‘I don’t want them to mesh!’) My son can, so to speak, get his act but not his acts together. He lacks integrity – fortunately, not a serious ailment at such an early age – and in many ways behaves like a ‘wanton’: his decisions, however rational in themselves, tend to be taken in isolation from other deci-92
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sions past or future, not to mention any ‘second-order volitions’ about what he should want to want.2 An extreme example of an adult ‘wanton’ is Zelig in Woody Allen’s film: the human chameleon who even acquired the physical characteristics of the people with whom he happened to identify at any given time in his life.
I understand integrity primarily as a psychological condition rather than a moral one: we are unwilling to consider people’s decisions as ‘truly their own’ unless they form part of a (more or less) coherent set of decisions reflecting their real concerns. A person of integrity looks backward and forward, and the procedure by which decisions are reached, as well as the decisions themselves, fall into some sort of a line; display some sort of a (predictable) unity. While this does not require that the agent always act in the same way with respect to the same or similar objects and people, we expect to find some explanation of such differences, in a person of integrity, when looking at the details of the entire choice situation. The unity required for integrity could, however, be the unity of a villain just as well as that of a saint; such a psychological condition does not place any limits on moral content. Ordinary language commonly assumes that a person of integrity must uphold certain moral virtues, such as fairness and truthfulness, but I think it is more useful to retain here the narrower sense of integrity in which the requirement is merely a procedural and a formal one.3
To continue our ascent of the conditions of moral and emotional excellence, let us next consider self-respect. In an age which speaks so easily of relative values, there seems to prevail a surprising consensus on self-respect being one of the chief ingredients of a life worth living. Thus, philosophers of every stripe and persuasion close ranks in celebrating it as a virtue and/or a character trait to which pride of place should be given in our lives. For once, in philosophy, there seems to be a use for the old saying: ‘Like mother-hood, we are all for it.’ Although self-respect is so widely, and undoubtedly rightly, taken to be an important value, there seems at first glance to be little agreement in the literature on the necessary and sufficient conditions for self-respect, and on its relation to other concepts and values.4 Thus, we have various overly narrow analyses in which self-respect is explained without the barest acknowledgement of other related concepts, including its sister concept: self-esteem. We also see a number of overly broad accounts in which the extensions of terms such as ‘self-esteem’, ‘honour’, ‘pride’,
‘dignity’, and even ‘integrity’ are promiscuously run together under the rubric of ‘self-respect’, making the latter term bloated beyond good sense.
This apparent disarray gives us a reason to attend to self-respect in some detail, and to that end I would like to start again with a personal story.
A few years ago, I was asked to give a number of talks at meetings of teachers’ and parents’ societies in Iceland about the importance of students’
self-image for their educational achievement. I took ‘self-image’ to refer to self-respect plus self-esteem. However, not having at that time delved into the 93
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philosophical literature on these concepts, I had to rely solely on my ‘pre-theoretical’ intuitions. I tried to recollect my own experiences as a teacher at various levels of the school system, from primary school to university, in so far as they related to this topic. And additionally, I was reminded of a science fiction story I had once read about a sadistic host who systematically humiliates guests at his cocktail parties. Gaining, with the help of an alien, control over the guests’ souls, he makes them do things which they would otherwise never have done. Surprised that it is not yet his turn to be picked on, the narrator in the story is told that he is an ‘immune’: a creature who cannot suffer any such humiliation because there is nothing he would not do anyway, in real life. The upshot of the story was that the narrator is completely devoid of self-respect and, hence, morality.
Holding this story in view, I suggested to my audience a simple test of one’s self-respect: ask yourself what you would never do for all the tea in China, starting with the (hopefully) obvious things such as killing your own child or selling your grandmother into slavery.5 Extend the list, and the longer it is, the stronger your self-respect. In this sense, your self-respect encompasses your unshakeable commitments: the most important goals you set yourself in life and the moral principles by which you abide. We can, then, profitably view self-esteem as the level of one’s own estimated successes in upholding those commitments. For illustrative purposes, I suggested that we think of self-respect as a jar – the larger it is, the stronger the self-respect
– and self-esteem as water in the jar: the more water, the higher the rate of estimated successes. I then presented a simple model (see below) of the possible relations between self-respect and self-esteem: portraying four paradigmatic character types which should be familiar from the classroom, and giving them catchy names:6
SELF-RESPECT
(the ‘jar’)
Much
Little
Much
The aristocrat
The servant
SELF-ESTEEM
(the ‘water’)
Little
The whiner
The shit-eater
The aristocrat is a student who typically comes from a ‘good family’; a student who follows clear rules and principles, does what is required with aplomb, and is self-satisfied. The aristocrat tends to excel in schoolwork and rule the roost in the classroom. The servant does not set such high goals or follow clear principles, but often finds at least a temporary vocation in doing 94
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the aristocrat’s bidding. Being at the latter’s beck and call, the servant’s self-esteem is kept high by the praise received from the aristocrat for services provided. Other words to describe the servant might be ‘complacent’ and
‘dependent’. To turn to the whiner, it may of course be the case that a person is ashamed and un-self-forgiving for the simple reason of having allowed some improper incursions upon his or her strong sense of self-respect. In a more typical classroom situation, however, the whiner is at least equal in accomplishments to the aristocrat, but is unhappy with the ratio between accomplishments and pretensions. Here, the jar leaks, or is too large in the first place: the result of standards too high for anyone to live up to (extreme perfectionism). Finally, the shit-eater typically comes from a ‘broken home’.
This person has never learnt to abide by moral rules and has weak aspirations, but however meagre these aspirations are, the shit-eater still falls short of them: here we have a small jar containing little water.
Most members of my audience seemed to be familiar with those character descriptions from their own classroom experiences, from pre-school upwards (and some also from their encounters in the workplace – these traits do not suddenly disappear upon leaving school!). Some of them noticed precisely those weaknesses in this, as well as in other, accounts of self-respect which will become apparent below, but the general reception indicated that my model did reasonable justice to people’s intuitions.
Unknowingly at the time, I had also availed myself of a deeply-entrenched way to make sense of our attitudes and emotions by way of conceptual metaphors, and hit upon a pretty common and appealing one: the ‘container metaphor’.7
There is a lot of truth in Weber’s dictum that academics tend to be as proprietary of their preferred vocabularies as of their toothbrushes. Thus, it seems to me in retrospect that much of the apparent diversity in recent accounts of self-respect can, on closer inspection, be ascribed to differences in terminology. For instance, Rawls’s much-discussed treatment of ‘self-respect’ in A Theory of Justice basically focuses on people’s favourable opinion of themselves, and hence on what I have above called ‘self-esteem’.8
Other writers gloss over the term ‘self-esteem’, but speak instead of two kinds of self-respect: on the one hand conative self-respect; on the other hand estimative or evaluative self-respect.9 Their ‘conative self-respect’ corresponds largely to what I have called ‘self-respect’, and their ‘estimative self-respect’ to my ‘self-esteem’. The reason for doing this may lie in the fact that in ordinary English it sounds odd, in certain contexts, to say that a man who thinks he has violated some fundamental commitment – perhaps through a momentary lapse of will – still has self-respect, witness the phrase
‘I could never respect myself again if I did that’.10 The way out of this linguistic impasse is then to say that his conative self-respect is intact although his estimative self-respect has been (temporarily) defiled. Not being as worried as these writers about the vagaries of ordinary language, 95
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where ‘loss of self-respect’ sometimes signifies self-disesteem11 as in the given example, I shall in what follows continue to talk simply about ‘self-respect’ where others might be tempted to modify it by ‘conative’, etc., and the same holds, mutatis mutandis, for my use of ‘self-esteem’.
Now, if we defuse the terminological differences in this way, a remarkable concordance of opinion starts to emerge in the growing mountain of literature on these two concepts. Self-respect is a complex character trait involving a desire and a disposition ‘not to behave in a manner unworthy of oneself ’ – that is, to shun behaviour that one views as ‘contemptible, despicable and degrading’.12 A person with a sense of self-respect ‘identifies with a project, activity or status’ which provides a standard of worthy conduct,13
a line past which one does not go. The person is committed to the standard, confident that by and large they are the right commitments, and tries to live accordingly.14 Self-respect thus requires that one develop and live by a set of such personal standards ‘by which one is prepared to judge oneself even if they are not extended to others’.15 By contrast, self-esteem is a merit-based favourable opinion of oneself, ‘arising from the belief that one meets those standards that one believes one ought to meet’.16 In other words, self-esteem
‘is the judgment that one is living congruently with one’s values and thus is or is becoming a kind of person it is worth being’.17
Notice that these references to the contemporary literature do nothing to invalidate the insights from the original pre-theoretical model. The only serious conflict which I have come across between recent sources and my original model relates to David Sachs’s claim that the notion of an excess of self-respect is a perplexing one.18 This would seem to contradict my earlier example of the perfectionist whiner whose standards are too high to live up to and who might be better off with pared down aspirations, relinquishing the unattainable. However, Sachs admits that this notion could be intelligible
‘from one or another utilitarian perspective’,19 although that is not the general moral framework within which he is working. My preferred justification of the value of self-respect would, indeed, be a utilitarian one (see below), and such a justification readily accounts for the notion of excessive self-respect as one undermining a person’s chances of leading a rewarding life: consider a case such as that of a perfectionist schoolgirl who does not dare write letters to her best friend, who is on an exchange programme in another country, for fear of making spelling errors. In such circumstances, part of the person’s self-respect can truly be considered an encumbrance devoid of value, not only an item that, as Sachs puts it, ‘may more or less painfully have to be sacrificed’ while valuable in itself.20 By failing to acknowledge this possibility, Sachs denies himself insights that are common from everyday life about a person’s having to ‘swallow’ or ‘pocket’ his excessive self-respect. On the other hand, Sachs more plausibly argues later that a total absence of self-respect is hard, if not impossible, to imagine. Thus, even our ‘shit-eater’ will possess some measure of self-respect, however low and 96
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pitiable: for any socialised human being, it will always be possible to locate companions in distress, and to conceive of an even worse state of degrada-tion and deprivation.21
As noted earlier, self-respect is uncontroversially regarded a valuable moral goal. Moreover, few would want to deny that it is good for people to esteem their achievements in a realistic way – preferably of course a positive way after their own standards have truly been reached. To quote the psychologist Bain, an ‘estimate of self that ended in nothing would be flat and unprofitable’.22 What are the grounds for this univocal view? With the evils of allowing inroads upon one’s self-respect – a danger against which perpetual vigil must be maintained – being a constant theme in world literature and folk psychology, it is not difficult to imagine why philosophers have thought self-respect to be of capital importance. Firstly, self-respect is commonly considered to have the psychological value of imparting in us the zest necessary to pursue our life plans, whatever they may be. Secondly, there is the celebrated moral value of self-respect as a guardian of the (other) virtues: as the column of true majesty in man which preserves moral character and contributes to the continuation of morality. Thirdly, self-respect is often considered as having an educational value, not only in keeping students’ noses to the grindstone and persuading them not to let their talents lie fallow, but also in instructing them to stand up to unfair treatment and claim their proper due – for instance, when discriminated against, whether on grounds of race, gender, or simply by a teacher who happens to dislike them. Fourthly, let us not forget the value which has been given least space in philosophical journals: the pragmatic one of being more successful in life and better liked by one’s peers by maintaining a proper sense of self-worth.
In so far as self-respect fosters reliability and reliability is a cherished character trait, the self-respectful person is likely to be held in higher esteem than the mercurial one. Thus, we seem to care about people, in particular our closest friends and relatives, those on whom we rely, having some sort of ballast which is not subject to the play of chance and the wear of time; such
‘ballast’ is commonly referred to as ‘self-respect’.
When ascending to a theoretical level, we are bound to encounter Kantian justifications of self-respect as a perfect duty to oneself, the breach of which signals a failure to acknowledge one’s own moral rights. However, the tenor of my above remarks should suffice to indicate that for those of us with consequentialist leanings, a utilitarian line of justification will do the job perfectly well: showing à la Hume how a proper sense of self-respect will ‘advance a man’s fortune in the world’, ‘render him a more valuable member of society’, ‘qualify him for the entertainment of company’ and
‘increase his power of self-enjoyment’.23 For if ‘to lose one’s self-respect is, in the end, to lose oneself ’,24 then such a loss should be no less of an anathema to a consequentialist than to a deontologist. Indeed, a utilitarian will, as Geoffrey Scarre has shown, view self-respect both as a necessary 97
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condition of happiness and a major source of it. Whatever contributes to making human beings flourish comes within the purview of utilitarianism; and if it is true, as it surely is, that to consider oneself worthless – to realise a hollowness at the core of one’s life – is to be wretched, then there exists the strongest utilitarian reason possible for promoting self-respect.25
However, if we want to go so far as to consider a secure sense of self-respect to be tantamount to moral and emotional excellence, two important deficiencies appear, deficiencies that are visible in both the conceptual specifications of my ‘pre-theoretical model’ and in the scholarly accounts. To put the first one succinctly, we have so far spoken as if every kind of self-esteem is predicated upon self-respect. However, it seems possible to suggest various cases of self-disesteem which have nothing to do with the evaluation of one’s self-respect.26 I am here not so much thinking of cases where a person takes pride in a certain kind of self-disesteem – such as the literary buff who boasts about an inability to do simple mathematics – but rather cases where persons believe they have violated certain standards they have set for themselves, but without it affecting the appraisal of their self-respect: for instance, a person takes pride in being a dab hand at painting, but one day makes a mess of it; yet the evaluation of self-respect remains unscathed. One attempt to solve this problem might be to concede that ‘self-esteem’ –
encompassing any attributes that one would be pleased to have or regret not having – is generally speaking a much wider notion than that specific kind of self-esteem which concerns our self-respect. The obvious recourse would then be to fall upon some term, such as ‘estimative self-respect’, to distinguish the latter cases of self-esteem from the former. However, this does not really resolve our problem, for the violation of any standard that we set ourselves seems potentially capable of affecting the evaluation of our self-respect, given that we consider it as one of our core commitments or aspirations: even failing to do a good job at painting one’s house might count. The question remains: what is or should be the difference between those cases of self-disesteem which do, and those which do not, affect the level of water in our jar of self-respect? Invoking the term ‘estimative self-respect’, without further explanation, simply begs that question.
A second, related but even more serious, problem is this: according to the generally-accepted specification of self-respect above, the standards that one sets oneself need not necessarily relate to anything that others value. In other words, this specification does not impose any constraints, moral or otherwise, upon what counts subjectively as worthy conduct. In Milan Kundera’s novel Life is Elsewhere, there is mention of a woman who finally wanted to be herself and could do so only in being insincere! Even more worryingly, Dillon’s ‘corrupt’, ‘amoral’, and ‘wicked’ individuals, who devote themselves to the bad out of selfishness or plain turpitude,27 would all fall under the heading of the ‘aristocrat’ in my original model, as long, that is, as they identified with their evil aspirations and viewed their achievements in 98
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that respect favourably. They would have a large jar of self-respect with a lot of water in it. There is no use in trying to explain evil standards away as unrealistic in practice. One only needs to read a few classics of literature, for instance The Brothers Karamazov, to realise that a sense of worth that is ill-grounded or morally execrable can be as uplifting and empowering, and defended with equal fervour, as morally valid self-respect28 – and the devil looks after his own.
Perhaps Massey is right in that there are two notions of self-respect abroad in the literature, a subjective one and an objective one – that is, of valuing oneself and of properly valuing oneself. But, as he also notes, philosophers have failed to face this distinction squarely and adequately.29
While some have furtively smuggled objective moral standards into their conception of self-respect – which, if done without explaining what kind of standards are needed and why, is question-begging – most have relied upon the subjective conception familiar from our pre-theoretical model and the scholarly accounts cited above. Apt as this conception may be for various purposes, it leads, in the course of our discussion, to the paradoxical conclusion that promoting morally unworthy, but internally coherent and strongly held, convictions can be a proper moral goal. The traditional accounts of self-respect do furnish us with necessary conditions of moral and emotional excellence, but surely not with sufficient ones.
I have now examined three conditions of ‘the good life’ where each condition builds upon the previous one and includes it as an element. As I have specified it, integrity is, in a nutshell, personhood plus coherence; self-respect, in turn, is integrity plus goals, principles, and the concern that these be actualised and honoured. However, an analysis of these three conditions furnishes us, at best, with an incomplete, formal (non-substantive) account of moral and emotional excellence, as none of them places any moral constraints upon the agent. To flesh out this account, we must look to higher things.
3.2 Aristotle’s megalopsychia
Historically speaking, the most famous account of the virtues which make up ‘the good life’ is that of Aristotle. His account is particularly pertinent in the course of the present discussion because of his already-mentioned insistence that our emotions, as well as our actions and dispositions to act, are to be seen as potentially virtuous or vicious. Nowhere in his corpus does Aristotle produce a definitive list of all the character traits that can count as moral virtues. For example, it is often not entirely clear whether the emotions discussed in his Rhetoric should be considered full-blown virtues or vices, or simply concomitants of other such traits, in particular of those listed as moral virtues and vices in the Nicomachean Ethics. The following list of the Aristotelian moral virtues qua ‘golden 99
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means’ between the corresponding vices of deficiency and excess is not meant to be exhaustive. However, it comprises the ones described in the Nicomachean Ethics and two clear examples of specific emotion-virtues (righteous indignation and pity) from the Rhetoric – although I have had to correct Aristotle’s formulations somewhat with these last two in order to make them more consistent with his usual architectonic (see further in s.
5.1). Notice that, for simplicity’s sake, I have given ‘appropriate’ names to some of the traits Aristotle calls ‘nameless’, and that when Aristotle mentions more than one vice of excess or deficiency, I have chosen the most general or characteristic one.
Deficiency
Mean
Excess
Cowardice
Bravery
Rashness
Insensibility
Temperance
Intemperance
Ungenerosity
Generosity
Wastefulness
Niggardliness
Magnificence
Vulgarity
Pusillanimity
Megalopsychia
Vanity
Under-ambitiousness
Right Ambition
Over-ambitiousness
Inirascibility
Mildness (of temper)
Irascibility
Quarrelsomeness
Friendliness
Obsequiousness
Self-deprecation
Truthfulness (about oneself)
Boastfulness
Boorishness
Wit
Buffoonery
Indifference to injustice
Righteous Indignation
Begrudging spite
Callousness
Pity
Hypersensitivity
Regardless of precisely which traits shall count as individual virtues, it is pellucidly clear that in Aristotle’s virtue theory the virtue of megalopsychia 30
occupies a central position, a fact which, interestingly enough, has rarely been acknowledged during the recent revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics.
The most important characteristic of the megalopsychos – he who possesses the virtue of megalopsychia – is that he ‘thinks himself worthy of great things and is really worthy of them’. True to his famous architectonic of virtue as a mean between two extremes, Aristotle presents the megalopsychos as striking the right balance between two other character types: the vain,
‘who thinks he is worthy of great things when he is not’, and the pusillanimous, ‘who thinks he is worthy of less than he is worthy of ’.31 The conditions of this virtue, and its respective extremes, thus appear as greatness and self-knowledge, that is, on the one hand the merits of a person and on the other the person’s estimate (realistic or not) of those merits.
But then two problems turn up in trying to fit megalopsychia into the usual architectonic. Aristotle is himself aware of the first problem when he says that the megalopsychos ‘is at the extreme in so far as he makes great claims. But in so far as he makes them rightly, he is intermediate’. In other 100
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words, megalopsychia only presents a mean if we view it from the standpoint of one of its two conditions, self-knowledge, and there it actually coincides with the fourth character type: the person who is temperate without megalopsychia, that is, a person who ‘is worthy of little and thinks so’.32 However, viewed from the standpoint of the other condition, greatness, megalopsychia is in a certain sense an extreme: you cannot go further on the greatness continuum than being great. So the virtue of megalopsychia is obviously not as simple as, say, that of bravery which fits snugly into the middle between rashness and cowardice. The other problem is that self-knowledge seems to be an intellectual, rather than a moral, virtue. However, megalopsychia is listed among the moral virtues, that is, as a mean of actions and passions.33
Perhaps both these problems rest on the temptation to view megalopsychia as just another moral virtue. Although it is classified as such in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle clearly points out its unique position as ‘a sort of adornment of the virtues’. Megalopsychia is a higher-order virtue – a kind of summation – which makes the other virtues greater and ‘does not arise without them’.34 This is made even more obvious by the fact that I have so far been able to speak, in turn, of megalopsychia as a ‘virtue’ and a
‘character type’. Thus, it should be of no surprise that it does not fit into exactly the same architectonic as the other, subordinate, virtues.
Before proceeding further, it might be helpful to present a model of the relations between megalopsychia and the other character types: GREATNESS
Worthy of much
Worthy of little
Thinks himself
The megalopsychos
The vain
worthy of much
SELF-
KNOWLEDGE
Thinks himself
The pusillanimous
The temperate
worthy of little
without megalo-
psychia
So far, everything sounds clear, but the question now arises why some people are worthy of great things and others of small. Aristotle says that the megalopsychos ‘has the right concern with honours and dishonours’: we can call those the external criteria of greatness. However, plainly, gaining external respect is not a sufficient condition of greatness. The main point is that the honour be deserved, and deserved honour is only ‘awarded to good people’.
Hence, the true megalopsychos ‘must be good’, must possess ‘greatness in each virtue’.35 It is vital to keep in mind in the following that the megalopsychos cultivates all the other virtues to a fault: he is great because of his own moral greatness.
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Since deserved honour is an external criterion of greatness, the megalopsychos is concerned about gaining his merited respect: And when he receives great honours from excellent people, he will be moderately pleased, thinking that he is getting what is proper to him, or even less. For there can be no honour worthy of complete virtue […] But if he is honoured by just anyone, or for something small, he will entirely disdain it; for that is not what he is worthy of.
And similarly, he will disdain dishonour; for it will not be justly attached to him.36
From this passage, and others following it, we might be tempted to conclude that megalopsychia actually has three main components rather than just two.
In addition to the above two conditions of greatness (which we now know means greatness of virtue) and self-knowledge, the megalopsychos is highly concerned with his own worthiness or respect, in his own eyes and in the eyes of others. This concern reverberates throughout all his attitudes and conduct and makes him exude a certain ‘aura’ which cannot simply be reduced to (although compatible with) the two main conditions of the virtue. Let me, for the sake of convenience, get a little ahead of my argument and identify this third component of megalopsychia as the emotion of pridefulness.37 I shall say more about this emotion in section 3.3, but for the time being, the reader can simply consider ‘pridefulness’ an umbrella term for the features of the megalopsychos’ concern with his worthiness mentioned above.
Why has Aristotle’s crown of the virtues fallen into such desuetude and disrepute as to be almost unanimously condemned by Aristotelian scholars and moral philosophers alike?38 One of the reasons lies in some specific remarks made later in Aristotle’s discussion of megalopsychia, which many find distasteful, such as that the megalopsychos is ‘inactive and lethargic except for some great honour and achievement’, and that he is ashamed of having to receive benefits from others, thus returning ‘more good than he has received; for in this way the original giver will be repaid, and will also have incurred a new debt to him’.39 Holding these remarks in view, many people have been tempted to write the megalopsychos off as obsessed with honour, arrogant, ungrateful, inactive, unneighbourly, and unable to form deep friendships.40 Howard Curzer has recently lessened the severity of such accusations by subjecting the apparently distasteful remarks to a more positive critical scrutiny in light of their textual context. Where all else fails, Curzer can and does correctly point out that any descriptions of the megalopsychos’ attitudes or practices must remain subordinate to the central condition of his possessing all the (other) virtues.41
To take a brief look at the textual evidence against the most common charges, the megalopsychos is not (a) obsessed with honour, for if he were, he would not count as a megalopsychos in the first place, but rather belong to 102
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the category of the vain who think they are worthy of great things when they are not. The megalopsychos does not ‘even regard honour as the greatest good’,42 and he must possess the subordinate virtue of right ambition, which is explained in the Nicomachean Ethics next after megalopsychia: a virtue characterised precisely by the morally right concern with honour, contrary to the concern of the ‘honour-lover’.43 Megalopsychia is based upon complete virtue, but vanity and vainglory upon imitations, presump-tions, and the advantages reaped from them. The megalopsychos is surely not (b) arrogant either, but ex hypothesi modest, in stark opposition to those who think ‘they are superior to other people’ and ‘despise everyone else’ –
arrogant people being consigned to the category of the vain. Toward inferiors, an air of superiority is ‘as vulgar as a display of strength against the weak’,44 Aristotle says. The megalopsychos admittedly despises some people, especially those who show ‘wanton aggression’, but that attitude is not one of arrogance but rather disdain based upon justified beliefs about their immoral behaviour.45 The megalopsychos can hardly count as (c) ungrateful either. He is not unhappy about the benefits received from others when he is in need; what he is unhappy about is having been in need for those benefits.
This is why he wants to erase the memories of such circumstances, rather than to nurse them, but notably only after he ‘returns more good than he has received’.46
The megalopsychos is concerned with great achievements, but does this mean that he is generally (d) inactive? Not unless we assume, like Hardie does, that ‘opportunities for spectacular action are rare’.47 But given the present state of the world, where so much work needs to be done to make it a more habitable and happier place for human beings, there seems little reason to suppose that the megalopsychos is bound to spend most of his time in bed (see further in s. 4.3). Furthermore, it would be a strange characteristic of an (e) unneighbourly person to be, like the megalopsychos, ready to
‘help eagerly’ while asking ‘for nothing, or hardly anything’ from his neighbours.48 Finally, the suggestion that the megalopsychos is (f) incapable of forming friendships seems absurd. Not only must he display the ordinary niceties of friendly, civil behaviour (as is called for by the virtue of friendli-ness), he must honour the value of deep friendship which is extolled elsewhere at great length by Aristotle as being ‘most necessary for our life’.49
Besides, in the very analysis of megalopsychia itself, Aristotle adamantly states that the megalopsychos ‘cannot let anyone else, except a friend, determine his life’.50 Can we ask for more from a real friend than to be ready, if necessary, to let us guide his life?
Although many of the specific misgivings hovering over Aristotle’s account seem to be off target, there is, I believe, a deeper reason why people tend to be disturbed by his description of megalopsychia, as well as that of some other related virtues, such as magnificence. In particular, there are some elements in these descriptions which seem to contrast sharply with 103
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what we could loosely label the ‘modern moral outlook’. It may, in other words, be the totality of Aristotle’s account and its general background assumptions, rather than any specific scattered remarks, which tend to repel modern sympathies. More precisely, I think that what disturbs modern readers about megalopsychia is, first and foremost, that general feature of the megalopsychoi which I have already referred to as the emotion of pridefulness. I return to this general feature, and its various manifestations, in the following section, and offer a detailed defence of it in chapter 4.
3.3 Pridefulness: pride and shame
In the preceding section, we noticed a specific feature of Aristotle’s ideally virtuous character-type, the megalopsychos, a feature that I tentatively equated with the emotion of pridefulness. This emotion allegedly generates deep concern with the person’s own worthiness, and makes him exude an aura of aesthetic grace. To secure a richer understanding of pridefulness, we need, once again, to disentangle a web of interrelated concepts. My aim here is neither to uncover the real meaning of ‘pridefulness’ which has been lying all the time hidden from view, nor to offer a stipulative, sleight-of-hand definition of the emotion, but rather (as explained in s. 1.3) to argue for serviceable specifications and fine-grained distinctions that do justice to our intuitions and help us make sense of the emotional landscape.
Let us start with pride. Pride, in its simplest and most commonly understood sense, is an emotion of self-satisfaction, arising from the belief that oneself, or someone else with whom one identifies, has achieved something that is worth achieving. For example, I myself or my children (whose accomplishments form part of my self-conception) have done well in a difficult exam, and that makes me proud. Pride, in this simple sense, differs from mere joy in that the former emotion attributes (some) responsibility for the achievement to the subject. If I have simply won a big lottery prize, I may be joyful but hardly proud unless the participation in the lottery involved some positive contribution on my part which influenced the result. However, there is nothing in the nature of pride itself which guarantees adherence to moral norms; one can be equally full of pride about an amoral, or immoral, achievement as a moral one, as long as it conforms with one’s idea of self-worth.
It is important to distinguish between pride and self-esteem. Although my heart swells with pride after a particular achievement, my self-esteem may still be, on average, quite low, since that is a measure of my overall sense of achievement. Conversely, high self-esteem does not guarantee a constant flow of pride; our pride may still sink occasionally when we mess things up, although we are, in general, well pleased with the ratio of our accomplishments to our ambitions. Notice, furthermore, that a person who has a lot to be proud of, and regularly experiences a welling up of pride, would not, on 104
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those grounds alone, be referred to as a ‘proud person’. We would simply say that he is very pleased with himself, or, if we want to be more academic, that he has a lot of (well-earned) self-esteem, while the term ‘proud person’ is reserved for something rather different, as I explain soon.
We now see why the common translation of megalopsychia into English as ‘pride’ is not particularly apt.51 People can be proud of non-moral attainments, whereas the megalopsychos is proud only of his good moral character and its results. Moreover, knowing that people are proud of their achievements does little to indicate the strength and endurance of their self-respect: that column of true majesty in the megalopsychos’ character. For the latter reason, the translation of megalopsychia as ‘dignity’52 comes closer to the mark; it captures the self-respectful character of the megalopsychos and also his concern with honours, but it does not include the element of positive overall self-assessment which characterises the megalopsychos: a person may retain dignity even in the absence of ‘moral luck’ (s. 4.2), when the opportunities to be proud, therefore, happen to be few and far between.
Although both the suggested translations of megalopsychia are, in important respects, incomplete or misguided, they do offer some illumination of features of Aristotle’s supreme virtue – illumination which I think can be articulated as follows: ‘pride’ does, in certain instances, denote not only actual self-satisfaction but general concern with such satisfaction, its conditions and appearances; ‘dignity’, similarly, brings to mind not only worthiness but also sensitivity to one’s worthiness being somehow confirmed, attested to, or impugned. Thus, both terms close in on the component of megalopsychia which I have called ‘pridefulness’. Sachs has pointed out that it can be categorically true that a person both takes pride in nothing whatever and yet ‘has his pride’, since there is, after all, a well-understood sense in which ‘pride’ refers exclusively to one’s self-respect.53
Sachs is right, and we shall return to precisely that sense later. However, I would like to add that there is another distinct sense of ‘pride’ at work when we say that a person, who is not (at the moment) proud of anything in particular, is yet a ‘proud person’. In the locution ‘proud person’, ‘pride’
refers to something other than the person’s self-respect (as specified in s.
3.1): namely, or so I maintain, to the person’s pridefulness. If it is true that
‘pride’ has many distinct meanings in ordinary language, and that too much conceptual freight is heaped on it, some tidying up may be in order. In the following, I propose that we reserve the term ‘pridefulness’ for the sense of
‘pride’ in ordinary language which is brought out in the locution ‘proud person’, for example the sense in which it would be correct to say that the megalopsychos, in addition to being self-respectful, having a realistic evaluation of accomplishments, and being (episodically) proud of particular achievements, is also a ‘proud person’. Let us meanwhile reserve the term
‘simple pride’ for the episodic emotion of self-satisfaction.
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dispositional emotion. Prideful persons are inclined to experience profound and frequent (simple) pride when living up to their own expectations and successfully achieving their goals, but also profound and frequent shame upon failing to do so. Thus, pridefulness incorporates the episodic emotions of simple pride and shame as acute signals of success or failure, and provides in itself a strong source of motivation: shame is the ultimate turn-off for the prideful person and must be avoided at all cost, whereas simple pride becomes a highly-prized end. Moreover, the prideful person is sensitive to the just recognition of accomplishments, feels entitled to obtain, without cavil, any deserved rewards, and will experience disappointment or indignation towards those who fail to show proper regard.54 The constant concern with the inner and outer reinforcement of self-worthiness lends the prideful person precisely that aura of aesthetic grace which I have already mentioned as a feature of the megalopsychos.
When I speak of pridefulness as being most easily recognisable as a
‘dispositional emotion’, I have two distinct senses of ‘dispositional’ in mind.
First, pridefulness disposes us to feel other emotions, such as simple pride and shame, frequently and intensely. Second, pridefulness is typically a character trait; a person will not normally experience and be moved by pridefulness unless that person is a prideful person. By contrast, someone who is not, for example, a jealous person, that is, who does not possess the character trait of being easily disposed to jealousy, can nonetheless experience pangs of jealousy in some (extreme) situations, and similarly the most inirascible and mellow person can be led to anger, for there are circumstances in which ‘even a worm will turn’. I am not saying that experiencing pridefulness once or twice but never beforehand or never thereafter is psychologically, let alone logically, impossible, but it would count as both rare and rather peculiar. In spite of this twofold dispositional character, pridefulness is, I suggest, more than merely a name for the tendency to experience simple pride and shame – however strongly associated it is with such a tendency. Admittedly, the word ‘pridefulness’, and it corollary ‘shameful-ness’, might sometimes be used simply to denote that tendency; however, the sense implicit in the locution ‘proud person’ is much wider, lending weight to the claim that pridefulness is a specific emotion, which can be experienced episodically, with its own unique characteristic beliefs and concerns. A prideful man believes that he should experience simple pride often but shame seldom (and ideally never). He also believes that he is entitled to due recognition of his achievements, and is deeply concerned about his opportunities for simple pride and the merited external recognition. When this is not forthcoming, he feels (episodically) bad; ‘his pride is hurt’, as we say – another example of a locution where ordinary language substitutes ‘pridefulness’
with the more familiar word ‘pride’ – and, conversely, when the recognition is forthcoming, ‘his pride is satisfied’. Notice that this is more than saying that a person feels proud or ashamed over an achievement or failure (or over 106
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an external response to such an achievement or failure). A non-prideful person may also experience those simple emotions: the distinctness of pridefulness lies in the episodic nature of the experience, that the prideful person, in addition to feeling ashamed over a failure, also feels ‘hurt pride’.
Why not use ‘self-respect’ instead of ‘pridefulness’ here? Well, because having strong principles and high goals need not include that element of sensitivity to external recognition which characterises pridefulness, as I have described it, although it may be argued that pridefulness is in fact needed to maintain self-respect (see s. 4.1). ‘Dignity’ may, however, be well fitted to cover the extensions of both ‘self-respect’ and ‘pridefulness’. To complicate matters, there is, nevertheless, as Sachs pointed out, a use of ‘pride’ abroad in everyday language where it refers distinctly to a person’s self-respect; think of a locution such as ‘his pride prevented him from doing such a vile thing’. Arguably, this is also the sense of ‘pride’ inherent in popular slogans such as ‘Gay Pride’ or ‘Black Pride’: members of marginalised groups begin to consider some of their own properties, previously despised, as valuable, as a source of self-respect – a source of goals and principles with which they positively identify – rather than as a source of self-disrespect.55 However, this is not the same as saying that they become prideful.
The term ‘pridefulness’ is not exactly on everybody’s lips. It exists as a term in English, but its connotations are not always entirely clear. Still, there definitely exists a concept of pridefulness as I have described it, although it is commonly captured through other locutions, such as ‘the proud person’, and ‘hurt’ or ‘satisfied pride’. I think that if we scrutinise uses of the term
‘pridefulness’ in English, they may come fairly close to expressing the above-described emotion of pridefulness. At any rate, they may come close enough for us to argue that ‘pridefulness’ can usefully be refined so as to give this emotion an appropriately inclusive name – without thereby severing the link to any features that ‘pridefulness’ in ordinary language tends to convey before the refinement. This is not to deny the fact that ‘prideful’ and
‘pridefulness’ are cumbersome expressions which must, in an analysis of a common emotion, be invoked somewhat apologetically. Another option would have been to distinguish from the start between three typical senses of
‘pride’, calling them ‘pride ’, ‘pride ’, and ‘pride ’, where ‘pride ’ referred to 1
2
3
1
pride as the emotion of self-satisfaction over an achievement (what I have called ‘simple pride’), ‘pride ’ to pride as self-respect, and ‘pride ’ to that 2
3
particular dispositional and episodic emotional sensitivity to inner and outer recognition of achievement that I have termed ‘pridefulness’. However, given that ‘pridefulness’ is at least a term that exists in English, talking about
‘pride ’ would, I think, be considerably more awkward.
3
Ben-Ze’ev includes pridefulness in his list of emotions; he defines it, however, as a global emotion ‘resulting from the belief that one is a good person’, related to but distinct from pride which rests on the belief that one has, in specific cases, ‘done a good thing’.56 While there is some connection 107
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between our respective uses of ‘pridefulness’, and how it relates to simple pride, there are also differences in scope and focus. For me, pridefulness need not necessarily be (although it perhaps ideally should, as in the megalopsychos) restricted to concern with goodness. Furthermore, I take pridefulness to include proclivity not only to simple pride but also to other episodic emotions concerned with our own and other people’s evaluations of our deeds and status. It is difficult to say whether that specification or Ben-Ze’ev’s is ‘more correct’ since both are critically invoked to serve a purpose rather than simply discovered, and adducing evidence from ordinary language for the superiority of my proposal will not settle the issue.
However, I would argue that there is at least more urgent need for my
‘tidying-up’ work than for Ben-Ze’ev’s. We could, without trouble, refer to
‘pridefulness’ in his sense as ‘high self-esteem’; the dispositional emotion that I have described, however, has no obvious candidate for expression in our language other than ‘pride’ in one of its many and easily conflated senses.
In addition to simple pride, shame is the emotion to which pridefulness will most easily give rise – when and if called for. Ben-Ze’ev thinks of shame as the opposite of pridefulness and understands it as a global emotion where one considers oneself to be a bad person.57 I, however, take shame to be felt when we negatively evaluate some action or aspect of ourselves, in the light of norms that we accept or of a standard that we want to live up to. In other words, when experiencing shame, we believe that we have violated some criteria furnished by our self-respect. So far is it from being true that pridefulness is the opposite of shame that the former will frequently imply and occasion the latter – unless, that is, one can be saintly and omnisciently ‘wise at all times’. Robert Frost once wrote that if ‘one by one we counted people out / For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long / To get so we had no one left to live with’. Similarly, if every bout of shame meant that we evaluated ourselves negatively overall, then it would not take long until we had nothing left to live for. Ben-Ze’ev’s ‘global shame’ is better described as
‘general self-disesteem’ than as ‘shame’ in the ordinary sense.
There is a common distinction, and not a negligible one, between shame and guilt. The invocation of a sharp distinction between ‘shame societies’
and ‘guilt societies’ is, for instance, a commonplace in the social sciences where the former is supposedly characterised by heteronomy: avoidance of wrongful action for fear of being found out and ridiculed by others, the reaction of running or hiding away, if caught, while the latter is characterised by autonomy: avoidance caused by one’s own sense of guilt, the reaction of self-loathing and of wanting to compensate one’s victims, should one have fallen into temptation.58 The idea seems to be that in shame one’s assessment of failure is merely external, whereas in guilt it is purely internal, that is, only concerned with the subject’s own norms and evaluations without regard for the verdict of a detached observer or the gaze of an 108
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external audience. It is initially tempting to consider guilt an independent emotion – one focused on the individual’s own moral failure which has caused harm and is thought to stand in need of rectification – and it is certainly possible to envisage people experiencing some sort of shame which does not involve guilt. However, the conceptual allure of the Kantian distinction between autonomy and heteronomy, reflected in the above guilt–shame dichotomy, has recently been waning. Furthermore, a close empirical look at actual uses of the term ‘shame’, even in paradigmatic ‘shame societies’, reveals that the emotion of shame is, indeed, taken to include guilt as a subclass. I shall return to both these points in section 4.1. In the meantime, let me state, without further argument, that I think guilt can be viewed more productively as a special kind of shame rather than as its contrary. The statement ‘I felt more guilty than ashamed’ would then not be taken to mean that shame was not felt, but that its focus was more on those elements which accompany guilt (moral breach, direct harm, reparation) than on other common elements of shame – in the same way as the statement ‘it tasted more creamy than milky’ is not to be understood as a rejection of the fact that cream is also a milk product. Nevertheless, there is an important distinction to be drawn between cream and other milk products.
The preceding discussion should help us to negotiate a way out of the common controversy over whether shame is primarily related to one’s self-respect or to one’s self-esteem. In favour of the former connection is, for example, that fact that the Greek word aidos can be translated both as
‘shame’ and ‘self-respect’. G. Taylor claims that there is a case for linking shame with self-respect,59 and J. Kekes goes so far as to state that ‘in feeling shame, we feel the loss of self-respect’.60 D. Sachs opts for the other course by equating shame with a certain kind of self-disesteem.61 My analysis above of shame helps us to solve, or rather to dissolve, this dispute by suggesting that while shame presupposes self-respect (for else there would be nothing to be ashamed about), and is in that sense linked to it, the experience of shame signals the presence and persistence, rather than the loss, of self-respect. The link between shame and self-esteem, on the other hand, consists in shame being a specific instance of that kind of negative self-evaluation for which self-disesteem is the global manifestation. Shame, if pervasive and frequent enough, will, thus, issue in (global) self-disesteem. However, another subtle point to be observed is that there evidently exists a contingent, psychological link between shame and self-disesteem on the one hand, and self-respect on the other, in that if a person has a lot to be ashamed about, or sinks into a generalised state of self-disesteem, he may be tempted to lower his standards accordingly rather than to raise his level of effort. In such a case, then, shame can constitute a warning signal that not only the person’s self-esteem but also his self-respect is in jeopardy, just as fever can eventually start to endanger rather than to preserve a patient’s health.
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Prideful persons will normally, in the course of their lives, experience numerous instances of simple pride and shame. A person who does not possess this emotion dispositionally, or possesses it to a lesser degree than the megalopsychos, may of course still feel simple pride and shame, but will do so less intensely and less often. Even when there is little to be proud of, the prideful person may take pride in the fact that his or her self-respect is at least still undefiled.62 In light of this analysis of pridefulness, it may come as a surprise to see Aristotle denying the claim that shame is a virtue. Given that he considers megalopsychia the supreme virtue, and that megalopsychia includes pridefulness as an element, as I have pointed out, one would have expected Aristotle to say that the ability to experience shame, when appropriate, is a sign that the megalopsychos’ virtuous moral principles are intact.
Taylor’s observation that ‘avoidance of shame is one way of losing self-respect, for it is one way of blurring the values the person is committed to’63
seems, at first sight, to have a distinctively Aristotelian flavour. However, Aristotle adamantly states that no one ‘would praise an older person for readiness to feel disgrace, since we think it wrong of him to do any action that causes a feeling of disgrace’.64 Part of the explanation lies, once again, in the audience at which Aristotle’s moral teachings are aimed: well-brought up virtuous persons. He does, by contrast, consider shame ‘suitable for youth’, where it has an educative function to fulfil, for the young ‘often go astray, but are restrained by shame’.65 There is no contradiction between Aristotle’s description of megalopsychia and his rejection of shame as a virtue for adults, but he probably over-estimates the way in which even a megalopsychos can be wise at all times and immune to mistakes, and underestimates the way in which a virtuous person can maintain fortitude and self-respect in the face of an occasional minor slip from the path of the right which requires a thimbleful of shame as a corrective. Once the topic of the moral justification of pridefulness and its emotional concomitants is broached, however, my conceptual clarifications and refinements have reached an end, and with it the time has come for a shift of emphasis.
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4.1 The value of pridefulness
To recapitulate, section 3.1 testified to a broad academic consensus on the value of self-respect as a condition of the good life. The striking similarities between the model of self-respect versus self-esteem presented there and Aristotle’s historical account of greatness and self-knowledge subsequently sketched in section 3.2 – including the self-explanatory parallels between the respective character types – will not have escaped the reader’s notice. The excursion into ancient territory thus brings home to us that philosophers were dealing with issues relating to self-respect and self-esteem long before these two terms officially entered the philosophical vocabulary in the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries.
Of even greater interest should be the fact that, however similar Aristotle’s model is to the contemporary one, the former does not seem to be marred by the same defects as the latter. Now, if the older model includes all the essential elements of the younger, without the latter’s defects, a tempting suggestion might be simply to skip modern accounts of self-respect in favour of Aristotle’s account of megalopsychia. However, let us make do here with the weaker claim that considerable strength can be added to modern conceptions of self-respect by supplementing them with insights from Aristotle’s model.
What do I mean by saying that the older model, when compared with the contemporary one, is not marred by ‘the same defects’? Recall the two major shortcomings of modern accounts of self-respect and self-esteem (the terminological disarray aside). First, these accounts do not distinguish between that kind of self-disesteem which does and that which does not affect the evaluation of the extent to which we are living up to the demands of our self-respect. Second, these accounts are neutral as to the moral value of the commitments protected by our self-respect. To start with the second shortcoming, this is ameliorated in Aristotle’s model by insisting that ‘greatness’
means ‘moral greatness’ and that the megalopsychos must possess all the virtues. Correspondingly, for self-respect to live up to its promise and count 111
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as a moral value, we must demand that a person respect himself for the proper reasons. Simply possessing a large jar of commitments does not suffice as those commitments can be at odds with moral virtue.
Furthermore, to consider the first shortcoming, the emphasis in our historical model on deserved honour and dishonour as criteria of greatness helps us realise that the only kind of self-disesteem which has relevance for the evaluation of how well we live up to our self-respect is that which involves shame, and that shame is properly felt only when a person has allowed inroads upon those commitments which have moral worth. In this way, the experience of shame becomes an important warning signal that one’s moral values are under threat, which carries with it the practical implication that fostering receptivity to properly felt shame can be an important educational goal.1 That Aristotle should have declined this implication, except for the young (s. 3.4), must simply be seen as one of his (infamous) empirical errors
– in this case the psychological error of failing to accept the fact that no man is wise at all times.
Let me say something here about my choice of Aristotle for an account of moral and emotional excellence: an account meant to bridge the gap between formal and substantive conditions of moral appraisal. For one thing, Aristotle’s moral outlook is ‘in fashion’ at the moment, though that fashion is highly selective and elaborated. For example, while the current preoccupation with virtue ethics is commonly spoken of as a revival of an Aristotelian or, more generally, an ancient moral outlook, most modern virtue theorists seem to think that considerable progress has been made in our understanding of human flourishing since Aristotle. Thus, their classifications and substantive accounts of the virtues are often strikingly different from those of the Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle’s crown of the virtues, megalopsychia, hardly gets a mention, and when it does, as we saw, it is emphatically rejected. Some kind of moral progressivism seems to serve as a backdrop here: while interesting in themselves, moral codes from bygone cultures, such as the Greek polity, will fail to appeal to moderns.
Quite recently, however, a number of philosophers have challenged this progressivism and advanced a case for a purer form of ancient morality2 as a viable option in the modern moral arena. These ‘purists’ claim that ‘when we think most rigorously and realistically’ – or when we distinguish ‘what we think from what we think that we think’ – our deepest moral convictions are not so different from the ancients. Moreover, if and when these happen to clash, the morality of the ancients may simply be ‘in better condition’.3 As against that, other philosophers have objected that there still exists a wide gulf between ancient morality and our modern moral outlook, impregnated as the latter is with Christian and Kantian values even in those who claim to have no truck with either Christian or Kantian ethics. Hence, endorsing a pure Aristotelian conception of the virtues may require a more radical abandonment of modern morality than the purists have given us to believe.4 Such 112
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sceptical voices are undoubtedly right in that embracing ancient morality amounts to more than ridding ourselves of a few embarrassing delusions about what we think that we think. Nevertheless, the purists have achieved their primary goal of elevating a moral tradition from its previous status as an item of mere historical interest to that of a serious contender for our allegiance: an outlook to be judged on its own merits here and now, by reflective moral agents, as superior or inferior to its rivals.
While I have elsewhere tried to do the same for ‘saga morality’, namely, to liberate it from a state of moral mummification,5 justifying all the details of ancient or medieval moral perspectives is outside the purview of the present book. There are certain aspects of Aristotle’s moral account that I view with suspicion.6 Perhaps also his account fails to fit the modern state or other factual conditions of modernity – those remain matters for further investigation. Even more importantly, there may exist contemporary moral perspectives that also conceive of morality as being social, secular, and naturalistic, that can do everything we expect from ancient morality equally well or even better. Indeed, I have already argued for a sophisticated form of utilitarianism as my preferred moral account (s. 2.3).
However, there is a reason why I think that the invocation of Aristotle’s account is particularly apt in the course of our discussion of moral and emotional excellence. His account suggests that the emotion of pridefulness, analysed in section 3.3, is a necessary component of such excellence. I agree.
And although my reasons for agreement may be slightly different from those of Aristotle, his account provides a valuable source of evidence – philosophical, psychological, and anecdotal – for the viability of this claim. More specifically, it can help us to counter the standard ‘modern’ objections to pridefulness as a potentially virtuous emotion.
The remaining part of this section presents some of the positive arguments for pridefulness as a virtue (or an ingredient in virtue), as well as coming to grips with the objection that the prideful person illicitly considers shame a proper motivation for action and emotion, while more advanced moderns only accept guilt as a motivation in such cases. Sections 4.2–4.4
then explore and respond to three other common objections, namely, that pridefulness falsely presupposes the ideas that: (a) moral greatness may be dependent upon external resources and personal luck (s. 4.2); (b) extraordinary or heroic deeds are more worthy of pride than the ordinary deeds of daily life (s. 4.3); and (c) people are not morally equal; thus, rejecting in an unacceptable manner the (Christian) virtue of humility (s. 4.4). To prevent any misunderstanding, let me make it clear at once that when I speak of pridefulness in the following, I am referring to that emotion as (potentially) experienced by a virtuous person – a megalopsychos, if you like. My question is whether pridefulness is a necessary component in the good life to which such a person aspires. Thus, my focus is on people who, like Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, are said to have no ‘improper pride’. I am not rejecting 113
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the possibility that pridefulness can be a feature of a villain – certainly a villain can be motivated by simple pride and shame and concerned with recognition.7 For a description of an ‘aura of aesthetic grace’ in an evil person, as well as of the peculiar beauty (aesthetic as opposed to moral) and fascination of evil emotions and deeds, let me remind the reader again of The Brothers Karamazov, or for that matter the Godfather film trilogy. Such a possibility does not contradict the claim that pridefulness can be a virtue; as with other emotions, pridefulness will only count as virtuous when it is morally appropriate – that is, when it is felt with respect to the right things at the right times. That is why it is fitting, at this point, to limit our purview to persons of moral and emotional excellence and ask whether they will be prideful or not. It should be noted that my aim here is not that of defending a life of moral and emotional excellence against other ‘options’ – although I believe that such a defence is possible on utilitarian grounds (s. 2.3) – but rather to establish the viability of a specific component of such excellence.
The most convenient way of arguing for the value of pridefulness seems to be to emphasise its role as a guardian of self-respect. Couched in utilitarian terms, for instance, the argument would then be that the life of moral and emotional excellence is the life that, ceteris paribus, produces most happiness; that self-respect is a necessary ingredient in such a life; and that pridefulness protects, maintains, and reinforces our self-respect. We have already considered this line of argument for shame – an emotion to which the prideful person is strongly prone upon falling short of the moral ideal –
namely, that shame is as important a warning signal in the moral realm as fever is in the realm of physical health. Or as Ben-Ze’ev puts it bluntly:
‘Shame prevents many people from behaving immorally and from losing their own self-respect.’8 It may well be true that there is a reason to distinguish between two kinds of shame here, a forward-looking ‘deterrent’ shame and a backward-looking ‘post-mortem’ shame, where the first motivates us beforehand to steer clear of actions or emotions which will make us ashamed, but the second hits us, so to speak, after the event. However, it is a mistake to refuse to call the first kind ‘shame’ and claim that its protective value lies in its constituting fear of shame rather than real shame.9 In forward-looking shame I do more than experience an emotion of fear of what may/will happen if I follow a certain course of action or reaction; rather, I am filled with shame at the recognition that if I really found myself in the circumstances which I am imagining, I might, possibly, succumb to the temptation in question, for instance, that of betraying a member of my own family for financial gain. It is this forward-looking shame, this prior identification with the shame of the proposed action or reaction, which (among other things) deters me from ever doing such a vile thing; it is not only the fear that if I decide to betray my relative, I will feel bad about it afterwards. Similarly, simple pride – the other emotion so frequently generated by pridefulness – need not simply be a backward gaze or savouring of 114
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past glories; it also incorporates a forward-looking identification with courses of actions and reactions that one is likely to choose, and which can make one proud.10
Although Aristotle seems to be all at sea about the utilitarian deterrent value of shame, and does not say much directly about the stimulus of forward-looking pride, utilitarian or quasi-utilitarian defences of pride from Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment times tend to have a more distinctively Aristotelian flavour than Aristotle himself: Bain thought of it as a
‘feeling prompt[ing] powerfully to self-cultivation and active usefulness’, and earlier Hume described pride as reliably useful and reliably pleasing: ‘This constant habit of surveying ourselves, as it were, in reflection […] begets, in noble creatures, a certain reverence for themselves as well as others; which is the surest guardian of every virtue.’11
Plainly, whatever Aristotle said about shame, in much of ancient morality the avoidance of shame constituted a strong motive for action, reaction, or inaction. Indeed, it is exactly here that many people think we have reached a perilous region where older accounts start to compare poorly with modern ones which have happily replaced ‘heteronomous shame’ with ‘autonomous guilt’ as a motivation. I have already claimed that conceptual clarity is best served by regarding guilt as a subclass of shame (s. 3.3). While there is a distinction to be drawn between the two concepts – otherwise one would not form a specific, identifiable subclass of the other – the modern tendency to contrast them as stark opposites lacks a conceptual argumentative point, if it is argued for at all. When reasons are offered for the complete separation of shame and guilt, they are often of the metaphorical and/or rhetorical kind. For example, Taylor maintains that while shame signifies ‘the recognition of the failure of the worthy self ’, guilt implies that for the agent involved ‘another self ’ has emerged which he fails to recognise as his own.12
But why should every self-attribution of guilt presuppose the idea of a bifur-cated self ? After beating his wife, a man will typically feel guilty about something that he himself did, not that his supposed alter ego did, although he might be tempted to say ‘I don’t understand how I could have done that’
– an exclamation that would be equally fitting in many cases of what Taylor would call ‘mere shame’. In general, we should avoid reading too much philosophical content into the rhetoric of everyday life.
Apart from conceptual considerations, the distinction between the primitive ‘outer’ evaluation of ancients and the more mature ‘inner’ evaluation of moderns seems, as Bernard Williams for one has noticed, to be factually wrong.13 First, shame for the ancients did not have to involve the presence of an actual audience; the imagined gaze of an imagined other would do. In other words, one could experience equally strong shame over unworthy conduct which would have resulted in dishonour had one been seen, as over one which in fact was seen. Moreover, in ancient morality, being honoured undeservedly could be as shameful as being dishonoured deservedly. Being a 115
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derivative of aidoia (a standard word for the genitals), the Greek word for shame, aidos, signifies an experience akin to that of being caught in public with one’s trousers down. Shame is the result of being seen, inappropriately, by the wrong people, in the wrong condition. But then people can, as I said, also be ashamed of being admired by the wrong audience in the wrong way.
For example, the emperor in H. C. Anderson’s famous story could have felt equal shame even if only he, and no one else in the audience, had grasped the meaning of the child’s revelation about his ‘new clothes’. Nothing in the nature of so-called ‘shame societies’ thus excludes the possibility of personal moral convictions which contradict those of the (misled) majority. It is an over-simplification to say that the image a person in such a society has of himself ‘is indistinguishable from that presented to him by other people’.14
What matters is whether he can identify with the visions of the given audience or not, and that depends on the content of his own self-respect and how well he deems himself to have lived up to it.
Second, it is also naive to conclude that because the Greeks did not have two separate words for what we call ‘shame’ and ‘guilt’, their word aidos could not cover the meanings of both. Indeed, as Williams amply demonstrates, aidos included elements of inner sanctions, indignation, reparation, and forgiveness: the things typically associated nowadays with guilt rather than shame.15 A Greek hero was clearly capable of responding emotionally to merely internal sanctions – witness Ajax’s suicide.
Recall that we are considering the argument that the value of pridefulness lies in its generating emotions of shame and simple pride that tend to the protection of self-respect. The conceptual and historical connections between shame and guilt notwithstanding, it might still be objected that the same given objective of self-protection can be achieved ‘in less destructive ways’ than by experiencing shame, and even guilt, emotions which threaten to deplete our most important resources for self-improvement.16 For example, Kekes argues that instead of flagellating ourselves with the stick of shame, we should concentrate on the attractions of the carrot which our conception of a good life represents. Why, if we stray from our purpose, should we not learn to focus more on the appeal of the purpose from which we strayed rather than to wallow in self-condemnation? Answers to Kekes’s question will necessarily be psychological and have to do with the nature of human motivation. The first thing to notice is that people do, fortunately, learn from their mistakes. If we sweep all our mistakes and faltered attempts under the carpet, to concentrate instead on the ultimate prize of all-round excellence, we fail to utilise important possibilities for moral progress.
Second, ‘ultimate prizes’ tend to be less tangible in most people’s minds, and yield less easily to instant motivation, than the dangers awaiting us along the way. For instance, more people are surely deterred from smoking by the imminent danger of the lung cancer they might develop in mid-life than by their abstract contemplation of a life of mental and physical well-being: a 116
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life to which a decision to refrain from smoking might (perhaps) contribute.
We must not forget that we are seeking a naturalistic justification of shame and, more generally speaking, pridefulness, situated in the realm of the actual rather than the ideal.
But then a much more profound and serious objection awaits us: even if it is true that both shame and simple pride need to be felt towards the right people, at the right times, and in the right proportions to preserve self-respect, we cannot further assume, without argument, that this amounts to a justification of pridefulness. Pridefulness is an emotion of its own. It does, among other things, dispose a virtuous person to feel simple pride and shame at the proper time but, more than that, to feel those emotions frequently and intensely, and furthermore to be deeply concerned with receiving external recognition of worthy attainments. So, the objector might retort, the problem is not so much that the megalopsychos could not feel guilt, as well as shame, but rather that he is moved to action not only by the desire to be, but also the desire to be seen, as virtuous – a fact which does not tally with more advanced modern ideas about moral self-sufficiency and autonomy.17 To put it differently, for the prideful person ‘the desire to be acknowledged, even celebrated, as virtuous by others is internal to the desire to be virtuous’, ‘internal to his sense of who and what he morally is’. Thus, his essential relatedness to, and placement before, his peers, goes ‘all the way down’ to the very bottom of his selfhood.18
There is no denying the fact that the self of the prideful person is more other-entwined and other-identified than most modern moral theorists are willing to accept. But is that necessarily a failure? Needless to say, many recent criticisms of modern morality have focused on the very idea of a disembodied, socially rootless person who passes ‘autistic’ moral judgements in a vacuum, the basis of whose self is supposed to transcend all contingent ends. As a result, we are now happily being offered Aristotelian or Humean conceptions of our sense of self as being derived from social recognition and admiration: as essentially ‘heteronomous’ in the strict Kantian sense, but at the same time less characterless, less alienated from its counterpart social identity.19 By drawing on these insights, I want to claim that pridefulness is not only important because it is conducive to the maintenance of self-respect – nor even because most people think it vital to their sense of worth that others recognise their merits – but, more radically, that pridefulness is psychologically necessary for the formation of that very self which can be respected, namely, of our underlying sense of personhood (s. 3.1). It is in order to create and sustain one’s personhood that a person must seek recognition from others.
The critical ammunition for this view has perhaps nowhere been as convincingly presented as in the works of Hume. His view that pride produces the idea of self as a continuing agent, while at the same time arguing that pride is caused by a pleasant sensation related to the self, has 117
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puzzled many commentators. Amélie Rorty suggests that he is talking about
‘pride’ in different senses.20 This conundrum is, I think, caused by the unfortunate role ‘pride’ typically plays in ordinary language in expressing both the emotion of simple pride and of pridefulness.21 If we understand Hume to be talking about pridefulness when he describes the ‘pride’ which produces our underlying idea of self, his argument becomes more salient, and Rorty’s excellent analysis of his view even more to the point.
To have a sense of personhood, we need to have grasped the idea of things being valued and chosen by us. But to grasp that idea, we must first have grasped the idea of things being valued and chosen by others: primarily of ourselves as being valued and chosen, or disvalued and rejected, by them.
In other words, the idea of our own self as distinct from, but still essentially of the same kind as, those of others must derive from the very possibility of evaluating our self and its existential connections as equal, superior, or inferior to theirs, and such an evaluation is dependent upon external criteria both for its formation and sustenance. To quote Jerome Neu, ‘for certain purposes, who we are is fixed by who others think we are’.22 Or to put it in terms well known from modern symbolic interactionism in social psychology, it is through taking the role of the other that the self acquires its reflexive quality and attains self-consciousness.23 This early learning process then serves as a filter through which other passions and habits can also become constitutive of our agency as we gradually develop our integrity and self-respect.24 There is no choice between an autonomous and a heteronomous formation of a self to begin with and, although one can later take autonomous decisions about the content of one’s self-respect, the underlying sense of personhood needs to be constantly sustained through social comparison in order for there to be any self which can respect itself.
Pride[fulness] leads us to ‘think of our own qualities of circumstances’, Hume says; it ‘cause[s] us to form an idea of our merit and character’.25
Pridefulness is thus nothing more than (heightened) sensitivity to those features which underlie, create, and co-ordinate our moral actions and reactions, a positive conscious attunement to our social surroundings. More specifically, to be sensitive to pride and shame is to be subtly alert to those social features, those existential connections, that define one’s personhood,26
and hence to questions of moral value in so far as they relate to oneself; to seek merited recognition throughout one’s life is to be eager to sustain that locus of the moral self, one’s personhood, which enables one to pass rational value judgements and to make reasonable choices.
If my sense of myself requires me to seek recognition from others, and my social existence and social emotions are essential rather than contingent parts of my personhood, pridefulness re-emerges as a perfectly valid motivation from its repressed back-alley existence in our consciousness – for whatever proponents of modern morality have tried to teach us, the passion for glory has always remained the torch of the mind, as is seen most clearly 118
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in films and fiction. This also explains how sensitivity to one’s own pridefulness being impugned, and to that of other people doing things which are beneath their dignity – where one, so to speak, becomes ashamed on their behalf – go hand in hand in morally mature persons, binding them together in a community of feeling. Writ large, invoking the term ‘shame society’
does not any longer, if it ever did, tell against the well-foundedness of the sort of ideal of moral and emotional excellence found, for instance, in Aristotle. ‘If it ever did’ is a particularly apt reservation, for there is every reason to question whether the appreciation of the value of pridefulness disappeared entirely in modern morality. Perhaps MacIntyre is right in thinking that every human being is (and has always been) potentially a fully-fledged Aristotelian – unless corrupted by that particular kind of idea of a
‘divided self ’ so prized in many modern moral theories.27 Thus, I am inclined to believe that the man in the street may well be more open than the average philosopher to the view suggested here of pridefulness as a psychological need and a moral requirement.
4.2 The dependence upon luck
In the foregoing discussion, I have presented Aristotle’s megalopsychos as a pivotal example of a person exhibiting pridefulness. However, an objector might point out that this choice of example reveals a serious underlying defect in my account of pridefulness as a potentially virtuous emotion. The reason given would be that the pridefulness of this character type is often directed at conditions and attainments beyond his own control; he claims recognition for accomplishments which have basically dropped into his lap through strokes of luck and, conversely, experiences shame over conditions for which he cannot himself be held responsible. But does this not contradict the historically and logically powerful assumption that moral evaluations rationally require the moral responsibility of the person evaluated by others or evaluating himself – an assumption that I myself defended against various suggestions to the contrary in section 1.4? In that case, I would have been extolling the virtues of an emotion whose very logic is, in my own account, at best, amoral. Let us take some time to consider this formidable objection.
There is a passage in the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle says that the results of good fortune ‘contribute to’ megalopsychia: ‘For the well-born and powerful or rich are thought worthy of honour, since they are in a superior position, and everything superior in some good is more honoured.’ Aristotle is quick to remind us that, in reality, ‘it is only the good person who is honourable’, but still ‘anyone who has both virtue and these goods is more readily thought worthy of honour’.28 This insistence upon the necessity of external goods and moral luck contrasts sharply – or so we are often told –
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about moral goodness being wholly independent of any worldly contingencies, corruptible by moth and rust. There, a person’s good will is the only thing which matters – witness the unsurpassable virtue of the widow with her two mites in the New Testament.29
It is worth pausing at this juncture to notice that there are divided opinions as to whether ‘contributing to’ megalopsychia means, for Aristotle, that wealth, power and such things merely enhance megalopsychia or are necessary for it. Curzer favours the former interpretation.30 However, I think there are two reasons to doubt that reading. First, the megalopsychos possesses all the virtues, and that must include the virtue of magnificence: generosity on a large scale. Although the magnificent person is by definition generous, ‘generosity does not imply magnificence’, for the latter requires
‘heavy expenses’.31 Since one cannot make bricks without straw, a poor person cannot be magnificent, despite good intentions. For Aristotle, ‘heavy’
in ‘heavy expenses’ cannot mean ‘excessive’, for he elsewhere says that ‘we can do fine actions even if we do not rule earth and sea’, and that ‘even from moderate resources we can do the actions expressing virtue’.32 Nevertheless, we cannot do those actions if ‘we lack the resources’ entirely:33 the latter are more than the icing on an already-baked cake. Thus, for Aristotle, megalopsychia requires at least a minimal standard of wealth and power, a standard in fact that the majority of people in Greek society could not reach.
The second reason for disputing the claim that for Aristotle riches and other external conditions are not necessary for megalopsychia lies in his well-known discussion of how eudaimonia itself is partly dependent upon external goods: goods which are either instrumental to or constitutive of virtuous activity:
For, first of all, in many actions we use friends, wealth and political power just as we use instruments. Further, deprivation of certain
[externals] – for example, good birth, good children, beauty – mars our blessedness; for we do not altogether have the character of happiness [ eudaimonia] if we look utterly repulsive or ill-born, soli-tary or childless, and have it even less, presumably, if our children or friends are totally bad, or were good but have died.34
We must not conclude from this, however, that eudaimonia is ‘insecurely based’ and that even the most virtuous person is some ‘kind of chameleon’, changing colours constantly along with the winds of fortune. For although
‘great misfortunes’ may ‘oppress and spoil his blessedness’, he will at least accept them with equanimity and good temper, and can never become wholly miserable.35
If we are forced to judge here the merits of the two conflicting sets of background assumptions, those of Aristotle on the one hand, and those of 120
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the allegedly more ‘modern-sounding’ ones on the other, it may be helpful to start with the notion of ‘reasonable expectations’. Do we really reasonably expect a child who has had to cope with hostile and denigrating conditions in its upbringing – a child whose virtues have not been cultivated by habituation – to turn out as a paragon of moral virtue? Do we reasonably expect people at their beam-ends and/or in wholly dependent positions to be as active in contributing to the well-being of their neighbours as those who are better off and have the resources to lend a helping hand? The mere asking of such questions is, I think, enough to bring out the true nature of our expectations, whatever the Christian and Kantian strands in ‘modern morality’
command us to believe. Indeed, modern philosophers have written at considerable length about the importance of moral luck,36 although their message does not seem to have filtered through modern society or effected any radical change in the prevailing assumptions of current moral theories.
Whether we like it or not, luck – both circumstantial and resultant37 –
contributes to the overarching virtue of megalopsychia, as to all the other (particular) virtues. Our genes matter, our upbringing matters, our family matters, and so do our living conditions and the people we happen to meet in life. There is, unfortunately, little truth in the promise of virtute securus.
Virtue is no protecting shield which wards off grief and misfortune; the most great-minded and noble-hearted persons do not always die of old age after a long and happy life, surrounded by their children. Immunity to luck is not as realistic an idea as it may be a soothing one. There is no reason to reject a moral perspective out of hand simply because it accepts that fact of life. Incidentally, luck qua social standing may have mattered more for Aristotle than it would for people in modern Western societies simply because being poor or belonging to the ‘baseborn multitude’ was more of an insurmountable barrier then than it is now: nowadays, the majority of people can, for instance, afford to be ‘magnificent’, not merely ‘generous’, when such gestures are called for. Nevertheless, at any given time, the opportunities a person has for virtuous activity and the expectations people have of that person as a potential benefactor are heavily influenced by the position the individual occupies in society.
It is true that Aristotle’s moral system has been described as a paradigmatic role morality, and not entirely without good reason. But instead of automatically attaching opprobrium to that notion, we must realise that all moralities are to a certain extent, by necessity, role moralities. As we have noticed, what is morally required or expected of people – supererogatory actions apart – always depends to a large extent on what role they happen to occupy in the given circumstances (that of a mother or a daughter, an employer or an employee, etc.), roles which are either adopted by people or into which they are born. No morality can function without the notion of such role-based reasonable expectations: I can reasonably be expected to tie my child’s loose shoe laces, but surely not the shoe laces of all the children in 121
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my neighbourhood (see s. 1.4). To be sure, if one takes the view that morality is socially anchored, then there is something self-contradictory about supposing that modern morality is not. Maybe moderns have never really stopped believing that certain virtues are tightly tied to social roles.
However, there is no denying the fact that certain prominent modern moral theories have tried to sever the link to social roles, and it is precisely in those cases that they have fared the worst – witness, for instance, the so-called strong doctrine of responsibility espoused by vulgar utilitarianism, according to which we are responsible for any outcome that we could possible have altered, irrespective of costs or (factual, moral) expectations: a doctrine which is, I believe, counter-productive from the utilitarian point of view itself.38
There is a common prejudice in modern thinking that role moralities are rigid and unchangeable. However, even a somewhat rigid role moral system, such as that of the Icelandic sagas, does not preclude the possibility of social change and mobility.39 In a poor and/or a quiescent society, we may have to concede that a great number of people are excluded from the possible roles of megalopsychos. But such a concession does not imply that megalopsychia is, in principle, a ‘privileged’ virtue.40 Indeed, the concession should not be seen as an argument against the historical moral system of Aristotle, but rather as an encouragement to create such economic and social conditions as will give everyone the opportunity of achieving moral excellence.
Much of what I have said so far may perhaps be summed up by the sardonic remark from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: ‘Grub first, then ethics’.
Perhaps, also, the reader may feel that my insistence upon the necessity of moral luck for the good life is now leading me closer and closer to the temptation which I earlier promised to resist, namely, to champion Aristotle’s moral account, warts and all. All that I can say here is that such has not been my intention; nor is a general defence of ‘ancient morality’ necessary for the points that I want to establish in the present section. To recall, the complaint was that the alleged value of pridefulness undermined the assumption that moral evaluations presupposed the responsibility of the agent(s) in question, since much of what the typical prideful person is potentially proud or ashamed, that for which recognition is claimed, is beyond the bounds of that person’s emotional agency and hence responsibility. I have so far responded by trying to suggest a plausible sense in which the virtuous life is partly dependent on external circumstances, but a more direct answer to the complaint itself it still needed.
In section 1.4 I explained how evaluations of outcomes can be morally significant in various ways without constituting evaluations of the person(s) involved as moral agents. This recourse may not seem to offer much help here, for the outcomes in which prideful persons take pride and for which they expect/demand recognition are specifically outcomes that affect their assessment – and do/should affect the assessments of others – of themselves 122
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as moral agents. A man, for example, thinks all the better of himself for having given most of the lottery prize he won to charity, and expects to be duly respected for his generosity. In other words, he construes the gift as a credit to himself qua generous person, not only as an abstract moral credit underscoring the value of generosity, the educational importance of teaching people to remember those in need, etc. But then the question remains both whether the alleged value of pridefulness does not discriminate against those less fortunate, since they will have less reason to be prideful simply in virtue of their being less fortunate, and also, more generally, whether it undermine the evaluation-requires-responsibility assumption, since the man who won the lottery prize was after all not morally responsible for the ‘manna’ which came into his possession ‘from heaven’ and gave him a chance to be generous. How can an emotion so heavily dependent upon external circumstance, even serendipity, count as a potential moral virtue?
To complicate matters even more, Aristotle starts his famous discussion of moral responsibility with the uncompromising claim that virtue ‘is about feelings and actions’ and that these receive praise or blame only ‘when they are voluntary, but pardon, sometimes even pity, when they are involuntary’.41 The same idea is pressed repeatedly, for example, when he says that
‘we never censure someone if nature causes his ugliness’ but only if it is due to ‘his lack or training or attention’.42 But how does this insistence upon personal responsibility square with Aristotle’s remark cited earlier in the section that the well-born and powerful or rich are thought more worthy of honour than the rest, since they are in a superior position, and everything superior in some good is more honoured? (Notice that Aristotle must here be talking about deserved honour, that is, honour bestowed only upon those who morally deserve it.)
The present book does not constitute an exegesis of Aristotle. However, let me in the following suggest a way in which we can make sense of these apparently disharmonious claims. If it is found to conflict incurably with something else that Aristotle said or ‘really meant’, then so much the worse for him but not necessarily for us, since what I am interested in here is a defence of pridefulness rather than a defence of Aristotle.
Consider four men: P1, P2, P3, and P4. P1– P3 have all come into large fortunes, perhaps through inheritance, perhaps a lottery prize. P4, on the other hand, is poor. P1 has done a lot of good with his wealth to benefit others, P2 has not started to utilise his fortune for good deeds, but he has at least preserved it and not let the wealth spoil him morally by leading him into wastefulness or debauchery. P3 has squandered all his wealth and debased himself. In a certain significant sense, P1 has not only more to be proud of than P2 and P3 (which seems rather obvious) but also more than P4. Perhaps P4 would have become just as worthy of pride and respect if he had had the same opportunities as the other three, and he should clearly not 123
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be blamed or blame himself for not doing what was beyond his power.
However, he should not be praised or praise himself either, for he did not have a chance to prove his mettle. Perhaps P4 would in fact have fallen into similar temptations as P3 if he had been in the latter’s shoes, even if we deem P4 in advance, in light of his good character, to have stood a good chance of coping well with a windfall: we know from ample anecdotal evidence and a famous Latin proverb that corruption of the best can become the worst. We also have historical reasons to take seriously the warning that all power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Aristotle had, no doubt, something similar in mind when he warned us of how hard it is ‘to bear the results of good fortune suitably’, and how easily it leads to arrogance, disdain of those less fortunate, and even ‘wanton aggression’.43
P2 has confessedly not done much good yet with his abundant resources
– he has not pulled his weight morally to the same extent as P1 and has thus less to be proud of. But being uncorrupted by his good fortune makes him a candidate for one kind of praise which is not applicable to P4: he has at least proved himself to be an exception to Aristotle’s rule of thumb that people in power are more likely to succumb to indecent actions that those of moderate means.44 In this way we can make sense of Aristotle’s claim that those in superior positions are worthy of more honour than the rest, as long as they remain morally uncorrupted, since they are, because of their very position, more open to err.
Some people use their resources badly (such as P3), others use them well (such as P1), yet others make no use of them at present but at least preserve them for prospective future use (such as P2). And then there are those who simply lack the resources (such as P4). The interpretation that praise (internal and external) is truly due to P1 and P2, as their pridefulness demands (given that they are prideful persons), in virtue of the way in which they have handled their resources, does not discriminate morally against P4. Although not a candidate for praise, P4 does not shoulder any blame either for not having handled well those resources which were simply not there. If he experiences shame merely because of his poverty, then that emotion is irrational and should be uprooted. From the above considerations we can also divine that the evaluation-requires-responsibility assumption remains intact since P1– P2 are only praised for outcomes for which they are ‘jointly responsible’.45 They are not supposed to take pride in or accept recognition for their abundance of resources as such but rather for what they did with them. That is also why P3 has a good reason to be ashamed, whereas P4 has not.
Other kinds of problematic cases may remain, such as when we, as prideful persons, take pride in or experiences shame over things which do not seem to be our personal doing but rather those of the social group to which we belong (extended family, friends, nation, etc.). However, I think 124
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that these can be rather easily accounted for as cases of shared identity; we often feel that our heritage and social groups are important constituents of what we are,46 and frequently not without good reason either. After all, we play some part (however small) in influencing the activities of the social groups to which we belong, and we can sometimes be correctly blamed for not having done more to put our neighbours and relatives right. The prideful person, however, is irrational if the shame experienced concerns conditions which are not subject to the person’s control, such as the naturally caused irredeemable ugliness that figured in Aristotle’s above example.
Or is this wrong? In his explication of the value of pride in identity politics, Jerome Neu challenges the view that even partial, or Aristotle’s ‘joint’, responsibility is a condition of pride. ‘If responsibility were a condition of pride, a politics of pride in group identity, where the characteristic defining group identity […] was not itself something deliberately chosen, would make no sense.’47 Two things may be said in response to Neu’s claim. The first is that I think Neu misrepresents the pride at work in identity politics as referring primarily to simple pride (‘pride ’, to recall a barbarous expres-1
sion from s. 4.1) or pridefulness (‘pride ’), when it is much more easily 3
understood as self-respect (‘pride ’). A black man, for instance, acquires 2
pride qua black person through beginning to respect his background and himself and adopt certain principles, views, and values that he previously thought of as degrading. ‘Black pride’ in that sense does not bring with it any problems of tracing a chain of credit back to a non-responsible self.
More generally, while I agree with Neu that ‘nearness to self ’ distinguishes pride (that is, both simple pride and pridefulness) from mere happiness or joy and that taking credit for a valuable object can expand our identity (be
‘self-enhancing’),48 he is, I believe, too generous in his understanding of how claiming group membership is a way of claiming the associated value for oneself. Consider his example of the ‘we’re number 1!’ chant of ecstatic football fans around the world. The fan who has cheered the team on to victory, bought tickets to its matches and so forth, can of course unproblematically feel proud of the team’s success, and prideful with respect to the recognition it gets. But what about the only person on a desert island who suddenly decides to become a fan of the San Francisco Forty-Niners football team, without ever having shown an interest in the team before, and subsequently, upon hearing via transistor radio about the team’s victories, claims to feel proud? What grounds do we have for saying that this person is experiencing the emotion of pride as distinct from simply that of joy? None, it seems to me – the person is surely better described as joyful than proud –
for the kind of group membership required for taking pride in the group’s successes cannot be claimed simply on a whim. It must require some minimal effort, some minimal participation – that is, some responsibility, however small and partial.
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I conclude from all of this that the objection which has been scrutinised in the present section leaves my account of the value of pridefulness untouched. Importantly, I think that this does not only apply to pridefulness as some sort of an ideal emotion, which real people rarely if ever experience, but rather to the earthbound emotion of pridefulness attributable to Aristotle’s famous character type, the megalopsychos. However, while I frequently have taken my cue from Aristotle in the foregoing argumentation, I repeat that it is meant to rest on more than textual evidence from his writings.
4.3 The extra value of the extraordinary
In section 3.2 I briefly mentioned as an example of the specific suspicions hovering over Aristotle’s account of megalopsychia the complaint that the megalopsychos is inactive and unneighbourly. There I responded somewhat abruptly that such a complaint both illicitly assumes that opportunities for spectacular actions – actions in which the megalopsychos allegedly revels –
are rare, and fails to take notice of the textual evidence for the constant readiness of the megalopsychos to lend a helping hand to neighbours.
However, these charges might reappear at a deeper level in the context of our present exploration of pridefulness as a morally valuable emotion. For it seems explicitly in Aristotle’s account that the pridefulness of a supremely virtuous person can only be satisfied through extraordinary deeds. In other words, some spectacular heroics seem to be required for such a person to deserve honour. That, in turn, might, according to a possible objector, be taken to mean that the ideal life of a prideful individual is one of sporadic bursts of great achievements interspersed with extended periods of indolence, periods which are only interrupted when the person starts to suffer unbearably from what nowadays is mockingly referred to as LDS: limelight deprivation syndrome. The implications would then be pretty similar to the ones that I tried to rebut in the previous section: that pridefulness is, at best, a privileged virtue – this time not, as in 4.2, of those born with silver spoons in their mouths, but rather as a virtue of superhuman heroes. How does the demand for Herculean heroism square with the prevailing assumption of most moral theories (and not only modern ones) that moral perfection does not necessarily require extraordinary situations for its realisation, but rather that we should perform deeds in ordinary situations of life extraordinarily well?
The demand for heroism in a fully virtuous life is often thought to follow from Aristotle’s exploration of the whole gamut of conditions of moral character: from bestiality (at worst), through vice and incontinence to continence, virtue and ‘heroic’ or ‘divine’ virtue (at best). Even though he says that both the extreme conditions of bestiality and divinity are ‘rare among human beings’,49 that remark may be seen to imply that there will be few 126
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people exhibiting megalopsychia around at any given time, rather than that megalopsychia does not require heroic virtue. Now, since my aim in the present book is not to justify pridefulness as an emotion realisable only (or only to full extent) by Herculean heroes, but rather by people like you and me, I either have to reject Aristotle’s account of heroism or his suggestion that such heroism can only be displayed in rare, ‘spectacular’ circumstances by a limited number of unique individuals. I have no intention of challenging the thesis that the greatest achievements merit, and indeed foster, the greatest respect, so let me opt for the second course: I think that there are opportunities in everybody’s life for great achievements – ‘heroics’ if you like
– opportunities which may be chosen and seized upon with relish, but which at least equally are often thrust upon us by external circumstances whether we ask for them or not.
The virtue of courage is a good place to start. People tend to take pride in their own courage and feel ashamed when they find themselves showing a yellow streak. The prideful person will be highly concerned with exhibiting courage in the appropriate situations; not only will such situations not be avoided, but they may even be positively sought out.
Subsequently, the prideful person will claim recognition for not having run away when that may have seemed, to a less virtuous person, the most alluring recourse. Recall that, as before, I am considering pridefulness as a characteristic emotion in an otherwise virtuous person. The question is whether pridefulness complements and completes virtuousness, or whether it detracts from it. The obvious fact that a vicious person can also be prideful, and that such a person will utilise courage for evil purposes, need not concern us here.
It is salutary at this point to bring in Aristotle’s explication of courage, perhaps more fittingly translated into English as ‘bravery’ since Aristotle’s prime example of courage is that of the brave soldier. Why is it that the kind of bravery Aristotle considers to engender the highest esteem is, (in)famously, that of the intrepid soldier ‘facing a fine death’ in battle? Why is only he ‘brave to the fullest extent’?50 It is easy to understand Aristotle’s argument to the effect that fearlessness is to be admired more in proportion to the seriousness of the frightening condition, with prospective death being the most frightening of them all. However, it is more difficult to understand his insistence that fearlessness towards death ‘on the sea or in sickness’ must be relegated to secondary importance vis-à-vis the primary example of death on the battlefield. Among the considerations Aristotle invokes for the prospect of death in the latter instance being a greater danger, and overcoming it a source of more profound pride than ever realisable by seafarers and the sick, is that fearlessness based on the positive utilisation of strength in order to achieve a potentially realisable goal (victory in battle) is ‘finer’
than the equanimity or negative surrender to the winds of fortune typically displayed by fearless seafarers and patients.51
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To avert this conclusion we do not, I think, need to go back on the assumption that actual achievements – not only the purity of intentions –
matter for moral assessment (see previous section). What we should question instead is Aristotle’s curious underestimation of the ‘glory’ of the actual measures taken, in typical cases, by courageous seafarers and patients. They do not simply sit back and wait fearlessly for the powers of the ocean or the disease to do their work. The brave seaman tries to the very end to rescue his ship, or at least as many of his shipmates as possible, often jeopardising or sacrificing his own life in the bargain. The brave patient positively fights the disease as long as any hope of recovery remains, and even after that has become a lost cause, tries to safeguard the interests of family and friends, both financially (by arranging affairs in the best possible order) and psychologically (by comforting them and trying to lessen their grief over their imminent loss). A brave soldier may surely contribute gloriously to the defence of a city, but the brave seafarer and patient may also save a considerable number of people from loss: death, financial setbacks, and mental suffering. It is, indeed, difficult for us moderns to envisage more pivotal examples of heroic virtue than that shown by people fighting disasters and disease at all costs. It does not help here to come to Aristotle’s rescue by suggesting that there is a time-relative factor built into our assessments of particular kinds of courage, and that because of the admiration for the belligerent acts of the brave soldier in ancient Greece, they would have carried more weight morally there than they do nowadays. For it seems to be less, rather than more, heroic to perform great deeds if they are immediately highly prized: an act of heroism loses value in proportion to the costs incurred by the agent in refraining from performing it – witness the saying that many would be cowards if they dared to.
We may conclude, then, that it is relatively easy to sever the link that Aristotle wanted to uphold between the value of pridefulness in the megalopsychoi and his belief that those examples of a standard virtue, such as bravery, which merit the highest regard are confined to extraordinary circumstances, for instance, on the battlefield. Rejection of his empirical claims here do not amount to a rejection of the underlying account of pridefulness, any more than the rejection of his claim that students between the ages of 18 and 21 are best advised to concentrate on little else than physical training amounts to a rejection of his general theory of education. Aristotle made many factual errors, but we have, after all, had 2,300 years for the gradual, subtle correction of those.
Incidentally, Aristotle does not even seem to have been fully consistent in his belief that supreme virtue (namely, megalopsychia) requires bravery in its war-related sense. For why else does he take Socrates as an example of a megalopsychos? Surely it is for his ‘equanimity amid the vicissitudes of life’,52 rather than for his heroics on the battlefield, although Socrates seems 128
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admittedly to have been in his element there also.53 One of the things which characterises the megalopsychos is, indeed, for Aristotle, the ability to bear
‘many severe misfortunes with good temper’.54 Perhaps, if Aristotle had written his analysis of bravery today, he would have singled out for special consideration and admiration in the young the courage to withstand peer pressure; few accomplishments seem to be more urgently needed for young people to learn to take pride in than that of daring to ‘be different’. For their elders, situations calling for great courage seldom need to be specially sought out; nature has usually provided ample unsolicited tests of fortitude along the course of a lifetime.
To abandon the claim that extraordinary circumstances are required for the satisfaction of pridefulness is not the same as rejecting out and out the extra value of the extraordinary. There is no denying the fact that heroic achievements are particularly valuable and respected, no less today than in the distant past. We need only to recall the typical media reaction when a fire worker rescues an endangered child – or even a cat – from a burning house at considerable risk to himself: our hearts beat faster and our minds are inspired. The point of this section has simply been that in real life we all face situations where we have the opportunity to prove our mettle. That is, the contingencies, and frequent exigencies, of our everyday existence will make ample room for extraordinary acts that merit and win the most golden approbation. Incidentally, one of the problems with the meek, as opposed to the prideful, is their tendency to shy away from even attempting great deeds. While engaged in such deeds, the ‘hero’ will, needless to say, have to be selective: we hardly blame Nelson Mandela for not having spent much time alleviating the difficulties of dyslexic or autistic children while heroically spending all his time and energy on fighting apartheid. However, being (by necessity) selective is a far cry from being indolent and inactive.
The fact that few people in modern times find Aristotle’s over-concentration on the bravery of soldiers morally warranted,55 does not undermine the general truth that if people have refused to face danger in times of need, when they should have risen to the occasion, their proper moral reaction should be one of shame. The link between heroic acts and pridefulness thus cannot, and should not, be completely severed. As John Casey correctly notes, the best ‘primitive’ model of courage is of a small child that hurts itself but refuses to cry: it refuses to cry because it does not want to seem a baby, because it is ashamed to cry, because it is prideful.
Courage, or for that matter any virtue which requires at times heroic manifestations, essentially involves, Casey says, ‘one’s having a picture of oneself in relation to others, having a sense of one’s place in the world, taking seriously one’s reputation’.56 As I have presented pridefulness in the preceding sections, this is both educationally, psychologically, and morally true.
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4.4 Moral equality, modesty, and humility
A quick search utilising a popular search engine on the World Wide Web disclosed, in March 2000, 200 instances of the word ‘pridefulness’ in 166
distinct sources. Interestingly enough, most of the sources were religious sites where pridefulness turned out, on a closer look, to be invoked and condemned as a symbol of conceit and haughtiness. The common opprobrium attached to this notion nowadays (that is, to pridefulness and to pride when that term is used to denote pridefulness) is no doubt heavily influenced by Christian ideas about hubris being the radix omnium malorum – the root of all evil – and Kantian ones about the basic equality of moral worth among persons, each one being an irreplaceable subject in a kingdom of ends.
Recall, however, that the historical character type exhibiting pridefulness, which has so far served as my main source of inspiration, the megalopsychos, is modest by definition. That is, he does not over-estimate his merits; he thinks himself worthy of much only because he is worthy of much. This character type is starkly contrasted with those who over-estimate their merits: the arrogant and the vain. Aristotle also contrasts the megalopsychoi with the pusillanimous: the unduly meek and humble who underestimate their merits.
Now, if the prideful person is, conceptually, to be placed in the middle between those individuals who exhibit hubris and haughtiness, on the one hand, and those (existent or non-existent ones) who undervalue their standing, on the other, we may ask why pridefulness is so frequently equated with one of its excesses – witness the results of my Web search. Is there some logical or linguistic confusion at work here? Obviously, one of the reasons may be that the word ‘pridefulness’ means the same as ‘arrogance’ for some people; they might then modify their account if they abided by my specification of the underlying concept in section 3.3. Another source of confusion is undoubtedly the frequent conflation of the terms ‘modesty’ and ‘humility’, even in academic circles; it is often not entirely clear whether people (lay people and scholars alike) are speaking about non-overestimation of merits (which I call here ‘modesty’) or underestimation (here ‘humility’) when they invoke either of the two terms in question.57 The third reason might be the (not so implausible) psychological belief, apparently held by many, that the balance of prideful modesty is difficult to maintain, and that a person trying to strike such a balance is liable to err on the side of arrogance rather than humility. Even so, a realistic, high self-estimate is fully compatible with a low-key demeanour,58 and a true megalopsychos has learnt not to flaunt his excellence, being free from any inclination to marvel, or even to talk about himself.59
However, there are much more profound and morally significant reasons for the widespread disapproval of those persons who pridefully think them-130
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selves superior to others, believing themselves to have, in fact, more merit.
Let me in the following consider three such reasons and the respective objections to my account of pridefulness as a moral value which they entail.
The first objection states that true modesty requires – pace Aristotelian morality – humility. A religious version of this objection is that all human achievements fade and dwindle when compared to the omnipotence and unlimited goodness of God. Thus, the prideful modesty of the megalopsychos signals a vice qua lack of awareness of the gulf dividing man and God.
Howard Curzer has tried to rebut this objection by insisting that the transvaluation of megalopsychia from Aristotelian virtue to Christian vice is wrong. Pridefulness, according to Christianity, is taking oneself to be more worthy than one really is, but the megalopsychoi, who think themselves worthy of greater things than others, are ex hypothesi really worthy of them.
Thus, Christian doctrine could not define megalopsychoi as prideful but rather as non-existent, there being no persons around satisfying Aristotle’s criteria (with Jesus, perhaps, constituting an exception).60 However, Curzer’s defusing of this transvaluation does not really work, for Aristotle is not depicting an idealised character type which may or may not exist. He is demarcating the characteristics of certain existing persons who take themselves to be (and are according to Aristotle) morally superior to others.
Hence, what the megalopsychoi understand as correct self-knowledge must, for Christians, constitute a vice qua blameworthy false beliefs. Incidentally, Curzer is not alone in wanting to assimilate Aristotle to more ‘modern’
accounts in some ways; much of what passes nowadays for Aristotelian ethics is highly contrived in order to achieve such an assimilation – witness the already-mentioned elision of megalopsychia from much of the current work on Aristotle.
Since the present book has little to say about theological questions, let us focus instead on a common secular version of the modesty-requires-humility objection. The traditional message there is: although you may run faster than others, climb higher mountains or solve more complicated mathematical puzzles, you are definitely inferior to them in some other respects, for no one excels in everything. To be on the safe side, it is thus better to underrate one’s achievements than to overrate them, that is, to be humble.61 This will, then, be the main reason why even non-religious moderns tend to view the insistence of the megalopsychos upon his own superior standing, as well as his proclivity to pull rank, negatively; he must surely, like everyone else, have his weak spots.
A second, but related kind, of objection has been advanced by Ben-Ze’ev.
He claims that truly modest people evaluate their fundamental human worth as similar to that of other people, thus exhibiting a kind of egalitarianism: This evaluation rests on a belief in the common nature and fate of human beings and on a belief that this commonality dwarfs other 131
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differences. Modest people believe that (a) with regard to the fundamental aspect of human life, their worth as a human being is similar to that of other human beings, and (b) all human beings have a positive worth which should be respected.62
Ben-Ze’ev does not think that modesty requires the underestimation of one’s worth – in this way the second objection distinguishes itself from the first –
but he claims that true modesty requires us to view our (realistic) judgements of a superior position as being inevitably relative to a particular evaluative framework. And the value of one such framework (excellence in physics, for example) must not be exaggerated in comparison with other evaluative frameworks, especially given the fundamental equality of general human worth. Prideful modesty, such as that experienced and displayed by the megalopsychos, is ‘problematic’ precisely because ‘there will always be people superior to us in some respects’.63
Stephen Hare has launched a memorable counter-attack on these two kinds of objections. He first asks us to notice that the examples which are supposed to show that no one is best at everything are often of runners, mountain-climbers, or mathematicians. But what if someone has reached a higher echelon of morality, is more virtuous than others?64 This question presents the objector with a dilemma: either the answer is that nobody is, in the end, more virtuous than others. But that seems to be highly counter-intuitive; was Mother Theresa not a morally better person than, say, Saddam Hussein? Or the answer must be that although A may be morally better than B, A does not run as fast or climb such high mountains, or whatever. But the problem with that answer is that moral worth really does seem to provide us with an unoverridable criterion of human worth. If a man is a villain, it adds in no way to his human worth that he happens to run fast (quite the contrary: he may then be able to escape more easily from the scenes of his crimes). These considerations seem to rebut the points of both the first and second objections in so far as these are directed against what I have here referred to as the ‘prideful modesty’ of the megalopsychoi, for their realistic self-assessment is of themselves as paragons of moral virtue, not as physicists, mountaineers, or anything else. The second objection could be supplemented by the claim that it is morally and/or psychologically impossible to be virtuous at all times, that moral people can still learn from others, that they should respect others, and refuse to see others as ‘less human’, in any sense, than themselves. However, all of these claims can be accommodated – and even the stronger one, which I suggest later, that people are, in a certain sense, of equal worth as (potentially) moral persons – without relinquishing the view that assessments of moral virtue take place within a single
‘evaluative framework’, and that within such a framework one can realistically and modestly deem oneself to be – on the whole, at least – more virtuous than another.
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A third kind of objection has recently been suggested by A. T. Nuyen.
Aware of the perils of the first and second objection, Nuyen does not find fault with the pridefully modest person remaining non-humble, or non-alert to alternative evaluative frameworks. His point is, rather, that truly modest persons know how to put their achievements, including moral ones, in perspective by taking into account the wider circumstances in which those achievements are made. In other words, because it is unlikely that a person can accomplish something extraordinary entirely single-handedly, true modesty gives ‘due considerations to all the factors that contribute to one’s success, other than one’s own effort’. ‘Not spreading the credit around is claiming for oneself a disproportionate amount’, and thus true modesty precludes pridefulness which constantly claims respect and recognition for the agent specially.65
This is a formidable objection to certain possible accounts of pridefulness: namely, those which would suppose that the objects of pridefulness can properly be ones for which the agent bears no responsibility – being ‘born’
with a kind heart, having had a fortune fall into one’s lap, etc. However, on the account of pridefulness defended in section 4.2, proper pridefulness only concerns those achievements which come within the purview of the agent’s responsibility and sustained exercise of moral choice, the value the agent adds to the fruits of moral luck whether by generously spreading them around or, at very least, by keeping them unspoiled. There seems nothing contradictory about the idea of fully appreciating the contribution made by external circumstances and other persons to one’s virtuous acts and emotions, and yet remaining pridefully modest, that is, realistically believing and cherishing that one has more moral worth, in virtue of what one has felt and done of one’s own accord, than those less virtuous.66
Perhaps the modern obsession with people’s equal human worth is, à la Nietzsche, characteristic of the degeneracy of modern morality. Or perhaps it is simply, à la Bernard Williams, one more example of people conflating what they think they think with what they really think (see s. 4.1). In any case, Aristotelian assumptions about the different levels of people’s moral excellence seem here more realistic and productive: furnishing us, for example, with the necessary conditions for moral educators’ ability to teach their protégés by example. Otherwise, the latter would have little to learn from the former. Notably, such assumptions of moral inequality do not undermine many other ideals of equality which we moderns tend to cherish
– for to grant that people are of unequal moral worth as persons, depending on their demonstrated level of moral attainment, is not necessarily tantamount to considering them of unequal worth as moral persons.67 For instance, there are undoubtedly sound utilitarian reasons for giving all people, as potential moral agents, a chance to prove their mettle (by providing equal opportunities of education, giving strangers the benefit of the doubt in human relations, etc.), and by respecting their ‘human rights’
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(such as considering people innocent until proven guilty). Logically, there is nothing wrong with the idea of people, who happen to be of unequal moral worth as persons, being treated equally, for moral reasons, in various spheres of life.
Indeed, a certain moral egalitarianism of this kind can be culled from Aristotle’s insistence that everybody should be judged on merit: that is, people should not be discriminated against for no good reason. The scale used to weigh different persons must be the same, although the outcomes will as a matter of fact be different. In this sense, there might be some reason to modify the claim made somewhat uncritically at the end of section 2.3
that Aristotle’s ethics is elitist. If we define elitism as the view that different individuals are to count differently in moral or political judgement, then it would be helpful to distinguish between two kinds of elitism: strong and weak. According to strong elitism, people will, by necessity, count differently in virtue of some necessary characteristics; there is no need for a second look. This was evidently not Aristotle’s view; rather, he thought that certain groups of people (women, slaves, manual workers, etc.) do, as a matter of fact, have less moral worth because of their limited capabilities. Such weak elitism is, however, always open to revision in light of new factual evidence, since the scale to weigh people’s moral worth remains one and the same for everyone, and there is no a priori assumption of difference.
To take stock at the end of this chapter, none of the objections raised in the present or previous sections seems to have undermined the moral value of pridefulness. Nor has any anachronism of Aristotle’s ‘old’ moral outlook, from which many of my arguments and examples stem, been revealed. If anything, the discussion has highlighted the contemporaneity of this outlook – perhaps reinforcing Williams’s insight that in our ethical situation we are now ‘more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime’,68 or perhaps simply underlining the fact that basic elements in human nature (s. 2.1) remain the same, irrespective of time and place.
The modern alternative of rejecting the value of pridefulness seems neither ennobling nor educative, neither pleasurable nor useful. Quite the opposite, modern morality’s denial of our right to take pride in our own moral achievements, our right to comport ourselves with the grace associated with a superior moral position – should we have reached it – and our right to demand an acknowledgement of such standing from others, may threaten our self-respect, and more fundamentally, if Hume is right, also threaten our sense of self. In the well-chosen words of Tara Smith, the demand for humility, or at least for self-effacing, rather than prideful, modesty, ‘is likely to cripple one’s morale. By puncturing one’s commitment to any purpose, it will deflate one’s energy, enthusiasm, and appetite for action’.69 In a recent article, G. F. Schueler echoes the opposite and more prevailing view: ‘The fact that […] a person cares about whether others are 134
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impressed with her for her accomplishments reveals, as one might say, a certain hollowness of self.’70 If the arguments of the present chapter hold good, we are able to turn this received wisdom upside down and say that it is indifference to, rather than concern with, merited recognition that reveals hollowness: the hollowness of a person lacking self-respect and even personhood.
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5.1 Jealousy as a type of envy
Jealousy constitutes a standard ‘negative’ emotion (see s. 1.4), that is, an emotion to which opprobrium has typically been attached. According to the traditional view, shared by philosophers, psychologists, and the general public alike, jealousy is the sign, if not of an irredeemably corrupt mind, then at least of an excessively possessive and insecure character. At best, jealous persons are considered to be suffering from a pathological condition standing in need of a cure; at worst, they are stigmatised as blackguards.
Some have even wanted to claim that jealousy is the most evil of emotions: the one rightly exciting the least pity in us for persons experiencing it.
During the recent renascence of emotion research, jealousy has aroused special interest, and as a result, some modifications of this traditional view have been suggested. One is more likely to read nowadays than before that, as opposed to envy, jealousy is ‘not as objectionable as it is generally made out to be’;1 it does not deserve its ‘unqualified opprobrium’,2 or that envy is at least ‘the more vicious of the two’.3 In the present chapter, I aim to strike an even more violent blow at the received wisdom by defending the thesis that jealousy can in many cases be justified as a rational and a morally fitting emotional response. My eventual claim, in section 5.4, will be that, so far from necessarily being a weakness or a vice, jealousy – as a mean between two excesses – is to be considered a virtue to which pride of place should be given in a well-rounded life: that experiencing jealousy at the right time, toward the right people, and in the right amount constitutes an essential element of human eudaimonia. I have already advanced a case for pridefulness as a value in human life; now I propose to show that jealousy is a necessary condition of pridefulness, and hence that it both acts as an important guardian of self-respect and also contributes, at a deeper level, to the formation and maintenance of personhood. The emotion of jealousy in this sense is a value which should be fostered rather than discouraged in moral education, an issue upon the practicalities of which I expand in a separate section (s. 6.4).
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As a prelude to the moral justification of jealousy in section 5.4, the present section argues for a new conceptual framework which affords a serviceable way of looking at jealousy and its relationship to envy. More specifically, I argue that, contrary to the general consensus in previous accounts, jealousy is best seen as a type of envy.4 Section 5.2 compares and contrasts my analysis with various other views, and section 5.3 then probes the nature of sexual jealousy, the special features of which have often diverted attention from the more fundamental conceptual issues at hand.
As noted above, the eventual goal of this chapter is to offer an antidote to the traditionally negative evaluation of jealousy among moral philosophers, psychologists, and educators. However, a start toward this goal can only be made by relocating the place of jealousy within the larger conceptual terrain and thereby securing an improved understanding of what this emotion really is.5 The need for a ‘critical naturalistic revision’ (s. 1.3) of this terrain, as a prelude to further inquiry, is extremely important as people’s opinions about the extensions of the basic terms in question seem to be highly divided. For instance, an informal survey that I recently conducted among fifty first-year students in nursing and occupational therapy, where they were asked to write down standard examples of envy and jealousy and then to define briefly the two concepts, revealed a confusing disarray of ideas. Many of the examples given of envy happened to involve cases of what I, below, call ‘emulation’ rather than ‘envy’, and for jealousy a whole gamut of characteristics appeared, ranging from jealousy being ‘more subjective’ and ‘more long-lasting’ than envy, to being ‘less personal’ and
‘more short-lived’. These results confirmed my hunch that in order to say anything morally constructive about envy and jealousy, more than a little trimming of the ragged edges of ordinary language would be required: trimming which aims at conceptual clarification and economy, coherence, and serviceability, while still trying to retain as many considered judgements of laymen and experts as possible. Most importantly, we must, I realised, explore the conceptual terrain from a wide perspective – encompassing the area of such surrounding emotions as indignation, anger, and Schadenfreude
– in order to understand how jealousy can most profitably fit into the system. What we find below is that some of those emotions are even more closely related than has previously been noticed.
Let me use as my starting point a thought experiment that brings out, I believe, all the significant variations of the concept of envy and helps us to think about what exactly distinguishes them from each other. This thought experiment is not offered here in lieu of a thorough conceptual analysis. The arguments for dividing up the conceptual terrain in the way I propose will gradually present themselves during the course of my discussion in this and the following section, especially when my proposal clashes with alternative conceptualisations. For expository purposes, however, I think that this is a good way to start.
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Suppose that during the Klondike gold rush, C, a mine owner, gives two portions of his claim, appearing to be of equal size and promise, to his two sons, A and B. They both start digging, and as it happens, B, after having worked on his shaft for a while, begins to turn out wagonloads of rich ore. Meanwhile, the shafts worked by A prove to be barren. A not only covets B’s gold, that is, he is not only ‘concerned with having something’, which is characteristic of simple covetousness, but also, he is ‘concerned with someone who has something’,6 that is, he envies B his superior position: his riches and status qua successful gold prospector. The envy involves A’s wishing that B could be deprived of his gold in some way and, additionally, that it would come into A’s possession – or at least that B’s relative advantage over A in this respect be somehow eliminated. Let us then envisage some variations in our scenario: