Lawrence A. Blum

I've noticed two interesting trends in the philosophical literature on friendship. The first is that many contemporary virtue theorists do not identify themselves openly as virtue theorists, or, if they do, they hedge about it. The second trend is related to the first (I'm guessing): contemporary virtue ethicists reinvent the wheel each time, with little reference or help from Aristotle (the consummate virtue theorist).

Lawrence Blum came on the scene in the early 1980s, not long after Michael Stocker published his famous article using the phenomenon of friendship to critique both utilitarianism and Kantian deontology (the dominant moral theories). His critique was similar to Stocker's, although his argument more sustained in "Friendship, Altruism and Morality." Neither principle-based nor impartialist theories can adequately capture moral motivation, and accordingly they cannot account for the ways in which our conative (affective) capacities inform our cognitive moral deliberations and/or actions. Relatedly, because they miss the sentiments as a major component of moral life, they also miss (or mis-describe) personal relationships, including friendships. So all in all, Blum is arguing for a partialist (particularist) theory of morality, and this will require a thorough accounting of moral psychology.

"Moral Perception and Particularity"(1994) is a follow-up to that critique and extends those arguments still further, while connecting himself to the (then) current trends in feminist care ethics and communitarian theory. His aim is to move away from the personal/impersonal dichotomy and to provide a communitarian moral psychology that properly values what he calls "the altrustic virtues." Once he establishes a what he calls a "limited community relativism," he is positioned to provide a theory of childhood moral development that fosters and promotes the altruistic virtues.

His inspiration is the Moral Exemplar as Iris Murdoch envisions her in her novels and philosophical writings. Murdoch's characters are exemplary in their attention and receptivity to the particularity of others; they care for others at personal cost, without losing their own identities in the process. To care for others requires accurate moral perception: we must correctly identify salient moral features of a situation before we can determine if/when to act. Blum points out that this moral perception often goes on in the absence of principles, as it is prior to (and informs) moral judgment. Murdochian exemplars have excellent moral perception, as well as a surplus of compassion. Compassion is informed and sustained by and through a whole host of moral sensibilities and capacities.

Compassion is Blum's favorite virtue, and one gets the impression that he thinks it far surpasses the others in importance. He prefers it to empathy, which he finds to be a psychologically vague concept.

My criticism of this book is similar to my critique of the justice/care dichotomy in feminist theory. For all of the work done to legitimate the partialist and affective dimensions of morality-- including all of the decimating critiques of utilitarian and deontological theories--most care theorists end up acknowledging that morality requires both principles and "care," thus welcoming "justice" back into the fold. But why? Why perpetuate this unhappy marriage? Divorce already, I say.… (más)

This is a seminal book in friendship studies, coming on the heels of GE Moore's 1958 critique of Anglo-American philosophy, Iris Murdoch's 1970 article critiquing impartialist theories on the grounds that they fail to properly account for love, and (as I mentioned in my review of his later book "Moral Perception and Particularity") Michael Stocker's 1976 "friendship critique" article.

Blum more or less extends Stocker's claims into an prolonged attack on Kantianism for its failure to recognize the intrinsic value of friendship. This is part of a broader argument that Kantians, because they exclude emotions from moral consideration, end up with a limited, skewed (and arguably unworkable) conception of moral life. For example, the Kantian notions of obligations and duties are limited (Blum argues) in their scope, and really only aid us in situations in which an impartial perspective is required. Sometimes, Blum thinks, an impartial perspective is inappropriate, such as in close personal friendships. In response to Kantian deficiencies, Blum argues that we need to develop a new conception of altruism (that does not = self-sacrifice), and the altruistic emotions which motivate us to perform other-regarding actions, for the sake of the other person (only). Altruistic emotions include: sympathy, concern, generosity, beneficence, care, empathy, etc.

I am still at a loss as to why Blum ends up, finally, as what will turn out to be a revisionist Kantian. Perhaps a better way to frame this book is to say: Please read this if you are a hard-line Kantian; it is written to convince you that you probably shouldn't be, at least, not in the way the Kant would have you be. However, no Kantian would accept the premise that anything other than reason can act as the source of morality.

The claim that Blum (and others circa 1980) is afraid to make is that he is in fact a virtue ethicist, despite the fact that he acknowledges that the altruistic emotions form a part of an "being towards-others-attitude" that is consistently displayed over time and within a wide variety of situations, thus contributing to our sense of our "whole" or "total" self. We can see this altruistic attitude in displays of sympathy, concern, generosity, etc. But here Blum is just avoiding using the language of virtues for reasons that don't really make sense. He provides a cursory and insufficient argument for his terminological preferences in the last 3 pages of the book, but it amounts to saying: "I just like these words better" when they do exactly the same thing. Altruistic emotions are just other-regarding social virtues, associated with the care and concern we display towards our friends ("loving the friend for the friend's own sake"). Blum's "attitude" is just the same as Aristotle's "disposition." Blum justifies his idiosyncratic language usage by saying that Aristotle's dispositions carry a sense of being too firmly fixed and inflexible, whereas Blum is advocating for the idea that individuals can participate actively in their own moral development (insofar as they include the altruistic emotions). This objection is just...nonsense, honestly, and is obvious nonsense to anyone who has read the Nicomachean Ethics. NE is presented precisely as a practical guide to moral development, and embedded within this notion is the idea that one can, ahem, develop.

My best guess is that Blum, Stocker, Slote, et al (i.e. the early closet virtue ethicists) didn't have the shoulders of Rosalind Hursthouse and Phillipa Foot to stand on, or their arguments to legitimate a modern virtue ethics, and so were hesitant to carry the mantle Virtue Ethicist.… (más)

A clear, engaging, and sophisticated analysis of America's most confounding problem. Blum outlines a progressive and compelling structure of how race works in America, how race talk is stifled, and how we overuse the term "racism." The most important thing his book adds to the discussion is not just that "racism" is an overloaded term. It's the call for a "more complex vocabulary" to deal with race. That is, in the status quo, one is either "racist" (evil) or not racist (good). This makes the definition of "racist" a scorched-earth battle, because the winner takes all. Blum argues convincingly that we should consider acts of racial insensitivity or subconscious racial prejudices to be really bad things, and work proactively to eliminate them, but should not necessarily tag them with the label of "racist". The simultanously concedes and turns the conservative objection that progressive race scholars are always "playing the race card" because it shifts the frame of debate--we need to discuss race issues, so we'll change the rhetoric we use, but we're not going to excuse bad conduct on your part just because it doesn't rise to the moral evil of slavery or Jim Crow.… (más)