Abstract
There are a class of moral virtues that have an intimate relationship with agential evaluation, following Gary Watson we can call these ‘second-order virtues,’ e.g., modesty, blind charity, being judgmental, etc. Julia Driver has argued that these virtues are distinguished by being virtues which require ignorance. Richard Y. Chappell and Helen Yetter-Chappell have argued that these virtues are distinguished by being virtues of salience. Aside from the disagreement about the distinguishing features of these virtues, there is an intrinsic interest in the second-order virtues and vices. For these virtues and vices play an integral role in moral education and character formation.
This paper seeks to deepen that discussion by examining a second-order vice, namely, the vice of being judgmental. I argue that being judgmental requires a salience structure which exhibits undue attention to the negative features of others (pace Jessie Munton). Modeling being judgmental as a vice of attention helps to unify the various characteristics of judgmental persons, namely, a tendency to excessive standing, excessive epitomization, and relational qualification. As an upshot, we receive another reason to adopt an attention model of the second-order virtues and vices.
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Notes
See Julia Driver, Uneasy Virtue (Oxford University Press, [5]); Damian Cox, “Judging Character,” American Philosophical Quarterly 50, no. 4 [10]: 387–397; Sarah Stroud, “Epistemic Partiality in Friendship,“ Ethics, 116, no. 3 [1]: 498–534; Simon Keller, “Friendship and Belief,“ Philosophical Papers, 33, no. 3 (2004): 329–351.
Gary Watson, “Standing in Judgment,” in D.J. Coates and N. Tognazzi (eds), Blame: Its Nature and Norms (Oxford University Press, [10]): 284–285.
Watson [10], p. 284.
ibid.
This is not intended as a knock-down argument. Rather, it just reveals some of the tension points in an account like Watson’s, and gives some reason to look in a different direction.
Jessie Munton, “Prejudice as a misattribution of salience,” Analytical Philosophy [7]: 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/phib.12250
This suggests a feature of attention which Wu makes hay about. Attention seems to solve what Wu calls the ‘Many-Many problem’. As agents in the world we confront many informational inputs and many behavioral outputs (as responses) which map what Wu calls ‘behavioral space’. Attention helps to carve a pathway through behavioral space by highlighting some inputs and some outputs, effectively solving an otherwise insurmountable problem.
Munton [7], p. 13.
Munton [7], p. 13-14.
Consider the relationship between visual attention and judgment in the case of Müller-Lyer illusion. We visually attend to the seeming unequal length of the lines while knowing that the lines are equal. Part of the surprise of the illusion is that it is not cognitively penetrable which is at least a matter of being unable to correct our visual perception through re-attending to the perceptual object(s). This surprise is especially vivid when you produce the illusion on gridded paper. In a similar manner, someone’s attention may be dominated by the negatively valenced information of others without thereby accepting the appearances as reality. This might be the first step in transforming a judgmental character. However, if someone is disposed to such a pattern of attention, then it seems psychologically improbable that they would refrain from making negative judgments about others. However, someone might be able to decouple their saliences from their judgments through practices such as meditation.
It is worth emphasizing that the norm governs the mother’s attention. Even if she restrained her overt judgment in this case, she should lament her salience structure and it would be fitting for someone to evaluate her salience structure as missing the virtuous or moral mark.
Watzl [11], p. 103-106 .
Watson [10], p. 285.
Iris Murdoch, Sovereignty of the Good (Routledge Classics, [8]): p. 36.
I do not mean to imply that being judgmental requires drawing explicit and disparaging inferences about the other. Though I do mean to suggest that a judgmental person will find it difficult to resist drawing disparaging inferences. And it seems implausible to suppose that someone could have a judgmental salience structure and yet refrain from drawing disparaging inferences. For example, the fundamentalist mother may desire to refrain from judging her son, despite being riddled with negatively valenced information about him in relation to divorce. And she may seek to resist the disparaging inferences suggested by her informational base. Can she achieve such a feat? It’s difficult to say. Some of this has to do with the details. If the mother characteristically resists these disparaging inferences, then we might think she lacks a judgmental salience structure, since her attention does not seem dominated by negatively valenced information, e.g., information regarding her son’s welfare and her love of the son competes for priority over information regarding his failing. However, an agent who displays the salience structure of being judgmental is judgmental. This draws out the difficulty in separating a salience structure from judgments. Imagine a person who has this salience structure but who claims to not believe that so-and-so fails in the specified manner or that so-and-so has the general flaw. That might beggar belief.
This raises the question of whether prudential norms can be cleanly separated from moral norms.
Aristotle. 2002. Nicomachean Ethics. tr. Joe Sachs, Focus Publishing: 1144b 18–32, 1145a 4–6. [2]
Robert Adams, A Theory of Virtue (Oxford University Press, [1]): p. 33.
See Sebastian Watzl, Structuring Mind: The Nature of Attention and how it Shapes Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2017).
References
Adams, R. 2006. A Theory of Virtue. Oxford University Press.
Aristotle. 2002. Nicomachean Ethics. tr. Joe Sachs, Focus Publishing.
Bommarito, N. 2013. Modesty as a Virtue of Attention. The Philosophical Review 122 (1): 93–118.
Chappell, R. Y., and H. Yetter-Chappell. 2016. Virtue and Salience. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (3): 449–463.
Driver, Julia. 2001. Uneasy Virtue. Oxford University Press.
King, M. 2019. “Attending to blame,” Philosophical Studies 177 (5): 1423-1439.
Munton, J. 2021. Prejudice as the misattribution of salience. Analytic Philosophy, 00, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/phib.12250.
Murdoch, I. 2001. The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Routledge.
Simon, C. 1989. Judgmentalism. Faith and Philosophy 6 (3): 275–287.
Watson, G. 2013. “Standing in Judgment,” in D.J. Coates and N. Tognazzi (Eds), Blame: Its Nature and Norms (2013). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Watzl, S. 2022. “The Ethics of Attention: a framework” in Salience (ed.) Sophie Archer. Routledge: 89-112.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Allen Wood for his many comments on earlier versions of this essay. My thanks to Justin Mooney who has helped this essay and its author in more ways than one. Thanks to two anonymous referees for comments on earlier versions of this essay.
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Dake, D. Being Judgmental–A vice of attention. J Value Inquiry (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-022-09894-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-022-09894-6