Diacritica 25-2_Filosofia.indb - cehum - Universidade do Minho

88
HASSE HÄMÄLÄINEN
lence” and her conception of the ends) [16] is to be assessed against the standards
internal to the practice: the assessment of one’s success in any practice,
for example, in portrait painting, “requires”, McIntyre argues, “[…] the kind
of competence that is only to be acquired either as a painter or as someone
willing to learn systematically what the (expert) portrait painter has
to teach” (McIntyre, 1984: 190). In the same vein, one has to practice wine
tasting for a long period of time with a view of learning the standards of
taste from the experts in order to be denoted a wine expert by the people
who defi ne the standards of taste – that is – the wine experts. One has no
good reason to try to assess whether the people who defi ne the standards of
wine tasting really are wine experts before she is familiar with those standards
– that is – before she is an expert.
In spite of their elitist character, many people (even many of those who
do not approve them) do, however, not regard practices such as portrait
painting or wine tasting as being particularly distasteful due to that particular
aspect. It seems to be out of place to criticise wine tasting on the basis
that its practitioners would not take it seriously if someone who could not
tell diff erence between wine and beer would attempt to evaluate their wine
expertise. Th erefore it may well be asked on the basis of McIntyre’s conception
of practice why VEE is considered a distasteful for communal life, if
similar elitism not a problem for practices such as wine tasting or portrait
painting? Could the incoherency of our intuitions against elitism signal that
they are mistaken?
No doubt the former question may seem to be easy to answer and
therefore the latter suggestion may seem to be pointless. Th e obvious way
to answer it would be to appeal the above considerations on the diff erences
in the area of operation between the practices, and argue that due to their
limited reach, people could be permitted to stay outside more context-specifi
c elitist practices such as wine tasting or portrait painting, but nothing
neither can nor could emancipate them from the ethical requirements of
communal life: our every choice is responsible to our community in some
extent. Were life in a community respecting VE to be elitist like all the
other practices, the people of that community could not have free choice
of whether they are to be guided by virtue or not in seeing who is practically
wise, although they could still freely choose whether they go to consult
wine experts or portrait painters or not. [17] Th is threat VEE poses to our
16 See the quotation on p. 9 above
17 For this type of arguments against attempts to dilute the contrast between ethical expertise and
other forms of expertise, see e.g. Louden 1992, pp. 20-21 and 61-81, and Driver 2006.
Diacritica 25-2_Filosofia.indb 88 05-01-2012 09:38:23