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PARTISAN REVIEW
Douglas Rasmussen:
Professor Haack, to what extent does your distinc–
tion between real inquiry and pseudo-inquiry and your desire for
investigators to manifest integrity have to do with a connection between a
deeper theory of ethics and virtue ethics?
Susan Haack:
I am not thinking in terms of any party lines in recent dis–
cussions in ethics. It's not quite manifest in what I said, but it's not far from
the surface, that we need to
talk
in terms
both
of virtue
and
of duty. There is
something (not necessarily the most important thing) wrong with the char–
acter of a person whose intellectual integrity is shaky. He may be really nice
to his wife and children and his dog, he may be absolutely honest on his
tax
return and so forth, but still there is something about him which falls short
of what a human being would ideally be. But it is
also
the case that some of
us have a special obligation to intellectual integrity. All of us who are acade–
mics have an obligation to engage in inquiry and to do it honestly. Not
everybody has this obligation, but we do. Someone who failed melodramati–
cally in a duty of this kind, in my recent experience, was a lawyer who advised
a friend of mine, an antique dealer who fell into the trap into which antique
dealers are apt to fall, buying stolen goods. This lawyer's advice was, "Look,
you bought goods which were stolen; that's an offense; you'd better plead
guilty." I ran around desperately to find out what the law really was, because
I knew this couldn't be right. And of course it wasn't; the offense is
knowing–
ly
buying stolen goods. The lawyer had, surely, failed in a duty to know. And
we academics
also
have a special duty to inquire, not to speak before we know,
or, if we have to speak before we know, to
say,
''I'm not sure." A full under–
standing of the ethics of intellect requires
both
the vocabulary of duty
and
the
vocabulary of virtue. I am not convinced that one must choose between the
two, as opposed to trying to understand how they fit together.
Speaker:
My second question is to Professor Stent, and is a comment about
Machiavelli. It seems to me that Machiavelli discovered what Isaiah Berlin
called "value pluralism," the distinct differences among people. He was con–
cerned about the aim of politics trying to make virtue as its end, and argued
for some other aim. Regrettably the modernists tend to take that as a separa–
tion of the political from the ethical. I believe what Professor Machan was
suggesting is that the earlier version, what he called the scientistic version of
liberalism, bought into the package deal that Machiavelli presented. Namely
that if you reject the aim of virtue as the aim of politics then you must reject
any connection between politics and a deeper ethical and ontological view.
Gunther Stent:
My struggle against the categorization of Machiavelli as
"scientistic" derives from my understanding of the commonly accepted
meaning of "scientism," namely the belief that the logical premises and
