Ethical Formation

Some critics of liberalism will point out the hazard of dealing with abstract ethical categories and definitions. In terms of the individual, there is a danger in focusing on the person merely as a “locus of dignity or as a bearer of rights.” Rather, our ethical perspective should be set by a conception of the individual as a particular person, embedded within a particular community and formed by particular conceptions of virtue and vice. On this point, Stout and Hauerwas share a piece of increasingly rare common ground. However, this brief alliance is broken up again, Stout alleges, when Hauerwas draws on MacIntyre’s notion that modern liberal discourse is inevitably and “expressively” incoherent due to its insistence on abstract, universal propositions.
Similar to his previous charge, Stout suggests that this is simply not how most modern individuals will actually go about rationally justifying their ethical choices. Few outside the graduate school classroom will ever appeal to remote ethical theories. Further, Stout argues, several traditions situated within modern “liberal” society have leveled sustained critiques of just such a “systematic” and abstract approach to ethics. He identifies three primary dissents: first, the Burkean preference for custom over intellectualist claims; second, the pietistic polemic against abstract contemplation; and third, the essayist tradition’s proclivity for satirical and philosophical complication of the supposedly ready-made formulations of systematic ethics. These diverse objections, all of which Stout is careful to place in some relation to the modern liberal context, reinforce the idea that liberalism doesn’t always work in the same way that both its proponents and its sharpest critics often allege.
If ethical character is most commonly shaped, not by abstract ideas, but by stories, personal examples, homilies, and so on, then we’re led to wonder what sort of exemplars should be held in esteem by the community. Both Hauerwas and Stout would agree on the basic notion that certain qualities and persons should be looked to, and remembered, for ethical formation. Stout, however, objects to what is implied in Hauerwas’ language of an “ethical aristocracy.” There is less to object to if this were merely a metaphor to describe the chosen aspects and qualities which a community should esteem. However, Stout suggests that democratic exemplars are not so much a new class of ethical elite, e.g. canonized saints, but rather “representative individuals” whose excellence serves to raise up both themselves and others around them to similar virtue. At root here is a fundamentally “spiritual” concern which Stout traces back to the medieval conciliarists and “Protestant radicalism” in the English Civil War. Excellence should not be presumed to be limited, in other terms, to an institutional or ascetic elite; virtuous examples might be identified in the most common of places. Along these lines, Stout enlists Barth and some strain of Montanism (even as he maintains that one might remain an anti-Montanist democrat).
There is a further complicating factor in what Stout views as Hauerwas’ Wesleyian perfectionism. Intriguingly, Stout highlights the similarities between Hauerwas’ 20th century critique of ethical theory and the 15th and 16th century humanist move away from the medieval genres of the fable and morality play. For as humanism began to develop “thicker,” more intricate, dramatic narratives and characters, the inevitable consequence was an increasing level of ethical complexity. And with that complexity came a difficulty in extracting more broadly ethical “lessons.” Gradually, the “culture of paideia became the culture of Montaigne, Shakespeare, and Marguerite de Navarre.” The irony in this development, regarding Hauerwas, is that the humanist drive toward “thicker” ethical examples led away from an “ethical aristocracy.” Plato’s Socrates offers us an ethical example with harder edges than, say, Shakespeare’s Prospero, although perhaps not a more useful or a truer one. For Stout, our ethical task requires a “more improvisational kind of explication.”
In a similar way, Stout sidesteps the critique offered by Seyla Benhabib, who had suggested that engaging the social theory of Habermas would provide him with “a firmer basis” in contemporary thought. For Stout, however, it seems that the very “firmness” of some contemporary social theories – which rely on certain “assumptions about the effects of rationalization … on religious worldviews” – is suspect. Stout wishes to avoid a totalizing account of modernity. And while both Hauerwas and Benhabib begin by emphasizing the moral complexity of thick narrative, expressive ethics, he believes both turn away from this commitment at critical moments – Benhabib in her critique of Hauerwas, and Hauerwas in his critique of liberalism.