Abstract
I argue that hope is a virtue insofar as it (1) leads to a more realistic view of the future than dispositions like optimism and pessimism, (2) promotes courage, and (3) encourages an important kind of solidarity with others. In light of this proposal, I consider the relationship between hope and our beliefs about what is good as well as the conditions under which hope may fail to be a virtue.
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Notes
In citing these examples of contexts in which the importance of hope is invoked, I do not mean to imply that everyone who invokes hope views the importance of hope in precisely the same way. My aim is merely to highlight the fact that a lot of people view hope as important and therefore deserving of further attention.
Hope is a prominent theme in the work of Gabriel Marcel 1951 and Ernst Bloch 1986, and though I make no pretense of fully grasping their views, I think I am sympathetic with much of what they have to say. However, Marcel and Bloch both explicate the importance of hope in the context of rather specific commitments: for Marcel, Christian existentialism, and for Bloch, Marxism. Without at all intending to discount their views on hope, my aim is to be somewhat more neutral with respect to the context in which virtuous hope might occur.
Compare, in this regard, Barilan’s appeal to hope as ‘universal human feature” and effort to explicate hope “without being committed to a particular religion or doctrine” (2012, p. 166) as well as Simpson’s identification of “the aspects of hope that are common to many understandings of what hope is, as discussed in a range of literature in philosophy and psychology, including those notions employed in healthcare” (2004, p. 430). Barilan, Simpson, and I thus approach hope from the “bottom-up” as opposed to the “top-down” in an effort to examine what can be said about hope as individuals tend to experience it in their daily lives (Barilan 2012, p. 167).
Searle 1983, p. 32.
Day 1969, p. 98.
Ibid., p. 95.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Pettit 2004, p. 154.
Pettit 2004, p. 158.
Ibid., p. 250.
Christy Simpson also echoes this line of thought when she argues that hope typically has an action component (even if such a component is not a necessary condition of hope). According to Simpson, “a person with hope will act in a manner that supports (or minimally does not foreclose) the hope. This aspect takes account of the expectation that an individual with hope will ‘do’ something on the basis of that hope; in other words, there are behavioral implications to having hope” (2004, p. 441). While I am less confident in the frequency with which hope is expressed in action, it does seem that hopes which involve us enough to be regarded as virtuous often do have some kind of behavioral manifestation.
Williams 1985, 129–30.
As Govier points out, this dynamic is what led to controversy surrounding those who suggested that the men who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks were courageous. “Because the word ‘courage’ functions as a term of praise, we don’t want to apply it to someone whose actions we profoundly disapprove of—even if that person does show physical daring and persistence in the face of danger” (Govier 2002, p. 112).
I am thus somewhat wary of the distinction that Bovens 1999 draws between the instrumental and intrinsic value of hope. As I hope to make clear below, there are times when hope seems to be instrumentally valuable as an aid in promoting other admirable character traits. But other times, hope seems almost to constitute those traits or, at the very least, constitute an important part of those other traits. In these latter cases, it is not clear to me whether the value of hope is best characterized as instrumental or intrinsic.
Adams 2006, p. 37. Cf. Barilan’s claim that hope is a “formal” virtue, “having no specific substance but that of esteem and care for the self and the environment that reaches out toward promotion focus goals” (2012, p. 173).
In this connection, see also Philippa Foot’s claim that the virtues are “corrective” in that they stand “at a point at which there is some temptation to be resisted or deficiency of motivation to be made good” (Foot 1978, p. 8). She thus explicitly notes that hope is a virtue “because despair too is a temptation; it might have been that no one cried that all was lost except where he could really see it to be so, and in this case there would have been no virtue of hope” (1978, p. 9). If the account below is plausible, then we may be able to put a somewhat finer point on the corrective nature of hope. As I will argue, hope is a corrective in varying ways to optimism, pessimism, cowardice, and social isolationism.
I am indebted to Emily Austin for this way of putting the point.
At this point, it is worth noting the sizable literature suggesting a highly positive correlation between optimism and positive outcomes (where what counts as a positive outcome can be defined in a variety of different ways). Sometimes being optimistic is helpful to us, even when it costs a of measure of realism about either ourselves or the future. See Peterson and Chang 2002, pp. 66–8 for a helpful overview of this literature.
In arguing that hope is virtuous because it tends to promote realism, I do not intend to discount this empirical data. Rather, my point is that hope will be valuable to the degree that we think it important to be realistic about the future. That conclusion is consistent with there being instances when the benefits of a less realistic disposition outweigh whatever value there is in believing in accordance with the evidence. However, it is important to point out that the view on offer is also consistent with the thesis that whatever external benefits might lie in being optimistic, there is nevertheless an intrinsic value in being realistic that outweighs those external benefits. In other words, the external benefits of optimism may sometimes outweigh the importance of realism (and thereby hope). But foregoing those external benefits in the name of realism may also be an important part of living the best life possible.
Bovens 1999, p. 673. Barilan makes a similar point when he writes: “Once we hope for something, we start deliberating whether the goal is still worth attaining, what priority it deserves relative to other goals and values, whether it is achievable, and which means serve it best. If we avoid deliberating the first two questions, we are confined to issues of optimism, not hope” (2012, p. 175).
Bovens 1999, p. 676.
Cf. Tiberius 2008, Chapter 5 which questions the relationship between true beliefs and self-awareness. Tiberius thus suggests that [s]ome self-knowledge is important for living a reflective life, but the virtue of self-awareness does not require a relentless purging of every useful fiction” (2008, p. 137). As with realism about the future, it seems that the challenge here is to balance the external benefits of “useful fictions” with the intrinsic (and instrumental) value of true beliefs about ourselves.
Smith 2008, pp. 15–16.
Lear 2008, pp. 119–20.
Lear 2008, p. 121.
Simpson 2004, p. 443.
In this connection, see also Bovens on the ways in which hope helps to counteract risk aversion (1999, pp. 671–673.
Smith 2008, p. 16.
Ibid.
I think this phenomenon bears an important connection to the often indeterminate nature of our desires. Thus Talbot Brewer argues that we should “understand the ideational content of a desire as an inchoate picture of some species or aspect of goodness. This approach permits us to see how an initially obscure desire can be cultivated over time so as to afford what its possessor regards as an increasingly clear understanding of a kind of goodness or value once seen through a glass, darkly” (Brewer 2009, pp. 54–55). In other words, we often don’t know what would count as a fulfillment of our hopes because we have only an inchoate sense of what we want.
To be sure, it seems possible to be courageous without being hopeful. A soldier may believe that defeat is certain while still fighting bravely and nobly. And even if one is justified in being confident of a good outcome, facing the future can still require courage. For example, a cancer patient may have very good reasons to believe that she will be cured and therefore have a justified optimism about her future health even as it requires a great deal of courage to undertake the difficult course of treatment required to obtain that goal. It thus seems fair to conclude that the one who is engaged by a particular hope exhibits courage even if the courageous person does not always exhibit hope.
This claim is, admittedly, controversial. For a penetrating examination of whether individuals can exhibit courage in the service of immoral ends, see Silke 2004. Govier also seems amenable to this conclusion (2002, pp. 111–14).
The place of false beliefs in the view on offer is importantly different from that defended by Julia Driver (1989). For Driver, certain virtues require that one possessing the virtue maintain false beliefs. Thus, modesty is a virtue, but the modest person must have false beliefs about herself. However, on my view, hope by no means requires that one have false beliefs of any kind. Rather, my suggestion is that hope can coexist with false beliefs, at least about what is good.
Smith 2008, p. 14.
In this connection, it is worth noting Bovens’s discussion of the connection between love and hope for the well-being of others. As Bovens puts it, “hoping and fearing for someone’s well-being are contained in a cluster of features that are constitutive of loving” (1999, p. 677). Thus, while sharing various kinds of hopes with others may do a great deal to promote solidarity, our connection to others may be best promoted when the hope in question is for each other’s well-being. Cf. Valerie Tiberius’s comments on the ways in which cynicism about our fellow human beings has the opposite effect (2008, p. 140ff).
At this point, it may be tempting to say that the strength of our hope should be proportional to the probability that any desired future will obtain. The more likely that future, the stronger a truly virtuous hope should be. If the probability is relatively low, we should work to keep our hopes in check. However, I don’t think we need to be quite so formulaic in our approach, in part because the strength of our hope is apt to be justified on the basis of the importance of hope’s object. Thus, a cure for a loved one’s cancer may be rather unlikely, but we needn’t criticize someone who maintains the fervent hope for such a cure. By the same token, to maintain a strong hope that the local coffee shop won’t run out of coffee tomorrow would be somewhat odd. It is, after all, highly unlikely that such an eventuality will occur. And even if it did, it would hardly constitute a tragedy. There are plenty of other coffee shops around. Thus, precisely how we should evaluate these matters is best determined on a case by case basis.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Emily Austin, Win Lee, Dan McKaughan, Christian Miller, Adam Pelser, and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on this paper.
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Kadlac, A. The Virtue of Hope. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 18, 337–354 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9521-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-014-9521-0