The Virtues of Limits
By David McPherson.
Oxford University Press, 2022 (Paperback 2025).
Paperback, 208 pages, $25.00.
Reviewed by Gene Callahan.
In an age that glorifies leaping past all barriers, David McPherson has written an argument for the importance of “recognizing proper limits in human life.” He focuses on the “limiting virtues” of “humility, reverence, moderation, contentment, neighborliness, and loyalty.” He discusses these virtues in relation to four kinds of limits: “(1) existential limits; (2) moral limits; (3) political limits; and (4) economic limits.” McPherson calls the approach to life that acknowledges such limits the “accepting-appreciating stance,” and that which seeks to overcome limits the “choosing-controlling stance.” Throughout the book, he stresses that both stances are essential aspects of human life, but that the accepting-appreciating stance should be our default attitude. Making the choosing-controlling stance primary drains life of meaning, since the world is seen as a collection of problems to be solved, the solving of which, in the absence of acceptance and appreciation, soon enough appears pointless: McPherson contends that the dominance of the choosing-controlling stance leads to nihilism.
McPherson begins his analysis of existential virtues by arguing that the master limiting virtue is humility, because it reins in our tendency to “play God,” a tendency McPherson also calls “the Promethean spirit.” As one prominent example of that spirit, McPherson cites Nietzsche’s murder of God, leaving us in a situation in which “we must play God,” and transcend humanity by becoming “ubermensch.” Many of Nietzsche’s epigones today call themselves “transhumanists” and hope to leave behind the human condition, not like Nietzsche, through the will, but largely through medical and technological sorcery.
McPherson then rejects notable legal theorist Ronald Dworkin’s embrace of genetic engineering, because it treats children as manufactured products from which all defects are to be removed, rather than as gifts to be accepted.
Given the many quotes from G.K. Chesterton in this book, McPherson is clearly an admirer; here he quotes him on the foolishness of piling up more and more stuff without appreciating what one already has: “there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them.”
The ultimate rejection of the accepting-appreciating stance is suicide, and McPherson again turns to Chesterton for insight on that act. He writes:
Not only is suicide a sin, it is the sin. It is the ultimate and absolute evil […] the refusal to take the oath of loyalty to life. The man who kills a man, kills a man. The man who kills himself, kills all men; as far as he’s concerned, he wipes out the world…
McPherson does not mention euthanasia, but the implication of the above should be clear: Assisting someone in committing “the ultimate and absolute evil” should not be condoned by our legal system.
McPherson next turns to morality. (As he notes, in a way his entire book is about morality, but here he means morality as it is typically and more narrowly discussed by moral philosophers.) His first topic is character formation, about which he adopts an Aristotelian position, where good character is formed by inculcating good habits, which necessarily involves restrictions and prohibitions. Oddly, the Ten Commandments don’t appear here (they only come on stage at the very end of the book), but they are an obvious and famous example of the value of prohibitions.
But why should we respect the restrictions that traditional morality puts on us? McPherson’s answer is “reverence.” A proper sense of reverence for the gift of the world will render these prohibitions not arbitrary but flowing from the very nature of our being. Interestingly, McPherson relies heavily on the Confucian tradition when discussing the virtue of reverence. A worthwhile move, I think, as it demonstrates that the idea of virtue inherently involving limits is not some “Eurocentric” notion. McPherson examines several other avenues that have been travelled in justifying absolute prohibitions, such as Stuart Hampshire’s argument that they are necessary to avoid “moral anarchy,” and finds them wanting.
McPherson goes on to make a compelling case for manners as a way of showing proper reverence and disciplining our animal appetites. For example, basic table manners are a way of taming and controlling our animal appetite for food and humanizing it. Animals simply consume the food available to them as quickly and efficiently as possible, but all human cultures place restraints on such behavior, helping us to control our animal appetites. Similarly, when it comes to sex, we ought to transform lust into romantic love.
McPherson next turns to the proper role of partiality in the moral life. Those entranced with rationalist moral theories often reject the idea that we should view our own children, or our next-door neighbor, with any higher regard than a person in need, whom we have never met, on the other side of the world: such attachment to our own is “irrational,” they contend. John Stuart Mill and Peter Singer are cited as prominent examples of this view. McPherson does an excellent job of destroying such nonsense: abjuring special concern for one’s own family, friends, and neighbors in favor of “humanity” is typically a mask hiding the fact that the person recommending it really doesn’t care for anyone else at all. The people embracing this view love “humanity in general,” an abstraction that has no annoying personality traits, as a way of excusing their lack of love for the frustratingly complex people that actually surround them in their lives. McPherson quotes Aristotle on this point: “Those who are many-friended, and treat everyone they meet as if they were their own kin, seem to be friends with no one.”
In the last part of this chapter, McPherson discusses the virtue of loyalty and how it relates to our duty to assist those in dire need. He makes the excellent observation that the parable of the Good Samaritan does not, in fact, suggest we have the same duties to distant people we know little about as to those we meet in person: the Good Samaritan was not sending his denarii to a relief fund to aid victims of an earthquake in Bactria, but was donating them to help a man whom he had directly encountered. It is very easy to adopt a high-minded desire to help “humanity,” but much more difficult (and useful) to actually engage in helping the people we personally encounter.
While I do think McPherson is largely correct here, I wonder if he gives quite enough weight to the limits on loyalty. He considers a case where a son turns in his father for stealing a sheep, and Confucius condemns the son. Perhaps sheep stealing is not a serious enough crime to justify overturning filial bonds, but what about rape, or murder? Surely one’s father could do something so heinous that one would have no moral choice but to turn him in?
In the political realm, the question of limits concerns the proper or most useful scope of our political action. Is there any justification for regarding the nation-state as a relevant entity in our evaluation of what actions are virtuous? Shouldn’t we instead aspire to perfect, global governance? And are there any reasonable limits on this sort of improvement to the human condition we can hope to achieve through politics?
Regarding the first two questions, McPherson examines the case that Martha Nussbaum makes for becoming a “citizen of the world,” rather than of any particular, local polity. While she dismisses attachments to our local political society as displaying ugly “us versus them thinking,” McPherson responds that her cosmopolitanism is, in fact, a form of us versus them thinking, allowing cosmopolitans like her to look down upon patriotic rubes attached to their own nation. In fact, as McPherson notes, proper loyalty to one’s own polity can, in fact, yield a genuinely cosmopolitan outlook, since it involves realizing that other people, in other polities, are similarly attached to their own country.
McPherson goes on to consider some radically egalitarian approaches to political morality, in particular, those of John Rawls and G.A. Cohen. As he sees it, Rawls and Cohen, in declaring a person’s natural endowment and circumstances of birth and upbringing as “arbitrary from a moral point of view,” are guilty of a lack of reverence for the world and our circumstances in it as given to us. They are waging “a metaphysical crusade against contingency,” McPherson argues (quoting David Wiggins). This is a very important point, as it undermines Rawls’s claim that his political principles are neutral between different comprehensive conceptions of the good life. In fact, they are dismissive of a notion of the good life based on such nostrums as “we should count our blessings and not be envious of others.” And McPherson notes that another egalitarian, Ronald Dworkin, has actually elevated envy, traditionally counted as a vice, into a “standard of justice.”
Cohen argues that the infeasibility of socialism is no reason to abandon it as an ideal; that is nonsense. A political system that relies on reality being other than it is can be rejected for that reason alone. If only people were the size of ants, we could fit all living humans in Central Park and leave the rest of the earth as undisturbed wilderness, but we aren’t that size, and there is no way to make us so. As McPherson puts it, “Utopianism wages war against the given world… It is better to focus on realizing the good that is possible, and one of the most important reasons for objecting to utopian thinking is that it is counterproductive to realizing this good.” McPherson argues that a “sufficientarian” approach to distributive justice, where it is a responsibility of the political system to ensure everyone has “enough” for a decent life, is a realistic and worthy alternative to the radical, utopian egalitarianism of someone like Cohen.
Finally, McPherson turns to economic limits. Here, he parts ways with almost every political figure in either party, in rejecting the idea that limitless wealth for everyone is a sensible goal to strive for. For both major U.S. political parties, the highest goal of government is to deliver more and more stuff to the people, and their major disagreement is about the best way to do so. To the contrary, as McPherson puts it, “endless economic growth… is senseless without knowing what it is for.”
Of course, both our right-liberal and left-liberal political pundits will tell us that liberalism certainly does not entail consumerism: under liberalism, they say, people are free to choose whatever sort of values they want, and if they prefer an Amish or monastic lifestyle, well, they can have it. But, as McPherson correctly notes, that very attitude, promoting choice as the ultimate value, is itself a comprehensive view: “however, liberalism is in fact, not really neutral, since it ends up endorsing a particular conception of the good life, namely, the life of the choosing, preference-satisfying self which is not ‘encumbered’ by any strong social ties, and an objective conception of the good life.”
McPherson does a good job debunking the libertarian case for unlimited wealth acquisition, which he finds exemplified in the work of Jason Brennan. Brennan endorses the unlimited acquisition of wealth for enabling us to get what we want, while ignoring the fact that living a good life is much more about learning to want the right things.
McPherson counters Brennan with the wisdom of Jesus as found in the Gospels, noting the tragedy of the man who could not surrender his attachment to his worldly goods to find true fulfillment. As McPherson puts it:
Precisely because of how greater wealth enables us to get more of what we want… it gives more free rein to our desires, and can encourage their multiplication in a way that is unconnected with living a good life, and thus it can lead … to our being enslaved to our insatiable desires.
Unlike some critics of homo economicus, McPherson correctly understands that the rational choice model of human behavior does not exclude ethical preferences. But, he argues, that model “distorts the nature of ethical reasons which recognize normative standards… for what we ought to desire, and so [they] should not be regarded as mere preferences among other preferences.” In lieu of that model, he offers the work of Wendell Berry and Catholic Social Teaching as providing better guidance on the role of economic activity in human life.
McPherson closes his book with a meditation on the importance of “keeping the Sabbath,” whether one is Jewish, Christian, or neither. The idea of a day where we refrain from working, and instead contemplate the life we have worked for and the world as given to us, is, for McPherson, a day devoted to the importance of the accepting-appreciating stance.
He claims that “even if one is not a theist, one can recognize the importance of the harmony that is sought here.” But is that really true? Granted, some views of the sacred typically regarded as “non-theistic,” such as Buddhism and Taoism, can recognize the importance of this sought-for harmony. However, I doubt such recognition is really available to today’s hardcore atheistic materialist.
One curious absence in the book is any discussion of transgenderism: rejection of one’s given sex and the employment of unnecessary drugs and mutilating surgery in order to become more like the opposite sex is about a radical rejection of the “accepting-appreciating stance” as is possible, but McPherson never mentions it. But perhaps he was wise to avoid doing so, since touching on such a divisive topic might have distracted from his overall thesis.
I also think that McPherson’s work could usefully employ the ideas of Iain McGilchrist on the differences between right-hemisphere and left-hemisphere thinking, which map quite nicely onto McPherson’s differentiation of the appreciative view and the controlling view.
But these are very minor quibbles: this is an excellent book, both clear and concise. It is not overburdened with references, but engages sufficiently with the relevant literature, allowing an interested reader to explore further. And at a time when so much of our culture regards any limits as abhorrent, and keeps telling us that we can “have it all,” it is also a very timely work.
Gene Callahan is a Lecturer in Computer Science and Economics at St. Joseph’s College and a Research Fellow at the Collingwood and British Idealism Centre at Cardiff University, Wales. He is the author of Economics for Real People and Oakeshott on Rome and America.
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