2. From logical to realist naturalism

As mentioned above, Foot takes herself to be offering a framework that renders explicit the ‘real logical grammar’ of moral judgments.Footnote ⁷ She is here evidently using the term ‘grammar’ in Wittgenstein's sense, on which it refers to the logical structure of the appropriate uses of words in various practical contexts, counteracting a philosophical tendency to abstract words from those contexts. It is a central part of Wittgenstein's philosophical methodology to conduct ‘grammatical investigations’, which is the exploration of the various ways in which a term is appropriately used, contrasted with artificial philosophical uses of the term in question.Footnote ⁸  Foot takes up this approach herself in her treatment of evaluations in general and moral judgments in particular. Following Peter Geach, Foot argues that the real logical grammar of goodness, counteracts artificial philosophical treatments of ‘good’ such as those found in statements like ‘pleasure is good’ wherein the evaluative predicate floats free. ‘Good’ does not function as a predicative adjective. So, such a statement is ‘rarely appropriate’, Foot thinks, and it invites fruitless philosophical speculations about non-natural properties or special attitudinizing in non-cognitive accounts. She writes, ‘Judgments of goodness and badness can have, it seems, a special ‘grammar’ when the subject belongs to a living thing, whether plant, animal, or human being’.Footnote ⁹ She thinks that the exploration of that grammar can yield insight into goodness as it is used in moral contexts. In her explication of that grammar, she relies on the work of Michael Thompson, who is much more explicit about his methodological commitments, which he names ‘analytic’ or ‘Fregean Aristotelianism’.Footnote ¹⁰

Thompson investigates life, action, and practices through analyzing the logical form of thoughts that apprehend each of these objects. Although his investigation ‘has something like a metaphysical character’,Footnote ¹¹ he distinguishes his investigation from a straightforward metaphysical investigation in that the distinctions he draws, for example between living and non-living, are distinctions among different forms of thought and not drawn directly from the things that are thought about.Footnote ¹² In the case of living things, he argues it is a mistake to think that living things are just like non-living things, except in that they feature some distinctive properties, such as growth, having DNA, or self-movement. He argues that each of these proposed marks of life is subject to counterexamples, and so builds a case that it isn't any property that distinguishes the living from the non-living; life cannot be given a real definition on his view. Rather, our talk about living things employs a distinctive categorial framework. If there were a property or set of properties picking out living things from non-living things, a single form of judgment would fully embrace both cases, and what would pick out something as alive would be that certain claims would be true of it that can be formulated in propositions with the same form as that instanced in describing a non-living object. ‘My cat has four legs’ would be much like saying ‘my car is red’. But this is not the case, according to Thompson; my thought about my cat employs a distinctive logical form, on his view. I am not inferring from some set of properties it has to the fact that it is living, but from the first employing a distinctive categorial framework in order to understand it as alive and to understand my cat as the bearer of legs in the relevant sense. Hence, we find in this domain a different way that the subject of judgments about living things relates to its predicates. For instance, from the fact that cats have four legs, and this is a cat, it does not follow that this cat has four legs. Judgments of living things have a distinctive ‘non-Fregean’ form of generality, such that general claims can be true of them despite their not describing even the most statistically common features of that form of life. The subject of what Thompson calls ‘natural historical judgments’ is something that is, on his view, necessary to the representation of things as alive, with this form of generality. The generality is attributed to the life form, e.g., the domestic housecat, which is then instanced, no doubt imperfectly, in the features and activities of particular cats.

It follows from this approach that we don't acquire the concept of life and living thing from observation and generalization. If there are no empirical properties that distinguish the living from the non-living, then of course we cannot form the concept by induction from instances that bear the appropriate properties contrasted with those that do not. Rather, Thompson believes that there are ‘irreducibly diverse but interrelated capacities that find their seat in our intellects’ that enable us to grasp different forms of being.Footnote ¹³ Though the content of our thoughts about living things comes from experience, the categories whereby we grasp living things as such are a priori and part of the power of thought itself. The concepts that Thompson arrives at to characterize the categorial structure of such thinking, including ‘life-form’ and ‘natural historical judgment’, are ‘supplied by reflection on certain possibilities of thought or predication’ rather than by experience.Footnote ¹⁴ They are pure a priori concepts, on his view.

For Foot's ethical naturalism, Thompson's analysis of the representation of life has the important result that our representation of something as living features species-dependence.Footnote ¹⁵ This means that any case of representing an individual as an organism requires situating that individual against the background of its kind. The reason this must be so is that in taking something to be alive we are taking at least some of the occurrences surrounding it as non-accidental and agential. If something happens to an organism whereby some matter gets into it and happens to further its metabolic processes it has not eaten, though perhaps it is nourished. When an animal eats it takes in something that at least appears to it to be the sort of thing from which it derives nutrition for that purpose; it is a non-accidental and active process. To see such a process, we must see it as acting in a way that characterizes something of its kind, and this brings in a normative dimension; such processes can go awry. Something being a cat is a sufficient explanation for its having four legs; the distinctive generality of natural-historical judgments allows for the statement that cats have four legs to be true while we are looking at a cat with three legs. We then register the cat in front of us as having a defect and may wonder how this came about. For these reasons, Thompson thinks that his Davidsonian swamp double who arises from a lightning-bolt and perfectly mimics his actions ‘is not so much as alive’.Footnote ¹⁶Ex hypothesi, what is happening in the swamp double is purely accidental; there is no way for it to be defective in any respect because it does not belong to any kind, instead being ‘a mere congeries of physical particles’.

Foot and Thompson both argue that this logical structure applies equally to the case of human beings. When we represent human beings in claims about them, we cast ourselves against the background of a form of life, the human being. Yet, as Thompson is especially at pains to emphasize, our relation to this life-form is unique in that our relation to it is necessarily not mediated by observation.  Here he draws an analogy between the I-concept and the concept human understood as the life form I bear. No observation could establish that the figure in the mirror is me in the absence of an a priori I-concept; that is, nothing could bring it about that I connect that image with an image of myself in the absence of such an a priori concept, because it is no empirical feature or set of features of the image that make it an image of me. I must have such an a priori concept and be able to apply it in a thought such as, ‘I've looked better’. Likewise, there are no empirical features of human beings that makes them bearers of the life form I bear; rather, I come into contact with the life form I bear primitively, albeit implicitly, in having thoughts about myself. Thompson describes his line of thought as follows:

This distinctive relation that we bear to our own life-form is crucial to Foot's naturalism, though she does not emphasize this in her own writings. On Thompson's understanding, we cannot get ourselves into view, describe ourselves, or so much as be aware of ourselves as thinking without situating ourselves as members of a life form that features some norms. This includes norms concerning what it is to reason and act well. Those norms, whatever they are, are norms that reveal our conception of what it is to live well qua human. These norms do not come to us from without, from observation, but are embedded in our a priori self-conception that is at the basis of our self-consciousness, according to Thompson. These norms are my norms if anything is mine. Thompson's thereby embraces a sort of life form internalism, according to which when we act deliberately and not in weakness of will, we necessarily demonstrate our conception of what it is to live well qua human.

On Thompson's view there are certain features of the human life form that are incontestable inasmuch as they are necessary components of a self-conscious form of life. It is instructive to contrast Thompson's methodology as an analytic or Fregean Aristotelian with the approach to self-knowledge found in Aquinas, who of course also draws on Aristotle. Aquinas writes:

This follows a methodological principle from Aristotle to the effect that ‘actualities and actions are prior in account to potentialities’.Footnote ¹⁹ The idea is reasonable since we can only know potentialities, if there are any, through their actualizations, and since potentialities are distinguished through being directed toward their distinctive acts. In Aquinas’ methodology, as with Thompson's, we come to know our powers through acts directed at objects, which are differentiated not materially, but formally. In Thompson's methodology, as distinct from Aquinas’, this is carried out in the first instance within the domain of intellectual judgments, delineating distinctive objects (e.g., living things versus inanimate objects) through analyzing the distinctive forms of thought that apprehend them, arriving at irreducible capacities for thinking about living things that reveal something about the powers of our form of life.

Thompson's methodology is necessary for getting at the grammatical forms pertinent to living things and their associated pure concepts; I will assume his claims about these forms are correct. My question is whether Thompson and Foot have an adequate philosophical interpretation of these categories. As I noted above, Thompson counts these concepts among the ‘irreducibly diverse but interrelated capacities that find their seat in our intellects’. The irreducibility of these powers is demonstrated by their purity and the irreducibility of the correlative judgments: as Thompson argues in detail, they can't be boiled down to standard Fregean judgments with ceteris paribus clauses or to Fregean judgments with second-order quantification. Given that such judgments are necessary to self-representation, there is a transcendental necessity to the attribution of a power of thought including the capacity for the representation of living things, on Thompson's view. I can't think of myself as thinking without representing myself as a form of life with the capacity for thought. Hence, I must take myself to be a form of life with at least this power if I am aware of myself as thinking of anything at all. As Thompson himself puts it, this argument has an ‘unwholesome Cartesian’ flavor.Footnote ²⁰ My concern is that this approach imposes a divide between powers that we must take ourselves to have on pains of not being able to represent ourselves as thinking, and powers that we merely represent ourselves as having without such transcendental necessity. There are, after all, acts that we apparently engage in that are not intellectual acts, and these acts seem not to be function of our cognitive powers alone. For example, we appear to be animals with appetitive powers that target particular material objects as good. Goodness in this sense is traditionally taken to be something that appears to us as an upshot of possessing appetitive powers. For Aquinas, these apparent goods are sufficient grounds for attributing a separate appetitive power. The objects of my sensitive appetites are formally distinct from the objects of my intellect or my senses, even when I desire the same object that I also sense and cognize. As Aquinas puts it, ‘An object of both apprehension and appetite is the same in subject, but differs in character (ratione). For it is apprehended insofar as it as it is a sensible or an intelligible being, whereas it is the object of appetite insofar as it is suitable or good’.Footnote ²¹ In other words, the intellect and the senses can contemplate objects without taking them to be good, but the appetites target objects as good or averse, or as threats to attaining a good or avoiding an evil. On Aquinas’ standard, then, the senses, intellect, and appetite are distinct powers, since their objects are formally distinct, and there are further distinctions to be drawn within each, as the intellect, senses, and appetites all collect further distinct capacities, that can be separated based on further formal distinctions among their respective objects.

Aquinas’ conception of ‘formal nature’ of course extends further than Thompson's, because it is not merely logical form. If I see some tofu, say, and it inspires an appetite in me, there is a relation between its nature, its form, as a piece of tofu, and my own, bodily animal nature, my senses and appetites, such that I situate it under the formal nature of goodness and love it, where this simply means that I am inclined toward the possession of the good, the eating of the tofu.Footnote ²² Aquinas could see the appetites and the passions that correspond to them as powers that are actualized in specific ways through movements that bring them to completion. For Aquinas, these aspects of our nature cannot be grasped without attributing powers to things, including our own bodies, and in so doing, we are attributing form and finality to them; we must take them to be in the things thought about in virtue of their bodily nature, both in the appetitive animal body and in the desired thing that satisfies those appetites.

My complaint is that Thompson's methodology does not, by itself, give us a framework for sorting out claims about powers other than those that are necessary to the capacity for self-consciousness. Aquinas, by contrast, provides such a framework, albeit one that depends on metaphysical claims that Thompson seems unwilling to venture. To illustrate, when I desire a piece of tofu and aim at attaining it, I represent myself as desiring tofu. I must take myself to have powers of thought to so represent myself. Yet, do I take the desiring of tofu to be a result of the power of representation, that is, an upshot of my cognitive powers, or part of a separate power? Thompson, on my reading, does not give us an approach to this question. And this question is important – is my excessive desire for tofu a cognitive defect – so that the problem is that I am representing myself in a certain way? That would seem to be clearly mistaken; the problem is with another power, the appetites, which, ex hypothesi, prompt actions in conflict with my conception of acting well qua human being.

Getting the appetites into view in a way that they can figure as needed in an Aristotelian framework requires this more expansive conception of form and a metaphysical commitment to realism about it. It requires, I think, conceiving the content of our representations of living things as having powers that feature formal and final causation on a physical level, and using these as a basis for distinguishing powers in much the way that Aquinas does in the Treatise on Human Nature. That is in part a matter of translating the features that Thompson finds in on the logical level of representation back into the physical world. Thompson finds concepts including organism, organ, vital operation, and life-form, which he collectively terms ‘vital categories’ to be irreducible logical categories.Footnote ²³ My claim is that they are not only that, and stopping there, with laying out a categorial framework for living things, would leave us with an incomplete self-understanding. Thompson's restrictions appear to issue from a worry about embracing an ‘egregious organicist metaphysics’ and a view that the inanimate physical world is to be understood as a realm of law and passive matter. Yet this picture of nature is increasingly coming under challenge from those committed to essentialist accounts of the physical world on which there are kinds with dispositions to act in certain ways that define their intrinsic natures, and these are their causal powers.

It is crucial to frame this issue in a way that brings Thompson's categorial framework into contact with the metaphysical claims in order to make headway. Recent work in neo-Aristotelian metaphysics has treated life in a way that does not integrate Thompson's categorial framework. For example, Edward Feser and David Oderberg defend a scholastic conception of life on which it is defined by ‘immanent causation’. This is ‘causation that originates with an agent and terminates in that agent for the sake of its self-perfection’.Footnote ²⁴ Nutrition, here, would be a paradigmatic case of immanent causation; an organism photosynthesizes or eats for the sake of maintaining its form, that is, for the sake of self-perfection. This is to be contrasted with transient causation: which is causation that terminates in something other than the origin of the cause: one rock knocking another off a cliff, for example.Footnote ²⁵ Thompson's argument shows that this definition cannot stand on its own. That is because the notion of self-perfection contains a reflexive term, and, as Thompson points out, ‘the whole problem is already contained in the reflexive’.Footnote ²⁶ That is, the reflexive conceals an assumption concerning the relevant entity that is to perfect itself. Consider Thompson's analogous case concerning self-movement, another mark of the living: he contrasts a bird flying out of a stadium of its own accord versus a bird that has been mistaken for a fast ball and is flying out of a stadium having been struck by a bat. Which one is self-movement? Intuitively it is the first, but as Thompson points out, ‘if A moves B, then the mereological sum of A and B in some sense moves itself, or some of itself’.Footnote ²⁷ In other words, the batter and bird together form a self-moving system. The determination of the relevant entity, the organism, depends on establishing the natural historical judgments against the background of which we can pick out a living thing as such and attribute flight to that thing. Thompson would therefore deny that we can pick out living things as individual material objects distinguished from inanimate objects through possessing a property or mark of engaging in self-perfective acts; we must have recourse to a life form, as captured in natural historical judgments, in order to pick out an individual living thing, and to see what happens in it as self-perfective action.

My suggestion, then, is that human beings are a distinctive sort of living thing with specific causal powers, that is, distinctive self-perfective powers. We require Thompson's categorial framework to get ourselves into view as living things. Within that framework, we need, in addition, something like Aquinas’ criterion to get our individual powers properly into view.

3. Appetitive powers and virtue

Awareness of oneself as having a desire is a deployment of the sort of form consciousness discussed above. To understand myself as having a desire I must understand myself as a living thing. As Anscombe says, ‘a primitive sign of wanting is trying to get’.Footnote ²⁸ A little before that she states, ‘one cannot describe a creature as having the power of sensation without also describing it as doing things in accordance with perceived sensible differences’. These remarks situate a living thing against a wider context which represents it as featuring sensory and appetitive powers. In my own case, my awareness of wanting something situates me under a certain kind with such capacities; wanting and trying to get are things that characterize that form, even if my particular wants are rather idiosyncratic. Part of my form consciousness is pure, on Thompson's view. I must have a pure conception of a living thing, he believes, and of the concept of ‘the life form I bear’. As with recognizing one's image in the mirror, a self-conscious desire is immediately attached to an I-concept; I don't observe a desire and then attach it to myself, but rather my desire involves me and directs me, in the case of what Aquinas terms ‘sensitive appetites’, to something in my sensory field or imagination. So, part of what I am aware of in desiring something is the pure form-consciousness that frames my form of life as something with a capacity for wanting and trying to get.

On the Thomistic view that I am advocating, we should understand our sensitive appetites as the function of a power separate from our powers of representation. That is because the objects those acts concern differ formally. The intellect's powers culminate in an act of cognition that abstracts from the particularity of the object of my cognition, and the psychological particularities of my occurrent grasp of the object of my cognition; it is something I can repeat under different circumstances faced with different particulars that fall under the same universals, grasped under different psychological conditions. It is repeated by others, in different bodies with different psychological contexts. In other words, sensed particulars might occasion an episode of cognition and it occurs in a particular embodied rational animal, but the cognitive act aims at something that goes beyond those particulars. By contrast, my hunger is sated by some particular bit of matter that I sense, ultimately being subsumed into my form, not by mere apprehension and cognitive appreciation of the tofu's form. My appetites therefore relate me as a concrete particular to other concrete particulars as such; indeed, it relates me to some of them as goods. The appetites in question are sensitive appetites in that they follow sensing something.Footnote ²⁹ Our bodies respond to what we perceive through the senses; there is physical change in us that responds to the perception of something desired or some threat to something desired. These changes initiated in us through sense apprehension Aquinas labels the passions; though they begin passively, in apprehension, each passion is the active bodily course of an appetite playing out in relation to a particular apprehended object inciting that appetite. The appetites relate to sensed particulars in a distinctive way, as goods. The appetites are a power to go for the good as it is manifest in the sensible world.

All of this occurs in an individual organism against the background of natural historical judgments that pick out an individual organism with powers of sensation and appetite that define natural norms for an organism of that sort. If I have a nagging appetite for what I know to be motor oil, there is clearly something defective about my appetites. Of course, the desire may persist in light of my recognition that it is leading me to something that is not genuinely good. Desires can thereby manifest in various ways; I can be plagued by an unwelcome desire, or I can identify with my desires as leading me to something genuinely good, and this is part of the form consciousness that is necessary for self-consciousness. Those desires that come unwelcome are represented as defective in the sense of being something not directed to a genuine human good. Most of us probably have some desires that show up in this way; these are desires that we wish to be rid of, and we may undertake to do so, say, through resolve and repeatedly acting to resist promptings of the desires. In so acting, we are working to transform the appetites, and positing that they can take on different qualities. These qualities are the subject matter of virtue ethics: they are the hexeis or habitus. In undertaking to bring our appetites into accord with our conception of what is good, our picture of the proper human life, we are positing that the appetites can take on these different qualities, virtues and vices.

Our attempts to transform our appetites imply that those appetites are variable causal powers, to use Brian Ellis’ terminology.Footnote ³⁰ More specifically, they imply that my appetites might be shaped through reason to acquire states that are a function of my choices. This is a core thesis of Aristotelian virtue theory: my appetites can be brought under a principle through my choices. In Aquinas’ terminology, the habitus that are moral virtues and vices are principles of the movement of the sense appetites. Developing such a principle is a distinctive sort of change that belongs uniquely to the appetitive powers of a rational animal. There are other changes that my appetites can undergo that are oblique to these changes. My appetites grow and diminish with age and health. From one day to the next, I may have a taste for fish, tofu, or leafy greens, all of which are wholesome and preserve good condition in moderate amounts. To introduce a distinction from Aristotle, these changes in my appetitive powers are merely alterations. But the change that occurs in bringing my appetites into accord with a principle that embodies my conception of the good is something I will conceive as a perfection. It is indeed a perfection if my conception of the human good is correct.

In my view, this interpretation of our form of life involves registering a desire and attributing it to a distinct power. There is a bit of metaphysics involved here: it goes beyond pure form consciousness and offers a metaphysical interpretation of that form consciousness that posits appetites as a power, belonging to me as a human being, but distinct from my intellect. It is difficult to see how we can avoid such a self-interpretation.  As Aquinas points out, the appetites contribute ‘something of their own’.Footnote ³¹ This is their independent capacity to grasp and present particular sensed things as good; reason cannot, on its own, relate to particular sensed objects as good. That is, there would be no reason to go for anything sensed apart from an appetite for it. Reason can, however, take an independent stand on what the appetites present to it as good or bad. Thus appetites ‘clash with reason as a result of our sensing or imagining something pleasant that reason forbids, or something unpleasant that reason demands’. These are everyday phenomena that support the Aristotelian interpretation that there is a distinct appetitive power.

That this power is perfectible is likewise a seemingly inevitable part of our interpretation of human form. Take the example of Mary from Julia Annas’ ‘Virtue Ethics and Social Psychology’. Mary treats her colleagues respectfully, but humiliates waiters in restaurants, yells at her son's soccer coach, and is rude to shop owners.Footnote ³² Let us say Mary recognizes that her behavior in restaurants, shops, and the soccer field is bad, and aims to get better. If Mary is to get so far as to be continent about her irascible behavior in these contexts, this must surely require a transformation of her appetites. If acting considerately in all of those contexts is indeed part of her conception of the good, she must regard her inclinations to the contrary as foreign intrusions that she would undertake to rid herself of. She must aim to bring her appetites into conformity her conception of how it is best to live.

To suggest that this is impossible or rare, as some philosophical situationists do, is to embrace a significant limitation on our moral agency: we cannot hope to ever fully desire what we claim to think of as good. But this isn't just a limitation on our desires, it is also a sort of cognitive limitation: a limitation on our ability to relate to the good as presented in the particulars of our existence. Mary could have a cognitive grasp on the importance of showing compassion to others, and yet not have the ability to desire to treat her waiter with compassion; for that reason, she would not be able to appreciate the particular goodness of that act of compassion, even if through self-control, she is able to bring it about that she acts in conformity with a rule. Of course, Mary may end up saddled with recalcitrant desires. But it is crucial for her to undertake to change her appetites, and there are reasons to see it as a process that takes time. As Aquinas points out, habitus change in rational animals requires more than one act. As he writes:

So, the nature of the appetitive power is such that it cannot be determined all at once to what is good, as discerned by reason. It takes time to perfect one's appetites, and no definite amount of time can be specified: hence, Mary should not all at once resign herself to recalcitrance if the appetites prove obstinate to change. Instead, she must continue to act on right reason, hoping her desires will come into alignment with her choices over time. For it is through acts that we change our appetites. On Aquinas's view, reason, as the active component of the soul, acts on the appetites as a passive component, producing a quality. As Aquinas puts it ‘the habitus of virtue is produced in the appetitive powers [i.e., the will and the sense appetite] as they are moved by reason’.Footnote ³⁴ Hence, it is not a distinct process that Mary would have to undergo to change her appetites, but rather a persistence in acting against contrary desires so as to bring about, eventually, appetites in conformity with her conception of the good.

4. Virtue and the Metaphysics of Powers

On the basis of these mundane but crucial features of our moral experience, I am arguing for a more metaphysically robust interpretation of human form than Foot or Thompson avow. Virtues are perfections of our appetitive powers, and so, these powers are in an important sense naturally directed to morally good acts. Those acts are the completion of the appetites as the sort of thing they are: they perfectly actualize them in that they are the attainment of what they are powers to do. Yet, as a power that is rational by participation there is another sense in which this does not happen naturally. For our appetites to attain their perfection they must take on qualities that come from reason and so are not simply there as a matter of course; rather, they require the exercise of rational agency to be developed. This can make it seem as though reason is setting standards quite independently of our so-called first nature. Foot describes virtues as consisting of ‘(a) the recognition of particular considerations as reasons for acting, and (b) the relevant action’.Footnote ³⁵ But which considerations should count? Those that make the will good, which on Foot's view includes the sort of considerations that are taken into account by agents who possess justice, courage, temperance, and charity, among others. As Michael Thompson interprets Foot, she does not want to justify these claims, but rather takes them to be self-validating. As he writes:

Let us call the strongly sui generis reading of the human good; it is an understanding of the project of naturalism that one can find in John McDowell, Thompson, and Foot on Thompson's interpretation. By contrast, I want to argue that the study of human life does yield substantive results. There seems to be some evidence that Foot herself thought along these lines, as when she says thing like ‘the evaluation of the human will should be determined by facts about the nature of human beings and the life of our own species’. The view that I am advocating might be called weakly sui generis in that I hold that there are distinctive standards that apply to human beings qua rational animals, and yet essential features of human beings as rational animals, including our appetitive powers, determine what it is for us to be good qua human beings.Footnote ³⁷

Part of the reason this latter interpretation of Foot's project may not seem to be open is due to blinkered metaphysics. If we can't think of finality in nature, we of course can't think of our desires as having an independent finality, that is, a finality independently of aims that we deliberately take up. One could think that appetites take on finality only through being integrated into intentional action, but I want to say that appetites have their own completion as a separate power, and their completion is essential to human excellence. That completion occurs when appetites take on the virtues as principles of their movement and then achieve their aim in morally good acts. We can, of course, act contrary to the finality of our appetites; for example, we can deliberate poorly about what constitutes the proper fulfillment of our appetites. Yet, I would like to say, for example, that there is such a thing as temperance that holds across human kind; it is, of course, contextually sensitive, such that there is a certain small amount of water to drink on an expedition in the Sahara, and another larger amount among the abundant freshwater lakes of Canada, but that the contextually appropriate mean, however much water that is, is the proper fulfillment of human appetites. It may be up to reason to determine what the mean is, but it is not up to reason to determine that whatever the mean is, that is the end of our appetites.

In affirming this, I am advisedly taking up a position that was not very long ago taken to be obviously out of bounds. Bernard Williams, to take one famous example, railed against the idea of an ‘inner nisus’ toward virtue in his 1986 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. Yet even some time before Williams wrote dismissively of these ideas, powers and finality were enjoying a revival in metaphysics and philosophy of science. As far back as 1970, Rom Harré argued that there is nothing occult about the idea of powers, and that they are in fact central to an adequate epistemology of science.Footnote ³⁸ To ascribe a power to something is to tell us what it will do because of its intrinsic nature. Molière's mockery of the virtus dormitiva is undeserved. Instead of the fatuous pseudo-explanation is supposed to be, it in fact says something substantive: that the sleepiness observed after the ingestion of opium is to be attributed to the intrinsic nature of the opium. This claim leads us to a scientific investigation of what it is about the constitution of opium that gives it this power. Further, on the view of some powers theorists, including Edward Feser and David Oderberg, powers capture aspects of causality that cannot be captured by a counterfactual analysis. Powers capture what causality is rather than its consequences.Footnote ³⁹ Oderberg argues that in order to account for efficient causality, we must make an appeal to finality:

In other words, effects are a function of the nature of the things involved in the causal interaction, and their powers are due to their constitution. Nancy Cartwright argues that the powers or capacities make better sense of the methods of the sciences than Humean approaches. We proceed scientifically, she thinks, by attributing powers to things, positing that these powers are behind the effects that we witness. Hence, there are reasons from both metaphysics and philosophy of science to affirm the existence of powers in nature, and no reason to hold the prejudice Williams and others harbor toward the view. All I mean to do here is to suggest that this prejudice is unwarranted, and to point to a potentially fruitful collaboration between neo-Aristotelian metaphysics and neo-Aristotelian ethics.

Specifically, taking our departure from this essentialist view of nature for developing a neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism allows us postulate that virtues perfect our first nature, and reject the strongly sui generis reading of the human good in favor of the weakly sui generis view. Take John McDowell's understanding of Aristotle. On McDowell's view, Aristotle conceives of ethics as an autonomous set of rational requirements that result from an upbringing that imparts an ethical outlook: an upbringing that gets us to see certain considerations as reasons for action. This Bildung, as McDowell styles it, imparts a second nature, operating within the realm of law yet not determined by its demands. Whereas nature controls the behavior of non-rational animals, the acquisition of a second nature frees us to answer to demands that are not given by nature, and ‘to step back from any motivational impulse one finds oneself subject to, and question its rational credentials’.Footnote ⁴¹ Through this reshaping of our motivational impulses, we ourselves acquire a freedom vis-à-vis the demands of nature, and our motivational responses are reshaped in accordance with what we rationally affirm: what is initially a passive, contingent upshot of our biological nature becomes, as a result of Bildung, a reflection of a conception of living well qua human being. Our desires thereby reflect our spontaneity as rational beings rather than our passive determination as natural beings.

McDowell rejects a reading of Aristotle according to which his aim is to ‘construct the requirements of ethics out of independent facts about human nature’.Footnote ⁴² He casts this reading of Aristotle as an ‘historical monstrosity’ because it attributes to Aristotle an anxiety about the status of reasons to which he was immune, because he lacked the modern conception of nature as a realm of law. What is bizarre about McDowell's argument is that if Aristotle's understanding of nature is not that of a realm of law, then what ‘constructing the requirements of ethics out of independent facts about human nature’ would mean for him would also be quite a different thing that it means to someone pursuing such a project today in light of a Humean conception of nature. So, what McDowell must mean is that those readings of Aristotle (he cites Williams) take him to be doing something we obviously cannot do because we reject his conception of nature. McDowell wants to save Aristotle from doing something that would be cogent given his understanding of nature, but not ours. If this is correct, the anachronism may be McDowell's: he is trying to defend Aristotle from criticism for a project that he didn't undertake: squaring ethics with nature conceived as a realm of law. Instead, Aristotle's project may indeed be that of squaring the requirements of ethics with nature, not as a passively obedient realm of law, but as a realm of active powers, which is the project that I want to defend in our contemporary context.

It is worth pointing out features of McDowell's account that are rendered either incoherent or trivial given his strongly sui generis stance on the human good. McDowell says that the educational process of Bildung is ‘an element in the normal coming to maturity of the kind of animals we are’; ‘Bildung actualizes some of the potentialities we are born with’;Footnote ⁴³ ‘our mode of living is our way of actualizing ourselves as animals’ or ‘exercises of spontaneity belong to our way of actualizing ourselves as animals’.Footnote ⁴⁴ What does such talk mean in the absence of a conception of nature as containing powers that stand to be actualized? These claims are all made from the standpoint of someone who has acquired the relevant upbringing: perhaps it is a matter of using traditional philosophical vocabulary to shower praise on what one has been brought up to praise. They simply mean: ‘our mode of living is good, according to our mode of living’. If they are supposed to mean something more than this, then it raises important questions of how these supposed potentialities we possess are part of the realm of law, which is exactly the sort of question that McDowell invokes the idea of second nature in hopes of silencing.

In light of an essentialist conception of nature, we can instead take these claims straightforwardly to be true. Virtue perfects us as the kind of thing we are by perfecting powers that are essential to us as rational animals. Placing virtue within nature in this way bridges the gulf between second nature and first nature in a more straightforward way. Instead of attempting to shut the questioning down as misplaced, this program offers the promise of a direct answer. As Brian Ellis states:

As Ellis sees it, the essentialist's conception of nature has the potential to bring the manifest and scientific image together by showing that human rational powers are in many ways like the things we find elsewhere in nature. That is, like powers in inanimate things, human rational and appetitive powers have intrinsic natures that dispose them to realize themselves in certain characteristic ways. Unlike inanimate powers and even the variable causal powers of complex systems, human rational powers are also metapowers: powers to change their own dispositional properties.Footnote ⁴⁶ Of course, understanding those sorts of powers would be a central question as part of a productive collaboration between neo-Aristotelian metaphysics and neo-Aristotelian ethical theory. Yet, if I am right, this is the direction that we need to go in order to fund a full-blooded realist ethical naturalism.

We should see the human good as a matter of perfecting appetitive and intellectual powers that we really have. The perfection of the appetites consists in their taking on qualities whereby they respond to our environment in a way that exhibits a principle of reason: they reflect our conception of the good as they reach out to sensible particulars. The human appetites are by nature aimed at morally good acts, and find their ultimate fulfillment therein. When we acquire virtue, we are acquiring states that allow us to fully realize our nature. In making this argument, I take myself to be going beyond the Wittgensteinian grammatical project started by Foot and the Fregean Aristotelianism of Thompson, but in a way that is very much indebted to their project. The point I'm making is that their vital-ethical Categories needs supplementation with a new, essentialist Metaphysics that bridges our moral judgments to a natural world inhabited by rational animals.