The third installment of “Practices and Practices in Human Moral Development” is the most direct extension of the “Tuning-In Relationship” paper, building on the connection between music and ethics.
III. Practices
Part of human sense-making arises from participation in shared ways of doing things. We more readily “tune in” with others who are participating in the same shared endeavor, with shared intentions and expectations, and shared ways of doing things. These intentions and procedures held in common are, in a broad sense of the term, practices.
For example, what is the difference between a violin and a fiddle? There may be only minor differences between the instruments themselves, with slight adjustments to height and shape of the bridge or the nut for example, which affect the “action” of the strings, that is, the height of the string above the fingerboard. The main difference, though, is in how the instruments are used, in what context, and with what expectations. The meaning of the instrument is relative to the role the instrument and the player have in relation to others within a community of practice. On one account, the violin is primarily a melody instrument while the fiddle is primarily a rhythm instrument, and so they contribute differently to their respective shared contexts of music-making.[1]
What counts as good fiddling depends on finer-grained differences among traditions or practices. Celtic, old-time, Bluegrass, québècois, and so on, each involve different repertoires of tunes and different ways of holding and using instruments, as well as differences in the range of tempos, the role of the individual in relation to the group, expectations on newcomers, the primacy of some players or instruments, and so on.
Drawing out the analogy for ethics, what counts as being a good person will be indexed in part to the shared expectations and ways of doing things within a community. In his reconstruction of virtue ethics, MacIntyre (2007) defines a ‘practice’ along these lines: “any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of achieving those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity.” A virtue is “an acquired human quality” that enables the achievement of “those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.”
The salient question here concerns the cognitive requirements for establishing and sustaining practices in ethics or in any other human endeavor. Following Donald’s model, it should be possible to peel back the layers to find the earliest point in human evolution at which practices, in MacIntyre’s sense, would have become possible.
John Rawls (1955), in an early paper, defines ‘practice’ as “any form of activity specified by a system of rules which defines offices, roles, moves, penalties, defenses, and so on, and which gives the activity its structure”, more simply as “a system of rules to be applied and enforced.” Rawls’ definition is firmly in the mode of theoretic culture, which arose with the cognitive capacity to generate systematic models of reality through the medium of external memory storage: rules are general principles of action that can be written down.
In his account of practices, Rawls allows systematic modeling to take the lead in setting expectations of conduct. In the immediate context, Rawls is responding to a point in utilitarian theory, with its systematic abstractions of utility and aggregation. In his later work, however, Rawls notably aligns himself with a Kantian approach to moral judgment, which is perhaps the epitome of systematic, theoretical modeling in ethics.
McIntyre (2007) himself goes one step further back in ascribing practices to narrative, characterizing the human being as “essentially a story-telling animal” in actions and in practice. He continues: “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”
In the model of cognitive evolution, MacIntyre’s ‘practices’ would arise within the context of mythic culture. On Donald’s (1991) account, the emergence of spoken language corresponds with the emergence of a new kind of integrative cognition. “The mind had expanded its reach beyond the episodic perception of events, beyond the mimetic reconstruction of episodes, to a comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe. Causal explanation, prediction, control – myth constitutes an attempt at all three and every aspect of life is permeated by myth.”
Narrative is a powerful cognitive tool, and one that is necessary for anything like ethics as MacIntyre understands it, but it seems not to be necessary for practices as such, including practices of social coordination. As Donald (1991) has it, the possibility of shared meaning-contexts arose early in the hominin line, with the emergence of mimetic memory and culture. As he writes, “mimetic skill, extended to the social realm, results in a collective conceptual ‘model’ of society, expressed in common ritual and play, as well as in social structure.” He describes mythic culture as building upon and organizing older, mimetic modes of action and coordination: “The scattered, concrete repertoire of mimetic culture came under the governance of integrative myth.”
The ‘models’ of mimetic culture would be quite distinct from the systematic models of theoretic culture: while systematic models connect abstract terms together, in a manner that may be expressed in written or graphic form using precise technical language, mimetic models remain grounded in intentional imitation and the perception of concrete social relationships.
Mimetic practices are conservative, in a broad sense of the word, or perhaps conventional. Would an appeal to the mimetic roots of ethics leave us hopelessly tradition-bound? Perhaps not. Even within mimetic culture on its own there is the possibility for change over time, a much higher degree of cognitive flexibility than is typical of animals confined to episodic memory and culture. While primates are locked into a narrow range of behaviors, Donald (1991) notes, mimetic culture “would have allowed a dramatic increase in the variability of facial, vocal, and whole-body expressions, as well as in the range of potential interactive scenarios between pairs of individuals, or within larger groups of hominids.”
And then, of course, modern practitioners of ethics are not confined to mimetic memory and culture. Mimesis may be a necessary condition for moral cognition, in that it establishes the possibility of a shared social world and stable practices within it, but it is not a sufficient condition for mature moral practice. For modern practitioners of ethics, there are possibilities for critique and change, drawing from narrative and theoretical modes of cognition alike.
The conservatism of mimetic culture may provide a kind of stabilizing function in the social world, however. While MacIntyre (2007) maintains that moral practices generate meaning and provide stable frames of reference, he insists they need not be “Burkean.” Mimetic traditions may indeed be Burkean, however, in a precise sense: while Burke certainly highlighted the vital importance of order, he also wrote of “the two principles of conservation and correction” that may be the basis of incremental reform to existing practices (Burke, 2014). On that account, any social change must be a revision of existing practices that maintains the core of those practices intact, rather than a revolution that would uproot or overturn them altogether. Otherwise, those bringing about the change are at risk of losing the shared meaning that makes coordinated action possible.
References
Burke, E. (2014). Revolutionary Writings: Reflections on the Revolution in France and the First Letter on a Regicide Peace (I. Hampsher-Monk, Ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press.
MacIntyre, A. (2007). After Virtue (Third ed.). University of Notre Dame Press.
Rawls, J. (1955). Two Concepts of Rules. The Philosophical Review, 64(1), 3–32.
[1] This account of the violin/fiddle distinction comes from Laurie Fisher, a multi-instrumentalist based in Asheville, North Carolina.
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