McCabe on Community and the Moral Life

1. Being a person is a human activity, and therefore a person can be judged objectively as either a good or a bad human being.
2. Every individual has a role and a function within a polis, or more specifically, a linguistic community. This polis is concerned with virtue.
3. A linguistic community can be judged upon how well it fosters virtue in its citizens.
4. A person can become a good person by recognizing that virtues are desirable, and then deliberately seeking to cultivate virtues for their own sake.
5. The study of ethics does not merely discuss the nature of goodness, but intends to make individuals good.
   
   Is moral goodness or badness a characteristic, and if so, how does a person develop into either a good or bad person?
   McCabe begins by addressing the nature of moral goodness or badness in human life. He starts by analyzing Hume, who believes that humans only see what is the case and not what ought to be the case. Followers of Hume claim that, “Ought (prescription) can never be derived from is (description)” (17). Resting on the assumption that moral behavior looks at the way a person ought to behave, the Humeans assert that humans cannot make judgments on whether moral behavior is morally good or bad. In this light, to be a ‘good person’ is to fulfill a subjective definition of moral goodness based upon an individual’s feelings (or to tie in Fletcher, based upon the situation).
   
   McCabe disagrees, claiming that being a person is a definite human activity and that as such, an individual can be judged as being either a good or a bad human being, just as an informed person can judge a good or bad ice skater. “To be human,” he writes, “is to be political, to be part of a polis” (25). (Based upon this assertion, he does not believe there is a need to bring God into the discussion at all.) Every individual has a role and a function within a community, but “community and individuality are not rivals”: an individual is the product of his or her linguistic community (which is distinct from an animal grouping) but the individual is also the product of his or her “free decisions” (28). In seeking to become a good person, which McCabe describes as becoming more yourself, a human being must “be educated into and respond creatively and critically to the tradition of [a] place and time” (30). This education develops in the way we live our daily lives.
   
   So what does it mean for us to be part of these larger communities, specifically, our respective linguistic communities? Our capacity for creativity and our ability to create meanings sets us apart from animal groupings. Through this creation of meanings, a person’s statements achieve a sense of objectivity, and the person, “behave[s] in a way that is not simply individual” (35). McCabe hones in on Aquinas’s belief that human beings’ thoughts are not essentially private. As a result, we as humans “are constituted as who we are not just biologically… but also culturally, spiritually, by the linguistic community, the polis in which we live” (37).
   
   McCabe expands on this concept of polis through describing Aristotle’s belief that a polis must “concern itself with virtue” (38). If the primary focus of the polis is to shape people to grow in virtue, then McCabe argues that we can use this as the critical standard upon which to judge a society. In examining any society in a particular time, we must focus on the extent to which “it fosters the virtues of its citizens” (39). McCabe then takes this standard a step further by narrowing in on the virtue of justice. He argues that, “one who has the virtue of justice is one who has learnt to want the things that are just” regardless of external reward or honor (40). When a person does a just act in order to gain the approval of an outside party or the internalized teachings of his or her conscience, the person is not truly acting justly. To become just, McCabe writes, a person must discover, “a new way of being in the world,” and to recognize justice as desirable in itself (48). He believes that every person strives to attain fulfillment, and that this fulfillment can only be attained through the “deliberate cultivation of virtues” (57). McCabe discussed justice and courage, but what do you think are some other universal virtues necessary to being a good human being? Can a person possess certain virtues very strongly yet be devoid of others? If so, do you believe that some virtues are more important than others?