‘evoking object or situation’ justify an emotion? What we need to do is to follow a twofold procedure: first we must ascertain whether the emotion is rationally formed, and then, whether it is morally fitting in the given 41
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circumstances. If the emotion passes both these sub-tests, then we can conclude that it is morally justifiable. Let me explain this in more detail.
Irrational emotions must first be distinguished from illogical ones. I have already mentioned an example of an apparently illogical emotion, that of feeling remorse with regard to a future act which we find morally praiseworthy.112 If someone claimed to be experiencing such an emotion, we would reject the claim on the grounds that illogical emotions cannot exist any more than widows who have not lost their husbands. The person perhaps misunderstands the term ‘remorse’, or is playing with words like an artist trying to disturb our traditional modes of thinking, or has identified a feeling similar to one sensed earlier when experiencing remorse (in which case we could point out that feelings do not uniquely distinguish particular emotions), or is perhaps even suffering from hallucinations. Irrational emotions, however, typically involve disregard for facts, negligent and hasty judgements, or purposeful self-deceptions: a jealous husband immediately draws the conclusion that his wife has been cheating on him when she returns late from work, although he could easily have verified her story about her car breaking down, and how it was fixed at the garage. Those inert emotions, discussed in the preceding section, which remain in place even after the facts undermining them have revealed themselves, also typically fall into the category of irrationally formed emotions. Admittedly, the dividing line between irrationality and illogicality of emotions may seem fuzzy at times: after the bill from the garage arrives in the mail, is it illogical or
‘merely’ irrational of the husband to be eaten up by jealousy because of his wife’s alleged misconduct on the day she came back late? In that case, I would say ‘irrational’ because the reason for his jealousy is still not beyond the bounds of logic although it is based on culpable disregard for facts.
However, if the same person claimed to be proud of an act which he viewed as despicable (and the reason could not be given that ‘deep down’ he viewed it somehow otherwise), then we could safely say that the emotion was illogical. For, irrespective of all contingent facts, such an emotion would simply not make sense.
After we have ascertained that an emotion is rationally formed in the relevant case, we need, secondly, to check whether it is morally fitting, that is, whether it is morally appropriate given the details of the situation, neither too strong nor too weak, nor overriding other more urgent concerns. For instance, anger towards a person, B, who has wronged you, may be fully rational, but if it overshadows your feelings of sympathy for B in a situation where B has tragically lost a spouse and needs your comfort, your anger is not a morally fitting response. Or to take another example, your anger (although rational) may be too excessive in circumstances where the wrongdoing was slight and a more moderate emotion was called for. It is important, as D’Arms and Jacobson have pointed out, to avoid a ‘moralistic fallacy’ here – namely, the fallacy to infer, from the claim that it would be 42
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morally unfitting to feel an emotion, that it is therefore irrational. The moral wrongness of feeling an emotion never, in itself, constitutes a reason that the emotion is irrational.113 Incidentally, an emotion can also happen to be morally appropriate to the situation although it is irrationally formed:114
maybe the man’s wife in the aforementioned jealousy example really did cheat on him on the day her car broke down, but as the reasons for her husband’s jealousy were unwarranted, his jealousy still counts as morally unjustifiable. It is, thus, not enough for an emotion to be morally fitting by chance for it to count as morally justifiable.
Let me make this twofold test clearer with a diagram: EMOTION
Rationally formed
Irrationally formed
Morally fitting
Morally justifiable
Morally unjustifiable
EMOTION
Morally unfitting
Morally unjustifiable
Morally unjustifiable
Clear as I hope this schema is, a few comments and clarifications are required. It might be tempting for those evaluation theorists who define emotion without any recourse to concern (see s. 1.3) to speak about our emotions being true or false instead of, or at least in addition to, their being morally justifiable or unjustifiable. An emotion is then simply ‘true’ if it correctly describes the given situation from a moral point of view, ‘false’ if it misdescribes it. However, there are two reasons why I consider it wise to resist this temptation: first, because it ignores the way in which the emotion is formed (we want our beliefs to have come about in the right way for them to be justifiable), and second, because I think it necessary, as already argued, to retain concern as an independent component, thus leaving it an open question as to whether an emotion is morally fitting even if it correctly records the moral description of a situation: ‘Yes, your anger because your car was stolen is true in the sense that it is wrong to steal, but should you be so concerned about it in this particular instance – where other emotions seem to be more urgently called for – that your anger can be considered morally justifiable?’ The reasonableness of asking questions such as this casts doubt on the value of speaking about emotions as true or false, even for theoretical purposes.115 It is probably no coincidence that they are hardly, if ever, referred to in such a way in ordinary language either.
A special problem of classification relates to those emotions which rest on non-culpable ignorance: where the subject simply could not know better.
My best friend, who has never lied to me before and in whom I have 43
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complete confidence, tells me that the job for which I applied has been given to a less-qualified applicant who happened to be the boss’s nephew. I become jealous, but it turns out that my friend lied to me, and it is still unde-cided who gets the job. Was my jealousy morally justifiable until I realised that my friend had lied (given, of course, that jealousy can be morally fitting, as I shall argue later)? It seems harsh to say that the jealousy was morally unjustifiable because it was irrationally formed: there was simply no good reason for me to question my friend’s words, so how could it have been formed more rationally? It may, on the other hand, also seem counter-intuitive to claim that a person was justifiably jealous because of something which in fact did not happen. However, as we are concerned here with justification in a moral sense, I consider this second way of speaking an innocuous one: we can hardly demand more of a person’s moral views than that they are warranted – even if they fail in the end to be true and to constitute real knowledge.
To complicate matters further, even if our emotion is rationally formed and morally fitting, it does not mean that the way we act in response to the emotion will necessarily be rational. I might respond to a sudden burst of anger towards my wife by beating my son (which is surely irrational), or I could take a photo of her from my desk and tear it to pieces. There are divided opinions as to whether the second reaction is irrational or merely arational; Rosalind Hursthouse, who opts for the latter, correctly points out that there seems to be something both rational and irrational about taking out our anger on the photo of the person who angered us.116 Moreover, it is always an open question as to whether or not an emotion should be acted upon at all.
An attentive reader will have noted that I asked a question about the moral blame- or praiseworthiness of emotions but couched my answer in terms of moral (un)justifiability. Do the extensions of these terms necessarily coincide? Well, as a general rule in the moral sphere, I think that they do. People are blameworthy for performing morally unjustifiable actions or entertaining morally unjustifiable emotions, and so forth. However, there are some subtle points to be observed here. Some morally unjustifiable emotions may be so trivial that it would seem odd to say that a person is blameworthy for having them (and by that I mean more than that he should not be openly blamed for them, which is another matter). Consider, for instance, a teenage boy who is a little bit more angry than he perhaps should be because the girl he fancies stood him up on a date. While it may seem a bit excessive to speak of a ‘blameworthy’ emotion there, it still remains that we should aim at as morally perfect a fit as possible between the intensity of our emotions and the situations in which they arise. In that sense, any deviation, however small, is blameworthy.
Another question arises in cases where emotions come about in irrational ways through hastily formed judgements. There might be a case for arguing 44
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that we cannot survive in life without forming such judgements now and then; rationally turning every stone to double-check facts would simply take up too much of our time. Indeed, many prejudices, especially in young people, are of this kind: they are not the entrenched, purposeful, and self-deceptive half-truths or truths-and-halves that every moralist will condemn, but rather judgements which people quickly form to get on with things and are ready to discard later when they have more time to consider details.
Should emotions that come about in this way still be deemed irrationally formed and thus morally unjustifiable? One reason to say no might be the didactic value of hasty prejudices. Every teacher knows how much easier it is to arouse students’ interest in – and ultimately to guide them to true opinions on – issues about which they already have formed some judgements, however hasty. I would much rather discuss the moral inappropriateness of disgust towards people of other races with a student who had already felt such disgust, for instance, upon sitting next to a coloured person in a bus, than with one who had no interest whatsoever in racial issues and who may never even have come into close contact with a person from another racial group. However, in the end, neither of these two reasons (the necessity of forming hasty judgements, or the didactic value of having some beliefs to work on rather than none) suffices to show that an emotion formed irrationally because of haste is not blameworthy. These certainly point to mitigating circumstances, where, for instance, expression of blame might be out of place, but they do not carry enough weight to undermine the demand which we must ideally make of every moral person, that his moral beliefs, including his emotion beliefs, are both rationally formed and morally fitting.
Let us now enter the forbidden ground of the ‘negative’ emotions. The first question to ask is then, of course: what is a ‘negative’ emotion? While reference to such emotions is a common feature of ordinary speech, not much scholarly work has been done to demarcate systematically their (alleged) negativity: what exactly is it that these emotions have in common which justifies their condemnation? Ben-Ze’ev provides a notable exception, however, for he spends considerable time exploring the characteristics of
‘negative’ emotions and what sets them apart from the ‘positive’ ones.
‘Essentially’, Ben-Ze’ev remarks, ‘positive emotions incorporate a positive evaluation, pleasant feelings, and the desire to maintain the situation; negative emotions incorporate a negative evaluation, unpleasant feelings and the desire to change the situation.’117 For example, love is according to Ben-Ze’ev’s analysis, ‘basically a positive emotion’, meaning that ‘the positive evaluation and its associated positive motivational component and pleasant feelings are more essential in love than are the negative elements’. So even for emotions as complex as love, ‘we can nevertheless characterise their typical cases as either positive or negative’.118
Ben-Ze’ev’s characterisations are coherent and consistently followed in his analyses of different emotions. They are thus theoretically useful, at least 45
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for his own line of inquiry. The snag is that these characterisations have arguably little to do with the way in which the terms ‘negative’ and ‘positive’
emotion are used in everyday language. For instance, in Ben-Ze’ev’s analysis, compassion and sympathy (traditionally praised as positive and virtuous) become ‘negative’ emotions, while Schadenfreude and pride (the former universally condemned and the latter commonly viewed askance) become
‘positive’. Now, there may be good reasons (see s. 1.3) to depart from ordinary language: sometimes deeply embedded distinctions in ordinary language turn out to be useless; alternatively, there may be good arguments for invoking new distinctions which cut across ordinary usage. However, Ben-Ze’ev does not provide any such arguments even though he is, naturally, well aware of the irrelevance of his characterisations to the common moral connotations of the terms in question.119 One might be tempted to ask, at first glance, why Ben-Ze’ev did not simply construe the distinction he singles out as one between ‘painful’ and ‘pleasant’ emotions. To that he could retort that his ‘positive’ emotions can sometimes be painful (as love frequently is), and his ‘negative’ emotions (such as anger) can sometimes be pleasant.
Furthermore, as the essential feature which picks out the nature of a specific emotion is, for Ben-Ze’ev, an evaluative one and not a feeling component (see s. 1.3), it is preferable for him to classify emotions in light of the former rather than the latter. But then I think that his purpose would have been best served by coining new but transparent terms such as ‘positively evaluating’
versus ‘negatively evaluating’ emotions (which must, however, not be confused with ‘positively evaluated’ and ‘negatively evaluated’, see below).
If we want to reserve the labels ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ for an understanding of the emotions that is more in line with ordinary usage, the question arises what precisely this usage amounts to. It has undoubtedly, I think, a moral dimension. When Calhoun and Solomon discuss the possible meanings of the labels ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ in this respect, their first suggestion is, thus: that these refer to morally ‘benign’ versus ‘hostile’
emotions.120 Some standard psychological studies of ‘negative’ emotions rely on a similar understanding of ‘negativity’.121 Is an emotion then perhaps labelled ‘negative’ if, and only if, it is morally unjustifiable, in which case the extensions of ‘negativity’ and ‘moral unjustifiability’ (as explained above) of the emotions would fully coincide? Not really, for then there must be cases where even the most ‘positive’ emotion, according to common opinion, such as compassion, would count as negative, that is, cases where it is, for instance, felt out of proportion. However, even in such cases of excessive compassion, the emotion itself would not normally be labelled ‘negative’.
The reason is that in ordinary language the terms ‘negative’ and ‘positive’
emotion are not used to refer to particular (and perhaps untypical) instances of an emotion but rather to emotions as a whole. I think it is fair to say that according to this understanding, a ‘negative’ emotion is one which in all cases (or, at best, in all but the most exceptional cases) is thought to be 46
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morally bad; a ‘positive’ emotion is one which in all (or almost all) cases is deemed morally good. The typical ordinary-language list of ‘negative’
emotions would then include Schadenfreude, anger, pride(fulness), envy, and jealousy, among others, whereas compassion, sympathy, love, considerateness, ‘happy-for’, etc., would be counted as ‘positive’.
I see no particular reason to depart from this received, if somewhat imprecise and non-technical, understanding of the terms ‘negative’ and
‘positive’ emotion. (Surely, owing to the context-dependence of moral appraisals, many emotions are difficult to specify as ‘essentially good’ or
‘essentially bad’, and thus belong on neither list.) However, given this understanding, what I shall argue is that people are often mistaken about which emotions fall into which category. More specifically, I argue that pride(fulness) and jealousy do not deserve their places on the list of negative emotions. In the following, whenever I use the terms ‘positive’ and ‘negative’
emotion in quotation marks, I am referring to the ordinary-language understanding of the respective terms and to the emotions which are typically placed in each category. When they appear without quotation marks, however, I am referring to the ordinary understanding of the terms and the emotions which should properly be placed there.
In recent years, we have seen a number of studies suggesting that particular ‘negative’ emotions, such as pride and jealousy, have some redeeming features: that they are not as black as they have been painted, do not deserve their ‘unqualified opprobrium’, etc.122 Some more general defences of the class of ‘negative’ emotions have also appeared, but these have been equally cautious and reserved. One of two approaches is then usually taken. One is to argue that while in principle negative, the ‘negative’ emotions can have some instrumental value in bringing about positive moral consequences in particular cases. However, this instrumental value is seen as somehow marginal and inessential.123 The other is to emphasise the contrast value of the negative emotions: they offer a kind of testimonial or guarantee of authenticity to the ‘positive’ emotions and virtues by making the latter stand out in sharp relief to the former.124 A certain ‘negative’ emotion such as anger can then even be a necessary condition for the existence of a basic virtue such as forgiveness. This second tack bears strong resemblance to a common solution to the theological problem of evil (why an almighty, all-benevolent God allows so much turpitude and suffering in the world): without all the badness – so the story goes – we would never learn to appreciate the good.125 What both these approaches have in common is the presupposition that while we would, in principle, be better off without the
‘negative’ emotions, there are some factual or conceptual considerations which force us to accept them, however reluctantly and conditionally.
A less guarded defence is suggested by Michael Stocker’s justification of the ‘painful’ emotions. While predominantly concerned with such painful (but non-‘negative’) emotions as regret and grief, much of what Stocker says 47
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seems, mutatis mutandis, applicable to the ‘negative’ emotions. He speaks about the ideal of wholly positive emotions as a ‘fantasy-ideal’. A life where we could only experience those ‘might well not be a life at all’ and ‘most certainly […] not […] anything even approaching a good life’. Stocker’s point is that the non-‘positive’ emotions are in fact good because they are necessary ways of experiencing, dealing with, and resolving the conflicts and ambivalences of daily life as we know it, and that ‘not to have these problems is not to be a person like us’.126
Combined with the insights expressed in section 1.1 about what really enters into personhood and the well-being of human beings, Stocker’s suggestions pave the way for the line of argument that I shall follow in subsequent chapters. I do not intend to unfurl a banner emblazoned with the phrase ‘All the “negative” emotions are good’. However, I want to argue, along naturalist lines, that the emotions of pride and jealousy, when properly formed, experienced, and displayed, can be morally justified as having a highly important, immediate part to play in the construction of a good human life. Before these ideas can be endowed with form and outline, it is necessary to spend some time unravelling the notions of moral justifiability and the conditions of a good (well-rounded, virtuous) life. That will be the task of the next two chapters, and our first destination there will be a quick stopover in the land of general moral theory.
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The need for moral theory
2.1 Human nature as the foundation of moral theory An emotion is morally justified, as we saw in the preceding section, if it has been rationally arrived at and is morally fitting in the given circumstances.
But how do we judge what is morally fitting in any given circumstances? If we are to make further headway on our journey towards the moral justification of pride and jealousy, we cannot ignore Nussbaum’s warning from section 1.1 about the futility of discussing what role particular emotions play in morality without first defending an overall normative view.1 In other words, we are required to look for a moral theory that not only gives us satisfactory answers about what to do or not to do (in the ordinary sense) in our everyday dealings with other people, but also which emotions to feel (and in what proportion) or not to feel.
Textbooks in philosophy will tell us that there are three basic moral theories to choose from: deontology, utilitarianism, and virtue ethics, the last of which has (re)emerged as a serious candidate for allegiance during the past quarter of a century or so. Sometimes, the latter two are classified together as having a consequentialist or teleological orientation, defining ‘the right’ in terms of ‘the good’ while deontology insists on the priority of ‘the right’, but such labels are less helpful than a careful look at the details of each theory. I shall commence with deontology in the present section, and then turn to virtue ethics and utilitarianism in sections 2.2 and 2.3, respectively. While I cannot avoid abstract theoretical considerations altogether, nor a short detour in the present section out of the territory of ‘pure’ morality or psychology into the realm of politics, my emphasis will be on the way in which these three theories can or cannot satisfactorily make sense of our emotions and guide our emotional life. To anticipate a bit, I argue that the prevailing deontological theory of our times, namely liberalism, yields too thin a conception of the good life to guide us here, and that virtue ethics fails to give us determinate enough counsel in times of moral and emotional conflict. What I offer instead is Millian utilitarianism with a generous helping of Aristotelian naturalism. As a matter of fact, I think that a sophisticated 49
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form of utilitarianism may provide us with a convincing account of the emotions, and of our moral life in general.
According to deontological theories, we are bound morally by universal categorical principles laid down by God, natural laws, or reason. It has become fashionable of late to write the first potential source off as irrelevant in an age of secularisation. How can a divine universal law exist without a divine universal law-giver, and if ‘God is dead’, is not everything morally permissible? This objection also hits indirectly at the second source, natural laws, and thereby at common conceptions of human rights as anchored in such laws: for John Locke’s early justification of natural laws, echoed in the US Constitution and reflected in most modern human rights agendas, ultimately presupposes the existence of a supreme benevolent being who has placed us in a world where natural laws can be discovered.
Kant famously tried to eschew such an objection by formulating a deontological principle grounded in human reason alone, arguing that reason requires us to follow universalisable maxims. Although most people will find themselves in agreement with some of the maxims derivable from Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ – for instance, the injunction to respect all human beings – it has, however, become a truism of late that since any given behaviour can be described in various ways, applying Kant’s test of universalisability may yield contradictory results depending on how the maxim of action is defined. For example, the ‘same behaviour’ can be seen both as that of ‘returning a borrowed knife’ and ‘giving a potential murderer a weapon to chop off his wife’s head’, with only the first maxim being universalisable. Moreover, for those interested in the moral role of the emotions, Kantianism does not offer much help as it denies moral value to any action stemming from desire. Giving money to a beggar out of compassion thus does not, for Kantians, constitute a morally admirable course of action, while giving money in the absence of compassion (or preferably, in the face of a contrary emotional thrust), simply because reason dictates it, does, since only the latter requires effort and self-sacrifice.2 Maintaining such a view clearly does not hold out much prospect of reasonable emotional guidance.
In spite of its theoretical trials and tribulations, deontological thought continues to nourish the reigning political ideology in modern Western democracies: liberalism. The most widely discussed attempt in recent year to give liberalism a firm deontological footing is that of John Rawls’s theory of justice.3 Given the prodigious attention paid to this theory in philosophical and political circles, I assume that the reader has some familiarity with it. To rehearse briefly, Rawls defines a morally and politically well-ordered society as a scheme of co-operation for reciprocal advantage regulated by principles chosen by rational persons under ‘a veil of ignorance’ (that is, not knowing beforehand which position they will occupy in the society). Because of their lack of information in this initial position, rational choosers will, for 50
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instance, opt for a principle of distribution enjoining that primary goods be distributed equally unless any inequalities are to the advantage of the least favoured. More generally speaking, the supposed fairness of the initial position yields deontological moral principles in the sense that they will appeal to all rational persons irrespective of their (diverse) substantive conceptions of the good life; the right remains firmly prior to the good.
So-called ‘communitarians’ have loudly criticised Rawls’s conception of the self of rational choice, as disembodied (alienated from its material constitutive ends) and disembedded (not rooted in any real society, lacking in
‘social personhood’), and see his theory as little but the topmost froth of Kantian rationalism and the last dregs of value subjectivism gulped down together.4 Two other kinds of objections to Rawls’s theory and the liberal enterprise in general are, however, more pertinent to our present purposes, concerning firstly the thinness of its conception of primary goods, and secondly its proneness to a vertiginous slide into a much more severe form of relativism – both of which have serious implications for our understanding of the emotions.
To start with the first point, liberals do rely on a certain notion of goodness, but since this assumption must not, as Rawls stresses, ‘jeopardize the prior place of the concept of right’, the theory of primary goods is
‘restricted to the bare essentials’. Such a ‘thin’ theory only embraces those goods which rational individuals, whatever else they want, will desire as prerequisites for carrying our their chosen plans of life. They will prefer a wider to a narrower liberty, a greater rather than a smaller share of wealth and income, and having secure bases of self-respect.5 If this list is substantially added to, liberals fear that the all-important ideals of pluralism and multiculturalism will be undermined: individuals (perhaps coming from diverse cultural backgrounds) will no longer be free to follow their own conceptions of the good life, although each conception may be as warranted as any other. Since radically different ‘life plans’ can be equally valid, the state must remain neutral about the value placed upon different goods or ways of living, apart from the ‘bare essentials’ mentioned above. Not only must the state resist forcing people into allegedly ‘good’ activities; it must not even subsidise such activities or publicly advertise their merits.6 The chief liberal character ideal is that of autonomy; liberal moral and political philosophy is all about laying down ‘procedural rules’ and ‘prerequisites’ for the game to be played while the contents of the game itself are left open for the autonomous participants to decide. Any complaints about the thinness of this liberal conception are immediately written off as meddlesome, paternalistic, and authoritarian.
When confronted with educational issues, liberals tend to tiptoe around controversial issues. On the one hand, they will, at least in their more earthbound moments, accept that education, be it moral education or that of the traditional school disciplines, must aim at making students good citizens 51
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and help them to function both as natural and as social beings. On the other hand, they will deny that this requirement entails instilling in students any substantive conception of the good life: any conception of the proper way of acting or reacting. At times, liberals seem to be at a complete loss about what should be taught in schools, apart from the ‘three R’s’ and other bare basics; at any rate, whatever is taught must be conducive to the students’
ability to choose without telling them what to choose.7 It is no coincidence that many contemporary writers on moral education claim to have come up against a brick wall of ‘teacher neutrality’ on moral issues, sometimes verging on excess in the direction of ‘political correctness’. Teachers, bred in the liberal tradition, tell us that instead of transmitting specific values or moral beliefs, they take care to respect students’ diverse beliefs and emotions, and not to offend those of opposing convictions or characters.8
They will thus avoid discouraging any emotional traits except those clearly inimical to a liberal frame of mind. To be sure, teachers will not be violating any liberal principle by nourishing students’ compassion (as long as they are not too specific about what to feel compassionate about) or dispelling irrational fear, but much further emotional schooling will not appear proper. To questions such as those posed in the present book about the moral justifiability of pride and jealousy, a consistent liberal will have to answer: ‘Well, the justifiability of pride depends on whether you have opted for the life of an ascetic hermit or an ambitious entrepreneur, and the justifiability of jealousy on the theory you happen to endorse about moral deserts, and (in the case of sexual jealousy) about the value of commitment in loving relationships’.
Perhaps these are all the answers that we can ask for. Perhaps we need to separate substantive considerations about the value of particular emotions in particular settings from our ‘thin’ moral discourse. But, then again, perhaps we do not. Before exploring a ‘thick’ Aristotelian alternative to the
‘thin’ liberal perspective, I will raise some questions about the ability of liberalism to keep the thin thread of goodness unbroken, that is, to prevent it from dissolving into the ultimate thinness of a postmodern void.
Notice that however pluralist and multicultural the liberal conception of the good life is, it distinguishes itself clearly from a more radically relativised postmodern multiculturalism or ‘politics of difference’.9 The liberal freedom to choose different ways of life is in the end anchored in an acknowledgement of the primary goods (however thin), the acceptance of the primary humanistic moral principles of freedom and fairness, and the Enlightenment conception of reason, truth, and personhood. These are unquestioned presuppositions supplying the background and basis for all the subsequent procedural rules: we want to live in peace and pursue our own interests, and we are able to understand other people, however different their specific interests are from ours, and their respective concerns with peace and freedom.
But why, would a postmodernist ask, should a fundamentalist Muslim, for 52
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instance, accept these presuppositions? Given the communitarian critique of Rawls’s original choice position, what if anything remains of the ‘bare essentials’ which are taken for granted in liberal theories? Why not reject humanism and Enlightenment aspirations altogether?
Rawls has in subsequent works denied that his intention in A Theory of Justice was to formulate more than a conception of justice for ‘us’ in Western liberal democracies; refining principles which we already more or less share: ‘Whether justice as fairness can be extended to a general political conception for different kinds of societies existing under different historical and social conditions, or whether it can be extended to a general moral conception, or a significant part thereof, are altogether separate questions. I avoid prejudging these larger questions one way or another’,10 the ‘new’
Rawls remarks. I am not saying that Rawls has turned into, or that he always was, a postmodern pluralist; he still believes that the original position places universally formal demands on the process of political or moral justification, at least for those who concern themselves with fairness: an essentially anti-postmodernist claim. However, the development of Rawls’s thought helps to enlighten the way in which a thin liberal doctrine is likely to slip and slide into increasing thinness. We have already seen how threadbare the advice is that a traditional liberal can give us about the justifiability of particular emotions, and hence about emotional upbringing. The direction in which Rawls’s political thought has headed gives us clues about the inevitability of further slippage. One may wonder, given the liberal rejection of a common human nature, where a consistent liberal can reasonably halt the slippage and say: ‘No more, no more’.
The starting point for an alternative to liberalism is the question: ‘Why, if you accept any universal values at all, do you not go for a much thicker conception of the good life?’ Martha Nussbaum has in recent years, in a series of interconnected essays,11 suggested an Aristotelian alternative, arguing that Rawls’s pessimism about the possibility of a universal agreement on values, going beyond the humanist presuppositions and the thin conception of the primary goods, is ‘both unjustified and dangerous’.12
Forswearing the liberal solution for a kind of fundamentalist Aristotelianism does not lead her to embrace Aristotle’s well-known racial and sexual prejudices (about slaves’ natural lack of practical reason, women’s lack of authority in governing their own lives, etc.), nor to endorse his more parochial concerns (such as his emphasis on stringent physical education).
Indeed, Nussbaum and most others who have tried to reintroduce Aristotelianism into the moral and political arena take it for granted that it is possible to separate the wheat from the chaff in Aristotle’s moral teaching: that his ‘inessential’ empirical blunders of application can be eradicated while his ‘essential’ theory and principles remain intact.13
The basic idea behind Nussbaum’s version of Aristotelianism is that we can construct an objective, universal conception of human nature without 53
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invoking Aristotle’s (or for that matter any controversial) metaphysics. What we need is simply a conception derived from the ‘human experience of life and value’: the shared ideas enshrined in the self-understandings of the
‘many and the wise’.14 The notion of the arête (the proper function or excellence) of human beings must be derived from the way in which such beings think, act, and feel when they function well and successfully, just as the arête of man qua musician must be observed from the manner in which he plays well. For Aristotle, signs of the excellence of human beings are – to cite the words of our poet Stephansson – the ‘unerring thought’ of theoretical wisdom, the ‘artful hand’ of practical expertise, and the ‘true and proper’
heart of moral virtue. But how do we ascertain that these excellences are characteristically human? The answer is: by exploring the evaluative, narrative beliefs of people at different times and places about what it means to be human, as opposed to being a beast or a god. To find out what our nature is
‘seems to be one and the same thing as to find out what we deeply believe to be most important and indispensable’.15 Here, an understanding of the emotions occupies a central role, for:
in the myths and stories that are central to most cultures, the notion of the human being and the human life assumes a special salience, mapping the domains of fellow feeling as it maps specific emotions within that domain. […] depictions of interaction between local and distant people rarely portray the distant as simply monsters: they are shown to have needs and aims similar to one’s own, and it is this that makes them intelligible and candidates for story-telling, though in many ways their concrete beliefs and practices may differ. Stories of ogres and monsters, by contrast, and contrasting stories of needless divinities, map the boundary of the human from the other side, showing the salience of certain elements in a human life by showing how weird and unrecognisable a way of life looks without them.
[…] The child learns that humans have both cultural and individual differences in character and way of life, and that these differences are frequently correlated with emotional differences. But she learns as well the sameness expressed in and through the differences, as a sameness without which its own activities of identification and empathy would come to nothing.16
The conception of human beings and their good which emerges from Nussbaum’s analysis is one which she terms a ‘thick vague conception’:17
‘thick’ as opposed to the liberal ‘thin’ conception in that it includes a much wider measure of essentially human characteristics; ‘vague’ in that it admits of various manifestations, since there can be many different ways to lead a good human life. In spite of its openness, what stands out in Nussbaum’s account is her objectivism about human nature, resting on empirical trans-54
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cultural comparisons, similar to those performed a century ago by the poet Stephansson, or myself a few years ago in Taiwan (see preface).
Stephansson’s ‘hunch’ that every nation comprises persons ‘with a similar mind, a similar heart’ was strengthened no end in the international hotch-potch of nineteenth-century Canada. His conclusion was that we all share a common human core, although some nations may be ‘separated by such a distant mother tongue and fatherland that no ferry has ever been known to pass between them’. The simple observation that the same ‘yearnings’ and
‘thoughts’ characterise people in different societies at different times, people sharing ‘eyes of the same ilk’, is the mainstay of the evaluative naturalist objectivism under scrutiny here, as distinct from a metaphysical and/or non-evaluative biological objectivism.
For the pumpkin of casual observations and anecdotal evidence to turn into a coach, we need to scrutinise more deeply the essence of our common humanity. To return to Nussbaum, she differentiates between two different sorts of universal human capabilities: internal (‘I-capabilities’) and external (‘E-capabilities’).18 The internal ones are conditions of the person that make him qualified to choose the various valued functions. Parts of these conditions are inborn but most of them are trained through education: the mental preconditions of autonomous choice, the moral character-base which enables us to deliberate and act or feel correctly, the bodily capabilities which must be in place for us to be able to function properly in the world.
These I-capabilities, however, may be present and still lack circumstances for their activation. So E-capabilities encompass both the internal ones and also the external material and social conditions that make available to the individual the option of each valued function. From the commonness of human capabilities and conditions (our mortality, our bodily functions, our capacity for pleasure and pain, our cognitive abilities, our early infant development, our humour and play, etc.) Nussbaum then derives a list of basic human functions to be promoted through educational and political measures.19
The political implications of Nussbaum’s Aristotelianism are far-reaching.20 Instead of state neutrality on major issues, the job of the state’s governing bodies becomes ‘broad and deep’.21 For judgements about how a country is doing, and how well its government is performing, will depend to a great extent on how its citizens are (made) able to function in the central human ways.22 The chief aim of the state thus becomes that of the distribution to individuals of the conditions under which a good human life can be chosen and lived; to move each and every one of them across a threshold of capability into circumstances of informed, autonomous choice and the actualisation of that which has been chosen.23 To return to the poetic visions of Stephansson, which neatly fall into line with Nussbaum’s ideals, the fact that human nature, as a battleground of good and evil, remains essentially unchanged does not mean that social progress is impossible. Quite the opposite: we know that ‘shortage intensifies our evilness, / whereas prosperity 55
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cultivates our best traits’. Through improved economic conditions, health and education reforms, and the dissemination of knowledge, the ‘dawn reaches numbers increased’: the boundaries of the realisation of humanness are expanded. The poet envisions a ‘future more noble and pleasant’ where the ‘good’ has been made ‘into better’ by combined human effort. We do not need human eugenics, any more than we need breeding of the birch tree, for it to prosper better; we simply need to find more fertile soil for it to grow in.
These political implications – culminating in the ‘fascinating convergence’
that Nussbaum envisions between Aristotle’s ideals and the policies of modern Scandinavian social democracies24 – are largely outside the province of the present study. However, what is relevant here is her insistence that an Aristotelian thick theory of the good will require the state to take a firm stand on many educational and cultural issues eschewed by liberal authorities. It will, for instance, have to support educational programmes aimed at fostering the basic human capabilities, and it must make sure that the content of these programmes is conducive to human flourishing, including
‘the good functioning of the imagination and emotions’.25 Questions such as
‘is proper jealousy part of a potentially good human life?’ or ‘is pride likely to contribute more to human flourishing than humility?’ re-emerge as intelligible and salient, which they would hardly be for a consistent liberal. And if the answer to one or both of them is ‘yes’, then something had better be done about it in the home and the school.
However, in shunning one kind of vice, Nussbaum is careful not to run to the other extreme. Her Aristotelian conception of the human good is ‘vague’
as well as ‘thick’, that is, it allows for considerable latitude concerning the actualisation of the major human capabilities. The constitutive circumstances of human life, while broadly shared, can be realised in different ways in different societies and among different individuals, allowing for ‘contextual particularity’ and a variety of talents and tastes.26 The ‘thick vague conception’ is not paternalistic, for paternalism would be counter-productive; it is not absolutist, for there are usually many good ways to reach the same destination, and it is not holistic in that it accepts the specificity of individual needs and interests. In the end, the ways of life of the ascetic hermit and the ambitious entrepreneur can be equally sound, just as the liberal maintains: not simply, à la liberalism, because they have been chosen as ways of life, but rather because they happen to be equally fruitful realisations of the same basic capabilities.
One might be tempted to bring this section to an early conclusion by saying that, given that this is a book about emotions, and that Aristotelianism yields a morally much richer account of emotions than does Rawlsianism, we should simply opt for the former and carry on from there.
However, such a manoeuvre would beg too many important questions, and also obscure the way in which the choice at present is not really (or at least not only) that between Aristotle and Rawls, but rather between ‘Aristotle 56
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and Nietzsche’27 – or shall we say between a broadly Aristotelian naturalism and a radically relativistic postmodernism. I have already suggested that liberal pluralism may, given its own premises, be prone to slide into a more relativistic form. Many thinkers, especially in Continental Europe but also from the ranks of traditional Anglo-American philosophy, have taken the plunge into postmodernism, either directly or via the liberal route.28
Something needs to be said here about postmodernism as a ‘moral theory’, or if you like, ‘anti-theory’, especially in so far as it relates to human emotions.
A vast array of motley, and sometimes conflicting, ideas tends to be accumulated under the rubric of ‘postmodernism’. However, some basic (mainly epistemological) tenets tend to unite them. To give a brief list: thoughts and intentions are merely word-like and have no intrinsic connection to a sense or a referent. They are simply a flux of text without a fixed foundation. There is no privileged point, such as the speaker’s intention or contact with external reality, that confers significance on such a text.
Hence, no perspective in looking at the world is better than any other.
Instead of objectivity, which is a howler, comes (at best) solidarity within our own language group: our own culture or sub-culture. There exists no truth, only convention. ‘Justification’ is a sociological, not a logical, concept. Science is no better than any other system, for instance, those of magic or fantasy. Indeed, there is no common philosophy and science, only philosophies and sciences. Traditional science and philosophy, including logic, must jettison their grandiose claims and view themselves more modestly as just another set of narratives. There is no unitary privileged history either, only different histories. Basically, postmodernism signals the
‘end of history’, the end in the belief of overcoming and learning from the past and the present in pursuit of the new. All things considered, our lives and the whole universe are but pieces of fiction. There is no autonomous individual, no common human nature. All social relationships are fundamentally relationships of power with no freedom residing anywhere. The post-Enlightenment, humanist, and modernist ideals of knowledge, progress and inter-human understanding are but illusory ‘grand narratives’ which must be given up like all other grand narratives (including the Marxist and liberal ones) as at best futile, at worst recipes for barbaric excesses when people attempt to put their ideals into practice. Acknowledging all of this then leads to scepticism (Derrida), stoicism (Lyotard, Lacan, Foucault), hedonism (Barthes), or cynicism/nihilism (Rorty, Baudrillard).29
Few serious attempts have been made to systematise these scattered visions of gloom and doom into a doctrinal body or to bring out their relevance for the life, morality, and emotions of individuals. The most successful one is perhaps an early attempt by Fredric Jameson to highlight the difference between postmodernism and modernism via contrasting conceptual pairs, including:
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Modernism:
Postmodernism:
Depth
Depthlessness
Historicity
Lack of historicity
Expressive emotions
‘Intensities’
Dualism of inside and outside
Monism
Alienation
Fragmentation
Individuality
Loss of individuality30
Jameson fleshes out the nature of the first three of these dichotomies through a comparison of two paintings: Vincent Van Gogh’s representation of peasant shoes in A Pair of Boots, and Andy Warhol’s Diamond Dust Shoes. Although the first painting has been interpreted in various ways, the different readings share a common hermeneutical core: its objectal form is taken as a clue for some vaster reality which replaces it as its ultimate truth.
By contrast, in the case of Warhol’s painting, we simply have a random collection of objects hanging together on the canvas like turnips, objects which do not admit of any deeper interpretation than merely being there.
In other words, depth has been replaced by superficiality: by surface or multiple surfaces. This goes hand in hand with the second characteristic of postmodernism: loss of historicity or context, both as far as physical world itself is concerned, which has become a set of texts, and the coherence of each individual’s life (see the fifth dichotomy), as postmodernism abandons all sense of historical continuity and individual unity. With the reduction of experience to a series of unrelated presents, a third feature of postmodern culture emerges as the ‘waning of affect’: emotions such as anger, pride, jealousy, or fear, which presuppose some cognitive content and thus the underlying self-identity of the person, are replaced by ‘intensities’. These are free-floating and impersonal instances of euphoria, which seem to amount to some kind of orgasmic, hallucinogenic feels. ‘Jouissance’ is the French term for it, about which Barthes and other postmodernists have written at length, contrasting it with ‘pleasure’: the latter being reserved for the lower enjoyment of the rabble, while ‘jouissance’ signifies the special euphoric pleasure of texts – or of the realisation that everything is a text – for the enlightened.
This brings us to the fourth feature of postmodernism on which Jameson sheds light, a feature that appears to me to underscore the first three: the rejection of the whole traditional philosophical metaphysics of inside and outside. Thus, all the common dualisms of essence versus appearance, latent versus manifest, authenticity versus inauthenticity, and signifier versus a fixed signified object are done away with. Instead we are offered a monistic system (or anti-system) of life qua text, practice, or play. Fifth, the much-cherished modernist concept of alienation also goes down the drain, for alienation and its sister expressions of anxiety and isolation, as depicted for example in Edward Munch’s The Scream, presuppose a true self from which 58
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a person’s less authentic self can become alienated, and where ‘liberation’
refers to a reunification of the two. However, if no such true self exists – the Cartesian ‘I’, implying a self capable of intentional, transparent communication and unmediated action, being rejected – we are left with a fragmented self where schizophrenia displaces anxiety and where liberation is exposed as an illusion. The sixth dichotomy is little but an implication of the others:
‘the death of the subject’, the loss of individuality and authorship, is a natural consequence of psychological fragmentation.
Since Jameson wrote his piece, there has been a major shift in ‘mainstream’ postmodernism from an uncritical and playful stance to critical postmodernism, the latter commonly being referred to as ‘politics of difference’ or ‘critical regionalism’. While both uncritical and critical postmodernism contextualise and pluralise, rejecting the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, the critical version claims that to the extent that the world makes any sense at all, it is at the local level where the limited scale makes some kind of mutual understanding possible. Instead of revelling in eclecticism, one thus sees in critical postmodernism the opposite reaction: the abandonment of placelessness and fragmentation through the search for personal and collective identity: place-identity, group identity.31
C. West talks about a new kind of cultural worker in the making, associated with the new politics of difference which is supposed to empower oppressed groups and individuals.32 Localism (or parochialism), nationalism, and even religious fundamentalism are suddenly the postmodern words of the day.
Criticisms of postmodernism are legion. Many focus on its logical inconsistencies. The ‘boomerang-effect’ of radical moral or epistemological relativism has been discussed since the days of Socrates: if everything is relative, then the statement that everything is relative is also relative. This purportedly hits at postmodern relativists who seem to be saying that it is always morally wrong to say that something is always morally wrong.
However, modern-day relativists have devised various ways in which to formulate their views while avoiding such inconsistencies. Moreover, postmodernists are particularly immune to these criticisms since they revel in paradoxes and reject ‘(phallo)logocentrism’: the (male) Western obsession with logic. What might give them more cause for concern is the moral paradox between intention and outcome entailed by the postmodernist project.33 Postmodernists claim, no doubt honestly, that they want to uphold the interests of minority groups (women, ethnic and racial minorities, colonised peoples, etc.). However, their ‘theory’ in fact contributes to the increasing ghettoisation and disempowerment of these groups through its fetishisms of locality and social grouping. More precisely, while emphasising the authenticity of ‘different voices’, postmodernism paradoxically shuts them off from access to more universal sources of power by ghettoising them within the opaque specificities of their own language-games.
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continue to be marginalised. One could even go further and say that postmodernism not only sidelines such groups but can, in fact, lead to racism, as the first step to racism is always the emphasis on cultural difference and inaccessibility rather than kinship and mutual understanding.
A similar observation, and one highly relevant to our present concerns, is that postmodernists ‘cheat’, as Nussbaum puts it, when they commend their view to us on the grounds of compassion, saying that it will help the situation of the excluded and oppressed. For to experience compassion – that painful emotion felt towards the pain or suffering of other people – one must be able to identify with their pain; that is, one must be able to understand them as similar enough to us to count as potential fellow-sufferers. In other words, compassion requires that very belief in a common humanity which postmodernism abandons.34
I would go even further than Nussbaum by saying that the postmodernist view of emotions not only contradicts their moral teachings, but also that it renders the emotions themselves, our own as well as those of others, unintelligible. Recall that for postmodernists no true self exists; the Cartesian ‘ sum’
of ‘ cogito ergo sum’ is rejected and life is defined as a series of unrelated presents. But then it becomes a paradox how even the limited scale, local group-identity sought after in critical postmodernism can be achieved: if there is even no affinity between ‘me’ now and ‘me’ at the next moment, how can there be any affinity between me and those belonging to my closest group/culture? How can one howl with one’s own fellow wolves if there is nothing to refer to as ‘oneself ’? Moreover, if there is no ‘ sum’, there is presumably no ‘ cogito’ either (no consistent thought), for a precondition of such a thought seems to be that there exists an ‘I’ at least stable enough to work out the thought from its premises to its conclusion. We thus see that the postmodernist ‘waning of affect’, the replacement of ordinary emotions with ‘intensities’, is much more than a simple factual description of the
‘postmodern situation’; it is a logical consequence of the basic tenets of postmodernism itself. For these tenets do not allow for the existence of any permanent cognitions or concerns out of which emotions could be formed.
Tellingly, postmodernists tend to be obsessed with the body and its
‘languages’, witness hundreds of recent books and artistic exhibitions exploring that theme. After the person’s self and its emotions have been disposed of, the only irreducible in the postmodernist scheme of things becomes the body: as the ‘site’ at which all the diverse forms of power and oppression are ultimately registered. Since there is no significant conflict left between beliefs, drives or emotions, what remains is only the tension between (socially constructed) bodies and those social constraints which cut against them. What an anti-climax to the history of philosophical thought which has traditionally considered the stable mental ‘form’ of the person to confer identity and permanence on the essentially unstable ‘matter’ out of which the person is made!
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It is psychologically and historically, if less philosophically, interesting to speculate about the origin and the fascination of postmodernism. Ellen Dissanayake ascribes it to the hyper-literacy (involuted self-consciousness) and ‘scriptocentrism’ of a literate mentality which, being disembedded from nature and genuine human experiences, seeks refuge in ivory towers where texts rather than people matter.35 Other ad hoc explanations, such as the postmodernists’ radical disillusionment with Marxist and other utopian solutions to the world’s problems, may be even closer to the mark.
Nevertheless, to avoid the historical fallacy, one should try to argue philosophically with postmodernists: ask them, for instance, whether they have considered the variety of expressions in our language(s) with the terms
‘good’ and ‘bad’ where some locutions may easily admit of a relativistic understanding (‘Porridge tastes good’, ‘Jazz sounds bad’) while others do not (‘It is bad for children to be sexually molested’, ‘ Schadenfreude is a bad emotion’).36 Should such a conversation with the postmodernist break down, as it probably will, I must appeal to the reader by telling a simple story: When I first went to Britain to study, next to me in my hall of residence there lived a young man from an underdeveloped country. He had never been exposed to Western culture before, and many of his ideas and attitudes seemed to me to be outlandish and bizarre. It was all too easy to jump to the conclusion that inter-human understanding between us was impossible.
However, a couple of months later, when he fell in love with a girl in the same hall, he started to express the same beliefs and behave in exactly in the same way as I would have. The subtle advances, the fear of rejection, the jealousy upon seeing the girl shower ‘undue’ attention upon a third party; it was all there. The point of this story is simple: if one believes, as seems to be the most natural thing to do, that my neighbour was in love, that he experienced jealousy and (more generally) that I could understand what was going on in his mind, one cannot endorse postmodernism which renders such emotions unintelligible and such understanding impossible.37
To retrace our steps: liberalism does make sense of our emotions, but only to a limited extent since it fails to take seriously our commonality, reducing it to people’s barest common concern with external goods, liberty, and self-esteem. Hence, the advice it can give us about emotional justification is too threadbare to provide guidance regarding many of our most intimate and personal experiences, or to aid us much in the emotional upbringing of our children and pupils. Even more seriously, since the idea of essential humanness has been abandoned, the very foundations of liberal morality crack and tilt. In this the postmodernists do have a point: if we accept the thrust of the trenchant communitarian critique of Rawls’s original choosers as lacking in personhood, little if anything seems to be necessarily decided in a liberal universe. We will have to rely, instead, on a consensus among real persons regarding basic liberal values, but the problem is that no such value is basic enough to be immune from rejection by fundamentalists and fanatics.
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Consequently, liberalism seems doomed to collapse into a form of radical relativism: the postmodernist dream comes true. In this sense, postmodernism may best be understood as the lunatic fringe of liberalism itself.
However, postmodernism yields a disintegrated self, incapable of emotion.
As long as the postmodernist does not ‘cheat’, his life becomes one of, at best, detached amusement, at worst, suicidal despair. So while the liberal course merely presents us with an unreal, uprooted self and an impoverished account of emotion, postmodernism brings this course to its logical conclusion of emotional unintelligibility. If we believe that some sense can be made of our lives at all, or simply – to take the most specific of examples – that both I and my student neighbour mentioned above could have experienced the same kind of jealousy in similar situations, then nothing short of a rejection of postmodernism is called for. Moreover, by implication, liberalism which ultimately entails postmodernism must also be rejected.
As an antidote to the reigning deontological theory of the day and its
‘lunatic fringe’, I have presented Nussbaum’s Aristotelianism, rooted in Aristotle’s basic observation that ‘in our travels we can see how every human being is akin and beloved to a human being’.38 This affinity and affiliation reveal themselves in our ‘grounding experiences’, those spheres of experience which figure in more or less any human life and give sense to the inter-human virtues and emotions. For an Aristotelian, the famous Kohlbergian claim that every culture has ‘its own bag’ of virtues and emotions (see section 6.2)39 blatantly ignores the amount of attunement, recognition, and overlap that actually obtains across cultures.40 This is not the place to go deeper into the issue of moral objectivity. However, it is clear that if we aim to say something substantial and important about the justification of particular emotions, our springboard must be naturalist, in the broad Aristotelian sense, rather than liberal or postmodernist.
As a final note in this section, let me mention the common complaint that Nussbaum’s (or for that matter any kind of ) Aristotelian naturalism is conservative. Politically speaking, at least, this seems to be a most curious claim. Is social democratic theory more politically conservative than liberalism? It is of course true that Nussbaum takes her cue from ideas which are
‘out of the ark’, historically speaking, namely, 2,300 years old, but ‘old’ is surely not the same as ‘conservative’. If ‘conservative’ is taken to mean, in line with an ordinary way of speaking, ‘supportive of the status quo’,
‘aiming at the stability or reinforcement of existing categories’, then Nussbaum’s Aristotle is anything but conservative, while ‘critical postmodernism’ is the very acme of conservatism. Indeed, in the field of morality and emotions, Aristotelian naturalism suggests a radical departure from existing practices of traditional liberal education, by condoning a much deeper and richer programme of character formation than does liberalist, not to mention postmodernist, pluralism. If Nussbaum and the present book are on the right track, we should not shy away from questions about 62
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the justification of emotions such as pride and jealousy, nor from making practical use of the answers through emotional guidance and coaching.
2.2 The shortcomings of virtue ethics: moral and emotional conflict
Let us continue our search for a moral theory that can guide our emotional life and provide satisfying answers to questions about the justification of particular emotions. Having shown, in the preceding section, the poverty of liberalism in this respect, and the superiority of Aristotelian naturalism, the next logical step seems to be to examine the strengths and weaknesses of a theory that has emerged as a result of, or at least in conjunction with, the recent resurgence of Aristotelianism.
During the last quarter of a century, a remarkably high number of eminent philosophers have gathered around a theory of virtue ethics (hereafter, for brevity’s sake: VE ). It has also received a warm welcome outside the confines of academic moral philosophy, especially in other surrounding disciplines; so much so that many people seem to consider VE our new balm of Gilead, soothing and curing all the ailments of modern morality. Given the variety of claims made in the name of VE, it might perhaps be more profitable to talk about moral theories than a single theory;41 however, the different conceptions tend to revolve around a common core. According to this ‘core’, an action is morally right if and only if it is an exercise of a moral virtue, the virtues being considered those character traits a human being needs to achieve eudaimonia in the Aristotelian sense: to flourish or live well.
For our present purposes, it is relevant to note that there seems to obtain a strong connection between philosophers’ interest in questions of emotional significance and justification, on the one hand, and their adherence to VE on the other. Philosophers have either been led to embrace VE
because of its supposed superiority over other theories in accounting for the moral salience of emotions42 or, conversely, they have leaned towards VE
first and from that perspective concluded that only VE could make sense of such salience.43 This interdependence may seem no coincidence, for in taking up Aristotle’s conception of the potential virtuousness of emotions, VE not only tells us that the morally right thing to do is to act virtuously; it also enjoins us to react and feel virtuously, that is, to experience the morally right emotion in the right situation. Thus, VE upholds a direct link between moral rightness and the justification of emotions, which many people think is understated, if not totally missing, in competing deontological and utilitarian theories.
Traditionally, critics of VE – utilitarian ones in particular – consider its potential virtues overwhelmed by two daunting weaknesses. First, the so-called self-centredness objection alleges that VE makes the agents themselves 63
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the focus of self-concerning sanctimonious attention, hence obscuring and ignoring the essential other-concern of morality.44 To couch this objection in Bernard Williams’s well-known terms, followers of VE will be guilty of a certain kind of ‘moral self-indulgence’, constantly asking themselves what they can do to preserve their own virtuousness; caring not so much about others as about themselves caring about others.45 Second, one of the most important demands which tends to be made of a moral theory is that it is able to provide us with some kind of a decision procedure, instructing us in what to do. However, the complaint inherent in the standard action-guiding objection is that VE fails precisely in this respect to deliver the goods – that it has (in many cases at least) insufficient resources to specify how we should act.
I shall return briefly to the self-centredness objection later in this section, but my main focus will be on the action-guiding objection. Unfortunately, discussions of this objection have in general been conducted almost entirely in terms of VE’s ability or inability to guide us in our actions. I propose – in line with the purpose of this book – to redress this imbalance by concentrating on the emotional sphere where VE encounters, I maintain, even more severe trials. Recall that VE not only demands virtuous actions but also virtuous emotions. Thus, it is crucial that we reformulate the standard action-guiding objection46 as an emotion/action-guiding one, and ask: Can VE reliably guide our emotional life by telling us what to feel in particular situations?
Consider a case such as the following, fleshed out from one of the rhetorical questions with which the present book started: I fail to get promotion in my company because the high-ranking job for which I was vying goes to the boss’s nephew. He was, on all accounts, a much less-qualified candidate for the post than I, and the only plausible reason anyone can see for his being promoted over me is sheer nepotism. To complicate matters, the nephew happens to be a colleague and a good friend of mine. Moreover, he has recently had to cope with tragic family events and everyone agrees that he deserves a break. Now, the question arises: Should I be happy for the ‘break’
he got, or should I be jealous? The problem is that both these emotional responses seem to be potentially justifiable if we look at the situation from different angles. (I am getting a little ahead of my argument at this juncture by assuming that jealousy is ever morally justified, but I ask the reader to grant me that point here; if not, simply envisage some other everyday case of emotional conflict: between anger and gratitude, grief and joy, etc.) Yet, these responses incorporate conflicting evaluations and imply conflicting wishes: the former, a positive evaluation and the wish that the status quo be maintained; the latter, a negative evaluation and the wish that the post which the nephew got should, ideally, be taken away from him and given to me.47
If a moral theory cannot tell us which emotional response is the (more) appropriate one in a common everyday situation like that, or at least guide 64
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us towards the considerations which we need to accommodate when resolving such conflicts, then we may question its usefulness, and even whether it really is a moral theory. To restate our example in the context of VE: an emotion/action-guiding objection will allege that while VE would enjoin us to be jealous in situations which call for proper jealousy, and happy-for in situations which call for that emotion; its lack of an overarching ‘first principle’ means that it has no way of adjudicating between the conflicting demands of these two potentially virtuous emotional responses in the same situation. Notice that the complaint is not that VE does not, generally speaking, furnish us with various suggestions about what to do and feel via the diverse virtues it upholds; the alleged weakness is rather that it does not provide any principle to which we can appeal in cases of conflict between the demands of the particular virtues.
Before considering internal VE-responses to this objection, let me briefly sketch an alternative strategy commonly invoked by virtue ethicists. The strategy is to draw on some additional moral principle(s), external but complementary to VE, to obviate problems of adjudication. Exploring such manoeuvres tends to the development of my argument, for the strategy of supplementary principles – in particular, the examples it adduces and the terms in which it is couched – reveals some striking limitations of the considerations that typically inform discussions of the objection in question.
One conspicuous fact is how such discussions tend to be conducted through an investigation of a battery of far-fetched, but now all-too-familiar, scenarios with catchy titles: accident, transplant, hospital, trolley, hostage, beggar, and so forth. Let me quickly rehearse the development of Philippa Foot’s ruminations on these scenarios. She is one of the most prominent virtue ethicists, many of the stock examples derive from her writings, and her train of thought is, I think, emblematic of a whole discursive tradition within and about VE.
Why is it wrong for a doctor to kill one (innocent, recovering) patient and use his organs as spare parts to graft on to five other needy patients ( transplant), while it is right for the same doctor to save five patients and allow one to die when an ambulance brings in the victims of an accident, where it so happens that rescuing the one would take as much time as saving the other five altogether, and the doctor must choose between these two courses of action? An initial response, and indeed one to which some virtue ethicists would be sympathetic, is that the killing in the first case constitutes a direct act while allowing the injured person to die in the second is merely an omission; and that acts are (for some reasons external to VE ) more morally significant than omissions. However, the act–omission distinction is beset by proverbial difficulties which render its moral significance dubious to say the least. Indeed, Foot herself only mentions this distinction in order to ‘set it aside’.48 In its place, she suggests another supplementary principle, embodied in the ‘doctrine of double effect’: that it 65
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can be morally permissible to bring about morally negative outcomes as long as they are merely foreseeable consequences of some praiseworthy actions, but not directly intended as ends or as means to ends. In this sense, the death of the person in transplant would be intended, and hence morally wrong, but in accident only foreseeable and hence, given the details of that situation, permissible. Now this is a principle to which many famous virtue ethicists, including Elizabeth Anscombe, strongly adhere.49 Other moral philosophers, especially those of utilitarian orientation, notably give it a wide berth as reifying a dangling and morally insignificant distinction.50
That disagreement is not really the issue here, for Foot herself, in her much-quoted essay, ‘The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect’, suggests a counter-example to this principle which relegates it to a
‘subsidiary role’: the example ( hospital ) of saving the lives of five patients in a hospital by the manufacture of a certain gas, but ‘this inevitably releases lethal fumes into the room of another patient whom for some reason we are unable to move’. Although his death is merely foreseeable but not intended, according to the principle of double effect, the way it is brought about cannot count as morally acceptable.51 These considerations led Foot to formulate a new morally crucial distinction: that between negative duties (duties of non-interference, of not causing injury) and positive duties (duties of bringing aid to others).52 Where a negative and a positive duty come into conflict, such as in hospital, the latter duty must give way; however, in cases of conflict between duties of the same kind, we are allowed to give weight to quantitative differences: for instance, in Foot’s trolley-case where she deems it permissible for the driver of a runaway tram to steer it onto a track where one man is working rather than another track where it would kill five railway workers.53
Foot considers this last case to exhibit a conflict between two negative duties.54 But what if the tram was, by chance, heading in the direction of the five: would steering it onto the other track then also have counted as an exercise of a negative duty towards the five, or perhaps of a positive duty (since chance had doomed them already), accompanied by the violation of a negative duty towards the one, in which case the interference would have been impermissible? That Foot would incline towards the second option is evidenced by her analysis of the hostage-case, where a terrorist holding me and other innocent hostages will kill all of us unless I kill one of them first, in which case he will set me and the rest free. There, Foot condemns the killing of the one as totally unacceptable: as a violation of a negative duty which no positive duties can override irrespective of the number of people involved.55 So freak happenings, originally beyond the control of the agent or even of anyone (as in trolley), seem to be able to make a moral difference.
That is not the most troubling aspect here, though; what is more worrying is that it seems often to be totally relative to description what we choose to define as a positive and what as a negative duty. Is the agent in hostage faced 66
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by the conflict of a negative and a positive duty, or two negative ones (not to bring about the death of one person versus not to bring about the death of more persons)? Similarly, was Sophie in Styron’s Sophie’s Choice faced by the positive duty of helping one of her children survive by handing the other child over to the Nazi officer and a negative one towards the one so sacrificed (in which case her decision was wrong), or two negative duties: not to have one child killed and not to have both children killed (in which case her decision was right)? The most plausible reason for saying that both hostage and Sophie’s choice should definitely be analysed as cases of a conflict between a negative and a positive duty seems to be that a negative duty always involves omission while a positive one involves commission, but that reason lands us right back in the territory of the rejected act–omission distinction which Foot’s new dichotomy was precisely meant to transcend.
To complicate matters even further, Foot later reinstated the principle of double effect as complementary to the positive–negative duty distinction, in order to make sense of a case where we allow a beggar to die by not giving him aid, so that his body will be available for medical research. Earlier, Foot explained the wrongness of beggar as a violation of a negative duty,56 but realising that this put too much strain on the concept of a negative duty, she came to see our lack of charity there as a violation of a positive duty; not wrong primarily for that reason but rather because the beggar’s death is directly intended as a means to an end.57 Foot, however, neither explains how her earlier misgivings about the principle of double effect (recall hospital) have been cleared up, nor what is now supposed to be the precise relationship between her two complementary principles.58 Elsewhere, in hostage, Foot invokes neither of these two principles to explain the moral impermissibility of killing. There, it is deemed impermissible because it is unjust, ‘and if it is unjust the moral man says to himself that he cannot do it’,59 which seems to be an echo of Anscombe’s earlier assertion about ‘the superiority of the term “unjust” over the terms “morally right” and
“morally wrong” ’.60 But, from the point of view of VE, a recourse to justice as the final arbiter seems to be little more than a fallback position; there is nothing in VE which says that justice is automatically an overriding virtue.61
I think that a number of salutary lessons can be learnt from the trajectory of Foot’s thought here. First, the invocation of supplementary principles is obviously external to VE, and perhaps to be seen as involving an implicit acknowledgement of the emotion/action-guiding objection. To be sure, a virtue ethicist could say that it is a virtue to be guided by such principles.
Somebody who never violates a negative duty for a positive one might then be said to possess the virtue ‘negative over positive’: to be ‘negoposi’; however, contemporary virtue ethicists (Foot included) do not typically invoke such ‘new’ virtues, but rather seek to re-establish the traditional virtues as the basis of morality. Second, the principles Foot invokes, whether to dismiss or to uphold, all seem to be more or less ‘dangling’: of dubious 67
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moral relevance, relative to descriptions, or mere articulations of faith (witness the final recourse to justice). Third, and most importantly, even if the principle of double effect and the negative–positive duty dichotomy were thought to have potential moral value, that value must lie in adjudicating between courses of action (in the ordinary sense), not between emotions. It simply has no meaning to say, in cases such as the one of my colleague’s undeserved promotion, that being jealous is wrong and being happy-for right, or vice versa, because one emotion is ‘intended’ and the other ‘merely foreseen’, or because one is a violation of a negative duty (‘non-interference’) and the other merely of a positive one (‘bringing aid’) in Foot’s sense.
These labels may become applicable when we start to think of the expression of emotions, how we decide to act or refrain from acting upon them, but they are totally out of place when we ask the basic question concerning which emotion is the morally appropriate one to feel (a question about which VE, of all moral theories, should be able to provide guidance). For episodic emotions are obviously not chosen or ‘intended’ in the same way as actions,62 and we are interested in the moral justification of an emotion such as my jealousy in the promotion case, although it may never be expressed and acted upon and hence never result in any ‘interference’. Foot’s two complementary principles are derived from the realm of actions and outcomes of actions, not from that of inner experiences. Given the way in which her constructions have dominated the relevant ‘discursive field’, we now realise why the typical VE-response here tends to be a response merely to an action-guiding objection, not an emotion/action-guiding one. Fourth, the very choice of examples biases the discussion towards the realm of actions, and pretty spectacular ones at that. By concentrating on scenarios in which no ordinary people will ever find themselves, and at the same time ignoring cases of emotional conflict (or, for that matter, the conflict of more everyday-like courses of action), VE ’s problems of adjudication are systematically trivialised.
Let us now consider answers to the emotion/action-guiding objection that do not rest on supplementary principles but are rather internal to VE: which make use of the resources of that moral theory itself. Here we are much aided by Rosalind Hursthouse’s recent attempts, in a series of inter-related essays, to come to VE ’s rescue.63 I shall be eliciting from her writings, and those of some of her fellow virtue ethicists, a number of manoeuvres that need to be scrutinised. Let me call them manoeuvres (a)–(e): (a) VE does guide emotion/action.
The idea here is that every virtue gener-
ates
an
instruction/prescription
(be
compassionate,
happy-for;
act
courageously, justly, etc.), and every vice a prohibition (do not be spiteful; do not act cruelly).64 The importance of this truth about the capacity of the virtues to guide emotion/action notwithstanding, to invoke it here seems merely question begging. The manoeuvre overstates the idea behind the 68
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emotion/action-guiding objection: its point is not, as already noted, that the virtues are individually unable to guide action, but rather that they do not tell us by which virtue to abide in cases of conflict.
(b) Other moral theories do not fare better than VE here, or fare even worse.
This partner-in-crime manoeuvre is typically invoked via some sub-claims of which I shall mention three:
(b1) At least VE does not try to make the difficult look easy, as for instance does utilitarianism.
This manoeuvre rests on the assumption that knowing what to feel and do in a morally appropriate way is a ‘difficult business’, and that utilitarianism (and even deontological theories) tend to treat these difficulties with levity.65 Hursthouse complains specifically about the lack of a
‘moral remainder or residue’ in utilitarianism: that lingering sense of regret or remorse a virtuous person continues to feel even after choosing the lesser of two evils.66 Utilitarians, by contrast, allegedly act in their moral lives as if they do not care a whit about the ‘eggs’ that need to be broken to make the
‘omelettes’. I am, however, at a loss to understand why utilitarians’ reliance on a strict decision procedure implies that they cannot agonise afterwards about the choices they had to make. There is nothing in utilitarianism that could possibly refute Aristotle’s truism that it ‘is sometimes hard […] to judge what [goods] should be chosen at the price of what [evils], and what
[evils] should be endured at the price of what [goods]. And it is even harder to abide by our judgment, since the results we expect [when we endure] are usually painful’.67 That utilitarians take their reflective emotions or actions
– inspired by the principle of utility – to be morally right, and hence admirable, given the situations in which they find themselves, does not mean that they cannot regret that the situation did not present a better choice, or that it was not possible to bring about an even better outcome. Agony after a painful decision is not a special privilege of virtue ethicists.
(b2) Utilitarians will also encounter cases where there is nothing to choose morally between the competing options.
It is quite true that for every moral
theory there will be cases where both/all options are equally good/bad, so that it does not really make a moral difference which one we choose (for instance, which of two identical twins to pick when a doctor can save one of them but not both). However, as Daniel Statman notes, cases of this sort
‘are so rare that they seem irrelevant’.68 Indeed, this is acknowledged by Hursthouse, who refrains from invoking (b2) since ‘the hard cases that figure in the debates are not, by and large, of these sorts’.69
(b3) The stories used to demonstrate VE’s lack of emotion/action-guidance are too fantastical to be of any practical import.
There may be valid
doubts about the usefulness and the edificatory force of the current fad for 69
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far-fetched moral examples. It may even be true that this fad has exerted a debilitating influence on much recent empirical work in moral psychology and moral education (see s. 6.2). However, when coming from virtue ethicists, this response seems like the throwing of a stone from a glass house, since most of the ‘fantastical’ stories have been devised by the virtue ethicists themselves in order to highlight the repugnancy of utilitarianism.
Utilitarians would be the first to welcome a change of compass to more everyday-like situations.70 Anyway, the example that I used earlier to introduce VE ’s problem of emotion-guidance derives from common, rather than extraordinary, circumstances in the workplace.
(c) Many of the putative conflicts under discussion are merely apparent, resulting from a misapplication of virtue or vice terms.
So, for example, what
at first sight seems like a conflict between kindness and honesty, when considering whether to reveal a hurtful truth to a person, may resolve itself once we realise that one does the person no kindness by concealing this sort of truth from him.71 Strict adherence to a doctrine of the intrinsic unity of the virtues would make this manoeuvre a compelling one. However, most contemporary virtue ethicists do not embrace that doctrine; Hursthouse for one does not, implicitly acceding that this manoeuvre is only of minor importance.72 Hence, the appropriate response to (c) will be more or less the same as to (b2): true but rare.
(d) So much the better!
This is a bullet-biting manoeuvre par excellence.
The fact that VE allows for comprehensible disagreement on many important issues of emotion and action is to be seen as a virtue, rather than as a vice, of the theory – that is, ‘entirely to its credit’. Generally, to quote Hursthouse, ‘we should make it a condition of adequacy on a theory that it can leave some cases un resolved’.73 The reason why philosophers find this uncomfortable is, according to Hursthouse, simply that they are loath to admit that they are qua philosophers not ‘fitted to say anything true or even enlightening on real moral issues’.74 Here is a convenient excuse for scepticism and amoralism, a release from and transcendence of the human condition: there is nothing to say, from a philosophical perspective, about the moral conflicts confronting us! This manoeuvre has already been seized on with relish, for instance, in a recent paper arguing that there is ‘no one single answer to the question, “Would a virtuous person refrain from committing adultery?” ’ The author, Raja Halwani, claims, à la Hursthouse, that VE ‘does not give us one formula for treating the issue’, and this is seen as a ‘positive aspect’ of the theory.75 Now, it is one thing to underline the essential difficulties in determining, from a moral point of view, what to feel and how to act; it is quite another to make a positive virtue of falling between two stools. Fortunately, Hursthouse has subsequently come to realise that her original claim was much too strong, and that ‘an adequate 70
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ethics should be sufficiently flexible to allow for a comprehensible disagreement on the question whether there are unresolvable dilemmas’.76 Whether or not these are, in principle, unresolvable may not be the major issue, but rather that there are some dilemmas ‘from which even a virtuous agent cannot emerge with her life unmarred’.77 However, this is also easily accounted for by utilitarianism (see my response to (b1) above); and if the point is that our choice may at times be confined to equally bad or equally good options, then (d) will have collapsed into the rather insignificant (b2).
(e) VE instructs us to ask what a virtuous agent would feel /zdo in the circumstances and take our cue from that.
Hursthouse emphasises that this is
more than a ‘trivial point’, since ‘it gives a straightforward explanation of an aspect of our moral life which should not be ignored, namely the fact that we do seek moral guidance from people who we think are morally better than ourselves’.78 This suggestion, commonly invoked by virtue ethicists, evidently goes back to Aristotle’s specification of a virtue as a state determined by reasons, by reference to which the idealised figure of the phronimos (the ‘intelligent’ person; the person of practical wisdom) would define it.79
Now, simply pointing to Aristotle is of course a mere argumentum ad verecundiam. What does he mean and what are the credentials of what he is saying? Aristotle’s phronesis entails the capacity to see what is conducive to the human good in particular situations and this, in turn, entails the capacity to know both what to feel and what to do. But the perennial question here is the Euthypro-type one:80 are these standards for action and emotion morally appropriate only because the phronimos follows and enjoins them, or are they followed and enjoined by him because they are morally appropriate? Michael Slote, among others, has given a variety of reasons for ascribing the latter view to Aristotle.81 The chief reason why I concur with Slote is that Aristotle clearly does not shrink from detailed discussions of moral conflicts and how they should be solved. Although ‘it is not easy to define [such] matters exactly’, ‘we must try to offer help’.82 And the ‘help’
does not consist merely in asking the phronimos what he would do and follow suit. Moreover, whatever Aristotle may or may not have thought, the former view invites well-known problems of intuitionism. There seems to be more to moral understanding, even if one happens to be a phronimos, than simply recognising what to feel and do through some symptoms provoked in one by the confronting situation – as in a terrier smelling a rat. Further, supposed cases of intuition guiding people along the right path in this or that field of life usually turn out, on closer inspection, to involve the systematic application of knowledge and experience. For example, popular folk theories in Iceland, about a small number of skippers blessed with the ability to locate and catch fish on the grounds of a mysterious ‘hunch’, have been decisively refuted. The ‘skipper effect’ turned out to depend upon other, more earthbound, factors.83 My bet is that the ‘ phronimos effect’ does too.
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There is a much more productive sense, however, of the invocation of the phronimos to be teased out of Aristotle and, indeed, of manoeuvre (e): that is, the reference to the person of practical wisdom as an educational exemplar rather than as a moral arbiter. We must always bear in mind that Aristotle’s target audience comprises people already ‘brought up in fine habits’,84 people for whom the question ‘Why be moral?’ does not present a live option, and who are (or at least should be) eager to learn how to feel and what to do in order to lead a fulfilling life. In such a study plan, the first lessons naturally consist in watching people who are more competent than the student and modelling oneself on them.85 The exemplar serves the educational function of awakening one to the truth; the ultimate aim is not to mimic him, or to do things just because he does them, but to learn to think like him: as soundly, as morally (see s. 6.3). Thus, the exemplar’s superiority is not inherent and persistent, not a function of a special intuitive ability from which his emotions and actions flow, but rather contingent and provisional. We learn from him and follow him until we have caught up with him on the path of moral understanding: a path which is, in principle, open to each of us. These educational lessons are salient and cogent, but as part of a manoeuvre to rebut the emotion/action-guiding objection, they are question-begging, for mature persons may always have good reasons for second-guessing their teachers.
To retrace our steps, virtue ethicists typically respond to the emotion/action-guiding objection through manoeuvres either external or internal to VE. I sketched the supplementary principles discussed by Foot and found them to be of dubious moral value in adjudicating between actions. Others may deem them weightier there. That makes little difference, for the main point was that these principles, derived as they are from the sphere of actions and outcomes, essentially fail to guide our emotions. Only by steering clear of examples of emotional conflict are we able to present such principles as rescuing VE. The internal responses, while mostly question-begging or morally irrelevant, did inure VE to the objection under discussion in some cases. Various other cases, however, seemed to be left open.
But should its supposed failure to meet the emotion/action-guiding objection necessarily count as a sign of VE ’s inadequacy as a moral theory? As has been richly documented in recent discussions of the self-centredness objection, one of VE’s chief assumptions concerns the primacy of character over particular acts and emotions. Why should a moral theory be found wanting and dismissed for failing to deliver goods that it never aspired to deliver, while its main advantage over other theories, that of accounting for the notion of a good moral character, is overlooked?
In response to this question the following answer is in order. If VE aims to confine its attention to virtues of character at the expense of particular acts and emotions, then it ignores the fact that the value of a virtue, qua disposition to act or feel, must be logically parasitic on the worthiness of the 72
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acts and emotions to which the virtue tends to give rise. For in default of these acts and emotions, as Hugh Upton has convincingly argued, we would have no grounds for regarding the relevant virtue as a disposition at all; nor, therefore, as a good one.86 Interestingly enough, there is never any question in the works of Aristotle – the grandfather, if not the father of VE – that being virtuous means doing something with it rather than sitting pretty on it. Well-being is an ‘activity’ rather than a ‘state’: for if it were not, someone might enjoy it and yet ‘be asleep for his whole life, living the life of a plant’.87 ‘Olympic prizes are not for the finest and strongest, but for contes-tants, since it is only these who win; so also in life [only] the fine and good people who act correctly win the prize.’88 There is no ‘primacy of character’
here; rather, the tree is known by its fruit. Being endowed with a good character is, for Aristotle, clearly not praiseworthy as such; what matters is how it is manifested through particular actions and emotions. One might even read him as saying that attributing ‘good character’ to a person who fails to exemplify it in his deeds is a logical mistake.89
We may conclude from this that an attempt to evaluate virtuous character independently of its manifestations is as futile – to take an example from politics – as to give an account of the nature and value of social freedom independently of the actions that agents are (actually or prospectively) free or not free to perform.90 To continue with this comparison, there do exist various purely conceptual accounts of freedom, which are interesting both in themselves and as necessary preludes to substantive theories;91 however, a full-blown normative theory of freedom will have to make room for quantitative as well as qualitative measurements of freedom and to weigh the substantive importance of different freedoms in different contexts.92 Virtue ethicists do not typically present their theory as a mere conceptual account of what a virtue is; they present it as a substantive rival to deontological and utilitarian theories. But then they must be required to satisfy the same demands as these competing moral theories, and also (by comparison) as substantive theories of freedom: namely, they must have something important to say about particular cases.
It might still be urged that this answer does not go to the heart of the original question about the thrust of the emotion/action-guiding objection.
Does this objection not from the very beginning load the dice against VE in general and Hursthouse’s account in particular by assuming that the demand which tends to be made of moral theories, that they supply a comprehensive emotion/action guide, is a valid one? Is not the real point at issue between me and Hursthouse, a supposed interlocutor might ask, that I deem a moral theory inadequate unless it can fully specify how we should act or feel whereas she does not consider VE ’s inability to provide such direction as a failure at all – that it is not a necessary condition for any presumptively adequate theory that it provides as much – in which case my complaints have simply begged the all-important question?
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There are various reasons why I think that the interlocutor’s question oversimplifies and misconstrues the point of disagreement. First, the claim that a moral theory need not guide action has never been insisted upon in practice by leading virtue ethicists. Recall that the point of Foot’s additional moral principles was that with the help of such principles VE could and should guide action, even in as far-fetched cases as those sketched earlier.
Recall also that Aristotle certainly thought it worthwhile to ‘try to offer help’, that is, moral guidance, in dilemma-situations (although I do not, any more than Hursthouse, propose an argumentum ad verecundiam with respect to Aristotle here). Second, as far as Hursthouse herself is concerned, she was reportedly drawn towards VE in the first place because of its ability to account for the moral salience of the emotions, and it is obvious from the thrust of her writing that ‘moral salience’ here means the ability to guide our emotions in practice, not only to account in theory for their moral significance. Third, it is not really true either that, while acknowledging the role of emotion-guidance, she still thinks that such guidance need not be ‘comprehensive’, for the very point of most of her manoeuvres was precisely that VE
does guide action/emotion more clearly and comprehensively than the opponents of the theory tend to think. With the exception of the bullet-biting manoeuvre, which Hursthouse has already relinquished, her manoeuvres are all about how VE does not fare worse than competing theories with respect to the very demand of emotion/action guidance: that many of the putative conflicts are merely apparent, that we can and should listen to the advice of moral experts, etc.
In sum, Hursthouse’s basic point is not that an adequate moral theory may with impunity fail to specify how we should act; nor does she think that there is anything special about emotions which makes their guidance, in principle, more difficult than that of actions. Quite the contrary, she takes it to be a chief virtue of VE that it can account for emotions no less than actions. My argument above was thus not question-begging with respect to the demand of comprehensive emotion/action guidance; rather, I argued that a demand which Hursthouse herself accepts is not really met by VE: that the combined efforts of all the internal manoeuvres do not suffice to meet it. Incidentally, Hursthouse and other virtue ethicists will no doubt reject the claim that a moral theory need fully specify how we should act/feel in every conceivable situation, but then, not even the strictest utilitarian will understand the demand for ‘comprehensive guidance’ from a moral theory to mean that it must yield a single determinate answer to every moral quandary, however far-fetched (see (b2) above).
To resume the earlier thread of argument, perhaps we should sympatheti-cally conclude from the combined efforts of VE ’s internal responses that the cases in which VE fails to guide our actions are, at least, less frequent than the action-guiding objectors think. Is it necessarily unreasonable to relegate the remaining ‘hard cases’ to the level of secondary moral importance: as 74
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‘tragic dilemmas’ that should appear equally tragic, intractable, and agonising to followers of other moral theories, too,93 and/or as dilemmas with which most ordinary people fortunately do not have to cope (witness the battery of fantastical examples)? If we are only thinking about actions, this may not seem so unreasonable. Fortunately, in the vast majority of cases, followers of different moral theories will – or so it could be argued –
differ little, if at all, about what is the correct thing to do. For example, if my promoted colleague and friend in the earlier example is feeling really low for some personal reason, all mainstream moral theories will probably concur in advising me to comfort him. However, what should I feel about him deep down while doing so?
While reflective decisions about actions may tend to follow well-trodden paths, and only leave room for a limited number of tragic dilemmas, the same surely does not apply to conflicting emotions. In the former sort of cases, we are guided by all kinds of signposts and ‘traffic lights’ – social norms, contextual conventions, and practical considerations – and we often have some time at our disposal to consider what would be the correct way to act. In the latter sort of cases, social and contextual conventions offer much less help, while various disharmonious, intense, and unstable beliefs and concerns tend to pop and clatter like fireworks in our minds, demanding our immediate attention. Central to VE ’s internal responses may, I suggest, be a failure to appreciate the ubiquity of the tragic in human life as embodied in the numerous hard emotion-cases which we encounter almost at every turn: questions of what is the morally appropriate way to feel in everyday situations – irrespective of what we, in the end, decide to do or refrain from doing. By avoiding common examples of mundane but tragic emotional conflict, and concentrating on far-fetched examples of morally competing actions, virtue ethicists are able to lessen the thrust of the standard action-guiding objection. But the force of an emotion/action-guiding objection lies exactly in such common examples. While Foot’s supplementary principles seem to ignore the very existence of emotional conflicts, the internal responses implicitly underestimate the frequency and pervasiveness of such conflicts. However, if the emotion-part of the emotion/action-guiding objection cannot be rebutted, the value of VE seems to be more or less reduced to that of a spectator sport.
Now, it is quite true that even a strict decision procedure, such as the utilitarian one, would not be able to determine whether I should properly feel jealous of or happy for my colleague in the example as I sketched it above.
Utilitarianism would require a much richer description of the facts of the situation in order to tell us how to solve that conflict, or even in order to guide us productively towards its solution. However, such context-dependent empirical facts are what utilitarianism thrives on, what the utilitarian decision procedure is all about. The problem is that, by contrast, even if such a rich description were forthcoming, there does not seem to be much that VE
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could do with it. ‘What should I feel?’ is simply not a question that VE is fit to answer in cases of all the small conflicts and minor tragedies of everyday life, that is, when there is more than one potentially virtuous emotion on the moral menu.
What are we to make of all of this, then? If VE cannot satisfactorily guide our emotional life, perhaps it is not the moral theory for which we have been looking. Perhaps its appeal has been specious, or perhaps at least
– as Hursthouse herself now frankly admits – the supposed link between a belief in the moral significance of the emotions and an adherence to VE was never more than an ‘historical accident’.94
Is there a better theory at hand? The reader may be excused for thinking, given the above line of reasoning, that my answer will be utilitarianism.
Indeed, I think that classical utilitarianism is an untapped source in our search for the moral justification of particular emotions (see the following section). For those less sympathetic to utilitarianism, however, let me suggest an alternative route for VE: namely, to stray less than it typically does from the teachings of Aristotle himself. Virtue ethicists commonly speak as if there is nothing special about other-concerning acts and emotions; the fact that some virtues directly benefit others seems to be viewed as a kind of happy but accidental feature of character traits which primarily enter into the well-being of the agent himself. After all, benevolence is ‘only one of the virtues’, as Foot states;95 similarly, compassion is presumably only one of a set of virtuous emotions relevant to a given situation. In Aristotle, however, there is no hint of the thesis that each virtue is simply one among others of equal or incommensurable standing. By contrast, ‘the greatest virtues are necessarily those most useful to others’, for instance justice and courage, and even Aristotle’s supreme virtue of megalopsychia (see s. 3.2) is so highly ranked because of its capacity to produce ‘great benefits’.96 Virtue ethicists would be well advised to concede the moral precedence of other-concerning elements in the virtues; that would also help to dispel some of the odour of sanctity surrounding their theory, which has, among other things, given rise to the objection of self-centredness. Such a concession would not require them to relinquish their deep-seated antipathy to maximisation,97 nor commit them in advance to any particular view about how to adjudicate between competing other-directed concerns, but it would at least help them make a start towards their professed goal of doing justice to the moral salience of the emotions.
2.3 Utilitarian naturalism and the emotions: an untapped source
We have seen that virtue ethics is superior to liberalism and postmodernism in so far as it makes sense of our emotions and gives them pride of place in a well-rounded, moral life. At the same time, however, the basic weakness of 76
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virtue ethics as a moral theory – its failure to arbitrate between potentially virtuous but conflicting actions and reactions – is nowhere more apparent than in the case of the emotions, both because of the pervasiveness of emotional conflict and the imperviousness of the emotions to the supplementary principles commonly invoked by virtue ethicists.
Is it possible that a sophisticated form of utilitarianism can retain the advantages of virtue ethics while circumventing its problems? Utilitarianism happens to be both a widely discussed and a widely misunderstood moral theory. This is not the place to correct all the misunderstandings that flourish in academic circles, and are perpetuated in journals and textbooks, about the nature of utilitarian reasoning. Let me simply rehearse some basic truths from John Stuart Mill’s locus classicus, both to set the stage for the subsequent discussion, and to emphasise that the ‘sophisticated form of utilitarianism’ mentioned above refers to Mill’s classical version of it. What interests me here, in a book about emotional justification and in the context of finding a corrective to virtue ethics, is the Millian type of value objectivism rather than those more recent forms of value subjectivism with which utilitarianism has unfortunately come to be connected and even equated.
Thus, I have no truck with ‘preference utilitarianism’ which defines happiness as the satisfaction of actual subjective desires: a theory to which I shall momentarily return below.
Millian utilitarianism holds that ‘actions are right in proportion as they tend to promote happiness, wrong as they tend to produce the reverse of happiness’, and by ‘happiness’ is simply meant ‘pleasure, and the absence of pain; by unhappiness, pain, and the deprivation of pleasure’. In other words, what powers the utilitarian engine and motivates one to act as a utilitarian is hedonism. However, it is a subtle form of hedonism which not only instructs us to take the long view, that is, to forgo short-term for long-term gain in pleasure, but also refuses to equate the correct hedonistic choice with what any given agent may think here and now will satisfy his desires: a doctrine which would truly be ‘worthy only of swine’. For some kinds of pleasure happen to be objectively more desirable and valuable than others: ‘Human beings have faculties more elevated than the animal appetites, and when once made conscious of them, do not regard anything as happiness which does not include their gratification.’ Those competently acquainted with the cultivation of a higher quality (say the reading of classics, or the experience of profound personal love) will place it so far above the cultivation of a lower quality (such as the consumption of chocolate) that they will prefer the former, ‘even though knowing it to be attended with a greater amount of discontent’, and would not resign it for any quantity of the lower-order pleasure. Hence, Mill’s oft-quoted remark: ‘It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied.’ The verdict of the ‘competent judges’, who know both pleasure-levels from their own experiences, is an objectively valid one, although it is 77
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derived from the human life-world rather than from any a priori, abstract reasoning. Mill further holds it to be psychologically true that nothing is desired by human beings which is not either a part of happiness or a means to happiness, and he also maintains that the only reasonable evidence we can give for something being desirable lies – as is the case with all other similar questions of fact and experience – in its actually being desired (by competent choosers). But why should we aim for the general happiness of mankind,
‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’, rather than simply our own happiness? Again, Mill’s reasons are entirely empirical: human beings are in fact generally so constituted as to be pleased by what is useful and pleasant to their fellows. Should a person lack this natural constitution, there are other valid motivations to maximise the general happiness: calculated prudence (‘if I scratch their backs, they’ll scratch mine’), or fear of blame and punishment.98
Now, there are obviously various empirical (especially psychological) facts about which one needs to agree with Mill in order to become a devout utilitarian. Evidently, however, the same applies to an adherence to any form of virtue ethics: such adherence presupposes factual beliefs about what is actually good for human beings, what makes people tick. Indeed, Mill has a lot to say about the virtues from his empirical standpoint; so much so in fact that his utilitarianism could reasonably be subtitled a ‘virtue-based ethics’.99
‘The utilitarian standard’, Mill says, ‘enjoins and requires the cultivation of the love of virtue up to the greatest strength possible, as being above all things important to the general happiness.’ People should desire and cherish the virtues not only as means to happiness, but as part of their happiness: for not only does displaying the virtues bestow happiness upon others and thus tend to the ‘multiplication of happiness’, which is the ultimate object of virtue as of other human pursuits, but also developing and exhibiting the virtues is intensely gratifying for the agent himself, as competent judges can witness. Hence, cultivation of the virtues becomes the fundamental goal of moral education, to which the utmost care and attention must be devoted, not least the nourishment of the capacity for ‘nobler feelings’ which is such a
‘tender plant’, and easily killed in youth by want of sustenance.100
Mill would have agreed wholeheartedly with George Eliot who in her Middlemarch remarks that there is ‘no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men’. The emotion of compassion acts here as the ‘basic social emotion’101 which fortunately comes naturally to most of us but can still be killed in childhood by lack of nurture and by hostile influences. As the emotional bridge between individuals, compassion constitutes a fundamental virtue for the utilitarian, and in many ways the very fulcrum around which a true utilitarian disposition revolves. However, it is not the only virtue: a person so overcome with compassion for the plight of convicts escaping from prison by climbing down a drainpipe that he decides to lend a 78
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helping hand is not acting in accordance with the utilitarian spirit. Even if we add as condition to justified compassion, as Aristotle does to his specification of pity, that it rests on the belief that the suffering in question is not caused primarily by the victim’s own culpable actions,102 we are not yet on solid ground in giving unoverridable priority to compassion, for a person who seriously neglects his children and spouse because of intense compassion for the innocent victims of an avalanche in a nearby village may also fall short of the utilitarian standard. Furthermore, there may be cases where the virtue of justice (or simply that of honouring promises and other formal obligations) conflicts with that of compassion; recall that for Mill, requirements of justice stand collectively higher in the scale of utility than any others.103
The important point to note here is that none of the individual virtues of reaction and action are, in principle, unoverridable except the fundamental one encapsulated by the utilitarian principle of the maximisation of general long-run happiness. Generalised beneficence is the utilitarian virtue par excellence to which all the other virtues must remain subordinate. However, it cannot be exhibited over and above the other virtues; its role is more that of an arbitrator deciding when and in what proportion the other virtues should be displayed. There is a firm decision procedure at work here which helps utilitarians steer clear of the emotion/action-guiding objection to which virtue ethicists succumb.
The importance of a virtue, be it one of reaction or action, can lie in its directly benefiting others and ourselves, or in benefiting others without harming ourselves, or in benefiting ourselves without harming others, or in benefiting ourselves so as to be (more) capable in the long run of benefiting others and ourselves. A perfect utilitarian will never need to exhibit a virtue benefiting others while harming himself, for though he may need to choose a course of action painful to himself (even the ultimate one of sacrificing his own life for that of others), the pain he would experience by refraining from that course of action would outweigh the one induced by his choosing the sacrifice as the lesser of the two evils. Notice that although the original motivation behind a utilitarian frame of mind is a hedonistic one, the objection of self-centredness (s. 2.2) does not hit at utilitarianism, as the utilitarian virtues are essentially other-directed: concerned with benefiting or at least not harming others. The notion of acting for beneficiaries rather than oneself is not, as in modern-day virtue ethics, a fringe benefit of one’s own character training. Performing one’s duties towards others is the crucial thing.
Moreover, keeping the original hedonistic motivation constantly in mind would be counter-productive from the utilitarian perspective, in the same way as asking oneself every morning what one could do today to achieve the most pleasure would be self-defeating – it would undermine pleasure rather than increase it. It is better simply to carry on with one’s virtuous activities.
At the centre of the utilitarian virtues is, as we have seen, the emotion of 79
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compassion. Needless to say, all the other emotions will play their roles as virtues in so far as they are necessary ingredients in and/or conducive to happiness. The requirements of the utilitarian principle clearly encompass all states of affairs for which agents can be morally responsible, be those states of experience, character traits, or direct actions. Why, then, is it frequently charged that utilitarianism fails to take account of the moral significance of the emotions? Perhaps another of the ‘historical accidents’104
to which Hursthouse refers is here to blame. It is true that when Mill introduces his principle of utility, he formulates it in terms of right actions, not right emotions. Moreover, in his Utilitarianism and indeed in the whole of his corpus, the emotions are rarely mentioned directly. However, it may be helpful to bear in mind that Mill was notoriously reluctant to duplicate the work of his friends and colleagues. In one place in his Utilitarianism, he cites approvingly the ‘elaborate and profound work’ done by his friend and biographer Alexander Bain on the ethical emotions.105 Bain had given reasons in the work to which Mill refers for classifying the emotions with the higher senses and provided an extensive account of their moral dimensions.106 In another work Bain wrote: ‘Our several Emotions or Passions may co-operate with Prudence and with Sympathy in a way to make both the one and the other more efficacious’, and he particularly singled out anger or resentment as a moral sentiment which ‘heightens the feeling of reprobation against wrong-doers’.107 Bain’s orientation is echoed in Mill’s description of how the sentiment of justice, which in itself ‘has nothing moral in it’, stemming as it does partly from a ‘natural feeling of retaliation or vengeance’, becomes moral once it has been subordinated to considerations of the general happiness.108 In other words, morally fitting emotions will form a part of utilitarian moral reasoning. We need to do more than to concede, as Hursthouse does, that it would not involve any ‘immediate inconsistency’
for utilitarians to add on to their doctrine how ‘optimific’ it would be for people’s emotions to be morally justified;109 it would indeed be inconsistent for them not to include potentially alterable states of affairs, such as our emotional reactions, in their calculations. Quite apart from this general truth is the fact, already highlighted, that a central virtue in utilitarianism, compassion, happens to be an emotion.
Perhaps Mill thought that his friend Bain had said what needed to be said about the ‘ethical emotions’. Whatever the reasons are for his reticence, they should not be seen as revealing any overt or covert utilitarian under-appreciation of the moral significance of emotions. Indeed, utilitarianism with its single standard of moral justification seems better fitted than most other moral theories to fend off any illusions of the emotions as intruders in the moral realm. Despite the demise of non-cognitive theories of emotions, such illusions still linger on and are even perpetuated to some extent in Ben-Ze’ev’s book, where the personal, limited, and non-intellectual perspective of the emotions is often contrasted with the detached, objective perspective 80
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of intellectual, rational thinking.110 Utilitarianism is particularly adverse to the thought, commonly implied by such a dichotomy, of ‘intellectual’ moral reasoning being a case of letting one’s head rule one’s heart. For utilitarians, without the heart there is no morality. With beliefs – perhaps more often than not rational beliefs – forming a central part of emotions, there is no question of subordinating those automatically to beliefs from some more
‘intellectual’ perspective. All our beliefs, in so far as they have a moral dimension, be they originally formed from a ‘partial’ or from a more
‘detached’ perspective, must in the end submit to the same authority, namely, the test of conduciveness to the general happiness. That test requires that we be prepared to feel our thoughts and think our feelings.
Someone might object, however, that although utilitarianism pays heed to the moral significance of the emotions, it does so in the wrong way by subjecting this significance to the principle of utility. Are there not morally justified emotions which have nothing to do with the production of the general happiness, not even the happiness of the person experiencing them?
Oakley takes as an example the experience of grief at the passing of those close to us. Does lack of grief in such circumstances not indicate a moral defect, even in cases where it does not have the utility of showing others that we commiserate with them, or of assisting us psychologically in coming to terms with our own bereavement?111 The simple utilitarian answer to this question will be that it is contingently true that people cannot be utility-maximisers without feeling grief in those circumstances. If they do not experience the emotion, there is something missing in their emotional repertoire which characterises kind and compassionate persons. Feeling the appropriate grief is thus both indicative, and conducive to the sustenance, of the kind of people who are likely to make this world a happier place.
However, Oakley’s complaint exemplifies a range of objections against utilitarianism based on considerations of what might theoretically be the case if people were different from what they happen to be. Would it not be better, from the utilitarian standpoint, if people could continue to be utility-maximisers without experiencing the kind of grief Oakley describes? I shall try to bring out the irrelevance of such ‘other-worldly’ considerations to the utilitarian enterprise later in this section.
Before that, a few words must be said in passing about two standard textbook objections which tend to be levelled against utilitarianism, at least in so far as these might seem to undermine the standing of the theory as an account of the moral significance and justification of emotions. The first of these, all too often invoked to demonstrate the repugnancy of utilitarianism, rests on the alleged problem of victimisation: there are no categorical prohibi-tions in utilitarianism preventing the sacrifice of the interests (and even the lives) of innocent people to serve the needs of the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’. A utilitarian must thus be ready to stoop to anything to fulfil the obligations of his theory, even to the killing of the innocent patient 81
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in the transplant-story (s. 2.2) in order to save the lives of five others.
Utilitarians typically retort that such killings will not in fact tend to the overall happiness of mankind because of the precedent they will set and the fear created for others who might end up in the same shoes; only in far-fetched science-fiction examples will victimising the innocent really be utility-maximising. In the context of the emotions, the anti-utilitarian objection might be that if a person’s desires could be intensively enough gratified through the experience of a negative emotion, such as Schadenfreude, so as to outweigh the grievous plight of the victims whose suffering is being gloated over, then Schadenfreude would be morally justified on utilitarian grounds.
More than that, it might even be beneficial overall to create new circumstances of undeserved suffering in order to satisfy the pleasure of the malicious observer. Theoretically this may be true, but in the real world the intensity of people’s pains and pleasures seems to be pretty equally distributed. It is impossible to think of an actual situation where the outcome of the utilitarian calculation would in fact be the emotional victimisation envisaged in this example, especially if we take into account the precedent it would set to others. To be sure, there could exist a world, half made up of sadists and half made up of masochists where the best utilitarian state of affairs involved the constant torture of the latter by the former, but that is far from being the world that we real human beings inhabit. In our world as it really is, the most perfect utilitarian is likely to be much less trigger-happy, much more queasy, and much more ready to put his foot down, than the critics seem to think. Why such an answer cuts less ice with them than it should is another story, which I shall briefly explore later in this section.
Another common reason for rejecting utilitarianism lies in the alleged problem of detachment: we, as normal people, are driven forward by certain ground projects, based on deep-seated emotional attachments to specific persons and causes which happen to be so important that they virtually decide whether life for us has any meaning. Utilitarianism allegedly requires us to give up these projects if they conflict with what we are obliged to do as utility-maximisers. But that is psychologically absurd because without these projects we lack any motivational basis; we have no reason to feel and act at all.112 Let us say that a man is ‘driven forward’ by deep love for his wife; she happens to be dying as a result of a serious accident and asks her husband to hold her in his arms. According to this criticism, however, he as a consci-entious utilitarian would be required to abandon her: ‘Tough luck, my dear, but I’ve got to attend to five other victims of the accident whose lives I could possibly save while you’re passing away’. The cold voice of utilitarian calculations fails – objectors will claim – to honour the truth that for a system of morality to work, various forms of emotional selectivity have to be deemed permissible and even encouraged; any viable moral theory must thus make room for the kind of personal commitments and blood-is-thicker-than-water assumptions against which utilitarianism requires us to steel our hearts.
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But does utilitarianism really make such a ‘psychologically absurd’
demand? What should be noted first is that utilitarianism is not the likeliest of moral theories to make such psychologically absurd demands of people; asking people to act or feel in ways which grind them down as human beings, and deprive them of any reason for living at all, is not likely to be utility-producing in the end. Utilitarians have long acknowledged the justification of special care based on deep personal friendships and ties of consanguinity: human beings are in fact so constituted as to be able to form deep personal ties with only a limited number of people, and those reasonably expecting to be specially treated will suffer more acutely than others if we neglect them. Additionally, we are able to promote the happiness of our friends and relatives less haphazardly than that of others in so far as we know them better,113 and finally, but no less importantly, it may well be that people who are not imbued at an early age with the spirit of personal attachments will later be unable to comprehend the needs of those at a distance –
witness the soulless Gradgrinds in Dickens’s story.
Selectivity in emotions and actions on grounds of special attachments had been psychologically explained by Alexander Bain two years before Mill published his Utilitarianism: ‘The love fire subsisting in the mind by nature bursts out on the choice of some one object, and is best sustained upon one.’114 These psychological insights are given a moral grounding by Mill who says that a person ‘would be more likely to be blamed than applauded for giving his family and friends no superiority […] over strangers, when he could do so without violating any other duty’; and he firmly states that both
‘genuine private affections’ and a ‘sincere interest in the public good’ are possible ‘to every rightly brought up human being’.115 The right balance between those may, of course, in practice be difficult to strike. However, it is a pure travesty of utilitarianism to claim that the man in the above example shall ex hypothesi, cool as a cucumber, neglect the last wish of his beloved dying wife to attend to the needs of the other victims. First of all, no decent person would listen to the demands of such a heartless moral theory (which would deprive it of any potential utility); second, the person who left his wife in such circumstances would probably either end up committing suicide afterwards or be(come) so spineless and emotionally detached as to pose a threat to his neighbours. Even if that were not the case, we simply do not wish to live in a world where such decisions are taken by ‘kind-hearted’
people, and, thus, there are good utilitarian reasons for not taking them.
Still, although the foes of utilitarianism might possibly agree with the conclusion reached about this particular case, they would dislike the argument which supports it. They would grumble – as has been done in various recent articles about utilitarians’ inability to form real friendships – that the attachments and commitments to which utilitarianism may give pride of place are still but ‘instrumental friendships’, incompatible with the emotions and practical requirements of real ‘end friendships’.116 The problem is said 83
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to be that for utilitarians any friendship is in principle relinquishable, should the total consequences of honouring it be outweighed by some other relevant considerations. What utilitarians fail to accept, then, is the intrinsic, as opposed to the instrumental, value of deep affections. Now if this means that utilitarians cannot conceive of the value of attachments as part of their happiness, rather than as a means to it, then that contradicts Mill’s very own specification of happiness, as we have already seen. However, if what is meant is that there might always be cases where the utilitarian would consider himself required to sacrifice the value of a friendship, or even the friend himself (should the latter, for example, be infected with a deadly virus from outer space threatening the future of mankind), then that is theoretically true.117 But no true friend would make the demand of us, for example, that we neglect the cries of a child drowning in a pond outside of our window on grounds of the intense pleasure of engaging in a conversation with him, let alone that we should rather see the world go under, than sacrifice his life. Such demands would not be demands of friendship, or even deep personal love, but rather of desperate, mindless obsession.
Anti-utilitarians seem to find something impure about the very possibility that utilitarians will, in times of urgency, balance their commitments towards their family and friends against the harm which they could prevent by abandoning them. But the question is whether by abandoning the possibility of calculations about best states of affairs we shall not substitute the
‘utility machine’ with a much more repellent apparatus. Good people should not wear blinders, narrowing their moral vision. Fortunately, the occasions for the sacrifice of deep affections on utilitarian grounds will be extremely rare; I do not think it would be called for at all in the husband–wife scenario above. However, to reject out of hand the possibility of interpersonal calculations of utility when our friends are at stake may, in the end, lead to a much more serious psychological disharmony than that of which utilitarians are accused. For if it is morally better to act out of ‘pure’ friendship rather than friendship which is in principle revisable, then it must be better to act spontaneously out of such ‘pure’ friendship rather than out of the sense or the theory that it is better to act out of such friendship.118 Hence, in the end, the ‘pure’-attachment demand not only excludes the possibility of utilitarian calculations, but of all rational, moral considerations whatsoever, leaving us only with the intuitive reliance on our ‘moral nose’. Given the accumulated experience of mankind, with people relying in their actions and reactions on their strongest moral intuitions ‘feeling true’, I would suppose that the reader now understands what I mean by a ‘more repellent apparatus’ than utilitarianism.
The above considerations show, I believe, how utilitarianism emerges more or less unscathed from the two standard objections. A closer look at specific richly illustrated examples may be needed to check whether utilitarianism really passes muster in all conceivable ‘this-worldly’ scenarios, but at 84
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least no good reasons have presented themselves to undermine its potential value as a foundation for the justification of emotions. The demand that a morally justified emotion is one which makes our world a better place in the long run seems to be an admirable springboard from which to launch an exploration of the moral worth of particular emotions, and I shall make such use of it in the sequel. For me, the appeal of utilitarianism here lies in its retaining the best of Aristotle’s insights into the salience of the emotions while averting the mess created by modern-day virtue ethics. The basic lessons to be learnt from the present and the preceding sections are that, when we consider the emotions, the objections levelled at modern virtue ethics hit their mark while the ones aimed at utilitarianism do not.
There are, indeed, striking similarities between Aristotle’s and Mill’s conceptions of happiness, which partly explain the compatibility of utilitarian considerations of the emotions to an Aristotelian approach. These similarities tend to be explained away in the literature as superficial or, at best, mentioned as an example of Mill’s indebtedness to Aristotle from whose anti-hedonism Mill, however, unhappily departed. Yet, surprisingly, I have not come across any book-length, or even a thorough article-length, study of the exact relationship between their respective ideas of happiness.
Clearly, for Aristotle, no one can enjoy happiness ( eudaimonia), that is, flourish as a human being, without also experiencing pleasure, for ‘happiness’ is at once ‘best, finest, and most pleasant’. Actions expressing virtue are particularly pleasant in this way. The pleasure derived from them is ‘not to be added [to virtuous activity] as some sort of ornament; rather, it has its pleasure within itself ’.119 Hence, he who lives well necessarily enjoys the activities which make him flourish. Pleasure ‘completes’ his activities ‘like the bloom on youths’.120
Although these remarks are well known and often quoted, Aristotle’s distance from utilitarianism tends to be highlighted through his slighting dismissal of pleasure as the end of human pursuit, being fitting only as an end ‘for grazing animals’.121 However, if we look more closely at what Aristotle says about pleasure, and especially why he refuses to equate the life of pleasure with the good life, those with classical utilitarian sympathies will find little to complain about. Aristotle points out that ‘the things that please most people conflict, because they are not pleasant by nature, whereas the things that please lovers of what is fine’, in particular actions expressing virtue, ‘are pleasant in this [natural] way’.122 He later suggests that ‘perhaps pleasures differ in species’; for those derived from fine sources, such as the praise bestowed upon us by a true friend, are different from those of shameful origin, such as the praise of a flatterer.123 Now, this sounds suspiciously similar to Mill’s qualitative distinction between higher-and lower-level pleasures, mentioned above, and Mill’s claim that indiscriminately seeking the gratification of all pleasures was ‘worthy only of swine’.
It might still be objected that Aristotle’s conception of eudaimonia as the 85
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end of human life is radically different from Mill’s in that Aristotle never conceded that an ingredient of well-being, for example a virtuous emotion, is ultimately chosen for the sake of pleasure. Although both conceive of
‘happiness’ as an inclusive end, Mill’s hedonistic spur to engaging in ‘truly pleasant’ activities would thus be alien to Aristotle. Far be it from me to make a hedonist out of Aristotle.124 However, notice that questions of motivation are not, in general, given much attention in Aristotle’s ethical writings. We should not forget that his readership comprises people brought up in good habits, people who have already decided (or at least should have decided) that they want to be good. Aristotle does not need to gild what for them is already a lily. Mill cannot and does not take such motivation for granted: the hedonistic rewards are the carrots he offers to those who are ready to make an experiment with living a life of virtue. The eventual reason why even a sceptic can be persuaded to want to achieve eudaimonia in Aristotle’s sense will, for Mill, be the fact that nothing makes life more joyful. Pleasure, fecund and deep, is the ultimate motive behind the choices of any rational human being, and, given our common human nature, it so happens that steadily aiming at individual betterment along Aristotelian lines yields more pleasures of that sort than any fleeting fancies.
The point of this brief comparison of Aristotle and Mill is that, while they approach the question of the good life from, so to speak, different angles, the recipe they offer us is basically the same. Although I have chosen utilitarianism as the theoretical framework within which I want to defend particular emotions, it would thus, I think, make little difference in practice if I had opted for a ‘pure’ form of Aristotelianism – as distinct from modern-day virtue ethics – instead. To capture the essential spirit of both these theoretical frameworks in one sentence, we could say, as Susan Wolf does in a stimulating essay, that ‘meaningful lives are lives of active engagement in projects of worth’. The recognition that ‘meaningful activity and self-interest cannot psychologically stretch too far apart’ brings us to the realisation that a meaningful experience, be it of an action or an emotion, only arises when the ‘subjective attraction’, on which Mill concentrated, meets the ‘objective attractiveness’ which both he and Aristotle emphasised.125 My reasons for siding with utilitarianism here are educational, in a practical sense, more than strictly philosophical: for utilitarianism provides us with the carrots needed to convince even those not already brought up in fine and noble ways that exhibiting morally justifiable emotions matters for them, an issue to which I shall return in section 6.2.
Before I finish this discussion, two final observations are in order. First, nothing in what I have said undermines criticisms that writers of broadly Aristotelian sympathies commonly direct at more modern versions of utilitarianism. For instance, Nussbaum does well to remind us of the fact, frequently emphasised by Aristotle himself, that ‘desire is a malleable and unreliable guide to the human good’, and that if we aim at the satisfaction 86
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of the desires people happen, as things are, to have, our decisions will frequently succeed only in shoring up the status quo. The kind of subjective preference utilitarianism dominating much of contemporary economic and political debate is thus correctly described by Nussbaum as a ‘prominent opponent’ of Aristotelianism.126 However, my point has been that preference utilitarianism provides a lean counterpart of utilitarianism proper, in Mill’s sense, and that we have no reason to be stuck with the former.
Second, there is of course a difference between Aristotle and Mill in that Aristotle is not a utility-maximiser. The main reason for that lies in his elitism: his belief that only a small group of men (as opposed to women, slaves, etc.) are capable of reaching true happiness. Hence, there is no worldly reason for him to champion the general maximisation of happiness in human society. However, modern followers of Aristotle tend to dismiss his elitism as resting on factual, rather than theoretical, errors, and I shall follow suit. Once we acknowledge that every human being is, in principle, both capable and worthy of leading the good life, the idea of maximisation is bound to get a more sympathetic hearing than Aristotle would have given it in his day.
Having announced that my preferred method in justifying emotions is a utilitarian one, there still remains something to be said about the nature and scope of such a method. Let me here, towards the end of this section, focus on a feature of a utilitarian moral justification that it shares with various other theories, such as Aristotelianism and contemporary virtue ethics, namely, its uncompromising naturalism. What is the scope of utilitarianism qua naturalistic strategy, and why do so many philosophers look down their noses at such a strategy?
Naturalism, in general, maintains that answers to moral questions are to be derived from the world in which we live, in particular from human psychology, sociology, and biology. This means, among other things, that evaluative concepts must be constructed out of empirical non-evaluative ones, but as we saw from Anscombe’s grocer example (s. 1.3), such a demand does not present any serious problems. In the kind of naturalism under discussion, human nature becomes the starting point of morality, not as an external metaphysical (or even biological) fixed point, but as a humanly experienced context for human lives – recall Nussbaum’s reconstruction of Aristotelian naturalism (s. 2.1). The role of morality is to co-ordinate the (often) conflicting interests of human beings in a world of scarce resources –
our world, that is, not some other world – and to help real people achieve real happiness. There is no transcendence, no other-worldliness, no ‘view from nowhere’ at work here, but moral ‘objectivity’ is grounded instead in common facts about man and his world. This is what Nussbaum calls
‘empirical’ or ‘internalist essentialism’.127 The idea is not of giving up something more tangible that we had before and being left with an abyss, for though ‘we get rid of the hope of a transcendent metaphysical grounding for 87
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our evaluative judgments […] we have everything that we always had all along: the exchange of reasons and arguments by human beings’, reasons
‘that are historical and human but not the worse for that’.128 We can easily imagine a world in which these reasons do not hold, since the facts on which they are based are only contingently true, but that world is not ours to live in.129 The essence of ‘internalist essentialism’ has perhaps never been more lucidly captured than in Hilary Putnam’s explication of his ‘realism with a human face’:
Rather than looking with suspicion at the claim that some value judgments are reasonable and some are unreasonable, or some views are true and some false, or some words refer and some do not, I am concerned with bringing us back precisely to these claims, which we do, after all, constantly make in our daily lives. Accepting the ‘manifest image’, the Lebenswelt, the world as we actually experience it, demands of us who have (for better or for worse) been philosophically trained that we […] regain […] our sense of the common (for that some ideas are ‘unreasonable’ is, after all, a common fact – it is only the weird notions of ‘objectivity’ and
‘subjectivity’ that we have acquired from Ontology and Epistemology that make us unfit to dwell in the common).130
Yet, many philosophers are reluctant to take up Putnam’s challenge of
‘dwelling in the common’. They seem to feel that if we justify our actions and emotions solely in terms of how human beings and their environment happen to be constituted, the heavenly alchemy is missing: the immensity, the categorical force. An old Chinese fable tells of a man in the State of Zheng who wanted to buy himself a pair of shoes. He measured his feet, but then forgetfully left the measurements on his seat and headed off for the market. When he got there, he found out that he did not have his size sheet with him. He went back home to get it, but when he returned, business had ended and he could not buy any shoes. Asked why he simply did not try out the shoes on his feet, he retorted: ‘I would rather believe in my measurements than my own feet.’ Unfortunately, many academics, even of the most practical bent, are more willing to believe in measurements, preferably worked out by ‘pure reason’ and applying to all ‘rational beings’, than their own feet.
Not only is there a wide-ranging suspicion of naturalism in philosophical circles, many writers fail or refuse to understand what a naturalistic strategy involves. Thus, many common misinterpretations of utilitarianism seem to be based on deep-seated misapprehensions of, and insensitivity to, its naturalistic foundation. For instance, it is often claimed that Mill is somehow inconsistent in his hedonism, or not a true hedonist, since he maintained that the value of higher pleasures is ‘intrinsically’ greater than that of the 88
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lower pleasures, so that no quantity of the latter could ever outweigh the value of the former – whereas a consistent hedonist should say that the value of no source of pleasure is intrinsically higher than that of any other but simply proportional to the amount of pleasurable experiences associated with it.131 What is forgotten here is that ‘intrinsically’ means, for the robust empiricist Mill, nothing more than as a matter of fact always. Even more outrageous are claims such as the one that since utilitarianism ‘puts no constraints on paternalistic action in principle’, the utilitarian world ‘tends to look like a realm of children’.132 Although this is true in principle, and may apply in some other possible world, it has absolutely no relevance in our world: a world for which no one has incidentally produced a more convincing anti-paternalistic argument than Mill himself, claiming that in practice an area of private action can be cordoned off where certain paternalistic and moralistic interventions are always, in fact, outweighed by anti-paternalistic considerations with higher utility.133
To take one more example, it has recently been claimed that utilitarianism constitutes ‘too feeble a basis’ for the equal treatment of women: ‘If the continued subordination of women produced more happiness than emanci-pation, then utilitarianism would yield the result that continued subordination was morally preferable.’134 The ‘if ’ is the great stumbling block here: how could anyone imagine that in our world oppressing half of the inhabitants for reasons of gender could possibly produce more happiness than not doing so? This is a mere theoretical possibility which, for the naturalist, has no practical application, no moral significance. But notice the trend of all these examples: our own ‘feet’ are too feeble a basis for buying shoes; we need some abstract ‘measurements’ instead. However, in looking for profundity, what we most likely end up with is vacuity. At least, we shall never be able to buy a decent pair of shoes.
It is, as we have already seen, de rigueur in philosophical writings to envisage some counterfactuals or possible worlds and ask: ‘What if our world looked like this?’ ‘What would have happened had Aristotle become a shoemaker instead of a philosopher?’ is indeed an interesting question. But the same does not apply to: ‘What would have happened if Aristotle had only been born with reason and no desires?’ He could not have been born in such a condition and still remained the human being Aristotle. We must not forget truths about man qua natural being when toying with counterfactuals.
I once tried, in a short essay, to give a specific example of how naturalistic reasoning can actually tell us what to feel and how to act. I chose my example from a topic often discussed at the dinner table: sexual conduct.
Can an analysis of the nature of an emotion such as (erotic) love135 guide us satisfactorily in our evaluation of casual sex? In the essay, I first indicated a line of defence for Anscombe’s well-known claim that promiscuity can make people ‘shallow’.136 Whether it actually does (as she, of course, also claims) is, however, basically a factual question. There is absolutely nothing odd 89
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about that, for it is inherent in the naturalist strategy that all normative ethics must be answerable to empirical research on human nature. Trying to construct a serviceable moral theory without recourse to human psychology and biology must be considered as fruitless as trying to build a fish-friendly aquarium without taking notice of the biology of fish. What I then, subsequently, set out to do was to produce plausible psychological and anecdotal evidence for the claim that the one-dimensionality of ships-in-the-night liaisons in fact undermines people’s capacity for experiencing the emotion of genuine love.137
An example such as this one may give people a taste of what a naturalistic moral argument looks like, by showing how certain facts about the nature of a (highly-important) human emotion can, for instance, give us a good reason for modifying our desires and behaviour in significant ways.
Generally speaking, rather than ignoring what the natural and social sciences tell us about human beings, or inventing their preferred psychology from scratch, philosophers would do well to pay heed to empirical evidence, scientific or even anecdotal. If my arguments in this section hold water, a project such as that undertaken in the present book, of justifying particular emotions through naturalistic utilitarian reasoning, will thus not incidentally but necessarily be interdisciplinary.
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3
S O M E T H I N G T O B E P RO U D O F
The nature and conditions of moral and
emotional excellence
3.1 Personhood, integrity, and self-respect
After having spent considerable time unravelling the credentials of different moral theories in accounting for the morality of emotions, the reader will now be expecting a justification of pride and jealousy from the utilitarian perspective adopted. Indeed, that is an expectation which I plan to fulfil, first for pride and subsequently for jealousy. However, a few more intermediary steps are still required as preludes, steps which have to do with moral context: It is a fruitless endeavour to try to defend particular emotions in vacuo. Exhibiting a single defensible emotion in a life otherwise characterised by moral indifference or turpitude has little if any moral relevance. It is only within the context of a life of moral and emotional excellence (whether as a reality, or – perhaps more typically – as an ideal at which the individual aims) that different attitudes, desires, and emotions acquire suitably clear and coherent roles to become objects of general moral appraisal.
An art critic does not judge the appropriateness of individual colours on the painter’s canvass; he judges them in so far as they tend to or detract from the unity and the overall impression of the given work of art.
In this chapter, I start by making some observations about the necessary conditions of moral and emotional excellence. The present section explores the nature of personhood, integrity, and self-respect. Section 3.2 then describes one notable ideal of such excellence: Aristotle’s megalopsychia. I do not necessarily mean to recommend every aspect of this ideal to the reader. However, it brings to light certain elements of the good life with which I find myself in agreement and which I intend to use as a foundation on which to build my defence of pride and jealousy.
These intermediary steps concern what we could call the substantive moral context of my argumentation. However, there is also a conceptual moral context at issue here: the concept of pridefulness is, for example, located within a nexus of interrelated concepts, ranging from integrity and self-respect, to honour and dignity. For clarity’s sake, there is every reason to keep those distinct, as far as possible. Thus, I argue in section 3.3 along the 91
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naturalistic lines suggested earlier (s. 1.3) for the most profitable specifications of pridefulness and some of its related concepts. That is necessary both for the general reason that one’s bricklaying will never be better than one’s bricks, and the more specific one that ‘pridefulness’ is not a frequently used word, if it figures at all, in most people’s functional vocabularies.
For an individual human being to be a possible object of moral appraisal in the first place, he must be capable of moral judgement. More specifically, he must have the capacity to make practical, reasoned choices: to listen to reasons, look for reasons, deliberate upon reasons, and make rational decisions when confronted by a range of options. I shall call this capacity the capacity for personhood. In addition to the capacity for reasoned choices, personhood also implies a vision of oneself as a distinct person, an individual whose choices are essentially – in nature and significance – on a par with those of others but are still profoundly one’s own. Although the term
‘personhood’ may have some controversial connotations, it is at least apt in so far as we refuse to call anyone a ‘person’ who does not have the capacity (potentially or actually) for practical reason. Incidentally, I think that a thorough analysis would show this capacity to be a sufficient condition of human personhood: a human being does not need to possess anything else in order to be properly considered a person. This is not the place to argue that point; if someone is unwilling to reserve the term ‘personhood’ for the capacity in question, as I do in the sequel, and prefers a more technical term, ‘autarchy’ may, for example, do nicely. Indeed, ‘autarchy’ has the special advantage of reminding us of the difference between the capacity for practical reason and its actualisation, that is, between ‘autarchy’ and
‘autonomy’. For autarchy only sets a minimal standard; the autarchic individual must be capable of taking autonomous decisions, whether this capacity is necessarily utilised for extended periods or not; perhaps, in some areas of life, it never is. Or as I would put it: A person does not need to make autonomous choices all the time to remain one.1
My four-year-old son possesses personhood in that he can reach reasoned decisions about various aspects of his life, for instance, which toys to play with in particular contexts with particular persons. He is on the whole, at present, however, quite far from being a suitable candidate for moral and emotional excellence, and even lacks some characteristics necessary for general moral appraisal. The biggest handicap is that while he has in a certain sense ‘a mind of his own’, his decisions lack unity and coherence.
One cannot even rely on their transitivity: although he prefers toy T1 to toy T2 and T2 to T3 at a given time, it is not certain that he prefers T1 to T3 at the same time. (If I complain that his choices do not mesh, he simply retorts: