Moral Knowledge in the Modern University by W. Robert Connor

"Moral Knowledge in the Modern University" by W. Robert Connor
Appearing in Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1999
(Continued, Part 2 of 2)

III. Moral Knowledge and the Humanistic Disciplines

Such knowledge requires, however, something that these other activities do not need—self-understanding. Socrates saw that perhaps more clearly than anyone, as Plato reminds us in a famous passage in the Phaedrus. You remember Socrates' exchange with his young friend, Phaedrus, who, as they walk along outside the city walls of Athens, asks him whether he actually believes in the story that Boreas, the north wind, really abducted an Athenian maiden at this spot. Socrates refuses to speculate and invokes instead one of the mottoes one would have seen when entering the temple of Apollo at Delphi: "Know Thyself."

I am not yet able to follow the Delphic inscription and come to know myself; while I still lack this knowledge. It seems ridiculous to investigate irrelevant matters. So that is the reason I leave such matters alone. I conduct my researches not into them, but into myself. Am I perhaps a creature more complex, more puffed with passion than Typhoon? Or am I a gentler straightforward animal to whom the gods have given a modest nature?

In these comments, Socrates tries to get his young friend to pause and step back from his frenzied enthusiasm about rhetoric. He is trying to get him to look inside himself and to think about what sort of creature we humans are. Of course, the second he starts that process, Socrates will be there to goad him on, ask the annoying, silly-sounding questions, and push him to the limits of his ability to see into himself.

Although self-examination is still a prerequisite to the growth and transmission of moral knowledge, even Socrates would not claim it was sufficient. It has to go along with something else—the development of perspective, the acquisition of some distance from one's immediate situation. Socrates would insist that one can get that perspective through constant challenging and cross-examining of everything one assumes to be correct. That seems to me a necessary part of the process, but not the whole story. It may even be dangerous if one does not have a Socrates to do the questioning. For most of us, other practices and disciplines may be more helpful than unmitigated dialectic. Some benefit from activities that have almost no place in the laboratory, or the library—reading, discussion, listening to music, studying art help us imagine ourselves outside our present situation and make it possible to imagine the way moral choices may appear to others. To accomplish this, the study of not only moral philosophy but history, literature, and the other humanities is of immense importance.

"[Moral knowledge] could not care less about . . . publishing learned papers and books, or listening to talks with 'moral knowledge' in the title. What could be more boring?"

No matter that, as our postmodernist colleagues will swiftly remind us, we never can fully enter another society, historical period, or individual life. What counts is not achieving some "objective truth" about others, but the "gymnast's struggle" and the robustness that comes from imagining people confronted with ambiguous and challenging circumstances. This process gives us some perspective on our own situation. It can also, however, give us the practical wisdom that is strengthened as we watch how they responded and as we learn from their successes and failures.

Ever since Hannah Arendt's discussion of the "banality of evil" in her treatment of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, humanists in many fields have struggled to understand the role of the imagination in ethical thinking and action. We cannot claim, I must confess, to have found fully satisfactory ways to nurture and develop that form of imagination, but we know that two humanistic disciplines have much to contribute—history and literature.

These two disciplines respond to a peculiar feature of moral knowledge—in academic settings, moral knowledge is the bad boy on the block. It is the deviant, the one that does not conform to the rules. It does not pay much attention to memorizing textbooks or codes or rules. It could not care less about hypotheses or replicable results, writing up research papers or Ph.D. dissertations, going to conferences, publishing learned papers and books, or listening to talks with "moral knowledge" in the title. What could be more boring? It thumbs its nose at calls for respectability and walks out on sermons. It wants to experience the richness of the world and only then to sort out the feelings of delight and joy, guilt and remorse, that come through such experience. As time goes on, like a boy with his first bike, it realizes it can succeed only if it can achieve balance. It finds out soon enough that instruction manuals do not help with that task.

Literature and history, properly studied, respond to this experiential side of moral knowledge. They confront us with human beings, not so dissimilar to ourselves, faced with choices of great difficulty. What considerations have guided such choices? What were their consequences? Could they work for us?

History, conceived in this way—that is, as a humanistic discipline—does not entirely coincide with current practice. It pays its respects, of course, to the power of abstract forces, social and economic, but rejects any determinism. It might wish that the old dream of history as a scientific discipline concerned with universal laws of human societies had come true but now sets for itself a more modest goal. It helps us remember and understand the experience of people who have traveled these roads before, especially when they leave some record of the choices made and their consequences.

The study of history can contribute to the growth of moral knowledge in another way, one that is more controversial. Irwin Miller, the former chair of Cummins Engine and a shrewd observer of history, ancient and modern, and its educational importance, has recently argued that the humanities have flourished when they "attempt something more than simply to document and discuss" how we have come to where we are today. Is it not also part of the business of the humanities, he asks, "to give to each generation notes of warning and caution out of human experience, art, music, history, and perhaps a nudge or two in what might seem a better direction?"

He is in good company, at least if you consider Livy good company. As Miller points out, Livy begins his history of Rome with the following observations:

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick man, for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience, plainly set out for all to see, and in that record you can find for yourself and your country both examples and warnings: Fine things to take as models, base things, rotten through and through, to avoid.

The practice of history over the last century or so has, in many respects, been a reaction against the idea that the study of history should be largely concerned with positive and negative examples. Anyone who has completed a course or two in history can list the limits of such an approach, but pendulums swing to extremes. We may be in danger today of forgetting the power of history to identify paradigmatic cases and to encourage the exercise of moral judgment, in short, to nurture the moral imagination.

Bob Connor's wonderfully stimulating essay urges us to affirm that moral education is one of the core missions of the modern university. I agree wholeheartedly. Indeed, I would urge us to recognize that universities are inevitably engaged in moral education, even when we pursue this task without much reflection or intention. The college and graduate school years are an immensely formative period, when young people acquire habits of mind and heart and new identities as adults and professionals. To be sure, important moral learning and character formation occur in early childhood, but these processes continue throughout one's life, and higher education is an especially critical time for them. We at universities also cannot escape our role as moral educators because we help to set the public agenda of questions worth asking—in our fields, in the professions, and to a considerable extent in the larger culture. Even when we declare fields of study "value-free zones," we are setting an agenda, one that often has profound moral consequences in the world.

Bob uses the phrase "moral knowledge," a term that may raise hackles in the academy, where disagreements over the good and the right abound and where faculty rightly worry about the damage moral orthodoxy can wreak on free and open inquiry. It is important to acknowledge that deliberations over moral issues are marked by plurality and controversy and that we are often more confident about ethical questions than about their answers. Nevertheless, we do know about the moral virtues of the academic enterprise—virtues like honesty, open-mindedness, and respect. We have knowledge of rich traditions of argument about the good life and the good society. And we have disciplinary and interdisciplinary resources for examining human flourishing and character and for exploring the social, historical, cultural, technological, biological, and ecological processes that shape people's lives and possibilities.

I second the invitation for a multidisciplinary conversation about ethics and urge us to think of moral education as a complex process involving the development of qualities of mind, heart, and will. Efforts to hone capacities of meticulous thought, open-mindedness, and familiarity with ethical arguments play an important role in this process, as do efforts to stimulate moral imagination and to enlarge our understanding of the lives of others. So, too, do opportunities to practice living up to high moral principles and showing moral leadership. A distinguished Duke colleague once commented to me, rather memorably, that efforts to teach ethics at university were doomed to fail, because "the way you teach ethics is you force young people to learn irregular Greek verbs and beat them if they get them wrong." Although I do not share this enthusiasm for corporal discipline, I think the broader point—that important moral learning occurs through experience—is tremendously important. Taking this seriously means recognizing that moral education occurs both inside and outside the classroom, through the behavior we model as well as the words we say, through the campus ethos and peer culture we nurture, and through the opportunities we give students to make a difference in the world. Ultimately, taking moral education seriously requires us to be attentive to, and responsible about, the normative issues within our disciplines, in our teaching practices, and in the institutional cultures we help to create.

Elizabeth Kiss, a 1995–96 Fellow of the National Humanities Center, is Director of the Kenan Ethics Program and associate professor of the Practice of Political Science and Philosophy at Duke University.

Likewise, the study of literature has some similar potential benefits as the study of history. In fact, it may be even more important than the study of history in the growth of the moral imagination, for literature, more than any other form of expression, allows us to explore moral complexity and ambiguity, to detect self-deception and its consequences. Above all, it envisions the possibilities of better lives than we are now leading. This is what Henry James was saying when he wrote that there was no better way to show one's commitment to what we might actually achieve than "to imagine … the honorable, the producible case. What better example than this of the high and helpful public, and as it were, civic use of the imagination?"

The stimulation of the moral imagination, however, is not the only contribution of literature, nor perhaps the most important. After all, a person can have a powerful moral imagination and still lack the stamina, the determination, the robustness to follow through on it. Moral "robustness" may be as important as the moral imagination, but they are not unrelated. The same process that feeds the moral imagination can also, over time, step-by-step, with due allowance for our differing dispositions and aptitudes, help us move from the moral imagination to moral action (the gymnasium). We are not talking about generation of new knowledge, but of conditioning, readiness.

So, when we humanists ask, "How can we do our work better?"—for surely the development of the moral imagination is a major part of our work—we need to turn not to some new critical theory, nor to some imitation of what goes on in the labs or cyclotrons, but to an analogy developed by the Hellenistic philosophers, appropriated by the early Christian monastics, and given a radically fresh expression by, of all people, Walt Whitman. The analogy is to physical training, the gymnasium, what the Greeks would call askesis—rigorous physical conditioning—which the Christians restated as asceticism—rigorous spiritual training—and which Whitman saw as the way literature contributes to moral robustness:

Books are to be called for and supplied on the assumption that the process of reading is not a half-sleep, but, in the highest sense, a gymnast's struggle; that the reader is to do something for himself, must be on the alert, must himself or herself construct indeed the poem, argument, history, metaphysical essay—the texts furnishing the hints, the clue, the start of the framework.

Whitman goes on to make an immensely important point:

Not the book so much needs to be the complete thing, but the reader of the book does. That was to make a nation of supple and athletic minds, well-trained intuitive, used to depend on themselves and not on a few coteries of writers.

That is what I mean by moral robustness and this is why I stole Whitman's metaphor of the gymnasts' struggle. In a democracy, at least, the moral robustness we are talking about must come not from a small cadre of specialists but from every one of us. It is, moreover, the analogue in practice to the understanding of moral knowledge as an activity rather than a body of facts and laws.

An education that embodies literature and the other humanities in this way is our best hope for developing ourselves and our students. There is, however, one further component in the development of moral knowledge. I find it troubling but inescapable. A philosophical friend, reading an earlier draft of these comments, noted that I had referred to Socrates and "could not only imagine that suffering injustice was better than committing it, he had the gumption to live and die that way." My friend, Alexander Nehamas of Princeton University, wrote:

What is also necessary for a moral education is the example: teachers have to embody the principles that we are to teach our students. However, are we capable of that? Is our conception of our job at all compatible with our putting ourselves forward as people worth emulating? Socrates was great because he did not just have theories—he lived and died for them. His power comes from being able to appear as a believable and admirable human type, not just because he claimed that reason is important. How can we make sure that university teachers accomplish such a thing? I do not know. But I suspect we will fail at dealing with moral knowledge without an answer to that question.

These comments are an arrow to the heart. I cannot escape the conclusion to which they point nor feel anything but chastened by the demands they make on my conscience and my conduct.

IV. What Should the University Do?

I have no prescription for how our colleges and universities should respond to the most difficult of the challenges facing them. Yet the approach I have sketched out does lead to three requests, for three different groups.

"There can be no 'value-free zone' in the university, nor can we dismiss these issues simply because they do not fall neatly into any one field of specialization."

One is for university leadership, especially for university presidents, not to shy away from affirming that moral knowledge remains a central part of the university's mission, not to shrug it off as an anachronism or drop it like a hot potato whenever there is a hint of controversy. The issue lies at the center of the problems confronting our society. It will not be solved by the strategy universities commonly use in dealing with problems—delegation to specialists. The establishment of a few more centers for ethics or a few more requirements in moral and ethical reasoning will not do the trick. University leaders, however, do have a bully pulpit to keep attention focused on this issue, and they have the convening power to draw together the intellectual talent, from all parts of the university, focus their efforts, and find the ways by which universities can fulfill this part of their historic mission.

My second appeal is to faculty in all fields, including the natural and applied sciences. If war is too important to leave to the generals, moral knowledge is too important to leave to moral philosophers and ethicists, but they would be the first to say that they have no monopoly on the creation of moral knowledge and its transmission. We need a broader-based effort, especially since so many of our most difficult ethical issues are posed by the relentless march of technology and by our changing insight into the workings of the human brain. There can be no "value-free zone" in the university, nor can we dismiss these issues simply because they do not fall neatly into any one field of specialization.

Let me conclude, however, with a special appeal to a third group, my colleagues in the humanities. We humanists have a special responsibility in this regard. We may also have a special opportunity to invigorate disciplines that have too often been marginalized by the evolution of the university or by our own drifting toward the trivial, the pedantic, or the abstract. The oportunity for the revival of the humanities is presented to us at each moment when we choose the texts and problems we will study or teach, the questions we ask, and the issues we bring into focus or leave aside. The texts and other material entrusted to us—that is, the knowledge we profess—derive much of their vitality from their ability to pose with honesty and in sharp delineation the most fundamental and persistent questions about human nature and action. Good scholarship does not run away from those texts or from their moral implications. It may use formalist, structuralist, contextualist, deconstructionist, or other approaches, but its goal is not simply to illustrate, refine, or add to these approaches. Since teaching, over time, for better or for worse, follows scholarship, our best beginning may be to step back from the expectations others set for us and ask what in our fields really matters most to us, individually. If we can answer that question, and pursue it with determination, we will at least have made a start.

Further Reading

Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1963).

Alexander Nehamas, The Art of Living: Socratic Reflections from Plato to Foucault (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

Martha C. Nussbaum. Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon, 1995).

Plato, Crito, ed. J. Adam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Plato, Dialogues: The Apology, Crito, Phaedo, and Republic, trans. B. Jowett and ed. Louise Ropes Loomis (New York: W. J. Black, 1942).

Plato, The Last Days of Socrates, trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant (New York: Penguin, 1993).

Plato, Protagoras, trans. E. C. W. Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976).