The Bright and the Good: The Connection between Intellectual and Moral Virtues 1786602369, 9781786602367

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction • Audrey L. Anton
PART I: ANCIENT ORIGINS OF THE INTELLECTUAL-MORAL RELATIONSHIP
1 Geometry in the Humming of the Strings • Anne Mamary
2 What the Theoretical Sciences Can Teach Us About Right Action: Plato and Intellectual Virtues • Eva María Cadavid
3 How Practical Wisdom Depends on Moral Excellence • Marcia Homiak
4 Practical Wisdom and Happiness as a Political Achievement in Aristotle • C. D. C. Reeve
5 Intellectual Virtue and the Non-Sage in Stoicism • Ryan Korstange
PART II: THE ASSUMPTION RE-EXAMINED
6 Pagan and Christian Paths to Wisdom • David Bradshaw
7 Moral and Intellectual Virtue from Greek to Arabic Philosophy • Lenn E. Goodman
8 Moral and Intellectual Virtues in the Medieval Latin Tradition—and the Limits of Virtue Ethics • Lenn E. Goodman
9 Hume, Intellectual Virtue, and Virtue Epistemology • Dan O’Brien
10 Mill on Rousseau on the Sciences and Morality • Piers Norris Turner
11 Kant and the Intellectual Virtues: “Good and Stupid”? • Michael Reno
PART III: SPECIFIC VIRTUES AND CONTEMPORARY REFLECTIONS
12 How Second Nature Becomes Primary • Jonathan Jacobs
13 Intellectual Trust in an Examined Life: On Vicious and Virtuous Trust in Philosophy • Ben Almassi
14 Ignorance and Hope • Katherine Johnson
15 Intellectual Courage • Eric Kraemer
16 Patience and Practical Wisdom • Matthew Pianalto
17 The Virtues of Justice and Mercy: On Knowing the Difference • Audrey L. Anton
Index
About the Contributors

Citation preview

The Bright and the Good

The Bright and the Good The Connection between Intellectual and Moral Virtues Edited by Audrey L. Anton

London • New York

Published by Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB www.rowmaninternational.com Rowman & Littlefield International Ltd. is an affiliate of Rowman & Littlefield 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706, USA With additional offices in Boulder, New York, Toronto (Canada), and Plymouth (UK) www.rowman.com Selection and editorial matter © 2018 Audrey L. Anton Copyright in individual chapters is held by the respective chapter authors. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: HB 978-1-7866-0236-7 PB 978-1-7866-0237-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Anton, Audrey L., editor. Title: The bright and the good : the connection between intellectual and moral virtues / edited by Audrey L. Anton. Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018006029 (print) | LCCN 2018014055 (ebook) | ISBN 9781786602381 (Electronic) | ISBN 9781786602367 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781786602374 (pbk. : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Virtues. | Intellect. | Virtue. | Virtue epistemology. | Knowledge, Theory of. Classification: LCC BJ1531 (ebook) | LCC BJ1531 .B75 2018 (print) | DDC 179/.9--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018006029 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

In Honor of Mary Ellen Anton (November 14, 1948–July 16, 2010) The wisest woman I ever knew Though she never put on airs Her creativity inspired a few Her pupils knew she cared “Not everyone is clever, but all can be good!” She proclaims from her heavenly portal An exemplar of care and motherhood An angel who walked among mortals

Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi Audrey L. Anton PART I: ANCIENT ORIGINS OF THE INTELLECTUAL-MORAL RELATIONSHIP 1  G  eometry in the Humming of the Strings Anne Mamary 2  W  hat the Theoretical Sciences Can Teach Us About Right Action: Plato and Intellectual Virtues Eva María Cadavid 3  H  ow Practical Wisdom Depends on Moral Excellence Marcia Homiak 4  P  ractical Wisdom and Happiness as a Political Achievement in Aristotle C. D. C. Reeve 5  I ntellectual Virtue and the Non-Sage in Stoicism Ryan Korstange

3

19 33

49 77

PART II:  THE ASSUMPTION RE-EXAMINED 6  P  agan and Christian Paths to Wisdom David Bradshaw vii

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Contents

 7  M  oral and Intellectual Virtue from Greek to Arabic Philosophy Lenn E. Goodman  8  M  oral and Intellectual Virtues in the Medieval Latin Tradition—and the Limits of Virtue Ethics Lenn E. Goodman

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 9  H  ume, Intellectual Virtue, and Virtue Epistemology Dan O’Brien

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10  M  ill on Rousseau on the Sciences and Morality Piers Norris Turner

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11  K  ant and the Intellectual Virtues: “Good and Stupid”? Michael Reno

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PART III: SPECIFIC VIRTUES AND CONTEMPORARY REFLECTIONS 12  H  ow Second Nature Becomes Primary Jonathan Jacobs 13  I ntellectual Trust in an Examined Life: On Vicious and Virtuous Trust in Philosophy Ben Almassi

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14  I gnorance and Hope Katherine Johnson

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15  Intellectual Courage Eric Kraemer

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16  P  atience and Practical Wisdom Matthew Pianalto

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17  T  he Virtues of Justice and Mercy: On Knowing the Difference Audrey L. Anton

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Index 323 About the Contributors

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Acknowledgments

As is often the case with works such as this one, there are many people deserving of acknowledgment, without whom this collection either would not have been possible or would not have been as good. First, naturally, I would like to thank the editors at Rowman & Littlefield International, in particular, Rebecca Anastasi, Sarah Campbell, and Isobel Cowper-Coles, both for their faith in the project and their patience throughout the revision process. Second, I must thank all of my contributors, but especially those who were selected several years ago and stood by the project as the final contributors and contributions were secured. All of these people shared in my vision to make the volume as inclusive of both historical and contemporary accounts as possible. I wish to thank Tom Magnell and the International Society for Value Inquiry for the opportunity to host a conference on virtue ethics, which drew my attention to the need of such a volume. I must also thank the members of the Philosophy and Religion Department at Western Kentucky University for their help and support of that conference, especially Eric Bain-Selbo and Paula Williams. Although funded for other reasons, I must thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for the Enduring Questions Grant it awarded me, as I used much of the research conducted under that grant in putting the collection together. I must thank several anonymous reviewers for their assistance in reviewing, selecting, and refining contributions. I thank my friends and family for their love and support. Most of all, I thank my husband, Stephen Kershner, for everything. Steve graciously reviewed drafts of everything multiple times, if only to indulge my paranoia of missing typos. I was justified in my fear as Steve caught many mishaps and offered countless suggestions for style and readability, most of which I took. I apologize for any errors in the manuscript, as those are certainly my fault. I thank Steve for everything else that goes well. ix

Introduction Audrey L. Anton

This book’s cover image is not random. The statue does not depict just any dog; it is the likeness of one very famous Skye terrier, Greyfriars Bobby.1 Bobby’s life story provides an opportunity for discussion of numerous virtues, practical wisdom, and character. His is a tale of duty, loyalty, justice, patience, and courage. His presence in Victorian Edinburgh inspired an otherwise desperate (and desolate) community to practice virtues of charity and care. Through his example we can see how—despite evidence to the contrary—treating others humanely is a mark of humanity. Bobby was the watchdog assigned to policeman John Gray. Prior to his appointment, Gray, his wife, and their son were living in abject poverty. While not literally living in the poorhouse, their living conditions were not far from it. In a time when poverty and disease tempted many a pauper to resort to theft (or worse) to get by,2 and when hopelessness led many to drink themselves unconscious regularly, John Gray preferred to take little pay in exchange for difficult and dangerous work protecting the public with continuous faith in the rule of law. Nearly twice the average policeman’s age, the forty-year-old Gray outlasted the majority of his colleagues by serving five years—a service cut short only by Gray’s contraction of tuberculosis and his subsequent death. The average policeman’s tenure was brief, as policemen were routinely dismissed for various infractions that arguably amount to succumbing to temptation. Gray routinely fulfilled his duties while earning the respect and admiration of the people. Gray was known to despise cruelty to animals, and unlike other dog owners (including policemen), Gray never enticed Bobby to be in a dogfight for amusement. Gray often counseled his citizens on how to avoid going into debt or, more simply, how to avoid temptation. He believed that his position xi

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as a policeman brought with it a responsibility to make his community better; and Bobby appears to have learned by his example. Gray took Bobby with him everywhere. Reportedly, Bobby was quick to defend his master against other male dogs, regardless of their size, including a mastiff. He did not allow himself to bother any female dogs while he was “on duty.” In addition to this apparent courage and temperance, Bobby routinely demonstrated the virtue of patience. Whenever Gray pointed to a location and commanded, “Bobby, on trust,” Bobby would lie at that location and wait until commanded to move again. Bobby famously lay perfectly still for hours during long afternoon drill sessions. Little did Gray know that this training would eventually make Bobby famous. Up until Gray’s death, Bobby remained at his side day and night. Shortly before Gray expired, his physician had instructed Bobby “to be a good dog and guard his master well.”3 When the body was carried to its resting place in the Greyfriars Kirkyard, Bobby followed it. After the human mourners cleared out and the graveyard gates were locked, Bobby lay atop his master’s grave. With minimal interruption, Bobby kept guard over his master’s grave until his own death—fourteen years later. During this time, Bobby demonstrated the virtues of fortitude and courage countless times. He protested being removed from the spot so vehemently that he was permitted to stay. This fact, in itself, is remarkable, as the kirkyard gates were designed to keep dogs and children out when locked. Initially, Bobby only left his master’s grave to seek shelter under a stone bench adjacent to Gray’s interred body during poor weather. As it became apparent that Bobby would not budge, townspeople began to bring Bobby food and a satchel to sleep on. Eventually, various citizens would manage to coax Bobby out to spend a night indoors when the weather was life-threatening. Bobby always returned to his master’s grave as soon as weather permitted it. Measures were taken to allow Bobby to exit and enter the kirkyard daily for a meal. Gray had frequented the same restaurant daily when off duty. The owners routinely fed Bobby. They pledged to continue doing so after Gray’s death. By the time these owners retired, Bobby’s reputation prompted each owner thereafter to keep up the tradition. Shortly after Gray’s death, Edinburgh began firing a cannon at one o’clock each afternoon to serve as a reference point for setting watches and clocks. Crowds gathered each day to watch Bobby leave the kirkyard for his meal immediately after the signal. He returned to Gray’s grave promptly after finishing his food. Unlike the majority of dogs, Bobby was not afraid of loud noises. He was often “invited” to Edinburgh castle to witness the cannon fire and take his



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meal there. Apparently, Bobby enjoyed the cannon explosion, gratefully accepted the food, and returned to his post shortly thereafter. The public’s fascination with Bobby prompted the entire community to care for Bobby and, ultimately, save his life. Bobby did not officially belong to anyone. When Edinburgh adopted a policy of licensing dogs (and destroying any unlicensed dogs), the police asked Mr. Traill, the current owner of the restaurant where Bobby ate, to claim ownership and pay the fee. Much to the townspeople’s dismay, Mr. Traill refused. He was brought to court for failure to pay (as the enforcers deemed Traill the obvious owner, since he fed Bobby most regularly). Traill explained Bobby’s unique situation as a dog who belonged to everyone, and the charges were dropped. Two citizens, James Anderson and Robert Ritchie, decided to pay for Bobby’s license. Shortly thereafter, Sir William Chambers, the lord provost of Edinburgh, who also happened to be director of the Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, met Bobby and pledged to purchase Bobby’s license for as long as Bobby lived. Chambers argued that, since the Town Council owned the burial ground where Bobby slept, Bobby was encouraged to live there, and the townspeople took turns looking after him, the entire town ought to be considered Bobby’s owner. As Chambers was also the head of the Town Council, he felt it was fitting that he sponsor the license. Chambers purchased a collar for Bobby, inscribed with Bobby’s official title, “Greyfriars Bobby.” THE CONNECTION BETWEEN MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES I begin with the story of Greyfriars Bobby as it raises many questions concerning the connection between the moral and the intellectual insofar as training, habituation, and character are concerned. There is no doubt that Bobby was a very smart dog. However, as few scholars are willing to admit that animals can be as intelligent as humans, we are left to ponder whether intelligence is truly necessary for moral virtue. Ancient Western views presumed that it is; however, even some interpretations of these views allow that intellectual virtue can be relative to the capacities of the subject.4 While Bobby was most certainly well trained, his skills and concern outlived his master (quite literally). It is certain that Bobby internalized his upbringing, acting from habits that required no further instruction. Several authors in this collection ask similarly, what use is intellectual virtue to the moral virtues? For instance, Eva Cadavid argues that Plato believed certain intellectual pursuits (in particular, the mathematical sciences) had to be achieved if one were to lead or teach virtue to others. However, right action

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can be achieved solely through right opinion. Ryan Korstange presents how, for the Stoic philosophers, the relationship was so close that moral virtues were a specific kind of expression of intellectual virtues; any lack of intellectual virtue renders a person essentially vicious, despite whether their actions were identical to those of other virtuous persons. Piers Norris Turner considers Rousseau’s position that scientific knowledge can only corrupt the otherwise good nature of man. Michael Reno defends Kant against the allegation that he believed one could be both good and stupid; Reno argues that intellectual virtues were very important to Kantian moral virtue. Katherine Johnson argues that the theological virtue of hope requires ignorance (or, at the very least, some selective negligence of otherwise hopeless information). Other authors address a related question: Do intellectual virtues require moral virtues? Anne Mamary addresses the Pythagorean theme found throughout Plato’s works that what is beautiful and good is mathematical, ordered, and able to be grasped by the intellect. According to Mamary, the moral virtues both precede intellectual pursuits and grow from them. Marcia Homiak provides an Aristotelian analysis of an affirmative response to this question. For Homiak, taking enjoyment in the right activities and in the right way—an ability acquired only through moral habituation and political deliberation—unifies the virtues. Jonathan Jacobs argues that not only do intellectual virtues require moral virtues, but also moral vices can disable a subject’s agency entirely. Matthew Pianalto argues that patience is a necessary virtue in order for one to develop (and routinely practice) practical wisdom. Another theme runs through this volume—how virtues relate to society. C. D. C. Reeve presents an account illustrating why, for Aristotle, happiness (and, therefore, both moral and intellectual virtues) requires a society of a certain sort. Ben Almassi presents an account of how the philosophical community can rationally accept intellectual trust in the general pursuit of wisdom. Eric Kraemer argues that intellectual courage is particularly subjective, as what is courageous for one person might not be courageous for another. And finally, I, Audrey Anton, contribute a chapter concerning the common aim of the virtues of justice and mercy—moral education. I argue that it is this aim that not only makes individuals and societies necessarily concerned with both Justice and Mercy, but also it is this aim that renders these two virtues inextricably linked. Within this collection the reader will also find historical analyses of transformations in traditions regarding the relationship between the intellectual and moral in virtue ethics. Part II addresses virtue ethics moving into the medieval period. David Bradshaw and Lenn E. Goodman both consider the integration of pagan philosophies and theological ideologies and how this synthesis precipitated shifts in philosophical thinking concerning the connection between moral and intellectual virtues. David Bradshaw describes the shift in thought on wisdom, highlighting the similarities and differences



Introduction xv

between the pagan and Christian Greek traditions. Goodman provides two historical accounts—one primarily focusing on medieval philosophy written in Arabic and the other on medieval Latin virtue ethics. These three chapters serve to bridge the gap between ancient canonical views of virtue in general to the diverse accounts of the relationship between the moral and the intellectual found in early and late modern Western philosophy. While the Renaissance reintroduced a diversity of thought concerning human nature (mostly) independent of theology, the views espoused were hardly repeats of those found in ancient times. For example, despite the boom in scientific interest, Turner argues that Rousseau worried that scientific and philosophical inquiry ran the risk of turpitude. Unlike the ancient Greeks and Romans, Rousseau was doubtful that knowledge could guarantee its possessor would maintain a good heart. Hume is often considered a sentimentalist and, as Dan O’Brien argues, is mistaken to be completely enthralled with the emotional over the intellectual. O’Brien explains how this oversimplified view of Hume overlooks Hume’s views and commitments that might categorize him today as a virtue epistemologist. The Bright and the Good is organized both chronologically and thematically. As ancient philosophers began theorizing from the assumption that there are both intellectual and moral virtues, which enjoy a reciprocal relationship, Part I begins with a solid foundation of various ancient philosophers’ views, revealing how entrenched the assumption of a connection between the virtues was. Part II begins with chapters addressing medieval thinkers, who adopted and adapted ancient views of virtue. As philosophers became theologians, theological virtues had to be introduced and integrated, which yields a plethora of perspectives on the connections between the moral and the intellectual. By the modern period of philosophy, the assumption was no longer seen as axiomatic. This portion of the book traces the assumption of a connection between moral and intellectual virtues to various challenges of both science and ideology that precipitated current discussions in virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. In Part III the issues discussed in the first two parts are reconsidered and applied to individual virtues as “case studies” of sorts. In these essays, contemporary literature is integrated into each author’s piece in illustration of the importance of the question concerning the connection between moral and intellectual virtues and reasons for the diversity of answers found in philosophical discussions today. CHAPTER SUMMARIES In the first chapter, Anne Mamary illustrates Pythagorean themes in Plato’s dialogues to show the importance of mathematical and musical training to

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virtues of understanding. Mamary argues that evidence suggests in both the description of Pythagoras’s “legendary walk” and several passages in Plato’s Republic and Timaeus that mathematics and music (in the form of geometric, harmonic, and arithmetic means) first clue us in to the structure and order of the world. Once we are aware of this connection, we can review (and relive) our education with new eyes. In reviewing the systemic processes of our prior learning, we learn even more about the truth and reality initially exposed. Mamary argues that, not only do passages in these works suggest this process, but also the overall structure of how Republic is organized and presented resembles such a Pythagorean journey. In following this route, Plato’s readers are invited to engage the intellectual virtues to learn mathematics and music, astronomy and dialectic. Yet the moral virtues both stand behind those intellectual pursuits and grow from them. One first must have sufficient moral virtue to pursue the truth and insist upon deeper understanding. While moral virtues motivate the necessary steps to intellectual virtues, they are not themselves fully developed (or perfected) until these intellectual pursuits are reflected back on themselves. As in a harmonic ratio, the overall sound (virtue) is more than the mere sum of its notes. Mamary concludes that we find in the music of the spheres a model for the harmony of the soul. In the second chapter, Eva Cadavid advances the view that mathematical and scientific inquiry in Plato is required for moral virtue. However, Cadavid approaches the topic from the perspective of learning from others. In this chapter, Cadavid argues that on Plato’s account, virtuous actions do not require knowledge. In order to act well, an agent must honor the good regardless of her awareness or understanding of it. One may be able to arrive at the right action merely by possessing right opinion. Indeed, following someone with right opinion is sufficient; the person following acts well despite perhaps having no opinion of how the action is right. As both one who possesses right opinion and the ignorant tagalong can perform the same act, acting well requires very little. However, it is easy to develop the wrong opinions, or to fail to follow the right exemplars. First, one must eschew false opinions. Then, one must follow the right models to develop the right opinions. In so doing, one gathers knowledge of the abstract through mathematical training. Only through this method can one become virtuous in any sense. Once virtuous, an agent is likely to lead others down a similar path. In chapter 3, Marcia Homiak provides an Aristotelian account of the relationship between the intellectual excellence traditionally associated with the virtuous person (practical wisdom) and the virtuous person’s excellence of emotional response and attitude. According to Homiak, the cognitive and emotional complexity of virtue is best understood by giving priority to the passional aspects of virtue, as practical wisdom depends on moral virtue.



Introduction xvii

Aristotle writes that moral excellence involves having correct desires and passions. Having the correct desires and passions causes one to enjoy life in the right way which, in turn, serves to unify the virtues. What is more, this unification requires cooperation with others in activities that express our realized human powers of thinking and reasoning. Homiak illustrates how certain deliberative decisions involving others reveal to us our values as, in deciding what to do, we are in fact deciding what kind of person to be. In the final part of chapter 3, Homiak essentially defends Aristotle’s insistence that political activity is central to virtue. However, Homiak modifies and extends Aristotle’s view to include all persons, eschewing the false dichotomy Aristotle presents when he suggests that a society either require that some people toil with labor exclusively and take no part in political action or the society will fail to foster virtue. Homiak concludes with some modern examples, which illustrate the possibility and attractiveness of her revision of Aristotle’s vision. In chapter 4, C. D. C. Reeve addresses the difficult question of whether and how we can reconcile Aristotle’s view of the happy moral life with the happy contemplative life. Reeve argues that each of the three kinds of goods (external goods, goods of the body, and goods of the soul) are necessary for a happy life. However, there is an order of priority in both the acquisition of these goods and their importance. Keeping in mind Aristotle’s claim that happiness is activity in accordance with virtue and Aristotle’s view that happiness is not measured in moments but over the course of a lifetime, Reeve analyzes Aristotle’s texts for insight on what makes a life complete. We need both goods of the body and external goods in order to develop the goods of our souls, which are the most important. As happiness is active, good souls must make frequent use of external goods and mustn’t be prevented by physical barriers to expressing their virtue. Goods of the body and external goods are necessary to a point as they indirectly facilitate the goods of the soul, which include both moral and intellectual virtues. The question remains whether the morally virtuous (and, in particular, the politically virtuous) life is better than (or even as good as) the intellectually virtuous life. Indeed, scholars for millennia have criticized Aristotle on the basis that he appears to prefer the life of study (an appearance supported by the texts and one that Reeve accepts), which seems to be practically incompatible with a life of political virtue. Still, Aristotle insists on the importance of moral (and therefore, political and social) virtue. In recognizing that the three essential goods to a happy life (external, bodily, and of the soul) are all also, in a way, social goods, Reeve proposes an interpretation that resolves these tensions. Only a polis can provide the necessary goods for anyone to become virtuous in either way (moral or intellectual). And while moral virtue

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is good in its own right, it is also good insofar as it makes possible intellectual virtue. But as the highest good will be the one pursued for its own sake alone, the contemplative life is the best. Confusion ensues when we mistakenly believe that some individuals will pursue one type of life at the expense of their own happiness while others enjoy contemplation free from civic obligations. Instead, Reeve suggests that a given individual can lead a political life for a time and transition into a contemplative life. The developmental stages required for contemplative happiness provide an image of how one can (and must) live both lives at different stages in life in order to be truly happy. In chapter 5, Ryan Korstange considers how the Stoic system of virtue divides humanity into two categories—the virtuous and the vicious. While this binary classification seems problematic on its own (as it begs the question of whether one might be neither), it forces us to reconsider the ubiquitous examples found in everyday experience of relatively good behavior performed by so-called vicious people. For Stoicism requires that for one to be virtuous, one must possess all of the virtues (that is, one must become a sage). At the same time there is an open discussion as to whether anyone can become a sage and possess all the virtues. Practically speaking, either none or very few people can be properly called “virtuous.” Yet many people do perform actions that seem to be virtuous. These seemingly virtuous actions cannot be considered virtuous inasmuch as they are not carried out by people who are themselves virtuous. This chapter considers first virtue theory in Stoicism broadly, examining the connection between virtue and proper knowledge, with particular attention to the specific point of demarcation between the seemingly virtuous actions carried out by a non-sage and the very similar actions, which are virtuous when carried out by the sage. Korstange argues that the point of demarcation between virtue and vice is proper knowledge. The sage knows all things completely and so can act virtuously, whereas the non-sage is missing vital pieces of information, and therefore can never act virtuously. With this foundation, Korstange considers the ways in which seemingly virtuous actions are categorized when they are carried out by the non-Sage, describing the difference between kathorthomata and kathekonta, which comes down to different knowledge or disposition. In chapter 6, David Bradshaw investigates the similarities and differences between pagan and Greek Christian views of wisdom, focusing on the ascetic and monastic traditions. Bradshaw illustrates how Christian Greek philosophy adopts the Greco-Roman conception of wisdom as belonging both to humans and to God, whereby human wisdom requires participating in a sort of divine wisdom, which is only achievable if one has proper moral habits. Plato’s Republic presents an elaborate educational scheme in which



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the gradual acquisition of temperance, courage, and justice is necessary to attaining the vision of the Good, which Christian Greeks identify as God. Aristotle similarly regards the acquisition of the moral virtues as essential for correcting one’s moral perception, enabling one to perceive as pleasant only those acts that truly are pleasant by nature. While the early church surely appreciated how virtuous habits facilitate wisdom, its view of the frailty of human nature (and its tendency toward temptation and backsliding) created doubt that humans could achieve wisdom on their own. It was only through God’s grace that we are able to develop virtues. As a result of introducing coordination with God to the acquisition of human virtues, a host of new virtues (and with them, new vices) emerged. Some had obvious roots in the ancient tradition (for example, chastity is one type of temperance), while others seemed to diverge significantly (as the former virtue of pride [megalopsychia] became a vice). This shift in virtues reflects other changes at a more theoretical level. Within ancient Greek philosophy, the highest divine reality was generally conceived as impersonal—and, in particular, as having no “will” other than the necessary expression of its own nature. Hence to come to know and to be in communion with this reality was not so much an act of personal obedience and submission as one of bringing to their fullest realization potencies that are already present within one’s natural being. For Christian thought, by contrast, God is a personal being whose will can often take idiosyncratic and unpredictable forms. Although Christian thought retains much of the earlier language regarding the realization of the true self, it invests this language with new meaning. On the Christian view, the fullest realization of one’s nature consists in entering into a relationship of personal obedience and trust with God, who is presumed to have a distinctive will for one’s life. For this reason Christian thought identifies the fundamental problem of ethics not simply as wrongdoing or injustice, but as sin, understood as a rupture of this primal relationship between creature and Creator. In chapter 7, Lenn E. Goodman considers the connection between the intellectual and moral virtues according to five major medieval thinkers who wrote in Arabic: Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn Miskawayh, Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, Saadiah Gaon, and Moses Maimonides. First, Goodman lays out the ancient Greek principles of Aristotle, Plato, Plotinus, and Proclus that will be traced throughout his discussion. These include flourishing, functioning well, dependence on external goods, voluntary habits, nature, and the divine. While all such concepts can be found in medieval Arabic philosophy, the transformation and revisions of these concepts illuminate interesting developments concerning the connection between the moral and intellectual virtues insofar as the human relationship with the

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divine calls for modifications. Goodman begins with Yaḥyā, the Logician, who guarded against religious interpretations he feared threatened human ownership of behavior, such as the Ash‘arite notion that God acts and his creatures merely appropriate such actions. Like many medieval philosophers, Yaḥyā understood eudaimonia in terms of self-perfection, opening the prospect of everlasting life. In walking the fine line between Aristotelian naturalism and Christian piety, Yaḥyā revised several of Aristotle’s virtues to make room for the role partnership with the divine plays in human perfection. For example, humility, for Yaḥyā, was not a vice, but rather a virtue, as humility before divinity is appropriate and necessary for being open to grace. Miskawayh follows, explains Goodman, and adds that virtues develop beginning with smaller virtues and leading up to larger ones. For example, no one can simply become liberal. One must first become abstemious and give reason sufficient practice over appetites (which undoubtedly lean toward prodigality and wastefulness). Only then may one be in a position to develop liberality. In fact, Miskawayh subsumes many “smaller” virtues underneath each of the traditional cardinal virtues. In addition, Miskawayh appreciates that while self-control (and the master of reason over the rest of the soul) is essential to virtue, these virtues are social and are, therefore, not developed in isolation or as individual achievements. In contrast to Miskawayh, al-Ghazālī advocates a pietist development of virtue, as the pursuit of immortality and closeness with God will require forfeiting worldly goods. Saadiah, on the other hand, advances a holistic and pluralistic view whereby God made humans capable of enjoying diverse goods with the intention that, like Him, humans could learn to balance different goals. Goodman closes with Maimonides’s view that moral virtues lay the groundwork for intellectual virtues but are also sustained by them. This mean is reflective of both human nature’s inferiority to God and its potentiality to transcend itself and become ever closer to God. In chapter 8, in pursuing philosophies of moral and intellectual virtue in the Latin tradition, Goodman considers the views of Augustine, Anselm, and the synthetic work of Aquinas, leavening the classical scheme centered on the cardinal virtues of justice, wisdom, courage, and sophrosyne, with the Pauline theological virtues celebrated by Augustine: faith, hope, and love. These “infused” virtues spiritualize the personal and social virtues of the classical age, overlaying the moral sphere with thoughts of grace and redefining the ideals of personhood and community articulated by the medieval philosophers committed to virtue ethics. Goodman illustrates how the religious virtue ethic in medieval thinkers writing in Latin begins to make way for more rule-based ethics, such as deontology and consequentialism. First, virtue ethics begins to seek supererogatory distinctions—distinctions that made little sense in the



Introduction xxi

virtue ethics of the ancient Greeks. Latin authors needed a way to explain the difference between, for example, being a good Christian and being a saint. Certain natural “virtues,” such as pride, became sins, since complete commitment to their opposing characteristic (in this case, humility) may have been required by religious law or, in the case of foreswearing anger completely, stood as the mark of the saint. Goodman concludes by touching on the voluntarist thinking of Duns Scotus as a paradigm of the shift away from the synthesis of the cardinal and theological virtues forged by Augustine, paving the way for modern deontologies. In chapter 9, Dan O’Brien explains how, for Hume, virtues are character traits that are useful and agreeable to ourselves and to others. Such traits are wide-ranging, from moral virtues such as benevolence to intellectual virtues such as courage of mind and penetration. O’Brien focuses on Hume’s account of the latter. O’Brien argues that Hume is a virtue epistemologist, principally interested in the role that intellectual character traits play in social interactions. He should not be interpreted as a reliabilist with respect to testimonial knowledge; rather, trust, for Hume, is an artificial virtue, one grounded in its usefulness to society. In the final part of chapter 9, O’Brien argues that this interpretation is consonant with his mitigated skepticism. In chapter 10, Piers Norris Turner examines how Rousseau’s commitments concerning our knowledge of virtue affect his tally of the moral costs and benefits of the sciences, including philosophy, in the First Discourse. Turner notes that Rousseau’s contribution has a special resonance in our own time, when so many citizens have apparently become skeptical of the sciences, critical thinking, and the value of a liberal arts education. But, Turner argues, it is important to set aside the easy misconception that, by rejecting the sciences, Rousseau and contemporary science skeptics deny the value of knowledge of how to live virtuously. Rather, they argue that the pursuit of knowledge through science and philosophy has such detrimental side effects as to make the pursuit not worth the cost. In particular they argue that science and philosophy actually obscure knowledge that can be acquired by other, less costly, means. Chapter 11 considers virtue ethics according to Kant. Beginning with Alasdair MacIntyre’s famous critical remark that Kant believed one could be “both good and stupid,” Michael Reno parses the ways in which that statement is true and false. In presenting Kant’s egalitarian view of the potential of a rational mind to assign itself and grasp the moral law, Reno explains that elite intellectual capacities are not necessarily required of a moral agent. However, he argues, to suggest that Kant had no place for intellectual virtues is to misrepresent Kant. Reno argues that intellectual virtue is essential to moral goodness in Kant’s view, despite the fact that this achievement is

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widely accessible. The autonomous power of practical reason to both dictate and follow its own laws renders consistently moral behavior of the type Kant deemed virtuous also sufficiently intellectual. However, the potential for every rational being to dictate and follow the same moral law makes virtue accessible to all rational beings. While one needn’t be a genius to be good, one certainly has to be rational. In chapter 12 Jonathan Jacobs explains that there are respects in which states of character are voluntary even if the agent has no explicit intention to acquire those specific states. Moreover, though states of character do not determine choices and actions, they can powerfully shape an agent’s conception of what is choiceworthy. Virtues and vices shape and orient what is practically necessary and what is practically impossible for a person. Character shapes the exercise of voluntariness but it does not diminish it, even when character has become more or less fixed. The second nature constituted by the states that shape what is practically necessary and practically impossible for a person is a specific way in which the individual’s agential capacities are actuated and disposed. The second nature one acquires is the way in which one’s primary nature is realized; it is not a set of features and abilities in addition to primary nature. Though we are able to reflect on our states of character and can undertake to revise various dispositions, propensities, and patterns of motivation, it is not as though there is a capacity for rational agency independent of second nature. States of character can have a decisive impact on what one can plausibly aspire to and on the contours and content of a (realistic, accurate) self-conception. A chief concern regarding vices is that they not only reflect disordered agential capacity but they also diminish it. In addition to the difference they make to how an agent judges, acts, and what she finds pleasing, they also shape what the agent is capable of being responsive to and recognizing as an action-guiding consideration. While vices do not generally diminish an agent’s voluntariness they can corrupt capacities in ways that render the person less capable as a rational agent. However, this form of (voluntary even if non-intentional) disability does not imply diminished responsibility. In chapter 13, Ben Almassi asks the question: Does philosophy have trust issues? While epistemic dependence is widely recognized throughout many areas of our lives, whether trustfulness rightfully extends to philosophy itself is especially contentious. Its critics take intellectual trust to undermine the imperative, dear to many philosophers, to know oneself. The assumption is that trust abdicates critical reflection, invites our gullibility, and should be rejected as intellectually vicious. Almassi engages anti-trust theses, which he takes to be representative of concerns raised against trust in philosophy, and against them he defends the possibility of virtuous philosophical trustful-



Introduction xxiii

ness. The first critique extends a general rejection of testimonial knowledge to philosophy. The second critique questions the epistemic necessity of trust for philosophy specifically. The third critique turns on a claim of epistemic authenticity, such that philosophy by its nature is incompatible with trust. On Almassi’s analysis, the arguments for these critiques prove too much or prove to be inconclusive. Almassi suggests that we take these concerns not as categorical injunctions against philosophical trust, but rather as guiding parameters for its virtuous practice. Katherine Johnson questions in chapter 14 the traditional view that ignorance ought to be discouraged as it is an impairment to agency. This traditional view maintains that we ought to avoid being ignorant for it is (often) the cause of our bad acts. Johnson explores the flip side of ignorance and considers the possibility that it may be beneficial for us to choose it. She argues that willful ignorance, when carefully and deliberately cultivated, is essential to hope in “against the odds” type situations. In fact, without choosing to be ignorant in this way, we cannot foster in ourselves a disposition to hope, which can impair our ability to act and to flourish. Johnson proposes that hope is a virtue of ignorance. In chapter 15, Eric Kraemer offers an inclusive and coherent account of intellectual courage. In considering a wide range of instances of it, Kraemer argues that intellectual courage is not always to be found where one might have thought; some intellectual acts, which might appear as non-courageous for some, turn out to be extremely courageous for others. More than most any other virtue, including intellectual virtues, intellectual courage turns out to be a trait that is manifested differently in different individuals, and depends crucially for its presence on specific aspects of each individual’s condition. Kraemer argues that while intellectual courage is often only regarded as a key element for those who wish to defend a responsibilist account of virtue epistemology, its significance is actually much greater in that all who are interested in humans increasing both knowledge and virtue generally have an important stake in stimulating and supporting the development of intellectual courage. After distinguishing several different forms of courage from intellectual courage, Kraemer defends a seven-part schema for intellectual courage. He then employs this schema to demonstrate how intellectual courage contributes directly to the project of acquiring knowledge. Arguing that intellectual courage is an important if often over-looked aspect of what makes someone genuinely morally courageous, Kraemer concludes by demonstrating the important interconnecting role that intellectual courage plays in the system of the moral virtues. In chapter 16, Matthew Pianalto briefly surveys conceptions of patience from several traditions in order to motivate a revival of a specific broader

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notion of this virtue—patience as wise endurance. Nowadays, we tend to think of patience as a kind of waiting. However, waiting too long may be a vice, and some instances seem to lack any notion of waiting (e.g., “I’ve run out of patience with you!”). Pianalto explains that many historical accounts characterize patience as a form of endurance or tolerance related to the virtues of constancy and self-possession. Pianalto argues that, just as courage is not the facing of any and every danger, patience is not manifest in every instance of waiting. As with other virtues, patience requires practical wisdom. However, unlike other virtues, patience also appears to promote the further development of practical wisdom and other virtues. Since the cultivation of other virtues as well as growth in any other practice takes time, effort, and perseverance, patience plays a significant underlying role in the development and exercise of other virtues. In the final chapter, chapter 17, I consider the apparent tension between the virtues of justice and mercy. As virtues, justice and mercy are perfectly compatible. I argue further that the two are inextricably linked. No one could be called just who never grants mercy and nobody who grants mercy indiscriminately could be just (or even truly merciful, for that matter). I concede that merciful acts (which lead to merciful states of affairs) do temper the demands of justice (insofar as justice is measured according to desert of punishment); however, this tempering is not necessarily a tampering. Justice has many aims, and it shares one of its central aims in common with mercy: moral education. A just and merciful person may elect to display mercy on a given occasion because she recognizes mercy-justifying reasons related to the transgressor. In preserving our considered intuitions about mercy, I argue that while mercy is never owed to a transgressor, it can be warranted insofar as it contributes to moral progress. Part of what warrants mercy in general is that, while nobody is entitled to it on any given occasion, everyone deserves some mercy at some point in life. For this reason, a truly just person would certainly grant mercy on some occasions, as she would recognize that everyone needs some leniency sometimes. Still, as a merciful person, she would not grant mercy indiscriminately, for that would defeat a common purpose of granting mercy in the first place (to inspire positive change). Finally, I argue that the just and merciful person has the practical wisdom necessary to assess well on which occasions and to whom an investment of mercy would perpetuate justice overall. This practical wisdom grasps both the past wrongs of a subject and the subject’s potential for moral improvement. The delicate practice of exacting justice or granting mercy helps recipients both take responsibility for their past and behave responsibly in the present and future.



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NOTES 1.  Forbes Macgregor, Greyfriars Bobby: The Real Story at Last (London: Steve Savage Publishers, 2012). 2.  At this time, it was not uncommon for thieves to rob graves and steal corpses to sell to medical schools for dissection. Scottish law made it very difficult to acquire corpses, despite the fact that Edinburgh was a world-leading center for scientific inquiry and discovery. Indeed, Gray and Bobby lived in Edinburgh mere decades after William Burke and William Hare murdered sixteen homeless people in order to sell their corpses to the local medical school. 3. Macgregor, Greyfriar’s Bobby, 32. 4.  For example, Aristotle believed 1. Women and natural slaves were intellectually inferior to men but that 2. Women and natural slaves can develop their own virtues insofar as their potential reaches (e.g., Politics 1.13).

Part I

ANCIENT ORIGINS OF THE INTELLECTUALMORAL RELATIONSHIP

Chapter One

Geometry in the Humming of the Strings Anne Mamary

There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres. —Pythagoras

On a legendary walk, Pythagoras descended “into the forge” and ascended having reconsidered his suspicion of the variability of the sensible world, having heard musical harmony in a blacksmith’s hammers ringing against anvils.1 The story goes that he discovered the weights of the hammers to be 6, 8, 9, and 12 and that ratio of one to the other (rather than any absolute weight), produced the intervals that he heard. Although the story is apocryphal, those ratios (12:8 = 3:2; 12:9 = 4:3; and 12:6 = 2:1) representing the geometric, harmonic, and arithmetic means, respectively, on the string of an instrument, say, produce the fifth (diapente), the fourth (diatesseron), and the octave (diapason), respectively.2 We might think of the journey of the Republic along Plato’s image of the divided line as a string, divided in arithmetic and harmonic means and, as a special case of the geometric mean, the golden section, as the line is explicitly divided in means and extremes.3 To take this journey, Plato’s readers are invited to engage the intellectual virtues to learn mathematics and music, astronomy and dialectic. Yet the moral virtues both stand behind those intellectual pursuits and grow from them. For, in the music of the spheres is a model for the harmony of the soul. The three Pythagorean means describe the relationships of the tones to each other. As Ernest McClain points out, there are two means in every interval, the arithmetic and the harmonic (also called the subcontrary or subarithmetic mean).4 The arithmetic mean (Ma) “is when there are three terms showing successively the same excess: the second exceeds the third by the 3

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same amount as the first exceeds the second.”5 It is calculated as the sum of n numbers divided by n, or, as Russell Campbell puts it: “B-C = C-A => B+A = 2C => C = (A+B)/2,” where C is the Ma. Musically, if the shared distance between the extremes is x-Ma = Ma-y, using the weights of Pythagoras’s anvils, 6-Ma = Ma-12, we find the Ma is 9, and this is a 2:1 ratio (18:9), which produces the octave. The harmonic mean (Mh) gives another way of thinking about the ratios of a string divided or between two strings. The harmonic mean is a ratio, that “by whatever part of itself the first term exceeds the second, the middle term exceeds the third by the same part of the third.”6 And, as Campbell continues, “algebraic manipulation recharacterizes the harmonic mean. (B-C)/B = (C-A)/A => (AB-AC)/AB = (BC-AB)/AB => AB-AC = BC-AB => 2AB = C(A+B) => C = 2AB/(A+B) = 1/(.5(1/B+1/A),” where C is the Mh. The harmonic mean, then, of our Pythagorean weights, 12 and 6, is 8. But, as it is the ratios of the weights of those legendary anvils to each other that interested Pythagoras, we can generalize. “The harmonic mean frequency of an octave gives the perfect fourth,” or the ratio 4:3.7 Thinking about these two musical ratios, which the Pythagoreans considered most pleasing to the human ear, McClain shows how the arithmetic and harmonic means function in the octave interval between a D and a D, both rising and falling. See Figure 1.1 for McClain’s illustration.8 While giving a visual image, McClain also points out how it can be misleading, since: these numbers function in reciprocal ways (as ratios of wave-length and of frequency, or as multiples and as submultiples of some unit of a string length), and hence they apply to both rising and falling sequences of pitch. Mh Ma 6 : 8 :: 9 : 12 . . . rising D : G :: A : D [D to G is the 4th up the scale; G to D is the 5th up the scale] . . . falling D : A :: G : D [D to G is the 5th down the scale; G to D is the 4th down the scale] In the octave on D, for instance, the tones A and G reverse their roles as arithmetic and harmonic means; both tones and numbers, then, delude us with mere “appearances.” Notice how the geometry of the “tone circle” helps us rise to a higher insight, hence closer to the reality of invariant truth.9

These same means appear in Plato. For example, in the Timaeus, he mentions both the arithmetic and harmonic means when he writes that there are “two middle terms, one exceeding the first extreme by the same fraction of the extremes by which it was exceeded by the second, and the other exceeding the first extreme by a number equal to that by which it was exceeded by the second.”10



Geometry in the Humming of the Strings 5

Figure 1.1.  Circular Projection of the Musical Proportion

Copyright of Ernest McClain (The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself)

The third Pythagorean mean in mathematics and music is the geometric mean (Mg), which is a relationship between (or among) the extremes based on a common multiplier (rather than the equal distance between or among the numbers of the arithmetic mean). We have a geometric mean, writes Campbell, “when the second is to the third as the first is to the second.” If we call the geometric mean Mg we can illustrate this ratio as Mg/A = B/Mg So, Mg² = AB Mg = √AB For “n” numbers, the geometric mean is the nth root of the product of all n numbers.11

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In the image of the divided line, Plato gives us a string on which to play. Socrates asks us to consider a line divided into unequal parts, one part corresponding to the intelligible, or the realm illuminated by the Good and the other, the visible, illuminated by the sun. Within each section, the line is again divided into unequal segments in the same proportion to each other as the longer part of the whole line is to the shorter.12 If we construct the divided line in the proportions Socrates mentions, using a, Mg, and b, we have the line divided in mean and extreme ratio. One way of looking at it is to think of the triangle formed from the center of the line (from the Ma or a+b/2) to the top of the perpendicular. If Mg is the unknown geometric mean (the length of the perpendicular), Mg = √ab.13 The geometric mean in music defines the tritone, three whole steps, which is the augmented fourth rising and the diminished fifth falling. Using our octave on D, the tritone rising is G# and falling A♭. The augmented fourth and the diminished fifth are the halfway point in an octave, rising and falling. In the equal temperament of pianos, the tuning system with which most of us are familiar, those two tones are identical. In the Pythagorean tuning system, they are not. The G# is slightly sharper, the A♭ slightly flatter. In McClain’s figure 1.2 below, the tritone visually divides the octave, if we fill it in between the A falling and the G rising. The tritone is always dissonant, always moving

Figure 1.2.  The Geometric Mean

Used by permission of Scott Makeig (Means, Meaning, and Music: Pythagoras, Archytas, and Plato)



Geometry in the Humming of the Strings 7

toward resolution. But it is always moving, like the dissonance of Platonic aporia or the productive agitation of eros.14 Looking once more at Plato’s description of the divided line, we have not only a geometric mean but a special case of the geometric mean, the golden mean, or the golden section. In On Plato’s Polity, John Bremer following Euclid, Book VI, Prop. 30, puts it this way: Let AB be the given finite straight line: thus it is required to cut AB in extreme and mean ratio. A________________E_______B And since in any proportion, the product of the means equals the product of the extremes and conversely, AB:AE :: AE:EB, which is the requirement of Euclid VI, Prop. 30. . . . A final mathematical point: if we convert our geometrical diagram of the line divided in extreme and mean ratio into algebraic terms, we come to the quadratic equation x² + x – 1 = 0, for which there is no rational solution. x = 0.61803398875. . . . The required ratio in rounded numbers is 1:0.618.15

And this ratio, 1.618 . . . , is also known as Phi, or the golden number or golden section (Φ), named for Phidias the sculptor, if we move from longer to shorter or 1/Φ ( ) or about .618 . . . if we move from shorter to longer. Although Plato’s description of the divided line makes it certain that the middle two sections are of the same length, he does not say whether the visible is longer or the intelligible. We could be going up or down, yet we must be in motion, a generative and productive motion of music in the soul and music in the cosmos. And the way up and the way down are not quite the same, as one sees “with new eyes” a place at once familiar and made strange. According to another of Bremer’s books, Plato and the Founding of the Academy: Based on a Letter from Plato: Newly Discovered, Plato himself said of the divided line: In our learning, this sense of going up and down is a most useful image. Ultimately, the movement is cyclical, since, in the extreme, when we have finished our learning (a thing impossible to accomplish), we would journey up the Line and then retrace our steps to confirm, as it were, what we had learned or to apply it in some new way. I myself have found it useful, and on many occasions, to ask the companions, “Are we on our way to or from first principles [that is, ideas or archai]?” This is obviously the same thing as asking are we going up or down the Line. All this suggests the pattern of learning in the Academy.16

Plato’s Republic begins with another legendary walk. Already in the Republic’s (or Politeia’s) opening words, “I went down to . . . Piraeus with Glaucon, son of Ariston,”17 Plato sets his readers, his characters, and the

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dialogue in motion, on a night-long journey that inspires several lifetimes. The Republic or Politeia “ends” with the story of Er and his descent into and ascent from Hades. The conversation begins at sunset and continues through the night, suggesting, as the sun rises, both the conclusion and launching of a journey. In the opening lines of book I, Er’s story of descent echoes, suddenly seeming remarkably close. A reader can go forward and backward, up and down. And, upon passing a place one has already been, it is both familiar and changed. Of course, along a circle’s diameter is not the only way to travel. Rotating a line creates the circle. Socrates describes the journey along the heavenly path and along the lower one. If we start going down to Piraeus and take the longer way around the circle’s circumference, going down and then up, or the other way around, we have only to glance back (or forward) to understand why the beginning so resonates with the end, the beginning transformed from having made the journey. But, whether the journey is a walk along the diameter or around the circumference, the middle of each could be at the same place. In On Plato’s Polity, Bremer puts the arithmetically numerical center, in terms of reading time, the dramatic numerical center for the men involved, at the point where Glaucon “tires of speaking of war and demands that Socrates address whether the polity that has been described is possible.”18 Socrates and his companions have just survived the first two waves and are poised to meet the third, the coincidence of philosophy and politics, as they search for a pattern of justice in city and soul. In the center, the dialogue is at a turning point, perhaps at a crisis point. Socrates says, “I have hardly escaped the first and second waves, and you seem not to be aware that you are now bringing upon me the third, which is the greatest and heaviest.”19 Propelled on the force of the waves at the dialogue’s arithmetic mean, Glaucon’s musical education continues in the central books. From just beyond the dialogue’s numerical center, Socrates asks Glaucon to consider three images: the sun, the divided line, and the cave. In these images is not a simple dichotomy of bodily fallibility and intellectual superiority.20 Rather, a willingness to embrace confusion and uncertainty, to dwell in the space between, and, there, to embrace both visible and intelligible, is essential for the kind of geometric thinking, the kind of intellectual virtue that enables the soul to take flight, to dance in freedom, to become morally virtuous. The slightest dabbling in geometry is all that is necessary for soldiers, for those who are courageous in the conventionally accepted sense. But, Socrates is pushing Glaucon to engage in the lessons of the cave, not just to observe them with neutral interest. It is harder, requires perhaps more courage, to live the sort of geometric life about which Socrates is speaking. Socrates says to Glaucon, “nothing is surer . . . than that we must require that the men of your



Geometry in the Humming of the Strings 9

Fair City (kallipolis) shall never neglect geometry, for even the by-products of such study are not slight.”21 In his (Glaucon’s) beautiful city, geometry remains earthbound (it is, after all, in the business of measuring the earth). But even if Glaucon remains still and sticks to his insistence on the practical benefits of geometric study, there will be positive by-products, even if Glaucon’s soul does not question his basic premises, does not enter the cosmic dance hinted at in both the ensuing discussion of astronomy and in the earlier discussion of the divided line. Glaucon is eager to move to astronomy studies for a variety of practical reasons, including for “agriculture and navigation, but still more to the military art,”22 to which Socrates answers his amusement, gently mocking Glaucon. He says, “it is indeed no trifling task, but very difficult to realize that there is in every soul an organ or instrument of knowledge that is purified and kindled afresh by such studies when it has been destroyed and blinded by our ordinary pursuits, a faculty whose preservation outweighs ten thousand eyes; for by it only is reality beheld.”23 And, in his haste to move to this reality, Socrates realizes he has slowed himself down by moving too fast and skipping over plane geometry. Just after presenting the cave image, which, not incidentally, Bremer describes as the “dynamic or moving picture of the structure of knowing being diagrammed in the Divided Line which immediately precedes it,”24 he outlines for Glaucon first the arithmetic study of points (no dimension), to the study of lines (one dimension), to a study of plane geometry (two dimensions) and then, to a study of the three-dimensional movement of solid geometry, which is what, he says, astronomy studies.25 As the two men consider these intellectual virtues, they melt into (and out of) the moral virtues. As Plato’s characters move from point to line, from line to plane, and from plane to solid (and soon, the solid will move, like the planets move), they are tracing the very education Socrates proposes in Book VII as he and his friends search the heavens for the pattern of justice on earth. They are journeying on a vibrating string, resounding with the musical ratios in the Pythagorean tetractys: 2:1 the octave; 3:2 the fifth, and 4:3 the fourth. And they are propelled by the generative incommensurability of the golden ratio, out of which the cosmos themselves come into being in a mathematical, musical consciousness. The tetractys is represented in a triangle composed of ten dots, one (no dimensions) in the first row, two (one dimension) in the second, three (two dimensions) in the third, and four (three dimensions) in the fourth. And in these ten dots can be found the entire world from the four elements (earth, air, fire, and water), four of the five Platonic solids (tetrahedron—fire; cube— earth; octahedron—air; icosahedron—water; and dodecahedron—ether or the spirit or sphere of the whole), arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, harmony (the

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Figure 1.3.  The Pythagorean Tetractys

Copyright of Ernest McClain (The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself)

octave, the fifth, and the fourth), justice (four is one justice number; nine is another, being the first square of an odd number), the human and the divine.26 If we think of the arithmetic mean of the divided line as a point at the center of the dialogue, it moves forward and backward, up and down, to form the line itself. The two men move, down and up, forward and backward, like a point moves to make a line, which, rotating, makes a circle, which spins to carve out a sphere (which soon will move, like the planets move). And so we move from the study of plane to solid geometry, from geometry to astronomy, which, if rightly studied can “convert to right use from uselessness that natural indwelling intelligence of the soul.”27 Glaucon agrees, although he recognizes that this will make the work he and Socrates are engaged in much more difficult. And Socrates returns the conversation to music—to harmony—as a key part of that strenuous work. While both can be studied with physical examples from the eyes and ears, true understanding comes from considering those examples through a mathematical method, which, in turn, reshapes how one experiences the physical, as Socrates and Pythagoras demonstrate. Socrates says, “Their method [those studying harmonies] exactly corresponds to that of the astronomer; for the numbers they seek are these found in those heard concords but do not ascend to generalized problems and the consideration which numbers are inherently concordant and which not and why in each case.”28 And all of this is a prelude to dialectics, to the song itself.29 If we walk across the dialogue’s diameter, its vibrating string, the arithmetic mean is at its numerical center. What if we imagine that diameter to be the divided line, which is, within each section—the visible and the intelligible—



Geometry in the Humming of the Strings 11

divided again into unequal segments in the same proportion to each other as the longer part of the whole line is to the shorter.30 Moving along the line, Socrates says the segments represent, in the visible portion of the line, images or icons (eikonas)—shadows and reflections—and physical things—animals, plants, and human artifacts.31 The intelligible part of the line is divided into “geometry and the kindred arts”32 and eide.33 Students of geometry, those on the third section of the line, Socrates says, often engage in geometrical thinking. That is, they “regard geometric principles as known and treating them as absolute assumptions, do not deign to render any further account of them to themselves or others, taking for granted that they are obvious to everybody.”34 By contrast, the journey along the fourth section of the line treats assumptions differently. In this section are ideas “which reason itself lays hold of by the power of dialectics, treating its assumptions not as absolute beginnings but literally as hypotheses, underpinnings, footings and springboards,”35 beginning places that are themselves open to revision. The place where visible and intelligible are both joined and pull apart, the place on the diameter where the divided line comes into the conversation, as Bremer suggests, is at the Golden Mean. It is at that place of necessary incommensurability that is perpetually generative. Bremer reminds us that Socrates has divided the dialogue with the divided line in a ratio of 5:3 (about 1.6) and “in doing so it could be seen as dividing the dialogue into a section or segment of the visible and section or segment of the intelligible. Thus, the Divided Line could be doing to the dialogue what it describes.”36 From the division of the line in this ratio, we can also divide planes, like the pentagon, and solids, like the dodecahedron, by the golden ratio. Truly in the music and mathematics of the spheres can be found a pattern for justice. The intellectual virtues lead to the moral ones, while a predisposition to recalling the soul’s own health, gives the context for the moral virtues to move toward the intellectual ones. If the movements and harmonies of the heavens provide a pattern for our lives, those patterns do not move in ceaseless, serene circles. In the Timaeus, Plato describes the planets’ “back-circlings and advances of their circular courses on themselves.”37 Ernest McClain understands Plato’s description of the planets in Er’s myth as an argument for equal tuning. In Pythagorean tuning, the third has the ratio 64:81, so there is always a slight excess or defect and A♭ and G# are slightly incommensurable. McClain argues that the three Fates in Er’s myth correct for the Pythagorean commas, for this incommensurability. “Lachesis,” he writes, “—who must use both hands alternately—is shown at the equal-tempered A♭ = G# = √2, for which Pythagorean integer ratios show a slight excess or defect, while Clotho and Atropos, who need only one hand each, are shown at C and E, which are slightly too far to the

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Figure 1.4.  The Thrones of Necessity and the Fates

Copyright of Ernest McClain (The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself)

left and right of D, according to Plato’s ratios.” McClain diagrams the Fates’ equal tuning this way (see figure 1.4 above).38 Yet, looking at the heavens, we do not see perfect circles. We see the Fates’ correcting motions—and embody them—as we walk on a line that moves, that turns into a circle that rises and falls. Using Plato as his primary ancient source, A. P. David argues that Homer’s poetics take the form of a circle dance with retrograde motion. David writes: “The impulse to circle in the face of life’s mortal linearity has also a pedestrian origin. All the rest of this would have been impossible if such an impulse had not diverted the human foot from its purposes backward and forward, to bear its burden sideways with bended knee, so to circle (with retrogressions) in the way of the cosmos and the dance of the Muses.”39 And, the circular movement of the Republic has those correcting motions built into it as well. For us, the Socratic aporia, the agitation of eros, the generativity of the golden mean, are the places where philosophy, the song itself, begins. In the circling dance of human life, with our feet planted firmly on the earth, illuminated by the sun and the Good, we descend and ascend, look ahead and back to examine where we have been with fresh eyes. Contrary to Glaucon’s understanding of geometry as a useful tool for navigation, the philosopher is a different sort of stargazer than the ship captain. We get an



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idea of Glaucon’s limitations (and, in a curious way, his awareness of them), when he says this study of astronomy and harmony that moves from visual and aural examples to a mathematical understanding of the principles at work in and shining through them is “a daimonic task.”40 Socrates’s response that it is, “rather, useful . . . for the investigation of the beautiful and the good, but if otherwise pursued, useless”41 turns the conventional view of philosophers and philosophy as useless upside down. In that moment Glaucon agrees, and while he really tries, he seems—when left to his own devices—to mistake again and again a view of geometry as it is useful for “practical” matters (e.g., such as warfare) for philosophy itself. Glaucon still sees the true astronomer and the philosopher as stargazers in the sense that they are engaged in absurdity. In Socrates’s view, the philosopher is a stargazer of a different sort, using “the blazonry of the heavens as patterns to aid in the study of those realities”42 and “that one who was an astronomer in very truth would feel in the same way [that they are engaged in absurdity] when he turned his eyes upon the movement of the stars? He will be willing to concede that the artisan (demiurgos) of heaven fashioned it and all that it contains in the best possible manner for such a fabric.”43 But the true astronomer goes further, neither conceding that the study of the heavens is an absurdity nor that the apparent randomness of planetary motions are the truth of astronomy. It takes mathematical abstraction to give a fuller account of the planetary motions, which both elevates the phenomena and astronomy at the same time. And brings us back to music. For, Socrates continues, “we may venture to suppose . . . that as the eyes are framed for astronomy so the ears are framed for the movements of harmony; and these are in some sort kindred sciences, as the Pythagoreans affirm and we admit.”44 McClain says nicely what a study of music and mathematics accomplishes for the stargazing philosopher, who dances the round dance of the planets with retrograde motions. He writes, “The art of mathematics holds a very special place in Plato’s esteem: it is essentially an art of changing viewpoints, of alternative perspectives, and it gives to those who pursue it seriously a release from the imprisonment of a single viewpoint—a real freedom of thought.”45 As Er’s story reminds us, the journey of souls in Hades is a long one. The conversation of the Republic is a long one, too, “winding a long and weary way”46 through the night. Plato is patient; we have not only the time of our own lives but cosmic time. Socrates reminds us of the connection of the intellectual and moral virtues, when he hopes we may both fare and do well. As dawn’s pink fingers streak the sky and the company is about to depart, he says, “and thus both here and in that journey of a thousand years . . . eu prattomen.”47

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NOTES 1. See Daniel Heller-Roazen’s discussion of Pythagoras’s journey “into the forge,” in his chapter by that name in The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World (New York: Zone Books, 2011). Heller-Roazen writes that Pythagoras discovered that “the consonance lay in the one of the hammers’ many sensible properties. . . . [which] resulted from the relations between the hammers’ weights, which caused a set of pleasing sounds” (12). In addition to the consonance in the first four hammers, though, there was a discordant fifth hammer—producing the interval between the fourth and the fifth, which, according to Heller-Roazen, Pythagoras both discarded and considered. Heller-Roazen speculates, “Perhaps . . . Pythagoras found himself drawn to that very instrument: the hammer with no number and no master, which somehow—yet impossibly—sounded both [as Boethius reports] ‘in a single consonance’ and in utter discordance ‘with all’” (17). 2.  See Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism, trans. Edwin L. Minar (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972) on the empirical impossibility of weights producing these musical ratios. Yet, as Burkert suggests, “the legend, in spite of its physical impossibilities, does make a certain kind of sense. The mythical inventors of smithcraft, the Idaean Dactyls, were regarded not only as wizards and founders of mystic rites, but also as the inventors of music. . . . The acusma which states that the sound of bronze when struck is the voice of a daimon makes the transition, in the Pythagorean milieu, between music and metal working. The claim that Pythagoras discovered the basic law of acoustics in a smithy is a rationalization—physically false—of the tradition that Pythagoras knew the secret of magical music which was discovered by the mythical blacksmiths” (375–77). 3. Plato, Republic (Rep.), 509d. All citations of Plato’s works come from Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997). 4.  Ernest G. McClain, The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself (York Beach, ME: Nicolas-Hays, 1978), 15. The late Professor McClain held copyright for this text. Every reasonable effort was made to secure permission to reproduce the images from his book that are included in this chapter. 5.  Russell B. Campbell. “Pythagorean Means,” October 15, 2012, http://www. cs.uni.edu/~campbell/stat/pyth.html. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid. 8. McClain, Pythagorean Plato, 11. 9.  Ibid., 10. 10. Plato, Timaeus (Tim), 36a. 11.  Campbell, “Pythagorean Means.” 12. Plato, Rep., 509d. 13.  Scott Makeig, “Means, Meaning, and Music: Pythagoras, Archytas, and Plato,” ex Tempore, vol. 1 (1981), October 15, 2012, http://www.ex-tempore.org/means.htm. The images from Professor Makeig’s article are used by permission of Scott Makeig.



Geometry in the Humming of the Strings 15

14. Heller-Roazen makes an interesting observation about the Pythagorean response to the dissonance of the fifth hammer in contrast with a modern scientific response to such phenomena. Heller-Roazen writes: Boethius’s public may have concluded that the presence of the fifth hammer betrayed a fault to be ascribed not to Pythagoras, but to our own lowly world. . . . Its discordant sound may have testified to the limits of the sublunary sphere, where natural science, even in its most developed forms, could predict no physical event with certainty. . . . But today, of course, there is a more obvious solution to the problem of the noisy part. One may choose to point an accusing finger at the primitive, if ingenious theorist, inferring simply that something in the Pythagorean calculus was amiss. . . . Yet each solution, however imaginable, conceals an obscurity. What was the world of ancient knowledge, if it allowed—and perhaps demanded—a sound discordant with “all the others”? And what is the universe of modern science, if it, by contrast, cannot permit the noise of a single inconsonant part? (16)

However reluctantly acknowledged, the Pythagorean response points both to a humility lacking in the modern mind—a different sort of moral virtue arising from the intellectual—and to an awareness of the potential in the mysterious. 15. Bremer, On Plato’s Polity (Houston: Institute of Philosophy, 1984), 83–85. 16.  John Bremer, Plato and the Founding of the Academy: Based on a Letter from Plato: Newly Discovered (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), 67. 17. Plato, Rep., 327a. 18. Bremer, On Plato’s Polity, 48 (Rep., 472a). 19. Plato, Rep., 473d. 20.  In his description of Pythagoras’s epiphany during his descent into and ascent from the forge, as reported in Boethius, Heller-Roazen makes a similar point. At first refusing to trust sounds physically produced or apprehended, Pythagoras resolved to learn the principles of harmony through reason alone. Yet, in the smithy, he journeyed to (and from) those relations of sounds and weights, “the consonance [he realized], lay in one of the hammers’ many sensible properties” (12). 21. Plato, Rep., 527c; emphasis added. 22. Plato, Rep., 527d. 23. Plato, Rep., 527d–e. 24. Bremer, On Plato’s Polity, 90. 25. Plato, Rep., 528d–e. 26. Kitty Ferguson, The Music of Pythagoras: How an Ancient Brotherhood Cracked the Code of the Universe and Lit the Path from Antiquity to Outer Space (New York: Walker, 2008), 70. See McClain’s discussion of “Plato’s Musicalized Genetic Theory” (12–15) in the “Introduction” to The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself and his chapter on “The Marriage Allegory” (17–31). Like many other commentators, McClain points out Plato’s sense of humor in this section, which, as it seems always to be in Plato is tied to something serious. Familial relationships, “‘mother,’ ‘father,’ and ‘child,’” McClain argues, are “mathematical metaphor[s]: . . . From his point of view ‘God’ is the immovable ‘1,’ the reference point; ‘2’ is the

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mother’ or ‘Receptacle,’ symbolized by the undivided circle; and her first ‘child’ is the arithmetic mean between them, the prime number 3 in the octave which has been doubled to avoid fractions so that it reads 2:3:4. But this ‘child’ always has a ‘twin’ brother derived from the reciprocal meanings of 3—functioning as harmonic means—so that we actually meet our first Platonic children within the musical proportion 6:8::9:12” (13). McClain argues that the philosopher’s work is modeled on the arrangements of the stars and planets in the heavens and on tuning in music, when he says, “What the demiourgos has shown to be possible in the heavens, what the musicians have shown to be possible with tones, the philosopher should learn to make possible in the life political” (14). He claims that each of Plato’s four cities (Callipolis, Athens, Atlantis, and Magnesia) correspond to four different tuning systems (tempered, Pythagorean, Just, Archytas), respectively (14). Heller-Roazen’s discussion of unity and multiples is helpful for understanding the difference between ratios and fractions in a classical context and is illuminating for thinking about the divided line as well. He points out that the modern notion of a fraction would have indicated a fracturing of the unity, of the one, for the ancient thinkers. For them, ratios indicate not that “the one” is divided but rather that it is enhanced. “Not only is its unity not broken; as Theon notes, it is multiplied” (38). See also Zdravko Planinc’s Pythagorean reading of the Laws’ Magnesia, which he calls the “ikon of the cosmic sphere” (226), derived from the point, line, plane, and solid of the tetractys. (Zdravko Planinc, Plato’s Political Philosophy: Prudence in the Republic and the Laws (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991). The 5,040 hearths of the city, Planinc points out, are derived from 7! (7x6x5x4x3x2x1). Seven is the first parthenogenic number, the “number of demiurgic genesis” (228). Even if the city is “tuned” differently from Callipolis, the idea that “the city will be[come] an ikon of the cosmic sphere . . . and be transformed into an ikon of the justice of the whole” (232) through an education in the “choral art” (235) resonates with McClain’s Pythagorean explanation of the Republic. Interestingly, Planinc reads Kallipolis as Calypso’s city and so understands the name to be ironic in Plato Through Homer (20). Perhaps Plato meant it as both the beautiful city and as Calypso’s city, for it seems to me that both paths are possible. Glaucon and Adeimantus do seem tempted by the possibility of Kallipoli’s treacherous beauty, by the temptation “to be ruler and king over all the dead who have perished” (386c–d). But Odysseus leaves Calypso’s island for the love and recognition of Penelope. Glaucon—and readers/hearers of the Republic—have this option, too, taking the longer and more daunting path leading to the just person, recognized and loved without deceit (613c–d). 27. Plato, Rep., 530c. In the Timaeus, Timaeus says the demiurge created the world soul into a long strip divided into these intervals: First [the creator] took one portion from the whole and next a portion double the first a third portion half again as much as the second the fourth portion double the second the fifth three times the third the sixth eight times the first and the seventh 27 times the first

(1 unit) (2 units) (3 units) (4 units) (9 units) (8 units) (27 units)



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“They give the seven integers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9, 27. These contain the monad, source of all numbers, the first even and first odd, and their squares and cubes.” Paul Calter, “The Platonic Solids,” Dartmouth College, 25 July, 2013, http://www.dartmouth. edu/~matc/math5.geometry/unit6/unit6.html. As in the discussion of the divided line in the Republic, the Timaeus also points to the music in creation. The first four portions are the units of the tetractys, and, filling in the intervals between them with arithmetic and harmonic means, Plato generates the scale here, too, generating the fourth with the arithmetic mean and the fifth with the harmonic. 28. Plato, Rep., 531c. 29. Plato, Rep., 535a. 30. Plato, Rep., 509d. 31. Plato, Rep., 509e–510a. 32. Plato, Rep., 511b. 33. Plato, Rep., 511d. 34. Plato, Rep., 510c. 35. Plato, Rep., 511b. 36. Bremer, On Plato’s Polity, 85. 37. Plato, Tim., 40c. 38. McClain, Pythagorean Plato, 54. 39.  A. P. David, The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 207. 40. Plato, Rep., 531c. 41. Ibid. 42. Plato, Rep., 529e. 43. Plato, Rep., 530a. 44. Plato, Rep., 530d. 45. McClain, Pythagorean Plato, 133. 46. Plato, Rep., 484a. 47. Plato, Rep., 621c–d.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Brann, Eva. The Music of the Republic: Essays on Socrates’ Conversations and Plato’s Writings. Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2004. Bremer, John. On Plato’s Polity. Houston: Institute of Philosophy, 1984. ———. Plato and the Founding of the Academy: Based on a Letter from Plato: Newly Discovered. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002. Burkert, Walter. Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism. Translated by Edwin L. Minar. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Calter, Paul. “The Platonic Solids.” July 25, 2013. http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/ math5.geometry/unit6/unit6.html. Campbell, Russell B. “Pythagorean Means.” October 15, 2012. http://www.cs.uni. edu/~campbell/stat/pyth.html. David, A. P. The Dance of the Muses: Choral Theory and Ancient Greek Poetics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

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Ferguson, Kitty. The Music of Pythagoras: How an Ancient Brotherhood Cracked the Code of the Universe and Lit the Path from Antiquity to Outer Space. New York: Walker, 2008. Heller-Roazen, Daniel. The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World. New York: Zone Books, 2011. Makeig, Scott. “Means, Meaning, and Music: Pythagoras, Archytas, and Plato.” ex Tempore 1 (1981). http://www.ex-tempore.org/means/means.htm. McClain, Ernest G. The Pythagorean Plato: Prelude to the Song Itself. York Beach, ME: Nicolas-Hays, 1978. Planinc, Zdravko. Plato’s Political Philosophy: Prudence in the Republic and the Laws. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Plato. Plato: Complete Works, Edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997.

Chapter Two

What the Theoretical Sciences Can Teach Us About Right Action Plato and Intellectual Virtues Eva María Cadavid Current literature in virtue epistemology investigates the similarities and differences between moral and intellectual virtues. Some philosophers address whether intellectual virtues are faculties or character traits, or both.1 Others consider whether the two are distinct, whether intellectual virtues are a subset of moral virtues, or whether there is some other connection between them.2 Some philosophers focus on Aristotle3 as the model for understanding intellectual virtues, while others have focused on Plato.4 For example, Julia Annas draws attention to the richness of the virtue ethics tradition in the Ancients and challenges contemporary virtue epistemologists to consider the import of theories other than Aristotle’s to current work.5 My contribution is much more humble in goals and scope, although I think it will support Annas’s view and perhaps offer some insight into intellectual virtues and how they facilitate moral virtue and virtuous actions. Annas argues that for the Ancients, epistemological virtues are not a subset of moral virtues but a separate type of virtue.6 I will argue that although Plato does see the two as separate types of virtue and, without knowledge, there may be virtuous action but no virtuous individuals, he does hold the view that epistemological virtues are necessary for the development of moral virtue. For Plato, sciences—specifically the mathematical sciences and their role in education and right action—are sufficient but not necessary for virtuous action, but they are indeed necessary for the development of virtue. Therefore, while the moral virtues an individual may acquire do depend on their precedent intellectual virtues on a Platonic framework, an individual’s moral actions do not. Instead, an action can meet the standards to be considered moral even if the source of the intelligence that ultimately guides the agent is external to the agent. I will first argue that intellectual virtues although sufficient are not necessary for moral action as seen in both the characters of Cephalus in Republic I and 19

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Socrates in Plato’s middle period dialogues.7 I will then present Plato’s account of philosophical nature and the intellectual virtues it exemplifies. I will turn to the role of mathematics in training such natures properly, which leads to acquiring moral knowledge and understanding, and thus acquiring moral virtue. WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW DOESN’T MAKE YOU A BAD PERSON (NECESSARILY) In the Meno, which is an inquiry into whether or not virtue is teachable, we see Plato renegotiating the Socrates from the early dialogues such as the Apology and the Euthyphro, as he develops his views in response to Socrates’s. One of the most memorable passages in the dialogue is when Meno challenges Socrates, who claims not to have knowledge of the virtues (or virtue itself for that matter), while still rejecting definitions as wrong all the while recognizing some instances of virtuous actions. How can that be? Although the original answer in the dialogue is the introduction of the theory of Recollection, Plato also explores the distinction between correct opinion and knowledge. In the last third of the dialogue, Meno and Socrates’s inquiry leads them to a discussion of whether morally good people8 must have knowledge to be virtuous examples and guide others properly. Their answer is that correct opinion is enough: SOCRATES: I mean this: we were right to agree that good men must be beneficent, and that this could not be otherwise. Is that not so?—Yes. SOCRATES: And that they will be beneficent if they give us correct guidance in our affairs. To this too we were right to agree?—Yes. SOCRATES: But that one cannot guide correctly if one does not have knowledge; to this our agreement is likely to be incorrect.—How do you mean? SOCRATES: I will tell you. A man who knew the way to Larissa, or anywhere else you like, and went there and guided others would surely lead them well and correctly?—Correctly. SOCRATES: What if someone had had a correct opinion as to which was the way but had not gone there nor indeed had knowledge of it, would he not also lead correctly?—Certainly. SOCRATES: As long as he has the right opinion about which the other has knowledge, he will not be a worse guide than the one who knows, as he has a true opinion, though not knowledge.—In no way worse. SOCRATES: So true opinion is in no way a worse guide to correct action than knowledge. It is this that we omitted in our investigation of the nature of virtue,



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when we said that only knowledge can lead to correct action, for true opinion can do so also.—So it seems.9

The conclusion seems to be that someone may act virtuously without having knowledge.10 In addition, Socrates allows that guiding correctly (guiding to correct or virtuous action) is possible absent knowledge if one has correct opinion. This passage above may be controversial since Meno and Socrates remain puzzled by why knowledge is more valuable than correct opinion, and the dialogue ends with Socrates saying that they have failed in their endeavor to analyze whether virtue is teachable. However, in the process they are adept at identifying at least some allegedly virtuous persons, although they conclude that virtue must not be knowledge since these virtuous people are unable to teach it to others, including their own children. A concern here is that some of the individuals identified by Socrates are Sophists, such as Protagoras. Others, such as Anytus’s father, Themistocles, and Aristides the Just, are either politicians or successful craftsmen. Perhaps virtue cannot be taught. Or, perhaps Meno and Socrates were too quick to label these people “virtuous.” Perhaps they were merely good. Perhaps they had right opinion, which would make them able to lead others without explaining why they were right. At Meno 93a5, Socrates tells Anytus, who wants to argue that all the Athenians are good people, that his concern isn’t about who is good at business but who is a good individual. Socrates queries, “I believe, Anytus, that there are many men here who are good at public affairs, and that there have been as many in the past, but have they been good teachers of their own virtue?” Meno and Socrates have already agreed that good men are beneficent, and if beneficent, they are able to guide correctly. Correct opinion leads to good actions. However, the addition of these examples at 93a suggests a hierarchy of supposed goodness.11 People with right opinion are able to instruct others well (provided others listen). But does that mean that those others share the right opinion? Or might they merely follow one who has right opinion? In other words, while right opinion might be sufficient to lead others to right action, it does not follow that everyone who performs right action has right opinion (let alone knowledge or virtue). Perhaps the “good Athenians” are neither good nor bad. Perhaps they are fortunate enough to follow the opinion of one who is right. But following another who possesses right opinion might yield the happy accident of behaving well even without having right opinion oneself. To continue with the analogy of a successful journey to Larissa, one might follow another who has right opinion of the route while developing no opinion of the way oneself. Perhaps they follow the leader and arrive safely, but they paid little to no attention as they journeyed. We have all had the

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experience of following someone from a point A to a point B only to realize that, had we to repeat the journey alone, we might still get lost. Unless one is carefully noting the twists and turns of the route, one is developing no opinion of how one gets to point B from point A (despite the fact that one has, in fact, done so). These Athenians may have the wrong opinion or, what is more likely, no opinion at all. Perhaps they behave rightly. But the fact that their sons do not suggests they lack what’s necessary to lead others to behave similarly. It might be that they have right opinion, but they lack the powers to persuade others to follow them. In other words, were others to follow them, they would behave well also; but these leaders are not cognitively capable of persuading those who wish to behave contrarily to follow their example. Perhaps they do not have right opinion, yet they follow another who does. While sufficient for these Athenians to behave rightly, it is insufficient to convince their sons to follow the same person. To summarize, there may be people with no opinion at all who happen to act well as a result of following others who have right opinion. Those with right opinion can lead others to behave well, despite the fact that they lack knowledge; however, we have no reason to conclude that those who can and would be sufficiently beneficent to guide others well would be successful in convincing others to follow. Therefore, while knowledge may not be necessary to act well and it might not even be necessary to lead others in acting well, there is room for it to have more value than mere correct opinion if it can further contribute to propagating good action. Socrates’s lack of moral knowledge seems to be no impediment for both correct action and leading others to it. However, unlike other Athenians, Socrates’s right behavior is integrated with a sincere care and concern for not being wrong. It is not merely the case that Socrates may have right opinion about actions; he takes care not to acquire any wrong opinions.12 Plato illustrates the relative importance of not acting poorly even when one is not certain of how to act well in his presentation of Cephalus in Republic. If C. D. C. Reeve is correct in his interpretation of Book I, then Cephalus is a man who behaves justly even though he does not have knowledge of Justice itself.13 Here again is an example of virtuous actions performed by a nonvirtuous agent. Cephalus is good at his business. He is older and is recognized as a moral man. Plato depicts him as a man whose piety leads him to sacrifice to the gods, speak the truth, and pay his debts. Although he does not have the correct definition of justice, as the exchange between Socrates and Polemarchus shows, his life is good. Indeed, Cephalus is following tradition and the poets, telling Socrates that “someone who knows that he has not been unjust has sweet good hope as his constant companion.”14 He quotes Pindar on living a just and pious life and is grateful for his wealth, which makes it



What the Theoretical Sciences Can Teach Us About Right Action 23

possible for a good person to live “[n]ot cheating someone even unintentionally, not lying to him, not owing a sacrifice to some god or money to a person, and as a result departing for that other place in fear.”15 Moreover, Cephalus is similar to Socrates in many ways: The problem Cephalus poses to Socrates—and so to Plato (1.8, 2.13, 3.3)—is that he is to some degree moderate, just pious, and wise without having studied philosophy or knowing what the virtues are. He is thus a sort of living counterexample to Socrates’ claim that virtue is that kind of knowledge (1.2).16 But the problem is sharper even than that. For, on Plato’s view, Cephalus’ life is not very different in character from Socrates’. . . . Both men have avoided injustice and impiety. Both face death with good hope (Apology 41c8–9; cf. 331a1–3). Neither knows what justice is (Apology 21b4–5).17

Plato depicts Socrates as behaving piously and justly18 even though he fails to have philosophical knowledge of piety or justice. What Socrates has that Cephalus does not is a philosophical nature. Cephalus is good natured and allows himself to be guided by tradition. Socrates, on the other hand, is guided by reason19 and his respect for argumentation and evidence. He displays the nature that Plato considers necessary for the philosopher. Socrates has the faculties that when fostered lead to knowledge and therefore moral virtue. His philosophical nature is intellectual virtue. THE TRAITS THAT WE MUST NURTURE Throughout Apology and Crito, Plato reminds us of Socrates’s respect for argumentation and for engaging the beliefs and reasons of his interlocutors. The Apology and the Crito present a Socrates that emphasizes rational argument over emotional appeals.20 It is a Socrates who respects and appeals to the rationality of his interlocutor as seen by his arguments to the jury21 and to Crito,22 and by the arguments he has the Laws present to him.23 These passages also show a Socrates who values education as a means to moral virtue and he explicitly states that in the Apology, “Now if I corrupt them [the youth] unwillingly, the law does not require you to bring people to court for such unwilling wrongdoing, but to get hold of them privately, to instruct them and exhort them; for clearly, if I learn better, I shall cease to do what I am doing unwillingly.”24 Plato’s characterization of Socrates is also one that exemplifies good memory, the willingness to listen to reason by following arguments where they lead, a search for a stable justification, and above all, a commitment to truth. It is this appeal to the rational capacities of others as well as honoring his own rational capacity, and the value given to truth that becomes

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the foundation for the philosophical nature that we see Plato highlighting in the middle period. In the Phaedo, Socrates describes the promising philosopher as the one who can focus on the Forms, the objects of thoughts, and is capable of abstracting them from the sensory and emotional component. The aim of such a person is discovering truth and gaining knowledge by following reason: Then he will do this most perfectly who approaches the object with thought alone, without associating any sight with his thought, or dragging in any sense perception with his reasoning, but who using pure thought alone, tries to track down each reality pure and by itself, freeing himself as far as possible from eyes and ears, and in a word, from the whole body, because the body confuses the soul and does not allow it to acquire truth and wisdom whenever it is associated with it.25

This passage highlights the importance of the mind and reason over the body and sense experience. It is about the intellect that we should care the most. A similar account is presented in the Symposium, where the philosophers are the ones “pregnant in soul”26 and their minds produce when they encounter the right kind of nature, noble and well-formed, for “such a man makes him instantly teem with ideas and arguments about virtue—the qualities a virtuous man should have and the customary activities in which he should engage; and so he tries to educate him.”27 Plato’s fullest discussion of philosophical nature is in the Republic, where Socrates and Glaucon discuss philosopher kings and queens in books V, VI, and VII. One of the first descriptions Plato gives us is “one who readily and willingly tries all kinds of learning, who turns gladly to learning and is insatiable for it.”28 The virtues of the mind are specified in Republic Book VI, where Socrates described them: “Is there any objection you can find, then, to a way of life that no one can adequately follow unless he’s by nature good at remembering, quick to learn, high-minded, graceful, and a friend and relative of truth, justice, courage, and moderation?”29 These passages and more in Republic V–VII give us a list of the intellectual virtues. These virtues are faculties that focus on either oneself or on how one treats other people. Among these virtues are faculties that, if the person develops them, are directed toward oneself. For example courage, love of truth, good memory, wit, love of wisdom, grace, perseverance, intellectual honesty, willingness to reason and to develop the ability to reason, the ability to go beyond sense-perceptibles, focus on precision, stability of character, an appreciation for hard work, and persistence.30 From Plato’s discussion on Republic, we can also infer intellectual virtues which are directed toward other people, for example, respect for the rationality of others, appeal to rationality,



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and understanding the importance to educate others, which is a development of the earlier discussion of the Apology and Meno. The philosophical nature is fostered and developed through a rigorous education outlined in Republic VII and also seen in Diotima’s speech in the Symposium.31 The goal of the education process is to shift the focus from the material, sense perceptible world to the world of Forms. The philosopher in training must begin to see the resemblances among particulars and begin to understand their generalizability until the focus moves from particulars, to groups, to abstracts, to Forms. One of the most important ways to do this, as outlined in the Republic, is to study mathematics. It is well known that Plato had great respect for mathematics and the mathematical sciences. There is evidence that he was in contact with Pythagoreans, he may have even known Philolaus, and corresponded with Archytas of Tarentum. As he founded his Academy, mathematics played a big part in the education system of philosophers and statesmen. His school was a fertile ground for the study and development of arithmetic and geometry.32 Plato’s own works show his interest and background in the mathematics of his time. The dialogues from the middle and late period are filled with mathematical examples, discussions, references, and some of his interlocutors are well-known mathematicians, for instance, Theaetetus. In fact, arithmetic, geometry, and other mathematical sciences are integrated into his account of knowledge and are presented as models of knowledge that the philosophers are to follow. Granted that mathematical knowledge is seen as faulty, or perhaps current mathematicians’ knowledge claims are the ones that fail,33 nonetheless, mathematics is a part of the education program that he puts forth. In fact, although mathematical sciences may not be “necessary” for being morally virtuous, they are necessary for the path to philosophy presented in the Republic. HOW MATHEMATICS CAN MAKE US BETTER PEOPLE Plato’s characterization of mathematicians in Meno and Republic suggests that Plato thought mathematicians have knowledge. In the Meno, the example given by Socrates of a good definition is of shape, a mathematical property. Similarly, when explaining to Meno how recollection works, Socrates relies again on a mathematical example. Mathematics plays a greater role in the Republic, where the Divided Line passage34 discusses how mathematicians and philosophers are the ones who attain knowledge rather than just opinion because they have access to truth. Mathematics is included in the education process in Republic VII as counterpart to physical training and as being foundational for music, poetry,

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and the crafts. When considering the best way to teach and train the future philosopher queens and kings, Socrates introduces the subjects that draw the soul away from sense-perceptibles and lead it to thinking abstractly. Glaucon and Socrates come to this conclusion through this exchange: GLAUCON: Of course. And yet, what subject is left that is separate from musical and physical training, and from the crafts? SOCRATES: Well, if we have nothing left beyond these, let’s consider one of those that touches all of them. GLAUCON: Which? SOCRATES: Why, for example, that common thing, the one that every type of craft, thought, and knowledge uses, and that is among the first things everyone has to learn. GLAUCON: Which one is that? SOCRATES: That inconsequential matter of distinguishing the number one, two, and three. In short, I mean number and calculation. Or isn’t it true that every type of craft and knowledge must share in them?35 ... SOCRATES: Then do you notice the same thing about this subject as I do? GLAUCON: What? SOCRATES: That in all likelihood it is one of the subjects we were looking for that naturally stimulate the understanding. But no one uses it correctly, as something that really is fitted in every way to draw us toward being.36

Socrates gives great credit to mathematics, developing the praise given in Book VI where the mathematical sciences belong on the intelligible side of the divided line and have dianoia even if not noesis. By placing mathematics in the intelligible side of the divided line passage and below the philosophical forms, Plato has made mathematics important. It is through knowing and thinking about the Equal and Equality that the philosopher can better understand Justice itself. It is by thinking about proportions and the golden ratio that the philosopher is prepared for Beauty. Mathematics prepares the philosopher for understanding ethical Forms. Plato’s education program in Book VII takes the person from numbers and calculations through plane geometry, solid geometry, harmonics, and astronomy. The mathematical part of the education program creates the foundations for continuing the education with dialectic and civil service.37 Plato’s focus on the importance and power of mathematics is also seen in the Meno’s demonstration of recollection. The slave boy passage38 shows Socrates using



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the new method of educating, turning the slave boy’s soul away from senseperceptibles towards the Forms. Geometry serves as a tool to move toward understanding: “Geometry compels the soul to study being.”39 Numbers and calculations are included in the Republic’s education program because they benefit all and even make those who are slow improve and become sharper.40 Geometry “is knowledge of what always is.”41 Although the slave boy in the Meno is working with the drawings in the sand, both he and Socrates know that they are really talking about doubling squares, any square. It is about being a square and what that entails. Socrates demands of the slave boy that he be invested in the inquiry and that he reason through the demonstration. He and the slave boy engage in an elenchus that requires to be respectful of reason, be courageous (at least the slave boy), be humble in their knowledge, and be willing to take the argument where it leads them. Plato requires that both Socrates and the slave boy demonstrate intellectual virtues as they search for truth and eventually knowledge. After all, knowledge entails being able to arrive at the same Truth at different times and questioned in different ways. Knowledge entails good memory, gracefulness, perseverance, and stability. Even when criticizing the mathematicians, Plato highlights the positive things about mathematics. The mathematicians may use images in their investigations but “their thought isn’t directed to them but to those other things that they are like. They make their claims for the sake of the square itself and the diagonal itself, not the diagonal they draw, and similarly with the others.”42 Mathematics fosters our intellectual virtues and Plato uses them to develop the philosopher. Plato’s criticism of the mathematicians at the end of book VI of Republic, that they assume the truth of the hypothesis instead of proving it, points to another way in which the mathematical sciences support the moral virtues. The actual criticism is that instead of proving hypotheses like the philosophers do, mathematicians postulate hypotheses and proceed to use them in proofs. Socrates tells Glaucon: that students of geometry, calculation, and the like hypothesize the odd and the even, the various figures, the three kinds of angles, and other things akin to these in each of their investigations, as if they knew them. They make these their hypotheses and don’t think it necessary to give any account of them, either to themselves or to others, as if they were clear to everyone. And going from these first principles through the remaining steps, they arrive in full agreement.43

This passage from the Republic is illustrated in the slave boy passage from the Meno. In the Meno, Socrates asks the slave boy at the start if he knows what a square figure is and they both agree on the figure drawn in the sand. They agree that the four sides are equal in length and that the lines intersecting the

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square through the middle are also equal. Neither offers additional proof for what is a square figure nor of its properties. But as has been argued recently by Benson,44 the concerns are with mathematicians rather than mathematics. If used properly, hypotheses not only foster our intellectual virtue and lead us to transcend beyond the sense perceptible, but they also allow us to do philosophy. They ground the dialectical method. The intellectual virtues involved are ones that involve responsibility to provide an account or proof, stress the importance of precision, respect for others’ rationality, the importance of coherence of beliefs, and models a methodology that leads to dialectic. The mathematician has a responsibility to test repeatedly and to lead others to find the truth and act mathematically (epistemologically) in a correct way. In conclusion, Plato’s transitional and middle period dialogues give us an account that explains how the historical Socrates could act virtuously yet fail to be virtuous since he did not have philosophical knowledge. Although the ideal is acting virtuously as a result of having understanding, Socrates exemplifies how having correct opinion and being epistemically virtuous also result in virtuous action. Moreover, Socrates had intellectual virtues that if carefully nurtured through the mathematical sciences can lead to philosophical knowledge and true virtue. Plato’s educational system as presented in the Republic emphasizes the importance of the mathematical sciences to the development of real goodness.45 NOTES 1.  John Turri, Mark Alfano, and John Greco present these two camps as virtue reliabilists (faculties) and virtue responsibilists (traits). See their entry “Virtue Epistemology,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ epistemology-virtue/. 2.  Jason Baehr, The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtue & Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 209. 3.  John Greco, “Two Kinds of Intellectual Virtue,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60, no. 1 (2000): 179–84. 4.  Linda T. Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 5.  Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 6.  Julia Annas, “The Structure of Virtue,” in Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, edited by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). 7.  This interpretation comes primarily from the Republic, Phaedo, Meno, Symposium, and Theaetetus, which I read as dialogues where Plato is responding to Socratic thought and developing his own views.



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8.  The focus seems to be people who are seen as morally good and who behave morally. 9. Plato, Meno, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 96e6–97c2. 10.  The end of the Meno is not a straightforward presentation of this view, but it leaves open the possibility of virtuous action without knowledge. Consider Socrates saying, “and that only these two things, true belief and knowledge, guide correctly, and that if a man possesses these he gives correct guidance. The things that turn out right by some chance are not due to human guidance, but where there is correct human guidance it is due to two things, true belief or knowledge” (Meno 99a1–5). 11.  I am indebted to Audrey Anton for the comment that there may be a hierarchy of goodness in Plato. Real goodness involves acting well and not acting poorly because one has understanding of the virtues. For Plato, philosophers should be striving for this ideal goodness. A lower level of goodness is the one exemplified by Socrates, where he acts well and does not act poorly because he has correct belief about the virtues. Moreover, he is committed to examining his beliefs, not developing wrong ones, and purging his belief system of ones he identifies as wrong ones. A third level of goodness involves acting well as a result of having a correct opinion about virtues. The lowest level of goodness involves acting well because one listens to and follows someone who has correct opinions. 12.  For an argument supporting the view that Socrates acts well and does not act wrongly because he has correct opinions, which he continually examines to purge from false belief, see Audrey Anton, “The Epistemological Benefits of Socrates’ Religious Experience,” Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy, “Ancient Epistemology” 19 (2016): 144–61. 13.  C. D. C. Reeve, Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). Reeve develops this in section 1.3 of his book. 14. Plato, Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve, in A Plato Reader: Eight Essential Dialogues, edited by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012), 331a1. 15. Plato, Republic, 331b1–2. 16. Reeve, Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic, 6. The references to sections of the book are Reeve’s. 17. Reeve, Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic, 6. 18.  The account of Socrates in the Apology is of an individual who has devoted his whole life to following the decree of the god and who makes references to his daemon, a divine entity whose role is the one of conscience. The account of justice that we get in the Crito is also one of piety. As Socrates argues to protect the laws of Athens, he is arguing in defense of the laws of Zeus since that would explain the description of the laws as the brothers of the laws of Hades. 19.  Socrates’s value of reason as a guiding factor can be seen in Apology in his commitment to the examination of the Athenians (21b–23a, 29d–30a), his focus on rational persuasion (35c), his refusal to keep philosophizing (37e–38a). Reason as a guiding factor is evident throughout the Crito, but two passages of note are 46b, where Socrates reminds Crito of the importance of rational reflection, and 50a–54c, where the Laws engage in rational persuasion of Socrates and Crito.

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20.  See Plato, Apology, 35c1–d5 and Plato, Crito, 48b2–c2. 21.  See Plato, Apology, 35c1–5. 22.  See Plato, Crito, 48e1–49a1. 23.  See Plato, Crito, 50a4–54c8. 24. Plato, Apology, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 26a1–6. 25. Plato, Phaedo, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 65e5–66a6. 26. Plato, Symposium, trans. Alexander Nehamas and Paul Woodruff, in Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 209a1. 27. Plato, Symposium, 209b6–209a1. 28. Plato, Republic, 475c6–7. 29. Plato, Republic, 487a2–5. 30.  See Plato, Republic, 535a–b. 31.  See Plato, Symposium, 201d1–212c3. 32.  See Fowler and Pritchard. D. H. Fowler, The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy: A New Reconstruction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) and Paul Pritchard, Plato’s Philosophy of Mathematics (Sankt Augustin, Germany: Academia Verlag, 1995). 33.  See Hugh Benson. “The Problem Is Not Mathematics, but Mathematicians: Plato and the Mathematicians Again,” Philosophia Mathematica 3, no. 20 (2012): 170–99. 34. Plato, Republic, 509d6–511e2. 35. Plato, Republic, 522b4–c6. 36. Plato, Republic, 522e5–523a1. 37. Plato, Republic, 537. 38. Plato, Meno, 82c–86c. 39. Plato, Republic, 526e3. 40. Plato, Republic, 526b. 41. Plato, Republic, 527b. 42. Plato, Republic, 510d. 43. Plato, Republic, 510c2–d1. 44.  Benson, “The Problem Is Not Mathematics, but Mathematicians,” 185–91. 45.  Early drafts of this chapter were presented at the 39th Value Inquiry Conference at Western Kentucky University and at the 31st annual joint meeting of the Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy in 2013. I am grateful for the comments and feedback from those in attendance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Annas, Julia. “The Structure of Virtue.” In Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, edited by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. ———. Intelligent Virtue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.



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Anton, Audrey. “The Epistemological Benefits of Socrates’ Religious Experience.” Logical Analysis and History of Philosophy, “Ancient Epistemology” 19 (2016): 144–61. Baehr, Jason. The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtue & Virtue Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Benson, Hugh. “The Problem Is Not Mathematics, but Mathematicians: Plato and the Mathematicians Again.” Philosophia Mathematica 3, no. 20 (2012): 170–99. Fowler, D. H. The Mathematics of Plato’s Academy: A New Reconstruction. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Greco, John. “Two Kinds of Intellectual Virtue.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60, no. 1 (2000): 179–84. Plato. Plato: Complete Works, edited by John M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. ———. A Plato Reader: Eight Essential Dialogues, edited by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2012. Pritchard, Paul. Plato’s Philosophy of Mathematics. Sankt Augustine, Germany: Academia Verlag. 1995. Reeve, C. D. C. Philosopher-Kings: The Argument of Plato’s Republic. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. Turri, John, Mark Alfano, and John Greco. “Virtue Epistemology.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-virtue/. Zagzebski, Linda T. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Chapter Three

How Practical Wisdom Depends on Moral Excellence Marcia Homiak

It is not possible to be . . . practically wise without moral excellence. —Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics 1144b31–32)

What is it to have a virtuous character? It seems obvious that a virtuous person has an intellectual excellence: she has good judgment about what to do. A brave person, for example, recognizes which dangers she ought to face, even at a risk to her own life. But it also seems obvious that being virtuous involves more than having good judgment about what to do. Someone who faces the dangers she ought to face, but does so because she enjoys taking risks is not courageous. Similarly, someone who recognizes that another needs help and does help, but does so grudgingly, in irritation, is not generous. In addition to having good judgment, a virtuous person acts, one might say, in the right spirit, with the right feelings and attitudes, in an unconflicted way. Moreover, these patterns of thinking and feeling are not unconnected: the virtues seem to involve deeply entrenched, integrated, organized, wide-ranging dispositions to reason and act, to respond and feel.1 This chapter explores the relationship between the intellectual excellence traditionally associated with the virtuous person (practical wisdom) and the virtuous person’s excellence of emotional response and attitude, broadly understood. I use Aristotle’s discussions as a guide. Aristotle was among the first to recognize that emotional response itself is complex, involving interconnected elements and capacities: perceptual, affective, and deliberative, in effect a mixture of non-cognitive and cognitive elements. Someone who is angry, for example, believes, judges, construes, perceives that he or someone or something he values has suffered some undeserved injury, and he may respond by retaliating against what he thinks has caused the injury.2 33

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This general characterization of emotional response as involving a cognitive component suggests there is a relationship between good judgment and excellent emotional response that gives priority to good judgment: one might think that if we can get the cognitive elements right (since they are necessary for most emotional responses), then the passional side of virtue will fall into place. Although Aristotle sometimes seems to endorse the priority of good judgment over excellent emotional response, I argue, rather, that we have a better chance of understanding the cognitive and emotional complexity of virtue if we give priority to the passional side and consider how practical wisdom depends on moral excellence. When Aristotle writes of this dependence at Nicomachean Ethics 1144b31–32, I interpret him to mean that wise deliberation depends upon the deliberator’s enjoying his life in the right way.3 Taking enjoyment in the right activities in the right way serves, I argue, to unify the virtues and its absence serves to unify the vices. I begin by exploring the assumed priority of correct belief, judgment, or deliberation over proper emotional response. I discuss two versions of this view, the first suggested by Aristotle in the Rhetoric and the second, using a more complex version of deliberation suggested by him via his interpreters, in the Nicomachean Ethics. I conclude that the second version can illustrate the deliberations of the practically wise person if we assume that the deliberator has deep values of the correct sort. Because valuing has the affective dimension of loving or enjoying, to say that the wise deliberator (and hence virtuous person) has deep values of the correct sort is to say that he enjoys the right activities in the right way. If this is correct as a reading of Aristotle, we need to look in his writings for some account of what those enjoyments are, how they are formed, and how they serve to distinguish virtuous from vicious persons. These accounts are the topics of the second section of this chapter. There I turn to Aristotle’s discussion of the proper self-lover, who enjoys his life in the right way. To do so, he must cooperate with others in activities that enable him to fully develop his human powers of thinking and reasoning. For Aristotle, the most important of these activities is political. Hence virtue requires a specific sociopolitical environment. This aspect of Aristotle’s view is usually dismissed by contemporary philosophers as unrealistic or misguided. In the final section of this chapter I defend Aristotle’s insistence that political activity is central to virtue. Indeed, it is a view we have good reason to accept. In concluding, I provide some empirical data that offer support for Aristotle’s view. CAN DELIBERATION SHAPE THE PASSIONS? As I indicated above, a commonly held characterization of emotional response suggests a strategy for shaping the passions. Aristotle discusses this



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strategy in the Rhetoric Book II. There he explains how various emotions (for example, fear, anger, pity, contempt, spite, insolence) are in part constituted by beliefs or appraisals. He then indicates how a good orator can exploit these connections to predictably elicit a particular emotional response from his audience. A good orator knows that people will tend to pity someone they believe has suffered some undeserved misfortune;4 that they will fear someone they come to believe is about to harm them if they cannot prevent it;5 and that they will feel warmly toward someone they believe has acted to benefit them for their own sakes.6 If the orator can direct an argument to the beliefs characteristic of specific emotions expressed at specific moments, then the chances are good for eliciting the proper passion or for silencing the desire to act that is typically associated with the improper passion. As Martha Nussbaum noted when discussing these and similar passages in the Rhetoric, “at least much or most of the time the belief does sufficiently cause the complex passion.”7 In the Rhetoric, Aristotle explains that a successful orator must work with “notions possessed by everybody,”8 not with specialized knowledge or with beliefs about what is good that ordinary persons would find strange or unacceptable (for example, Plato’s belief that we need knowledge of the Form of the Good in order to live well, or Socrates’s belief that we cannot be overcome by pleasure). The Rhetoric works on the assumption that ordinary people share important common beliefs about what is good and valuable. If it were not for this fact they would not be vulnerable to the orator’s arguments about what is good. The orator’s job is not to assess the truth of these beliefs but to make use of them. Given that the beliefs in question are held by persons of good and bad character alike, this strategy can be learned and used by anyone, whether virtuous or vicious, to alter others’ emotional responses on particular occasions. It is not surprising then that Aristotle does not mention this strategy in his ethical writings when he comments on the education of the emotions. To find a description of good deliberation that illuminates the emotional responses characteristic of the virtuous person, we need to look elsewhere. In the Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle tells us that the person of good moral judgment attends to the “particulars” of his situation without neglecting “universals.”9 In this way he conceptualizes the situation in the right way to find what is ethically important in it.10 How might someone do this? Drawing on others’ work on practical deliberation, Nancy Sherman provides an example.11 She aims to show how deliberation and perception combine so that we come to transform what she calls “general ends” into particular rational choices. I will begin with a brief summary of Sherman’s example. Then I will extend it to show its importance for our discussion. Sherman’s example is of someone (let’s call her Ann) who decides to give a considerable portion of her resources to a dear friend (call her Sarah) who is in dire financial straits. Sarah is destitute, having been unable to work for

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some time because of sudden illness, her savings now used up to cover medical expenses. Sarah’s two dependent children are destined for foster care if Sarah cannot show she can provide for them. If Ann provides the necessary financial help, this will require sacrifice on her part: she will need to work more years than she had anticipated, and she will need to put less into her own savings than she had planned. But Ann is healthy, with no dependents. Sherman describes Ann as moving back and forth between a consideration of her actual circumstances and a consideration of her “general ends.” By reflecting back and forth on these ends and the situation she faces, Ann engages in a process of re-describing and re-framing from which she ultimately sees “how and if she can be generous without financially crippling [her] self.”12 Summing up her discussion of this example, Sherman notes that the search for what is morally salient takes seriously the complicated context of Ann’s choices, yet that this search is “never free of appeal to more general or deeper values (albeit mutable) that explain why something is important. Short of that appeal, contextual salience works in a vacuum. It is little better than intuition.”13 Sherman does not explain what Ann’s deeper values might be. Yet unless we can make sense of them, we cannot adequately understand why Ann acted as she did, and what her actions may indicate about her character. So we need to add some detail to Sherman’s example. Sarah is said to be a very close friend. Ann must then care deeply about Sarah’s well-being, for Sarah’s sake, and Ann must have expressed this concern in various ways over time. But this is an urgent situation, asking more of Ann than she has given before. Ann also cares about her own future, and fears that generosity at this level might threaten her economic well-being. She must confront her fears about her future while determining how properly to express affection for her friend. To determine what to do, Ann must consider what is most important. At what cost to her economic well-being is it worth parting with her wealth? Has her concern for her economic well-being led her to undervalue her long-standing friendship with Sarah? Or to overlook important sources of comfort and joy in her life, such as sustained opportunities for meaningful work, her network of personal and social relationships, her continued pursuit of knowledge, her experience of beauty? Would they be endangered by her financial assistance to Sarah? If the deep values of Ann’s life are secure, Ann can be confident that what she does and how she lives will provide her with appropriate sources of joy and meaningfulness in her life, that her own life, in short, will be worth living. It is acceptance of, and confidence in, her deep values that enables her to assist Sarah willingly, with the affection and concern appropriate to their long-standing friendship. Ann appears to have at least the virtues of generosity, compassion, and bravery, all of which are grounded in her view of what is most valuable.



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In effect, the urgency of Ann’s situation, her need to confront her fears, uncertainties, and affections, has led her to consider not only what she ought to do, but who she is, what matters most to her. This examination is comparative.14 For to know the value of economic security is to know its value in relation to other “central human goods,” such as friendship and social life, material comfort, and meaningful work.15 Because Ann’s deliberations now range widely over these goods, her reflections are characteristic of Aristotle’s practically wise person, who deliberates about “what is good and expedient for himself, not in some particular respects . . . but about what sorts of thing conduce to the good life in general.”16 Our example has suggested that the need to face a critical situation can show us what we deeply value and thus what sort of persons we are. This should be as true of persons who lack virtue as it is of those with virtuous traits of character. Consider now Alice, a university professor, who has some version of Aristotle’s vice of irascibility. Alice is prone to anger, too often, in the wrong circumstances, toward the wrong persons.17 Alice is angry when she perceives others to be unfairly taking advantage of her or to be challenging her without good reason (a student who asks to take an exam at a later time; a colleague who differs with her over how to restructure the department’s curriculum). When her colleagues are appointed to important committees for which she thinks she is ideally suited, she feels insulted. When others receive university awards, she feels slighted. In short, she is prone to seeing examples of unjustifiable injury, insult, indifference, or slight where none of her colleagues would reasonably find it. Yet Alice keeps her anger hidden, realizing that if she did not, her behavior might endanger her position at the university. That she strives to keep her anger under control indicates that she has some self-knowledge. She recognizes, on some level, that she perceives insults and slights where they do not exist. At the same time, she may notice that she reads others’ politeness and social grace as intended praise of her. She may begin to wonder why she is so desirous of others’ positive recognition and praise. If circumstances become critical and Alice’s relations with her colleagues deteriorate, Alice may realize that her high estimation of the value of others’ approval is a reflection of a negative attitude she has of herself.18 She may realize that she does not feel successful at what she does, and that her selfdoubt creates a strong need for others’ approval. To come to this realization would take considerable self-examination on Alice’s part, for it is not easy to recognize patterns in one’s emotional tendencies and to reach some understanding of why they take the form they do. If Alice wanted to alter these tendencies, she would have to think about her evaluative center, about what would make her life valuable and worth living such that she does not have

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to depend so heavily on others’ opinions. Like Ann in our previous example, Alice would have to deliberate about the “sorts of things that conduce to the good life in general.” Our discussion has brought us to this point. We have reason to think that an individual’s patterns of passional response (e.g., fear, affection, confidence, anger, envy) depend on estimations of what she takes to be worthwhile and valuable. These estimations are relative to other judgments of value. If circumstances become especially difficult and push the individual far enough in her deliberations, she will be led to a consideration of her deep values, her sense of what grounds (or should ground) the enjoyment she takes (or hopes to take) in how her life goes and the confidence she has (or hopes to have) to continue. This sort of reflection, performed well by the practically wise person, depends on the deliberator’s valuing her life in the right way. As our examples of Ann and Alice have shown, “valuing” in these cases is not simply a matter of having a true or false estimation of what is valuable. Valuing has a non-cognitive dimension that includes loving or enjoying, understood broadly.19 We expect morally virtuous people to be in a psychological state where Alice is not and where Ann might be. Alice’s irascibility is, at bottom, a result of her not having appropriate sources of satisfaction and confidence in her life. Ann’s life, on the other hand, we imagined to have such sources. We supposed she likes herself and enjoys her life. HOW TO ENJOY ONE’S LIFE PROPERLY If practical deliberation done well depends on the deliberator’s valuing her life in the right way, then Aristotle has reason to claim that one cannot be practically wise without moral excellence. If this interpretation of what Aristotle has in mind is correct, then we should expect him to say what proper deep values are and how they are formed. Can Aristotle explain what is involved in enjoying one’s life as one should? I argue that Aristotle provides answers to these questions in his discussions of specific virtues and vices in Nicomachean Ethics III–IV, of friendship in Nicomachean Ethics IX, and of the value of political activity in the Politics. First, consider the portrayals of virtuous and vicious types in Nicomachean Ethics III–IV. Aristotle explicitly associates several vices with slavery. This is a sign that persons with these character traits do not enjoy their lives in the right way. These vices include intemperance,20 vulgar buffoonery,21 and inirascibility. In describing the inirascible person, Aristotle writes that “willingness to accept insults to oneself and to overlook insults to one’s family and friends is slavish.”22 Other morally vicious types act in ways typical of slaves,



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even though Aristotle does not explicitly call them slavish. These include cowards, reckless persons, obsequious flatterers, prodigal persons, mock modest, and boastful persons. Because these people don’t like themselves in the right way, they don’t have the confidence and determination to act in ways befitting a human being. Cowards, for example, fear everything, which shows that they do not have any strong emotional attachments, even to themselves.23 For if they did, they would be willing to risk danger to safeguard what they care about. Reckless persons also lack strong emotional attachments, which explains why they are willing to sell their lives for trifling gains.24 Sometimes Aristotle makes an individual’s underlying negative self-assessment clear by noting that what he enjoys is too easy (and hence suitable for slaves, who lack the full complement of human rational powers). Thus intemperate people are characterized as liking physical sensations.25 In other cases, vicious people rely, as Alice tried unsuccessfully to do, on others’ actions to bring them the enjoyment they don’t find in what they themselves can do. So boastful and mock modest people seek the good opinion of others.26 The flatterer wants to improve his position by gaining the favor of more privileged persons.27 Vain people seek honor, but are not worthy of it.28 Other vicious types seem to enjoy their lives, but, in Aristotle’s view, not in the right way. They like most to accumulate material wealth or to have power over others. As a result, they disregard others’ views and fail as cooperative partners. Cantankerous and churlish persons, for example, are contemptuous of others’ opinions.29 One type of unjust person suffers from pleonexia, the desire to have more at others’ expense. He believes he is superior to others and has contempt for his fellow citizens.30 Another type of unjust person fails to treat his fellow citizens fairly, disregarding their rights and interests, whether rich or poor.31 The vice of insensibility is oddly similar. The insensible person does not sufficiently enjoy the appetitive pleasures and, by implication, the social occasions they promote.32 His lack of interest suggests he finds these occasions boring, not worth his time. How, then, does the virtuous person enjoy his life, so that he is not slavish and does not endanger good social relations with others? Aristotle’s answer is in Book IX. Aristotle writes that the decent person enjoys most the activities that actualize his realized abilities.33 These are the activities that express our characteristic human powers—our abilities to think, to know, to understand, and to figure things out on the basis of reason.34 They are our “existence.” That is, they are most fundamentally who we are.35 When we love these activities most, we are proper lovers of self. Vicious people, then, love something else more. Aristotle puts this point by saying they love another part of themselves, the non-rational part.36 This contrast in what is loved most helps us to understand specific vices. Intemperate people love most the experience

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of physical sensation. Flatterers and vain people love most honor and praise from others. Cowards and reckless persons love nothing deeply. Alice, in our earlier example, found herself without a stable source of positive enjoyment. If considered at the extreme, she is like Aristotle’s self-conscious vicious person, who “shrink[s]” from life, finding nothing in himself to love.37 These discussions show that there is a unity to both virtue and vice. At their evaluative centers, virtuous and vicious people have different loves or enjoyments. The virtuous person enjoys thinking and reasoning more, and the vicious person enjoys them less, than the pursuit and accumulation of material wealth, than being in positions of power or influence, than a life of physical pleasures, or than the pleasures of fame. Suppose someone loves his life (himself) as he should. What sort of life will he live? Many different kinds of life seem possible, because we can enjoy the expression of our realized rational powers in a wide variety of different activities. We can be poets, plumbers, violinists, physicists, gardeners, political activists, and many more. But don’t many poets, plumbers, political activists, and other capable persons have distorted values, even if they enjoy writing, solving mechanical problems, and organizing? Aristotle can reply by explaining that proper self-love is a collective achievement, not an individual one. He writes that an individual’s activity is more continuous when it takes place “with others and towards others.”38 Aristotle is taken to mean that the grounds for our enjoyment in our lives are expanded and more fully developed when we cooperate with others to achieve a shared aim.39 In shared cooperative activity, individuals often play different roles in achieving the group’s aim. We assume that each person acts responsibly and fairly in performing his role, and each performs well, relative to his level of developing or developed ability. Shared activity can characterize many different groups: families, schools, religious associations, political assemblies, sports teams, musical groups, professional associations, workplaces, and so on. In cooperative activity, others share our commitment to the goal that gives point to the activity in which we are engaged. Moreover, because individuals participate in different ways, each can participate indirectly, through others’ activity, even when not directly involved in what others are doing. When others act, it is as though we are acting, too. In these ways the conception of who we are is expanded, and thus the expression of our powers is made more continuous and more stable. Others’ activities become our own. Shared activity affects us in another way as well. We may have joined a cooperative venture for self-interested reasons. (Think of neighbors who clear away a vacant lot to plant a vegetable garden.) As individuals do their parts and demonstrate their developed abilities, otherdirected feelings emerge. We come to enjoy the expression of our partners’



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realized abilities, and we come to care about them for their own sakes. For Aristotle, feelings of friendship are caused to form; they are not chosen. We come to care about our cooperative partners for their own sakes.40 Aristotle takes these points further. The most important shared activity is political.41 In Aristotle’s ideal city, the major portion of each (male) citizen’s adult life is spent in political activity, for example, in the citizen Assembly, as a member of juries, as a city official.42 Citizens take turns ruling and being ruled. They deliberate “for the sake of a good life”43 and thus make overarching decisions about how more specific activities are to take place.44 Their deliberations are comprehensive in scope and comparative in nature. They decide the relative value of the city’s resources and of ways to organize and distribute them (for example, education should be public, land should be distributed to all but not equally, common meals and cultural festivals should be made an ongoing part of city life).45 In deciding what is best for the city, they engage in the deliberation characteristic of the practically wise person, now not at the personal level (as in our examples of Ann and Alice), but at the most generalized and generalizable level. Because their deliberations are directive, prescriptive, and concern how to achieve the well-being of the city, Aristotle can claim that practical wisdom can only be possessed by someone who rules, not by someone who is ruled by another.46 The city’s arrangements are the citizens’ handiwork. Like poets who love their poems, citizens come to love the institutions of their city.47 Because their institutions express who the citizens are, we would expect citizens to respond bravely to obstacles and threats. Their enjoyment in the city’s life gives them a confidence that is not easily upset. Moreover, because citizens have the material resources to live decently and civic institutions foster trust, there is no cause for envy among some or for jealous guarding of resources among others. A sense of friendship pervades the city. Citizens value themselves and each other for the right reasons: not for wealth or power, but as equal participants in their community’s cultural traditions and as equal practical deliberators.48 SOME WORRIES AND REPLIES In this chapter I have argued that the passional responses of the virtuous person reflect her estimations of what she takes to be worthwhile and valuable. These estimations ultimately depend on what I have called the evaluative center of the virtuous person’s life—on her having the proper grounding for the enjoyment she takes in her life and for her confidence in her future. The intellectual excellence of the practically wise person works with this grounding in

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place. I have argued that Aristotle’s writings provide what we had hoped to find—a description of what this evaluative center looks like, roughly how one acquires it, and how it serves to unify the virtues and its absence to unify the vices. I ended with Aristotle’s claim that to have and sustain this evaluative center, to realize one’s powers fully, a wider socio-political environment is necessary. In Aristotle’s view, virtue is possible only within a community in which there is a system of public education, roughly equal property ownership, subsidized leisure activities, and the expectation of meaningful political participation on the part of each citizen. There are reasons not to agree with Aristotle that virtue requires this wider socio-political environment. First, the features of Aristotle’s city I have pointed to may be inextricably connected to other, deeply objectionable features of that city (for example, the acceptance of slavery, the denigration of manual labor, the inferior political status of women). Aristotle thought that it was not possible for some to spend most of their time at politics and at leisure unless others did the work of farming, building, trading, craft production, and domestic labor. And even if the admirable and objectionable features of Aristotle’s city are not inextricably connected,49 we may question why democratic political participation is required in order to realize one’s powers fully and to become a virtuous person. In the minds of many modern political theorists, sound political institutions ought not promote particular ways of life; nor should they engage in projects of moral education.50 These tasks are better left to parents and early role models. Finally, even if we grant that socio-political institutions can influence citizens’ motivations, aims, and traits of character for the better, we may wonder if anything close to Aristotle’s ideal is possible now. For if modern socio-political institutions continue to create large disparities in the ownership of property and wealth, as is true in the United States today, then the degree to which ordinary persons can participate meaningfully in political deliberation and decision-making is seriously undermined and virtue, in Aristotle’s view, is not possible. We need not be so pessimistic. First, it is important to remember why Aristotle thought that active political participation is necessary for our development as virtuous persons. Only this kind of activity, he thought, involves comprehensive, overarching deliberation about the common good. The citizens of his ideal city discussed issues of war and peace, taxation, the distribution of land, water and food supply, the construction of public buildings, establishment of cultural activities, and more. Aristotle thought that manual laborers, even if they were skilled workers, could not engage in such deliberation because they were always “at another’s beck and call.”51 They were, in effect, ruled by others. Their economic dependence on others, he thought, limited their ability to think and reason beyond questions of immediate eco-



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nomic survival. He could not imagine that manual labor could be reorganized to promote wider thought. John Stuart Mill saw what Aristotle did not see. Recognizing that workers’ economic dependence on employers impedes individuals’ moral character, Mill proposed that work be re-organized so that laborers “work with or for one another in relations not involving dependence.”52 He wrote admiringly of small workers’ cooperatives in France where individual laborers were both skilled craftspersons and, more important, equal participants in decisionmaking about how the cooperative is to function, how work is to be done, who is to manage it, for how long, and so on. When these changes are in place, Mill argued, each worker’s daily occupation becomes “a school of the social sympathies and the practical intelligence.”53 If these cooperatives were to multiply, Mill thought they would realize “the best aspirations of the democratic spirit, by putting an end to the divisions of society into the industrious and the idle, and effacing all social distinctions but those fairly earned by personal services and exertions.”54 Mill’s worker-managed firms have, unfortunately, not multiplied. And labor unions in the United States, which historically functioned to promote political discussion and activism, have lost the strength they had in the middle of the twentieth century. But some countries in western Europe have vibrant labor movements, and their activism has helped to promote changes in socioeconomic policy that, when implemented, improve the quality of life for all workers. It is not surprising that many western European countries have, compared to the United States, shorter work weeks, legally mandated paid vacations, generous parental and work leave policies, subsidized child care and elder care, educational paid leave to workers who want more schooling, free university education, free health care, and secure pensions.55 These policies, taken together, reduce income inequality and create opportunities for the upgrading of skills and for life-long learning. In so doing, they make it possible for all citizens to enjoy most the expression of their human powers as cooperative partners in a community’s cultural and political life, and thus they make it possible for citizens to be virtuous. This goal, fundamentally Aristotelian, is one I hope I have shown we have good reason to embrace.56 NOTES 1.  See, for example, the extended discussions in N. J. H. Dent, The Moral Psychology of the Virtues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), passim; and Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), chaps. 4–7.

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The notion that virtues are integrated, organized, wide-ranging dispositions has recently been subjected to intense criticism. See, for example, Gilbert Harman, “The Nonexistence of Character Traits,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 223–26; John Doris, Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Peter Vranas, “The Indeterminacy Paradox: Character Evaluations and Human Psychology,” Nous 39 (2005): 1–42. For replies, see Joel Kupperman, “The Indispensability of Character,” Philosophy 76 (2001): 239–50; Rachana Kamtekar, “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character,” Ethics 114 (2004): 458–91; and J. Sabini and M. Silver, “Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued,” Ethics 115 (2005): 535–62. 2. For more detailed discussion of the components of emotion, especially the cognitive element, see Cheshire Calhoun, “Cognitive Emotions?” in What Is an Emotion? ed. C. Calhoun and R. Solomon (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 327–41; Lester Hunt, Character and Culture (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 119–35; and Nancy Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 52–74. 3. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. W. R. Ross, rev. J. O. Urmson. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Cited as NE in subsequent notes. 4.  Rhetoric 1385b13–15, trans. R. Rhys Roberts, in The Complete Works of Aristotle. 5.  Rhetoric 1382b30–83a1. 6.  Rhetoric 1381a13–14. 7.  Martha Nussbaum, “Aristotle on Emotions and Rational Persuasion,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, ed. A. O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 310–11. 8.  Rhetoric 1355a28. 9.  NE 1141b14–15. 10.  NE 1142a25–30; 1144a29–30. 11. Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, 270–72. Sherman mentions her indebtedness to Henry Richardson, Practical Reasoning About Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and Jonathan Dancy, Moral Reasons (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993). 12. Sherman, Making a Necessity of Virtue, 272. 13. Ibid. 14. For detailed discussion of the comparative nature of value judgments, see Dent, The Moral Psychology of the Virtues, 154–67; and Susan Wolf, “Moral Psychology and the Unity of the Virtues,” Ratio 20 (2007): 145–67. 15.  For this phrasing, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 373. 16.  NE 1140a26–28. 17.  NE 1126a8–11. 18.  For more detailed discussion of this point, see Dent, The Moral Psychology of the Virtues, 157–58.



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19.  For insightful discussion of the non-cognitive dimension of valuing, see C. A. Campbell, “Moral and Non-Moral Values: A Study in the First Principles of Axiology,” Mind 44, no. 175 (1935): 273–99. 20.  NE 1095b19, 1118a25. 21.  NE 1128a21. 22.  NE 1126a7–8. 23.  NE 1116a2–4. 24.  NE 1117b18–20. 25.  NE 1118a32–33. 26.  NE 1127a20-23; b3–4. 27.  NE 1127a7–9. 28.  NE 1125a27–31. 29.  NE 1126b16, 1126a19. 30.  NE 1129a32–33. 31.  NE 1129b25–1130a10. 32.  NE 1119a5–11. 33.  NE 1168a14–15; 1168b35–1169a3. 34.  I follow Richard Kraut in thinking that practical and theoretical reasoning are not different in kind and that Aristotle does not imagine individuals must be philosophers in order to live well. See Kraut’s Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989) and his Aristotle: Political Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 35.  NE 1168a5–9; 1168b35–1169a3. 36.  NE 1168b21. 37.  NE 1166b14, b25–26. 38.  NE 1170a6. 39.  Here I am indebted to John M. Cooper’s insightful discussion of the psychological effects of shared cooperative activity. See his “Aristotle on Friendship,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. A. O. Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 301–40. See also Rawls, A Theory of Justice, section 79, for a discussion of the related notion of “social unions.” 40. For detailed discussion of the causal formation of friendship, see Cooper, “Aristotle on Friendship.” 41.  NE 1141b23–24. 42.  Politics 1329a2–34, trans. B. Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle. 43.  Politics 1280a31–32. 44.  NE 1094a27. 45. On land distribution, see Politics VII.10; on common meals, see Politics VII.10, 12; on ruling, see Politics VII.14. 46.  Politics 1277b25–30. For an extended discussion of this passage, see Malcolm Schofield, “Aristotle’s Political Ethics,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. R. Kraut (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 318–21. 47.  NE 1141b24–29. 48.  Politics 1325b14–32, NE 1137a14–17.

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49.  For an argument that they are not so connected, see my “Feminism and Aristotle’s Rational Ideal,” in A Mind of One’s Own, ed. L. Antony and C. Witt, 2nd ed. (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002), 3–20. 50. See, for example, John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 179–80; and Ronald Dworkin, A Matter of Principle (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 191. 51.  Rhetoric 1367a32–33. 52.  John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 2 vols. (London: Colonial Press, 1991), Book IV, chap. 7, section 4. Arabic numerals occurring alone in subsequent footnotes indicate sections. 53. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, 6. 54. Ibid. 55.  For more detailed discussion of the contrast in socio-economic policies affecting working life in the United States and western Europe, see John de Graaf, ed., Take Back Your Time (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2003), 202–10; Robert Kuttner, “The Copenhagen Consensus: Reading Adam Smith in Denmark,” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 2 (2008); and Erik Olin Wright and Joel Rogers, American Society (New York: W. W. Norton, 2011), chap. 2. 56.  Earlier versions of this chapter were read at a conference on Virtue, Vice, and Character, University of Western Kentucky, 2013, and at the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy, Athens, Greece, 2013. I am grateful to conference participants, and to Barbara Herman, for helpful advice and comments.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. The Complete Works of Aristotle. Ed. J. Barnes, vol. 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Calhoun, Cheshire. “Cognitive Emotions?” In What Is an Emotion?, edited by C. Calhoun and R. Solomon, 327–41. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Campbell, C. A. “Moral and Non-Moral Values: A Study in the First Principles of Axiology.” Mind 44, no. 175 (1935): 273–99. Cooper, John M. “Aristotle on Friendship.” In Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, edited by A. O. Rorty, 301–34. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Dancy, Jonathan. Moral Reasons. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993. de Graaf, John, ed. Take Back Your Time. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2003. Dent, N. J. H. The Moral Psychology of the Virtues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Doris, John. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Dworkin, Ronald. A Matter of Principle. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. Harman, Gilbert. “The Nonexistence of Character Traits.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (2000): 223–26.



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Homiak, Marcia. “Feminism and Aristotle’s Rational Ideal.” In A Mind of One’s Own, edited by L. Antony and C. Witt, 2nd ed., 3–20. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2002. Hunt, Lester. Character and Culture. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997. Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Kamtekar, Rachana. “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character.” Ethics 114 (2004): 458–91. Kraut, Richard. Aristotle on the Human Good. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989. ———. Aristotle: Political Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Kupperman, Joel. “The Indispensability of Character.” Philosophy 76 (2001): 239–50. Kuttner, Robert. “The Copenhagen Consensus: Reading Adam Smith in Denmark.” Foreign Affairs 87, no. 2 (2008): 78–94. Mill, John Stuart. Principles of Political Economy. 2 vols. London: Colonial Press, 1991. Nussbaum, Martha. “Aristotle on Emotions and Rational Persuasion.” In Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, edited by A. O. Rorty, 310–11. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Rawls, John. Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. ———. A Theory of Justice. Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Richardson, Henry. Practical Reasoning about Ends. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Sabini, J., and M. Silver, “Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued.” Ethics 115 (2005): 535–62. Schofield, Malcolm. “Aristotle’s Political Ethics.” In The Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, edited by R. Kraut. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Sherman, Nancy. Making a Necessity of Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Vranas, Peter. “The Indeterminacy Paradox: Character Evaluations and Human Psychology.” Nous 39 (2005): 1–42. Wolf, Susan. “Moral Psychology and the Unity of the Virtues.” Ratio 20 (2007): 145–67. Wright, Erik Olin, and Joel Rogers. American Society. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.

Chapter Four

Practical Wisdom and Happiness as a Political Achievement in Aristotle C. D. C. Reeve

Metaphysics Zeta (XII) has been described as the Mount Everest of Aristotle’s works. If there is a comparable peak in his ethical and political works, it is, I suppose, the texts in which the relationship between the practical political life and the contemplative life, and its implications for the nature of Aristotelian happiness, are characterized. This is the mountain I want to try to climb. In Plato’s Symposium Socrates agrees with Diotima that “those who are happy are happy through possessing good things,”1 and that “happiness” is the name for whatever it is that puts a stop to the question: Why do you want or wish for that? Once I say, “Because it will make me happy,” we supposedly know all there is to know. “Happiness” is thus the name of the final practical end. Everyone agrees to that. What good things the name applies to, however, is hotly disputed, as Aristotle tells us: About its name, most people are pretty much agreed, since both ordinary people and sophisticated ones say it is “happiness” and suppose that living well and doing well are the same as being happy. Concerning happiness, however, and what it is, they are in dispute, and ordinary people do not give the same answer as wise ones. For ordinary people think it is one of the plainly evident things, such as pleasure or wealth or honor—some taking it to be one thing, others another.2

Indeed to the question of how long we would need to possess the relevant good things in order to be happy Diotima and Aristotle themselves give quite different answers—answers that merit a bit of exploration. Diotima says: “There is nothing else that people are in love with except what is good. . . . But oughtn’t we to add that what they love includes their possessing what is good? . . . And . . . not only possessing it, but always possessing it? . . . In that case . . . we can sum up by saying that love is of 49

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permanent possession of what is good.”3 The ultimate object of our wishes and desires in her view, then, involves eternal life, since in wishing to be happy—in wishing good things to be ours forever—we are wishing to be around forever to possess them. Having established in the famous ergon or function argument that the good in which happiness consists is “activity of the soul in accord with virtue and, if there are more virtues than one, in accord with the best and most complete,” Aristotle goes on to add, “furthermore, in a complete life (bios teleios), for one swallow does not make a spring, nor does one day. Nor, similarly, does one day or a short time make someone blessed and happy.”4 It is worthy of note that happiness and the happy life are not the same. Happiness is “what, on its own, makes a life choiceworthy and lacking in nothing,”5 that is, it is what makes a life—a complete life—be a happy one. Now sometimes a complete life seems to be one that reaches normal life expectancy: “It is correctly said among the majority that a life’s happiness should be judged in its longest time, since what is complete should exist in a complete time and a complete human being.”6 But this does not seem to be what a complete life is in the Nicomachean Ethics: It is true of an excellent person too that he does many actions for the sake of his friends and his fatherland, even dying for them if need be. For he will give up wealth, honors, and fought-about goods generally, in keeping for himself what is noble. For he will choose intense pleasure for a short time over weak pleasure for a long one; living life nobly for a year over many years lived in random fashion; and a single noble and great action over many small ones. This is presumably what happens with those who die for others.7

The sort of life (bios) to which a natural life expectancy belongs, in fact, is a biological life—elephants and plants also have life expectancies in this sense. An individual human being’s life, however, is an agentive life—the sort that involves planning and deliberate choice. (Children, remember, cannot be happy, because they have no share in such choice.) And an agentive life, Aristotle is implying, can be happy—can be choiceworthy and in need of nothing—even if it is not of normal biological length, provided it contains sufficiently good things for a time sufficiently suited, as it were, to contain them. Knowing all this, any rational agent eager to ensure a happy life for himself will want to know at least two things: first, what good things happiness consists in, and, second, how to arrange for himself a life suited to containing enough of them over a long enough time to count as happy. We would expect, then, that he would begin his task by assembling a reasonably complete list of good things—or the various sorts of such. And this is how we see Aristotle proceeding:



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To tell the truth, as regards one way of dividing them, at any rate, since there are three groups—external goods, goods in the body, and goods in the soul—no one would dispute that all of them must belong to those who are blessedly happy (makarios). For no one would say that someone is blessedly happy who has no shred of courage, temperance, justice, or practical wisdom, but is afraid of the flies buzzing around him, stops at nothing, no matter how extreme, when he has an appetite to eat or drink, betrays his dearest friends for a pittance, and has a mind as foolish and deluded as a child’s or a madman’s.8

Notice the point on which there is universal agreement: all these good things must belong to those who are blessedly happy. Where disagreement arises is not about what the good things are, but rather about what I shall call their impact on the happiness of a life. Aristotle continues: “But while these claims are ones that almost everyone would agree with, people disagree about their quantity and their relative superiority. For they consider any amount of virtue, however small, to be sufficient, whereas of wealth, property, power, reputation, and the like they seek unlimited (eis apeiron) superiority (huperbolên).”9 But Aristotle does not agree with what most people think: We, however, will say to them that it is easy to become convinced of these things even from the facts themselves. For we see that the virtues are not acquired and safeguarded by means of external goods, but rather it is the other way around, and a happy life for human beings, whether it consists in enjoyment or virtue or both, is possessed by those who have cultivated their characters and minds to a superior degree (eis huperbolê), but have been moderate in their acquisition of external goods, rather than by those who have acquired more of the latter than they can possibly use, but are deficient in the former. But to those who investigate the matter on the basis of argument, the point is also easily seen. For external goods have a limit, just like any instrument, and everything useful is useful for something, and in excess must either harm or bring no benefit to their possessors. Where each of the goods of the soul is concerned, by contrast, the more superior (huperballê[i]) it is, the more useful it is—if these goods too should be thought of not only as noble but also as useful.10

Notice that none of this unseats the previously agreed conclusion that some amount of all three sorts of goods—of soul, of body, and those that are external—are needed for happiness. It simply assigns them different impacts, different levels of importance. Then, after a brief appeal to the superiority of the soul to the body, comes Aristotle’s conclusion: Let us take it as agreed, then, that each person has just as much happiness as he has virtue, practical wisdom, and action done in accordance with them. We may use the [primary] god as evidence of this. For he is happy and blessedly so, not because of any external goods but because of himself and by being in his nature

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of a certain quality. This is also why good luck and happiness are necessarily different. For chance or luck are the cause of the goods external to the soul, but no one is just or temperate by luck or because of luck.11

The question is, what exactly does this conclusion tell us? Well, it tells us that external goods do have some degree of impact on happiness. Aristotle remarks: All the same, it [virtuous activity] apparently needs external goods to be added, as we said, since it is impossible or not easy to do noble actions without supplies. For just as we perform many actions by means of instruments, we perform many by means of friends, wealth, and political power. Then again there are some whose deprivation disfigures blessedness, such as good breeding, good children, and noble looks. For we scarcely have the stamp of happiness if we are extremely ugly in appearance, ill-bred, living a solitary life, or childless, and have it even less, presumably, if our children or friends are totally bad or were good but have died.12

But though the deprivation of external goods—the inadequacy of their supply—disfigures blessedness (the highest level of happiness), it can never make us positively wretched, it can never make us the polar opposite of happy: If, however, it is activities that control living, as we said, no blessed person will ever become wretched, since he will never do hateful or base actions. For a truly good and practically-wise person, we think, will bear what luck brings graciously and, making use of the resources at hand, will always do the noblest actions, just as a good general makes the best uses in warfare of the army he has and a good shoemaker makes the best shoes out of the hides he has been given, and the same way with all other craftsmen. If this is so, however, a happy person will never become wretched— nor blessed certainly—if he runs up against luck like Priam’s.13

Overall, then, we can look at the impact of external goods as being fixed initially by two facts. One, they cannot in any amount make us wretched. Two, beyond an adequate or moderate amount, they cannot increase our happiness. Next, let us add a further fact, which is to some extent implicit in what we have already seen and is completely explicit in the following texts: The goods people fight over and believe to be the greatest—honor, wealth, bodily virtues, strokes of good luck, and powers [= external goods and goods of the body]—are good things by nature, but may be harmful to some people because of the states they are in. For neither those without practical wisdom (tôn aphrôn), nor the unjust, nor the intemperate would get any benefit (onêtheiê)

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from the use of these, any more than an invalid from the food of a healthy person.14

and, Neither wealth nor strength nor beauty is good for those who are badly disposed in things related to the soul. Instead, the more superior the possession of these [bodily and external] conditions, the more, and the more often, the harm the one who possesses them but does not possess wisdom (phronêsis) does. The saying “no knife for a child” means “do not give abundant resources to base people.”15

It is because they do not realize this, indeed, that “people consider the causes of happiness to be external goods—as if a lyre rather than craft knowledge were the cause of brilliant and noble lyre-playing.”16 So the further fact we need to add to the earlier two is: three, external goods cannot make us to any degree happy unless we already have the goods of the soul—the virtues. But the sword of use cuts both ways. After all, the virtues of character and practical wisdom need external goods in order for them to have something to use well, since merely having these goods of the soul is not enough. If they are to have their impact on happiness, they must be put to use. In remarking on this fact and drawing the pertinent moral, Aristotle states: Now with those who say that happiness is virtue or some sort of virtue, our argument is in tune, since activity in accord with virtue is characteristic of that virtue. But it makes no small difference, presumably, whether we suppose the best good to consist in virtue’s possession or in its use—that is, in the state or in the activity. For it is possible for someone to possess the state while accomplishing nothing good—for example, if he is sleeping or out of action in some other way. But the same will not hold of the activity, since he will necessarily be doing an action and doing it well. And just as in the Olympic Games it is not the noblest and strongest who get the victory crown but the competitors (since it is among these that the ones who win are found), so also among the noble and good aspects of life it is those who act correctly who win the prizes.17

It is this, indeed, that makes it possible for external goods to have an impact on the happiness of a life. As a way of summing up the findings of this investigation of external goods and goods of the soul, I shall say that external goods have low indirect impact on the happiness of a life, whereas goods of the soul have high direct impact. For activity in accord with the virtues of the soul just is happiness. So put some of that in a life and you have put it on the map of happiness, so to speak; put enough of it in and you make it happy—choiceworthy and lacking in nothing.

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Suppose we—or Aristotle—stopped there. We would have our answer, wouldn’t we, to the question of what good things happiness consists in? Aristotle asks, “What, then, prevents us from calling happy the person who is active in accord with complete virtue and is adequately supplied with external goods not for some random period of time but in a complete life?”18 To be happy you first and foremost need complete virtue, but you also need an adequate supply of external goods and a complete life—a life suited to containing them. It is important to notice at this juncture that the three sorts of goods Aristotle recognizes—those of soul, those of the body, and external goods—are all or most what I shall call social goods. And what I mean is that they are goods reliably made available in the long term only within a community organized to provide them. In Aristotle’s view this community is the polis or “city,” since it is the only completely self-sufficient community. Thus, for example, the virtues of character require socialization, and the virtues of thought— practical wisdom (phronêsis) and theoretical wisdom (sophia)—require education.19 And education and socialization require schools and institutions and teachers, and the societal stability, with its attendant legal and political institutions, necessary to keep these around generation after generation, and—where appropriate—to keep them improving. Health needs doctors and hospitals, and so on. Providing all those things, it can hardly be controversial to say, itself requires excellent thinking, and so a virtue of thought. And to that virtue Aristotle gives the name politikê—the craft or science of politics. Indeed almost the first thing he does tell us in the Nicomachean Ethics is that politikê is the architectonic practical science. And what prompts its introduction is the search for the best good—for happiness—and so for the science or capacity that ensures it: It would seem to be the one with the most control, and the most architectonic one. And politics seems to be like this, since it is the one that prescribes which of the sciences need to exist in cities and which ones each group in cities should learn and up to what point. Indeed, we see that even the capacities that are generally most honored are under it—for example, generalship, household management, and rhetoric. And since it uses the other practical sciences and, furthermore, legislates about what must be done and what avoided, its end will circumscribe those of the others, so that it will be the human good.20

Thus it is that we are reminded later in the Ethics that it is “the political philosopher” who “is the architectonic craftsman of the end to which we look in calling each thing unconditionally bad or good.”21



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What politics does, we see, is to organize all the various practical or productive crafts or sciences into what I call the craft hierarchy, a fragment of which has been brought to our attention a few lines previously in the same text: But since there are many sorts of actions and of crafts and sciences, their ends are many as well. For health is the end of medicine, a ship of shipbuilding, victory of generalship, and wealth of household management. Some of these fall under some one capacity, however, as bridle making falls under horsemanship, along with all the others that produce equipment for horsemanship, and as it and every action in warfare fall under generalship, and, in the same way, others fall under different ones. But in all such cases, the ends of the architectonic ones are more choiceworthy than the ends under them, since these are pursued for the sake also of the former. It makes no difference, though, whether the ends of the actions are the activities themselves or some other thing beyond them, just as in the sciences we have mentioned.22

We can think of politics, then, as organizing all these bodies of knowledge so that they produce the goods in whose possession happiness consists, and then ensuring that they are appropriately distributed to the relevant people, namely, the members of the community that politics governs, who are themselves appropriately prepared by education and socialization to enjoy them, and so to have happy lives. In Nicomachean Ethics VI 8, Aristotle writes, “Politics and practical wisdom are the same state, but their being is not the same. Of the practical wisdom concerned with the city, the architectonic part is legislative science.”23 We may infer, since the text is pretty much a proof text, that politics is a virtue that exercises its control over the city largely through its legislative component. We are used, I think, to privatizing practical wisdom, or “ethicizing” it, so to speak, but for Aristotle it is at heart a political virtue, indeed “the only virtue special to a [political] ruler.”24 What is true of politics, then, is also true of practical wisdom. It is in the business of providing and organizing good things, and it is through legislation that it will—as architectonic—do much of this organizing and providing. For laws produced by practical wisdom both embody practical wisdom and propagate it. At almost the end of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle reminds us of this: It is difficult, however, for someone to get correct guidance toward virtue from childhood if he has not been nurtured under laws of the appropriate sort, since a moderate and resilient way of living is not pleasant for ordinary people, most of all when they are young. That is why laws must prescribe their nurture and practices, since these will not be painful when they have become habitual. But

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it is not enough, presumably, that when people are young they get the correct nurture and supervision. On the contrary, even when they have grown into adulthood they must continue to practice the same things and be habituated to them. And so there will need to be laws concerning these matters as well and, in general, then, concerning all of life. For ordinary people obey force rather than argument; and they obey penalties rather than what is noble.25

“A sophisticated and free person,” to be sure, “is a sort of law for himself,”26 since he is governed by his own practical wisdom. But this is so because he has become practically wise under the guidance of laws that are already the product of someone else’s practical wisdom, which is thus achieved, maintained, and reproduced, socially. I said earlier that we had our answer, that a person is happy “who is active in accord with complete virtue and is adequately supplied with external goods not for some random period of time but in a complete life.”27 But that answer covers over a mountain of a problem, which Aristotle expresses as follows: It is evident that the best constitution is necessarily that organization in accord with which anyone might be able to do best and live blessedly. But the very people who agree that the most choiceworthy life is the life that involves virtue are the ones who dispute about whether the political and action-involving life is choiceworthy or rather the one detached from all external concerns—some sort of contemplative life, for example, which some say is the only life for a philosopher. For it is evident that these two lives are pretty much the ones that the human beings most ambitious for virtue deliberately choose, both in earlier times and at present. The two I mean are the political life and the philosophic one. And it makes no small difference on which side the truth lies. For the person who thinks correctly, at any rate, must organize his affairs by looking to the better target—and this applies to each human being and to the constitution communally.28

So even though everyone agrees that external goods, goods of the body, and goods of the soul all have an impact on the happiness of a life, there is disagreement between the many and the wise about their relative impact, and a further disagreement, even among the wise themselves, apparently, about which goods of the soul—the ones required for the political life and the ones required for the contemplative life—have the more or most important impact. Now it is well known, indeed it is a topic of philosophical jokes, that Aristotle seeks the mean or middle way. (How did Aristotle die? the joke goes. The answer: From an excess of moderation.) So it should come as no surprise that he thinks there is some truth on both sides—on both the political side and the contemplative side: “As regards those who agree that a life in accord with virtue is most choiceworthy, but disagree about the use of it,29 we must



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say to both sides that they are both partly correct in what they say and partly incorrect.”30 When he comes to expressing the truth they share, however, this is what he says: If the things we have said are correct, and we should take it that happiness is doing well in action, then the best life, both for the whole city collectively and for each individual, would be a practical life of action. Yet it is not necessary, as some suppose, for a practical life of action to involve relations with other people, nor are those thoughts alone practical that arise for the sake of the consequences of doing an action, much more so are the acts of contemplation and thinking that are their own ends and are engaged in for their own sake. For doing well in action is the end, and so action of a sort is the end too. And we say that in the strictest sense the ones who above all do actions, even in the case of external actions, are the ones who by means of their thoughts are their architectonic craftsmen.31

It is probably not the answer we expect. For, as we see, Aristotle thinks that the challenge the defender of contemplation must answer is to show that the contemplative life is in fact a life of action, and one, moreover, that is more practical—more action-involving—than the political life.32 After all, the function argument has shown that happiness lies in action. No defender of the political life, then, can either reject the contemplative life as one of inaction, or reasonably prefer the political life to it on the grounds of its being more practical—more action involving. To think otherwise, indeed, is to think that the agents are the ones whose bodies move rather than the ones whose architectonic acts of thought work out their plans of action and then prescribe them in laws or decrees.33 Let us briefly take stock before looking for the grounds of these claims about contemplation and politics. A happy human life requires external goods, goods of the body, and, especially, goods of the soul. It requires all of them. These are social goods in the relevant sense. To have them and enjoy them, one must live in a society that provides them. Or, rather, to reliably have and enjoy them—to have them as a result of rational planning, as a result of the exercise of politics, or practical wisdom—we must live in a society that provides them. Luck, of course, or the gods, might also enter the picture in various ways—a point we shall be returning to at the end of this chapter. Why does Aristotle think that the activity of contemplating is more practical than the activities that make up the political life for those who contrast it with the contemplative one? The answer lies in the fact that these contemplative activities are their own ends and are engaged in for their own sake in a way that practical political activities are not. For it is a key element in Aristotle’s theory of action that actions—at any rate, complete ones—are activities or

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energeiai that, as such, are complete at any moment: If φ-ing is a (complete) action, you both are φ-ing and have φ-ed simultaneously.34 One could, I suppose, call this a key element in Aristotle’s metaphysics of morals, since pretty much the first thing he does in the Nicomachean Ethics is to remind us of a distinction between sorts of ends that, in effect, marks the distinction between complete activities and incomplete ones: “A certain difference, however, appears to exist among ends. For some are activities while others are works of some sort (erga tina) beyond the activities themselves. But wherever there are ends beyond the actions, in those cases, the works are naturally better than the activities.”35 It is hardly a step to the conclusion that happiness must be a complete activity. For if it were an incomplete one (which it would be if it had a further work or result beyond it), the work would be better than it, and so it itself would not be the best end or good. Incomplete activities, by contrast, when they are ends, are ends that are choiceworthy not for themselves alone, but in part for themselves and in part for their further consequences: [Practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom] must be intrinsically choiceworthy (since each is the virtue of one of the two parts that have reason) even if neither of them produces anything at all. Next, they do indeed produce something; not, however, as medicine produces health but as health does. That is also how theoretical wisdom produces happiness, since as a part of virtue as a whole, by being possessed and actualized, it produces happiness.36

Recall Socrates’s exchange with Diotima. Nothing could be happiness unless it is the correct ultimate answer to all practical why questions. Express that in terms of Aristotelian ends and what you get is that nothing could be happiness—nothing could be doing well in action (eupraxia)—unless it is a complete activity. For, if it were anything else, there would be a further why question, to be answered by appeal to the activity’s further—and ipso facto superior—end. Let us go back now to a notorious problem in the conclusion of the function argument. It lies in the fact that having identified happiness with “activity of the soul in accord with virtue,” Aristotle adds “and, if there are more virtues than one, in accord with the best and most complete.” This has stalled many climbers on the way to the peak. But we need not be among them. For we know that the completeness of virtues has to be reflected in the completeness of their activations—of the activities that are in accord with them. If it were not, why would the activation of the complete one be happiness? That, in effect, is the import of the following brief text: “While movement does seem to be a sort of activity, it is incomplete activity. But the cause of this is that the potentiality it is the activation of is incomplete.”37 For a virtue is a state, and a state is a capacity or potential that has been made more steadfast



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and unchangeable through practice. Hence, as we are about to see, it cannot be phronêsis or politikê that is the complete virtue, and so it cannot be the amalgam of all the virtues of character, since practical wisdom already involves all of those.38 The next episode in our story, the next stage in our climb up the mountain, lies in Nicomachean Ethics X 7: “this activity [namely, contemplation], and only this, would seem to be liked because of itself [alone]. For nothing arises from it beyond having contemplated, whereas from the practical ones we try—to a greater or lesser extent—to get for ourselves something beyond the action.”39 Thus, on the supposition that this characterization of contemplation is correct, actions or activities that are not contemplative have a further end, and so are incomplete in the way that contemplative activities are not. Contemplative activity of some sort, then, must be happiness. There is no way around that: “Happiness extends indeed just as far as contemplation does, and those to whom it more belongs to contemplate, it also more belongs to be happy, not coincidentally but, rather, in accord with contemplation, since this is intrinsically estimable. And so happiness will be some sort of contemplation.”40 But contemplation, as a kind of thinking, can be done well or badly. Hence to be done well, it will need to be in accord with the relevant virtue of thought—and that virtue is sophia (theoretical wisdom). So what we can say more exactly is that happiness, as activity in accord with complete virtue, is not just any old sort of contemplation, but the most excellent sort, the sort that is in accord with the relevant virtue, which is theoretical wisdom. But what activity exactly is that? Here is part of the answer: “Theoretical wisdom must be the most exact of the sciences . . . [it] must be understanding plus scientific knowledge—scientific knowledge, having a head as it were, of the most estimable things.”41 And this answer is developed for us in Metaphysics I 2. For there the search is for the most universal and most exact theoretical science, which Metaphysics VI 1 will identify as theological philosophy or science:42 For it was when pretty much all the necessities of life, as well as those related to ease and passing the time, had been supplied that such wisdom began to be sought. So clearly we do not inquire into it because of its having another use, but just as a human being is free, we say, when he is for his own sake and not for someone else, in the same way we pursue this as the only free science, since it alone is for its own sake. It is because of this indeed that the possession of this science might be justly regarded as not for humans, since in many ways the nature of humans is enslaved, so that, according to Simonides, “a god alone can have this privilege”. . . no science should be regarded as more estimable than this. For the most divine science is also the most estimable. And a science would

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be most divine in only two ways: if the god [= the unmoved mover] most of all would have it, or if it were a science of divine things. And this science alone is divine in both these ways. For the [primary] god seems to be among the causes of all things and to be a sort of starting-point, and this is the sort of science that the [primary] god alone, or that he most of all, would have. All the sciences are more necessary than this one, then, but none is better.43

When Aristotle gives us a rare piece of practical advice in the Nicomachean Ethics, it is this passage that he recalls to our minds: We should not, however, in accord with the makers of proverbs, “think human things, since you are human” or “think mortal things, since you are mortal” but, rather, we should as far as possible immortalize (athanatizein), and do everything to live in accord with the element in us that is most excellent. For even if it is small in bulk, in its power and esteem it far exceeds everything.44

Whatever immortalizing is—the verb athanatizein is rare enough that its meaning is difficult to tie down—we do it when we contemplate in accord with sophia, and that we do when we join with the genuinely immortal god in theologizing—in contemplating that very god.45 What I want to take from this brief venture into the Metaphysics is a challenging fact. The god referred to is the unmoved mover, the starting-point and primary cause of everything—of everything. Including—as their teleological cause—our own deliberately chosen actions. God is his own happiness, the Eudemian Ethics tells us, whereas he is ours: “God is in a state of wellbeing . . . by being too good to contemplate anything besides himself. And the explanation for this is that while our wellbeing is in accord with something different, he is himself his own wellbeing.”46 So if the contemplative life and the political life have different ultimate ends—different sorts of happiness as their ends—we will face a dilemma that will threaten not just the Ethics but also Aristotle’s entire picture of the world. Here are two texts to drive the point home. First: Just as in the whole it is the [primary] god, so it is too in us. For the divine constituent in us [= understanding or reason] in a way does all the moving. Of reason, however, the starting-point is not reason, but something superior. But what besides the [primary] god is superior to both scientific knowledge and understanding, since virtue [of character] is an instrument of understanding?47

Second: “Happiness is a starting-point, since it is for the sake of it that we all do all the other actions that we do, and we suppose that the starting-point and cause of what is good is something estimable and divine.”48 Hence, in part, the comparison I drew earlier with Metaphysics Zeta.



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The question to pursue next is what the consequences of all this are for the happy life. And it is here that some delicate footwork is required if we are not to follow other climbers into a crevasse that blocks the final ascent to the peak. As a rational agent, your goal is to achieve a happy life for yourself. This requires thought—indeed, excellent thought. Could the virtue that ensures its excellence be sophia? No, “for surely theoretical wisdom will not have a theoretical grasp on any of the things from which a human being will come to be happy (since it is not concerned with anything’s coming to be).”49 So it must, and not just for this reason, be practical wisdom or politics. After all, even the acquisition of theoretical wisdom, as the most exact of the sciences, is a practical, political achievement, requiring teachers, schools, and research institutions like the Academy and Lyceum. But so too, of course, is the leisure needed for its exercise—for contemplative activity in accord with it. Wars and criminals, blights and famines, ignorant ideologues in places of political power, to mention just a few things, see to that. Now, the happy life as I have insisted involves all three sorts of goods: goods of the soul (the virtues), goods of the body, and external goods. But these, as we saw, have different impacts on the happiness of a life. And this is the finding that we are now in a position to expand upon. External goods, we saw, have low indirect impact on how happy a life is, whereas the virtues have high direct impact. But these virtues come in two varieties: virtues of character and virtues of thought, which themselves come in two varieties, namely, practical wisdom and theoretical wisdom.50 So what we must now do is calculate the different degrees of impact of activities in accord with these two virtues on how happy a life is. And the solution to the calculation can be readily inferred from our discussion of complete and incomplete activities. The solution is this. Activity in accord with theoretical wisdom has the highest-degree of direct impact on how happy a life is, whereas practical wisdom and the virtues of character have both a direct impact and an indirect one. Aristotle explains: But honor, pleasure, understanding, and every virtue, though we do choose them because of themselves as well (since if they had no further consequences, we would still take each of them), we also choose for the sake of happiness, supposing that because of them we shall be happy. Happiness, on the other hand, no one chooses for the sake of these things or because of anything else in general.51

That they have a direct impact is registered in the claim that we choose them because of themselves; that they also have an indirect one is registered in the claim that we choose them for the sake of happiness. In the closing sentence of Nicomachean Ethics VI 13, the implication for the relationship between phronêsis and sophia is described this way: “[Practical wisdom] does not

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control either theoretical wisdom or the better part any more than medicine controls health, since it does not use it but sees to its coming into being. So it prescribes for its sake, but not to it. Besides, it would be like saying that politics rules the gods, because it prescribes with regard to everything in the city.”52 This is why the office that supervises the worship of the gods and other religious matter is distinguished from the various political offices at Pol. VI 8 1322b17–29. Phronêsis is, as the Magna Moralia felicitously puts it, “a sort of steward of sophia, procuring leisure for it and its function.”53 Does that mean that the deal Aristotle has brokered between the political life and the contemplative one results in a single life? We shall have to see. When Aristotle introduces us to the three broad kinds of lives, he writes: “People seem (which is not unreasonable) to get their suppositions about the good—that is, happiness—from their lives. For ordinary people, the most vulgar ones, suppose it to be pleasure. And that is why the life they like is the life of indulgence. For there are three lives that stand out: the one we just mentioned, the political, and, third, the contemplative.”54 What matters most for our purposes is that the political life, like the life of indulgence and the contemplative life, involves a conception of happiness, so that what we want to say about it is that it conceives of happiness as consisting in honor—in success and the approval of others: Sophisticated people, on the other hand, and doers of action, deliberately choose honor, since it is pretty much the end of the political life. It, however, is apparently more superficial than what we are looking for, since it seems to be in the hands of the honorers more than of the honorees, whereas we have a hunch that the good is something that properly belongs to us and is difficult to take away.55

Thus the crudest political life, as I shall call it, is quickly rejected. Honor is too superficial and too dependent on others to be happiness. But just as the defenders of the life of indulgence are on to something—the happy life really does need the external goods that gratify their appetites and that they (wrongly) think are the best ones there are—so too are the defenders of the crude political life: Further, people seem to pursue honor in order to be convinced that they are good—at any rate, they seek to be honored by practically-wise people, among people who know them, and for virtue. It is clear, then, that according to them, at least, virtue is better. Maybe one might even suppose that it is more the end of the political life than honor is. But even virtue is apparently too incomplete, since it seems possible to have virtue even while sleeping or being inactive throughout life or while suffering evils and bad luck of the worst sort. Someone who was living like that, however, no one would call happy unless he was defending a thesis at all costs.56



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Therefore, in what we might call the cruder political life, virtue (of character), not honor is the end, since it is what garners honor and praise of the right sort. But even that is not correct. Instead, the crude political life, which is clearly the one so-called in the Politics, thinks of action in accord with virtue and practical-wisdom as its goal. From now on, then, when I speak of the political life, I mean the crude one. And what I want to ask about it is just this. Suppose you were a champion of it, what would you do? That is, what would practical wisdom have you do? And here we confront a political fact of great magnitude, which is that there are many different political constitutions, both correct and deviant, each with its own conception of happiness, and so with its own views about the virtues that will best promote them: “By pursuing this [happiness] in different ways and by different means each group of people produces different ways of life and different constitutions.”57 Hence one thing your practical wisdom will have to do is pick one of these constitutions for you to live your political life in. The question is, how will you select it? It is in trying to answer this question that you will confront a version of the metaphysical problem that I used in part to connect our mountain to the Mount Everest of Metaphysics Zeta. Here is a variant of it. In which constitution will the virtues of character that you acquire by living in it be not just those of a good citizen of that constitution, but of a good human being? In which, since happiness is the activation of genuine human virtue, will you be genuinely thriving, genuinely happy? Here is Aristotle’s answer: It is correct, then, to call the constitution we treated in our first accounts an aristocracy. For the one consisting of those who are unconditionally best in accord virtue, and not those who are good men relative to a hypothesis, is the only constitution that it is just to call an aristocracy. For only in it is it unconditionally the case that the same person is a good man and a good citizen, whereas those who are good in the others are so relative to their constitutions.58

It would seem most desirable to live in a society organized by the constitution under which practical wisdom and the virtues of character best further your chances of acquiring theoretical wisdom. Of course, in order to actively engage in theoretical wisdom, the desirable constitution must provide as much leisure as possible. Indeed, Aristotle confirms our conclusion when he writes, “Whatever choice and possession of natural goods (whether goods of the body, or wealth, or friends, or any other goods) will most produce contemplation of god, that is the best, and this is the noblest defining mark”59 and “a person should do other things for the sake of the goods that are in himself, and of these the ones that are in the body for the sake of those that are in the soul, and virtue [of character] for that of wisdom (phronêsis = sophia), since

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this is the highest [good].”60 After all, that activity is what the function argument shows us that our genuine happiness consists in. And what makes it yet clearer that this is indeed what the function argument does show is an initially puzzling doctrine about what a human being really is. First, then, we need to look at the texts in which the doctrine is expressed, and here some identifying numbers will help us keep track: [1] But just as a city too or any other complex system, seems to be most of all (malist’) its most controlling part, so also does a human being.61 [2] It would seem too that each person actually is this, if indeed it is the controlling and better element. So it would be strange if he were to choose not his own life but that of something else. Moreover, what we said before will fit now as well. For what properly belongs to each thing by nature is best and most pleasant for each of them. For each human being, then, the life in accord with understanding is so too, if indeed this most of all is a human being. Hence, this life will also be happiest.62 [1] tells us that a human being is malista (“most of all”) its most controlling element, which [2] identifies with the divine element in him, namely, understanding (nous). [2] initially goes further than [1] in one dimension, since it drops the adverb malista, and speaks of a human being simply as being—as being one and the same as—his understanding. At the same time, it is more tentative about this identity—“if indeed it is the controlling and better element”—and in the end restores the adverb: “if indeed this most of all is a human being.” Now it is certainly true that we cannot make much sense of one thing being most of all one and the same as another, if this means that it has a very high, or the highest, degree of numerical identity to it. For numerical identity, like existence, does not come in degrees. Things either exist or they don’t and are either identical to each other or they aren’t. However, the fact that [1] mentions a city as an example of the sort of complex system that is most of all its most controlling element gives us a way to understand it in more familiar and less apparently paradoxical terms. In Politics III 6, Aristotle squarely states that “[3] the governing body controls the city everywhere, and constitution is governing body.”63 What is revealing about this statement is that, like [1] and [2], it mentions the notion of control, which is itself characterized in terms of degree: “most controlling” in [1] and “controls the city everywhere (pantachou)” in [3]. And the reason it is revealing is made plain in the following two texts: [4] A person is called “self-controlled” or “lacking in self-control” depending on whether or not his understanding is in control, on the supposi-



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tion that this is what each person is, and it is actions involving reason that people seem most of all to do themselves and to do voluntarily. So it is clear enough that this part is what each person is or is most of all and that a decent person likes this part most.64 [5] Just as in the whole it is the [primary] god, so it is too in us. For the divine constituent in us [= understanding or reason] in a way does all the moving. Of reason, however, the starting-point is not reason, but something superior. But what besides the [primary] god is superior to both scientific knowledge and understanding, since virtue [of character] is an instrument of understanding?65 Without going into all the details involved in interpreting [5], we can see that together with [4] it licenses us to understand [1–2] as expressing a doctrine that is as much about control as it is about identity. When contemporary philosophers try to understand human agency, they often find themselves wanting to distinguish actions that originate in—or have their causal source in—the agent from actions that stem from the agent’s “real self” or “will” or what the agent “identifies” with. A reforming smoker, for example, may succumb to temptation and exhibit lack of self-control by smoking a cigarette, without thereby returning to being a smoker. Why? Because that action stems from a desire that is no longer a part of his true self, that he no longer wills or identifies with. However precisely we are best to understand the psychology of agency that makes these distinctions fully intelligible, it is attractive to see Aristotle as making an early contribution to it, since this allows us to make good sense of [1–2]. For on this way of looking at them, degrees of identity have no place in them. We are most of all our understanding because our understanding is our “true self”—the source of those actions that are most our own, that we most identify with. And our function—even though unlike the primary god we are complex beings—is our function for the same reason. It is, so to speak, the function that is most of all ours—the function of what we most of all identify with. Recall our earlier discussion of the choice of lives. A champion of the contemplative life will face the same problem as the champion of the political life, since he will want to know what constitution will best further his chances. And it is no surprise that he must, since practical wisdom is also his best guide, come to the same conclusion. He will want to be a citizen—to have been born and brought up as a citizen—of an aristocracy of virtue. Thus the champions of the political life and those of the contemplative life, guided by the same practical wisdom, will end up as equal citizens of the very same constitution. Does that mean that the political life and the contemplative are the same? Well, as Aristotle likes to say, in a way they are and in a way they are not.

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For there is truth on both sides, but also falsehood. We may usefully begin with the falsehood. The falsehood in the position of those who champion the crude contemplative life, as we may now call it, and those who champion what we have been calling the crude political life is that each aims to live his respective life in complete separation from that of his opponent. One seeks a life with no contemplation in it, the other seeks a life with no political action in it—no activity in accord with practical wisdom and the virtues of character. The truth that each grasps, on the other hand, is that activity in accord with the virtue he champions—provided of course that these virtues and the relations between them are correctly conceived—is indeed (a sort of) happiness. So what we should say, if we want to put the matter exactly, is that the crude political life and the crude contemplative life are indeed distinct lives, but that the refined political life and refined contemplative life—the ones from the conceptions of which the falsehood of separation has been removed, so that only the truth remains—are indeed the same. They are one human life with, as we are about to see, two sides, not two separate lives. I said that the virtues involved in the political life and the contemplative life must be correctly conceived if they are to fit together in the one life that is the refined version of each of these two lives. It is worth spelling out what exactly this means. Because a champion of the crude political life sees it as entirely separate from contemplation, he implicitly (or perhaps explicitly) sees the virtues exemplified in this life—crude practical wisdom, crude virtue of character, as we may call them—as separate from contemplation and its virtue. This is an error, because refined practical wisdom (and the virtues of character), as we saw, is a steward of theoretical wisdom that must see to its coming into being. Similarly, the champion of the crude contemplative life sees the virtue exemplified in his life—crude theoretical wisdom—as separate from practical wisdom and the virtues of character. This too is an error, although its nature is a bit more complex. The understanding “seems to be born in us as a sort of substance, and not to pass away,”66 so that of all the constituents in the human soul “it alone is immortal and eternal.”67 As a result it is separable from the body, and “when separated (chôristheis)” from it, as it is after the body has passed away, “this alone is just what it is (touth’ hoper esti).”68 Thus insofar as the champion of the crude contemplative life conceives of the understanding—the possessor of theoretical wisdom and the agent of contemplation—as separable from the body, he is quite correct, in Aristotle’s view. Thus he is also correct in thinking that “the virtue of understanding is separated (kechôrismenê)”69 from the body, as well as from those elements in the soul, such as practical wisdom, which require a body.70 The error he makes is in thinking that what applies to the soul when it is actually separated from the body also applies to it when it is not separated. For, as Aristotle puts it, “to the extent that someone is a hu-



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man being, he will also need external prosperity, since his nature is not selfsufficient for contemplation, but his body needs to be healthy and provided with food and other sorts of care.”71 When we begin to think out what is involved in providing these bodily needs in the best way—in the way that they will be provided in the best constitution, the one that is an aristocracy of virtue—we are quickly led to retrace the route up the mountain that we have already taken. For goods of the body, as we recall, are genuine goods only if combined with, and controlled by, the goods of the soul, including, therefore, practical wisdom, and the virtues of character. Thus while theoretical wisdom is indeed separated from the body and from the practical wisdom and virtues of character that see to its needs and care, it is nonetheless true that when the understanding of which it is the virtue is connected to a human body, it does need a body as well as these other virtues of character and thought. Let us return now to the one life that is the refined political and the refined contemplative life combined, and ask what the day-to-day activities will be of the people—the agents—who live it. Well, slaves will do all of what we would call the real work, leaving the citizens free from all that. So their lives become initially bipartite, where the split is between the unleisured part (which is not quite our work world because of the slaves) and the leisured part. And it is into the unleisured part that the refined political life falls: Happiness seems to reside in leisure, since we do unleisured things in order to be at leisure, and wage war in order to live in peace. Now the activity of the practical virtues occurs in politics or in warfare, and the actions concerned with these seem to be unleisured and those in warfare completely so (for no one chooses to wage war for the sake of waging war, or to foment war either, since someone would seem completely bloodthirsty, if he made enemies of his friends in order to bring about battles and killings). But the activity of a politician too is unleisured and beyond political activity itself he tries to get positions of power and honors or, at any rate, happiness for himself and his fellow citizens—this being different from the exercise of politics and something we clearly seek on the supposition of its being different.72

That is the main reason, indeed, that the refined political life cannot be the happy—or anyway the happiest—one: “For the person who is being unleisured is being so for the sake of some end he does not possess, whereas happiness is an end, and everyone thinks that it is accompanied not by pain [as unleisure is] but by pleasure.”73 The refined political life has two distinct parts, moreover, namely, that of the citizens who rule and that of the citizens who are ruled, and thus has two distinct sides to its functioning: “The political life . . . is itself di-

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vided into what is useful for war and what is useful for peace.”74 In many constitutions rulers and ruled, soldiers and administrators, are, of course, distinct groups of people, but in the best one, which we are considering, they are not: The best city contains both a military part and one that deliberates about what is advantageous and renders judgment about what is just, and since it is evident that these are most of all parts of the city, should these functions also be assigned to distinct people, or are both to be assigned to the same people? [The answer to] this is evident too, because in one way the functions should be assigned to the same people and in another they should be assigned to distinct ones. For since the prime time for each of the two functions is different, in that one requires practical wisdom and the other strength, they should be assigned to different people. On the other hand, insofar as it is impossible for those capable of using and resisting force to tolerate being always ruled, to that extent they should be assigned to the same people. For those who control the hoplite weapons also control whether a constitution will endure or not. The only course remaining, therefore, is for the constitution to assign both functions to the same people, but not at the same time. Instead, just as it is natural for strength to be found among younger men and practical wisdom among older ones, so it is advantageous and just to assign the functions to each group in this way, since this division is in accord with worth.75

What the political life amounts to for someone in the best city, then, depends, among other things, on his age. But it also depends irremediably on luck and chance. How much time will you need to be on active military duty? How much time in political deliberation? Outside the circumstances we would pray for, it all depends. So much, then, for the unleisured part of the refined political in the best city. Now for the leisured one. It is enough to notice that, while contemplation of god is its peak activity, it is far from being the only one. Tired after a long day spent in running the city or serving in the army—“unleisure is accompanied by toil and strain”76—leisured activities first require that we relax, so we need something to relax us: “Amusing ourselves so as to engage in serious matters,” as Anacharsis puts it, seems to be correct. For amusement is like relaxation, and it is because people cannot labor continuously that they need relaxation. End, then, relaxation is not, since it occurs for the sake of activity.77 Thus the best city will “introduce amusement, but watch for the appropriate time to use it, as if dispensing it as a medicine [for the ills of unleisure].”78 Once relaxed, we are then ready for leisured activities, which include playing and (especially) listening to music, since “music is for passing the time in leisure.”79



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Also included among leisurely activities is philosophical discussion of a variety of sorts: No matter what existing consists in for each sort of person, no matter what they choose to be living for the sake of, it is this they wish to pass their time doing in company with their friends. That is why some drink together, some play dice together, while others train together, hunt together, or do philosophy together, each sort spending their days together in whatever they most like in life. For since they wish to be living together with their friends, they do these actions and share in these things in which they think living together consists.80

Thus at one point in the Politics Aristotle postpones discussion of some topics to “another leisurely discussion.”81 Beyond these not strictly contemplative activities, there are also a number of different contemplative ones: Each type of theoretical knowledge has its attractions. For even if our contact with eternal things is but slight, all the same, because of its esteem, this knowledge is a greater pleasure than our knowledge of everything around us, just as even a chance, brief glimpse of those we love is a greater pleasure than the most exact view of other things, however many or great they are. On the other hand, because we know more of them and know them more fully, our scientific knowledge of things that pass away exceeds that of the others. Further, because they are nearer to us and because their nature is more akin to ours, they provide their own compensations in comparison with the philosophy concerned with divine things. . . . For even in the theoretical knowledge of animals that are disagreeable to perception, the nature that crafted them likewise provides extraordinary pleasures to those who can know their causes and are by nature philosophers. . . . That is why we should not be childishly disgusted at the investigation of the less estimable animals, since in all natural things there is something wondrous.82

Of these, contemplation in accord with theoretical wisdom may be the best sort, the one in which the best sort of happiness consists, but the others have delights of their own to offer. In fact, though it is seldom remarked on, contemplation of god—at any rate when embodied human beings do it—seems almost to need these other delights. In discussing pleasures, Aristotle addresses this need in raising the following puzzle: How is it, then, that no one is pleased continuously? Or is it that we get tired (kamnei)? For continuous activity is impossible for all things human. So no continuous pleasure arises either, since it is entailed by the activity. Some things delight us when they are novelties, but later delight us less, because of the same thing. For at first thought is called forth and is intensely active regarding them,

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as happens in the case of our sight when we look hard at something, but later the activity is no longer like that but has grown relaxed, so that the pleasure is dimmed as well.83

The tiredness that explains why we cannot be continuously pleased might, of course, be the sort a good night’s sleep relieves—which is what the verb kamnein usually signifies. But the immediate mention of novelties suggests that boredom rather than fatigue may be the issue—especially since the reason no activity pleases us for long is not simply that our batteries wear down: In no case, though, is the same thing always pleasant, because our nature is not simple but also has another element in it, in that we are mortals. As a result, if one of the two is doing something, it is contrary to the nature of our other nature, and when the two are equally balanced, what we are doing seems neither painful nor pleasant. For if the nature of some being were simple, the same action would always be most pleasant. That is why the god always enjoys a single simple pleasure. For there is not only an activity of moving but also an activity of unmoving, and pleasure is found more in rest than in movement. “Change in all things is sweet,” as the poet says, because of a sort of wickedness. For just as a wicked human being is an easily changeable one, a nature that needs change is also wicked, since it is neither simple nor decent.84

Contemplation of god may be the peak leisured activity, but human beings cannot stay on the peak for long, without needing to do something else. The refined contemplative life needs to be variegated, in other words, and cannot be monochrome, even if its one color is as dear to us as a loved one. Having climbed Everest, and admired the view, we need to come back down. Having done so, moreover, and having seen not only the view from the peak but also the route to it, we are in a position to see something else of importance, namely, the unhelpfulness of the standard way of understanding Aristotelian happiness as either inclusive of other goods or exclusive of them. For the peak happiness of the leisured part of the life that is both the refined political and the refined contemplative one is exclusivist, whereas its overall happiness is inclusive. For the latter involves the partly intrinsic, partly extrinsic, goods consisting in the exercise of those virtues of character useful in leisure, and so the external goods needed for that exercise. The peak happiness of the unleisured part of that life, on the other hand, is also inclusive, but in another way than the leisured one, since it includes the partly intrinsic, partly extrinsic, goods consisting of the exercise of those virtues of character useful in unleisure, as well as the external goods they require for their exercise. Aristotle makes the requisite division between these two sets of virtues thus:



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Now, courage and resilience are for unleisure, philosophy for leisure, and temperance and justice are useful in both, and particularly when people remain at peace and are at leisure. For war compels people to be just and temperate, but the enjoyment of good luck and the leisure that accompanies peace make them wantonly aggressive instead. Much justice and temperance are needed, therefore, by those who seem to do best and who enjoy all the things regarded as blessings—people like those, if there are any, as the poets say there are, who live in the Isles of the Blessed. For these above all will need philosophy, temperance, and justice, to the extent that they are at leisure amidst an abundance of such goods.85

Finally, the happiness of the human life as a whole is inclusive in a yet other way, since it includes the peak happiness of the refined contemplative life as well as that of the refined political life, which is in part lived for the sake of contemplation and in part for its own sake. Thus the peak happiness of the refined political life without that of the refined contemplative one is deficient in happiness, it is a mountain without its highest peak—a life always conscious, so to speak, of an intrinsic deficiency. On the other hand, without the happiness of the refined political life, there is no mountain for the happiness of the contemplative life to be the peak of. I end, though, on another note. “It is appropriate,” Aristotle tells us, “for those people to do best who live in the best constitution their circumstances allow—provided nothing contrary to reasonable expectation occurs.”86 But things can happen contrary to reasonable expectation in two ways—we can be unlucky, but we can also be lucky. So in making a deliberate choice to live in the best constitution, though we are, of course, making the best choice in the abstract, we are not necessarily reaching the best possible outcome in our actual circumstances. Aristotle draws the relevant distinction in his own terms: But now there are two questions that need to be investigated. First, which life is more choiceworthy, the one that involves being active in politics with other people and sharing in the city, or the life of an alien, detached from87 the political community? Further, what constitution and what condition of the city should be taken to be best—regardless of whether sharing in a city is choiceworthy for everyone or for most but not for all? Since [to answer] this question, but not the one about what is choiceworthy for each, is a function of political thought and theoretical knowledge, and this is the sort of investigation we have deliberately chosen to undertake now, the first is a side issue, whereas the second is a function of our method of inquiry.88

As not self-sufficient a human being needs to live in a community with others.89 But he could do that in two ways: (1) by being a citizen of a city,

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actively participating in its political life—for example, by serving in the military, attending the assembly, holding office if elected, and so on; or (2) by being a resident alien, excluded from such participation. Politics is concerned with the question of which constitution it is unconditionally best for all or most human beings to live in, and so politics has something to say about (1). But it is not concerned with (2). For what life is best for a given individual depends on the particularities of his nature, character, and circumstances. For him therefore the question is not which life is unconditionally best for human beings universally, but which of the lives actually available to him is best. This might well be the life of a resident alien in, say, a democratic city, a tenured professor in a good university, or a senior fellow of All Souls.90 NOTES 1. Plato, Symposium (Smp.), 204d4–205a3, my translation. 2. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Translation with Introduction and Notes, trans. and ed. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014), I 4 1095a17–23. Hereafter NE. 3.  Smp. 205e6–12. 4.  NE I 7 1098a15–20. 5.  NE 1097b14–16. 6. Aristotle, Magna Moralia (MM) I 4 1185a6–9, my translation. 7.  NE IX 8 1169a18–25. 8.  Politics, A New Translation with Introduction and Notes, trans. and ed. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017), VII 1 1323a24–34. Hereafter Pol. 9.  Pol. 1323a35–38. 10.  Pol. 1323a38–b12. 11.  Pol. 1323b23–29. 12.  NE I 8 1099a31–b6. 13.  NE I 11 1100b33–1101a8. 14. Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics, VIII 3 1248b27–33, my translation. Hereafter EE. 15. Aristotle, Protrepticus, B4, my translation. Hereafter Protr. 16.  Pol. VII 13 1332a25–27. 17.  NE I 8 1098b30–1099a6. 18.  NE I 11 1101a14–16. 19.  NE II 1 1103a14–26. 20.  NE I 2 1094a26–b7. 21.  NE VII 11 1152b1–3. 22.  NE I 1 1094a6–18. 23.  NE 1141b23–25. 24.  Pol. III 4 1277b25–26. 25.  NE X 9 1179b31–1180a5. 26.  NE IV 9 1128a31–32. 27.  NE I 11 1101a14–16.



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28.  Pol. VII 2 1324a23–35. 29.  “[One sort of justice] is complete virtue in the highest degree, because it is the complete use (chrêsis) of complete virtue. It is the complete use because someone who possesses it is able to use his virtue in relation to another person and not solely with regard to himself” (NE V 1 1129b30–33). The disagreement, then, is about whether happiness for a city or an individual lies in the use of virtue in relation to another or in the use of it with regard to himself. 30.  Pol. VII 3 1325a16–18. 31.  Pol. VII 3 1325b13–23. 32.  Thus one major problem with Plato’s Form of the good is that it is not prakton—not, in contrast to contemplation, doable in action, and so cannot be happiness, since happiness is precisely the highest of goods doable in action (NE I 6 1096b32–35). 33. Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. and ed. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2016), I 1 981a30–b6. Hereafter Met. 34.  Met. IX 6 1048b18–36. 35.  NE I 1 1094a3–6. 36.  NE VI 12 1144a1–5. 37.  Met. XI 9 1066a20–22; also Ph. III 2 201b31–33. 38.  NE VI 13 1144b31–32. 39.  NE 1177b1–4. 40.  NE X 8 1178b28–32. 41.  NE VI 7 1141a16–17. 42.  Met. 1026a18–23. 43.  Met. I 2 982b23–983a11. 44.  NE X 7 1177b31–1178a2. 45. See Met. XII 9. 46.  EE VII 12 1245b16–19. 47.  EE VIII 2 1248a25–29. 48.  NE I 12 1102a1–3. 49.  NE VI 12 1143b19–20. 50.  NE I 13 1103a3–7. 51.  NE I 7 1097b2–6. 52.  NE 1145a6–11. 53.  MM I 35 1198b8–20; also I 34 1198a14, 1198b4–8. Compare: “Being a master does not consist in acquiring of slaves but in his using them. But there is nothing grand or dignified about this science. For what the slave needs to scientifically-know to do is what the master needs to know how to prescribe. That is why for those who have the resources not to bother with such things a steward takes on this office, while they themselves engage in politics or do philosophy” (Pol. I 7 1255b31–37). 54.  NE I 5 1095b14–19. Compare: “We can distinguish between sorts of lives. Some of them make no claim to this sort of thriving (euêmeria [= happiness]), since they are pursued only for the sake of necessities—for example, those concerned with the vulgar crafts or concerned with money-making or vulgar occupations. . . . But since there are three things thought to lead to a happy life (the ones spoken of earlier as the greatest of human goods), namely, virtue, wisdom (phronêseôs), and pleasure,

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so we also see three lives that all those who have the power to do so deliberately choose to live—the political life, the philosophical life, the life of indulgence. For of these, the philosopher wishes to concern himself with wisdom and the contemplation that is concerned with truth; the politician with the actions that are noble (these being the ones that stem from virtue); and the indulgent person with pleasures that are of the body” (EE I 4 1215a25–b5). 55.  NE I 5 1095b22–26. 56.  NE I 5 1095b27–1096a4. 57.  Pol. VII 8 1328a41–b2. 58.  Pol. IV 7 1293b1–7. 59.  EE VIII 3 1249b13–19. 60.  Protr. B21. The surviving fragments of the Protrepticus provide a picture of the best life that is remarkably similar to the one we find in the Nicomachean Ethics. Here human beings are identified more than anything with their understanding (B62), which is the only divine element in them (B108–110). Its virtue or excellence, which is variously called phronêsis (B5, 17, 20–21, 38, 40, 43, 77, 103), sophia (B27, 29, 53, 94), or philosophia (B5, 9, 41, 52, 55–57, 95), is the one associated with happiness (B68, 91–95). At the same time, a kind of phronêsis, recognizably akin to practical wisdom, is distinguished from a kind of sophia, recognizably akin to theoretical wisdom, and assigned a subsidiary value and role: “Some acts of thinking are choiceworthy solely because of the contemplation itself and are more estimable and better than those useful in relation to other things. The contemplative ones are estimable because of themselves, and the sophia that is characteristic of understanding (nous) is choiceworthy for them, but phronêsis is choice-worthy for the sake of practical ones. The good and the estimable, then, lies in acts of contemplation in accord with sophia, but certainly not in acts of contemplation of every kind” (B27). Implicitly acknowledging that phronêsis and sophia are doing this sort of double duty in the account, some fragments speak of “theoretical” sophia (B29) or “theoretical” phronêsis (B46), contrasting these with their practical varieties. Thus animals have “some small sparks of reason (logos) and phronêsis but are entirely deprived of theoretical sophia” (B29). Theoretical phronêsis, which seems to be the same as theoretical sophia, is the special possession of the philosopher, who “alone lives with his eye on nature and the divine” (B50). 61.  NE IX 8 1168b31–33. 62.  NE X 7 1178a2–8; also Protr. B58–70. 63.  Pol. 1278b10–11. 64.  NE X 8 1168b34–1169a2. 65.  EE VIII 2 1248a25–29. 66. Aristotle, De Anima, trans. and ed. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017), I 4 408b18–19. Hereafter DA. 67.  DA III 5 430a23. 68.  DA 430a22–23. 69.  NE X 8 1178a22. 70.  NE 1178a10–22. 71.  NE 1178b33–35.



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72.  NE X 7 1177b4–15. 73.  Pol. VIII 3 1338a4–6. 74.  Pol. I 5 1254b30–32. 75.  Pol. VII 9 1329a2–17. 76.  Pol. VIII 3 1337b39–40. 77.  NE X 6 1176b33–1177a1. 78.  Pol. VIII 3 1337b40–42. 79.  Pol. 1338a21–22. 80.  NE IX 12 1172a1–8. 81.  Pol. VII 1 1323b39–40. 82. Aristotle, Parts of Animals, I 5 644b22–645a17, my translation. 83.  NE X 4 1175a3–10. 84.  NE VII 14 1154b20–31. 85.  Pol. VII 15 1334a22–40. 86.  Pol. VII 1 1323a17–19. 87.  Xenikos is often best translated as “foreign,” as, for example, at Pol. I 9 1257a31, II 10 1272b20, and sometimes “foreign (xenos)” is contrasted with “resident alien (metoikos),” as at III 5 1277b38 and VII 4 1326a20. Here, however, xenikos seems to refer specifically to someone who is a resident alien in a city, not to someone who, as “no part of a city” at all, is either “a wild beast or a god” (I 2 1253a28–29). The verb apoluein (“detached from”) is used at I 9 1257a40 to mean “save themselves from the trouble,” and probably preserves some of that connotation here. 88.  Pol. VII 2 1324a13–23. 89.  Pol. I 2 1253a26–29. 90.  An earlier version of this chapter was delivered as the 2015 A. E. Taylor Lecture at Edinburgh University and later that year at the Institute of Philosophy, The Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czech Republic. I am grateful to those present for their challenging questions and helpful suggestions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Edited and translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014. ———. Metaphysics. Translated and edited by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2016. ———. De Anima. Edited and translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017. ———. Politics. Edited and translated by C. D. C. Reeve. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2017.

Chapter Five

Intellectual Virtue and the Non-Sage in Stoicism Ryan Korstange

There is an open question when one studies virtue theory in Stoicism as to whether or not virtue is attainable. The system created by the Stoics is both binary and idealistic, resulting in the identification of virtuous action as anything undertaken by the sage, and only those actions undertaken by the sage. But there are several points at which it becomes clear that few, if any, have progressed to the level of the sage. To this point, Alexander of Aphrodisias describes the Stoic ethical system as follows: According the them [the Stoics] virtue and vice are the only things that are, in the one case, good, in the other, bad, and none of the other living creatures is able to admit of either; and of men the greatest number are bad, or rather there are one or two whom they speak of as having become good men as in a fable, a sort of incredible creature as it were and contrary to nature and rarer than the Ethiopian phoenix; and the others are all wicked and are so to an equal extent, so that all who are not wise are alike mad.1

The larger picture of virtue within Stoicism casts virtue as a disposition. Therefore, anyone who possesses one virtue possesses them all, and inversely, anyone who does not possess all virtues possesses none of them. Therefore, we are left with the unavoidable conclusion that virtuous action can only be done by the sages, which, as we have already seen, are rarer than the Ethiopian phoenix. In other words, within the Stoic system it is almost as if only the bright (that is, the sages) are good (that is, capable of virtuous action). But, this categorization presents something of a problem—for it is readily observable that apparently virtuous actions are done every day (that is, acts of wisdom, courage, self-control, or justice), and are carried out by people who are obviously not sages. 77

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This chapter will not attempt to disentangle the Gordian knot of Stoic ethics or virtue theory. Rather, it will examine the way in which the seemingly virtuous actions of non-sages are contextualized within the Stoic system, giving particular attention to the role of proper knowledge in the categorization of virtuous action. My analysis will progress in two directions: first, I will outline the main lines of Stoic virtue theory, paying particular attention to the intimate connection existing between virtue and knowledge, specifically with regard to the point of demarcation between the vicious non-sage and the virtuous sage. Second, I will consider the way in which the Stoics categorize actions that seem to be virtuous when the non-sage carries them out. STOIC VIRTUE AND KNOWLEDGE Stoic virtue theory starts from the proposition that all life has the same goal. The articulation of this goal goes back to the founders of Stoicism, and is summarized in several doxographical sources, specifically Diogenes Laertius2 and Arius Didymus.3 According to these presentations, Zeno and Cleanthes considered the end as “life in agreement with nature,” whereas Chrysippus identified the goal of life as: “to live according to experience of the things which happen by nature.” The individual definitions of the goal of life differ in some regards, but the general thrust in each is similar—the ideal life, or the virtuous life, is that lived in complete accord with nature. As the telos or standard, the term nature (phusis) means both cosmic nature and human nature: as is described by B. Inwood: Nature thus plays the roles of standard and guide for human actions in two senses: the “things according to nature” are reasonable as objects of choice for human beings just because our human nature is what it is; but the larger plan of nature is the ultimate framework and constraint for all of our particular and local choices. Human and cosmic nature both matter.4

Further, both Diogenes and Arius Didymus considered the goal “to live in agreement with nature” as equivalent to “to live in agreement with virtue.” After relating the telos as Zeno saw it, Diogenes adds: “which is the same as to live according to virtue, for nature leads us to virtue.”5 Arius Didymus puts the equation this way: Therefore it is clear from these things, that “to live according to nature” and “to live properly,” and “to live well,” are equivalent, and even “the beautiful and the good,” and “virtue and that participating in virtue”; and that every good thing



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is beautiful, and likewise even every reproachful thing is bad; for which reason the Stoic telos can be equated to live in accord with virtue.6

For the human, virtue is that which fulfills the telos of human life. This idea is derived from the notion of oikeiosis, which suggests that a living beings first impulse is toward self-preservation. The connection between the oikeiosis and the aforementioned goal of life in Stoicism is described well by G. Reale, who says: “since man is not only a living being but a rational one, to live according to nature means to live feeling an attachment [oikeiosis] for his rational being, conserving and bringing it to full completion.”7 A virtuous human agent, therefore, is one who consistently enacts virtue by living in accord with his own rational nature.8 We see from Diogenes Laertius9 and Arius Didymus10 that there are no degrees of virtue, which implies that an agent is either perfectly virtuous or entirely vicious. In this regard, the Stoics considered the transition from vicious to virtuous to be nearly instantaneous.11 But whenever the transition to virtue happens, it happens completely. An individual is either virtuous, and thereby has all the virtues, or is not virtuous and has none of the virtues.12 So, the Stoics understood humanity to be divided into only two moral categories: virtuous and vicious.13 The point of division between these two moral categories is the knowledge of the individual agent. There are several places in Stoic texts that define virtue as something related to knowledge. For our purposes, the following statement from Arius Didymus will illustrate this point: Wisdom [phronesis] is a knowledge of what must be done, what must not be done, and what is neither, or a knowledge of good things and bad things, and naturally indifferent things for one living in community . . . and Temperance [sophrosune] is a knowledge of what things are to be chosen, and what are to be avoided, and what are neither; and Justice [dikaiosune] is a knowledge of distributing what is fitting to each [person]; and Courage [andreia] is the knowledge of what is fearful, and what is not fearful, and what is neither. Folly [aphrosune] is [ignorance of] the good things, and the evil things, and those which are neither, or ignorance of what things are to be done, and which are not to be done, and which are neither; and Intemperance [akolasia] is ignorance of what things are to be chosen, and what are to be avoided and what are neither; and Injustice [adikia] is ignorance not able to give each his due. Cowardice [deilia] is the ignorance of what things are fearful and what are not fearful, and what things are neither.14

What becomes clear is that the acquisition of virtue begins with the acquisition of specific kinds of knowledge. A. A. Long explains: “The sage is defined by his moral expertise. He knows infallibly what should be done in each

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situation of life and takes every step to do it at the right time and in the right way.”15 In other words, virtue requires a certain “skill” in living, which turns out to be common to all humans.16 In this regard Diogenes Laertius says that virtue is a “consistent disposition.”17 Similarly, Arius Didymus represents the stoics as asserting that “virtue is a disposition of the soul which is in agreement with itself concerning the whole of one’s life,”18 and Plutarch describes the Stoic definition of virtue as: “a certain disposition of the governing portion of the soul, and a faculty produced by reason, or rather to be itself reason which is in accord with virtue and is certain and unshaken.”19 Understanding virtue in Stoicism as requiring a certain skill is not insignificant. As J. Annas points out, virtue “has the intellectual structure of a practical skill.”20 A claim she justifies through three points of comparison, asserting that a skill is teachable, and that an expert understands the subject as a whole, and is able to give an account of their understanding of that skill. The point of demarcation between the sage and the non-sage is related to knowledge. The sage knows what should be done in every situation, and therefore acts virtuously with every action, whereas the non-sage, due to his improper knowledge, can never act virtuously. Therefore, in the idealistic description of the Stoics, virtue is a skill, disposition, or state, not a category of action. That is to say, virtue is classified neither by any actions themselves, nor by their results, but by the intentionality and knowledge which lay behind the action. Knowledge plays a key role in the Stoic understanding of virtue. An individual action is only properly understood as virtuous when it is undertaken in relation to proper knowledge. Annas is again helpful in contextualizing the connection between virtue and knowledge, she says, “having a virtue involves having an intellectual grasp which is in an important way unified.”21 VIRTUOUS ACTION IN STOICISM That attainment of this virtuous disposition relies on acquisition of knowledge becomes clear when considering the following statement by Seneca: But virtue means the knowledge of other things besides herself: if we would learn virtue we must learn all about virtue. Conduct will not be right unless the will to act is right; for this is the source of conduct. Nor, again, can the will be right without a right attitude of mind; for this is the source of the will. Furthermore, such an attitude of mind will not be found even in the best of men unless he has learned the laws of life as a whole and has worked out a proper judgment about everything, and unless he has reduced facts to a standard of truth. Peace of mind is enjoyed only by those who have attained a fixed and unchanging



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standard of judgment; the rest of mankind continually ebb and flow in their decisions, floating in a condition where they alternately reject things and seek them.22

From this passage, we see the relationship between knowledge and virtue inherent to the Stoic system, which is revealed through a hierarchical structure in which Seneca is working backward from virtuous action, and describing the things necessary for action to be truly virtuous. This progression goes as follows: a) Actions are right when the will is right. b) Will is not right unless the attitude of the mind is right. c) This proper attitude of mind is not found unless the person has learned the laws of life as a whole—and has worked out a proper judgment about everything, and reduced everything to a standard of truth. d) Equanimity is enjoyed by those who have attained a fixed standard of judgment—the rest of people ebb and flow in their decisions. By turning this progression around, we see quite obviously that virtuous action begins when, and only when, the actor knows the “standard of truth” for everything, and therefore has a “proper attitude of mind.” Therefore, the Stoics understand virtuous action to be judged by the excellence of the activity itself, that is, its telos, not by the results of the action, its skopos.23 To this point, Cicero asserts that “Every action that the Wise Man initiates must necessarily be complete forthwith in all its parts; since the thing desirable, as we term it, consists in his activity.”24 Here we come to the place of the kathorthoma, correct or virtuous action. Kathorthoma are the proper actions, they are based on proper knowledge, and undertaken with proper intentionality. Arius Didymus defines kathorthoma as a specific type of appropriate acts (kathekonta) which “are complete,” and “the actions according to virtue—like to be wise, to act honestly.”25 The intellectual base of proper actions leads Reale to conclude: “Because a ‘correct action’ is caused by virtue, that is, by wisdom, it follows that no silly man [non-sage] can even perform correction actions. In order to perform a correct action, he would first have to become wise [that is, a sage]. This means that most men will never be able to perform ‘correct actions (kathorthomata),’ because they are not wise.”26 When we recall that the Stoics divide the world into only two moral categories,27 this makes good sense. The one who does not have perfect knowledge is not virtuous, and so none of his actions can be virtuous. Chrysippus also confirms this view when in discussing one who has nearly become a sage, he says: “he fulfills all appropriate actions in all respects and omits none; but his life is not yet in a state of well-being. This

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supervenes when these ‘intermediate’ actions acquire the additional property of firmness, consistency, and their own proper co-ordination.”28 Thus, it is clear that within the Stoic system one can live in agreement and harmony with nature only when one consistently applies their knowledge of the natural causes to their actions in life. Therefore, virtuous action begins with proper knowledge, which then produces proper action. Further, we can say that all virtues are essentially intellectual virtues in that they are rooted in proper knowledge, whereas all vices rest on the lack of the proper knowledge. SEEMINGLY VIRTUOUS ACTION, CARRIED OUT BY THE NON-SAGE The idealistic system of virtue in Stoicism creates something of a binary opposition of acts: Actions are either virtuous or vicious—and the determining factor is to be the knowledge of the actor and the purity of his motivation. Purity of motivation is measured by the extent to which any action coheres with both cosmic and human nature, which the Stoics call homologia. So, virtuous action can only be carried out by the sage, who is virtuous by disposition, has all the virtues, and only acts virtuously. Here, the Stoic system of virtue encounters a problem: People who are not sages, and who therefore do not have perfect knowledge, often act in ways that seem virtuous—specifically when the standard for virtuous action is understood as coherently living in accordance with nature. How then shall we understand these seemingly virtuous actions? Certainly not as virtuous action. A. A. Long describes this conflict like this: If an appropriate action is considered independently of the character of its agent it must be judged “intermediate.” But in terms of the agent’s character every action, whether appropriate or not, is either “perfect” or “faulty.” . . . If an appropriate act is performed by someone who is not a sage it lacks the fundamental characteristic of fitting into a pattern of actions all of which are completely harmonious with each other. . . . In Stoic ethics a miss is as bad as a mile. There are no degrees of goodness, though there are degrees of coming closer towards it. But until a man is good he is bad.29

Everyone who is not a Sage is incapable of virtuous action, despite the fact that individual actions occasionally seem virtuous. In order to understand the way in which the Stoics classify the seemingly virtuous actions of the non-sage, we have to first briefly explore their threefold categorization of nature. The Stoics classify everything that exists as good, bad, or indifferent.30 Good and bad are the easiest categories to under-



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stand: The goods are generally those things that are virtuous, or participate in virtue. As Diogenes presents it, In general, good [agathos] is that which has some advantage, and in particular it is either identical with or not different from benefit. For which reason both virtue itself and that participating in it is called good in three ways: that is to say (1) the good from which benefit results; or (2) that according to which [good] results, like the virtuous action; or (3) that by which [good results], like the virtuous man participating in virtue.31

Arius Didymus defines good more simply as “everything which is a virtue, or participates in virtue.”32 Bad is essentially the inverse of good, or in the words of Arius Didymus, “everything which is a vice, or participates in vice.”33 Defining the third category, the “indifferents,” is a bit more tricky. Arius Didymus summarizes the Stoic view of indifferents as follows: They say that indifferents are those things between good and bad, saying that indifferent is understood in two ways: in the first way as that neither good [agathos] nor bad [kakia], and that neither worth choosing nor avoiding; and in the other [way] as neither urging impulse nor repulsion. . . . It is necessary to say according to the first way, that the things between good [agathos] and bad [kakia] are called indifferents by the members of this school [Stoicism], not in view of selection and rejection.34

These indifferents are further categorized as preferable, dispreferable, or neither. Arius Didymus clarifies this conception for us: Yet, of the indifferents, some have more value, and others have less. And some [have value] according to themselves, but others are productive. And some are preferred but others are dispreferred, and still others are neither. Preferred are as many which are indifferents, which have much value, as much as [is possible] among indifferents. And in the same way, dispreferred are as many as have much disvalue. And the neither preferred nor dispreferred are as many as have neither much value nor much disvalue.35

Actions are either virtuous or vicious. There is no mediating category of indifferent actions. Virtuous actions are called kathorthomata, which can be glossed as perfectly appropriate actions, or the right duties. As we’ve already seen above, all actions of the sage are kathorthomata. But there are some actions of the non-sage that look like kathorthomata either in appearance or effect, though they are vicious simply because they were not carried out by a sage. These actions are called kathekonta, which can be glossed as “duties,” or “suitable actions.” These actions are preferable in that they cohere with some aspect of nature, as is made clear by Diogenes Laertius: “Furthermore,

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the term duty [kathekon] is applied to that for which, when done, a reasonable defence can be adduced, e.g. harmony in the tenor of life’s process, which indeed pervades the growth of plants and animals. For even in plants and animals, they hold, you may discern fitness of behaviour.”36 The difference between kathekonta and kathorthomata is wide. Arius Didymus describes it this way: They say that some of the duties [kathekonta] are morally perfect actions [kathorthomata]. And morally perfect actions are those actions in accord with virtue, for example: to be wise, or to be honest. They do not call those [acts] not like this, which are not complete duties [teleia kathekonta], morally perfect actions [kathorthomata], but intermediates, for example: to marry, to be an ambassador, to have a discussion, and the like.37

He goes on to categorize actions as follows: “Everything done against the duties [para to kathekon] in a rational creature is a sinful action, but a duty which has been perfected is a morally perfect action [kathorthomata]. The intermediate duty [ta meson kathekon] is measured by certain indifferents, being selected with or against nature.”38 So, within Stoicism, actions are either virtuous, that is done by the sage, or vicious, done by the non-sage. These vicious actions carried out by the non-sage are not all bad. In fact, some are even preferable. Those virtuous actions carried out by the sage are referred to as kathorthomata, and virtue-seeming, preferable actions carried out by the non-sage are called kathekonta. Thus, the problem is clear. By setting cohesion with nature as the standard for virtuous action, and by creating a binary system of virtue in which essentially no virtuous agent can exist, the Stoic system does not allow all actions that cohere with nature to be considered virtuous. In fact, no action carried out by a non-sage can be considered virtuous in the least because every nonsage is inherently vicious. So, the Stoics have to create a new category for actions (and things), which cohere with nature, and are therefore good, but cannot be virtuous in themselves because the one carrying them out is not himself virtuous—this category is “preferable indifferents.” Reale observes: “It is clear that actions of the ordinary man can never be placed within the morally perfect actions (kathorthomata), but they can rightly be defined as ‘suitable actions’ [kathekon].”39 One final point remains. The Stoic system of virtue was not envisioned to be a static system, but rather the Stoics envisioned a means of moral progress (prokope) from vice to virtue. M. Holowchak describes the progression as “a shift from ‘recognition’ of a duty to preserve oneself at all costs (oikeosis) to a recognition of a duty to act with full expression of excellence as cosmic awareness.”40 The implication is that while most agents



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will not preform morally perfect actions, and will not be virtuous—this is not the desired end. To go all the way back to the beginning, the goal in life for the Stoics was to live according to nature. In this regard, the Stoics considered any action that was in accord with nature to be a step toward a life consistently lived in accord with nature. The progression from a vicious agent, capable of only engaging in duties to a virtuous agent, engaging in perfect moral actions is made clear by Cicero in de finibus 3.21–22. In this passage, Cicero outlines four stages a human agent progresses through in moving toward virtue. First, the human is attracted toward the things and actions that are in accordance with nature. Then the human forms concepts (ennoia) and sees the harmony of actions, thus coming to value appropriate things over what was valued previously. Then the person learns to choose by considering the appropriate action (kathekon). Next, continued choice of appropriate action becomes a habit. Finally, habits become harmonized with reason, at which point they create homologia or conformity with Nature.41 Two things are noteworthy: First, kathekonta are not envisioned as ends themselves, but as means to a bigger end. Cicero makes this point explicitly saying, “But since those actions which I have termed ‘appropriate acts’ [kathekonta] are based on the primary natural objects, it follows that the former are means to the latter. Hence it may correctly be said that all ‘appropriate acts’ are means to the end of attaining the primary needs of nature.”42 The end is not the action itself, but life lived consistently with nature. And in this regard, it is important to remember that the Stoics did envision virtue as something which can be taught. Diogenes of Laertius describes virtue as being both intellectual, like prudence, and non-intellectual, like health. The non-intellectual virtues do not require the activity of the mind, and are present even in vicious people. The intellectual virtues do require the activity of the mind. The Stoics believed that this type of virtue could be taught, and according to Diogenes at least, this is demonstrated by the fact that bad men become good.43 Second, the point of demarcation between virtue and vice, and therefore between kathekonta and kathorthomata, is predominately one of disposition and knowledge. The differentiation is not in the action itself. R. W. Sharples summarizes the difference well: The Stoic sage, and the ordinary person who is doing what he or she should, will make the same selections—e.g., in most circumstances, health rather than sickness, wealth rather than poverty—and will try to put them into effect. The difference is in their attitude and motivation. For the ordinary person thinks that it is achieving health that matters, while the Stoic sage will realise that the important thing is trying to do so.44

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This is to say that the virtuous sage and the vicious non-sage may well carry out the same actions at many points. Yet the action of the sage is virtuous, whereas the action of the non-sage cannot be. To use the Stoic terminology, a sage will always preform kathorthomata, whereas the non-sage will never preform kathorthomata. Further, in those instances where the sage and the non-sage are doing the same thing, the non-sage’s actions can only be considered kathekonta. The differences between the always virtuous action of the sage, and the never virtuous actions of the non-sage become clear through considering virtue as a skill. According to the Stoics, virtue is like other skills in that it shares a common taxonomy of knowledge.45 Primarily, the sage knows how to act in every circumstance because they understand their subject completely, which renders each of their actions virtuous at the start, without reference to the results of those particular actions. Further, the “skill” of virtue is something that can be learned/taught. However, virtue is unlike other skills in that it is a global skill, that is, virtue permeates the whole of a sage’s actions. Becoming a sage requires the attainment of all virtues, and in addition each action carried out by a sage is virtuous at the start. Second, virtue differs from other skills in that it involves reflection on the nature of virtue itself. It is on the basis of this type of comparison that Annas asserts that in the Stoic system, an actor is entirely in control of their own virtue. Virtues require right motives, right desires, a correct practiced disposition, and right reasoning—but each of these elements is something that can be learned.46 That virtue requires proper knowledge has certain implications for the larger Stoic virtue theory. In this system, virtuous action is both a means to an end, that of becoming a sage—and an end itself, that of acting like a sage. The differentiation between kathekonta and kathorthomata is therefore essential to the Stoic system. The acquisition of virtue requires the development of the right kind of knowledge, and habituation in the proper ‘skill’ of living. Once this knowledge and skill is attained, every action undertaken by the actor is immediately virtuous, regardless of the specific results of that action. Until that knowledge and skill is attained, no action is virtuous despite their results. That is, virtuous actions (kathorthomata) always achieve their telos—“life in agreement with nature,” which is itself the definition of virtue—regardless of the immediate consequences of the particular action. However, appropriate actions (kathekonta) are never virtuous because the knowledge and disposition of the actor does not properly cohere with the telos. In this way kathekonta are never virtuous acts even when they have preferable immediate results. Kathekonta do contribute to one’s virtue, but only in the sense that they increase one’s knowledge of and habituation to virtuous action. Were it otherwise, the Stoic system of virtue would end up hopelessly circular by



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considering seemingly virtuous actions to be both contributive to the acquisition of virtue, and the evidence of virtue itself. CONCLUSION Within orthodox Stoicism virtuous action can only be performed by the sage who has complete knowledge and who consistently lives and acts in accord with human and cosmic nature, which is to say rationality. Further, few, if any sages, have ever existed. This necessarily leads to the conclusion that virtuous action is essentially impossible. Yet, ordinary people do good things—often the same things as do the sages—and while the Stoics certainly do consider this good action to be preferable, preferable actions are never considered virtuous. A virtuous action requires perfect knowledge and the proper intentionality on the part of the agent, and the perfection of knowledge and intentionality cannot be had but by the sages. So, we have seen that nonsages are incapable of virtuous action. This does not mean, however, that no actions of the non-sage are good. Since the goal of life for the stoics is to live in accord with nature, anything (including actions) that accomplishes this goal is preferable to those things that do not. These actions are “good” (that is, preferable) insofar as they have potential to contribute to the agent’s virtue, therefore providing the possibility for the attainment of virtue, and making virtuous action possible. This is a high standard indeed, and strangely, it is one that the vast majority of people will never achieve. But, the Stoic system holds out some hope that by doing enough good, by choosing to act in accord with nature enough, this action will become a habit, and eventually, this habit will produce a virtuous disposition. NOTES 1.  Alexander of Aphrodisias, de Fato, 199.14–20; trans. R. W. Sharples, Alexander of Aphrodisias: On Fate (London: Duckworth, 1983). 2.  Diogenes Laertius, Vitae philosophorum, 7.87–88. 3.  Arius Didymus, Epitome of Stoic Ethics. The so-called Epitome of Arius Didymus was preserved within Stobaeus’s Eclogae, which can be found in C. Wachsmuth and O. Hense, eds., Ioannis Stobaei anthologium, 5 vols. (Berlin: Weidmann, 1884–1912), 2.57–152. The sections where Stobaeus made use of Arius’s Epitome have been excerpted and printed together in A. Pomeroy, Arius Didymus: Epitome of Stoic Ethics (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999). Translations of Arius Didymus are my own, utilizing the Greek prepared by A. Pomeroy.

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For more information on Arius Didymus as a doxographer, see the various chapters in W. Fortenbaugh, ed., On Stoic and Peripatetic Ethics (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983). 4.  B. Inwood, “Stoic Ethics,” in The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. K. Algra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 686. 5.  Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Philos., 7.87. 6.  Arius Didymus, Epitome, 6e (compare with 5b3). 7.  G. Reale, The Systems of the Hellenistic Age, trans. J. Catan (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 262–63. See also Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Philos., 7.85 = SVF 3.178 (Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta, in Bibliotheca Teubneriana, ed. Hans von Arnim [Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2009]; hereafter SVF); Cicero, de Finibus bonorum et malorum, 3.5.16 = SVF 3.182, and in particular Seneca, ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, 121.14 = SVF 3.184. 8.  See also Arius Didymus, Epitome 11g = SVF 1.216. 9.  Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Philos. 7.127. 10.  Arius Didymus, Epitome 5b8. 11.  Cf. Plutarch, Quomodo quis suos in virtute sentiat profectus, 75c. 12.  See Arius Didymus, Epitome, 5b8, which reads: “And they also say that the wise man does everything in accord with all the virtues. For every action of his is complete, for which reason he lacks nothing of virtue.” 13.  See Arius Didymus, Epitome, 11g = SVF 1.216. 14.  Arius Didymus, Epitome, 5b1 = SVF 3.262. 15. A. A. Long, Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 205. 16. Aristotle was the only Ancient philosopher who disagreed with the notion that virtue was a skill, and his dissent has influenced the trajectory of modern virtue theory. For further description of the idea of virtue as a skill in ancient philosophy, and of Aristotle’s contrarian perspective, see P. Bloomfield, “Virtue Epistemology and the Epistemology of Virtue,” Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 60 (2000): 23–33, and J. Annas “The Structure of Virtue,” in Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, ed. M. DePaul and L. Zagzebski (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 16–23. 17.  Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Philos. 7.89. 18.  Arius Didymus, Epitome, 60.7–8. 19. Plutarch, de virtute morali, 441c. 20.  Annas, “The Structure of Virtue,” 17. 21. Annas, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 70–71. 22. Seneca, Ep. 95.56–7; Trans., R. M. Gummere, Seneca ad Lucilium Epistuale Morales, vol. 3; LCL 77 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925). 23. Annas, Morality of Happiness, 404–5, categorizes Stoic virtue as “indifferent to results,” and points out that “an exercise of virtue is successful, achieves its end, as soon as it is initiated and regardless of whether it achieves its intended outcome.” 24. Cicero, de finibus, 3.32; Trans., H. H. Rackham, Cicero: On Ends, LCL 40 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931).



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25.  Arius Didymus, Epitome, 8.5–10. For further description of kathorthomata, see SVF 1.203, 204, 234, and 3.504. Also consider Reale, Systems of the Hellenistic Age, 275–77. 26. Reale, Systems of the Hellenistic Age, 277. 27.  Arius Didymus, Epitome, 11g: “For, it is the view both of Zeno and of those Stoic philosophers of his school that there are two races of men: on the one hand the worthwhile, and on the other the worthless. And the worthwhile make use of the virtues through all their lives, but the worthless [make use of] the vices.” 28.  SVF, 3.510. 29.  SVF, 3.657–70; Long, Hellenistic Philosophy, 203–4. 30.  Arius Didymus, Epitome, 5a. 31. Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Philos. 7.94; my translation. 32.  Arius Didymus, Epitome 5a. 33. Ibid. 34.  Arius Didymus, Epitome 7. See also Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Philos. 7.107 = SVF 3.493. 35.  Arius Didymus, Epitome, 7b. See also Cicero, de finibus 3.56, and Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Philos. 7.107. 36.  Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Philos. 7.107; trans., R. D. Hicks, Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers: Books 6–10, LCL 185 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925). 37.  Arius Didymus, Epitome, 8. See also Cicero, de officiis, 1.3.8. 38.  Arius Didymus, Epitome, 8a. 39.  Reale, Systems of the Hellenistic Age, 278. 40.  M. Holowchak, The Stoics: A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Continuum, 2008), 39. 41.  According to Long and Sedley, The Hellenistic Philosophers, 2 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 1.383, Homologia should be understood as “harmony of (or with) reason.” This leads to the conclusion that: “Virtue, then, is rational consistency, a character of the soul’s commanding faculty.” 42.  Cicero: On Ends, trans. H. H. Rackham. 43.  Diogenes Laertius, Vit. Philos. 7.90–91. 44.  R. W. Sharples, Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics: An Introduction to Hellenistic Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996), 105. 45.  Cicero engages in a lengthy comparison of the idea of virtue as a skill and other skills in de finibus 3.24–35. 46.  Annas, “The Structure of Virtue,” 26–27.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Annas, J. “The Structure of Virtue.” In Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, ed. M. DePaul and L. Zagzebski, 15–33. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. ———. The Morality of Happiness. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.

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Bloomfield, P. “Virtue Epistemology and the Epistemology of Virtue.” Philosophical and Phenomological Research 60, no. 1 (2000): 23–43. Fortenbaugh, W., ed. On Stoic and Peripatetic Ethics. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1983. Gummere, R. M, ed. Seneca ad Lucilium Epistuale Morales. Vol. 3. Loeb Classical Library 77. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1925. Hicks, R.D., ed., Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers: Books 6–10. Loeb Classical Library 185. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925. Holowchak, M. The Stoics: A Guide for the Perplexed. New York: Continuum, 2008. Inwood, B., and P. Donini. “Stoic Ethics.” In The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy, ed. K. Algra, 675–738. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Long, A. A. Hellenistic Philosophy: Stoics, Epicureans, Sceptics. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986. Long, A. A., and D. N. Sedley. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Long, H.S., ed. Diogenis Laertii vitae philosophorum. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966. Polenz, M., W. R. Paton, and W. Sieveking, eds. Plutarchi moralia. Vol 3. Leipzig: Teubner, 1972. Pomeroy, A. Arius Didymus: Epitome of Stoic Ethics. Texts and Translations 44. Graeco-Roman Series 14. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999. Rackham, H. H., ed. Cicero: On Ends. Loeb Classical Library 40. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931. Reale, G. The Systems of the Hellenistic Age. Translated by J. Catan. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. Sharples, R. W., trans. Alexander of Aphrodisias: On Fate. London: Duckworth, 1983. ———. Stoics, Epicureans and Sceptics: An Introduction to Hellenistic Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 1996. von Arnim, H., ed. Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. 4 vols. Leipzig: Tubner, 1905– 1924.

Part II

THE ASSUMPTION RE-EXAMINED

Chapter Six

Pagan and Christian Paths to Wisdom David Bradshaw

We tend to assume that there is little connection between someone’s intellectual capacities and moral character. This is most obvious when it comes to various forms of expertise or factual knowledge; we do not, as a rule, suppose that the abilities of a doctor, mechanic, or scientist depend upon the possession (or lack of it) of any particular virtue. Of course it is true that even in assessing experts we value highly qualities such as honesty and integrity. These relate, however, to the reliable use of the relevant skill or knowledge, not to its mere possession. Someone may be shifty, unreliable, and disingenuous, yet a fine doctor if he chooses to exercise his skills in a particular case, and the same is true for other forms of expertise. The situation is quite different when it comes to wisdom. Wisdom is an intellectual quality, of course, but it is also a virtue, and clearly the possession of the other virtues is not irrelevant to it. In fact, to judge someone to be wise is an assessment of the entirety of that person’s character, and in that respect is quite different from the ascription of expertise. Yet perhaps for that very reason we make such judgments rarely, save in mockery or teasing. Most of us would be hard pressed to say precisely what constitutes wisdom, how it is recognized, and how it is acquired. The answers to these questions depend on ethical and religious presuppositions about which there is no social consensus, and even as individuals we may be uncertain. So for the most part we set aside questions about wisdom, talking (and, presumably, thinking) about them much less often than we do about the various forms of expertise. Modern thought is in this respect much more constricted than that of antiquity. Broadly speaking, there was considerable consensus among at least the most influential ancient philosophical schools—Platonist, Aristotelian, and Stoic—regarding the fundamental character and value of wisdom. (The Epicureans and Skeptics stood apart, although the Epicureans, at least, would 93

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have agreed with some aspects of the consensus.) We can summarize this consensus under three headings. First, wisdom is not solely a human characteristic, but belongs preeminently to God. Second, human wisdom consists in participating in divine wisdom; that is, it consists in both seeing the world as God sees it, and responding accordingly. Third, to be capable of such perception and action requires appropriate moral habituation, so that wisdom cannot be gained through purely intellectual pursuits but requires a broad development of character. Judaism and Christianity, as they entered the Greco-Roman mainstream, embraced this consensus. This is hardly surprising, for the major elements of the consensus (apart from the concept of participation) can already be found in the Jewish wisdom literature. It was largely for this reason that Christian authors such as Eusebius of Caesarea saw Greek philosophy as a praeparatio evangelica, preparation for the Gospel. Yet such agreement must not be allowed to mask an equally fundamental disagreement. The Judeo-Christian God is radically different from that of the pagan philosophers, in that (among other things) he issues commands, expresses a passionate and jealous love for his people, and demands in response an unconditional faith. All of this would be unthinkable of the Platonic Good, the Aristotelian Prime Mover, or the Stoic Logos. Such differences in the way God is conceived naturally have repercussions for ethics. It is not surprising then that Judaism and Christianity had from the beginning a very different understanding of the virtues necessary for wisdom, and the practices that cultivate them, than did pagan philosophers. It was Greek-speaking Christianity, in particular, which most fully developed a comprehensive ethical vision in dialogue with ancient Greek philosophy.1 My aim here will be to explore that dialogue. I will begin by summarizing some of the key aspects of ancient Greek philosophical teaching regarding the acquisition of wisdom, focusing particularly on those points that were most fertile for Christian thought. I will then turn to the Greek Christian tradition, including particularly its monastic and ascetic strands, since it was in these that its ethical teaching received fullest expression. Finally, I will offer some reflections regarding the relationship between the two traditions and the light that they shed upon one another. THE GREEK PHILOSOPHERS ON PROGRESS TOWARD WISDOM The acquisition of wisdom (sophia) is a central theme of Plato’s Republic. In Book IV Socrates defines wisdom as the state in which the rational part of the



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soul directs the spirited and appetitive parts for both their own good and the good of the whole.2 Socrates does not discuss at this point the possibility that the rational part of the soul itself might be in error. Later, however, it emerges that reason as such does not err, but only seems to when it is “forced to serve evil ends.”3 Reason is in fact something divine, however much its true nature may be obscured in our present state.4 This rather simple account of wisdom as consisting in the proper ordering of the soul is complemented by a more complex account of what is involved in growing wise. Every reader of the Republic will remember the Myth of the Cave, the story of the ascent from the fixation upon shadows—symbolizing our present condition to the extent that we take the deliverances of the senses for true knowledge—up to the sunlit world. Socrates tells us that the point of the story is to reveal the nature of education, and it is accordingly followed by a long description of the ideal educational program.5 Like so much else in the Republic, the program is schematic and no doubt exaggerated for effect; nonetheless, it offers Plato’s fullest description of the ascent to wisdom. Such an education would begin with a youthful immersion in music, poetry, and athletics. The purpose of these early studies is two-fold: to harden the spirited part of the soul without making it savage, while at the same time “strengthening and nurturing” the rational part so that it grows accustomed to governing the rest of the soul.6 At the age of twenty those who have excelled are selected for intensive training in mathematics, beginning with arithmetic and continuing through geometry, astronomy, and harmonics.7 The role of these studies is not solely practical, although it is that; more important, it is to “summon” the mind beyond its preoccupation with the senses and accustom it to dealing with intelligible realities. After ten years there is a further selection, after which the best students advance to five years of training in dialectic. Dialectic (derived from dialegesthai, to converse) is the attempt to “give an account of the being of each thing” in a way that survives all refutation; in other words, it is systematic philosophical inquiry.8 At the age of thirtyfive the incipient young philosophers are assigned positions of leadership in war and politics, forcing them, in effect, to test and refine through practice their hard won beliefs about the good. Finally, at the age of fifty, those who have “survived the tests and been successful both in practical matters and in the sciences” are “compelled to lift up the radiant light of their souls to what itself provides light for everything”—that is, the Form of the Good. It is at this point that they achieve full wisdom, having become able to order the city in accordance with the Good.9 This educational program helpfully fleshes out what it means to attain wisdom. The particular shape this takes will no doubt vary greatly with age, education, and many other factors; we may suppose, for instance, that those

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in their late teens who have been well educated in music, poetry, and athletics have already achieved a kind of wisdom that is effective within the narrow range of the demands placed upon them. But they have not yet had to face hard questions about “the being of each thing,” including the nature of courage, justice, and the other virtues; nor have they had to place whatever convictions they may form about these matters into practice. To meet these challenges requires wisdom of a higher order, one that is accustomed to look beyond sensible realities to the intelligible. To achieve such higher wisdom requires a combination of intellectual exercise, moral habituation, and practical experience. This process ultimately renders the soul capable of beholding the Good, the transcendent reality that is the source of both the reality and the value of all things. Already we find in Plato a rich and multi-layered account of wisdom, one that seeks to ground it in both the internal structure of the soul and the relationship of the soul to the Good. The account may be misleading, however, if it seems to suggest that wisdom can only be achieved through a carefully structured education. After all, Plato’s portrayal of Socrates is a vivid depiction of what wisdom looks like in practice, one that bears little resemblance to the elaborate schematism of the Republic. More precisely, it is a depiction of what a life spent seeking wisdom looks like, for of course Socrates made no claim to be wise. It is left to the reader to infer that Socrates did indeed possess a certain hard-earned wisdom, one that lies largely in the ability to combine the determined seeking of truth with a fully engaged human life. Readers of the dialogues will recognize the traits that make Socrates so powerfully attractive: his relentless curiosity; his independence of social convention; his ironic humor; his disregard of bodily pleasure and pain; his willingness to accept poverty, and ultimately death, in order to fulfill his mission. There is no suggestion that to be wise (or even to seek wisdom) always looks like this. Rather, Plato’s portrayal of Socrates presents a kind of dramatic counterpoint to the more abstract account in the Republic, enabling us to see its limitations and to envision imaginatively how wisdom might be embodied in an actual human life. Two aspects of the portrayal of Socrates were of particular moment for Christian thought. One is the ascetic streak evident in his acceptance of poverty and disregard of bodily pleasure and pain. The Phaedo offers a rationale for this Platonic (or Socratic) asceticism in its teaching that the body is a hindrance in the pursuit of wisdom, and philosophy itself is a way of preparing for death. Socrates offers a number of reasons why the body is a hindrance: the senses are unreliable and deceptive;10 to satisfy the demands of the body presents a constant drain on time and attention;11 the passions and desires introduced by the body are a distraction;12 bodily pleasures and pains are so



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intense that they effectively “nail” the soul to the body, making it think that whatever causes them is most real.13 Virtues such as temperance, courage, and justice purify the soul from bodily passions and desires, rendering it fit to enter the company of the gods.14 The other aspect of Socrates that calls for attention is that he is a lover (erastēs). Socrates’s attraction to male youths often appears in the dialogues as a subject of jocular innuendo, but nowhere is it portrayed more fully than in the Symposium, where at the same time it undergoes an unmasking. The entry of Alcibiades—the very epitome of a handsome and attractive youth— near the end of the dialogue culminates in the revelation that his direct physical advances to Socrates were spurned.15 Plainly the implication of this story is that Socrates was not, after all, interested in physical relations with young men. The larger context for this revelation is provided by the Ladder of Love passage in Socrates’s own speech.16 There we learn that the true lover quickly leaves behind the love of a single beautiful body, ascending in succession first to the beauty of all beautiful bodies, then to that of the soul, then to that of the activities, laws, and forms of knowledge that make the soul itself beautiful. Finally, having grown and been strengthened by gazing upon this “great sea of beauty,” the lover comes at last to the vision of Beauty itself, the eternal and unchanging Form in which all other beautiful things participate. There can be little doubt that this is an ascent to wisdom, however different in particulars it is from that in the Republic. The lover ascends in “unstinting love of wisdom,”17 and indeed Eros himself had earlier been identified as a philosopher.18 More significantly, the vision of Beauty is not something enjoyed only briefly, but a “way of life” (bios) that is most worthy of living (biōtos).19 Just as the vision of the Good enables one who has attained it to set the city in order, so the vision of Beauty enables the lover to bring forth virtue.20 Clearly this is wisdom of a high order.21 What the Symposium adds that was missing (or less prominent) in the Republic is that the attainment of wisdom is also the full expression and realization of the soul’s innate erotic drive. Much more could be said about the Socratic and Platonic ascent to wisdom. For present purposes, however, let us move on to a few observations about Aristotle. Aristotle, as is well known, distinguished between theoretical wisdom (sophia) and practical wisdom (phronēsis).22 Theoretical wisdom is knowledge of “the first causes and principles of things,” and so is divine in two senses—both in that God is among the first principles and causes, and in that God either alone, or above all others, possesses such knowledge.23 To possess theoretical wisdom is the highest human virtue, and to live in accordance with it is “divine in comparison with human life.”24 Practical wisdom concerns, instead, excellence in deliberating regarding action; it is “a truthful characteristic of acting rationally in matters good and

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bad for man.”25 Because it consists partly in aiming at the right end, and the virtues are that which makes us aim at the right end, practical wisdom cannot exist without the moral virtues.26 The path to attaining practical wisdom thus consists, at least in large part, in attaining the moral virtues—courage, temperance, generosity, gentleness, and so on. Each of these virtues is in turn a habit both of acting and of being disposed rightly in regard to a certain emotion or passion (pathos). Since it is a habit, each virtue is attained through repetition of the appropriate action, typically under the direction of law, custom, or some other form of moral guidance.27 Moral habituation also has for Aristotle an important epistemic role. He remarks near the beginning of the Nicomachean Ethics that “some moral truths are apprehended by induction, others by perception, and others by habituation.”28 What does it mean to apprehend a truth by habituation? Later Aristotle explains that, just as one who is healthy finds things wholesome that really are wholesome, so a virtuous person perceives as good and desirable things that really are worthy of desire.29 A virtuous person thus perceives correctly the moral qualities of actions and other ends. In particular, those who possess a particular virtue find pleasure in performing the corresponding virtuous act.30 This is a form of veridical perception, for virtuous acts are “pleasant by nature” even though, in our current state, we may not find them so. A point of particular importance for the Christian tradition is the nature of emotion or passion (pathos). The Nicomachean Ethics defines passion as “appetite, anger, fear, confidence, envy, joy, affection, hatred, longing, zeal, pity, and in general anything [among qualities in the soul] that is followed by pleasure or pain.”31 On this view the passions are in themselves morally neutral, becoming good or bad insofar as they are shaped and directed by the virtues or vices. Aristotle is here in agreement with Plato, for whom spirit (thumos) is a necessary and healthy aspect of human life provided that it is directed by reason. The Stoics famously held a different view. Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, defined a passion as “an irrational and unnatural movement of the soul, that is, an excessive impulse.”32 On this definition the passions are intrinsically bad and are best eradicated altogether. Later Stoics (if not Zeno himself) added the further specification that they are false judgments, and so can be eliminated by properly disciplining the soul to adhere to the truth. The result of this process is not simply the removal of passion, however, but its transformation into something better. Fear can be transformed into caution (eulabeia), the rational avoidance of danger; appetite or craving (epithumia) into rational wish (boulēsis); pleasure (the “irrational elation at the accruing of what seems to be choiceworthy”) into joy (chara), proper delight at that which is truly good. Significantly, the fourth major category of passion, pain or grief (lupē), was held by the Stoics to have no rational correlative, and so



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to need simple eradication. One in whom all the passions have been removed or replaced by the eupatheiai such as caution and joy is said by the Stoics to have attained apatheia, freedom from passion.33 THE CHRISTIAN PATH TO WISDOM As mentioned earlier, Christianity shared the main points of the Greco-Roman consensus regarding wisdom: that wisdom is not solely a human characteristic, but belongs preeminently to God; that human wisdom consists in participating in divine wisdom; and that to attain such wisdom requires moral habituation. From that point the divergences are many and complex. They derive not only from the Judeo-Christian belief in a personal God, but also from the distinctively Christian belief in the Incarnation. More specifically, one major source of difference was that Christians understood wisdom (sophia) as one of the names of Christ, so that philosophy, the love of wisdom, is properly understood as the love of Christ. This naturally led to a different understanding of both the nature of wisdom and the means of attaining it. The identification of Christ with divine Wisdom was made by St. Paul, for whom Christ is “the wisdom of God and the power of God.”34 Readers steeped in the Septuagint naturally took this to indicate the identity of Christ with the figure of divine Wisdom in Proverbs. A particularly influential passage was the soliloquy of Wisdom in chapter 8: The Lord created me at the beginning of his ways for his works. He established me before the ages, in the beginning before he made the earth. . . . When he prepared the heaven, and when he set his throne among the winds, I was present with him; when he strengthened the clouds above, and when he made secure the fountains under heaven, and when he strengthened the foundations of the earth, I was by him, conforming myself to him. I was that wherein he took delight, and each day I rejoiced continually in his presence.35

The identification of Christ as Wisdom thus embraced the traditional understanding of wisdom as insight into the “first causes and principles of things,” but gave it a more personal and affective meaning. To achieve wisdom now meant (to again quote St. Paul) to “take every thought captive in obedience to Christ.”36 In light of this conception of wisdom, it is not surprising that the more philosophically inclined among early Christians saw Christianity itself as a form of philosophy or love of wisdom. Justin Martyr refers to Christianity as “this philosophy”; Tatian calls it “our barbarian philosophy”; Clement says it is a “divine and barbarous philosophy.”37 (It is barbarous, of course, because it originated among the barbarians rather than the Greeks.) Likewise, the

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predominant meaning of “to philosophize” in Christian literature was to live the Christian life to the utmost, particularly as a martyr or ascetic. Eusebius of Caesarea describes the philosophic mode of life of Origen: He persevered, as far as possible, in the most philosophic manner of life, at one time disciplining himself by fasting, at another measuring out the time for sleep, which he was careful to take, never on a couch, but on the floor. And above all he considered that those sayings in the Gospel ought to be kept which exhort us not to provide two coats nor to use shoes, nor, indeed, to be worn out with thoughts about the future.38

An early fifth century monk, St. Nilus the Ascetic, summarized this distinctively Christian understanding of what it means to be a philosopher: Philosophy is a state of moral integrity combined with a doctrine of true knowledge concerning reality. Both Jews and Greeks fell short of this, for they rejected the Wisdom that is from heaven and tried to philosophize without Christ, who alone has revealed the true philosophy in both his life and his teaching . . . [By his example] he taught us that the true philosopher must renounce all life’s pleasures, mastering pains and passions, and paying scant attention to the body; he must not overvalue even his own life, but must readily lay it down when holiness demands.39

Despite its distinctively Christian content, there is an obvious similarity between Nilus’s definition and the model of the philosophical life presented by Socrates. The monastic movement that Nilus represented in effect gave institutionalized form to the impulse to give up all else in order to pursue wisdom—that is, divine Wisdom—that Socrates had embodied. It will be noticed that these passages give a prominent place to asceticism in the philosophic life. To what extent was this due to the influence of Greek philosophy, and to what extent was it native to the biblical tradition? Fasting was of course integral to Judaism, and Jesus plainly expected his disciples to fast.40 There are also some notably ascetic strands in St. Paul, such as the injunction to “make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.”41 But even taking such passages together, they fall well short of Nilus’s statement that the true philosopher must “renounce all life’s pleasures” and “pay scant attention to the body.” These plainly owe much to the tradition of philosophical asceticism deriving from Plato’s Phaedo and Stoic teaching about the passions. On the other hand, the whole thrust of Nilus’s definition is that Christ is the paradigm of wisdom, and (as we see in the case of Origen) Christian asceticism often had a distinctive form that owed much to the commandments of the Gospel. The best way to understand the role of asceticism in early Christianity lies in seeing it in light of biblical anthropology. Perhaps the most striking



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feature of the biblical view of the human being is the role of the heart.42 The heart is in the Bible the deepest part of the human person, both physically and mentally. Because it is deep it is hard to know, and indeed can be known fully only by God. Jeremiah exclaims, “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?”43 He then answers his own question, “I the Lord search the mind and try the heart, to give to every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his doings.”44 The depth and unknowability of the heart mean not only that people often are a mystery to one another, but even that they can be a mystery to themselves. In the Book of Isaiah, God complains of the Israelites that they “draw near me with their mouth, and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me.”45 His complaint is not precisely that the Israelites are hypocrites, for it is quite likely that they believed that they were serving God as they ought; it is rather that, despite their words and their conscious thoughts, they were far removed from him in the deepest core of their being. The lapidary statement of Jesus, “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” is, among other things, a warning that one can be damnably mistaken about the contents of one’s own heart.46 The notion that the heart is deep and hard to know is still relatively commonplace today. We typically think of the heart as the seat of the passions and emotions, however, whereas in the Bible it is also the locus of reason, will, and desire. In fact the Bible draws little distinction among these different functions. The Book of Proverbs commands, “O ye simple, understand wisdom: and, ye fools, be ye of an understanding heart.”47 The context makes plain that to be of an understanding heart is not primarily a matter of mental acuity, but of the possession of rightly ordered intentions and desires. The reason that this is seen as a form of understanding is that for them to be rightly ordered requires that they be formed in light of the knowledge of God, so that knowledge and rightly ordered desire go hand in hand. The centrality of the heart was further confirmed in the New Testament, above all in the sixth Beatitude, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”48 The question before the early Christians was how such purity is to be attained. The Sermon on the Mount (of which the Beatitudes are the prologue) offers much that is germane to this question. Yet the bar it sets seems almost impossibly high—not only the banishing of all thoughts driven by anger or lust,49 but unstinting generosity to all,50 love of one’s enemies,51 freedom from worldly care,52 and freedom from the inevitable human tendency to judge and condemn.53 That is not so much an answer as a further amplification of the question. How is an ordinary human being, full of all the ordinary faults and weaknesses, to attain such an impossible standard?

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It is in light of this question that the particular form taken by early Christian asceticism must be understood. What was needed was not just a disengagement from the body and bodily concerns, as in the Phaedo, nor even freedom from irrational emotions, as in Stoicism. It was a thorough redirection of character, perception, and affections, such that what one sees becomes what God sees and what one cares about becomes what God cares about. Purity of heart, so understood, is not primarily an ethical state, but a form of communion. However (and this is again a point of difference from pagan philosophy), it is a communion that is made possible only because God himself actively seeks it. Obedience to the divine commandments is the means of accepting and embracing this invitation. One way of answering the question of how the commandments can be obeyed, then, is through divine grace. Such grace is not a magic wand, however, but can be fully received only through hard and persistent effort.54 This is the point at which asceticism (from askēsis, training) becomes essential. Because the heart is deep and hard to know, one is in no position to judge either one’s true state before God or the steps that will draw one closer to him. There is too much room for excuses and self-deception, on the one hand, and false anxieties and self-hatred, on the other—seeming opposites that in fact are often conjoined. What one needs is a way to step outside of the hall of mirrors of subjective approval and disapproval onto a path of discipline that truly is capable of reaching and transforming the heart. The ascetic disciplines of the ancient Church, and monasticism in particular, were the answer to this need. The monastic way of life consisted of a wide variety of disciplines: fasting, vigils, manual labor, constant prayer, reading and meditation on Scripture, confession of sins, almsgiving, hospitality, not judging others, obedience to an elder, the acceptance of insults, the patient endurance of suffering, learning to be content with silence and solitude. The disciplines were both physical and spiritual, addressing (to use what became a common distinction) both the passions of the body and those of the soul. Let us take perhaps the most elementary of these disciplines, fasting. The monks of the desert ate only one meal per day, usually of dry bread with water, occasionally accompanied by oil.55 What could be the purpose of such an austere diet? According to Evagrius of Pontus, the first theoretician of monasticism, it was to “put to death the passions of the body,” particularly those of gluttony and lust.56 Gluttony is in fact “the mother of lust,” so both can be addressed by disciplining the stomach.57 Fasting thereby indirectly helps purify the mind as well, for “when the intellect is blunted by satiety, it does not receive the knowledge of God.”58 As his reference to the passions of the body illustrates, Evagrius adopted the Stoics’ negative view of the passions. Passions are diseases of the soul,



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whereas freedom from passion (apatheia) is its health.59 However, what he has in mind by these terms is quite different from what they meant for the Stoics. Evagrius famously lists eight primary passions, which he also refers to as vices or simply as “thoughts” (logismoi): gluttony, lust, avarice, sadness, anger, listlessness (akēdia), vainglory, and pride.60 These became, with some modifications, the source for the later list of Seven Deadly Sins. The reason Evagrius spoke of “thoughts” rather than of sins is that a thought is not in itself sinful, but becomes so only as it is encouraged and allowed to take root.61 For Evagrius the focus of attention is thus not so much one’s immediate emotional state, as the interlocking network of memories, desires, and inclinations that render one susceptible to a given passion. More broadly, whereas the Stoics viewed the passions as irrational disruptions of the soul’s equanimity, for Evagrius they are primarily barriers to communion with God. That is why his list of passions is so different from that of the Stoics—not fear, desire, pleasure, and grief, but a range of sinful states from the sensual (gluttony, lust) to those affecting primarily the soul or spirit (sadness, listlessness, vainglory, pride). It is also why so much attention is given not simply to acts or even emotions, but to what can best be characterized as moods (sadness, listlessness) or habitual ways of thinking (avarice, vainglory, pride). Such habitual patterns of thought often involve cool, calculative reason as much as or more than emotion. Thus in Evagrius we begin to see the meaning of pathos shift away from emotion toward “passion” in the broader sense that became the focus of Christian spiritual direction.62 Finally, it is why such prominence is given to the body and bodily disciplines. Since the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit and is destined for resurrection, it too must be brought within the orbit of salvation; to quote a later Greek Christian author, St. Maximus the Confessor, the goal of ascetic discipline is to “render the body familiar to God as a fellow servant.”63 Just as pathos takes on new meaning in Evagrius, so too does the goal of apatheia. Evagrius holds that apatheia is accompanied by joy and issues in love (agapē).64 Later monastic authors amplify this point. Maximus the Confessor sees as the goal of the Christian life the transformation of the soul’s innate drives into love: “For the mind of one who is continually with God, even his appetite (epithumia) abounds beyond measure into a divine desire (erōs), and his entire spirited part (thumos) is transformed into divine love (agapē).”65 For Maximus, “the perfect soul is one whose passionate faculty is wholly directed to God.”66 Maximus in fact quietly sets aside the Stoic and Evagrian view of the passions as intrinsically disordered. Instead he insists that their value depends upon their use: “In the devout even the passions become good when, prudently turning away from the things of the body, they concern themselves with the possession of heavenly things.”67 He illustrates by citing the four Stoic

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passions: “Appetite brings about an insatiable movement of spiritual longing for divine things; pleasure a quiet enjoyment of the activity of the mind as it is enticed by the divine gifts; fear unceasing diligence to avoid sin in light of the future punishment; and grief a scrupulous fixation on present evil.”68 Maximus also gives more explicit attention than had Evagrius to the cognitive effects of the passions. Passionate thoughts, he says, “darken the rational element of the soul,” whereas “a pure mind sees things rightly.”69 We hear in these statements an echo of the Platonic account of wisdom as the proper operation of reason without impediment from the passions and appetites. Maximus’s own account of wisdom similarly reworks Platonic thought in a way shaped by the ascetic tradition. Each of the senses, he says, is an image (eikōn) of one of the faculties of the soul: sight of intellect (nous), hearing of reason (logos), smell of spirit (thumos), taste of appetite, and touch of the vital power.70 The virtues arise as the soul makes proper use of each pair of faculty and sense. Vision/intellect and hearing/reason together give rise to practical wisdom; smell/spirit to courage; taste/appetite to temperance; touch/ vital power to justice.71 These “most generic” virtues in turn produce two higher-level virtues, practical wisdom and justice uniting to produce contemplative wisdom (sophia) and courage and temperance uniting to produce apatheia. Finally wisdom and apatheia unite to produce the highest virtue, love. In this way, Maximus says, the senses are “rendered rational” (logistheisas) by the rational principles contained in the virtues; and the whole soul, thus unified and rendered simple, is offered to God. CONCLUSION I hope it will be plain how much the Greek Christian tradition owes to its pagan philosophical predecessors. The debts range from the level of practical techniques and methods, to that of goals and aspirations, to the overarching philosophical framework. Among them are asceticism itself (traceable, in large measure, to Plato’s portrayal of Socrates); the fundamental moral psychology of reason, the passions, and appetite; the understanding of the virtues as habits that have to be acquired through repeated, disciplined effort; the belief that the virtues transform perception, enabling the recognition and appreciation of that which is truly good; and the further belief that the goal of the moral life is to know the Good and the Beautiful, which Christians identified with God. Yet the differences are just as important. They arose, as I have mentioned, partly from divergences between the pagan and Christian conceptions of God, and partly from the Christian belief in the Incarnation.



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Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics conceived of the highest divine reality as impersonal, and in particular as having no “will” other than the necessary expression of its own nature. Hence to come to know and to be in communion with this reality is not so much an act of personal obedience and submission, as one of bringing to their fullest realization potencies already present within one’s nature. On the Christian view, by contrast, the fullest realization of one’s nature cannot be achieved apart from entering into a relationship with God that requires trust and obedience. For this reason, Christian thought identifies the fundamental problem not simply as wrongdoing or injustice, but as sin, understood as a rupture of the primal relationship between creature and Creator. It similarly sees the passions, which for pagan thought were impediments to the full realization of one’s nature, as barriers to full communion. It seems to me that even one who rejects the theological presuppositions of the Christian view should still recognize its psychological insight. Richard Sorabji has noted how the Christian focus on “thoughts” opened up a range of important questions that had been obscured by the earlier focus on emotions—whether one dwelt on the thought, enjoyed it, deliberately put oneself in the way of it, and so on.72 He also observes how Evagrius went beyond the Stoics in providing a theory of the causal interrelationships of the passions and in his virtual discovery of the psychological category of mood.73 Iris Murdoch similarly praises the characteristically religious focus on states of mind, including particularly the dangers of self-deception. She even goes so far as to suggest that religious believers are showing an insight lost on most philosophers when they attempt to confront their states of mind by seeking “supplementary energy” through prayer.74 Underlying these psychological insights was a deeper structural difference. Pagan ethics aims at integrating the individual into the larger cosmic order, whether through knowledge of the Good (Plato), performance of the human function (Aristotle), or living in accordance with reason (Stoicism). This focus on cosmic order gives pagan ethics a fundamentally static character. The pattern of the good life is largely fixed, however much the individual efforts needed to attain it may vary. Christian ethics seeks instead a relationship with a living God whose will for each individual has to be discovered through faith. That relationship requires the cleansing of the heart, and so Christian ethics must go deeper than does pagan ethics, aiming to transform the depths of the heart that are accessible only through divine grace. This psychological ambition (if that is the right term for it) and reliance upon grace gives Christian ethics a certain open-ended and unpredictable character. Sanctity can emerge in new and unexpected forms, as it did, for example, in the early monastic movement.

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To probe the depths of the heart can be a dangerous thing. History shows amply enough that in time the very ambition of Christian ethics led to forms of delusion and fanaticism that were unknown in the ancient world. To my mind part of the interest of the Greek Christian tradition lies in the reminder it provides that Christian ethics originally retained, despite its dynamism, a sense of disciplined objectivity that was rooted in classical philosophy. Nor is this fact merely of antiquarian interest, for the disciplines and underlying ethos described here remain alive in those aspects of the Christian tradition that carry forward the goals and methods of ancient monasticism. One has only to spend some time in an Eastern Orthodox monastery to recognize that this way of life remains powerful today. Classical Greek thought about the virtues and the Christian pursuit of wisdom, then, have much to offer one another, and the synthesis between them retains a vitality that is well deserving of our attention.

NOTES 1.  In saying this, I certainly do not wish to deny the independent interest of ancient Jewish and Latin Christian philosophical ethics. For some relevant discussion see David Winston, “Philo’s Ethical Theory,” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 2.21.1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984), 372–416; John Rist, Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 148–73; Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 385–86 (Philo), 372–84 (Augustine). 2. Plato, Republic, 442c. 3. Plato, Republic, 519a. 4. Plato, Republic, 590d, 611a–e. 5. Plato, Republic, 514a. 6. Plato, Republic, 410d–412a, 441e–442a. 7. Plato, Republic, 525b–531c, 537b–c. 8. Plato, Republic, 534b–c. 9. Plato, Republic, 540a–b. 10. Plato, Phaedo, 65c. 11. Plato, Phaedo, 66c. 12. Plato, Phaedo, 66c–d. 13. Plato, Phaedo, 83c–d. 14. Plato, Phaedo, 69b–c. 15. Plato, Symposium, 218c–219e. 16. Plato, Symposium, 210a–212a. 17. Plato, Symposium, 210d. 18. Plato, Symposium, 203d. 19. Plato, Symposium, 211d.



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20. Plato, Symposium, 212a. 21.  Of course, as in the Republic such assertions must be taken with a grain of salt. The subsequent intrusion of Alcibiades makes it clear that Socrates, at least, was far from able to bring forth virtue at will. 22. Plato often refers to phronēsis when speaking of wisdom concerned with practical and political affairs (e.g., Symposium, 209a), but does not systematically distinguish it from sophia. 23.  See Aristotle, Metaphysics, I.1 981b 28–29, I.2 983a 5–10. 24. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, X.7 1177b 31; cf. the reference to sophia at 1177a 24. 25. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.5 1140b 5–6. It is “truthful” because the deliberative part of the soul aims at a kind of truth, “truth in harmony with right desire” (Nicomachean Ethics, VI.2 1139a 30–31). 26. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI.12. 27.  For the details of this well-known account, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.1–5. 28. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.7 1098b 3–4. 29. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, III.4 1113a 25–33. 30. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I.8 1099a 11–21, II.3 1104b 3–11. 31. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II.5 1105b 21–23; cf. the similar definitions at Aristotle, Eudemian Ethics II.2 1220b 12–14 and Aristotle, Rhetoric II.1 1378a 20–22. 32.  Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII.110. 33.  See Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VII.110–18, with detailed discussion in Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 359–401; Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 181–210; Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), 47–80. 34.  I Corinthians 1:24. 35.  Wisdom 8:22–30. Translation modified from Lancelot C.L. Brenton, The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1986). 36.  II Corinthians 10:5. 37.  Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 8; Tatian, Oration 35; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata I.20; cf. numerous similar examples in G. W. H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), s.v. philosophia. 38. Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History, VI.3, ed. Henry Wace, trans. Philip Schaff, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982), 252. 39.  Nilus the Ascetic, Ascetic Discourse, trans. G. E. H. Palmer et al., The Philokalia: The Complete Text, vol. 1 (London: Faber and Faber, 1979), 201. 40.  See, for example, Matthew 6:16–18, 9:15; cf. Acts 13:3, 14:23, I Corinthians 7:5. 41. Romans 13:14. Biblical quotations are from the Revised Standard Version (R.S.V.), except where noted.

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42. See David Bradshaw, “The Mind and the Heart in the Christian East and West,” Faith and Philosophy 26 (2009): 576–98, from which I borrow in this and the following paragraph. 43.  Jeremiah 17:9. Here and in some of the following passages I have replaced the R.S.V.’s “mind” or “understanding” with “heart” in order to preserve the literal force of the Hebrew (and its Greek translation). 44.  Jeremiah 17:10. 45.  Isaiah 29:13. 46.  Matthew 6:21. 47.  Proverbs 8:5. This is the King James Version; the R.S.V. flattens the concluding phrase to “pay attention”! 48.  Matthew 5:8. 49.  Matthew 5:22–30. 50.  Matthew 5:38–42. 51.  Matthew 5:43–48. 52.  Matthew 6:24–34. 53.  Matthew 7:1–5. 54. It would take us too far afield to discuss here the synergism of the Greek Fathers, which is different from both the Augustinian and so-called semi-Pelagian theologies more familiar in the West; cf. David Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 120–25, 172–78, and David Bradshaw, “St. John Chrysostom on Grace and Free Will,” Common Ground Journal 12, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 30–36, http://www. commongroundjournal.org/volnum/v12n02.pdf. 55.  See Robert E. Sinkewicz, ed., Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), xxvi. 56.  Ibid., 10 (Evagrius of Pontus, 345–99). I use “lust” rather than “fornication” to translate porneia since Evagrius is concerned more with the thought than with the actual deed. 57.  Ibid., 62. 58.  Ibid., 74. 59.  Ibid., 107–9. The description of the passions as diseases of the soul is of Stoic provenance (Galen, On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, V.2) and entered Christian discourse through Clement of Alexandria (Protrepticus, 11). 60. Sinkewicz, Evagrius, 97; the list of vices with their opposing virtues (62–65) also includes jealousy. 61. Ibid., 97–98. It must be admitted, however, that Evagrius’s terminology is not wholly consistent, for he elsewhere refers to the passion as the sinful “element” within the thought (166). For this reason, I would not wholly agree with Sorabji’s suggestion that the thoughts of Evagrius are like the pre-passions (propatheiai) of the Stoics (Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 359–60). In general, apart from the two passages cited, Evagrius often treats the thoughts and passions as equivalent. 62.  In fact, the term “passion” was ultimately expelled from psychology precisely because of its moral and spiritual overtones; see Thomas Dixon, From Passions to



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Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 63.  Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua, 7; Patrologia Graeca (PG), vol. 91, col. 1092B. See also Timothy Ware, “The Transfiguration of the Body,” Sobornost 4 (1963): 420–34; Bradshaw, Aristotle East and West, 193–204, 230–36. 64. Sinkewicz, Evagrius, 33–34, 63. 65.  George C. Berthold, Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings (PG 90 1000C) (New York: Paulist Press, 1985), 53. 66. Berthold, Maximus Confessor, 75 (PG 90 1048A). 67.  Maximus Confessor, Questions to Thalassius 1 (PG 90 269B), trans. Robert Wilken, “Maximus the Confessor on the Affections in Historical Perspective,” in Asceticism, ed. Vincent Wimbush and Richard Valantasis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 412–23, at 416 (modified). 68.  Ibid., 416. 69. Berthold, Maximus Confessor, 61, 63. 70.  For this and the following see Nicholas Constas, ed. and trans., Maximos the Confessor: On Difficulties in the Church Fathers, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 431–35. 71.  It will be noticed that Maximus here stays fairly close to the Platonic schema, save that he substitutes practical wisdom (phronēsis) for sophia and he correlates justice with the vivifying faculty rather than proper order within the soul. He thinks of justice in ascetic rather than political terms, as “the equal, ordered, and harmonious distribution of vital power to more or less all objects of sense perception through the sense of touch” (Maximos the Confessor, 433). 72. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind, 356. 73.  Ibid., 360–69. 74. “Modern psychology here supports the ordinary person’s, or ordinary believer’s, instinctive sense of the importance of his states of mind and the availability of supplementary energy. . . . We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually self-preoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world. Our states of consciousness differ in quality, our fantasies and reveries are not trivial and unimportant, they are profoundly connected with our energies and our ability to choose and act. And if quality of consciousness matters, then anything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity, and realism is to be connected with virtue.” Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London and New York: Routledge, 1971), 81–82.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Berthold, George C. Maximus Confessor: Selected Writings. New York: Paulist Press, 1985. Bradshaw, David. “St. John Chrysostom on Grace and Free Will.” Common Ground Journal 12, no. 2 (Fall 2015): 30–36. http://www.commongroundjournal.org/volnum/v12n02.pdf.

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———. “The Mind and the Heart in the Christian East and West.” Faith and Philosophy 26 (2009): 576–98. ———. Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Brenton, Lancelot C. L. The Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1986. Constas, Nicholas, ed. and trans. Maximos the Confessor: On Difficulties in the Church Fathers. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Dixon, Thomas. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Knuuttila, Simo. Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004. Lampe, G. W. H. A Patristic Greek Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961. Murdoch, Iris. The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge, 1971. Nussbaum, Martha. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Palmer, G. E. H. et al., trans. The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Vol. 1. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. Rist, John. Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Schaff, Philip, and Henry Wace, eds., Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Second Series. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1982. Sinkewicz, Robert E., ed. Evagrius of Pontus: The Greek Ascetic Corpus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Sorabji, Richard. Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Ware, Timothy. “The Transfiguration of the Body.” Sobornost 4 (1963), 420–34. Wilken, Robert. “Maximus the Confessor on the Affections in Historical Perspective.” In Asceticism, edited by Vincent Wimbush and Richard Valantasis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Winston, David. “Philo’s Ethical Theory.” Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 2.21.1. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984.

Chapter Seven

Moral and Intellectual Virtue from Greek to Arabic Philosophy Lenn E. Goodman

The adoption of Ancient Greek virtue ethics by medieval philosophers, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish, who wrote in Arabic, called for a synthesis of moral with religious ideas, setting human responsibility alongside divine agency in the framing of actions and the forming of character. Ancient ideas of the virtues were reshaped in the light of scripture and tradition, revealing both the flexibility and the robustness of virtue ethics, and casting new light on the dynamic interaction of the moral and intellectual virtues. ANCIENT GREEK ROOTS Virtue in Aristotelian philosophy is a means to an end. The uncontroversial human end is happiness, understood in objective terms. Happiness is not pleasure, euphoria, satisfaction, or self-satisfaction. One might enjoy such states in sublime ignorance of one’s real situation: one’s health has crashed, one’s spouse has decamped with one’s best friend, one’s children are lost, one’s business has failed, and one’s assets have crumbled, along with all means of recovery. To avoid paradox and to mark the distinction between subjective happiness and objective well-being, some gloss eudaimonia as, “flourishing,” or “felicity,” cautioning the unwary that happiness means not feeling good but doing well. That last rendering is helpful. For the Aristotelian emphasis is not just on one’s state or even one’s status alone but on the activities that together constitute a good life. “Virtue,” too, should be posted with warning signs: virtue here designates not the trait sometimes intended by that term in days past—discipline, say, in men, or chastity in women. For a time, until Alasdair MacIntyre breathed renewed life into the classical concept, some even translated arete as “excellence,” leaning on the Greek etymology but 111

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ignoring the fact that the word “excellence,” pressed into service to name the varied virtues, does not work well as a plural in English and neglects the fact that virtues, in Aristotelian theory, are dispositions, not vague or abstract “superiorities.” The virtues of a thing, classically, were those characteristics that made it good at its function. Exploiting the familiar division between nature and artifice, Aristotle saw two broad types of virtue: living beings typified things natural; tools were the typical artifacts. The function (ergon) of a tool was its task. The organs of a living being, as the word implies, were its tools. One could find the task or function of an organism by tracing the work of its organs to the end they serve, pursued when the organs work optimally. In the most general sense, the end of a living being was living well; bare survival is not the goal. Aristotle’s medical family background is evident in the physiological slant of his thinking here. Even his cosmos was not a machine. The heavens were alive with gods. Purpose, for Aristotle, was the cosmic theme: Nature, he wrote, does nothing in vain. If the human purpose is happiness, the human virtues are the dispositions that promote it. So one could hone in on happiness by tracking acknowledged virtues, or one could refine one’s idea of virtue by testing claimants to the name against their yield in human fulfillment. The comparative or superlative connotations of the word arete remain. For the virtues of a thing are those features that allow it to perform well—better than it might have done, or better than others of its kind. Keenness is a virtue in a sword—unless it’s a stage weapon. All depends on function. Diverse swords have diverse virtues, depending on the kind of fighting for which they’re meant. And since virtues are dispositions, much depends on matter, the locus of potentiality. One can’t make a saber out of butter, or a darning needle out of wool. Health (and other “externals”) are necessary conditions of a good life for Aristotle. Some of these are external only in that they may lie beyond our personal control. But two classes of virtue of special human interest, moral and intellectual virtues, reflect our personal choices. Both types emerge from one’s natural endowment but are honed by practice. Aristotle inclines to call at least some intellectual virtues God-given, for one must work with the intelligence and memory one has. With the moral virtues in particular, Aristotle prioritizes our upbringing and the habits we see modeled around us and acquire, at first passively. In addition we are able to cultivate such virtues through conscientious effort. The sweet or bitter fruits of habit and cultivation are manifest in our social interactions. For we humans are social animals: our fully human lives depend on polity.1 Two key premises guide Aristotelian thinking about the moral virtues: First, virtues are acquired when regular practice of suitable actions makes



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them habitual. Habit, as Aristotle saw it, is second nature—acquired rather than innate as a disposition of character, but steady and reliable, personal rather than species wide, thoughtful rather than reflexive or instinctual, yet spontaneous rather than tortured by doubts and hesitations. We can’t control the weather or other external factors in good or ill fortune. But our actions, insofar as they are ours, are within our voluntary control. So our habits are, in good measure, of our own making. If moral virtues are habits, and virtues are habits conducive to happiness, then our happiness (or unhappiness) is in significant measure of our own making. Second, the moral virtues are linked inextricably to the intellectual virtues. For Aristotle a moral virtue is a disposition to choose actions in accordance with a mean discovered by reason (logos). The critical role of reason links this account with the Socratic understanding that moral virtues are intellectual essentially.2 Investigating what Socrates meant by calling the unexamined life not worth living and by saying that to know the good is to do the good, Plato found that the knowledge Socrates relied on lay not in formal maxims like those retailed by the Sophists but in a deeply ingrained habit of mind that reliably makes sound choices rather than veer toward excess or deficiency in the face of various prima facie goods or ills. A vice is a habit of making consistently poor choices. Moral virtues are reliable but not mechanical. The virtuous don’t just preserve a certain bias but habitually act thoughtfully. Cowards, predictably, shun risk; hotheads pursue it as if danger were a good in itself. But the courageous have developed habits of mind that guide them toward well-considered choices. Hence the truth behind the Socratic paradox: victims of akrasia (moral weakness or “incontinence”) know generally what they should do but fail to apply the knowledge they have. Their knowledge clearly does not run deep enough to frame a steady habit of mind (hexis). Sound practical judgments consider not just, say, danger or cost, pleasure or pain, but every relevant good or ill attendant on one’s choices. Recognizing that the goods and ills to be weighed in any ordinary or morally challenging situation are typically incommensurable, Plato looked to an implicit knowledge of the Good itself as the ultimate arbiter of sound choices. That analysis underlies his thesis that reason must rule in a well-governed, wellintegrated state and in the individual who hopes for sound self-governance and a well-integrated personality. The wise, as Plato sees it, will rely on the innate acquaintance with the form of the Good that dialectic has freed from the false conceit of wisdom and made accessible to conscious thought and action. Aristotle, less comfortable with Plato’s Forms and his appeal to an innate, if latent, knowledge of them, found the notion of a sheer intuition of the Form

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of the Good too general to specify a “doable good”—just as innate knowledge is of little help in understanding nature. Knowing that all organs serve some good cannot reveal to the zoologist or botanist just what good it is that each organ serves, or how it does so. Similarly, innate knowledge of the Form of the Good, even if surfaced by dialectic, proves too broad to afford concrete advice in particular circumstances. So, rather than appeal to knowledge of the Forms, Aristotle gestured toward familiar moral notions like nobility. Lest that advice too seem overbroad or conventional, Aristotle advised we seek out role models—ideally a phronimos. Long rendered “prudence,” phronesis is often translated as practical wisdom.3 Phronesis, for Aristotle, was an intellectual virtue focused on practical choices. Although phronesis is a critical virtue ubiquitous in the acts and choices of the virtuous individual, Aristotle’s appeal to such a virtue did not render his account of virtue circular. Experience acquaints us with suitable role models, and we’re able to study and appreciate the acts of those who have or lack it, who exercise it or fail to do so. Shared experience, too, perhaps literary or historical, can augment our personal knowledge. Knowing the tenor and outcome of wise or unwise choices can help us chart the course that will manifest and form our character. Happiness, understood as fulfillment of our human nature, rising to the heights of contemplation and the steady exercise of practical wisdom, is a divine gift. But, for that very reason, Aristotle argues, happiness is most fittingly seen as the reward of virtue, not the toy of chance. As such, it is not a commodity to be jealously guarded, as though one person’s happiness must inevitably diminish that of another. On the contrary, happiness, properly understood, can be “shared by many. Study and effort put it in reach of anyone who is not a moral cripple.” For nature must be governed in accord with what is generous and right.4 Aristotle spoke qualifiedly here about the justice of the natural order (consistent with his biological view that nature does nothing in vain). Indeed the major thesis of the Nicomachaean Ethics is that happiness is a life in accordance with the virtues. For this to be the true character of happiness is the view most in keeping with the justice and generosity of nature’s order—as opposed to the notion that what Aristotle calls externals are not only necessary to happiness but sufficient in constituting it. Externals, as distinguished from the goods achieved through cultivation of one’s character, do depend on chance—that is, on causes that are random relative to the dispositions of one’s character. Plato, less sanguine than Aristotle about this world, describes our highest aim as becoming as like to God as possible, by means of flight from the world and its ills. Accordingly, the virtues he admired tend toward the ascetic,



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relaxing one’s attachments to sensory things in the world of “becoming” and enlisting the discipline of the soul in the interest of returning our truer self to its divine root. But for Aristotle, despite his shared hopes of immortality for the rational soul, worldly activity looms larger and looks friendlier: human reason, at its peak, emulates divine self-sufficiency in contemplation but does not neglect the more immanent expressions of the divine, pursued in the guidance reason offers for life’s governance. For Plotinus, virtue has become a more inward quest. There are no “civic virtues” in divinity. Fortitude, Plotinus explains, is not needed “where there can be no danger.” Nor is temperance, where there is no lack and nothing is alluring.5 Still, worldly virtues “are a principle of order and beauty in us, as long as we remain passing our life here”—for Plato’s reason: “they ennoble us by setting bound and measure to our desires and to our entire sensibility.”6 Moral virtues, moreover, dispel false judgment, “by sheer efficacy of the better, by the very setting of the bounds, by the fact that the measured is lifted outside the sphere of the unmeasured and lawless.”7 In somewhat Stoic style, Plotinus here treats moral virtue, conceived as discipline and measure, almost as if it were an end in itself, a worldly good to be cultivated as learning might be while we await release from our worldly prison. At the same time, he tightens the bond of intellectual to moral virtue: It’s not just that reason rightly rules the appetites and passions but that moral discipline is a prerequisite if reason itself is to gain the wisdom that resolves any conflict among the worldly virtues and brings the fully realized rational soul to the detachment from the physical that is its apotheosis.8 Where Plotinus echoes Plato’s counsels of flight from the sensory realm in his imperative, “Cut away everything!” Porphyry (ca. 234–ca. 305) chooses the less violent, still therapeutic image of catharsis, bearing mystical as well as medical overtones. Plato’s worldly virtues are now preludes to the vita contemplativa, purifications like those of the mysteries, disciplines that elevate the soul to the realm of true being and godlikeness, where such virtues are no longer needed. Only wisdom, ultimately, fills their place.9 In Proclus (ca. 410–485) virtue becomes theurgic, sublimated to a kind of faith that “unites us to the Good,”10 modeling the dynamic unity of faith, truth, and love that unites the gods themselves in lively society. Faith, truth, and love will resurface in Augustine’s appropriation of the Pauline virtues of faith, hope, and love, as will the lively interactions of their heavenly counterparts in the unity-in-diversity of the persons of the Trinity. A comparable dynamic unity will be sought throughout the Middle Ages in the unitive ecstasy projected or pursued by Sufis, kabbalists, eremites, mystics, and saints climbing a ladder of numbers, letters, or phases of ecstasy, and witnessing the familiar yet exotic landmarks and furnishings of the heavenly pleroma, whose

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summit returns adepts to Parmenidean oneness, passionately forgetful of the landscape left behind. But long before Proclus, and more accepting than Plato of our life within the world, Philo (ca. 25 BCE–ca. 50 CE) sets out what will become the agenda of medieval virtue ethics. Building on Stoic and Platonic ideas, he argues that the Mosaic law reflects the harmony and order of the cosmos,11 allowing us to live a heavenly life in this world: “true everlasting life, as the Law says, is to live in obedience to and worship of God.” To live without God is already to be dead; to serve God is already to enjoy life everlasting.12 The Talmud strikes a kindred note, arguing that the righteous, even in death, are called living; the wicked, even in life, are called dead.13 Connecting righteousness to life eternal, Philo identifies that life with the life of virtue. Philosophically, that equation is warranted by way of the idea of natural law—on Plato’s grounds, for example, that the just soul, integrated by reason, is the most capable of surviving death. But scripturally, as Philo suggests, the promise is kept in the good life to which the Torah’s guidance leads.14 At Proverbs 3:18 we learn that wisdom is called a tree of life to those who hold fast to it, and in the Hebrew liturgy that life-giving wisdom is identified with the wisdom of the Torah and its ways. YAḤYĀ: THE VIRTUES IN EARLY ARABIC MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī (893–974) was a bridge person. Sometimes called the Logician, he hailed from Takrit, an important center of Jacobite Christianity, the confession for which Yaḥyā wrote a good deal of theology. He studied both under the Nestorian philosopher Abū Bishr Mattā, who defended logic against the Muslim grammarian al-Sīrāfī’s charge that logic is not universal but merely the grammar of the Greeks, and under the Muslim philosopher al-Fārābī (ca. 870–950), a pioneer of Arabic logic, metaphysics, and political and cultural philosophy, known to this day as al-Mu‘allim al-Thānī, the Second Teacher—after Aristotle. Yaḥyā was a leading Baghdad Peripatetic, with both Muslims and Christians of varied denominations among his followers.15 An active conduit of classical learning and humanistic values, he stood at the center of what Joel Kraemer has called the Renaissance of Islam.16 Of critical ethical relevance is a work of Yaḥyā’s rebutting “those who say that actions are created by God and only appropriated by His creatures.”17 This was the doctrine of the Ash‘arite school of Islamic theology, marked by the trademark Ash‘arite notion of “acquisition,” which Maimonides would scorn as doubletalk.18



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Ash‘arite determinism, emerging in Yaḥyā’s time and enshrined as a dogma in Sunni creeds, was branded by al-Fārābī “an outrageous conclusion, repugnant to every religion and very, very dangerous for people to believe.”19 Yaḥyā followed al-Fārābī’s lead here and, not surprisingly, took up Abū Bishr’s defense of logic,20 championing universal reason against the rising tide of Islamic claims that knowledge must rest on received tradition. Often pressed for philosophical defenses of the Trinity and Incarnation, Yaḥyā answered not only rival Christian sects and polemical skeptics like Abū Isā al-Warrāq (d. ca. 862), but also the first major Muslim philosopher al-Kindī (ca. 801–866/7), the famous Philosopher of the Arabs. In a treatise on monotheism, he appealed to thoughts of three robust divine attributes— wisdom, benevolence, and power—a scheme traceable, via pseudo-Dionysius, to Proclus’s efforts to address neoplatonic problems of deriving a multifarious world from divine unity. His trinitarian work, seeking in its own way to unite love and logic, became a mainstay of Arabic speaking Christians, not least, the Copts, the denomination once the majority in Egypt but today violently targeted by the Muslim Brotherhood. Amid his many theological tracts, some sixty devoted to distinctively Christian topics, Yaḥyā’s ethical treatise stands out. YAḤYĀ ON PERFECTING THE SOUL Perhaps first titled On Governance of the Soul, the work is best known by another phrase it uses: On the Refinement of Character (Fī Tahdhīb alAkhlāq).21 Standing in for eudaimonia in Yaḥyā’s scheme of virtue ethics is self-perfection (al-tamām wa-’l-kamāl), one’s worthiest goal,22 attained by cultivating as habits (‘ādāt) our noblest of character traits (akhlāq). Contrary to the Ash‘arites, not only our actions but also our character is in our own hands—although not absolutely or exclusively. Ill nature tends to dominate in most human beings. So they are readily corrupted. Hence, the need for government—and moral handbooks. But such books, Yaḥyā confesses, will likely be more prized as a guide and a goad to perseverance by one who is already virtuous. Tracing Plato’s path, as seen through Galen (for many of the second century physician’s medical and philosophical works were translated into Arabic in the years before Yaḥyā wrote, including some surviving only in Arabic), Yaḥyā identifies three “souls” or psychic faculties—appetitive, irascible, and rational. The rational marks mankind’s difference from all other animals. It is the seat of memory and reasoning, discrimination and understanding. Reason ennobles man, makes him resolute, and imparts self-respect. Reason distinguishes fair

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from foul, valuing the former and disvaluing the other.23 Despite the nod toward thoughts of original sin in the mention of the rarity of good natures and the prominence of vices, manifested in a lust for domination or for vengeance, Yaḥyā trusts reason to master the appetites and passions. Reason itself is not corrupted, and it is not merely calculative but valuative. Here, as in Plato, it can guide one toward temperance and enlist the “irascible” soul to promote “contempt for worldly things, love of legitimate authority, and a pursuit of higher planes” than sensuous desires know.24 The moral virtues begin with abstemiousness. They include contentment with one’s lot, respectability (a mix of gravitas, self-respect, and highmindedness), the famous royal virtue of ḥilm (clemency), sobriety (including attentiveness, patience, and composure in responding—virtues of a teacher or pastor). Part of sobriety is delicacy or decency, reflecting a sense of shame. This is not Aristotle’s shamefacedness but the opposite of shamelessness or impudence, commendable, “as long as it does not reflect inarticulacy or incapacity.” Aristotle’s moral categories are re-tuned here for a new cultural context. Like Aristotle, who saw friendship at its best as reciprocal and reciprocated virtue, Yaḥyā counts friendship among the virtues, defining it as “a moderated love, free of passionate pursuit.” Compassion blends love and caring and is directed toward those in abject want. A Christian ethos blossoms here. Fidelity is steadfast devotion to one’s cause, even in the face of injury. Its rewards are trust and moral growth; its exercise is critical in an effective ruler. Trustworthiness is a related virtue— a critical virtue in dealing with goods, or interacting with women. Discretion is a blend of sobriety and trustworthiness. Reflecting a courtly context, Yaḥyā calls discretion laudable in anyone but vital in the intimates of rulers. Like other scriptural moralists and unlike Aristotle, who finds a mean in “proper pride,” Yaḥyā sees humility as a virtue, calling it a distaste for selfaggrandizement, preening, and the avid pursuit of dominance and marks of recognition. The humble do not brag. They avoid conceit and the arrogance it breeds. But only in leaders and dignitaries is humility a virtue. Others are humble by their station, not their character; they need not act the part. Affability shows warmth and pleasantness to all, whether brethren (viz., co-religionists), friends, acquaintances, or relations—a virtue in kings and commoners alike. Candor means truthfulness, a virtue so long as it’s not hurtful or harmful. Yaḥyā echoes Plato’s instance of the weapon not to be returned. But he enlarges the boundaries of discretion to include reticence about one’s own wrongdoing, endorsing a variety of self-protection that may conflict with the notes of penitence that other monotheist moralists will sound.



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Good will, for Yaḥyā, is faith in human goodness and suppression of malice and deceit. Liberality means spending freely, regardless of desert—so long as one does not bankrupt oneself. The Arab poets’ romantic image of carefree generosity is in play here, alongside Christian thoughts of agape. So Yaḥyā does not cast every virtue into the mold of the middle way. Courage means facing what is hateful or destructive when one must—another virtue critical in rulers—and in the persecuted. Ambition is worthy when what one admires and emulates is virtue or some genuine attainment, but loathsome when bent on pleasures, passions, or pomp. Fortitude (al-ṣabr ‘inda al-shadā’id) mingles sobriety with courage. It is highly praiseworthy, so long as one does not use trickery to project illusions of pain or harm. Yaḥyā may have fakirs and stylites or braggart warriors in mind, who make a public display of self-imposed or self-sought sufferings, real or counterfeit. He has high praise for fortitude but condemns sham sensationalism. Like Aristotle, Yaḥyā counts greatness of soul a virtue rightly cultivated by kings, other leaders, and anyone who seeks high office. Greatness of soul engenders generosity and scorns pettiness and mediocrity. It is here that we see the counterparts of Aristotle’s virtues of proper pride, righteous indignation—and even a virtuous jealousy, which Yaḥyā suggests is an unwillingness to suffer fools and incompetents and contempt for, say, seductive scheming. We catch a glimpse of Yaḥyā's world here. He has strikingly little to add about justice, describing it more in Justinian’s than Plato’s terms, as fair distribution and proper use of things. He does seek to steer between excess and deficiency, pairing that effort with the biblical virtue of impartiality. But, perhaps in deference to the powers that be, he does not mark out the guideposts of justice. As Sofia Vasalou points out,25 Yaḥyā distinguishes greatness of soul from greatness of spirit. The latter looks not just to past achievements and present status but to future hopes and aspirations. The concern is not with entitlements to honor or recognition but with moral growth and future development of one’s character and role. Building on thoughts Aristotle broaches in the Rhetoric concerning zeal and hope as motives of striving, especially in the young, the idea fits well with scriptural visions of God’s challenge to the aspiring to lead a life in pursuit of a higher ideal. YAḤYĀ AND INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES The intellectual virtues may seem to have dropped into the background here: Yaḥyā knows that refining one’s morals depends on the rational soul.26 But he

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simply reaffirms Plato’s maxim, that reason must rule appetite and passion. The rational sciences and the society of the learned will strengthen one’s reason. But Yaḥyā does not detail just how. He contents himself with commending the study of those sciences and books on morals like his own, evidently convinced that good will (like good upbringing in Aristotle) and good nature, a gift of divine grace, are the key factors in setting a sound moral course. But notice what Yaḥyā says about patience, echoing thoughts of Galen’s, also echoed by the free thinking physician Muhammad b. Zakariyā’ al-Rāzī (ca. 865–ca. 925):27 a patient man won’t rise in anger against someone who berates him. Seeing an adversary seemingly unable to restrain himself, he feels no more anger than if he heard a dog barking at him. The angry man sets to. He’ll even kick some obstacle he trips over, too angry to reflect that it could mean him no harm.28 Passions can submerge good sense. Patience, as a Stoic would say, comes from realizing with whom (or what) one is dealing. So virtue, for Yaḥyā, remains thoughtful, profiting from reason at its most practical. With money, knowing matters. As we make our choices, we need constantly to bear in mind that money is a medium of exchange, as Aristotle taught, “wanted only for the sake of something else and not worthy of being sought for its own sake.”29 So, here too, moral virtue means keeping reason in control. That’s the moral reason for valuing the sciences. Beyond moral handbooks like his own, Yaḥyā writes, one should read biographies and works on politics, school oneself “somewhat” in rhetoric and grammar, learn to speak eloquently and clearly, listen to wise and learned men, and befriend wholesome, modest people,30 training the mind to recognize a sound and dignified course of action and way of life, spending time with works of literature and history, but also with worthy friends, cultivating the habits that will show oneself worthy of worthy company. MISKAWAYH The champion of virtue ethics among Muslims was the courtier philosopher, historian, and physician Abū ‘Alī Miskawayh (ca. 932–1030). A Shī‘ite born at Rayy near present day Tehran, he stands out among Muslim philosophers for the centrality of ethics in his work. Trained in ethics by Ibn al-Khammār, the most prominent of Yaḥyā’s Muslim students, Miskawayh came late to ethics. In the “experience of nations,” as he called it in the title of his multivolume history, he found practical wisdom for statecraft. Like Yaḥyā and Abū Bishr Mattā, Miskawayh defended the Greek sciences against parochial resistance, convinced by Ibn ‘Adī that our highest calling is universal love of



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humankind. His ethical work, best known by the same title as Yaḥyā’s, On the Refinement of Character, set the pattern for centuries of work in Islamic virtue ethics. Like Plato, Miskawayh links the cardinal virtues to three psychic interests. Like Galen and Yaḥyā, he does not press their assignment to discrete souls. Rather than argue as Plato does, that our desires contradict one another, Miskawayh says that they compete: overstressing one weakens the others.31 Reason, the royal faculty, considering the true natures of things, rightly rules since it is able to discriminate. The irascible faculty is manifest in anger, of course, but also in boldness, self-assertion, pursuit of dominance, superiority, and esteem. The appetitive pursues the delights of food, drink, sex, and other base pleasures. Larger virtues grow from lesser ones. So reason, when well balanced and not over-reaching, seeks genuine, not specious knowledge. It wins knowledge but rises to wisdom.32 The appetitive animal soul, reined in by reason, becomes abstemious, then liberal. Moderated by obedience to reason, the irascible gains clemency (ḥilm), then courage.33 One needs self-control, it seems, before one can advance to generosity. Ḥilm precedes courage, perhaps because clemency belongs to those who have the upper hand; courage becomes relevant in facing a challenge. Abstemiousness (al-‘iffa) sounds a bit stronger, perhaps, than temperance in representing sophrosyne. All these virtues, Miskawayh stresses, are social. Generosity that regards ego alone is prodigality. Courage, kept to oneself, turns arrogant. Inquiry, if selfish, is mere inquisitiveness. Miskawayh avoids adding that it may decay into pedantry or dogmatism. Liberality, we note, jostles asceticism when sophrosyne, modestly, allows it. Wisdom, we know, is not merely calculative but judicious. Temperance is good judgment about the appetites. Courage, in its proper role, acts as reason’s executive. Although justice remains a mean between wronging another and being wronged, justice still means a proper balance among psychic faculties,34 achieved, as in Plato, by reason’s rule. MISKAWAYH’S CLASSIFICATION OF THE VIRTUES Miskawayh gathers the intellectual virtues under wisdom: Intelligence means catching on quickly, and deftly reaching sound conclusions. Where Aristotle stressed intuiting a syllogism’s middle term, Miskawayh cuts to the chase and puts the emphasis on the conclusion. Memory means retention of an image. So it depends on imagination. To be reasonable is realism, seeing things as they are. Clear-sightedness is readiness to pursue an inference. Perspicacity is the capacity to see what follows from a premise. A ready learner is one

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prepared to grasp ideas for himself. The conclusions Miskawayh treats as desiderata, might as readily be practical as intellectual. Like the statesman he was, Miskawayh sees conclusions as practical goals and not just as findings. Under temperance he lists modesty, calm, steadfastness, honesty, and contentment. His ideal man is gentle, orderly, personable, cordial and conciliatory, serious and pious—as shown in his good deeds, inspired by piety. Liberality has subspecies: charity, altruism, openhandedness (generosity, even to one’s cost), remission of one’s due, and a delight in helping others that becomes a way of life. Temperance moves from the stringencies imposed on children to the more positive modes of generosity commended in adults.35 Under courage Miskawayh lists greatness of soul (contempt for triviality, readiness to bear adversity although deserving of great things), dauntlessness, composure (even in the face of death), steadiness under fire, clemency, imperturbability, gallantry, and fortitude. We’re no longer in a classroom or courtly interior now but perhaps in a military camp. Under justice itself, Miskawayh groups friendship, fellowship, mother love, pleasantness, fairness, equity, reciprocity, reverence, and the rejection of jealousy, spite, and talebearing. Again we see virtues reflective of a courtly setting. MISKAWAYH AND THE MEAN Each virtue, Miskawayh explains, is like a bulls-eye, centered among alternatives, some peripheral enough to count as vices. Even wisdom is a mean, between cunning and stultification. So is intelligence, between the sly and the stolid. Since knowledge addresses values as well as facts, and truth remains a value, Miskawayh sees the moral side of the intellectual virtues. Intellectual sloppiness, laziness, and passivity, then, might be added to our lexicon of vices, along with intellectual dishonesty. As in Aristotle, we need all the intellectual tools we have. And, for Miskawayh, the stress is on using those assets. With a keen eye to the swift or halting channels of inference, he pinions dullness (and the attitudes that promote it) and praises penetration, not just the insight but the drive to press for solutions. Miskawayh loves the middle enough to call good memory a mean between recollecting too little and too much. He makes a similar point about mental rambling and overshooting. Sophistry is a vice. But even rational intuition can leap too far and too fast. Clarity lies between foggy-headedness and an almost paranoid seeing too much. And a quick study can advance too fast to digest what has been learned.36 So density is not the only intellectual weakness, and cleverness is not invariably a virtue.



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The moral side Miskawayh finds in the intellectual virtues highlights his awareness of how multifaceted the mind is and reflects his thoughts about context and wisdom, the indissoluble links of truth to other values, and his deep seriousness about humanity’s social nature. “A man,” he writes, “cannot reach perfection all by himself. He needs many others to achieve a good life and to manage things properly. That is why the philosophers said that man is political by nature. One needs a good-sized city fully to attain happiness. Everyone, by nature, is dependent on others. So one must live with them, relate well to them, and sincerely care for them. For it is through them that one’s personhood is made complete and one’s humanity perfected.”37 Miskawayh’s virtue ethics was highly influential among Shi‘ite writers, most notably in the spiritualizing ethics of Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūṣī (1201–1274). Ṭūṣī’s work was popularized by Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī (1427–1502), who equated Ṭūṣī’s paragons of natural virtue with the ‘ulamā (clerics) and dervish shaykhs, and called his own patron the “shadow of God on earth.”38 But it was Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (1058–1111), author of The Incoherence of the Philosophers, a systematic attack on the neoplatonic Aristotelians of Islam, who made virtue ethics all but canonical in Sunnī Islam. AL-GHAZĀLĪ’S PIETIST ETHICS Ghazālī adopted the framework of Miskawayh’s Aristotelian virtue ethics, as my teachers Richard Walzer and H. A. R. Gibb explained.39 But they glossed over his substituting Sufi pietism for Miskawayh’s courtly humanism. As I wrote elsewhere: The ancient architecture is strikingly preserved—Aristotle’s profound and profoundly original conceptualization of the virtues. But, like the mosaics in the Byzantine basilicas, the faces are erased or plastered over: Where the lithe forms of pagan demigods once danced and later the spiritual lineaments and heavenward gaze of late antique piety and paideia could once be seen in the tesserae of the mosaics, the space is filled with painted sayings from the Prophet and his Book.40

Ghazālī rejects Miskawayh’s dismissal of Sufi asceticism and his endorsement of the youthful study of mathematics as vital to the good life. He suppresses Miskawayh’s dismissal of a life of solitude and has no use for his appraisal of communal worship and the Ḥajj as means of binding together the community of Islam. Following Miskawayh line for line but erasing his humanistic orientation, Ghazālī dropped about a third of what Miskawayh had to say about ethics.41

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Wisdom, courage, and temperance remain the cardinal virtues for Ghazālī, still linked with the rational, appetitive, and irascible faculties. Justice still integrates them. Like Miskawayh, he groups other virtues under the cardinal three, although he sets no sub-virtues under justice. He retains the ancient idea of retributive and distributive justice that Miskawayh adopted from Aristotle but, understandably, seems less concerned with self-assertion. Still, like Miskawayh and Aristotle, he rejects Plato’s denial that justice is a compromise between doing wrong and being wronged. Wisdom still rules, but love of God is teased out and set ahead of the knowledge Aristotle made the ground, expression, and goal of such love. Where Miskawayh prized memory and clarity, Ghazālī canonizes discernment in a controversy. In place of reasonableness he sets insight, the ability to hit the truth without need of argument. Ghazālī, like Miskawayh, values liberality. But he qualifies his praise since such virtues suit only those still immersed in the world of material possessions. Aristotelian magnificence (listed under courage) is rightly shown in building mosques, roads, hospitals, and bridges. But, again, it is relevant only for those still caught in worldly toils. If Miskawayh could expatiate on the varieties of liberality, Ghazālī will list twenty evils of the tongue. Cheer and good humor are valued; but sociability can become a chore. Solitude is preferable. Courage is needed, but only in confronting enemies of Islam. Greatness of soul means caring little for honors. Righteous indignation, an Aristotelian virtue elided by Miskawayh, is set back in place, with cautions against confusing it with spite or envy. Where Miskawayh praised actions done for their own sake or for God’s, Ghazālī pairs the quest for immortality with the desire to draw nearer to God. Intrinsic worth smacks too much of worldliness to hold its own here. Setting a pietist mantle over the virtue of contentment, Ghazālī urges one not to seek one’s needs beyond a single day—a month at most. All worldly excess is frowned on. But one cannot be too sober or sedate: The Prophet preferred a smile to laughter, and the Sufi saint Ḥasan al-Basrī did not laugh for thirty years. Miskawayh had related personable self-presentation very much to dress, but Ghazālī gives clothing an even greater emphasis: The Prophet, he teaches, wore whatever came to hand, saying he was a slave and should dress accordingly. We should wear only the coarsest of fabrics, just enough to give the necessary coverage and stout enough to last a day and a night— showing our trust in God. SAADIAH ON GUARDING AGAINST VICE Saadiah Gaon (882–942), exegete, lexicographer, grammarian, and Talmudist, the first systematic Jewish philosopher, does not develop a full virtue



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ethics. But he does hold, with the Mu‘tazilites of Islam, that sin takes hold of one’s character as a result of morally flawed choices. Our wise or willful choices enlarge or constrict our degrees of freedom, as the Talmudic rabbis taught: fulfillment of one divine commandment draws in its train the privilege, opportunity, penchant, and strength to fulfill another.42 And each act of disobedience, similarly, digs one into a moral rut. So not only is virtue its own reward but each dutiful or disobedient act frees one for further exercise of virtue or mires one in ever deeper bondage than the choices that led to it. Saadiah follows the rabbinic doctrine that we are judged on the preponderance of our actions,43 a thought in tune with virtue ethics since such ethics rests merit and blame on the overall tendency of one’s doings and not simply on isolated acts—although, of course, each of our actions contributes to the framing and setting of our character.44 Working inductively with the values he finds in scripture, Saadiah lays out a pluralistic ethics, critical of attempts to make “a single trait of character” the guide of our choices in life. The quest for balance here stands in for Aristotelian moderation. God, Saadiah argues, gave humans diverse interests just as He made us of diverse elements and parts. We don’t build houses of stone or brick or thatch alone but combine our materials to complement one another. The same is true with foods, he urges. Just as music must harmonize diverse tones and rhythms, and medicines compound multiple ingredients, a good life blends varied ends, balancing the sensuous with the ascetic, the goods of the appetites with those of procreation, urban and agrarian development, health and longevity, governance and knowledge, leisure and rest, gratitude in worship, and retribution for crimes. None of these, Saadiah argues, is rightly made the be-all and end-all of our lives, as narrowly focused advocates might imagine. Each is sorely wanting when pursued to the detriment of the rest—self-undermining, in fact, when not balanced by the other goods, to yield the good life the Torah proposes.45 Saadiah is looking for good judgment here, so there is a role for intellectual virtues in the pursuit of the good life, but much of the tuning has been left to the Torah and the ethos it seeks to frame and foster. MAIMONIDES ON MORAL AND INTELLECTUAL ENDS Moses Maimonides (1138–1204), philosopher, physician, and jurist, knows his Aristotle well and uses virtue ethics to unify Saadiah’s lively crowd of ends.46 Seeking a highest goal, he marshals our diverse authentic goods as means to a single summum bonum. Reason, he affirms, links us with God and is the referent of scripture’s poetic affirmation that humanity is created in God’s image.47 Our ultimate end is perfection of the intelligence that distinguishes us from all

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other animals, and reason’s quest is consummated in knowing God. That goal (open ended, since the approach to God is asymptotic) is the rightful pinnacle of our aspirations, fulfilling Plato’s counsel to become just and pious and as like to God as possible.48 Scripture frames the aim in its own distinctive register, as an imperative: Ye shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy.49 This we do, Maimonides holds, by practicing the kindness, grace, and generosity revealed in God’s governance of nature—but also through the quest to know God. We emulate God by striving to perfect ourselves through exercise of the moral and intellectual virtues. The ancient rabbis had long glossed the imperative to emulate God’s holiness by making God the model of benevolence—clothing the naked, visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, burying the dead50—actions that typify the life of goodness that realizes and deepens a character aspiring to emulate God’s love, ḥesed. In an individual or a community, the rabbis call that character middat ḥasidim, the ethos of the devoted, piety manifested in acts of loving kindness. For Maimonides this moral side of imitatio Dei is capped and complemented by fulfillment of reason’s yearning to know God—reconnecting with the Source of understanding and of life itself. God makes Himself known in our recognition of his absoluteness, voiced in his I am that I am, and its shorthand expression in the Tetragrammaton—and by a more a posteriori route, through study of His works in nature. For the more we know of nature the more we see God’s grace and wisdom, and the more we see and love God’s transcendent perfection. Maimonides’s use of Jacob’s ladder, with God atop its summit and angels ascending and descending, like Plato’s ladder of love, or the line in the Republic, maps the ontic, axiological, and epistemic scale that souls must climb. The angels, Maimonides stresses, descend again after their ascent. For all messengers have a mission beyond their own fulfillment, to bring guidance, counsel, and instruction to those remaining below. Here enlightenment links up with responsibility, and intellectual virtue touches moral virtue and is touched by it. The two meet in the Torah and in God’s commandments training the soul in moral virtue and preparing it for the intellectual perfection that pursues knowledge of God. Although intellectual perfection fulfills man’s inner affinity to the divine, it also guides us in the definition and development of the moral virtues, and in their expression. For without God-given reason human beings would be no better than animals and no more subject than they to any moral imperative.51 HOW LAWS FACILITATE VIRTUE If a system of law, Maimonides writes, aims for civic order, checking wrongdoing and promoting what the lawgiver takes for human happiness, but



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without regard to character or ideas it is clearly a law of human devising. A divinely inspired law pursues not just material welfare but the reform of character and enhancement of belief, seeking to elevate human understanding and allow those it serves to fathom the true nature of things. Such, Maimonides holds, is the Mosaic law. It does seek to curb the harm wrought by force and fraud and to enhance the material well-being of those sheltered by its rules. But it also institutes actions and abstentions aiming to perfect human character and instill moral virtues. Beyond that, it seeks to enlighten its adherents, not by way of dogma but through symbols. A paradigm case of the Torah’s moral project is the mandate to assist one’s enemy whose ass lies sprawling under its load.52 An enemy is specified, Maimonides explains, because this law, like the prohibition of vengeance and grudges,53 seeks “to abate the force of anger and spite.” The commandment to return an enemy’s stray beast54 seeks to purge any drift toward avarice. Israelites are told to “rise up before a hoary head”55—to instill an ethos of respect, reflected also in the commandment, to honor one’s father and mother,56 and more impersonally in the obligation to obey duly appointed magistrates.57 The cultivation of kindness, similarly, is the object of the laws regarding slaughter of animals for food and such commandments as the requirement to shoo away the mother bird if one is to take her eggs.58 The Torah, Maimonides says, seeks to purge arrogance and foster modesty. But it would be out of balance if it steered one to extremes of shamefacedness. So it commands reproof of wrongdoing59 and stern and resolute resistance to false prophets.60 Maimonides tells us that we need only test the commandments against this standard to see how they guide and train our dispositions. Biblical ethics here is not the mere mass of thou-shalts and thou-shaltnots, mocked by Nietzsche as camel’s burdens. Biblical commandments, as Maimonides reads them, aim to cultivate virtue and attune the ethos toward a wholesome and well-reasoned ground. Thus the Psalmist’s words at 19:8, as Maimonides glosses them: The Law of the Lord, which is perfect, reforms the soul—passing on, in concrete terms amenable to action and imagination, its ideal of human perfection.61 MAIMONIDES ON KNOWING AND BELIEVING How, then, is intellectual perfection sought without dogmas or catechisms? Maimonides confronts this question when he reads in the Mishnah62 that all Israel have a share in the World to Come—as do the righteous of all nations.63 The World to Come, as Maimonides understands it, is timeless contact (Arabic, ittisāl, Hebrew, devekut) of the rational soul with the Divine. That goal, as Plato taught, is to be won philosophically. How, then, is it attainable by

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those who are not philosophically adept? To this Platonic question, Maimonides has a Platonic answer. For, as Plato makes clear in the Meno at 97a, for most practical purposes true belief is as good as knowledge, although not for teaching when explanations are required, nor for creative work. Poets are the mediators, as Plato proposed in the Republic. Al-Fārābī, adept in Plato’s thought and deeply respected by Maimonides, had carried that thought a step further, seeing it as the special task of prophets to use rhetoric and imagery to translate the pure ideas known to a philosopher into beliefs and practices accessible to those who never dream of practicing philosophy. Scripture, Maimonides argued, imparts true beliefs about God and His governance of the world. It makes practice, too, a vehicle of ideas. Sabbath observance, paradigmatically, offers not just a day of rest but an opportunity to contemplate the two great themes that Sabbath rest symbolically intends: providence, as exemplified in the Exodus and liberation from Egypt; and creation, which Sabbaths celebrate. Beliefs can point beyond themselves, toward knowledge; symbols can stand in for concepts. So the Torah’s ritual laws, far from being merely ornamental or empty “ceremonial,” carry rich messages, via the imagination, to the emotional lives of those unused to sustained conceptual thinking. Indeed, they invite deeper probing. Taking up an image from the Book of Proverbs, Maimonides finds a symbol addressing the workings of biblical symbolism itself: Golden apples chased with silver is a word well spoken, says the sage (Proverbs 25:11). To explain that idea: The chasing here is a filigree tracery with tiny openwork eyelets like those that silversmiths make. They’re called eyelets because you can see through them. . . . What it says is that a poetic figure is a golden apple encased in silver filigree with tiny piercings. . . . See how marvelously this describes well wrought imagery. It says that when words work on two levels, a surface and a deeper meaning, the outer sense should be fine and fair as silver, but the inner must be more, just as gold is more precious than silver. Still, the surface meaning must lead those who ponder it toward the inner, as the tiny eyelets do in the silver tracery around this apple. From a distance or at a glance it looks like a silver apple, but a keen observer who studies it closely will see inside and realize it’s gold. Just so the prophets’ poesy holds practical wisdom on the surface, including much that is socially wholesome. . . . But the inner sense bears a wisdom beneficial in a different way, imparting true convictions about Reality.64

The Torah’s laws and narratives bear an implicit intentionality toward higher truths. By inscribing ideals of justice, mercy, and loving kindness (ḥesed) the ethical laws point toward their transcendent Source. The ritual laws, through their symbolism, point in the same direction, giving a worldly concreteness to ideas like holiness. So practice builds more than character. It guides the beliefs that make knowledge articulate affectively and intellectually inviting.



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There’s more than one virtuous circle here. Actions build habits, and habits yield further actions, faithfully expressing the dispositions now instilled. So society’s material well-being is enhanced: life is surer; basic needs for civil security and material welfare are more readily met as the ethos grows more generous. That matters for the intellectual project Maimonides expects a good society to sustain. No one, he argues, can think much of higher things when hungry, cold, or frightened. The ideal of Perfection itself inspires emulation, contributing to the betterment of character and thus to enhanced material well-being. Medicine and wholesome lifestyles, for Maimonides, are not ends in themselves. But they are valued for improving human life, and they too are improved when practiced with discipline and devotion. So even the highest thoughts prove worthy means as well as precious ends. Knowledge of God inspires a passionate love, an appetite for deeper knowledge that can not only quell unruly appetites and passions but, indeed, put them in service to our higher moral and intellectual goal. Moral virtue, Maimonides holds, lays a foundation for the deeper thoughts that are our highest goal and raison d’être. For only the pure soul wins knowledge of God. Why so? The most natural answer, which Maimonides affirms forthrightly, is that appetites and passions are distractions: “When one finds oneself susceptible (whether innately or by an acquired tendency) to pleasures and passions, or prone to anger and irascibility, losing control and venting one’s ire, then wherever one steps one will slip and fall, pursuing beliefs that support his natural bent.”65 Truth shines undiminished. But habit and the demands of our embodiment obscure it, “plunging us,” he writes, echoing Avicenna’s language, “back into the black of night.” For a prophet of the highest order, light may gleam: like lightning flashing repeatedly overhead . . . so steadily that he seems in constant, unbroken light. . . . For others lightning flashes but once the whole night through. . . . Still others never reach a plane where lightning lights up the darkness for them. But some highly polished body might, a stone or some such thing gleaming in the dark. But even so faint a light shining down on us will not be constant. . . . The degrees of enlightenment vary accordingly: Some never see this light even once but stumble in the dark.66

Enlightenment is obscured or blocked, then, not just by intellectual but by moral weaknesses. Moses, having purged such defects, saw, as the Talmud put it, “through a pellucid lens.”67 But gluttony, pride, ill temper, stinginess, avarice, and many another vice impede intellectual access to God. Maimonides cites Isaiah here: Your sins have sundered you from your God.68 Maimonides takes sins here to be character flaws. So he finds the sin that

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barred Moses from the promised land, not in lack of trust or faith but in his allowing his self-control to slip to the point that he let anger get the better of him, lashing out at his dispirited people: “Listen, rebels!”69 Prophets, for Maimonides, are paragons of enlightenment. Their special awareness of God and His expectations arises from natural, rational insight, an intellectual virtuosity given focus by moral virtue. Maimonides cites the Talmud to underscore the point: “Prophecy rests only on the wise, the brave, and the rich.”70 He explains by reference to the words of the rabbinic sages themselves: The wise are those who unite the intellectual virtues. “Rich” stands for the virtue of contentment, as the rabbis say: “Who is rich? He who rejoices in his lot.” “Brave” here stands for self-control: “For they say, ‘Who is brave?’ He who conquers his bent.”71 Courage and sophrosyne, then, undergird the wisdom prophetic insight requires, filling out the trio of Plato’s cardinal virtues. “Do not be surprised,” Maimonides writes, “that a few moral defects diminish prophecy. Some character flaws, we find, block it altogether. Anger is one. Thus they say, ‘If any prophet is enraged, his prophecy vanishes.’ . . . Likewise, anxiety and grief.”72 Jacob, the Talmud reports, lost touch with the Holy Spirit all the while that he mourned for Joseph.73 If moral imbalance impedes spiritual vision, allowing passions or appetites to distract the mind from its quest, how does moral virtue prepare one for pure intuitions of God’s reality? Perhaps because intimations of God’s absoluteness are implicit in the moral virtuosity of the saintly—just as one might see such intimations in pure mathematical concepts, say, of unity or infinity, or in the pure idea of truth—or, refracted in the character of loved ones, or reflected in the elegance of natural patterns and the constancy of natural laws. Perhaps purity of character is one of those shiny surfaces that take up and reflect divine light. That possibility shines most brightly, perhaps, when prophets take the role of “monishers,” their moral purity critical to their credibility. This is the reflex of the idea that the learned desecrate God’s name by actions or omissions not earthshaking in others but devastating in those seen as exemplary.74 Just as a moral vice can subvert one’s vision and blunt one’s impact, moral virtues may sharpen it and point the way toward God’s perfection. The idea may be generalizable: if captiousness or narrow-mindedness can blind one, receptivity and intellectual openness are critical to creativity and invention. With intellectual, as with moral virtue, there is a mean to be found, between blanket skepticism and credulity.75 So moral and intellectual virtue support each other. It’s not enough to be discerning. To be discriminating demands habits of thoughtful reflection on hypotheses and options, one’s own and those of others. The same is true of the social graces that foster dialogue: one must learn when and how to listen as well as make a point.



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Tact is the sober sister of keenness. And moral virtues, generally and intellectually applied, prove as critical to spiritual fulfillment as social epiphanies are to moral grace—a rather special case of the Socratic brief for the unity of the virtues and the centrality of insight in the moral life. Just as phronesis mediates between thought and action, making actions thoughtful, it seems not unreasonable to expect sophrosyne to serve as reason’s guide, making thinking, judicious.76 CONCLUSION The roots of Greek virtue ethics remain prominent in the work of those of its Muslim, Christian, and Jewish philosophical heirs who wrote in Arabic. Scions from the now ancient tree have been grafted to distinctive scriptural stocks. The fruits of the new trees are rich and distinctive, and their foliage offers shade as well as light to the followers of these confessions, as well as handholds for those willing and able to climb higher. Questions of freedom and responsibility stand out sharply under the scrutiny of the God of monotheism. The moral force of the idea of virtue has deepened its spiritual coloration; and eudaimonia, always a spiritual concept in Plato and Aristotle, has intensified its spiritual coloration as the ancient philosophers’ bold speculations as to the immortality of the soul have become the common hope of the faithful. NOTES 1. See Goodman, “Aristotle’s Polity Today,” in Aristotle’s Politics Today, ed. Lenn E. Goodman and Robert B. Talisse (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 129–50. 2.  See Plato, Gorgias 460b; and Lorain Smith Pangle’s study, Virtue Is Knowledge: The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014). 3.  The idea of phronesis as prudence made good sense when the word prudence had not yet lost far wider and deeper reference than it has today. Cf. its sense in, say, the writings of Henry Fielding. 4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (NE) I 9, trans. after Ostwald. 5. Plotinus, Enneads, I 2.1. All translations from the Enneads of Plotinus are from the translation of Stephen MacKenna (1917–1930), 4th ed., revised by B. S. Page (New York: Pantheon, 1969). 6. Plotinus, Enneads, I 2.2. 7. Ibid.

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8. Plotinus, Enneads, I 2.6–7. 9. Porphyry’s Aphorisms is more formally titled Sententiae ad intelligibilia ducentes. See the translation of Thomas Taylor (1758–1835) in Select Works of Porphyry (repr. Lawrence, KS: Selene, [1823] 1988), 34. 10. Proclus, Platonic Theology, trans. Thomas Taylor (Kew Gardens, New York: Selene, [1816] 1985), I 25. 11.  All the Philo references are from the Loeb Classical Library translation, ed. and trans. F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker, De Cherubim 27 (LCL 2.25); Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit, 166 (LCL 4.101); De Abrahamo, 124–26 (LCL 6.65–67). Diogenes credits Zeno of Citium, the founder of Stoicism, as “the first (in his treatise On the Nature of Man) to designate as the end ‘life in accord with nature’—which is the same as a virtuous life, virtue being the goal toward which nature guides us” (Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VIII 87). Diogenes finds the same theme repeated in Cleanthes, Posidonius, Hecato, and Chrysippus. As Diogenes explains, reason rules both in the cosmos and in the well-governed individual. So the life of virtue puts one in harmony with nature. As Plato argues in the Republic, it puts one also in harmony with oneself. 12. Philo, De Specialibus Legibus, I 345 (LCL 7.303). 13.  Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 18ab, glossing 2 Samuel 23:20 and Ecclesiastes 9:5; cf. Sifre § 308, and R. Banna’a (late second to mid-third century), Ta‘aniyot 7a, quoted by José Faur, The Horizontal Society (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 1.183–84, where the Torah is called an elixir of life for those engaged in it for its own sake, but a deadly poison for those who use it otherwise. The critical issue, as Faur interprets “for its own sake,” is whether one’s engagement with the Torah does or does not aim to fulfill it. 14.  See Deuteronomy 4:6–8, 11:26–28, Leviticus 26:3–11, and Goodman, Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 123–25. 15.  Sidney Griffith in the Introduction to his edition and translation of Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, The Reformation of Morals (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2002), xviii. 16.  Joel Kraemer, Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1992). 17.  See Shlomo Pines and Michael Schwarz, “Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī’s Refutation of the Doctrine of Acquisition (iktisāb),” in Studia orientalia memoriae D. H. Baneth dedicata (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979), 49–94. 18. Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed I 51, ed. S. Munk (Osnabrück: Zeller, [1856–1866] 1964), 1.58b. 19.  Al-Fārābī, on Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, ed. Wilhelm Kutsch and Stanley Marrow (Beirut: Catholic Press, 1960), 98. 20.  The work is edited by Gerhard Endress as “Maqāla fī tabyīn al-Faṣl bayna Sinā‘at al-Manṭiq al-Falsafī wa al-Naḥw al-‘Arabī” (Treatise on the Distinction Between the Philosohical Art of Logic and Arabic Grammar), Journal for the History of Arabic Science (Aleppo) 2 (1978): 181–93. 21.  The edition cited here is edited and translated by Sidney Griffith as The Reformation of Morals. My translations. Twenty classical manuscripts are known, attesting to the work’s wide diffusion. There are also over twenty printed editions. The surviv-



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ing manuscripts are often falsely ascribed to celebrated Muslim authors including the essayist/theologian al-Jāḥiz. (d. 868), the pioneer of optics Ibn al-Haytham (d. 1041), and the mystic virtuoso Ibn al-‘Arabī (d. 1240)—an ironic tribute to its influence and appeal. One twentieth-century Muslim scholar, sharing the moniker al-Takrītī, unblushingly called Yaḥyā a pioneer of Islamic ethics! In a sense, he was—just as Philo pioneered Christian philosophical theology. 22.  Yaḥyā, Tahdhīb, 1.2. 23.  Yaḥyā, Tahdhīb, 2.11. 24.  Yaḥyā, Tahdhīb, 2.9. 25.  In her paper presented at the conference on Character, Wisdom, and Virtue of the University of Birmingham Jubilee Centre, Oriel College, Oxford, January 2017. 26.  Yaḥyā, Tahdhīb, 4.22–24. 27.  For Rāzī’s ethics, see L. E. Goodman, “How Epicurean was Rāzī?” Studia Graeco-Arabica 5 (2015): 247–80. 28.  Yaḥyā, Tahdhīb, 5.13. 29. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V.8. 30.  Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, V.4. 31. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb (Beirut: Khayyat, 1961), 19–20. 32. Cf. Aristotle: “wisdom must plainly be the most finished of the forms of knowledge.” Nicomachean Ethics VI 7, 1141a 17. 33. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb, 20. 34.  ‘Adl, the Arabic word for justice, indeed means balance. The same root underlies the word Miskawayh uses for moderation or modulation. 35.  Cf. M. Abdul Haq Ansari, The Ethical Philosophy of Miskawayh (Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University Press, 1964), 104. 36.  Cf. Maimonides Guide I 30, 32 re honey. 37. Miskawayh, Tahdhīb, 34–35. 38.  For Ṭūṣī and Dawānī, see Majid Fakhry, Ethical Theories in Islam, second edition (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 130–47. Ṭūṣī’s ethics is translated by G. M. Wickens as The Nasirean Ethics (London: Allen Unwin, 1964); Dawānī’s, by W. F. Thompson as Practical Philosophy of the Mohammadan People (Karachi, [1839] 1977). 39.  See Walzer and Gibb’s article, “Akhlāq,” (Ethics) in Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 1.325–29. 40. Goodman, Islamic Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 119. 41.  Muhammad Abul Quasem, “Al-Ghazālī’s Rejection of Philosophic Ethics,” Islamic Studies 13 (1974): 119–20. 42.  Mishnah Avot, 4.2. 43. See Kitāb al-Mukhtār fī ’l-Amānāt wa-’l-I‘tiqādāt (The Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions—abbreviated below as ED), VI 4, ed. J. Kafih (Jerusalem: Yeshiva University, 1970), 206; trans. Samuel Rosenblatt as The Book of Beliefs and Opinions (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948), 249. Maimonides adopts the view in explaining the biblical statement that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart (Exodus 9:12). See “Eight Chapters,” 8, ed. and trans. Joseph Gorfinkle, as The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912; repr. AMS, 1966), 94–98.

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44. See ED V 1-2, ed. Kafih, 174, trans. Rosenblatt, 210; and see Rabbi Akiva, at M. Avot 3.16, B. Kiddushin 39b, Rosh ha-Shanah 17a, Berakhot, 5ab, Sanhedrin 101a, Bava Batra 15b, Genesis Rabbah 33.1. 45.  See Goodman, God of Abraham (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 141–52. 46.  For Maimonides’s integrated approach, see God of Abrahham, 153–66. 47.  Maimonides, “Eight Chapters,” 5; Guide I 2. See Goodman, “Happiness,” in Robert Pasnau, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 1.457–71. 48. Plato, Theaetetus, 176b. 49.  Leviticus 19:2. 50.  Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 14a; Genesis Rabbah 8.13; Sifre, Piska 49. 51. Maimonides, Guide, I 2, 7. 52.  Exodus 23:5. 53.  Leviticus 19:18. 54.  Deuteronomy 22:1. 55.  Leviticus 19:32. 56.  Exodus 20:12. 57.  Deuteronomy 17:11. 58.  Deuteronomy 22:6. 59.  Leviticus 19:17. 60.  Deuteronomy 18:22. 61.  Maimonides, “Eight Chapters,” 4. 62.  Sanhedrin 10.1. 63.  Babylonian Talmud Sanhedrin, 105a and the Tosefta. 64. Maimonides, Guide Introduction, Munk, 1.7a. The translation here is from the new version in preparation by Lenn Goodman and Phillip Lieberman. 65. Maimonides, Guide II 23, Munk 2.51a. 66.  Guide Introduction, Munk 1.4ab. 67.  B. Yevamot 49b. 68.  Isaiah 59:2. 69.  Numbers 20:10; Maimonides, “Eight Chapters,” 4. 70.  B. Nedarim 38a; cf. B. Shabbat 92a. 71.  Mishnah Avot 4.1. Philo too connects prophecy with the intellectual and moral virtues: “The wicked may never be God’s interpreter. So no unworthy person is truly God-inspired. The name befits only the wise.” Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit, §§ 52–53, 259–65, trans. after F. H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker (London: Heinemann, 1958), LCL 4.416–19. 72.  B. Pesaḥim 66b, 117a, quoted by Maimonides in “Eight Chapters,” 7. 73.  See Y. Sukkah 55a, B. Shabbat 30b, Pesaḥim 117ab. Cf. Plato, Phaedo 65c. 74.  Thus B. Yoma 86a, Shabbat 51, cited by Maimonides in his “Epistle on the Persecution.” 75.  See Maimonides, Guide I 32, 63; cf. II 13, 17, 22, 23. 76.  Aristotle argues, on etymological grounds, that sophrosyne is what “preserves” phronesis. See Nicomachean Ethics VI 5, 1140b 12-14; cf. Plato, Cratylus 411e.



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BIBLIOGRAPHY Abdul Haq Ansari, M. The Ethical Philosophy of Miskawayh. Aligarh: Aligarh Muslim University Press, 1964. Abul Quasem, Muhammad. “Al-Ghazālī’s Rejection of Philosophic Ethics.” Islamic Studies 13 (1974): 111–27. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated and edited by Martin Ostwald. New York: Pearson, 1999. al-Dawānī, Jalāl al-Dīn. Akhlāq, translated by W. F. Thompson as Practical Philosophy of the Mohammadan People, Karachi [1839] 1977. Endress, Gerhard. “Maqāla fī tabyīn al-Faṣl bayna Sinā‘at al-Manṭiq al-Falsafī wa al-Naḥw al-‘Arabī” (Treatise on the Distinction between the Philosophical Art of Logic and Arabic Grammar). Journal for the History of Arabic Science (Aleppo) 2 (1978): 181–93. Fakhry, Majid. Ethical Theories in Islam, second edition. Leiden: Brill, 1994. al-Fārābī on Aristotle’s De Interpretatione. Edited by Wilhelm Kutsch and Stanley Marrow. Beirut: Catholic Press, 1960. Faur, José. The Horizontal Society. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008. Goodman, Lenn E. God of Abraham. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. Islamic Humanism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. “Aristotle’s Polity Today.” In Aristotle’s Politics Today, edited by L.E. Goodman and Robert B. Talisse. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. ———. Love Thy Neighbor as Thyself (Gifford Lectures). New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. ———. “Happiness.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy. Rev. ed. edited by Robert Pasnau, 1.457–71. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. ———. “How Epicurean was Rāzī?” Studia Graeco-Arabica 5 (2015): 247–80. Kraemer, Joel. Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam. Leiden: Brill, 1992. Maimonides. Guide to the Perplexed. Edited by S. Munk. Osnabrück: Zeller, [1856– 1866] 1964. ———. The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics. Edited and translated by Joseph Gorfinkle. New York: Columbia University Press, 1912. Repr. AMS, 1966. Miskawayh. Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq. Beirut: Khayyat, 1961. Naṣīr al-Dīn al-Ṭūṣī, Akhlāqi Nasīrī, tr. G. M. Wickens as The Nasirean Ethics. London: Allen Unwin, 1964. Pangle, Lorain Smith. Virtue Is Knowledge: The Moral Foundations of Socratic Political Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. Philo. Opera. Translated by F.H. Colson and G. H. Whitaker. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann, 1958. Pines, Shlomo, and Michael Schwarz. “Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī’s Refutation of the Doctrine of Acquisition (iktisāb).” In Studia orientalia memoriae D. H. Baneth dedicata, edited by S. Pines et al., 49–94. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1979.

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Plotinus. Enneads. Translated by S. MacKenna. 4th ed., revised by B.S. Page. New York: Pantheon, 1969. Porphyry. Select Works. Translated by Thomas Taylor. Lawrence, KS: Selene, [1823] 1988. Proclus. Platonic Theology. Translated by Thomas Taylor. Kew Gardens, NY: Selene, [1816] 1985. Saadiah Ben Joseph al-Fayyūmī. The Book of Beliefs and Opinions. Translated by Samuel Rosenblatt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948. ———. Kitāb al-Mukhtār fī ’l-Amānāt wa-’l-I‘tiqādāt (The Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions). Edited by J. Kafih. Jerusalem: Yeshiva University, 1970. Walzer, R., and H. A. R. Gibb. “Akhlāq.” In the Encyclopedia of Islam. Edited by P. Bearman et al., 2nd ed., 1.325–29. Leiden: Brill, 1960. Yaḥyā ibn ‘Adī, The Reformation of Morals. Translated and edited by Sidney Griffith. Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 2002.

Chapter Eight

Moral and Intellectual Virtues in the Medieval Latin Tradition— and the Limits of Virtue Ethics Lenn E. Goodman

Thomas (1225–1274) knows that virtues are habits of action, not actions themselves, emotions, or relations.1 The virtues are linked by their pursuit of the good, specifically of the soul.2 They’re differentiated by their diverse objects.3 Addressing the objection that virtue must be God’s gift and thus a trait one cannot take credit for—let alone “be justified” by, Thomas distinguishes ordinary from “infused virtue,” given by God without action on our part, but not without our consent. God, he explains, “works in every nature and will.”4 Virtue becomes ours when we appropriate it. An Ash‘arite might have said that of an act. But, since God empowers us to act, our acts remain our own. Wedding Plato’s cardinal virtues to the Pauline virtues of faith, hope, and love (caritas) is a striking work of synthesis. None of the added three would have been called a virtue in ancient Athens. Plato had given piety (eusebia) a special role. Impiety, after all, was the charge against Socrates. So Plato made a point of showing Socrates as a paragon of this virtue, contrasting Socratic piety with the screwball piety of Euthyphro. But in the Republic piety is eclipsed by justice, rightful ordering of our interests and desires; and Aristotle treats piety as a part of justice, or “an accompaniment of it.”5 It was Philo who crowned eusebia queen of the virtues. This, in good part, in recognition of the interdependence of the moral and intellectual virtues. For, as Wolfson showed, Philo’s designation of piety as “first” among the virtues reflects scripture’s bonding of piety to wisdom: “fear of the Lord is the start of wisdom—arche sophias phobos Theou”6—one might almost say, “the cardinal virtue.” For wisdom was the chief virtue of reason and rightful ruler of the soul on Plato’s account. What of faith? There is a Hebrew virtue of trust and trustworthiness (emunah), resonant in the bond between God and those who love Him and faithfully keep His commandments. But pistis, in Greek philosophy, as Wolfson 137

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notes, does not name a virtue; it’s an epistemic term, on the plane, for Plato, of doxa, opinion. Aristotle does gives pistis some moral valence, defining it as conviction (hypolepsis sphodra). The Stoics build on that thought, since, for them, belief always has a moral side most visible when we’re on the brink of committing to an idea. And Philo saw commitment of the right sort as a virtue, prompted in part by Stoic reflections, but also by the scriptural ideal of emunah, trust in God and loyalty to His covenant.7 When the Septuagint reports that Abram believed God’s promises, and God counted that in his favor,8 the Greek “believed” (episteusen) renders the Hebrew “trusted”’ (he’emin). Philo glosses: “he had a firm, unwavering faith in God”—“a firm conviction.”9 “In Greek philosophy before Philo,” Wolfson writes, “neither faith in general nor faith in God in particular is spoken of as a virtue on a par with piety, the fear of God, or holiness.”10 But Stoicism has clearly dressed the ground on which Philo runs his race. The Roman ideals of trust and loyalty that made Stoic ethics so welcome in Latin society foster a now familiar Augustinian ideal of faith, an alloy of Platonic pistis and Ciceronian fides. Augustine can accept Plato’s locating belief on a lower plane than knowledge since he holds the common folk to be bound by an obligation to accept on faith beliefs they may not know for themselves, so long as authority can vouch for them. An Aristotelian would want to know more about how and where one was to place one’s trust before calling faith a virtue. The same is true of hope. Faith and hope, in Aristotelian terms belong to rhetoric, not apodeictic reasoning. In a way, the very notions are inchoate. One needs to know: faith and hope in what? But Christians are meant to know what will complete such trust and expectation. Here, as so often in Christian texts and contexts, love is the answer. Caritas, love or charity, the Latin counterpart of the Greek agape and the Hebrew ḥesed, is another virtue that will look foreign from the standpoint of Greek philosophy. Perhaps for that reason, Paul saw agape as an enrichment to virtue ethics. Aristotelians would seek a habit attuned to a proper mean before calling charity a virtue. Liberality can pass that test. But charity may seem unbridled (although we caught a whiff of such unbridled generosity in Arabic accounts of generosity, and it’s present earlier, too, in the Mishnaic idea that no limit is set by the Torah to the “corner” of the field that must be left unharvested for gleaners). Christian charity might seem odd for another reason, if the charitable are seen too often and too anxiously glancing over their shoulders, as if asking God’s approval—or heard to confess that they act less for others’ good than “for God’s sake”—a strange locution in Attic terms. Unmoored to a rational appraisal of circumstances, the very idea of charity might seem just too generic. So it might help to recognize that tzedakkah, justice in the Torah’s lexicon, becomes the Hebrew name for charity: charity



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as a matter of right, not just of kindness or compassion. The noble lineage of caritas helps explain its new éclat among the virtues: Caritas is more than Stoic caring or concern. It springs from justice on its Hebrew mother’s side. Ḥesed, favor at its barest, rises to an ethos of devotion—receiving God’s favor, and requiting it, not by attempting to return it but by sharing it—and partly by expressions of gratitude and symbolic acts honoring its Source. Both the kindness and the devotion at the root of piety fall under the rubric of ḥesed/ḥasidut and reflect the mutuality of divine and human love. God’s devotees, the truly pious (ḥasidim) are most clearly known by the grace (ḥesed) they exercise toward others. Accordingly, ḥesed calms thoughts of piety as fear of God. The Septuagint quite naturally translates the Hebrew yir’at haShem, fear of the Lord, at Proverbs 1:7, as eusebia, piety—a good fear. The treatment would warm Stoic hearts. For not every emotion is frowned upon by Stoics; eupatheiai are prized. Through ḥesed, the rabbis find, mortals can emulate and honor God, as called for in the Torah’s imperatives to pursue God’s holiness, and walk in God’s ways.11 And through ḥesed one can fulfill the seemingly paradoxical obligation of the Law to be more generous than the letter of the law requires—by incorporating loving kindness into one’s ways and not just strictly following a rule. In Christian thought, similarly, charity commands altruism—modeled, ultimately, in God’s sacrifice of his only begotten. Love, as a virtue, seeks no middle ground in the Jewish or the Christian case. WILL AND INTELLECT In baptizing Plato’s cardinal virtues Thomas foregrounds grace: Human virtues dependent on the will cannot take root and flourish until watered by faith, hope, and charity. For Aquinas will and intellect work in tandem. Even faith and hope, not dependent on the intellect, depend on will and thus on grace. The mind is still at work, of course. But Thomas cannot ignore Augustine’s Pauline demand that caritas replace prudentia as virtue’s guide. Omitting love, Augustine had argued, no pagan philosopher could perfect the scheme of moral virtue. The worldliness of such philosophers gave them only an external, pragmatic sense of goodness and the good life. Phronesis must give way to grace. Thomas is in tune with Aristotle and the Socratic/Platonic tradition as to the necessity of intellectual virtue in support of the moral virtues. Prudentia, he writes (using the word in its classical sense, as a calque for Phronesis): is a virtue of utmost necessity in human life. For to live well is to do well, and to do well it matters not just what one does but how one does it—not on mere

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impulse or in a passion but by rightful and deliberate choosing. Since choice addresses an end, rightful choosing demands two things: a proper end and means conducive to that end. Man is guided to his proper end by a virtue that perfects the soul in its appetitive part, orienting it toward the good as its goal. But what leads one to the proper means conducive to that end is a habit of reason. For it is reason’s task thoughtfully to choose the means to one’s ends. The intellectual virtue that perfects and attunes reason to locate such means is prudentia.12

The classic cardinal virtues can be rational, Thomas reasons, although they address irrational powers like the appetitive and spirited: Because prudentia chooses means, virtue can be predicated of the appetitive and spirited insofar as reason guides them.13 But more is needed. The will may need no special virtue to steel its resolve when its object is of its measure. But the love of God and the charity and justice due one’s neighbor ask more, making critical a habit of the will—and thus requiring grace.14 The intimate, active linkage of the moral to the intellectual is evident in reason’s need for ideals to orient it and integrity to keep it honest. But intellect alone no longer begets honesty. That Socratic teaching, first couched in paradox, has not proved robust. Good grammar, Thomas says, won’t make one good. The mind can be called good in relative (prudential!) terms. But it can’t choose the good unless will so moves it.15 Reason here (as later in Hume) has lost its Platonic yearning for the Good, still preserved in Aristotle’s stipulation that phronesis, as a kind of wisdom, cannot concern itself with ways and means alone but must always keep an eye cocked on rightful ends, lest it decline to mere cunning. What sunders reason’s attachment to the good here is the primacy of grace, led by the nexus of grace to faith: “no man believes unless he will,” Thomas writes. The intellect, “like all other powers, is moved by the will”—and good will depends on grace.16 Thomas accepts Gregory’s view that “the contemplative life is more meritorious than the active”—thus more virtuous. But tying virtue to the will foregrounds the moral virtues. So Thomas most favors the contemplative life when it’s moved by charity or justice.17 Maimonides, by contrast, does not press thoughts of a rivalry between active and contemplative lives. For Jacob’s dream image of God’s messengers ascending and then descending God’s ladder graphically reveals a complementarity: Some of the enlightened are able to receive no more light than suffices for their needs. Others are compelled to share the surplus they receive, and thus to lead and guide. Maimonides’s imagery of compulsion, as if those who share their insights were as powerless to contain their thoughts as, say, a woman giving birth, may seem to lessen the credit such thinkers deserve—were it not for the courage the enlightened need, often under threat, to divulge and share what they have seen. Knowing God and steadily contemplating His wisdom and grace (best seen in nature) is the



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consummate attainment of the human individual, making even suffering and untimely death worth the risks and vulnerabilities that embodiment entrains. But the highest life, as Maimonides envisions it, is not spent simply in rapt contemplation but in the return of the enlightened to share and teach, guide and lead others, helping them to the same higher state, in keeping with their God-given capacities. The greatest spiritual leaders—Moses and the Patriarchs before him—were able to abide in God’s presence even while actively engaged with others since all their actions were in service to the God they loved. Paul had said he would be but a banging cymbal if eloquent but without love—and empty if all-knowing and even possessed of prophetic powers but without faith. Every gift, he confesses, is worthless without love. Love, agape, is the root of patience, kindness, humility, forbearance, commitment to truth and justice—every moral virtue. Love, he argues, makes even hope possible. It anchors faith as well since faith needs trust. Love, Paul urges, is what clears the turbid glass of knowledge and brings maturity to vision.18 So, where Plato had let piety to slip into the wings once it had danced its solo turn in the Euthyphro, Paul highlights faith, hope, and love, and names love foremost among them. TRANSFORMING THE NATURAL VIRTUES These theological virtues, Augustine had taught, depend on grace.19 Aristotle’s virtues, by contrast, being natural, “cannot exceed nature’s capacity.” If one yearns not just for a good and righteous life but for life eternal one needs virtues instilled “by divine influence.”20 Aquinas’s imagery and the very term “influence” reflects the world of astrology. For influences were the proposed means by which the incorporeal gods/angels/intellects that rule and move the spheres were said by neoplatonists to affect and govern sublunary bodies. Virtues, as Aquinas defines the term, are those qualities of mind by which one lives righteously. He adds: “of which no one can make bad use.” That thought allows him at a stroke to offer a solution to the old Socratic puzzle of the unity of the virtues by way of a rather sharp distinction: Natural virtues are indeed compatible with wrongdoing. For “we find men who, by natural temperament or by being accustomed, are prompt in doing deeds of liberality, but are not prompt in doing deeds of chastity.”21 Love changes everything. By directing one to his ultimate end, it fuses the virtues, uniting them while love lasts.22 For the prudence that unites the virtues is powerless without love to energize it:23 It is the infusion of love that assures Thomas that no one can make ill use of virtue, which God instills in us almost without our help, “quam Deus in nobis sine nobis operatur.”24

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Moral virtue, Thomas explains, may be perfect or imperfect. The latter is a mere inclination to do good.25 Only when infused with love does such a virtue become perfect. So the virtues celebrated by pagan philosophers, natural or acquired by habituation, are rightly branded false by Augustine: They fail to direct one toward one’s true highest goal.26 But love, granted by grace, transforms every virtue: temperance becomes not merely moderate but abstemious, even indifferent to external loss.27 Phronesis, as in Aristotle, does demand experience. So it can hardly be expected in the young. But infused prudentia can lead even the young or the mentally impaired to accept needed guidance—and, indeed, to “discern good from evil counsel.”28 The infusion of love along with faith and hope allows Thomas not only to enlarge the crucial suite of cardinal virtues from four to seven but to transmute every virtue in an Augustinian direction: True virtues come through grace. They grow still larger by the addition of “gifts,” “beatitudes,” and “fruits.” The fruits of the Spirit, Thomas explains, reflecting on Galatians 5:22, are sweet and bring delight. They arise from the beatitudes, and render the virtues operative. For the virtues, after all, remain dispositional.29 So even when infused they must be realized by the “higher perfections” that open one up to inspiration.30 Understanding and knowledge are gifts attached to faith; wisdom, to love; counsel, to prudence. Fear is the counterpart attached to infused hope; piety, to justice; courage, to the virtue of the same name. The gifts that realize the fruits of virtue are the work of grace.31 VIRTUES AND RULES Virtue ethics was not the only form of ethical theory addressed in medieval philosophy. It would hardly be philosophy if it left no room for critical thinking. Virtue ethics is humanistic since it looks to the strengths and weaknesses of human character as the source of norms. And it is at least potentially cosmopolitan since it recognizes moral strengths and weaknesses in a variety of cultural settings. But conceptualizing ethics in terms of virtue and vice and understanding the virtues by reference to an idea of happiness or fulfillment leaves lacunae in the theory that were not invisible to critics among the monotheist heirs of classical philosophy. Virtue theory fosters an ethics of tendency, less focused than other schemes on categorical obligations—rights and duties, innocence and sin. It can generate clear ideas of depravity but understands it more in terms of dissoluteness than in terms of evil. Likewise, with merit: Virtue, as a mean, does not readily lend itself to ideals of saintliness, heroism, or self-sacrifice—thoughts of moral or spiritual virtuosity important to Christians, Muslims, and Jews, as they were in Hellenistic visions of the imperturbable Stoic sage.



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Aristotle, of course, recognized the limits of virtue ethics. Not every action, he observes, has a proper mean. There is no right or fair or noble manner or extent of theft, murder, or adultery: “these and their like are implied by their very names to be bad.” Likewise such passions as malice, shamelessness, and envy.32 But Aristotle’s focus is on character, not single actions or passing emotions. He expects his hearers to have been raised to live decently and concentrates on developing his virtue theory and using it to show how the virtues point toward an idea of happiness that one must recognize even if tempted by more vulgar goals like pleasure, wealth, and honor. Aristotle’s strategy is to show that the nobler course is in one’s genuine interest. And he preserves Plato’s antipathy for the Sophists’ maxims promising to set one on the road to success. Like Plato he finds such pretensions cheap and thin, both for their superficial assumptions about what constitutes success and for their formulaic, behavioral descriptions of the routes by which it is attained. But distaste for such formulae and a lively, Socratic interest in countercases and the particularities of situations, where only experience can teach one to navigate, promotes something of a bias against rules that Plato struggled to overcome (as we can see in comparing the Republic with the Laws) and that leads Aristotle to neglect a detailed anatomy of right and wrong to balance his brilliant account of the virtues. It’s not just linguistic usage, of course, branding certain acts wrong and certain emotions ignoble, that makes murder, adultery, and theft wrongful acts or makes schadenfreude, impudence, and envy ignoble emotions. These acts and emotions themselves are blameworthy. They would be such even in a noble character. Even for Saadiah, in a context where merit and sin loom large, the general tenor of one’s actions is what normally matters most—although some sins are unforgiveable.33 As Aristotle puts it, echoing one of Aesop’s fables, one swallow does not a summer make: Happiness is not just action in accord with virtue but a life of actions in keeping with the ensemble of the virtues.34 Still, certain actions are wrong enough that the moral issue is not what they show or make of one’s character but the crime itself, its impact and intentions. The same is true, of course, of saintly acts. If there are holy or unholy acts, character, although still of moment, recedes in prominence; outcomes, attitudes, and intentions shine or glare in the foreground. Here rules become salient, imperatives turn categorical or supererogatory, and the ethical schemes of deontology and consequentialism make their claims. PRIDE AND HUMILITY Virtue ethics, unlike rule-based schemes, offers no decision procedure to subjects facing a moral crux, beyond telling them to find a worthy role model

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and ask themselves the (sometimes iffy) question, what he or she would do at such a pass. God’s presence makes a difference here, in what one is to expect of oneself and in how one relates to others. For the motto inscribed on many a synagogue’s front wall is the Psalmist’s admonition, “Ever shall I measure myself against the Lord”—and no lesser standard.35 Thus Maimonides shows his cultural differences from Aristotle in the value he places on humility. He’s influenced, no doubt, by the Torah’s calling Moses the humblest of men.36 Pride, Maimonides argues, is never worthy: “With some dispositions, a middle course is forbidden. These must be shunned to the extreme. One is pride. The good path is not simply to be humble but to be utterly meek and selfeffacing. That is why it says that Moses was not just humble but exceedingly humble37—and why our Sages command us to be ‘very, very self-effacing.’”38 Maimonides is not simply differing with Aristotle about where to find the mean. He’s not looking for a mean at all here, as he so often does in reading Mosaic norms. Hence his talk of the Sages’ giving not just advice but orders, entering into the Torah’s characteristic use of the imperative. Pride, on this account, is not just imprudent, the prelude to a fall. It’s a gateway to impiety. For the Sages warned, “Whoever lets his heart swell with pride denies God, as it says, lest thy heart grow proud and thou forget the Lord thy God.”39 ANGER For anger too Maimonides finds no proper mean. It has its function biologically. But, given vent, anger fuels only itself: “One should avoid it to the utmost extreme and train oneself to avoid anger even at things deserving it. If one wants to give a scare to one’s children or family members, or the community one leads, by evincing displeasure to correct them, one should make a show of umbrage but remain calm within like one who pretends to be angry but is not really.”40 These passages occur not in a work of ethical counsels and philosophical analyses like those of Maimonides’s “Eight Chapters,” but in his comprehensive legal code, the Mishneh Torah, under the heading of Hilkhot De‘ot, Ethical Laws. Scripture advances an imperative condemning anger: Banish anger from your heart.41 For Maimonides this ethical imperative is categorical—not just in being more than prudential but in the sense that it is unconditional— like the commandments against covetous longings, acts of vengeance, and passions like hatred and grudge bearing.42 Maimonides condemns anger with the same stringency that Kant uses when he rejects lying, and his motive is the same: Anger shows a deep disrespect for personhood, one’s own and that of others. We can see how it does so in the texts he cites to underwrite and underscore his concern.



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The ancient Sages, he observes, called anger tantamount to idolatry—not surprising since anger eclipses the insight and goodness one might otherwise have called upon in a tight situation. It voids one’s wisdom and purges even prophecy, as we’ve seen. A life of anger, the rabbinic sages said, is no life at all. Applying to anger (and pride, its frequent co-conspirator) what Plato has Socrates say of injustice, Maimonides declares it better to be belittled than to be the belittler. Those who can show love to others by acting on the biblical commandment to love others as we love ourselves43 are fulfilling the commandment44 to love God as well, since humans bear God’s image. That is why the patient deserve scripture’s praise: They that love Him are like sun rising in all its might.45 The Talmud reports Rabbi Yonatan’s saying that an angry person loses control and surrenders to “all kinds of hell.”46 It was anger, Maimonides argues, that cost Moses his chance to enter the promised land. For in his harsh rebuke of his thirsty people, Moses let anger get the better of him. His loss of temper revealed that in the strain of leadership he had allowed his character to slip. All Israel, Maimonides reminds his readers, looked to Moses as the paragon of virtue. For him to set a bad example with an unwonted display of temper did, in effect, desecrate God’s name. For wise and respected persons, the Talmud teaches, bear a special responsibility to live as befits their wisdom, and its Source. Any community should be addressed with deference and respect—all the more so a nation like Israel, of whom the Sages said, in view of the epiphany at Sinai, that the least handmaid among them was on a par with the prophet Ezekiel.47 Anger in such a case degraded the people and demeaned Moses. Even a paragon, then, can set a bad example. We need our good moral sense and texts, traditions, and rules to help keep us on the right path. And rules here are not mere guidelines. Israel’s mandate, the bond spoken for in God’s eternal covenant, only begins in hewing to a middle path. The higher calling is to sanctify this life with acts of loving kindness and an open-ended quest to know and emulate God’s perfection. CROSSCURRENTS Thomas, as we’ve seen, defers to Augustine’s Pauline thoughts about the infusing of virtue by grace. Reason plots the prudent course, but will is the executive. For as Aristotle conceded, “Intellect moves nothing.”48 Clearly sin and faith stand far more prominently in Christian moral thinking than in the work of Jewish moral philosophers; and grace wears a different mantle. Grace in Jewish thought is salient in the act of creation and in God’s governance of the world. For Christians, Adam’s fall makes grace a necessity, if mankind is to be

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redeemed: Christ’s sacrifice is the vehicle of that grace, and faith in the redemptive power of Christ’s sacrifice can open that door. But grace holds the keys to faith. Nature cannot redeem itself. So natural virtues, moral and intellectual, cannot assure the path to happiness, or its Christian counterpart, salvation. Augustine’s idea of faith was mediated by the Stoic moralists. They had transformed pistis from Plato’s portrayal, as the half-sister of knowledge, making it over as a virtue of loyalty and commitment. Augustine knew the Stoic idea well, not least from Cicero, whose work he’d taught long before his conversion. Cicero had made out fides a Roman virtue, redolent of his own love of the idealized Republic, its ancient mores, and even its lares and penates. Beyond that, Augustine knew from his own experience and its resonance with Paul’s how faith depends on grace. But his discontent with the intellectualism of the pagan philosophical moralists was sharply accentuated when the crisis of Rome called on him to defend Christians and Christianity from the charge that it was the decline in civil piety that had unleashed the sack of Rome in 410 by Alaric and the Goths. Augustine knew that the best defense would be a vigorous offense, and he grounded that offense in the charge that even at its best Greek philosophical ethics, with virtue theory at its core, was a worldly system lacking the Pauline virtues of faith, hope, and love, and unsustained by the grace that made those virtues possible. Unrolling the massive argument of the City of God, he drew his line, lifting apart the heavenly city from all that was temporal. The civic virtue epitomized in the Roman ideal, Augustine argued, was mere lust for domination. But even the noblest of the pagan philosophers fared no better. Turning on them the same charges Plato had leveled against the Sophists, Augustine found their vaunted love of truth a mere intellectual shadow, no better than the eristic Plato had despised, the same hollow hunger for victory. Given the pettifoggery and parti pris of much academic philosophy, then or now, it’s hard to call Augustine entirely wrong, uncharitable and quick to generalize though he was. These philosophers, he wrote, would not accept the truth even when confronted by it. The virtues they celebrate are pseudo-virtues: They fail to acknowledge the True God or even to live by the standard they claim as their own, the pure love of truth.49 The eudaimonism of the philosophers, for Augustine, smacked of the lust for control that he saw permeating earthly civilization. Romans might idealize the peace they promised and proffered, by way of war. But even the philosophers sought domination: of the body by the mind, and of action by reason. At issue was not just the rarity or virtuality of the Stoic sage. The problem was endemic in the very project of virtue ethics. For virtue, as the philosophers understood it, was tragically inseparable from vice. The call to conquer one’s impulses preserved the lust for domination that was the heritage of the Fall.50 Knowledge, contrary to all that Socrates pretended, was an insufficient guide to life.



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From the Stoics Augustine had learned that knowledge needs an act of will if it is to energize commitment and not rest in mere awareness of some fact. But will, he knew, depends on grace. It seeks the good as we see it, but only by God’s grace do we see the good aright. “When we represent the good intelligibly,” as Wetzel puts it, voicing Augustine’s thought, “we are moved by God. Hence freedom coextends with grace.”51 The integrated work of will and reason has vanished, and with it the idea of freedom as God’s gift, allowing us to claim our rational actions as our own. The Socratic love of truth for its own sake has vanished too, partly through the failure of too many philosophers to live by it—as if the failure of Socrates’s self-styled followers had discredited his quest. The Hebraic identity of truth with justice, too, has slipped out of sight. Augustine’s uneasy synthesis of will with grace now affords the foundation for later Christian philosophers to build on. Some, like Thomas, will reinvigorate the pagan virtues by the infusion of their Pauline counterparts, or rivals. But others will turn, even more insistently, toward will, faith, and grace. It’s unclear and hotly disputed whether Anselm (1033–1109) had access to the materials from which a Christian virtue ethics could be framed.52 His outlook is clearly and avowedly Augustinian.53 But one mustn’t underestimate Anselm’s sophistication and creativity. Jeffrey Bower has seen elements of both eudaimonism and deontology in Anselm’s writings. Deontology in the end takes, it seems, the upper hand. Anselm, Bower writes, “separates morality from happiness (at least conceptually) and emphasizes the need for agents to be motivated by justice rather than happiness.”54 In a key passage from Anselm’s work on Satan’s fall, Bower finds him fighting shy of eudaimonism and planting the pennant of virtue firmly in the Augustinian, ultimately Pauline, soil of grace: “one cannot be called just or unjust for willing only happiness or for willing only what is appropriate when he wills that way out of necessity. Again, one neither can nor ought to be happy unless he wills to be happy and wills it justly. For both of these reasons, therefore, God must create both wills in him in such a way that he both wills to be happy and wills it justly.”55 “Rightness of will, as Anselm conceives of it,” Bower explains: is not something that rational creatures, at least in the first instance, are responsible for acquiring; rather it is something they are responsible for preserving once it has been given . . . more like what Aquinas and other medieval eudaimonists would call a theological virtue than it is like one of the traditional moral or intellectual virtues—that is to say, it is something supernaturally infused as opposed to acquired by repeated action.56

We’ve seen the robust survival of a comparable Augustinian thought at the heart of Thomas’s virtue ethics. God made man’s rational nature, Anselm

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argues, as He made its counterpart in the angels. Anselm’s affirmation of our responsibility to preserve it does much the same work in his thinking as the Ash‘arite thesis that we may appropriate our actions but cannot be said to create them, lest human agency seem to crimp or stunt God’s power and grace. VOLUNTARISM In John Duns Scotus (ca. 1266–1308) Augustine’s tribute to grace comes clearly to the fore, and the weld of virtue ethics to a Christian theology of grace, so carefully forged in Aquinas’s synthesis of Aristotle’s natural virtues to the Pauline theological trio, has begun to disjoin. Justice, Scotus argues— but all the virtues, in fact—rests on the will, “the chief agent in performing distinctively human actions if they are to be praiseworthy”—and, the most able to moderate the passions. Yet will “is not of itself righteous.” It is no less undetermined and determinable than the intellect, but rather—as Augustine implied—just as inclined by nature to delight in its own way.57 Responding to Aristotle’s reliance on reason as the guide of virtue, and to Thomas’s synthesis, Scotus sets will in control: The intellect can, through repeated “elicited acts” gain a habit of prudence, and in the same way can the will acquire “a proper virtue” inclining it to choose aright.58 But it is will that makes the choice. And in so doing, will depends ultimately not on reason but on grace. For many Catholics, the synthesis Thomas forged will hold, just as Jews concerned with moral theory will look to Philo and Maimonides, and Muslims will consult Ghazālī’s summation in The Revival of the Religious Sciences. But Duns Scotus has prepared the ground for the overthrow of virtue ethics and the rise of a new voluntarism, passionately proclaimed by Luther and championed philosophically by Kant. The slogan on the new banner proclaims that only the good will is unqualifiedly good. Consequentialism too will jettison virtue ethics, for quite different reasons, invested more in outcomes and results than in intentions. Virtue ethics, for many, will lie in limbo at least until Alasdair MacIntyre breathes new life into the idea of cultures and traditions of virtue. Deontology will follow Kant, if it does not devolve into Nietzschean or Existentialist heresies treating the will not merely as the critical agent of choice but as the arbiter of authentic and therefore sound and adequate choices. But, in one of the many paradoxes of philosophical history, options nominally outworn or outgrown, will revive and show new life, doubtless because there was insight in their conception. The marriage of will and reason is not dissolved, and the synthesis of love and grace with critical understanding in the constitution of virtue and the quest for human happiness remains very much alive today.



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NOTES 1.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 55. 2.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 55 a. 4 ad 2. 3.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 65 a 1 co. 4.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 55 a. 4 ad 6. 5. Aristotle, Nicomachaean Ethics V 1, 1129b 2728; On Virtues and Vices V. 1250b 22–23. 6.  Proverbs 1:7. See Philo, De Decalogo 12.52 = LCL 7.32-33; Wolfson, Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 2.215–18; cf. Letter of Aristeas 131, trans. H. St. J. Thackery (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917). 7.  Cf. Dennis Lindsay, Josephus and Faith (Leiden: Brill, 1993). 8.  Genesis 15:6. 9. Philo, De Virtutibus 39.216 = LCL 8.294–95. Cf. Wolfson, Philo, 1.152. 10. Wolfson, Philo, 2.216. 11.  Leviticus 19:2; Deuteronomy 28:9; cf. Exodus 15:2. 12.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 57 a. 5 co. 13.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 56 a. 4 ad 4. 14.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 56 a. 6 co. 15.  Compare Aristotle’s thought: “While young men do become good geometers and mathematicians . . . they seem not to attain phronesis. The reason is that practical wisdom is concerned with particulars too, and knowledge of particulars comes from experience,” Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI 8 1142a 12–13. Thomas has shifted the ground here, privileging the will, which he will treat morally, rather than experience, which he may take to seem too worldly for such treatment, being set apart in common understanding from the acceptance of God’s rule. 16.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 56 a. 3 co. 17.  Cf. Linda Zagzebski’s view that, “Intellectual virtues are best viewed as forms of moral virtue” in Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 139. But collapsing the intellectual virtues into a subspecies of moral virtue may deny us the critical help of the intellectual virtues in the exercise of moral virtue. 18.  1 Corinthians 3:1–13. 19.  Augustine finds Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics wanting in their accounts of the virtues, for failing to recognize the primacy of grace. See Augustine, The City of God 5.19, 11.16–17, 14.25, 15.22, 22.30. Grace imparts true piety, on which knowledge, especially self-knowledge depends, and without which virtue remains merely earthly and (as the case of Cicero and many another Roman seems to argue) a slave to human praise. 20.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 63, QDVC, q. 1 a. 10. 21.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 65, a. 1. 22.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 65, a. 3.

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23.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 65, a. 2. 24.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 55 a. 4. 25.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 65, a. 1. 26.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 65 a. 2 co. 27.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 61 a. 5. 28.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 47, a. 14 ad 2. 29.  See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 139, a. 2, q. 68 a. 2. 30.  Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 68, a. 1. 31.  Andrew Pinsent relates the gifts that foster virtue’s perfection to a “second person perspective,” evident, say, in shared attention, reflecting on a human plane the I-Thou relationship of the soul with the divine. Andrew Pinsent, The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics (New York: Routledge, 2012), 62, citing Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I-II q. 68, a. 5. 32. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, II 6, 1107a, 9–12. 33.  Saadiah Gaon, The Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions, ED, V 6 ed. Kafih 185–86; trans. Rosenblatt 224–25 cf.; cf. IX 1, 5, 7, 9. For Saadiah, see chapter 7 in this volume. 34. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, I 7, 1098a 18. 35.  Psalms 16:8. 36.  Numbers 12:3. As José Faur notes, “Moses, the first sovereign of Israel, was also the first sovereign in history to divest himself from authority of his own volition, without the threat of violence.” José Faur, The Horizontal Society (Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008), 1.127. George Washington, like Cincinnatus, did the same. 37.  Numbers 12:3. 38.  M. Avot 4.4. 39.  Deuteronomy 8:14. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah Ethical Laws, 2.3. 40. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah Ethical Laws, 2.3. 41.  Ecclesiastes 11:10. 42.  Exodus 20:14; Leviticus 19:17–18. 43.  Leviticus 19:18. 44.  Deuteronomy 6:5. 45. Judges 5:31. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah Ethical Laws, 2.3, quoting the Babylonian Talmud, Pesaḥim 66b, 113b. 46.  B. Nedarim 22a. Cf. Berakhot 29b: “do not be angry and you will not sin”; Gittin 7a: “avoiding anger yields justice.” 47. Maimonides, The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics, ed. and trans. Joseph Gorfinkle (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912; repr. AMS, 1966), 4. 48. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VI 2, 1139a 35. 49. Augustine, The City of God, Book 18 and Brian Harding, Augustine and Roman Virtue (London: Continuum, 2008), 104. 50. Augustine, De Libero Arbitrio, Book I; Harding, Augustine and Roman Virtue, 117; and James Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits of Virtue (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 93. 51. Wetzel, Limits of Virtue, 216.



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52. See John R. Sheet, “Justice in the Moral Thought of St Anselm,” Modern Schoolman 256 (1947): 136. 53. See Anselm’s “letter to Lanfranc,” in Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works, edited by Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 3–4. 54.  Jeffrey Bower, “Anselm on Ethics,” in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, edited by Brian Davies and Brian Leftow (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 223. 55. Anselm, De Casu Diaboli, quoted in Bower, Anselm on Ethics, 245. 56. Bower, Anselm on Ethics, 249. 57. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio III dist. 33, trans. modified after Allan Bernard Wolter, in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 229. 58. Duns Scotus, Ordinatio, trans. Wolter, Duns Scotus on the Will, 230. As Richard Cross argues, Scotus is innocent of the extreme version of voluntarism sometimes assigned him, that would commit him to a variety of divine command theory tantamount to theistic subjectivism. But he does locate the moral virtues in the will, “the faculty crucially responsible for free rational choice.” Richard Cross, “Recent Work on the Philosophy of Duns Scotus,” Philosophy Compass (May 8, 2010). Such choices, and the intellect itself, are ready prey to “foolishness.” Scotus’s moral psychology here offers an account of akrasia, as Cross notes, reflecting the phenomenology of Paul’s confession, “the good that I would I do not: but the evil I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19). Citing Bonnie Kent’s Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 174–98, Cross concludes: “In this as on many of the issues I have discussed before, Scotus’s influence on the subsequent history of philosophy is astonishing.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anselm of Canterbury. The Major Works. Edited by Brian Davies and Brian Leftow. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Aristeas. Letter of Aristeas. Translated by Henry St. John Thackery. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated and edited by Martin Ostwald. New York: Pearson, 1999. Bower, Jeffrey. “Anselm on Ethics.” In The Cambridge Companion to Anselm. Edited by Brian Davies and Brian Leftow, 222–56. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cross, Richard. “Recent Work on the Philosophy of Duns Scotus.” Philosophy Compass 5 (May 8, 2010): 667–75. Faur, José. The Horizontal Society. Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2008. Harding, Brian. Augustine and Roman Virtue. London: Continuum, 2008.

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Kent, Bonnie. Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Lindsay, Dennis. Josephus and Faith. Leiden: Brill, 1993. Maimonides. The Eight Chapters of Maimonides on Ethics. Edited and translated by Joseph Gorfinkle. New York: Columbia University Press, 1912; repr. AMS, 1966. Pinsent, Andrew. The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics. New York and London: Routledge, 2012. Saadiah Ben Joseph al-Fayyūmī. The Book of Beliefs and Opinions. Translated by Samuel Rosenblatt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948. ———. Kitāb al-Mukhtār fī ’l-Amānāt wa-’l-I‘tiqādāt (The Book of Critically Chosen Beliefs and Convictions). Edited by J. Kafih. Jerusalem: Yeshiva University, 1970. Sheet, John R. “Justice in the Moral Thought of St Anselm.” Modern Schoolman 256 (1947): 132–39. Wetzel, James. Augustine and the Limits of Virtue. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Wolfson, H. A. Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962. Wolter, Allan Bernard. Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997. Zagzebski, Linda. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Chapter Nine

Hume, Intellectual Virtue, and Virtue Epistemology Dan O’Brien

This chapter explores Hume’s account of the intellectual virtues. I first sketch his account of virtue in general, next focusing on the intellectual virtues. I then consider the relation in Hume between character, the self, and wisdom. Next, I suggest that Hume should be seen as a virtue epistemologist. I conclude with the argument that this interpretation is consonant with his mitigated skepticism. HUME’S ACCOUNT OF VIRTUE Hume’s account of virtue is grounded in his naturalistic explanation of our emotional responses to others. Empathy, or what Hume calls “sympathy,” plays a crucial role here. Our responses to the actions of others can be biased. I may approve of Cynthia’s caustic wit because I am dazzled by her pyrotechnic wordplay. Judgments concerning her character, though, should be independent of my own weaknesses, predilections, or circumstances. They should not be made solely from my own point of view, but from a “general”1 or “common point of view.”2 I may find her aggressive put-downs titillating, but others disapprove and in sympathizing with their disapproval I can come to see this as a flaw in Cynthia’s character. Thus, for Hume, those aspects of a person’s character toward which we feel approval from the general point of view are virtues, and those toward which we feel disapproval are vices. We feel approval toward character traits that are useful to the person acting, such as good sense, fortitude, and dexterity; toward those that are useful to others, such as benevolence, generosity, and bravery; those that are agreeable to ourselves, such as good humor, ambition, and philosophical tranquility; and those that are agreeable to others, such as sociability, wit, cheerfulness, and 153

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fidelity.3 Virtue is thus a broad category, covering moral virtues and “intellectual . . . endowments,”4 and also bodily attributes such as “broad shoulders” and a “lank belly.”5 Annette Baier talks of Hume’s “defiant inclusion” of such physical characteristics in his catalogue of virtues,6 and James Harris chides Mary and David Norton, in their co-edited Treatise of Human Nature (2000), for changing the title of a section (T 3.3.5) from “Some farther reflections concerning the natural virtues” to “Some farther reflections concerning the natural abilities.” Harris plausibly claims that “Hume intended ‘natural virtues, it may be presumed, as part of his strategy of unsettling the reader’s grip on the distinction between virtues and abilities.”7 The title of book 3 of the Treatise may be “Of Morals” but it discusses all agreeable and useful human qualities. In this, Baier claims, “[h]e is realistic about what we do admire and deplore in one another and rightly says that no one wants to be thought stupid. So stupidity counts as a vice, just as much as cruelty or dishonesty.”8 Further, Hume notes that “Cicero, in imitation of all the ancient moralists . . . enlarges very much his ideas of virtue, and comprehends every laudable quality or endowment of the mind, under that honorable appellation.”9 Hume has a sentimentalist account of morality: moral judgment is grounded in sympathy and the sentiments that we feel toward others. Reason, though, is not completely inert with respect to moral judgment. Probabilistic or causal reasoning is involved in gauging the likely effects of character traits on others: “reason must enter for a considerable share” in all moral judgments, reason “to instruct us in the tendency of qualities and actions, and point out their beneficial consequences to society and to their possessor.”10 Reason therefore has input into the sympathetic mechanisms underlying the appreciation of virtuous and vicious action. Hume provides a naturalistic account of virtue, one grounded in sympathy with utility and pleasure, and people just do find utility and pleasure in a set of character traits wider than that circumscribed by traditional morality. We do perhaps tend to limit the word “virtue” to traits that have moral worth, and downplay mere talents and abilities, but, for Hume, there are no deep metaphysical distinctions between these categories. Hume thinks that disputes concerning whether or not a particular trait or ability should fall under the category of virtue are merely “verbal” or “grammatical.”11 INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES Linda Zagzebski suggests that “[o]ne way to express the depth required for a trait to be a virtue or a vice is to think of it as a quality we would ascribe to a person if asked to describe her after her death,” and Hume’s most developed



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descriptions of virtuous and vicious people are contained in posthumous character sketches in his History of England.12 The traits for which historical figures are praised include intellectual virtues, those that are involved in the acquisition of knowledge and understanding, and those that promote discourse and sociality upon which the cultivation of knowledge depends. Some of these concern the way one intellectually engages with others. Charles, king of Navarre, was “engaging, eloquent . . . [and] enterprising”; Henry VIII and Richard I were frank. Henry I’s “conversation [was] affable and entertaining: His elocution easy, persuasive, and ever at command,” and “the affability of . . . [his] address encouraged those who might be overawed by the sense of his dignity or of his wisdom.”13 It is also virtuous to show discretion,14 candor,15 and eloquence.16 There are virtues that have a more direct relationship with the acquisition of true beliefs. It is good to show industry in acquiring knowledge17 and to be open to the acquisition of truth.18 Other epistemically praiseworthy traits include penetration,19 courage of mind,20 vivacity of understanding,21 “that sagacity, which leads to the discovery of truth,”22 solidity of understanding,23 “perseverance . . . quickness of conception, facility of expression,”24 “good sense, and sound reasoning.”25 Intellectual vices are also highlighted. It is a character flaw to display pedantry,26 avidity,27 and obstinacy.28 “[C]redulity” is a vice that rashly “commands our assent beyond what experience will justify,”29 and “[i]ndolence, negligence, want of order and method . . . fickleness, [and] rashness” are seen as vicious.30 Virtues also have associated vices when overplayed—“scarce any of them pure, or free from the contagion of neighbouring vices”: King James’s “learning [bordered] on pedantry . . . his wisdom on cunning.”31 Hume draws a distinction between natural and artificial virtues. Natural virtues are innate, whereas the artificial virtues are those aspects of character that are encouraged in society by the “artifice and contrivance of men”32 because we have discovered that they lead to utility and pleasure. Natural virtues include benevolence and love toward our children.33 The artificial virtues include politeness, chivalrousness, loyalty to government, chastity, promise-keeping, and justice. Intellectual virtues should be seen as artificial in this sense: we praise eloquence, courage of mind, and sincerity because we have found that in various ways they promote communication and the cultivation of knowledge. Courage of mind may not be innate, but it is a respected trait because we have established conventions to inculcate such behavior. The claim that justice is “artificial” may suggest Bernard Mandeville’s approach in The Fable of the Bees (1714) where he argues that moral distinctions are arbitrary inventions for the preservation of man and for his selfish pleasure and utility. For Hume, a sense of justice may not be hardwired in those who are virtuous, but he does not embrace the egoism of Mandeville.

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Hume was influenced to some degree by Francis Hutcheson’s (1725) account of morality. For Hutcheson we have a moral sense that enables us to perceive that certain actions are virtuous and that others are not, just as we can perceive the visible properties of objects with our sense of sight. This is an innate sense, planted in us by God—designed to make us feel moral approval toward virtuous action and disapproval toward that which is vicious. Hume agrees with Hutcheson that moral distinctions are not arbitrary and that the moral sentiments of approval and disapproval are central to moral judgment, although he sees no reason to postulate the existence of such a God-given moral sense. The moral sentiments we feel toward the extensive catalogue of traits we see as virtuous and vicious are not produced by original or primary constituents of human nature.34 The ability to feel such sentiments toward the actions of others depends on more “general principles”—on, that is, our natural sympathetic mechanisms. Further, societies—and the artificial virtues upon which they depend—are not planned, Mandevillean creations; it is, rather, sympathetic engagement between individuals that drives the development of virtuous forms of behavior, or “conventions,” that support social relations. Conventions are artificial in the sense that their roots lie in societal interaction, but such interaction does involve our innate capacity for sympathizing with others and resultant conventions can become second nature.35 Hume does not draw a rigid distinction between artificial and natural virtues. Both kinds of virtue depend on our sympathy with those affected by the actions of ourselves and others, and both can be seen as constituting the character of an individual: one can be an honest, polite, and just person (artificial virtues) just as one can be a benevolent person (natural virtue). Hume suggests that: The only difference betwixt the natural virtues and justice lies in this, that the good, which results from the former, arises from every single act, and is the object of some natural passion: Whereas a single act of justice, consider’d in itself, may often be contrary to the public good; and ’tis only the concurrence of mankind, in a general scheme or system of action, which is advantageous.36

Politeness is good because the institution as a whole is beneficial to society, even if in some cases no one is edified by forced politeness to, perhaps, officious or brutish acquaintances. In contrast, though, a natural virtue such as benevolence is always beneficial to others and to the virtuous person.37 Hume’s account of virtue, whether “natural” or “artificial,” is grounded in his account of human nature and in the fact that we are naturally social creatures tuned in via sympathy to the pleasures and pains of our fellows. Such a sympathy-based picture provides an account of morality that is opposed to



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both the natural, God-given benevolence of Hutcheson and to the calculating self-interest of Mandeville. CHARACTER, SELF, AND WISDOM There is an ancient conception of virtue according to which the virtues are not independent of each other.38 In order to have a particular virtue one must have them all. A compassionate person requires courage in order to stand up for those who are oppressed, and a person with courage must have wisdom and knowledge of the dangers involved, otherwise their actions would be merely foolhardy. Hutcheson (1725) also sees virtues as interrelated in that they are all derived from (God-given) benevolence: courage, for example, is only virtuous if it is manifest in the pursuit of benevolent goals. Hume seems to reject any such unity: in a letter to Hutcheson he says: “Were Benevolence the only Virtue no Characters cou’d be mixt, but wou’d depend entirely on their Degree of benevolence.”39 Unity of the virtues seems to be at odds with Hume’s naturalistic, cataloguing approach toward the various traits and abilities of which we approve and disapprove, and with the “mixt” way we commonly describe each other: she is kind (virtue), although a little over-bearing (vice); intellectually courageous, yet careless; witty yet closed-minded. There is, however, a kind of unity to Hume’s account. We do not see ourselves or each other as mere bundles of character traits, but as unified people—individuals proud of our make-up.40 The passions—and pride in particular—play a crucial role in self-consciousness. The object of pride and humility “is self, or that succession of related ideas and impressions, of which we have an intimate memory and consciousness.”41 The claim is not merely that we have an independent impression of the self that at times pleases us and leads us to feel pride. As Lorenzo Greco puts it: “the self and pride or humility present themselves simultaneously, in a sort of reciprocal construction”:42 “nature has given to the organs of the human mind, a certain disposition fitted to produce a peculiar impression or emotion, which we call pride: To this emotion she has assign’d a certain idea, viz. that of self, which it never fails to produce.”43 We take pride from “qualities of the mind; wit, good-sense, learning, courage, integrity: from those of the body; beauty, strength, agility, good mein, address in dancing, riding, fencing: [and] from external advantages; country, family, children, relations, riches, houses, gardens, horses, dogs, [and] cloaths.”44 I therefore come to see myself as a courageous fencer and agile dancer, and it is virtuous to feel a certain amount of pride in my achievements and for this to mould the self-image I have of myself.45

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History provides us with exemplars of virtue, those who have “greatness of mind.” King Alfred, for example, “deservedly attained the appellation of Alfred the Great”: So happily were all his virtues tempered together; so justly were they blended; and so powerfully did each prevent the other from exceeding its proper boundaries! He knew how to reconcile the most enterprising spirit with the coolest moderation; the most obstinate perseverance with the easiest flexibility; the most severe justice with the gentlest lenity; the greatest vigour in commanding with the most shining talents for action.46

Alfred was wise in that he could mediate between the demands of different virtues. Queen Elizabeth I was also wise in this way: “[b]y the force of her mind . . . [she] controuled all her more active and stronger qualities, and prevented them from running into excess: Her heroism was exempt from temerity, her frugality from avarice, her friendship from partiality, her active temper from turbulency and a vain ambition.”47 Thus, “[a] due medium . . . is the characteristic of virtue.”48 On an Aristotelian account it is phronesis or practical wisdom that enables us to determine the due medium or “golden mean.” There are no algorithms to help with this, yet those who are wise can, with practice, learn to do so. Hume can be seen as having a naturalistic account of such wisdom. Virtues are character traits of which we naturally approve, and we do this because we are capable of sympathizing with their beneficial effects on individuals and on society. This is determined by their utility and on how agreeable such character traits are to ourselves and to others. We therefore approve of, and encourage, the due medium, both in children through education and throughout life by the arrangements of social institutions.49 We see precision as a virtue because we can sympathize with the utility this brings, although we are also aware that too much emphasis on precision can lead to inflexibility or staleness. Just as wisdom is required in the moral sphere, there are times when it is not clear which are the appropriate intellectual virtues to exercise. One may have worked on a philosophy paper for years and submitted it to many journals. Time after time it’s been rejected. Should one persevere and continue—courageously—to argue for what you take to be your revolutionary new approach, or should you show intellectual humility and accept the decision of the referees and give up on years of work? There is a point where intellectual courage and perseverance shade into foolishness; sometimes projects should be abandoned. There are no hard and fast rules here and intellectual wisdom must be learnt. Wisdom can be acquired, and it is essentially social: the wise man is not the solitary sage, but the thinker immersed in sympathetic engagement with the community.



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HUME AS A VIRTUE EPISTEMOLOGIST For Hume virtues are “durable principles of the mind,” that is, character traits.50 It is upon such traits that moral judgments focus, rather than merely on the consequences of actions or on whether they conform to duty, requirements of consequentialist and Kantian thinking respectively. Hume has therefore been interpreted as a kind of virtue ethicist.51 In this section I suggest that it is also illuminating to see Hume through the lens of contemporary virtue epistemology. There are various kinds of virtue epistemology. A useful distinction can be drawn between virtue reliabilist and virtue responsibilist approaches. According to the former, epistemic virtue amounts to the possession of reliable faculties, those that consistently lead to the acquisition of true belief. Such faculties include those involved in sense perception, inductive and deductive reasoning, and memory.52 There is a good case for thinking that at times Hume had such an approach. Frederick Schmitt and Helen Beebee argue that Hume has a reliabilist account of causal or inductive reasoning: such inference is justified because it tends to lead to beliefs that are true; our inferential habits are in harmony with the course of nature.53 In his discussion of miracles, for example, Hume argues that testimonial belief should be grounded in inductive inference and it is natural to see that the reason for this is that inductive reasoning is reliable.54 As we have seen, though, Hume notes a wide range of character traits that should be seen as intellectual virtues. His focus is not just on reliable faculties.55 There are other epistemic dimensions along which thinkers can be evaluated: with respect, for example, to whether they are open-minded, intellectually courageous, precise, or creative. Virtue reliabilism does not therefore provide the whole story concerning the role of virtue in Hume’s epistemology. Reliable faculties are not character traits, and thus virtue reliabilism can be seen as only paying lip service to the kind of virtues that play a role in virtue ethics. A form of virtue epistemology is required that takes seriously the role of character. Accounts that take their inspiration from Aristotelian virtue ethics fit this bill. Zagzebski develops this kind of theory.56 As with virtue ethics the primary concern is not with actions—in this case, mental acts of believing—but with the intellectual characters of thinkers. There are analogues of the moral virtues such as intellectual courage, humility, and honesty, and also distinct intellectual virtues such as creativity, clarity, adaptability, open-mindedness, thoroughness, rigor, attentiveness, and flexibility. Intellectual courage, for example, is a virtue that enables one to go out on a limb and test out ideas that may at first be met with hostility; adaptability is the kind of virtue necessary for epistemic success in inter-disciplinary contexts. Such virtues have associated vices: in contrast to

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intellectual clarity there is wooliness of thinking; carelessness as opposed to thoroughness. And, as with their ethical counterparts, some intellectual virtues lie on the mean between two vices: in persevering with your work there are the twin dangers of laziness and self-destructive determination, whereas openmindedness requires that a path be found between dogmatism, suspicion, and gullibility. We have seen that Hume has a similar geography of the virtues and the relations between them. The kind of epistemology derived from Aristotelian virtue ethics is called virtue responsibilism, since virtues are seen as character traits for which we are responsible. It is up to the scientist, for example, how much effort she puts into her research, how much precision she brings to bear on setting up her experiments, and how much creativity she allows into her analysis of the data. The traits of thoroughness, precision, and creativity are acquired characteristics and thus we are seen as responsible for our acquisition of them, our cultivation of them, and for the way we attempt to apply them in the right circumstances. Here there is a contrast with virtue reliabilism. The latter approach focuses on, for example, the reliability of perception and memory, but these natural faculties are not, it could be argued, something for which we should be seen as responsible, and thus they should not be seen as virtues. The scientist deserves praise for the careful way she analyzes the data, but not for merely having good eyesight; she deserves blame for her inattentiveness, but not for her poor memory.57 Virtue reliabilism does not sufficiently acknowledge the credit deserved by thinkers. Epistemic virtues should be seen as “active features of her agency: actions, motivations, and habits over which she has some control and for which she is (to some degree) responsible.”58 Hume canvasses the suggestion that moral virtues can be distinguished from mere natural abilities in virtue of their voluntary nature: we can, for example, choose to act benevolently in a certain situation, whereas we cannot decide whether or not to have broad shoulders. Hume notes, though, that many traditional moral qualities, those that “all moralists . . . comprehend under the title of moral virtues”59 are involuntary and thus (in some sense) not under our control; this can be so in the case of “courage, equanimity, patience, self-command,”60 “constancy, fortitude, magnamity; and, in short, all the qualities which form the great man.”61 If responsibility demands such control, then it may appear that Hume cannot be seen as a virtue responsibilist. Hume, though, is a compatibilist with respect to moral responsibility: you are responsible for how you act if your actions are caused by enduring aspects of your character.62, 63 You can thus be seen as responsible for your wit even if it comes naturally and even if it is difficult or impossible for you to turn it off. The picture that is emerging of Hume’s account of intellectual virtue is pluralist. He can be seen as holding a virtue reliabilist account of inductive



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inference and thus of testimonial justification, and also, in his wider treatment of intellectual traits, as supporting virtue responsibilism. The pluralism goes deep: the virtues relevant to the latter are themselves of two kinds—natural and artificial—and the properties to which our sympathetic mechanisms are sensitive are of four kinds (traits that are useful and/or agreeable to ourselves and/or others). DOGMATISM, OPEN-MINDEDNESS, AND MITIGATED SKEPTICISM In this final section I consider the intellectual virtue of open-mindedness and how this trait is related to Hume’s mitigated skepticism. Dogmatism for Hume is an epistemic vice. In recent discussions of epistemic or intellectual virtue, the neighboring virtues of dogmatism are open-mindedness and intellectual humility. Wayne Riggs describes open-mindedness as the ability “to be aware of one’s fallibility as a believer, and to be willing to acknowledge the possibility that anytime one believes something, it is possible that one is wrong.”64 According to Hume, just this virtue is inculcated in the “true philosopher” by mitigated skepticism. In “Of skepticism with regard to reason” and “Of skepticism with regard to the senses” Hume provides, and embraces, arguments to the conclusion that none of our beliefs about mind-independent objects have any justification whatsoever.65 This does not have the disastrous Pyrrhonian result of forcing us to withhold all belief concerning such matters, since “Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable necessity has determin’d us to judge as well as to breathe and feel.”66 Further, such skepticism is both “durable and useful” and “could such dogmatical reasoners become sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding . . . such a reflection would naturally inspire them with more modesty and reserve, and diminish themselves, and their prejudice against antagonists.”67 Mitigated skepticism induces a “degree of doubt, and caution, and modesty, which in all kinds of scrutiny and decision, ought for ever to accompany a just reasoner.”68 It assists in limiting “our enquiries to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding.”69 In undermining our intellectual pretensions, it helps make us more co-operative inquirers who are modest about our own expertise. Dogmatism and aggressive defense of our beliefs is checked when we “become sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding, even in its most perfect state, and when most accurate and cautious in its determinations.”70 In order to have the right level of intellectual modesty71 or open-mindedness a certain level of self-awareness is required—awareness, for example, of when

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one is likely to be led astray by one’s biases, wishful thinking, and enthusiasm. As Riggs puts it: “the open-minded person is moved by her awareness of her own fallibility to search for domains and situations in which she is prone to these habits of thought that produce closed-mindedness.”72 In Hume’s discussion of miracles, he suggests just such scrutiny of our cognitive capacities. We must closely monitor the influence of certain passions on our belief in miraculous occurrences. Testifiers concerning miracles gain pride in “exciting the admiration of others”—“what greater temptation than to appear a missionary, a prophet, an ambassador from Heaven?”73 And, “the gazing populace, receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition, and promotes wonder.”74 We should thus be on the alert for such disruptive passions when determining what to believe. One who is open-minded must resist the siren song of their disruptive passions and be receptive to counter-evidence. Robert Roberts and Jay Wood talk of the due medium between dogmatism and openmindedness as “firmness”: “The virtue of intellectual firmness is the disposition to grip currently possessed particular intellectual goods, in the various contextual vicissitudes of the epistemically relevant passing show, with just the right degree of tightness/lightness.”75 Education can encourage epistemically beneficial forms of skepticism. Lorne Falkenstein explains how this is so: “For Hume, an encounter with skeptical arguments diminishes the vivacity of all of our ideas, but certain beliefs (those originating from causes that we consider to be legitimate) are better able to recover from the blow.”76 Skepticism muffles the volume of the cacophony of noise emanating from our various belief-forming mechanisms, and this allows the steady pulse of causal reasoning to be heard more clearly. For Hume, the wise or those with “good sense” are those who reason well— not in terms of system-building, “abstract reasoning”—but in terms of good causal reasoning supplemented by the application of general rules, such as those outlined in “rules by which to judge of causes and effects.”77 Falkenstein discusses the pedagogical role played by the kinds of skeptical arguments presented in the Treatise.78 David Norton, however, suggests the point has wider application: “Whether . . . she . . . has been affected by considerations of exactly the type that constitute philosophical doubt is unimportant. The point is, rather, that Hume saw that we would benefit from the kind of philosophical activity that adds an appreciation of our limitations to the conditions in which belief is formed.”79 Children are not usually introduced to doubts concerning the existence of the external world or whether the sun will rise tomorrow, but education in the arts and sciences can involve recognition of the limits of our knowledge of the natural world and of our mental life. Education, for example, can alert us to how we are easily swayed in our beliefs by eloquent writing; due skepticism, then, can reduce the vivacity of ideas acquired from



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this source, allowing beliefs acquired dispassionately from causal reasoning and the application of general rules to have more influence.80 The claim, then, is that such acknowledgment of one’s fallibility is an intellectual virtue, one acknowledged to be so by contemporary virtue responsibilists and one that is consonant with Hume’s claims concerning the epistemic value of skepticism. Hume’s account of virtue is grounded in our sympathetic appreciation of the useful and agreeable effects that various character traits have on ourselves and others. His account does not respect certain traditional borders between virtues and other kinds of traits that we think it good to possess, since human excellences come in various forms: moral, physical, and intellectual. I have focused on the latter, arguing that Hume can be seen as a virtue epistemologist, one who is pluralist in his approach. NOTES 1.  David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature, ed. D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1739] 2000), 3.3.1.15. 2. Hume, Treatise, 3.3.1.30. 3.  See, for example, Hume, Treatise, 3.3.1.24, 3.3.4.3, 3.3.1.11, 3.3.2.13, 3.3.3.3 and David Hume, Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. T.L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1772] 1998), 6.21. 4. Hume, Enquiry, App. 4.2. 5. Hume, Treatise, 3.3.5.3. 6.  Annette Baier, “Kinds of Virtue Theorist: A Response to Christine Swanton,” in Hume on Motivation and Virtue, ed. C. Pigden (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 251. 7.  J. Harris, “Free Will,” in Bloomsbury Companion to Hume, ed. A. Bailey and D. O’Brien (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 226n9. 8.  Annette Baier, The Pursuits of Philosophy: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of David Hume (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 47. 9.  See J. Feiser, “Hume’s Wide View of the Virtues: An Analysis of His Early Critics,” Hume Studies 24, no. 2 (1998), 295–311 for discussion of Hume’s contemporaries who criticize him for having too “wide” a view of virtue. 10. Hume, Enquiry, App. 1.2. 11.  See Hume, Treatise, 3.3.4.4; David Hume, Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 1.33 and, Enquiry, App. 4.2 and 4.6. For further discussion of Hume’s account of the virtues, see D. O’Brien, “Hume and the Intellectual Virtues,” Discipline Filosofiche 22, no. 2 (2014): 153–72 and D. O’Brien “Hume and the Virtues” in A. Bailey and D. O’Brien, eds., Bloomsbury Companion to Hume (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 288–302. 12.  L. T. Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 135.

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13.  Charles, king of Navarre: David Hume, History of England: from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press, [1778] 1983), 2.244; Henry VIII and Richard I: Hume, History, 3.227, 1.403, 3.127; Henry I: Hume, History, 1.370 and 1.276. 14. Hume, History, 1.276 and 6.466. 15. Hume, History, 3.450. 16. Hume, History, 1.276, 4.338, 4.308, 5.407, 5.422. 17. Hume, History, 4.338. 18. Hume, History, 3.322, 1.403, 3.127. 19. Hume, History, 4.351. 20. Hume, History, 2.63. 21. Hume, History, 2.418. 22. Hume, Enquiry, App. 4.11. 23. Hume, History, 4.308. 24. Hume, Enquiry, 6.21. 25. Hume, Enquiry, 8.7. 26. Hume, History, 1.277. 27. Hume, History, 5.146. 28. Hume, History, 3.461. 29. Hume, Treatise, 1.3.9.12. 30. Hume, Enquiry, 6.1. 31. Hume, History, 5.121. 32. Hume, Treatise, 3.3.1.1. 33. Hume, Treatise, 3.3.2–3. 34. Hume, Treatise, 3.1.2.6. 35.  As William Faulkner puts it in his novel Absalom, Absalom!, “the very abstractions which he might have observed—monogamy and fidelity and decorum and gentleness and affection—were as purely rooted in the flesh’s offices as the digestive processes.” William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (London: Random House, [1936] 2005), 199. 36. Hume, Treatise, 3.3.1.12. 37.  Any hard distinction between the natural and artificial virtues is explicitly rejected in the second Enquiry, where all disputes concerning the naturalness of justice are seen as “merely verbal” (Hume, Enquiry, App. 3.9n64). 38.  For discussion and partial defense of the unity of the virtues, see Susan Wolf, “Moral Psychology and the Unity of the Virtues,” Ratio 20, no. 2 (2007): 145–67. 39. Hume, Letters, 1.34. 40.  See L. Greco, “Towards a Humean Virtue Ethics” in Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective, ed. J. Peters (London: Routledge, 2013), 210–24 and L. Greco, “The Force of Sympathy in the Ethics of David Hume,” in Hume Readings, ed. L. Greco and A. Vaccari (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2012), 207–10 for discussion of Hume on the unity of character. 41. Hume, Treatise, 2.1.2.2.



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42.  L. Greco, “The Self as Narrative in Hume,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 53, no. 4 (2015): 708. 43. Hume, Treatise, 2.1.5.6. 44. Hume, Treatise, 2.1.2.5. 45.  Such talk of self-knowledge may seem to be at odds with Hume’s apparent skepticism concerning the self at Hume, Treatise, 1.4.6. Hume, however, is only skeptical with regards to our having the impression of a “simple and continu’d” self (Hume, Treatise, 1.4.6.3)—a Cartesian self. We can have impressions and ideas of our social, embodied selves: “the true idea of the human mind” is the idea of “a system of different perceptions or different existences, which are link’d together by the relation of cause and effect, and mutually produce, destroy, influence, and modify each other” (Hume, Treatise, 1.4.6.19). 46. Hume, History, 1.74–5. 47. Hume, History, 4.351. 48. Hume, Enquiry, 6.2. 49. Hume, Treatise, 3.2.2.25–6. 50.  Hume is talking at Hume, Treatise, 3.3.1.4 only of moral and intellectual virtues and not the bodily attributes discussed above. 51. See, for example, C. Swanton, “Hume and Virtue Ethics,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hume, ed. P. Russell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 470–88; G. Sayre-McCord, “Hume and the Bauhaus Theory of Ethics,” in P.A. French, T.E. Uehling, and H.K. Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy 20 (1996): 280–98; J. Taylor, “Virtue and the Evaluation of Character,” in The Blackwell Companion to Hume’s Treatise, ed. S. Traiger (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 276–96; and Greco, Towards a Humean. 52.  See E. Sosa, Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Vol. 1: A Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 53.  Frederick Schmitt, Hume’s Epistemology in the Treatise: A Veritistic Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Helen Beebee, Hume on Causation (London: Routledge, 2006), 66–74. 54.  M. Root, “Hume on the Virtues of Testimony,” American Philosophical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (2001): 21, suggests a different reading of trust in testimony: “the distinction in the Treatise between natural and artificial virtue supports a different way of viewing the credibility of witnesses, for if giving honest or well-founded testimony is an artificial virtue, then B has a reason to believe that A is a credible witness, a reason to expect that, in testifying that p, A is conforming her testimony to the truth that is based on convention rather than a past conformity.” 55.  Julia Driver, “The Conflation of Moral and Epistemic Virtue,” Metaphilosophy 34, no. 3 (2003) and Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind take intellectual virtues to be essentially aimed at the acquisition of true belief. I shall not consider here whether Hume’s virtues should be limited in this way or whether they should concern intellectual flourishing in a more general sense. 56. Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind.

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57.  We may comment on the excellence of someone’s eyesight, but we do not praise them for having it. We should not, though, be too quick in claiming that certain epistemic achievements are out of our control. In certain situations one may be praised for one’s visual acuity—for, perhaps, spotting Elmo—and one can justifiably be admonished for not looking properly. Perceptual abilities can be cultivated and improved just as can one’s abilities in mathematics or music. See R. C. Roberts and W. J. Wood, Intellectual Virtue: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 214. 58.  H. Battaly, “Virtue Epistemology,” Philosophy Compass 4, no. 3 (2008): 648. 59. Hume, Treatise, 3.3.4.3. 60. Hume, Enquiry, App. 4.2. 61. Hume, Treatise, 3.3.4.3. 62. For Hume’s compatibilism, see P. Russell, Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume’s Way of Naturalizing Responsibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 63.  R. Vitz, “Doxastic Virtues in Hume’s Epistemology,” Hume Studies 35, nos. 1–2 (2009): 211–29, suggests that Hume’s account of virtue should be considered as an alternative to the usual Aristotelian accounts offered by contemporary virtue epistemologists of a responsibilist stripe. 64.  Wayne Riggs, “Open-Mindedness,” Metaphilosophy 41, nos. 1–2 (2010): 180. 65. Hume, Treatise, 4.1–2. 66. Hume, Treatise, 1.4.1.7. 67. Ibid. 68. David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. T. L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1772] 2000), 12.24. 69. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human, 12.25. 70. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human, 12.24. 71.  Contemporary virtue epistemologists focus on intellectual humility as a virtue. I discuss this virtue under the title of “modesty” given Hume’s hostility to the “monkish virtue” of humility (David Hume, Natural History of Religion in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1777] 1993), 163. He claims that we should “transfer . . . [such religious virtues] to the opposite column, and place them in the catalogue of vices” (Hume, Enquiry, 9.3). 72. Riggs, Open-Mindedness, 183. 73. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human, 10.29. 74. Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human, 10.30. 75.  Roberts and Wood, Intellectual Virtue, 206. 76.  L. Falkenstein, “Naturalism, Normativity, and Scepticism in Hume’s Account of Belief,” Hume Studies 23, no. 1 (1997): 31. 77. Hume, Treatise, 1.3.15. 78. See also A. Bailey, “Hume on Scepticism and the Moral Sciences,”’ in Bloomsbury Companion to Hume, ed. A. Bailey and D. O’Brien (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 162–66 and Falkenstein, Naturalism, Normativity, 53–62. 79. D. F. Norton, “How a Sceptic May Live Scepticism,” in Faith, Scepticism and Personal Identity, ed. J.J. Macintosh and H.A. Mendel (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1994), 131–32.



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80.  For further discussion of Hume on education, see D. O’Brien, “Hume on Education,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98, S1 (2017): 619–42.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Baier, Annette. “Kinds of Virtue Theorist: A Response to Christine Swanton.” In Hume on Motivation and Virtue, edited by C. Pigden, 249–58. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ———. The Pursuits of Philosophy: An Introduction to the Life and Thought of David Hume. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Bailey, A. “Hume on Scepticism and the Moral Sciences.” In Bloomsbury Companion to Hume, edited by A. Bailey and D. O’Brien, 146–66. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Battaly, H. “Virtue Epistemology.” Philosophy Compass 4, no. 3 (2008): 639–63. Beebee, H. Hume on Causation. London: Routledge, 2006. Driver, Julia. “The Conflation of Moral and Epistemic Virtue.” Metaphilosophy 34, no. 3 (2003): 367–83. Falkenstein, L. “Naturalism, Normativity, and Scepticism in Hume’s Account of Belief.” Hume Studies 23, no. 1 (1997): 29–72. Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! London: Random House, [1936] 2005. Feiser, J. “Hume’s Wide View of the Virtues: An Analysis of His Early Critics.” Hume Studies 24, no. 2 (1998): 295–311. Greco, L. “The Force of Sympathy in the Ethics of David Hume.” In Hume Readings, edited by L. Greco & A. Vaccari, 193–210. Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2012. ———. “Towards a Humean Virtue Ethics.” In Aristotelian Ethics in Contemporary Perspective, edited by J. Peters, 210–24. London: Routledge, 2013. ———. “The Self as Narrative in Hume.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 53, no. 4 (2015): 699–722. Harris, J. “Free Will.” In Bloomsbury Companion to Hume, edited by A. Bailey and D. O’Brien, 214–26. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. Hume, D. Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1739] 2000. ———. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by T. L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1772] 2000. ———. Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by T.L. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1772] 1998. ———. Natural History of Religion in Dialogues and Natural History of Religion. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1777] 1993. ———. History of England: from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688. 6 vols. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, [1778] 1983. ———. Letters of David Hume. Edited by J. Y. T. Greig. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932. Hutcheson, F. On the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue. London: W. and J. Smith, 1725.

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Mandeville, B. The Fable of the Bees. Edited by F. B. Kay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1714] 1924. Norton, D. F. “How a Sceptic May Live Scepticism.” In Faith, Scepticism and Personal Identity, edited by J.J. Macintosh and H.A. Mendel. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 1994. O’Brien, D. “Hume and the Intellectual Virtues.” Discipline Filosofiche 22, no. 2 (2014): 153–72. ———. “Hume and the Virtues.” In Bloomsbury Companion to Hume, edited by A. Bailey and D. O’Brien, 288–302. London: Bloomsbury, 2015. ———. “Hume on Education.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 98(S1) (2017): 619–42. Riggs, W. “Open-Mindedness.” Metaphilosophy 41, nos. 1–2 (2010): 172–88. Roberts, R. C., and W. J. Wood. Intellectual Virtue: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Root, M. “Hume on the Virtues of Testimony.” American Philosophical Quarterly 38, no. 1 (2001): 19–35. Russell, P. Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume’s Way of Naturalizing Responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Sayre-McCord, G. “Hume and the Bauhaus Theory of Ethics.” In P. A. French, T.E. Uehling, and H.K. Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy 20 (1996): 280–98. Schmitt, F. Hume’s Epistemology in the Treatise: A Veritistic Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Sosa, E. Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge. Vol. 1: A Virtue Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Swanton, C. “Hume and Virtue Ethics.” In Oxford Handbook of Hume, edited by P. Russell, 470–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Taylor, J. “Virtue and the Evaluation of Character.” In The Blackwell Companion to Hume’s Treatise, edited by S. Traiger, 276–96. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. Vitz, R. “Doxastic Virtues in Hume’s Epistemology.” Hume Studies 35, nos. 1–2 (2009), 211–29. Wolf, S. “Moral Psychology and the Unity of the Virtues.” Ratio 20, no. 2 (2007): 145–67. Zagzebski, L.T. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Chapter Ten

Mill on Rousseau on the Sciences and Morality Piers Norris Turner

Reflecting on Rousseau’s argument that the advancement of society has tended to corrupt individuals’ morals, John Stuart Mill found himself sympathetic with many of its substantive claims: The superior worth of simplicity of life, the enervating and demoralizing effect of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial society, are ideas which have never been entirely absent from cultivated minds since Rousseau wrote: and they will in time produce their due effect, though at present needing to be asserted as much as ever, and to be asserted by deeds, for words, on this subject, have nearly exhausted their power.1

And yet, Mill elsewhere calls Rousseau a “fanatic” for concluding that we would be more virtuous if society abandoned the sciences and philosophy, and that we should therefore—at least as Mill interpreted him—return to a state of ignorance. In an early speech on the topic of whether “[t]he revival of art and science has contributed to promote morality,” Mill writes: “[t]he beneficial effects produced upon the human mind and upon the structure of society by the revival of science and by the cessation of feudal darkness have been so obvious that there is scarcely room for the smallest discussion.”2 He is adamant: to say that knowledge can be an enemy to happiness is to say that men will enjoy less happiness, when they know how to seek it, than when they do not. This reasoning is on a par with that of anyone who should refuse when asked to point out the road to York, saying that his inquirer would have a much better chance of reaching York without direction than with it.3

As we shall see, this misrepresents Rousseau. In fairness to Mill, Voltaire responds similarly, writing “Never has so much intelligence been employed 169

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in order to render us stupid.”4 But, in the First Discourse and related writings, Rousseau does not deny that knowledge is instrumental to virtue or the good. He is not for ignorance. In fact, he repeatedly expresses his own “enthusiasm for truth”5 and summarizes his basic convictions thus: “Virtue, truth! I will call out incessantly; truth, virtue!”6 What is fair to point out is that Rousseau’s account of the costs and benefits of pursuing the sciences is made possible by a common sense moral epistemology that Mill vehemently rejects. Rousseau argues that, for most people, the sciences (including philosophy) actually obscure our innate knowledge of how to be virtuous and that, when combined with other detrimental moral effects, the costs of pursuing the sciences outweigh the benefits. My main aim in this chapter, then, is to locate the true source of their disagreement. Mill’s defense of the arts and sciences, including philosophy, is due to his conviction that we are never rationally entitled to undermine the free discussion and “experiments of living” that allow us to learn from others. We have no other means to learn how to be virtuous than the experimental and critical method of the sciences. This argument finds its fullest expression in On Liberty, with his claim that the silencing of discussion amounts to an “assumption of infallibility.”7 Mill’s misdiagnosis of his disagreement with Rousseau is important for contemporary public debates about the value of critical thinking, the sciences, and liberal arts education in general. One sometimes hears critics of science called anti-intellectual or anti-expertise when such labels may misrepresent their position, just as Mill misrepresents that of Rousseau. Typically, these critics do not reject the value of knowledge or expertise for promoting virtue, but they do believe that the relevant knowledge or expertise is achievable in the absence of the sciences and philosophy, for example through common sense or private revelation. If so, then their assessment of the importance of pursuing the arts and sciences will be quite different than it would be for someone who rejects those other sources of knowledge. The crucial question is not whether knowledge is morally “useful” but where it comes from.8 ROUSSEAU’S ARGUMENT In making his case for the sciences and philosophy, Mill takes himself to be offering a response to Rousseau’s First Discourse. That essay was written for, and won, a competition arranged by the Academy of Dijon in 1750 on the question: “Whether the restoration of the Sciences and Arts has contributed to the purification of morals.”9 Rousseau’s answer—in stark contrast to Mill’s—is that the revival of the arts and sciences, including philosophy,



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has in fact contributed significantly to the corruption of morals.10 Part I of Rousseau’s essay attempts to establish, through historical examples, that all societies with flourishing arts and sciences have been vicious. Part II then offers an explanation of how their rise leads unavoidably to the moral deterioration of society. The sciences, including philosophy, waste time in pursuit of false ideas, undermine real concern for truth, decrease our physical vigor and courage, reward superficial talents, and diminish our sense of fellow-feeling. At the societal level, and for the typical person, the practice of the sciences is therefore incompatible with virtue. He imagines our descendants saying: “Almighty God, you who hold all Minds in your hands, deliver us from our Father’s Enlightenment and fatal arts, and restore us to ignorance, innocence, and poverty.”11 Near the end of the First Discourse, Rousseau does seem to allow that, although the sciences should not be pursued by the public, they should still be pursued by a few remarkable men in private, whose knowledge of virtue should then be utilized by our leaders to train the public to develop beneficial tendencies and adhere to promulgated rules.12 We will examine this in more detail, but even this concession to the sciences is undercut by his contention in the final paragraph of the essay that we all can acquire knowledge of virtue by heeding the dictates of an inborn moral faculty he calls “conscience.”13 The standard view of this last passage seems to be that it should be treated only as a bit of rhetoric, or as a “salutary untruth,” meant to suppress any desire among the public to engage in the sciences.14 But recent work by David Lay Williams and others on Rousseau’s overall corpus has shown that his repeated appeals to conscience as a source of knowledge of virtue should be taken at face value.15 If so, then it is puzzling that Rousseau would retain any place for the sciences, including philosophy, at all. To begin to get clear on Rousseau’s assessment of the costs and benefits of pursuing the sciences, including philosophy, it is worth distinguishing the various objections he raises against them. His “Observations” offers the following rough genealogy of moral deterioration in society: inequality (“the first source of evil”) gives rise to relative rich and poor; relative riches in turn give rise to vanity and idleness, which give rise to science and to luxury (which “corrupts everything”); luxury then gives rise to the arts.16 This genealogy may give the impression that the real corrupting influences are inequality, riches, idleness, and luxury, and that the arts and sciences play a merely peripheral role. But Rousseau’s strong antipathy to the sciences—my focus here—is due to the fact that they feed back into a loop of corruption, inducing even greater concentrations of vice in society. He writes, “the sciences corrupt morals, render men unjust and jealous, and cause them to sacrifice everything to their self-interest and vainglory.”17 In fact, the development of

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the sciences helps tip the scales toward moral decline: “Sciences develop the vices, which were previously outweighed by our virtues.”18 Beyond the contribution of the sciences to riches and luxury, Rousseau makes at least five other arguments concerning their corrupting influence. The first concerns “loss of time.”19 People cannot be out doing good while they are engaged in the sciences. Because fulfilling one’s duties leaves no time for “leisure for frivolous speculations,” he concludes that “no honest man can ever boast of leisure as long as good remains to be done.”20 Whatever occasional progress the sciences may make toward truth, Rousseau argues it is not worth the loss of time.21 Relatedly, their tendency to encourage exploration in many directions produces more error than truth, more confusion than knowledge, which puts us at moral risk:22 “How many dangers! How many wrong roads in the investigation of the Sciences! How many errors a thousand times more dangerous than the truth is useful, have to be overcome in order to reach it?”23 A second argument concerns “abuse of time.”24 Worse than loss of time, “vain and futile declaimers” are guilty of abuse of time when they “go off in all directions, armed with their deadly paradoxes, undermining the foundations of faith and annihilating virtue.”25 These “enemies of public opinion” find notions of God and country to be quaint.26 They do not merely lose time in an honest effort, but actively undermine virtue by producing confusion and misunderstanding.27 A third argument concerns the loss of martial values. Pursuing the sciences saps not only the mind, but also the body and, therefore, the virtues that benefit from physical vigor, such as courage: “the study of the sciences is much more apt to soften and effeminate men’s courage than to strengthen and animate it.”28 He argues that we harm ourselves by not recognizing how our physical health and mental health are connected: “[w]ork in the study causes men to grow frail. It weakens their temperament, and the soul’s vigor is difficult to preserve once the body’s vigor is lost. Study uses up the machine, exhausts minds, destroys strength, enervates courage, and this alone shows us clearly enough that it is not made for us.”29 One might point out that the development of the medical sciences should mitigate some of the bad effects due to physical weakness. But Rousseau denies even this, for two reasons. First, the doctor’s greater knowledge only causes him increased stress, since “knowledge . . . reveals many more dangers to us than it reveals means to guard against them.”30 Second, he denies the contribution of the medical sciences to extending life because they rise with society, and with society comes a host of new illnesses and dangers: “I shall ask whether there is any solid evidence to conclude that in Countries where this art is most neglected the average life span is shorter than in those where



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it is cultivated with the greatest care; how could it be, if we inflict more ills on ourselves than Medicine can provide Remedies!”31 Rousseau’s fourth argument concerns the tendency of the sciences to encourage valuing superficialities—a taste for study causes us to care more about mere “talents” than moral character:32 “Where do all these abuses arise, if not in the fatal inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the disparagement of the virtues? That is the most obvious effect of all our studies, and the most dangerous of all their consequences. . . . Rewards are lavished upon wits, and virtue remains without honors.”33 We thus honor the merely skilled and learned over the virtuous: “Call out to our People about a Passer-by Oh, what a learned man! And about another Oh, what a good man! They will not fail to turn their eyes and respect toward the first. A third Caller is needed. Oh, what blockheads!”34 This problem intensifies over time through the education of the young.35 A fifth argument concerns the problem of mutual dependence and detachment.36 The rise of the sciences creates new and growing desires that lead us to place ourselves in a “position of mutual dependence,” which ironically causes us to become detached from others.37 Mutual dependence might seem a good thing insofar as it induces sympathy and a sense of common interest. Rousseau admits that these are “certainly fine ideas,”38 but argues that a state of mutual dependence in fact causes us to become “deceitful, jealous, and treacherous.”39 We “cannot possibly live together without obstructing, supplanting, deceiving, betraying, destroying one another . . . a state of affairs in which everyone pretends to be working for the others’ profit or reputation, while only seeking to raise his own above them and at their expense.”40 The problem is the way that mutual dependence ultimately affects our interactions with each other. In his Second Discourse, Rousseau argues that philosophy plays a special role in obstructing fellow-feeling. Philosophy, with its focus on reason and critical reflection, leads a person to take a detached, abstract view of his sympathetic connections: “[a] taste for philosophy loosens all the bonds of esteem and benevolence that tie men to society, and this is perhaps the most dangerous of the evils it engenders.”41 Taking these five arguments together, Rousseau concludes that the moral costs of the sciences greatly outweigh any potential benefits: “Science is not suited to man in general. . . . Reflection only makes him unhappy without making him better or wiser. . . . Study corrupts his morals, affects his health, ruins his temperament, and often spoils his reason: even if it did teach him something, I would find that a rather poor compensation.”42 It is not just that the potential epistemic benefits of the sciences are lost on most people (because they lead to wasted time, error and confusion, and a disregard for truth), but that the direct moral costs outweigh whatever epistemic benefits

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are on offer (because they cause loss of physical health, courage, time, regard for virtue, and sympathy). At this point, one might respond to Rousseau by arguing that he has overstated some of the direct moral costs of the sciences. For instance, while Mill was sympathetic to a number of Rousseau’s specific claims, he thought that the widespread provision of leisure is one of the moral benefits of the physical sciences, because it fosters regard for others’ interests and allows for one’s own moral development: [Leisure] forces them to seek society, it forces them to seek education. Each working man becomes himself better qualified to distinguish right from wrong, while each knows that he is under the constant surveillance of hundreds and thousands equally instructed with himself. Thus does the improvement of the physical sciences, by increasing and diffusing wealth, indirectly tend to promote morality.43

Alternatively, one might note that modern medicine has lengthened lifespans, despite Rousseau’s doubts. The cogency of Rousseau’s critique is challenged by these and other objections. But in the remainder of the chapter, I instead want to focus on his key epistemic contention: that the sciences do not provide—and in fact obscure—knowledge of what really matters, that is, how to be virtuous. As he writes in the Second Discourse: “[T]he more new knowledge we accumulate the more we deprive ourselves of the means of acquiring the most important knowledge of all.”44 It is this claim that marks the crucial difference between Mill and Rousseau, and which leads to their different assessments of the balance of costs and benefits of pursuing science and philosophy. A FEW SUBLIME GENIUSES It is worth first addressing Rousseau’s allowance that the sciences might be beneficial when pursued by a few remarkable men, producing what Mill calls “useful” knowledge: I acknowledge that there are a few sublime geniuses capable of piercing the veils in which the truth wraps itself, a few privileged souls able to withstand the folly of vanity, base jealousy, and the other passions to which a taste for letters gives rise. The small number of those who have the good fortune of combining these qualities are the beacon and the honor of mankind; only they should properly engage in study for the good of all.45

He also allows that their exceptional talents—when put to good use by a virtuous ruler—might redound to the benefit of society: “But how could I



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have said that Science and Virtue are incompatible in every individual, I, who exhorted Princes to invite the truly Learned to their Court and to place their trust in them so that we might for once see what Science and Virtue combined can do for the happiness of mankind.”46 He even seems to recognize an ideal of science and reasoning that is not rife with superficialities when he distinguishes between true science and the so-called science of his contemporaries: “[s]cience, taken abstractly, deserves all our admiration. The foolish science of men deserves nothing but derision and contempt.”47 In fact, he repeatedly emphasizes the value of good reasoning, which he calls the “science that serves as the foundation of all the other sciences,”48 and his essays are laced with sharp attacks on the poor reasoning of his critics: “I cannot understand how Philosophers dare find it objectionable to be offered opportunities for discussion: what a fine love of truth, that is frightened at having the pro and con examined! In Philosophical inquiries the best way to render a sentiment suspect is to deny the opposite sentiment a hearing.”49 These passages suggest that Rousseau retains a place for the sciences, including philosophy, as long as they are pursued privately only by those few geniuses capable of practicing them correctly: “If celestial intelligences cultivated the sciences, only good would come of it; I say as much about the great men made to guide others. Socrates, learned and virtuous, did mankind honor; but the vices of vulgar men poison the most sublime knowledge and render it pernicious to Nations.”50 What Rousseau seems to reject in these cases is only the public pursuit of the sciences. It is on the societal level, not the individual level, that “science and virtue [are] incompatible.”51 There is a major risk with this proposal, however: it is unlikely that the sciences could be kept perfectly private. Once the sciences take root among the few, Rousseau’s own historical examples teach us that they are likely to spread, and then society as a whole would suffer, as detailed above. Given the severity of those costs, on Rousseau’s account, even a small chance of incurring them is significant. This is presumably why some commentators argue that Rousseau introduces “conscience” as a salutary falsehood, because belief in conscience would help the public to rest content and not pursue the sciences. But I want to suggest that Rousseau is committed in these early essays to the view that, given the option, we would do better to avoid the sciences altogether, to avert the chance that “for a few men they enlighten, they corrupt an entire nation at a pure loss.”52 However marvelous and potentially beneficial the achievements of those “few sublime geniuses,” Rousseau treats unscientific, less “civilized” societies as the most virtuous—and virtue is more important than everything else. Early Romans, for instance, “had been content to practice virtue; all was lost when they began to study it.”53 This is why Rousseau’s contention that knowledge of virtue is available by conscience, if

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it is not introduced only as a salutary falsehood, is so significant: the benefits of such knowledge could then be had without the risks associated with the sciences. I turn now to this claim. CONSCIENCE AND REASONABLE IGNORANCE The basic point is that Rousseau’s argument in the First Discourse is sensitive to the epistemic opportunity costs of starting down the path of the sciences in the first place, and not just to the costs that arise once we have done so. He imagines—and I believe this argument should be taken at face value—that knowledge of virtue can be acquired without study or philosophical reflection, by “conscience”: O virtue! Sublime science of simple souls, are so many efforts and so much equipment really required to know you? Are not your principles engraved in all hearts, and is it not enough, in order to learn your Laws, to return into oneself and, in the silence of the passions, to listen to the voice of one’s conscience? That is true Philosophy, let us know how to rest content with it.54

The phrase “principles engraved in all hearts” suggests that, for Rousseau, conscience is an innate moral sense or faculty, the guidance of which is both accessible to any person able to “return into oneself,” and universal in its prescriptions.55 Although he criticized philosophy earlier as part of the sciences, “true philosophy” is now distinguished from scientific inquiry and identified with a self-awareness that allows us to hear the voice of conscience. He reinforces this image elsewhere: “we still have some true Philosophers eager to recall to our own hearts the laws of humanity and of virtue.”56 On this view, those who reason well about morals merely “reestablish on different foundations” what we all already know naturally by our “secret voice of . . . conscience.”57 What is more, conscience is extremely reliable: “We have a guide within, much more infallible than all the books, and which never forsakes us when we are in need.”58 Why would we pursue the sciences when doing so threatens “the most important knowledge of all,” which we already know by heart? The exact nature of conscience, including how it could be so reliable, need not detain us here. What matters for our purposes is just (a) that each of us possesses an innate moral sense, (b) that it is accessible without the sciences, including philosophical reflection, (c) that its output is a kind of near-infallible knowledge, and (d) that it becomes inaccessible for most of us once the sciences take hold. If so, the epistemic opportunity costs of starting down the path of the sciences are massive.



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It makes sense, then, that Rousseau often associates virtue not with ignorance, but with ignorance of the sciences: “the time of virtue for every People, was the time of its ignorance; and that in proportion as it became learned, Artistic and Philosophic, it lost its morals and its probity.”59 This sort of ignorance is compatible with knowledge of the most important sort. While science leads to an ignorance of virtue that is “ferocious and brutal,”60 conscience preserves a virtuous and “reasonable sort of ignorance”: There is another, reasonable sort of ignorance which consists in restricting one’s curiosity to the scope of the faculties one has received; a modest ignorance, born of a lively love of virtue, and which inspires nothing but indifference toward all that is unworthy of occupying man’s heart and does not contribute to making him better . . . that finds all its felicity in retreating into itself, in confirming itself in its innocence, and has no need to seek a false and vain happiness in the opinion others might have of its enlightenment: That is the ignorance I praised.61

This virtuous form of ignorance consists in our steering clear of what we cannot think about or desire without tending toward vice. Conscience keeps us from transgressing those limits, and our ability to hear conscience suffers once we have transgressed those limits. Rousseau’s point is not that virtue requires a mindless lack of curiosity or modesty. “True philosophy” requires and preserves this reasonable sort of ignorance. While early societies may have lacked sophistication, “it was not owing to stupidity that they preferred other forms of exercise to those of the mind.”62 Rather, they possessed an ability to sense that certain paths would not conduce to virtue, and to restrict their “curiosity to the scope of [their] faculties.” As we saw, what makes a few men remarkable, besides their natural reasoning ability, is that they are able to “withstand the folly” of the sciences. But Rousseau clarifies that “if all men were Socrates, science would not harm them, but neither would they need it.”63 He asserts that “a good mind needs little learning”64 and that the remarkable few have no need of teachers themselves.65 These passages suggest that the few retain their ability to hear the voice of conscience even as they pursue their scientific studies. Without their studies, they would still possess knowledge of how to live virtuously, so that conscience is able to guide and confirm their reasoning for the benefit of society. Thus, on one hand, it seems that conscience is playing an important underlying role even when only the few practice the sciences. On the other hand, we have reason to think that a virtuous society should reject the sciences altogether. If knowledge of virtue can be acquired—much more reliably and widely—by listening to one’s conscience, and the sciences impede the ability of most of us to do that, then the moral risks of introducing the sciences in the first place (such as the loss of the martial values) are unnecessary.

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CONCLUSION Interestingly, Rousseau’s argument is shared by many recent critics of science and critical thinking. Contemporary skeptics of science and the liberal arts do not simply claim that there are direct moral costs of promoting a scientific or rationalist worldview. Many of them also assume that the most important knowledge of all—knowledge of virtue, or of the good—is available by other means, whether by conscience, emotional intelligence or gut feelings, or revelation. If they are correct, it undermines the main argument made on behalf of science, philosophy, and reasoning in general: that they contribute to public enlightenment and social progress.66 The obvious problem for Rousseau and these others is that the existence of an inborn moral sense, or conscience, or some other unreasoned source of moral knowledge, is dubious.67 If so, the claimed epistemic opportunity costs of adopting the sciences evaporate. We do not already know in our hearts what we must do; we must find out. And here we find the source of Mill’s charge that Rousseau is a fanatic. On Mill’s view, Rousseau is proposing to extinguish the sciences, understood broadly to include philosophy and critical thinking, when they are the only reliable source of intellectual and moral progress. For Mill, the demise of the sciences would result in our social and political lives being governed by the mere preferences of the dominant group, rather than by reason, with the result that there would be no engine of moral improvement. Doing away with the sciences would be epistemically justified only on the assumption that we have nothing to learn. But this, Mill points out, is ridiculous.68 Rather, we must embrace: that multiform development of human nature, those manifold unlikenesses, that diversity of tastes and talents, and variety of intellectual points of view, which not only form a great part of the interest of human life, but by bringing intellects into stimulating collision, and by presenting to each innumerable notions that he would not have conceived of himself, are the mainspring of mental and moral progression.69

Of course, Rousseau might nevertheless maintain that the moral costs of pursuing the sciences exceed those of giving up the opportunity to improve our knowledge. Certainly, one might argue that we should limit the pursuit of science in certain specific instances.70 But it is important to appreciate that Rousseau’s views on conscience significantly affect his overall assessment of the costs and benefits of pursuing the sciences. And, appreciating this, we can see that, like Rousseau, contemporary critics of science and critical thinking are not truly proponents of ignorance. They are simply mistaken about the sources of knowledge.



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NOTES 1. J. S. Mill, On Liberty (1859), CW XVIII, 253. Citations marked by “CW volume number, page number” refer to The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson, 33 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963–1991). 2.  Mill, “The Utility of Knowledge” (1823), CW XXVI, 257. 3.  Mill, “The Utility of Knowledge” (1823), CW XXVI, 258; see also On Liberty, CW XVIII, 253. 4. Quoted in Terence E. Marshall, “Rousseau and Enlightenment,” Political Theory 6 (1978): 421. 5.  PB, 112. For ease of reference, unless otherwise noted, all page citations of Rousseau’s work are to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The First and Second Discourses, Together with the Replies to Critics and Essay on the Origin of Languages, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch (New York: HarperCollins, 1988). D1 = “Discourse on the Sciences and Arts or First Discourse”; D2 = “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men or Second Discourse”; G = “Letter to Grimm”; LR = “Last Reply”; NR = “Letter about a New Refutation”; O = “Observations [to Stanislas, King of Poland]”; PB = “Preface of a Second Letter to Bordes”; PN = “Preface to Narcissus”; RAY = “Letter to Raynal.” 6.  RAY, 30. 7.  On Liberty, CW XVIII, 229, 234. 8.  Mill writes: “useful knowledge is that which teaches us how to seek what is good and avoid what is evil; in short how to increase the sum of human happiness” (“The Utility of Knowledge,” CW XXVI, 258). 9.  D1, 1. 10.  I want to emphasize that my discussion is limited to (1) the sciences, including philosophy, and (2) the First Discourse, Rousseau’s replies to critics, and other early writings that elaborate on his arguments in that essay. 11.  D1, 25. 12.  D1, 25–26. For this view, see, e.g., Gourevitch, “Rousseau on the Arts and Sciences,” Journal of Philosophy 69 (1972): 746, 749, 751; Clifford Orwin, “Rousseau’s Socratism,” Journal of Politics 60 (1998): 182–85. 13.  D1, 27. 14.  For a recent review and defense of this position, see Jonathan Marks, “The Divine Instinct? Rousseau and Conscience,” Review of Politics 68 (2006): 566, 581–85. 15. See especially David Lay Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 73–76, 127. For a comprehensive account of developments in Rousseau’s account of conscience, see Laurence D. Cooper, Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), 80–114. Cooper emphasizes that developments in later writings are compatible with the more limited account of conscience found in the early writings alone. 16.  O, 45–46; clarified in LR, 67. 17.  NR, 91.

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18.  LR, 73n. 19.  D1, 15; emphasis added. 20.  PN, 102. 21.  LR, 71. 22.  Allen Buchanan has developed the idea that false beliefs place us at “moral risk” in his “Social Moral Epistemology,” Social Philosophy & Policy 19 (2002): 126–52. 23.  D1, 14–15. 24.  D1, 16; emphasis added. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27.  PN, 99. 28.  D1, 19. 29.  PN, 103. 30.  LR, 85. 31.  D2, 144–45. 32.  See PN, 102. 33.  D1, 22. 34.  G, 57; see also LR, 76. 35.  LR, 86; D1, 20, 21n. Rousseau’s developed theory of education is contained, of course, in Emile. 36. The fifth argument is not aired in the First Discourse itself but appears in Rousseau’s replies to critics and related early writings. 37.  PN, 105. 38. Ibid. 39.  LR, 73. 40.  PN, 105. 41.  PN, 104; see also D2, 162. 42.  PN, 107; emphasis added. 43.  “The Utility of Knowledge,” CW XXVI, 259. 44.  D2, 129. 45.  PN, 107. 46.  O, 34; see also D1, 26. 47.  PN, 101–2; see also LR, 66–67. 48.  PN, 97. 49.  NR, 91. 50.  LR, 66. 51.  D1, 13. 52.  G, 55; see also 58. 53.  D1, 12. 54.  D1, 27. 55.  See especially Williams, Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment, 73–76; Cooper, Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life, 83–84; and Laurence D. Cooper, “Human Nature and the Love of Wisdom: Rousseau’s Hidden (and Modified) Platonism,” Journal of Politics 64 (2002): 120. Jeff J. S. Black argues that conscience cannot be universal because it must be trained up in society, and societies differ. But



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different practical codes might be applications to different circumstances of the same general underlying principles. It is also not clear that Rousseau treats conscience in these early writings as something necessarily unavailable to a lone introspective individual, or even to “savage man.” See Black, Rousseau’s Critique of Science (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009), 243. 56.  PN, 102. This language seems incompatible with Joseph R. Reisert’s suggestion that conscience is merely “the faculty that inclines us to delight in what we judge to be good and to be distressed by what we deem to be evil.” At least in these early essays, conscience clearly involves a capacity to be guided by a universal set of moral laws or principles. See Reisert, Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 20. 57.  Preface to D2, 133; Epistle Dedicatory of D2, 124. 58.  O, 37. 59.  LR, 69. 60.  O, 49. 61.  O, 49, emphasis added; see also D1, 13. Compare Rousseau’s discussion of Socrates’s praise of ignorance (D1, 11; see also NR, 94). For a detailed discussion of varieties of ignorance in Rousseau, see Black, Rousseau’s Critique of Science, 105–31. These distinctions do not affect the present discussion. 62.  D1, 9. 63.  PN, 107; emphasis added. 64.  LR, 86. 65.  D1, 25. 66.  To give just one example: it is not entirely surprising to find a major US political party in a large state passing a platform that expressly opposes teaching “critical thinking skills” because it “has the purpose of challenging the student’s fixed beliefs and undermining parental authority.” Paul Krugman, “The Ignorance Caucus,” New York Times, February 10, 2013. 67.  There is now a vast literature on the role of emotions in moral judgment, but even views that emphasize the epistemic and practical value of the emotions do not deny the value of reasoning, as well. See, e.g., Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 68.  For elaboration of these Millian themes, see On Liberty, chaps. 1 and 2, as well as Piers Norris Turner, “Authority, Progress, and the ‘Assumption of Infallibility’ in On Liberty,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51, no. 1 (January 2013). 69.  Principles of Political Economy (1848), CW III, 979. 70.  For a contemporary argument in this direction, though much more nuanced than what I here associate with Rousseau, see Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Black, Jeff J. S. Rousseau’s Critique of Science. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009.

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Buchanan, Allen. “Social Moral Epistemology.” Social Philosophy & Policy 19, no. 2 (2002): 126–52. Cooper, Laurence D. Rousseau, Nature, and the Problem of the Good Life. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. ———. “Human Nature and the Love of Wisdom: Rousseau’s Hidden (and Modified) Platonism.” Journal of Politics 64, no. 1 (2002): 108–25. Gourevitch, Victor. “Rousseau on the Arts and Sciences.” Journal of Philosophy 69, no. 20 (1972): 737–54. Kitcher, Philip. Science, Truth, and Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Krugman, Paul. “The Ignorance Caucus.” New York Times, February 10, 2013. Marks, Jonathan. “The Divine Instinct? Rousseau and Conscience.” Review of Politics 68, no. 4 (2006): 564–85. Marshall, Terence E. “Rousseau and Enlightenment.” Political Theory 6, no. 4 (1978): 421–55. Mill, John Stuart. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill. Edited by J. M. Robson. 33 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963–1991. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Orwin, Clifford. “Rousseau’s Socratism.” Journal of Politics 60, no. 1 (1998): 174–87. Reisert, Joseph R. Jean-Jacques Rousseau: A Friend of Virtue. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The First and Second Discourses, Together with the Replies to Critics and Essay on the Origin of Languages. Edited and translated by Victor Gourevitch. New York: HarperCollins, 1988. Turner, Piers Norris. “Authority, Progress, and the ‘Assumption of Infallibility’ in On Liberty.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51, no. 1 (2013): 93–117. Williams, David Lay. Rousseau’s Platonic Enlightenment. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.

Chapter Eleven

Kant and the Intellectual Virtues “Good and Stupid”? Michael Reno

Bringing Kant’s moral thought into the frame of Aristotle’s taxonomy of virtues cannot be done neatly. The highest intellectual virtues for Aristotle, those that have to do with theoretical wisdom (sophia)—namely intuitive understanding (nous) and scientific knowledge (epistēme)—seem to correspond to the sources of morality for Kant. For example, in the first Critique, Kant states, “In the universal principles of ethics nothing can be uncertain, because the propositions are either totally nugatory and empty, or else they have to flow merely from our concepts of reason.”1 The moral law is unchanging, and so, in Aristotle’s frame is an object of wisdom (or at least intuitive understanding).Yet, the area of investigation relevant to Kant’s moral law, since it obviously has to do with how things might or could be, falls under Aristotle’s notion of practical thinking (phronēsis). Simply put, Kant, in using scientific law as a model for the moral law and reason as its source,2 slices through Aristotle’s attempt to divide the study of how things are from the study of how they ought to be. A second relevant point of contrast, by way of introduction, is the tight connection that Aristotle draws between happiness and virtue. In the standard reading of Aristotle, intellectual wisdom is an end in itself and the moral virtues are a means to intellectual wisdom.3 But, the intellectual virtues are also necessary to the formation of the moral virtues. For Aristotle, being virtuous requires a development of the whole person in such a way that all (or most) of the virtues are both necessary and collectively imply the other virtues. To live virtuously is to live well. For Kant, however, living well is not implied by living morally. A good life in the sense of living well is doubly removed from a moral one. That one is due happiness or a well-lived life is a postulate of practical reason, something we must assume in order to hold the system of 183

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morality in place, and, at best, reward in proportion to virtue is only something to be assumed about the afterlife. That is even if we assume a possible connection between virtue and happiness, this possibility only need be thinkable, not actual. The line of thought that begins by drawing these several contrasts between Aristotle and Kant and concludes with the claim that the intellectual virtues have little relevance to Kant’s moral thought can be summed up with Alasdair MacIntyre’s assessment, which, at least has the virtue of brevity: “So for Kant one can be both good and stupid.”4 In what follows, I articulate in what sense this is right and how it is mistaken. For, while one can act in accord with the moral law without possessing much by way of moral reflection, Kant is skeptical that non-rational motives are sufficient, even in the teaching of children, to support long-term compliance with the moral law. Yet, it’s clear that Kant thinks he is merely refining and bringing to reason a system of morality already practiced. Given this, one certainly need not be learned to be moral. But, it also seems a stretch to think that one need possess any special faculty of reason in order to be moral. And yet, Kant extends morality toward Aristotle’s ideal—a person who both desires to act virtuously and realizes so acting as good—in both the second Critique and the Metaphysics of Morals. To show this I turn to Kant’s infamous characterization of our consciousness of the moral law as a “fact of reason” in the second Critique. For, this passage and the surrounding examples show reason and the intellectual virtues are indeed crucial to the development of moral virtue. In the second Critique, and in the Tugendlehre, he articulates the necessity of thinking of an ultimate end, a final cause, a purpose for our actions. While Kant does reject an approach to morality that reduces it to learned habit, this is precisely because he embraces a conception of human nature that incorporates the moral law, as a law of reason, into its very fiber; we fulfill our final end through building up the moral strength implicit in human nature.5 And this requires a development of the intellectual virtues. KANT, GOOD WILL, AND THE MAXIM I’m not so concerned with the question of whether Kant is truly a virtue ethicist, a question over which much ink was spilt in the 1980s as contemporary Kantians attempted to defend Kant from MacIntyre’s attacks.6 I am asking a more specific question here. That is, contra MacIntyre and other contemporary interpretations of Kant, given Kant’s seeming equation of irrationality and immorality, one is tempted to conclude immediately that the intellectual virtues are crucial to the development of the moral virtues, even if this is not



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true in the same way that it is for Aristotle. Yet, as MacIntyre and others point out, Kant begins the Groundwork with the claim that the only thing that we know to be good without qualification is a good will, which on its face, seems in line with the claim that intelligence is irrelevant to moral goodness. How can we resolve this conflict? MacIntyre’s claim, which is not uncommon in the literature, stems from a particular reading of the Groundwork. For, if the mark of the moral is a good will, and intelligence or any of the intellectual virtues are irrelevant to such a will, which it seems they are, then surely one could be “both good and stupid.” MacIntyre summarizes Kant’s position as claiming a good will is both “necessary and sufficient for moral worth.”7 In addition to the well-known opening claim that nothing other than a good will can be good without exception,8 Kant’s own discussion of the virtues in Groundwork I seems to support this view. That is, a common interpretation of Kant’s ethics, and especially of the Groundwork, takes it that the state of an agent’s will determines the rightness or wrongness of the agent’s action. Further, since the will is (on this interpretation) taken to be the individual intention directly underlying an action, the rightness or wrongness of an action is determined by the agent’s intention in acting as she does. The four paradigm examples played out in Groundwork I and II, then, are indicative of the rules that an agent must follow in formulating her intentions. Roughly, if the agent makes a lying promise in order to gain needed funds, she has the intention of lying in order to get what she needs; she wills a lying promise. There is then, no reason to expect the cultivation of the intellectual virtues to have even an indirect connection to an agent acting morally. For, the will— understood as the state of the agent’s intention—can be expected to be good or bad independently of her ability to carry out such a will or calculate the effects of her actions. And, in fact, the agents who are more cunning and so more capable of calculating such effects, are more prone to fall into immorality. The ability to know how others will react to one’s actions at least implies the latent ability to manipulate others. And so, Kant can begin his concluding remarks to Groundwork I, “there is, accordingly, no need of science and philosophy to know what one has to do in order to be honest and good, and even wise and virtuous.”9 And, indeed, at the end of the transition from the discussion of duty as embodied in categorical imperatives to the discussion of the possibility of the moral law in Groundwork II, Kant characterizes the true form of virtue as at once free from empirical ornamentation and accessible to all, “By means of the least effort of his reason . . . provided his reason is not altogether spoiled for abstraction.”10 This line of thought seems to support MacIntyre’s assessment that for Kant the prime character of moral agency “is anyone

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and everyone not actually mentally defective.”11 On this interpretation then, moral goodness is a property of actions, whose morality is determined by the immediately guiding intention. The concept of maxim is conspicuous in its absence from the discussion so far. And this is possible on this interpretation because maxims are equated with the immediate underlying intentions of an action. This equation follows from the elimination of the intellect from relevance for moral worthiness. Recall, Kant defines maxims as “the subjective principle of volition (des Wollens).”12 This means, first, that maxims are principles, and so must take the form of propositions (at least in reconstruction). At first glance, this seems to support the position that the intellectual virtues are not relevant to being moral—the propositions in question are subjective principles in that they are the moral agent’s intention in a particular instance. As both O’Neill and Herman show, however, a more plausible interpretation of maxim does not reduce it to an agent’s intention or to the subjective state immediately preceding an action.13 The first point to reiterate from O’Neill’s account is that subjective in this context does not necessarily mean aiming at what the subject desires.14 While a maxim is a subjective principle, it need not be transparent to the subject. It is the general rule endorsed in acting as the agent does.15 Kant emphasizes that in acting, we always act on a maxim, yet, we clearly do not always have some specific intention, so intentions are not equivalent to maxims. Second, even when maxims are transparent, they are not always the sort of things that are immediately guiding for an action. An agent holds maxims that are general guides to actions, but which do not imply any specific action at any specific time. As Robert Louden points out, Kant is ambivalent on this point; maxims are supposed to work as both immediate intentions and underlying character principles.16 In the third book of the Harry Potter series, The Prisoner of Azkaban,17 Hermione18 learns that Harry has anonymously received a new broom for Christmas. Suspiciously, the broom is the “state-of-the-art” model called the “Firebolt.” After Christmas dinner, she stays behind to talk to their Head of House, Professor McGonagall. She tells her of the gift, which results, almost immediately, in it being confiscated in order to be examined for jinxes. Her motive is not entirely clear, even to herself. Circumstantial evidence leads Hermione and then McGonagall to suppose that the broom is from Sirius Black, who they have reason to believe wants to hurt Harry. On the one hand, Hermione is telling the truth, and also doing so in order to protect a friend. Yet, she also must have known the consequences, namely that the broom would be confiscated, making it likely that Harry would not succeed in his next Quidditch match, something she knows to be very important to Harry. She is quite



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clearly embarrassed as McGonagall comes to examine the broom, both turning red and pretending to read a book, which is positioned upside-down. In Kantian terms, she quite clearly holds competing maxims, which she is struggling to put into practice. She holds that she ought to be loyal to her friend, Harry. Yet, she also holds that she ought to be truthful, even going so far as to avoid a lie by omission, particularly when telling the truth might avoid terrible consequences. For, she thinks that absent her speaking up, it is unlikely that any authority figure would come to know of the broom before Harry tries to use it. But, there is, perhaps, another maxim lingering in the background. Hermione, for several reasons, tends to do what is pleasing to authority figures within the school; she craves approval from the teachers at Hogwarts. While the preponderance of evidence speaks for the virtue of Hermione’s action, the scene is ambiguous. “In fact, it is absolutely impossible by means of experience to make out with complete certainty a single case in which the maxim of an action otherwise in conformity with duty rested simply on moral grounds and on the representation of one’s duty. . . . One need not be an enemy of virtue but only a cool observer . . . to become doubtful at certain moments . . . whether any true virtue is to be found in the world.”19 INTELLECTUAL VIRTUE AND THE FACT OF REASON In this more complicated conception of maxim, understood not just as the principle immediately underlying an action, but as a more general principle of character, the relevance of the intellectual virtues for Kantian morality emerges. As the example illustrates, the more complicated view of maxim leads to questions about consequences, character, motives, and moral virtues such as loyalty and truthfulness. It also prompts questions about practical judgment and moral education. But, before examining these, let’s recall the initial puzzle. Briefly, Kant thinks that anyone can be moral, but also thinks that immorality is irrational; prima facie, we have reason to think the intellectual virtues irrelevant to morality for Kant, but also that they are extremely important. So far, I have shown that there is an interpretation of Kant, especially one taken from the Groundwork, that sanctions the first kind of view, here exemplified by MacIntyre’s criticisms of Kant. But this interpretation of Kant implies too simplistic a view of maxims and their object. What, then, is the connection between reason and the morality of maxims? Interpreting the concept of a “fact of reason” (Faktum) from the second Critique gives us an answer from which we can proceed to the discussion of the role of the intellectual virtues.

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The fact of reason is the awareness of our participation in the intelligible order. At the outset of the second Critique Kant marks the difference between law and maxim in terms of the objective versus the subjective.20 The determining factor here is not reason simpliciter, since maxims too invoke, at the very least, instrumental reason, but rather that lawgiving need only invoke reason itself without any object of desire. When we justify an action by reference to an object of desire, we are in the realm of the senses, that which is agreeable and disagreeable, pleasurable and painful: “All practical principles that presuppose an object (matter) of the faculty of desire as the determining ground of the will are, without exception, empirical and can furnish no practical laws.”21 While acting in order to avoid pain and gain pleasure is not itself irrational, it also cannot be, at least without qualification, good. What is required then, for the pure rationality of desire, is that the desire be without object. Kant recognizes that this is a problem, as the problem of practical reason. The aim of the first chapter of the Analytic is to show that this problem is solvable, that the will can be determined through reason in the form of its ability to give the law. Following the framing of this problem in terms of the mutual implication of freedom and the moral law, Kant introduces the epistemic priority of the moral law. It is our consciousness of the moral law that “inasmuch as reason presents it as a determining ground not to be outweighed by any sensible conditions and indeed quite independent of them, leads directly to the concept of freedom.”22 The argument takes two paths: a theoretical justification of the priority of this consciousness and an experiential confirmation of its priority. The theoretical justification argues that since freedom has no relevance to the realm of appearances (where everything is determined according to natural laws) and since pure (speculative) reason is led into antinomy when it attempts to unpack freedom within the realm of those natural laws, freedom simply would have no place in thought had practical reason not “forced this concept upon us.”23 The experiential confirmation comes through the two gallows examples. In the gallows examples, a moral agent, who claims that he has an uncontrollable lust, is given the opportunity to sate it. But, he is then asked whether the lust would still be uncontrollable even if a gallows were erected at the site and that he would be immediately hanged after sating his lust. The point here seems to be to question the characterization of any sensibly formed inclination as uncontrollable. The moral agent is then asked whether under the very same threat of the gallows, he would bear false witness against an innocent. Kant concludes that he may or may not, but that the agent must admit the possibility of telling the truth despite the threat to his life. Through the two



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scenarios, the moral agent comes to see that he can act against his inclinations (even if only at first in order to fulfill a stronger desire), and that he could—it is at least possible—that he could act against all his inclinations. It is after both the theoretical argument and experiential confirmation that Kant introduces the concept of a “fact of reason” as “Consciousness of this fundamental law.”24 Owen Ware presents a particularly sensitive and insightful interpretation of what these examples are supposed to do, couched within his interpretation of Kant’s fact of reason.25 Ware argues that rather than presenting a dogmatic intuitionism or an incoherent reversal of the argument of Groundwork III, Kant is pushing us to philosophize from the standpoint of everyday moral activity rather than the standpoint of speculative reason.26 The gallows example, in particular, and the presentation of our awareness of the moral law generally, are supposed to lead the philosopher to see the priority of practical reason. But, and this is crucial, the point is not that human beings qua human beings are immediately presented with the moral law, but that “we take up a deliberative perspective available to all rational beings.”27 The human being is a member of the class of rational beings and so participates in the moral law as a lawgiver. Guyer28 and Ware29 both argue that Kant reasons from the necessity of the moral law to the purity of the faculty that determines the will. The fact of reason, the consciousness of this necessity, grounds this will determining pure faculty, not because the moral law binds our actions, but because the moral law is itself necessary. Our knowledge of its necessity is proof of our participation in the realm of rational beings for whom such knowledge is possible. The necessity of our consciousness of the moral law (not it’s binding necessitation on us as human beings) leads us to consciousness of freedom. Kant concludes the gallows demonstration of the epistemic priority of the moral law with the claim that also appeared in Groundwork III:30 “He judges, therefore, that he can do something because he is aware that he ought to do it.”31 But, the source of the moral law, reason, seems to be the primary basis of the argument here for Kant.32 The consciousness (of the necessity) of the moral law, the fact of reason, leads us on to freedom, the awareness of our ability to act in accord with the moral law: “the self-consciousness of a pure practical reason,”33 as Kant characterizes it at the outset of this discussion in the second Critique. The connection of reason to morality for us comes through our awareness of our own condition as rational beings. We are forced in our thinking about morality to the concept of freedom and so to the possibility of acting against our desires, no matter their pull under specific circumstances. It is at least possible that the determination of the will through the form of subjective principles could also be the objective determining ground of the will. And,

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this is why we are to take the “holy will,” the rational will that does not need commands because it does have sensible incentives to distort it, as a model.34 The awareness of our existence as practically rational beings, then, is the object of our development as moral beings. The development of the intellectual virtues is a development of this awareness and the ability to invoke this awareness while under pressure from immoral inclination and the distortions of reason itself. STRENGTH, HUMAN NATURE, AND THE MORAL LAW In the introduction to the Tugendlehre, Kant emphasizes that while the investigation of metaphysics is necessary, at least on the part of the philosopher, to get at the proper concepts of duty and virtue, “aller Tugendlehren becomes . . . ridiculous if it is decked out in scraps of metaphysics.”35 The consistent position that runs through Kant’s thinking is that the moral law is not provable, but it is not for that reason to be dismissed. In introducing the Metaphysics of Morals in the Rechtslehre, Kant characterizes moral laws, though “incapable of being proved and yet apodictic,” as less strange than they’d otherwise be since they “at the same time” allow one “to see a whole field of practical cognition open up before one, where reason in its theoretical use, with the same idea of freedom or with any other of its ideas of the supersensible, must find everything closed tight against it.”36 The “scraps of metaphysics” are unhelpful, but practical thought about our freedom and duties is necessary. The moral law opens another way of seeing the world, the practical view. And in this practical view, we act as though we are free in the natural realm and as though the will produced results through (naturelike) causality in the noumenal realm (even though we cannot prove either of these metaphysically). “For, provided that the will conforms to the law of pure reason, then its power in execution may be as it may, and a nature may or may not actually arise in accordance with these maxims of giving law for a possible nature.”37 The moral law, unlike pure reason in its speculative form cannot concern itself with the cognition of objects from outside itself, “but rather with a cognition insofar as it can itself become the ground of the existence of objects and insofar as reason, by this cognition has causality in a rational being, that is, pure reason, which can be regarded as a faculty immediately determining the will.”38 This can be summarized in Kant’s dictum that freedom is the ratio essendi of the moral law, its metaphysical basis, and the moral law is the ratio cogniscendi, the epistemic foundation, of freedom.39 We’ve seen, then, that the moral law forces upon us the recognition of the possibility of a causality of the will, understood in parallel to the causality



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of nature. Kant refers to this recognition as the fact of reason. And, its possession as a condition of the possession of rationality produces the relation between morality and rationality we sought in the second section. Though all of this raises more questions regarding the plausibility of Kant’s account of freedom of the will and its relation to the moral law, I want to focus on one aspect of this bundle of issues, as it gets to the heart of the question of the relevance of the intellectual virtues for human beings’ moral development. First, I want to explicate the way in which this connection between rationality and morality produces the problem of moral motivation for Kant. We, thus, must ask, given Kant’s assumptions regarding the power of inclination, how it is that the moral law can have any sway over our actual moral lives. For Kant, we are certainly rational beings. And that has been my emphasis so far. But we are also beings of sensibility. We have needs in the physical world, and we have both the inclination and moral right to fulfill them. “Considered in themselves natural inclinations are good.”40 Two points stand in need of emphasis here. First, this need, as part of our nature as finite beings is a source of immorality; our finite nature means that we are capable of pursuing our own (whether actual or merely perceived) interests to the detriment of others and ourselves. But they also make possible the ought of the moral law. For “imperatives are only formulae expressing the relation of objective laws of volition in general to the subjective imperfection of the will of this or that rational being, for example, of the human will.”41 And so, when thinking about the role of intellectual virtues the starting place must be the role that rationality can play in structuring and limiting the sensible inclinations. Our rationality is tied to our moral lives in the fashion explicated in section II; our consciousness of our rationality, of our existence as something beyond mere sensible inclination, forces us to think of ourselves in terms of moral claims. How is this claim on us by our awareness supposed to put limits on the sway of the inclinations? Kant explicates this ability in terms of the fact of reason and respect for the moral law, the combination of which he calls, “a special kind of feeling, which, however, does not precede the lawgiving of practical reason but is instead produced by it and indeed as a constraint.”42 In thinking of ourselves as moral beings, we place rational constraints on our behavior. But the ability to enact these restraints requires practice. While the moral law is taken as unprovable, for “The human mind takes (as I believe is necessarily the case with every rational being) a natural interest in morality, even though this is not undivided and practically overwhelming,”43 Kant is clear that reason must “work itself up”44 if it is to be effective in actual moral agents. In part this is simply the idea that the moral law is the activity of the will itself, not imposed from without. But the other point of emphasis here needs clarification, the way in which reason can be built up and to what end.

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Kant defines virtue as “the moral strength of the will.”45 And for human beings, this means strength in the face of vices suggested to the agent by her inclinations. Moral strength is the ability to constrain the incentives of the senses. But not only this, since a corrupted reason can be more compelling. For we possess not just a disposition toward good, which, as “a disposition in accord with this law is the first condition of any worth of a person . . . ,”46 but also, a disposition toward evil. And this disposition takes the form of convincing ourselves of the morality of an action despite its being questionable; it takes the form “of the will not to resist the inclinations when they invite transgression.”47 Strength of this sort, then, must be the tendency to adopt maxims with the proper ends and for the proper reasons. The duty to virtue requires more than mere right (Recht). In addition to self-constraint (as opposed to the mere external constraint of right), it requires “an end, not an end that we have but one that we ought to have, one that pure practical reason therefore has within itself.”48 The end here is virtue in our own person, the tendency to adopt maxims that include the proper ends for the proper reasons. And so, all duties are dependent on there being duties to oneself; without them, “there would be no duties whatsoever.”49 Constraint is self-constraint. The proper end will always involve the cultivation of one’s virtue. The moral strength of which we are capable must be cultivated, “both by contemplating the dignity of the pure rational law in us and by practicing virtue.”50 The danger that Kant warns against in this cultivation of virtue is the reduction of it to mere habitual action. Virtue requires reason for its development: But virtue is not to be defined and valued merely as an aptitude and . . . a long standing habit of morally good actions acquired from practice. For unless this aptitude results from considered, firm, and continually purified reason, it is neither armed for all situations nor adequately secured against the changes that new temptations could bring about.51

In a sense, this merely confirms what was articulated in the second section. In order to act morally, we must cultivate the consciousness of our reason as responsible for any law that does not come from nature. Recall the example at the end of the first section. Now, we can say Hermione is wiser than Ron and Harry, not merely more studious. All three are struggling with the emotions of a budding adulthood, yet Hermione is actively struggling to put at bay her inclination to go along with Harry and Ron and simply accept the “Firebolt.” She already has an awareness of herself as a moral being; she displays consciousness of the moral law. In the scene already described, she knows that Ron and Harry will likely be angry with her for telling McGonagall about the broom. While her motives cannot ever be completely transparent to herself (or others), the best explanation of her



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actions is her concern for Harry’s safety. But for her to act upon this concern, she must not merely weigh the competing consequences of telling and not telling, she must confront a distinct form of weakness of the will, fear of disapproval from her peers, and in this case, her best friends, Ron and Harry. And she could also justify inaction on the grounds that it is what Harry wants; she might have convinced herself that she was acting morally by keeping silent because she was acting in the way Harry would want her to act. We might ask what can give her the ability to do this, and Kant tells us that it is her moral strength. So while her sensibility inclines her to keep the broom a secret, and even reason gives her justification for inaction, she produces the strength to do what she ought. We can think of this in more concrete terms through the concept of conscience. When we judge morally, whether judging ourselves or another, we must have a judge and a judged. In self-judging the agent needs the intellectual ability to create another who is judged, “a dual personality in himself.”52 We consider ourselves worthy of happiness or misery through this process. The thesis that the disposition to reason as well as its cultivation are necessary for moral virtue is consistent with Kant’s discussions of moral education that run through his writings. For example, even in the Groundwork, Kant argues that rather than relying on the emotional grounds for acting morally: the most ordinary observation shows that if we represent, on the one hand, an action of integrity done with steadfast soul, apart from every view to advantage of any kind in this world or another and even under the greatest temptations of need or allurement, it leaves far behind and eclipses any similar act that was affected in the least by an extraneous incentive; it elevates the soul and awakens a wish to be able to act in like manner oneself. Even children of moderate age feel this impression, and one should never represent duties to them in any other way.53

And, it is clear that in the process of cultivating our practical reason: Moral cognition of oneself, which seeks to penetrate into the depths (the abyss) of one’s heart which are quite difficult to fathom, is the beginning of all human wisdom. For in the case of a human being, the ultimate wisdom, which consists in the harmony of a being’s will with its final end, requires him first to remove the obstacle within (an evil will actually present in him) and then to develop the original disposition to a good will within him, which can never be lost. (Only the descent into the hell of self-cognition can pave the way to godliness.)54

As both Louden and O’Neill hint, the reading of Kant’s moral thought as rationalistic and purely rule-following seems to follow from an overreliance on the Groundwork. But even within readings of the Groundwork, one must

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be clear what the examples are for. And as both Louden and Ware point out, the examples are framed by the analogy to chemistry.55 That is, they are there to refine our thinking to the point where we can see what precisely has moral worth, just as chemical experiments use catalysts to refine a product. The examples are not to be taken as demonstrative of how duty and our development of our duties are supposed to work in real life. I began with two contrasts between Aristotle and Kant on the moral life: the link between virtue and happiness and the relation between theoretical and practical thinking. Now it is clear that Kant’s account is not so far from some themes in Aristotle’s. For Aristotle, a moral life is a good life, and indeed part of being wise. Kant, too, asserts that through understanding ourselves as rational beings, and so as capable (at least possibly) of action done from duty alone, we come closer to the preconditions of a happy life. But, more than this, like Aristotle’s view, wisdom is relevant in the sense that we must come to know ourselves if we hope to lead virtuous lives. Knowing ourselves includes practical thinking (phronēsis) in that we come to be aware of the ways in which we are sensibly inclined and so under what conditions and specifically how to bring to mind our condition as rational beings and so the moral law within. And we also come to know the ways in which reason itself can convince us of our virtue, when in fact, we lack it. Through the development of our moral selves, we develop wisdom. One might be able to be good and stupid for a while, but the lack of reason is also one path to vice. NOTES 1.  Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, edited and translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 505 (A480/B508). In each citation of this work, I will cite the A/B locations of the Akademieausgabe first Critique parenthetically after a citation to the Guyer/Wood translation. 2.  See Kant’s discussion of the contrast between the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Practical Reason in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Practical Philosophy, edited and translated by Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 174–80. (KpV, 5:42–51). I will cite the Akademieausgabe Kritik der practischen Vernuft (KpV) in parentheses after the Gregor translation. 3. See, for example, Richard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 173. 4.  Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007), 155. 5.  To be clear, I am not advancing the position Kant explicitly warns against in Groundwork II, that of deriving “the reality of this principle from the special property of human nature.” Kant, Practical Philosophy, 76 (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten [G 4:425]). Rather humanity’s rational capacities bind it to the moral law, which holds for all (finite) rational beings.



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6.  On this question, see Onora O’Neill, “Kant After Virtue,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 4 (1983): 387–405; Robert Louden, “Kant’s Virtue Ethics,” Philosophy 61 (1986): 238, 473–89; and Barbara Herman, Kant and the Practice of Moral Judgment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). More recently, two noteworthy edited volumes addressing the relation between Kantian ethics and virtue ethics have appeared in English: Monika Betzler, ed., Kant’s Ethics of Virtue (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008) and Lawrence Jost and Julian Weurth, eds., Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 7. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 154. 8.  “It is impossible to think of anything at all in the world, or indeed even beyond it, that could be considered good without limitation except a good will” (Kant, Practical Philosophy, 49 [G 4:393]). 9. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 58 (G 4:404). 10. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 77 (G 4:426). 11. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 155. 12. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 56 (G 4:400). 13. See O’Neill, “Kant After Virtue,” 393–94 and especially, Herman, “What Happens to the Consequences,” 94–125. 14.  O’Neill, “Kant After Virtue,” 393. 15.  See the opening paragraph of the second Critique (Kant, Practical Philosophy, 153 [KpV, 5:19]). Kant defines maxims as more general than rules, which are regarded by the agent as holding for her will only. 16. Louden, Kant’s Virtue Ethics, 480–81. Louden makes this claim against O’Neill, but I take it that this is O’Neill’s point in her discussion. 17.  J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (New York: Scholastic, 1999), 223–32. 18.  Kant’s explicit sexism notwithstanding, his theories of moral education and the development of virtue are supposed to apply to all of humanity, and his moral theory more generally to all rational beings. For a compelling discussion of Kant’s sexism and theory of character, see Jean P. Rumsey, “The Development of Character in Kantian Moral Theory,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 27, no. 2 (1989): 247–65. 19. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 61–62 (G 4:406–7). 20. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 153 (KpV 5:19). 21. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 155 (KpV 5:21). 22. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 163 (KpV 5:29–30). 23. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 163 (KpV 5:30). 24. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 164 (KpV 5:31). 25.  Owen Ware, “Rethinking Kant’s Fact of Reason,” Philosopher’s Imprint 14, no. 32 (2014): 1–20. 26.  There is a voluminous literature on the fact of reason. See, for example, Henry Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 228; Karl Ameriks, “Kant’s Deduction of Freedom and Morality,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 19, no. 1 (1981): 53–79; and Paul Guyer, “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50, no. 5 (2007): 461–62.

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27.  Ware, “Rethinking Kant’s Fact of Reason,” 12. 28.  Paul Guyer, “The Problem with Freedom: Kant’s Argument in Groundwork III and Its Subsequent Emendations,” in Kant’s “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals”: A Critical Guide, ed. Jens Timmermann (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 192–93. 29.  Ware, “Rethinking Kant’s Fact of Reason,” 8. 30. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 106 (G 4:460–61). 31. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 163–64 (KpV 5:30). 32.  Guyer, “The Problem with Freedom,” 192 concludes this as well. 33. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 163 (KpV 5:29). 34. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 166 (KpV 5:32). 35. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 509 (TL 6:376). 36. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 380 (RL 6:225). 37. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 176 (KpV 5:46) 38. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 177 (KpV 5:46). 39. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 140 (KpV 5:4). 40.  “Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,”/“Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft” (RG), in Religion and Rational Theology, ed. George di Giovanni and Allen Wood, trans George di Giovanni. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 102 (RG 6:58). 41. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 67 (G 4:414). 42. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 213–14 (KpV 5:92). 43. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 689 (A829–30/B857–58). 44. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 258. 45. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 533 (TL 6:405). 46. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 199 (KpV 5:73). 47.  “Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” 102 (RG 6:59). 48. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 526 (TL 6:396). 49. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 543 (6:417–18). 50. Kant, Practical Philosophy: “Yet this capacity as strength is something he must acquire,” 527 (TL 6:397). 51. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 515–16. 52. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 560 (TL 6:438). 53. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 64 (G 4:411). 54. Kant, Practical Philosophy, 562. 55.  Louden, “Kant’s Virtue Ethics,” 487. Ware’s entire article is about the concept of fact in experimental chemistry as a frame for thinking about the fact of reason.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Allison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Freedom. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Ameriks, Karl. “Kant’s Deduction of Freedom and Morality.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 19, no. 1 (1981): 53–79.



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Betzler, Monica, ed. Kant’s Ethics of Virtue. Berlin: Walter de Gryter, 2008. Guyer, Paul. “Naturalistic and Transcendental Moments in Kant’s Moral Philosophy.” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 50, no. 5 (2007): 444–464. ———. “The Problem with Freedom: Kant’s Argument in Groundwork III and Its Subsequent Emendations.” In Kant’s “Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals”: A Critical Guide, ed. Jens Timmermann. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 176–202. Herman, Barbara. Kant and the Practice of Moral Judgment. Cambridge: MA: Harvard University Press, 1993. Jost, Lawrence and Julian Weurth, eds. Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. In Practical Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Mary Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 133–271. Translation of Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. AK 5: 1–164. ———. Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Translation of: Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Akadamieausgabe A-edition (1781). AK 4: 5-252. B-edition (1787). AK 3: 2-552. ———. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Mary Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 37–108. Translation of Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. AK 5: 1-164. ———. “Lectures on the Philosophical Doctrine of Religion.” In Religion and Rational Theology. Ed. George di Giovanni and Allen Wood , trans. Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 339–451. Translation of Philosophische Religionslehre nach Pölitz. AK 28.2.2. ———. The Metaphysics of Morals. In Practical Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Mary Gregor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 353–603. Translation of Metaphysik der Sitten. AK 6: 205-493. ———. “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason.” In Religion and Rational Theology. Ed. George di Giovanni and Allen Wood, trans. George di Giovanni. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 39–215. Translation of Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft . AK 6: 3-202. Kraut, Richard. Aristotle and the Human Good. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Louden, Robert. “Kant’s Virtue Ethics.” Philosophy 61 (1986): 473–489. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue. 3rd ed. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. O’Neill, Onora. “Kant After Virtue.” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 26, no. 4 (1983): 387–405. Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. New York: Scholastic, 1999. Rumsey, Jean P. “The Development of Character in Kantian Moral Theory.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 27, no. 2 (1989): 247–265. Ware, Owen. “Rethinking Kant’s Fact of Reason.” Philosopher’s Imprint 14, no. 32 (2014): 1–20.

Part III

SPECIFIC VIRTUES AND CONTEMPORARY REFLECTIONS

Chapter Twelve

How Second Nature Becomes Primary Jonathan Jacobs

One of the chief reasons it is important to pay attention to one’s own habits and patterns of activity is that they can lead to the formation of dispositions that are then very difficult to change. Dispositions reflect valuative commitments, perspectives, attitudes, and ways of responding—aspects of one’s nature that are not episodic or situational. Acquired dispositions substantially shape what one is like in regard to character. This includes patterns of emotionality, the sorts of concerns and interests that shape one’s motivations, the justifications and explanations one typically proffers, and the person’s self-awareness and self-conception. We sometimes admonish others or are admonished by others—“you don’t want to make a habit of that”—and often the main message is that, if you carry on acting that way you may come to think that acting that way is acceptable or may find it second nature to do so but, there are good reasons not to act that way. Perhaps it is unfair or selfish or inconsiderate or otherwise objectionable. In a significant respect, what we come to be like as a matter of second nature is who we are. In this chapter I will argue that voluntary acquisition of significant vices not only results in the agent acting badly but also in a diminution of agency, though not in a sense that reduces responsibility. In some cases agents’ states of character are corrupted by conditions they cannot reasonably be expected to resist effectively. That kind of “coercive corruption” diminishes agency and because of the much-reduced role of voluntariness in the acquisition of vice the agent’s responsibility is also diminished. Much of the discussion will be concerned with how the two kinds of cases—vicious agents with undiminished responsibility and those whose responsibility is diminished—are to be characterized and explicated. 201

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HABITS, DISPOSITIONS, AND THE VOLUNTARINESS OF CHARACTER As regularity of conduct shapes a disposition to act a certain way we might become less able to notice and assess respects in which there are reasons against so acting. One becomes steadily more accustomed to seeing things a certain way and acting accordingly. This can be a good thing. The firmly virtuous agent is deaf to considerations that are contrary to virtue and is not tempted by inclinations that are not in accord with what one ought to do. Often, as Aristotle thought, what has become second nature also comes to be pleasing, which is a way for the disposition to be reinforced. Part of what is admirable about a virtuous agent is that even if it is difficult to ascertain what is to be done, the virtuous agent typically is moved to act in an unconflicted way.1 This is not to say that once states of character are firmly established the individual’s capacity for voluntariness is diminished. The firmness and durability of a state of character is not a factor limiting voluntariness; it is a way that the exercise of it has been shaped. An individual whose choices, actions, and responses do not lead to the establishment of dispositions, and who does not acquire tendencies to choose and act in regular ways would be barely recognizable to us as a human agent. Such an individual would hardly seem like a person with ability to act freely. Without any enduring dispositions and approaches to weighing considerations it could be extremely difficult for such an individual to decide what to do other than to act on the strongest impulse. The person’s desires, concerns, attitudes, and so forth would not have acquired any intelligible patterns. Whether people are thoughtful and deliberate in a notably self-aware manner or tend to act in more spontaneous ways without giving much thought to the likely consequences of their actions, people do tend to settle into characteristic dispositions of action and response. Emotions, motives, concerns, and desires tend to reflect dispositions resulting in certain patterns of choice and action even including the sorts of explanations the agent gives for his or her actions. Someone might be reliably forthcoming and honest while someone else is guarded and reticent, and another person is self-absorbed and dishonest. Those features will be exhibited in actions, reactions, and how the agent talks about her choices and actions. Human beings are typically capable of the kinds of awareness of their own actions and motives that enable them to evaluate themselves and their actions. Perhaps many persons do not undertake careful consideration of their motives, values, and perspectives but we are capable of the relevant kinds of awareness. And many people do engage in such reflection and strive to change in various ways. This does not mean that we all have sufficient ca-



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pacity to change in whatever ways we might choose. It does not even imply that we all have sufficient judgmental capacity to appreciate our own actions and motives in ways that are generally honest and accurate. After all, some people are habituated to go in for self-deception and dishonesty. That, too, can become second nature. But ceasing to think of ourselves and others as having a meaningful measure of responsibility for our states of character would require radical changes in how we regard ourselves and others. There may be grounds for exceptions, excuses, mitigating factors, and other qualifications but responsibility for important aspects of what we are like is one of the elements of how we conceptualize our lives. Consider the importance that we attach to aspiration, to effort, and to imagination in regard to what might have been and who we would like to become. We say things such as, “don’t you want people to trust you, and to have confidence that you will do what you say you will do?” or “whether you are in a position to succeed in this, is up to you; are you going to bemoan your misfortune or are you going to start taking control of your situation?” A person might say to herself, “I become much too angry much too easily and it clouds my judgment. I need to control my temper and think more carefully before reacting.” There are all sorts of ways—for better or worse—that people seek to revise their own dispositions, making these judgments on the basis of their character as so far formed, and with a view to acquiring different dispositions. Maybe a great many of these judgments are distorted by self-deception, misrepresentation, and an unwillingness to confront the facts. Still, matters of character are often the central concern. These sorts of considerations help make the case for states of character as enduring dispositions that are both explanatorily and ethically important. When we say that we are well acquainted with someone part of what we generally mean is that we have a sense of the substance of the person’s actionguiding dispositions, primary values, and typical reactive attitudes. Friendships often involve likeness in values, perspective, and responses or at least considerable knowledge of each other in those respects even if there is not a great deal of likeness. A friendship is sustained, in large part, by our being able to rely on persons having enduring states of character and friendships sometimes are undone when we discover that we have been mistaken in what we took to be the other person’s stable dispositions. It is when someone acts very much out of character that we might say, “Where is this coming from? Sometimes I feel like I don’t know you.” Perhaps there was evidence of this aspect of the person’s character but we were blind to it or had a somewhat idealized or selective view of the other person. In any case, what we take to be someone’s states of character are typically crucially important to what sort of relationship we think we can have with that other person.

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Habituation by others (in conjunction with one’s natural temperament) powerfully shapes a person’s dispositions and does so at a time when the individual is not sufficiently mature to be critically judging what is going on. The agency that underlies voluntariness is not unconditioned, isolated from a complex nexus of empirical factors that impact outlook, desires, values, and patterns of motivation. Still, part of what it is to have and to exercise rational capacities is to endorse some values and reject or disavow others, and to regard some impulses and emotions as one’s own and disown others, choosing not to identify with them. A person might believe that he is too quick to feel resentment and that he allows resentment to become rooted too deeply, thereby corrupting some of his judgments and actions. It might be very difficult to overcome the tendency to feel resentment but the attempt and the reasons for the effort are intelligible. It is a kind of undertaking rational agency makes possible. We need to acknowledge that there is not a clear, bright line between dispositions formed as a result of intention and effort and those that are formed without explicit efforts to acquire them. Still, even in the latter situation, the fact that the agent voluntarily undertook the actions that led to the disposition is a reason for regarding that person as having some responsibility for being like that.2 For the disposition to be part of one’s character as an agent, the individual need not have made it a specific project to bring it about. Moreover, taking responsibility for a disposition is not a necessary condition for being responsible for it. As Aristotle noted, one would have to be insensible—quite remarkably and persistently distracted—to fail to see that acting a certain way is likely to form a disposition to act that way. Like activities cause like states and that fact is basic to a great deal that human beings do intentionally, as when they set out to acquire a skill or develop an ability in a specific way or practice with a view to performing better, as in a sport or playing a musical instrument or making pastry or painting. Some people are insensible in that respect but that does not diminish their responsibility. It may be that they have been unfortunate in how they were habituated but the misfortune is aggravated by negligence—negligence in regard to attending to one’s own tendencies. Even with respect to those who are not self-aware in a steadily alert, searching way it is reasonable to expect them to be aware of their motives and attitudes and evaluations. Maybe they do not think about the long-term effect on their states of character. Still, a kind of blanket obliviousness to what moves one to act or to the sorts of reactions one has is no excuse for having objectionable states of character. We can come to have states of character so firmly fixed that they are unresponsive to various kinds of considerations. In fact, it is an ideal of virtue



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that considerations incompatible with virtue should be “silenced,” as John McDowell has put the point.3 That is not a form of narrow-mindedness or neglect of relevant action-guiding considerations. It would be inappropriate to describe the soundly virtuous agent as limited or incapacitated in some way on account of being altogether unresponsive to what is contrary-to-virtue. It is not a diminution of one’s freedom that the agent’s character is a basis of virtuous practical necessity. An acquired rational incapacity to respond to what is contrary to virtue is not properly described as a diminution or defect of agency. That a person has become unable (or very nearly unable) to sin does not involve a loss of freedom.4 Someone may be fortunate in regard to natural virtue but no one is ethically virtuous by accident or entirely by nature. Genuine ethical virtue involves judgment and deliberation in ways that differ from being kindly by nature or being generous by nature. However, character-based practical necessity is not limited to virtuous characters. The vicious agent’s actions also reflect character-based necessity. It might seem that for the vicious agent characterbased practical necessity is an incapacity limiting the agent’s freedom. This is because there is something it is rational for the agent to desire but the agent’s character is an impediment to desiring it and pursuing it effectively. However, there is an important difference between the kind of case in which the limitation results from the agent’s voluntary activity and the kind of case in which the limitation is a result of factors over which the agent has little or no control. At least some cases of the second kind involve what I call “coercive corruption.”5 That is corruption to be explained largely in terms of factors it is not reasonable to expect the agent to resist effectively. Or, it would be extraordinary (in an admirable way) for a person to be subject to such factors and not be corrupted by them. The difference between coercive corruption and what we might call “voluntary corruption” is morally significant in a fairly obvious way. The latter case, being responsible for one’s vices, is a basis for blame. However, significant vice, whether a result of coercive corruption or voluntary activity is damaging to the person as an agent. The cost is more than the fact that the individual will surely engage in morally blameworthy conduct. VIRTUE, VICE, AND ONE’S WAY OF SEEING THE WORLD A human being leads a life by negotiating a path shaped by the exercise of agential capacities. The way the agent sees the world involves more than merely formal features of practical rationality. Values, patterns of affective response, policies of motivation are all elements of the agent’s practical rationality. In that

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respect there is an externalist dimension of a person’s realized capacities for practical rationality inasmuch as those are connected with how the agent sees the world and other persons and what the agent regards as the valuative features of them. One’s exercise of practical reason depends in part on the values one endorses, one’s conception of what is important, worthwhile, and a view of what merits concern. Such a conception, including what merits our attention, what motivates aspiration, elicits disgust, and so forth can be integral to the content of character. Aspects of a person’s conception of the world are registered in the person’s character inasmuch as that conception shapes engagement with the world and one’s manner of negotiating it. As Williams remarks, “it must be true, not only of practical reasoning but more generally, that one finds out about oneself by thinking about the world that exists independently of oneself.”6 Virtuous agents have an accurate, sound appreciation of ethically relevant features of situations, persons, and actions, and they have a durable concern to be responsive to that appreciation. They are responsive to the realities they encounter rather than projecting value onto the world. That is how the virtuous agent’s judgment can become steadily more informed, more textured, more discriminating. As Gabriele Taylor writes of the virtuous agent, “There are . . . standards by reference to which she may, or may fail to correct her reasoning and attitudes” and “The fully virtuous comply with this requirement because they get their reasoning right, they possess practical wisdom, a kind of knowledge or sensitivity.”7 This fact is connected with the way that virtue is “naturally pleasing” in that a key aspect of the enjoyment accessible to the virtuous agent is that the virtuous agent is “at home” in the world.8 There are many different ways in which the virtuous agent can do an excellent job of living life—many kinds of lives can be virtuous lives—but all such lives are informed by practical wisdom. The virtuous agent is generally spared vulnerability to agent-regret and remorse. Much may happen in the person’s life that is unfortunate and regrettable but not in ways that are traceable primarily to poor judgment or choices on the agent’s part. Virtuous agents are able to enjoy their lives through appreciating virtuous activity as genuinely worthwhile and desirable for its own sake. Ethically good activity is enjoyed in an enduring way; the individual’s happiness is “constitutional” rather than circumstantial on account of how it reflects stable features of character. For any given virtue there are a great many ways it can be expressed in activity because of the countless kinds of circumstances an agent may encounter and because of the ways it is related to other states of character. That open-ended diversity is not a basis for thinking there is not something stable in a virtue. The responsiveness to the particular features of situations and to the ways that multiple values are often involved is a crucial aspect of practical



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wisdom. We should not expect a virtue to be exhibited in just one way in all contexts. Still, the exercise of a virtue is recognizable across a wide range of contexts and circumstances, even though virtues tend not to be exercised in a stand-alone way. In addition, the enjoyment of how one exercises agency supplies the individual with a reason to go on acting virtuously even though there may be considerable diversity in the sorts of situations the agent faces. Finding the exercise of virtue gratifying is a key aspect of being at home in the world, an aspect of the way a virtue is an enduring feature of a person over time and across all sorts of contexts of action. Vices, too, are enduring but the vicious agent is vulnerable to damage regarding understanding and motivation. Significant vices not only result in ethically blameworthy actions, they also harm the agent in ways that diminish agential capacity. This is primarily on account of how significant vices typically make the self, instead of the world, the central concern of the exercise of agency. Taylor writes: For the vicious the focus of care was exclusively their own position, and the irrationality of their attitude was in its lack of cohesion and consequent deception of self. Conversely, the rationality of that of the virtuous contributes to their authenticity. This is so because they do not live in a fantasy world which can be kept going only by distortion and suppression of desires, a process which leaves the agent at their mercy and robs him of control over his life.9

Because of what vices are a vicious agent can only be at home in the world in a counterfeit way, one that involves a distorting project of rationalization. The vicious person’s self-respect will depend upon corrupt, erroneous notions of value, achievement, and worth. This is not the same as arguing that all significant vices are forms of selfishness; that seems empirically quite implausible. But vices involve a way of being invested in actions and values such that concerns with the self have priority over engagement with the ethically relevant features of others, events, and situations. This is not healthy, prudential concern. The person with vices is concerned with the self in ways that are preoccupying distractions from the valuative considerations that are the proper objects of concern. Thus, vicious character-based practical necessity is not a symmetrical counterpart to virtuous character-based practical necessity. The additional dimension or mediating factor is the vicious agent’s self-preoccupation. If a person becomes settled in a vicious second nature, various actions that appear to that agent to be necessary will appear that way because they are responses to the vicious agent’s interior demands and not because they are worthwhile or right. Vice involves a self-centered agenda absent from the virtuous agent, an agenda that would only be a distraction and impediment to the aspiration

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for virtue. The vicious agent’s judgments and responses might be fueled by resentment, arrogance, malice, cruelty, or contempt and those need not take a recognizably self-centered form. Rather, the point is that what the vicious agent perceives as necessary will be mediated and mandated by internal imperatives of self-oriented concern in a manner that is not a feature of the virtuous agent’s activity. Of course, a vicious agent may be highly attentive to detail and might plan, strategize, and choose in ways that depend on having thought about and inquired into many kinds of considerations. In that sense a vicious agent’s exercise of vice can be world-guided. However, for the vicious agent— whether concerned most with greed and self-aggrandizement or cruelty, arrogance, treacherous dishonesty, or something else—the exercise of agency is inflected by concern with self, taking the form of rationalization, self-deception, and misrepresentation. Virtue involves responsiveness that aspires to comprehend persons and their situations accurately, taking their reality seriously. For the vicious agent the way one is regarded, how one regards oneself in comparison with others, whether one has “won” in the situation, and how one’s self-esteem has been aggrandized or wounded are prominent concerns. Vicious persons lack the kind of sympathy that enables one to “represent to oneself the mental state of others irrespective of one’s own interests, a feat which evidently is not possible if one is chained to one’s self-referential perspective.”10 This kind of sympathy “is necessary for the avoidance of moral solipsism.”11 Moreover, “With diminishing need for self-protection there is a diminishing need also for that web of self-deception in which the vicious were entangled.”12 The enjoyment from activity experienced by the vicious is not appreciation of kinds of genuine worth external to the self. Vicious agents can enjoy their actions but the enjoyment depends on the dishonest or distorted rationalizations involved in the vicious agent’s way of seeing things. The virtuous agent feels no comparable need to overlay the world with a projection tailored to the contours of self-protective desire or need. In addition, a virtuous agent is more open to experience being morally educative in a constructive way. Taylor says of the self-love attainable by the virtuous agent that it is: “Genuine self-love, since it rests on positive self-evaluation, demands that the person concerned should feel herself to be engaged with the world in ways which she considers to be worthwhile. It is these engagements rather than she herself which will absorb her attention.”13 The vicious person’s preoccupation with self primarily concerns the ways that such a person needs to represent the world so that it is congenial to the agent’s values and perceptions rather than seeking to attain an accurate conception of the world. The self-deception of the vicious, needed to protect themselves from disturbing realizations about themselves, has itself to be protected from discovery by oth-



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ers, and so plays a part in predisposing them towards aggression. It does so also in another way. The vicious’ self-deception means that they present a false self to the world. In that sense they are hypocrites.14

And “further, what they do to themselves is reflected in what they do to others. Their layer of self-deception is corruptive of the self. The layer of protection against others is similarly corruptive of their relationship with others.”15 Taylor writes of the vicious agent: “Since he feels only for himself, any personal relationship with another is doomed from the start. To acknowledge others, therefore, both awareness of their consciousness and any feeling involved should at least occasionally be self-transcendent.”16 In some vicious agents aggression is more pronounced than hypocrisy, and in others, it’s the other way round. But reflection on vices and the kinds of motives they involve, the attitudes and reactions with which they are associated, and the perspectives on how to deliberate and choose indicates that vices dispose a person to frictional relationships, to interactions and responses that are fraught in ways rooted in (often dishonest) self-concern. The virtuous agent is able to draw enjoyment and rich gratification from activities, interactions, encounters, and associations involving many sources and without self-aggrandizing or selfprotecting interpretation and rationalization. This is a way of engaging with, and finding worthwhileness in the world outside the self. In “Freedom and Resentment” Strawson’s chief concerns are different from those in Taylor’s Deadly Vices, but there is an interesting affinity between the versions of solipsism each of them diagnoses. The solipsism of which Strawson speaks is a significant distortion of the sort of regard for others that is a basic feature of our lives in human community. In addition to the personal reactive attitudes so important to interactions between people he says that there are “vicarious analogues” of them. “They are reactions to the qualities of others’ wills, not toward ourselves, but toward others.”17 They “rest on or reflect, that is, the demand for the manifestation of a reasonable degree of good will or regard, on the part of others, not simply towards oneself, but towards all those on whose behalf moral indignation may be felt, i.e., as we now think, towards all men.”18 It matters to each of us (in different ways and to different degrees, but still genuinely) that people in general, in their relations with each other, regard each other in ways that reflect the sorts of attitudes that matter to each of us in our own relations with others. He goes on: One who manifested the personal reactive attitudes to a high degree but showed no inclination at all to their vicarious analogues would appear as an abnormal case of moral egocentricity, as a kind of moral solipsist. Let him be supposed fully to acknowledge the claims to regard that others had on him, to be susceptible of the whole range of self-reactive attitudes. He would then see himself as

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unique both as one (the one) who had a general claim on human regard and as one (the one) on whom human beings in general had such a claim. This would be a kind of moral solipsism. But it is barely more than a conceptual possibility; if it is that.19

This is moral solipsism underwritten by a failure to recognize how the personal and vicarious attitudes “are connected not merely logically. They are connected humanly.”20 Strawson writes, “we demand of others for others, as well as of ourselves for others, something of the regard which we demand of others for ourselves.”21 Relentless self-centeredness, self-importance, inconsideration of others—those are all familiar and distressingly common. The sort of person Strawson is describing would have to be someone who somehow managed to understand how concepts such as resentment, apology, gratitude, admiration, and forgiveness could apply to aspects of her own life without grasping how they apply in the lives of people generally. We can describe that state of affairs though it is extremely difficult to consider it as actually obtaining. It is very difficult to genuinely imagine what such a person’s conceptions could be and how they could achieve a coherent view of themselves as an agent living in the world with other agents. The solipsism would almost certainly have to be parasitical on the relevant concepts as we normally understand them, the concepts disfigured to somehow suit only oneself and one’s own experience. Strawson’s discussion is not directly about character. Nevertheless, we can see important ways in which it can be related to considerations concerning character, given that states of character figure in such a pronounced way in what sorts of reactive attitudes we believe are merited, are appropriate. Resentment, gratitude, admiration, forgiveness, and a host of other attitudes and sentiments are constitutive elements of recognizably human lives. The forms in which they figure in our actions and responses are typically rooted in character. Someone is maliciously spiteful, and someone else nurses resentment. Another person freely shows gratitude and is generous with well-placed admiration, and so forth. The most important ways in which these attitudes and sentiments occur in our lives are not episodic and unconnected with each other and other dispositions. Moreover, these attitudes cease to be coherent if we think of them as entirely phenomenological or affective without an externalist dimension. What we believe, and whether what we believe is true is often vitally important to the aptness of these attitudes, and one’s attitudes can be poorly or well-supported by reasons, and can be apt and warranted or highly inappropriate, and so forth. Focusing only on the affective aspect of such attitudes leaves out the traffic back and forth with the world external to affect that is structured and addressed by these attitudes. Such attitudes are not merely responses; they are modes of engagement by rational beings with the world.



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One respect in which the vicious person’s agential capacity is diminished is that a sustained effort of attention and energy is required to “keep to the script” of misrepresentation and deception. A vicious agent is liable to be especially sensitive to the numerous and diverse ways in which reality does not cooperate with what that person would like to believe. The vicious agent needs to be ready constantly to fabricate formulations that are suitably selfserving. And if those are prima facie implausible, the agent needs to add to the fabrication in ways that—at least to him or her self—explain away the implausibility. The sort of dishonesty involved in many kinds of vice is work and it can involve creating and maintaining a complex fabric of explanation and interpretation meant to “domesticate” the facts to the vicious agent’s preferred way of seeing things. COERCIVE CORRUPTION AND VOLUNTARY VICES I noted above that we should distinguish between agents whose vices are voluntary in the respect that, intended or not, those states of character are formed largely by the voluntary activity of the agents in question, and agents who have acquired vices through a process of coercive corruption. Those are agents who have endured conditions that are known to be damaging to character and agential capacities.22 One context for which there is empirical evidence of coercive corruption is long-term incarceration in the conditions in many prisons in the United States. Such conditions are prevalent in many prisons in a great many countries but they are fairly widely studied in the United States (and the UK) and are of particular importance in a liberal democracy because of how such conditions are antithetical to the values and principles of such a political order. Among the sorts of conditions that contribute to coercive corruption are (i) severe overcrowding; (ii) near-constant risk, and frequent occurrence of brutality and sexual assault; (iii) severe limitations on permitted activity including communication with other prisoners and persons outside prison; (iv) long periods of unrelieved tedium and few opportunities to exercise the sorts of capacities one needs to be able to participate in civil society successfully upon release; (v) long periods of isolation in solitary confinement for many prisoners; (vi) seemingly arbitrary administrative decisions and lack of explanation of decisions and rulings; (vii) excessively long sentences. Such conditions are found in many prisons and while order and security are priorities it is very doubtful that the form the prison experience often takes is made necessary by those concerns. In the numerous studies of the impact of incarceration, the conditions mentioned are among those which, in increasingly substantiated ways, are

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known to harm or worsen prisoners. The conditions are impediments to the acquisition of habits, attitudes, and dispositions needed for participating in civil society. They also occur through the way the conditions encourage the acquisition or reinforcing of vicious dispositions. That is morally objectionable in its own right but as noted above, especially objectionable on account of the ways that it is antithetical to the valuative commitments, principles, and ideals of a liberal polity. In addition, often prisoners are not only unprepared for reentering civil society upon release, in many cases the carceral experience encourages exactly the wrong attitudes, dispositions, and habits for desistance and successful reintegration. In a liberal polity the state should not enforce or impose any specific conception of how people should lead their lives. While extensive liberties and rights, sound laws, and morally fair and decent policies can help encourage virtuous dispositions (through the kind of open, dynamic civil society such an order supports), the liberal polity should not require the acquisition of virtues. At the same time, it is not justified in harming people, causing them to acquire vices. Whatever one’s view about the proper aims and justification of punishment in a liberal democracy it is surely wrong for the state to worsen people in known and regular ways. There is the additional problem of the various disenfranchisements and disqualifications former prisoners face once released. We do not have space to pursue that issue here except to say that it is, in many cases, a way of continuing punishment beyond completion of sentence in ways that often amount to disproportionate punishment.23 This discussion does not presuppose (nor am I trying to show) that punishment should be abolished or even that incarceration should be abolished as a form of punishment. The main point is that in requiring offenders to endure just deserts it is not morally permissible to diminish them as agents or worsen them in ways that are avoidable. There is no question that the conditions in many US prisons do constitute conditions of coercive corruption. In many cases it would be unreasonable to expect people not to be worsened by them. This has nothing directly to do with whether sanction should aim at reforming offenders; that is a distinct issue. However, as a matter of fact the very poor conditions almost surely contribute to recidivism rather than desistance, and changing the conditions so that they are more morally tolerable might well contribute to desistance. There are plenty of vicious individuals and individuals who enter prison with already badly corrupt character. That is not in doubt. Plus, the power and influence of gangs institutionalizes vice in ways to which many persons remain faithful. However, most prisoners do not want to be career criminals and most want much the same things in life that non-offenders want. For the very large population of offenders who are not already established in serious vices



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the experience of prison in the currently prevailing conditions can do considerable damage. The conditions do not only demoralize prisoners in the sense of affecting prisoners’ moods. They de-moralize many prisoners in a deeper and more troubling sense, having to do with eroding agential capacities. Many prisoners reach a point at which they feel as though they are no longer regarded as human beings and that their rights, dignity, and welfare count for next to nothing. As a prisoner in a British prison remarked: I remember being there—on the edge of a precipice. You lose all hope. Your inner self changes, You start to think, what does anything matter? It was about four years before I left [Whitemoor prison], around 2003, about eight years in. . . . It builds up—your efforts to be good are not being recognised. You think, “I’ve tried, you’re not going to give me a chance.” You hit a wall where nothing matters. Suddenly, you are capable of anything. You’d betray anyone. . . . You lose your moral compass.24

Often, adapting to the conditions in prison results in various types of psychological ill-health: “Whether they experience some form of PTSD or some other diagnosable psychological disorder, many prisoners do adapt to the pains of imprisonment by developing overt psychological symptoms—clinical depression, paranoia, and psychosis.”25 Many prisoners suffer not only in terms of discouragement, distrust of the institutions of criminal justice, and doubt about their prospects upon release. Some become ill with clinically identifiable conditions. Others may not have specific clinical conditions but as a result of the prison experience their ability to function in the social world is seriously compromised. They may have spent many years in conditions in which they are able to do almost none of the sorts of things one needs to do on a habitual basis as a member of civil society. In regard to many types of activity, interaction, opportunities for deliberation and decision, and collaborative undertakings prisoners are effectively rendered incompetent. The situation is aggravated by the fact that many members of the public believe that punishment should be a miserable experience and they believe that many offenders are incapable of reform or rehabilitation. When prisoners are regarded as being, in effect, nothing but criminals, and that becomes the identity with which they are forced to live, reintegration after completion of sentence is made very difficult in ways that almost certainly contribute to harming prisoners and to recidivism. If former prisoners find it exceedingly difficult to find jobs, rent apartments, obtain public benefits, seek loans for education or for home ownership, and so forth they are thereby excluded from many of the contexts of civil society. The habits and attitudes people need for participating successfully in civil society cannot be acquired and they are crucially important to one’s capabilities for practical rationality.

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We have not done a satisfactory job of responding to the fact that, “The average inmate coming home will have served a longer prison sentence than in the past, be more disconnected from family and friends, have a higher prevalence of substance abuse and mental illness, and be less educated and less employable than those in prior prison release cohorts. Each of these factors is known to predict recidivism, yet few of these needs are addressed while the inmate is in prison or on parole.”26 Being cut off from the bonds of association taken for granted in civil society, and having few occasions for exercises of judgment and deliberative rationality, many prisoners suffer in ways that are lasting, damage having been done to their agential capacities. For those prisoners who enter prison with vices it is hardly surprising that incarceration does not improve them. I mention carceral conditions for how they illustrate coercive corruption and also how they are to be contrasted with the conditions of most people’s lives. The ways in which carceral conditions are morally problematic is especially important in a liberal democracy and even though the conditions of many people’s lives outside of prison are also morally troubling it is plausible to suggest that most vicious persons do not acquire their vices as a result of coercive corruption. In a liberal democratic political order the legitimacy of institutions and policies is in question if they are known to diminish persons as agents. One of the chief considerations in support of a liberal democratic order is that it makes possible the sort of civil society in which people have extensive opportunity to engage in a wide range of voluntary activities, interactions, and associations. It makes possible extensive rights and liberties—providing the political and legal conditions for extensive exercise of agential capacities. Also, many persons who have vicious states of character have acquired them voluntarily, at least in the sense that their own choices, actions, and responses have had a central role in shaping and establishing their vices. There may be circumstances in their lives that help us understand why they have acquired vices even if those circumstances do not constitute causally sufficient conditions. These agents are responsible for their vices but it is much less clear that they should have diminished responsibility. VIRTUE, VICE, AND RESPONSIBILITY It is doubtful that we can infer—as a general matter—directly from diminished agential capacity to diminished responsibility. The cognitive and motivational capacities of an agent whose vices are voluntary are diminished insofar as the person’s second nature makes certain kinds of ethical under-



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standing inaccessible to the person and the agent may be settled in morally objectionable motivational dispositions. Moreover, if second nature is firmly established the agent may no longer have the ability to even understand the reasons there are for trying to change her dispositions. As Sarah Broadie wrote, in regard to Aristotle’s conception of the vicious agent: Now if the vicious person comes to hate himself and his modes of practical acceptance, it does not follow that he knows in a practical way how else to be or even how to begin to change. At the moments of choice and action he has no other moves to make, and no other ways of seeing and classifying his particular circumstances, than those which express the detested character.27

Fixity of second nature—if dispositions do sometimes become fixed—may mean that the vicious agent will not come to hate herself on account of her vices. That agent might not even recognize her vices as such. Or, let us suppose that this person can be reached and she somehow comes to recognize her defects of character. It would be profoundly disheartening to judge oneself as having very undesirable states of character and find that one is unable to change significantly and reorient one’s life. But the vicious agent who is altogether blind to her vices is perhaps even worse off though she does not feel worse off. She not only has significant vices but also cannot recognize them as such. If that is a condition of diminished agential capacity why is it not also a condition of diminished responsibility? Human beings have certain general agential capacities as part of being human, and the specific ways in which those are exercised cause them to become disposed in specific, enduring ways. Those dispositions are part of the substance of character. The exercise of agential capacities concerns much more than formal features of practical reasoning. It shapes one’s second nature, and that involves the shaping of temperament, strategies of evaluation, and ways of weighing considerations; it involves acquiring motivational policies, ways of being moved to act. One’s second nature also involves dispositions concerning the kinds of explanations and justifications one gives for one’s decisions and actions. On this issue McDowell writes: “One’s formed practical intellect—which is operative in one’s character-revealing behavior—just is an aspect of one’s nature as it has become.”28 Rationality is not fully assimilable to the causal order of natural phenomena and “[t]he concept of second nature registers that we do not need to conceive practical reason as subject only to formal constraints.”29 McDowell adds: What it is for the practical intellect to be as it ought to be, and so equipped to get things right in its proper sphere, is a matter of its having a certain determinate

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non-formal shape, and a practical intellect’s coming to be as it ought to be is the acquisition of a second nature, involving the moulding of motivational and evaluative propensities: a process that takes place in nature.30

Describing abstract features of practical reasoning does not capture and express the multiple aspects of character that are involved in the person’s understanding, reasoning, and in how the person decides. In addition, the aspects of a human being’s primary nature are such things as a certain type of physiology, longevity within a specific range, a specific genome, capacities for sensation, perception, memory, anticipation, and also capacities for reasoning about what is the case and reasoning about what to do; that is capacities for both the theoretical and practical employment of reason. As a person matures and acquires habits, and as those habits shape dispositions, and some of those dispositions become strongly established one’s practical reasoning increasingly reflects the values, concerns, reactive tendencies, and attitudes that have become durable (even if revisable) features of the individual. It is not as though there remains a disposition-free set of capacities of primary nature in addition to the specific dispositions constitutive of second nature. There is not the agent or capacities for agency, distinct from dispositions the person has acquired, except in the sense that, in different individuals there are different degrees of plasticity of character even once the persons are mature. Features constitutive of second nature can become established sufficiently to provide a basis for character-based practical necessity, for good or ill. Neither vice nor virtue—nor any state in between—has a monopoly on character-based practical necessity. States of character—however they might be evaluated ethically—figure in deliberation, judgment, and choosing. The ways in which a human being regards the world as a context for acting and the ways in which a person is invested in what he or she does are ways in which character has a significant role. Because the vicious agent is committed to values and dispositions that do not motivate and inform activity that realizes genuine good the vicious agent can become increasingly alienated from correct values and ends and endorse what are wrong, rationally unjustifiable values, while finding it pleasing to act in ways shaped by them. In that sense the individual suffers a diminution of agential capacity; the more vicious the person, the more she is alienated from sound cognitive, affective, and motivational dispositions. Practical wisdom preserves agential capacity and vice corrupts and undermines it. Is it unjust to regard a person whose agential capacities are limited by vicious states of character as a fully responsible agent? After all, that person may be unable to understand the justice of punishment and may be unable to attain correct ethical understanding. Yet, there would be something even more perplexing about a conception of accountability such that a person’s



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seriously corrupt character, which resulted from voluntary activity were also the basis for diminished responsibility. To be sure, it can be very difficult to sort out the impact of various influences and circumstances from the exercise of agency; neither of those aspects of action discloses themselves in pure samples, unmixed with other aspects. In fact, it is a mistake to think that agency is a capacity that is isolable, capable of operating apart from the substance and orientation indicated by the person’s dispositions and states of character. We can only exercise agential capacities in ways that are engaged to commitments, interests, concerns, sensibility, and to conceptions of what is worthwhile, enjoyable, or repugnant, and so forth. When we say, “Look, you know him; what else did you expect?” or “She is definitely the person to ask about this; however, I would ask her about it at a time she is relaxed and not preoccupied with work. You know how she sometimes becomes preoccupied with things at work and may not give you full attention” we are remarking on the significance of aspects of persons’ characters. Two people with the same information may respond very differently to it and the differences are often rooted in their characters. Their perspectives, affect, attention to different aspects of a situation, primary concerns, and so forth shape their judgment. Someone might have excellent judgment with respect to certain kinds of issues or certain kinds of people but also be the sort of person who is inclined to react initially in a highly emotional way, yet almost always settles down, considers the facts carefully, and arrives at a thoughtful, considered conclusion about what to do. Bernard Williams discussed a notion of character-based practical necessity he took to be distinct from the moral “ought” and concerning decisions and actions that have more than ordinary significance on account of the challenges or circumstances faced. Williams argued that in such tests we might find out important aspects of our characters rather than exhibit aspects already known to us. In such situations we make choices that “constitute, to a greater or lesser degree, discoveries about oneself.”31 Whether one agrees with his view regarding the place of the moral “ought” in practical rationality the notion that character-based practical necessity figures in significant ways in our lives seems right. In fact, how the moral “ought” figures in an agent’s conception of what it is necessary to do depends substantially on character. Human beings are responsive to several different types of action-guiding considerations. There is a “have to” of legal requirement, a “have to” of moral requirement, a “have to” of strong desire, of prudence, and of etiquette. How those figure in what one does and in one’s guiding concerns exhibits important features of an agent’s character. Whether or not the agent regards moral requirements as practically necessary, in the strongest sense states of character are critically important to an agent’s conception of what is necessary, worth considering, inconceivable

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(for that person) and so forth. How different types of action-guiding considerations rank in the person’s overall approach to action and life is rooted in character. This is consistent with Williams’s insight that in deliberation one can make a discovery about oneself, something that is different from just being faithful to how one already sees and knows oneself. Even in making such discoveries, one is acting voluntarily. The discovery might be that in the deepest, most fundamental sense I find that I am responsive to moral considerations; or perhaps, some other type. In either case, it is oneself as an agent that is being disclosed, not some factor that makes us decide and act as we do. We also acquire knowledge of our characters in more ordinary contexts, simply because we encounter new circumstances and the challenges they involve are novel even if they are not extraordinary situations testing us to the core of our being. One’s notion of compassion or fairness or courage, and one’s ability to enact those values can develop and become better articulated through encountering new situations and new ways that those values are interrelated. Being a reflective person involves willingness to consider one’s values and commitments, attitudes and perspectives, being open to the realities one confronts. Character can shape responses and perspectives without any sort of mechanical determination of them. That responses are characterbased does not mean that they are spontaneous in a mindless way even when they seem to be nearly automatic or not requiring reflection. Rather, second nature can be a basis for perceiving, discerning, weighing, and judging in specific ways. If the situation is of a familiar type and the agent recognizes what she takes to be most significant about it then judgment and decision may seem automatic though, in fact, they reflect understanding and discernment. Or, if the agent has a less virtuous character judgment and decision may be equally swift but they will reflect features of the agent’s character that are not admirable. In different stages of life as well as in different contexts in our lives the voluntariness of conduct is exhibited in different ways. At age thirty, voluntariness can be exercised in ways that were not available to the same individual at age seven. Still, the individual’s activity is largely voluntary at both of those points in her life. The development of one’s awareness, the development of capacities for deliberation and reflection, and the accumulation of experience all make a difference to how voluntariness can be exercised and to the expectations of accountability that are appropriate. The fact that, at age thirty, many of the person’s states of character have become second nature does not diminish voluntariness or accountability. Even if we regard acquired second nature as involving certain limits on the ability to exercise rational self-determination, it is also a set of specific realized capacities for the exercise of rational self-determination.



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However, there is an important asymmetry regarding the ways that virtue and vice impact one’s agential capacity. Because of the way that a vicious second nature (i) involves erroneous conceptions of worthwhileness and desirability and (ii) it involves taking pleasure in actions that are, in fact, morally objectionable and for which there are not rational justifications the vicious person’s agential capacity is diminished, though without correspondingly diminishing responsibility. The (uncompelled) vicious agent is not a less voluntary agent than the virtuous (or continent) person but on account of settled vices this person is a less capable agent.32 If a person has become firmly established in vice that person may have become disabled for various types of right action. However, because of the role of voluntariness in acquiring vices, the result is self-imposed. It is not chosen, if by “chosen” we mean that the person had an intention to acquire those vicious states of character. But having become like that and being like that are voluntary in respects that underwrite responsibility. This is so even though a person with a vicious second nature may be no longer able, or is much less able, to choose and to do what a correct conception of good would require. This does not presuppose or require that it is not possible to revise one’s second nature. There seem to be vicious persons who make successful efforts to ethically reorient themselves and there are some apparently virtuous agents whose virtue proves not to be enduring or it fails when meeting certain challenges and the person may then go further and acquire vices. But there is considerable plausibility in the view that Aristotle seems to hold, that typically, we should not expect persons with mature characters to change their habits and dispositions (except for the changes that come with different stages of life).33 One’s second nature is not just a feature of one’s agency; it is much more who that person has become. A vicious second nature can render a person unable to acquire virtue, and that is surely a significant limitation. A virtuous second nature may be deaf to the appeal of considerations that are contrary to virtue. But that limitation on voluntariness is not—as in the vicious person’s case—a diminution of agency. There are things the genuinely virtuous agent cannot do; among them are cruel acts of betrayal, lying promises meant to ruin other persons’ prospects, acts of malicious spite, and taking delight in humiliating others. The incapacity for such acts hardly counts as a lamentable limitation. The condition is more a matter of the agent’s rationality being undistracted by false goods, which do not even appear good to the virtuous agent. Virtuous activity—in the way a virtuous person undertakes it—is not just a matter of engaging in different behavior from that chosen by a vicious person. Virtuous persons and vicious persons do not arrive at different conclusions of practical reasoning despite having started with the same premises. Their

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premises differ, and the ways they regard considerations as relevant to valuative judgment and to decision differ. Those differences are anchored in their second natures, which, in mature persons can be more or less fixed features shaping outlook, concern, interests, and sensibility. States of character are not accessories to capacities for practical reasoning; they orient and inform those capacities in substantial respects. In that regard an acquired second nature can be the shape that a person’s primary nature comes to have through the course of experience, decision, and action. NOTES 1.  Though there could remain unresolved issues in the situation and the virtuous agent can see merit in more than just one particular judgment or course of action. Or the reality of the situation might overmatch what can be gratifyingly achieved. Still, the virtuous agent will not have grounds for regretting her own action. 2.  See, in particular, Nicomachean Ethics, Book III, chapter 5 for Aristotle’s discussion of how particular states of character can be voluntary even if the agent does not have an explicit intention to acquire them. 3.  John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” Monist 62.3 (1979): 345. 4. Anselm presented such a view in “On Free Will” and “On the Fall of the Devil” arguing that the capacity to sin is not essential to free will. 5. I introduce and explicate the notion of coercive corruption (and also demoralization) in “From Bad to Worse: Crime, Incarceration, and the Self-Wounding of Society,” and in “Character, Punishment, and the Liberal Order.” It is a notion that refers to the damage done to prisoners by some of the most morally objectionable features of contemporary carceral practice. 6. Bernard Williams, “Practical Necessity,” in Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 130. 7.  Gabriele Taylor, Deadly Vices (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 2. 8.  See, in particular, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, chapter 8, and Book X, chapter 9 for Aristotle’s notion of the naturally pleasing. 9. Taylor, Deadly Vices, 151. 10. Ibid. 11. Taylor, Deadly Vices, 127. 12. Taylor, Deadly Vices, 128–29. 13. Taylor, Deadly Vices, 139. 14. Taylor, Deadly Vices, 123. 15. Taylor, Deadly Vices, 126. 16. Taylor, Deadly Vices, 152. 17.  P. F. Strawson, “Freedom and Resentment,” in Free Will, ed. Gary Watson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 70. 18. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, 71.



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19. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, 72. 20. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, 71. 21. Strawson, Freedom and Resentment, 72. 22. Of course, there could be coercively corrupting circumstances that are not known to be corrupting. In this discussion the primary concern is with conditions that are in fact known to corrupt character and harm persons as agents. 23.  I discuss this issue in the two articles mentioned above. Many of the disqualifications and impediments faced by former prisoners are in conflict with appropriate measures of proportionality and just desert. 24.  Alison Liebling, “Moral and Philosophical Problems of Long-Term Imprisonment,” Studies in Christian Ethics 27, no. 3 (2014): 264, doi: 10.1177/0953946 814530219. 25. Craig Haney, Reforming Punishment: Psychological Limits to the Pains of Imprisonment (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2006), 185. 26.  Joan Petersilia, When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 53. 27. Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 161. 28.  John McDowell, “Two Sorts of Naturalism,” in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, ed. R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, and W. Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 167. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid. 31.  Williams, “Practical Necessity,” 130. 32.  This is not a new thesis. An important source for it was elaborated by Anselm in “On Truth,” “On Free Will,” and in “On the Fall of the Devil” though Anselm’s view involves a Christianized Platonic conception of good, the notion that there is a fundamental inclination to happiness and a fundamental inclination to rectitude (or justice), and the notion that through grace the agent who can no longer preserve rectitude for its own sake (i.e., freely will rightly) can be enabled once again to will to preserve (the now absent) rectitude for its own sake. Those works are all included in Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works. 33. In Categories Aristotle mentions a bad man’s ethical improvement as an example of change from one contrary to another. He writes: “The bad man, if he is being brought into a better way of life and thought, may make some advance, however slight, and if he should once improve, even ever so little, it is plain that he might change completely, or at any rate make very great progress; for a man becomes more and more easily moved to virtue, however small the improvement was at first” (Categories 13a 19–27). In his discussion of habituation, character, virtue, and vice in Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle seems to argue that states of character generally become firmly fixed and very difficult to change. However, he does not explicitly rule out the possibility of change and this example from Categories indicates, at the least, that it is an issue Aristotle thought appropriate to illustrate a type of change.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Anselm. Anselm of Canterbury: The Major Works. Edited by Brian Davies and G. R. Evans. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. and ed. Terence Irwin. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999. Broadie, Sarah. Ethics with Aristotle. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Haney, Craig. Reforming Punishment: Psychological Limits to the Pains of Imprisonment. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2006. Jacobs, Jonathan. “From Bad to Worse: Crime, Incarceration, and the Self-Wounding of Society.” In Justice and Penal Reform: Re-Shaping the Penal Landscape, edited by Stepehn Farrall, Barry Goldson, Ian Loader, and Anita Dockley, 8–26. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. ———. “Character, Punishment, and the Liberal Order.” In From Personality to Virtue: Essays on the Philosophy of Character, edited by Alberto Masala and John Webber, 9–34. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Liebling, Alison. “Moral and Philosophical Problems of Long-Term Imprisonment.” Studies in Christian Ethics 27, no. 3 (2014): 258–73. doi: 10.1177/09539468145 30219. McDowell, John. “Virtue and Reason.” Monist 62, no. 3 (1979): 331–50. ———. “Two Sorts of Naturalism.” In Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, edited by R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, and W. Quinn, 150–79. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Petersilia, Joan. When Prisoners Come Home: Parole and Prisoner Reentry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Strawson, P. F. “Freedom and Resentment.” In Free Will, edited by Gary Watson, 72–93. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. Taylor, Gabriele. Deadly Vices. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Williams, Bernard. “Practical Necessity.” In Moral Luck, 124–31. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Chapter Thirteen

Intellectual Trust in an Examined Life On Vicious and Virtuous Trust in Philosophy Ben Almassi Does philosophy have trust issues? Epistemic dependence is recognized throughout our lives, yet whether trustfulness should extend to philosophy seems especially contentious. Philosophical trust is criticized as intellectually vicious: an abdication of critical reflection, invitation of gullibility, hostile to the imperative to know thyself. Huenemann’s essay “Why Not to Trust Other Philosophers” contends that trusting in philosophy is a substitute for exercising one’s cognitive faculties.1 While trust is appropriate in intimate relationships and for non-experts in some domains of inquiry, Huenemann allows, philosophy is not such a domain. I suggest, however, that in recognizing how trustfulness can be intellectually virtuous, we can see why trust has a place in philosophy. I begin by recapitulating several accounts of trust to anticipate how different critics of philosophical trust understand the concept. I outline a defeasible prima facie case for epistemic trust in philosophy and assess three critiques representative of concerns of trust-based philosophical belief. The first critique is a general rejection of testimonial knowledge applied to philosophy; the second critique challenges the relevance of trust for philosophy; with Huenemann, the third critique concerns epistemic authenticity—that philosophy is incompatible with trust. I find such critiques to be inconclusive at best, absent a compelling explanation of the special vice of philosophical trust. Trust can be lazy; there are vicious ways of trusting instead of reflective examination. Such concerns should not be taken as categorical injunctions against philosophical trust, but rather as guiding parameters for its virtuous practice.

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ACCOUNTS OF TRUST To appraise virtuous philosophical trust, let us begin by considering several general accounts of trust. The point is not to find one best account, nor imply that such accounts are mutually incompatible. There is overlap among them, and some fit particular contexts of epistemic dependence better than others. Nonetheless their differences mean that anti-trust criticisms gain more traction against some accounts than others. Trust as Simple Reliance All accounts considered here agree that trust is a form of reliance: when we trust, we rely in some way on those we trust. We may rely on them to complete a particular task or provide testimony. Usually we trust those we regard as reliable, but not always: we may trust, but warily, when other options are even worse. Thicker accounts of trust distinguish it as a special kind of reliance, but this first account treats trust and reliance interchangeably: to trust someone’s testimony is just to rely on their testimony. The thin analysis of epistemic trust underlies much work in the epistemology of testimony.2 Lackey notably argues that any thicker view of epistemic trust is either inadequate or adds nothing epistemologically significant to straightforward testimonial reliance.3 Trust as Affective Attitude Baier’s “Trust and Anti-trust” revived trust as a previously neglected philosophical issue.4 Trust is messy, Baier argues; it can be rational or irrational, morally decent or rotten, wanted or unwanted, or recognized or not. But what characterizes trust as more than predicting someone’s behavior is the trusting person’s reliance on the goodwill of the trusted person toward her and her object of trust. So trust is a three-place relation of entrusting: A trusts B with C such that A grants B discretion in securing C. Stronger trust enables greater discretion, and greater discretion makes the trusting person more vulnerable to betrayal, which Baier sees as a crucial difference between trust and mere reliance. If I just predict your actions and plan accordingly, then if you act otherwise I will be worse off but not betrayed. According to Baier, “One leaves others the opportunity to harm one when one trusts and also shows one’s confidence that they will not take it.”5 In trusting we make ourselves vulnerable, and yet in the best cases, this vulnerability is buttressed by rational assessments of trustworthiness. Rational trust, as Baier sees it, requires “good grounds for such confidence in another’s good will, or at least the absence of good grounds for expecting their ill will or indifference.” 6



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Jones’s analysis of trust as an affective attitude is distinct from yet still indebted to Baier. Specifically, she argues, trust is “an attitude of optimism that the good will and competence of another will extend to cover the domain of our interaction with her, together with the expectation that the trusted will be directly and favorably moved by the thought that we are counting on her.”7 Her emphasis is not on what we are entrusting, but rather when we trust: that is, trust concerning the goodwill and competence of another person in the circumstances of our interactions with them. Faulkner similarly characterizes trust in testimony as affective trust contrasted with predictive trust. In the latter, A trusts S to do something, in the sense that A knowingly expects S to do it, but doesn’t expect anything of S. But if A affectively trusts S’s testimony to proposition p, Faulker explains, A expects that S “recognizes his need to know whether p, and presumes that the speaker’s telling him that p is a response to this.”8 Trust as Encapsulated Interests Hardin agrees with Baier that “to say we trust you means we believe you have the right intentions toward us and that you are competent to do what we trust you to do,” but disagrees about what constitutes “right intentions.”9 On his view, trust concerns encapsulated interests: X judges Y trustworthy when X believes Y accounts for X’s interests as X’s interests, and vice versa. Our reasons to encapsulate one another’s interests vary. Perhaps I aim to maintain the relationship; maybe you value your reputation. But it is not enough that our interests coincide: trustworthiness on this account concerns cooperation and reciprocity for mutual benefit, where trusting parties care about the other’s interests because they are the other’s interests: “It is this fact that makes my trust more than merely expectations about your behavior.”10 Trust as Committed Ignorance The last account of trust considered here emphasizes the proper place of ignorance in trust and discretion. Townley argues that a commitment not to alleviate one’s ignorance is constitutive of trust in another. “To trust a colleague is to ‘take her word for it’ without checking up . . . the trustor’s commitment involves forbearance to seek supplementary or corroborating information, thus maintaining degrees or domains of ignorance.”11 Failing to forgo further investigation can destroy otherwise healthy trust relations by evidencing lack of genuine trust. This commitment account is an alternative to both affective accounts12 and thin accounts of trust: while Townley agrees there is a connection between betrayal and trust, she believes this

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connection is better understood as a commitment not to breach trust rather than an optimistic attitude. On any of these thicker accounts, it is possible to rely without genuinely trusting. We may find ourselves forced by circumstances to rely on those we suspect to be incompetent, careless, yet like a creaky bridge we must cross, we rely anyway. On these accounts it is also possible to withhold trust without distrusting. I might withhold trust because I cannot tell whether the conditions for rational trust hold of this person in these cases. Perhaps I am not sure whether you care for my interests as my interests; on Hardin’s account, I do not trust, but neither do I distrust you. Or I might see you are unresponsive to my dependence on you (perhaps you don’t realize anyone is relying on you); on Jones’s account, I might neither trust nor distrust you. Those we consider insincere, incompetent, dismissive of our interests or values, unmoved by the fact that we depend on them—these are the people we distrust. THE GENERAL CRITIQUE If any advice is as common as the encouragement to trust the experts, it is the urge to think for ourselves. Initially these recommendations seem at cross purposes: shall we trust the experts or think for ourselves? Can epistemic trust have a role in reason-governed inquiry? We might worry that trust is the attitude one takes instead of attending to evidence or reasons—that trusting others is a substitute for exercising our own critical faculties. This tension between trusting testimony and figuring things out for oneself is assumed in a variety of social contexts. Skeptics about expert claims, from tobacco lobbyists urging us not to defer to scientific opinion to lawyers challenging expert witness credibility, exhort their listeners to weigh evidence ‘for themselves’ rather than trust what experts say—the implication being that trust must mean foregoing justified critical assessment of what to believe. If philosophy by its nature is celebrated as constituted by reflection, the apparent tension within the notion of virtuous philosophical trust comes to the fore. So one critique of philosophical trust is a corollary of the general argument against epistemic dependence: that “men must think and know for themselves.”13 Locke famously argues, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, that “[t]he floating of other men’s opinions in our brains, makes us not one jot the more knowing, though they happen to be true.”14 To be sure, even those with Locke counsel listening to others, whether on philosophy or on other things, as others’ opinions can inspire our critical assessment or can remind us of things we might have forgotten. Others can offer reasoning and arguments that we can and should consider ourselves: otherwise, how



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could Locke publish anything? According to this general critique, we should listen to others but not believe them.15 That they offer us testimony, that they may be telling us something with implicit or explicit invitations to trust them should be totally irrelevant.16 We should give their words no more evidential merit for being testimony than had they been randomly assembled by a computer for our consideration. The general critique of testimonial knowledge is quite radical and fairly unpopular, at least when properly appreciated for its radical scope. As Adler observes, Locke’s epistemology does not easily “align with contemporary views” of knowledge and belief.17 The notion that trusting others and thinking critically must contradict puts everyone in a bind, experts and non-experts alike. Hardwig argues that experts too must frequently trust others’ testimony, even in their own fields.18 Elizabeth Fricker captures the sweepingness of the general critique: Who would really give up the fruits of the sciences including all technology, medicine, dentistry, foreign travel, as well as historical understanding and knowledge—and so on? The epistemically autonomous individual could not trust an electrician to wire her (self-built!) house for her, since she would not accept his testimony about what he was going to do, and that it would work safely; nor her doctor to prescribe medicines; nor would she try skiing because her friends (she could not have many!) told her it was fun.19

Or as Hardwig puts the point, “if I were to pursue epistemic autonomy across the board, I would succeed in holding relatively uninformed, unreliable, crude, untested, and therefore irrational beliefs.”20 Such implications of the general critique compel us to reconsider trusting other intellectuals. But how can we do this well; how can we trust virtuously? Trustworthiness is an intellectual virtue. As Craig,21 Fricker,22 and other philosophers explain, giving trustworthy testimony requires competence and conscientiousness in the formation of one’s beliefs and expression of one’s words; as Jones further explains, being trustworthy means responding well to being counted upon.23 And as trustworthiness can be virtuous in philosophy, trustfulness can be virtuous or vicious. Specifically, virtuous trustfulness in philosophy requires skillful discrimination among whom to trust (or distrust), how much to trust them, and on which subjects. One main reason to trust or distrust testimony is that one has good evidence that this speaker, in this context, is trustworthy or untrustworthy. Trust is a fallible epistemic source, to be sure; particular assessments of particular speaker trustworthiness provide listeners reasons for trust of varying strength depending on their evidence for a speaker’s care and competence in offering testimony. In this way, as useful yet fallible, testimony is similar to introspection, perception, and memory

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as epistemic sources. While epistemologists debate whether testimony is its own source or reducible to others,24 whether or not testimonial justification is evidential,25 and whether testimony generates or only transmits knowledge,26 there is wide agreement that relying on testimony has a defensible epistemic function. In addition to its contribution to knowledge and justification, trust has been valued for epistemic agency. Townley argues that being trusted can bolster one’s sense of epistemic agency.27 For example, an apprentice must develop not only the relevant skills for their craft, but also warranted confidence in their skill-knowledge, and targeted trust from a respected teacher can do wonders in bolstering this confidence. By contrast, not being trusted—being distrusted, or being treated as merely an instrument of information—can erode epistemic agency. A person whose testimonies are repeatedly doubted by peers or authorities, for example, may naturally lose confidence in their own judgments and so lose confidence in themselves as knowers. Horsburgh notes that while we often rely on others when we are confident they will come through, we sometimes rely when this is unlikely.28 Why? It may be inexperience or carelessness, but sometimes it is because we hope to foster a person’s trustworthiness. “Therapeutic” trust is predicated on the idea that a vote of confidence can move a person enough to positively affect her actions. Distrust can have an opposite effect: “each instance of distrust erects barriers to intercourse and co-operation, thereby limiting the scope—and with it the moral opportunities—of the distrusted person’s life.”29 For her part, Govier describes this trust as Gandhian, as it functions by “making an explicit appeal to the potential of a person as a reliable moral agent.”30 Such observations may especially resonate with philosophy teachers, who know well how our expressed attitudes of trust, distrust, or even neutrality toward our students’ ideas and interpretations positively or negatively impact their senses of themselves, as knowers, as agents capable of doing philosophy rather than just passively receiving it. Also therapeutic is that, in cultivating trust, we come to “realize a conception of ourselves.”31 I may wish to become a more trusting person (or avoid becoming a misanthrope) and so adopt a trusting attitude for that purpose. Virtuous trustfulness is neither sweeping nor irrevocable: we need not trust just anyone or always whether in philosophy or other domains. But our general reasons underwriting epistemic trust provide a defeasible warrant for epistemic trust in philosophy, as in other domains, absent a compelling critique of philosophy specifically: that is, we begin with a prima facie case for philosophical trust. If a diagnosis for the vice of philosophical trust is to be established, it must turn on something more specific to philosophical inquiry. My worry is that a general critique of epistemic trust might be leveraged opportunistically or selectively, applied against philosophical trust while



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ignored in other areas of our lives. To the extent that we happily allow ourselves to organize our knowledge in many practical and scholarly domains of knowledge around reflective, careful, revocable trust in others’ testimony, principled opposition to trust in philosophy ought not be grounded in general skepticism about the epistemic significance of others’ opinions floating in our brains. The requisite hesitancy must be primed and targeted. THE IRRELEVANCE CRITIQUE A second critique against philosophical trust challenges the relevance of trust specifically for philosophy. This irrelevance critique is narrower in scope than the general critique: it admits that eschewing trust can be practically and intellectually disastrous in other domains of inquiry while challenging the necessity of trust for philosophy in particular. For example, we are invited to consider how standard citation styles are importantly different in philosophical and scientific publications; we are reminded that in philosophy our emphasis tends to be on clear, accessible, and assessable arguments rather than on detailed or complicated empirical research results. The irrelevance critique captures the suspicion that we should not need to trust others to know philosophical truths, and furthermore, that we cannot truly know them without being able to articulate our reasons—in which case our reasons should be shared and evaluated individually, without any need for epistemic trust. I agree that interpersonal philosophizing can be bracing and intellectually exhilarating precisely because we need not completely ‘take another’s word for it’; we can engage each other in dialogue. As speakers we too benefit from others’ critical engagement rather than passive acceptance of our ideas. But let’s not conflate the value of philosophical dialogue with the irrelevance of philosophical trust. For one thing, other people’s intuitions and reflections provide valuable contrast or support for one’s own intuitions and reflections, and vice versa. Discovering reflective disagreement on philosophical issues can be intellectually exciting precisely because we extend trust to ourselves and others: it gives us reason to keep searching, to keep talking, to reflect further and ward against epistemic arrogance.32 The irrelevance critique seems to presume that each of us can assess the merits of philosophical reasoning independently. Initially this is more plausible than the general critique, which impugns cognitive division of labor into historical, scientific, and other empirical matters. But the irrelevance critique requires a clear demarcation between the philosophy conceived as non-empirical and the empirical content bound up with the philosophy. The presumption that an empirical/philosophical demarcation can be found in

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philosophy of science, ancient philosophy and other history of philosophy, moral psychology, philosophy of mind, or environmental, medical, and practical ethics is highly questionable. Even for those aspects of philosophy that each of us could conceivably evaluate on our own without extending trust, we may still struggle. For example, a proof is set before me, yet I don’t “get it.” Must I continue in my attempted solitary evaluation of this proof; should I maintain my independent judgment against overwhelming testimony? Consider an undergraduate logic student unmoved by Russell’s devastating counterexample for Frege. In principle the student may not need to trust others to appreciate his misjudgment, but in practice, others’ testimonies to the value of Russell’s counterexample might be the very thing that moves him to question himself. My final reservation about the irrelevance critique is that it rules out the possibility of situated knowledge in philosophy. Standpoint epistemologists argue that one’s social situation can significantly impact one’s experiences, biases, and cognitive skill development, which can weaken or strengthen our first-personal epistemic privilege on specific domains of knowledge.33 A standpoint is a way of perceiving and interacting with the world; it is not an automatic perspective, but developed via critical reflection on one’s experiences. We might worry that situated knowledge entails a pernicious relativism, that people occupying different social locations are unable to share knowledge; and yet virtuous epistemic trust can be a powerful resource to address this concern. Exclusively reflecting from our own experiences yields only limited critical insight without listening respectfully and sometimes trustfully to the testimony of those differently situated.34 The presumption that we never need to trust others’ opinions for philosophy, I worry, too quickly disregards the social-epistemic value of trust concerning situated knowledge. THE INAUTHENTICITY CRITIQUE Huenemann’s anti-trust theses take up the issues of expert epistemic interdependence and philosophical authenticity. True expertise is incompatible with trusting in one’s field of expertise, he says. Specifically, “if we hold you to have expert knowledge about X, we presume that your knowledge of X goes beyond your intellectual trust in others . . . if you are an expert, you should not merely trust others’ intellectual authority, and you should know the central and important items in your domain of expertise for yourself.”35 Here Huenemann describes a physicist whose work crucially uses mathematics developed by others. Even if she knows a lot of math and uses it skillfully in her work, this physicist does not have real mathematical expertise, because her mathematical



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knowledge is trust-based. Because she is not an expert in mathematics, her lack of mathematical expertise is perfectly fine, Huenemann notes; but as a physicist, her physics expertise requires physics knowledge for herself. Furthermore, Huenemann argues, there are some domains in which no one should trust, domains in which all of us should seek the kind of epistemic self-sufficiency he prescribes for experts. Philosophy is one such domain. When Huenemann says that in domains like philosophy one should not trust others’ intellectual authority, he means that the justification for our beliefs in these domains should not be based on epistemic trust. Instead, we are urged to achieve knowledge for ourselves. Philosophical beliefs are so central to our lives and our identities, Heuenmann says, that trust is inappropriate and even inauthentic for such beliefs; to believe something philosophical based on trust is to give up. Succinctly, the reason we should not trust with regards to philosophy is that “it is our job, as human beings, to figure these things out for ourselves.”36 Central to Huenemann’s anti-trust position is the distinction between knowing for oneself and knowing via trust. No matter how reliable she may be, a person with many true beliefs and knowledge based on trust cannot thereby be an expert, no matter the domain of inquiry; her trust-based philosophical knowledge is knowledge, but it is nonetheless epistemically suspect. Such a person has “given up” on philosophy and an examined life, Huenemann says, owing to how her beliefs are justified. He describes knowing for oneself as when one’s “cognitive capacities are importantly autonomous—that is, which are not justified reliably upon because of trust in others” while “knowledge through intellectual trust, on the other hand, bypasses these capacities in some significant ways.”37 Autonomous capacities include our basic logical and mathematical capacities as well as rudimentary abilities to interpret our individual experiences. Here we might observe, however, that applying autonomous cognitive capacities is at most necessary for knowledge “for oneself” but not sufficient, as trust in others’ testimony can involve these capacities as well. In making a decision to trust another’s opinion because she is reasonably believed to be trustworthy, a trusting believer might engage in fairly sophisticated rational deliberation. Huenemann acknowledges this point, and responds: Yet still there is a difference, for the very point of placing intellectual trust in others is so that we do not have to take on the laborious task of coming to know the same truth for ourselves. Look at it this way: if knowing X through intellectual trust employed our capacities in the very same way that knowing X for ourselves does, then there would be little advantage in placing intellectual trust in others—which clearly there is.38

But this response equivocates on the phrase “in the very same way.” Cognitive capacities can be exercised in the same way without giving the same output,

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as when two people use an algorithm to solve different arithmetic problems, or when one person watches a full movie and another leaves halfway through. These people employ their capacities the same way in some sense, in some sense not. I posit that the difference between trust and independence is not the cognitive capacities used, but particular perceptions, inferences, and observations made. To prompt assent to his anti-trust position, Huenemann presents two thought experiments: Follower & Searcher and The Pill. In the first, we are invited to consider contrasting cases of Follower who knows through trust and Searcher who knows for himself. Follower subscribes to authority figures’ testimony and “never once questions it” while Searcher “reasons through the evidence and arguments and would be perfectly willing to reject the big story if her reasoning required her to.”39 We are urged to find Searcher’s intellectual life the better one, even if they believe the same things. In fact, Huenemann argues, Searcher’s life is better even if neither is epistemically autonomous: consider a variation on the Searcher-Follower story, in which unbeknownst to them an evil genius exercises tight cognitive control over both. Neither is really autonomous, yet as Huenemann sees it one of them exhibits admirable intellectual virtue lacking in the other. Follower has given up; Searcher has epistemic authenticity. Note that as constructed Follower & Searcher is predicated on the assumption that extending intellectual trust like Follower precludes revoking trust or revisiting trust-based beliefs given countervailing evidence. Irrevocable epistemic trust would indeed be intellectually vicious for matters of philosophy and elsewhere too. Note also that Huenemann assumes that epistemic trust cannot be a reason-governed mechanism for belief-formation. Both presumptions are far from universally affirmed; they conflict with common-sense intuitions and with multiple accounts of trust. Now consider the Pill. We are invited to imagine a drug known to produce an accurate, psychologically persistent belief that a particular philosophical proposition is false only if that proposition is false. Assume, for example, that there is no God: when taken, the Pill would cause a user to firmly believe that the proposition “God exists” is false. (The Pill has no effect on true beliefs, but a user could simply infer from the lack of negative psychological effect coinciding with a particular philosophical proposition that the proposition must therefore be true.) The Pill does not give reasons why a false proposition is false; it only produces a psychologically persistent and (by hypothesis) reliable belief that the proposition is false. So should intellectually virtuous people refuse to take the Pill? Huenemann’s intuition is affirmative: we should stand firm. He invites those who agree to thereby recognize that the value of epistemic authenticity can trump even the value of true belief.



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Note that the Pill does not stop further inquiry into the underlying reason why a proposition is false. It just says “false!” Here the thought experiment provides a good analogy to trust without begging the question, without assuming that philosophical trust must obstruct further exploration via other means into the truth. Yet this similarity also undercuts the intended force of the Pill: why not take it? Would it really be giving up, since we can still explore underlying philosophical explanations should we so choose? Let’s consider a parallel scenario where hypothesis H has an implication I, and the implication has been shown false. We may reject H even if the explanation why it’s false is not yet totally clear. For example, H = “Mitt Romney wins the US presidential election in November 2012” and I = “Paul Ryan wins the US vice presidential election in November 2012.” Knowing I is false is enough to know H is false, yet knowing I is false does not fully explain why H is false. We might like to know more, but we’d be foolish to dismiss I’s falsity as irrelevant to H just because it does not tell us everything we would like to know. Testimony may not yield sufficient, satisfying philosophical explanations, yet still provide reasons to believe. Consider again Huenemann’s contention that if one’s knowledge is based on intellectual trust in others, those people are the real experts. As Hardwig reminds us, being an expert is compatible with trusted others also being experts.40 It is furthermore possible that trusted testifiers each know specific things on their own while their interdependence allows each to muster comprehensive knowledge of the field. A philosopher may be no less an expert because her knowledge rests on epistemic trust. Consider an expert on Stoic ethics (call her Julia) whose knowledge of ancient Stoicism relies on commentaries from Cicero and other contemporaries. By historical circumstance Julia has no access to primary sources from actual Stoics. Yet if archeologists unearth parchments written, they might be mutually interdependent with Julia in assessing the writings therein as consistent with Stoicism. Julia does not merely parrot Cicero et al.; it is even conceivable that Julia’s understanding of Stoicism surpasses their understanding, as she grasps subtle interconnections between and justifications of things that Cicero and others dutifully report. It will not do to insist that Julia is neither an expert nor epistemically authentic nor to pretend that she avoids epistemic trust in her expertise. She knows Stoicism well and her knowledge rests in her trust in reports from Cicero and others. While they are evocative, Huenemann’s examples of the trusting physicist, Searcher-Follower, and the Pill fail to establish his thesis against philosophical trust. Why trustfulness in philosophy is vicious rather than virtuous, how it circumvents cognitive capacities and reasoning abilities, why it must contradict

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epistemic responsibility or authenticity is unclear unless we presume that epistemic dependence must be antithetical to critical thinking. Now for his purposes, Huenemann assumes only a thin notion of trust in philosophers as relying on testimony in one’s basis for belief, but we might envision an authenticity critique of thicker accounts of epistemic trust. Is it inauthentic to take an affective attitude toward those whose philosophical testimony I trust? Must philosophical testimony fail to meet trustworthiness criteria for thicker accounts of trust? Philosophical scholarship does not always have a clearly identified audience. I do not know who exactly will read this essay, as Plato could not have known the extent of his readership. Plato clearly did not have an attitude of goodwill toward me specifically; he could not have identified me among all trusting readers. But we can make sense of goodwill for readers in a more open-ended way. I trust Plato inappropriately if I take him to have goodwill or conscientious responsiveness to specific facts about me, yet I might trust sensibly in his goodwill or responsiveness toward a generic as-yet undetermined testimonial audience of which I have become part. This is a more modest affective trust: is it still more than is philosophically proper? Should we withhold affective attitude in philosophers as a shifty-eyed bunch? Socrates in the Meno is not especially trustworthy in this sense: his (and Meno’s) words are not given in response to their conscientious recognition of readers’ epistemic expectations, but serve the author’s purposes. I encourage my students, for example, not to uncritically accept the claim in the Apology that the oracle of Delphi has deemed no man wiser than Socrates. After all, this praise is transmitted by Socrates himself, secondhand and without eyewitness corroboration, as part of a legal defense (that is, not necessarily the historical defense, but rather as Plato seeks to present it). The rhetorical layers affect the epistemic significance of the testimony to Socrates’s wisdom in intriguing and unusual fashion. As rhetorical devices, the characters in Hume’s Dialogue Concerning Natural Religion have no goodwill toward me. We can sensibly ask whether Hume and Plato should be trusted even as their characters cannot. Indeed, sometimes philosophers deliberately adopt rhetorical stances that do not merit our epistemic trust in a thick sense. I have no confidence that a philosophical Dadaist and gadfly like Feyerabend can be trusted, for example: he may be inclined to shirk his readers’ expectations of responsiveness.41 Yet these examples show how atypical this rhetorical pose is for philosophical testimony. In virtuous, trustful receipt of philosophical testimony, our challenge is to identify unusual cases of unreliable narrators; the lesson for virtuous listening is not to refrain from philosophical trust entirely, but rather to develop our sensitivity to the presence of untrustworthy (albeit intellectually stimulating) philosophical texts.



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We encounter the ancient imperative to know oneself in Plato’s Apology and other corroborating sources. I have denied that trust must contradict selfknowledge, but what about trusting as committed ignorance? How could forgoing further inquiry on philosophical issues one does not yet fully understand not mean giving up? Yet Townley’s ignorance account of trust would seem to do that. Should we praise Follower for deliberately abdicating independent philosophical investigation, on the grounds that trust requires it? This seems pretty discouraging, even anti-philosophical; yet Townley’s account extended to philosophical trust will emphasize the broader social-epistemic value of committed ignorance. In refraining from further inquiry, we might bolster the epistemic agency of those in whom we trust, and furthermore, bolster trust relationships that undergird our epistemic communities. These benefits may be worth the loss of corroborating evidence or further insight required by trustful ignorance. I would also argue that an ignorance account of trust can admit of more or less demanding interpretations. The more demanding version prohibits any further investigation or corroboration concerning the matter of trust; the less demanding version specifies that too much additional inquiry shows a lack of genuine trust. The degree of discretion in trust differs between these two interpretations of trustful ignorance. The latter interpretation seems more plausible given human fallibility. Consider a story. Riley trusts her spouse Shannon with many things, including balancing their checkbook. If Riley occasionally checks Shannon’s checkbook arithmetic, does she not genuinely trust her spouse? She may simply realize that Shannon like Riley herself and everyone else is fallible and so makes mistakes; double-checking is a prudent practice. She still trusts Shannon, not absolutely but with as much discretion as anyone (including Riley herself) should be granted here. Now if Riley finds herself checking Shannon’s math more often than she would for someone else, given similar stakes, in similar circumstances, then her trust is doubtful. Philosophical testimonies likewise need not require granting absolute or permanent discretion over one’s philosophical beliefs: trustworthy yet fallible people offering philosophical testimony need not demand such committed ignorance. We can meaningfully trust each other and yet continue searching, as long as we refrain from searching too quickly or too much, compared to how we would trust another person similarly situated or compared to how we would want to be trusted ourselves. LIMITS ON PHILOSOPHICAL TRUST I have defended the place of intellectual trust in philosophy, but I hasten to add that withholding trust in philosophical testimony may be an intellectually

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virtuous decision. Virtuous epistemic trustfulness is neither sweeping nor irrevocable: we should not trust just anyone in philosophical and other intellectual inquiries. Necessary for virtuous trustfulness is a reflective sensitivity to evidence of trustworthiness, or to use Miranda Fricker’s terms, of indicator properties of speakers’ competence in belief formation and trustworthiness in their testimony.42 We can get lucky in extending trust and distrust, but epistemic luck alone is insufficient for intellectual virtue. Developing this reliable sensitivity is a social-epistemic challenge for many domains of knowledge, but especially for philosophy, where reasonable disagreements over fundamental issues persist for centuries.43 Prudence sometimes advises withholding epistemic trust on philosophical issues for which evidence of trustworthiness is scant. Elsewhere, where evidence of trustworthiness is overly abundant, we must guard against extending too much trust in any particular source among comparable conflicting testimonies on philosophical issues. Another reason to withhold philosophical trust appeals to epistemic division of labor in which different individuals or subgroups in an epistemic community work independently on different things or employ different approaches toward solving a common problem.44 The underlying assumption is not that others are untrustworthy in their testimony, but rather that epistemic independence will serve our collective epistemic practice more effectively. For example, consider double-blind tests of pharmaceutical products, in which strict division of labor prevents participants and some researchers from knowing which participants are members of test vs. control groups, so as to avoid biasing effects. We might also consider collaborating research teams that agree to pursue different research methods and share results afterwards, thus enabling comprehensiveness while avoiding evidential cross-pollination. Strict epistemic divisions of labor are not as common in philosophical investigations than in natural or social sciences, to be sure. Yet whatever the relative value of this sort of approach for various social-epistemic circumstances, its overall efficacy is itself predicated on a reputable role for trust. We can divide our labor and thereby increase our cognitive resources, after all, precisely because those members of our epistemic community pursuing one line of inquiry can be trusted to do so in our stead, while we likewise act on their behalf for our part. Each of us trusts the collective process rather than pursuing all potential avenues of investigation on our own. We can make a limited case for refraining from philosophical trust to foster knowledge and justification, promote someone’s epistemic trustworthiness, or develop epistemic agency. There may be role-specific reasons for some people to refrain from trust in their philosophical beliefs without categorically rejecting all philosophical trust. Some people may be warranted in refraining from trusting others to increase self-trust, for example. Perhaps I have too



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little intellectual self-respect, so I should attempt self-reliance as a temporary measure. If therapeutic trust is trust extended to increase someone’s trustworthiness, we might describe therapeutic distrust as trust withheld to increase the trustworthiness of one not trusted. Consider an overly privileged person given too much credibility or intellectual authority, so that “this causes him to develop such an epistemic arrogance that a range of epistemic virtues are put out of his reach, rendering him close-minded, dogmatic, blithely impervious to criticism, and so on.”45 Mill’s criticism of sexual inequality, in addition to depriving women of opportunities to develop and exercise their talents, was that it produces profound epistemic limitations in men who develop inflated senses of their intellectual abilities.46 Trust judiciously withheld may foster a privileged person’s epistemic humility and long-term epistemic trustworthiness. As with the argument from self-trust, this argument from therapeutic distrust at best warrants a bounded injunction against philosophical trust. Even if compelling, these limits on philosophical trust do not justify general rejection of intellectual trust as vicious. Decisions to withhold trust in philosophy concern crucially contingent social-epistemic details rather than the nature of philosophical trust itself. Upon reflection we can see the challenges for virtuous trustfulness and appreciate why trust does not always come easy, still we need not, and perhaps ought not, reject philosophical trust as intellectually vicious. FINAL REMARKS It is appealing to think that all of us should know some things “for ourselves” and that philosophical truths are among such things; yet it is not obvious why intellectually virtuous philosophical inquiry must forgo any extension of epistemic trust. We have seen reasons why trust in philosophical testimony is avoided, given epistemic challenges involved in discerning whom, when, and how much to trust. And if epistemic trust implies belief unaffected by countervailing evidence, if trusting testimony means forswearing further inquiry altogether, then philosophical trust would indeed be intellectually debilitating; it would sacrifice the examined life many of us value. I have argued that philosophical trust need not demand this sacrifice. Several accounts of trust easily avoid this issue, with only Townley’s ignorance-based account inviting an interpretation of epistemic trust as an intellectual sacrifice. Even then, a less demanding interpretation of Townley’s account mitigates this problem. Thus I urge us to recognize trustfulness and trustworthiness as intellectual virtues, neither inimical to philosophy nor easily achieved, but honed through our reflective individual contributions to collective philosophical inquiry.

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NOTES 1.  C. Huenemann, “Why Not to Trust Other Philosophers,” American Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2004): 249–58. 2. Thin accounts of trust as epistemic reliance can also be seen in J. Hardwig, “The Role of Trust in Knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy 88, no. 12 (1991): 693–720; J. Adler, “Testimony, Trust, Knowing,” Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994): 264–75; E. Fricker, “Telling and Trusting: Reductionism and Anti-Reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony,” Mind 104 (1996): 393–411; A. Goldman, “Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63, no. 1 (2001): 85–110; R. Foley, Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); E. Fricker, “Trusting Others in the Sciences,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33 (2002): 373–83; Charles Huenemann, “Why Not to Trust Other Philosophers,” American Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2004): 249–58; and R. Foley, “Universal Intellectual Trust,” Episteme 2, no. 1 (2005): 5–11. 3.  J. Lackey, Learning from Words (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 4.  Annette Baier, “Trust and Anti-Trust,” Ethics 96 (1986): 231–60. 5.  Baier, “Trust and Anti-Trust,” 235. 6. Ibid. 7.  K. Jones, “Trust as an Affective Attitude,” Ethics 107 (1996): 4. 8.  P. Faulkner, “Telling and Trusting,” Mind 116 (2007): 888. 9.  R. Hardin, Trust (New York: Polity Press, 2006), 17. 10.  R. Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002), 3. 11. C. Townley, “Towards a Revaluation of Ignorance,” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 41. 12.  Jones, “Trust as an Affective Attitude”; see also B. Lahno, “On the Emotional Character of Trust,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 4, no. 2 (2001): 171–89. 13.  J. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 58. 14. Locke, An Essay Concerning, 58. 15.  G. E. M. Anscombe, “What Is It to Believe Someone?” in Rationality and Religious Belief, edited by C. Delaney (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979). 16.  E. Hinchman, “Telling as Inviting to Trust,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70, no. 3 (2005): 562–87. 17.  J. Adler, “Epistemological Problems of Testimony,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2013 edition, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/ entries/testimony-episprob. 18.  J. Hardwig, “Epistemic Dependence,” Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 7 (1985): 335–49 and Hardwig, “The Role of Trust in Knowledge.” 19.  E. Fricker, “Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy,” In The Epistemology of Testimony, edited by J. Lackey and E. Sosa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 238. 20.  Hardwig, “Epistemic Dependence,” 340.



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21.  E. Craig, Knowledge and the State of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 22.  M. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 23.  K. Jones, “Trustworthiness,” Ethics 123, no. 1 (2012): 61–85. 24. J. Lackey, “It Takes Two to Tango: Beyond Reductionism and NonReductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony,” in The Epistemology of Testimony, edited by J. Lackey and E. Sosa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 225–51. 25. R. Moran, “Getting Told and Being Believed,” Philosopher’s Imprint 5 (2005): 1–29. 26.  P. Graham, “Transferring Knowledge,” Nous 34 (2000): 131–52 and Lackey, Learning from Words. 27.  C. Townley, A Defense of Ignorance (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011). 28.  H. J. N. Horsburgh, “The Ethics of Trust,” Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1960): 343–54. 29.  Horsburgh, “The Ethics of Trust,” 350. 30.  T. Govier, Dilemmas of Trust (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998), 172. 31.  Jones, “Trust as an Affective Attitude,” 23. 32. For more on trust in self and others, and on reasonable disagreement, see Foley, “Universal Intellectual Trust” and R. Feldman, “Epistemological Puzzles About Disagreement,” In Epistemology Futures, edited by S. Hetherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 33.  D. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges” and A. Wylie, “Why Standpoint Matters,” both in The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reading, edited by S. Harding, 81–102, 339–52 (New York: Routledge, 2004). 34. For more on social knowledge across epistemic difference, see L. Bergin, “Testimony, Epistemic Difference, and Privilege,” Social Epistemology 16, no. 3 (2002): 197–213 and L. May, “A Progressive Male Standpoint,” In Men Doing Feminism, edited by T. Digby (London: Routledge, 1998), 337–54. 35.  Huenemann, “Why Not to Trust,” 250. 36.  Huenemann, “Why Not to Trust,” 255. 37.  Huenemann, “Why Not to Trust,” 242. 38.  Huenemann, “Why Not to Trust,” 252. 39.  Huenemann, “Why Not to Trust,” 253. 40. Hardwig, “Epistemic Dependence” and Hardwig, “The Role of Trust in Knowledge.” 41.  P. Feyerabend, Against Method (New York: New Left Books, 1975). 42.  M. Fricker, “Rational Authority and Social Power: Towards a Truly Social Epistemology,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98, no. 2 (1998): 162–63. 43.  A. Goldman, Knowledge in a Social World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Goldman, “Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?”; and C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992). 44. P. Kitcher, The Advancement of Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993) and P. Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

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45. Fricker, Epistemic Injustice. 46.  J. S. Mill, “The Subjection of Women,” in Essays on Sex Equality, edited by A. Rossi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adler, J. “Testimony, Trust, Knowing.” Journal of Philosophy 91 (1994): 264–75. ———. “Epistemological Problems of Testimony.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Spring 2013 edition. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/ testimony-episprob. Anscombe, G. E. M. “What Is It to Believe Someone?” In Rationality and Religious Belief, edited by C. Delaney, 141–51. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979. Baier, Annette. “Trust and Anti-trust.” Ethics 96 (1986): 231–60. Bergin, L. “Testimony, Epistemic Difference, and Privilege.” Social Epistemology 16, no. 3 (2002): 197–213. Coady, C. A. J. Testimony: A Philosophical Study. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992. Coady, D. What to Believe Now. Malden MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Craig, E. Knowledge and The State of Nature: An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990. Faulkner, P. “The Social Character of Testimonial Knowledge.” Journal of Philosophy 97 (2000): 581–601. ———. “Telling and Trusting.” Mind 116 (2007): 875–902. Feldman, R. “Epistemological Puzzles About Disagreement.” In Epistemology Futures, edited by S. Hetherington, 216–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Feyerabend, P. Against Method. New York: New Left Books, 1975. Foley, R. Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. “Universal Intellectual Trust.” Episteme 2, no. 1 (2005): 5–11. Fricker, E. “Telling and Trusting: Reductionism and Anti-reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony.” Mind 104 (1996): 393–411. ———. “Trusting Others in the Sciences.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 33 (2002): 373–83. ———. “Testimony and Epistemic Autonomy.” In The Epistemology of Testimony, edited by J. Lackey and E. Sosa, 225–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Fricker, M. “Rational Authority and Social Power: Towards a Truly Social Epistemology.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 98, no. 2 (1998): 159–77. ———. Epistemic Injustice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Goldman, A. Knowledge in a Social World. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. ———. “Experts: Which Ones Should You Trust?” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 63, no. 1 (2001): 85–110. Govier, T. Social Trust and Human Communities. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997. ———. Dilemmas of Trust. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1998.



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Graham, P. “Transferring Knowledge.” Nous 34 (2000): 131–52. Haraway, D. 2004. “Situated Knowledges.” In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reading, edited by S. Harding, 81–102. New York: Routledge, 2004. Hardin, R. Trust and Trustworthiness. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2002. ——. Trust. New York: Polity Press, 2006. Harding, S., ed. The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reading. New York: Routledge, 2004. ———. “Rethinking Standpoint Epistemology.” In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reading, edited by S. Harding, 127–40. New York: Routledge, 2004. Hardwig, J. “Epistemic Dependence.” Journal of Philosophy 82, no. 7 (1985): 335–49. ———. “The Role of Trust in Knowledge.” Journal of Philosophy 88, no. 12 (1991): 693–720. Hinchman, E. “Telling as Inviting to Trust.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 70, no. 3 (2005): 562–87. Horsburgh, H. J. N. “The Ethics of Trust.” Philosophical Quarterly 10 (1960): 343–54. Huenemann, C. “Why Not to Trust Other Philosophers.” American Philosophical Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2004): 249–58. Jones, K. “Trust as an Affective Attitude.” Ethics 107 (1996): 4–25. ———. “Trustworthiness.” Ethics 123, no. 1 (2012): 61–85. Kitcher, P. The Advancement of Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. ———. Science, Truth, and Democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Lackey, J. “It Takes Two to Tango: Beyond Reductionism and Non-Reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony.” In The Epistemology of Testimony, edited by J. Lackey and E. Sosa, 225–51. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. Learning from Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Lackey, J., and E. Sosa, eds. The Epistemology of Testimony. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. Lahno, B. “On the Emotional Character of Trust.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 4, no. 2 (2001): 171–89. Locke, J. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961. May, L. “A Progressive Male Standpoint.” In Men Doing Feminism, edited by T. Digby, 337–54. London: Routledge, 1998. Mill, J. S. “The Subjection of Women.” In Essays on Sex Equality, edited by A. Rossi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Moran, R. “Getting Told and Being Believed.” Philosopher’s Imprint 5 (2005): 1–29. Potter, N. N. How Can I Be Trusted? A Virtue Theory of Trustworthiness. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. Townley, C. “Towards a Revaluation of Ignorance.” Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 37–54. ———. A Defense of Ignorance. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011. Wylie, A. “Why Standpoint Matters.” In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Reading, edited by S. Harding, 339–52. New York: Routledge, 2004. Zagzebski, L. “Epistemic Trust.” Philosophy in the Contemporary World 10, no. 2 (2003): 113–17.

Chapter Fourteen

Ignorance and Hope Katherine Johnson

The most important product of knowledge is ignorance. —David Gross (2004 Nobel Prize winner)

Is there anything beneficial about being ignorant? My husband and I recently endured our first round of IVF. It was unsuccessful. As we proceeded through every step (shut-down, start-up, retrieval, fertilization, biopsy, transfer), we had no idea what to expect. We were motivated to believe against the odds and we chose to do so. On day 3, seventy-two hours after fertilization, we received a call from the clinic to inform us that our four embryos were not likely to survive to day 5 for a biopsy. The choice before us was pretty much a gamble: transfer today or wait and possibly lose the chance of having any embryos to biopsy or transfer. We opted for a day 3 transfer. Our reproductive endocrinologist (RE) warned us that the odds were not good. Nevertheless, my husband continued to proclaim that while the odds were low, there was still a chance.1 In fact, most people who heard about our plight seemed to say the same thing: don’t give up, there is still a chance. Interestingly, this led me to consider the possibility that ignorance might in some way be valuable if deliberately and carefully cultivated. Perhaps there are times when ignorance can be beneficial because without it, there is no hope and one may lose the motivation to act. If I continued to believe the evidence, then I would have believed that I probably wouldn’t have my own biological children or experience pregnancy—surely, the odds are not in my favor. And if I accepted this, then I wouldn’t have taken any further action to improve my chances because I would have believed that a 3–5 percent chance is not worth the money and hardship of undergoing further fertility treatments. However, if I choose to 243

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believe against the odds and the evidence, and this is certainly a belief that brings with it a lot more peace and contentment than the alternative (regardless of the outcomes), then I am motivated to act because a 3–5 percent chance is still a chance. Socrates believed that ignorance is in no way beneficial to flourishing and only in ignorance do we commit wrongdoings. If we had known better, we would have done the right thing. While knowledge is a virtue, ignorance is a vice. In this chapter, I attempt to show that ignorance—of a very specific sort—ought to be cultivated in what I call “against the odds” type cases. Traditional views claim that ignorance is a state that ought to be avoided and prevented since our beliefs clearly influence (and often impair) our agency. In the words of Nicholas Rescher: “Even as knowledge is power, so ignorance is impotence.”2 Contrary to the traditional view, I attempt to show that in special cases there is indeed something beneficial about ignorance. Ignorance can inspire action. More important, ignorance can inspire good action when knowledge would otherwise discourage it.3 Next, I present and examine a series of cases. These aim to illustrate the types of “against the odds” situations that I am interested in dealing with. These cases shed light on an unusual phenomenon—a situation in which an agent is doxastically incontinent and motivated to believe something beyond the evidence—even in the face of it and even though she has none in support of her chosen belief. 4 Her ignorance helps to spur and incite action. Further, I use these cases to explore the nature of doxastic incontinence and present it as a form of ignorance. I then propose a number of reasons why ignorance is neither beneficial nor valuable: (1) it is epistemically irresponsible, (2) it can lead one to become insensitive and form bad habits, and (3) it is foolish. I proceed to challenge each of these claims and show that in “against the odds” type cases, these counterarguments have no force. Willfully incontinent ignorance may not be consistent with our greater intellectual obligations and commitments—however I show that it can be an invaluable disposition to cultivate in the right situation. In conclusion, I show what makes this unusual species of ignorance good for us and conclude that it is, in fact, something of value. I argue that hope is a virtue of ignorance. IGNORANCE AS INCONTINENT BELIEF Standard accounts broadly classify ignorance as either the absence of knowledge or a kind of “not-knowing.”5 For the purposes of this discussion, I will endorse the position that a person “can only be ignorant of truth” and cannot be ignorant of a belief that is false.6 Next, by way of example, I wish to show



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that incontinent believing is a form of ignorance—in fact, it is willful ignorance. Consider the following. The Case of Kate Kate has been pregnant twice. Both times she miscarried. Now, over a year later, Kate still hasn’t gotten pregnant. She regularly takes various medications recommended by her doctors and has even started non-traditional therapies like acupuncture, yoga, and meditation in the hopes of becoming pregnant again. She and her husband have already been through four months of Clomid, three IUI procedures, and one round of IVF. None of these protocols have resulted in a pregnancy. Kate is trying to do everything in her power but, at this point, she doesn’t know what else she can do. She does not want to believe that she may have exhausted almost every possible option to achieve her goal. Rather, she chooses to believe it will happen. Kate’s belief is not based on evidence, statistics, or fact. In fact, her belief goes against the evidence—she is well informed and while she appreciates the information, she is motivated to believe otherwise. After multiple tests, her RE informed her that there is nothing medically wrong with her to explain her fertility issues. He said that the issue is likely her age and because of this along with her history, the odds of success are not in her favor. She has a 3–5 percent chance of having a successful pregnancy. Kate appreciates the information offered by her RE and recognizes the slim chance. But she keeps trying against the odds. She patently believes that she will become pregnant again and have a child. In this case, my interest is not in evaluating whether or not Kate is culpable for her ignorance.7 Even if we can blame Kate for her ignorance and speculate that it is unreasonable for her to believe as she does, I suspect that many of us would be inclined to sympathize with her reasons. What makes this case so philosophically interesting is that we do sympathize and allow Kate the luxury of what appears to be irresponsible—perhaps even irrational—believing. Why do we sympathize with Kate but not, say, a racist who appreciates (yet chooses to disregard) the evidence that shows there to be no difference in intelligence and moral status between darker-skinned and lighter-skinned persons? We think the racist is ignorant, irrational, and blameworthy for his beliefs. He has been informed about things like “mitochondrial Eve,” the fact that different races do not exist for any biologically meaningful use, and why morphological characteristics are not indicators of intelligence or moral status. Yet Kate does the same thing with regard to the evidence in this case— she appreciates it yet disregards it and believes otherwise. Nevertheless, we are sympathetic to Kate but not to the racist whose doxastic practices really aren’t that much different. Consider another case.

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The Case of Viktor Frankl Viktor Frankl was a Jewish man who was a concentration camp prisoner for three years during the Holocaust.8 Frankl endured unspeakable acts of torture for many years, lost his wife and other family members, and somehow managed to survive his ordeal. In his account of life in a concentration camp, Frankl spoke of the many obstacles he dealt with in order to survive: the lack of hygiene at the camp, the absence of a healthy diet, the demanding labor, the blatant cruelty, and the overall unsuitable conditions in which to live and work. Frankl acknowledged the low odds of survival and how the odds were not in his favor. While appreciating the evidence, he chose to believe otherwise—he chose to believe that he would eventually leave the camp alive and see his wife again. Frankl proclaimed that he must continue to believe this and not believe that he would die in the camp. Both the case of Kate and Viktor illustrate what I call “against the odds” type situations. Their chance of success in achieving their desired end (i.e., pregnancy or survival) is so low and significantly at odds with what the evidence supports. Further, they are both ignorant in a very specific way—they are willfully ignorant—they choose to believe against the evidence. More to the point, they believe incontinently.9 All of the beliefs they hold were crafted in conformity to what they desire and in opposition to the evidence indicating low odds of success. They are strongly motivated to believe in a way consistent with their desires and not according to their “better epistemic judgment.”10 John Heil claims that an incontinent believer like Kate or Viktor is one “who acknowledges the evidence, appreciates its import yet, for all that, ‘refuses’ to believe ‘what she ought to believe.’”11 According to Heil incontinent belief is when “one believes what one knows (or, at any rate, supposes) one ought (epistemically) not believe. Belief of this sort is to be distinguished both from belief founded on bad or mistaken reasoning, and from belief that is merely epistemically ill-advised.”12 As Heil shows us, Kate’s beliefs are not the product or result of bad or mistaken reasoning. She has gone out of her way to collect, evaluate, assess, and apply information. She is quite educated and informed about her situation. But, after evaluating the evidence, she is simply compelled to believe that she ought to believe that she will become pregnant and have a child. She believes against any epistemic reasons and evidence in virtue of the fact she doesn’t like the alternative—to believe in conformity to evidence that shows the low probability of success.13 Kate chooses to believe the way she does for the sake of what she so strongly desires. Believing according to her desire will only continue to fuel her desire, in effect, facilitating and spurring action.14 She can’t help but to do this. Kate does not simply believe against her



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better epistemic judgment, rather she is reflectively compelled to believe for the sake of the object of her desire. Similarly, like Kate, Viktor’s beliefs are those that he knows he ought epistemically not to believe. Nevertheless, he is unmoved by this. Even the fact that the evidence that death is likely—even imminent—is present and easily accessible does not impress him to believe in this way: When the last layers of subcutaneous fat had vanished, and we looked like skeletons disguised with skin and rags, we could watch our bodies beginning to devour themselves. The organism digested its own protein, and the muscles disappeared. Then the body had no powers of resistance left. One after another the members of the little community of our hut died. Each of us could calculate with fair accuracy whose turn would be next, and when his own would come. After many observations we knew the symptoms well, which made the correctness of our prognoses quite certain.15

The odds of survival and his desire to survive are in clear conflict. The odds don’t support his desired goal—success appears highly improbable. Nevertheless, having evaluated and considered the evidence, Viktor is moved to believe that he ought to believe that he will survive. Like Kate, he, too, cannot resist his desires and instead chooses to believe for the sake of the objects of his desire even though he is aware that doing so goes against his better epistemic judgment. Interestingly, in his book Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl tells the story of F—, a man he knew in Auschwitz. F— believed according to the evidence and suffered the corresponding loss of motivation to act: The case of F— F—, my senior block warden, a fairly well-known composer and librettist, confided in me one day: “I would like to tell you something, Doctor. I have had a strange dream. A voice told me that I could wish for something, that I should only say what I wanted to know, and all my questions would be answered. What do you think I asked? That I would like to know when the war would be over for me. You know what I mean, Doctor—for me! I wanted to know when we, when our camp, would be liberated and our sufferings come to an end.” “And when did you have this dream?” I asked. “In February, 1945,” he answered. It was then the beginning of March. “What did your dream answer?” Furtively he whispered to me, “March thirtieth.” When F— told me about his dream, he was still full of hope and convinced that the voice of his dream would be right. But as the promised day drew nearer, the war news which reached our camp made it appear very unlikely that we would be free on the promised date. On March twenty-ninth, F— suddenly

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became ill and ran a high temperature. On March thirtieth, the day the prophecy had told him that the war and suffering would be over for him, he became delirious and lost consciousness. On March thirty-first, he was dead.16

Here Frankl offers a case in which a man, having little evidence for belief other than a dream, is motivated to act toward his desires. Once his desire extinguishes, we see a change in his attitude and how his body shuts down—he has lost the motivation to believe. Is the story of F— another example of an incontinent believer? Initially, F— believes against the evidence and instead on the basis of a dream. As time passed by, he seemed to change—he went from being willfully ignorant to holding epistemically warranted beliefs.17 Heil points out that: The incontinent believer is typified by the psychoanalytic patient who has acquired what might be termed an intellectual grasp of his plight, but whose outlook evidently remains unaffected. Such a person has failed somehow to integrate his appreciation of certain facts into his overall psychological state. He continues to harbor beliefs, desires and fears that he recognizes to be at odds with his better epistemic judgment.18

The incontinent believer is one who “fails to be moved . . . as he ought to be moved.”19 Rather, like the psychoanalytic patient, the incontinent believer is unaffected by his state of affairs. He believes what he wants to believe even in the face of what he acknowledges to be “at odds with his better epistemic judgment.”20 The change in F— ’s attitude and outlook demonstrates how he has lost the impulse and drive to believe against his better epistemic judgment.21 Although Kate and Viktor appear to be models of Heil’s incontinent believer, Alfred Mele contends that Heil’s account of incontinent belief actually reflects epistemically irresponsible believing, not incontinent believing.22 He would claim that Kate and Viktor are in fact clear illustrations of incontinent believing. For Mele, two conditions must hold for incontinent belief: first, the agent must have freedom of belief (that is, a kind of control) and second, the agent is motivated by and yet incapable of restraining his desires and feelings.23 Kate and Viktor fit both of these conditions. First, they must believe freely. As Mele points out, “Full-blown incontinent action, traditionally conceived, is free action . . . [T]he freedom* of a belief during a period of time is a function of the degree and kind of control that the believer or his doxastic mechanisms had, or were capable of having, in the etiology of his holding the belief during the period in question.”24 Kate and Viktor have the requisite control over the beliefs they form in this instance. Having considered the evidence and identified the beliefs supported by it, they are reasonably reflective and freely decide to reject those beliefs and



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adopt ones that are consistent with what they desire. They both think that low odds and uncertainty is sufficient to warrant their respective beliefs—even though the odds are so low that they don’t support a reasonable estimate of success—because of their motivation to do so. Both Kate and Viktor appear to exhibit qualities of character that are manifest in their attitudes and actions. They are propelled to actively pursue the objects of their desire. Second, while clearly motivated, both Kate and Viktor are deficient in their ability to restrain their desires. Their main flaw is that they aren’t driven to do so: As incontinent action is typically conceived, the incontinent agent is defeated by motivation which opposes his better judgment. . . . To be incontinent (in the pertinent sense) is, by definition, to be deficient in one’s capacity to contain or restrain one’s desires, feelings, and the like; and incontinent “behavior,” whether actional or doxastic, is a manifestation of this deficiency, or at least of an associated imperfection.25

Kate and Viktor have both considered giving up in light of the odds. There is insufficient evidence to support the probability or likelihood of achieving their goals. Yet, the intensity of Kate’s desire to have a successful pregnancy drives her to adopt beliefs contraindicated by her RE’s assessment. The fact that the evidence is not in her favor does not sway or inspire her to believe otherwise. Similarly, the force of Viktor’s desire to live compels him to adopt beliefs that go against the likelihood of survival under such horrible conditions. Of course, their decision to believe as they do is voluntary (and not irresistible) even though they are in some way compelled by the circumstance—the choice they make to believe is one based on rational desires and autonomous life goals in that situation. Kate and Viktor think that they would be better off accepting beliefs that go against the evidence rather than those supported by it.26 Indeed, what they choose to believe is not impossible, it is statistically unlikely. For example, Frankl notes in his memoirs: I said that to the impartial the future must seem hopeless. I agreed that each of us could guess for himself how small were his chances of survival. I told them that although there was still no typhus epidemic in the camp, I estimated my own chances at about one in twenty. But I also told them that, in spite of this, I had no intention of losing hope and giving up. For no man knew what the future would bring, much less the next hour.27

Frankl’s point illuminates the nature of willfully incontinent ignorance. While appreciating the evidence, he acknowledges that his desire to believe otherwise drives him to abandon and disregard any epistemic reasons for

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belief. Viktor’s beliefs lack warrant and there is no evidence of their truth.28 Just as the incontinent agent knows what he ought not to do and desires to do it anyway, Viktor knows what he ought not to believe, yet believes it anyway. Mele points out that an agent’s “believing does not manifest incontinence if, in the agent’s (non-akratically held) opinion, his pertinent epistemic values are evaluatively overridden by nonepistemic values of his.”29 This is a crucial point to note: Viktor’s doxastic attitudes illuminate a weakness of character on his part, namely, a weakness to believe against the odds. He simply can’t motivate himself to believe what he knows he ought to believe. Viktor understands that it would be better to believe the evidence rather than the opposite but he is deficient in his power to make himself do (believe) otherwise. THE CASE AGAINST WILLFULLY CHOOSING IGNORANCE Is there something valuable in choosing ignorance? At times, Kate certainly feels better in her state of ignorance. She anticipates possibility whereas she feels misery and despair while pouring over medical facts about her body, pregnancy, and fertility. Indeed, for Kate, ignorance sounds like a preferable state to be in. Or, at least, it appears much more conducive to a happier, optimistic disposition rather than to believe that she won’t have a successful pregnancy. Kate can believe anything she wants about her reproductive potential regardless of the evidence and the facts. F— is also a case in which it seemed preferable for him to believe against the evidence because it helped to compel him to act—he (initially) did not succumb to despair or inaction. Of course, even though the seeming benefits of choosing ignorance seem understandable in these low odds cases, there are three reasons to challenge the case for doxastic incontinence and choosing willful ignorance. First, it is irresponsible to believe against the evidence even for the sake of some good, advantage, or benefit. This is characterized as epistemically irresponsible conduct on the grounds that we as believers have obligations to believe according to the evidence.30 To allow one’s intellectual commitments to be compromised for the sake of one’s desires and (non-epistemic) goals thereby undermines our doxastic habits as well as the pursuit of knowledge. To believe on the basis of non-epistemic reasons that are in opposition to epistemic reasons is inconsistent with being a responsible believer. Even so, there may be cases in which it is better to believe for non-epistemic reasons (instead of epistemic ones) in order to promote or attain some goal. Mele points out that on occasion there is “something significant to be gained by doxastic incontinence.”31 What that “something significant” is he doesn’t



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explicitly describe but suggests by way of example. Mele offers the example of Wilma, a mother who has evidence that her son, Basil, is using drugs. While the evidence is reliable and reasonably convincing, she decides for both epistemic and non-epistemic reasons that it is better to believe that he is innocent of drug use. What is “significant”—perhaps even beneficial—it seems to me, is the hopeful disposition that she cultivates. Wilma is able to maintain an optimistic outlook about her son and respond to him in positive ways. Second, to be ignorant as a result of disposing oneself to engage in incontinent believing jeopardizes what good epistemic and doxastic habits we do have. If Kate adopts habits of irresponsible believing as well as those that lead her to become insensitive to epistemic reasons for belief (and those practices are justified), then perhaps many of our epistemic practices can be (justifiably) overridden at the behest of other goals. For example, Roderick Chisholm contends that we ought to believe in a way that is conducive to our moral ends.32 Supposing for a minute that the desire to have a healthy pregnancy is a moral end, Chisholm would first argue that Kate has an intellectual obligation to believe only true beliefs and to avoid believing false ones. However, since intellectual obligations are a subspecies of moral obligation (and all moral obligations are overriding), then Kate ought to believe on the basis of what will satisfy her overriding moral duties. Chisholm’s “ethics of belief” position is dangerous. It allows for moral considerations to trump our epistemic goals and intellectual commitments.33 It also sounds irrational to suggest that one’s reason for belief (of any kind) can be outweighed by moral, prudential, or other considerations. Moreover, the type of ignorance under scrutiny here is willful ignorance. This is quite different from the everyday and ordinary kinds of ignorance that we encounter and often cultivate. Consider the case of a racist who not only believes but also acts on the basis of his all-things-considered epistemically irresponsible beliefs. To be ignorant in this way is an impairment of agency.34 What good can come of beliefs that are epistemically inferior (and patently false) like those of the racist? In contrast, Kate’s beliefs—while epistemically inferior as well (yet not patently false, only statistically unlikely)—promote optimism and hope and help to spur action (as opposed to inaction). The racist’s beliefs, which also spur action, cause harm. Only in “against the odds” type cases— like Kate and Viktor—is such ignorance valuable (and permissible). Third, ignorance can lead us to act foolishly and irresponsibly. Our beliefs influence and inform our actions and it is (morally) irresponsible to act upon the basis of beliefs that are ill-formed and ill-considered, especially those that result in wrongful acts. One’s ignorance can be both culpable and non-culpable.35 As an excusing condition for moral responsibility, non-culpable ignorance is exculpatory. However, the willful ignorance that Kate demonstrates is ignorance

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for which she is culpable—thus, all bad acts fueled by those beliefs are those that Kate is morally blameworthy for. Thus, we ought not to permit or allow (or excuse) practices that could lead her to act foolishly. However, while it is often argued that culpable ignorance is ignorance that ought to be avoided or prevented, Kate’s ignorance in this case can help to promote her agency rather than hinder it. Kate’s intentional ignorance actually helps to promote her ability to act as an autonomous agent and in ways that are consistent with her life plans and goals.36 If Kate believes in accord with the evidence that her chances of having a successful pregnancy are very low, she probably won’t perform actions that aim to attain her and her husband’s goal because it would seem futile.37 This is an impediment to agency. Further, it would be irrational for her to act against her beliefs. It is (all things considered) rational for Kate to act on the basis of her beliefs; however, the concern is with the beliefs Kate has. For example, are they reasonable, rational, and responsible?38 Yet, one of the problems with this position is that if false belief—namely, the kind of false belief that qualifies as incontinent ignorance—is conducive to the attainment of moral ends, we could believe anything we wanted to and it wouldn’t matter so long as we achieved the end. This seems incompatible with our basic and common sense moral expectations. In response, Rescher offers an interesting point to challenge this objection. He points out that the “status of knowledge in point of positivity/negativity depends not so much on the information as such but on what is done with it.”39 Even though our beliefs inform and influence action, perhaps we ought not to be too hasty in claiming that ignorance is a vice because it is sometimes the cause of morally bad (or wrong) acts. In fact, if the goal itself is morally commendable (or permissible), then perhaps ignorance may be useful to bring it about.40 This is certainly not uncommon when it comes to medical matters and health complications. For Kate, her health plays a very powerful role in how she chooses to believe, respond to, and act upon, the information. It is better for Kate to believe that she will become pregnant simply because these beliefs make life more pleasant and bearable. People with serious health issues are better off even if such an imperative flies in the face of our ordinary doxastic practices.41

HOPE AS A VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE In her article “The Virtues of Ignorance,” Julia Driver argues against the claim that “No virtue is constituted by, or based upon, ignorance.”42 She contends that there are indeed virtues of ignorance that can be beneficial to a person. Driver points out that the basis for certain virtues like modesty and blind charity is ignorance—thus, to be virtuous does not require that one



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possess knowledge.43 In fact, if we are not ignorant we could not be virtuous in these ways.44 I propose that, like modesty and blind charity, hope is also a virtue of ignorance. Hope, as a virtue, correlates to a special kind of moral obligation, namely, an obligation driven by one’s desires that fuel the motivation to willfully believe incontinently—provided that such beliefs promote the disposition toward hopefulness in one’s attitude and actions.45 Driver’s assertions seem to echo my position that there is something beneficial and virtuous about being ignorant like the way that Kate and Viktor are. If they are not willfully ignorant, they probably would not be hopeful. Their weakness of character is displayed in their doxastic practices—they are deficient in believing what they know they ought not to believe but they believe it anyway. In “against the odds” type cases, a disposition to hope in the face of such low odds requires willfully incontinent ignorance. The basic structure of hope helps to explain how and why Kate and Viktor willfully choose to be doxastically incontinent. Further, this structure illuminates why such an apparent defect is actually beneficial to one’s well-being—hope is a virtuous character disposition. As a virtue, hope is a disposition of character found manifest in one’s attitude and in action. Hope propels us to continue to pursue our desires and is the fuel that moves us to act. In extreme “against the odds” type cases, Kate or Viktor cannot be persons disposed to hope if they believe according to the evidence. In doing so, their beliefs would not fuel action conducive to attaining the hoped-for object, namely, the object of their desire. (Rather, they would be like the case of F—.) By evaluating their doxastic conduct in light of flourishing rather than in line with epistemic standards and norms, it no longer appears that this seeming epistemic vice is actually a vice after all. Rather, we say that they are hopeful. As persons of hope, they see and choose possibility. The hopeful person is motivated by the chance of possibility even in the face of the likelihood of impossibility and apparent low odds. The hopeful person says “I grant you the chance is only one in a thousand, but it is possible!” whereas the person who lacks hope says “I grant you it is possible, but the chance is only one in a thousand!”46 Hope involves a kind of internal and psychological thriving. It is a chosen activity that leads one to act in ways that are positive and that promote living well and flourishing. By definition, hope typically refers to “a feeling, a wish, or an optimistic disposition toward the future.”47 Hope consists of two dimensions: first, “the good hoped for” and second, “the means that makes its attainment possible.”48 According to Adrienne Martin, hope has the following structure: [T]o hope for an outcome is to desire (be attracted to) it, to assign a probability somewhere between 0 and 1 to it, and to judge that there is sufficient reasons to engage in certain feelings and activities directed toward it. . . . Hope is thus

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a distinctive way of exercising one’s rational agency. It is a way of making an attractive outcome a part of one’s mental, emotional, and planning activities, without setting out to bring it about. This is why I say hope is a distinctive way of incorporating one’s attraction to an outcome into one’s agency.49

For hope to be present, it must have an object and manifest itself in tangible activities—whether it is optimism in terms of attitude and disposition or action in pursuit of the object. Hope, however, is a direct reaction to and cultivated disposition toward situations that appear to limit one’s opportunity to achieve the hoped-for, the object of one’s desire. Hope requires a rejection of probability and instead, demands that we look differently at the odds. This, to me, appears to be incontinent believing and a form of ignorance. The willfully incontinent believer is deficient in his ability to overcome what in his better judgment he knows he ought not to do or believe. This is not to say that hope is an imperfection of character. Rather, hope is found in those with what standard analytic epistemology takes to be a deficiency as a believer. Such a disposition, when properly cultivated, leads one to rationally see past one’s better epistemic judgment and remain inspired by one’s motivation for the hoped-for object. If we look at the doxastic practices of the hopeful person in the context of flourishing, we no longer see deficiency—rather, we see strength in character as demonstrated in one’s attitudes and actions. Whatever opposes the good hoped for or the means to that good, while appreciated, is freely rejected as a result of the motivation they have as persons of hope. As incontinent agents, their doxastic practices reveal a tendency toward optimism, a character trait that goes beyond fact and evidence but instead can identify possibility. This ability does not admit of deficiency, imperfection, or a lack of ability—instead, we can recast willfully doxastic incontinence as an instance of strength of character in cases when one pursues what one believes is in her best interest despite the odds. Consider the following example. The Case of Little Boy Michael Michael was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia when he was only 1 year old. His parents, Tammy and Mark, have been diligent in doing the research and have had their son see every reputable doctor who specializes in this area of pediatric oncology. All of Michael’s doctors agree that his chances of survival are less than 5 percent. They informed Tammy and Mark that a bone marrow transplant as well as chemotherapy, while possible treatment options, offer no guarantee. In fact, his oncologists stress that given Michael’s unusual situation, the odds of remission are well below even 5 percent.



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In the case of little boy Michael, his parents chose to believe in the possibility of a less than 5 percent chance of success and to act against the odds. Had they followed the advice of the oncology team, they may have not pursued any treatment options or believed in the possibility. This example aims to illuminate a unique feature of hope: possibility. As Martin points out: The hopeful person doesn’t act like this because she has decided to act as if the outcome is indeed more likely to occur than she believes it is; rather, she acts like this because she sees the outcome’s probability as good enough to permit it. She doesn’t say to herself, “set that miniscule probability off-line”; she says, “focus on the fact that even a miniscule probability is a possibility.”50

Certainly, many of us are sympathetic to Tammy and Mark’s plight and can appreciate their decision to reject the evidence and instead, to act otherwise— to act against the odds. However, we consider it ridiculous for someone to believe that the earth is flat since the evidence does not support such beliefs. We consider it irresponsible for a pilot to believe that he can safely land in a storm even when he is informed that the storm is too dangerous and he must change course and wait it out. We may even consider it irrational for a person sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole to believe that he will ever get out. 51 However, is it ridiculous, irresponsible, or irrational for Tammy and Mark to believe otherwise in this case? What makes us able to appreciate and sympathize with (and not criticize) Tammy and Mark unlike the flat earth believer, the prisoner, and the airline pilot? The reason that we sympathize with Tammy and Mark is because we identify with their plight. The circumstances in which they find themselves demand more than adherence to epistemic norms. Like the prisoner and the pilot, their doxastic practices clearly admit of incontinence and yet we appreciate Tammy and Mark’s ability to see possibility in the face of such odds—quite unlike our response to the prisoner and pilot. Now, consider a modified version of the case. The Case of Little Boy Michael* Michael was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia when he was only 1 year old. His parents, Tammy and Mark, have been diligent in doing the research and have had their son see every reputable doctor who specializes in this area of pediatric oncology. All of Michael’s doctors agree that his chances of survival are less than 5 percent. They informed Tammy and Mark that a bone marrow transplant as well as chemotherapy, while possible treatment options, offer no guarantee. In fact, his oncologists stress that given Michael’s unusual situation, the odds of remission are well below even 5 percent. Now 4 years

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old, Michael has undergone two bone marrow transplants and three rounds of chemotherapy. His parents have recently decided to try a fourth round after test results came back positive again. Tammy and Mark have continued to put their sick child through years of treatment and chemotherapy in the hope that their son will get well again. At some point, these treatments become futile and thus need to stop. However, they struggle to give up hope. But, it is precisely here where hope must stop. There is a point at which low odds, uncertainty, and seeming futility must override hope—this is not the kind of hope that is virtuous or beneficial to flourishing. Rather this is when willfully incontinent ignorance warps into something other than hope—it becomes a harmful disposition, taking the form of bad cognitive habits like overconfidence or wishful thinking (e.g., thinking about impossible objects).52 This is the kind of ignorance that is manifest in bad habits of mind that we ought to avoid and prevent because it is not deliberate or carefully cultivated—it is reckless and certainly not based on optimism or possibility; rather, it is desperation. Hope as a virtue, like any virtue, has limits and should be practiced in moderation. A virtue, cultivated as such, is one that helps people to actively promote flourishing and well-being—and yet it does not require success in attaining the hoped-for object. Hope requires mindfulness. A hopeful person is one who responds accordingly to the situation and is not one who is willfully incontinent all of the time. In the case of little boy Michael*, Tammy and Mark, while appearing hopeful, are actually better characterized as reckless, foolish, overconfident, or even irresponsible. This is a situation where hope no longer belongs. Once hopeful action brings with it too much harm and suffering, the object of hope must be abandoned for something else that will once again return the (disposed hopeful) agent to a balance and equilibrium that helps to resume one’s flourishing. In contrast, the virtue of hope positions one to be able to identify and distinguish between times when one’s hope ought and ought not to be acted upon. Hope demands that we deliberately choose to challenge the evidence before us so that we can act in ways that promote well-being. Hope is pragmatically grounded in a psychological state of optimism. Yet, as a virtue that is connected to an optimistic disposition, it must also be realistic (unlike the case of little boy Michael*).53 A hopeful person is one who willfully chooses ignorance because it is fitting to the situation, specifically, a situation that can be paralytic. Willfully incontinent ignorance, of the sort required for hope in “against the odds” cases, is not based on ignorance concerning the truth (or success of achieving) of that which is hoped for. Hope is not blind and does not desire to be; it is aware, mindful, and reflective. However, a hopeful person responds rationally and knowingly that his better



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epistemic judgment is in conflict with the hoped-for object of desire. Hope as a virtue of ignorance must be cultivated in a way that is sincere, does not inspire or perpetuate bad doxastic and epistemic habits, and is valuable to a sense of well-being. NOTES 1.  An early draft of this chapter was first presented at the Kentucky Philosophical Association summer workshop in July 2015 at Centre College. I am indebted to all participants for their helpful and instructive comments and feedback. I would also like to thank Alexis Elder for her commentary on another revision of this chapter at the Philosophers Cocoon Philosophy Conference in November 2015 at the University of Tampa as well as to audience members. Special thanks to the editor, Audrey Anton, for helpful feedback and suggestions to help me through this project. Finally, I would like to thank my husband John for being a paradigm of hope and who inspired in me this idea. 2. See Nicholas Rescher, Ignorance: On the Wider Implications of Deficient Knowledge (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 2. 3.  In fact, Rescher does offer a positive reading of (unavoidable) ignorance (and not the ignorance in question in this chapter). He states: “One of the positive consequences of unavoidable ignorance is that it facilitates life being a voyage to discovery. If ignorance were extinguished and everything knowable known, open horizons would be replaced by a walled enclosure. Important facets of life’s mystery and excitement would be lost forever. And so in the end ignorance is not an unalloyed negativity—even apart from its role as a goad to the virtue of humility.” See Rescher, Ignorance: On the Wider Implications of Deficient Knowledge, 151. 4.  Robert A. Burton calls this a “feeling of knowing.” See Robert A. Burton, On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008). 5.  See René van Woudenberg, “Ignorance and Force: Two Excusing Conditions for False Beliefs,” American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2009): 373. 6.  See Rik Peels, “What Is Ignorance?” Philosophia 38 (2010): 60. 7.  Kate is not simply ignorant in this case; she is willfully ignorant. Willful ignorance admits of degrees. For example, one can be willfully ignorant to the extent that one does not seek out evidence when forming beliefs or by rejecting the evidence and believing counter to it. I think most of us would agree that Kate is responsible for her ignorance. However, whether or not you think that her willful ignorance is worthy of blame goes beyond my present purposes as are reflections about what it is reasonable for her to believe as well. This case aims to illuminate an unusual phenomenon—Kate is certainly not an epistemically responsible believer, however, we can sympathize with her and may characterize her doxastic conduct not as irresponsible but as heroic, optimistic, strong, positive, and/or hopeful. Specifically, we tend to focus on Kate’s overall character traits and not her epistemically unwarranted beliefs.

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8.  This example is drawn from Viktor Frankl’s autobiography, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014). 9.  For discussions about doxastic incontinence, see John Heil, “Doxastic Incontinence,” Mind 93 (1984): 56–70; Alfred R. Mele, “Incontinent Believing,” Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1986): 212–22; and, Alfred R. Mele, Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-Deception, and Self-Control (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 10.  See Mele, “Incontinent Believing,” 214, and Heil, “Doxastic Incontinence,” 69. 11.  Heil, “Doxastic Incontinence,” 64. 12.  Ibid., 64. 13.  This suggests that Kate believes for non-epistemic reasons, which may be true. As I will show, Mele’s account of incontinent believing can explain this and still allow for Kate to be an incontinent believer. 14.  However, maybe Kate is simply an irresponsible, but not incontinent, believer. Or, perhaps this is merely a case illustrating local irrationality. 15. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 29. 16.  Ibid., 70–71. 17.  Of course, this may be a stretch. Frankl never offers direct evidence about what F— believed. He observed, however, that F—’s attitudes changed from those of a hopeful disposition to a loss a hope. 18.  Heil, “Doxastic Incontinence,” 69. 19. Ibid. 20.  Ibid., emphasis added. 21.  This case clearly demonstrates the “willful” element of this species of ignorance that I’m interested in here. 22.  Mele, “Incontinent Believing,” 214. In his article, Mele is interested in exploring what he calls “full-blown incontinent belief” and not all forms of incontinent believing. Thus, he does not deny that incontinent believing can also involve cases in which an agent ranks beliefs for non-epistemic reasons over epistemic ones (like Heil’s account does). Rather, Mele is concerned with formulating an account of a certain species of incontinent believing that stresses the absence of self-control (analogous to traditional accounts of akratic action). 23.  Ibid., 215. 24. Ibid. 25. Mele, Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-Deception, and Self-Control, 112. 26.  Of course, it should be acknowledged that the information does not indicate that there is no chance for either Kate or Viktor. Typically, with odds so low, we think it appropriate to believe based on the evidence. Consider a major winter storm warning. For example, back in February, statistics showed that there was an extremely high chance—90 percent— that Louisville would be hit by a major snowstorm. In Kentucky, when the forecast predicts a major snowstorm, public schools often close (even before one snowflake hits the ground). We tend to believe and to react accordingly. In contrast, if the chance of snow was, say 5–10 percent, schools probably



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wouldn’t close. If they did, we would likely condemn the school system for acting in a way that is inconsistent with such low odds. 27. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 77. 28.  Here things get tricky. We cannot say that Viktor’s beliefs are patently false either. They are simply not supported by the evidence. They could, however, be proven false (or true!) in the future. 29.  Mele, “Incontinent Believing,” 214. 30. See Hilary Kornblith, “Justified Belief and Epistemically Responsible Action,” Philosophical Review 92 (1983): 33–48. 31.  Mele, “Incontinent Believing,” 219. 32. See Roderick Chisholm, “Firth and the Ethics of Belief,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (1991): 119–28, and Theory of Knowledge, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989). 33.  It may sound like this proposal supports an ethics of belief approach to understanding epistemic and moral duty. I will not address this matter in the chapter. Instead, my goal is to show that willfully incontinent ignorance is a virtuous disposition in “against the odds” cases. 34.  To be fair, I don’t think this is what Chisholm had in mind. 35.  For a discussion that is at the core of the distinction between culpable and nonculpable ignorance see: Holly Smith, “Culpable Ignorance,” Philosophical Review 92 (1983): 543–71; Michael Zimmerman, “Moral Responsibility and Ignorance,” Ethics 107 (1997): 410–26; Gideon Rosen, “Culpability and Ignorance,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (2003): 61–84. 36.  While the same can be said of the racist who acts in ways consistent with his/ her life plans and goals, the racist who acts upon his/her beliefs certainly does not bring anything beneficial or good to others and society. Racism promotes oppression and does not help (or in any way benefit) persons. Racism can be viewed as a kind of willful ignorance—when one does not seek out any evidence at all for belief. The racist is an example in stark contrast to Kate and Viktor who have pursued information but while appreciating it, choose to believe otherwise because doing so is inconsistent with their (morally commendable or permissible) desires. Further, a racist does not constitute an “against the odds” type situation. 37.  I qualify this point later in the chapter to show when it is irresponsible or irrational to believe against the evidence. I show that instances of (medical) futility as well as when one’s action (fueled by one’s willful ignorance) becomes harmful to oneself or to others is the limit for the permissibility of one’s doxastic incontinence as well as the nature of hope. 38. Most theories of rationality endorse some kind of consistency condition where to act rationally is to act on the basis of one’s beliefs (rather than against them). For example, if Kate consistently believes that she shouldn’t stick a metal knife into a toaster oven that is on because it will electrocute her, then she won’t act that way. If she does stick a metal knife into the toaster, her act is irrational (regardless of the outcomes). See Stephen Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (Boston: MIT Press, 1990). 39. Rescher, Ignorance: On the Wider Implications of Deficient Knowledge, 22.

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40.  In the context of this project, this claim pertains exclusively to “against the odds” type cases. 41.  And, ordinarily, we don’t consider the person irrational or irresponsible but given the situation, we are sympathetic and see that person as hopeful. This is a fine line that I will not attempt to address here. 42.  See Julia Driver, “The Virtues of Ignorance,” Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 373. 43.  For a challenge to Driver’s fundamental claim that virtue requires knowledge, see Michael Jeffrey Winter, “Does Moral Virtue Require Knowledge? A Response to Julia Driver,” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (2002): 533–46. 44.  That is, if we are not ignorant in a specific way relevant to the nature of the virtue itself. Also, it is important to note that Driver does not offer an account of ignorance. This is noted by Rik Peels, “What Is Ignorance?,” 66. Rather, she describes the nature of these virtues to illuminate how, for example, modesty involves ignorance (and awareness) of one’s accomplishments and blind charity involves ignorance (and blindness) about seeing the badness in others. Driver is not making a claim about general ignorance or even that any kind of ignorance can support virtuous conduct—only a kind of local ignorance, namely, that which coincides with the nature of the virtue itself, is appropriate. 45.  While Heil would likely reject the claim that willful and incontinent ignorance could ever be a ground for a virtue, he would not dispute that both Kate and Viktor are models of this alleged vice: “Doxastic incontinence, considered now as a condition of an agent that gives rise to incontinent beliefs, may be viewed as an epistemic vice. The corresponding virtue is that of continence. Roughly, a continent doxastic agent is one who accepts a proposition on the basis of evidence available to him only when there is no competing proposition that is, so far as he can tell, better warranted by that evidence.” John Heil, “Doxastic Incontinence,” 70. 46. See Adrienne M. Martin, How We Hope: A Moral Psychology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 45. 47.  See Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, “Practicing Hope,” Res Philosophica 91 (2014): 387. I draw on these standard elements of hope that she presents. However, in her paper, she explores hope as a theological virtue, something I neither attempt nor suggest in this chapter. I am exclusively concerned with offering a scaffolding of a philosophical conception of hope especially as it is understood in the context of “against the odds” type cases. 48.  Ibid., 398. 49. Martin, How We Hope: A Moral Psychology, 8, 69. 50.  Ibid., 23. 51.  This example was motivated by DeYoung’s analysis of The Shawkshank Redemption in her article “Practicing Hope,” along with the recent prison breaks in the news (in June 2015, from Clinton Correctional Facility, inmates Richard Matt and David Sweat, and in July 2015, El Chapo). DeYoung claims that such beliefs helped to promote hope and facilitate one’s ability to tolerate life in a prison environment. Interestingly, we are much more sympathetic to Andy and Red’s plight than we would be to, say, Charles Manson’s belief and hope in release or escape.



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52.  See Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999), Book III, 52–82. 53.  Alexis Elder brought this point to my attention in her commentary. She noted that it is important to consider the clear connection between hope as a virtue and a disposition of optimism. While I have not touched on this connection much in this chapter, as she rightly points out, moderate optimism certainly helps to explain the nature of the virtue of hope as I describe it here. However, Pettit offers a different claim concerning the relation between hope and optimism: “Where hope is an intentionally sustained, essentially avowable response, optimism is a spontaneous, perhaps unconscious habit of belief formation.” See Philip Pettit, “Hope and Its Place in Mind,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592 (2004): 161. I stand by my original position that optimism helps to explain the nature of the virtue hope without addressing matters involving the role of optimism (as a psychological habit of mind) in belief formation. My account is consistent with the view that optimism helps to ground hope but it is not that which inspires choosing willfully incontinent ignorance for its own sake—hope as a virtue does not value ignorance for its own sake and it surely does not desire truth (as such). Rather, hope is an element of character that makes possible a person’s ability to thrive and promote one’s wellbeing in paralytic situations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Martin Ostwald. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999. Burton, Robert A. On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2008. Chisholm, Roderick. Theory of Knowledge. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989. ———. “Firth and the Ethics of Belief.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 51 (1991): 119–28. DeYoung, Rebecca Konyndyk. “Practicing Hope.” Res Philosophica 91 (2014): 387–410. Driver, Julia. “The Virtues of Ignorance.” Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 373–84. Frankl, Viktor. Man’s Search for Meaning. Boston: Beacon Press, 2014. Heil, John. “Doxastic Incontinence.” Mind 93 (1984): 56–70. Kornblith, Hilary. “Justified Belief and Epistemically Responsible Action.” Philosophical Review 92 (1983): 33–48. Martin, Adrienne M. How We Hope: A Moral Psychology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014. Mele, Alfred R. “Incontinent Believing.” Philosophical Quarterly 36 (1986): 212–22. ———. Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-Deception, and Self-Control. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Peels, Rik. “What Is Ignorance?” Philosophia 38 (2010): 57–67.

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Pettit, Philip. “Hope and Its Place in Mind.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 592 (2004): 152–65. Rescher, Nicholas. Ignorance: On the Wider Implications of Deficient Knowledge. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Rosen, Gideon. “Culpability and Ignorance.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (2003): 61–84. Smith, Holly. “Culpable Ignorance.” Philosophical Review 92 (1983): 543–71. Stich, Stephen. The Fragmentation of Reason. Boston: MIT Press, 1990. van Woudenberg, Rene. “Ignorance and Force: Two Excusing Conditions for False Beliefs.” American Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2009): 373–86. Winter, Michael Jeffrey. “Does Moral Virtue Require Knowledge? A Response to Julia Driver.” Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 15 (2002): 533–46. Zimmerman, Michael. “Moral Responsibility and Ignorance.” Ethics 107 (1997): 410–26.

Chapter Fifteen

Intellectual Courage Eric Kraemer

Moral virtues are traits of character, but what are the intellectual virtues? The major point of current disagreement among virtue epistemologists is whether the intellectual virtues should be construed as cognitive powers or as states of character.1 One way of moving the debate forward is to identify specific intellectual character traits and determine whether these traits play a significant role in our epistemic lives, over and above the important roles played by our cognitive powers. Following this strategy, the present discussion focuses on the specific trait of intellectual courage.2 One item that invariably turns up on almost every list of the virtues is courage. And, while some forms of courage, such as physical courage and mental courage, have been and are still required for the immediate continued survival of the species, there is another form of courage, namely intellectual courage, which has also played and continues to play a very important role in both our individual and species intellectual development. That intellectual courage should play a central role in epistemology will be seen as a challenge to certain views held by naturalistic and super-naturalistic epistemologists, views that emphasize how human beings are either naturally constructed by evolution or super-naturally designed by God to have the beliefs they do.3 While it is imparative to acknowledge the inherited and created aspects of our doxastic system, there seems to be more to the acquisition of knowledge than mere receptive passivity. An examination of intellectual courage will therefore help recover notable elements that some current efforts in epistemology have left out. It will also help fill out important relations between certain moral and intellectual virtues. In this discussion, after distinguishing several different forms of courage from intellectual courage, I defend a seven-part schema for intellectual cour263

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age. I then use this schema to consider how intellectual courage contributes to the project of acquiring knowledge. Arguing that intellectual courage is a critical if often over-looked aspect of what makes someone genuinely morally courageous, I conclude by demonstrating the prominent role that intellectual courage plays in the system of the moral virtues. KINDS OF COURAGE It will strike some as odd to think of the business of knowledge as requiring a specific form of courage. This is because it normally appears as though the direction of courageous activity goes the other way round. Typically, in the business of courage it is knowledge that comes first. One first comes to believe something that is disturbing or troubling. One then realizes that one possibly can do something about the threatening situation to prevent, alleviate, or at the very least lessen the prospective harm. Further, one must also perceive that such action would involve one taking a significant risk. One is then faced with performing a difficult or challenging action that involves exposure to significant risk. If one does so engage and take the risk, one is then regarded as courageous. If one deliberately refrains from engaging in this activity, then, without an excusing condition, one risks being considered to have acted in a cowardly fashion. The call to dangerous or risky physical activity based upon knowledge is typical of the challenge to be courageous. Standing up to a menacing bully terrorizing innocent children is a typical case. Call this “Physical Courage.” It is tempting to conceive of intellectual courage on the same model as physical courage, as involving risky mental action aimed at averting a grave problem. That is, one perceives a serious situation and then engages in risky mental activity with the goal of combating the physical problem at hand. One example of such an activity might involve a case of whistleblowing, in which one uses knowledge one has to put oneself at personal risk by making this knowledge generally available to prevent harm to others. Another case in point involves using one’s wits to avoid a dreadful fate, as Scheherazade courageously does in The Arabian Nights. Call these instances of “Mental Courage.” Again, it is important to note, the goal of this courageous activity is achieving a particular physical state of affairs. In the case of the whistle-blower it is exposing nefarious behavior; for Scheherazade it is the goal of keeping her life. A further type of courage is exhibited by those who find themselves facing a difficult moral dilemma in which they might either take the easy way out or have instead the option



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of making a challenging moral choice, as for example, a case in which they are called upon to go against standard social mores, which they recognize to be immoral. Call this “Moral Courage.” The actions of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, are illustrations of such courage.4 One can also think of cases that combine several of these forms of courage, that is, mixed cases of both physical and mental courage, or mental and moral courage, or even all three. Instances of espionage involve the use of one’s intellect, one’s physical abilities, and one’s moral determination in a risky situation. Perhaps the majority of cases of courage are mixed cases of this sort.5 While these typical kinds of courage are familiar to us, they are not my direct concern.6 I am, instead, interested in a different set of cases, those for which the directionality is the direct opposite of that sketched above: namely, where one moves from activity to knowledge instead of moving from knowledge to activity. In the case of proceeding from activity to knowledge, or at least to attempted knowledge, one is challenged to engage in specific forms of intellectual and physical activity with a different goal, not that of preventing an impending disastrous state of affairs, but, rather, the objective of obtaining knowledge. Thus, what I am suggesting is that, in addition to physical, mental and moral courage, there is a further sort of courage, namely intellectual courage, a form of courage that is specifically related to the enterprise of knowledge.7 Those who exhibit intellectual courage do so with the goal of strengthening what is known. This firming up of knowledge may itself take one of several forms, which will be enumerated in what follows. Further, in order for an intellectual endeavor to count as demonstrating intellectual courage, the intellectual activity required needs to earn the title of “courage” by posing a significantly intellectual challenge to the individual in question. Thus, for example a neophyte to a particular intellectual area who has no preconceptions about what to believe or a recent zealous convert to a new paradigm would not count as exhibiting intellectual courage. In the case of the neophyte intellectual curiosity seems a more appropriate label. In the case of the new paradigm convert, her activities may be better described as what Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow,” an optimal psychological experience requiring no courage at all, as one is firmly in the grip of one’s new perspective.8 By contrast, I will understand the requisite challenge as requiring one or more of the following features: that of being intellectually disconcerting, epistemically risky, or involving an element of intellectual fear.9 Let us now examine intellectual courage in a bit more detail. In particular, let us ask the question: what different kinds of situations require the virtue of intellectual courage?

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INTELLECTUAL CHALLENGES To set the stage, let us note that an assortment of significant intellectual challenges exist with respect to acquiring knowledge. Each of these challenges occurs with respect to a different stage in the process of sustaining what one claims to know. To clarify these cases it is useful to compare them with situations in which no such intellectual challenge is present. Consider the following: [1] Consideration that an important view may be wrong: While no courage seems required to reflect critically about obvious media propaganda supporting a political candidate one detests, thinking hard about the fairness of media pronouncements about a favorite candidate with whom one deeply identifies presents a significant challenge. The former is easy to do, the latter is much more difficult. [2] Re-examination of one’s basic reasons for holding an important view: There is rarely any difficulty encountered in doubting claims from disreputable groups, such as those who proclaim that the world will be destroyed tomorrow. There is much greater difficulty coming to doubt what one has long taken as received orthodoxy or conventional wisdom, such as questioning the justification for the religious principles one lovingly learned from one’s parents. Intellectual courage seems required in the latter case, not in the former. [3] Admission of error regarding one’s basic reasons for holding an important view: No courage seems needed to admit error regarding which exit on a map to take to reach a destination if it is pointed out that one has been using one’s distance glasses instead of one’s reading glasses. It is more difficult, however, to admit that one’s favorite argument for the existence of God which has served as the foundation for one’s theistic orientation and which one has repeatedly used in numerous religious debates and in print to defend theism over a period of several decades is in fact subject to unanswerable philosophical objections. [4] Willingness to consider alternatives to an important belief: When one lacks commitment as to whether a particular city in central Asia was on the Silk Road, entertaining the view that it was not is not particularly difficult. However, it is much more challenging when one is asked seriously to entertain the thought that one’s life partner has been unfaithful with a half dozen of one’s best friends. This is typically a genuinely fearful belief to entertain, one which often sparks massive efforts at selfdeception. Facing this possibility head-on normally requires courage.



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[5] Admission that an alternative to one of one’s important beliefs is intellectually on a par with or even superior to the important belief: With regard to cases of admitting possible error, such as the date of Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon, those who are not Roman historians would not find this to pose a serious issue. Admission of possible error regarding one’s religious or political perspective, or even “life-style,” is much harder and typically requires courage. [6] Abandoning a belief one has taken to be important: Those who are not experts can easily discard the belief that a minor painter belonged to an obscure early twentieth-century school of painting on being informed to the contrary by an art expert. However, the belief that a painting that one has oneself certified as being painted by a well-known artist is difficult to abandon, even after entertaining the possibility that it might be a forgery as a result of examining some compromising evidence regarding its authenticity. As significant personal cost comes with abandoning such a belief, courage is often involved. [7] Adoption of an alternative belief to a previously held important belief: For some beliefs, such as changing one’s mind regarding tomorrow’s weather, it is easy to adopt an alternative belief on seeing a revised weather report. Changing other beliefs can be much harder. Suppose one suddenly realizes that the political allegiance one has mocked for the past four decades better represents one’s basic core values. Adoption of the formerly despised perspective is by no means a facile achievement. These seven cases each represent different conditions in which the exercise of an intellectual aspect of courage is required. In each we should note that it is the intellectual nature of the difficulty or challenge that seems to be relevant, not the mental complexity that is demanded. Doing a complicated mathematics problem, for example, for someone with serious math anxiety, while certainly demanding personal mental courage, does not typically require intellectual courage. What is required is bringing oneself to do a mental activity that one finds unpleasant because of what one takes to be a lack of ability. One is not, however, being asked to reconsider one’s deeply held beliefs or to question whether one’s reasons for these beliefs are respectable. CLARIFYING INTELLECTUAL COURAGE From these seven sets of contrasting cases one can derive a tentative, sevenstage scheme for locating characteristically intellectual courage. This schema is the following:10

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Intellectual Courage Schema 1.  The courage to consider that an important view may be wrong 2.  The courage to re-examine one’s basic reasons for holding an important view 3.  The courage to admit error regarding one’s reasons for holding an important view 4.  The courage to consider alternatives to one’s important beliefs 5.  The courage to admit that an alternative belief to one of one’s important beliefs is intellectually on a par or even superior to the important belief 6.  The courage to abandon a belief one has taken to be important 7.  The courage to adopt an alternative to a previously held important belief This schema presents seven different situations in which intellectual courage is typically required.11 And, we may call a person intellectually courageous to the extent that she demonstrates courage while engaging in one or more of the activities listed above. It is important to note that, as a result of training and education, some, especially professional philosophers, may be relatively comfortable with the first several elements in this schema, and that, depending upon the belief in question, one might only require intellectual courage for some of these steps but not others. And, it should also be expected that some acts of intellectual courage will turn out to be more or less courageous than others. Further, while the exercise of intellectual courage can lead to one’s coming to adopt new beliefs for good reasons, it should also be emphasized that engaging in the activities outlined in these steps will not always produce new beliefs. After all, it is to be expected that a great many of the important beliefs that one has are in fact well supported intellectually, and that soul-searching reconsiderations of one’s reasons for holding them need not result in a change of belief but might instead produce a strengthening of one’s justification or warrant for holding them. It may also be the case that one is unable to adopt a new belief to replace an old one but may choose, for very good reasons, to remain agnostic on the matter at hand. Just how many of the different steps one engages in regarding a particular belief will depend not only upon one’s intellectual courage but also upon the results of one’s honest deliberation. But it should be emphasized that engaging even in just one of these activities with respect to a deeply held belief is sufficient for intellectual courage.12 That intellectual courage must involve activity on the part of the agent and not mere passivity is revealed by the following thought experiment. Imagine a case in which someone takes a special “mind-altering” drug that results



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in transforming her from being a devout atheist into a deeply, traditionally religious person. In this situation the cause for the change is, in an important sense, “external” to the agent. She did not do anything—the change just happened to her. In this case it seems clear that there is no intellectual courage. Intellectual courage requires that agents engage in the sort of intentional activity characterized by one of the steps in the above schema.13 Having identified and clarified intellectual courage, let us now consider first its epistemic value and then its moral importance. THE EPISTEMIC VALUE OF INTELLECTUAL COURAGE It might seem that intellectual courage is of limited epistemic value. Critics may point out that epistemic courage seems to be required with respect to relatively few cases of knowledge. If the vast proportion of what we know is determined by perception, deduction, induction, memory, and testimony, then this would leave relatively little room for concerns about the reflective intellectual virtues, such as intellectual courage.14 In response one can cite a handful of good epistemic reasons for valuing intellectual courage. Our first two reasons are derived from considerations of the beginning of modern epistemology with the example of Descartes vigorously challenging the prominent skeptics of his age. Whether one approves of the controversial details of Descartes’s classical foundationalist project or not, two important points emerged from his famous effort. First, there is epistemic value in entertaining skepticism; and, second, there is epistemic value in taking a firm cognitivist stand against the skeptic when one has good reason to do so. Both of these activities often involve intellectual courage. The early stages in the above scheme make a place for taking the skeptic seriously. One reason we need to take skepticism seriously is that fallibilism, the view that most of our beliefs could in principle be wrong, seems the best account of our common epistemic condition. Further, we all are faced with the obvious problem that on many important matters widespread human disagreement is the norm rather than the exception. Being willing to examine and reflect on our beliefs in such cases seems to be a way of improving our odds of obtaining correct beliefs on controversial matters, which seems of obvious epistemic value, but only on condition that we part company with the skeptic. Further, there are many common sense cases of knowledge in which it seems unjustified to embrace skepticism. The latter stages in the intellectual courage scheme make a place for taking a stand against the skeptic.

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One of the more important aspects of value for intellectual courage is that provided by those who engage in unpopular research, who face serious challenges because they are attempting to develop unpopular views. In order to engage in such work, however, it is first necessary that one challenge the status quo. And, as Thomas Kuhn underscored, this requires the intellectual courage to oppose existing paradigms! As the history of science reveals, many of the most significant scientific discoveries involved just such challenges.15 An additional reason for taking intellectual courage as epistemically valuable has to do with enabling one to combat the all-too human tendency to engage in personal rationalizations. We can glean from this the following. Whenever we find ourselves making difficult decisions in which alleged distinctions are invokved that involve distinguishing our own case from that of others we need to engage, courageously, in some of the steps listed earlier. The clear epistemic (and moral) value of doing so is avoiding falling into obvious inconsistencies and in having enhanced self-knowledge. From these considerations we can see that intellectual courage, while not required for many of the beliefs that constitute what we know, is still an important epistemic virtue for the various reasons just provided. In response to the challenge with which this section began, we note that intellectual courage is intellectually beneficial because it is potentially involved in many of the most important soul-searching epistemological activities in which we engage. If none of us could ever engage in any of these activities, intellectual courage would be impossible. But many human beings are practicing epistemologists, at least in specific areas in which they specialize, and naturally find themselves questioning received claims in their areas of expertise. Thus, many humans should not only be open to possibly being intellectually courageous, but seem directly engaged in doing so and benefit intellectually by this activity. But epistemic benefits are not the only benefits of intellectual courage. Intellectual courage plays a major role in enabling one to become a significantly morally virtuous person. THE MORAL SIGNIFICANCE OF INTELLECTUAL COURAGE The moral importance of intellectual courage is to be found in the following three areas: in human development, in being fully courageous, and in deepening the inter-relation of the virtues. As a point of departure it should be noted that intellectual courage appears as a key element in intellectual and moral de-



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velopment. Let’s consider two classic studies. In his ground-breaking (1970) investigation of intellectual development during the college years, which culminated in a nine-stage schema for intellectual and ethical development, William G. Perry explicitly emphasizes the importance of courage. For Perry, progress in intellectual and moral development involves intellectual courage: Since our developmental scheme concerns precisely a person’s “moral” development, in the sense of his assumptions about values and responsibility, these implications require direct confrontation. For example, since each step in the development presents a challenge to a person’s previous assumptions and requires that he redefine and extend his responsibilities in the midst of increased complexity and uncertainty, his growth does indeed involve his courage.16

On Perry’s account, one moves from an initial stage of dualistic, blackand-white thinking, in which every topic has a single, correct answer which it is the student’s duty to memorize, to Perry’s final stage of commitment in relativism, in which one recognizes that there is a wide variety of viewpoints on important matters and that one must make an intellectual commitment to a particular way of viewing the world. Further, one also becomes all the while aware that one may well change one’s mind for good reason in the future. Such development takes not only time but enormous intellectual courage. In fact Perry ends his report as follows: “Finally, the study makes salient that courage required of the student in each step in his development.” As Perry’s study involved interviewing only Harvard male undergraduates in the 1960s, a second, important analysis of women students was carried out by Belenky et al. in the early 1980s, culminating in their landmark work, Women’s Ways of Knowing (1986). Although emphasizing insightful differences between traditional female and male approaches to knowledge, such as working collaboratively versus working individually, nevertheless significant overlaps and similarities with Perry’s scheme emerge.17 Though not explicitly referring to intellectual courage as such, the authors of Women’s Ways of Knowing instead emphasize the importance of empowering women by breaking the cycle of violence against them, of finding one’s authentic voice, of question-asking as the central methodology, of negotiating meaning and constructing knowledge. They end their report with explicit suggestions on how to “help women develop their own authentic voices” by, among other things, “instead of imposing their own expectations and arbitrary requirements, they encourage students to evolve their own patterns of work based on the problems they are pursuing.”18 This encouragement, again, seems aimed at developing intellectual courage as here defined. Women are stimulated to question the views of traditional sexist society; this will typically involve

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many of the various stages listed above, which will lead to considering that the traditional sexist view is incorrect, that the reasons proposed for it are flawed, that there are better supported alternative views, and that these better, egalitarian feminist alternatives should be embraced. Thus, in both classic studies of intellectual development, intellectual courage plays a major role. Because of its key role in intellectual development, intellectual courage is also crucially related to the moral virtue of courage. All instances for courage take an object. In order to determine the best possible object for moral courage one must have sufficient intellectual development to be relatively confident that one’s moral courage is aiming at reasonable goals. This is important for two reasons. First, intellectual courage, since it promotes intellectual development, can lead to a better and enlarged awareness of what items require a morally courageous response. For example, development of cultural awareness may make one more sensitive to the need to respond forcefully to racist or sexist slurs one hears. A related reason is the increased moral value in having carefully examined one’s life and commitments. It seems reasonable to hold that a courageous and well-self-examined life is of greater value than a merely courageous life. Thus, intellectual courage plays an important role in filling out the moral virtue of courage by guiding its mature application. This role can be extended to other important moral virtues. Consider the other three cardinal virtues: wisdom, justice, and temperance; all three of these virtues require significant intellectual development which in turn requires intellectual courage. To be wise one needs to be able to ascertain what is appropriate to hold or do in a complex situation. For the virtue of wisdom significant intellectual development is essential. This is why wisdom is a trait that is exhibited only by those with substantial age and experience. To be just one similarly needs to be able to evaluate the conflicting claims in a given context and determine which should prevail. The trait of justice also demands advanced intellectual development, including a sophisticated conceptual framework within which one can adequately measure the relative weight of competing considerations as well as adequate self-knowledge to ensure that one’s judgments are not clouded by one’s personal preferences. A similar case can be made for the virtue of temperance, in that one needs to develop an understanding of how competing tendencies can be harmonized by being courageous in developing one’s self-knowledge. For example, if one recognizes the value of achieving a reasonable work-life balance but one has a strong tendency to be a workaholic, then this recognition helps one to take steps to mitigate this tendency, including counseling and deliberate familyoriented scheduling. A further moral item that requires intellectual courage is that of proper humility.19 Trying to understand correctly one’s own limitations both as a



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thinker and as an actor requires the intellectual courage to confront the numerous limitations that researchers have revealed in how humans operate.20 In addition to the standard moral virtues, intellectual courage is also fundamentally implicated in other items that have correctly attracted attention as having moral importance. These include both items that directly involve oneself, such as autonomy and authenticity as well as those that concern others, such as sympathy and care. In order to develop autonomy and authenticity one needs sufficient intellectual courage to identify and confront the forces that have significantly formed and continue to modify one’s typical ways of thinking and acting. In order to become truly sympathetic and caring one similarly requires the intellectual courage to challenge the social boundaries of concern one’s socialization has imposed. This is because all societies are limited in terms of which groups they recognize as morally significant and how different groups are to be treated. One has to take steps to overcome one’s social conditioning as well as to make oneself ever sensitive to new discoveries that necessitate that we to rethink who is deserving of our attention. In conclusion, there are indeed many reasons why intellectual courage is important, both for the intellectual virtues and for the moral virtues and related moral matters. Once we become aware of these many connections, it becomes clear that trying to develop intellectual courage in others and to sustain it in ourselves is an important and challenging responsibility. How this obligation should affect us all in our daily lives demands our intellectually courageous consideration.21 NOTES 1.  Virtue Reliabilists include Ernest Sosa and John Greco; Virtue Responsibilists include Lorraine Code, James Montmarquet, and Linda Zagzebski. Some philosophers, such as Guy Axtell, have urged that intellectual virtues should be construed as being either capacities or character traits. See Eric Kraemer, “Virtue Epistemologies and Epistemic Vice,” Athens Journal of Humanities and Arts 2 (2015): 19–26. 2.  The choice of courage is deliberate. Of the four cardinal moral virtues—wisdom, temperance, justice, and courage—the first three seem to have relatively obvious connections to the intellect. Wisdom is by definition an intellectual virtue, temperance relates to not claiming more than one is entitled to, and justice clearly relates to appropriate evaluation of one’s warrant. Courage, by contrast, seems much less straight forward, hence a fitting subject for investigation. 3.  See, for example, the standard evolutionary naturalist approach to epistemology vis-à-vis Alvin Plantinga’s defense of super-naturalistic epistemology. This challenge also explains why certain theistic authors, such as Hartcliffe, who discuss the intellectual virtues do not perceive a need to include courage among the required intellectual virtues.

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4.  This explains the uproar caused by the release of Harper Lee’s recent alleged prequel, Go Set a Watchman (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), in which the character of Atticus Finch is not portrayed as exhibiting the same moral courage. 5.  The case can be made that members of the species Homo sapiens in virtue of their very biological designation are destined to use their intellects along with their physical bodies in almost every courageous action they try to perform. 6.  A further kind of courage involving the intellect is that of overcoming fears that risk disrupting one’s intellectual functioning, discussed in chapter 8 of Robert C. Roberts and W. Jay Wood, Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 7.  Some may prefer the term “epistemic courage.” Further, some might want to construe mental courage as the genus of which epistemic courage and the other kinds of mental courage cases are both species. My concern in this chapter is with the specific form of courage involved in certain cases of knowledge acquisition. 8.  Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: HarperCollins, 1990). 9.  See Geoffrey Scarre, On Courage (London: Routledge, 2010) for a helpful overview. Scarre emphasizes the importance of fear in situations calling for physical and mental courage. It is useful to extend the response to fear to the intellectual form of courage discussed in this chapter. 10. See Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989) for Chisholm’s account of different epistemic states. The present discussion can be interpreted as an attempt to re-cast Chisholm’s discussion of epistemic responsibility in terms of the intellectual virtue of intellectual courage. 11.  It should be admitted that not everyone requires intellectual courage. Being omniscient, God for one has no need of intellectual courage. 12.  My account of intellectual courage differs from that sketched by James Montmarquet, Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), 23. Montmarquet and Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) might view the present account of intellectual courage as over-emphasizing intellectual “Open-Mindedness.” Montmarquet also includes “perseverance in the face of opposition” (or fortitude) and “determination” to see a project through to completion as further virtues of intellectual courage. I take these latter two virtues as examples of mental fortitude or mental determination, not intellectual courage, as they seem insufficiently related in general to courage. Courage requires a significant and dangerous challenge to be overcome. Fortitude and determination are intellectually virtuous only in so far as they contributed to one’s holding good beliefs. All too often intellectual fortitude and determination are used to prevent one’s considering unpleasant alternatives to views one fondly cherishes. Compare Jason Baehr’s discussion of intellectual courage vs. intellectual fortitude in his The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 13.  For the sake of this discussion I will leave it open as to whether intellectual virtue requires direct doxastic voluntarism or whether indirect doxastic voluntarism can also accommodate the intellectual virtues.



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14. For a discussion of different kinds of intellectual virtues (and vices) see Heather Battaly, “Virtue Epistemology,” Philosophy Compass 3 (2008): 639–63 and Kraemer, Virtue Epistemologies and Epistemic Vice. 15. We might also note the value of the role that intellectual courage plays in balancing other intellectual virtues. Montmarquet, for example, cites epistemic fastidiousness as an intellectual virtue. It is clear that courage is a useful antidote to an excess of fastidiousness. See also Alan Ryan, “Intellectual Courage,” Social Research 71 (2004): 13–28. 16.  William G. Perry, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 44. Perry also explicitly cites Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952) on courage in this context. 17.  An important finding that Mary Belenky et al., Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1986) made, one not discovered by Perry, is the existence of the epistemic position of “Silence,” or being silent, in which one does not even consider oneself to be the sort of being who is capable of having an opinion on any serious matter. Perhaps the most important challenge that Belenky et al. present is that of enabling those in this difficult position to develop the mental courage to become full-fledged knowers! 18.  Belenky et al., Women’s Ways of Knowing, 228. 19.  Whether one regards humility as a virtue depends upon which virtue list one consults. While not a classical Greek virtue, humility is often cited as an important Christian virtue. 20. See, for example, Daniel Kahneman, Thinking Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011); Adam Morton, Bounded Thinkers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), and Heather Battaly, “Acquiring Epistemic Virtue,” in Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue, edited by Abrol Fairweather and Owen Flanagan, 175–96 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014) for recent discussions of human limitations with respect to developing intellectual virtues. See also Kraemer, Virtue Epistemologies and Epistemic Vice. 21.  I am grateful to Audrey Anton for insightful comments on an earlier draft.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Axtell, Guy. Knowledge, Belief and Character. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Baehr, Jason. The Inquiring Mind: On Intellectual Virtues and Virtue Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Battaly, Heather. “Virtue Epistemology.” Philosophy Compass 3 (2008): 639–63. ———. “Acquiring Epistemic Virtue.” In Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue, edited by Abrol Fairweather and Owen Flanagan, 175–96. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Belenky, Mary, et al. Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self, Voice and Mind. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

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Chisholm, Roderick. Theory of Knowledge. 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1989. Code, Lorraine. Epistemic Responsibility. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperCollins, 1990. Greco, John, and John Turi, editors. Virtue Epistemology: Contemporary Readings. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Hartcliffe, John. A Treatise on Moral and Intellectual Virtues; Wherein Their Nature is Fully Explained and Their Usefullness Proved, as Being the Best Rules of Life. London: C. Harper, Fleet-street, 1691. Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Kraemer, Eric. “Virtue Epistemologies and Epistemic Vice.” Athens Journal of Humanities and Arts 2 (2015): 19–26. Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. Kvanvig, Jonathan. The Intellectual Virtues and the Life of the Mind. Savage, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992. Montmarquet, James. Epistemic Virtue and Doxastic Responsibility. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993. Morton, Adam. Bounded Thinkers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Perry, William G. Forms of Intellectual and Ethical Development in the College Years. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. Plantinga, Alvin. Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Roberts, Robert C., and W. Jay Wood. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Ryan, Alan. “Intellectual Courage.” Social Research 71 (2004): 13–28. Scarre, Geoffrey. On Courage. London: Routledge, 2010. Sosa, Ernest. A Virtue Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. Knowing Full Well. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952. Zagzebski, Linda. Virtues of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Chapter Sixteen

Patience and Practical Wisdom1 Matthew Pianalto

Simone Weil wrote that, “We do not have to understand new things, but by dint of patience, effort and method to come to understand with our whole self the truths which are evident.”2 This is reminiscent of the suggestion in Plato’s Meno that knowledge is recollection. Although most of us would not take Plato at his word, we might charitably read him and Weil as suggesting that the solution to some problems depends not upon learning something new, but rather in understanding how to apply what we have already learned, in knowing how to look at the problem in the right way, or how to ask the right question, so that the solution—the answer, the right course of action— becomes clear. Knowing how to apply ourselves, our skills, and our experiences, is what it means to have practical wisdom. It is traditionally assumed that the virtuous person is also the practically wise person, that there is no human virtue without such wisdom. Although this view that practical wisdom is internal to the virtues has been challenged on various grounds, here I will travel close to the traditional conception while also convinced that what I offer here identifies an important relationship between patience and practical wisdom regardless of whether we construe virtues in an Aristotelian fashion or otherwise.3 On traditional accounts, we need practical wisdom in order to have virtues. On other accounts (and putting aside Driver’s alleged “virtues of ignorance”), one might say that we need practical wisdom in order to exercise our virtues at the right time and in the right way. But how, aside from the vague answers of experience, proper training, and practice is practical wisdom acquired? Weil emphasizes patience, which is a virtue that has received little attention in contemporary moral philosophy. In the first century, Gregory the Great described patience as “the root and guardian of all the virtues.”4 To lose patience is to be consumed by anger or despair, to lose a grip on oneself. 277

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Wise judgment presupposes patient self-possession, and thus the exercise of the other virtues also depends upon the calm, attentive, and persevering guidance of patience. This means that patience is not simply a transitional virtue needed by those who are still developing other virtuous dispositions; patience remains instrumentally necessary for the continued exercise of all virtue. But its instrumentality is distinctive because it is perpetually indispensable, for it is only through patient attention to a task that one can do things rightly. For both Gregory and Weil, as Christians, it is patience that maintains the open space within the soul through which the illuminations of divine grace and wisdom might enter. However, even if we put their theological commitments aside, we can see that patience plays a significant role in the development and exercise of practical wisdom. Learning requires patience, and even if we do not think that insight is a deliverance of divine grace, it remains something for which we must at times wait. CONCEPTIONS OF PATIENCE We tend to associate patience quite strongly with waiting, but many traditional accounts define patience as something more than wise waiting. A touchstone for Christian thought on patience is the remark of Jesus in Luke 21:19 (King James Version): “In patience possess ye your souls.” Gregory expands upon this as follows: We gain possession of our lives by patience, since when we learn to govern ourselves, we begin to gain possession of the very thing we are. True patience consists in bearing calmly the evils done to us by another, and in not being consumed by resentments against the person who inflicts them. A person who bears the evils done to him by his neighbor, so that he suffers them in silence, while looking for a time for suitable revenge, is not practicing patience but only displaying it. It is written that Love is patient and kind . . . often we appear patient because we are unable to repay evils. . . . [but] We are not looking for a patience on the surface but in the heart.5

For Gregory, then, it doesn’t matter how patiently McCoy plots his revenge against Hatfield—a deeper kind of patience is missing that would altogether rule out his quest for revenge. Gregory’s patience “in the heart” differs significantly from patience as recently defined by Joseph Kupfer, who characterizes it as, “the disposition to accept delays in satisfying our desires—delays that are warranted by circumstances or the desires themselves.”6 According to Kupfer, patience is an instrumental virtue and thus does not have any particular end; Kupfer’s patience “can be instrumental



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in attaining wicked ends as well.”7 For Gregory, there are some things that a patient person would not desire (such as the revenge that is a constitutive desire of anger on traditional accounts of that emotion).8 At the same time, we needn’t interpret this notion of “bearing calmly the evils done to us” as implying that the patient person bears them without seeking, when possible, to respond to and correct evils in a non-vengeful manner. That would seem to be the patient way to respond. The conceptions of patience in Gregory and Kupfer also differ in terms of what the central feature of patience is on each account. For Gregory (and other Christian theologians, including Aquinas, whose view I discuss below), patience is a kind of endurance, a form of fortitude. Kupfer characterizes patience more narrowly, as a kind of wise and calm waiting, and it does not appear that Gregory’s patient endurance can be fully reduced to Kupfer’s patient waiting. In part, this is due to the point noted above, that Gregory’s patience rules out certain desires, but also because the person who patiently endures the wrongdoing of another person needn’t be thought of as accepting a delay in the satisfaction of some desire. His or her desire not to be wronged in such ways has been frustrated, perhaps, but such a frustration does not seem to be a delay. Nevertheless, we could take a conciliatory approach here, noting that patient endurance will often involve some kind of waiting, and that patient waiting is itself a form of patient endurance. This link between patience and endurance creates a further link to the virtue of perseverance (or constancy). In his sixteenth century neo-Stoic work On Constancy, Justus Lipsius tells us that, “the true mother of Constancy is Patience, and lowliness of mind, which is a voluntary sufferance without grudging of all things whatsoever can happen to or in a man.”9 Here the scope of patience is broadened to include all misfortunes and not just those suffered at the hands of others. Inspired by the ancient Stoics, Lipsius counsels patience in responding to hardships that are “not up to us”—to accept what we cannot change, even as we seek to change what we can. What else—other than losing ourselves in anger or despair—can we really do? Looking to other traditions, the eighth century Buddhist Shantideva identifies patience as a core virtue, and patience is again identified as tolerance of real or perceived wrongdoing done to us by others. The Dalai Lama’s assistant and translator Geshe Thupten Jinpa explains that the Tibetan term soe-pa, which he translates as “patience,” literally means “forebearance,” and when “used to describe a quality, as in the case of a person’s character, its meaning is best understood as ‘tolerance.’” However, Jinpa notes that tolerance “does not capture the complete meaning of soe-pa, for it is possible for someone to have a tolerant temperament and yet be quite impatient.” This point resembles Gregory’s distinction between “patience on the surface” and patience “in the

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heart.” Jinpa tells us that “a person who is ‘great in soe-pa’ is said to have a patient temperament.”10 In the Islamic tradition, al-Ghazālī offers a treatise expounding upon Mohammad’s saying that, “Patience [al-ṣabr] is half of faith.”11 Recognizing that believers must contend with conflicts between the “religious impulse” to live rightly (in submission to Allah) and the “impulse of desire,” Al-Ghazālī characterizes patience as “the steadfastness of the religious impulse in confronting the impulse of desire.”12 Here, patience is conceived as perseverance in seeking the good (the Divine). Unlike the other figures discussed so far, al-Ghazālī emphasizes that it is not only misfortune that calls for patience, but also good fortune. He cites Sahl al-Tutsarī as saying that, “Patience in well-being is more difficult than patience in tribulation.”13 Although this may seem counterintuitive, the idea is that good fortune may tempt a person to take a moral holiday, to become lax in honoring his moral or religious commitments, and thus become “soft” in character. Thus, for al-Ghazālī, there is also a conceptual connection between patient endurance and temperance or self-control. This brief survey indicates that patience has assumed various, though interrelated, faces. If we turn to the Oxford English Dictionary, we again see all of the central ideas discussed above associated with patience. The OED definition of patience includes the following characterizations: • The calm, uncomplaining endurance of pain, affliction, inconvenience, etc.; the capacity for such endurance. • Forbearance or long-suffering under provocation; esp. tolerance of the faults or limitations of other people. • Calm, self-possessed waiting. • Constancy or diligence in work, exertion, or effort; perseverance. This definition highlights the relationship between patience and other capacities that are often identified as distinct virtues, such as fortitude, tolerance, and constancy or perseverance. For some purposes, we may wish to identify these virtues separately, but we may also want to note their interconnectedness. Kupfer argues that patience is not a primitive virtue, but is “the manifestation of more basic character traits,” and so perhaps we should call the relevant virtues aspects of patience.14 If we are waiting for some pain or inconvenience to pass, then self-possessed waiting will involve fortitude. If we are waiting for others to make progress in their own moral development, or to develop some other skill or aptitude, where we play the role of teacher (or parent), then our patience will involve a kind of tolerance. Finally, when we ourselves are engaged in some activity or project which unfolds over a



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significant period of time, there will be times when we have to wait for some phase of the project to reach its completion before moving to the next step, times when we must step away from the project and wait to return to it, times when we must wait in the face of a problem for the insight that will enable us again to move forward. These various demands of time, the delays, setbacks, and interruptions that may occur, as well as the demands of all of our other responsibilities, interests, and desires, which may often incline (tempt) us toward the abandonment or neglect of our project, all indicate the need for constancy or perseverance. Patience will often require that we wait calmly, but then we must also possess other capacities such as fortitude and tolerance. Instrumentally, patience enables us to wait calmly and wisely in our pursuit of particular goods—often either with or in spite of others—but insofar as patience is also the virtue by which we remain self-possessed, there is also this internal good toward which patience aims, upon which the genuinely patient person—even while practicing patience—does not have to wait.15 CONCERNS ABOUT PATIENCE Some may contend that patience has its limitations, that it is not always a virtue to be patient. As Eamonn Callan notes (although he thinks this view is confused), patience seems to be “perilously close to a kind of weakness, and any excess provokes pity or contempt.”16 Our patient good will might be abused by others, and perhaps no one values patience in others more than a tyrant. With enough of such worries, we might be inclined to agree with Ambrose Bierce that patience is not a virtue at all, but rather, “a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue.”17 At the very least, we might say that virtue at times manifests itself in impatience, as in King’s famous “Letter from Birmingham Jail”: “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.”18 But we might read King’s use of “impatience” as ironic, or as an acknowledgment of those who believed, if mistakenly, that King’s activism was impatient. Others wanted King and his fellow demonstrators to wait, but no one thinks that waiting itself is always virtuous. This is not only because we can be plagued by impatience even as we wait, but also because it cannot be impatient to speak out or to act when doing so is appropriate. Some will have heard patience defined as “waiting without complaint,” and thus defined, patience will not seem to be uniformly virtuous unless complaining is understood to be uniformly vicious. We could try to motivate that view by distinguishing appropriate protest, objection, and expressions of negative

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feeling from merely useless and aggravating complaint. But the definition fails anyway because it does not capture the inner qualities of patience. An ability to quash one’s desire to complain certainly shows self-control, but the genuinely patient person will not feel the desire to complain. Again, however, this needn’t imply that the patient person does or says nothing at all. Here, we might distinguish between pointless or useless complaining and wise complaint (or objection), and also notice that in situations of injustice what is needed is often more than mere complaint, but positive action. Indeed, when the various aspects of patience above are taken into account, it appears that in addition to courage, those who worked and walked with King would have needed patience in the broadened sense. In particular, the principles that guided King’s method—taking non-violent direct action when necessary, but doing so “openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty”— calls for great patience of endurance and perseverance. King’s “impatience” with injustice is in that respect not incompatible with Gregory’s “patience in the heart.” Thus, we also can sympathize with Nietzsche’s suspicion that the ideal of patience is easily distorted so as to give cover to vice and weakness: “The inoffensiveness of the weak man, even the cowardice of which he has so much, his lingering at the door, his being ineluctably compelled to wait, here acquire flattering names, such as ‘patience,’ and are even called virtue itself.”19 Of course, the distortion of a virtue is not a virtue, and we have no reason to think that patience is especially prone to such abuse and deformation.20 The persuasive tyrant can also convince soldiers to sacrifice their lives (and the lives of others) for both petty and monstrous causes by appealing to their desire to be courageous. Patience is no more or less close to a kind of weakness than courage is to rashness. Still, we sometimes inform (warn?) others that we have run out of patience with them or that we are losing (or have lost) our patience with them. We also say things like, “I am angry with you!” Most people seem to think that anger is justified at times, and similarly, that even if patience is usually a virtue, there is a limit to how patient we ought to be in any given circumstance. The suggestion that patience is always a virtue seems to conflict with our ordinary use of the concept, and this implies that the ordinary use of the term is often ethically neutral—whether it is virtuous to be in a patient state of mind and to act accordingly depends upon the circumstances. The question then is whether it is wise, given the circumstances, to be or to remain patient. Is the disagreement between this ordinary conception of patience and those who imply that patience is an unequivocal virtue a substantive disagreement or a merely verbal one? In some cases, the disagreement is perhaps substantive. This will be true at least in those cases where the disagreement is also over



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whether anger is ever appropriate, as in Seneca’s Stoic critique of Aristotle on anger.21 But in many cases the disagreement may be merely verbal. Often, when we have “run out of patience,” we are simply judging that it is no longer wise to wait for something or on someone, or that we should no longer put up with someone’s bad behavior. Those who regard patience always as a virtue needn’t disagree that waiting beyond a certain point, passively tolerating certain behaviors without intervention, or persevering in a lost cause, is unwise. From that perspective, one would not describe Vladamir and Estragon, in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, as patient, but rather quite simply as fools. At any rate, they aren’t particularly patient even as they wait for Godot. Some people might have a naturally patient disposition, in the ordinary manner of speaking. (I am not one of them.) It is true that such people, although blessed with a “natural virtue,” would be at risk of over-waiting, suffering fools without appropriately responding, and so forth, if their natural disposition is not itself regulated by what Aristotle calls practical wisdom (phronesis). Only the latter sort of patience would be unequivocally virtuous, since merely natural patience that is unmodified by practical wisdom will sometimes get things wrong. People might disagree about how long it is wise to wait for certain things, what can be tolerated of others (without intervention or response), and to what extent we should persevere in certain tasks before judging it better to give up and to try something else. The question needn’t be whether or not it is wise to be patient, but instead what a wise patience requires of us in the particular circumstances. Patience that is foolish, self-denigrating, and unwise will be akin to seemingly courageous acts that are more aptly described as rash or foolhardy. Both sorts of acts are to be avoided, whatever we name them.22 PATIENCE IN RELATION TO OTHER VIRTUES In any particular situation, we might wonder how much more waiting, forbearance, endurance, or perseverance is warranted. Of course, there can be no very substantive generic answer to a contextual question. But one general answer we might give is that patient self-possession will always have a point as long as there is something worth doing with and in one’s life. Or we might say: patience will remain valuable for as long as there are other virtues we can exercise in life that will be supported or further developed by our continued patience. To illustrate this contribution of patience to the other virtues, let us briefly consider it in relation to courage, justice, and love. In Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, Kierkegaard asks, “Is patience not precisely that courage which voluntarily accepts unavoidable suffering? The

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unavoidable is just the thing which will shatter courage.”23 We distinguish the courageous person from the coward by noting that the courageous person does not flee from danger that ought to be faced. Kierkegaard reminds us that some kinds of adversity are inescapable, and fleeing (at least physical fleeing) is thus not an option. We can thus either accept this adversity, in the sense that we endure it as best we can, or we can surrender to despair, or explode in futile anger. Although courage and patience seem to travel in different directions, with courage a virtue of action and patience a virtue of restraint, when courage is understood as fortitude, then their relationship appears less oppositional.24 Patient endurance is itself a kind of fortitude, and patience of this sort is crucial to the more active forms of courage in at least two respects. The first is that courageous actions often unfold over time: a person who possesses what Tim O’Brien calls the “courage of the charge” will not necessarily possess the “wise endurance” needed to sustain action on a battlefield over time.25 To complete a temporally extended courageous action will typically require some capacity for endurance of the unavoidable dangers and other adversities that are part of the situation. Second, patience understood as a form of restraint, of waiting, also contributes to courage, and helps in distinguishing courageous action from rash action. We might say that the difference between courageous and rash individuals (or actions) has to do with the presence or absence of practical wisdom—a rash action is an unwise action—but patience may make it more likely that a person is able to judge wisely in a dangerous situation and to choose the right moment in which to take action.26 Similar connections can be made between patience and justice. Like courageous action, just action requires good judgment, and specifically, justice involves properly impartial judgment. Arriving at a just judgment may also require patience in various ways. It may be necessary to wait until one has surveyed all of the relevant details of a case, resisting the temptation to come to a hasty conclusion. In particular, we may be tempted to judge or act impatiently when we are angry. Stoics and Aristotelians will disagree about whether anger itself can ever be virtuous, but no one would disagree with the general point that anger is often dangerous, can cloud judgment, causes great damage in relationships, and motivates undue and excessively harsh punishments.27 Taking the impartial step back from a situation, especially when one’s own interests are involved and when one feels wronged, will take significant patience. These considerations suggest that a general feature of patience is that it supports discernment and the exercise of practical wisdom, protecting us from the interference of anger and other forms of impatience. In other words, patience enables attention in difficult circumstances. Circumstances can be



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difficult because of external factors, because of what others are doing or have done, and also due to internal factors, our preconceptions, preoccupations, expectations, and the busyness of our own minds. Love requires attention that can cut through the obstacles that we ourselves create and which make it difficult to make ourselves properly available to the other. Here, I follow Simone Weil, who says that attention should not be “confused with a kind of muscular effort” or straining, but must instead be understood as, “suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object.”28 This means: putting aside our preconceptions, preoccupations, and so on, so that the other may speak to us and that we may hear fully what the other has to say. Weil says that, “To love purely is to consent to distance, it is to adore the distance between ourselves and that which we love.”29 Pure love is attentive and accepting of difference, rather than possessive and imposing.30 The idea that “love is patient,” understood in this light, hardly means that love simply puts up with all of the beloved’s nonsense, but rather, and more fundamentally, that love involves waiting upon the other—serving the other—and not just waiting for the other to match one’s own agenda and pace. This kind of patience involves something more than “accepting delays in satisfying our desires,” since patient love for the other may involve making significant changes to our own desires, and also giving priority to the desires, and especially the needs, of those we love and those who would be well-served by our love. PATIENCE AND MORAL DEVELOPMENT Aquinas follows Gregory and Augustine in defining patience as the calm endurance of evils and misfortune, but argues that patience is not one of the “greatest” virtues, even as he acknowledges Gregory’s remark that patience is the “root and guardian of all the virtues.” The reason is that patience is less directly oriented toward good than virtues such as courage, justice, and the theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity). Patience prevents us from being consumed by anger or despair—it provides “a check on things that withdraw man from good”—but is thereby less directly involved in positively good action. Aquinas glosses Gregory’s claim thus: “Patience is said to be the root and safeguard of all the virtues, not as though it caused and preserved them directly, but merely because it removes their obstacles.”31 Aquinas acknowledges that an inability to bear patiently with hardship makes it immensely difficult, if not impossible, to exercise the virtues of justice, courage, and love. This would imply that in the exercise of such virtues, patience is also at work, albeit in a way that is, so to speak, behind

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the scenes: patient attention and effort guides and improves our efforts to be courageous, just, and loving. Thus, where we are successful in the cultivation and exercise of these other virtues, it may well be that some credit is also owed to patience, or that in learning to develop these other virtues, we are also learning to be patient. That patience is integral to moral development and growth (in broad rather than narrow terms) may be seen more clearly by considering the role of patience in the context of a specific role (or practice). Take the case of teaching. In teaching, of course, we must often wait upon students to master content or skills, correct errors, and adopt a pace which corresponds to the capabilities of our students (while at the same time presenting challenges to the students that encourage their own growth). When what we teach goes beyond the delivery of content and involves an education in skills such as critical thinking and reading, or the conducting of fieldwork or experiments, we must often model these skills to our students, and in doing so we model patient attention to a particular task.32 In many cases, we must find ways to guide our students into an ability to dwell within the task—to take their time, to be present in the task, rather than to rush through the motions or to do it distractedly, smartphone in hand. Here, one of Nietzsche’s most positive remarks on patience (which some might find surprising) helps to illustrate the role of patience as an intellectual virtue (and not just as an ally to moral virtues): People must learn to see, they must learn to think, they must learn to speak and to write: the goal in all three cases is a noble culture.—Learning to see—getting your eyes used to calm, to patience, to letting things come to you; postponing judgment, learning to encompass and take stock of an individual case from all sides. This is the first preliminary schooling for spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but instead to take control of the inhibiting, excluding instincts.33

Nietzsche’s emphasis on patience as a kind of holding back is strikingly similar to Weil’s discussion of attention. In both cases, patience creates room for a more informed judgment and presumably also for discoveries and insights that are not available to those who rush their work or do it in a distracted state of mind. To the extent that we are patient teachers, we guide students into this kind of investment in their own efforts, in part, by example.34 A point to stress here is that patience in a task is not merely the ability to wait for the task to reach its completion—that is to leave oneself, as the performer of the task, too much out of the picture. To be present in the task involves the kind of self-possession manifest in patience; by contrast, impatience (as well as passive indifference) is often a sign of distraction, and thus of absence from the present task. We wait, then, not merely to have our desires satisfied, but



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rather because a proper understanding of the demands of the task leads us to accept that in roles such as teaching, waiting—as well as the other aspects of patience—is part of the task. In this respect, we cannot aspire to be a good teacher without aspiring to be a patient teacher. As students, we may not be able to appreciate the goods that flow from the excellent performance of the activity unless we learn how to apply our patience to it. The need for patience is internal to the task (or activity) and our desire to participate in it with excellence. In the absence of patient self-possession, we fail to be present to the tasks through which we cultivate and exercise the other virtues.35 NOTES 1.  This chapter draws on ideas that I have gone on to develop in further detail in several different chapters of my book On Patience (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016). 2.  Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 116. 3.  For challenges to the Aristotelian approach on which practical wisdom is an internal feature of virtues, see Julia Driver, Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 4.  Gregory the Great, Homiliae in Evangelia XXXV; in Forty Gospel Homilies, trans. D. Hurst (Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009), 305. 5. Ibid. 6.  Joseph H. Kupfer, “When Waiting Is Weightless: The Virtue of Patience,” \ Journal of Value Inquiry 41 (2007), 265. 7.  Kupfer, “When Waiting,” 277. 8.  On anger and revenge, see Martha Nussbaum, “Transitional Anger,” Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1, no. 1 (2015): 41–56. 9.  Justus Lipsius, On Constancy, ed. John Sellars, trans. John Stradling (Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006), 37. 10.  The Dalai Lama, Healing Anger: The Power of Patience from a Buddhist Perspective, trans. Geshe Thupten Jinpa (Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1997), xv. This book is a discourse on the chapter on patience from Shantideva’s Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life. 11.  Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, On Patience and Thankfulness (Book XXXII of The Revival of the Religious Sciences), trans. H. T. Littlejohn (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2011), 8. 12.  al-Ghazālī, On Patience and Thankfulness, 15. 13.  al-Ghazālī, On Patience and Thankfulness, 33. 14.  Kupfer, “When Waiting,” 278. 15.  This internal significance of patience is stressed by Søren Kierkegaard, “To Gain One’s Soul in Patience,” in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 159–76.

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16.  Eamonn Callan, “Patience and Courage,” Philosophy 68 (1993): 523. 17. Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary [1911], http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/972/972-h/972-h.htm. 18.  Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” April 1963, 3, http:// kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/kingweb/popular_requests/frequentdocs/birmingham. pdf. 19.  Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay, §14, in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 47. For more on Nietzsche’s views about patience, see my “Nietzschean Patience,” Journal of Value Inquiry 50, no. 1 (2016): 14152, doi: 10.1007/ s10790-015-9503-z. 20.  On this point, see also Callan, “Patience and Courage,” and Glen Pettigrove, “Meekness and ‘Moral Anger,’” Ethics 122, no. 2 (2012): 341–70. 21.  See Seneca, “On Anger,” in Anger, Mercy, and Revenge, trans. R. A. Kaster and M. Nussbaum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 14–97; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, Chapter 5. However, even here, it is difficult to adjudicate between Aristotle and Seneca because their theoretical conceptions of the emotions are somewhat different, and although the Stoics condemn emotions such as anger, they allow that certain feelings (the eupatheiai) are experienced even by the sage. Also, the precursory impressions that give rise to anger and other emotions (the propatheiai) might include what we would regard as “angry feelings.” For the Stoic, these impressions are not themselves anger; we become angry, in the strict sense, if we respond to these impressions in the wrong way. See my article, “In Defense of Patience,” in Epictetus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance, ed. Dane Gordon and David Suits (Rochester, NY: RIT Press, 2014), 89–104. 22.  A further question or concern we might have about patience is whether it always serves good ends. Earlier I noted that Gregory’s “patience in the heart” seems to oppose what he regards as the patience of the person who calmly waits for an opportunity to get his or her revenge. We might similarly imagine that patience will be instrumentally valuable to thieves and serial killers, and similar questions will arise about courage. Gregory (as well as other figures considered in this chapter) would not regard this kind of patience as “true patience,” because the desired ends conflict with moral virtue in general. Nevertheless, it seems that we often do use the term patience in this thinner sense, to describe a particular state of mind and action, regardless of the end being pursued. This differs from the worry about whether patience is sometimes weakness insofar as the problem there is a failure to pursue a good end, while the sorts of cases just described involved, as it seems, patiently pursuing a vicious end. Similar worries arise about other virtues; in the case of courage we might ask whether it is appropriate to describe an ignoble end pursued or attained under great danger as a courageous act. Although classical philosophers and theologians insisted upon only describing as virtuous (patient, courageous, etc.) actions that themselves accord with the good, contemporary thinkers seem divided on the question, some preferring to use the virtue terms in a less morally thick manner. My own inclination is to take the oldfashioned approach on such issues, but one could also say that if a person is deficient in other virtues, then his or her actions, even when supported by other virtues, may



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not be, on the whole, morally good. Of course, those who subscribe to a strong unity of the virtues thesis (if anyone does) will claim that if a person is deficient in one virtue, then he or she cannot possess any other virtues. The rest of us will just have to allow that the possession of any particular virtue, to a greater or lesser degree, will not guarantee right action in any given situation. 23.  Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing, trans. Douglas V. Steere (New York: Harper, 1956), 173. In Danish, the term for courage (tålmod) contains in its root the term tåle which can be translated as to be patient but which also means to tolerate or endure. 24.  Callan stresses this point in “Patience and Courage.” 25.  Tim O’Brien, If I Die in a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home (New York: Delacorte Press, 1973). 26.  This is also the kind of patience that athletes are often praised for exhibiting on the field or the court. 27.  See note 15. See also the Buddhist sources in note 6, as well as Robert Thurman, Anger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 28.  Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” in Waiting for God, trans. Emma Crawford (New York: Harper, 2009), 60–62. 29. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 65. 30.  This is congruent with Troy Jollimore’s characterization of love as a “moral way of seeing,” in Love’s Vision (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 26. 31. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, II.2.136, http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3136 .htm. 32.  Compare this point about attention to Christopher Cordner’s remark, drawing from Keats: “The ‘chameleon poet’ waits for otherness to come upon her, receptive to taking on its colour and pattern. This receptiveness to the world is literally a form of patience.” Christopher Cordner, “Waiting Patience and Love,” in Waiting, ed. Ghassan Hage (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009), 170. 33.  Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), “What the Germans Lack,” §6. 34. On this point, see Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Education,” in Lectures and Biographical Sketches (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1893), https://archive.org/details/ lecturesbiograph00emer. 35.  Portions of this chapter were originally presented between November 2012 and April 2013 at meetings of the Tennessee Philosophical Association, the Indiana Philosophical Association, the Kentucky Philosophical Association, and at the 39th Conference on Value Inquiry at Western Kentucky University. I am indebted to the audiences and commentators at those meetings for their comments, questions, and suggestions, especially Ben Bryan, Trevor Hedberg, W. David Hall, and Susan Purviance (who first brought Justus Lipsius’s work to my attention). I must also thank Duncan Richter and my EKU colleagues Ron Messerich and Mike Austin for their frequent, and patient, conversation (online and in person) about many of the issues explored in this chapter.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 2nd ed. London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1920. Bierce, Ambrose, The Devil’s Dictionary. New York, 1911. http://www.gutenberg. org/files/972/972-h/972-h.htm. Callan, Eamonn. “Patience and Courage.” Philosophy 68 (1993): 523–39. Cordner, Christopher. “Waiting, Patience, and Love.” In Waiting, edited by Ghassan Hage, 169–83. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2009. Driver, Julia. Uneasy Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Education.” In Lectures and Biographical Sketches. Vol. 10: Emerson’s Complete Works, 123–56. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1884. https:// archive.org/details/lecturesbiograph00emer. al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid. On Patience and Thankfulness (Book XXXII of The Revival of the Religious Sciences). Translated by H.T. Littlejohn. Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 2011. Gregory the Great. Forty Gospel Homilies. Translated by D. Hurst. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2009. Jinpa, Geshe Thupten. “The Challenge of Patience.” Translator’s Introduction to Healing Anger, by the Dalai Lama, xi–xxiii. Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, 1997. Jollimore, Troy. Love’s Vision. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Kierkegaard, Søren. Purity of Heart. Translated by Douglas V. Steere. New York: Harper, 1956. ———. “To Gain One’s Soul in Patience,” In Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Translated and edited by H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” April 1963. http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/kingweb/popular_requests/frequentdocs/birmingham.pdf. Kupfer, Joseph H. “When Waiting Is Weightless: The Virtue of Patience.” Journal of Value Inquiry 41, nos. 2–4 (2007): 265–80. Lipsius, Justus. On Constancy. Edited by John Sellars. Translated by John Stradling. Exeter: Bristol Phoenix Press, 2006. Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Twilight of the Idols.” In The Antichrist, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings, edited by Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, translated by Judith Norman, 153–229. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ———. The Genealogy of Morality. Edited by Keith Ansell-Person. Translated by Carol Diethe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Nussbaum, Martha C. “Transitional Anger.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 1 (2015): 41–56. O’Brien, Tim. If I Die In a Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. New York: Broadway Press, 1999. Pettigrove, Glenn. “Meekness and ‘Moral’ Anger.” Ethics 122, no. 2 (2012): 341–70. Pianalto, Matthew. “In Defense of Patience.” In Epictetus: His Continuing Influence and Contemporary Relevance, edited Dane R. Gordon and David B. Suits, 89–104. Rochester, NY: RIT Press, 2014.



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———. “Nietzschean Patience.” Journal of Value Inquiry 50, no. 1 (2016): 141–52. ———. On Patience: Reclaiming a Foundational Virtue. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. Seneca. Anger, Mercy, and Revenge. Translated by R.A. Kaster and Martha C. Nussbaum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Thurman, Robert A.F. Anger. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr. London: Routledge, 2002. ———. “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.” In Waiting for God, translated by Emma Craufurd, 57–66. New York: Harper, 2009.

Chapter Seventeen

The Virtues of Justice and Mercy On Knowing the Difference Audrey L. Anton

The cardinal virtue, justice, is frequently considered incompatible with the theological virtue, mercy. After all, a common notion of justice has a retributive aspect; we believe justice is served when one incurs a proportionately deserved punishment for some transgression. On the other hand, mercy seems to be exercised through softening punishment or pardoning transgressions altogether, thus, foregoing deserved punishment. If virtues are character traits and character traits require habitual action to develop, we might conclude that any aspiring virtuous person must decide which of the two virtues to develop, as the actions of each run contrary to the habits of the other. However, this common description is inadequate. This common view implicitly equivocates between: the virtues of justice and mercy and the actions and states of affairs that can be considered just or merciful; deserts and rights; and the aims of virtue and the justifications of punishment. As it turns out, these differences are significant. In this chapter, I shall argue that not only are the virtues of mercy and justice compatible, they are inextricably linked. Indiscriminate mercy may result in many merciful states of affairs (i.e., many individuals will be treated more leniently than they are entitled to be), but indiscriminate leniency is not merciful. Likewise, indiscriminately serving “justice” is both merciless and unjust. As Seneca says, punishing all is just as bad as punishing none.1 A virtuous person would have neither track record; for, as I shall argue, a common aim of justice and mercy—moral education—requires that neither virtue be indiscriminately and exclusively exercised. As Aristotle tells us, having a virtue entails knowing when and how to exercise it. What makes it possible for an individual to be both just and merciful is a specific skill stemming from practical wisdom. This wisdom enables the agent to discern which virtue to express when and in regards to whom, to what degree, and in which manner. In this regard, justice and mercy 293

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require emotional intelligence. For this reason, they exemplify the coherence between moral and intellectual virtues. Defending my position requires many steps. First, we must distinguish the following from each other: just and merciful states of affairs, just and merciful actions, and the virtues, justice and mercy. In so doing, we shall sketch a preliminary description of each virtue, which will be further qualified after we consider how justice and mercy, the virtues, operate in non-ideal circumstances (i.e., normal life). In light of these non-ideal circumstances, it becomes clear why one and the same person can (and must) possess both virtues. Part of what makes any scenario of ethical concern non-ideal is the fact that the human agents in the scenario are rarely (if ever) morally perfect. Justice and mercy’s common aim of moral education is central to their interconnectedness, and it is this aim that will determine whether mercy is a permissible (or advisable) option for response. MERCIFUL STATES OF AFFAIRS, MERCIFUL ACTS, AND EXPRESSING MERCY A merciful state of affairs is any in which someone is punished less than they deserve as a result of human decision to be lenient. A merciful act is one performed with the intent of creating or contributing to a merciful state of affairs. That a merciful act must be intentionally executed to show mercy is essential for distinguishing such behavior from other instances when offenders simply “get away with” their crimes. For instance, consider the case of Cam. Cam has a sterling reputation as a gentleman; however, that reputation is inaccurate. Cam rapes his friend, Clara. She presses charges. The jury is fooled by Cam’s testimony and that of a fleet of naïve character witnesses. Based on this evidence, the jury acquits Cam of the charges. While Cam is not punished for his crime as a result of human decision, the decision was not meant to be merciful. The jurors believed the decision to be just, as they mistakenly believed Cam to be innocent. Acts of mercy can be distinct from expressions of the virtue of mercy as well. For instance, let us reimagine Cam’s scenario. Pretend that no one is fooled by the testimony, and the jury votes to convict Cam. However, the judge, Chris, underappreciates the harm of rape, and is friendly with Cam’s father, Cole. Judge Chris overturns the conviction out of apathy for Clara and fellow feeling with Cam and Cole. In this revised version, Cam is granted mercy. Cam is punished less than he deserves as a result of human decision to act mercifully. Nevertheless, Judge Chris lacks the virtue of mercy. One with the virtue of mercy would suggest mercy only for mercy-justifying reasons.



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Expressions of mercy (qua virtue) are merciful acts issuing from practical wisdom, which identifies and responds to what I shall refer to as mercyjustifying reasons. A merciful person shows leniency toward the guilty because something about the perpetrator warrants (or, at least, permits) special treatment. The offender may be suffering significantly through sincere and crippling guilt or remorse. Perhaps the offender recognizes the error of her ways and is motivated to learn from her mistakes. The virtuous person judges that an act of kindness would further kindle a desire to improve. In a subsequent section on the priority of justice, I shall explain how mercy-justifying reasons are compatible with the aims of justice. For now, let this summary suffice as a description of what motivates merciful acts performed by merciful persons. Some merciful acts do directly conflict with justice because they are performed for bad reasons by persons lacking virtue (as is the case with Judge Chris’s action). But as the merciful acts do not express a virtue of mercy, the virtue of mercy remains compatible with the virtue of justice. MERCY CLARIFIED In philosophical literature, mercy is often identified and described first in virtue of what it is not. We determine that mercy is not these closely related phenomena because they conflict (either directly or by implication) with our considered intuitions of necessary aspects of mercy. These considered intuitions are the following. First, we consider mercy to be an alleviation of some suffering or burden.2 I argue that this suffering must be deserved in expressions of mercy (otherwise, mercy is indistinguishable from other virtues). Second, mercy is considered a tempering of justice; mercy limits the extent to which justified punishment is carried out. Third, mercy seems to be some sort of gift; we are never entitled to it. Finally, fourth, as a gift, it is believed that granting mercy is supererogatory. Each of these intuitions sheds light on the nature of and circumstances surrounding the virtue of mercy. However, some qualifications are in order for each consideration. The refinements necessary for the first, second, and fourth intuitions can be made easily when we test these intuitions against some controversial understandings of mercy. The third will be refined later in a discussion of what it means to deserve a second chance. Once these intuitions are qualified, we shall see how mercy and justice interact. Mercy and Compassion This notion of mercy is predominantly popular in theistic contexts. I concede that mercy can be moved by compassion; however, mercy is not the only

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virtue that can be so moved. Generosity and benevolence can also be moved by compassion. We may be moved by compassion to send aid to people in need, to visit sick children in the hospital, or to volunteer at the humane society. However, it seems too broad to consider all such examples instances of mercy. After all, there is something unique and poignant about mercy concerning wrongs and punishment versus general benevolence or concern. We can easily imagine that the people in need, sick children, and homeless animals have done nothing wrong and that is part of what moves our compassion. Their innocence alone warrants our attention. For this reason I argue that our first considered intuition (concerning alleviating suffering) should be qualified by desert. In order to distinguish mercy from other virtues (kindness, care, generosity, etc.) we must recognize that mercy is the alleviation of deserved suffering. The innocence of such subjects also threatens our third and fourth considered intuitions: that mercy is a gift and is therefore, supererogatory. No child deserves to be sick, and no animal deserves to be abused. This negative desert may be reflective of rights. For example, domestic animals have a right to not be neglected or abused. Perhaps persons in need (including sick children) have positive rights to basic necessities. If this is the case, then our compassion cannot be a gift, as the victims are entitled to such treatment. While it is true that the persons responsible for fulfilling the entitlement may not be determined, and while we may decide to take up the role as they who alleviate such suffering, the fact that we volunteer does not make our service a gift. Just as we do not consider a mailed paycheck a “gift” because any postal worker might deliver it to us, we cannot presume fair treatment is a gift on the basis that no one in particular is obligated to provide it (despite it being true that it must be provided). It may be the case that we have imperfect duties to be compassionate; however, such duties are still obligations. The fact that we may use discretion as to when to discharge them does not make them supererogatory. Indeed, I believe the fourth criterion ought to be adjusted to include a notion of mercy as responding to imperfect duties rather than no duty at all.3 We needn’t exclude supererogatory mercy, as such instances surely occur. For example, while we may not be obligated to pardon egregious offenses, if we do, our act would seem both merciful and supererogatory. Therefore, our fourth intuition can generate a disjunctive criterion that genuine mercy is either supererogatory or a discharge of an imperfect duty. Mercy as Pure Mitigation One way to dissolve the apparent tension between justice and mercy is to consider mercy applicable to extenuating circumstances. Mercy, on this ac-



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count, is the virtue of recognizing when circumstances are so unique that the measure of justice prescribed by a law is not apt. It is the ability to recognize when there is “a gap between moral justice and legal justice”4 and to show leniency in efforts to fill this gap. Such instances might include, “when an offence is intrinsically less evil than another, where a person acts under provocation, and where there are extenuating circumstances such as impaired judgment, coercion and ignorance. It is sometimes appropriate where the offender has already suffered a great deal.”5 Alwynne Smart has argued convincingly that such instances are not examples of genuine mercy. They are instances in which what is just comes apart from what an otherwise just law might prescribe. Smart explains, “In each of the [above] examples . . . a recommendation of mercy was necessary to avoid an injustice because the law cannot always anticipate all the significant differences that there might be between offences that look alike superficially.”6 If the standard punishment would be too harsh, then it would be unjust to exact it since (I think we may take for granted that) it is unjust to punish someone more harshly than is deserved. This approach fails because, “if we simply use the term mercy to refer to certain of the demands of justice (e.g., the demand for individuation),7 then mercy ceases to be an autonomous virtue and instead becomes a part of . . . justice.”8 Furthermore, if punishing to the full extent of the law is unjust, then just treatment would have to be punishing less than the law allows. But we ought not to call that mercy, for if we do, we neglect to designate anything as just treatment. The attempt to dissolve the tension between justice and mercy by designating extenuating circumstances as those that warrant mercy does not do justice to mercy. Mercy, on this account, is merely justice exacted by wise persons in the face of imperfect laws. As a result, this view violates all four of our considered intuitions about mercy. This view violates our first criterion, as the remitted punishment was not deserved. According to our second consideration, mercy is thought to be something granted instead of justice. This account reduces justice to mere laws and mercy to justified exceptions to those laws, which essentially reduces mercy to a species of justice (and not an alternative to it). Per the third criterion, mercy is considered a gift and not an entitlement. However, in such scenarios the “merciful” treatment is not optional. Therefore, contrary to the fourth criterion, this merciful response cannot be supererogatory.9 Mercy is not mere mitigation. Forgiveness and Mercy While forgiveness and mercy are often found together, they come apart quite easily. First, we can imagine cases where one is able to forgive but not grant

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mercy. For example, someone might forgive a deceased transgressor, yet there is no way to show that person mercy.10 We can also forgive someone without mercy even when mercy is available. Let us revise Cam’s case again. In this version, Cam is found guilty and punished. Clara could forgive Cam while endorsing full punishment. Perhaps Clara is a particularly forgiving person. However, she is particularly astute at judging incorrigible persons. In rightly judging Cam to be incorrigible, she forgives him, but supports the jury’s decision to incarcerate Cam for as long as possible so as to protect society from him. Clara’s forgiveness violates both our first and second considered intuitions concerning mercy; the forgiven (Cam) is not relieved of suffering and justice is not tempered.11 We can grant mercy without forgiveness as well. It is certain that the majority of judges and jurors who show mercy on a convicted perpetrator needn’t forgive them. In fact, as they are strangers, it makes little sense to speak of them as forgiving or not forgiving. Forgiveness is the prerogative of the victim. Anyone in a position to mete out punishment may show mercy. One important difference is that we must have some effective reach when we grant mercy; however, we may forgive others regardless of whether our forgiveness could affect them (as is the case with the deceased). As Lucy Allais puts it, “mercy centrally concerns how you act toward the perpetrator, while forgiveness centrally concerns how you feel about her.”12 This difference supports my claim that mercy must entail punishing less than is deserved; expressions of mercy must transcend the mind and affect their beneficiary. Whether forgiveness is a judgment, an attitude, or some other mental event, it is clear that forgiveness is a feature of mind. Mercy, however, necessarily extends beyond the mind of the merciful to its target. A SKETCH OF JUSTICE Like with mercy, the adjective “just” can describe states of affairs, acts, or persons. The way this adjective operates depends on context. I shall take the liberty of relying on an inclusive view of theories of justice, assuming from the outset that justice is about the following aspects of human existence: desert, fairness, equity, retribution, entitlements, human rights, restoration, rehabilitation, and education.13 A just state of affairs is one in which: no one is punished without desert; agents are treated fairly; goods and harms are experienced equitably; wrongdoings are accounted for; people have that to which they are entitled; nobody’s human rights are violated or, if and when they are, the victim’s losses are restored or retribution is achieved; and the offender is taught to see and care about the error of her ways such that she becomes less likely to reoffend or offend similarly.



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Just people do what they can to make their actual circumstances resemble these as much as possible. A few consequences of taking this view of justice immediately stand out. First, the described state of affairs resembles almost none with which I am familiar. This observation motivates non-ideal theories of justice—theories that we ought to approximate justice while accepting that complete justice is unattainable.14 Second, in being inclusive, this account of justice’s diverse interests makes conflict possible.15 As not all of justice’s aims may be met perfectly, different states of affairs can be, all things considered, equally just even though they may be just in different ways. One scenario might be just due to the fair punishment of the wicked, whereas another is just in that, while no parties are wicked, scarce resources are shared equally. Since justice has many (though, admittedly related) aims, and since no state of affairs is perfect, different maximally just states of affairs may exemplify the importance of different aims of justice. Just acts are those taken by people with the intention of serving or promoting justice (which is compatible with minimizing injustice under difficult circumstances). Just acts can serve or promote justice in states of affairs and as a virtue. A just person will not only try to make situations just; since agents are among the parts of morally charged situations, a just person will also encourage others to cultivate their own virtue of justice. Just acts must also in fact serve or promote justice (in addition to the agent’s intention that it be so). Otherwise, we would have to concede that vigilante justice is just; we would have to call “just” those acts done where no actual desert or warrant exists beyond the imagination of the actor. As we can be mistaken about what is just, we must assume that just acts satisfy conditions of normativity. In short, an act is just only if its agent intends that it serve or promote justice and the act does positively contribute to the justice of the state of affairs.16 If we consider the notion of justice as a virtue, we see first and foremost that just persons do not perpetrate injustices. In addition, a just person will support incentivizing others to behave justly, whether through punishments or rewards. She leads by example and serves as a mentor and educator to those not yet just. If the just person is successful, she not only minimizes the amount of injustice that could be perpetrated through correcting what little she has already witnessed, her legacy continues in all of the virtuous souls she has helped to develop. JUSTICE AND MERCY IN NON-IDEAL CONTEXTS The fact that we live in an imperfect world where justice must be approximated supports my claim that mercy can be appropriate without undermining justice. As the world is imperfect, injustices abound. Punishing every transgression is

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neither possible nor desirable. Indeed, justice would undo itself if it were exclusively and always served. Let us consider why justice and mercy in particular are suited for a non-ideal world. Virtues for the Imperfect It could be argued that all virtues belong in non-ideal contexts. After all, it would seem that courage requires a frightful and dangerous threat, generosity needs its beneficiary (i.e., it needs a needy party), and patience requires some hold up or breakdown in an otherwise expeditious system. However, while these virtues are often demonstrated in the face of adversity, it is not obvious that they require it. For instance, we might be courageous in taking up new endeavors, where the fear we face is more a fear of the unknown. In such circumstances, we are brave, but not because anything is necessarily wrong or threatening. So, there is room for courage in a world free from war, disease, and death. Similarly we might also be generous to a beneficiary who is not needy. Patience, I imagine, could be beneficial to its possessor regardless of whether she were in a hurry. But punitive justice and mercy seem different. A just person demonstrates justice in a multitude of ways. Surely, the first way is ubiquitous in interpersonal interactions: a just person does not perpetrate injustices even when she is in a position to do so with impunity.17 We can imagine an ideal world where everyone behaves this way toward everyone else. However, the second way—doling out justice (and the mercy that is its counterpart) does require non-ideal circumstances. Just as mercy is of no use to the innocent, there is no need for doling out just punishments in a perfect world. But we do not live in a perfect world. When we punish transgressors fairly, we are exhibiting justice in non-ideal circumstances. If circumstances were ideal, no one would be in need of trial, conviction, or punishment. It is this side of justice—that of righting wrongs— that is logically committed to non-ideal circumstances. By extension, mercy is also logically tied to non-ideal circumstances. Demonstrating mercy entails punishing less or less harshly than one may be entitled to do according to justice. But in order to demonstrate such graces, someone must have failed morally. In either type of case—exacting justice or granting mercy—someone must have failed morally for the demonstration of either virtue to make any sense. The Best Possible Outcome In addition to requiring non-ideal circumstances, the virtues of justice and mercy might not be reflected (or reflected fully or well) under circumstances



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in which a virtuous person would likely want to demonstrate them. Unlike other virtues (e.g., courage), the state of affairs that constitutes justice, though related to the virtue of justice, is distinct from exhibiting justice (mutatis mutandis for mercy and its states of affairs). If one exhibits courage in a dangerous situation, the bravery demonstrated and the virtue demonstrating it are congruent. However, a just person’s actions may not yield a just state of affairs (though, it is likely to facilitate improvements or minimize inevitable depreciations). That is to say, a truly just person might happen upon a horrifically unjust scene and find herself in the precarious position of being able to demonstrate either little or no justice in response. The following example illustrates this phenomenon. Imagine that two men (let us call them Bill and Bob) jointly commit a horrendous crime somewhere in the United States. Bill flees to a country that denies the extradition of accused criminals to the U.S. Bob is tried by a jury comprised of just people. These just people determine that Bob is guilty, and they sentence him to incarceration for a fair amount of time. Insofar as the state of affairs goes, only a measure of justice has been realized. Both criminals deserve to be punished. Only one of them has been. There remains deserved punishment that will not be doled out. Of course, this “unfinished business” does not constitute mercy. Bill is not pardoned. He is simply not punished. Still, this fact does not mean that the judge and jurors were only moderately just. Indeed, given the sanctity of sovereign nations, had they done anything else (e.g., hired someone to kidnap Bill and forcibly return him to the U.S.), their behavior would have been unjust. Given the circumstances (circumstances which are not ideal), the only just way for the jurors (and law enforcement) to behave is exactly as they do in the example as described. The Essentially Imperfect Human A significant part of such less-than-ideal circumstances are the imperfect moral agents who find themselves in them. As beings born without developed moral understanding, we must learn to be good—often through trial and error. Given that such error is necessary for moral improvement, we must be both allowed to make mistakes and held to account for them when we do err. However, part of our imperfection is that we have fragile egos. The human being can only be punished and criticized so much before she regards herself as less-than human and surrenders all hope of improvement.18 Justice corrects the error of our ways; mercy enables us to keep moving forward. Seneca was among the first to recognize that mercy is necessary for moral improvement. The entire point of subscribing to a virtue ethic is to foster

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self-improvement. Yet Seneca clearly maintains that incessant punishment of those deserving of it would render self-improvement impossible. For example, he writes: “How many a prosecutor would be liable by the very laws they enforce! How rare an accuser would be free of guilt! I rather think no one is more obdurate in granting pardon than a man who repeatedly should have begged it for himself. We have all sinned.”19 As we have all sinned, we have all deserved punishment. Hopefully, if we are punished, we learn from it and improve. However, sometimes we are slow learners, and other times we are overwhelmed with copious “opportunities” to learn from multiple mistakes all at once. Upon facing our transgressions, we may become overwhelmed by our own flaws. We may deprecate ourselves for having “backslid” or for being so flawed that we cannot even address one flaw at a time. In such a state, we are acutely aware of our desert of punishment. However, we may lose faith that we will improve as a result of being punished. If we are granted mercy, we can be shown that someone else has more faith in our ability to improve than we do.20 Of course, these phenomena cannot justify perpetual mercy. Instead of considering ourselves beyond repair we may begin to consider ourselves beyond reproach—neither of which is the case.21 Still, pardoning no one is out of the question, as Seneca reminds us that, “while frequent punishment does crush the hatred of a few, it provokes the hatred of all.”22 Punishment can humble us when we need it; however, too much punishment can drive us to an angry hopelessness. Humans require time for reflection and reform in order to heal from injuries—even deserved or self-inflicted injuries. Indeed, we may resent all punishment because, without a break from it, we might start to doubt whether it can improve us at all or wonder whether it is a ploy by persons in power to oppress us. We may resent that the officials who punish us are hardly flawless. After all, it is easier to see the flaws in others than it is to acknowledge one’s own. Such consequences are detrimental to the potential virtue of a community and its members. Still, one may argue, this leaves open the possibility that certain individuals deserve no punishments and are truly just. However, Seneca reminds us that nobody is born that way, as even the paragons of virtue were once imperfect: “even if a man has purged his soul so thoroughly that nothing can now upset or deceive him, yet it is by sinning that he has reached that innocence.”23 Even the just were sinners once. This could be read in one of two ways: either their sins were minor, justice was exacted, and they learned their lessons, or justice was not exacted (or was exacted in a muted sense) and this leniency left room for mercy and opportunity, from which these individuals benefitted. I contend that the latter must be the case for Seneca. Just prior to the above quote, Seneca writes, “Not only have we been derelict but we shall continue



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to be so to the end of our time.”24 He seems to hold that we sin so often and so egregiously that incessant justice would end us before we are able to reform. I agree with this assessment as well as Seneca’s supposition that, “a large portion of mankind might be restored to innocence if punishment is remitted.”25 THE PRIORITY OF JUSTICE While mercy may be a good alternative to punishing someone according to his or her fullest deserts, it must be conceded that justice is prior to mercy. Both are required of a virtuous person in the actual world. However, justice seems to ground mercy in several ways. The Necessity of Injustice Before we ponder whether justice or mercy should be expressed, there must first have been an injustice perpetrated. There is no reason to punish the innocent, so a fortiori there is no reason to grant mercy to the innocent. Since the aptness of mercy entails some injustice, justice is prior to mercy. If there were a world in which no one perpetrated injustices, justice would exist (even if only in a vacuous sense), whereas mercy would not. For mercy to be permissible, justice must first be violated in a sufficiently significant way that would warrant punishment. Prohibition on Perpetuating Injustice Justice is prior to mercy in another sense: mercy should not commit or encourage additional injustice. It is possible that merciful acts could embolden perpetrators to reoffend because they were not punished. For instance, mercy ought not to be granted to an unrepentant lifelong perpetrator of serious harms with a penchant for fooling her marks. In this instance, mercy might “prove” the transgressor’s inaccurate view of the world (that some people are just “suckers” begging to be harmed). While showing mercy in this instance would constitute a merciful act, it is unlikely to be one a virtuous person would take. Similarly, a merciful person would not grant mercy when doing so would unjustifiably harm someone else. For example, a merciful judge would not sentence a perpetrator to probation if that perpetrator showed signs of being a dangerous stalker who had already harmed her target. If, before sentencing, the perpetrator announced her intention to kill her target at the first opportunity, the judge would be morally prohibited from releasing her. When a judge

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has reason to fear for a victim’s safety, mercifully releasing the convicted is unwise (and unfitting) as the risk of further injustice is too great. A merciful person would not grant mercy in an unjust fashion. For instance, granting mercy to perpetrators of a certain race, gender, religion, or creed and not others would be an injustice on its own. Either mercy should be granted regardless of such matters or not at all. Mercy motivated by unjust reasons certainly occurs (one need only look to the catastrophic problem of massincarceration in the United States for evidence of this fact).26 But a merciful person would only grant mercy for reasons that are, themselves, relevant and with good evidence that no further injustices would be perpetrated as a result. Mercy, on my account, is not automatically a tampering of justice (even though it does amount to tempering the demands of justice). However, I concede that some merciful acts (not to be confused with the virtue of mercy) may perpetuate injustice. For instance, a failure to punish someone can be unjust depending on the circumstances (i.e., the state of affairs is unequal, imbalanced, corrupt, or otherwise unjust). For example, on August 25, 2017, President Donald Trump pardoned former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio. Arpaio was found guilty of violating the rights of many persons for racially motivated reasons.27 Despite this verdict, Arpaio was initially permitted to maintain his post as sheriff. Arpaio quickly demonstrated himself unworthy of that merciful decision, as he continued to perpetrate similar crimes. The court instructed him to stop, and Arpaio ignored this instruction. He was then found guilty of contempt of court for not heeding the instructions and terms of his release. Since then, the citizens of Maricopa County have elected a different sheriff. The fact that Arpaio cannot perpetrate similar crimes with authority is insufficient reason to pardon him. Arpaio’s lack of remorse is morally significant. It renders mercy inappropriate. But Arpaio was inexplicably granted mercy already, twice. Not only is there no reason to suspect any good could come from mercy, there is every reason to expect further injustice. Arpaio’s case so clearly warrants punishment. This presidential pardon shows that not all merciful acts are just. But a merciful and just agent would only grant mercy when it is justified. Because justice rightfully takes priority in the sense that it proscribes merciful actions that perpetuate injustice, these virtues work in concert, despite limitations posing obvious (and egregious) conflicts. Mercy-Justifying Reasons While the virtue of mercy is checked by the virtue of justice, there are circumstances in which justice allows mercy to take over. There are copious reasons that might justify merciful treatment. As previously noted, I call these



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reasons mercy-justifying reasons, as they promote only the noble aims of mercy. When these reasons are present, and when granting mercy would not perpetuate injustice, a virtuous agent may elect to express mercy. Reasons that justify mercy have to do with mercy’s aims. First, mercy is humane. Mercy communicates to offenders that they are more than their crimes. It presumes they can do better—even without learning the hard lessons of (full) punishment. If practiced well, mercy can reveal the positive forward-looking nature of humanity. It suggests we can transcend our lesser nature to become more. Mercy makes the most sense when the subject is acutely aware of the error of her ways. Moral education is the common goal between the virtues of justice and mercy; each seeks to restore and improve humanity. But mercy may only be effective as a gift if the recipient knows she has no right to it. One sign that an agent grasps the significance of their offense and their unworthiness of mercy is remorse. Feelings like guilt and remorse can be a subconscious way of punishing oneself, as such emotional states are painful. Indeed, one might be so harsh on herself that it would make little difference whether she were punished or not. She may deserve to be punished—even formally, but if her own guilt or a lesser punishment could educate the offender sufficiently so that she never reoffends, the remaining deserved punishment is justified, though not required. Mercy may be appropriate for first offenses. The significance of poor behavior is rarely appreciated until one is caught and forced to acknowledge what one has done. Once, when I was a child, a few friends and I tried to break into an unoccupied cabin. We had no intention of damaging or taking anything; we merely wanted to see if we could do it. We were caught immediately, and the error of my ways was instantly apparent. It didn’t matter if I wasn’t going to hurt anything; I had no right to be there. The owner was entitled to privacy, and snooping in their house was like spying on their life. My thoughts immediately turned to how upset and embarrassed my parents would be. They had believed they had raised me to be better than that, and there I was, living proof of their failure. Needless to say, when the officer let us go with a stern warning, I vowed to never do anything remotely of the sort again. I was so relieved to get a second chance; I was going to take it and make it count. Mercy may also be fitting in cases of what is known in the vernacular as cosmic justice—or, when something terrible befalls a person deserving of punishment without anyone determining the hardship to serve as a punishment. Elsewhere, I use the example of William to articulate this point: Blame . . . might be deserved but inappropriate in circumstances that are so dire the subject becomes a candidate for mercy. For example, imagine that William,

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a single father, elects to drive home slightly intoxicated when alternative transportation was available. His slightly impaired reflexes were insufficient to avert a collision—one we may suppose a sober William could have avoided. In this collision, his young child is killed and William is permanently disabled . . . his situation is so dire that we might consider expressing blame to be cruel. . . . He is punished (and punishes himself) each and every day more harshly than all the blame in the world could ever accomplish.28

Sparing William blame (or further punishment) would be merciful. It is also permissible, given the mercy-justifying reasons. William is remorseful and (we may imagine) would never commit the offense again. The direct consequences of his moral failure punish him so much that it is unlikely that further punishment could even register. The fact that William learned from his mistakes and continues to be punished for them regardless of our efforts to impose formal punishment on him makes punishment optional. The retributive and rehabilitative aims of justice have already been met. These are just a few examples of mercy-justifying reasons. In general, mercy-justifying reasons are considerations that, when sufficient, render full just punishment unnecessary and mercy, permissible. Justice may be unnecessary in that mercy would have the same (or better) result, just punishments might backfire (if punishing the subject would only make her more defiant), or moral education is no longer possible (e.g., a guilty person at death’s door). Mercy’s noble aims share much in common with justice’s, despite the fact that acting on those aims might limit just punishment. DESERTS, RIGHTS, AND GOODS The notion that tempering justice is necessarily tampering with justice stems, at least in part, from a lack of appreciation for certain distinctions between deserts, rights, goods, and harms. Let us begin with desert. If one has worked hard and achieved much, we might say that person deserves a raise. She deserves something good. If one has harmed others knowingly and unnecessarily, she might deserve punishment (something bad). Rewards are generally considered good. Punishment is meant to be bad. In fact, if one attempts to punish another and the treatment is pleasant to the recipient, the punisher has failed. This is not to say that the only aim of punishment is pain or misery. Indeed, we may justify punishment by its potential to teach a recipient a valuable lesson. However, one thing that distinguishes punishments from education in general is that punishments must be unpleasant, whereas education can be pure joy. Therefore, deserving something good is meant to be good, and deserving something bad is meant to be bad.



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Rights, on the other hand, operate differently. While theorists similarly speak of positive and negative rights (rights to something and rights to not be subjected to something), both types involve some obvious good (even though rights need not be exercised). For example, Sarah might have a right to a chocolate chip cookie (let us imagine she just purchased it from a consenting vendor, her money was justly acquired, etc.). If she has that chocolate chip cookie, that is good. Even if she decides to give it to someone else (i.e., she relinquishes her right to the cookie), prior to that, she had a positive right to the object, and it is good that the reason she no longer has the object is that she chose not to exercise her right to keep it. Similarly, Susan has a right not to be force-fed (well, anything, but especially) Sarah’s chocolate chip cookie. If Sarah were to try to force Susan to eat the cookie against Susan’s will, Sarah would be causing an unfair harm. But let us say that Sarah first offers the cookie to Susan, Susan declines, and Sarah does not try to forcefeed Susan the cookie. It is good, in this situation, that Susan’s right not to be force-fed was not violated. Therefore, regardless of whether a right is positive or negative, it is good, ceteris paribus, that rights be honored. The same does not hold for desert. If one deserves something good, and she gets it, the outcome is, ceteris paribus, good. It is good in that (as implied by the ceteris paribus clause) it is brought about justly. It is also good for the person deserving of the good. It might also be true that if someone deserves something bad, and it happens, the outcome itself, in general, is also good (it is good in that it serves the interest of justice). However, it is not obvious that the outcome is good for the person to whom something bad happens.29 Prima facie, the opposite would seem to hold. It is for this reason that no one speaks of a perpetrator’s right to be punished.30 First, if transgressors had a right to be punished, I imagine it is one most would elect not to exercise if given the choice. Second, as rights are justified claims to goods (positive goods [e.g., cookies] and negative goods [e.g., not being assaulted]), and as punishment is at least in part bad, to suggest one has a right to a punishment sounds as if some categorical mistake has been made. Something about the suggestion seems inconsistent, incoherent, or perhaps incompatible. This difference is crucial to understanding how justice and mercy can work in concert. If transgressors do not have rights to punishments, then failing to punish a transgressor is not a violation of her rights. And if her rights are upheld, there is room for her situation to be just. In other words, a transgressor may be punished less than she deserves without injustice being done to her. One might argue that while the perpetrator has no right to punishment, the victim has a right to have her aggressor punished. Alas, this is an

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unfortunate confusion stemming from the language we use in a victimfocused society. Focusing on victims has its merits. It humanizes the harm committed. It is sensitive to the fact that people deserve punishment not only for their behavior but also for the consequences of that behavior. A focus on victims can also discourage sensationalism of the crime and its perpetrator, which all too often makes entertainment out of tragedy. However, when we exclaim, “Justice for Trayvon!” we are not suggesting that Trayvon’s killer owes Trayvon a debt that, if not paid, would further harm Trayvon. We certainly don’t mean to suggest that if Trayvon’s killer were punished, Trayvon and all of his promise and potential would be restored. If Trayvon is murdered, there is no harm left for him to suffer, and nothing that could undo the harm he has suffered. Nor are we saying that Trayvon’s life is worth his killer’s incarceration (or even his execution). Far from it, Trayvon’s life is worth so much more.31 We rally to such calls because we believe the perpetrator deserves punishment and we believe the victim to have been innocent. Imagine an alternative case. Imagine that two dangerous serial offenders who have been sworn enemies their entire lives are shooting at each other. Each is trying to kill the other once and for all. Grant (for the sake of argument) that each could easily escape (and so neither is fighting in selfdefense). One person is killed. The other survives. The survivor is arrested and indicted. Would it make sense for the prosecutor to ask the jury to grant justice for the deceased? Or is it more likely that the prosecutor would advance an argument that murder is wrong and we, as a society, must punish murder accordingly? In this situation, the victim was not innocent. Nobody, let us suppose, deserves to be killed. However, our rationale for incarcerating the serial offender is that 1) She deserves to be punished and 2) She is a danger to society who would continue to perpetrate injustices if released. Whether her victim “deserves” justice seems irrelevant. I am not suggesting we be more sympathetic to the loser of the gunfight; nor am I suggesting we be less sympathetic to innocent victims like Trayvon. What I suggest is that the impulse to demand Justice for ________ is more a symptom of our outrage than a justification for punishing murder. Indeed, it is clear that we do not have rights to other people’s treatments. Trayvon does not have a right that his killer be put in jail. His killer ought to be punished, but not because Trayvon has a right to the killer being punished. The killer ought to be punished because the killer deserves to be punished. We commit a categorical mistake when we say Trayvon deserves for his killer to be incarcerated. Trayvon had a right not to be murdered in the first place. Rights are personal. Agents have rights to be treated certain ways (both positive and negative), but they do not have rights to other people’s treatment.



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This distinction between rights and deserts is important. If expressing mercy to one person were to violate another person’s rights, it would indeed be the case that mercy both tempers and tampers with justice. Rights are among the sorts of things justice seeks to protect. Any rights violation is an injustice. However, as I shall argue in the next section, desert operates differently. While justice demands that no one be punished more than she deserve, it is not clear that justice demands that everyone get all and only what they deserve. If justice were to require this outcome, the world we live in would be far more unjust than we may fathom. THE MYTH OF METAJUSTICE The “problem” of justice and mercy rests on several confusions, but none more insidious than the false assumption I shall call the metajustice assumption: MJ: It is just (or otherwise morally required) that every person get what they deserve (including punishment) whenever they deserve it.

The first mistake this assumption makes is that justice can (and should) be judged on its own terms. The claim that it is just that justice be served is not an innocuous tautology. We can imagine that when justice is served, it must be the case that the treatment in question was deserved. However, it is not obvious (nor do I believe it to be true) that every person deserves to get what he or she deserves always. In fact, I wish to make two claims that conflict with this last one: 1) Mercy is not the sort of thing that can be deserved on any particular instance, but 2) Everyone deserves mercy sometimes. Before defending these claims, let us consider why MJ is false. I have argued elsewhere32 that it is likely that every person is blameworthy in virtue of some (of their) moral attitude(s) all the time, as we all surely harbor morally inapt attitudes (or, no attitudes [indifference] when morality calls us to attention). Fortunately, we may also be deserving of praise frequently too. Importantly, what it means to deserve praise or blame is distinct from what it means for praise or blame to be warranted and what it means for any particular individual to be justified in expressing praise and blame that is warranted. On my account, we deserve praise or blame in virtue of our moral attitudes toward objective moral principles and morally salient aspects of the situations in which we find ourselves. How much blame or praise we deserve is sensitive to both our moral progress (e.g., whether we are children or adults who should know better, or whether we are backsliding on moral

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progress we’ve made and merely had to maintain) and the status quo (e.g., while it might not have been common knowledge that slavery was wrong in Seneca’s time, it is common knowledge today). But the vast majority of our moral attitudes remain beneath the surface of our everyday interactions (e.g., an acquaintance might be very racist and we are unaware of this fact for some time as there was no opportunity for that attitude to manifest and present itself). For this reason, praise and blame are only warranted when we are in a position to identify the attitude in virtue of which praise or blame is deserved. Finally, the standard of justification for praising and blaming is much higher. The evidence must be present, clearly warranting a response, and we must be in a context permitting such a response whereby we are fitting agents to give that response. The result is that we are all blameworthy in virtue of whatever moral attitudes we have wrong (or lack) all of the time, but blame is warranted only on those occasions in which the attitudes manifest (or, in the case of good moral attitudes, ought to manifest and notably do not). While we are apt targets of praise and blame less often than we are deserving of praise and blame, we are even less often primed to be praised or blamed by particular individuals. This combination of values makes sense of why we are likely always blameworthy but that we ought not to be blamed constantly (or, perhaps, even often). The problem of how to express justice or mercy concerns not only desert of blame, but more specifically desert of punishment, which is even less common than our desert of blame (for we deserve blame whenever we deserve punishment, but not necessarily the other way around).33 Analogous to my view of the important difference between deserving blame and it being appropriate that one be blamed, I shall now argue that we are likely to deserve punishment more often than it would be fitting for us to receive it. In On Clemency, Seneca writes to his pupil Nero who, at the time, was eighteen years old and the emperor of Rome. One might suppose that Seneca (perhaps presciently) saw in Nero the potential to take justice to the extreme, as the content of the treatise implores young Nero to occasionally practice mercy. Since Seneca’s treatise, many have recognized that granting mercy is hardly optional. Seneca states: “That none of the other virtues is more becoming to a human, none being more humane, must be accepted as axiomatic.”34 Seneca adds, “Relentlessness is a trait of ignoble animals.”35 Indeed, if we were to examine a subject who punished the guilty relentlessly—even if she were to stay within the limits of what is deserved—we would not consider that person to be just; we would consider that person merciless. Calling a person merciless is no mere observation—it implies an evaluation of the person as immoral, cruel, and unjust. Therefore, it would seem that some record of



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granting mercy is not only compatible with a history of behaving justly, it is required for the virtue of justice. As I am committed to the idea that mercy is a tempering of justice, I must accept that when just persons practice mercy, they are not assigning all of the punishment that their subject deserves. If Seneca (and others) are correct that a just person would never be merciless, MJ must be false. MJ states that it is just that everyone get what they deserve all the time. But only an unjust person would punish others to the fullest extent and always. We are left with the absurdity that only an unjust person can behave justly. But one with a virtue of justice would 1) behave justly (by definition) and 2) refrain from exclusively punishing based on full desert. Nor is it the case that the just give their subjects only what is deserved. In other words, in giving less punishment, a just person will do so in order to express mercy (i.e., she does not do it for unjust reasons). But mercy is a gift; it is not owed. In this regard, when a just person gives another less than is deserved in the negative sense, she is, at the same time, giving them more than what they deserve in a positive sense.36 The Impossibility of Metamercy It is perhaps more evident that there is no such thing as a virtue or principle of metamercy. It cannot be the case that it is merciful to always grant mercy. Anyone who has witnessed the egregious spoiling of a child understands that never punishing a person for wrongdoing in fact does that person more harm than good. First, we are not the only individuals in a position to punish any other individual. If we do not punish children when they misbehave, eventually a teacher, coach, police officer, or employer will. When this inevitability occurs, it is likely that the recipient will suffer more harshly simply due to the unexpected nature of these consequences. At least when we punish our own children, they are being taught to be just by someone who loves them. When strangers punish them, this benefit no longer applies, and the punishment may be perceived as harsh or even cold. Such treatment is equally harmful to adults. If virtue ethicists are correct that virtue is essential to happiness, perpetually merciful treatment can only enable vice, thus making happiness beyond the recipient’s reach. People in recovery for addiction learn how harmful enabling influences can be on their lives. When mercy would serve to perpetuate vice and ignorance, the humane response is to follow justice. The two share a common aim of moral education. Humans need both lessons in order to achieve virtue. For this reason, it is essential to both virtues that neither be expressed exclusively.

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HOW MERCY AND JUSTICE EDUCATE Moral education is unique in both its content and practice. What we learn is how to be good, or, perhaps more accurately, to be good. As Aristotle expressed, we do not study ethics to merely understand goodness, we study ethics in order to become good. This study is instructional and essentially applied. It is instructional in the sense that we must defer to experts and follow their prescriptions with faith that we will come to understand our object of inquiry. It is applied in that we personally must undergo the exercises and when we have learned the subject well, we will know because we will be acting with skill and expertise (i.e., not because we passed an exam). Learning these lessons involves discovering, assessing, and adopting values. It changes the learner. While it is true that when I learn about a war in history class, I have changed insofar as I know something I did not previously know, only part of me has changed. The “receptacle” of my knowledge is a bit more full. My intellectual capacities for learning new information have been sharpened simply through use. But I have not developed new abilities, characteristics, or aptitudes to such a degree that I am a completely changed person.37 But learning how to be good involves changing the quality of the agent’s entire being. This is why we cannot be simply told what virtue is or how to be virtuous. We must become virtuous to even fully understand virtue. For these reasons, the lessons justice and mercy teach are difficult to learn. We always provide students the chance to first learn these lessons from instruction, example, and rules; but we know no student will learn all of the lessons by these methods alone. Learning to appreciate value takes a second sight. Appreciating is more than understanding. Appreciating is seeing the importance or value of the thing understood. Only when we appreciate the value of our actions and their consequences have we truly learned. JUSTICE, MERCY, AND RESPONSIBILITY What is it that we learn? What does it mean to learn to be good (and not just how to or what it is to be good)? Justice and mercy help us to learn how to be responsible. It is obvious how justice teaches responsibility. In punishing offenders justly, we impress upon them the importance of the value they have disrespected or disrupted. By suffering, the punished associate pain with a loss of value. They may develop empathy for their victims in understanding (even if only slightly) the suffering their victims endure as a result of their transgressions. Responsibility theorists call this kind of responsibility retrospective.38 We are responsible now for what we have done in the past. We pay today for what



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we unlawfully stole yesterday. In looking back at our behavior, we evaluate it as it was. We see what was wrong with our choices and actions. Eventually, we accept that we deserve punishment, for that is how we take responsibility. Oftentimes, we promise not to repeat the offense. We may apologize. At the very least, we acknowledge the wrong we have done. If we do not accept responsibility for our bad behavior, punishment might be fitting also because it can help us to appreciate our role in the bad outcome. It is fitting simply because we deserve it; but it is also fitting because it may educate us in understanding why we deserve it. Sometimes, we appreciate the wrongness of our behavior quickly after acting. If we are caught, we fear the consequences perhaps not only because we foresee them, but also because we understand that we deserve them. We may feel remorse, guilt, or even disdain for ourselves. In fact, it is possible that we dwell too much or inappropriately on the past. The fact that we behaved wrongly does not escape us. Instead, we are ashamed that we did such an awful thing especially given that we knew better. In such instances, the lesson is learned or “remembered” quickly. That the behavior is wrong is obvious. What the agent must come to appreciate is that her knowledge imposes a duty not to repeat the behavior. Responsibility theorists call this type of responsibility prospective.39 When we recognize that we have a responsibility to do something, either now or in the future, we are taking responsibility in advance. We pledge to be good in the future. Mercy can be helpful in encouraging prospective responsibility. The merciful might show leniency to one who suffers the knowledge of their moral failings. Unlike justice, mercy educates people not about the value of what they have done, but the value of what they can become. Mercy can show its recipient that, despite her present recognition of how awful she has been, history need not repeat itself. Mercy empowers the agent to become better. In understanding that one does not deserve mercy when one deserves to be punished, if mercy is granted, the recipient can “make good” on the kind fortune. She may aspire to be worthy of the gift, even if she is not worthy at the time of receiving it. She may see her fortune as compounding her responsibility to behave better in the future, as she has been given a second chance. Justice helps us see the error of our ways; Mercy reveals to us the potential to be good despite past failures. DESERVING A SECOND CHANCE I believe that the common saying “Everyone deserves a second chance” is true (and possibly a third, or fourth). If every virtuous person’s journey to perfection is rife with mistakes and mishaps, and if virtue is an appropriate

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goal of human life and necessary for flourishing, then everyone deserves mercy at some point in their lifetime. If we were blamed and punished on every occasion we deserve, it is unlikely any of us would make it to adulthood. Those who do would be unrecognizable as humans. Humans might be so fragile that, without mercy, we break. Instead of learning from punishment we resign ourselves to being worthy of nothing else. If this is the case (as mercy is necessary for anyone to reach their human potential and presuming that human rights and some basic deserts derive from the basic needs of being human), everyone deserves mercy sometime. I hesitate to say that everyone has a right to mercy for one reason only. When we say we have a right to something, we have a legitimate claim of complaint when we do not get it. We do not have a legitimate claim of complaint whenever we are justly punished. However, we would have a legitimate claim of complaint if we died suffering a lifetime of exclusively deserved punishment. Fortunately, I doubt that anyone has ever lived such a life.40 In essence, I accept the common assumption that mercy is a gift and is not deserved with qualification. Mercy is deserved in a general sense. Everyone deserves some mercy at some time. However, there is no particular time in which anyone deserves mercy. If we are tempted to call a particular case one where the offender deserves mercy, we are either saying that the person ought not to be punished (so, as mentioned earlier, it is a case of mitigation and, in fact, a matter of justice and not mercy) or we are saying that the case is a prime example of an opportunity for a merciful person to demonstrate that virtue. If it is the latter, we recognize clear mercy-justifying reasons. Still, mercy-justifying reasons are not mercy-requiring reasons. If we had an offender who was remorseful, suffered greatly already, was a first-time offender, and whose crime was minor, it would be fitting to practice mercy on such a person. However, that person is not entitled to mercy on that occasion (or any other). When the virtues of justice and mercy first appear to conflict, it is not the virtues themselves that are in competition, but rather the diverse deserts of the subject. People are imperfect; virtue (by definition) is not. When a virtuous agent considers whether to follow the strictest prescriptions of justice or to take the opportunity to treat the subject with mercy, she is considering whether to fulfill the particular deserts of the agent that stem from her transgressions or whether to fulfill her general deserts as a human being. However, mercy must be finite and unpredictable in order for it to encourage moral improvement. If mercy were commonplace, it might begin to be expected. If it is expected, it looses the surprise customary of a gift. I agree with mercy theorists that mercy must be a gift. However, I do not believe it is impossible for a good to be both a gift and deserved. Mercy is a gift in that no



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one has a right to mercy on any particular occasion. But mercy is deserved in a more general sense—we all deserve a second chance at some point. Mercy is a gift insofar as it is not deserved at any given instant, and so any time it is received, it is special. But granting mercy is not necessarily supererogatory, for if it were, one could live a long life without every granting mercy and still be considered a good person. As Rainbolt puts it, merciful action is not exclusively supererogatory, “because it would imply that those who never act mercifully are blameless. It is clear that we do blame those who never act mercifully. They are merciless—a term of condemnation if there ever was one.”41 It is required that we all show mercy sometime, and we all deserve to receive mercy in general. However, because mercy is a gift and is never owed, precisely when we are to receive mercy is indeterminate. As Joel Feinberg puts it: “A person’s desert of X is always a reason for giving X to him, but not always a conclusive reason.”42 Virtuous people may use their discretion as to whether or not to grant mercy. They are restricted to doing so only when mercy-justifying reasons are present (and no further injustice would be perpetuated by granting mercy). But they are not required to grant mercy whenever such conditions are met. PRACTICAL WISDOM: ON KNOWING THE DIFFERENCE We have seen that justice and mercy are inextricably linked by their common aim of moral education. Since moral education is a delicate affair, and since one must know what one teaches, it becomes clear that justice and mercy have particularly stringent connections to certain intellectual strengths (even virtues). Knowing Other Minds In recognizing mercy-justifying reasons (as in noticing their absence), the virtuous agent must endeavor to do the impossible—she must try to read the minds of the people set before her in judgment. I am not claiming that virtuous persons are telepathic (in fact, it is likely that no one—not even the virtuous—fully grasps all of their own motives, weaknesses, or strengths). Instead, I suggest that just and merciful persons must demonstrate a sort of emotional intelligence in reading people. Just and merciful persons are particularly skilled at discerning whether someone else understands or appreciates the moral weight of their behavior. This skill goes beyond mere interrogation. It is not sufficient to simply ask a transgressor to describe the error of her ways. Indeed, any jailhouse lawyer

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can explain how certain phrases and behavior patterns are known to suggest remorse and are adopted for the sole purpose of increasing chances of parole or early release. Judging the sincerity of a transgressor’s attitudes is difficult, and it requires a certain kind of wisdom of communication and interpersonal interactions to do well. Assessing Learning Potential It is difficult enough to discern when a transgressor recognizes the error of her ways and appreciates the value of that error. A further feat that only the just and merciful agent can achieve reliably is accurate assessment of the strength of another’s conviction and the probability that they will be sufficiently motivated to act differently in the future. I surmise that we have all been in a position where we truly and sincerely regret our behavior and reject the desires and motives that precipitated it, only to “forget” this experience later on and repeat the offense. Akratic behavior is an unfortunate and ubiquitous phenomenon in moral development. The just and merciful agent will know whether a remorseful or otherwise receptive person will translate their current appreciation of their wrongdoing into better action in the future. Sometimes, agents have a good track record, and this evidence is sufficient to justify mercy. More often than not, a transgressor has some history of backsliding, as it is much easier to backslide than it is to progress. Mercy can be helpful in inspiring an agent to resist temptation and, if successful, the agent’s odds of backsliding are less. With every successful attempt at moral improvement, we gain self-confidence, which can be essential to persevering. The ability to see whether an agent is “ready” for transformation is mysterious. It is, like many intellectual virtues, a sort of second sight. However, what the just and merciful agent sees is potential. In this sense, the just and merciful person both sees the depravity of a transgressor and foresees that same person’s moral conversion. The evidence alone is insufficient, as it often suggests an agent is incorrigible. Mercy encourages us to rise above our weaknesses, to surprise even ourselves by becoming worthy of the gift we have been granted. And yet, we must be ready to be inspired. Only the wise can discern that in us. The Hard-Hearted Finally, the wisdom of the just and merciful enables them to see when evidence that would normally count against justification for mercy, oddly enough, counts for it. For example, some candidates ripe for mercy may be devoid of



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remorse. For instance, consider Twilight, a career criminal since his youth. Twilight learned the following lesson from a series of unjust interactions with others: Every person is either a lion or a lamb; if you don’t want to be eaten, you must take steps to be a lion and live as such unapologetically. For decades, in practicing this philosophy, Twilight lived at the expense of others. He stole from, harmed, and humiliated others both to service his needs and his own amusement. If ever he was victimized, instead of lamenting the violations of his “rights,” he merely fostered the necessary anger to be “on top” expeditiously, which he determined always entailed someone else being shown to be beneath him. Twilight’s philosophy of life is difficult to penetrate. He cultivated an immunity to empathy and self-pity. He believed that everyone deserves what they get, and if he does not like what he gets, he must be meaner, tougher, and willing to do more harm than anyone else to “deserve” better. In this state, Twilight was incapable of experiencing remorse. Twilight is a real person, and a formerly incarcerated student of mine. However, he is unrecognizable today as the person I just described. After nearly beating a man to death in prison, a corrections officer commented, “Boy, you ain’t nothing but a devil.” Of course, Twilight was punished with solitary confinement in response to his transgression. But Twilight had become so hardened that this punishment hardly had any effect. What did was the comment of the guard. Instead of trying to elicit guilt, remorse, or even fear of consequences, she communicated her belief that Twilight was so incorrigible he was practically inhuman. This observation was not a means of castigation. In fact, the officer may have been sparing Twilight the criticism he so deserved; she spoke dismissively and out of exasperation. By sparing Twilight the typical “lecture” and responding so calmly and disinterestedly, the officer got Twilight’s attention. He considered the comment in light of his philosophy. He was neither a lion nor a lamb. He was a devil. This realization shook Twilight to his core. He had never intended to become a devil; he had merely intended to survive and flourish. Sparing Twilight the standard lecture sparked a reflective process he was otherwise unlikely to undertake. Despite his treacherous record of bad behavior, Twilight was granted opportunities to enroll in pro-social educational programming, which he took. Decades later, Twilight was being called upon to mentor other residents (especially youths) in efforts to turn their lives around. Twilight’s original sentence exceeded 200 years. The punishment he deserved for his offenses would persist long after he expired. In an act of mercy, the Tennessee parole board granted Twilight parole in 2016 (he had been incarcerated since 1983). As a law-abiding citizen, Twilight routinely speaks publicly about his transformation. He negotiated a “cease fire” among several gangs in Nashville. He

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sees himself as a servant of God, and through Him, humanity. Twilight’s case illustrates the value of the occasional pre-emptive, mercy-justifying reasons. In his case, punishment had proved unsuccessful in educating him. As Livia was rumored to have advised Augustus, who struggled to punish Cinna for his betrayal: when the treatment (punishment) only worsens the disease (vice), it may be wise to try the opposite.43 Cases like Twilight’s are rare. They are rare because most people can learn something from punishment. But they are also rare because the risk they pose is so great that mercy must be very, very selective. Only the wisdom of a wise and just person can see when incorrigibility is itself a mercy-justifying reason. Typically, the opposite is the case. Sometimes, the action that serves the good and the fine is the one least suspected to do so by an untrained eye. For this reason, the just and merciful person is more than someone with a knack for identifying remorse and an algorithm for granting mercy unpredictably. The just and merciful person knows that sometimes fully deserved punishment is the prudent course of treatment while, other times, leniency will do more to perpetuate virtue. It is in knowing this difference that makes virtuous expressions of true justice and mercy possible.44 NOTES 1.  Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “On Clemency,” in Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters, trans. Moses Hadas (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968), 137–66. 2.  I concede that some instances are more about obligations than punishment. For instance, we can mercifully waive a debt owed to us. Paying a debt is not necessarily a punishment. However, it can be a hardship. When we waive one’s obligation to repay us, depending on the circumstances, we may be acting mercifully. I beg the reader’s pardon in setting aside such examples. I follow David Dolinko, who claimed, “justice and mercy are most often alleged to clash when it comes to questions of punishment” (“Some Naïve Thoughts About Justice and Mercy,” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 4, no. 2 [2007]: 350). I respectfully set aside such examples in the interest of word count. 3.  George Rainbolt has argued that mercy is permitted instead of justice sometimes because it is an imperfect virtue and, therefore, it generates imperfect duties. See George W. Rainbolt, “Mercy: An Independent, Imperfect Virtue,” American Philosophical Quarterly 27, no. 2 (1990): 169–73. I wish to say something similar, but with certain key clarifications. First, I am reluctant to call any virtue imperfect, for that would imply some virtues were perfect. But as traditional virtue ethics recognizes that all virtues are context-sensitive and maintains that there are no general rules guiding action types, I am inclined to deny that virtues are the sorts of things that can be imperfect or perfect (i.e., to call them one or the other is to commit a category mistake). Instead, I shall argue that we all have general desert of limited mercy, no one has particular desert to mercy (not definitively at a particular time or place, anyway), and



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mercy-justifying reasons can provide adequate justification for a phronimos to stay justice in favor of mercy. This last occurrence may constitute an instance of discharging a benefactor’s imperfect duty to be merciful. I contend that it is consistent with virtue ethics to make use of concepts such as imperfect duties and conflicts of duties without applying such properties to virtues. 4.  Alwynne Smart, “Mercy,” Philosophy 43, no. 166 (1968): 348. 5.  Ibid., 348–49. 6.  Ibid., 349. 7.  For an account of how mercy is defined as honoring individuation of cases and persons, see Martha C. Nussbaum, “Equity and Mercy,” Philosophy & Public Affairs 22, no. 2 (1993): 83–125. 8. Jeffrie G. Murphy, “Mercy and Legal Justice,” in Forgiveness and Mercy, edited by Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 169. 9.  In addition to our considered intuitions about human mercy, this view of mercy yields a very unpleasant consequence for theists. If mercy simply is the virtue that allows us to tell when a legal formula suggests a punishment that is too harsh, then the very existence of a virtue of mercy depends on human ignorance. An omniscient god would have no use for mercy. An omniscient god would simply know the deserved punishment of an offender. Humans require the skill for differentiating between standard and exceptional cases; but this is only the case because humans are so feebleminded that we must rely on something as formulaic as a law in most instances. If mercy is merely nuanced justice, how could an omniscient god be merciful? If there is to be any sensible way of a god being merciful and just, mercy must be something essentially distinct from justice. 10.  See Lucy Allais, “Forgiveness and Mercy,” South African Journal of Philosophy 27, no. 1 (2008): 7–8. 11.  I say that it probably violates the second because we presume Cam feels not remorse. Only one who suffers from remorse could be punished less by forgiveness alone. 12.  Allais, “Forgiveness and Mercy,” 8. 13.  While most theories of justice prioritize these aims or determine one to be central, the vast majority of theories incorporate all of these elements in one way or another. In this chapter, I adopt a kind of value pluralism akin to W. D. Ross’s. In some circumstances, one or more of these might take priority over others. 14.  I recognize that many non-ideal theories maintain additional central theses. For example, one might argue that any idealization of justice (for example, a Rawlsian theory of justice) is unhelpful to determining how best to approximate justice. In proceeding with a non-ideal framework, I am not making this strong claim. 15.  I follow Joel Feinberg in maintaining that justice can have multiple “claims,” which can clash. See “Justice and Personal Desert,” in Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility, ed. Joel Feinberg (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 55–87. 16.  The success standard here is isolated. If one performs a just act and something else interferes with its good consequences, the act itself remains just. For example,

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if a judge were to sentence someone to ten years of incarceration, and the defendant dies prior to beginning that sentence, the judge’s act is not unjust. If that were the case, we are left with the absurdity that the judge should not have sentenced him to be punished on the basis that the punishment cannot be carried out. It remains just to make the correct judgment and prescribe the correct punishment. 17.  This is a reference to “the truly unjust man” from Plato’s Republic 359e–361e. 18.  For example, Alison Liebling argues that long-term imprisonment risks the dehumanization of the incarcerated and, along with it, a clear path to improvement. In other words, it is possible that too much punishment ruins a person’s ability to learn from mistakes and improve. Alison Liebling, “Moral and Philosophical Problems of Long-Term Imprisonment,” Studies in Christian Ethics 27, no. 3 (2014): 258–73. 19.  Seneca, “On Clemency,” section 6, 144. 20.  This idea of the importance of mercy for moral improvement is not exclusive to Ancient philosophers. For a discussion on a Kantian interpretation of an imperfect duty to forgive the repentant, see Paula Satne, “Forgiveness and Moral Development,” Philosophia 44, no. 4 (2016): 1029–55. 21.  For an interesting discussion of how we deceive ourselves into believing we are better people than we actually are, see the chapter titled “Fooling Yourself: Blind Spots and Other Psychological Shenanigans,” in Bruce Hamstra, Why Good People Do Bad Things: How to Make Moral Choices in an Immoral World (Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996), 84–100. 22.  Seneca, “On Clemency,” section 8, 146. 23.  Seneca, “On Clemency,” section 6, 145. 24. Ibid. 25.  Seneca, “On Clemency,” section 2, 140. 26.  For a good discussion of our problem of mass incarceration and racism in the criminal justice system, see Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012). 27.  Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Pardons Joe Arpaio, Who Became Face of Crackdown on Illegal Immigration,” New York Times, August 25, 2017, https://nyti.ms/2vwUubN. 28.  Audrey L. Anton, Moral Responsibility and Desert of Praise and Blame (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 174. 29.  For an extensive argument on why “things like harm and suffering are never intrinsically good—even when bad people experience them,” see Nathan Hannah, “Two Claims About Desert,” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (2013): 54. 30.  I recognize that Kant and Hegel can be interpreted as having held this position. For an interesting argument against the view that we have an obligation to punish to full deserts, see J. L. A. Garcia, “Two Concepts of Desert,” Law and Philosophy 5, no. 2 (1986): 219–35. 31.  This is an allusion to the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin (and the subsequent acquittal of George Zimmerman, his killer) in Sanford, Florida. 32. Anton, Moral Responsibility, especially chap. 7. 33.  I take for granted that while some outward expressions of blame may qualify as punishments, blame needn’t be a punishment (it need not even be expressed). However, justice and mercy are about specific treatment of a deserving transgressor.



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34.  Seneca, “On Clemency,” section 3, 141. 35.  Seneca, “On Clemency,” section 5, 144. 36.  Jeanine Diller has argued for a principle of merciful justice, which maintains that people ought to receive what they deserve or better. Diller admits that mercy necessarily creates comparative injustice (any time we grant someone mercy, every like case where mercy is not similarly granted constitutes an instance of comparative injustice) (726). Still, those same instances might bear noncomparatively just deserts (and this is what matters most). She distinguishes between getting exactly what one deserves (neither more nor less) and in fact what one deserves (at least as much good as is deserved, and perhaps more). Jeanine Diller, “Merciful Justice,” Philosophia 41 (2013): 719–35. I find this view attractive. However, it poses a few difficulties. For instance, I do believe certain merciful acts are themselves unjust (even noncomparatively so). While the guilty party would receive more than she deserves, that might be the precise violation in question. Diller accounts for this objection in declaring that mercy is only justified when granting it “creates more good than harm overall” (729). I am confident that there are examples where this criterion is met and mercy would still be immoral. I also disagree with Diller’s claim that only victims can justifiably grant mercy. To my mind, such a claim stems from equivocating between forgiveness and mercy. Nevertheless, Diller’s account is novel and her treatment of possible objections is worth the read. 37.  This description may be unfairly extreme. Certainly, lessons learned in any humanities class have the power to add perspective and prompt the mind to consider other people’s points of view and to appreciate the human condition. The point I wish to make (with what is likely hyperbolic word choice) is that while learning history, literature, and poetry may contribute to one’s emotional and social development, such advancements are often accidental and may require lengthy study to bear fruit. Punishment (e.g., incarceration) or mercy (e.g., being granted parole) can prove to be instantaneous lessons, the learning of which leaves the subject altered. 38.  See Anton, Moral Responsibility, chap. 1. 39.  See Anton, Moral Responsibility, chap. 1. 40.  I admit that some have lived horrific lives. In these instances, I’m inclined to imagine such people were unjustly punished frequently (even if the suffering is not man-made, as in the case of debilitating and painful illness). Their claims are legitimate because they suffered harms they did not deserve—not because they were not granted mercy. What I cannot imagine is that any human who reaches adulthood could be punished for every transgression. Whether we recognize it or not, we have all gone unpunished for something. Such instances need not be manmade; they may amount to mere merciful states of affairs. Naturally, it is ideal for every human to know that another human is punishing them less than they deserve for the purpose of showing mercy. Such instances inspire faith in humanity and hope for the future. 41.  Rainbolt, “Mercy: An Independent, Imperfect Virtue,” 171. 42.  Feinberg, “Justice and Personal Desert,” 80. 43.  Seneca, “On Clemency,” section 9, 148. 44.  An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the inaugural Aretai Center on Virtues Conference, “Connecting Virtues: Theoretical and Educational Insights,”

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in Genoa, Italy, September 29, 2016 (via Skype presentation). I am grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions provided by those in attendance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press, 2012. Allais, Lucy. “Forgiveness and Mercy.” South African Journal of Philosophy 27, no. 1 (2008): 1–9. Anton, Audrey L. Moral Responsibility and Desert of Praise and Blame. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Diller, Jeanine. “Merciful Justice.” Philosophia 41 (2013): 719–35. doi: 10.1007/ s11406-013-9445-2. Dolinko, David. “Some Naïve Thoughts About Justice and Mercy.” Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 4, no. 2 (2007): 349–60. Feinberg, Joel. “Justice and Personal Desert.” In Doing and Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility, edited by Joel Feinberg, 55–87. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Garcia, J. L. A. “Two Concepts of Desert.” Law and Philosophy 5, no. 2 (1986): 219–35. Hamstra, Bruce. Why Good People Do Bad Things: How to Make Moral Choices in an Immoral World, 84–100. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Group, 1996. Hanna, Nathan. “Two Claims About Desert.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (2013): 41–56. Liebling, Alison. “Moral and Philosophical Problems of Long-Term Imprisonment.” Studies in Christian Ethics 27, no. 3 (2014): 258–73. doi: 10.1177/ 0953946814530219. Murphy, Jeffrie G. “Mercy and Legal Justice.” In Forgiveness and Mercy, edited by Jeffrie G. Murphy and Jean Hampton, 162–86. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988. Nussbaum, Martha C. “Equity and Mercy.” Philosophy & Public Affairs 22, no. 2 (1993): 83–125. Rainbolt, George W. “Mercy: An Independent, Imperfect Virtue.” American Philosophical Quarterly 27, no. 2 (1990): 169–73. Ross, W. D. The Right and the Good. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Satne, Paula. “Forgiveness and Moral Development.” Philosophia 44 no. 4 (2016): 1029–55. doi: 10.1007/s11406-016-9727-6. Seneca, Lucius Annaeus. “On Clemency.” In Stoic Philosophy of Seneca: Essays and Letters, 137–66. Translated by Moses Hadas. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968. Smart, Alwynne. “Mercy.” Philosophy 43, no. 166 (1968): 345–59.

Index

accountability. See responsibility agency, 65, 148, 160, 185, 204, 207–8, 216–17, 219; diminished, xiv, xxii– xxiii, 201, 204–5, 219, 251; divine, 111; epistemic, 228, 235–36, 244, 252–54 anger, xxi, 33, 35, 37–38, 98, 101, 103, 120–21, 127, 129–30, 144–45, 192–203, 277, 279, 282–85, 288n21, 302, 317 akrasia. See incontinence Anselm, xx, 147–48, 220n4, 221n32 Aquinas, xx, 139, 141, 147–48, 279, 285 Aristotle, xiv, xvii, xix–xx, xxvn4, 19, 33–35, 37–43, 49–71, 88n16, 97–98, 105, 112–16, 118–25, 131, 137–45, 148, 149n15, 149n19, 183–85, 204, 215, 219, 220n2, 220n8, 293, 312; Categories, 221n33; on anger, 37, 283, 288n21; on character, xix–xx, 34, 58, 112–13, 123, 143, 183; on friendship, 40–41, 118; on habit, xvii, 98, 202, 221n33; on happiness, 39, 45n34, 49–54, 61–63, 112, 114, 183; on politics, xvii, 34, 42, 54–56, 64, 69, 71; on prudence, 37–38, 41, 57, 66, 97, 114, 140, 142, 149n15, 183, 194, 283, 292; Rhetoric, 34–35,

119; on slavery, xxvn4, 38–39; on temperance, 135n76 asceticism, 18, 94–97, 100–104, 109n71, 114, 121, 123, 125. See also monasticism Ash’arite, xx, 116–17, 137, 148 attention, 21, 96, 100, 150n31, 201, 2082n, 217, 278, 284, 317 Augustine, xx–xxi, 115, 138–39, 141– 42, 145–48, 149n19, 285–86, 289n32 autonomy, xxii, 227, 231–32, 249, 252, 273, 297. See also freedom avarice. See greed Baier, Annette, 154, 224–25 beatitudes, 50–52, 56, 71, 101, 142, 283 beneficence. See benevolence benevolence, xxi, 20–22, 117, 126, 153, 155–57, 160, 173, 296 blame, 125, 143, 160, 205, 207, 245, 252, 257, 305–6, 309–10, 314–15, 320n33. See also ignorance, culpable; punishment; responsibility Buddhism, 279, 289n27 care, xi, xiii, xix, 22, 24, 36, 41, 67, 102, 118, 123, 173, 207, 225–29, 273, 296, 298; lack of. See negligence 323

324

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caritas. See love character, xi, xiii, xxi, 142–43, 153–60, 173, 249–50, 263, 273n1, 279–80, 293; binary, xviii, 77, 82, 84; development or cultivation of, 23–28 94, 102, 111, 114, 119, 125, 127, 129, 201–7; stability of, 24, 105, 113, 207, 210, 216–217, 221n33; virtuous, 33–37, 42–43, 51, 53–54, 59–63, 65–67, 70, 74n60, 117, 126, 185–87; vicious or inferior, 38–39, 125, 129–30, 145, 155, 195n18, 205, 207, 212, 219, 254; voluntary nature of, xxii, 117, 211, 214–20, 220n2 charity, xi, 122, 138–40, 252–53, 260n44, 285. See also benevolence chastity, xix, 111, 141, 155 causation, 65, 105, 154; causal reasoning, 159, 162–63, 190, 214–15 children, 21, 50–55, 111, 122, 144, 155, 157–58, 162, 184, 193, 243, 245–46, 256, 264, 296, 305–6, 310–11 Chisholm, Roderick, 251, 259n34, 274n10 choice, xxii, 35–36, 50, 63, 71, 78, 85, 112–14, 120, 125, 140, 148, 151n58, 202, 206, 214–15, 217, 249, 265, 313; worthiness of, xxii, 50, 53, 55–56, 58, 71, 74n60, 98. See also deliberation Christ, 99–100, 146 Christianity, xviii–xxi, 41–43, 54–55, 71, 79, 96, 98, 116–19, 145–48, 278–79 community, xi–xii, xx, 41–43, 54–55, 71, 79, 123, 126, 144–45, 158, 209, 236, 302 compassion, 36, 118, 139, 157, 218, 295–96 compatibility: justice and mercy, xxiv, 293, 295, 299, 307, 311; moral responsibility, 160; natural virtues and wrongdoing, 141; philosophy and trust, xxiii, 223–24, 230, 233; politics and study, xvii, 55–58;

science and virtue, 171, 175, 177, 179n15 conscience, 29n18, 171, 175–78, 179n15, 180n55, 181n56 consequentialism, xx, 57–58, 61, 143, 148, 154, 159, 173, 187, 193, 202, 270, 312–13. See also utilitarianism constancy, xxiv, 130, 160, 279–81. See also endurance cooperation, xvii, 34, 39–43, 45n39, 225. See also community corruption, xiv, xxii, 23, 101, 117–18, 169, 171–75, 192, 204, 207, 209, 216–17, 220n22, 221n22, 304; coercive, 201, 205, 211–14, 220n5. See also vice courage, xi–xiv, xix–xxi, xxiii–iv, 8, 24, 27, 33, 51, 71, 77, 79, 96, 123–24, 130, 140, 142, 155, 157–60, 171–74, 218, 282–86, 288n22, 289n23, 299– 301, 303; intellectual, 263–276; mental, 263–65, 267, 274n7, 274n9, 275n17; moral, 265, 272, 274n4; physical, 263–64 deliberation, xvii, 33–35, 37–38. 41–42, 50, 97, 107n25; political, xiv, 42, 68, 74n54; resulting in decision, xvii, 50, 60–62, 68, 71, 140, 209, 213–14, 216, 218, 243, 256; capacity of, 33–35, 37–38, 41–42, 97, 107n25, 202, 205, 218, 231; deontology, xx–xxi, 142, 147– 148. See also Kant Descartes, Renee, 165n45, 269 desert: of blame, 305–310; compared to rights and goods, 306–9; lack of, 35, 119, 122, 299, 321n40; of praise, 145, 160, 175, 309; of punishment, xxiv, 212, 221n23, 293–299, 301–3, 305, 308, 310–11, 313, 317–18, 319n9, 320n30; of a second chance, 295, 313–15, 318n3; of treatment, 309, 315 320n33, 321n36 dignity, 155, 192, 213



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dispositions. See character; habit diversity, vx, xx, 112, 115, 125, 137, 178, 206–7, 211, 299, 314 divine, xix–xx, 10, 29n18, 59–60, 64–65, 69, 74n60, 94–95, 97, 99–100, 104–5, 111, 114–15, 130, 139, 141, 150n31, 280; agency, 111; attitude/desire, 103, 117; commandments, 102, 125–27; grace, 102, 105, 120, 278. See also God Driver, Julia, 252–53, 260n44, 277 duty, xii, 68, 74n60, 84, 159, 185, 187, 190, 192, 194, 259n33, 271, 296, 313, 319n3 education, xiv, xvi, xix, xxi, xxiv, 8–9, 16, 19, 23, 25–28, 35, 41–43, 54–55, 95–96, 158, 162, 170, 173–74, 187, 193, 195n18, 213, 268, 286, 293–94, 298, 305–6, 311–12, 315, 317 emotion, xv–xvi, 23–24, 33–35, 37, 39, 44n2, 98, 101–103, 105, 128, 137, 139, 143, 153, 157, 178, 181n67, 192– 93, 201–204, 217, 254, 279, 288n21, 294, 305, 315, 321. See also passion endurance, xxiv, 68, 102, 160, 202–203, 206–7, 211–12, 215, 219, 243, 246, 279–85, 312. See also constancy envy, 38, 41, 98, 124, 143. See also jealousy epistemology, xv, xxi–xxiii, 19, 28, 98, 126, 138, 153, 155, 157, 159–63, 165n57, 166n63, 166n71, 170, 173–74, 176, 178, 181n67, 183, 188–90, 223–24, 226–37, 238n2, 244, 246–51, 253–55, 257, 258n13, 258n22, 259n33, 260n45, 263, 265– 66, 269–70, 273n3, 274n10, 275n15, 275n17 eudaimonia. See happiness Evagrius, 102–5, 108n56, 108n61 evil, 79, 95, 104, 124, 142, 171, 173, 179n8, 181n56, 192–93, 232, 285, 297; suffering of, 62, 278–79 excuses, 102, 203–204, 251–52, 264

fairness, 37, 39–40, 43, 117, 119, 122, 128, 143; lack of, 201, 307 faith, ix, xi–xii, xx, 94, 105, 115, 119, 130–31, 137–42, 145–47, 172, 285, 302, 312, 321 faithful, 129, 131,137, 212, 218, 267 Al Fārābī, 116–17, 128 fear, 23, 35–39, 79, 98, 103–104, 142, 193, 248, 266–67, 274n6, 274n9, 300, 304, 313; of consequences, 317; of God, 137–39 feminism, 271–72, 275n17 forgiveness, 143, 210, 297–98, 319n11, 320n20, 321n36 fortitude. See courage; endurance freedom, 8, 101–103, 131, 147, 188–91, 205; degrees of, 125; from passion (apatheia), 99, 103–104; of thought, 13, 248. See also autonomy friendship, 35–38, 41, 45n40, 50–52, 63, 67, 69, 111, 118, 120, 122, 158, 186–87, 203, 214, 227, 267 Gaon, Saadiah Ben Yosef, xx, 124–25, 143 al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid, xix–xx, 123, 280 generosity, 33, 36, 43, 98, 101, 114, 119, 121–22, 126, 129, 138–39, 153, 205, 210, 296, 300. See also charity geometry. See mathematics God, xix–xx, 15n26, 22–23, 29n18, 51, 57, 59–60, 62–63, 65, 68–70, 75n87, 94, 97, 99, 101–5, 112, 114–16, 119, 123–26, 128–31, 133n43, 134n71, 137–41, 144–48, 149n15, 156–57, 171–72, 193, 232, 263, 274n11, 318, 319n9. See also divine grace, xix–xx, 24, 27, 37, 102, 105, 120, 126, 130–31, 139–42, 145–48, 149n19, 221n32, 278 gratitude, 22, 125, 139, 210 gratification, 207, 209–10; of appetites, 62, 100 Gray, John, xi–xii, xxvn2

326

Index

greed, 103,127–129, 158, 162, 208. See also money Gregory I, the Great, 140, 277–79, 282, 285, 288n22 Greyfriars Bobby, xi–xiii habit, xiii–xiv, xix, 55–56, 85–87, 94, 96, 98–99, 103–4, 112–13, 117, 120, 129–30, 137–38, 140, 142, 148, 159– 60, 162, 184, 192, 201–4, 212–13, 216, 219, 221, 244, 250–51, 256–57, 261n53, 293 happiness, xiv, xvii–xviii, 49–64, 66–67, 69–71, 73n29, 73n32, 73n54, 74n60, 111–14, 123, 126, 142–43, 146–48, 169, 175, 177, 179n8, 183– 84, 193–94, 206, 221n32, 311 harmony, xvi, 3–4, 9–11, 13, 15n20, 16n26, 17n28, 26, 82, 84–85, 89n42, 95, 109n71, 116, 125, 132n11, 159, 193, 272; octave, 3–4, 6, 9–10, 16 hate, 52, 119, 215 Homer, 12, 16 honor, xvi, 39–40, 49–50, 52, 54, 61–63, 67, 101, 119, 124, 127, 139, 143, 154, 173–75, 280 hope, xiv, xx, xxiii, 22–23, 115, 119, 131, 137–39, 141–42, 146, 213, 243– 45, 247, 249, 251–57, 257n1 258n17, 259n37, 260n41, 260n47, 260n51, 261n53, 285, 301–302, 321n40 human nature. See nature Hume, David, xv, xxi, 140, 153–63, 165n45, 234 humility, xx–xxi, 15, 27, 118, 141, 143–44, 157–59, 161, 237, 272, 275n19, 302 Hutcheson, Francis, 156–57 identity, 64–65, 99, 147, 213 ignorance, xiv, xxiii, 111, 169–71, 176– 77, 249–52, 257n7, 297, 311, 319n9; culpable, 79, 251–52, 258n21, 259n36, 259n37, 260n45; virtues of, xxiii, 181n61, 225, 235, 237, 243–

45, 252–54, 256–57, 257n3, 260n44, 261n53, 277 imitation, 154, 304 imperfection, 142, 191, 249, 254, 296– 97, 299–302, 314; duty, 296, 318n3, 320n20 incommensurability, 9, 11, 113 incontinence, 113, 151n58, 248–56, 258n13, 258n14, 258n22, 259n33, 259n37, 260n45, 261n53, 316; doxastic, 244–46, 248–56. See also habit inequality, 6, 11, 43, 171, 173, 237, 304. See also injustice infused virtues. See virtue injustice, xix, 22–23, 39, 52, 79, 105, 145, 147, 171, 216, 282, 293, 297– 301, 303–5, 307–9, 311, 315, 317, 320n16, 321n36, 321n40. See also inequality; justice instrumental, 9, 51–52, 60, 65, 170, 188, 228, 278, 281, 288 intellect, xiii–xxiii, xxvn4, 3, 8–9, 11, 13, 15n14, 19–20, 23–24, 27–28, 33, 41, 80–82, 85, 93–94, 96, 102, 104, 111–15, 119, 121–23, 125–31, 134n71, 137, 139–41, 145–48, 149n17, 151n58, 153–55, 157–63, 165n55, 166n71; anti-intellectual, 170 interconnected. See interdependence interdependence, xxiii, 33, 137, 173, 230, 233, 280–294 irrationality, 184, 207. See also incontinence; rationality Islam, xx, 111, 116–17, 120–21, 123– 25, 131, 133n21, 142, 148, 280 jealousy, 41, 94, 108n60, 119, 122, 171, 173–74. See also envy Judaism, 41, 94, 100–111, 124, 131, 139, 142, 145, 148, 246 judgment, 33–35, 38, 68, 80–81, 216– 18, 220, 220n1, 228, 272, 286, 298, 315, 320n16; capacity of, 203–206,



Index 327

214; epistemic, 247–49, 257; false/ poor, 98, 115, 208, 230, 297; good/ wise, 121, 125, 181n67, 254, 278, 284; practical, 113, 187 justification: epistemic, 178, 219, 226, 228, 231, 233, 236–37; for action and omission (including practices), 188, 193, 215, 251; for mercy, xxiv, 23, 80, 137, 159, 161, 294-95, 297, 302, 304-6, 309-10, 314-16, 318, 319n3, 321n36; of punishment, 201, 212, 215, 219, 228, 293, 308; religious, 266, 269 justice, xi, xiv, xix–xx, 8–11, 16, 22–24, 26, 29, 51, 71, 73n29, 77, 79, 96–97, 104–105, 109n71, 114, 119, 121–24, 128, 137–48, 150n46, 155–56, 158, 164n37, 213, 216, 221n32, 272, 273n2, 282–85, 293–315, 318, 318n2, 318n3, 319n15, 320n33, 321n36; divine, 305, 319n9; nonideal theories of, 294, 299–300, 319n14; priority of, 295, 303–306, 319n13 Kant, Immanuel, xiv, xxi–xxii, 144, 148, 159, 183–94, 195n18, 320n20, 320n30 kathekonta, xviii, 81, 83–6 kathorthomata, xviii, 81, 83–86, 89n25 Kierkegaard, Søren, 283–84 Kraut, Richard, 45n34 Kuhn, Thomas, 270 Kupfer, Joseph, 278–80 law, xxii, xxv, 29n18, 43, 54–57, 80–81, 97–98, 12–27, 139, 144, 176, 212, 214, 217, 234, 297, 301–2, 319n9; lawless (unlawful), 115–313; moral, xxi–xxii, 55–56, 181n56, 183–85, 188–92, 195n5; natural, xi, 116, 176; religious, xxi, 116, 126–28 laziness, 122, 160, 223 learning. See education leisure, 42, 61–64, 67–71, 125, 172, 174

liberal arts, xxi, 170–178 liberalism, 211–12, 214, 220n5 liberality, xx, 119, 121–22, 124, 138, 141 Locke, John, 226–27 love, xx, 16, 24, 34, 39–41, 49, 69–70, 94, 97, 99, 101, 103–4, 115, 117–18, 121–26, 129, 140–42, 145–48, 155, 175, 177, 208, 278, 283, 285, 289n30; caritas, 137–39 luck, 52, 57, 62, 68, 71, 236 luxury, 171–72, 245 MacIntyre, Alasdair, xxi, 111, 148, 184–85, 187 magnificence, 124 Maimonides, Moses, xix, xx, 116, 125– 30, 133n43, 140–41, 144–45, 148 mathematics, xxii–xvi, 3, 5, 7, 9–11, 13, 15n26, 19–20, 25–28, 95, 123, 130, 149n15, 166n57, 230–31, 235, 267; geometry, xvi, 3–13, 25–27, 95, 149n15 maxim, 113, 120, 143, 184–192, 195n15 Maximus, the Confessor, 103–4, 109n71 megalopsychia. See pride medicine, 55, 58, 62, 68, 112, 115, 117, 125, 129, 172–74, 227, 230, 245, 250, 252, 259 mercy, xiv, xxiv, 128, 207, 293–307, 309–318, 318n2, 318n3, 319n9, 320n20, 320n33, 321n36, 321n37, 321n40 Mill, John Stuart, 43, 169–70, 174–75, 177–78, 179n8, 181n68, 237 Miskawayh, Aḥmad ibn Muḥammad ibn, xix–xx, 120–24 mitigation, 203, 296–97, 314. See also excuse monasticism, xviii, 94, 100–6. See also asceticism money, 23, 35–36, 73n54, 120 moral development. See education moral worth, 154, 185–86, 194. See also praise

328

Index

motivation, xvi, xxii, 42, 82, 85, 147, 160, 191–207, 214–16, 243–54 260n51, 284, 295, 304 motive, 86, 119, 144, 184–87, 192, 202–204, 209, 315–16 music, xv–xvi, 3–13, 14n2, 15n26, 16n28, 25–26, 68, 95–96, 125, 165n57. See also harmony Muslim. See Islam nature: human, xv, xix–xx, 78, 82, 114, 156, 178, 184, 190; primary, xxii, 216–17, 220; secondary. See character; habit negligence, xiv, 155–57, 160, 204, 226, 228 Nietzsche, 127, 148, 282, 286 Nussbaum, Martha, 35, 181n67 passion, xvi–xvii, 34–38, 41, 94–105, 108n59, 108n61, 109n62, 115, 118– 120, 129–30, 140–44, 148, 156–57, 162, 174–76. See also emotion patience, xi–xiv, xxiii–xxiv, 13, 102, 118, 120, 141, 145, 160, 248, 277–87, 287n10, 287n15, 288n19, 288n21, 288n22, 289n14, 289n32, 289n35, 300 peace, 42, 67–68, 71, 80, 146, 244 perception, 24–27, 33, 35, 69, 109n71, 159–60, 165n45, 165n57, 216, 218, 227, 230, 232, 269; moral, xix, 37, 94, 98, 102, 104, 156, 205–211, 216–218, 264, 279 perfection: in math, 4, 12; of God, 126–30, 145; of self, xvi, xx, 103, 117–19, 123–26, 140–42, 150n31, 161, 294, 300; of thought and action, 79, 81–87 perseverance, xxiv, 24, 27, 100, 117, 119, 155, 158, 160, 274n12, 278, 279, 280–83, 316. See also constancy; endurance Philo, 116, 132n11, 132n21, 134n71, 137–38, 148

phronesis. See wisdom, practical Plato, xxii–xvi, 3–13, 19–28, 28n7, 29n11, 73n32, 94, 104, 109n71, 115–16, 124, 126, 130, 137–39, 141, 221n32, 234; Apology, 20, 23, 25, 29n19, 234–35; cave, 8–9, 95; Crito, 23, 29n18, 29n19; divided line, 3, 6–11, 16, 25–26; Euthyphro, 20, 137, 141; knowledge, 20, 35, 113, 138; mathematics, 25–27; Meno, 26–27, 128, 277; Phaedo, 24, 96; Republic, xix, 7–9, 12–13, 15n26, 19, 22, 24–28, 94–95, 107n21, 126, 128, 132n11, 137, 320; Symposium, 24–25, 49, 97; Timaeus, xvi, 4, 11, 16n28 pleasure, 35, 39–40, 49–50, 61–62, 67, 69–70, 73n54, 96–98, 100, 103–104, 111, 113, 119, 121, 129, 143, 154– 56, 188, 219 Plotinus, xix, 115 pluralism, xx, 125, 160–63, 319n13 polis, xvii, 54. See also politics politics, xiv, xvii–xviii, 8, 16n26, 34, 38, 40–43, 49, 52, 54–57, 60–72, 73n53, 74n54, 95, 107n22, 109n71, 116, 120, 123, 178, 181n66, 211, 214, 266–67 Porphyry, 115 poverty, 85, 96, 171 power, 74, 109n71, 137, 140–41, 158, 169, 190, 290; of appetite, 35, 39–40, 140, 191; divine, 99, 117, 146; as influence, xxii, 204, 212; intellectual, 34, 140, 244, 263; political, 39–41, 52, 61, 67, 302 practical wisdom. See wisdom practical necessity, xxii, 205, 207, 216–17 praise, 26, 37, 40, 63, 119, 122, 124, 148, 149n19, 155, 160, 165n57, 177, 181n61, 234–35, 289n26, 309–10 pride, xix, xxi, 103, 118, 119, 129, 143–45, 157, 162 Proclus, xix, 115–17



Index 329

prudence. See wisdom, practical punishment, xxiv, 104, 212–13, 216, 220n5, 284, 293, 295–318, 318n2, 319n9, 320n16, 320n18, 320n33, 321n37. See also blame Pythagoras, xiv, xv, xvi, 3–6, 9–13, 14n1, 14n2, 15n14, 15n20, 16n26, 25 racism, 245, 251, 254n36, 272, 310, 320n26 rationality, 23–24, 28, 87, 188, 191; practical, 9, 35, 38, 183, 187–94, 205–6, 213–217, 219–20. See also irrationality Rawls, John, 44n15, 45n39, 46n50, 319n14 reasons, 9, 23, 39, 41, 192, 210, 226–29, 232–33, 236, 246, 249, 251; bad, 293, 304; basic, 266–67; as deterrents, 201–202; epistemic, 246, 249–51, 269; fact of, 184, 187–91; non-epistemic, 250–51, 258n13, 258n22; sufficient, 253 recidivism, 212–14 reciprocity, xv, 4, 16n26, 118, 122, 157, 225 reliabilism, xxi, 28n1, 159–60, 273n1 resentment, 204, 208, 210, 278 responsibilist, xxiii, 28n1, 159–60, 163, 166n63, 273n1 responsibility, xxiv, 40, 111, 126, 131, 147–48, 160, 203–204, 271, 312–13; accountability, 216–218; diminished, xxii, 201, 203–104, 214–19, 234; retrospective, 160, 205, 214, 257, 273, 312; prospective, 28, 145, 244, 313. See also blame; praise; punishment retributivism, 124, 293, 306. See also punishment reward. See praise righteous indignation, 119, 124. See also anger rights, 39, 142, 212–14, 293, 296–98, 304–309, 314, 317

Ross, W. D., 319n13 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xiv, xv, xxi, 169, 170–78, 179n5, 179n10, 180n36, 181n55, 181n61, 181n70 Russell, Bertrand, 230 science, xii, xv, xxi, 13, 14n2, 15n14, 19, 25–28, 29n18, 54–55, 59–61, 73n53, 95, 120, 148, 162, 169–78, 179n15, 227, 230, 236, 270 self: -concept, xxii, 157, 201, 218; -control, xx, xxiv, 64–65, 77, 113, 121, 130, 160, 192, 218, 258n22, 280–82; -deception, 102, 105, 203, 208–9, 267; -destruction, 125, 144, 160, 208, 283, 302; -improvement, xx, 37–39, 117–18, 302; -knowledge, 37, 39–40, 149n19, 157, 161, 165n45, 176, 193, 201– 202, 204, 223, 270, 272; -respect, 117–18, 207, 237; -sufficient, 54, 71, 79, 115, 231, 237 Seneca, 80–81, 88n7, 283, 288n21, 293, 301–303, 310–11 sex, 121; sexism/sexual inequality, xxvn4, 195n18, 237, 271–72; sexual assault, 211 sin, xix, xxi, 84, 102–105, 108n61, 118, 125, 129, 142–45, 150n46, 205, 220n4, 302–303 skepticism, xix, 130, 153, 161–63, 165n45, 229, 269–70 Socrates, 6, 8–11, 13, 20–28, 29n10, 29n11, 29n12, 29n18, 29n19, 35, 49, 58, 94–97, 100, 104, 107n21, 113, 137, 145–47, 175–77, 181n61, 234, 244 stoicism, xviii, 77–85, 98, 102, 105, 132n11, 138, 233 suffering, 62, 102, 119, 141, 247–48, 256, 280, 283, 295–98, 312–14, 320n29, 321n40. See also evil, suffering of supererogation, xx, 143, 295–97, 315

330

Index

temperance, xii, xix, 38, 51, 71, 79, 97–98, 104, 115, 118, 121–22, 124, 142, 272, 273n2, 280 theological virtues. See virtues theology, xiv, xv, xix–xxi, 59, 60, 105, 108n54, 116–17, 133n21, 141, 147– 48, 260n47, 278–79, 285, 288n22, 293 time, xviii, xxiv, 13, 25, 27, 36, 39, 46n55, 50, 54, 56, 59, 68–69, 80, 96, 120, 127, 169, 171–74, 177, 186, 190, 207, 217, 256, 271, 277–78, 281–84, 286, 301–302, 310, 313–15, 318n3, 321n36 tolerance, xxiv, 279–81 trust, xii, xiv, xix, xxi–xxiii, 15n20, 41, 105, 118, 124, 130, 137–38, 141, 165n54, 175, 203, 213, 223–37, 238n2, 239n32 truth, xvi, 4, 13, 22–25, 27–28, 35, 51, 56–57, 66, 74n54, 80–81, 96–98, 107n25, 113, 115, 118, 122–24, 128–30, 141, 146–47, 155, 165n54, 170–75, 187–88, 229, 231, 233, 237, 244, 250, 256, 261n53, 277 utilitarianism, 154–55, 158. See also consequentialism vice, xiv, xviii–xx, xxii, xxiv, 34, 37–40, 42, 77, 82–85, 89n27, 98, 103, 108n60, 113, 118, 122, 124, 129–30, 142, 146, 153–55, 157, 159–61, 166n71, 171–72, 175, 177, 192, 194, 201, 205, 207–9, 211–12, 214–16, 219, 221n33, 223, 225–26,

228, 244, 252–53, 260n45, 275n14, 282, 311, 318 virtue: cardinal, xx–xxi, 121, 124, 130, 137, 139–42, 272, 273n2, 293; epistemic, 19, 159–60, 237, 270; infused, xx, 137, 142, 147; theological, xiv–xv, xix–xxi, 115, 137, 139, 141, 145–48, 260n47, 285, 293 volitional necessity. See practical necessity voluntarism, 148, 151n58, 274n13 voluntary, xix, xxii, 113, 160, 201, 205, 211, 214, 217–19, 220n2, 249, 279 warrant, xxiv, 210, 228, 236, 248–50, 257n7, 268, 273n2, 283, 293, 296– 99, 303–304, 309–10 Williams, Bernard, 206, 217–18 wisdom, xix–xx, xxiv, 24, 49, 69, 73n54, 77, 79, 81, 94–101, 106, 107n22, 113–117, 120–14, 126, 130, 133n32, 137, 140, 142, 145, 153, 155, 157–58, 183, 193–94, 207, 234, 266, 272, 273n2, 287n3, 293; practical, xi, xiv, xvi, xxii, xxiv, 33–35, 37–38, 41, 43, 45n34, 51–59, 61–63, 65–68, 74n60, 97–98, 104, 109n71, 114, 120, 128, 149n15, 158, 206, 216, 277–78, 283– 84, 292, 295, 315–18 wrongdoing, xix, 23, 105, 118, 126– 127, 141, 244, 279, 298, 311, 316 Yaḥya, ibn ‘Adī, 116–120, 121, 133n21 Zagzebski, Linda, 149n17, 154, 159, 165n55, 273n1, 274n12

About the Contributors

Ben Almassi, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Governors State University. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Washington. His research interests include applied and practical ethics, philosophy of science, and social epistemology. He has published articles in journals such as Bioethics, Ethics and the Environment, the Journal of Applied Philosophy, and Philosophy of Science. Audrey L. Anton, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Western Kentucky University. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from the Ohio State University. Her research interests include ethics (especially virtue ethics), moral psychology (especially moral responsibility), ancient philosophy, and philosophical gerontology. She is the author of Moral Responsibility and the Desert of Praise and Blame (2015). She has published in journals such as Philosophical Papers, Philosophy in the Contemporary World, Society for Ancient Greek Philosophy Newsletter, and Southwest Philosophy Review. She has won prestigious grants from the J. William Fulbright Association, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University (Junior Thyssen Fellowship). David Bradshaw earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. His research areas include ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, and philosophy of religion. His book, Aristotle East and West: Metaphysics and the Division of Christendom (2000) was the winner of Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas in 2004. His articles have appeared in journals such as The Thomist, Apeiron, Ancient Philosophy, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Faith and Philosophy, and the Review of Metaphysics. 331

332

About the Contributors

Eva María Cadavid, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Centre College. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester. Her research focuses on Aristotle’s metaphysics and epistemology and gender studies. She has served as the president of the Kentucky Philosophical Association (2014–2015) as well as the vice president (2013–2014). Cadavid is currently working on several projects including a collection of essays tentatively titled “Contemporary Perspectives on Classical Issues: A New Generation of Voices and a project in Experimental Philosophy” that examines student perspectives of gender in introductory philosophy classrooms. Lenn E. Goodman, D.Phil., is Professor of Philosophy and Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University. He earned his D.Phil. from Oxford University. His primary areas of research include metaphysics and ethics, Islamic and Jewish philosophy, theories of knowledge and culture. Among his seventeen books are Religious Pluralism and Values in the Public Sphere and the co-authored Coming to Mind: The Soul and its Body. Other major titles include In Defense of Truth: A Pluralistic Approach, and translations of Arabic classics including Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan and the tenth century ecological fable by the Brethren of Purity The Case of the Animals vs. Man before the King of the Jinn. His many articles appear in journals such as Philosophy, Society, the Review of Metaphysics, and Philosophy East and West. Goodman is a past winner of awards from ACLS and NEH. He won the American Philosophical Association Baumgardt Memorial Prize and Vanderbilt University’s top research award, the Earl Sutherland prize. He is now completing a new book, written as a Herzl Institute Templeton Fellow: The Holy One of Israel. With his colleague Phillip Lieberman he is preparing a new translation/commentary of Maimonides’s Guide to the Perplexed. Marcia Homiak, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at Occidental College. She earned her Ph.D. from Harvard University. Her philosophical work is primarily in areas of moral and political philosophy (especially moral character and virtue) and seeks to show the continuing relevance of Aristotle’s discussions of these topics. Her work appears in several edited volumes, in journals such as Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophical Books, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, and Philosophia, and in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Jonathan Jacobs, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy; Director of Institute for Criminal Justice Ethics; and Presidential Scholar at Jon Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of



About the Contributors 333

Pennsylvania. His research interests include metaethics, moral psychology, the history of philosophy (both medieval and modern), and criminal justice. He has published books with Oxford University Press, Blackwell Press, and Cornell University Press. His journal articles appear in American Philosophical Quarterly, Criminal Justice Ethics, the Review of Metaphysics, the Southern Journal of Philosophy, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Value Inquiry, International Philosophical Quarterly, Reason Papers, the Heythrop Journal, and Ratio. Katherine Johnson, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Bellarmine University. She earned her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Loyola University Chicago. Her research interests include ethics and epistemology with a special focus on understanding the nature of ignorance and its impact on our moral lives. Her work has appeared in journals such as Radical Philosophy Review. She currently serves as the director of Bellarmine University’s Ethics and Social Justice Center. Ryan Korstange, M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of University Studies at Middle Tennessee State University, where he coordinates the firstyear seminar program. His research interests include ancient philosophical and theological understandings of the human soul, translation theory, particularly as it relates to translations of the Hebrew Bible, and pedagogy that promotes student learning. He serves on the board of directors for the Society for Values in Higher Education. His work has appeared in the Routledge Dictionary of Ancient Mediterranean Religion (2015), and the Journal of Student Success and Retention. Eric Kraemer, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy at University of WisconsinLa Crosse. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from Brown University. His primary areas of research include philosophy of mind, theory of knowledge, philosophy of science, ethics, and medical ethics. He has published dozens of articles in such journals as Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Topics, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Mind, Philosophical Studies, and Analysis. Anne Mamary, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at Monmouth College, Monmouth, IL. She received her Ph.D. from the Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture program at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Her research areas include ancient philosophy (especially Plato), feminist philosophy, and post-colonial studies. She is co-editor, with Gertrude James Gonzalez, of Cultural Activisms: Poetic Voices, Political

334

About the Contributors

Voices (1999). Her articles appear in several edited collections as well as in such journals as Reason Papers, International Studies in Philosophy, Women’s Studies, and Feminist Studies. She participated, with Eva María Cadavid, in the Council of Independent Colleges and Harvard University’s Center for Hellenic Studies seminar on Ancient Greece in the Modern Classroom, “The Verbal Art of Plato,” in July 2017. Dan O’Brien, Ph.D., is Reader in Philosophy at Oxford Brookes University. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Birmingham University. His research areas include epistemology, Hume, and the philosophy of religion. He is author and editor of eight books (several appear in multiple languages) and over a dozen articles. His articles have appeared in journals such as the Philosophical Quarterly, the European Journal of the Philosophy of Religion, Hypatia, and the Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. Matthew Pianalto, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Eastern Kentucky University. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Arkansas. He is the author of On Patience: Reclaiming a Foundational Virtue (2016). He has also published papers in several scholarly journals and edited collections, especially on virtue ethics, dealing with patience, moral courage, tolerance, and humility and moral disagreement, as well as on animal ethics and environmental ethics. He has budding research interests in aesthetics. C. D. C. Reeve, Ph.D., is Delta Kappa Epsilon Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Adjunct Professor of Classics at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He works primarily in ancient Greek philosophy, especially Plato and Aristotle, but is interested in philosophy generally and has published work in the philosophy of sex and love and on film. His books include Philosopher-Kings (1988; reissued 2006); Socrates in the Apology (1989; Chinese edition, 2017); Practices of Reason (1992); Substantial Knowledge (2000); Love’s Confusions (2005); Action, Contemplation, and Happiness: An Essay on Aristotle (2012; Portuguese edition, 2014); Blindness and ReOrientation: Problems in Plato’s Republic (2012); Aristotle on Practical Wisdom: Nicomachean Ethics Book VI (2013). He has translated Plato’s Cratylus (1997), Euthyphro, Apology, Crito (2002), Republic (2004), and Meno (2006) as well as Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (2014), Metaphysics (2016), Politics (2017), and De Anima (2017). His translations of the Physics and Rhetoric are forthcoming in 2018. He is currently working on the Topics and Sophistical Refutations.



About the Contributors 335

Michael Reno, Ph.D., is Visiting Assistant Professor of Philosophy at University of Mary, Washington, DC. He received his Ph.D. from Michigan State University. His research interests include critical social theory, environmental philosophy, and German Idealism. He has published in Radical Philosophy Review, Idealistic Studies, and Ethics, Policy, and Environment. Piers Norris Turner, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Philosophy at The Ohio State University. His research focuses on utilitarianism and liberal political thought, especially the moral and political philosophy of John Stuart Mill. His articles appear in journals such as Ethics, the Journal of the History of Philosophy, Utilitas, History of Philosophy Quarterly, and the Canadian Journal of Philosophy. He is also co-editor of Public Reason in Political Philosophy: Classic Sources and Contemporary Commentaries (2018).