Choosing Character: Responsibility for Virtue and Vice 9781501725807

Table of contents :
Contents
Preface
Introduction
CHAPTER 1. Voluntariness and Habits
CHAPTER 2. Ethical Disability and Responsibility
CHAPTER 3. Ethical Accessibility and Plasticity of Character
CHAPTER 4. Conscience and Its Work
CHAPTER 5. Metaethics and Moral Psychology
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Choosing Character

Choosing Character Responsibility for Virtue and Vice

JONATHAN JACOBS

Cornell University Press ITHACA

AND

LONDON

Copyright© 2001 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 2001 by Cornell University Press Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jacobs, Jonathan A. Choosing character responsibility for virtue and vice I Jonathan Jacobs. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-8014-3859-4 (alk. paper) 1. Responsibility. 2. Free will and determinism. 3. Character. I. Title. BJ145l J33 2001 170-dc21 00-012990 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks, and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. Books that bear the logo of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) use paper taken from forests that have been inspected and certified as meeting the highest standards for environmental and social responsibility. For further information, visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. Cloth printing

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Nancy, Nathan and Daniel

Contents

1x

Preface

Introduction

1

1

Voluntariness and Habits

9

2 Ethical Disability and Responsibility

34

3 Ethical Accessibility and Plasticity of Character 4

Conscience and Its Work

5

Metaethics and Moral Psychology Conclusion Notes

129

Bibliography Index

118

145

141

82

97

62

Preface

The issue of whether vicious agents are rational and responsible is a long-standing difficulty in ethical theorizing and practice. In this book I offer a reconsideration of the extent to which agents can effectively acquire a correct grasp of ethical considerations and guide their actions by it. This involves exploring a number of topics in moral psychology and metaethics as well as the nature of voluntariness. There appear to be strong reasons in favor of concluding that agents who lack sound understanding of ethical requirements are less than fully rational and perhaps also less than fully responsible. Nonetheless, it also seems that there are vicious agents who know what they are doing, are acting voluntarily, and who merit ascriptions of full-fledged responsibility and liability to blame. This is so even if, given their characters and circumstances, they could not have known or acted otherwise. Think of the deeply vicious agent who has an opportunity to do harm in just the way he cruelly enjoys. Not only does it not occur to him to refrain, but the reasons to refrain may not be acknowledged by him in any practically effective way. Still, he seems to be a voluntary agent enacting values he endorses. I argue that it is not true in a completely general way that 'ought' implies 'can.' There are agents who cannot do what they ought to do, but the conditions that explain their disability do not defeat their responsibility. The account does not eliminate the perplexities we feel concerning vicious agents. It attempts to diagnose them and keep them at the center of our attention. They cannot be explained away or analytically reduced to something more amenable. Some of the claims and arguments in the book are developments of ideas I first presented in articles. I am grateful to the editors of the journals in which those articles appear for permission to use portions of them. "Taking Ethical Disability Seriously" appeared in Ratio; "The ix

x

Preface

Virtues of Externalism" in the Southern journal of Philosophy; "Plasticity and Perfection: Maimonides and Aristotle on Character" in Religious Studies; and "Luck and Retribution" in Philosophy. "Metaethics and Teleology" is forthcoming in the Review of Metaphysics at the time this book is going to press. A large portion of the book was written during a sabbatical semester and summer spent at the University of Edinburgh and at Oxford. That sabbatical was generously supported by the Earhart Foundation, which awarded me a Fellowship Research Grant. I am very grateful to the Foundation. I also owe thanks to the Humanities Division at Colgate University for a Faculty Development Grant during that period. While in Edinburgh I was the John MacMurray Visiting Professor of Philosophy. The department was very welcoming, and I gained a great deal by being able to spend time with its members. I offered a seminar on the metaethics of virtue, and the postgraduates and faculty who attended were generous, patient, and demanding in exemplary ways. In particular, I thank Dory Scaltsas (then Head of the Philosophy Department), David Robinson (of the Classics Faculty), and David Carr (of the Department of Educational Theory) for making the seminar a success and a pleasure. At Oxford, I was Visiting Senior Member of Linacre College, and I am very grateful to the College and especially to a very good friend there, Simon Saunders. The book was completed while I was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Philosophy and Public Affairs in the Department of Moral Philosophy at the University of St. Andrews during spring 2000. For making that semester a fine experience in many ways I am especially indebted to John Haldane and David Archard. John Skorupski, Garrett Cullity, and John Broome are also owed thanks that I am very happy to extend to them. Robert Audi of the University of Nebraska and Daniel Frank of the University of Kentucky made many helpful criticisms and suggestions in conversations and in correspondence on topics discussed in the book. The editor at Cornell University Press, Catherine Rice, helped me in sustained, constructive, and encouraging ways. It was a pleasure to work with her. Readers for the Press did the sort of thoughtful, responsible job that made their criticism both challenging and welcome. Thanks are owed to Teresa Jesionowski, the senior manuscript editor, and Kristin Herbert, the copyeditor, for their corrections, suggestions, and indulgence. The index was prepared by Alex Jeffers, and I am indeed very grateful to him. jONATHAN jACOBS

Hamilton, New York

Choosing Character

Introduction

The main claims of this book are that there are substantial respects in which character is voluntary, that there is an important role for character in ethical cognition, and that agents are typically responsible for their actions even when fixity of character limits what are real, practical possibilities for them. In several respects the account is a development of some Aristotelian resources, but the project is not to ascertain precisely Aristotle's own views. An important result of the account is that there are agents I shall call ethically disabled. Their characters are such that sound ethical considerations are inaccessible to them and they have severely limited capacity for ethical self-correction. Still, they are fully agents, and it is appropriate to attribute responsibility to them. The phenomenon of ethical disability needs fuller treatment than it has received. Moral philosophers have not ignored vice and the ways in which we corrupt our own characters. Still, the treatment of these issues is often somewhat derivative in the sense that they are handled as departures from virtue or lapses from principles of right action. We tend to interpret what it is to be a rational agent in terms of what it is to be a well-ordered rational agent. That is fair enough; we are rational beings and rationality is indeed normative. Still, it is important to explain why and how an agent can be a responsible, rational agent and a full participant in the practical order, while being deeply alienated from what virtue requires. Such an agent does not regard himself as lapsing or violating principles of right action, and it may not be possible to change his view though he is rational. Human beings are creatures of habit, and we will see how habits for which we are responsible can be enabling in regard to virtue and how they can be disabling without creating exemption from responsibility. 1

2

Choosing Character

Chapter 1 presents the view that (typically) there is a significant degree of voluntariness in the establishment of character even though everyone is subject to powerful influences of many kinds. I do not mean that agents choose their characteristics, but that the way in which the exercise ofvoluntariness is involved in the formation of character supplies grounds for regarding agents as responsible for many of their ethically relevant characteristics. Even the very young, who do not yet act on the basis of practical reasoning, move about voluntarily and there is not some particular point or stage of life at which one becomes a voluntary agent. There is voluntariness all along, but the texture of it changes. There is voluntary motion that developmentally precedes rational, deliberate motion, and the character of one's voluntariness changes with maturity. The agent becomes more capable of rational judgment and is more in control of what appears good. Responsibility increases accordingly. Habituation has a powerful formative influence on character. There are, though, ways in which being habituated involves the agent's own voluntariness. It certainly does in so far as compliance and willingness are involved. Even though a good deal of habituation occurs prior to the time the agent is rationally mature, it is still not a process that simply imposes characteristics. Moreover, as one matures, habituation is more and more a process of habituating oneself as there is a greater role for one's own reasons, judgment, and perspective in motivating actions and shaping dispositions. The establishment of a characteristic is rarely if ever the effect of any single action or decision, though voluntary acts have the cumulative effect of shaping character. Thus, in addition to pre-rational habituation there are also the habits that mature agents establish in themselves, and the latter are of particular importance in this account. Habituation is not exclusively something that only goes on (or that 'happens to' a person) during a stage of life prior to when he or she is capable of practical reasoning. It is also a process we engage in by acting on the basis of what we take to be good reasons for action and what we judge to be worthwhile and desirable. While the interpretation of voluntariness is important to the overall account, the free will debate is not the central concern here. Rather than attempting to resolve the metaphysical issue of free will and determinism, I pursue some avenues that explanatorily relate important issues of moral psychology and moral cognition. I am more concerned with various issues connected with what agents 'have to' (or cannot) do on account of character as a matter of moral psychology than with determinism as a metaphysical issue. The views defended are at odds with hard determinism but do not require that determinism is false, only that determinist incompatibilism is false.

Introduction

3

The discussion of responsibility for character shows that agents can voluntarily come to be ethically disabled. This is the main topic of chapter 2. A rationally competent agent may voluntarily come to have a character such that it is not practically possible for that person to recognize ethical considerations in the right sort of way and to be motivated by them. These agents are still responsible for their actions despite the fact that their conceptions of value may be so disordered that well-ordered practical comprehension and reasoning are no longer realistic possibilities for them. 1 At least these are not things that it would be reasonable to expect of these agents. An agent can come to be ethically disabled voluntarily without having set out to become so just as one can voluntarily come to lead an unhappy life without having unhappiness as an aim. The agent does not engage in actions under the description 'doing this, or doing this regularly, is likely to cause a undesirable limitation of my judgmental or motivational capacities.' Still, the agent's voluntary actions have that effect, and the agent may even have some awareness of it. So the agent acts voluntarily and knowingly in ways that degrade his ethical personality, though he is not aiming to do so. (Or, he may have been warned but does not believe or heed the warning.) I argue that even the influence of ethically disordered prevailing norms and perspectives generally does not excuse the agent's responsibility or lessen the voluntariness of his character. That claim is central to this book and thematically unifies the overall discussion. The issue of whether there is such a state as ethical disability matters for a number of reasons. It bears on questions about what can be reasonably expected of people with respect to sound moral understanding and the capacity to reform unsound understanding and dispositions. Is a developed, effective ability to understand ethical matters in a sound manner a necessary condition for attributing moral responsibility? (I will answer in the negative.) Can mature, rational agents be morally incorrigible? (I will answer in the affirmative.) Ethical disability also bears on the extent to which moral disagreements can be resolved by reflection and reasoning. There may well be agents who are rational and responsible but who are impervious to right reason with respect to various ethical matters. They are not incompetent as rational agents but they are in certain important respects, unreachable. I think that there are such agents and that their actions and characters make for a kind of unclarity on the ethical landscape. We are often perplexed about how to address these agents and what attitudes and actions are appropriate with regard to them. To resolve the unclarity by diminishing their responsibility might make our ethics more tidy, but it would be a kind of denial, a denial of the fullness of their voluntary agency and participation with us in a common ethical world.

4

Choosing Character

The notion of ethical disability is also relevant to the debate about the appropriate weights of retributive, deterrent, expressive, rehabilitative, and denunciatory considerations in conceptions of the justification and aims of punishment. (I am beginning to explore these issues in a fuller way in other work) .2 I will not explore the issue of punishment here on a large scale, though I will make some remarks about the ethical aptness of retributivist considerations in general and suggest how the issue of ethical disability might bear on retributivist considerations in the justification of punishment. There surely are agents who generally act in conformity with what morality and the law require while not having ethical integrity or admirable character. Perhaps they are just being prudent or perhaps they have had the experience of blame and punishment and want no more of it. They may also just be reliable moral conformists, as it were. My main concern though, is to show that even agents who endorse wrong or perverse values and who cannot see the wrongness or perversity of them may well be responsible agent