A virtuous woman

What is the point in being virtuous in today's hedonistic society? TIM WATKIN puts the question to Auckland University's new head of philosophy.

Virtue is such a quaint notion these days, engulfed in soft visions of Victorian lace and gentility, that the last thing you'd expect is to be watching one of its staunchest advocates kick off her shoes, push back her wild shock of hair and start talking like a whirlwind.

Rosalind Hursthouse is anything but quaint. More a mixture of Plato and Mary Poppins. She insists there is nothing more important for children than a moral education and believes we humans don't try hard enough to be good, yet is willing to offer a moral defence for the September 11 suicide bombers.

Last year Hursthouse returned home from a 25-year career in Britain, where many moons ago she was the first woman employed as a lecturer at an Oxford men's college, to take up the reins as head of the University of Auckland's philosophy department. The 58-year-old is a catch for the university.

She has risen through academic circles to become one of the world's pre-eminent virtue ethicists and has published the textbook on the subject, On Virtue Ethics. "Hursthouse has been a major contributor" to "perhaps the most important development within late 20th-century moral philosophy", according to book reviews.

You might expect a mention of virtue ethics' beginnings and its founding fathers, Plato and Aristotle, to be met with a certain reverence.

Not by this woman who once described herself as "a simple colonial girl".

"Even for an Athenian," she exclaims, "Aristotle was a right-wing redneck."

I don't dare ask about Plato. Which raises the question ...

"Why in the 21st century should anyone want to go back to these ancient Greeks for inspiration on ethics, middle-class, male chauvinist pig, Athenian snobs that they were?" Hursthouse proposes.

Well, yeah, though I wasn't going to phrase it like that.

The answer, she believes, is that unlike other classical thinkers ("no one thinks the Romans were very great shakes at philosophy") the vitality and suitability of their thinking has survived the centuries. What's more, because they were marketplace raconteurs they remain accessible in a way that later learned philosophers don't.

"When I used to teach Plato and Aristotle to my Open University students, their standard response was, 'This is just sound commonsense'." And I said ... " (she launches her arms and her voice upwards) " ... Yes, yes, that's what it's MEANT to be. It's not meant to be fancy academic stuff. What a dreeaadful thing it would be the day ethics or morality became something that you only studied at university. Of coouurse it ought to be something that everyone can think about. Eeveeryone's got to think about what sort of person they want to be, what sort of life they want to lead, what they're prepared to stand up and fight for and what they're prepared to let go."

Her words are gleefully stretched and launched and relished as she talks about a subject she clearly still adores after all these years.

"Philosophy's the best friend I've ever had," she laughs. Elsewhere she's written of her discovery of philosophy as love at first sight.

Thanks to a couple of tutors at Oxford, the field of philosophy she's come to know best is what's known as virtue ethics, the smallest of the three strains of mainstream philosophical thought. Indeed, it's only in recent decades that it's been reclaimed and brought back into the mainstream.

Since the 19th century, philosophy has been dominated by the legacies of Emmanuel Kant and John Stuart Mill; deontology and utilitarianism respectively. Borrowing an example from one of Hursthouse's papers helps to distinguish the philosophies: If you're in a situation where it's obvious you should help someone, Kant claims that you are acting in accordance with a moral rule or principle, while Mill claims that you are acting to maximise well being and achieve the best outcome. Rules versus outcome.

"A virtue ethicist will emphasise the fact that providing help would be charitable or benevolent, charity and benevolence being virtues," she writes.

So what does virtue mean?

"To Aristotle, it's an excellence of character," she says. "It's those character traits that make them morally good people."

Suddenly we're on the brink of the minefield. Start using words like good and bad, right and wrong, and you introduce the assumption that we can identify and agree on such things. This is why virtue ethics is so contentious - and why it's increasingly popular.

For decades, even centuries, philosophers had embraced subjectivism, doing away with the absolutes of rights and wrongs. If we're motivated by rules and outcomes, why waste time debating rights and wrongs? But when questions of morality and happiness, of how a person should live and behave socially grew in urgency through the 20th century, Hursthouse says deontology and utilitarianism were found wanting.

One suggestion is that the rediscovery of virtue ethics was prompted by the social challenges coming out of the US - the civil rights movement, Vietnam protests and feminism.

"Before then, perhaps, philosophers saw no point in writing about ethics, but then all these other issues came up and people were going to the barricades saying, 'What's going on is wrong'."

Right and wrong were back on the agenda.

Hursthouse is frustrated that the rest of us have been slow to catch on. She's critical of "the kind of galloping subjectivism we have nowadays when people have got so self-conscious they can't even say wrong. They say inappropriate."

She puts on a mock announcer's voice. "This man is sexually abusing children, this is inappropriate behaviour."

Her voice returns to normal and with a wry note, she adds, "Wicked, I thought might be the word for it."

These days, it's common to hear people claiming that right and wrong is whatever they say it is and advocating the idea that, as The Proclaimers put it in their song Everybody's A Victim, "It doesn't matter what I do/ You have to say it's all right".

Hursthouse doesn't buy that. For all her jolly ways, she enters a debate with her mental weaponry well-sharpened.

She says that in any particular situation, "there's going to be at least one correct and an awful lot of incorrect ways to act."

She sees subjectivism as "a creeping disease".

"What am I trying to do after all, what's best or what I think is best? And I also don't believe that when you push them, anybody really believes that. Try them. Say something like, 'so you mean if you felt like raping someone that would be ok?'.

Sure, we would all be able to agree that rape is wrong, but aren't there less extreme examples that people would disagree on? Isn't virtue in the eye of the beholder?

"People say that to start with, until one says 'name me one about which there is disagreement ... In fact one way to get people to realise is just to say write down the characteristics that you would aspire to have yourself or that you would like your children to have. In contrast, write down the characteristics that you despise yourself for having."

It's an interesting exercise. Kindness, honesty, courage, compassion ... it's hard to find a disputable virtue. But the vices offer more scope. What about greed? Most would say that's a vice, but some say 'greed is good'.

"That's rather different from saying that being greedy is the right way or virtuous way to be. You won't get many people saying that. Instead, people immediately start looking for a virtue term that everyone will agree on, like self-reliance."

If you think Hursthouse is creating some absolutist, black and white world view, let's put that to rest. While we might have widespread consensus on what the virtues and vices are, that does not equate to consensus on how we judge and apply them.

For example, we all might agree that killing another human is a vice. In the context of war it's a virtue.

The crucial point, Hursthouse says, is that it all depends on circumstance.

"It's amazing how often you get back to circumstance."

Take the circumstance of all recent circumstances, September 11, as an example. Surely it was one of the most vicious acts of our time. While not defending the attack, Hursthouse says it depends on how you judge that circumstance.

"The defence in that case could be that it's courageous and perhaps it's just. And that's exactly the debate. They [the bombers] say that America, through the World Trade Organisation, the IMF and so on, has been oppressing us for decades. We are entitled to view all of America, due to the huge amount it consumes, as living off us and inflicting starvation on us. We are allowed to go to war to defend yourself against starvation. Now I'm agin' it myself, but that's a perfectly well-structured argument."

She confesses it's hard to apply virtue ethics to politics, because it's hard to be virtuous collectively. The bigger the numbers involved, the more circumstances to consider. Disagreement on which course to take is certain to arise and national leaders have particular obligations that might steer them away from virtuosity. Further, in a democracy we follow those most popular with the majority, not the most virtuous.

What this circumstantial view means is that there's no golden rule and one prescribed choice or action that will always be virtuous. Hursthouse says that conclusion disappoints some people, who want their morality cut and dried.

"Some say, 'What you describe as flexibility I find to be uncertainty. I came to moral philosophy to be given direction.' To those people I really want to say - grow up."

Hursthouse grew up practising for her career as a philosopher at the kitchen table.

"We were a tremendously argumentative family. My father and mother were both happy to argue the hind leg off a donkey at the drop of a hat. In fact in our kitchen we used to keep all these reference books so that as soon as a good argument at the dinner table foundered on some boring fact, we could leap up, consult the books, settle the fact and get back to the argument."

Having moved from England to New Zealand as a 2-year-old, she grew up in Wellington, the eldest child of two, her brother being six years younger.

When she was 18, two years into a BA at Victoria, the family moved to Auckland and she transferred. After completing her masters at Auckland, she headed to Oxford in 1966 on a postgraduate scholarship and there she completed a BPhil.

Keen to continue on with a DPhil (doctor of philosophy), Hursthouse was hoping to get some lecturing work when Corpus Christi, one of the men's colleges in those segregated days, advertised a position.

"Usually there was a pronoun in there. 'He will live in college etc'. Well, just by pure accident this time round Corpus happened to word its advertisement in a way it didn't use any pronouns. And my tutor at the time, an absolutely wonderful man called Tony Kenny - at the time a master at Balliol - he said, 'Rosalind, you should put in for this'. I said, 'You know they only expect men to apply'. 'Yes,' said Tony, 'but look, they've forgotten to say so'. And to its credit Corpus bit on the bullet of the fact that I was the best candidate, and appointed me."

Her appointment, she says, "shattered convention" as the first woman to teach at a men's college.

"However they did not, as a body, go on to behave very well," she adds.

Her male colleagues didn't know how to handle her - "they were old women in many ways" - and would turn their backs on her at social functions.

She slowly gained acceptance, but then came a minor epiphany, she explains emphatically.

"I found most of them inTENsely boring and unbeLIEVably narrow-minded. I thought, 'Rosalind, do you really want to spend the rest of your life with these people just for the sake of being somewhere as grand as Oxford?' And I thought, 'No'."

She saw a job at the Open University and jumped at it. At Corpus her students were bound for success and the quality of her teaching "wouldn't have made a blind bit of difference to their well-secured futures", but at the Open University her teaching skills were essential to her students' progress. She revelled in this environment for 25 years.

Although she has visited New Zealand regularly, in recent years the tug for home grew more intense.

"Then, like a gift from the Gods, the opportunity of this job just appeared out of nowhere."

Hursthouse returns to Auckland University at a time when philosophy is resurgent. So popular, Hursthouse hasn't had time for anything as mundane as a haircut since the beginning of the year. She waves a hand through her wild hair and asks for some warning before a photograph is scheduled.

The number of first-year philosophy students has risen from 642 in 1992 to 1821 last year, an increase of 283 per cent.

She suggests that it may be part of a general return to arts that colleagues say they're seeing. Perhaps, she says somewhat hopefully, the new generation of students is less materialistic than its predecessor.

A life of philosophy has forged and reforged her standards. She became a vegetarian 15 years ago on moral grounds, even thought she loooves meat. She bought a house in Oxford for homeless people. Her study demands a response.

So does her evolving morality suggest that a virtuous character can be learned? Or is a person born virtuous?

"Ooh," she says excitedly. "My favourite quotation from Aristotle is: 'We have the virtues neither by nor contrary to our nature. We are fitted by nature to receive them.' The idea of saying we're fitted to receive them means, yes they have to be instilled in us, but they find a natural home."

She says that installation is of vital import to individuals and societies.

"If you don't start off with reasonable moral training, the chances of your becoming good are small. That's why nothing is more important in society than the moral education of our children. And no amount of legislation and ranting from the pulpit or telly is going to do any good. It'll fall on deaf ears."

She's not against programmes through schools, but says it's much easier for parents to teach morals - by example.

"We know it's very hard to inculcate habits and patterns of behaviour that you don't manifest yourself. If you want to bring your child up to be honest - I keep going back to that one because it's such a simple one - and not to be materialistic, this is going to be very hard if the child constantly hears you lying and seeing you spend everything you have on yourself."

All this talk to teaching morals makes Hursthouse sound like a wowser in an era when hedonism has a greater grip on more people than ever.

"I think America is a shiningly horrible example for us," she warns. "There they are, the richest country in the world, with a huge number of them living by most standards in unimaginable luxury, and what are they doing? They're whinging on their psychiatrists' couches saying how unhappy they are. They haven't got anything to do except consume more, get through more marriages, more drugs."

Hursthouse's hands have continued to wave around with her voice for several hours now, the thrill of the debate never waning. But it's time for me to go. Just one last, crucial question for the ethicist. Why should I be virtuous? Her answer doesn't give me room to budge.

"Do you want to throw your life away? No? Then sign on. If you want really good friends, and a really good partner in life, and to really enjoy your children, and to feel at home in your society, then the virtues are what you need."