Moral Action: A Phenomenological Study 0813230071, 9780813230078

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Forms of Choice
2. Interpreting Choices
3. Moral Action
4. Actions and Speech
5. Reciprocities between the Chosen and the Voluntary
6. Doing What We Do Not Want to Do
7. The Being of Human Agents
Appendix A. Stoicism
Appendix B. Thomas Aquinas and the Christian Sense of the Good
Appendix C. Intentions and the Will: Aquinas and Abelard
Appendix D. Kant
Index

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Acknowledgments I WISH to thank Francis X. Slade for conversations that stimulated and developed many of the ideas in this book; I am grateful to Dominic J. O'Meara for suggestions and comments concerning the section on Stoicism; and I am deeply indebted to Thomas Prufer for his help throughout the writing of this work. Much of the book was written in 1982-83 under a Fellowship for Independent Study and Research from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and I wish to express my thanks to the Endowment for this support. I am also grateful to The Catholic University of America for support given to me during that year. It is appropriate for me to dedicate this book on human action to Jude P. Dougherty, whose generosity and good judgment have been of such great assistance to me in so many situations.

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Moral Action

Introduction The beginning of anything is, very likely, the most important part, as the saying goes; hence it is also the most difficult. For, as it is very powerful in its effect, so it is very small in size and therefore very hard to see. But once the beginning has been found, it is easier to add to it and to develop, along with it, what still remains to be done. -Aristotle, On Sophistical Refutations, chapter 34

THERE IS, as Aristotle tells us, a difference in scale between making a discovery and developing a discovery made by someone else. Developing the insight may take on the form of a very large project; it may involve many people and show definite stages of advancement. In contrast, the discovery itself usually looks small at first. It is also hard to see: because it is a beginning, it occurs in a setting in which everything else remains the same as it was before the discovery was made. Only one small change, the discovery, occurs. But once the beginning has been made, it exercises a strong influence on what surrounds it. It has an effect on the rest, it transforms its context. And the discovery makes things easier for others, for those whose task it is to develop the insights they inherit. It makes it easy for them to draw out implications and to apply the discovery to areas that can be illuminated by it. Edmund Husserl made a philosophical discovery in his understanding of the intentionality of consciousness. It may seem to have been a small thing indeed-what could be more trivial to declare than that consciousness is always consciousness of something?-but it has exercised a considerable effect on a large part of the philosophical world. It has established the phenomenological movement and has influenced existentialism, structuralism, and hermeneutics. However, even now this discovery of intentionality, "very small in size," is "very hard to see." Although intentionality has been developed in such now-familiar philosophical themes as the human way of being in the world, intersubjectivity, temporality, and historicity, the core of the doctrine of intentionality as it was discovered by Husser! has been left relatively unexploited. Husser! first formulated the issue of intentionality in connection with

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Introduction

the activity of identifying and differentiating. And he first explored identity and difference as they occur in three areas: in our perception of things, in our picturing of things, and in our articulated thinking about things. Perception, imaging, and thinking were the three forms of intentionality that Husserl treated in his Logical Investigations. t His discussion of intentionality culminates in his study of the third of these forms, in his analysis of our articulated thinking about things. Here he describes "categorial objects" such as facts, states of affairs, judgments, propositions, relations, groups, and sets. He describes how such "objects" are established, presented, referred to, named, and identified. He traces the categoriality of such objects: he shows how layers of identification and differentiation succeed one another to constitute, say, a fact or a proposition. These analyses are less dramatic than the descriptions one might give of, for example, our encounters with other persons or our engagement with emotionally charged objects. The analyses of the categorial have a drier task to perform: they are to trace the veins of thinking, of identifying and differentiating, that run through our more striking involvements. Although categorialities may seem thin and technical as philosophical issues, they are the element that makes our perceptions, experiences, emotions, and reactions to be human and to be ours in a human way. And Husserl gets inside categorialities and logical form in a way that few philosophers have succeeded in doing; there is pure philosophical gold in what he does here. And yet, strangely, little has been done with his discovery of the intentionality of thinking and articulation. His gold has yet to be mined and sifted, his discovery is still hard to see. This book is an attempt to exploit the discovery Husserl has made about the intentionality of thinking. It is an attempt to apply what he has discovered to the domain of human action. It is an attempt to trace the categorialities, the forms of thinking, that occur in human action and that constitute it as human action. It is an attempt not to narrate a drama of some human performance but to display the identifications and differentiations whose presence is required if there is to be human action at all. Furthermore, our purpose is not to comment on Husserl's thought; it is to clarify the being of deliberate, moral human conduct. Our reason for turning to Husserl's ideas is not to explain his philosophy but to make our own project "easier" by developing and applying the discovery he has made. According to Husserl, a categorial object is an object in which parts and wholes have been explicitly identified and differentiated precisely as parts and wholes. It is an object that has been articulated, an object in which syntax has been established, an object in which relations, both

Introduction

3

internal and external, have been registered. When we carry out the activity of predication, for example, we present not only a simple object; we distinguish the object and a feature in the object, and we identify the feature with part of the object. When we collect two objects and take them as a pair, as a new kind of whole, we present not only this thing and that thing; we also present this and that: we register the "being together" of this and that. Both predication and collection are modifications of how we present things and how we can refer to things in their absence. They are modifications that involve thinking. They are activities carried on by the mind; indeed "minding" things is precisely the achievement of categorialities. Categorial forms are relations and articulations in things that are correlative to our thinking about things; as modifications of the presence and absence of things, they are not just "mental" occurrences but aspects of the being of things. However, categorial forms are "in" things in a special way. They are not still further things. There was once a cartoon in which three canisters were depicted resting on a shelf. One canister was labeled "Sugar," the second canister was labeled "and," the third was labeled "Spice." But clearly the "and" is not another thing added to sugar and spice; what would we find if we looked inside the canister labeled "and"? What there is first in the world is sugar, spice. But if we take sugar and spice together, if we think them as a collection, then there also is "sugar and spice" in the world, even though the "being together" has to be recognized as being in a new and different way. Their being together is the kind of being we identify when we think articulatedly, when we present and recognize and intend categorially. As Husserl observes, in a photograph or a painting we can depict sugar and we can depict spice, but the "and" is not picturable: it surfaces only in response to thinking.2 Whether we are looking at things or at a picture, we have to collect, to think, for what is signified by "and" to appear; but when we do think and collect, it does appear, it can be referred to, it can be registered and reported and identified. The same things are true of the "is" of predication. The "is" in "This elephant is grey," does not denote another elephant or another color, but the "being articulated" or the "being featured" of the thing we are talking about. As in the case of the "and," it is something we register only when we think the things we experience. In his account of categorials, Husserl has made the philosophical discovery that categorial forms do not exist simply in the mind in privacy and immanence. They are not merely mental. They belong to the presencing of things, to how things can be given and referred to and talked about. They belong to the being of things. Heidegger was vividly aware of the

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Introduction

importance of categorials for ontology, for the attempt to think about being, but other followers of Husserl have generally neglected this part of his work. 3 In this book we propose to show how categorial structures occur in human action. We wish to show the special forms of identity and difference that occur in human conduct. In doing this we will show what practical thinking is. We know from ancient philosophy that practical is to be distinguished from theoretical thinking, but Husserl can help us do more than merely acknowledge this difference; he can help us spell out in some detail the formal structures that make practical thinking the kind of thinking that it is, and that make action the kind of being that it is. In clarifying action and practical thinking, we will describe three categorial structures: (1) the categoriality found in choices: in the acts in which one thing is chosen in view of another, or in which one thing is chosen as preferred to another; (2) the categoriality proper to moral transactions, the form of identity and difference that changes a material performance, such as a handing over or a striking, into a moral act, such as an act of gratitude or an act of revenge; (3) the categoriality proper to moral judgment, to praising or condemning a particular performance as being good or bad, as being, say, an act of generosity or an act of hatred. We will discuss the kind of thinking that establishes choice, the kind that establishes moral transactions, and the kind that establishes moral praise and blame. It is not differences in material performances that bring about these various aspects of human behavior, any more than it is the addition of a new canister labeled "and" that establishes "sugar and spice." It is differences in thinking that bring them about, differences in the way material performances are identified and differentiated. Such differences in presentational form, such categorials, occur not only in cognition, science, mathematics, and logical deduction, but also in practical human conduct. They establish conduct as human, as practical, as moral, as our own, and as our responsible behavior. For example, when we do one thing in view of another, when we make a choice in view of a purpose, we achieve a particular kind of differentiation between what we choose to do now and what we are after; the two things are distinguished. But they are not left separate and unrelated. They are held together in that special identification in which the purpose is being served in what is being done now, in which the purpose is somehow seen to be in what is being chosen now, in which the thing chosen is already permeated by that in view of which it is being done. This categoriality is different from the kind that occurs in simple collecting, in predication, or in counting. It corresponds to a particular kind of thinking, to a particular kind of identifying and

Introduction

5

differentiating, and it is one of the constituents of human conduct. The categoriality that establishes moral transactions and the categoriality that establishes moral judgment, praise and blame, are still other forms of the thoughtful articulation that occurs in human action. And such differences in presentational form are not merely subjective occurrences taking place in the will or the intention ofthe agent; they take place in what happens publicly, and they establish some public activities as a distinct kind of being, as human action. It is our handing over or pushing that becomes informed by moral categoriality. In our moral thinking we identify and differentiate a public and material performance. The substance of human action is what is actually done. Thus while we will emphasize the categoriality of practical thinking, we will also insist that such thinking is not private but that it articulates and defines public performances. This book rests on two supports, on the thought of Husserl and on the moral philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. We will use issues from classical moral philosophy, issues such as deliberation, choice, character, and action, as a kind of magnet to draw out potentials in Husserl's thought that have not yet been actualized. At the same time we will use the superbly rigorous technique and the powerful insights found in Husserl's writing to refresh the ancient understanding of human conduct. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle various philosophical developments have tended to obscure the public character of moral action. This tendency is found in Stoicism and in some medieval philosophical and theological work; it has been reinforced in the modern tradition, in the thought of.· Montaigne , Descartes, and Kant. The tendency to internalize moral action has been part of a more general tendency to internalize mind, to neglect the public character of the activity ofthinking. It was in such a setting that Husserl's discovery of intentionality occurred, and his discovery has made it possible gradually to transform that setting, to break through the restrictions and distortions imposed on philosophy by an excessively internalized understanding of mind. Some of the implications of his discovery have already been worked out, but not the one we wish to develop in this book: a phenomenological account of the special kind of thinking that constitutes human agency. We will develop the categorialities proper to practical thinking, the categorialities that make up phrones;s. In using Husserl's thought to recover an ancient understanding of mind and action, we do not wish to claim that we are merely restoring the classical position. Although the modern interpretation of appearances is philosophically inadequate, it has provoked a deeper concern with appearances, with the forms of thinking, and with subjectivity, and it has left a rich heritage for us to exploit. But the heritage can bear fruit only if

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Introduction

intentionality is properly reintroduced, only if we get beyond considering thought and action as entirely internal events and appearances as merely subjective impressions. Thus as we attempt to recover the ancient understanding of human conduct, we hope also to be able to bring out new elements in the forms of practical thinking, elements that the modem concern with appearances and subjectivity has allowed to come into view. We hope not only to restate what phrones;s is, but to provide a new clarification of it. In chapter 1 we will distinguish choice from simply voluntary performance and will distinguish two kinds of choice, choice in view of something and choice as preference. In chapter 2 we will describe the categoriality at work in choice. In chapter 3 we will describe various kinds of human performance, using choice as a guide in our analysis; in this chapter we will be led to the structure of moral transactions and will describe the second kind of practical categoriality, the one that constitutes a performance as a moral action. In chapter 4 we will show how human performances can occur in and through speech. In chapter 5 we will discuss the relationships between choice, simply voluntary actions, and moral conduct, and we will show how and why moral action must be done as an end in itself. In chapter 6 we will discuss various ways in which we do what we really do not want to do; these phenomena serve as a foil to bring out the nature of simply positive human action. In chapter 7 we discuss what we might call the truth and the being of human conduct; in this chapter we introduce the third practical categoriality, that of moral judgment. We also discuss the being of situations and agents as well as the virtues of fortitude and temperance (which are essential in establishing an agent as capable of moral conduct). We close with remarks about law, philosophy, and the relationship between the good and the beautiful. After having presented the ontology of human conduct, we will discuss, in the supplement of this book, some major historical positions in moral philosophy and theology. These studies will serve to define our own position more exactly and to show how it comes to terms with some developments that have occurred since Plato and Aristotle. Our study of human action is part of a larger effort to work out the philosophical implications of intentionality; in a book entitled Presence and Absence we have examined, in the light of intentionality, some themes in ontology and the philosophy of language, and in The God of Faith and Reason we have discussed some fundamental issues in Christian theology. In four essays, "Picturing," "Making Distinctions," "Timing," and "Quotation," we have attempted to carry out analyses of still other phenomena. 4

Introduction

7

NOTES 1. See Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), Investigation VI. On identity and difference in perception, see §4-§11 , §16-§24, §47; in picturing, see §14, §51; in categorial articulation, see §46-§58. 2. Ibid., Investigation VI, §51. 3. See Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. A. Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), §16d-§l8; Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit, ed. W. Biemel (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976), pp. 24-25, 112-14, 153-61; "Mein Weg in die Phaenomenologie," in Zur Sache des Denkens (TIibingen: Niemeyer, 1969), p. 86. Logical issues play an important role, and Husserl's influence is perceptible, in Heidegger's doctoral dissertation and in his Habilitationsschrift; see Fruhe Schriften (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1972). 4. Robert Sokolowski, Presence and Absence (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978); The God of Faith and Reason. Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982); "Picturing," Review of Metaphysics 31 (1977): 3-28; "Making Distinctions," Review of Metaphysics 32 (1979): 639-76; "Timing," Review of Metaphysics 35 (1982): 687-714; "Quotation," Review of Metaphysics 37 (1984): 699-723.

1. The Forms of Choice is to clarify what human action is. Our procedure will be to bring out a number of strategic distinctions in human conduct. As we elaborate these distinctions we will also describe the things and aspects that are distinguished. We will, for example, distinguish choice from simply voluntary behavior, and while making this distinction we will describe both choice and voluntary performance. Our descriptions and our distinctions will reinforce one another. Because our descriptions will serve as a way of getting at distinctions, they will be more than merely narrative descriptions, more than just accounts of how things happen to be; they will assist us in getting at the essentials of the things we examine. They will help us see how the things in question have to be, not just how they are. And we will show how things have to be by showing that they must be distinguished from other things. We will show that each of the things we distinguish is necessarily not the other: that a moral transaction is necessarily not merely a material performance, for example. or that making a product is necessarily not the same as carrying out an exchange. And because we want to get at distinctions that are terminal-distinctions that are not derivable from other distinctions. distinctions that are not mere instances of other distinctions-we will be engaged in a philosophical enterprise and not simply a scientific one. 1 In trying to clarify what human action is. we will begin by discussing the phenomenon of choice and we will distinguish choice from simply voluntary behavior. We will then use the phenomenon of choice as a kind of analytical instrument to pry open other dimensions of human conduct and to make other distinctions. until we have completed a reasonably comprehensive examination of what action is. Our first topic. then, is the act of choice. OUR CONCERN

Getting at Choice

What should we examine if we want to bring out what it is to choose? At first it might seem that we should inspect the act of choice itself: that 8

The Forms of Choice

9

we should describe how we experience the making of a decision, and how choices or decisions differ from inclinations, desires and aversions, wishes and regrets, and other phenomena involved in human behavior. It seems obvious that if we want to know what choice is, we should examine the psychological phenomenon of choosing, and that we should therefore tum our attention to the act of choice and describe what we experience. But in fact this is not the direction in which we should look. Instead of examining the act of choice and the experience of choosing, we would do better to examine the thing chosen and to differentiate "the chosen" from the compelled, the automatic, and the accidental, as well as from the simply voluntary. Instead of trying to look directly at the act of choice, we should look at what is enacted when a choice is made. We should look not to a psychological event but to something that happens in pUblic. If we tum to the thing chosen, we will be able to "bring out" choice in two senses of this phrase: we will show what choice and the chosen are, and we will place the issue of choice out among the things we find around us, and not merely in the secrecy of our hearts and minds. Some chosen things are very large and some are small. A military attack may be something chosen, but so can the wearing of a particular suit of clothes, employment in a particular job, or the presence of a particular word in a sentence: when writing Little Gidding, for example, T. S. Eliot-as the manuscripts show-chose "marred" in place of "scarred" in writing the line "The marred foundations we forgot. "2 In such cases the thing is there because it has been chosen: it would not have been there had it not been chosen. Choice leaves its mark in the thing. There is something about the thing we would not understand if we did not know it was chosen. But sometimes the same kind of thing can be there without coming from choice: the suit may be worn, or the job may be taken, or the word may be used by virtue of something that is not choice. The word "get" is not really chosen when I blurt out to someone, "Please get out of the way." How can we tell if what is before us-the military hostilities, the blue suit, being a postman, the word "marred'·-is there through choice or not? What is the feature that we recognize when we recognize the thing as chosen? It is not one of the descriptive features of the thing, such as the size of the invasion or the ordnance used in it, nor is it like the color of the coat or the vocal sound of the word "marred." The thing's having-beenchosen shows up in another way. Often it is not simply the thing, the coat or the word, that is chosen, but the thing in its external relationships or in its internal attributes. What is chosen is the coat's being worn or the word's being placed in a poetic line; or the coat's being blue or the word's being pronounced in an elongated way (if I were to say "maaaarred," for example). But even in such cases

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the feature of having been chosen is not one of the descriptive, material features of the thing. The feature chosen may be a descriptive feature, but its having been chosen is not. Finally, there are cases in which the very being of the thing, the fact that this cloth is a coat at all or that these sounds are a word, is what has been chosen (this would be especially clear in a novel word). But still the character of having been chosen shows up differently from the character of being a coat or being a word. The feature of having been chosen does not show up in everything, not even in everything effected by human beings. A thing or an arrangement can be what it is by nature, quite apart from any human involvement, and even if it were to have been brought about by a human being, it still might have been done through compulsion, through automatic behavior, or through accident, and not by choice. A toppled fencepost may be a toppled post because the wind knocked it down, because someone knocked it over trying to get out of the way of a passing car, because someone absentmindedly pushed it over while thinking about something else, or because someone did not see it there and ran into it. When we just look at the toppled post we do not necessarily see the look of choice. The word "get" is most likely not chosen when I say, "Get out of the way," certainly not in the way "marred" is chosen in Eliot's line. "Having-beenchosen" need not be present in a thing, but sometimes it is present and we can usually tell whether it is or not. What does it mean to be able to tell this? In the biblical parable about the weeds sown among the wheat, how can the householder say, "An enemy has done this" (Matt. 13:28)? What are human beings, that they can recognize choice in things, and what is choice, that its presence and its absence can be acknowledged? It is no answer to such questions to say that seeing something as chosen means to know that this thing or that arrangement was deliberately caused by someone, to say that the feature of having been chosen is not something in the thing but a causal relation to an agent. Such a causal relation itself is something "in" or "on" the thing or the situation, and it is what we wish to clarify. What is it in the thing that demands mention of a causal agent? Furthermore, the look of having been chosen can still occur long after the choice took place. Someone now examining the cave paintings at Lascaux can see that certain colors and certain shapes have been chosen, and he sees this thousands of years after the choices were made. Choice does not show up only when it is happening. This persistence of the chosen, as such, through time, this visibility of the chosen, as such, even when the act of choice is finished, is one of the indications that it will be more productive to tum to the thing chosen than to the felt or perceived act of choice when we wish to analyze what choice is. Also it is obvious that the clear-cut alternatives between having ex-

The Forms of Choice

II

plicitly been chosen and not having been chosen at all are somewhat abstract. Most actual cases are an ambiguous mixture of the chosen and the unchosen, with choice present to a greater or lesser degree. It is necessary for us as agents to acquire a sense of the nuances and the hints of choice that come and go in what people do: to perceive choice where it may be intimated but is not obvious, to realize that it sometimes may not be present where it seems to be, and to know that such ambiguity occurs in ourselves and in others. For example, choice may surprise us: we may consider a statement made by someone as standard and as automatic, not really chosen, then suddenly realize that the speaker is being ironic or is using a code word. The irony or the signal may be apparent to some but concealed from others, so that the chosenness may not be seen by everyone. We need to acquire this sense of the ambiguity of choice even when we live in our everyday exchanges with others, and our philosophical description of choice must also take this ambiguity into account. Still, the complex and the intermediate and the ambiguous can be comprehended philosophically only if we clarify what the uncontaminated forms of the chosen and the unchosen are.

The Chosen and the Voluntary To say that something has been chosen is not the same as to say that someone wanted or willed to do it. The chosen is not the same as the willed or the wanted; many things can be willed or wanted without having been chosen. In using the stock expression, "Please get out of the way," the speaker wants to say "get" and "way," but he most likely does not choose these words. Someone may feel chilly and may put on a sweater; he wants to wear the sweater and wears it willingly, but he may well not have chosen to wear the sweater. Someone may be thirsty and take a glass of water; the water is drunk voluntarily but may not have been chosen. Hilda may see that someone looks lost and may volunteer to give him directions; she wants or wills to help him but may not have chosen to do so. Everything chosen is voluntary, but not everything voluntary is chosen. The voluntary or the wanted, that which is done willingly, is a genus that covers two species, the chosen and the willed-but-not-chosen. So when we try to find out what we see in things or situations when we say they have been chosen, it does not suffice to say that a human agent has brought the thing or the situation about or that a human being has expressed himself in it. The agent may have brought it about voluntarily or willingly without having chosen it. The voluntary is what we do with

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awareness and with consent, when we do simply what we want to do; Aristotle says that even animals and children can do what is voluntary. 3 Choice involves something more. And there is nothing reprehensible about doing some things voluntarily but without choice; we cannot saturate with choice everything that we do, and it would be ridiculous to wish to do so. Our choices themselves have to be supported by much behavior that is voluntary but not chosen. In our philosophical analysis, the voluntary, the chosen, and the voluntary-but-not-chosen-the genus and its two species-have to be brought out together. We will bring them out by discussing an example in which something chosen is played off against something voluntary and not chosen: the use of a decoy to get someone to act instinctively. Suppose there are two military commanders, one clever and the other impetuous, opposing one another in a battle. The clever commander, knowing the impulsive character of his opponent, sends part of his force off in one direction, counting on the other to rush headlong into the fight and to leave his flank or his supplies or some other target unprotected. Something like this happened in the Battle of Leyte Gulfin October 1944, when the impetuous Admiral Halsey went after a decoy Japanese fleet and left an American amphibious force vulnerable to an attack by other Japanese forces; only luck and very skillful tactics on the part of the commander remaining on the site prevented the landing force from being destroyed by the Japanese. In such an operation the clever commander makes a choice and the impetuous one acts simply voluntarily: he sees the enemy and goes to fight him. But the motion of the decoy is not just what it appears to be, a force in motion: it is two things, (X) a force in motion in order (Y) to draw protective cover away from the real target. The impetuous commander's action is one thing and not two; it is simply going to fight the enemy. Inclination takes over and the commander goes after what he wants. He does so consciously and willingly, but, strictly speaking, he does not choose. And playing the chosen off against the simply voluntary occurs not only in warfare but in all sorts of human exchanges, when we want to get someone to show his hand, to disclose his sentiments, to leave something unguarded. Suppose that our clever commander is facing someone who is not impulsive but, like himself, also cautious and shrewd. (For example, in contrast to Halsey at Leyte there is the case of Admiral Raymond Spruance at Midway, who held back from pursuing a damaged Japanese fleet and consequently may have avoided running into a large force of which the Americans were unaware.) Suppose the commander provides false information and makes his enemy think that the "decoy" force is

The Forms of Choice

13

really the whole force; and suppose that the cautious and shrewd opponent, on the basis of this "information," moves to the attack. In such a case the deceived commander would have exercised choice, even though he would have been operating under false assumptions; he would have chosen (X) pursuit in view of (Y) total destruction of the enemy. But this is not what the clever commander does toward the impetuous one; he counts not on disinformation but on inclination, and he counts not on his adversary's choosing but on his adversary's "doing what comes naturally." It is interesting to note that one must know what kind of man one's adversary is if one is to play on inclination or the simple voluntary, whereas disinformation, as the provocation of a misinformed choice, applies to almost everyone and involves less consideration of character, less consideration of native and developed inclinations. In the Battle of Leyte Gulf, for example, we could not understand what Admiral Halsey did unless we knew the kind of man he was. The circumstances alone would not explain his action. 4 The structure of choice is less characterdependent. It is more of an objective pattern, more of a calculation that works for anyone who calculates. For that reason we often can recognize something as having been chosen even though we have no idea who might have exercised the choice. The chosen requires a two, an (X) in view of a (Y), whereas the simple voluntary requires only a one. The difference between this "two and one" can appear on a scale much smaller than that of a military conftict. If a rude man is invited to dinner and eats so much that others do not have enough, he behaves according to the way he is and his performance is voluntary but not necessarily chosen. But if he eats voraciously out of a kind of spite, so that the other guests do not get enough, or if he calculates how he will be able to get as much as possible (he positions himself near the source of food, for example), his performance becomes chosen and it takes on a different tone. There is a sense in which we are more offended by his chosen activity than by his voluntary behavior. His voluntary action is the price we pay for having him there at all, since that is the way he is; but his chosen performance implies that he has introduced his own mind into the situation and has distinguished between an (X) and a (Y). He has not just followed a gravitational pull but has arranged the situation. He thereby gives rise to the question of why he did not know better. If he exercises that much mind, why does he not exercise more? To shake out an (X) and a (Y) is to arrange a more objective pattern, to institute categoriality, to enact something that can be recognized and appreciated by others, and it is therefore a sign that the one who shakes them out is not simply drawn by what he wants or repelled by what he wishes to avoid. There can be more malice or more goodness in a choice than in a

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simply voluntary act, even though both may reveal the same moral character. Choice emerges out of simply voluntary behavior just as eategorial objects-judgments about situations, for example, or the enumeration of objects-emerge out of simple perception. l Once choice is differentiated from the voluntary, it allows us to make several distinctions within the voluntary itself. (a) There is first the simple or immediate voluntary, which precedes choice and serves as a matrix for it: the immediate performances of eating, drinking, walking, rising, sitting, chattering, or swimming, all as done directly and spontaneously. Such voluntaries are prior to choice even in the chronological sense: while we are still children, before we acquire the power to choose, we carry out simple voluntaries all the time. Even when we have grown up, choice and the chosen surface only now and then in the midst of a seapf immediate voluntaries. (b) The activities in view of which choices are 11lade, the "ends," are voluntary and not chosen: choices insinuate thems~lves between us and voluntaries that cannot be immediately executed. We can call these the mediated voluntaries. The voluntary is, therefore, at both extremes of choice. As a simple performance the voluntary provides the matrix within which choices will emerge, and as an end it stands beyond the chosen. Choice both rests on and moves toward the simply voluntary. (c) Finally, another kind of voluntary can occur "after" choices: a choice-sequence can become disarticulated; it can settle into being a routine performance and can then be done as a simple voluntary rather than as a thoughtful enactment. We can call this the sedimented voluntary. The sedimented voluntary can be incorporated into further thinking: it can be like mathematical or musical routines that have been mastered and now serve as the basis for further articulations and nuances; or the sedimented voluntary can become merely routine and mindless, the mechanical repetition of things that have been settled and provoke no further thought; or, finally, it can become a simple voluntary again, done without much further thinking but directly enjoyed because it can be done so easily. In summary, therefore, the simple or immediate voluntary is the setting for choice, the mediated voluntary is that in view of which choices are made, and the sedimented voluntary is choice relaxed and in repose. The voluntary can exist as a simple performance quite apart from choice (I reach out and drink some water), or it can exist as an end, as something reached through the mediation of choices (I swim because I was able to drive to the swimming pool). In both states the voluntary is done for itself; neither my drinking nor my swimming is chosen in view of anything beyond itself. (There can, of course, be cases in which drinking

The Forms of Choice

15

and swimming are chosen in view of ulterior ends, but we are now considering them as actions done in and for themselves, whether directly or through the mediation of choices.) But there is a significant phenomenological distinction between these two kinds of voluntaries, the kind immediately executed and the kind done through choices. The presence of choice as a mediation has a phenomenological repercussion on the voluntary with which it is involved. It is not the case that all voluntaries are the same, some just happening to have choices attached to them, like rope ladders dangling from some of the windows of a building. A voluntary changes when it serves as an end in view of which choices are made. How does it change? When we have to take steps to achieve something instead of doing it straightaway, its being as a good in itself stands out more vividly, precisely in contrast to the chosen that is subordinated to it. When we just perform immediate voluntaries, we have a less articulated sense of the good than we acquire when we start deliberating and acting in view of a good that is reached through choices. It is not just that we are immature; rather, a particular kind of good, one played off as an end against its intermediates, has not yet appeared to us. A form of moral presentation has not yet been instituted. We achieve a more complex categoriality when we choose in view of something, and the "content" under that categoriality-whatever is the end in view, now appreciated as end-is modified by the categorial form. Its being an end in itself emerges in this contrast. For example, various means can be substituted for one another as we pursue a purpose; if one choice does not work, we can try another while still keeping the same end in view. This substitutability of the chosen emphasizes, by contrast, the irreplaceability of that for which we choose: if we find we are not able to attain by any means the thing we are after, we simply abandon our hope for it; we do not find something else that serves equally well. Also the various means we employ in view of a purpose are linked one to another in a series; this concatenation of what we choose emphasizes, by contrast, the singularity of that for which we choose: it is not one more link in the chain of choices, but exercises a governing role over all the links in the chain. "Growing up" as an agent therefore does not just involve more and more experiences. It also requires that we become able to work out a categorial difference between what is chosen and what is simply desired. To do this requires more than learning to delay gratification, because it involves being able to think how we can achieve goods through our choices. We do not just wait to be gratified, we must deliberate and set things in motion to that end. We have to think actively. Also we do not just insert choices between ourselves and the goods we want without

16

MORAL ACTION

affecting the goods we are after. The goods themselves become appreciated more vividly as goods because of the choices intervening between us and them, and there are many goods that can surface and be desired only through the mediation of choices. If John and Paul want to run a newspaper (not for the money, just for the activity as such), they cannot do so straightaway; the activity may be an end in itself but it cannot be done simply in itself; it can only be done through complicated choices (renting a building, getting a loan, interviewing staff members and employees). Agents who are simple-minded cannot institute such categoriality and therefore they cannot achieve certain kinds of goods. The sense of goods desired in themselves thus takes on a deeper hue when such goods are contrasted with the choices that lead to them. Finally, by a further phenomenological repercussion, even the immediate, simple voluntary-drinking water, taking a walk, being with someone, pleasant conversation-becomes appreciated as immediate when we realize that we do not have to make choices in order to get at it. It takes much experience, categoriality, and contrast to realize, as the song says, that the best things in life are free. Thus when choice and the chosen surface out of the voluntary, they cast philosophical shadows on their surroundings and bring into relief various kinds of voluntaries and various forms at work in the presence of the good. We have been using the word "voluntary" in a way that differs somewhat from its current usage. Although the word can in principle be used as an adjective or as a noun, it is now most commonly used as an adjective: a voluntary oath, voluntary service, voluntary manslaughter, a voluntary donation. Its only common meaning as a noun is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, "a musical piece or movement played or sung spontaneously or of one's free choice, especially by way of prelude to a more elaborate piece": a trumpet voluntary, an organ voluntary. We will use the word as an adjective but will also take advantage of the possibility of using it as a noun; we will distinguish, for example, between simple voluntaries and things that are chosen. It is interesting that in music a voluntary is not only spontaneous but also often a prelude to a larger and more elaborate piece: it is as though musical voluntaries provided a setting for more deliberate, more chosen compositions, just as the voluntary in general serves as a prelude for choice and its categorialities in our ordinary activities. But whether used as an adjective or as a noun, "the voluntary" is used to name things that take place publicly around us. It can, of course, also be used to name decisions or feelings or "acts of the will." But in using it philosophically, we wish to emphasize and exploit its public application, its application to donations, killings, promises, hospitals,

The Forms a/Choice

17

military service, and musical performances, and we wish to draw attention to "being voluntary" and "being chosen" as "looks" that things, events, and activities can have. We want to turn the philosophical analysis of willing and choosing from a concern with private experiences to a study of public behavior. We should also mention that we do not intend to equate "the chosen in view of something" with "means to an end." "Means," a term that is used to translate the Latin word media, refers to that which comes between the agent and his purpose; it connotes things used as instruments or as resources to achieve something. But "chosen in view of something" is much broader. It reflects the Greek phrase, which is often found in Aristotle, ta pros to telos, "things related to an end." For example, if I use my car to drive to the swimming pool, driving the car is a means of getting to swim, but my return trip home from the pool is no longer a means toward swimming. However my driving home is indeed still "chosen in view of swimming," even though it comes after the swimming. I am not simply driving home; I am returning home from a swim. If I had not swum I would not be driving now. What I am doing can only be defined in relation to the swimming. "Chosen in view of something" is a more flexible category than is "means toward an end," with its overtones of instrumentalism. The former involves a more varied range of relations than does the latter. Choice as Preference

In distinguishing the chosen from the simple voluntary, we have worked with choices that are made in view of something. In such choices the action chosen is done for the sake of something else, while in simply voluntary actions the performance is done for itself. Choice in view of a purpose is the kind of choice described by Aristotle in his treatment of proairesis. He says that choice and the deliberation that establishes choice are both concerned with that which is related to ends. 6 But choice can also occur in another way: choice can be the preference of one voluntary before another. Instead of simply drinking a glass of water, I may consider whether I want to drink some water or some milk. Instead of simply helping this person who seems confused, I may consider whether I should help him or should instead take care of this child who has just hurt himself. In the case of the simple voluntary, the situation I am in yields one thing that is wantable and doable and I respond by doing it. But my

18

MORAL ACTION

situation may yield two or more things that are desirable and doable, and it may become necessary for me to weigh the alternatives. Comparison surfaces in the situation and comparison involves presence of mind: BOSWELL: I suppose, Sir, he has thought superficially, and seized the first notions which occurred to his mind. JOHNSON: Why, then, Sir, still he is like a dog, that snatches the piece next him. Did you never observe that dogs have not the power of comparing? A dog will take a small bit of meat as readily as a large, when both are before him.7

Choice as preference involves articulation and thinking, while the immediate voluntary does not, but the thinking in preference is not the same as the thinking that occ~rs in choices made in view of something. Both involve a two, but the two's are different. In preference, the two are compared with one another and one is chosen while the other is dismissed; in choosing for the sake of something, the chosen is distinguished from the purpose, but one is done so that the other will be. There is distinction but not exclusion. Choice as preference is like the direct voluntary in that each possibility arises as to be done without mediation, but since the two possibilities together cannot be done immediately, one has to be thought in contrast with the other. One has to enter into combat with the other. Moreover, the choice between them is not made in view of anything beyond them both: choice as preference does not get settled by becoming choice in view of something. Choice for the sake of something is preceded by deliberation, the form of thinking that shakes out means and ends. Choice as preference is preceded by a thinking without the subordination and architecture that deliberation in view of something involves. It is the simple comparison of goods, not planned strategy. The goods we recognize and the comparisons we see in them reveal our character very much as our simple voluntaries do. But since what we prefer is now chosen against other possibilities, what we are as agents can be defined with a greater categoriality when it shows up in our preferences. People who describe us can not only say what we have done but can show what we have preferred and what we have excluded when options were available. It is one thing to go off to enjoy a glass of wine and a cigar; it is another thing to do so when there is a crisis and people need our help. Sometimes we maintain our categoriality until we make our choice between the alternatives we are considering; we remain thoughtful to the end and the action is fully our own. At other times we may become dazzled by one of the alternatives and rather lapse into a "preference"

The Forms of Choice

19

instead of deciding for it; in such cases the situation is not really resolved into a choice. Instead, it becomes disarticulated, our thinking erodes, and we become engaged in a simple voluntary in place of a preference. The thinking is not sustained and the performance, although still done by me, is less my own. But in the cases in which we do make up our minds about a preference, the dismissed alternative does not just drop off and leave us with a simple voluntary. If we have indeed made a choice, the aura of the alternative remains; the thing preferred has been preferred in contrast to what concretely might have been. The preferenceJor has been a selection against. This may enhance either the goodness or the badness of what is done. If someone stays to help when he could have escaped, his action is different from staying when there was no real option; if someone runs away when there is very little danger and when the one he abandons desperately needs him, his action is different from running away when no real good could have been done for the one he left behind. Sometimes the options that a situation throws up to us are those that would be weighed as options by any reasonable person. But often enough an issue of preference arises only because of the kind of person who is engaged in the situation. The fact that we consider alternatives at all, or that we entertain certain possibilities as realistic options, may disclose what kind of agent we are. This connection between character and preference is behind Jack Benny's well-known joke: he is held up by a robber who demands, "Your money or your life." After a long silence the robber repeats his demand and Benny answers testily, "I'm thinking, I'm thinking." The joke worked because Benny developed the public persona of a stingy man as the basis for much of his humor. Most comedians have to develop a public personality so that the simple voluntaries and the options among them become available as resources to be structured into jokes and situations. Character is revealed in the voluntaries, and the voluntaries become visible as voluntaries over against a character. And certain options among voluntaries are admitted as options only by certain kinds of people. What we weigh, and not just what we do, shows what we are. When we deliberate and make choices in view of something, we also weigh alternative courses of action, but in this case they are determined largely by what we are trying to bring about. It is true that some people will consider certain courses of action, certain means, that others would not, so thinking about means can also reveal the kind of person the agent is; but in choices made in view of something, there is also pressure coming from the purpose desired. Some possibilities surface only because there appears to be no other way of getting to what we want. The ends, and not primarily our characters, stir up the possibility that we may have to hurt someone or deprive someone of something. But in choice as

20

MORAL ACTION

preference there is just the consideration of alternatives in what we immediately want to do, in what we want to do for itself. The desired is presented in a more elementary form. It is also possible for us to begin weighing not just immediate voluntaries but also the ends that have been established in our lives, the steady purposes in view of which and for the sake of which choices are made. This is a much more solemn reappraisal of who we are and what we have been; it is not comparable to choice as preference, which is the resolution of a particular situation and not the recharting of a course of life. We do not make preferences among ends in the way we choose among voluntaries that can be immediately executed. Making a choice, whether in view of something or as a preference, is completed when it is done, but establishing or changing a purpose in life is accomplished only through a long course in time. The simple voluntaries are to choice as prepredicative experience is to categorial articulation. The predications and relations achieved in categorial thinking emerge out of the immediate involvement we have with the things around us. Even in prepredicative experience we carry out some identifications and differentiations, we recognize some perceptual samenesses and differences, but in categorial thinking, identity and difference are brought to a much more refined and explicit state. And once they have been achieved, the categorial structures we express in language and other symbolic systems can fall back into a prepredicative, associative condition. Instead of speaking thoughtfully, we can just read off or repeat the words we have become accustomed to. This is the process of sedimentation. The same possibilities exist in the voluntary and the chosen. The simple voluntary is the immediately desired and the immediately done. It involves some identification and difference-the water we wish to drink has to stand out as drinkable within our situation and against the other things in it-but it does not necessarily engage a practical categoriality. But when we weigh alternatives and choose what we prefer, or when we introduce intermediaries between what we do and what we want, we articulate moral and practical categorialities and introduce moral and practical thinking into what we are doing. A heightened presence of the good and the desirable occurs, not because it is more intense but because it is more thoughtful. The categorialities of choice as preference and choice in view of something can in turn lapse into sedimentation; our actions can become simple voluntaries, performances in which the sharp edges of articulation are softened and blended into what we want and what we do immediately Gust as the use of language, once having been thoughtful, can become sedimented into association and vagueness).

The Forms of Choice

21

Such sedimented voluntaries can then become the base for still further articulated choices. All such structures and transformations show up as features of the performances we do in the situations we are in, in the performances we see others do, and in the things we see as having been done and chosen by others. They are looks of things and not merely psychological episodes. And if the voluntary is a matrix for the chosen, something we can call the situation is in tum a matrix for the differentiations that allow even the voluntary to surface as an issue for us.

NOTES I. On philosophy as the activity of making distinctions, see Robert Sokolowski, ""!\vo Questions about Philosophy: Whether It Is, and What It Is," Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 54 (1980): 26-36. 2. See Helen Gardner, The Composition of Four Quartets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 168. 3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III 2, llllb8-9; III 1, lllla26. 4. See Samuel Eliot Morison, Leyte. June 1944-January 1945, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, vol. 12 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1958), pp. 194-95. Halsey later claimed that he was faced with the option of either pursuing the Japanese fleet to the north or waiting for the other fleet (the one that later did attack the Americans). He said he thought that this other fleet was too weak to do any damage. Morison writes: It was not a case of either-or. Halsey had enough gun and air power to handle both Japanese forces. The alternative to rushing everything up north was not, as he said, "to guard statically San Bernadino Strait." ... But Halsey wished to deal the Northern Force a really crushing blow.... After all, the Northern Force was out in the Philippine Sea, "asking for it." The Center Force might never come out; and Halsey was no man to watch a rathole from which the rat might never emerge .... At least three task force commanders were amazed and disturbed by Halsey's decision.

These passages indicate that Halsey's character entered into the action, that others thought his action to be impetuous and his appraisal of the situation wrong, and that one of the deficiencies in his action was a failure to distinguish alternative possibilities, a failure to shake out means and ends and preferences effectively ("It was not a case of either-or"). And while Halsey may be criticized for his action at Leyte, there are other situations in which a man like Halsey is exactly the kind of agent that is required.

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5. Husserl describes the emergence of categorials out of perception in Experience and Judgment, trans. J. S. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), pp. 197-263. 6. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III 2, llllb26-27; III 3, 1112bll-1ll3a5. 7. James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson (New York: Modern Library, n.d.), pp. 358-59.

2. Interpreting Choices Triangulating the Chosen

in action and in speech. In both domains choices are nested in and surrounded by the merely voluntary. Most of what we do is done simply because we want directly to do it ("So we do not ask: Why does Iago do such evil acts? He does them by definition"I), and much of what we say is said as the chatter we simply want to carryon. We stand up, walk over there, greet someone, comment on the weather, think about what happened yesterday, listen to the news, go to a movie, loan someone five dollars, visit a sick friend, walk the dog; each thing is done with awareness and with consent, and it is done just for itself. In this ocean of the voluntary, in this element of direct consummation, there occur episodes of choice. A choice is more discrete and more identifiable than a simply voluntary thing. Each simply voluntary performance flows into another-often we are not sure that one has really taken place, often we are not clear about what is being wanted, what the voluntary is, in a particular action. But a choice involves an (X) standing out against a (Y). Something is done in view of something else, or something is preferred to something else, and so the this being done is more explicitly determined. The contrast makes it more precise. There is a more definite beginning and end, there can be more definitive argument about whether the choice should be performed. The choice is digitalized, so to speak. Mind and not just awareness has gone into the choice-an (X) has been identified and differentiated against a (Y)--and what the mind has brought out can be reidentified by a spectator when he recognizes something as chosen. The chosen is thus easier to interpret than the simply voluntary. But a choice made in view of a purpose has a further categoriality. Besides being determined in view of something beyond itself, that for which it is done, the chosen is identifiable in still another dimension, and in this dimension it can be identified in two different ways. (1) Whenever CHOICES OCCUR

23

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MORAL ACTION

an item is chosen in view of something, it is selected as one option among many. Some other (X) could have been selected in view of the same (Y). If this (X) were the only one imaginable in view of a given (Y), it would really not have been something chosen; it would be merely a part of (Y) and its being done would be more like a simple voluntary, not a matter of choice. The chosen is, in principle, substitutable. This replaceability is especially vivid in speech. Practically anything we say could be said in other words, in some paraphrase, with the same object being displayed and the same rhetorical effect achieved. Every linguistic choice is positive but also privative, excluding the other formulations that could have been stated. But even in regard to action, there will always be argument about the best way to go about achieving a certain goal. There always are several possibilities and whichever is chosen is selected against the others. The options are not random, however; if we choose this over that, we are still acting in view of that for which we are choosing. The sameness of the purpose contributes a touch of sameness to all the options that are considered, so that people who seem to be doing very different things-one is stuffing envelopes and one is telephoning voters and one is collecting and counting money-can all really be doing "the same thing," bringing about the election of a political candidate. (2) Besides being profiled against possible alternatives or possible substitutes, the chosen is involved in concatenation. Although that in view of which we choose may remain one, what we do to bring it about is usually several. In speech we almost never say just one word: we combine many words and many sentences (each word and each sentence being, in principle, subject to substitution), and in action we almost always must work out a strategy in several stages to bring about what we want. Each chosen (X) has to be seen in the context of the other chosen (X)'s that must also be made, and this concatenation, this syntax of what is chosen, can exercise pressure on any particular choice and can modify it. We may wish to use the word "frighten," but two words ago we used "lighten," so we now select "scare" instead, but all this in view of displaying the same situation and achieving the same rhetorical impact on our listeners or readers. The choice among options, the act of substituting, is influenced not only by the purpose in view but also by the assembly of choices. We may want John Jones to help in the financial side of the campaign, but we are also asking his enemy David Drew to assist in the management, so we had better get Marie Smith to handle the finances instead. The grammar of our personnel demands it; our choices are determined by more than just the goal we have in mind. Substitution and concatenation thus give two more points that can be added to that in view of which the choice is made. With these three

Interpreting Choices

25

points, the interpreter of an action can identify, by a kind of hermeneutic triangulation, the feature of "having-been-chosen" as belonging to a particular action or thing or word-whole. If we find a shaped stone and see it as an arrowhead, we do so by interpreting it (a) against the activity of hunting an animal; (b) against other stones or metals or kinds of wood that could have been used for this purpose but in fact were not (we appreciate why this was the best stone for arrows for hunting or why arrows are better than clubs); and (c) against the other instruments with which it is enchained: the arrow shaft, the bow or the atlatl, the stones used to shape this stone, and so on. The shaped stone is seen as chosen against the background of purpose, substitution, and concatenation, and it is these relationships that make it possible for us to think about and to explain what we have before us; we are not limited simply to sympathizing with someone who just voluntarily shaped the stone. An agent who thinks clearly is able to set out the articulations of choice in all three directions. He can achieve all the appropriate categorialities. He is able to differentiate crisply the chosen from what is purposed, he is able to arrange the sequence of steps that must be chosen in view of what is wanted, he is able to distinguish clearly between this substitutional possibility and that one and to see what concatenations and consequences are involved in each. To do all this is clear practical thinking. Supporting such thought is the imagination that lets the possibilities of choice arise, that presents what else might be done in view of the same. Imagination suggests, thinking arranges, and both gifts are not always found together in one and the same person. But over against both of these powers is the dimness that really does not distinguish one option from another, that does not isolate and arrange steps, that suffocates both the chosen and the purpose in one affectionate but undiscriminating embrace: the state of "mind" in which practical categorials are watery or diluted. If we try to interpret another's choices, whether they are done in our presence or have been done some time ago, our hermeneutical triangulation has much to work with if the choices were or are thoughtfully done, but if the "choices" were or are mindless, we waste our time if we try to see reason in them. We have to stop looking for identifiable structures and turn to the hermeneutics of simple desires and simple voluntaries, to decipher what someone wants or what someone wanted. The "agent" in such a performance may use some of the words generally associated with making choices in view of a purpose, but the words are used without reference and without coherence. The pretense at a span between choice and purpose, the pretense at planning a strategy, at deliberating and making a choice, is just a cover for impetuous motion. The difference between articulation and vagueness will be familiar to anyone who has seen a

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MORAL ACTION

practical situation handled competently by some agents and smothered by others, and who has been able to see a difference between the two. In the first case the observer will be able to give an account of what was done and why it was done, but in the second, very little can be said about what has happened. Something chosen in view of a purpose is articulated in three ways. A simply voluntary action is much less articulated. We do it not in view of anything beyond itself but just because we want to do it; we do not set up a range of substitutable alternatives that would serve the same purpose, but merely do directly what is to be done; and there is no concatenation of voluntaries under a single aegis, only a succession of one voluntary after another, a blending of one into another. Since the voluntary lacks such relationships, it cannot be identified as rigorously as the chosen can. The voluntary lacks the categoriality of the chosen. Hence we who interpret the voluntary, we who see something as b~ing voluntary for someone, must sympathize to some degree with the desire corresponding to it and with the achievement that satisfies the desire. We have to appreciate that thirsty creatures drink, that people like to take walks, that conversation is good. On a more sensitive level, we must appreciate the affection that an old person may have for the place in which he lives, the kind of importance a pet may have for a child, the pleasure one can have in listening to a piano sonata, the sort of love that can exist for someone who is, say, crippled or retarded, the sense of home that a town may have for someone who grew up in it. And turning from general human likes to more individual ones, we would, if we were familiar with someone, if we knew his little ways, simply appreciate that he was fond of doing this thing or that, doing one thing or another. We would understand what was to his liking. The things that can be liked occur in an infinity of colors and shades. When we want them and do them we are not always after something else beyond them. As observers we simply have to comprehend such things and not always feel obliged to explain why they are good. There can be no derivation or proof of such voluntary goods, whereas there can be a kind of derivation showing why something has been chosen, a derivation along the three lines of purpose, substitution, and concatenation. Choice in view of something can be triangulated but choice as preference cannot. Choice as preference is much nearer to the simple voluntary. If we weigh two goods and decide for one over the other, there are no substitutions we could have put in the place of what we have chosen, and, more regrettably, there are no substitutes for what we have left behind. Both goods were the wanted goods; no good beyond them, no purpose made them liable to replacement. Nor are they concatenated into chains of choice; each is wanted by itself. As observers of the choices of others,

Interpreting Choices

27

we can come to understand preferences just as we understand the simple voluntaries, by appreciating what can be wanted by human beings, but we must add the element of contrast: we must appreciate how one thing can be desired when it means the loss of another. The Publicity of the Chosen and the Voluntary

Consider four cars moving up Connecticut Avenue. In one car, Marie is on her way to visit a friend who is in the hospital; in another, Paul is on his way to go swimming; in the third, Debbie is going to work at a bank at the Van Ness Center; in the fourth, Steve is just out for a ride (he enjoys driving, and he especially likes to drive on Connecticut Avenue). We might be tempted to describe these cases this way: all four drivers are doing the same thing, driving, but each has a different intention in mind; all four bodily motions are the same but the mental states of the participants are different. But such a description would be Cartesian, and it would not be adequate to what is being done there before us. The differences in the four cases are not just internal and mental but are present in the processes that are going on. We cannot describe what is going on as a purely bodily process: if we were to try to do so, we could not stop with four people driving or four cars being driven; we would have to go down to molecular, atomic, or subatomic motions, and then there would not be four but an indeterminate number of processes. The borders at which we mark off each one of the four things in motion, the four cars being driven, would dissolve. Identifying four cars moving is not as unproblematic as it might seem at first sight, and identifying four cars being driven is even more perplexing. Once we have identified them as being cars and being driven, we have already introduced dimensions in which "being chosen" and "being done for that purpose" belong. We do not project something mental into the bodily when we bring in the chosen and the willed; we simply unpack the aspects that show up when we identify four cars being driven on Connecticut Avenue. The movement of one of the cars is a simple voluntary, an automotive voluntary: Steve likes to drive along Connecticut Avenue and he is doing so now. The being driven of the other three cars is something chosen: one in view of visiting a sick person, one in view of swimming, one in view of banking. These chosen procedures are already saturated by that in view of which they occur. Paul's driving participates in swimming and Marie's participates in visiting someone. We would not adequately describe the vehicles going by us-as we stand at the comer of Connecticut Avenue and Porter Street-if we did not recognize the distinctions between an

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automotive voluntary and a chosen ride, and between driving to swim and driving to visit. And by the principle of substitution, Paul could have been going to swim by taking the subway and Debbie could have been getting to work by taxi. By the principle of concatenation, Marie does not get to her friend only by driving; her driving is enchained in many other chosen procedures that get her there: walking to the car, finding a parking space, buying some flowers, asking which room her friend is in. But Steve's voluntary driving could not be achieved in any other way except by driving where he is driving, so his activity does not involve substitution and concatenation, just as it does not involve driving in view of anything beyond the activity of driving itself. If we sawall four cars waiting for the light to change at the corner of Connecticut Avenue and Tilden Street, we would not be able to identify which cars were there as something chosen and which as simply voluntary, and we would not be able to determine what substitutions and concatenations each might be profiled against. But we would know and even "see" that such aspects-of being either chosen or just voluntary, of being chosen for one purpose or another-are indeed there in the throbbing, waiting vehicles. If we see them as cars being driven-and not as leaves falling from a tree or as grass growing through the sidewalk or objects just rolling down the street-we must also see them with these colorations. And in the case of some cars we might also be able to determine whether they are chosen or not and what they are chosen for: if we recognize this car as Paul's and recognize Paul as the driver, we might well register the car as being driven to the swimming pool, and we might well recognize Steve as just out for a ride. These are categorial recognitions similar to recognizing someone's approach as threatening or someone's smile as friendly. The Emergence of Choice in View of Purposes

When we do something that is simply voluntary, we do immediately what we want to do, we are the ones who do it, and we do it while being aware of what we are doing. Such immediate execution of what we want to do serves as a margin for us in our philosophical analysis of human action. When we attempt to define, philosophically, choice and the chosen, we must make use of such immediate doing as a foil. Immediate action, the simple voluntary, is, moreover, a final margin, a fixed foil for our analysis, since there is no form of human behavior that stands still further over than the simple voluntary. There is nothing in the realm of

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action that is more elementary than the immediate performance of what we do consciously and willingly. The simply voluntary engages us all the time, usually in regard to trivial matters but sometimes in regard to the serious: we sit, walk, adjust our posture, greet someone, smoke a cigarette, feed the baby; or we may get angry and excoriate someone, we may embrace someone, console someone, we may brag because we like bragging. There is immediate intervention, immediate behavior, desire simply unfolding, the simple voluntary. The simply voluntary is a matrix even for frustration, for being unable to do what we wish or for having to do what we do not want: we are irritated when our easy sequence of behavior is hindered or interrupted. And the simply voluntary is also a matrix for the chosen. The chosen comes between us and what we are choosing for. What we choose for is something voluntary, but it is no longer a simple voluntary. We cannot just do it, we have to do it through something else. Now if our philosophical analysis were to consist in drawing up a kind of catalogue of moral realities, we might proceed in the following way: we could first collect into one class all the voluntaries, both the simple voluntaries and those that are mediated, those that serve as "ends" to be reached through "means"; we could then contrast this class with another, with things that are mere means, things chosen not in themselves but for something else. Such a division might be useful in a simple description and classification of practical goods. But our philosophical enterprise is not meant primarily to generate a catalogue; it is meant to show how the items in the catalogue are originally differentiated from one another. It is meant to show, for example, how the chosen surfaces as different from the merely voluntary. In such a phenomenology we dare not place the simply voluntary into the same category as the mediated voluntary. The mediated voluntary, that in view of which choices are made, has phenomenological features in which we are interested. For us the mediated voluntary is philosophically different from the simple voluntary. The exercise of any desire, even an unmediated satisfaction, a simple voluntary, involves some anticipation and recognition if it is to be done by us, done willingly, and done consciously. It is not the case that we first feel a need and then search for something to fill the need, nor that we first imagine what we would like and then look for something to match the imagination. We do not begin with the mental and project it into the world. Rather something in the world simply begins to look good. Our initial focus is on something that invites our involvement. The water would be good to drink, the person would be good to talk to. It is not that we simply admire something in what we experience; in that case the

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admirable would be the beautiful and not the good. The good is essentially attractive, always promissory. A thing's being good for us signifies that we can act with it in such a way that the acting is good. The primary sense, the prime analogue of the human good is not a feature of something but an exercise and an involvement, an activity with something. Water attracts and promises my drinking the water; that person attracts and promises my conversing with him; that mountain attracts and promises my climbing it. Anything presented as good is presented in an identity synthesis. It must be first anticipated and then engaged. But this is neither the simply perceptual nor the categorial identity synthesis that Husserl describes, the kind that satisfies merely cognitive interests, the kind that could go, indifferently, either this way or that in the course of perception, or the kind that could generate just any predicates at all, indifferently, so long as we continue to learn more and more about the thing. The identity synthesis involved in the good is not neutral. When a thing starts to look good, the possibility of engaging the thing becomes insistent until it is consummated or until it loses its being good. Even the simplest voluntary involves some anticipation on our part and correlatively some attraction on the part of the thing; the voluntary itself, what we do as being good while we do it, needs to have been anticipated if it is to be a voluntary. There must be a recognition in its being performed, a recognition of it as the same as what had been desired. If it had not been anticipated and were not recognized, it would not really have been done by us and would not have been done consciously and willingly. There will be a hiatus between the anticipation and the fulfillment and we will have to cross it to achieve the fulfillment: we must walk over, reach out, say hello; we must stand on something, cup our hands, put them into the stream, and collect the water we want to drink. Such intermediate behavior is merely the beginning of our involvement with the good. It is not something chosen; it is not distinct enough to be a choice and it need ~ot involve categoriality. It is just the first stage of what we do to exercise the good and it is continuous with the simply voluntary. It is the beginning of our response to what appears attractive, the beginning of the continuous identity synthesis in which the good is at work. This inception of a simple voluntary must be distinguished from making a choice in view of a good. Since there is a hiatus, there can also be an obstacle. I may be hindered from achieving what I anticipate. Then it becomes necessary for me to see the good in something other than its normal beginnings, in something other than the early stages of my achieving it. I cannot reach the fruit and cannot grasp it with my hand, but this piece of wood with the

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forked end can be my hand, can substitute for my hand, in grasping the fruit. (This is different from using a stick to knock the fruit down; then the stick is merely an extension of my reach and not a replacement for it; it is part of the continuum and it is not categorialized.) I want to open a bottle and cannot twist the top open; I notice a nutcracker and use it, as one might use a pair of pliers, to open the bottle. The eating of the fruit, the opening of the bottle are no longer simple voluntaries because a new kind of thinking, a new kind of identification, has to take place before they can be accomplished. The thing wanted, the good, has to be seen in something very different from itself. Another kind of identity synthesis has to occur, one different from simple anticipation and fulfillment. And once the good desired can be seen in something other than itself, in something other than its own early stages, the possibility of substitution arises: the good can be recognized in still another "other," in still another thing that could have been chosen instead of this one, without changing that in view of which the choice is made. There results an estrangement between the good desired and what is being chosen or done now. It is true that the good is seen in what is chosen now, that driving to the swimming pool is already permeated by swimming; but we have to make a fuss and insist that such a saturation occurs. It does not show up at first sight. In contrast, we do not have to insist on the continuous identification between reaching out for an apple and eating the apple. The initial stages of a simple voluntary are not other to the voluntary in the way that the chosen is other to the good toward which it is chosen. In choice the mind has gone to work with its differentiations and identities, with its seeing the same in things that appear other, with its categorialities, and we must now explain-using our minds again, from still another angle-how something that looks so different can really be the same: how someone driving can "already" be engaged in swimming. The exercise of mind to shake out what can be chosen in place of something else, what can be chosen in view of what we want, is carried out in an immediate involvement with things we want to do and with things in the world. We look around for what we can use. Deliberation is not a withdrawal from the world, not a turn into mental exercises of deriving means from ends. There has to be imagination in our shaking out of possible choices, since we have to see a possibility of acting that is not immediately available and not normally done. But the imagination in question is not an abstraction fit; it sees this paper clip as standing in for that broken screw in view of holding this ventilator secure; it sees that this garden hose can be worked into that drainpipe and attached to that faucet to get hot water into the drainpipe to melt the ice forming during this storm so that the drain will be unclogged and the water in it will not

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overflow and damage the house. It sees that a fork can be brought out of this fallen branch-by carving and whittling-to make a support for a spit to hold meat over a fire (instead of our holding it by hand). Practical imagination is seeing one thing in another in the things around us. We rummage, we do not hide ourselves, when we shake out things that can be chosen. If we withdrew from the thick of things, there would be no possibility of bringing about, by choice, what we need and what we want to do. What we want to do, what we are after, is itself a possibility we have come to expect in the things around us. It is not an abstract value or an imperative but a good in things, a good to be pursued. Thus both what we are after and what we choose to do in view of what we are after are available to us in the world in which we live. It is exhilarating to exercise our minds in deliberation, to be placed into a problem and to be able to resolve it. A raw clarification has to take place and the ability to see what can be done is highly individual. As an act of intelligence it is uniquely our own, but in its display it shows something that then becomes everybody's, sometimes with our name attached (the Salk vaccine, the Heimlich maneuver, Napoleonic strategy). The publication of practical intelligence is done in one way by an inventor: what an inventor does becomes a common procedure, and while he may be happy to see the general benefit that his invention has brought, his own special pleasure is in having been perplexed and in resolving the perplexity, in his activity of mind. He may enjoy this activity so much that he releases procedures that are not beneficial at all but harmful to others. But while an inventor discloses a repeatable technique, a trouble-shooter has an excellence that is even more uniquely his own: he accomplishes practical identities and differences tailored for just this particular situation. He never needs to patent what he does, because his reading of the good to be accomplished here and now, his invention of the choices to be made in view of this good, cannot be done by someone else in another situation. He does not generate a repeatable technique; he generates rather a story that serves as a model for similar circumstances. His practical intelligence is publicized in another way, and only an agent who is also quite prudent himself will see how the model fits in new situations. Things like military manuals and bureaucratic handbooks are attempts to combine the repeatability of inventions with applicability to situations. For institutional purposes, many choices have to be made routine. The manual and the handbook set out the ways in which certain things are to be done. Few choices may be left to the individual agent. Such regularity is necessary because many people will have to be involved in the procedures, predictability is required in order to allow coordination, and the regulations can compensate for the deficiency of practical intelligence in

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some of the people who have to take part in the activities. A handbook of procedures is an interesting phenomenon for moral philosophy. It is like a disembodied practical intelligence: it does shake out choices and aims, it spells out the concatenations of choices required for an enterprise, it may even outline some substitutions that can be made among what can be chosen. But it achieves all this in a cold and dreamy abstraction from the particular situation in which things have to be done. It is like a residue, a ghost of practical intelligence trying to come to life in a world necessarily different from the one in which it led its own original life. It is like a lawgiver trying to guide a people in his absence; it looks to other situations and other agents, but is well aware that it will not be there to think and to act, to shake out choices, in the new predicaments that will arise. A guide to procedures can be very helpful, but everyone certainly has found situations in which the handbook destroys the goods it is supposed to promote. It destroys them precisely by not letting practical intelligence deliberate and choose on the scene. Arguments about the applicability of rules are precisely arguments about whether the rules or the local intelligence should take precedence. And just to give the handbook its due, such arguments are often also arguments whether that which pretends to be intelligence on the spot really is what it claims to be. It is demoralizing to be forced to shut off one's prudence and to have to follow routines that lead nowhere. One has to live in a kind of personal falsity, doing things but knowing that they are not what they are supposed to be; one is trapped by techniques that stifte production, regulations and forms and meetings that inhibit what they are supposed to facilitate, requirements that in practice almost compel deception and evasion. People caught in such false copies of prudence have to renounce their own prudence and hence discredit themselves. In contrast, the release from such suppression, the sudden possibility of deliberation and prudence, is a release into the possibility of acting and being what one is. In a story describing city police and crimes related to drugs, the Washington Post described a policeman who "was considered a burned-out street cop waiting to ride out his remaining years." This policeman's captain started a new approach to the drug problem in his district and put the officer in charge of it. "I gave him a little responsibility and, boy, did he take a turn around," the captain said. "He went from the bottom all the way to the top. . . . It was like pouring water on magnesium."2 The reason the policeman ftared up as an agent is that he suddenly had the opportunity and the need to think about situations and to shake out choices in view of what ought to be done. His further activity, as described in the article, was imaginative and successful. It was a mind at work in situations calling for action, situations in which possibilities for choices had to be projected

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and in which moves in human relationships were always being made. It was not a withdrawal into a purely imaginative acrostic, not a private deduction of means from ends. It was activity for and before others, seeing resources where others could not see them, even generating situations where choices become possible. And always the thoughtful activity is made up of that dance between the imaginative projection and the categorial confirmation: seeing how that can indeed be realized in this, then affirming and actually doing this in view of that. Choice in Speech

The contrast between the chosen and the simply voluntary occurs not only in moral, political, and personal matters, but also in what we do with language and other symbolic systems. Speech, the use of language, is saturated by choice because language gives us multiple alternatives to pick from when we want to say something. Language is a garden of options. It solicits choice and urges us to be more active as choosers. Still, there is a form of speech that is simply voluntary and not chosen. It occurs when we automatically say what anyone would say in a given situation, when we say what we say all the time, when we just let words roll out. For example, if I become irritated by someone and say something like, "Why did you do that? What a dumb thing to do," or if I am pleased and say, "Thanks so much; that was very nice," I quite probably am only reacting and not choosing what I say. The use of stock words and stock phrases is hardly different from reaching out for a glass of water when I am thirsty. But if I deliberately select a word, a phrase, and a grammatical structure, my speech takes on more of the tone of a minded and effective discourse. A carefully crafted insult is more cutting-because more thoughtful-than an outburst of harsh words, and a selected expression of thanks is more grateful than a perfunctory phrase. Yet the automatic and spontaneous speech is done with awareness and done willingly; it is voluntary and we can be praised or blamed for it. But it is not chosen. Some of the choices we make in speech are simple preferences of one thing over another. If we know several languages we may choose to speak one instead of another simply because we like the one better than the other; or we may select one word or phrase over another. But such preferences are not very interesting philosophically because they do not show us much about speech and language as such. Instead of examining choice as preference, we will find it more helpful to examine how the other kind of choice, choice made in view of something, functions in speech. Speech acts generate chosen speeches. What serves as the "two," the

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"(X) and (Y)," in them? What serves as the thing chosen and what serves as that in view of which choices are made? The things chosen are the words, phrases, sentences, and arguments, the word-wholes. That in view of which the word-wholes are chosen can be either (a) the display of the things and situations that are to be shown and communicated, shown and shared, by the words, or (b) the effect the words are to have on the one who hears them. We may refer to these as, respectively, the semantic and the rhetorical purpose of the chosen words. I choose the words "The house is on fire" in view of the burning house; I choose the words "What an imbecilic thing to do" because I know the word "imbecile" will especially arouse the person with whom I speak. Words as chosen things are thus profiled against two "beyonds," two contexts: that ofthings and that of the audience. Both contexts are necessary to a speech act because we always, in principle, speak about something and to someone. A chosen word-whole (X) is thus seen against (Yt ) and against (Y a ), the subscripts indicating "thing" and "audience" respectively. Choices in language are made in view of two horizons, not one, and are therefore more complex structurally than the choices we make in our nonlinguistic performances and productions, which are made in view of a single purpose. In our analysis, we will for the moment not consider performative speech acts, statements such as "I arrest you" or "I sentence you to pay a fine of ten dollars," which do bring about a change in the world. Such speeches are performances: they are acts of prudence or moral transactions. We will examine them later. At present we will consider speech simply in its functions of displaying and persuading. We not only have an opportunity to choose when we use language; we are obligated to do so. Speech ought to be chosen because it must be formulated in view of its two purposes, display and rhetorical effect. Merely voluntary speech is a passive response that lacks the thoughtful articulation the speech pretends to express. Merely voluntary speech falls short of being "real" speech. In this respect speech differs from action, because simply voluntary actions can be genuine actions, whereas unchosen, simply voluntary speech is less than genuine speech. Something is left out in it. If we are engaged in a conversation and one of the speakers talks in a simply voluntary way, he becomes either boorish or boring. ~e no longer selects what is to be said in view of the thing to be displayed and in view of the effect on his hearers. He also foregoes the substitution and the enchainment, the word choice and grammar, that would make his speech appropriate and alive. 3 Although he seems to speak with others about something, he is really disengaged from the conversation as such, since the conversation is essentially a play of selections and counterselections and branching sequences.

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It is true that we may recite or read a speech that we have articulated earlier, or that we may repeat passages of poetry or prose that we simply enjoy, but such activities are sedimented voluntaries: they presume that linguistic choice was exercised beforehand. In such speech we enjoy the patterns that the earlier choices installed. Moreover, to the extent that they are merely voluntary, done merely for the pleasure of these linguistic patterns, they fail to be subordinated to the purposes of display and persuasion. They may involve substitution and enchainment but not in view of any purpose; they are articulated as music is articulated, simply for the sake of the pattern that is in them. That is, merely voluntary speech, even if it is a sedimented voluntary, fails to be incorporated into the activity of thinking. To think while we speak means to be alert to the displays and persuasions the speech is to achieve, and therefore it means that we will choose while we talk; we will make choices in view of what is to be stated and who is to be convinced or moved. The semantic and rhetorical purposes are always other to the speech-wholes that are chosen. Linguistic choices are made in view of a display and in view of a rhetorical effect. Other choices, the nonlinguistic, are made in view of something's coming about. They bring about a change in the agent's situation. Making something happen is different from making a display, since a display reveals what is already there or what could be there, but does not make it to be there. Hence linguistic choices, as involved in a display, intervene less in the world than do the choices in ordinary human action, which are meant to rearrange the way the world is. Linguistic choices are made in order to reveal, not to bring about. However, the rhetorical dimension of linguistic choice seems to be more like ordinary choices in this respect; in rhetoric we might seem to do something in order to change something: we speak in order to change the attitudes and beliefs and actions of other people. But even here there is a difference. The rhetorical force of words changes people by virtue of the display that these words bring about, not by virtue of a direct causal sequence. It is not because the words are loud or colorful that they influence people rhetorically, but because of what they reveal, whether about the speaker, the audience, or the situation. Rhetoric works not causally on things or listeners but through a modification of what is believed, through a modification of the way the world is made to seem. Therefore, rhetorical persuasion is not like the "persuasion" achieved by, say, compulsion or torture, nor is it like the conviction brought about by an act of kindness or an act of cruelty toward the person who is convinced. Rhetorical force is also different from the force exercised by actions when they serve as examples to other agents. It is true that our actions

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normally are viewed by an audience. Our actions change things in the world, but they are also seen by onlookers who may not be the targets of our actions and choices: they merely watch what we do, but they also may be encouraged to act and choose as we have acted and chosen. Is this effect of our actions on them not the same as the rhetorical effect our words have on an audience? Not really; if others imitate what we have done, they are responding to the new situation brought about by our performance and our choice. Our behavior introduces something new in the world and the others are reacting to it, even if they do so by imitation and not by counteraction. It is true that their opinion is changed and that the new opinion may be the origin of their performance, but the opinion changes on the basis of what has happened, not in response simply to what has been said. For instance, if the audience were to be impressed by the fact that I had the courage to make a speech in adangerous situation, and were thereby "persuaded" to speak. out themselves about the issue in question, this would not be persuasion through rhetoric, even though it was brought about by a speech; it would not be persuasion through what is said and displayed, but persuasion through example. In rhetoric as such we do not do anything and others do not react to us. We merely display the situation, its dissatisfactions and its possibilities, and make it appear differently to the audience. The appearance or the opinion has changed, not the situation itself: the work of rhetoric is done through a display. Making a speech, no matter how short the speech might be, is an act of composition. Words are put together into word-wholes: into phrases, sentences, arguments, lectures, questions, and answers. The act of verbal composition yields a verbal object, the speech, but the speech is not put together simply in and for itself; it is done in view of another composition, the articulated display of the things spoken about. The verbal assembly is not an end in itself; it is not like assembling pieces of wood into a pattern just for the sake of the pattern. Words cannot be rid of reference and signification, so when they are put together something else, another composition, also occurs: the verbal composition brings about, essentially, a differentiation and composition between things and their aspects and relations. For example, through my speech someone's behavior is made to be taken, by you, as friendly or as threatening; through my speech and its composition your physical symptoms are made to be taken as worrisome, as needing a doctor's treatment; through my speech this flower comes to be seen by you as geometrically harmonious. Through speech, what Wittgenstein has called "seeing-as" or "aspect-seeing" comes about. 4 1t is not so much the aspect that is important in this; it is that a differentiation and identification occur between a thing and its aspects (its features and relationships); the aspect remains an aspect of and in this thing. The thing is

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made to show up in its aspect and while being differentiated from is also identified with the aspect. The composition in speech is a kind of wand that brings out such differentiation-composition in things: it makes aspects dawn on us in the things we see or know, in the situations that we are in or that we anticipate. This is the power of display that is vested in speech, and some users of language, some speakers, are able to exploit this power more than others. And once the possibility of display arises, there arises also the issue of aspect-blindness.' Some persons cannot be brought to see something as such and such, either because of dullness, of inattention, or perhaps because of moral character: a thief will be unpersuaded when someone says that this helpless person should be assisted; he will see the situation as a chance to steal. But an honest person would not find that thieving aspect dawning on him; he would be startled to hear someone articulate the situation in such terms. If, as Wittgenstein says, "the dawning of an aspect on us seems half visual experience, half thinking,"6 then aspectblindness means that we do not or cannot think in such a way as to allow this or that aspect to surface, to allow this or that display to occur; if the aspect is a moral one, it means that we are not the sort of agent who, by character, lets such possibilities emerge. And even if the display can be made to occur for us-we may understand that this situation is being taken by the thief as a chance to steal-we would not be persuaded that this display belongs to this situation, that one should act that way in it; our character resists such conviction. Now if a speaker tries to get someone to see an aspect or a possibility in things but is unable to do so, or if the audience is brought to imagine the possibility but refuses to be persuaded, that is, refuses to assert and confirm the possibility in thought and in action, then the speech has failed of its purpose. That in view of which it was done-the display and the rhetorical persuasion-was not accomplished. The speech was indeed put together: it was composed and completed as a speech. It exists as a verbal whole. But it fails either in its display or in its attempt to convince others of the display; it fails in its semantics or in its rhetoric. This possibility of failure illustrates the difference that exists between words and the things that are displayed and believed: between speeches on the one hand and displays and convictions on the other. When speeches work effectively, this difference seems almost to disappear: the speaker seems only to be displaying and persuading. But in fact he is also assembling word-wholes, speeches, which must be distinguished from what is shown and from the convictions that are generated. The distinction is not easy to make because, in the uncanny way that words seem to contain things, the displays and the convictions seem almost to be right in

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the speech; or, inversely, the words seem to be nothing but the things as represented. The ontology of such presentation and representation is not our primary concern now. The point we wish to make is that there is a difference between assembling a speech and successfully displaying and persuading, that the former is done in view of the latter, that the former mayor may not achieve the latter. The speaker can thus be judged according to two criteria: on how well he has put his speech together, and on how well he has displayed and persuaded. . However, even if the speaker succeeds in all these ways, he still remains only a speaker. He still circulates in words, displays, and convictions, and he still has not done anything. He has not changed the facts of the situation: he has not rescued the trapped children, has not cured the sick man, has not stolen anything or injured anyone. He may have exercised power over appearances and this may have made him extremely influential, but, in a very curious way, he still remains idle. There remains a lag between his words and his deeds. This possibility of circulating only in words and appearances, and of evading action, is a possibility available only to the animal that speaks. It is a peculiarly human defect, of seeming to act without acting, of taking a kind of credit for action without really doing anything. It can occur because ofthe ontology of words-and-things, because ofthe way things can seem to be and be seen to be in words. But, of course, the power of speech need not lead to deficiencies in action; it can also be used positively to amplify action, to organize many agents in one concerted effort and thus to multiply by far the power we have to perform. Most significant human performances on the large scale, such as efforts undertaken by a nation or by an organization, obviously require the support of speech, not only in giving commands but also in articulating what is to be done and in persuading others of the good in it. Finally, the power to display, to bring out distinctions between things and their aspects, is the same power that lets us shake out choices and purposes, that lets us see one thing in another, that lets us see the same purpose in very different things. The categoriality of spoken displays is the work of the same mind that generates practical categorialities when we move from the simple voluntaries we have in common with children and animals toward the differentiations and identifications that occur when we do one thing in view of another and one thing rather than another. Choice and its categoriality occur in both speech and action.

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NOTES I. James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad: The Tragedy of Hector (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 59. 2. The Washington Post, Thursday, July 15, 1982, p. A14. 3. The dimensions of substitution and enchainment are called "metaphor" and "metonymy" by Roman Jakobson. See Elmar Holenstein, Roman Jakobson's Approach to Language: Phenomenological Structuralism, trans. C. Schelbert and T. Schelbert (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). In Part 3 of the book, Holenstein describes the origins and development of this "two-axis" theory of language. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), pp. 197,206,211. 5. Ibid., pp. 213-14. 6. Ibid., p. 197; translation modified.

3. Moral Action Seven Forms of Human Action WE HAVE WORKED out some of the differences between the simple voluntary, that which is chosen in view of something else, and the chosen as the preferred. We can now discover still more differences, of a finer grain, by increasing the magnification with which we examine what it is to be chosen and what it is to be voluntary. (I) In some cases an agent may do something because he simply wants the performance itself, this performance here and now. I may take a walk, take a swim, mow the lawn, drink this glass of water, talk to someone, shout at someone, all as simple voluntaries. Once again the simple voluntary is the base from which our analysis takes its bearings. (2) In other cases an agent may do something because he wants an altered state in things that comes about while he executes his performance. What he wants is not the performance as such, but the new condition in things. What is wanted is not that there has been the performance itself, but that a state exists that is owed to the performance. The new state may consist in things like (a) the lawn as mowed or the hair as cut or myself as warm (after I have wrapped myself in a blanket), or in things like (b) my ability to swim better, my improved ability as a barber, my ability to walk faster. I may alter myself in my ability to do the performance I have been doing, or I may alter something outside my performance, that upon which my action is directed. But whether I change myself or the world around me, I do not just act in this performance here and now. I act wanting something more, something that continues beyond the performance. Still, the something more is not anything radically other in kind than what I am doing now. (3) Someone can act in order to make a product. A product is different from a rearrangement, different from a new state in what is already there. Production brings about a new thing, not a new state. A carpenter makes

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a chest of drawers; the product is established and continues as an identifiable thing, a made thing, after the activity of making has been completed. But someone who keeps the chest clean does not make another thing, nor does he continue the process of making that was begun and ended by the carpenter. (4) Someone can act in view of something that is entirely different from the activity he is carrying on at the moment. Debbie is now driving in order to work at the bank; the driving and the banking are two different activities. The driving does not make Debbie better at banking (as swimming makes me better at swimming), the driving does not leave an altered state that we call banking (as barbering leaves a haircut), and the driving does not somehow make a new thing, a product, called a bank. And the driving in this case is not done simply because Debbie wants to drive. There is a more radical "two" in Debbie's driving to the bank than there is in the cases that preceded it in our analysis. Only when this kind of twoness occurs can we speak of choice in view of something. I If 1 swim to become a good swimmer, I am not swimming in view of anything different from swimming. I am swimming in order to do better or to do more of what I am doing now. Practicing is not something chosen in view of something other than the activity practiced. Although this particular practice session may not be a simple voluntary, my swimming as such is a simple voluntary and not something chosen. I swim in order to be able to swim, not to do something else. The continuity, the lack of otherness, between practice and its result, is shown by the fact that we cannot find alternatives to practicing; the principle of substitution does not apply. I cannot directly get good at swimming by reading a book, by hiring someone to practice for me, or by canoeing instead of swimming. The gardener mows the lawn so that what he is doing will be finished, not so that something else, something other to his activity, will take place. He is cutting grass and wants to have cut grass: both to have finished cutting the grass and to have the grass itself cut. The altered state is in something outside his ability to do what he is doing (in contrast to the case of practice sessions, in which we alter our own ability), but it is not other to the activity he is carrying on. It is that activity, that altering, as completed. It is interesting that practice leaves us able to do more, while performing a service-cleaning or mowing or cutting-leaves us with no more to do. The process of making a product is different from the process of altering a state. In making there is an identifiable new thing in the process of becoming itself, a thing that will remain itself when the process of making is over. The continuance of the thing, of the desk or of the computer, its being itself, is different from the becoming of the thing, but the

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thing is not different, as regards either its individuality or its kind, in its becoming and its being. It does not change from being one thing to being another. It does not even change, say, from being wood to being a desk, since the desk itself is also wooden. It is the same thing, first becoming and then being. Now the producer is involved in the becoming of the thing produced, but he is no longer involved in its continuation. The whole point of making is not just to be finished with the process, as is the point of cleaning or of mowing, but to be able to let the thing go, to let the thing be by itself. Nor is the point of making to train the maker. It is to bring about something made. This made thing is recognizable as something made: the making mind gives the thing its look as a desk or as a computer, and the skill lets the look emerge in what the thing is made of; when we perceive the thing we see it as made by someone. But still the process of making is not chosen in view of the continuance of the thing, no more than the becoming of a thing is chosen in view of the thing's being. The becoming is subordinated to the thing's being, but not as something chosen in view of it. The thing continuing is not different enough-in kind or in individuality-from the thing becoming to let us say that the becoming, the being made, is something chosen in view of the thing's being. Furthermore, activities such as sawing and planing and hammering are in turn not chosen in view of making the table; they are ingredients or subparts of the process of making and being made, just as shifting gears and steering are ingredients or subparts of driving a car. (5) But normally a product is not made just for the sake of the being of the product; normally a product is made in order to be used. A carpenter makes a table so that people can eat meals at it; a suit of clothes is made so that someone can keep warm and appear dignified. A distinction then arises between the product and the use to which it is put, and whereas we cannot say that the activity of making the product is chosen in view of the being of the product, we can indeed say that making the product can be chosen in view of the use of the product. The making and the using are different in a way that the making and the made are not. There is enough difference, enough of a "two" between making and use, to allow the making and even the made to appear as chosen in view of the use. Making a table so that people can eat at it is similar to driving to the bank in order to work at the bank. There is the required duality between the chosen and that in view of which it is chosen. The same is true of providing a service or altering the state of a thing. We change a state-we clean things, cut hair, mow lawns, prepare food, apply hot compresses-not just to have the changed state, but to exploit the new condition; the exploitation of the new state is like the use of a product. We clean dishes not just to have clean dishes, but to eat from

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them or at least to use them as decorations; we cut grass so that a reception can be held on the lawn. Also, we may practice swimming not just to be good at swimming, but to win a prize or to work as a lifeguard. And the procedure of changing the state is sufficiently different from the exploitation of the state to allow us to say that the changing of the state-the cleaning, the warming, the cutting, the curing, the practicing-is chosen in view of exploiting the adjusted thing, precisely in its form of having been adjusted. (6) But besides use there can be exchange. We can service something or produce something not for the use we can make of it, but to exchange it for something else. Exchange is more alien to the thing or the product than is its use; in use the object itself becomes activated-the table serves at a meal, the house is lived in, the typewriter is exercised as a typewriter-but in trades the object is equated with something other than itself. The thing becomes taken not for itself and for its own activity but as equal to some other thing, and this other thing is what we are really interested in. Therefore, when we make or service something in view of exchanging it for something else, there is a still more conspicuous otherness between our activity of servicing or making and the purpose for which the activity is carried out. The simple voluntariness and the internal excellence of what we are doing can become diminished; it becomes possible for us to do what we are doing primarily in view of trading it for something else. The presence of choice is thus sharpened by the possibility of exchanges. What we do can become chosen in view of what we can get for it, and not done for what it is in itself. And exchange opens up the possibility of a special kind of universal purpose, one to which almost any performance can be subordinated, one that can transform almost any activity from being simply voluntary into being something chosen. As Hobbes, writing during the early stages of the economic era in which we live, observed, "all things obey money."2 But this thought is not new with Hobbes; in his own statement he repeats Ecclesiastes 10: 19, and Plato also knew that the peculiar identifications made possible by money can cause a doctor to become concerned about something else besides what he does precisely as a doctor (curing the sick), and that they can cause a shepherd to become concerned about something else besides the care of his sheep: instead of acting according to what they are-doctors or shepherds or writers or builders-men can do their own activity in view of something beyond that activity, and can turn that activity from being voluntary and desired in itself to being chosen in view of money. Before there are exchanges through money, there are exchanges

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through barter. Barter also allows us to carry out our own activity in view of obtaining something else; hence it allows our activity to be no longer done for itself but chosen in view of another. Also like money, barter allows the performer to work for his own advantage and not immediately for the excellence of his performance and what his performance achieves. He can work to accumulate resources and not just to paint or to build or to cure. The phenomenon of exchange, whether through barter or through money, enables the performer to choose his performance in view of some advantage to himself and not for the good directly accomplished by virtue of what he is and does. Thus the mediating identifications that allow us to tum our work to our own advantage, and into a means for getting something beyond our work, exist before money exists. And finally, both barter and the use of money go beyond familial and friendly exchanges, the kind in which measured identifications are not made between what is given and what is taken, the kind in which we give what we can and take what we need. Barter and the use of money introduce equations and begin to divide those who are involved in the exchanges. The activities of those involved in exchanges must become more calculating, more chosen in view of the exchanges themselves and not just in respect of the good to be directly achieved in the performance. But in barter the exchanges are still sluggish. My work, which is equated with someone else's achievement or with some other object, keeps its own identity both as mine and as the kind of work it is: as the curing of a sick person, as a collected basket of apples, as the singing of a song. We have to think about that song and the supper I am singing it for, of this roofing job and that medical treatment I exchange it for. In contrast to barter, money is almost electronically rapid and universal in its exchanging. Everything becomes cashed. My work is not measured against some other achievement or some other object, it gets equated with and drawn into a third element that can be turned in for anything else whatever, so long as I have enough of it; and no one to whom I offer the money can tell what I did in order to get it. Money is effective; it partitions, translates, and delivers in a way that no familial reciprocity or barter could ever do. Hobbes compares the use of money in society to the circulation of blood in the body, and Samuel Johnson says, "The great effect of money is to break property into small parts. In towns, he that has a shilling may have a piece of meat; but where there is no commerce, no man can eat mutton but by killing a sheep."3 But while money permits such easy transfer and enumeration, it also separates the doctor from the farmer whose produce he buys; the farmer who sells to the doctor is no longer a judge of the doctor's performance. He no longer thinks about the medical service in

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determining how much meat and vegetables he should give in exchange for it. He, or some merchant who comes between them, simply takes the doctor's money. Money becomes a distinctive kind of thing, and it is established as that in view of which actions and products can become chosen. Then the issue arises whether a person will perform for the good that his performance is to achieve or for the money that his performance can bring. It is true that money encourages the flourishing of performance because it allows many things to be done that could not be done without the exchanges it facilitates; but it also brings a distinctive kind of pressure to bear on what is done. It is like the rising of a new sun, an artificial copy of the good described by Socrates in the Republic, a new light in view of which almost anything can be done. But these identifications and copies could not occur if men did not have desires and did not do some things as simple voluntaries, did not choose some things in view of others, and were not able to let one thing, even one action, be measured as equal to another. The world economy depends on identification and distinction, on the presencing of the one and the two. So far we have distinguished six forms of human behavior. The first three-simple voluntaries, changing the state of things, and making products-did not as such involve choices made in view of purposes. They did not involve the kind of otherness between what we are doing and what we are doing it for that choice demands. Choice was introduced as the fourth form of behavior, and the otherness between the chosen and its purpose was stressed. The next two forms of behavior-making use of products and changed things, and exchanging, by barter and by money, what we have done-were said to make room for choice, because they introduce the appropriate duality between performance and purpose. Making a product can be chosen in view of the use of that product or in view of the trades that can be made with the product; servicing an object can be chosen in view of the uses or the exchanges in which the object can become involved. The duality between the chosen and the purposed, the categorial articulation that is proper to choice, has thus been the pivot around which our analysis has moved. Having analyzed these six forms of human behavior, we now can approach the seventh and last form. We can now discuss moral action. We will continue to make use of choice as the catalytic agent in our analysis; by asking how choice and the chosen are related to moral behavior, we will attempt to show what moral action is. (7) Someone asks, "Why is Henry mowing the lawn?" and the response is, "To spite his wife; she always tells him not to work in this

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heat." Someone asks, "Why is Helen making that dress?" and the response is, "She is making it for Ann; she wants to thank her for the vacation they had at her cottage." In such cases a service is being performed (the lawn is being mowed) and a product (the dress) is being made, but the thing being done is not just a new arrangement (the mowed lawn) or a new object (the dress). Henry is not just changing the condition ofthe lawn and Helen is not just making a dress; each is carrying out a move in human relationships. Henry is performing an act of spite and Helen an act of gratitude. Such moral acts, such definitions and redefinitions of ourselves in our human involvements, can be "attached" to anything we do. In this respect, strangely, the moral dimension resembles money: like money, the moral dimension can be a universal form for which almost anything can be done. Any human performance is capable of engaging this dimension of defining or confirming the agent's place in the web of human relationships. Even the attempt to get away from human contact is a move within the human relations that define us. But although the moral dimension can be as universal as the dimension of money and exchange, it is not as adventitious to what we do as money and exchange are. The moves within the personal context, the acts of spite and gratitude, of betrayal and generosity, get into the activities of mowing the lawn, making a dress, running away, and giving food. The moral dimension is not a separate form as money is, and hence it does not run the risk of depleting its subordinate performances, of turning them into instruments for its own purposes. The moral act is not just a further purpose simply added to our performances. An act of spite or gratitude is not related to the mowing of the lawn or the making of a dress in the way that banking is related to driving to the bank. If such were the case, if material performances were chosen in view of moral acts, then practically everything we do would be chosen and nothing would be simply voluntary, since everything we do has at least some minimal impact on how we are related to others. The personal context would make every human performance into something done in view of something else. The superordination of moral acts over other performances must be so understood that it does not flatten all the other performances into means for its own ends. The human act is not "other" to the other performances, to cutting the grass or to making a dress, in the way that a further purpose is or in the way that money can be. The moral act, the move in human relationships, is therefore more than the activities of making, servicing, exchanging, and simple doing, but it is "more" in a special sense. It is more without being separate, without being radically other. Therefore we cannot say that our performances of

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making, cleaning, talking, or giving are chosen in view of a move in human relations. But how then are our material performances related to the moral action? How does moral behavior exist?

The Moral Act and the Material Performance Why is it wrong to say that Henry has chosen to mow the lawn in view of spiting Mildred his wife, that Helen has chosen to make a dress in view of showing gratitude to Ann, that Paul has chosen to push Joe down in view of showing contempt for him? Why is it wrong to say that the material actions, the mowing, making, and pushing, are chosen for the sake of the acts of spite, gratitude, and contempt? There certainly is subordination in these cases; contempt is certainly somehow the reason why Paul pushes Joe, and Henry does cut the grass to show spite. But the subordination is not the kind that exists between something chosen and that for which we choose it. For one thing, the move in human relationships is not as substantial and as separable as, for example, banking is when related to driving to the bank, or eating at a table is when related to fabricating the table. "Being spiteful" is not another independent activity like mowing the lawn; it cannot be placed over against mowing the lawn as banking can be placed over against driving to the bank. Being spiteful is, rather, expressed and achieved in mowing the lawn, whereas banking is not expressed and achieved in driving to the bank, no matter how saturated the driving might be with the banking for which it is done. A move in the web of human relationships is never an act just by itself; it needs to be embodied, it needs to be expressed and accomplished in a more tangible activity. If we were to say the embodying activity is chosen in view of the personal act, as driving to the pool is chosen in view of swimming, we would be making the moral act into something separate and substantial by itself. It is true that we may have options as regards the embodying performance; Paul can show contempt by pushing Joe, but also by shouting at him or by kicking sand in his face at the beach. Helen can show gratitude to Ann by taking her to dinner as well as by making a dress for her. The principle of substitution seems to apply to the embodying acts. But Paul does not push or shout or kick to bring about a separate event of contempt; these actions express and establish contempt, they themselves are contemptuous. They are not ways of getting to contempt, they are ways of showing it and of doing it. Contempt is not sufficiently other to them to be that in view of which they are chosen. The unity between the behavior and the contempt is further shown by the fact that a feeble push or a half-

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hearted shout will achieve a feeble or half-hearted contemning, and a decisive push or shout will be a strong act of contempt, but a listless manufacture of a table does not make the meals eaten on the table to be listless as well. And yet there is a difference between the shout or kick and the act of contempt, between handing something over and the act of gratitude as such. The pushing or the shouting or the kicking are not the simple becoming of contempt, as making a chair is the becoming of the chair; nor are they the becoming of a contemptuous state, as cutting grass is the becoming of a cut lawn. (They may be the development of a habit of contempt and a settled attitude of insolence of Paul toward Joe, but the offensive gesture at the moment is not made offensive by its becoming a habit; simply by itself it determines the relationship.) There is a certain kind of otherness between the embodying act and the personal move, but it is not the radical kind that exists between the chosen and that for which it is chosen. Even something simply voluntary can embody a human act. Simply going for a walk with someone can be incorporated into an act of sociability and can establish or confirm friendliness. The simply voluntary act does this without necessarily becoming chosen for the sociability or in view of the friendliness, as one might, for example, choose to take a walk with someone so that a conversation will take place that, in turn, may incorporate a personal act such as reconciliation or warning. Then the walk is merely chosen in view of the conversation and the moral act embodied in it. But a walk saturated with sociability is not chosen in view of the sociability; it remains a simple voluntary. It is remarkable that we are so constituted that there cannot be a move in human relations without something else also being done: HELENA: PAROLLES: HELENA:

'Tis pity.What's pity? That wishing well had not a body in't, Which might be felt.'

Just as there cannot be an ace in tennis without a ball being hit, so there cannot be an act of gratitude, of contempt, of generosity, without at least a glance or a word or, more likely, a handing over, a striking, a making, a going. Because the embodying act is usually more manageable, we may try to master the human relationship by mastering the embodiment. Someone may try to secure respect or gratitude simply by, say, providing money or food or giving a good course in algebra, while shrinking from recognizing and doing this as a good for the other person. This is rather

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like speaking to someone while forever keeping one's eyes averted; it is a delivery without a greeting. Such an offer with evasion is itself a kind of move in the web of human relationships. It is a special kind of reserve, a cool and deliberate noninvolvement in a context where an involvement is normally expected. It is a particularly human way of keeping at a distance, and it is made possible precisely because our moral acts always occur in conjunction with a material performance from which they can be distinguished. Since the material embodiment both expresses and achieves the moral human act that is fused with it-giving something both expresses and achieves an act of gratitude-the attempt to master the moral act by controlling the embodiment is an attempt to bring about the achievement while neglecting the expression. We hand something over as a return for something else, and in handing it over we want to get gratitude done, but we do not want to be recognized thereby as being grateful, as needing to be grateful. But a moral act can be disordered in another way as well. The moral act is not only expressed but also achieved by its embodiment. And instead of trying to master the moral move through its embodiment, we may think we can achieve a move in human relationships without incorporating it into a material doing. We may think we can assert the moral move in the absence of an embodying performance. We might wishfully persuade ourselves that we have been grateful when we have done nothing as an act of gratitude, or when we have just talked about gratitude-or contempt or spite-without ever having done anything that counts as an act of this kind. In such cases we pretend we are expressing gratitude and we may talk a lot in our attempt to express it, but we fail to achieve it; or we may talk about disdaining someone, but never do anything to achieve contempt. The words or the fantasies replace the act; we lavish expression on our putative moral act, but we deprive it of execution. There is no embodying act to achieve an actual move of gratitude or contempt. Thus in one way we can fail in moral action by neglecting the expressive function ofthe material acts that embody our moral moves; in another way we can fail by neglecting the executive role of these material performances. These possibilities bring out more fully the differences and the unity between material activities and the moral moves that take place in them. The human impact is distinct from the embodying performance; hence it can be realized in many different ways. Bravery can be expressed and achieved by standing firm, by escaping, by clever concessions, by an attack; generosity can be embodied in giving but also, at times, by a refusal to give. And it will require prudence, moral intelligence, to see how a human relationship can be established or confirmed when the resources for action are not obvious: how to be tactfully respectful in an

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embarrassing predicament, how to be courteously generous or reassuringly forgiving. To be able to save such situations-where a lapse in dignity seems inevitable, where generosity would seem almost necessarily to involve rudeness, or forgiveness contempt-is like being able to make a beautiful statue out of a flawed piece of marble. And in contrast to such prudence, malicious intelligence can find ways to be exquisitely cruel and to deliver crushing insults, sometimes in situations that no moderate person would perceive as capable of being turned to such devices. And it is our situation that gives us the resources for moral action. We do not begin by selecting our situation; we always must begin with what is there, and the situation does set limits to what we can do. One man comes of age in a time of peace, another during a war; one is looking for a job during a time of economic expansion, another during a depression. One person is physically strong, another weak or lame. We can take some measures to rearrange our situation: we can move to another country, take exercise to improve our health, or get trained for another job; this affects the resources that will be available for action, but pervading these effects of ours are the things we have done nothing to bring about: we may move to another country only to run into a civil war when we get there. Situations are always a mixture of what we have done and what we undergo, and indeed each human act is a mixture of what we are doing morally and what happens by the inertial necessities in the material performance in which our action happens. But apart from extreme circumstances, situations do provide resources for moral action, and the general lines of moral behavior can almost always be realized in every human life. There will almost always be some need for courage, and, along with it, possibilities of rashness and cowardice; there will almost always be occasions for temperance and generosity, occasions that also permit self-indulgence, prodigality, or miserliness. The moral acts, the moves in human relationships, emerge within and upon the resources that situations give us. These moral acts are precisely the being-at-work of human nature. The acts of courage, generosity, temperance, tact, and justice are the ways human beings can be when they are being specifically human; the acts of cowardice, rashness, self-indulgence, boorishness, and iI\iustice are the ways human beings can fail specifically in being human. Human nature is both achieved and shown for what it is in the acts that we have been calling the moves in human relationships. Thus, although human beings can act only with the resources that situations provide, human actions are not just those resources, no more than the moral act is only the material performance it is fused with: no

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more than gratitude is, say, merely making and handing over a dress, or contempt is merely the act of pushing. A human act is never simply its situation; indeed, a situation is a situation precisely in being a place in which a moral act is possible and is called for. It is most vividly perceived as a situation by someone who is in the position of being about to act: things settle around him in such a way that a move in human relationships becomes possible. There is someone who needs help, there is someone who looks vulnerable, there is something I could take. A situation is not a ftat-out landscape but a contoured arrangement of things concentrating around something that is not there yet, something I could do. When I do act, I have not just rearranged what was there, I have also moved morally-I have betrayed, I have protected, I have helped-and that act will be there from then on, along with the material changes I have made. My moral act is something new, something entirely my own, in a way that my rearrangement of the materials about me is not. My act of generosity is wholly mine, it would not have been without me, whereas the thing I hand over is something that was there before I gave it, and it could have been given by someone else or in some other way. But my generosity could only have been done by me. The dependence of a moral act on a material performance and on the resources necessary for such performance is shown by the fact that extreme circumstances can extinguish the possibility of moral action. Temperance is not an issue in a famine, in a natural disaster nothing courageous may be possible. Everything is swept away and there is nothing that one can do. Some ftashes of human action may be possible, but they are pathetic in their isolation and lack of consequence: the figures found huddled together after a ftood or an earthquake or a war, the body of someone who was trying to get to safety, the looter found with the things he has taken: human nature in disarray. The ftame of action sputters out as the fuel on which it feeds-the situations in which it can occur-gradually disappears. Although moral action is immersed in material performances, it is also distinguishable from them. But the nature of this distinction is elusive, and it is easy to go wrong in describing it. We can go wrong in two ways, and both ways are found not only in reftective philosophical analysis but also in ordinary discourse about human behavior. (1) One can suggest that the moral act is essentially an internal achievement: it is the formulation of an intention, it is an act of the will, a decision, and the material performance is merely an expression and an outcome of what has gone on inside our hearts and minds. The move in human relationships, according to this understanding, is an act of intention and will: the act of gratitude, the act of contempt, the act of revenge,

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the act of generosity is achieved in our decision; by this we are newly related to the person toward whom we act. The material performance, the handing over, taking, pushing, or stabbing, merely expresses what we have, morally, already done. The material performance only publicizes what has already been achieved in privacy and inwardness. This description recognizes the distinction between the moral act and the material performance, but it makes it into a distinction between two separate, though related, events, one the outcome of the other. But the intention and act of will that this description appeals to, as events separate from what we do publicly, are philosophical incoherences. They are unnecessary entities, analogous to the putative "concept" or "meaning" taken as a distinct mental entity separate from the words or actions that express it. To postulate an internal intention and act of the will is the typical philosophical mistake of making a dimension of something into a new event or a new thing, of creating new entities to explain the phenomena before us. It is an instance of the Cartesian doctrines that Ryle has correctly criticized. 5 Instead of being located internally, the moral act must be placed in the public domain; it is distinguishable from the material performance, from its material substrate, but it is also accomplished in this substrate. It is therefore also somehow identified with the material act. (2) To make the moral act internal and the material performance external, as its outcome and expression, is one way of distorting our understanding of human action. This approach places the moral act "before" the material performance, the generosity or the contempt "before" the handing over or the pushing. Another way of going wrong in describing action is to see the material performance as chosen in order to bring about a new human relationship. The moral achievement would in this case be seen as the outcome, the consequence of what we have done materially; I hand some food over to you and therefore an act of friendship occurs between us; I strike you and consequently we become related as enemies. In this understanding the moral act would come "after" the material performance, and once again the moral act would be separated from the material doing that brings it about. Again we are left with two events instead of one, again we fall into the philosophical mistake of turning a dimension of what we wish to analyze into a distinct event or thing separable from the analysand. To see the moral act, the move in human relationships, as the purpose of the material performance-to see contempt as the purpose of pushing, to see gratitude as the purpose of handing over-is a misunderstanding that is, perhaps, less common than the error we described first, in which we make the moral act interior and prior to the material performance. But

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it is in fact the understanding of human action that underlies the moral theories called utilitarianism and consequentialism. In these theories a particular act is morally neutral until its outcome can be evaluated; the act is thus seen as something chosen in view of its outcome, and the outcome makes it a truly moral act. A new relationship follows after and from the performance; it is not accomplished in the performance itself. The act itself is not good or bad; something beyond the act, something other to the act, makes it so. In this case the moral act comes after the material performance; in the first case the moral act comes before. In this case the moral achievement is doubly "outside" the agent: it is not only outside the agent's mind, it is outside and beyond the material act he is engaged in; the moral good or bad is in the comfort or distress that others now enjoy or suffer, not precisely in the agent's doing. But in the first case the moral act is entirely "inside" the agent, in his intention and his will; it is not even externalized and publicized into the material performance he carries out. Our task is to avoid both of these extremes. We must show that the moral act occurs publicly, in the material performance and not only in the mind and the heart; but also that it itself does indeed occur in the material performance and not in something beyond it. The handing over and the striking are generosity or cruelty, but not without a distinction. Our task is to elaborate the ontology of human action, to show what form of identity takes place in it. We must clarify how the moral act is identifiable with the material performance in which it is achieved and expressed. The Being of Human Action

How does striking become cruelty, how does handing over become generosity, how does pushing become contempt? We will not accept the answer that the pushing becomes contempt because it is the outcome of another performance, an intention or an act of will, that precedes it; we will also not accept the answer that pushing becomes contempt because something, some pain, or a new relationship, or a new self-understanding in the person affected by the performance, issues from the pushing. Somehow the very pushing has to become an act of contempt, the very handing over has to become an act of generosity. What happens to the material performance to make it into a moral act? The answer is that the material performance, while it is going on and in addition to going on, is also recognized or identified (1) as being my, the agent's, performance, and (2) as being good or bad to those toward whom

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it is done. What is added to the performance is a form of recognition, a "being identified as" or "being recognized as." The performance is done recognizably. It is done with a special kind of awareness, an awareness that enters into the nature of the act being performed. The performance itself becomes categorially formed. The recognitional form changes pushing into contempt and handing over into generosity; it changes the material performance into being a moral act. It is not another performance or another event, not an occurrence in the brain or simply in the mind of the agent; it is the material performance itself, the pushing or the handing over, being recognized. "Being recognized" or "being identified" in this way is a presentational form. It is like "being a picture," "being a word," "being a perceived thing," "being a predicate," or "being a state of affairs." All such presentational forms occur in and on things: it is this colored surface that is a picture, it is that sound that is a word; the picture and the word are not brainy events or mental concepts. They are things being presented or being interpreted in a certain way. Because of our Cartesian bias, we want to place all such presentational forms simply in the mind and leave the world as a collection of plain objects devoid of presentational forms. We want to say that the "world" is made up only of bare things, while mere appearances are all psychological, all in consciousness. But this philosophical bias has been overcome by Husserl's disentangling of the forms of intentionality and by his clarification of what intentionality is. It has been overcome especially by his success in placing categorial forms out, in, and with things, as presentational forms, in showing that they are not just categories in the mind or forms we "impose" on things. 6 The colored wood is the picture, the heard sounds are the words, the metal machine itself is the clock, the rocks and the road are the fact that the road is rocky. The cube is distinguished from its color and yet identified, categorially, with it, the man's face is seen as smiling, the desk is truly something to write on. In matters dealing with action, the car being driven is something chosen, the water being drunk is a voluntary, and the pushing or the giving is a moral act. And the philosophical enterprise we are now engaged in is to clarify the presentational form, the way of being identified, that makes pushing to be contempt and handing over to be generosity. Our endeavor is to show that the presentational is outside, but thoughtfully and mindfully outside, not outside in a behavioristic sense. The material performance is thus recognized not only as pushing or handing over but also (1) as mine and (2) as bad or good for the one affected. Both these elements must be clarified. We will proceed in two stages. (A) We will first explain what "being identified as mine" and "be-

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ing identified as good or bad" signify in the case of performances; then (B) we will show how the recognitional form changes the material performance into a moral act.

(A) (1) My material performance, my pushing or handing over, is "mine" in a special way. We can imagine a case in which I accidentally stumble and knock someone down. Such a performance is mine, but not in the way we are discussing now. The human performance we are concerned with is "mine," it is "owned" by me, because the pushing or the handing over comes about through my appraisal of my situation. I understand my situation in a certain way; I see it as capable of being changed by what I can do; I see such a change as desirable; I execute the procedure. The "mineness" arises not primarily because I have started the motions involved in the performance: the critical factor is that I have so appraised the situation, the situation has so appeared to me, that this performance became a way in which I might proceed, and then a way in which I do proceed. The understanding is what makes the performance most radically "my own," because the performance would not have happened had not the situation appeared to me in a certain way. It is not primarily my initiative, my act of will, that make the performance truly mine; it is the light I shed on the situation, the fact that I open up the possibility of this material performance because of the way the situation appears to me. Things can be moved in a certain way because they seem so-and-so to me. The appraisal might seem to be rather idle and preliminary, rather insubstantial in contrast to the energy of a doing or a willing, but it is at the heart of a performance. It makes the performance possible-the performance would not occur without it-and hence it makes the performance radically mine, since the performance would not have been without me: specifically, it would not have occurred without me as the displayer of the situation (not "me" simply as the mechanical or the emotional source of motion). The way the world appears to me is thus an urgent issue in the behavior that occurs, and it is especially urgent to you if you are the target of my transaction. If you are pushed not because I have stumbled but because you seemed to me as one who is pushable and to be insulted in this way, then your being pushed takes on a moral tone it would not have in the case of an accidental shove, and you can resent what has occurred; this thing would not have befallen you had I not been the way I am and had not things appeared to me as they do. If you get something from me not because I happened to leave it where you happened to find it, but because you seemed to me as someone to whom

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something was giveable, because you appeared to me as one who should be a recipient, then you can be grateful for what I have done. The benefit would not have occurred to you had th\ngs not seemed to me as they did. The agent's appraisal is thus a constitutive element in the establishment of the moral context. The agent's appraisal lets there be a situation for action. Now in addition to making an appraisal I must also initiate the performance. I have to set things in motion-by a bodily intervention, by saying something, by signing something, by handing something overand I must thereby crease the world. But what I initiate I also identify as what I anticipated: when the material performance is being done, it is recognized by me, the agent, as issuing from my appraisal. It is recognized as mine. I realize that I am not just stumbling and knocking someone over, but that I am pushing with an understanding of my situation. This pushing now going on, or this handing over now going on, is my very own not just because I start it, but, more profoundly, because it is being started out of my appraisal. It would not have been initiated had not the world appeared to me in a certain way. I therefore recognize the performance as mine, and because recognition is a mindful act, you too can recognize it as mine and so can other people; however, my recognition is more essential than yours or theirs because it is my performance that is at issue. I who recognize am also the one who appraised and initiated. Others can recognize it as mine only because I first identify it as mine; their recognition is something like a quotation of my recognition.' But does this not throw the moral dimension back into an internal intention, an appraisal that precedes the material performance? Are we not saying that I as agent recognize my performance as the outcome of something prior and internal? Not at all: the primary actuality of the moral act is the actual performance recognized as done mindfully and done as mine. Until the initiation occurs, the appraisal has not been completed and has not come to itself. The anticipation of the performance and the appraisal of a situation are derivative and are to be understood in relation to the actuality of the performance. Because in some cases they may come first in time does not make them to be the substance of the moral act. Many philosophers have reversed the relationship: they have tried to describe the actual performance in relation to its anticipation, in relation to an intention and an act of will. K They have tried to describe the actuality in reference to what is potential and preparatory, instead of working the other way around. They have therefore postulated internal acts and have even shifted the actuality of a moral performance from the material action to something hidden, something that we reach by inferences, or something we get to by introspection. But in doing this they have violated a

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principle of philosophical analysis, that the potential should be interpreted in terms of the actual and the partial in terms of the complete. To support our claims and criticisms, we will have to say more about what an appraisal of a situation is, how an appraisal is an anticipation of a performance, and how an actual performance issues from an anticipation. We will address these and other problems as we move on to our second point; in our first point we have emphasized that a material performance becomes a moral act when it is recognized-primarily by the agent but also by others-as being his, as being done out of his understanding of his situation. And we have continued to emphasize that it is the material performance itself, the handing over, taking, striking, or feeding, that becomes actualized as the moral action. (2) The material action must also be recognized as good or bad. When we do anything, we do what it seems good to do. Even in very simple voluntary actions, when we adjust our posture or eat a snack, we are doing what seems good and thus what is desirable. When I eat something or make myself warm I not only achieve what I want, I also appreciate it, while I achieve it, as good. There is always a slight reflection tagging along with my performance. I am aware not only of food being eaten or of warmth, but also of food as satisfying my hunger, of warmth as overcoming my discomfort. I recognize the eating and the warming as what I sensed as desirable in my situation and what I undertook to achieve. I identify what I am doing with what I wanted or with what I want. Thus I not only enjoy something good, I also appreciate and recognize it as good. And we must emphasize that this recognition takes place on the performance in its actuality, while it is being done, and not simply when it is anticipated or intended. It is the actual performance that is recognized and appreciated "as good." Now this appreciation of the good thing "as good" introduces an enormous complication into what I am doing. Because I appreciate what I do as good, the issue of whether it is truly good for me arises; and because I appreciate it as good, the issue of whether others see it as good for me or for themselves also arises. I am not only enjoying the warmth; if that were all I was doing there would be no concern whether it is really good or not, and there would be no concern about whether it is good or bad for others. But I also appreciate it as good, and so I can worry whether it really is good for me (is it going to make me sick? am I self-indulgent?) and I can worry whether while it is good for me it may be bad for you (I am taking the warm spot and leaving you out in the cold). The various perspectives on the good, and the difference between genuine and only apparent good, arise for us as agents because we not only enjoy something good but also

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recognize it as good while we enjoy it. That recognition is what makes us to be agents. Moreover, this slight reflective difference, between the good simply and the good recognized as such, is achieved in the same recognition that we described earlier, the recognition of an act as mine. To see the warming or the eating as good is to see it as having been anticipated and desired by me in my understanding of my situation. Thus no matter how caught up I may be in what I am doing, unless I entirely lose my self-possession, I remain quite aware of what I do as good and wanted, and as wanted precisely by me for myself and perhaps for others as well. In fact, my own self-awareness, the sense of my own identity, is correlated to my recognition of good things "as good," since I identify myself as the one who once wanted something and now possesses it as having been wanted; I am the one who both emptily intended (desired) this and who now possesses it in a filled intention. In moral issues, therefore, the slight reflection that introduces the distinction between a good thing and a thing as good is the essential minimum of human reason that accompanies and constitutes whatever we do in a human way. And the most basic object of this reflective recognition is not my intentions or my desires or my sentiments or my will, but the material performance being done. It is the feeding, the warding off, the warming, the pushing, the cutting, the taking, each identified as good and as mine. The actual material performance becomes actualized to a higher pitch by being recognized as good. Once again the core of the being of the moral act is not something that comes before or something that comes after, but the performance itself. The befores and the afters, the anticipations and the consequences, are derivative upon the activity itself. Now my good can be either good or bad for you. My pushing you is good for me but bad for you; my feeding you is good for you and also good for me. All these perspectives on the good thing, and many other perspectives besides, come into play together, and they surface when the "as good" surfaces in my own performance. I cannot recognize something as good without appreciating that there are viewpoints from which it may not be good, or from which it may be good in a different way. I become sensitive to differences in the presence or absence, to me and to others, of things that are good for me and for others. We will try to explore and justify these claims. At the moment a parenthetic comment is appropriate. The distinction between a good thing and a thing "as good" seems to be almost nothing. But it is the elementary introduction of human reason, that which changes what would otherwise be an animal performance into a human act. The difference between a

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good thing and a thing "as good" is like the ontological difference Heidegger talks about, but it is that difference as realized in moral matters. It is very much like, and very much related to, the difference between a thing and the presence and absence ofthe thing.9 It is, furthermore, more basic than other factors that we might suppose are essential to moral activity. It is more basic than our ability to see an act as an instance of a species or a category or a universal that we know to be good; it is more basic than the difference between what we may be doing now and what we see as good in the future. The possibilities of universalizing, or of seeing an activity as an instance of a value, or of interpreting the present in view of the future, are possibilities grounded on the difference we are talking about now, the distinction between a good thing and the thing appreciated as good. Philosophers who try to explain the morality of actions by invoking universalization or values or consequences do not cut deep enough in their analysis, and the dilemmas they come to are the result of their not reaching what is "first in itself." They do not succeed in their ontology of human action. What we are exploring is not merely a verbal and insignificant difference, but something that is usually overlooked because it is so fundamental. When it is overlooked by those who undertake to analyze human action, it becomes impossible for them to avoid paradoxes and inconsistencies in what they say. (B)

We have claimed that the recognitional form. the identification of a material performance as good or bad and as mine. turns the material performance into a moral act. The recognitional form turns pushing into contempt and handing over into generosity. How does it do so? Consider the following four possibilities: (a) I am rushing somewhere and, not seeing you, bump into you. In this case I am simply pursuing my own good and have not acted morally toward you, even though I may have pushed you. Ignorance of your presence is my excuse. (b) I am rushing somewhere and see you in my way; I push you aside. In this case I am aware of what I am doing but I do not act against you "personally." I am rude rather than cruel; my action is a breach of manners rather than of morals, because what was bad for you-your being pushed-did not as such become good for me. (c) I am rushing somewhere and see you in my way; I push you aside. But I want to push you aside, and your being pushed

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becomes my good. Perhaps you are not really in my way, but I go over and give you a shove nevertheless. In this case I am cruel and I have accomplished a moral act. The human relationship between you and me becomes modified by such an act in a way in which it does 110t become redefined by the acts we have examined in (a) and (b). (d) I am rushing somewhere and see you in my way and push you aside, and do so with the sense that I can push you aside when I want to; this is not just cruelty but contempt, reflecting my low opinion of you, my opinion of your helplessness. What is bad for you is my good, and in a special way. This sequence of cases shows that once the distinction between the good thing and the thing recognized "as good" arises, the possibility of higherlevel goods also arises. I might push you because somehow it is good for me to carry out this material performance (I am taking the shortest route and want nothing in my way); but if! recognize this same performance as bad for you, it becomes possible for me to want it, to take it as my good, precisely in its being bad for you. And then an explicit moral transaction has taken place between you and me. I have defined or confirmed our human relationship: I have been cruel or contemptuous and not just "pushy." This level of interaction is made possible by the introduction of the "as good" into the material performance. It would not be there if we merely pursued what we materially need. This level of transaction also highlights me and you as moral agents and patients. Moral actions and transactions are folded into people. What I am as an agent is consolidated by the generosities, cruelties, cowardices, braveries, and injustices I have done. What we are to each other is established by the fact that you once helped me out of trouble (my escape from an impending harm was, as such, your good), that I once helped you achieve something you needed (your good was, as such, my good). I do not just deliver something good to you: rather precisely as your good it is my good. Its "being your good" is identified as good for me. I do not just inflict a harm on you; your harm as such becomes my good: not just because it is a harm, but because it is a harm to you. It is not just that I want the same thing that you do or do not want; rather I want as such your having the good or bad in question. Once I begin to distinguish between simply wanting something good and wanting someone else's good or bad as my good, a great range of complexities is introduced; they are the complexities of the human condition. For example, it is possible for me to oscillate between wanting primarily the material good, the substrate, and wanting primarily the more

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formal aspect, the good of another as a good for me. If you are hungry and I give you food, I concentrate on the remedy of your distress. I hand over to you the food you need. I must also take this remedy, this material good for you, as my good, if my feeding you is to be a human act of kindness. (If I fail to appreciate it as my good, I would either be acting accidentally or absentmindedly or under duress, or I would be operating in a strange sort of perversity, delivering the benefit but shrinking from the human recognition, in a kind of elaborate sulking.) But sometimes I can concentrate on the formal element: I can want specifically and almost purely to do good to you merely as good for you. This occurs when we give gifts. A gift is not meant primarily to remedy a distress; it is governed not by the material need and performance but by the recognitional forms of being seen as good or as bad. The sheer form of your good becoming my good comes first, and it searches for a substrate. for a gift. A material performance is needed if the gift is to be actualized, but the material performance is the embodiment rather than the urgent basis for the recognitional transaction. Then all sorts of intermediate cases and complexities can occur between emphasizing the substrate and emphasizing the form. A nuance added to a necessary thing-a flower added to a meal tray-can give it the tone of a gift. A gift may be badly given and may sink into being just a material assist or even a selfish action ("He gave his wife a washboard for Christmas": what should be her good seen as a good for him becomes her drudgery seen as his advantage; the very disappointment is made possible by the play and cancellations of recognitional forms). Friendship in a common task can become "personal" friendship as the task is carried on not just to be completed but for the good of the partner. And complexity is possible not only through oscillations between the matter and the form of the act, but also by making the formal element more and more complicated. I can want and do simply what is bad for you, and that would be cruelty. I can want and do what is bad for you in return for a harm you once did to me, a harm that was once your good; that would be revenge. I can want and do what is bad for you to show that I hold you in low esteem, as unable to ward off the damage I inflict, and that would be contempt. Acts of arrogance, jealousy, spite, hatred, injustice, and the like, are all variations on my wanting something bad for you precisely as bad and as seen as bad by you. They are variations on the presentational forms that can be introduced in my wanting and doing what is bad for you. And more positively and benignly, I can want and do what is simply good for you, and that would be benevolence or kindness. I can want and do what is good for you in return for a good you did to me, and that would be gratitude or justice. I can want and do something good for you to show I think you can do more than I am able to do, or to show that what I give you is really somehow already yours, and that would be

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tribute or esteem. There are an unlimited number of possible permutations of good and bad, yours, mine, and theirs: my good can be your good, my bad can be your good, your good can be "their" bad, and so on; some of these forms have names and some do not. For example, do we have a name for the case in which I want something good for you as a way of showing that you depend on me for your good, that you cannot secure your good without me? All these forms yield various possible moves in human relationships. And these human transactions in all their variety are modulations of the single recognitional form of being seen as good. But although the formal element seems to become the substance of the action, although the form of "being good for you" or "being bad for you" may be what I want in such transactions, the form is always the form of something material, of some material performance, which remains always-the pushing and the handing over, the feeding and the striking-as the foundation for a human transaction, as that which is caught up in the categoriality. We can now return to the examples we used in introducing the issue of moral action, to Henry mowing the lawn to spite his wife and to Helen making a dress for Ann as an act of gratitude. The material performance, the mowing and the making, cannot be said to be chosen in view of the moral acts of spite and gratitude, because the moral acts are not numerically different from the material doing: they are just the mowing and the making identified as good by Henry and by Ann. The act of spite is the mowing seen by Henry as something bad for his wife-something she tells him not to do, something she thinks will harm his health-and precisely as so rejected by her, the mowing is identified as good for him. It is something he wants to do not because he wants to cut grass, but because he wants to activate a recognitional form between himself and Mildred. But although there is more than cutting grass in this transaction, in a sense there is "only" the mowing of the lawn, activated in the formal identities that achieve and express what we call spite, just as in the fact that the road is rocky, there are "only" the rocks and the road. Helen's dressmaking achieves and expresses gratitude because she makes the dress precisely as a good for Ann; Ann's good becomes her good, specifically in response to another benefit done earlier by Ann toward Helen. The moral act thus is in the material performance; it is not a purpose in view of which the material performance is chosen. Further Aspects of Moral Action

We will now discuss some of the many dimensions of the moral act that remain to be examined. We will discuss (1) the difference between the

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moral act on the one hand and intentions and consequences on the other; (2) the understanding and decision that anticipate a moral act; (3) how character is expressed in actions and in moral appraisals; (4) how actions help us understand ourselves as agents; (5) some further issues to be treated later in this book. (1) Writers who place the substance of a moral act in the intention the agent has when he performs it will often conclude that the external material performance is morally neutral. 10 The intention, they say, will determine whether the act is gratitude, spite, jealousy, courage, or benevolence, and it will make this determination no matter what we actually do. Also they conclude that we must look to the intention to define whether the act is good or bad, right or wrong. Other writers place the moral character of the act in the consequences that it has. If the outcome of the act is some benefit, suitably measured, the material performance is good in the sense of being useful; if the outcome is some harm, suitably measured, the performance is bad because it leads to something bad. Both of these escapes, into the intention or into the consequences of the act, do not do justice to the being of a moral act. They are attempts to place the moral aspect of a performance into something outside the performance, whether before or after it. They rest on an improper ontological understanding of the being of moral acts, on a failure to work out the identities and differences proper to moral activity. They are in moral philosophy the equivalent of theories in epistemology that postulate sense-data or brain states as putative explanations for how we know things, or theories that posit an unknowable thing-in-itself as the hidden cause of our cognitions. All such theories reflect failures to come to terms with the identities and differences appropriate to the issue under discussion. And yet the turn to intentions or to consequences seems to have some plausibility. Human beings can be, say, grateful or courageous in so many different ways: one can act gratefully by giving something, by saying something, by not doing something one usually does, by keeping silent, and so on; one can be courageous by standing and fighting, by enduring, and sometimes by running away. Generosity or cruelty can sometimes be shown in ways that seem quite strange to those who are foreign to the transaction. Do we not have to turn somewhere else, toward the internal intention or toward the subsequent outcome, to find what brings moral stability into all this variety and change? We maintain that the moral act exists in itself and not in intentions or in consequences. The material performance itself becomes actualized as the moral act when it is identified as good or bad for you, and, as such, as good or bad for me. As a substrate receiving this form, the material

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performance must be able to be recognized as good or bad for you and, as such, as good or bad for me. What other writers call an intention we call a recognition, but it is a recognition achieved upon this material performance, this handing over or pushing, and not achieved in isolation. If the recognition is to be achieved, the material performance must be identifiable or recognizable as good or bad for you (and desirable or rejectable, as such, by me). I cannot say I intend to express gratitude to you and then proceed to do just anything at all, or proceed to do things that are painful and outrageous. Recognitions are not arbitrary: I have to do something gratifiable if it is to be identified as gratitude. The matter has to be suitable if the form is to suit it. Sometimes I may follow the standard, obvious ways of expressing and achieving gratitude, but at other times, if I am morally thoughtful, I may actualize gratitude in a surprising way, with unexpected resources: but if I succeed it will, certainly, be visible to myself, to you, and to others as gratitude, provided we and they think about and understand what is going on. But what about the great variety of material performances that seem to serve for one and the same form? How can so many different things be done in the name of gratitude or courage or, say, patriotism? How can what looks to one person like benevolence appear to another to be cruelty? There can indeed be misidentifications in these matters, and there can be puzzling cases, just as there can be error and strangeness in our attempts to recognize any sort of object; but the mistake or the surprise simply calls for clarification and explanation, to show how in these circumstances among these people this can be taken as good or bad for another and hence wanted as good or rejected as bad by the agent. We must come to appreciate the range of human voluntaries and to see how much they depend on the circumstances in which the moral agents and patients live. And the consequences of a moral transaction may be very important, but the moral act itself, apart from its consequences, defines and confirms the agent and the target in their human relationship: your harm has been recognized by me as my good (I have betrayed you), and even if no damage follows (you escape from your enemies, you become a hero), I am still there as your betrayer and you are there as the one I was traitor to. The betrayal as a moral act took place when I led your enemies to where you were: this leading and handing over was your harm recognized as my good. The material performance makes my betrayal or my gratitude truly happen as an event among men in the world. My moral act is not a ghostly interaction between minds or wills; it is achieved and expressed materially. Once done, it cannot be undone. Through the material occurrence

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the world has been creased by my moral transaction. I may act differently later on and you may forgive what I did, and we may later see aspects of my action that are not visible now, but the action is there and will be there as the core for all later interpretations and reactions: we cannot interpret it any way we like, and only some reactions are appropriate to it. The interpretations and reactions must involve further identifications of the same moral act I achieved in my original identification, the identification in which I let the act be. (2) But what about all my planning and anticipation of the act? Do I not somehow make a decision to act before I actually perform? If the consequences of my moral transaction do not establish my moral act, perhaps the external performance does not establish it either; perhaps my appraisal of the situation, my planning, and my decision are enough. Are you not already betrayed by me when I decide to betray you? Does this not happen even before I lead your enemies to where you are? Are you not morally murdered by me once I decide to murder you? Is not the human relationship determined by the agent's appraisal and decision, more than by the outcome of his decision? We did, after all, concede that the origin of a moral act is found in the agent's appraisal of his situation. Does this not make the moral act to be achieved before the material performance is done? We can respond to these questions by discussing how anticipation is related to a recognition." We will make use of Husserl's distinction between empty and filled intentionalities and the identification he says takes place between them. We are again engaged in the issue of identity and difference and of presence and absence. The understanding and appraisal of a situation does not necessarily come ·before the material performance, although it often does so. But whether or not it precedes the performance, the primary existence, manifestation, and exercise of a moral understanding is in its consummation, when it is at work in a performance. If! give you something in gratitude, it is true that I must have had a dispositional understanding, prior to my handing over, that you have been good to me and deserve something in return. But this prior appraisal and disposition are to be understood philosophically in relation to the performance of handing over; they are not somehow an efficient cause of my handing over. They become actualized in the formal cause of my grateful giving. Sometimes indeed there may be no prior anticipation at all; my understanding might develop along with a situation and its resources and along with my performance as it goes on in them (even though my character as one who will help others in danger must dispositionally precede the situation). Something threatens you and I defend you from it at some risk to myself; I act protectively and coura-

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geously, but right along with the situation. My understanding and decisions are not prior transactions, mental acts, causing my defense of you. But what about the cases in which there is prior consideration, understanding, and decision? How are these preliminary activities related to my performance? We will approach this issue by drawing a comparison. Instead of speaking directly about a moral transaction, we will first discuss a more casual instance, that of planning and executing a purchase. With the resources this example provides, in, so to speak, the light this example casts, we will be able to treat the more difficult case of moral action. Suppose I buy a computer. The initial state I am in is one of increasing dissatisfaction with myoid typewriter. It is old, it no longer strikes evenly, it often jams, it needs repair. The possibility of a new typewriter arises for me as an issue. For months it hovers around in the background. To buy a new typewriter would be one of the standard and obvious possibilities, the simple replacement of what I already have. In all this, it is the world and my situation that are modified, not merely my mental states. My typewriter appears more and more unreliable and aggravating; new typewriters-those I see, those I see pictures of, those I hear about-begin to look good, good for me. As I talk with others about this situation, and as I read more about it, new kinds of typewriters surface: electronic machines with memories and many other new features. I also hear and read about computers and word processors. I have to find out, by reading, hearing, and seeing, a lot of new things about them. I have to articulate a lot, to register and report. Different prices are mentioned; at first the high price seems to exclude a computer as a possibility for me, then other prices make the possibility return again. I look at many computers, I imagine myself using one, I try a few in various stores. The possibility begins to get more and more proximate as I shake out more and more about the issue. I return to a couple of stores, reexamine some machines, talk further with the dealers. I still have not bought a computer, but it has almost happened. Then gradually the way that I find myself talking with one of the dealers shows-shows him and shows me-that I am going to buy it. I start talking about still more immediate questions, such as the time of delivery and the manner of payment. I still have not bought the computer, but I have "decided" to buy it. Finally, I tell the dealer I will buy it next Thesday. I proceed to get a bank check; on Thesday I drive to the store, give him the check, and take the equipment away in my car. I take it home, install it, and begin using it. In this procedure my situation has changed; it was an appreciated situation in which a need was felt and possibilities were understood. The climax of the procedure was the exchange of the check for the computer, but the change desired was the presence and use of the machine in the

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place where I work. Before the situation was resolved, there was much imaginary rehearsal of myself using the machines, there was much talking and reading about such instruments and their use, there was some practice use in stores, and through all this there was a thoughtful, though often confused, appraisal of this type of machine, of my needs, of my situation. All this rehearsal (I,nd thinking goes on at the moment when it occurs, but it is also an anticipation of something in the future, an anticipation of actually having and using "my" computer. The rehearsal and thinking cannot be defined simply by what goes on when the rehearsal and thinking go on; they must be seen as "containing" somehow "the same" that will happen in the future. We do live in the future: when I actually have and use a computer, what I do is identifiable with, is recognizable as the same as, what I anticipated. Even the unexpected features we find in the thing once we have it are different and unexpect,ed precisely because they belong to the thing we identify as the same as what we anticipated. We can live in the future just as we can be involved with what is absent when we speak and think about it. When the future and the absent become present, what is present is recognized as the same as what was intended from before and from afar. Now at what point have I decided to buy the computer? For a while it is only a remote possibility. There are some aspects-the price, the need for a dust-free environment and for controlled temperature (are these necessary for a computer? at first I am not sure)-that seem to make it impossible, as attractive as it might be. Then the obstacles dissolve as I find out more; then comparisons are made (between various products and various prices and various maintenance services). Then it becomes plausible; then I find myself behaving as if I am getting it. A few actions are carried out: I tell the dealer I will take it, I ask about delivery, I inquire about getting a bank draft. At this point a kind of coherence has settled into my situation with its needs and possibilities. It is not that at some moment I have made a distinctive, abrupt act of the will. The whole procedure was willed, it was penetrated by an inchoate voluntary that had to clarify itself. It was desirous from the beginning, not just after I made a "decision." I was wanting loosely at first, then more tightly as the situation shaped up. The vague voluntary differentiated itself into a mediated voluntary (an end in view) and choices that I could perform. The coherence occurs as the choices become definite and possible. The coherence does not happen instantaneously; there is a period in which it is dawning. There is a certain period of time during which I have not yet achieved the coherence, and there is a period in which I have clearly already gotten it, but there will usually be a stretch of time in which I am not sure if it is

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there or not. I still test for it, but I test with a sense that it is already there. 1l And once the coherence is achieved, once I succeed in reasoning to what can be done now, my behavior takes on a different tone. Things are settled. I now act under the sway of something I am to do next Tuesday; I now make choices in view of a purpose: I get my car ready, I arrange for the check, I begin adjusting my furniture. At this point choices are clear and distinct. Until the coherence sets in for me, I continue to deliberate under a rather vague and general aegis, of remedying my unsatisfactory situation, of getting a new machine and perhaps a computer; after the coherence arrives, the categoriality of the chosen is introduced. I now choose this action in view of that action which is to be performed at suchand-such a place in five days, which in turn is to be done in view of having and using a computer. But even when I am making these choices, I still have not bought my computer. I do not buy it until I hand over my check, get a receipt, and take the equipment. Even my promise to the dealer is not yet the purchase: my promise speaks about and anticipates a future purchase, one that is still absent. I must initiate and not only appraise, and I must initiate not only choices but also the act in view of which the choices are made. The world has to be creased by my material performance, which is identifiable with my act of purchasing, for the act to take place. Everything before that, even the coherence that settles in when I "make up my mind," and even the choices that lead up to what I want to do, is anticipatory. Ontologically, all those anticipating things do not fully exist for what they are until the transaction takes place. They truly are anticipations. The same ontology holds for moral action. My understood situation contains you as someone who has been generous to me. The situation calls for reciprocity, for gratitude. The situation shifts and resources emerge whereby I can be grateful; it becomes possible for me to get you something I know you always wanted. A coherence emerges in my situation; I take the steps now possible and give you something, something appropriate, for what you have done. Before I creased the world by giving my gift, I may have felt grateful but I really was not yet actualized as being grateful. The feeling of gratitude is the anticipatory understanding I have of my situation; it anticipates, at least vaguely, what I will later do. It is something, but in its being it is something anticipatory. Its being is not yet complete. The pulses of emotion, the watery eyes, the fond remembrance of what you have done, are not enough of a material performance to actualize gratitude. Even the steps taken to get your gift, once a gift has been settled on, even the choices made in view of the now definite act of

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thanking, are not yet the act of gratitude. The act of gratitude truly happens only when the gift is given and taken and the crease is made. Only in that act have I fully identified your good as my good, in response to the good you did for me earlier. Only then was there a good for you that could be taken as my good. An identification takes place in the world. A feeling of gratitude, a feeling of contempt, a feeling of cruelty, a feeling of generosity: these are not just inner turmoils but understandings. They are sentiments, ways in which we sense our situation, ways in which the world is appreciated. They involve pleasure and pain, but they are primarily a way of apprehending. The rhetorician therefore works on the emotions of his audience not primarily to rile his listeners but to make them understand their situation in a certain way and to make a course of action seem the one to pursue. The feelings of the listeners are shaped in view of action, an action they are to take themselves. But since these feelings are dispositional and anticipatory, they are only potentially what their names imply; they are not yet the actual being of gratitude, contempt, cruelty, or generosity. (3) As we have said before, an action is most profoundly "mine" because it is made possible by the understanding I have of the situation we are in. The action thus reveals the understanding I have of my situation, and it also reveals what sort of person I am, because the kind of person I am will allow certain features of the situation to become prominent and will open up certain possibilities of action that would not occur to someone else. When faced with someone in need, one person may help in a trivial way, another may give generous aid, a third may exploit the needy person. The target owes the transaction to the agents because the action occurs out of what the agents are: casually helpful, deeply generous, avaricious. And all of us have become characterized in certain ways, as courageous, selfish, aggressive, or sneaky, through the actions we have carried out and through the habits we have picked up from others. Character is also dispositional and anticipatory, but in a degree more remote from the action itself than are appraisal, deliberation, planning, and choices made in view of the action. But although more remote, it is also more fundamental. It is the agent as he is disposed to appraise and to act, the agent as allowing a transaction to become really possible. Moral understanding surfaces in a situation out of the character the agent has. Character, however, does not in tum come forth from a more basic root. Character is terminal; it qualifies us definitively as we take our moral position among others. It is what we are as the deposit of what we have done, the consolidation of the acts by which we have defined and confirmed ourselves toward others, toward these others; it is what we are as the origin of what we will do. Even our "natural inclinations," such as

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hunger or thirst or fear, are not sources for character, because they do not fit us specifically for moral transactions. Only actual performance, first guided by the understanding and the impulse of others and then done on our own, gives us our moral character. Still, as basic as it is, character remains only dispositional; it comes to itself in the actions we perform, just as the skill of an athlete comes to itself when it is exercised in the sport he plays. An agent's character is the source of his ability to appraise a situation, to see it as an opportunity to help someone or an opportunity to defraud; in many cases character makes the agent obtuse, incapable of seeing that a human transaction should be carried out. Sometimes a person ought to be ashamed for not knowing that something should be done ("You saw them in that danger and you did nothing?" "Well, I just didn't realize ... "). This sort of blindness is not ignorance of facts but inability to appraise, and it reveals a deficiency not in one skill or another, but in being human. Often when we try to excuse ourselves for not having morally understood a situation, we try to interpret our moral obtuseness, of which we know we should be ashamed, as mere ignorance of the circumstantial facts, an ignorance that does not come from character and is therefore not a reason for shame. Our involvement with one another, our verbal exchanges, our cooperation, our plans and choices, our confidences and suspicions, show that we take the character of others into account: everyone is modulated, characterized, as an agent. In our exchanges we never deal with a sheer ego, one without character and features. When we meet someone for the first time we may not know what his character is, but we know he has one, and what it is becomes an issue for us if we are to continue to act and react with him. The character will show up initially in his appraisal of situations, in what he says about things, but it will show up definitively, and his words will be either verified or falsified, by what he does in his human transactions: what goods and bads of others does he identify as good and bad for himself? Everything dispositional comes to itself in activity. Because a moral transaction involves a material performance, there is a sense in which our bodies participate in our moral activity and our character. The body does not receive and hold actions the way character does, or even as memory does, but it does assimilate them as a body can: we are identifying something when we note that the surgeon's hands are the hands that saved many lives; that a veteran's wounds are still the expression of courage ("Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say, 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day' "13); that years of deception and cruelty are in someone's eyes and smile, someone whose soul is reflected in his face. When a man dies there is a kind of summary of the

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life in what remains, in what can now no longer enter into further appraisal and transaction. And people who live together a long time, husband and wife, brothers and sisters, old friends, do have their transactions on deposit with one another, not just in their recollections but bodily as well, since it was these hands and arms and faces that entered into all the moral recognitions that made up the life they led. When such people talk to one another about what they did, it is not like talking about the same things to a stranger or into a tape recorder. The dispositional and the residual are real, but always in reference to the activity. People want to remember primarily what they have done, not their fantasies and deliberations. (4) A transaction issues from an understanding of a situation, one in which the agent appreciates dissatisfaction, resources, and possible avenues of proceeding, one in which he rehearses possible behavior. The agent also understands himself in a certain way, even though the aim of his appraisal is on the issue to be settled and not on himself. Such practicall1nderstanding is an exercise of thinking and as such it may be good or bad, clear or confused. Usually we are aware of how we appreciate our situation, and if asked we could explain what we think we need and how we think we might go on. But often enough we may not be clear about what is cooking as we proceed, we may not be able to say, to ourselves or to others, what we are after. Sometimes our sentiment may be clearer to others than it is to ourselves, and the others mayor may not be able to help us see what is going on. Some people may be more prone to selfconcealment than others. But once again, the activity brings out the being of its own anticipations. The way we begin to act shows more vividly what we were about and may show to us ourselves what we have been getting into. Someone may be growing infatuated with someone else but may not be able to state, clearly, what is going on until some action-an intimacy perhaps, that special gestured form of identifying your good as mine and mine as yours-reveals the disposition and appraisal that have been coming along. Or someone may be getting envious and feel dissatisfied with his situation according to that particular mixture of goods desired and bads resented that we call envy; he may assert that he is simply short-tempered or tired, but actions will sooner or later show that there is envy and not just irritation. The activity helps us define ourselves in our own selfunderstanding, which is never without the possibility and the need of further clarification. Thinking has been exercised in the appraisals and sentiments that preceded the action, but thinking is not always clear to itself; what seems to be understanding can often enough be misunderstanding. But even such confusion and error are failures in thinking, not

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failures to think. Thinking, whether practical or speculative, always shadows itself to some degree. (5) Any material performance can be incorporated into a moral transaction. We might execute a simply voluntary action, such as walking with someone, as an expression and an exercise of friendliness. A nurse's care of a sick person is a service, a modification of the patient's condition, but it can also be done as an act of kindness. A carpenter can make pews for his parish church as an act of generosity; his action of making a product becomes also a moral act. But a moral transaction cannot, as such, be chosen in view of some further purpose. Something strange happens to it when it is subordinated in this way. If I am "generous" to you in order to impress my supervisor and to get a promotion, my performance erodes as a moral transaction. If I am cruel to you for some advantage to myself, for some purpose, then even my "cruelty" takes on a different tone. As bad as it might be, it is not exactly like the cruelty I would exercise if your misery were as such directly my good. A different moral categoriality takes place when something that seems to be simply a moral transaction is done in view of something else. Further, if we execute what looks like a moral act for the sake of exchange or for money, the action again takes on a different tone. How and why this is so will be a topic for us later; at present we simply remark that a moral act is most fully a moral transaction only when it is done as a voluntary in itself, whether as a direct or mediated voluntary. It is in moral transactions that we are most properly at work, whether successfully or unsuccessfully, as human beings. In examining moral action we have concentrated so far on actions done on the small scale. We have discussed one agent acting toward another in gratitude, revenge, spite, generosity, or cruelty. We have restricted ourselves to this scale in order to make it easier to draw the distinction between material performances and moral acts and to display the ontology of moral behavior. But if we flourish as human in our gratitude and generosity to another person, how much more real can we be when we achieve and recognize a performance that is good for our community? And how much more of a failure is one as a human being if one betrays or tortures not an individual but a people? Moral transactions occur on the large scale as well as on the small, and actions done toward a community will call for analyses beyond those we have made so far. Large-scale action will still require a material performance as its basis, but the recognitional form will be greatly expanded. In a large-scale action we recognize the performance as being good for many others, for a community, perhaps for men living in the future, and as such we make it our good. We may hope that our recognition and achievement of the good of all these others will be in turn recog-

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nized by them in what they think of us and in what they do for us. The scope is expanded but the structural elements, the matter and the form, remain the same. We have used the word "transaction" to name a moral action and we have used the word "target" to name the person toward whom a moral action is directed. Both these words help us to show the public character of moral conduct. They help us, so to speak, to spread out the moral categoriality. The term "transaction" reminds us that moral acts are not simply decisions but performances that change the way things are. The term "target" reminds us that moral acts involve someone's being affected by us: they are not merely acts done in conformity with or in violation of rules or abstract values. But there are shades of meaning in "transaction" and "target" that can be misleading. The terms might convey the impression that the agent is engaged in one activity in one place while the target is being affected separately somewhere else. But in moral conduct, the agent and the patient, the performer and the target, are not morally separated. The two persons and the transaction are engaged in one activity, one "being at work." My thanking is your being thanked, my insult is your being insulted, my honoring is your being honored, my vengeance is your being repaid. If you are not insulted, I have not achieved an insult, no matter how hard I tried, just as I have not taught if you have not learned. The agent and target are, as such, actualized together no matter how far apart they may be in space or time: a letter, for example, may actualize insult or gratitude over several weeks and thousands of miles, a gift left behind or a dangerous substance implanted somewhere can transact love or hatred over a long span of time. The moral actuality exists in a material performance but it introduces its own form of identification. In exchanges between individuals and in transactions affecting a community, a material performance becomes a moral act when it enters into a particular form of identification, when the performance is recognized as the good or the bad of another and desired or rejected as such. Human beings are able to exercise this sort of moral categoriality: moral identifications are achieved and further recognitions are built upon them as our moral actions and reactions become more complex. The power to make moral recognitions is moral thinking. Thinking and reason occur not only in making inferences but also in simple identifications and in establishing categorialities. Such human accomplishments need language. They may not involve language explicitly each time they occur, but they can be achieved only by a being that, in principle, enjoys language, and they are in fact usually capable of being brought to speech. We can usually state in words what we are doing morally and others can talk about

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our performance. We must be able to speak if we are to be taught to perform moral transactions, and we need language if we are to get very far in assessing a situation and defining actions of our own. Having introduced moral behavior and having discussed its structure, we must now tum to a discussion of language and its role in human conduct.

NOTES 1. In "Three Ways of Spilling Ink," in Philosophical Papers (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 275-76, J. L. Austin writes: "We do not say, 'A wounded B for the purpose of killing him.' Why not? Because the killing and the wounding are 'not sufficiently separate'-are 'too intimately connected': because there are not 'two things' that are done? But what does this really mean?" It is precisely the presence and the absence as two of the "two things" mentioned by Austin that we take as the categoriality at work in choice. They are articulated as one and as two in the special way things are articulated in the categorialities proper to phronesis. Our book is an attempt to show "what this really means." 2. Thomas Hobbes, De Cive, or Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society, ed. W. Molesworth (London: Bohn, 1841), XIII, §l3, p. 176. 3. Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 92. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. W. Molesworth (London: Bohn, 1839), chapter XXIV, paragraphs 11-l3, pp. 238-39. 4. Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, 1.1. 5. Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949). Ryle's critical remarks are apt, but he does not succeed in formulating a positive philosophical doctrine, an ontology of the way mind and thinking can exist publicly. He does not have enough to say about the being of appearances, identities, differences, forms, and categorials. 6. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), Investigation VI, chapter 6. See Robert Sokolowski, "Husserl's Concept of Categorial Intuition," in Phenomenology and the Human Sciences, Supplement to Philosophical Topics, ed. J. N. Mohanty, vol. 12 (1981), pp. 127-41. 7. It is within differences such as these that self-identification takes place: in the difference between identifying an action as mine, and identifying it as identified by others as mine, and identifying it as not done by someone else, and so on. The self is what is identified as the same owner of actions in such a complex of differentiations. And in contrast to the identity of an action, there is the identity of a statement as said by me, as understood by another, as quoted by someone, and so on: in these differences there arises the identity of the speaker. Philosophy is

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the reflective activity of revealing how such identities occur within their appropriate differences. 8. In the Appendix to this book we will show how the Stoics, Abelard, and Kant internalize human action. Our own position has much in common with the analysis Alfred Schutz gives of human action: he also uses the Husserlian structure of empty intention and fulfillment. However, there does seem to be a difference in emphasis between his position and ours. Schutz seems to place a greater stress on the project that precedes the performance, on the voluntative fiat, on the intention, than we do. He seems to consider the act itself as an outcome of this internal achievement. In our position we give priority to the action itself. See Alfred Schutz, Collected Papers I, ed. M. Natanson (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962), pp. 20, 67, 70; Collected Papers II, ed. A. Brodersen (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1964), pp. ll, 15, 289; The Phenomenology of the Social World, trans. G. Walsh and F. Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1%7), §9. 9. For a study of the meaning of the ontological difference and a survey of works in which it is found, see William J. Richardson, Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1963), pp. 10-15. The ontological difference is the difference between beings and being, between things and being. For Heidegger, being is also disclosure or manifestation, so it is appropriate to say that the ontological difference is the difference between a thing and the presence and absence of the thing. In practical and moral matters, the dimension of "being good" covers both presence and absence: something good is both desired when absent and enjoyed when possessed. It is appreciated as good when this dimension of its presence and absence becomes a concern. 10. Classically, this position is attributed to Abelard. See the Appendix to this volume. 11. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, Investigation VI, §4-§l2. 12. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III 3, 1113a2-5: "The deliberated and the chosen are one and the same, except that the chosen has already been made determinate; for that which has been filtered out through the deliberation is the chosen." 13. Shakespeare, King Henry V. IV.3.

4. Actions and Speech Words as Actions, Words about Actions MANY MORAL TRANSACTIONS are simply verbal achievements. The material performances that underlie many of our moral acts are simply acts of speaking. We can crease the world by saying words as well as by pushing someone or handing something over to someone; Homer often has one of his characters ask, "What sort of word has escaped the barrier of your teeth?" (Iliad, 14.83) Letting words go can be just as decisive as feeding or striking another person. Insult, gratitude, consolation, discouragement, encouragement, dedication, all can take place through speech. It is true that usually nonverbal actions are more of a commitment of ourselves than words are. Words usually remain somewhat provisional so long as there is nothing besides words. Words work through what they display, and accomplishing the words does not yet mean we have accomplished what they display, nor does it definitely assure others that we are dedicated to what the words display, that we will act in accordance with what we have said. I may promise but not perform, I may commiserate but do nothing to help, I may join in the complaint but not do anything to remedy the situation. Ontologically there is always something of a lag between what is said and what is done, precisely because of the displaying function of words. To get caught in the words while never getting to the deed is a peculiarly human way of being a failure. Only a being with speech can fail in this way. But words are not always irrelevant or false; if they can be idle or misleading, they can also be pertinent and true. They often do portend actions and sometimes they are the moral action itself. An insult is achieved when words are spoken. We have been redefined in our human relationships by the insulting statement. We can be encouraged or strengthened in our resolve by the words of others and we are grateful to those who knew what to say and who did say it to us. How can speech

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serve as the vehicle for moral transactions, and why does it have that provisional, dubious relationship toward the other kind of human performance, toward deeds? Why is speech open to suspicion in a way that deeds are not? Speech acts sometimes make up the moral transaction, but even when they do not, they surround the performances we carry out. There is almost always an enormous amount of talking around whatever we do. There is talking before, during, and after most moral transactions. Speech helps us define and evaluate our situation, it helps us shake out ways of dealing with it, it helps us determine what should be chosen in view of the purposes we have in mind, it lets us state the action even before we perform it, it lets us test and rehearse and clarify what we are going to do, and to get an initial, and also verbal, reaction from others: it lets us display the action and its effects when the action is still absent, before it occurs. Speech then helps us explain, both to others and to ourselves, what we are doing while we are doing it, it helps us hold fast to the identifications and recognitions that make up our moral transaction, even while the circumstances continue to change under the pressure both of external factors and of our own intervention. Finally, speech allows us to restate, confirm, and interpret what we have done, it allows the action to become reputed, it allows assessment and praise or blame, it allows both gossip and commemoration, and lets other agents take our performance into account as they in tum think about what they should do in their situations. A moral transaction of any importance at all generates floods of talk and chatter and much serious speech as well. Moreover, it is specifically moral transactions that generate so much discussion. The process of making a product, the activity of changing or servicing the condition of things, and even the activity of choosing in view of an end, do not call for nearly as much comment and continuous reappraisal. They also do not bring nearly as much fame or infamy. Speech is thus one of the elements of human conduct, and it is related to performances in a way different from the way actions are related to reactions; somehow speech as an element for action can be outside the action itself. It can be only the cushion and the mirror for action. What is speech, and what is moral action, that the two should be related in this way? Earlier we distinguished a moral action from the understanding the agent has of his situation, and also from the agent's character as the origin of both his understanding and his behavior. The moral understanding, the diagnosis of a situation, comes between character and performance. It reflects the agent's character (some ways of acting surface as possibilities only for some agents), and it enables the actions to be performed. If another person does not understand the situation in the same way that the

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agent understands it, the action will be more or less incomprehensible to him. He as a spectator will not understand what the agent is doing: he will not understand why the agent does what he does; he will find it hard to "quote" the appraisal from which the agent's action issues. The agent's moral appraisal, his prudence, is an act of intelligence. As an act of thinking, its content can be thought by others as well. But when it is achieved by others, the act of thinking may well be achieved confusedly; indeed, there is almost always some confusion and misunderstanding, some lack of fit, when two people think the same thing. The possibility of sharing thoughts is also, inevitably, the possibility of some static in this sharing. What Husserl calls the ideality of meaning, the possibility that the same sense can be thought by many persons, does not signify that everyone who entertains the meaning possesses it clearly and distinctly, with only occasional and superficial smudges of confusion; the identity of sense is always penetrated by some vagueness and misapprehension. I But despite this element of misinterpretation, an agent's appraisal of a situation can be appreciated by others. The same situation is understood both by him and by the others; if the same were not being understood, we could not speak of vagueness and static; we would have to speak of a different understanding and indeed a different situation, not the same one vaguely comprehended. The others can to some degree understand what the agent is doing, and they often will understand it very clearly. They may marvel at the light he sheds on the situation, they may agree with his assessment, or they may think him wrong. Such conflicting attitudes are possible because the object ofthinking can be held in common. However, the moral action itself is not common in the same way. The onlookers may appreciate what the agent does, but he alone is the agent and they do not act with him. His creasing of the world by his actual performance sets him off as the agent (and his target as the patient) while it defines the others as the mere lookers-on; agent and spectators are divided off by the definitive performance. Until the action is transacted, so long as it is just being talked about, the "agent" and the chorus still have much in common: the action is still only there in speech. The chorus even joins in the deliberation and is therefore not as uninvolved as it will later be. But once the crease is made, agent and onlookers are marked off, each in its own definition, by the line that has been drawn. The speech that surrounds and cushions action is related to the prudence, the understanding of a situation, that reflects character and enables performance. Both the serious discourse and the chatter are a continuous reprocessing of the situation as understood and the action as performed within that understanding. The speech is a continuous airing of the situation as appraised. There is talk about what should be done, about

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what is being done, about what has been done, about what should have been done, and all this talk keeps expressing the understanding that made the action possible. It is not the action as creasing the world that is simply repeated in speech, but the understanding that created a context and a plausibility for the performance. The reason why the understanding is a topic of speech is that it culminated in the action, but the action by itself, abstracted from the agent's own understanding and the understanding of the onlookers, is too episodic to catch in speech. But the prudential understanding that yields the action, as an act of thinking, provides an abundance of material for verbalization. In fact, the activity of working out an understanding of a situation can sometimes, and especially for some personalities, get overdeveloped and expand so much that it paralyzes action. We can analyze and refine so much that we cannot move. This happens especially with those who deal a lot with words: academics, actors, commentators, journalists, philosophers. They get enthralled in telling and may never do anything. They also may overanalyze a situation and put themselves into a nervous panic about acting: their words and thoughts can balloon into huge constructions with problems, avenues, and solutions so highly articulated that they could never be brought back into the situation and its resources. Too many words, whether arising from enjoyment or from anxiety, block performance. This moral affliction is made possible by an ontological structure, by the lag between speech and deeds. The activity of displaying overwhelms the possibility of doing something to be displayed. It is not just that such people cannot act, it is that they do something else instead of acting, something that seems to "contain" the actions and can therefore somehow make the person think he has acted when he has only talked. Speech about action, gossip and commentary, draws primarily on the understanding an agent has of his situation. Such understanding comes between character and actual performance. Both gossip and serious talk can therefore move off in two directions. They can expatiate upon the agent's character as the origin of this concrete moral understanding, or they can focus on the deed itself. The character: "What kind of man is he to have done that?" "She must be very different from what we thought her to be." "Do you know what else he did, and what he said?" "She is proving to be very reliable." The performance: "He then stood up and walked away; you should have seen the looks on their faces." "She then got the material through and we were able to proceed." "He took Joe's watch and Joe ran after him and caught him." Both these forms of talk and evaluation, the retrospective, which reflects on the character of the agent, and the prospective, which reflects on the action and its effects, are worked out through the understanding of a situation that enables the performance to occur and makes the performance the agent's own.

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The prominence of moral understanding as the central topic of gossip and commentary is shown by the reaction people have to actions that appear puzzling. On the large scale, an election always provokes much talk about what the electorate is trying to "say" (the electorate only acts; it exhibits its political intelligence but does not formulate it). Moves in the stock market are analyzed to find "what the market is telling us," that is, how it understands its economic situation. An individual may perform an act that solicits commentary: Pope John Paul II meets with Yasser Arafat; somebody promises to deliver something but repeatedly refuses to do so. What is going on? The commentary is an attempt to work out the situational understanding that went into the action, the understanding that crystallizes the situation and allows the action to be performed, the anticipation with which the action is to be identified. Speech about the actions of others has an analogue in speech about what happens in sport. We are interested in spectator sports not simply because we enjoy watching a game. Our interest extends into all the talking that goes on about the game, before, during, and after it is played. Sports give people something to talk about, something with which to fill up conversation. And much of the talk is about the way the players and coaches understand the situations in which they are to act. People talk about whether a quarterback called the right play, why he was afraid to move toward this or that player, how he exploited that weakness of the opposition, how he misjudged, what he will do next time, how this player was able to react to that situation, who will pitch in the next game. This focus on the prudence of the players and coaches sometimes moves toward comments about the ability of the players and on their "moral" character as players (on whether they are impetuous, cunning, foolish, or lazy), and it sometimes moves toward remarks about this or that good or bad performance, which is where the ability and the prudence, the assessment, come fully to themselves. There will also be comments on the material resources that surface in situations-on the weather, on injuries, on the quality of the turf on which the game is played, on the home team's advantage-and on the restrictions they impose and the opportunities they provide for the participants. Sports thus provide an interesting analogue to life, both as regards what is done and as regards what is said about what is done. Seven Forms of Speech as Human Behavior

Speech and action run in tandem. Earlier we distinguished seven categories applicable to human behavior: (1) simply voluntary performances; (2) changing or servicing the condition of things; (3) making products;

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(4) making choices in view of purposes; (5) making use of things that have been fabricated or serviced; (6) exchanging by barter or by money; (7) moral transactions. In trying to show how speech and action are related, and how they resemble and yet differ from one another, it will be useful to show how these seven categories are realized in the activity of speaking. As we move forward in this analysis of speech, we will have to introduce more themes from the phenomenology oflanguage and cognition. Speech is the place where action and thinking most clearly come together; it is where prudence or good moral appraisal is most vividly shown to be a virtue of the mind as well as of character. Our philosophical analysis of moral conduct will thus become involved with various forms of presence, absence, and identity, the elements that come to light in the phenomenological analysis of thinking and speaking. Through this study we will be able to show how and why thoughtful identifications are necessary when a material performance becomes a moral transaction; we will thus clarify the cognitive dimension in human conduct. (1) Some speech is simply voluntary. Some speech is just talk for its own sake. In such cases the purpose and the effect of speech recede from our concern: our words are not chosen in view of any display or rhetorical impact, and because choice dwindles away in such speech, even the internal structure of the speech-its substitutions and concatenations-is neglected. We simply exercise language for the special immediate sociability it provides, for voicing routine phrases and cliches, for the simple pleasure of verbalizing. This is a rather thoughtless use of language but it underlies other forms of linguistic activity. (2) We can practice a language in order to improve our ability to use it. When I make practice statements while learning German, I do not take responsibility for what I say. I am only exercising the use of the word "ausgezeichnet," I am not praising anything, and I do not promise anything when I say "Ich verspreche Dir." Or I may use language in such a way as to change the state of the language; I may use "naivety" in order to promote the growing use of that form of the word in place of "naivete." Prominent speakers may pronounce a word in a distinctive way and thus affect the way the word is generally pronounced. Thus just as I can drill teeth in order either to become more proficient at dentistry or to bring about repaired teeth, so I can use language either to change my ability to use the language or to change the condition of the language itself. (3) I can use language to construct a linguistic object that will outlast my act of producing it. In principle this is true of almost any sentence anyone states, since the sentence can always be repeated and quoted by someone else. But in fact, most of the sentences we make are throwaway

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products, paper cups or Kleenex tissues oflanguage, pretty much used up the moment they are used. Yet there are more lasting products. A poem is a permanent linguistic object, an artifact in the liberal arts. It needs a reader, a performer, to be brought to life again, but it exists in its repeated readings as something once made by someone else. It even exists, and can be referred to, as an established cultural object when it is not actually being read or performed. (4) There are no very important differences between linguistic and nonlinguistic activity as regards the three structures we have mentioned so far, but a significant difference arises in regard to the way language functions as chosen in view of a purpose. A chosen performance is one that is done in view of something beyond itself, and it involves the possibility of substitution and concatenation in what is chosen. Speech, the use of language, is essentially a matter of choices. Every word and every combination of words is open to substitution and concatenation, and every chosen word or combination of words is chosen in view of something beyond itself. It is at this point that the major difference between speech and action arises. Actions are chosen primarily for another activity, another performance, another engagement that we want. We drive in a car in order to visit a friend, we cook food in order to be able to eat, we murder someone in order to get an inheritance. In action we choose something in order that some other event or state of affairs occurs. But, as we have seen in chapter 2, linguistic choices are made in view of two purposes: to display states of affairs and to have an effect on the interlocutors; language has both a semantic and a rhetorical purpose. The semantic or display function of speech does not bring about a new situation, as practical choices do. It simply shows what is. The rhetorical function of speech does bring about something new, but it does not primarily engender a new situation in the world. It primarily brings about a conviction or an attitude on the part of interlocutors, that is, on the part of others like me who are also cognizers and evaluators of what there is in the world, those for whom the display of things and situations takes place. The rhetorical function of speech makes the world and its facts look different to those who hear the speech. The rhetorical effect is not a new fact that the interlocutors have to take into account, as the consequence of a practical choice would be. For example, if my linguistic choices brought it about that my interlocutors became surrounded by a hostile crowd, this effect would not be a rhetorical effect on the interlocutors; it is a new situation, not a new attitude, not a new way of being persuaded, not a new opinion about me and the situation that already prevails. The semantic and rhetorical powers of speech do not touch the situation itself; they merely display it and adjust other persons' views of what is dis-

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played. Linguistic choices are thus different from other choices not only in having essentially two purposes, the semantic and the rhetorical, while practical choices have essentially only one, but also in not having a material effect on the situation in the world. Linguistic choices can also have an impact on human relations-they may constitute an insult or a reconciliation, for example-but such an impact is above and beyond their essential linguistic function; linguistic choices can occur without such moral impacts, but they cannot occur without an element of display and rhetorical effect. The various rhetorical tropes and figures, such as irony, synecdoche, litotes, simile, or antitheton, all work to promote the rhetorical effect of the discourse, to enthrall the mind of the interlocutors; they are not moves in the human relationships that exist among the interlocutors. Irony, for example, is not sarcasm. Rhetorical tropes and figures work within the compositional whole of speech, not on personal relationships. Even if a speech is contrived to present the character of the speaker as trustworthy and concerned with the well-being of his audience, the point of such persuasion is not to make the audience trust the speaker in real life, but only to convince them within the context of his present speech.2 (5) Once we have made a table or mowed a lawn, someone can use the table for a picnic or use the lawn for a party. In what sense is there an analogous "use" in language and speech? There is, first, a rather obvious parallel: once we learn German, we can use it to converse with others; once the word "naivety" is established, it can be used in a particular sentence. But such uses are uses of language, not of speeches; in them we make use of vocabulary and grammar and other resources provided by a language. A language is not a made thing. Actually stated sentences, paragraphs, arguments, poems, and books are the fabricated linguistic products. Such things are speeches and not language. Is there any sense in which we can make use of a speech? A problem arises because a speech has to be made and remade each time it is to be presented. A table can be made once and used later, but a speech has to be stated and articulated each time it is to be available; even silently reading someone else's speech is a way of letting the speech be made again. If tables were like speeches, we would have to become carpenters making the table each time we wanted to use the table; and we would have to make and remake the table constantly while we were using it. In the case of speeches, it seems that we must be so totally absorbed in making that we are never able to use what we have made. And yet there is a way we can use a speech: we do both make and use someone's speech when we are engaged in quotation. When we quote we remake the same linguistic construct that someone else made, or one that we made earlier,

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and yet we take some distance to it, we incorporate it into our present speech, and we therefore make use of it as a product somewhat distinct from the speech we are making now. We might use the quotation to illustrate or to confirm what we are saying ourselves, to mock the original speaker, to test the truth of his opinions, to impress our audience, to make propaganda. These are all uses distinct from what the quoted speaker achieved when he made his statement. His statements are being put to use: they are not merely repeated, even though they must be repeated to be put to such a use. Moreover, they are being put to a specifically spoken usage; they are incorporated into further displays and further rhetorical accomplishments. The use ofa speech remains within speech; the original display is fitted into a further display and persuasion. (The original rhetorical effect, however, need not be picked up by the one who quotes; the rhetorical element is tied to the situation in which the speech is made; the rhetorical function of a speech is depleted when we move into the absence of the original context, but the displaying function is not.) (6) Like all human actions, the use of language can be subordinated to the demands of exchange, and like all products, compositions made of words can be bought and sold as such. Plato has described the sophist as someone who both uses language in view of monetary gain and teaches others to do the same. When someone subordinates language to money, the semantic function of speech is deemphasized, since issues of truth and disclosure lose their independence. We are no longer concerned in our speech to show what is, and we tum our attention to what we can get for what we say. The speech continues to signify but its signification and its truth are downgraded. They are no longer truly ours. But the rhetorical force of speech remains important, since it affects not only the audience we are being paid to address, but also the mind of those who will pay us for the speech we give; the rhetorical dimension of language is thus inflated at the expense of the semantic. The semantic becomes, in a way, part of the rhetorical, since instead of persuading others to accept what can be shown to be the case, we now are willing to say that the case is as our sponsors are already pleased and persuaded to think it to be. We flatter them by asserting and documenting their opinions as true. Writing for pay is thus the opposite of quotation, which deflates the rhetorical and sustains the semantic. A hack, a writer who hires himself out, is defined not only by turning out what someone else pays him for, but also by saying what his employer wants stated as being the case. To be a hack is more degrading than simply to work for someone else, because one has to sell not just one's labor but one's mind. One says what someone else wants said, not what one sees and thinks should be said. (7) Moral transactions can be carried out in words. We can, for exam-

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pie, insult, thank, humiliate, or encourage others by what we say, and in doing so we define, redefine, or confirm our relationships with them. In such cases, saying takes the place of handing over, pushing, feeding, and striking. In such cases the lag between words and deeds seems to be overcome; we seem to do something by speaking. How can this occur? How do words function in actually executing human conduct? Speech in Moral Transactions There are many different kinds of utterance that can be used as a basis for moral transactions. We will examine several, and will begin by describing and comparing two of them. (a) We can act toward someone simply by articulating a state of affairs: "So the fender is dented again"; the context and tone of my utterance make it clear that I am not just reporting a fact but that I am also reproaching or insulting you. "The help you gave us got us through a very difficult time"; this can be uttered not as a mere statement offact but also as an act of thanking someone. In such cases the simple observation of a fact becomes the basis for a moral transaction; the statement of fact substitutes for the material performance-the striking or the handing over-that becomes identified in nonlinguistic performances as a human act. (b) We can act toward someone by stating our sentiments: "I detest you," "I am grateful to you." In such statements we refer to ourselves, and we formulate the attitude we have toward the target of our transaction. But once again we can use such statements as a basis for a moral act. In saying such things we usually are not just describing how we feel; we are acting hatefully or thankfully toward the person we address. When we act by speaking, we do not push, strike, hand something over, embrace, or feed, but we do have to take an initiative. We have to perform. What sort of "doing" do we carry out in verbal transactions, whether in statements of fact or statements of sentiment? We make a verbal construct, and in doing so we display something. We carry out an articulation, a registration or a report of what is the case. The articulation is our doing and we are responsible for it; we have to emerge out of silence for the display to take place. Moreover, this verbal doing of ours, with the display that it enacts, is a good or a bad for our addressee; we the speakers recognize it as good or bad for the addressee, and we take it, as such, as our good. It thus enters into a moral transaction. By our words we have humiliated, we have thanked, we have hated, we have encouraged. We have defined, redefined, or confirmed our human relationship with the person to whom we speak. How does this occur?

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Consider first the simple statement of fact. If I say, "The fender is dented again," I bring you out as the incompetent driver; if I say, "You have such large ears," I bring you out as ugly; and in both cases this bad of yours, this "being unfavorably displayed," is wanted by me as my good; therefore, my performance is a moral transaction. It is a reproach or an insult. But what I have done to you is not to have struck or pushed you, I have only displayed you. You realize that I have displayed you, since you recognize your being displayed as a bad for you, and you know that this harmful display, as such, has been done by me as my good. I wanted you to be thus shown and shown up. You have therefore been reprimanded or insulted, and not just informed, by my statement. You can build up a shield against my performance simply by not identifying the display as bad for you; you can maintain that it does not matter if I or anyone else notes that you have damaged the car or that you have big ears. Then there is no uptake because there is no bad on your part that I can take as my good, and my attempt at a moral transaction misfires. You make yourself impervious to my spoken moves. It is easier to defend ourselves against verbal assaults than against physical ones; I could hardly say that someone who strikes or pushes me is not really doing me any harm. But even in verbal transactions we are vulnerable at some point or other; we cannot shield ourselves against everything. A truly noxious person is one who can ferret out displays that his target cannot be indifferent to, those he could not allow to happen without resentment. Everyone can be gotten to in some way or other. And besides protecting ourselves against verbal assaults, we can also turn aside positive gestures. You can be indifferent to the displays that are intended to praise or thank you; you may not accept them as goods for you, and so there is no good for you that I can identify, as such, as my good. I am left stranded, embarrassed, and spurned. I made the verbal gesture but there was no uptake, so the words are hollow. They get reduced, perhaps contemptuously, to mere statements of fact ("Your driving us here saved us a lot of walking." "Yes, didn't it. Good weather we're having these days"). The moral transaction that should have happened did not; another transaction, perhaps of contempt or indifference, executed by the other person, has taken its place. Sometimes, of course, the same statement of fact that serves as the basis for a moral transaction can be made simply as an ordinary statement of fact, not as a reprimand or an act of gratitude. I might just observe, "The fender is dented." And sometimes it may not be very clear whether the speaker intends or does not intend a moral transaction in what he says. He may hint at a moral act but pull back if pressed ("Did you mean to offend me by what you said?" "No, of course not; I only made an observation"). Someone who is paranoid may take many innocent state-

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ments of fact as criticisms, reprimands, or objections; he will see moral conduct where none is intended. Sometimes a speaker may find himself drifting into moral transactions as he narrates facts, gradually beginning to reprimand or perhaps to encourage someone by what he says; but if it is to be a full moral act, it must become deliberate and not just inertial. And finally, we can sometimes display a fact not directly by a statement but by asking the embarrassing or the complimentary question ("What size shoes do you wear?" "How did that person get rescued?"); the display is made when the question is answered, but the point of the question is precisely to bring about the display and to execute thereby a moral transaction, an act of humiliation or of commendation. A purposeful question can thus serve as an indirect statement offact. All these phenomena indicate how a statement of fact can be very discreetly used as the carrier for a moral transaction. Its being involved in a moral transaction is not explicitly documented within the statement itself. There is no particle or verb form or word that shows that the statement ought to be taken as a moral act. All the speaker does grammatically and linguistically is to record a fact, and yet we all know he has done something more. The other linguistic form we are discussing, the statement of our sentiment, does not pick out a relevant fact in our situation; it states our moral disposition toward the person we address: "I hate you," "I love you," "I am grateful to you," "I pity you." Such statements express the moral appraisal we have of our situation and of the person to whom we speak. Sometimes, indeed, even such statements can be used as mere reports of fact ("I am your sworn enemy and have hated you for years and still hate you now"; "Do you really love me?" "Of course; I always have"), but to be mere statements of fact is not their normal use. A profession of sentiment is itself a confirmation of the sentiment and a commitment to it. If I say, "I detest you," I have not just informed the person of my attitude but have acted hatefully toward him; if I say, "I have confidence in you," I have not only reported but also encouraged; when someone asks, "Say that you love me," the petitioner wants a transaction and not just a report of fact. A moral move is being made or being requested, a relationship is being defined, redefined, or confirmed. It is not just that we are excited when we make such statements; rather a disclosure with a special moral effect and with its own pattern of presences and absences is taking place. The statement of sentiment both arises out of the sentiment and speaks about it. It can display hatred or love while also being an act of hatred or love. It displays to someone that from which it emerges and it therefore sanctions that from which it emerges. In such a statement we say, "This is how lam," and in taking the initiative actually to say and

Actions and Speech

show this, we confirm the way we are. The actuality of our speech both shows and ratifies the disposition from which it comes into being. As a moral transaction the statement of sentiment is less subtle and less discreet than the statement of fact. When we state facts we do not mention ourselves. We remain somewhat hidden and uncommitted as agents. To say, "You are beautiful, exciting, ravishing," is still not the same as saying, "I love you." To say, "You have delivered your friend to his enemies," is still not the same as saying, "I detest you." No matter how enthusiastic a statement of fact becomes, no matter how strongly it betrays a sentiment, it still does not cross over into expressing the sentiment and involving the speaker as professing that he is so disposed. The statement offact could always, in principle, have been stated by someone else because it presents itself as a report of what is the case; but "I love you" or "I hate you" or "I am grateful to you" is a statement that could only have been made by the one that says "I." Thus a coy hiding and showing goes on between the two forms of statement we are discussing; often we stay simply with the statement of relevant fact when we want to convey a sentiment but not yet commit ourselves, and sometimes it would be in bad form, a bad show, to come out with a blunt admission offeeling. How uncouth it is to say, "I am fed up," as compared with the discreet enumeration of a few appropriate facts. And once I do say, "I am grateful" or "I detest you," I cannot pull back into the shelter of saying that I was only observing a fact. I have made a more explicit move in my human relationships. When we state a fact, even when the statement is involved in a moral act, we need not mention ourselves; it is enough to speak about some relevant items in our situation ("It cost five hundred dollars to fix the car," "The children are now safe"). When we state our sentiments, we do mention ourselves as disposed in a certain way ("I am grateful," "I detest you"). We shift from displaying facts to displaying our moral assessment. But even when we mention ourselves as so disposed, we still do not mention ourselves as actually performing the moral act we execute while we speak. When we say, "I am grateful," we are not saying, "I thank you"; when we say, "I hate you," we are not saying, "I now perform an act of detestation toward you." We are not saying anything like, "I congratulate you" or "I apologize." Such moral performatives require that we mention ourselves not just as disposed, but as actually performing here and now in what we say. In performative utterances we articulate and mention the performance that we enact, and we also articulate and mention ourselves as enacting it. Thus (I) when we state facts we need not mention ourselves at all, even though we may be acting morally when we

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state the fact; (2) when we describe our sentiments we mention ourselves as disposed but not as acting now, even though we are acting, morally, while we speak; and (3) when we execute a performative we do mention ourselves as actually acting now. There is an illuminating progression through these three stages. We come out of hiding, linguistically, to different degrees when we move from one of these forms of speaking to another. And yet in all ofthem we can carry out moral transactions. A display of our sentiment, a statement such as "I admire you," can serve as the basis for a moral act. How does such a display serve as a good or a bad for the person we are addressing? It is not that our display somehow threatens harm or promises benefits in the future; the very display of how we assess the person is identifiable as a good or a bad for him, and it is therefore done, as such, as our good. To say, "I am grateful" is to exhibit my being gratefully disposed toward you. Moreover it is actually to exhibit it; it is not just that I am grateful that it is the good for you, it is that at this time and in these circumstances I actually display and profess this disposition, and this display and professing is good for you. This "being disclosed," in its actuality, is good for you; I as the speaker recognize it as your good and I want and execute it, as such, as my good. My speaking and my disclosing make up therefore a moral transaction. (c) When we state our sentiments, we also imply that the addressee is in fact as we take him to be. If I say, "I detest you," I imply that you are loathsome. However, my statement of sentiment does not explicitly state this implied fact. We should therefore introduce a third kind of verbal statement that can be used in a moral act, statements such as "You have been generous," "You are despicable," "You are pitiable." These are different from the statements of fact we discussed earlier; the utterances we are now examining employ moral categories while the statements of fact describe a situation in morally neutral terms. The statements we are now considering have an element of accusation or of commendation built into them. They are the correlatives of moral assessments, and we do take an explicit moral position when we use them. To say, "You are cowardly" is more decisive than to say, "So here you are miles away from the conflict." But even though such assessments do betray an evaluation, they still do not force us explicitly to mention ourselves and our dispositions. When I say, "You are loathsome," I still have not said, "I despise you." I may censure you, but I still have not taken the step of placing myself against you. I have stated what your character is like, but I have not yet displayed myself in my relationship to you. Thus the kind of utterance we are now describing is different from the statement of sentiment we discussed earlier. There is less of a self-engagement of the speaker in what is said. What I say I put forward as, in principle, capable of being stated by

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others: if you are said to be generous, you can be stated as being generous by anyone. But "I am grateful" can only be stated by me. (d) The next kind of statement to be described is the moral performative, sayings such as, "I apologize," "I congratulate you," "I encourage you," "I denounce you," "I disown you," "I do honor to you." Such statements do not only report facts, they do not just disclose sentiments, and they do not reveal moral features in other people; instead they are executions of moral moves. They are acts of apology, congratulation, encouragement, denunciation, and the like. Moreover, they not only are such acts, they also say they are. In contrast, a statement of sentiment may be a moral act, such as an act of hating, but it does not name itself as such. It merely names the disposition out of which it arises. But performatives both are and say they are moral transactions. We have introduced performatives earlier and have briefly contrasted them with statements of sentiment. Let us develop the contrast more fully. All utterances occur as discrete wholes. It may take time to pronounce a sentence, but "the sentence" is stated as a single unit. Statements of sentiment ("I respect you") occur as discrete wholes, but what they display is not discrete: they display a continuous, enduring disposition the speaker has toward someone. Moral performatives also occur as sudden, discrete wholes. But they also display something discrete. They display what is done when they are uttered. "I apologize" displays the moral act of apologizing that occurs there and then when the words are uttered, and in and by the words that are uttered. Moral performatives, as speech acts, do not abandon their semantic function; they continue to display. But they display their own moral enactment, and only their own moral enactment. Performatives shrink into themselves and say only what they do. Furthermore, when I say, "I apologize" or "I encourage you," the I that I mention is not the I as disposed in a certain way, as loving or hating, but the I that is actually performing at the moment precisely by saying, among other things, "I." There is a kind of compression into sheer moral actuality in a performative. The performative utterance displays only the transaction that occurs within itself, nothing more. (But it still does cast a shadow: it mentions the I who acts morally, but strictly speaking it does not mention, as such, the I who is using language; the agent is mentioned but not, formally, the speaker.) There is another difference between a statement of sentiment and a moral performative. A statement of sentiment ("I respect you") displays a permanent disposition; a moral performative ("I apologize") displays a change, and it displays the change while the change occurs. Before I said the words I had not apologized, and after I said them I have apologized; but I respected you before I said so and I continue to respect you after I

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have spoken. A performative catches the change, it documents the change itself; the statement of sentiment says how I am disposed all along. But the statement of sentiment itself, as a statement and a display, is a change: something moral occurs between us when I say, "I love you," even though I have loved you all along. Still, this change is not caught in what I say when I make my statement. I name my disposition and not my moral enactment, whereas in a performative I name my enactment. In working out these features ofperformatives and other statements as moral acts, we are not describing mere psychological phenomena, nor are we just analyzing the "concepts" of performances, speeches, and moral behavior. We are describing, analytically, how human conduct exists and how it is displayed. We are clarifying the being of moral transactions, the being of statements of sentiment, of performative utterances, and the like. We have attempted to bring out the dispositional and the potential, the actualized, the displayed, the concealed, the identified and the misidentified, the operative but unmentioned, the enacted. All these are dimensions of the being of human conduct and speech, and conduct and speech are where human being asserts and displays itself, where it shows what it is and what it can be. From one perspective, the distinctions that we have drawn-between, say, insulting someone by reporting a fact, by expressing our disposition, by stating a moral performative-may seem to be insignificant. If we are engaged as agents in a transaction and response, it does not matter much whether the insult is accomplished in one way or another; the important thing is that the action has been done. As agents we look through and not at the modes of presentation and we see primarily the thing presented, the enactment that is performed. Even if we are engaged in moral evaluation, if we wish to pass judgment on what has been done, the distinctions in the way the act is identified do not matter: the issue for us is that it is an act of courage or betrayal, not how it is presented and identified. But the enterprise we are now engaged in is not to accomplish a moral transaction, nor is it to pass judgment on what is done; our task is to display the forms in which moral action is achieved and displayed, and the way human being is achieved and displayed in them. We are occupied with the distinctions and forms that we use but do not usually dwell on; we look at what is usually looked through. (e) The final types of utterance we will discuss are commands and decisions: "You are to leave this job and take over the sales office," "I will go to New Orleans." Such sayings are different from performatives because they reach out, in what they achieve, beyond their own enactment. A performative only directly accomplishes itself: if I apologize, I simply execute the apology, but if I tell you to dig a ditch, I bring about more than

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my ordering. I change an item in our situation. A moral performative also brings about a change, but only in my moral relationship to someone: I have honored or censured someone, but I have not, or at least not yet, elevated or demoted him in rank; I may have thanked someone, but I have not said I will give him my watch. A command or a decision is similar to a statement of fact in that both treat of the arrangement of things in the situation: both deal with fenders, ditches, jobs, domiciles, or salaries; they display the elements in a situation and not the performance carried out in it. The difference between commands or decisions and reports of fact is that the latter display the arrangement that already subsists, while the former display the arrangement that will be or that should be. Of all the utterances we have examined, commands and decisions come closest to leaving the domain of speech and entering the domain of material performances, the acts of handing over, pushing, feeding, and striking. Commands and commitments say that a rearrangement is indeed to occur; they bring about a rearrangement at a distance and in some absence and through a display, in the way that words can bring it about. They are the anticipations of the new arrangement, but in a more imminent way than are the deliberations and rehearsals that precede a material performance. Commands and decisions come from a mind that is made up, not from one that is still testing. The action is determined; it is now only to be done. But we still must distinguish between the new arrangement that will come to pass and my saying of the command or the decision, my saying that displays the new arrangement. There is a presentational difference between them. My very stating of the command is the command, my stating of the commitment is the commitment, and as such it can be good or bad for someone and can be taken, as such, as my good or bad. The command and the commitment themselves can become a moral transaction between me and someone else. It is not just the new arrangement that is good or bad for the other person, it is also that it has been commanded or decided by me. There is a formality to the new arrangement that gives it a distinct moral tone. You may like the job you are going to undertake, but the fact that I ordered you to undertake it can introduce an element of benevolence and gratitude between us, and the moral transaction that establishes this relationship lies in my act of ordering you to take the job, not in the fact that you have obtained ajob that you like. The issue of commands and decisions raises the distinction between actions performed by someone as a person, as a moral agent, and actions performed by someone as holding a responsibility in an office. The oscillation between these two formalities calls for further distinctions. For ex-

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ample, an officer may order a soldier on a dangerous mission; but the officer may also recognize this danger to his subordinate as a bad for the subordinate, and may want and do this "bad," as such, as a good for himself, for the officer; in this case a moral transaction takes place. The officer is using his authority as a cover for a personal moral act, an act of revenge or cruelty. And the officer himself exists as a special sort of double agent, as someone acting both officially and personally, all in a single performance. Human beings can carry out moral transactions (a) by statements of relevant fact, (b) by statements of sentiment, (c) by applying moral categories to others, (d) by moral performatives, (e) by commands and commitments. If we were to inspect philosophically almost any conversation, we would find all these forms of utterance surfacing intermittently and weaving through one another. As moral acts they would usually be light and undramatic: a touch of praise, a request, a deft insult, a remembrance of an earlier injury, a small request or a small reciprocation, the question or the statement that shows respect, the promise, the expression of gratitude. Sometimes one of these utterances can become a truly major transaction: an insult or a statement of affection that marks a change in the entire relationship, something unforgettable and perhaps unforgivable. Usually such a major move is prepared by smaller ones that lead up to it: growing disenchantment, occasional conflicts, increasing benevolence, small generosities. And surrounding and penetrating these verbal moral acts are the neutral statements of fact and of understanding that provide both background and consistency. We do not jump from one moral act to another in what we say. The moral acts emerge out of the simple conversational exchanges of how we view things, of what has happened, of what we think will happen: the casual speech that is our way of having a world in common. And then there will be the moments when we are not sure whether a transaction has darted by or not. Was it a simple observation? Was a reprimand intended? A hint of affection? Sometimes the displays are just there for the sake of showing things, for sheer doxa; other times they are as good or as bad for you and wanted, as such, by the one who speaks them. This world in speech is not a network of mere ideas passed from one brain to another, but the way the world shows itself to us. This world in speech is also the same world in which we perform materially, in which we not only censure but also take steps to avenge, in which we not only say we reverence but also pay homage. The material performances themselves, the handing over and the striking, could not become identified as

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moral transactions, as generosity and as cruelty, except to agents who also exercise language. Only because our speech allows us to take a cognitive distance to things, to identify and name them as the same across presence and absence, and to articulate things and their aspects and relationships, can we also take categorial distances toward our own performances: we can begin to weigh whether this should be done in preference to that, whether this should be done in view of that, whether this good or bad of yours should be taken as my good or bad. The displays that speech permits are our doings; we have to think and speak to let them happen. But as displays they also permit, in tum, the articulations of action. They also permit our moral doings and our purposeful activities. Thus we can be responsible because we can speak, and we can speak because we can be responsible.

NOTES I. On the ideality of meaning, see Edmund Husserl, Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. D. Cairns (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1969), §2-§3, §56-§58, §73. On vagueness, see §16 and Appendix II. On both ideality and vagueness, see Husserl's "The Origin of Geometry," in The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. D. Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 353-78. 2. On the "ethical argument" in rhetoric, the argument that deals with the way the speaker presents his own character to the audience, see Aristotle, Rhetoric, 12, 1356al-13; II 1, 1377b21-1378a20.

5. Reciprocities between the Chosen and the Voluntary How Simple Voluntaries Intrude on Choices

the difference between the chosen and the simply voluntary. Beginning with that difference we have examined many forms of human conduct. Let us now turn back to our original distinction and show how the chosen and the simply voluntary can act on and react to one another, how they rub against one another in the course of human action. We will first examine what occurs when simple voluntaries intrude upon choices and shatter the order that the agents are trying to establish in them. Suppose several people are planning a strategy of choices toward a particular goal. Suppose further that two ofthe planners simply do not get along. Their hostility often breaks out during the planning sessions; some possible options may be dismissed simply because Jim does not like anything Jeff proposes. In such a case a "choice" may occur not really through substitution and concatenation and not in view of something that is desired through the choice, not through the reasoned triangulation by which true choices are established, but as something simply voluntary, something simply wanted or disliked by the persons involved. Jim simply will not have the option suggested by Jeff, or he will have the option suggested by Joanne simply because it is not the one that Jeff wants. The voluntary inserts itself into the deliberation. It is not even the case that choice in view of a purpose becomes replaced by choice as preference. Jim does not simply prefer this option to that one; what Jim wants is what Jeff does not want, or what Jim does not want is what Jeff wants. It is a matter of direct willing, not a matter of preference. Instead of being a WE HAVE ELABORATED

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choice orchestrated through purpose, substitution, and concatenation, it becomes something done in itself, and it becomes, further, a moral transaction. Jim wants this precisely as undesired by Jeff, or he is against that precisely as desired by Jeff. Jeff's bad is Jim's good, Jeff's good is his bad. We as interpreters of these events would not understand what has been done if we tried to triangulate the performance according to the three hermeneutic coordinates that are used when we interpret choices. We simply have to know that Jim hates Jeff and everything Jeff does. It is not even the case that Jim introduces an alternative plan (a substitution) or that he proposes a different overall purpose as a basis for deliberation; he simply wants or does not want this. It is not a disagreement about choices but a clash of voluntaries. To interpret what has occurred when the voluntary intrudes on choice, we must once again be aware of the character and the consequent likes and dislikes of those involved in the proceedings. And, of course, there always are those interesting intermediate cases in which it may not be clear whether choice or the simple moral voluntary is dominant. Jim may move everyone toward a choice that does seem to be appropriate and even necessary, toward what is obviously the right choice, but he may be delighting in the choice because it is disliked by Jeff and because it humiliates or demolishes him. It is also possible, of course, to use the requirements of a choice benevolently: to pursue a particular choice because what it involves is a good for someone, then to do it, as good for him, as our good. These are the covers we sometimes use in our moral transactions, the "obligations" we sometimes appeal to when we also want to redefine or confirm our moral relationships with others, and when we perform our moral transaction not as a consequence of or a purpose in our choices, but in making the choices themselves. There is always some moral ambiguity when we act this way, even if the choice is being done in a spirit of benevolence toward someone else; there is always the danger that the interest of the simple voluntary will distort the triangulation we work out to determine the choice in regard to its purpose, its possible substitutions, and its concatenations. We really are doing two things when we do the one, and there arises inevitably the question whether we are respecting the integrity of each of the two. We may, in fact, be quite honest, but the issue does arise. The simple voluntary that intrudes on the rationality of a choice may be a moral transaction; an act of hostility toward an enemy, an act of benevolence toward a friend. But there is also a simpler form of intrusion, one that involves neither a moral act nor another person toward whom we are acting. It is possible that the simple inclinations of our character just assert themselves. In the midst of deliberations about a procedure, a person who tends to be hysterical might move toward this or that

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"choice" simply on impulse. A cowardly person might shrink from one option simply because it involves some risk; a rash person might lunge toward another option simply because it is dangerous. The articulation of the choice gives way to the insistence of character. Such motions of the agents are provoked not by abstract values but by the articulations of the world that are being made. Some things begin to look vividly good or bad to the agents. In the deliberations a possible way of proceeding is being articulated in view of a purpose, in contrast to other options, in relation to other steps; but the surfacing of a particular possibility provokes an urgent desire on the part of our hysterical or cowardly or rash participant and breaks up the thoughtful proceeding. And finally, a deliberation can be broken up by someone who simply wants to show off, by harmless but tiresome vanity; the intruder does not want to act toward anyone or achieve a good or avoid a harm, but merely to accomplish a display of what he is and what he knows. Anyone who has to guide a deliberation will recognize these structural possibilities, these possibilities of overlap and interruption between the voluntary and the chosen; he knows that it is his task to be aware that they might occur and to bring the deliberation to a successful conclusion despite them, perhaps by exploiting them. We in our philosophical analysis are identifying these things in a way different from the way he, the director of deliberations, recognizes them; we think about them in their presentational necessity, as inevitable elements in what goes into making us human. We as philosophers cannot substitute for the director of deliberation, nor can our philosophical skills serve to replace his prudence; our task is not to enter into the deliberations but to contemplate him as well as the deliberation he governs, and to disclose both him and the discussion in their presentational necessities. A good way offormulating, philosophically, the intrusion of the simply voluntary into deliberation and choice is to say that in such cases "static" occurs between the chosen and the simply voluntary. The simply wanted brings the continuance of deliberation to a standstill, and it introduces noise into the articulations that our thinking has been trying to achieve. The hysterical remark arrests the argument, the hostile intervention obscures the thoughtful choice of this in view of that, of this in place of these, of this along with those. How the Chosen Can Become Simply Voluntary

We have described how the simply voluntary can break in on choices, how malice or rashness, say, can intrude on and replace thoughtful deliberation. It is also possible for something that is chosen to become wanted

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and done in itself and so to become a simple voluntary. 1 can come to enjoy the drive to the swimming pool so much that it becomes what 1 simply like to do, and at some point 1 may take the drive even when 1 am not going swimming. Someone who uses a computer in his business may find he enjoys the calculations and the programs themselves and may begin to entertain himself with them for their own sake, quite independently of the purpose they normally serve. A person may get to like Alka-Seltzer for its own sake and take a glass of it now and then even when he does not need it for any purpose. However, even when 1 come to enjoy a chosen performance very much, it remains a chosen performance so long as it is being done in view of something else. The relationship of the chosen and the purpose is independent of my pleasure. 1 may enjoy driving to and from work more than 1 enjoy my job, but 1 still drive to work and do not work to drive. An interesting oscillation occurs when the chosen becomes more and more prominent and threatens to displace that for which it is chosen. The clearest case is the one in which the chosen performance becomes detached from any purpose beyond itself: Ijust drive the car, Ijust play with the computer. But before this break is reached, there is a period in which the chosen remains subordinate but becomes, morally, more and more prominent, more and more inflated. The issue arises whether 1 am really choosing for the sake of my purpose or whether my purpose is turning into an occasion for what Ijust seem to be choosing, for what is becoming a simple voluntary itself. 1 may get to like driving so much, and begin to get bored with swimming, so that gradually 1 begin simply to tum in an appearance at swimming as a way, perhaps the only way, to indulge in driving. It may be the only way 1 can get the car. Or a young man may visit a nurse for treatment of an ailment, but may become more and more interested in the nurse and may use the ailment as a way of getting to see her. There are two reversals, therefore, that we must distinguish: in one case, that which was originally chosen in view of something becomes done simply in and for itself, and the purpose drops off entirely (I indulge in the use of the computer for its own sake and do not even pretend to be using it for any purpose); in the other case, the purpose remains around, but it becomes subordinated to the chosen means, which are what 1 really want: the "purpose" becomes merely an occasion to carry out that which is "chosen," which "really" is not a chosen mediation any longer (I say 1 want to swim in order to be able to drive the car; 1 talk about a headache in order to visit the nurse). The most interesting phenomenon in such changes is not the full reversal, in which the chosen becomes simply voluntary, in either of the two forms we have just distinguished. The most interesting moral phenome-

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non is the stage in between, when it is not clear, even to the agent, which action is being done in view of which, which action is the one desired for itself. The fact that we often cannot be sure does not destroy the distinction between the chosen and the purposed; the very uncertainty would not obtain if the distinction were not at work in the situation. Moreover, the oscillation between what is chosen and what we choose for can occur on a very large scale and not only in regard to the actions of an individual. One can ask the philosophical question, for example, whether civic society is brought about as something voluntary and good in itself or as something chosen in view of something else, such as the preservation of life and the increase of wealth. Different answers to this question would mark the difference between the political philosophies of Plato and Aristotle on one hand and Hobbes and Locke. on the other. One can ask whether a particular bureaucracy or administration performs its tasks in view of something beyond itself, or whether it subsists as something pursued in itself. How can we answer questions such as these? How does the relationship between the purpose and the chosen make itself known? We do not determine which is the chosen and which the purpose simply by asking the agents involved to tell us what they consider each to be; a self-serving administration will certainly say that its tasks are chosen for something beyond themselves, and it may even sincerely believe that it is doing something more than taking care of itself when in fact it is not. Stated intentions alone do not necessarily define the relationship. The only way the distinction and the relationship between the chosen and the wanted show up is the actual performance, in what is actually done, and they only show up to an intelligent observer who can look around and see what is happening. He has to be able to exercise moral identifications and distinctions and categorialities. There is no simple key to finding out what has priority, no criterion that substitutes for intelligent appraisal. And the relationship between the chosen and the wanted shows up not to a single perceptual act, but to repeated examinations, to a study of the details, to an extended familiarity. What is happening takes time to reveal itself. Sometimes we can tune into a situation with only a brief glance, but usually we have to see the pattern happening over and over again, and some of us may be faster and better at deciphering "what is going on" than others are. The situation itself may be ambiguous and may be taking shape only gradually; John visits the nurse for treatment of his headache, then he talks about the headache to arrange a visit to the nurse, then the whole adventure falls apart and he just takes some aspirin or forgets he ever had a headache. The hermeneutic, rational triangulation that we use in understanding something as chosen may have to give way as we begin to interpret the same performance as not really chosen but rather just

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willed-it would make no sense to visit the infirmary that often if John were going there just for his headaches-and we must tum away from rational triangulation and tum toward our decipherment of the things that can be simply desired by the human heart. This subtle back-and-forth, this suggestion and withdrawal, this testing, conquest, or abandonment of what we want or what we dislike among all the things that we do, this surfacing and disappearance of desire within the systematic, established patterns of choice, substitution, and sequence, all these nuances of human insistence take place within the limits set by the chosen and the voluntary. There is and there always will be much ambiguity in all this, but there are clear, decisive cases as well. And the ambiguity is hardly something we would wish to remove; without it we could never tease, try, or start anything. Moral Actions Must Be Done for Themselves When something that was chosen becomes voluntary in itself, when the use of my computer is done for its own sake and not in view of something else, what had served as the purpose simply drops away. The categoriality of the chosen and that in view of which it is chosen disappear; there is only the simply voluntary with its direct identifications. But when a reversal takes place, when a purpose remains but only as an occasion to carry out the "choices" that lead to it, when I swim just so that I can drive the car, which is what I really want, a strange moral phenomenon occurs. It is not the case that the original purpose becomes a means and the means becomes a purpose: it is not the case that a simple reversal takes place. Rather, we have to practice a kind of deceit to bring the change about; we have to pretend to want to go swimming when we use this strategy to get the car. We therefore really are not choosing to swim in view of driving the car; we are taking advantage of a complex situation in which the only way we can use the car is to seem to want to use it in order to go swimming. What we use as a means to get the car is not swimming, but seeming to want to swim, or seeming to swim willingly and for its own sake. In carrying out this duplicity we must in fact swim, but although we present the swimming as done for itself-otherwise the ruse would not work-it is not what we pretend it to be. The categoriality of our moral understanding of what we are doing, the categoriality of our recognitions, becomes more complicated. When the swimming becomes presented as voluntary even though it is not done for itself, it nevertheless remains swimming. Its presentational form is changed, but it remains itself as a performance despite our insincerity. But such insincerity has a different effect when we tum from the

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rather neutral activity of swimming to something like friendship. Suppose Steve and Sam have been friends; the exercise of friendship between them is simply voluntary and wanted for its own sake. But at a certain point Sam realizes that the reason Steve cultivated his friendship was to get some financial benefit from it or to get some preferment in the company in which they work. The friendship turns out to have been something chosen in view of a purpose beyond itself. In such a case we do not say that the same friendship was once simply voluntary and is now something chosen; the friendship never really was voluntary in itself, and therefore it never really was friendship, no matter that Sam thought it was. Or if it really was a friendship for a while and then began to be used for certain purposes, it ceases to be friendship in itself. It shatters as friendship. Swimming can remain swimming when it is shifted into being a pretense chosen for something else, for getting to drive the car, but friendship cannot withstand such a reversal. At best it can become a friendship of utility, but that is not the sort offriendship it was originally presented as being. I An act of friendship is the kind of thing that can subsist only when it is done for itself, either as a simple voluntary or as a voluntary in view of which other acts are performed. Swimming can subsist as swimming whether it is done for itself or whether it is chosen in view of something else. Even if we pretend to do it for itself when this is not the case, it remains swimming, but friendship does not remain friendship when it becomes chosen in view of something other. We cannot therefore turn anything we wish into a means for something else. We do not have this sort of dominion over the things we deal with and the things we are engaged in. Some things, such as friendship, honor, loyalty, aesthetic appreciation, and religious observance, either dissolve when we do them for the sake of something beyond themselves, or they turn into something else, or-most commonly-they turn into a peculiar kind of simulacrum of themselves. Whether we like it or not, we dissimulate when we perform such things not for themselves but for something beyond themselves. It is not our claims or our wishes that make such things genuine or dissimulated; it is whether or not we are in fact doing them for themselves or for something else. Our protestations do not change anything; they may even be part of the deceit. We do not decree that there will be some things that can subsist only when they are done in themselves. They are not the result of an agreement. There simply are such things. The essential part in becoming human is to acquire a sense for such things, to be able to discriminate them when they surface as issues in our lives. We acquire such a sense only by actually becoming involved in such things during the course of our up-

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bringing and in our own actions. If we have a sense of what friendship is, we know that this action should not be done for that or for anything, that this-a gesture of friendship-would become deceptive and unfaithful to itself if it were done for the sake of something beyond itself. Someone who is given a position of great importance and power, such as the directorship of an intelligence service or a high military command during a war, could exploit this position as a way to assume political control, but if he has civic virtue he will not do so. He will carry out his task as it should be carried out and in doing so he will exercise loyalty and civic responsibility, which can exist only as wanted and done for their own sake; he will not simply pretend to be patriotic. It is not only checks and balances that prevent tyranny; there also has to be an element of civic virtue in people who can be appointed to important offices. On the level of family life, parental kindness can be answered with filial piety, or it can be exploited as an opportunity, say, to drain money from the parents; someone who either is wicked or who lacks moral sense-a moral imbecile, so to speak-will abuse parental concern, will use it for something beyond itself instead of recognizing it and responding to it on its own terms. And sometimes there are situations that are opposite to those we have described. Instead of pretending to be good but really exploiting a situation, someone might be forced to pretend to be, say, cowardly or a traitor because this may be the only way he can help those who depend on him. Here the pretense is not at recognizing the good in itself while actually exploiting it, as the incipient tyrant or the ingrate does; instead, one pretends to exploit the situation while actually preserving the good. Admiral William Canaris was the head of Hitler's military intelligence service, and late in the war he was killed by the Nazis. Those who defend his memory claim that he actually worked against Hitler, but obviously he could never assert that he did. If their claims are true, Canaris pretended to work with the tyrant while in fact doing what could be done out of civic virtue, even at the cost of his own reputation. Since we are not engaged in writing history, it is not our task to determine whether Canaris was heroic or not; our task is to display the moral dimensions within which heroism and cowardice, civic virtue and tyranny, and genuine virtue and pretense-as well as the many states that fall between such extremes-are possible, the dimensions within which Canaris is what he is as a moral agent. The performances that must be done for themselves, the performances that shatter when done for an ulterior purpose, are the transactions that display specifically what we are as human beings. In carrying them out, we are at work as human beings. We come to appreciate what human nature is, not by a merely cognitive analysis of the definition of human

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being, but by experiencing human being in its actuality, when it does excellently what it is capable of doing. Human nature at work in these ways becomes normative for human transactions; but it becomes normative in and by achieving its actuality, when human agents act well and show what can be done. This showing takes place in the thick of things, not in cognitive abstraction, but since it is made up of transactions that issue from an appraisal of a situation, it is also thoughtful; it is an exhibition of intelligence. It is thoughtful in the concreteness of this situation in which it occurs; it can be repeated, as a showing, in a narration or in a remembrance of the performance and its setting; and it can be compared with other performances and generalized into a maxim or a guide for conduct. It has to become somewhat idealized, either in its remembrance or its generalization, if it is to help in other situations, in other thickets of performance. But the initial showing and the later application are always in the actuality of performance, with human nature at work, and not with words and argumentation. Laws and customs also derive from such expressions of human nature and are supposed to help us appreciate the good in such things as honesty, filial and parental loyalty, respect for what is another's, fidelity to promises, and the like, but because situations change, the human good does not always coincide with the legal good, and so the performances we are now discussing are said to be good by nature and not simply by law or custom. One of the most humiliating criticisms one can make of another person is to accuse him of exploiting a human good that should be respected in itself and should not be chosen in view of something else. Such a criticism is more severe than to accuse someone of being simply vicious. If! accuse someone of open vice, my criticism is not really humiliating; the perpetrator knows he wants just money or power and he goes out to get it even though, in this situation, he acts against the nature of his relationships with others. He hides nothing from himself or from others. The vicious man is willing to do directly what is bad. But the one who pretends to friendship or piety while really using them for ulterior purposes is more vulnerable. Here the critic has a target and he cuts deeply: he accuses the agent of something like moral obtuseness, of being so obtuse morally that he does not see that the friendship or piety he proclaims is blighted by what he does. The words and actions of the agent do not cohere. And the agent is accused of imbecility not in regard to some special science or some special skill but in regard to being human. There is no insult greater than to say someone is inept at being human. We could call this "blindness to human values" or "having no sense of the good," but what we are talking about is more contemptible than these rather aesthetic phrases would suggest. It is the inability to see that some things, these things, are

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to be reverenced and not used, to be done for themselves and not chosen in view of something else. What does "growing up" mean, if it does not mean becoming able to see things such as these? Thus the inability to exercise the distinction between the simply voluntary and the chosen, in particular and in important cases, is moral ugliness. The distinction between the simply voluntary and the chosen is not merely a matter of philosophical reflection. To accuse someone else of being inept and ugly in this way, of being unable to discriminate between what he should want in itself and what he can choose in view of a purpose, is to imply that the accuser does appraise the situation correctly himself, that he sees the insufficiency of the agent's moral sense, and that he discloses this inadequacy of the agent to the agent himself. This sort of moral criticism is itself an important moral phenomenon and the fact that it can occur-its moral and ontological possibility-is part of the possibility of human action generally. We do not act in the secrecy of our hearts. What we do is visible as an action to ourselves and to others, and what may be obscure to the agent can be clear to his critic. Each of these perspectives, that of the agent and that of the critic, is necessary in bringing out the identity of an action. We should also mention that in making these remarks we are not engaged in a moral reprimand. We are showing how men act and how they respond to actions when they use the special form of discourse called praise and blame, but we ourselves are not praising or blaming anything. We are attempting to tease out the presentational forms involved in the being and the presencing of moral behavior. One of the forms that germinates in moral action and that makes both moral success and failure possible is the difference between the chosen and that which is done for itself. In carrying out our description of moral and practical presencing, we have extensively discussed acts that violate goods that ought to be desired and pursued in themselves, acts that attempt to exploit such goods as chosen in view of something beyond them. This emphasis on the wicked and ugly is caused by the fact that studying the negative of an object of analysis often brings out the object itself more vividly than does simply studying the object's own positive features. Sickness shows what health is, and criminal acts shed light on what the law is. But while conceding the importance of the negative, we must also remember that there are performances that bring out positively the nature of the thing or the relationship they activate. There are performances of parental concern and filial piety, of friendship, of courage and loyalty, in which the agents do achieve something for its own sake and not in view of something beyond itself. Only because such good actions can occur is it possible for their opposite, the exploitation of a relationship or a good, to happen.

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Why Moral Actions Must Be Done for Themselves

We have asserted, and have attempted to argue, that there are human actions that ought to be pursued in themselves, actions that spoil when chosen in view of something else. But can we go on to show why some actions are of this sort? Can we clarify, structurally, what such actions are? Why is it, for example, that swimming can remain itself when it is chosen in view of something else, such as winning a prize, while acts of friendship, acts of honor, loyalty, piety, and the like, as well as activities such as aesthetic enjoyment, the exercise of thinking, and philosophy, cannot? Why can such activities exist only when they are done for their own sake? (A)

Swimming is a material performance. For it to become a moral transaction, it has to become recognized as a good for someone and done and willed precisely as such, as a good for someone. But it does not have to be elevated into being a moral transaction; it can be done simply as an enjoyable bodily exercise. But if it is assumed into a moral transaction, the only things added to it are the recognitional or presentational forms. No new material performances must be added to what is already there: we do not begin to swim faster, better, or differently. Likewise, if swimming were to become chosen in view of something beyond itself, the only thing to be added to it would be a categoriality, a set of presentational relationships: it would now be done in view of something else. No new material dimensions need be introduced. But a moral transaction already has a recognitional form built into it. An act of friendship is an act in which something is done precisely as being a good for another, for the friend. This categoriality is contradicted if we introduce the categoriality of choice, if we choose this performance in view of some other good. 2 For example, suppose the act in question is that Steve does Sam's job for him when Sam is ill. It appears that Steve does this precisely as being a good for Sam. But then we find that he really did it in view of getting a promotion. It was chosen in view of an ulterior good; it was penetrated by the good for which it was done, and so it could not have been done as a good for Sam. The one categoriality, the one formality, excludes, as such, the other. Steve only seemed to do it as an act of friendship, so it really was not an act of friendship. Even if Steve is not being selfish when he only seems to be acting as a friend-Steve helps Sam not for his, Steve's, own advantage, but in view of fulfilling the department's weekly quota of work-the "act of friendship" still gets depleted or spoiled and is not the kind of moral transaction it seemed to

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be. A beneficent moral transaction can be done only as a direct voluntary, not as chosen for something. Of course, there are many intermediate cases that fall between sheer voluntary benevolence and sheer utility. Steve may have been considering both his advancement and Sam's needs when he did hisjob for him; Steve might have been able to seek promotion in some other way, he may not have needed to help Sam. The purpose he had in mind could have been served by many options, each capable of substituting for the other. He chose this option because he also wanted to help Sam. His action then has elements of both an act of benevolence and an act of self-interest; both categorialities, that of a direct moral transaction and that of choosing in view of a purpose, are engaged to some degree and do not cancel each other. Most human actions are intermediate cases of this sort. But even in this case, the element of benevolence has to be done as a simple voluntary; Sam is grateful to Steve precisely to the extent that Steve wanted to do what he did for Sam. That nucleus of well-wishing, that element of simply wanting to do, as such, what is good for the other, has to be there if there is to be even an element of moral transaction in what we perform. But what are we to say about malevolent performances? Is it also true that there cannot be an act of cruelty or revenge unless it is willed in itself, as a simple voluntary? Certainly the pure cases of cruelty, revenge, treason, hatred, and the like, demand that the act be done in and for itself: if I turn you over to your enemies simply because I detest you, I am more purely a betrayer than if I do so for the money it gets me. However, the interesting case, the one in which the malevolent transaction differs from the beneficent, is the case in which I inflict harm on you "with no hard feelings," so to speak, without any simple voluntariness; suppose I turn you over to your enemies without any hostility toward you at all, simply for the money I get from doing so. It is a purely utilitarian act, there is no element of ill-wishing, there is "nothing personal" in it, and yet you certainly can resent what I did (whereas you would not be grateful to me for an act that helped you but with absolutely no well-wishing on my part, an act that I did only for my own advantage). How is it that a harmful performance can still be a moral transaction even when it is done, apparently, without any element of the simple voluntary? What occurs in such a case is that some harm, something bad, is done to you. This "bad" is done by me in view of some purpose that serves my interests. There are two faces to the act: the act is bad for you and yet good for me, good not directly but in view of something I want. I recognize that the very thing that is good for me is, intrinsically, bad for you (I get money precisely by your being delivered to your enemies); it is not merely an accidental connection. Your bad does therefore become my good; I may wish it were not so, but, in fact, what I am initiating is what is

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bad for you. The material performance pulls the two categorialities, the two formalities, together; I would have liked to let only one of the formalities, that which serves my purpose, be the determining factor, but that categoriality, that presentational form, has fastened itself onto something that is, essentially, a bad for you, and I recognize it as a bad for you. So, whether I like it or not, I am doing what is bad for you when I turn you in for the money, and I am doing it as good for me. I get trapped into a moral transaction whether I want it or not, and, always on the presumption that I know what I am doing, on the presumption that ignorance does not excuse me, I get trapped, by the nature of the things in my situation, into a simple voluntary, into doing something directly toward someone else. The reason for this is that our acts do intersect with the goods and bads of other people, and, whether we want to or not, we act toward them when we pursue our purposes, so long as we are aware of what our actions are doing to them. I may decide to buy something but I can buy it only by cheating Michael out of some money, so I cheat him not because I hate him but because of what I want. What I do is in fact a bad for him, even though I do not want it as a bad for him; I want it only because it has become a good for me. The presence of other agents, of other recognizers of the good and bad as such, is insistent. I cannot dismiss their presence and cannot treat them and theirs merely in view of my purposes. Simply by being what they are, they, with their goods and bads, resist becoming merely things that can be chosen in view of purposes. The case in which we do some harm to others as a means toward some purpose of our own must be distinguished from the case in which some harm to others issues from some action that we think we must perform. This second case has been discussed in moral theory under the rubric of the principle of double effect. Because things and persons are so implicated with one another, there will be cases in which something we can and perhaps should do will issue in something bad for others: we act to defend ourselves and injure not only our attacker but also someone standing near him (a hostage, perhaps); a doctor acts to cure an illness and brings about, as an effect, some other bodily disability in the patient, a harmful concomitant aspect or "side effect." The injury to the innocent person and the infliction of bodily harm are not wanted for themselves (they are not simple voluntaries), but neither are they chosen as means toward some purpose of the agent. They follow from or occur along with what we do. They in no way become goods for us, not even as means toward some other good. Strictly speaking, we do not do them; we do the other action, the legitimate or the obligatory action (we defend ourselves or cure the disease), but these other things, the harmful things, are so

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interwoven with what we do that they also happen, and they happen because of our doing what we do. It is not a moral evasion to appeal to the principle of double effect. It is not a surreptitious way of inflicting harm on others while pretending to preserve our own innocence. There are difficult situations in which something important needs to be done, but in which other undesirable and harmful things will also occur when it is done. The ethical articulation of the principle of double effect is an attempt to provide guidelines for handling such cases. Thus, in deciding whether we should act when our action will have undesirable and harmful aspects, we are told that we must weigh both the good our action achieves and the bad that is interwoven with it: the harm must be proportionate to the good achieved. We also must not want to do the harmful thing as such. And finally, the harmful aspect must not in fact be a means toward achieving the good we wish to accomplish. If it were a means, it would become good for us; it would share in the desirability of the purpose we are seeking. It would not be something we merely tolerate, something that occurs because of the implications of things: it would issue from our assessment and therefore would be our own action, our own responsibility. Thus we have distinguished between actions that are done as simple voluntaries, actions that are done as means toward a purpose, and harm that is not intended as such but merely implicated in what we do when we perform an action. (B)

When I do some harm to you not out of malevolence but merely to serve my own purposes, I still am the originator of what happens to you. I am responsible for the damage you suffer; your bad issues from my assessment. This form of responsibility deserves further clarification. We will examine it by comparing it with a case in which harm is inflicted but no moral transaction takes place. Consider two soldiers, Ulysses and Robert, in opposing armies at war. Ulysses wants to inflict harm on Robert (and vice versa), so in a sense Robert's bad would be Ulysses's good. But it would not be Robert's bad specifically as belonging to Robert that Ulysses wants; hence if Ulysses kills, wounds, or captures Robert, he has not acted toward Robert in a moral transaction. And Robert does not bear resentment toward Ulysses as an agent. If both Robert and Ulysses survive the war, they might well meet later on as veterans, they might attend reunions together, and they might even go over the battles in which they tried to kill each other. But suppose that a man tries to murder another man and that his plot fails; these two would certainly not meet

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later on to recall "the good old days" and relive the unsuccessful attempt at murder. In this case, the relationship between the plotter and his intended victim has been redefined by what was attempted. But in the case of the opposing soldiers, the human relationship has not been redefined, even though materially "the same thing" was being done by the soldiers and by the man who plotted to kill another man. There is a moral transaction in one case but not in the other, because in one case the particular bad of this individual is, as such, made to be the good of another individual, whereas in the other case this individualized form of moral recognition does not take place. If Ulysses the soldier tries to harm Robert the soldier, Ulysses is really not trying to harm Robert. Ulysses wants that soldier eliminated, he does not want Robert eliminated (even though that soldier is Robert). He attacks Robert as an enemy soldier, not Robert as Robert. The form of moral identification needed to make the performance a moral transaction is not present, and Robert's attitude toward Ulysses in the postwar period reflects this. But why is it the case that Ulysses is not trying to harm Robert, even though materially it seems that he is doing so? The reason is that the situation in which Robert is identified as to be killed, wounded, or captured is not established by Ulysses. The situation in which they are made to be opposed in conflict is not the responsibility of either Robert or Ulysses; it does not stem from their assessments. An immediate skirmish may be the responsibility of Ulysses or Robert, if they are the officers on the scene, but the skirmish does not establish their being enemies. It was another assessment, made by governments, that identified opposing military personnel as subject to hostile action. In contrast, a murderer establishes a situation by his assessment; the transaction is his own by virtue of both his moral appraisal and his initiating the process. He identifies his target as the target, and the target resents what has been done to him. But Ulysses, although he initiates the action of hurting Robert, did not establish the original moral categoriality under which Robert is identified as to be hurt, and so Robert and Ulysses are not newly related to one another, as agents, by this performance. l Let us now tum back to the case in which I harm you not out of hatred or malice, but for some advantage of my own: I betray you for the money I get out of it. Even though there is "nothing personal" about what I do, I still am the one who establishes the situation in which you become identified as to be harmed. I originally target you. My assessment is the thoughtful beginning of this transaction; I am not working in an appraisal established by others and I am not conscripted to capture you. Therefore I act toward you, and I own what I have done. My appraisal was centered on my financial gain as the purpose that surfaces for me, but you do enter into the picture and you are a target of my action, whether I like it or not.

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The moral relationship between us is defined or redefined by what I have done; it all begins with me and I determine how we are to be related from then on: as betrayer and betrayed. The beginning of my moral transaction is my assessment. (C)

Ulysses and Robert, as soldiers, are not defined in their human relationship toward one another by the fact that each tries materially to harm the other. The same is true when two people do something good to each other, but do so under the guidance of the law. If several cars stop at a red traffic light and allow me to cross the street, I am not personally grateful to each of the drivers. They have done something good for me, but they did not do it for me, any more than Ulysses tried to hurt Robert. The drivers did not establish the situation in which I was allowed to cross the street: they were acting under the assessment established in the law and were following the thoughtfulness originated by someone else. However, we do feel a kind of gratitude toward those who obey the law. They are not acting toward you or me individually, but they are acting for a common good and they do exercise a kind of benevolence and friendship toward those with whom they live, including you and me. People do not obey the law only out of self-interest, only because they want to avoid penalties or because they think that if they break the law others will do so also and the disorder will cause them great harm; if selfinterest were the only reason for acting according to the law, then the good actions of other citizens toward me-their waiting while I cross the street-would be only a chosen performance, not a moral voluntary, and it would be done only for their own advantage. But there is more to a good citizen than that. He does what is right not out of calculation but to keep the common life functioning well, and while I, as the "target" of such civic benevolence, may not be personally grateful to him for what he does, I am grateful as a citizen that I am with people like him. We may not be personal friends, but we are civic friends and share the form offriendship Aristotle called unanimity or concord: Analogously, Ulysses and Robert may not be personal enemies, but while the war is going on they remain antagonists and share in the kind of enmity that is the opposite to concord. We have distinguished four kinds of moral exchange: (1) personal, direct moral transactions: I achieve your good or bad as such as my good or bad; (2) doing something that is good or bad for you as a means toward some other purpose of mine; (3) doing something from which a secondary, unintended effect also follows, or with which an evil is implicated although not chosen as such, an evil done and known to be done as part of

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what we do: the case of "double effect"; (4) doing something good or bad for you, but doing it within a situation set by others and under the guidance of laws that conscript or order me to act. We now can examine a final type of action, (5) doing something good or bad for you out of culpable ignorance or negligence. This occurs when, say, someone becomes intoxicated and drives a car, or when someone is simply careless in doing what he does. This fifth case must be examined if we are to confirm our description of moral transactions. In drunkenness or negligence a harm can be culpably inflicted on someone and the one so injured can bear resentment toward the one who did it, but clearly the "agent" did not in any way want to take the bad of another as his own good. He did not want to injure the person he hit while he was driving carelessly and he will profess his sorrow at what happened. How can such an act be a moral performance? If I behave negligently, I do not articulate a situation in which you are identified as the target of my transaction, but I do establish a situation in which my material behavior becomes random. I continue to move through the world, but in negligence I let my movements become uncontrolled. I drive my car recklessly, I throw money away, I thoughtlessly sign a contract, I carry out my medical practice carelessly. I do not identify and articulate such actions as they should be identified and articulated, but I do execute them materially. I keep creasing the world. The material performance is there but with an inadequate categorial form. To be negligent is precisely to deprive the material performance of the full categoriality it demands. Moreover, I deliberately engage such negligence and therefore what is done is "mine," but mine at one step removed: I injure you not hatefully but carelessly, and therefore the injury was done by me, though not in the way something done out of hatred would be mine and done by me. Furthermore, a negligent action is different from something done purely by accident. If your car and mine accidentally collide, I have not struck you at all, not as a moral transaction, nor have you struck me. (Neither direction ofthe transaction has priority over the other in the case of an accident, but there is a dominant direction in the case of deliberate or negligent performance.) But in my negligence I have indeed injured you (or anyone in your position) because I established the sitl!ation in which my random movements became a threat to someone like you. In acting negligently, I behave as though others were not present to be injured: just as in the case in which I take something harmful for another as a means for a purpose that suits my own interest, so in negligence I disregard the presence of others who recognize goods and bads as such and can be agents or patients in a moral act. Because I disregarded you in this way and subsequently did you some harm, our human relationship becomes

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redefined by what I have done, but not in the way it would have been redefined had I acted out of hatred or vengeance. I am the careless driver who broke your arm, not the enemy who injured you in revenge for what you did earlier. The emphasis in negligence is on the material harm that I did-breaking your arm-rather than on the formal categoriality of the act and the relationship. The five possibilities of interaction-directly targeting someone, using others as means toward some purpose, tolerating a secondary effect or a concomitant harmful aspect in what we do, acting under laws or conscription, acting negligently-are differentiated by changes in the moral categoriality that informs the material performance. The material performance, the handing over, the striking, feeding, or the pushing, may be the same, but it defines you and me differently because of the way it is identified and articulated. The thoughtful dimension remains the defining form in a moral act, the element that makes the act to be my own. (D)

At the beginning of this chapter, when we listed the kinds of actions that must be done in and for themselves, we mentioned moral acts such as acts of honesty, loyalty, and friendship. But we also mentioned aesthetic enjoyment, thinking, and philosophy. These activities are not moral transactions, but they also have a kind of internal goodness that makes them desirable and doable for themselves. They are exercises of reason, of thoughtfulness; as such they generate an internal magnetic field that prevents their being lined up according to forces generated by some other good. The exercise of thoughtfulness has something in it that is to be done in itself and not in view of something else. But do people not write poems in order to celebrate an event? Is that not using a poem in view of something beyond itself? Such celebration is not a purpose beyond the being of the poem, and it is not other to the being of the poem. The thoughtfulness in the poem is precisely the display of what is to be commemorated. The display is part of the celebration, not something chosen in view of it. But do people not write poems and books and paint pictures for the sake of applause and money? The poem, book, or picture may be bought and sold, but the thoughtfulness in it is not. The actual exercise of thinking is not-the commodity; it never really gets its "owner" any external reward that is commensurate to it; in fact, large public and monetary rewards are often given to things that possess little thoughtfulness. But do not scientists exercise their thinking in order to solve practical problems, in medicine, in the economy, in providing heat, transportation, and food, in improving transportation and safety? Are such exercises of reason not done in view of tasks set outside the exercise

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of reason itself? Such technological reasoning does obey a law outside itself, but it is precisely not the kind of thoughtfulness we are examining now. What we are discussing is the simple display of how things are and how they have to be. Even if such a display is used for a purpose, there is something in it that deserves to be known in itself. Even very pragmatic researchers dwell occasionally on what they discover as simply good to know for its own sake. If a researcher totally loses this thoughtful element, even his practical investigation is likely to dry up. And whereas he may be paid for the results of his researches, and whereas his research may have an impact on health, agriculture, transportation, or warfare, the thoughtful element in his study is good and desired for its own sake. It is enjoyed in itself. If I use "friendship" for my own profit, it ceases to be friendship; it is only a simulacrum. If I try to use "thoughtfulness" for some profit, it also ceases to be thoughtfulness, but the pretense at thoughtfulness is different from the pretense at a moral transaction. In the simple exercise of thinking, I do not carry out a material performance that can serve as the bodily basis for the simulacrum: I am not doing someone else's job, I am not feeding or carrying someone as a basis for my hypocrisy. I am only speaking, writing, painting, or displaying in some way. I may be doing so falsely, but my falsity is different from the pretense in a moral transaction. I am pretending to contemplate, to be thoughtful for its own sake, when I am really not being thoughtful. How does this pretense occur? How can I possibly just pretend to be truthful? One cannot successfully pretend at thoughtfulness before someone who is himself thoughtful: the dissimulation is immediately obvious. The pressure put on the display by the purpose in view of which it is done is immediately visible. There is no bodily performance to insert an ambiguity of interpretation ("Is he providing food out of generosity or out of pride?"). There is just the thoughtfulness and its display. If the display is done for an ulterior purpose, this new field of force makes itselffelt on the display; what is displayed, and the precision with which it is displayed, are determined by the requirements of the new purpose and not simply by what is being displayed. The clarity of the display is warped in view of the purpose and not achieved in view of the thing itself. The thing does not appear simply on its own. But this interference from the purpose will not be discerned by someone who is himself not thoughtful and not able to appreciate the dissimulation at a display. An audience of such persons will take trendy writing as literature, propagandistic painting as art, and a pretentious speaker as a philosopher ("the nonthinking man's thinking man"). The spoilage of thoughtfulness is different from that in moral transactions. In moral hypocrisy, there is an action that is used differently from the way it is made to appear: the feeding is not kindness but self-

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interest. There is something there that gets interpreted. But in pretended thinking, there just is no thoughtfulness; there is only something that looks like it to the thoughtless, but the thoughtless do not think either, so there really is nothing at all. There is a failure to be at all; there is only a show. Furthermore, this special kind of spoilage in thinking is what makes moral transactions to be failures in their own kind. What makes a material performance into a human act is precisely the element of reasonableness that goes into it: the achievement of an identification of a performance as good for another and done as such as the agent's own good. This moral recognition is practical, not theoretical, intelligence, but it is an act of thinking. It is when this act of thinking is pretended but not genuinely done that we have a simulacrum of a moral transaction. The categoriality of a moral transaction is replaced by the categoriality of a choice in view of the agent's own purposes; what is supposed to be achieved and displayed as done for its own sake is not being done. A genuine moral transaction is an act of thoughtfulness because in it the agent recognizes, by what is done and in the identifications added to what is done, the being of the person who is the target of the transaction: I recognize you as having been generous to me, as a human being in need of food, as having insulted me. It is the element of thoughtfulness that makes the material performance, the feeding or the striking, into a moral transaction. Hence the violations of specifically human goods, the offenses against what is good by nature, are also violations of the reasonableness we must exercise if we are to be human. The cases in which we harm others not out of direct malice but out of our own self-interest-I betray you for money, not out of hatred; a spouse is unfaithful out of intemperance, not revenge-also stem from failures in thoughtfulness: in such cases we wish the other were not there to be injured; we wish the world were such that we could have what we want without bringing harm to another. But in fact, the world is not like that, and in this situation someone else is there and will be hurt and we are the ones who hurt him. We cannot wish away the "bad for another" that we are initiating as our good. We want to overlook the presence of the other, but we do so only by being false and morally thoughtless. We fail to recognize things as they are. The virtue of justice is not only a recognition of the particular goods that we should grant to others and the bads that we should avoid infticting on them; it is also a recognition of the very presence of other agents in the world in which we act. And laws are a public thoughtfulness that coerces us into recognizing the presence of others and the goods that are due to them; it is a thoughtfulness that sometimes must do our moral thinking for us, since there are occasions when we are unable to carry it out ourselves. Finally, the cases in which we must

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tolerate a harmful aspect implicated in what we do-the cases of "double effect"-are not lapses in thoughtfulness. On the contrary, they are a recognition that because this particular good is so important and must be accomplished, that harmful aspect or consequence must be accepted and cannot be avoided. Thus, even though contemplative reasonableness is "beyond" moral transactions, moral transactions are established for what they are by sharing in reasonableness. The core of moral virtue is a kind of truth. And while dissimulation in simple thoughtfulness is not as such a moral evil, it can be an evil of its own, one perhaps more insidious than moral wickedness and hypocrisy.

Happiness and the Good

We have emphasized that human activities such as acts of friendship, honesty, generosity, and thoughtfulness can subsist only when done for themselves. But is there not a sense in which even such actions and activities are performed in view of something beyond themselves? Are they not done in view of human happiness? Aristotle admits that we want virtues, honor, and understanding for themselves, but he adds that we also want such things for the sake of happiness, and happiness seems to come from them and through them. Does this not imply that these goods in themselves are chosen in view of happiness? And if we are exercising, say, friendship or loyalty for the sake of happiness, have not our friendship and our loyalty become pretenses, just intermediaries bringing us some other benefit? The obvious answer is that happiness, or living as a good human being, is not other to things like friendship or courage in the same way as the purposes in view of which things are chosen are other to the things that we choose: as swimming is other to driving, or accumulating money is other to curing people of illness. Being active as a human being is precisely exercising friendship and courage and generosity; it is being clear about those things in life that should be done for their own sake, and it is being able to do those things. It is not just having virtues and capabilities; it is also actually having and using the opportunities to exercise them. The virtues are precisely the abilities to recognize and to achieve those things in life that are to be done for themselves. However, happiness is not just the resultant sum of such activities. Happiness is something that is somehow the same in all such activities. Although courage is not, as such, temperance, and generosity is not, as such, friendship or filial piety, being courageous is "being excellent" here

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and now in these circumstances, if that is what these circumstances call for; and being generous is "being happy" there and then in those conditions; and being a friend or being reverent to one's parents is being happy or being excellent in still other circumstances. There is a special form of identity synthesis in the actuality of happiness. There is something the same in all excellent human performances, even though the performances are so different one from the other. It is our philosophical task to respect this identity and to show it on its own terms, without confusing it with other identities that are more familiar and easier to manage. The way happiness is in all good acts is not the way courage is in all courageous acts, and not the way "being a dog" is in all dogs. One of the things we can say about happiness is what we have said already, that it is always done for its own sake, that it is something we want because it is simply wantable. This is not a consequence of some sort of human psychological structure or of some social convention. It is not a consequence of goals we set for ourselves. There are goods that are simply wantable, and we are happy when we have them. And they are elusive, because if we try to exploit them, instead of recognizing and doing them in and for themselves, they vanish or they tum into grotesque effigies of themselves. And all such goods are what they are because the good is simply wantable and because we are happy when we have it; because the good as such cannot be chosen for anything beyond itself without turning into dust; and because the good is somehow involved in all the goods that we want. The issue of the good and of happiness is one in which philosophical delicacy is needed to prevent moral confusion. We think philosophically when we think about identities, even about the special identity that characterizes the good and happiness. For some strange reason, we are inclined to tum into utilitarians when we speak about the good and happiness. We think that the good things we try to do are somehow only way stations toward something else, toward happiness and goodness "in themselves." It is true that happiness and goodness are never simply equatable with any single good action or with any series of such actions: to make such an equation would submerge the identity of the good and of happiness into some of its particulars. But what we have of the good and of happiness is there in what we do. It is not apart from what we do. There is no way of substituting for the good actions, for the simply wantable goods, that surface as to be done in situations in which we live: we could not choose something else in their place and still "get to" happiness and the good, as we might substitute the subway for a car in getting to work. These things are to be done and we are there to do them. There is no other thing the agent could do and still be a man. In anyone situation not all the faces of the good are revealed, not all

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goods can be achieved. It may turn out that the urgent good is such that doing it may render impossible many other goods in other situations. Loyalty in a particular instance may mean that one suffers great loss-the loss of opportunities or talents or even life itself-but it still remains that to act otherwise, to fail to do what the situation calls for, is to render oneself unhappy in a permanent way, to become alienated from the good. Whatever urgent goods arise are the ones we have to deal with; they, in fact, are the ones in which the good and happiness are there for us, and if in a serious situation we exploit the simply wantable good-the friendship or the call for help-instead of responding to it on its own terms, then we have not just betrayed this kind of good, this friendship or this generosity, but the good and happiness as such, since that is the way that the good and happiness have in fact identified themselves for us. We have, in effect, blown the good as such, not only this opportunity or this form of the good. We cannot simply expect to be able to shrug off the act, to move from this kiosk to another one, and to buy another issue of the good to replace the one we have bungled. The identity of the good is not like that, and we, as recognizers of the good, are not like that. We have also done something to ourselves in having done the wrong thing in this our situation. We have made ourselves to be different, to be as our action was. There is sometimes, of course, the possibility of correcting what we have done, the possibility of repentance, of restitution, and of forgiveness, but then we are engaged in damage-control and repair, which is not the same as improvement, and the greatest danger in slighting the good is that we may lose sight of it in a permanent way, that our character will become such that what is truly good will no longer seem good to us. We run this risk when we obscure the good for ourselves in what we do.

NOTES 1. It may be helpful here to point out a difference between my treatment of the simple, direct voluntary and Aristotle's treatment of the voluntary. Aristotle considers the voluntary (to hekousion), that which is done knowingly and without compulsion, as a genus, with the chosen (to proaireton) as a species (see Nicomachean Ethics, III 1-3). It is the presence of thinking (dianoia) in choice that makes choice different from the rest of the voluntary (see especially Magna Moralia, I, 17, 1189a31-b3). For Aristotle, therefore, the "simple" voluntary would include only the thoughtless kind of behavior one finds in children, in animals, and in mature human beings who are not deliberating about what they do.

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But I allow moral transactions to be considered as simple, direct voluntaries because they must be done for themselves. Some of my "direct voluntaries," therefore, can involve thinking: they involve the kind of categoriality that establishes a performance as a moral transaction, the categoriality of taking your good or bad formally as my good or bad. The reason for this discrepancy is that Aristotle does not describe the categoriality of a moral transaction. The only categoriality he works with in describing human acts is that of doing something in view of something else, the categoriality of choice in view of an end. His proairesis is a selection made after a diairesis in which options have been articulated. It is a selection that excludes other possibilities, and one made in view of something beyond the selection itself. The categoriality I have described as the form of a moral transaction also involves a kind of diairesis (I must distinguish your good or bad and my good or bad), but it issues in a more intense identity synthesis than the kind found in choices made in view of a purpose. I do not take your good or bad in view of my good or bad, but I identify your good or bad as such as my good or bad. Of course in my analysis I also recognize some direct voluntaries that are not moral transactions but are simply the unfolding of satisfactions. Thus I introduce a distinction into the domain of the direct voluntary, whereas Aristotle simply distinguishes that domain from the domain of choice. 2. We deal here with a prelogical form of contradiction, a disruption in an identification that is attempted in the very constitution of an entity (in this case, an action). Such a prelogical contradiction is more basic than the logical contradictions that can occur when we try to formulate and state the internal and external relationships of the entity once it has been established. 3. We abstract from those cases in which the individual ought to question the justice of what his government or superiors command. If the individual were ordered to do something unjust, if he had a choice of obeying or not obeying, and if he actually did what he was told to do, he would be engaged in a moral transaction toward his target. And yet there would still be a difference between him and the murderer; because he was following orders and not arranging the situation himself, he would be related to his target in a way different from the way the man attempting murder is related to his victim. Both actions would be unjust, but the forms of injustice would be different and the relations between agent and patient would be changed in different ways. 4. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IX 6.

6. Doing What We Do Not Want to Do WE HAVE ATTEMPTED to describe human actions as done simply for their own sake or as done in view of some purpose. We have discussed actions that we as agents perform positively, actions that we want to do. We can now approach action from another angle by describing how we act when we do things that we really do not want to do, things that we would rather not have to perform. We will examine three ways in which such performances occur: as done out offear, as done out of moral weakness, as done out of obedience. These moral phenomena occur frequently in human affairs; they involve different moral categorialities, forms other than those we have discussed so far. These phenomena are therefore interesting in themselves, but examining them will also, by contrast, help us understand our more positive actions, the things we do simply on our own. And after we have examined these three ways of consciously doing what we do not want to do, we will briefly examine a fourth case, the unconscious confusions that we sometimes undergo in targeting our human performances.

Doing Things out of Fear

We sometimes do things out of fear. We perform an action in order to avoid some harm that would occur if we did not act or if we did something else; Aristotle's example is that of a captain of a ship throwing his cargo overboard to save the ship in a storm. I The captain would not do this if there were no danger to the ship. He does the action willingly, but only as against the alternative. The performance is voluntary but not voluntary in itself; it is voluntary only as against something else. In discussing actions done out of fear, Hobbes gives an interpretation 120

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that differs in a slight but important way from that of Aristotle. Hobbes says, in agreement with Aristotle, that actions done out of fear are done freely. He says that "fear and liberty are consistent."2 Acts done out of fear may even be more explicitly voluntary because of the fear, he says, because the passion intensifies our concern. Hobbes wants, of course, to justify the freedom of the social contract, which is done out of fear of violent death, and he wants to confirm the freedom of acts of obedience to law, which are performed out of the fear of punishment. But in striving to show the freedom of acts done out offear, Hobbes neglects an important difference. He neglects the difference between things done simply and things done as against something else; he neglects the difference between what we want in itself and what we want by accident. A nuance, a difference in dimensions, a difference in the form of presentation, in the as, is lost. For Hobbes, if a thing is done willingly, there can be no qualifications about it. We simply want it at the moment, so it becomes a wantable thing and therefore good. For Hobbes the good is simply what men in fact desire. In the Hobbesian perspective, we cannot distinguish between (a) something that is wantable and good in itself and (b) something that is wantable and "good" only to avoid something else; and we cannot distinguish between someone who does something simply because he wants to do it and someone who does it to avoid some harm. But there certainly is a difference in character between a man who, say, would leave a wounded soldier behind because this is the only way for the others to be saved, and one who would leave him behind because he dislikes him or hopes to get some benefit from his capture. This difference in moral tone is not recognized in Hobbes's political science. As always, the intermediate cases help bring out the things being distinguished: actions done for themselves and actions chosen as against something else. Clearly there are cases in which the agent uses the cover of doing something out of fear as an excuse for doing something he really wants to do but does not want to admit he desires. And there are unfortunate cases in which someone may first have to do something harsh out of fear-such as killing in self-defense-and may then develop a taste for that kind of activity, so that for him it becomes desirable in itself and he becomes the kind of person that desires it. This is why law-enforcement officers need a stronger form of civic virtue than other citizens do; it can be tempting for them to use the coercive powers of the law simply to dominate other people or to extort things from them. One form of introducing fear into action is coercion. Acting out of fear is a genus; it covers fears generated by natural phenomena, such as storms or precipices, but it also covers fears generated deliberately by other persons. Coercion involves two agents in conflict. One agent

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threatens to inflict some sort of harm on the other if the other does not perform a particular action: a blackmailer threatens to reveal a secret if the person being coerced does not give him money; someone threatens bodily pain and harm if the person under coercion does not sign a particular document or reveal information. The person under pressure does not want to perform the action; if he performs it he does so only to avoid the alternative. But in this case the alternative has been arranged by another agent; it is not there simply through the forces of nature. If the person under pressure finally agrees to do what the other wants him to do, he has been overcome by the determination of the one coercing. His will has been broken, and the one exercising coercion has triumphed over his victim. As Hegel says, "Only the will which allows itself to be coerced can in any way be coerced."3 But if the one coercing exerts so much pressure that the other person loses the ability to act and performs in a merely mechanical way, there really has been no conquest. In this battle of wills, the one who has resisted to the end and has simply been compelled by the force-as opposed to being coerced by the threat-has, in a moral sense, won. He was able to withstand the fear of the alternative and the fear of the harm; he refused to comply as long as he was there, as an agent, to refuse. And, of course, the one being coerced triumphs definitively if he resists the coercion entirely and cannot be made, even mechanically, to do what the other wants him to do. Not all coercion is bad. Parents have to coerce children, teachers have to coerce students, superiors injobs have to coerce subordinates, and the law has to coerce people under the law. People often will do what is good, for themselves and for society, not because it is good but only because of the penalty that is attached to its opposite. Coercion is a way of introducing foresight and moral judgment in others, and it is a way of cultivating a taste for the good in those who do not, or do not yet, have it. It helps them articulate a situation morally instead of simply doing what is pleasant or avoiding what is painful. It helps them focus on this as an issue by confronting them with that as an alternative. It engages choice as preference and the categoriality that such choice implies. But the level on which it introduces moral categoriality is inferior because it plays pleasures and pains against one another and does not appeal to a sense of the good intrinsic to the thing being urged; still, it at least brings about a comparison of pleasures and pains, and so introduces some thoughtfulness into the situation, and it may be the only way to make the one coerced attentive to the good that is being recommended. He may then come to see it as a good in itself. Even if he does not, it is still better to do the good under coercion than not to do it at all. The thoughtfulness is introduced into the situation by another person.

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Coercion necessarily requires my situation's being articulated by someone else; and yet 1 can recognize how the situation is articulated. 1 know what can be done and what follows each alternative; if! were not aware of this, it would not be a case of coercion. The possibility of coercion is thus a tribute to the publicness of mind: what someone else thinks can be thought by me; the same situation articulated by another can be articulated by me. We have seen earlier that a moral transaction is something done by one agent toward another because the possibility of the event is brought about by the agent's own appraisal and articulation ofthe situation. It is his thoughtfulness that lets it happen. But coercion is even more a case of one agent intruding into another, of one doing something to another. You do not just feed or strike or push me when you coerce, you arrange an action for me. 1 am not just a target of your transaction but an agent in a situation made by your, and not primarily my, thinking. You affect me more interiorly; 1 have done what you thought was to be done, and 1 have done it by thinking it should be done, even if only in contrast to the harm 1 wished to avoid, a harm that you also brought into the picture. The sense of "you" and "I" that each of us has is certainly established in part by the inevitable coercions that occur in life, especially during those early years when pleasures and pains, fears and losses and presences, are all very indeterminate and very ominous, when we have not yet begun to distinguish aggressively on our own but have to have much of our thinking done for us. When one agent is simply under the influence of another-if Walter is influenced by Jane-then the common thinking, the common appraisal, which is primarily Jane's, holds sway without coercion. The one influenced likes seeing things as seen by the other and may not even distinguish two ways of appreciating things. At the other extreme, we have one agent totally differentiated from some other one, acting definitely toward that other agent: handing something over to him, taking something away, helping or hurting him. Coercion is halfway between influence and a direct moral transaction. Coercion resembles influence because both involve a common articulation, but the articulation in coercion is there as intrusive and alien to the one coerced; he sees it as proposed by the one coercing. Coercion requires the possibility of quotation, at least in a rudimentary form. We are coerced into "saying" another's "speech"; his articulation is foisted on us. But coercion resembles a moral transaction because the one coercing intervenes as an agent toward the one coerced; he intervenes as the one who urges the common appraisal and as the one who threatens the painful transaction if the other does not submit. But in contrast to acts done under coercion, there are the acts done simply out of fear, without the intrusion of some other mind. We walk

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along this road, which we would not normally do, to avoid the dangerous animals on the other path; we buy a large car not primarily because we want one but because we are afraid of having an accident in a small car; we throwaway the cargo out of fear that the ship will sink. In such cases it is our own articulation that sets up the action, not the imposed thinking of someone else, but our articulation is not simply positive. We are not just doing the simply voluntary, what we simply want to do, nor are we simply avoiding something we are pained by or afraid of. We are actually doing something and doing it voluntarily. But we are also not simply articulating choices in view of purposes; when we do something out offear we are not choosing it as a means to avoid the fearful thing; we are doing it instead of doing or suffering the fearful thing. If simple voluntaries and purposes could be considered as exercising a "vertical" pull on our actions, fear could be considered as a kind of "lateral" pressure exercised on them. Thus when we try to decipher what people have done, when we try to determine what was desirable for them in their actions, we must call up not only the various things that human beings can want, and we must engage not only our skill in triangulating choices and purposes; we must also keep in mind that some things are done and some options are chosen not simply in themselves but out of the fear of an alternative. For some human performances, this may be the only key to understanding.

Moral Weakness

People also sometimes do things that they do not want to do because they are too weak to resist doing them. This is the moral phenomenon Aristotle describes as akrasia, weakness in self-control.4 The moral possibility of such weakness sterns from the fact that there can be a distinction in human beings between what they are inclined to do and what they say or think they should do. The possibility ofthis difference is, in turn, based on what speech and thinking are. In our speech and thought we can become involved with things that are absent and with points of view that are different from our own point of view. We are able not only to be engaged with what surrounds us and with things as they just seem to us to be, but also with things that are distant and things as they are seen and stated by others. Therefore, in regard to the desirable and the good, we are not just our inclinations; we can be exposed to goods and slants on goods that are not simply congruent with the goods we immediately desire. We can therefore talk about goods in a way that may be at odds with what seems good to us.

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In the course of life, as we work out the distinction between what we think or say and what we feel, we can become consolidated in four different ways. We may develop convictions about the good that are themselves true, and our inclinations may come to be in harmony with what we think and say. Someone who succeeds in doing this is what Aristotle calls a virtuous man. Or we may not succeed in harmonizing reason and inclination, but may succeed in mastering inclination by reason. This would be the state of self-control, and an agent so formed would be a self-controlled man. There is a difference between virtue and self-control. Some things appear desirable to the self-controlled man that he wishes would not seem so; he has inclinations that he has to master. There is some alienation between his passion and his reason, and his reason does not permeate inclination. But his reason does control his passion; this kind of man is reliable, he is what we could call a solid citizen, while the virtuous man is, in the fullest sense of the word, a good citizen (provided he lives in a country in which a good life is publicly acknowledged and praised). In a situation in which someone needs help and there is considerable inconvenience in giving help, a virtuous agent would not even seriously consider not helping the person. That avenue of behavior would not surface for him as one of the things that might be done. It would not come up as a real possibility for him. The virtuous man would suffer so much pain and shame at not having helped the person that it would overshadow any difficulty he experiences in helping him. But he does not help because he has calculate