(with qualifications) Alasdair MacIntyre^64 in the mid 1970s to early 1980s
argued that it is impossible to cultivate all the genuine virtues simultan-
eously. In at least some cases, spontaneity competes with integrity, fore-
sightedness competes with generosity, moral uprightness competes with
sympathy and love, and courage competes with prudence; some relation-
ships may have to be sacrificed for the sake of others. Against this back-
ground of thinking about ethics, a turn to literary accounts of complexities
of particular actions-in-contexts seemed natural. Nussbaum did her initial,
influential work on literature and moral philosophy explicitly under the
influence of Williams’thought that tragedy, resulting from having to make
hard choices in cases in which the cultivation of one virtue must lead to the
suppression of another, might be inevitable in human life.^65
The trouble with moral particularism, despite its insights into the com-
plexities of hard cases, is that it threatens to underplay the thought that
there are some values, such as justice, that might command our allegiance,
however difficult it is to cultivate them. Worried about this threat, Kieran
complains that“moral particularism ends up implausibly and uncritically
exempting received ways of carrying on from reflective inquiry and criti-
cism.”^66 Gaut criticizes the tendency of moral particularism to“den[y] the
existence of any general and informative moral principles.”^67
In fact, however, those who have developed a clarificationist stance have
generally not been full-blooded moral particularists. Rather, they accept the
thought urged by Kieran that“it is perfectly compatible with foregrounding
the rich particularities of certain cases to allow that there is a symbiotic
interplay between moral principles and judgment.”^68 Thus Nussbaum argues
that“perception without responsibility is dangerously free-floating, even as
duty without perception is blunt and blind. The right‘basis’for action is
found in the loving dialogue of the two.”^69 She has gone on to articulate a
multidimensional neo-Aristotelian theory of the good, arguing in detail that(^64) See Alasdair MacIntyre,After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory(Notre Dame University Press,
1981).
(^65) See Nussbaum’s discussion of the work of Williams in herThe Fragility of Goodness: Luck
and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy(Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 18–20.
(^66) Kieran,“Art, Imagination, and the Cultivation of Morals,”p. 340B.
(^67) Gaut,“Ethical Criticism of Art,”p. 191.
(^68) Kieran,“Art, Imagination, and the Cultivation of Morals,”p. 340B.
(^69) Nussbaum,“‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible,’”p. 155.
240 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art