Abstract
Can a virtuous person act contrary to the virtue she possesses? Can virtues have “holes”—or blindspots—and nonetheless count as virtues? Gopal Sreenivasan defends a notion of a blindspot that is, in my view, an unstable moral category. I will argue that no trait possessing such a “hole” can qualify as a virtue. My strategy for showing this appeals to the importance of motivation to virtue, a feature of virtue to which Sreenivasan does not adequately attend. Sreenivasan’s account allows performance alone to be a reliable indicator of the possession of virtue. I argue that, at least with respect to a classical, Aristotelian conception of virtue, this assumption is mistaken: a person is said to possess a virtue only when she is properly motivated. In my view, the nature of motivation required for the possession of Aristotelian virtue does not admit of blindspots. I am not primarily interested in details about the situationist critique of virtue theory but rather the implications that blindspots have for our conception of virtue. I argue that because the practical reasoning of the virtuous requires both cognitive and motivational coherence, the motivational structure of the virtuous agent cannot accommodate blindspots. My conclusion is neither a defense of motivational internalism nor of an idealized conception of Aristotelian virtue. My aim is to show that because blindspotted virtue does not cohere well with Aristotle’s conception of virtuous agency, friends of virtue theory must choose one or the other; they cannot have both.
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Notes
Howard Curzer identifies seven different ways that a virtue may be defective. Curzer, Howard J. “How Good People Do Bad Things: Aristotle on the Misdeeds of the Virtuous,” in David Sedley (ed.), Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Volume 28, Issue 1, 2005), pp. 233–256.
Howard Curzer identifies seven ways in which a virtuous person may act wrongly. (Curzer 2005) Curzer also points out that Aristotle urges learners of virtue to opt not for the mean (which is, of course, the virtuous response, but too difficult) but one of the extremes—as second best. This does not, I think bear on Sreenivasan’s point since I interpret Sreenivasan to be referring to adult moral agents, rather than learners; thus his conception of blindspots isolates the problem with motivation that interests me here.
To be clear: my discussion refers only to Sreenivasan’s conception of a blindspot unless otherwise noted.
Compassion is an easy example for Sreenivasan because it does not obviously require perfect performance. But other examples are far less clear. For instance, the virtue justice, may not admit of any exceptions because of the nature of the virtue. This claim is different from the idea that people may disagree whether a situation requires behavior in accordance with virtue X or Y.
Curzer (2012) provides a taxonomy of stages of moral development that is instructive at least partly because in identifying six different stages of moral development (the incorrigible, the generous-minded, the incontinent, the continent, the naturally virtuous, and the properly virtuous), he points out that a person may, at any one of the lower stages, act in accordance with virtue, but yet not possess virtue.
Curzer 2005.
The following was suggested to me as a proposed counterexample. Consider failures to abstain from binge eating each Thanksgiving. Such an occurrence seems to qualify as both rare (i.e., once a year), and highly predictable. Fair enough, but I think this example doesn’t capture the role of virtue adequately. Here is a variation: An otherwise attentive parent gets drunk every Thanksgiving and takes all the children out for a high-speed joy ride in her convertible. The first example is, with respect to the attainability of the virtue of self-control, uninteresting; the second is pretty clearly disqualifying. I thank Brannon McDaniel for pressing me to clarify this point.
Curzer might agree, in that an obvious requirement of virtue is unlikely to be a rare occurrence.
See Bagnoli, “Moral Perception and Knowledge by Principles.” Forthcoming in New Intuitionism, J. Hernandez ed., Continuum.
One might attempt to avoid this objection by distinguishing egregious from non-egregious failures as, for instance, Mill does. Mill holds that there are different spheres of actions, some of which—presumably because of their seriousness—are worthy of external sanctions, and some of which should receive only the internal sanctions of conscience. It is not at all obvious that Aristotle’s own ethics has the resources to make this sort of distinction, though another version of virtue theory might.
See Broadie 1993, Ethics with Aristotle, p. 259.
Here I agree with Curzer. For a helpful discussion of the orthodox view and why it is suspect, see Aristotle and the Virtues, ch. 14.
Curzer considers what sorts of exceptions are admissible under this conception of virtue, pointing out that the megalopsychoi are capable of greater—more extensive virtue than those who have less wealth. Aristotle appears to acknowledge that it is largely a matter of luck that their virtue has greater scope. Accordingly, one sort of exception might be made for those who are not lucky with respect to wealth, and so unable to perform certain virtuous actions. But if we grant that “ought” implies “can,” the less wealthy are not less admirable for being unable to perform such actions.
Curzer also notes another sort of exception: he points out that Aristotle holds that virtues are of a nature that they require occasional non-medial (hence non-virtuous) manifestations in order to sustain the character trait. For instance, Aristotle says that the mild person “seems to err more in the direction of deficiency [of anger], since the mild person is ready to pardon.” (Curzer 2005]. I do not think, however, that we should take this to mean that Aristotle allows for blind spots in the sense under discussion. It seems to me more likely that Aristotle’s allowance of non-medial actions in the virtuous is rather a reasonable concession to human psychology; we sometimes need to over-compensate in order to get it right most of the time. Put differently, the person in the example performs a non-medial action in order to reliably perform virtuous ones. I thank one of the referees for pressing me to clarify these points.
Even with respect to the Milgram experiment, however, the subject’s response is only potentially disqualifying since it is not an iterated trial. While Sreenivasan’s example of “egregious” suggests as a paradigm something morally outrageous, we might also deem systematic failures of performance egregious because there are just too many instances of failure.
Hereafter, “virtue” and “the virtuous” refer to the natural version.
See, for example, Curzer 2005.
Curzer points out that those who are naturally virtuous already know which actions are virtuous—they don’t require practical wisdom for that. (See Curzer 2012, p. 12). Those with blindspots knowingly (and voluntarily) perform an action contrary to virtue; this is, I will argue, inconsistent with even natural virtue.
The notion of reason here is meant to be quite broad. McDowell, for instance, does not think that one who fails to act in accordance with virtue thereby exhibits a failure of rationality. In his view, it is a defect of character. See McDowell 1979. This is also not to say that desires are necessarily excluded from the Aristotelian account of motivation. Rather, the virtuous agent’s desires have been properly trained and so are in this sense reasonable.
A blindspotted action is not the result of overlooking the requirements of one virtue in favor of another; it is not in accordance with any virtue.
Curzer claims that this need not be the case. Since a virtuous character may be flawed, blindspotted action need not be viewed as out of character. See Curzer 2005.
I take it that this weak claim about generality is not inconsistent with claims made by particularists and sensibility theorists.
See Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Aristotle’s Ethics,” Richard Kraut.
The reasons of the naturally virtuous may not be identical to those of the fully virtuous, but they are virtuous nonetheless. While there is not space to argue for the view here, I take it that Aristotelian habituation must include habituation to respond to certain properties. After all, it is very hard to see how moral progress could be made If all Aristotle had in mind was mimicking the specific actions of the moral teacher. A naturally virtuous person knows that certain types of situations require actions with certain properties, and the naturally virtuous person’s response will be motivated by the situational requirement. A fully virtuous person, by contrast, understands and appreciates why virtue requires such a response. See Broadie for a fuller discussion.
Both Curzer and Hursthouse entertain the possibility of explaining a blindspot as a slight glitch. Hursthouse (1999) locates the glitch in the agent’s personality, Curzer in the agent’s character. I am suspicious of this strategy. For Hursthouse, it requires drawing a distinction between personality and character, a notoriously slippery distinction. But a glitch also suggests an involuntary response, and that is not what Sreenivasan or I have in mind by “blindspot.”
For similar views, see Bagnoli and Badhwar.
I thank Gopal Sreenivasan for raising this objection.
See Nicomachean Ethics, Book VII.
Broadie, p. 259. She goes on to say that “A mixed pair of ethical terms can hold of the same subject, but then this subject is an inappropriate model, since a model shouldn’t send mixed messages. It makes sense in a work of practical ethics to shape the logic of ethical terms in such a way that they cannot send mixed messages.”
I borrow this term from Scanlon 2000. See What We Owe to Each Other, ch. 1.
I thank Gopal Sreenivasan for pressing me to address this objection.
McDowell, John, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” 1985, p. 142.
For example, a person might have a disposition to be fair, but where her children are concerned, she reliably displays (unjustified) favoritism.
Some qualification may be in order. Those suffering from Asberger Syndrome, for instance, are sometimes reported to possess a theoretical grasp of social norms, but are able to translate their understanding to action—if at all—only with great difficulty and awkwardness. While the causes of Asberger Syndrome are poorly understood, one might think that it resembles a failure analogous to a “mechanical failure” of sensory perception. Even so, this does not conflict with McDowell’s official view of sensibility theory, since he says that “…we can learn to see the world in terms of some specific set of evaluative classifications…only because our affective…propensities are such that we can be brought to care in appropriate ways….” In other words, while he does not say so explicitly, his view appears to imply that those with affective personality disorders may be excluded from those who can be said to possess moral sensibility tout court. Adverting to those with such disorders does not affect my argument concerning the inconsistency of blindspots with Aristotelian virtue, though it may be a reason to think that McDowell’ sensibility theory could use some modification. I thank one of the referees for urging me to consider this point.
This does not amount to a defense of the unity of the virtues. A single virtue requires a degree of unity, an organizing principle that makes it appropriate, for instance, for all cases of liberality to count as liberality. This is not to say that virtue is rule-governed or codifiable. I make only the much weaker claim that instances of virtue V must have something in common in virtue of which we call them V.
Neera Badhwar, “The Limited Unity of Virtue,” (Nous 30 (3), 1996) pp. 306–329.
I have amended a formulation of motivational internalism found in Kristjánsson (2013) p. 437.
The notion of character and practical reasoning embraced by Aristotelian ethics is not so much perfectionist or idealized as it is comprehensive and integrated. Rachana Kamtekar takes a similar view, claiming that “the conception of character in virtue ethics is holistic and inclusive of how we reason: it is a person’s character as a whole (rather than isolated character traits), that explains her actions, and this character is a more-or-less consistent, more-or-less integrated, set of motivations, including the person’s desires, beliefs about the world, and ultimate goals and values. The virtuous character that virtue ethics holds up as an ideal is one in which these motivations are organized so that they do not conflict, but support one another. Such an organization would be an achievement of practical reason rather than as the result of the absence of character traits” (Kamtekar 2004, “Situationism and virtue ethics,” Ethics 114: 460). Assuming one can be virtuous without being perfect, then a virtuous individual can have a blindspot, provided that, when she becomes aware of the blindspot in question, she works to address it.
Psychic incoherence is one of the reasons Aristotle introduces the notion of the continent character. Those who are continent do not perform their actions as the virtuous person does because they are at war with themselves.
For helpful criticisms of earlier versions of this essay I would like to thank Gopal Sreenivasan, Geoff Goddu, Brannon McDaniel, John Simmons, and two anonymous referees.
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Schauber, N.E. How Bad Can Good People Be?. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 17, 731–745 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9475-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-013-9475-7