Asymmetry between moral and physical excellence

We can use a Mahatma Ghandi or a Mother Teresa as a moral exemplar to figure out what our virtues should be. But we cannot use an Usain Bolt or a Serena Williams as a physical exemplar to figure out what our physical capabilities should be. Why this disanalogy between moral and physical excellence?

It’s our intuition that Bolt and Williams exceed the physical norms for humans to a significant degree. But although Ghandi and Mother Teresa did many supererogatory things, I do not think they overall exceed the moral norms for human character to a significant degree. We should be like them, and our falling short is largely our fault.

Teaching virtue

A famous Socratic question is whether virtue can be taught. This argument may seem to settle the question:

1. If vice can be taught, virtue can be taught.

2. Vice can be taught. (Clear empirical fact!)

3. So, virtue can be taught.

Well, except that what I labeled as a clear empirical fact is not something that Socrates would accept. I think Socrates reads “to teach” as a success verb, with a necessary condition for teaching being the conveyance of knowledge. In other words, it’s not possible to teach falsehood, since knowledge is always of the truth, and presumably in “teaching” vice one is “teaching” falsehoods such as that greed is good.

That said, if we understand “to teach” in a less Socratic way, as didactic conveyance of views, skills and behavioral traits, then (2) is a clear empirical fact, and (1) is plausible, and hence (3) is plausible.

That said, it would not be surprising if it were harder to teach virtue even in this non-Socratic sense than it is to teach vice. After all, it is surely harder to teach someone to swim well than to swim badly.

The impact of right action on virtue

One of Socrates’ great discoveries is that moral goodness is good for us.

Virtue ethicists think there are two ways that acting morally well is typically good for us:

1. The action itself is a constituent of our well-being, and

2. The action promotes our possession of virtue.

Now, (1) is not just typically present, but always: good actions are constituents of human well-being. But unless we can count on miracles, there is no guarantee that (2) is always there. We can easily imagine cases where if you don’t do something immoral, you will captured and made to live among people whose vice will rub off on you to a degree where you are likely to become more vicious than you would have been had you done that one immoral thing. But those cases involve highly unusual situations. You might think that (2) is true except in highly exceptional cases.

Are there more common cases where morally good action fails to promote virtue? Well, acting morally well sometimes puts one in a position of temptation. This is not at all uncommon. You take a paycut to work for a charitable organization. But this results in financial pressures and now you are tempted to embezzle from your employer. For the sake of justice you work as a judge. And now you may be offered bribes, or simply be tempted to pride because of your social position. You drive to the grocery store to buy a treat for your child, and then along the way you are tempted to unsafe driving practices.

In a number of such cases, if you fall to the temptation, you become morally worse than you would have been had you omitted the initial morally good action. It is better to work for Morally Neutral Conglomerate, Inc. than for a charitable organization if you would be embezzling from the latter but not from the former. And we empirically know that people do fall to such temptations.

Thus we know there are ordinary cases where an instance of acting morally well has led to moral downfall.

But whether these cases are also counterexamples to the universality of (2) depends on how we read the “promotes” in (2). If we read it purely causally, then, yes, these are cases where doing the right thing was an important causal factor in someone’s moral downfall. But likely we should read (2) in a probabilistic tendency way. Perhaps we have something like this:

3. The mathematical expectation of the level of virtue is higher upon doing the action than upon omitting it.

Again, in the highly exceptional cases this need not be true, unless you can expect a miracle. You may be in a position to be pretty confident that you will morally deteriorate unless you escape a corrupting environment but have no way to escape it except by doing something immoral.

But in typical ordinary cases, (3) seems pretty plausible. At least this is true: there are going to be few cases where the expected level of virtue is significantly lower upon doing the right action. For if that were the case, that would constitute a strong moral reason not to do the action, and hence except in a few cases where that strong moral reason gets overridden, the action won’t be right after all.

All that said, I wonder how good our empirical data is that (3) is true in the case of most ordinary actions.

Transfer of endurance

There are empirical indications that various skills and maybe even virtues are pretty domain specific. It seems that being good at reasoning about one thing need not make one good at reasoning about another, even if the reasoning is formally equivalent.

I do have a piece of anecdotal data, though. I’ve been doing some endurance-ish sports. Nothing nearly like a marathon, but things like swimming 2-3 km, or climbing for an hour, typically (but not always) competing against myself.

And I have noticed some transfer of skills and maybe even of the virtue of patience both between the various sports and between the sports and other repetitive activities, such as grading. There is a distinctive feeling I have when I am half-way through something, and where I am fairly confident I can finish it, and a kind of relaxation past the half-way point where I become more patient, and time seems to flow “better”. For instance, I can compare how tired I feel half-way through a long set of climbs and how tired I feel half-way through a 2 km swim, and the comparison can give me some strength. Similar positive thinking can happen while grading, things like “I can do it” or “There isn’t all that much left.” Though there are also differences between the sports and the grading, because in grading the quality of the work matters a lot more, and since I am not racing against myself so there is no point of a burst of speed at the end if I find myself with an excess of energy. Pacing is also much less important for grading.

I have no idea if anything like this transfer works for other people.

Two different ways of non-instrumentally pursuing a good

Suppose Alice is blind to the intrinsic value of friendship and Bob can see the intrinsic value of friendship. Bob then told Alice that friendship is intrinsically valuable. Alice justifiedly trusts Bob in moral matters, and so Alice concludes that friendship has intrinsic value, even though she can’t “see” it. Alice and Bob then both pursue friendship for its own sake.

But there is a difference: Bob pursues friendship because of the particular ineffable “thick” kind of value that friendship has. Alice doesn’t know what “thick” kind of value friendship has, but on the basis of Bob’s testimony, she knows that it has some such value or other, and that it is a great and significant value. As long as Alice knows what kinds of actions friendship requires, she can pursue friendship without that knowledge, though it’s probably more difficult for her, perhaps in the way that it is more difficult for a tone-deaf person to play the piano, though in practice the tone-deaf person could learn what kinds of finger movements result in aesthetically valuable music without grasping that aesthetic value.

The Aristotelian tradition makes the grasp of the particular thick kind of value involved in a virtuous activity be a part of the full possession of that virtue. On that view, Alice cannot have the full virtue of friendship. There is something she is missing out on, just as the tone-deaf pianist is missing out on something. But she is not, I think, less praiseworthy than Bob. In fact Alice’s pursuit of friendship involves the exercise of a virtue which Bob’s does not: the virtue of faith, as exhibited in Alice’s trust in Bob’s testimony about the value of friendship.

The variety of virtue ethical systems

One thinks of virtue ethics as a unified family of ethical systems. But it is interesting to note just how different virtue ethical systems can be depending on how one answers the question of what it is that makes a stable character trait T be a virtue? Consider, after all, these very varied possible answers to that question, any one of which could be plugged into a virtue ethical account of rightness as what accords with virtue.

• having T is partly constitutive of eudaimonia (Aristotelian virtue ethics)

• having T is required by one’s nature or by the nature of one’s will (natural law virtue ethics)

• a typical human being is expected to gain utility by having T (egoist virtue ethics)

• a typical human being is expected to contribute to total utility by having T (utilitarian virtue ethics)

• it is pleasant to think of oneself as having T (hedonistic virtue ethics)

• it is pleasant to think of another as having T (Humean sentimentalist virtue ethics)

• God requires one to have T (divine command virtue ethics).

The resulting ethical systems are all interesting, but fundamentally very different.

The good of competent achievement

One of the ways we flourish is by achievement: by successfully fulfilling a plan of action and getting the intended end. But it seems that there is a further thing here of some philosophical interest: we can distinguish achievement from competent achievement.

For me, the phenomenon shows up most clearly when I engage in (indoor) rock climbing. In the case of a difficult route, I first have to try multiple times before I can “send” the route, i.e., climb it correctly with no falls. That is an achievement. But often that first send is pretty sketchy in that it includes moves where it was a matter of chance whether I would get the move or fall. I happened to get it, but next time I do it, I might not. There is something unsatisfying about the randomness here, even though technically speaking I have achieved the goal.

There is then a further step in mastery where with further practice, I not only happened to get the moves right, but do so competently and reliably. And while there is an intense jolt of pleasure at the initial sketchy achievement, there is a kind of less intense but steadier pleasure at competent achievement. Similar things show up in other physical pursuits: there is the first time one can do n pull-ups, and that’s delightful, but there is there time when one can do n pull-ups whenever one wants to, and that has a different kind of pleasure. Video games can afford a similar kind of pleasure.

That said, eventually the joy of competent achievement fades, too, when one’s skill level rises far enough above it. I can with competence and reliability run a 15 minute mile, but there is no joy in that, because it is too easy. It seems that what we enjoy here has a tension to it: competent achievement of something that is still fairly hard for us. There is also a kind of enjoyment of competent achievement of something that is hard for others but easy for us, but that doesn’t feel quite so virtuous.

There is a pleasure for others in watching an athlete doing something effortlessly (which is quite different from “they make it look effortless”, when in fact we may know that there is quite a bit of effort in it), but I think the hedonic sweet spot for the athlete does not lie in the effortless performance, but in a competent but still challenging performance.

And here is a puzzle. God’s omnipotence not only makes God capable of everything, but makes God capable of doing everything easily. Insofar as we are in the image and likeness of God, it would seem that the completely effortless should be the greater good for us than the challenging. Maybe, though, the fact that our achievements are infinitely below God’s activity imposes on our lives a temporal structure of striving for greater achievements that makes the completely effortless a sign that we haven’t pushed ourselves enough.

All this stuff, of course, mirrors familiar debates between Kantians and virtue ethicists about moral worth.

In defense of a changing beatific vision

It is widely taken in the Thomistic tradition that:

1. Different people in heaven have the beatific vision to different degrees, corresponding to the saints’ different levels of holiness.

2. The beatific vision does not change with time for a given individual.

I think there is a tension between these two claims which is best resolved by dropping the no-change thesis (2). Dropping the difference thesis (1) is not an option for Catholics at least, since it’s a dogma taught by the Council of Florence.

To see the tension, note that the fact that different saints have holiness to different degrees implies that those saints who have a lesser holiness have not maxed out what human nature makes possible. And holiness is attractive to the holy, and infectious. If one saint is less holy than another, it seems likely that given a sufficient amount of time, we would expect the second saint’s greater holiness to inspire the first to even greater holiness. And then we would expect the beatific vision to increase.

We also have one New Testament case where it seems likely that a person’s level of beatific vision has increased. In 2 Corinthians, Paul writes of knowing someone who, fourteen years ago, was caught up to the third heaven. It is common to take that to be a modest reference to Paul himself, and the “third heaven” to be a reference to the beatific vision. Now, eventually Paul died and experienced the beatific vision again. It seems very implausible to think that the significant number of years between Paul’s first experience of heaven and his final experience of heaven did not result in Christian maturation and growth in virtue. Thus, it seems quite plausible that Paul had greater holiness when he died than when he was first caught up to heaven, and hence by the correspondence thesis (1), he had a greater degree of beatific vision at death than at the earlier incident.

Note, too, that a Catholic cannot say that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of death, since then purgatory wouldn’t make sense. And, intuitively, we would expect heaven to be inspiring of growth in holiness!

Now, one could insist that the level of holiness is fixed at the time of entry to heaven. But if so, then we couldn’t really say that the death of a saint is always something to rejoice at. Imagine that Paul had died at the time of his first experience of the beatific vision. Then on the no-change view of the beatific vision, he would eternally have had a lesser beatific vision than in actual world where he continued to grow in holiness for over decades more.

A picture of continual growth in holiness and the beatific vision fits better with our temporality. One may worry, however, that it takes away from the picture of resting in God. However, rest is compatible with change. One of the best ways to rest is to read a good book. But as one reads the book, one grows in knowledge of its content. And if one worries that the thought that one will come to have a greater happiness should induce in one a present sorrow of longing, I think it is plausible that with perfect virtue one would no more find the expectation of greater future happiness to be a source of sorrow than a lesser saint would find the observation of greater saints a source of envy. And, coming back to the book analogy, when one reads a good book, there need be no unhappiness at the fact that there is more of the book yet to come—on the contrary, one can rejoice that there is more to come. (In some cases, there may be a weak negative emotion as one longs for the author to reveal something—say, the solution of a mystery. But not every genre will generate that.)

Furthermore, there is good reason to think that change is not incompatible with rest. Since we will have bodies in heaven, and we will flourish in body and soul, while bodily flourishing involves change, heavenly rest must be compatible with change. And plausibly some of the bodily activities we will engage in will involve a variation in the level of happiness at least in some respects. Thus, eating is an episodic joy, and music, I take it, involves much in the way of anticipation and change.

A variant virtue ethic centered on virtues and not persons

I’ve been thinking a bit about the virtue ethical claim that the right (i.e., obligatory) action is one that a virtuous person would do and the wrong one is one that a virtuous person wouldn’t do. I’ve argued in my previous posts that this is a problematic claim, since given either naturalism or the Hebrew Scriptures, it is possible for a virtuous person to do something wrong.

Maybe instead of focusing on the person, the virtue ethicist can focus on the virtues. Here is an option:

1. An action is wrong if and only if it could not properly (non-aberrantly) flow from the relevant virtues.

This principle is compatible with a virtuous person doing something wrong, as long as that wrong thing doesn’t flow from virtue.

The “properly” in (1) is an “in the right way” condition. Once we have allowed, as I think we should, that a virtuous person can do the wrong thing, we should also allow that a wrong action can flow from virtue in some aberrant way. For instance, we can imagine a wholly virtuous person falling prey to a temptation to brag about being wholly virtuous (and instantly losing the virtue, of course). The bragging flows from the virtue—but aberrantly.

A down-side of (1) is that it is a pretty strong condition on permissibility. One might think that there are some permissible morally neutral actions which can be done by a perfectly virtuous person but which do not flow from their virtue. If we accept (1), then in effect we are saying that there are no morally neutral actions. I think that is the right thing to say.

The big problem with (1) is the “properly”.

Naturalists shouldn't be virtue ethicists

Virtue ethics is committed to this claim:

1. A choice of A is wrong if and only if a person who had the relevant virtues explanatorily prior to having chosen A and was in these circumstances would not have chosen A.

But (1) implies this generalization:

2. A person who has the relevant virtues explanatorily prior to a choice never chooses wrongly.

In my previous post I argued that Aristotelian Jews and Christians should deny (2), and hence (1).

Additionally, I think naturalists should deny (1). For we live in a fundamentally indeterministic world given quantum mechanics. If a virtuous person were placed in a position of choosing between aiding and insulting a stranger, there will always be a tiny probability of their choosing to insult the stranger. We shouldn’t say that they wouldn’t insult the stranger, only that they would be very unlikely to do so (this is inspired by Alan Hajek’s argument against counterfactuals).

And (2) itself is dubious, unless we have such a high standard of virtue that very few people have virtues. For in our messy chaotic world, very little is at 100%. Rare exceptions should be expected when human behavior is involved.

(Perhaps a dualist virtue ethicist who does not accept the Hebrew Scriptures could accept (1) and (2), holding that a virtuous soul makes the choices and is not subject to the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics and the chaos of the world.)

There is a natural way out of the above arguments, and that it so to change (1) to a probabilistic claim:

3. A choice of A is wrong if and only if a person who had the relevant virtues explanatorily prior to having chosen A and was in these circumstances would be very unlikely to have chosen A.

But (3) is false. Suppose that Alice is a virtuous person who has a choice to help exactly one of a million strangers. Whichever stranger she chooses to help, she does no wrong. But it is mathematically guaranteed that there is at least one stranger such that her chance of helping them is at most one in a million (for if p_n is her chance of helping stranger number n, then p₁ + ... + p_1000000 ≤ 1, since she cannot help more than one; given that 0 ≤ p_n for all n, it follows mathematically that for some n we have p_n ≤ 1/1000000). So her helping a particular such stranger is very unlikely to be chosen, but isn’t wrong.

Or for a less weighty case, suppose I say something perfectly morally innocent to start off a conversation. Yet it is very unlikely that a virtuous person would have said so. Why? Because there are so very many perfectly morally innocent ways to start off a conversation, it is very unlikely that they would have chosen the same one I did.

Virtue ethics and peer disagreement

Aristotelian ethics is committed to the claim that the virtuous person knows what actions and habits are virtuous and is justified in holding on to that knowledge, and indeed should hold on to it. There is a deep stability to virtue. This means that an Aristotelian virtuous person ought not adopt a conciliationist response to those who disagree as to what is virtuous, suspending judgment over the disagreed-upon items.

Indeed, one imagines that Aristotle’s virtuous person could say of those who disagree: “They are not virtuous, and hence do not see the truth about moral matters.” Aristotle’s virtuous person would reject the idea that someone who disagrees with them about virtue could be an epistemic peer. Virtuous habits give epistemic access to moral (and not only moral) truth.

Of course, the disagreer may think themselves virtuous as well, and may think the same thing about the virtuous person as the virtuous person thinks about them. But that does not shake the Aristotelian virtuous person.

This means that if Aristotelian virtue ethics is correct, there is a clear thing that a Christian can say about religious disagreement. The Christian thinks faith is a virtue, albeit an infused rather than natural one. As such, faith gives epistemic access, and someone lacking faith is simply not an epistemic peer, since they lack a source of truth. The fact that a person lacking faith thinks they have the virtue of faith should not move the person who actually has the virtue.

Of course, one might turn all this around and use it as an argument against virtue ethics. But I think Aristotle’s picture seems exactly correct as to the kind of firmness of moral knowledge that the virtuous person exhibits, the kind of spine that lets them say, without pride or vanity, to vast numbers of others that they are simply wrong.

Saints and faith

There are many ways of life that people claim to be virtuous. A central thesis of Aristotelian ethics is:

1. The virtuous person knows what is the virtuous human form of life, at least insofar as this is relevant to her own circumstances.

She knows this by living virtuously, which enables a from-the-inside appreciation of the virtue of the virtuous life she lives. This is a mysterious thing, but it means that the virtuous person does not need to worry sceptically about the fact that other people disagree with her about this way of life being virtuous (maybe they say to her: “You should have a stronger preference for people of your country over foreigners”, and she just knows that her preference should not be stronger). These other people are not virtuous, and hence lack that from-the-inside view on what it is to live a virtuous life, and hence they are not her epistemic peers with respect to virtue.

Suppose we accept (1). Now imagine that Therese leads a kind of life L that is deeply intertwined with a particular religion R, in such a way that clearly L would be unlikely to be virtuous if R were false, but is very likely to be virtuous if R is true.

It is easy to imagine cases like this. Perhaps most religious and non-religious views other than R would object to significant aspects of L—perhaps, L includes forms of activism that R praises but most other religious and non-religious views look down on, or lacks forms of activity that most religious and non-religious views other than R think are required for a fulfilling human life. The life of a good contemplative Catholic nun is like that: most non-Catholic views will see it as a waste.

Suppose, further, that Therese is in fact virtuous. Then she knows that L is virtuous, and this gives her significant evidence that R is true because of how much L is bound up with R.

One may have a Christian worry about what I just said. What about humility? Would Therese know that she is living a virtuous life? But she might: true self-insight is compatible with humility. However, my argument does not assume that Therese knows that she is living a virtuous life. All that (1) says is that Therese knows that L is a virtuous life—but she need not know that she is in fact living out L. She knows the model of the virtuous life by living it, but she may not know that she is living it. (Aristotle wouldn’t like that.)

Now, suppose that Therese’s virtue in fact comes from God’s grace. Then Therese has a deep reason to know R on the basis of grace: the grace leads to virtue, and the virtue leads to knowledge of what is virtuous.

So, we have a model for how saints of the true religion can know the truths of their faith, because their radical forms of life are so tightly bound up with their religion that their knowledge that this way of life is virtuous (a knowledge compatible with certain ways of agonizing about whether they are in fact living that way) yields knowledge of their religion.

Can this help those of us who are not saints? I think so. It is possible to see the virtue of another’s form of life even when one does not have much virtue. And then the tight intertwining between the saint’s life of virtue and the saint’s religion provides one with evidence of the truth of their religion.

(Note the similarities to the line of thought in van Inwagen's deeply moving "Quam Dilecta".)

Is this immune to sceptical worries in the way that the virtuous person’s knowledge of the virtue of the form of life she follows is? I don’t know. I think there is room for some proper-functionalism here: we may have a faculty of recognition of a virtuous form of life.

Note, finally, that there are multiple virtuous forms of life, some less radical than others. The more radical ones are likely to be more tightly bound up with their religion, and hence provide more evidence—even if they are not necessarily more virtuous. Perhaps the difference is in how specific a religion is testified to by the virtue of the way of life. Thus, the contemplative cloistered saint’s life may give strong evidence of Catholicism, or at least of the disjunction of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, while the life of a married saint as seen from the outside may “only” give strong evidence of Christianity.

A few thoughts on a fashionable virtue

Alice is thinking about a question q in science or philosophy, and concludes that figuring out whether a certain mathematical proposition p is true will help her make progress on q. So Alice tries to prove p. She puts some time in, but keeps on failing. She tries another approach for proving p. That also fails. And another, with the same non-existent result. This makes Alice think that perhaps p is not true at all. She tries out a few potential counterexamples. Some of them turn out not to be counterexamples, though for one or two she can’t prove or disprove whether they are counterexamples. She goes back to trying to prove p, and makes no progress. Then she goes back to q, and finds a different mathematical proposition, p₂, such that figuring out whether p₂ is true will help her make progress on q. She now tries to figure out whether p₂ is true. And so on. This is a not unrealistic picture of how research in mathematics-heavy theoretical disciplines sometimes goes.

Alice’s research activities involve a lot of persevering but also a lot of quitting: she perserves for a while on an approach, and then quits (perhaps only temporarily), and tries a new one. The quitting is itself in the service of a higher level goal. For instance, she quits trying to prove p in order to try to disprove p, but both tasks are in the service of trying to figure out whether p is true, which in turn is in the service of learning about q. There is thus a lot of quitting which is actually a form of perservering in investigating q.

Alice’s research behavior can easily sound like it exhibits the virtue of grit. But it might also be an instance of one of the virtue’s opposed vices: being a quitter or being stuck in a rut. The story I gave is compatible with Alice putting too little time and effort into each sub-goal, and it is also compatible with Alice being under the sway of the sunk costs fallacy and spending too much time and energy on each approach before moving on to a different one. As is often the case, the virtue here is a balance between opposed, a balance that cannot be quantified but requires sound judgment to determine.

We normally think of grit as opposed to being a quitter, but quitting in order to move on to a different approach to a higher level goal can be an exhibition of grit. This can repeat at even higher levels of the hierarchy than those mentioned in my initial story. Alice might quit working on q and instead work on some other question in her discipline. Or she might quit working in her discipline, and aim to advance human knowledge in another discipline. Or she might even quit trying to advance human knowledge, and seek to advance human wellbeing in a different respect than knowledge.

But there is a sense in which the vice of being a quitter—a form of acedia, I suppose—is more opposed to grit than the vice of being sticking in a rut. What can be rational is to quit working for one valuable goal in order to work for another valuable goal (often, but not always, the other goal will be a subgoal of some goal that one is thereby continuing to work on). But there is such a thing as quitting completely: giving up on life. And that is always extremely bad. On the other hand, getting stuck in a rut forever, and never quitting, is bad, but at least there is some hope—it might work out, in a way in which completely giving up will not.

Deserving the rewards of virtue

We have the intuition that when someone has worked uprightly and hard for something good and thereby gained it, they deserve their possession of it. What does that mean?

If Alice ran 100 meters faster than her opponents at the Olympics, she deserves a gold medal. In this case, it is clear what is meant by that: the organizers of the Olympics owe her a gold medal in just recognition of her achievement. Thus, Alice’s desert appears appears to be appropriately analyzable partly in terms of normative properties had by persons other than Alice. In Alice’s case, these properties are obligations of justice, but they could simply be reasons of justice. Thus, if someone has done something heroic and they receive a medal, the people giving the medal typically are not obligated to give it, but they do have reasons of justice to do so.

But there are cases that fit the opening intuition where it is harder to identify the other persons with the relevant normative properties. Suppose Bob spends his life pursuing virtue, and gains the rewards of a peaceful conscience and a gentle attitude to the failings of others. Like Alice’s gold medal, Bob’s rewards are deserved. But if we understand desert as in Alice’s case, as partly analyzable in terms of normative properties had by others, now we have a problem: Who is it that has reasons of justice to bestow these rewards on Bob?

We can try to analyze Bob’s desert by saying that we all have reasons of justice not to deprive him of these rewards. But that doesn’t seem quite right, especially in the case of the gentle attitude to the failings of others. For while some people gain that attitude through hard work, others have always had it. Those who have always had it do not deserve it, but it would still be unjust to deprive them of it.

The theist has a potential answer to the question: God had reasons of justice to bestow on Bob the rewards of virtue. Thus, while Alice deserved her gold medal from the Olympic committee and Carla (whom I have not described but you can fill in the story) deserved her Medal of Honor from the Government, Bob deserved his quiet conscience and “philosophical” outlook from God.

This solution, however, may sound wrong to many Christians, especially but not only Protestants. There seems to be a deep truth to Leszek Kolakowski’s book title God Owes Us Nothing. But recall that desert can also be partly grounded in non-obligating reasons of justice. One can hold that God owes us nothing but nonetheless think that when God bestowed on Bob the rewards of virtue (say, by designing and sustaining the world in such a way that often these rewards came to those who strove for virtue), God was doing so in response to non-obligating reasons of justice.

Objection: Let’s go back to Alice. Suppose that moments after she ran the race, a terrorist assassinated everyone on the Olympic Committee. It still seems right to say that Alice deserved a gold medal for her run, but no one had the correlate reason of justice to bestow it. Not even God, since it just doesn’t seem right to say that God has reasons of justice to ensure Olympic medals.

Response: Maybe. I am not sure. But think about the “Not even God” sentence in the objection. I think the intuition behind the “Not even God” undercuts the case. The reason why not even God had reasons of justice to ensure the medal was that Alice deserved a medal not from God but from the Olympic Committee. And this shows that her desert is grounded in the Olympic Committee, if only in a hypothetical way: Were they to continue existing, they would have reasons of justice to bestow on her the medal.

This suggests a different response that an atheist could give in the case of Bob: When we say that Bob deserves the rewards of virtue, maybe we mean hypothetically that if God existed, God would have reasons of justice to grant them. This does not strike me as a plausible analysis. If God doesn’t exist, the existence of God is a far-fetched and fantastical hypothesis. It is implausible that Bob’s ordinary case of desert be partly grounded in hypothetical obligations of a non-existent fantastical being. On the other hand, it is not crazy to think that Alice’s desert, in the exceptional case of the Olympic Committee being assassinated, be partly grounded in hypothetical obligations of a committee that had its existence suddenly cut short.

An important use for virtue

It’s obvious that virtues are morally instrumentally useful: possessing them makes it more probable that one will act morally well. Many of my friends think virtues are much more important than that.

Here is one thing that has occurred to me along those lines. Pretty much any action can be morally ruined by a bad intention. But in some specific cases, an action will be ruined by the lack of a specific kind of reason, intention or end. Here are some potential examples, not all of which will be plausible to everyone (the first two reasons should be plausible to everyone; the remaining ones will have narrower appeal):

• The wrongness of BS and lying shows that it is (at least normally) wrong to make an assertion if the (believed) truth of the content is not among the reasons for making it.

• It is wrong to intentionally kill someone except for the sake of a very small number of clearly delineated reasons (justice, defense of the innocent, etc.)

• Since we are to love God with all our hearts, every action should be done at least in part for the sake of God.

• If a married couple engages in sexual union for reasons that do not include their being married to each other, then their act is internally too much like an act of fornication.

• It is sacrilegious to attend Mass without doing so at least in part for some religious reason.

But practically speaking, it is hard to include an explicit intention each time one engages in an act of a certain type, especially if the act is moderately frequent (as assertion is, and as killing in wartime can be).

Here virtue can come in: an act’s flowing from a virtue allows the act to inherit the intentions and reasons that are attached to the virtue, and virtue is a habit, so this mechanism is perfectly suited to attaching the right intention to each act of a given type.

Virtues as pocket oracles

Consider three claims:

1. Virtues when fully developed make it possible to see what is the right thing to do without conscious deliberation.

2. Acting on fully developed virtues is the best way to act.

3. Acting on a pocket oracle, which simply tells you in each case what is to be done, misses out on something important in our action.

All three claims sound pretty plausible, but there is a tension between them. To make the tension evident, ask this question:

• What makes a fully developed virtue relevantly different from a pocket oracle?

Consider three possible answers to the question:

Answer 1: The virtue makes you understand why the right thing is right (e.g., because it is courageous, or loyal, etc.). The oracle just says what is right.

But: We can easily add that the oracle gives an explanation, and that you understand that explanation. Intuition (3) is still going to be there.

Answer 2: The virtues are in us while the oracle is external.

But: Suppose that due to a weird mutation your gut had the functions of the pocket oracle, and gave you literal gut feelings as to what the right thing to do is (and, if necessary, why).

Answer 3: The virtues are formed by one’s own hard work.

But: Perhaps I had to work really hard to get the oracle. Or maybe I designed the AI system it uses.

Maybe there is some other answer to the question. But I would prefer to say that there is a relevant similarity between the case where the virtue tells me what to do and when the oracle does (even the gut oracle), namely that in neither case did I consciously weigh the options myself to come up with the answer.

I would deny (1). There are some independent reasons for that.

First, in difficult cases the struggle is important. This struggle involves oneself being pulled multiple ways by the genuine goods favoring the different actions. It is important to acknowledge the competing goods, especially if they are weighty. If I am trying to decide whether to rescue the drowning friend of five years or the mere acquaintance, it is by being deliberationally pulled by the good of rescuing the mere acquaintance that I acknowledge their moral call on me.

Second, there is sometimes literal and complex calculation going on in decisions. There is a 25% chance of rescuing 74 people versus a 33% chance of rescuing 68 people. It is not a part of perfected human virtue to have us do arithmetic in our heads instantly and see whether (0.25)(74) or (0.33)(68) is bigger. Of course, most of the time the deliberation is not mathematical, but that only makes things harder. We are not gods, and our agential perfection does not involve divine timeless deliberation.

Third, there is a trope in some science fiction (Watts’ Blindsight is where I saw this first) that there are non-human beings that are highly intelligent but lack consciousness. The idea is that consciousness involves some kind of second order reflection which actually slows down an agent, and agents that lack this evolutionary complication might actually be better. It seems to me that the temporally extended and self-reflective experience of deliberation is actually quite important to us as human agents. We are not gods or these kinds of aliens.

A value asymmetry in double effect reasoning

The Knobe effect is that people judge cases of good and bad foreseen effects differently with respect to intention: in cases of bad effects, they tend to attribute intention, but not so in cases of good effects.

Now, this is clearly a mistake about intention: there is no such asymmetry. However, I wonder if there isn’t a real asymmetry in the value of the actions. Simplify by considering actions that have exactly one unintended side-effect, which is either good or bad. My intuition says that an action’s having a foreseen bad side-effect, even when that side-effect is unintended and the action is justified by Double Effect, makes the action less valuable. But on the other hand, an action’s having a foreseen good side-effect, when that side-effect is unintended, doesn’t seem to make the action any better.

Let me try to think through this asymmetry intuition. I would be a worse person if I intended the bad side-effect. But I would be a better one if I intended the good side-effect. My not intending the good side-effect is a sign of vice in me (as is clear in the standard Knobe case, where the CEO’s indifference to the environmental benefits of his action is vicious). So not only does the presence of an unintended good side-effect not make the action better, it makes it worse. But so far there is no asymmetry: the not intending of the bad is good and the not intending of the good is bad. The presence of a good side-effect gives me an opportunity for virtue if I intend it and for vice if I fail to intend. The presence of a bad side-effect gives me an opportunity for vice if I intend it and for virtue if I fail to intend.

But maybe there still is an asymmetry. Here are two lines of thought that lead to an asymmetry. First, think about unforeseen, and even unforeseeable, effects. Let’s say that my writing this post causes an earthquake in ten years in Japan by a chaotic chain of events. I do feel that’s bad for me and bad for my action: it is unfortunate to be the cause of a bad, whether intentionally or not. But I don’t have a similar intuition on the good side. If my writing this post prevents an earthquake by a chaotic chain of events, I don’t feel like that’s good for me or my action. So perhaps that is all that is going on in my initial value asymmetry: there is a non-moral disvalue in an action whenever it unintentionally causes a bad effect, but no corresponding non-moral value when it unintentionally causes a good effect, and foresight is irrelevant. But my intuitions here are weak. Maybe there is nothing to the earthquake intuition.

Second, normally, when I perform an action that has an unintended bad side-effect, that is a defect of power in my action. I drop the bombs on the enemy headquarters, but I don’t have the power to prevent the innocents from being hit; I give my students a test, but I don’t have the power to prevent their being stressed. The action exhibits a defect of power and that makes it worse off, though not morally so. Symmetry here would say that when the action has an unintended good side-effect, then it exhibits positive power. But here exactly symmetry fails: for the power of an action qua action is exhibited precisely through its production of intended effects. The production of unintended effects does not redound to the power of the action qua action (though it may redound to its power qua event).

So, if I am right, an action is non-morally worse off, worse off as an exercise of power, for having an unintended bad effect, at least when that bad side-effect is unavoidable. What if it is avoidable, but I simply don’t care to avoid it? Then the action is morally worse off. Either way, it’s worse off. But this is asymmetric: an action isn’t better off as an exercise of power by having an unintended good effect, regardless of whether the good side-effect is avoidable or not, since power is exhibited by actions in fulfilling intentions.

Aristotle's optimism and pessimism

Aristotle seems to accept these three claims:

1. For the most part, things behave in a natural way.

2. Most people are bad.

3. To behave well is to behave in accordance with your nature.

I always thought there was a contradiction between (1) and (2) given (3). But actually whether there is a contradiction depends on the reference class of the “For the most part” operator in (1). Suppose the reference class is all behaviors of all things. Then it is quite likely that most of these behaviors are natural, bad human behaviors being far outnumbered by the natural behaviors of insects and elementary particles.

Back when I thought there was a contradiction, I assumed the reference class was the behaviors of a particular kind of thing, a sheep or a human, say. That may be correct exegetically, but even so it does not yield a contradiction. For morally significant activity is only a small fraction of the activity of a human being. Leibniz thought that about three quarters of the time we behaved as mere animals. That’s likely an underestimate. So even if all our morally significant activity is bad, it may be far outnumbered by non-moral activity, and hence it may well be that most activity of humans is good. But when we say that a human is good or bad, we only refer to their moral activity.

The only hope for a contradiction is to take the reference class of (1) to be all the activities of every subsystem type. Even so, I do not know that there is a contradiction. For to say that a person is bad is not to say that the majority of their morally significant actions are bad. Suppose that Monday in the morning Bob kicked a neighbor’s puppy. At noon, she sent a harsh and false email to a struggling student saying that he had never seen worse work than theirs. At three, he googled for articles in obscure Romanian journals that I could translate and plagiarize. And in the evening he cheated while playing chess with his daughter in order that she might never win. It would be fair to say that Bob am very bad person indeed, but that’s only on the strength of four morally significant actions. There were many other morally significant actions Bob engaged in. Each time he was asked a question, he had the possibility of lying. When driving, he had the possibility of murder. He did many things that were morally neutral and no doubt a number of things that were good. But the four bad things he did were enough to show that he was a bad person.

Our standards for moral okayness are much higher than the standards for a hard calculus exam where you just need to get more than half the questions right.

See also the quote from George MacDonald here.

Virtue, deliberation and contemplation

Is it better to be virtuous or simply to deliberate about each case as one comes to it, making the right decision?

I worry about this: the virtuous person often acts from an internalized habit, without deliberating about the reasons, as these reasons have been internalized. She skillfully comforts a friend without consciously deliberating whether to do it. But by not deliberating, she misses out on things of moral worth. For in deliberating, we consciously contemplate the goods that provide reasons for action. Deliberating about what to do in light of a friend’s needs is a crucial instance of contemplating the worth of one’s friend. The more the virtuous person has internalized the reasons that arise from this worth, the more she misses out on these instances.

Of course, there are other occasions for conscious contemplation of the worth of one’s friend. But it seems to me that when the contemplation is tied to action via deliberation, it is particularly valuable.

And the same applies to other virtuous and other goods.

A curious story about becoming just

Alice is a supervillain and Bob is a mad scientist. Alice wants Bob’s device to destroy the world. Bob makes Alice a deal: gain the virtue of justice and get the device. Alice isn’t smart enough to realize that once she gains the virtue of justice, she won’t want to use the device. She reads the best in ancient and modern wisdom, works hard, and gains the full virtue of justice, all in order to destroy the world.

Let’s suppose that when you have the full virtue of justice, you have to act from justice (at least in actions where justice is relevant). At some point Alice lost the motivation to destroy the world. Let’s suppose that as it happened, she lost that motivation at the same moment at which she gained full justice.

Alice now possesses justice, but it seems she is not praiseworthy for being just. All her just actions are ultimately explained by her former desire to destroy the world. They are not to her credit.

Now, here is what I think is rather odd about this story: Precisely by becoming fully just, Alice has lost all possibility for getting moral credit for acting justly. She is now locked into a non-praiseworthy justice.

I don’t know how this story bears on other philosophical questions or what interesting conclusions to draw from it.

In practice, I suspect, it would be unlikely that Alice would lose the motivation to destroy the world just as she gained full justice. There would likely be an intermediate time when she is no longer motivated to destroy the world, but has incomplete justice and hence is capable of choosing between virtue and vice, and hence can praiseworthily gain full justice.