Playing by Our Own Rules

Models in Virtue Ethics

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One of the uses of history, especially history pursued on a longer time scale, is to unsettle present certainties and thereby enlarge our sense of the thinkable. It is a curious property of the reigning conceptual milieu to appear coherent and inevitable to its inhabitants, in much the way that local customs seem self-evident to provincials who never leave home. Simply knowing in principle that the way we think now is the product of historical contingency rather than of logical necessity is rarely sufficient to lift the blinders imposed by history and habit. The mental world we happen to inhabit contracts the imagination to its own cramped dimensions. One epoch’s self-evidence—how could anyone think otherwise?—is another’s perplexity—what were they thinking?

Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By

Stop for a moment and think about all the rules in your life: office policies, traffic laws, tax codes, procedures and forms required when you visit a doctor’s office, unspoken (but very real) rules of etiquette when you attend a wedding or go on a date or even buy groceries at the store. Rules, whether formal or informal, written or unwritten, surround us and seem to be constantly hovering over our shoulder, urging us to do (or not do) one thing after another. They are part of our busy and complex societies. Modern life seems unimaginable without them.

What about in the realm of ethics? In your efforts to “be a good person” or “do the right thing,” do you follow rules? Many ethical expectations have been codified into laws or regulations that most of us feel we have to follow, but plenty remains up to each individual. When we decide how to interact with family members and friends, how to approach a project at work, or whether to stop and help someone on the side of the road, are we following some kind of rules? If not, how do we make these decisions?

I think many of us would reflexively say that we are guided by some version of moral rules, such as the Ten Commandments or the Golden Rule. We’ve been conditioned by our bureaucratized culture to expect and adhere to rules, so that’s how we tend to think about things. Many contemporary philosophers also see our ethical actions as primarily rule-based. There are three main approaches to ethics that are typically recognized and discussed by philosophers today:

• Deontology: concerned with duty; typically relies on rules to guide our behavior, the most famous of which is Kant’s categorical imperative

• Consequentialism: concerned with outcomes; typically concerned with maximizing benefit, as in the Utilitarian adage of “the greatest good for the greatest number”

• Virtue ethics: concerned with properties of agents rather than rules or consequences

Stoicism and most other ancient philosophies are virtue ethics, emphasizing character development as a means to a good life and ethical action. However, virtue ethics only came back into vogue in academic philosophy in the mid-20^th century. For several hundred years prior to that, early modern and Enlightenment-era philosophers had worked to define ethical rules or maxims that could guide behavior. Today many people, including professional philosophers, still see ethics primarily as a matter of following rules that tell us what we should do.

In her intriguing new book Rules: A Short History of What We Live By, historian Lorraine Daston charts the history of rules in Western society—not just ethical guidelines but everything from cookbooks to architecture to computer code. Daston is uniquely qualified to write a book like this: as former director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and the inaugural Humanitas Professor in the History of Ideas at Oxford, she knows a thing or two about rules and paradigm shifts.

While Daston’s book is not primarily on virtue ethics, or ethics at all, I found it highly relevant to our efforts at Stoicism for Humans to apply ancient Stoic ideals to modern living. So below I’ll introduce her short history of how the concept of rules changed from antiquity to modernity, and then I’ll explain what I think this means for a virtue ethics based on ancient philosophy. Along the way we’ll look at two types of rules that can inform our practice of Stoicism today: guidelines (such as Hursthouse’s v-rules or Cicero’s regula) and role models, with an emphasis on the latter.

Rule as Model or Paradigm

Daston begins by explaining that “since Greco-Roman antiquity, three principal semantic clusters have mapped out the meanings of rules: tools of measurement and calculation; models or paradigms; and laws” (209). All of these are branches of the ancient Greek word kanon, which derived from a Semitic word for the ramrod-straight giant cane plant (qaneh) and had long associations with measurement and precision. (We can still see the relationship between rule and measurement in the English word ruler.) Throughout Western history, kanon and its Latin successor, regula, could be used in these three different senses:

1.      Rule as algorithm (procedure for solving a problem)

2.      Rule as model, pattern, or paradigm

3.      Rule as law

Today rules are almost synonymous with proscriptions, codes, and regulations. Thanks to the standardizing pressures of the modern period, we tend to think of rules strictly in the algorithmic sense, as tightly defined restrictions we must follow (definitions 1 and 3). So we might ask, as Daston does,

Algorithms and laws are still central to our understanding of rules, but whatever happened to the third member of the ancient trio, models or paradigms? Right through the end of the eighteenth century, this now-extinct meaning of rules was robust in both precept and practice. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, rules-as-algorithms increasingly edged out rules-as-paradigms. This shift spawned [a] modern philosophical problem about thin rules: can rules be followed unequivocally, without interpretation or contextualization, and if so, how is this possible? This is a problem that can hardly even be formulated until the prototypical rule shifted from being a model or paradigm to being an algorithm, especially an algorithm executed by a machine. This shift is remarkably recent, and its consequences are still reverberating in philosophy, administration, military strategy, and the ever-expanding domains of daily life conducted online. (270)

Even in the Middle Ages rule could mean a pattern or prototype, as in the Rule of Saint Benedict, in which the abbot embodies and personifies the rules of monastic life—in other words, “a ‘rule’ in the singular and a model to be emulated” (781). As other examples of this type of rule, Daston also points to

a work of art or literature that defines a genre by exemplum, in the way that the Iliad defined the epic in the tradition from the Aeneid to Paradise Lost, or a well-chosen example in grammar or algebra that teaches the salient properties of a much larger class of verbs or word problems. Whatever form the model takes, it must point beyond itself. Mastering the competence embodied by the model goes well beyond being able to copy the model in all its details. (307)

And here is where rule-as-exemplar differs most from rules as laws or algorithms: “Models are to be emulated, not imitated” (311). While algorithmic rules or laws are to be followed to the letter, role models should not be exactly copied—indeed, it would be ridiculous if they were. This type of rule leaves plenty of room for discretion, which was seen as a necessary complement to the rule. Daston defines discretion as “one form of judgment, though not the whole of judgment, which embraces not only knowing when to temper the rigor of rules but also matters of taste, prudence, and insight into how the world works, including the human psyche” (708), adding that

To be able to distinguish between cases that differ from one another in small but crucial details is the essence of the cognitive aspect of discretion, an ability that exceeds mere analytical acuity. Discretion draws additionally upon the wisdom of experience, which teaches which distinctions make a difference in practice, not just in principle. (730)

One sphere in which exempla and discretion are still in common use is legal precedent, as lawyers and judges rely on previous cases to argue for and decide on issues of fairness, guilt, and punishment. While governments certainly do have laws in place regarding most offenses, the actual implementation of the law requires determining exactly which laws apply in a given case and how closely they match the reality of the situation:

Reasoning from precedent in common law traditions supplies a familiar example of rules-as-models in analogical action. Not every past case of manslaughter can be plausibly presented as a precedent for the one at hand, and not every detail of even a convincing precedent will match up with the present case. The way seasoned jurists deliberate over legal precedents highlights the difference between a mere example (this or that manslaughter case) and a model or paradigm (a load-bearing precedent with broad implications for many manslaughter cases). The serviceable paradigm must exhibit a high ratio of essential to accidental details and radiate as many analogies as a porcupine does quills. (316)

Unfortunately, this type of discretionary model-based system has fallen out of favor in almost every other arena of our lives today, including ethics. Virtue ethics is often criticized by other philosophers for not supplying rules for decision-making, and for lacking the type of clear, actionable algorithms that are viewed as necessary in contemporary philosophy.  

But is this criticism valid? As we will see below, there are at least two different ways of answering this question. One way is to suggest that virtue ethics does have rules of the type that contemporaries expect—in other words, rules-as-algorithms and rules-as-laws. This has been done effectively by Rosalind Hursthouse in On Virtue Ethics and more recently by Chris Gill in Learning to Live Naturally: Stoic Ethics and Its Modern Significance. But another way is to return to the missing meaning of rule identified by Daston: rule-as-model. We will discuss both these possibilities below.

Thin and Thick Rules

Daston distinguishes between thin rules, which “articulate only the imperative to be executed, with no further elaboration,” and thick rules, which “come enriched with copious advice on how to apply them: examples, exceptions, problems, provisos, models, caveats, and, in almost all cases, an appeal to what Saint Benedict had deemed the abbot’s cardinal virtue, discretion” (1049). Thin rules, like the kind a computer operates on, assume uniformity of environment, where everything can run in a clinically similar manner and without need for further specification. Thick rules, in contrast,

were not free-standing: models, examples, tips, and observation propped them up and filled them out. This is not necessarily because the rules were vague or unspecific or approximate. Rather, it was because no universal formulation could anticipate all the particulars with which it would be confronted in practice. (1130)

Citing the examples of early modern cookbooks and manuals of “mechanical arts,” Daston emphasizes the expectation of existing experience that supported the thick rules they presented. Artisans such as engravers, goldsmiths, and clockmakers learned the basics through their apprenticeships, which could then be refined into true skill:

Thick rules repeatedly gestured toward experience because that was both the departure point and destination of their readers. The rules could not replace experience, only systematize and extend it. But this was already a great deal: experience refracted through the lens of the rules of art was better ordered, more sharply focused, and above all broader than that of most craftsmen… (1233)

Thick rules are necessary in an unpredictable world, where the environments in which they will be applied are dissimilar or subject to frequent change. In other words, they would have been the most useful type of rule for most of human history. Only in rare places and times have environments been stable and predictable enough for thin rules to be more useful. As Daston points out, “Enormous efforts of technical know-how, political will, and cultural imagination must be invested to create and sustain such islands of ruliness” (4528).

Contemporary culture is one such “island of ruliness,” in which we have temporarily figured out how to reduce the unpredictability of things such as food supply, medical conditions, energy distribution, etc. From our current rulebound vantage point, it necessarily seems that ethics would be subject to rules just like everything else. As the early modern period gave way to the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, societies increasingly figured out how to stabilize what had always been variable. Scientific laws were discovered in “natural philosophy” (what we today call physics, chemistry, and biology) suggesting that ironclad rules were also discoverable in other philosophical fields like ethics. Society was being transformed by machines, which could be programmed to act in predictable ways, and algorithms, in which chance and variability were increasingly filtered out. Why not ethics too?

As a result, modern academic ethics (which is heavily biased toward deontology and consequentialism) has become rule-based in the algorithmic sense, which causes acute difficulties since ethics is always going to be messy and call for discretion. Contemporary advocates of virtue ethics, especially Rosalind Hursthouse and Julia Annas, have addressed this problem by introducing the concept of v-rules (rules for virtue and vice), which are beautiful examples of Daston’s thick rules applied in the ethical sphere. (Annas also uses the terms thin and thick to describe moral concepts, but she applies them in the opposite way from Daston: thin concepts like wrong are not fleshed out, while thick concepts provide lots of context and specification. To avoid confusion, in this article I will continue using Daston’s version, since that is what we began with.) Let’s look briefly at these special types of “thick” guidelines and how they are applied.

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V-Rules

Hursthouse’s v-rules are guidelines tied directly to the virtues and vices, such as “Do what is courageous,” or “Don’t do what is unjust.” They are based on the idea that “An action is right [if] it is what a virtuous agent would, characteristically, (i.e. acting in character) do in the circumstances” (Hursthouse, Contemporary Debates in Moral Theory, p. 106). Clearly, this type of instruction relies very much on context and judgment, since the guideline by itself provides very little specification for action. However, virtue ethicists see this openness as a strength rather than a weakness, since it allows for human experience and adaptability to come to the fore. I love the real-life example Hursthouse provides from Elizabeth Anscombe (who is credited with kicking off the modern interest in virtue ethics). Hursthouse describes sitting as a student at one of Anscombe’s lectures:

An old woman in Austria under Nazi rule had given shelter to some Jews in her attic, and one evening, there was the dreaded knock on the door and a young SS officer saying “ We believe you have some Jews here?” “Clearly,” said Anscombe, “she must not lie.” And there was a long embarrassed silence because we all thought that obviously she must—that this was the “morally right” thing to do — but did not dare to say so. And she let the pause continue, and then said “Of course, she mustn’t tell the truth either,” and we were all greatly relieved, but also puzzled.

She went on to describe what the woman had in fact done; she had turned on a brilliant performance of pretending to believe that the young officer was her sister’s son, whom she had not seen since he was a boy. “Gustav!” she cried, “how wonderful, come in, come in. How is dear Lotte, I haven’t heard from her for so long, I never knew you had become an officer, how tall you have grown … .!” And she kissed him and babbled on (never once telling a lie) and insisted he have coffee and cakes and, being young and well-mannered, he was too embarrassed to tell her she had made a mistake and press his official question. So he partook of the coffee and cakes and escaped as soon as he could.

From Hursthouse’s 2008 paper Discussing Dilemmas

This beautiful story captures the ingenuity and flexibility that characterize the best of our species—which is, of course, what virtue is. In this case, the old woman effected a moral end by relying on a wealth of social and psychological knowledge: that the officer, being young and well-mannered, would feel obligated to be polite to a grandmotherly older lady; that this was a believable mistake for a grandmotherly old lady to make; and that by effusing over him and kissing him like a doting aunt would do, she could convincingly play the part. These are all part of normal human social knowledge that can never be fully captured by algorithmic rules.

Rules-as-algorithms can be a crutch to those who do not have enough knowledge and experience to enact virtue on their own, but for those who do have the appropriate knowledge and experience, rules-as-algorithms will be a burden. In other words, tightly prescribed rules may help those who struggle with ethical decision-making, but they will never equal the individual discretion of those who excel at it. Rules-as-algorithms can only be a crutch, never a ladder.

Of course, it doesn’t take a moral virtuoso to see the problem with what Daston calls thin rules—even a child can do it. In fact, I would say children excel at doing this; they are better than grown-ups because their moral imaginations are less constrained. At least, that’s how it is in my family! Whenever I make the mistake of issuing a categorical declaration around my three kids, they gleefully find as many exceptions to the rule as possible. One day when my 6-year-old was reprimanded by the teacher for running at school, I said something like, “We never run in the classroom.” Naturally, the kids spent the rest of the car ride home thinking of potential situations in which they should run in the classroom. For the next few minutes I was reduced to admitting that yes, if you’re being chased by a giant octopus, or if aliens descend from the sky, or if a bully is running after you with a lighted match, then you can run at school.

So I’ve now changed my approach—I use mainly v-type rules around my kids.

Cicero’s Regula

Another model of Daston’s thick rules predates us all by 2,000 years. In Learning to Live Naturally: Stoic Ethics and Its Modern Significance, Chris Gill identifies a type of thick rule introduced by Cicero in On Duties. Cicero called it a regula, applying the Roman legal term for rule in a philosophically novel way. What’s particularly interesting about this is that regula was one Latin translation for the Greek kanon; as Daston notes, “The range of the Latin regula followed that of the Greek kanon closely…both as the geometric doctrine of proportions and as the tool of measurement and computation” (379). However:

In the field of Roman law regula took on a special meaning with no close Greek equivalent but with important consequences for later understandings of rules more generally. The regula iuris applied to a particular case but also summarized other, similar cases. In the late Roman republic, jurists collected these regulae as pithy distillations of earlier cases, associated with one another by analogy. (599)

Already in Roman law of the first century CE, jurists effectively distinguished between “law” (lex) and “rule” (regula): the latter collected ancient legal decisions into a general precept or proverb, some two hundred of which were appended to the Justinian Digest under the rubric De diversis regulis juris antique. (5533)

This was perhaps due to Cicero’s innovation in applying a regula to philosophical life—or alternatively, perhaps he just took the first step in recording an already existing trend. Whatever the case, Cicero presents his regula like this:

Of justice, the first duty [appropriate action] is that no one should harm another unless he has been provoked by injustice. (1.20) . . .we ought to follow nature as our leader, to contribute to the common stock the things that benefit everyone together, and by the exchange of dutiful services, by giving and receiving expertise and effort and means, to bind fast the fellowship of human beings with each other (1.22). (cited in Gill, p. 93)

Gill suggests that Cicero is here offering a rule of procedure “designed to inform decision-making, and especially to enable someone to determine which specific factors need to be considered, and how they should be understood, both in preliminary reflection and in the immediate situation” (pp. 96-97). Like a good lawyer, Cicero follows his general discussion by considering two specific cases in which the regula could be applied: whether a wise person would steal food if he were starving to death, and whether he would steal the clothes of a cruel tyrant if he were freezing to death. In both cases, the regula acts as a thick rule by Daston’s definition, guiding behavior with the expectation of being “upholstered with examples, caveats, observations, and exceptions” (225). As such, it can serve as a model for similar thick rules in Stoicism today.

Rules as Models

As promising as these types of thick rules are for contemporary virtue ethics, there is another, perhaps more important implication arising from our study of ancient rules: in ancient philosophy, role models were rules. As Daston’s sweeping historical research shows, the ancient Greek word for rule (kanon) applied just as much to a pattern or paradigm as to an algorithmic rule. The only reason we don’t see this today is because our idea of what a rule is has changed so dramatically.

When contemporary philosophers look at ancient virtue ethics and ask, “Where are the rules for decision-making?”, they are asking a legitimate question. But that question has a totally different answer than any of us were expecting: in ancient philosophy, the rules are the role models! It’s all there in the lives of eminent philosophers. Why did ancient doxographers focus so much on biographical details of philosophers, in a way that seems simplistic to us today? Because the rules are the role models! Just as later Benedectine abbots instantiated the Rule of Saint Benedict, so the philosophers instantiated the rules for their philosophy. In the now-lost sense of rule that we discussed above, they were the rules, the patterns which could be emulated but never imitated. Virtue ethics didn’t need rules-as-algorithms or rules-as-laws—at least, not to the extent of modern philosophies—because it had rules-as-paradigms. The rules have been there all along.

Even a philosophy like Stoicism, whose leaders insisted they were not sages, still provided plenty of patterns for adherents to study. Zeno and Musonius Rufus may have declared themselves to be unwise, but to their students they were still as close to perfect wisdom as anyone could come. Cato and Epictetus didn’t strut around calling themselves sages, but their lives formed a template for many others who came after them. Today “philosophy” is centered around well-reasoned beliefs, but as Pierre Hadot suggests, in antiquity it was also (perhaps even primarily) a lifestyle.

The importance of role models was well recognized in ancient Stoicism. Seneca, for example, often talks about his own role models (Stilpo, Bassus, etc.), and makes explicit the connection between role models and correct measurement when advises his friend Lucilius (Letters on Ethics, 11.10),

Choose anyone whom you admire for his actions, his words, even for his face, since the face reveals the mind within. Keep that person in view at all times as your guardian or your example. I repeat: we need a person who can set the standard for our conduct. You will never straighten what is crooked unless you have a ruler.

And, of course, Marcus Aurelius says of his primary role model, his adoptive father Antoninus Pius (Meditations, 6.30),

Be in everything a true pupil of Antoninus: imitate his energy in acting as reason demands, his unchanging equanimity, his piety…Follow his example, then, so that you may have as clear a conscience as he when your final hour arrives.

Rules as Models in Virtue Ethics Today

In closing out her illuminating book, Daston comes out in favor of bringing back the rule-as-model, claiming its superiority over rule-as-algorithm and rule-as-law:

And models? In the end, the one ancient meaning of rules that seemed to go extinct around 1800 may prove to be the most enduring. Rules-as-models are the most supple, nimble rules of all, as supple and nimble as human learning. Whether the model was the abbot of a monastery or the artwork by a master or even the paradigmatic problem in a mathematics textbook, it could be endlessly adapted as circumstances demanded. (4613)

Following models remains a more efficient and flexible way to learn than following explicit rules—even for those activities that are the most rule-bound, like playing chess. Moreover, models as implicit rules pave the way for explicit rules, just as a grammatical paradigm of the conjugation of a specific verb paves the way for an explicit general rule of conjugation. A well-chosen model—a paradigm, to remain with grammar—is already halfway to a generalization. Models bridge the ancient philosophical opposition between universal and particulars, rules and cases. And they circumvent the modern philosophical problem of how to interpret rules unambiguously altogether: ambiguity in a model is a feature, not a bug. (4620)

I agree with this very positive assessment of rules-as-models, and I think we have much to gain from applying them in virtue ethics today. Rather than falling in line behind deontological and consequentialist approaches by inventing rules that fit their narrow definition, why not bring back the rule-as-model, which has just as distinguished a pedigree? Let’s play by our own rules! Paradigms and patterns are much more suitable for virtue ethics than algorithms are. Models were never meant to be copied and pasted, but rather adapted based on the hard-won experience and best judgment of real people. They are made for the rough-and-tumble, give-and-take of real-life ethics.

At the same time, Daston suggests that we resist the temptation to directly equate models to principles. While these two types of thick rules share similarities, they are distinct:

Because both principles and models stand opposed to explicit rules mechanically applied and because both require judgment, it is tempting to assimilate one to the other. But the emulation of a model mobilizes judgment in a different way than honoring a principle does. The principle is abstract and general; the model is concrete and specific. A principle such as “Honesty is the best policy” or “Be kind to others” must be translated into the specifics of each new situation: what would constitute honesty (or kindness) in this particular context? Here judgment throws down a grappling line from the universal to the particular. But in the case of emulating a model, judgment hops from particular to particular, charting its path by analogy. There’s no need for judgment to descend from the general to the specific and to solidify the abstract into the concrete. Instead, its role is to connect two equally concrete, specific instances by carefully assayed analogies. Which similitudes are strongest and just how far can they be pushed? Judgment enlisted in following rules-as-models, whether in discretion or emulation, is not the same judgment that anchors principles to particulars. (809)

I think this is a really interesting and important point. Ethics is too messy to have narrow rules-as-algorithms for every conceivable circumstance, which is why guidelines must be quite general. But abstractions can be difficult to apply amidst the concrete difficulties of life. This is where examples and role models shine. I certainly don’t have the same life as Marcus Aurelius, but when I see Marcus applying philosophical ideas to stop worrying about his children, I relate to it and apply the same ideas in my own life. Even though I’m not a Roman emperor fighting battles and gritting my teeth through court ceremonies, I can employ the same strategies in my own way.

Concluding Thoughts

The ancients left us a variety of important resources for applying virtue in our lives, including both guidelines (such as Cicero’s regula) and role models. Both of these are, to use Daston’s characterization, thick rules, which are meant to be applied with a hefty dose of experience and good judgment. You can’t eliminate context and life experience from ethics. Most people already know this, but over the past few hundred years some philosophers have forgotten it. I’m very glad that virtue ethics has once again emerged as a serious field of inquiry, and I’m glad that you have joined me here on our adventure through the history of rules.

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