Linda Zagzebski's Exemplarist Moral Theory

Linda Zagzebski’s Exemplarist Moral Theory (2017) is a very cogent and persuasive attempt to construct a comprehensive moral theory by directly referring to moral exemplars, of whom she identifies three types: heroes, saints, and sages. Moral exemplars, according to Zagzebski, are people we regard as admirable and may therefore attempt to emulate, because they embody moral virtues, such as love, compassion, wisdom, and courage. Exemplars of non-moral qualities, such as athletically gifted or artistically talented persons, may also be admirable, but they may not be imitable in the same way or to the same extent that we can imitate moral exemplars, unless they have developed their gifts or talents through other qualities that we can imitate, such as determination and hard work. 

      Zagzebski observes that we may sometimes be mistaken in our admiration of people, and we may sometimes envy or resent, rather than admire people for their admirable qualities. We may also disagree about what exactly we admire in some person(s). However, an advantage of exemplarist moral theory is that we may often be more certain that some people, like Confucius, the Dalai Lama, and the Buddha are admirable than we are of what exactly is admirable about them.¹ 

      Zagzebski also notes that we may not always be able to fully imitate the admirable qualities of moral exemplars, unless we completely refocus our lives, which may be very difficult for many of us. Even though such saintly figures as St. Francis of Assisi, St Catherine of Siena, and Mother Theresa may be very admirable for their self-sacrifice and love for strangers, we may not have the moral resources to be able to emulate them in every respect. We may also not always regard moral saintliness as something desirable or something we want to completely devote ourselves to trying to emulate. We may admire some things (such as lives of asceticism and self-sacrifice) without truly desiring them, and we may desire some things (such as lives of comfort and financial security) without truly admiring them. 

      Another point Zagzebski makes is that although the emotion of admiration is assigned a primary function in her moral theory, this fact in no way implies that admiration is necessarily a more trustworthy emotion than other emotions or that we should not attend to moral judgments justified by other emotions.² Admiration shares with other emotions the features of (1) having an intentional object, (2) having an affective component, and (3) having a potentially motivating aspect. However, there may be at least two kinds of admiration: admiration for inborn talent, and admiration for acquired excellence. The latter kind is the more important one for exemplarist theory. 

      Three possible responses to an admirable person may be (1) to feel positively about her, leading to a desire to emulate her, (2) to feel negatively about, or benignly envious of her, but still leading to a desire to emulate her, and (3) to feel negatively about, or malignantly envious toward her, leading to a desire to deprive her of her admirable qualities.³ The third kind of response (malignant or spiteful envy) may arise from a kind of resentment, in which the envious person sees her own lack of, or inability to acquire, the admired good, and thus tries to deprive the admired person of that good, rather than try to acquire it herself.⁴ 

      We may admire some people more than others if they are more consistently admirable or seem to have a deeper disposition to be admirable in a wider range of situations. We may also admire some people more than others if they are admirable in a greater variety of respects (for example, if they are tactful as well as honest, temperate as well as courageous). Moral examplars, according to Zagzebski, tend to be admirable in all or most of their acquired traits, although they don’t have be admirable to the highest degree in all their acquired traits (such a feat would be very difficult or impossible). 

      Zagzebski identifies Leopold Socha (1909-1946), a Polish sewage inspector who at great personal risk sheltered Jews from the Nazis during World War II, as an example of a hero. She identifies Jean Vanier (1928- ), a Canadian philosopher and theologian who founded L’Arche, an international federation of communities for the care of the mentally disabled, as an example of a saint. And she identifies Confucius (551-479 BCE) as an example of a sage. 

      Some of the distinctive qualities possessed by sages include wisdom, insight, understanding, reflectiveness, equanimity, open-mindedness, intellectual humility, fairness, self-discipline, and creativity in problem-solving.⁵ 

      Among the advantages of exemplarist moral theory, according to Zagzebski, are that it may serve as a map, rather than a supposed manual for moral decision-making. 

      Among the purposes of such a theory are (1) to create a comprehensive ethical theory that serves the same purposes as deontological, consequentialist, and virtue theories, (2) to have practical application by structuring moral theory around a motivating emotion—the emotion of admiration, (3) to explain and justify a genealogy of morals, and to track moral development, (4) to link theoretical ethics with empirical research in psychology and neuroscience, and (5) to meet the needs of different communities, and to frame the discussion of moral theory in cross-cultural discourse, by allowing different communities to identify distinct but overlapping sets of moral exemplars.⁶


FOOTNOTES 

¹Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski, Exemplarist Moral Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 10. 

²Ibid., p. 28. 

³Ibid., p. 53. 

⁴Ibid., pp. 55-56. 

⁵Ibid., p. 95. 

⁶Ibid., pp. 3-4.