Emotion and Virtue

Gopal Sreenivasan

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780691212517, 9780691134550
• eBook ISBN: 9780691208701
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

A novel approach to the crucial role emotion plays in virtuous action

What must a person be like to possess a virtue in full measure? What sort of psychological constitution does one need to be an exemplar of compassion, say, or of courage? Focusing on these two examples, Emotion and Virtue ingeniously argues that certain emotion traits play an indispensable role in virtue. With exemplars of compassion, for instance, this role is played by a modified sympathy trait, which is central to enabling these exemplars to be reliably correct judges of the compassionate thing to do in various practical situations. Indeed, according to Gopal Sreenivasan, the virtue of compassion is, in a sense, a modified sympathy trait, just as courage is a modified fear trait.

While he upholds the traditional definition of virtue as a species of character trait, Sreenivasan discards other traditional precepts. For example, he rejects the unity of the virtues and raises new questions about when virtue should be taught. Unlike orthodox virtue ethics, moreover, his account does not aspire to rival consequentialism and deontology. Instead Sreenivasan repudiates the ambitions of virtue imperialism.

Emotion and Virtue makes significant contributions to moral psychology and the theory of virtue alike.

1

Credo

Credo virtutem nec unam nec omnipotentam

§1. WHAT IS A VIRTUE? There are several different ways to hear this question. On perhaps the most basic way of hearing it, a long-standing philosophical tradition answers that a moral virtue is a species of character trait. While some contemporary philosophers depart from this tradition, even they do not deny that virtuous character traits and virtuous actions can be inter-defined. Indeed, they can be inter-defined in various, verbally equivalent ways. For example, a kind person can be defined as someone who, among other things, can be relied upon to act kindly—to help an old woman to cross the street, say, or to overlook faults in others.^a Alternatively, kind actions can equally be defined as the sort of actions characteristically performed by a kind person (i.e., a person with a certain trait). In one sense, then, kindness can easily be regarded as both a character trait and a species of action.

To isolate the feature of the traditional view in dispute, it therefore helps to advert explicitly to the direction of priority being affirmed when virtuous traits and virtuous actions are inter-defined. Are kind actions basic, with the character trait of kindness defined derivatively (in terms of them)? Or is the priority rather reversed, with the character trait being basic and kind actions being defined derivatively (as characteristic expressions of the trait)? On the traditional view, character traits have priority in the definition of virtue.

By contrast, Thomas Hurka (2006) defends an ‘occurrent-state view,’ according to which virtuous actions have priority. Specifically, on his view, an action is virtuous if and only if it is virtuously motivated; and independent conditions are given to define what makes a motive or desire virtuous. Crucially, these conditions do not refer to any disposition or character trait. Thus, an agent’s occurrent desire (and hence her occurrent action when so motivated) can satisfy these conditions, and thereby qualify as virtuous, even if it is ‘out of character’ or is a onetime occurrence. Virtuous character traits are then defined derivatively, as dispositions to perform virtuous actions.

Hurka opposes his view to a ‘dispositional’ view. However, as he defines it, the dispositional view does more than merely reverse the direction of priority from the occurrent-state view. For it not only defines a virtuous act derivatively, as a characteristic expression of a virtuous disposition, but also requires the agent performing the act herself to possess the virtuous disposition in question: ‘the dispositional view also holds that virtuous [occurrent] states necessarily issue from virtuous dispositions’ (Hurka 2006: 71). Consequently, if an agent lacks the trait of kindness, it follows that no act that she performs can count as a kind act—however much it may otherwise resemble the acts characteristically performed by kind people.

Hurka rejects this implication, and rightly so. Yet it is important to see that traditional views on the definition of virtue need not endorse the implication he rejects, since they need not embrace the additional requirement built into his dispositional view. Consider, for example, Aristotle’s well-known distinction between performing a virtuous act and performing a virtuous act as an exemplar of virtue would perform it (EN 1105b5–9), i.e., as a model or paragon of virtue would perform it. Exemplars of virtue have, and characteristically act from, a stable disposition. A fortiori, no one can act ‘as an exemplar of virtue would’ without herself acting from a stable disposition.¹ However, the whole point of Aristotle’s distinction is precisely to allow that someone can still perform a virtuous act—can still do what the exemplar of virtue does—even if he or she cannot perform that act as the exemplar performs it (e.g., because he or she lacks the relevant stable disposition).

Accepting Aristotle’s allowance is entirely compatible with reversing the direction of priority from the occurrent-state view. It is compatible, that is, with insisting that what nevertheless makes the act in question ‘virtuous’ is that it is the characteristic expression of a certain trait, i.e., that it is what an exemplar of virtue would characteristically do (under the circumstances). For example, what makes ‘helping an old woman to cross the street’ a kind act is that helping her to cross is what an exemplar of kindness would characteristically do. On the resultant (perfectly traditional) view, the kindness of the act is derivatively defined, and this derivation refers to a character trait, but that prior trait need not be possessed by the agent who performs the act (in order for it to be a kind act). Let us distinguish this logically weaker opponent of the occurrent-state view from the dispositional view by calling it the (metaphysical) agent-centred view.^b Since Aristotle’s distinction is what opens the door to a perspicuous statement of this weaker view, it seems a mistake to saddle him with Hurka’s dispositional view (and its implausible implication).²

Like Hurka (2006), Judith Thomson (1997) also rejects the traditional direction of priority in the definition of virtue. However, unlike Hurka, Thomson construes occurrent virtuous acts strictly objectively (1997: 281, 286). Hence, in addition to excluding reference to any disposition or character trait, the conditions her view employs to define what makes an act virtuous also exclude reference to the agent’s occurrent motive or intention.

One way to understand this narrowed scope of the ‘occurrent acts’ to which Thomson gives metaphysical priority is to see her as shifting the agent’s occurrent motive from the ‘performs a virtuous action’ side of Aristotle’s distinction to its ‘performs a virtuous action as the exemplar of virtue performs it’ side (cf. endnote 1), where what remains on the first side still suffices to qualify an occurrent performance as a virtuous act.³ Thus, someone who helps an old woman to cross the street, even from an unsuitable motive, still performs a kind act. That is, he still does what an exemplar of kindness does. Naturally, he deserves less (and perhaps very little) credit for doing so, but that is another matter.⁴

I believe that, metaphysically, kind actions are basic and that the virtuous character trait of kindness should be defined derivatively, as a disposition to perform kind actions (among other things). Let us call this the metaphysical act-centred view of virtue. Rather than argue for this position, I shall take it as intuitive.

To this point, I have discussed the priority question in metaphysical terms, since that is the predominant treatment in the literature. But let us now proceed to distinguish metaphysical and epistemological versions of the priority question. A sufficient reason to do so is that one may wish to answer the two versions of the question differently (e.g., I do). In the epistemological case, the priority question concerns the starting point for identifications of virtue. Do we first identify a character trait as virtuous (or, more specifically, as kind), and only then identify its characteristic act expressions as virtuous acts (or kind acts)? Or do we rather identify various acts first as kind acts, and only then identify the persons who reliably perform those acts as kind persons (i.e., as having that trait)?

According to the epistemological act-centred view of virtue, the priority for identifying instances of virtue lies with virtuous acts, whereas according to the epistemological agent-centred view it lies with virtuous traits instead.⁵ Unlike with the metaphysical priority question, I do not believe that the act-centred view gives the correct answer here. To make a start on seeing why not, we should notice that the rival answers to both priority questions have been presented in all-or-nothing terms. In the metaphysical case, this arguably makes ready sense. But in the epistemological case, it obscures a coherent intermediate position.

Consider the following entailments of the two extreme answers to the epistemological priority question: On the act-centred view, it follows that every kind act, say, can be identified as kind without any reliance on a kind person.^c On the agent-centred view, by contrast, it follows that no kind act can be identified as kind without some reliance on a kind person. Evidently, there remains the intermediate possibility that some kind acts can be identified as kind without any reliance on a kind person, while other kind acts cannot be so identified except by relying somehow on a kind person.

Whatever else one thinks of it, this intermediate option is immune to the two most obvious objections against the agent-centred view.d One obvious objection is that, intuitively, some kind acts are straightforwardly identifiable as kind without one’s either being or referring to a kind person. ‘Paradigmatic’ or ‘stereotypical’ acts of kindness, such as helping an old woman across the street, seem to have this feature by definition. Another popular objection claims that the agent-centred view cannot explain how anyone can non-arbitrarily identify who the kind persons are (e.g., O’Neill 1996; Cholbi 2007). Or, more generally, it cannot identify who the virtuous persons are.

Let me therefore introduce the modest agent-centred view. According to this intermediate answer to the epistemological priority question, some non-paradigmatic acts of kindness (say) can only be identified as kind acts by exploiting the fact that they are the characteristic act expressions of a certain trait (kindness). More specifically, some kind acts cannot be identified as kind except by relying on a kind person one way or another. Since it is common ground between the modest agent-centred view and the act-centred view, the fact that paradigmatic acts of kindness can be identified as kind without relying on any kind person grounds no objection to the modest agent-centred view. Moreover, the same fact leaves it open to the modest agent-centred view to hold that kind persons are to be identified by means of their reliability in performing paradigmatically kind acts (a criterion that anyone can employ), thereby defusing the second objection.

I believe that the modest agent-centred view gives the correct answer to the epistemological priority question.^e Now a case can be made that this same view could equally well be called the ‘modest act-centred’ view. However, I shall nevertheless call it the modest agent-centred view. I do so in order to advertise the fact that it preserves an indispensable role for virtuous traits in the identification of virtuous actions, and thereby partially vindicates the traditional view of virtue. As I see it, the modest agent-centred view articulates what is correct in the traditional answer to the epistemological priority question. Where the (extreme) act-centred view goes wrong, by contrast, is in denying that virtuous traits have any indispensable role at all in identifying virtuous actions.

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§2. If a virtue is a species of character trait, it is very natural to wonder further: what sort of character trait is it?f Or, to adopt somewhat different phrasing, what are the ‘other things’ referred to in the proposition that a kind person can be relied on to act kindly, among other things? Theories of virtue disagree about what else is required, for reasons having nothing to do with the particulars of kindness. By way of illustration, consider the following three possible additional requirements for virtue (we shall encounter others in time). All three are affirmed by Aristotle, for example....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Credo
• 2. The Integral View
• Preliminaries
• Arguments
• Consequences
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• References
• Index