The Moral Psychology of Pride

J. Adam Carter, Emma C. Gordon

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783489107
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Is it good to be proud? We sometimes happily speak of being proud of our achievements, ethnicities and identities, yet pride is also often described as the most serious of the seven deadly sins. This edited collection of original essays examines pride from a variety of perspectives in philosophy, psychology, sociology and anthropology. The volume seeks to explore such topics as the nature of pride, its connection to other human emotions, whether it is a virtue or vice (or both), and what role it might play in both our intellectual and moral lives. Containing diverse voices and viewpoints, this book aims to illuminate the various and complex dimensions of pride.

Chapter 1

The Moral Psychology of Pride

An Introduction

J. Adam Carter and Emma C.Gordon

PRIDE: A BACKGROUND

Research Context

Pride is – among other things – a central aspect of the human condition. As social history has overwhelmingly indicated, pride has been and continues to be an important explanation for morally as well as intellectually significant human behaviour, from subaltern movements such as black pride and gay pride to the rally-round-the-flag nationalism now on the march throughout Europe and other parts of the world.

Even so, there is little consensus on some of the most basic issues concerning the nature of pride: for example, what sort of thing is pride, and why do we care about it? Does being prideful lead us to act in particular ways, and if so, which ways? How do people become proud? Can one be proud only of one’s own achievements and characteristics, or is it at least conceptually possible to be proud of the achievements and characteristics of others, such as those with whom one identifies? Generally speaking, is pride a good thing or a bad thing? Why?

That there have thus far been few agreed answers to such questions is, we suspect, at least partly due to the compartmentalised means by which questions about the nature, value and psychology of pride have traditionally been investigated. On the bright side, we think that this problem has the potential to be overcome by investigating pride from the interdisciplinary methodology of moral psychology – viz, in particular, by bringing together the conceptual resources that have been refined within professional philosophy with the empirical scrutiny that is distinctive of the human sciences, and the chapters in this book reflect this overarching goal. The present volume will accordingly explore some of the most important issues connected to the topic of pride in a way that utilises the theoretical resources of philosophy, psychology, sociology, religious studies and anthropology.

Pride: Key Themes

Discussions of the nature and value of pride (including moral, conative, intellectual and social dimensions) feature many distinctions drawn between different kinds of pride, as well as between different aspects of pride. It would be convenient if any one such distinction were clearly more fundamental than any of the others. However, different distinctions to do with pride tend to cluster around different kinds of research questions, and some of these research questions overlap (sometimes considerably) with others.

In what follows, we offer a brief survey of some of the key research themes that have guided some of the key contemporary discussions of pride. Each chapter in this volume addresses either directly or indirectly at least one of these themes. We note explicitly that in many cases, the kind of philosophical stance one takes on one of these themes can (but will not always) determine the kind of stance one is in a position to take on one or more of the others.

Pride, emotion and virtue

Pride is often discussed as an emotion but perhaps equally often as a kind of character trait or agential disposition. Emotions are, in the most general sense, reactions to matters of apparent importance or significance.¹ Different kinds of characteristic reactions line up with different emotions, and these reactions generally involve certain kinds of distinctive feelings and appraisals.² A theory of the nature of the emotion of pride will thus be a theory of what such characteristic reactions include and why we should think pride includes these kinds of reactions rather than others. Furthermore, to the extent that the emotion of pride involves certain kinds of appraisals (and not just feelings), we may ask what is, to use Richard Lazarus’s (1991) term, pride’s core relational theme. This point can be perhaps made best by analogy: envy’s core relational theme is wanting what someone else has. The core relational theme of guilt is having transgressed a moral imperative. A theory of the emotion of pride will have something to say about pride’s core relational theme. Finally, emotions themselves can be appraised as more or less appropriate in light of the circumstances under which they are manifested: what circumstances are befitting a response of pride? Is pride ever morally (or intellectually) forbidden? A satisfying account of the emotion of pride will likely tell us something about the appropriateness of pride as an emotional response and how this appropriateness can be accounted for with reference to specific features of the emotion of pride (e.g., its distinctive feelings, appraisals, core relational theme).

Whereas emotions are actual reactions to matters of importance or significance, character traits are stable dispositions to behave in typical ways when certain kinds of considerations are present. When these ways are conducive to or constitutive of human flourishing, they are classed as ‘virtues’, moral virtues (e.g., benevolence, compassion, kindness, courage, temperance) in the case of moral flourishing, intellectual virtues (e.g., open-mindedness, intellectual honesty, curiosity, fair-mindedness) in the case of intellectual flourishing.³

When we say of someone that, for example, she is ‘prideful’ or a ‘proud’ person, we might grant that the individual is not (at the time of the attribution) actually reacting in any particular way distinctive of pride. The person might simply be the sort that, in the right kinds of circumstances (e.g., where certain kinds of reasons or values are present), she would be disposed to respond in certain pride-relevant ways. Furthermore, the proud person will have such a disposition not in some fleeting way, but in a way that is appropriately stable and integrated within her cognitive psychology.

On the Aristotelian conception of the structure of virtues, virtues necessarily have both a motivational component and a reliable success component.⁴ For example, the honest person must be not only suitably morally motivated in ways that are characteristic of honesty but also reliably (enough) successful in bringing about the ends of such motivations.⁵ The attempt to characterise pride, as a virtue, takes for granted that motivations that are characteristic of a proud person are grounded in a more basic or fundamental morally worthy motivations. However, the presupposition that pride qua character trait is a (moral) virtue is controversial on philosophical grounds. Pride is sometimes (and perhaps often) discussed qua character trait not as a virtue but as a vice, and when theorised about in this way, the proud person will be understood (again, on the broadly Aristotelian picture) as having certain characteristic motivations that line up with certain behaviour patterns, where the motivations are themselves are grounded in more basic morally unworthy motivations. We will turn now to the issue of positive and negative pride – viz, pride (generally speaking) understood as admitting of positive and negative moral valence.

Positive and negative pride

Aristotle and Hume have both (for different reasons) famously viewed pride positively. In Hume’s case, this is because he understood pride as a certain kind of satisfaction one has on account of one’s accomplishments or possessions, the experience of which brings us well-founded enjoyment.⁶ Likewise, for Aristotle, the trait of pride is a virtuous trait befitting the accomplished or great person who has a right or correct conception of her merits.⁷

Other thinkers, however, have taken a considerably less-favourable line. Take as a starting point St Augustine’s view that pride is the ‘commencement of all sin’,⁸ a view that is deeply grounded in the Christian tradition, where pride is that which turned the devil against God, and which was responsible for original sin. As it is put in Ecclesiasticus 10:12–13, ‘The beginning of pride is when one departs from God, and his heart is turned away from his Maker. For pride is the beginning of sin, and he that has it shall pour out abomination’. Similar cautioning against pride and its consequences can be found throughout the Western intellectual tradition, from Hobbes⁹ to Jonathan Edwards¹⁰ to Alexander Pope¹¹ to C. S. Lewis.

An important second-order question about pride (in its positive and negative guises) is whether, in fact, such opposing characterisations of pride (e.g., as it is praised by Aristotle and Hume and disparaged by Augustine), in positive and negative terms, are best understood as in competition with one another, viz, as mutually exclusive characterisations of the same underlying phenomenon. Alternatively, one might reject such a second-order view for any variety of views on which these positive and negative characterisations do not preclude one another. Perhaps, for example, pride is polysemous such that multiple meanings of pride correspond with emotions or traits that differ in their valences. Finally, perhaps pride can have multiple aspects with different valences even if pride itself is not polysemous. It is possible to give an account of pride as an emotion or virtue without taking a stand on this second-order issue, though at various points in typical first-order accounts of pride, this second-order issue can become relevant.

Appropriateness of pride

According to negative characterisations of pride, such as that which we find in Augustine, the question of the appropriateness of pride is foreclosed in advance by the fact that pride is inherently vicious. On views that refrain from this sort of claim, without thereby embracing the strong opposite position that pride is always and everywhere a good thing, it is relevant to inquire into the appropriateness of pride.

One matter relevant to the appropriateness of pride is the object of pride and the agent’s relationship to that object. On a first pass, one might submit that pride in something X is appropriate, for someone S to have, only if S has through S’s own efforts or skill managed to bring about X, and X is suitably good. Such a condition (albeit strict) on the appropriateness of pride gets very simple cases right. For it rules out that it would be appropriate for you to feel pride in something that (say) someone socially unconnected with you accomplished before you were born, a result that aligns with our patterns of attributing pride. Further, it rules out that it is appropriate to be proud of a wicked accomplishment – viz, pride experienced as a result of cheating your friends. However, the simple condition on the appropriateness of pride under consideration does less well in other cases. For example, it often seems appropriate (or at least common and unobjectionable) to feel pride in one’s family and one’s children, and perhaps in their accomplishments, even though we ourselves did not bring about these specific accomplishments through any skill or effort of our own. Or, though more controversially, it might seem appropriate to feel pride in less socially connected entities such as sports teams as countries. Furthermore, a well-meaning individual might intuitively be appropriately proud of some misguided action, where the action itself is all-things-considered not suitably good. A satisfying account of the appropriateness of pride will aim to say something informative about the appropriateness of pride which is not too inclusive or exclusive.

Objects and relations of pride

We should distinguish between the appropriateness of pride in other individuals and their accomplishments from the possibility of doing so, the latter of which is more or less uncontroversial. Typically, discussions of pride in philosophy as well as psychology have clustered around the kind of pride one has when the object of pride is primarily oneself or one’s own accomplishments, the appropriateness of such pride and the social role this kind of self-regarding pride can play.

That said, the matter of to what extent what we say about self-oriented pride should apply mutatis mutandis to others-oriented pride constitutes an interesting and open question, one that can be helpfully explored by thinking about what it is in virtue of which one feels pride in others when one does, and how these considerations connect with one’s attitudes about oneself.

For example, one might feel pride in one’s own accomplishments because of some relationship that the individual has to oneself, and perhaps because the other’s accomplishment (or existence) is taken to reflect well on oneself. Though the psychological profile of this form of others-oriented pride need not match other kinds of others-oriented pride, such as the pride one feels in (say) a group (e.g., a social or political movement) that one is a member of, but which one knows that no one knows one is a member of. More fine-grained distinctions are, of course, possible here, mapping on to different candidate objects (i.e., individuals, events, states of affairs, modal facts; e.g., pride in what one could have done or almost did¹²), the social distance between oneself and such objects (personal versus impersonal relationships, degree of agency mixed with the object of pride), our attitudes about these relationships (e.g., because they reflect well on us, because they reflect well on our social group, or on things we value) and how we regard ourselves as expressed or reflected in such relationships.

Social function of pride

An important question in empirical psychology concerns the social role that pride, in fact, plays, and how different forms of pride potentially play different social roles, generating different kinds of social benefits. Pride based on our own accomplishments, for instance, might play a different kind of social role, with different kinds of benefits than, say, certain kinds of others-oriented pride. A correlative issue concerns social costs (i.e., of a given individual) of expressing certain kinds of pride: for example, are th...

Table of contents

• 1 The Moral Psychology of Pride: An Introduction
• 2 The Appropriateness of Pride
• 3 Pride versus Self-Respect
• 4 Beyond the Self: Pride Felt in Relation to Others
• 5 Intellectual Pride and Intellectual Humility
• 6 Intellectual Pride
• 7 Jesus and the Virtues of Pride
• 8 Goal-Oriented Pride and Magnanimity
• 9 Moral Pride: Benefits and Challenges of Experiencing and Expressing Pride in One’s Moral Achievements
• 10 Pride, Achievement and Purpose
• 11 White Pride
• 12 Pride in Christian Philosophy and Theology
• 13 The Practical Advantages of Pride and the Risks of Humility: The Defence of Pride Occasionally Found in the Work of David Hume and Jane Austen
• Index
• About the Editors and Contributors