Exemplarity, expressivity, education

ABSTRACT

This article proposes that Catherine Elgin and Nelson Goodman’s work on exemplification is relevant for discussions within moral philosophy and moral education. Generalizing Elgin and Goodman’s account of exemplification to also cover ethics, the article develops a two-factor account of moral exemplarity. According to this account, instantiation and expressivity are individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for someone or something to function as a moral exemplar. Applying this two-factor account of exemplarity to discussions within the philosophy of moral education the article then argues that it is the expressive aspect of moral exemplars, which explains and justifies the educational significance of such exemplars. The article concludes by discussing the similarities and differences between the expressivity account and the transparency criterion formulated by Michel Croce and Maria Silvia Vaccarezza in a recent paper.

KEYWORDS:

• exemplarity
• moral exemplars
• expressivity
• moral excellence
• moral education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Thanks to Wayne Riggs from the University of Oklahoma for bringing Elgin’s work on exemplification to my attention.

2. One might object that an inanimate work of fiction cannot instantiate psychological or moral properties, and thus cannot exemplify such properties. Elgin replies to this by arguing that a text ‘can instantiate and exemplify abstract properties that are concretized in human agents. … Strictly, in the fictional setting it is not a pattern of psychological features. But it is a pattern that is, or that may be, instantiated by psychological features. So it affords epistemic access to a pattern that we may find ourselves or our fellows instantiating’ (Elgin, 2014, p. 232).

3. Croce and Vaccarezza adopt a modified version of Blum’s distinction (Blum, 1988, pp. 197–06) between moral heroes and moral saints. On their account moral heroes form one subset of what they term ‘single-virtue’ exemplars, i.e. exemplars who possess a single virtue to an exceptional degree. The hero is thus typically characterized by being exceptionally courageous, but might not be particularly caring, wise, or modest. Moral saints on the other hand are what we might call ‘un-restrictive’ (or ‘full-virtue’) exemplars, i.e. exemplars who possess ‘all the virtues at an exceptional level’ (Croce & Vaccarezza, 2017, 3–4).

4. Croce and Vaccarezza also rely on narratives as one of the most important ways of being exposed to and gaining knowledge of moral exemplars. ‘… encountering a moral exemplar, in person or through narratives, elicits our admiration and can be of the utmost moral significance …’ (Croce & Vaccarezza, 2017, p. 3. See also pp. 5–8).

5. I include the ”at least at first glance” proviso in order to make room for Zagzebski’s claim that our immediate admiration may be flawed or misguided, and that reflection and judgement are needed to determine whether the object of our admiration is truly admirable (Zagzebski, 2017, pp. 44–59, pp. 62–65, pp. 152–153, pp. 222–226).

6. Chapter 5 of Zagzebski’s book provides a detailed discussion of the importance of imitation and emulation for moral education.

7. Olberding (2012, pp. 35–36). Much of Olberding’s book is dedicated to spelling out the implications of this claim for our understanding of Confucius’ thought. See also Olberding (2008, p. 628): ‘The moral exemplars of the Analects are not merely important [for moral education], but indispensable and necessary to its ethical vision.’

8. Zagzebski (2017, p. 60, emphasis added). It is probably no coincidence that Zagzebski here employs an aesthetically loaded term, ‘moral beauty’, to describe the inherent expressivity of moral exemplars. As soon as we begin to talk about the expressivity and attractiveness of certain publicly observable features of the moral agent aesthetic considerations are hard to avoid.

9. For the distinction between moral saints and moral heroes, see n. 4 and Blum (1988).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carsten Fogh Nielsen

Carsten Fogh Nielsen is a research assistant at the Department of Educational Philosophy and General Education at the Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Denmark.