04 April 2011

Instruments of Virtue and Vice, Part III

The question that occurred to me upon hearing Dr. Müller's defence of the Neautral-Product Thesis was whether, if virtuous exercise is never demanded of poietic products, the same held true of vicious exercise.  It seemed to me that it did not, for some poietic products (I used viciously racist propaganda as my example, so sorry if that offends any anti-PC sensibilities) appear to just by their very nature to exclude virtuous use.  Still, I was open to being proved wrong, which is why I posed the question to Dr. Müller.  His tentative answer was agreement with me that such products are intrinsically vicious in character, but some interesting counterexamples to that claim arose in our discussion between ourselves and a philosopher of law on whose name I am currently blanking (argh!).

The first, posed but rejected by Dr. Müller, was the Scholastic point that such propaganda could be used as an example of what not to engage in or be tempted by; the second, posed by the philosopher of law whose name I cannot remember, was that such propaganda might be used to excite the identification of unconsciously racist viewers with the propaganda presented, thus exposing their unexamined vice.  I shall deal with both of these objections in turn.

The first, as Dr. Müller himself remarked upon voicing it, appeals to a suspiciously special case; indeed, a case that seems parasitic upon the propaganda's inherent viciousness; moreover, the same strategy could be used to prove that virtue, defined after the fashion of St. Augustine as a quality of the mind that cannot be put to ill use, does in fact admit of evil use: a wicked man might point, say, to the impossible-to-misuse virtues of the Virgin Mary as examples of what not to engage in.  Since this is obviously a silly line of thought, we are justified in rejecting Dr. Müller's proposed counterexample.  The nameless philosopher of law's counterexample is subject to much the same criticism: insofar as it can be put to virtuous use, that use is parasitic upon the intrinsic evil of the propaganda, and certainly has an unnatural or contrived ring to it lacking in, say, Dr. Müller's bicycle thank-you card.  This counterexample, furthermore, suffers from a potentially even graver defect, for it is not at all clear that the suggested use is, in fact, in accord with virtue.  If we grant the eminently plausible doctrine that evil may not be sought that of it good might come, then it ceases to be obvious that the educator performing the above-described psychological trick; after all, such and educator would intend to evoke hateful and uncharitable sentiments among the educated, and would thus actively pursue a vicious operation in the educated, an act just as blameworthy as the sentiments it seeks to dispel.*  In light of the failure of these objections, therefore, my original answer seems secure.  Next up: an explanation of why.

*After hearing me make this remark, Dr. Müller provided an insightful comment on the famous Milligan Experiment: even if said experiment helped us to see the unethical dispositions of our character or the evils of obeying authority or whatever, has it really escaped everyone's notice that the conductors of the experiment were themselves acting in a clearly immoral manner?  Purposefully tempting someone into callousness verging on cruelty is, after all, hardly a noble thing to do, especially if we agree with Socrates that evil is better suffered than performed.  First cast the beam out of thine own eye...

3 comments:

  1. the same strategy could be used to prove that virtue, defined after the fashion of St. Augustine as a quality of the mind that cannot be put to ill use, does in fact admit of evil use: a wicked man might point, say, to the impossible-to-misuse virtues of the Virgin Mary as examples of what not to engage in

    I'm not sure I follow you here. Augustine's meaning of 'use' here has to do with a particular kind of act of will, related in a certain way to fruition or enjoyment. I'm not sure it should be taken as a parallel use; particularly since we would have to be talking about the wicked man somehow using the Virgin's own virtues for evil (and not, say, simply descriptions of the virtues). And if we confine ourselves to poietic products (e.g., written descriptions of the Virgin Mary's virtues) then we are already assuming, I thought, that no poietic product of itself demands virtuous exercise. So I'm unclear on how this response to the objection is supposed to work.

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  2. Thanks for the response.

    I agree that I am equivocating on the word "use" here, but no more so than the objector that Anselm Müller imagined would be: "using" propaganda as an example of what not to do:using a poietic product::"using" Mary's virtues as an example of what not to do:using a habit, since we would not use the propaganda in the manner for which it was intended as propaganda.

    As for your second point, it seems clear to me that a vicious man would be using Mary's virtues as an example rather than some description or account thereof. That (using virtue as an example...) seems to me an acceptable way of using the word "use" without having to take it as shorthand for something else, such as using a description of virtue as an example.

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  3. Herewith some confirmation from St. Thomas:

    "One can make bad use of a virtue [not of its description or the like] objectively, for instance by having evil thoughts about a virtue, e.g. by hating it, or by being proud of it" (ST, I-II:55:4:ad 5, emphasis mine).

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