Two Cheers for Virtue
Peter Railton
The University of Michigan
Draft of 15 May 2009
Introduction
The modern revival of virtue ethics took hold in part because it promised a richer and
more faithful account of actual moral life, and especially, of the psychology of the moral
agent. Yet recent years have see increasing criticism of virtue ethics precisely on the
ground that it fails to fit the best evidence of contemporary empirical psychology.1
What is the nature of this dispute? Traditional accounts of virtue give a central
role to the idea that the virtuous person will have developed robust character traits –
such as courage, generosity, compassion, honesty, loyalty, etc. – that will enable her to
act well across a wide range of situations, responding spontaneously and appropriately
even in the face of challenges that would daunt or confuse weaker souls.
These accounts typically involve two elements, one perceptual, the other
motivational. In the case of the first element, it is held that virtuous individual will “see
what is required” in a given situation: compassionate generosity in this case, or stern
and dispassionate honesty in that one; resolute courage in facing a mighty foe, or
For positive theories, see Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1999) and Rachena Kamtekar, “Situationism and Virtue Ethics on the Content of Our Character”, Ethics
114 (2004): 458-491. For criticisms, see Peter Railton, "Made in the Shade: Moral Compatiblism and the
Aims of Moral Theory", Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 21 (1995): 79-106; John
Doris, “Persons, Situations, and Virtue Ethics”, Noûs 32 (1998): 504-530; Gilbert Harman, "Moral
Philosophy Meets Social Psychology: Virtue Ethics and the fundamental Attribution Error," Proceedings of
the Aristotelian Society, New Series Volume 109 (1999): 316-31; and Peter Vranas, The Indeterminacy
Paradox: Character Evaluations and Human Psychology”, Noûs 39 (2005): 1-42.
1
prudent flexibility in withdrawing before an overwhelming foe in order to fight another
day. Thanks to her character, the virtuous person will immediately grasp the essentials
in a situation, sense the values at stake, be sensitive to their weight, see the right
response, and not be distracted by temptations or moral irrelevancies. Let us call this a
capacity for reliable evaluative perception. And let us borrow a bit from the classical
model, and think of rationality in terms of ratio – i.e., proportion. We can then say that
the virtuous person’s capacity for evaluative perception, as a reliable ability to have a
proportionate response to the risks, values, and possibilities at stake, is part of her
practical rationality – not a deliberative part, but a crucial one. And even when
deliberation is called for, evaluative perception plays an indispensable role. For it
typically furnishes the primary information that serves as basis for deliberation – if such
perception is disproportionate, then deliberation, too, is likely to go awry. Thus we
should picture the courageous person as neither irrationally cowed by danger (overestimating it, like the coward), nor arationally oblivious to it (under-estimating it, like the
reckless individual). Rather, she perceives the risks as they are, and likewise, appreciates
the values at stake as they are – thanks to this, her response to these features of the
situation, both non-deliberative and deliberative, is appropriately focused, measured,
urgent, etc., and is responsive the relevant considerations. That is, it is proportionate
and rational.
The second element of virtue is concerned with the translation of perception
into action. Thanks to her character, once the virtuous person has seen what is called
for, she will immediately be moved to act accordingly. She will neither seek nor need
any further motive or incentive in order to perform the right action – her evaluative
2
perception will be sufficient. Nor will she need, like the merely continent person, to
fight off competing motives in order to win her way toward doing the right thing. In this
way, her action will be fully attuned to what is called for in the situation – she will act in
the right way, at the right time, with the right feeling, and for the right end. Her action
will be a case of reason being in control, but not necessarily owing to deliberation and a
conscious act of will – for these would be the signs of a character not already fully
attuned to the situation. Let us call this section feature of the robust character of the
virtuous practical attunement. Simplifying considerably, then, we will think of the
virtuous person as someone robustly capable of reliable evaluative perception and, on
this basis, reliable practical attunement.
One chief strand of empirically-based criticism of this traditional conception of
virtue takes as its starting point the large body of experimental work indicating that
individual behavior in a given situation – whether assistance is given to someone in need,
or harm is inflicted on someone vulnerable, or impulse wins out over reflection – is
heavily driven by situational features.2 This would be untroubling if the features in
question had moral relevance, so that sensitivity to them would be part of a fine-grained
skill in evaluative perception and practical attunement. Unfortunately, however, the
opposite seems to be the case. Presented with morally similar situations differing only
in irrelevant details, individuals tend to react and act markedly differently. In one
notable recent example, whether an individual responded generously or ungenerously to
request for charity significantly reflected whether she was holding a warm or cold
2
Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, The Person and the Situation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).
3
beverage in her hand at the time.3 Notably, this influence of morally irrelevant
variations in circumstance upon individual behavior was unperceived by the agent
herself. Asked why they responded favorably or unfavorably to this particular charitable
request, participants in the experiment never cited holding the warm or cold drink as a
factor in their decision. Pressed for an explanation, they instead would try to tell a
meaningful narrative in the form of a rationalizing explanation: “This just seemed like a
really good cause”, or, “The guy on the phone was obnoxious”, etc.4 This case might
seem too trivial to warrant any interesting conclusions about the role of traits of
character in determining action, were it not one of thousands of experiments in which
manipulating trivial situational features can strongly affect behavior – even when it is a
question of rendering help in (what appears to be) a terrible accident, or inflicting (what
appears to be) severe pain upon a hapless victim.5
Of course, no psychological tests administered to random samples drawn from
the general population could disprove the existence of exceptional individuals who
possess robustly virtuous traits of character in traditional sense. People of this kind
might exist in our midst, yet it seems clear that, if they exist, such individuals must be
quite rare. Most of us, it seems, are not much like this.6 Moreover, the sad history of
Reported by John Bargh. See the related experiments in L.E. Williams and J.A. Bargh, “Experiencing
Physical Warmth Promotes Interpersonal Warmth”, Science 322 (2008): 606-607.
4
See the discussion of post facto rationalization in J.A. Bargh and T.L. Chartrand, “The Unbearable
Automaticity of Being”, American Psychologist 54 (1999): 462-479.
5
Moreover, holding a hot vs. cold drink has been found to significantly influence evaluations of other
individuals as themselves “warm” or “cold”, and relative warmth is considered to be, along with
competence, one of the two primary dimensions of initial interpersonal evaluation, making a significant
difference in willingness to trust another. See Williams and Bargh (2008).
6
See for example Ross and Nisbett (1999). Some contemporary defenders of virtue theory dismiss this
sort of evidence, arguing that we should not look for direct situation-behavior links in the virtuous agent,
but for a whole pattern of thinking, perceiving, feeling etc. that is embodied in practical reason. See
Kamtekar (2004). Unfortunately, however, it has been one of the lasting accomplishments of
contemporary cognitive social psychology to demonstrate that what it occurs to individuals to think,
3
4
the past hundred years appears strongly to confirm the conclusion that perfectly
ordinary, well-respected, and well-behaved people can, under certain conditions, be
brought to commit horrible violence upon innocent individuals, or to tolerate it with
equanimity. When Stanley Milgram was about to begin his famous experiments to test
the willingness of individuals to comply with an instruction to inflict serious harm on
others (“I was just following orders”), he approached forty experienced psychiatrists
and posed to them the question of what proportion of individuals to expect would be
willing to administer (what they took to be) an electric shock labeled ‘Severe Shock’ or
‘XXX’ upon a slow-learning adult “student” who protested that he had a heart
condition. The psychiatrists – aware of the relative infrequency of acts involving such
severe violence against strangers in the general population – gave an average prediction
of only 1%.7 They took the infrequency of such severely harmful acts in normal lives
acts as a sign that people, sociopaths aside, had a robust disposition against it – they
would therefore be expected to refuse to obey such instructions. But when Milgram
actually ran the experiment, nearly two-thirds of the participants complied with a series
of firm instructions to apply a complete sequence of voltages leading from the weakest
to the very top of the range – even to a subject who had been calling out in pain, and
then fallen silent.8
Later variants of the experiment showed that, by manipulating just one
situational variable, such as how close the “teacher” was to the “student” (apparently)
receiving the shocks, or whether the “teacher” had had physical contact with the
perceive, or feel in a given situation is highly sensitive to subtle variations in the cues they are given. (See
below.)
7
Reported in Philip Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (New York:
Random House, 2007).
8
Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority (New York: Harper and Row, 1974).
5
“student” prior to the experiment, the rate of compliance could be shifted up and down
the range from 10% to 90%. Milgram’s aim had been to study compliance with authority,
not virtue as such, but his experiments attest to the power of slightly abnormal
circumstances to produce very dramatic, even lethal shifts in behavior. Something
similar has been observed repeated in incidents of genocidal violence and torture. Of
course, historically acts of genocidal violence and torture have also occurred
spontaneously, not at the direct behest of an authority, and in a climate where a
dehumanizing racial or ethnic ideology has taken hold. So Milgram’s original
experiments are not an all-purpose model. But since Milgram, similar experiments have
been done in a large number of countries, sometimes removing the authority figure and
allowing individuals greater freedom to make choices. Even in these cases, high rates of
willingness to inflict severe harm have been observed, and morally insignificant
situational variables have been shown to have strong effects.9
The good news from such studies is that virtually everyone, sociopaths aside,
seems to have core capacities for non-violent, cooperative behavior in the broad normal
range of circumstances. Moreover, in some circumstances, ordinary individuals will
typically show empathy and compassion, or a resentment of injustice, or a willingness to
resist arbitrary authority. Indeed, in examples of so-called “altruistic punishment”,
individuals show themselves willing to pay money to see someone they believe to have
behaved unjustly denied a reward.10
9
For discussion of the Milgram experiments and their variants, see Zimbardo (2007).
See Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter, “Altruistic Punishment in Humans”, Nature 415 (2002): 137-140.
10
6
The bad news is that virtually everyone, sociopaths included, also has core
capacities for cruelty, violence, opportunism, and indifference to the abuse and suffering
of others, which can equally effectively be evoked in other situations.11
As Peter Vranas puts it, our psyches appear to be fragmented.12 If people do not
possess overarching and highly general situation-independent dispositions to act, neither
are they a mere, suggestible, infinitely malleable mass of dispositions. Instead they
appear to possess a behavioral repertoire of a large number of very different, fragmented
dispositions. Which fragment comes to the fore in thought and action appears to have a
great deal to do with social setting and morally irrelevant situational cues, but we would
not see such predictable shifts in behavior with shifts in situation were there not some
clusters of underlying, fairly reliable dispositions. Some of these might be found in
nearly everyone, others might vary from person to person.
At the same time, however, individuals do appear to possess some quite general,
stable “traits” that mark them as possessing different “personalities”. These personality
traits often first appear early in life, and normally are relatively constant over a lifetime.
They lead to distinctive behavioral “styles” – not constancies in behavior across all
variations in circumstance, to be sure, but similarities in behavior across a sufficiently
wide range of normal circumstances to result in genuine differences in average individual
behavior, differences with real predictive value. Evidence suggests that these traits
typically involve both genetic and environmental determinants, and that the early
childhood period is of special importance in their emergence and development.13
11
See Zimbardo (2007).
Vranas (2005).
13
Certain developmental effects can have an important role in augmenting or reducing these traits later in
life. For example, the traits of conscientiousness and self-control tend to grow in the period after
12
7
Unfortunately, however, behavioral constancy of this kind does little to help
virtue theory, for the relevant personality traits do not look much like the traditional
virtues. Among the best-documented personality traits are: extroversion (vs.
introversion), openness to novelty (vs. discomfort with change), aggressivity (vs.
passivity), self-control and “conscientiousness” (vs. impulsivity), sociability (vs. a
tendency toward social withdrawal), agreeableness (vs. suspiciousness), and neuroticism
(a tendency toward negative vs. positive feeling and thought). While we might agree
that possessing some of these traits to a certain degree would be useful acting morally,
it would be very implausible to say that one or another of these features is a moral
virtue. They all can be exhibited, even prominently, in bad as well as good behavior.
And none of them, taken singly or together, can be seen as a plausible basis for guiding
one’s life, or as providing a standard for right action.
Consider what might appear to be the strongest candidates, self-control or
conscientiousness. Individual differences in conscientiousness, for example, are
determined by strength of agreement or disagreement with such statements as, “I follow
a schedule”, “I always do my duty”, “I get chores done right away”, and “I often forget
to put things back in their proper place”. We all know such people, but do we look to
them for moral models? What about self-control? Here the case is more promising. A
standard way of assessing degrees of self-control is to test an individual’s ability to defer
gratification. This is an important capacity of practical reason – certainly one that
Aristotle would have recognized. When Walter Mischel tested pre-school children to
see how long they could refrain from eating a marshmallow that has been set before
adolescence, and while the trait of openness tends to decline with age. For discussion, see D.J. Ozer and
V. Benet-Martinez, “Personality and the Prediction of Consequential Outcomes”, Annual Review of
Psychology 57 (2006): 401-421.
8
them in an otherwise empty room, if they have been told that, by abstaining until the
experimenter returns to the room (an unspecified amount of time), they will receive an
extra marshmallow at the end. Following these same children through their school
years and beyond, Mischel found that their ability to defer gratification at age 4 was a
good predictor of school grades, frequency of “behavior problems” in school and other
institutional settings, college-entrance examination scores, stable relationships, and
much more.14 This makes a capacity for self-control look fairly virtuous, and it certainly
is true that, in many circumstances, self-control is essential if one is going to be
successful, do the right thing, or act well. But it simply isn’t true that we can look to
self-control to point us toward the right aims in life (consider the self-disciplined SS
officer), or to show us the best ways of living or relating to others (consider the ascetic),
or to alert us to moral problems in what we set our minds upon doing (consider the
torturer, rigorously following orders). Interviewing 19 violent murderers in prison,
selected at random, the psychologist Philip Zimbardo found that 10 were impulsive,
extroverted, and aggressive. But the other 9 had strong self-control, were introverted,
and passive.15 Sometimes, to put things in Aristotelian terms, acting at the right time, in
the right way, with the right feeling, and toward the right end will call for spur-of-themoment generosity (a “failure to defer gratification”), or impulsive defiance of an
authority (a “behavior problem”), or unreflective loyalty to a threatened friend (a
“failure to be considerate of others”). Individuals rated as very high in self-control and
conscientiousness are also prone to perfectionism, personal rigidity, compulsiveness,
As Aristotle would have noted, there can also be excess in deferral of gratification. Those
preschoolers who waited the full fifteen minutes, but then continued to defer eating the marshmallows
were found to have a higher rate of psychological difficulties than those who allowed themselves to enjoy
the treat they had earned by their patience.
15
Zimbardo (2007).
14
9
social distancing, and manipulation by authorities. We should not confuse Aristotle’s
great-souled man, or courageous warrior, or true friend, with Goody Two-Shoes.
*
*
*
Suppose, then, that we move away from the idea of hoping that we could expect
people to develop stable character traits like courage, compassion, temperance, justice,
etc., to regulate their behavior appropriately across a wide range of normal and
abnormal circumstances. What then remains of virtue theory?
A great deal, I believe. Enough to warrant at least two cheers for virtue. First,
virtue theory emphasizes the importance of thinking in terms of the whole agent – not
only what we do, but what we are. Second, virtue theory draws our attention to the
eudaimonist project – the idea that what makes for a morally good life, and what makes a
life worth living or intrinsically rewarding, are allied in some fundamental way. The first
cheer salutes virtue theory for helping to move contemporary moral philosophy away
from a fixation on judgment, cognition, command, will, and principle to a more
encompassing understanding of the moral self, including social environment, affect,
emotion, and motivation. The second salutes virtue theory for reminding us that morality
will not take strong root in our lives, or sustain itself as a living force in the world,
unless it can be connected with actions and lives we find meaningful and in some
measure rewarding. These two salutary features of virtue theory are not, I would claim,
at odds with contemporary empirical psychology. On the contrary, a large and growing
body of psychological research gives them very substantial support.
First cheer: the perspective of the whole agent
10
In the first half of the twentieth-century, moral philosophers tended to take the
question, “What ought I to do?” to be the moral question. So strong was this
preoccupation, that moral philosophers often wrote as if normative ethics just was a
answer to the question, “What ought I to do?”16 Curiously, this was true of teleological
and deontological theories alike. For example, it often was assumed by utilitarians as
much as their critics they were offering a distinctive sort of theory of right action. Thus
understood, utilitarianism was typically seen as coming in two basic forms: actutilitarianism and rule-utilitarianism. For example:
(AU) Act A at time t is right iff Of all the alternative acts accessible to the agent at t,
A has the highest expected value, taking all potentially affected equally into
account.
(RU)
Act A at time t is right iff Act A is required by the set of rules of conduct, the
general adoption and enforcement of which would, of all the possible systems of
adoptable and enforceable rules, have the highest expected value, taking all
potentially affected equally into account.
But why should a utilitarian – whose ultimate concern after all was with human weal and
woe – restrict her attention to the well-being produced by acts, rather than by feelings,
motives, or relationships? Put another way, why focus on the rightness rather than the
goodness of ways of acting? These questions might seem especially pressing for ruleutilitarians, who seek to be sensitive to the importance of rules in moral life. Formal
and informal rules can contribute to overall utility in many ways beyond providing a
16
P.H. Nowell-Smith, Ethics (London: Penguin, 1954).
11
criterion of right action. For example, one advantage of a system of formal and informal
rules is that such background norms can promote the coordination of behavior in ways
purely individualistic theories cannot. But does (RU), a theory of right action founded
upon optimal rules, do this?
Suppose that our town is threatened by a flood. If a nearly all the townsfolk go
to the levee and stack sand bags, the floodwater can be stanched and the town saved. If
only most, or fewer, go to the levee, however, the person-power will be insufficient to
keep up with the rising water and the levee will collapse. In this circumstance, the town
will be flooded and some of those on the levee might drown, adding human tragedy to
the massive loss of property – it would have been much better if no one had gone to
the levee and all instead had headed for the safety of higher ground. Let us further
suppose that the current low-level flooding has already destroyed communications. So
there I stand, asking, Should I go to the levee, or head for higher ground? That now
depends, according to (RU), upon what rule for such a circumstance belongs to the set
of rules with optimal acceptance utility. From the description thus far, it seems likely
that this rule would say that one ought to go to the levee to fill and stack sandbags. If
nearly everyone follows this rule, the best result will obtain. But what if this optimal
rule is not, in the actual circumstance, widely accepted? Then, by following this rule and
going to the levee, I would do no good, or perhaps even perish, when too few show up.
Surprisingly, it is no part of (RU) as a criterion of right action to take the actual climate
of rule acceptance and compliance into account.17 Surprisingly, too, an act-utilitarian
As an alternative, suppose instead that the optimal rule is thought to be “playing it safe” – i.e., one
should head for higher ground. But if I follow this rule, and if almost everyone else decides to go to the
levee, then not only will I fail to play my part in saving the town, but I might even contribute to the
17
12
fares better in this regard. For in deciding which act is right by criterion (AU), I must
wonder about how others are likely to behave, and what marginal difference my acts
might make. (RU)’s criterion, by contrast, does not pay attention to questions about
what (usually imperfect) rules or norms or habits are actually present in the population,
shaping their behavior and providing possible points of coordination for them. If we
wish to give a teleological foundation for coordination in moral life, (RU) appears to be a
step in the wrong direction.
The first clear exceptions to the 20th-century pattern of reducing utilitarian
theories to theories of right action were Donald Regan’s Utilitarianism and Cooperation
and Robert Adams’ “Motive Utilitarianism”.18 Let’s look at Adams’ proposal:
(MU) A human individual I is morally best iff I has those patterns of motivation,
among the patterns of motivation psychologically possible for human beings, that
have the highest expected value, taking all affected equally into account.
Notice that (MU) is a theory about the morally best way to be motivated, and says
nothing directly about how it is right to act. In particular, it does not say that the right
act is the one that would proceed from the morally best way of being. That would, as
Adams notes, be an implausible claim.
We can see this as follows. An old friend is passing through town, and he and I
have gotten together for the evening. We have had plenty to talk about, but now are in
the wee hours, and I still have a lecture to prepare for an early-morning class. For me
to interrupt the flow of the conversation at this point would be a bit jarring, and might
terrible disaster of having a large but not quite adequate number of people sand-bagging the levee –
resulting in the loss of many lives as well as the town. Once again, (RU) pulls me away from cooperating.
18
Donald Regan, Utilitarianism and Cooperation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980); Robert M.
Adams, “Motive Utilitarianism”, Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 467-481.
13
seem inhospitable in a way that would somewhat dim the pleasure of the evening. But
by this point my friend and I mildly aware that we are mostly talking for the sake of
talking, and the diminished pleasure we would experience would affect only two
individuals. By contrast, if I give a poorly-prepared lecture tomorrow, I will cause 150
students to experience a mix of confusion, frustration, and boredom, and leave them
with an inadequate understanding of the slated topic, “the problem of coordination in
moral theory”. It seems, then, all things considered, as if I ought to find an opportune
moment to suggest that we break off the conversation, so that he can go to bed and I
can go to prepare. That is, let us say, the right act to perform. But perhaps the best set
of motives to have would include so strong a desire to keep connected with an old
friend that one would in such circumstances not be motivated to break off the
conversation, and instead would want to keep talking despite the call of pedagogical
duty. Thus the action that would stem from the best motives to have would not be the
right thing to do.
The action consistent with the best motives might, however, be part of the
morally best way to be, or the morally best sort of life to live. These “non-acts” are as
central to life as acts themselves, and to whether our lives go well or ill, or are a
blessing or a curse to others, or make the world a better place, will have a great deal to
do with them. Always doing the right action, by contrast, might not be psychologically
compatible with the way of life that most contributes to value in the world. As the
example suggests, always acting rightly might not be conducive to the most affectionate
or meaningful relationships, or to the deepest loyalties and commitments.
14
Now consider a somewhat different example. It might be high time for Smith to
offer his spouse, Jones, an apology. After all, it was his sharp remark that started this
quarrel, and his continuing failure to apologize is leading to nothing more at this point
than an escalating and more argument. To be sure, his sharp tone was somewhat
provoked, but that really is no longer the issue. Apologizing, let us say, is the right thing
to do. But how well Smith has acted, even in apologizing, will also be a function of the
motive or feeling behind his apology – something he has long since ceased to be able to
deceive Jones about. And how well Jones and Smith have acted as a couple will
additionally depend upon the spirit in which Jones receives Smith’s apology. Experts on
marriage emphasize that it is not whether couples fight, but how they fight – including
what they feel as they fight, how they manage to stop fighting, and what unresolved
emotion remains in the aftermath of fighting – that matters for the long-term health of
the relationship. Getting a child to see and understand this crucial fact about giving and
accepting apologies is as much a part of his moral education as getting him to say “I’m
sorry” or “I accept your apology” in the right circumstances.
Suppose that a child, subjected to just such a talking-to after making a patently
sarcastic and therefore ineffectual apology to her brother, complains, “But what can I to
do about it? I can’t make myself feel sorry when I’m still so mad at him.” She has a
point. The feeling behind an apology or its acceptance is critical, but how can one learn
to feel? Or how could committing oneself to follow a principle about how to apologize
or accept an apology be efficacious? Still worse, if we know from psychology that
situational variables tend to exert a preponderant influence on how individuals will
think, feel, and act in a given setting, then it seems overwhelmingly likely that, in the heat
15
of a conflict, with harsh words on both sides, one would not be cued to consider or
follow such a principle at the appropriate time. Rather, the literature on psychological
“dissonance” suggests that situations of conflict of this kind tend to result in emotional
escalation. Each side experiences the claims of the other as threats to their own sense
of themselves as decent, caring, and capable. As a result, each side is cued to frame the
situation in defensive, self-justifying terms. Thus a quarrel over something minor
escalates into a heated, morally-charged conflict. Each side concentrates on proving the
reasonableness and non-culpability of their own behavior, and this is exactly what stokes
the anger of the other side.
Knowing all this, one could easily despair of finding any way of improving things.
Especially, because the problem in cases like this is not brought on by the individuals’
lack of a strong concern with the justness and fairness of her actions. Indeed, this
strong concern appears to be part of the problem. Neither is the problem brought on
by the individuals’ failure to endorse reasonable principles of conduct. They certainly do
endorse such principles. And were Smith and Jones instead to be dispassionately
observing a nearly identical fight among acquaintances, they would readily identify which
moral principles apply, and understand how and when to apply them to improve the
situation. But in an actual quarrel, moral principles tend to make their appearance
primarily as weapons or shields, not as solutions. So: If we cannot appeal to durable
moral character to supply the needed “evaluative perception” of what needs doing, and
practical attunement to do it in cases like this; and neither can we expect endorsement
of correct principles to enable people to avoid, or avoid prolonging, such self-defeating
situations; then, where then can we turn? And has virtue theory anything to offer us?
16
Affect and evaluation
Virtue theory, I have claimed, has the virtue of asking us to look to the whole agent. It
therefore has historically been very much concerned with questions like: How can one
learn to feel? And especially, how can one learn to feel the right way at the right time
with the right object? For Aristotle (and, one might add, Hume), the core of the answer
lies with the regulation of affect through habit and habituation. Nietzsche appears to
have shared this perspective:
One will rarely err if extreme actions are ascribed to vanity, ordinary actions to
habit, and mean actions to fear.19
In the case of Smith and Jones, emotion certainly seems to grease the skids down which
the quarrel slides, gaining speed and force. And ingrained habits of thought and feeling,
habitual ways of arguing and counter-arguing, becoming defensive, upping the ante by
turning criticisms back upon the other, etc., make this predictably self-defeating slide
seem almost inevitable. Well, if they are so central to the problem, might not affect and
habit also be central to the solution? Virtue theory proposes just this, I claim. So, in
spelling out my first cheer for virtue theory, we will be taking up questions of affect and
its role in our psychology, and questions about the nature and cultivation of habits of
feeling and acting.
I have suggested that contemporary social psychology will prove helpful in this
task. To begin to see why, let us ask how a psychologist might explain the effectiveness
19
Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Alexander Harvey (Chicago: Kerr, 1908), p. 74.
17
of seemingly unimportant situational features – features we would dismiss on a
moment’s reflection as irrelevant – in shaping the behavior of otherwise sensible
individuals. It appears that certain salient features of a situation are able to “get to us”
affectively well before self-conscious thought and judgment can enter the scene.
Perception of a salient situational “cue” tends to produce, within the first hundreds of
milliseconds, and well before any self-conscious process of judgment can act, an
immediate, affective response in us. This response is typically below the level of
awareness, yet it strongly influences how the mind will go on to think and act. The
immediate affective response “tags” or “codes” the incoming information as positive
(“approach”) or negative (“avoid”), and as important (“attention and arousal”) or
unimportant (“ignore”). This affective coding then “potentiates” (makes more
accessible and thus more likely) certain thoughts, conscious feelings, memories,
associations, and inferences. Encountering a friend in evident distress, for example,
might immediately be encoded as “approach” and “important”, triggering intense focus
upon him (ignoring the surroundings), and priming an empathetic simulation of his
feelings, which arouses sympathy for him and “motivated cognition”, as we take in the
situation and hunt through our minds ways in which we might understand it or help out.
By contrast, our perception of an unpleasant-looking, ill-dressed stranger in an agitated
state of evident distress whom we encounter in a narrow alleyway might immediately be
encoded as “avoid” and “important”, focusing attention on possible risk or threat from
this person, exciting fear that blocks empathy with this person, so that no sympathy is
aroused and our attention is instead directed away from him as a person (as opposed to
an “obstacle”), and turned to the surroundings and ways of escaping the situation as
18
cleanly as possible. All of this occurs within seconds, yet once it has happened, the
entire frame within which we will see the situation and act has been fixed. Affect, then,
occupies a pivotal place in perception, “triaging” stimuli and priming a train of direct and
indirect psychic effects and influences – on attention, arousal, evaluation, memory,
association, judgment, and motivation, on what an individual sees, feels, thinks, and seeks.
All before we have had a chance to reflect consciously upon the situation.
Affect by its nature thus involves a suite of responses straddling feeling,
cognition, and motivation. When the unattractive, distressed stranger encountered in
an alleyway triggers fear, we will promptly undergo physiological arousal, heightened
attention, a reshaping of focus, a readiness for action, and a motivational impetus to
protect oneself and evade engagement (“flight”, in this case, rather than “fight”). In
evolutionary terms, it seems clear why it would be an advantage to be capable of feeling
an emotion immediately in response to risks and threats in one’s environment, if this
emotion could produce an almost instantaneous, co-ordinated mobilization of the
organism’s capacities to cope. And that is the role of fear, in humans and animals alike.
Our rapid, non-voluntary affective responses are not, however, mere “innate
reflexes”. They are not simple “reflex arcs”, involving only distal elements of the
nervous system, and never passing higher than the motor neurons in the spinal cord.
Instead, they involve numerous, coordinated mental processes – perception, cognition,
memory, conation, etc. Nor are they all “hard-wired instincts”, capable only of
responding in a fixed way to a sharply delimited set of stimuli – like the human aversion
to spiders and snakes, or attraction to smiling faces and babies. Our affective repertoire
importantly includes such basic responses, but it also can be enlarged and refined almost
19
indefinitely through experience, learning, and cognitive development. We can come to
dread or welcome all manner of things, natural or human: people, places, rituals,
examinations, peer review, and business opportunities. And although our affective
responses are often lightning fast, and involve activation of so-called “action programs” –
such as “fight or flight” in the case of fear, or “engage or withdraw” in the case of a
novel social situation – the bulk of these responses and action programs have been
shaped and reshaped through a long history of personal experience, and thus vary from
one individual to another, becoming more discriminating and elaborate over the course
of a single individual’s life.
Because these rapid affective processes tend to operate “spontaneously”, i.e.,
without intervention of explicit judgment or will, they are often called ‘automatic’ or
‘autonomic’. And because they are often not directly accessible to consciousness, they
are often called ‘subpersonal’. These rather ominous-sounding terms suggest something
robotic, uncontrollable, and unintelligible to the agent – a loss of agency comparable to
the so-called “automatic writing” of spiritualist séances or post-hypnotic suggestion.
And, of course, in some cases one is affected by a situation, and finds oneself responding
to it – with anger, say, or uneasiness, or pleasure, or dread – in a way one simply cannot
understand. But more typically our affective reactions figure in quite intelligible
everyday exercises of agency, even in its most sophisticated forms – as when a skilled
athlete, politician, teacher, or chess player is engaged in situations with continuously
changing demands, “picking up on” certain things as encouraging or worrying, “sensing”
that things are going well enough or not as expected, “feeling” that a certain action is
needed. We speak of such complex behavior as “intuitive”, since it typically proceeds
20
with very little self-conscious deliberation. The “cognitive-affective system” at work in
these behaviors enables individuals to take in, process, and respond aptly to a much
greater wealth and complexity of information than self-conscious deliberation alone
could manage. At the same time, this system can also function to alert, encourage,
inform, and “advise” higher-order thought, including self-conscious deliberation.
Humans are thus seen as possessing a “dual process” mind, in which affect plays
an important information-gathering and -evaluating role, and functions jointly with
cognition in enabling us to understand and navigate the world. As the social
psychologist Jonathan Haidt describes the “new synthesis” in thinking about moral
psychology:
… the key factor that catalyzed the new synthesis was the “affective revolution”
of the 1980’s… . [S]ocial psychologists have increasing embraced a version of
the “affective primacy” principle … [in light of] evidence that the human mind is
composed of an ancient, automatic, and very fast affective system and a
phylogenetically newer, slower, and motivationally weaker cognitive system. …
[The] basic point was that brains are always and automatically evaluating
everything they perceive, and that higher-level thinking is preceded, permeated,
and influenced by affective reactions (simple feelings of like and dislike) which
push us gently (or not so gently) toward approach or avoidance … .20
If a simple environmental cue like a feeling of warmth can trigger an immediate
positive affective response (“approach”), which then in turn primes a more open and
Jonathan Haidt, “The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology”, Science 316 (2007): 996-1002, also “The
Emotional Tail and the Rational Dog”, Psychological Review 108 (2001): 814-834. For some systematic
presentations of recent work on the role of affect in the regulation of cognition and behavior, see Roy
Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs (eds.), Handbook of Self-Regulation (New York: Guilford Press, 2004).
20
21
empathetic response to those around us, then a simple psychological “manipulation” like
giving someone a cup of warm coffee to hold can alter his response to a charitable
appeal. Thus, we can alter individual moral behavior rather dramatically but
unknowingly once we have identified specific situational cues that play effectively upon
the affective system, even if they are morally irrelevant. In this way, we can understand
the mechanism behind many of the studies “situationalists” have used to criticize
traditional “trait” psychology, and philosophers have cited in the critique of virtue ethics.
However, this is not the end of the story. The same “dual-process” theory can
also be put to good use helping an Aristotle-inspired account. In the first instance, it
affords a psychologically credible way of explaining the otherwise rather mysterious idea
that a person can “simply see” certain situations as involving certain values and calling
for a particular response (what we have called “evaluative perception”) – and in virtue
of seeing it this way be immediately moved to make this response without other
incentive (“practical attunement”). As long as we conceive of perception as wholly
cognitive, encoding only sensory information, it is quite unclear how perception could
incorporate evaluation or be motivating. What would value look, sound or taste like?
How can a percept call for a response? But the Aristotelian picture of evaluative
perception makes better sense in the setting of dual process psychology, in which new
perceptual information is immediately coded affectively – as “pro” or “con”, “important”
or not. This coding then primes certain tendencies to act and react – “approach”,
“avoid”, “notice”, “ignore” – when directly induce motivated cognition and actionreadiness. Affect, for the psychologist, is the most basic evaluative currency of the brain
– small wonder that a brain that is built to respond to the values and disvalues in its
22
environment, and produce behavior properly attuned to them, is also built to encode
perception affectively. After all, this brain grew and took shape in an evolutionary past
when animals lacked the luxury of self-conscious judgment. And as Aristotle and Hume
would be quick to point, we, no less than they, need much more by way of practical
attunement than self-conscious judgment could ever provide. As Hume pointed out in
the Treatise, nature was more thoughtful than to trust our fates to the uncertain
workings of reason.
The “new” personality theory
Let us return to those “character traits” that, according to a large consensus in
contemporary personality psychology, do play an important role in the explanation of
behavior. In particular, consider the so-called “Big Five”: openness, conscientiousness,
extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Recall that these traits often emerge
relatively early in life, and remain fairly stable over substantial periods of time. Whether
an individual is attributed the traits, and to what degree, is typically determined by
specialized “personality assessment” scales, in which individuals are presented with a
large number of statements, to which they are asked how strongly they agree or
disagree. Such assessment techniques plainly suffer from the well-known biases of selfreporting, yet the scores individuals receive on these scales do appear to be picking up
on important dimensions of individual difference. For example, even though it generally
is not possible on the basis of these broad “traits” to predict with precision how
individuals will behave in particular contexts – here the “situationists” are clearly right
23
that situation-specific cues often play a dominant role, swamping other factors and
masking differences in individual temperament – , still, knowing that someone scores
highly on, say, neuroticism or extraversion, has significant predictive value when that
individual’s behavior is taken in the aggregate, summing together many acts and many
circumstances and looking for broad patterns.21 This, in effect, was the lesson of
Mischel’s early experiments with deferred gratification.
More recently, Mischel, one of the architects of the critique of traditional trait
psychology, has joined with others to develop a “new personality theory” to help us
integrate the lessons of situationalism with those of contemporary trait psychology.22
Despite the demonstrable power of situations to affect behavior, it remains the case
that everyday individual behavior remains highly predictable. This is something we all
know from experience, and something we all count on in our daily interactions. What
could account for this sort of constancy in behavior? A key to the explanation is that,
for most individuals most of the time, their environment is also highly predictable – we
tend to face the same sorts of situations day-in and day-out. This means that if we
possess stable dispositions to respond in distinctive ways to rather specific kinds of
situations, the regular recurrence of such situations will ensure that our behavior itself is
largely regular.
Indeed, although how people will react to extraordinary situations is often less
predictable, even highly stressful situations tend to fall into identifiable kinds that will, for
different individuals, trigger a distinctive array of stress responses – depending, for
See Ozer and Benet-Martinez (2006).
See, W. Mischel and Y. Shoda, “A Cognitive-Affective System Theory of Personality: Reconceptualizing
Situations, Dispositions, Dynamics, and Invariance in Personality Structure”, Psychological Review 102
(1995): 246-268.
21
22
24
example, on the particular sources of stress, the public vs. private character of the
situation, which emotions are involved, what degree of personal control is possible, or
what personal relations or relations with authorities are involved. Individuals vary in
their dispositions to be sensitive to these factors, and to respond in particular ways –
e.g., to respond to public failure with self-directed vs. other-directed anger, to be made
fearful or excited by novel social situations, etc. – and therefore, even when “under
pressure”, people’s behavior will show some degree of constancy or predictability. All
of this contributes to our everyday sense that people do have something like “personal
character”.
“New personality theory” explains these phenomena by positing that individuals
possess distinctive arrays of “if ... then ...” dispositions or “behavioral contingencies”,
which constitute a kind of “personal profile” or “signature”. Rather than speak in
terms of overall character traits like courage, honesty, friendliness, etc., the emphasis is
upon how individuals differ in these “if ... then ...” dispositions, which link certain
situational features with a “cognitive-affective” response – a way of seeing things, feeling,
thinking, and acting. Consider again Smith, who we will suppose had a middling score on
“agreeableness” measures, and whose behavior, looked at in aggregate, doesn’t show a
pronounced tendency toward agreeableness or disagreeableness. Nonetheless, Smith’s
behavior might be far from random: there might be a distinctive, situation-relative
pattern to its variability, since he responds to certain recurring situational cues in a
reliable way. When the person with whom he is interacting is perceived as possessing
high status, Smith is open, agreeable, and accommodating. When the person is
perceived to be of low status, Smith is closed, lacks interest, and is reluctant to
25
accommodate his own behavior to the others’. His spouse Jones, on the other hand
might have a very different sort of "behavioral signature” – she is fearful and withdrawn
in the face of those she perceives as possessing higher status, relaxed and engaging with
those she perceives to be of lower status. These “if ... then ...” dispositions might not be
anything of which either Smith or Jones is aware. Those close to them might never
notice these patterns explicitly, and yet, for those who deal with them regularly, the
manifestation of these dispositions will generate expectations (perhaps unacknowledged)
of how Smith and Jones will behave, and this creates the impression that each has a
“character”. Those of higher status who deal regularly with Smith will see him as “a
really nice, a good guy, very helpful”, those of lower status will see him as “stand-offish,
cold, and self-centered”. Their perceptions of Jones, of course, will be quite otherwise.
Yet these very different patterns of behavior and conflicting perceptions by others will
be the result of each individual’s unique “cognitive-affective personality system”.
Where might these complex and differing arrays of “if ... then ...” dispositions in
individuals come from? Genetic differences make some contribution, as any parent with
more than one child knows, but they only do so via development and environment.
There is very good evidence that individuals tend to imitate those around them, often
picking up their distinctive styles of interaction: children look to their parents;
adolescents to their peers, or the “cool” kids; adults look to those who seem successful,
and to their own institutional context. Patterns of behavior acquired in these ways also
tend to be contextually rewarded or punished by the behavior of others. In these ways,
we come to acquire a large number of ingrained, habitual ways of acting. But these are
not only ways of acting. With them come ways of feeling and being motivated as well, as
26
we adapt to our world at many levels. Knowledge of such “if ... then ...” contingencies in
the case of a given individual will give substantial insight into how he or she behaves, but
many of these contingencies are fairly narrow in scope, and, taken together, they might
not support any global evaluation of “character”.23
Smith, for example, might be a lawyer and a committed activist in the American
Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), who devotes an exceptional amount of time and effort to
fighting various forms of social injustice. In this respect, he far exceeds most of us. He
would presumably be deeply embarrassed and disturbed to realize the role of status in
shaping his ways of interacting with the individuals he meets. Partly this is because in
some contexts, he is in fact very helpful and accommodating toward those of low status.
For instance, when he is dealing with someone in a professional legal setting, he may see
them in the first instance as “underdogs” who are “innocent victims”. If that is his cue,
then his immediate affective reaction will be positive rather than negative, and he will be
primed to empathize with the individual and take her side. Here we see a different “if ...
then ...” contingency at work. Yet in his behavior toward strangers in an airport waiting
room, or even toward his own office staff, the stable “if someone is of low status, then
keep a distance” contingency will be cued by the salience of their low status, and a
different side of Smith will be in view. 24 Insofar as propensities to treat people
respectfully are concerned, Smith is fragmented – like all of us.
See Vranas (2005).
Strictly speaking, of course, one’s “if ... then ...” contingencies will operate with one’s apparent perception
in context (perhaps unconscious) of the relevant “if ...” cue.
23
24
27
Habits and habitudes
Where, psychologically, can we locate these relatively stable “if ... then ...” contingencies?
From the standpoint of classical virtue theory, they are not themselves virtues, for they
are typically too narrow. But they are something the importance of which Aristotle
emphasized above all else: habits, i.e., habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and acting –
acquired by example and through repetition. Of course, not everything contemporary
speakers of English would normally call a habit is like this. We sometimes speak of an
addiction, such as smoking, as a habit. Certain drugs, we say, are “habit-forming”. And
we sometimes speak of stereotypic, mindless behavior, such as repetitively and
unreflectively twirling a strand of hair in one’s finger as one struggles through a timed
exam, as a habit. Perhaps these are even paradigmatic habits, as we now use the word.
But there are good reasons to try to reclaim the word for what Aristotle seems to have
had in mind by ethos, which led him to say that the formation of proper habits is the
chief task of moral education (see NE 1104a25; hence, the Nicomachean Ethics), and to
claim that virtuous behavior, such as acting courageously in battle or generously toward
friends, is “as it should be” when it is done from habit (NE 1105a38). To spare readers
of unwelcome suggestions, however, I propose that, for now, we not struggle with the
English word habit and instead import and anglicize the French term habitude as our
equivalent of ethos.25 (Later, we’ll return to simple notion of habit.)
We speak of the habit of smoking, but for a French speaker, il n’a pas l’habitude de fumer does not mean,
“he doesn’t have the smoking habit”, but rather, “he isn’t used to smoking” or “he isn’t an experienced
smoker”, in the sense that he’s a novice, awkward at it, coughs when inhaling, can’t take strong tobacco,
etc.
25
28
As Aristotle emphasized, acquiring a skill or mastery requires development of a
habitude that involves a large number trained responses to a wide range of
circumstances. Each of these trained responses integrates a way of noticing certain
features of situations, seeing what’s at stake, reacting in thought and feeling, and
ultimately acting in consequence, without need (in this respect at least) for much if
anything by way of conscious reflection or additional motivation. Put in terms we
introduced earlier, such habitudes thus involve both evaluative perception and practical
attunement. As a result of a fortunate nature, exposure to good examples and good
training in youth, and from her own growing experience, the virtuous person acquires
such habitudes, enabling to her to in the right way, at the right time, with the right
feeling, and toward the right end.
It is important, Aristotle believed, to distinguish such habitudes from norms or
principles. Surely they often involve internalization and acceptance of relevant norms,
e.g., those of proper speech, comportment, law, customary distribution, etc. But these
norms alone will not determine proper action, nor will they equip an individual with
evaluative perception and practical attunement. Two of us might accept the same
norms, yet, if you are well-trained and experienced and I am not, then in many cases you
will notice what is important in a situation, and what specific response is called for, while
I will not. Without training and experience, I will often need to deliberate heavily and
clumsily, fail to respond fluently to a changing situation, and be beset by conflicting
thoughts and irrelevant considerations. Think of two individuals, one of whom grew up
in a bilingual Polish-English environment, and while the other was raised in English and
learned Polish much later, in college. Each will in some sense have learned the same
29
grammatical rules, yet they will differ markedly in their ability to bring these different
rules to bear in spontaneous Polish conversation, or to notice what is well-formed or illformed, felicitous or infelicitous, or in the right or wrong register. They will also differ
markedly in the complexity of thoughts and feelings they can readily understand or
effectively express and communicate. One will require a great effort of concentration
and will – a great deal of “linguistic deliberation” and high motivation – to keep up her
end of a conversation. For the other, conversing is like swimming for a fish –
unselfconscious, fluid, precise, and calling for no special thought or effort. In short,
other things equal, one will be much more capable than the other of saying the right
thing at the right time in the right way with the right feeling. What accounts for this
difference? Not a difference in principle, rationality, or conscientiousness. In English we
might say that one, but not the other, has the habit of speaking Polish, but that
understates the case. Someone fluent in Polish can lose the habit of speaking it, simply
by failing to use the language for a year or so. Yet her fundamental competency in the
language could remain largely intact. This competency is better termed a habitude than a
habit. And it is this sort of habitude, I believe, that Aristotle had in mind in speaking of
the centrality of ethos.
Return to Smith for a moment. His behavior is not incomprehensible or
arbitrary – on the contrary, we can see it as a manifestation of a stable, but somewhat
narrow disposition. A champion of the underdog, does not accept a principle to the
effect that lower status individuals are to be received with less warmth and
accommodation – I suspect Smith does not even hold such a principle unconsciously.
Certainly, he never represents his behavior to himself in this way. It seems more
30
accurate to say that he has a habitude, perhaps acquired by modeling on the behavior of
his status-anxious parents. As a result, he has learned an entire suite of status-oriented
ways of sizing up a situation and responding to it in feeling and action. Thanks to this
“cognitive-affective” disposition, he will see certain social situations or relationships as
attractive, and find them rewarding to pursue, even as other kinds of situations and
relationships will seem to him unattractive and unrewarding.
Aristotle is very explicit about the importance to habituation of acquiring certain
ways of feeling as well as certain cognitive orientations. By deeply emulating admired
models – identifying with them, as we might now say – we will tend to come to feel as
well as act as they do. Such positively affectively charged emulation will, after, give rise in
us to empathetic simulation of the model’s thoughts and feelings, as well as her actions.
Aristotle is particularly concerned that we come in this way to find pleasure and pain in
the right things. Indeed, we know someone’s motives – what really moves her, not
simply what she takes to move her – by knowing what gives her pleasure or pain (NE
1104b3). Witness the case of Smith vs. Jones. In Aristotelian psychology, anticipated
pleasure and pain play a fundamental role in guiding behavior, so that if we seek reliably
good behavior, we must cultivate within ourselves and others “habits of feeling” that
align pleasure with what is good, and pain with what is bad. Smith, despite his high
principles and wonderful dedication, will persist in showing a regrettable indifference to
those who are saliently below him in status until he begins to find some pleasure in
connecting with them. Aristotle writes:
There are three objects of choice – fine, expedient, and pleasant – and three
objects of avoidance – their contraries, shameful, harmful, and painful. About
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these, then, the good person is correct and the bad person is in error, and
especially about pleasure. For pleasure is shared with animals, and implied by
every object of choice ... . Further, since pleasure grows up in all of us from
infancy on, it is hard to rub out this feeling that is dyed into our lives; and we
estimate actions as well, some of us more, some less, by pleasure and pain.
Hence our whole inquiry must be about these, since good or bad enjoyment is
very important for our actions. … [F]or if we use these well, we shall be good,
and if badly, bad. [NE 1104b31-1105a13]
Psychologists speak of situations as having “affordances”, roughly, as seeming to hold out
certain prospects. If Smith’s immediate, unconscious affective reaction to people of
conspicuously low status is habitually negative, then social situations involving such
persons will, for Smith, have negative affordances as well. Whatever principles this
individual might subscribe to, however strong his “moral identity” as just and fair might
be, we know quite well how he will actually behave.
Thus we come to the problem of how to learn how to feel, and how to regulate
one’s feelings. How might Smith’s behavior come more closely into line with his
principles? Aristotelian virtue theory speaks directly to this problem, by arguing that we
must fight affect with affect, and habitude with habitude. Smith might discover someone
in the ACLU he deeply admires, and register (perhaps unconsciously) how this individual
conducts herself around others. He might hear from those who work below her of
how warmly they regard her, and notice how much pleasure she gets from engaging in a
give-and-take with people she encounters, high and low. Like all of us, he will begin to
pattern himself, consciously or unconsciously, upon someone he admires. Like all of us,
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he will in so doing simulate her thoughts and feelings as well – and the experience of this
simulation will itself be positive, or rewarding. (Contrast simulating the thoughts and
feelings of someone who treats you, and others, with anger or disdain.) Moreover, as
he unknowingly models her actual conduct in his own dealings with others, he will find
that this, too, is gratifying. To be welcomed by people, and engage them on terms of
mutual respect and interest, is a rewarding experience in itself. Smith will begin to find
pleasures in activities and relationships he would previously have found emotionally
empty. Like someone learning a second language, Smith will pick up new habits of
interaction and new ways of thinking – eventually, they will become a habitude, with
momentum of its own. He will have changed how he feels, changing his pleasures and
pains as well as his conduct, so that the changes in behavior will become self-reinforcing,
not self-denying. And, of course, once they have become an ingrained, habitual way of
being, a true habitude, there will be little need to supply any further motivation in order
for them to operate reliably and effectively in his life.
I have been writing as if all this were unconscious on Smith’s part, and so it might
be. But someone who has learned that he is viewed as cold and uninterested by his
fellow workers – perhaps through an anonymous annual evaluation – can also embark
upon such a campaign of emulation. Given his values, Smith would admire someone who
could former warmer and more respectful relations with subordinates, and this
admiration can affectively empower even deliberate emulation.
The notion of perceptual affordance helps us understand why habits of feeling
and acting – habitudes, as I have called them – are critical in moral psychology. We see
this most readily in the case of the simplest habits. Unlike principles and
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pronouncement, habits tend to be “self-applying”. That is, their very nature is to be
cued to particular, often recurring, features of one’s situation, and to yield by default a
reliable response to it. If I have the habit of brushing my teeth at bedtime, I don’t need
remember to do this, or to feel any special motivation, or to engage in an act of will, in
order to get me to carry out this small but worthy task. The habit itself will remind me,
cued by the characteristic activities of preparing to go to bed, and will carry me forward
through the task. I need not adhere conscientiously to a principle of oral hygiene in
order to be slightly discomfited (“pained”, so to speak) if, when bedtime comes, I cannot
find my toothbrush. Nor do I need such adherence to a principle to give me a certain
satisfaction (“pleasure”), if I do find it, and manage to brush my teeth after all.
Individuals who exercise regularly will also be stimulated by the normal sequence of the
day’s events to take exercise at the usual times, and will feel “out of sorts” when they
cannot. Through these good habits, we rely less upon the uncertainties of will and
motive, and more upon expectations gradually “dyed into” into the organism. This is no
less true of various worthy habits of social comportment. As George Eliot wrote, habit
is, “That beneficent harness of routine, which enables silly men to live respectably”.
But what if we are not lucky enough to have been well trained in youth, or to
find worthy models to emulate? What if we are faced with a difficult challenge,
equipped with manifestly bad habits, and trying to improve? Experts on nutrition find
that a better predictor of good dietary practices in adulthood than possessing an active
concern with diet is whether one has grown up in a household where meals are regular
and social, and food is diverse and largely home-cooked. Such individuals tend to expect
diversity and freshness in eating, and to prefer social eating, and to be discomfited when
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these are missing – they have “good eating habits” – even if they pay relatively little
attention to food in their lives. But suppose one is not so lucky, and faces the very
great difficulty of controlling one’s weight, a vital problem in a world beset with the
diseases of obesity and affluence. It would seem in this circumstance, one has no choice
but to rely upon principle or resolution and will power. Recall those who children who in
pre-school refrained from eating one marshmallow in order to have two. And recall
their successes later in life. Among these are better success at weight control. So it
would appear that the secret to good conduct in this case does lie in character – in will
power – for isn’t that precisely the trait they manifested so early on, and that served
them so well throughout life?
That is not at all how Mischel and others have analyzed his results. Children
who were successful in delaying gratification did not rely upon steely well, but upon
cognitive and affective strategies to redirect their attention from the tempting
marshmallow, or to re-interpret the marshmallow in a way that reduced its salience as a
tempting food. Successful children turned around in their chairs, sang songs, closed
their eyes, told themselves stories, imagined the marshmallow a cloud, and so on. This
is not “will power” as we ordinarily understand it, but something quite different – a
form of flexible cognitive-affective adaptation to a situation in which a tempting stimulus
is “too hot”, so that one must change its valence or reduce its power. Since his original
experiments, Mischel has tried teaching such simple strategies, even to children who
initially showed almost no ability to resist the marshmallow. For example, the simple
suggestion that a child to draw a frame around the marshmallow and think of it as a
picture enabled some children to increase their delay of gratification from 15 seconds to
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15 minutes. What is being controlled here is not the will, but one’s attention and
ideation, with effects upon one’s feeling and motivation. One is engaging in the regulation
of affect by using one’s mind’s broader resources. All of us understand this at some
level – for example, when we take care not to fill the house with attractive goodies that
would elicit immediate interest and test our resolve. By structuring our environment,
we thereby also shape how we will feel.
How is all this relevant to the new personality theory? A monumental number
of studies of dieting have led in the main to the disappointing conclusion that dieting is
not an effective strategy for long-term weight loss. At best, it tends to result in
temporary reduction in weight, which is typically regained within a year or two. There
are a great many factors at work against the dieter, not least that his metabolism may
shift to higher efficiency mode when he manages to restrict his intake, thus tending to
cancel any positive effect. But one researcher has found that a very simple shift in
technique can enable people to control their food intake more effectively.
Peter Gollwitzer and colleagues have been interested in the effectiveness of rules
in controlling behavior. They have found that general rules and imperatives are not
especially helpful. A dieter who gives herself the imperative, “No snacking between
meals!”, is found to have less success than a dieter who says to herself, “If it’s before
12:00 noon, [or before 7:00 pm], don’t go into the kitchen”. Similarly, students score
better on timed tests if they are encouraged to give themselves the action-plan, “If I
can’t answer a question in two tries, I will leave it for later, and refocus on to the next
question”, rather than the general rules, “Stay focused!” or “Don’t waste time on
36
questions you can’t answer”.26 Gollwitzer has found, in effect, that situation-specific and
situation-cued “if ... then ...” plans can be much mroe effective in self-regulation than
general rules. Moreover, these “if ... then ...” plans tend to be retained, so that
individuals continue to show beneficial effects a number of months later. Neurological
evidence suggests that “if ... then ...” plans can become “automatized” within the brain,
and therefore operate more reliably – that is, they become habit-like. By contrast, openended imperatives tend to lead to conflicts within the control system and less reliable
behavior – like the test-taker who is torn between “Stay focused!” and “Don’t waste
time on questions you cannot answer!”27 Research in artificial intelligence has also
shown the effectiveness of programming that uses a multiplicity of situationally-specific,
default “if ... then ...” subroutines, rather than a master decision-theoretic program that
inventories alternative acts and attempts to calculate the expected value of each before
executing. The latter sort of program quickly overwhelms computational capacity of
any system, whereas the former allows the artificial device or system to take an action
promptly upon a receiving an input, compare the outcome with some target value, and
then either continue or switch to a different contingency, accordingly.
Return to the earlier challenge of apologizing well. How might habit help here?
In the wake of such arguments, one often thinks, “I should really be more gracious and
forgiving”. Perhaps one will even express this as a resolve or resolution, to “Be more
gracious!” or “Be more forgiving!”, or “Treat others as you would have yourself be
treated!” Unfortunately, general resolutions of this kind are unlikely to have much
traction in the heat of an argument. Nothing will automatically call them to mind, or
Peter Gollwitzer, “Self-Control by If-Then Planning”, presentation to the Research Seminar in Group
Dynamics, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, 16 March 2009.
27
Gollwitzer (2009).
26
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give them a concrete implication for action if it were to come to mind. General
principles do not cue us as to when to apply them, and typically they require a good deal
of interpretation to see how to they are to be applied. But suppose a wise uncle has
told you, “Whenever I’m about to apologize, before I let the words leave my mouth, I
stop and listen to what I’m about to say. And I think, is that a real apology?” This
action-plan is cued to a specific circumstance, and it redirects your attention away from
your own anger and toward your partner’s point of view. In effect, it triggers
empathetic simulation of your partner’s situation and feelings, and this momentarily
checks the natural rush of self-righteous thought and anger that fuels an escalating
argument. By redirecting attention to the goal of apologizing, rather than trying to score
points or avoid making concessions, it engages different feelings, reframing the situation
at the non-conscious, affective level that will actually shape the spirit as well as the word
of your apology. As a result, you will be more likely to apologize well, in a way that
conduces toward de-escalation and resolution, and invites acceptance. If such an actionplan becomes a habit, then one can acquire the habit of making apologies that work28.
And the habit of making apologies that work can be part of an array of habits that
constitute the habitude of fighting well.
The insight of virtue theory is that, ultimately, one cannot counter bad ways of
being – mauvaises habitudes – with will power and principle. The rapid, self-applying, and
self-gratifying character of bad habitudes will tend to win the overwhelming number of
This isn’t purely speculative. Ethan Kross and colleagues have found that recasting the viewpoint with
which one represents a situation can be very effective in changing its emotional valence and helping one to
cope adaptively. For example, someone who is having trouble with obsessive recollections of a
humiliating incident can much reduce this tendency, and help regulate negative affect, by imaginatively
picturing the original humiliating episode from a spectator’s point of view. See E. Kross and O. Ayduk,
“Facilitating Adaptive Emotional Analysis: Distinguishing Distanced-Analysis of Depressive Experiences
from Immersed-Analysis and Distraction”, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 924-938.
28
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such contests in the long run. One must instead find ways – such as empathetic
modeling, mastering techniques, and modifying one’s environment – to call upon the
resources of affect and habit constructively, lest they be your undoing.
Those drawn to a picture of sovereign reason guiding our lives on the basis of
principle will likely find this notion of habitude, of acquiring and acting from complex
arrays of habit, distasteful. It seems like a way of transferring authority from the self to
a set of automatized sub-routines, a loss of autonomy. I have argued elsewhere why I
think this is not so.29 And I am also struck with how false it would be to say that,
because fluent speech is the exercise of a habitude acquired by modeling, training, and
practice, rather than by a self-conscious and deliberate application of principle, it is
somehow “robotic”, mechanical, or fails to express one’s individuality or “real self”.
The Ancients found it natural to compare virtue with excellence in a technical area
(techné), such as a skilled trade or a sport. In my experience, people who exhibit
impressive skills – craftsmen, athletes, musicians, mariners, teachers, researchers,
managers – have developed habitudes, in fact, an enormous number of “good habits” of
the sort I have described. They do not rely heavily on abstract principles, or continual
exercise of reflection and will power, to do the daily work of exercising or elaborating
their skills. This is unremarkable, since, for most of us, the bulk of what we do in any
given day will be a matter of habit rather than active reflection, choice, and willfulness.
Why should it be otherwise with the most skilled, who know how to do what they do
so much better and more intuitively than the rest of us? To achieve a very high level of
“Practical Competence and Fluent Agency”, in D. Sobel and S. Wall (eds.), Practical Reason (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
29
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accomplishment typically means having better habits, not greater freedom from the
habitual.
Talk of the habitual often excites the notion of mindlessness – “unthinking
routine”. And it is true that a major function of habit is to relieve the mind of certain
burdens so that it can focus on other things. But recall that we have been discussing
habits that are situationally cued rather than simply routine. This makes them sensitive to
the environment and capable of refinement – like fluent speech. Thus, an expert athlete
or craftsperson does not respond in the same way, regardless of circumstance. On the
contrary, part of expertise is acquiring “facility” with a very great range of circumstances
– so that one has appropriately different ways of responding intuitively in all manner of
relevant situations. This requires an increasingly fine discrimination of situations, a
practiced eye and trained responses. That is, an increasingly elaborate and well-adjusted
set of “if ... then ...” dispositions.
The root of the English word ability is the same as the root of habit, and the two
are in psychological fact closely related. Still, a skilled person must not be a prisoner of
habit – if a genuinely anomalous or novel situation presents itself, she must be able to
break from ordinary responses. But this, too, can be done well or badly. Doing it well
is likely to call for good habits for dealing with the stress and demands of anomalous or
novel situations. All of us have to hope we will have such abilities when faced with a
difficult situation. If we are among the very skilled who have come to have them as
second nature, so much the better. This does not look like mindlessness to me.
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A second cheer: Eudaimonism
About my second cheer for virtue theory I can be – happily! – brief. Classical virtue
theory embodied an idea sometimes called ‘eudaimonism’, according to which living well
and doing well are not at odds, but rather come together in the life of an excellent or
virtuous individual. The aim of ethical theory was to give an account of the best way to
live, and to show how leading this sort of life was best not only for the individual, but
for his family, friends, and the polis. The life of a bad person was not to be envied, and a
good person was not only someone you’d want to know, but someone you’d want to be.
Today’s ethical theorists are less sanguine about this sort of uniting of all of the
goods. Too often, it seems, virtuous action is its own punishment: standing up for
what’s right or doing what’s best regularly collides with powerful interests bent on
other purposes, and is personally and socially “inconvenient”, to put it mildly. Englishlanguage moral and political thought from Hobbes on has tended to take it for granted
that the natural condition of most of us, even if we are fortunate enough to live
together peaceably, is fundamentally competitive. And getting ahead – amassing wealth,
power, recognition, or status – seems to have no intrinsic connection with moral worth.
Part of what is misleading about this way of looking at things, however, is that
the relationship between, for example, wealth and income, on the one hand, and life
satisfaction, on the other, is hardly linear. Indeed, an increasing body of evidence
indicates that, at least in terms of so-called “subjective well-being” (how happy people
report themselves as being, or how satisfied they claim to be with their lives as a
whole), once people have reached a fairly modest level of material affluence, the
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contribution of more wealth or income to the perceived quality of life makes falls off
dramatically. On average, law school professors report greater subjective well-being
than clerks in cubicles, but foregoing a career as a corporate lawyer with a salary in
seven figures in order to hold a law school position at one quarter of this salary, is not
sacrificing one’s life happiness. And despite a near-tripling of the material standard of
living in the United States since 1946, the average level of reported well-being has not
increased.30
So we have reason to be suspicious of the idea that the road to happiness is
paved with material wealth. Indeed, there is an interesting body of literature suggesting
that the experiences individuals enjoy most intensely are not leisured, luxurious
consumption of the sort featured in advertising, but focused activity or social interaction
that engages us mentally and physically, and enables us to exercise a range of our
abilities in a way that involves mastering challenges. Performing in a local theater,
orchestra, or choir, for example, or successfully repairing your motorcycle, or dancing,
or engaging in a lively conversation at a dinner party with friends.31 Aristotle appears to
have been vindicated: we seem to find our greatest happiness engaging in activity in
accord with our full nature as rational, social animals. This suggests that we might
revisit the doctrine of eudaimonism in a modern setting.
The field of “positive psychology” was founded in recent decades with the aim of
creating a body of knowledge about the various ways in which, and means by which,
lives can go well – from subjective measures of the felt quality of experience to
objective indicators of success in health, school, work, sports, and relationships.
For much relevant data, see D. Kahneman, E. Diener, and N. Schwartz (eds.), Well-Being: The
Foundations of Hedonic Psychology (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999).
31
Mihalyi Csikznetmihalyi, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).
30
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Although it is early to draw broad conclusions, a number of large-scale studies of have
given evidence for the conclusion that, in the workplace, individuals experience the
greatest value in their work when professional requirements and incentives are aligned
with doing work that they can see as of high quality and integrity, and useful to the wider
society.32 More generally, it appears that people gain a greater sense of meaning from
what they do, perform it better, and find it more rewarding, when they see it as coherent
with their underlying values and contributory in some way to the world.33
Of particular importance in all this positivity is our social nature. Few if any of us
have aims, ambitions, values, or aspirations that can be understood without seeing us as
operating in a world of other beings to whom what we does matters. The situationalist
literature in cognitive social science makes it clear how much we take our cue from
those around us, even when we are being oppositional or competitive. After all, what
would be the meaning of being a revolutionary or a champion, or an avant gardiste
overthrowing all convention in a solitary world? As far as I can see, there is no magical
world-telos or World Spirit that guarantees virtuous action will be rewarded. But the
idea that doing well and doing good might find some common ground in the conditions for
a human life full of purpose and reward – that is something for which we having an
increasing weight of evidence.
Most of us find ourselves with a strong desire to see ourselves as good. This can
be the source of a great deal of mischief and self-deception, since it leads us into all
manner of rationalizations. But rationalization is only necessary if we perceive, perhaps
unconsciously, an incoherence between what is good and what we do. Moreover, few of
See the publications of the “Good Work Project”, especially Howard Gardner, Mihalyi Csikzentmihalyi,
and William Damon, Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet (New York: Basic Books, 2001).
33
Gardner, et al (2001).
32
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us would attest that the process of rationalization is one of life’s greatest satisfactions.
Compare this with a situation that needs no rationalization – devoting a weekend day to
helping build housing for the homeless, helping a student finally understand the
difference between a derivative and an integral, fixing the jammed door that has been
annoying the whole family, holding a successful party, or returning a lost wallet. Martin
Seligman, a prominent researcher in positive psychology, reports that the most reliable
way to improve someone’s mood – even when that person is chronically depressed – is
for her to do an unanticipated bit of good for someone else.34
Notice that we are speaking here entirely of actions done in a certain spirit, not
of any underlying moral personality or global character. All of us, again, excepting a very
few, have the capacity for such actions well within our reach. And, depending upon the
environment, we will find such actions come more or less easily and naturally. A
marriage, office, sports club, community, or army platoon can meet incredible challenges
with resilience – or collapse in the face of a minor crisis. Very good predictors of
success are whether the members of the group have mutual respect, a willingness to
sacrifice, a strong sense of shared purpose, and a sense of being able to make best use
of their talents.35 Unsurprisingly, these very same factors correlate well with the level of
subjective well-being experienced within the group, as well as objective measures of
health or group accomplishment. Unsurprisingly, too, these are sorts of groups and
relationships we find it attractive to be in. At least at this level, doing well and living
well can cohere with some regularity – for people of perfectly ordinary character, not
Martin Seligman, Authentic Happiness (New York: Free Press, 2002). For recent experimental work,
see E.W. Dunn, L.B. Aknin, and M.I. Norton, “Spending Money on Others Promotes Happiness”, Science
319 (2008): 1687-1688.
35
See Gardner, et al. (2001).
34
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moral titans. Solitary, self-sacrificing virtuous action in the face of a hostile or
uncomprehending society may afford one of the most remarkable testimonies to the
human spirit, but the eudaimonist will quickly point out that this is not a sustainable
picture of morality.
If we could set our sights not on Virtue, but on the many unextraordinary forms
of virtuous action that are within our reach, and that would add a bit of purpose and
pleasure to our lives, we might even begin to make something of a habit of it. And as
Aristotle reminds us, once something has become a habit, it can generate reward and
motivation of its own, increasing its ease and fluency, and lessening the demand upon
will. In this way, too, understanding the nature and operation of affect and habit is
essential to understanding how such beings as ourselves – faults, weaknesses, and all –
might manage to live well, and do good.
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