Abstract
I am very grateful to Rachel Barney and Christian Miller for their helpful and challenging comments on my book, Emotion and Virtue (Princeton, 2020). My response aims first to clarify and then to fortify my position on some of the many excellent points they raise in this symposium.
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Notes
I borrowed this label from David Pears, “Courage as a mean,” in A. Rorty (ed.) Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Pears labels danger as the ‘counter-goal’ in courage, and distinguishes both from its ‘internal’ goal of nobility. However, nobility is not distinctive to courage, but common across all virtues. We shall come on to the misunderstanding below.
The wide sense of being worthwhile combines the narrow sense with some position on the reciprocity of the virtues. It is thereby bound up with Barney’s first puzzle. Since that is the other puzzle we shall engage, I concentrate on the narrow sense for the time being.
To that extent, ‘counter-goal’ is inapposite as a fixed label for danger.
Of course, this proposition is controversial. On the traditional view, courage can only be exhibited in pursuit of permissible goals. This controversy is entwined with Barney’s first puzzle, too, since it runs together with the debate over the reciprocity of the virtues. However, even on the traditional view, the content of the external goal can still vary widely, which is all that matters here.
Sometimes this distinction will be hard to make out. Was the defiance of the student who blocked the tank column’s path in Tiananmen Square a momentary gesture, without temporal extension?
In the book, I lay out Pears’ account (op. cit.) of an alternative psychological mechanism for exercising courage and defend its coherence. But for present purposes, it is irrelevant whether the everyday mechanism is compulsory or not. (It remains relevant to Barney’s second puzzle.)
Of course, some of these goals can be held simultaneously (notably, the first two can, as can the last three). Hence, the goals of a given courageous act need not be singular either.
This arguably means that when endurance in the face of danger fails to be narrowly worthwhile, it is not so much ‘rash’ as it is misguided. All the same, it is still not courage.
J. Lear, Radical Hope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Thanks to the radical form Lear gives it, the second proposition can be rejected while retaining the vast bulk of his moving account of the extent of the cultural apocalypse suffered by the Crow. For one way to thread this needle, see Emotion and Virtue, pp. 358–9, endnote 18.
Strictly speaking, the evaluative dimension of courage has two parts, corresponding to the narrow and wide senses of ‘worthwhile.’ To diagnose the fallacy in the reciprocity argument, one only has to recognise that some extra capacities are called for here. It is not necessary to settle precisely what they are. But on my view, these capacities include cleverness and supplementary moral knowledge. I discuss this aspect of my view in replying to Christian Miller (see notes 18 and 19 below).
C. Miller, Honesty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), chapters 3 and 5.
Specifically, it is structured so that each subject is not only placed in a plurality of eliciting situations, but this plurality is constituted by a variety of different situations, each designed to elicit a manifestation of the same trait (in this case, honesty). That is what is needed to investigate cross-situational consistency. By contrast, in the studies to which Harman and Doris pay more attention, subjects are each only placed in a single eliciting situation. For the full significance of this contrast, see Emotion and Virtue, ch. 5, §§5–6.
Contrary to Miller, though, and to convention, I do not think the liability of virtue prescriptions to being defeated like this should be expressed in terms of their being supererogatory. I reject the classification of virtues as supererogatory in chapter 11, §6.
Miller’s comment focuses on five canonical functions, whereas his book considers seven. I shall follow his comment, while setting aside the ‘justification’ function, which I do not accept.
So there are still two grounds for rejecting Miller’s first option.
For discussion of this claim, including its two caveats, see my chapter 9, part II, §§2–3. Among other things, I argue that the reliability of an agent’s evaluation of the danger at hand (including its magnitude) is secured by their having a rectified fear trait.
Here we see the gap between the narrow and wide senses of being worthwhile.
In chapter 7, I argue at length that the combination of cleverness and supplementary moral knowledge suffices to correct the moral errors to which ordinary sympathy is liable under the minimal moral decency standard. On my account, ordinary sympathy plays much of the role assigned to natural compassion in the Aristotelian picture reviewed earlier, including the end-setting function. (Likewise, ordinary fear plays some of this role in relation to natural courage, though less of it.)
The fact that my account of the act prescriptions entailed by virtue terms applies without amendment to cases like these, where the prescriptions are defeated, reinforces the point made earlier that (K-occurrent) and its analogues were always meant to be read in pro tanto terms.
For a fuller discussion of the dialectic sketched sparingly here and below, see chapter 12, §§6–7. My discussion there works with the example of compassion, rather than honesty.
For helpful comments on an earlier version of this reply, I am grateful to Rachel Barney and Christian Miller. Many thanks as well to Massimo Renzo for proposing the symposium in the first place and for organising it so expertly.
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Sreenivasan, G. Courage, Consistency, and Other Conundra. Criminal Law, Philosophy 18, 281–296 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-023-09716-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11572-023-09716-1