Are we Aristotle's enemies?

Are we Aristotle's Enemies? is the title of a paper Agnes Callard gave at the 2011 Pacific APA, with commentary by Michael Thompson, which I would dearly love to have heard, both because I suspect he had interesting things to say about it in general and because of a particular part of the paper where he's mentioned only to be set aside, in what I think was an intellectual lapse—not because he deserves to be treated more thoroughly in himself, but because putting aside a view simply because only one person holds it, when it might offer a way out of the difficulty you're proposing, strikes me as irresponsible.* At any rate, I didn't hear either her delivery of the paper or his delivery of his response, because I was speaking elsewhere at the same time. But she did kindly send me a copy of the paper.

Probably unsurprisingly, the paper does not explicitly answer its titular question, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the intended answer is yes. I do not think that, in general, enemyship is a symmetrical relation, but it does seem as if in this case it is: if we are Aristotle's enemies, then Aristotle is reciprocally ours. (Aristotle being dead, it makes more sense for us to think of him as our enemy, since we still interact with him in the form of his writings and influence, than for us to think of ourselves as his enemy, since he is, as mentioned, dead, if there is to be an enemy on the scene at all.) At the very least, if we are not his enemies, or he ours, we may not be able to be friends: The cost of understanding Aristotle might be that we can no longer read him in the amiable spirit to which we are accustomed. The crux is the concept of natural slavery, which goes deep in his philosophy, or rather, comes from deep in his philosophy: his views about slavery … follow directly from his views about the nature of action and how it is bound up with choice. These views, or rather, the underlying basis for these views, makes for a deep difference between Aristotelian ethics and anything we could, today, call ethics.

I don't much like the first-order discussion of the paper, for reasons that I will relegate to the paragraphs following the last occurrence of a doubled asterisk in this post.** I'm more interested in the way she talks about Aristotle. She does not downplay his commitment to slavery as an acceptable or even good and just phenomenon; instead, she invokes it at several times, and even concludes with it, saying that the difference between Aristotelian ethics and modern rights ethics explains why we’re against slavery, and why Aristotle wasn’t. The discussion of slavery is not actually necessary to establish the putative difference (it's present in the elaboration of what she takes to be Aristotle's position, but more as a description of Aristotle on slavery than as anything that furthers the discussion of the theoretical basis of his ethics). It is, as she advertises in her introduction, a consequence of the deeper view on action, choice, and "moral sources" that she lays out. (Or at least, it's advertised as a consequence. It doesn't actually follow from anything she presents as his views on choice, etc.!—we get his thesis that slavery is actually good for those who are lesser, but that doesn't follow from his views on choice, etc.; it's something additional.) Its function in the paper is to drive us to answer its titular question in the affirmative.

She does not attempt to minimize but amplify the moral significance of Aristotle's commitments; she does not, for instance, suggest that he ended up with a view on action, choice, etc., that underwrites the idea that some of us are less than fully accomplished persons because of the stratification of and presence of slavery in ancient society, as if he lacked the wit to envision alternate social arrangements (something that would be a truly spectacular suggestion, both because his predecessors were able to do so, as Bryan W. Van Norden points out in this generally good piece, and even Euthyphro was able to frame the thought that one can do wrong to a manual laborer—and because a world of slavery and of the subjugation of women and manual laborers was not exactly unknown to modern thinkers). Perhaps for the same reason, she isn't really interested in why Aristotle thinks the things he does at the empirical level, either—she mentions his assessment of Dacians, but it isn't really all that interesting to her.

What, if we believe all the arguments in the paper, would we do with Aristotle? Would his ethics be salvageable—might there be something to the vision of megalopsuchia, "great deeds" (her translation of eupraxia), and being tall? Well, maybe, but the list of specific things Aristotle thinks virtue to consist in is not very interesting, except insofar as it still lives alongside other visions of the good and noble in our lives; the interesting thing would be the account of the acquisition of virtue, the nature of deliberation, etc., and on our present supposition, those are all vitiated by their leading directly to approving slavery. (It would be even worse for Aristotle, here, if we did think that he had arrived at his account simply because he looked around and saw a world of injustice and subordination and couldn't but echo it. If we knew in advance that that was why he thought what he did, we might be interested in the details as a kind of curiosity—what explanation for what he saw did this famous empiricist come up with?—but given that we'd see the explanatory project as misguided from the jump, how could it rise above being a curiosity?) Would it be instructive as a contrast class? Perhaps, but Callard has no reference to Aristotle in the development of her account of what she takes our current (oddly univocal) beliefs to be. We don't, evidently, need him to learn for ourselves about our own commitments. And we might well wonder if idly debating about such things, in the abstracted manner characteristic of many contemporary philosophers, in which the nature of the phenomena being discussed is generally covered over, doesn't tend to damage our souls, to put it in terms that an ancient philosopher would recognize: for there is a far greater risk in buying teachings than in buying food [because] you cannot carry teachings away in a separate container. You put down your money and take the teaching away in your soul by having learned it, and off you go, either helped or injured. Ironically, it's those who get hotheaded about such things that keep themselves best.

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What are we to make of Callard's much later declaration that Aristotle is not our enemy? I don't think the piece in which the claim appears is very good—in fact, I think it's quite bad. To pick up the thread most recently laid down above, at one point she says that dangerousness [of speech], I have been arguing, is less a matter of literal content than messaging content. In fact, she has not argued that at all; to argue that, one would have to argue not only that messaging content is dangerous—which she doesn't do—but also that literal content is not—which she also doesn't do. (She points out that what she calls messaging content, which is not actually about the content but the use of an utterance, has an aim other than the conveying of a truth via the content of the utterance. She calls this, absurdly, extra-communicative, as if communication were primarily a matter of conveying truths via utterances whose contents are those truths. I'm so happy for you! would be, by her lights, at least on dangerous ground vis-a-vis messaging content, since the point of saying such a thing is not, in the first instance, to inform its hearer of its speaker's emotional state. Oh, yay! is even worse in that regard, and I now pronounce you man and wife might give her much to ponder. None of these things is plausibly "dangerous", think what you will about the institution of marriage.) Her concern with messaging content is in any case ironic, since there is no serious way to take her piece except as a bit of messaging content, given the context of its publication and, especially, that there is no remote threat of Aristotle's being cancelled, however one might understand that term. Are we really to imagine that Callard chose to write this piece simply to unburden herself of some things she holds to be true and to inform us that she holds them to be true, and that's it? It hardly seems worth the effort! It is an attempted intervention in something it doesn't mention, one in which being able to pose as being a reasonable, civil person who just wants to hear the other person out is itself a position of power. It is too bad that sometimes on particular occasions simple utterances of things that even are truths will convey further things, as when someone who truly has been living in a cave says all lives matter, not realizing the further significance doing such a thing has. The solution to this is not to insist on an impossible nightmare of strictly literal utterances, but sensitivity and discretion. But these things aren't to be extended time and time again to the same subjects.

*Much turns on the idea that A wrongs B and B is wronged by A are different albeit reciprocally entailing facts; that there are active facts and passive facts, rather than one fact differently expressed. (Active and passive are particularly unfortunate. Consider this bats description of rights (also a rather bats scenario in general):

… a right makes someone a threat. If B was going to prevent someone from φ-ing, and he had to choose between A, who has a right to φ, and C, who doesn’t, A’s right to φ would be an intelligible ground of his choosing to act on C. B cannot act on A with impunity—that is, he cannot act on A without thereby doing something wrong. A’s right might, then, exert a certain pressure on B’s treatment of A. Notice that B’s experience of this pressure, insofar as he does experience it, will be independent of A’s exercising his right. This pressure is the pressure of a threat: should B act on A (rather than C) he knows that A holds the trump card that will make him into a wrongdoer.

On this description, the same pair of sentences about A and B having wronged/been wronged bye each other could be replaced by these, to describe the same reality: A is made vulnerable to B and B gains the upper hand over A.)

**For one thing, it seems to be internally inconsistent; I don't see how you can simultaneously say that enslaving those who are natural slaves is good for them in the way she says it can be (bringing them into some connection with the human good) and also say that only the naturally free can be moral patients, capable of being wronged or done well by. And she identifies without argument, and without even seeming to realize that these are different sorts of things, the idea that someone has "passive virtue", that is, someone who responds virtuously without the involvement of choice or deliberation (because the source of the action is outside the agent), and the idea that someone can be a "moral patient", that is, that someone can be wronged or done well by. (By "without argument" I mean to include the fact that she doesn't cite anything from Aristotle that would support his holding this position, whether he argues for it or not. Of course the "moral source" language is not his.) There is certainly nothing prima facie in the idea of someone's being capable of reacting rightly to the sight of someone needing urgent help to connect it with their being capable of being wronged by being denied an agreed-upon share of some goods, for instance. I take it that someone is wronged in cases of pleonexia! (An uncharitable person would consider this motivated by little more than a pun.) Later she will say that, for Aristotle, what’s wrong is what the unjust persons does, by choice, to his fellow citizen. But she hasn't equipped us to understand why it has to be done to a fellow citizen. And this is actually the heart of the claim that the defense of slavery falls out of Aristotle's understanding of action and choice, as far as I can tell—that, for instance, it would be inconceivably un-Aristotelian to object to slavery on the grounds that a just person wouldn't do that to another human, even if you accept the idea that person is a status only some humans have. After all, there are lots of things that the virtuous person doesn't do even though the patients of the action aren't "moral sources" (for instance, torturing cats); the virtuous person doesn't do them because to do them is base or vicious.