may point to the need for 
a system like the communicative ethics, where participants will inevitably be called on to 
acknowledge temporality under the framework of an epistemically boundless dialogue.  
 
Second, while the history of relationships between groups is in one sense constitutive of 
asymmetries between groups, looking solely at history to define power relationships may 
run the risk of abstracting too much from the lived experiences of participants in dialogue. 
By its nature as a historical descriptor, temporality is something that is constantly maturing 
and never static. The relationships between different communities might best be described 
as itself a constantly shifting dialogue, which indicates the utility of developing a system 
like the communicative ethics rather than rely on asymmetrical reciprocity as a framework. 
 

the JustifiCation-appliCation speCtrumthe JustifiCation-appliCation speCtrum
Though I believe that Benhabib’s communicative ethics present a better model than 
Young’s asymmetrical reciprocity, I find Benhabib’s description of appropriate contexts 
for the Concrete and Generalized Others lacking. In response to James Sterba’s 
objections, Benhabib writes that she considers two “contexts” in which action occurs: 
the moral standpoint (which corresponds to the Concrete Other) and the standpoint of 
institutional justice (which corresponds to the Generalized Other).20 For Benhabib, the 
moral standpoint encompasses scenarios where norms are applied, making them contexts 
of application, whereas the standpoint of institutional justice refers to scenarios where 
abstract principles are justified, making them contexts of justification. Below, I have 
grouped the different concepts and descriptors that Benhabib aligns with the mutually 
exclusive contexts of application and contexts of justification into their respective categories.  
 
Contrary to Benhabib, I believe that contexts of application and those of justification ought 
to be conceptualized as two ends of a spectrum, rather than separate contexts with no overlap. 
The spectrum model is best understood as a model that explains how people’s obligations 
and perspectives change as new information is gathered through participating  
19 Tamara K. Nopper, “The Unexceptional Racism of Andrew Sullivan,” Verso Books. Web. https://versobooks.com/blogs/3172-the-un-
exceptional-racism-of-andrew-sullivan.
20 Benhabib, In Defense of Universalism, 183.



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in discursive formulations such as the communicative ethics. In essence, participants may 
enter into dialogues from a standpoint that is very close to either application or justification 
but will move towards the other side as the dialogue continues; perspectives become either 
more Applied or more Justified. I also contend that discourse causes conversations and 
participants to converge towards the middle of the spectrum, wherein the conclusions 
reached through conversations have elements that are both Applied and Justified. 
 
The spectrum model indicates how principles can exist in between purely justified contexts 
and purely applied contexts—that we can have nuanced principles that reflect material 
realities, but are still principles, rather than exceptions. For example, a professor who 
modifies the norm that “extensions on papers will not be granted” to include “unless in the 
case of a documented family emergency” can still retain the Justified Principle of wanting to 
give all students an equal amount of time on the assignment, while still accounting for the 
Applied contexts in which students may face constraints on their time that are personal and 
uncontrollable. Under the spectrum model, a maxim can include an exception for specific 
cases, while retaining its universal normative force as any student, through no fault of his 
or her own, might encounter an unforeseen emergency that meaningfully hampers his or 
her ability to write papers without extensions. The spectrum model might suggest that 
exceptions to maxims are desirable if they could apply that the maxim would affect and be 
directly relevant to the appropriateness of the maxim’s primary subject.

To illustrate what I mean, consider a classroom setting where teachers and professors must 
establish fair rules that govern how the class will operate, such as deadlines and consistent 
grading scales that are shared by all members of the class. Professors construct class norms in 
contexts of justification, where they legislate with the understanding that the norms they set 
will be the same for all of the students regardless of the students’ identity, educational history, 
or experiences; norms are enacted without reference to, or exceptions for, any particular 
student. But most classrooms are not so simple: as the class progresses, students may ask 
for extensions on assignments or for grades to be rounded up to an A. Students make those 
requests based on concrete features of their experience unique to them, ranging from disability 
accommodations to hardships that they may have experienced during the pandemic. In 
changing or making exceptions to class policies, teachers must take a middle-ground stance 
between the contexts of justification and application and must view their students as both 



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Dianoia: The Undergraduate Philosophy Journal of Boston College

Generalized and Concrete. The resulting dialogue that occurs between teachers and students 
and the outcome of most class norms by the end of the semester shows that there is a 
middle-ground between contexts of Application and Justification, and demonstrates how 
stances that are in-between the ends of the spectrum are often both realistic and desirable. 
 
Finally, returning to the introductory example of the badminton coach, the athletes entered 
the dialogue (the online conversation surrounding the coach’s actions and their allegations) 
from a context of Application. The Medium article made note of the power imbalances present 
between coach and student, and quoted the athletes’ accounts of harassment, indicating an 
attention to individualized experiences. Those who defended the coach by attesting to his 
good character and citing the principle of “innocent until proven guilty” approached the 
conversation from a context of Justification because the norms they cited were abstract 
and not tailored to the particulars of the situation. However, as conversations continued, 
participants on Facebook representing both sides of the divide seemed to reach a consensus 
on several stances: that the coach’s character should be evaluated in light of the plethora of 
accusations against him and that the testimony of the athletes held comparable weight to the 
coach’s defense of himself. The terms of the dialogue shifted to a middle-ground between a 
context of Application and a context of Justification. And, as dialogues continued, the overall 
evaluation of the coach seemed to become more nuanced: participants, whether in defense 
of the coach or not, seemed to agree that his intentions of “joking around” and “getting 
comfortable” with students were separate from the effects of his actions on the athletes. 
 

ConClusionConClusion
Shortly after the article was published, the coach published a post on his blog apologizing 
for his actions and was terminated by the Badminton Club. But, as conversations brought 
about by #metoo continue, the importance of discursive frameworks such as Benhabib’s 
communicative ethics cannot be understated. Historically, rights and laws have been 
created from the standpoint of the Generalized Other, which can foreclose important 
dialogue about whether principles that presuppose equality can be applied to situations 
where material inequalities and power imbalances are the norm. The communicative 
ethics, which I have defended from the competing framework of asymmetrical 
reciprocity, not only provides an appropriate framework for understanding political 
discourse, but it also gives theorists a method of reconciling the seemingly opposite 
conceptions of subjectivity encompassed by the Generalized and Concrete Others. 
 
To construct this defense of Benhabib’s position, I have argued that the way that the 
Generalized and Concrete Others are reconciled in real-life discursive formulations 
aligns best with a spectrum between Justification and Application, rather than a binary 
construction where situations are either Justified or Applied. The spectrum model adds 
flexibility to Benhabib’s communicative ethics as it applies to the process of creating real 
rules, policies, and laws. Put together, the spectrum model and Benhabib’s communicative 



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The Justification-Application Spectrum

ethics establish legitimate procedures for respectful and productive dialogue with other 
subjects, and can extend from typical, everyday encounters to societal policymaking. 

WORKS CITED
Benhabib, Seyla. "In Defense of Universalism. Yet Again! A Response to Critics 

of Situating the Self." New German Critique, no. 62 (1994): 173-89. 
doi:10.2307/488515

Benhabib, Seyla. "The Generalized and the Concrete Other: The Kohlberg-Gilligan 
Controversy and Feminist Theory." PRAXIS International, no. 4 (1985): 402-424.

Dickinson, Grace. “What does ‘defund the police’ mean, and what would it look like in 
Philly?” The Philadelphia Inquirer, June 10, 2020, https://www.inquirer.com/news/
defund-the-police-black-lives-matter-what-does-it-mean-20200610.html.

Gilligan, Carol. In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. 
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936).

Jones, Trina. “The Significance of Skin Color in Asian and Asian-American Communities: 
Initial Reflections.” UC Irvine Law Review, University of California Press 3 (2013): 
1105-1123

Nopper, Tamara K. “The Unexceptional Racism of Andrew Sullivan,” Verso Books. Web. 
https://versobooks.com/blogs/3172-the-unexceptional-racism-of-andrew-sullivan.

Sterba, James P. "Benhabib and Rawls's Hypothetical Contractualism." New German 
Critique, no. 62 (1994): 149-64. doi:10.2307/488513.

Vasilogambros, Matt. “Training Police to Step In and Prevent Another George Floyd,” The 
PEW Charitable Trusts, June 5, 2020, https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-
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george-floyd. 

Young, Iris Marion. “Feminism and the Public Sphere: Asymmetrical Reciprocity: on 
Moral Respect, Wonder, and Enlarged Thought.” Constellations 3, no. 3 (1997): 340-
363.



98

C
O

N
TR

IB
U

TO
RS ALEC OAKLEY

University of Victoria
Alec Oakley is an undergraduate student of philosophy and mathematics at the University 
of Victoria. Though his philosophical interests remain broad, his central interests are in 
metaphysics (especially the metaphysics of science), virtue theory and moral psychology, 
and ancient philosophy. When he is not doing philosophy or staring at a math problem, 
he writes music and reads poetry. 

GABRIEL AINSA
University of Chicago
Gabriel "Gabe" Sánchez Ainsa (he/him) is a third-year Philosophy and Fundamentals 
double-major in the University of Chicago. He likes to drink coffee prepared by his 
generous roommates while he reads, writes, and chats about ethics and political philosophy, 
especially about the questions of a good life, emotions, friendship, and social justice and 
their intersection. He indulges in logic when nobody is watching. He tends to draw from 
Greek and Roman texts as well as the opinions of his family and friends, who know more 
about living well than he does. In his free time, he enjoys exercising, maining Ness, and 
arguing in Spanish.

MATTEO DE DONATO
University of Chicago
Matteo de Donato is a sophomore student at the University of Chicago, studying 
philosophy and economics. His main philosophical interest is Continental philosophy, 
especially German Idealism and its critics.

NIKKI IVIE
Utah Valley University
Nikki Ivie is a philosophy student attending Utah Valley University.  Her first degree 
was in Information Systems. After a fruitful career in software, she returned to school to 
pursue her passion for philosophy. Nikki believes in a practical philosophy–one that helps 
explain the world and our place in it. In her spare time she can be found reading, running 
or tending to her bees.

ALICIA NILSSON
Linköping University
Alicia Nilsson is a senior at Linköping University studying practical philosophy. Her 
interest in philosophy is very diverse, but she is mostly drawn towards the continental 
tradition, aesthetics, and questions of freedom and authority. She also has a One Year 



99Issue VIII ◆ Spring 2021

Master in Business and Economics from Linköping University where she majored in 
accounting and auditing.

MEGAN WU
Swarthmore College
Megan Wu is a sophomore at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia, PA. As a philosophy 
and mathematics double major, she is interested in a range of philosophical topics including 
ethics, Plato, and logic. Aside from philosophy, she debates competitively and is a hobbyist 
film photographer.



Dianoia fosters open philosophical discussion and writing 
among undergraduate students. The journal is committed to 

providing the opportunity for intellectual reflection that bridges 
the academic disciplines in pursuit of holistic understanding.

The ancient Greek word ‘διανοια’ translates as ‘thought’ but 
connotes a discursive direction or search for a higher form of 
knowledge. We thus hope to direct philosophical discourse toward 

an intellectually rigorous level of thinking.

Dianoia is sponsored by

The Institute for the Liberal Arts and the
Philosophy Department of Boston College




